Religion Versus Reality

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.

With Ladane Nasseri in Tehran and Alan Isenberg in New York

© 2005