There have been several “interpellations” of the crowd. State media call them thugs, vandals or terrorists. They accuse them of being members of the MKO. They draw parallels between today and the events of June 1981 when MKO armed supporters took the streets of Tehran inaugurating a long wave of terrorist attacks that killed many of the ideologues and leaders of the revolutionary movement.

The opponents call the protesters the “people” and attribute sovereignty to them. In his letter Mousavi described them as those who have really understood the essence of the Islamic Republic, those who ---even if unaware of the struggles of thirty years ago -- are in fact continuing and realizing the ideals of those days.

In the meantime, a parliamentary commission set up to investigate attacks against university of Tehran students has declared that they do not know who the plain-cloth (lebas-shakhsiha) individuals who entered the campus are and that it will take time to find out. This admission points not only to the differences among state officials, but underlines how some of the “defenders” of the order are today an anonymous force that the state itself cannot or does not want to recognize.
As a counterpoint to this anonymity, Saturday the Tehran chief of police announced that they were going to suppress any protest whatsoever.

All these elements highlight the “fear of the crowd” in both senses: the crowd generates fear; the crowd itself is afraid.

This fear is evident in the numerous videos that circulate on the internet that are reconfiguring the ways in which events such as mass protests are experienced. Slogans such as “don’t be afraid don’t’ be afraid” or “we will protect you, we will protect you” --even if addressed to Mousavi-- are in fact a spell against the fear that runs through people on the street confronting guns. Neda’s video is the most terrifying of all. It both represents fear and effects it.

Among the videos, there is one that stands out for the way in which it draws the viewer into the experience of the crowd. The perspective of the camera/cell-phone is that of someone walking down a street along with many other people. The crowd is not compact but walks in small groups, sometimes shouting a slogan. There are some people walking in the opposite direction. A couple of them pick up stones. This scene continues for few minutes in tense suspension. It is as if the camera encounters the events as they unfold in this long walk. The crowd thickens, The camera frames the name of the street and a voice, probably the “cameraman,” repeats the names written on the sign. It is an intersection. Slogans are heard and eventually gunshots. People hide behind cars. All of a sudden a large groups passes by holding a wounded or dead person, everyone runs, including the camera, amidst screams and scenes of panic.



June 21, 2009

Though some are still silent, many have spoken now.
Ayatollah Khamenei in his sermon for the Friday Prayer on June 19 spoke about the need to find strength and unity in God in the face of the enemy. Making reference to Quranic verses and the Prophet Muhammad, he said that in times of need the Muslim community needs to be united and that difficult situations are a test, but that in the end they can be resolved through faith and commitment. He noted that the strength of the Republic was measured by the high participation in the elections (85%). He was particularly emphatic in praising the spirit of true confrontation and debate that characterized the elections even though he objected to some of the tones and insults that were used by the candidates, including President Ahmadinejad.

All along his speech, Khamenei drew lines between the inside and the outside of the established order (nezam), and placed people and situations within or without. He characterized all the four candidates as complete insiders citing both their past actions and his personal knowledge of them as evidence of their integrity and commitment to the Republic. He evoked several foreign governments as “enemies,” as total outsiders. Insiders are interlocutors, people who might not all share the same opinions but with whom one can amicably disagree. Outsiders are enemies that should be fought and whose “plots” shall be uncovered.

On the inside, Khamenei drew more lines of distinction, between winners (the President) and losers, between those he sides with and those he disagrees with. At times paternal at others menacing, he said that the time had come to call things over, accept the result of the elections as it was declared, stop street demonstrations and get on with things. He therefore drew a sharp and renewed temporal line between the words and actions of the past few days and what lay ahead. From Friday onwards, whoever crosses the threshold he delineated goes “outside” the established order, even if they were previously insiders.

It is the role of the Supreme leader to act as a guarantor of the established order and to draw the lines between inside and outside, between people and actions that are considered as fitting the order and people and actions that are not. The figure of the Supreme Leader is itself at a threshold between inside and outside: the post is at once inside and outside the constitutional order.

The leader is bounded by the constitution and by allegiance to the sharia as interpreted by Twelver Shiites. According to the constitution itself, the leader is above and beyond (outside) the order so that he can effectively guarantee and supervise that the government of the Republic is in conformity with the sharia. He is outside government but inside the sharia. Acting according to the sharia, is not the equivalent of obeying a set of pre-established rules, especially in cases such as these when what are at stake are not settled matters but unforeseen situations. Being inside the sharia therefore is less a stable position than the continued and changing engagement with Islam. It is a teleological orientation and in many ways a personal one, given that there is no single authority that is considered infallible in this respect, and there is a wide variety of opinions on what constitutes acting according to the sharia. Deep knowledge of the sharia and the recognition of that knowledge by peers are two of the criteria that the constitution lists as necessary for the post. In fact, the choice and evaluation of the actions of the Supreme Leader lie in an elected council of scholars who are to supervise the actions of the leader.

From the point of view of doctrine and history there is a marked productive tension between Islam and power in Shiism, at least in the ways in which this school is currently interpreted in Iran. On the one hand Shiism gives more relevance to the actual presence of a guide of the community, someone who through his knowledge and acts testifies for the true interpretation of Islam and is therefore able to conduct the community. On the other hand this guide is absent, absconded and only to return at the end of time, making worldly power something to keep distant from or be suspicious of, since it is somehow tainted with illegitimacy.

This productive tension is present in a secularized version in the Constitution. Even though the parallel is probably not entirely fitting, the post of the Supreme leader can be considered as the “state of exception” that constitutes the order of the Islamic Republic, the condition of possibility for the exercise of government. By attributing the role of guarantor to the Leader, the constitution places its own legitimacy outside its order.

This is the reason why it is inappropriate to call the Islamic Republic a theocracy. Islam in the last analysis is located outside the state, and not within, and it is the condition of possibility of IRI to the extent that it remains outside of it. If this line were to be crossed, if the engagement with the sharia placed the Supreme Leader within the confines of the Republic rather than outside, the Republic would find the resolution of its contradiction but also its “end.” The engagement of the Leader in the exercise of government therefore always runs the risk of neutralizing the power of the post, since a more direct involvement in politics curtails the absolute “outsider” status of the office.

This contradiction came to the fore with the question of the succession to Imam Khomeini. Ayatollah Khomeini was the leader of the 1979 revolution, the scholar who with his interpretation of the Sharia had constructed the theological theory that justifies the order of the Republic. As a founder Khomeini was both guarantor and political actor in the Republic, but this combination proved impossible to realize in the succession given the constitutive contradiction of the office. When, with the succession, the role of leader was instituted as a post, rather than as the irreplaceable role of Khomeini. Candidates who had the necessary knowledge and scholarly recognition either did not recognize the order of the Republic, or if they did, they were seen as political opponents of the current leadership. In other words, they were either too much outside the order or too much inside of it.
The solution was to choose someone who did not have the sufficient knowledge and recognition but who was a trusted politician, Khamenei. In fact a few months before Khomeini’s death the constitution was amended, giving less relevance to the degree of scholarship the leader had to posses and insisting on his political experience as a criteria for his choice. Since his election, Khamanei had therefore to both acquire the sufficient scholarly recognition (by finally becoming ayatollah) as well as show sufficient distance from everyday engagement in order to build his role as guarantor.

During the past twenty years (1989-2009) Khamenei’s “distance” from politics, his role as outsider, has varied in degrees. He has been often portrayed as a supporter of this or that line of action and he has spoken his mind on many contentious points, including relations with the United States. Last Friday however, though framing his speech in terms of unity and collective commitment, he has located himself “within” the government of the Republic in such a way that makes his role perilous.

In what he admitted was an exception, Khamenei named the people he was talking about and in particular discussed at length Hashemi Rafsanjani. He praised Rafsanjani as a column of the Islamic Republic and someone he has known for fifty years. Khamenei therefore placed Rafsanjani firmly on the inside and criticized the Ahmadinejad’s accusations of corruption against Rafsanjani during the campain. Later in his speech however Khamenei went on to say that politically he is much closer to Ahmadinejad and disagrees with Rafsanjani on many counts.

In the post-election context, this disagreement is not a simple question of degree, as Khamanei implied. On one hand it signals the implicit speculation that were Rafsanjani to challenge electoral results, he would fall himself “outside” the order. On the other hand it marks an unprecedented entrance of Khamenei into government. Whatever it will happen, Khamenei has narrowed the distance that his role prescribes and by claiming political agency for himself, he has significantly reduced the role of guarantor of the office of Leader.

In this regard, it is noteworthy that in many other passages of his sermon Khamenei acted instead as a distant guarantor, as if to dispel the impression that he had taken a political position. He not only praised the unity of the “people” but went on to say that compared to the many countries in which there is total disregard for spiritual values (ma’naviyat elahi) the population of Iran and its youth in particular are particularly attentive to these values, even if superficially it might appear otherwise.

The speech also marked the definitive “interpellation” of the crowd. By finally identifying protesters as “idiots” Khamenei distinguished them from those 85% of the people who voted ten days ago. After a few days of incertitude, the boundaries have been sharply drawn and Saturday afternoon saw the enactment of those consequences.
IRIB, the state radio and television channels, portray Saturday’s clashes and death as a plot by the archi-enemy of the Islamic Republic and make reference to the defeat they suffered in 1980. But this is a defensive move that seriously reduces the political space of the “inside.” Denouncing “plotting” (see below) it remains caught in that interpretative framework.
It will be hard for Khamenei to reassert the distance that is the necessary correlate of his post, and thus draw the crowd back inside the established order. And it will be hard to deal with the crowd as an outsider.