Honeymoon in Tehran: Two Years of Love and Danger in Iran (24 page)

As we drove home, I turned my thoughts to my bridal bouquet, to whether our cake would be chocolate or marzipan, and to the candles that would line the garden. Outside, the sunset cast pink and lavender hues across the quiet city, bathing the unfinished minarets of the vast new prayer ground. To the north, luxury residential towers soared above Soviet-style apartment blocks in a shimmering light.

I
jabbed at the remote control in frustration, searching for a channel, anything besides the Uzbek shopping network and the angry Saudi preacher station that was not jammed. Officially, satellite TV was banned in Iran, but for several years the authorities had not enforced the prohibition, and the majority of Iranians had dishes on their roofs. But in the past two years the authorities had found a more sophisticated way to control what Iranians watched. They blocked the signals of particular stations they found objectionable, mainly Farsi-language networks that offered alternative sources of news and a platform for dissidents abroad. This way, they figured, they could permit housewives their pop psychology shows and teenagers their music video channels, while protecting everyone from seditious criticism of the regime. The technology by which they achieved this, however, did not function flawlessly, and sometimes most or all of our thousand channels were distorted. Such was the case that day, and when I gave up and turned off the TV, I heard singing from across the street.

They were either using a megaphone or nightclub-grade speakers, I couldn’t be sure, but the nasal singing of the
rowzeh
blasted through our apartment. On days commemorating the deaths of Shia saints, pious Iranians invite
rowzeh-khans,
or preachers of edifying stories, to their homes to recite from books with titles like
The Deluge of Weeping
and
The Mysteries of Martyrdom.

The neighbors’ house was
mosadereye
—that is, it had been confiscated after its owners fled the revolution. The three families that had sectioned it off were typical of those who occupied the quarters of Iranians
who had left the country. They were deeply religious, enough so that the women wrapped themselves in chador even when darting onto the balcony to hang laundry, and clearly affluent. They accrued their wealth by selling construction-grade stone in the Tehran bazaar, but nowhere was this prosperity apparent in their home’s décor—machine-woven Persian rugs over cheap classroom carpet, and little furniture, for they mostly sat on the floor. Their affluence was displayed only in the ceremonies and parties they held on nearly all of the sixteen official religious holidays. I was familiar with some of these from my childhood, when I accompanied my grandmother to
sofrebs,
female religious rituals dedicated to various saints, where
rowzeh
was sung before a meal. The
sofrebs
I remember from my youth, though, only commemorated a handful of key saints. The neighbors across the street observed the death anniversaries of even minor religious figures, so they seemed to host a large party every few weeks.

On these occasions, they rented folding chairs, erected garden tents, and cooked food for half the neighborhood. I was envious of their expansive garden, especially its swimming pool, which they filled with fresh water each day of summer, indifferent to the country’s chronic water shortage. The women rarely used the pool, but every so often, under cover of night, they would join their husbands in the water, flapping about amorously in wet black chador, coyly chirping “Hajj Agha,
nakon!”
—“Hajj Agha, don’t!” Sometimes I watched them from our apartment, marveling to hear them address their husbands as if speaking to an older man or mullah.

Despite their conspicuous piety, they were mostly harmless as neighbors. They kept to themselves, never complaining about our alternative lifestyle. Between us, Arash’s sister, Solmaz, and the eighteen-year-old son of the retired colonel upstairs, our building threw parties as often as they did, and they never reported us to the authorities, though it was not uncommon for neighbors to do so. Sometimes it was done out of genuine pious indignation, sometimes as revenge for neighborly quarrels. The neighbor of a friend reported him, he told me, for boycotting the building’s plan to install an electric garage door opener.

The day our neighbors set up the powerful megaphones was Norouz, the first day of the Persian new year (the holiday is celebrated over thirteen days, and the term
Norouz
refers to both the period of festivity and New Year’s Day). Iranians had been celebrating this holiday on the spring equinox since around 1000
B.C.E.,
the era of the prophet Zoroaster. This year, Norouz fell on the same day as Arbaeen, the fortieth day after Imam Hossein’s death, another occasion to mourn his martyrdom. The two holidays contrast rather dramatically. Norouz celebrates the spirit of joy and new life; children paint eggs and everyone buys hyacinths. Arbaeen glorifies martyrdom and resistance to political injustice; everyone wears black and keens in lament.

Since Shia mourning and Norouz were of equal importance to Iranians, the only civilized response seemed to be for everyone to celebrate the holiday of their choice quietly, so as not to impose their preference on others. The amplified wailing, however, signaled no such forbearance. The neighbors chose Arbaeen, therefore so must the block. For ten minutes I stood beside the window resenting the way deeply religious Muslims imposed their beliefs on their surroundings. I believed there was a place for tolerance in Islam; in fact, I was engrossed at the time in a book by that title. It argued that the Koran enjoins Muslims to practice mercy, justice, and tolerance, to accept diversity, and to pursue peace; that it was only the overly literal, ahistorical misreadings of radicals that distorted the faith’s true message. I was familiar with such reformist claims, and believed them to be intellectually honest and historically accurate. The trouble was, most pious Muslims either did not know there was a case for tolerance, or they disagreed with it. It occurred to me what a theoretical space that was, confined to the elegantly spun discourse of a handful of Muslim intellectuals adept at speaking to the West. I decided to do something. I moved all four of our speakers directly in front of the windows, and turned on a song by Haydeh, a beloved Persian singer, at shattering volume.

Arash rushed to the window. “What are you doing?”

“I’m taking back the night!”

“You’re mad.”

“They’re audio terrorists and I’m fighting back. They are sabotaging Norouz!”

“When are you ever going to understand this country? You don’t have the right to voice that opinion. You’re going to get us into trouble.”

He was right, of course. I was being immature, my mood labile from the hormonal swings of early pregnancy. We did consider driving out to Lavasan, where we had spent Ashoura a month earlier, but decided to stay in Tehran. I wondered how often throughout history Norouz had coincided with Islamic holidays. Probably no more frequently than every few decades, given the difference between the Persian and Islamic calendars. Although Iran has struggled for centuries to reconcile the Islamic and Persian traditions, the inevitable friction between them still defines the culture today. In the seventh century
C.E.,
when Arab nomads from the desert conquered what was then called Persia, Iranians practiced Zoroastrianism. This distinctly Iranian faith was the world’s first monotheistic religion, and its belief in a future savior; its dualistic concept of good and evil, as embodied by the struggle between God and the devil—went on to influence Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Zoroastrianism was the state religion of three great Persian empires, from 550
B.C.E.
to 651
C.E.
It shaped the identity, language, and culture of Persia for at least two millennia. When the Arabs invaded, they imposed Islam on the Persians, burning many of their books and seeking to erase their traditions. But although in other ancient lands they had conquered, such as Egypt and Iraq, they successfully imposed their culture, in Persia they failed. The Persians retained their language and identity. They developed a national epic poetry in which they preserved their myths. They began leaving their own indelible traces on the Arab religion, an influence of such profound importance that one historian calls it the “second advent of Islam itself.”

In the twentieth century, Iran’s political upheavals brought this past alive in the form of a modern culture war. The secular leaders charged with building the nation between the 1920s and the 1970s concluded that Islam was their chief obstacle. Since 1979, Iranians disappointed in the revolution’s authoritarianism had blamed Islam.
Those who considered themselves secular, modern, and western began reconnecting with the Persian past and identifying with it. They believed that the Arab conquest had ended the golden age of Persian history, and they viewed Islam as a colonizing faith that had diluted Iranian civilization. These Iranians, my grandfather among them, named their children after the great kings of the pre-Islamic empires. Their heroes included the mythical figures of the
Shahnameh,
the national epic that recounts Persia’s hostility to the Arab invaders. Ferdowsi, writing in the tenth century, captured a sentiment that many Iranians still feel today: “Damn this world, damn this time, damn this fate, / That uncivilized Arabs have come to make me Muslim.”

Such Iranians tended to ignore facts that contradicted their bias: that Iran’s most distinguished contribution to world civilization, Persian poetry, belonged to the post-Islamic era; that the
Skaknamek’s
author, Ferdowsi, was a pious believer; that in the early twentieth century it was the mullahs, not the king, who had rescued Iran from colonialists and promoted democratic rule. My family was full of such types and I found their pronouncements tedious and historically ignorant.

Growing up in California, I learned that Islam was fundamentalist and incapable of change. My grandfather had all sorts of unfair notions about devout Iranians—that only maids had names like Fatemeh, that the chador was backward, and that mullahs were hypo crites and seminaries hotbeds of homosexuality. As you can imagine, this left me with a rather distorted sense of Islam in Iran. I had no idea that a sizable percentage of Iranians obeyed the wisdom and decrees of grand ayatollahs, that they traveled to Islamic centers of learning and places of pilgrimage in Damascus, Karbala, and Najaf. I only discovered these realities as a foreign correspondent reporting in the Arab world, a rather circuitous route to learning about one’s own homeland. I remember checking into a hotel in Najaf, Iraq, the city of the gold-domed shrine of Imam Ali, Shia Islam’s holiest site, and being dumbfounded that the receptionist spoke Farsi. It was just weeks after the U.S. invasion, so there were no Iranian pilgrims in the city at the time, but before and after they traveled there in the tens
of thousands. Every one in a position to haggle—hotel clerks, street vendors, jewelers—spoke Farsi. While reporting in Lebanon on Hezbollah, I learned of the existence of a Shia clerical aristocracy; it was impossible to untangle whether its members were originally Iranian, Lebanese, or Iraqi, but many shaped the politics of all of these countries. I had known, before, that many Iranians were religious. But I hadn’t known how deeply Shia and Persian culture were intertwined, hadn’t known that I could not understand one without understanding the other.

Just as the pursuit of modernization biased many Iranians toward secularism, suspicions of both the West and modernity moved others in the opposite direction, to wage holy war against Iran’s pre-Islamic traditions. The Islamic revolution brought men like Ayatollah Sadegh Khalkhali to power. Before 1979, the Shah’s regime took seriously ahistorical attacks on the pre-Islamic Iranian dynasties. It imprisoned Khalkhali for authoring a tract called “Impostor Koorosh,” which portrayed the great Persian king (known in English as Cyrus the Great) as a tyrant and a liar. After the revolution, Khalkhali dispatched bulldozers and militiamen around the country to raze everything Persian: the ancient ruins of Persepolis (the seat of Persia’s great empires); the tomb of Ferdowsi; the Pahlavi family mausoleum, the resting place of Reza Shah, who could be credited with building modern Iran (Khalkhali built a public toilet in its place). Arash recalls how one day, state television began broadcasting dramas in which the heroes were named after Islamic figures while the villains bore Persian names. The regime banned hundreds of names that harked back to the era before Islam, and rewrote history books to reflect an Islamicized view of the past.

Often I would open the morning newspaper to stories about the regime’s ongoing campaign to physically rid Iran of traces of its pre-Islamic past. It had blithely chosen a gorge near Pasargadae, the tomb of Koorosh, as the site for an immense dam. The tomb stood to crumble away entirely owing to its proximity. Few rulers in history are remembered with such reverence as Koorosh. In 539
B.C.E.,
his first year in Babylon, Koorosh issued a decree authorizing the Jews to return
to their land and rebuild their temple at Jerusalem. Both the Bible and other Hebrew texts speak of him admiringly, and in her Nobel speech Shirin Ebadi referred to herself as a “descendant of Koorosh.” The evening of my loudspeaker showdown, I logged onto Shia-chat, a forum where Shias from around the world discussed their sect. A number of Arabs on the forum were chiding the Iranian Shias for wishing each other a happy Norouz. One Iranian member, who identified himself by the blood-red emblem of the Shia Imam Hossein, responded angrily that “congratulating each other on the occasion of Norouz is not only a fine act, but Islamically advised.” From across the street, I heard the long hiss and sudden pop of Norouz firecrackers. The neighbors’ children, having concluded their Islamic lament, were sending brilliant purple sparklers into the air.

N
ot long after Norouz, in early April, I flew to the United States for the paperback release of my book
Lipstick Jihad.
Before I began the promotional tour, though, I spent a weekend in California buying a wedding dress. My friends in Tehran had encouraged me to have my dress made by a seamstress. But that would have involved multiple fittings over long weeks, and at some point I would have needed to explain my expanding proportions. I had no wish to be candid about my pregnancy with a perfect stranger in Iran. What if the seamstress turned out to be extremely devout, privately considered my situation immoral, and sabotaged my dress? While that was unlikely, I felt more comfortable all around dress shopping in California, where people considered it sweet to be an expecting bride. Because I was already beginning to lose my waist, the first sign of the baby weight to come, I discarded my dreams of a form-fitting Badgley Mischka wedding gown. A pregnant figure requires a simpler dress, and I found a lovely A-line at a bridal shop in a suburban strip mall in Sunnyvale.