Hassan Rouhani

Hassan Rouhani: The Diplomat Sheikh

On 27 September 2013, in a car leaving New York, the president of Iran took a telephone call from the president of the United States. It lasted a quarter of an hour and was the highest-level exchange between the two governments since 1979. Hassan Rouhani was met at Tehran airport by protesters throwing eggs and shoes. Less than two years later he had the nuclear agreement; three years after that, an American president tore it up, and everything he had built with it came apart.

From Fereydoun to Rouhani

He was born Hassan Fereydoun on 12 November 1948 in Sorkheh, near Semnan. His father kept a spice shop and was arrested more than twenty times for opposition to the Shah. The son later took the surname Rouhani — "spiritual," or "cleric" — though he still appeared as "Hassan Fereydoun Rouhani" on a parliamentary roster in July 1981.

He did something few of his contemporaries attempted: he pursued both educations at once. Seminary studies at Semnan from 1960 and Qom from 1961, under scholars including Mostafa Mohaghegh Damad and Morteza Haeri Yazdi — and simultaneously a BA in judicial law from the University of Tehran, completed in 1972. Decades later he added an MPhil in law from Glasgow Caledonian University in 1995 and a 1999 doctorate in constitutional law with a thesis titled "The Flexibility of Shariah, with reference to the Iranian experience." During the 2017 campaign, student organisations alleged extensive unattributed material in the theses; Glasgow Caledonian University confirmed that sources had been properly cited.

The Man Who Called Khomeini "Imam"

He was a travelling revolutionary preacher through the 1960s and 1970s, arrested repeatedly and banned from public speaking. In November 1977, at Tehran's Ark Mosque, he publicly used the title "Imam" for Ayatollah Khomeini — by several accounts the first to do so, and the usage stuck. Under SAVAK surveillance he was advised to leave the country and joined Khomeini in France, returning after the revolution.

He entered the Majlis in 1980 and stayed for five terms and twenty years, serving as deputy speaker in the fourth and fifth and chairing the defence and then the foreign policy committees. During the war with Iraq his roles were operational, not ceremonial: member of the Supreme Defence Council, deputy war commander from 1983, commander of the Khatam-ol-Anbiya Operation Center from 1985, and commander of Iran's air defence force from 1986 to 1991. He was decorated with the Fath and Nasr medals. In May 1986, when Robert McFarlane arrived secretly in Tehran, Rouhani was one of three officials in the room discussing weapons — the episode that became Iran-Contra.

Sixteen Years at the Security Council

When the constitution was amended to create the Supreme National Security Council in 1989, Rouhani became its first secretary and held the post for sixteen years, serving as national security adviser to both Rafsanjani and Khatami and sitting on the Expediency Council from 1991. This is the part of his record that his admirers rarely dwell on. After the student uprising of July 1999 he announced: "At dusk yesterday we received a decisive revolutionary order to crush mercilessly" the protesters, and he led the crackdown.

The Diplomat Sheikh

On 6 October 2003 Khatami handed him Iran's nuclear file with special powers. For 678 days, until 15 August 2005, he negotiated with Britain, France and Germany — first at the Sa'dabad Palace in Tehran, then in Brussels, Geneva and Paris. His method was to trade voluntary suspension of specific activities for the avoidance of referral to the UN Security Council. Iran completed its nuclear fuel cycle during the same period, which is why hardliners later attacked the strategy from one side and Western critics from the other. The reformist daily Sharq gave him the nickname that stuck in November 2003: the Diplomat Sheikh. He resigned when Ahmadinejad took office.

The Deal

He ran in 2013 as the candidate of exhaustion, endorsed by Khatami and Rafsanjani after the reformist Mohammad Reza Aref withdrew. On 15 June he won outright in the first round with 18,613,329 votes — 50.7 percent of nearly 36.7 million cast — against 6,077,292 for the Tehran mayor Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, and he polled unexpectedly well in Mashhad and Qom. "Our centrifuges are good to spin," he said, "when our people's economy is also spinning."

The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action was concluded on 14 July 2015: enrichment capped at 3.67 percent, strict limits on the low-enriched stockpile, and an inspection regime, in exchange for sanctions relief. An IranPoll survey for the University of Maryland put his approval at 88 percent afterwards. He was re-elected on 19 May 2017 with 23,636,652 votes, 57.1 percent on a turnout of 73.07 percent.

What the Deal Could Not Buy

In May 2018 Donald Trump withdrew the United States and imposed roughly 1,600 new designations covering terrorism, human rights, metals, mining and textiles. The Iranian economy, which had never fully absorbed the promised relief, collapsed under the pressure. From mid-2019 Iran began breaching the agreement's limits; by 2021 it was enriching to over 60 percent, the highest level it had ever reached, and producing uranium metal enriched to 20 percent. Protests broke out in 2017–18 and again in 2019–20, when more than 4,000 people were arrested after the earlier round. On 8 January 2020, in the panic following the American killing of Qasem Soleimani, Iranian air defences shot down Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752, killing 176 people. Then COVID-19.

His domestic record was mixed to poor by his own supporters' standards. He freed eleven political prisoners, including the lawyer Nasrin Sotoudeh, days before his first UN visit. He appointed women as vice presidents, the first female foreign ministry spokesperson and the first female ambassador since 1979, and the first Sunni Kurdish ambassador. But 599 people were executed in his first fourteen months, against 596 in Ahmadinejad's final year, and he maintained a policy of not publicly raising human rights questions at all. Shirin Ebadi, the Nobel laureate, said so plainly.

Why Hassan Is Called a Genius

The nickname the Iranian press actually gave him — Diplomat Sheikh, coined by Sharq in 2003 — is more precise than "genius," and it points at the right faculty. Rouhani's rare quality was an ability to operate simultaneously inside two systems that mistrust each other: the clerical establishment and the technical-legal world of international negotiation. He is a Qom-trained cleric with a Scottish doctorate in constitutional law, a wartime air defence commander who ran a think tank, a man who held Iran's top security post for sixteen years and then persuaded that same security establishment to accept externally verified limits on its most prized programme. Nobody else in the Islamic Republic had that combination, and the JCPOA — whatever became of it — was a genuinely difficult piece of statecraft, achieved against opposition in Tehran and Washington at once.

But it should be described as skill, not brilliance, and the counter-case is substantial. The "moderate" framing that Western coverage attached to him was always a translation error. This is the official who, in July 1999, announced the order to "crush mercilessly" student protesters, and under whose presidency executions did not fall. More damagingly for the genius claim, his central achievement was strategically fragile in a way he seems not to have priced: he staked Iran's economy on an agreement that had no ratification able to survive one American election, and when it was withdrawn he had no alternative. The economy cratered, the streets filled, and the system he had served for forty years eventually turned him out — in January 2024 the Guardian Council struck him from the shortlist for the Assembly of Experts, the body he had sat in since 2000. Real negotiating talent; insufficient strategic insurance.

Legacy

He has written some twenty books in Persian, English and Arabic on Islamic political thought, national security, nuclear diplomacy and constitutional law, and has run the Center for Strategic Research since 1991. Out of office he has grown sharper in public, criticising the reinstatement of the morality police and saying the 2024 hijab law aligned "neither with the Constitution, nor with justice, nor with the Qur'an and Islamic culture." His presidency remains the closest the Islamic Republic has come to a negotiated settlement with the West, and the clearest demonstration of how little such a settlement was worth without domestic power on both sides to hold it.

Achievements

• Affiliated with University of Tehran and Center for Strategic Research
• Educated at Qom Hawza, University of Tehran and Glasgow Caledonian University
• Worked as politician, diplomat and writer