by Hooman Majd
My father soon tired, even as a teenager, of what he saw as a backward rural setting (what he called, according to an older uncle, a shit-town because of the ubiquitous odor of sewage), a setting that also happened to be the home of a future president of Iran, Mohammad Khatami. My father tired of it despite the fact that his father had procured Ardakan’s first automobile, the make long forgotten now, but a handsome machine in which he posed for photographs with local townspeople, both envious and admiring. (Even by automobile, though, Ardakan was hours away on unpaved roads from the nearest city, a fact that didn’t stop the family chauffeur from establishing a side business, unbeknownst to my grandfather, in the transport of coffins securely strapped to the running boards.)
To his delight, my father, Nasser, and his older brother Mahmoud found an escape from their rural setting when they were sent to an exclusive boarding school in Tehran, Alborz (the Eton or Choate of Iran), and my father quickly and consciously lost his provincial accent, one that he has refused to employ since, even in the presence of President Khatami and other family, who unashamedly, in the age of a republic and a supposedly classless society, lapse into the instantly recognizable dialect in the company of fellow Ardakanis. The modernization begun under Reza Shah attracted the likes of my father, people who would later form the backbone of an Iranian middle class in a society that had been semi-feudal for as long as anyone could remember, but my father and my uncle’s sojourn at school in Tehran, where modernization had its greatest (and perhaps at that time its only) impact, was short-lived. Expelled from Alborz for punching the headmaster in the chin in response to the fellow boxing my uncle’s ears for some long-forgotten transgression, both boys were sent to Yazd, the larger ancient city thirty miles from Ardakan where their family now lived, and they were forced to complete their high school education away from the sophistication of Tehran.
Curiously, Yazd is at once one of the most religious and religiously tolerant cities in Iran. It has produced both the most liberal and the most hard-line clerics, military men, and politicians of the Islamic Republic era, as well as being home to large and vibrant Zoroastrian (and in my father’s time Jewish) communities whose children played with, and remained friends with, their Muslim counterparts throughout their lives. It wasn’t long, though, before my father was able to sit for the concours, the countrywide university entrance exam, and gain a place at Tehran University, coincidentally where my mother, Mansoureh, also was enrolled, and where her father, an Ayatollah and theologian, taught philosophy.
By that time, Reza Shah had been forced off the Peacock throne and into exile by the Allies of World War II—he had been a German and even Nazi sympathizer, partly because of his revulsion for the British and Russians, who had dominated his country for so many years, and partly because he admired German efficiency and technological progress—and the new young king, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, looked to be vulnerable to pressure from pro-democracy Iranians. The democratic movement in Iran was not a new phenomenon; it had merely been suppressed and silenced during the reign of the Shah’s father, who had also silenced clerical opposition to his secular ways. In 1906, in what is known as the constitutional revolution, pro-democracy forces had successfully forced the then Qajar king, Mozzafar al-Din Shah, to sign a decree establishing a Majles, or Parliament, the first of its kind in the region (and against the wishes of Russia, and to some degree Great Britain), whereby the absolute powers of the monarchy were curtailed and the Iranian people were given the vote. The Shah died shortly thereafter though, and his successor, Mohammad Ali Shah, a fan of Russia but no fan of democracy, attacked the Majles in 1908 with Cossack troops and suspended the nascent constitution. The revolution did not end there, though, and in a campaign of resistance against the Shah, the constitutionalists were successful in re-establishing the Majles and the rule of law in July 1909, forcing the abdication of Mohammad Ali Shah in favor of his thirteen-year-old son, Ahmad Mirza.
Curiously and ironically, two Americans played significant roles in the constitutional revolution and its aftermath: Howard Baskerville and William Morgan Shuster. Baskerville was a young Princeton graduate who went to Persia in 1907 as a teacher and missionary at the American School in Tabriz, a northern city that was a hotbed of revolutionary activity. Against the American consul’s advice, he joined the constitutionalist revolutionary forces fighting the Shah’s troops who had laid siege to the city, and he was killed, at the age of twenty-four, leading his students, who he had trained, into battle against the imperial army on April 19, 1909. He is buried in Tabriz, and Iranians, including the Islamic revolutionaries, recognize him as a martyr—in some ways he is the John Reed of Iran, his name forever associated with Iran’s fight against the tyranny of dictatorship. (John Reed, made famous by Warren Beatty in his movie Reds, a portrayal of the young American fighting in the Russian Revolution, is the only American buried in Red Square.)
The other American, William Morgan Shuster, was a civil servant, lawyer, and financial expert hired by the government of Iran on the advice of U.S. President William Howard Taft—again, against the wishes of the imperial powers—to become Persia’s treasurer-general in the immediate aftermath of the success of the constitutional revolution, a time when Persia was not only impotent but also essentially bankrupt owing to heavy Qajar indebtedness to both Britain and Russia. At that time the United States, powerful as she already was, had not, in the minds of much of the world, set her eyes on colonizing or exploiting less strong nations, at least not as the European powers had for more than two centuries. Immensely popular among Iranian nationalists who witnessed his dedication to building an independent nation, Shuster’s tenure lasted less than a year. Against the wishes of the Majles, which had hired him, he was forced out of Iran by Russia, which opposed, along with Britain, his plans to bring financial autonomy to Persia. He wrote a book on his return to the United States, The Strangling of Persia, which is as damning of foreign interference in Iran’s affairs as it is full of praise for Iran’s quest for democracy. That was in 1912, more than a decade before my father was born. Shuster wholly believed in the Iranian constitution and wholeheartedly supported Iranian nationalists; in describing their vision of a “Mohammedan democracy” as having been thwarted by imperialist powers, he was also perhaps the first person to coin the phrase, linking Islam and democracy.
MY FATHER was among the first group of Iranians from the outlying provinces to attend the university in Tehran—the college was founded in 1934, after all—but he was part of a trend to educate Iranians in a post-feudal society that continued up until the revolution of 1979, after which there was a veritable explosion in higher education, one of the priorities of the new Islamic regime. Well versed in the history of democracy in Iran, particularly the constitution of 1906, these college students, as well as high school students everywhere, saw an opportunity for a return to the Iranian democracy that the constitutionalists had envisioned at the turn of the century, with the appointment of Mohammad Mossadeq as prime minister in 1951—he had been an elected member of Parliament who was then voted to the premiership by the body—and with the presence of a weak Shah, the promise that Iran might finally become a constitutional democracy seemed ready to be fulfilled. But it was not to be. The history of the Mossadeq years, his battles with the Shah over authority, with Great Britain over oil nationalization, and finally with the United States over suspicions that he was a communist sympathizer or would allow Iran to fall into the Soviet sphere—a battle he was unaware of until his overthrow in a CIA plot—has been told often enough. Although the consequence of his overthrow and a return to the absolute monarchy is usually thought of as the genesis of anti-Americanism among Iranians, which is true to some extent, that doesn’t tell the whole story.
For many Iranians, particularly those who had reaped the benefits of modernization and institutionalized higher education, the “Mossy” affair (as the British press, in their own peculiarly endearing way, was fond of calling Mossadeq) was one more, p
erhaps even final, nail in the coffin of Iranian self-determination and political freedom. This time, the strangler of Persia was Shuster’s very own United States, but resentment of her never reached the level Iranians reserve for the British. Most Iranians who had once rejoiced in the return to constitutional democracy simply bowed their heads and moved on, no longer politically active, fatalistic about their ability to effect change in a country that seemed to always revert to dictatorship after a brief flirtation with democratic rule. My father, who had been doing his compulsory military service as a cavalry officer during the Mossadeq years and who had been an ardent supporter of him and Iranian constitutionality, not only decided that he could no longer be in opposition to the Shah, but also actually joined the government, sitting for the Foreign Service exam the first year it was offered to the public at large. He was one of a handful of candidates from a non-elite class accepted into the Foreign Ministry, a ministry that up until then had been closed to anyone from outside the very top elite families that dominated Iranian political life—families that did not include villagers, no matter their wealth and standing in the provinces. At the same time, his best friend from the army who had been a member of the now-outlawed communist Tudeh party was sent to prison on a two-year sentence for anti-Shah political activity, but as a measure of how Iranians had yet to adjust to what soon became an autocracy intolerant of dissent, my father visited his dissenter friend, Dr. Bazargan, in jail every Friday and signed his own name in the guest book. And next to his name, for employer, he wrote, “Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Tehran,” not fearful of any consequence. Bazargan himself gave up political activism on his release and has since devoted himself to medicine, building a successful (and apolitical) medical practice in his native Mashhad and remaining friends until this day with his former army buddy who once worked for his jailer.
EVERY NOW and then Mossadeq’s name comes up in conversations about Iran, whether among Iranians or among Americans. Curiously, the Islamic regime is ambivalent, if not actually hostile, to Mossadeq and what he represented, both because of the embarrassment of many mullahs’ general collusion with the Shah (with few exceptions), and because ol’ Mossy was in fact a strict 1906 constitutionalist (and monarchist), came from a prominent family, and was a secularist (albeit still a Muslim) who had allowed the communists to gain influence under his premiership. The Islamic regime is not, however, shy about invoking his name and legacy when it might be convenient. In 2005, only a few weeks after Ahmadinejad’s surprise victory in his first presidential campaign, the new Iranian president traveled to New York to attend the UN General Assembly, in all probability his first trip outside of Iran in his forty-plus years of life (rumors that he spent time in Lebanon in the 1980s with the Revolutionary Guards cannot be confirmed, nor has he confirmed or denied them).
Ahmadinejad, a villager from a deeply religious family that had moved to the capital when he was still a boy, had drawn conclusions from the Mossadeq years (not having lived through them) that differed from those of his compatriots, and his antipathy to the monarchy under which he was about to be elevated from working to middle class, owing to his education, manifested itself in a devotion to Islam and Islamic principles. He was not part of the active resistance to the Shah (and unlike some of the clerics in power today had not served time in prison) until the revolution gathered steam, and when that happened, he, along with hundreds of thousands of fellow university students, many once villagers like himself, joined in the protests and demonstrations that quickly brought down the monarchy.
Ahmadinejad was not as confident a leader then as he is now, nor was he on sure ground as he made his first trip to the United States. Among his entourage was Ali Larijani, who had just been appointed as secretary of the Supreme National Security Council and chief nuclear negotiator to replace Hassan Rowhani, a mid-level cleric who was close to the defeated candidate Ayatollah Rafsanjani, and a middle-class Iranian who had changed his name from the somewhat aristocratic Fereidoun to the properly Islamic Rowhani, meaning “of faith.” Larijani, actually a challenger to Ahmadinejad in the presidential election, had impeccable qualifications for the job: not only was he a former Revolutionary Guard but his father had been an Ayatollah; he was highly educated, including having earned a doctorate in Western philosophy; he was fiercely loyal to the Islamic system but was also urbane—and Ahmadinejad deferred to him on every occasion when the issue of Iran’s nuclear program arose. The president had not yet denied the Holocaust nor had he uttered harsh words about Israel, so apart from curiosity about him as a person and what kind of leader he might be, the pressing issue of the day was Larijani’s mandate, and it was he who patiently explained to the American media and to scholars who met with the Iranian entourage what Iran intended to do with its long-running but up until then slowly building nuclear energy program.
After Larijani and Ahmadinejad arrived in New York, Mohammad Javad Zarif, Iran’s ambassador to the UN at the time, who arranged extracurricular activities for both men during their trip, threw a big party for Iranians living in the United States, or at least Iranians not openly hostile to the Islamic regime. During the Iranian delegation’s last night on American soil, all three appeared before a crowd of some five hundred ostensibly friendly Iranian-Americans in the grand ballroom of the Hilton Hotel on Sixth Avenue in Manhattan. Ahmadinejad, still unaccustomed to the spotlight a president is perpetually under, gave a short speech, sticking to platitudes concerning the greatness of Iran and Iranians and his own humility, and left the podium to Larijani to explain Iran’s nuclear program to an audience that perhaps had divided loyalties. Dr. Larijani, in a much better tailored suit than his president’s standard issue, began by saying that Iran would never, ever give up its right to peaceful nuclear energy. But he then compared Iran’s sovereignty over its nuclear fuel cycle, one that the administration of George W. Bush had declared unacceptable, to Iran’s immensely popular nationalization of its oil industry under Mossadeq—a clever analogy that drew thunderous applause from the crowd. Dr. Larijani also recounted that he had told Jack Straw, the British foreign secretary, that Iranians still viewed Britain—which had decried its loss of control over Persia’s oil under Mossadeq as a “threat to the security of the world”—with deep suspicion because of the one-sided oil concession of the last century, and had warned him that Britain should not repeat the same mistake when it came to nuclear power. But when the applause died down, a young woman in full black hijab—someone I had wondered about when I saw her outside, since she seemed to be the only guest who interpreted the hijab so literally, in New York City at that—stood up at her table and shouted, “Agha’ye Larijani!” She was visibly shaking. “How dare you,” she continued, her voice strong but with a slight quiver of rage, “talk about Mossadeq when there isn’t even a street in Tehran named after him.” She stood waiting for his reply, as a few in the crowd applauded. Larijani seemed unperturbed but took a moment to gather his thoughts. “Mossadeq’s place,” he said gently, “is in every Iranian’s heart”—rather than on a street sign, presumably an honor reserved for everyone from Imam Khomeini to martyrs of the Iran-Iraq War to Anwar Sadat’s assassin. The woman, still shaking, turned and stormed out of the room, unescorted.
ALI LARIJANI may be a fierce nationalist, a loyal soldier of the Islamic regime, and even an apologist for many of its excesses, but he is a different political animal from Ahmadinejad, the president he once served. Although perhaps obliged to generally downplay Mossadeq’s significance in the development of Iranian democracy, he nonetheless sounded sincere in his laudatory remarks that night in New York. Like many of those in the Iranian leadership, Larijani comes from a clerical family, once its own class that sat happily beside the growing middle class of the Pahlavi era, far removed from the poor and working class that made up the majority of Iran’s population in the earlier years of the twentieth century. Unlike Ahmadinejad and some of his closest allies, he would have had the benefits of higher education, or the rigorous th
eological training his brother Sadeq, the head of the judiciary, went through, under any government or system, and his upward mobility would not have been so hard as Ahmadinejad’s, which was a struggle against the tide of class consciousness under the monarchy and the enduring Persian class system. Larijani certainly would not have been elevated to the ranks of the elite as he has been under the Islamic system, but he and other villagers, like the landowning pistachio farmer Rafsanjani and dozens of others in the leadership of the Islamic Republic, have a sense of history and of the Iranian struggles for self-rule that an entire new breed of leaders like Ahmadinejad appear not to have, nor even particularly care about. Larijani and the like joined the revolution of 1979 because they were staunch believers in the struggle for democratic rule, in their belief that Islam offered a more just political system than what Iran had experienced under successive dynasties, and in a nationalistic fervor whereby sentiment for a powerful and independent Iran was a leading impetus for change.
Although their fervor led to excesses and outright abuses of human rights in the early days of the revolution (and even well into its maturity), leaders like Larijani who believed themselves to be inheritors of causes such as those of the constitutionalists of 1906, or of Mossadeq in the early 1950s, are markedly different from the clique that took the election of 2009. The members of this clique, with no connections to the clergy, except for their devotion to the most radical, least educated, most autocratic, and least respected of the Ayatollahs of Shia Islam, and hardly a connection to the revolutionaries and dissident thinkers of the Shah’s days, rose to prominence in recent years. Their disdain for the old guard of the revolution, in their view a privileged and corrupt lot not unlike the Shah’s men, is palpable and forms their political philosophy. That disdain does not go unreciprocated.