For the past few weeks, our weekly column has focused on the Islamic Republic’s turn towards détente with its neighbors, and perhaps even with the United States, and the potential opportunities such a reorientation might produce. Call us starry-eyed optimists but, rather than fretting about how Iran had somehow escaped the reservation to which the US has sought to confine it, it seemed useful to point out how such developments might be shaped into something beneficial. We stand by that analysis, but at the same time, this is the Islamic Republic we are discussing. We should not be surprised that Iran’s more pragmatic turn abroad includes a sinister byproduct at home: more repression.
We have previously observed that the timing and content of Iran’s agreement to normalize relations with Saudi Arabia suggests that it was driven by the political and security crisis of the Women, Life, Freedom protests last year. Facing the most acute challenge to the Nezam’s authority in forty years, Tehran sought to reduce external pressure on Iran and give the government the breathing room to suppress or coopt domestic opposition. The China-brokered normalization agreement with Riyadh revived dormant previous Iran-Saudi agreements on mutual non-interference, and media reports indicate that the Saudis agreed to back off its support of expatriate Iranian media opposed to the Islamic Republic in return for Iran scaling back support to the Houthis in Yemen. Principlist media, in particular, also have touted the economic opportunities of détente with Saudi Arabia, no doubt recognizing that economic growth would help assuage popular dissatisfaction.
Hamid Azizi, a visiting fellow at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs, has argued in a recent article that we may be seeing the emergence of an “authoritarian order” in the Middle East. He suggests that, following Iran’s Green Movement and the Arab Spring, a decade of domestic turmoil and intense interstate rivalry and proxy conflicts has exhausted the regional powers and caused them to recognize that there is an advantage to non-interference in each other’s internal affairs. Add to it that external great powers—especially the United States and China—are preoccupied with their increasing competition in other theaters and seek stability in the Persian Gulf, and the prevailing winds are very much blowing in favor of reduced tension and increased cooperation among the regional dictatorships. Although the underlying rivalries remain, all the countries see benefits in cooling them down and, Azizi suggests provocatively, may prefer that their authoritarian rivals remain in power lest the fall of one autocrat “goes viral” and, as in the Arab Spring, inspires popular uprisings elsewhere.
Azizi may have something there. So far, both sides have worked hard to avoid unnecessarily provoking the other. But, as tensions in the Persian Gulf subside, the Nezam has gained a freer hand to put its own house in order, and it has done so with a lack of vision that is at once typical and appalling. The most high-profile example has been the half-hearted but still oppressive resumption of morality patrols and efforts to enforce compliance with the hijab laws. In addition, as the PersuMedia Daily Summary has reported during the past month, the regime has also launched a sustained effort to curtail the independence of civil society institutions of long standing: the Iran Chamber of Commerce, Industry, Mines, and Agriculture; the Iran Chamber of Guilds; the Bar Association; the universities. In addition, there have been hardline calls to confiscate businesses—often lucrative online firms—deemed insufficiently compliant or aligned with regime policies. And as is usual in such efforts to suppress diversity and control the public space, the regime has stepped up arrests of religious minorities such as the Bahais and Sunni clerics, usually on specious criminal charges intended justify and normalize state-directed persecution.
There is a stench of déjà vu about all this. The campaign to control the universities, in which the government is, under various pretexts, systematically purging regime critics from the faculties bears a strong resemblance to the “Cultural Revolution” of 1980-83 in which the universities were shut down and cleansed of “Western influence.” Reformist figures openly suspect that this effort to purge the professors will soon extend to the student body as well. Students and the universities have a tradition of criticism of the regime and a history of support for the reform of the system, so they are perhaps an obvious target for a Nezam nervous about its diminishing public support and intent on reasserting its authority. But the broader campaign to rein in other civil society actors—including such hardly radical organizations as the Chamber of Commerce—reveals a broader sense of insecurity regarding the regime. Arch-hardliner Hosein Shari’atmadari has argued in a Kayhan editorial that Iran’s roughly 400 digital businesses effectively operate as a parallel government providing services to the public and that therefore they should be brought completely under government control. Like the purges at the university, Shari’atmadari’s call to confiscate an entire industry evokes memories of the early years of the revolution when businesses deemed too close to the ousted monarch were seized by revolutionaries and their owners exiled, jailed, or executed.
For President Ebrahim Ra’isi, who cut his teeth as a young revolutionary by serving on one of the death panels that sent at least 3,000 dissidents to summary executions in the late 1980s, such revival of the excesses of the revolution probably seems both natural and efficacious. Revolutionary extremism—and loyalty to the Leader—has been very, very good to Ra’isi. But it also shows how much his choices are constrained by an existential fear for the Nezam and by ideology. If reforms that would help to preserve the system—such as granting greater freedom to women—risk diluting and attenuating its “Islamic” character, then they cannot be implemented. That leaves coercion, increased control, and the shrinking of the circle of trusted supporters who are considered true revolutionaries.
The irony is, of course, that such a course is itself an abandonment of the original vision of the revolution. To be sure, the Islamic Republic was never especially inclusive, but it had pretensions to mass support. It was assumed that, once the “Westoxicated” were swept away, Islamic values would take hold and a righteous, pious public would gravitate naturally toward the building of an Islamic government under the guidance of a supreme Muslim jurisprudent. Instead, over the decades the Nezam has steadily pared away segments of the revolutionary coalition that brought Ayatollah Khomeini to power: first the leftists, then the liberals, then the Islamic reformists, more recently the technocratic and moderate conservatives. And, although mass support and participation in the political system is still given lip service, in practice the electoral process has been so engineered as to insulate the selection of political leaders from the popular will. The steady imposition of totalitarian controls over Iranian society, imposed by an ever-diminishing circle of loyal elites, is an implicit admission that the revolution has failed.
The Islamic Republic, despite its diminished political legitimacy and manifold failures, still has reserves of strength. With few places to go other than the gallows should the regime fall, regime elites still have good reason to prop up the corpse of the revolution and pretend it is still lively. However, to do so, the Islamic Republic has already embraced a status quo in the region in which the monarchies of the Persian Gulf, once denounced by Khomeini as abominable American puppets, are now considered valued partners in maintaining regional security and even as sources of economic progress. Necessity has forced such a compromise on the Nezam. Eventually it may force similar compromises at home.
