Children of Paradise (14 page)

• • •

P
ERHAPS THERE WAS NOTHING
quite like direct and vocal opposition to concentrate the philosophical mind; perhaps the intellectual stakes were simply where clarity dwelt for Soroush. For it was in these years, the mid-1980s, just after his departure from the Cultural Revolution Institute, that Soroush came out of the closet as a liberal and as a critic of
velayat-e faqih
.

Bazargan’s provisional government was long gone. “Liberal” had become a term of abuse attached to it, and Soroush, six years after the fact, felt compelled to rehabilitate the term and perhaps the man. Although he had never supported the seizure of the American embassy, he had not spoken out in Bazargan’s defense during his tenure as prime minister. Still, over the course of the 1980s, Soroush became increasingly convinced that the Fardid circle
had a hand in demonizing the liberal prime minister and that this needed to be rectified.

Soroush gave three speeches at the University of Tehran in 1986, two on fascism and one on liberalism. His lecture on liberalism he titled “Dare to Know,” a phrase from Kant’s essay “What Is Enlightenment?” He used it to argue that at the vital crux not only of enlightenment but of liberalism were scrutiny and criticism, the absence of secrets, the absence of certainty. Iranians, he suggested at a time of opacity and repression, should aspire to such a liberalism. In another of his 1986 lectures, Soroush argued that to devise and attempt to execute a blueprint for society, especially a heavenly one, would lead ineluctably to fascism.

Soroush expected that not everyone would approve of his arguments, but disapproval came from one particularly disappointing quarter. Mohammad Khatami, now the culture minister, relayed his displeasure to Soroush in a harshly worded message.

Soroush believed that Khatami had come partway under Fardid’s influence. At least, he saw that Khatami oscillated, sometimes embracing the ecumenical rationalism of Soroush’s circle and other times the anti-Western binarism of Fardid’s. When Khatami believed that Fardid was right—that the West was infected by an intrinsic and contagious evil—then he concluded that Western rationality, which Soroush embraced, must be corrupt. Soroush saw in Khatami’s lack of clear philosophical loyalties a wavering spirit that would undermine his political effectiveness as well. It was, to Soroush, a source of sadness, for while he saw Fardid as a twisted and devilish soul, a proponent of violence and an opponent of human rights, he believed that Khatami had a good mind and heart that were clouded by equivocation.

Mostafa Rokhsefat was less sympathetic. His relationship with Khatami had grown testy over the cleric’s timorousness about publishing Soroush’s essays. Khatami was, in Mostafa’s estimation, a timid, conventional man. During his years at
Kayhan
, Khatami once said that the role of the press was to voice the views of the people, and the views of the people “
are identical to those of Khomeini.”

Toward the end of the 1980s, Khatami was asked to put forward the
name of an individual to be considered the license holder, publisher, and editor in chief of
Kayhan-e Farhangi
. Mostafa was the obvious candidate, but Khatami did not submit his name. Mostafa resigned, taking his circle of intellectuals with him.

Kayhan-e Farhangi
swiftly deflated. Mostafa went to work briefly as a cultural consultant to the government. But his work as a cultural impresario was not yet finished. Neither was the excitement he had stirred with
Kayhan-e Farhangi
or the demand for a continued forum for the discussion it had begun.

And so Mostafa started a journal and intellectual salon of his own, called
Kiyan
, which meant “foundation.”
Kiyan
was independent from the state and associated strongly with Soroush. It would become, ironically enough, and against Mostafa’s instincts, the vehicle for a political movement that would one day fasten its hopes to Mohammad Khatami.

  FOUR  

B
APTISM OF
B
LOOD

T
HE
1980
S WERE A SPIRAL INTO DARKNESS.
The revolution that was supposed to yield a just and self-governing Iran gave way first to war, want, and profound isolation. Open contestation in politics had ended with the expulsion of Bani-Sadr; so had the propaganda war that accompanied those political fights, the leaks and appeals to public opinion. Now the country’s politics disappeared behind an opaque curtain.

Iran was an international pariah, suffering under blockade and leeching the blood of its young men at the Iraqi front. Years later, many Iranian decision makers would claim to have opposed continuing the war with Iraq after Iran regained its territory in the battle of Khorramshahr. But official Iranian policy was “war, war until victory,” or until Saddam Hussein’s unconditional surrender. The Basij militia made up fully 84 percent of Iran’s fighting forces and 43 percent of the country’s
190,000 combat dead by decade’s end, according to official Iranian statistics. The Basijis were mainly teenage boys. Their graves populated a vast necropolis called Behesht-e Zahra in southern Tehran, glass cases above the plots displaying photographs of boys too young to shave, in row upon row as in a ghostly high school yearbook.

Starting in 1984, Iraqi Scud-type missiles periodically rained down on
Tehran and other Iranian cities. A young Tehrani woman who lived near a day care would never forget leaving her home one day to find her sidewalk littered with tiny hands. Some seventeen thousand Iranian civilians perished in eight years of episodic war. But this figure does not include the tens of thousands of lives that would be extinguished over decades by the lingering effects of mustard gas, which the Iraqis deployed against civilian as well as military targets while the world looked away and the United States supplied the Iraqi regime with crucial military intelligence.

Iran’s economy was in free fall. It was never worse before, nor has it been since. War, inflation, political instability, and foreign sanctions conspired in its unraveling. So did the fact that economic planning was a bone of contention among competing political factions, pulled this way and that to the point of incoherence; and that the country depended heavily on oil revenues at a time when a worldwide oil glut caused oil prices to plummet. By 1988,
Iran’s gross domestic product per capita was half of what it had been in 1976. Poverty spiked.
Decline on this scale was not only new to Iran but, as a leading scholar of the Iranian economy points out, rare in modern history.

Under a cloud of tension and violence, the October 2, 1981, presidential election brought Ali Khamenei to power, and with him the consolidation of single-party rule. Of the Islamic Republican Party’s best-known founding fathers—Beheshti, Rafsanjani, and Khamenei—now Khamenei was president, Rafsanjani was speaker of the parliament, and Mir Hossein Mousavi, Ayatollah Beheshti’s thirty-nine-year-old protégé, was prime minister. This was the most unified and stable government in many years. The only politics that mattered now were those that divided the Islamic Republican Party from itself, even if only by shades of gray.

Factions coalesced behind each of the three major political figures of the 1980s. President Ali Khamenei was associated with what would be called the Islamic Right. This traditional, conservative wing of the party supported private property rights and opposed the centralization of the economy. Prime Minister Mir Hossein Mousavi’s faction was known as the Islamic Left, allied with the students who had seized the American embassy
and the club-wielding men of Iranian Hezbollah.
This radical faction advocated state control of the economy and a hardline foreign policy of exporting the Iranian Revolution abroad. Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani’s faction was pragmatic. Whether it leaned left or right was a matter of perception, for Rafsanjani was a canny triangulator who knew how to play rivals off one another, and he swung his considerable political weight from one faction to another, often without warning and sometimes playing both ends simultaneously in secrecy. These three protagonists, and the alliances and resentments they forged, would shape the Iranian political drama for the foreseeable future.

• • •

A
LI
K
HAMENEI
, the Mashhadi cleric with the poetry circle, was a literary man who adored John Steinbeck and Victor Hugo and had ties to lay intellectuals before the revolution. He was also close to Ayatollah Khomeini, having studied with him in Qom in the early 1960s. Khamenei absorbed the anti-imperialism of the left and the Islamism of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, the work of whose ideologue, Sayyid Qutb, Khamenei translated into Persian.

Houshang Asadi, then a member of the communist Tudeh Party, claims to have been Khamenei’s cellmate in prison under the shah.
His account has been called into question, but if true, it offers a humanizing glimpse of the cleric as a young man. Asadi remembers Khamenei as a mild and genuinely pious person, passionate about literature and tolerant of political differences. When Asadi grew depressed, he writes, Khamenei would invite him to go walking. The two men would supposedly pace around their cell, pretending they were hiking through the landscapes of their childhoods, exchanging thoughts on literature and politics. Together, Khamenei and Asadi conspired to keep a third cellmate alive: a teenage Marxist guerrilla fighter who had been badly beaten and was close to death of starvation but would not unclench his mouth except when threatened. Asadi contrived to threaten the young man so that Khamenei could slip bits of meat between his teeth. After some months of strange camaraderie, when Asadi was
about to be moved to a different cell, he saw that Khamenei was shivering and gave the cleric his sweater in parting. The two men embraced; Khamenei, in tears, allegedly told Asadi, “Under an Islamic government, not a single tear would be shed by the innocent.”

In scant years, the 1979 revolution propelled Khamenei’s group to power and drove Asadi’s to the brink of annihilation. Khamenei served, variously, as minister of defense, supervisor of the Revolutionary Guards, and leader of Friday prayers for the city of Tehran. Though Khamenei belonged to the revolutionary inner circle, he did not carry nearly the political weight that Rafsanjani or Beheshti did.

The presidency to which Khamenei ascended in 1981 was shorn of many powers. The clerics had deliberately weakened the position when Bani-Sadr was president, tipping the weight of authority to the prime minister instead. And Khamenei did not care for his prime minister. Economic differences were the main source of dissension, but Mousavi also antagonized Khamenei with public statements to the effect that he, Mousavi, was the real head of government, and the president was merely a figurehead. Twice, Khamenei appealed to Ayatollah Khomeini to replace Mousavi with someone more pliable. Twice, the Leader refused. With some reason, Mousavi would come to be seen as Ayatollah Khomeini’s favored son and a rival to Khamenei.

• • •

M
OUSAVI WAS
a young lay intellectual who had been an architect and a newspaper editor. His wife, Zahra Rahnavard, was a well-known artist with ties to Shariati. Mousavi, too, was a regular presence at Hosseiniyeh Ershad in the 1970s, but he did not follow the anticlerical strain in Shariati’s thought that led the Mojahedin and its sympathizers to their doom. Instead, Mousavi became an ally and deputy to Beheshti, the ayatollah who spearheaded the assault on liberals after the revolution and helped write
velayat-e faqih
into the constitution. Many times the clerics tried to force Mousavi on Bani-Sadr as foreign minister, but Bani-Sadr rejected him as a radical and a party man for the other side. After Bani-Sadr fled,
Mousavi briefly helmed the foreign ministry, where he was best known for introducing the clerics’ ascetic style and removing the handmade carpets, conference tables, and chairs.

Mousavi was a populist who called for a more equitable distribution of goods and services, including education and health care.
He supported nationalizing all foreign trade over the objections of the bazaar merchants whose interests Khamenei represented. Those who worked with him during his premiership remember him as an effective if colorless bureaucrat dedicated to pushing policies through the logjammed system that was part parliamentary, part theocratic, and riven with intrigue.

Mousavi’s public persona was rather more vivid. He was the external face of Ayatollah Khomeini’s radical foreign policy, rejecting every cease-fire the United Nations tried to broker with Iraq and threatening neighboring Arab states that, if they continued to cast their lot against Iran, “
the flames of this fire would spread to them.” Israel, Mousavi averred, was a “
cancerous tumor.” In 1985, Suleiman Khater, a border police sergeant in Egypt, shot up a family of Jewish tourists in the Sinai, killing four children, two women, and an elderly man. When Khater hung himself in prison, Iranian state radio quoted Mousavi declaring that “
to honor the brave resistance of this great man, a street in Tehran will be named after him.” On the fourth anniversary of the students’ takeover of the American embassy,
Mousavi spoke from the roof of a guardhouse at the embassy wall, lauding the students for publishing documents exposing the “liberal” enemies of the revolution, by which surely he meant Abbas Amirentezam.