I read that as merely pious rather than Heideggerian. It is said that Khatami is fond of Habermas, and his culture minister Ata'ollah Mohajerani brought Habermas to Khatami's the Center for Dialogue Between Civilizations: "The Unrest is Growing: Habermas in Iran: Interview with Juergen Habermas on his visit to Iran," <http://www.pubtheo.com/page.asp?pid=1073>. Habermas observes:
<blockquote>During the 1990s, Martin Heidegger and Karl Popper provided the key terminology for a debate between Reza Davari Ardakani on the one side and Abdolkarim Sorush on the other. Davari is now president of the Academy of Sciences and classed with the "postmodernists." The latter were particularly drawn to the analysis of the "nature of technology" in Heidegger's later writings and linked it to the Iranian critique of Western modernity.
Sorush, meanwhile, who is currently spending a semester as guest lecturer at Harvard, personally tends toward a mystical branch of Islam, but, as a Popperian, is a resolute adherent of a cognitive division of labor between religion and science. If I understood it correctly, during this dispute Davari rose to the status of philosophical spokesman of the Shiite orthodoxy, while Sorush continues, albeit with dwindling influence, to favor an institutional division of political and religious realms.</blockquote>
Khatami's pointed distancing of himself from post-modernists, I gather, is a gesture that distances his criticism of liberalism and secularism from that by Heideggerian post-modernists in Iran, who are said to be largely opposed to reformists.
For more on the Davari-Soroush debate, see Mehrzad Boroujerdi, "Three Philosophical Debates in Post-Revolutionary Iran," <http://www.seraj.org/borouj.htm>. See, also, Valentine M. Moghadam, "Review Essay: Nativism, Orientalism and the Left," Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East (CSSAAME) XVII.2, 1997 <http://www.cssaame.ilstu.edu/issues/V17-2/VAL.pdf>.
I really don't care for either side of this debate between Popperians and Heideggerians, fascinating as it is. Iran needs a better debate, IMHO. -- Yoshie <http://montages.blogspot.com/> <http://mrzine.org> <http://monthlyreview.org/>