Survival: Global Politics and Strategy, vol. 51, no. 5, October–November 2009, pp. 91–104
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The Iranian leadership’s handling of the dispute over the 12 June 2009 presidential election, which the challenger, reformist Islamist Mir Hossein Mousavi, claimed was rigged in favour of the incumbent conservative Islamist President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, not only bitterly alienated a sizeable proportion of the population; it also deeply split the ruling clerics. The government has lost the support of many ranking Islamist figures, whose continued backing is necessary to maintain its coherence and effectiveness. Its legitimacy has been eroded to the extent that it will now find it increasingly difficult to cope with some of the daunting domestic and foreign-policy challenges it faces, including those arising from US President Barack Obama’s call for improved relations with Iran in particular, and the Muslim world in general. If the Iranian government fails to modify its authoritarian Islamist mindset and power structure to claw back some, if not all, of its lost clerical and public support, the scene is set for a greater popular backlash in the long run. Just such a backlash propelled the mass revolution of 1978–79, the overthrow of the Shah’s pro-Western autocracy and the establishment of Islamic rule.
The current turmoil, ostensibly sparked by the June election results, stems from a confluence of factors, including growing public discontent with the regime’s theocratic behaviour, economic mismanagement and foreign-policy embarrassments, especially since Ahmadinejad became president in 2005. These are symptomatic, however, of deeper structural problems in the nature of the Islamic government that has evolved in Iran.
Two-tiered sovereignty
Iran’s political system was originally shaped by the Shia Islamic vision of its founder and the leader of the Iranian revolution, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. The country’s Islamic Constitution, adopted in October 1979 and amended ten years later, prescribes a two-tiered system of governance. On the one hand, it upholds the ‘sovereignty of God’ embodied in the position of a supreme religious and political leader, which Khomeini called velayat-e faqih (rule of the jurist or philosopher-king). On the other hand, it enshrines the ‘sovereignty of the people’ to ensure that the Islamic political system also rests on a pillar of popular legitimacy. A government composed of an elected president and National Assembly and an appointed judiciary provides for public participation and political contestation, and therefore an expression of the will of the people within an Islamic framework. The president and the National Assembly are elected through universal suffrage every four years, with the president’s tenure limited to two terms.
The supreme leader is selected by the Assembly of Experts on the basis of an individual’s qualities as the repository of Islamic knowledge and wisdom, justice and impartiality of the highest order.
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The Assembly, whose 86 members are popularly elected for eight-year terms from a government-screened list of candidates, is theoretically empowered to monitor the supreme leader’s work and dismiss him when he fails to act in conformity with the precepts of Shia Islam and the constitution.
The constitution vests the supreme leader with enormous ‘above-the-fray’ religious and political authority, enabling him to...
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Amin Saikal is Professor of Political Science and Director of the Centre for Arab and Islamic Studies (the Middle East and Central Asia) at the Australian National University, and author of The Rise and Fall of the Shah: Iran from Autocracy to Religious Rule (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009).
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