Another strand in the reform movement held a pragmatic vision for Iran’s future. Their main objective was to redefine the system’s mandate along conventional lines—economic growth and the welfare of Iranians. Promoting ideological causes, they felt, kept Iran in a state of fixed tension with the West, and retarded the country’s potential as a great power in the region.
Had the reformists been able to agree on priority and strategy, their diversity could have been a source of strength rather than weakness. But they were unable to create a real coalition, and instead bickered among themselves over whether or not to engage with America, over the priority of domestic freedoms, over strategy in dealing with their conservative opponents.
Aligned against these forces stood the old-guard clerical establishment, known as the hard-liners. Just as “reformers” was an umbrella term for diverse political groups seeking change, the “hard-liners” were an equally diverse group, brought together by their allegiance to the status quo. Many were simply outright fundamentalists, Taliban-like in their rigid, backward attitudes toward women, society, and the world outside. Their commitment to exporting Khomeini’s Islamic Revolution had not wavered, and they sought to extend Iran’s regional influence through support for militant causes. Just as many, if not more, were motivated by money and greed, keen to preserve the rich patronage networks, privileges, and unbridled power the system in its current form allotted them.
The hard-liners, for all intents and purposes, controlled the country. They ran the army and the Revolutionary Guard, had foot militias at their service, held monopoly over state media, and supervised the economy through the bonyads, massive funds for the oppressed created after the Revolution. They were custodians of government and law as well, because the elected branches of government—the executive and parliament—were legally vulnerable to the decrees and vetting procedures of the clerical bodies, accountable to the country’s supreme religious leader. This position, more powerful than president, was the brainchild of Ayatollah Khomeini, who passed it down to his successor, Ayatollah Khamenei. The photos of both men, with their twin black turbans and dour glares, wallpapered the country.
The history lessons I absorbed during this first visit back helped me understand the struggles revolutionary Iran was facing. But understanding the full splay of the history also complicated my work as a journalist, to document these events for the American media. In my files, generalizations like “reformist, liberal, progressive, moderate” appeared over and over again. My conscience bristled at this language, especially since news stories rarely had room for the historical context required to explain the nuances of these misleading labels.
Writing about Iran as an American journalist, in language that did not get one banned from the country, meant effacing history from the story. It was, to read most written accounts of the political schism, as though real liberals—secular intellectuals, technocrats, and activists with no ties to the clergy—either did not exist or were too irrelevant to be counted as political realities. A conservative politician whom I frequently visited in Tehran had the same complaint, though from a slightly different standpoint. “You journalists, you’re painting this story as a fight between good and evil,” he said. “You’re absolutely right,” I told him, though I finished the sentence silently this way: “It’s actually a fight between evil and slightly less evil.”
President Khatami, perhaps aware that recasting the state’s foreign policy would be a task for Sisphyus, set about transforming the style and culture of daily life. By restructuring the upper management of key ministries, he discreetly engineered a more relaxed official approach to Iranians’ private lives. The morality police, charged with enforcing the strict social code, began to behave with less regular brutality, and the Culture Ministry issued permits for independent newspapers. In his speeches, he retired the inherited rhetoric of the revolution—martyrdom and death, struggle and enemies—and spoke instead of civil society, dialogue, and openness.
In the early years of Khatami’s first term, from 1997 to 1999, Iranians experienced only modest change. I stayed on for a few weeks, during that chaotic, life-transforming first visit, and found the atmosphere decidedly Soviet. My female relatives and I wore dark veils and sandals with socks, wiped off our lipstick when we saw policemen in the distance. My aunt still came along for the ride, if a male cousin was dropping me off late at night, in case we were stopped at a checkpoint. In taxis, my relatives hissed me silent, when I jabbered away critically, suggesting Tehran seemed like a giant cemetery, with nearly every street and tiny alley named for a martyr.
From a purely moral and political vantage point, not to mention an emotional one (what Iranian didn’t despise the revolutionary clerics, really, for all they had done?), we considered the reformists suspect, a choice of the less bad among the awful. But did they help transform the way we lived, our habits and sensibilities? They did.
By the end of 1999 and into 2000, the pressures lightened noticeably, and people felt more comfortable behaving in ways that had before seemed reckless. While the legal basis for the regime’s oppressive ways stayed intact, the open spirit of Khatami’s presidency, and his relentless rhetoric about the rule of law, changed the culture of Iran. For years, public space had been the domain of Islamic vigilantes and the morality police, who arbitrarily terrorized people. Khatami reined them in, and under him Tehran became almost a normal city, with young couples strolling in the park arm in arm, licking ice cream cones.
The demonstrations both fed off and propelled this energy. The hundreds of thousands of people who poured into the streets of Tehran and shouted “Death to the Supreme Leader!” collapsed the regime’s façade of invulnerability. More powerful than a mass referendum, as loud as the opening cries for change in 1979, the protests signaled that Iran’s nearly 70 million people wanted a different set of rules, a different kind of country. How the clerics in charge would respond, whether they were prepared to change, hung in the balance.
The demonstrations of 1999 also played a central role in my own life. Captivated by the political drama, I knew I had to return and watch the rest unfold. Compared to the stagnant politics of Egypt, the electric, bold debates in Iran, and the open battle for the country’s future, were dream stories for a young journalist. A few months later, the regional bureau chief of Time suggested I go work in Tehran as the magazine’s stringer.
At that time—before the second Palestinian Intifadeh, and well before September 11—Iran was the hottest news story in the region, and the regime didn’t allow U.S. publications to base American journalists in Iran. Because I was also Iranian, the regime politely ignored my American birth and passport, and allowed me to come and work. I would be the only American journalist permitted to base myself in Tehran, during what seemed at the time one of the most significant political transformations in the modern history of the region. I packed my bags, and prepared to leave Cairo behind.
My preparations proceeded smoothly, until I announced the decision to my family in California, who were immediately horrified, convinced that torture and certain death awaited me. Relatives from all over the world, of all ages, were recruited to aid the effort of dissuading me. Scandalized Maman, with twenty-year-old visions of political repression of journalists, tried to prevent my going with alternating tactics of fiscal blackmail, admonition, and horror. (“You realize that the physical scars of the torture will heal, but the nightmares of prison rape will haunt you forever. Your personality will never be the same. Be advised your father will cut you off entirely. No more ski vacations, nothing. You can fund your own foolishness.”)
I tried to avoid the hysteria building around me, though at times I reminisced over the grimmer moments in our family lore—the uncle imprisoned by the revolutionary regime; the great-uncle who hurled himself from a third-story window to evade the Shah’s secret police—and wondered whether my identity could not be explored in, say, the Iran archives of a really good university library. During these
moments of doubt I would leaf through Goldman Sachs recruitment literature, and contemplate whether I could endure life with, for example, a giant scar on my cheek slashed by a vindictive Islamic thug. The terror campaign shook me a little, because ultimately I didn’t really want to die in the course of covering a story, and didn’t know Iran well enough to know this was unlikely. But I reminded myself these were the same relatives who thought they would be murdered riding the subway through Manhattan, and went ahead and bought my ticket.
During my first weeks back in Iran, in the spring of 2000, the family devoted much time and energy to ensuring I dressed properly. Among the most concerned was my Khaleh Farzi, who was in her mid-forties, petite, and marooned in Iran from her two favorite pastimes, jogging and drinking coffee at Starbucks. She and her husband had moved back to Iran in 1998, after long years in New Jersey. During the first year that my uncle had floated the idea of relocating, she would only say—in a nod to my grandfather’s refuge in poetry—“I will only move to places that rhyme with Tehran, such as Milan.” This awkward relationship with reality also characterized her life in Iran, where she spent most of her time reminding us all that “this is not a country, it is hell.”
She thought if left to my own devices, I might forget we lived under an Islamic regime and stride outside in a tube top. Are your ankles covered? Elbows? Khaleh Farzi would call out a checklist of body parts from wherever she was in the house, as I headed for the door.
Mercifully, by the time I began living in Iran, the Khatami spring had made it possible to wear roopoosh (a long, loose coat also called by the French term manteau) that did not make one look like a great-aunt. Just one year before, going outside had meant draping oneself in banal and anonymous folds of cloth. Every morning, getting dressed had involved a me vs. the regime calculus. Shall I look remotely like myself, or shall I pass through all this unpleasantness as a ghost, invisible in a wash of grey or black? One’s relationship to the veil had been a truly existential question: How important is it to be myself, to have my outside reflect my identity? When faced with this choice, only the true radicals and street warriors chose to flout the dress code. Because it was a fight, they applied war-paint—coats and coats of makeup—and aggressively risqué clothes. But ordinary women who just wanted to go to work, rather than be Rosa Parks through their choice of dress, simply accepted the erasure of their personality through the roopoosh uniform.
But by 2000, a roopoosh as concealing as the chador, the billowing, all-encompassing black tent that only very traditional women and government employees wore, was no longer required apparel. The middle part of the spectrum—between washed-out ghosts and angrily painted peacocks—had grown. The stark contrast between how one looked in public and private faded. Isn’t it lovely, I said to Khaleh Farzi happily, we don’t look like crows anymore. Come on, she replied, running her fingers over the rainbow of colors in her drawer, it’s just a prettier cage. Like so many small freedoms that Iranians began experiencing that year, it registered as miraculous progress for about ten minutes, and then was deemed no progress at all.
Still, once the costs of disobeying the regime were reduced, people began steadily pushing the limits. My great-aunt, who had no patience in her dotage for purchasing something that would be confiscated the next day, went out and bought a banned satellite dish. We stopped carrying socks in our purse, reasonably sure we could bare our toes in sandals without hassle. My uncle stopped watching basketball on satellite television each and every night, and began reading the newspapers instead, stopping every ten minutes to read aloud a particularly amusing criticism of the ruling clergy. The changes were modest, and no one pretended they were nearly enough or nearly secure; but they made life, compared to the gloomy years of pre-Khatami privation, infinitely more livable.
My family in Iran still amuse themselves telling stories about the first weeks I moved to Tehran, in the early months of 2000. My patience for this humor is limited, because in the end, no one who feels imbued with serious purpose enjoys being mocked for verbal slips, such as confusing the Farsi words for “speech” and “cabbage,” which were unhelpfully distinguished only by a twist of a vowel. But there was such an entertainment deficit in Iran that the bumbling first steps of a newly returned relative offered a welcome distraction from the dulling routine of daily life. I was like a running sitcom played for their amusement, Azadeh in Ayatollahland: Watch her accidentally insult powerful clerics! See her try to wear a beret instead of a veil!
My Iranian version of the exotic ethnic novels I read in college—my Persian Like Water for Chocolate, where I was supposed to discover the ancient myths of human civilization in a kitchen, in the ancient ritual of sauces or puddings three days in the making—was nowhere to be found. Where were the orchards, the old houses filled with evocative scents and closely knit clans who spent their days cooking together and puzzling the meaning of life over tea? Not only did this world not exist anymore, it had been replaced by something cynical and alien, familiar only through course of habit to those who had known nothing else. Iran, fountain of my memories, the leisurely black and white world of old films like My Uncle Napoleon, had been wiped away, replaced by the Islamic Republic.
Of course until that moment, had someone asked me, I would not have admitted to living most of my life under the spell of nostalgia, an emotion that disguises itself as healthy patriotism or a fondness for Iranian classical music or a hundred other feelings that are sincerely experienced as something else. The first, jarring chip at my romanticized view of Iran was inflicted by Siamak Namazi, a cocktail party acquaintance who quickly became one of my closest friends. Many of the U.S.-educated Iranians who had returned to Tehran were there because they had been mediocre in the West, and preferred to be big fish in a small swamp. “All the exceptional people have left,” said a young Tehrani to me one night at a party. “They’re the ones who’ll never come back.”
Siamak was one of the few exceptions. He helped start a business consulting firm in Tehran because he actually wanted to be there and build something that could make a lasting contribution. He was twenty-eight, a Tufts graduate, and the son of a U.N. diplomat, with wide brown eyes and the sort of endearing, chauvinist-tinged gallantry common to frat boys from the American South. Socially, he affected an image of rebel playboy, but he could strategize better than most Iranian ministers and was vulnerable to his mother’s dictums.
He warned me, in the early weeks of our acquaintance, of the difference between nostalgic and realistic love. If you are a nostalgic lover of Iran, he said, you love your own remembrance of the past, the passions in your own life that are intertwined with Iran. If you love Iran realistically, you do so despite its flaws, because an affection that can’t look its object in the face is a selfish one. I observed Siamak’s life, its constant negotiations and self-interrogations, and took note, tried to set things in perspective. I had to reconcile with actually existing Iran; fate had determined that in the course of 2,500 years of Iranian history, I would live during this blip, this post-revolutionary second.
Most of my relatives lived uptown, in northern Tehran, in quiet back streets of leafy suburbs, behind tall gates that separated them from the loud, polluted, congested downtown that was home to the rest of the city’s inhabitants. As a rule, I am not the sort of person who sees valor in discomfort. The Vogue down the pants was pretty much my threshold. But from the moment I arrived, I saw very clearly that I would not see much of Iran from my family’s privileged perch.
Much of my extended family had left Iran on the eve of the revolution. One of my uncles, an industrialist with close business ties to many of the Shah’s associates, saw his assets confiscated, while another uncle, who supported the revolution, saw his appropriated as well. The latter uncle was one of the few to stay in Iran and, with a great degree of effort and caution, managed to rebuild his petrochemical company in the course of the next two decades. I spent a great deal of time with him and his wife, but among all the rel
atives who had remained, including a few of my parents’ cousins and the odd great-aunt, I was closest to Khaleh Farzi, my mother’s sister who had returned a few years before me. This smattering of family lived in various corners of the city, and I shuttled between their houses for teas and lunches, but when it came to choosing a residence, I decided to move in with my grandfather.
My father’s father, whom we called Pedar Joon, lived in central Tehran. Still the family patriarch in his nineties, his house sat off of Villa Street, in a middle-class neighborhood that forty years ago, when he moved there, had been a desirable location. It was near one of the few institutions the Islamic Republic did not rename after the revolution, the Danish Pastry Shop. Living downtown meant inhaling air thick with pollution, hotter during the summer than north Tehran and sludgy with dirty, melted snow in the winter, but it was worth it to be closer to the heart of the city, to Tehran University, to the cafés where Iranian intellectuals had sipped Turkish coffee and brewed politics over the years.
Though I hated parting with my long-cultivated fantasies, I began to accept that life in Iran was more a firsthand lesson in the evolution of a tyrannical regime than an ephemeral homecoming to a poetic world of nightingales. But there were enough moments of delicious poignancy that I could, for a time, postpone facing this reality. The first round of teas and lunches with relatives around the city were so atmospheric and idyllic, so overflowing was everyone’s graciousness, that I felt like a character in a period drama.
Lipstick Jihad Page 6
