Persian Mirrors: The Elusive Face of Iran (14 page)

But Khatami also persuaded his father to allow him to study philosophy at the University of Isfahan, where he was exposed to ideals of freedom and civic responsibility that he believed could be incorporated into Islam. Although many clerics obtained exemptions and avoided serving in the Shah’s military, Khatami fulfilled his two-year mandatory military service as a junior lieutenant in the army.

Khatami never spent time in the Shah’s prisons and played only a peripheral role before the revolution, as the head of Iran’s Islamic Center in Hamburg, Germany. Soon after the revolution, though, he was elected to Iran’s first Parliament from his hometown of Ardakan and was appointed, then dismissed, as head of the giant Kayhan Publishing Company. For ten years after that, Khatami served as Minister of Islamic Guidance. In his first several years in the job, he enforced the regime’s strict censorship. But in the last three years he eased restrictions on films, music, art, and literature. He reinstated awards for the best books and created a press arbitration council to help mediate accusations against journalists and writers.

In 1992 the Parliament forced Khatami to resign. In an impassioned resignation letter, he complained of threats and ill will. His efforts to create “a superior culture” for Iran were a “weighty responsibility” that, he said, had become too heavy for him to carry. He was banished to the National Library in Tehran and for five years faded from public view.

But there Khatami developed a passion for the computer, envisioning a time when Iranians in remote villages would log on to networks for information contained within library walls. He also wrote two books that sealed his reputation as a forward-looking thinker.
Fear of Waves
—a phrase taken from a Hafiz poem—is a collection of essays in which he argues that even though Islam is superior to Western thought, it is no longer responsive to modern life, especially when it comes to “one of the basic needs of human beings: freedom.” As a result, he wrote, the West has more economic, political, military, scientific, and technical power. Khatami’s other book,
From the World of the City to the City of the World,
is a conventional survey of several Western philosophers, including Plato, Aristotle, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau.

In his election campaign, Khatami continued to work within the system. He extolled the Iranian revolution and endorsed the Islamic Constitution and the idea of the Supreme Leader. He said he approved of the rules governing dress for Muslim women. On the other hand, he argued that the way to make the system relevant for the people was to create an open civil society that reconciled the sacred and the secular. Once in office he extended individual rights and basic freedoms and called for the rule of law. Nothing less than the survival of Iran’s Islamic Republic, he argued, was at stake.

I knew Khatami was different the first time we met, during a chance encounter in January 1998 at the Presidential Palace. His shoes gave him away. “If you want to figure out someone’s politics, look at his shoes,” Nazila once told me. She was right. Shoes often reveal class, wealth, religiosity, and Westernization. Khatami wore beautiful shoes. Simple, finely stitched black leather shoes with laces, not the
nalein
or rough slippers favored by Iran’s ruling class of clerics. The shoes complemented the crisp gray pin-striped robe and matching black cloak and turban. So did the string of small turquoise-colored prayer beads dangling in his left hand.

Khomeini hadn’t worn beautiful shoes. The first time I saw him in Paris, he was wearing blue plastic sandals. Indoors, he left them at the door and conducted business in his socks. So did his aides. A pair of Khomeini’s sandals, brown and worn, have even been placed in a tiny shrine to his memory at his house in Tehran.

By contrast, Khatami seemed worldly. If Khomeini represented the triumph of the clerical over the temporal, Khatami stood for a reconciliation of the sacred and the secular, the traditional and the modern.

Actually, I hadn’t gone to the Presidential Palace that day to see Khatami. I was looking for his chef de cabinet, a portly cleric in his late thirties named Mohammad-Ali Abtahi, whom I had been unable to reach by phone. Having decided to just show up, I called him from the phone at the security station. “I just tried to call you,” he said, full of hospitality and regrets. “I would have been able to meet you right now.”

“That’s great,” I replied. “I’m downstairs.”

It shouldn’t be so easy to get into official buildings in Iran. The country has a history of terror attacks, and even the holiest Islamic sites have not been immune. Security is usually tight.

But Iran is also a place of face-to-face lobbying, cajoling, begging, and, more and more frequently, bribing, to secure favors. Abtahi couldn’t lose face by refusing to see me after he had told me he was available. So I was body-frisked by a pair of energetic chador-clad women, forced to relinquish my handbag, camera, tape recorder, and wristwatch, and sent up a broad, elegant staircase into a sunny circular room where visiting dignitaries are received. After an hour of conversation, Abtahi abruptly stood up and said, “Come and meet the President.”

There in the hallway was Khatami. He escorted me back into the reception room. He did not shake my hand, but unlike Khomeini, who had sat far away and turned his gaze from me during our interview in France years earlier, Khatami pulled up a large armchair, sat close, smiled broadly, and looked me straight in the eye.

He had once been a journalist himself, he said, and asked me how I had come to cover Iran. I told him I had been based in Paris when Ayatollah Khomeini arrived there in 1978. Khatami threw his head back and laughed. “
Khanoum
[Ms.] Sciolino,” he said, “you look too young to have been in Neauphle-le-Château with Khomeini.” I know full well that I have a face to match my age, and that the head scarf is not exactly an age-defying accessory. And I had never heard that kind of talk from a serious mullah before. Simply stated, Khatami is a charmer.

Khatami spoke passionately, sometimes in English, about the need for women’s advancement and the need for a “dialogue among civilizations.” He admitted that he might fail in his attempt to bring reform to Iran. “Politicians only speak to the superficial level of the spirit,” he said. “There is a need to have more in-depth dialogue, with a deep meeting of minds among peoples. This is my hope. But maybe I’m not capable of carrying it out.”

And he went off on a long sentimental riff. “We say we love all the people in the world and we want them to love us in return,” he said. “Resentments should be turned into kindness and love.” I thought of one of Mario Cuomo’s best lines about politicians: “We campaign in poetry, but when we’re elected we’re forced to govern in prose.” Khatami is that rare politician who campaigns in poetry and tries to govern in poetry.

I saw Khatami’s dynamism firsthand many times after that. After a speech to the graduating class at the all-women’s Al Zahra University in Tehran in 1999, young women greeted him with applause and two-fingered whistles. They shoved to get close to him, squealing and reaching out to touch his cloak. They begged him to sign autographs and pose for pictures. When the crowds dispersed, he even posed for a picture with Nazila and me, although he took one step back and looked away from the camera just before the shutter clicked. It wouldn’t do him any good to be photographed too close to an American journalist, I guessed.

Still, Khatami stopped for a chat. He asked me in Persian, as he had before, whether my Persian language skills were improving. Then he asked me if I had learned how to cook Persian food. That question was beyond my language ability, so Nazila stepped in. “Oh, Mr. President, she’s a great Iranian cook!” she exclaimed. “She knows how to cook
ghormeh sabzi
.”

Ghormeh sabzi,
a subtle dish of lamb, herbs, and lemon, is considered one of the hardest Iranian dishes to prepare. It takes hours and is easy to ruin. In fact, I don’t know how to cook it. The question about cooking had sounded condescending to me, and I told Nazila afterward that we should have asked Khatami if
he
knew how to cook it.

But when I told this story to some of my female Iranian friends, they told me I was being unfair. They told me the President had been struggling to make small talk and find some common ground. They told me that he was the first leader in the Islamic Republic to talk seriously about women’s rights. They told me stories about their own fathers who didn’t know how to make
ghormeh sabzi
either, indeed, who never cooked at all, but sent their daughters as well as their sons to college and insisted they get good jobs. But I stuck to my position. The Iranian women I knew were among the strongest, toughest, most inventive women I have ever met. How could an open-minded cleric like Khatami still think of women as the keepers of the hearth? Then something my friend Farideh Farhi, Fereshteh’s sister, said made sense. “You don’t understand something about Iranian culture. We take our food and our language very seriously. They are the most important components of Iranian identity.” Language and food. That made sense. As someone who took my Italian identity very seriously, I could relate to that. And I realized how once again I had seen only one facet of the mirror.

Khatami’s charm does a lot to explain his popular appeal. But it isn’t always enough to prevail. The main impediment to his success may be the Islamic system itself. The President is one player among many, and in his executive role Khatami is sometimes hampered by the powers the system assigns to others. Chief among them is Ayatollah Khamenei, with whom Khatami has an extraordinarily complex relationship.

The two men have a lot in common. Both are clerics, only a few years apart in age. Both are committed to upholding the powers of the Supreme Leader and the Islamic Republic. Both are men of ideas and claim descent from the Prophet. In addition, clerical families in Iran are like a private club, and the Khamenei and Khatami families have been close. Khamenei, as a teenage student of religion in the holy city of Mashad, was a devoted disciple of Khatami’s father. Khamenei later made special trips to Ardakan to visit Khatami and his relatives, who in turn stayed with the Khameneis when they traveled to Mashad on pilgrimages.

But Ayatollah Khamenei, the son and grandson of clerics, is not a fun-loving sort. Or perhaps his position prevents him from loosening up. One of his most famous religious rulings as Iran’s Supreme Leader was to ban music lessons—this despite his own experience early in his career in Mashad, where he wrote poetry, appreciated painting, played the stringed
tar,
and sang.

Khamenei has expressed views on all sorts of subjects. For example,
Sobh,
a radical right monthly magazine, once published his answers to a list of twenty-nine questions on social morality. He never said that his answers were fatwas, or official religious decrees, but others treated them as if they were. A sampling:

What color clothing may women wear? “Women should avoid colors that attract attention.”

May women wear makeup? “It is permissible to wear makeup but women must cover their makeup in the presence of men who are not close relatives.”

May men shave? “Shaving a beard is forbidden, but trimming it is allowed.”

May women ride bicycles or motorcycles? “Women riding bicycles or motorcycles would spread corruption and so it is banned.”

But in the competitive world of Iranian politics, even Ayatollah Khamenei cannot always muster full obedience. A religious leader in Iran is judged by the sagacity of his writings and the approbation of his peers. By these criteria, Khamenei has fallen short in the eyes of many. He was not even an ayatollah when Khomeini died, although he was quickly given the title when he was promoted to Supreme Leader. From the start, he was out of his depth. He had been President from 1981 to 1989 but lacked the religious credentials, the intellect, and the fire of Khomeini.

Still, Khamenei had golden revolutionary credentials. According to some reports, he was one of the original band of young theology students in Qom who first rallied to Ayatollah Khomeini’s call for religious revolution in the 1960s. He became a loyal confidant of Khomeini, leading the movement against the Shah in Mashad and helping to organize secret cells. He spent three years in prison and one year in internal exile. He was tortured; his beard was shaved and his turban removed to humiliate him. Ironically, it was pressure from President Jimmy Carter that forced the Shah to free Khamenei in the late 1970s. One of his strongest supporters was Khatami’s father.

After Khomeini’s return to Iran, Khamenei was appointed the first head of the Revolutionary Guards, the military force initially envisioned as an alternative to the regular army. He wrote press releases and gathered intelligence on plots against the new regime. He became a member of the secret Revolutionary Council that governed Iran immediately after the monarchy was toppled. In 1980, he became Friday prayer leader in Tehran, in effect becoming the capital’s spiritual guide. Throughout the war with Iraq, he chaired the Supreme Defense Council that determined war strategy. On June 27, 1981, he was giving a fiery speech at the Abuzar mosque near Tehran’s vast bazaar when a bomb hidden inside a tape recorder exploded, costing him the use of his right hand. He has been in pain ever since. But he recovered enough to be elected President later that year and held that position until Khomeini’s death.

When I interviewed Khamenei in 1982, he said that no one man could ever replace Khomeini as Supreme Leader, predicting that instead a council of three or five religious leaders would have to rule. He certainly didn’t portray himself as a candidate for the job. Indeed, in a rare unguarded conversation just months before Khomeini’s death, Khamenei confided to a foreigner, “I’m not qualified to be Supreme Leader. It’s not the proper place for me.”

But the group of clerics whose role was to choose a successor to Khomeini thought differently. The stability of the Islamic Republic was more important than charm or brilliant religious thinking, and so sixty out of its seventy-four members voted for Khamenei. He was a clear departure from the inventive and improvisational Khomeini. Still, Iran remained what it was: a vastly complicated, subtle, and challenging society no matter who was in charge.