Religion Versus Reality

After Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was elected president of Iran, he played a Persian version of the American actor Jimmy Stewart in the 1939 movie "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington." Like that Hollywood hick, he presented himself as anything but a slick political insider. Instead, he was the well-meaning idealist who mistrusted the ruling establishment and just wanted to do good for the country's neglected common folk. There was some truth to the pose. After all, he ran on a populist economic platform and beat former president Hashemi Rafsanjani--hugely wealthy and purportedly very corrupt.

But that common-man act is already wearing thin. Ahmadinejad's inflammatory rhetoric--"Israel should be wiped off the map"--has alarmed Western diplomats. It has also worried Iranians, who in growing numbers have come to suspect that their new president is an ideological and religious zealot bent on casting the country back onto a revolutionary Islamic track. Eerie stories about Ahmadinejad's mystical obsessions have been drifting out of Tehran of late, specifically his devotion to the so-called 12th imam--the Shiite messiah, better known as the Mahdi, who's supposed to return and lead an apocalyptic revolution of the oppressed over vague forces of injustice.

By some accounts, the new president's first deputy, Parvis Davoudi, recently asked cabinet members during a formal meeting to pledge their allegiance to the Mahdi in a signed letter. And when Ahmadinejad was Tehran's mayor, he reportedly refurbished a major boulevard on grounds that the Mahdi was to travel along it upon his return. Last week, a videodisc began circulating that reportedly shows the president chatting with one of the country's leading clerics, Ayatollah Javadi Amoli. Referring to his September speech to the United Nations, during which he called for the return of the 12th imam, the Iranian president confides that he felt himself surrounded by a radiant light. Not one foreign diplomat blinked during his speech, he adds. All this has caused a major stir, prompting some critics to wonder if Ahmadinejad has come to fancy himself as the 12th imam's representative on Earth--a dangerous notion for a man with a Ph.D. in traffic management.

Iran may be a nasty theocracy, but it's no monolithic evil empire. Indeed, the country's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said before last June's election that "the existence of two factions [conservative and reformist] serves the regime, like the two wings of a bird." But Ahmadinejad's messianic message has shaken the boughs of the establishment and created turmoil within the conservative leadership at a time when Iran is involved in crucial international negotiations over its nuclear program. Khamenei is said to have thrown his support behind Ahmadinejad just two days before the election last June, supposedly at the urging of his son, Mojtaba. But some experts now believe Khamenei regrets his decision and fears Ahmadinejad more than he did the previous president, Mohammad Khatami, who though a reformist at least supported the status quo.

Clearly, the new president does not--and that makes the country's traditional and very conservative clerical leaders uneasy, partly because they've exploited the current system for personal gain. "The new government is neoconservative and quite hard-line, and that doesn't even do justice to how wacky they are," says Ali Ansari, an associate professor of modern history at St. Andrews University in Scotland. As for Ahmadinejad himself, Ansari describes him as "very naive politically and out of his depth."

It's not clear if Ahmadinejad poses a serious threat to Khamenei's authority, but the new president certainly aims to install a more rigid Islamic government. He's been sweeping away moderates and, in many cases, replacing them with incompetent, ideological cronies. On November 16, at a congress on Friday prayers, he again struck his mystical theme. "We should define our economic, cultural and political policies based on Imam Mahdi's return," he declared. "We should avoid copying the West." Ahmadinejad has sacked 40 of Iran's most experienced foreign diplomats, seven state bank directors and numerous other public officials. He's thrice nominated individuals for the position of Oil minister whose qualifications for the job were light or nonexistent. All have been rejected by Parliament.

The new president's chief spiritual adviser is the extremist Ayatollah Mohammad Taqi Mesbah-Yazdi, dubbed "the Crocodile" by critics for his less-than-attractive facial features and aggressive views. He's a member of the Assembly of Experts, which chooses the supreme leader, and heads the Imam Khomeini Research and Learning Center in Qum, an Islamic seminary to which members of the Basij volunteer militia (street thugs who serve as de facto morality police) are sent for indoctrination. Elements of Iran's Revolutionary Guards are said to revere him. Ahmadinejad meets regularly with the cleric. No friend of democracy, according to Vali Nasr at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, Mesbah-Yazdi said recently that with a true Islamic government at hand, Iran has no need for future elections.

Mesbah-Yazdi's relationship with Khamenei is complicated and intriguing. He enjoys the supreme leader's respect, while he himself views the latter's lack of theological grounding with something approaching condescension. (Khamenei was not an ayatollah when elected to his paramount position.) Not content with their current level of influence, according to Stanford professor Abbas Milani, Ahmadinejad and Mesbah-Yazdi may even band together and "try to organize a majority in the Assembly of Experts to remove Khamenei--and elevate Mesbah-Yazdi to supreme leader."

That seems unlikely, if only because Khamenei still commands the loyalty of the Revolutionary Guards. Ahmadinejad is not a budding Stalin, many experts suggest, but merely a grossly inexperienced, unpolished political tyro. Says Hamid Reza Jalaipour, a political analyst and professor at Tehran University: "The question is, can his reliance on Imam Mahdi be turned into a political ideology? I don't think so. Even the leading theologians in Qum do not take these allusions seriously."

Parliament doesn't either, apparently. Already it has dismantled the centerpiece of Ahmadinejad's populist program--the Imam Reza Care Fund, better known as the "Love Fund," intended to provide interest-free wedding loans for young people as well as to offer make-work employment programs. Meanwhile, Khamenei may now be working behind the scenes to bolster Rafsanjani at Ahmadinejad's expense. The presidential also-ran currently heads the Expediency Council, which mediates disputes between the Parliament and the top leadership--and just recently Khamenei delegated much of his supervisory authority over state policy to the body. Rafsanjani himself has excoriated the president (albeit without naming names) for his diplomatic purge, among other things, arguing that the moves will only deepen Iran's international isolation and economic problems.

The president will fight back, no doubt. But much depends on his ability to spread out Iran's burgeoning oil wealth. "If he manages to fulfill the economic promises he made to the deprived part of the population, his power will increase," says Jalaipour. If not, those same voters may turn from him, possibly encouraged by the traditional clerics whom he risks alienating. With the country's reformers and more-educated young people already against him, Ahmadinejad's base could erode surprisingly quickly. "There's tension between those who want Iran to be a medieval theocracy, like Ahmadinejad, and the pragmatists," says Milani. "The medieval side is getting its chance--but it will surely fail." As with Mr. Smith, who went to Washington and flunked, time seems not to be on the side of the man with the Mahdi complex.