The Ayatollah Begs to Differ (2 page)

When I, along with countless Iranians at home and abroad, voted in the yes-or-no ballot following the Shah’s downfall, we overwhelmingly chose an Islamic Republic. Islam had won the revolution; even the traditional and secular left-wing opponents of the Shah’s regime had recognized that without Islam, without
“Allah-hu-Akbar!,”
the revolution would not have been possible. Iranians still very much believed that to the victor go the spoils, and the mosques (and Khomeini in particular) were the victors in a battle that almost all Iranians were involved in. Iran was an Islamic country, a
Shia
country, and now, because the very concept of the Islamic Republic was a purely Iranian and Shia one, for the first time in hundreds, if not thousands, of years, Iranians were defining their own political system and, more important, their own destiny.

This memory rang in my head when I was in Tehran in the days after Ahmadinejad’s election in 2005 and as I tried to understand how he had become president.
Everyone
openly talked about politics, and I understood from the many unlikely people who had voted for him, along with the millions that make up Iran’s underclass, that he had successfully expressed the hope, a hope that had withered over the years, that the revolution was for
Iran
, for all Iranians, and its glittering promise still held. Ahmadinejad has also always understood that his message, a message of independence from East and West, plays well not only to his Iranian audience, who overwhelmingly support his uncompromising stance on the nuclear issue (if not his style), but to a wider audience across the Third World that sees in the Islamic Republic a successful example of throwing off the yoke of colonialism and imperialism.

I spoke to Fuad almost two years into Ahmadinejad’s presidency, and he again surprised me with his comments. Despite Ahmadinejad’s anti-Semitic remarks, which like many Iranian Jews he just didn’t take as seriously as we did—or as he probably should have—Fuad understood him and, yes, in some ways even admired him.
Admired?
It was simple for Fuad: he told me that if Ahmadinejad was sincere in what he desired for Iran, and until then there had been no reason for Fuad to disbelieve him, then as a patriotic Iranian he found it hard to argue with many of his ideas and policies. I’ve heard the very same thing from other Iranians in exile, even among intellectuals, and it brought to mind early opinion on Khomeini.

I have spent the decades before and since the Islamic Revolution living in America. The son of an Iranian diplomat, I grew up in different parts of the world, attending kindergarten in London and San Francisco and grade schools at American schools, populated by the children of American diplomats, expatriates, and businessmen, in various other countries. As a teenager, I was deposited in boarding school in England, where I finished my secondary education before rushing back to America for college. I had, needless to say, a somewhat confused identity as a child and teenager who more often than not thought of himself as more American than anything else, although by the time I reached drinking age (which was eighteen at the time), I had made the decision to live and work in Iran. The revolution that arrived unexpectedly a few years later nixed my plans, mostly because I felt that with my father’s background (he had been an ambassador of the Shah’s regime) I would be rather unwelcome in Tehran, but also because I felt, with both regret and a little admiration, that Iran no longer had much use for my very American worldview.

But in the early days of the Islamic Republic, it was hardly clear that the new political system would survive very long, and Iranian exiles, like the Parisian Russians of the 1920s, promoted the notion that their stay abroad was a temporary one. I watched events unfold in Iran from afar, uncertain of what might happen in the nascent republic and whether I would ever be able to go back, and then the hostage crisis happened—hardly a time for a Westernized Iranian who was already in the West, watching fellow Iranians stream out of Iran by the thousands, to think about setting up shop in the old country. The hostage crisis played out long enough, with Iran’s revolutionaries seemingly not only victorious in humiliating the great superpower but also determined to disengage from the West and Western ideas, that many exiles somberly calculated that they would not outlive the Islamic Republic (though some, particularly those who show up, Chalabi-like, on Capitol Hill from time to time, still cling to the hope). I had by this time started to settle down to an adult life in the United States, and as the years passed, any fantasy ideas of starting from scratch in Iran, an Iran that by the end of the 1980s had suffered a horrific eight-year war and that I, as an able-bodied young man and unlike my patriotic contemporaries, had played no part in, were inconceivable.

A friend once told me that I was the only person he knew who was both 100 percent American and 100 percent Iranian. Oxymoronic as that sounds, I knew what he meant. I was raised and educated completely in the West, but am the grandson of a well-respected
Alemeh
(learned) and Ayatollah; my first language is English, but I am also fluent in Farsi and am told that I speak it without an identifying accent. But more important, my Western outlook on life doesn’t interfere with my complete ease in the company of even the most radical of Iranian political or religious figures (and often theirs with me), and in my travels to Iran I have often thought that there must be a toggle switch somewhere along the electrical system in my brain that is magically triggered to “East” when my plane crosses into Iranian airspace. I live in New York—where the switch is unconsciously set to “West”—and in 2006, in front of my apartment building in lower Manhattan across from City Hall Park and one block from the World Trade Center site, an Egyptian food cart vendor of kebabs had been selling halal (unbeknownst to the majority of his customers) grilled meat for lunch for quite some time. I would often say hello to him on my way out, and one day I stopped and asked where he was from, and he asked where I was from. When I said Iran, his first response was
“A-salaam-u-aleikum!”
and then he proceeded to tell me that for the last three or four months he “had started to really love Iran.” Why? I wondered. And why only in the last three or four months? Because, he told me, “Iran is the only country standing up for Muslims.”

This immigrant is no radical: from my conversations with him I discovered that he believes in America, at least the America of his dreams; it’s an America he’ll one day make enough money in to bring his family to and an America where he, and his children, will have opportunities denied them in his native Egypt. An America where he can say what he wants, and do what he wants, even though he believes his religion (and he’s deeply religious) is under attack in some quarters. “I really like that man,” he told me that same day, referring to President Ahmadinejad, enemy of America in the day’s newspapers, and if our government was to be believed. But Ahmadinejad spoke to him in a language he understood—a simple language stripped of any elitism—and his message reverberated around the Islamic world, even if that world was in Queens, New York, where the vendor retired every night to a small shared apartment. It was a message of hope for many Muslims from the Third World, hope that they could guide their own destiny wherever they were. The Holocaust, incidentally, has always held little meaning to most of these Muslims who grew up with neither the benefit of a history lesson on it nor a sense of collective guilt. But of course Israel, to them the product of a war among Christians,
does
hold great meaning. And men like Ahmadinejad know it. But what Ahmadinejad knew better from the start of his presidency than many other Middle Eastern politicians was that the promise of his beloved Islamic Revolution, in the wake of war, corrupt leadership in the region, and declining American prestige, could hold sway even over men like the Sunni Egyptian kebab vendor in lower Manhattan.

In late August 2006, a week after the cease-fire in Lebanon, and a week after President Bush simply declared Israel’s victory over Hezbollah without a hint of irony, I happened to mention Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah during a brief conversation with the vendor, who had asked me a probing question about Shiism (presuming that I, to him a good Muslim—a notion I did not disabuse him of—would know). It was probably the first time in his life he had wondered about a sect that some Sunnis consider heretical, and when I mentioned Nasrallah, he held his hand up, signaling me to stop. I paused as he brought his hand to his chest. “When you mention his name,” he said, “I get emotional, I feel tears coming; I’m sorry.” I looked at him, somewhat surprised to see that his eyes were already moist. He then turned to sell a Snapple to a woman with a worried, no, nervous, look on her face, and then turned back to me and wiped his eyes with his fingers. “He is
something!
” he said. A Sunni man in tears of love and joy over a Shia cleric, a cleric whose power is a product of Iranian nurturing, had been, I thought, an impossibility until that day.

If we cannot understand the depth of feeling in the Muslim world toward Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood, and Islam as a political force, then we will be doomed to failure in every encounter we have with that world. True, the secular and intellectual classes we most come into contact with from that world are much like us, and often they would like us to believe that their countrymen would like to be too, but they make up a small percentage of the Muslim population on the planet and spend as little time with those who are in the majority of their countries as we do. But Iran and its Islamic society (or even Islamic democracy) are the adversarial powers we have to face in the coming years, and to understand Iran, we have to understand Iranians. Who are the Iranians? What is the Iranian mind-set, and, perhaps more important, what moves it? And what happened to Iranians like Fuad, including some thirty thousand other Iranian Jews who, unlike him, stayed in Iran and now make up its middle and intellectual classes?

Whether in exile abroad or inside Iran, Iranians rarely seem to behave the way we expect them to, and Iranian diplomacy and foreign policy have in recent years run circles around their Western counterparts. Iran is at the center of the United States’, if not the world’s, attention today, partly because of its nuclear program and the Bush administration’s labeling of it as an enemy (and part of the “axis of evil”) and partly because Iran’s power and influence, in the wake of the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Lebanon, have grown exponentially just as U.S. power and influence seem to be on the wane. It is important to understand Iran and Iranians, because American and Western conflict with Iran, armed or otherwise, is unlikely to abate in the next few years, and Iran will have the ability, as it surely does now, to directly affect all Americans through its vast oil reserves as well as its ability to stall, as it has now, American vital interests in a strategically vital region.