Tehran fatally oblivious to social change

The Islamic Republic has been unable to quell the civil unrest that erupted three months ago, after Mahsa Amini died after being detained for violating hijab rules. Now the protesters have broadened their demands. Commentary by Djavad Salehi-Isfahani

By Djavad Salehi-Isfahani 

The massive public protests that have raged across Iran since 22 year-old Mahsa Amini died in the custody of the morality police in September reached the World Cup. Ahead of its 6-2 loss to England last month, the Iranian team refused to sing the Islamic Republic’s national anthem, with some activists in attendance waving protest signs and booing the team for not quitting the tournament altogether in a show of solidarity toward the hundreds of young Iranians killed during the past ten weeks.

Football is Iran’s favourite sport by far. So, for Iranians to turn against their national team, especially one that had topped the Asian qualifiers, speaks to the deep wound that the protests have etched on the country’s psyche.

As the movement has grown and protests spread from Tehran to the provinces, protesters have broadened their demands. Their call for an end to harassment by the morality police soon hardened into chants of “death to the dictator”, referring to 83 year-old Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Losing the support of the people

To be sure, this crisis does not appear to threaten the regime’s survival. The protesters lack the means to overthrow the government, while the leadership is unlikely to splinter. Fortunately for the regime, its external enemies are helping it keep its different factions united.

Iranian fans protest at the World Cup in Qatar (photo: Michael Klenzler Ulmer/Team photo/Imago)
At the Qatar World Cup, activists in the stands waved protest signs and booed the team for not quitting the tournament altogether in a show of solidarity toward the hundreds of young Iranians killed during the past ten weeks. Football is Iran’s favourite sport by far. So, for Iranians to turn against their national team, especially one that had topped the Asian qualifiers, speaks to the deep wound that the protests have etched on the country’s psyche

Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and Israel’s former and likely future prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, both supporters of the protests, are probably the two most reviled figures in Iran. And the United States has a poor record of fostering regime change in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria, leaving behind failed or deeply destabilised states.

But the Islamic Republic’s harsh crackdown on protesters has severed the government’s ties not only to its young people, but to several generations of Iranians. Today’s generation of parents had been largely loyal to the revolution; in their own youth, middle-aged Iranians sought to reform the system from within rather than overthrow it. They elected politicians who promised not just material benefits but also greater tolerance toward different lifestyles.

Failed reformers

Over the past two decades, Iranian reformists have tried with limited success to make the Islamic Republic more tolerant. Former President Mohammad Khatami, elected in 1997, pushed for “dialogue among civilizations”, until he stepped down in 2005. President Hassan Rouhani, who served from 2013 until 2021, promised more moderate social policies, as well as repairing relations with the West and bringing an end to economic sanctions.

It’s disinformation that Islamic Republic of Iran has abolished it’s morality police. It’s a tactic to stop the uprising.

Protesters are not facing guns and bullets to abolish morality police or forced hijab.They want to end Islamic regime.#MahsaAmini

pic.twitter.com/qRcY0Kaepc pic.twitter.com/6ShBqnSbMn

— Masih Alinejad ️ (@AlinejadMasih) December 4, 2022

 

 

Even former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, elected as a hardliner in 2005, later turned against his conservative benefactors and adopted his own style of reformism.

Since leaving office in 2013, he has campaigned for greater individual liberties and the abolition of the morality police [Ed.: whether the morality police have actually been disbanded is disputed by some experts].

Raisi supposed to deliver economic prosperity

In 2021, frustrated hardliners engineered the election of a deeply conservative cleric, current President Ebrahim Raisi, whose task would be to demonstrate to the public what true Islamic revolutionaries could deliver. A uniformly traditionalist government, the hardliners hoped, would deliver economic prosperity at home and cement Iran’s position as a regional power, turning Iranians away from reform and rapprochement with the West.

When prosperity failed to materialise, the hardliners blamed Iran’s poor economic performance on Western sanctions, neoliberal policies introduced by previous governments and over-reliance on globalised markets.

Some even blamed the ineffectual 2015 nuclear deal for the country’s economic ills. Raisi, who won the presidency with only 18 million votes (out of an electorate of 59 million), lacks the mandate and the experience to deliver on his promises to reach a deal with the West, tame inflation and stop the currency from depreciating.

Iranian society has changed

It follows, then, that Iranian conservatives were unprepared when the protests erupted. Tensions between young women and the authorities over forced hijab wearing have been bubbling for years, but conservatives paid little attention.

An Iranian woman with her mobile phone (photo: Ralf Gerard/Joker/imago images)
Oblivious to changes in society: what the regime has missed is that Iranian society not the same as it was 1983, when most women observed the hijab law willingly. Many women lived very different lives back then; they experienced 6-8 pregnancies on average, did not seek work outside the home and were not as highly educated. Iranian women these days are more likely to have a university degrees than their male counterparts and many are in employment. The fact that the regime was going directly against the zeitgeist with its compulsory headscarf ruling, and that the dress code had already sparked protracted anti-hijab protests in Iran’s more affluent urban neighbourhoods, failed to trigger alarm bells

In fact, hardliners had been pushing for increased surveillance of women in public spaces since 2019, before Raisi’s election. Many thought it was time to reverse the lax enforcement of the 1983 hijab law that criminalised female attire deemed “un-Islamic”.

That doing so was inconsistent with the changing times, and that the dress code had already sparked protracted anti-hijab protests in Iran’s more affluent urban neighbourhoods, did not seem to trigger alarm bells.

What the regime missed is that Iranian society has changed since 1983, when most women observed the hijab law willingly. Many women lived very different lives back then; they experienced 6-8 pregnancies on average, did not seek work outside the home and were not as highly educated.

More women attend higher education than men

The pro-poor policies of the early Islamic revolutionaries provided electricity, clean water and health services to rural and poor urban areas, transforming many women’s lives.

Today, however, women in Iran marry in their mid-to-late twenties and have two children on average. Thirty-eight percent of Iranian women in their twenties have at least some higher education, compared to 33% of men in their age cohort. To them, the mere thought that they could be arrested and dragged to a re-education camp by the morality police is intolerable.

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To his credit, President Ebrahim Raisi, who promised to create a million jobs and a million new homes every year during his four-year term, has mainly focused on realising his ambitious economic goals.

But during his first year in office, the economy added only 374,000 jobs. We do not have data on how many new homes were built during this time, but it seems safe to assume that it was far fewer than a million.

A decade of economic failures has stoked even more anger among Iran’s youth. Young Iranians graduating from college wait more than 2.5 years on average before landing their first job. In 2021, almost half of college-educated women in their twenties and a quarter of their male peers were unemployed. Most Iranians in their late twenties still live with their parents, financially unable to start a family of their own.

In trying to quell popular unrest, the authorities will likely find it was much easier to abolish the hated morality police than it will be to bring about robust economic growth. Given Iran’s support for Russia’s war in Ukraine, reviving the nuclear deal seems all but impossible, as does the prospect of Iran rejoining the global economy anytime soon.

Djavad Salehi-Isfahani

© Project Syndicate 2022

Djavad Salehi-Isfahani, professor of economics at Virginia Tech, is a research fellow at the Economic Research Forum in Cairo and an associate of the Middle East Initiative at the Harvard Kennedy School Belfer Center.

 

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