The Ayatollah Begs to Differ

by Hooman Majd

  Indeed, Iran still is the only country in the world whose officials, including all of its diplomats abroad, are always seen tieless. True, Fidel Castro often wore fatigues, and a few other Third World leaders wear national costumes or appear with open-necked shirts, but the government cadres are always seen in suits and ties. To the Third World “street,” and particularly the Muslim Third World, where Khomeini wished to have the most influence, even encouraging new Islamic revolutions, the effect was important. First, the message that “real Muslims don’t wear ties” resonated in places where most men, other than the rich, Westernized, and intellectual classes, didn’t wear ties (including in Iran), and, second, the image projected by Iran, that the country was independent of the norms and standards of international behavior (norms that Khomeini believed were created and imposed by the West), was proof of liberation from the shackles of colonialism. The servants would no longer emulate, much less listen to, their former masters. It would be hard to prove, but when I sat at the UN General Assembly in 2006 as the improbable translator for Ahmadinejad’s upcoming speech, only a few feet away from Bolivia’s Evo Morales, who was making his first appearance in New York since his election as president and who was wearing a native leather jacket and tieless white shirt, I couldn’t help but think that Iran’s dismissal of diplomatic etiquette had had some effect on what Third World leaders today thought of as appropriate attire for addressing the entire world.

  The sartorial aspects of Hashemi-Samareh’s “Psychology of the Infidels” may have become obsolete during the reformist president Khatami’s administration, which ushered in an era of relative elegance among government officials to match Khatami’s own preference for bespoke garments (though stopping well short of rehabilitating the necktie), but the underlying philosophy became all too apparent in the wake of Ahmadinejad’s election. Among his first duties as president, in an act that betrayed Hashemi-Samareh’s hand (for Ahmadinejad had no experience in foreign affairs and had probably never even left the country6), was the wholesale removal of virtually the entire corps of ambassadors based in the West: an elite group of reform-minded diplomats who not only didn’t seem to think the West was all bad all the time but even polished their brogues and pressed their European-made suits from time to time.

  Hashemi-Samareh’s influence in international affairs became even more apparent when it was he (and not the new ambassador to Paris, whom he undoubtedly had a hand in choosing) who flew to Paris in September 2006 to meet with President Jacques Chirac and deliver a private message from Ahmadinejad. Very shortly afterward, he was appointed deputy interior minister for political affairs, a post he would assume along with his full-time duties as senior adviser. To opponents of Ahmadinejad, and more particularly opponents of Ayatollah Mesbah-Yazdi, it became alarmingly clear that October why Hashemi-Samareh had chosen to take the somewhat higher-profile position in government; as part of his duties he was also appointed head of the election commission, supervisor of the poll for the Assembly of Experts (the body that oversees the work of the Supreme Leader)—an election where Mesbah-Yazdi and his allies hoped to gain ground against the more moderate clerics. To his credit, I suppose, and to the credit of the election process, Hashemi-Samareh must not have interfered with the vote count: his mentor Mesbah-Yazdi suffered a humiliating sixth-place finish in the Tehran municipality (barely squeezing into his seat in the Assembly), and his and Ahmadinejad’s allies generally fared far worse than expected, perhaps contributing to Hashemi-Samareh’s reasons for resigning his post a few months later, in the summer of 2007, ostensibly to spend less time with his family while his duties as top presidential adviser became all-encompassing, as he claimed, and allowed him not a waking moment to ponder such pedestrian issues as poll supervision. Persian cats, it appears, when they come together once in a while, find a way to trim the whiskers of even the laat cats.

  THE AYATOLLAH HAS A COLD

  The Supreme Leader of the Islamic Revolution, not Republic, is his official title, but in Iran he is known simply as Rahbar, or “Leader.” The title betrays two conflicting sides of the national character (plus an emphatic statement that Iran is forever a revolutionary state). Iranians have traditionally, at least in the last few centuries, despised their leaders no matter their character or their deeds, been quick to turn on and mock them, but at the same time yearned for strong leadership and someone to look up to.

  Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the founder of the Islamic Republic and the leader of its revolution, was arguably the first genuinely popular leader in recent Iranian history (except for the democratically elected prime minister Mohammad Mossadeq, whose premiership was short-lived, courtesy of the CIA1), but he recognized better than most that the Iranian habit of souring on the subjects of their hero worship meant his dream of a long-lived Islamic state could easily evaporate on the whims of an unruly populace. His concept of velayat-e-faqih—“guardianship of the jurist” or “rule of the jurisprudent,” depending on interpretation—which he revealed in a published work in 1970 from his exile in Najaf, Iraq, had Shia Islam as its rationale and basis. But apart from the implication that he would be the faqih, which also means “leader,” it conveniently also envisioned a leadership removed enough from public scrutiny (partly owing to its religious credentials but also because of its inherent aloofness from day-to-day political considerations) that it would not suffer the wrath of the people, should they become wrathful, as other leaders traditionally had. Although some Shia clerics rejected the concept entirely and others have disputed the extent to which the faqih can exercise power—for example, whether he should be limited to purely Islamic questions and issues, or whether he is a “ruler” or “guardian”—it was nonetheless enshrined in the Islamic Republic’s constitution after the revolution.

  Khomeini, as father of the revolution and someone who was elevated (some argue inappropriately) to Imam, an honorific that has seldom been applied to any Grand Ayatollah, as it implies sainthood of the sort that is the basis of Shia Islam with its twelve Imams, didn’t need to worry about his authority and popular support while he was alive, but he was careful to ensure that his successors, who could not be guaranteed to enjoy the same privileges, would have an absolute authority that would entrench the Islamic Republic for generations to come. Today, the valih-e-faqih, “Supreme Leader,” is Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the similarity of his name to his predecessor’s entirely coincidental but guaranteed, as it has over the years, to confuse Westerners. He has, in the years since Khomeini’s death elevated him to the post, carefully balanced his use of what is arguably unlimited power with the cultivation of a public perception that the elected presidents of the republic are responsible for the ordinary welfare and woes of the people, and their general dissatisfaction, if they have any, with their government. It’s a difficult balancing act, one that he plays with enormous skill, for when the people are too happy, as they perhaps were in the wake of the initially extremely popular election of President Mohammad Khatami, he has to ensure that credit for that happiness doesn’t rest entirely with the elected officials; otherwise his very role might come into question. Similarly, a certain amount of dissatisfaction, whether from the left or the right, bodes well for his authority as Iran’s “Guide,” someone who can lead the nation through turbulent times. It speaks volumes about both Iranians’ penchant for dislike of the leaders they elect and the Supreme Leader’s deft manipulation of the political system that Iranians’ disapproval of Khatami’s inability to deliver on his promise of reform was blamed not on Khamenei directly, although Khatami and his allies implied as much at every opportunity and most Iranians understood the limits of the president’s power, but on Khatami’s unwillingness to stand up to conservatives and Khamenei, who by the very nature of his job supported the conservative agenda as often as, if not more often than, the president’s. Blaming the weakness of their president rather than the strength of the Supreme Leader, then, stands in contrast to Khatami’s successor’s term, when those Iranians
who quickly became unhappy with the state of affairs under President Ahmadinejad blamed him for incompetence and pigheadedness rather than Khamenei for his apparent inability or unwillingness to completely rein him in. The Supreme Leader, it seems, can never lose.

  When I arrived in Tehran in January 2007, the world’s capital of rumors was abuzz with the mother of all rumors: that the Supreme Leader was either dying or already dead. The elections for the Assembly of Experts, the body that chooses and theoretically supervises the Supreme Leader, were over in December, and moderate clerics had, contrary to some expectations, done extremely well, but there was still some uncertainty as to whom they would choose to succeed Khamenei, who was, after all, a prostate cancer survivor who at sixty-eight looked even older than his years. Many people, even those with close connections to the highest levels of government, spoke in the inimitable Persian way of treating almost any rumor, no, every rumor, as fact until it is proven otherwise, and as if Khamenei’s imminent demise if not his death were very real. Unlike Cuba, say, where the president’s health is a state secret, Iran has no such prohibitions, but it is widely assumed that those in the know would keep the Supreme Leader’s passing quiet, particularly at times of sensitive security for the nation, until a succession had been finalized. What led to the rumors were the facts that Khamenei hadn’t been seen in public for some weeks, hadn’t appeared as he traditionally does at celebrations for the important Muslim holiday of Eid al-Adha (marking the end of the hajj and falling on the last day of the year in 2006), and had apparently been taken to the hospital at some point in late December.

  It’s impossible to know if the rumor was started in Iran or by hopeful exiles abroad, but Michael Ledeen of the American Enterprise Institute, a notorious neocon, perhaps having picked up some Persian traits of his own through his obsession with all things Iranian, or actually all things Iranian having to do with regime change, declared it as a fact on his Web site and viewed it, as almost every Iranian did, as one of the momentous occasions in the brief history of Iran’s Islamic Republic.2 Ledeen, famous for advocating regime change in Iran before Iraq, and an archenemy of the Iranian clerics since 1979, could hardly contain his glee, perhaps believing that a weak Iran temporarily without a Supreme Leader might be ripe for some “shock and awe” courtesy of the Pentagon. For days afterward, bloggers, both in Iran and internationally, competed with each other to either confirm or deny the rumor, but what seemed clear, even to those who denied Khamenei’s death, was that business was not as usual where the valih-e-faqih was concerned.

  Inside Iran, the question quickly stopped being whether he was dead or not and became who his natural successor was. It was assumed that Ayatollah Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, chairman of the Expediency Council (a body that is technically above the president and supervises his work), newly reelected to the Assembly of Experts along with many of his allies, and the de facto number two in the hierarchy of the Islamic Republic, would once again, as he did when Khomeini died in 1989, play kingmaker rather than king. Rafsanjani, from the pistachio-producing town of Rafsanjan, had been one of Khomeini’s closest aides and advisers, almost always seen quietly by his side, but his public profile had risen when he became president in 1989 and served two terms until Khatami’s election in 1997. Rafsanjani’s wealth (and his penchant for accumulating more of it), along with his sons’ extensive business dealings and his notoriety overseas (an Argentine judge has issued an arrest warrant for him for his alleged role in the bombing of Buenos Aires’s Jewish Center in 1994), many argued, would lead him not to seek the Supreme Leader’s office but rather to use his influence and power to put someone else, considerably weaker than himself, in the job.

  There was also the unspoken issue of Rafsanjani’s white turban: he was not a Seyyed, a direct descendant of the Prophet Mohammad who is entitled to wear a black turban, and in the Shia tradition of placing great importance on bloodline in the legitimacy of rule, it might be difficult, at least for some, to accept a non-Seyyed as their Supreme Guide. Seyyed Mohammad Khatami, however, black-turbaned and with the blood of Mohammad coursing through his veins, was a name that kept surfacing as a likely choice. There was, of course, the question of his religious credentials, for even though he was a Seyyed, he was only a Hojjatoleslam, a rank below Ayatollah, and the Supreme Leader is supposed to be a marja-e-taghlid, or “source of emulation,” the Persian definition of a Grand Ayatollah. But that hadn’t stopped Khamenei from becoming the Supreme Leader in 1989; he was overnight promoted to Ayatollah (promotion to Ayatollah happens by consensus among other Ayatollahs), and soon thereafter was being referred to as “Grand.” Those who spoke of Khatami as potential Supreme Leader were genuinely excited by the prospect, and those who dismissed him as a candidate felt he lacked the cunning required to pull off such a feat (in both cases being complimentary to Khatami, for the cunningness of mullahs—or akhound, as they are known in Farsi—is considered both legendary and their fundamental character flaw).

  As the days wore on with still no public sign of Khamenei, the rumors gathered steam, forcing Iranian diplomats abroad to deny them without offering proof that their Supreme Guide was still giving them guidance. The Supreme Leader’s office was mute on the subject, although it is not known to issue press releases or have much of a public face, even in extraordinary times. Maintaining the image of the Supreme Leader as “guide,” rather than executive, is part and parcel of the office’s job. The Supreme Leader gives no press conferences, never grants interviews, and speaks only at special gatherings, such as an occasional Friday prayer or commemoration ceremonies of one sort or another. The Leader meets with foreign dignitaries (almost exclusively Muslim, with few exceptions) but limits any televised and public words to generalities, such as Iran’s support for the country (or entity, in the case of Hamas and Hezbollah) whose emissary he’s meeting, Iran’s peaceful and Islamic nature, and Iran’s eagerness to expand trade and contacts with the friendly country in question. As such, he pointedly does not meet with representatives of Western powers. The Leader does not travel overseas; if anyone worthy wishes to see him, that person must travel to Iran. (Khamenei has been outside Iran, although not as Supreme Leader: during his presidency in the 1980s he even visited New York to attend the UN General Assembly.) He does not travel to Mecca to perform the hajj; having been a cleric his entire adult life, he became a hajji many times over prior to assuming the mantle of Rahbar. But the Supreme Leader is supreme not just because of his religious credentials in an Islamic republic; he’s supreme because his position is protected by the nation’s most powerful military force, and it’s not the army.

  Sepah-e Pasdaran-e Enghlab-e Eslami, or “Guardians of the Islamic Revolution Corps” (now that doesn’t sound so bad, does it?), better known as the Revolutionary Guards in the West and, naturally, reporting directly to the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Revolution, are the military force responsible for protecting the velayat-e-faqih and, by extension, the valih-e-faqih. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini created the militia very soon after assuming power in 1979: he had witnessed the supposedly mighty U.S.-equipped army of the Shah, including his much-feared and supposedly elite Imperial Guard unit, the “Immortals,” retreat to their barracks and allow his revolution victory with hardly a fight, and he realized that a regular army could not be trusted to protect a regime. In a nation that relied (and still relies) on conscription to man its army, Khomeini wanted an all-volunteer militia that would be fiercely loyal to the regime that created it, and the Pasdaran were born. Pasdaran were recruited from religious and working-class neighborhoods, the base of the Islamic Republic’s support, and although initially they were a purely defensive force, defending even the nation’s Islamic liquor prohibition, much to the consternation of many an imbibing Iranian, the Iran-Iraq war gave them the opportunity to show their mettle. The Guards fought fiercely, the youthful Basij units their kamikazes, and their strength grew as a parallel force on par with the regular army.

  Over time the Guards
created their own air force and navy, and of course their foreign expeditionary force, the now famous but quite small Qods (Jerusalem) Force, which the United States accuses of everything from supplying Hezbollah to providing arms to Iraqi insurgents. But the Guards aren’t only concerned with security and all things military; they’re also concerned with what ultimately assures loyalty to a system beyond pure faith: money. The Supreme Leader has given them much control over the economy of the country, and they willingly exercise it. Revolutionary Guards are involved in everything from oil, such as contracts for drilling and exploration, to the import-export market. It is, I am told time and time again whenever I’m in Iran, virtually impossible to do any kind of large-scale business deal in Iran without the involvement of the Sepah, as they are generally referred to by Iranians. A friend who was working with a European oil equipment company and who had, in 2007 when I was in Tehran, been running around meeting with various officials to try to secure a government contract had his partner meet with representatives of the Sepah, who seemed very interested in getting involved in any deal. A few days later, however, the partner was arrested by the very same Revolutionary Guards, with no real reason given, but presumably as a signal that any deal would from now on exclude him and my friend. (The partner was quickly released on bail, and is unlikely to hear from the Sepah again.)