MAHMOUD AHMADINEJAD: THE REBEL WHO STRIKES A CHORD WITH IRANIANS
Topic(s): Iran | Comments Off on MAHMOUD AHMADINEJAD: THE REBEL WHO STRIKES A CHORD WITH IRANIANSMAHMOUD AHMADINEJAD: THE REBEL WHO STRIKES A CHORD WITH IRANIANS
By Iason Athanasiadis
Newhouse News Service
June 8, 2006
TEHRAN, Iran — It is 1977 in the Iranian city of Shiraz. Four young
men arrange themselves by height and lean on a wall to pose for a
photo. Two of them sport American-style T-shirts and three are wearing
flared jeans — the uniform of the ’70s fashion-conscious. But the
shortest man sticks out for his lack of style and conformity. Wearing a
nondescript shirt tucked into his trousers, the man who is now Iran’s
president cuts a plain figure in one of the earliest photos of him
to enter the public domain.
“We headed down to Shiraz and Esfahan for six days in my car,”
recalls Hassan Beheshti, a childhood friend of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad
who has stayed in touch with the president. “We went to the cinema,
watched films, had a good time.”
The sequence of 10 photographs — obtained during recent interviews
with the president’s friends — is well-thumbed and suffering from
light-corruption around the edges. But the scuffed shoes, ordinary
brown jacket and conservatively parted hair on the young, beardless
Ahmadinejad reveal a young man as obstinately dowdy and ordinary as
he remains today, 10 months into his term as president.
“He was religious at that time, more religious than us,” adds Beheshti,
who went on to join a conservative militia after the 1979 Islamic
revolution but wore Levis and a flashy, imported leather jacket in some
of the photos. “We used to bet on the football (soccer) but Ahmadinejad
wouldn’t. Even as of then, he was faithful to his religion.”
Now the slight, out-of-place man in the old photos finds himself on
the world stage, playing a game of chicken with U.S. Secretary of
State Condoleezza Rice over demands that Tehran cease its uranium
enrichment activities.
To Middle East watchers — not to mention the other men in the old
photos — the verbal volleys Ahmadinejad has been firing are hardly
surprising.
In the span of a year, Ahmadinejad has delivered a combative address to
the United Nations General Assembly, questioned what really happened
during the Holocaust and demanded an end to Zionism. His outspoken
nature and inflammatory claims have resulted in Iran’s theocratic
elite banning him from making foreign policy pronouncements.
At the same time, though, he is developing a reputation as a man of
the people, an Islamic iconoclast and someone unafraid to defy the
West, the Iranian mullahocracy or well-off constituents who sneer at
his ordinary-Joe appearance.
Childhood friends say Ahmadinejad, a blacksmith’s son they remember
as a talented athlete and straight-A student, is largely unchanged
from the boy who grew up in the streets of Narmak, an unremarkable,
solidly middle-class neighborhood in East Tehran.
“Mahmoud has not changed much in the 30 years I’ve known him,” says
Saeed Hadian, a friend of the president who was along on the trip to
Shiraz. “He’s almost the same Mahmoud.”
Friends say the obstinate streak Ahmadinejad has shown while defending
his country’s right to develop nuclear technology was just as visible
at an early age. And Nasser Hadian, Saeed’s uncle and a man who went
to school with Ahmadinejad, says the president is numb to criticism.
“From the super-secular elite to the super-religious elites, they
have all turned against him. And he doesn’t care,” Hadian says. “He
says, `Let them come, let them vote against me, I have the support
of the people.”‘
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad: Which portrait do you believe?
To his critics and many in the Western media, Ahmadinejad is a neo-Nazi
anti-Semite desperate to develop a Shiite nuclear bomb to extinguish
Israel and pull his country up to superpower status.
In late May, it was reported Ahmadinejad was spearheading a bill to
force Christian and Jewish religious communities to wear distinct
clothes identifying them as “religiously unclean.” He also is
frequently misquoted when speaking about Israel, a fate he may have
earned with other correctly attributed comments. The mistakes have
been corrected, but not before spreading around the world.
To his devotees here and in much of the Muslim world — from Casablanca
to Cairo and farther east — Ahmadinejad is seen by many as the Muslim
leader who dares speak up to the West when other heads of state are
too beholden to do so.
As a grass-roots politician, Ahmadinejad also seems to have something
of a magic touch.
During the campaign last year, he appealed to Iran’s middle and lower
classes by divorcing himself from the glitter of other hopefuls.
Where two-time president Hashemi Rafsanjani rolled out party tents and
Western music in Tehran’s trendy northern suburbs and Mohsen Qalebaf
employed a slick advertising campaign, Ahmadinejad called himself a
“mar domyar” (man of the people) and the nation’s “little servant
and street-sweeper.”
In the process, he built on the capital he earned while transforming
and untangling problems in Tehran while its mayor.
Ahmadinejad the president has practiced what Ahmadinejad the candidate
preached.
He has visited the forgotten, poverty-wracked counties of provincial
Iran.
And in May, he confounded everyone by canceling a law that banned women
from sports stadiums. He was overruled by senior ayatollahs but reaped
great popularity among the crucial constituency of secular, liberal
Iranians who traditionally had opposed many of his other policies.
He has refused to receive dignitaries in the shah’s former palaces,
preferring to see visitors in his old offices in smog-choked downtown
Tehran. When he inherited the president’s office, he completed a
process of donating all the lavish Persian rugs that once decorated it
to Tehran’s carpet museum. And last year, he reportedly refused to fly
in a VIP jet, which cost $59 million and had been specially set aside.
His words and actions, experts say, are creating a new, populist idol
to fill a widening class void.
“Ahmadinejad is supported by a coterie of fervent supporters of the
original revolution who feel they have been cheated of their rightful
place in the Iranian power structure,” says William Beeman, an author
who has written about the U.S. and Iran.
These men are war veterans, devout in their faith, he said. “They
contrast themselves with the corrupt clerical establishment, whom they
believe have utterly abandoned the original revolutionary ideals —
especially regarding economic justice for the poor and middle classes.”
In a society torn between old and new, young and old, and East and
West, Ahmadinejad seems content to play the role of populist icon,
friends say.
Critics say his systematic purges of the foreign service, provincial
governorships and key economic posts — and his appointment of
mostly former Revolutionary Guard comrades to those offices — have
been meant to intentionally anger older clerics, erode their power
bases and appeal to the millions of citizens disillusioned by the
religious regimes.
The president recently buried his 89-year-old father. Within hours,
an unsubstantiated rumor was whipping around Tehran: Ahmadinejad
had fired the director of the hospital where his father had been
hospitalized for offering to waive the cost of treatment.
In a country where personal connections are everything, many of
the Tehranis who reminisce about former President Mohammad Khatami’s
fashion sense scoffed at Ahmadinejad’s “bi savad” (Farsi for clueless)
behavior. But the president’s friends say fairness always has been
a guiding principle.
They dwell on his “indefatigable habits of work” and “financial
incorruptibility.” As mayor of Tehran, they point out, he lived in
an unpretentious home in the same neighborhood where he grew up. And
he drove a Paykan, Iran’s second-least-expensive mass-produced car.
His sartorial style has remained unapologetically dour. As a testament
to his connection with his citizens, his signature gray jacket has
become a fashion statement here, with shopkeepers reporting record
sales of the $20 cotton garment and ordering more from China.
Sitting in a summer house in the al-Borz mountains behind Tehran, the
men in the old photos reminisce and share little pieces of information
they are comfortable divulging.
The say little is known about Ahmadinejad’s family. He met his wife
at university and married on campus. They raised two sons and a
daughter. The family is rarely seen in public.
Aside from their historical interest, friends say, the series of 10
photographs featuring a young Ahmadinejad disproves the accusation
that he was involved in the U.S. Embassy siege in 1979.
The young, beardless Ahmadinejad shown posing in Shiraz with his
friends in 1977, they say, bears little resemblance to the fully
bearded Islamic revolutionary depicted in the controversial picture
two years later.
The also point to the Iranian newspaper Shargh — hardly an Ahmadinejad
supporter — that identified the two men depicted in the picture as
Jafar Zaker and a man named Ranjaban. The former was killed in the
Iran-Iraq War and the latter executed for alleged connections to a
Marxist-Islamic opposition group, the newspaper said.
Western diplomats in Tehran agree that Ahmadinejad was not involved
in the Embassy siege, and his friends say his ideals and principles
would have prevented his involvement.
“He sees things in terms of justice and fairness,” says Hadian,
one of the friends in the old photos. “They’re much more important
than democracy and freedom. Political freedom in his mind is for the
elite to be able to say whatever they want and is very distanced and
abstract from what the ordinary people really need.”
(Iason Athanasiadis wrote this article for The Star-Ledger of Newark,
N.J. He can be contacted at iason@fastmail.fm.)