In 1980, Ahmadinejad married a devoutly religious mechanical engineering student he had met while in university, and the couple had three children, a daughter and two sons, the last of whom was born in 1987. But for the first half of the 1980s, at least, Ahmadinejad was not home much. Millions of Iranian men were being sent to the front to fight the war Saddam Hussein had launched in 1980. Khomeini was also sending hundreds of thousands of small children to the front to walk across minefields, blowing themselves to smithereens, “martyring” themselves in the cause of jihad and thus clearing a path for trained soldiers to follow and advance against the Iraqis.
Ahmadinejad had no choice but to fight in the war, and he may have believed that doing so was preparing the way for the revelation of the Hidden Imam, but his precise role during the war is murky. His official biography states that “during the war imposed on Iran, Dr. Ahmadinejad was actively present as a member of the volunteer forces (Basij) in different parts and divisions of the battlefronts particularly in the war engineering division until the end of the war.”284 That may be true in part, but Western intelligence sources, along with numerous media and academic accounts, say Ahmadinejad eventually became a senior commander in the Qods [Jerusalem] Force, a unit of the Revolutionary Guard Corps known for assassinations and terrorist attacks throughout Iran, the Middle East, and Europe.285
When Ahmadinejad completed his military service, he began to serve in various positions in provincial government throughout Iran, eventually becoming a close personal friend and disciple of an aging but very influential ultraradical Shia theologian by the name of Ayatollah Muhammad Taghi Mesbah-Yazdi.
Born in 1934, Mesbah-Yazdi has arguably become Iran’s leading clerical voice proclaiming the coming of the Mahdi and the urgency of preparing the way for his arrival and appearance on the earth. Nicknamed “Professor Crocodile” because of “a notorious cartoon that depicted him weeping false tears over the jailing of a reformist journalist,” he fiercely opposes democracy, opposes free speech, hates the U.S. and Israel, supports the use of suicide bombings against innocent civilians to advance an Islamic agenda, and supports the assassination of critics of Islam such as Salman Rushdie.286
“The prophets of God did not believe in pluralism,” Mesbah-Yazdi once said, voicing his hatred for representative government and Reformers. “They believed that only one idea was right. What is being termed as ‘Reform’ today is in fact corruption. What is being promoted in the name of Reforms and the path of the prophets is in fact in total conflict with the objectives of the prophets.”287 A fierce proponent of violent jihad as a means of preparing the way for the Mahdi’s arrival, Mesbah-Yazdi has argued that “we must wipe away the shameful stain whereby some people imagine that violence has no place in Islam. We have decided and are determined to argue and prove that violence is at the heart of Islam.”288
Just to give you a sense of how dangerous this guy is, one of Mesbah-Yazdi’s disciples, Mohsen Gharavian—a teacher of Shia theology in Qom—once issued a fatwa that declared “for the first time that the use of nuclear weapons may not constitute a problem, according to Sharia.” He then asserted that “when the entire world is armed with nuclear weapons, it is permissible to use these weapons as a countermeasure.”289
Did Ahmadinejad distance himself from his mentor before or after the issuing of the fatwa, or based on any of the other positions the professor has taken? To the contrary, Ahmadinejad has said publicly, “I regard Ayatollah Mesbah-Yazdi as one of the great leaders of Islam and Shi’ism. . . . I sincerely respect him as one of the leading scholars of Islam.”290
Not surprisingly, when he was elected mayor of Tehran in 2003, Ahmadinejad brought his dual passion for the Mahdi and for martyrdom to office. “Today our nation’s great duty and prophetic mission is to prepare for the formation of the universal rule of the Mahdi,” he insisted.291 He called for the people of Tehran to prepare to fulfill their “historical prophetic mission,” that of establishing a “global Islamic government.”292 He forced men and women to take separate elevators in Tehran, created separate parks for men and women, demanded that billboards of British soccer heartthrob David Beckham be taken down, sharply critized Western movies and music, passed a city ordinance exempting mosques and religious organizations from paying taxes and fees, visited Radical mosques frequently, and encouraged religious zealotry, eventually earning the nickname “the Iranian Taliban.”293
In a speech to religious activists, he said, “This is the time for a cultural war. We have to direct the minds of our youth towards the basic principles, methods, and values of the Revolution.”294 In another speech, he declared, “Any society that has the spirit of martyrdom will remain undefeatable. . . . If we want to resolve today’s social problems, we must return to the culture of the martyrs.”295 He even ordered an enormous billboard that depicted a female Palestinian suicide bomber holding a boy in one hand and a machine gun in the other erected along one of the business streets in Tehran. The caption read: “My children I love, but martyrdom I love more.”296
Along the way, he captured the imagination of the Ayatollah Khamenei, who decided Ahmadinejad was just the man to take the Revolution to the next level.
Campaigning for the Mahdi
From the beginning of his campaign for president, Ahmadinejad started his speeches by praying for the reemergence of the Twelfth Imam, calling for the reinvigoration of the Islamic Revolution, and insisting that Iran should oppose the Western powers of “global arrogance” and lead the way in establishing one world government under Sharia law.
Ahmadinejad insisted that Khomeini’s Revolution was not meant to have solved all of Iran’s social and economic problems. Only the Mahdi could solve mankind’s problems, he argued. Of course there was poverty. Of course there was unemployment. Of course there were political scandals and crime and prostitution and cultural pollution from the West corrupting their young people. Of course the Americans and the Zionists were running the world and enslaving oppressed peoples of the world, particularly the Muslims. These were not failures of the Ayatollah Khomeini—or, more importantly, the Ayatollah Khamenei—but rather evidence of the last days. Now was not the time to be weak, he said. Now was the time to finish the Revolution. Now was not the time to reach out to the West, as Rafsanjani suggested. Now was the time to take them on. History was on Iran’s side, he promised. The Americans and the Israelis would be judged in due time. So would all other apostates and infidels. Now, therefore, was the time to prepare the way for the Mahdi to come and make it all right. But who was going to do that? he asked. A near-apostate like Rafsanjani, or a true believer like him?
Piling on, Ahmadinejad played the class warfare card. Attacking Rafsanjani as an out-of-touch politician of wealth and privilege, Ahmadinejad dressed in plain trousers, an open shirt, and a simple, tan, zip-up jacket (which he would come to refer to as his signature “Ahmadinejad jacket”), vowing to care for the poor and needy because he understood their plight firsthand. Again and again he told his personal story of growing up with almost nothing, the son of a father who constantly had to change jobs and look for work but who always taught him from the Qur’an.
Ahmadinejad’s rhetoric was a potent and provocative cocktail of fundamentalist religion mixed with a dash of revolutionary Marxism, and it had a strong appeal with a significant minority of Iranians. But was it really enough to intoxicate 62 percent of the Iranian people into voting for him in June of 2005 when most of the country had barely heard of him two months earlier? It does not seem likely, particularly given that the vast majority of Iranians—some experts I have spoken to say 70 percent or more—have turned against Islam and are now quite secular in private, even if they are cautious about expressing their dissent in public. This is why neither Rafsanjani nor the political and media elites in Tehran (or outside the country for that matter) saw Ahmadinejad coming. They dismissed him as a zealot buffoon, not an international statesman, and little worried that he had a chance of overtaking the f
ront-runner.
But Ahmadinejad’s campaign strategy, in retrospect, was a very shrewd one. He was not trying to win over 62 percent of the country. He had an audience of one. The Supreme Leader had, after all, liked what he had seen and heard when Ahmadinejad was mayor. If Khamenei continued to like what he saw throughout the campaign, Ahmadinejad knew that the ayatollah could throw the levers of power in his favor. That was what he was betting on, and in the end, his bet paid off. The more strident Ahmadinejad became on the stump—explaining that the Revolution was not a failure but rather that the Mahdi was coming to solve everything—the more energized the Supreme Leader became. Khamenei heard the message and quietly chose the man.
When Khamenei then turned to the fundamentalist leaders in the military and paramilitary—men the ayatollah had been actively courting and winning over since 1989—and whispered that Ahmadinejad was “the one,” it was not a hard sell. Indeed, such Radicals, burrowed into key positions throughout the Iranian government and society, could read between the lines. They could see Ahmadinejad was speaking their language, making the case that Islam was the answer and jihad was the way. They were also beginning to believe the time was ripe for the Mahdi to return. And so they did whatever they had to do to put the ayatollah’s man over the top.
Governing for the Mahdi
No leader in the history of Iran had ever been so fully devoted to the notion that the Mahdi was coming soon and that it was his responsibility to prepare the Iranian people and the world for his increasingly imminent arrival. Such beliefs were actually a sharp departure from the teachings of the Ayatollah Khomeini, who certainly believed in the concept of the Mahdi and referred to him occasionally but never believed his reappearance on earth was close at hand. As we saw earlier, Khomeini believed it was his job—not the Mahdi’s—to establish a global Islamic government aggressively and proactively, not to wait for it to “come down from the sky.” But Ahmadinejad was about to change everything.
Upon the election of his protégé as president, Ayatollah Mesbah-Yazdi said Ahmadinejad had won because of “the special kindness of the Mahdi.”297 Ahmadinejad, in turn, increased government funding for his mentor’s messianic institute 1,000 percent to $3.5 million.298 He also began conferring with his mentor more regularly and appointed no fewer than four of Mesbah-Yazdi’s disciples to key cabinet positions, bringing others into the government to serve as advisors and in other critical posts, including in the Ministry of Intelligence and Security and the Ministry of the Interior.
From day one, Ahmadinejad made it clear he was the Mahdi’s man. In fact, he seemed to see himself as a John the Baptist figure—not the Islamic messiah himself but the one appointed to lay the groundwork and herald his coming. The question was whether Ahmadinejad intended to baptize the world by water or by fire.
Before his inauguration, Ahmadinejad told Khamenei that he was only a temporary steward of the presidency and would soon be handing over the reigns of power to the Mahdi. The Ayatollah asked, “What if he doesn’t come by then [the end of your term]?” Ahmadinejad was adamant. “I assure you; I really believe this. He will come soon.”299
At his first cabinet meeting, Ahmadinejad required every government minister to sign a statement pledging loyalty not to him but to the Mahdi.300 He told his senior advisors in July 2005 that his mission was “the establishment of a global Islamic government, with the assistance of the Mahdi.”301 He publicly announced that his mission as president was to establish a government and society that would be “a blueprint for the people of the world and thus [one that] ultimately serves as a platform for the reappearance of the Mahdi.”302 He visted the Jamkaran Mosque near Qom and prayed at one of the two wishing wells where Iranian Shias believe the Mahdi once appeared, then committed millions of dollars for improving the facilities around the well and additional sums to build new roads and rail lines that would bring people to the site from all over the country.303 He then declared the Mahdi’s birthday—September 9—a national holiday. This, in turn, triggered a wave of one million Iranian pilgrims who visited the well on that day in 2005, most of whom tossed small scraps of paper with their prayers scrawled on them into the well, hoping for the Mahdi to read and answer them.304
For the Western world, the first public hint of just how central Islamic eschatology would be to Ahmadinejad’s governance came during his first address to the United Nations General Assembly in New York in September of 2005. Ahmadinejad stunned the audience of world leaders and diplomats by ending his speech with this prayer: “O mighty Lord, I pray to you to hasten the emergence of your last repository, the Promised One, that perfect and pure human being, the One that will fill this world with justice and peace.”305
As the fall progressed, reports were beginning to surface in the Iranian media that Ahmadinejad was telling associates he was in direct communication with the Mahdi and was one of a select group of men specifically chosen by the Mahdi to be his representatives and helpers in the world prior to his return. Whether this communication was supposed to have come in the form of prayer, through some sort of spiritual vision or manifestation, or by an actual physical visitation was not clear. But some reports have indicated that Ahmadinejad has slipped away from official duties for several hours to have secret conversations with the Hidden Imam.306
What’s more, Ahmadinejad began speaking of a specific time frame, telling associates and even foreign ministers of Islamic countries that he believed the end of the world was just two or three years away and that the way to hasten the coming of the Mahdi was to annihilate two countries: Israel and the United States. According to the widely respected Iranian-born journalist Amir Taheri, Ahmadinejad started boasting “that the Imam gave him the presidency for a single task: provoking a ‘clash of civilizations’ in which the Muslim world, led by Iran, takes on the ‘infidel’ West, led by the United States, and defeats it.”307
Ahmadinejad later stunned a group of senior Islamic clerics by claiming that during his U.N. speech he was surrounded by a light until the end and felt the presence of Allah speaking through him. A colleague told him that when he began his speech, “I saw a celestial light come and surround you and protect you.” Ahmadinejad then told the clerics, “I felt it myself, too. Suddenly, the atmosphere changed. [All the people in the room] sat there and for the duration of the twenty-seven or twenty-eight minutes, they did not blink. I am not exaggerating. I looked up and I saw them. They were transfixed. It was as if a hand was holding them.”308
In October, Ahmadinejad laid his eschatological cards on the table when he gave a speech in Tehran in which he further clarified his objectives. He vowed to wipe Israel “off the map” and urged Muslims to imagine a world without the United States. “Is it possible for us to witness a world without America and Zionism?” he asked a gathering of leaders from Hamas and Islamic Jihad. “You had best know that this slogan and this goal are attainable, and surely can be achieved.” He urged Muslims all over the world—Shias and Sunnis alike—to prepare for the day when “our holy hatred expands” and “strikes like a wave.”309
Next Ahmadinejad began publicly denying the Holocaust even while calling for another. “Some European countries are insisting on saying that Hitler burned millions of oppressed Jews in crematoria,” he said at an Islamic conference in Mecca. “They insist so much on this issue that if someone proves the opposite, they convict him and throw him into prison. Although we do not accept this claim, let’s assume that it is true, and we ask the Europeans: Does the killing of oppressed Jews by Hitler [justify] their support for the regime that is occupying Jerusalem?”310 Later, in a nationally televised speech in Iran, Ahmadinejad said that the Zionists “have fabricated a legend under the name, ‘Massacre of the Jews.’”311
It was not just talk. Ahmadinejad was simultaneously making a number of aggressive moves to build up Iran’s military and accelerate its bid to go nuclear. That fall Iran purchased $1 billion worth of missiles from Russia, building on years of buying submarines a
nd other advanced weapons systems from Moscow.312 Iran also received a dozen cruise missiles with a three-thousand-kilometer range, each of which was capable of carrying nuclear warheads.313 Iran’s parliament voted to block international inspections of its nuclear facilities.314 And Ahmadinejad “placed the military firmly in control [over] his nation’s nuclear program, undercutting his government’s claim that the program is intended for civilian use,” according to a report in the Pakistani Daily Times.315
Ahmadinejad’s actions and remarks understandably ignited an international firestorm of protest. Curiously, numerous senior Iranian clerics and political leaders were outraged as well. Some opposed the president’s call for genocide on principle. Others, even though they privately agreed with the president, publicly opposed him for making remarks in a way that would risk Iran’s international reputation and trade status with the West—and, by extension, Iran’s economy. Former Iranian president Mohammad Khatami, for example, said Ahmadinejad and his fellow Radicals aspired “to imitate bin Laden” and argued that “they are competing with the Taliban in calling for violence and in carrying out extremist crimes that are counter to the [Islamic] religion.”316
Such pushback was a useful reminder that even in a Radical government there are many differences and crosscurrents—some policy-driven and some personal—operating in tandem. But in the end, the important thing to note is that none of the harsh criticism of Ahmadinejad, either external or internal, silenced his voice. The Ayatollah Khamenei could very well have reined in his hand-picked president, but he chose not to do so. To the contrary, he actually demanded that Ahmadinejad’s critics be quiet and show deference. “Khamenei,” noted one shrewd Mideast analyst, “took up a position next to Ahmadinejad, praising him and his functioning, requesting that none criticize him, and calling for the support of all the political forces in the government. Khamenei pointed out that Iran is now in a sensitive stage, and called for putting aside political rivalries—and indeed, Khatami’s comments were not subsequently reported in the Iranian press.”317
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