Dreams and Shadows: The Future of the Middle East (48 page)

Ahmadinejad is a skinny man, small at only five foot four inches. His head is wide at the top but tapers to a narrow jaw that is covered with a close-cropped black beard. He has small, deep-set eyes. His short black hair spills a bit over his forehead, partially covering a deep mark from praying several times a day—a telltale sign not found on Rafsanjani, Khatami, Khamenei, or many other ranking clerics in Iran. It is all the more striking because Amadinejad is not a cleric.

Iranians called the race “the turban versus the hat.” Ahmadinejad was the first noncleric to make the presidential final runoff election since passage of the Islamic republic’s constitution.

Born in 1956, Ahmadinejad was more than twenty years younger than Rafsanjani. He came of age during the revolution. He trained as a civil engineer and had a doctorate in traffic management. He was a campus leader during the student takeover of the American embassy, although one of the masterminds told me that Ahmadinejad had opposed the plan because it did not include a simultaneous takeover of the Soviet Embassy. He was a Revolutionary Guard during the war with Iraq in the 1980s. In the 1990s, he was appointed a provincial governor. He then taught engineering at Tehran’s technical university. In 2003, he was appointed mayor of Tehran by a city council elected with only a twelve-percent turnout.

As mayor, Amadinejad shunned the official manor and stayed in his small town house in a working-class neighborhood. His campaign was unsophisticated. He tapped into mosque networks and personal ties to the Revolutionary Guards and Basij. In his television spots, he was shown praying and, dressed in military fatigues, praising veterans for their sacrifices during the war with Iraq. Many men on his campaign dressed in black shirts; women always wore the full black chador.

On domestic issues, Ahmadinejad was disdainful of reform. “We did not have a revolution,” he said, “in order to have democracy.”
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On foreign policy, he was disdainful of rapprochement with the West, particularly the United States. “In the past, the Americans broke off relations with Iran to create pressure,” he said. “If they want to reestablish them now, it is for the same reasons. We do not want to have imposed relations.”
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Ahmadinejad was a master of earthy street politics. “I take pride,” he said often, “in being the Iranian nation’s little servant and street sweeper.” During the campaign, he drove around Tehran in his 1977 Peugeot.

The final vote stunned the establishment. The little mayor beat the most cunning politician in Iran by a humiliating seven million votes. Rafsajani garnered only one third of the tally.

Iranians had again signaled that they wanted something different. Even Khamenei, who owed his job to Rafsanjani, talked of the need for “new political blood.”

Rafsanjani was not a gracious loser. He lashed out at opponents who “spent billions from the public funds to ruin the reputation of me and my family in a vicious way.” He warned that those who intervened in the election would “pay back in life and after death.”
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But Amadinejad heralded the election as a turning point. “A new Islamic revolution has arisen,” he said.

His surprise win marked the emergence of a younger generation of conservative and hard-line technocrats. They were not clerics. They had limited exposure to the outside world, particularly the West. They were young adults during the revolution and worked their way up through the Islamic system, often as its foot soldiers in the war with Iraq.

But the pendulum swung so dramatically for three other reasons that had little to do with Ahmadinejad’s hard-line politics. Thirty-five to forty percent of Iran’s voters tend to prefer the puritan politics of traditional, conservative, or hard-line candidates, three quite distinct categories in Iran. But the rest had different rationales.

First, Ahmadinejad was a grassroots politician from the working class, a newcomer, and largely untainted. His father, he boasted, was a “hard-bitten toiler blacksmith.” He campaigned as Mr. Clean—and against the notoriously corrupt clerical oligarchs who had become a virtual mafia. During the monarchy, Iranians complained that everything in Iran was run by 1,000 families close to the shah. With cronyism rampant again, Iranians complained that the oil-rich country was run after the revolution by 1,000 families close to the clerics.

Rafsanjani’s family empire embodied the new privileged class. His children held powerful or lucrative positions in everything from the oil industry to Iran’s Olympic committee. His daughter had also been a member of parliament. Siblings, nephews, and cousins fared well too. A few months before the election, I interviewed Rafsanjani’s brother, who had headed Iranian television and radio for years; his opulent office was in the shah’s old palace compound.

So a huge part of Ahmadinejad’s victory was a protest. It was an antielite vote. Iranians have become increasingly sophisticated politically. Even in a rigidly restricted political arena, they look for options. As with Khatami, they were rejecting the status quo.

“People’s expectations have not been realized over the past eight years [of Khatami’s presidency], so they are looking for something different,” Mirdamadi, the former hostage taker and ex-parliamentarian, told me shortly before the election. “People still want change, and they will vote for anyone they think will be able to change something.”

Second, Ahmadinejad’s populist economic message appealed to Iranians made poorer since the revolution. He ran as a man of the people on a ticket of piety, price controls, and clean management. He pledged to put oil revenues on Iranians’ dinner tables. He crafted an image as Iran’s Robin Hood.

The timing was right. The Islamic republic had not produced heaven on earth, and Iranians were increasingly impatient. Unemployment was officially ten percent, but in reality at least twenty percent—and some economists claimed even higher. With at least one in four living below the poverty line in a country with inflation at sixteen percent, many Iranians had two or even three jobs to make ends meet. Women increasingly worked because they had no choice. Despite rigid social controls, prostitution had become rampant, even among women who wore the chador.

Many in the huge baby bulge of young students who had voted for Khatami eight years earlier had graduated and were out looking for jobs and housing. Iran struggled—usually unsuccessfully—to absorb 500,000 baby boomers added to the labor market every year. Deferred marriage had become a chronic problem because of housing shortages.

As mayor, Ahmadinejad had set up a marriage fund, granting loans to young people who could not afford to wed. Bread-and-butter issues explained his appeal. He won in part on a variation of “It’s the economy, stupid.”

Third, Ahmadinejad beat two reformers because Iranians were exhausted by the political infighting and inertia. They were looking for a man of action. “People were tired of the political bickering. Iran was consumed every day with arrests, closures, and infighting. It led to a stalemate,” Hadi Semati, the political analyst, told me.

“People thought conservatives weren’t going to allow the reformers to move on. And they were tired of the reformers’ inability to fulfill their promises,” he said. “So many people thought the conservatives might at least be able to do something economically.”

Many Iranians did not initially take Ahmandinejad seriously. Some saw him as a bit of a bumpkin. As mayor, he had banned billboard ads featuring Western celebrities, such as British soccer star David Beckham. He closed down cultural centers that had performed the works of Arthur Miller, Anton Chekhov, and Victor Hugo and converted them into religious education centers.

Tehran’s ever-frenzied grapevine speculated that he would segregate, by sex, all public elevators, parks, and even sidewalks. An Iranian friend recounted a joke that had Ahmadinejad standing in front of a mirror combing his hair and repeating, “OK, male lice to the left, female lice to the right.”

Cell phones are ubiquitous in Tehran, and the text-message crowd frantically exchanged new “Mahmoud” jokes, irreverently referring to the new president by his first name.

Iranians were generally as surprised as the outside world by how his presidency unfolded. Ahmadinejad quickly proved to be Khatami’s opposite. In contrast to the western-educated advisers and enlightened clerics who surrounded Khatami, Ahmadinejad brought in colleagues from the Revolutionary Guards and the Basij. His spiritual mentor, Ayatollah Mohammed Mesbah-Yazdi, was often referred to as Ayatollah Crocodile for both his prickly positions, sometimes to the right of the supreme leader, and his long bulbous nose. “Beware! Don’t let them fool you,” Mesbah-Yazdi once said at Friday prayers. “In legislation, Islam and democracy cannot in any way be reconciled.”
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Amadinejad began to sweep the nation back in time.

In the first year alone, he purged professors by forcing early retirements, then called on students to report professors with liberal or secular tendencies. He named a cleric to head Tehran University, replacing an academic normally elected by the faculties. He ordered the confiscation of satellite dishes that brought in news and entertainment from the outside world. He banned Western music, including the classics, from radio and television. The sound tracks, without words, of the Eagles’ hit “Hotel California” and Eric Clapton’s “Rush” had often been used as background music on Iranian news.
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The new president changed the face of the Islamic republic, both at home and abroad. He brought home dozens of Iran’s most experienced diplomats. He banned the Center for Protecting Human Rights, led by Nobel Peace Prize laureate Shirin Ebadi. And he closed the last reformist newspaper and three magazines.

Even as he launched his own blog, the government clamped down on others. After Israel, Iran has spawned the largest number of Web sites in the Middle East. Iranians love technology. Several ayatollahs have their own sites, on which they issue fatwas in answer to followers’ questions. I once interviewed a senior cleric in the dusty religious city of Qom who had made his life’s work putting all the writings of Islam, Christianity, and Judaism through the ages, and in several languages, on a single website. More than 140,000 Iranian Web sites sprang up between 2001 and 2005. Khatami’s vice president was one of the early bloggers and encouraged others to engage.

Ahmadinejad instead shut down chat rooms, sites on local politics or international affairs, and anything that even hinted of sexual content. Dozens of bloggers were detained, some on charges of subversion. Thousands of foreign Web sites were also blocked by state-controlled servers.

Some of his most striking reversals were economic. With oil revenues at an all-time high, he crisscrossed the country pledging wider distribution of Iran’s petro-wealth—sometimes to the horror of the ayatollahs and the Central Bank back in Tehran.

“National resources must be freed from the state and given to people to use them for the advancement of the country,” he explained shortly after his election. “There must be justice and equal opportunities for all.”
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The response was tumultuous. He promised low-interest housing loans—and ended up with two million applications. At each stop, he collected thousands of letters from the poor with their stories and pleas for help. A large staff in Tehran went through the missives and referred them to government ministries for action.

“I love you, too,” he would often shout back over a crowd’s cheering.
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Ahmadinejad’s decisions often reflected naïveté and inexperience. The most glaring example centered on Iran’s swelling population.

Shortly after the revolution, the clerics had called on Iranian women to breed an Islamic generation. They quickly complied. Iran had thirty-four million people when the monarchy ended in 1979: Over the next seven years, the population soared to over fifty million. By 1986, Iran’s population growth rate hit 3.2 percent per year, among the world’s highest. The average Iranian woman was bearing around seven children.

“We’d just had a revolution that faced threats from both internal and external enemies,” Ayatollah Nasser Makaram-Shirazi told
The New York Times.
“We wanted to increase the number of people who believed in the revolution in order to preserve it.”
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But the ruling clerics soon realized that—whatever their belief in God’s will—the state did not have the resources to provide food, education, housing, or employment for the population at the rate it was growing. And the surging numbers would take generations to slow and come under any control.

So in 1989, the year the Imam died, the regime had an economic epiphany: To sustain the revolution, Iran itself had to survive—and that meant keeping a modern state afloat. The needs of the state and the hard realities of earthly existence suddenly superseded the dictates of Islam or the traditional practices of Muslims.

The turnaround was stunning. After years of banning it, the clerics suddenly put family planning high on the national agenda. All forms of birth control—from condoms and the pill to Norplant—were distributed free. The new supreme leader issued a
fatwa
legalizing vasectomies for men, and free clinics were opened to perform them. A big water tower near a Tehran clinic was painted with a sign, in Farsi and English, advertising its location. Billboards went up along Tehran boulevards proclaiming,
DAUGHTERS OR SONS, TWO CHILDREN ARE ENOUGH
.”

Clerics countrywide pressed the message. During Iran’s annual Population Week, tied in to the United Nations Population Day in July, mosques and centers of religious study all over Iran focused on the importance of small families—and how to keep them that way. More than 30,000 women were recruited to go door-to-door to educate poor and illiterate women on family-planning choices.