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

by Majd, Hooman

  The culture he referred to, which he is proud of and wanted Karri to see and experience, is one of beauty, poetry, hospitality, and manners, yet was still very much formed by Shia Islam: mournful, strict, and austere. Islamic culture never fully supplanted an ancient Persian culture that revered power and authority, whether exercised by tribal and village chiefs, priests, or kings and “kings of kings,” and that still hides its adherents’ true character with its uncompromising rules for public behavior. The political culture of Iran has always been authoritarian, and what Khatami was saying was that reconciling Persian culture with the concept of democracy meant that the political culture had to change, yes, but also that other elements of Persian culture and even of Shia Islam (which unlike Salafist or Wahhabi Islam actually allows for interpretation) had to adapt. Khatami, in his terms of office, had himself been guilty of succumbing to the pull of traditional culture, when it urged him to stand down in the face of higher authority and to “know his place”; and he makes no excuse for his failures to institute long-lasting change. But he believes that his bringing the issue of culture to the fore will at least have an effect on how it is viewed in future political discussions. It was clear to us both, though, that it was the young men and women of Iran who would bring about such change, not the aging theocrats or politicians who ruled over them now. Less clear was exactly who those young people were, in a society where three-quarters of the population was under thirty.

  The girl faced me, seated at a small table next to ours in the outdoor café at Hesabi Park, another old mansion in Elahieh, North Tehran, whose gardens have been converted to a public art space. She wore her hair in a beehive, and the Chanel scarf dangling from it did not conceal her bleached-blond hair and matching blond eyebrows. Her perfume was overpowering, so much so that Karri thought we should change tables when another became available, and her tight manteau very much accentuated an hourglass figure. The Sister Sledge song “He’s the Greatest Dancer” came to my mind, especially the line, “Halston, Gucci, Fiorucci,” except in Tehran today it’d be “Chanel, Gucci, Louis [Vuitton],” for the men and women, great dancers or not, who are “dressed to kill.” The Gucci handbag on the floor by her feet, the fat diamond ring on her slender and perfectly manicured finger, the conspicuously labeled Chanel sunglasses perched above her forehead, the surgically enhanced breasts and altered nose—nose piercing included—were all signs of the new moneyed class; the nouveau riche of Iran are very riche indeed.

  Her companion, a dark-skinned chubby man with a shaved head, Bluetooth headset glued to his ear, had his back to me. I could see, though, the gargantuan gold watch on his hairy wrist and his Ray-Bans and iPhone on the table by his side, within easy reach of his stubby, ringless fingers. He seemed bored, fiddling with his iPhone and car keys as the girl carried on speaking, just out of earshot, which annoyed me no end, for I really wanted to hear what she was saying. Khash tried to get her attention—she had to be the first pretty girl who hadn’t fawned all over him since we returned to Tehran from our travels, and when he finally succeeded, she gave him a big smile and said something to the man before she lifted her coffee cup, carefully sipping her cappuccino through pursed lips to avoid disturbing her perfectly drawn lipstick. He turned around to look at us and smiled too before returning his attention, or whatever he had of it, to his girlfriend.

  Who were these people? They weren’t expat Iranians home for a visit to family and friends. They weren’t the middle class who shopped for counterfeit designer goods at malls everywhere in Tehran—theirs were the real things. They weren’t religious or tradition-minded Iranians, and they weren’t quite the secular Westernized Iranians I knew both in Iran and abroad. They were a new breed of Iranians, but ones I felt no connection to whatsoever, and not for any classist or snobbish reasons. Nouveau didn’t bother me, and neither did riche; I just couldn’t place them in the Iranian culture I knew, or in the political culture that Khatami was talking about. If to Persians life was shameful, as the poet said, these Persians showed no sign of believing it. Whenever I was with Karri in Tehran, I always felt more of an outsider, less Iranian and more American, perhaps because we spoke English and because her presence by my side was a constant reminder of my life as someone other than an Iranian; but I never felt more of an alien than when confronted by Iranians I couldn’t identify with.

  Even though I had never really lived in Iran, and certainly never until now as an adult with my own family and in my own apartment, it had come to feel completely natural, especially if I was out on my own. Karri, too, now related to ordinary Iranians: to mothers in the park with whom she struck up conversations, whether or not they spoke English well enough; to shopkeepers who patiently counted out change for her, making sure she understood that she wasn’t being ripped off; and to cab drivers who did their best to accommodate her and Khash, even taking directions from her, something Iranian men are loath to do, on the best route back to our apartment.

  But we couldn’t identify with or understand people like the ones in the café at Hesabi Park, or others like them whom we came across, gross caricatures of modern Iranians, even though in their outlook on life, they might resemble, at least superficially, certain Westerners more than, say, the passengers on the crowded buses we rode, or the chador-clad women in the parks we frequented, who smiled and nodded at Karri as their children attempted to play with Khash.

  I could relate to the young soldiers I overheard on the bus one day, bemoaning the fact that they were being sent to a far-flung province—the dangerous Sistan va Baluchistan, on the border with Pakistan, which was infested with Sunni separatist rebels and the terrorist Jundullah group; to the street hawker on the same bus who was selling kitchen sponges in the no-man’s-land between the women’s and men’s section, and who, after completing a few sales to the women, turned to the men and shouted, “I guess the gentlemen on this bus don’t do dishes”; even to the Revolutionary Guards up the street from us who wanted their picture taken with Khash and who asked me, incredulously, if it was true that the U.S. military was afraid of them. Of them?

  Yes, they were all Iranians to me, even the delivery van driver I got into a screaming match with on the street one day, when he repeatedly honked at me as I pushed Khash up a steep hill, the narrow sidewalk impassable with a stroller.

  “Shut the fuck up!” I screamed at him. “Where the fuck do you think I should walk?”

  Karri pleaded with me to move on and not get into a fight.

  It’s my country, I thought, and I’ll fight with whomever I please.

  The driver stopped his car and yelled back at me, “On my head! You can walk on my head, or better yet, on Khamenei’s head!”

  I had to laugh at that, and when I related the exchange to Ali Khatami, he laughed, too. Yes, it is my country, and these are my people. All of them expressed an Iranian character that I knew and was comfortable with and that, to my mild surprise, Karri had come to understand and was comfortable with, too.

  Many of the new rich, I knew, were either apolitical or hoped for the political status quo to endure. After all, they benefited from it, and social restrictions didn’t seem to crimp their lifestyles. They were unlikely to receive anonymous calls on their iPhone 4S’s from the intelligence services, telling them not to speak to this or that person, to be careful about what they said on the phone, or patronizingly, to be a “good boy.” One day a young friend—he had just finished his mandatory national service in the army—received a call on his ancient Nokia that threw him into a panic and prevented him from even answering his phone or texts for the following week. “They hear everything,” he said to me later, visibly shaken; although a reformist, he was a strict Muslim who had never questioned the regime’s legitimacy, not in his twenty-odd years of life under it.

  The man and woman in Hesabi Park, and the two young women at the table next to us at Terrace, an upscale continental restaurant, with matching beehives, nose jobs, makeup, and Hermès Kelly bags—authentic ones, I�
�m sure—who nibbled at salads that were more expensive than the daily grocery bill of most families, were unlikely to do anything controversial. They are unlikely to be part of the change that any person residing in Iran long enough can recognize is bound to come, whether the conservative ayatollahs like it or not; less likely even than the apathetic youth who have lost hope in their country but linger on, politics very much on their minds—it is politics, after all, that has given them their apathy; and less likely than the men and women whose only defiance of the state is in their dress, and who venture into crowded public spaces and are harassed by the morality police. The new rich, for all intents and purposes, live strictly in their self-contained bubbles.

  Not all the rich, or even all the new rich, are like them, of course. They are a new breed, I’ve been told by friends, apart from what many Iranians would recognize as Iranian. One friend, a frustrated businessman who despises the regime even as he continues to deal with it, told me that when the day finally came that the regime fell, he would personally rip them to shreds, these fellow Iranians who prospered under the Islamic regime while remaining immune to its mores, indifferent to the country’s corruption and mismanagement, and oblivious to the difficulties ordinary Iranians face. They are complicit, he insisted, in every crime the regime has committed.

  A rather severe reaction, I thought. He claimed that they were amoral—which they perhaps were—and un-Iranian. But “un-Iranian” today is “very Iranian” tomorrow, for virtually no one in Iran below the age of thirty would be recognizably Iranian to my parents’ generation, especially not to those abroad, just as the Iranian American cast of Shahs of Sunset are unrecognizable to most older Iranians who live in Tehran. Khatami had never even heard of the show, while some young Tehranis had. I have friends who are rich, poor, and in between, who are new rich and old money, who are religious and secular, who are regime supporters and antiregime activists—and my inability to relate to that new segment of society was my issue, not theirs, and it was irrelevant to their politics or their future influence on the politics of the country, which is bound toward a more democratic system and which they, the new rich, may or may not adjust to. The Occupy Movement didn’t arrive in Tehran while we were there, although the state media reported heavily on it, hypocritically, as an example of the rot in liberal democracies; but it surely will, once, or if, the reform movement is back on its feet, or when the nation finally just gets fed up with its state of affairs, social, economic, and political.

  Much like the opposition during the shah’s time, whatever movement one day springs from the streets—and youth will be its vanguard, as they were in the shah’s time—will rail against an unjust autocratic, as well as economic, system. And any real change may well have to come from those streets. As more than one Iranian said to me, “Iran is a kettle on the boil, and the ayatollahs know it: either they will have to bring it down to a simmer, or it will boil over into the streets.” If it does boil over into the streets, others maintained, it will unlikely be a repeat of 2009; it will be more like 1979. But while many of the new rich fled the revolution that overthrew the shah’s system, it is unclear what will happen to the new rich in a new revolution. Or if they will even have anywhere to go.

  Meanwhile, politics played no small part in our lives in Iran, more in mine than in Karri’s, although she was constantly aware of politics throughout our stay. She was angry at Iran for treating its citizens like errant children, angry at her own country for imposing sanctions on Iran that seemed to affect only the people, including her, and angry most of all that anyone would even talk about a war with Iran, much less a war that, some predicted, Israel might launch while we lived there. It is impossible to live in Iran and not be aware of international politics, domestic politics, the nuclear crisis, and talk of war, and not to be anxious about a dangerous future. An American war with Iran, or even just a military strike, would affect Iranians far more than Americans.

  The assassination of another nuclear scientist during the summer we were there; a mysterious explosion at a military base, acknowledged as part of the Western and Israeli campaign to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons; and the deepening sense that something would have to give in Iran’s fight with the West made Tehran a place where, although we were comfortable and reasonably unafraid, we worried. That was even without the “anonymous” or “private number” calls I received on my mobile phone and the ever-present threat that one day those government officials calling might decide that I was actually a spy, like Amir Hekmati, the Iranian American who traveled to Iran in August and was arrested two weeks later. The authorities had refused me permission to work; at what point, Karri continually wondered, would they decide I had to be up to something if I continued to stay in Iran?

  She was shaken by the news that an Iranian American, simply visiting his elderly grandmother, had been arrested, not when he arrived at the airport but a full two weeks after he set foot in Tehran. “If they knew he was a spy, then why didn’t they arrest him at the airport?” she asked me.

  I explained that his case was radically different from mine, that he had served in the U.S. Marines, had military identification on him, and had served in Iraq and Afghanistan, where Iranian spies undoubtedly know the name and rank, and probably serial number of every Iranian American in the U.S. military. I found it odd that he had dared come to Iran in the first place, no matter how much he missed his family, at a time when the media was full of reports of CIA and other agencies’ clandestine activities inside the country.

  Karri agreed that it was odd, but she was not convinced that I was therefore clear of any danger. “They gave him an Iranian passport, they let him in, they let him stay at his grandmother’s for two weeks, and then they arrest him?” she said. “Something is wrong with that picture, and it means it can happen to anyone.” (Hekmati was subsequently sentenced to death, but in mid-2012 his sentence was overturned. He is, however, as of this writing, still in jail.)

  I did receive a call one day in October from someone at the Supreme National Security Council relating to my journalism, asking if I would write an essay refuting an op-ed by John Bolton (former U.S. ambassador to the UN) that appeared in The Guardian, on the alleged 2011 Iranian plot to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to Washington.

  Fuck you was my first reaction, although I didn’t voice it. “I don’t have a press pass,” I said instead.

  That could be arranged, the caller assured me.

  “Well,” I said, “I can’t really do this.”

  He was unperturbed, and perhaps my tone hadn’t reflected the fuck you one I wanted it to. “How about placing an anonymous piece in the paper, then?” he asked.

  You’ve got to be kidding me, I thought. After depriving me of work all this time, they now wanted me to be in their service? But I politely extricated myself from the call and from any obligation, insisting that I was in Iran not to work but to spend time with my family. It probably became another mark against me.

  On another occasion I received a call from a newspaperman I didn’t know who worked for a conservative but anti-Ahmadinejad paper. I have no idea how he got my number. The call concerned Fareed Zakaria, who had just left Tehran after interviewing Ahmadinejad; I had had dinner with the CNN journalist at his hotel the night before his meeting with the president. Ahmadinejad’s rivals, in government and in the media, were having a field day, criticizing him for agreeing to the CNN interview and criticizing his administration for allowing Fareed a visa in the first place. Fareed had sympathized with the Green Movement and had been a harsh critic of the regime for its crackdown on protesters, but the conservatives didn’t care that much about his views. Rather, his visit and his interview were ammunition that they could use against a president they had come to despise, mostly for his defiance of the Supreme Leader, his big sulk, and his dismissive attitude toward anyone, ayatollahs included, who excoriated him.

  The caller seemed to know that I had seen Fareed and, curiously, wanted to
know what hotel he had stayed in. “I’ve called all the major hotels in town where foreigners stay,” he said, “and no one has a record of him.”

  I replied that I couldn’t divulge that information, and that if he had any questions, he should ask the Culture Ministry, which had approved the trip, or ask Fareed himself, via e-mail to his Web site.

  “I won’t quote you,” he said, finally getting to the point, “but I want to know if the interview was Zakaria’s idea or the president’s.”

  I’d rather not be quoted, even anonymously, I told him, aware that either or both of our phones were being listened to by someone else, pro- or anti-Ahmadinejad, it didn’t matter.

  As a relative of Khatami, I was already known to be a supporter of reform and of the Green Movement, but the last thing I needed was to get caught up in the conservative infighting that was going on all year, in the politics of divide and conquer that the Supreme Leader seemed to have decided would ensure his supremacy. Ahmadinejad’s sulk; the conservatives’ attack on him and his allies for that insubordination and for his refusal to share any power with them; the Leader’s refusal to let them impeach him but his quiet encouragement of attacks against him—all were elements of a drama that it was best to avoid participating in at all costs. Already too many actors in that drama had ended up in jail, or been harassed by one or another security agency—and these were actors who had supported (or remained silent over) the crackdown on the reformists. The annus horribilis of the political elite that began with a potentially fatal—not only to the protagonists Ahmadinejad and Khamenei but to the system itself—clash between two competing powers was eating away at the core of the revolution: the regime’s thirty-year-long unity of purpose. Infighting and palace intrigue had long been a staple of Iran’s political culture, all the way back to the ancients, but like everything else Persian, it had mostly been kept private and hidden from the public until now. Perhaps Khatami’s hope that the political culture would change was coming true after all, though not through any willful act by the regime.