A Culture, More Than a State, Reaches Out

On the medium of global television, Mohammad Khatami came before the American people Wednesday bearing 2,500 years of Iranian history. In an unprecedented act of diplomacy, the president of the Islamic Republic of Iran packaged his message in terms of culture, not politics. And it is only in terms of culture that America can understand what is happening in Iran and what it means to U.S. interests.

Iran possesses an old, complex culture composed of three competing yet interlocking identities. The first strand of that identity stretches back to the 4th century BC when Cyrus the Great built the mighty Persian empire. Into the soil of its heartland were planted the seeds of intellectual inquiry, artistic excellence, tolerance and assimilation. For almost a thousand years, this culture survived all challenges hurled at it.

In the 7th century AD, the Iranians acquired a second identity when they embraced Islam. Although Persia, the nation, had fallen to Arab conquest, Persian culture fed Islam’s great intellectual achievements. By the 16th century, the Iranians had found in Shiism, Islam’s dissenting sect, the vehicle that allowed them to preserve their unique Persian identity while remaining professing Muslims. Essentially Persianized Islam, Shiism wrapped an Islamic cloak around Persian culture. Under it, the legacies of ancient Persia and Shia Islam intertwined to create what we now know as the Iranian nation.

In the 19th century, the Iranians gathered in the political ideas of the West. As a result, representative government and the rule of law embedded themselves into Iranian culture to form yet a third strand of Iranian identity.

Over the centuries, Iran functioned best when the various parts of Iranian identity maintained balance. But over most of the 20th century, that vital balance has tipped in one direction and then the other. Before 1979, Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi pushed the Iranians to the extreme of their Persian identity, and after 1979, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini pushed them to the extreme of their Islamic identity. Neither leader achieved the internal peace and the external security the nation required. Just as the shah attempted to break the powerful Iranian cultural pattern composed of Persia, Islam and Western political liberalism, the imam enforced his own aberration of Iranian culture. It is Mohammad Khatami who now, in the interest of the nation, seeks to instill the delicate balance between the Iranians’ three identities. This is why the United States must take seriously what he says.

Khatami is first and foremost a nationalist. Unlike Khomeini and those who continue to follow his line, Khatami sees the interests of the nation exceeding the interests of Islam. Peering through an Iranian lens ground by a thousand years of experience, he recognizes that if Iran is to achieve prosperity, security and social order, the Islamic Republic must change course. But this change cannot be simply political. It must also be cultural. Thus into the inflexible frame of political Islam, Khatami is placing the tolerance of Persia. And into the vitriolic anger of the revolution, he is pouring the oil of Persian assimilation that embraces the Western concept of civil society and the rule of law.

In his call for internal reform and external accommodation, Khatami is not exercising the caprice of a leader engaged in an internal power struggle. Rather he is responding to the life force of ancient Iranian culture which is reasserting itself after two decades of rigid Islamic rule. This is precisely why Khatami spoke to the American people about a dialogue between cultures in which the old civilization of the East engages the new civilization of the West. Praising both American and Iranian cultures and acknowledging the hurts that Iran and the U.S. have inflicted on each other, Khatami’s remarks in the CNN broadcast Wednesday night were intended to spin the first thread of understanding between equals.

In the face of Khatami’s bold and studied gesture, the Clinton administration cannot stay mired in the same worn formula concerning improved relations between the United States and Iran. That formula, restated by the State Department’s official response to the Iranian president, maintains that improved relations between the two countries can begin only with official government-to-government engagement.

At the moment, President Khatami understands perhaps better than President Clinton that Iran and the United States have demonized each other so long that neither government is in a position politically or emotionally to embrace the other. That is why what Khatami terms “the crack in the wall” must be expanded by scholars, traders, artists and tourists. This is something that Americans, as eager entrepreneurs and highly successful exporters of popular culture, can understand. So must the American government.

In an extraordinary way, Mohammad Khatami has opened the door to a new relationship between revolutionary Iran and its Great Satan. The United States must walk through that door by accepting the cultural dialogue that Iran’s president seeks. Both the ancient Iranian civilization and the new American civilization can benefit from the flow of ideas from one to the other. That in turn will result in the government-to-government relationship that the United States demands.