The Ayatollah Begs to Differ

by Hooman Majd

  “Thanks so much,” I said. “I really appreciate it.” I knew my mother, whom I’d be re-gifting them to, actually would.

  “It’s auspicious,” she said, staring straight at me. “Blessed, because it comes from the shrine.” Mr. M.’s daughter, who watches PMC and other satellite television stations, who sees Iranians abroad happily living luxurious lives, and who might wish, hopelessly, to join them, perhaps takes comfort in believing that she has something many of those exiles don’t: faith, and proximity to where the Messiah will appear one Tuesday night to set all the wrongs of the world right.

  I put the prayer beads back in the box and into my pocket, taking out my cell phone and turning it on. She glanced at the phone in my hands. “It’s different from the last one, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” I replied. “I got this one quite recently.”

  “Is it also a Motorola?” she asked.

  “Yes,” I said, handing her the phone to examine, surprised to learn that she had noticed the make of my phone over a year ago.

  “Gosh. It’s so beautiful!” she said, caressing the phone. “They make such beautiful things in America,” she continued, throwing a glance at her father. I didn’t have the heart to tell her that it, like almost all American electronics, was made in China. She handed the phone back to me.

  “Is it expensive?” she asked.

  “No, not really,” I said, “about a hundred dollars: cell phones are pretty cheap in America.” She paused, converting the sum into rials in her head. I started for the door, the family following my footsteps as good Iranian manners dictate. I, as manners also dictate, begged them to remain in the room, saying that I would see myself out, but of course they followed me anyway. “Goodbye again,” I said, putting on my shoes by the door. “Thank you so much, and I again apologize for imposing on you.”

  “Please,” they all said, Mrs. M. adding the classic ta’arouf line: “Sorry you had a bad time.”

  “I had a wonderful time!” I said, and I meant it, although they, unaccustomed to anything but ta’arouf, would never know whether my words were spoken sincerely. I noticed the daughter was still looking at the phone in my hand.

  “Excuse me,” she said, looking up. “Does it give good antenna?”

  PRIDE AND HUMILITY

  The Iranian Foreign Ministry sits on parklike grounds in the center of downtown Tehran: a visually stunning low-slung building built at the time of Reza Shah but with more art deco and classically Persian flourishes than other government buildings, all of which exhibit the German fascist architecture so popular with the Shah at the time.1 It is also one of the few large government buildings where you will very rarely encounter a cleric, or even someone not wearing a proper suit, for the Foreign Ministry is where the Islamic Republic gets down to the now critical business of interacting with the outside world at a time when its power and influence are on the rise. Joining the foreign service is the most difficult career choice for would-be civil servants (as it is in most other countries), and the legions of gray-suited men and elegant hijab-wearing women who march purposefully up and down the vast marble-floored corridors of the Foreign Ministry have all, at one time or another, had to endure classes, lectures, and study at the ministry’s North Tehran campus: the Center for Research and Education. Nestled in the foothills of the Alborz Mountains on a street named for a war martyr and in the very far reaches of the northern part of the city, the campus is not unlike a college, with numerous nondescript buildings strewn about on acres of parkland.

  On a warm winter day in 2007 it was snowing lightly when I arrived at the facility, from a sunnier downtown, twenty minutes early for my appointment with the deputy foreign minister in charge of research and education, and the man essentially responsible for instilling Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s ideology in Iran’s diplomats’ heads. I decided to linger just outside the gates for a few minutes, and I took shelter under the overhang of the large bookstore accessible to the public, but not yet open for business in the morning. In the windows of the store there were copies of every political tome imaginable, from East and West, Persian authored as well as many translated into Farsi, displayed on stands and stacked in artful piles as they would be in any commercial bookstore in the West.2 Prominent among the titles, almost center stage in the middle window, was the Farsi translation of Mein Kampf, complete with a photo of a serious-looking Adolf Hitler on the cover. A jarring image that I couldn’t help but stare at, wondering if President Ahmadinejad had personally directed the ministry to display the book for all to see or if an employee had taken it upon himself or herself to anticipate the president’s taste in political literature. I noticed that books on Marx and communism, an ideology that is anathema to the Islamic Republic, were also available, but it was hard to tell from the titles if they were critical of the ideology or merely critiques of it.

  It stopped snowing rather suddenly, and the sun shone brightly as I made my way past the security gate and onto the lavish grounds of the center, asking directions to the deputy foreign minister’s office, which could have been in any one of a dozen buildings in my view. It was quiet on campus, hardly anyone was around, not even in the building where I finally found myself, and I had to knock on a few doors to find someone who would tell me on which floor and where their boss’s office actually was. At the end of one empty hallway near a window I saw a blond young man in jeans, a Briton, complaining loudly into his cell phone about various visa issues and the troubles he was encountering. What an Englishman was doing at the center was a mystery to me, for it’s not where foreigners come to extend their visas, but presumably he was a student who, like an English girl I’d met before, had managed to penetrate Iran’s normally secretive Foreign Ministry. He turned and looked at me, and I reluctantly moved on, knowing that if I lingered, he’d assume I was spying on him, which I’ll freely admit held some appeal to me, especially since my Persian conspiracy-minded opinion was that he had to be a spy, or budding spy, himself.

  I finally found the office I was looking for at the end of a wide corridor on the third floor of the building, and within minutes I was ushered by an assistant into the cavernous office suite of Manouchehr Mohammadi, Ph.D. (as it points out on his business card), the deputy foreign minister for research and education. (Ph.D. is seemingly not adequately prestigious for Dr. Mohammadi, for his business card also shows his e-mail address as beginning with “professor.”) Dr. Mohammadi, dressed in a three-piece suit and the classic collarless white shirt of the Foreign Ministry, stood up and shook my hand, and indicated that I should sit on a sofa some distance from his desk. He sat down on the chair facing his desk and opened a file, presumably mine.

  “What can I do for you?” he asked, looking through the papers. I told him that I wanted to chat about various things, that I was a writer, and that I hoped he didn’t mind if I took notes. He smiled and waited for the attendant who had walked in with a tray to place a glass of tea on the table in front of me. He waved the attendant away when he approached him with the tray, and looked at the file once more. “Happy to meet you,” he said, closing the folder and putting it back on his desk. “I have fond memories of America,” he said, “of my time at university there, in Wisconsin.”

  “Which school did you go to?” I asked.

  “Madison,” he said. “You know, I’ve never felt as comfortable anywhere outside Iran as in America.”

  “Yes,” I said, “I think most Iranians feel that way.”

  “You know, the era of Mr. Nice Guy is over,” he suddenly said, seriously, “because it didn’t work.” He was referring to Khatami, and he must have gleaned from my file that I was close to the ex-president. I thought he wanted to see my reaction, but I showed none except to nod my head and write in my little notebook. “Ahmadinejad is working,” he continued matter-of-factly, “and the United States must accept the Islamic Republic as a reality.”

  “I can’t speak for the government,” I said, “but I think many ordinary Americans are worried abo
ut President Ahmadinejad and the policies of the Iranian government.”

  “We’re not after public diplomacy,” said Dr. Mohammadi with a broad and insincere smile. “One and a half billion Muslims have woken up after five hundred years of Western hegemony,” he continued, “and we don’t want Dick Cheney or Condoleezza Rice to give us orders. We are interested not in compromise but in coexistence.” He had used the English words, and he proudly smiled again as I furiously underlined “no compromise” in my notebook. And as if anticipating my pen strokes, he repeated, “No compromise.”

  “So how did the Holocaust conference relate to a position of ‘no compromise’?” I asked, trying to steer the conversation to that touchy subject. Manouchehr Mohammadi had been the man responsible for organizing the infamous Tehran Holocaust conference of December 2006, on direct orders from President Ahmadinejad. And he had, it seemed, relished the task, beaming in every photo of him at the event.3

  “Ah,” he said, looking at me carefully. “We have a saying in Iran that I’m sure you know. It goes: ‘You say something; I believe it. You insist; I begin to wonder. You swear on it; I know you’re lying.’ The Holocaust conference was an academic affair, looking to find answers to unanswered questions. The West insists—no, swears—it happened, so we wanted to see what we could discover.”

  “But why would you invite someone like David Duke,” I asked, “who has no credibility whatsoever and is a known racist and anti-Semite?”

  “Listen,” he said, smiling again, “we received a résumé and request to attend from Kiev, Ukraine, from Mr. Duke, and after he arrived in Tehran, there was all this fuss—I think it was CBS News that started it—and he personally came here and told me that it was all Zionist lies and propaganda.”

  “With all due respect,” I said, “David Duke is very well-known in the United States, at least to anyone over a certain age. I myself remember the headlines and the scandal when it was revealed that he was KKK all those years ago, and of course it’s not that he’s just an anti-Semite; he’s a racist ex–Klan leader who actually believes that blacks, and I presume Iranians too, are inferior to whites like himself. Surely that is a problem for the Islamic Republic, a country greatly popular in Africa, even if the Holocaust denial or anti-Semitism isn’t?” I really wanted to also ask him whether anyone in his office was aware of Google, but I bit my tongue. Mohammadi stared at me for a few moments, but not angrily. It was as if a realization, that perhaps Duke’s racism has additional targets inconvenient to the Islamic Republic’s repute, had hit him for the first time.

  “Well, we didn’t know,” he then said with finality, “and when the whole thing happened, I summoned him to my office for an explanation—he sat right where you’re sitting—and he denied it, as I just told you, but I had him put on a plane anyway. And I denied his request to meet President Ahmadinejad.” We were interrupted by his cell phone, ringing with a Muzak-like soft rock tone, and I unconsciously shifted in my seat. David Duke, after all, had been sitting on the very same cushion only a few weeks earlier. When Mohammadi finished the call, he went into a monologue about how wonderful the hard-line policies of President Ahmadinejad were and how the West was beginning to realize that it couldn’t shove Iran around any longer. I stopped taking notes and just looked at him, in a sort of wonderment that the training of Iran’s young diplomats had been put under the charge of a person who exhibited about as much diplomatic finesse as John Bolton had as an American ambassador. After a few more interruptions of his cell phone (didn’t people know his office number?), he looked at his watch and I took the cue to excuse myself.

  “Thanks very much,” I said, standing up. “This was enlightening.”

  “You’re very welcome,” he replied. “On the Holocaust, by the way, you should know that I conducted my own very extensive research into it. You know I’m a scholar, of course.”

  “Really,” I said, a little surprised that he’d want to revisit the topic.

  “And I discovered the truth,” he continued proudly. “There was no Holocaust.” He gave me a knowing smile. “Sure, some people died,” he carried on, perhaps because of my hanging lower jaw and dead stare, “but you see, there was an outbreak of typhus in the prison camps, and in order to stop its spread, the Germans burned the corpses. All told, something like three hundred thousand people died from typhus.” Mohammadi smiled again, a little triumphant smirk.

  I stood still in disbelief, not knowing what to say. In the space of minutes he had gone from being Holocaust agnostic, like his president, to a full-fledged denier, like Duke. It was, of course, an old theory put forth years ago by various Holocaust deniers, and something he had probably read somewhere in his “scholarly” research. And, although head of research at the Foreign Ministry, he had undoubtedly not availed himself of the ministry archives, archives that might have revealed to him that Iranian diplomats in Paris, from this, his own Foreign Ministry, had taken it upon themselves to issue Iranian passports to Jews escaping the very Holocaust they were aware of, but that he now denied. Or he could have simply asked an ex-ambassador or two, say, someone like my father, who knew one of those diplomats himself, a diplomat who had been the uncle of the onetime prime minister Amir Abbas Hoveyda and as such had been a well-known figure in the Foreign Ministry. (An Iranian television historical miniseries a few months later depicted an Iranian diplomat’s role in rescuing French Jews, and became the highest-rated show on television in 2007.4 Presumably the producers did not ask for Dr. Mohammadi’s input.) But I quickly decided there was no point arguing with him, smiled back at him, and just shook his hand and left.

  I felt relieved to be out of his presence, and as I walked across the perfectly manicured lawns outside, I wondered just how much influence men like him could have on Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s thinking. Ahmadinejad may be open to questioning the Holocaust, I thought, but he was a far smarter man than the deputy foreign minister. A few days later, when I was relating my meeting with Mohammadi to President Khatami, he screwed up his face in disgust at the first mention of his name. Mohammadi has held senior positions at the Foreign Ministry even under the reformists, just as other hard-liners have, and their apparently untouchable status only serves to illustrate that the “Ahmadinejad element,” always a factor, will remain a constant in Iranian politics long after he is gone.

  President Ahmadinejad and his government deserve much of the scorn heaped on them if for no other reason than his and some of his officials’ singular and puerile obsession with the Holocaust, which most Iranians feel has nothing to do with them. But if Ahmadinejad is best known in the West for his outbursts on the Holocaust, Israel, and Iran’s more forceful defiance in pursuing a nuclear program, he represented far more to average Iranians the summer they elected him to the presidency.

  On a hot night a few days after Ahmadinejad’s inauguration in August 2005, in a comfortably air-conditioned hired car in Tehran, I sat next to the college-educated driver, a clean-cut man in his late twenties who, with his impeccably clean car, manner, and dress, could easily be from the wealthy tree-lined neighborhood in the north of the city where I was headed. When I asked him about the elections that had brought Ahmadinejad to power, the subject of every conversation in Tehran at the time, he pointed to a group of girls in the car next to us: heavily made-up, on their cell phones, and with scarves barely covering their well-coiffed heads. “Some people,” he said, “think that freedom means men being able to wear shorts or women to go about without the hijab. Others think that freedom means having a full belly.” He paused for a moment. “There’s just more of the latter,” he said, forcefully changing gears as if to emphasize the point, which I took to mean that he had voted for the president. When we arrived at the slick apartment building that was my destination, I felt almost embarrassed that to him I must have represented one of the people who, with a stomach about to be made full, felt that freedom did indeed mean that people might dress as they please. But there was no tension in the car, and in fact he
enthusiastically engaged in the most traditional form of ta’arouf, which in a taxi ride means having to sometimes beg the driver to take your money. “How much do I owe you?” I asked, fumbling with the thick stacks of well-worn Iranian money in my hands, all of which added up to less than thirty dollars.

  “It’s unworthy” came the standard ta’arouf reply.

  “No, please,” I insisted.

  “Please, it’s nothing,” said the driver. Normally, at this stage one more “please” from me and the bill would be settled, usually to the driver’s advantage, but this young man was going for a bout of extreme ta’arouf.

  “Please,” I implored him, counting out some bills.

  “Absolutely not, you’re my guest,” he said.

  “No, thanks very much, but really, I must pay you,” I insisted.

  “I beg you,” he replied. For a moment I questioned whether this was not in fact classical ta’arouf but the more sinister form of the art that requires a decisive winner and loser in the verbal sparring, with the winner’s philosophical point having been acknowledged by the loser. Was he suggesting that he didn’t want to take my money because he was so scornful of the full bellies?

  “Please,” I implored again, no longer caring if I appeared desperate or if I lost this round. “Please tell me how much the fare is.” That did it. He had made me really beg, and with a slightly scornful but not malicious smile he said, “Thirty-five hundred tomans” (about four dollars), and about five hundred more than the ride should have cost at the time. I paid him without disputing the amount and watched him turn his car around and leave, his smile, a little triumphant, not quite disappearing as he watched me through the window until he stepped heavily on the gas pedal, the car shrieking away down the narrow street.