The Revolution Devours Its Own

Laura Secor surprised me. I had expected to read yet another journalist’s account of an Iran where “reformists,” though bruised and battered, remain hopeful and allied to “moderate” president Hassan Rouhani. An Iran in which Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif actually means what he writes on the op-ed page of the New York Times and where Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, whom Messrs. Rouhani and Zarif have loyally served, values economics more than ideology.

“Children of Paradise” isn’t that book. Mr. Zarif isn’t mentioned. Mr. Rouhani, when he first appears in 1999 in support of crushing student demonstrations at Tehran University, is accurately described as a “conservative cleric with deep ties to the security apparatus.” Ms. Secor pays little attention to Iran since Mr. Rouhani became president in 2013: This mullah hasn’t shown signs that he’s changed since he was the secretary of the Supreme National Security Council.

What Ms. Secor gives us instead is a deeply moving, intimate collection of personal stories that show the travails of the Islamic leftists who helped to oust the shah in 1979 and have since lost nearly everything. Ms. Secor, who has written on Iran for the New York Times Magazine and the New Yorker, doesn’t appear to know much Persian and started seriously reporting on Iran only a decade ago. Yet she has managed to give, through extensive interviews with Iranians in the country and in exile, a first-rate, highly readable intellectual history of those who loved the Islamic Revolution, but have been cruelly betrayed by it.

Applying Western political terminology to Iran is always a bit misleading, since “left” and “right”—and, even more so, terms like “moderate,” “reformist,” “conservative” and “pragmatist”—connote sentiments and ethics that don’t translate well. By the 1970s, Marxism had seeped into everything Persian, including the most traditional religious schools. Even anti-Marxist clerics and intellectuals often deployed, unknowingly, Marxist ideas and language against their abundant Marxist enemies. But the “Islamic left” works well enough.

The Islamic revolution was the product of crisscrossing currents and antagonistic fellow-travellers: classical Westernized liberals, social democrats, Marxists, Islamo-Marxists and theocrats all marched together against the shah. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the father of the revolution who established Iran’s theocracy, allowed a very limited democracy to develop under the mullahs. This tension between the democracy that many of the revolutionaries desired and the theocracy that they got has roiled Iranian society ever since.

The radical spirit of the Iranian revolution resurfaces at times. The election in 1997 of the reformist cleric Mohammad Khatami, whose presidency was rapidly crippled by his enemies and his own timidity, was one occasion. The failed pro-democracy Green Movement of 2009 was another eruption of the revolution’s democratic birthright. These journalists, bloggers, poets, clerics and politicians have formed the most captivating intellectual movement in Iran since the revolution, and Ms. Secor captures well the tortuous evolution of these complicated individuals as they have distanced themselves from the Islamic regime, often reluctantly. Her discussion of the philosopher Abdolkarim Soroush, once a loyal minion of Khomeini and now an exiled supporter of democracy, is the best available in English. She is similarly good on Akbar Ganji, the former Revolutionary Guard propagandist turned muck-racking journalist, who is also now exiled in the West.

Ms. Secor is at her very best when she relays the bravery and despair of dissidents, in particular the agony of women who have thrown themselves into the fight. Her portrait of Asieh Amini, a journalist who tried to publicize the epidemic of child rape and sexual abuse over the past decade, stays with the reader. So does her description of Aida Saadat, who was the first to expose the rape and murder in Kahrizak prison of young men who had supported the Green Movement. Fearing for her life after a beating by regime thugs, Ms. Saadat fled Iran in the winter of 2009, via Kurdish smugglers into Turkey. She had to leave her 11-year-old son behind.

Suffering under the mullahs is not limited to political dissidents. “Under the Islamic Republic’s draconian moral code,” Ms. Secor writes, “nearly every Iranian was guilty of something that could carry a prison sentence: extramarital sex, drinking, even shaking hands with members of the opposite sex. What had begun as a religious imperative had become little more than a system of universal blackmail” by the time the Green Movement took to the streets. The book’s testimonial to Iranian suffering is a much needed corrective to the current tendency among many Western observers to play down the brutality of the regime for fear of damaging better—and now more lucrative—relations between Iran and the West.

Internal Iranian dissent continues, and Ms. Secor is certainly right that the regime cannot stamp it out—though it will try. As she wisely notes, the regime keeps dividing against itself: The seed of democracy, however stage-managed by the clergy, keeps pushing against theocracy. The possibility of another unforeseen explosion of anger remains omnipresent. Yet the longtime aspiration of the Islamic leftists—that gradual, peaceful change could come from within the system—is now a pipe dream.

Ms. Secor relates the painful reflections of Saeed Hajjarian, a founding father of the Islamic Republic’s dark intelligence ministry who became a dogged political reformer. “Hajjarian acknowledged that his tactic of building pressure from below while bargaining at the top had failed,” she writes. Yet “he refused to believe, even after all he’d seen and personally suffered, that negotiation was impossible.” Mr. Hajjarian adds: “If our presupposition about their rationality is wrong, we have then established the . . . [reformist] movement on a misunderstanding.” The Islamic leftists, as Laura Secor powerfully shows, have paid dearly for their misunderstandings.

Ms. Secor last visited Iran in 2012. We can hope that she isn’t denied a visa in the future for her truth-telling. If she is, “Children of Paradise” was worth the price.

Mr. Gerecht is a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.