Children of Paradise (24 page)

M
OHAMMAD
K
HATAMI’S
single greatest asset was his face. That was not to say that he lacked other attributes: he was learned, affable, moderate. His affect was gentle and open to compromise. Born in 1943, he was the son of a grand ayatollah from the Yazdi town of Ardakan. As a young man, he had studied Islamic jurisprudence in the seminaries of Qom as well as Western philosophy at the University of Isfahan. In Hamburg, Germany, in 1978, he helmed an Islamic institute where expatriate revolutionaries gathered. For the better part of ten years, from 1982 until 1992, he was minister of culture and Islamic guidance. He held the clerical rank of
hojjat ol-eslam
, and his robes were always warm-hued and well cut. But it was Khatami’s face that would be described in newspaper story after newspaper story, for all the years he remained in public life, as though all that mattered about that moment in Iranian history were expressed in its folds.

It was not that he was handsome, although it could be said that he was, in an avuncular way. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini was handsome, too. At least, some Iranians described him that way. In the United States Khomeini’s face—gaunt by the end of his life and lengthened by the trailing point of his white beard, his eyes deeply set beneath arching, furry eyebrows that remained black long after the rest of his hair had whitened—would become
an icon of Muslim fury and severity. But the young Khomeini had a heart-shaped face with broad, planed cheeks, a sensuously curved mouth, and molten eyes; in his old age, he had the formidable face of a man who had truly lived, a visage inscribed with soulful intelligence and force of character that symbolized the reassertion of a national dignity long denied. Mohammad Khatami had a different kind of face, and with it he presented a different face for Iran. Khatami’s was open and good-humored, quick with a smile so spontaneous, it seemed to erupt for every occasion. He had the appearance of a favorite professor—the sort of face that looked familiar, even if you had never seen it before. Where Khomeini’s imposed, Khatami’s invited.

To judge from Khatami’s writings, however, that invitation did not come without ambivalence. While his colleagues at the Center for Strategic Research, at
Kiyan
, and even within his own ministry, Ershad, seemed to borrow confidently and at will from Western and Islamic canons, Khatami retained a concern that was central to the pre-revolutionary thinkers. He did not want Iranians to suffer the “diluted identity” of Westoxication: “neither ourselves, nor Western.” Like Reza Davari, he saw a toxic seed at the core of all Western thought. In the West, Khatami noted, Enlightenment ideas had led to imperialism, violence, and godlessness. They served, among other things, as tools for the enrichment and empowerment of a new bourgeois class. Moreover, today the West faced internal crises in its economy and culture. Iranians should observe the whole of the Western experience, look deeply into it, and seek to understand it so that they might better extract what was worth extracting and leave the rest behind.

Still, the very notions of modernity, of development, were Western ones; to strive to become a developed country, Khatami believed, meant adopting Western values. And Iranians had reason to yearn in this direction. Their country lagged behind Western countries in science, economics, and political power. Its political and intellectual culture had been stunted by a long history of despotism, which had produced quietism among Iranian religious thinkers and an emphasis on metaphysics rather than politics.

The trouble was that the very thing that was most corrupt about Western values was also compelling. The West valued freedom: the liberty to eat, drink, dress, think, and speak as one pleased. Human beings were naturally attracted to such freedom. Islam, by contrast, called on believers to exercise restraint—to strive for abstinence, honesty, and rectitude, none of which were inborn, all of which required effort and self-mastery. And so the Islamic system was bound to impinge on individual liberties, and young Iranians were bound to ask why they did not enjoy the freedoms they saw their counterparts enjoying in the West. True freedom, Khatami argued, stemmed from moral and spiritual growth. But people required guidance in order to understand this. Khatami wrote, “
To make our society stable and strong we must teach the young a more worthy path than hedonism, such that they gain pleasure out of abstinence.”

Khatami believed that the future of Iran lay in the embrace of Islamic civilization. But this embrace should not be an embrace of the past. Muslims should recognize that although their religion was itself eternal, its interpretation was a dynamic thing that could be renewed and made consonant with the modern world. Iranians could reinterpret and refresh Islamic civilization. But this was necessarily an internal endeavor, and it required self-knowledge: “
We can only critique tradition if we have a firm sense of our own identity; a traditionless people are invariably devoid of serious thought.”

If Iranian intellectuals were to mine the West for its most useful modern ideas while discarding its toxic core—if they were to look deeply into Iranian and Islamic traditions and circumstances, in order to critique and update the indigenous civilization—they would need latitude, fresh air, something like a free press. And so, although Khatami cautioned that some restrictions would be necessary, he favored freedom of information and dialogue with the West: “
The cultural strategy of a dynamic and vibrant Islamic society cannot be isolation,” he wrote. Later he would emphasize the role of popular participation in politics, calling on the public to supervise, evaluate, and critique the government’s performance. “
The legitimacy of government stems from people’s vote,” he declared. “And a powerful government, elected by the people, is representative, participatory, and accountable. The Islamic government is the servant of the people and not their master, and it is accountable to the nation under all circumstances.”

The Khatami of these writings was not nearly as liberal as the most liberal of the reformists. And while his vision of a bifurcated religion—immutable at its core, dynamic in its interpretation and jurisprudence—surely owed something to Soroush, it did not approach the vertiginous upper reaches of Soroush’s register. Khatami remained a creature of the revolutionary milieu, and perhaps this was appropriate. He was a presidential candidate in a country less than twenty years past its Islamic Revolution, not a representative of the intellectual avant-garde.

Nonetheless, in that sometimes rueful, humble smile and in the quiet sincerity of his words, Khatami seemed to proffer other hopes. Khatami’s could not be the face of a regime that ruled by the clubs and fists of street militias or that silenced critics at the gallows. It could not become the symbol of a nation willfully isolated from the world. Khatami believed above all, and perhaps to his ultimate detriment, in the power and the necessity of dialogue.

• • •

M
OSTAFA
R
OKHSEFAT HAD ACHIEVED
, with
Kiyan
, more even than he had dreamt of in his poster-printing days. Here at last was the vehicle for a cultural renaissance that was vibrant and innovative but authentically Islamic and Iranian. And yet, shortly after founding
Kiyan
, Mostafa left the country. He had always wanted to spend some time studying in the West. He thought it would help him to better understand his own society. And so, in the early Rafsanjani period, he went to Montreal, Canada, where he studied for a PhD in Islamic philosophy at McGill University. He was not there long when news began to reach him of a conflict simmering within the
Kiyan
Circle he had left behind.

In the months between Mousavi’s withdrawal and Khatami’s entry into the 1997 presidential election, Khatami had met quietly with colleagues and acquaintances to sound them out about a potential run. Akbar Ganji attended at least one such meeting. Khatami told his confidants that he didn’t imagine he’d become president. Rather, he expected to get just three or four million votes. With that support behind them, they could publish
an exciting intellectual journal that the regime would hesitate to close. For this, Ganji was game.

Other members of the
Kiyan
Circle believed there was a more consequential political moment to be seized, and that
Kiyan
’s purpose was not only intellectual but political. Chief among these thinkers was a young technocrat named Mohsen Sazegara, who had served as a head of industry under Rafsanjani until his association with Soroush became a political liability. Sazegara believed that the reformism percolating through
Kiyan
and the Center for Strategic Research was something more than a new trend in Iranian thought. It was, at least potentially, the nucleus of a larger mobilization. As Khatami’s campaign gathered steam in 1997, Sazegara pressed the members of the
Kiyan
Circle to organize. Even—especially—if they ascended to power, the reformists would surely face struggles with Khamenei. They needed a political party and a newspaper: infrastructure to sustain them through the coming storm.

Saeed Hajjarian, of the Center for Strategic Research, agreed with this approach. Others, including Ganji, favored remaining more aloof—perhaps publishing a weekly magazine, announcing themselves more as a pressure group within civil society than as a political party with ambitions of its own. They were wary of linking their project’s fate too closely to the Khatami campaign.

Mostafa’s friends recalled him to Tehran to mediate the dispute. But by the time he got there, it was too late.
Kiyan
had divided—fatefully, permanently. Although the journal would survive the dispute, the intellectual circle that had coalesced around it was rent by new rivalries.

There would not be much mystery about where Mostafa stood. Even Ganji’s approach was too worldly: for Mostafa, the reformist project had always been an intellectual one, and that work was far from finished. Done right, it would encompass more and endure longer than politics. As philosophers, sociologists, theologians, and theoreticians, the reformist intellectuals might split open the rigid shell of their society—its traditions, its authoritarian politics—in such a way that it could never again clamp shut. But if they entered politics now, they would confront a regime at the height
of its power before they had amassed enough power of their own. Why press for progressive change before the society was fully ready for it, and before the hard-liners had come to see it as inevitable? A party could be banned, a newspaper closed. But a reformation, an awakening, a renaissance, could not so easily be stopped. Mostafa believed that this was what was even then unfolding and that entering the 1997 presidential election, far from touching off reform, would render it stillborn.

Moreover, Khatami was not the man for the job. To stand up to Khamenei required strength, know-how, and, above all, conviction. Mostafa did not see these qualities in Khatami. He believed that Khatami had at times favored Fardid over Soroush, Heidegger over Popper; he had not been a consistent friend to the intellectual movement that had first coalesced at
Kayhan-e Farhangi
under his uneasy watch. Khatami was not, Mostafa argued, a reformist. He was intellectually confused; he vacillated in politics because he vacillated in his heart.

Mostafa would not hesitate to admit that for him the matter was personal. He was the black sheep in a conservative family of carpet merchants; at least one of his brothers belonged to Motalefeh, a secretive association of bazaar merchants close to the most hardline elements of the clerical establishment. Mostafa alone had abandoned the family business for intellectual endeavors. He alone held forth in heated family debates about the promise of reform. He felt himself at once scorned and held dear, loved for all that his brothers saw in him as exceptional, even as he stood for the negation of all they believed. With dread, he watched his friends, colleagues, and allies cast themselves into a political system that he knew would only humiliate and expel them. It was his own dignity as much as their movement that he felt at stake; it was everything he had worked for and the enlightenment he had found in Soroush. For Soroush, to Mostafa’s anguish, cast his lot with Hajjarian and Sazegara. He was, Mostafa railed privately, their prisoner. But Soroush, years later, would coolly recall choosing the path of politics of his own free will, with animus toward no one, and he would wonder if the acid discord within the
Kiyan
Circle at that time was the work of hardline provocateurs.

Mostafa withdrew to Canada, to the little apartment where for years life
had consisted of nothing but his family, the library, his course work, drills in French and Arabic, his master’s thesis. Only his dissertation remained. But when he returned from Iran, his studies no longer meant anything to him. He abandoned the dissertation and turned where he never thought he would: to carpets, which from his student days he had shunned. The Rokhsefat brothers had long pressed cerebral Mostafa to bring the family’s business to Canadian shores. He had neither their experience, nor, perhaps, their acumen, but nobody figured on his fury.

In Iran, Mostafa Rokhsefat was a cultural figure of considerable if quiet renown. In Canada he was an inflamed businessman who sold carpets with a demonic determination, a mad competitive energy that he had never before discharged. His family’s prestige translated into credit; at one point he had twenty-five containers of Persian carpets sitting in Canadian customs. He distributed them, he would later recall, viciously, wildly, like no one had ever distributed Persian carpets before. He worked his way into debt and out of it, and the experience consumed him. But none of it assuaged the feeling that his true project had been hijacked, that it had come to carry a meaning he never intended and to defy his good judgment at what he knew would be an incalculable cost to history.

• • •

K
HATAMI HAD NOTHING TO LOSE
. His main opponent, Nategh-Nouri, had been handpicked by the Leader. Nategh-Nouri was so favored that he was already making state visits before the campaign had even concluded. The other candidates on the field included Reza Zavarei, deputy head of the judiciary and a member of the Guardian Council, and Mohammad Reyshahri, “the scary ayatollah” who had been Mousavi’s intelligence minister. Neither would attract even 3 percent of the vote. The roster was designed to usher Nategh-Nouri into office with little ado.