Children of Paradise (25 page)

In every way the establishment candidate, Nategh-Nouri, ran on familiar revolutionary themes. He railed against the “
cultural onslaught” from the West, which he believed would saturate Iran with “corruption, decadence and idleness.” Only by strengthening its indigenous Islamic culture
could Iran become immune from this stealth invasion. Nategh-Nouri stressed the defense of Palestine and an enduring enmity with the United States. His campaign operated through government offices, which functioned normally during the business day. Its operatives little noticed, at first, that the Khatami camp had student activists painting and hanging banners into the wee hours, throwing campaign postcards into the windows of cars, singing in the streets.

Khatami, until recently the head of the national library and a retiring intellectual figure,
campaigned in the American style, touring the provinces by bus and glad-handing in a way that was never before a part of Iranian electioneering. He was an unexpectedly charming political candidate. He was open and friendly with voters and, despite the elegance of his robes, he displayed a humility that fit the populist sensibility of postrevolutionary Iran. His ideas—rule of law, civil society, political development—came directly from the intellectual hothouses of
Kiyan
and the Center for Strategic Research. But he rendered them accessible to ordinary people, whose hunger for them exceeded the fondest hopes of his advisers.

What Khatami promised was an Iran where the government’s voice would not ring out in silence. Civil society was a catchphrase for all the recourse Iranian citizens lacked: an independent press, grassroots associations, political parties, checks and balances on power—even, for those who dared to hope for it, an independent judiciary that might enforce equality before the law and safeguard the rights and freedoms of individuals. He suggested such a future while wearing clerical robes and a black turban that marked him as a
seyyed
, or a descendant of the Prophet. He was not a radical figure. To vote for Khatami was to express the hope that the Islamic Republic had better days ahead of it, that the 1979 Islamic Revolution might yet be one of liberation.

Still, the weight of the establishment and the authority of the Leader were arrayed against him. For a long time Khatami had only his hard work and native appeal to marshal. Then, just two months before the election, an enormous tactical advantage fell into his lap. In March 1997, Rafsanjani and his Kargozaran Party unleashed Tehran mayor Gholamhossein Karbaschi to endorse Khatami and place
the entire machinery of the Tehran
municipality at his disposal. Now Khatami had flush coffers and billboards all over the capital, where one in five Iranians lived. By the beginning of May, the month of the election, it was increasingly obvious not only that Khatami was winning but that more Iranians would turn out for this election than for any since 1979.

The reformists watched in amazement, but they were too skeptical even to prepare a victory speech for Khatami in advance. Surely the balloting would be rigged. As Khatami’s brother, Mohammad Reza Khatami, told a foreign reporter, “
Less than a week before the election, we were certain of Mr. Khatami’s victory, although as I say we were not certain it would ever be announced.” The Khatami campaign appealed to Rafsanjani, who was still the president after all, and who wielded enormous personal influence behind the scenes. At Friday prayers on May 16, Rafsanjani announced that no sin was worse than vote rigging. Khamenei had to say something. He paid lip service to the same principle. “
I shall not allow anyone to give himself the right to cheat in the election, which is contrary to religion and contrary to political and social ethics,” he said.

Two nights before the election, the members of the
Kiyan
Circle gathered for dinner. One suggested that Khatami was still lagging behind Nategh-Nouri but drawing closer. The social scientists from the Center for Strategic Research who’d formed a polling institute had surveyed the public, and they chose that moment to unveil that, according to their latest figures, Khatami was about to win by an overwhelming majority. Sure enough, on May 23, 1997,
some 80 percent of Iranian voters turned out at the polls, 69 percent of them for Khatami.

Temperate, conciliatory, lacking conviction—years later, Khatami’s closest allies and advisers would claim to have seen tragic flaws in him all along. But in 1997, in the wake of an election that would become known as “The Epic of the Second of Khordad,” after its date on the Persian calendar, Iran was the site of as-yet-untrammeled hope. No one spoke of it more plainly or at greater cost than Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri, the disinherited successor to Khomeini who had raised his voice against the prison massacres not ten years before.

• • •

A
YATOLLAH
M
ONTAZERI HAD GUARDED
a tense political silence for nearly a decade. Now, in November 1997, he delivered a rare lecture in Qom, unleashing his anger and outlining a vision he had nurtured for all the intervening years. Maybe he knew these remarks would cost him everything he had not already lost. Maybe he didn’t care.

Montazeri, one of the original authors of the doctrine of
velayat-e faqih
, said now that he had envisioned the Leader as a safeguard against despotism in the wake of the shah’s abuses. The
faqih
, who was in the first instance the nearly universally adored and respected Khomeini, was to check the power of the prime minister and president, assuring that neither of these assumed absolute rule. But that was not how things had worked out. Instead the Leader had become an absolute ruler. And while the people held the president and the parliament responsible for enacting their will, these elected leaders lacked power. The Leader held all the power, Montazeri lamented, but was responsible to no one.

Only the twelve imams of Shiite tradition were infallible, Montazeri reminded his listeners. Although his followers had dubbed him “imam,” even Khomeini was human and never claimed to be anything more. And yet, among the conservative clerics, his words and deeds had assumed the petrified quality of scripture. Montazeri decried the worship of Khomeini as a kind of idolatry. He returned, always, to the Quran, the sayings of the Prophet, and the lives of the imams. Montazeri believed in a kind of dynamic
ijtihad
, the interpretation of the sacred texts in light of contemporary concerns. When he spoke of Imam Ali, founder of the Shiite order—and Montazeri spoke of him often—he depicted him as warm, flexible, and confident, a model and a foil for the brittle Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.

Montazeri stood out among the political clergy for his fearless and respectful engagement with opposing ideas. He was not afraid of the tumult and tussle implied by free expression and a free press. He could not understand why Khamenei and his lieutenants felt threatened by criticism. Nor did he worry that the people would fall into error if clerics did not preselect their
candidates for office. Iranians were good Muslims; surely they would not be mistaken about more than a few parliamentary deputies, who would be rendered ineffectual by the majority. Montazeri believed in the wisdom and goodwill of the public
.
Verses in the Quran called for rulers to engage in “consultation.” Some Islamic scholars, Khomeini among them, interpreted this to mean that consultation was permitted but not required, and that in any case leaders should consult qualified Islamic scholars, not the public. Montazeri took a populist view of these ambiguous verses. At least by 1997 he saw consultation—with the people—not only as required but as the fundamental source of a government’s legitimacy.

In his 1997 speech, Montazeri scolded the armed militias that patrolled Iranian universities. “Hezbollah” meant “party of God.” No party of God mindlessly chanted slogans and beat political opponents with clubs, he insisted. The Iranian people could not be governed by brute force. Rather, Montazeri said, they deserved a system with political parties, separated powers, free elections, and free expression. The Guardian Council, in his view, had no business selecting the candidates for office. The president and the parliament should be elected directly by the people.

The man who would have been Leader but for the fateful developments of 1988 decried what he saw as the expansion and abuse of the system’s supreme office. The Leader was there not to make laws, to play favorites, to crush dissent, or to assure the victory of any particular political faction. He should not command police or military forces or run his own special, extrajudicial court for keeping the clergy in line, as he now did. Rather, he was to “supervise” the affairs of state within the realm of religious law, essentially acting as the government’s spiritual adviser. Even in so doing, he should not be insensitive to the will of the people or place himself above the law. In later writings Montazeri would clarify that the Leader should himself be elected and popularly accountable.

Montazeri made no secret of his disdain for the man who had assumed the office of Leader in his stead. Khamenei did not have and would never have the jurisprudential authority of a Khomeini or a Montazeri. But shortly after assuming the Leadership, Khamenei had tried to get himself
swiftly ordained with higher clerical authority than his training, publications, and standing in the scholarly community suggested. Montazeri let the Leader know that he found these efforts objectionable. They “
degraded” traditional Shiite lines of authority and rendered them “infantile.”

Khamenei’s interpretation of
velayat-e faqih
had effectively evacuated the elected offices of their power. The president, Montazeri would soon note, could not enforce the rule of law. The instruments were not under his control. The police answered to the Supreme Leader, who also claimed control over the judiciary. Moreover, the Leader could summon the Special Court of the Clergy, whose purpose was to purge the clergy of contrary elements but which had recently extended its jurisdiction even to laypeople who “insulted” the clergy. This ad hoc revolutionary tribunal corresponded to no provision in the constitution, but neither Khomeini nor Khamenei had seen fit to disband it. In fact, Khamenei had expanded it when he assumed leadership, so that it now had branches throughout the country and commanded its own security network, complete with its own prisons. Its judges, prosecutors, and even defense lawyers were directly answerable not to the judiciary or any elected branch of government but to the Leader himself, who was inclined to draw the court’s jurists from the intelligence ministry and a network of particularly hardline clerics.
Even its budget was overseen by the Leader rather than by the parliament.

Perhaps, then, it should have been no surprise when the Special Court of the Clergy came for Montazeri. His 1997 speech offended Khamenei to the very core. The Special Court sentenced Montazeri to house arrest. The Revolutionary Guard, Basij, and intelligence ministry sent a mob to ransack Montazeri’s home, his office, and the
hosseiniyeh
in Qom where he lectured and taught. According to the ayatollah’s memoirs, these security forces, all of them answerable to the Office of the Supreme Leader, destroyed the
hosseiniyeh
, sealing it off and leaving it in ruins. Montazeri was barricaded on the second floor of his home and all but one of the doors to the outside were welded shut; inside the remaining door, the security forces built a small room to house armed guards. For five years, this was how Montazeri lived, isolated from all but his immediate family.

His words, however, had already breached the barricaded doors and taken wing. Khamenei, Montazeri declared in that November speech, had made the Islamic Republic into an autocracy hardly distinct from the shah’s. There was nothing Islamic about oppression. “
If I were you,” he advised Khatami, “I would go to the leader and tell him that, with all due respect, 22 million people voted for me while everyone knew that you preferred another candidate. It means, therefore, that the people have rejected the existing order.”

  III  

R
EFORM