The president of Iran is second only to the supreme leader in controlling administrative power and state resources. Cohorts of the supreme leader — including Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati, the chairman of the Council of Guardians of the Constitution — endorsed Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s candidacy. Yet on election day, popular sentiment suggested that democracy had finally trumped theocracy. The people of Iran appeared to be declaring through their ballots that religion had lost its absolute hold over politics. The most important popularly elected position in Iran was about to move beyond the mullahs’ control.

It was for this reason that, after a hard-fought electoral season followed by the largest turnout of voters in Iran’s history, the incumbent administration of Iran first chose to generate an electoral miracle — as the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei termed the official outcome — then failed to inquire thoroughly into widespread claims of election fraud, and finally unleashed paramilitary forces against the citizens. Iran’s theocratic hardliners’ desperate attempt to suppress freedom and sustain fanaticism has replaced any semblance of official accountability with brutality by day and terror by night.

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Voter turnout exceeded 100 percent in many locations, if the Iranian interior ministry’s ballot tabulations are valid. Protestors now jest that the mahdi or twelfth imam, for whom Ahmadinejad regularly places an empty chair at public events, must have resurrected the dead to rejoin the electorate temporarily. The Council of Guardians could have cast aside Ahmadinejad by using its own publicized conclusion, that at least 3 million votes cast in over 50 cities are invalid, to annul the election. But the council knew that if the contest were to be held again, its ally the current president would be unlikely to win, as he is linked to the savagery inflicted by the Pasdaran and Basij upon Iranians claiming their fundamental rights. So the Council of Guardians ratified the election results.

Iranians’ protests against the rigged presidential election direct public attention to a more central issue: Why are Iranians ruled by an ayatollah after ending the autocratic rule of a shah 30 years ago? Iran’s supreme leader, by hastily and inaccurately declaring the incumbent as reelected to presidential office, focused Iranian voters’ attention directly on this paradox. His words and actions revealed most clearly that theocratic governance clashes with the essential freedoms that underpin constitutional statehood. Iranians now are demanding public justification as to why a nation of more than 70 million people is governed by an individual who was not elected directly through universal franchise. The thugs let loose by the Iranian government aim to silence that challenge.

Retreating under the theocracy’s street assaults will deprive Iranians of their opportunity to resolve an even more basic issue as well: Can democracy really exist and ultimately thrive within a theocracy? After all, should religious tenets be the primary justification and legal basis for why only clergy and their subordinates may determine who is fit for public office, what is worn, and how social interactions occur? Many Iranians are answering those questions in ways that could return their faith and its clerics to being one component of Iranian society rather than the determiners of everything.

As events unfold inside Iran, and regardless of the outcome, neither the American people nor the Obama administration can afford to hesitate in supporting, enthusiastically and completely, the democratic aspirations of Iranians. We made that error from 1953 to 1979, alienating us from many Iranians. It is futile to hope that fundamentalist ayatollahs like Khamenei and xenophobic politicians like Ahmadinejad will cooperate with the United States on nuclear proliferation, international terrorism, Middle East peace, or human rights.

— Jamsheed K. Choksy is professor of Iranian studies and former director of the Middle Eastern Studies Program at Indiana University. He also is a member of the National Council on the Humanities at the National Endowment for the Humanities. The views expressed here are his own and do not necessarily represent the views of Indiana University, the NCH, the NEH, or the U.S. government.