Nearly two years after Iranian President Hassan Rouhani was elected and began the slow process of rebuilding trust with Washington, a nuclear deal was reached last week in Switzerland. Iran promised to make drastic cuts to its nuclear program in return for the gradual lifting of sanctions as part of a historic breakthrough in Lausanne that could end a 13-year nuclear standoff.
“Today is a day that will remain in the historical memory of the Iranian nation,” the moderate cleric said shortly after the deal was announced as he thanked Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, without whose approval he could never have stepped up engagement with the West.
Rouhani swept to a surprise landslide victory in Iran’s 2013 presidential elections as a candidate of curious contradictions — a cleric from the heart of the political establishment who carried the battered hopes of reformists.
Illustration: Mountain People
A former nuclear negotiator who had preached and practiced moderation and compromise, he promised Iranians that he would be the candidate to end their country’s isolation, without also ending its peaceful nuclear program.
It was an ambitious pledge that would be battered by the opposition at home, in Western capitals and Israel, and until last week, no one was really sure if he could pull it off.
Rouhani was born to a modest family of farmers and carpet weavers in the hamlet of Sorkheh, where his father owned a spice shop and had links to clerics in the city of Qom, a center of religious learning and authority for Shiites. A calm child and good student, he enjoyed reading the Koran, but also nurtured a love for swimming and mountain hiking that friends say has endured to this day.
The president has described his family as “religious and revolutionary;” they were also close-knit. His brother, Hossein Fereydoun, serves as his special adviser and was at the heart of the Lausanne talks, and when their mother died after a long illness last month, negotiations were briefly suspended.
At about the age of 20, he had an arranged marriage to his 14-year-old cousin, Sahebeh, who kept such a low profile for many years that when Rouhani was running his election campaign, journalists did not even know her name.
He went on to a seminary in Qom, where he became a cleric and forged the ties that would underpin his life, career and even his name. After his preaching attracted the attention of the Shah’s feared secret police, the Savak, he changed it in a bid to escape capture. Eventually he decided Iran was too dangerous and fled to Paris before returning in triumph after the revolution.
His credentials and intellect ensured a rapid rise and to the very heart of Iran’s government. He was commander of the Iranian National Air Defense during the war with Iraq in the 1980s, and in 1986, as deputy speaker of parliament, took part in secret talks with the US over the arms-for-hostages deal that became known as the Iran-Contra affair. In 1989, the year Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini died, he was made secretary of the Supreme National Security Council.
“He is the ultimate insider,” a former Tehran-based diplomat said soon after his election. “He knows all Iran’s secrets.”
Despite, or perhaps because of his impeccable revolutionary credentials, Rouhani has never seemed bound to any of its orthodoxies, including kneejerk anti-Americanism. He caused a minor sensation in 2003 when he visited the scene of the devastating Bam earthquake and took the unusual step of thanking the US for its help in a field hospital staffed by US medics.
More than a decade later, he called subtle attention to that early gesture of friendship by tweeting a picture of the visit and calling for the healing of a “very old wound” the day after his first presidential election.
He chose to study for both his master’s and doctorate in Glasgow, Scotland, juggling the final stage of his education with his position as deputy speaker of the Iranian parliament, apparently with great humility.
“He was on first [name] terms with fellow students,” Hassan Amin, now retired from the law faculty at Glasgow Caledonian University, told the BBC. “Many times he ate in the students’ canteen and sometimes I would take him to the staff restaurant. He chose Great Britain because he has respect for the legal system here, for the judiciary and also for the legislative system.”
He also has a reputation for staying cool in even the most emotional political crisis, due in part to his response to the 1998 murder of several Iranian diplomats in Afghanistan. The killings sparked a wave of public anger that other politicians tried to ride; Rouhani was one of the rare regime voices to oppose a military response.
Part of the hope his election victory sparked among foreign governments, keen to end the standoff with Iran, was born of his previous role as a top nuclear negotiator. The British and US diplomats he faced across the table respected him as an effective pragmatist.
“People don’t realize that he’s the one who convinced Khamenei to stop the clandestine military nuclear program at the end of 2003,” Francois Nicoullaud, France’s ambassador to Iran at the time, told Time magazine when Rouhani was elected. “This makes me optimistic now because I believe that he is a man able to take such an important step.”
He was sidelined by the election of former Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2005, resigning to run a government think tank, the Center for Strategic Research, that became something of a haven for others out of favor with the government.
He was an outspoken critic of Ahmadinejad and his team for nearly a decade, domestically and abroad.
“A nuclear weaponized Iran destabilizes the region, prompts a regional arms race and wastes the scarce resources in the region,” he wrote in a letter to Time in 2006. “An Iranian bomb will accord Iran no security dividends.”
That opposition culminated in the presidential race, when he faced off against Ahmadinejad’s lead nuclear negotiator, Saeed Jalili. He accused him of crippling the country and its economy with short-sighted dogmatism.
“It is good to have centrifuges running, provided people’s lives and livelihoods are also running,” he said in one TV debate. “All of our problems stem from this — that we didn’t make the utmost effort to prevent the nuclear dossier from going to the UN Security Council.”
The pragmatic flexibility on means, without compromise on principles, appears to define much of his life and career; it is even laid out in the introduction to his doctoral thesis.
“This thesis verifies that no laws in Islam are immutable,” the abstract says. “Immutability is only applicable to faith, values and ultimate goals in Shariah.”
Indeed, his lifelong enthusiasm for defying conventional expectations in pursuit of his goals continued into office, where among other innovations he has embraced opportunities offered by Twitter to communicate with supporters — even though it is officially banned in Iran.
Last summer, he tweeted a picture of an Iranian mathematician who had won a prestigious medal, considered the Nobel prize for math, without a headscarf. “Congrats to #MaryamMirzakhani on becoming the first ever woman to win the FieldsMedal, making us Iranians very proud,” Rouhani said, attaching two photographs.
Women are legally obliged to cover their heads in Iran, which made the picture highly controversial; one newspaper later Photoshopped in a head covering.
He also shocked conservatives in a country where religious strictures have been written into law by suggesting that people should have more freedom to choose for themselves.
“We can’t take people to heaven by force and with a whip,” he told a healthcare conference.
However, his limited authority has also disappointed some who expected faster progress on promises of transformation on everything from political prisoners to relaxation of religious dress codes.
Several high-profile cases have been a reminder of the power still wielded in Iran’s complicated political system, where the office of president is just one center of authority and like all other factions must defer to the supreme leader.
The Washington Post’s correspondent in Tehran, Iranian-American Jason Rezaian, has been detained for nearly eight months, and little is known about the charges leveled against him. His wife is also facing charges, though she has been released on bail.
The Lausanne deal, though, was a huge victory for Rouhani, and the nationwide celebrations that followed an endorsement of his chosen approach, cautious persistence. If the final agreement can be sealed for June, that diplomatic achievement and the economic benefits it will bring may earn him room to focus his intellect and political skills on another target.
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