One evening, a youth group organized a candelight vigil for the victims of the attack on the Twin Towers at a square in north Tehran. A decent and varied number of people turned out, the Basij attacked, and I, of course, hyperventilated. But the vigil, with its undercurrent of sympathy and openness to America, was just one strand of the Iranian reaction. It was only in the astounding indifference around me that the depth of accumulated resentment of American foreign policy in this region became apparent to me. The fraught, emotionally charged conversations I had in the days that followed left me stricken, but in their course I learned many things. The first was that the U.S. government was viewed as a greedy, heartless uber-power in pursuit of domination of the Middle East, indifferent to its civilians.
Reza and I fought heartily. Aren’t you going to tell me you’re sorry? I asked accusingly, overwhelmed and infinitely sad. Don’t you want to ask me whether I have friends in New York, and whether they’re okay? Did you know that two of my cousins live in lower Manhattan?
He lit a cigarette carefully and looked away, a flicker of anger passing over his freshly shaven face.
“Don’t you care that thousands of people died?” I pressed on. I needed desperately for someone to register that this was tragic. My voice pitched high, and I hated its strident, hysterical tone. “Are you so dehumanized that you can’t even feel sympathy for dead office workers?”
“Don’t preach to me about dehumanization,” he said.
“Reza, they jumped out of burning buildings,” I said.
“Why did no one talk about dehumanization when America armed both Saddam Hussein and the mullahs, and allowed us to bloody each other during eight years of war,” he replied, his arms tightly folded across his chest.
“But these were civilians—” I interjected.
“Civilians!” he snorted. “What about our civilians? Do our lives count for less? There’s no outrage in the West when we die, no one talks about civilian deaths, because by now our loss of life is ordinary. What about the Iraqi civilians dying because of sanctions? What about Palestinian kids who get shot in the street running out for candy?”
In all the instances he named, the injury inflicted on civilians was considered to be encouraged or abetted by America, the instigator of sanctions, the ally of Israel. Surely those deaths, the thinking went, could not have been silently facilitated by the United States unless it considered us, people of this region, animals, whose slaughter was less regrettable than that of Americans. It was from this sense of having already been dehumanized, counted for less, that the attitudes around me seemed to come. Understanding the origin of these views depressed me profoundly, because I saw they did not arise from cultural rage, jealousy, powerlessness, or religious hate, all the explanations that emerged to explain why anyone should feel anything other than absolute horror at what happened that day. The heartlessness was political, linked to specific events and places and ways in which America was seen as having behaved cruelly against the civilians of other nations. I saw only a reluctant satisfaction, as though a mirror was finally being held up—now you see what it feels like to die, you who have for years reserved death only for us.
Though Iran played no role in Sept. 11, it was, like Iraq and Palestine, contaminated by the fallout. President Bush declared Iran part of an “axis of evil,” which did not bode well at the time, since it was becoming clear that Iraq, our neighbor and fellow axis member, was going to be invaded. The term “axis of evil” sounded funny in English, but in Farsi it struck a bizarrely familiar note: It was ideological and inflammatory, the sort of phrase a mullah would think up and bellow out during Friday prayer. For years the clerics behaved like madmen, screeching at the Great Satan from their pulpits, and suddenly there was an echo from the other side, someone screeching back in the same tone.
Do you want to throw an “axis of evil”-themed cocktail party in honor of our fresh national relevance? I asked Siamak. I pictured appetizers on skewers, and drinks with red and green food coloring, but he vetoed the idea. The Islamic Republic, of course, could not strike back against George W. Bush’s Washington, and instead released its anger at home.
The newspaper headlines, their criticism tempered out of fear of the press court, became inane. Important acts of legislation, like a bill that would have allowed single women to study abroad, landed in the trash bin of a clerical adjudicating body. Being in the axis made reporting thorny, too. Sources were afraid to say anything at all, lest they be dragged before a court for endangering national security. It was as though an unspoken emergency law had gone into effect, terrifying the skittish and silencing the outspoken. It was a divine gift to the hard-liners, who were running out of excuses for their ongoing repressiveness.
The label seemed to signal no policy shift by the Bush administration, which before had refused to deal with Iran and continued to do so. The difference was that now there would be name calling. And so Washington said there should be “regime change” in Iran, but the task would be left to the Iranian people.
In the immediate months that followed, the already painfully slow process toward change ground to a halt. The sorts of organic debate that had been commonplace in 2000—on the role of sharia (Islamic law) in society or the degree of social freedom that custom could tolerate—were now muted, or avoided altogether. The country was under attack, said the hard-liners, and everyone needed to band together. Internal conflict would no longer be tolerated. If the ostensible goal of the Bush administration was to promote tolerance and democracy in the Middle East, thereby discouraging militancy and religious extremism, then its policies had neatly produced the opposite effect.
When the world’s biggest superpower puts you on its top-three hit list and begins talking about regime change and the possibility of military attacks on nuclear power plants, the national attention span can scarcely focus on a bill to adjust women’s marriage dowry for inflation. I imagined the clerics sitting in Qom, rubbing their hands together with delight, cackling with glee. For two decades, they justified their neglect of Iran in the name of fighting “enemy plots.” Finally, the “enemy” was acting its part.
Many people, including some Iranians, said this was not such a bad thing. That given the failure of the reform movement, American pressure could push Iranian society to look more seriously for another option. Were there an alternative, they might have a point. But there was none. The Shah’s son, sitting in Maryland, lunching with congressmen, and waiting for conservatives in Washington to install him as the next president of Iran, was out of the question.
Iranians did not take him seriously. He had no popular following, though lots of people enjoyed tossing his name about, as it made them feel like at least they had an option to reject. One day, if the plates underneath Iran shifted, the regime crumbled down, and the choice came down to a U.S. occupation force (à la Iraq) and Reza Pahlavi, then okay, Iranians would choose him. But it would be a choice of that order. An anti-choice. Like President Khatami.
Admitting there was no alternative to the reform movement deeply disappointed me. A devotion to a secular Iran ran through both sides of my family, and everything I had learned about religion and freedom convinced me secularism was the only way to safeguard people’s basic rights. The reformists, in their agenda and its pursuit, were highly flawed, but there was no alternative waiting in the wings—no charismatic student leader with an organized following, no ambitious Boris Yeltsin-type figure who saw personal gain in rocking the system.
The first year I lived in Tehran, over family lunches on Fridays, my family asked me, so, this Mr. Khatami, what is he going to do for us? Now they asked, so, this Mr. Bush, what is he going to do for us? They said this in one breath, and in another said they didn’t want another revolution. They wanted everything to change, they wanted to hurl the mullahs into the mosques and double-bolt the doors, but they did not want their society to fall to pieces all over again. They did not want to be Iraq.
When I first walked the str
eets of Tehran, during the war in Afghanistan and, later, during the war in Iraq, people were thrilled. When will it be our turn, they would ask me eagerly, eyes gleaming at the fresh sense that entrenched orders could collapse. And then we would go over to a shop corner and talk quietly, and it would become clear they did not, in point of fact, want the U.S. military to carpet bomb Tehran. “When will our turn come” was a cry of helplessness, an admission that change was out of their hands. The Islamic Republic appeared immune to internal change, and so it could only be fixed by being toppled. It meant: We would immediately like something extremely different from what exists now. When meaningful change was reduced to a speck of light down a very long, very dark tunnel, there was nothing left to say but “When will our turn come?” The very phrase was an affirmation, in its repetition, people reminding themselves that one day, they would have a turn.
With the United States at war in Afghanistan, my work in Tehran now centered on Afghan exiles. I found myself interviewing ex-warlords with Taliban sympathies, and their inflammatory quotes about fighting the infidel American invader surfaced in my stories. Mr. X, my interrogator, did not appreciate my associating with such types without his approval.
One day he phoned to complain. “What did you and Mr. Hekmatyar talk about?” he asked, referring to a shady tribal chief I had met with recently.
Whenever I picked up the receiver, and heard his voice, the urge to be flip overtook me. “Spring hemlines!” the urge whispered. “Oh, you know,” I said. “The war. The Taliban. That kind of stuff. Listen, I have something on the stove. I have to go.” The “axis of evil” had amplified Mr. X’s suspicions about everything.
Up until that point, I had been working with a relative freedom that surprised even me. The red-lines had seemed lenient enough that I kept pushing, and finding a give, pushed even more. I wrote about torture, public lashings, show trials, attacks on demonstrations, and attempted assassinations of the regime’s opponents. I wrote that young people were fed up, hated the revolution, and considered the reform movement only one degree better than the ruling clergy. I wrote that the regime staged its rallies.
Throughout it all, I listened patiently to complaints from Mr. X that I had got the story wrong, that I wasn’t being sensitive enough to the red-lines, that unbeknownst to me, my editors at Time were collecting cash gifts from the Iranian opposition and the CIA. The criticism was sometimes overt, often oblique, mostly friendly, occasionally intimidating. But in the course of it all, I was never, not even once, told not to write. Until the day the Bush administration declared war on terror, invaded Afghanistan, told the world it was either “with us or against us,” and declared Iran evil.
Mr. X, who had until that point harassed me in ways I could mostly bear, became intolerable. He accused me of having worked on a story that must have been either a CIA or a Mujaheddin-e Khalq (the country’s main armed opposition group) plant. When I denied this, several times and at several different octaves of voice, he shrugged his shoulders.
“Fine, maybe you weren’t in on it. But that means your editors are on the CIA payroll, and you’re their blind servant. Not even getting a cut.” It wasn’t clear which he considered worse. It was all so bizarre and seedy, I didn’t know how to respond.
He insisted we talk on the phone several times a week, and turned our charged, uncomfortable meetings into full-blown interrogations. Who told you to write this? Who are these “opposition sources” you keep quoting? What do you mean you can’t tell us? Doesn’t national security mean anything to you? Khanoum Moaveni, the country is falling apart. And you’re not doing enough for us. Perhaps it would be useful if we saw your work before publication, just in case we have any helpful ideas.
I had rejected many of Mr. X’s suggestions in the past. When he asked me to email him from Damascus or Cairo, to tell him what people were saying there about Iran, I said no. When he asked me to brief him on what foreign diplomats in Tehran had to say, I talked in broad terms about the day’s headlines. Most of the time, between flat-out refusals and empty blather, I managed to evade his attempts to make an informant out of me. But this request, to have my articles vetted, was too specific to slip out of.
Over the past year, I had exhausted all the resources at my disposal to extricate Mr. X from my life. The Culture Ministry was no help. I had gone to my one friend in a high place, the vice president, and asked him to help. He had a talk with the minister of intelligence, and promised things would get better. They did not. Now Mr. X was pressuring me even harder. I couldn’t take it anymore.
I phoned Siamak and we convened an emergency summit over sushi at an Asian fusion restaurant that was pioneering the trend in mood lighting. We ordered our rolls and bent our heads low over the lacquered table. What should I do, I whispered, I can’t say yes, I can’t say no. I’m totally screwed.
For once, he wiped the smirk off his face, muted the teasing twinkle in his eyes, and listened to me seriously. You’re right, he said, there’s only one thing you can do. What? Leave.
The waiter returned with steaming cups of jasmine tea. We pulled back, careful not to appear too tête-à-tête.
They’re so stupid, he fumed, jabbing a chopstick into the air for emphasis. They’re freaked out—which is understandable, being in the axis and all—but instead of trying to use you to their advantage, they’re bullying you.
As usual, Siamak’s mind was working like a consultant’s, whirring to prescribe the self-interest-maximizing course of action a rational government would take (generally, the opposite of what the Islamic Republic chose to do).
I agree with the stupid part, I said, but I’m not sure about the using part.
Our summit lasted only an hour. Instinctively, we both knew there was not much to discuss. There were certain questions to which there was only one answer. Siamak was right. It was time for me to leave. The ground had become too unstable. Until it settled, working in Iran would be impossible.
The next day I sent an email to my editor in New York with a John le Carré subject line: coming in from the cold. I knew my editors well enough to be certain they would want me on the next flight, if anything jeopardized my ability to report or to work safely. I followed it up with a phone call and bought a one-way ticket to New York.
I did laps around my apartment, gazing at my belongings, at the telephone, in confusion, unsure what to pack, or who to call. I didn’t know whether I would be back in three weeks, six months, or never. How many seasons of clothes would I need? Should I arrange someone to water my plants, or store my carpets with mothballs? I didn’t know what sort of mood the occasion called for. Should I go out to dinner? Should I stay home, listening to old Iranian music and feeling somber? I felt an unnatural detachment, as though I was watching myself in silent, still-frames. In the end, I took a sleeping pill and went to bed.
At the buzz of the alarm just a few hours later, I got up and made what I sensed would be my very last espresso in my beloved, moonlit Tehran kitchen. I threw some jeans and scarves into my suitcase, sent emails canceling my meetings and dinners for the week, and then set about combing through my office. I did this each time I left Tehran for work, but this time I was diligent. I went through piles of old notebooks, blacking out names and phone numbers of student organizers or activists, erasing disks with notes from sources, throwing old tapes of interviews into a bag to take with me. Should Mr. X or his associates end up going through my things, my files would be sanitized, my sources would be protected.
My uncle drove me and my one bag to the airport in the dead of night (the uncivilized hours when flights out of Tehran are routinely scheduled) and waved his medical badge so he could accompany me up to the dreaded passport control. We were both tense, uncertain whether the life we shared together in Tehran was ending or simply being interrupted. A loud, clucking woman, weighed down by several bags, and two boxes of pastry, was making the rounds of the passport lines, begging someone to carry her sweets onto the plane. Please, she said,
lumbering from line to line, I have too many bags; I don’t want to leave my shirini here in the airport.
I bet I’ll be stuck sitting next to her, I whispered. Iranian mothers who carried Tupperware full of cooked, smelly food onto planes were our family joke. They were convinced that the Persian stews they cooked in Tehran to bring to their sons were wholly distinct from the exact same thing they would make for them upon arrival. If you had the misfortune of being seated next to one, you were likely to come away either smelling of stew, or getting oil stains on your bag. She waved at me with a questing look.
Don’t even think about it, my uncle said, that baklava could be filled with cocaine. Caviar, I replied, is the only acceptable food item to export on one’s person. We distracted ourselves with this sort of light conversation, avoiding the question neither of us could answer: When will I see you again? I waved goodbye from the other side of the line, and watched my uncle light a cigarette, take one last look at me, and turn down the stairs.
During the interminable wait for my flight, my mind flitted back to my most vivid memory of Mehrabad Airport, the day my mother and I left Tehran after that summer of 1981. When we stopped at the female security check, a woman in chador, with a thick caterpillar of hair above her lips, told my mother to take her pants off. I was only five, but old enough to realize that was an alarming thing to be told at the airport. In those days, many women leaving Mehrabad were emigrating permanently, trying to take their worldly possessions, most importantly their jewelry, with them. Since the revolution had abolished private wealth, suddenly Iranian women’s jewels were part of the revolution’s assets, and confined to its borders. So women devised elaborate ways to hide them upon exit, a favorite method being to hide them not on one’s person, but in one’s person, if you know what I mean.
Lipstick Jihad Page 27
