The Ideological Guidelines for Political Reform. The term ‘Ideology’ as an important instrument of domination of the IRI political culture, given its suspicious past, was subject - perhaps more than any of the other reforms - to the ideological suspicions of unconvinced conservative elite. From the very start it was obvious to moderate reformers that the new political process had to be encapsulated and integrated into a body of safe Islamic ideological guidelines, so that it could be harnessed to the uplifting pursuits of Islamic state (Alavitabar, 2003, p.51). The problem, however, was that in the early days at least moderate reformers and officials alike did not know exactly what political reform really was. Because President Khatami had actually used the concept of ‘rule of law’ for political reform, it did not mean that everything had been settled. True, there were those reformers and even Islamic scholars who wasted no time in saying that at the time it had been wrong to abandon the political pluralism of early post- revolutionary days and to stop debates about political modernisation as a crucial aspect of Islamic Republic (Shabestari, 1994, p.94). But, they had not explicitly added that the existing political modernisation in the transitional context, although of great merit, was clearly far better than the “Islamic” model. A huge gap, therefore, yawned between the safe territory of the principles of moderation and the concrete contours of a practical political modernisation. The extreme uncertainty about the precise nature of political modernisation was reflected in the first President Khatami discourse that grappled with the first concrete details of the political reform. From the early days of 1997 and onwards, he limited himself to offering an idea of possible areas with which debates of political modernisation could take place (Khatami, 1996, p.3).35 These reflected the political mood of the day as much as any serious attempt at establishing the more general principles of a stable modern Islamic state. Mainly these principles contained such topics as austerity to conflict and crisis, reconstruction of the regime’s legitimacy, changes in methods of decision-making and decision-building, reduction of conflicts with the outside world, and ideas in the past and present (Alavitabar, 2003, p.44). In 1997, a great number of reformer groups under the Second Khordad Front naturally referred to such popular topics as the development within and help of civil society, or the strength of Republicanism 35 ...
