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About two hours after you leave the snow-dusted streets of Tehran, after the polluted city air gives way to the warm wind above the salt flats and camel herds of the Dasht-e Kavir Desert, you begin to notice the President's dream poking its metallic spines above the horizon.

There, in the dry scrubland beneath the Zagros Mountains, is a large construction site, its empty asphalt expanse dominated by two cylindrical towers supported by large boom cranes, perhaps 20 storeys tall. Farther away, covered in scaffolding, is a foreboding dome.

This eerie, almost empty place represents the political and spiritual ambitions of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the awkward, voluble man who 18 months ago became President of Iran on stark promises to transform his country and change the world. He is the uncharismatic leader who has shocked the world with his atomic ambitions and his defiance of nuclear treaties and watchdogs, his violent threats against Israel and the United States, his open embrace of anti-Semites and Holocaust deniers, his efforts to build a network of Islamic-extremist governments and movements across the Middle East.

But it is also here, in this ultra-conservative corner of Iran, where you can see most clearly the fractures appearing in Mr. Ahmadinejad's authoritarian façade, and the forces of opposition beginning to mass against him.

Last year Mr. Ahmadinejad seemed unstoppable — the first Iranian president whose views were perfectly in sync with the ayatollahs who'd endorsed his candidacy. But for the past three months, he has become increasingly fragile and isolated. It is a development that could lead to a change of leadership — and reform and moderation for Iran — or to acts of increasingly violent desperation. It all depends on the President's personality.

During two weeks in Iran tracking this man's power and influence, I asked many people, supporters and opponents, where I might go if I want to understand him. Most pointed to a place in the desert called Jamkaran.

No, this place is not the site of Iran's underground uranium-enrichment facility. That is an hour's drive south from here, its 328 giant centrifuges buried deep in the bedrock beneath the desert outside the town of Natanz.

This potential atom-bomb factory has been the subject of a perilous cat-and-mouse game with the United Nations and the International Atomic Energy Agency, whose inspectors were expelled from Iran last month.

When you pass the facility on the highway, all you see are the hilltop anti-aircraft batteries peering into the sky, manned by young soldiers who, their colleagues say, have been told to be extra alert this month as the Americans or Israelis could attack at any moment.

Jamkaran, once an obscure mosque on the outskirts of the holy city of Qom, is Mr. Ahmadinejad's other great construction site, and home to the extremist Shia sect whose beliefs provide the apocalyptic images in his speeches and pronouncements. Its spiritual powers, many Iranians fear, are inseparable from the nuclear powers being sought by the President.

In fact, Mr. Ahmadinejad made a point of coming here this week, to reassure the clerics of Qom and to pay homage to the mosque, in advance of the “dramatic announcement” he has said he will make tomorrow, on the anniversary of the 1979 revolution, regarding Iran's nuclear intentions.

That announcement is bound to be controversial, and he has caused enough controversy internationally in the past year — with his open threats to U.S. President George W. Bush, his defiance of international bodies and his playing host in December to a conference of historical revisionists and anti-Semites devoted to “questioning” the Holocaust — to cause grave and open concern among the conservative clerics who brought him to power.

It was these clerics, based largely in Qom, who supported his unlikely, long-shot bid for the presidency in 2005. That bid was aided considerably by the banning of most other presidential candidates by the Grand Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the nation's Supreme Leader, and his pledge to launch a “second Islamic revolution” more strict and total than the first.

So it is surprising that Mr. Ahmadinejad now finds himself in the awkward position of needing to persuade the ayatollahs, who have become openly critical, to let him stay in power.

Until 2005, the combination of booming oil-export wealth and the cautiously reformist, pro-Western government of Mohammad Khatami had begun to free Iranians from a quarter-century's isolation from the world.

Mr. Ahmadinejad, elected on populist promises to reform the economy and bring oil wealth to the poor, has instead launched Iran on a lavish program to become the leading ideological power in the Middle East and to use its nuclear program (which was launched before he was elected, but had been mothballed for years) to threaten the United States and Israel.

Iran is now more isolated than it has been since the years immediately after the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomaini's 1979 revolution.

Here in Jamkaran, the subject of all this lavish construction and ideological attention is the robin's-egg blue dome of a mid-sized mosque, built in the 20th century on the site of a much older building, known mainly to a small subset of Shiites who believe in the imminent return of the Mahdi, the messianic Twelfth Imam who disappeared in the year 939. While most Shiites and almost all religious Iranians believe that the Mahdi will some day return (accompanied by Jesus Christ), devotees of Jamkaran believe that he is currently performing miracles on Earth and that he will return very soon, in an apocalyptic moment, making his appearance from the Jamkaran mosque's well.

After he was elected, Mr. Ahmadinejad's first act was to budget $20-million — a huge sum in Iran's depressed economy — to turn this mosque into his country's major spiritual attraction.

Today, this ambition is nearly complete: The Jamkaran mosque has turned into a Las Vegas-style structure, with a 20,000-car parking lot and fairy-tale minarets the size of transmission towers.

When I visit on a Tuesday for midday prayers, the parking lot is nearly empty; clearly it has been built for the sort of mass gatherings that have yet to take place here. Clustered around its edges are young refugees, some of the more than two million Afghans who have poured across Iran's eastern border in the past five years, mostly to do menial jobs or to beg. These ones are selling made-in-China portraits of the Madhi to the pilgrims, who call themselves the Mahdaviat — believers in the impending Second Coming.

Mr. Ahmadinejad is now their most famous member. His faith became apparent to the world during his address to the United Nations in 2005, when his defence of Iran's nuclear ambitions culminated in an apocalyptic vision: “O Allah, I pray to you to hasten the emergence of your last repository, the promised one, that perfect and pure human being, the one that will fill this world with justice and peace.”

He later said, in a widely circulated video, that he felt a holy aura surrounding him during that speech.

Inside the mosque, I join several hundred men crouched on the carpets of its central chamber. I take my place beside Hirsa, a 43-year-old oil-industry technician who lives in Garmsar, the desert town an hour's drive from here where Mr. Ahmadinejad was born.

Hirsa tells me that he knew the President's father, Ahmad, a blacksmith, before the family moved to Tehran, and that he believes the son will soon bring miracles to his land.

“Ahmadinejad is a great man, a man of faith, and he has made it possible for Allah to improve our lives,” he says. “I have succeeded by praying and by purifying my soul, and that is how we Iranians will succeed. We are soon going to be redeemed, God willing, and we must prepare ourselves.”

He comes here every week, and, like most visitors, he drops a note in the mosque's well, asking the Mahdi to perform a domestic miracle or to right some glaring wrong in his life. Hirsa knows people who have had blindness and arthritis cured by coming here. It is all part of the Mahdi's power, he says.

As I begin to ask about this, I am interrupted by a crisp young man who taps me on the shoulder and asks me who I am and what I am doing here. In a country where the morality police and the information ministry are constantly on the lookout for nosy foreigners like me, this sounds like trouble.

I have entered Iran without the government's knowledge, since Canadian journalists have been denied entry to Iran for more than two years, since it was revealed that Iranian-Canadian photographer Zahra Kazemi had been tortured to death in 2003 for taking photographs of Tehran's notorious Evin prison, where political and religious prisoners are kept.

Relations between Canada and Iran have deteriorated, and now, people who work with the Information Ministry tell me, Canada is “the most unacceptable country” to the Iranian regime, perhaps more so than the United States.

But it turns out this isn't trouble. The man's name is Majit, and he wants to tell me about his miracle.

“I have been coming to Jamkaran for nine years, making the long drive from the east of Tehran,” he says excitedly, “and it has made my life much easier. This place has real power.” He is 27 and has just gained admission to medical school, he says. “My friends who do not pray here, they have needed to study for a year, sometimes two years. Some of them did not gain admission. But because I prayed here every week, I only needed a month of study to become a doctor.”

Later, an Iranian friend will laugh when I tell him about Majit's miracle. “He's discovered the Ahmadinejad solution — hardly any effort or knowledge, but plenty of faith!”

NARMAK: HEAT IN THE 'HOOD

Another sort of pilgrimage, with an equally strong message of redemption, takes place every day on a pleasant residential street in eastern Tehran.

In the populist speeches of Mr. Ahmadinejad, Narmak is the “poor neighbourhood” where he has lived since his family moved him here as an infant, and where he learned to understand the needs and aspirations of the less fortunate.

In reality, Narmak is a comfortable, mainly white-collar district designed by French urban planners in the early 20th century, its small stucco-walled homes built around a sequence of treed squares with parks in the centre.

Mr. Ahmadinejad's house is in Square No. 72. In the mid-afternoon, there are four people lined up outside what looks like a ticket window built into the side of the house, with a large awning to protect them from the elements and a number of armed Revolutionary Guards patrolling the sidewalk.

I have come here to see the other side of Mr. Ahmadinejad, the rabble-rousing, working-class-hero side that won him a following as the capital's ultra-conservative mayor and was the root of his election success in 2005 — and that could soon prove to be his undoing.

The pilgrims here, poor Tehranis wearing their best clothes, have come to present their grievances, wishes and desires to the President himself, in written notes. Presidential aides staff the windows and receive the visitors' notes, perhaps 100 each day. The aides invite me inside for tea, and explain that this is a custom that began when Mr. Ahmadinejad was mayor and actually lived in this house (he now has an official residence near the city centre), that every petition is answered personally by his staff.

“We get people who have problems with the bureaucracy, with gaining admission or getting work done, and people who feel they have been unfairly treated or wrongly punished by traffic police, or people who simply are in trouble and need some money,” one staffer says. “We make sure that all of them get what they need. The President takes this very personally; he wants everyone to be listened to.”

While driving from Jamkaran, I had stopped just outside Tehran at the shrine of the Ayatollah Khomaini, where a young Iranian from the southern city of Shiraz had practised his English on me.

I asked him about his President.

“He is just like, you would say in America, a Huey Long,” he said, making a surprisingly acute reference to the Louisiana governor famed for his pork-barrel politics.

“He goes all over the country making speeches, and promises to open hospitals everywhere, and on return to Tehran, the Finance Minister says, ‘We can't afford it.' He then declares in a speech: ‘There are hands behind the curtain controlling things.' ”

This is a good summary of Mr. Ahmadinejad's economic policies. In the election, he won popular support with his pledge to “put the oil money on the tables of the people,” to redistribute wealth. This resonated with a working class that had become increasingly poor as oil prices rose, and sociologists say this, rather than his talk of a “new Islamic revolution,” was the main reason for his success. (Political polls are banned, so sociological field work is Iran's only source of public-opinion research.) In other words, Iranians voted with their pocketbooks.

Mr. Ahmadinejad has responded in an especially blunt fashion: He has increased government spending dramatically, by 27 per cent in last year's budget. He spent $1.5-billion on grants to young married couples, and forced banks to make low-interest loans (effectively grants, since repayment is not required) to low-income families and small businesses; he ordered workers' salaries increased by 40 per cent; he regulated the price of housing and set state-determined prices for numerous goods.

But the main effect of his economic policies, which have maintained the heavily state-owned economy that produces hardly any revenues beyond oil incomes, has been galloping inflation and rampant unemployment.

And in the final insult, Iran, the world's fourth-largest oil exporter, has run into severe gasoline shortages. It has had to import billions of dollars' worth of gasoline, because it has neither enough refineries to serve its people nor the investment to exploit its full reserves. More than 6 per cent of the oil it drills is lost to leakage, and there is no apparent interest in fixing the leaks because the state monopoly has little incentive to do anything.

The society, one former Finance Ministry official tells me, is “dying of petroleum poisoning.”

This is no secret to anyone living in Tehran, the most car-clogged city in the world. The government has fixed the gas-pump price at 8 cents a litre, far below the cost to produce it (Mr. Ahmadinejad introduced a bill this month to raise the price — in five years, when he will be out of office). Tehran, with 7 million people, has three million cars on the road, and 1,500 new vehicles registered every day.

In Narmak, his old neighbours, who should be his most loyal supporters, are turning against Mr. Ahmadinejad.

“This past year and a half has been very difficult for us,” says Hamid, 20, who with his father runs Istanbul Greengrocers, where the President used to shop. “Prices for all the fruit and vegetables have doubled. It's the inflation that's done it. And people can't afford to buy more than the absolute minimum of produce, because 100 per cent of their salary is taken up with rent, which has doubled.

“People around here still like Ahmadinejad personally; he's one of us. But we can't live this way. He should have a different job.”

From its very beginning in 1979, the Iranian revolution has always been an equal mixture of Islamic fundamentalism and Marxist class-struggle rhetoric. The Ayatollah Khomaini won his core support, and most of his revolution's financing, from the moneyed merchants of the Tehran bazaar, and their desire to maintain an import-sale monopoly and tax-free status has been a big part of the revolution's continued support. The bazaaris, as they are known, have long been considered the sine qua non of the regime's hold on power.

Over tea at the bazaar one morning, I speak to two of the merchants who supported the revolution from the beginning. The mood is sour — there is a sense that consumer spending has dribbled away and is not likely to reappear. And while the conservative families of the bazaar have no objection to Islamism and its social repressions, they become concerned when it starts to interfere with their livelihoods.

Sajjad, who imports Black and Decker tools and T-Fal appliances, says he is feeling the effects of Iran's rogue-state status. “We're having serious problems with making payments for our orders. Whenever the President says something about nuclear weapons or Israel, another European bank stops doing business with Iran.

“It's getting increasingly difficult to find a way to send money to the exporters. It's really hurting us and, frankly, I don't know what to do if it gets worse.”

His neighbour, who imports Braun and Philips products, fears the sabre-rattling will put him out of business. “The people don't spend money when they are doubtful — and they are doubtful now. They don't know if there is going to be a war.”

In the 1980s, Iran could get by on its own resources. But today its economy is deeply dependent on imports. Most of the cars on the road are Peugeots and Toyotas, with the Iranian-made Paykans rusting on their suspensions. Private homes, even poor ones, are equipped with imported washing machines, satellite dishes and cook stoves.

Mr. Ahmadinejad may want to keep his new Islamic revolution separate and distinct from his new economic nationalism, but the two are headed on a collision course.

QOM: A LOSS OF CONFIDENCE

Here, on the dusty streets of the most conservative city in Iran, is where it all began. The Ayatollah Khomaini started his movement here in the 1950s, lacing his Islamic sermons with polemics against the Shah's dictatorship, the first time religion and politics had been mixed this way in the Middle East. After he was expelled in 1964, first to Iraq and then to Europe, the Ayatollah drew on Qom, second only to Najaf in Iraq as the Shiites' holiest city and home to its most powerful clerics, for his support.

If Mahmoud Ahmadinejad can succeed anywhere, it will be here. But there are strong signs that even the revolution's birthplace is turning against its most devoted torch-bearer.

On the face of it, nothing has touched Qom's Islamist fervour. While in Tehran or Shiraz, you will see most women wearing only the legal-minimum head scarf, usually a colourful pattern by a French designer that reveals a lot of hair and makeup, on the streets of Qom you see only a sea of all-concealing black chadors. Music classes were allowed here, once, for a year, during the reforms of Mr. Khatami, but then were quickly banned again. The three movie theatres refuse to show anything with a woman or a musical instrument in it.

But there are two enormous population movements taking place in Qom, and they are microcosms of the Iranian dilemma. For one thing, the young generation is becoming restless.

In Iran, 70 per cent of the population is under 30, because of a huge revolution-inspired baby boom, and it's hard to find a young man or woman here who has anything good to say about the President.

“Our research shows that more than 80 per cent of the young generation of Qom want to leave, ideally for Tehran, as soon as they're married, and that the overwhelming majority of them do not support the revolution any more,” says an Iranian sociologist who has just completed a major survey of Qom's youth. The study will be published in France, because its authors fear government reprisals in Iran.

Much of their anger is directed at another boom in Qom: the 11,000 foreign students who are sponsored by Mr. Ahmadinejad's government to attend Islamic schools, often with their families in tow.

This is a hugely expensive venture, a small part of the massive state effort to spread the Islamic revolution's values across the Middle East and around the world. In Qom, the resentment directed at these privileged visiting students by the local youth is palpable.

“We have no life here, no way to make a living or change our circumstances, and all the money is going to help these Arabs who are already well off,” one young man tells me as he loiters with friends in the centre of an uptown boulevard. Until last year, they would have strolled with their chador-clad girl friends along the sidewalk, but the city government banned window-shopping in order to prevent such socializing.

I heard this sort of resentment all over Iran, in the poorest shanty towns and in the wealthy enclaves of north Tehran: Why are we helping the Arabs, why are we spending billions rebuilding Beirut and even more billions winning control of southern Iraq and western Afghanistan, why are we financing Hamas and Hezbollah and Iraq's Mahdi Army, when our own poverty and unemployment is overwhelming?

This year, that dilemma was expressed for the first time by Iran's spiritual leaders. It began in December, when student protests against the President at Tehran University were broadcast on state television — seen as a clear indication that Ayatollah Khamenei, the Supreme Leader, wanted it shown. He regulates television personally.

Then, this month, the two leading opposition groups, Akbar Rafsanjani's Militant Clergy Association and Mr. Khatami's Militant Clerics League, joined forces to call for the President's impeachment, stinging him repeatedly with accusations that his failure to introduce a market economy had been a betrayal of the revolution's values. They cited the Supreme Leader in their attacks, and the silence from the ayatollahs who oversee the government seemed to indicate that they were sympathetic.

Mr. Ahmadinejad and his opposition are in the midst of an epic battle for the attention of the Supreme Leader, and it isn't clear who will win. Hours after the President travelled to Qom this week to persuade the ayatollahs that tomorrow's nuclear declaration won't harm the country, he was followed by Mr. Rafsanjani, who told the clerics that Mr. Ahmadinejad is leading the country into a violent confrontation with the U.S. that will destroy its fragile economic foundations.

Things are changing rapidly, even here in the most conservative corner of Iran. While tomorrow's nuclear declaration, whatever it may be, is likely to create more distance between Iran and the larger world, there is a growing realization that Iran's economy and society are dependent on that world.

The United States or Israel may attack, but even a total mobilization of Iran's already heavily militarized society is unlikely to distract people from their deepening troubles. The fissures are widening beneath Mr. Ahmadinejad's feet, and his anti-American tub-thumping only widens them.

“He talked about class struggle and all that, and he said he was going to bring a lot of money into people's houses,” says Daryush Shayegan, Iran's most prominent secular philosopher. “He made a lot of promises, and those promises didn't work out. The only thing we've had so far is inflation.”

Mr. Ahmadinejad, begging for his political life while making fire-and-brimstone proclamations, is learning the ultimate political lesson: Your foreign accomplishments, no matter how grandiose, will never fully distract from an unhappy situation at home.

“After all, economic things are very stubborn,” Mr. Shayegan says. “You can't just manage an economy by fatwas.”

Doug Saunders is a London-based member of The Globe and Mail's European bureau.