A Letter for Tomorrow

A Letter for Tomorrow (; also translated Letter for the Future) is an open letter first published on 3 May 2004, by then-President of Iran Mohammad Khatami, addressing Iranian citizens, especially the youth. The letter was later published as a book by Khatami Culture House Institute. He promised to write the letter at a 27 April 2004 meeting with youth. Naming Iranian blogger writing under the pen name A disqualified Citizen, comments that Khatami, by calling his statements "A Letter for Tomorrow" means that "today's electorate and the current population of Iran lack the qualifications to fathom the depth of meaning stashed way in its luminous pages. It will have to wait for the people of tomorrow to catch up with the President's intellectual depth and realize that his apparent failures were veritable triumphs in disguise." Summary and themes Khatami asserts that the Iranian reform movement aimed at the "modernization of religious culture" in order to render it compatible with democracy; it wanted to create a "free, prosperous, and happy" Iran. Iranians had demanded "liberty, independence, and progress," for more than a century and despite numerous setbacks had not relented in pursuit of these aims. Placing the Iranian reform movement in the broader context of Iranian history, he implicitly compared the problems he faced with those encountered by Mohammad Mosaddeq. In this letter, Khatami readily admits to his own errors and unfulfilled objectives, conceded that not all his reforms had been successful, primarily because reforming legislations had often been blocked by the Guardian Council. He nevertheless contended that the achievements of the reform movement were not negligible and insisted that change would continue, citing a gradual softening of the hardliners' position, as comparing the past, the opponents were now more obliged to speak the language of law, reform, and democracy and to shun myopic views; violations of the private sphere were much less frequent than before.