City of Lies: Love, Sex, Death and the Search for Truth in Tehran

by Ramita Navai

  ‘Hey man, I’m sorry. I deserve all the punches you throw. I was only teasing you. I think you’re cool. It’s the tough guys like the twins who are the idiots.’ Ebbie fished out a handful of fluff-covered raisins from his pocket as a peace offering. Morteza chewed on a few before speaking. ‘So why did you join then?’

  ‘My mum’s a terrible cook,’ Ebbie deadpanned. Morteza began to laugh.

  The following week the boys waited outside the Commander’s office. Morteza was the first to be summoned inside. He began the recital in his mellifluous voice, ‘Those who oppose (the commands of) Allah…’

  ‘I can’t hear you. Stand here boy.’ The Commander gestured to Morteza from behind his desk.

  He started again, ‘Those who oppose (the commands of) Allah, And His Messenger will be, Humbled to dust; as were, Those before them: for We…’

  The Commander stood up and walked towards Morteza, who backed away. The Commander did not stop advancing until Morteza was up against the wall. The Commander’s stomach pressed hard against Morteza’s chest. Morteza’s voice grew louder, ‘Have already sent down, Clear Signs. And the Unbelievers, (Will have) a humiliating, Chastisement…’ The Commander clenched his buttocks as he ground his pelvis into Morteza. Morteza continued to recite, eyes on the floor, ‘On the Day that, Allah will raise them, All up (again) and tell them, Of their deeds (which), Allah has reckoned and, Which they forgot, For Allah is Witness, To all things…’

  When the Commander started to pant, Morteza began to cry. He was struggling to get the words out. The Commander stopped, a look of surprise on his face.

  ‘The path to God is always painful, but why are you crying? Is your spiritual connection with Him making you feel uncomfortable?’

  ‘No sir.’

  ‘It is a sin to cry when speaking God’s words. You’d better have a good excuse for this crying?’

  ‘I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.’

  ‘I will forgive you but only because you have learnt your homework. You must not be scared by the spiritual awakening that happens in us when we are at one with God. Do you understand me? Or shall I tell your parents about this?’

  ‘I understand you. Please don’t tell my parents.’ The Commander nodded. Morteza felt overwhelming relief and gratitude to him for showing such leniency.

  Ebbie was called in next. The Commander took the longest with him. Ebbie emerged silent and sullen.

  Within a few months, Morteza was madly in love. He thought he would accept a grisly death in exchange for Ebbie taking him in his arms. It was not the first time Morteza had been in love with a boy. To his parents’ shock, he had repeatedly exposed his erect penis to his cousin Jaffar when he was seven. They did not realize that, at that young age, Morteza had felt the first pangs of sexual desire towards a boy.

  Ebbie knew it. Yet he was unperturbed. He revelled in the attention. He was used to the eccentrics and oddballs that were vomited up on the streets. The bulk of Ebbie’s education had been in the company of labourers, black-market traders, street kids and prostitutes. They had filled his mind with all that was possible; it did not matter to him if it was condemned. His uncle was a part-time transvestite who wandered the streets in a dress and lipstick; some people thought he was mad and left him alone, others spat on him. Ebbie accepted Morteza without question or judgement. Because of this, Morteza came to trust him more than he had trusted anybody else. Ebbie was the only one who knew that Morteza picked and dried flowers as a secret hobby, or that he liked to touch silk chadors in the bazaar.

  The changes happened quickly. Far quicker than Morteza could ever have imagined. For the first time in his life, he began to feel accepted. His uncles now patted him on the back. The local baker, a member of the Basij unit of bakers, served him and other basijis before anyone else. When he entered secondary school, his teachers made the basiji boys classroom monitors. When enrolment for the Basij took place at school, Morteza was asked to help.

  He was experiencing the pride and power of respect, and it was because he was a part of something big and powerful. The Commander said there were millions of Basij members across the land. In reality, nobody really knew how many of them there were, but they had units in schools, universities, mosques, factories, state institutions and private businesses. They were in towns and villages and even tribes in all corners of the country. They were everywhere.

  Morteza’s own views were not changing so much as being formed for the first time. The lectures were having an effect. Islamic scholars thundered about the dangers of moral decay, titillating the boys with enough morsels of lascivious detail to keep them interested and entrusting them with enough responsibility to keep them excited. The boys were wide-eyed with pride when they were told that they were guardians of their citizens’ virtue. A local mullah enraged them with stirring tales of class inequality, underpinning the threat against the Islamic Republic of Western-imported promiscuity.

  The majesty and romance of war were instilled in regular lectures by heroic veterans who had fought on the front lines against Iraq. The boys were electrified, and left desperate to fire futuristic weapons straight out of films and experience the purest love they would ever encounter, that of brothers in combat. They were shown videos of Basij training camps. Over a pumping soundtrack, men in fatigues bounded over mountain terrains, bombs exploding around them as they fired their automatic weapons. Afterwards, the boys would be reminded of the invincibility of the Basij force. If they were to be slain in honourable action, they would be venerated for the indisputable glory that awaited them in death. The highest service a Basij could give was to sacrifice his life in war. It was a win-win situation.

  Sometimes it felt as though Iran was already at war. At the mosque and on the news they would hear that Zionists controlled the world; that Israel could invade Iran at any moment. Newspapers ran shrill headlines: ISRAEL ANNOUNCES DATE IT WILL ATTACK IRAN.

  The Supreme Leader’s response always gave the boys hope. At a speech in Mashhad he had said: ‘If Israel makes a wrong move, we’ll level Tel Aviv!’

  The Basij gave Morteza purpose and focus. Supplication to God and country strengthened his resolve to fight his debased feelings towards his sex.

  As the boys entered puberty, a long line of clerics attempted to dampen their lust with lectures on the dangers of desire. The lessons only succeeded in arousing the boys’ anger. Anger that they could not fight the urge. Anger at those who indulged. Anger at women who posed a temptation.

  Morteza’s anger was mostly aimed at himself, for inadvertently enticing the Commander’s libido. Morteza thought the Commander could tell that he had been built wrong and he felt responsible for the weekly abuse, with the Commander continuing to rub against him until he cried. This must be what happened to boys like him.

  The Commander invited a black-turbaned ayatollah to give morality lessons – dars-e akhlaagh – to the boys. The black turban perched on his head was his ace of spades, marking him out as a descendant of the Prophet. Through tireless self-publicity, the cleric had elevated his status to that of a leading purveyor of modern ethics and standards, as well as his bank balance. He only ever travelled in his white Mercedes. A huge billboard of the Ayatollah’s smiling face stood on Vali Asr, near the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting network, with an offer of his services at reasonable rates. The Commander had haggled ferociously with him for a discount on a series of lessons for the boys.

  The arrival of a celebrity cleric was one of the highlights of Morteza’s year. Even Gholam the caretaker was beside himself that such an exalted and virtuous cleric would be gracing his mosque. He had seen the poster and he had heard the cleric’s adverts on the radio; he spent three days scrubbing and demanded his wife buy a new chador. Gholam had asked if his daughters could stand behind the door and listen to the cleric’s holy counsel. He was berated for even thinking this would be acceptable. His daughters might still look like little girls, but they were dangerously close to bleeding age, which was ban
ishment age at the mosque whenever the basijis were near.

  The Ayatollah’s lectures crystallized Morteza’s resolve to fight his urges by devoting himself to God through his work with the Basij. But he could hardly bear to listen as the Ayatollah lectured extensively on the scourge of homosexuality. He would lift passages from the Koran, quoting paragraphs about Lot, who was punished by God for sodomy. Mostly he free-styled, crackling with repulsion as he told the boys gay men were lower than dogs and pigs and were to blame for Aids. With each new session, Morteza realized the magnitude of his sinful thoughts. After the fourth session, Morteza swore to himself he would never see Ebbie again. That was not hard, for Ebbie had stopped turning up. Morteza guessed why, but the two boys had never spoken of what the Commander did to them in his office. Morteza had heard that Ebbie had started smoking sheesheh in the local park with a bunch of down-and-outs.

  A year later, Ebbie disappeared.

  ‘He’ll turn up, he always bloody does,’ his father said. But he never did. Morteza cried when he heard the rumours: that his body had been found near Shoosh, where the shrunken corpses of drug addicts surfaced from time to time.

  The Commander retired the same year that Ebbie went missing. A new commander of the Basij unit was appointed. Commander Abbas Yazdi wore a black and white kuffieyh scarf round his shoulders as a mark of solidarity with his Palestinian brothers. The Basij sessions took a more political turn: Commander Yazdi fed the boys with revolutionary stories and gave them reading lists. Morteza found a new hero in Ali Shariati, a Sorbonne-educated academic who was imprisoned under the Shah and who died before the Islamic Revolution. Shariati had unleashed a revitalized appreciation of the Islamic faith on the masses before his death, cleverly fusing Western philosophy and sociology with the principles of Shia Islam to create a doctrine that had class war, revolution and Islamic puritanism as its cornerstones.

  Morteza’s Hezbollahi uncle had recognized Commander Yazdi’s name: he was a renowned war veteran and an original revolutionary who had worked his way up the ranks of the IRGC, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, also known as Sepah. Among his peers, Commander Yazdi had a reputation as a fair and incorruptible man. He also detested clerics. In the early days of the Islamic Republic, in the 1980s, Commander Yazdi had been the chief bodyguard of a prominent cleric. The cleric was an ultra-conservative and a vocal champion of stoning; he believed in the literal interpretation of the Koran and rigorous adherence to Islamic law. He was also under threat of assassination by the MEK. When the cleric was admitted to hospital, an informant had reported that the MEK were going to strike. Commander Yazdi stationed his men around the building and nervously paced through the wards, hand on gun. The MEK came for the cleric on the third day. A nurse had questioned a man dressed as a doctor. She knew immediately from his faltering response that he was an impostor. She shouted for help and he darted towards a back staircase. Commander Yazdi reached the stairwell in time to catch a glimpse of him and fired a shot. Somehow the assassin managed to escape. As Commander Yazdi neared the cleric’s room, he panicked. The soldier guarding it was nowhere to be seen and the door was ajar. He took his gun out of its holster, edged closer and peered in. The soldier was lying on top of the cleric, who had his arms wrapped around him, pulling him down. Finally the cleric eased his grip and the soldier shuffled towards the door. As he emerged, Commander Yazdi slammed him against the wall.

  ‘What the fuck was going on there?’

  The soldier’s face flushed red with embarrassment. ‘Sir, you got to help me. He does this the whole time. He says holding me like that is for my spiritual development, so he can transfer God’s energy to me through his body. One thing it doesn’t feel is Godly. I don’t know what to do!’

  Commander Yazdi was furious. He marched in and told the cleric exactly what he thought of his ‘spirituality’. The cleric told him to relax, and that it was hard for a common man, so far removed from God, to understand the workings of religion. Commander Yazdi marched out, pulling all his men from the operation. At a disciplinary hearing, at which a dishonourable discharge looked imminent, he made the charges against the cleric.

  ‘Yes, we know. He’s also been caught touching little boys. Listen, we applaud you for standing up to him. It shows you’re a man of morals. But what can we do? You know his links. It’s one of those things we have to let go,’ the investigating officer had said. Commander Yazdi’s charges disappeared, replaced with a commendation for excellent behaviour. But he could not let the case go, passing the allegations to a brigadier-general. He was in luck. The general had never liked clerics. He also happened to be a trusted confidant of one of the country’s most influential politicians; but despite being kicked out of parliament, soon enough the cleric returned to public life. Commander Yazdi stepped back from his rising career in disgust. He insisted on teaching young basijis in the hope of instilling proper values in the new generation.

  By the time the protests of the contested elections of 2009 started, Morteza was spending most of his time with the twins, who he saw as exemplars of masculinity. Mehran had already left. He had resigned when some of the boys in the group started stopping cars in the neighbourhood, intimidating those who played music too loudly. ‘I don’t want to be the arsehole that hassles people,’ he had said, looking at Morteza.

  At the hosseinieh the boys watched videos of rampaging protesters. State television was tirelessly reporting on these crim-inals who were threatening the security of the state. The boys heard about a basiji called Saaneh Jaleh who had been martyred in the line of duty, shot by a demonstrator. State television had broadcast a photo of a bearded Jaleh with his basiji colleagues. In fact, unbeknown to Morteza and his class, Jaleh had most probably been killed by a government sniper; friends of Jaleh declared he was not even a member of the Basij and that a picture of his Basij membership card had been Photoshopped by Fars, a news agency linked to the Revolutionary Guards. Jaleh was, they said, an anti-regime Sunni Kurd and art student, and the authorities had hijacked his death for their own propaganda.

  Yet the boys wanted retribution for the killing of one of their brothers, and they were itching for some action. But they were deemed too inexperienced to be sent out into the fray. Older basijis gleefully described their street battles, showing mobile-phone footage of beatings and mass arrests. Morteza and the boys went out during the second week of the protests, on motorbikes donated by the twins’ father, Haji Ahmadi. They had not been allowed near the action by the security forces, but the petrified looks on people’s faces as their bikes neared gave them a thrill. Morteza did not feel the same. He was overwhelmed with sadness, which in turn made him angry at his wretchedness. He had taken to berating himself out loud: You stupid idiot, what’s wrong with you? Once Khadijeh had heard him, but she had said nothing. She was relieved that Morteza was fighting his weaknesses.

  A week after the protests started, Morteza heard Mehran and his family shouting Allah Akbar, God is Great, in the dead of night from the rooftop of their home. It was the cry of dissent, the same chant protesters had used against the Shah. Morteza was scared for Mehran’s family; he knew that his unit were trawling the streets, listening out for that cry so they could storm the homes of those who dared to chant from their roofs. What Morteza did not know was that another Basij unit did storm Mehran’s house, but that the commander had sent his boys away and let Mehran’s family walk free; he did not agree with the violence against the demonstrators. Morteza also did not know that across the city some basijis had refused to beat protesters and had deserted.

  After the demonstrations ended, out on the streets the Basij were more hated than ever. Grand Ayatollah Montazeri, one of the world’s highest-ranking Shia clerics and one of the founders of the Islamic Revolution, had publicly condemned the Basij’s involvement in the violence. Montazeri had already been sidelined from power and put under house arrest after speaking out against the mass killings of political prisoners in the 1980s.

  At a footbal
l match, a few hundred supporters chanted at a crowd of basijis: kos-e-nanat, ‘your granny’s cunt’.

  The protests changed the boys’ allegiance to the Basij. It was now much more than a hobby; it was a matter of life and death. High-ranking Basij commanders briefed the boys on crowd control, on using weapons against the public and on obeying orders to shoot.

  The tops of the trees on Vali Asr had been swallowed up by the night. On either side of the street, hundreds of dusty tree trunks disappeared into a black sky that pressed down onto the road below. Morteza, Abdul, Majid and the Ahmadi twins were standing near the intersection of Vali Asr and Parkway, a few hundred yards from Pop Stereo, which sold top-of-the-range sound systems for thousands of US dollars. On the way, Morteza and the boys had walked past a phone box on Vali Asr on which someone had daubed: DEATH TO THE DICTATOR. They had stopped to scrub it off.

  They spoke in short, fast bursts, their speech speeded up by the excitement of their first real mission as basijis. They had been given a Colt and a pair of handcuffs each. The group began to unload the pick-up truck a few yards behind a new government poster: MY DAUGHTER, I’M TALKING TO YOU: IN GOD’S EYES, BY PRESERVING YOUR HEJAB YOU ARE SAFEGUARDING THE BLOOD I SHED.

  For no particular reason other than the thrill of it, the boys radioed to the team that had been stationed at the northern end of Vali Asr, just past Tajrish Square. Both teams were setting up checkpoints, and had been instructed to stop anyone they deemed to be involved in immoral or dubious behaviour.

  That turned out to be mostly attractive females. The Ahmadi twins waved a car over. Two pretty girls were manically readjust-ing their headscarves.

  ‘What time do you call this to be out alone, dressed like that? Where are you going?’

  ‘Just home,’ one of the girls squeaked. The terror in the girls’ faces roused the boys’ spirits and their nerve.

  ‘Where have you been? Both of you get out.’