Word: rafsanjani
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Much of that change, dramatic by the standards of revolutionary Iran, has been at least indirectly endorsed by President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, who came to power two months after Khomeini's death. Rafsanjani has not actually called for a reversal of strict Islamic injunctions, but in oblique ways he is signaling that he favors a more relaxed approach, especially in the enforcement of hijab. In a much publicized sermon last November, for example, Rafsanjani chided fellow clerics who make a virtue of "austerity" and argued that "appreciating beauty and seeking embellishment are serious feelings. To fight them...
That small incident, as much as the debate between Rafsanjani and the conservative stalwarts, illustrates a revolution running low on zeal. Today Rafsanjani faces a population exhausted by eight years of war with Iraq, domestic political turmoil and a severe economic slump. The President seems to realize he must respond to those hardships, and thus has tried to ease the harsh enforcement of hijab. More important, Rafsanjani wants to end Iran's pariah status in the world community and gain desperately needed aid. "We are in a period of reconstruction," says Rajaie Khorassani, chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee...
...Rafsanjani wants to rescue the economy by returning the nationalized industries to private hands and attracting foreign investment and technology. His government has also initiated talks with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in hopes of eventually obtaining loans. Those steps, however, depart from the revolution's commitment to reject outside influence (the Islamic republic's constitution explicitly forbids foreign investment), and his adversaries in the Majlis will not go along...
Iran's motives in seizing the planes are more political than material. President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani plainly hopes to redeem Iran's tough behavior toward Iraq for better ties with the West and the gulf countries. Iran may still use the planes -- and their pilots, who remain in detention -- as leverage in any future bargaining with Iraq over a final settlement of the Iran-Iraq war, for which there is now only an oral peace pact. If that fails and the planes eventually decompose into pricey rust heaps, at least Iran will have the satisfaction of knowing that Saddam...
...rabble-rousers also included a large number of Shi'ite fundamentalists, some of whom paraded portraits of Mohammed Bakr Hakim, Iraq's leading Shi'ite cleric. Hakim lives in exile in Iran and aims to install a Tehran-like revolutionary government in Baghdad; Iran's President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani last week called on Saddam's regime to "surrender to the will of the people." Hakim cheered the insurrection but denied assertions that he had orchestrated it. "What we're seeing," said a senior Western envoy in Riyadh, "is a case of spontaneous internal combustion...