Cyrus The Great, Muslim Before His Time?

The only predictable thing about an Iranian presidential election seems to be the season of strangeness that precedes it. In recent years, we've seen Qalibaf campaigning with donbool pop music from Los Angeles, we've heard Ahmadinejad pretending not to care about hejab. Now we have Zartosht himself on Facebook campaigning for Esfandiyar Rahim Mashai.

It has yet to be seen whether the Guardian Council will approve Mashai's candidacy in the upcoming presidential elections. Ahmadinejad's beloved is a divisive figure who makes the political establishment nervous, as though the man has direct access to some switch animating Iranian society, and his finger must be kept off the button at any cost.

But whether or not he's permitted to run, his candidacy itself is instructive, especially the recent and alleged hijacking of the Zartosht Facebook page, one of the most popular Persian pages on Facebook with over 290,000 followers. People who've liked this page in recent years out of an interest in Iran's pre-Islamic past and Zoroastrian faith are now receiving daily updates about Mashai, the Kaveh Ahangar of the modern age.

The page now features photos of Mashai meeting with Zoroastrian leaders, and promotes a new political movement in which the Hezbollahi followers of Ahmadnejad embrace a new vision of Iran and Iranianess which celebrates the Persian past and ideals of Zartosht, and uses this new vision to bypass the fossilized, corrupt clergy.

The site's previous administrators claim on separate pages to have been lured by Mashai supporters operating secretly into sharing admin control of the page, only to have it hijacked for campaign purposes. Precisely how this page ended up as part of the Mashai campaign machine remains murky, but what's clear is that Mashai and Ahmadinejad's supporters are still seeking to ride the social trend of Iranian nationalism that we see expressed in the vast popularity of a page like Zartosht.

But the response to the Mashai takeover has been fierce, with numerous comments and 'dislikes' from followers of the page saying they refuse to be taken by such naked political opportunism by men who until recently only spoke of Imam-e Zaman. The Facebook page is now linked to a separate website for Jonbesh-e Farzandan-e Koroush, whose origins are unclear but leads with an article about the refashioning of Ahmadinejad by Mashai, a refashioning that reads Ahmadinejad as a friendly egalitarian with dervish tendencies:  “With Mashai's friendship, from yesterdays' Hezbollahi a new man has been born, one that goes to New York and says at the United Nations, 'a nation that has Cyrus the Great has no need for nuclear bombs.”

The piece goes on to claim that Ahmadinejad's liberality also originates from Mashai's influence: “Pressure for freedom of dress, a delicate, realistic look at the arts and music, these are also talents of Mashai that have founds their way into Ahmadinejad's interior. Amidst all this, we can also count the declaration of friendship between the people of Iran and the people of Israel among one of the greatest shattered taboos of the Islamic Revolution. Standing before the institution of the Supreme Leader, the traditional layers of the Revolutionary Guard, the bazaar and the clergy, and also the majority of the intellectuals, all these acts are once again being led by one individual, one man.”

Whether Esfandiyar, as it seems he likes now to be called, will even feature in this election remains to be seen. But the creation of a hybrid figure – a Muslim Cryus the Great, as Ali Ansari describes in his interview with us this week – is a new notion for Iranian politics. We'll see in the month ahead whether it has any success, either on Facebook or real life.