Can Islam, in its fundamentalist, political form, ever be truly democratic?
The answer to that question has long seemed crucial to the destiny of a movement that has in recent times profoundly shaken the existing order in the Muslim world and beyond.
There was never a more important place from which it could come than Iran, where Ayatollah Khomeini's revolution wrought political Islam's first, greatest and still enduring -- if now severely eroded -- triumph.
The answer from Islamism's foremost bastion has become clear: a resounding no, which today's parliamentary elections will merely ratify.
"We could not have overthrown the Shah without the clergy," said Khomeini's first foreign minister, Ibrahim Yazdi. "Because only they commanded the popularity to mobilize the people."
But 25 years on, this same clergy, or the arch-conservative clique of them that rules the Islamic republic, "have completely forfeited all bonds with the people."
The elections mark a turning point in a fundamental conflict which beset the republic from the outset. The republic may not have arisen democratically, but it was undoubtedly an expression of overwhelming popular will.
However archaic the religious beliefs that inspired it, the republic was to incorporate all the rights and freedoms associated with modern democracy.
That, at least, was its original promise, and very much part of the reason why so wide a spectrum of social classes and political forces, secular as well as religious, rallied enthusiastically to it.
But the promise was quickly betrayed. The Shiites clergy's historical role had been to furnish a moral counterweight to temporal power, never to assume that power themselves. But with Khomeini, they did so.
The endemic contradiction to which that led was embedded in the constitution, which sought to marry two sources of sovereignty. The modern one, with its implicit concession to the idea of democracy, was the people's; the other, traditional and "sacred," was God's.
Popular sovereignty was chiefly vested in elected institutions such as presidency and parliament; God's in unelected, exclusively Islamic institutions empowered to undo all acts and intentions of the popular ones.
Whenever there was conflict between the two, God's sovereignty, or the clerics' interpretation of it, always prevailed. It was not just secular forces that were ostracized, or ruthlessly repressed; so were Islamic ones.
If a person or an organization disapproved of, or sought to modify, the behaviour and ambitions of the clergy in power, all that Khomeini or the "sacred" institutions had to do to neutralize them was to declare them un-Islamic.
The last parliamentary elections gained international attention because of the landslide victory that Mohammad Khatami had won in presidential elections three years before. With this victory, the "popular" side of the republic had dealt an unexpected but potentially mighty blow to the ascendancy of the "sacred."
Many voters would undoubtedly have preferred to see the back of the whole Islamic republic; but now they were ready to put their faith in a president who, though a mullah himself, appeared so sincerely bent on reforming and democratising it from within.
In the event, the conservatives managed to obstruct him at every turn. So when Khatami's reformist allies wrested control of the other "popular" institution, the hitherto conservative-dominated parliament, it seemed he finally commanded the overwhelming, constitutional means to give real substance to an Islamic "civil society" -- rational, liberal and humanist -- which would eventually reduce the "sacred" institutions to a purely symbolic function.
That has now proved a delusion in its turn. The Guardian Council persisted in obstructionism, amid explicit assertions that democracy could not coexist with Islam.
Today's elections, followed by next year's presidential ones, are the culmination of the conservatives' strategy to regain their ascendancy over the "popular" as well as the "sacred." The Guardian Council disqualified 2,500 reformist candidates, including 80 serving deputies, who were judged insufficiently Islamic and told that they would be waging war on God if they resisted their fate.
The ever-prudent and conciliatory Khatami has acquiesced in an electoral sham that he reviles; it is the latest and most drastic in a long line of retreats that have steadily eroded the people's belief in his and the reformists' will to transform the regime on which they all depend.
What the conservatives will do with a monopoly of power apparently about to be restored, or what the people's reaction to it will be, remains to be seen.
Meanwhile, a historical cycle, from one tyranny to the full flowering of another, however fragile, seems to be complete.
In the bitter verdict of a prominent reformist who wished to remain anonymous: "This religious monarchy, in its backwardness, is worse than the secular one of the Shah, which was at least modern."
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