So you see, we are conditioned to be base with one another, she continued. There are cues to show you are not receptive: You must be cold, arrogant, and extremely formal at all times. Keep your greetings curt and short, and stop smiling so much. But then people will talk behind my back, and call me a snob, I said. They’ll talk about you no matter what. Better they call you a snob than worse names. It’s unfortunate, but you have no choice. This is the world you’re living in now.
I was skeptical, but on a snowy afternoon in Kermanshah, a city in the Kurdish province of northwestern Tehran, Najmeh proved herself right. President Khatami had flown the press corps up with him, as he toured the provinces in anticipation of the presidential election the following year, 2001.
From the airport we squeezed into a few unheated mini-buses, and were deposited at a frigid hotel to await the precise itinerary of rallies and baby-kissing. If the electricity goes out, we’ll all freeze to death, I thought, surveying the grim lobby. Then I wondered whether Islamic law would forgive unmarried men and women for huddling together for warmth, if they were in sub-zero temperatures and threatened with frostbite or worse. Mentally I made a note to submit this question to an ayatollah, since they are trained to resolve such dilemmas of faith and extenuating circumstance.
There was even a television show devoted to such questions, and the presiding ayatollah responded to queries like: Say there’s a two-story house, with a woman sleeping on the first floor and her nephew on the second. If there’s an earthquake that brings down the second floor, and somehow the nephew falls on the aunt and she gets pregnant, is the child a bastard or not? Such urgent and sophisticated matters were often debated on state-controlled television. It was not a high moment for Islam.
Inside the lobby, where we were destined to spend long hours, I sat on a faded brown couch and lit a cigarette. Najmeh frowned. Smoking in public, she informed me with a dramatic look of recrimination, is a major public statement. You might as well announce your room number out loud. What am I supposed to do? I asked plaintively. Not smoke for two days? Besides, anyone who thinks less of me for smoking is an ass, whose opinion wouldn’t matter anyway.
The next event was delayed, and we drank endless cups of tea, cuddling the cups in our hands for warmth. A rusty aquarium stood near the entrance to the hotel restaurant. Even the fish seemed cold. I was flipping through my notebook when a journalist I vaguely knew, a correspondent for an Islamist television network, wandered over, and asked if he could sit next to me. His beard, television affiliation, and collarless shirt marked him as a pious Muslim man. But months later, when he was hired to work for a non-Islamist network, the beard was swiftly shorn and he acquired a tie, so as is the case with many regime apparatchiks and hangers-on, the real extent of his devotion remained a mystery.
According to Najmeh’s rules, I should have immediately risen to change my seat; proper Iranian women did not elicit men’s advances by holding conversations in public. But I was not yet convinced that a mercenary frostiness was required to have a civilized encounter with the opposite sex. And so I nodded, and he sat down and began a predictable conversation about the president’s popularity among young people. After making a handful of generic observations, he proceeded to talk about Iranian youth generally, and the social challenges they faced, from drug addiction to unemployment.
“How do you think young people deal with their physical needs?” he asked, leaning forward, lowering his squeaky voice, and answering his own question: temporary marriage. In Shiite Islam, when a man wants to sleep with a woman without marrying her, he can opt for a sigheh, a temporary marriage. Though sordid and unromantic, temporary marriage is convenient: the duration can be as short as fifteen minutes, and the vows can be exchanged in about fifteen seconds. The institution serves clerics, seeking a theological loophole through which to philander, and prostitutes, who need such a pretext to operate in an Islamic society. The revolution popularized sigheh among ordinary Iranians, especially during the years when dating couples were routinely harassed by the police and forced to show some form of relation.
“What do you think about that option?” he asked. I thought: It is a form of prostitution, which enables a patriarchal culture to cement the imbalanced gender relations in the guise of empowering women with a temporary and flimsy legal status that rarely works to their benefit. But I didn’t know how to say all of that in Farsi, and while I struggled to find the right words, he leaned in closer.
“What do you, personally, think about that. Might you consider it, were we to make that suggestion?” he asked, using the formal plural that in Farsi means “I.” I felt a thousand ants crawling on my skin at once. This! This is what I got, for not flitting away like a nervous schoolgirl?
I shot him a reproachful glance, as my fingers flew up to fiddle with my head scarf, pulling it over my hair, closer to my forehead, as though to impose a cotton barrier of Islam between us. I’m sorry, I need to make a phone call, I said, and rose to walk away, furious with myself for being so naive, with him for the hypocrisy of his beard and Islamist television network, and with my Farsi for being deficient, so I could not sear his ego with a devastating retort.
I drifted to the other side of the room, to the side of a photographer friend I always relied on for pep talks. “I know I’m not supposed to smoke in public,” I said. “What would you do if you were me? Would you avoid doing that?” “Personally, I dislike lies,” he said. “I find that if you act them out long enough, you begin believing them. You’ll find that lies are natural for people here. Having a façade is normal, because being honest is such a hassle. You have to decide what bothers you most—lying all the time, or the consequences of openness.”
What an impossible pair of choices: One would corrode your spirit, and another would bring daily aggravation to your life. This, I realized, was the central dilemma of life under the Islamic regime, and its culture of lies—whether to observe the taboos and the restrictions, or resist them, by living as if they didn’t exist. What if your conscience and your spirit dictated the latter, but you didn’t have the energy to live each day as a struggle? What did you do then?
To ordinary Iranians—people like my Khaleh Farzi, my Starbucks-deprived aunt, who wanted nothing more than to go hiking without a veil, or her husband, who wanted to practice medicine in a system not wholly contaminated by inefficiency and corruption, or my driver, who wanted a job that paid enough for him to get married—reformist political debates were arcane to the point of exasperation.
If the reformists had a wish list, at the top would have been to abolish the system of rule by the supreme religious leader—in Persian, velayat-e faqih—altogether. While to those unfamiliar with Shiite state formation and jurisprudence, such a question sounds understandably intricate and abstract, it is actually not at all. A state must be anchored in an identity of law and be governed by a leader accountable to something. Under the Khomeini model of velayat-e faqih, upheld by the hard-liners, the state was Shiite, the leader was a cleric, and both were accountable only to God. Most of the reformers sought a system characterized by democracy, with an executive as leader, accountable to his constituency.
The open schism between reformists and hard-liners centered on this question. In 2000, that first year I lived in Iran, Iranians elected a reformist parliament by overwhelming majority, and eagerly awaited the passage of more liberal laws. But hard-line-dominated institutions like the judiciary blocked even their modest attempts at tinkering with the Islamic system. A proposal in parliament to allow single women to travel abroad for study, for example, would become lost within the sticky, labyrinthine system of clerical checks and balances, and eventually sink.
The Islamic religious law (sharia) imposed by Ayatollah Khomeini in 1979, as the legal foundation for his Islamic state, made misery and repression official policies. Shocking acts (like marrying a girl of nine) became legal, and ordinary acts (like listening to Western music or showing your hair) were banned. The religi
ous codes stripped women of an array of rights—traveling alone, divorcing with ease, retaining custody of children—and produced a judiciary ruled by chaos and brutality.
Because the structure of the Islamic state, written into the constitution, granted over-arching powers to the supreme religious leader and clerical state bodies, the elected branches of government—like the presidency and the parliament—had no meaningful authority in practical terms. Their policies were either vetoed, ignored, or contradicted.
Well into President Khatami’s first term, late 2000, most Iranians were on the verge of losing patience. They considered the changes to date an upgrade to Taliban Lite, and wanted much more—a free, lawful, and efficiently run country, and an end to the corruption and Islamic white noise that were the system’s trademarks. Some already deemed the reformists a failure, a judgment the majority of Iranians would only reach after the presidential election of the next summer, 2001.
In my familial sphere, Khaleh Farzi was the voice of Iranian frustration, the people who despised the reformists for their powerlessness, and their inability to tear down and reconstruct twenty years of Khomeiniism in five years or less. “They should resign, they should call for mass demonstrations, they should hold a referendum on the whole stupid mess,” she would say, furrowing her eyebrows in contempt.
It was impossible to understand sexual relations in modern Iran without understanding the culture of the revolution, and no one knew this better than the reformists. Many had been fiery radicals in the days of Khomeini and, two decades into the ayatollah’s grand experiment, found themselves baffled that their utopian vision had produced an oppressive, overly sexualized society. Although they sensed that something had gone desperately wrong and recognized dysfunctional social behavior when they saw it, they still refused to believe that women’s oppression was among the Islamic Republic’s central problems. Somehow, they could not admit that all these deficiencies shared an origin—the animating ideological character of the Islamic state. The clerics were bad planners for the same reason they were sexists. But the reformists thought that if economic mismanagement were fixed, if more “immediate” rights were protected, the matter of women would sort itself out.
I realized the depth of that misperception through talks with one reformist legislator whose office was just a few blocks from home. We were on friendly terms, and I stopped by to see him frequently. During one visit, the view from his office raised the question. We had been talking about universities in Tehran, and how, paradoxically, the ones that banned student organizations, and separated men and women most rigidly, were hotbeds of political activity and dating.
The sky darkened as we talked, and during a pause, he pointed a finger at the office building across the street. All the lights were off, save one room, in which the outline of two figures was visible. Do you see that? he asked. She takes a different man up there each week. A woman like that, a simple clerical worker, isn’t educated or cultured enough to know why she’s compelled to sleep around like that. She’s not conscious of craving freedom, of finding it in the crannies where the regime’s eyes can’t follow.
So they do understand, I thought to myself. We continued to talk, and he displayed an advanced awareness of gender relations and their intersection with politics in an oppressive system. But as with so many reformists, his were private reflections. I never heard him air them in public and incorporate them into policy strategy.
Many of the reformists came from an ultra-traditional class that held more conservative social values than the majority of Iranians. Because they were enamored with Western philosophy and borrowed all their ideas about freedom and rights from thinkers such as Kant and Habermas, they were starting to see that their vision of an open society was incompatible with individual rights. But they were as yet too narrow to include women in the category of individual.
This was the Achilles heel of their movement, this foolish idea that they could take a Western concept, like democracy, alter it with Islamic attitudes toward women, and expect it to function properly. Siamak described it well one day, in a conversation about his antique, forest-green Mustang convertible. He had purchased it for what he called “Mustang therapy,” which mainly involved gunning it up and down the expressways of Tehran, blaring Led Zeppelin. His mechanic kept installing old Iranian parts into the car, and declared himself shocked each time to find they didn’t work. It’s the same with our politicians and intellectuals, Siamak complained. They borrow Western concepts like democracy, stick in Iranian parts, and can’t figure out why they’ve lost the juice.
My reformist and I sat smoking in silence, until the light in the office went off, and the streetlights cast shadows over the building. We were both trying to quit, and always fidgeted through the first minutes of every meeting, before sheepishly asking if the other had any cigarettes. In those days, the height of the reform movement’s struggles with the establishment, such figures made themselves available to journalists.
Those were the days when we saw each other every other week, when the reform movement was on everyone’s lips, the topic of lively dinner debates in homes across the country. When it had spark and momentum and people actually believed it could change Iran. As I walked home, I wondered how long it would hold together, this delicate alliance between a long-suffering people and a political movement without prospect.
The mysterious woman across the street continued to fascinate me. When I watched her turn that light off, I knew once and for all that skewed sexual relations were not confined to cosmopolitan, Westernized Iranians. They were experienced by two halves of a society, sliced apart by the regime’s gender hang-ups, struggling to relate to one another in a toxic atmosphere of moralizing propaganda. I wished I could find her, and tell her story.
I imagined her walking out into the street, getting into a shared taxi to go home. She would be wearing a navy-blue maghnaeh (an Islamic bonnet that cloaks the entire head), a faceless public-sector employee, and melt away into the ordinariness of rush-hour Tehran. She probably did not speak English, and her evening would not be colorful or particularly interesting. Her promiscuity did not offer as striking and exotic a contrast to the Islamic face of society as the parties of north Tehran, awash in tequila, drugs, and designer labels. Had I found her, she wouldn’t have made coolly detached comments about love and tyranny that would have made sexy quotes for a story. But her alienation was also Iran’s reality, in all its drab desperation.
Even teenagers, at the high-pitched outset of adolescence, found themselves relating awkwardly across the gender divide. I spent a lot of time with teenagers, and was becoming somewhat expert in their mores. They were easier on my nerves than Iranian adults, smooth men who flirted in grandiloquent, high Farsi, or catty women whose skillfully masked insults I was unequipped to defend myself against. Instead of being reduced to a tongue-tied teenager, I figured, I might as well just hang out with real teenagers. They made me feel clever and interesting. And their conversations, though no material for literature, were a lot more edifying.
One summery Thursday afternoon (the Friday afternoon of a Thursday-Friday Islamic weekend), as I sat scrawling vocabulary flash cards at the office, my cousin Kimia called my mobile phone. “Pleeeease, pleeeease, Azi, you must come out with us, it’s going to be so fun, and Kaveh might even be there, and you can meet my friends, and if Mom knows you’re going I can stay out later,” she pleaded in one breathless, run-on sentence. I contemplated my choices for the evening: going out as Kimia’s chaperone (again), or yet another night with my faithful companion, the dictionary. For the last two hours I had been too distracted to absorb new words and had taken to comparing the Farsi and English for terms like “lust,” in search of cross-cultural insight. A change of scenery was clearly in order.
Fine, I’ll go, but I’m not going to stay out too late, and I’m not going to drive, I said. Driving in Tehran, with its exhausted and edgy taxi drivers and daredevil motorbikes flitting through miles of gnarl
ed traffic, gave me backaches. The veil impaired my sideways vision, and I constantly feared it would slip off while I was driving. What do you do first? Uphold modesty or prevent an accident? I had meant to pose this conundrum to an authoritative ayatollah, after one day, while attempting to do a U-turn across four lanes of oncoming traffic, I found my head scarf down around my shoulders. A man crossing the street in front of my car noticed my confusion, and laughed. Khanoum (lady), you’ve lost your Islam!
Kimia shrieked with joy at my agreement and promised to share her strawberry Pop-Tarts with me and love me forever, in that order. As dusk turned into night, her two friends picked us up in a gray Peugeot. One’s face looked like a cadaver, under what must have been a solid centimeter of foundation and powder. The other had glued little rhinestones around her eyes, and wore a smear of fuchsia where her mouth should have been. We piled into the car, and headed toward Shahrak-e Gharb, a suburban neighborhood in west Tehran, which is home to Golestan, a large mall popular with teenagers.
I assumed the mall was our destination, until Kimia informed me she and her friends had been caught at the mall by komiteh last week and couldn’t risk going back there so soon. As we fermented in the awful traffic, the girls scanned the cars next to them, making eye contact, giggling furiously, and rolling the windows up and down. Who knew so much flirtation could be conducted while cruising? They finally located their crew of male friends, having traded coordinates by mobile phone, and a Jeep full of teenage boys drove perilously close to our sedan, trying to keep pace so the couples facing each other could talk, or rather yell, over the engine noise.
This continued for an hour, and I leaned my head back against the seat, trying to test myself on vocabulary (How did you say supranational again?). Azi, hissed Kimia, stretching my nickname into two syllables, you’re not talking to anyone. I’m here to observe, not participate, I said. But she looked so tense that I relented, and stuck my head out the window, to answer one of her friend’s questions about UCLA. That one could be Iranian, from California, and not from Los Angeles occurred to no one. Suddenly, the exhaust fumes, the crick in my neck, and the sad nuisance of it all got to me, and I caught a cab home, leaving the youngsters to pursue the only public activity they could think of—getting cantaloupe smoothies.
Lipstick Jihad Page 10
