Iran: Know Thine Enemy

By Bill Berkeley, Columbia Journalism Review. Posted September 14, 2006.

On a reporting trip to Iran in the spring of 2004, I visited the northeastern city of Mashhad. It's an important pilgrimage destination for Shiite Muslims, a sprawling, low-slung metropolis that fans out from a central plaza built around the gold-domed shrine of the Imam Reza. Imam Reza is believed to have hailed from the family of the prophet Mohammad. He was designated the eighth of the twelve sacred imams of the Shi'a faith, and is the only one buried in Iran. Hundreds of thousands of devout Shiites from across south Asia and the Arab world make pilgrimages to Mashhad each year to worship inside this splendid compound of aqua-tiled spires and arches, luminous chandeliers, and gushing fountains under two glittering domes.

My own experience of Mashhad was memorable for a different reason: it raised fresh doubts about the significance of religious orthodoxy in the Islamic Republic.

My driver in Mashhad was an amiable, bearded man named Ali, whose enviable ability to shirk traffic rules and park in no-parking zones was soon explained by his membership in the Basij militia, the hard-line paramilitary force that serves as one of the main coercive arms of the ruling mullahs. Like many Basiji, Ali, who is from a poor and devout family in the hinterland far from Tehran, had joined the Basij as a sixteen-year-old and gone off to fight in the Iran-Iraq war. The Basiji achieved notoriety in the war for their massive human-wave attacks and suicidal mine-sweeping operations, in which tens of thousands perished. Ali himself was wounded by shrapnel.

After eight years of brutal fighting and incessant clerical exhortations about the inevitable triumph of the armies of God, Iran's war with Iraq ended without achieving any of its declared objectives. For many veterans like Ali, there was a ready explanation for this disastrous turn of events. It was not the inadequacy of Iran's military planning or the miscalculations of its commanders. Rather, Ali told me, it was the West's cynical machinations that had turned the tide of battle. Ali reminded me that the Reagan administration, eager to block revolutionary Iran from defeating Iraq and spreading its influence across the Persian Gulf, helped arm Saddam Hussein and provided him with satellite reconnaissance of Iranian troop positions. Ali and many of his comrades would remain forever suspicious of America, and steadfast supporters of the ruling mullahs.

For all that, Ali, like so many Iranians I'd met, was eager to invite an American into his home. And so one evening Ali's wife and daughter served me a scrumptious traditional lamb stew known as abgusht. After a dessert of peeled cucumbers and tangerines, we shared a water pipe, known as a hookah, and talked into the night. When it was time to leave, Layli, Ali's lovely thirteen-year-old daughter, eagerly pressed upon me a delicate silver necklace -- a gift for my own daughter back in New York.

On the strength of this warm experience of cross-cultural bonding, over lunch the following day I put a sensitive question to Ali that I'd wanted to ask all along. "Ali," I said, "do you think these ruling mullahs are genuinely religious people?" Or did he think, as many Iranians I'd spoken to had told me, that they are just using religion as an instrument of power?

Ali listened carefully as the question was translated. A small smile crossed his lips. But he said nothing. He simply let the question pass.

After lunch, we repaired to a teashop across the street. I put the question to him a second time. "Ali," I said, "You didn't answer my question. Do you think these mullahs are genuinely motivated by religious piety?"

Again Ali listened carefully as the question was translated. Again a smile crossed his lips. And again he said nothing.

I've reported enough from abroad to know not to generalize too much from a single interview with an opinionated driver -- a classic error of foreign correspondence. But it struck me as significant that this avowed supporter of the regime, deeply suspicious of America, was unwilling to defend the religious bona fides of the ruling clerics -- the core of the regime's ideology and a central pillar of its legitimacy -- in response to a question from an American journalist.

I had grown accustomed to middle-class elites back in north Tehran vehemently mocking the religious pretensions of the ruling mullahs. But a Basiji in conservative Mashhad? Surely he would vouch for the clerics. Ali's disinclination to do so seemed to suggest just how cynical even the regime's most trusted allies had long since become -- and how illusory its mask of religious orthodoxy really was. It fit into an impression I had that was reinforced in scores of subsequent interviews with Iranians across a broad spectrum, left and right, high and low.

My encounter with Ali was typical of Iran: surprising, paradoxical, counterintuitive, and both gratifying and humbling for an American reporter whose memory of cold-war intrigue was short and whose assumptions about the so-called Islamic Republic turned out to be inadequate. Those assumptions would be all the more confounded a year later, when Ali and his Basiji confederates played a key role in electing one of their own, the fiery Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, as president -- apparently in protest against their sponsors among the mullahs as much as in support of them.

Bill Berkeley is the author of The Graves Are Not Yet Full -- Race, Tribe and Power in the Heart of Africa (2001). He teaches writing at Columbia's School of International and Public Affairs, and is writing a book about the Iranian hostage-takers.

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