By Uditha Devapriya
At the time of his death on May 19, in a helicopter crash that has yet to be fully investigated, Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi had risen through the ranks. Sanctioned by the West and nicknamed the “Butcher of Tehran” for his uncompromising attitude to protesters, he was seen as the successor to Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei. Under his watch Iran went through some pretty turbulent times, including a spate of protests in 2021 following the death in custody of a 22-year-old woman. But it also saw through a transformation in its foreign relations, signalling an outreach to Asia and the Global South.
Raisi’s death raises speculation about what will follow in Iran. He had been virtually groomed for succession after Khamenei’s death. Under his watch Iran became more conservative, one could say less tolerant of dissent. But he also raised the country’s profile in the Global South, joining the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) and becoming a member of BRICS. External developments, including of course the Russia-Ukraine War and the Israel-Gaza War, reinforced its links with not just Russia and China, but also India.
Donald Trump’s unilateral abrogation of the US-Iran nuclear agreement signalled to Tehran that the US could not be trusted. Joe Biden’s silent manoeuvres following his election – he became president around the same time Raisi did in Iran – did little to mend the damage. What Western analysts miss out in their commentaries on the deal and its subsequent breakdown is that the Iranian government could not be forced to buy the agreement: it would accept it only if the deal could be sold to hardline conservative elements. Trump’s belligerence more or less pre-empted those possibilities.
Then there was the pandemic. With the restoration of Western sanctions, Iran’s health sector came to a screeching halt. Rather than doing what any superpower capable of a great many things would have done, which is relaxing sanctions, Washington chose to continue them. Western analysts who pontificate on human rights violations in Iran – which are real, as they are in countries like ours – ignore the hatred of the West that spread throughout Iran because of US policies. Ebrahim Raisi’s tenure should be seen in light of these developments, even if, as reports indicate, certain Iranians did celebrate his death.
How exactly has the country responded to the death of their president? Iran is a complex society, and like all complex non-Western societies has been muddled up and misinterpreted by the West. The truth is that we don’t know how Iranians have responded to Raisi’s death. Any open celebration of his passing will almost certainly be censored and suppressed. But more than one Western media outlet has taken a handful of incidents as representative of the mood across the country. This is debatable. On the other hand, it is plausible that many protesters are celebrating the fact that Raisi will now not succeed Khameini. Yet even taking this into account, it is questionable whether, as one protester puts it, “The death of Raisi has made the people of Iran very happy.”
The bottom line is that Iranian society, with or without Raisi, cannot be understood without a wider understanding of its modern history, the geopolitical intrigues which shaped the theocratic State to what it is today. From the 1953 CIA-sponsored coup to the Revolution, from the Iran-Iraq War to the sabotage of Iran’s nuclear programme, Western officials and commentators seem to have short memories. Iranian politics today is a consequence of these developments, just as American politics today is a consequence of the polarisations which have grown in American society since 9/11.
In 2009, at the height of protests against then President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad, the Iranian historian Ervand Abrahamian noted that, despite the many criticisms one could make of it, the Islamic Republic had withstood Western pressure for three full decades. Dismissing four commonly cited reasons for this – the numerous cleric-sponsored reigns of terror, the Iran-Iraq War, oil revenues, and the appeal of Shi’ism – he argued that Iran had been able to continue the way it has because of the clerics’ ability to appropriate the populist rhetoric of the radical intelligentsia minus their secular cosmopolitanism.
Critics of the Islamic Republic tend to consider pre-1979 Iranian society as having been qualitatively better for citizens in general and women in particular. But this would be like claiming that Russia before Stalin and the Bolsheviks was better for all. Iran under the Shah was oppressive and authoritarian. The 1979 Revolution, not unlike the aragalaya in Sri Lanka, drew in every political group opposed to the Shah. For a while, this movement became dominated by radical-secular progressives. Raisi figured in among the Islamists who usurped the progressives while advocating for a more egalitarian social order. In this, they succeeded beyond expectations; as Abrahamian points out,
“In three decades, the regime has come close to eliminating illiteracy among the post-revolutionary generations, reducing the overall rate from 53 percent to 15 percent. The rate among women has fallen from 65 percent to 20 percent. The state has increased the number of students enrolled in primary schools from 4,768,000 to 5,700,000, in secondary schools from 2.1 million to over 7.6 million, in technical schools from 201,000 to 509,000, and in universities from 154,000 to over 1.5 million. The percentage of women in university student populations has gone up from 30 percent to 62 percent.”
The situation has improved steadily since then. World Bank data, for instance, show a rise in youth female literacy from 66 percent in 1985 to 99 percent in 2022. This underlies perhaps the most enduring paradox in Iranian society today, its concurrent entrenchment of social welfare and religious conservatism, especially in relation to women. Such paradoxes cannot be understood without reference to the 1953 coup, which sowed among Islamist groups a perpetual suspicion of the West and put them in the same league as radical anti-imperialist progressives. And they cannot be resolved by resorting to the conventional Western solution of colour revolutions and regime change operations.
For these reasons, Raisi’s death hasn’t actually let to a fluttering of hope among Western analysts. The consensus seems to be that his death will do nothing to stall the further Islamisation of Iranian society, and that he will be succeeded by an even more conservative and anti-Western leader. Meanwhile, the world order, specifically in the Global South, is changing so fast that Western narratives no longer cut it.
With or without Raisi, there is unlikely to be a revival of the Obama nuclear agreement, notwithstanding Joe Biden’s gestures. That was a one-hit wonder which did little to assuage Islamist fears of the West or the American right’s deep-seated Islamophobia. In itself, it was not a failure. But like all such initiatives, it was ultimately doomed to failure. Raisi’s tenure marked a heightening of tensions with the West in general, and the US in particular, in light of its abrogation. This will continue, for a long time.
Uditha Devapriya is the Chief Analyst – International Relations at Factum and can be reached at uditha@factum.lk.
Factum is an Asia-Pacific focused think tank on International Relations, Tech Cooperation, Strategic Communications, and Climate Outreach accessible via www.factum.lk.
The views expressed here are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the organization’s.
