SEVEN

THE SECOND OF KHORDAD

MOHAMMAD KHATAMI’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.

• • •

MOSTAFA ROKHSEFAT 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.

• • •

KHATAMI 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.

In every way the establishment candidate, Nategh-Nouri, ran on familiar revolutionary themes. He railed against the “cultural onslaught” from the West, which he believed would saturate Iran with “corruption, decadence and idleness.” Only by strengthening its indigenous Islamic culture could Iran become immune from this stealth invasion. Nategh-Nouri stressed the defense of Palestine and an enduring enmity with the United States. His campaign operated through government offices, which functioned normally during the business day. Its operatives little noticed, at first, that the Khatami camp had student activists painting and hanging banners into the wee hours, throwing campaign postcards into the windows of cars, singing in the streets.

Khatami, until recently the head of the national library and a retiring intellectual figure, campaigned in the American style, touring the provinces by bus and glad-handing in a way that was never before a part of Iranian electioneering. He was an unexpectedly charming political candidate. He was open and friendly with voters and, despite the elegance of his robes, he displayed a humility that fit the populist sensibility of postrevolutionary Iran. His ideas—rule of law, civil society, political development—came directly from the intellectual hothouses of Kiyan and the Center for Strategic Research. But he rendered them accessible to ordinary people, whose hunger for them exceeded the fondest hopes of his advisers.

What Khatami promised was an Iran where the government’s voice would not ring out in silence. Civil society was a catchphrase for all the recourse Iranian citizens lacked: an independent press, grassroots associations, political parties, checks and balances on power—even, for those who dared to hope for it, an independent judiciary that might enforce equality before the law and safeguard the rights and freedoms of individuals. He suggested such a future while wearing clerical robes and a black turban that marked him as a seyyed, or a descendant of the Prophet. He was not a radical figure. To vote for Khatami was to express the hope that the Islamic Republic had better days ahead of it, that the 1979 Islamic Revolution might yet be one of liberation.

Still, the weight of the establishment and the authority of the Leader were arrayed against him. For a long time Khatami had only his hard work and native appeal to marshal. Then, just two months before the election, an enormous tactical advantage fell into his lap. In March 1997, Rafsanjani and his Kargozaran Party unleashed Tehran mayor Gholamhossein Karbaschi to endorse Khatami and place the entire machinery of the Tehran municipality at his disposal. Now Khatami had flush coffers and billboards all over the capital, where one in five Iranians lived. By the beginning of May, the month of the election, it was increasingly obvious not only that Khatami was winning but that more Iranians would turn out for this election than for any since 1979.

The reformists watched in amazement, but they were too skeptical even to prepare a victory speech for Khatami in advance. Surely the balloting would be rigged. As Khatami’s brother, Mohammad Reza Khatami, told a foreign reporter, “Less than a week before the election, we were certain of Mr. Khatami’s victory, although as I say we were not certain it would ever be announced.” The Khatami campaign appealed to Rafsanjani, who was still the president after all, and who wielded enormous personal influence behind the scenes. At Friday prayers on May 16, Rafsanjani announced that no sin was worse than vote rigging. Khamenei had to say something. He paid lip service to the same principle. “I shall not allow anyone to give himself the right to cheat in the election, which is contrary to religion and contrary to political and social ethics,” he said.

Two nights before the election, the members of the Kiyan Circle gathered for dinner. One suggested that Khatami was still lagging behind Nategh-Nouri but drawing closer. The social scientists from the Center for Strategic Research who’d formed a polling institute had surveyed the public, and they chose that moment to unveil that, according to their latest figures, Khatami was about to win by an overwhelming majority. Sure enough, on May 23, 1997, some 80 percent of Iranian voters turned out at the polls, 69 percent of them for Khatami.

Temperate, conciliatory, lacking conviction—years later, Khatami’s closest allies and advisers would claim to have seen tragic flaws in him all along. But in 1997, in the wake of an election that would become known as “The Epic of the Second of Khordad,” after its date on the Persian calendar, Iran was the site of as-yet-untrammeled hope. No one spoke of it more plainly or at greater cost than Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri, the disinherited successor to Khomeini who had raised his voice against the prison massacres not ten years before.

• • •

AYATOLLAH MONTAZERI HAD GUARDED a tense political silence for nearly a decade. Now, in November 1997, he delivered a rare lecture in Qom, unleashing his anger and outlining a vision he had nurtured for all the intervening years. Maybe he knew these remarks would cost him everything he had not already lost. Maybe he didn’t care.

Montazeri, one of the original authors of the doctrine of velayat-e faqih, said now that he had envisioned the Leader as a safeguard against despotism in the wake of the shah’s abuses. The faqih, who was in the first instance the nearly universally adored and respected Khomeini, was to check the power of the prime minister and president, assuring that neither of these assumed absolute rule. But that was not how things had worked out. Instead the Leader had become an absolute ruler. And while the people held the president and the parliament responsible for enacting their will, these elected leaders lacked power. The Leader held all the power, Montazeri lamented, but was responsible to no one.

Only the twelve imams of Shiite tradition were infallible, Montazeri reminded his listeners. Although his followers had dubbed him “imam,” even Khomeini was human and never claimed to be anything more. And yet, among the conservative clerics, his words and deeds had assumed the petrified quality of scripture. Montazeri decried the worship of Khomeini as a kind of idolatry. He returned, always, to the Quran, the sayings of the Prophet, and the lives of the imams. Montazeri believed in a kind of dynamic ijtihad, the interpretation of the sacred texts in light of contemporary concerns. When he spoke of Imam Ali, founder of the Shiite order—and Montazeri spoke of him often—he depicted him as warm, flexible, and confident, a model and a foil for the brittle Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.

Montazeri stood out among the political clergy for his fearless and respectful engagement with opposing ideas. He was not afraid of the tumult and tussle implied by free expression and a free press. He could not understand why Khamenei and his lieutenants felt threatened by criticism. Nor did he worry that the people would fall into error if clerics did not preselect their candidates for office. Iranians were good Muslims; surely they would not be mistaken about more than a few parliamentary deputies, who would be rendered ineffectual by the majority. Montazeri believed in the wisdom and goodwill of the public. Verses in the Quran called for rulers to engage in “consultation.” Some Islamic scholars, Khomeini among them, interpreted this to mean that consultation was permitted but not required, and that in any case leaders should consult qualified Islamic scholars, not the public. Montazeri took a populist view of these ambiguous verses. At least by 1997 he saw consultation—with the people—not only as required but as the fundamental source of a government’s legitimacy.

In his 1997 speech, Montazeri scolded the armed militias that patrolled Iranian universities. “Hezbollah” meant “party of God.” No party of God mindlessly chanted slogans and beat political opponents with clubs, he insisted. The Iranian people could not be governed by brute force. Rather, Montazeri said, they deserved a system with political parties, separated powers, free elections, and free expression. The Guardian Council, in his view, had no business selecting the candidates for office. The president and the parliament should be elected directly by the people.

The man who would have been Leader but for the fateful developments of 1988 decried what he saw as the expansion and abuse of the system’s supreme office. The Leader was there not to make laws, to play favorites, to crush dissent, or to assure the victory of any particular political faction. He should not command police or military forces or run his own special, extrajudicial court for keeping the clergy in line, as he now did. Rather, he was to “supervise” the affairs of state within the realm of religious law, essentially acting as the government’s spiritual adviser. Even in so doing, he should not be insensitive to the will of the people or place himself above the law. In later writings Montazeri would clarify that the Leader should himself be elected and popularly accountable.

Montazeri made no secret of his disdain for the man who had assumed the office of Leader in his stead. Khamenei did not have and would never have the jurisprudential authority of a Khomeini or a Montazeri. But shortly after assuming the Leadership, Khamenei had tried to get himself swiftly ordained with higher clerical authority than his training, publications, and standing in the scholarly community suggested. Montazeri let the Leader know that he found these efforts objectionable. They “degraded” traditional Shiite lines of authority and rendered them “infantile.”

Khamenei’s interpretation of velayat-e faqih had effectively evacuated the elected offices of their power. The president, Montazeri would soon note, could not enforce the rule of law. The instruments were not under his control. The police answered to the Supreme Leader, who also claimed control over the judiciary. Moreover, the Leader could summon the Special Court of the Clergy, whose purpose was to purge the clergy of contrary elements but which had recently extended its jurisdiction even to laypeople who “insulted” the clergy. This ad hoc revolutionary tribunal corresponded to no provision in the constitution, but neither Khomeini nor Khamenei had seen fit to disband it. In fact, Khamenei had expanded it when he assumed leadership, so that it now had branches throughout the country and commanded its own security network, complete with its own prisons. Its judges, prosecutors, and even defense lawyers were directly answerable not to the judiciary or any elected branch of government but to the Leader himself, who was inclined to draw the court’s jurists from the intelligence ministry and a network of particularly hardline clerics. Even its budget was overseen by the Leader rather than by the parliament.

Perhaps, then, it should have been no surprise when the Special Court of the Clergy came for Montazeri. His 1997 speech offended Khamenei to the very core. The Special Court sentenced Montazeri to house arrest. The Revolutionary Guard, Basij, and intelligence ministry sent a mob to ransack Montazeri’s home, his office, and the hosseiniyeh in Qom where he lectured and taught. According to the ayatollah’s memoirs, these security forces, all of them answerable to the Office of the Supreme Leader, destroyed the hosseiniyeh, sealing it off and leaving it in ruins. Montazeri was barricaded on the second floor of his home and all but one of the doors to the outside were welded shut; inside the remaining door, the security forces built a small room to house armed guards. For five years, this was how Montazeri lived, isolated from all but his immediate family.

His words, however, had already breached the barricaded doors and taken wing. Khamenei, Montazeri declared in that November speech, had made the Islamic Republic into an autocracy hardly distinct from the shah’s. There was nothing Islamic about oppression. “If I were you,” he advised Khatami, “I would go to the leader and tell him that, with all due respect, 22 million people voted for me while everyone knew that you preferred another candidate. It means, therefore, that the people have rejected the existing order.”