by Hooman Majd
In addition to calls from extremists on the right for Khatami to be censured or even defrocked for traveling to the United States in 2006, there were renewed attacks on his Islamic piety when news surfaced in Iran in the late spring of 2007, via video on YouTube, that Khatami had shaken the hands of women on a visit to Rome, where he had met Pope Benedict, a few weeks earlier. YouTube is blocked in Iran, as are many other foreign Web sites, and it is often impossible to fathom the reasons behind the censorship (the Web sites of the New York Post, the Baltimore Sun, and the International Herald Tribune are blocked, for example, but those of the New York Times—which owns the International Herald Tribune—Haaretz, and even the conservative and rabidly anti–Islamic Republic Jerusalem Post aren’t), particularly since it is common knowledge in Tehran that proxies are used to gain access to blocked sites. Naturally the government censors block the proxies as well as soon as they become aware of them (using U.S. software, much like the Chinese censors), but new proxies pop up on a daily basis, and Internet-surfing Iranians will often call each other in the mornings, as I have often done, to pass around the latest proxy addresses that enable them to freely navigate the Web. As such, and without too much trouble, the YouTube Khatami video and downloaded versions of it made the rounds of Iranian computers with lightning speed. Although the clip clearly showed him shaking hands with female admirers, he was forced to first issue a denial, and then say that in the crowds he encountered, it was far too difficult to see whether an outstretched hand belonged to a man or a woman.2
His denial was reminiscent of another denial he was forced to make while he was still president—that he had cordially chatted with Moshe Katsav, president of Israel at the time, at Pope John Paul II’s funeral in 2005, also in Rome. (What is it about the Eternal City that comes back to haunt him?) Ali Khatami, his chief of staff, had told me a few days prior to attending the funeral that they were making arrangements with the Italian government and Vatican officials to ensure that Khatami, representing Iran, would not be seated too close to Katsav, representing the alphabetically adjacent Israel, in the viewing stands, but it had been impossible to separate the two by more than a few chairs and a few feet. Khatami’s problem was not so much that he might be forced to cross paths with an Israeli leader, who under normal circumstances would have wanted to shun the leader of Iran anyway, as that Katsav was an Iranian by birth, spoke fluent Farsi, and, moreover, was from the same hometown as Khatami. As such, and with Katsav’s inherent knowledge of ta’arouf, the danger that he would say hello was real, particularly to someone such as Khatami, who was known, even among the Iranian community in Israel, as a mild-mannered mullah who harbored none of the prejudices of some of his fellow clerics. (Under Khatami, Iranians who lived in Israel, for example, were quietly allowed to reclaim their Iranian citizenship through the Iranian Consulate in Istanbul and travel back and forth—again, usually through Turkey—unmolested, a practice that continues today, despite Ahmadinejad’s anti-Israel rants.)
As it happened, Katsav did apparently say hello, at least according to him, perhaps offering up proof to Iranian Jews that his ta’arouf skills had not diminished, speaking in Farsi and reminiscing for a few moments about their hometown of Yazd. Foreign newspapers published photographs that showed Khatami and Katsav standing very close to each other, apparently engaged in conversation, although it was impossible to prove that they actually uttered any words, and upon his return to Iran, Khatami simply flatly denied, despite Katsav’s assertion, having had any contact whatsoever with the Israeli president. The issue died quickly, in all probability because the Supreme Leader, who had no desire to see his president in the kind of hot water that might lead to a destabilization of the republic, ordered the dogs off, but Khatami’s enemies made a mental note that apparently remains archived in their memories.
Khatami was and is by no means a friend of Israel, and he shares the Iranian leadership’s view that the “Zionist” state is an illegal one, but he has told me on many occasions that he strongly believes that Iran under any leadership would abide with whatever the Palestinian people decided on their future, implying that if the Palestinians made peace with Israel, then Iran’s position might change. As president, if on a foreign trip an Israeli reporter tried to ask him a question at a press conference, Khatami would, as other Iranian officials do, refuse to take the question, but at Harvard University in 2006, as a private citizen, he had no qualms about politely answering the questions of a few Israeli students who quizzed him on the Holocaust (he said of course it happened), on Israel, and even on the topic of Ron Arad, the missing Israeli pilot who bailed out of his crippled Phantom jet fighter over Lebanon in 1986 and was captured by Shia militias, but is believed by some to be held alive in Tehran. One question, on the issue of Ahmadinejad’s “wiping Israel off the map,” left Khatami distancing himself from his successor’s remarks but pointing out at the end that “Palestine has been wiped off the map for sixty years,” a quip that drew cheers from many in the audience and, surprisingly, no jeers. It is difficult to dislike Khatami, even, apparently, if one is an Israeli at Harvard.
I met with Ayatollah Bojnourdi for the second time in Tehran after Ahmadinejad took office and the reformers he was close to had suffered a stinging loss at the polls. Bojnourdi, who with visible pride told me of his audience with Pope John Paul II, is known for his progressive views on women’s rights in Islam, although his front office was staffed with women fully enveloped in black chadors, not scarves. One of them served us tea and Persian sweets while we sat and chatted, or, more accurately, while I sat and he chatted, but at least women were present, I thought, even if they didn’t shake hands with men—unlike in Qom, where senior Ayatollah offices are all-male enclaves. Bojnourdi himself doesn’t have a strong feeling on men shaking hands with women and believes it to be a nonissue, although he himself would not shake the hand of a woman not his wife, sister, or daughter (mahram to men in Islam, which means women who can be uncovered and one can physically touch, while all other women, even cousins and aunts, are namahram, and therefore even their hair mustn’t be seen).
An endearing and disarmingly laid-back rotund man, the Ayatollah launched into a spirited defense of Khatami and his policies, policies that he claimed had the full support of the people. Barely giving me time to comment, he then jumped to a defense of Islam: his Islam. Islam, he said, is based on logic, Islam is based on friendship and love, and Islam’s ideology is the ideology of freedom. “The twelfth Imam will come [it appears that all Shia roads lead back to the Mahdi], and he will bring the Islam of dialogue, not of blood!” he exclaimed. But what about the lack of certain freedoms in the Islamic Republic? “In Shia Islam, anyone has the ability to disagree. In the West, and even in Iran, things are done in the name of Islam that are not Islamic,” Bojnourdi said, implying but not specifying his view that many of the freedoms curtailed in his country have no basis in his religion. “Islam made a point of peaceful dialogue fourteen hundred years ago,” he pointed out. “Islam teaches character and morality. There is no ambiguousness about that,” he continued. What about the role of women in Islam? I asked. “Women have all the God-given rights. A woman can certainly be president,” Bojnourdi added, referring to the argument before every presidential election when women are automatically disqualified from running, despite registering freely as candidates in the initial stages of the process. That opinion on women’s rights alone puts him at odds with many fellow Ayatollahs, has enhanced his stature among Iranian females (and activists quote him), and perhaps accounts for the all-female staff in his front office.
It could be argued that Bojnourdi’s stance on female presidents is a clever distraction from the larger issue of gender equality in Islam, for although women in the Islamic Republic enjoy rights that women in some Arab countries can only dream of, they are hobbled in achieving parity with their male counterparts by interpretations of Islam that vary widely among the clerics of Shia Islam, and “God-given rights” is, after all, a
rather ambiguous phrase. How to challenge Islamic law that states, for example, that a woman’s testimony carries half the weight of a man’s, or that a woman can inherit only half of what a male sibling can, is an issue on the minds of feminists who are generally careful to not be seen as un-Islamic, and opinions from Ayatollahs such as Bojnourdi are crucial to the advancement of their cause. A nation that churns out hundreds of thousands of college graduates each year—60 percent of them women—many of whom end up either jobless or working in fields below their qualifications (such as running a taxi service or even driving a cab), will have to deal with the question of gender equality sooner rather than later, and Bojnourdi’s pronouncements on female presidents, distraction or not, are seen to be a step in the right direction. For if a woman can be president, it surely follows that she can also be a judge (a position denied the Nobel laureate Shirin Ebadi), and if she can be a judge, then perhaps more liberal interpretations of the law, on issues such as divorce, child custody, and spousal rights, might soon gain favor. And if a woman can be president, then surely she would no longer need her husband’s or her father’s permission to travel abroad—a law that dates from the time of the Shah, who, despite his Western ways and progressive reputation, was as sexist and misogynist as some of the Ayatollahs—unlike Bojnourdi, who is a voice of reason in an often unreasonable debate.
The Shah, who had divorced two women he claimed to love for their inability to produce a male heir, when asked by Barbara Walters in an interview in 1977 about his earlier sexist comments to the journalist Oriana Fallaci, didn’t deny them, and in fact went further in dismissing equality of the sexes and betrayed his misogyny by saying that women hadn’t even been able to produce a famous and great chef (he must not have heard of Alice Waters, whose reputation and restaurant were in their infancy at the time). Walters’s follow-up question, with the Shah’s wife, Farah, looking on, was whether he believed that Mrs. Pahlavi could govern as well as a man, and he replied that he “preferred not to answer.” I remember feeling sorry for the empress, whose tear-filled eyes were clearly visible even on my small portable TV. But in the context of the kinds of questions on women’s rights that have been debated in Iran since before the revolution, it is easy to see why the issue of the hijab, a flashpoint for liberals in the West but an inconvenience that pales in significance compared with other gender issues in Iran, is not a battle that women are keen to fight, at least not yet.
In my meeting with Bojnourdi, I was also curious to hear him speak about the notion that an all-encompassing Islam has smothered the Iranian character, the soul of the nation. “Not at all,” the Ayatollah replied indignantly. “Islam is a way of life and part of the Iranian soul,” he said, “but so is poetry, music, and Iranian art. Hafez, Sa’di, Rumi, and all the Sufi poets are more widely read and taught now than before the revolution.” Bojnourdi wasn’t quite being disingenuous, but in naming Sufi poets, he was touching upon another of the infuriating contradictions of Islamic Iran, for Sufism has always been viewed with great suspicion by some of the Ayatollah’s fellow clerics as a potential challenge to their supreme, and more orthodox, religious authority. Not all Sufis (who owe a philosophical allegiance to and are disciples of a master of an order, rather than an Ayatollah) are poets, but nearly all the great poets of Iran were Sufis. The authorities, though, know better than to disparage Iran’s national heroes, the great poets of centuries past, and most will extol their virtues as humans—pious Muslims at that—as well as recite their poetry at the drop of a turban. Bojnourdi, to my relief, did not recite any ancient verses to make his points (for that would have required me, if I were to be considered at all literate, to respond cleverly in kind), but this gentle Friar Tuck–like figure left me with no doubt that he would, with his religious authority, remain a powerful force for would-be reformers of Iran. That he, and even a few of his fellow clerics, bearded men in eighteenth-century garb, would hold views more progressive on some issues than even the Shah (yes, she can govern!), a king and leader beloved and even glorified by every U.S. administration since FDR (and who did not live to see either Nigella Lawson or the Food Network), may seem counterintuitive, but it provides more than a glimmer of hope for Iranians struggling to effect change within the constraints of an Islamic society. Undoubtedly disliked for his views by the Supreme Leader and the band of conservative mullahs and their supporters whose Islam he clashes with, in some cases severely, Bojnourdi nonetheless is one of the Ayatollahs they can’t mess with, for messing with a “sign of God” is fraught with risk in a country ruled by, well, God. And thank Allah for that.
I saw Mohammad Khatami twice when I was in Tehran in early 2007, this time at his offices in Jamaran. Having been evicted from Sa’adabad by Ahmadinejad when he took office as president, Khatami must have seen it as sweet revenge to land at Jamaran, the name of a neighborhood, once a village but now part of the urban sprawl, in the far reaches of North Tehran, but best known as home to Ayatollah Khomeini while he was still alive. Ahmadinejad, who after all campaigned on bringing back the purity of Khomeini’s revolution and whose feelings toward the founder of the Islamic Republic border on hero worship, could not have anticipated that Khomeini’s family and the Khomeini foundation, with the full backing of the Supreme Leader, would provide offices to Khatami and his International Institute for Dialogue Among Cultures and Civilizations in one of their compounds at Jamaran. In a way, it’s far more appropriate for Khatami than the royal palace of Sa’adabad, as it shields him from accusations that he is enjoying an imperial lifestyle and puts Khomeini’s imprimatur onto his organization, an advantage that I’m confident he doesn’t take lightly in the always turbulent political atmosphere of Tehran.
On the second floor of a stately villa behind tall walls and an imposing gate, manned by security guards, Khatami sat in his thousand-square-foot office in mid-January, preparing for a trip to Davos and the World Economic Forum. Word among former and present high-ranking government officials was that Ahmadinejad, verging on apoplexy upon hearing that Khatami would be hobnobbing with the likes of Tony Blair and John Kerry, demanded from his foreign minister, Manouchehr Mottaki, that he be invited too. Mottaki came up, needless to say, empty-handed, but it is doubtful that he took the opportunity to mention that if His Excellency the good doctor had been a little less confrontational, a little less dubious about the Holocaust, and a tad more diplomatic, perhaps the world leaders and businesspeople gathering in Switzerland wouldn’t be so keen to avoid his company at any cost. Khatami told me he had been scheduled to be on a panel with Senator Kerry, which would constitute a rather high-level contact between Iran and the United States, and rather than be impolitic and ask Khatami directly if he had the approval of the Supreme Leader, I merely brought his name up, hoping to get my answer indirectly. And Khatami obliged, telling me that he saw the Supreme Leader regularly, a few times a month, and that they discussed all kinds of issues. Including, I suspect, whether he should accept the invitation to Davos and whether he should have a tête-à-tête with a former U.S. presidential candidate.
I saw Khatami again after his Davos trip and before I left Tehran; his appearance on the panel with Kerry had received scant attention in the Iranian media, either because Ahmadinejad didn’t want anything to do with publicizing Khatami for fear of raising his popularity or because enemies who might ordinarily want to attack Khatami for engaging the “Great Satan” were held in check by the Supreme Leader, or a combination of the two. Ali Khatami, his brother who continued in his job as the unpaid chief of staff, sat in on my meeting with Khatami (quietly, as he has in almost all of Khatami’s meetings over the years), and the former president and I had a frank discussion about his role in the future of Iran. Ali, the uncharacteristically low-profile former high-ranking official, has always been his older brother’s closest adviser, but he continues to shun the spotlight and avoids the media to the best of his ability. Scrupulously honest (he refused a salary during Khatami’s presidency to avoid charges of nepoti
stic advantage in a country where nepotism is rampant and, to many, a right, and in fact suffered financially while in the administration when he was unable to tend to his businesses), he is a witty, American-educated engineer who has as good a grasp on Iranian politics as anyone in Tehran but, unlike the youngest Khatami brother, Reza, a former M.P. who fiercely opposes the status quo and openly criticized President Khatami for not doing enough for the cause of reform, maneuvers stealthily through the Machiavellian maze that is the Persian political system, fiercely defending his brother’s interests and legacy.
Mohammad Khatami is a keen conversationalist, and although he is, as a true politician, careful with his words, he is not shy in setting out his philosophy. “Iran,” he told me, “deserves a much higher status than it occupies today. Democracy is ultimately the only hope for Iran. Democracy in the West is shaped by their culture, by their history, and in Iran we have our own culture and history, and our democracy will be shaped in accordance with our culture.” Was he trying to say that that meant it had to be an Islamic democracy? I wondered. “I don’t mean ‘liberal democracy,’” he answered. “Democracy means the government is chosen by the people and they have the power to change it if they are unhappy, but Islam is one of the foundations of our culture, and it will influence our democracy. Of course Islam must adjust to democracy as well,” he added, a sentiment that puts him greatly at odds with influential conservative clerics who in some cases believe democracy to be incompatible with Islam, or, more precisely, with their God-given mandate to rule.
We talked at length about his ability to influence events in Iran as a private citizen, but I really wanted to know if he would, given that Ahmadinejad had proven to be vulnerable at the polls, run again for president in 2009. (The Iranian constitution forbids more than two consecutive four-year presidential terms, as does ours, but does not disqualify an ex-president who has served two terms from running for the office again.) Khatami insisted that it was not what he desired, telling me that Iranian politics has to move away from being so strongly personality based (parties are notoriously weak in Iran, and individual politicians are prone to creating cults of personality) and that he only wished to have some influence in the future. I knew, however, that more and more people were advising him to think about running, including his close adviser Sadeq Kharrazi, the fiercely loyal former ambassador, and I pressed him on the issue. “Of course,” he said, “che farda shavad.” He smiled knowingly. “As Ferdowsi [the great tenth-and eleventh-century Persian poet and author of Iran’s epic masterpiece the Shahnameh, or Book of Kings] said,” he continued, in the typically Persian way of making a point obliquely, “‘Che farda shavad, fekr’e farda konim.’” (When [if] tomorrow comes, let’s think about tomorrow.)