Hadi Hadizadeh does not look like a man who, seven years ago, spent 128 days in a small Iranian cell under grim conditions.

During almost all of that ordeal he was kept in solitary confinement. His only break came each weekday when he was taken out of his cell for 20 minutes, but blindfolded.

Despite that treatment, he looks now to be in flourishing health at age 60. Of medium height, affable, and given to frequent smiling, Hadi appears none the worse for the persecution he suffered for supporting democracy in his native country of Iran.

However, the open heart surgery he underwent, while teaching at Ohio University in October 2004, may suggest the toll taken on him. And his troubles are not over yet. For fear of being thrown back into prison to serve a term of more than eight years, he cannot return home.

Iran continues to be a hotspot in the world. The Bush administration keeps threatening to take action to stop suspected nuclear weapon development. Some European nations share this concern, as does the United Nations.

This crisis, centered on yet another Muslim country in the mideast, has sparked my personal interest in Hadi Hadizadeh, an Iranian nuclear physicist who has lived in the U.S. for the last five years.

He is a leader of a political party that opposes the absolute power of clerics in his native country. As he told one of his judges; “We did not have a revolution to substitute one dictator by another.”

Hadi belongs to the central council of the Freedom Movement of Iran. For nine months after the fall of the Shah in 1979 the FMI had control of the government.

Under the leadership of the party’s founder Mehdi Bazargan, democracy thus returned to Iran, but only for that short period. The establishment of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini as supreme leader brought a swift end to democratic rule.

At the time of these events, Hadi was at the beginning of what promised to be a distinguished career in Iran.

After graduating from college in 1970, Hadi served two years in the Iranian army as a second lieutenant.

Then he came to Ohio University where he earned his doctorate in 1978. With this degree in hand, he returned home to teach at Ferdowsi University in Mashhad, Iran’s second largest city.

By any measure, his qualifications would appear to be excellent, but the clerics of the new regime found otherwise.

The Iranian constitution of 1980 gives virtually all the governmental power to the clergy. A group of 80 members, all of them clerics, chooses a fellow cleric as ruler for life.

The country does have a parliament with elected members, but a group of six clergy and six lawyers carefully filters candidates for this body. The judiciary, too, is carefully controlled by the supreme leader.

Hadi has nothing against the clergy as such. As he explains: “I do not disapprove of the clergy if they just deal with religion. But they say no other class has a right to rule.”

His main objection therefore is the clergy’s usurpation of power. “They have established a theocracy in place of a republic,” he charges.

In fact, Hadi professes himself a practicing Muslim, although one not entirely orthodox. He admits to having his own way of practicing his religion.

Hadi currently faces a major dilemma. Returning home, something he would like to do, would expose him to the likelihood of imprisonment. Only action by the authorities to ignore or pardon the sentence imposed on him by the courts could make it possible for him to resume his teaching career in Mashhad.

But, if he stays here, where he is currently doing research in Harvard’s physics department, he will forfeit the bail paid for him by his nephew and two friends. To free him, they pledged their apartments as bail and stand to lose about 125 thousand dollars if he does not return.

“If they call me to report to start serving my sentence and I do not go, the judiciary is going to confiscate those three apartments,” he laments.

However, if he can raise that much money here, it would discharge his debt to the three pledgers and make it possible to stay in the United States. He owns a house in his native Mashhad but, by order of the judiciary, cannot sell it unless he returns to Iran.

Though he has faced long visa delays and denials in the past at the hands of U.S. immigration authorities, Hadi’s research has no connection with the development of nuclear weapons. Rather, he works on screening devices used in medical research and for luggage examination.

A striking sign of the regard in which Hadi is held came in 2001 when 33 international Nobel Prize laureates signed a petition for his release from prison. Also his campaign for human rights in his native country has been widely recognized and honored by colleagues in physics.

Richard Griffin