Battling Evil in Tehran

This is from Monday’s New York Times. 

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, ended his prayer sermon in tears on Friday, invoking the name of a disappeared Shiite prophet to suggest that his government was besieged by forces of evil out to destroy a legitimate Islamic government.

The opposition leader, Mir Hussein Moussavi, in criticizing the government, demanded the kind of justice promised by the Koran and exhorted his followers to take to their rooftops at night to cry out, “Allahu akbar,” or “God is great.”

In the battle to control Iran’s streets, both the government and the opposition are deploying religious symbols and parables to portray themselves as pursing the ideal of a just Islamic state.

That struggle could prove the main fulcrum in the battle for the hearts and minds of most ordinary Iranians, because the Islamic Revolution, since its inception, has painted itself as battling evil. If the government fails the test of being just, not least by using excessive violence against its citizens, it risks letting the opposition wrap itself in the mantle of Islamic virtue.

“If either the reformists or the conservatives can make reference to Islamic values in a way that the majority of citizens understand, they will win,” said Mohsen Kadivar, a senior Iranian religious scholar teaching Islamic studies at Duke University.

Moments in the Times’ coverage of Iran’s post-election crisis have touched on this: the Islamic Revolution promises to legislate good and prohibit evil, which has made for a rocky relationship with democracy.  Can a nation actually vote good in and evil out?  Or does that need to come from on high, hence the need for a supreme leader (whom some in the opposition are now doing their best to characterize as evil). 

At the risk of gross cultural insensitivity, I wonder if this dilemma is central to the unsettling faith the Bible pitches.  “Man looks on the outside, but God looks on the heart,” for instance, or Jesus’ fundamental clash with the Pharisees, whose entire focus is legislating the good and forbidding the bad.  The progression of the Bible’s argument increasingly seems to argue for a kind of relational truth trumping a focus on good/evil and it increasingly warns of dire consequences for ignoring this switch in perspective.  This, for instance, is Jesus’ warning to his followers: “In fact, the hour is coming when those who kill you will think they are offering a service to God.” Those who see God primarily as an arbiter of good and evil, to paraphrase John 16:2, will kill God’s actual disciples.  That should give us all pause.

Like most Westerners, I’m rooting like crazy for Iran’s protesters and this does seem like a seminal moment for at least what’s possible there.  But what’s possible seems truly fundamental, seems to strike at the heart of the whole enterprise of the Islamic Revolution.  And, strangely enough, in rooting for the protesters, I seem to be rooting for a kind of secularism—the kind of secularism that believes that the freedom that comes from democracy is a good thing, though it might sometimes be used for what I believe to be evil; the kind of secularism that—if I’m understanding A Secular Age right (note Brian’s review from last Monday)—faith in Jesus, strangely enough, created; the kind of secularism that frees me to say “God is good” but demands that I follow it with “but religion (as perhaps we see in Iran) is, regrettably, bad.”