The Ayatollah Begs to Differ (18 page)

Haq-khordan—
“trampling of rights”—is a very common expression, and I have heard on many occasions, even from pro-American Iranians, how the United States, whether on the nuclear issue or on others (and certainly in the case of the CIA-backed coup of 1953), has trampled on the God-given rights of the Iranian people. For Iranians, fierce capitalists that they are (which Islam allows, even if only grudgingly), the pursuit of happiness is an important right, as are life, equality (an equality encouraged by Islam with the unfortunate exception of gender equality and, in its attempts at breaking the class system, by the Islamic Republic), and brotherhood (encouraged by Islam). Liberty is the one right that Western democracies view differently, as do some Iranians of course, from the way Iranian governments do. But most Iranians believe that they had defined their liberty under Mossadeq, the prime minister overthrown by the CIA, and had redefined it with the revolution of 1979, which liberated them from the totalitarianism of the Western-supported Pahlavis. Foreign powers, regrettably, often conspire to trample that right in pursuit of their own interests, and their own leaders too, who, as President Khatami once told me, have had little history of or experience with democracy, can exhibit dictatorial qualities rather soon after they’ve been democratically given the reins of power.

President Ahmadinejad, perhaps better than most other Iranian leaders, made haq the defining concept of Iranian politics both during his campaign and after he was elected. His obvious resentment of the ruling class was based not just on working-class values but also on his deep Shia sense of injustice done to the masses, of the violation of their haq, by their rulers. And to Ahmadinejad, the injustices that Ayatollah Khomeini had railed against were once again taking root in his beloved Islamic Republic, injustices such as corruption, cronyism, nepotism, and a stranglehold on power by a handful of politicians. Just as Khomeini had eschewed the language of politics and diplomacy, so did Ahmadinejad. He spoke in simple, informal terms, in the language of the street, with no nuance or obfuscation, and to many it was a refreshing change. His ta’arouf, often self-deprecating, was to present himself as but a simple man (like Khomeini) who only sought to defend the rights of Iran and Iranians, at home and abroad. His promises to fight corruption, patronage, and privilege while at the same time redistributing the government’s (oil) wealth directly to the dinner tables (“tablecloths,” or
sofreh
, as he put it) of ordinary Iranians were believed, and despite the trepidation of wealthy Westernized Tehranis he started his four-year term with a high degree of popularity.

Ahmadinejad had no religious credentials, but he also managed to out-believe even the strongest believers in Shia Twelver Islam by constantly invoking the Mahdi’s name, which in itself spoke to his obsession with haq and justice, which the good Imam is to deliver to all believers on Judgment Day.
⁸
Ahmadinejad not only interprets the story of the Mahdi’s occultation literally but believes it will be during his presidency that the Mahdi will resurface among ordinary mortals to once and for all fix the world’s problems. I was told by one person present at his inauguration that Ahmadinejad told several people there that he was only a temporary president, and that the Messiah would relieve him of the burdensome responsibility in a “few” years, at the
most
.

Despite his Shia fervor, however, Ahmadinejad’s acute sense of what Iranians might consider mundane but essential haq led him to declare less than a year into his presidency, and in the Messiah’s continued absence, that women have the right to attend soccer matches (the announcement cleverly coinciding with the international release of a film, banned in Iran, about a group of girls who disguise themselves as boys to do exactly that, but are arrested by army conscripts
⁹
). Senior conservative Ayatollahs, who are generally less concerned that the Mahdi will render their work irrelevant in their lifetimes, evidently took exception to their lay president’s interpretation of women’s rights, and Ahmadinejad’s initiative was vetoed immediately.

Disappointed female soccer fans aside, Ahmadinejad’s inability to deliver either the basic rights of Iranians or the Imam Mahdi began to be felt within a year of his taking office. As the winter of 2006–7 approached, discontent in Iran grew as the economy actually worsened and the prospect of international isolation, attributed largely to Ahmadinejad’s style if not his policies, worried the average Iranian. Iranians, like Americans, vote for their president and fully expect him, perhaps as naïvely as we do, to deliver on his campaign promises. Ahmadinejad’s promise to fill the bellies of all Iranians with the proceeds of Iran’s oil exports had fallen drastically short by that winter, well over a year into his presidency, and after his slate was trounced in municipal and national elections in December, attacks on him in the press, in salons, and in the streets became all too common. Foreign policy, what we were most concerned with when it came to Iran and its unusual leader, was mostly relevant to the Iranian masses only inasmuch as it affected their pocketbooks and, of course, their security. President Ahmadinejad’s promises to alleviate Iran’s economic woes were no longer believed, and the style of his foreign policy was viewed as having both exacerbated the economic crunch and contributed to the sense of insecurity, even if it continued to defend a nation’s rights.

The UN Security Council resolution of December 2006 imposing sanctions on Iran for its refusal to suspend uranium enrichment was viewed in Iran as a foreign policy failure, not because President Ahmadinejad’s sometimes belligerent and always defiant insistence that Iran would not give up its rights under the Non-Proliferation Treaty was largely disapproved of, but because the result of that resolution was that certain food staples, such as tomatoes, had, since the passage of the resolution, become unaffordable to the Iranian masses. The Holocaust conference in Tehran that preceded the UN vote was derided not because of its preposterous premise but for its being viewed as having unfavorably swayed the UN vote. The Iranian administration’s goading of President Bush and the U.S. government, whether on Iraq, Lebanon, the Palestinian question, or basic issues of Iranian and American power, was viewed not as illegitimate but as having resulted in unilateral U.S. economic sanctions (and undue U.S. pressure on European and Asian allies), which meant foreign letters of credit were essentially unavailable to Iranian businesses that would, if sanctions continued or even expanded, downsize and contribute to Iran’s already unenviable unemployment rate.

Iranians inside Iran were neither shy nor fearful in expressing their dissatisfaction with their president, but if his honeymoon with both Iranian voters and the Iranian media had been even shorter lived than President Bush’s (his extended by the events of 9/11, as it was), it did not mean that he was politically doomed, nor did it even mean that he couldn’t regain his popularity. Foreign policy was indeed inextricably linked in the minds of Iranians to the economy, but it was by no means certain that Iranians, who seemed to generally prefer that their president project a more benign image abroad, were more willing now than before to forgo what they believed to be nuclear independence in order to buy, say, cheaper tomatoes. However, Iranian obsessiveness with a single issue such as the price of tomatoes—and tomatoes were the national obsession for almost two months—was evident in the airtime it received on national television, in a debate in parliament, and in Ahmadinejad’s remark on the matter, widely ridiculed, that people should shop in his neighborhood because the price of tomatoes at his corner bodega hadn’t increased as much as elsewhere. He was actually not too far off the mark with his quip, which was intended as much as a dig against the elite as a defense of his economy, but his populist tone still wasn’t quite putting tomatoes on the tables of the working classes, who naturally deemed it their right to enjoy a meal with that most common of fruits. On weekday afternoons at the Behjatabad bazaar, however, Tehran’s chicest (and most expensive) outdoor food emporium, which I visited a few times, tomatoes of every variety were piled high in front of the vegetable stalls, and hawkers beckoned the well-dressed shoppers to sample their wares. The exquisitely red tomatoes, out of reach for most South Tehran residents, were bought by the kilo by men and women with sculpted noses who pulled up in their $120,000 Mercedes and $60,000 BMWs (in a city filled with $8,000 Iranian-made cars), many of whom would go on to discuss the price they paid at dinner parties with the same seriousness they normally reserved for discussing the Dow Jones Industrials or foreign exchange rates.

The Iranian wealthy, certainly the secular, Westernized ones, were taking delight in Ahmadinejad’s unpopularity, thankful that at last Iranians from all walks of life were turning against him, but their own lives were actually very little affected by Ahmadinejad’s policies. The concern that many had had when he was first elected president—that the social freedoms they had enjoyed under Khatami would be severely curtailed—had not yet materialized, and in Tehran in early 2007 the liberal interpretation of the hijab, along with dating, sex, liquor consumption, and every form of Western influence, continued unabated with the government still turning an, if not blind, then extremely myopic eye.

In the late spring of 2007, however, with an embattled government facing the possibility of further UN sanctions that could harm the already-unsteady economy, the authorities, in what seemed a move to turn attention away from more serious issues, embarked on a far more severe crackdown on liberalization than had been the norm in the past, and Ahmadinejad, despite his earlier statements that the issue of hijab paled in significance to greater issues of haq, did not weigh in on the crackdown.
¹⁰
A yearly rite when warm weather, and therefore more revealing outfits, first make their appearance, the public crackdown on “mal-veiling”—another of the wonderful words the Islamic Republic has given us—made only a small dent in Iranian lifestyles (but received much attention in the West). On the streets, women (and men with exaggerated hairstyles or skimpy T-shirts) were arrested with much greater frequency than in past years, but usually only if they challenged the authorities, who generally first warned them to, and then showed them how to, “correct” their behavior. But apart from the unusual wave of arrests for “un-Islamic behavior,” accusations were made both inside and outside Iran that there was a more nefarious aspect to the crackdown, namely, that it had been used as a cover to arrest, imprison, and intimidate opponents of the regime.

Indeed, a simultaneous crackdown on crime and gangs resulted in an unusually high number of executions by the state—a state that is second only to China in the number of its citizens it puts to death—and exile groups made the claim that the government had used the opportunity in enforcing Sharia (Islamic law, which automatically imposes the death penalty on crimes such as murder and rape unless the victims’ families agree to receive blood money as reparations) to eliminate some of its opponents. It was an accusation that was difficult to prove, for the most prominent political prisoners, such as labor leaders, student activists, feminists, and, of course, the Iranian-Americans accused of espionage, were not among the hanged, but those the government called “terrorists” certainly were (echoing the Shah’s era, when virtually all political prisoners hanged had been first found guilty of “terrorism,” and a reminder that the “terrorist” moniker has worked in undermining civil rights in autocracies and democracies equally). They included the confessed assassins of a judge, and a number of men found guilty, having provided less convincing confessions, of acts of terrorism in the troubled regions of Sistan va Baluchestan (bordering Pakistan and where Sunni separatists frequently engage government forces) and Khuzestan (where Arab separatist groups have on occasion resorted to terror tactics and where Iran accuses the United States and the United Kingdom of fomenting unrest).