National Agenda : Mullahs Losing Grip in Iran : President Rafsanjani’s failure to create a utopia threatens his political future as well as the power of the clergy.

Ever since he emerged in the mid-1980s as the real power behind the Islamic Republic, Ayatollah Hashemi Rafsanjani has been known among diplomats in Tehran as the “Teflon mullah.”

Iran’s shrewdest politician, he secretly swapped arms for hostages with the United States, confessed--and survived. He overhauled the economy, even reviving Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi’s banned stock market--and then got other mullahs to invest. And when he wanted to run for president, the constitution was conveniently rewritten to abolish the premiership and create an executive presidency.

But today the Iranian president--not unlike Bill Clinton--is captain of a storm-tossed boat, facing an upstart, conservative Parliament and fighting for his political life.

And as Rafsanjani goes, so go the direction and pace of change in the Islamic Republic.

“The Rafsanjani era has not ushered in the dawn of progress, as many anticipated,” said a Western diplomat in Tehran. “In the past, he has brilliantly manipulated the system to achieve his ends. But now it appears to be manipulating him.”

Part of Rafsanjani’s problem is timing. Plummeting oil prices have created havoc with the regime’s budget and its five-year plan to rebuild the economy after the crippling 1980-88 war with Iraq.

“Rafsanjani promised too much,” Hadi Semati, an analyst at Tehran’s Center for Scientific Research and Middle East Strategic Studies, said in his downtown office. “People were ready to accept troubles after eight years of war with Iraq, but he made a lot of promises and undertook grandiose projects. Then he couldn’t deliver. And things have instead gotten worse.”

Rafsanjani’s plight represents, on a wider scale, the declining status of Iran’s clergy. Once widely visible on Tehran’s streets, the mullahs are now in retreat as public opinion turns hostile. The Iranian Revolution is turning on its priests.

At a recent Tehran wedding, the master of ceremonies did a 20-minute routine ridiculing the clergy--in the presence of a table full of mullahs. Taxis in the Iranian capital often pass them by, cabbies sometimes even running their fingers across their throats to signal their anger.

The world’s only theocracy may have given vast new powers to the clergy, but their failure to create a utopia has made them vulnerable.

“The clergy were once just interpreters of God’s word,” said the Western diplomat. “Now they have to account for the state’s acts--which has turned out to be tougher. Politics has tainted them.”

The most damning and daring public criticism of the clergy was issued in September by a former general, Azizollah Amir Rahimi, in a letter published in Europe and circulated privately in Tehran.

Suggesting that Iran was on the verge of imploding, he noted: “The clerics who have ruled the country for years are responsible for this misery. . . . The only way to save the country is through deep changes in the way the country is run. And if Rafsanjani is not capable of doing this, he should concede to a national salvation government.”

The former general called on the government to release political prisoners, allow free elections with no examination of candidates by clerical bodies, reinstate military officers purged since the 1979 revolution and end the “regime of censorship, denunciation and the rule of the mullahs.”

Rahimi, who headed the military police after the revolution, is known in Tehran as a bit of a gadfly who has written letters to the government since the shah’s era. But this letter resonated throughout the country.

The regime was quick to move. Rahimi, who is in his mid-70s, and his son were both detained. The government charged that the general was an opium addict and incompetent to stand trial for slander.

But his was not a lone voice. This fall, 134 prominent Iranian writers, publishers and translators issued an open letter appealing for an end to censorship and intimidation.

“It is our basic natural, social and civil right that our written work . . . reaches our audiences without any interference and impediment,” it said.

The letter evoked sharp criticism from Tehran’s press, even though the contents were never published inside Iran. Several of the signers told The Times that they had received threatening calls or pressure to withdraw their names. Ten did.

In an ominous signal of official displeasure, Ali Akbar Saidi Sirjani, a leading dissident, died in detention in November, eight months after he was charged with espionage and drug abuse. Officials said Sirjani died of a heart attack, although family members said he had no history of heart or drug problems.

Sirjani was a best-selling writer of Iranian history and folklore and was a guest lecturer at Columbia University in the 1980s. An outspoken activist against censorship who also wrote letters to officials, Sirjani saw his books banned in 1991 after he wrote about Iran’s pre-Islamic history and that era’s respect for human rights--an indirect rebuke of the practices of Iran’s theocracy.

Rafsanjani supporters contend that the president, whose Cheshire Cat smile has made him seem more accessible than many stern-faced mullahs, is largely a victim of the open discourse that his rule introduced and tolerated. Critics claim that the regime should be held accountable. Either way, Rafsanjani appears to have lost his veneer of invincibility.

In a concession to conservatives, many of his reforms this year have been scrapped or put on hold indefinitely, while key loyalists, including a UC Berkeley-educated brother, have lost their jobs or been replaced.

Scrutiny by Tehran’s often feisty press also has turned nasty. After a Rafsanjani sermon at Friday prayers last month, Jahan Islam, a Tehran publication, reported that the speech “provided a pretext for misleading and rabble-rousing propaganda” and was full of “polemic.”

Although Jahan Islam did not name Rafsanjani, there was no doubt about the target of its subsequent criticism.

“All we know,” it said, “is that those who have parted company with the people and who are giving, in appearance, slogans in support of the deprived and downtrodden actually live in very expensive houses, ride the latest makes of cars, have villas, orchards and palaces around Tehran, are involved in almost every economic activity and have import-export companies at home and abroad.”

A former student of the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, Rafsanjani has impeccable revolutionary credentials, including multiple stints in the jails of the late shah.

But since coming to power, the son of a pistachio merchant has moved, as have his grown children, to wealthy north Tehran. His sons, at least one educated in Europe, are thriving businessmen. A daughter chairs the women’s Olympic Committee.

The family pistachio business, run by another brother, is now heavily into exports. And the Tehran grapevine contends that one son is the largest importer of lucrative satellite dishes, although he officially denies it to friends.

Rafsanjani was first elected with 95% of the vote just a month after Khomeini’s death in 1989 and, facing only token opposition, was reelected last year in a lackluster turnout for his second and, according to Iran’s constitution, final term.

Since his reelection, Rafsanjani’s main political challenge has come from the man he replaced: Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who was chosen by the Council of Experts to succeed Khomeini as Iran’s spiritual guide, a lifetime post, in 1989.

In the 1980s, the two men worked together at critical junctures, Rafsanjani as parliamentary speaker and Khamenei as titular president.

Khamenei was often seen as riding on the more charismatic Rafsanjani’s coattails. But their current jobs often put them at odds.

The rivalry has played out most visibly over economic policy. Rafsanjani, a free-market mullah, pushed private ownership of business, subsidy cutbacks and debt repayment to get the economy back on track. He placed Western-educated technocrats in top jobs.

But Khamenei pressed for “social justice” and stronger state intervention in the face of hardships. To build his own power base--in part because his religious credentials are widely viewed as insufficient for the job--Khamenei has allied himself with religious conservatives and hard-liners.

“As president, Khamenei was more open-minded,” said a leading political scientist in Tehran. “But his role and constituency changed, and he is now more conservative. Old allies have increasingly become new rivals.”

The victim of a tape recorder bomb that cost him the use of one arm, Khamenei is also now jockeying for position to lead the entire Shiite Muslim world after the death last month of Grand Ayatollah Ali Araki, who was more than 100 years old.

Just Wednesday, the Islamic preempted the normal procedure by declaring Khamenei to be the marja ala , or supreme head, of the world 100 million Shiite Muslims, a move that could be rejected by Shiites elsewhere. The dispute could lead to a split within the Shiite world.

In contrast, Rafsanjani--once nicknamed “Akbar Shah,” an allusion to his king-like powers--is now a lame duck with an uncertain future.

Tehran’s ever-churning rumor mill contends that he has even tried to resign three times over the past year, a report that he denied at a news conference this summer when he pledged to “serve the system” for the rest of his life.

But a recent proposal to allow him a third presidential term, which would require a constitutional amendment, has been sharply and widely attacked.

“The spirit of such an action--moving in the direction of establishing a permanent presidency--is disagreeable and reproachable, for it lays the foundations for an authoritarian and autocratic government,” warned Gozaresh Hafteh, a Tehran paper. “Our country is not North Korea, Syria or Libya to have a lifelong president.”

Without Rafsanjani, however, many diplomats in Tehran think that the chances of significant change in the regime are limited.

And without change, Iran faces a hard future. “He’s the only one who has the power and the personality,” said an Asian diplomat in Tehran. “If he can’t pull off economic and political change, no one can.”

The prospect of Iran without Rafsanjani, who was the major influence in the day-to-day running of government even during Khomeini’s life, already has led to speculation about who is next. The majority of possible successors are more conservative than the current Iranian leader.

The elections are not scheduled until 1997. But the scuttlebutt in Tehran currently favors the man who inherited Rafsanjani’s last job: Speaker of Parliament Ali Akbar Nateq-Nuri, a cleric and former Interior minister.

Nateq-Nuri has been stumping the country as if on a campaign. Pressed by Kayhan, a Tehran newspaper, last month, he barely concealed his intentions.

“These trips are just part of my responsibility. If one day I am to serve at another post, I will take it on, just as I have never failed so far to take on any responsibility,” he told Kayhan. “I believe I am capable of handling that job too.”

While on the same tour, he also effectively nixed a third term for Rafsanjani.

“If the constitution is to be altered so easily, then it will lose its legal credibility,” he said.

Compared with Rafsanjani, who prefers an open foreign policy, free markets and a middle-of-the-road political course, Nateq-Nuri is widely viewed as a social conservative and a religious ideologue with strong anti-Western views.

Among the other possible candidates are long-serving Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Velayati, who has weathered several policy storms in an attempt to keep Tehran’s door open to both East and West, and Deputy Speaker of Parliament Hasan Rouhani, chairman of the foreign affairs committee and a member of the National Security Council.

Yet diplomats caution against writing Rafsanjani off as long as the clerics retain power.

Still believed to have the widest following of any mullah, he is unlikely to cede his influence.

Even as criticism of constitutional change was coming in, the English-language Iran News--which first floated the idea of a third term in an interview with one of Rafsanjani’s vice presidents--planted the idea of his return after an interval:

“The constitution clearly states that, after two terms of presidency, one must step down and stand aside, that is, for only one intervening term, and after that, one could be nominated again. The good thing about his interval is that one will have a refreshing opportunity to study . . . the working of government in the past and the present.”

In fact, experts on Iran contend that even that option would require a constitutional change.

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Contenders

Likely candidates to succeed Hashemi Rafsanjani as Iran’s president include:

* Ali Akbar Nateq-Nuri

Speaker of Parliament. Widely viewed as social conservative and religious ideologue with anti-Western views.

* Ali Akbar Velayati

Foreign Minister. Has weathered several policy storms in attempt to keep doors open to both East and West.

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A History of Upheaval

1941: The Shah of Iran, Reza Pahlavi, abdicates and places his son, Swiss-educated Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, on the throne.

1951: Mohammed Mossadegh becomes prime minister and leads a drive to nationalize the Anglo-Iranian Oil Co., a move that undermines the power of the Shah.

1953: Mossadegh is arrested and removed from his position as prime minister by loyalist army forces with the aid of the Central Intelligence Agency.

1978: Public opposition to the Shah increases. Martial law is declared.

1979: After 15 years in exile in Iraq and France, the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini comes to power in the Iranian Revolution. The Islamic Republic is declared, placing supreme power in the hands of the clergy. In November, militants seized the U.S. embassy and take Americans hostage, holding 52 of them for 444 days.

1980: Moderate Abolhassan Bani-Sadr, a former adviser to Khomeini, is named president.

1980-81: Iraqi forces invade Iran, launching a devastating eight-year war.

1981: Faced with growing political unrest centered around the fundamentalist clergy, Bani-Sadr is removed as president and Prime Minister Mohammed Ali Rajai replaces him. Less than a month later, Rajai is assassinated. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is elected president.

1988: Speaker of Parliament Hashemi Rafsanjani is named commander in chief of the armed forces.

1989: The 89-year-old Khomeini dies on June 3. President Khamenei is named his successor as supreme leader, while Rafsanjani is named president.

1993: President Rafsanjani defeats three other opponents and wins reelection to a second four-year term.

Source: Political Handbook of the World, 1993.