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- [00:01]
Podcast Host (Sponsor Segment)
This episode is brought to you by Starbucks.
- [00:03]
Thomas Small
That is fire. Whoa, that's good. This might be the drink of the summer. Okay, I like this one, too.
- [00:09]
Yeganeh Torbati
I'm rocking with it.
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Podcast Host (Sponsor Segment)
Okay, try it for yourself. Starbucks refreshers concentrates are coming home. Find them in the coffee aisle and make it yours.
- [00:24]
Narrator/Announcer
Iran and the Iranian Revolution. Nearly 50 years later, the Islamic Republic overshadows everything in the Middle East. In 1979, revolutionaries promised Iranians justice, dignity, and an end to corruption. Instead, they created an absolutist theocratic state whose influence derailed the whole region and whose citizens have spent decades struggling to reclaim the future they were promised. Yeageneh Torbati is the Iran correspondent for the New York Times and the co author of Stolen Betrayal and Hope in Modern Iran. A remarkable new history told through the lives of the people who built the Islamic Republic, tried to reform it, and
- [01:21]
Thomas Small
finally rebelled against it.
- [01:24]
Narrator/Announcer
Turbati explains how revolution, revolutionary idealism hardened into authoritarian rule, how the regime's charitable institutions became engines of corruption and economic power, why repeated movements for reform have failed, and how Iran's protesters have continued to resist despite increasingly brutal repression. I'm Thomas Small. This is my Conflicted conversation with Yegana Torbati.
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Thomas Small
Hello, Yegana. Welcome to Conflicted. It's really nice to meet you.
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Yeganeh Torbati
Thank you so much for having me, Yegan.
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Thomas Small
I mean, it's more than just nice, it's a kind of tremendous honor for a couple of reasons. First, you are the New York Times Iran correspondent. That's just a very elevated position to hold in the world of global media. And given what's going on in the world, you're the right person to talk to at the moment. But also you are the co author of this just fantastic new book, Stolen Betrayal and Hope in Modern Iran. And it's the sort of book that really everyone needs to read now for all sorts of reasons, which we'll get into. But thank you for writing the book or co authoring the book. Thank you for coming on the show. It's so great to talk to you.
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Yeganeh Torbati
Thank you for the kind words. Really appreciate it, Thomas.
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Narrator/Announcer
So,
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Thomas Small
you know, before I pushed record, you know, dear listeners, you'll laugh. I mean, I was saying just how deflated I feel. It is Thursday, the 18th of June. I think it's important to point out when we're talking, Yegana, because things change really on a dime these days. So who knows when this episode releases if things will be the same. But just yesterday, President Trump signed the MOU that he has agreed with the Islamic Republic of Iran. He signed it in the Versailles Palace. You know, it's sort of. I can't really. How did that land for you? How is all of this landing for the New York Times Iran correspondent?
- [03:28]
Yeganeh Torbati
You know, it's a bit. It's a lot of whiplash. I remember in 2018 when one of the reasons that President Trump gave for pulling out of the nuclear deal that had been signed and negotiated under his predecessor, President Barack Obama. The reason, one of the main reasons he gave was that the deal did not address Iran's ballistic missiles. Well, fast forward eight years, and President Trump is saying at a press conference, you know, why shouldn't they have some ballistic missiles? Other countries in the region have them. You know, this agreement, I've read through it, experts have read through it. I've spoken to them. Some people are very puzzled as to why. Like, what was the point of the war in this case? I mean, this was a. These are diplomatic agreements and negotiations and concessions sometimes on the US Side that could have been reached without a military conflict, in their view. And so I think it remains to be seen what happens over the next two months in terms of negotiating an actual deal. Let's remember this memorandum is really just an agreement to try to come to an agreement, but in the meantime, Iran gets to sell its oil, it gets economic benefits, and the main concession that it's making is to lift its hold on the Strait of Hormuz, which came about as a result of the war. So the achievements of this deal or this agreement are pretty limited. But on the Iranian side, they get some major economic benefits that are very valuable to them.
- [05:00]
Thomas Small
Trump said all sorts of wacky things yesterday. I don't mean that disparagingly. I should say things that surprised me. For example, he said that in his view, Hamas has behaved quite well. That's a kind of amazing thing that he said. I really. I can't understand that he would say that. And I just. I don't know how I'm supposed to interpret it, given everything that's happened in the last three and a half years. It's a shocking time. As I said at the outset, everyone should read your book, Stolen Revolution, because it tells the whole story of modern Iran from the revolution to the present. Really? Well, I was going to say from a ground's eye view, but that's not fair. It really tells the. The whole story, both from the ground and from the top of the regime in all of its many transmutations over the decades. You know, it unfolds Like a genuinely gripping and ultimately quite tragic drama. It explains so much. Its subtitle, yegan Betrayal and Hope in Modern Iran. That lands a little bit, I don't know, questionably. Now. Where at the moment, for the Iranian people, do you think is the hope?
- [06:18]
Yeganeh Torbati
Yeah, I mean, look, we. We really try to look for those moments in Iranian history. And I think, you know, the subtitle and the title I think, refers to this idea that there have been these movements to change Iran deeply over the years, going back to the revolution and even before that. But we kind of focus on the revolution onwards, and at every turn, those best intentions were e subverted for the narrow gain of a few powerful elite, or they were completely stamped out by that same elite. And we're talking about movements for political change, but also kind of economic freedom inside the country. And this is a very difficult moment for those people who want change for Iran at this point. The regime has carried out the killings of thousands of protesters in January and since the war started in February, has picked up the pace of execution and in general, repression arrests have picked up. I just saw a headline right before we started recording a singer who recorded a concert without the mandatory hijab, I believe last year she's been sentenced to, I think, 74 lashes. So these are the kinds of punishments that the government is carrying out against those who dare to resist it. And so it's a difficult moment. I do think, however, that what we found in the course of reporting, supporting the book is that even in out of kind of those darkest moments in Iranian history, the Iranian people find ways to still dissent. It's a very kind of vibrant polity that doesn't simply accept whatever's handed to it. And so I don't expect the status quo to remain the status quo for a very long time. I think we will continue to see Iranian society shift and change and find ways to make its demands known.
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Thomas Small
It's a real shame to hear about that particular sentence against that singer, because since the woman life freedom movement broke out a few years ago, it did seem that despite the repression that it was met by the regime, it did seem that it had shifted, at least in the cities, a little bit towards granting or allowing women a little bit more freedom. If I, you know, if I've understood correctly, women without the hijab or only very, you know, moderately wearing the hijab were seen in greater numbers. Maybe this is now being pushed back upon or rolled back.
- [08:46]
Yeganeh Torbati
I actually think. No, I think, you know, we kind of point out in the book that the Woman Life Freedom movement, although it failed in its political project of unseating the regime, it had vast social effects and very deep ones that I don't think have been reversed even with this greater repression by the government. I've talked to women who didn't, who wore the hijab for decades and have decided to put it aside after that movement. I've talked to women who had resisted mandatory hijab for years, but had always faced opprobrium and sort of judgment from their family members. And now their family members have stopped doing that. They've had kind of a cultural change. So I think the killing of Mahsa Amini in the custody of the morality police really had a big effect on people who could see their own daughters, their own wives in that situation, or themselves as women had been in that situation. And I think what people perceived as the right righteousness of that movement had a deep impact on society in a way that I think can't easily be reversed.
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Thomas Small
Well, if you take us back to the end of December last year and January this year, when those protests broke out, I think they were the biggest protests that Iran had seen in a long time, maybe since the revolution, maybe certainly since 2009. The numbers on the streets were remarkable. The widespread nature of the protests were unprecedented. And the courage shown by the protesters was, you know, reached a new height, it seems to me, at least, if you go back and take us back into back to January, try to capture for us what the. Almost like the worldview of the protesters was then, because Donald Trump, the President of the United States, is tweeting, we're coming to your rescue. That must have encouraged them. He literally told them, take to the streets, keep protesting, don't stop. So, you know, imagine that. You don't know what the next five months is gonna hold. What were those Iranian protesters in their hundreds of thousands and millions thinking? What were they expecting?
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Yeganeh Torbati
I think that we see the outbreak of protests every couple years now in Iran. And at first, this round was not really different from those others that have come before. It started off with economic, and then very quickly turned into demands for the entire regime to fall, which happens now within, honestly, sometimes hours of an initial spark these days. And so at first, we saw kind of these scattered protests, and there were some initial killings. There were arrests. I covered kind of some of the early funerals in late December and early January. And then we see President Trump kind of do something that American presidents had really avoided doing in the past, which was to openly kind of both endorse the protests, and then also to say that U.S. protection was there for the protesters, help is on the way, these kinds of things.
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Thomas Small
We're locked and loaded.
- [11:56]
Yeganeh Torbati
Yeah. And I think that I won't say that that was the reason that people were protesting at all, but I do think that it added a bit of confidence to the protesters that they were somehow protected, you know, by the world's most powerful superpower. And I think that helped to contribute to the size of the protests that we saw, especially January 8 and January 9, which were also the two days that the kind of most well known opposition figure, Reza Pahlavi, the former Crown prince, the son of the deposed shah, you know, he called for people to protest at a specific time on those two nights, and people heeded the call. I think the analysis sort of points to the fact that one big reason those protests got so big in a way that we really haven't seen since 2009, is that people were given a specific day and time to protest by someone who they saw as an opposition leader. And so people came out and I think initially people thought, wow, all these people are out. The images that we saw and the Internet was cut off very quickly into the protests on January 8th. So we really just got a very early snapshot. But the images we saw seem to indicate at least that we can say millions nationwide. And in any one protest, maybe tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, numbers that we really have not seen in a long time in Iran came out. And I think people thought, wow, surely something must happen from this.
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Thomas Small
I don't know if this is the case. I can imagine possibly some Iranians at least had their minds what happened in Syria the year before. And a bit, I mean, it's completely different. There had been a civil war there. I mean, I understand it's not the same. Iranians would have known about that civil war because their government participated in it a lot. And the failure of their government to prop up the Assad regime, which, you know, was very repressive, and if you're anti Islamic Republic, you might have seen some kind of similarity between those two regimes. They might have thought, this is it, there's a wave happening. We can achieve now what happened in Syria, kind of a reverse of what happened at the Arab spring, where the 2009 protests in Iran, which failed, were then followed by the Arab uprisings across the Middle east, some of which failed, but some of which in the end didn't fail. So Iranians might have thought, now finally we get our chance. But, you know, I guess is that. Do you think that's true?
- [14:25]
Yeganeh Torbati
I mean, the Syrian uprising had kind of succeeded the year before. So I think it wasn't that momentum, maybe necessari necessarily wasn't there. But I do think that that moment, it sort of showed Iranians like, oh, these, these leaders, these authoritarians, these autocrats are not invincible. Like there could be, there's a post Assad Syria now maybe there's a post Islamic Republic possible. But of course, you know, that's a very different situation. It was over a decade of armed conflict, kind of like a more organized kind of rebel groups with weapons. And the Iranian people don't have that. The opposition doesn't have that. And I think what we ultimately saw in January, mid January, was how defenseless people on the street really are when their government is willing to carry out mass violence against them.
- [15:23]
Thomas Small
And they really were willing. I mean, obviously lots of numbers have been bandied about Huron conflicted. Based on conversations that my co host Eamon has had with intelligence officials across the region, some of whom have no reason to lie about this, can sort of verify that those upper ranges, 30 to 40,000, are really very possibly the case. I don't know. In your reporting, if you feel like you can verify that or what do you think is the truth about the degree of repression that the protests in January experienced?
- [15:56]
Yeganeh Torbati
It's difficult, perhaps impossible for independent journalists to operate in Iran. And so it's really hard for us to verify those figures. I generally rely on my stories on what human rights groups outside the country say that they can verify through their own interviews, through public open source reporting. And one of the most prominent and active ones says that they've confirmed 6,500 protesters killed by security forces during those protests. Just if that's the number that we accept, at least for now, and they're investigating thousands of other deaths, deaths, that is a scale that we really have not seen in Iran's modern history. With the possible exception of the 1988 prison massacres at the end of the Iran Iraq war that Khomeini ordered against dissidents who were in prison and some of whom had served their sentences and many of whom were not sentenced to death to begin with, those estimates range from maybe like the upper 2000s up to tens of thousands. We don't of course, have transparency on that. But in every other round of protests in 1999, in 2009, 2017, 2019 at most, we understand that maybe hundreds of people were killed. And so the idea that we would have thousands of Protesters killed over the course of. Largely over the course of two nights. I mean, it explains some of the videos that we saw. I mean, videos of people, just dozens and dozens, hundreds of bodies stacked up just in a single morgue outside Tehran. And that's just one video from one city. And we know that in major other cities there were also these mass killings. So we really just saw a scale of repression that we have not seen in Iran in decades.
- [17:50]
Thomas Small
I think a lot of listeners might be thinking, gosh, are we returning to this same old story? Like, you know, it was so horrible, but. But we want to move on. You get a sense that there are people out there who opposed America's war in Iran, you know, which broke out on the 28th of February. Now, there's a sense that. What do I mean? You get a sense that those protesters are being forgotten by people who opposed the war and, fine, oppose the war. Clearly, in retrospect, it was a foolish war, it seems to me, but I don't think we should lose sight of those protesters. And I can't imagine really what they must be feeling. I mean, I feel like, wasn't there a plan? Were they just making this up as they went along? I'm talking about America and Israel and the allies, if you like, the Gulf states. Were they just making it up as they went along? Was there really no plan? Because in January, I suppose Iranian protesters must have thought the President saying he's coming to our rescue. There must be a plan.
- [18:55]
Yeganeh Torbati
You know, I think one thing I have noticed in my discussions with members of the Iranian opposition over the years is there is a persistent belief, and I think this has been encouraged by the Islamic Republic's own propaganda, that of course, the US Is obsessed with Iran and Iran policy, and therefore nothing will really happen in Iran unless the US and maybe Israel wants that to be so. And I think we kind of make this point in the book as well. It's actually been kind of one of the most successful pieces of Islamic Republic propaganda, I think, because I've seen even opponents of the Islamic Republic sort of say. Say that the US Has a large, very large role to play in kind of Iran's fate. And so I think those of us who I worked and lived in Washington, D.C. for over a decade, and I've met many Iran policymakers, and when you talk to them often, they're very skilled, and they may even care about Iran's future, but they're also reactive. They're reacting to events, and there's not really some grand plan. The Days of kind of the Dulles brothers are over. And the power that these Western countries have over events in other countries is just not what I think sometimes public perception in some of these countries actually is. And so when President Trump said that, even putting aside that sort of substrate of belief in Iranian society, that the US Kind of has a plan for Iran, President Trump made a very specific promise and public statement. And so I think people thought, well, he wouldn't just say that if there wasn't. Wasn't like a plan. And I think they were disappointed eventually by what happened.
- [20:55]
Thomas Small
Yeah, it's true. And we're approaching the 50th anniversary in a couple of years, it'll be 50 years since the Iranian revolution kind of, well, frankly broke out in 1978. And then Khomeini returned to Iran early in 79, and the new constitution was sort of of drafted by March, April of that year and eventually through a referendum was accepted and the Islamic Republic began. So we're approaching 50 years since those really world historic events. And your book starts then it takes us back into the revolutionary period. And just like the whole book, which is grounded in real people with real ambitions, some political, some economic, some social, whatever, the book reveals that, that even within Iran there wasn't like a grand plan in the sense of this kind of watertight puppet master situation, that actually the whole thing was kind of being in a hardscrabble way, invented on the fly out of a lot of different competing political trends and stuff. So the value of the book, and this is why I really recommend people read it, is it is showing how history is actually made as a constant surprise. You know, we've just gone through one, but the Iranian people have been going through surprise after surprise, surprise after surprise, as everything they expected to happen never really happened. So if we go back to 1979 and the revolution, what would you say now 50 years later actually animated that revolution? And, you know, I'm a kind of conservative guy. You know, I in general am not temperamentally inclined to go out to the streets and protest things. And I was raised to think that that's usually quite destabilizing. I'm that kind of guy. Although I'm open minded in retrospect, it seems to me that the animal spirits that broke out in Iran over the 70s ultimately were just kind of irrational, too idealistic, not grounded in reality. But there was a great desire for things like social justice and everything. So, Yegana, how do you think, on balance, one should understand the revolution now, almost 50 years later, I think you
- [23:01]
Yeganeh Torbati
would get along well with the grandfather of Hela. Did you, if you remember one of our characters, her grandfather was someone who just was like, did not. Did not believe in any of this political stuff or in revolution while his brother did. Yeah, I mean, look, it was a different era, right? The 70s, there was kind of this global left. There was this idea of, like, resisting against imperialism. And, you know, the clerics and the people who animated the revolution, you know, also the secularists, the liberals, the communists, they saw themselves kind of as on the forefront of this global battle against US Imperialism, colonialism, et cetera. People believed really fervently in their ideologies. It was a less cynical time, it was a less jaded time. And they really kind of believed on the religious side, on the kind of Islamist cleric side, that they could establish heaven on earth or at least put their society on the path to heaven. We could recreate the Islamic state that the Prophet Muhammad established in the 7th century. Khomeini really believed that Islam had created all of the laws that man needed, at least in theory. Then when he got into power, he proved himself very adept at making the exemptions and exceptions that were needed to kind of keep the Islamic Republic in power. And we kind of trace those as well in the book. On the other side of the coin, the kind of communists or socialists and leftists who had been heavily repressed by the Shah, they wanted to see an Iran free of Western involvement and also one that was kind of economically just. And you sort of see these two sometimes competing, sometimes complementary desires sort of shape at least the first decade of the Islamic Republic, with the leftists on one side, with, you know, the communists and socialists, had huge impact on the. The constitution of the new government. But then also there was this very strong and ultimately dominant Islamist faction that really then set the rules that were to come. And I think the Iranian people, they largely believed what Khomeini was telling them, especially at the outset, that we were going to have a just society. There was going to be a vote for the people. This was an Islamic republic. That was a very deliberate framing of this new government. But I think what that meant in practice turned out to be quite different from what people expected.
- [25:41]
Thomas Small
You show for sure that, you know, very quickly, though, the new state, the new government that was founded in the wake of the revolution considered itself to be an Islamic government and thought that it was enshrining those original prophetic principles into practice. Let's say the Sharia was finally going to, in its fullness manifest in the world. Very quickly, it was the state that actually trumped the Sharia. The state was happy to make all sorts of compromises with, you know, with the principles of Islamic justice and jurisprudence to defend itself. And my goodness, does that come out in the narrative as it unfolds over the decades as a new elite, you know, frankly, feather their nests and become mired in a degree of corruption and oppression that really does just totally leave the Shah's era in the dust. I mean, the degree, once you get into like the chapters in the teens, during that brief period of kind of economic openness when, because of the jcpoa, but also before, when foreign investment is flowing into Iran a bit, and a kind of not libertarian certainly, but there's a sort of dimension within the Iranian scene where investment, innovation, economic development is practiced in an almost kind of Wild west way. And the amount of wealth that is being creamed off by the top and the brazenness with which they flaunted that wealth. And you go back to 1978 and you think, well, this is way worse and much more endemic. So what happened? I mean, honestly, it is so depressing.
- [27:28]
Yeganeh Torbati
Yeah, I mean, there's a lot there. So it started very early where Khomeini realized that we could not actually follow all of the laws of Islam to rule over a fairly sophisticated Westernized modern society of tens of millions of people that he needed to make exemptions to Islamic law. And so he kind of puts out this statement. It was in response to a fairly minor kind of like picayune dispute between the leftist clerics and the right wing clerics. But what he basically lays out out is that the highest precept of Islam is the Islamic government. And to preserve that government, you can violate the other precepts of Islam. Meaning, I think the specific ones he names are the Hajj and fasting. These are like, you know, some of the pillars of, of the religion. And so if you carry that logic forward, which he did and. And his successors did, or his successor Ali Khamenei did, what that means is that you can violate other precepts of Islamic law in order to preserve the Islamic Republic for the expediency of the state. And what's the most important part of the Islamic State, at least as it's interpreted in the Islamic Republic, it's the institution of the supreme leader, the cleric that rules over everything. And so once that is kind of accepted as what we're going to do going forward, that means that really you can do anything in the name of protecting the Supreme Leader. And it's allowed. And so we sort of discuss that decision. And then I think you just see the reverberations throughout. So that's one part of it. The second part is that after the war, after the Iran Iraq war of the 1980s, there were all these unemployed or underemployed soldiers. And so again, with somewhat good or maybe benign intentions, the leading kind of people in charge at the time decide, well, we need them to do something. We also need to rebuild. So why don't we get these forces to participate in the economy and rebuild the country?
- [29:40]
Thomas Small
This phase is associated with Rafsanjani.
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Yeganeh Torbati
Exactly. Rafsanjani is kind of the main person who suggests this and pushes it forward, but also Khamenei, who was Supreme Leader at the time, definitely a sense. And he is trying to strengthen the Revolutionary Guards as a way to build up also his own power. Power. And so they enter the first construction sector and then kind of other sectors and build up their resources, which they then use to buy into other industries. And of course, you know, I think a somewhat predictable outcome of this is that you have an economic player that is benefiting hugely from Iran's economy. How do you have a real private sector under that? If your competitor as a private company, you know, has access to a wing of prison and guns. Guns. And can interrogate you, that's not a fair competition. And so it was very important to us to not only focus on Iran's government or ideology or even society, we felt that to really explain both the longevity of the Islamic Republic and some of the reasons why people are so unhappy with it, you have to also get into the economic dimension. And so, yeah, that meant really doing a lot of investigative reporting on how precisely the Revolutionary Guards took over the economy. And it's not just the legitimate deals that they were granted. Whether or not you agree with those official deals that were granted and announced for them to take on certain projects, but also how they use these underhanded techniques to take over industry after industry. And we focus on one of those industries in particular, which really thrived after the sanctions were removed in 2015, 2016, but which quickly found itself the target of the Guards and of the security state in general.
- [31:32]
Thomas Small
I mean, I can't really stress enough, dear listeners, just how this book is a genuine. I mean, it's character driven, it's dramatic, it has all the great benefits of good journalism, but it is also a step by step narrative of the political economy, the history of the political economy of Iran you really see exactly what happened. A lot of histories of Iran are very top down. They're rather ideologically framed. They have a kind of almost like a sort of predestinarian quality to them. Like this was all going to happen, it was just unfolding kind of by fate. But you really show like, you know, that committee did this, responded by that opposition figure, then this person was put in prison, which, which inspired these protests which caused the Supreme Leader to make this decision. You really put the pieces together so you see how it unfolded. And I think that's very valuable going back, back to what you said about the, the way in which the, the Supreme Leader's office became the primary priority of the whole revolutionary movement and was happy to subjugate Sharia and whatever to, to that priority. For me, that's where the leftist dimension in the strange fusion that occurred in the 50s, 60s and 70s of a kind of Islamic thought with a kind of leftist revolutionary thought thought, that's where that to me is very much revealed because it's so similar to what happened after the Bolshevik Revolution. You know, the Bolshevik Revolution was about these great universal ideals. But very quickly the torchbearer of the revolution, that is the Soviet Communist Party and its, you know, and its Supreme Soviet becomes like the avatar of all of those ideals. So it becomes the most important thing. And suddenly all of those ideals are being actually trounced in practice in order to protect the Supreme Soviet. And so you sort of think it's this utopian thinking that is the problem. Anyway, so this book has many characters. You really do ground the story in these real people whom you interviewed, who, you know, you can tell their stories in detail. It's fantastic. But one character for me that sort of jumped off of the page because despite having read lots and lots of books on the history of modern Iran and having encountered this name a lot, I didn't really know him. His name is Mehdi Karubi. He is still alive, but was a major player in the early revolutionary period. So he's a kind of character that can frame the whole narrative in a way. And his journey is in a way, the journey of modern Iran. Who is Mehdi Karubi? And you know, in Sketch, what does his life and his evolution as a political person and reveal about the Islamic revolution of Iran?
- [34:24]
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- [35:54]
Yeganeh Torbati
Mehdi Karabi is a really fascinating and complicated figure and we really try to dig into kind of what he meant and what his life tells us. So he is a young Islamist cleric in the 1960s. He becomes a a student of Khomeini and then a disciple of him. We open with him kind of escaping across the border to go visit Khomeini in exile in Iraq. And he is one of the clerics who's kind of one of his lieutenants and really helps Khomeini to keep his movement alive while he's in exile. He distributes Khomeini's speeches and teachings. He takes on a role raising funds, collecting the funds that are sent to Khomeini's office and distributing them to imprisoned clerics and their family members, sort of helping people to maintain their resistance. During the Shah's era and after the revolution, he's rewarded with a position of power, multiple positions of power. He joins parliament, he's elected to parliament and then eventually rises to become speaker in the late 1980s and early 90s. But also he is given a position of the post revolutionary revolution version of what he was doing before. So taking funds, taking properties that were confiscated from both members of the old regime, but also people kind of believed to be associated with the regime. And that standard is quite a loose one at times. And confiscating those properties and distributing the proceeds to the poor and also to people who the Regime kind of wanted to co opt the kind of lower middle classes, the people that it wanted to present as being part of, of its base. And so Karubi, he has kind of a leftist streak. He had spent time with communists in prison and had sort of absorbed some of their ideals and ideas. And so he kind of sees himself as like being on this Robin Hood like mission. And we try not to look away from some of the things that he does wrong, including participating in these confiscations that often did not have legal justifications and often were quite haphazard hazard, but also sort of finding ways or exemptions around for some of these. What's happening is that he's confiscating these properties on behalf of these foundations, these boniads as they're called, that he controls and that the other clerics sort of run. And these are connected to the state but they're kind of not officially part of the official elected government. They're sort of this quasi governmental institution
- [38:27]
Thomas Small
and he wins for them an exemption, exemption from a kind of taxation or import tax or something. So it, this is a very, it's a very important fact that at some point early on these foundations were granted significant exemptions from normal economic sort of strictures.
- [38:44]
Yeganeh Torbati
Exactly. So they become unfettered by the rules of traditional bureaucracy that other companies have to abide by. And this is again done with good intentions. We want to help. Like in this specific case case, he wanted to import wheelchairs, better quality wheelchairs from Germany for paraplegics who were injured during the Iran Iraq war. The government wants to avoid imports, they want to encourage the domestic industry. And Kadraby finds a way around for his specific foundation or charity. You know, the intention is good, but he is helping to establish a norm where these entities, because they're connected to the clerical establishment, do not have to follow the rules of other companies and other entities. So fast forward, Khomeini dies. Kadubi's faction of leftist clerics is pushed out of power by Khamenei and Bhairav Sanjani who was president at the time. And they find themselves on the outs and they start to rethink their ideals. Now part of this is kind of a tactical competition. Only if the Islamic Republic becomes a more representative system would these leftists ever be able to hold power again. But I also think that some of it was genuine and I think we see evidence in Kadraby's later life that he really did become a much more open minded and liberal minded person. They are pushed by Huge societal changes. At the bottom, a baby boom. Young people who, you know, did not have any memory of the revolution and wanted simply a more normal life and kind of normal freedoms. And they kind of these, like, sort of leftist clerics helped to kind of bring about what then becomes known as the reform movement, this idea that we could redefine what it really means to be an Islamic republic, create a stronger social contract with the people, and sort of have a world where the democratic elements of the constitution are given more weight. So the elected president, the elected parliament, you know, they don't say this directly, but at the expense of the supreme leader's power.
- [40:55]
Thomas Small
So if the construction of the centralized, quite totalitarian Islamist state across the 80s, and this happens in the context of a terrible war with Iraq and all sorts of things, again, it's not just some kind of inevitable master plan. It happens almost accidentally. But if the construction of that totalitarian regime at the top is a kind of stolen promise of the revolution, a first betrayal, then this reform movement, which comes out of that fact, and it gained steam in the late 90s. It's associated initially with the president, Mohammad Khatami, and then in the teens, it sort of comes back again with Hassan Rouhani. So there is, we know, this seam throughout the last couple of decades, at least three decades of reformism. And it meets a backlash, a sort of populist security services backlash initially associated with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. So, again, dear listeners, it is a great story. It is told in incredible detail, and it's gripping. How would you summarize the political dynamics at work there between Khatami's period, which was so promising? I know, because we talk a lot from the Gulf perspective. I know that Arabs at the time in the Gulf felt very encouraged by Khatami and what they thought he might bring to the table. And then the war on terror begins. A whole new global security atmosphere arises. Ahmadinejad rides that somehow pushes back. How would you summarize the dynamic there?
- [42:30]
Yeganeh Torbati
Yeah, I think one thing the reformists, I think, try to downplay is that the structure that they were operating in just simply really was not conducive to their political project. I mean, once you accept that one man can hold ultimate power and that power is given to him by God effectively because he's acting on God's behalf and establishing and ruling over this Islamic system, it's really hard to find space within that for a genuine kind of democratic movement. And I think the reformist, first of all, they did not quite realize that they were going to take power. The election results in 1997 were a huge surprise to them. No other time in the Islamic Republic's history had a candidate who was kind of known tacitly to not be favored by the Supreme Leader. At no other point had that person actually won. And so it took both the reformists by surprise and also the conservative establishment. And very quickly you start to see that establishment, this sort of security forces, the clerics start to accuse the reformists of not really fully accepting this concept of velayat al Fagh, or the rule of the Islamic Jurist. And they have to kind of fall over themselves to affirm that, no, we do accept this. We accept the Supreme Leader's authority. So in that case, when you accept that and you're not fighting against that, there's sort of a contradiction in your movement. You can push things, but only, only so far as it doesn't threaten the Supreme Leader or his interests. And I think that kind of led them to this situation where ultimately all of the changes that Khatami was trying to make and that Kadribi was trying to make in tandem, so he rises again to power during this reform era. He becomes speaker of parliament again. Those were ultimately stymied by not just Khamenei, but also this council, the Guardian Council, which includes clerics and is quite right wing throughout the Islamic Republic's history, and that they ultimately come to a complete failure. And because that movement was not and still is not willing to challenge the fundamental precept of this idea of a society ruled over by a cleric, by an infallible man, there's not really anything they can do to resist. In 2013, when we see the emergence of, of Hassan Rouhani as kind of a counterweight to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, that is a much less ambitious movement and era, really, his remit was to get the sanctions lifted. Now, he did also want to kind of relax some of the social restrictions, sort of allow a pressure valve for society, which was really kind of at its limit. But he wasn't really talking about, about fundamental reforms or civil society or kind of a new social contract, things like that. It was a much more limited movement. And we see that also we have a reformist president today. But he has repeatedly said that he follows what the Supreme Leader tells him. And often even in the era before this recent war, he was known for saying, there's not really much I can do. I don't really have that much power. And so. So I think you've kind of seen over the years those Ambitions really narrow quite a bit.
- [45:57]
Thomas Small
The IRGC plays a role in all of this as its power increased over the decades. I think the period of Ahmadinejad was a big turning point in that story. I mean, Ahmadinejad not only brought a kind of renewed sense of apocalyptic and eschatological religious fervor, kind of bringing Iran back into that headspace from the 70s, making the whole thing a little bit more. More from the perspective of someone outside of it, nuts. You know, he brought that, that to bear. But he also encouraged or allowed the IRGC to increase its domination of the economy. So that in the teens, when in the Rouhani era, as a result of the JCPOA and the relaxation of sanctions and the increase in foreign investment, that corruption that I talked about before, the fabulous corruption of the late teens, corruptions in the country was made possible because that corruption is very much implicated in the IRGC and its stranglehold on the economy.
- [46:57]
Yeganeh Torbati
Right. So, yeah, all the things you said about Ahmadinejad were absolutely true. And it's ironic because he kind of came in with this populist wave, and I think people really appreciated that. He almost had kind of like an anti clerical vibe, that this sort of comes out more later in his presidency that wasn't quite as blatant as that, especially at the beginning of his presidency and candidacy. But people kind of discerned in him, kind of someone who had those sort of early revolutionary ideals and would sort of throw out the elites that had been tormenting them and gathering all this wealth.
- [47:34]
Thomas Small
If I may sort of make an analogy, because he really was a populist in that sense. So a bit like how Donald Trump both stuck it to the Democrats, but also to the old GOP figures. He had that kind of rock star energy. Like, this guy is not just a follower, he's also a rebel, but he's conservative.
- [47:52]
Yeganeh Torbati
Exactly.
- [47:53]
Narrator/Announcer
Yeah.
- [47:53]
Yeganeh Torbati
And, you know, but. But sort of disappointingly to, to, you know, many of his followers and certainly to those who really want some kind of populism in Iran, he simply replaced the old elites with kind of his. His version of the elites. So he empowered the security forces, appointed a lot of, you know, kind of former Guard and Basij commanders to his cabinet and just gave them really plum contracts and sort of opened the way for them to dominate the economy even more.
- [48:23]
Thomas Small
Now, in those chapters of the book, you introduce the reader to a guy, Mohammed Shariat Madhuri. Again, a name I kind of encountered. Didn't really know much about him after reading your book. Not a Huge fan of him. Tell the listeners a little bit about Mohamed Shariat Ma.
- [48:40]
Yeganeh Torbati
So Mohammed Sharia Madhuri is kind of the antagonist of one of our characters. And effectively he is someone who, I think through him we show that the corruption was not just limited to Ahmadinejad and to the Revolutionary Guards. It wasn't that you could just get rid of Ahmadinejad and things would all magically be better. He is someone who. He's basically a kind of senior sort of bureaucratic official throughout a bunch of different administrations. So he has deep connections to Khamenei and his office. He ran one of these major foundations that was kind of gathering wealth and economic power throughout the 90s. And he served as a minister in Khatami's government in the reformist era. He sort of is sidelined by Ahmadinejad, but then is a able to come back as a vice president under the Rouhani. And our character, this guy Amir Moqaddam, who's a bureaucrat, an ideologue, very much believes in the system. He kind of comes in for a rude awakening because he works for Shariat Madari and he believes I'm going to help the country. The nuclear deal has just been signed. It's going to be great. But he very quickly starts to see that the people around Shadiyad Madot and he himself are just as corrupt in his view as what he experienced under Ahmadinejad. So Sharia Madhuri brings in his son, you know, who's very young and really doesn't have that many skills to work in his office. And even more than that, he empowers his son in law to get access to kind of secret information and, you know, be able to benefit his businesses through his power. And we should say that, that Shariat Madhuri denies these claims and denies claims of corruption or that he kind of helped his son in law in untoward ways. But that is what our character witnesses. And it's sort of. He is disillusioned from the idea that it's just one faction in Iran. That's the problem. He comes to believe that the rot is much deeper than that. And I think what's interesting about his story is that in tandem, the rest of Iranian society also comes to realize that that. So one of the chants that becomes popular during this era when protests break out in 2017 is that reformists, conservatives, the story for all of you is now over. They're no longer chanting for the release of kind of the Green movement leaders from 2009 they're no longer voting for reformist candidates in big numbers. They've kind of given up on the entire system because they see that no matter what, matter who's in power, they don't benefit.
- [51:24]
Thomas Small
Well, given the. From one point of view, at least, failure of the original 1979 revolution to bring social justice, prosperity, regular justice, et cetera, to the Iranian people, periodically those people have returned to what was within their power to do protest, and the book makes that clear. In 1999, you mentioned there was. Were there was a wave of student protests In Iran in 2009, obviously, the Green movement protests. There was a lot of hope. Then that hope was dashed. But then, as you say, in 2017 and then really, year upon year, or at least every other year, there are protests that break out in Iran and they grow in ferocity, if you like. There were general strikes in 2018 and 2019. In 2020, there were protests and again, protests. After the terrible, tragic shooting down of that Ukrainian flight by the IRGC, there were more protests in 2021 and 2022, obviously, after the death of Mahsa Amini, more protests. They kept growing, and then they reached a new peak in January. So do you think, given that really it's the only tool at their disposal, that Iranians, who really want to live in a sane and just country, do you think they really will be able to employ the power of protest in the end to fundamentally transform the whole system, which is the problem?
- [52:52]
Yeganeh Torbati
I think if you look at the recent history, there's pessimism on that front. So, you know, ever since the invention of gunpowder, if someone's willing to use those tools against an unarmed person, they will win out. And so. So there are other methods of protest and of dissent that are not as dangerous as street protest. But for various reasons, the Iranian people have not been able to turn to those. And I think we should kind of just examine it. So internally, there's immense repression. And I think it's not wise for us outside the country to kind of judge the internal opposition because. Because there are human rights lawyers who simply are trying to enforce the elements of Iran's own constitution that ban torture, for instance, and they are imprisoned and persecuted for their work. Civil society organizations who want to do simple things like provide charity and help to poor people. In Iran, they are hounded out of existence. And the reason for that is that the government, government finds it very challenging or threatening to have independent organizations that are not fully in line with it or depend on it for largess operating in Iran. And so it goes after even seemingly benign groups and organizations. You see that in the book with what happens to the civil society movement in the 90s and the 2000s in Iran. So it's hard to kind of judge Iran's internal opposition for not being, being able to organize and strategize about different methods of dissent outside the country. There's been a real challenge for opponents of the regime to unite and to form an organization that could strategize about tactics, that could strategize about boycotts or strikes or things that are just a bit less dangerous than people going out into the streets and putting their bodies on the line against a government that is willing to, to use often military grade force is kind of what we saw in January. I think there will be future protests. I think it's really hard to look at Iran's recent history and believe that people are not going to dissent again, especially with the way the economy is right now. But while those demands register for the government and it recognizes in some way that people are unhappy, it hasn't shown itself willingness to be accountable and to change its policies and response. And it's shown itself very willing to repress them violently if they get to a certain point where it feels very threatened. I think just realistically the mechanism for change, I don't see that right now just in street protest.
- [55:42]
Thomas Small
And what about from within the religious clerical establishment? Ultimately, the Iranian revolution succeeded because from outside the country, a very charismatic cleric rallied anti Shah sentiment across Iran, was able to channel that sentiment into an effective revolutionary movement. Surely there must be within the very broad stream of Shia clerics, Shia theologians who, who have their finger on the pulse of the sorts of Iranians that even books like yours tend not to focus on, like, I don't know, peasants, I don't know what you want to call them, the rural hinterland. Iranians in their many millions, they must have their finger on the pulse of these people and know that they're also increasingly unhappy. Can't there be from within that dimension of Iranian culture a movement for genuine change, a repentance, almost saying the transformation to Shia Islam that we allowed the Ayatollah Khomeini to impose upon us, and which many Shia even at the time were saying, this is not in accordance with our tradition, this is modern, this is ideologically radical, this is wrong. Can't they just say we got it wrong? And couldn't they more forcefully lend their voices to change? That possibility never comes up for some reason.
- [57:12]
Yeganeh Torbati
I think there's a couple Reasons it, it, it doesn't come up and it seems unlikely to me. One Iranian society is different than it was in 1979. You know, there's been almost like a thermostatic reaction to having a Islamic government and it has pushed people towards secularism, towards other religions. You know, that's of course not the case all over the country and it's still a significantly Muslim country. But just when I talk to people, people, even in opinion polls carried out by the government, there was one conducted a few years ago that was then leaked to BBC Persian, found that a huge majority of people want the separation of mosque and state. And when asked, you know, are the people around you more or less religious than they were five years ago, large numbers of people said they were less religious. And this is a government conducted poll. So not, you know, kind of just people talking to a Western reporter. So that's one thing, and I think that lessens the influence of a clerical message, secondly is that the Islamic Republic itself knows the power of a critique based in Islam. And so it has moved very systematically to both co opt the clerical class and to repress clerical dissidents. Khamenei in particular has vastly changed Qom, the kind of city of religious learning in Iran from what it was in the 70s. You know, he has poured, he, when he was alive, he poured money into the clerical schooling system, provided many, many, many thousands of posts to clerics and exerted control over kind of their, what they were taught to the point where, you know, that establishment is really not an independent counterweight or independent entity that could kind of pressure the government. And then secondly, there's something called a special court of the clergy, which is completely unconstitutional, is not provided for at all in the constitution, but is specifically used to go after wayward clerics. And so even clerics who. It's been used, for instance, to shut down the newspapers that are owned by or kind of given the protection of leftist clerics or reformist clerics. It's been used to punish clerics who, you know, disagree with the religious justifications for certain decisions. So that we have seen clerical dissonance in Iran's modern history, you know, post revolution, but they have been, I think, recognizing that the kind of moral weight that they have, the state has gone after them. And so I, I think that method or path has not, not proven fruitful.
- [59:50]
Thomas Small
Well, you know, as a sort of final question, I'd like to return to the present, I mean like to today, following this war, following the surprising for many of us conclusion to the war, at least for now, God knows anything can happen. This is just an MOU that Donald Trump signed yesterday in France. It might result in a return to war before we know it. Who knows? But nonetheless, when you were finalizing your book for publication, Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader, was alive. The system that he had constructed, and he really was the second great architect of Iran after the Iran Iraq war. People kind of underplay this, but he was, in a way, the architect of modern Iran. That system has been shattered by war. I mean, the regime is in place, the new leadership are powerful, the people are crushed. But the architecture was, I think, powerfully shattered by all of this war. And therefore, what do you think now about Iran's leadership? You know, his son Mujtahene is the supreme leader, still hasn't made himself, you know, publicly visible in any way. And there seems to be this tight coterie of about nine figures that surround him, him. And that in some quite chaotic way, come to conclusions. So what is the political economy of Iran now? You know, now after six months or even a year of devastating war, it's
- [61:23]
Yeganeh Torbati
interesting that you say that. I sort of think we're seeing the natural result of the system that Khamenei put into place in terms of empowering the military forces economic, economically and politically, in terms of sidelining kind of dissenting, even loyal dissenting views on kind of what the future of the country should be. We're seeing all of that now. We have a system that is more dominated by the military and by the Revolutionary Guards than it was before. But really the continuation of a trend that we've seen for 30, 40 years in Iran. And we're seeing that there's, yes, there's technically a reformist president in power, but in terms of disagreement on some of the key issues, it's just not there at this moment. And it's very much, of course, also been stifled by the war and kind of the need to present a united front and kind of win this war in the immediate term and kind of punt the more difficult issues on the economy and kind of perhaps some form of political reform if that were to come down the line to much later. So that's kind of where we are now in terms of the political economy. I mean, so this memorandum that's been signed calls for the establishment of a $300 billion reconstruction fund to be carried out by outside companies, outside governments. And I think that's going to be very interesting to see how it plays out. I mean, I think if you read Our book, there's obviously the nuclear deal kind of never came to its full fruition because President Trump pulled out of it just three years after it was signed. But I think if you read our book, you realize that there was a moment where foreign investment was coming in and there were people who wanted to bring in more. But even before President Trump was elected, there was a backlash internally against the idea that foreigners are going to take advantage of our economy and get wealthy in any way from the Iranian system. And not just foreigners, even, even dual nationals, they were regarded by the security state and by the guards as complete outsiders who should have no share in what happens in Iran. There isn't this concept of a win win or creating kind of a bigger pie for everyone. There is very much a sense that if you get a peace as an outsider, that means that I, as a Revolutionary Guard or as kind of a loyalist to this regime, will lose out. And so I am very interested to see if this reconstruction fund takes place, if the sanctions are really lifted as the MoU calls for, not just the sanctions that were lifted under the previous nuclear deal, but all American sanctions. What is the reaction of the system to that kind of major change? Up to now, they have not been open to, to opening up Iran's economy in a real way. And I think that's something that's a story that we will have to follow in the months and years to come.
- [64:27]
Thomas Small
Just shortly after the war started in February, we had Ali Ansari on the show, and he did his best to explain some of those internal dynamics as well. And what you just said about there not being a win win mentality there echoes things he was telling us and things that he writes about that it's hard sometimes for outsiders to understand that it's a kind of winner take all mentality, a kind of mafia mentality at times.
- [64:51]
Yeganeh Torbati
Well, and you see this kind of in comments from President Trump at times where, you know, he's a businessman, right? And I think his, his perspective is like, well, of course they're going to want economic growth and like, look at all the things we can offer them and won't that be great? But that's not the perspective that they've had historically. Now I think it's also important for us to stay humble. A lot of things have happened this year that I never, ever thought would happen. And this is a strange world that we're living in and anything can happen. So I think I have this background. I've researched this book. I have my own expectations perhaps, but it's also important to really stay open minded to what might happen and what change might occur.
- [65:38]
Thomas Small
Well, dear listeners, Stolen Revolution, Betrayal and Hope in Modern Iran is well worth reading. Thank you very much Yegana for coming on the show. Yegana Torbati, you co authored the book with your co author Bozorgmar Sharafedin. I don't know as you pronounce it perfect and it really is splendid. Wonderful. I mean a bit sad I'm afraid, if it's subdued. Titled Betrayal and Hope in Modern Iran. At the moment I'm feeling like that word betrayal is jumping off the page at me far more than hope. But the people of goodwill and who know that Iran is a country of 90 million souls who ultimately deserve human dignity, prosperity and justice, you know, we can all just hope that things will get better there.
- [66:26]
Yeganeh Torbati
Thank you so much, Thomas. I really enjoyed this conversation. It was, it was really wonderful.
- [66:30]
Thomas Small
Thank you.
- [66:33]
Narrator/Announcer
That was Yegana Turbati. Her very moving and enlightening new book, Stolen Betrayal and Hope in Modern Iran is available from all good booksellers. And remember, for deeper dives into the ideas we explore on this show, including extended conversations and Q&As with my CO host, Eamon Dean. Check the show notes for details on how to join the conflicted community. I'm Thomas Small. Conflicted is a message Heard Production. Our executive producers are Jake Warren and Max Warren. This episode was produced and edited by Thomas Small.
- [67:21]
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