Vows and Prayers.(Mohammed Khatami)(Brief Article)

After months of suspense, Mohammed Khatami ended all speculation last week. In a drab Tehran office, he filled out a standardized five-page form that included his "revolutionary credentials," like any other candidate for the June 8 vote. Then, as he spoke to journalists and supporters, Iran's enormously popular president melted into tears. The room was quiet, save for the clatter of cameras. "I have nothing except my dignity," said Khatami, regaining his composure. "And it's the people's gift to me." Then he recited a classical Persian poem about lovers who willingly sacrifice themselves for the beloved.

So begins a campaign that pits Khatami, with his strong support from women, intellectuals and the young, against the conservative clerical establishment that controls Iran. Few doubt Khatami will win by a landslide, as he and his allies have in every election since 1997. The question is whether, even in victory, the reformer--himself a cleric-- can deliver the "democratic system within a religious framework" that he promises. The answer may well depend on a coterie of aides and allies that includes the former students who masterminded the taking of 66 American hostages in Tehran 22 years ago.

Washington has grown increasingly skeptical; some senior officials in the Bush administration are even pushing the line that Khatami is simply a frontman for the status quo. But Farahnaz Ghazi, a 20-year-old history student in Tehran, is keeping the faith. In a country still dominated by billboards of the grim-faced Ayatollah Khomeini and the blank, dour visage of his successor as Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Khatami is "calm, intellectual and smiling," says Ghazi. "That's why we love him." When she heard about the scene at the registration office, she cried too: "When a man, especially a leader, is not ashamed of expressing his emotions, he endears himself to his people." Says her father, Ahmad: "He kept us waiting, but we knew he... wouldn't let the people down."

Khatami likes to say that the hard-liners have created a new crisis for his government every nine days. His supporters argue that any of those crises--the serial killings of political activists, the beating and jailing of students, closure of pro-reform newspapers and imprisonment of the president's closest allies--would have toppled a government with less popular support. True enough. But that's only part of the story. The success of Khatami--whose executive resume before he became president was limited to the Ministry of Culture and the National Library--is largely dependent on a group of former radicals who act as both the shock troops of Iran's reform movement and its brain trust.

Ironically, many of them are the same people who suppressed political opposition and "anti-revolutionary elements" at the beginning of the revolution. They are the former leaders of the U.S. Embassy seizure in 1979, the Revolutionary Guards, and intelligence officers with long experience in the regime's covert wars at home and abroad (graphic). And they are admired by Iranian youths who see in their change of heart proof that Iran can change too. "When we were young we admired movie heroes like John Wayne and Clint Eastwood, who fought the bad guys," says Farahnaz's father, Ahmad, a retired teacher. "But for my daughter's generation, [Emmadedin] Baghi and [Akbar] Ganji are the real ...