Few personages make Iran’s conservative elites more uneasy than Mohammad Khatami, Mir Hossein Mousavi, and Mehdi Karroubi. Throughout the Islamic Republic’s history, they have vied for power with the politically predominant right-wing clerical faction. Though they hail from the same revolutionary milieu as Ayatollah Khamenei, each has challenged the latter’s reactionary attitude toward popular opinion. They have represented popular opinions about the importance of free and fair voting to the overall functioning of the system, without repudiating the system itself. In the summer of 2009, the streets of Tehran erupted in protests against a presidential election perceived by many as fraudulent. Both Karroubi and Mousavi had run as reformist candidates and blamed their loss on the trickery of the incumbent Ahmadinejad administration. Spurred on by the public outrage, they broadened their confrontation with Ahmadinejad into a melee over the overall running of the state, dragging into the fight Ayatollah Khamenei, an arch-nemesis of left-wing clerics. Their clash has centered on two contrasting interpretations of the Islamic Revolution. Both sides support their agenda by using a favorable narrative of this revolution. These competing narratives demonstrate that the Islamic Revolution has never had one single meaning. Its memory can be invoked to justify armed resistance against the US one moment while in the next, to strengthen democracy. Mousavi and other reformists frame their movement as an outgrowth of the Islamic Revolution that pursues the same values.

In broad terms, two factors explain their persistent influence within an otherwise reactionary establishment: first, their positive historical relationship to Ayatollah Khomeini, and second, their masterful understanding of generational shifts, specifically of Iranian youth whose life experience encompasses neither the revolution nor the war. Their personal backstory, tied as it is to the consolidation of clerical power post-revolution, lends them an authentic voice within the government and without. Although Karroubi and Mousavi are under house arrest and all but barred from politics, they cannot easily be explained away as agents of the “Great Satan” and “Zionist Entity.” Furthermore, their progressive interpretation of the revolution is a potent alternative to the staid and recycled narrative propagated by right-wing elites. By embellishing the spirit of that revolution and interpolating the progressive values of the contemporary era, they have legitimized their past and also channeled opposition discourse into a platform of internal reform.

To understand their history as revolutionaries and historical antagonism with right-wing factions of the same camp, I have briefly profiled Karroubi and Mousavi below. Feel free to skip it if you are already familiar with the two. The information is sourced from biographical studies by Muhammad Sahimi, head of PBS Frontline’s Tehran Bureau.

Mehdi Karroubi studied theology in Qom’s seminaries and was a student of a primary proponent of the revolution, Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri. During Khomeini’s period of exile, Karroubi disseminated Khomeini’s dissident letters and advocated his revolutionary teachings, actions for which he was imprisoned numerous times by the Shah. Karroubi has served as a member of parliament throughout the republic’s history and taken a generally center-left position on questions of civil rights. Sahimi attributed Karroubi with one major moral lapse: the decision to back Khomeini’s persecution of erstwhile ally turned outspoken liberal critic, Grand Ayatollah Montazeri. Montazeri famously spoke out against the state’s mass execution of political prisoners, in the order of a few thousand, in the summer of 1988. In a public letter designed to silence Montazeri, Karroubi and two other Khomeinist figures railed against what they depicted as open counterrevolution and sedition. This disagreement ended up costing Montazeri his political career–the mantle of the velayat-e faqih which he was slated to assume. At around the same time, nonetheless, Karroubi played a role in fostering liberal politics through founding the left-leaning Association of Combatant Clerics. Karroubi subsequently became a fixture of liberal politics in Iran and eventually formed a new political party, National Trust, and newspaper by the same name (etemad-e melli). It was on this ticket that he ran for the 2009 presidential election. During his campaign, he stressed the need to amend the Constitution to reinforce its democratic and progressive values.

Hossein Mir Mousavi surpassed Karroubi in the significance of his role to the Islamic Republic’s foundational narrative. Mousavi served as director of Khomeini’s de facto political party the Islamic Republican Party (IRP) 1979 to 1981 and as editor-in-chief of the party’s mouthpiece, Jomhouri-e Eslami. In 1981, he was put-forward as a second-choice candidate for the premiership by then-President Ali Khamenei. He served in this post until its abolition in 1989. Khamenei consistently opposed Mousavi openly as well as covertly, by disparaging his policies and making contentious decisions behind his back, including revolutionary provocations against the Saudis. The persistent back-stabbing so aggrieved him that he voluntarily sent in a letter of resignation, to which Khomeini–his chief supporter and reason for overcoming Khamenei’s objections–did not assent. Khomeini’s balancing of the left with the right has crystallized his legacy over the years into something sacred for both factions. This ambiguity has prevented either side from monopolizing the narrative of the revolution, leaving it open to constant reinterpretation, as if a palimpsest for the dominant faction to etch their side of the story. After the tumultuous end to his premiership and death of his patron, Mousavi quietly stayed out of politics for well over the next decade. He reentered the political stage, however, for the 2009 elections and stepped onstage to thunderous applaud from the reformist quarters. He won widespread endorsements and, in the wake of widely perceived election fraud, became the face of the Green Movement.

Mousavi and these other figures tell a compelling and dynamic story of the Islamic Revolution. It begins with a proud and enlightening moment for the people in 1979, a changed consciousness unshackled from the tyranny of the Shah and the West. Certain values central to the revolution, such as plurality and popular sovereignty, were not well respected by the government which followed it. What they fail to mention is their complicity in actively disregarding those same values in order to ensure the clerics’ ascendance over the new regime.

This revisionism aside, these same figures, now unequivocally reformist in stature, support the further progress toward the values of freedom and human rights embedded in the Islamic Revolution but left out of governance by the victors. These retrospectively declared true values of the 1979 revolution inform the goals of the Green Movement: “We are not up against our holy political system and its legal structure, it protects our freedom, independence and the Islamic Revolution. We are up against lies and deviations and we wish to reform it [the system] by returning to the pure principles of the Islamic Revolution.”

Perhaps Mousavi is correct in stating that the 1979 revolution never reached its conclusions, and perhaps it never will. The lofty values of justice and equality that all post-enlightenment revolutions have in one shape or form aspired to attain have proven out-of-reach for terrestrial governments. Revolutionaries of course recognize aspects of those platonic values and strive to reflect them in society. Inevitably, the policies and programs they create cannot achieve the perfect representation of the values they stand for. The limits of human reason simply prevent revolutions from ever producing the utopias they are supposed to. If the values can never be fully comprehended and guaranteed by policy, then so too can the revolution never end. A revolutionary government might achieve certain goals, but it cannot live up to the optimism that first captivated the masses. As one set of goals is accomplished, an entirely new set arises out of the inadequacy of the first, and the abstract values that initially compelled people to action are still by and large absent from reality. Mousavi based his leadership of the Green Movement on this idea of an unfinished revolution:

“30 years ago a revolution under the banner of Islam was victorious; a revolution to revive freedom and human rights; a revolution for honesty. During this period, particularly when our enlightened Imam was still living, the nation invested heavily in terms of human lives, wealth, and credibility, in order to consolidate this achievement, which brought us further achievements. The light that we had never experienced before filled our society, and people gained new lives that, although very difficult, were sweet and rewarding. What our people had gained were human rights and freedom, and uncorrupted lives. I am certain that those who experienced this life will never settle for anything less.”

Revolution, in other words, is a doctrine of progressive change. To affirm the links between the present struggle with the past one, Mousavi emphasized the Islamic quality of both. He even obliquely attacked the manipulation of religion by the right-wing, claiming that the Islamic nature of the 1979 revolution pervaded the protest movement:

“The same generation that is accused of distancing itself from the religious values arrived at the chants of ‘Allah-o Akbar,’ and relied on ‘victory belongs to God and the defeat [of the enemy] is close,’ Hossein and Khomeini, in order to prove that whenever this pure generation bears fruits, the fruits are similar [to those of 1979]. They learned this from none other than God. How unfair are those who, due to the pity interest that they have, are forced to claim that this miracle of the Islamic Revolution is a creature of the foreigners and represents a ‘velvet revolution.'”

The conversation about the 1979 revolution is alive and well and in fact central to the political future of the country. The divergent interpretations of the true meaning of this revolution obliges one to ask, which version of the revolution happened and for what purpose? Or was the revolution essentially an umbrella of distinct yet interrelated opposition movements? The rift between the reformist and right-wing clerics shows that even within a distinct sub-movement, there is no consensus or unity of purpose. At that point, with so little coherence, is it not absurd to ask why a revolution happened at all? The revolution is almost less an historical event than it is a vehicle for discussing current politics. Opposition discourse depends upon one interpretation of the revolution, while opposition to the opposition depends on a different notion of the same thing. The dispute over history is unlikely to ever be resolved, but its importance to the present is a fact of political life.