Tehran or Bust

The highlight of the drive from Isfahan to Qum, at least for someone from the West, has to be the Natanz nuclear-enrichment facility, located outside a once unremarkable town and conveniently right alongside the highway. It is easy to miss, but few drivers resist the temptation to point it out, especially to foreigners. What is visible in the distance are a number of buildings, which can also be seen on Google Earth, but it is up to one's imagination to picture the now thousands of centrifuges spinning tens or hundreds of meters below ground, depending on whom one believes. Stopping by the side of the road will invite a swift response by the Revolutionary Guards. Still, the facility's presence right there for all to see on one of the more heavily traveled highways in Iran naturally raises the question of whether Iran's nuclear program has been worth the cost. The answer is yes, according to the vast majority of Iranians, even though some may disagree with their government on almost any other matter.

Ever since Iran's enrichment program was revealed, the government has done a much better job of justifying it to its own people than to the outside world. Iranians know well that before the Islamic revolution, their country suffered at the hands of the great powers—Great Britain, Russia and the United States—whether through cripplingly one-sided tobacco and oil concessions, land grabs or outright regime change. Framing the nuclear issue as one of the rights, or haq, of the Iranian people that the same powers now want to deny them was a brilliant move. It ensured support for the government's insistence on taking full advantage of every right afforded it under the Nuclear Non--Proliferation Treaty, whether absolutely necessary or not. The United States has questioned Iran's need to make its own fuel for reactors not yet built. But to Iranians, the idea that their nation should be dependent on outside sources for fuel when the reactors finally are built is anathema. If President Obama would like to liberate America from dependence on foreign oil suppliers, many Iranians argue, then why should Iran be forced to depend on foreign sources for its energy?

That doesn't mean every Iranian agrees with the Ahmadinejad style of negotiating the nuclear issue, in which he's conflated defending Iran's rights with denying the Holocaust and Israel's right to exist. But Iranians do agree with the fundamental principle, one that the more genteel Khatami government also adhered to—i.e., that Iran will not give up its haq simply because greater powers say it should.

My driver on the road to Qum—an off-duty Isfahan policeman who much to my alarm could barely keep his eyes open at the beginning of our journey, thankfully due to a sleepless night of crimefighting rather than a heavy dose of morning opium—was no exception. I wondered, given that he admitted he couldn't make ends meet on his policeman's salary of $300 a month and was forced to drive a car two or three days a week, whether he might still be as enamored of President Ahmadinejad as he was when he voted for him four years ago. "He's done many good things," he said to me, "and he works really hard for the people." Patrolman Ali was unconcerned with Israel, and granted that better relations with the United States could improve the deteriorating economic situation in the country. But he felt that he should leave the big political issues to the experts, for he had only a high-school diploma. That Iranian scientists have mastered enrichment technology at Natanz is not only a source of pride for Isfahani policemen, but also for almost all Iranians, who place a premium on scientific study and who rigorously apply an honorific—"Mohandes"—to anyone who has a degree in engineering.

Qum, Iran's religious capital, holds a special place in the hearts of the pious, though my driver was not starry-eyed about its virtues. "Blessed as this place is," he said as we entered the city, "it is cursed by its hot weather and salty water. God gives and he takes." I mentioned that the birthplace of Islam in Arabia was also no paradise in terms of ab o' hava ("water and weather," a favorite expression and obsession of -Iranians), and although the thought hadn't occurred to a native of Shiraz who lived in Isfahan, two cities known for good ab o' hava, it only confirmed to him that Allah works in mysterious ways.

Qum is home to a major pilgrimage site—the grave of Fatemeh, sister of Imam Reza—and its dozens of seminaries are the foundation of the clerical establishment at the heart of the Islamic Republic. But five minutes outside town lies another mosque, at Jamkaran, the site of a vision of the hidden Twelfth Imam, who went into occultation 11 centuries ago. For years Jamkaran was an obscure site, apart from the Qum orthodoxy, but since Ahmadinejad came to power and started talking about the return of the Mahdi, or messiah, it has grown into what can only be described as a megamosque, and one that dwarfs the megachurches of California or Texas. On Tuesdays (the day the Mahdi allegedly appeared at the site) and on Fridays hundreds of thousands of pilgrims show up, on foot, by car and by coach, to pray, picnic and to drop a handwritten note into a well (actually two wells, gender-segregated but close) where some believe the Mahdi will read them and perhaps grant the wishes of the petitioners. I had visited three years ago on a Tuesday evening, in time for the dusk prayer and in the company of an overflowing crowd of what seemed like millions. But on this trip my car pulled into the new parking area on a Sunday afternoon, a normal workday in Islamic countries. I was struck by the scale of the construction: hundreds of thousands of square feet of new covered space surrounded the main mosque, and new minarets on the edges of the grounds could be seen from miles away.