Honeymoon in Tehran: Two Years of Love and Danger in Iran

by Azadeh Moaveni

  On the way to Naziabad, a working-class district in south Tehran where I would finish the day’s reporting, I mulled over Tavana’s pronouncements. I wondered whether his preoccupation with social freedoms would be echoed in this neighborhood, where young people tended to be poorer and lacked such westernized habits as the afternoon iced espresso drink.

  The huddled brown apartment blocks were interspersed with fruit sellers, butcher shops displaying forlorn heaps of raw chickens in their front windows, and kiosks adorned with portraits of the Shia Imam Ali appearing as tanned and handsome as a Brazilian soap opera star. In north Tehran, such kiosks would sell imported European chocolates and Zippo lighters, but here they peddled the Iranian version of Kit-Kat (Tic-Tac), tasbeek (prayer beads), and special pillows that murmur the Koran. The murals extolling revolution and martyrdom that adorned the sides of Naziabad’s buildings had clearly not been touched up in years, the faded ayatollahs still frowned sternly and the artwork still bore the raw touch of Maoist propaganda. Though the city had yet to deliver its twenty-first-century billboards to Naziabad—central and north Tehran were treated to sleek black-and-white portraits of beaming revolutionaries; gorgeous, graffiti-inspired renderings of Persian calligraphy—the neighborhood’s power is still considerable. Its Basij militia commands units across the city. Many of the city’s influential politicians have risen to prominence from Naziabad’s side streets, and mayors of Tehran, along with senior clerics, often pay visits to its main mosque.

  Nasrine and I had agreed to meet at a busy intersection; waiting for her to arrive, I peered into the window of a bridal shop filled with mannequins wearing décolleté gowns adorned with feathers and sequins. Their finery in no way contradicted the black-clad figures of the neighborhood women striding past, plastic bags heaving with summer fruit. The brides from this culturally conservative neighborhood would most likely celebrate in the company of only female relatives, so they could dress as seductively as they pleased. Nasrine handed me a plain veil of navy cotton, which I pulled on in place of my thin scarf, and we set out toward the neighborhood mosque, in search of its mullah. It was three in the afternoon, an hour when many Iranians go home for a siesta. Most shops and doctor’s offices close in the mid-afternoon, in the old European style. A gardener spraying enameled tiles till they sparkled in the sun directed us toward the mullah’s house.

  We rang the mullah’s bell, and only when the iron door clicked open did I notice I had forgotten to bring a pair of closed-toed shoes. If the Iranian press corps had had a prize for Most Unsuitably Dressed Reporter, I would have won easily, year in, year out. Most female journalists kept alternative manteaus, headscarves, and shoes in their offices, for reporting trips to more conservative places like mosques and universities. Without an office to speak of, I often ended up as I did that day, suitably modest from head to ankles, with one forgotten detail, in this case a crimson pedicure, ruining the effect.

  Hajj Agha (Iranians referred to most clerics over thirty this way; it literally designates a man [“agha,” or mister] who has performed the hajj) invited us into his spare living room, empty but for a machine-woven carpet and a few cushions for furniture. He cast a bemused glance at my toes, but said nothing. Nasrine, in her most honeyed voice, addressed him with a string of gracious Farsi formulas: “How is your health? May your hands not hurt for agreeing to see us. I hope we are not disturbing the family, who I hope are well …” Then she began explaining our reporting needs. She was skilled at eliciting information from men, an indisputable aid to her reporting, and one of the reasons why I had asked her to join me.

  Hajj Agha adjusted his blue-gray robes and invited to us sit down. Even he expected little to change with this election, he explained. When he heard that I worked for an American magazine, he stiffened slightly, but said we were welcome to talk to the Basij of his mosque. Like most of the militia, he said, they tended to be underemployed, occasionally borrowing a motor bike to work as messengers outside the Tehran bazaar.

  The origin of the Basij as a frontline militia during the Iran-Iraq War is one of the saddest stories of the Islamic regime. Comprising volunteer soldiers too young to serve in the regular army, the Basij were used as human mine sweepers. The government dispatched them onto the border plains to certain death, supplied with plastic keys meant to open the doors to heaven. When the war ended, the Basij was transformed into a paramilitary force with the hazy, worrisome mandate of “promoting virtue” among young people, nominally accountable to the country’s chief authority, the Supreme Leader, but run unsystematically out of local mosques. Depending on the bias of the news source, the Basij today are variously described as an Islamic version of the Boy Scouts, a voluntary militia, or a thuggish street gang. Really they are all these things at once. Basijis carry official cards; some carry weapons (from the classic AK-47 to the more medieval mace, depending on the task at hand); and they operate both independently and in coordination with what human rights groups call the state’s “quasi-official organs of repression.” The murky origins of the Basij’s authority lie in the government’s mix of Islamic and secular law, an unworkable amalgam that produces only lawlessness.

  I suppose most Iranians would favor the description that reflects their particular history with the Basij, either as the recipients of its happy largesse or as victims of its unofficial but vicious authority. In the short time I had spent in Iran, my experiences with the Basij included being thrown out of a mosque because a lock of hair peeked out beneath my scarf; being arrested at a checkpoint because I was in the company of a male colleague; being pulled over on the freeway for sleeping in the backseat of the car (I had just traveled overland from Baghdad to Tehran and had nodded off in exhaustion; “Is sleep now also illegal?” I asked in exasperation); and being chased with a club for attending a soccer rally. If I had endured all those run-ins in the course of just five years, I could only imagine what those who had spent their whole lives in Iran must have suffered.

  Western reporters tended to view the Basij only through the lens of social class, writing that they were well received in low-income neighborhoods and shunned in the affluent suburbs of north Tehran. While this captured the element of class frustration in the Basij running checkpoints in north Tehran, it missed the dislike of middle-class and working-class Iranians for the Basij’s strong-arm tactics. They often acted like mafia enforcers in ordinary neighborhoods, demanding bribes from store owners for letting them sell contraband music and films and raiding private parties to confiscate alcohol that they would later resell for profit. They abused their privileges within the university system, intimidating other student organizations and crushing student protests.

  But regardless of the Basij’s reputation for enforcing a Taliban-esque morality, they also happened to be far more representative of Iranian society than most people realized. In 2001, a majority of their ranks had voted for Khatami.

  As dusk settled and the call to prayer echoed from the mosque loudspeakers, the men of the neighborhood gathered inside to kneel in the direction of Mecca. After prayer they filtered out, disappearing into the narrow back alleys or the produce shops, and the nineteen-year-old head of a Basij unit joined us on the lawn outside the mosque. His name was Hossein, and the gel that slicked back his hair glinted under the orange of the street lamps.

  We began by discussing television.

  “I only watch Fox News,” he said.

  “Fox News?” I repeated.

  “Yes, it is important to know what the military Americans are thinking.”

  When I asked if he was pleased with Khatami, he responded quickly.

  “He is a good man. But he has allowed the atmosphere to get too open. Worst of all, he has melted before the West. At night we sit with my father, and we discuss. Why should Iran have to curtail its nuclear program? We who control the Strait of Hormoz.”

  Hossein was eager to show us that despite his nationalist views, he was a thoroughly modern young man. In our thirty-minute conve
rsation, he managed to mention that he met friends on orkut.com (Google’s social networking site), owned a complete collection of Eminem, considered A Beautiful Mind the finest movie ever made, and enjoyed weekend trips to the Caspian subsidized by the Basij. He said he would vote in the election, for a conservative candidate with close ties to the Supreme Leader.

  “What about your friends?” I asked, nodding toward the young men in untucked shirts and shabby shoes who were congregating near the front of the mosque.

  “Them? It hasn’t really come up.”

  After our talk, Nasrine and I bought potato chips for our journey back to north Tehran, a trip that took two hours in traffic. On the way we debated how the Basij might vote in this election, whether they might take another chance on a reformist candidate, or favor the conservatives whose more austere campaigns resonated with their traditional sensibilities. We both felt that Hossein did not entirely represent the Basij’s wider cadres. His status in life—as a college student, reasonably well trained in English, who owned a mobile phone—suggested he was the son of a well-off conservative bureaucrat, pushed forward to speak to us by his less educated Basij peers, because he could articulate his views. In fact, Hossein was something like a voluntary fundamentalist. He did not need the Basij; his ties of loyalty to the force were hereditary, traditional, and optional. He could afford university and weekend trips to Mashad and the Caspian Sea without the militia’s help. But his low-income friends, the ones who had spoken reluctantly when Nasrine and I approached, self-conscious about their unrefined answers to our questions, relied entirely on the Basij for the very minor perks that brightened their otherwise bleak, impoverished lives.

  Were the Basij a problem or a benign sociological reality? Their existence reflected the fact that a portion of the populace still believed in Khomeini’s legacy, but to my mind, this was not necessarily pathological. Compared with those youths in other Muslim countries who considered Osama bin Laden a hero and were signing up to be suicide bombers, the conservative Basij were tame, even manageable. They became a threat only when they ceased to be a civic organization for traditional youth, and became a tool in the hands of militant ayatollahs hostile to democratic change. I had spoken to many Basij members during my years in Iran, during demonstrations and at universities, and it was obvious they were not an independent movement, but a private force operated by remote control. Men who wanted to maintain active membership—and enjoy those trips to the Caspian, those bus rides to Imam Reza’s shrine in Mashad—had to show up for duty; that sometimes meant breaking up lectures by progressive clerics and beating students during sit-ins. The Basij, in short, did not mobilize themselves, but were mobilized by others.

  This distinction mattered deeply to Iran’s future. It meant the difference between a core of fundamentalists who would die to prevent change, and a core who might not embrace democracy, but who could be convinced of its merits. In the 1997 and 2001 elections, the Basij were permitted to vote freely, and they cast their ballots for a moderate who advocated an open society and rule of law. Somehow, though, I could not imagine them voting for a reformist this time around. The Iran of 2005 was not the Iran of 2001; the notion of reform now rang empty, and the reformist candidates had not risen to the challenge of convincing people otherwise. Would they vote for Ghalibaf, the conservative police chief? He was a natural candidate, but so far the style of his campaign did not resonate with the youth of Naziabad; everything from his choice of poster attire (chic shirts and glasses) to his sponsors (one was a maker of nonalcoholic beer) seemed to cater to a more secular, middle-class constituency. That left only Ali Larijani, the respectable but somber director of state radio and television, and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a relative unknown whose only record of public service was an undistinguished term as the mayor of Tehran. Perhaps, as the reformists hoped, the conservative vote would be divided among these various candidates, and in the end someone reasonable—pragmatic and open to the West—would win.

  CHAPTER 3

  The It Girl of Tehran

  A week into my trip to Iran, I felt vexingly uncertain about my big Iranian youth story. The only thesis I could come up with—that young people were unhappy but also disinclined to revolt—struck me as limp and obvious. It occurred to me that I could test the theory of Kambiz Tavana, the Rafsanjani hack, who argued that the regime was easing young Iranians’ discontent by loosening social strictures. While that sounded reasonable enough, especially considering young Iranians’ rebelliousness and their taste for western culture, I felt the point needed refining. I decided to investigate further by spending some time with a twenty-eight-year-old professional race car driver named Sonbol, Tehran’s reigning It Girl and a symbol of the regime’s new tolerance.

  Nasrine had suggested right away that I interview Sonbol, but I had resisted. Every foreign correspondent in town covering the election had already written about her, using her as an example of how Iranian women were among the most sophisticated in the region. In Saudi Arabia, women were forbidden to drive altogether, while in Iran they were literally racing ahead. It was a useful point to make, given that many in the West saw the situations of Iranian and Saudi women as comparable, but I was more interested to know whether such liberalism was winning over restless young Iranians, or at least keeping them quiet.

  We planned to meet Sonbol one evening at Parkway intersection, one of north Tehran’s busiest interchanges. Nasrine idled her car near where Vali Asr Boulevard tangled with multiple cement overpasses, and we watched cars pause to pick up discreetly dressed prostitutes. Though it was difficult to tell from a distance, what with the women’s thick makeup and the homogenizing effect of their veils and manteaus, the average age of the city’s prostitutes had fallen to about twenty, by the government’s own published calculations. Young girls who ran away from home often resorted to selling their bodies, as did drug addicts, who numbered in the hundreds of thousands in Tehran alone. The rush hour traffic of early evening was the prostitutes’ busiest time; indeed, there was nothing any woman could do to avoid being propositioned, if she found herself walking outdoors between five and eight P.M.

  Half an hour after our appointed time, Sonbol screeched up alongside in a silver BMW. She had pouty, collagen-enhanced lips and a nose job better than most, and seemed to be wearing a velvety hunting manteau, if such a garment existed. She leaned over the passenger seat, raising her voice above the din of traffic. “I forgot my riding lesson! Follow me out to the stables.” With that command, she must have floored the gas pedal, for in seconds she was lengths ahead of us.

  We sped in the direction of Behesht-e Zahra, the sprawling cemetery on the southern outskirts of the city, where the approximately 500,000 young men who had died in the eight-year war with Iraq were buried. Somewhere in the vicinity of the Imam Khomeini’s shrine—its ornate gold and turquoise domes designed to convey the ayatollah’s divine status—she called Nasrine’s mobile phone. “Do either of you ladies want a drink? Hurry up and catch me!”

  The speedometer on Nasrine’s Kia quivered as she yanked the wheel right and left to avoid the slow-moving Peykans on the highway.

  “This is ridiculous,” I said, unable to look ahead. “What’s wrong with you two?” Since Nasrine had met Sonbol the previous month, they had become party friends. Sonbol was clearly a bad influence, a point I would make as soon as their obnoxious race concluded. Nasrine pressed on, and soon we were speeding alongside Sonbol, who stretched her arm out the window, waving a plastic cup of honey-colored liquid. We barreled down the highway side by side, swerving to get close enough to pass the drink, so close that I could hear the insipid Lebanese pop song Sonbol was playing. (In our car, you could hear only the dignified bass rumblings of Shaggy.) Tehran, with its “I Love Martyrdom” murals of suicide bombers, Versace billboards, and rickety buses adorned with portraits of Shia saints, slid by in a smoggy blur. As we veered close, I looked down at my lap, too nervous to watch. “You can’t do this properly if you keep closing y
our eyes,” Nasrine snapped.

  At last we got close enough. I grabbed the cup and leaned back in my seat with great relief. I tasted the liquid. “Something alcoholic with mulberry juice,” I announced. “Is that a good mix?” Nasrine grabbed the cup and nearly emptied it. I was aghast.

  Fortunately, we were not far from the stables. Within a few minutes, we pulled up beside the barn, parking near an old Toyota Land Cruiser.

  “Is that his car?” I said. For weeks, Nasrine had insisted I meet a close friend of hers, a man named Arash. She had invited him along to the interview with Sonbol and had phoned him en route to the stables with directions. “You’re perfect for each other,” she had insisted. “Both of you act like you’re already retired, always stuck at home reading books.”

  In anticipation of the meeting, I was wearing a new sea-green manteau and a cashmere shawl. “You look like a grandmother,” Nasrine said, yanking it off.

  Sonbol was already in the ring, lit by fluorescent lamps, cantering a sleek mare. A long plastic table bore mezze, olives, chips with yogurt, and falafel, and her instructor and a few friends were smoking and mixing drinks. Arash sat slightly to the side of the group, legs crossed, listening to the frivolous chatter with an amused expression. He wore a dark red plaid shirt, jeans, and leather sandals, all of which immediately conveyed long years spent in the West—the luxury of being casual, of not having to impress anyone. His black hair, wavy and nearly to his chin, complemented his relaxed bearing. Though I found him quite attractive in general, his eyes were his finest feature. They were immense, rimmed with a sweep of dark lashes and set under elegant, winged eyebrows, their expression both playful and serious. His skin was olive, like my own, and his slender fingers tapped rhythmically on the table. Nasrine introduced us, and I liked him from that first moment. As we made introductory small talk, I noticed the deep timbre of his voice, and a formality that seemed a cover for shyness.