Amid signs of growing police brutality and arbitrary violence, the Iranian authorities are stepping up their repression of dissenters now that the Guardian Council has validated the June 12 election presidential results.
The government closed the reformist newspaper Etemad Melli after defeated presidential candidate Mehdi Karroubi, who is associated with the publication, insisted that Mahmoud Ahmedinejad re-election was invalid and that his government was illegitimate.
In a further sign of the regime’s hardening line, Ayatollah Mohammad Yazdi, the deputy head of the Council of Guardians, said that the body would not allow Mir Hussein Mousavi to contend a future presidential election. “If people like me remain in the Guardians Council,” he said of a possible Mousavi bid, “We will not approve him.”
Ahmedinejad’s spiritual mentor, Yazdi has long been a member of what Stanford’s Abbas Milani calls a “surprisingly powerfully cabal“, comprising the Council of Guardians, the Revolutionary Guard and other security forces, including the paramilitary Basij, and a faction of messianic clergy, which anticipates the imminent return of the Hidden Imam, or Mahdi.
The regime is ready to abandon its democratic pretensions, writes Amir Taheri, author of The Persian Night: Iran under the Khomeinist Revolution, adopting a new form of theocracy modeled on an imamate or Taliban-like emirate. In the absence of genuinely democratic legitimacy, he notes, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei, “who claims descent from the Prophet, could base his claim of legitimacy on the more specifically Shia doctrine of rule in the absence of the ‘Hidden Imam’.”
Nevertheless, the Islamic republic faces “a deep crisis of legitimacy,” says Nader Hashemi, author of Islam, Secularism and Liberal Democracy. “There is a very politicized and very discontented society that is pushing for greater change and accountability within Iran’s political system.”
“We don’t know how all this is going to play out,” explains Hashemi. “But the ruling élite has suffered a huge blow to their credibility. Looking at the high level of popular mobilization and discontent, it will be very difficult to forever crush the opposition and go back to the way things were. There is now an opposition leadership that is willing to stand up to authority in Iran, not be cowed and force a debate over the status quo.”
Iran analyst Reuel Marc Gerecht concurs that “a permanent opposition to Khamenei and his constitutionally ordained supremacy has now formed”. The two pillars on which the Islamic Republic rested – the Shi’ia clergy’s legitimation and a semblance of popular support for the state – have been fundamentally weakened with profound implications for Iran and for the future of Islamist politics in the wider Middle East:
It’s not difficult to foresee the Islamic Republic spiritually unraveling. If it does, the most important experiment of Islamist ideology since the birth of the Muslim Brotherhood will have proven itself–to its own people, to the clerical guardians of the faith, and to the world–a failure. Unless Mousavi withdraws and leads his followers in a renewed quietist retreat, the Islamic revolution, which shook the Muslim world 30 years ago, will now become either a real laboratory of democracy or a crude and violent dictatorship that might rival the Baathist regimes of Iraq and Syria in its savagery. Either outcome would be momentous.
[...] Democracy Digest, Michael Allen considers the newspaper’s close in the context of declining Iranian democracy, a crisis of legitimacy and the now solidified [...]