The Ayatollah Begs to Differ (31 page)

While political activists of all stripes continue to devise imaginative ways to further their causes and agendas, whether by retreating behind walls they believe the authorities can’t or won’t breach or by challenging the government publicly but with caution, they know they have to tread lightly as their names become known to the security services, who are at all times suspicious of any activity that might lead to a revolution, “velvet” or otherwise. Iranians who are of little or no interest to agents of the Islamic Republic are Iranians who, despite privilege, wealth, Western appearance, and generally secular ways, live their lives quietly behind the walls of their homes and have neither real political influence nor ambitions. As long as they can continue to make a living, maintain their wealth, travel freely, and party as they please in private, the members of this secular elite are generally unwilling to jeopardize their comfortable lifestyles for the sake of any form of political activism. They have political opinions, of course, and they express them openly among friends in the privacy of their homes, but they seem uninterested in any real activism—the kinds of efforts that would include attending or organizing protest rallies or marches—and they are no threat to the Islamic Republic.

On New Year’s Eve 2005, I was invited to a party in North Tehran, one of many being held by desperately Westernized Persians, for whom their own calendar, firmly stuck in the fourteenth century, provided little excuse to show off their European ways. The ride to the wealthy part of town took me past grand embassies, smart shops with Christmas decorations, and a brightly lit Apachi burger joint on Shariati Avenue. The “Apachi” is, as one can denote from the logo, indeed meant to be an Apache, or at least a cartoon depiction of a tomahawk-wielding Native American, another indication that racial sensitivity has never been the Persians’ strong suit. Crawling along the boulevard at rush-hour pace despite the late hour, I could see the inside of the burger joint teeming with youngsters of both genders, and they were hanging out, just as teenagers do in small-town and rural America, where the Dairy Queen and the bowling alley are the only places to meet girls or boys. And although the signs above the registers—big enough to be read from a passing car—begged the customers to be respectful of and follow Islamic dress laws, the diners inside seemed more intent on testing the boundaries of exactly what those laws were. This night, at least, the Islamic Republic was allowing the walls of the fast-food restaurant, even its glass ones, to be a private barrier not to be breached.

I heard the music before I spotted the building. Bass, heavy bass, and all I could think was that the whole neighborhood knew there was a party going on. My cabdriver sensibly zeroed in on the source and let me out. “No, please, it really was very worthy,” I said a few times, trying to hand over a few banknotes to his ta’arouf protestations. Inside the fancy apartment liquor flowed, the music was loud, the women were not only bareheaded but mostly bare, and I thought that there was nothing Islamic about this little part of the republic, with the glaring exception of the person who was serving drinks. She was a tall woman in head-to-toe chador with no hint of makeup, and stood in stark contrast to the heavily mascaraed, rouged, and lipsticked ladies, most with décolletages that would be considered provocative by Parisian standards, all around her. Her little daughter in the kitchen was helping out with the food: she couldn’t be more than ten, but she was also wearing a full head covering, a hijab, tightly contoured under her chin. What, I wondered, did the mother-and-daughter domestic team make of all this? Wasn’t the mother offended by the bacchanalia? Especially in front of her daughter? Wasn’t she going to call the morals police?

The women danced to nauseating Los Angeles–produced Iranian pop, and every now and then one of them would shimmy up to me provocatively, breasts heaving, and encourage me to join in. “Can’t dance Persian,” I would say, but they were really insistent. “Really, no,” I would insist, but ta’arouf extends to the dance floor and “no” really means “ask me again.” Other men, all wearing ties as symbols of their disapproval of Islamic dress codes and hearty approval of all things Western, succumbed to their charms rather more readily and flailed about hopelessly while the women who enticed them from their chairs all but ignored them, happier to show off their own dancing and their seduction skills to anyone who cared to notice.

Eventually the chador-clad housekeeper elbowed her way through the gyrating bodies to place food on the dining table, but she kept her head down in either submissiveness or denial, I couldn’t be sure which. My eyes followed her back to the kitchen and watched her pick up the phone. Perhaps she had had enough; perhaps she
was
calling the vice squad. But no, nothing happened. She was behind the walls of her employer, after all, of her own free will, and she might explain it that way to her young and impressionable daughter. The men and women, oblivious to them, danced the night away as if they were in New York or London, and the housekeeper and her daughter were driven southward home, a home behind their own more
najeeb
, or “virtuous,” walls, by the husband she had called. A home where the Islamic Republic lived up to its name, and where it would have no reason to ever come knocking.

THE AYATOLLAH BEGS TO DIFFER

Arriving in Tehran from Qom late at night on the last day of Mohammad Khatami’s presidency, I switched on the car radio. A sweet-voiced female presenter read an ode to the president as my car passed by a huge mural depicting an American flag on the side of a building facing an overpass—stars represented as skulls, and stripes as the trails of bombs falling. Her voice was sorrowful with a hint of trepidation. The next day Mahmoud Ahmadinejad would be installed as the new president of Iran by the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and Tehran seemed to have suddenly become collectively nostalgic for a man it had all but abandoned, if not openly mocked, in the last years of his eight-year presidency.

All week I had witnessed a sort of melancholy mood; Iranians, even those who voted against the reformers, heirs to Khatami’s politics, seemed now saddened to see him go. He had been the soft face of the nation for a long time, a period of growth and international outreach for the Islamic Republic, and despite frequent criticism from both left and right he had, many Iranians agreed on the eve of the archconservative Ahmadinejad’s inauguration, performed his duties as honorably as any man could. Slowly, middle-and upper-middle-class Iranians seemed to be coming to the realization that perhaps their lives, at least their social lives, could be in for a change, and not for the better. Khatami had challenged the system, if not changed it, in a way that no high-ranking official had, for although Iran had had its share of dissident mullahs, none had been permitted to advance their careers within the system as Khatami had. Strictly speaking not a dissident, for Khatami was a product of the revolution and was dedicated to its promise, he was nonetheless someone who differed with many of the leading senior Ayatollahs, and certainly with their conservative followers in government, on issues as far-reaching as the place of Islam in society and relations with the outside world, including the United States.

My friend Fuad once joked to me, after I had spent time with President Ahmadinejad in New York, that I should persuade the president to go to dinner at his house in Los Angeles, implying that he—and perhaps some other Iranian Jews—would politely give him a piece of his mind, certainly while employing some particularly challenging ta’arouf. I half-jokingly replied that although I thought that was an impossibility, perhaps I could persuade Khatami, who had told me he very much wanted to go to California the last time he toured the East Coast, to have dinner with him instead. “Listen,” Fuad said in all seriousness, aware of my relationship with Khatami, “if you could arrange that, believe me, it would be a greater honor for me than if Ben-Gurion himself came to dinner! Please tell him that; I really mean it.” Over a year and a half after leaving office, Khatami still had his fans.

That Khatami would still be relevant in Iranian politics today, particularly after a stunning loss in the presidential elections of 2005 by his would-be successors (Mehdi Karroubi and Mostafa Moin, the reform candidates in the first round, finished third and fourth, respectively), is not particularly surprising. Iranians have very little experience with political parties (the Shah having outlawed all except his own, Rastakhiz, to which membership was mandatory for not only all civil servants but practically the entire country), and few identify themselves with one or another of the parties that have existed legally under the Islamic governments that followed. Most Iranian voters wouldn’t know to what party a particular candidate belongs anyway, and as such, personality plays a large role in elections, as does, naturally, where a candidate falls in the political spectrum: liberal, pragmatic center, or conservative. Khatami was the first true liberal (by the standards of Iran, or indeed the Middle East) to become president, and under his leadership noticeable changes occurred in Iranian society. Not only were laws on public behavior relaxed (or ignored, mostly), but Iran’s isolationist policies were almost completely reversed, leading to an opening for Iranian businesses and even tourism that changed the character of the Islamic Republic. Iranians abroad, after years of staying away from their homeland partly out of fear and partly because of the obstacles Iranian consulates would erect for dual-passport holders, were actively encouraged to return to Iran, if only for yearly visits, and the normally dour and even rude officials in charge of issuing passports to Iranians were transformed, by direct order from Tehran, into charmingly polite, ta’aroufing, and helpful fellow citizens.
¹

The kinds of changes to Iranian society that were made under Khatami have proven very difficult to undo, even when conservatives have tried their utmost. (It is important to note that during his populist campaign, Ahmadinejad convincingly dismissed, usually with a giggle, as ridiculous any notion that his administration would clamp down on press freedom, questionable hijab, or the Internet, all of which of course he then proceeded to attempt to do with varying degrees of success.) It is probably safe to say that a majority of Iranians, perhaps commensurate with the percentages that voted for him, share a political philosophy with Khatami—that is to say, a philosophy of moderation and real political change that doesn’t subvert the Islamic underpinning of the state. (It should be noted that the Revolutionary Guards, thought of in the West as monolithically and ideologically hard-line, also voted for Khatami with about the same percentages, over 70 percent, as the general population.) Naturally the more left-leaning and liberal Iranians were greatly disappointed by the pace of change and by Khatami’s unwillingness to take on the real hard-liners when it most counted, and there are those in the diaspora who are reluctant to countenance anyone who works within the Islamic system, but leaving aside economic factors (which Ahmadinejad played to his advantage), few Iranians, including members of the Guards, would describe themselves as being philosophically much to the left or the right of Khatami.

The desire for reform, both economic and political, is very much alive in Iran, no matter whom one talks to, and the broader reform movement seems to be awaiting a leader to emerge before the presidential elections of 2009. In every election since Ahmadinejad became president, the moderate and reform candidates have—much with the same majority that Khatami attracted—won decisive victories. A senior Iranian diplomat (and relative of an important cleric), in the days after Ahmadinejad’s election, described to me what he believed to be Khatami’s, and ultimately the reform movement’s, biggest fault. “He didn’t designate a successor,” he told me, “and that doomed the reform candidates. If only he had groomed someone, if only he had properly endorsed one of the candidates, that person would have won easily, and we wouldn’t be stuck with this idiot, this
ablah
!”

A few days before he was to hand over power to his successor, I met with Khatami at Sa’adabad Palace, his part-time office in the less polluted and more secluded part of the city, and he seemed relieved to be leaving office, happy to be able to devote his time to what he truly believed in—working for dialogue among civilizations. Khatami, a mid-level cleric, a Hojjatoleslam (meaning “expert on Islam” or “proof of Islam”) and not yet an Ayatollah, told me he was forming an NGO to pursue his dialogue initiative, and I got the sense that he thought he might actually be more effective outside government than in it, for he had, over the years, been thwarted by the clerical leadership in trying to implement many political and societal changes he thought necessary to the healthy development of “Islamic democracy.” He also had a fatalistic view of the future of politics in Iran, hinting at the probability of a painful future for democracy-minded Iranians under a strict rightwing regime not known for its tolerance of liberal or, in their minds, un-Islamic thought.

Khatami seemed saddened by the Bush administration’s attitude toward his country; he told me of his brief encounter with Bill Clinton at the pope’s funeral that April, a mere nod of the head, and wistfully said that things would have been much different the last few years had America been under a Clinton presidency. He reminded me that Clinton had been the first U.S. president to sit through a speech by an Iranian official (his, at the UN) since the founding of the Islamic Republic (U.S. officials normally stand up and walk out as protest when an Iranian leader begins a speech at the UN), a sign to him that had there not been an American election in 2000, or had the Supreme Court decided its outcome differently, Iran and the United States might have found a way toward normalization of relations. Fundamentalists in both countries, he said, contributed to the animosity between the United States and Iran, and now, he implied, the situation could only get worse. I don’t think he was quite aware of the irony that the “fundamentalists” he spoke of in America were closer in philosophy to Muslim fundamentalists, his political enemies, than to anyone else in the West. It strikes me often while I am in Iran that were Christian evangelicals to take a tour of Iran today, they might find it the model for an ideal society they seek in America. Replace Allah with God, Mohammad with Jesus, keep the same public and private notions of chastity, sin, salvation, and God’s will, and a Christian Republic is born.

During the last few days of Khatami’s presidency, there were a number of farewell events planned by his supporters and, on an official level, the state. On the Sunday night of the biggest event, dubbed
“Salam Khatami!”
(
salam
can mean both “goodbye” and “hello”), traffic around the Interior Ministry, where it was held, was snarled, and the main conference hall itself was packed. As I walked to my reserved seat, I passed many dignitaries I could recognize and some I couldn’t. The Chief Rabbi of Tehran was conspicuous in the front row, as were the Bishops of the Armenian Church and the Assyrian Church, and the Zoroastrian priests who were scattered about the first and second rows in prominent and television-dominating seats, no doubt reserved for them on explicit instructions by Khatami himself, who had made interfaith relations a priority of his presidency. Ayatollah Khomeini’s grandson Hossein sat in the front row, center, next to Khatami’s brother Reza, the ultraliberal politician disqualified from running for any office by the Guardian Council, who sat with his wife, Zahra Eshraghi, Ayatollah Khomeini’s granddaughter. This was the liberal face of the Islamic Republic, even with Khomeini descendants in the crowd, and die-hard conservatives chose to stay away. The evening began, as all official functions in Iran do, with a piercingly loud recitation of the Koran. It sounded not unlike the call to prayer to my ears, but every time I thought the orator was finished, he’d leap into another verse. It was hauntingly beautiful, for Khatami’s people had chosen a man with a mellifluous voice, though I still couldn’t help but wonder as it went on and on with no end in sight whether the rabbi and the priests were thinking the same thing I was: that sometimes the
Islamic
part of the Islamic Republic can be, shall we say, a little overbearing.

When the recitation was finally over, speakers from all walks of life—artists, professors, doctors, and students—took to the stage and spoke proudly of Khatami’s accomplishments and what he had meant to them and the nation. The highlights of the evening were two young students, one man and one woman, who, with a nationalistic fervor that would have been more appropriate at a fascist rally than at a gathering of liberals, poured poetic praise on the great nation, the great people, and the great leader they had had. The Khatami cheerleading section behind me broke out in chants, raised their banners, and enthusiastically jumped but not quite danced (for public dancing is prohibited in the Islamic Republic, especially for women), even as the applause died down. The speeches and the cheering momentarily threatened to turn the event into a dangerous celebration of a cult of personality, but I was confident that Khatami himself, who forbade government offices to display his photograph while he was in office (although many ignored his request), would ensure that it would not.