The Ayatollah Begs to Differ (36 page)

And millions they were, at the mother of all rallies in a nation that has grown accustomed to the distraction of all too many government-sanctioned public gatherings. From early in the morning one could see men, women, and children marching along the streets of Tehran, miles from their destination, waving Iranian flags, and some holding banners, thoughtfully provided by the government, proclaiming their right to enjoy nuclear energy (in English, for the benefit of the foreign press and television cameras).

Ali Khatami, the former president’s brother, picked me up from my house in downtown Tehran early, and driving through alleys and streets not yet closed, past cars double-and triple-parked, we made our way to an area filled with buses about four or five kilometers from Azadi Square—Tehran’s Arc de Triomphe or Trafalgar Square—where the huge rally was to be held at midday. Ali himself triple-parked, careful to leave an exit route, and we walked the few blocks to Azadi Street, the main thoroughfare that had been lined with loudspeakers and was already filled with marchers who moved slowly toward the monument where President Ahmadinejad was to speak. The crowd on the sidewalk seemed to thicken rapidly, and walking soon slowed to a crawl. It was at a complete standstill by the time we reached the spot where former president Khatami stood outside a white SUV, surrounded by machine-gun-toting Revolutionary Guards, to say a few words to the crowd and the cameras. (By tradition, the Islamic Republic’s senior clerics and dignitaries do not join the president on the podium or even enter the main square, but make short appearances on the sidelines of the mass rally to show their support for the revolution without upstaging the administration in power. The Supreme Leader himself never makes an appearance at the rally, which is, after all, in some ways a celebration of his and his clerics’ authority.) And both Rafsanjani, who was elsewhere along the route, and Khatami could well have upstaged the beleaguered Ahmadinejad in 2007, whose very few posters were far outnumbered by those of the Ayatollahs Khomeini and Khamenei, who, more than any sitting president, represent the continuity of the Islamic Republic. As the crowd pressed in toward the beaming Khatami, he got into his car before his brother and I could say hello, and the crowd then rushed the vehicle, forcing it, with men standing on its roof, to maneuver with great difficulty onto a side street, crushing a few bodies, including mine, along the way. It disappeared to cries of “Khatami, Kahatami, we love you!” sung with both emotion and conviction, and if anyone had imagined that this was the national day for hard-liners and conservative supporters of the government only, the scene surrounding Khatami, a person some hard-liners had accused of wanting to dismantle the Islamic state, proved otherwise.

We caught our breath and continued along the sidewalk at a snail’s pace, hearing the by-now-standard chants of “Nuclear energy is our obvious right,” “Death to America,” “Death to Israel,” and “Death to the hypocrites” (MEK) every few minutes, and we were surrounded by many halfheartedly waving preprinted signs, in English, with a bright red check mark by “yes” for nuclear energy. The chants were shouted with some vigor and emotion but without anger, and lacked the conviction required of a literal interpretation. “Death to,” in a society where an exclamation of surprise is
“Khak-bar-saram”
—“May I be covered with dirt” (struck dead)—is rarely truly meant. We were still stuck on the sidewalk when the president started his speech, which was being broadcast along the route, and we were still a kilometer or so away from the square. The crowd could no longer move forward, even at a shuffle. Caught in a sea of people, I could do nothing but stand and listen to the president make his speech, moderate by his standards and evidence of sorts that the rumors that he’d been instructed to tone down the rhetoric were true. On the nuclear issue, he reiterated the long-standing Iranian position that the government desired negotiations and talks, but that uranium enrichment would not be suspended as a precondition. But he chose, rather than his belligerent and confrontational tone of the past, a more rational argument that questioned the logic of the U.S. position, which demanded Iran first do as it said before it would entertain any negotiations on the issue. “If we suspend enrichment,” Ahmadinejad asked softly and to great applause, “then what is there to talk about?”

The crowd where I was standing, far less interested in his speech than in the spectacle of celebration, suddenly started moving backward, then forward, as if we were a human battering ram trying to break down the gates to the city. Women started screaming for the men to stop shoving, some of them trying to protect crying children they held tightly from being trampled, but the crush went on. Forward at a pace that would have meant falling headfirst were it not for the sea of bodies, and then backward, sideways, and forward again, with no crowd control or any police presence to ensure a modicum of safety, we were being slowly crushed, but when the crowd decided to make an escape along a side street, I became truly worried. I could barely see Ali, a former president’s chief of staff who himself was bobbing up and down, struggling to break free, and I wondered if he now regretted his modesty in keeping a low profile while in office, a profile that meant he was unrecognizable, despite his resemblance to his brother, to the people in the crowd who were shoving him with as much verve as they were shoving everyone else.

The street the crowd had decided upon for escape was as packed with people as Azadi Street was, and that crowd was trying just as hard to get to where we were as
we
were trying to escape. The slightest panic, I thought, would have resulted in tragedy, but somehow the crowd on my side overwhelmed the side-street crowd, and like a great wave we crashed into them, scattering whoever was in our way. At this point there was no hope of making it onto the square, so I let myself be pushed and shoved down the street, and then, after I found a somewhat-battered Ali, we slowly made our way back to where he had parked, passing people who were heading to the square and still shouting revolutionary slogans. I was sorry that I had been unable to enter the main square, but less sorry than I would have been had I missed hearing the “nuclear symphony,” which unhappily never materialized.

For ten days the Islamic Revolution of 1979 had been replayed over and over on television, reminding Iranians who watched that for all their post-revolution worries the revolution itself, the once popular concept of a religious democracy, was alive and well. The claim by secular and uninterested Iranians, and echoed by ABC’s Diane Sawyer, who was in the crowd the day I was, that thousands of people had been bused in by the government from other cities to bolster the numbers for the festivities was belied by the fact that in every other city in Iran, even smaller towns, huge numbers also showed up to celebrate their revolution—the evidence clear from nonstop television reports throughout the day.

I asked people gathered by a group of old, rusty municipal buses parked at a roundabout, well away from Azadi Street, where they had come from to join the rally, and all said that they had been picked up at various points in the city. Ali Khatami, a former top official himself, explained that buses were indeed provided by the government, but more as a traffic-control issue, to ferry marchers to the square from predesignated points across the city, than anything else. At any rate, no one present had been forced to attend, not even schoolchildren or government employees, as evidenced by the full restaurants and cafés and busy sidewalks far away from the rally in the northern parts of the city that I retreated to after my bruising encounter with fervent supporters of the Islamic Revolution. But every year the 22nd of Bahman, the tenth day of the Ten-Day Dawn, affirms for many Iranians their faith in their nation and their revolution, if not in their president, and in their own peculiar form of democracy, a form of democracy that celebrates majority rule but increasingly, and despite occasional setbacks, allows the minority to quietly ignore the masses. By skiing, by drinking, or by partying, as I did that very night at a high-rise apartment building in a duplex penthouse, where on one level an opium den had been set up in the library for the older men and a poker table and bar in the dining room for the younger men and women, who played, drank, and never once mentioned the Ten-Day Dawn or the Ayatollahs whose revolution it celebrates, a revolution that (with apologies to Gil Scott-Heron) will
always
be televised.

Perhaps the booze-soaked furloughed political prisoner from Evin, the man who insisted to me that 80 percent of those born after the revolution had to be killed if there were to be another revolution, had a point, perverse as the way he made it might have been. For many of those in the majority of the population with no memory of a pre–Islamic Republic Iran, perhaps even 80 percent, those for whom patriotism means allegiance to the only republic they’ve ever known, the revolution wasn’t just a revolution: it was the birth of their
nation
. The rally at Azadi Square is never an ordinary rally, yet another tedious propaganda affair in a country where the government is given to propaganda; and if we fear the black turbans who rule Iran, then surely we must fear those who rally too.

If patriotism, and perhaps only the false patriotism that Samuel Johnson may have been referring to, is indeed the last refuge of a scoundrel, then Iran is not bereft of scoundrels at the highest levels of government. They have their followers, sometimes many, but they are hardly as fearsome as they would like to think they are. A few months after the Ten-Day Dawn, on Friday, May 25, 2007, an interim prayer leader of Tehran, the archconservative cleric Hojjatoleslam Ahmad Khatami (no relation to former president Mohammad Khatami), gave a speech to the thousands gathered at the University of Tehran for Friday prayers. On Fridays, the Tehran prayers are where Iran’s clerical leaders, in the social and political section of the sermon, outline their views. “Interim prayer leader,” and there are a few of them, denotes that the official prayer leader, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, is not present that day, and of course he rarely is. Ahmad Khatami was giving an official response to continued statements in the spring of 2007 by U.S. officials regarding the possibility of the United States using force to stop Iran’s nuclear program, and in particular a response to Vice President Dick Cheney, who had recently made an aggressive anti-Iran speech aboard an aircraft carrier in the Persian Gulf, right on Iran’s doorstep. Khatami’s speech was translated and covered, as it always is, by IRNA (the official state-run Islamic Republic News Agency) exactly as follows (and I’ve left the English uncorrected, reflecting the government’s persistently defiant use of incorrect English):

Khatami reminded the worshipers of US Vice President Dick Cheney’s comment aboard a US warship in Persian Gulf, where he said that the presence of US warships in the Persian Gulf convey a clear message to United States friends and foes, adding, “We would not permit Iran to get access to nuclear arms, and in order to achieve that goal, all options are on the table.”

According to Political Desk reporter of IRNA, Hojjatoleslam Khatami added, “We tell this notorious and extremely corrupt individual you have repeated such words so often that one feels like vomiting when one hears them uttered anew, so why don’t you try to say something new now?”

The interim Friday prayer leader of Tehran, addressing the US officials, added, “Just as you bully, uttering such nonsense, you should be aware that the Iranian nation, too, has all options on the table for punching the United States on the mouth.”

He reiterated, “It is truly befitting to tell these narrow minded wretched figures, ‘O little fly! The high peaks where eagles build nests are far above your flight altitude. You are just ruining your own reputation, yet, not really troubling us, either.’”

Friday preacher of Tehran this week added, “Thanks Allah, this nation is a weathered one, and you (Americans), too, are not competent for committing such mischief, because you have not forgotten having received severe blows on the mouth from this nation continually for eight straight years.”