Mohammad Khatami
Mohammad Khatami was president of Iran from 1997 to 2005, the smiling cleric and former culture minister whom the establishment had let run as the token liberal and who won the election of May 1997 with seventy per cent, twenty million votes, from the women, the young and the cities, on a promise of the rule of law, civil society and a dialogue among civilisations, which the UN adopted as the theme of 2001. The eight years were the Tehran spring of the press, with two hundred newspapers licensed and then closed by the judiciary one by one. There were the students' protests of July 1999 over the closure of Salam, the largest since the revolution, put down by the police and the vigilantes, and the chain murders of dissident writers in 1998 traced to the intelligence ministry, whose minister he forced out. There was the reformist parliament elected in 2000 whose every bill the Guardian Council vetoed, and the local councils elected for the first time. There was the détente with the Gulf states and Europe, and the nuclear programme's exposure in 2002 and the suspension of enrichment he agreed with the Europeans in 2003. There was the disqualification of two thousand reformist candidates in 2004 that gave the parliament back to the conservatives and ended the experiment. He had said in 2004 that the president in Iran was a functionary, and the office's limits were the lesson. He was born in Ardakan in 1943, the son of an ayatollah, studied philosophy at Isfahan and theology at Qom, ran the Islamic centre in Hamburg before the revolution. He was minister of culture and Islamic guidance from 1982 to 1992, when the hardliners forced him out for permitting too much, after which he ran the national library. His sentences, his German, his interest in Tocqueville and Habermas and his clean turban were the reformists' image. He was re-elected in 2001 with seventy-seven per cent and less power than before. He handed over to Ahmadinejad in 2005. He has since been the reform movement's silent leader, banned from being quoted or photographed in the state media since 2010 for backing the green movement of 2009, permitted to vote and not to speak. He is consulted by the candidates who still run under his name, of whom Pezeshkian in 2024 was the latest to win an election and find the office what Khatami had said it was.
- Lived: 1943 CE – ?
- Nationality: Iranian
- Roles: president, cleric, politician
