The debate over Iran's quest for nuclear
weapons has produced thousands of headlines over the past couple of years, but
anyone who's been following closely should know this much: There is no real
news there. The issue has become a mere political symphony in which the same
theme gets repeated over and over with only small variations. Yet it still gets
significant coverage in the global media.
To those, like me, who lived through the 1979
hostage crisis in Iran,
this is eerily reminiscent of what happened then. After 444 days in captivity,
the American hostages returned home -- without a single one of Iran's
demands being met. Yet the country's revolutionary hard-liners had scored the
victory that counted: While the world was fixated on the hostages, they had
annihilated all internal opposition and consolidated their grip on power.
Today, the hard-liners are rejoicing once
again, for now the nuclear debate is eclipsing the most important current
headline about Iran.
That headline is simply the name of a man: Akbar Ganji.
The threat of a nuclear standoff with Tehran
is, by most accounts, at least 10 years away, but the democratic antidote to
that possibility is perishing as I write. A prominent investigative journalist,
Ganji has been in jail since 2000 for putting out a
slew of articles, books and lectures that amount to a comprehensive one-man
campaign against Iran's
ruling clerics. From prison, he has sent out a daring manifesto containing the
five words no one else in the country has dared to utter: "The supreme
leader must go!" -- a declaration all the more powerful for being a
dramatic echo of the late Ayatollah Khomeini's revolutionary war cry against
the shah in the 1970s.
Now, Ganji is in
the end stages of a second hunger strike to protest his imprisonment. Yet even
with his blood pressure falling and clots accumulating in his veins, he still
stands as the most formidable challenge to Iran's
theocracy in 26 years.
That challenge began years ago, capping a
remarkable evolution that took Ganji from hard-line
Islamist and fervid supporter of the revolution to Iran's
most outspoken advocate of secularism, the embodiment of a metamorphosis that
the Western world longs to bring about in the Middle East.
The son of a laborer, born and raised in the destitute neighborhoods of south Tehran,
Ganji answered Khomeini's call as a teenager and
joined the ayatollah's movement. He quickly rose through the ranks to become a
leader of the Revolutionary Guards. In 1985, the Ministry of Culture and
Islamic Guidance appointed him its cultural attaché in Turkey.
By then, however, Ganji had begun to question the
status quo in Iran.
According to his successors, he began a series of conversations with the youth
of Turkey's
Islamic Rafah Party. By the end of his stay, he had
managed to dissuade them from following in the footsteps of hard-line Iranian
Islamists, turning the 1979 revolution into a cautionary tale for other
aspiring radicals.
After returning to Iran
in 1988, Ganji joined the staff of Kian quarterly, Iran's
leading journal of modern Islamic theory and philosophy. His work at the
magazine, and with the 25 writers and influential religious intellectuals known
as the Kian Circle,
marked the real turning point of his evolution from revolutionary to reformer.
The circle gathered every Wednesday evening to discuss politics and, as most of
them held prominent government positions, the country's direction.
It was there, under the mentorship of Abdolkarim Soroush, one of the
world's leading Islamic theoreticians, that Ganji
reexamined all of his most venerated totems: Khomeini, the notion of the
Islamic republic, and finally Islam itself. He remains to this day a believer
in God and in Islam, but -- after years of imprisonment -- he also believes
that separating religion and state is an essential prerequisite for democracy.
At first, Ganji had
hoped that Iran's
transition to democracy could be accomplished through reform and from within.
So he threw his support behind the 1997 campaign that brought former president
Mohammad Khatami to power. But by the end of
Khatami's first term, Ganji had concluded that reform
was impossible within the boundaries of the current constitution. He broke away
from many of his comrades, and from the circle, to endorse the idea of a
national referendum. Since the Islamic republic had been voted in through a
national referendum in April 1979, Ganji and a
handful of others put forth the idea of repeating that referendum as a peaceful
way out of the current impasse in Iran.
Ganji has his share
of critics -- from the puritanical members of the diaspora
for whom trusting a former Khomeini sympathizer is anathema (and
who wish to put him on the stand before a truth commission someday for his
involvement in establishing the regime) to left-leaning intellectuals and
scholars who say that his cause would be noble had he not become a pawn in the
hands of American neoconservatives. But the neocons
are a facade behind which these scholars hide their lack of vision for Iran.
In June 1999, they viewed the historic student uprising, the greatest display
of protest in Iran
since the revolution, with the same degree of suspicion. When it failed and
those involved were arrested, and the prospect of reform gradually died, they
cited the neocons and the U.S.
invasion of Iraq
as the reason for the students' failure.
If the words, "The supreme leader must
go!" are historic, it is not only for their truth, or their unadorned
clarity, or the courage with which they are spoken. Courage has been in ample
supply in Iran
since 1979. There have been many others just as resilient as Ganji: Abbas Amir-Entezam, deputy
prime minister of Iran's
post-revolutionary provisional government, refused to sign a recantation letter
that would have absolved him of the charge of "espionage for the Great
Satan," and remained in prison for 20 years. The journalist Faraj Sarkuhi, kidnapped by
intelligence agents in 1996, managed to send a note that told the world about
his captivity and brought about his freedom.
But Ganji possesses
courage and more. He has produced an intellectual blueprint to contemporary
Iranian politics, the regime, its flaws and the way forward. After publishing
his seminal books of investigative journalism, in which he traced the murders
of leading dissidents inside and outside the country to the country's highest
leadership, he tackled the system as a whole. Being locked up in solitary
confinement proved to be an opportunity for him to focus and produce his two
"Republican Manifestos." These extended essays make two key points:
That a "supreme leader" is incompatible with democracy, as is the
mixing of Islam with the affairs of the state. A religiously eclectic country
like Iran, he
asserts, must do away with "official religion."
In the country where just last month two
young men were publicly hanged for sodomy, Ganji
writes these words from prison: "My voice will not be silenced, for it is
the voice of peaceful life, of tolerating the other, loving humanity,
sacrificing for others, seeking truth and freedom, demanding democracy,
welcoming different lifestyles, separating the private sphere and the public
sphere, religion and state, promoting equality of all humans, rationality,
federalism within a democratic Iran, and above all, a profound distaste for
violence."
In response to a letter from his mentor Soroush, who pleaded with him to break his hunger strike, Ganji displayed his originality as a thinker. He
respectfully defied the master who taught him much of what he knows. Recalling
the experience of Italy
under the fascists, he declared that the supreme leader is Iran's
Mussolini. And as the master instructed, a tyrant should not be tolerated.
"Freedom and democracy come at a price," the pupil writes in his
letter, "and I am here to pay my dues." Ganji
is foreshadowing his own death. If he maintains his hunger strike and dies, it
will be a grave loss. But the fundamental ideas that he has put forth will be
the departure point for any future democratic movement in Iran.
Twenty years ago, when I was a disillusioned
teenager in Tehran, the possibility
that I would someday write in defense of a former member of the Revolutionary
Guards would have seemed unthinkable. The Guards had robbed the Iranian people
of the egalitarian dream the revolution had once instilled, even in minorities --
even in a Jewish girl like me. But for my change of heart, I deserve no credit.
It is Ganji, and others like him throughout history, whose quest for
justice soothes the wounds of a dictator's assault, and leads the bitter exile
to forgiveness.
Source: The Washington
Post, Sunday, August 21, 2005;
Page B03
