Fighting for Moderation

Kasra Noori is a worried man. The 38-year-old Iranian journalist is anxious about what will happen to his country after next week's parliamentary elections. But he also has more personal concerns. With military and judicial hardliners shutting down reformist newspapers on charges ranging from promoting decadence to endangering national security, Noori has lost eight jobs in the last 10 years. Now he frets over how he can provide for his wife and three-year-old daughter. "I've been seriously looking for an alternative source of income," says Noori. "You simply can't make a living as a journalist in Iran."

Noori hoped that politics might offer one of those alternatives. "I thought in a hardliners-dominated parliament we should have a strong reformist contingent in order to express people's concerns about [Iranian President Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad's disastrous economic and international policies," Noori says. But when he tried to register last year as a moderate candidate for the March 14 ballot, he found his path blocked by the Council of Guardians of the Revolution. The conservative group of clerics and lawyers, which supervises Iran's elections, was on a mission to exclude almost any reformist who dared to register as a candidate.

A few days after Noori submitted his name, the inspectors from Council of Guardians' Supervision Committees started asking about him around his neighborhood. "They went to my local grocer and asked him about my personal life," says Noori. "They asked him questions like if I look at women lustfully, if I go to the local mosque to pray, if my wife dresses modestly, what I buy from the grocer. Questions that had nothing to do with my qualifications as a candidate." Still, Noori considers himself relatively fortunate that the questions were so mild. In some cases the inspectors have asked candidates if they have had illegitimate relationships with women and whether they were addicted to drugs. There are no reports that conservative candidates have come under similar scrutiny. Indeed, in some cases the inspectors are conservative candidates themselves.

Like most disqualified moderates, Noori was expelled on three main charges: lack of real commitment to the teachings of Islam; lack of belief in velayate faghih, Iran's system of governance, in which a religious scholar is the supreme leader of the country; and "notoriety," a catchall phrase that is essentially meaningless. A devout Muslim from a religious family in Tehran, Noori objected to all charges. "As far as I know I'm a good Muslim, and it seems that I'm also enjoying a relatively good reputation in public," he says. Noori challenged the claims and was finally cleared of being "notorious," but he was still disqualified on the basis of the first two charges.

Many moderates see the conservatives' pre-election witch hunt as tantamount to a military coup. According to reformist activists, the Revolutionary Guard forcibly mobilized its members, including the paramilitary youth group Basij, to vote for Ahmadinejad in the 2005 presidential election. They fear similar tactics in this upcoming poll as well. "The Guards are the main supporters of the hardliners," says Saeid Shariati, the spokesman for the largest reformist party, the Participation Front. "The Council of Guardians as a group didn't qualify and disqualify the candidates. It was a group of five or six Guards, military and intelligence commanders, who decided the filtering of the candidates."

Undeniably, Iran's high inflation and unemployment rates have cost Ahmadinejad some support among his conservative backers. Still, he has retained some genuine grass-roots backing. Take Masoomeh Ramezani, a single mother of five in Lalain, a village three hours south of capital. She lives in a different world from intellectuals and journalists like Kasra Noori. Widowed when her children were young, she supported her family by working as a cleaner in the nearby town of Saveh. Last year, after Ahmadinejad passed a new law increasing payouts for single mothers, Ramezani received the equivalent of a $9,000 loan. "God bless Mr. Ahmadinejad. May he live a hundred years," says Ramezani with tears in her eyes. "He rescued me. The other people in Tehran only talk and talk, but they don't care about us poor people in the villages. But Mr. Ahmadinejad, may God protect him, works for us." Who is she going to vote for in the parliamentary elections? "Whoever supports Mr. Ahmadinejad."