Iran - Reform or chaos?

The hybrid of democratic and theocratic institutions of revolutionary Iran is over twenty years old, and is now being challenged. An elected president with popular legitimacy but no control of the: means of coercion is endeav ouring to open up and liberalise, but is being opposed by means of theocrat ic vetoes, newspaper closures and street violence. First, the author looks at the diarchy of President Khatami and Supreme Lea der Khamenei, their legitimacies, their much less than minimalist much grea ter than strategies, and their common interest in restraining their more ex treme supporters from provoking chaos or civil war. Khamenei is not in fact the villain of the piece but plays a very ambivalent role. Further, the author considers the elements of much less than civil society much greater than resulting from deep structural change in Iran: demography and education, the role of women and the free press. He finds it unlikely that these genies can ever be put back in their bottles. Finally, he consid ers the journalistic comparison of Khatami with Gorbachev, and finds that a lthough both are/were attempting limited reform of a faltering system of wh ich they were themselves a part, no Iranian Yeltsin has yet emerged. It wou ld be a grievous error to imagine that - even if the extreme elements of Is lamism are dismantled Islam as a religion will go the way of Communism as a creed. The contours of the reformers' much less than religious-democratic state much greater than have yet to be discerned.