President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has been given until next Friday to stop Iran's nuclear programme. Does his hardline stance have the support of his people? Lara Marlowe reports from Tehran
Standing in the middle-class neighbourhood of Narmak, who would ever imagine it could be the focus of global sound and fury, swirling around the most famous resident of Square 72? A couple of desultory revolutionary guards stand watch over the Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's house. Davoud the vegetable vendor sits at his stall, waiting for Iran's first lady to come on her weekly grocery outing. Birds chirp in the park at the centre of the square, where an old man struggles to his feet to buy fertiliser from a travelling salesman with two camels.
In Cairo, Moscow and Washington, they talked of Ahmadinejad's nuclear programme this week. The hardline Iranian president sent the crisis into high gear by announcing triumphantly on April 11th that Iran has enriched uranium to a low grade, appropriate for nuclear power reactors. The UN Security Council has asked Iran to stop by April 28th, when the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) will issue a crucial report.
But how to make them? In Cairo, French President Jacques Chirac and Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak said the resolution of the crisis must be "diplomatic and political". The Chinese President, Hu Jintao, on a visit to Washington, said the same thing. Condoleezza Rice again refused to rule out military action. "All options are on the table," George W Bush repeated. The US doesn't need a Security Council resolution to defend itself, Rice added.
The US's Cold War adversaries were not helpful. Russia refused to stop building a nuclear power plant for Iran at Bushehr, and refused to cancel the sale of Tor surface-to-air missiles to the Islamic republic. Russia would not approve of sanctions against Iran without hard evidence that the Iranian nuclear programme was not peaceful, its foreign ministry added yesterday.
Meanwhile Haj Husseini, the old man buying fertiliser in Square 72, invites the camel driver into his courtyard to unload two smelly sacks for his rose bushes. "It was the camels that brought us together!" he laughs a few minutes later, as we settle into armchairs under the gaze of Ayatollah Khomeini and his successor as supreme leader, Ayatollah Khamenei.
Husseini (72) sold antiques in the bazaar until his legs failed him. "When Ahmadinejad was elected, I was the first to congratulate him!" he boasts. "When he was mayor [ of Tehran, from 2003 until 2005], every day he took a sack lunch to city hall so he wouldn't spend the people's money."
From time to time a veiled woman emerges from the kitchen bearing fruit, cakes or tea. Husseini's son Ali (46), a civil servant at the defence ministry, joins us. Ali has a dark bruise on his forehead, the sign of a man who prays five times a day. A daughter who studies philosophy at university listens as she sits on the floor pitting dates.
"I didn't like Khatami," Haj Husseini laughs, referring to the reformist president who left office last summer. "He gave too much freedom to women who didn't want to wear hijab." Haj Husseini is affable, his son brooding. "People prefer Ahmadinejad to Khatami because he stands up to America," Ali interrupts. "The country made a revolution against the superpowers. We should be brave enough to stand up to them now. Khatami accepted the suspension of enrichment. He stopped the country from going forward. With Ahmadinejad we're making progress."
The Husseinis don't fear an American attack. "We went through eight years of war with Iraq," says Ali. "Forty-six countries supported Saddam Hussein against us, and America was behind them. Not only do we have Ahmadinejad, our real leader is Ayatollah Khamenei. The president is like an executive manager. In Khatami's time, they were separated. Now the supreme leader and the president have the same goals. They are united, so we are not worried."
Khamenei has been supreme leader since Ayatollah Khomeini's death in 1989, but he is so self-effacing that it is difficult to get a sense of his personality. No two people offer the same analysis of the balance of power within Iran. For some, Ahmadinejad is Khamenei's puppet. For others, the boisterous and surprisingly popular president has escaped the control of his mentor.
Under the constitution, the ayatollah has the power to revoke the president. He controls the media, the justice system, the regular army and the Pasdaran (revolutionary guards). As a Pasdar, Ahmadinejad fought on the minefields of the Iran-Iraq war. He has placed many of his former comrades-in-arms in high positions. The 300,000-strong military organisation owns thousands of companies, which build much of the country's infrastructure. If Iran had a secret nuclear programme parallel to the civil programme declared to the IAEA, it would probably be run by the Pasdaran.
Iranian society is deeply divided between the religious conservative majority, who now control every aspect of power; defeated religious reformers; and the westernised minority, who Ahmadinejad tolerates on condition they follow their "sinful" ways in private.
Ahmadinejad's speech on October 26th, 2005, at a conference entitled A World without Zionism, set the stage for his present confrontation with the West. "As Imam (Khomeini) said, Israel must be wiped off the map," Ahmadinejad said. "Whoever recognises Israel will burn in the fire of the fury of the community of Muslim believers. Whoever recognises the Zionist regime admits defeat and the surrender of the Muslim world."
The last sentence singled out president Mubarak's regime, among others. Egypt has stopped giving visas to Iranians, but Ahmadinejad's anti-Israeli discourse, like his repeated assertions that six million Jews did not die in the Holocaust, have made him popular on the "Arab street".
Back in Square 72 in Narmak, Ali and Haj Husseini voice the concerns of Iran's conservative majority. "When women go around that way (in bad Hijab), it awakens sexual desires in young men, and prevents them from studying or working," Ali complains. Just as the nuclear crisis reaches full pitch, the government is launching a campaign to correct the flimsy chiffon headscarves and short, tight tunics over jeans which became fashionable under Khatami.
Ali has no time for the whingers in north Tehran who say they want more personal freedom. "They want the kind of freedom they have in the West," he says. "Like boys going out with girls. Islam doesn't accept that." They want freedom in art, literature and music, I add, sensing Ali's annoyance. "What's their problem?" he asks. "If you want any kind of musical instrument, you can go and buy it. In Islam, a woman cannot sing alone, but she can sing in a choir. The way a woman sings alone can raise sexual feelings in men. In their houses they have no problem. They can have their CDs and satellite dishes."
The reformist philosopher Mohsen Kadivar says president Khatami was the man of freedom. Kadivar explains: "Ahmadinejad says, 'I am the man of justice'. He wants to take up the mantle of the 12th imam (who disappeared in Samara, Iraq, in AD941 and is believed to have been wandering around the Earth ever since). The nearest equivalent in your society would be a St Robin Hood."
Massoumeh Ebtekar, who was Khatami's vice-president, believes Ahmadinejad has promised more prosperity than he can deliver. "Human rights and personal freedom were never on his agenda," she says. "President Khatami strived to promote openness and personal freedom. Ahmadinejad came with a populist, economically socialist agenda."
Disappointment with Khatami, who was not able to prevent his own friends being sent to prison, is bitter. "A few years ago, right after the student protest crisis, Khatami's office asked me what I thought of him, so I wrote him a letter," says the publisher Shahla Lahiji.
Lahiji quotes the letter from memory: "Leave your position. You cannot achieve social or economic reforms, because power is in otherhands. Be honest with people and say you cannot do it and step down. If you do this, maybe in the future you can lead a real opposition in Iran. But if you continue and people lose hope, they will not attack you but they will go home and we will have another 20 years of silence."
Khatami's aides told Lahiji he cried when he read her letter. "I didn't want tears. I wanted action," she says today. "What I said in the letter is exactly what happened."
In north Tehran, I meet an academic who returned to Iran after a successful career in Europe. The professor's surroundings are more luxurious than Haj Husseini's modest house in Narmak. His conversation slips from French to English, and is truffled with allusions to Shakespeare, Tocqueville, Habermas. Of Ahmadinejad he says: "I find his presence humiliating. I don't find him dignified enough to be our president."
Ahmadinejad's appearance and personal hygiene - the subject of jokes among the westernised elite - are never mentioned by his supporters. He allegedly sleeps on the floor in hotel rooms so he doesn't forget how the poor feel. He once showed up at the town hall wearing the orange jumpsuit of a street cleaner. He wears an anorak and has holes in his shoes.
Ahmadinejad may exaggerate his humble origins. His father was reportedly a blacksmith, but the secretary of the mosque in Narmak told me he rented flats in his building to poor people at cut rates. A blacksmith landlord? Intellectuals mock Ahmadinejad for saying he "felt bathed in a halo of light" when he addressed the UN general assembly last November. Supporters took it as another sign that Ahmadinejad is preparing the country for the return of Mehdi, the 12th imam.
At his house in Narmak, clerks from the presidential office receive up to 200 letters a day. Nasreen Okhovat (32), asked for money to open a sewing school. "I need 15 million toman [ about €15,000]," she told me. "They gave me a numbered receipt, and promised to phone me within six weeks.
"We like him because he's middle class like us," Okhovat continues, beside her husband Hassan Farahani, a driving instructor, in Square 72. "It's important to me that he has made a place where I can come and make a request. Other presidents didn't do that." For her, the most important thing about Ahmadinejad is that "he does what he says". As for his nuclear policy and diatribes against Israel, "We support him 100 per cent", she says. "We were with the government for the revolution, for the war with Iraq, and we're with them now."
Even among those who dislike the government, there is unanimous opposition to a US attack on Iran. "I don't think they can get rid of the regime by bombing Iran," says the professor. "There's no substitute for this regime, no credible alternative. It would just end up in huge chaos."
Shahla Lahiji agrees: "I don't think the US is crazy enough to attack Iran". But if they are, we will lose everything we have gained in 27 years since the revolution. It will be 1979 all over again."
Those gains are not enough to satisfy Mohamed Reza Ghanizadeh (19), the co-manager of Godot cafe, near the University of Tehran. Ghanizadeh's brother put on a student production of Waiting for Godot two years ago. Vladimir and Estragon's black felt hats hang from a bare tree in the centre of the cafe. Ayatollah Khomeini's portrait sits next to the coffee machine, less prominently displayed than John Minihan's portraits of Samuel Beckett.
Where but in Tehran could Khomeini and Beckett co-exist in a teenager's firmament of heroes? Though he is not religious, Ghanizadeh says, "I love Khomeini because he was strong and intelligent and thought about God and the world." But Godot is magical for him, he explains: "It goes inside you and makes you think about everything. You are waiting for God and he never comes." Ghanizadeh will leave Tehran this summer to study music in Toronto. Then he hopes to settle in Italy, "because that is the most artistic country". Why is he so enamoured of things Western? "I love beauty," he shrugs.
The student protest movement was repressed. "I don't like Ahmadinejad," Ghanizadeh says. "But I never think about my government; I think about myself. I am making a gift to myself, to go abroad."
Iranian society explodes with contradictions. A few miles away, in the former US embassy, now a museum run by the Basij militia, I meet a man who looks like Ghanizadeh, but inhabits a different universe.
Mohamed Mehdi Reza Zadeh (23), is a member of the Basij and president of the student group that is hosting an exhibition on Palestine on the former embassy grounds. A few years ago, a Basij would not have smiled at a woman, but Reza Zadeh is cheerful, even friendly. We sit among posters showing Palestinians wounded by Israeli forces. Models of Qassam missiles rise above life-sized rag dolls representing Palestinians in blood-soaked clothes. "We are enemies of America because of its behaviour in the world," he begins. "After the revolution, it was hostile to us.
"I feel deeply sorry for the American people, because their government is giving such a bad image of their country to the world," Reza Zadeh continues. "I don't want a war. Nobody does; war is the worst thing in human existence . . . But the Christian right are in power in America. They want the war of the end of the world. They believe in Armageddon."