The Ayatollah Begs to Differ (34 page)

Reformists, keen to bring Iran into the twenty-first century in terms of social progress, all agree, but it is important to note that without the power the Supreme Leader wields, a government such as Ahmadinejad’s, also democratically elected, would undoubtedly harm Iran’s political and social development to a far greater degree than it has. The Supreme Leader, a sort of one-man Congress and Supreme Court rolled into each other, provides something of a bulwark against extremism from any side, and although a different Supreme Leader might swing more to the left or to the right, it is unlikely that a Leader elevated to the position by the Assembly of Experts—a sort of College of Cardinals that is popularly elected and reflects the diversity of Iranian political opinion—would not understand that his and his government’s stability and survival depend very much on his performing the balancing act with finesse. (The first and only chairman of the Assembly of Experts, Ayatollah Meshkini, died in the summer of 2007, and while one or two extremist members made a bid for his position, they were easily defeated when the body elected the pragmatic and far-from-extreme Rafsanjani as its chairman.)

Iran’s second Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, listens to his constituents, the Iranian people, he listens to all sides of the political spectrum, he considers public and world opinion, and then he makes decisions that annoy one or more parties but keep the Islamic Republic somewhat on an even keel. Democracy it is not, at least not by Western standards, but, as has often been stated to me by supporters of the system inside Iran, supporters who dislike being lectured to by Americans or even Iranian-Americans on the niceties of democracy, neither was the Supreme Court’s decision in 2000 to award the presidency to George Bush “in the interests of the country” despite his second-place showing in the popular vote and a very questionable victory in the electoral college. But reformers are convinced, as they might be in any democracy, that in a truly free system the people would choose them, the liberals intent on empowering the people, rather than conservatives who would limit their freedoms. They believe that Iran would not have produced a president such as Ahmadinejad had they not been unfairly blamed for the limitations of the political system, a system that meant they had to compromise with and even yield to the Supreme Leader and the more conservative politicians at every turn.

One of the leading and most senior Ayatollahs closely allied with Khatami and known for his liberal views is Mohammad Mousavi Bojnourdi, head of the Imam Khomeini Center for Islamic Studies. He was present at almost every public event that Khatami attended, even traveling with him on his trips abroad (I met him for the first time at a UNESCO conference in Paris in 2005), and provided Khatami with some serious Islamic cover, for although Khatami himself was a cleric, he was, and is, far more vulnerable to attack by hard-liners than an established Ayatollah ever would or could be.

In addition to calls from extremists on the right for Khatami to be censured or even defrocked for traveling to the United States in 2006, there were renewed attacks on his Islamic piety when news surfaced in Iran in the late spring of 2007, via video on YouTube, that Khatami had shaken the hands of women on a visit to Rome, where he had met Pope Benedict, a few weeks earlier. YouTube is blocked in Iran, as are many other foreign Web sites, and it is often impossible to fathom the reasons behind the censorship (the Web sites of the
New York Post
, the
Baltimore Sun
, and the
International Herald Tribune
are blocked, for example, but those of the
New York Times—
which owns the
International Herald Tribune—Haaretz
, and even the conservative and rabidly anti–Islamic Republic
Jerusalem Post
aren’t), particularly since it is common knowledge in Tehran that proxies are used to gain access to blocked sites. Naturally the government censors block the proxies as well as soon as they become aware of them (using U.S. software, much like the Chinese censors), but new proxies pop up on a daily basis, and Internet-surfing Iranians will often call each other in the mornings, as I have often done, to pass around the latest proxy addresses that enable them to freely navigate the Web. As such, and without too much trouble, the YouTube Khatami video and downloaded versions of it made the rounds of Iranian computers with lightning speed. Although the clip clearly showed him shaking hands with female admirers, he was forced to first issue a denial, and then say that in the crowds he encountered, it was far too difficult to see whether an outstretched hand belonged to a man or a woman.
²

His denial was reminiscent of another denial he was forced to make while he was still president—that he had cordially chatted with Moshe Katsav, president of Israel at the time, at Pope John Paul II’s funeral in 2005, also in Rome. (What is it about the Eternal City that comes back to haunt him?) Ali Khatami, his chief of staff, had told me a few days prior to attending the funeral that they were making arrangements with the Italian government and Vatican officials to ensure that Khatami, representing Iran, would not be seated too close to Katsav, representing the alphabetically adjacent Israel, in the viewing stands, but it had been impossible to separate the two by more than a few chairs and a few feet. Khatami’s problem was not so much that he might be forced to cross paths with an Israeli leader, who under normal circumstances would have wanted to shun the leader of Iran anyway, as that Katsav was an Iranian by birth, spoke fluent Farsi, and, moreover, was from the same hometown as Khatami. As such, and with Katsav’s inherent knowledge of ta’arouf, the danger that he would say hello was real, particularly to someone such as Khatami, who was known, even among the Iranian community in Israel, as a mild-mannered mullah who harbored none of the prejudices of some of his fellow clerics. (Under Khatami, Iranians who lived in Israel, for example, were quietly allowed to reclaim their Iranian citizenship through the Iranian Consulate in Istanbul and travel back and forth—again, usually through Turkey—unmolested, a practice that continues today, despite Ahmadinejad’s anti-Israel rants.)

As it happened, Katsav did apparently say hello, at least according to him, perhaps offering up proof to Iranian Jews that his ta’arouf skills had not diminished, speaking in Farsi and reminiscing for a few moments about their hometown of Yazd. Foreign newspapers published photographs that showed Khatami and Katsav standing very close to each other, apparently engaged in conversation, although it was impossible to prove that they actually uttered any words, and upon his return to Iran, Khatami simply flatly denied, despite Katsav’s assertion, having had any contact whatsoever with the Israeli president. The issue died quickly, in all probability because the Supreme Leader, who had no desire to see his president in the kind of hot water that might lead to a destabilization of the republic, ordered the dogs off, but Khatami’s enemies made a mental note that apparently remains archived in their memories.

Khatami was and is by no means a friend of Israel, and he shares the Iranian leadership’s view that the “Zionist” state is an illegal one, but he has told me on many occasions that he strongly believes that Iran under any leadership would abide with whatever the Palestinian people decided on their future, implying that if the Palestinians made peace with Israel, then Iran’s position might change. As president, if on a foreign trip an Israeli reporter tried to ask him a question at a press conference, Khatami would, as other Iranian officials do, refuse to take the question, but at Harvard University in 2006, as a private citizen, he had no qualms about politely answering the questions of a few Israeli students who quizzed him on the Holocaust (he said of
course
it happened), on Israel, and even on the topic of Ron Arad, the missing Israeli pilot who bailed out of his crippled Phantom jet fighter over Lebanon in 1986 and was captured by Shia militias, but is believed by some to be held alive in Tehran. One question, on the issue of Ahmadinejad’s “wiping Israel off the map,” left Khatami distancing himself from his successor’s remarks but pointing out at the end that “Palestine has been wiped off the map for sixty years,” a quip that drew cheers from many in the audience and, surprisingly, no jeers. It is difficult to dislike Khatami, even, apparently, if one is an Israeli at Harvard.

I met with Ayatollah Bojnourdi for the second time in Tehran after Ahmadinejad took office and the reformers he was close to had suffered a stinging loss at the polls. Bojnourdi, who with visible pride told me of his audience with Pope John Paul II, is known for his progressive views on women’s rights in Islam, although his front office was staffed with women fully enveloped in black chadors, not scarves. One of them served us tea and Persian sweets while we sat and chatted, or, more accurately, while I sat and he chatted, but at least women were present, I thought, even if they didn’t shake hands with men—unlike in Qom, where senior Ayatollah offices are all-male enclaves. Bojnourdi himself doesn’t have a strong feeling on men shaking hands with women and believes it to be a nonissue, although he himself would not shake the hand of a woman not his wife, sister, or daughter (
mahram
to men in Islam, which means women who can be uncovered and one can physically touch, while all other women, even cousins and aunts, are
namahram
, and therefore even their hair mustn’t be seen).

An endearing and disarmingly laid-back rotund man, the Ayatollah launched into a spirited defense of Khatami and his policies, policies that he claimed had the full support of the people. Barely giving me time to comment, he then jumped to a defense of Islam:
his
Islam. Islam, he said, is based on logic, Islam is based on friendship and love, and Islam’s ideology is the ideology of freedom. “The twelfth Imam will come [it appears that all Shia roads lead back to the Mahdi], and he will bring the Islam of dialogue, not of blood!” he exclaimed. But what about the lack of certain freedoms in the Islamic Republic? “In Shia Islam, anyone has the ability to disagree. In the West, and even in Iran, things are done in the name of Islam that are not Islamic,” Bojnourdi said, implying but not specifying his view that many of the freedoms curtailed in his country have no basis in his religion. “Islam made a point of peaceful dialogue fourteen hundred years ago,” he pointed out. “Islam teaches character and morality. There is no ambiguousness about that,” he continued. What about the role of women in Islam? I asked. “Women have all the God-given rights. A woman can certainly be president,” Bojnourdi added, referring to the argument before every presidential election when women are automatically disqualified from running, despite registering freely as candidates in the initial stages of the process. That opinion on women’s rights alone puts him at odds with many fellow Ayatollahs, has enhanced his stature among Iranian females (and activists quote him), and perhaps accounts for the all-female staff in his front office.

It could be argued that Bojnourdi’s stance on female presidents is a clever distraction from the larger issue of gender equality in Islam, for although women in the Islamic Republic enjoy rights that women in some Arab countries can only dream of, they are hobbled in achieving parity with their male counterparts by interpretations of Islam that vary widely among the clerics of Shia Islam, and “God-given rights” is, after all, a rather ambiguous phrase. How to challenge Islamic law that states, for example, that a woman’s testimony carries half the weight of a man’s, or that a woman can inherit only half of what a male sibling can, is an issue on the minds of feminists who are generally careful to not be seen as un-Islamic, and opinions from Ayatollahs such as Bojnourdi are crucial to the advancement of their cause. A nation that churns out hundreds of thousands of college graduates each year—60 percent of them women—many of whom end up either jobless or working in fields below their qualifications (such as running a taxi service or even driving a cab), will have to deal with the question of gender equality sooner rather than later, and Bojnourdi’s pronouncements on female presidents, distraction or not, are seen to be a step in the right direction. For if a woman can be president, it surely follows that she can also be a judge (a position denied the Nobel laureate Shirin Ebadi), and if she can be a judge, then perhaps more liberal interpretations of the law, on issues such as divorce, child custody, and spousal rights, might soon gain favor. And if a woman can be president, then surely she would no longer need her husband’s or her father’s permission to travel abroad—a law that dates from the time of the Shah, who, despite his Western ways and progressive reputation, was as sexist and misogynist as some of the Ayatollahs—unlike Bojnourdi, who is a voice of reason in an often unreasonable debate.