The Ayatollah Begs to Differ (32 page)

Khatami, elegant as ever in his summer cream-colored linen robes and perfectly wound black turban, rose from his front-row seat to renewed thunderous applause and an audience of millions watching on live TV. He hushed the crowd with gestures and launched into a speech that was self-congratulatory and yet somehow modest at the same time. How often, I wondered, had he wanted to give this speech, to tell an ungrateful nation that they didn’t have it so bad, that without him they wouldn’t have enjoyed even the modest freedoms they now took for granted? He spoke at length of two Islams—
his
true Islam and the Islam of extremism and fanaticism: the Islam of the Taliban. Both, he daringly said (for the strictly Sunni Taliban were Iran’s archenemies and are reviled by almost all Iranians, including all the mullahs), exist in Iran, a veiled reference to the likes of Ayatollah Mesbah-Yazdi, Ahmadinejad’s archconservative patron, and to what might come under the new regime. A few people shouted, “Death to the reactionaries!” but Khatami quickly silenced them. “‘Death to,’” he said in so many words, “is
so
over.”

The president defended the progress made under his administration, listing his accomplishments one by one, but what was notable about his almost hour-long speech was that he referred to the Rahbar, or “Supreme Leader,” only once. No public figure in Iran would ordinarily dare to exclude his ultimate boss, Ayatollah Khamenei, from a major speech, but Khatami was, now that he was leaving office, showing his contempt for the ruling class that had made his job difficult during his presidency. The only other reference to Rahbar (which simply translates from Farsi as “Leader,” but is also Khamenei’s title) during the evening was when the MC, in a flourish of Persian ta’arouf that combined flattery for one and insult for another, referred to Khatami as the “Rahbar” and, after an almost perceptible pause, “of the dialogue among civilizations.” Wow, I thought,
that
did not go unnoticed by the conservative supporters of Khamenei watching at home. At the end of his speech, and a moment that I found out later had been cut away from on television, a man shouted from the floor, “What about Ganji?,” referring to the hunger-striking political prisoner Akbar Ganji languishing in Evin prison at the time. Khatami smiled and called back, “Okay, okay,” as if he intended to answer, but the MC, a tall, imposing woman in a cream-colored manteau (ankle-length lightweight coat) and hijab, intervened quickly and brought the rally to an end, allowing Khatami to be conveniently whisked away by his security contingent. Don’t push it, she wisely must have thought, and as I looked behind me, I was relieved to see the man walk away unmolested by any government security agents undoubtedly mingling with the crowd.

Seyyed Mohammad Khatami was elected president of the Islamic Republic of Iran by a landslide in 1997. It had been eighteen years since the revolution of 1979 had wiped out over twenty-five hundred years of monarchy and the Shia clerics of Iran had solidified their power in forming the only functioning theocracy of the late twentieth century. Iran had suffered a brutal eight-year war with Iraq in the 1980s, a period when immigration to the West resulted in brain drain on a scale Iran had never seen, and those who remained committed to living in Iran (out of either necessity or unwillingness to start a new life elsewhere), from all classes in society, were ready for a change. The austere, rigidly controlled society had already started opening up under Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, the pragmatic and fiercely capitalist previous president, but Iranians were growing tired of the establishment that he and other clerics represented—a corrupt establishment given to cronyism—and voted overwhelmingly to give power to the relatively obscure former culture minister Khatami, someone they knew had at least allowed far greater freedom from censorship and a freer press and had expressed liberal views on Islamic democracy during his tenure as minister of culture and Islamic guidance—more so than any other public figure had dared to in the past.

Khatami had studied Western philosophy at university in Isfahan, but after receiving his bachelor’s degree and while still studying for a master’s at the University of Tehran, he moved to Qom to further his education in Islam. He completed his studies,
ijtihad
, at the seminaries, achieving the status of
mujtahed
, or “scholar,” the equivalent of a divinity Ph.D., before moving to Hamburg, where he became chairman of the Islamic Center in the German city. He returned to Iran after the revolution of 1979 and immediately became involved with the government, first as a member of parliament, then as culture minister twice, once from 1982 to 1986 and then again from 1989 to 1992, when he resigned. He then went on to become the head of the National Library, reflecting his taste for all things academic, until his election as president in 1997. He was also (and still is) a member from its inception of the beautifully named but actually liberal-leaning Association of Combatant Clerics, not to be confused with the hard-line Combatant Clergy Association, both of which conjure up images of Monty Python’s “Spanish Inquisition” skit from the 1970s, though only some of those in the latter group espouse philosophies bearing any similarity to the Bishops’ of the Python troupe’s fantasies. The “combatant” (or
mobarez
in Farsi, which can also be translated as “resistant”) clerics of neither association, however, are ninja Ayatollahs who might, with robes flying, soar across a room to land a deadening blow on those they do combat with, but they are politically minded senior clerics who have chosen one side or another, reform or conservative, in the ongoing struggle for the soul of their beloved Islamic Republic.

There are some in either camp who agree on many issues, and Hassan Rowhani, for example, the chief nuclear negotiator under Khatami and by no means a staunch conservative, is in the opposing camp to his, as is Rafsanjani the pragmatist, who leans to the reform side in Iranian politics, particularly if the conservatives are ascendant. Both clergies, extremely influential with the Supreme Leader, have, under a continued onslaught by Ahmadinejad and his allies, grown even closer to Khatami and the liberal reformers, perhaps hoping to derail any possibility of hard-line conservatives staying in power after the next presidential election in 2009 by uniting in their opposition to them.

Khatami was born in Ardakan, in the desert province of Yazd, in 1943, and so, unlike some other clerics, he has spent most of his adult life under an Islamic Republic. Ardakan is my father’s hometown, and at the time of Khatami’s youth was a backwater small village where everybody knew one another and a handful of families, probably no more than four or five, were wealthy landowners and the acknowledged elite. These families intermarried, naturally, and two of Khatami’s mother’s siblings, a brother and a sister from the Ziaie family, married my father’s older sister and brother, thus making my many first cousins on that side of the family first cousins to Khatami as well. I had never met Khatami himself, however, until well into his presidency, but I had met his brother (and chief of staff during his second term) Ali Khatami in the late 1970s, when we were both in college in Washington, where he roomed with his cousin Mohammad Majd, also my cousin.

Iranian small-town values aren’t diluted by years in the big city or even abroad, or by elevated status, and President Khatami welcomed me in Tehran in 2004 as a
hamshahri
, a “fellow from the same hometown,” and as though I were a long-lost relative. I saw Khatami twice on that trip at his offices at Sa’adabad Palace, a former palace of the Shah’s used mostly for entertaining foreign dignitaries and assigned to the presidential office under Khatami for essentially the same purposes. Khatami was most concerned at the time with finding a solution to the nuclear issue, and his government had suspended uranium enrichment research and processing while negotiating with the Europeans. But he was adamant that Iran had no plans to develop weapons and was incredulous that many Americans, especially members of the Bush administration, didn’t believe
him
, even if he recognized that they might have a harder time trusting some of the other members of Iran’s ruling class.

On my subsequent trip, in 2005, I met with him again at Sa’adabad, once while he was still president and once a few days after Ahmadinejad took office but while Khatami was still ensconced in his palace offices, which had been promised him by the Supreme Leader for his post-presidential career. (Ahmadinejad quickly convinced the Leader that that arrangement needed to end and evicted him within weeks of taking over, perhaps as payback for Khatami’s barring him, when Ahmadinejad was mayor of Tehran and as was customary for the mayor, from attending his cabinet meetings.) Ali Khatami would normally arrange for a car to pick me up, but on my second visit, when Khatami had been out of office for a few days, there were no cars available from the presidential pool, so I jumped in a taxi and asked to be taken to Sa’adabad.

My driver was a chatty fellow, and we got into a conversation about war, mainly because, with Ahmadinejad taking over the presidency,
le tout
Tehran was coming to believe that conflict with the United States was a distinct possibility. I asked the driver if he had served in the military, compulsory for Iranian males at eighteen or after college, and he replied in the affirmative. “I was wounded in battle,” he said, “which is why my arm doesn’t work properly.” He lifted his right arm in the air, although it was impossible to detect any injury.

“The Iraq war?” I asked.

“Not exactly,” he said. “It was at the tail end of the war, and it was the battle with the Mujahedin.” I felt a chill, for he was referring to the Mujahedin-e-Khalq, the Iranian resistance group, the MEK, which had attacked Iran from its base in Iraq in July 1988 and had been ambushed by waiting Iranian troops, who decimated the small army, leaving some two thousand Mujahedin dead. My childhood friend and the son of one of my father’s oldest friends, Payman Bazargan, who had joined the Mujahedin out of college in the United Kingdom, was one of those killed.

“Did you shoot any of the Mujahedin?” I asked, wondering if my driver could have fired the shot that killed my friend.

“Well, I fired my rifle, but I was wounded almost immediately and evacuated from the battlefield. Those poor bastards, they didn’t stand a chance. We knew they were coming, and we just mowed them down.”

“And how did that feel?” I asked. “I mean, killing fellow Iranians?”

“Just as bad as killing anyone, I suppose,” he replied. “It’s all awful, this business of war, no matter who’s fighting. I hope it never comes here again.”

I was silent for a while, but didn’t tell him that a friend had died in the battle he had described. I blamed Payman’s death on the Mujahedin anyway, for as far as I was concerned he had been brainwashed by the cultlike organization, which had no business sending amateurs to fight against an army such as the Islamic Republic’s. Payman had been a press officer for the Mujahedin; his British-accented perfect English had been useful to them until they had decided that in their biggest military campaign against Iran, pompously named Forouq-e Javidan—or “Eternal Light”—every able-bodied member of the organization would have to fight. Fight they did, and die they did. I had lost contact with Payman from the time he had joined the resistance group, but our families are very close, and his death had a large impact on our lives.