Mahmoud the Obscure
Overview: We have tried to find out about Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s past to possibly better understand the fellow. The little we have learned is not encouraging.
We think that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is the real deal, an authentically religious man, though his religious beliefs themselves may be demented. You may disagree with his religion if you like. But in our view, it is a mistake to think he is just a clever pol, or a huckster, or a good negotiator. You might say he is mad as a hatter, but consider that he might be more like Joan of Arc than P.T. Barnum.
Ahmadienjad is a mystery to the West. His background is obscure. Here are a few odds and ends.
Extreme or odd or apocalyptic religious beliefs can derive their strength from the circumstances of the believer’s early life. In the case of Ahmadinejad, we know little of his early life (if you have sources we can read, send an email). We know little of his mother, and that his father was a blacksmith who still lives with the son’s family. This from a profile by (a foolish but attentive reporter named) Pepe Escobar in Asia Times:
The heart of Ahmadinejadland is Tehran’s lower middle-class neighborhood of Narmak. It’s a leafy area pinpointed by about 100 small squares. Off the 72nd square, there it is, in Hedayat Alley, 90 square meters, a two-storey house on the right side: Ahmadinejad house. The president lives - or used to live - on the first floor, with his family (he has two sons, one 19 and the other in his early 20s). The second floor is for his father, a former blacksmith. Ahmadinejad was practically forced by state security to relocate to more palatial surroundings.
Only a five-minute walk from his house, on Samangan Avenue, one finds Jami mosque. His mosque. Right in front of it, imprinted on the asphalt, urban graffiti to defy anything that ever came out of the New York Bronx: three giant, colored flags, American, British and Israeli. Traffic steadily rolls over them. They were painted three years ago by the mosque and have been there on the asphalt ever since. Every once in a while, they are repainted.
Inside the mosque, a resident says Ahmadinejad usually came for the evening prayer, by himself. A man named Karami, principal’s assistant at Danishmand High School, says Ahmadinejad was “a good student since his childhood. He was admitted to Sharif University, this is something very difficult.”
In the ante room, under a tapestry of a gorgeous Imam Hussein Muzzaffar Salak (”people call me Ali”), the mosque’s caretaker for the past 38 years remembers young Ahmadinejad coming to prayers with his father, and the grown up Ahmadinejad coming to prayers with both his sons. It’s a very active mosque - usually 600 people during evening prayers. “Three of the prayer leaders were martyred during the Iran-Iraq war [of the 1980s].”….
[Well-off Teheran resident Mr.] Shiravi - like most of Tehran’s secular elite - is terrified of Ahmadinejad’s godfather, Ayatollah Mesbah Yazdi in Qom, who “believes he can convert all of America to Shi’ism” and who issued a fatwa ordering all of the alleged 20 million bassijis to vote for Ahmadinejad. Mesbah is Ahmadinejad’s marja’a (source of imitation). He’s above all the grandmaster of the isolationist Hojjatieh sect (something he always denies), which was pushed out of government by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in the early stages of the revolutionary government. Shiravi does not believe Ahmadinejad will be able to complete his four-year presidential term, because Mesbah will keep on pushing the ultra-hardline envelope.
Shiravi reflects current consensus among Western diplomatic circles in Tehran that the presidential election was a silent coup - carried by the Revolutionary Guard and the Hojjatieh, with support from bassijis - the so-called “army of 20 million”. The new intelligence minister, Hojjatoleslam Gholam Hossein Mohseni-Ejehyi, is a graduate from the Haqqani hawza - founded by the Hojjatieh. Same for new Interior Minister Mostafa Pourmohammadi, who the guys and girls in Gandhi are beginning to call “the Taliban”.
Tehran’s secular upper middle class is terrified of these muttehajar (literally “fanatics” or “those who want to go back to the Stone Age”), whom they identify as people-brainwashing mullahs who oppose anything modern…
If this account is to believed, there is a consensus in poor and middle class circles in Teheran that Ahmadinejad is austere, genuinely religious, and committed to his cause. One faction welcomes this, while another fears it. And with an influence like Ayatollah Mesbah Yazdi, there seems to be quite a lot to fear.
Though we know little of Ahmadinejad’s childhood, we know quite a lot about his radical godfather, Ayatollah Mesbah Yazdi. Just as Ahmadinejad is called mad, Ayatollah Mesbah Yazdi is in his turn also called the Mad Ayatollah., head of a group (the Hojjatieh group) dedicated to bringing about the return of the 12th Imam, or Mahdi, through the spread of chaos. Here’s a little on the Ayatollah, via the Telegraph:
Ayatollah Mohammad Taghi Mesbah-Yazdi, who espouses total isolation from the West, has a blunt message for anyone who veers from his fundamentalist readings of Koranic texts: “If someone tells you he has a new interpretation of Islam, sock him in the mouth.”
An enthusiastic supporter of both the death penalty and public floggings, and the use of suicide bombers against “enemies of Islam”, the bespectacled 70-year-old is viewed as an extremist even by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the current religious leader who is Iran’s supreme authority. But since Ayatollah Mesbah-Yazdi issued a fatwa, or holy order, in support of Mr Ahmadinejad’s presidential bid, his influence has expanded hugely, possibly eclipsing even that of Ayatollah Khameini….
In a sermon at Teheran University, Ayatollah Mesbah-Yazdi reminded worshippers: “We should know that 1,400 years ago the Koran said that the enemies of Islam will always fight while chanting peace-seeking slogans.” The ayatollah’s hostility towards allowing Iranians to be exposed to challenges to Islamic dogmas may also have spurred Mr Ahmadinejad’s enthusiasm for censorship in the public realm, including, last month, a ban on foreign films.
In a veiled reference to the democratic principles ushered in by the previous government, Ayatollah Mesbah-Yazdi said: “An Islamic government must combat this, because injecting misleading ideas is like injecting the Aids virus!” Young Iranians who questioned the regime after studying abroad did so only because they had been trained in “psychological warfare” by foreign universities, he added.
Ayatollah Mesbah-Yazdi’s notoriety is not just confined to rhetorical flourishes, however. In addition to being an enthusiastic endorser of the fatwa against the author Salman Rushdie, he was accused of giving religious sanction to government death squads which assassinated political opponents both at home and abroad in the 1990s…
We were told once that the Swiss Christian theologian Karl Barth referred to World War II as the “war against God.” In retrospect, our current war may be seen as “the war about who God is.” We have no doubt that Ahmadinejad believes he is fighting for God and “monotheism”, as he put it in his letter to George Bush. He is fighting for the Allah who is the same as the the God of the Old Testament and the New Testament, only with updated revelations. His God authorizes head-chopping, and sharia, and the worldwide dominance of Islam. His God is either a false God or a true God, and Ahmadinejad means to put himself, and us, and Allah to the test. We perhaps shall live to see the result.
We have wanted to understand the past of Ahmadinejad to better understand the present. As far as the past goes, he is Mahmoud the Obscure. There is, however, nothing obscure about the present and future he seeks to create for all of us.
UPDATE
Amil Imani in The American Thinker writes that Ahmadinejad is not unhinged; rather he is hinged precisely as millions of others are in the Islamic world.