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The mullah wore beautiful shoes. Simple, elegant black leather shoes with laces, not the rough slippers favored by Iran's ruling class of clerics.
The shoes complemented the crisp gray pin-striped robe and matching black cloak and turban. So did the string of small turquoise-colored prayer beads that he dangled in his left hand.
During a recent chance encounter with an American guest in the glittery presidential compound, Iranian President Mohammad Khatami was radiant, even regal. As is the custom between Iranian Shiite clerics and women who are not close family members, he did not shake hands.
But unlike the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the leader of Iran's revolution of 1979, and his successor, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who sat far away and turned their gaze from this visitor during interviews years ago, Khatami smiled broadly and looked straight at his guest in an armchair close by.
The 54-year-old cleric spoke passionately about the need for women's advancement and for communication among cultures. He showed off his English, saying that he reads it better than he speaks and that he reads a lot.
"We say we love all the people in the world and we want them to love us in return," he said. "Resentments should be turned into kindness and love."
All-we-need-is-love may not be enough. Granted, Khatami is by far the most popular man in Iran, a soft-spoken, speed-reading, Internet-literate leader who has dared to say that many revolutionary policies must change.
But five months after taking office, he is finding extraordinary obstacles as he moves within the constraints of the Islamic Republic in which he believes. He admits that he knows little about the economy, whose direction is determined by a five-year plan that he inherited. He lacks a political apparatus or party to give cohesion to his goals. He is confronted by powerful political enemies who are determined to deprive him of the power to shape policy and to reach out to the United States.
Most crucial, under Iran's Constitution, Khamenei -- the "supreme leader" of the Islamic Republic -- is more important than the president, with control over the armed forces, the judiciary and the security, intelligence and broadcasting services. On many issues, the two men have sharply different views.
And in the eyes of the Clinton administration, Khatami has yet to prove he has the power or the will to curb groups and individuals engaged in activities the United States defines as terrorism and in programs to develop nuclear, chemical and biological weapons and a ballistic missile capability.
He has yet to articulate his view on Khomeini's decree that the British writer Salman Rushdie insulted the prophet Mohammed in a novel and should be put to death.
"More than at any time in our revolution we need a person like Mr. Khatami," said Ezzatollah Sahabi, a layman who was a member of Iran's ruling Revolutionary Council early in the revolution and now runs an opposition magazine. "He has tremendous popular support, but it is not organized. The other side has all the power. He is under tremendous pressure."
The Early Years: Envied Upbringing In a Clerical Family
Behind a wall in the small, dusty village of Ardakan in central Iran is the spacious mud-colored house with a stone terrace where Mohammad Khatami was born.
His mother, the daughter of a wealthy landowner, was only 15 when she married his father, a learned ayatollah who became the leader of Friday Prayers in the provincial capital, Yazd, and one of the country's most beloved religious leaders.
Sitting in the house in Yazd where she lives with one of her daughters, the president's mother, 77-year-old Sakineh Ziai, tells this story: Years before the revolution, the security police summoned Ayatollah Khatami for questioning. "But as he entered all the people bowed to him and kissed his hand," she said, laughing. "The authorities told him to go home."
The Khatami family lived an exceptionally comfortable life for a clerical family. In addition to the large residence in the center of town, they owned a summer house a few miles away with a lush garden of pomegranate trees and an enormous, deep concrete pool -- for water storage, but, more important, for swimming.
"We had no restrictions on anything," said Maryam Khatami, the president's 48-year-old sister, who is a schoolteacher in Yazd. "We could spend as much as we wanted."
Still, the Khatami children were encouraged to earn their own money, said Ali Khatami, 44, the president's brother, a businessman who lived in Fort Lee, N.J., for a year and a half while he was getting his master's degree in industrial engineering. "We made good money on the pomegranates," he said.
Unlike other clerics, Ayatollah Khatami allowed his family to listen to the radio (the news, not the music) and to read -- poetry, novels, newspapers, even books banned by other clerics.
As a child, Mohammad Khatami talked about becoming a doctor. But it was clear his father wanted him to become a cleric.
He went to Qom when he was a teen-ager to study religion; but when he wanted to study philosophy as well, his father sent him to the best university in the field, in Isfahan. It was there that he was exposed to Western ideals of freedom and civic responsibility and the notion that they could be incorporated into Islam. He also became a disciple of a firebrand preacher, Ayatollah Khomeini. 
Although some clerics avoided the military, Khatami fulfilled his two-year mandatory military service as a junior lieutenant in the shah's army. "He looked at the military as an education he should have," said his sister Fatimeh, 60, a women's rights advocate for Ardakan. "It wasn't considered support for the shah."
As was the custom in religious families, his marriage was arranged by his family, recalled his wife, Zohreh Sadeghi, 48.
The first lady is an articulate woman, the daughter of a famous professor of religious law. Seated in an armchair in the sumptuous Pink Palace, which used to belong to Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlevi, she opened her head-to-toe chador to reveal a printed head scarf, tinted brown hair and a black tailored jacket with white piping. She was wearing a heavy layer of foundation and a hint of blush.
"My father went and spoke to him and then he came to our house," she recalled, giggling. "I met him just once before we married. I do not remember how long our meeting was, but it was longer than 10 minutes. I fell in love at first sight."
Two months later, they were married.
Khatami played only a peripheral role in the revolution. As the head of Iran's cultural center in Hamburg, he organized Iranian students studying abroad and wrote leaflets in opposition to the shah, learning German along the way.
Although he briefly served as head of a publishing house and was elected to the first Parliament after the revolution, it was only after he was appointed minister of Islamic guidance and culture in 1982 that he earned a national reputation for easing restrictions on films, music, art and literature.
During that decade, he was obsessed by his work. "In comparison with other fathers I can say he never in his life had enough time to be with his children," said his daughter Leila, 22, a mathematics major in Tehran and the oldest of his three children.
But he was not strong enough to prevail, and in 1992 the Parliament forced him to resign. In an impassioned resignation letter, he complained of threats and ill will and called the "creation of "a superior culture" a "weighty responsibility" that, he said, had become impossible for him.
"He did what he had to do," said his sister Zahra Khatami, 32, a schoolteacher in Yazd. "When he felt he couldn't continue, he resigned."
He was banished to the National Library in Tehran and faded from public view. He developed a passion for the Internet, envisioning a time when Iranians in remote villages could log on to the information contained within the library walls.
He also wrote two books. In one, "Fear of the Wave," he proclaims Islam superior to Western thought, but acknowledges that the West offers something "that is one of the basic needs of human beings: freedom." Because of this freedom, he adds, the West enjoys strong economic, political, military, scientific and technical power.
His other book, "From the World of the City to the City of the World," is a survey of several Western philosophers, including Plato and Aristotle. "No intellectual who studies philosophy and politics can deprive himself of these two sources," he wrote.
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The Path to Power: A Victory Achieved The Western Way
Khatami was not supposed to become president. Ali Akbar Nateq-Noori, another midlevel cleric with the same rank -- hojjatolislam -- and the powerful speaker of the Parliament, was the designated winner who enjoyed the endorsement of the religious establishment and the majority of Parliament and the bazaar merchants.
By contrast, Khatami entered the race reluctantly, after no other viable opposition candidate surfaced and after he received permission from Khamenei. More than 230 other candidates put their names forward, but in the restrictive, elitist system of Iran's clerical politics, only four, including Khatami, were not struck down.
Many of his close family members were initially unhappy with the decision. "I didn't agree with it," said his daughter Leila. "I didn't want my father to become father of all the people."
Initially, he was supported only by an odd coalition: the former radical revolutionaries who seized the U.S. Embassy in 1979 and the reform-minded officials and technocrats close to President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, who was not eligible for re-election for a third term.
But Khatami ran a Western-style people's campaign, traveling around the country, giving lengthy interviews and addressing many of his remarks to young people and women. He talked about his hobbies -- table tennis and swimming -- his favorite philosophers and how he wished his wife knew how to drive.
Khatami had other advantages. Iranians resented the official endorsements of Nateq-Noori. Pledges by both Khamenei and Rafsanjani that the election would be free caused a larger turnout. And unlike Nateq-Noori, who wears a white turban, Khatami wears a black turban, the sign of a direct descendant of the prophet Mohammed.
Still, his political advisers were stunned that his views resonated so loudly, so quickly.
"We thought we were speaking to the intellectuals, and that it would take years to succeed," said Reza Khatami, 38, the British-educated brother of the president, who is a kidney specialist, deputy minister of health and one of his closest political advisers. "But we were wrong. The people got the message."
Even toward the end of the campaign, the consensus in Iran was that Nateq-Noori would win. But Khatami was so confident that the day before the election he prepared his acceptance speech.
At midnight on election day, after it became clear that Khatami had won, his sister Maryam called him at his home in Tehran to congratulate him. But he was already asleep.
"Tell your father to sleep calm tonight because it will be his last night of sleep," she recalled telling his daughter Leila.
The Cares of Office: Will the Changes Be Enough?
Khatami's aides acknowledge that he is extraordinarily pressured as he pushes his platform: the rule of law, tolerance for opposing views and the creation of a civil society. When he feels unfairly criticized, he issues public reminders, warnings even, that he has the people of Iran behind him.
When the Iranian soccer team qualified in December for next year's World Cup -- in which it will face the U.S. team -- Iranians poured into the streets of Tehran to celebrate. They wrapped themselves in the Iranian flag, danced and bought candies and flowers for strangers. Some women even threw off their head coverings in full view of the police, who went home. The event was a stunning demonstration of the power of the people in the face of authority, a power that could be mobilized in Khatami's favor should he be threatened.
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People close to Khamenei [the leader] seem to resent that he gets so little favorable press coverage abroad. "Iran is not just Mr. President," said Abbas Maleki, an English-speaking former deputy foreign minister who is now working for Ayatollah Khamenei. "The leader -- he's artistic. He knows about culture and civilization, I believe, more than Mr. Khatami."
Years ago, Khamenei was not so rigid in his views, but he began to turn inward after he succeeded Khomenei, who died in 1989.
"He used to be very reasonable, very open-minded," said Sahabi, the opposition figure, who has known Khamenei for more than three decades. "He played the sitar. But the clerics around him became more defensive. They monopolized power. Little by little he became distant from us."
Aides to both Khatami and Khamenei insist the two get along well. Both are clerics only a few years apart, men of ideas and descendants of the Prophet who are opposed to political ties with the United States and are determined to strengthen Iran's Islamic system of government. But they have different roles under the Constitution, different styles and different constituencies.
"President Khatami has never considered himself going beyond the Leader," said Ayatollah Abbas Ali Amid-Zanjani, an expert on Iran's Islamic Constitution. "But Mr. Khatami believes that the more freedom we have and the more rationally we treat the West, the more we will have an enlightened future. There are many high officials in our country who are not very enthusiastic about this idea. They are afraid it will turn into a wolf-sheep relationship."
The Khamenei and Khatami families are close, a relationship that was forged when Khamenei, as a teen-age religious student in Mashad, became a devoted disciple of Khatami's father. Khamenei made special trips to Ardakan to visit and the Khatami family vacationed with the Khameneis in Mashad.
"He was a unique person and there was a special closeness between us," Khamenei wrote about the elder Khatami after his death. "Even though we were 30 years apart, our ideas were just the same."
As president, Khatami consults with Khamenei at least once a week. But he does not tell him everything. Aides insist that Khatami's "message to the American people," including his proposal for cultural ties with the United States, via an interview with CNN in early January was shared with Ayatollah Khamenei only in broad terms.
Nowhere do the two men disagree more than on their view of the United States. Where Khatami sees the benefits of using the best from the Americans, Khamenei wants to prevent the return of cultural colonialism, particularly because Iranians are already so hooked into America.
"Go talk to the Iranian people and see how many of them want to go to the U.S.," Maleki said. "Then go to the American people and ask them how many want to go to Persepolis. In this area we don't have the upper hand."
Khatami has succeeded in lifting some restrictions on publishing and the arts. The Iranian newspapers are more open. Women are wearing makeup and showing some of their hair. Even the Revolutionary Guards are smiling.
But even his supporters ask how long he can keep the confidence of the people in a country where housecleaners earn more than college professors, inflation is running at 30 percent, about 20 percent of the population is unemployed and more than half the population is under 21.
"People are not poking their noses into other people's business as much," said Saied Rajaie-Khorasani, an adviser in the Foreign Ministry. "But the president has not been able to bring about very significant change. The red lines have not changed."
A heavy air of uncertainty hangs over the people around the president, and there is an unwillingness of his ministers and aides to commit themselves to fixed positions.
Even the first lady seems to feel that uncertainty. During the interview, she suddenly interrupted herself to comment about the flower arrangement on the table beside her.
Sticking up in the middle of the bowl of yellow, purple and white flowers was a single pink rose. She appeared to notice that attached to it was a hidden microphone. "There is a microphone here," she announced. "Is somebody listening to what we're saying?"
The official interpreter omitted the comment from her translation. In the hallway outside, three men with headsets were recording the interview.
So creating a civic society that begins with more openness at home and abroad takes time. Khatami himself is not certain he will prevail.
"Politicians speak to the outer level of the spirit," he said in the conversation in his office. "There is a need to have more in-depth dialogue, with a deep meeting of minds. This is my hope. But maybe I'm not capable of carrying it out."
Text: The New York Times.
February 1, 1998. By Elaine Sciolino.
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