Thailand Edging toward Civil War?

Thai General Linked to Protests Is Shot in Head During Interview - NYTimes.com

By THOMAS FULLER and SETH MYDANS

BANGKOK — A renegade major general who allied himself with the protesters who have paralyzed Bangkok for weeks was shot in the head and critically wounded here on Thursday as the military began sealing off a barricaded encampment of antigovernment protesters.

The general, Khattiya Sawatdiphol, 58, had become a symbol of the lawlessness and impunity that have torn Thailand apart as the protests have pitted the nation’s poor against its establishment.

He was shot during an interview with a reporter for The New York Times about 7 p.m., one hour after the military announced the start of a blockade and cut off electricity and water to a tent city of thousands of protesters.

Photographs

Rogue General Shot During Thai Protests

The reporter, who was two feet away and facing the general, heard a loud bang similar to that of a firecracker.

The general fell to the ground, his eyes wide open, and protesters took his apparently lifeless body to a hospital, screaming his nickname: “Seh Daeng has been shot! Seh Daeng has been shot!”

He was later reported to be on life support. Within hours, protesters were clashing with security forces in Lumpini Park in Bangkok.

The general rankled both the government, by joining the so-called red-shirt movement, and many protest leaders, for his refusal to back down. The government accused him of a role in the violence that has taken more than two dozen lives since the protests began in mid-March. In the interview on Thursday, he described other leaders of the protesters as cowardly “idiots.”

Nonetheless, the general had assumed control of security for the protesters, placing his own black-shirted paramilitary fighters at entrances in the makeshift barriers around their encampment, and he claimed the loyalty of a small but intense group of protesters.

Although the government called him the main impediment to peace and suspended him without pay, he was allowed to move freely, exposing the impotence of the authorities here.

“I deny!” he cried in English, with a laugh, when asked in an interview on Sunday about the dozens of bombings that have set Bangkok on edge and about the mysterious black-shirted killers who escalated the violence on April 10 that killed 26 soldiers and civilians. “No one ever saw me.”

The military, which has held back from clearing out the protesters for fear of bloodshed, now appeared ready to crack down. The general’s last words before being shot were, “The military cannot get in here.”

But even as the military moves to seal off the area, it remains stymied by the likelihood of resistance that could expand outside Bangkok into rural areas that are the heartland of the opposition.

And the protests themselves are only the latest and most dangerous manifestation of what seem to be irreconcilable differences in the country. Thailand’s social contract has frayed, posing a challenge to an entrenched hierarchical system with a constitutional monarch at its core.

There are several levels to the protesters’ demands, including the return of former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, who was ousted in a coup in 2006 and is now abroad evading a corruption conviction, and a desire for a more equitable democratic system in which their voices would carry greater weight.

The protesters first accepted and then refused a government offer to hold an election in November in return for an end to their sit-in. On Wednesday, Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva withdrew that offer. He previously called General Khattiya a terrorist.

The reversal of the agreement with the government was a sign of growing factionalization of the protest movement — the Thai news media reported that a number of the leaders stepped down on Thursday — and raised fears that even if some of them agreed to break camp, others would hold their ground.

General Khattiya’s involvement with the protest movement underlines fractures in the military, and more broadly in Thai society, after four years of political turmoil.

“The people won’t go home,” the general said on Sunday night, as admirers crowded around him at a McDonald’s restaurant in the heart of the protest area. “Just stop? Compromise? All these people, the hard core, they want to stay longer.”

When the bullet struck him on Thursday, General Khattiya was facing a road, an overpass and a business district with several tall buildings.

In the minutes afterward, more gunshots were heard, and there were later reports that 20 people had been injured, though the cause of their injuries was unclear.

The protesters clustered around a high fence surrounding the park, throwing stones and firing slingshots and possibly shooting firearms at soldiers inside. One protester was shot in the head and was taken away by an ambulance, even as gunfire from within the park continued. He was later reported to have died.

Still later in the night, gunshots and explosions could be heard.

General Khattiya reveled in the attention he was receiving, from the prime minister, the press and the protesters, who he said “believe that because Seh Daeng is here they won’t die.”

“That’s why everywhere I go people cheer me and ask for my autograph,” he said. Along with a knife and a canteen, he carried a blue marker pen and wrote his name on shirts and caps as he posed for pictures with his admirers.

Before he was shot, the government had announced that armored personnel carriers would be used to cordon off the area in what appeared to be the beginning of an operation to disperse the thousands of protesters who were camped out outside shopping malls and luxury hotels.

A half-hour before he was shot, General Khattiya was addressing a scrum of reporters at sundown at the barricades. Most peeled away, leaving the general in a conversation with the reporter.

The general commented on his uniform, saying it was the one he had worn when fighting communists three decades ago. He spoke about working with the protesters and about how it was different from his previous military missions.

He described himself as leading a “people’s army” that was bracing for a crackdown by the military.

This clash would be “free form,” he said, adding, “There are no rules.”

Seth Mydans contributed reporting.

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A Quiet Revolution Grows in the Muslim World

by Robin Wright

Three decades after Iran's upheaval established Islamic clerical rule for the first time in 14 centuries, a quieter and more profound revolution is transforming the Muslim world. Dalia Ziada is a part of it.

When Ziada was 8, her mother told her to don a white party dress for a surprise celebration. It turned out to be a painful circumcision. But Ziada decided to fight back. The young Egyptian spent years arguing with her father and uncles against the genital mutilation of her sister and cousins, a campaign she eventually developed into a wider movement. She now champions everything from freedom of speech to women's rights and political prisoners. To promote civil disobedience, Ziada last year translated into Arabic a comic-book history about Martin Luther King Jr. and distributed 2,000 copies from Morocco to Yemen. (See pictures of Islam's revolution.)

Now 26, Ziada organized Cairo's first human-rights film festival in November. The censorship board did not approve the films, so Ziada doorstopped its chairman at the elevator and rode up with him to plead her case. When the theater was suspiciously closed at the last minute, she rented a tourist boat on the Nile for opening night--waiting until it was offshore and beyond the arm of the law to start the movie.

Ziada shies away from little, including the grisly intimate details of her life. But she also wears a veil, a sign that her religious faith remains undimmed. "My ultimate interest," she wrote in her first blog entry, "is to please Allah with all I am doing in my own life."

That sentiment is echoed around the Muslim world. In many of the scores of countries that are predominantly Muslim, the latest generation of activists is redefining society in novel ways. This new soft revolution is distinct from three earlier waves of change--the Islamic revival of the 1970s, the rise of extremism in the 1980s and the growth of Muslim political parties in the 1990s.

Today's revolution is more vibrantly Islamic than ever. Yet it is also decidedly antijihadist and ambivalent about Islamist political parties. Culturally, it is deeply conservative, but its goal is to adapt to the 21st century. Politically, it rejects secularism and Westernization but craves changes compatible with modern global trends. The soft revolution is more about groping for identity and direction than expressing piety. The new revolutionaries are synthesizing Koranic values with the ways of life spawned by the Internet, satellite television and Facebook. For them, Islam, you might say, is the path to change rather than the goal itself. "It's a nonviolent revolution trying to mix modernity and religion," Ziada says, honking as she makes her way through Cairo's horrendous traffic for a meeting of one of the rights groups she works with.

The new Muslim activists, who take on diverse causes from one country to another, have emerged in reaction to the Sept. 11 attacks and all that has happened since. Navtej Dhillon, director of the Brookings Institution's Middle East Youth Initiative, says, "There's a generation between the ages of 15 and 35 driving this soft revolution--like the baby boomers in the U.S.--who are defined by a common experience. It should have been a generation outward looking in a positive way, with more education, access to technology and aspirations for economic mobility." Instead, he says, "it's become hostage to post-9/11 politics." Disillusioned with extremists who can destroy but who fail to construct alternatives that improve daily life, members of the post-9/11 generation are increasingly relying on Islamic values rather than on a religion-based ideology to advance their aims. And importantly, the soft revolution has generated a new self-confidence among Muslims and a sense that the answers to their problems lie within their own faith and community rather than in the outside world. The revolution is about reform in a conservative package.

Text-Messaging The Koran

The soft revolution is made concrete in hundreds of new schools from Turkey to Pakistan. Its themes echo in Palestinian hip-hop, Egyptian Facebook pages and the flurry of Koranic verses text-messaged between students. It is reflected in Bosnian streets honoring Muslim heroes and central Asian girls named after the holy city of Medina. Its role models are portrayed by action figures, each with one of the 99 attributes of God, in Kuwaiti comic books. It has even changed slang. Young Egyptians often now answer the telephone by saying "Salaam alaikum"--"Peace be upon you"--instead of "Hello." Many add the tagline "bi izn Allah"--"if God permits"--when discussing everything from the weather to politics. "They think they're getting a bonus with God," muses Ziada.

Even in Saudi Arabia, the most rigid Muslim state, the soft revolution is transforming public discourse. Consider Ahmad al-Shugairi, who worked in his family business until a friend recruited him in 2002 for a television program called Yallah Shabab (Hey, Young People). Al-Shugairi ended up as the host. Although he never had formal religious training, al-Shugairi quickly became one of the most popular TV preachers, broadcast by satellite to an audience across the Middle East and watched on YouTube. "The show explained that you could be a good Muslim and yet enjoy life," says Kaswara al-Khatib, a former producer of Yallah Shabab. "It used to be that you could be either devout or liberal, with no middle ground. The focus had been only on God's punishment. We focused on God's mercy."

In 2005, al-Shugairi began a TV series called Thoughts during the holy month of Ramadan, focusing on the practical problems of contemporary Muslim life, from cleanliness to charity. Sometimes clad in jeans and at other times a white Saudi robe and headdress, he often speaks informally from a couch. "I'm not reinventing the wheel or the faith," al-Shugairi explains in Jidda's Andalus Café, which he opened for the young. "But there is a need for someone to talk common sense." (See pictures of Ramadan.)

Al-Shugairi's own life mirrors the experimentation and evolution of many young Muslims. In the 1990s, he says, he bounced from "extreme pleasure" as a college student in California to "extreme belief." The shock of Sept. 11, an attack whose perpetrators were mostly Saudi, steered him to the middle.

Traditional clerics deride al-Shugairi, 35, and other televangelists for preaching "easy Islam," "yuppie Islam," even "Western Islam." But his message actually reflects a deepening conservatism in the Islamic world, even as activists use contemporary examples and modern technology to make their case. One of al-Shugairi's programs on happiness focused on Elvis Presley, a man with fame, talent and fortune but who died young. Life without deep spirituality, al-Shugairi preaches, is empty.

The soft revolution's voices are widening the Islamic political spectrum. Mostafa Nagar, 28, an Egyptian dentist, runs a blog called Waves in the Sea of Change, which is part of an Internet-based call for a renaissance in Islamic thinking. Yet Nagar belongs to the Muslim Brotherhood, the largest Islamist movement in the Middle East. His blog launched a wave of challenges from within the Brotherhood to its proposed manifesto, which limits the political rights of women and Christians. Nagar called for dividing the religious and political wings of the movement, a nod to the separation of mosque and state, and pressed the party to run technocrats rather than clerics for positions of party leadership and public office.

When Nagar and his colleagues were urged to leave the Brotherhood, they decided to stay. "As a public party," he says, "its decisions are relevant to the destiny of all Egyptians, so their thoughts should be open to all people." And indeed, his blog--and other criticism from the movement's youth wing--has caused the manifesto to be put on ice.

The flap underscores an emerging political trend. Since 9/11, polls have consistently shown that most Muslims do not want either an Iranian-style theocracy or a Western-style democracy. They want a blend, with clerics playing an advisory role in societies, not ruling them. As a consequence, Islamist parties are now under intense scrutiny. "Islamists, far from winning sweeping victories, are struggling to maintain even the modest gains they made earlier," says a recent survey by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. In Iraq's recent elections, for example, secular parties solidly trumped the religious parties that had fared well four years ago.

Rethinking Tradition

Politics is not the only focus of the soft revolution. Its most fundamental impact, indeed, may be on the faith itself. In the shadows of Kocatepe Mosque in Ankara, Turkey, a team of 80 Turkish scholars has been meeting for the past three years to ponder Muslim traditions dating back 14 centuries. Known as the hadith, the traditions are based on the actions and sayings of the Prophet Muhammad and dictate behavior on everything from the conduct of war to personal hygiene. (See pictures of Iranians.)

Later this year, the Turkish scholars are expected to publish six volumes that reject thousands of Islam's most controversial practices, from stoning adulterers to honor killings. Some hadith, the scholars contend, are unsubstantiated; others were just invented to manipulate society. "There is one tradition which says ladies are religiously and rationally not complete and of lesser mind," says Ismail Hakki Unal of Ankara University's divinity school, a member of the commission. "We think this does not conform with the soul of the Koran. And when we look at the Prophet's behavior toward ladies, we don't think those insulting messages belong to him." Another hadith insists that women be obedient to their husbands if they are to enter paradise. "Again, this is incompatible with the Prophet," Unal says. "We think these are sentences put forth by men who were trying to impose their power over the ladies."

The Hadith Project is only one of many such investigations into Islam's role in the 21st century. This is perhaps the most intellectually active period for the faith since the height of Islamic scholarship in the Middle Ages. "There is more self-confidence in the Islamic world about dealing with reason, constitutionalism, science and other big issues that define modern society," says Ibrahim Kalin of the Foundation for Political, Economic and Social Research in Ankara. "The West is no longer the only worldview to look up to. There are other ways of sharing the world and negotiating your place in it."

Crucially, this latest wave of Islamic thought is not led only by men. Eman el-Marsafy is challenging one of the strictest male domains in the Muslim world--the mosque. For 14 centuries, women have largely been relegated to small side rooms for prayer and excluded from leadership. But el-Marsafy is one of hundreds of professional women who are memorizing the Koran and is even teaching at Cairo's al-Sadiq Mosque. "We're taking Islam to the new world," el-Marsafy says. "We can do everything everyone else does. We want to move forward too."

The young are in the vanguard. A graduate in business administration and a former banker, el-Marsafy donned the hijab when she was 26, despite fierce objections from her parents. (Her father was an Egyptian diplomat, her mother a society figure.) But last year, el-Marsafy's mother, now in her 60s, began wearing the veil too. That is a common story. Forty years ago, Islamic dress was rare in Egypt. Today, more than 80% of women are estimated to wear the hijab, and many put it on only after their daughters did.

Piety alone is not the explanation for the change in dress. "The veil is the mask of Egyptian woman in a power struggle against the dictatorship of men," says Nabil Abdel Fattah of Cairo's al-Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies and author of The Politics of Religion. "The veil gives women more power in a man's world." Ziada, the human-rights activist, says the hijab--her headscarves are in pinks, pastels, floral prints and plaids, not drab black--provides protective cover and legitimacy for her campaigns.

Read "Finding God on YouTube."

Waiting for Obama

The ferment in the Muslim world has a range of implications for President Barack Obama's outreach to Islam. Gallup polls in Islamic societies show that large majorities both reject militants and have serious reservations about the West. "They're saying, 'There's a plague on both your houses,'" says Richard Burkholder Jr., director of Gallup's international polls. Many young Muslims are angry at the outside world's support of corrupt and autocratic regimes despite pledges to push for democracy after 9/11. "Most of the young feel the West betrayed its promises," says Dhillon, of the Brookings Institution. Muslims fume that a few perpetrators of violence have led the outside world to suspect a whole generation of supporting terrorism. "The only source of identity they have is being attacked," Dhillon says. The post-9/11 generation has been further shaped by wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon and Gaza, all of which Washington played a direct or indirect role in.

Although he is the first U.S. President to have lived in the Muslim world and to have Muslim relatives and a Muslim middle name, Obama is likely to face skepticism even among those who welcomed his election. In an open letter on the day of his Inauguration, the 57-nation Organization of the Islamic Conference appealed for a "new partnership" with the Obama Administration. "Throughout the globe, Muslims hunger for a new era of peace, concordance and tranquility," wrote Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, secretary-general of the conference. He then pointedly added, "We firmly believe that America, with your guidance, can help foster that peace, though real peace can only be shared--never imposed." (See pictures of Muslims in America.)

That is the key. Gallup polls show that by huge margins, Muslims reject the notion that the U.S. genuinely wants to help them. The new Administration, with a fresh eye on the world, wants to bolster the position of the U.S. But "Obama will have a narrow window to act," says Burkholder, "because the U.S. has failed so often in the past."

Ask Naif al-Mutawa, a clinical psychologist from Kuwait. Al-Mutawa is the publisher of The 99, glossy comic books popular from Morocco to Indonesia, with 99 male and female superheroes, each imbued with godly qualities such as mercy, wisdom and tolerance. In a recent article for the Chicago Tribune, Obama's hometown paper, al-Mutawa recounted a conversation with his father about his newborn son. Al-Mutawa's grandfather had recently died, and he expected his father to ask him to keep the name in the family. Instead, his father suggested the child be named after Obama. "I was stunned," al-Mutawa wrote. "Instead of asking me to hold on to the past, my conservative Arab Muslim father was asking me to make a bet on the future."

But al-Mutawa opted against it. "I want to see results, not just hope, before naming my children after a leader," he wrote. Such pragmatism is typical of the Muslim world's soft revolutionaries. They believe that their own governments, the Islamist extremists and the outside world alike have all failed to provide a satisfying narrative that synthesizes Islam and modernity. So they are taking on the task themselves. The soft revolution's combination of conservative symbols, like Islamic dress, with contemporary practices, like blogging, may confuse outsiders. But there are few social movements in the world today that are more important to understand.

Wright's most recent book is Dreams and Shadows: The Future of the Middle East

The Islamic Republic’s Failed Quest for the Spotless City by Azam Khatam

Azam Khatam

(Azam Khatam is an urban sociologist, a member of the Iran Sociological Association and a member of the editorial board of Goft-o-gu.)

A bathroom sign at Persepolis. Contrary to myth, the Islamic Republic mandates only that women wear a manteau and headscarf, not the chador. (Axel Schmidt)

It is characteristic of modern social revolutions to seek moral improvement of the population, as well as redress of the injustices of the ancien regime. In 1794, Paris echoed with calls to “righteousness”; in 1917, the Bolsheviks denounced the bourgeois decadence of the czarist era. For Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and other clerical leaders, the Islamic Revolution of 1979 was not only a seizure of political power, but also the moment of revival of Islamic morality, which had been systematically weakened by the secular Pahlavi regime. The clerics set out to build in Iran “a spotless society.”[1]

Since its inception, the Islamic Republic has labored tirelessly to indoctrinate society with a state-sponsored Islamic ethical vision, through the education system, state-owned broadcast media, propaganda films known as “holy defense cinema” and a host of coercive measures. In 1980, the regime infamously launched a “cultural revolution” aimed at intellectual elites, closing the universities for three years, and reopening them only after extensive purges of the faculty, administration and student body.

But the lives of ordinary Iranians have been far more deeply affected by a parallel project, based on the Qur’anic verse “commanding what is just and forbidding what is wrong” (amr-e be ma‘ruf va nahy-e az monkar), a basic tenet of Islamic jurisprudence and a moral obligation for every Muslim. In most times and places in Islamic history, this formulation has been akin to the concept of “personal responsibility” propagated by social conservatives in the contemporary United States—an exhortation to industry, propriety and clean living that is, in the end, up to the individual to heed or ignore. Under the Islamic Republic, it was to be up to the state. For two decades, a special morality police rigidly enforced “Islamic” codes of behavior in the streets, workplaces and parks of Iranian cities.

By the end of the 1990s, it was clear that the morality police had lost its power to intimidate. Increasingly youthful and educated, Iranians came to make a clear distinction between Muslim religious identity and the claim that Islam is a basis for an alternative social and political order. And they would simply decide for themselves what was pious personal behavior and what was not. Sights that once incurred the wrath of the virtue squads—forelocks poking out from under women’s headscarves, satellite dishes and weekend parties of young friends—were now regarded as ordinary aspects of life, especially in big cities like Tehran. Women, in particular, kept expanding the definition of the ordinary by dint of their actions, working outside the home, exercising in parks, walking the streets in colorful dress and running businesses in the male preserve of the bazaar.[2] Young people were not necessarily becoming secular. The same man might have a taste for Western music and for innovative hymns of mourning for the martyrdom of Imam Husayn; the same woman might have a keen interest in fashion and believe in a religious duty to cover her hair. Youth turned the occasion of Ashoura, when Shi‘i Muslims commemorate the death of Husayn, into a mix of sacred ritual with provocative fashion, flirting and a festival atmosphere.

Conservative hardliners were resentful of the slippage in enforcement of their puritanical standards, a slippage they regarded as a betrayal of the revolution as well as an offense against Islam. Their presidential candidate in 2005, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, ran what has been called a campaign of “stealthy radicalism,” pledging to restore moral rectitude by example and not by force. Once he was elected, of course, he cracked down. But the children of the revolution no longer fear or respect the cultural code that Ahmadinejad seeks to reimpose—and, indeed, they have defied it.

Revolutionary Piety

In April 1979, Khomeini ordered the Revolutionary Council to create a morality bureau (dayereh amr-e be ma‘ruf) that would uproot corrupt pre-revolutionary cultural habits. Initially, this bureau may have held some populist appeal, in that Khomeini hinted it would be a people’s watchdog in the corridors of power. In a May 1979 speech, the ayatollah said: “The morality bureau will be independent of the state, so as to monitor it, and no one, not even the highest authorities, will be exempt from its supervision.”[3] Indeed, Article 8 of the Islamic Republic’s constitution refers to amr-e be ma‘ruf—the shorthand term for public morality—as a key basis of social relations and a mutual obligation of ordinary citizens and government. In practice, enforcement of amr-e be ma‘ruf has been directed overwhelmingly at the citizenry—and in particular at women.

A morality police unit was established in Tehran in 1979. One of its first acts was to demolish the old red-light district of Tehran, removing 2,700 prostitutes.[4] In the ensuing months, thousands of people were arrested for such “moral crimes” as extra-marital sexual relationships, alcohol consumption, gambling and pederasty, and hundreds were executed. More liberal Revolutionary Council members objected to the excesses, as well as the unaccountability of the morality bureau to the Council, and the Revolutionary Court briefly disbanded the bureau, citing unauthorized arrests and confiscation of personal wealth. The bureau was resurrected in 1981, this time as a special court for prosecuting cases of “prohibited activities.” In the same year, the Islamic Republic mandated that women wear modest “Islamic” attire. (Contrary to persistent myth, the law in Iran has never required women to don the full chador, though they are strongly encouraged to do so. In practice, “Islamic” attire has meant a variety of manners of dress, typically a manteau covering the arms and a headscarf. The chador is enforced, however, in mosques, judiciary buildings and other public spaces, including on some university campuses.)

At first, the power of the morality court was absolute. Then, in 1982, the first Islamic penal law was ratified by Parliament. The law codified the prohibition of “non-Islamic” dress for women. Article 102 declared that women dressed “improperly” in public would receive up to 74 lashes, a penalty only softened in 1996, when it was changed to jail time or a fine. This clause of the penal law remains the only legal instrument for implementing amr-e be ma‘ruf. With codification, the bureaucratic state sought not only to restrain judicial autonomy, but also to construct an Islamic identity through threat of sanction. In the 1980s, the state promoted a culture of self-sacrifice and obedience, and any resistance on the part of women to strictures upon dress was treated as counter-revolutionary treason. Even as the Iran-Iraq war raged, prominent conservative figures took the line that the struggle over moral issues should not take a back seat.[5] Authoritarian enforcement of amr-e be ma‘ruf created what Roxanne Varzi has called a “public secret,”[6] by which many urbanites hid their “non-Islamic” beliefs and habits at home, while appearing to be properly Islamic in public.

The Post-War Era

Authorities begin a nationwide program to enforce “Islamic” dress codes, Tehran, April 23, 2007. (document IRAN/Mohammad Berno)

In the late 1980s, morality policing entered a second phase with the formation of a new state “headquarters” (setad) for enforcing amr-e be ma‘ruf and the return of thousands of Basiji (voluntary militia) activists from the war front. The Basij, initially created to shield the Islamic Republic from internal security threats, was now assigned the role of ensuring that Islamic ethics were observed. Basiji checkpoints in the streets gradually turned to the task of imposing Islamic codes, peaking in 1993, when Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Khomeini’s successor as Supreme Leader, espied a “cultural invasion” of Western, secular and counter-revolutionary influences. The state-owned press put the number of Basijis thus engaged at anywhere from 230,000 to 3.5 million.[7]

The target population was no longer the secular Iranians who had criticized the revolution in the 1980s, but the masses of urban middle-class youth who were born and raised under the Islamic Republic, and had supposedly eaten and breathed nothing but revolutionary Islamic ideals. Patrolling setad units harassed, humiliated and arrested young men and women in streets, workplaces, universities and other public places, accusing them of moral misconduct.

Meanwhile, the face of the capital was changing under Gholamhossein Karbaschi, the mayor from 1989 to 1998. In the first half of the 1990s, Tehran witnessed an explosion of new construction, financed partly by the municipality, which levied steep new taxes on commercial developers, and partly by the developers, for whose benefit the city bent zoning laws.[8] The number of parks doubled, and 74 new cultural centers appeared in less than five years.[9] Meanwhile, the proliferation of shopping malls reflected the decline of revolutionary fervor, with its collective ideals, as individual consumerism took root. Eventually, the new urban policy became the focal point of a confrontation between the “reformist” figures associated with President Mohammad Khatami and traditional conservatives. Mayor Karbaschi’s Hamshahri, the most popular newspaper at the time, endorsed Khatami’s presidential run in 1997. The next year, he was tried and imprisoned on corruption charges related to the methods behind Tehran’s urban renewal.

But the modernization and revitalization of Tehran’s public spaces reflected powerful desires among city residents, desires that also hindered the implementation of amr-e be ma‘ruf. The post-revolutionary technocratic elite, for instance, having made fortunes through political connections, wanted to indulge in conspicuous consumption. The generation of youths that had grown up under the Islamic Republic were highly frustrated by the limits imposed by scarce resources and exclusive policies upon their life chances. They understood the policies as an effort to marginalize those who were insufficiently “Islamic.” Public opinion on cultural values began to fragment. The families of war martyrs, who tended to be of humbler origins, supported the fight to safeguard the moral promise of the revolution as well as their protected access to state-sponsored privileges. Meanwhile, the modern middle classes were eager to make a clean break with the “republic of piety.”

The extension of setad activities into government offices and the provinces intensified official disagreements. Conservatives, raising the specter of cultural invasion, accused the more pragmatic Khatami camp of being indifferent to the ethical promise of the revolution. They mounted attacks in the press on Karbaschi’s cultural centers in Tehran.

As minister of culture and Islamc guidance in 1992, Khatami ratified the Principles of Cultural Policy, which became the reformist charter for cultural reform. The charter advocates relatively tolerant policies and refers not at all to amr-e be ma‘ruf. On the contrary, it calls for government institutions to restrict the selective imposition of severe religious views upon the public, for fear of negative social consequences. In 1999, an Islamic institute at Tehran University sponsoring research on amr-e be ma‘ruf proposed that “the political system should avoid imposing on people too much ideological pressure, too many restrictive codes and too much propaganda based on religious principles.”[10]

The ascendancy of the reformist bloc in Parliament, and the associated intellectual and cultural ferment, effectively ended the second stage of moral policing in the name of amr-e be ma‘ruf. From 1996 to 2005 the Basij checkpoints were fewer and further between, and the government told the setad it lacked legal authority for its indiscriminate patrols.[11] Setad authorities also lost their control over believers in faraway cities. The discourse of “cultural invasion” through communications technology and mass media was replaced by Khatami’s talk of the “dialogue of civilizations.” People expressed their will for cultural change through street celebrations, starting with the victory of the national soccer team over Australia in the 1997 World Cup qualifying match. These celebrations were a cultural turning point, since such “non-Islamic” emotions of jubilation had not been expressed in public since the revolution.”

Yet the hardliners did not simply acquiesce in their marginalization. Renegade “operational teams” of the setad meted out “Islamic punishment,” as with the serial killings of women accused of being prostitutes in Mashhad and Kerman in 2002 and 2003.

The New Puritanism

In 2003, even as many conservatives in Parliament dropped revolutionary-era rhetoric in recognition that Iranian society has changed, the hardliners consolidated themselves in a coalition of more than 18 groups, some of which had been active since the 1990s, and others of which were new associations organized by clerics and officials. Although the coalition had ties to traditional conservatives in the bazaar and among clergy in Qom and Tehran, it aimed primarily to give voice to the less privileged among Islamist ranks, including the radicals marginalized under Khatami and the urban low-income strata.[12] The hardliners turned amr-e be ma‘ruf into a mobilizing slogan for radical Islamist forces as the reformists’ moment waned. Later, they used amr-e be ma‘ruf to gain leverage in their political conflicts with reformists and even more pragmatic conservatives.

Conservatives took over Tehran’s city council in 2003, Parliament in 2004 and the presidency in 2005. From their first move back into power, they upped the volume of their demands for aggressive policies to control public life, directing harsh criticisms at the laxity of the reformists to prepare society for the coming retrenchment in cultural policies. The judiciary announced another initiative to create a force responsible for policing “moral crimes” in November 2004. Committees answering the force’s national command were to be formed in each mosque, neighborhood, factory, school and government office, with the task of implementing amr-e be ma‘ruf. Several clergymen, including teachers in the Qom seminaries responsible for training judges since the revolution, mildly protested the idea of placing such a body under judicial supervision.[13] Independent lawyers also pointed to the clear conflict of interest, as well as the lack of parliamentary approval for the plan.[14]

As the 2005 presidential campaign got underway, the leader of the hardline coalition, Ahmadinejad, promised his followers a new age of economic justice and Islamic piety. The two components of his populist platform were harmonious, even if they aimed at different political targets. With his denunciations of corruption and promises to put the fruits of oil wealth on the humblest of dinner tables, Ahmadinejad cast himself in subtle, but clear opposition to Islamist power brokers such as former President Ali Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani, a founder of the Islamic Republic who wound up as his rival in the presidential runoff. At the same time, he stoked resentment of the reformists among the more ideological sectors of his base, such as war martyrs’ families and Basiji families, by decrying reformist disregard for amr-e be ma‘ruf and vowing as well to crack down on conspicuous consumption. The 2005 presidential election was the first since the revolution in which candidates felt compelled to declaim a “mild” position on veiling. Wary of being labeled a fundamentalist, Ahmadinejad promised that he would not “interfere with the choice of hairstyle of young people.” But after he won, and all the branches of government were back in conservative hands, the conservatives resumed attempts to discipline public behavior with the language of amr-e be ma‘ruf.

In May 2005, Tehran’s conservative city council called in the police commander and blasted him for excessive tolerance of “inappropriately veiled” women in public. A few days later, special morality patrols reappeared in the streets, for the first time employing women officers.[15] In August of that year, the arch-conservative newspaper Keyhan demanded that the government step up its efforts to enforce amr-e be ma‘ruf: “Why do secular states expend such great effort to protect their youth from moral decadence while our Islamic state is painfully indifferent and silent toward the degradation of ethics among our youth?”[16]

The same month, the city council ratified a document called “Strategies to Extend Piety,” mandating still more bureaucratic organs, including a coordination committee drawn from various ministries and executive bodies, that would cooperate with police to punish violators of “moral codes.” By the spring of 2006, the morality police were once again ubiquitous, arresting or intimidating young women and men for their dress and conduct, confiscating satellite dishes and punishing shopkeepers who were selling “inappropriate” articles of clothing. At the same time, several cultural institutes formed during the reformist period were closed. Others were severely restricted; the budgets of cultural centers in Tehran were cut by half, while more funding was provided to religious institutions.

Within the conservative coalition, there were disagreements over amr-e be ma‘ruf. The director of the parliamentary cultural commission mounted what he called a “fundamentalist critique of fundamentalism,” pointing to the inefficacy of past attempts to police morality. Another conservative said enforcement efforts should be “soft, not hard.” As conservative intellectuals left the coalition in protest of the morality campaign, more power accrued to the radicals.

In the spring of 2007, the most extreme conservatives in the Tehran courts designed a “public safety program” (tarh-e amniat-e ejtema‘e) aimed at allaying public fears about increased consumption of drugs, thuggish behavior among youth, rape and burglary—but also at enforcing amr-e be ma‘ruf. As it was nominally a normal anti-crime initiative, the program was assigned to the regular municipal police by the president. The move was in keeping with Ahmadinejad’s “stealthy radicalism” during the campaign, for he sought to assure Tehranis that the regular police, not the notorious Basij, would be the enforcers. As a police commander told the Fars News Agency, “We didn’t use Basij forces, because we assumed there would be more resistance from the people.”

The Basij, however, criticized police for their “mild” methods. By August, the Basij had been invited to take over operations targeting drug dealers and gangs of robbers. Basij commanders, embedded in the state bureaucracy, used the chance to proclaim themselves the saviors of political stability of the Islamic Republic in the cities. They inveighed against a “cultural NATO” and a “conspiracy of foreign forces” seeking to overthrow the Islamic Republic through the propagation of “non-Islamic” behavior among youth and women. The mix of cooperation and competition between the Basij and police ended in a kind of military occupation of cities in the spring of 2008. Patrols criss-crossed each of Tehran’s 23 main thoroughfares, where confrontations between police and citizens over “moral issues” were a daily occurrence.

The fresh campaign was vicious in its treatment of young people dressed in “non-Islamic” fashion and its harassment of alleged arazel va obash, a derogatory phrase meaning drug dealers, addicts and thieves. In the first four months, nearly 1 million people were publicly humiliated, or “instructed,” in the streets and 40,000 were arrested. Of those detained in 2007, 85 percent were youths aged 16 to 26, and 10 percent were accused drug dealers and thieves, 35 of whom were executed within a month of their arrest. Reports on the program’s progress were released to the press as a warning to all. Investigative reporters revealed that an “instruction” center for addicts in Kahrizak, on the southern fringe of Tehran, was turned into a temporary prison, where “criminals” were severely tortured for one or two months, without trial, to terrorize them prior to their release.

This new puritanism disguised as a “public safety program” lifted the most fanatical elements of the hardline conservative firmament to the commanding heights of cultural policymaking in the Islamic Republic, and turned amr-e be ma‘ruf into a major challenge for the government, at a time when it already faces crises in economic and international policy. Human rights lawyers and activist women started a round of protests against the “public safety program” in 2007. The feminist website Meydan Zanan took the initiative, publishing news of street demonstrations, human rights activities and government debates on the issue. At the same time 20 independent lawyers filed a complaint against police with the highest court with jurisdiction over government agencies, claiming that the “public safety program” is illegal because it is not included in routine police tasks and it lacks parliamentary sanction. One year later, the court rendered its verdict that “there is no sanction or legal requirement” for the “public safety program.” In the summer of 2008, the main independent student organization, Tahkim Vahdat, initiated a series of public meetings on “violations of human rights by the public safety program” in Tehran and other cities. In most of these activities, there was reference to principles of human rights and the protections of personal freedom outlined in the constitution.[17]

In late January 2009, the new minister of interior and the deputy police commander suggested that the “public safety program” violates the citizenship rights of the people.[18] Regular police patrols have decreased markedly in the streets of the capital. At the same time, Basij commanders and others among the arch-conservatives dream of institutionalizing the agencies enforcing amr-e be ma‘ruf as a separate ministry[19] and of making amr-e be ma‘ruf the basis of the penal system. Already, toward the end of 2008, the Basij had declared that its enforcement activities would intensify in redress of the “retreat” of the municipal police.[20] The failure of the “public safety program” is another piece of evidence for the proposition that present-day Iran is de facto a post-Islamist society, a place “where, following a phase of experimentation, the appeal, energy and sources of legitimacy of Islamism get exhausted even among its once ardent supporters.”[21] During the 2005 presidential campaign, Elahe Kolaei, spokeswoman for the reformist candidate Mostafa Moin, referred passingly to his opposition to mandatory veiling. In January 2009, the Coalition of Nationalist Religious Parties, a collection of liberals and social democrats with active “Islamist feminists” among its members, has published a statement calling for the “remedy of discrimination everywhere” and asking that obligatory veiling be abandoned. This is the first time since the consolidation of the Islamic Republic that a political party has taken this step. The events of early 2009 mark both the end of the third phase of the attempts of the state to impose amr-e be ma‘ruf upon an increasingly recalcitrant population and an unprecedented degree of political fragmentation within the power centers of the Islamic Republic.

Endnotes

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[1] Keyhan, December 12, 1981.

[2] See Asef Bayat, “A Women’s Non-Movement: What It Means To Be a Woman Activist in an Islamic State,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 27/1 (2007).

[3] Ettelaat, April 4, 1979.

[4] Ettelaat, February 20, 1980.

[5] Ettelaat, April 21, 1986.

[6] Roxanne Varzi, Warring Souls (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000).

[7] The lower number appeared in Keyhan, November 11, 1995, and the higher number in Ettelaat, February 5, 1997.

[8] For details, see Kaveh Ehsani, “Municipal Matters: The Urbanization of Consciousness and Political Change in Tehran,” Middle East Report 212 (Fall 1999).

[9] Yas-e No, November 22, 2003.

[10] Jahad Daneshgahi, A Study on the Conditions of Revitalization of the Tradition of “Commanding the Just and Forbidding the Wrong,” (1999), p. 138. [Persian]

[11] Sharq, September 8, 2003.

[12] See Mohammad Maljoo, “Political Economy of the Rise of Ahmadinejad’s Government,” Goft-o-gu 49 (August 2007). [Persian]

[13] See, for example, Laila Asadi, “On Legal Aspects of Veiling in Iran,” a paper published by the research section of the Hozeh Elmieh Qom, and accessible online at http://www.porsojoo.com/fa/node/73527. [Persian]

[14] Aftab Yazd, December 12, 2004.

[15] Hamehan, June 14, 2005.

[16] Keyhan, August 14, 2005.

[17] For more on the protest campaign, see the Meydan Zanan website at http://meydaan.org/campaign.aspx?cid=55. [Persian]

[18] Etemad, January 29, 2009.

[19] Iran, February 5, 2009.

[20] Etemad, December 16, 2008.

[21] See Asef Bayat, “What Is Post-Islamism?” ISIM Review 16 (Autumn 2005).