Lipstick Jihad

by Azadeh Moaveni

  I respected Mitra for boxing up a privileged life, saying goodbye to all of her extended family, and starting from scratch in another hemisphere. Leaving was not an act of treason or disloyalty but of self-preservation. I had always believed that we outside were compromised for leaving Iran behind. That belief had colored my life, filled it with remorse for a decision that had not been mine. But for Mitra, and thousands of mothers like her, it would have been more compromising not to leave. Sacrificing a middle-aged life was one thing. Sacrificing two fresh daughters entirely another.

  On the plane, a British businessman sat down next to me, and began chatting as the other passengers found their seats. We both watched women sit down, and, with the exception of pulling their head scarves off, looking pretty much as they had when they got on board. This was wholly unlike the boarding of outbound planes in years past, when women did an elaborate changing routine out of their black roopooshes, emerging in full makeup and Western clothes, as though the airplane bathroom was a backstage dressing room. Well, it’s much better now, isn’t it? he asked, trying to engage me in conversation. Yes, of course, I said quietly. And I didn’t elaborate because I didn’t have it in me at that moment to extol all the ways Iranians now had it better. I wanted to say: Yes, it’s better, but not for me, because I’m a female journalist, and life is still really crap. But of course I didn’t say that, because it was so easy to make Westerners think the worst things about Iran, and my private misery was highly specialized and therefore irrelevant.

  At that moment, I remember thinking really how stupid the mullahs were. If they didn’t intimidate us with their goony Mr. Xs, people like me could be really useful. I’d have sat here chirping away about how much relative freedom women had, and blah blah. I would have been a perfect little commercial for the democratizing Islamic Republic. But instead, they played stupid games and harassed you and pretended to threaten your family and tried to make you rat on your friends and made your friends rat on you. And then they acted incredibly affronted when you wrote that not everything was sublime in the Islamic Republic.

  I was on my way to New York. As assignments went, it was relatively painless. It was not a squalid refugee camp, full of ragged children whose torn overalls and forlorn eyes made your heart splinter, or a trip to a desolate border region where you ate nothing but canned tuna for a week. But for me, following President Khatami to New York, for the United Nations General Assembly, held all the appeal of a winter jaunt to Taliban-controlled Kabul.

  Under the Clinton administration, the possibility of a stealthy Iran-U.S. détente always lurked around the corner. It seems quaint from the vantage point of today, with the region on the verge of falling apart and Iran branded as one-third of the “axis of evil,” to consider such micro-diplomacy a big news story. But at the time, every journalist who covered Iran scrutinized Tehran’s relationship with Washington for signs of thaw. Since ties were formally severed, the two countries communicated through what was called “track two diplomacy,” where former officials and diplomats acted as intermediaries through private relationships and quiet international conferences that pretended to be about other subjects. The U.N. General Assembly was one of the few occasions when the president of Iran and the president of the United States would be in the same room, so journalists showed up in case the backroom diplomacy went public through some last-minute haggling.

  When asked to go, I said yes. Then I went to pack a suitcase and immediately regretted it. I was getting better at existing between Iran and America. Most days one helped me understand the other better, rather than the two squishing me like elephants. But geographically at least, I still preferred them apart. The certainty of vast ocean and great land mass as separator was reassuring. There was always some European airport duty free to loiter through in between, where you could try on ten different perfumes and buy chocolate and prepare yourself for the transition. I did not want the mullahs to come to Manhattan. New York was my American stomping ground. I went there to lounge half-naked in dimly lit bars, sip cocktails with friends, and forget about those same mullahs. Their arrival in New York would taint my sanctuary. Turbans and the Manhattan skyline would mingle in my mind. And the question of “What do I wear?” would take on whole new dimensions.

  The morning of President Khatami’s press conference, I walked east down 42nd Street toward the U.N., wearing a gray, Donna Karan pantsuit, gripping a soy-milk cappuccino, invisible in the crowded commuter lane of the sidewalk. I was very pleased with this suit because it was my first adult woman suit that actually looked natural on me, instead of boxy and self-consciously suit-like. But inside my bag, glowing like pink kryptonite, was the accessory that would damn it to hell. A carefully folded, rose-colored head scarf.

  For months, I had worked around the president and his entourage in Iran, veiled properly, like a professional Iranian woman. Technically, since I carried an Iranian passport and had Iranian nationality, I was legally required to wear the veil everywhere, at all times.

  Even secular women activists wore the veil when outside the country, so the system’s eyes abroad did not document their violation and use it as pretext to harass them upon return. This probably wouldn’t happen to me, but at the same time, I knew the president and his aides were more comfortable dealing with Iranian women who were veiled. Something about speaking Farsi in public with a bare-headed woman distracted them, even though they pretended everything was perfectly normal.

  If I appeared before them with my hair exposed, the image would be etched onto their minds forever. Every time thereafter, they would recall me as Ms. Moaveni-whom-I-once-saw-without-hijab, rather than simply Ms. Moaveni. I had gone unveiled before at regional conferences, and half the Iranian delegation ignored me, looking away when we passed in the hallways as though passing a strip club.

  The president’s men were not so lumpen, and would of course still speak to me. But they would feel mortally disrespected. My youth would render it a precocious offense, rather than a political statement. Who does this girl think she is, they would say to themselves, to be asserting herself so impertinently before her elders? If there was one over-arching value to Iranian culture (at least until the revolution created its own culture of anarchy), it was respect for one’s elders. That’s why it actually mattered, when you were passing out tea in a crowded room, which elderly woman with purple hair you served first.

  Maybe it seems excessive, elevating the question of putting on that scarf to high drama, a Hamletesque teetering back and forth over a square of cloth. But every now and then, I would find myself in these situations, which demanded an understanding of who I was and what mattered to me, and truly felt paralyzed. Putting on that dumb scrap of pink meant betraying my personal beliefs.

  First there was my opposition to the veil, inherited from both sides of my family, an heirloom value that every single one of us—monarchists, secularists, socialists, capitalists, dilettantes—held dear. We did not negotiate with the veil. It was the symbol of how everything had gone horribly wrong. How in the early days of the revolution, secular women wore the veil as a protest symbol against the West and its client state policies, and then had it imposed on them by the fundamentalist mullahs who hijacked the revolution and instituted religious law. My generation, Iranians who learned about 1979 at kitchen tables in the United States, absorbed this version of history as truth. Though most women in modern-day Iran might not consider the veil their highest grievance, they knew it symbolized the system’s disregard for women’s legal status in general. Mandatory veiling crushed women’s ability to express themselves, therefore denying them a basic human right.

  As a child of this diaspora, how could I wear the mullahs’ veil on the streets of New York? As a student of a liberal American education, taught to apply my political beliefs to my everyday life—to recycle and vote, to respect picket lines and observe boycotts—how could I not take a personal stand against the repressive veil? Did I not owe it to the thousands of Afghani wom
en, veiled by force under the Taliban, the millions of Iranian women who had no choice, to take a stand, when I did?

  Of course, even if I’d had days to come up with a position, I wouldn’t have known what to do. American individualism and Iranian deference to tradition were irreconcilable. That was the catch that no one ever told you about—that traveling down one of those paths meant turning your back on the other. No commuting back and forth, no shared custody. End of story.

  As the flags of the U.N. appeared in the distance, I realized there was no graceful way out. My feet sailed over the pavement, closer and closer to the unmakeable decision. Suddenly, Siamak’s voice entered the din in my head. I had spent a lot of time calling him up and presenting him with impossible situations, and by now I could pretty much play his role in my head and talk myself down from the ledge. Okay, Azi jan, stop for a second, he would say. Stop, and imagine the two possible outcomes. Once you can imagine both, decide which one is worse. Decide which one you can live with. If you can figure that out, you know what you need to do.

  And so I thought out the worst. Veiled, I would dislike myself. I would brush my teeth in the dark, embarrassed to look at myself in the mirror. But going bareheaded, I would display disrespect for the faith of men I esteemed. Men who had, on their territory, encouraged me, treated me with respect, and always helped me, even when it didn’t serve their purposes. On what they perceived as my territory, I would be flinging it all in their faces. This I would carry around like a brick of guilt in my stomach. This I could not live with.

  With just a block to go, I unfolded the veil and draped it over my hair, tossing the ends over my shoulders. For a second I felt transported back to Villa Street, that day when Khaleh Zahra dropped her veil and attracted eyes like a lighthouse. On this Manhattan street, wearing a veil was the equivalent of going bare-headed in Tehran. Suddenly, I wasn’t invisible anymore. People’s eyes actually skimmed over me, instead of sliding past blindly, as they’re supposed to do on a crowded urban sidewalk. I had been so busy contemplating “to veil or not to veil” that it hadn’t occurred to me anyone else would notice. It was like wearing a neon sign, blinking “Muslim! Muslim!”

  I reached the U.N. Plaza Hotel and joined the other journalists, television anchors with brand-name voices, in the lobby. As though the self-immolation I had subjected myself to en route was not enough, a prominent television reporter took one look at my covered head and informed me imperiously that I was not required to veil (as though I had forgotten that the laws of the Islamic Republic did not apply in New York City) and that in fact, I was doing the other women there a disservice by doing so. So now, not only was I wearing the veil, but I was forced to defend the decision publicly with all these people listening. I live and work in Iran, I explained. My situation is different. I deal with these officials all the time, not once a year at election time.

  After the day’s round of meetings, I slunk back to my hotel room, peeled off the outfit of shame, and poured myself a glass of wine from the mini-bar. Lying naked on the fluffy white comforter, I contemplated, in between sips, where my cousins and I should go for dinner that evening. Somewhere very unIslamic Republic. Tapas? Nobu? Just as the hundreds of small kinks in my shoulders had begun to ease, the phone rang.

  “Salaam Azadeh Khanoum.” It was Parsa, the president’s translator, and apparently, he was downstairs in the lobby. My lobby. No, no, no, I groaned face down into the pillow. He had asked me that afternoon where I was staying, and since international law prohibited the delegation from leaving U.N. grounds, it hadn’t occurred to me not to tell him. “For just one second, come down. I have to speak to you about something,” he said.

  Parsa was arrogant, boyish, and spoke four languages fluently. He had sneaked me into a bunch of bilateral talks that day, and had given me play-by-play updates of the president’s movements by cell phone, since their arrival. Now we’re on the Brooklyn Bridge, getting pelted by eggs [anti-regime activists]. Now we’re at the hotel, and he’s taking a nap. Now we’re skipping the photo session, because Madeleine Albright is supposed to be there.

  “Basheh,” I sighed, all right. “Give me a minute.” I pulled on a pair of jeans, but refused to brush my teeth. He and his friends were probably drinking back at their hotel, and I didn’t care if he smelled wine on my breath. There was nothing sadder than official Iranian delegations—journalists, officials, their assistants—abroad. Half of any group usually couldn’t wait to crack open a beer, but there were always one or two devout spoilers. They argued among themselves, like those sour couples who are always bickering in the breakfast rooms of hotels. I wouldn’t wear the veil, either. He’d showed up on my turf and he’d just have to deal.

  When the elevator doors opened, I saw Parsa perched awkwardly on a red velvet chaise longue shaped like a kidney. The Royalton is one of these overly clever hotels that is deliberately invisible from the street. Its lobby is a stark, white, sunken lounge filled with lithe, beautiful people holding flashy conversations over drinks. Parsa had likely never seen so much exposed skin all at once, but he held his head high, trying to appear unfazed. He undid the top button of his collarless shirt as the waitress, an angular blond giraffe in all black, handed us the cocktail menu. Parsa ignored her, for which I gave him credit. It was a rare servant indeed of the Islamic Republic who could avoid checking out a half-naked blonde. Instead, his eyes scanned the rest of the room like strobe lights. I ordered mineral water, and prayed that he would leave quickly.

  In a small, nervous voice, he asked me if anyone at Time needed a Farsi-speaking assistant in New York, and seeing the incredulous look on my face, revised his request slightly. Or in Tehran. Or Dubai. Or anywhere really, as long he was working for an American company.

  “Are you kidding?” I asked him gently. “You have an amazing job. You speak all these languages and get to travel the world. You translated for our president in front of the entire General Assembly. Why would you want to give that up to be someone’s assistant?”

  His face sank in disappointment. In the end, he said, each glamorous assignment landed him back in Tehran, on an Iranian passport. He didn’t care about the status; he wanted a life with a future. Besides, there were handfuls of qualified translators who deserved his job, and he owed his to some combination of chance and connections to insiders within the system. If those connections dried up or he fell out of favor, well, he would be just another talented, Iranian twenty-something working long hours for a paltry salary and little chance of upward mobility.

  This type of conversation, of which I’d had too many, was akin to treating a splinter. Any tug or pull, whether getting the splinter out or pushing it in further, hurt. And in the end, no one would listen to what I said, because I was not considered an impartial judge. If I argued that life in Iran, for all its oppressiveness, had a sweet, singular appeal, I would be scoffed at. Nafasat az jayeh garm darmiyad, as the Persian expression went, loosely meaning: You’re judging the coldness of a place from a warm spot. As long as I bore an American passport, any Iranian who didn’t would reject my opinions on the livability of Iran. They would interpret my reaction to mean that I didn’t think Iranians deserve better, that they shouldn’t strive for what I had. But if I agreed, commiserating about how life in Iran could grind you down to a fine powder, like a few strands of saffron crushed under the weight of a pestle, I would be confirming the future’s bleakness. And then my judgment would be fresh cause for despair.

  Parsa fidgeted, trailing his finger through the condensation on the green glass of the water bottle. I asked if he could find his way back to the hotel. He said he could. Phew. Operation Abort Translator Defection appeared to be a success.

  Presidents Khatami and Bill Clinton had come within yards of a handshake. For weeks before the Assembly, an informal group of senior semi-official intermediaries had convinced both Iranian and U.S. officials to proceed with the gesture, on the sidelines of the summit, in the first public display of rapprochement between t
he two countries in decades. The Americans had said yes, provided the Iranians promised not to make any stentorian rhetorical accusations. The Iranians had the same requirement. Both were reassured the other would behave discreetly. Everything was set. It was meant to happen as the world leaders gathered for the annual picture.

  But at the eleventh hour, the Iranian side backed out. For reasons I didn’t quite understand, I took this failure of diplomatic vision personally. I felt like the Islamic Republic had let me down. Or maybe it was the first time I had front row seats to the Islamic Republic messing up a good opportunity, the first time I had seen its foreign policy so starkly reactive, so absent of long-range strategy or ambition. The leaders weren’t taking Iran forward, they were doing damage control and trying to keeping a failed revolution afloat.

  At such times, when the puppet-show character of Iranian leadership was put in stark relief against the panorama of the possible that was both the U.N. and New York, I felt crushed by the magnitude of Iran’s national decline. How had we been reduced to this? We who had once brimmed with potential, we who had an embarrassing wealth of riches—oil, an ancient civilization, gorgeous cities that would forever draw tourists, mountains and sea, an educated and talented population.

  It was impossible for me to form any thoughts beyond what my role was, or what it should be, in relation to this national disaster. One part of me felt involved. I felt like I should make a firm decision, as Siamak had done—roll up my sleeves and take up permanent residence in Iran and in some small, modest way, chip away at the edifice of this rotten regime. At this tendency, my father would have rolled his eyes and said (pointedly and in English), “We raised you in California. We sent you to an American university. Get over it.”

  Another part of me wanted to listen to my dad and pretend it was okay to do that. I could leave Tehran to study Persian literature at Stanford and buy French cheese at the gourmet groceries in Palo Alto and serve wine to my well-groomed Iranian yuppie friends. I could be Iranian without the Islamic Republic, without the Mr. X interrogations, the nightmares, the veil, and the lascivious mullahs with their temporary marriage proposals.