Iran's new head brings dialogue into the open

There are portraits of Rimbaud and Braudel on the walls of Morad Saghafi's neat little Tehran office, along with piles of his latest magazine. And like the rest of his tiny staff, the francophone Mr Saghafi is a happy man, rejoicing in the extraordinary election victory of Mohamed Khatemi - not because of the new president's personality, but because of what his success represents.

"The people asked their candidate to take care of their day-to-day life and not only of their life after death," Mr Saghafi says, and pours himself a glass of scalding hot coffee to help him endure the baking hot Tehran afternoon.

Could the defining moment in Iran's domestic life be better described? "The first thing everyone in the United States, Europe and elsewhere should realise," he goes on - the words confident and carefully phrased - "is that Iranian society is a lively political society, and that the things that made people come into the streets have changed in 15 years. They voted before because they supported anti-imperialism and the holy war and the dream of constructing a unified religious society. But this time the people went to the polls for love of freedom and more tolerance."

It is something dear to Mr Saghafi's heart. For his four-year-old magazine Dialogue is slowly becoming one of the most respectable intellectual publications in Tehran, a stimulating collection of articles on Iran's cultural and sociological problems, along with interviews with French philosophers, even with Gary Sick, the US National Security Council adviser during the Iranian hostage crisis.

"We want to talk about the Arab-Israeli problem, about our problems with America, our non-rational attitude on counting only on the Russians for our foreign policy," Mr Saghafi says. "We can be very frank and we think this is because we didn't try to play the role of martyrs and say we are persecuted. What we print is what we think we can print. We try to know what the limits are - because [that's the] best way to push the limits a little bit further. We want to talk - and talk about the problems we can't find in the newspapers. Our latest issue contained seven articles about democracy and how it could be implemented in Iran."

Dialogue is a quarterly whose circulation has risen from 600, when it began four years ago, to 4,000. A quarter of the budget comes from advertising and the magazine costs only 50 pence. Mr Saghafi, who is 40, is an electrical engineer and keeps the rent at bay with two other jobs - but this has not lowered the magazine's standards. The forthcoming election issue is likely to be among its most stimulating, asking readers to understand the implications as well as the results of the poll.

"Khatemi had three times more votes than [the speaker of parliament Ali Akbar] Nateq Nuri ... more than 90 per cent of the electorate voted - which means that Iranian society is not politically dead.

"Civil society here is very proud and is looking for a place to talk; at last they have this possibility with Khatemi."

Dialogue in no way opposes the Islamic revolution - indeed, it totally accepts the Islamic Republic as a nation that is going to last. Mr Saghafi was outraged and frustrated when a Scandinavian reporter asked him if there would one day be a counter-revolution. "He had read and understood nothing about us," he says angrily. "I said to him: `I'm just sending my child to school for the first time. It is an immense amount of work for a government to send 19 million children to school for the first time - so do you think this is a government that is expecting a coup?' He was ridiculous."

Morad Saghafi's little magazine and its graduate founders are important because they represent the intellectual society that has been waiting for a Khatemi to win the presidency. They were not uncritical of the new president, who holds a BA in philosophy and an MA in education, but have shrewdly noted that "his mind became more open after each speech he made", and, "as minister of Islamic Guidance, he gave a new life to the Iranian press".

Iranian intellectuals do not fall into the Western trap of believing that a power struggle is inevitable between President Khatemi and the conservative clerics who supported his rival in the elections. True, as Mr Saghafi points out, "every politician is limited by his electoral entourage"; but cohabitation between conservatives and liberals is not impossible in the next government.

Mr Saghafi, however, sitting in an office that smells of printer's ink and fresh coffee, has few illusions. No one here has forgotten the euphoria that greeted President Rafsanjani's first election victory eight years ago - and how his ambitions became blunted by the bureaucracy and internecine power-struggles that followed. "I don't know if Khatemi will continue as he has campaigned or become part of the establishment like the others," Mr Saghafi concludes.

"Yes, we all remember how happy we were at first after Rafsanjani's election."