MIDDLE EAST JOURNAL M VOLUME 67, NO. 3, SUMMER 2013 Iran’s Basij: Membership in a Militant Islamist Organization Afshon Ostovar The Basij militia is a central component of Iran’s clerical regime and a sup- porter of hard-line conservative interests. It is a security organization that also engages in social and political activism. This study focuses on the group’s rank- and-file members and looks at the organization’s mechanisms for recruitment, participation, and training. Based in part on interviews with current and former Basij members, the article concludes with general observations about the orga- nization and its internal practices. The Basij militia is an omnipresent feature of life in many Iranian cities. The orga- nization is one of the regime’s largest social enterprises, encompassing somewhere between 1.5 to 15 million members, and has steadily evolved over the last two decades into a pillar of Iran’s security establishment. 1 There are seventeen separate Basij subor- ganizations (e.g., for university students, factory workers, government workers, engi- neers, etc.) and three types of Basij memberships: regular, active, and special. Regular members comprise the vast majority of the organization and are the lowest ranking, having undergone a minimal amount of training. Active members comprise a middle level and receive complete basic ideological coursework, and some military training. Special members are full-time Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) soldiers who have been assigned to Basij units. 2 Although the Basij has steadily gained the attention of scholars, relatively little has been written about those who join the organization. 3 To that end, this article explores Afshon Ostovar is a principal Middle East analyst at the Center for Strategic Studies at CNA, a nonprofit research organization, and an adjunct professor at Johns Hopkins University. His research focuses on poli- tics and armed forces in Iran and, more broadly, on the nexus of Islamism, political activism, and security issues in the Middle East. He wishes to thank William Rosenau, Michael Connell, Eric Thompson, and an anonymous reviewer for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this article. 1. An accurate figure of Basij membership is impossible to gather given available information. While Iranian officials often claim the Basij has more than 15 million members, a more realistic estimate is that the organization’s total membership is closer to 4 million, including 3 million regular members, 800,000 active members, and 200,000 special members. See Saied Golkar, “Paramilitariza- tion of the Economy: The Case of Iran’s Basij Militia,” Armed Forces & Society, Vol. 38, No. 4 (2012), pp. 625–648, http://afs.sagepub.com/content/early/2012/04/05/0095327X12437687. 2. Golkar, “Paramilitarization of the Economy.” 3. Although the Basij figures prominently in many works on contemporary Iranian politics, only a handful of scholarly works have focused on the organization specifically. Saeid Golkar, for example, has published a few strong articles on the subject including the previously cited “Paramilitarization of the Economy;” as well as, “Politics of Piety: The Basij and Moral Control of Iranian Society,” Journal of the Middle East and Africa, Vol. 2, No. 2 (2011), pp. 207–219; and, “The Ideological-Political Train- ing of Iran’s Basij,” Middle East Brief (Crown Center for Middle East Studies, Brandeis University), No. 44 (Spring 2010). See also, David Thurfjell, Living Shi’ism: Instances of Ritualisation among Islamist Men in Contemporary Iran. (Leiden: Brill, 2006). Journalists and filmmakers have also made important contributions on the issue, for instance, Farnaz Fassihi, “Inside the Iranian Crackdown,” [Continued on next page]