Children of Jihad: A Young American's Travels Among the Youth of the Middle East

by Jared Cohen

  Even more remarkable than the transformation I witnessed with Gita and Leila in their physical appearance was the change in their personalities that seemed to accompany the new attire. When they sat down on both sides of me wearing their bright pink and blue head scarves, they seemed more comfortable, playful, and frivolous than before. They sensed I was intrigued by the metamorphosis I had just witnessed. Their sense was right.

  Gita looked at me. “You know we don’t like to wear these. The government makes us and we hate it so much. The black we have to wear for school uniform is so ugly and if I have to wear this I will at least have it be my own.” It was remarkable; in just a few spoken words and a change in attire, the sisters showed me a powerfully yet subtle form of social resistance. While many Muslim women choose to wear the hejab, the Iranian women are not given any choice at all. In the absence of this choice, they feel as though wearing hejab or chador is forced endorsement of the regime, rather than adherence to Islam.

  Many young Iranians feel similarly about attending prayer services. While many youth in Iran would like to attend Friday prayer out of a commitment to their religion, they choose not to. In Shi’a Islam, the dominant sect of Islam in Iran, a senior ranking cleric in every major city gives two sermons at the central mosque. The first is a religious sermon, while the second usually focuses on political or social issues. Most of the Friday prayer leaders in Iran are conservative clerics, and the sermons therefore tend to have a strict Shi’a interpretation of the Quran. While they vary in their style of speech, each holds one of the three highest ranks in Shi’a Islam: grand ayatollah, ayatollah, or hojjatoleslam. The “Down with USA” and “Death to Israel” rhetoric that is often captured in the media usually comes from a Friday prayer.

  These political sermons are hardly the representative phenomena they are often made out to be: Less than 3 percent of the population attends Friday prayers. This is a shocking statistic for a country that claims to be an Islamic republic and that just a decade ago required people to attend by law. Many of those who do attend Friday prayer do so because they fear absence will result in the loss of a job or, for students, the loss of favor with the university. It is not uncommon for a bystander to see the Friday prayer venue emptying out just before the political sermon. Most Iranians view Friday prayer as a forum that has been hijacked by the conservatives, and they have no interest in endorsing the regime with their attendance. Many people in Iran view the Friday prayer as having lost its religious essence. Instead, they see it as a mere forum for the regime to galvanize its few supporters and reaffirm its ideology.

  Friday prayer in Iran is hardly the scene that it was in the initial years after the Islamic Revolution, when waves of Iranians washed into mosques throughout the country to hear the clerical icons who “liberated” Iran from the grip of the world’s superpowers. The brand of nationalism and religion that they advocated resonated in a revolutionary context. But it was not long before the prolonged Iran-Iraq War and the reality of economic hardships made everyday life virtually unbearable for the Iranian people. The leadership fruitlessly tried to use religion to keep a hold on their hearts and minds.

  Despite a massive decline in attendance at Friday prayer, the government continues to force a visible presence. Every Friday, crowds of people still walk as a mass through the streets, blocking traffic as they stroll to the mosque. But the genuine fervor that surrounded the Friday prayer in 1979 is long gone. Today, the politicization of Friday prayer in Iran attracts mainly the most devout and the coerced. The scene is almost a robotic display of indoctrination as crowds will throw their fists in the air, repeating the words of fiery clerics such as Ayatollah Jannati: “Markbar Ameerika! Inshallah! Markbar Ameerika! Inshallah!” Not surprisingly, it is often these same people chanting “Death to America, God willing,” and those the government pays, who participate in protests against the United States.

  Given the imposed regulation of wearing hejab, the sisters demonstrated to me that while removing the head scarf was not possible because of the legal consequences, the discomfort of compulsory dress codes could be mitigated. They took ownership of the repression: If the government forced them to wear hejab, they wore the hejab in a style and manner that was farthest from what Iran’s conservatives envisioned. They westernized the scarf and wore it on their own terms.

  The hejab is a fascinating topic of conversation, especially among youth. In every country in the Middle East, I encountered women with various interpretations of the hejab. In Islam, the Quran states the following with reference to concealing the body:

  And tell the believing women to subdue their eyes, and maintain their chastity. They shall not reveal any parts of their bodies, except that which is necessary. They shall cover their chests, and shall not relax this code in the presence of other than their husbands, their fathers, the fathers of their husbands, their sons, the sons of their husbands, their brothers, the sons of their brothers, the sons of their sisters, other women, the male servants or employees whose sexual drive has been nullified, or the children who have not reached puberty. They shall not strike their feet when they walk in order to shake and reveal certain details of their bodies. All of you shall repent to GOD, O you believers, that you may succeed. (Sura al-Nur, 24:31)

  It does not state in the Quran that a woman must cover her head, let alone her hair, face, and neck. The Quran explicitly states that women must conceal their genitals and their breasts. For Muslim women that I met, the hejab was a symbol of modesty; it depended on the individual if that modesty was represented from within—something women described to me as a “metaphorical hejab”—or by covering one’s head or body.

  The women in Iran, beginning with the sisters, made it very clear that the hejab had no meaning if they were forced to wear it. They emphasized how the Quran is meant to be interpreted in an evolutionary manner and therefore, it should be up to the women to decide what is meant by modesty.

  In the absence of the freedom to choose, especially in Iran, the hejab has actually come to exemplify for many the exact opposite of modesty. In Iran, it is as if there is an unofficial competition among women to see who can have the best designer head scarf, who can have the brightest colors, and who can come up with the most fashionable way to wear the cloth. It always gave me a good laugh when I would walk behind someone and see the initials “CK,” for Calvin Klein, or “DG,” for Dolce & Gabbana. I spent more time with Gita than I did Leila and one thing that I noticed was that each time we met, she seemed to outdo herself with an even more intricate and elaborately decorated hejab.

  While we waited to order our food, I shared with the girls a list of government leaders I hoped to interview while in Iran. I had typed a full two pages of leaders without much consideration for how such a list might be interpreted. Gita grabbed the list and muttered something in Farsi to her sister. I could see their faces turn from joy to disgust.

  Both girls lifted up their menus so as to hide from potential eavesdroppers what they were about to tell me.

  “Why do you want to meet with these people?” Gita asked me, simultaneously stern and dumbfounded.

  “I want to learn about the politics of the Islamic Republic.”

  “If that is what you want, don’t talk to these donkeys, they will only tell you lies, all lies! If you want to learn about Iran, they will only tell you bad things.” Then she looked at me and said with a smile and a small laugh, “Luckily you have met me and I will not let you leave without knowing Iran. But you have to promise that when you go back you will tell people the truth about how we are; that we are just like you. We are not crazy people, we are not terrorists; we are not represented by the mullahs.”

  This hospitality from the Iranian youth was not only moving, but also indicated an itching curiosity and need to connect with the outside world. A number of students throughout Iran told me stories of how they have tried desperately to do so. Some write e-mails to the Associated Press, while others use MySpace, Orkut, and other o
nline social networking sites that allow users to search for friends by country.

  Young people have no means for political or social expression, and they are shielded from a world that is becoming more and more technologically advanced. They want to be modern, but the iron fist of an archaic regime prevents them from being so. As a result, they reach out to anything or anyone that can serve as a bridge to the outside world. For the sisters and the numerous other youth I met while I was in Iran, I served as this bridge. From their perspective, they had one challenge while I was there: They wanted to demonstrate similarities between youth in Iran and youth in America and distinguish themselves from their government. They are proud of their country but embarrassed and even repulsed by their government. Gita and her hejab was an introduction to this paradox of pride and repulsion.

  I learned more about this paradox on my trip to Shiraz and Esfahan. Unfortunately, I was accompanied in this trip by Shapour, who by that time I had given a variety of derogatory nicknames including “Ayatollah Assahola.” I kept this to myself during the ride.

  Esfahan is known to be one of Iran’s greatest aesthetic treasures, with the Imam Square as its centerpiece. A truly spectacular site, the Imam Square consists of a plaza spanning two football fields, with a mosque on each side of the square. The two mosques are connected by a colonnade of stores and bazaars, selling everything from Persian chess sets to carpets and other artifacts. The centerpiece of the Imam Square is a tremendous fountain whose two streams cross about ten feet in the air.

  The Imam Square was a center for activity. I saw children playing soccer, a man and a woman snuggling together on a bench, businessmen, families of tourists, religious clerics, and shopkeepers. The air in the Imam Square—trapped by the walls of four mosques—had a purity from the car pollution that I rarely experienced in other Iranian cities. I heard the sounds of people speaking, the air blowing, and water from the fountains spraying. As I walked around the bazaar that surrounds the Imam Square, I was in fact approached to buy one type of product. Iran has a serious drug problem, but I wasn’t offered drugs at Imam Square. I wasn’t offered alcohol either. Instead, I was approached repeatedly by various individuals asking me if I wanted to buy playing cards. Because of their association with gambling, the Iranian regime has banned playing cards from being either used or bought inside of Iran. Not surprisingly, playing cards have become a hot commodity on the black market.

  As I walked toward the central fountain in the Imam Square, I noticed that the cement benches that form a perimeter around the fountain were each carefully designed with large stenciled slogans of “Down with Israel” and “Down with USA.” This was not graffiti; it was political messaging from the government of Iran.

  These slogans do not represent the people of Iran, and in fact it is more common to see advertisements and products of Western culture than it is messages denouncing America and Israel. In Tehran, in front of the old American Embassy—the “Den of Spies”—one can find merchants selling pirated American DVDs on blankets. The selection was actually quite impressive: I found action movies like The Rock, patriotic allegories like Independence Day, and more than a few skin flicks.

  Even for the many contradictions I’d already witnessed, this was pretty shocking, especially given the fact that the former embassy serves as the training ground for the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps. It is also symbolic of the tragedy of the relationship between the United States and Iran. When the shah fled Iran during the 1979 Islamic Revolution, he actively sought treatment for cancer in exile. After much debate and political disagreement, President Jimmy Carter agreed to admit him for medical treatment. Outraged that the shah would not be returned to Iran for trial and suspicious that this was part of an American plan to repeat the 1953 coup and restore him to power, protesters gathered almost immediately outside of the embassy.

  On November 4, 1979, five hundred students, led by Abbas Abdi and spiritually guided by Ayatollah Khuiniha, climbed the embassy gates and seized sixty-one hostages, later freeing six. Some scholars and journalists suggest that Iran’s current president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, was one of the students involved in the embassy takeover; however, the validity of this allegation remains uncertain. Immediately after the seizure, President Carter responded by banning the importation of Iranian oil and freezing all assets owned by the Iranian government and the Iranian Central Bank. A few months later, the United States banned exports to Iran and travel of American citizens to Iran, made it illegal to conduct transactions there, and severed all diplomatic ties between the two nations.

  The hostage crisis lasted 444 days, and during this period Iran occupied the American airwaves and “took up much of the nightly network news.” Immediately after the seizure of the embassy, “ABC scheduled a daily late-evening special, America Held Hostage, and PBS’s Mac-Neil/Lehrer Report ran an unprecedented number of shows on the crisis.”* In retaliatory mood fueled by the relentless demonstrations and anti-Americanism on display there, American politics and media contrived a picture of Iran as a country of religious fanatics, terrorists, and lawless Islamists. As was explained to me by Mohsen Sazegara, founder of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, “If you went to the embassy on every night for the first year of the hostage taking, on every street around the United States Embassy, every night you could see at least forty to fifty thousand people located over there until the morning.” He recalls that “it was like a ceremony; there were even several vendor stations to sell popcorn, tea, and coffee.”

  Today, the front walls of the seized American Embassy are divided into panels, each painted with elaborate anti-American images. One panel is painted light blue with large red letters stating, “America Shall Face a Severe Defeat.” On another panel, there are paintings of the American hostages, missiles with “USA” written on them, and American fighter jets. There are slogans all around the building saying, “Down with USA” and one panel that reads, “The United States of America, the great occupier regime, is the most hated state before our nation.” The most imposing panel on the front gate depicts the Statue of Liberty with a skull for a head. This same image is repeated in the form of a brass sculpture inside the compound of the old United States Embassy. Intertwined with the branches of trees along Taleqani Avenue, where the embassy is located, there are pieces of charred black fabric, the remains of burned American flags from the 444-day hostage crisis.

  Had Shapour been in Esfahan with me, he probably would have stopped me, but he had grown tired and gone back to the hotel. I removed my camera from my bag and lifted it up to take a picture of the government-sanctioned graffiti. As I was peering through the lens, a body jumped in front of my camera. When I looked up, I did not see police or Revolutionary Guards Corps, as I had suspected. Instead, I saw a young man of about my own age. I thought he was making a childish joke at my expense, and I was annoyed.

  He had long black hair, which he tucked behind his ears; the rest hung down to his shoulders. He wore a blue-and-white beanie that concealed the top of his head and he wore a pair of glasses with thick black frames. He was well-dressed, wearing finely pressed khaki pants with a white collared shirt and a blue sweater.

  He spoke loudly and firmly to me, as if he was scolding my actions. “Why are you taking a picture of that?”

  “Am I not allowed to?” I asked.

  “You are allowed to, but please don’t!” I lowered my camera and looked at him with great confusion. I still didn’t understand why he cared.

  “Where are you from?” he demanded to know.

  “I’m from America,” I told him.

  He waited for a moment and walked closer to me. “You must not take pictures of these things. This does not represent the Iranian people! We don’t want you to show these pictures to people in America so they will think this is us. We love the USA. If you look around and you talk to people, you will not see that we hate America. You will see the opposite. We listen to American music; we get our news from Radio Israel and Voi
ce of America. The government puts these stupid signs here, this is not us. Ask anybody, they will tell you this.”

  His name was Omid and I asked him if he would be offended if I took a picture to remember this conversation. In Iran, I couldn’t walk around with a computer and had to be careful even about taking notes because I was not authorized to be a journalist. The best way for me to remember things was by capturing particular scenes and memories on camera.

  “You can take the picture, but please explain to people that this is the government and not the people,” he reminded me.

  I reassured him and extended my hand to formalize my promise, “I will.”

  Omid invited me to take a walk through the Esfahan bazaar with him. The bazaar reminded me of an intricate labyrinth. The smells in the bazaar changed with each corner I turned. One moment the aroma of Persian tea overwhelmed me, yet just a few paces in another direction the foul stench of hanging meat usurped that delicious spicy mint smell. As I strolled through this labyrinth of shops, I saw just about every type of Persian jewelry imaginable, stores that sold religious decorations ranging from framed verses of the Quran to pictures of the revered Shi’a Imam Hussein, and what became a repetition of the same types of Persian knickknacks: boxes, chess sets, pen holders, and other wooden objects, each with intricate gold, black, and white checkered designs. Some parts of the bazaar offered more universal goods, such as everyday kitchen supplies, shoes and clothing, and machinery such as Walkmans, tape recorders, and radios.

  Omid walked me into a carpet shop that was inhabited by a group of his friends. They were all male and they sat in various positions throughout the carpet store. Some lounged on their sides, while others sat on stacks of carpets. The store was small, and while some carpets were displayed on the wall, most were piled on top of one another. I could smell the dust that had collected in this store; it was clear that business was not good. Three of us sat on small black stools and drank Persian tea, placed elegantly on a silver platter. He told them the story of how we had met and introduced me as the American who was taking pictures of the “Down with USA” slogans. The group of young guys gave me an unsparing critique of the regime: They told me they wanted the mullahs out of power and the freedom to choose their own leaders. They wanted access to the outside world and they wanted to be able to have the same social and political opportunities as Americans. It also became clear to me that this group of boys had no interest in international events. Whenever I would mention Israel, Iraq, or Afghanistan, the conversation always seemed to return to a discussion of their domestic troubles.