The Ayatollah Begs to Differ

by Hooman Majd

  All week I had witnessed a sort of melancholy mood; Iranians, even those who voted against the reformers, heirs to Khatami’s politics, seemed now saddened to see him go. He had been the soft face of the nation for a long time, a period of growth and international outreach for the Islamic Republic, and despite frequent criticism from both left and right he had, many Iranians agreed on the eve of the archconservative Ahmadinejad’s inauguration, performed his duties as honorably as any man could. Slowly, middle-and upper-middle-class Iranians seemed to be coming to the realization that perhaps their lives, at least their social lives, could be in for a change, and not for the better. Khatami had challenged the system, if not changed it, in a way that no high-ranking official had, for although Iran had had its share of dissident mullahs, none had been permitted to advance their careers within the system as Khatami had. Strictly speaking not a dissident, for Khatami was a product of the revolution and was dedicated to its promise, he was nonetheless someone who differed with many of the leading senior Ayatollahs, and certainly with their conservative followers in government, on issues as far-reaching as the place of Islam in society and relations with the outside world, including the United States.

  My friend Fuad once joked to me, after I had spent time with President Ahmadinejad in New York, that I should persuade the president to go to dinner at his house in Los Angeles, implying that he—and perhaps some other Iranian Jews—would politely give him a piece of his mind, certainly while employing some particularly challenging ta’arouf. I half-jokingly replied that although I thought that was an impossibility, perhaps I could persuade Khatami, who had told me he very much wanted to go to California the last time he toured the East Coast, to have dinner with him instead. “Listen,” Fuad said in all seriousness, aware of my relationship with Khatami, “if you could arrange that, believe me, it would be a greater honor for me than if Ben-Gurion himself came to dinner! Please tell him that; I really mean it.” Over a year and a half after leaving office, Khatami still had his fans.

  That Khatami would still be relevant in Iranian politics today, particularly after a stunning loss in the presidential elections of 2005 by his would-be successors (Mehdi Karroubi and Mostafa Moin, the reform candidates in the first round, finished third and fourth, respectively), is not particularly surprising. Iranians have very little experience with political parties (the Shah having outlawed all except his own, Rastakhiz, to which membership was mandatory for not only all civil servants but practically the entire country), and few identify themselves with one or another of the parties that have existed legally under the Islamic governments that followed. Most Iranian voters wouldn’t know to what party a particular candidate belongs anyway, and as such, personality plays a large role in elections, as does, naturally, where a candidate falls in the political spectrum: liberal, pragmatic center, or conservative. Khatami was the first true liberal (by the standards of Iran, or indeed the Middle East) to become president, and under his leadership noticeable changes occurred in Iranian society. Not only were laws on public behavior relaxed (or ignored, mostly), but Iran’s isolationist policies were almost completely reversed, leading to an opening for Iranian businesses and even tourism that changed the character of the Islamic Republic. Iranians abroad, after years of staying away from their homeland partly out of fear and partly because of the obstacles Iranian consulates would erect for dual-passport holders, were actively encouraged to return to Iran, if only for yearly visits, and the normally dour and even rude officials in charge of issuing passports to Iranians were transformed, by direct order from Tehran, into charmingly polite, ta’aroufing, and helpful fellow citizens.1

  The kinds of changes to Iranian society that were made under Khatami have proven very difficult to undo, even when conservatives have tried their utmost. (It is important to note that during his populist campaign, Ahmadinejad convincingly dismissed, usually with a giggle, as ridiculous any notion that his administration would clamp down on press freedom, questionable hijab, or the Internet, all of which of course he then proceeded to attempt to do with varying degrees of success.) It is probably safe to say that a majority of Iranians, perhaps commensurate with the percentages that voted for him, share a political philosophy with Khatami—that is to say, a philosophy of moderation and real political change that doesn’t subvert the Islamic underpinning of the state. (It should be noted that the Revolutionary Guards, thought of in the West as monolithically and ideologically hard-line, also voted for Khatami with about the same percentages, over 70 percent, as the general population.) Naturally the more left-leaning and liberal Iranians were greatly disappointed by the pace of change and by Khatami’s unwillingness to take on the real hard-liners when it most counted, and there are those in the diaspora who are reluctant to countenance anyone who works within the Islamic system, but leaving aside economic factors (which Ahmadinejad played to his advantage), few Iranians, including members of the Guards, would describe themselves as being philosophically much to the left or the right of Khatami.

  The desire for reform, both economic and political, is very much alive in Iran, no matter whom one talks to, and the broader reform movement seems to be awaiting a leader to emerge before the presidential elections of 2009. In every election since Ahmadinejad became president, the moderate and reform candidates have—much with the same majority that Khatami attracted—won decisive victories. A senior Iranian diplomat (and relative of an important cleric), in the days after Ahmadinejad’s election, described to me what he believed to be Khatami’s, and ultimately the reform movement’s, biggest fault. “He didn’t designate a successor,” he told me, “and that doomed the reform candidates. If only he had groomed someone, if only he had properly endorsed one of the candidates, that person would have won easily, and we wouldn’t be stuck with this idiot, this ablah!”

  A few days before he was to hand over power to his successor, I met with Khatami at Sa’adabad Palace, his part-time office in the less polluted and more secluded part of the city, and he seemed relieved to be leaving office, happy to be able to devote his time to what he truly believed in—working for dialogue among civilizations. Khatami, a mid-level cleric, a Hojjatoleslam (meaning “expert on Islam” or “proof of Islam”) and not yet an Ayatollah, told me he was forming an NGO to pursue his dialogue initiative, and I got the sense that he thought he might actually be more effective outside government than in it, for he had, over the years, been thwarted by the clerical leadership in trying to implement many political and societal changes he thought necessary to the healthy development of “Islamic democracy.” He also had a fatalistic view of the future of politics in Iran, hinting at the probability of a painful future for democracy-minded Iranians under a strict rightwing regime not known for its tolerance of liberal or, in their minds, un-Islamic thought.

  Khatami seemed saddened by the Bush administration’s attitude toward his country; he told me of his brief encounter with Bill Clinton at the pope’s funeral that April, a mere nod of the head, and wistfully said that things would have been much different the last few years had America been under a Clinton presidency. He reminded me that Clinton had been the first U.S. president to sit through a speech by an Iranian official (his, at the UN) since the founding of the Islamic Republic (U.S. officials normally stand up and walk out as protest when an Iranian leader begins a speech at the UN), a sign to him that had there not been an American election in 2000, or had the Supreme Court decided its outcome differently, Iran and the United States might have found a way toward normalization of relations. Fundamentalists in both countries, he said, contributed to the animosity between the United States and Iran, and now, he implied, the situation could only get worse. I don’t think he was quite aware of the irony that the “fundamentalists” he spoke of in America were closer in philosophy to Muslim fundamentalists, his political enemies, than to anyone else in the West. It strikes me often while I am in Iran that were Christian evangelicals to take a tour of Iran today, they might find it the model for an
ideal society they seek in America. Replace Allah with God, Mohammad with Jesus, keep the same public and private notions of chastity, sin, salvation, and God’s will, and a Christian Republic is born.

  During the last few days of Khatami’s presidency, there were a number of farewell events planned by his supporters and, on an official level, the state. On the Sunday night of the biggest event, dubbed “Salam Khatami!” (salam can mean both “goodbye” and “hello”), traffic around the Interior Ministry, where it was held, was snarled, and the main conference hall itself was packed. As I walked to my reserved seat, I passed many dignitaries I could recognize and some I couldn’t. The Chief Rabbi of Tehran was conspicuous in the front row, as were the Bishops of the Armenian Church and the Assyrian Church, and the Zoroastrian priests who were scattered about the first and second rows in prominent and television-dominating seats, no doubt reserved for them on explicit instructions by Khatami himself, who had made interfaith relations a priority of his presidency. Ayatollah Khomeini’s grandson Hossein sat in the front row, center, next to Khatami’s brother Reza, the ultraliberal politician disqualified from running for any office by the Guardian Council, who sat with his wife, Zahra Eshraghi, Ayatollah Khomeini’s granddaughter. This was the liberal face of the Islamic Republic, even with Khomeini descendants in the crowd, and die-hard conservatives chose to stay away. The evening began, as all official functions in Iran do, with a piercingly loud recitation of the Koran. It sounded not unlike the call to prayer to my ears, but every time I thought the orator was finished, he’d leap into another verse. It was hauntingly beautiful, for Khatami’s people had chosen a man with a mellifluous voice, though I still couldn’t help but wonder as it went on and on with no end in sight whether the rabbi and the priests were thinking the same thing I was: that sometimes the Islamic part of the Islamic Republic can be, shall we say, a little overbearing.

  When the recitation was finally over, speakers from all walks of life—artists, professors, doctors, and students—took to the stage and spoke proudly of Khatami’s accomplishments and what he had meant to them and the nation. The highlights of the evening were two young students, one man and one woman, who, with a nationalistic fervor that would have been more appropriate at a fascist rally than at a gathering of liberals, poured poetic praise on the great nation, the great people, and the great leader they had had. The Khatami cheerleading section behind me broke out in chants, raised their banners, and enthusiastically jumped but not quite danced (for public dancing is prohibited in the Islamic Republic, especially for women), even as the applause died down. The speeches and the cheering momentarily threatened to turn the event into a dangerous celebration of a cult of personality, but I was confident that Khatami himself, who forbade government offices to display his photograph while he was in office (although many ignored his request), would ensure that it would not.

  Khatami, elegant as ever in his summer cream-colored linen robes and perfectly wound black turban, rose from his front-row seat to renewed thunderous applause and an audience of millions watching on live TV. He hushed the crowd with gestures and launched into a speech that was self-congratulatory and yet somehow modest at the same time. How often, I wondered, had he wanted to give this speech, to tell an ungrateful nation that they didn’t have it so bad, that without him they wouldn’t have enjoyed even the modest freedoms they now took for granted? He spoke at length of two Islams—his true Islam and the Islam of extremism and fanaticism: the Islam of the Taliban. Both, he daringly said (for the strictly Sunni Taliban were Iran’s archenemies and are reviled by almost all Iranians, including all the mullahs), exist in Iran, a veiled reference to the likes of Ayatollah Mesbah-Yazdi, Ahmadinejad’s archconservative patron, and to what might come under the new regime. A few people shouted, “Death to the reactionaries!” but Khatami quickly silenced them. “‘Death to,’” he said in so many words, “is so over.”

  The president defended the progress made under his administration, listing his accomplishments one by one, but what was notable about his almost hour-long speech was that he referred to the Rahbar, or “Supreme Leader,” only once. No public figure in Iran would ordinarily dare to exclude his ultimate boss, Ayatollah Khamenei, from a major speech, but Khatami was, now that he was leaving office, showing his contempt for the ruling class that had made his job difficult during his presidency. The only other reference to Rahbar (which simply translates from Farsi as “Leader,” but is also Khamenei’s title) during the evening was when the MC, in a flourish of Persian ta’arouf that combined flattery for one and insult for another, referred to Khatami as the “Rahbar” and, after an almost perceptible pause, “of the dialogue among civilizations.” Wow, I thought, that did not go unnoticed by the conservative supporters of Khamenei watching at home. At the end of his speech, and a moment that I found out later had been cut away from on television, a man shouted from the floor, “What about Ganji?,” referring to the hunger-striking political prisoner Akbar Ganji languishing in Evin prison at the time. Khatami smiled and called back, “Okay, okay,” as if he intended to answer, but the MC, a tall, imposing woman in a cream-colored manteau (ankle-length lightweight coat) and hijab, intervened quickly and brought the rally to an end, allowing Khatami to be conveniently whisked away by his security contingent. Don’t push it, she wisely must have thought, and as I looked behind me, I was relieved to see the man walk away unmolested by any government security agents undoubtedly mingling with the crowd.

  Seyyed Mohammad Khatami was elected president of the Islamic Republic of Iran by a landslide in 1997. It had been eighteen years since the revolution of 1979 had wiped out over twenty-five hundred years of monarchy and the Shia clerics of Iran had solidified their power in forming the only functioning theocracy of the late twentieth century. Iran had suffered a brutal eight-year war with Iraq in the 1980s, a period when immigration to the West resulted in brain drain on a scale Iran had never seen, and those who remained committed to living in Iran (out of either necessity or unwillingness to start a new life elsewhere), from all classes in society, were ready for a change. The austere, rigidly controlled society had already started opening up under Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, the pragmatic and fiercely capitalist previous president, but Iranians were growing tired of the establishment that he and other clerics represented—a corrupt establishment given to cronyism—and voted overwhelmingly to give power to the relatively obscure former culture minister Khatami, someone they knew had at least allowed far greater freedom from censorship and a freer press and had expressed liberal views on Islamic democracy during his tenure as minister of culture and Islamic guidance—more so than any other public figure had dared to in the past.

  Khatami had studied Western philosophy at university in Isfahan, but after receiving his bachelor’s degree and while still studying for a master’s at the University of Tehran, he moved to Qom to further his education in Islam. He completed his studies, ijtihad, at the seminaries, achieving the status of mujtahed, or “scholar,” the equivalent of a divinity Ph.D., before moving to Hamburg, where he became chairman of the Islamic Center in the German city. He returned to Iran after the revolution of 1979 and immediately became involved with the government, first as a member of parliament, then as culture minister twice, once from 1982 to 1986 and then again from 1989 to 1992, when he resigned. He then went on to become the head of the National Library, reflecting his taste for all things academic, until his election as president in 1997. He was also (and still is) a member from its inception of the beautifully named but actually liberal-leaning Association of Combatant Clerics, not to be confused with the hard-line Combatant Clergy Association, both of which conjure up images of Monty Python’s “Spanish Inquisition” skit from the 1970s, though only some of those in the latter group espouse philosophies bearing any similarity to the Bishops’ of the Python troupe’s fantasies. The “combatant” (or mobarez in Farsi, which can also be translated as “resistant”) clerics of neither association, however, are ninja Ayatolla
hs who might, with robes flying, soar across a room to land a deadening blow on those they do combat with, but they are politically minded senior clerics who have chosen one side or another, reform or conservative, in the ongoing struggle for the soul of their beloved Islamic Republic.

  There are some in either camp who agree on many issues, and Hassan Rowhani, for example, the chief nuclear negotiator under Khatami and by no means a staunch conservative, is in the opposing camp to his, as is Rafsanjani the pragmatist, who leans to the reform side in Iranian politics, particularly if the conservatives are ascendant. Both clergies, extremely influential with the Supreme Leader, have, under a continued onslaught by Ahmadinejad and his allies, grown even closer to Khatami and the liberal reformers, perhaps hoping to derail any possibility of hard-line conservatives staying in power after the next presidential election in 2009 by uniting in their opposition to them.

  Khatami was born in Ardakan, in the desert province of Yazd, in 1943, and so, unlike some other clerics, he has spent most of his adult life under an Islamic Republic. Ardakan is my father’s hometown, and at the time of Khatami’s youth was a backwater small village where everybody knew one another and a handful of families, probably no more than four or five, were wealthy landowners and the acknowledged elite. These families intermarried, naturally, and two of Khatami’s mother’s siblings, a brother and a sister from the Ziaie family, married my father’s older sister and brother, thus making my many first cousins on that side of the family first cousins to Khatami as well. I had never met Khatami himself, however, until well into his presidency, but I had met his brother (and chief of staff during his second term) Ali Khatami in the late 1970s, when we were both in college in Washington, where he roomed with his cousin Mohammad Majd, also my cousin.