In my 30 years as a foreign correspondent, I have interviewed many "unusual" leaders. But I do believe that I have finally found the most stunningly unusual one. Her name is Maryam Rajavi, she has been elected the "future president of Iran" by the growing Iranian Resistance, and she is driving the women-hating mullahs of Iran crazy.
To find this impressive woman, one drives about an hour outside of Paris to this lovely, leafy, languid French town. Here, in a neat compound of small buildings heavily guarded by the French police, the Iranian "mujahedin," or National Council of the Resistance, has long had its government-in-exile. What is new is that Maryam Rajavi has become a prime and remarkably adept player at the highest levels of plans to overthrow Iran's feudally theocratic regime.
"My first task is to give the Iranian people back their hope," she said during our interview. "I want to give them hope that, with our solidarity, they can overcome the darkness, hopelessness and death that has enveloped our country."
As eloquent as she can be regarding freedom for Iranians-and particularly freedom for women-it soon becomes clear that this cultured 41-year-old woman is a figure to be watched. Since its founding in 1965, originally to overthrow the shah, the mujahedin has been active, but always in the background of world news.
But this spring, from Washington to Sydney to Bonn, tens of thousands of exiled Iranians (20,000 in Bonn alone) demonstrated peacefully on behalf of the Iranian Resistance. And invariably, they were shouting, "Maryam, the shining sun, future president of Iran."
Since she was elected president last October by the 235 members of the resistance council, Rajavi has been overseeing all the organizing, suddenly very public and noteworthy, among the 3 million to 4 million Iranian exiles abroad. It is also she who is rapidly becoming the Rorschach blot of hope into which the long-suffering modern and liberal Iranians can read all kinds of hopes.
Meeting her in the mujahedin's strange little world in Auvers, one soon senses a complicated human being. There is an oddly tremulous quality about her, and with it, a contradictory feeling of solidity. This day, she was wearing a violet suit, with violet stockings and shoes and a violet scarf tied around her head, hiding her dark hair.
Indeed, it was when she began to wear the scarf over her head as a university student that her upper-middle-class parents in Tehran realized something was happening inside her. "That was in itself an open sign that something had changed," she said. "When I wanted to wear it for the first time, I had a lot of trouble with my family."
But that decision, by a "progressive" student of metallurgy engineering, was and is, to Rajavi, a sign of a real inner freedom. She is definitely not wearing the chador, the ugly black robe the Ayatollah Khomeini and the mullahs insist Iranian women wear. "That is a means to enslave women," she believes. Instead, the head scarf, part of a tradition known as the "hejab," "allows us to be active as human beings and not only as women."
If that decision was controversial, her decision in 1984 to marry Massoud Rajavi, the charismatic and respected top leader of the mujahedin, tells even more about the degree to which women of different cultures and beliefs find fascinating pathways to independence and fulfillment. (Massoud Rajavi is in Iraq most of the time with the mujahedin army, which he commands.)
For one thing, she was already married and the mother of a little girl. She had also been elected one of the very top leaders of the mujahedin. But let her tell the story:
"Because of circumstances, it was necessary to marry Massoud. I had a difficult choice to make. I had to divorce my previous husband. I felt that for any woman to be seriously involved in political work, to work for the ideals of nation and of countrymen . . . in order to be at the highest level, any factor that would impede the movement was simply unacceptable. If my role as joint leader was not a formalistic one-but one to which I was to give all my energies-my commitment could not be conditional."
Today, Maryam Rajavi and other mujahedin leaders seek to convince others that the original anti-American or "Islamic Marxist" (or whatever else) caste of this complex movement are things of the past. They say they want a democratic, free-market Iran, with a political life close to that of the European Social Democrats.
Meanwhile, she is becoming the symbol of something new: the modest but active Islamic woman. "She emerges as the antithesis of the mullah's fundamentalism," adds Ali Safavi, a mujahedin spokesman. "You cannot confront fundamentalism with an anti-Islamic culture; you confront it with a tolerant and modern Islam. Our society is a society bleeding, a society needing a symbol to offer compassion, mercy, tolerance and love. She has those attributes more than anyone."