Word: tehran
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...walked at first, then found a cab. But central Tehran had become an implacable traffic jam - and a gridlocked political debate. The Ahmadinejad supporters, many on motor scooters, skittered through the lines of automobiles, most of which were decked out with signs supporting the moderate challenger Mir-Hossein Mousavi. There was good-natured banter between the two groups. "Chist, chist, chist," the Ahmadinejad supporters chanted, referring to Mousavi's awkward, constant use of that word - Farsi for "y'know" - during his debate with Ahmadinejad. The Mousavi supporters chanted, "Ahmadi - bye, bye." After about an hour, our cabdriver gave...
...favorite slogans of his supporters was "Ahmadinejad is love." On election day, Nahid and I went to Ahmadinejad's childhood neighborhood, Nazi Abad, and interviewed voters. The lines at the central mosque were every bit as long as they were at the voting stations in sophisticated north Tehran. There was a smattering of Mousavi supporters, but the Ahmadinejad worship was palpable. He was kind to the families of martyrs, one man said, which was true - Ahmadinejad had lavished attention on the veterans of the Iran-Iraq war and given special preferences for university admissions to their children. "He works...
...years of the Islamic republic - especially during the Iran-Iraq war - when he served as Prime Minister. But he had pretty much disappeared from public view for 20 years, living a quiet life as an artist and architect until he re-emerged as a polite prototype of the north Tehran élite. These were people - like the two former Presidents who backed his campaign, Rafsanjani and Mohammed Khatami - who seemed as concerned with Ahmadinejad's crude populist style as with his crude populist economics. Mousavi's wife inadvertently made plain the mind-set when I asked her about her husband...
...Mousavi seemed less pretentious. On the day before the election, Nahid and I interviewed him in a building he had designed, part of an art school and gallery complex in central Tehran. He seemed an exceedingly gentle man, soft-spoken to a fault - whisper-spoken, in fact. His most emphatic moment came when we asked about Ahmadinejad's attack on his wife. "I think he went beyond our societal norms, and that is why he created a current against himself," Mousavi said. "In our country, they don't insult a man's wife [to] his face. It is also...
...sensationalism" for "domestic use" is what political campaigns are usually all about. During more than a week in Iran, I interviewed as many people who admired Ahmadinejad as were appalled by him. On election day at the Hossein Ershad Mosque in north Tehran, I spoke with Ismail Askari, the head of the taxi drivers' union in the city of Malard, just west of Tehran. He was a Mousavi supporter, but he admitted, "Most of the people in my cab have been happy with the present government...