Dreams and Shadows: The Future of the Middle East (45 page)

But Boroujerdi had not been cowed. “The most afflicted victim of this theocracy has been God,” he said in 2006.

“The regime is adamant that either people adhere to political Islam or be jailed, exiled, or killed. Its behavior is no different from that of Osama bin Laden or [Taliban leader] Mullah Omar.”

In desperation, Boroujerdi wrote the United Nations, the European Union, and the Vatican for help. “I believe people are fed up with political religion and want traditional religion to return,” he told the Islamic Labor News Agency.
¹²

But the controversy among clerics was perhaps best reflected in Khamenei’s own family. His younger brother Hadi was a most unusual rebel. When I visited his office in 1999, he helped to put a human face on the clergy for me. His turban had been unwound; the long piece of black cloth was draped on a corner coatrack, alongside his limp dangling robe and above his shoes. He was wearing an open-necked shirt with rolled-up sleeves and large aviator glasses on his long, leonine face.

The younger Khamenei had been lecturing at seminaries and universities across Iran against the idea of absolute religious rule—and a supreme leader. He also edited a newspaper critical of the hard-liners’ politics. He had even registered as a candidate for the 1998 election for the Assembly of Experts, which selects the supreme leader and is supposed to monitor his performance.

He was, not surprisingly, disqualified from running by the Council of Guardians.

“The most important thing we’re looking for today in Iran is the rule of law,” he told me. “And that means no one, whatever his position, is above it.

“Unfortunately for the rest of us,” he added, “there are still people at the top who don’t accept that basic right.”

But many clergy do. The majority of Iran’s clergy are actually not in government—and do not want to be. Many oppose religious rule.

“At least ninety-five percent of the clergy have not been beneficiaries of the revolution,” Hadi Semati, the Tehran University political scientist, told me. “Some got money and prestige, but the overwhelming majority are poor and have not been part of the power structure.”

They have also felt the fallout of public resentment.

Three decades after the revolution, Iranians are increasingly derisive about the regime’s clerics. Iranians love to point out how many mullahs settled into the posh northern suburb of Jamaran. The Imam’s home and mosque were near the top of one of its scenic hills. Jamaran means “haven of snakes.”

Tehran taxis often do not stop to pick up clerics. One cleric told me his tale of a taxi slowing in front of him, only to have the driver look at him and run his finger, like a knife, across his throat, and then speed away. An Iranian friend recounted his own ride in a group taxi on a particularly hot day. His taxi next pulled over to pick up a cleric who had been standing on a curb under the cooling cover of a leafy tree. Two blocks later, the cabbie stopped and told the cleric to get out. My friend asked the driver what he was doing.

“I didn’t want him to have the benefit of the shade,” the cabbie replied.

Iranians, who love their humor, can convert even the most unlikely news story into a joke about the clerics—usually implying their ignorance. In 2006, Iranian-born Anousheh Ansari became the first female tourist in space when she flew on a Russian shuttle to the International Space Station. Iranians laughed that the clerics, when asked if there was anything wrong with a Muslim woman in space not wearing proper Islamic dress, debated the issue and finally decreed that it was OK—as long as outer door of the space station was left open at all times so that no sex could take place.

The clerics have come under the scrutiny of Iran’s imaginative film industry, too.
Under the Moonlight
is the politically incorrect story of young Hassan, who reluctantly agrees to give up what he loves to become a cleric to please his parents. On his way back from buying clerical robes for his induction ceremony, the garments are stolen by a young boy. Hassan eventually tracks down the lad, who agrees to return the robes that evening under one of Tehran’s main bridges.

But under the moonlight of the bridge, Hassan finds a world unknown to clerics—of the homeless and prostitutes and the unemployed. He listens riveted to their stories. When the garments are finally turned over, Hassan decides to sell them and buy food for the bridge people—and not become a cleric.

The implicit message of
Under the Moonlight
is that the clerics know little about reality; they live in isolation and do little for those suffering the most.

The box-office hit
The Lizard,
released in 2004, tells the delicious story of a thief who steals the robes and turban of a mullah to escape prison—and then gets stuck as a cleric to elude capture. Reza Marmulak—a double entendre name meaning Reza the lizard—heads for the border, but stops in a remote village where he is mistaken for the new cleric expected to take over the local mosque. He quickly becomes popular, slithering past complex religious questions, and giving off-the-cuff and occasionally humorous sermons that lead villagers to flock back to the mosque.

The film has another double meaning: A criminal may be able to find redemption through God, but at the same time an ignorant criminal can masquerade as a cleric—and bring believers back to their faith. Its mockery of the clergy, bordering on subversion, ended up being too much.
The Lizard
was banned a month after it opened to around-the-block queues in Tehran.

As supreme leader, Khamenei has the tools to quash, banish, and imprison to force conformity. But he has never been able to evoke reverence or impose fealty. Iranians, like their traffic, are simply not controllable.

Even after he was cast aside, Montazeri continued to offer a different vision. “One cannot work in the world by wielding clubs any longer. The government of clubs will no longer work,” he said in an address to his followers in Qom in 1997. “Nothing is accomplished when two or three people sit and make decisions for the country. ‘Republic’ means ‘government of the people.’”

Iran’s Islamic courts ordered Montazeri to be silenced. He was also placed under house arrest. Guards were deployed around his home to prevent any contact with other clerics, seminary students, or the public. Thugs smeared a sign across his office: “H
ERETIC OF THE AGE
.”

But when his house arrest ended in 2003, Montazeri again went public with his criticism. “Either officials change their methods and give freedom to the people and stop interfering in elections,” he warned in 2004, “or the people will rise up with another revolution.”

The longer Islamists compete in elections, the greater the diversity—and the divisions.

Iranians love to joke: Where there are three Shiites, there are four political parties. And tomorrow there may be five.

During the revolution’s first decade, there was only one party. Three decades later, there are dozens. But divisions are not always easy to diagram. Iran’s hard-liners reflect a bloc of some two dozen different parties, both isolationist and internationalist. Reformers are dispersed among some eighteen parties, both religious and secular. In between are many others, constantly reconfiguring. Some, like the Freedom Party, are not allowed to run; their members are regularly harassed, questioned, and detained.

And names often confuse, even mislead. The difference can be only a couple of letters. The Association of Combatant
Clergy,
or
Rouhaniyat,
is hard-line. But the Association of Combatant
Clerics,
or
Rouhaniyoun,
is reformist.

Labels are somewhat simplistic too. The Association of Combatant Clergy favors unchallenged power for the clergy. It wants limits on personal freedoms. It includes the most right-wing mullahs, Friday prayer leaders, judges of Islamic courts, and older clerics in their seventies and eighties—and the supreme leader.

Yet it is still diverse. Its younger members tend to be ideologically hard-line, while older members tend to be conservatives guided by traditional religious values.

On the other end of the political spectrum, the Association of Combatant Clerics wants limits on clerical power. It advocates individual freedoms, although within limits that will not lead to secularism or liberalism. It includes left-wing and midlevel theologians, aged mainly in their forties to sixties, and less traditional in their interpretation of Islam. But it also does not fit a stereotype. Among its members is the spiritual adviser to the students who seized the United States Embassy in 1979, Ayatollah Mohammed Khoeiniha.

And those are just two of the parties. Few societies are as complex or nuanced as Iran. But understanding the diversity within political Islam is understanding its future.

Two Iranian presidents illustrate the chasm. Both are devout Muslims. Both have impeccable revolutionary credentials. Both pledged full loyalty to the supreme leader and the Islamic republic. Both were dark-horse candidates. And both were elected, against stiff odds, because Iranians wanted change.

Yet they have little else in common.

In their differences, the two men—the first elected in 1997, the second in 2005—personify the dispute among Iran’s revolutionaries over just what an Islamic republic should be. Their presidencies also address the question of whether Iran’s Islamic system is flexible enough to survive.

The first president was Mohammed Khatami, a mild-mannered cleric distinguished by a barbered beard, elegant robes, a black turban, and elastically expressive eyebrows that bob up and down over his rimless glasses. He was born in 1943. His father was a cleric and close adviser to the Imam; his brother married the Imam’s granddaughter. As a seminary student, Khatami drafted and distributed pamphlets during the Imam’s confrontation with the shah in the 1960s. He was elected to the first revolutionary parliament. He was elected president in 1997.

Khatami is a midranking cleric. A religious intellectual, he is also referred to as sayyid, an honorific title meaning “master” or denoting descent through the Prophet Mohammed’s family. In his case, it is both. He is among Iran’s clerical elite.

On Iran’s peculiar political spectrum, he is a reformer. Unlike Soroush, however, Khatami is still inside the system. Like Iran’s parties, personal relationships among its leading players are rarely simple: Khatami and Soroush are friends. But Khatami’s family has also gone on vacation with the supreme leader and his relatives.

Khatami’s victory marked Iran’s greatest political comeback. After a decade as minister of culture, he was forced out of office in 1992 for encouraging openings in the press, arts, and film. He was almost literally shelved, relegated to the obscurity of Iran’s national library. The charges against him included “negligence” and “liberalism.”

Urged on by peers five years later, Khatami reluctantly ran for the presidency to offer a symbolic alternative to several hard-line candidates. He was not disqualified, by most accounts, because he was such a long shot against the regime’s favorite and front-runner, Speaker of Parliament Ali Akbar Nateq-Nouri. Many Iranians considered the election a foregone conclusion.

But during Iran’s brief presidential campaign, a mere twelve days, Khatami caught fire. He attracted growing crowds as he talked about the rule of law, encouraging debate, tolerating dissent, and addressing the needs of youth and women. He had an easy charisma. He also did not glower or lecture like so many of the mullahs.

Tehran suddenly buzzed with excitement.

“People were enthusiastic because that election offered the biggest choice of candidates since the revolution,” Hadi Semati, the political analyst, told me. “One was the candidate of the status quo, while the other was for change. He was like Bill Clinton—a new generation. People wanted a new face and new energy, and Khatami was full of energy.”

The vote was a landslide upset. Everyone over the age of sixteen can vote in Iran, male and female. Khatami ran just as the youth bulge born after the revolution came of voting age. More than twenty million people voted for Khatami. He won seventy percent in a huge turnout.

Iranians sent a decisive message: They were rejecting a generation of conservatives who had dominated politics since the revolution.

In his inaugural address in parliament, Khatami struck a new tone.

The atmosphere in Iran changed quickly.

A wave of independent newspapers opened with irreverent editorials and lampooning cartoons. Books long held back by censors were published; critical movie scripts were approved. The works of Western artists—European masters like Van Gogh, Picasso, Chagall, Miró, and Monet, as well as the pop art of Andy Warhol—were taken out of storage and put back up in the Museum of Contemporary Art. Satellite dishes proliferated, bringing in everything from CNN and Oprah Winfrey to the soap opera
Santa Barbara
and Asia’s equivalent of MTV. Social restrictions were relaxed.