by Hooman Majd
Iranian small-town values aren’t diluted by years in the big city or even abroad, or by elevated status, and President Khatami welcomed me in Tehran in 2004 as a hamshahri, a “fellow from the same hometown,” and as though I were a long-lost relative. I saw Khatami twice on that trip at his offices at Sa’adabad Palace, a former palace of the Shah’s used mostly for entertaining foreign dignitaries and assigned to the presidential office under Khatami for essentially the same purposes. Khatami was most concerned at the time with finding a solution to the nuclear issue, and his government had suspended uranium enrichment research and processing while negotiating with the Europeans. But he was adamant that Iran had no plans to develop weapons and was incredulous that many Americans, especially members of the Bush administration, didn’t believe him, even if he recognized that they might have a harder time trusting some of the other members of Iran’s ruling class.
On my subsequent trip, in 2005, I met with him again at Sa’adabad, once while he was still president and once a few days after Ahmadinejad took office but while Khatami was still ensconced in his palace offices, which had been promised him by the Supreme Leader for his post-presidential career. (Ahmadinejad quickly convinced the Leader that that arrangement needed to end and evicted him within weeks of taking over, perhaps as payback for Khatami’s barring him, when Ahmadinejad was mayor of Tehran and as was customary for the mayor, from attending his cabinet meetings.) Ali Khatami would normally arrange for a car to pick me up, but on my second visit, when Khatami had been out of office for a few days, there were no cars available from the presidential pool, so I jumped in a taxi and asked to be taken to Sa’adabad.
My driver was a chatty fellow, and we got into a conversation about war, mainly because, with Ahmadinejad taking over the presidency, le tout Tehran was coming to believe that conflict with the United States was a distinct possibility. I asked the driver if he had served in the military, compulsory for Iranian males at eighteen or after college, and he replied in the affirmative. “I was wounded in battle,” he said, “which is why my arm doesn’t work properly.” He lifted his right arm in the air, although it was impossible to detect any injury.
“The Iraq war?” I asked.
“Not exactly,” he said. “It was at the tail end of the war, and it was the battle with the Mujahedin.” I felt a chill, for he was referring to the Mujahedin-e-Khalq, the Iranian resistance group, the MEK, which had attacked Iran from its base in Iraq in July 1988 and had been ambushed by waiting Iranian troops, who decimated the small army, leaving some two thousand Mujahedin dead. My childhood friend and the son of one of my father’s oldest friends, Payman Bazargan, who had joined the Mujahedin out of college in the United Kingdom, was one of those killed.
“Did you shoot any of the Mujahedin?” I asked, wondering if my driver could have fired the shot that killed my friend.
“Well, I fired my rifle, but I was wounded almost immediately and evacuated from the battlefield. Those poor bastards, they didn’t stand a chance. We knew they were coming, and we just mowed them down.”
“And how did that feel?” I asked. “I mean, killing fellow Iranians?”
“Just as bad as killing anyone, I suppose,” he replied. “It’s all awful, this business of war, no matter who’s fighting. I hope it never comes here again.”
I was silent for a while, but didn’t tell him that a friend had died in the battle he had described. I blamed Payman’s death on the Mujahedin anyway, for as far as I was concerned he had been brainwashed by the cultlike organization, which had no business sending amateurs to fight against an army such as the Islamic Republic’s. Payman had been a press officer for the Mujahedin; his British-accented perfect English had been useful to them until they had decided that in their biggest military campaign against Iran, pompously named Forouq-e Javidan—or “Eternal Light”—every able-bodied member of the organization would have to fight. Fight they did, and die they did. I had lost contact with Payman from the time he had joined the resistance group, but our families are very close, and his death had a large impact on our lives.
In Iran, former monafeghin, or “hypocrites,” as the MEK are called by the government, are usually given amnesty if they repent and pledge allegiance to the Islamic Republic—in fact, the Iranian media make a fuss over every former MEK member released from prison as a show of Iran’s leniency—and I wondered as I sat in a cab heading to see a president of Iran whether Payman, if he had survived, would today have wanted to take advantage of the government’s largesse. He would have recognized by now, I like to believe, that if there’s one thing almost all Iranians inside Iran, and most outside, agree on, it is particular disdain for the most organized and militant of the exile opposition groups, the MEK. Although individual members have been in the forefront of a struggle against the Islamic government and have brought a good measure of deserved pressure on the regime, the fact that the group allied itself with the hated Saddam Hussein—an Arab tyrant who, unprovoked, rained Scud missiles on Tehran and whose soldiers massacred untold hundreds of thousands of Iranians—and then actually fought on the Iraqi side during the long war, is an unforgivable crime in the minds of most. Even Iranians most strongly opposed to the Islamic Republic cannot abide the MEK and its leaders, Massoud and Maryam Rajavi, who were allies of Khomeini in the revolution that toppled the monarchy but broke with the regime, it is widely thought, not because of any discomfort over its interpretation of democracy, but because they were excluded from power by the clerics. Deep in thought, I looked out the window as my driver took me on a route I didn’t recognize and came to a stop outside gates that were unfamiliar. “Sa’adabad,” he said triumphantly.
“This isn’t it,” I said.
“Yes, it is,” he replied indignantly. “The museum entrance is right there, past the gate.”
“But I don’t want the museum,” I said, realizing that I’d have to tell him whom I was going to visit. “I need to go to the offices.”
“Which offices?”
“Khatami’s office.”
The driver turned and looked at me. “President Khatami?”
“Former president,” I said. “But his offices are still where they were.”
“I think that’s all the way at the other end,” said the driver as he turned the car around. He looked at me suspiciously, wondering what business I could possibly have with the former president of Iran. When we finally pulled up to the correct gate, manned by soldiers and Revolutionary Guards holding machine guns, fingers on the triggers, he seemed nervous. “What should I say?” he asked me.
“Just stop right in front of the gate,” I said, rolling down my window and smiling at the soldiers as we slowly came to a stop.
“Are you going to see Khatami himself?” the driver asked, seemingly unconvinced, after I paid him.
“I think so.”
“Then tell him damesh-garm!” he exclaimed, grinning, a Persian expression difficult to translate into American English but oddly very close to the Australian “good on you.”
Khatami was as usual gracious when he met me at the door to his office, despite my being late because of the detour with my driver, and seemed even more relaxed than ever. We talked in general terms about his presidency and his plans for the future. He asked me if I understood his speech at the “Salam Khatami!” function; he seemed proud of his “two Islams” reference, although he wouldn’t go into more details or launch a more direct attack on the new leadership in Iran. His goal now, he said, dismissing an invitation to critique the hard-liners taking over, was to further the understanding of Islam and Iran in the West, but also to further the understanding of the West in the Islamic world. He felt perfectly suited to the job. And, a year later, at the end of August 2006, in keeping with that job, he made his first trip to the United States as a private citizen and, more important, as the most senior Iranian official to visit the United States, outside of a trip to the UN, in the history of the Islamic Republic. He was serious, it appeared, abo
ut his new role and what he believed were his responsibilities. I traveled with him to Chicago, Washington, and Boston, and spent time with him in New York, and throughout the trip he was energized and frankly amazed at the goodwill he experienced at every stop, whether by Americans or Muslim Americans who hosted a number of functions for him. He was genuinely embarrassed by the level of security provided him by the State Department, a level normally reserved for the highest-profile visiting heads of state and one that attracted much attention, and by the end of the trip had become friendly with the security detail assigned to him, so much so that jokes and pleasantries, in halting English on his part, were often exchanged with his minders, who told me they had really enjoyed working with and learning from Khatami and his entourage. “Axis of evil,” it seems, was the furthest thing from their minds.
President Khatami had arrived in New York on August 31, at almost the exact hour that Ambassador John Bolton declared the deadline would pass for Iran to comply with the UN resolution on enrichment. As ludicrous as it sounds, there had been some question as to whether it would expire at midnight New York time or Tehran time; in the end, it seems, Tehran time, seven and a half hours ahead of New York, won. And Ambassador Bolton’s own State Department met Khatami’s Austrian Airlines jet at Kennedy, on the tarmac, with a full contingent of security provided by the department’s Bureau of Diplomatic Security (along with the New York Police Department and the New York State Highway Patrol). The president was whisked to the residence of the Iranian ambassador to the UN on Fifth Avenue, and he settled in for a quiet day of rest before his tour of America began in earnest. The Bush administration had already forbidden contact between current government officials and Khatami (not counting the security contingent), and for domestic Iranian political reasons he couldn’t have met with anyone from the Bush administration anyway, but there were apparently many former government officials who were keen to see him, along with countless other influential Americans, such as George Soros and Richard Blum (Dianne Feinstein’s husband), who flew into Boston on his private jet to have a private meeting with Khatami in his hotel suite. Blum, who is close to Jimmy Carter, again offered Khatami (I was interpreting for them) to help set up a meeting between the two, suggesting his jet could be available should it be necessary for logistical reasons. Khatami declined graciously, and I pointed out that not only was his schedule full but his special visa allowed him to visit only the cities that had been preapproved by the State Department. Atlanta was not on the list.
At the end of President Khatami’s private U.S. trip, the question of whether it was sanctioned or not or even ordered by the leadership in Tehran, as some American political figures claimed, seemed to fade away, at least to those of us who were along for the ride. The symbolism itself of an Iranian president in America was important, yes, but outside of the media reports and what could be gleaned from the interviews and the questions Khatami answered publicly, there were moments that gave real hope to those who were looking for signs, any signs, that a conflict with Iran could be avoided, even with a far more obstinate government in power in Tehran. Khatami’s U.S. visit began on a day when Iran defied the UN and the world by refusing to abide by a resolution, and ended on the fifth anniversary of September 11, a tragedy that, he often pointed out on his trip, he was one of the first world leaders to condemn. Many of the Americans he met, evidently impressed by him, expressed the wish that he was still the president of Iran rather than the incorrigible Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, but the same is probably said often enough to Al Gore about the Bush administration and almost certainly privately said to Bill Clinton as well. Khatami, who still has the ear of the Supreme Leader and will remain influential in Iranian politics for years to come, was himself influenced by traveling around the eastern United States, always on commercial flights (including a Jet Blue one-class-service flight from Boston to New York, where the security agents accompanying us managed to get seats in the middle of the aircraft, much to the surprise and trepidation of some of the passengers who, when they saw the bearded and turbaned Khatami and the half-dozen bearded men with him—to say nothing of the SWAT team, machine guns at the ready, surrounding the jet on the tarmac—asked to be let off the plane).
He was already a man who admired the United States for some reasons, all the while discounting its “liberal” democracy as a model for his own country, but on more than a few occasions he told Americans an anecdote that gave a clue as to what he most admired about that democracy. “Erdogan,” he would say (referring to the Islamist prime minister of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, at the time), “was once asked by angry Islamic nationalists why he sent his daughter to the United States to attend college. And he replied, ‘Because in America she can wear her hijab at university.’” (In Turkey, a strictly secular, albeit Muslim, state, the headscarf, or hijab, was banned in academic institutions until 2008 and is still banned in government.)
Mohammad Khatami was neither the first nor the only cleric to differ with the ruling establishment of the Islamic Republic on matters of democracy, affairs of state, or even interpretation of Islam. Shia Islam allows for a wide range of opinion on virtually every issue, religious or political, which is partly why Iran feels it needs a Supreme Leader, an Ayatollah ostensibly senior to others, to guide the nation and its policies. Khomeini was certainly senior enough, and by virtue of his leadership of the revolution he would have had the title anyway, but Ali Khamenei is, despite his designation as a Grand Ayatollah, not universally recognized by Shias as the most senior of the clerics. Grand Ayatollah Hossein-Ali Montazeri, once Khomeini’s designated successor, subsequently disgraced for criticizing him and the government, placed under house arrest in Qom for his dissent, and finally freed during Khatami’s presidency, qualifies as perhaps the first Ayatollah to differ with the ruling establishment on political and religious matters, and was far senior to Khamenei at the time of his ascendancy to the position of all-powerful leader of Iran. Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the most senior cleric in Iraq, who is actually Iranian, is also considered senior to most other Ayatollahs, although, because he differs with his Iranian peers on the matter of velayat-e-faqih, “rule of the jurisprudent,” he would be automatically disqualified from any governmental role even if he tried to use his Iranian passport to gain entry to the corridors of power (he doesn’t hold Iraqi citizenship). While most Iranian Ayatollahs, certainly those deemed “Grand,” and even most Hojjatoleslams, the next rung down in the Shia hierarchy, agree with the concept of “rule of the jurisprudent,” they often differ as to the interpretation of “rule.” Some, like Khatami, believe strongly in the operative word “guide” and feel, for good reason in Khatami’s case, that the role of the Supreme Leader should be limited to one of a guide in matters mostly confined to the religious, leaving the president of the republic, democratically elected, to administer the country with little interference from above.
Reformists, keen to bring Iran into the twenty-first century in terms of social progress, all agree, but it is important to note that without the power the Supreme Leader wields, a government such as Ahmadinejad’s, also democratically elected, would undoubtedly harm Iran’s political and social development to a far greater degree than it has. The Supreme Leader, a sort of one-man Congress and Supreme Court rolled into each other, provides something of a bulwark against extremism from any side, and although a different Supreme Leader might swing more to the left or to the right, it is unlikely that a Leader elevated to the position by the Assembly of Experts—a sort of College of Cardinals that is popularly elected and reflects the diversity of Iranian political opinion—would not understand that his and his government’s stability and survival depend very much on his performing the balancing act with finesse. (The first and only chairman of the Assembly of Experts, Ayatollah Meshkini, died in the summer of 2007, and while one or two extremist members made a bid for his position, they were easily defeated when the body elected the pragmatic and far-from-extreme Rafsanjani as its chairman.)
Iran’s second Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, listens to his constituents, the Iranian people, he listens to all sides of the political spectrum, he considers public and world opinion, and then he makes decisions that annoy one or more parties but keep the Islamic Republic somewhat on an even keel. Democracy it is not, at least not by Western standards, but, as has often been stated to me by supporters of the system inside Iran, supporters who dislike being lectured to by Americans or even Iranian-Americans on the niceties of democracy, neither was the Supreme Court’s decision in 2000 to award the presidency to George Bush “in the interests of the country” despite his second-place showing in the popular vote and a very questionable victory in the electoral college. But reformers are convinced, as they might be in any democracy, that in a truly free system the people would choose them, the liberals intent on empowering the people, rather than conservatives who would limit their freedoms. They believe that Iran would not have produced a president such as Ahmadinejad had they not been unfairly blamed for the limitations of the political system, a system that meant they had to compromise with and even yield to the Supreme Leader and the more conservative politicians at every turn.
One of the leading and most senior Ayatollahs closely allied with Khatami and known for his liberal views is Mohammad Mousavi Bojnourdi, head of the Imam Khomeini Center for Islamic Studies. He was present at almost every public event that Khatami attended, even traveling with him on his trips abroad (I met him for the first time at a UNESCO conference in Paris in 2005), and provided Khatami with some serious Islamic cover, for although Khatami himself was a cleric, he was, and is, far more vulnerable to attack by hard-liners than an established Ayatollah ever would or could be.