The Ayatollah Begs to Differ Read Online Free Page B

or society, in any one book. There are, of course, Iranians in every socioeconomic class, and then there are the Iranians whom we most come into contact with, the ones who live in the West, many of whom have adopted Western culture while maintaining, to one degree or another, their own in the privacy of their homes, but who are not a relevant part of this story. The Iranians one encounters in this book come from all walks of life inside Iran (although I have chosen to feature stories that reveal something about the character of the Iranian people today without concern for their background), and I try to show how even the senior political and religious figures we meet are representative—perhaps far more so than in countries that have had a longer time to establish an entrenched political elite—of who the Iranian people are.
    While American (and some European) politicians may often come from ordinary backgrounds, their lifestyles usually change dramatically when they are in office, and by the time they have reached the pinnacle of power, they are long removed from their more humble roots. Iranian leaders in the Islamic Republic, however, clerical or lay, continue to live their lives almost exactly as they always have, living in modest houses in their own neighborhoods surrounded by their social peers, driving nondescript cars, and maintaining their social networks. There is no presidential palace, no equivalent of the White House, in Tehran, and despite the wealth of the Islamic Republic, no fleet of limousines, or even the level of security one would assume, for Iran’s leadership. The presidential automobile is a Peugeot (albeit armored), and President Ahmadinejad lives in the same house he always has in a lower-middle-class neighborhood, while his predecessor, Mohammad Khatami, lives in a small villa, nice but not especially so, in North Tehran. It was Khatami who remarked to me, on a trip to the United States after his presidency, with genuine surprise and not a little admiration, that the security offered him by the State Department (as well as the limousines and SUVs) as an ex–head of state was far more comprehensive (and luxurious) than anything he had had as president in Iran. He also remarked how very much it resulted in his trip occurring inside a “bubble.”

    Iranians are known to have a public face and a private face, a public life and a private life. For millennia Iranians have built tall walls around their houses to keep the private and public separate; one reason for the endurance of the Islamic system of government, despite its restrictions on public behavior, is that it has understood that the walls, literal and figurative, and even movable, as they often are, mustn’t be breached. The Shah by contrast, with his insistence on peering over the walls, was doomed to fall.
    Sure, we may have heard of bacchanalian parties, of alcohol and drug consumption, even of expressions of extreme dissatisfaction with the regime behind those walls, wherever their borders may extend to, but how do we peer inside the Iranian soul? What is it about Iran that gave us Omar Khayyám and Rumi centuries ago, and gives us Ahmadinejad and the mullahs (but also Kiarostami, the celebrated filmmaker) today? One constant throughout most of Iran’s history, certainly in Islamic times, is that Iranians, the mullahs included, are great lovers of poetry: it is the literary expression best suited to the Shia martyr complex and the very Persian allegorical way of looking at an unexplainable world. It is said that Ayatollah Rafsanjani, a former president and still very powerful figure, once said to a foreign visitor, “If you want to know us, become a Shia first.” While Rafsanjani made a very good point, almost poetically so, he could have just as well told his visitor to read and understand Persian poetry, but of course the two, Shiism and Persian poetry, are not mutually exclusive. Virtually everyone in Iran, from the lowliest