COLUMN ONE : Mullah Maneuvers Into Power : Tough conservative who heads Iran’s Parliament is the next likely president. But many in Tehran, including some religious leaders, argue clergy should share power or step aside.

In 1979, a young mullah with a stylishly trimmed black beard helped Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini escape the millions who had assembled in Tehran to welcome him home from 15 years in exile. After a helicopter dash to a hospital parking lot, the cleric packed Khomeini into his old Volkswagen Beetle and rushed him to a relative’s home through the city’s labyrinthine back streets.

The day marked the climax of Iran’s Islamic revolution. It also symbolized the emergence of Ali Akbar Nateq-Nuri.

A decade later, Nateq-Nuri again rescued Khomeini--from mourners grabbing at his near-naked body as it was jostled from an open coffin before being laid to rest.

“Both episodes were accidental,” he said during a lengthy interview as he stroked his beard, now turned white. “I’m a well-built and athletic man who ventured to go and help.”

Likewise as a politician, Nateq-Nuri is gaining a reputation for using his strength to maneuver himself into the right place at the right time. As Speaker of the Majlis, or Parliament, he is redefining Iran’s political agenda--by undoing a recent package of political and economic reforms--as thoroughly and tenaciously as Newt Gingrich is redirecting the U.S. Congress.

At the same time, he has positioned himself as the leading candidate to be Iran’s next president, succeeding Hashemi Rafsanjani, author of many of Iran’s political and economic changes.

Nateq-Nuri’s unofficial candidacy comes during a deepening debate over whether the clergy should continue to dominate Iran’s government.

“The real issue of the next election is whether the president should be a man with a turban or a hat,” said a prominent journalist. “This could be a fundamental turning point for the revolution.”

A growing array of political interest groups, intellectuals and even some mullahs argue that it’s time for the clergy to begin sharing power or stepping aside.

However, the new group of social conservatives, led by Nateq-Nuri, favor slowing the reforms that were stimulated by the end of the Iran-Iraq War in 1988 and Khomeini’s death the following year. They advocate maintaining state controls and entrenching the revolution’s religious identity.

“We wish to see more clerics represented in government, not less,” said Nateq-Nuri, in his early 50s, who like many mullahs takes his name from a variation on his birthplace, the northern city of Noor near the Caspian Sea.

At stake is the basic issue facing every revolution: when and how to settle down.

The election is still two years away, but Nateq-Nuri now appears the most likely alternative, political analysts and diplomats here say. And since it will mean a critical transition, the political intrigue has already begun.

With the charismatic Rafsanjani, who shaped policy for most of the revolution’s 16 years, now a lame duck because of the presidency’s two-term limit, key politicians are jumping onto the Nateq-Nuri bandwagon. Advisers are quietly mobilizing backers and devising strategies. And often with presidential airs, Nateq-Nuri is stumping the countryside.

Among workers at a packaging plant during one recent appearance, he was an earthy man of the people. “Bad packaging does to a good product what ugly clothing and makeup do to a beautiful woman,” he told them.

Among university students, he took the high road, proclaiming that the Islamic revival has thwarted the ambitions of Iran’s enemies.

Unlike many colleagues who have mellowed over the years, Nateq-Nuri more often still employs the revolution’s early rhetoric.

“The emergence of the Islamic republic has provided a glimmer of hope for all Muslims.. . . Our adversaries believe the same thing. That’s why they say Iran is dangerous,” he said in the interview.

“We have established an Islamic government that is one step to Utopia.”

He is equally single-minded about U.S. politicians. He once labeled House Speaker Gingrich an “imbecile,” and during the interview called both Gingrich and President Clinton “simpletons” who had “slipped on watermelon peel” in developing policy on Iran.

Nateq-Nuri’s rise as Speaker reflects a dramatic political shift since the last parliamentary elections. In 1992, Iran’s most notorious hard-liners--including several linked to the 1979-81 U.S. Embassy seizure and other anti-American acts--were either disqualified from running or defeated.

The new Majlis, which elected Nateq-Nuri, was widely expected to usher in a new era. But it has instead forced Rafsanjani to all but abandon the Iranian version of shock therapy, a bold attempt to open up Tehran’s economy, privatize companies that were nationalized after the revolution and re-integrate Iran in the global economy.

It also restored many food, gas and utility subsidies that Rafsanjani wanted cut--adding billions in costs to the debt-ridden economy.

The actions reflected Iran’s confusion over which way to turn. In April, hikes in transportation costs triggered riots in Tehran suburbs--not the first episodes of unrest.

“Sometimes the shock requires us to slow down a bit to address the needs of the people,” said Nateq-Nuri.

Although he has a limited power base--he needed a runoff election to win his seat--Nateq-Nuri has managed to capitalize on the uncertainty and seize the initiative. Despite a constitutional amendment in 1989 that created an executive presidency, Nateq-Nuri’s Majlis has now increasingly begun setting Iran’s political pace.

“Nateq-Nuri didn’t get enough votes in the last election to win outright,” a leading political analyst here said. “But as he became the champion of the social conservatives, he’s become almost as powerful as Rafsanjani.”

The Majlis now bears his imprint. Unlike in the years when Rafsanjani was Speaker and the chamber echoed with feisty debates, the current Majlis is sedate and businesslike. His peers say Nateq-Nuri commands order, in contrast to Rafsanjani, who charmed and cajoled disparate interests.

As president, Majlis members and staffers predict, Nateq-Nuri would also toe a tough line. “He favors the status quo, particularly on the economy and foreign policy. He’s not a man to engage in abrupt change,” said a fellow member of the Majlis who asked to remain anonymous.

But that course is still to be decided. And although the names of other presidential contenders are widely bandied about in Tehran, the most dynamic alternatives are actually a new set of ideas that already have sparked intense new debate in the country.

“There’s a growing feeling that the next president should not be a cleric at all because of the growing public antipathy toward the clergy,” explained a former senior government official.

“Large numbers of clerics are now against the clergy in power. They now think it was a mistake to take government office.”

The number of clerics in government has in fact diminished over the years. Rafsanjani, a middle-level mullah, has appointed technocrats and specialists, many U.S.-educated. And membership in the Majlis is less than one-quarter clerics, down from a half in Iran’s first two Parliaments.

But public discussions now go even further.

“Islam is tainted when the clergy is held responsible for everything wrong in society,” said a young woman sitting in the viewing gallery of the marble Parliament building originally built by the monarchy. “They should hand over power to laymen and go back to doing what they do best.”

Other quarters are demanding the right to mount a legal opposition. The independent TV show “Weekly Report” last month labeled promises of liberalization a failure and called for the creation of formal political parties.

And in a blistering public letter in May, the Freedom Movement, the largest internal opposition group, said growing problems of poverty and political instability are “caused above all by the structure of the Establishment, which does not believe in the rule of nation and is worried by people’s participation in freely determining their fates.”

Although officially outlawed and never quoted in the Iranian press, the Freedom Movement is gradually being tolerated. The Minister of Islamic Guidance even offers to set up interviews for visiting journalists, one sign of a tentative political opening.

At a time of deep political turmoil, the most controversial ideas come from philosopher Abdol Karim Soroosh. In an upcoming article in Kayhan magazine, he proposes that clerics no longer be paid by the people in order to “free religion from the clergy.”

“The clergy should not feed on religion. They will have to earn their money from elsewhere,” he said in an interview.

In another upcoming article, he also argues that secularism is not the enemy of religion. In contrast to ancient times, which were dominated by religion, and modern times, dominated by reason, he said, the new “postmodern” era reconciles the two sources of human knowledge and experience.

Soroosh is not alone in discussing a once-taboo subject. During a visit to New Delhi this spring, Rafsanjani paid tribute to the secular character of India, as a country where diverse religions could coexist.

“For the president of a religious government and society to commend secularism is an event,” said a diplomat from another Muslim country.

With the presidential election not due until 1997--and a parliamentary poll due next spring--much can still happen.

“Nateq-Nuri’s the current favorite,” said a Western envoy. “But in Iran you learn quickly that nothing is predictable.”