Presidential term of Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani: reconstruction and liberalization

Change began in short order, when the Assembly of Experts appointed Pres. Ali Khamenei rahbar following the death of Khomeini in June 1989. The following month elections were held to select Khamenei’s replacement as president. Running virtually unopposed, Hojatoleslām Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, speaker of the Majles since 1980, was elected by an overwhelming vote. Rafsanjani, whose cabinet choices represented the various factions, immediately began the process of rebuilding the war-torn economy. Considered a pragmatist and one of the most powerful men in Iran, Rafsanjani favored a policy of economic liberalization, privatization of industry, and rapprochement with the West that would encourage much-needed foreign investment. The new president’s policies were opposed by both Khamenei and the conservative parliament, and attempts by conservative elements to stifle reforms by harassing and imprisoning political dissidents frequently resulted in demonstrations and violent protest, which were often brutally suppressed.

In this new political atmosphere, advocates of women’s rights joined with filmmakers who continued to address the gender inequities of the Islamic republic. New forms of communication, including satellite dishes and the Internet, created for Iranians access to Western media and exile groups abroad, who in turn helped broadcast dissident voices from within Iran. International campaigns for human rights, women’s rights, and a nascent democratic civil society in Iran began to take root.

Inside Iran in the mid-1990s, Abdolkarim Soroush, a philosopher with both secular and religious training, attracted thousands of followers to his lectures. Soroush advocated a type of reformist Islam that went beyond most liberal Muslim thinkers of the 20th century and argued that the search for reconciliation of Islam and democracy was not a matter of simply finding appropriate phrases in the Qurʾān that were in agreement with modern science, democracy, or human rights. Drawing on the works of Immanuel Kant, G.W.F. Hegel, Karl Popper, and Erich Fromm, Soroush called for a reexamination of all tenets of Islam, insisting on the need to maintain the religion’s original spirit of social justice and its emphasis on caring for other people.

First presidential term of Mohammad Khatami: reformist movement and conservative intervention

The May 1997 election of Mohammad Khatami, a supporter of Soroush, as president was a surprise for conservatives who had backed Ali Akbar Nateq-Nouri, speaker of Iran’s Majles. Shortly before the elections, the Council of Guardians had placed Khatami on a list of four acceptable candidates in order to give a greater semblance of democracy to the process. Khatami had been Iran’s minister of culture and Islamic guidance but was forced to resign in 1992 for having adopted a more moderate view on social and cultural issues. He campaigned for president on a platform of curbing censorship, fighting religious excess, and allowing for greater tolerance and was embraced by much of the public, receiving more than two-thirds of the vote and enjoying especially strong support among women and young adults.

The election of Khatami, and his appointment of a more moderate cabinet, unleashed a wave of euphoria among reformers. In less than a year some 900 new newspapers and journals received authorization to publish and added their voices to earlier reformist journals such as Zanān and Kiyān, which had been the strongest backers of Khatami. However, the limits of the reformist president’s authority became clear in the months after his election. The rahbar, Ayatollah Khamenei, continued to exercise sweeping executive powers, which he did not hesitate to use to thwart Khatami’s reforms. In June 1998 the parliament removed Khatami’s liberal interior minister, Abdullah Nouri, in a vote of no confidence, and Tehrān’s mayor, Gholamhussein Karbaschi, was convicted of corruption and jailed by the president’s conservative opponents despite strong public opinion in his favor. Reformist newspapers were accused of offending Islamic principles and shut down one by one, and six prominent intellectuals, including secular nationalist leader Dariyush Farouhar and his wife, Parvaneh Eskandari, were assassinated. Their murders were traced to agents of the Iranian intelligence services, whose representatives claimed that the assassins were acting without orders.

In the February 1999 elections for roughly 200,000 seats on village, town, and city councils, reformers once again won by an overwhelming margin, and many women were elected to office in rural areas. The antidemocratic nature of the office of rahbar was vigorously debated, and calls for its removal from the constitution now began to appear in the press. In July 1999 students protested the closing of the Salām newspaper and opposed further restrictions on the press; and police, backed by a vigilante group known as Anṣār-e Ḥezbollāh, attacked a dormitory at Tehrān University. Four students were reported killed, and hundreds more were injured or detained. On the day after the attack, 25,000 students staged a sit-in at the university and demanded the resignation of Tehrān’s police chief, whom they held responsible for the raid. Within 48 hours, demonstrations had erupted in at least 18 major cities, including Gīlān, Mashhad, and Tabrīz in the north and Yazd, Eṣfahān, and Shīrāz in the south. The demonstrators demanded that the murderers of the Farouhars and other intellectuals be brought to swift justice. They also called for freedom of the press, an increase in personal liberty, an end to the vigilante attacks on universities, and the release of 13 Iranian Jews who had been arrested by the government on allegations that they were spying for Israel. This was the first major student demonstration since the 1979 revolution, and it lasted for five days. By mid-July the government had quelled the protests, and hundreds more were arrested.

Second presidential term of Mohammad Khatami: continued intervention

In 2001 President Khatami was reelected by an overwhelming majority. Although his victory was considered an expression of support for his programs of reform, at the beginning of his second term there was less popular confidence in his ability to bring about swift and dramatic political change. Attempts by the judiciary to curb pro-reform elements accelerated after Khatami’s reelection, including arrests and acts of public censure. In November 2002 Hashem Aghajari, a prominent reform-minded academic, was sentenced to death by a court in western Iran following a speech he made in support of religious reform, sparking the largest student protests since those of 1999. Aghajari’s death sentence was subsequently reduced, reinstated, and reduced again before he was released on bail in August 2004.

In the month before the Majles elections scheduled for February 2004, the Council of Guardians announced that almost half the candidates in a pool of some 8,000, including many reformists, would be disqualified from participating in the coming elections. The decision—which entailed a ban on some 80 sitting members of the Majles, including President Khatami’s brother—sparked a political crisis, and Khatami himself was among those who subsequently threatened to resign if the ban were not lifted. Following direct intervention by Ayatollah Khamenei, the council reinstated some of the candidates; nevertheless, the conservatives, as expected, emerged victorious in the elections, replacing the more centrist outgoing cabinet.