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

by Azadeh Moaveni

  Solmaz coped by sending Aryo to the German school, bypassing school protest rallies and the Iranian education system entirely. In the process, she also bypassed Iranian reality. While no one disagreed that in the short term, Aryo was receiving an education far superior to Koorosh’s—Aryo’s teachers exposed him to world history and no one forced him to chant “Allaho Akbar, Khamenei rahbar!” (“God is great, Khamenei is our leader”) during recess—the choice carried its own set of constraints. For one, the tuition was equivalent to that of an elite private school in the West, far more than Solmaz could afford without help. As a divorced single mother, she could not work full-time; she needed and received her parents’ financial support. Since Arash and I both worked, however, it was expected that we manage our own lives. Though Arash’s salary was generous by Iranian standards, it could not hope to cover tuition priced for western incomes. A school like Aryo’s would be beyond our means.

  Cost aside, there was also the uncertainty involved. The German school existed to educate the children of diplomats and expatriates, whose numbers would immediately dwindle should Iran’s political relations with the West turn rocky. In that event, the school would close, and Aryo would be forced to attend regular Iranian school. His teachers would not be warm, enthusiastic, unveiled women, but dour, bored men with beards who used microphones to call the children to order. He would need to learn to read and write in Farsi and to socialize with children from vastly more diverse backgrounds. They would not be called Joschka and Fabian, but Hossein and Mohammad, and they would taunt him mercilessly, in the classic fashion of Iranian schoolboys.

  As it was, Aryo was growing up a stranger to his own society. One recent afternoon, as we were baking his favorite marble cake, he casually looked up from the mixer and asked, “Maman, where is the nearest church?”

  “Why do you ask?”

  “Since we’re Christian, we should know where the church is.”

  Solmaz explained that they were not, in fact, Christian. He could be forgiven the assumption, since most of his friends and classmates were, since he had played the part of a Wise Man in the school nativity play, and since in his secular family no one had taught him anything about Islam. We strove to keep serious expressions at the time, but after he went to bed we howled with laughter. It was almost as funny as the time he had asked his mother in the shower, “Maman, did you have a penis before the revolution?”

  Apart from misleading him about the family’s religion, we anticipated that a German education would later complicate Aryo’s social life as a teenager outside the circle of his classmates. Iranian men edu cated in western environments, for example, usually lacked the requisite machismo to flirt with Iranian girls. But for the time being, Aryo seemed equally at home with his school mates and his Iranian friends. That afternoon, he and Koorosh stormed about the house making helicopter noises and fielding armies of Lego action figures, occasionally passing by to snatch piroshki, cream-stuffed dumplings, off the coffee table.

  Koorosh’s grandmother called for him to start his homework. She had taught elementary school for three decades in the Shah’s Iran, and controlling the damage wrought by Koorosh’s schooling now consumed her life. She spent evenings completing his art assignments for him, filling in the color-by-numbers book of the Shia imams’ portraits (“Who ever heard of color by numbers at this age!”) so that he could let his imagination roam with watercolors on blank paper. To her perpetual dismay, there was nothing she could do about the core third-grade textbook, which followed the devout Hashemi family through the course of their pious lives, from the meals they ate on the floor to their road trip across Iran. The father in the textbook, Mahmoud Hashemi, was a bearded civil servant who enjoyed taking his family on outings to seminaries, Shia shrines, and martyrs’ cemeteries. When he took them to the city of Shiraz, he showed them many minor tourist sites but neglected to stop at Persepolis. This was something like going to Rome but skipping the Forum and the Colosseum. The task of Koorosh’s grandmother was to teach him that Mr. Mahmoud Hashemi, the character at the center of his education, was a raging fool. As we gathered our things to leave, she closed the textbook with a long sigh. “Before the revolution, I used to dislike people who left Iran and chose to live abroad,” she said. “I used to think, What is wrong with you that you prefer other countries to your own? But not now, not anymore.”

  CHAPTER 17

  Under Investigation

  On a cold, clear day in January, a relative, Laila, came to visit us with her five-year-old daughter. Hourmazd was almost three months old, and we were still receiving visits from friends and female members of our extended families. Laila brought a hand-knit pair of pajamas for the baby, and an apple pie with saffron crust for us. We gossiped for about an hour about mutual acquaintances, and Laila mournfully complained about her family’s imminent move to Tabriz. Tehran had become too expensive under Ahmadinejad, and her husband felt that they could have a better quality of life in a smaller city. After drinking our tea and eating pie and a plate of grapes (Iranian socializing requires fruit, and the quality of your fruit bowl is a key measure of your hospitality), Laila prepared to leave. Her little girl proudly pulled out a cherry-red scarf from her purse and tied it over her hair with an innocent flourish. Only the most religiously extreme families force girls that young to cover their hair, and we all looked at her mother inquiringly.

  “She insists on wearing it,” Laila said, shaking her head. “I’ve tried to discourage her, but she thinks it makes her look like her mommy.” The girl beamed beneath her scarf, imagining herself quite grown-up. She did not realize, of course, that her mommy wore the scarf because it was mandatory, and that if given the choice, she would do otherwise. The sight of them together depressed me, and I trudged downstairs thankful that Hourmazd was a boy. As I prepared him for bed, I lost myself in thoughts of the little girl, wondering whether she would be doomed to wear the veil without having had the chance to truly choose.

  Hourmazd was wakeful that night, and I paced the room trying the sleep-inducing maneuver my baby books called the milk shake. It did not work. As I paced, I compiled a mental inventory of all the girls and women in my social circle whom I had observed during my years in Iran. Laila’s little girl would grow up in the society in which these women had come of age, a society whose middle-class value system was being transformed. Because laws enforced religious observance, one might expect faith to grow out of a lifetime’s habit rather than conviction. But in practice, this seemed true of a startlingly small number of women. Paradoxically, rather than turning out uniformly devout or predictably rebellious, the Iranian women I knew were more independent than any generation before them. They negotiated their way through society, and around hejab, with the assurance of true individuals, rather than like the model Islamic subjects the regime wished them to be.

  Instead of allowing themselves to be simply oppressed by hejab, they treated it with an instrumentalist practicality. Like so many seemingly fixed or imposed beliefs, hejab could be tinkered with for the sake of an attractive marriage proposal, for instance. In Iran, where “marrying up” in social or financial standing was more imperative than in a Jane Austen novel, women commonly adjusted their head covering to match their prospective partner’s degree of religiosity. Was this fluid morality or resistance to subjugation? Perhaps both.

  I thought about one of Arash’s cousins, a doctoral student we had seen the previous week on one of her visits home from Canada. Born into a secular family, to a mother who did not cover her hair, she started veiling to marry a more religious man she deeply loved. Her mother was mortified at first, and the extended family reacted a bit snobbishly, but with the passing of time the young woman’s hejab became very ordinary. Then take the case of one of my own family acquaintances, a young man from a wealthy and devout family in Mashad, Iran’s shrine city. He ended up being snared by a young woman of little religious conviction, who happily adopted greater propriety and more conservative dress to cemen
t the match.

  Most recently, we had met the girlfriend of a bohemian but pious painter at the opening of one of his gallery shows. From the moment we shook hands, I felt there was something peculiar about her—the bright turquoise scarf and Doc Martens that peeked out from under her chador, the easy way she looked Arash in the eye and engaged him in conversation. As everyone in the gallery admired her boyfriend’s art, a playful series of whirling dervishes in tribute to Rumi, she and I chatted. I learned that she had spent half her life unveiled in London and had only donned the full-length black chador to satisfy what she called his “aesthetic conception of the feminine.” This sounded to me like paternalism wrapped in painterly abstraction, but she seemed entirely at ease in her new reincarnation, chirping “Ciao!” as we left the gallery.

  I could easily think of other women whose marriages had necessitated a turn in the opposite direction. I knew a young chadori photographer, Fatemeh, from a deeply conservative family. Even on reporting trips to the border with Iraq during the roasting days of high summer, Fatemeh wore layered chador, dexterously managing her multiple cameras from within its nylon folds. She had married a similarly religious man, then divorced him when he objected to the long hours she spent working around other men. When she married a less strictly devout colleague, she of the tri-fold chador downgraded to a simple headscarf.

  In short, many women developed a malleable attitude toward the veil, despite being forced to wear it since adolescence. This showed how dramatically the revolution had failed in keeping women subordinate to families and husbands. Iranian women now saw themselves as individuals who could challenge their families’ traditions, whether liberal or conservative, and chart a wholly independent course. The other fascinating thing about such marriages is that they would have been unlikely in the Iran of my parents’ generation, where social classes were impermeable; people mostly married within their religious and financial caste, and hejab was an inherited, fixed custom within specific groups. Back then, the daughters of veiled women learned to veil, the daughters of secular women learned to go bareheaded, and each group was taught to regard the other as, respectively, backward or immoral.

  Such attitudes, as you might imagine, were not conducive to peaceful coexistence in a country that comprised religious traditionalists, westernized secularists, and everything in between. That these days women chose their life partners from a broader range of candidates, and felt confident enough to tailor their hejab accordingly, suggested an erosion of social boundaries that could only be healthy for a country whose revolution had broken out partly over class stratification and the role of religion in daily life. Paradoxically, authoritarian laws had somehow made Iranian society more tolerant. There was a perverse pluralism in today’s Iran, where the moral weight of the family was removed in questions of religiosity, and young people, all exposed to the same restrictions, grow up freer to choose and change.

  In the early months of 2007, American and Iranian analysts, European diplomats, and the West’s media elite collectively predicted that the United States might soon unleash a military attack on Iran. I will forever recall that time as the winter of “Do you think America will attack us?” dinner parties, during which everyone debated the likelihood of a bombing campaign. The previous fall I had reported a story for Time the editors called “The Coming War with Iran,” and in the intervening months similar breathless anticipation of a conflict dominated the American media. At the nervous dinner parties, friends often commented that the media frenzy amounted to psychological warfare—that it was an American tactic to keep the mullahs uneasy and undermine how ascendant they felt in places like Iraq and Lebanon. While this might have been true, the saber-rattling could as easily have signaled a serious intention to attack, or at least a serious ambition on the part of neoconservatives to push for a military confrontation. My editors set about ensuring that I would be prepared in case of an attack, dispatching a Thuraya satellite phone for me to use in case the aerial campaign targeted communication and electricity infrastructure. I unwrapped the heavy phone with a sense of foreboding. The last time I had received such equipment, just before the war with Iraq, it had also been sent “just in case.”

  In December of 2006, the U.N. Security Council had unanimously passed a resolution imposing sanctions on Iran over its nuclear program. Not long after, American troops in Iraq arrested several members of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, and a top official in Washington accused them of being “engaged in sectarian warfare.” Most worrisome of all, though, was the January State of the Union address, in which President Bush lumped Iran together with Al Qaeda and claimed that “the Shia and Sunni extremists are different faces of the same totalitarian threat.” This statement was dangerously, and some said deliberately, misleading. European diplomats argued it was Washington’s way of seeking a more “robust” position ahead of negotiations with Iran, but to me it just sounded like more scary justification to bomb.

  With the world so focused on the emerging threat of a U.S.-Iran confrontation, my editors pleaded with me to resume work. Though they had agreed to allow me three months of maternity leave, they convinced me to return after just two months, to help them consider making Ahmadinejad “Person of the Year.” In the end, they did not bestow the president that distinction, but I was caught up again in the whirl of news and somehow back on my editors’ radar. That was why, even before I’d managed to teach Hourmazd that he should sleep at night rather than during the day, I found myself riding a taxi to central Tehran to interview a university professor who was also a prominent political analyst. America wanted to know whether Tehran had the jitters, and it was my mission to find out.

  It was my first full-fledged outing without three-month-old Hourmazd; I felt a rush of exhilaration, closely followed by panic. I had planned the meeting with great precision, making the appointment for an hour when traffic was at its lightest so that I could be back within three hours, the longest stretch Hourmazd, who still refused to take bottles, could go without being nursed. I prayed that there would be no unexpected accidents clogging the freeway and no collapse in the mobile phone network: that the first outing of my career as a working mother would go smoothly.

  Usually the guards at the front of the university waved my taxi through the gates. But that day, they gestured me out of the car. I impatiently collected my purse and rushed up to the guardhouse, calculating the stop would entail about five minutes of lost interview time.

  I explained to one of the guards who I was, whom I was there to see, but he just stared at me glacially.

  “You can’t enter looking like that,” he said. “Your manteau has too few buttons.” He used the formal pronoun for “you,” the equiva lent of the French vous in Farsi, but his tone radiated scorn.

  I looked down at what I was wearing, confused. It was one of my more conservative overcoats, loose and olive green, and it was held together in the front by little hooks, not buttons. I wasn’t sure if he took issue with my having hooks in lieu of buttons, or with the insufficient number of those hooks. I told him I was a foreign correspondent on my way to an interview, and that I should not be held to the dress code for female students. He shook his head, and turned his back to me. In a raised voice, I said that my attire was perfectly appropriate, that I had visited this professor numerous times without any such hassle. These protestations failed to move him, so I called the professor on my cell phone. Surely the security guard would not be screening the guests of such a prominent academic.

  The professor asked to speak to the guards. I passed them my mobile phone. “Sorry, Doctor,” the shorter of the two said, pronouncing the title with a sneer. “But you cannot imagine how this lady is dressed. … No, it is not possible.” He handed the phone back to me.

  “I truly apologize for this, but it seems they’re not going to let you in.” The professor sounded embarrassed. “When they’re intent on picking on you, there’s nothing that can be done.” He used the Farsi verb gir dadan, which m
eans to pick on or harass for no discernible reason. The term became popular after the Islamic revolution to describe a form of behavior that had not existed previously. I resented the professor for not coming out to defend me in person, as challenging them on the phone from the warm confines of his office seemed a bit unchivalrous. But I politely said that I understood, and hung up. I tried one last time with the guards.

  “Please reconsider. I’ve left my baby at home, and he still nurses. I don’t have time to go home and come all the way back.”

  “Lady, I don’t care if you have a baby,” said the shorter guard. “I don’t care if you’re double-parked. I don’t care if you’ve left food on the stove. You are simply not entering the university like this. You look … you look appalling.”

  I felt as though I had been slapped. “How dare you speak to me that way?”

  The taller guard rebuked him for addressing a “sister” so disrespectfully, but he continued to gaze at me with brazen contempt, relishing his petty power over the gate, over me.