The Ayatollah Begs to Differ
Page 1
Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Acknowledgments
INTRODUCTION
PERSIAN CATS
THE AYATOLLAH HAS A COLD
IF IT’S TUESDAY, THIS MUST BE QOM
PRIDE AND HUMILITY
VICTORY OF BLOOD OVER THE SWORD
PHOTO INSERT
PAIRIDAEZA : THE PERSIAN GARDEN
THE AYATOLLAH BEGS TO DIFFER
FEAR OF A BLACK TURBAN
Notes
A Note About the Author
Copyright
For Nasser and Badri
Acknowledgments
I have based this book mostly on personal experience. In 2004 and 2005 I spent several weeks in Iran as a journalist, and in 2007 I spent almost two months living in Tehran, working on what was to become the manuscript. Both in Iran and in the United States, I have relied on my family, friends, and contacts as sources (as well as many other ordinary Iranians I have spoken to in Iran), some of whom I acknowledge in the text and others whose identities I have disguised for their own safety or who wish to remain anonymous. I have also served on a few occasions as an unpaid adviser to the Islamic Republic, bringing me into close contact with Presidents Khatami and Ahmadinejad and numerous members of their staffs, who have all contributed to my knowledge.
I am particularly grateful to President Mohammad Khatami, who took time out of his schedule, both during his presidency and afterward, to engage in long discussions with me and to answer my many questions, and to his brother (and chief of staff) Seyyed Ali Khatami, who spent even more time with me and who introduced me to many other influential Iranians, most of whom I continue to speak with on a regular basis. I learned more about the intricacies of the politics (and the history) of the Islamic Republic from Ali Khatami than I could have from reading dozens of books, and he gave me invaluable lessons on the personalities of the characters who make up the ruling elite of Iran.
I am deeply indebted to the former UN ambassador Mohammad Javad Zarif for his keen insights (and his patience with me) and to the ambassadors Hossein Fereidoun, Sadeq Kharrazi, and Mehdi Danesh-Yazdi, all of whom contributed to my understanding of the politics of the Islamic Republic. I’m also grateful to Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki for the time he set aside to meet with me on his visits to New York.
In addition to those who are already named as characters in various chapters, I would like to thank the following persons in Iran, in no particular order, for their assistance and their contributions to my knowledge: Ali Ziaie, Mohammad Ziaie, Amir Khosro Etemadi, Seyyed Hossein Khatami, Maryam Majd, Mohammad Mir Ali Mohammadi, and Mehrdad Khajenouri.
Finally, I’d like to thank my editor, Kristine Puopolo, and my agent, Lindsay Edgecombe, and her colleague James Levine for their hard work in making this a readable book. And, of course, thanks to my father, Nasser Majd, and my mother, Mansoureh Assar, for what they’ve taught me; and to Karri Jinkins, Davitt Sigerson, Michael Zilkha, Selim Zilkha, Simon Van Booy, Daniel Feder, Eddie Stern, Michael Halsband, Paul Werner, Suzy Hansen, Roger Trilling, Glenn O’Brien, and Ken Browar.
INTRODUCTION
“Yeki-bood; yeki-nabood.” That’s how all Iranian stories, at least in the oral tradition, have begun, since as long as anyone remembers. “There was one; there wasn’t one,” as in “There was a person (once upon a time); but on the other hand, no, there was no one.” Often, the saying continues with “Gheir az Khoda, heech-kee nabood,” or “Other than God, there was no One,” a uniquely Persian obfuscation of the Muslim Arabic “La’illa ha il’allah” (There is no God but Allah), and which one might think makes much less sense than the original, but is in a way perfectly reasonable. Introduce a young mind to the paradoxes of life with a paradox, you see, which is what most of the Iranian folk stories are about in the first place. As a child, I heard those stories alongside English equivalents (which of course began with the seemingly far more sensible “Once upon a time”), but it never occurred to me then that the simple “Yeki-bood; yeki-nabood” said so much about the inherited culture that so deeply penetrated my otherwise Western life.
“Yeki-bood; yeki-nabood.” Yes, we are about to hear a fantasy, but wait—is it a fantasy? While most Iranian stories that begin so are indeed fantasies, the fantastic Shia stories of early Islam are thought to be true history by the legions of believers in the faith, and if evoked, “Yeki-bood” wraps itself in religious significance as well as the Persian art of the epic. On one of my trips to Iran, to Qom to be precise, I picked up some CDs of noheh, Shia religious incantations, usually sung to huge crowds on religious holidays, that tell the stories of Shia saints and their martyrdom. One CD contained a rather mellifluous version of the story of Fatimeh Zahra and Ali (the daughter and son-in-law of the Prophet) that began with “Yeki-bood; yeki-nabood” and continued with “zeer-e gonbad’e kabood,” or “under the bruised [or dark] dome [or sky],” alluding not just to the Islamic roots of “There was one, there wasn’t one” but also to the Shia sense of the world as a dark and oppressive place. The singer claimed the tale to be one of “estrangement and woe,” central themes in Shiism. There is no God but God, there was one and there wasn’t one, other than God there was no One, and the world is under a perpetual dark cloud. Welcome to Shia Iran.
Iran is better known today by the outside world than at almost any time in its history, certainly since the fall of the Persian Empire, mostly because of the Islamic Revolution, which to many ushered in an era of successful but much-feared Islamic fundamentalism. As a child, I had to patiently explain to new friends in school where and exactly what Iran was, if they even bothered to inquire about my strange name; today I suspect that young Iranians have no such problems. When I look back now, both in my childhood and even as a young adult, I couldn’t have imagined my country as anything more than a second-rate Third World nation subservient to Western powers: had someone seriously suggested to me, or any other Iranian for that matter, that the United States would one day be proposing to build a missile defense system in Europe to guard against an attack by Iran (as the United States has, to the great consternation of the Russians), with Iranian-made missiles, I would have instantly labeled that person as stark raving mad. Despite the negative connotations of a perceptibly hostile Iran, Iranians of a certain age can be forgiven for feeling a tinge of pride in their nation’s rapid ascent to a position of being taken seriously by the world’s greatest superpower, and all in just a little over a quarter of a century. One might argue whether Iran and Iranians would have been better off without the Islamic Revolution of 1979, but it is indisputable that had it not happened, Iran today would likely not have much of a say in global affairs.
Rightly or wrongly, the revolution and the path the nation took after its success have led to Iran’s prominence and repute, but of course at the time Iranians could hardly have known that their revolt would have such far-reaching consequences and effects. For two or three hundred years Iran had been, in all but name, a proxy of Western powers—specifically Britain and then the United States when it took over the mantle of empire after World War II. Iranians overthrew a twenty-five-hundred-year monarchy in 1979 to liberate themselves from an autocratic dictator as much as to liberate themselves from foreign domination (a factor that most in the West did not understand at the time and that was also partly the motivation for the takeover of the U.S. Embassy), and for almost thirty years now, whatever can be said about Iran, it cannot be said that it is subservient to any greater power.
In the early summer of 1979, only a few months after the Islamic Revolution had liberated me from having to explain to geographically and politically challenged fellow students where I was from, I fou
nd myself at Speakers’ Corner in London’s Hyde Park, shouting until I was hoarse. I had recently finished my college studies and was visiting friends and family in London, and as I stood on the lawn surrounded by a very emotional crowd of recent Iranian exiles—many of whom had been forced, at least so they thought, to flee in recent months—I vehemently defended the Islamic Republic. I surprised myself: as a secular and thoroughly Westernized Iranian (or gharb-zadeh—“West-toxified” in the revolutionary lexicon), the nascent Islamic Republic should hardly have been my cup of tea, but I didn’t find it hard, nor did I see any contradiction in it, to celebrate an Iran that, after years of subjugation to outside powers, finally had a political system it could call its own. That was certainly good enough for me. As a twenty-two-year-old who until recently had had very little idea of Iran’s place in the world, I’ll admit that my newfound political awareness of the country of my birth was heavily tinged with youthful idealism, mixed with a good measure of latent Persian pride. The English who looked on curiously at the screaming wogs (as I, along with anyone darker than ruddy, used to be called at my English public school, a school that boasted Milton as an alumnus) seemed bemused; a few shook their heads in disapproval. At least, I thought, now they know where Iran is, a country where they will no longer have a say.
I tell this anecdote because I often see Westerners react to Iran with a sense of bafflement. But that moment at Speakers’ Corner and the seeming absurdity of my brief defense of Khomeini’s Islamic Republic bring to light a paradox about Iran that is still conspicuous today. Many of my Iranian friends have had these moments, and perhaps the most surprising comes from my Jewish-Iranian friend Fuad. A few years after the revolution, in Los Angeles, I had dinner with Fuad and his wife, Nasreen, where he told me a story that called to mind my Speakers’ Corner experience of 1979. He had recently arrived in L.A. from Tel Aviv, where he first sought asylum after leaving Iran, and he was recounting the days preceding the revolution in Tehran. He told me that on one of the nights when millions of Tehran residents protested the Shah’s government by taking to rooftops on Khomeini’s instruction and shouting, “Allah-hu-Akbar!” Fuad and his family found themselves up on their rooftop shouting the same words as forcefully as their Muslim compatriots. Even after leaving his homeland, after settling first in its archenemy Israel and then moving to Los Angeles, even while we were getting drunk on scotch and savoring Nasreen’s kosher cooking, neither he nor I saw any contradiction in either his initial sanguine view of an Islamic Revolution or his chanting, at the time, the most Islamic of Muslim sayings.
Fuad’s parents had fled Baghdad in the 1930s during a wave of pogroms and institutionalized anti-Semitism, when many Iraqi Jews made their way to neighboring Iran, settling in a country that had boasted a large and vibrant Persian Jewish community for millennia. But Fuad didn’t feel in the least Iraqi, and despite his extended stays in Israel (where he also attended college before the revolution and where he learned his fluent Hebrew), he didn’t feel Israeli; he felt Iranian. And as an Iranian, he was with his countrymen when they rose up against the Shah. Islam, particularly Shia Islam, was as familiar to him as it was to his many Muslim friends; he understood that it formed their character as much as anything else did, and although he didn’t participate in the rites of Shiism, he and his family were comfortable with the culture that surrounded them, a culture that, although steeped in the Shia tradition (which has borrowed from Iran’s pre-Islamic culture), was as much theirs as their fellow Iranians’.
In order to understand Iran and Iranians today, one needs to understand what it meant to shout “Allah-hu-Akbar!” in 1979. The expression has become known as a sort of Muslim fundamentalist battle cry, uttered in every Hollywood movie featuring terrorists and notorious as the famous last words of the 9/11 hijackers. But the “God is Great!” that Iranians shouted in 1979 predated the concepts we have of fundamentalism—there was no Hezbollah, Hamas, or Islamic Jihad then, nor an Al Qaeda or a Taliban (and the PLO, the Middle East’s most prominent terrorists, was still famously secular, and very few in the West had even heard of the Muslim Brotherhood, let alone knew what it stood for)—and to the Shia people the words signified their fearlessness in confronting an unjust ruler.
When the revolution came, I greeted it with fascination. Only a few years earlier, I had believed that the Shah was all-powerful, and now he was improbably on his way out. I disagreed with other Iranian students in the United States, both monarchists and revolutionaries, who thought that Jimmy Carter was pulling all the strings in Iran; my American side liked Carter, who seemed to me a truly decent man in the White House, and I believed that he was caught unawares by the Khomeini-led movement, mainly because I believed in his naïveté. But Iranians hated him: the few remaining monarchists, because they felt the United States had intentionally abandoned the Shah; the revolutionaries, communists, Islamists, and everyone else, because he had not forcefully spoken out against the Shah (and had even toasted him at a New Year’s party in 1978 in Iran) and was perhaps even conspiring to reinstall him, much as Eisenhower had done in 1953.
When I, along with countless Iranians at home and abroad, voted in the yes-or-no ballot following the Shah’s downfall, we overwhelmingly chose an Islamic Republic. Islam had won the revolution; even the traditional and secular left-wing opponents of the Shah’s regime had recognized that without Islam, without “Allah-hu-Akbar!,” the revolution would not have been possible. Iranians still very much believed that to the victor go the spoils, and the mosques (and Khomeini in particular) were the victors in a battle that almost all Iranians were involved in. Iran was an Islamic country, a Shia country, and now, because the very concept of the Islamic Republic was a purely Iranian and Shia one, for the first time in hundreds, if not thousands, of years, Iranians were defining their own political system and, more important, their own destiny.
This memory rang in my head when I was in Tehran in the days after Ahmadinejad’s election in 2005 and as I tried to understand how he had become president. Everyone openly talked about politics, and I understood from the many unlikely people who had voted for him, along with the millions that make up Iran’s underclass, that he had successfully expressed the hope, a hope that had withered over the years, that the revolution was for Iran, for all Iranians, and its glittering promise still held. Ahmadinejad has also always understood that his message, a message of independence from East and West, plays well not only to his Iranian audience, who overwhelmingly support his uncompromising stance on the nuclear issue (if not his style), but to a wider audience across the Third World that sees in the Islamic Republic a successful example of throwing off the yoke of colonialism and imperialism.
I spoke to Fuad almost two years into Ahmadinejad’s presidency, and he again surprised me with his comments. Despite Ahmadinejad’s anti-Semitic remarks, which like many Iranian Jews he just didn’t take as seriously as we did—or as he probably should have—Fuad understood him and, yes, in some ways even admired him. Admired? It was simple for Fuad: he told me that if Ahmadinejad was sincere in what he desired for Iran, and until then there had been no reason for Fuad to disbelieve him, then as a patriotic Iranian he found it hard to argue with many of his ideas and policies. I’ve heard the very same thing from other Iranians in exile, even among intellectuals, and it brought to mind early opinion on Khomeini.
I have spent the decades before and since the Islamic Revolution living in America. The son of an Iranian diplomat, I grew up in different parts of the world, attending kindergarten in London and San Francisco and grade schools at American schools, populated by the children of American diplomats, expatriates, and businessmen, in various other countries. As a teenager, I was deposited in boarding school in England, where I finished my secondary education before rushing back to America for college. I had, needless to say, a somewhat confused identity as a child and teenager who more often than not thought of himself as more American than anything else, although by the time I reached drinking age (wh
ich was eighteen at the time), I had made the decision to live and work in Iran. The revolution that arrived unexpectedly a few years later nixed my plans, mostly because I felt that with my father’s background (he had been an ambassador of the Shah’s regime) I would be rather unwelcome in Tehran, but also because I felt, with both regret and a little admiration, that Iran no longer had much use for my very American worldview.
But in the early days of the Islamic Republic, it was hardly clear that the new political system would survive very long, and Iranian exiles, like the Parisian Russians of the 1920s, promoted the notion that their stay abroad was a temporary one. I watched events unfold in Iran from afar, uncertain of what might happen in the nascent republic and whether I would ever be able to go back, and then the hostage crisis happened—hardly a time for a Westernized Iranian who was already in the West, watching fellow Iranians stream out of Iran by the thousands, to think about setting up shop in the old country. The hostage crisis played out long enough, with Iran’s revolutionaries seemingly not only victorious in humiliating the great superpower but also determined to disengage from the West and Western ideas, that many exiles somberly calculated that they would not outlive the Islamic Republic (though some, particularly those who show up, Chalabi-like, on Capitol Hill from time to time, still cling to the hope). I had by this time started to settle down to an adult life in the United States, and as the years passed, any fantasy ideas of starting from scratch in Iran, an Iran that by the end of the 1980s had suffered a horrific eight-year war and that I, as an able-bodied young man and unlike my patriotic contemporaries, had played no part in, were inconceivable.
A friend once told me that I was the only person he knew who was both 100 percent American and 100 percent Iranian. Oxymoronic as that sounds, I knew what he meant. I was raised and educated completely in the West, but am the grandson of a well-respected Alemeh (learned) and Ayatollah; my first language is English, but I am also fluent in Farsi and am told that I speak it without an identifying accent. But more important, my Western outlook on life doesn’t interfere with my complete ease in the company of even the most radical of Iranian political or religious figures (and often theirs with me), and in my travels to Iran I have often thought that there must be a toggle switch somewhere along the electrical system in my brain that is magically triggered to “East” when my plane crosses into Iranian airspace. I live in New York—where the switch is unconsciously set to “West”—and in 2006, in front of my apartment building in lower Manhattan across from City Hall Park and one block from the World Trade Center site, an Egyptian food cart vendor of kebabs had been selling halal (unbeknownst to the majority of his customers) grilled meat for lunch for quite some time. I would often say hello to him on my way out, and one day I stopped and asked where he was from, and he asked where I was from. When I said Iran, his first response was “A-salaam-u-aleikum!” and then he proceeded to tell me that for the last three or four months he “had started to really love Iran.” Why? I wondered. And why only in the last three or four months? Because, he told me, “Iran is the only country standing up for Muslims.”