Honeymoon in Tehran: Two Years of Love and Danger in Iran (18 page)

For much of our group, climbing this mountain was a chief source of pleasure in life. It was the only soul-lifting pursuit available in this city that did not cost anything, at least no more than the gear it required. On the windy peaks, they could spend private time with their girlfriends, away from nosy families and the prying eyes of those who roamed the city’s parks, to say nothing of policemen and sometimes Basij. Arash and I parted ways with the group halfway up the mountain, taking a detour to what was known as the fifth station. There we wrapped our hands around mugs of hot cocoa and reclined on chairs by the window, gazing out across the snowy peaks. I don’t recall precisely how our conversation turned to religion—perhaps we were gossiping about one of the religious couples in the group—but I found myself describing to him for the first time how I felt about Islam.

It all started, I like to believe, in a dark auditorium in Oakland, California, in the early eighties. With the lights low, a small assembly of Iranians began chanting rhythmic lamentations and thumping their chests, creating an almost trancelike atmosphere in the warm room. Six years old, I was accompanying my veiled grandmother to an Ashoura commemoration, though I scarcely understood that at the time. I clutched my strawberry-shaped purse nervously. I don’t recall the moment I actually fainted, just the fluorescent glare of the building’s lobby where I was being revived, and the soothing voice of my grandmother, as she gently pressed a cup of lemonade to my lips. I hadn’t been scared, exactly, just overwhelmed by the heat and the atmosphere of passionate flagellation. And once I finished my lemonade and ate a cookie, I remember being very impatient to go back inside.

That memory is how my lifelong fascination with Shia Islam began, and in many ways it is inseparable from my memories of my grandmother. It was only as I recounted this to Arash that I realized my grandmother is a construct for me, a way of avoiding my more messy adult relationship with Islam, which became complicated in earnest when I first moved to Tehran. Until then, I had associated the faith with the cozy, warm lap of my grandmother, who taught me the
fatiha,
the opening sura of the Koran, and let me crawl on her back when she was kneeling in prayer. She never chided me for stealing her prayer tablet (Shia Muslims touch their foreheads to a piece of clay during prayer), but scooped me a bowl of
yakh dar behesht
(“ice in heaven”), my favorite rice custard with rosewater and pistachios, and recounted the tale of Imam Hossein’s martyrdom at Karbala, where the piece of clay had originated. My grandmother, whom we called Madara, was devout in the most appealing way. Though she prayed five times a day, wore a scarf over her hair outside, and never drank or smoked, she maintained a wry composure when her children drank whiskey and devoured sweet-and-sour pork in her presence. She even indulged in the occasional lotto ticket, though I was the only one who knew (she didn’t speak English, so we negotiated the transaction together at 7-Eleven) and was bound to secrecy. In the fuzzy sunlight of her San Jose living room, where her nylon knee-highs rolled into doughnuts usually sat atop my grandfather’s books of poetry, she
taught me the principles of Islam as she saw them, and entertained my childish doubts.

“A true Muslim’s heart must be pure, and free from hatred,” she would say.

“But don’t you hate the Ayatollah Khomeini? You must.” If there was one lesson I had learned by the age of six, it was that we must all hate the ayatollah, the cause of our exile.

“No, not even him.”

“But why not? He is a bad man.”

“He has never done any harm to me
personally,”
she would say. And I would lay my head on her chest, trying to feel her pacemaker, and fall asleep in the sun, contemplating what a noble spirit she must have. I adored my grandmother—her soapy smell, her serene doting, her impish humor. She died at our house one spring day when I was in junior high, and at the exact hour of her passing, I doubled over with stomach cramps in science class. She left me a knitted periwinkle purse that contained a handwritten version of the Ayat ol-Korsi, a verse of the Koran, and I felt thereafter that only the prayers she had taught me would keep me connected to her. That her legacy to me was Islam is not something I chose, or that I always liked. There were times when I lay awake in bed at night, refusing to recite the prayers, but sleep would elude me until I muttered them into the pillow, unsure whether I resented my grandmother or my own confusion.

While my attitude toward Islam grew out of my love for my grandmother and, later, out of my liberal American college education, Arash’s, he told me as we finished our hot chocolate, was formed under more dramatic circumstances. He was nine in 1979, and the revolution had captured his preadolescent imagination. He fell in love with the dashing revolutionaries, especially the guerrillas. He built himself a wooden rifle out of popsicle sticks and marched around the backyard practicing maneuvers. On the occasion of Norouz, the Persian new year, which falls on the first day of spring, he collected in a brown envelope all the crisp new bills he had received as gifts, and took the money to the guerrilla headquarters to donate to the revolutionary cause. He lectured his sister, Solmaz, then five, about the importance of revolution, and convinced her to donate her Norouz cash as well.
When the revolution turned bloody, when the Islamic radicals began executing people in droves and terrorizing the populace, Arash felt betrayed to the depth of his boyish heart. Naturally, this history shaped his attitude more than it had mine, since at the time I was playing with Barbies and building sand castles in California.

I had grown enamored of Islam from afar, while he had grown skeptical from up close. Where I saw the potential for more democratic, modern interpretations in the work of Islamic reformists, he saw convoluted debates that whorled and led nowhere. In a way, our attitudes reflected the identities we had crafted for ourselves. I leaned toward Islam to anchor myself amid the distant culture of the West; he leaned away to anchor himself amid the chaotic culture of the Islamic Republic. With time, I hoped, each of us would feel enriched by the other’s outlook. After all, I told myself, couples didn’t need to feel the same way about everything.

T
hat year, Ashoura, the holiday that commemorates the Imam Hossein’s death, fell on a Friday in February. If you visit Iran, you will very quickly notice the imam everywhere. His name is planted in verdant letters on the banks of freeways; his portrait adorns kiosks, walls, and shopping centers. He plays a greater role in the Iranian and Shia consciousness than even the Prophet Mohammad himself, though to say so is considered heretical. The third in the line of Shia imams, the grandson of the prophet, Hossein died in 680 at the battle of Karbala, defending his family’s claim to leadership of the Muslims. The battle is a defining moment in Islamic history, and each year Shias enact passion plays of Hossein and his seventy-two followers being slaughtered by their enemies. For the Shia, Hossein represents courage and resistance to injustice. For the pious, his martyrdom is an intimate event, as fresh a memory as last night’s meal.

On the occasion of Ashoura, Shias hold mourning processions that wind through the streets of modern cities and tiny villages. Each year, I looked forward to the ritual, the remarkable transformation that it effected in Iranians, softening even the most jaded cynics into humbled weeping spectators. How glorious it must be, I had always
thought, to be transported to such depths of emotion by local passion play reenactments, by the neighborhood dry cleaner dressed up as Hossein. Arash, for his part, preferred to stay home. “You know what it’s going to be like,” he said. “The streets are going to be full of thugs looking for a fight, and I don’t feel like dealing with that.”

Public space in Iran already bordered on violent. Traffic altercations often resulted in one party brandishing a pipe; walks through the park ended in confrontation, as angry young men ogled women visibly in the company of husbands or boyfriends, purposefully seeking out fights. This type of aggression, probably an outgrowth of the notion of manhood the state cultivated—Islamic, touchy, with “honor” easily offended—made even a trip to the bazaar a potential catastrophe. I had many girlfriends whose husbands refused to accompany them to such crowded places. Inevitably some sixteen-year-old with greasy hair would pinch the woman’s behind, puffing his chest out eagerly, waiting for a reaction. To do nothing at all was humiliating, while to brawl with a sixteen-year-old who was probably carrying a knife was foolish. Avoiding the situation, which meant avoiding crowds altogether, was the best option of all.

“But I really want to go,” I said, disappointed. “Wait, I have an idea!” I suggested we drive out to Lavasan to watch the
dasteks,
the neighborhood mourning processions. The crowds in the suburb would be smaller than in Tehran, and less volatile. Arash agreed to go, and within a couple of hours we were walking toward the processions.

The mourners, all wearing black, filled the narrow streets, weeping, wailing, and self-flagellating. They hoisted
alams,
towering metal structures adorned with Shia amulets that looked like giant ornate candelabras, high into the air. Their rhythmic chanting of “Hossein! Hossein! Hossein!” grew frenzied; the bodies pressed together with an almost sensual grief, soaked in the rosewater that was sprayed over the crowd.

At twilight, we walked to the village’s main thoroughfare to buy groceries, and found the little shops busy, the weekend crowd preparing to hunker down in their villas for the holiday. Though they had spent the afternoon in the processions, it did not appear as though
they planned to spend the evening in lamentation. They bought chips, creamy yogurt, pickles, and olives—traditional Iranian
mezze
(the term itself comes from Farsi, meaning “taste”) typically accompanied with homemade vodka. Having spent the afternoon commemorating the martyrdom of Imam Hossein, they would now retire to their homes and, in the company of friends, indulge. Like so many Iranians, they had worked out a way to reconcile their faith with a secular lifestyle. Very devout Muslims would call this hypocrisy (and so did Arash), but it seemed more like Islam lite to me, an altogether modern form of devotion that reflected the way people around the world accommodated a secular, modern lifestyle to religious and cultural tradition. They partook of religion as they would of a culture, rather than a faith with tenets, if you will. In the same way, my Jewish friends in America kept only a flimsy form of kosher but unfailingly attended their parents’ Passover seders.

Arash looked at the groceries people were buying. He turned to me with a disdainful expression, as if to say, “See what company you are in.” My attraction to Ashoura incensed him no end. When we first met, perhaps assuming it was transient, or out of the magnanimity that characterizes the very beginning of relationships, he never mentioned his disdain for what he considered hypocrisy. But once we started living together, he would roll his eyes in bemusement whenever I spoke admiringly of Islam and call me a mullah. I tried to win him over. I spoke, in what I thought were moving terms, about how the beheading of the Prophet’s grandson on the plains of Karbala (whose name means “Land of Sorrow”) was a rich, multilayered legend that had animated Shia history for thirteen centuries.

Ashoura shaped the temperament of Shia Islam, imbuing the faith with a passion for lamentation, saints, and martyrs (not unlike strains of Roman Catholicism, as some scholars have noted). In the twentieth century, radical Shia politicians in the Middle East recast the tale of Ashoura to kindle support for their modern political aims. In their opportunistic retelling, the defeat of Hossein’s small army became a lesson in political daring and rebellion. The new, combative spirit of Ashoura inspired a radical fervor that led to the Iranian revolution, as
well as the militant movement in Lebanon that gave rise to today’s Hezbollah.

I loved the folk mythology of the fallen Hossein as an erudite man who carried on the noble traditions of the Prophet’s family, standing against the villainous Yazid, a man fond of power and drink, whose Umay yad clan had opposed the Prophet. In times and places where Shias were still in opposition or perceived themselves as persecuted—in the south of Lebanon, or in the Shah’s Iran—Ashoura commemorations seethed with anger and resentment. They were political demonstrations shrouded in the history of Hossein, an expression of grievances given religious form.

Young Shias throughout the Arab and Islamic world identified intimately with Hossein’s legend. Though many young middle-class Iranians still participated in Ashoura celebrations, they were less drawn to the ritual than their peers in other parts of the Shia world. Instead, they were attracted to the West and its traditions, which represented the freer lifestyle the clerical regime denied them. The government seemed to acknowledge this, and had developed a strategy in response.

Instead of dealing with young people’s alienation from religious ritual only politically, by amplifying its Islamic propaganda in the media and the educational curriculum, it had recently begun to engage culturally as well. The religious murals throughout the city had been redesigned, staid Persian calligraphy replaced by edgy, modernist graphics that might have been done by a talented graffiti artist. And on the birthday of Fatemeh, the Prophet Mohammad’s daughter, the authorities had launched a new commemoration campaign dubbed Fatemieh, or the Week of Remembering Fatemeh. The stylish posters and billboards across the city were clearly meant to appeal to a more savvy, less traditionally pious demographic.

In its own way, the campaign reflected a major evolution in the state’s goal of entrenching Islamic piety. Back in 1988, a state radio program in Tehran had interviewed women on the street on Fatemeh’s birthday. One young woman replied that she did not consider Fatemeh a role model at all, and that she identified far more with Oshin,
the heroine of a popular Japanese drama series being broadcast by Iranian television at the time. The Ayatollah Khomeini was enraged, and by different versions sent the head of state radio to prison and ordered the young woman found and killed.