Mystery Mosque

Is Iran the world's most inexplicable country?

I am reluctant to write anything about Iran yet. My gut says Trump’s decision was a bad one. There are too many complications. Iran is not Iraq, which was, and is, an amalgam of three different Ottoman satrapies, with three major factions—Sunni, Shi’a and Kurd. Iran is far more coherent and, at the same time, stupifyingly mysterious. It does not have straight-line borders, which means it wasn’t created by western colonial powers. It has a brilliant ancient heritage. It is a middle class country. And, in my visits there, I came away convinced that while the Iranian people hated the brutal velayat-e-faqih regime, it hated the notion of foreigners invading and overthrowing the regime even more.

Wait a minute, Joe: what’s this velayat-e-faqih business you just dropped on us? Well, it was a minority extremist religious movement—the core belief was government by Religious Guardians—that took over the country in 1979, led by the charismatic and rather curious Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, and has somehow remained in power ever since. Well, not somehow: it ruled the old-fashioned way, in alliance with a powerful militia, the Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). This represented a sharp divergence from the more traditional Shi’a quietist tradition, which held that clerics should steer clear of politics. In his recent book about the revolution, King of Kings, Scott Anderson starts from perplexity: The revolution was entirely unexpected. To this day, no one knows why it succeeded. Anderson cites the American Iran expert Gary Sick who says that he’s been reading books about the revolution for 40 years and hasn’t found one that explains it. (I’ve just started reading King of Kings—I would guess Donald Trump hasn’t—and I’m hoping for answers.)

The crown never rested easily on the Guardians. Khomeini’s successor, Grand Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, took his governing style from the Russians: he thought that Gorbachev had brought on the downfall of the Soviet Union by adopting liberal reforms. Khamenei took the opposite course, presenting a stone-brutal face to the world—and to his own citizens—and aggrandizing Iran’s power surreptitiously by arming proxy militias in the region: Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthi in Yemen, Hamas in Gaza, various Shi’a militia in Iraq—to project regional power.

But the regime had gone wobbly. The seeds had been sown by Khomeini: he continued the Shah’s practice of allowing women to be educated. And women became the locus of the reform movement in Iran. When I first visited in 2001, you could see a woman’s politics by where she placed her hijab. If the scarf was fastened in a severe Virgin Mary wimple, showing no hair, she was a regime-supporting conservative; the more hair shown, the more progressive. I had coffee with four delightful female college students, who wore their hijabs so far back that they kept slipping off. Why not just pin them in place, I asked. Because, they told me, boys liked it when the hijab slipped off. “They like to see us retie it,” one woman said, “and each of us have our own distinctive way of doing it.”

Ah, individuality—the death knell of tyranny! It is difficult to sustain fanaticism. People want things. They have a need for distinction. Indeed, the fact that the regime has lasted this long is a consequence of its fabulous brutality; the thousands murdered in the streets in January seemed a possible denouement—but no, as in the past, the demonstrations waned. There was little appetite for violence, except among the basij—the religious police—and the Revolutionary Guards. When I visited again in 2009, I found myself in the midst of a street riot with the basij pummeling Green Party reformers, including a line of quietist Mullahs, opposed to the Guardians. I vowed not to call the government “the mullahs” after that; there were plenty of clerics who wanted no part of the regime.

And now? Who knows? There are fantasies that Ali Larijani, the secretary of the National Security Council, will play the role pioneered by Delsey Rodriguez in Venezuela, the socialist vice president who enabled the American takeover. Larijani is certainly a player. It is said that he organized the crackdown on the anti-regime street demonstrators in January. But he was also banned from running for President by the Council of Guardians in 2021 because of his alleged “pragmatic” tendencies. Like so much of Iran, he’s a mystery. This is a nation of bazaaris and conspiracists. My favorite question when I visited Iran was, who really runs this country? A common answer: the dark forces!

As with Venezuela, there seems to be no real plan here. Trump no doubt believes that he’ll luck out again. And there is the possibility that he can thread the needle and negotiate a deal with the new, severely weakened leadership of the regime. But history says otherwise. History says quagmire…or tyranny. A wise Iranian once said to me, “The Shah thought Iran was Persian not Muslim. The Ayatollah thought Iran was Muslim not Persian. They were both wrong.”

If Iranians, a studiously clever people, can’t figure out the true nature of the country on their own, what makes Donald Trump—and his crypto-colonialist thugs (though apparently not General Dan Caine and the US military)—think he can?