The Ayatollah Begs to Differ (8 page)

I left Javanfekr’s office and headed back to the unrestricted section of Pasteur Avenue to hail a cab. I stopped in at the cell phone drop and handed over my token to the Guard, who reached behind him and handed me my phone. “Thanks very much,” I said, turning to leave.

“Excuse me,” he said politely. “Can I ask you a question?”

“Of course.” I turned back to face him. He had the classic Revolutionary Guard look: a very close-cropped beard with severe lines demarcating where it was permissible to shave for a more professional appearance, that is, the upper cheeks and the lower neck. His cap was pushed back from his forehead, which I suppose gave him a friendlier air than one would expect of a guardian of the Islamic Revolution, one whose uniform’s insignia comprised a raised arm holding a Kalashnikov rifle (the same logo that Hezbollah, a creation of the Revolutionary Guards, uses). I wondered what he wanted.

“Where did you get that cell phone?” he asked. “Is it a Motorola?”

“Yes, it’s a Motorola, and I got it in New York.”

“New York? Wow.” He looked at me, as if trying to comprehend what a bearded Iranian who visits the president’s office was doing in New York. “Tell me,” he continued, “is it any good? Does it give antenna [Farsi for ‘work well’] in Iran? It’s very beautiful.”

“Yes, it gives good antenna,” I replied. “No problems at all. I think you can buy them here too.”

“Yeah, I think I’ve seen them in the shopwindows, but I don’t know anything about Motorolas.”

“They’re pretty good, very popular in the United States.”

“Really?”

“Yes.” I turned to leave.

“Thanks,” the Guard said. “Have a good day.”

“You too.” I left his little room and continued walking toward the main entrance to the presidential compound. I turned on my cell phone and stared at it, waiting for it to “give antenna.” I noticed from the corner of my eye various pedestrians heading in the direction I had come from, all of them staring at me, I felt. Was it the beard, the suit, and the phone?
“Haj-Agha!”
I heard a squeaky woman’s voice and looked up. “
Haj-Agha
, is this the president’s office?” She was enveloped in a black chador and holding it tightly with one hand by her mouth, but I could see that she was quite old. She had an accent, provincial, and I noticed that her chador was stained.

“Yes,” I said to her. “Straight ahead, keep going.”

“Is he there?” she asked. “I’m going to see the president.” She sounded determined and as if she wanted to give him an earful.

“I think so,” I replied.

“Thanks very much,” she said. She continued walking, her chador flapping with every step. I looked back and watched her for a moment. She walked past the cell phone Guard and disappeared into the first building I had visited earlier. I turned and walked out of the compound, wondering if she would be successful in her quest to deliver a message to her president, a president who had styled himself as a man of the people: a people represented by her, and by those who wear plastic slippers indoors.

Ahmadinejad’s “man of the people” image owes as much to his conservative, religious upbringing and his own philosophies as it does to his political mentor, the shadowy Mojtaba Hashemi-Samareh. Officially the “senior adviser to the president,” Hashemi-Samareh acts more as a cross between Iran’s Karl Rove and a president’s chief of staff, although his secretive nature would put Rove to shame. Clearly a ripe subject for an investigative report, or at least an in-depth profile, given that he accompanies the president on every trip and is a disciple of Ayatollah Mohammad Taghi Mesbah-Yazdi (far and away the most hard-line of any cleric in Shia Islam and the dean of the Imam Khomeini Education and Research Institute in Qom), who publishes the archconservative weekly,
Parto-Sokhan
, Hashemi-Samareh has avoided the media glare mostly due to the fact that investigative reporting in Iran can sometimes lead to the curious disappearance of the reporter, particularly if the subject of an investigative report is an unwilling subject, has strong ties to the Revolutionary Guard Corps and to the intelligence services, and is known to have particularly frightening ideas about what comprises an ideal Islamic society. Check all three for Mr. Hashemi-Samareh. Like the president a former member of the Revolutionary Guards, he is believed to have served with Ahmadinejad during the Iran-Iraq war, although it seems impossible to verify this simple fact. It has also been said that Hashemi-Samareh is married to Ahmadinejad’s wife’s sister, although this too has oddly never been confirmed, or even brought up by the media. What is known is that he is a constant presence at the president’s side, in every cabinet meeting and during midday prayers at the office (and on every occasion when I met or saw Ahmadinejad in New York).

Hashemi-Samareh is a slight man, not unlike Ahmadinejad in stature, and has a disarmingly wide smile, almost a Cheshire (and not very Persian) cat grin that, given what is known about him, can send shivers down one’s spine. In the early 1990s, when he was sponsored by Ayatollah Mesbah-Yazdi for and quickly appointed to a critical job, director of placements, at the Foreign Ministry, he indeed sent shivers down the spines of not a few diplomats who were subjected to his tests for loyalty and Islamic virtue before they could secure a coveted overseas post. He even published a pamphlet at the Foreign Ministry, one that no one seems to have a copy of but every diplomat swears existed, titled “The Psychology of the Infidels,” which could have been subtitled “Forget Everything You Think You Know About How to Be an Exemplary Diplomat.” (A colleague, Saeed Jalili, who rose rapidly through the ranks after Ahmadinejad was elected, published a book titled
The Foreign Policy of the Prophet [PBUH]
,
^*1
presumably also intended as a field guide for Iran’s budding diplomats.)

In his pamphlet Hashemi-Samareh apparently laid out the rules for Iranian diplomats’ dealings with foreigners overseas, the presumption being that every person an Iranian diplomat comes into contact with is a spy, and included sartorial advice that could have served as a warning of presidential shabbiness to come. In the antithesis of common notions of diplomatic style and sophistication, Hashemi-Samareh believed that Iranian diplomats’ trousers could not sport sharp creases, for if they did, it was surely a sign that the diplomats were neglecting their thrice-daily obligatory prayers, which comprise repetitive standing, kneeling, and bowing gestures. For the same reason, he held that Iranian diplomats with polished, lace-up shoes (practically part of the global uniform of diplomacy) could not be counted upon as loyal to the Islamic Revolution, whereas loafers with a heavy crease on the heel, evidence that they’ve been used as male versions of mules for easy slipping on and off, should be preferred footwear. He didn’t need to remind his fellow foreign service officers that in Iran loafers such as he described, particularly if the heel was always left pushed down, were the choice of every laat, jahel, and dahati, the underclass of society.

Hashemi-Samareh hadn’t needed to worry about neckties by the time he achieved his position of power at the Foreign Ministry: Ayatollah Khomeini had, early on, decreed that the wearing of them was not only a sign of “West-toxification,”
gharb-zadegi
, one of the catchwords of the early years of the revolution, but even a nod to Christianity, for, viewed with an artistic eye, the tie could be said to make the sign of the cross. Naturally, no one in any position of power wished to be thought of as either West-toxified or, worse, nodding to Christ, so neckties rapidly disappeared from men’s wardrobes, or at least those of men who cared about their jobs. It is a little strange to now see film of Khomeini and his entourage in Paris plotting the Shah’s downfall, or photos and film of the very early days after the Shah’s ouster: other than the clerics who flocked to his side, some of Khomeini’s closest advisers wore ties and in some cases were clean shaven. Mehdi Bazargan, the first prime minister of the interim government, and Sadeq Ghotbzadeh, foreign minister for the first six months of the hostage crisis, easily come to mind. Of course Bazargan was quickly shunted aside, and Ghotbzadeh jailed and later executed for plotting against the revolution, though presumably not for wearing a tie. But Khomeini, or whoever brought the issue of ties to his attention—and given his apparent early disinterest in the matter, it is unlikely that he gave it much thought until it was brought to his attention for an opinion—understood that eliminating them from the government wardrobe would make a unique impression on the world: that Iran wouldn’t play by Western rules.

Indeed, Iran still is the only country in the world whose officials, including all of its diplomats abroad, are always seen tieless. True, Fidel Castro often wore fatigues, and a few other Third World leaders wear national costumes or appear with open-necked shirts, but the government cadres are always seen in suits and ties. To the Third World “street,” and particularly the Muslim Third World, where Khomeini wished to have the most influence, even encouraging new Islamic revolutions, the effect was important. First, the message that “real Muslims don’t wear ties” resonated in places where most men, other than the rich, Westernized, and intellectual classes, didn’t wear ties (including in Iran), and, second, the image projected by Iran, that the country was independent of the norms and standards of international behavior (norms that Khomeini believed were created and imposed by the West), was proof of liberation from the shackles of colonialism. The servants would no longer emulate, much less listen to, their former masters. It would be hard to prove, but when I sat at the UN General Assembly in 2006 as the improbable translator for Ahmadinejad’s upcoming speech, only a few feet away from Bolivia’s Evo Morales, who was making his first appearance in New York since his election as president and who was wearing a native leather jacket and tieless white shirt, I couldn’t help but think that Iran’s dismissal of diplomatic etiquette had had some effect on what Third World leaders today thought of as appropriate attire for addressing the entire world.

The sartorial aspects of Hashemi-Samareh’s “Psychology of the Infidels” may have become obsolete during the reformist president Khatami’s administration, which ushered in an era of relative elegance among government officials to match Khatami’s own preference for bespoke garments (though stopping well short of rehabilitating the necktie), but the underlying philosophy became all too apparent in the wake of Ahmadinejad’s election. Among his first duties as president, in an act that betrayed Hashemi-Samareh’s hand (for Ahmadinejad had no experience in foreign affairs and had probably never even left the country
⁶
), was the wholesale removal of virtually the entire corps of ambassadors based in the West: an elite group of reform-minded diplomats who not only didn’t seem to think the West was all bad all the time but even polished their brogues and pressed their European-made suits from time to time.

Hashemi-Samareh’s influence in international affairs became even more apparent when it was he (and not the new ambassador to Paris, whom he undoubtedly had a hand in choosing) who flew to Paris in September 2006 to meet with President Jacques Chirac and deliver a private message from Ahmadinejad. Very shortly afterward, he was appointed deputy interior minister for political affairs, a post he would assume along with his full-time duties as senior adviser. To opponents of Ahmadinejad, and more particularly opponents of Ayatollah Mesbah-Yazdi, it became alarmingly clear that October why Hashemi-Samareh had chosen to take the somewhat higher-profile position in government; as part of his duties he was also appointed head of the election commission, supervisor of the poll for the Assembly of Experts (the body that oversees the work of the Supreme Leader)—an election where Mesbah-Yazdi and his allies hoped to gain ground against the more moderate clerics. To his credit, I suppose, and to the credit of the election process, Hashemi-Samareh must not have interfered with the vote count: his mentor Mesbah-Yazdi suffered a humiliating sixth-place finish in the Tehran municipality (barely squeezing into his seat in the Assembly), and his and Ahmadinejad’s allies generally fared far worse than expected, perhaps contributing to Hashemi-Samareh’s reasons for resigning his post a few months later, in the summer of 2007, ostensibly to spend
less
time with his family while his duties as top presidential adviser became all-encompassing, as he claimed, and allowed him not a waking moment to ponder such pedestrian issues as poll supervision. Persian cats, it appears, when they come together once in a while, find a way to trim the whiskers of even the laat cats.

THE AYATOLLAH HAS A COLD

The Supreme Leader of the Islamic
Revolution
, not Republic, is his official title, but in Iran he is known simply as
Rahbar
, or “Leader.” The title betrays two conflicting sides of the national character (plus an emphatic statement that Iran is forever a revolutionary state). Iranians have traditionally, at least in the last few centuries, despised their leaders no matter their character or their deeds, been quick to turn on and mock them, but at the same time yearned for strong leadership and someone to look up to.

Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the founder of the Islamic Republic and the leader of its revolution, was arguably the first genuinely popular leader in recent Iranian history (except for the democratically elected prime minister Mohammad Mossadeq, whose premiership was short-lived, courtesy of the CIA
¹
), but he recognized better than most that the Iranian habit of souring on the subjects of their hero worship meant his dream of a long-lived Islamic state could easily evaporate on the whims of an unruly populace. His concept of
velayat-e-faqih—
“guardianship of the jurist” or “rule of the jurisprudent,” depending on interpretation—which he revealed in a published work in 1970 from his exile in Najaf, Iraq, had Shia Islam as its rationale and basis. But apart from the implication that he would be the
faqih
, which also means “leader,” it conveniently also envisioned a leadership removed enough from public scrutiny (partly owing to its religious credentials but also because of its inherent aloofness from day-to-day political considerations) that it would not suffer the wrath of the people, should they become wrathful, as other leaders traditionally had. Although some Shia clerics rejected the concept entirely and others have disputed the extent to which the faqih can exercise power—for example, whether he should be limited to purely Islamic questions and issues, or whether he is a “ruler” or “guardian”—it was nonetheless enshrined in the Islamic Republic’s constitution after the revolution.

Khomeini, as father of the revolution and someone who was elevated (some argue inappropriately) to Imam, an honorific that has seldom been applied to any Grand Ayatollah, as it implies sainthood of the sort that is the basis of Shia Islam with its twelve Imams, didn’t need to worry about his authority and popular support while he was alive, but he was careful to ensure that his successors, who could not be guaranteed to enjoy the same privileges, would have an absolute authority that would entrench the Islamic Republic for generations to come. Today, the
valih-e-faqih
, “Supreme Leader,” is Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the similarity of his name to his predecessor’s entirely coincidental but guaranteed, as it has over the years, to confuse Westerners. He has, in the years since Khomeini’s death elevated him to the post, carefully balanced his use of what is arguably unlimited power with the cultivation of a public perception that the elected presidents of the republic are responsible for the ordinary welfare and woes of the people, and their general dissatisfaction, if they have any, with their government. It’s a difficult balancing act, one that he plays with enormous skill, for when the people are too happy, as they perhaps were in the wake of the initially extremely popular election of President Mohammad Khatami, he has to ensure that credit for that happiness doesn’t rest entirely with the elected officials; otherwise his very role might come into question. Similarly, a certain amount of dissatisfaction, whether from the left or the right, bodes well for his authority as Iran’s “Guide,” someone who can lead the nation through turbulent times. It speaks volumes about both Iranians’ penchant for dislike of the leaders they elect and the Supreme Leader’s deft manipulation of the political system that Iranians’ disapproval of Khatami’s inability to deliver on his promise of reform was blamed not on Khamenei directly, although Khatami and his allies implied as much at every opportunity and most Iranians understood the limits of the president’s power, but on
Khatami’s
unwillingness to stand up to conservatives and Khamenei, who by the very nature of his job supported the conservative agenda as often as, if not more often than, the president’s. Blaming the weakness of their president rather than the strength of the Supreme Leader, then, stands in contrast to Khatami’s successor’s term, when those Iranians who quickly became unhappy with the state of affairs under President Ahmadinejad blamed him for incompetence and pigheadedness rather than Khamenei for his apparent inability or unwillingness to completely rein him in. The Supreme Leader, it seems, can never lose.

When I arrived in Tehran in January 2007, the world’s capital of rumors was abuzz with the mother of all rumors: that the Supreme Leader was either dying or already dead. The elections for the Assembly of Experts, the body that chooses and theoretically supervises the Supreme Leader, were over in December, and moderate clerics had, contrary to some expectations, done extremely well, but there was still some uncertainty as to whom they would choose to succeed Khamenei, who was, after all, a prostate cancer survivor who at sixty-eight looked even older than his years. Many people, even those with close connections to the highest levels of government, spoke in the inimitable Persian way of treating almost any rumor, no,
every
rumor, as fact until it is proven otherwise, and as if Khamenei’s imminent demise if not his death were very real. Unlike Cuba, say, where the president’s health is a state secret, Iran has no such prohibitions, but it is widely assumed that those in the know would keep the Supreme Leader’s passing quiet, particularly at times of sensitive security for the nation, until a succession had been finalized. What led to the rumors were the facts that Khamenei hadn’t been seen in public for some weeks, hadn’t appeared as he traditionally does at celebrations for the important Muslim holiday of Eid al-Adha (marking the end of the hajj and falling on the last day of the year in 2006), and had apparently been taken to the hospital at some point in late December.

It’s impossible to know if the rumor was started in Iran or by hopeful exiles abroad, but Michael Ledeen of the American Enterprise Institute, a notorious neocon, perhaps having picked up some Persian traits of his own through his obsession with all things Iranian, or actually all things Iranian having to do with regime change, declared it as a fact on his Web site and viewed it, as almost every Iranian did, as one of the momentous occasions in the brief history of Iran’s Islamic Republic.
²
Ledeen, famous for advocating regime change in Iran
before
Iraq, and an archenemy of the Iranian clerics since 1979, could hardly contain his glee, perhaps believing that a weak Iran temporarily without a Supreme Leader might be ripe for some “shock and awe” courtesy of the Pentagon. For days afterward, bloggers, both in Iran and internationally, competed with each other to either confirm or deny the rumor, but what seemed clear, even to those who denied Khamenei’s death, was that business was not as usual where the valih-e-faqih was concerned.

Inside Iran, the question quickly stopped being whether he was dead or not and became who his natural successor was. It was assumed that Ayatollah Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, chairman of the Expediency Council (a body that is technically above the president and supervises his work), newly reelected to the Assembly of Experts along with many of his allies, and the de facto number two in the hierarchy of the Islamic Republic, would once again, as he did when Khomeini died in 1989, play kingmaker rather than king. Rafsanjani, from the pistachio-producing town of Rafsanjan, had been one of Khomeini’s closest aides and advisers, almost always seen quietly by his side, but his public profile had risen when he became president in 1989 and served two terms until Khatami’s election in 1997. Rafsanjani’s wealth (and his penchant for accumulating more of it), along with his sons’ extensive business dealings and his notoriety overseas (an Argentine judge has issued an arrest warrant for him for his alleged role in the bombing of Buenos Aires’s Jewish Center in 1994), many argued, would lead him not to seek the Supreme Leader’s office but rather to use his influence and power to put someone else, considerably weaker than himself, in the job.

There was also the unspoken issue of Rafsanjani’s white turban: he was not a
Seyyed
, a direct descendant of the Prophet Mohammad who is entitled to wear a black turban, and in the Shia tradition of placing great importance on bloodline in the legitimacy of rule, it might be difficult, at least for some, to accept a non-Seyyed as their Supreme Guide. Seyyed Mohammad Khatami, however, black-turbaned and with the blood of Mohammad coursing through his veins, was a name that kept surfacing as a likely choice. There was, of course, the question of his religious credentials, for even though he was a Seyyed, he was only a
Hojjatoleslam
, a rank below Ayatollah, and the Supreme Leader is supposed to be a
marja-e-taghlid
, or “source of emulation,” the Persian definition of a
Grand
Ayatollah. But that hadn’t stopped Khamenei from becoming the Supreme Leader in 1989; he was overnight promoted to Ayatollah (promotion to Ayatollah happens by consensus among other Ayatollahs), and soon thereafter was being referred to as “Grand.” Those who spoke of Khatami as potential Supreme Leader were genuinely excited by the prospect, and those who dismissed him as a candidate felt he lacked the cunning required to pull off such a feat (in both cases being complimentary to Khatami, for the cunningness of mullahs—or
akhound
, as they are known in Farsi—is considered both legendary and their fundamental character flaw).

As the days wore on with still no public sign of Khamenei, the rumors gathered steam, forcing Iranian diplomats abroad to deny them without offering proof that their Supreme Guide was still giving them guidance. The Supreme Leader’s office was mute on the subject, although it is not known to issue press releases or have much of a public face, even in extraordinary times. Maintaining the image of the Supreme Leader as “guide,” rather than executive, is part and parcel of the office’s job. The Supreme Leader gives no press conferences, never grants interviews, and speaks only at special gatherings, such as an occasional Friday prayer or commemoration ceremonies of one sort or another. The Leader meets with foreign dignitaries (almost exclusively Muslim, with few exceptions) but limits any televised and public words to generalities, such as Iran’s support for the country (or entity, in the case of Hamas and Hezbollah) whose emissary he’s meeting, Iran’s peaceful and Islamic nature, and Iran’s eagerness to expand trade and contacts with the friendly country in question. As such, he pointedly does not meet with representatives of Western powers. The Leader does not travel overseas; if anyone worthy wishes to see him, that person must travel to Iran. (Khamenei has been outside Iran, although not as Supreme Leader: during his presidency in the 1980s he even visited New York to attend the UN General Assembly.) He does not travel to Mecca to perform the hajj; having been a cleric his entire adult life, he became a hajji many times over prior to assuming the mantle of Rahbar. But the Supreme Leader is supreme not just because of his religious credentials in an Islamic republic; he’s supreme because his position is protected by the nation’s most powerful military force, and it’s not the army.