Iran: between light and darkness

By: Beatrice E. Rangel - 22/05/2024

Except for Mahatma Gandhi and Lee Kwan Yew, who managed to drive democracy or modernity into the hearts of their followers, the majority of leaders with a transformative spirit have ended their lives sunk in painful loneliness watching their nations shipwreck in chaos, poverty and/or hopelessness.

This happened with the leaders of Iranian modernity. Mohammad Mossadegh whose development program was interrupted by a coup d'état supported by the United Kingdom and the United States to place Mohammad Reza Pahlavi at the head of that nation. Reza Pahlavi transformed Mossadegh's nationalist plans into an accelerated Westernization that collided with the ancient institutions that gave identity to the Persian nation to open the floodgates to the emergence of a theocracy that has oppressed Iran since 1979.

Since then, the country has fallen into a kind of modern medieval period in which a religious elite violates the freedoms of the 89 million Iranians and condemns them to live under the yoke of the pre-Enlightenment in which governance is not based. in a social contract built by citizens but in the will of a religious leader who relies on authoritarian sects who receive divine orders via conversations between the leader and God.

Iranian civil society, however, has tried on at least three occasions to shake off the theocratic yoke without success but with the ability to prevent the deepening of the opprobrium.

The instrument of power of the theocracy is the Iranian Revolutionary Guard made up of cadres trained in the secrets of Islam and trained to defend it with their lives.

The digital revolution, however, is characterized by its ability to penetrate all the institutional structures of the world and by its stubborn transmission of messages that portray other realities. Hence, over the years the powerful Iranian Revolutionary Guard has ended up harboring nationalist elements that differ from the theocratic approach. This development led part of the clerical class to regroup behind the thought of Ayatollah Mesbah-YazdiEnt, a deeply conservative cleric who managed to create followers for the theocratic regime through his deep knowledge of the Shiite scriptures. The founding nucleus of the Paydari Front emerged from his circle of students. According to The Economist, “the Paydari Front is made up of Shiite Supremacists who oppose any kind of understanding with anyone inside or outside Iran who is not governed by the Shiite worldview.”

The Paydari Front has developed a strategy of penetrating Iranian institutions with the sole objective of maintaining the theocracy “and expelling non-believers from power and the country. The Paydari Front's big bet to carry out the seizure of power was the selection of Ebrahim Raisi as successor to the great Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. His death truncates those plans and places the Paydari Front on a war footing against the reformist clerics who were already defeated with Raisi's selection.

We therefore have the forces of obscurantism on alert to wage the final battle against any gap in the regime's opening towards internal democracy and international harmony.

The victory of the Paydari Front will depend on several factors. The first and most important is perhaps the degree of organization of Iranian civil society. If it were to form a united and compact front, the Paydari Front would be reduced to a minority, a very dangerous one but a minority. The other factor is the behavior of the international community. If it omits to make gestures of hostility towards the country, possibly Ali Khamenei, whose temperament leans towards centrism, will have a range of maneuver to impose controls on the Paydari Front. And it is certainly not possible to omit the outcome of the current conflict in the Middle East. If more hostilities against Iran occur in this context, Khamenei will have his hands tied ab initio. Hence, the situation poses new challenges to the liberal democracies of the West whose behavior may contribute to the emergence of avenues of internal control in the face of the political offensive of the Paydari Front or to the fact that they end up taking control of the situation.

In this scenario, an act of provocation by the Paydari Front to the West via a controlling Islamic Revolutionary Guard command cannot be ruled out. In this case a stream of gasoline would fall on the fire that is already engulfing the Middle East. And the consequences will be similar to those that followed the assassination of the Archduke of Austria in Sarajevo.

«The opinions published herein are the sole responsibility of its author».