WASHINGTON — During his decades in Iranian politics, Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani has been praised as a pragmatist, criticized as spineless, accused of corruption and dismissed as a has-been.Now, in assailing the government’s handling of last month’s disputed presidential election, Mr. Rafsanjani, a 75-year-old cleric and former president, has cast himself in a new light: as a player with the authority to interpret the ideals of Iran’s 30-year-old Islamic republic.
Using his perch as a designated prayer leader on Friday to deliver the speech of a lifetime, Mr. Rafsanjani abandoned his customary caution to demand that the government release those arrested in recent weeks, ease restrictions on the media and eradicate the “doubt” the Iranian people have about the election result.
Behind the words was the clear assertion that for the Islamic republic to survive, it must restore its legitimacy and find a formula for governing. And to establish his own legitimacy, Mr. Rafsanjani evoked his long personal and political history, and his current position as leader of two important consultative bodies.
“What you are hearing now is from a person who has been with the revolution second by second from the very beginning of the struggle,” he said, adding, “We are talking about 60 years ago up until today.”
He recalled that his mentor, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the father of the 1979 revolution, said that the key to success was that the “people’s will” be done, and in this case, the trust of the people had been broken and would not be restored overnight.
In claiming Khomeini’s mantle, Mr. Rafsanjani was challenging the authority of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader and most powerful man in Iran, to make decisions on his own without seeking consensus. He was also defying weeks of effort by the government to silence him, in which senior officials issued a stream of personal attacks and barely veiled threats in the state media.
An outspoken critic of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and a supporter of the opposition candidate, Mir Hussein Moussavi, during the campaign, Mr. Rafsanjani at first did not directly question the government’s declaration that Mr. Ahmadinejad had won a landslide electoral victory. But he now is moving closer to Mr. Moussavi as a public symbol of opposition as well as a behind-the-scenes dealmaker.
In delivering his sermon on Friday, Mr. Rafsanjani essentially usurped the institutional role of Ayatollah Khamenei.
“This was a speech Khamenei should have given,” said Farideh Farhi, a political scientist at the University of Hawaii. “That’s his designated role as the spiritual and political guide, to heal rifts, to be above the fray. But Khamenei is probably too insecure and has too much to lose. He took sides. Rafsanjani rose to the occasion and offered a path to national reconciliation.”
Still, it would be wrong to say that Mr. Rafsanjani has suddenly become a proponent of justice, human rights and freedom.
In the summer of 1999, after all, when the government brutally crushed student demonstrations at Tehran University, he delivered a harsh prayer sermon in the same place as he did last Friday. Back then, he blamed the unrest on “enemies of the revolution” and “sources outside the country.” He praised the use of force by the state.
During much of his eight-year presidency, from 1989 to 1997, many Iranians were executed, principally political dissidents, and also drug offenders, Communists, Kurds, Bahais, even clerics.
Politically, Mr. Rafsanjani was humiliated twice: first in 2000 when he ran for Parliament and came in 30th and last place in Tehran (amid charges of ballot fraud in his favor) and again in 2005, when he performed dismally in his bid to regain the presidency.
But unlike many political figures in Iran, and certainly unlike most clerics, Mr. Rafsanjani is the consummate politician. He refuses to abandon the political battlefield in a country in which withdrawal and silence in the face of criticism and defeat is the norm.
He also knows how to shift gears. The photograph for his ad campaign in the 2000 campaign showed him sitting under a tree without his turban. He must have thought that a clerical uniform had become a liability.
Mr. Rafsanjani’s bold public stance is not without risks. Members of his family have been detained briefly during this period of turmoil, and the government could use his own record, and his family’s financial dealings, to discredit him.
For his part, Ayatollah Khamenei delivered his own notable prayer sermon four weeks ago, in which he embraced the victory of Mr. Ahmadinejad, called the election proof of the people’s trust in the Islamic republic system and threatened a violent crackdown if demonstrations continued.
Mr. Rafsanjani used melancholy, and Ayatollah Khamenei used anger to drive home their respective points. Mr. Rafsanjani struggled to woo the center, the ayatollah stuck to his base of support on the right.
Mr. Rafsanjani spoke about the Prophet Muhammad’s style of governing in Medina, with its insistence on listening to the people, and treating them with respect and “Islamic kindness.”
He called for the release of those who have been arrested in recent weeks for pragmatic reasons. “Let’s not allow our enemies to reprimand and laugh at us and hatch plots against us just because a few certain people are in prison,” he said.
Ayatollah Khamenei, by contrast, in his sermon railed about the enemies of the prophet and the foreign enemies both inside and outside Iran today. “The violators,” as he called them, “are not the public or the supporters of the candidates. They are the ill-wishers, mercenaries and agents of the Western intelligence services and the Zionists.”
Ironically, his speech sounded much like the one Mr. Rafsanjani gave after the disturbances a decade ago.
From the early days of the revolution, Mr. Rafsanjani has favored pragmatism over religious absolutism.
During the seizure of the American Embassy in Tehran in 1979, Iran’s leaders demanded the return of the exiled Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi as a condition of the release of the 52 American hostages. Mr. Rafsanjani had a better idea: “If the Shah dies, that would help,” he said to this reporter in an interview in 1980. (Shortly afterward, the shah died of complications caused by cancer.)
In 1986, after the Reagan administration’s secret American arms sales to Iran with Iraq was disclosed, Mr. Rafsanjani, then the speaker of Parliament, used his Friday prayer sermon to explain why. He said that Iran needed to acquire weapons to fight Iraq, even if it meant dealing with the enemy United States. Later, he was credited with helping to persuade the ayatollah to end the eight-year war.
A state-builder, Mr. Rafsanjani even set aside religion to rehabilitate the image of Persepolis, the site of the 2,500-year-old Persian empire, saying, “Our people must know that they are not without a history.”
This time, he did not lay out his goals. He did not say whether he hopes to get the recently “stolen” election results overturned or merely to convince the country to make peace with those results.
“He doesn’t address the basic problem for the opposition: that they have been dealt with brutally on the streets and that this was a manipulated election,” said Shaul Bakhash, professor of Middle Eastern history at George Mason University.
Yet he remains a wily survivor. In a book about miracles that he wrote in 1963, Mr. Rafsanjani bragged about his escape from an assassin’s bullet. “You were saved,” he said of himself, “with the revolutionary speed with which you travel and punch those who say nonsense.”
Perhaps Mr. Rafsanjani has declared this the moment for the Islamic republic to reaffirm its republican aspects. But given the fluid nature of Iranian politics, it would be a foolish to make predictions about whether he can make miracles.
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