Transition to Democracy for Iran — Part VIII:
Political Legitimacy
The Claimed Legitimacy of the IR Regime
In Part II we saw that the IR regime is an oil-mafia and uses Mullahs as a mask for legitimacy. But why do that? The reason is that it is nearly impossible to rule a country without legitimacy, especially a country with over 80 million population and a large area. Political legitimacy is “a virtue of political institutions and of the decisions made within them”. Having legitimacy means that the decisions of the rulers (laws) are accepted by the population through coercion and authority. People would follow the laws of the regime. If a system doesn’t have legitimacy, people wouldn’t respect its laws. Such a system wouldn’t remain in power for a long time.
In order to stay in power, and to be accepted or tolerated by the population, rulers provide or claim some type of legitimacy. Often these are coupled with promises of benefits from working with the government or threats of punishment for working against the government.
In earlier times, kings and queens claimed their families and their bloodlines were special. This gave them legitimacy.
Some Chinese kings claimed they were sent by heavens or by dragons.
European priests claimed they best understood the words of god and could decipher them as laws for humans.
Feudal lords claimed they owned the land and could hence decide for the population.
In some countries rich and wealthy families would take over the control and use their wealth for legitimacy.
Communist parties claim they represent the interests of the workers and the poor.
Foreign invaders or colonizers said they were stronger or better, and so they were legitimate.
Military rulers get their legitimacy from having military power.
In a democracy, legitimacy comes from the fact that people decide who manages the government.
The Islamic Republic has two claims to legitimacy. The first one comes from the referendums after the revolution, as discussed in Part 02. The second one is religion.
Mullahs claim Islam is the last, best and only correct religion and that their god has decided that humans should be ruled in this way. And they know exactly the way, and what you see today is apparently that exact way. Executing young men for protesting in streets, jailing young women for reporting the death of someone in police custody, killing school girls by chemical gas, torturing children in prisons, burying people in unmarked graves, because they were Marxists, etc. Apparently, this is how their god wants us to be ruled. Or so claim the Mullahs.
If you are a young person, it probably sounds ridiculous to you that Khamenei (Iran’s self-claimed supreme leader) has a mandate from some gods to rule over us in this exact way. But 44 years ago, after the Islamic Revolution, there were many Iranians who truly believed that Khomeini (the previous supreme leader) was indeed right in his every decision. And since then, the regime has tried very hard to keep the appearance of being legitimate based on the ideology of “velayate faghih” and religious and revolutionary behavior.
The Mask of Legitimacy for the Oil Mafia
It didn’t take long after the revolution for most Iranians to realize that Islam was just an excuse for ruling. Sending boys as young as 15 to minefields, raping young girls before executing them so that they wouldn’t go to heaven, stoning people for extramarital affairs, executing thousands for their political views, etc. The barbaric methods employed by the regime and the goals they wanted to achieve with these methods showed Iranians quite rapidly that they have been fooled. They were promised a democracy “like they have it in France”, but had gotten a totalitarian theocracy.
From 2018 years ago, Iranians finally started to directly name and shame Khamenei as the mastermind of this regime. You can see the result of that in the protests of the WLF uprising. People are directly pointing the finger at him, at Mullahs and at Islam. The chants that we heard in streets show clearly that the Islamic Republic has lost its legitimacy with regards to Islam. Most Iranians aren’t even Muslims today.
The only remaining claim to legitimacy comes then from the referendums after the revolution. Well, that is nice. But surely, after 44 years, people might have something else to say?
Why don’t we organize a new referendum? The Islamic Republic says it is so certain that it has legitimacy, that “executing young protesters is the will of the people” (sic). Alright then, let us put that claim to the test. Let us have a new referendum, under control and observation of the UN and Amnesty, and we will see if the regime still has legitimacy. The regime won’t accept a referendum easily. And we all know why. They know that they have no legitimacy among Iranians today.
The Moral Justification of Democracy
But what is our legitimacy? Why do we claim that we have the right to change the regime, then manage the transition period and establish a new government?
One of the most important reasons why the current regime has no legitimacy, is because it does not respect the human rights of the people. Nor does it respect their decisions or preferences. In a democracy, the legitimacy comes from the fact that the governing system is made up of normal people, who have been put in charge by voting. The representatives in a parliament do not and cannot claim to be special or sent by gods. They are simply the voices of the people. And so, the laws that decide the rights of the people are effectively decided by the people. And if after 44 years most people would want to change the hijab law, then they can do it through the parliament in a democracy.
But we won’t stop at just this. We base our thought system on moral philosophy and even go one step further and base our laws on ethics. To clarify this concept, we will draw the parallel with the evolution of the moral basis of political legitimacy in Europe.
For over 1500 years, Europe was subjected to the rule of the church. For the past 1400 years, Iran has been subjected to the rule of Islam. In Europe, during those 1500 years of rule by the church, science, culture, freedom of thought and expression, arts and humanities were suppressed. Slavery, killing non-Christians or „fake Christians“, forceful conversion, burning women uninterested in marrying the village goons (witches), hanging scientists for finding out that the Earth is rotating around the sun and many such things were normal. Somehow the triangle of gods (father, son, holy ghost) had decided to put a lot of contradictory and inhumane rules and anecdotes in the book the church pretended to be “holy”. A book that you never really know who wrote. And that decided all aspects of life in Europe. You can clearly see how the same thing applies to Iran today with the book that Mullahs pretend to be holy.
After Europe started becoming Christian, for nearly 1500 years everything was decided by the Vatican. The center of the church organization claimed to know everything because of its connection with god. Only they could decipher the rules for humans. And just like our religious regime, that catholic regime also changed its laws arbitrarily, every time it saw benefits in a change.
For example, a few years ago Khamenei decided to bow to the US and sign the nuclear deal in return for gaining access to foreign currency, when a year before that talking about working with the US was a great sin. Just like that, until around 1500 the church claimed no human could be sure and be guaranteed to enter heaven. They said people should work hard to obey the gods and the church, so they could get into heaven. But around 1500 Italian bishops came up with a clever idea. They started selling pieces of heaven for gold coins on earth. The demand was huge. A lot of Italians started buying contracts from the church that told them they owned pieces of land in heaven. It was like a guarantee that they would enter the illusionary place they called heaven.
When these bishops went to Germany to sell pieces of heavens to Germans, some people there became skeptical. Is that even possible, they asked themselves. So they brought a few of these contracts to the university of Frankfurt to show them to the expert of theology, Martin Luther. He analyzed the texts and then decided that this is not possible. He said you cannot buy pieces of heaven with gold coins on earth.
This led to huge conflicts between Germany and Italy. The Vatican wanted to keep making money by selling a few pieces of paper. Germans back then were hardcore Catholics themselves. But they couldn’t accept this new change. So, Martin Luther proposed a reform: the Pope cannot simply make new rules or laws as he sees fit. Everything should come from an acceptable source, from a fixed point of reference. To him, that reference was the book he considered holy.
For the people of that time, the suggestion to change the basis of laws from the Pope to the Bible was a big deal. It was an extremely huge change. Suddenly, it wasn’t the Pope, who could simply decide randomly about new laws. There needed to be a fix point, a reference, something for comparison. And because Martin Luther was a hardcore Christian, that reference for him was the Bible. This was still a huge step. It was the first time anyone in the Christian world had dared to stop the church and tell it that its laws cannot be arbitrary.
For us, this is obviously meaningless today. Practically no one, not even the Vatican, considers the so-called holy book (Bible) as the reference for laws today in Germany or in Italy. If Bible would have been the point of reference for laws in Germany now, most of the entertainment pieces would have been banned, many books would have been burned, and a large number of people would have been executed. So, today, the Germans know that so-called holy books shouldn’t and couldn’t be the basis for laws. Obviously, aside from some catholic fanatics, nobody considers the Pope as the basis for laws either.
We can compare that with the case of Iran. Khamenei and other Mullahs don’t follow Islam or Quran actually. They simply make up arbitrary rules that benefit them, inspired by Islam, they claim. They cherry pick things that suit them well. The proof that Iran’s Mullahs don’t follow Islam is easy to see. There are many other Islamic countries in the world. None of them works like the IR regime.
After Martin Luther, Northern and Western Europeans started to be more skeptical about the church. Of course, the huge wars that the catholic church waged against them didn’t help much. In all that chaos, philosophical work was not the highest priority for a while. So it took 250 years for the next major step, which was then taken by David Hume around 1750. Hume showed with clear arguments that miracles don’t happen. Religions like Christianity and Islam consider so-called miracles as the proof of the legitimacy of their claims to have a connection with what they call higher powers. But if miracles don’t happen, that means religious establishments don’t truly represent gods but rather a very limited human understanding of gods, if they exist at all. And this means that they shouldn’t make decisions about laws. We should consider human morality for laws.
This was obviously a radical change compared to all previous methods. But today we can understand well that it was correct. We know today that no miracle can ever happen. We know today that no human is special. We know today that laws should not be based on religion. We know today that legitimacy of a ruling system cannot be derived from religion.
In the next part (Nr. 04) we will see how Hume’s work eventually led to new concepts for laws. Here, we will only focus on legitimacy as a result of modern laws. When we want to obtain a right (change a law), we should understand what the root of law is. In a democracy, there are only 3 ways of turning a concept into a law:
it is based on human rights;
it is based on a scientific or technical solution to a problem, while respecting human rights.
it is based on the will of the democratic majority, while respecting human rights; if no scientific solutions are available.
It is not religion that gives a system legitimacy, but respecting human rights, science and principles of democracy. As mentioned in the previous parts, we aim to establish an institutionalized democracy in Iran. And this is how we justify the legitimacy of the political system that we want to achieve.
The other articles of this collection:
1. Institutional Democracy for Developing Iran
2. The Structure of the IR Regime
3. Conditions for Regime Change
6. The Missing Link — A Consolidated Leadership
7. Developing Leadership through a Parliament in Exile
9. The Roots of Laws in Modern Societies
References
Meysam Badamchi (2017), Post-Islamist Political Theory, LINK
Michael Albertus (2017), Authoritarianism and the Elite Origins of Democracy, LINK
Farshad Malek-Ahmadi (2015), Democracy and Constitutional Politics in Iran, LINK
Arshid Adib-Moghaddam (2014), A Critical Introduction to Khomeini, LINK
Hadi Enayat (2013), Law, State and Society in Modern Iran, LINK
Ali Abdel Razek (2012), Islam and the Foundations of Political Power, LINK
Said Amir Arjomand (2010), The Shadow of God & the Hidden Imam, LINK
Nader Hashemi (2009), Islam, Secularism and Liberal Democracy, LINK
Bruce Ackerman (2019), Revolutionary Constitutions, LINK