A week before local council elections were held in Iran, Hojatoleslam Abdullah Nouri, a leading reformer, kicked off his campaign for the Tehran city council by telling university students that only "an Islam of love" could crack the conservative clerical establishment's hold on power. As head of the largest pro-reform ticket, Mr. Nouri knew the key to victory was convincing the youth, women and others on the margins of Iranian political life that Islam could be a flexible, humane religion with room for true participatory democracy.
"Our Islam is the Islam of love and friendship, not the Islam of suspicion. That is not our Islam," said Mr. Nouri, a former interior minister turned crusading newspaper publisher. "Islam and a supreme clerical leadership that supports breaking up public meetings and violence and opposes its critics, we do not believe in that Islam. If that is your conception of Islam, then you are wrong. If that is religion, then we do not accept it."
His speech brought the crowd at Amir Kabir Technical University to its feet. More significantly, it served notice on the conservative establishment that Mr. Nouri and his allies, including President Muhammad Khatami, were unwilling to surrender the interpretation of their faith to their hardline rivals. Iran's first local elections were an appropriate forum to begin devolving power from the central authorities, dominated by conservative clerics, and empowering ordinary Iranians through a democratic process. The will of the people, as products of God's genius, would supplant that of the appointed clerics. In short, Mr. Nouri and his allies asserted, voting itself was an act of faith.
Mr. Nouri's case, presented at the start of a one-week campaign, was a compelling one, for he was living proof of the changes underway in the Islamic Republic. As a close ally to President Khatami, Mr. Nouri had been ousted by hardliners from his post as interior minister in a power struggle in June 1998. His exile from the ministry was intended to minimize his influence, but instead it gained him such immense public support that he decided to run in the council polls in February. When the final results were counted, Mr. Nouri had placed first in the race for 15 city council seats in Tehran, winning 589,000 votes out of 1.4 million ballots cast.
The election was a great success for Mr. Khatami; reformers who ran for posts across the country captured an estimated 80 percent of the vote, with conservatives trailing far behind. By electing representatives to village, town and city councils, centralized political power will be diluted for the first time in 2,500 years. Because much of that power today rests with the clerical establishment, the results of the election were effectively anticlerical in that political authority lies in the hands of the victors, whether they are theologians or not.
The election was truly democratic, marking a significant step toward Mr. Khatami's broader goal of a "civil society" based on the rule of law. The registration of candidates, the brief campaign itself, and the balloting were all widely seen as free and fair, with only scattered reports of vote-rigging or other irregularities. An array of candidates from bearded, turbaned clerics to yuppies, women and one clean shaven aristocrat in a coat and tie offered their fates to the body politic. The poll demonstrated the electorate's keen interest in directly choosing its own representatives. Efforts to disqualify in advance candidates inimical to the establishment, a regular feature of past Iranian elections, were defeated. Mr. Khatami, armed with public outrage at conservative interference, intervened to keep hopefuls like Mr. Nouri and a dozen other leading reformers in the race. This defiance weakened the process whereby candidates were vetted by a select body of Shiite theologians. With decisive elections to the sixth Majlis (parliament) looming next March, success in protecting pro-reform candidates ahead of that race could prove crucial to Mr. Khatami's long-term success or failure.
A truly democratic electoral process was a pillar of the constitution implemented after the 1979 Islamic revolution. But for 20 years, many of its basic principles have been put on hold. Mr. Khatami has tried to resurrect the ideas stated in the document. "I am so glad that one of the most important promises I made is materializing less than two years since the new government took office," the president said as he cast his ballot at a Tehran mosque.
PEOPLE'S VERSUS CLERICAL POWER
The triumph of reformist candidates brought to the surface the underlying cause for Iran's new phase of philosophical angst. What is the true instrument of God's will in an Islamic republic? Does ultimate political power reside with a small cadre of senior theologians, the mojtaheds, qualified to interpret and apply Islamic holy law to modem life? Or is it the people who exercise political sovereignty in God's name? Mr. Khatami, in shaping his policies, is willing to surrender the composition of his government to the people. And, in doing so, he is willing to risk the outcome largely because he is confident of his popularity. It is often said in Iran that Mr. Khatami is the only president in the world who is also the leader of the opposition movement.
Perceived as a maverick within the system, Mr. Khatami won a great victory and exposed the enormous gap between the clerical establishment and the people who had been ruled by the mullahs for two decades. Mr. Khatami offered the perfect formula for change; he advocated fusing Islam with democracy and modernity, but all within the existing system.
Since he took office in August 1997, one key to Mr. Khatami's success lies in a new movement of intellectuals who promote ideas similar to his own. These Islamist thinkers, some of whom are outside the system or part of the opposition within the establishment, are in a safer position than the president to test the limits of national debate. Thinkers such as Mohsen Kadivar and Abdolkarim Soroush agree with Mr. Khatami's views on the role of the people in an Iranian style democracy. And both have had to pay a price for being in the vanguard of what religious intellectuals are calling Iran's 'Islamic Reformation.' Mr. Soroush was stripped of his teaching position at Tehran University, and Mr. Kadivar recently was tried for confusing public opinion and spreading propaganda against the Islamic system. The charges stemmed from a series of essays Mr. Kadivar published last winter in which he argued that conservatives had failed to give people the political power they were promised at the time of the revolution.
The conservatives are clinging to the divine power they believe is bestowed upon them by God, power which they say is not subject to public scrutiny. This belief not only assures them a monopoly over how religious principles are applied in politics, but it has so far guaranteed their survival. Islamic thinkers such as Mr. Kadivar, therefore, present a direct threat to their place in politics.
One month after Mr. Khatami was elected in the landslide poll, Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati, a hardliner, tried to set the record straight on religious authority versus public mandate. In a Friday sermon, he urged Mr. Khatami to please God, the eminent leader, and the electorate, in that order. "Everything, great and small in the world, ultimately is in God's hand. All is God's design. Therefore humankind must be answerable to God; must know what He wants. The first thing is to please God."
In contrast to this view, Mr. Khatami emphasized the will of the people in speeches after his victory. "The presence of the people is the sign of this nation's life. It is a sign that our people have begun a new phase in their history, thanks to their revolution, thanks to their imam, when they feel that the country belongs to them and that they can affect their destiny."
In another interview, he elaborated on his point: "When we speak of a civilized society today, the main question is that the people have the right to determine the form of their government. Unfortunately, an idea has been instilled in the world that in a religious government the ruler or the state dictates its instructions and people have to obey."
ELECTION RESULTS
Election day, February 26, 1999, featured two types of contests, each with its own unique characteristics. The highly-politicized capital, Tehran – and to a lesser extent the urban hotspot of Isfahan – saw races that mirrored Iran's national struggle between the forces of republicanism and those of traditional clerical power. The issues centered on broad questions of freedom, faith and democracy. Everywhere else, the elections turned more on local concerns, such as municipal services, planning and economic development. Voters wanted local personalities to right the wrongs of their daily lives, people they knew or otherwise trusted to represent them in the face of the central bureaucracy.
Enthusiasm for Iran's first direct municipal election was more pronounced in the countryside and in small towns and villages than in big cities. Citizens in small communities, who decorated their shop and office windows with home- made campaign posters of their favorite candidates, cheered the prospect of having their friends and relatives on the councils. In one small village outside Tehran, residents campaigned for a husband and wife team - a basij, or member of the hardline voluntary militia, and his wife, who appeared in pictures in a severe veil with only her eyes exposed. Citizens felt at last they could break free from the anonymous central authorities and register their demands for more telephone lines, running water and a cinema directly with local officials accountable at the ballot box.
In large cities, excitement existed primarily among young, first-time voters. Slick billboards plastered over large walls in downtown Tehran and hung along the highways did little to inspire the general public. In fact, turnout in the capital was just 1.4 million out of 4 million eligible voters. Many Tehranis appeared tired of the rhetorical squabbling between rival factions, a sentiment not helped by the candidates' failure to mobilize support based on local issues. Instead, the contest in the capital of 10 million featured some of the most prominent figures in the country, including newspaper editors and intellectuals. Like Mr. Nouri, they focused their campaign on the most profound issues of the day, including the role of religion and politics and the distribution of power between the president and the supreme leader. City dwellers, like their village counterparts, were more interested in remedies for unpaved roads, unemployment and decaying public services.
The one candidate who did manage to capture the imagination of Tehran is was perhaps the least substantive. Photographs of Sadegh Samii, an aristocrat featured in a tie, were the talk of the town. His tie was intended to be a signal that Mr. Samii offered an alternative to the Islamic system, which after the revolution banned the accessory as a symbol of Westernization. Mr. Samii ran his campaign from his publishing house, a modern multi-story office filled with the nervous energy of a New York advertising agency. "Why shouldn't I wear a tie?" Mr. Samii asked, shuffling papers while trying to answer his mobile telephone. "Not a day has passed in twenty years when I didn't wear a tie. My tie is a symbol of education, of technology, of modernity . . . . As a member of the aristocracy, I think the time is right for someone like me to participate in politics."
The fact that iconoclasts such as Mr. Samii were allowed to run at all speaks volumes about the changes in Iran. However, those who appealed to a narrow audience also received fewer votes. Jamileh Kadivar, the sister of reformist thinker Mohsen Kadivar and the wife of the minister of culture and Islamic guidance, Ataollah Mohajerani, tried to appeal to a cross-section of voters. Her achievements, including months as an aide to President Khatami, would suggest that her aspirations are similar to those of any liberated western woman. But her conservative dress exposes her complex nature. She wears a severe chador, the black cloak extending to the floor and tightly framing the face. Mrs. Kadivar is a strong-willed activist who is trying to craft an Islamic system that is both democratic and modern. Achieving that goal, in her view, requires meeting the needs of the rich and poor. "When I am in south Tehran, I talk about the need for sewage systems and running water. When I am in north Tehran, I talk about republicanism and the need for fulfilling the promises of the revolution," Mrs. Kadivar said.
Despite the existence of these parallel contests - one national, the other local - it is possible to discern a number of important trends. The results clearly broadened the participation of those who previously had a limited voice in Iranian politics. Women, who generally are active only behind the scenes, won 300 out of 197,000 seats. Although this may seem a small number, it was their first significant entree into the political process since the 1979 Islamic revolution. Some 5,000 female candidates ran among 300,000 contenders. The tendency of many women to vote along gender lines meant that female candidates often did well in those conservative bastions where all but a handful of candidates were men. For example, in Saveh, a traditional farming town south of Tehran, women won a majority of seats on the council. Mr. Khatami's eldest sister, Fatemeh Khatami, a former official in women's affairs, won a seat in the central desert town of Ardakan.
The most prominent woman elected was Mrs. Kadivar, who came in third in Tehran with 370,00 out of 1.4 million votes. Her growing popularity has stemmed in part from a backlash against an earlier political setback at the hands of the conservative clerics of the Guardian Council, who nullified her election in 1995 to the fifth Majlis from her hometown of Shiraz on ideological grounds. In the freer atmosphere that surrounded the council elections, Jamileh Kadivar ran as a leading member of Abdallah Nouri's reformist ticket, polling more votes than any other woman in the country.
In terms of the numbers, Mr. Khatami's reformist allies were clear winners, especially in the high-profile contest in Tehran. Candidates endorsed by the Great Coalition of the Imam's Line Groups captured all but two of the 15 council seats, ensuring that the next mayor of the metropolis will be a Khatarni man as well. The president's supporters won eight of eleven seats in the central city of Isfahan, a recent flashpoint between conservatives and reformers. Even in Mashhad, traditionally a conservative stronghold, reformers secured five of eleven council seats, with two additional posts going to independent candidates.
The ambiguous performance of the Kargozaran-e Sazandegi, or Servants of Construction, was another notable factor. Until last autumn the Kargozaran, a moderate faction led by the popular reformist mayor of Tehran, had been a major force in Iran's emerging democratic politics. Money and organizational muscle from the mayor's office had played a major role in getting out the vote for Mr. Khatami in May 1997. But a conservative-led prosecution of the mayor, Gholamhossein Karbaschi, on charges of graft had steadily sapped the fledgling party. In an apparent bid for a reduced sentence, Mr. Karbaschi fielded a slate in national polls in October for the Assembly of Experts, an obscure theological body with little or no popular base. He then publicly broke ranks with his former allies in the Khatami campaign, the influential Islamic leftists, and called for a big turnout despite blatant disqualification of any candidate at odds with traditionalist thinking.
Tehran voters took their revenge four months later, when only two Kargozaran candidates not shared with the more radical Great Coalition won city council seats. At city polling places a number of voters cited Karbaschi's "treachery" in the Assembly of Experts election as reason to spurn his party's list. The leadership of Kargozaran includes a number of powerful members of Mr. Khatami's government, including the influential minister of culture and the governor of the central bank. But its potential as a vote-getting machine has been derailed, for now.
The size, scale and novelty of Iran's democratic experiment meant relatively few of the hundreds of thousands of candidates were affiliated with any of the recognized factions or fledgling parties. Campaigning lasted just one week, further obscuring the political orientation of many of the contenders. As a result, it is difficult to draw firm conclusions about the composition of the city, town and village councils. But, say members of Mr. Khatami's inner circle, that is largely beside the point. The important purpose was to carry off the elections successfully and to implement one of the most democratic elements of the 1979 constitution.
It is uncertain how much power the local councils will wield. On paper, the councils are charged with taking an active part in the following: appointing mayors for towns and cities and managers for villages; supervising central government functions on the local level, including tax assessment, education, cultural and economic projects; planning for social services and economic development; encouraging construction of sports and cultural centers; and setting taxi and bus fares.
On a practical level, there is no history in Iran of political autonomy on the local level. Even if local representatives have the best intentions of installing sewer lines, the mechanism to channel funding from the central government may be absent. Even tax collection, the most logical avenue for funding local projects, is enforced haphazardly.
CONSERVATIVE REACTION
Hardliners used the first Friday sermon after the election to voice their reaction. They feared the winners might tum their new influence against the conservative establishment. At Friday prayers in Tehran, the platform for discussing issues of the day, Ayatollah Mohammad Yazdi, head of the judiciary, warned the winners not to grab too much power. “I'm speaking to you gentlemen and ladies who think you are so successful and important ...don't think you're the president now and can say and do anything you like. Think of your town's and village's interest,” he said.
Conservatives had tried to prevent a large victory for the reformers by vetting candidates ahead of the poll. The supervisory board in charge of qualifying contenders banned Mr. Nouri, Mrs. Kadivar, Azam Taleghani, a noted Islamist women's-rights advocate and daughter of revolutionary icon Ayatollah Mahmoud Taleghani, and an array of others for allegedly refusing to agree that ultimate political authority should rest with Iran's supreme clerical leader. This doctrine of velayat-e faqih, advanced in its absolute form by Ayatollah Khomeini, has shown signs of wear since the charismatic revolutionary leader died ten years ago. As public opinion increasingly shapes Iranian politics, the power of the people has become a serious rival to the institution of the supreme leader, and to the clerical establishment as a whole. The February elections were a major landmark in this process.
There is little the conservatives can do to control the influence public opinion will have on the struggle underway. But they are already gearing up for parliamentary elections scheduled for next March by manipulating the avenues of public expression. They clearly intend to use the institutions they still control fully, in particular the judiciary, to limit t e power of the people, the press and the reformers.
The arrest of Mr. Kadivar, made one day after the February election, was the conservatives' answer to their electoral defeat. Mr. Kadivar's case is being heard in the Special Court for Clergy, dominated by conservative clerics. As an advocate of increasing people's power within an Islamic system of government, Mr. Kadivar was the perfect target for hardliners. In silencing him, they hoped to limit the voices providing religious legitimacy for public demands for more say in their social and political affairs. But the tactic has backfired. As the nation awaits the verdict, Mr. Kadivar has become a martyr for sacrificing his own freedom to that of the nation. One commentator compared him to Galileo, the man of science persecuted for his beliefs. More significantly, hundreds of conservative clerics in the holy Shiite city of Qum have parted ways with the establishment and signed petitions demanding Mr. Kadivar's release. His "crime," they say, was nothing more than the traditional right of a learned theologian to question and reinterpret his Shiite faith.
The conservatives' second line of attack was aimed at the press, most notably at the reformist women's daily Zan, run by Faezeh Hashemi, daughter of fonner President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani. The Islamic Revolutionary Court summoned Mrs. Hashemi and closed the newspaper, after it quoted the widow of the late Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. Farah Diba, the former queen, had written a greeting to the nation to mark the Iranian New Year. The court, which swept aside all objections that press matters should be resolved under the law in the special Press Court, also cited the newspaper for ridiculing the practice of "blood money." The payment in Islam to escape execution for committing murder. But the penalty for killing a woman is half that of a man. Zan published a cartoon showing a thief holding a couple at gunpoint. The husband advises the gunman to kill his wife, given he would have to pay less in blood money.
The court declared the queen's message represented propaganda on behalf of the fallen monarchy and ordered Zan to cease publication indefinitely. But the motivation of the conservative panel had little or nothing to do with a lone voice from the defunct monarchy. Just weeks earlier, a right-wing newspaper had published parts of a lengthy interview with Farah Diba in which she said the Iranian people pined for the days of the shah. The publication, Azadi, has so far escaped punishment.
Instead, the move against Zan and a related attempt by parliament to harness the liberal daily Hamshahri are part of a coordinated strategy to reduce the influence of the reformists ahead of next spring's crucial elections for the sixth Majlis. Seen in this light, the arrest and prosecution of Mohsen Kadivar by the Special Court for Clergy fits neatly into the same pattern. Such moves exploit the conservatives' remaining strongholds - the judiciary and the legislature - to block their rivals at every turn.
"The right-wing faction is launching a serious attack ahead of…the parliamentary elections in a bid to eliminate some publications and individuals from the political scene," Zan publisher Hashemi said after the Revolutionary Court closed her newspaper. She said the conservative campaign also included the Supreme Court's decision to uphold a two-year jail sentence for graft against Tehran mayor Karbaschi and growing threats to oust the president's liberal culture minister through a no-confidence motion.
The intense maneuvering ahead of polls some ten months away - a lifetime in Iranian politics - is a measure of just how seriously all factions are treating the next Majlis elections. Conservatives, many of whom owe their seats in large measure to aggressive vetting of reformist rivals by the aging theologians of the Guardian Council, now control the parliament and its powerful leadership. Together with the judiciary and the Friday prayer leaders, these MPs form an effective locus of opposition to the social and political reforms of President Khatami. Taking control of the parliament, which is a powerful institution under the constitution, is thus vital to the future of the president's campaign for a civil society under Islamic principles.
Against this backdrop, the recent local elections can be seen as little short of a disaster for the conservatives. The overall strength of the reformists shows that public ardor for the president and his allies, while fraying a bit around the edges in the face of increasing economic hardship, remains strong. Traditional means of political control, especially the pre-election elimination of popular candidates, failed miserably and may be undermined for good.
The contest also revealed the reformers' growing organizational strength in the relatively smooth creation of effective tickets and voting blocs. What's more, it demonstrated the increasing power of the independent press to shape public opinion despite residual controls on freedom of speech. Finally, the February 26 elections handed Mr. Khatami an enormous victory over his institutional rivals: by chipping away at centralized power and implementing one of the constitution's most democratic provisions, the president changed forever Iran's political scene.
THE COUNCILS' FIRST MEETINGS
On April 29, the newly elected council members held their first meetings across the country. In Tehran, Abdollah Nouri and Jamileh Kadivar took their seats among other reformers gathered in a wood-paneled hall with an enormous crystal chandelier. Until the final hours leading up to the morning session, conservatives were still trying to have Mr Nouri and four others disqualified. When the gathering opened, Iran's interior minister, who has final say in the election results, stepped up to the podium and made clear that the reformers had won fairly and would begin their terms in office at that moment.
The mostly male audience of senior clerics and cabinet ministers then greeted Mr Khatami, as he stepped out from the crowd dressed in a flowing black robe draped over a beige cloak. His confidence was reflected in his words: "We are witnessing one of the most evident manifestations of people's control over their destiny. The people have taken a decisive step toward freedom and national pride." Iran's experiment at grass-roots democracy had begun.
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