Rafsanjani is often described as a ‘pragmatic conservative.’ George Friedman of Stratfor succinctly expounded this phrase in a bulletin today, noting that “Rafsanjani is a pragmatist in the sense that he systematically has accumulated power and wealth. He seems concerned about the Iranian economy, which is reasonable because he owns a lot of it.”
His feelings towards Mahmoud Ahmadinejad are as warm as those of John Kerry towards Karl Rove. The current President, who defeated Rafsanjani’s effort to return to the Presidency in 2005, despises the older man’s dubiously acquired and ostentatious wealth. Rafsanjani, be it remembered, was the primary backer of the defeated Mir Hossein Mousavi, whose defeat was today confirmed by the recount, or alleged recount, of some votes. The sting remains, and he hoped for vengeance.
If people weren’t getting arrested for protesting, and facing serious punishments, this would make great and guilt-free TV drama. Rafsanjani in the past week has been determinedly lobbying clerics in the religious centre of Qom, trying to overturn the election results, and it seems he has played all his cards – and this time, lost. Nobody should count him out, because he can buy and sell people as well as pistachios and oil, but there is a sense that, at age 75, he has finally hit the wall. His day is, perhaps, finally over.
Rafsanjani was born to a relatively poor family of pistachio farmers in south-eastern Iran, in Kerman province. This is a large region of mountains, sandy desert and farmland, and prone to earthquakes. Perhaps the uncertainty of life in such a place in early 20th Century Iran, at a time when the country was slowly modernising under Shah Reza (the last Shah’s father) and chafing under British dominance of its oil industry and foreign relations, was what conditioned Ali Akbar’s thinking: trust in God, but keep a stash in the cashbox too. At 14, he left home to study religion in Qom, becoming involved simultaneously in the religiously influenced nationalist movement. That led him in time to the firebrand Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, and when Khomeini was forced into exile in Iraq, Rafsanjani became one of his key aides still in Iran. It was nearly two decades before the disciple was able to welcome his teacher back to Iran in triumph, and he suffered several imprisonments during that time, as well as torture.
Nobody should dismiss him as someone who never took a risk.
He has published altogether seven volumes of memoirs, none of which appear to be available yet in English. I don’t doubt they are self-serving, but the man has done a lot in one lifetime, and has much to say.
My reflections on Iran the past few days have moved all over the place. The younger people yearning for a more open and better-managed society deserve and receive my full sympathy, but I also can’t scorn the generation that dared to oust the Shah in 1979, then endured the horrors and slaughter of the war with Iraq in the 1980s. And it’s on that ‘generation’ (a broad swathe of age-groups that includes both Rafsanjani and Ahmadinejad) that my thoughts dwell tonight.
We have put Iran and Iranians into boxes. In the West, most people are now finally aware there are both religious fanatics and secularised urban liberals, and more discerning people see the nuances that complete the spectrum between those two over-simplified extremes.
What we are mostly unable to grasp is the people for whom religious obligation is not something imposed, or something rigid and unquestionable, but something felt from within. Shi’a religiosity is presented as alien and perverse when it’s presented at all in the West – we’ve all seen those pictures of devotees covered in blood from self-inflicted cuts in Ashura processions. But I doubt if one in a hundred non-Muslims in the West appreciates the quiet richness of everyday devotion practised by many Iranians, or has ever tried to imagine what a life lived on that basis might be like. It doesn’t have to exclude iPods, movies or intelligent discussion, nor does it require fanatical forms of expression or extreme superstition.
Most people I know are embarrassed by spiritual devotion, and can’t include it comfortably in their view of the world. Part of the fascination of Iran, for others as well as myself, is that it incorporates this humility and devotion as well as all the bloggers and well-informed thinkers. As Khomeini intended, Iran has remained a bubble in today’s world, a paradox that frightens, frustrates and fascinates us. We rationalise this by muttering about the nuclear weapons Iran doesn’t have, or its active support for armed radical groups like Hamas, but the cultural phenomenon of Iran is what we find more compelling than its politics.
Whatever stereotypes we project onto it, they don’t quite fit.
A glance at a map shows that Iran has always been a crossroads point. It included part of the Silk Road for centuries, and it sits precisely between the Arab Muslim world to the west of it, and the Indian subcontinent that begins at its eastern borders. The vast mass of Russia with its former (and current) empire lies to the north, and the Indian Ocean to the south: the stories of Sinbad the Sailor, don’t forget, are Iranian. This was never a nation closed to the world. Like many major trading nations, it absorbed what it wanted, and kept its own traditions safe behind its southern deserts or in its mountain ranges.
Rafsanjani came out of this immensity of land and faith and history. His piety has never been in doubt, even if he always interpreted his own position as one in which he was entitled to liberal material blessings as well as conservative spiritual ones.
Perhaps the old fox will rise again next week or next month, and continue to make power-plays for another five or ten years. But as noted earlier, it’s possible Ahmadinejad and his supporters have him in a corner, and he can’t continue as the operator he has been since he first became Speaker of the Majlis in 1980.
A man of power’s final stand inevitably helps define his career. I keep wondering, in light of this possibility, what his real inner journey has been like. That starry eyed adolescent in Qom became a devoted (but not purblind) servant of the Ayatollah who reshaped the Middle East, not just his own country, and Rafsanjani’s years of genuine suffering and sacrifice were rewarded with increasing positions of trust. He saw a dream realised only to become a nightmare in the 1980s, yet he has worked on tirelessly for a vision that only makes sense if we allow ourselves, just briefly, to step across the divide.
Iran has never achieved what it intended, and corruption and incompetence have so often made sure the ideal remains only an ideal. Yet inside that outer failure is the continuing life of both a nation and all the individuals it comprises. Many have been terribly hurt by its callousness to its own, yet there is still a remarkable depth of faith in the Iranian people, whatever the anger we have witnessed in the past two weeks. Those survivors of revolution and war know they embody something unique and, even with his riches and his well-looked-after relatives, Rafsanjani is not wholly an outsider to their world of faith and longing.
He is, to us, a seemingly unique paradox: a greedy man of profound faith, both in his God and his own destiny under that God. In that, despite all the hurt he has wrought or tolerated, and the ambition that has sometimes deflected his inner compass, I find something admirable. We demonise him and his associates because their aims clash with ours at every point. But he has kept to his own course through the years, and helped shape the history that, like it or not, we have had to share with his intractable, maddening, beautiful and compelling homeland.