by Robin Wright
“We wanted to create a heaven. We didn’t want a shah, but we were not clear on what we desired,” Ganji told me, when we finally met in 2006.
“The more we had repression, executions, as the revolution started swallowing its own children, I started to see this unbelievable reality, and from the other side I started to read about revolutions throughout history. And I ended up seeing one pattern—that all revolutions are the same, they follow the same rules, and they all deviate.
“I realized that repression is in the essence of revolution,” he said, smiling, the crows’-feet around his eyes crinkling. “And I realized that we cannot produce democracy with revolution.”
Soroush provided the inspiration and intellectual foundation for a burgeoning new reform movement. But Ganji became the practitioner of dissent.
Ganji started writing about Soroush’s ideas in Kiyan, Iran’s leading intellectual journal. Kiyan means “source” or “foundation.” Soroush wrote for it too—until the government denied the magazine access to printing paper. It was a common trick the regime used to close down publications that relied on state-subsidized newsprint.
Ganji then shifted his focus and began investigating the ruling clerics.
He was brazen by the standards of a movement more comfortable with nuance, nudges, and intellectual debate. In a series of investigative articles for the new crop of reformist newspapers, many of them started by Soroush’s followers, Ganji linked Iran’s intelligence ministry to the killings of dozens of dissidents in the late 1990s. He charged that key clerics, whom he dubbed “gray eminences” and “red eminences,” had issued fatwas approving the murders.
As the regime closed the reformist newspapers one after another to silence them, Ganji compiled his accusations in the Dungeon of Ghosts, the Iranian equivalent of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago. Other books chronicled corruption by top—very top—clergy.
“Ganji was the down-to-earth rabble-rouser of the reform movement,” Semati, the Tehran University political scientist, told me.
“Despite his junior status, he became the symbol of fierce resistance to a dogmatic vision of Islam and a status quo that had not wanted to change for centuries.”
In 2000, the ruling clerics struck back. Ganji was arrested and charged with defaming the regime and jeopardizing national security. After a series of trials, he was sentenced to ten years in prison, followed by five years of internal exile. The sentence was later modified to six years in prison.
But Ganji was not cowed by the ayatollahs. At his trial, he tore open his gray prison uniform to sit shirtless in court, showing what he said were the wounds of torture. In prison, often in solitary confinement, he secretly started writing again.
In 2002, Ganji managed to sneak out his book-length Republican Manifesto. He began with a quote from Thomas Paine. He was brutal about the Islamic republic.
Iran’s revolution was born in circumstances that could never have led to democracy, he wrote. Khomeini had sought to create a society that lived perpetually in an “iron cage.” The Islamic republic, he concluded, had reached a dead end.
“A vast stratum of society is in a state of despair, hopelessness, disillusion and dejection,” he wrote…. “Therefore, only a break from tyranny can make transition possible.”7
As the regime increasingly smothered the voices of reform, Ganji’s missives from prison were the buzz of Tehran. They went out on the Internet, were passed around among students, and were scrutinized in Iran’s political circles.
In 2005, Ganji sneaked out a sequel, a more strident second volume to his manifesto. This time, he went after the reformers.
He lambasted the movement for timidity and selling out. “The reformists’ false idea that only through active participation in the government can one achieve anything has, in practice, only led them to function as mere window-dressing for the system, both inside and outside the country,” he charged.
Change from within, he concluded bluntly, was no longer possible.
The time had come to end theocratic rule through a new strategy of mass civil disobedience. He called on Iranians to boycott all elections, which he charged had a long record of fraud, forged ballots, and “orders given from above” to add votes to bolster turnout figures—and the regime’s legitimacy.
Invoking Mahatma Gandhi, he called on student activists and intellectuals to ignore court summonses for opposition activity that, under Article 500 of Iran’s penal code, made them automatically liable to three to twelve months in prison.
“Citizens must break this law,” he wrote. “If this law is broken extensively, the regime will not be able to send many people to jail for expressing their opposition…. The uneven path to freedom will be opened by our efforts.”
From his isolated cell in Tehran’s notorious Evin Prison, Ganji acknowledged that most Iranians were wary of more revolution, warfare, turmoil, and uncertainty. After a quarter century of upheaval, most Iranians simply wanted to make it through the day. Ganji tried to egg on fledgling democrats.
The struggle for freedom is always initiated by a few people. Others will eventually join them. A political player cannot give up with the excuse that people aren’t politically motivated or do not support the fight for justice and freedom. The dissidents in the second half of the twentieth century constituted a small minority in all nondemocratic societies. But that small minority opened up the difficult road to democracy by their steadfastness and bravery in the face of suffering….
We must show them that running away from political struggle is not the remedy to their despair…. We shouldn’t believe that democracy is impossible unless all the people become democratic-minded.8
The regime repeatedly tried to force Ganji to recant his treatises. When he fell ill, he later told me, the prosecutor refused to allow him medical treatment unless he repudiated his work. That’s when Ganji heeded his own message.
Two weeks after the second manifesto was published, he went on a hunger strike. As the weeks passed, he dropped ten pounds, then twenty, then thirty. Pictures were sneaked out of prison showing his once beefy figure frail and gaunt, huge dark gullies encircling his eyes.
As he weakened, Ganji wrote two “Letters to the Free People of the World.” Both were smuggled out of prison. In the second letter, he drew a parallel between his own struggle and Socrates’ defiance of the state and his willingness to “invite death.”
“Life in slavery is not worth a dime in my eyes,” he wrote.9
On the forty-third day of his hunger strike, Ganji wrote Soroush. His mentor was among dozens of friends and fellow reformers—including Nobel Peace Prize laureate and human-rights activist Shirin Ebadi, who was one of Ganji’s lawyers—who had appealed to him to end the hunger strike.
Ganji expressed the gratitude of his generation to their “beloved teacher” and was wistful about missing the freedom to have another long discussion with Soroush. But he had no choice, he wrote, because of the clerics’ betrayal, hypocrisy, and deceptions.
“They are immersed in corruptions but claim to be innocents. Their other service is to defend killers and murderers,” he wrote. “They know nothing but claim to be the holders of divine secrets. They are experts in breaking promises.”
With scathing bitterness, he described the clerics’ “machine” of terror and assassination. “It knew no limits, and every single dissident had to be eliminated,” he told Soroush.
In his letter to Soroush, Ganji’s transformation was complete. Ganji was not among the well-heeled in the villas and condos of North Tehran who had rejected the revolution from the early days. He was not among the thousands of the Western-educated elite embarrassed by the revolution’s excesses and Iran’s isolation. He was not among the businessmen who wanted to end economic sanctions as well as tensions with the outside world. He was not among the artists, writers, and filmmakers who felt confined by the Islamic republic’s restrictions. He was not even among the prominent student leaders, many of wh
om were also jailed and tortured.
Once charged with protecting the clerical regime and teaching its virtues, the former Revolutionary Guard had become Iran’s noisiest democratic activist and, some claimed, the most popular.
“No other dissident has emerged since the revolution who has the respect of all the disparate elements of Iranian society, from Revolutionary Guardsmen and Basij [volunteers], senior clergy and religious intellectuals, to the secular and religious middle class within Iran, and the strong Iranian exile communities in Europe and North America,” Karim Sadjadpour, the Iran analyst for the International Crisis Group, told me.
“The fact that Ganji is held in such high esteem by all of these disparate actors is really quite remarkable.”
Ganji held out for seventy-three days. By then, however, he was suffering severe kidney problems and other medical complications. He had lost over fifty-five pounds. In the end, he was lapsing in and out of consciousness. Pressured by family and friends, who argued that he would be more effective alive, he finally ended his hunger strike.
In March 2006, Ganji completed his prison term. Reformers and friends swamped his home to celebrate his release. International groups wanted to honor him; universities abroad wanted him to lecture.
The more important question, however, was how relevant he was at home. By the time he was freed, Iran’s reform movement had faded into a whisper. The political environment had changed completely while he was in prison.
Parliamentary elections in 2004 and presidential elections in 2005 had put hard-liners in office. Even friends questioned his ability to effect change.
“Ganji probably represents the loudest and most courageous voice of dissent in Iran, but it’s not necessarily a pragmatic or effective one,” Semati told me. “His combative and aggressive ideas on reform may not be in tune with the broader popular mood. The economic situation and the problems of everyday life and people are their priorities.”
But Ganji continued to speak out.
“The regime is driving Iran toward a catastrophe,” he told me when we met several weeks after his release in 2006. “Iran is today an archipelago of prisons.”
We met in Washington. He had always been in jail when I was in Tehran. He had come to pick up the 2006 International Freedom of the Press Award from the National Press Club. “There is perhaps no greater exemplar of journalistic heroism in the world today than Iranian investigative reporter and dissident Akbar Ganji,” the club said in honoring him.
In his acceptance speech, Ganji said he became a journalist “in order to instigate protest.” He cited Albert Camus’ The Plague, a tale of a disease’s devastating toll on society that is often interpreted as a metaphor for repression’s deadly impact.
“I am with you here today in order to bear witness on behalf of the fallen victims of the plague of violence,” he said. “It recognizes no boundaries. One day, incarnated as Stalin, it ran over the vast territories of Russia. One day, as Hitler, it tormented the people of Germany, the Jews, and other people…. One day, as Mussolini, it wreaked devastation on the beautiful landscape of Italy. And another day, as bin Laden, it wrought havoc on the United States.”
As he traveled abroad, Ganji continued his protests. En route to Washington, he stopped in New York and held a symbolic three-day hunger strike in front of United Nations headquarters. Friends and supporters organized small simultaneous demonstrations in eighteen cities around the world to demand the release of Iranian political prisoners, particularly a philosopher, a bus-driving labor activist, and a male former legislator arrested during a women’s-rights rally.
He also published a series of op-ed pieces in American newspapers condemning the clerics. “The official ideology of the ruling clerical regime considers all humans to be less than adult and says that without the supervision of the clergy, they will act like children, if not madmen,” he wrote in The Washington Post. “According to this clerical theory, the people are most virtuous when they are most docile.”
“We want the world to know that our rulers do not represent the Iranian people and that their religion is not the religion of the entire nation,” he wrote, with almost reckless abandon.10
When we spoke, I asked Ganji if he wanted to return to Tehran—or dared to return. Soroush was under such pressure that he had left in 2000 to teach at a string of American universities, including Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, and then in Berlin. He went back to Tehran only occasionally. Soroush was writing, from outside Iran, about issues of justice and Islam. Again stirring huge controversy, he proffered that justice is the standard of what is Islamic—not the other way around.
When I saw Ganji, the two men had just had an emotional reunion, their first in seven years, in Germany.
The regime effectively encouraged its dissidents to leave—or face jail. Ganji’s previous arrest in 2000 had come shortly after a trip to Europe for a conference. He had been warned that he would be arrested if he returned.
“I went back, was arrested, and I don’t regret it,” he told me.
“I told them from the beginning that it’s a two-sided cost,” he added. “They imprison me, and I pay the cost. But when I talk about them, they also pay a cost. And when they imprisoned me for six years, the cost was higher to them.”
EIGHT
IRAN
The Reactionaries
If you cry “Forward!” you must without fail make plain in what direction to go. Don’t you see that if, without doing so, you call out the word to both a monk and a revolutionary, they will go in directions precisely opposite?
—RUSSIAN PLAYWRIGHT ANTON CHEKHOV
The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution.
—AMERICAN POLITICAL THEORIST HANNAH ARENDT
Islam’s priests will wield enormous political influence during the Middle East’s turbulent transitions. Many already do. They fill a void created by the imprisonment, exile, or execution of secular democrats and other opponents. Religion’s utopian ideals define goals; its institutions offer instruments of action when other avenues are barred.
The phenomenon is not unique to Islam or the region. In their own different ways, popes, dalai lamas, reverends, and rabbis have played pivotal roles in earlier political changes elsewhere—some peaceful, some not.
Yet within Islam, the ayatollahs, imams, sheikhs, and sayyeds speak with many voices. The spectrum is as disparate among clerics as it is among the region’s politicians, and in their own ways they are also competing—among themselves—for the future just as fiercely.
Nowhere is the disparity more conspicuous than in Iran. Among the clerical corps, rivalries have spawned opposing parties and led to political subterfuge, physical sabotage, house arrest or imprisonment, and even conflicting fatwas.
From his home in Tehran’s foothills of the snow-capped Elburz Mountains, Ayatollah Khomeini regularly reprimanded the theocracy’s squabbling clerics. “Stop biting one another like scorpions,” he rebuked them in 1981.1
When the clerics’ political party imploded from internal divisions in 1987, Khomeini again scolded them. “Sowing discord,” he said, “is one of the worst sins.”2
The Islamic Republic’s raucous politics function much like Tehran’s irreverent free-for-all traffic. Both are irreverent.
In a city with a sea of cars fueled on gasoline at twelve cents per gallon, the unwritten rules of the road are riotously counterintuitive: To turn left on one of the capital’s leafy boulevards at busy rush hour, get in the far right lane—and vice versa. A red light means gun it. A green light means slow down and wait until the light turns red—and then gun it. Speed is limited only by what your car can do. See an ambulance or fire truck? Race it. If you pass your exit on a packed freeway, back up fast into oncoming cars. If you need to make a U-turn, wait until oncoming traffic is roaring toward you, and then veer wildly out in front of it. A two-lane road is actually three and possibly four—and, by all means, also feel free to move int
o a lane of oncoming cars. The Lonely Planet travel guide describes Tehran’s roads as “lawlessly aggressive,” even “homicidal.”
In 2004, Tehran unleashed a new breed of traffic cops and meter men to restore order. Dressed in white broad-brimmed military hats and forest-green uniforms with gold epaulets, the traffic police acted like a brigade of generals let loose on street corners. Daringly deployed on busy streets and freeway entry ramps, they did not hesitate to order drivers to pull over for violating the dictate on new billboards, in Farsi and English: FASTENING THE SEAT BELT IS MANDATORY.
But at nine P.M., as the traffic generals retreated for the night, the chaos would resume.
It is much the same in politics. The theocracy has a plethora of forces charged with policing ideas in government, mosques, universities, the military, the press, and the professions. Yet after-hours, Iran bursts with a noisy, honking, chaotic cacophony of political notions.
“If you live in Iran, you have to deal with politics from seven in the morning until eleven at night,” University of Tehran political scientist Hadi Semati told me. “It’s like our traffic. It can be really frustrating—and really exhausting.”
Khomeini’s heirs reflect the competing array of visions—even on the theocracy itself.
The most powerful cleric in the Middle East is arguably Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader of Iran. He is only the second person to have the job; he has already held it twice as long as the revolution’s founder.
To the great confusion of Westerners, Khamenei (with an a) was selected after Ayatollah Khomeini (with an o) died abruptly in 1989. The similarity in names was misleading; they were quite different men. The revolution’s founder was popularly known as the Imam, an honorific denoting someone considered by the faithful to be capable of leading them in all aspects of life; his successor was a midlevel mullah with marginal credentials, scholarly or otherise, who had to be hastily elevated to ayatollah over the objections of many peers. It was roughly equivalent to picking a pope from among archbishops or monsignors and quickly elevating him to cardinal in the process.
