Iranians Loosen Up Under New President

As a director making movies about women in Iran, Tahmineh Milani was not exactly popular at the strait-laced Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance.

Her last film never made it into theaters because it showed an 8-year-old girl who wasn’t wearing the hijab, the Islamic head covering. After that, she was prevented from making another film by a ministry bureaucracy packed with former Revolutionary Guards who, she says ruefully, loved only war movies.

But Milani persisted, going regularly to the ministry’s film department to argue for her latest script, “Two Women.” Last month, after four years of waiting, she received an unexpected reply: “No problem.”

She credits Iran’s surprising new president, Mohammad Khatami, a leader who is challenging the widely held belief that post-Islamic Revolution Iran is undemocratic, immune to change and stuck in a medieval time warp.

Thanks to him, dour Iran is becoming more open and exciting. Fun, even.

“We think there will be a lot of things coming,” said 20-year-old Mittra, a young woman whose life reflects a generation’s frustration at living in a theocracy. She believes she was turned down for study by the education faculty at her university because her instructors did not find her style sufficiently Islamic: a long coat and scarf with blue jeans peeking out instead of the full-length black cloak known as the chador.

“We picked him to relax things,” Mittra said of the president.

Her friend Gaelareh, a 17-year-old starting college, agreed.

“Khatami gets into our hearts, and he sees the society in a more open way,” she said.

When the soft-spoken cleric took office in August, he ushered in a new era. Based on a series of interviews conducted earlier this month with a cross section of Iranians--including students, intellectuals, workers, businesspeople and government officials--a picture begins to emerge of this era, the most important turning point in this nation of 60 million people since Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi was toppled from power in 1979.

In these dawning days of Khatami, Iranians feel more confident and freer to speak their minds. They have more daring choices at movie theaters and in bookstores. (One movie that has sparked a scandal, and long lines, is “The Snowman,” in which an Iranian is so desperate for a visa to the United States that he disguises himself as a woman.) Their new national soccer coach cares more about winning games than about taking his players to prayers. Nongovernmental organizations agitate about human rights. And the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance has discovered the World Wide Web.

Reversing the Islamic Revolution is not uppermost on people’s minds, but reform is--making the country’s institutions accountable and law-abiding, ending abuses of privacy and individual rights, and breaking down barriers between Iran and the rest of the world, including the United States.

“What happened during the election showed that people are tired of all this stuff,” Milani said. In Khatami, a huge and restive younger generation of Iranians has found its icon of change, its “supermullah.” And the younger generation in turn provides Khatami with his political strength, because opponents know that he has the overwhelming majority of the people--20 million voters--behind him.

But questions still abound: What will happen if Khatami goes too far in challenging the conservative religious establishment represented by the country’s supreme leader, the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei?

Could his gamble on openness lead to Iran’s version of the fall of the Berlin Wall, or will Khatami preside over a brief “Tehran Spring” that ends with renewed censorship, arrests and tears?

Figuring out Khatami and his presidency has become the issue du jour inside Iran. It also has risen to the top of the foreign policy agenda in Western capitals, including Washington, where President Clinton is weighing how warmly to respond to Khatami’s direct overtures for dialogue.

Just as Khatami has taken a risk by speaking publicly in favor of contacts with America after nearly two decades of enmity, America must decide if it is worth taking a chance on him. Some hawks are urging the United States not to be taken in, suggesting that Khatami is merely pretty window-dressing on an ugly regime, a decoy meant to get the West to ease up on Iran.

But there is also a risk that by being too cautious, the United States could undercut him.

“They [Iran’s conservatives] are waiting for one mistake to pull him down,” said one businessman from a prominent family who admires Khatami.

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Until early this year, Khatami was a relatively obscure former minister of culture and Islamic guidance with religious credentials orthodox enough to get him past the screening of the archconservative Council of Guardians--an advisory council for the supreme leader--and onto May’s presidential ballot.

But through some alchemy, this demure figure in a black turban was able to telegraph to the electorate that he stood for everything that the country’s austere ruling mullahs did not. The people, particularly the young, awarded him 70% of the vote in a four-person race, the largest margin for any candidate since the revolution.

“Khatami’s election victory was an avalanche. No one, not even the most optimistic in Khatami’s election campaign, believed he could have such a huge success,” said Iranian political historian Sadiq Zibakalam. “Since Khatami’s election, there has been a lot of soul-searching among many Iranians over what happened.”

One obvious conclusion: Critics of the system are far from alone, and that has made people bolder.

“After the election, we can feel that the Iranian nation has no more fear,” said Ali J. Dehbashi, editor in chief of Kelk, an arts and culture review. “They dropped their fear and are thinking that they can affect their own fate. If you see something beneath the surface, it is because of this self-confidence. This is something new.”

But it did not stop there.

The election had a ripple effect. Suddenly, the conservative religious clique was on the defensive. Iranians were on a high of self-assurance that reached its apogee on the afternoon of Nov. 29, a day that will be remembered as Iran’s “Soccer Revolution.”

On that day, the national soccer team clinched a cliffhanger tie with Australia to win a berth in next year’s World Cup, the first time Iran has made the tournament since the year before the revolution. Moreover, the victory came after an Iranian coach, considered by many to be excessively religious, had been fired under public pressure in favor of a Brazilian who was completely sports-oriented.

The fans, as they say, went wild. “Hysterical happiness” is how novelist Mahmud Doulatabadi described the scene. “The only time I saw such happiness was during the revolution itself.”

Ali Rashidi, an economist, said he could not believe what he was seeing. From the tops of buildings, people were throwing down money to celebrate, he recounted--and not small bills either. And wads of them, he added. He saw a flower seller giving away his entire inventory to passersby. He saw a chocolatier handing out his expensive sweets one by one to the throngs pouring into the street to celebrate.

There was not only happiness on display, but defiance. Public dancing is banned, but many people danced, even on the tops of buses. Men and women are not supposed to mix, but they did. Some women threw off their scarves and let their hair free, violating decency in the eyes of the country’s conservative rulers. And the regime’s enforcers, the religious shock troops called the basij and the komiteh, were told to back off when they dared to intervene.

“They tried to stop things and they got their butts kicked,” recounted one excited youth. “Everybody pushed them. They ran away and came back with more but couldn’t do anything!

“It ended up [that] the komiteh started dancing. We told them, ‘Get out of your cars or we’ll bust your windows.’ They got out of their cars and danced,” he said, savoring the memory.

That rebellious mood was repeated later when the capital welcomed the heroes back from Australia. The team was helicoptered into the city’s 100,000-seat stadium. Because of the segregation of the sexes routinely practiced here, women were asked to stay away. But 5,000 came anyway and would not be turned back. Chastened, the authorities decided on the spot to open a women’s section in the stadium for the first time.

Was it all only about soccer? No, in the opinion of one professor who asked not to be identified. He said he thought Iranians seized the occasion to reach back to when their country was just Iran, not the Islamic Republic of Iran.

“For once, they wanted . . . to shout ‘Iran, Iran, Iran,’ not ‘Allah, Allah, Allah,’ ” the professor said. “It is a political challenge, not really about sport at all.”

Said one Western diplomat, “It must have caused some concern to the system.”

Naturally, Khatami was the first top official to congratulate the team.

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Experts are divided on where the Khatami phenomenon is headed. For the United States, which accuses Iran of sponsoring global terrorism and pursuing weapons that threaten its neighbors, a true change in attitude in the Iranian leadership would be welcome.

Zibakalam, the political historian, said that Khatami reminds him not so much of Mikhail S. Gorbachev, the Soviet leader who brought glasnost to the U.S.S.R., as of Mohandas K. “Mahatma” Gandhi, the spiritual and nonviolent rebel, “because he simply is not advocating bitterness and hatred.”

But there is still the unknown factor of the conservatives arrayed behind the supreme spiritual leader, Khamenei, and the security forces. Will they act to topple Khatami? Some see a recent parliament-ordered corruption prosecution of Tehran Mayor Gholamhossein Karbaschi, a Khatami lieutenant, as the hard-liners’ opening shot across the bow.

A professor with close links to the hard-liners’ camp, however, said the conservatives have not even begun to fight back, because Khatami so far has not dared any significant challenge to them.

“Nothing is there. . . . He is a soft guy,” the professor concluded.

That is a minority opinion. Most see a power struggle looming as Khatami and his loyalists fight to assume a greater share of executive power. To do this, they must overcome the intransigence of bureaucrats from the old government who have held fast to their positions.

Dehbashi, the Kelk editor, tells an anecdote illustrating that Khatami’s appointees do not have carte blanche by any means in ushering in cultural reforms. For years, he said, his review was banned from reissuing an encyclopedic “Lexicon of World Literature” because the compendium of 600 authors contained an excerpt from the “pornographer” D. H. Lawrence. Now the ministry has said he can go ahead, but on condition that he not publish the volumes all at once. That would attract attention, he was told.

When the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance relaxes controls on publications, he said, hard-liners just file lawsuits appealing to the conservative courts to block works they don’t like.

Still, Dehbashi said, he is optimistic that in time Khatami will prevail. “If he stands firm, the opponents will retreat,” he said.

One former mayor recalled how, during the shah’s reign, the ruler became more and more distant from the public, until he was swept aside. “The mullahs have started to ignore people now,” he observed. “And they are losing their power because of that.”

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What is driving the changes in Iran? It could be something as simple as not wanting to tell lies any longer. People complain that hypocrisy has become part of their lives--that they watch television programs from forbidden, and hidden, satellite dishes, or listen to certain kinds of music--but that because of religious strictures, they must instruct their children to keep silent about this at school.

How’s this for hypocrisy? One young man in working-class south Tehran, walking through a pleasant family park that the city built atop a now-razed red-light district, said he has no difficulty meeting members of the opposite sex.

He explained that in south Tehran, the basij do not bother harassing young unmarried couples because the families couldn’t afford to pay a decent bribe. All the enforcement of the morality laws, therefore, takes place in swanky north Tehran, where the bribes are fatter, he said.

Similarly, a young woman named Negra, standing outside a popular pizza shop in north Tehran, told foreign journalists that she favors this particular restaurant because “the owner pays off the komiteh. It’s a secret.”

Of course, it’s no secret at all. Everyone knows.

Milani, the director, said the strictures that outsiders always point to are not the things that annoy her the most.

“Issues like the hijab you can get used to,” she said. “But other pressures stay with you--issues like arbitrary break-ins to people’s houses, or that they can train your child [in school] as they want, not how you want, or that certain people are getting jobs that they don’t deserve.”

Two months before the election, Milani was thinking about emigrating with her husband, a successful architect, and their 1 1/2-year-old daughter. But for now, she said, she has changed her mind.

“I have a better feeling here. With Khatami and the things he is talking about, people start feeling they are being treated with respect. It is not a land without law. Women are optimistic. Young people are optimistic.”