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

by Majd, Hooman

  But I had no intention of becoming an unintended victim of political upheaval, let alone a wholesale change in the culture. The fact was, I did know whose idea the interview was, for Fareed had told me that the president had specifically asked for him, and him personally, to come to Tehran to interview him, in what appeared to be an effort at public relations; he wanted to counter the notion that he was weak and no longer relevant, and he wanted to revel in the spotlight of the international media, something that he had craved from the beginning of his presidency and now sensed he might be in danger of losing. The anti-Ahmadinejad crowd sensed it, too, but I didn’t want to be the person who confirmed it for them. Ahmadinejad still had allies in the Intelligence Ministry and in the Revolutionary Guards, and pissing them off was a far bigger risk for me and my family than the other potentially political acts I regularly undertook, such as visiting Khatami, dining with foreign ambassadors, and accompanying reform politicians in their think tanks.

  Indeed, while Karri brushed up on her Farsi at the Dehkhoda Institute, I would often head down to the offices of Iranian Diplomacy—assuming our baby-sitter showed up; it was a sort of political think tank, an NGO, and an influential Web site all rolled into one. These were afternoons when both of us would be liberated from the not entirely unpleasant chore of keeping Khash constantly amused, and also from the constant companionship with each other that living in Tehran, both unemployed, had somehow imposed on us. Karri mostly enjoyed her Farsi lessons at the famous school—where various foreign diplomats, some Iranophile foreign students, and a handful of Iranian Americans registered to learn the language as taught by a stern, unforgiving taskmistresses—particularly once she became accustomed to the teacher’s style. The woman actually had Karri in tears the first day of class after berating her for unpreparedness: it was Karri’s fortieth birthday, a difficult enough occasion for anyone, and more so away from friends and family; and she was taken aback, after witnessing ta’arouf and Iranian hospitality so often, by the style of Persian teaching, which is rather more Victorian than progressive. But after that it was all business; the teacher, perhaps shocked by Karri’s initial reaction, became more courteous, and Karri looked forward to learning more Farsi.

  Meanwhile, I looked forward to spending an uninterrupted afternoon at one of Iran’s only independent political and media organizations. It’s a reform-oriented one, staffed by former government officials from the Rafsanjani and Khatami administrations who somehow have escaped the ignominy of a prison term while maintaining a fierce opposition to the Ahmadinejad government, and are even critical of the regime itself at times, albeit in subtle ways. Presided over by my friend Sadegh Kharrazi, the gregarious former deputy foreign minister, ambassador, nuclear negotiator, war veteran, and fanatical nationalist, the center brings together analysts and political figures (none associated with Ahmadinejad except for a professor at Tehran University, a classmate and friend of the president) for monthly conferences and the occasional off-the-record briefing. I had no doubt that among its dozens of employees there were spies or informants, perhaps unwilling, working with the Intelligence Ministry and probably the Revolutionary Guards, too, and the offices were probably bugged; harsh criticism of Iranian policy under Ahmadinejad was voiced, to be sure, but apart from that only a strong defense of the nation and its rights and even assertions of loyalty to the system. And no one is more loyal to the nation, to the revolution, and to the ideals it once promised than Kharrazi, who—despite his unwavering support of Khatami, whom he sees as an adviser every week—is also loyal to the Supreme Leader, whose son is married to one of Kharrazi’s sisters, and whom he also sees regularly. It makes Kharrazi a rather unique figure in Iranian politics: enormously influential across the political spectrum, a reformist and democrat at heart, but true to the entrenched political culture of the country, a pragmatic operator who believes that the nation, its security, and its interests always trump politics. He is not pragmatic enough, though, to fully conceal his pure contempt for Ahmadinejad and his government.

  The conferences at Iranian Diplomacy, which always begin with an invocation from the Koran, played on an iPhone placed in front of a microphone, are mostly concerned with foreign policy, and the invited speakers are experts in the field or former government officials. The views expressed and the debates that follow are summarized and distributed via nicely printed full-color booklets as well as on the Web. Foreigners, particularly diplomats stationed in Iran, are eager to attend or to meet with the staff and their associates, but none are ever invited, indicative of the Iranian paranoia that surrounds contact with anyone the state believes might be hostile to it—essentially, anyone foreign.

  What struck me at these gatherings was both the high level of sophistication of Iranian officials and their overreliance on facts and figures, statistics and history—an empirical approach taught and emphasized in Iranian schools and universities—at the expense of more theoretical analysis and imaginative thinking. It explained to me, a little, why Iranian politicians are rarely truly innovative, and why Iranian diplomats, despite their skills, have made very little progress in relations with the outside world in the thirty-plus years since the Islamic Revolution. For instance, at a conference on the Persian Gulf (a favorite topic of xenophobe Iranians), the former commander of the Revolutionary Guards’ Navy during Khatami’s presidency, Hossein Alaie, displayed impressively thorough knowledge of U.S. warships, their missions in that body of water, and even the first and last names of every commander of every U.S. Navy ship in the region. The information, while impressive, was not particularly revealing or even relevant.

  It has always been this way in Iran, since before the time of the ayatollahs and Islamic-approved curricula: know the facts, but don’t present opinions that might conflict with any shah- or state-approved message. And since it has also always been impossible for anyone to know exactly what might offend at any given time, leaders have most often kept their opinions to themselves. Ahmadinejad is a glaring exception, and his fall from grace over the year, perhaps even leading to future legal entanglements (as his imprisoned aides have discovered since we left Iran), may serve to deter others.

  But it’s not just terror that keeps Iranians from expressing their opinions or engaging in creative thought; it’s the paradoxical nature of Persian culture. While creative thinking abounds in Iran, it is often kept close to the chest for fear of not just political repercussions but ridicule. Hence a culture that reveres poetry above all tends to disdain artistic endeavors as impractical; the great Persian poets are quoted every day, and their contributions to math, science, and medicine are almost equally heralded, but no consideration is given to the idea that perhaps it was their creative thinking that led to advances in science in the glory years of the Persian empires—advances that Iranians boast of but that have ceased, leaving Iranians at a loss to explain why.

  Alaie’s Revolutionary Guards do not report to the president. Rather, they report directly to the Supreme Leader and are supposed to be, according to the constitution, removed from politics. But those Guard commanders who served during Khatami’s reformist years appear to have been influenced by his philosophy of what an Islamic democracy should look like—a society that allows independent thought and criticism and that sees no conflict in that with Islam. As such, Alaie’s more creative thinking, which was not on display at the conference but which he exposed months later in a newspaper article, got him into hot water with the authorities, and his house was besieged by Basij protesters. He crossed a red line, apparently, by seeming to compare the political situation in Iran today with that preceding the fall of the shah, warning the authorities, and therefore the Supreme Leader himself, against making the mistakes that the shah made in creating an oppressive atmosphere that was ripe for revolution.

  Alaie was forced to apologize for his impudence, explaining, of course, that he had been misunderstood. Yeah, right, just misunderstood. The fact that many Iranians, pro- and antiregime, privately agreed
with him (privately being the operative word)—a regime stalwart who lived in a secure compound of senior Revolutionary Guard commanders—mattered little to the state.

  Alaie’s ill treatment made me think back to the time of the shah, and how things have changed and how they have stayed the same. One of my uncles, a deputy prime minister in the 1970s, had once given an interview expressing himself on a matter of foreign policy that the shah didn’t like. The problem was not the opinion itself, which was mostly in line with the shah’s and the regime’s, but the fact that he had dared express an opinion at all. He was summarily fired and declared persona non grata by the regime, but his house wasn’t surrounded by thugs, nor was he or his family threatened, as Alaie and his were. Plus ça change, in the political culture of Iran.

  That said, the range of opinions expressed in Iran under the Islamic regime is much broader than it was under the shah, and there are far more competing political factions today, all state-approved of course, but crossing certain red lines can result in much worse than a “you’ll never work in this town again” reaction from the state, as presidential candidates Mousavi and Karroubi sadly discovered after serving their beloved regime for thirty years.

  I would sometimes daydream at these political conferences, lulled into a virtual unconsciousness by the stream of facts and statistics that so many of the speakers liked to spew, trying to impress one another and validate their own importance, as Iran’s elite are wont to do. I would also stare—again, not considered impolite in Persian society—at the attendees around the big conference table and in the surrounding seats. There sat Ali Jannati, the son of the octogenarian Ayatollah Jannati, that fiercely antireform mullah, one of Khamenei’s closest and most loyal advisers, who seemingly hasn’t aged a day since well before the revolution—an Iranian Dorian Gray of sorts, and the butt of Iranian jokes. His son looked fit but not young, and I wondered if he was there to report back to his father or the Supreme Leader, and also if, thirty years later, he would look the same as he did on this day. The father was a staunch opponent of Khatami and of any liberal views even before the Green Movement, while the son served in the administration as an ambassador, which only made me realize how different Iran was prior to Ahmadinejad, when the concept of bipartisanship actually existed. Under Khatami, probably for the first time in recent Iranian history, the regime could reasonably argue, despite the human rights abuses that existed, that there was some modicum of democracy in the republic.

  In the audience were reporters, too, furiously scribbling notes while they also taped the sessions with their phones or with mp3 recorders. Every newspaper would send one, usually an earnest cub reporter, a far cry from the idle and rich young men and women we saw in the uptown cafés. A fair share of university students were present too; they and the reporters both sometimes approached me at the end of the session to see if they could interview me. I was in their eyes an interesting person: someone who lived abroad and had been critical of the regime, yet still ventured to Iran and even to Iranian Diplomacy conferences. I always had to decline, saying I was not permitted to engage in any journalism, including giving interviews where I might express my views.

  One woman reporter, her hijab properly covering every strand of hair but her stylish manteau a sign of less-than-strict piousness, asked me repeatedly, at every conference, when I might be willing to talk to her. When I finally said, “After I return to New York,” she said, “Then can you leave soon, please?” She laughed and apologized for her inhospitable statement. But I didn’t flatter myself that I was so much in demand: few Iranian American writers, other than the handful strongly supportive of the regime, are willing to talk to the Iranian media or are even accessible to it. Scarcity breeds demand, particularly in the fearful Iran of today.

  Standing-room-only gatherings at Iranian Diplomacy and other forums point to Iranians’ popular preoccupation with foreign policy, since, as is not the case in the United States and to some extent in Europe, it has a direct impact on ordinary people’s lives, even in the absence of conflict or war. Their perceptions are colored not just by the conspiracy theories Iranians are so fond of, but also, in a few cases, by willful ignorance. To my astonishment, nothing of importance—the killing of Osama bin Laden, the nuclear crisis, the Arab Spring, and especially what was going on in Syria, not even the Murdoch hacking scandal—was immune from a grand conspiracy theory or, on occasion, just ignorant appraisal. At a roundtable discussion at KhabarOnline, the Larijanis’ media outlet, I had difficulty persuading the attendees (university graduates and professors all, and otherwise very bright) that Rupert Murdoch was not Jewish, and I struggled to understand why it would even be relevant to the hacking scandal going on in Britain. Nor could I convince some that the United States and Israel might not have planned the Syrian uprising, or that there might not be a whole lot more to bin Laden’s death than met the eye. And yes, I did believe that Osama was indeed dead as a doornail and not hidden in some prison somewhere by team Obama, as some Iranians suspected without being able to give one really good reason why.

  But conspiracy, and the concept that there is always something hidden in any news we hear, is not just an obsession of ordinary Iranians; it’s part of Iran’s political culture. Understandably so, since for Iranians conspiracy theories have often proven, years later, to be true, as most famously with the 1953 coup, which Iranians always believed was a Western conspiracy but which the United States did not fully admit to until well after the fall of the shah.

  That most Iranians, and even those in the leadership (of any political persuasion), remain forever suspicious of foreigners and the Western media, and on guard for plots against Iran, has contributed to a paralysis of sorts when it comes to repairing relations not just with America but with perceived rivals and enemies everywhere. The stream of Wikileaks releases while we were in Tehran that revealed the antipathy of Sunni Arab leaders toward Shia Persia were fodder for the political elite, and for many ordinary citizens, too; the revelations were simply confirmation for those who had never believed that Iran could trust even its fellow Muslim states, rather than a sign that perhaps their own mistrust and sense of superiority might be fueling the antipathy.

  Later in the year, though, I found myself agreeing with most Iranians, regardless of where they stood politically, that the alleged Iranian plot to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to the United States at a Washington, D.C., restaurant was not based on reality. Everyone was incredulous. It was not that Iranians didn’t believe their regime was capable of assassination or that it would hesitate to kill a perceived enemy; rather, they didn’t believe the regime was that stupid. Most thought it yet another case of there being more to the story than met the eye. Persian nationalism, which is loath to admit incompetence in the nation’s military and security complexes, was at the forefront of the reaction; and nationalism, even extreme nationalism bordering on jingoism, is very much a part of the culture, political and otherwise.

  Many journalists in the United States agreed that the plot appeared to be outlandish, and their doubts about the Obama administration’s account of it made the rounds in the Iranian media as well as in private conversations. Western governments assigned blame to the Qods Force, the foreign expeditionary division of the Revolutionary Guards headed by General Qassem Soleimani, a shadowy figure dubbed by some (including a senior U.S. official in Iraq) the real-life Keyser Söze, the villain in the 1995 film The Usual Suspects; but Iranians, even those who despised the Guards for their role in the 2009 crackdown, defended Soleimani, who was considered one of the brightest and most accomplished men in the leadership. “I’d give my blood for him,” Sadegh Kharrazi told me, after speaking to him on the phone about the plot. “He is as incredulous as we are about this, and tells me the Guards don’t even have anyone by the name the Americans claim.” And Mohammad Khatami, who Soleimani served under, told me he was the most knowledgeable and professional official he had come across during his presidency, while his brother Ali told
me that Khatami’s administration relied more on Soleimani for expertise on the region than on the Foreign Ministry, or the ambassadors based in Afghanistan or Iraq, where Iran’s national interests were critical, regardless of domestic politics. That he would be behind the farcical plot described by Eric Holder, the U.S. attorney general, beggared belief.

  It was perhaps a little odd, though, and not a question of “going native,” that Karri, an American from the Midwest, would decry the political situation in Iran but defend the country against American and Western accusations. She was initially distressed at the news of the plot, telling me that it concerned her that things between the United States and Iran were getting worse by the day, and that she was feeling less and less confident that the animosity between the two countries wouldn’t lead to armed conflict and that we, or more precisely I, mightn’t get caught in the middle. She agreed with Iranians, and many Americans back home, who thought the accusation simply an attempt to paint Iran as evil in preparation for a potential war. But this, I realized, was one of the strengths of the regime: as long as it defended Iranian interests, as long as it defined its relationship with the outside world as nationalistic, as one where it was defending the people’s interests and not just its own, it would enjoy some measure of support even among those who hated it and even as so many internal factions fought over the urgent questions of what it meant to be an Islamic Republic, and whether Islam should play much of a role in the governing of the country.