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

by Majd, Hooman

  His response: “California?”

  I was amused of course, by his thinking that a strange name had to have been bestowed by Californian hippie parents, but it did make me feel one with America.

  Still, walking the streets of Tehran, pushing my son in his stroller, also somehow feels right and not just exciting and an adventure; the smells of the city, the air in the parks, the interactions with shopkeepers, even the yelling matches with drivers, especially those who like to drive backward at high speed down alleys, ignoring pedestrians in their way, all feel wonted and part of who I am.

  On my first visit to Iran in 2004, after a thirty-two-year absence, and after the nightmares of not being able to leave had finally disappeared, I tried to find the street my grandfather’s house had been on, the house where we spent some summers, the house where my mother was born over eighty years ago. I knew it had been torn down very soon after the revolution; my mother had made one quick trip to Tehran to sell it when her mother died, and I expected that an apartment block would stand where it once stood, on a corner of a street and a tree-lined alley with a deep joob running along one side (the bane of drivers, including my father, who I remember cursing after dropping the front wheel of his used powder-blue 1961 Renault Dauphine car into it one day). I thought the little deli might still be there, as so many delis from yesteryear still are in Tehran, which sold everything a little boy would want, from adams-e khorous-neshan, “Rooster” brand chewing gum, to sodas, nuts, chocolate, and little plastic toys. I hoped that finding the street would jog my memory, that I’d feel a stronger connection than ever to the soil, to the mud walls, and to the air of the city.

  My family in Iran naturally all remembered the house well, but no one had any idea how to get there. Highways crisscrossed the city that didn’t exist when anybody I knew had last gone there; the names of the streets had all changed, mostly to the names of martyrs of the Iran-Iraq War, and sometimes more than once, presumably because a more important young man had been martyred; and the neighborhood, which had been chic enough when my grandfather bought the house before my mother was born there, was now deep in the heart of downtown, not quite South Tehran but pretty close, a neighborhood where no one ventured anymore unless they had specific business there.

  Nevertheless, I went with a friend to investigate, taking a taxi to the closest major street that still did exist, then walking around hoping to stumble onto something familiar. Apartment buildings were everywhere, four- and five-story blocks that were as ugly as they were poorly constructed, but the alleys and the joobs were there, too. Turning corner after corner, something would ring a bell, and a few times I was sure I was on the right street, but couldn’t verify it.

  We stepped into a shop and asked. Ayatollah Assar? Yes, one old man remembered my grandfather but couldn’t place the house. Was I his son, the one who was in government once? No, I told him, that’s my uncle, who escaped Iran in 1979 and has never come back, as much as it is his strongest desire.

  We continued to explore the neighborhood, and my friend Kaveh, who has lived in England most of his life, actually found his grandmother’s house, still intact, or at least he thought it was her house, on a street that he declared recognizable the minute we stepped into it. The smell of the neighborhood, though, the smell of the remaining mud walls that hadn’t been torn down, the joob, the trees—it was familiar. I was saddened that I couldn’t find the street where I had had such happy memories, but I consoled myself that maybe I had walked on it without knowing it, and when I returned to my hotel uptown, I thought maybe it was better that the house and even the street weren’t there. Reality could not possibly rival a childhood memory, and my memory was intact, if rose-colored. That memory was one of the things that had kept me connected to Iran, and if it was disturbed, who knew how I would feel? Not finding the house also kept me somewhat rootless—now there truly was nothing for me to directly claim as mine.

  And in a strange way I felt relieved. The house my father grew up in in Yazd, which I saw on that same trip, meant little to me, as I had never been there before, although I did rather enjoy imagining my father, the stern but loving man who had forced me to get on a horse at age three, himself playing as a child in the unchanged garden. But those were my father’s roots, in Yazd and Ardakan, not mine. And when I had Khash with me in Iran, as much as I wanted to walk down the alley of my childhood with him, go to the deli I once frequented, ask for a Cooka, as Coke was called, and buy him a toy whistle or a bag of balloons, I knew it would mean something only to me, and never to him, not even if I showed him photographs when he grew to adulthood. The only meaningful thing to him then would be that his father had had this inexplicable connection to, and love for, this far-off land, and that he had once dragged his wife and infant son to live there for a year.

  My sense of being home was barely colored by the security state we lived in, although I was reminded of it every time I met a friend or relative who was in any way politically active. I tried to imagine how the security state, much more tangible now than on previous visits, compared to the one at the time of the shah, when SAVAK agents were presumed to be lurking in every corner ready to inform on you, even in one’s own home. People still speak up, complain, and even curse the authorities in public, in a way that would have been unimaginable forty years ago.

  And not that it would strictly qualify as vocal political dissent, but in a state where Islamic values are political, a neighbor on our street, populated with religious families, had a dog that yapped away all day, oblivious to the fact that the state frowns on dog ownership. Signs at park entrances inform the public that dogs are not allowed, and while we were in Iran, Parliament even threatened to propose a bill outlawing dogs altogether. Of course Parliament did no such thing, predisposed as it is to bombast and bluster, and the veterinary clinic at Parkway and Vali Asr, where the Basij and security forces like to gather under a bridge to harass and sometimes leer at female drivers, was able to keep its conspicuous billboard, a large photograph of a pet dog, visible to millions a day.

  A dog-owning acquaintance in Tehran, disgusted with the way they are treated in Iran—if they’re not the pets of the upper class, that is—once said to me, “Churchill said you can judge a civilization by the way it treats its animals,” condemning not just the regime but his own people, too.

  My ghoroor, or pride, got the better of me. Yes, I told him, but Churchill would have done better to worry less about the treatment of dogs by wogs and more about the treatment of those wogs by his empire. We Persians are not perfect, not even close by any stretch of the imagination, but I couldn’t bear for my culture to be criticized, least of all by an Iranian anglophile, and in Tehran of all places, the city of my birth. Yes, this was home, and Iranians were my people, too.

  Before the revolution, the shah had dogs himself, Doberman pinschers actually, befitting his personality, and in that time there was no personal behavior, especially un-Islamic, that would get one into trouble with the state—other than political activity not in line with the one-party (Rastakhiz) system, instituted by the shah at the same time that he changed the Iranian calendar from its Islamic origin to reflect 2,500 years of rule by kings of kings. Iran didn’t feel like a security state to me then, or to anyone who just visited, because it wouldn’t have crossed anyone’s mind, except for some of the clerics and other revolutionaries, mostly communists and leftists, to even think of engaging in political activity, let alone talk about it.

  Today, everyone engages in political talk, and many in activity, even if it is online or only anonymous. The state cannot arrest them all, but it can intimidate in a way the shah didn’t need to. The Green Movement is a perfect example: two years after the movement erupted on the streets, the regime was still pressuring its subjects to disassociate from it. “Don’t be fooled by this,” a friend told me many times, waving his hand in a circular motion, as we drove from our apartment in his car around Tajrish Square to some destination or another. He meant t
he bright sunshine, but also the busy shoppers, hawkers, kids running behind their mothers, the packed cafés, and the complete sense of normality one felt. “It’s really quite dark,” he said, “and we’re very much in a security state.” It didn’t really affect us on a daily basis, just as it didn’t affect the millions of Tehranis like us who ventured out every day, to work, to shop for necessities, or to play, and it affected other cities and rural areas even less. But it was there, and we knew it.

  The security state had virtually no effect on visiting Americans, despite the lingering, even intensifying, conflict between the United States and Iran about everything from the nuclear issue to Iran’s support for Hamas and Hezbollah, to its overt support of Bashar al-Assad of Syria, and to its actions in Iraq and Afghanistan, all of which the Iranian leadership interpreted to mean that the United States was hell-bent on changing the regime. But no state authority ever batted an eye at the fact that we were dual citizens, and Americans in Iran rarely felt threatened; not journalists like Ann Curry and Fareed Zakaria, who visited while we were there, and not my friends the writer Alan Weisman and his artist wife Beckie Kravetz, who also traveled around Iran unmolested while we were there. We had breakfast with them at a lovely outdoor café while their interpreter and guide, a young man who may have been an informant, willing or unwilling, for the Intelligence Ministry nevertheless kept his distance—a good two blocks away. And not Karri, who would surprise people when she told them she was American, not German as they assumed, and would elicit great empathy and admiration from almost everyone she met, including chador-clad women on the bus who wanted to strike up a conversation with the unlikely foreigner in their midst.

  Toward the end of our stay in Tehran, as friends and some in officialdom were hinting that staying much longer could get uncomfortable with the tensions rising between Western countries and Iran, Christmas approached. We had planned to go to the United States for the holidays and then come back to Tehran after the New Year, but were now thinking that it might be best if we didn’t. The assassination of the scientist and the more recent explosions at a military base, a comprehensive report in The New Yorker on U.S. covert activity by agents on the ground (which was widely read by regime insiders), Britain’s sanctioning of Iran’s Central Bank and the British embassy episode, and the accelerated pace of currency devaluation all contributed to a growing sense that as things got progressively worse, any suspicions that I might be an agent of the West could harden, with unpredictable consequences. (After arriving back in the States, a friend with close ties to U.S. intelligence told me that a very recent Iranian intelligence file, handed to the United States by Omani intelligence—Oman has close ties to both Iran and the United States—specifically named me as a U.S. intelligence operative. “They don’t know which agency you work for, CIA or the Department of Defense, but I saw the file,” he said, “and it’s your name.” A year in Tehran must’ve finally convinced the Iranians that I could be nothing but a spook.)

  As a December chill descended on Tehran, with forecasters predicting another early snow, our neighborhood of Tajrish was busy with shoppers; most avoided the exposed alleyway stalls and instead strolled inside the attached mini-malls, as overheated here as they are anywhere in the United States. There were Christmas decorations in some windows—and a Christmas shop in one mall drew kids to its windows full of tree ornaments and plastic Santas—and no security forces dissuaded shopkeepers or their customers from celebrating or even recognizing a non-Islamic holiday.

  The scene sharply contrasted with the Shiite passion plays going on inside and outside the bazaar, and with the thousands of black-and-green Ya Hossein flags fluttering outside virtually every street-side shop, signifying a devotion to the beloved Shia saint Imam Hossein, the justice-seeking grandson of the prophet who was martyred by the ruling and tyrannical caliph’s Sunni army in Karbala. It was also now the Arabic month of Moharram and the season of Ashura, a commemoration of Hossein’s martyrdom and the most solemn period in the Iranian calendar, which, being lunar like the Arabic, varies from the Western by a few days a year.

  As ordinary Iranians, including me and Karri, went about our business, shopping for food in the bazaar or for clothes and household goods in the malls, the more pious attending mosques for mourning ceremonies, there was little indication that Iran was now facing a much deeper international crisis, with Western moves to tighten the screws on the regime. But outside any of the many sarafi, foreign exchange bureaus, people gathered on the street to watch flat-screen televisions displaying the almost minute-by-minute slide in the rial, which had held its value for most of the time we lived in Iran; and men and women gathered at the kiosks to buy dollars as a hedge against crippling inflation or just because they thought the government might soon run out of them due to new international sanctions against Iranian banks. I was there to change much coveted dollars into rials, about as rare a transaction as can be, for almost all exchanges were the other way around. But along with me and whatever tourists were present in Iran, the government was routinely pumping hundred-dollar bills into the economy in an effort to keep the rial stable. Still, in late 2011, confidence that the regime could withstand international financial pressure, particularly after the British government cut all financial ties with Iran, was at an all-time low.

  To me, the slide in the rial (which subsequently accelerated in January and February) merely capped the Iranian leadership’s annus horribilis (the Iranian annus ends in March), certainly for the Supreme Leader and President Ahmadinejad, but also for every politician in between. All had been at odds with one another in 2011 over seemingly every possible matter of state; no one had come out on top, and the Leader himself was still supreme but demoted in the eyes of many citizens. It had been an awful year for the Iranian people as well, and more anni horribiles were undoubtedly on the way. Toward the end of the year, the increased talk of war or military strikes on Iran raised anxiety in Tehran to levels I had never before witnessed: war over the nuclear program had always been the subject of chatter in Iran, but few people had taken the notion very seriously, and in fact in ordinary conversation with Iranians, war would often be referred to jokingly. In December, however, my optician, who has a wry sense of humor and who hosts a salon of sorts with locals—from wealthy to poor—every evening in his shop, captured the mood of the city when he said, after I asked him what he thought of all the talk of war, “Boosh meeyad. Een daf-e boosh meeyad.” “You can smell it. This time you can smell it.”

  It didn’t matter if war came or didn’t—and some people even said to me that they hoped it would and then be over with, so they could get on with their lives. What mattered was the anxiety, which I couldn’t see abating anytime soon. It was weighing more and more on Karri, too, convincing her that combined with all other factors, returning to Tehran after the New Year made little sense, even though she found it hard to believe that there might actually be a war. “The anxiety is enough,” she agreed. After I reconfirmed our flights back to New York, she was relieved when I told her that KLM, which flew direct to Tehran but had to make a stop in Athens to refuel on the way back to Amsterdam, had now started flying bigger planes that could make the round-trip without refueling. (Iran had stopped refueling European airlines in a tit for tat when European countries stopped refueling Iran Air flights, turning a five-hour flight into an eight- or nine-hour one, and with an infant, that was more of a nightmare than it had to be. It was incomprehensible to many Iranians how refusing to refuel a passenger jet that probably carried Iranians less enamored of their regime than most would do anything to pressure the government to change its ways.) At this stage in our Iran adventure, Karri said, she was simply thankful that in this case we would not be personally affected by the Iran-West conflict. Iran was in some ways great, yes, and perhaps even a second home of sorts where she had grown comfortable with the culture, but she was, I knew, really looking forward to going home.

  On Ashura itself, the black-uniformed security for
ces were out in force in Tehran, swarming Vanak Square, Tajrish, and other major intersections. Mourning processions continued there as they did every year, predating the Islamic Revolution, with slowly marching self-flagellating men, their chains falling on their backs to the rhythm of drums and noheh, lamenting anthems. Scores of spectators participated by beating their own chests or simply watched, as we did near our apartment, Khash transfixed in his stroller. It was difficult to say exactly why the security forces had been called out, for this was what Ashura always was, and what it would always be, no matter the regime in Iran. Was it because this year the authorities feared, in light of the Arab Spring—or the “Islamic Awakening,” as the Iranian regime preferred to call it—another spontaneous outbreak of protest against the regime? There had always been a security presence at Ashura, but never like this, so that must have been the reason, but they needn’t have worried.

  Exile groups had once again called for protest via social media and various foreign-based Web sites, but on the days leading up to Ashura, no one I knew inside Iran, not even regime haters, seemed to pay any heed. “We’re sick of those exiles telling us what to do,” one person said to me. “Let them come here and do it themselves.” I sympathized with the sentiment, and having finally lived as an Iranian among Iranians inside Iran, I realized that no matter how sincere, how genuinely concerned about the future of the country Iranians abroad might be, they could have little say in how, when, or even why the Islamic Republic would reform, change, or collapse under its own oppressive weight.

  A couple of weeks earlier, in a driving rainstorm, I met my friend Jalal for afternoon coffee at the House of Cinema coffee shop, a place where intellectuals, pseudo-intellectuals, students, and ladies (and gentlemen) who lunch often gather. The billboard outside advertised Julian Schnabel’s by-now-four-year-old The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, with Farsi subtitles; another, larger billboard across the alley advertised Masoud Dehnamaki’s The Outcasts 3, a pro-regime comedy that skewered the opposition, the Green Movement and its supporters, and was a surprisingly huge hit in Iran. Asghar Farhadi’s Jodaeiye Nader az Simin (A Separation) had also been a huge hit in the summer (and later won an Oscar), though presumably not with the same audience. That was Iran, or at least Tehran, I thought; two societies with conflicting social mores and political leanings living together, sometimes in the same families, the tension almost imperceptible but bubbling nonetheless—just as Farhadi showed in his film. (A Facebook campaign against The Outcasts, urging moviegoers to boycott it and see Farhadi’s film instead, had no effect, except on those who were already Green.)