by Robin Wright
Over his well-tailored robes, Khatami wears diaphanous cloaks of fine mohair in summer and thick wool in winter, in shades of black or rich brown. Iranians love nicknames, and Khatami was been variously dubbed the “cleric in the chocolate robe,” for the color of his favored cloak, and the “Armani mullah.”
The size of a turban can also be telling. Many of the traditional or conservative clerics wear bulky headpieces wrapped from cloth sixty feet long. Khatami wears the trendier tighter turban crafted from cloth as short as twelve feet.
Shoes are the other political indicator. Conservative clerics wear slippers, in part for fear the leather does not come from an animal killed according to Islamic ritual. Modern mullahs wear shoes; Khatami’s always match his outer cloak. His vice president, Mohammed Abtahi, once explained that his own father, also a cleric, had recently approved of Abtahi’s shoes, but only as long as he wore socks so that the leather did not touch his skin.13
In the same way, wearing a wristwatch is a telltale sign of a modern cleric. Conservatives carry pocket watches, if they have watches at all. Khatami wore a designer watch.
Politically, Khatami’s style differed too.
When he came to office in 1997, a country with almost seventy million people had only 400 elected officials, all concentrated in the capital. His government moved quickly to hold long-delayed local elections. In 1999, Iranians elected almost 200,000 people to run towns, villages, and hamlets throughout the country. Power, hogged for two decades by the clerics, was finally being dispersed.
I first met Khatami in 1998 when he made his international debut at the opening session of the United Nations General Assembly. The Iranian mission in New York organized another informal press breakfast. In contrast to Khamenei, Khatami was engaging, inquisitive, and expansive on a range of subjects. His one wish, he told us, was to be able to get to know New York by walking its streets.
Over bagels, mushroom omelets, and hash browns, he explained why he had come to New York to call for a dialogue of civilizations.
“At the end of the twentieth century…what is the legacy of humanity? In his famous book The Republic, Plato says, ‘What is justice?’” Khatami opined to a group of journalists who had all come to talk about issues a bit more pressing than ancient Greek philosophy.
“The Koran says that the aim of the prophethood was defense of justice and equality. One can interpret the same meaning from the Bible and the Torah. “But twenty-five hundred years after Plato, two thousand years after Jesus, and fourteen hundred years after Mohammed, we still ask: What is meant by justice? The very fact that humanity has not reached a united definition means we are still in a period of trial and error. We need to have a dialogue among civilizations about the issue of justice. We must make efforts to have greater equality and justice for all humanity.”
Khatami’s idea resonated at the United Nations. The world body designated 2001, by ironic coincidence a year that sparked the deepest tensions between the Islamic and Western worlds, the year for a dialogue of cultures. It followed up in 2005 by creating the Alliance of Civilizations, cochaired by the prime ministers of Spain and Turkey, to keep a dialogue going. The panel included Muslims, Jews, Catholics, Protestants, Hindus, and others, as well as Khatami.
At home, Khatami took his own steps to ease Iran’s tensions with the outside world. He ended a standoff with the West over a death sentence imposed by Imam Khomeini on Salman Rushdie for his book The Satanic Verses. The Imam had issued the controversial fatwa, inconveniently, just before his death in 1989; it was difficult for his less powerful successors to lift. It soured Iran’s foreign relations and hurt trade for almost a decade.
“We should think of the Salman Rushdie issue as completely finished,” Khatami told us during his 1998 United Nations visit.
In an interview with CNN the same year, he also said that the time had come to bring down the “wall of mistrust” between the United States and Iran. He called for cultural exchanges to begin the process. The diplomatic overture was daring, given suspicion and skepticism among hard-liners.
But Khatami had some unusual supporters, reflecting Iran’s often unpredictable political alliances.
Among the most ardent reformers were the former students who had seized the American embassy in 1979. A generation later, many had moved on to major political positions. I tracked some of them down in Tehran to talk about Khatami’s outreach both at home and abroad.
Ibrahim Asgharzadeh was one of three engineering students who masterminded the embassy seizure. Asgharzadeh had been the students’ primary spokesman throughout the hostage crisis, which lasted 444 days, introduced the yellow ribbon as a national symbol, cost eight American lives in a failed rescue attempt, ostracized one of the world’s largest oil producers, redefined both diplomacy and terrorism, and ended the Carter presidency. He coined the term “den of spies” to describe the American embassy. The little nook at the corner of the old embassy compound was converted into the Den of Spies Bookshop, which sold copies of secret U.S. documents pieced together from shredders after the takeover.
I met Asgharzadeh in 1999 at the home of husband-and-wife professors we both knew. He was forty-four by then; he had changed in many ways in the two decades since I’d covered the hostage crisis. I had also been on the tarmac of the Algiers airport when the fifty-two hostages arrived from Tehran on their first stop to freedom in 1981. Asgharzadeh’s hair back then had been a dark, messy mane; twenty years later, his silver locks were fashionably barbered.
Over dinner, Asgharzadeh recounted the elaborate planning before the embassy seizure, after students from several campuses decided to protest Washington’s decision to take in the ailing shah. Iran for decades had been one of two pillars of American foreign policy in the Middle East; Israel had been the other. Even after the revolution, the United States maintained relations, bought Iran’s oil, and continued to sell it weapons. The embassy seizure abruptly turned Iran from ally into enemy.
“The critical phase was getting three pieces of information,” Asgharzadeh recalled. “The most important was an inside plan of the embassy. Two student apartments were across the street, so we used different rooms to draw maps. We also had to find out about the staff, so we kept a log on the personnel. Students were posted around the clock to watch how many there were, and who went in and out. We wanted all the Americans inside when we took it.
“Finally, we had to know the security situation inside. We had to do this all ourselves, and we were just students,” he continued. “But, in the end, we had really good information on the Marine guards.”
The original intent, Asghazadeh explained, was to hold the embassy for three to five days. It was supposed to be a repeat of the first brief seizure of the U.S. Embassy on Valentine’s Day nine months earlier, just two weeks after the Imam returned from exile. The first takeover had been resolved peacefully, and diplomacy resumed after the students left.
The second time, however, the Imam stunned the students by endorsing the embassy takeover. Holding the Americans hostage suddenly became a government cause.
“The masses demanded that we continue, something we didn’t anticipate,” Asgharzadeh told me. “It became a very complicated situation, one that was out of our hands.”
But two decades later, Asgharzadeh was much more interested in discussing other issues. When Iran held its first local elections earlier that year, he had run—and won one of fifteen seats on Tehran city council.
“Traffic, pollution, sewage—ninety-five percent of my time is now spent trying to solve the issues of ordinary people’s lives,” he told me.
“I’ve learned that people’s worldview is changed more by dealing with the small problems of life.
“And, unfortunately,” he added, “ideology can’t solve them.”
In the two intervening decades, all three ringleaders and many of the student captors had become, by Iranian standards, reformers. The radicalism of their youth—demanding accountability from the Uni
ted States for embracing the deposed shah in 1979 and orchestrating, with Britain, the 1953 coup in Iran—had been channeled into demanding accountability from their own troubled government.
The conversion was striking. I often timed my trips to Iran to coincide with the embassy takeover anniversaries. The commemorations are a good barometer of Iranian public sentiment about the United States—and their own government. The year before, in 1998, I had heard Asgharzadeh speak to students for the first time since the takeover. His message had changed.
“Our dealings with the hostages were not directed against the American people, and not even against the hostages themselves,” he told the crowd, standing on a specially raised dais put up every year in front of the old embassy wall.
Asgharzadeh was repeatedly interrupted by a group of young vigilantes shouting Marg bar Amrika, or “Death to America”—the same slogan he had shouted twenty years earlier.
But Asgharzadeh yelled back through a loudspeaker, “Today, we invite all the hostages to return to Iran, as our guests. Regarding relations with America, we must look to the future and not to the past. We have a new language for the new world. We defend human rights. And we’ll try to make Islam such that it won’t contradict democracy.”
In 2000, I tracked down another of the original ringleaders. Mohsen Mirdamadi is a short man with a trim salt-and-pepper beard who had shed student garb for a pinstripe suit. Once willing to take the law in his own hands, Mirdamadi ran for parliament in 2000 on the reformist platform of restoring the rule of law. He had just been named head of parliament’s foreign relations committee.
“We’ve always wanted a country that had independence, freedoms, and was an Islamic republic, though our emphasis originally was on winning independence from foreign influence and creating an Islamic state,” he told me when we met at the Islamic Participation Party’s headquarters, just two blocks from the old American embassy compound.
“But today our emphasis is on freedoms,” he said. “And now we want to be more of a republic. Our tactics have shifted too. Before, we carried out a revolution. Today we’re trying evolution.”
Iran’s disparate reform movement pulled together those early radicals as well as lawyers and human-rights activists, young clerics as well as Westernized elites, students and private entrepreneurs, women and academics. They channeled their frustration with almost two decades of autocratic and abusive rule by rallying around Khatami.
As the reform movement picked up momentum, Khatami was nicknamed Ayatollah Gorbachev, after the Russian leader whose policies introduced change at home and outreach abroad.
Unlike Soroush and Ganji, however, Khatami was still an insider. He still believed in the Islamic republic. He just wanted to reverse the emphasis. In Iran’s constitution, the mix of Islamic law and Western republican law, borrowed from France and Belgium, had always left an unanswered question: Is Iran first a modern republic that factors in Islamic values? Or is it foremost an Islamic state that selectively borrows from democratic ideals, but has no obligation to the principles of republicanism? Which does the state protect first: individual rights or Islam?
Khatami came to office having thought a lot about the answer. During his five years in political exile at the national library, he had published two books. One was a collection of essays about recent Shiite clerics engaged in ijtihad, reinterpreting Islam; the second was an exploration of Western political thought—Plato and Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas and St. Augustine, Machiavelli and Hobbes. It was entitled From the World of the City to the City of the World. In it, Khatami explored the conflict in Europe on the eve of the Christian Reformation. The Church, then endowed with absolute power from God while the faithful were trapped in feudalism, was pitted against new Christian reformers, sages of reason, and advocates of individual rights.14
The same struggle was playing out within contemporary Iran 400 years later.
Khatami was particularly fascinated with seventeen-century British philosopher John Locke, the son of Puritans who wanted to separate church and state—largely to protect religion. Locke did not want faith to be discredited by incompetent rule. The same issue resonated again in contemporary debate among Iran’s clergy. Many fretted over the impact of the Islamic republic’s shortcomings on Shiites’ faith in their faith.
Khatami’s speeches often echoed Locke. “We must use all our strength to avoid doing anything against the Islamic Sharia—God forbid that day. But we must also do our best so that no one would accuse Islam of not being able to resolve economic, social, political, and security problems,” he said in his second inaugural address, after his reelection in 2001 by an even bigger margin.15
Khatami prodded political discourse toward the idea of Iran, first and foremost, as a modern republic with Islamic values—or what he called a “republic of virtue.” Officials elected by the people—rather than the religious institutions run by the clerical elite—should have primary power in running the state, he argued.
“Iranian culture is religious,” he told me at another meeting a few years later. “I have been pressing for a reading of religion that would allow us to achieve independence, freedom, and progress. If we can interpret religion in a way that conforms with democracy, both democracy and religion will benefit. If we see freedom and religion as opposing each other, both will suffer.”
Unlike the conservative clerics, Khatami was not afraid of what the Imam called “Westoxification.”
“Without a doubt, we will succeed in moving forward only if we have the capacity to reap the benefit of positive, scientific, and social accomplishments of Western civilization,” he said at an Islamic summit the year he took office.
Two aspects of democracy scare even reformers: One is secularism, for fear it will rob society of its core values. The other is liberalism, for fear it will introduce pornography and other perceived social ills. Khatami did not embrace or accept either. But he understood something of the outside world.
“Liberalism is the world’s religion,” Khatami said in 2006. “We do not have the right to insult liberalism.” He saw the Islamic republic fitting into the world as it is—albeit on terms comfortable to Tehran.
In the end, however, Khatami’s vision of reform proved illusive. He failed to achieve most of what he set out to do. His fellow clerics made it impossible.
During his two terms, the Islamic judiciary was a constant challenge. Its courts closed down more than 100 independent publications that had opened since he took office and encouraged a more independent press. Several journalists bravely turned around and launched new ones with the same staff, same slant, and same look, but a different name. When the Islamic judiciary could not stop them, it began arresting editors and reporters.
In 1999, the banning of the popular reformist paper Salam—edited by Abbas Abdi, another former hostage taker—triggered the largest protest since the revolution. Students poured out by the thousands in Tehran to demonstrate. Paramilitary vigilantes soon stormed campuses to quash the revolt. Several students were beaten. Police then arrested more than 1,400 people. Many spent years in prison. Two of the jailed students died in mysterious circumstances in 2006.
Parliament also moved against Khatami by impeaching the most popular reformer in his cabinet, Abdollah Nouri. In Iran, government permits are required for public gatherings, and Nouri had granted them for student demonstrations and other meetings, effectively endorsing greater freedom of speech and assembly. The judiciary tried and imprisoned Nouri on charges of insulting Islamic values, even though he was a cleric.
Tehran’s charismatic mayor Gholem Hossein Karbaschi, one of Khatami’s campaign advisers and an innovator who had beautified war-ravaged Tehran, was also tried and imprisoned on charges of corruption.
The tension became deadly. Khatami’s rivals within Iranian intelligence were widely tied to the serial murders of dissident writers. They were also suspected of the motorcycle drive-by shooting of the chief architect of Khatami’s reform agenda, Saeed Haj
jarian, who had been elected to Tehran’s city council in the first local elections in 1997, along with Asgharzadeh. He was left paralyzed.
As Khatami failed to fight back, his constituency began to turn on him. In an open letter, Iran’s students chastised their president. “Are you awake or asleep?” they demanded. “Why do you remain silent? What is the price of staying in power?”
Soroush sent his own letter to the president.
“The peaceful and democratic uprising of the Iranian people against religious dictatorship in 1997 was a sweet experience,” he wrote, referring to Khatami’s election. “But your failure to keep the vote and your wasting of opportunities put an end to it and disappointed the nation.”16
And Montazeri, in the speech that led the Islamic courts to put him under house arrest for eight years, scolded the president. “He should have gone to the Leader and said, ‘You have your position of respect. Twenty-two million voted for me. They have expectations of me, and if you want to interfere with my ministers…I can not work. Hence, I will thank the people and resign.’”
The small Council of Guardians dealt Khatami the fatal blows. The twelve-man board quashed twin pieces of legislation submitted to parliament that would have strengthened the president’s powers and effectively curbed the Guardians’ clout. For the 2004 elections, the council then disqualified more than 2,000 candidates for parliament, including eighty-seven reform incumbents. Among them was Khatami’s younger brother, a popular physician who was the deputy speaker of parliament and married to the Imam’s granddaughter. The former hostage takers, Asgharzadeh and Mirdamadi, were also disqualified. So was the sister of rebel cleric Mohsen Kadivar, who had been one of the ranking female members of parliament.