Ebrahim Raisi was obsessed with the security of the people
As the helicopter rose through the misting clouds, Ebrahim Raisi stared sombrely out of the window. The view, of the rugged mountains of north-west Iran, should have been magnificent. Today, there was not so much to see. And in any case he was not given to smiling. It did not suit the black turban he wore, a token of his descent from the Prophet, or his usual black clerical robes, or his thin glasses. He preferred to appear as what he was, an unbending expert on sharia law, for whom chopping off the hands of thieves was “one of our greatest honours”.
Yet he had done an unusual amount of smiling that day, as he inaugurated, with President Ilham Aliyev of Azerbaijan, the giant Qiz Qalasi dam on the Aras river. It marked a rapprochement between their countries. They had had their ups and downs, but today he had called Mr Aliyev a brother and a friend. Their co-operation, he said, would make their enemies despair.
Enemies inevitably preyed on his mind. They began with America, a country he loathed beyond any other except the false Zionist regime of Israel. But Israel, especially after the Hamas attacks of October 7th, could be made to disappear. America was the immovable Great Satan whose sanctions weighed Iran down, cramping its oil exports, tyrannising its innocent people and scuppering his attempts to improve the economy. He had often talked of restoring the nuclear deal of 2015 which Donald Trump had rescinded. But he did not mean it much. When he appeared on “60 Minutes” in 2022, infuriatingly interviewed by Lesley Stahl with her hastily thrown-on headscarf and pitiful expression, he said he could not talk to the Americans. There was no trust. A meeting with Biden would be pointless. He did not deny that Iran was enriching uranium to a very high grade, but that was for industrial use, agriculture, medicine. A nuclear weapon? Baseless. It had no place in their doctrine.
Alongside the foreign demons lurked enemies of the state: anyone opposed to the revolution of 1979, when the Shah was toppled and Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini established his theocracy. He had been swept up in it as a young student at the seminary, where he was taught for a while by Khomeini’s brother and the supreme leader’s successor, Ali Khamenei. Thanks to Khamenei he got his first prosecutor’s job at the age of 20, and at 25 was deputy prosecutor in Tehran. It was there in 1988 that thousands of enemies of the state were massacred by a “Death Committee” that re-tried leftists in the jails and, if they would not recant, hanged them from cranes by the half-dozen. Westerners said he was on that committee; they called him the Butcher of Tehran. He repeatedly denied it. But he was sure it had been the right thing to do. Khomeini had decreed a fatwa against those miscreants for waging war on God. And when a prosecutor defended the security of the people, he should be praised.
Disorder appalled him. Acts of chaos were unacceptable. In 2009 he enthusiastically backed a clamp-down on the Green Movement, which was rioting against a disputed election. Hundreds were arrested to uproot this sedition. In 2022 it was the women’s turn, objecting to his hijab and chastity law with displays of what amounted to nudity and indecency. So, when they objected, he made the law tighter. For showing any part of the body higher than the ankles or forearms, or lower than the neck, they would now get not five years in prison, but ten. He sometimes admitted that women had talents, and rights, too; at home he had two daughters, and his wife, Jamileh Alamolhoda, taught at a university. But in public she knew her place. Sitting beside him, swathed in black, she would say “We want women to remain women! Why should we be like men?”
National morality he could police as hard as he liked. Other powers were more limited. Khamenei had the final word on everything. Foreign policy was mostly made by commanders of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, despite the fact that at meetings with them they would sit meekly cross-legged at his feet. It was also made by those invaluable proxy groups—Hamas in Gaza, Hizbullah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen—which, in his view, safeguarded a region where Israel was the disrupter.
His own brief was to run the country, and he did so as a jurist, since all his previous jobs—prosecutor-general, attorney-general, head of the judiciary—had to do with the law. When he first ran for president in 2017, it surprised people. He knew nothing of economics, indeed had little standard education; after a few years of school, it was into the seminary in Qom. The Koran, and sharia, were his first recourse: his idea of rooting out graft and corruption was to prosecute his foes with big, showy trials. He had entered politics because it was his revolutionary and religious responsibility to do so. If Westerners carped on about human rights, he retorted that these meant security. Freedom was not included.
He did not win, that first time. He got only 38%. In 2021 he changed his tactics, touring the country to talk to the poor. His closeness to Khamenei and the juduciary also paid off; 600 rival candidates, some of them even conservatives, were reduced to a handful by the clerical authorities. He won a landslide then, and fellow conservatives controlled every branch of power.
Rumours had been swirling that he was first in line for supreme leader. Yet it was never proclaimed. Besides, though he stated otherwise, he was not an ayatollah, or sign of God. He was merely a hojat-ol-eslam, or authority on Islam. When Khamenei declared him president, he mentioned this fact. He also called him popular; but that wholesale rejection of candidates had not gone down well. Turnout in 2021 had been Iran’s lowest-ever.
There was much to ponder on that flight home. The foreign minister, sitting opposite, was fidgety; others dozed. But the president stared out of the window, unsmiling, as the fog closed in. ■