Descendants of Cyrus

by Thornton, Christopher;

  I recalled the comment of another friend, who told me how the love of wine expressed so profusely by the fourteenth-century poet Hafez was treated in classes on Persian literature: “We were told that Hafez was using wine symbolically, that when he talked about drunkenness he was really referring to his relationship with God. We all knew that was ridiculous. We laughed about it. We knew what Hafez was talking about.”

  Niloofar’s complaints about the education system confronted issues that struck at the core of Persian society: “In the stories the students read in class men and women are presented in very traditional gender roles, and always there is the message that this is what society should be like. But these days everyone knows that it isn’t like that at all and never will be. Some of the very conservative leaders would like women to go back to their traditional roles, but we know it’s never going to happen. This creates such a contradiction. Everything we see in society tells us something else.”

  Higher education was not immune from criticism.

  “So much of it is a monologue,” Niloofar went on. “There should be a lot more exchange of ideas, a dialogue, going on in the classrooms. Students should be allowed to question what they’re told, not necessarily to contradict it, but to ask critical questions about what they’re learning.”

  These were the kinds of topics that flirted with the vague and ill-defined red lines—lines that were drawn and redrawn depending on which faction within the faction-ridden government was holding power. But the result was always the same—the newspaper was closed down. One day the entire staff would simply be told not to report for work. They were, in Niloofar’s words, “fired.”

  “There was never any security,” Niloofar continued. “We never knew how long we would be working or how long we would be out of work. It could be a month, six months, a year, even two years. In the end we would always get permission to open up again, because we applied under a different name. But we would have the same staff, or most of the same people. Some found other jobs, but it wasn’t easy. We usually started the new paper with all or most of the same people.”

  The obscurity of red lines was a conscious strategy, I had heard before, from a couple of friends who had never worked as journalists for a reformist newspaper but had long experience navigating the dos and don’ts of the Islamic regime. They lived together, unmarried, illegal in Iran but unofficially “tolerated,” or officially—the distinction is always intentionally vague. Called the “white marriage,” the practice has become more popular in recent years, as economic hardship has prevented any long-term planning on matters such as marriage for so much of the population.

  “It’s a way to maintain control,” the male half of the couple told me, “not to allow anyone to know clearly what is permitted and what isn’t. That way there is always a level of fear in the people, and fear puts everyone on guard. It’s the same not only with free speech but other aspects of society, like the Islamic dress code. At times it seems that the rules are loosening. There won’t be any arrests for hijab violations, but then there will be a crackdown and many women will be arrested on charges of ‘indecency.’”

  Another friend of mine was caught up in one of those crackdowns, which typically take place at the beginning of summer, when lighter, looser clothing is more conducive to the punishing Persian heat. She was coming out of a supermarket when a police van in the parking lot was being loaded with women violating the government-imposed standards of modesty. All the way to the police station she berated the officers: “How long have you been trying to enforce this, tell us what to do, what to wear? You think we’re ever going to listen to you?”

  And so it went, all the way to the police station. The policemen ignored her, as they could, having been on the receiving end of such diatribes many times before. She had experience in this as well. This was her second arrest for “indecency.” At the station she had to listen to a lecture from a mullah on proper Islamic behavior and sign a statement promising not to offend again. Her father had to appear with a proper hijab for her to wear before she was allowed to leave, and that was the end of it—until next time.

  Imprisonment, arrest, persecution—all are tender themes to explore in Iran because they have a lengthy history. Northeast of central Tehran is a prison dating from the nineteenth century that once held not only common criminals but those who crossed the nineteenth-century red lines in their criticism of the ruling order—political prisoners in today’s terminology. Today it is a museum, part of which recreates the prison conditions of nineteenth-century Iran in the original facility. Another section was a much more modern detention center that is also now a museum, paying homage to the prisoners held there in the final years of the rule of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, whose authoritarian streak drove his reign into the depths of dictatorship.

  In 1957, four years after the CIA-backed coup that toppled popular prime minister Mohammad Mosaddegh and threw open the door for the reign of the second Pahlavi, the American intelligence agency assisted the shah in setting up his own secret police and spy network. It went by the acronym SAVAK, which stood for Organization of National Intelligence and the Security of the Nation. It had sixty thousand members in its prime, and an administrative staff of several thousand more. The SAVAK was charged with ferreting out malcontents who might stoke rebellion against the ruling order, censoring the media and other forms of expression, and, as expected, “interrogating” prisoners. The means employed were drawn from the torture practices used by most authoritarian regimes, which led to the death or disappearance of many in custody. One specialty was the bastinado, beating the soles of the feet with a wooden stick, causing excruciating pain.

  Iran’s refuseniks were held in the newer addition to the nineteenth-century prison, now a museum showcasing the repression and brutality that the 1979 revolution sought to overturn. Inside the reception area the walls are covered with black-and-white photos of some of the inmates who passed through. One of them is Masoumeh Jazaveri, whom the SAVAK had caught with microfiche and recordings of speeches of Ayatollah Khomeini, then in exile. She was arrested while making a phone call to cancel a meeting because she feared, correctly, that SAVAK agents had been tailing her. At the time she was also carrying a stolen gun, which may not have been a proverbial “smoking gun” but did seal her conviction.

  Masoumeh now works at the ticket desk, where she can eye her mugshot high up the wall on the other side of the room, and share stories of her incarceration with curious visitors. She displayed characteristic Persian hospitality, inviting me into her office for a cup of tea and a few minutes of reminiscences. She had bright eyes and was serene and confident, appearing perfectly at ease in her surroundings, in spite of what she had once endured within the same walls.

  “We had no heat in the winter and no air-conditioning in the summer,” Masoumeh began, describing the conditions at the prison. “There were five or six of us in every cell, and there was no toilet. Once in a while we would receive a little extra meat, and we would give it to the women who were weak or pregnant. Sometimes one of us would receive gifts, and they were always extra food along with necessary items like hygiene equipment we could never get in prison. Again, the food would be given to the weak women and those who were expecting children.”

  Then she added, almost impossibly: “I actually have very good memories of that time.”

  Masoumeh became one of the women on the receiving end of the others’ charity. While in prison she gave birth to a son, now thirty-six years old and living in Tehran.

  Soon enough came the chaos of the Islamic Revolution. One day the prison was quickly overrun with revolutionaries demonstrating against the rule of Mohammad Reza. Masoumeh was in one of the first cellblocks to be liberated. She fled to a medical clinic, where she was given a change of clothes so as not to be identified.

  Masoumeh divorced her husband after hearing that he had been working as an informant for the SAVAK. He may have been the one to have turned her in, or it could have b
een one of his friends. She doesn’t know. After prison she worked for a while as a teacher but was relocated far from home after word got out that she was supporting Mir Hossein Mousavi in the 2009 election. Behind her desk is a picture of herself with Zahra Rahnavard, the former candidate’s wife.

  In the end she was forced to take early retirement, which led to the job taking tickets at the prison museum reception desk.

  I asked her what she thought of the leaders who had ruled Iran since the Islamic Revolution. Mohammad Khatami, another reformist cleric from the 1990s, she said, was a “nice man.” I asked what she thought of America’s leaders. At the mention of former president Barack Obama she became rhapsodic: “Nice man!” she exclaimed, throwing her hands across her chest.

  What did she think of the current state of Iran? Was this the country she envisioned almost forty years after the revolution? With proper Persian obtuseness, she replied, “I never thought there would be this kind of criticism, so much fighting within the government.”

  And what kind of Iran would she like to see in the near future, ten or twenty years down the line?

  With equal Persian brevity she had an answer for that too, and it was in tune with the times: “I’d like to see less corruption,” she replied, “and I wish all of our intelligent young people wouldn’t feel they had to leave Iran to find success in their careers.”

  Masoumeh’s last wish was the most important, not only for the Iran of the present but any Iran of the future. The brain drain phenomenon had long been crippling the country, as university graduates in every discipline lined up at Western embassies in the hope of gaining residency, and a future, anywhere there was greater freedom and chances of a better life—economically, politically, socially—in other words, anywhere but Iran. Many university students chose their course of study based on the employment prospects it might offer outside Iran. English translation had become a popular major. A friend of mine earned a master’s degree in foreign languages and found a pathway to migrate to Canada. Her brother was working on a PhD in abstract mathematics at the University of New Brunswick and did not plan to return to Iran.

  No conversation on Iran-U.S. relations could conclude without mentioning the current American president, Donald J. Trump. Then Masoumeh dropped her characteristic Persian reserve and spoke with atypical Persian clarity: “He is mad! He knows nothing about the world!”

  I thanked Masoumeh for the cup of tea and her stories and left to stroll for a while around the park-like grounds. Places that served as settings for the most reprehensible human horrors, like the Auschwitz compound in Poland, or the Khmer Rouge detention and torture center in Phnom Penh, had a way of dressing themselves up in the most everyday exteriors, which today only magnify, rather than conceal, the enormity of the crimes that took place hidden behind them. Around the prison, both the nineteenth-century blockhouse and Mohammad Reza’s twentieth-century addition, leaf-littered pathways cut across well-kept lawns, and the streets that defined its borders were spared the nerve-straining traffic of central Tehran. Cars and delivery trucks trundled along with the casual ease of daily life.

  To an outsider Tehran can feel like a city in a time capsule, one that experienced the tumultuous revolution in 1979 and appears, on the surface, to be caught in a phase of posttraumatic shock. Forty years have passed, but the chants of “Death to America!” still ring out at Friday prayers when global events call for a denunciation of the “Great Satan.” But it has become a hollow, lifeless phrase, drained of the revolutionary fervor of 1979. The “Down with the USA” mural, accompanied by mockups of descending missiles on the American flag, still stretches the length of a high-rise tower in central Tehran, but it, too, is little more than a relic of an era and little more than another feature of the Tehran cityscape. And November 4, the anniversary of the takeover of the American embassy, is still commemorated outside the compound with the ritual burning of the American flag, but it has lost its meaning, as rituals do when they are repeated too often.

  It has all gotten a little stale. The Great Satan of 1979 is not the Great Satan of 2019, and today’s geopolitical realities are not what they were in 1979. Yet the revolutionary spirit, such as it exists, and its rhetoric, has not progressed much beyond 1979. A regime hardliner may argue that the geopolitical outlook of the Great Satan, and its methodologies, have also not changed since 1979, which may be true, from the hardliner’s point of view, but revolutionary movements, like any political force, need to refresh themselves from time to time, to retune their message, to reshape their ideology to keep abreast of a changing world. The Islamic Revolution, like so many others, has become a spent force, saddled by the baggage of its own doctrines, political as well as social. After the overthrow of the shah they offered nothing to Iranian society, nothing that would improve life in Iran.

  The result is that, despite the liberalizing trends fought for over the decades by counterrevolutionary forces, Iranian society has largely stagnated or, more correctly, been squelched. Iran has a lively contemporary art scene and its film industry is arguably the most accomplished in the Middle East, but the restrictions on all political, intellectual, and creative activity have mercilessly stifled what would otherwise be a thriving and vibrant society.

  “This is dead country,” a friend once told me, a remark that was a bit extreme, but it conveyed the acute sense of loss felt by many Iranians that the Islamic Revolution brought. Postrevolutionary Iran was another country, another society, another day-to-day reality from the Iran of the 1970s.

  “My father liked to go to the Café Naderi,” my dinner partner at the Iranian Artist’s House told me. “It was where all the artists and intellectuals would hang out, talk about art and politics.”

  The Café Naderi was opened in 1927 by Khachik Madikians, an Armenian entrepreneur who also owned the hotel where it is housed. Throughout the twentieth century it became a focal point for artists, poets, and journalists. Today it prides itself on having preserved its original atmosphere by having retained the same tables and chairs, silverware, and décor, though framed photographs of Ayatollahs Khomeini and Khamenei now hang above the serving counter, where they compete with a nearby wall adorned with an array of photos that represent a who’s who of prerevolutionary creative and intellectual life.

  Behind a brick wall lining Taleqani Street stands perhaps the most poignant symbol of the Islamic Revolution. The former American embassy, renamed the U.S. Den of Espionage and now a museum, is dedicated to showing what hardliners would call American malfeasance and intrusion in Iranian affairs. It may be the starkest and most resonant time capsule in all of Iran. Little has changed since the mob of student demonstrators—the Muslim Student Followers of the Imam’s Line—scaled the walls and took control of the compound on November 4, 1979. At the time, sixty diplomats and marine guards were still at work in the embassy and soon became bargaining chips in the longest hostage crisis in history. U.S.-Iran relations have been sucked into the same time capsule, where they have remained for forty years, stagnant except for regular spates of bristling acrimony.

  The walls of the compound on Taleqani Street are decorated with anti-American murals, which must be refreshed from time to time, because they had changed slightly from when I first saw them in 2009. There was the Statue of Liberty with the face in the form of a human skull, the outline of a handgun filled with the Stars and Stripes, a lengthy quote of Ayatollah Khomeini denouncing American imperialism, and the ubiquitous “Down with the USA” stenciled in red, white, and blue. But like the building façade expressing the same sentiments a short distance away, these too have become an invisible part of the Tehran landscape. Pedestrians stroll past them without a notice, just as they ignore the government “news” put out over the state-sponsored networks.

  “Prophet Mohammad is the true way,” preached the English-language radio station I was able to listen to through the satellite TV connection in my hotel room. “The Islamic government has brought peace and justice,” it trumpe
ted. It is hard to imagine who the audience is for this tripe, for the slice of the population with enough English ability to comprehend it is the better educated, Western-friendly class that deplores the regime and any radio messages it puts out. The target audience had to be foreign visitors in three-star hotel rooms like myself, in a half-hearted effort to make us believe that these pronouncements were the common sentiment on the “Persian street.”

  When I was there in 2009 the former embassy compound was still a headquarters for the security services operated by the Revolutionary Guard and therefore off-limits to visitors. Now it welcomed the public, even representatives of the American public, like myself, and with typical Persian hospitality.

  “Welcome home,” the ticket taker at the entrance said, after asking my nationality.

  Passing through the entrance, I could have been stepping onto the set of Argo, or back into the far more surreal setting of 1979 Tehran. I had to give the movie’s producers credit for coming up with a convincing location for shooting the embassy scenes at the beginning of the film. The actual embassy was designed in 1948 and modeled after American high schools of the 1940s. It was completed in 1951, two years before the CIA-sponsored coup that ousted Mohammad Mosaddegh. The cinematic replacement was the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in the San Fernando Valley, in suburban Los Angeles, which has become a treatment center for substance abuse.

  The film also conveyed, quite accurately, the spasmodic revolutionary fervor that swept Iran. The stairways and offices have been left as the diplomats abandoned them on November 4, 1979. One exhibit features the shredder used to destroy reams of documents that the Iranian government claimed were evidence of American crimes. After the takeover, master rug weavers were employed by the Islamic government to piece together the thousands of strands of paper. In the hallway that runs behind the banks of offices overlooking the courtyard, the walls are covered by newspaper clippings reporting the events of that day, accompanied by the same photos that have become iconic in the West—blindfolded diplomats being led out of the main door among mobs of students chanting anti-American slogans. At the far end of the hall a cluster of rooms displays office machinery and electronic equipment meant to serve as proof of spying and other acts of subterfuge going on in the “Den of Espionage.” But for the routine visitor it is hard to sort all this out, or to extend any degree of credibility. The gadgetry may be little more than the usual collection of tech hardware, circa 1979, that any large-scale embassy would have had on hand to manage its daily duties.