The Ayatollah Begs to Differ (39 page)

The dynamics of Iranian politics, which make the Islamic Republic a difficult target for regime-change proponents, can be witnessed a few miles farther north of Vanak Square at the Center for Strategic Research, a quasi-governmental organization, which occupies a striking blue glass modern high-rise in Niavaran, one of the northernmost and wealthiest districts of Tehran. The center, a think-tank-like arm of the Expediency Council (whose chairman is Ayatollah Rafsanjani), employs a legion of former government employees, allies of Rafsanjani and Khatami, who have found themselves unemployable in President Ahmadinejad’s administration. The Expediency Council is one of those governmental bodies that mystifies Westerners; it was set up originally to settle disputes between the elected parliament, the Majles, and the Guardian Council (the body that ensures the principles of Islam are adhered to by the Majles and also vets candidates running for election, theoretically on their Islamic qualifications), but its true power lies more in its advisory role to the Supreme Leader, who in 2005 delegated some of his own authority to the council—granting it supervisory powers over all branches of the government of President Ahmadinejad—some think as a consolation prize demanded by Rafsanjani after suffering his humiliating defeat at Ahmadinejad’s hands.

A former ambassador under the previous administration invited me to a lunch there one day in early 2007, a political salon of sorts where former government officials who now presumably do strategic research for the benefit of one or another branch of the government (though certainly not the president, who couldn’t be less interested in the views, strategic or not, of any of his rivals) gather in a capacious conference room every Thursday to exchange ideas and, of course, discuss politics. Hassan Rowhani, the center’s highest-profile strategist, former chief nuclear negotiator in Khatami’s regime, a close confidant of the Supreme Leader
and
Rafsanjani, a member of the Assembly of Experts, and a potential rival to Ahmadinejad in the next presidential elections, does not participate in the salon; perhaps he knows that if he did, it would take on an uncomfortable hue of intrigue against an already paranoid presidency.

The conference room where we gathered was on the first floor (or “1th,” as was indicated by signs on the pillars, perhaps a
strategic
goof) of the building. A stream of attendants laid out steaming platters and plates of rice, kebabs, stews, and salads on the huge table around which we sat. The conversation was interrupted every few minutes by someone’s cell phone ring, usually an unlikely tone such as the “William Tell Overture” or a Muzak version of the theme from
Titanic
(also evidently the most popular song in elevators throughout the Islamic Republic), and at one point it seemed that half the room was talking on phones between mouthfuls rather than listening to any of the conversations that started and stopped in fits. But as the plates were cleared of the last morsels, talk turned to Ahmadinejad and his hated government, which had put these men out of work. “Do you realize,” one man said, “that he’s even tightened the customs office? I used to be able to just call the customs depot and have personal stuff I’m importing cleared through, but just last week I was forced to actually drive down there!” Others shook their heads in dismay that Ahmadinejad’s anticorruption drive had inconvenienced one of their own. “He’s serious about this business,” the man continued, shaking his head.

“That’s not all,” piped in a round and balding man, finishing a phone conversation by shutting his flip phone with a decisive snap while still noisily chewing on a piece of chicken. “Do you know anyone who wants an almost-new Mercedes S?”

“Why?” a chorus of voices responded.

“Ten million
tomans
!” he said incredulously (about eleven thousand dollars, and one-tenth the going market rate). “But you can’t get plates.” Sounds of “tsk, tsk” echoed in the room. “Maybe you can just wait this thing out,” he continued, shrugging his shoulders and reaching for another kebab. Ahmadinejad’s anticorruption drive had, seemingly, driven the price of stolen cars, usually from Dubai or other Gulf states, way down, because there was no longer a way to register the vehicles, not even with once-common bribes and influence. The conversation continued with indignant stories of how difficult life had become under a new administration, and I wondered if Ahmadinejad, if he could hear these men, would be slapping his thighs with delight at how he had not only shut them out of government but deprived them of what they thought was their right to a privileged life. But despite their loss of real political power, these men were still very much part of the ruling class of Iran, and they all believed that their situations could only be temporary. They were very much against men such as Ahmadinejad, either for rational reasons of opposition to hard-line policies or for less virtuous reasons of self-interest, but they could never be recruited to a cause against the Islamic Republic.

As I left the building that day, I couldn’t help but think of my father’s friend Mr. N., a former diplomat in the Shah’s regime who had taken me to a very different lunch at the Diplomatic Club a week before. Mr. N. is, like everyone associated with the Shah’s regime, most definitely not part of the ruling class, and never will be, but unlike so many members of the ancien régime, he continues to live in Iran and even take lunch at the Diplomatic Club, an outpost of a Foreign Ministry that one would suspect prefers to have nothing to do with him. Mr. N. has few contemporaries in Tehran to lunch with, unlike the men at the Center for Strategic Research, let alone the opportunity to regularly complain with friends about their loss of privilege. Mr. N. was recalled to Tehran from a foreign posting after the revolution of 1979, and he continued to show up for work every day at the Foreign Ministry, in a suit and tie, until he was finally forced into early retirement less than a year later.

He recalled for me his worst days at work, which had nothing to do with being harassed by revolutionaries who had taken over the ministry. No, it was during the U.S. hostage crisis, when Bruce Laingen, the U.S. chargé d’affaires (who had been visiting the Foreign Ministry when students overran the embassy), was being held captive, for his own safety, the Iranians argued, at the ministry building. Mr. N. had to cross a courtyard and quadrant every day to get to his office, and Laingen would often be at a window looking straight out in his direction, but Mr. N. would hold a cup of coffee and a newspaper and walk on, pretending to be juggling the two as he passed Laingen, just so that he could avoid waving at him and acknowledging a fellow diplomat. “The poor man,” he said to me. “I felt absolutely awful every single morning. He didn’t even have the comfort of receiving a dignified wave!” Mr. N. still wears a suit and tie every single day, sometimes a hat too, making him highly conspicuous in a society where ties are frowned upon as symbols of Western decadence. The suits are probably the same suits he had at the time of the revolution, for they are all cut in the late-1970s style, but perhaps Mr. N.’s fashion sense, for someone who has rarely gone abroad since his permanent return to Iran almost thirty years ago, is simply frozen in 1979.

Mr. N., who drives around Tehran in an old Peugeot but probably shouldn’t be driving at all, and certainly not in a city like Tehran, picked me up one Friday morning and with much difficulty—including stopping in the middle of a busy freeway, getting out of the car, and asking directions of surprised and honking drivers—drove me to the far northern reaches of the city, where the Foreign Ministry’s Diplomatic Club is located. Built at the urging of the former ambassador Sadeq Kharrazi, the ardent bespoke-suit-wearing reformist who tried to infuse the ministry with some of the elegance of its past, the club is shunned by the most conservative allies of Ahmadinejad but attracts diplomats, their families, and the odd mullah to its beautiful grounds and sumptuous buffet lunches.

We sat alone at a table in the expansive dining room, overlooking the vast city of Tehran through floor-to-ceiling windows, Mr. N. the only one in the room wearing a tie, and we comfortably talked politics without lowering our voices to a whisper. Other tables were filled with stubble-faced men in ill-fitting jackets, women in scarves and hijab, and unruly children who banged into the glass windows as they played noisily while their parents dined. If Mr. N. was aware of the stares we received, he didn’t show it, and the maître d’ was uncommonly courteous to him, but as others in the dining room table-hopped to say hello to one another, we were conspicuously left alone. But Mr. N., the least privileged but by far the most elegant man in the room, was unperturbed, and as he finished his meal, he fell silent. He stared out the windows at his beloved city, and I wondered what this dignified man, someone who had refused the opportunity to leave his country and start a new life elsewhere like many of his contemporaries, someone who continued to live his life exactly as he thought he should without fear of the black turbans, someone who might have at one time been recruited to a strong democratic movement, was thinking. I didn’t ask, but then again, I didn’t need to.

“Yeki-bood; yeki-nabood.”
Other than God, there was no One. Islam was never supposed to have a clergy; in fact there is no “church” in mainstream Islam, and part of the appeal of the Koran for believers is that it is the word of God Himself, and therefore not subject to interpretation by man. Except, for Shias, by the Ayatollahs. Shia Islam, the overwhelming majority sect in Iran, a less-overwhelming majority in Iraq and Bahrain, and a large segment of the fractured religious makeup of Lebanon, has both a church
and
a clergy. Ayatollahs, those “signs of God,” are in some ways the Shia equivalent of Catholic cardinals. There is no pope-like figure in Shia Islam, however, although the most senior Ayatollahs, the Grand Ayatollahs, hold positions of respect and authority not dissimilar to the authority of a living pope, the Patriarch of the Orthodox Church, or, say, the Archbishop of Canterbury. They are men and not considered divinely appointed (and certainly not divine—not even the Prophet was divine, according to Islam), but they are men who instruct others to behave according to how they believe God wishes. Ayatollah Khomeini, the founder of the Islamic Republic and the one man responsible for making his title a household word, wasn’t Iran’s first political cleric; he was merely its most successful.

Much has been written about the Shia split from mainstream Sunni Islam over thirteen hundred years ago, and the narrative often centers on the seminal event of the Battle of Karbala and Hossein’s martyrdom—what is dramatically commemorated at Ashura every year. It may be the simple story of what Shias believe to be Hossein’s just cause against the unjust Yazid, but it is really a sort of David and Goliath tale where Goliath wins, and it is what forms the Shia worldview—a worldview particularly suited to Persian sensibilities, formed as they have been by centuries of perceived injustices to their nation and to themselves. The modern Shia world had in Ayatollah Khomeini its first David who defeated a Goliath (the Shah), and a David who stood up to another, far more powerful Goliath: the United States. In 2006,
shi’at Ali
(“followers of Ali,” as “Shia” means) had Seyyed Hassan Nasrallah of Lebanese Hezbollah as their victorious David against the Goliath of Israel, a Goliath that still stands, and must do, as a constant threat to the ever-believing David. For Shias are always Davids, always the underdogs fighting for a just cause in an unjust world, except it matters not that they actually slay their enemy, but merely that they hold their ground and chalk it up as a victory of justice over tyranny. To them, there is no Goliath today greater than the United States. The Ayatollahs and all their little Davids are determined to stand up to it whenever necessary, whenever the cause is just, and to never lose, even if, or maybe
because
, they can’t win outright.

Iranians, whether religious or not, and with or without the Ayatollahs, have always had a
Shia
sensibility. Akbar Ganji, the onetime Islamic revolutionary, did not lose his Shia sensibility when he turned against the regime he helped bring to power, and Shirin Ebadi, who fights injustice with the law but, like Ganji, refuses help from any Goliath, maintains a Shia sensibility whether she even believes in God or not. Golsorkhi, the Marxist poet executed by the Shah’s firing squad, had a Shia sensibility, and his death, he knew, would at least keep his ideas alive. Iranian opposition groups in exile, some of whose members have not walked the streets of Tehran for almost thirty years, believe that they are the Davids that justly fight the Goliath that (to them) is the Islamic regime, and they have a Shia sensibility too. Iran may evolve or even change politically, and its constitution may become as fastened with amendments as ours is one day, but the character and sensibilities of the people will not change. The Ayatollahs may from time to time silence dissent at home, they may rule autocratically, and with their infuriating manners they may annoy and even repulse many in the West. But they rule for now with the confidence that they do not face a population that seeks to overthrow them. As long, that is, as they don’t lose their Persian sensibilities.