Abstract
The paper looks at the presidential election and the unrest that followed the declaration of its results in Iran in June 2009 as a disruption of an officially organised play by the voters equipped with a heuristically devised game. The play was designed to make the ruled confirm the Islamic identity they purportedly shared with their rulers which overrode the difference between the loser and the winner. Entering the election as the virtual space of a game, voters were able to drive a wedge between the candidates selected for them as ‘good players’ by playing them off one another as the ‘reformer’ versus the ‘hardliner’. The game was enhanced by the fierce competition among the ‘good players’ over access to Islamic faith as a privilege. The played out difference between the candidates allowed for a gap, forbidden under the Islamic rule, to emerge between the represented and representative that is the condition for politics. The consequent appearance of the represented as a subject that was spoken for undermined the rule in which the ruled were only spoken of by their rulers. The sudden public appearance of the represented became less tolerable at the time when it needed to be represented by the ruling mullahs pursuing a shared nuclear ambition, a necessity that spoiled the voters’ virtual game at some human cost.
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Notes
According to this result, Ahmadinejad had secured 62.6% of votes as opposed to Mousavi who only got 33.7% of votes on a huge turnout of 85%.
The interconnection between the constitution of popular will and identification of their ruler by a people is hinted at by Machiavelli who regarded neither the identity of the ruled nor that of their rulers knowable outside the encounter between the two (see Althusser 1999; Sanadjian 2009). In contrast, Rousseau saw the constitution of a people preceding their choice of their rulers (1973, p. 190).
In 2005 election, Ahmadinejad was elected in the second round on a turnout of 59.6%, and after scoring, only 19.43% of the votes in the first round.
After the election and as a part of its response to the widespread public protest to the official results, the Islamic regime blamed the western media and government for the unrest. Britain was particularly singled out as the main troublemaker. There is attributed a deviousness to the ‘English’ character in Iranian popular images which the regime’s officials evidently invoked in their blame game. It is, however, worth remembering that the regime had found itself wrong-footed by the voters and some candidates who were engaged in a political game. Playing politics, Marx noted, is a necessary but ‘devious way’ of liberating oneself (p. 218, original emphasis). The deviousness of the political action the regime faced was only homologous, structurally, with the deviousness historically attributed to the English. The regime, however, was connecting the two formally identical positions as if they were substantially linked.
The six other Iranians wanted in this connection included the former Iranian President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani who has presented himself as pro-reformist, and the former Iranian Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Velayati (Stephens 2007).
In February 1982, Amnesty International appealed publicly to the erstwhile Prime Minister, Mir Hossein Mousavi, for a public proclamation of ban on torture by the Muslim rulers in Iran. In the same communiqué, Amnesty renews its request for sending delegates to Iran to bring to end the human rights violation in the light of the report that at least 255 people had been executed in Iran in January 1982 (Amnesty International 1982). It is telling that Mr. Mousavi who emerged in the presidential election of 2009 identifying himself a pro-reform candidate could not afford to call for moderation at the time when at the centre of power by proclaiming a ban on torturing the regime’s detainees!
In June 2009, competing with three candidates, Ahmadinejad’s share of votes, according to official results, increased to 24.5 million out of 39.2 m voters in the initial stage which enabled him to claim victory without needing to go to the second round. Comparing the results of initial stages of the two elections, in 2009 Ahmadinejad managed, according to the official figures, to more than quadruple his share of votes!
The ‘alien’ character of the reformer under the Islamic rule was widely acknowledged by the regime’s officials soon after the election result was announced, and the reformist candidates were declared as the loser. In the wake of the brutal suppression of the public protest against the possible foul play in the election, a high-ranking mullah, the representative of the Supreme Leader in the Islamic Revolutionary Guards, addressing an official gathering portrayed the ‘reformist’ candidates as propagating an ‘Americanised Islam’ as opposed to the’ purely Mohammedan Islam’ endorsed by those who governed the country (Kayhan News 2009).
The privileged status of Islamic faith is evidently recognised in the following passage in the Koran alongside an ironical allusion to the potential equality between humans when their religious belief is taken out of equation,
They wish that you should disbelieve as
they disbelieve, and then you would be
equal; therefore take not to yourselves
friends of them, until they emigrate in
the way of God; then, if they turn their backs,
take them, and slay them wherever you find them;
take not to yourselves any one of them
as friend or helper
except those that betake themselves to a people
who are joined with you by a compact,
or come to you with breasts constricted
from fighting with you or fighting their people.
(The Koran, Sura IV (‘Women’), verse 91, p. 85.)
It goes without saying that in the above and similar Koranic verses one can read the tragic fate of thousands of the Islamic regime’s victims.
The recognised privilege for the faith has not prevented its advocate from claiming that there is more freedom under the Islamic rule than any other form of government. In a small book in which Khomeini set out the argument for the establishment of Islamic rule before its advent in Iran in 1979, he claims, ‘There will be freedom in the rule of Islamic justice unlike all these rules…’ (1978, p. 94).
A notorious example of this rewarding proximity is the public and personal fortune of Mohsen Rafighdoost, who started as the bodyguard of Khomeini and the driver of the vehicle that took him from Tehran airport to his temporary residence on his return to Iran in January 1979. From an obscure position in the Iranian bazaar (traditional market) with no qualification the bodyguard-driver, was quickly moved to become a high profile official figure in the Islamic Republic. He served as Minister of the Revolutionary Guards from 1982 to 1989 and played a leading role in eliminating dissent to the Islamic rule. Later Rafighdoost was placed in charge of the state charity foundation with enormous assets from which he and his family have accumulated a considerable personal wealth. His brother was arrested a few years ago by the Islamic judiciary for fraudulently extracting a large sum of money, estimated at hundreds of millions of dollars, from the foundation when Mohsen Rafighdoost was in charge of the organisation. The culprit was sentenced to life imprisonment but was released in less than 2 years and was sent abroad for medical treatment!
Khamenei was ‘elected’ as the Supreme Leader by the Assembly of Experts after Khomeni’s death after the latter’s close aide revealed to the delegates in 1989 that Khomeini had mentioned to him Khamenei as his personal choice of his successor.
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Sanadjian, M. A virtual game and the actual Islamic rule: the recent presidential election in Iran. Dialect Anthropol 34, 13–26 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10624-009-9137-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10624-009-9137-2