Children of Paradise (50 page)

Like many Iranian thinkers, Soroush ruminated on the classic dilemma of his country—so classic that it had ossified into cliché: Iran, the country forever torn between tradition and modernity. Soroush reflected that it was not meaningful to speak of tradition as a thing to be preserved or jettisoned, because tradition was not one thing but a thousand things. Nor was it meaningful to speak of modernity as a state to be engineered or rejected: modernity, too, was multifarious and, perhaps more important, it was not planned or chosen so much as it was the unintended consequence of human endeavor.

“We are neither modern nor traditional,” Soroush remarked. “We are neither here nor there. We are just feeling our way as if in darkness. Sometimes we see better, sometimes not.” This in-betweenness, to Soroush, was not a thing to be lamented. It was an impetus to dynamism. At some time in the past, perhaps, Iranians had lived in a world whose philosophy was consistent with its ethics, science, and politics. “Now we are no longer in that state of equilibrium. We are between two things—the harmony lost to us and the harmony yet to be gained.”

• • •

B
Y
M
AY 2005
, former president Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani looked poised to replace Khatami as president. He was everything the reformists
had measured themselves against for years. The reformists associated Rafsanjani with the chain murders, with economic corruption and inequality, and with the more repressive atmosphere that preceded their own rule. And they feared his pragmatism. Unlike a true conservative, he would know to open pressure valves—for example, by allowing the people superficial freedoms, like laxer enforcement of the dress code—and how to present a moderate face to the world. But unlike a true reformist, he had no principled investment in democratizing the regime.

Rafsanjani’s campaign was flush with funds of mysterious origin and alight with a slick and giddy optimism. It printed no end of glossy stickers and posters; its headquarters teemed with heavily made-up women in glittery sandals and scanty hijab; and young people eagerly snapped up paid work tossing campaign paraphernalia into the windows of cars idling in traffic, lending the Rafsanjani camp a façade of youthful energy. Campaign posters showed an unaccustomed sight: below his narrowed eyes the beardless, plump-faced ayatollah smiled, a tense and mirthless smile that did not inspire joy.

Near mythical in his backroom influence, Rafsanjani was the candidate of the cynical and the uncommitted. His rallies were filled with supporters of other candidates who had come to take in the festive atmosphere or to ask themselves whether whatever it was they wanted done might be done most effectively by someone who was already very powerful. As the sociologist and newspaperman Emadeddin Baghi explained, “People make judgments like this: Khatami was good but too weak. Rafsanjani isn’t good, but he’s strong.”

The reformists could not agree on whether they should present a candidate, let alone on whom that candidate should be. So in the end they presented three. Mehdi Karroubi, the populist cleric who still believed it was possible to negotiate with the conservatives, was the closest to center. He appealed to traditional voters of modest income who had voted for Khatami. His principal campaign promise was a universal $50 cash handout. Mostafa Moin, a colorless former education minister close to the students, was the candidate for the lay reformist party, Mosharekat. He appealed to
the modern, urban, and intellectual wings of the reform movement, and embraced the strategy Tajzadeh had articulated in the 2003 seminar, of using government positions for a kind of internal activism. A third candidate, Mohsen Mehralizadeh, little-known outside the northern provinces, served to further divide the reformist vote.

To Rafsanjani’s right, the field was crowded as well. The favored conservative candidate, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, was the country’s chief of police, a Revolutionary Guardsman who presented himself as a modern conservative, hip to young people’s concerns and savvy with modern technology. Thuggish-looking campaign workers in purple jackets zoomed around Tehran on motorcycles to promote Ali Larijani, a hard-liner in the state media and culture establishments. The little-known mayor of Tehran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, was the election’s darkest dark horse, presumed to trail the other two conservatives, who trailed the centrist former president. Not a single political association or newspaper endorsed him.

Ganji, the student leaders, and a number of other reformists called for boycotting the presidential election. After what had happened to the parliament, there was no point in lending popular legitimacy to a regime determined to expel its loyal opposition. Even some reformists who publically repudiated the boycott privately confessed that they themselves would not vote. Khatami’s presidency had deflated their optimism and unmasked the regime’s inner inflexibility. Moreover, neither reformist candidate inspired passion.

In the end, the boycott and apathy would hurt no one more than they did Moin, as it was his constituency that was most likely to tilt toward the radical call for noncooperation. To many reformists’ surprise, Soroush endorsed Karroubi, although he was closer to Moin both personally and intellectually. Karroubi, in Soroush’s view, was closer to the grain of Iranian society and truer to the mood of his moment in history. Moreover, Soroush liked what he saw of Karroubi’s conduct, particularly “
the relatively free atmosphere that he brings about for thinkers and scholars.”

Rafsanjani easily led the first round of voting on June 17 with 21 percent of the vote. The reformists won about 35 percent even with the
boycott. But these votes were divided among three candidates, all of whom were sunk. Karroubi won 17.2 percent, Moin 13.8 percent, and Mehralizadeh 4.4 percent; Mehralizadeh’s share alone would have catapulted Karroubi into the second round of voting against Rafsanjani. But Rafsanjani would face an unexpected challenger from the right instead. On the eve of the election, the Supreme Leader had shifted his favor from Ghalibaf to Ahmadinejad, who edged past Karroubi with 19.4 percent of the vote. Within the city of Tehran, where the reformist voter boycott was most pronounced, Ahmadinejad even led Rafsanjani by some 200,000 votes in the first round, with the reformists trailing well behind their national totals.

Mehdi Karroubi cried fraud. When he went to sleep at five in the morning on the eighteenth, he famously proclaimed, he was in second place; when he awoke two hours later, he was in third. In fact, the sequence of events was stranger than this. At one point the interior ministry and Guardian Council simultaneously issued partial returns that differed by a count of 6 million votes. The ministry claimed that 15 million votes were in, with Karroubi polling second; but the Guardian Council claimed that 21 million votes had been tabulated, with Ahmadinejad polling second.

Karroubi issued an open letter claiming that Ahmadinejad’s share had been artificially inflated. The newspapers that carried the letter were forbidden to circulate. Karroubi resigned from all his political posts, including one as an adviser to the Supreme Leader, who accused him of “poisoning the atmosphere.” More surprising was that Rafsanjani, the undisputed front-runner, suggested that there had been “an organized interference” and lent credence to claims that the Basij and Revolutionary Guard had used six million unexpired birth certificates of dead people to force Ahmadinejad into the second round.

• • •

A
S IT HAPPENED
, Ahmadinejad was an ingenious foil for Rafsanjani. The older ayatollah was the consummate political insider, spectacularly wealthy, associated with widening economic inequality, and perceived as a schemer and dissembler. Ahmadinejad was an outsider if ever there was one. The Tehran mayor was a plainspoken everyman, the son of lower-middle-class rural migrants and an economic populist who spoke with naïve simplicity of bringing the country’s oil revenues to the people’s kitchen tables. His social conservatism soothed the anxieties of traditional voters even as the fact that he was not a cleric pleased voters weary of theocratic rule. The mayor’s face, homely and weathered, had something comical in its proportions: the goofy grin, the swooping wing of side-combed hair, the eyebrows that could lift almost vertically in certain moments of enthusiasm. The scruffy beard and perennial windbreaker marked him, to the urban elite, as a roughneck, a rube, an impression belied by the canny intelligence in his deep-set eyes.

Like Khatami before him, Ahmadinejad could call on the Tehran municipality’s war chest for campaign funds, and also like Khatami he ran a masterful campaign, if not in the election’s first round, then in its second. During the week between the first and second rounds, an Ahmadinejad ad with poor production values aired incessantly on television. It showed Ahmadinejad driving his 1977 Peugeot, then lingered long inside his small house in South Tehran, where he had remained even as mayor. The ad counterposed these images with shots of a lavish mayoral palace from the shah’s time. A voice-over admonished that greed should be eradicated among government men. “Why do they want so much when so many people have nothing?” To the theme song from the 1960 western
The Magnificent Seven
, the voice-over spoke of Ahmadinejad’s childhood. The mayor had no money. He’d had to create his own games and toys. “What is youth?” the voice-over asked. “Youth is purity, courage, sacrifice, and serving others.”

One of Ahmadinejad’s flyers listed five reasons that his opponents might say he should not be president. First, his clothes were not as expensive as those of his security detail. Second, he never took a government car to use for his sons’ friends’ birthdays. Third, when he met with the city council, instead of speaking for two hours, he sat for seven hours and listened. Fourth, unlike the previous mayor, he didn’t smoke a pipe or have an expensive bulletproof car. Finally, instead of paying out tax money to loyalists, he distributed it to young people to help them get married.

The reformists seemed unprepared for this populist assault from the right. Halfheartedly, some of them lined up behind Rafsanjani and called on their supporters to vote for him. But it was hardly a full-throated endorsement. One poster the night before the second-round vote read, “We supporters of Moin, because we do not want to end up in the hands of the Basij, now vote for Hashemi.” Even the Rafsanjani campaign had an ironic quality. Some of its young campaigners needled the Ahmadinejad camp by chanting for their candidate as “DJ Ali Akbar.”

The streets of Tehran were electric the night of June 22, but the atmosphere had tilted from festive to volatile by an imperceptible degree. Campaign paraphernalia, from posters and bumper stickers to CDs, rained down on passing traffic from the sides of the roads. Young bearded men, less visible in the first round, now owned large tracts of the city for the Ahmadinejad campaign. They had a sober, earnest quality, especially in comparison to the slightly ironic cast of the Rafsanjani campaign. Revolutionary Guardsmen and Basijis manned the intersections.

Among Ahmadinejad’s young voters and volunteers were many who had voted for Khatami just four years before. They were young men and women from the lower middle and working classes, some of whom had embraced Khatami’s call for greater political freedom. But they did not feel they’d gotten much out of eight years of reformist rule. They imagined that Ahmadinejad, by virtue of being a common man without a turban, would better understand their economic problems. And to the extent that reform had not produced any freedom that mattered in their lives, they did not fear that Ahmadinejad would cost them anything of value.

• • •

M
AHMOUD
A
HMADINEJAD WAS ELECTED
president on June 24, 2005. In August he appointed a cabinet that made his intentions unmistakably clear. He drew ministers from the ultra-hardline Haghani Circle of clerics that Ganji had once linked to the serial killings. The judge who had presided over Mayor Karbaschi’s trial, Gholam-Hossein Mohseni-Ejei, was made minister of intelligence. The new interior minister, Mostafa
Pourmohammadi, had served on the three-man board that consigned prisoners to execution in the 1988 prison massacre. The Tehran chief prosecutor, Saeed Mortazavi, would swiftly emerge as one of Ahmadinejad’s closest associates and political allies.

After the election, Roozbeh Mirebrahimi resembled a bereaved man sorting through the personal effects of a loved one who had unforgivably disappointed him. The reform movement as he knew it was dead. Sometimes it seemed to Roozbeh that it deserved to be.

For Roozbeh, Khatami embodied the movement’s promise and its failure, and it was with pained ambivalence that he watched the president leave office on July 30. He wrote on his blog, “I only feel sorrow for Mr. Khatami, that everything he had in the palm of his hand in most regards will disappear into the sky.” Later he questioned his own sorrow. Khatami held a ceremony honoring his return to private life. At the event, he was asked about Akbar Ganji. “The problem is more on Ganji’s side,” Khatami said, blaming Ganji’s extended incarceration on his refusal to stop speaking out.

Roozbeh wrote, “Truth be told, a while ago I wanted to get a letter to him somehow, which I wrote upon the end of his presidency, and thank him and let him know how well I appreciate the lasting accomplishments he made during his term. I’d readied the letter a while back, but the position Khatami took about Ganji made me abandon the idea of sending it.”

As he reread his letter, Roozbeh wrote, he felt depressed. “But what gains did we make in that time that we screamed: ‘Do something!’ Only his silence was our answer . . . In any case, now still, we must sit and, with fear and never-ending hope, look to the future together.

“With shame, I must say to those who support the reformists that, even in your dreams, in the next election you won’t be allowed to so much as put up posters.”