Persian Mirrors: The Elusive Face of Iran (13 page)

I once asked Soroush to define the Iranian state. The answer eluded him. “The state is Islamic,” he said. “It is a republic. It is a mixture of both. It is neither of them.” Yet he survives and I continue to talk to him. Obstreperous clerics and lay intellectuals may find themselves isolated and imprisoned. But there is no system of gulags in the Iranian theocracy, nor is there excommunication. However hemmed in they are, their religion guarantees them a right to their point of view.

Firmly in the conservative camp was Ali-Akbar Nateq-Nouri, an outgoing, mid-ranking cleric who had been the Speaker of the Parliament from 1992 to 2000. Over glasses of sour cherry juice in an ornate reception hall in the Parliament building one day in 1998, I asked him what he thought of Soroush’s idea that clerics should not be running the state. He laughed so hard that he spat out the juice he had not yet swallowed.

“If I believed in the separation between religion and the state, what am I doing here then?” he asked. In fact, Nateq-Nouri wanted to put more clerics into government. “Yes, more clerics!” he exclaimed. “Our presence proves that government is not separate from religion.”

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So the Islamic Republic remained an odd entity. It tried to gain legitimacy through the use of democratic forms: referendums and elections, and a promise to build a freer, more just society. It was consolidated when there was a leader—Ayatollah Khomeini—with enough charisma, vision, and credentials to compensate for the fact that his revolution didn’t come with a wiring diagram. But after Khomeini’s death, there was no single person strong enough to resolve differences or to rule alone—certainly not Ayatollah Khamenei, Khomeini’s successor as Supreme Leader. So new ideas were forced into the open, demanding resolution in the open.

Never was this clearer than in the May 1997 presidential election. Nateq-Nouri was running and he was expected to win. He had the endorsement of the conservative Militant Clergy Society, which included most of the leading politicized clerics; the clerical leaders of Friday prayers from most big cities; the majority of Parliament; and a number of key cabinet members and bazaar merchants. He enjoyed the implicit backing of Ayatollah Khamenei. All that support brought with it the power of state-run television and a well-organized political machine with the resources to get out the vote: the nationwide network of mosques.

I went to see Nateq-Nouri five months before the election. He was so confident of victory that he told me who he would put in his cabinet. “Specialists, believers, competent, healthy, and honest Muslim people!”

At first there were only two other candidates, both of them weak. Neither represented the dissatisfaction bubbling up among an increasing number of reformers. So after a considerable amount of prodding, Mohammad Khatami, the head of the National Library and a former Minister of Islamic Guidance, entered the race. The son of a prominent cleric and a supporter of the revolution in 1979, Khatami owed his emotional and spiritual allegiance to the religious world in which he was raised and trained. But he had studied various concepts of law and representative government, and he was able to combine worldliness and intelligence with a gift for politics and campaigning. For Iran’s Islamic Republic, he was a fresh face, and the perfect candidate to reach out to the disaffected segments of society.

It wasn’t just anyone who could run for President. All candidates had to have the tacit acceptance of Ayatollah Khamenei and the official approval of the Guardian Council. In 1997, more than 230 candidates put their names forward; only four were not struck down, among them Nateq-Nouri and Khatami.

Khatami demanded assurances from the top that it would be a fair fight. “When Khatami wanted to run for President he went to the Leader and shared his ideas and said, ‘If you think it’s possible and society will tolerate my ideas, I’ll become a candidate,’” Khatami’s American-educated younger brother, Ali, told me after the election. “ ‘But if you don’t see that possibility I won’t. I don’t want your personal endorsement, but I want a free and fair election.’ And Khamenei said, ‘Whoever wins, I will support him.’”

At the start, Khatami hardly looked like a threat. The assumption was that the clerical system would not allow anyone but Nateq-Nouri to win. But there was space for political competition, and the campaign that followed had some echoes of an American election: tough, nasty, confusing, and full of alliance-building, horse-trading, and mud-slinging.

Khatami was supported by the oddest of coalitions; it included two factions that functioned like mini-political parties, the Servants of Construction and the Militant Clerics’ Association (not to be confused with the conservative Militant Clergy Society). The Servants of Construction included technocrats and businessmen who favored a smaller role for the state in the economy, more foreign investment, and better relations with the West. They were aligned with Rafsanjani, the outgoing President, who was ineligible to run for a third four-year term. The group threw its support behind Khatami late, only after it could not come up with a candidate of its own. The Militant Clerics’ Association was behind Khatami’s nomination from the start. It consisted of left-wing supporters of state control of the economy and included among its ranks several of the militants who had seized the American embassy in 1979.

Khatami took his message directly to the people and ran a Western-style campaign: he traveled in a simple Iranian-made car or by bus. In interviews he talked about his hobbies—table tennis and swimming—his favorite philosophers, and how he wished his wife knew how to drive. He appealed to women, young people, and intellectuals with pledges to create a civil society, promote the rule of law, fight “superstition and fanaticism,” break the political monopoly of the right, and create more jobs and better educational opportunities.

The lofty discourses about tolerance and the rule of law were tempered by Khatami’s wry sense of humor. “Who is the boss in your house?” an interviewer from
Zanan,
Iran’s boldest women’s magazine, asked. “Naturally my wife has a more important role than I,” he replied.

Khatami also got a boost from a series of televised presidential debates. The state-controlled television barely covered Khatami’s campaign. But when the debates were broadcast, they could not help Nateq-Nouri compete against Khatami’s open style and intellect. A friend watching on a construction site in Shushtar noted that the entire workforce—from construction workers to senior supervisors—was won over by the reformist.

In fact, Khatami had a basic advantage. Nateq-Nouri was regarded as part of the clerical establishment, and the establishment had lost much of its credibility. And the fact that Nateq-Nouri acted as if he had already been elected turned off many voters. “Why is the television showing him every hour on his trip and broadcasting an anthem written especially for him?” one reader asked in a call-in complaint column in the leftist daily
Salaam.

Despite all this, it became apparent in the final days of the campaign that this election was a real contest—one that would help define just what an Islamic Republic is. By this time, there was little that the conservatives could do. Authorities in the Intelligence and Interior ministries worried that any effort to rig the election would set off uncontrollable demonstrations. The notion that elections might be rigged was not outlandish. Indeed, there were rumors that a well-known and powerful ayatollah had gone to Qom to put in the fix. In the end, both Khamenei and Rafsanjani pledged that the election would be free—and this, in turn, inspired a larger turnout than had been expected. People realized that their votes might actually count.

I knew this would be a different kind of election when a young friend took to the streets to campaign for Khatami. For days after work she handed out leaflets to shoppers and pedestrians. She even dragged her relatives to the polls on election day—among them her father, a retired civil servant who had served under the Shah and had never voted before in his life.

In the end, nearly 80 percent of those eligible voted, the highest percentage since the early years of the revolution. (By contrast, the turnout in the American presidential election in 1996 was 49 percent.) The turnout made large-scale fraud unthinkable.

More than twenty million people—70 percent of those who voted—cast their ballots for Khatami. Khatami captured the vote of the young, the women, the intellectuals, and the middle class. He won among voters of extremely different political views and economic and educational backgrounds. He even did well in small towns and villages where citizens generally do what their religious leaders tell them to do.

As Khatami’s mother told me at the
eftar
dinner, “It is said my son’s election was a second revolution.”

Indeed, the election of Khatami as President exposed fault lines that were present at the creation of the Islamic Republic. His call for tolerance and the opening of public spaces invigorated an intense reform movement among many clerics and religious and secular intellectuals; they began to experiment, to take chances, and to challenge the most fundamental tenets of the state. The restrictive measures that had worked in times of revolution and war no longer fit a dynamic society where the people had come to want the fruits of peace. What resulted was a struggle between conservatives determined to preserve unity and stability and reformists equally determined to make the system more transparent and accountable. More significant, Iran began to debate how to let go of a controlled political system without descending into chaos.

The central question became: Will the people be allowed to govern through an elected President, an elected Parliament, and a freer press while still holding to the vestiges of clerical rule? Can elements of democratic politics become integral parts of the Iranian political system even as a relatively closed club of deeply conservative clerics and entrenched lay revolutionaries continue to wield tremendous power? What the election touched off was a fierce guerrilla style of politics, full of remarkably intense and intellectually creative surprise attacks and waged on a variety of battlefields—much of it in public.

Iran’s President, who was fifty-four when he was elected, invites comparisons to Nelson Mandela, Vaclav Havel, and Bill Clinton. Khatami is a larger-than-life figure with the ability to defy the odds and stick it out during times of crisis. Like Clinton, he has the ability to compartmentalize problems and smile through the bad times. And he seems on a permanent campaign, constantly selling himself and his message to a public that can turn apathetic and weary, no matter how much it yearns for change. During my first meeting with the President in January 1998, I found myself blurting out that if he and Bill Clinton sat down with each other, they would probably hit it off beautifully.

If Khatami played a musical instrument, it would be Clinton’s: the saxophone. The Iranian President is the political equivalent of a jazz musician. He knows how to improvise, to listen to voices around him and then pick up the theme as if he had invented the solo, to negotiate and blur the lines and move on to the next stage, even if he doesn’t know exactly what that stage will be.

Khatami is charming, so much so that it is tempting to think of him as a Jeffersonian democrat masquerading as a cleric. But this is no masquerade. He is one of them. He is a midranking cleric known as a
hojjatoleslam,
and he wears a black turban that identifies him as a descendant of the Prophet Mohammad.

Many of the attitudes Khatami has brought to the presidency—tolerance, duty to country, nationalist feelings, the absence of any sense of victimization—derive from his own upbringing. Behind a wall in Ardakan stands the spacious mud-colored house with a stone terrace where Khatami was born. His mother was the daughter of a wealthy landowner; his father a famous cleric. As an ayatollah, Khatami’s father became the leader of Friday prayers in the provincial capital, Yazd, and one of the country’s most beloved religious leaders. He was so revered that he also held the Shah’s repressive state system at bay. Sitting many years later in the house in Yazd where she lives with one of her daughters, the President’s mother told me this story: Years before the revolution, the Shah’s security police summoned Ayatollah Khatami for questioning. “But as he entered, all the employees and the visitors bowed to him and kissed his hand,” she recounted with a laugh. “The authorities told him to go home.”

The Khatami family enjoyed a comfortable life not uncommon among well-to-do clerical families. In addition to the large residence in the center of town, they owned a summer house a few miles away with a lush garden of pomegranate trees and an enormous, deep pool—for water storage, but, more important, for swimming. The President’s sister Maryam was particularly eager to present her family as both enlightened and well off. “We had no restrictions on anything,” she said. “We could spend as much money as we wanted.” Her brother Ali, a businessman who lived in Fort Lee, New Jersey, for a year and a half while getting a master’s degree in industrial engineering in Brooklyn, put it more bluntly: “My mother came from a rich family. Very rich.”

Khatami learned tolerance from his father. Ayatollah Khatami allowed his children to listen to news on the radio and read banned books while they were growing up, which helps to explain his son’s political dexterity. At one point after the revolution, a group of fervent believers came to the ayatollah with a list of people in Yazd who had collaborated with the Shah and therefore should be arrested. Ayatollah Khatami told them, “Then arrest me too, because I didn’t do more to oppose the Shah.”

As a boy, Mohammad Khatami talked of becoming a doctor, but his father wanted him to become a cleric. So Khatami, as a teenager, dutifully went to study religion in Qom. There he became a disciple of a firebrand preacher named Ruhollah Khomeini and a close friend of his son, Ahmad. There would be other connections. Khatami’s brother Mohammad-Reza married a granddaughter of Khomeini; Khatami’s future wife was the cousin of the wife of Khomeini’s son, Ahmad. Khatami’s sister Maryam married a widely respected cleric who had been a close aide of Khomeini’s during his exile in Paris. Connections like these are extraordinarily important within the clerical class.