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

by Majd, Hooman

  Before we took our leave, we went into a guest bedroom, where the senescent Mrs. Khatami, née Ziaie, was resting. She had recently suffered a stroke and lost almost all her sight, but was nevertheless engaged and very curious about Khash, whom she said she wished she could see. Karri said a few words in Farsi, her accent apparently amusing to the others in the room, and we left, saying our goodbyes to all the Khatamis, me a little sad about the somber mood in the house and the dramatic change in all their lives: not just the death in the family, but the way the once hopeful and ascendant reformists had been brought down by a vengeful regime that couldn’t abide even the gentlest of criticism. One didn’t feel sorry for the family necessarily, despite the harassment, the calls to Evin prison for hours-long interrogations that Reza—married to the granddaughter of the founder of the republic, no less—had to deal with, and the fall from grace in a regime they had helped create. No, the family would be all right—better off, in fact, than the vast majority of their countrymen. One simply felt sorry for the country, and Karri, the outsider, concurred. Plus, Mohammad Sadoughi’s newfound clerical role meant I had one less friend on Facebook, which, he embarrassingly confessed, glancing at the iPad in his hands, he had now been obliged to abandon.

  We left Yazd the next day by taxi, since I discovered that it would cost only about sixty dollars to go to Esfahan, some two hundred miles away. Our driver, a pleasant enough man, had an ample supply of roasted watermelon seeds on the dash and proceeded to plow through the bag, one seed at a time, cracking it between his front teeth and extracting the tiny nut with his tongue, almost all the way to our destination. As such, he was rather laconic, not even expressing interest or irritation when Khash screamed bloody murder. He would only smile, and nod his head. “Kids,” he’d say, knowingly.

  But when we reached the outskirts of Esfahan, a large city with an industrial base, he grew loquacious, complaining that the Esfahanis were mean people and the world’s biggest liars. He didn’t know our hotel, even though I told him it was close to the main square and within walking distance of the famous Safavid-era Si-o-sel Pol, or “Thirty-three Bridge” (named for its thirty-three arches over the Zayandeh River), and he insisted he would simply stop and ask for directions, even though we would be intentionally misled. He’d have to ask a number of different people, he said, and would hope that a few wrong directions would cancel one another out and he would eventually be put on the right path. Karri laughed when I translated, assuming it was intercity rivalry speaking. Iranians are as tribal and chauvinistic about their hometowns as, say, New Yorkers are about midwesterners, whose abode some derisively refer to as the “fly-over zone.” Or as some Londoners might be about Mancunians—or any northerners, for that matter.

  Anyway, we stopped at a traffic circle, and our driver stepped out to ask the driver of another car, parked just in front us. After much waving of hands, our driver returned and proclaimed, “He lied through his teeth. He told me to go back the way we came, which would take us out of the city.” Karri was unsure whether he had intentionally been given bad directions, or his prejudice didn’t allow him to believe what he was told, or the other driver had a different, albeit longer, route in mind. But when we stopped again, and got completely different directions, she began to wonder. By the fourth time we stopped to ask—at which point I recognized the main road leading to the hotel and could guide the driver—she was genuinely tickled. How could it be, she said to me, that our driver was right? Coincidence, I assured her. But the surly receptionists at our hotel, so unlike every other Iranian she had met, made her think that perhaps Esfahanis were indeed a different breed.

  The hotel, once called the Shah Abbas Hotel, for the Safavid king who had made the city his capital and built most of it, was at one time a grand Persian structure, an old estate converted to a hotel in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Renamed after the revolution the Abbassi Hotel—the regime seems incapable of even pronouncing the word shah—it was virtually unchanged from when I first stayed there, as a visiting student on Christmas holiday from boarding school in London. In 1972. Everything in the hotel, including the furniture in the rooms, seemed to be exactly as it was then, and the only care taken by the owners, a semiprivate insurance company, appeared to be in the gardens, which were as magnificent as ever, their persimmon and quince trees fat with fruit that greeted us when we ventured out for a cup of tea.

  It was too late to go out and wander the old city, so after a long sojourn in the fragrant gardens, where Khash delighted in running around, especially on the grass where signs were posted to keep off, we decided to stay in for dinner and put Khash to bed early. Having subsisted on a diet of Persian food for days, delicious as it was, we craved something different, so we went to the cafeteria by the lobby, where I could swear the low furniture and tables were the same ones I had sat on and at forty years ago. The hamburger, a huge but thin concoction in a bun the size of a Frisbee that just had to be custom baked for the hotel, was also exactly as I remembered it, from when my older brother, his American classmate David Smith, and I all ordered the same thing on the first night we arrived in the city by bus from Tehran.

  The hotel is a short walk from most tourist attractions, the main one being Naghsh-e Jahan Square, the largest in the world after Tiananmen in Beijing, built by Shah Abbas in the late sixteenth century. In keeping with the schizophrenic naming method of the Islamic revolutionaries, its name was changed from Shah Square to the current “Image of the World” Square, but it is also known, or the regime would like it to be known, as Imam Square. Referring to Imam Khomeini, presumably, and not to one of the imams, or saints, of the Shia faith.

  Or perhaps the current Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, or his supporters, have designs on the honorific and the immortalization that the name of the square might provide. On the outside walls of the exquisite Ali Qapu palace, on whose columned terrace Abbas once sat and watched the polo games in the square below, are painted two large modern portraits, of a size to be seen from every corner of the vast square, of Ayatollahs Khomeini and Khamenei. Imams both? As Karri pointed out, neither had anything whatsoever to do with Esfahan or the square, and their likenesses were completely out of place in the environment. It was as if Silvio Berlusconi had had his portrait painted on the side of the Duomo in Florence. She was genuinely offended, not because she held any specific antipathy toward mullahs or even the two Supreme Leaders of the revolution, but because their images defaced a beautiful historic monument.

  I hadn’t thought of that before, on my previous visits to the city, and perhaps as an Iranian one simply gets used to public spots being festooned with portraits of the nation’s leaders, even during the time of the shahs. Perhaps journalists and other foreign visitors, expecting an autocratic regime if not an outright dictatorship, don’t find it odd either, having seen so many buildings in Tehran and elsewhere with immense portraits painted on the sides, not just of the two Supreme Leaders but of every revolutionary figure, as well as many martyrs of the Iran-Iraq War. I decided it took someone like Karri, neither a visitor nor a true resident, the unlikeliest of tourists in this tourist town, to be offended by the images at the same time she was breathless with wonderment at the sheer beauty of the place. Wonderment also, and a little sadness, at how there could be no other tourists, no one to witness this beauty, other than Iranians themselves.

  Much has been written about Esfahan, about the magnificence of the square and the mosques and palaces that surround it, and it has a magical quality that words and images can’t quite describe. Nesfe-Jahan, as Persians still vaingloriously refer to it: “Half the World.” At one time—at the height of the Safavids’ power and a revived empire—it must have indeed seemed half the world, if not more. The Florence of Persia, Karri proclaimed it, not the first person to recognize it as such, just as we walked past a somewhat faded fresco, painted on the side of one of the Safavid palaces, of a European gentleman of the sixteenth century, with plumed hat and a small dog on a leash. A Eur
opean ambassador to the court of Abbas, no doubt, at a time when the sight of Europeans in Iran’s capital was possibly more common than four hundred years later, even when direct flights connect most European capitals to Iran’s.

  We put the Esfahani tendency to misdirect visitors to the test only once more, for Karri has an acute sense of direction, and we walked almost everywhere without getting lost. After visiting one museum, however, I felt disoriented and asked a passing man how to get to Imam Square. He pointed straight ahead, but Karri, by now as prejudiced as any Iranian, was sure he had lied, so I asked a young couple strolling toward us, and they pointed in the opposite direction. “Make a left at the next street,” the man said.

  Karri laughed, saying there was no point asking again and that she would get us back to the hotel. She chose a third way, cutting across a park, where we stopped for Khash to play on the swings in the meticulously clean, rubber-floored playground, that led us straight to the back of the hotel. The surly doorman and receptionists greeted us with barely a smile, but it was almost a relief not to feel obligated to be polite, as one does everywhere else in Iran. Khash was probably a little disappointed that he didn’t receive as much attention in Esfahan as he did elsewhere, except for the stares and whispers on the street. Even the waiters in the hotel restaurants, grizzled old types who had probably served me back in 1972, hardly paid any attention to him. One morning I caught one of them trying to conceal a smile as he walked away, just as Khash had thrown a piece of bread on the floor, and laughed heartily, so I knew their demeanor was all show. The hostess, who sat at a small table just outside the breakfast room, finally couldn’t resist showing her true colors either: that same morning she leaped out of her chair and hugged him as he ran down the corridor yelling, me hot on his heels and feigning embarrassment at my unruly American child.

  I always suspected that Esfahanis, known in Iran for their business acumen and even their cunning, were simply masking their true selves by being standoffish and sometimes even rude. The last time I had been in Naghsh-e Jahan Square, in 2009, I was with Ann Curry and an NBC News crew. We had seen families picnicking on the grass, children playing in the fountains, and overtly religious families—the women in chadors and the men bearded and solemn—lounging about and drinking tea or eating ice cream and faloudeh, a uniquely Iranian iced concoction of starch noodles, rose water, and lemon juice, none of them paying us much attention beyond their curious stares. Ann approached one group of black-clad women and quickly fell into conversation with them. They turned out to be as friendly as any other Iranian family, showing her how to wear the chador, complimenting her on her beauty, and telling me, standing by, that she looked better veiled than bareheaded. But of course she did.

  They also invited us to their home, an invitation we were unable to accept as we were on a tight NBC-mandated schedule, disappointing as that was to Ann. It is an experience that many tourists and visitors to Iran share—Iranians, even deeply pious ones, opening up to a foreigner, treating them as guests of honor in their country no matter their origin, and displaying the kind of hospitality to strangers that is unheard of in the West. It goes beyond and is distinct from the uniquely Persian ta’arouf that one also might encounter, although less frequently as a foreigner. Karri and I enjoyed our brief respite from that hospitality and didn’t engage much with Esfahanis, but we also recognized, in their veneer of arrogant pride and haughty attitude, the general demeanor of those who live in what they believe is the greatest city on earth, indeed, according to them, half the world. We live in New York, after all, and have been to Paris.

  We took a taxi back to Tehran, double the price of the taxi from Yazd for a distance only a little farther, but I knew the driver might spend hours just driving through Tehran to get to our apartment and then hours getting out of Tehran on the way back. In fact, he’d probably spend more hours in Tehran than on the highway between the two cities. We made good time to South Tehran, stopping only for gas and a quick cappuccino for us and a prayer break for the driver at a rest area—not unlike those on U.S. highways or the autostradas in Italy, only cleaner and better stocked.

  Khash slept most of the way. When we finally made it home, after a couple of hours navigating Tehran highways, he shrieked with delight at seeing our building and ran through the lobby to our ground-floor apartment door with a big smile on his face. We realized, after we settled in and unpacked, that it wasn’t just Khash who thought of this little apartment as home: we did too. Life in Tehran had become, finally, normal.

  11

  POLITRICKS

  We should listen in earnest to what other cultures offer.

  —SEYED MOHAMMAD KHATAMI, PRESIDENT OF

  THE ISLAMIC REPUBLIC OF IRAN, 1997–2005

  Within a week of our settling down in Tajrish, former president Khatami had invited us to tea at his office in Jamaran, not too far from us, in a compound owned by the Imam Khomeini foundation. Khatami, since stepping down from the presidency in 2005, was slowly being nudged away from relevance to the political culture of the republic. First the Ahmadinejad administration took away the office space in a presidential building (less than a hundred yards from our apartment, coincidentally) that had been granted him by the Supreme Leader. Then, in 2009, when he announced he was seeking the presidency again, he received death (and other) threats. Many Iranians believed that he withdrew from that race because of the threats.

  But the truth was that he had always said he wouldn’t run if Mousavi did, and he withdrew as soon as Mousavi announced his own candidacy. Subsequent to the elections of 2009, Khatami became something of a persona non grata in Iranian politics—his support for Mousavi, with whom he campaigned, his steadfast support for those imprisoned during the protests against the election results, and his continued insistence that all political prisoners must be freed and the crackdown on civil liberties lifted provoked the ire of the establishment. As a result, he was severely restricted, both physically and in terms of his ability to communicate with the public. The Iranian media were officially banned from even mentioning the names of the two reform candidates, Mousavi and Karroubi, who were languishing under house arrest; mentioning Khatami, therefore, particularly to promote his message, might mean crossing a boundary that few reporters or editors wished to traverse.

  I had visited Khatami on the previous occasions I traveled to Iran, even after the elections, when he was under close state surveillance and banned from travel, and I was familiar with the compound, his staff, and even with the Revolutionary Guards in civilian clothes who provided him security. Karri had met him, too, when he visited New York in 2006. But it was going to be the first encounter with a president for Khash, who hadn’t yet turned one on the day we headed to Jamaran.

  Khatami was genuinely happy to meet Khash, whom he’d asked about when we were still in New York, and to catch up with Karri in his somewhat broken English, and in the hour we spent together, our conversation centered on family and on the Iran he loved. He expressed a certain satisfaction—one that other nationalist Iranians shared—that I had decided to spend a year in Iran, with my family at that, and happiness that Karri, whom he had urged years ago to visit Iran soon, was finally here. But he also referred, a little obliquely, to the state of affairs in Iran—to the “uncomfortable” political climate, as he put it, and the authorities’ absolute intolerance of any dissent. When he mentioned these topics, he’d look up at the ceiling, as he had done in meetings with me before, and with a little shake of his head indicate that we were being listened to. I didn’t want to say much, for I felt that my recorded words should not cause him more trouble than he already had, and so other than replying to his questions, mainly about what I was interested in writing about, I didn’t volunteer much on what I thought had happened to Iran since he left office. By the time we said our goodbyes, his present to Khash of a gold coin in hand (the traditional gift for a newborn family member), I was saddened that the Iranian regime’s tolerance of criticism was so low that a fo
rmer president, who had garnered over 70 percent of the popular vote in two elections, couldn’t be trusted, and that he could no longer trust the regime he had served.

  Another day, not long before we left Iran, President Khatami told me over tea that to understand Iran, you had to understand the culture. “We have always wanted freedom, democracy, human rights, and so on,” he said, “but we have never instituted the culture for them.” He continued, somewhat wistfully, “We haven’t figured out how to reconcile those concepts with our culture. We can’t be completely modern, or reject all modernity. Neither works in our culture, as much as we might try.” Khatami, whom people had referred to, either admiringly or disdainfully, as a philosopher-king when he was in office, recognized his political impotence in 2011 and was under no illusions that he might be a factor in reconciling Persian culture with the concepts of democracy and freedom, if that indeed ever happened. It wasn’t just that his activity had been restricted by the state; he openly admitted that his time had come and gone, that the youth were hardly aware of him or of his ideas about Iran as a democratic, albeit still Islamic, state anymore, and that a new generation of politicians would have to take on the challenge of reform. He did indicate to me, and I don’t think he was being overly optimistic, that he thought he could have some influence on those new leaders—as a philosopher, rather than as a king or even a kingmaker.