Dreams and Shadows: The Future of the Middle East (47 page)

Khatami’s speeches often echoed Locke. “We must use all our strength to avoid doing anything against the Islamic Sharia—God forbid that day. But we must also do our best so that no one would accuse Islam of not being able to resolve economic, social, political, and security problems,” he said in his second inaugural address, after his reelection in 2001 by an even bigger margin.
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Khatami prodded political discourse toward the idea of Iran, first and foremost, as a modern republic with Islamic values—or what he called a “republic of virtue.” Officials elected by the people—rather than the religious institutions run by the clerical elite—should have primary power in running the state, he argued.

“Iranian culture is religious,” he told me at another meeting a few years later. “I have been pressing for a reading of religion that would allow us to achieve independence, freedom, and progress. If we can interpret religion in a way that conforms with democracy, both democracy and religion will benefit. If we see freedom and religion as opposing each other, both will suffer.”

Unlike the conservative clerics, Khatami was not afraid of what the Imam called “Westoxification.”

“Without a doubt, we will succeed in moving forward only if we have the capacity to reap the benefit of positive, scientific, and social accomplishments of Western civilization,” he said at an Islamic summit the year he took office.

Two aspects of democracy scare even reformers: One is secularism, for fear it will rob society of its core values. The other is liberalism, for fear it will introduce pornography and other perceived social ills. Khatami did not embrace or accept either. But he understood something of the outside world.

“Liberalism is the world’s religion,” Khatami said in 2006. “We do not have the right to insult liberalism.” He saw the Islamic republic fitting into the world as it is—albeit on terms comfortable to Tehran.

In the end, however, Khatami’s vision of reform proved illusive. He failed to achieve most of what he set out to do. His fellow clerics made it impossible.

During his two terms, the Islamic judiciary was a constant challenge. Its courts closed down more than 100 independent publications that had opened since he took office and encouraged a more independent press. Several journalists bravely turned around and launched new ones with the same staff, same slant, and same look, but a different name. When the Islamic judiciary could not stop them, it began arresting editors and reporters.

In 1999, the banning of the popular reformist paper
Salam
—edited by Abbas Abdi, another former hostage taker—triggered the largest protest since the revolution. Students poured out by the thousands in Tehran to demonstrate. Paramilitary vigilantes soon stormed campuses to quash the revolt. Several students were beaten. Police then arrested more than 1,400 people. Many spent years in prison. Two of the jailed students died in mysterious circumstances in 2006.

Parliament also moved against Khatami by impeaching the most popular reformer in his cabinet, Abdollah Nouri. In Iran, government permits are required for public gatherings, and Nouri had granted them for student demonstrations and other meetings, effectively endorsing greater freedom of speech and assembly. The judiciary tried and imprisoned Nouri on charges of insulting Islamic values, even though he was a cleric.

Tehran’s charismatic mayor Gholem Hossein Karbaschi, one of Khatami’s campaign advisers and an innovator who had beautified war-ravaged Tehran, was also tried and imprisoned on charges of corruption.

The tension became deadly. Khatami’s rivals within Iranian intelligence were widely tied to the serial murders of dissident writers. They were also suspected of the motorcycle drive-by shooting of the chief architect of Khatami’s reform agenda, Saeed Hajjarian, who had been elected to Tehran’s city council in the first local elections in 1997, along with Asgharzadeh. He was left paralyzed.

As Khatami failed to fight back, his constituency began to turn on him. In an open letter, Iran’s students chastised their president. “Are you awake or asleep?” they demanded. “Why do you remain silent? What is the price of staying in power?”

Soroush sent his own letter to the president.

“The peaceful and democratic uprising of the Iranian people against religious dictatorship in 1997 was a sweet experience,” he wrote, referring to Khatami’s election. “But your failure to keep the vote and your wasting of opportunities put an end to it and disappointed the nation.”
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And Montazeri, in the speech that led the Islamic courts to put him under house arrest for eight years, scolded the president. “He should have gone to the Leader and said, ‘You have your position of respect. Twenty-two million voted for me. They have expectations of me, and if you want to interfere with my ministers…I can not work. Hence, I will thank the people and resign.’”

The small Council of Guardians dealt Khatami the fatal blows. The twelve-man board quashed twin pieces of legislation submitted to parliament that would have strengthened the president’s powers and effectively curbed the Guardians’ clout. For the 2004 elections, the council then disqualified more than 2,000 candidates for parliament, including eighty-seven reform incumbents. Among them was Khatami’s younger brother, a popular physician who was the deputy speaker of parliament and married to the Imam’s granddaughter. The former hostage takers, Asgharzadeh and Mirdamadi, were also disqualified. So was the sister of rebel cleric Mohsen Kadivar, who had been one of the ranking female members of parliament.

Several of Khatami’s own cabinet ministers resigned to protest the ban on reformers running again. Tehran’s theocracy had never been so widely split.

At a 2002 commemoration of the student protest over the newspaper closure three years earlier, Khatami compared his situation to Socrates. The Greek philosopher, he noted, had opted to drink poison in order to maintain respect for the principle of law and order.

“Forget Athens,” the students shouted back. “Change this place first!”
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In the end, Khatami was an ivory-tower intellectual more comfortable with lofty ideas than with dirty day-to-day politics. He was a thinker and a talker, not a doer.

“Khatami feared instability in Iran, so he wanted to move slowly,” Hadi Semati, the political analyst, reflected. “He was not a street fighter. He did not want to take on his own people. He wanted to talk them into this. He felt moving one step ahead was better than moving three steps ahead and then having to move four steps back.”

Khatami’s presidency withered. With most reformers ineligible to run, parliament was taken over by conservatives and hard-liners. The reform movement disintegrated into its diverse pieces. He left office in 2005.

In 2006, the United States granted Khatami a visa to give a series of lectures in five American cities, including an address at the National Cathedral in Washington. President Bush later acknowledged that he personally approved the unprecedented tour. Khatami was the highest-ranking revolutionary to tour the United States since the shah’s ouster in 1979. I saw him twice during that visit. I asked him what had happened to his presidency.

“Reform is a gradual process,” he reflected during a long conversation in New York. “To make it work, two things have to happen. First, people’s expectations have to be brought in line with reality. Freedoms can’t be achieved in one night. We couldn’t solve the long-standing problems of unemployment or poverty quickly. So we have to convince Iranians to lower their expectations.

“At the same time, we have to increase the tolerance of government for reform. It is a distinctive feature of dictatorships,” Khatami added, “that they are intolerant.

“I wasn’t successful in the first part,” he continued, his arm emerging from under his chocolate cloak to scoop up a handful of pistachios from a decorative coffee-table dish. “But I was more successful in the other. For the first time you saw a president at least trying to give people more rights.”

The solution in Iran, he said, was to shake up the system and redistribute power—including term limits on the supreme leader. Ultimate power should rotate, he added. Iran’s Islamic pope would, in effect, no longer be infallible. “Of course, in our constitution, this is not the case,” he offered. “But if it were, I think it would be better.”

I noted that the twelve men on the Council of Guardians had been more of a problem during his presidency, since they were the ones to disqualify candidates and shoot down more than 100 laws proposed by a president who had come to office with tens of millions of votes.

“Twelve?” Khatami said, his eyebrows arching up, his forehead rising. “All they needed was seven votes! Seven is
their
majority.”

But the pendulum does swing in Islamist regimes.

Religious ideologies invoked in earthly politics are just as vulnerable as any other utopian ideology. They come up against the real world. They can fail to deliver what they promise. Publics can turn against them.

Whatever their powers, clerics depend on the public for their legitimacy. They can be rejected.

In 2005, Iranians went to the polls to elect a new president. As in 1997, the election appeared preordained. For two decades after the revolution, Iran’s master wheeler-dealer was Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, the cleric with the Cheshire-cat grin. Iranians called him the Shark, for both his smooth, beardless skin and his killer political instincts. A centrist who appeased conservatives and teased reformers, he was also known as the Teflon mullah because he got away without anything sticking to him—including the arms-for-hostage scandal he secretly orchestrated with the United States in the mid-1980s.

A popular joke in the 1980s had him driving in a car with the two other most powerful politicians at the time—then-President Khamenei, a conservative, and Prime Minister Mir Hussein Musavi, a leftist. When they came to a T-junction in the road, the driver asked which way he should turn.

“Right,” Khamenei said.

“No, go left,” the prime minister said.

Rafsanjani then instructed, “Signal left, but turn right.”

Rafsanjani was speaker of parliament in the 1980s. The position belied his power. He was Iran’s wiliest politician. He finagled his way into one position after another. During Iran’s grisly eight-year war with Iraq, he even took over as commander of the Revolutionary Guards. Iranians began referring to him as “Akbar Shah,” or King Akbar, using his first name to imply that he had the powers of a monarch.

After the Imam’s sudden death in 1989 left the revolution without its father figure, Rafsanjani crafted the post-Khomeini era almost single-handedly. He engineered a succession that put Ali Khamenei into the job of supreme leader. He then had the constitution amended by parliament, which he led, to create a stronger executive presidency—a job he then ran for twice and held in the 1990s.

In 1997, he put out feelers about amending the constitution again so he could run for a third term. But public opinion overwhelmingly opposed it, and he backed down. That was the year Khatami won.

In 2005, Rafsanjani decided to throw his turban in the ring again for president. Although he still held several positions, it was to be his comeback at the top. More than 1,000 candidates, including several women, registered to compete. The Council of Guardians disqualified all but eight men; among the rivals allowed to run were two reformers and the little-known mayor of Tehran. But Rafsanjani was the clear front-runner, with one of the reformers expected to be his main competition.

Then something happened on the way to the polls.

Rafsanjani ran a slick and lavish campaign the likes of which Iran had never witnessed, complete with bumper stickers, huge banners strung across streets, and campaign tents with Western rock music. Dozens of girls on roller blades skated around the capital with his name—in Farsi and English—pinned on their backs. Two famed Iranian film directors produced his television spots.

He fudged the issues, always talking in vague terms so he could be every mullah to everybody. But his ticket implied better relations with the United States, privatization to spur the troubled economy, and greater social freedoms.

Rafsanjani had said in 2002 that exposing a single strand of a woman’s hair was “a dagger drawn toward the heart of Islam.” But in a campaign meeting with youth in 2005, he teasingly offered a different redline. “No nudity,” he quipped.
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“There is no use imposing tastes, being strict, and going backward,” he told reporters. “Whoever becomes president cannot work without considering the demands and conditions of society.”

On Iran’s political system, he came down on both sides at the same time. “I certainly believe in democracy,” he said. “But I believe we have to take this course step by step.”
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In the first round of elections, as expected, Rafsanjani came in first out of the eight candidates, but only narrowly, and not with the majority needed to win outright.

The runner-up was the shocker. He was not a reformer. The dark-horse mayor of Tehran, a political nobody who had never run for office before, came in a close second. Although city councils in Iran are elected, mayors are appointed. And Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had been mayor for only two years.

In the run-off election, the two men offered a stark contrast.

Rafsanjani, the son of a wealthy pistachio trader whose brother had attended a California university, had just turned seventy. He is a tallish man with a robust girth, smooth fleshy cheeks, an almost invisible white moustache, and a tuft of white hair protruding from under his white turban. Of all Iran’s clerics, he most revels in the limelight and is famed for the way he cajoles and circuitously manipulates others to embrace his positions. He lived in a villa in the cool foothills of North Tehran. He was driven to campaign stops in an entourage of bullet-proof Mercedes limousines.