RELIGIOUS STATECRAFT The Politics of Islam in Iran
Mohammad Ayatollahi Tabaar
Introduction The Politics of Islam
IN FEBRUARY 1979, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini sat at the helm of God’s Government in Iran. While history has remembered him as a man of unbending principle, he charted a complex and contradictory course—from defender of the constitutional monarchy in 1961, calling on Mohammad Reza Shah to reign, not rule; to developing a doctrine of supreme clerical rule, Velayat-e Faqih (Guardianship of the Jurist), to replace the monarchy; to reverting to advocating a progressive constitutional government minus the Shah on the eve of the Iranian Revolution in 1978–79; to institutionalizing Velayat-e Faqih in the new constitution, putting himself at the top of the combined supreme religious and political authority. On his deathbed, he revised even Velayat-e Faqih, no longer requiring his successor to possess the highest possible clerical qualifications but instead endowing the position with ultimate political authority—Absolute Velayat-e Faqih. Before ascending to power, Khomeini pledged freedom to the opposition to unite under his Islamist banner, made alliances with nationalists, attracted leftists to his political cause, endeared himself to the Iranian army, and promised the monarch’s American patron unobstructed access to oil. Once in power, he and his followers would “break the pens” of the dissidents, uproot the nationalists, liquidate the leftists, decapitate the army, install their own Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), and bring the entire state apparatus under the Islamists’ control. He had vowed friendship with the United States but then blessed the seizure of the American embassy. [1]
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He sought a united Shi’a authority to capture the state, only to end its independence and bring it under the state’s control. Khomeini preached the establishment of an Islamic state to implement Islamic law but reversed the means and ends when he sanctioned the abrogation of Islamic law to protect the state. His followers were no less fickle. After Khomeini’s death in 1989, they split into two groups and took his ideological legacy down opposite paths. the radical Islamist leftists who had structured their faction around statism and anti-imperialism, and seized the U.S. embassy in 1979, later reinvented themselves in 1997 as proponents of reformist Islam, human rights, and better relations with the United States. By contrast, the conservative Islamist right, which was considered more “moderate” in the early years of the revolution, evolved into a more statist, ultraconservative, anti-American faction. Khomeini’s successor, Ali Khamenei, initially downplayed his predecessor’s preference for the Absolute Guardianship of the Jurist, only to further expand it once he himself became the Guardian Jurist; he then went from a middling title, Hojjat al-Islam, to Ayatollah, before ultimately claiming to be a grand ayatollah. Former president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, who played a critical role in institutionalizing Velayat-e Faqih in 1979 and then tailoring that robe for Khamenei in 1989, backed the popular pro-democracy Green Movement in 2009 and strove to weaken the position of the Guardian Jurist to the clerical equivalent of the British monarchy. His reformist successor, Mohammad Khatami, symbolized the transformation of a staunchly antiimperialist faction into one that would advocate better relations with the United States. Former president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his circle spoke of wiping Israel off the map, but later declared friendship with the Israeli people. His anti-American position was followed by numerous unsuccessful attempts to open a secret channel to the White House. the story of post-revolutionary Iran is one of ideological and political contradictions—often articulated by the same actors. Religion is a ubiquitous and yet mercurial feature of contemporary Iranian politics. “Islam” has taken a wide range of quietist, revolutionary, reformist, nationalist, and secular manifestations in contemporary Iran. Scholars and policymakers have not paid su cient attention to how elites have constructed and used religious narratives1 for political purposes, and changed these narratives in the process. Religion is often described as either a mask for Iranian leaders’ hunger for power or a determinant of their behavior. Lost between the two is an analysis [2]
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of how religion is instrumentally crafted, negotiated, and contested in the political sphere. If elites unremittingly develop and deploy religious discourse, scholars should study this continual development and deployment. Just as social scientists examine elites’ electoral and nuclear politics, so should they examine their religious politics. Ignoring the role of religion in political analysis, Clifford Geertz once prudently observed, “is not so much to stage the play without the prince as without the plot.”2 Conversely, one can argue that ignoring politics is to stage a play that—despite having a plot—leaves out the prince and the rest of the cast. Beneath the façade of a seemingly static, consistent, and ideological political system is a dynamic, fast-paced underworld of bold, ideational impresarios unabashedly comfortable with supplying any religious commodity necessary to control the state. In this book, I demonstrate that Iranian politics revolve around instrumentally constructed religious doctrines and narratives. Interactive and embedded in daily politics, these doctrines and narratives shift as the positions of their carriers change within the political system. Actors develop and deploy religious narratives to meet their factional and regime-level interests, depending on their locus in the system and their subsequent threat perceptions.3 Rather than the driving force behind behavior, religious ideas are the constructs of actors seeking to meet the challenges of elite competition. In an uncertain climate, political actors are prone to become ideational entrepreneurs,4 reformulating their goals according to ideological references that capture the popular imagination and bring them closer to dominating the polity. the state is not “a means for the production of meaning,”5 but the opposite. Meaning production is a means for capturing the state. A monopoly over the legitimate use of religion is a sine qua non of an “Islamic” state. Before proceeding, a critical caveat is in order. this book does not seek to uncover the “real” Khomeini or, for that matter, any political actor that appears in this account. Rather, it studies him and his fellow Islamists as rational actors without making unfalsifiable assumptions about their “true” ideological dispositions. the Islamists’ instrumental use of religion neither negates nor confirms their sincerity. One could claim that Khomeini was not a true believer in Islamist ideology, since he continuously used and bent religious rules to ascend to power. One could also posit that Khomeini was a genuine believer precisely because he was determined to make his vision [3]
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work, even if it required certain tactical adjustments. neither can be proven or disproven. to ascribe strategic thinking to a religious actor is not to call into question his or her beliefs.6
Religion, Political uncertainty, and Agency the central claim of this book is that there is no such thing as “political Islam.” there is, however, a politics of Islam. I argue that religious narratives can change, change rapidly, change frequently, and change dramatically in accordance with elites’ threat perceptions. that is not to say that religion holds no explanatory value in seeking to understand political action. On the contrary, the following chapters show that religious ideas, ideals, and ideologies play a critical role in generating mass support and elite cohesion. However, religion is not wholly malleable, either. Political actors must understand the religious market and consumers’ preferences before innovatively overcoming doctrinal and institutional constraints and crafting new religious narratives.7 In Iran, the societal turn toward Islam was palpable by the 1960s. Even Marxist thinkers such as Jalal Al-e Ahmad (1923–1969) came to acknowledge its potential superiority over other ideologies as a means to bring about fundamental social and political changes in the country.8 But this turn required appropriating and activating specific political properties in Islam in general and in Shi’a in particular. It took powerful figures such as the Frencheducated sociologist Ali Shariati (1933–1977) to turn a quietist Shi’a theology into a revolutionary ideology.9 By reconstructing Islamic history in terms of another popular ideology of the day, Marxism, he turned an anomaly in Shi’a—the revolt of only one out of the Twelve Imams—into a rule, proposing what he called “Red Islam.” Similarly, it was Khomeini who appalled the traditional clerical establishment in both Qom and najaf by proposing a “theory” of the state for the Shi’a. Thus, it was not Shariati’s revolutionary Islam or Khomeini’s Velayat-e Faqih that propelled the Islamic Revolution of 1979; rather, it was a popular aspiration for political change, if not revolution, that led both figures to reconstruct the history of Islam accordingly.10 In other words, revolution came first and “Islam” followed. Simply studying Shi’a theology would not predict or even explain the revolution.11 [4]
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unlike studies that take ideational factors as exogenous, this book demonstrates that religious narratives are endogenous to elite competition and factional politics. Actors are not solely driven by—nor do they simply use—the ideas that are available to them; rather, they craft their own narratives for political ends. Providing a revisionist reading of Iranian politics since 1979, I argue that these studies get the causal link between religious ideology and political order perilously backward. Instead of viewing religious ideology as a determinant of an actor’s political objectives and interests, I examine the religious consequences of politics. Political behavior that many experts interpret as an outcome of an ideology should rather be examined as a cause of that particular ideology. I process trace half a century of doctrinal changes against the backdrop of domestic and international politics and locate “political Islam” at the heart of elite politics in Iran. In this micro-level analysis, I claim that Islamist ideology was not only used, but also—more importantly—constructed and institutionalized strategically by elites in response to changing opportunities and threat perceptions. the more closely I have studied the evolution of religious narratives, the more strongly I detect a strategic logic behind them. My constructivist-interpretivist method has brought me to a rationalist conclusion. Scholarship remains confused over the causes and consequences of Iranian politics. The occupation of the U.S. embassy in Tehran was not driven by the Islamists’ inherent anti-Americanism, as is often claimed. this book shows that the Islamists’ internal competition with the Marxists dictated the anti-American shift culminating in the hostage crisis. The Iran–Iraq War did not last eight years because of an essential culture of martyrdom in Shi’a Islam. Rather, the Islamist government employed a variety of religious narratives and doctrines to achieve its internal political objectives and simultaneously resist the Iraqi army. Similarly, Khomeini’s “fatwa” against the British author Salman Rushdie was not simply the result of his religious fanaticism, as we are often told. Rather, in the aftermath of a devastating war with Iraq, the embarrassment of the Iran–Contra affair, and the growing reaction to Rushdie’s novel, The Satanic Verses, in the Muslim world, he used the fatwa as a way to silence enemies, outbid rivals, and restore his ideological credibility. In each instance, politics drove religious ideology, not the other way around. Iran’s pragmatic turn after Khomeini’s death was not only a result of his conservative successors’ learning from the negative experiences of [5]
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their revolutionary excesses in the 1980s. Rather, they had to “learn” how to selectively moderate their foreign and economic policy to succeed in their practical goal of reconstructing the war-torn country. Khomeini’s marginalized radical followers did not return to power in 1997 solely due to their intellectual journey to reformism; instead, they realized they had to reinvent themselves as Muslim democrats and proponents of “civil Islam” in order to simultaneously challenge the electoral process and the establishment’s “political Islam.” Ahmadinejad’s sudden shift from expediting the return of the Hidden Imam to praising Cyrus the Great was not a spontaneous appreciation of Persian nationalism. It was a calculated, albeit unsuccessful, move to cultivate public support against his old conservative allies. Similarly, Ayatollah Khamenei’s purported fatwa against the use of nuclear weapons can be explained as an effort to signal commitment, help the subsequent nuclear agreement in 2015, and save the Islamic Republic from political collapse.
This book is not only about religion and Iranian politics; it makes specific arguments about religious ideology with respect to individual Iranian leaders, not least of all the founder of the revolution, Ayatollah Khomeini. Scholars and observers of Iranian politics often describe Khomeini either as an ideological actor with a fixed goal of establishing an Islamic state to challenge international norms, or as a rational but deceitful leader, the Ayatollah Realpolitik,12 whose religion was only a façade covering his ruthless desire to ascend to and stay in power. Both groups refer to his treatise, Islamic Government, as strong evidence at least a decade before the Iranian Revolution of the blueprint he had in mind to bring the state under clerical control. Yet these teleological arguments conceal both the driving forces behind the evolution and institutionalization of Islamism in Iran and the unintended consequences that followed. If the final product of Khomeini’s vision was so unambiguous, the obvious question is, why did no one detect it before it was well established? How did a wide range of actors, from the united States, which had analyzed his writings, to the Iranian opposition forces that allied with him, fall into this “trap” and view him as a Gandhi? These analyses suffer from several problems. First, by inferring intentions from observed behaviors and religious rhetoric, they overlook other em-
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pirical evidence that can lead to alternative explanations for the postrevolutionary order. Second, by taking the emerging political order for granted and linking it to its religious foundation, scholars often overlook other contingencies as well as the factors that blocked alternative paths a post-revolutionary Iran could have taken. What seems predetermined in hindsight is simply one possible scenario among others ex ante. Presuming otherwise overlooks the interactive nature of politics, the intra-elite dynamics at critical junctures, and the unintended consequences of each step. the actual Islamic Republic that emerged in 1979 was more the product of uncertainties than the straightforward materialization of Khomeini’s Islamic Government lectures a decade earlier. Scholars often take Islamist ideology as a given, as they do the notion that the mosque was a built-in institution ready to be deployed for the revolution. However, as Charles Kurzman argues, the mosque network “was not controlled by the Islamists at the outset of revolution,” but by the mainstream traditional clergy.13 Fixation on Khomeini’s “immutable” ideological worldview as a goal keeps us from recognizing the strategies that he and his allies had to employ to weaken their clerical rivals and unseat the Shah. Khomeini’s religious “vision” was as much a goal as it was an evolving means to a political objective. Conversely, ignoring the ideological component would divest our perspective of the mechanisms through which such strategies became effective. Khomeini’s religious credentials and discourses brought him credibility to forge alliances, generate mass mobilization, and undermine regime cohesion. It was partly due to his effective use of religion that key players such as the chief of staff of the Imperial Army; the head of the much-feared secret service, SAVAK; and even U.S. o cials facilitated the political transition, intentionally or unintentionally. they believed that their positions within—or leverage over—the state would remain intact under the new regime. The Shah, too, deployed Islamic narratives as a counterstrategy by installing “religious-friendly” o cials, reducing public demonstrations of Western culture, and liberalizing the political arena. But in doing so, he fatally entered a territory in which he had little authority to compete with Khomeini, despite his attempts to mu e his rival. He sent Khomeini from om to be marginalized among the quietist clerics in Iraq. When this failed, he asked Saddam Hussein to expel Khomeini from the Shi’a-majority country to an “infidelistan” (France), where he only ended up attracting the world’s
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attention. Finally, the Shah’s last prime minister permitted Khomeini to return to Qom in the hope that there he would be “drowned” among the clergy. But instead, his political movement engulfed the clerical establishment. At each turn, Khomeini masterfully averted what could have been serious blows to his movement by adjusting his strategies and employing new discourses. In Najaf, his anti-Shah speeches eventually overcame his isolation as the demonstrations in Iran spread; in France, the “cradle of freedom,” he made powerful pro-democracy promises that helped bring him out of seclusion and break the French ban on his media coverage. He portrayed himself as a seminarian with no personal ambition other than removing the Shah and restoring the nation’s dignity. He repeatedly claimed that he would neither hold any position nor allow any cleric to leave the seminaries. All of this would change beyond anyone’s imagination—including Khomeini’s own—once the monarchy ended. He returned to Iran, and a range of new actors competed for political power. Each move shaped the scope of options ahead. upon landing in tehran, Khomeini ordered his militant clerics to serve as judges and summarily execute the army’s top generals and other remnants of the old regime for “sowing corruption on Earth” and “declaring war on God,” invoking these Quranic lines to swiftly and legitimately eliminate any potential military coup, even though some of these generals had worked with him to ensure a smooth regime transition. But toppling the monarchy also unleashed an existential threat to him and his appointed nationalist Provisional Government, not from the army or the United States, but from the mushrooming Marxist groups with their appealing anti-American ideologies and strong organizational capabilities. The institutional network, mobilizing capacity, and extensive popularity of these groups among students, workers, middle-class intelligentsia, and other anti-imperialist forces posed an overwhelming challenge to a nascent Islamist–nationalist government. Out of fear of becoming the Alexander Kerensky—the moderate chairman of the post-revolutionary Russian Provisional Government who was overthrown by the Bolsheviks in 1917—of the Iranian Revolution, Khomeini transformed from a Gandhi into a Lenin. He and his disciples stole the Left’s anti-imperialist narrative and organizational structure. Although they had not initially sought a confrontation with the United States, they calculated that outbidding their rivals’ anti-Americanism in such a threatening climate would generate new constituencies at the expense of the communist Left. [8]
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When radical Islamist students preemptively seized the U.S. embassy in November 1979, even U.S.-friendly Islamist clerics reluctantly ended their burgeoning communication with American o cials. Anti-Americanism had become the new game in town, and the Islamic Republic had to play along to survive against its internal challenges. Surprised by the turn of events, President Jimmy Carter sought out Muslim theologians in an effort to understand Khomeini’s worldviews. By projecting a committed, ideological, irrational, anti-imperialist image, Khomeini perplexed the United States, divided the Marxist Left, isolated the nationalist rivals, and paralyzed his orthodox clerical nemeses.
State-Building: Monopoly Over the Use of Religion Khomeini’s political gambit depended on his ability to institute and maintain a monopoly on the legitimate use of religion—which has in effect come to define the Iranian state since 1979. Doing so was a precondition to establishing a Weberian monopoly of the legitimate use of violence. In other words, to Islamicize the state, Khomeini first had to statize Islam. thus, he strove to order power14 in the mosque before doing so in the state. Concerned about the political ramifications of his theological isolation, Khomeini and his militant disciples relentlessly campaigned—from early on and particularly after the revolution—to make new institutional arrangements to intimidate and co-opt the clerical establishment. It was a daunting task to subjugate the Shi’a clergy, which had enjoyed centuries of institutional independence. the very brand of the project—the “Islamic” state-building enterprise aimed at implementing shari’a under the leadership of the now-titled Imam Khomeini—increased the cost of clerical opposition to the new political order. It silenced senior traditional clerics and co-opted many of their students. dissenters and defectors were dealt with through multiple institutions, including the Special Court for the Clergy (SCC), which was established even before the ratification of the new constitution. The SCC operated outside the lines of judicial authority, under the more political auspices of the Imam’s o ce. Any senior cleric who opposed Khomeini, including Grand Ayatollah Kazem Shariatmadari, was branded pro-American and silenced. Many scholars mistakenly treat the clerical community as a monolith, largely opposed to the Shah and in favor of the “Islamic Government”; they [9]
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also portray Khomeini’s own disciples as homogenous and blind followers. their accounts thus overlook the critical role that Khomeini and his lieutenants played in expanding Velayat-e Faqih and capturing the state. As I explain in the following chapters, recently released documents reveal Khomeini’s outbidding political strategies to overcome his senior clerical rivals before the revolution. Moreover, his close clerical associates pressed him to endow them with more power than he had originally anticipated. He initially resisted the establishment of the Islamic Republican Party (IRP), fearing an anti-clerical public backlash. He approved the first constitutional draft that contained no privilege for the clergy and no reference to Velayat-e Faqih. But facing threats from competing clerics, nationalists, and leftists, he eventually consented and funded the formation of a clerical Islamist “party” in 1979. After the IRP’s electoral success in the Constitutional Assembly, his disciples impatiently institutionalized Velayat-e Faqih as a bulwark against the growing internal threats. Khomeini put the militant clergy in charge of both the legislative and judicial branches of the government but deliberately prevented his ambitious followers from capturing the presidency. He was concerned that clerical involvement in the daily politics of the executive branch would compromise their religious—and ultimately political—authority. But after the defection of one lay president to the Marxist Islamists, and the assassination of the second lay president by them, Khomeini finally gave in and approved the candidacy of a cleric, Ali Khamenei, for president. Eight years later, Khamenei would succeed Khomeini as the new Guardian Jurist, despite his low religious credentials. For that political transition to take place, Khomeini had to significantly alter his own doctrine of Velayat-e Faqih shortly before his death. Otherwise, the state would have fallen into the hands of theologically more qualified competitors who did not adhere to his Islamist ideology. Despite four decades of relentless efforts to control the clergy and institutionalize a politicized theology as the only legitimate interpretation of Shi’a Islam, Iran’s Guardian Jurist remains existentially threatened by the millennia-old theological schools that oppose Velayat-e Faqih as a modern and even heretical invention. this perceived threat has shaped Iran’s domestic and foreign policy from the prosecution of the war with Iraq and the nuclear program to the ongoing “defense of [Shi’a] shrines” in Syria and Iraq. the Islamic Republic of Iran, with all its modern institutions and evolving religious character, is a relentlessly changing product of inter- and intra[ 10 ]
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elite rivalries. to this day, Iranian political elites respond to internal or external conflicts by devising ideational interpretations and innovations and attributing them to Khomeini, the Twelve Shi’a Imams, or Prophet Mohammad. the logic of political competition compels unanticipated ideological twists and turns, because threat perceptions and strategic interests continually shift as the positions of actors within the system change. this is the story of modern Iranian politics—imbued by a wide spectrum of debates ranging from seventh-century Islamic theology to contemporary, democratic and nondemocratic Western political thought. these dialogues are designed to constrain political rivals, change their strategic calculations, and reverse their preferences.
Contributions, Methodology, and Roadmap this book aims to understand how and why religious discourses evolve in reaction to elite politics. I do not examine them as causes but as outcomes, as well as processes through which elites act, interact, and compete for power. the empirical basis for this argument consists of a detailed period-by-period revisionist account of Iranian politics made possible by copious documents, primarily from Iranian media, multiple archives, and memoirs of key figures of the ruling elite. this is therefore a work of both social science and historical revisionism. I do not propose a theory to explain the Iranian Revolution, the Iran–Iraq War, Iran’s domestic politics, foreign policy, nuclear program, or regime durability. Instead, I offer a new framework within which to analyze them. this leads us to revise how we understand these events and issues. using this new framework, I debunk some existing claims while offering alternative explanations for why events unfolded as they did. Examining the religious consequences of politics has important theoretical, empirical, and policy implications. theoretically, this book contributes to the broader rationalist-constructivist debate in political science on the relationship between religion and politics by demonstrating how religious narratives and ideologies are constructed to correspond with the vicissitudes of elite competition in an uncertain climate. It exhibits the contradictory and multidirectional paths that religious narratives can simultaneously embark upon. At any given time, these narratives may take a combination of observable turns to manage the masses from below, elites from the left and right of [ 11 ]
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the political spectrum, and international actors from above. Both international relations and comparativist scholars of religion and politics have largely ignored this colorful collection of properties that ideas can concurrently acquire. Building on international relations and comparative politics literature, I offer a factional level of analysis—distinct from state- and regimelevel explanations—to account for the politics of religion. this framework allows me to more accurately analyze the domestic roots of Iran’s foreign policy, as well as the international sources of domestic politics and the linkage between this two-level game15 and ideological discourses. Empirically, this work sheds light on otherwise overlooked evidence to reveal the extraordinary level of ideational entrepreneurship necessary to preserve elite cohesion and generate mass support in Iran. Breaking binaries such as secular/radical, it aims to show that the emergence of religious narratives is neither accidental nor unidirectional, nor does it occur after behavioral change. Rather, religious ideology is a strategic tool, crafted and deployed intentionally along with, if not before, behavioral change to advance the elites’ interests at a given time and place. Finally, looking at religion as a commodity instrumentally configured to meet specific threats and opportunities can help policymakers better assess the causes and longevity of various ideological narratives, as well as the threat perceptions of their purveyors. I argue that (trans)national groups are not permanently wedded to an ideology. As their positions within the political system change, so too do their threat assessments and consequently the content (not the façade) of their ideological discourses. understanding the nuances of their ideational trajectories can help us better comprehend these actors’ calculations and responses.
Media as a Method In addition to archival research, theological and military journals, political memoirs, and other original sources, this book relies systematically on the media to follow the development of elite politics in parallel with the process of religious construction in Iran. daily accounts allow me to unearth the debates, doubts, perceptions, and contingencies that scholars may have overlooked or, more importantly, later considered a given. It is often surprising to
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see that what is now perceived as a fait accompli was previously only one of several possible outcomes. Ironically, the media can be a uniquely rich source of information in authoritarian regimes where there is little space for viable civil societies and alternative political parties. the Iranian media often plays the role typically filled by political activists in a more democratic polity. Despite massive censorship and crackdowns, the media (both “old” and “new”) remains a critical vehicle for the opposition and dissidents to reach their constituencies and challenge the state by writing “between the lines.” Moreover, scholarship on the Iranian media in particular frequently considers the state a monolithic entity and thus views state-controlled media as a unitary actor and mouthpiece of the government. It also focuses on dissident media and the “democratizing” role of the Internet in anti-government protests and the war of narratives with the regime.16 Iran’s contentious factional politics in fact furnish one of the most dynamic media environments among autocracies. While the regime brutally cracks down on dissident media outlets, hundreds of government and semi-governmental papers, websites, blogs, and other social media tools are engaged in highly combative debates on a wide range of issues. these elite media outlets are distinct from the mass media, including state-controlled television and radio, whose function is often limited to that of a traditional government propaganda mouthpiece. Rather than telling people “what to think,” the elite media are part of the factional war over “what to think about.”17 They discuss specific issues, test certain ideas, and present particular views. Many of these writers and contributors are former or current o cials, such as members of parliament, ministers, etc., while others may not hold o ce but are directly linked to top o cials—effectively unofficial o cials. Both groups, particularly the latter, play a critical role in promoting certain policies at the elite level. these media outlets constitute the extension of the fourth branch of the government. Instead of acting as a link between citizens and leaders, they serve as mediators between state elites. They are also uno cial traders of information, policies, and debates with other states. Having a ubiquitous presence in major policymaking decisions, they chronicle ongoing debates in the highest o ces and often signal what will ultimately become the state’s o cial policy. Thus, the elite media are less interested in shaping public opinion than in forming the strategic interests of the state, regime, or factions.
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This is a cost-e cient method of promoting policies because it allows the players to prepare the audience for a policy while leaving the door open for reinterpreting or backtracking on a proposed change. therefore, even state media should not be dismissed as mere propaganda but rather viewed as a dynamic platform through which ruling factions debate, dispute, demote, or promote particular policies. the media is thus an invaluable source of information and analysis for social scientists, who too often neglect it in favor of personal interviews, secondary sources, or public polling to develop or test theories in autocracies.18 It is an especially crucial source for studying elite-level politics in Iran. Much of my work relies on four decades of post-revolutionary Iranian media from a wide range of political perspectives, including nationalist, Marxist, Islamist, and reformist groups. Complemented by other primary and secondary sources—including theological writings, state-owned and independent academic journals, declassified documents from U.S. archives, and other materials—I construct a metaphorical motion picture whose scenes will be examined frame by frame. this approach allows me to highlight new empirical evidence with significant theoretical implications that should point to the endogeneity of religion.
This book offers a within-case study of the instrumentalization and evolution of religious discourses by political elites across six decades of Iran’s domestic and international politics. Employing process tracing,19 I closely examine the locus of ideas in a causal sequence. Studying elites in the same political environment allows me to more effectively isolate causality and explain their multifinality and divergent ideological paths while controlling for exogenous factors.20 In addition to the aforementioned overarching argument, each chronologically ordered chapter provides a revisionist account of a specific period of Iran’s recent history, presenting a stand-alone argument for that period and shedding new light on various aspects of the country’s domestic politics and foreign policy. Although religious narratives are the unifying theme throughout the book, some chapters concentrate less on discursive politics and pay more attention to the logic of factional politics at specific critical junctures. Chapter 1 lays out the theoretical argument at the intersection of comparative politics and international relations on the one hand, and rationalism [ 14 ]
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and constructivism on the other. Chapters 2 and 3 examine state–mosque relations in Iran and Khomeini’s constitutionalist and Islamist discourses aimed at uniting the clergy, forging an alliance with the nationalists, and establishing his religious authority leading up to the 1979 revolution. Chapter 4 focuses on how the intensification of the competition with the nationalists and orthodox clergy prompted the Islamists to unearth Velayate Faqih after the revolution and institutionalize it via the constitution. Chapter 5 looks at the communist threat to the new political order in the immediate wake of the revolution, the Islamists’ subsequent adoption of anti-Americanism, and the seizure of the U.S. embassy in November 1979. Chapter 6 details the factional sources and ideological consequences of the Iran–Iraq War (1980–1988), revealing how the Islamist–nationalist rivalry and the IRGC-army competition eventually turned into an intra-Islamist competition between the Islamic Republican Party and the IRGC. Chapter 7 traces the unintended discursive consequences of the war, including the formulation of Absolute Velayat-e Faqih. Chapter 8 argues that Khomeini’s successors used his Velayat-e Faqih selectively to remain in or return to power. A fruit of this political rivalry was constructions of new ultraconservatism and religious pluralism, which led to the confrontation of political Islam and civil Islam. If the political competition over religious ideas had been rooted in academic, theological, or intellectual circles in the late 1980s and early 1990s, it permeated the media and public discourse with the reform movement in 1997. Chapter 9 proposes that the reformists and conservatives endeavored to bring those discussions and, more importantly, their daily social and political implications to debates in the public sphere in order to expand their popular support and further open the electoral process in the lead-up to the 2009 Green Movement. Chapter 10 examines the simultaneous ideational threat that the reformists, a Turkish “moderate” Islamist government, and the then-ruling Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood posed to the incumbent conservatives in Iran. Chapter 11 discusses how new factional coalitions reinterpreted Velayat-e Faqih and adopted Persian nationalism before reentering the realm of internal and international politics to shape Iran’s regional and nuclear policies and relations with the United States. The final chapter concludes with a discussion of the book’s empirical findings, theoretical contributions, and policy implications.
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Praise for
RELIGIOUS STATECRAFT “Mohammad Ayatollahi Tabaar depicts Ayatollah Khomeini’s nimble ability to tailor religious and nationalist ideology to outmaneuver the Shah, the Iranian Left, and factional opponents. Though unabashed in arguing that political expediency has determined the regime’s selections from its toolkit of revolutionary religious doctrine, Religious Statecraft subtly portrays how factions struggle not so much to ‘tell people what to think’ as ‘what to think about.’ ” JACK SNYDER, Columbia University
“Continually changing narratives—based on individual, factional, or regime interests rather than on any consistent or immutable commitment to Islamic teachings and principles—define the ebbs and flows of Iran’s postrevolutionary politics. As Tabaar puts it, ‘there is no such thing as political Islam. There is, however, a politics of Islam.’ Through meticulous and extensive use of official, semiofficial, independent, and oppositional media, both in Iran and abroad, Religious Statecraft illustrates and persuasively proves this argument.” ALI BANUAZIZI, Boston College
“The politics of the Islamic Republic of Iran has been characterized by ideological inconsistency from its beginning. But Tabaar goes beyond describing the way in which leaders change core ideas. He advances a provocative argument that ideology does not guide decision making directly. Instead, leaders mold their principles to meet the political needs of the moment, restrained not by the contents of those ideas but largely by the need to mobilize followers.” NATHAN J. BROWN, George Washington University
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