Tehran or Bust

On a warm Friday in late April, as I rode back from prayers at the Molla Esmail Mosque in the dusty central Iranian town of Yazd, my companion was a loaded Kalashnikov rifle. The weapon belonged to the man who had just led the Friday prayers, as he does every week: Hojjatoleslam Mohammad Sadoughi, a kindly 60-year-old cleric who normally uses a cane but leans on the rifle when he delivers sermons. Sadoughi is the official representative of the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Revolution for Yazd province. This means that, in addition to leading Friday prayers, he plays host to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei whenever the Iranian leader visits Yazd, where his mother's family is from. This afternoon I too would be a guest at Sadoughi's sumptuously restored historic home in the ancient city center. While I have spent most of my life in the West, Yazd is my hometown as well, and whenever I visit Iran I return there to see relatives, one of whom (through marriage) is Sadoughi's wife, Maryam. Mrs. Sadoughi is a highly educated and erudite woman who, notwithstanding her black chador and obvious Islamic piety, holds reformist—even liberal—political views and is a strong supporter of her brother, the former president of Iran, Mohammad Khatami. So too is her husband, owner of the Kalashnikov that lay next to me.

 

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The layers of contradiction that make up the modern Islamic Republic of Iran are both pervasive and confounding, and not any less so in Yazd. Set amid the blistering deserts of central Iran, the city is home to the kind of fierce religiosity bred in Islam's starker landscapes, and many of its sons were sacrificed to the bloody war with Iraq. Yet it is also a capital of pre-Islamic Persia, and is well known for its Zoroastrian temples and grave sites. (At one fire temple, priests continue to tend a flame that they claim has burned for more than 500 years.) It is the only city in the world that can boast two native sons, Khatami and Moshe Katsav, who simultaneously served as presidents of Iran and Israel. Even the mosque where Sadoughi leads prayers is named after a Jewish convert.

The sermon that Sadoughi had delivered that morning had been equally impossible to categorize. He defended the inflammatory speech that President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had delivered earlier that week at a United Nations conference on racism, chiding Western nations who "allegedly are … defenders of free speech" for walking out. But he also criticized the government, in this case for failing to ensure that Iranian pilgrims traveling to Iraq were adequately protected, a large number of them having been killed the day before in a suicide bombing near Baghdad. And he conceded that the United States had elected a new president who had promised to change its relationship with Iran. He declared that Iranians were waiting to witness real deeds from Washington, not mere rhetoric. But at the end of his 30--minute sermon, unlike past Friday prayers and prayers that same day in Tehran, there were no chants of "Death to America" or "Death to Israel," not even halfhearted ones. Later that night in his office he repeated, wistfully, the same sentiment—that words alone were not enough from the United States, not for Iranians, who are master rhetoricians, and who well understand the many uses to which they can be put.

Anyone reading a translation of Sadoughi's sermon would quite likely miss the sincerity of his appeal, the doors it carefully left open. After 30 years of enmity, the United States and Iran have almost entirely lost the capacity to interpret such subtle signals. Very few serving U.S. officials have met their Iranian counterparts, and almost none have ever visited Iran. Yet such expertise is more critical than ever, as the administration of President Barack Obama prepares to embark on what could be months of difficult negotiations aimed at halting Iran's nuclear-enrichment program.

After Obama videotaped a Persian New Year's message for the Iranian people, reiterating his offer of unconditional talks, most Western commentators interpreted Khamenei's lengthy and defiant response as a slap in the face. But what would have been most significant to any Iranian listening was a passage at the very end of the speech, when Khamenei said, "If you change, our behavior will also change." Iran's supreme authority had never before used the word "change" in such a context, for up until now the Islamic Republic's position has been that there is nothing objectionable about its behavior. If the Obama administration truly wants to forge a new relationship with Iran, it will have to learn to hear the things Iranians are saying to them, whether it be the Supreme Leader or the rifle-toting Sadoughi.

I had come to Yazd to begin a road journey north, to Tehran. The route is a well--traveled one; it starts all the way in the south at the ports on the Persian Gulf, crosses deserts, and runs past cities such as Isfahan and Qum before entering the capital, a megalopolis that is home to 20 percent of Iran's population. While that 20 percent is of great significance in terms of what Iran is and how Iranians think, we, and even Iranians themselves, often forget or neglect the other 80 percent. Only by getting out of the confines of Tehran can one fully appreciate all the different, contradictory worlds that constitute modern Iran.