Praying for a Century That Is Not the American One
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By John F. Burns
01/01/2000 NY Times
URMIA, Iran -- FOR some in the ancient world, where civilizations
crumbled into dust 1,000 years before the birth of Jesus, the arrival
of a new millennium doesn't captivate the imagination quite as it does
elsewhere. Instead of seeing the last 2,000 years as a ladder for
mankind's ascent, they view much of the last two millenniums, and
especially the 20th century, as a chronicle of moral decay.
This view finds a natural home among conservative followers of Islam.
In the face of a growing challenge from movements that offer a more
tolerant vision of Islam, hard-liners remain implacably opposed to
accommodation with ''Western values'' in matters of morality, social
customs and criminal justice. For the 21st century, some would turn
back the clock to the eye-for-an-eye, do-as-the-prophet-said values of
Islam's origins in the seventh century A.D.
Among those who hold such views in Iran , few are more fervent than
Gholam-Reza Hassani, a high-ranking cleric who is wedded to the social
and political precepts that have been imposed on Iranians since the
Islamic revolution in 1979. Like many of Iran 's mullahs, Mr. Hassani
sees the 20th century -- ''the American century,'' as he refers to it,
with heavy sarcasm -- as a tale of decadence as much as of
technological advance.
After years as a political prisoner under the shah, Mr. Hassani became
an acolyte of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, Iran 's absolute ruler for
10 years until his death in 1989. In 1983, at the height of antileftist
purges, Mr. Hassani led Islamic guards to the hiding place of his
eldest son, Rashid, a 25-year-old Marxist, and assented eagerly as a
firing squad executed him. It was an event, he says, that proved his
loyalty to Islam.
The execution tied the mullah, at least in his own mind, to the
beginning of biblical time, when God challenged Abraham to sacrifice
his son, Isaac. ''Abraham didn't sacrifice his son, but I did,'' Mr.
Hassani said with a quick chuckle. ''Even today, I don't regret it.''
And what of the reaction of Rashid's mother, one of two living wives
who have borne the cleric five sons and seven daughters? ''I really
don't know,'' he said. ''If she has any thoughts about it, she has kept
them to herself, and I haven't asked.''
If this seems unbearably harsh in Western terms, it is at least
consistent with the view of the world that the 72-year-old cleric put
forth during a three-hour conversation at his villa in Urmia, where the
signature artwork is a machine gun suspended above his desk. He spoke
with deep hostility for the United States, a country he said he
respected for its technology but despised for its materialist culture,
its ''godlessness'' and its pervasive ''evil'' influence.
In the 21st century, Mr. Hassani said, the United States will find the
tide running against it. ''The Koran says all injustice will vanish
from the earth,'' he said. ''And so it will be for America, because it
is a country that has lost its soul. Its power will disappear, as the
power of all oppressors has before it. Look at the Egyptian pharaohs.
They were once as powerful as America is today, but where are they
today?''
Ask almost any Iranian who is the most conservative voice of Islam in
the country, and they identify Mr. Hassani, the top cleric in this city
on the ancient Silk Road to China that nestles in the hills of
northwestern Iran . Each Friday, the Muslim holy day, he thunders from
his pulpit in the Masjid-e-Jame mosque against everything he views as
threatening to Islam and its rule in Iran .
But in a broader sense, Hojatolislam Hassani -- the title places him in
the second rank of mullahs, below an ayatollah -- stands for something
that extends beyond Iran and the Islamic world: a deep-rooted anxiety
about the pace of change that causes many people, especially in poorer
countries, to take refuge in the certainties of ancient beliefs, and in
a prideful reassertion of national identity and culture. In this, there
is often deep resentment toward richer nations, and a fear that the
future they have charted is one in which poorer nations and peoples
will be even less able to compete.
Like many others who blame the United States for the world's ills, Mr.
Hassani likes to emphasize his familiarity with American ingenuity. He
owned a computer until recently, he said, but sold it because
it ''needed upgrading.'' With pride, he noted that he uses a mobile
telephone. In this, at least, he distanced himself from the Taliban,
Afghanistan's Islamic rulers, who have set vigilantes prowling for
television sets, video recorders, radios, even hair dryers, then
summoned crowds to watch these ''satanic instruments'' being hanged
from trees.
Told of this, Mr. Hassani was incredulous. ''You mean they actually
hang television sets?'' he said. ''That is wrong; they should not
refuse to learn what is going on in the world, good or bad. That is
pure stupidity.''
The core of the problem in the modern world, in Mr. Hassani's view, is
that spiritual development has receded as technological progress has
advanced. ''Do you want to know why we shout 'Death to America!'?'' he
said. ''It is because America has not heeded our prophet's teachings.
It has not matched its advances in science and technology with growth
in moral and spiritual terms. Of course, there are decent people in
America, many of them, but there is no vice that is not among them.''
The issue that seemed to obsess Mr. Hassani above all others was
sex. ''Look at Clinton!'' he said, referring to the president's
relationship with Monica Lewinsky. ''Even he has said he is not a clean
man.'' Then he offered his remedy: the adoption of strict Islamic codes
for adultery. For a wife who commits adultery and has no mitigating
circumstances to plead -- like a husband who travels frequently, or
is ''handicapped'' or a drunkard -- the proper punishment, he said, is
stoning to death, a punishment still inflicted in rural parts of Iran .
As his unconcern about his wife's grief over their son's execution
suggested, women, in Mr. Hassani's world, cannot hope for equal rights
with men. At no point in his discussion of sexual misdemeanors, for
example, did he even mention that men are equally liable for punishment
under Islamic adultery codes, nor that they face stoning, when it
occurs, alongside the women judged with them -- the difference being
that the women are usually buried to their shoulders before rocks are
thrown, the men left standing, their full bodies exposed.
B UT if the cleric's prescriptions for the next millennium had an
unrelenting grimness about them, it took only the few minutes on the
streets outside his home to be reminded that even in Iran , men like
Mr. Hassani face an uphill battle. The rush of modernity is visible on
every side in Urmia, with Internet cafes and travel agencies offering
cheap excursion fares to the United States.
Iran , which gave the world its first Islamic revolution of the modern
era, has also engendered the most powerful democratic movement in the
Islamic world, led by men who have rejected ancient Islamic verities
for the teachings of Locke, Jefferson and Rousseau. Judging by recent
elections in which Iran 's 65 million people have given that movement
landslide victories, the tide at the dawn of the 21st century, in Iran
at least, seems to be running strongly away from Mr. Hassani and toward
the more open and tolerant future he abhors.
Photo: Gholam-Reza Hassani, one of Iran 's most fervent Muslim clerics,
keeps a machine gun as artwork in his office. He says he respects
American technology.
(Kaveh Kazemi for The New York Times)
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