The evolution of a revolution in Iran

“Today, censorship and cutting telecommunication lines cannot hide the truth,” Montazeri wrote.

Senior clerics in the holy city of Qom, many of whom never favored an Islamic republic for fear its flaws would taint Islam, also have not embraced the election outcome. Even the brother of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Hadi Khamenei, himself a cleric and former member of parliament, urged that an impartial committee investigate the election results and provide a full public accounting.As the coalition expands, the stakes are widening well beyond who ends up as president.

The two faces of the Islamic Republic — Ali Khamenei and former Prime Minister Mir-Hossein Mousavi — are now pitted against each other. The religious ideologue against the lay technocrat. The two men embody the central debate that increasingly has obsessed Tehran over the last three decades: Is the Islamic Republic first and foremost Islamic or a republic? In other words, does God's law or man's law have the last word?

The debate was once beyond public reach. No longer. Unless Khamenei can satisfy the protesters, all the brutal tools of 150,000 Revolutionary Guards and 300,000 paramilitary Basij will be unable to sustain his legitimacy.

At the same time, however, hundreds of thousands of Iranians have taken to the streets not to reject the current constitution but rather to demand that the individual rights it guarantees are enforced.

Past international crises are being invoked to forecast Iran's fate: Mousavi supporters fear Iran's security forces will re-enact China's crackdown in Tiananmen Square. Regime supporters compare Mousavi to former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, fearing the undoing of their own revolution if he prevails.

But whatever happens in Iran will be distinctly Iranian in style and outcome. The movement already has invoked Shiite symbolism. Mourning traditionally is marked in commemorations on the third, seventh and 40th days after a death, a cycle also used to galvanize greater public outrage when the shah's forces killed protesters in 1978. The commemorations often led to new clashes and more deaths - and then volatile new cycles of mourning.

It was no accident that Mousavi called for the mass demonstration Thursday to mourn the dead killed Monday. The cycle is only beginning. The 40th-day commemorations traditionally are most important.

The stunning protests in this fourth phase of Iran's century-long political journey will change the country further. The only question is how long it will take.

Wright, author of “Dreams and Shadows: The Future of the Middle East,” has been covering Iran since 1973; she is a scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington.

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