Religion Versus Reality; Who is this man--a mystic, a bumbling political novice or an imminent threat to Iran's established order?

Byline: Richard Ernsberger Jr. (With Ladane Nasseri in Tehran and Alan Isenberg in New York)

After Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was elected president of Iran, he played a Persian version of the American actor Jimmy Stewart in the 1939 movie "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington." Like that Hollywood hick, he presented himself as anything but a slick political insider. Instead, he was the well-meaning idealist who mistrusted the ruling establishment and just wanted to do good for the country's neglected common folk. There was some truth to the pose. After all, he ran on a populist economic platform and beat former president Hashemi Rafsanjani--hugely wealthy and purportedly very corrupt.

But that common-man act is already wearing thin. Ahmadinejad's inflammatory rhetoric--"Israel should be wiped off the map"--has alarmed Western diplomats. It has also worried Iranians, who in growing numbers have come to suspect that their new president is an ideological and religious zealot bent on casting the country back onto a revolutionary Islamic track. Eerie stories about Ahmadinejad's mystical obsessions have been drifting out of Tehran of late, specifically his devotion to the so-called 12th imam--the Shiite messiah, better known as the Mahdi, who's supposed to return and lead an apocalyptic revolution of the oppressed over vague forces of injustice.

By some accounts, the new president's first deputy, Parvis Davoudi, recently asked cabinet members during a formal meeting to pledge their allegiance to the Mahdi in a signed letter. And when Ahmadinejad was Tehran's mayor, he reportedly refurbished a major boulevard on grounds that the Mahdi was to travel along it upon his return. Last week, a videodisc began circulating that reportedly shows the president chatting with one of the country's leading clerics, Ayatollah Javadi Amoli. Referring to his September speech to the United Nations, during which he called for the return of the 12th imam, the Iranian president confides that he felt himself surrounded by a radiant light. Not one foreign diplomat blinked during his speech, he adds. All this has caused a major stir, prompting some critics to wonder if Ahmadinejad has come to fancy himself as the 12th imam's representative on Earth--a dangerous notion for a man with a Ph.D. in traffic management.

Iran may be a nasty theocracy, but it's no monolithic evil empire. Indeed, the country's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said before last June's election that "the existence of two factions [conservative and reformist] serves the regime, like the two wings of a bird." But Ahmadinejad's messianic message has shaken the boughs of the establishment and created turmoil within the conservative leadership at a time when Iran is involved in crucial international negotiations over its nuclear program. Khamenei is said to have thrown his support behind Ahmadinejad just two days before the election last June, supposedly at the urging of his son, Mojtaba. But some experts now believe Khamenei regrets his decision and fears Ahmadinejad more than he did the previous president, Mohammad Khatami, who though a reformist at least supported the status quo.

Clearly, the new president does not--and that makes the country's traditional and very conservative clerical leaders uneasy, partly because they've exploited the current system for personal gain. "The new government is neoconservative and quite hard-line, and that doesn't even do justice to how wacky they are," says Ali Ansari, an associate professor of modern history at St. Andrews University in Scotland. As for Ahmadinejad himself, Ansari describes him as "very naive politically and out of his depth."

It's not clear if Ahmadinejad poses a serious threat to Khamenei's authority, but the new president certainly aims to install a more rigid Islamic government. He's been sweeping away moderates and, in many cases, replacing them with incompetent, ideological cronies. On November 16, at a congress on Friday prayers, he again struck his mystical theme. "We ...