The Ayatollahs' Democracy: An Iranian Challenge

by Hooman Majd

  OH YEAH? KARDEEM VA SHOD!

  Persians consider themselves to be the superior race among all nations. The exception in their eyes are the Medians who worship the same deity. This as a Greek I don’t believe, since I know of Spartans who can be of equal gallantry to Persians.

  —HERODOTUS, 454 BC

  When I was in college in the United States in the 1970s, before the Iranian Revolution of 1979, I befriended a group of Iranian students, a fast-growing contingent that reflected the expanding middle class’s ability to send its children off to faraway America to further an education that was impossible in Iran, given the small number of university places available at the time. Being the son of a diplomat who served in many countries from the time of my birth, I had hardly lived in Iran, and yet I was fascinated by these countrymen of mine, who seemed at once both exotic and very familiar to me. We had no shared childhood experiences, but I found their penchant for late-night gambling, disco jaunts on the weekend, and sometimes incongruously intense political discussions to be a refreshing diversion from the interactions with my often earnest American friends and fellow students, for whom the just-ended Vietnam War and resignation of Richard Nixon in the wake of Watergate meant some lost opportunities for youthful idealism. Nightly poker sessions among the affluent Iranians and sons of the powerful—a governor here, a general or police chief there—resulted in either supplemental income or deep debt. They also brought me face-to-face with my first SAVAK agent.

  The Shah’s secret police was ostensibly an intelligence organization trained by the CIA, but it was notorious for operating torture chambers in Iranian prisons and safe houses, an accusation the Shah repeatedly denied to foreign journalists, including Mike Wallace, who pressed him on the issue during a 60 Minutes interview. SAVAK had always had a presence on any campus, in Iran or outside, where anti-government students might be encouraged to express their opinions. No one could be one hundred percent sure of who the SAVAK man (or woman) was on campus, whether he or she was merely a paid informant (and there were many of those) or an actual officer on assignment, but clues were bountiful. This particular person, I’ll call him Masoud, was much older than the rest of us, he was clearly out of his league when it came to study (it was unclear that he was even pursuing a degree), his South Tehran street lingo and accent betrayed his underprivileged origins, and he was always more interested in where we stood in the political spectrum than in our college life, girls, or getting high—three priorities for most of us, though not necessarily in that order. He insinuated himself into every gathering at the cafeteria or other public place, and everyone whispered that he had to be savaki. I couldn’t find anyone who actually liked him, but he somehow was able to join various Iranian cliques, and no one bothered, or dared, to tell him he wasn’t welcome. He often asked me, casually while dealing cards, for example, whether I had recently been to any Confederation meetings, the “Confederation” being the largest organization of Iranian students abroad opposed to the ruling monarch. I knew he appeared at the meetings, because other friends had told me that he stood in the back of the room and was quiet, observing who showed up and what was being said. I wouldn’t dream of attending a Confederation meeting, for I was conscious of what that could mean to my father, an Iranian ambassador at the time. I did, however, have friends of all stripes: Confederation members, some of whom were picked up by SAVAK when they returned home for summer vacation, and even tortured; taghoutis (those in the ruling monarchical establishment); and a slew of friends who were sympathetic to one opposition party or another, from Mujahedin to Fadayeen to straight Islamist.

  One day Masoud warned me, in a creepy way that was his habit, to be careful of the people I associated with, for he had seen me in the company of students known for their dissident views (and for their dress, which consisted exclusively of U.S. Army surplus jackets shorn of their insignia paired with old jeans, a style they all took back to Tehran in 1979). I ignored him, for although I was confident by now that he had created a little file on me, it was unlikely he could pin anything on me in terms of my subversive views, which didn’t really exist except in relation to American politics. I did imagine, however, him noting in my file that despite the Shah’s preference for Republican administrations, the son of an Iranian ambassador was in fact an ardent and vocal supporter of the Democrat Jimmy Carter, on a campus a few blocks away from the White House no less.

  BEFORE THE Islamic Revolution, few could imagine that the Shah would be overthrown one day—Iran had been a monarchy for over two thousand years, after all—and I would often tell my friends that I couldn’t understand what they hoped to accomplish by agitating, abroad no less, for a change in a system that was unchangeable. “Nemeesheh,” I used to say—“It can’t be done.” The United States supported the Shah unequivocally, and all one had to do was look around. “This country, with its size, its people, its power, and the fact that they easily stopped one democratic movement in its tracks in 1953 [the United States had not yet admitted CIA involvement, but all Iranians knew it]: this is not a country that will allow Iran to change,” I would argue. “They like it just the way it is, with maybe a sprinkle of democracy thrown in because of Jimmy Carter’s own preferences and his distaste for human rights abuses.” I did not persuade my friends, most of whom grew more and more confident as the years went by and as we witnessed the revolution take hold from afar.

  Masoud remained his nosy and annoying self almost to the end, but on the day of the revolution’s success and the end of the monarchy, in February 1979, he disappeared for good. I often wondered what happened to him in the few months following Ayatollah Khomeini’s triumph, whether he had returned to Iran and managed to ingratiate himself with Iran’s new leaders (who needed spies, after all), many of them from similar unprivileged backgrounds, or whether he had returned and been jailed, or whether he had simply disappeared somewhere in America to reinvent himself. I didn’t give him much thought in the years that ensued, as Iran went through purges of the ancien régime, reconstituted an intelligence service, and slowly began to move toward Islamic democracy. I didn’t think about him, or about nemeesheh, not until the spring of 2009.

  IN THAT SPRING, a month and a half before the fateful presidential election of 2009, I was in Yazd, my father’s hometown and home to many of my relatives. It was a Friday, the Muslim day of rest, and I was looking forward to attending Friday prayers and hearing a sermon by Yazd’s Imam Jomeh, or Friday prayer leader, an appointee of the Supreme Leader but the only one among Iran’s Imams Jomeh who is not politically aligned to the conservatives. Although I have little interest in sermons, Iran’s Friday prayers always include a political sermon that follows the religious one, and in the run-up to the election I was curious how Mohammad Sadoughi, the reformist Imam Jomeh, would square the speaking points from Ayatollah Khamenei with his own opinions. There was no question that he would be supporting the reform candidate in the upcoming election, Mir Hossein Mousavi (rather than Mehdi Karroubi, also a reformist but not in the Khatami political camp), while the Supreme Leader had already made clear his preference for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. But as the Imams Jomeh and particularly the Supreme Leader were not supposed to show a preference for a candidate, and were certainly not supposed to encourage their flock to vote one way or another, political sermons in a campaign season promised to subtly show the divergent views on display in Iran, a country often considered intolerant of independent thought.

  Sadoughi is married to Maryam Khatami, the former president’s sister, and although he is not quite as liberal as she or her siblings, he is nonetheless a firm supporter of the reform movement started by Mohammad Khatami on his election in 1997. The morning of his sermon, his son, also Mohammad, called me at my hotel, suggesting we have tea together after which he would arrange to have me escorted to the mosque. When I met him in the lobby, he was, as is the Persian custom, bearing gifts for me, a visitor to his hometown, gifts of famous Yazdi sweets and pistachios.

  “Let
’s go into the tearoom,” I said, after thanking him profusely and insisting that I was an unworthy recipient of his family’s largesse. I handed him a copy of my last book, one in which I had thanked him and his parents, in return. He seemed a bit more nervous than the last time I saw him, his eyes darting this way and that, and I wondered what was causing him concern. In his left hand he casually held a walkie-talkie, an item strictly forbidden in Iran except to the military, the Revolutionary Guards, and the security services—as his father’s chief of staff he was never without it, and he used it to communicate with other staff, bodyguards, and Revolutionary Guardsmen who were assigned to protect the Imam Jomeh as part of their duties as guardians of the Islamic Revolution. We found an empty space in the vast tearoom, a traditional setup of two Persian-carpeted benches facing each other, and took our seats. He glanced around him, his eyes fixed on a group of four men who followed us into the room and sat down two tables away.

  “Let’s move to another table,” he said, standing up. I followed suit, and we moved a few feet farther from the men. “They’re following us,” he whispered to me across a low coffee table, his eyes steadily watching the men over my shoulder.

  “Really?” I asked. I slowly, and as casually as I could, turned my head and scanned the entire room, finally resting my eyes on the men, all with the same week-old stubble I was sporting but dressed identically in gray suits and white open-collared shirts. They didn’t look back at me. I was excited, even proud for a moment, contemplating the fact that I was now an important enough person, at least in Iran, to warrant a government tail. “I should have guessed,” I said, “that I might be under surveillance. I’m sorry.”

  “No, no,” said Mohammad, “it’s not you they’re watching—it’s me!” Embarrassed by my lack of required Persian diffidence and a little shocked, I turned to look at them again.

  “Are you sure? Whatever for?” I said, when I turned back to face him. I don’t think I hid my disappointment in not being the target of Iran’s security forces and I may have even had a pout on my lips. But I suddenly thought of Masoud, the SAVAK man from my college days. Masoud had spied, we were sure, even on trusted families in the ruling establishment, some of whom he hung out with—no one, as far as the intelligence services or the Shah himself, thought that anyone was above reproach. Could it be that the Islamic Republic was no different in that regard?

  “That’s what Iran has come to,” said Mohammad with a shrug.

  “Are you sure?” I asked. I had not, in my years of traveling back and forth to Iran, experienced either surveillance (at least I didn’t think I had) or the feeling that Iran was a police state, and I still didn’t feel that way.

  “I think so,” he said. “They want to turn the country into a one-party state. The party of God.” What Mohammad was saying made very little sense to me at the time. How could his family be under surveillance? The Sadoughis are protected by the Revolutionary Guards, after all—the most powerful and influential institution in the country, an institution that has its own intelligence division, which competes with and is often at odds with the government’s own Ministry of Intelligence (known as MOIS). Furthermore, Mohammad was chief of staff of the representative of the Supreme Leader, the valih-e-faqih after all, the very raison d’être for the Islamic Republic and therefore the Guards themselves. Perhaps, I thought, it was the MOIS that wanted to keep tabs on the Sadoughis, just in case their reformist minds veered past reform and into revolution, but I also secretly wondered if Mohammad was just, as Persian ta’arouf would demand, trying to put my mind at ease and in fact they were monitoring my movements.

  In the lead-up to what promised to be a hard-fought and even ugly presidential election, one that pitted extreme conservative thought embodied by Ahmadinejad against the liberal theology and progressive politics embodied by Mir Hossein Mousavi and his mentor, Mohammad Khatami, anything was possible. But the MOIS wasn’t like the SAVAK, with spies on every street and in every living room, and Iran wasn’t a one-party state anymore. Mohammad Sadoughi and myself, however, were relatives of Khatami (me by family marriage), we both hailed from Ardakan, and we both were known for expressing our reformist views, so perhaps, I thought, it was just standard practice to keep tabs on anyone with any political leanings, especially at election time.

  When I escorted Mohammad to the front door of the hotel after our tea, I noticed the four men didn’t follow, and an hour later, as I was lingering in the lobby waiting for the car to take me to the Molla Esmail Mosque, stepping outside now and then and walking back in, I searched, as nonchalantly as I could, for any signs of a tail but couldn’t identify any suspicious persons. Well, in a nation where staring is not considered rude and any unfamiliar face deserves a good long and hard stare, perhaps everyone was suspicious. Everyone except the group of elderly Italian and Japanese tourists who were happily oblivious to the political machinations of the Islamic Republic. But I decided that Mohammad might have been overly paranoid, and that as bad as the Islamic Republic’s security services could behave, they surely still respected the regime’s tolerance for opposing politics, even some measure of dissent? No, nemeesheh! That was then.

  HOJJATOLESLAM MOHAMMAD SADOUGHI, the Friday prayer leader of Yazd, is by definition not only the representative of the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Revolution for Yazd province in central Iran, but also the host, at his sumptuously restored historic home in the ancient city center, to the Supreme Leader whenever the hermitic Ayatollah Ali Khamenei visits the hometown of his mother’s family. Yazd, a city known for its pre-Islamic Zoroastrian temples and grave sites, also bears the distinction of being the only city in the world that could boast, in the early days of the twenty-first century, that two of its native sons, Mohammad Khatami and Moshe Katsav, simultaneously served as the sitting presidents of two different countries: Iran and Israel. Moshe Katsav’s family emigrated to Israel when he was still a child; the once-vibrant Jewish community they left in Iran has been reduced to a fraction of its size in recent years. Khatami maintains close ties to his hometown as well as the nearby town of Ardakan, where he was born and where his mother still lives, and which just happens to be the site of a uranium mine that is on the list of targets for Israeli or U.S. long-range bombers or missiles.

  Khatami’s sister Maryam, Sadoughi’s wife, hostess to the Supreme Leader at her home when he comes to stay, is a highly educated and erudite woman who, notwithstanding her black chador and obvious Islamic piety, holds reformist but even liberal political views. Like her husband, she is a strong supporter of her brother, who is politically the polar opposite of the Supreme Leader. In Iran, land of many paradoxes, there is, however, no incongruity in the Supreme Leader’s representative’s connection to and even support of a politician who holds often opposing political views to the valih-e-faqih, the ultimate authority in affairs of state. (The velayat-e-faqih, or rule of the jurisprudent, is an old Shia concept with differing interpretations over the ages; it was Ayatollah Khomeini who institutionalized it in Iran as the absolute authority and rule of a cleric over a Muslim nation, in the absence of the Shia Messiah.) Just as in Yazd, a deeply religious city that sacrificed many of its sons to the Iranian war with Iraq, there is no incongruity in Islamic fervor and fundamentalism combined with an unusual tolerance for other faiths, most notably Zoroastrianism, whose priests maintain an ancient fire temple in town that rivals any mosque as a popular sightseeing destination for Iranian and foreign tourists alike.

  Only a few months before I arrived in Yazd, in April 2009, the Supreme Leader had been a guest in the Sadoughi residence while on an extended stay in the central Iranian province. On that trip, hard-line conservatives unhappy with a reformist cleric serving as their Imam Jomeh had intimated to the Supreme Leader that there might be a cleric better suited to the task of disseminating conservative philosophy, but Ayatollah Khamenei had gone out of his way to praise Sadoughi at public speeches, an indication that he sometimes liked to keep the conservatives guessing and
on their toes too.

  ON FRIDAY MORNINGS, as the priests at the Zoroastrian temple in Yazd go about keeping the embers alive, which they have done continuously for over five hundred years (making it the longest fire in recorded history), Hojjatoleslam Sadoughi prepares to lead the prayers at the Molla Esmail Mosque, named for a nineteenth-century mullah who, in this city of contradictions, was actually a Jewish convert to Shia Islam. The prayers themselves need no preparation—Sadoughi, like every Muslim believer, has known the prayer by rote since childhood. The sermon, however, and particularly the second half, which traditionally discusses politics, does require some thought. Known for his moderate political views, Sadoughi nevertheless is not one to advocate radical political and social change; he is, after all, a believer in the Islamic system and the ideals of the revolution that brought clerics like him, and before him his father, to power. To make that clear, Sadoughi, who normally walks with a cane, leans on a Kalashnikov automatic rifle, loaded, while he delivers his sermons, just like every other Friday prayer leader in Iran. On the Friday I attended mosque, President Ahmadinejad had recently given what many in the West described as an incendiary and virulently anti-Zionist speech to a UN conference on racism held in Geneva. It was also the eve of the anniversary of the failed 1980 U.S. mission to rescue American hostages held in Tehran. Both those events featured heavily in the political segment of the prayer leader’s sermon, delivered to a large audience of men of all ages. Tabas (where U.S. helicopters were destroyed and American servicemen died), Sadoughi reminded his audience (some of whom weren’t born at that time), resulted from the student takeover of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, a “den of spies” as he described it, and the failure of the rescue mission signified Iran’s resilience in the face of decades of American interference and malevolent designs. So far, his words could have ushered forth from the Supreme Leader’s mouth, although most Iranians in the leadership, including almost all the “liberal” reformists, agree with that characterization of American-Iranian relations. The United States, he then conceded, had elected a new president, Barack Obama, who had promised change, and Iran was simply waiting to witness real deeds that might signify change beyond the new rhetoric emanating from the White House (something he repeated wistfully to me later that night in his office).