Persian Mirrors: The Elusive Face of Iran (50 page)

I saw Nouri up close at the party for his departure as Minister of the Interior in the summer of 1998. The departure was not voluntary. A group in Parliament had accused him of dismissing officials who did not share his politics, appointing like-minded men and women in their place, fostering an unstable economic environment, and putting the country’s security at risk by allowing student demonstrations. Since Parliament has the power to approve and remove ministers, this group introduced a resolution to strip Nouri of his office. After a day of angry debate and personal attacks, more than half of the deputies voted to oust him. But President Khatami fought back. Within hours of the vote, he named Nouri Vice President for Development and Social Affairs, a cabinet post that did not require Parliament’s approval. It was hardball politics using the rule of law as a weapon.

Nouri’s going-away party was unlike any I had ever attended. Thousands of people poured into the vast auditorium at the Ministry of the Interior—men on one side, women on the other. I was required to cover every bit of hair and wipe off my lipstick. There was no chitchat. There were no canapés. Just speeches and salutes to the Prophet. The audience gasped and murmured as Mayor Karbaschi, who had been on trial at the time, marched into the auditorium and sat down next to Nouri, his political ally and friend.

Nouri hardly looked like a dangerous enemy of the state. Small of build, he wore the uniform of a cleric: a turban, a cloak, and a beard. He spoke with a squeaky voice and hints of an Isfahani accent. But Nouri, like Karbaschi, was fearless. He called his dismissal “a serious warning to the Iranian people who must not assume that all is well.” And he accused unnamed enemies from “the other side” of secrecy and deception against the President.

A year later, in October 1999, the “other side” took revenge, putting Nouri on trial before the Special Clerical Court. This was not an ordinary criminal court, as in Karbaschi’s trial, but a powerful conservative tribunal that tried clerics for crimes against the Islamic Republic. The forty-four-page indictment accused Nouri of insulting Islam by pushing for democratic reforms that undercut the clerical monopoly on power; dishonoring Khomeini’s memory by questioning the authority of the Supreme Leader; and disseminating lies to foment unrest. Articles in
Khordad,
the outspoken newspaper that Nouri published as a daily pamphlet for his cause, were used as proof that he had conspired to undermine the Islamic state. One count charged him with advocating relations with the United States, another with seeking recognition of Israel, another with drawing comparisons between the Islamic system and the monarchy. Other counts faulted his newspapers for promoting a non-Islamic way of life. Though the court banned television cameras from broadcasting the trial, it did allow the presence of print reporters, an important concession to public pressure. Until then, all proceedings of the Special Clerical Court had been held in secret.

Like Karbaschi before him, Nouri seized the occasion of the trial to turn the spotlight around and train it on his inquisitors, charging that a system without legitimacy could not survive. Never before had someone from so deep inside the establishment been so openly critical. Because of the extensive charges against him, Nouri was able systematically to lay out what had gone wrong in the Islamic system and to show precisely how the democratic elements of the Constitution had been undermined by those in power. He did all this not by attacking the Islamic Constitution, but by using specific articles of the Constitution to question the manipulation of religion by others as a means to sustain power.

Before the trial had even begun, Nouri called his indictment illegal and politically motivated. This was another Inquisition, he said. He argued that the court had no legitimacy to try him, on the grounds that when Ayatollah Khomeini created the Special Clerical Court by personal decree, the intent had been for the court to be temporary. Nouri’s newspaper
Khordad
likened his situation to the trial of the Greek philosopher Socrates. The story was accompanied by an illustration of a hand clutching a bowl of hemlock. Later the text of his testimony was published, and became an immediate best-seller, under the title,
Hemlock
of Reform.

Nouri also had powerful allies within the clerical establishment. Ayatollah Jalaleddin Taheri, the Friday prayer leader from Isfahan, declared his readiness to defend Nouri in the clerical court—a powerful political signal to the judge, Mohammad Salimi, who was lower ranking and less learned. A group of sixty Islamic scholars from seminaries in Qom also threw their support behind Nouri, backing his assertion that the clerical court was illegal.

During his six-day trial, Nouri used his impressive argumentative skills to overwhelm the judge, who at one point had to remind him that he, and not the Islamic system, was on trial. “Listen,” warned Judge Salimi, “the reason we convened this court is not to give the accused a platform to cross-question those who sit in judgment on him.”

Nouri paid no heed. “I totally reject the court, its membership, and its competence to conduct this trial,” he said. “I ask myself, what has happened to us, to our revolution, to our faith, that it has come to this, that one group of clerics can make allegations against another like this?”

He made the point that even in an Islamic Republic, times change. People change their minds. Ayatollah Khomeini himself had repeatedly done so, and others had done things against his will, Nouri said. As evidence, he cited Khomeini’s insistence that Iran would never make peace with the ruling royal family of Saudi Arabia. However, Nouri pointed out, now “the government and people of Saudi Arabia are our friends and brothers.” Nouri also said that in the war against Iraq, Khomeini had vowed to continue fighting “up to the very last person,” but then suddenly ended the war.

No subject was off-limits. At one point he said that it was impossible to enforce the Islamic dress code for women with clubs and batons. Nouri also outlined a vision of political rule under an Islamic democracy and a vision of Islam as a forgiving and inclusive religious system. He even claimed that there was more than one way to believe. “You cannot say that religion is limited to your particular understanding of it,” he said.

The impact on many ordinary Iranians was dramatic. “I learned from his trial that even though I do not pray or fast but do many other things that I am not supposed to, I can still be considered a good Muslim!” one Iranian friend told me. “What Nouri was telling me was that the only belief that is essential is belief in the Prophet and the unity of God!”

“Breathtaking,” another friend called the trial. “Nouri is practically saying that the rule of the Supreme Leader is not a holy institution and that he has no special rights outside the law. No matter what becomes of Nouri, he has opened a door that will not be closed.”

The jury of theologians found Nouri guilty on fifteen counts. He was sentenced to five years’ imprisonment and fined. His newspaper,
Khordad,
was closed and he went to prison, but
Khordad
was later resurrected under a new name,
Fath.
The paper continued to publish Nouri’s words and statements from prison. (Later,
Fath
too was closed.) The conviction barred Nouri from running for public office or holding a position in government. With the parliamentary election less than four months away, the clerics who ran the courts had now sidelined Khatami’s two top lieutenants. And they did it by using the courts and the law—arbitrary and unjust though they might be.

The public debate sparked by the Karbaschi and Nouri trials echoed throughout the campaign for Parliament. It now had become clear that the conservative clerics and politicians were using the institutions of the state to keep their hold on power and to impose their will over a society no longer willing to be bullied into submission. And the people made themselves heard in the voting on February 18 and the runoff election that followed in early May. The 2000 parliamentary elections were the third consecutive victory at the polls for Khatami and his supporters: his election as President in 1997 had been followed by the 1999 municipal council elections and this victory now gave the President a commanding majority in Parliament. The conservatives’ strategy had clearly backfired.

As in other elections, many of the relatives of the powerful did well. The biggest vote-getter was the President’s younger brother, Mohammad-Reza. He announced after his victory that the Parliament’s top priorities would be to improve the economy, increase press freedom, and speed up reforms. Second place went to Jamileh Kadivar, the wife of Ataollah Mohajerani, Khatami’s Minister of Islamic Guidance and the sister of Mohsen Kadivar, the reformist cleric who was serving a prison sentence for his writings. Third place was secured by Ali-Reza Nouri, the thirty-six-year-old younger brother of Abdollah Nouri; the younger Nouri had been studying medicine in England and had never before been active in Iranian politics. Fifth place went to Hadi Khamenei, a reformist and the estranged younger brother of the Supreme Leader.

As for Rafsanjani, the clearest explanation of why he did so badly came from Hamid-Reza Jalaiepour, writing in the newspaper
Asr-e
Azadegan,
the latest reincarnation of
Jameah.
The former President “did not grasp the political climate and the democratic reforms,” Jalaeipour wrote. He accused Rafsanjani of relying on political tricks and his traditional sources of power, and failing to understand that the time had come for the will of the people to prevail.

Rafsanjani had once had so much power that he was given the nickname “Akbar Shah,” a play on one of his first names. What was astonishing was the speed of Rafsanjani’s political demise. Just as stunning was that his daughter, Faezeh, lost her seat. The same name identification that had catapulted her to second place in the 1996 contest for Parliament plummeted her to fifty-seventh place this time. Her fatal error had been to defend her father so fiercely.

A number of powerful conservatives were toppled. Former Minister of Intelligence Ali Fallahian, who had been an architect of assassinations and terror campaigns, received a scant 28,000 votes in Isfahan. His loss, the reformist daily
Sobh-e Emrouz
wrote, was “a sign of the public opinion’s hatred and sensitivity toward political killings.” Mohammad-Reza Bahonar, an outspoken conservative deputy from Tehran who had been at the forefront of the campaign to push Nouri from his job as Minister of the Interior, was ousted after sixteen years in Parliament. For days, he refused to believe that the conservatives had actually lost.

Ayatollah Montazeri, still under house arrest in Qom, had enough of a voice to utter his approval of the process. An enterprising reporter from the
Irish Times
went to the home of Montazeri’s son, which adjoins the house of his father, and spoke to the grand ayatollah through the brick wall dividing the two buildings. “The election should be enough to stop the bad things they have been doing to this country,” Montazeri was quoted as saying.

*    *    *

Well, perhaps. As ever in Iran, it was difficult to predict just how far-reaching the effects of an event might be. But one thing at least was clear. The victory of the reformers was another dramatic event that highlighted a conundrum that had confronted the revolution since its inception: whether sovereignty in an Islamic Republic is vested in clerics who claim to be God’s deputies on earth or in the people. “The Islamic leaders do not have a claim on government,” said the late Ayatollah Mahmoud Taleghani, in opposing Ayatollah Khomeini’s strict interpretation of an Islamic system in 1979. Twenty-one years later, Taleghani was being vindicated. The people, it turned out, believed they had just as much a claim. The election had sent a clear signal that the people were determined to break the monopoly of the conservative clerical establishment, not with violence, but with the vote.

After the election, my friend Nasser Hadian, the political scientist, told me that the vote was the revenge of the outsiders. “There were groups in Iran that had been marginalized over the years—women, youth, the modern middle class,” he said. “These are groups whose standard of living—culturally, politically, economically—has declined since the revolution. They have been increasingly alienated from the political system. They voted against the status quo when they elected Khatami President in 1997 and now they’ve done it again. For these groups, demonstrations, riots, strikes would have costs; voting is a cost-free way to register their demands for change.”

Nasser said that, in a way, the reformist victory was even more important than the election of Khatami because it had proven the staying power of the reform movement. It also offered the prospect that a majority in Parliament would succeed in endorsing at least part of Khatami’s drive for political and social reforms. Perhaps, Nasser said, the new Parliament would also use its authority to investigate the institutions of the state that still lay beyond its control: the foundations, the Ministry of Intelligence, the judiciary, the military. Perhaps it would pass laws making it easier for foreign firms to invest in the country. Perhaps it would use its power to fulfill its pledges to pass laws making the Iranian political system more inclusive and accountable.

But Iranian politics remains an open-ended game in which goals are tactical and reactions are based on what may happen tomorrow, not five years from now. Nasser suddenly stopped himself. He warned that the big win for the reformists signaled the beginning of a dangerous time in Iranian politics. The victory did not change the fact that, even working together, the President and the Parliament did not control many levers of power. A sustained backlash from the right was a dangerous possibility. “Many, many analysts, even secular ones, are convinced that these guys in the reform movement are moving too fast,” Nasser said. “The reformers cannot pass laws by themselves. The elections have produced a large weak majority inside the Parliament without much power outside, and a small powerful minority outside the Parliament with control over the economic and political levers of power.” This minority, he said, would not be likely to give up.