WE MUST thank the University of St Andrews for that rare opportunity — the chance to employ with a straight face the cliché “it’s like Caligula appointing his horse as consul”. How so? Because Scotland’s oldest university has decided to award an honorary doctorate of law to former President Khatami of Iran “in recognition of his efforts to encourage interfaith dialogue”.

I kid you not. No less a person than Sir Menzies Campbell, the university’s Chancellor, will bestow the accolade on the acceptable face of violent, arbitrary clerical rule. It will come to be seen as one of the most shameful days in the university’s history — on a par with the honorary degrees granted by the University of Edinburgh to Robert Mugabe, of Zimbabwe, or the Central London Polytechnic to Elena Ceaucescu, of Romania. They, too, were once fashionable items among the appeasing classes, of which Sir Menzies is the contemporary personification.

To extend politesse to foreign potentates can be a tricky business. But at least George V agonised over whether to appoint Mussolini GCMG or the greater GCB in the run-up to his state visit to Italy in 1923.

Sir Menzies gives the impression of being quite untroubled by such doubts. Indeed, his approach is more in keeping with that of Maggie Smith in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. Like the twee Edinburgh schoolmistress who declared that “in Italy, Mussolini has put an end to litter in the streets, you know”, Sir Menzies appears to have bought into the Khatami narrative rather too uncritically.

What, then, is that narrative? Khatami was elected President in 1997 as the great white hope of Iranian and Western liberals — after hundreds of other candidates had been disqualified by the Council of Guardians, the theocrats who really run the place.

The theocrats and Khatami have performed a masterful “hard cop, soft cop” routine that has helped to stave off regime change — by acting as a safety valve for discontent at home and deluding foreigners into believing that there was a Gorbachevian reform programme that would transform things from within.

In fact, Khatami’s liberal image has bought the regime stacks of time for Tehran’s nuclear weapons programme. The attempts by Britain, France and Germany (the EU3) to persuade the Iranians not to go nuclear were partly predicated upon such an assumption. Yet Hossein Mussavian, a key official in the Iranian atomic project, boasted on state TV last August that these talks enabled the Islamic Republic to forge ahead with its ambitions.

For all his liberal noises, Khatami did not even try to change the system in Iraq. The authoritative study of victims of the regime conducted by the online database Omid: a Memorial in Defence of Human Rights charts how the serial killings of intellectuals in late 1998 took place on his watch. He first expressed sympathy for the student uprising of 1999, and then joined with his fellow clerics in welcoming its bloody repression. And the parallel legal system run by the mullahs, the Islamic Revolutionary Courts, where every basic norm of due process was routinely trampled and defence lawyers for dissidents were arrested, continued its grim progress.

And what about his contribution to interfaith dialogue? In 2003 the UN General Assembly passed a resolution expressing serious concerns about the continued persecution of religious minorities in Iran — including Sunni Muslims, who are barred from becoming president. And then there is the persecution of Shia clerics who dissent from the current form of clerical rule — such as Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri.

Khatami has got away with this because he is seen as not being fully in favour of the regime. But anyone not in favour wouldn’t be living in the elite north Tehran area of Jamaran. Nor, like Khatami, would they be using the offices of the supreme leader, Ayatollah Khamenei.

Khatami is a member of at least 11 key regime bodies, including the Assembly of Experts. As Minister of Culture and Islamic Guidance in the 1980s and 1990s, before a temporary falling out with the powers that be, he censored hundreds of books and publications. He defends the death penalty for homosexuality — while mendaciously declaring that it is in practice well-nigh impossible to receive such a punishment.

That is the essence of Khatami — now you see him, now you don’t. As has been observed, even the English translation of his remarks has differed from the Farsi. This is a man who denies that Iran’s nuclear programme is about acquiring weapons or that Iran has anything to do with terrorism. Why should we believe anything he says?

If Sir Menzies et al wanted to celebrate genuinely liberal forces in Iran — in this centenary year of the Iranian Constitution of 1906, the first such document in the Muslim world — they should have given an honorary degree to those who are paying the price for really opposing the regime. Why not give one to Ahmed Batebi, the leader of the student uprising of 1999, who cannot continue his university courses? Khatami has had it both ways for too long. Perhaps he genuinely finds the excesses of the Islamic Republic repellent. If so, he deserves the Albert Speer Award for relative non-participation in the biggest atrocities of the regime. But he scarcely merits an honorary doctorate in law from Scotland’s premier university.

Dean Godson is the research director of Policy Exchange

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