The Ministry of Guidance Invites You to Not Stay: An American Family in Iran

by Majd, Hooman

  Before we left for Iran, Karri had scrutinized images of Iranian women on the Web and some days had returned home with shopping bags full of what she thought might pass for manteaus, holding them up for me and asking my opinion. They were inexpensive long cotton shirts that looked fine to me; plenty of young Iranian girls appeared to be wearing them on the streets, at least based on my own observation and the numerous photos on the Web. Since we arrived, we had seen similar ones in shops in Tehran, though not in proper manteau shops, which specialized in the heavier, more concealing tops that my cousins, but not their daughters, wore.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, “but she’s farangi, a foreigner.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” he said sternly. “Tell her to cover up.”

  Karri’s blond hair, meanwhile, was more than peeking out from under her very loosely wrapped scarf, but that didn’t seem to trouble the officer, or at least he didn’t mention it.

  “I tell her all the time,” I said, in a feeble attempt at humor, “but you know women.”

  “Just a warning this time,” he said, unsmiling and without a hint of emotion. “Tell her to cover up.”

  Karri was furious. It was ridiculous, she said, that in the summer weather these men were deciding what a woman should wear—especially a Western woman who hadn’t been raised in a culture where covering oneself completely was common among some women in every family, of every class. “I don’t care if I get arrested,” she said to me defiantly. Before we arrived, the idea of having to wear a scarf hadn’t bothered her, but then she actually had to wear one every day in stifling heat and had to deal with it falling off her head every time she lifted Khash, played with him in the park, or bent down to pick something up, which happened numerous times a day.

  From then on, though, we watched for the Gasht patrols, which could be spotted from a distance, and either crossed the street to avoid them or spiffed ourselves up as we walked by. (Like many of her Iranian sisters, Karri was far less intimidated by the patrols than I was.) We lived only a hundred yards or so up the hill from Tajrish Square, a busy traffic circle that seemed to be a permanent location for one or more patrols, even during winter snowstorms, and while walking down the hill, we could easily spot the green-and-white vans and patrol cars.

  Karri was stopped another time, alone with Khash, as she walked through the square on her way home. Again, a male officer gestured for her to approach him, and she simply yelled, “No Farsi!,” even though she understood well enough. He kept pointing to her scarf and manteau and saying something while the women officers yelled at him to give it up. “Khareji-e!”—“She’s a foreigner!”—they shouted back at him, she told me, and “Velesh kon!”—“Leave her alone!” He finally did give up, throwing his arms in the air and getting into his squad car, probably more convinced than ever that foreign women were a bad influence on all the girls, not just the scofflaw duffis and fenches, of the Islamic Republic.

  The days went by quickly once we had our own place and settled into our routine. We were indeed settled in Tehran, or as much as one might be, knowing that it was not a permanent condition. We had what we needed to live as middle-class or upper-middle-class Iranians do, except, in a city geographically much like Los Angeles, perhaps a car: we had satellite television, not-so-high-speed wireless Internet, a DVD supplier, a couple of good sources of liquor, a cell phone each (both with the Tehran emergency number, 115, stored in case in an actual emergency we accidentally dialed 911), bank debit cards, and an apartment that was small but comfortable.

  Our building even boasted a swimming pool in the basement, which had to be reserved in advance for use, for although it was large enough to accommodate multiple families, the building owner could not risk allowing unrelated men and women to cavort there, let alone cavort together unveiled, as the sexes are not permitted to mingle on the beaches or in any public space. That is certainly why it was built in a basement in the first place—so no stray eyes could fall on it, through a window or a crack in the wall. Karri at first thought the segregated swimming hours and windowless pool amusing but annoying, yet she soon got used to having the whole pool to herself and Khash. (In the heat of the long summer, the Islamic restrictions on life in Iran were an outright nuisance, since the same pool outdoors would not only have been a luxury that made Tehran far more bearable, but would also have provided a form of relaxed entertainment where it scarcely existed.) But as the cooler months were upon us—we even had a surprise October snow—the heated pool in the basement, even without windows, became more and more attractive a proposition for wasting an afternoon.

  The pool, like everything in Iran, was spotless and kept obsessively clean by the building staff. When we first arrived in Tehran, Karri had expressed relief at the city’s cleanliness, despite its awful pollution, and was surprised that drinking water straight from the tap was not only okay but as commonplace as in the United States or Europe. So was bottled water, hundreds of different brands, which she could buy at any deli or even at newsstands. Street sweepers and garbage collectors, who worked seven days a week as opposed to the twice weekly we were accustomed to in New York, were an ever-present sight, not just in the northern reaches of the city, where everything was pristine, but in the south, too, and in the midcity neighborhood where we had stayed for the first couple of weeks.

  The street sweeper who covered our area was almost always there whenever we left our apartment, an older white-haired man who got to know Khash and would say hello to him every day. Khash watched his every move, gathering leaves, sweeping the dust from the pavement, and picking up stray pieces of trash. Khash was so entranced by the sweeper’s twig broom that I bought a short-handled one for him, which provided hours of entertainment for him once he started walking and pure inconvenience for us, as the thin twigs would snap and make a mess in all corners of the apartment. The city’s cleanliness was largely due to a concerted effort by successive mayors, strict adherents to the revolution’s Islamic ideals, including the public segregation of the sexes and hijab rules, but thoroughly Persian in their zeal to provide as squeaky-clean an environment for the public as is possible in a city that has quadrupled its population in a thirty-year span.

  The Islamic ideals of the revolution had once been attractive enough to the general population to induce them to support it. The ideals that were articulated, though, had nothing to do with personal freedoms, and before the revolution Khomeini had in fact denied that he would enforce the hijab. Secular women who wore chadors in street protests against the shah were doing so out of respect for Khomeini, not out of religious belief, and soon after the revolution, when the hijab and modest appearance were deemed mandatory, those same women came out in large numbers to protest the state’s decision. (Few Iranian women who supported the revolution imagined that hijab would become compulsory or that swimming might effectively disappear from the list of their lives’ pleasures.) Women who defied the ban on immodest clothing or appearance then were treated harshly, in some cases beaten or violently manhandled by komiteh members—local “committees” set up to enforce the new standards of behavior. But despite a gradual loosening of standards, particularly after Khomeini’s death in 1989 and the rise of the reform movement in the mid-1990s, the concepts of the hijab and modesty endure, albeit continually challenged in different ways. Karri’s hijab is a loose scarf that covers some but not all of her hair, which, according to at least one low-ranking mullah, “radiates an aura” that makes her irresistible to men; it continued to be a nuisance to her, but she did her best to stay within the boundaries of what the republic considers modest dress.

  Other women, particularly younger ones, seemed oblivious both to those boundaries and to good taste, for not a day went by when Karri did not profess shock at the absolute disregard some women exhibited to the possibility of enticing men with their heavily made-up faces, bleached blond hair barely covered by a chiffon scarf, or a beehive hairdo with a piece of cloth perched perilously atop, as enticing as a virgin o
ut of A Thousand and One Nights, and tight manteaus that accentuated rather than covered their sometimes-generous behinds. Heels? Yes, as high as possible, making walking the sidewalks difficult and crossing the street while dodging cars almost as dangerous as climbing Everest. Of course few of these ladies ever walked very much, alighting instead from BMWs, Benzes, Lexuses, and other late-model luxury cars, and daintily dashing, hopping almost, into coffee shops, restaurants, and the odd shopping mall, assuming the morality squad wasn’t parked outside, ready to pounce.

  The number of women in Tehran wearing makeup, with hair and nails done perfectly even though lipstick and nail polish are forbidden, made me wonder where all the beauty parlors were. In my male-centric experiences in Iran, I had never stopped to wonder about them and the very un-Islamic world that they represented. All my female cousins and their daughters dye their hair, some for color and others to cover gray, and most wear makeup of some sort and paint their nails; one cousin, like many older Iranian women, wears cotton gloves while driving to avoid being stopped for the offense of having manicured and polished nails.

  Karri, who was less concerned with makeup or her fingernails, did want to have her hair done while in Iran, so we asked one cousin who lived nearby where she went for her hair, assuming it would be close and within walking distance of our apartment. It turns out that the salon was a stone’s throw from my cousin’s house in Elahieh, a chic, if not the chicest, neighborhood in Shemiran, North Tehran. I had driven past it many times but would not have known it was anything but another walled, private house on a corner of a residential street. There was no sign, and no windows, and when I dropped Karri off the first time, I waited for her to be buzzed in, still unsure whether this was what my cousin and a couple of friends had insisted was one of Tehran’s most exclusive salons.

  I, like other men, was not allowed inside, just as I was not allowed inside the children’s playhouse a block away from the salon, where we took Khash occasionally to play with other children his age. (Mothers there wanted to be able to take their hijab off while playing with or just watching their kids, but even in hijab they weren’t allowed into the exclusive and expensive health club one flight up, where they might see buffed young men sweating and in various states of undress.) In the hair salon, though, there was no activity or procedure to which the women subjected themselves that would be permissible for men to observe. The aura of their naked hair alone, washed, cut, and blow-dried might be enough to throw a mullah into paroxysms of sensual delight and was to be avoided by the pious at all costs.

  Karri told me it was exactly as any upscale salon would be in New York, or in any other Western capital for that matter, with the exception of no male presence whatsoever: no hairdressers, no colorists, no assistants, and not even a tea boy, ubiquitous in every other place of business in Iran. Although one would imagine gay men to be immune to the aura emanating from women’s hair, not even they are allowed inside, perhaps because, as President Ahmadinejad once made himself a laughingstock by suggesting, there are no gay men in Iran “like you have here” (in New York). Presumably he and his ilk imagine that Iranian homosexual men, unlike Western ones, can be tempted by a woman’s beguilement. Perhaps that’s what he meant by “like you have here.”

  One would also think that, given the phobia many Iranian men exhibit toward gays and the fact that otherwise intelligent men like Ahmadinejad think that homosexuality is a lifestyle choice made by morally corrupt Westerners, they might encourage whichever gay men they think do exist to be surrounded by hijab-less women, even naked ones, to cure them, as some mullahs believe possible, of their predilection. But no, gay and lesbian culture in Iran, like any of the mores not in strict compliance with conservative Islam, is consigned to the unseen. In a country where lavat, or sodomy, is punishable by death (usually for the passive partner, since the culture views only him as “truly” homosexual) but men holding hands while walking down the street are perfectly normal, the authorities may think they have been successful in driving what they don’t want to see underground or behind closed doors.

  But if my gaydar was as keen here as in New York, I’m certain that my own barber, his assistant, most of the employees, and some of the customers of the barbershop I frequented on Vali Asr, a ground-floor shop with expansive windows and a big sign, were gay. Not, as Jerry Seinfeld would say, that there’s anything wrong with that, but Iranian gaydar must be pretty feeble (or the feminine side of straight Iranian men extra pronounced, or both), because most people who spend time in Tehran can recognize that the revolution’s attempts to dispense with homosexuality have been spectacularly unsuccessful. As have the revolution’s attempts to change the behavior of men and women in general to behavior that is inimical to the actual values of many of them.

  At my barbershop, witnessing men getting their hair dyed was not the reason I thought some customers might be gay: Iranian men, peacocks all, have always been unashamed of primping. At a meeting with a few former senior officials of the regime, I was struck by the obviously dyed hair of one politician who spoke at length, and as I stared at his hairline for what seemed hours, it reminded me of the nouveau riche young men we’d see in cafés who were perfectly coiffed, wore the right jeans and the right watches, and conspicuously carried the right phones; many had nose jobs and depilated eyebrows. The older men, especially Islamists, are another thing altogether, as the regime once viewed paying excessive attention to grooming as un-Islamic and even derided Khatami for his elegant and too-tailored clerical garb.

  But over the years, grooming seems to have become fully accepted even in the corridors of political power. The most egregious example is one Hassan Firouzabadi, or Hassan kheeky, as some Iranians contemptuously call him, Hassan “the fatso,” for his rather corpulent figure, unusual in Iran and even more unusual among military men anywhere. The armed forces chief of staff, he has been seen variously with his hair and beard both dyed, or with one or the other dyed, or very rarely, au naturel (presumably between visits to his hair salon). An extremely powerful figure in the Iranian leadership, he is a hard-line conservative with uncompromising views, a cruel man, according to some, who wouldn’t hesitate to order his troops to kill anyone who might defy the regime.

  Why it is okay for a man to dye his hair while a woman isn’t allowed to show even a strand, according to conservatives like Firouzabadi, is a mystery, not just to people like me and Karri, but to many Iranians. One day while I was riding a bus, a woman, conservatively dressed in full black hijab, was seated behind me—in violation of the segregation rules. She even told a man who complained to mind his own business and piss off. As a morality police van passed us, she said to her companion, “Explain to us how the hijab helps Iran, and we’ll all wear it voluntarily.” At the officials’ meeting, as I stared at the speaker’s dyed hairline, I also thought how fortunate it was that hair plugs, as an alternative to the comb-overs some older men sport, hadn’t found a market in Iran. Yet.

  Perhaps nowhere in Iran is the contrast between the revolutionary vision and the reality more visible than in North Tehran. We had chosen to live in the northern reaches of the city for its cool climate, trees, and parks for Khash, and in the neighborhood of Tajrish for its proximity to markets and its good public transportation, especially the rapid transit bus line that runs the entire twelve-mile length of Vali Asr; unlike most Iranians, I refuse, except under extreme circumstances, to drive in Tehran traffic. Tajrish was a onetime village in the foothills that was now upscale and modern but that still housed many religious families. Every other house or apartment building in our immediate vicinity had a Koranic inscription carved into the wall above the entrance, a sure sign of pious families within, and black chador–clad women would emerge from the doors to go about their errands, mingling as they did with their more scantily covered peers.

  The diversity of the neighborhood was clearly visible at the bakery down the street, right by a mosque, where women in black, as well as girls and women with hair a
nd heavy makeup showing, would form a line for sangak. The hot flat bread, sprinkled with the little stones that give it its name, was baked fresh every day by teams of sweaty men who casually threw it onto a metal grate. There customers would daintily pick up their loaf, their fingers smarting from the heat, flick the pebbles off, carry it outside, and place it on a hook while it cooled down. At the fruit and vegetable stand where I would buy our daily produce, the religious and the obviously secular mixed, often exchanging pleasantries or sharing complaints. (“Buy these,” the fruit seller would say to me, picking out some less-well-formed and dull-looking fruit. “The others are to display for guests. They look good but don’t have the same taste.”) So did they intermingle all around Tajrish Square, a shopping mecca of sorts.

  Even at the upscale Tandis mall nearby—where almost every single store (Hermès, Louis Vuitton, and so on) was either a fake outpost of a European designer or carried mostly counterfeit goods of varying quality—religious families, women in chador or full black hijab walking behind their bearded husbands, mingled freely with the younger and more daring. In the coffee shops and restaurants in the mall, older ladies often gathered for lunch, some dressed very conservatively and others, sometimes at the same table, outfitted for a bistro or trattoria in New York, Paris, or Rome. (Still, the combination of heavy and at times outlandish or even grotesque makeup, surgically altered noses, injected lips, and obvious skin treatments on some women is rarely witnessed in the United States, even on Madison Avenue or Rodeo Drive.) We wondered how these women managed to get by the morality police without being immediately arrested, but I learned from a friend that some women would specifically avoid the mall on days when the green vans were parked outside, or would cover up as much as possible as they walked through the entrance and then once inside would loosen their veils.