President-elect Hassan Rouhani may be Iran’s hope for moderation

TEHRAN — As a seminary student, he made a hazardous foray across the border into Iraq to meet his icon, the exiled Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

Years later, he joined Khomeini in France, eventually returning home after the 1979 Islamic Revolution. On Sunday, Hassan Rouhani will be sworn in as Iran’s president, succeeding Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

The styles of the incumbent and his successor couldn’t be more different. But what everyone —in and outside Iran — wants to know is whether Iran’s policies will change as well. That is far less clear. The biggest test will be trying to find common ground with the West on a subject Rouhani knows well — Iran’s disputed nuclear program.

Rouhani, a white-turbaned legal scholar and theologian, has adopted “moderation” as his motto, a dramatic shift from his predecessor’s bluster. Unlike Ahmadinejad, a blacksmith’s son with little international exposure when he was elected, Rouhani is an intellectual who has represented Iran abroad. He holds an Iranian law degree and a doctorate from a British university.

At the heart of his candidacy in the June election was a paradox that he will have to confront as president. A consummate insider and conservative-leaning pragmatist, Rouhani played the insider-as-outsider card, securing a narrow majority in a fractured field.

He deftly appealed to more reform-minded Iranians beaten down in their perennial struggle with hard-liners. He was the sole cleric among the presidential finalists, yet the religious establishment was wary of his perceived liberal drift.

Many Iranians desperately seek a rollback of international sanctions imposed because of the nuclear program. The sanctions have contributed to rising prices and unemployment, especially for young people, many of them highly educated.

Even though he was one of the pioneering voices backing the mandatory wearing of the hijab, or veil, by women, he carries the hopes of those wanting reform. Recently, he has sharply criticized harassment of young people by the so-called morality police.

“Happiness,” Iran’s president-elect declared recently, “is our people’s right.”

And during the campaign, Rouhani accused the outgoing leadership of reveling in sanctions as a rebuke to the West while ignoring the resulting hardships.

“It’s good to have [uranium] centrifuges running,” Rouhani declared in the third and final presidential debate, “providing people’s lives and sustenance are also spinning.”

Rouhani, who previously served as Iran’s chief nuclear negotiator, has already signaled his refusal to abandon nuclear enrichment, a necessary step for atomic weapons development. Iran says its nuclear efforts are for peaceful purposes, such as energy generation. The Obama administration suspects that Tehran seeks nuclear weapons capability, and it has not ruled out a military attack.

Israel, the target of Ahmadinejad’s most incendiary rhetoric, is not convinced that the new man will be any different. On Friday, Iranian news media quoted Rouhani during an annual pro-Palestinian rally as comparing Israel to a “wound” that “should be removed.” The report prompted immediate condemnation from Israel. But Iranian media later acknowledged that Rouhani hadn’t called for the destruction of Israel, and a video of the interview confirmed that he had been misquoted.

Brokering a nuclear deal will require persuading both hard-liners at home and doubters abroad to choose compromise over confrontation.

“He believes in protecting and maintaining the Islamic Republic, and strongly supports the uranium enrichment program,” said Alireza Nader, a senior policy analyst at Rand Corp. in Washington. “But not at any price. Rouhani realizes the extent of Iran’s economic and political crisis. It is important the U.S. gives him a fair chance to negotiate Iran out of the current impasse.”

During more than three decades as a political insider, analysts say, Rouhani has shown an ability to shift with the times, seek out new allies, curry favor with the powerful, and adjust to changing circumstances.

He has served as a top military official and parliamentarian, and has held leading positions in the national security hierarchy. He is a protege of former President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, who backed Rouhani’s candidacy after hard-liners blocked his own comeback.

Rouhani also is a longtime associate of Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s ultimate decision-maker on matters of state, although tension has been reported as Rouhani has distanced himself from the hard-liners.

“He has a managerial style of … emphasis on teamwork,” Seyed Hossein Mousavian, Rouhani’s deputy in Iran’s national security council from 1997 to 2005, wrote in an email response to questions from The Times. “He is a strategist and planner … with a clear idea of reaching goals.”

The incoming president “is beyond factionalism and factional infighting,” Mousavian wrote, and is likely to name a Cabinet that includes moderates and conservatives.

The president-elect has come a long way from the village in southeast Iran where he was born in 1948 to a pious family. His name then was Hassan Fereydoun.

The clerical life has long been a means of upward mobility for clever young men from modest backgrounds in Iran, where the predominant Shiite faith wields particular influence in the traditional culture of the provinces.

His father, a farmer who also worked as a spice trader, wanted his son to follow the family tradition and become a cleric, according to Rouhani’s authorized memoir, a 631-page tome penned by ghost writers and said to be based on long interviews with the president-elect. Even Rouhani’s paternal grandmother was a “female mullah” who taught the Koran to village women.

He was introduced to the teachings of Khomeini while still at a local seminary. Moving on to Qom, Iran’s religious center, he studied Arabic, math and Islamic law. He mingled with like-minded students who would rise to prominence in the Islamic Republic. But his family name, taken from a virtuous king in an 11th century Persian epic, was considered too secular.

“Some of my fellow theologians said to me, ‘If you become an ayatollah in the future, your last name … would be your weak point,’” the president-elect was quoted as saying. He changed it to Rouhani, which essentially means “clergyman” in Persian.

Rouhani embraced Khomeini’s teachings assailing those who would combine Islam and socialism or political liberalism. But the memoir suggested a softer side, including a fondness for pranks.

On one occasion, according to the memoir, Rouhani and his partner in mischief, Masih Mohajer, now editor in chief of a leading Iranian daily, rolled a watermelon down the aisle of a Qom classroom to the consternation of the instructor. The pair also smuggled shortwave radios into their dormitory to listen to the news.

By age 19, Rouhani was determined to meet Khomeini, who at the time was living in exile in the Shiite city of Najaf in neighboring Iraq. Travel between the two countries was almost impossible, but Rouhani hired a smuggler and succeeded in making the trip, slipping into ditches and removing his turban to hide his status as a cleric.

Upon returning to Iran, Rouhani obtained a law degree at Tehran University. During his military service from 1973 to ‘75, he met a fellow activist and theologian, Ali Khamenei, now Iran’s supreme leader. The pair attended Koran classes at the family home of Hamid Reza Taraghi, today an influential hard-line politician and analyst.

“Rouhani was and still is a behind-the-scenes man, both in the revolution, and in war and diplomacy,” Taraghi told The Times.

His increasingly provocative sermons in the late 1970s drew the attention of the shah’s secret police, the Savak, and he fled to Europe.

Rouhani studied English in Britain, but soon linked up with Khomeini and supporters in the Paris suburb of Neauphle-le-Château, where they were plotting the overthrow of the shah. The cover photo of Rouhani’s official memoir shows the future president, with thick black hair and an equally thick beard, praying behind Khomeini in France.

After the revolution, Rouhani worked to stabilize the nascent Islamic Republic. The national army was disbanded in 1980 and Rouhani was assigned to organize troops and modernize aging military bases.

One of his first acts was to issue a directive that all female army personnel wear the veil to military bases, an achievement he boasts about in his memoir.

Rouhani held a number of high-level defense posts during Iran’s 1980-88 war with Iraq and served five terms in the parliament, including a stint as deputy speaker.

In his first news conference as president-elect, Rouhani described his election as heralding a “new era,” and said he would “follow the path of moderation and justice, not extremism.”

patrick.mcdonnell@latimes.com

Special correspondent Mostaghim reported from Tehran. Times staff writer McDonnell and special correspondent Sandels reported from Beirut.