Iran Rising

Amin Saikal is professor of political science, public policy fellow and director of the Centre for Arab and Islamic Studies at the Australian National University in Canberra. His 2019 book Iran Rising: The Survival and Future of the Islamic Republic (Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.de, Amazon.fr), published on the 40th anniversary of the Iranian Revolution of 1978-79, sums up the author’s knowledge about Iran, its history and present day politics.

Amin Saikal has been researching and writing about Iran for most of the forty years of his academic life. In fact, his first major work was entitled The Rise and Fall of the Shah, also published by Princeton University Press (in 1980).

According to Amin Saikal, the Iranian revolution was remarkable in many ways. It was a mass uprising of unprecedented scale and social breadth in modern history, even as it predated social media. It began with the aim of reforming the rule of pro-West Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi in order to transform Iran into a constitutional monarchy. However, it ultimately delivered a new Islamic type of government.

The main theme runing through Iran Rising is that of jihadi-itihadi within the framework of which, according to the author, the story of the Islamic Republic is best explained and analyzed. The Grand Ayatollah, founder of the Islamic Republic and 1st Supreme Leader of Iran, Ruhollah Khomeini, desired to create an Islamic polity that would be durable during a changing world. To achieve this, he adopted a two-dimensional approach to Islamic government: jihadi (“combative”) and ijtihadi (“reformist”). The former was to focus on the Islamization of politics and everyday life, and the latter to apply a novel interpretation of Islam based on independent human reasoning, to the degree necessary to forge a strong, modern Islamic Iran.

Although Ruhollah Khomeini never endorsed Marxist thought, his dichotomization of the social strata rhymed with the Marxist division of social classes in capitalist countries.

Amin Saikal analyzes the revolution and transition phase, explains Khomeini’s Theo-Political order, tells the history of the Islamic order under Supreme Leader Khamenei from the presidents Rafsanjani to Rouhani, presents the resource capabilities of Iran, the country’s regional relations as well as Iran’s relations with major powers. In his conclusion, the author offers insights as well as his assessment of US President Trump’s policies towards Iran.

According to Amin Saikal, Iran stands at a crossroads. It must either pursue further ijtihadi liberalization of its polity or face a future that may turn out to be as tumultuous as its past. The presidency of Donald J. Trump has not only made the first option more difficult, it also means that a direct confrontation between Iran and its main regional rivals is potentially on the cards. The Islamic Republic has proved resilient in the face of adversity before, but domestic and international developments have presented it with new points of vulnerability. The intertwined imperatives of regime preservation and external-threat deterrence have historically shaped the Islamic Republic’s internal development and security and foreign policies are set to determine its future path.

Amin Saikal presents a numer of variables which explain the resilience of the Islamic Republic since its inauguration as well as the main challenges the country will have to face in the future. For instance, the two-tiered system of governance has not worked as well as its founder, Ayatollah Khomeini, had intended, giving rise to serious political bifurcation and factionalism, power and personal rivalries, patronage building, bureaucratic and administrative malfunctioning, and systematic corruption. The Islamic Republic’s economic record poses another source of vulnerability.

Amin Saikal obviously mentions the upcoming succession of the Supreme Leader (Khameini is in his late seventies) as a future key decision for the fate of the Islamic Republic. However, he writes that the Trump administration’s attitude poses a greater and even more immediate challenge to the Islamic Republic. Invigorated by the support of the Israeli and Saudi leaderships, Trump has persistently castigated the Iranian regime as corrupt, a supporter of terrorism, and the source of all menace in the Middle East.

Here I would strongly disagree with the author, who evidently also presents what the Iranian regime is doing in Syria, Lebanon and Yemen and how it is attacking critics around the globe. Although I am no fan (to put it mildly) of Trump, Netanyahu and the Saudi regime, the US, Israel and Saudi Arabia have a strong point: Iran is a destabilizing factor in the region. The nuclear deal with Iran would give the religious regime billions of additional dollars to pursue its destablizing policies. It is obviously also true that especially Saudi Arabia is an equally destabilizing factor around the globe through its promotion of an extremist version of Islam and through its support of shady regimes, extreme political and terrorist forces.

Amin Saikal calls Trump’s decision to withdraw from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), aka the nuclear deal with Iran, a “diabolical decision” with serious implications, four of which he calls worth emphasizing. First, it has constituted a mortal blow to the nonproliferation regime and to the credibility of the United States as a reliable and dependable negotiator. This could turn out to be counterproductive in Trump’s negiotations with North Korea. Second, it has emboldened Iran’s regional adversaries, most importantly Israel and Saudi Arabia as well as some of its GGC partners, to continue to treat Iran as the number-one enemy while obscuring their own hand in the ongoing volatility in the Middle East. Third, Trump’s action has created a serious rift between the US and its allies, especially the UK, France and Germany. Trans-Atlantic relations have never been at  such a low point, widening the gap in world leadership, which adversarial powers, such Russia and China, would be eager to fill, at a tremendous cost to the US. Fourth, it has the potential to affect the texture of the Iranian domestic political scene. The Supreme Leader, the conservatives and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps are now in a position to remind their moderate and reformist counterparts that they had “told them so” and to push for a sterner attitude in response to Trump’s provocative actions.

This and much more can be found in Amin Saikal’s detailed analysis of Iran, its history and regime since the 1978-79 revolution.

Amin Saikal: Iran Rising: The Survival and Future of the Islamic Republic, Princeton University Press, 2019, 326 pages. Order the book from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.de, Amazon.fr.

Book review added on June 2, 2019 at 12:56 Berlin time. This review is based on the book presented. For a better reading, quotations and partial quotations are not put between quotation marks.