If Mahmoud Ahmadinejad loses this election, Soraya Roify will be heartbroken. “He’s very brave and a great man. He’s tried hard to take society back to the early days of the Islamic Revolution, when people believed in its values, and I wish he could finish the job.”
Mrs Roify, 28, is married with one young daughter. Her father was killed while fighting in the Iran-Iraq War when she was five months old. “Before Ahmadinejad, people were forgetting about the martyrs,” she says. “He said we should take care of the martyrs and their families. With the others it was just slogans.” She says his policies helped to win her a job in a bank and to give her access to a low-interest loan to buy her simple, ground-floor flat on Tehran’s eastern fringe.
She subscribes wholeheartedly to Mr Ahmadinedjad’s Islamic fundamentalism. She is very religious — “a true believer”. She regularly visits her mosque, wears black from head to foot and a tightly wound headscarf that conceals her hair. She never wears make-up. She prefers the sexes to be segregated. She hates the idea of alcohol or tobacco. Her only vice, she says with a smile, is tea.
Mrs Roify is neither censorious nor humourless but admits that she is shocked by some of the women she sees in affluent north Tehran, with their thick make-up and headscarves worn far back on their heads so their dyed hair is clearly visible. “They are real extremists. Even in Europe you don’t find girls wearing so much make-up,” she says. “They make men go after them. They have no values or respect. Such characters I condemn, especially in an Islamic society.”
Mr Ahmadinejad’s morality police are required because these women “want to abuse their freedom in society”, she says. “Ahmadinejad has said it’s a temporary solution but it’s necessary.”
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Both her husband and her brother are Basiji — members of the volunteer militia that enforces Islamic values. Mrs Roify shares Mr Ahmadinejad’s hostility towards the US, at least in cultural matters. She considers American values decadent and blames them for the loose morals of some Iranian women.
She has a television but watches little more than the news, and a DVD player, but watches Western films only when offensive scenes have been cut. “We prefer these kind of things to be censored,” she says. She reads no Western books. As for Western music? “I really dislike it,” she says.
Before she became a mother, she and her husband would occasionally go to the cinema. Nowadays they take their daughter to the park.
Mrs Roify is content with her lot, but still mourns for the father who gave his life for the Islamic Republic in which she believes so fervently. “I still have this grief in my heart,” she says — and for Mr Ahmadinejad’s recognition of her sacrifice she will always be grateful.