| The debate raging nowadays [25 May 2002] in Iran regards the possibility of the leader being converted into a kind of constitutional theocrat - so the elected President Mohammed Khatami may really govern and the 290-seat majlis (parliament) legislate with no constraints. Iranian democracy in this case would function smoothly - without any need to alter the constitution. At present, with the country governed by both secular and religious leaders and governing bodies, duties often overlap, although the religious leader holds sway. But if the leader is to remain the bearer of the last word, it is proven that the religious order is above the political order - even if the leader himself is a product of the political order (after all, he was elected by jurisprudents elected by the people). The conservatives in Iran are using any tricks in the book (or not in the book) to characterize the role of the leader as transcending even the conditions of his nomination. As the leader - a doctor of law - defends a system (fiqh) that is not open to a democratic debate, it is fair to assume that no real democracy is being practiced in Iran, as the so-called "third generation" of young Iranians - post- revolution - scream louder and louder. The conservatives are also fighting an extra challenge coming from the proponents of a "religious civil society". These people are not exactly secular, but they vigorously defend an "Islamic democracy" where the role of Islam would be ultimately determined by popular vote. To sum up, in the current circumstances the heirs of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's revolution of 1979 are split between the partisans of a "religious democracy" and the partisans of the velayat-e faqih. Who is the real sovereign, the people or the leader? |
Mr. Escobar is squinting through European spectacles, it seems to me, when he takes for granted that what one wants to know first about an unfamiliar political system is the locus of "real sovereignty." Even in the West, Mr. John Austin's key to all political mythologies can be rather misleading at times, and one would do well to recall with Ronald Syme that "There is always an oligarchy somewhere" on the practical side, even though the theoretical mysteries of sovereignty are genuinely believed in around our own parts. At Qom, the question raised is entirely useless: the persons whose disagreements are being described would all agree in a flash that the Real Sovereign can only be God. (Possibly even those third-generation screamers would admit that premiss, although they do not sound to be engaged in discussion of political theory.) "Sovereignty" is not at issue, "vicegerency" would be more like it, or why not simply wiláya in Arabic?
The expression "religious civil society" is hopelessly westoxicated. And it is trendy, too, which "sovereignty" is not. Can Mr. Escobar's comparative good guys reallly call their stuff anything so grotesque as that in Persian? I am not sure he understands "civil society" properly as the phrase is used by its fashionable Western devotees, or by the older tradition either. That which is "ultimately determined by popular vote" is eo ipso outside the perimeter of Civil Socialism. To dispense with jargon, voting and things votable about belong to Government as opposed to plain Society, unless the latter word means all human events taken together the way an anthropologist would use it.
"Religious democracy" makes more sense, at least as a factional slogan. But one wonders whether the Iranians don't have that already. "Is there not a Constitution that sets down 'the role of Islam'? Was that Constitution not endorsed by popular referendum? So what's your difficulty, gentlemen?" Presumably the comparative good guys would like to emend the Constitution and redefine the role of religion this way or that and then have a plebescite approve their tinkering over the pro-Khamíne'í tinkering. It would have been nice if we were told exactly what they have in mind. Also what Mr. Escobar had in mind himself when he began with "the possibility of the leader being converted into a kind of constitutional theocrat." I'd guess that he means reducing the mullahs to the effective impotence of a British or Scandinavian monarch, but that is only a guess. Here again, one could easily maintain that what they have already is nothing if not constitutional theocracy.
| The answer we get from the ayatollahs in conservative Qom - especially during the Friday prayers - is that the powers of the faqih are not limited by the constitution: this would mean that Khamenei enjoys the same powers as the Prophet Mohammed and the "immaculate imams". |
What the Friday prayers have to do with the case, who knows? But maybe we can guess: Mr. Escobar may be importing our own convention whereby edifying propositions are solemnly uttered on Sabbath mornings and Commencement Day (and perhaps some other ceremonial occasions) that one would never infer from an examination of people's actual behavior. If Pepe Escobar were to become the Lycurgus of Iran, perhaps he would allow the mullahs to claim anything they liked on Friday afternoons as long as nothing much ever actually happens on that account.
More importantly, he once again frames his issue in a way that the native parties would not disagree about: of course "the powers of the faqih are not limited by the constitution," how should they not be, when the fuqahá’ have been in business dozens of times longer than anything constitutional has? The received theory of where these powers derive from may not be entirely accurate historically, for I believe there is evidence that mere government had more to do with getting the system started originally than its practitioners care to admit, but that only makes it clearer that the mullahs wish the powers of the faqíh to be absolutely independent of worldly jurisdiction.
"Khamenei enjoys the same powers as the Prophet Mohammed and the 'immaculate imams'" is either a misunderstanding or a deliberate hobgoblinization. Nobody who has any credentials to take sides in whatever it may be that they are really squabbling about would pick up the stick by Mr. Escobar's end. Twelvers would not begin with "powers" misconceived constitutionally but with the capabilities or attributes or qualifications of the Apostle and the 'Imáms, and not even the blackest bad hat would maintain that the Rev. Khamíne'í, or the Rev. Khomeiní either, is on a par with the House proper. The wording used would apply accurately only to some individual who claimed in so many words to be the Mahdí - which of course nobody does.
One element in Mr. Escobar's floundering appears to be that he does not take the ghayba seriously and think about it all the time, as his informants cannot help but do. Both black hats and comparative good guys build the fact of Occultation into their notions of what an Islamic Constitution is for, but since that component corresponds to nothing at all in anybody else's constitutionalism, it eludes Mr. Escobar. I suppose he would admit, if pressed, that maybe these disputants are not in exactly the same line of work as Mr. Madison was, but although he probably knows that, sort of, he does not vividly realize it.
| The debate is absolutely crucial because it clarifies how far the Islamic revolution has deviated from its original ideology - which proposed an absolute convergence of interests between Islam and the popular will. It is fair to define the conservatives in Iran today as a group of neo-fundamentalists no different from the [W]ahhabis in Saudi Arabia. They are saying that Islam and democracy are incompatible because an Islamic state is defined by the primacy of fiqh - which is not to be subjected to popular debate. The whole evolution (or involution) is even more striking because this was not what Khomeini had in mind.[1] |
"An absolute convergence of interests between Islam and the popular will," by golly! Where did he fetch that from, I wonder? Though it is sound enough in an almost tautological sense if one understands "the popular will" in Rousseau's fashion as meaning rather what the mob ought to want than what it thinks it wants, the mere inferior "will of all." Again, nobody at Qom would deny such a convergence understood that way, although I daresay they are at least as unlikely to think of Jean-Jacques spontaneously as Mr. Escobar is to think of Occultation. Understood more as the latter probably means it, the claim certainly looks like being flat-out wrong. Everything in the Iranian Constitution(s) that looks undemocratic to us infidels at first glance presumes that the mob is likely to diverge from 'Islám and undertakes to make sure, if possible, that 'Islám prevails on all such unfortunate occasions. It is doubtless true that the enthusiasm of the mob for this self-limitation has declined since 1979, but that is not what Mr. Escobar means at all, unless he expresses himself very badly indeed. Meanwhile, he still has not told us what his "crucial" debate was substantively about - I was only guessing above that the comparative good guys proposed certain constitutional amendments that black reaction opposed. If that was the case, it would have been easy enough, I should think, to indicate the nature of these amendments. If that was not the case, then I am reduced to admitting that I haven't a clue what he was going on about, apart from probably attributing everything good and "democratic" to the faction he likes better, most of it having little to do with what his favourites actually care about.
The absurdity of the Wahhábí red herring is patent. As soon as Sa'údiyya sets up to be constitutional, the alleged analogy might be worth talking about, but not one minute before. To pick nits, PE should have spoken of "the primacy of sharí‘a" as regards both Twelvers and Wahhábís. In a certain sense, the latter are almost an anti-fiqh movement, for all that they pretend to be Hanbalís in a pinch. That, however, does not mean that these "neofundamentalists" have anything to say against the Divine Law proper, God forbid! But there is no need to overanalyze here when it is so obvious that Mr. Escobar is merely dumping on people he happens to dislike.
| Fortunately, since Khomeini's death an intellectual criticism of the velayat by clerics themselves has also been taking place - a criticism that ultimately "legitimizes parliamentary democracy in the name of Islam", as enunciated by Farhad Khosrokhavar, an Iranian scholar at the prestigious École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. He singles out a moammam ("turbaned", current Persian term designating mullahs), Mohsen Kadivar, as a master in mixing methods of Islamic juridical analysis with critical analysis. Kadivar is one of those who tries to smash the concept of velayat by stressing its minority role in the complex web of Shi'ite canonical law, which governs Iran. And because of his exhaustive and precise knowledge he simply cannot be disqualified by the conservatives. Kadivar has comprehensively demonstrated that Khomeini was never in favor of the velayat-e faqih, but of the nezarat-e faqih (surveillance). In his Paris conferences just before the revolution, and then in the first months of 1979, Khomeini advocated nothing else than a function of surveillance for the faqih. |
When he's puffing people he does happen to like, Mr. Escobar is a little less unsatisfactory, maybe, but not by much. He is off on the standard snark hunt for a Martin Luther, I fear, although it is not quite clear whether M. Khosrokhavar or M. Kadivar is now to become the official snark of Wittenburg East. There is a funny side to the ploy of unilaterally and preëmptively announcing "exhaustive and precise knowledge" or "has comprehensively demonstrated" when Mr. Escobar so plainly has not even any inadequate or vague knowledge what he's talking about -- not to mention no intention whatever of binding himself to what has supposedly been demonstrated or the framework within which such demonstrations take place.
As to nezárat-e faqíh, the odds are high that it was only a witticism, a memorable liitle zinger from the Rev. Kadívár at the expense of the Rev. Khomeiní not the name of anything systematic and ideological. "Surveillance" in English is a bit peculiar itself, since that word suggests something Orwellian, whereas most likely M. Kadívár will have meant rather that His Eminence claimed a veto power over laws than a desire to peep into bedrooms and so forth. But Khomeiní was a Very Bad Man, of course, and there is no need to worry too much about exactly what the badness of him consisted in as long as he gets well and thoroughly denounced.
Meanwhile, Mr. Escobar has yet to explain why "this was not what Khomeini had in mind," "this" being apparently "that Islam and democracy are incompatible because an Islamic state is defined by the primacy of fiqh - which is not to be subjected to popular debate." Perhaps one could just barely brazen it out that His Eminence in fact did drag Divine Law down to a marketplace level, reducing it to something one could - Oh blasphemy! -- vote against at a plebescite. Perhaps somebody or another at Qom or Najaf does take that holier-than-thou sort of view of the late 'Áyatolláh, although I have yet to learn of it. (That hypothetical attack would be rather like the hyper-Orthodox "quietist" denunciation of any Jewish Statism before the Messiah arrives in person - itself a matter unlikely to cross Mr. Escobar's type of mind.)
It would be ridiculous for an infidel journalist to say that, and it is extremely unlikely that PE ever would, but as to what he does (fail to) say, who can tell? He continues for several more paragraphs, but nothing in them is relevant to political theorizing at all, let alone an account of who betrayed Khomeiní and what the betrayal consisted in.
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[1] "Involution" is good, but not so good that it makes up for PE's failure to deliver an account of what the Rev. Khomeiní "really" maintained.
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