Before Barack Obama spoke to the Muslim world from Cairo in June, the president did some sightseeing. His first stop was the Sultan Hassan mosque, a 700-year-old marvel of Islamic architecture, where he and a hijab-clad Hillary Clinton gawked at towering arches and intricate carvings. But Obama didn't stop at the mosque next door, known as Al Rifai, which houses a monument that explains much about the politics of the wider Middle East. A few steps past its entrance sits a thick marble slab cordoned off with velvet red rope. The pale green stone bears a coat of arms and an ornate inscription written in Persian: "His Imperial Majesty, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, Shahanshah of Iran."
This is the tomb of the last Iranian monarch, who fled his country just before Ayatollah Khomeini's 1979 Islamic revolution and was given asylum by Egypt's president, Anwar Sadat. That was more than an act of humanity; it was an affront to the revolutionary mullahs in Tehran, who had been demanding their deposed leader's extradition. Sadat had been feuding with the mullahs since he had negotiated peace with Israel at Camp David in 1978. At the time, Khomeini had called Sadat a traitor to the Palestinians and to Muslims everywhere, while Sadat, a Sunni Muslim, branded the Shia Khomeini "a lunatic madman ... who has turned Islam into a mockery." Death did nothing to lessen the feud: When Pahlavi died of cancer in July 1980, Sadat granted him a state funeral and buried him at Al Rifai, in a room by the tombs of two former Egyptian kings. And, when a young Egyptian soldier named Khalid Islambouli emptied his machine gun into Sadat a year later, Tehran promptly issued a postage stamp in Islambouli's honor, named a street in Tehran after him, and painted a nearby building with a four-story mural of the glorious martyr (he was captured and executed).
The Cairo tomb and the Tehran avenue go a long way to illustrate the bitter relationship between Egypt and Iran--a relationship that has only degenerated further in recent months. And it appears that official Obama administration policy will be to exploit that tension to the fullest. That explains why the president is cozying up to Egypt's authoritarian dictator, Hosni Mubarak--saying nothing at Cairo University about Mubarak's penchant for political repression and torture. Obama clearly appreciates that this Egyptian-Iranian blood feud well serves his struggle to reach peace in the Middle East and stop Iran from becoming a nuclear-armed regional superpower. Democracy and human rights can wait.
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