Turbulence In Tehran: Decoding The Lineages Of The Protests Against Clerics

As American and Israeli bombs fell on Tehran and other Iranian cities, the global Left divided along familiar faultlines. Theocratic Iran has long been held up as an exemplar of an ‘Islamic Republic’. Its ‘rule by mullahs’, established under Ayatollah Khomeini in 1979, is now known as the ‘Islamic Revolution’, but that is more a correct description of how the new state took shape rather than the more diverse set of actors that came together against the brutal rule of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) stooge Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, whose family was installed by the Americans after the coup against Mossadegh in 1953, during whose short rule a raft of social democratic reforms were passed. The nationalisation of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company in 1951 set wheels into motion in Britain and the United States, and their secret agencies engineered the coup to stabilise imperial control over the global petro economy, and to counter what the West saw as undue influence of the communist Tudeh Party on his policies.

Interestingly, when Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi took power after the coup, realising that Mossadegh’ policies were popular, the Shah copied many of them. Embarking on trajectory of state-led developmentalism, Iran achieved high growth and improvements in standards of living. But from the 1960s, first in opposition to the permissions given to non-Muslims to participate in local elections, and then against the vote given to women in the referendum on his “White Revolution”, Ayatollah Khomeini and conservative clerics became his implacable foes. Increasingly ill and paranoid, like so many ‘strongman’ leaders of the day, the Shah came to rely on mass surveillance by his secret service, the SAVAK, with arrests and attacks on dissidents, including students, clerics and shades of the Left parties.

As Khomeini began to consolidate power in the aftermath of the revolution, he repressed or sidelined many of the movements that were part of the anti-Shah coalition. The new government labelled the opponents ‘fifth columnists’, and agents of the foreign powers. Significantly, Khomeini acknowledged the role of women in the ouster of the Shah but instituted the hijab as a sign of ‘women’s modesty’ that he said was necessary for the success of Iran as an Islamic republic.

This background helps us understand the lineages of the recent protests against the clerics. Protests by students, other dissidents and women and their protests were suppressed but not entirely extinguished. It bears remembering that in Iran’s informal markets, second only to the cassettes of Khomeini speeches, were bootlegs of Pink Floyd albums, particularly ‘The Wall’, with its anti-authoritarian messages. A section of youth clearly identified with western counter-culture and its emphasis on personal liberties and individual rights. This counter-culture, and dissident youth movements more generally, became targets for suppression by the Islamic state.

The 1999 Students’ Movement started as a protest against the closure of the popular newspaper Salam, run by the party of the reformist cleric Mohammad Khatami. Following police brutality, nearly 2000 Tehran University students were incarcerated. The Green Movement of 2009, which saw an estimated three million protesters in the streets of Tehran, opposed what they claimed was electoral fraud in declaring Ahmedinejad the victor. Around 100 protesters were killed in state retaliation. The anti-price rise protests of 2017, starting in Mashhad, Iran’s second largest city, spread to nearly 150 cities, as did the 2019 movements on economic issues such as rise in petroleum prices, growing economic inequalities. Trade unions and remnants of the party left participated heavily in these protests. Movements featuring female university and school students against the hijab became large-scale from 2020 after the jailing of Mahsa Amini for ‘improper hijab’; in state retaliation, nearly 500 were killed and up to 20,000 were arrested.

Coming back to the question of the split between ‘anti-imperialists’ and ‘supporters of social movements’ among the international Left, the potted history above should give us pause for thought. Iran as a Velayet e Faqih, that is, ruled under the Guardianship of the Clerics, was more anti-western than, in any Marxist or Leftist sense, ‘anti-imperialist’. American and western sanctions on Iran certainly had an impact on human suffering, including creating economic problems, and it was right for the international Left to see them as weapons of American imperialism and to oppose them. But should it be enough cause to ally with repressive regimes, in Iran as also in Assad’s Syria, Gaddafi’s Libya and Milošović’s Serbia?

The argument often made is that these regimes provided economic benefits even though they might have been repressive. This is a slippery slope: how would the economic argument work for repressive regimes of the Right allied to the US and the West, many opposed by anti-imperialists, that could also claim legitimacy on this basis? What is more understandable than the economic justification for supporting the rule of clerics is that Iran has withstood the US and its regional surrogate, Israel, for decades, for which it receives widespread admiration in the global South. Not only that, in the context of the blatantly illegal and lethal attacks on Iran, there is really only one side to choose.

But this should not obviate the questions of solidarity with the movements against the Velayet e Faqih. It is horrifying to see sections of the international Left lampoon all the anti-clerical movements as stooges of imperialism. As a comrade asked, will “women, life, freedom”, the slogan of the current women’s movement, come through Israeli and American bombs? Such a framing does massive disservice to the Iranian women’s movement. But, this section of the anti-imperialist Left says, women have very high literacy rates in Iran, and are in top positions in STEM and other university subjects.

This is of course true, but the factors behind it are more complex than the clerics being somehow pro-women. The textbooks released after Khomeini came to power broke from the westernised model of the modern Iranian woman under the Shah, with veiling being a key attribute of the ‘new Iranian woman’. Likewise, there were moves to have segregated schooling, and restrictions on women’s presence and participation in the public space.

There were also attempts to divide professions into ‘male’ and ‘female’. Education and freedoms for women expanded under reformists and Rafsanjani and Khatami and shrank under conservatives like Ahmedinejad and Khamenei. The highest enrolment rates for women were under Khatami’s rule. Subsequently, major universities have attempted to bar women students from many subjects, and strict policing of women on campuses for disrupting the hijab became common.

To offer support for the rule of clerics against the social movements of youth, women, and trade unions, because the regime that has the near-monopoly of power, and that retaliates against its opponents with violence, is opposed to the west and to Israel, is short-sighted for the Left.

To conflate anti-Americanism with anti-imperialism as a basis for condemning these movements shows a certain bankruptcy in the Leftist imagination. To think of movements for personal autonomy, individual rights, press freedoms, for greater economic rights and for plurality in the political system as being stooges of imperialists shows a shocking ignorance of the history of social movements in Iran.

To ignore or lampoon the attempts in Iran against the rule of clerics shrinks the space for the anti-imperialist Left to challenge other political ideologies, such as Hindutva, which bear many similarities to the political project of the clerics.

Subir Sinha is director, SOAS South Asia Institute