The Ayatollah Begs to Differ (35 page)

The Shah, who had divorced two women he claimed to love for their inability to produce a male heir, when asked by Barbara Walters in an interview in 1977 about his earlier sexist comments to the journalist Oriana Fallaci, didn’t deny them, and in fact went further in dismissing equality of the sexes and betrayed his misogyny by saying that women hadn’t even been able to produce a famous and great chef (he must not have heard of Alice Waters, whose reputation and restaurant were in their infancy at the time). Walters’s follow-up question, with the Shah’s wife, Farah, looking on, was whether he believed that Mrs. Pahlavi could govern as well as a man, and he replied that he “preferred not to answer.” I remember feeling sorry for the empress, whose tear-filled eyes were clearly visible even on my small portable TV. But in the context of the kinds of questions on women’s rights that have been debated in Iran since before the revolution, it is easy to see why the issue of the hijab, a flashpoint for liberals in the West but an inconvenience that pales in significance compared with other gender issues in Iran, is not a battle that women are keen to fight, at least not yet.

In my meeting with Bojnourdi, I was also curious to hear him speak about the notion that an all-encompassing Islam has smothered the Iranian character, the soul of the nation. “Not at all,” the Ayatollah replied indignantly. “Islam is a way of life and part of the Iranian soul,” he said, “but so is poetry, music, and Iranian art. Hafez, Sa’di, Rumi, and all the Sufi poets are more widely read and taught now than before the revolution.” Bojnourdi wasn’t quite being disingenuous, but in naming Sufi poets, he was touching upon another of the infuriating contradictions of Islamic Iran, for Sufism has always been viewed with great suspicion by some of the Ayatollah’s fellow clerics as a potential challenge to their supreme, and more orthodox, religious authority. Not all Sufis (who owe a philosophical allegiance to and are disciples of a master of an order, rather than an Ayatollah) are poets, but nearly all the great poets of Iran were Sufis. The authorities, though, know better than to disparage Iran’s national heroes, the great poets of centuries past, and most will extol their virtues as humans—pious Muslims at that—as well as recite their poetry at the drop of a turban. Bojnourdi, to my relief, did not recite any ancient verses to make his points (for that would have required me, if I were to be considered at all literate, to respond cleverly in kind), but this gentle Friar Tuck–like figure left me with no doubt that he would, with his religious authority, remain a powerful force for would-be reformers of Iran. That he, and even a few of his fellow clerics, bearded men in eighteenth-century garb, would hold views more progressive on some issues than even the Shah (yes, she
can
govern!), a king and leader beloved and even glorified by every U.S. administration since FDR (and who did not live to see either Nigella Lawson or the Food Network), may seem counterintuitive, but it provides more than a glimmer of hope for Iranians struggling to effect change within the constraints of an Islamic society. Undoubtedly disliked for his views by the Supreme Leader and the band of conservative mullahs and their supporters whose Islam he clashes with, in some cases severely, Bojnourdi nonetheless is one of the Ayatollahs they can’t mess with, for messing with a “sign of God” is fraught with risk in a country ruled by, well, God. And thank Allah for that.

I saw Mohammad Khatami twice when I was in Tehran in early 2007, this time at his offices in Jamaran. Having been evicted from Sa’adabad by Ahmadinejad when he took office as president, Khatami must have seen it as sweet revenge to land at Jamaran, the name of a neighborhood, once a village but now part of the urban sprawl, in the far reaches of North Tehran, but best known as home to Ayatollah Khomeini while he was still alive. Ahmadinejad, who after all campaigned on bringing back the purity of Khomeini’s revolution and whose feelings toward the founder of the Islamic Republic border on hero worship, could not have anticipated that Khomeini’s family and the Khomeini foundation, with the full backing of the Supreme Leader, would provide offices to Khatami and his International Institute for Dialogue Among Cultures and Civilizations in one of their compounds at Jamaran. In a way, it’s far more appropriate for Khatami than the royal palace of Sa’adabad, as it shields him from accusations that he is enjoying an imperial lifestyle and puts Khomeini’s imprimatur onto his organization, an advantage that I’m confident he doesn’t take lightly in the always turbulent political atmosphere of Tehran.

On the second floor of a stately villa behind tall walls and an imposing gate, manned by security guards, Khatami sat in his thousand-square-foot office in mid-January, preparing for a trip to Davos and the World Economic Forum. Word among former and present high-ranking government officials was that Ahmadinejad, verging on apoplexy upon hearing that Khatami would be hobnobbing with the likes of Tony Blair and John Kerry, demanded from his foreign minister, Manouchehr Mottaki, that he be invited too. Mottaki came up, needless to say, empty-handed, but it is doubtful that he took the opportunity to mention that if His Excellency the good doctor had been a little less confrontational, a little less dubious about the Holocaust, and a tad more diplomatic, perhaps the world leaders and businesspeople gathering in Switzerland wouldn’t be so keen to avoid his company at any cost. Khatami told me he had been scheduled to be on a panel with Senator Kerry, which would constitute a rather high-level contact between Iran and the United States, and rather than be impolitic and ask Khatami directly if he had the approval of the Supreme Leader, I merely brought his name up, hoping to get my answer indirectly. And Khatami obliged, telling me that he saw the Supreme Leader regularly, a few times a month, and that they discussed all kinds of issues. Including, I suspect, whether he should accept the invitation to Davos and whether he should have a tête-à-tête with a former U.S. presidential candidate.

I saw Khatami again after his Davos trip and before I left Tehran; his appearance on the panel with Kerry had received scant attention in the Iranian media, either because Ahmadinejad didn’t want anything to do with publicizing Khatami for fear of raising his popularity or because enemies who might ordinarily want to attack Khatami for engaging the “Great Satan” were held in check by the Supreme Leader, or a combination of the two. Ali Khatami, his brother who continued in his job as the unpaid chief of staff, sat in on my meeting with Khatami (quietly, as he has in almost all of Khatami’s meetings over the years), and the former president and I had a frank discussion about his role in the future of Iran. Ali, the uncharacteristically low-profile former high-ranking official, has always been his older brother’s closest adviser, but he continues to shun the spotlight and avoids the media to the best of his ability. Scrupulously honest (he refused a salary during Khatami’s presidency to avoid charges of nepotistic advantage in a country where nepotism is rampant and, to many, a right, and in fact suffered financially while in the administration when he was unable to tend to his businesses), he is a witty, American-educated engineer who has as good a grasp on Iranian politics as anyone in Tehran but, unlike the youngest Khatami brother, Reza, a former M.P. who fiercely opposes the status quo and openly criticized President Khatami for not doing enough for the cause of reform, maneuvers stealthily through the Machiavellian maze that is the Persian political system, fiercely defending his brother’s interests and legacy.

Mohammad Khatami is a keen conversationalist, and although he is, as a true politician, careful with his words, he is not shy in setting out his philosophy. “Iran,” he told me, “deserves a much higher status than it occupies today. Democracy is ultimately the only hope for Iran. Democracy in the West is shaped by their culture, by their history, and in Iran we have our own culture and history, and our democracy will be shaped in accordance with our culture.” Was he trying to say that that meant it had to be an
Islamic
democracy? I wondered. “I don’t mean ‘liberal democracy,’” he answered. “Democracy means the government is chosen by the people and they have the power to change it if they are unhappy, but Islam is one of the foundations of our culture, and it will influence our democracy. Of course Islam must adjust to democracy as well,” he added, a sentiment that puts him greatly at odds with influential conservative clerics who in some cases believe democracy to be incompatible with Islam, or, more precisely, with their God-given mandate to rule.

We talked at length about his ability to influence events in Iran as a private citizen, but I really wanted to know if he would, given that Ahmadinejad had proven to be vulnerable at the polls, run again for president in 2009. (The Iranian constitution forbids more than two consecutive four-year presidential terms, as does ours, but does not disqualify an ex-president who has served two terms from running for the office again.) Khatami insisted that it was not what he desired, telling me that Iranian politics has to move away from being so strongly personality based (parties are notoriously weak in Iran, and individual politicians are prone to creating cults of personality) and that he only wished to have some influence in the future. I knew, however, that more and more people were advising him to think about running, including his close adviser Sadeq Kharrazi, the fiercely loyal former ambassador, and I pressed him on the issue. “Of course,” he said,
“che farda shavad.”
He smiled knowingly. “As Ferdowsi [the great tenth-and eleventh-century Persian poet and author of Iran’s epic masterpiece the
Shahnameh
, or
Book of Kings
] said,” he continued, in the typically Persian way of making a point obliquely,
“‘Che farda shavad, fekr’e farda konim.’”
(When [if] tomorrow comes, let’s think about tomorrow.)

FEAR OF A BLACK TURBAN

I could have sworn that the dogs went first. Those Islamic-ly unclean creatures, strays, wild, and pets, howling in the dark mountains and valleys of Shemshak, a ski resort an hour or so north of Tehran. It was the ninth day of the Ten-Day Dawn in February 2007—almost a fortnight of celebrations commemorating the Islamic Revolution of 1979—and in anticipation of the national holiday on the tenth day, the day the revolution succeeded, many Tehran residents, or those who could afford a cabin in the mountains, had fled the city much as many New Yorkers do the week of the Labor Day or Memorial Day holidays. I had driven with a friend up the narrow, winding, and often treacherous roads to the resort for a party, and we were to drive back the same night so that I could attend the rallies and marches in the city the next day.

Shemshak, and some of the other ski resorts in the Alborz Mountains, would seem to a visitor out of place in the Islamic Republic, and not just because of the deep, powdery snow on the slopes or the chic men and women in Chanel sunglasses and the latest ski fashions on lifts at ten and twelve thousand feet above sea level, but also in the resemblance of the villages and the valleys they occupy to European resorts in Switzerland, France, and Austria. The chalet where the party was being held was on the edge of a steep cliff, and the views from the curtainless panoramic windows were breathtaking, but the windows also afforded a clear view
into
the house, where I was standing by the bar, liquor bottles arrayed on shelves behind me for the world to see, chatting with a French couple who had also driven up from Tehran. An oil executive and his wife, they had chosen to remain in Iran after his retirement, and he had become a consultant, a particularly lucrative occupation in Iran, even if it remains unclear what one actually consults on, as long as one knows the right people. They spoke no Farsi, and neither did the hostess, also European but married to an Iranian and a longtime resident of Tehran, and they found it strange that I would wonder if they were interested in learning.

As dusk turned to night, other guests arrived, some still in ski gear, and the party went into full swing. It was right before dinner was served, which included illicit appetizers such as pork salami and Parisian ham, and which the French couple took great delight in devouring, that I heard the dogs howling and I stepped to the windows. Then I heard the cries reverberating from the hills and amplified in the valleys:
“Allah-hu-Akbar! Allah-hu-Akbar!”
They were punctuated by the barking of the dogs, which politely waited until the cries died down before vigorously providing a chorus. And then,
“Allah-hu-Akbar!”
again. And again. No other guest, nor the host and hostess, seemed at all curious or disturbed by the sounds coming from the mountains. They had undoubtedly heard them in years past and on the same February evening—cries of
“Allah-hu-Akbar!”—
in remembrance of Ayatollah Khomeini’s request on the eve of the revolution that all Iranians take to their roofs and proclaim, “God is Great!” Which they did by the millions, sealing the fate of the monarchy and its unsure military apparatus, which the very next day withdrew to barracks and publicly proclaimed that it would abide by the wishes of the people. Khomeini’s request to the people had been a brilliant tactical move: he knew that the army, made up mostly of conscripts from the religious working class, would not only be deeply moved by the cry but also find it impossible to counter with any violent reaction. It had already been proven so: in the weeks leading up to that night, many soldiers had been unable to bring themselves to fire on crowds of demonstrators, crowds shouting the one slogan they could all agree upon—“God is Great!” I have often wondered why protesters in modern-day Iran who are set upon by the police and sometimes government-allied vigilantes do not employ the same tactic, for they have even more reason now to believe that the truncheon-wielding authorities might balk at harming those who proclaim the greatness of Allah, but perhaps the expression, even if they believe in it, leaves too bitter a taste of the regime to utter.

The sounds in the hills and valleys of the ski resort on this evening, twenty-eight years after the revolution, may have become white noise to these Iranians and foreign residents of Tehran, but it seemed remarkable that they didn’t see the irony of their discussing, as is common at middle-and upper-class parties, what they believed to be the singular unpopularity of the Islamic regime while supporters of that regime, in their very own upscale backyard, were proclaiming their allegiance to the revolution and to the Islamic state, piercing the silent mountain night with their defiant cries that even the loud stereo emitting Western pop couldn’t drown out. One could be forgiven for wondering why wealthy Westernized and indeed even Western-passport-holding Iranians, some of whom have sizable assets overseas, choose to continue to live in the Islamic Republic and raise their children under a less-than-liberal government. The answer, as one friend put it a few years ago, is that anyone who stayed during the worst of times early in the revolution—when not only could a glass of beer bring you thirty lashes or a trace of lipstick a trip in a paddy wagon, but Saddam’s missiles also rained down nightly on Tehran—hardly has a reason to leave
now
.

The next morning I was up early and only slightly hung over from the high-altitude drinking the night before, ready to head for the culmination of the Ten-Day Dawn, or Dah-e-Fajr, with an enormous rally at Azadi Square in Tehran. February 11, the actual anniversary of the Islamic Revolution, followed in 2007 hot on the heels of Shia Islam’s holiest days of mourning, Tasua and Ashura, and preceded the very solemn Arbaein, the fortieth-day commemoration of Imam Hossein’s death on the plains of Mesopotamia all those years ago. (Forty days of mourning for any death is prescribed by Islam.) Iran had been, for all intents and purposes, in a somewhat surreal state of deep mourning and ecstatic celebration for almost a month (as it is every year), all the while nervously peering into the Gulf, watching a massive U.S. naval buildup clearly intended by the Bush administration to make Iranians at the very least, well, nervous.

Tehran had been rife with speculation in the days immediately preceding February 11 on just how nervous the Iranian leaders actually were, and there were conflicting reports on whether President Ahmadinejad’s promised nuclear announcement or even publicly promoted “nuclear symphony,” to be played by an orchestra on a stage in the massive square, would actually take place. Ali Akbar Velayati, a former foreign minister and current foreign policy adviser to the Supreme Leader but not in the president’s cabinet, had made an unusually high-profile trip to Moscow, prompting questions about the level of confidence the Supreme Leader had in Ahmadinejad and his foreign minister, Mottaki, who would normally have been entrusted with diplomatic overtures to West and East. Ali Larijani, head of the Supreme National Security Council and Iran’s chief nuclear negotiator, had first announced, then canceled, then finally confirmed that he would attend a global security conference in Munich on the weekend, providing much fodder for political gossip in the capital, gossip that included everything from the Supreme Leader’s estrangement from the president to the continued rumors about the state of his health. Was a last-minute flurry of diplomatic activity outside of Ahmadinejad’s purview intended to signal the West that Iran was ready to back down on the issue of uranium enrichment? Or had the president been indeed effectively sidelined, as some had come to believe, in the foreign policy and nuclear arenas?

His dismissal in late January of Javad Zarif, Iran’s UN ambassador, had been a signal to some that he still held some sway, for that highly sensitive post is always filled at the exclusive pleasure of the Supreme Leader, but the fact that the Leader had subsequently personally chosen the moderate Mohammad Khazaee—someone far closer to Khatami than to the president—to replace him raised new questions. The Supreme Leader himself of course had already addressed the rumors of his illness and even impending death in an appearance on state television, but former Hojjatoleslam and now Ayatollah Rafsanjani,
¹
on a visit to Qom, had recently reassured senior clerics and the nation that there were qualified individuals to assume the mantle of Supreme Leader—to some a gaffe that confirmed Ayatollah Khamenei’s illness and to others a clumsy attempt to emphasize the continuity of the Islamic Republic in the face of external and internal threats, but at the very least an assertion of Rafsanjani’s own power. It had been reported in the early days of the Ten-Day Dawn that President Ahmadinejad was also due to visit Qom and the various marja-e-taghlid (“sources of emulation,” or Grand Ayatollahs) imminently, just as Ali Larijani had done in a much-photographed and symbolic visit with Grand Ayatollah Fazel Lankarani, but as the days passed and he remained in Tehran, it became obvious to most Iranians that his attempt to ingratiate himself with the center of clerical power had been rebuffed. February 2007 marked some lonely days indeed for the proud and defiant president of Iran, but it couldn’t matter to the Ten-Day Dawn. For Iran’s national day, once the birthday of the Shah (and thus more a celebration of a man’s vanity and conceit than of a nation), was now, like the Fourth of July for Americans, a day of nationalistic pride and a celebration of an independent nation. It could certainly not be about Ahmadinejad, or any other president for that matter, regardless of his popularity or accomplishments, and although the president would take center stage and make a speech, February 11 is for Iran, not for a person.

On Friday, February 9, a text message joke made the rounds of Iran’s upwardly mobile cell phones, a now-standard practice in distributing licentious and antigovernment material. The Saudis, it read, had announced that the 22nd of Bahman (February 11), Iran’s national holiday, would fall on Saturday, February 10. Both a dig at Iran’s ruling clergy class, who regularly and obstinately announce major Islamic holidays a day or two later than the Saudis (who are, after all, the guardians of Islam’s holiest sites and theoretically the defenders of the faith), and a dig at Iran’s contrarian foreign policy, it was wildly popular and the source of much hilarity among those Iranians who would most certainly not be attending the festivities and rallies on that Sunday, the national holiday. But Iran’s ruling class cares little for the wealthy and secular elite, those whom foreign reporters come into contact with most, and those who are quickest to tell anyone who cares to listen that the Islamic Republic’s days are numbered. Like proverbial ostriches with heads buried in the sand, and like my fellow guests at the party the night before, they spent the holiday skiing in resorts like Shemshak, on shopping trips to Dubai, or at home with friends watching illegal satellite broadcasts, rather than observing millions of their fellow citizens taking to the streets to proclaim their devotion and loyalty to their country and velayat-e-faqih, the very political concept that some of them insist is gasping its last breath.