When Baham Fozouni, coordinator of the government department’s International Affairs Graduate Program at Sacramento State, visited Iran this year, he found things to be drastically different from his visit of two years ago.

“It was like day and night in how they dressed,” said Fozouni, who was born and raised in Iran. “Girls in makeup, with their faces in plain view.”

Fozouni credits this change, and others, to Mohammed Khatomi, the former president of Iran, and the topic of a Friday afternoon forum in the Hinde Auditorium in the University Union.

The discussion, which attracted more than 100 attendees, is part of a weekly forum that is sponsored by the Renaissance Society, a partnership between Sacramento’s retirement community and the capital campus.

Before his summer visit to Iran, Fozouni was already displeased with the former Iranian president.

“What was important to me when I arrived in Iran was to see the results of Khatomi, I was deeply disappointed in his performance,” he said. “The taxi driver even began to call Khatomi the charlatan.”

After talking with Iranians, Fozouni learned that many of them had a negative image of their president. This caused him to question his own ideas.

“In my interviews with those who disliked Khatomi, I had to look at my own stereotypes,” he said. “I found out that everyone I talked with that was deeply disappointed had no anger, some even expressed affection for him.”

Though the leader is actually in charge in Iran and not the president, Khatomi did have the power to make changes but failed at times, Fozouni said.

“In his second term he operated as a weak president, both domestically and internationally,” he said.

In July 1999, vigilantes beat a group of Iranian college students during a campus protest. And though Khatomi sent guards to assist them, the students asked the president to come to their school.

“He didn’t go,” Fozouni said. “And he told them to abandon their protests or they would ruin the country.

“For him, talking at times was sufficient and action was just secondary.”

Fozouni discovered that Khatomi, though quick on words and slow to act, did do some good in his country.

“He started a political dialogue in Iran that was totally lacking before him,” he said.

And on his travels through Iran, it was apparent that freedom of speech was in place and there was also freedom of the press, Fozouni said.

Liberal in Iran means a respect for freedom of dignity of individuals and a tolerance for individual differences, he said.

“He was the first liberal leader in Iran since the 1950s,” he said.

After his recent visit, Fozouni’s idea of Khatomi changed.

“I began to change and thought to dismiss Khatomi as a failure was to dismiss the changes that took place in Iran,” he said.

After Khatomi finished two terms, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the mayor of Tehran, won the June 17 election by 61 percent of the vote over Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, rumored to be a government insider.