Islam in World Cultures: Comparative Perspectives - Islamic Books ...

9 4Islam i n World Cult u r e sreforms. They also rewrote the constitution to give the clerics even more powerthan before. Khomeini’s charisma gave the office of supreme leader morepower than was allocated in the constitution, so with his passing, the clergy sawthemselves losing authority to people in the democratically elected positions.In 1988, these clergy and Khomeini amended the constitution, giving the positionof supreme leader the de jure power that Khomeini held de facto. Theyabolished the position of prime minister, weakened the power of the presidentby giving presidential authority to the supreme leader, and lowered the religiousqualifications required for clergy to be eligible for the position ofsupreme leader.Upon Khomeini’s death, a low-level cleric, Hojatolislam Khamenei, who wasnot a marja-e taqlid, was made supreme leader, and he remains so today. Someo b s e rvers feel that he is a figurehead for the powerful conservative clergy onthe Guardian Council. In 1989, a neoliberal, pragmatic economic policy wasput in place by Khamenei and President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, then acleric. Due to the war and the economic sanctions enforced by the UnitedStates after the hostage crisis, the economy was extremely weak, with many Iraniansliving below the poverty line. In order to boost the economy, reformswere implemented to free the financial system from state control: Laws allowingprivate ownership and foreign investments were passed, the local currencywas floated on the free market, and people were encouraged to purchase commodities(Khajehpour 2001). Although the local “committees,” which prowledthe streets looking for people who broke the moral law, remained ubiquitous,some of the public restrictions, such as the prohibition of traditional music,were abolished. These reforms were not successful, and by the late 1990s, thediscrepancy between rich and poor was even greater than it had been before.The value of local currency continued to decline, and personal, cultural, andpolitical freedoms remained restricted (Yaghmaian 2002, 157).Since the 1980s, Iranians have lived through a devastating war, a falteringe c o n o m y, a repressive totalitarian regime, and the strictures of a state-sponsoredreligious extremism. A whole generation of disenfranchised youth—over 70 percent of the country is under thirty years old—have lived most oftheir lives under these conditions and are ready for moderating reforms, theend of the anti-West rhetoric, and greater political, religious, and social freedom(Yaghmaian 2002). These voices have voted into power moderate reformistclergy and lay parliamentarians. In 1997 and 2001, a moderate clericand former minister of culture who promoted the growth of the arts andw o m e n ’s rights, Muhammad Khatami, received a landslide victory in the presidentialelection, mainly because of his promised reforms in both domestic andforeign policy. Khatami promoted the notion of “dialogue of civilizations” as away to open the door to the alienated Western nations and also shrewdly arguedagainst the “death to America” and anti-West rhetoric of the conservative pow-