In praise of Iran

Other than Jeremy Corbyn, nobody seems to have a good word for Iran. Strident voices in Washington are accusing the Iranians of serial acts of maritime terrorism in the Gulf, maintaining the odious Bashar al Assad in power in Syria, distorting democracy in Iraq and harbouring unrequited nuclear ambitions. In fact, within the famously fissiparous Trump administration, probably the only thing that the White House, The Pentagon, State and the National Security Council can agree on is that Iran is bad. Neither does the holding of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe as a de facto hostage commend the Tehran government to the Foreign Office, or popular opinion in Britain. While to their Saudi co-religionists, there are Iranian fingerprints all over sectarian tensions in Bahrain and the eastern Saudi provinces and a conviction that the Houthi insurgency in Yemen has only been possible with Iranian support. On the austere Wahhabist wing of Saudi politics the Iranians are not only strategic competitors but also apostates to Islam; they might be forgiven the first infraction, but certainly not the second.

How did it come to this? How did a nation that has a claim to be heir to the longest unbroken civilisation in the world, author of some of the most sublime literature in either the religious or secular canons, custodian of one world religion (Shia Islam) and creator of the minor but enduring faith of Zaroastrianism become an international pariah? And, more importantly, is it fair description of a complex and sophisticated nation?

Iran has a long collective memory and has witnessed the passing of the armies of Alexander the Great, the Prophet Mohammed, the Byzantine Christians, the Mongols, the Ottoman Turks and the western imperialists. The weight of that folk memory seemed to be turned on its head in 1979 when a revolution, which in many ways prefigured the Arab Spring, installed Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini as a leader combining both spiritual and secular power in place of the shah, last scion of the parvenu Pahlavi dynasty. Khomeini has become part of the iconography of the late 20th Century but the Iran he bequeathed to history on his death in 1989 was in a parlous state. Exhausted after war with Iraq that ran from 1980–88, it was strategically boxed in from the west by the Sunni regimes of Iraq and Saudi Arabia and from the east by Pakistan and Taliban controlled Afghanistan. It had won the undying enmity of the United States in the wake of the hostage crisis and the humiliation of President Carter’s failed rescue attempt. And, when things couldn’t get much worse, Khomeini issued the notorious fatwah on Salman Rushdie that conveyed to the world the impression of a country resorting to medieval instruments to find an accommodation with modernity. Then, at a stroke, Mohammed bin Laden changed the world.

There are many consequences of the US led interventions after 9/11 but one stands out above all others: the complete transformation of Iran’s strategic condition. The invasion of Iraq in 2003 tore down the Sunni western wall and replaced it with a compliant Shia led regime, placing strategic depth between Iran and its main enemies. To the east, confusion in Afghanistan allowed Iran to resume its traditional influence in the western part of the country where the Herati dialect of Persian is the native language. All of a sudden, the contiguous geography over which Tehran pulled the strings began to resemble the Safavid Empire, one of the historic high points of Iranian power. The Iranians have not been slow to exploit this fortuitous advantage and now exercise power throughout the 140 million Shia Muslims living between Lebanon and Afghanistan, as they believe befits a nation with impeccable great power credentials. They may have latterly exercised strategic calculation but the simple – and barely credible – fact is that the Iranians are the beneficiaries of a western failure of historic proportions. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo may not be detained by irony, but even he might reflect on the fact that the Iranian actions that he denounces with such vehemence are the direct result of strategic advantage that America handed them on a plate. Indeed, there might be a case to make that the real cause of American discomfort is not so much Iranian adventurism as the patent and gratuitous failure of US statecraft, which must now be rectified.

So much for recent events but Iran’s place in the Middle East feeds off deeper historic currents, and, to establish proper context, we need to return to the birth of Islam. A schism between what would become the Shia and the Sunni strands of the belief system began shortly after the death of The Prophet in 632 CE. This split came to a head with the defeat and execution of Mohammed’s grandson, Hussein, by the Umayyad caliph Yazid at the battle of Karbala in 680 CE. This led to the historical primacy of the Sunni strand of Islam and laid the foundations of the Shia vocation of martyrdom, endurance and redemption through suffering, both as a personal code for the individual and a state doctrine. Anyone who has witnessed the Day of Ashura festival when the Shia faithful flagellate themselves with flails, whips and knives will need no instruction in this tradition. This sense of marginality may have spiritual benefits but it also prepared the Shia for a history which has been characterised by a subordinate position to the Sunni for most of the intervening 1300 years, with a few Shia interludes like the Egyptian Fatimid Caliphate around 1000 CE and the Safavid Empire of the 16th and 17th centuries. At its greatest extent, the Safavid Empire covered modern Iran, Azerbaijan, Armenia, most of Iraq, Georgia and Afghanistan, as well as parts of Pakistan, Turkmenistan and Turkey. One Safavid legacy which is central to the character of contemporary Iran is to set out clearly the political role of religious leaders in the state. The Safavids established the primacy of the ”Twelver” strand of Shia Islam which believes that the line of Mohammed became extinct in 873 CE when the twelfth Imam disappeared within days of inheriting the title, at the age of four. Believers hold that he will return, but, until he does, spiritual power passes to elected imams, as God’s representatives, and capable of holding both spiritual and temporal office. This conjunction of religion and state permits Shia jurists to straddle both disciplines and was the tradition that set the scene for Khomeini in 1979.

This set of beliefs that sustains the 250 million global Shia population is doctrinal nonsense to the 1.6 billion Sunni, but, both communities were able to rub along well enough so long as the Shia knew their place. Even in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, where there was a clear Shia majority, the Sunni grip on power was immovable. The problem that the region and the world now faces is that since 1979 we have embarked on another Shia interlude where the assumptions of Sunni primacy are no longer accepted and where present day Iran sees itself as proud custodian of the Safavid tradition. This, of course, has produced extremists on either side and both al Qaeda and ISIS have reserved their most intense bile for the apostate Shia rather than unenlightened non-believers. How far will these tensions go? It’s hard to tell because since the Ottoman Turks displaced the Safavids around 1730 and restored the normal service of Sunni primacy there has been no precedent to go on. What we do know is that inter-confessional conflicts are invariably bitter and protracted and we must fervently hope that the Middle East can avoid a Thirty Years War of the 21st century.

So, what exactly is Iran in the dock for? The first entry on the charge sheet seems to be making the most of breathtaking Western incompetence which released it from a state of tight strategic containment and granted unprecedented freedom of action. Iran has not been slow to make the most of the opportunity but where does historic responsibility lie? Probably closer to Washington than Tehran. The second item is that after over a millennium of second class religious citizenship, the Shia are seeking co-equal status with the Sunni within Islam. If this was the American civil rights movement or the Mandela inspired equality struggle in South Africa, liberal opinion would leap to the support of the underdog, so why do we demonise Iran and tolerate Saudi Arabia? The question is rhetorical, but the clear sense emerges that the civilisation that can trace its roots beyond Cyrus the Great and boast the glories of Isfahan’s architecture and Rumi’s poetry, is getting a raw deal in the court of global opinion.