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

by Majd, Hooman

  Not all young women, of course, push the boundaries of Islamic decency in Tajrish, or even elsewhere, particularly not the women who work as salesgirls in shops and pharmacies, tellers in banks, waitresses and hostesses in restaurants, or baristas in the numerous coffee shops that have sprung up in a city that once swilled tea almost exclusively. Every employed woman has to adhere to a quite strict dress code, for no matter what the owner of any establishment or business believes, no matter whether he or she is secular or pious, no one can risk being shut down for having created an unvirtuous environment. Every coffee shop and restaurant has a sign advising its customers to abide by Islamic dress, and while some owners might be relaxed about enforcing the rules, especially in areas less likely to be raided, others have staff who will plead with girls who’ve let their scarves drop to their shoulders, telling them to cover up or leave.

  But many women who work still wear makeup, sometimes a lot of it, perhaps as a sign to others that they are not quite what they appear to be. The coffee shop at the bottom of the hill from our apartment, which served pretty good espresso and sold excellent South American coffee beans (not easy to come by), employed an attractive young woman with bright red lipstick who befriended Khash the first time we walked in. Whenever Karri or I strolled by the shop without intending to go in, he would point to it and inevitably insist that we do so—which kept us unnecessarily caffeinated throughout our stay in Iran. The woman would fuss over him, cooing and playing with him, and he would flirt back, smiling and laughing and generally being way more adorable than even delusional parents could believe. She always wore a green bracelet, the mark of a Green Movement supporter, and even green shoelaces in her sneakers—she clearly identified with the reformist movement that had been crushed, but not completely vanquished, two years earlier. (So did a young woman we met in a park, who also wore a green bracelet; she once tried to get Khash to make the V sign with his fingers, “like the fetneh,” sedition, she said, laughing.) One day while we were walking home from a park we saw our barista in the street, in her trademark sneakers and green laces, and jeans; but she wore no formal manteau or hijab, just a scarf lazily thrown over her jet-black hair, the ends falling on the shoulders of a plain white shirt. She was with a boy, probably her boyfriend, judging by their body language, and she called out the minute she saw Khash in his stroller. She held him and kissed him, while the boyfriend exhibited a nonplussed expression, and I wondered about her life. In all likelihood she had protested the reelection of Ahmadinejad in 2009, she wasn’t happy with the turn of events since then, and she needed to show the world she was still “green.”

  But was that it? Had the youth of Iran, the vanguard of the movement to bring about much-needed change, given up on their own revolution, thirty years after their fathers’ and mothers’ revolution? Was flashing a dash of green the most they could do? The question proved difficult to answer. Almost every time we saw the Gasht-e Ershad patrols, Karri wondered aloud why Iranian women just don’t refuse to go along with state decrees on what they could and could not wear, especially after they were willing to protest an election so vehemently; if a million women removed their head scarves on a hot day, she reasoned, what could even seventy thousand cops do? I had the same thought, except that getting a million women or a million Iranians to do anything together is a monumental task under the best of circumstances; it would require a level of organization that the government could quickly uncover.

  But it did seem incongruous to us that the state crackdown—on everything from mal-veiling to more important civil rights, such as a free press or freedom of assembly—did not fan the flames of discord, as the shah had done in 1978 and as Arab governments had in 2010 and 2011; instead it seemed to render Iranians all the less willing to challenge the state. After the massive protests of 2009, one might have expected the Arab Spring two years later to energize the Iranian opposition movement, perhaps even lead to a Persian Spring. But some Iranians bought the government line that the fall of Western-backed dictators was a blessing for the Islamic Republic; others worried that the Arabs didn’t know what they were getting themselves into—an Islamist takeover of Egypt was a foregone conclusion, as far as they were concerned. And a majority simply either were not much interested or were weary of having tried and failed to challenge the authority of the Supreme Leader.

  It was easy for us, a secular Iranian and his American wife, to decide what Iranians should do to confront the regime, what they should prioritize, and what kind of country they should have, and it was certainly easy for anyone living outside the country. But I always checked myself, and Karri did, too, knowing that Iranians have to come to a conclusion about what they want themselves and then act on it themselves.

  I had coffee one day with a young woman who had lived in England for many years but had returned to open an art gallery. She kept adjusting her scarf as we spoke. After a while, I said it must bother her, much as it bothered Karri, but to my surprise she looked at me quizzically, then waved her hand dismissively. “Doesn’t bother me at all,” she said, and promptly changed the subject. Hijab alone was not going to be a reason for revolution, nor even for mass protest, as I already knew from past trips. Iranians had other, much bigger priorities, and their revolution, if it came, would be less specifically about dress codes than about the economy, foreign policy, and, above all, a definition of freedom. Especially as so many Iranian women, including some of my own otherwise liberal cousins, wore conservative hijab voluntarily and would continue to do so no matter the regime’s opinion.

  In mid-2010, when I made my first trip to Iran in the aftermath of the 2009 elections, a friend had recently been at Ayatollah Rafsanjani’s office, for a gathering of young political activists either recently released from or not yet in jail. The ayatollah—a pillar of the Islamic Revolution and once the most powerful man in Iran (some thought even more powerful than the Supreme Leader, who everyone in Iran knows was actually put in the leadership role by Rafsanjani) but who had supported the Green Movement before and after the elections—was asked what was next for the movement. Rafsanjani, deprived of his soapbox as a substitute Friday prayer leader of Tehran since a controversial speech in support of the protesters immediately after the disputed presidential election, replied, “We made our revolution; now it’s your turn.” If that wasn’t a green light, pardon the pun, for a second revolution in Iran by one of the founders of the original revolution, I’m not sure what could be, but it had no effect on the activists, or at least none that translated to Iran at large. Of course, it’s hard to know exactly what Rafsanjani meant by “revolution,” a word bandied about too liberally both in Iran and in the Western media to describe the Green Movement, for the movement’s failure can be partially ascribed to the fact that it wasn’t a revolution. It had started out as a protest movement, designed to force the government to reconsider its decision to let stand the suspicious tally of votes for President Ahmadinejad, and it turned into a civil rights movement when the government, contrary to the constitution, banned all protests, demonstrations, and public gatherings. But although some of its segments were radicalized, the large and disparate pro-democracy movement remained just that: pro-democracy but not pro-revolution, one that would turn the Iranian system upside down.

  A number of different groups of Iranians are opposed to the current political system or the government, and certainly object to the continuing human rights abuses, but the ones looking to overthrow the regime through revolution still seem to be in the minority. Perhaps the memory of the 1979 Islamic Revolution is too strong, if not in their own young minds, then in the minds of their parents and grandparents who took part in it: for it was a revolution hijacked, a revolution that broke promises, a revolution that, even with its authoritarian and sometimes fascist impulses, has yet to provide economic security, or any other kind, for a large portion of its population. In 1979, eliminating the 2,500-year-old monarchy was supposed to usher in a democratic era, albeit with an Islamic hue; now
the disappointment many Iranians feel, even pious Iranians who once believed in the revolution, is tangible and observable. Many of them seem reluctant to repeat what they believe will be another disappointment.

  One day a shopkeeper in my neighborhood, with pictures of Shia saints on the wall behind him and worry beads (a sure mark of piety) in his hands, stood with me looking at a group of Basij zooming down Vali Asr on their motorcycles. “They told us that the reign of kings was bad,” he said, “so why have you reigned for twenty years?” The you referred to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the undisputed lifetime leader of Iran, whose rule some Iranians believed more and more resembled that of a shahanshah, king of kings: the title was claimed by all Persian kings but was apt only at the height of empire millennia ago. Yes, today a kingly “priest of all priests” reigns supreme, but if he and his regime go, what will come next?

  Many Iranians have simply given up on the system but are unwilling to do anything about it, fatalistically resigned to a political order they mostly cannot abide. Fatalism, a strong trait of Persians, has partially prevented them, and their many governments, from making the progress they might deserve. Our baby-sitter was one such person; young and educated, she was living at home with her parents after a stint abroad and was making the best of a life she didn’t believe she had the power to change. Karri asked her one day if she wanted kids of her own, and she replied, “Not here, never in Iran. There’s no life or future for them here, so only if I move abroad.” The morality squads had stopped her many times, even impounding her car for a month for a skimpy-scarf-while-driving offense, but unlike some of her peers, she had never been to prison; nor did she seem eager to join in any form of activism, even on Facebook. She complained, but she showed no interest in Iranians who were still fighting the system from prison, house arrest, and occasionally in the streets. She told me she thought Iran needed sweeping change, of the kind that came with revolution, but she wasn’t going to be around to see it. Many other Iranians too complain loudly but seem otherwise inactive.

  The loudest complainers in public are often older Iranians. One rush-hour evening, after I’d waited at the stop for a long time, the bus pulled up, and people began boarding. When it could no longer accommodate a single additional passenger, the driver closed the doors. Suddenly, at the top of his lungs and within earshot of traffic cops—young men doing their military service—an old man who had been waiting with me yelled at the driver, “This is what happens when a two-bit mullah becomes the Supreme Leader!”

  The regime is not afraid, and with good reason, of the old man who expresses his frustration in public or of our baby-sitter, who will leave Iran to the clerics and their supporters when the right opportunity presents itself or continue to live quietly, her fatalism growing stronger by the day, unable to bring herself to leave the only home she really knows and that, despite her protestations, I suspect she loves.

  The Iranian sense of fatalism is often intertwined with a voracious appetite for conspiracy theories, perhaps adding to the inertia of would-be revolutionaries. The old man at the bus stop, who’d vituperated the not-so-supreme leader, took a seat with me on the next bus that would let us board, then let loose a refrain of complaints about how the very bus he was riding was part of the regime’s conspiracy to control the population. I heard the same complaint time and again by people both on and off the bus.

  Soon after the 2009 elections, Vali Asr, the long boulevard that the bus plied, had been turned into a one-way street with separate BRT (rapid transit) bus lanes, ostensibly to provide passengers like ourselves an efficient, fast, and cheap means of north-south transport in the otherwise traffic-clogged city. The bus-only lanes were cordoned off by concrete and metal barriers, and the traffic-free rides cost seven or eight cents (doubled to fifteen during our stay, to a chorus of rider complaints). Millions of Iranians, even those who owned cars, took advantage of this aboveground rapid transit system, so many that at rush hour buses would drive by the stops completely full.

  But most people, even as they took advantage of the cheap fares and speedy rides, were having none of it. They were convinced that the regime had cordoned off the bus lanes so it could control access to a favored protest street and move its own government and security vehicles up and down the boulevard, in the bus lanes naturally, with ease. They made no concession to the idea that perhaps, just perhaps, the system had been put into place for their convenience and to make one of the most unlivable cities in the world (as The Economist had dubbed Tehran in 2011) just a tiny bit more livable. To be sure, every now and then a police car would zoom up Vali Asr in the wrong direction, lights flashing as it avoided the buses barreling down the avenue, and sometimes government cars with blacked-out windows would do the same. But many Iranians, rather than consider ease of government transport simply as one added benefit, chose to believe it was the sole reason for the changes to Vali Asr. They were certain that the bus lanes were not for the benefit of the public but rather for controlling the people. What sealed their conviction were the days when the volunteer Basij militia on their motorcycles and the black-clad government security forces would disperse, often using the bus lanes, to various points in the city where they believed a protest might erupt, especially on days like religious commemorations or, better yet, the anniversary of the 2009 presidential elections.

  June 12, 2011, was such a day, the anniversary of the fateful vote two years prior that had returned Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to the presidency. On a sunny and extremely hot Tehran afternoon, the government was prepared for any outbreak, spontaneous or otherwise, of public protest or demonstration, whether directed against the entire regime or just the government of Ahmadinejad. Foreign-based Web sites had called for Iranians to come out and protest, and Facebook was filled with posts by Iranians, again mostly abroad, exhorting their fellows inside Iran to risk life and limb by marching in specific districts of Tehran, primarily Vanak Square. No one I knew was paying much attention to the calls by those in the diaspora, who, from the comfort and convenience of their Western homes and QWERTY keyboards, many felt, were encouraging what would certainly be a bloody revolution. But I planned to go to Vanak anyway, just to see if anyone showed up. Besides, I had an opium party to attend, and that wasn’t getting canceled for any revolution, let alone a protest march.

  At Tajrish Square, where I waited for a bus, the security forces were gathering a few hours before the protests were called for, to intimidate potential protesters and to announce their readiness for any move they might make. Motorcycle Basij and black-uniformed shock troops were stationed all the way to Vanak, a rather large contingent of them menacingly mustered under the Parkway overpass, but beyond their heavy presence, there was no sign that anything unusual was going on, not even that air of anticipation and anxiety you can almost smell in any danger zone. Certainly no one I spoke to could sense anything out of the ordinary, except the presence of the well-prepared troops, who obviously log on to the same Facebook pages and visit the same opposition Web sites as everyone else.

  As the bus pulled up, I happily noted that it was an articulated and fully air-conditioned Iranian-made model, unfortunately named King Long—surely the Iranian who came up with that name for a bus had, unlike most Iranian men, never seen or paid attention to the clever titles of American porn films—and I dutifully boarded. It was already filled with passengers, men in the front section and women in the back, and grumbling was under way. “Look at all the Basij,” one man said loudly. “What do they think they’re protecting?”

  A boy, probably in his late teens, got up from his seat, offering it to me. “Befarmaeed,” he said, “Please,” gesturing to the seat he had just vacated for me, the much older man. I would usually be just a little annoyed at the presumption of so many young Iranian men that I was at such an advanced age that good manners dictated that they offer their seats to me, and usually I declined, insisting that I was happy to stand, but this time I took the boy up on his insistent offer and sa
t down next to another man closer to my age.

  He thrust his chin in the direction of the window, at the youthful security forces milling about on the sidewalk near a newsstand, walkie-talkies in hand. “They’re always telling us that Islam is in danger,” he whispered loudly, “but no—it’s you who are in danger!”

  I smiled and nodded.

  “Islam has been fine for fourteen hundred years,” he continued, “and you’ve been around for thirty. It’s you who are in danger!” The you was obviously the state, and he was right. If it didn’t sense danger, why was it mobilizing its shock troops, now and at every perceived threat? The proposed demonstrations were still hours away, but if any were to occur, they would be easily broken up by the thousands of militiamen, some of whom seemed, at least on the surface, quite sanguine at the prospect of beating their fellow citizens into submission.

  I had an afternoon tea appointment near Vanak before I went to the opium party, so I got off at the Mirdamad stop, a busy intersection where grotesque cement-block high-rise apartment buildings, Eskan I, II and III, built in the latter days of the shah’s rule, stood looking as if the slightest earth tremor would send them tumbling down. They anchor a once-beautiful corner of a beautiful boulevard, facing a park. The balcony of my friend’s apartment afforded an unobstructed view of the square farther south and of the militiamen now milling about everywhere, their motorcycles neatly parked on the sidewalks, ready for action.

  All my friend’s guests dismissed the idea that anything significant would happen. “Nothing!” said my friend, no fan of the regime himself. “It’s ridiculous all this talk—who’s going to challenge these people?” I left after tea, near the appointed time of the demonstrations, and descended to the square. Someone was bound to show up. I continued to the home of another friend, and the opium smokers, regime haters all, were even less concerned with protest and revolution. The British were right about opium in China—it does keep the natives from getting restless, and I didn’t expect anything different.