Persian Mirrors: The Elusive Face of Iran (12 page)

— PRESIDENT MOHAMMAD KHATAMI IN A SPEECH TO THE NEWLY ELECTED TOWN COUNCILS IN FEBRUARY 1999

J
UST AFTER SUNDOWN
in the desert city of Yazd, three dozen women and children sat on the carpeted floor of an upper-class home, kissing and joking as heavy platters of food were laid before them on a plastic checkered tablecloth. It was time for
eftar,
the nightly ritual of breaking a dawn-to-dusk fast during the holy month of Ramadan.

The food was typical Persian fare: saffron rice, grilled chicken, lamb stew with herbs and scallions, fruits, dates, halvah, and sweets. But this was no ordinary
eftar
. It was an intimate meal with relatives of the newly elected reformist president, Mohammad Khatami: his mother, three of his sisters, and a gaggle of cousins, grandchildren, and friends.

In itself, an invitation to the home of a powerful family in the public eye is unusual in Iran, where private lives are fiercely guarded and trust of outsiders comes slowly. Fatemeh Khatami, the President’s older sister and the head of the women’s organization in the nearby town of Ardakan, explained that I had been invited because “hospitality is one of the pillars of our religion.” But I knew there was more to it than that. In fact, the invitation was a political gesture. Iran has changed drastically since the early days of the Islamic Republic, and President Khatami had been elected in 1997 as a champion of social reform. Iranians knew that. But the outside world didn’t know how far to trust this man. So the Khatami family seemed to think it important to reassure the world that the new President was both approachable and modern.

Because the women and men at the
eftar
were not all close blood relatives, the women and girls did not remove their chadors. But even the traditional garb could not hide the face of the guest of honor: Sakineh Ziai, Khatami’s mother, smiling broadly and draped in a black and white print. She was wearing makeup. Pencil-thin black eyeliner. A layer of foundation. A bit of blush. And was that lipstick on her lips? At one point, her chador dropped from her head to reveal a jet black pageboy, dangly hoop earrings, a thick gold necklace, and the look of a woman who knew she had been born beautiful. So the conversation at the women’s table turned to good looks. “My mother was a great beauty in her youth,” said one of President Khatami’s other sisters, Maryam, a schoolteacher in Yazd. “She is very aware of her looks. So she wears a little makeup, not when she goes out in public but in private social gatherings like this. We like to say that God is beautiful and appreciates beauty.”

The table talk was full of praise for President Khatami. One woman wanted to send him a kiss. “I wish you were part of our family so you could kiss the President for me when you go back to Tehran,” she said to me. Over fruit and pastries in the television room, the group became so boisterous that when the talk turned to family, I was asked to show photographs of my two daughters. Maryam jokingly offered to marry off her nine-year-old son, Mohammad, to one of them. In a later telephone conversation, she added a punch line for the joke: “If your daughter wants to marry my son, she has to wear a chador. My husband is very rigid.”

But months later, Hosein Nosrat, my friend at the Ministry of Islamic Guidance, told me that Khatami had not been pleased with articles I had written about his family for
The New York Times.
He had taken exception to the publication of a photograph that Khatami’s mother had given me. He said that the President had banned other media interviews with his family. I wasn’t surprised that a picture had caused trouble, assuming Nosrat was talking about a photograph of Khatami in his uniform as a second lieutenant in the Shah’s army.

“No, not that one,” said Nosrat. “His office said he didn’t like the picture of himself with his daughters. He thought he looked messy. He thought the house looked messy. I told his office to forget it.”

The complaint about what I had written was more serious. “You described the hair and makeup of the President’s mother and the President’s wife,” Nosrat said. “You should know better. You don’t write about these things here.”

I later learned from a friend of the family that the President was even more angry with his mother than with me, apparently for talking about makeup and beauty. Sakineh Ziai was so offended that she didn’t speak to her son for days, the family friend said. Finally, Khatami apologized to her, proving just how tough an Iranian mother could be, even if she wore a veil and her son was the President.

But this was not just a family spat. On some level, Khatami must have felt exposed, even vulnerable, by the public presentation of his family in the Western media. He wanted to be seen by the outside world as welcoming and open, but the revelations cut both ways. Such articles could be used against him at home.

How else to explain the presence of the pink rose on the day in January 1998 that I interviewed Zohreh Sadeghi, the First Lady? There we were, in her headquarters in one of the Shah’s former palaces. Suddenly she interrupted herself to comment about the flower arrangement on the table that divided us. Sticking up in the middle of the bowl of yellow, purple, and white flowers was a single pink rose. On closer inspection, it had a tiny microphone attached to it. “There is a microphone here!” she exclaimed. “Is somebody listening to what we’re saying?” I didn’t doubt that she was surprised, and the official interpreter omitted the comment from her simultaneous translation. It turned out that in the hallway outside, three men with headsets were recording the interview. It was just for the archives, they said.

The two incidents—Khatami’s anger and his wife’s surprise—spoke volumes about the tenuous nature of political power in the Islamic Republic, and showed how tricky any interaction with the press can be. These days, Iran’s politicians worry about how their actions and words will be received by rivals and by public opinion, which in Iran consists of fragmented audiences with different and even conflicting agendas—the clergy, merchants, students, war veterans, women, ethnic groups. Portrayals of private lives are particularly dangerous territory. Many leaders, like Ayatollah Khamenei, simply refuse that kind of access. (Once, during an interview with Khamenei in 1982, I asked him to describe his childhood and education. He told me such questions were a waste of time.)

If all this sounds familiar to Western ears—that supposedly powerful politicians fear becoming hostage to the caprices of the press—it is worth considering how surprising it is that Iranian politicians fit this mold too. Over the years, many Americans have come to think of Iran’s theocracy as a terror-based totalitarian regime like those set up by revolutions in Russia and China earlier in the twentieth century. In fact, Iran’s revolution has set up something quite different. It isn’t a democracy in a Western sense, of course. But within the tight intellectual limits of the theocracy set up by Ayatollah Khomeini, there is substantial rivalry for the loyalties of the Iranian citizen—a citizen who votes, and who is gaining more choice about whom to vote for. The fact that politicians worry so much about press coverage is proof.

Iran, in fact, has become a country with an open-ended political game, in which the stakes are enormous. As reformers challenge old-line clerics—in part by appearing more transparent and accountable to constituents—the rules of political conduct and the secret understandings that used to determine decisions are being questioned. But Iran is not yet a place where transparency and accountability are the rule. Instead, anyone who dares to innovate can find himself tripped up by a tough and messy style of domestic infighting with origins a lot older than the Islamic revolution.

Iran has a hundred-year history of dabbling with democracy and pluralism, as well as a long parliamentary tradition. Early in the twentieth century, Iranian leaders and politicians experimented with the ideas of a law-based state, and wrote a progressive Constitution. Even the Islamic Constitution ratified in 1979 reflects concerns over public accountability and transparency.

Once the clerics were in control, they found it hard to keep their people restricted to a rigid view of what Islam allows. Over the years, new ideas bubbled up about how to interpret the faith. Interest groups began debating them, in ways that have begun to have some of the trappings of a pluralist democracy—if not yet through official, mass-member political parties, then certainly through political groups that have begun to function as parties. Later, odd things began happening in key institutions such as the Parliament and the courts, which conservatives tried to use as vehicles for maintaining their hold over society, but where the Islamic Republic itself could also be put on trial. It began as a process not to overthrow the Islamic system but to reform it from within, to strike a balance between secular and religious worlds and between democratic and undemocratic principles. The outcome was not at all clear.

The origin of tension within the system lies in the nature of the Islamic Republic itself. What exactly is an “Islamic Republic” anyway? Its founders in 1979 certainly didn’t agree on a definition. The code of Islamic law, the sharia, had been around for quite a while, of course. Several Muslim countries—most famously Saudi Arabia but also, to a lesser degree, countries like Pakistan and Malaysia—were governed by Islamic principles. But a whole political system run by Islamic “guardians”? This was something new.

In its original form the Islamic Republic sounded like a straightforward theocracy, in which elections served to ratify the decisions made by the clerics, much as meaningless Soviet referendums once confirmed decisions already made by the Politburo. When Ayatollah Khomeini called for a referendum to determine the level of popular approval for an Islamic Republic, the people were asked not to choose between various options, but to vote either yes or no to the simple question of whether an “Islamic Republic” should replace the monarchy. According to the official tally, 98.1 percent of the voters said yes.

The task of defining an Islamic Republic was left to the drafters of the new Constitution, who included people of different political persuasions. They argued fiercely over the relationship between Western-based secular law and Islamic law, the role of Iranian culture alongside Islamic culture, and the distribution of power between the President and the Parliament. But the framers couldn’t agree, and instead of resolving the conflicts, the Constitution embraced contradictory elements—at once democratic and authoritarian, secular and religious. The entire government—with a President, a Prime Minister (abolished later with a Constitutional change), an elected Parliament, and a judiciary—was put inside a theocratic structure whose ultimate authority would be a man of God holding control of the state’s enforcement machinery, the police and military.

“Islamic principles” were explicitly recognized as the basis for the country’s legal system. The role of interpreting these principles was left to the conservative Guardian Council, an overseeing body of six clerics and six legal experts. That body was powerful enough to reject candidates for the presidency and the Parliament, and to strike down legislation passed by the Parliament.

The most creative—and drastic—innovation was the concept of the Supreme Leader. Khomeini had lectured about the rule of the ideal and just Islamic jurist years before, and as the constitutional debate raged in 1979, the position was added after the first draft was written. In the revolution’s first years, when Khomeini held the position, it was an unshakable pillar of the Islamic system. But a generation later it had become a lightning rod for democratic reformers who questioned its power and jurisdiction.

Since Khomeini’s death, the Supreme Leader has been appointed for an unlimited term by a clerically dominated but popularly elected Assembly of Experts, which also has the power to remove him. He controls the national police and the security agencies. He appoints the chiefs of the military, the Revolutionary Guards, the judiciary, national television and radio, and the ostensibly charitable foundations that control hundreds of companies and industries. He names the principal members of the Guardian Council. He sets the direction and tone of the country’s domestic and foreign policy. The President, by contrast, has responsibility for the cabinet, the government bureaucracy, and the economy, and for carrying out foreign policy.

In Khomeini’s time, the Supreme Leader had dictatorial powers. As the “founder” of the Islamic Republic, Khomeini used his authority in ways that went far beyond the Constitution. Yet he was also an astute politician who was careful to distance himself from the forces and personalities that competed for power in the revolution’s aftermath. The situation changed with Khomeini’s death. His successor, Ayatollah Khamenei, did not share the founder’s aura. Even constitutional amendments that gave his office more power could not assure his dominance. Khamenei himself complicated the situation with his inability to stay out of partisan politics. As a result, he undermined his own credibility and that of his office.

The stranglehold of the Islamic state also began to fail in the realm of ideology. The official and rather rigid version of Islam propagated by the state had created a backlash: a new breed of Islamic thinkers willing to challenge the official political orthodoxy on theological and ethical grounds. They took their inspiration in part from the much older commitment of Shiite Islam to argument and debate among the clerics. And this new challenge began to resonate ever louder once society itself began to change with the end of the Iran-Iraq war, the death of Khomeini, and the rise of a new generation.

Take, for example, Abdol-Karim Soroush, one of Iran’s most brilliant political and religious scholars. He is a dangerous man for the Islamic Republic these days, because cloaked in his philosophical language is a clear message: the need to replace Islamic dictatorship with Islamic democracy. He was dismissed in 1995 from his university teaching position and has been repeatedly attacked and prevented from lecturing by the
Ansar-e
Hezbollah
or “Helpers of the Party of God,” club-wielding thugs believed to be funded by extremists inside and outside the government. “If you do not preach the official interpretation of Islam, you will not be allowed to go to a mosque to preach,” he once explained to me. “You will not be allowed to teach at a high school or a university. This official interpretation is an achievement—a negative achievement—of the revolution.”