Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is coming to the United Nations this week.

If he holds a news conference, he will, of course, be challenged on Iran’s suspect nuclear program and his unrelenting rhetoric about Israel. But here’s a question that might get at the Iranian president’s vision for his country:

“Why have you jailed two Iranian doctors who pioneered the treatment of Iranian victims of HIV/AIDS?”

Kamiar and Arash Alaei, who are brothers, worked a near miracle by starting a broad AIDS awareness and treatment program in an Islamic republic that emphasizes a puritan image.

In the mid-1980s, Iranian officials viewed HIV/AIDS as a “Western disease” and were reluctant to acknowledge that it existed in Iran. But the disease was spreading among high-risk populations, especially drug addicts in prisons who reused dirty needles.

In 1999, the Alaei brothers, then newly minted doctors, learned of the high infection rate in a prison in their hometown of Kermanshah. With difficulty, they assembled community and government backing to treat the addicts and their family members.

The program gradually spread to clinics in cities across Iran, giving out clean needles and condoms. Religious leaders in the holy city of Qom endorsed it.

I met Kamiar Alaei at a conference in Washington last spring. Bubbling with enthusiasm, he described how he laid out the need for HIV/AIDS clinics to clerics, emphasizing that “saving a life is a priority in Islam.”

“We designed a model,” he added, “but we didn’t call it an ‘AIDS clinic.’ We never used the term ‘sex workers,’ but spoke of ‘vulnerable women.”‘

These brothers no doubt helped prevent an AIDS epidemic. With opium flowing in from Afghanistan, Iran’s rate of heroin use is high, and the risk presented by the use of unclean needles is enormous.

Perhaps this is why, as reported by McClatchy Newspapers’ Hannah Allam, Ahmadinejad came out in favor of distributing methadone a year after his election. (Some of his Cabinet ministers said, however, that AIDS was not a priority, and labeled the handbook produced by Arash Alaei as an embarrassment.)

Still, the World Health Organization named the Alaei brothers’ clinics the best-practice model for the Middle East and North Africa. The brothers held training courses for Afghan and Tajik medical workers, and they worked with the Asia Society on HIV/AIDS programs.

“They were doing great work, sharing best practices on HIV/AIDS around Asia with experts from around the world,” says Jamie Metzl, executive vice president of the Asia Society. “They were doing such a great job of helping the most disadvantaged people in Iran.”

So tell us, President Ahmadinejad, why are the Alaei brothers in jail?

One can view these arrests as part of the Iranian government’s current crackdown on activists and academics. Another of those arrested in August was Mehdi Zakarian, a scholar slated to spend the current academic year at the University of Pennsylvania. His focus, according to William Burke-White of Penn’s law school, is how to reconcile sharia law with modern conceptions of human rights.

As for the Alaei brothers, Iranian news reports say they have been charged with fomenting “a velvet revolution.” That’s shorthand for trying to organize civil society against the regime.

But here’s the irony: Kamiar Alaei described to me how he was hoping to increase scientific collaboration with U.S. medical experts in a way that avoids politics. Inspired by the history of U.S.-Iranian medical cooperation in the 1960s and 1970s, he started a “health diplomacy” project that brought U.S. medical students to Iran to work with Iranian counterparts.

“We wanted scientific collaboration, like ping-pong diplomacy,” he told me.

Is this what scares Iranian officials?

Or perhaps the Iranian government worries that the next U.S. president may propose more engagement with Tehran, which would unnerve Iranian hard-liners who need the threat of U.S. attack to rally the public.

Or maybe Ahmadinejad is worried that his own public may be getting restless, given nearly 30 percent inflation. Iranian presidential elections are in June 2009.

Yet none of this explains arresting the doctors Alaei.

“They were genuine patriots who loved their country – medical doctors trying to help those who wouldn’t be treated,” says Karim Sadjadpour, an Iran expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “It’s so egregious.”

When Ahmadinejad meets with American experts on Iran this week, he will be asked about the Alaei brothers. Their arrest indicates a government that fears the best and the brightest of its own people.

Trudy Rubin is a columnist and editorial board member for The Philadelphia Inquirer.