Farewell Khatami

Will Iranians grieve? asks Mustafa El-Labbad

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Iran is readying itself for presidential elections on 17 June against a backdrop of sharp domestic polarisation aggravated by mounting international pressures. Regardless of the outcome of the polls and the personalities of the candidates, what is certain is that President Al-Sayid Mohamed Khatami will be stepping down. Even if he wanted, Khatami could not run again, having served the maximum two terms (1997-2001 and 2001-2005) stipulate.

President Khatami is a political phenomenon. Like all such phenomena, he brooks no lukewarm opinions; people are almost invariably a hundred per cent for him or a hundred per cent against him. But however they may stand, the face of Iran today has become closely intertwined in many people's minds with the image of Khatami. To many intellectuals, he is the symbol of Islamist revival and reform, the hope for a pluralistic model of Islamist rule.

The Khatami phenomenon, having emerged during the period of reconstruction following the Iran-Iraq war, epitomises the profound transformations the Iranian revolutionary establishment has undergone since that war. If the post- war banner was economic development, Khatami spearheaded the drive to a more comprehensive development, with a strong emphasis on political reform. His views and theories in this regard thus came to represent the trend towards change in the substance and rhetoric of the Iranian Islamic Republic.

Khatami gave the presidency his stamp of charisma and respect, but the office itself stripped him of credibility and mystique. The reformer's theories had entranced people's minds, his writings had stirred widespread admiration at home and abroad and his erudition and philosophical knowledge were a source of pride to Third World intellectuals. However, his unshakable belief in the velayat- e faqih, the doctrine of clerical rule upon which the Iranian political system is based, impeded him from effecting substantive structural change, regardless of how the system and the reform trends have benefited from the marketing of "his pluralism" and "his openness to the world".

Even so, it was Khatami who gave the world the "reformist versus conservative" paradigm for characterising political developments in Iran, in spite of the fact that the Iranian political mosaic is as complex and interwoven as the most intricate Persian miniatures or Persian carpets. The closer one contemplates the minute details, the more one realises that what appears on the surface as a confrontation between two camps is in fact a network of rivalries within the framework of the system.

During his terms in office, the reformist president succeeded in radically improving Iran's regional and international image. Once commonly perceived as an intransigent maniacal exporter of its brand of Islamic revolution, Iran through the person of Khatami has become an advocate of mending fences with its neighbours and a proponent of a dialogue of civilisations. But that same perpetually smiling, ever eloquent and generally placid Khatami is also the Khatami whose hands were bound. Khatami, the intellectual, could formulate the idiom and expressions that gave his thinking a liberal cast without departing from the confines of Shia theocratic thought. In other words, he spent what limited time and room for manoeuvre he had in the pursuit of his endless obsession with bending the concepts of modernism and democracy to the demands of velayat-e faqih, rather than the reverse.

Khatami was the philosopher head of state who could never bring his theories of reform to fruition because of his restricted powers. Under the constitution of the Iranian Islamic Republic, the president is akin to the prime minister in parliamentary systems. But, it was not the constitution alone that curbed the Khatami experiment. His deep commitment to the doctrine of clerical rule impeded his ability to promote democratic principles of rule. In addition, the Khatami experiment begins where the rest of Islamist rhetoric in our region leaves off. The Iranian president spoke from a position of power whereas the Islamist trend elsewhere is still striving to reach power. In most of the Islamic world, Islamists can capitalise on the successive failures of ruling elites in order to gain popularity. Theirs is a rhetoric that takes the offensive and puts the existing regimes on the defensive. Khatami, in power, had assumed the task of legitimising the Iranian theocracy in modernist, civil society terms. It is a discourse that is inherently defensive.

Khatami the philosopher and reformist is also a revolutionary zealot and the president of the Islamic Republic -- a theocracy that rests on the doctrine of velayat-e faqih. Khatami, at once the champion of the constitutional codification of this ideology and of civilisational dialogue.

Next Friday, a new face will be climbing the front steps of the president's office and the current president will be stepping out the back door. Because the power balance has tilted back in favour of the conservative faction of the ruling elite, Khatami will be taking with him the remnants of his incomplete reform project and with this the remnants of the aspirations that had been vested in him until the end. However, in spite of the widespread dismay at this departure, contemporary Iranian history is certain to remember Khatami as more than a "former president of the Islamic Republic of Iran".