The Beginning of the End? by Fareed Zakaria

July 26, 1999, U.S. Edition

The Beginning of the End?
Raised on a too-strict diet of totalitarian Islam, young Iranians could forge the first modern--and moderate--Islamic society.
By Fareed Zakaria

Mohammed Khatami does not look like Mikhail Gorbachev. Iran's president is bearded and robed in high-clerical fashion. There's no birthmark on his forehead that needs airbrushing. Yet Khatami is often called Ayatollah Gorbachev, and with good reason. Like the former Soviet leader, Khatami is trying to pry open a closed and bankrupt system of government. Like Gorbachev, he will probably get a lot more than he bargained for. The most dangerous moment for a bad government, Alexis de Tocqueville once wrote, is usually when it begins to reform itself.

Iran is ripe for counterrevolution. Twenty years ago the Iranian revolution swept away the shah, who was equal parts modernizer and egomaniac. Since then, the country has been subjected to a disastrous experiment in social and ideological engineering, akin to the communist revolution in Russia. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini wanted to remake all of Iranian society on Islamic principles. But unlike the Soviet revolution, Iran's petered out within only a decade. By 1989, having utterly failed to foster a Pan-Islamic revolution across the Middle East, failed to create an Islamic economy (or an economy of any kind) and having failed to defeat Iraq in an eight-year war, the country was, in the phrase of the scholar Fouad Ajami, a cynical and weary state.

It was against this cynical and weary state that tens of thousands of students demonstrated last week in 15 cities. Those protests could mark the beginning of the end of the Islamic republic. First, some caveats: this is not the Soviet Union in 1989. Iran still has a vast group of believing revolutionaries. In addition, Khomeini's successor as Supreme Leader of the Iranian Revolution, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei--who outranks President Khatami and serves for life--is a dedicated opponent of any reform. The student protests were quickly countered by impressive pro-regime demonstrations. More significantly, President Khatami felt compelled (or was coerced) to denounce the students.

And yet, these were the largest demonstrations seen in Iran since 1979. They voice the frustrations of millions of young, energetic Iranians who have no memories of the tyranny of the shah or the euphoria of the revolution. (Sixty-five percent of Iranians are under 25.) Make no mistake, these students are not radical Westernizers or anti-Islamic zealots. They simply seek a less oppressive, less dogmatic system of government. Their demands are limited--jobs, an end to intrusive Islamic restrictions of individual rights and greater freedom of expression. (The protests began when the government shuttered the liberal newspaper, Salam.)

Islamic societies do not seem able to make the transition to modern societies with individual rights, separation of church and state and a prosperous economy. Scholars search far and wide for pockets of liberalization and triumphantly point to a reform here and there in some small country--Jordan, Tunisia and Oman are the usual favorites. But in the long run, Iran may prove to be the birthplace of a modern, moderate, Islamic society. By turning Islam into a totalitarian ideology, the mullahs have tarnished its appeal to the historically faithful. Having had a full dose of dogma, Iranians might yearn for secularism and cosmopolitanism. Travelers to Iran are often struck by the fact that while the regime is obsessively anti-American, many Iranians, particularly the young, are obsessively interested in the United States. The official denunciations of America in all its forms has given the United States a heady, furtive allure that neither McDonald's nor MTV could ever create. The Great Satan has become the great seducer.

Iran has a pope of sorts in its supreme ayatollah. This might actually help the cause of liberalization. After all, in the West, the presence of a powerful pope created resentments and rivalries among the rulers of Europe. They rebelled against Rome, often and with arms. And it was as a result of the battles between popes and princes that--exhausted by the perpetual religious warring--they moved toward the separation of church and state. Because the Islamic world has no pope, it can have no such challenge to the papacy. Except in Iran.

The Iranian regime has stood itself athwart modernity and said No! It will surely fail in this quixotic endeavor. How long and what form its failure will take--gradual evolution or bloody revolution--is difficult to predict. The demonstrators' demands are small and the protesters are still a weak force in society. But the tensions raised are unlikely to settle down to a quiet death. A chain reaction, however slow, has begun. De Tocqueville explains: The inevitable evil that one bears patiently seems unbearable as soon as one conceives of the idea of reforming it. Every abuse that is then eliminated seems to highlight those that remain. He was writing of the years before the French Revolution. But it rings true of Iran today.