The Ayatollahs' Democracy: An Iranian Challenge

by Hooman Majd

  Maurice (sometimes transcribed from Farsi as “Morris”) Motamed often came under fierce criticism from some in the Iranian Diaspora for his overt support of the Islamic system and particularly for his support of the anti-Israeli policies of his government, but he remained nonplussed and continued to do his job as he saw fit: a Jew serving his Jewish constituency and his nation. And while it may be easy to criticize from afar, it should be noted that Iran’s Jews, who know better than anyone else what it is like to live as a minority in a Shia country, overwhelmingly re-elected him to Parliament and, according to some I spoke to, would have done so again in 2008 if he had chosen to stand for a third term. Motamed can still, after all, point to real gains in rights for minorities during his two terms in office, particularly for Jews (even as compared to the benign political atmosphere for Jews under the Shah), and to his fearless criticism of and objection to the insulting and often outrageous anti-Semitism exhibited by the state under the administration of President Ahmadinejad, whether it be a celebration of the anniversary of the publication of “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” or the Holocaust conference of 2006, where an open invitation was made to cartoonists around the world to submit cartoons mocking the genocide.

  After eight years as a parliamentarian, Motamed returned to civilian life and his engineering firm, Iran Topography, which he runs from a small suite of offices on busy Valiasr Avenue in midtown Tehran. He remains active in the Jewish community, though, and is still recognized as a senior statesman who has many close contacts with Iran’s politicians (and a close relationship with former president Khatami, who attended services at the Yousefabad Synagogue in 2003 at his invitation, the first ever visit to a synagogue by an Iranian leader). I visited Motamed in his offices in 2008; a simple phone call from former president Khatami’s office to his cell phone had assured my being received by him as a trusted friend. Motamed had, in his years in Parliament, granted many interviews to the foreign media, particularly during times when President Ahmadinejad made headlines with his vitriolic statements on Israel or his questioning of the Holocaust, but with headlines when I visited him being mostly about the U.S. presidential campaign, Motamed was busy only with his work as an engineer. His office was strewn with maps and various files relating to his consulting business, and other than a large Iranian flag and a framed photograph of him with Khatami, there was no evidence of Motamed’s long tenure as a politician.

  MOTAMED WAS BORN in 1945 in Hamadan, one of the world’s oldest cities in midwestern Iran and a city with a once-sizable Jewish population. He was raised in Tehran and attended university there, but since the age of twenty-four or twenty-five, as he remembered it, he had been active in Jewish community affairs and politics as it affected the community. Since the 1979 revolution ushered in a strictly Islamic state, his activism grew more urgent and he decided to stand for Parliament to address, as he called them, the issues and problems that had arisen for Jews and that required a “professional approach” to solve. “Part of my job was to serve the community of Jews living abroad,” he said to me, “and fortunately, well, you know five of my years in Parliament were under the presidency of Mr. Khatami, and we were witness to his, let’s say, kindness to the religious minorities, and we were witness to a new direction in the relations with the religious minorities in the country. I developed a real affection for him during my tenure as a parliamentarian.” He passed me a tray of cookies. “These have come directly from Hamadan!” he said enthusiastically, and I couldn’t refuse the treat to go along with the obligatory glass of tea that had been brought in by an office servant. Iranian Jews, like all Iranians, remain obstinately proud of their hometowns.

  “Iranians who live in Israel seem to be able to come and go as they please, don’t they?” I asked him as I bit into the delicious confection. “Although obviously there are no direct flights between Tel Aviv and Tehran.”

  “This will be interesting for you,” he replied. “About eight years ago, it was exceedingly difficult for Iranians to travel to Israel and to return. They would be subject to all kinds of problems including even prison terms and having their passports confiscated. As one of my early duties in Parliament, I wrote to the presidency, to President Khatami, and explained to him that for many reasons it was necessary for Iranian Jews to be able to freely travel to Israel and back. To visit family, or to receive medical treatment, but above all, as part of their religious duties.” Motamed’s iPhone rang loudly (though obviously not on the AT&T network, which cannot boast coverage in Iran due to U.S. sanctions), interrupting him. “Excuse me,” he said, and took the call. “What were we talking about?” he asked distractedly after he hung up.

  “The Jews who live in Israel,” I said.

  “Yes, yes. Fortunately, this letter of mine had a positive impact. His Excellency Khatami gave orders that a group of ministers should look into the matter, and the result was that for about seven and a half years now, Jews do not face the same problems they did. They travel back and forth, and they encounter no problems. What’s even more interesting is that even Jews who have lived in Israel for thirty or forty years can go to the consulate in Istanbul or neighboring countries, and reclaim Iranian documentation and travel to Iran, without any problems.”

  “But why,” I wondered, “do Iranian Jews who still live here even persist in staying in Iran, when they are living as a small minority in an officially Islamic state, with all the laws and regulations that that implies?”

  “That’s a question I’ve been personally asked many times,” Motamed said wearily. “You see; this is our country. In my opinion, the reason Jews are often persuaded to leave a country is that old issue of anti-Semitism. It’s unfortunately a worldwide problem—you can witness even in France or Belgium or Holland, the attacks on Jewish houses of worship or cemeteries. An Iranian Jew might look at that and say, ‘Why should I leave my homeland to go somewhere alien to me, and where there might be anti-Semitism of the kind that isn’t in my own country?’”

  What about the state of affairs for Jews under Ahmadinejad, though? I wondered. Hadn’t the issue of “wiping Israel off the map,” the repeated Holocaust denials, made life more difficult for Jews and particularly the Jewish member of Parliament?

  “Absolutely,” said Motamed. “Being a Jewish member of Parliament is a very difficult job, one of the most difficult. When the Holocaust issue came up, I was interviewed by both the domestic and international media, and I expressed regret that the president is either uninterested in history or is unaware of it, and I considered Holocaust denial a great insult to all Jews everywhere. There was no reason for bringing up the Holocaust, and we can see that in the last few years how it has negatively impacted Iran’s reputation, both the people and the government. I raised my objections not just as a Jew, but first and foremost as an Iranian.”

  I asked Motamed if he felt that Iranian Jews, in an anti-Israeli nation, are obliged to always declare an anti-Zionist stance.

  He danced around the issue but finally said that his own stance has always been against extreme behavior by Israel, and for the rights of the Palestinian people. “Even abroad,” he said, “if you look at any demonstration for the rights of Palestinians, you’ll see Jews at the forefront.” It is a tricky question for the Jews of Iran, the fact that their welcome in their homeland is conditional on their rejection of what Iran terms the “Zionist state.” No Jew in Iran would want to go on the record defending Israel’s right to exist, but I sensed that Iranian Jews would prefer not to be asked, as if the uncomfortable question lingers over them all the time. To answer the question means they either have to lie or have to be confronted with the age-old question of where a Jew’s loyalty lies, an issue that should be more than obvious for Iranian Jews still living in the Islamic Republic of Iran, under an anti-Semitic president no less. Motamed’s own loyalty to the state, to his country, was not questioned by even the most anti-Zionist, anti-Semitic officials, and he was clearly comfortable in his own skin, first as
an Iranian, as he put it, and second as a Jew.

  “What are you doing tomorrow morning?” he suddenly asked me as my time with him drew to a close.

  “I have a few appointments in the morning,” I answered.

  “Come to the Sapir Hospital afterward. The board of directors holds its meeting tomorrow and I want to introduce you to them, and to the new member of Parliament, Dr. Moreh-Sedegh.”

  I wrote down the address and promised I would rush there after a meeting at the Foreign Ministry’s college campus at the northern fringes of town, a good hour’s drive away from the Dr. Sapir Hospital, the Jewish hospital of Tehran, in what was once the Jewish ghetto in South Tehran.

  THE JEWISH GHETTO of Tehran of course no longer exists. Partly because of Jewish emigration and partly because of the upward mobility of Iranian Jews, it had become a mostly Muslim neighborhood, albeit still resembling a ghetto, since before the revolution. About eighty thousand Iranian Jews have left Iran since the Islamic Revolution of 1979, leaving a population of between twenty and twenty-five thousand Jews in Iran, the majority in Tehran (about fourteen thousand) but with sizable communities in Shiraz, Esfahan, Kermanshah, Hamadan, and Yazd, and much smaller numbers scattered throughout the country. It is estimated that three million Iranian Muslims have also emigrated since the revolution, but, according to Motamed, the reason for the higher percentage of Jews is that “circumstances are somewhat easier for the Jews to leave and settle elsewhere,” both in terms of family connections in the West and in terms of obtaining coveted Western visas. But most big cities still have neighborhoods that were once, in the distant or recent past, Jewish neighborhoods and where a handful of less wealthy Jews, mostly very old, still live among Muslims.

  The Dr. Sapir Hospital, founded as a charity clinic by a famous Jewish doctor over fifty years ago, is on busy Mostafa Khomeini Street in the Cyrus section of South-Central Tehran, a street lined with shops selling inexpensive goods ranging from pots and pans to hookahs to automotive parts. A large sign faces the street—the Hebrew letters visible—and in the alleys behind and around the hospital, tall, pock-marked mud walls hide the decrepit homes that once housed some of Tehran’s Jews but are now almost exclusively Muslim, multifamily residences.

  On Tuesdays, the board of directors of the hospital, all prominent Tehran Jews, meet in the conference room/office of the hospital director, Siamak Moreh-Sedegh, a surgeon who had been elected to replace Maurice Motamed as the Jewish member of Parliament just a few months prior. After a long, traffic-choked drive, I was directed to the small office directly outside the conference room, where a secretary dressed in black and full hijab, but with rouge and bright-red lipstick, offered me a seat while she went into the conference room to announce my arrival. She returned to her desk facing me, and within a few minutes a servant appeared with a cup of Nescafé, a subtle nod that she knew I lived abroad and was therefore, in most Iranian minds, disposed more toward coffee than tea. She asked me to wait a few minutes while the board finished some business, important and contentious business judging by the raised voices I could hear from behind the door. I tried to make conversation as I sipped the coffee I didn’t really want.

  “Have you been here long?” I asked her.

  “About seventeen years,” she said.

  “And you like it?”

  “Very much,” she said enthusiastically.

  “Are you Jewish?”

  “No,” she replied with a smile. “Very few here are, except the board, of course. But they’re all such good people,” she added. Another man walked into the room and said a few words to her. She got up from her chair and walked into the conference room; when she returned, she gestured that I should go in, and said a few more words to the man, who was by now seated next to me.

  “Thanks,” I said, gathering my things and walking into the conference room. Maurice Motamed stood up from behind the large table and shook my hands, and then introduced me to the board, composed mostly of doctors but also the hospital administrator, a Mrs. Hasidim, who was wearing a proper Islamic manteau and tight scarf on her head.

  “Mrs. Hasidim will give you a tour of the hospital,” he said, “and then you’ll join us for lunch in the cafeteria downstairs.” I followed Mrs. Hasidim (who is not a Hasidic Jew, who do not exist in Iranian Jewry) out of the room and to her office down the hall.

  “What would you like to know?” she asked pleasantly.

  “How long have you worked here?” I asked, quite unprepared to ask any questions of a hospital administrator, Jewish or otherwise.

  “Forty-three years,” she replied. “I started as a midwife—this started as an outpatient maternity clinic, you know. It was started really because a pregnant Jewish woman, all those years ago, once bled to death because a Muslim doctor wouldn’t touch her, because of her being najess [unclean, in Islam].”

  “Really?” I said, surprised.

  “Yes, so it was decided that there had to be a place for Jews to go without worrying about the najess issue. Of course, those days are long past, and we’ve grown substantially.”

  “And how many Jews work here?” I asked.

  “We have 230 personnel of whom ten are Jews, including two doctors,” she replied. “The vast majority of the patients are Muslim, of course. We used to have only a Kosher kitchen, but after the revolution the employees demanded a halal kitchen too, so now we have two kitchens.” She looked at me, trying, I thought, to convey a little sarcasm with her expression.

  “And how is it with the government of Ahmadinejad?”

  “Well, we’ve been asked to cut back our connections to Iranian Jews in the United States, but the government continues to support us, donating funds every now and then. Otherwise, we’re entirely supported by the Jewish community.”

  “Any Muslim donors?” I wondered.

  “No,” she said wearily.

  “And have you ever thought of leaving Iran?”

  “No, this is my home. I’m a member of the Tehran Jewish Committee, a member of the board of directors of this hospital; I have work to do. My children are here too.” She paused and stared at me. “But I suppose now that I’m getting old, I might think about retiring abroad,” she added. The lights suddenly went off.

  “Another cutoff?” I asked. In the summer of 2008, Tehran had experienced major electricity shortages, courtesy of Ahmadinejad’s economic planning, and hospitals were not immune, apparently, from government-imposed shutdowns almost every day.

  “Yes,” she said. “The generator should kick in any minute.” She looked worried for a moment, and then the lights came back on, dimly. It was already warm in the building and over 100 degrees outside, but the air-conditioning would not come back on until power was switched on again, normally within an hour or two. “Come,” she said, “let’s take a tour and then go and have lunch.” I followed her out the door and walked with her through the hospital, along its impeccably clean and orderly corridors and through its wards. She pointedly identified the one or two Jewish patients in their beds. She also whispered, as we said hello at a nurses’ station, that “that tall one is the only Jewish nurse, or really midwife, left.” We took the stairs down to the basement and to an empty cafeteria, where a long table had been set up for the board of directors, who wandered in one by one.

  “The kosher kitchen, I presume?” I asked Mrs. Hasidim.

  “Yes,” she said with a smile.

  “Perhaps you might tell your Muslim staff that today the grandson of an Ayatollah, a descendant of the prophet Mohammad no less, ate a kosher meal in your cafeteria,” I said.

  “No, I won’t do that,” she said rather sternly and devoid of humor. Some things, one quickly learns, are just not funny when it comes to religion. Not in Iran. Mrs. Farangiz Hasidim, a Jew who was living and working among devout Muslims, knew that better than me.

  I RETURNED TO Dr. Sapir Hospital a few days later, to meet with Dr. Moreh-Sedegh for a longer chat. At the Safi car service office on the narrow str
eet where I stay in Tehran, in a downtown neighborhood not too far from the hospital, I told the dispatcher that I was headed to the Jewish hospital. “Why, do the Jews have a hospital?” he asked, raising his eyebrows. I had heard the same question from a number of other Muslims in Tehran.

  “Yes, you know, the Dr. Sapir Hospital, in Cyrus, on South Mostafa Khomeini Street,” I replied. The dispatcher shook his head and leaned over the glass partition separating him from the drivers lounging about and waiting for a fare.

  “The Jewish hospital?” he yelled, more a question than an order. “Sapir.” An older man came round, nodding his head, and guided me outside to his car. Fifteen minutes later he pulled right up to the gates, almost running over two people who were trying to cross in front of us. “Sapir,” he said triumphantly.

  Siamak Moreh-Sedegh goes to work everyday at the hospital and also visits his office in Parliament, where he conducts political affairs on behalf of his community. When I entered his office at the hospital, he was sitting at the conference table, which was right in front of his desk and had a plastic seven-branched candelabra, or menorah, prominently placed in front of the telephone. He was drinking tea and chain-smoking cigarettes and shouting and cursing on the phone. Forty-one years old and overweight, Moreh-Sedegh is a jovial, back-slapping, one-of-the-guys type of man, and his demeanor on the phone was affable.