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| Ander Nieuws week 36 / Midden-Oosten 2013 |
 
 
 
Egypt would do well to heed lessons from Iran's 1979 revolution

 
The Guardian
20 August 2013
Rod Mamudi for the Tehran Bureau
 
In July, the Egyptian army made good on an ultimatum it had issued to then-president Mohamed Morsi: to either respond to mass protests against his rule, or face a new "roadmap", of the army's making, for solving the country's political and economic challenges.
 
One opposition group had allegedly collected over 20m signatures calling for his resignation. A rushed constitution, fears of a creeping Islamisation of the government, and limited progress on the economy were all cited as driving the resistance to his administration.
 
The Egyptian revolution has, with Morsi's removal, progressed beyond the clearing of the old guard and entered a new phase of violent conflict. International mediation efforts have failed. The pressing question now is what effect this conflict will have on the trajectory of the revolution. The region is not lacking in revolutionary polities, and one in particular, Iran, and the impact of Iraq's invasion on the Islamic revolution there, may well offer insights.
 
Some revolutions mutate into war machines, like the French. Others, by the defiance they represent, provoke war, like the American. Others have conflict visited upon them.
 
On 22 September 1980, within 18 months of the declaration of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Saddam Hussein's Iraq invaded its nascent neighbour. The result was eight years of war, the most extensive use of chemical weaponry in several generations, and hundreds of thousands dead.
 
Less easily quantified is the effect the war had on the Islamic revolution. Certainly before the invasion there was little to suggest the revolution would enjoy anything like the longevity it has. In November 1979, the interim government of Mehdi Bazargan had resigned in opposition to the taking of the US embassy hostages.
 
An attempt to impose Islamic dress for women in March 1980 had sparked widespread protest, eventually leading to a humiliating climbdown for the government. Another such rule was promulgated in July, but this time only for government employees.
 
The Islamic republic's first president, Abolhassan Bani Sadr, was falling into increasing conflict with Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, and the Islamisation of universities was being widely challenged. Upward of 1,000 executions had taken place, to increasing outrage. The factions that had achieved revolutionary victory were splintering.
 
Then the war came. Islamic dress for women was imposed universally the following summer. Bani Sadr was impeached, and all political parties bar the Khomeini-ist Islamic Republican party banned. By the end of 1981, the political leadership that would see out the war had been established: Ali Khamenei as president, Mir Hossein Mousavi as prime minister. Senior clerics who challenged the revolution were stripped of their rank. Executions ran into the tens of thousands. But now there were others to mourn.
 
The immediate effect of war was twofold: it distracted from the regime's consolidation and draconian exercise of power; and it provided a rally-around-the-flag effect, which the regime further exploited to facilitate its liquidation of the opposition en masse.
 
But the most pervasive effect would reveal itself over the course of the war. For all the power such ideas exercise, there are no tombs of the unknown Marxist, or the unknown liberal. These are political schools for the living. The warrior is different. From London to Rome, Arlington to Buenos Aires, Osaka to Baghdad, nations mourn and honour their war dead in a way to which only religion compares.
 
As Benedict Anderson describes in his classic treatise on nationalism, Imagined Communities, to a given individual virtually all such war deaths will be of unknowns. They will know of them only that they died not for some set of interests, but for that which they share by birth, by name, by language, by culture. This shared loss becomes the life-and-death manifestation of the modern nation. In turn, giving meaning to such loss necessitates investment in the nation, each drop of blood justified by national continuity, survival. The war gave the Islamic republic hundreds of thousands of unknown warriors to mourn. This was the blood that would baptise a divisive and violent revolutionary regime.
 
It is unlikely, given the sheer depth of Khomeini's purges of the armed forces, that he had any plans for war. That the war came to the revolution, however, does not mean the revolution did not know how to use it. The "factory of the last will and testament" - invented self-eulogies from dead boys that sang the praises of the republic - became a key part of Iran's war effort.
 
Rafsanjani notes in his diaries that in 1982 the regime was offered $60bn (£38bn) to cease hostilities. It appears even that sum was not worth the political capital the war afforded. Still today, Tehran is scattered with vast murals of extinguished youth, and the evening television news is regularly preceded by dramatic images of the 25-year-old conflict. It bestowed on the regime both a legitimacy and identity that continues to shape Iranian politics, domestic and foreign.
 
Iran and its neighbouring Arab countries are rarely read together. Some academics point out that the Green protests of 2009 were a prologue for events to unfold to the west, yet the name Arab spring precludes ready comparison. Internal military intervention last month in Egypt seems to have little in common with the full-scale invasion mounted by Saddam in 1980. The very heart of the question in Egypt is the divisions within the country - the factions of the revolution splintering.
 
But, if the paradigm is shifted a little, with the Brotherhood, rather than Egypt, placed in the shoes of the regime of the early Islamic Republic, it gains relevance. The blundering, heavy-handed, and hardly homogenous Muslim Brotherhood that sustained Morsi's presidency may, in the brutality now being visited upon it, find a new cause for unity. And a still less compromising resolve. This is after all the story of another son, and Brother, of Egypt, Sayyid Qutb. Some call him the spiritual father of al-Qaida.
 
Official reports from Egypt count hundreds dead this week; the Brotherhood claims thousands. The latest crackdown on Morsi supporters' sit-ins is in many ways a natural extension of the recent coup: an extreme response intended to be a decisive statement, but which has built into it the risk of far greater conflict. The confrontation was clearly designed to exhaust, if not outright cow, the opposition.
 
Drawing on this analysis, it becomes apparent how such an attack may in fact empower its target. Even in the month leading up to last week's events, hundreds of Morsi supporters were killed - more than 50 in a day on two different occasions (8 and 27 July in Cairo) by some accounts.
 
Multiplying unknown warriors are replacing the compromises, circumventions, and slow grind of power's actual exercise. The Brotherhood is back on the oppositional terrain it knows much better, but with far greater scope for action than was historically the norm.
 
In the absence of a rapid settlement, perhaps the truest danger now is that the Brotherhood, like the young republic of 1980s Iran, will decide it simply has more to gain from all-out war.
 
© 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited
 
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| Ander Nieuws week 36 / Midden-Oosten 2013 |