The Revolutionaries
Men fear thought as they fear nothing else on earth—more than ruin, more even than death…. Thought looks into the pit of hell and is not afraid. Thought is great and swift and free, the light of the world, and the chief glory of man.
—BRITISH PHILOSOPHER BERTRAND RUSSELL
Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night.
—AMERICAN WRITER EDGAR ALLAN POE
Revolutions often eat themselves up. The turmoil, blood-letting, and failure to produce the promised utopia trigger a backlash. But in the reaction can lie the seeds of longer-term political change.
The French Revolution ended the Bourbon dynasty and introduced equality and civil liberty, but it imploded into a reign of terror. France then needed almost a century to establish a stable republican democracy. The Russian Revolution toppled the Romanov czar and introduced classless egalitarianism, but the new Soviet Union also spawned totalitarian rule for the next seventy years, until its failure opened the way for the current still-tentative experiment with democracy.
The same process is underway in Iran, the launching pad for the Middle East’s most zealous and novel revolution.
In 1979, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, a spindly cleric with forbidding black eyebrows and a long white beard, combined an old faith with new technology to unite liberals and traditionalists, democrats and communists, conservative merchants and rowdy student activists. Using tape cassettes and faxes from afar, he inspired more than a year of street protests, strikes, and rampages against the monarchy by his followers. Together, they forced the last shah, with the empress at his side and a small jar of Iranian soil in his hand, to depart on an “open-ended vacation.” Mohammed Reza Shah Pahlavi’s exit ended twenty-five centuries of dynastic rule.
Iran’s Islamic upheaval is the only original revolution among the half-dozen uprisings that have rumbled across the Middle East over the past century, because it introduced a genuinely new political ideology that altered the world’s political spectrum. It introduced a unique and aggressive form of political Islam.
Yet it has also spawned some of the boldest ideas about democracy in the Middle East from revolutionaries who soon soured on the new system and then turned against it.
Among them are two men I met a dozen years apart. They met each other in 1979 as ardent revolutionaries tasked with converting a kingdom ruled from the bejeweled Peacock Throne into a theocracy governed by turbaned clerics. They started out in the new Islamic republic’s inner circle. But over the course of a decade, both became deeply disillusioned.
Together, they illustrate the physics of political change.
Abdolkarim Soroush is a slight man with a whisper of a voice and a neat soft-brown beard. He dresses casually in the neutral tones of an academic and would disappear in any crowd. He is a philosopher. He worked to redefine the political debate in Iran during the last decade of the twentieth century. Soroush was the teacher.
Akbar Ganji is a short and once-beefy man with soulful eyes, a winsome grin, and a perpetual six-day stubble. Ganji is a writer. He worked to expose the regime’s failures and misadventures in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Ganji was the student.
Within Iranian society, both of their names became code words for defiance.
“They launched the most dynamic and novel debate about mosque and state, religion and politics, democracy and Islam in Iran in at least 100 years,” Hadi Semati, an American-educated political scientist at the University of Tehran, explained to me. “In fact, probably no where in the region could you find a more vibrant or original debate. And that debate,” Semati added, “is still going on.”
I set out to find Soroush in 1994 because his name was increasingly coming up in coffee-shop conversations, classrooms, think tanks, and seminaries. Iranians talked excitedly about his new ideas of reform. I tracked him down at his Tehran University office, where his big oak desk was covered with neat stacks of books; classical music played in the background. We began a conversation that has continued ever since.
“I’m not such an important man,” he told me in our first meeting, in a little voice that forced me to lean forward to hear him. “I’m just a writer and a thinker, and I’m just toying with ideas about religion.”
Born in 1945, Soroush came from the kind of lower-middle-class family that formed the revolution’s backbone. His mother, Batoul, was named after one of the Prophet Mohammed’s daughters; she refused to abandon the enveloping black chador that covers all but a woman’s face and hands, even when the shah banned it. His father, a grocer, refused to buy a radio because it meant listening to the shah’s state-controlled news. Most of the homes in old Tehran where Soroush grew up were mud brick; most had only a couple of large rooms and often no bathroom.
Soroush came of age in the 1960s as Ayatollah Khomeini began his campaign against the monarchy’s modernization plan—for failing the poor, deserting religious values, and corrupting a civilization dating back five millennia. Soroush grew up as sleepy Tehran was transformed into a cosmopolitan capital, complete with casinos and discos, Peyton Place on television and Kentucky Fried Chicken in restaurants, miniskirts and makeup, and shopping malls and supermarkets to rival traditional commercial powers in the Middle East’s grandest old bazaar. Iran became a hub of foreign influence in the Middle East.
“You see nothing but…self-interest, lechery, immodesty, criminality, treachery, and thousands of associated vices,” Khomeini railed in a little book called Secrets Exposed.1
The ayatollah, already in his sixties, was a rare voice willing to risk the dangers of speaking out. In 1963, after condemning the shah as a “miserable wretch,” Khomeini was arrested and held for ten months. Soroush was only a high-school student at the time. But when the cleric was released, Soroush was among the thousands who traveled to the cleric’s mud-brick home in Qom, the dusty religious center an hour’s drive from Tehran, to celebrate his release.
The final confrontation between king and cleric unfolded in 1964, when Khomeini attacked a new law granting immunity to thousands of U.S. military personnel—and all their dependents—for any crimes committed in Iran. To followers assembled in front of his home, the ayatollah thundered that Iran’s dignity had been destroyed. He linked the law to a $200-million loan from the United States.2 The controversial legislation, Khomeini pronounced,
reduced the Iranian people to a level lower than that of an American dog. If someone runs over a dog belonging to an American, he will be prosecuted. Even if the shah himself were to run over a dog belonging to an American, he would be prosecuted. But if an American cook runs over the shah, the head of state, no one will have the right to interfere with him…. Are we to be trampled underfoot by the boots of America simply because we are a weak nation and have no dollars?3
On November 4, 1964, the shah expelled the fiery ayatollah.*
Soroush kept up with the ayatollah’s wandering exile—in Turkey for seven months, in Iraq for twelve years until he was deported by Saddam Hussein, and the final four months in Paris. The first in his family to go to university and the first to go to the West, Soroush took a break from his studies in London to visit Khomeini in France in 1978, as the revolution was building up steam back home. The two men hit it off. When the ayatollah returned triumphantly to Tehran to install Islamic rule several weeks later, Soroush followed him home.
Soroush quickly became a prominent figure in revolutionary circles. He was the youngest of seven men named to the Committee of the Cultural Revolution. Before Iran’s universities were allowed to reopen, the committee conformed curriculum to Khomeini’s version of Islam and purged hundreds of intellectuals sympathetic to the shah.
But the turmoil of the revolution’s first decade took a toll. Daily life was harder for the average Iranian, and many were forced to take second or third jobs. Despite oil wealth, Iran’s economy was in trouble. The country was isolated diplomatically and under economic sanctions by major powers. It fought the longest war in modern Middle East history against Iraq, suffering hundreds of thousands of casualties. Corruption was worse, far worse, than during the monarchy. Squabbling among the theocrats forced them to disband their own revolutionary party.
By the late 1980s, Soroush was deeply disillusioned, even with Khomeini. The charismatic ayatollah, he told me, had proven to be only a function of the political transition, and not the symbol of its ultimate goal. Soroush gradually weaned himself from the inner circle and worked on his own political theories.
In the early 1990s, Soroush tapped into a debate that had been brewing for a century in the Islamic world about the scope of individual freedom. Islam literally means “submission”—to God’s will. The concept is enshrined in Iran’s constitution. Chapter One stipulates that government is based on faith in one God and that “man should submit to His will.”
But Soroush began to argue that Islam and democracy are not only compatible but inevitably intertwined.
“To be religious necessitates being a democrat as well,” he told me during our first meeting. “An ideal religious society can’t have anything but a democratic government.”
Soroush pulled off his wire-rimmed glasses and cleaned them with a handkerchief, as he often did when making an important point.
“You see, in order to be a true believer, one must be free,” he continued. “True believers must embrace their faith of their own free will—not because it was imposed, or inherited, or part of the dominant local culture. To become a believer under pressure or coercion isn’t true belief.”
Thus freedom always precedes religion—a revolutionary idea in the Islamic world.
I thought of Soroush’s argument a few months later when I walked the Tidal Basin in Washington, D.C., during the cherry-blossom festival and decided to duck into the Jefferson Memorial. I was struck by the four quotations carved into the stone walls around Jefferson’s statue, and I took a picture of each. On a trip to Tehran later that year, I showed them to Soroush.
The first inscription from Jefferson reads,
Almighty God hath created the mind free. All attempts to influence it by temporal punishments or burdens…are a departure from the plan of the Holy Author of our religion.
Another is Jefferson’s language from the Declaration of Independence:
We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, that to secure these rights governments are instituted among men.
Each of the four invoked God as the guarantor of freedom.
I laid the pictures out on Soroush’s oak desk.
“Yes,” Soroush replied, “Exactly.”
Soroush provided the intellectual bridge that allowed Iranians to be, at the same time, authentically Muslim and authentically democratic.
He quickly built up a strong following in Iran. A magazine was founded largely to promote his ideas—and the debate about them. Students and young clerics flocked to his lectures. A burgeoning reform movement grew up around his discourse—to the fury of Iran’s theocrats.
“Way back before September 11, Iran started the war on ideas—among Muslims themselves,” said Hadi Semati, the jovial Tehran University political scientist who has long been one of my guides to reform and politics in Iran.
“For almost a century, intellectuals had not produced anything of note. Mostly, they brought ideas from the West. But Soroush initiated new ideas on Islam. He changed the redlines of Islamic discourse. And he did it in our own political space. This made it genuine.”
Soroush’s emergence reflected the wider context of political change in the Middle East.
In the West, the timeline of democratic change was slow and sequential. The Reformation within Christianity gave birth to the Age of Enlightenment, which in turn paved the way for new political ideas about individual rights and democracy. The process unfolded over four centuries—and is still far from complete even in the world’s most durable democracies.
The Middle East is confronted with the extraordinary challenge of reforming Islam and overhauling political systems at the same time.
Adapting Islam is a process known as ijtihad, or “interpretation.” It is applying the essence of the faith—based on the Koran and the traditions of the Prophet Mohammed, known as the hadith—to new problems or a changing world. The word ijtihad derives from jihad.
Jihad is today easily the most misunderstood word in the world. It literally means “trying” or “struggle.” For practicing Muslims, it means engaging in the daily struggle—with oneself—to be a good Muslim. Jihad only becomes a legitimate military struggle with outsiders when Islam is believed to be endangered, in defense of the faith.
In the twenty-first century, ijtihad is the key to Islam’s own version of a reformation. It is also the key to political change. But no issue is more sensitive in the Islamic world today than ijtihad. Deciding just how to interpret and who has the right to interpret are hotly disputed. Outsiders beware.
The ijtihad camps fall into three categories. Think of them like three doors.
The first are the purists, such as Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda or the ultraconservative Salafi ideologues. They believe Islam was perfect and absolute in its original form. They see the early generations of Muslims, particularly the first three in the seventh century, as the model for all Islamic life in any age. They are literalists. Most are Sunnis.
For them, the door to ijtihad is sealed—forever. Opening it would compromise or corrupt the faith. Evil and heresy are on the other side.
The second category includes the majority of clerics and Islamic jurists, who do tolerate ijtihad. They straddle a wide middle ground. Most view interpretation through the prism of Islamic law, producing sometimes obtuse legal interpretations. Some like to draw on the Middle Ages, the golden age of Islamic scholarship, when the Middle East was the center of science, medicine, literature, and the arts—and Europe lived in intellectual darkness. Their perspective is narrowly confined and not conducive to independent thought or sweeping new ideas. Using modern reason is not encouraged. Most in this camp are Sunni, although the group includes many Shiite clerics, too.
For most, any movement on ijtihad is confined inside the room. Most do not notice the door, much less consider opening it.
Reformers or modernists are another minority. Some are clerics, but many are also academics, scientists, and philosophers. They believe in exploring the sacred text in search of new interpretations and applications for modern life. They argue that the understanding of Islam, like other religions, was not fixed for all time and all places when it was founded. They believe strongly in applying reason and science to enrich the faith and revitalize Islamic civilization.4 They want to reform Islam to take it forward. They include Sunnis, mostly nonclerics. But because of their own struggle to survive and adapt over the centuries, Shiites tend to conduct the more enterprising or adventurous exercises in ijtihad for the twenty-first century.
For them, the door to ijtihad is open—although how far is still a matter of fierce debate.
Soroush is one of those reformers.
“The essence of religion will always be sacred, but its interpretation by fallible human beings is not sacred—and therefore it can be criticized, modified, refined, and redefined,” he told me.
Human knowledge and experience evolve with time, he said. So, too, should interpretations of the religious texts.
“What single person can say what God meant?” he continued. “Any fixed version would effectively smother religion. It would block the rich exploration of the sacred texts. Interpretations are also influenced by the age you live in, by the conditions and mores of the era, and by other branches of knowledge. So there’s no single, inflexible, infallible, or absolute interpretation of Islam for all time.”
Soroush even finds freedom in submission.
“Since you’re free to be a believer, you should be free to leave your previous faith or to change your religion or to convert to another religion,” he explained. “So submission is still there. But if you want to surrender or submit to another faith, you should be free to do that, too.
“It’s a contradiction to be free in order to believe—and then afterwards to abolish that freedom.”
Soroush also challenges the core idea—on which Iran’s Islamic government was based—that there is a single right path for the faithful to follow. Tehran’s clerics believe they are the only ones who can define it.
Soroush argues, however, that there is no single right path in Islam—and no single right religion.
“Every day, Muslims recite a prayer ten times entreating God to guide us to the right path,” he explained to me. “Some say the only right path is Islam, and the rest stray or are on a deviant path. But I argue that there are many right paths. I try to justify a pluralistic view of religions—the internal sects of Sunni, Shia, and others, and also the great religions, like Christianity, Judaism, and the rest.
“We think they go to hell, and they think we go to hell,” he said, a smile crossing his face, as if the idea were amusing in its smallness.
“But I’m trying to say that Christians and members of other religions are well guided and good servants of God. All are equally rightful in what they believe. To some, this sounds like heresy,” he said, the smile widening. “But this, too, has found listening ears in our society.”
Not within the regime, however. From the mid-1990s, the ruling clerics increasingly cracked down on Soroush. After he was slowly squeezed out of his teaching posts at three universities, he established the Serat Institute. Serat means “path,” as in “in the path of God.”
The emergence of an Islamic reform movement in Iran is not surprising. Settled by an Aryan people, an Indo-European race from which Iran gets its modern name, the country of both snow-capped mountains and steamy deserts has historically been a crossroads for culture and ideas, commerce and religion. Iran bridges the Arab world to the west and Asia to the east, the former Soviet republics to the north and the Persian Gulf sheikhdoms to the south, Turkey in Europe in the northwest across to Pakistan and Afghanistan in the Asian subcontinent on the southeast. The great caravan routes of the old Silk Road cut through several Persian cities. The discovery of oil by British geologists in 1908 brought in many more outsiders from the West. Over the millennia, Iran has been a repository for souvenirs of disparate cultures.
Faith has also been a central part of Persian culture, long before Islam.
The Zoroastrians of ancient Persia founded one of the world’s first monotheistic faiths and heavily influenced subsequent Judeo-Christian thought. Their core ideas—about the devil, hell, a future savior, the worldly struggle between good and evil ending with a day of judgment, the resurrection of the dead, and an afterlife—had an impact on all other monotheistic faiths, and even Buddhism. The use of hands in prayer is widely traced to Zoroastrians praying by pointing both forefingers to the light above; they worship light as the symbol of a good and omnipotent God.
Iran’s constitution embraces Islam. But it also acknowledges some of Iran’s other faiths with their own seats in parliament, proportionate to their numbers. Christians, Armenians, Zoroastrians, and Jews have their own seats.5 Each is sworn in on their own holy book.
Jews have been in Iran from the early days of Persian civilization. The Bible recounts Cyrus the Great’s conquest of neighboring Babylon, today’s Iraq, in the sixth century B.C. He decreed that Jewish slaves be freed and then mandated reconstruction of their destroyed first temple. Many Jews opted to live in Persia rather than move to Israel after their liberation. So many settled in what is today Isfahan that it was once known as Yahudiyeh or Dar al Yahud, Farsi and Arabic titles both roughly meaning “haven of Jews.” The majority have fled sporadic persecution since the revolution, although Isfahan remains the largest Jewish community in the Middle East outside Israel.
But Islam, today, defines the national identity. It serves as the most common denominator among otherwise widely diverse ethnicities. The Persian descendants of the Indo-European settlers make up about one half of the seventy million people spread across a country larger than Alaska and more than three times the size of France. The rest are a mix of Turkish-speaking Azeris in the north, Baluchis (or “wanderers”) along the border with Pakistan, nomadic herding tribes in the south, Arabs along the Persian Gulf, plus Turkoman farmers and horse traders, mountain-dwelling Lors (an Arab-Persian mix), Armenians, Mongols, Afghans, Indians, and a smattering of several others.
Islam is the glue: Eighty-nine percent are Shiite; another nine percent are Sunni. Only two percent belong to other faiths.
Iran has also always been awash with ideas and science, of which reason played an important and early part.
In science, Avicenna—called Ibn Sina in the Muslim world—was an eleventh-century physician, scientist, and philosopher whose medical texts were taught in Europe until the seventeenth century. One of the moon’s craters is named after him. Nasir al-Din Tusi, who lived in the thirteenth century, is widely considered the most eminent astronomer in the 1,400 years between Ptolemy and Copernicus; he charted a science of evolution six centuries before Charles Darwin. The moon’s Nasireddin crater is named after him. Abu Bakr al Razi was one of the greatest physicians and philosophers of the Islamic world; his work had enormous influence on subsequent European science. He is credited with the discovery of sulfuric acid and alcohol in the tenth century. He was also an early rationalist. Iran still commemorates Razi Day (August 27), and both a university and institute are named after him. The list goes on and on.
Politically, the quest for empowerment also did not explode out of the blue with Ayatollah Khomeini in the 1960s. Twice before in the twentieth century, Iranians had tried to end dynastic rule—long before democracy was a word uttered in any neighboring state.
The Constitutional Rebellion of 1905–1911 forced the weak Qajar dynasty to agree to Iran’s first constitution and parliament. Foreshadowing the 1979 revolution, the revolt was launched by the same powerful troika—the clergy, bazaar merchants, and the intelligentsia—that would come together again later in the century. Their goal was to curtail the monarchy’s powers.
The rebellion was a reaction to the shah’s huge economic and political concessions to Europeans, particularly Britain and Russia. The dynasty was, in the end, permanently weakened. The last Qajar king fled to France in 1923.
A self-educated army colonel named Reza Khan wrested power from an interim government in 1926. He added the name Pahlavi, meaning “heroic,” and crowned himself king—launching the Pahlavi dynasty.6 He also changed the country’s name in the mid-1930s from Persia to Iran, reflecting its people’s Aryan roots. He ruled for almost sixteen years, until he was forced to abdicate for his pro-Nazi sentiments during World War II. In a virtual replay of the Constitutional Rebellion, his son soon faced similar demands to limit the monarchy’s power.
In 1953, a new coalition called the National Front, led by Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadeq, moved to curtail massive concessions—particularly in the oil industry—given by the shah to foreign powers. Mohammed Reza Shah Pahlavi tried to dismiss Mossadeq, but it backfired—and the shah ended up fleeing to Rome instead. The young king returned to the Peacock Throne after American and British intelligence orchestrated riots that forced the prime minister to resign. The foreign plot infuriates Iranians to this day. Many still want a formal apology from the United States and Britain. Mossadeq has since come to represent, in a single name, frustrated democratic aspirations—and how close Iran came to peaceful evolutionary change.
After the shah’s return, the Pahlavi monarchy ruled for another quarter century. Iranians turned to revolution only after evolution twice failed.
Abdolkarim Soroush embodies Iranian passions and politics. He is pious and immersed in its religious traditions. But he also loves the sciences. He earned a degree in pharmacology. After compulsory duty in the shah’s army and work at a Tehran laboratory, he went to London for graduate work in analytical chemistry and the philosophy of science. His first book on Islamic philosophy was The Restless Nature of the World.
During our conversations, he often mused about reconciling religion and modern reason.
“The ancient world was based on a single source of information: religion. The modern world has more than one source: reason, experience, science, logic,” he told me in the late 1990s.
“Modernism was a successful attempt to free mankind from the dictatorship of religion. Postmodernism is a revolt against modernism—and against the dictatorship of reason. In the age of postmodernism, reason is humbler, and religion has become more acceptable.
“The reconciliation between the two,” he said, “is now more viable.”
Over the years, I watched Soroush’s ideas grow in substance and influence. He became daringly outspoken, despite clerical criticism of his work. He also increasingly became the target of young vigilantes when he stepped into lecture halls. Several times he was injured.
Soroush is actually a pen name. Abdolkarim means “servant of God.” Soroush means “angels of revelation.” His real name is Hosein Dabbagh. Dabbagh means “tanner,” the profession of his grandfather. Most Iranians only took last names—many arbitrarily based on where they lived or a father’s profession—under orders from the first king in the 1920s. Khomeini came from the town of Khomein, but his brother ended up with a different last name, not all that uncommon from the time.
Soroush originally combined the names of his now-grown children as a pen name when he started writing poetry. He later began using it permanently to protect his family.
By 1999, Soroush crossed a political threshold. “This is totalitarian rule,” he told me when I returned to Tehran. “And they are totalitarian rulers. That is a harsh thing to say, but it’s the truth. The regime can’t survive the way it is.”
An Islamic state simply can not be imposed, he told me. It has to be embraced, accepted, and voted on by the majority of people. The use of religion in politics without full freedom is not only wrong, he added, it is dangerous. It will inevitably lead to totalitarianism.
“Governments can make people pay taxes, but they will never be able to breathe faith in God and the Prophet into people’s hearts,” he said. “Faith is made of the same fabric as love, and love cannot be created by force.”
He paused, reflecting for a moment. “You know, our revolution was a haphazard, chaotic, and theoryless revolution, in the sense that it really wasn’t well thought out—not by the leader, not by the people.
“For the Imam [Khomeini], Islam was everything. He wanted everyone to topple the shah in order to apply Islam. But he didn’t elaborate on any of these points,” Soroush continued.
“So now it’s the intellectuals’ job to provide a theory for the revolution, to rethink it, and to offer a new logic for it. And the outcome will be not another revolution, but reform. Because—two revolutions in one generation? Well, really! It’s too much!” And he chuckled.
As his public following grew, a follower began to organize free Thursday evening lectures for the public. They were held at private homes and at mosques on the eve of the Muslim weekend. I went to several of them and sat on the floor or outdoors with the overflow crowds, listening to him speak in that soft voice, often for hours.
Although I didn’t know it at the time, Akbar Ganji was in the crowd too.
Ganji was a former Revolutionary Guard, a member of the elite unit created to protect the fragile new Islamic republic. In the early years, he provided ideological training for its officer corps. Among those he invited as a guest lecturer was Soroush. He was captivated by the philosopher. Students often describe Soroush’s lectures in Persian as poetry. He can, in fact, recite from memory many of the long works of Iran’s great poets, Rumi and Hafez.
Ganji, who was born in 1959 and also grew up in the shabby suburbs of south Tehran, became a friend and a kind of disciple of Soroush. After the Revolutionary Guards, he moved to the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance, where he helped to churn out revolutionary propaganda. But the bonds with Soroush strengthened as he, too, grew disillusioned with the revolution.
“We wanted to create a heaven. We didn’t want a shah, but we were not clear on what we desired,” Ganji told me, when we finally met in 2006.
“The more we had repression, executions, as the revolution started swallowing its own children, I started to see this unbelievable reality, and from the other side I started to read about revolutions throughout history. And I ended up seeing one pattern—that all revolutions are the same, they follow the same rules, and they all deviate.
“I realized that repression is in the essence of revolution,” he said, smiling, the crows’-feet around his eyes crinkling. “And I realized that we cannot produce democracy with revolution.”
Soroush provided the inspiration and intellectual foundation for a burgeoning new reform movement. But Ganji became the practitioner of dissent.
Ganji started writing about Soroush’s ideas in Kiyan, Iran’s leading intellectual journal. Kiyan means “source” or “foundation.” Soroush wrote for it too—until the government denied the magazine access to printing paper. It was a common trick the regime used to close down publications that relied on state-subsidized newsprint.
Ganji then shifted his focus and began investigating the ruling clerics.
He was brazen by the standards of a movement more comfortable with nuance, nudges, and intellectual debate. In a series of investigative articles for the new crop of reformist newspapers, many of them started by Soroush’s followers, Ganji linked Iran’s intelligence ministry to the killings of dozens of dissidents in the late 1990s. He charged that key clerics, whom he dubbed “gray eminences” and “red eminences,” had issued fatwas approving the murders.
As the regime closed the reformist newspapers one after another to silence them, Ganji compiled his accusations in the Dungeon of Ghosts, the Iranian equivalent of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago. Other books chronicled corruption by top—very top—clergy.
“Ganji was the down-to-earth rabble-rouser of the reform movement,” Semati, the Tehran University political scientist, told me.
“Despite his junior status, he became the symbol of fierce resistance to a dogmatic vision of Islam and a status quo that had not wanted to change for centuries.”
In 2000, the ruling clerics struck back. Ganji was arrested and charged with defaming the regime and jeopardizing national security. After a series of trials, he was sentenced to ten years in prison, followed by five years of internal exile. The sentence was later modified to six years in prison.
But Ganji was not cowed by the ayatollahs. At his trial, he tore open his gray prison uniform to sit shirtless in court, showing what he said were the wounds of torture. In prison, often in solitary confinement, he secretly started writing again.
In 2002, Ganji managed to sneak out his book-length Republican Manifesto. He began with a quote from Thomas Paine. He was brutal about the Islamic republic.
Iran’s revolution was born in circumstances that could never have led to democracy, he wrote. Khomeini had sought to create a society that lived perpetually in an “iron cage.” The Islamic republic, he concluded, had reached a dead end.
“A vast stratum of society is in a state of despair, hopelessness, disillusion and dejection,” he wrote…. “Therefore, only a break from tyranny can make transition possible.”7
As the regime increasingly smothered the voices of reform, Ganji’s missives from prison were the buzz of Tehran. They went out on the Internet, were passed around among students, and were scrutinized in Iran’s political circles.
In 2005, Ganji sneaked out a sequel, a more strident second volume to his manifesto. This time, he went after the reformers.
He lambasted the movement for timidity and selling out. “The reformists’ false idea that only through active participation in the government can one achieve anything has, in practice, only led them to function as mere window-dressing for the system, both inside and outside the country,” he charged.
Change from within, he concluded bluntly, was no longer possible.
The time had come to end theocratic rule through a new strategy of mass civil disobedience. He called on Iranians to boycott all elections, which he charged had a long record of fraud, forged ballots, and “orders given from above” to add votes to bolster turnout figures—and the regime’s legitimacy.
Invoking Mahatma Gandhi, he called on student activists and intellectuals to ignore court summonses for opposition activity that, under Article 500 of Iran’s penal code, made them automatically liable to three to twelve months in prison.
“Citizens must break this law,” he wrote. “If this law is broken extensively, the regime will not be able to send many people to jail for expressing their opposition…. The uneven path to freedom will be opened by our efforts.”
From his isolated cell in Tehran’s notorious Evin Prison, Ganji acknowledged that most Iranians were wary of more revolution, warfare, turmoil, and uncertainty. After a quarter century of upheaval, most Iranians simply wanted to make it through the day. Ganji tried to egg on fledgling democrats.
The struggle for freedom is always initiated by a few people. Others will eventually join them. A political player cannot give up with the excuse that people aren’t politically motivated or do not support the fight for justice and freedom. The dissidents in the second half of the twentieth century constituted a small minority in all nondemocratic societies. But that small minority opened up the difficult road to democracy by their steadfastness and bravery in the face of suffering….
We must show them that running away from political struggle is not the remedy to their despair…. We shouldn’t believe that democracy is impossible unless all the people become democratic-minded.8
The regime repeatedly tried to force Ganji to recant his treatises. When he fell ill, he later told me, the prosecutor refused to allow him medical treatment unless he repudiated his work. That’s when Ganji heeded his own message.
Two weeks after the second manifesto was published, he went on a hunger strike. As the weeks passed, he dropped ten pounds, then twenty, then thirty. Pictures were sneaked out of prison showing his once beefy figure frail and gaunt, huge dark gullies encircling his eyes.
As he weakened, Ganji wrote two “Letters to the Free People of the World.” Both were smuggled out of prison. In the second letter, he drew a parallel between his own struggle and Socrates’ defiance of the state and his willingness to “invite death.”
“Life in slavery is not worth a dime in my eyes,” he wrote.9
On the forty-third day of his hunger strike, Ganji wrote Soroush. His mentor was among dozens of friends and fellow reformers—including Nobel Peace Prize laureate and human-rights activist Shirin Ebadi, who was one of Ganji’s lawyers—who had appealed to him to end the hunger strike.
Ganji expressed the gratitude of his generation to their “beloved teacher” and was wistful about missing the freedom to have another long discussion with Soroush. But he had no choice, he wrote, because of the clerics’ betrayal, hypocrisy, and deceptions.
“They are immersed in corruptions but claim to be innocents. Their other service is to defend killers and murderers,” he wrote. “They know nothing but claim to be the holders of divine secrets. They are experts in breaking promises.”
With scathing bitterness, he described the clerics’ “machine” of terror and assassination. “It knew no limits, and every single dissident had to be eliminated,” he told Soroush.
In his letter to Soroush, Ganji’s transformation was complete. Ganji was not among the well-heeled in the villas and condos of North Tehran who had rejected the revolution from the early days. He was not among the thousands of the Western-educated elite embarrassed by the revolution’s excesses and Iran’s isolation. He was not among the businessmen who wanted to end economic sanctions as well as tensions with the outside world. He was not among the artists, writers, and filmmakers who felt confined by the Islamic republic’s restrictions. He was not even among the prominent student leaders, many of whom were also jailed and tortured.
Once charged with protecting the clerical regime and teaching its virtues, the former Revolutionary Guard had become Iran’s noisiest democratic activist and, some claimed, the most popular.
“No other dissident has emerged since the revolution who has the respect of all the disparate elements of Iranian society, from Revolutionary Guardsmen and Basij [volunteers], senior clergy and religious intellectuals, to the secular and religious middle class within Iran, and the strong Iranian exile communities in Europe and North America,” Karim Sadjadpour, the Iran analyst for the International Crisis Group, told me.
“The fact that Ganji is held in such high esteem by all of these disparate actors is really quite remarkable.”
Ganji held out for seventy-three days. By then, however, he was suffering severe kidney problems and other medical complications. He had lost over fifty-five pounds. In the end, he was lapsing in and out of consciousness. Pressured by family and friends, who argued that he would be more effective alive, he finally ended his hunger strike.
In March 2006, Ganji completed his prison term. Reformers and friends swamped his home to celebrate his release. International groups wanted to honor him; universities abroad wanted him to lecture.
The more important question, however, was how relevant he was at home. By the time he was freed, Iran’s reform movement had faded into a whisper. The political environment had changed completely while he was in prison.
Parliamentary elections in 2004 and presidential elections in 2005 had put hard-liners in office. Even friends questioned his ability to effect change.
“Ganji probably represents the loudest and most courageous voice of dissent in Iran, but it’s not necessarily a pragmatic or effective one,” Semati told me. “His combative and aggressive ideas on reform may not be in tune with the broader popular mood. The economic situation and the problems of everyday life and people are their priorities.”
But Ganji continued to speak out.
“The regime is driving Iran toward a catastrophe,” he told me when we met several weeks after his release in 2006. “Iran is today an archipelago of prisons.”
We met in Washington. He had always been in jail when I was in Tehran. He had come to pick up the 2006 International Freedom of the Press Award from the National Press Club. “There is perhaps no greater exemplar of journalistic heroism in the world today than Iranian investigative reporter and dissident Akbar Ganji,” the club said in honoring him.
In his acceptance speech, Ganji said he became a journalist “in order to instigate protest.” He cited Albert Camus’ The Plague, a tale of a disease’s devastating toll on society that is often interpreted as a metaphor for repression’s deadly impact.
“I am with you here today in order to bear witness on behalf of the fallen victims of the plague of violence,” he said. “It recognizes no boundaries. One day, incarnated as Stalin, it ran over the vast territories of Russia. One day, as Hitler, it tormented the people of Germany, the Jews, and other people…. One day, as Mussolini, it wreaked devastation on the beautiful landscape of Italy. And another day, as bin Laden, it wrought havoc on the United States.”
As he traveled abroad, Ganji continued his protests. En route to Washington, he stopped in New York and held a symbolic three-day hunger strike in front of United Nations headquarters. Friends and supporters organized small simultaneous demonstrations in eighteen cities around the world to demand the release of Iranian political prisoners, particularly a philosopher, a bus-driving labor activist, and a male former legislator arrested during a women’s-rights rally.
He also published a series of op-ed pieces in American newspapers condemning the clerics. “The official ideology of the ruling clerical regime considers all humans to be less than adult and says that without the supervision of the clergy, they will act like children, if not madmen,” he wrote in The Washington Post. “According to this clerical theory, the people are most virtuous when they are most docile.”
“We want the world to know that our rulers do not represent the Iranian people and that their religion is not the religion of the entire nation,” he wrote, with almost reckless abandon.10
When we spoke, I asked Ganji if he wanted to return to Tehran—or dared to return. Soroush was under such pressure that he had left in 2000 to teach at a string of American universities, including Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, and then in Berlin. He went back to Tehran only occasionally. Soroush was writing, from outside Iran, about issues of justice and Islam. Again stirring huge controversy, he proffered that justice is the standard of what is Islamic—not the other way around.
When I saw Ganji, the two men had just had an emotional reunion, their first in seven years, in Germany.
The regime effectively encouraged its dissidents to leave—or face jail. Ganji’s previous arrest in 2000 had come shortly after a trip to Europe for a conference. He had been warned that he would be arrested if he returned.
“I went back, was arrested, and I don’t regret it,” he told me.
“I told them from the beginning that it’s a two-sided cost,” he added. “They imprison me, and I pay the cost. But when I talk about them, they also pay a cost. And when they imprisoned me for six years, the cost was higher to them.”