Not only women expressed resistance to the regime through their appearance. A few young men sported odd haircuts that the religious authorities had condemned as “un-Islamic” and added thick black belts embellished with metal studs to bell-bottom jeans that had disappeared from the global fashion scene in the 1970s. All this was simply to irk government hardliners, who viewed such things as symbols of “corrupt” Western fashion. At a pizzeria down the street from the Sharzeh a throng of young Shirazis filled its two levels to do what they could to create a nightclub atmosphere. Pop tunes—banned, tolerated, officially sanctioned, it made no difference—blasted into the night.
Around the corner from the pizzeria was a small supermarket, so I ducked in to see what goods could be had in a sanctions-afflicted country. American laws may prohibit any commercial relationship with Iran, but the shelves were stocked with Heinz ketchup and Breck shampoo, Kellogg’s cereals, Revlon cosmetics, and Johnson & Johnson bandages. In the soft-drink coolers the Pepsi cans were curiously printed in Farsi.
The store was a tribute to the Iranian entrepreneurs who had set up shop in Dubai and other cities on the other side of the Persian Gulf. Sanctions may drain the bank accounts of most of the population where they are applied and pinch some of the ruling, moneyed elite, but they are almost always a boon to black marketers, smugglers, and anyone else who thrives on illegal trade. In Dubai, for example, they typically ordered more than they could ever deliver to the local markets and shipped the surplus to Iran. International sanctions may have halted the sale of airplane parts, medical equipment, and other goods easy to monitor, but the flow of consumer items continued, ready to be snapped up by Iranians hankering for a taste of America.
“Sanctions? All they are is good for business—for Iranians doing business,” a correspondent for Radio Farda, the Iranian branch of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, told me.
It was after midnight, but still the traffic hadn’t thinned. The streets had become a parade route for late-model cars inching their way between the lights. With no taxis in sight, I began walking along the line of cars, when a large SUV pulled up beside me. A young woman poked her head out of the window and asked, in clear, crisp English, where I was trying to go.
Looking for a taxi on a Wednesday night in Shiraz was a fool’s errand, she said, though not in those exact words. But she knew of a taxi stand about a mile away and offered to take me there. She opened the back door, and I got in. Her name was Fereshteh, and piloting the enormous rig was her brother, Saeed. Saeed had lived in Los Angeles for two years, working in public relations, but had returned to Iran to get married. Fereshteh had spent six months in California and had wanted to stay longer, but her visa had been about to expire, and hiding from American immigration officials among family members with American citizenship was not an appealing option, as attractive as a new life in America appeared. So she, too, returned to Iran.
“You’re American, aren’t you?” she asked, in smooth, unaccented English, echoing Arash from the Bagh-e Eram.
Answering without answering, I asked how she could tell.
“The way you were walking,” Saeed cut in. “We saw you from the end of the street. Ferri did. She said, ‘Look, there’s an American.’”
I asked them how Americans walk.
“Like you . . .” Saeed equivocated.
“How do I walk?”
“. . . Like an American.”
I asked Saeed about his life in LA and living in the U.S.
“Once you get past the politics and religion there are a lot of similarities to Iran,” he began. “We are also a society with a lot of different cultures. You have all the Spanish-speakers and everyone else who came before, the Europeans. We aren’t much different. My father is Azeri, but his father was part Kurdish. My mother is Persian—mostly. She thinks there’s also some Turkish in there somewhere. You line up a group of Iranians and there’s no one you can say that looks ‘Iranian.’ There are Azeris, Baluchis, Arabs, Uzbeks, Persians, Armenians . . .”
I felt like prodding a little. “So multiculturalism and diversity link the two?”
“No, that’s not all. We also know what it means to be a superpower. We were also a superpower once.”
“Once” was more than two thousand years in the past, but in the Persian mind, when seeking respect and affirmation, two thousand years may as well be yesterday. But there was no point in quibbling. There was a subtext here, and I knew what it said—that Iran didn’t feel inferior to the U.S., that it believed its seven thousand years of civilization, while not outweighing America’s military and economic power, at least put Iran on an equal footing. In economic terms, Iran was “old money,” slightly faded but still holding its regal air; America was nouveau riche—young, glossy, even promising, but still quite “young,” naive, and inexperienced. Seen in this light, the Iranian position in the nearly four-decade-old standoff could be summarized as follows: “You have global economic, military, and political power beyond anything the world has ever seen. We have seven thousand years of history and artistic development and cultural achievements, and we don’t need an empire anymore. We’ve ‘been there and done that.’ See us as an equal and we can do business.”
We never found the taxi stand, so Saeed and Ferri offered to take me back to my hotel. In expected, obligatory taarof, I told them they didn’t have to put themselves out, and in expected, obligatory taarof, they said it was no problem at all, that it was on their way—more or less—but the last part wasn’t expressed directly, it was what I inferred. Where Persian protocols are concerned, little to nothing is directly expressed. The subtext is all that matters, but sometimes the subtext is as transparent as waxed paper.
Zigzagging through the empty streets of Shiraz’s residential neighborhoods, we continued to dissect the American-Iranian impasse. It was self-defeating and foolish, we concluded. If the Russians and Americans could maintain diplomatic relations all through the Cold War, and in doing so avoided a nuclear holocaust, why couldn’t the Americans and Iranians?
Back at the hotel, there was still a little life left in the “Happy Hour Café.” The sleepy waiter was tending to his last customers, so I ordered a mint tea and settled back to ponder the relationship between the United States and Iran. Forty years of Cold War diplomacy, as much as they avoided nuclear holocaust, never improved relations between the Soviet Union and the United States to a significant degree. The two continued to talk past each other but learned to agree to disagree. Nevertheless, the relationship did foster a degree of understanding, if not agreement.
The lesson from all this was that better relations between countries, even the most adversarial, do not need diplomatic relations to improve. In fact, relationships might have a better chance of improving if the diplomats simply got out of the way.
The following morning offered an affirmation of my view. I had just returned to my room from breakfast when the maid rapped on the door, but a little hastily, as hotel maids do. Once she saw me she started to back out, but I waved her in. As she puttered around the room, she finally got up the courage to ask, in practiced but pidgin English, “Where—are—you—from?”
I told her.
“Oooh . . .” she oozed, her eyes widening. I sensed surprise, admiration, envy, possibly a combination of all three.
The next morning I was heading to breakfast when a voice at the end of the hall called out: “Good—morn—ing!” she cooed, as smooth and as sweet as any of the birds portrayed in Saadi’s garden.
About Christopher Thornton
Christopher Thornton is a professor of writing at Zayed University in the United Arab Emirates. He has worked as a special correspondent to the U.S. State Department’s International Information Program, writing feature stories on Arab and Muslim life in the United States for the department’s website. His essays on Iran have also appeared in the Atlantic, Michigan Quarterly Review, Commonweal, and Confrontation.
Fig. 1. Tower of chocolate at refreshment stand,
Saad Abad Palace Complex, North Tehran. A former forested retreat in the days of the shah, the area is now a popular walking area and home to numerous museums.
Fig. 2. Tile painting, Golestan Palace, Tehran. Persian art departs from Islamic strictures, which prohibit the depiction of living forms.
Fig. 3. Courtyard of Imanzadeh Saleh Shrine, North Tehran. The shrine stands next to one of the city’s most popular bazaars and the end of one line of the Tehran metro.
Fig. 4. Troglodyte village of Kandovan. Residents of the region hid in the rocky hills to escape the Mongol invasion in the thirteenth century, which devastated much of Iran.
Fig. 5. Taq-e Bostan, Kermanshah. The rock relief sculptures were carved during the fourth-century Sassanid period to celebrate the glories of the dynasty.
Fig. 6. Iwan of the Blue Mosque, Tabriz. An earthquake in 1780 severely damaged the building, under reconstruction since 1973.
Fig. 7. Entrance to the mausoleum of Ayatollah Khomeini, Tehran. At night the bright green lights illuminate a dark landscape on the highway between Imam Khomeini International Airport and the city.
Fig. 8. Fruit vendor, Qazvin. Although Western-style supermarkets abound in every city, the freshest fruits and vegetables are still found the old-fashioned way.
Fig. 9. Courtyard, Golestan Palace, Tehran. The palace represents a combination of artistic styles, from strict interpretations of Islamic design to nineteenth-century European Romanticism.
Fig. 10. Fin Garden, Kashan. Built by Shah Abbas, the site served as his sylvan retreat, but in the nineteenth century it became the spot of the assassination of Amir Kabir, one of Iran’s modernizing rulers.
Fig. 11. Entrance to the tomb of Ferdowsi, Tous. Ferdowsi is to Iran what Homer is to the Greeks and Shakespeare to the British: the country’s national bard. Ferdowsi arguably saved the Persian language from Arabization when he wrote his epic poem, the Shahnameh.
Fig. 12. Imam Mosque, Esfahan. The enormous square in front of the mosque is the most pleasant place in the city to relax on a summer evening.
Fig. 13. Children playing in pool, Naqsh-e Jahan Square, Esfahan. The surrounding square is the second-largest public space in the world, after Tiananmen Square in Beijing.
Fig. 14. Elderly couple, Abyaneh. Abyaneh is one of the traditional villages of rural Iran and a popular weekend getaway destination.
Fig. 15. Dome of Soltaniyeh, Zanjan Province. The third-largest dome in the world, after the Aya Sofya in Istanbul and the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore in Florence, Italy.
Fig. 16. Road from Chalous to Tehran through the Alborz Mountains. The area is dotted with ski resorts that Tehranis flock to in the winter.
Fig. 17. Carpet merchants, Tabriz carpet bazaar. The city is one of the carpet-making centers of Iran.
Fig. 18. St. Stepanos Monastery, Aras Valley, on the border with Azerbaijan. The complex is not only a UNESCO World Heritage site but one of the officially designated historic churches of Iran.
Fig. 19. Courtyard wall, restored Ameri House, Qajar era, Kashan. Five of these houses are now open to visitors. During the nineteenth century they were owned primarily by wealthy merchants.
Fig. 20. Khaju Bridge at sunset, Esfahan. Esfahan’s bridges are the city’s signature sight. All were built during the rule of Shah Abbas in the sixteenth century, in his effort to unify the sprawling city.
Fig. 21. Azadi Tower, Tehran. Originally named the Shahyad Tower when it was built in 1971 to commemorate the 2,500th anniversary of the Persian Empire.
Fig. 22. Pedestrian shopping street, Rasht. The center of the city is a designated pedestrian zone, which includes a park and promenade in front of the Qajar-era city hall and its signature clock tower.
Fig. 23. Tomb of Hafez, Shiraz. A copy of the works of Iran’s greatest and most popular poet can be found in almost every household.
Fig. 24. Imanzadeh Hossein Mausoleum, Qazvin. Shrines to Shiite notables are spread throughout Iran. Many major cities have one.
Fig. 25. Christmas tree and holiday visitors, Sarkis Cathedral, Tehran. The complex is one of several gathering points of Iran’s Armenian community. Beyond its walls the Tehran traffic rushes by on busy Karimkhan Boulevard.
Fig. 26. Façade of Sarkis Cathedral, Tehran. Named after Saint Sarkis, the church is the center for the Armenian Diocese of Tehran.
Fig. 27. Tabatabaei House, Kashan. Another restored house that was owned by the city’s wealthy merchants in the nineteenth century.
Fig. 28. Restored Sultan Amir Ahmed Bathhouse, Kashan. Like elsewhere in the Middle East, the bathhouse in Iran was the focal point of social life, where business was conducted and gossip exchanged.
Fig. 29. Rooftops of Masouleh, Gilan Province. The town was constructed on a steep hillside so that the roof of one house became the aerial terrace of the hill above it.
Fig. 30. Farmhouse, Gilan Rural Heritage Museum, Rasht. Eighty structures from various provinces have been relocated to this open-air museum to preserve Iran’s rural tradition.
Fig. 31. Mullah in the courtyard of a madresse (religious school), Esfahan. The city is well known for its centers of Islamic learning, giving it a reputation as one of Iran’s more conservative cities.
Fig. 32. Relief sculptures, Persepolis. The processional staircase is one of the highlights of the ancient site, and its relief carvings are some of the finest and most well preserved in Iran.
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