Honeymoon in Tehran: Two Years of Love and Danger in Iran (3 page)

Our dinner conversation touched on the upcoming election, but just barely, for although the outside world was interested in its outcome, the race had generated little excitement among Iranians. In the two previous presidential elections, 1997 and 2001, the moderate cleric Mohammad Khatami drew Iranians to the polls with his cheerful magnetism and broadly attractive promises of political and social liberalization. His landslide victories were widely interpreted by Iranian analysts and the outside world as mandates by the people of Iran for building a more democratic society, one more at peace with and accepted by the international community. But the conservative establishment—fundamentalist clerics and bureaucrats influential within the regime’s myriad institutions—blocked Khatami’s liberal policies. People grew disillusioned with the regime as a whole, and with the electoral process as a means of reform. By now, many Iranians had come to view elections as a ceremonial act, an empty practice that lent a veneer of democratic consent to the mullahs’ absolutism. By boycotting the race altogether, many believed, Iranians could reject the entire system of Islamic rule.

The lackluster ballot also contributed to this widespread apathy. The three top candidates were equally lacking in personal charisma and fresh vision: Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a former two-term president, was a graying mullah notorious for his personal corruption, as well as for institutionalizing graft within the regime; Mohammad
Ghali baf, the former national police chief, came across as untested and vaguely junior; Mostafa Moin, a former minister of education, reminded most people of a librarian.

Although I opposed a boycott—the differences between the candidates were meaningful enough, I felt, to warrant making a choice—I understood the lure of opting out. The reformists, mired in internal squabbles, had failed to agree on a single candidate, and were fielding two, equally gray and uninspiring. The presumed leader, Moin, though outspoken on human rights and democracy, was worryingly silent on economic matters. Rafsanjani, a crook with a record of failure as president, was a catastrophe wrapped in a disaster. To understand how Iranians felt about him, you must imagine him as the equivalent of a Richard Nixon who also happened to sink the American economy. And the conservative—well, hardly anyone took him, or any conservative candidate for that matter, seriously. Khatami’s 2001 landslide, in which he took 80 percent of the vote, was interpreted by most Iranians as a loud rejection of Islamic conservatism in politics. Public support for his policies—dialogue with the United States, democratic governance, and cultural and social reform—indicated that the majority of Iranians wanted an open society run by a secular government. As one prominent conservative told me that year, “We need to go out into the wilderness for a long time, and figure out how we can one day return.”

This was the disappointing array of choices Iranians faced in the spring of 2005, which is why that evening, rather than discussing the future of our country, we talked about novels. Before long, we were engrossed in a discussion popular in Iranian literary circles: had Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa crushed or kindled Salman Rushdie’s talent?

“
A
zi
jan,
what would you like to do this Friday night?” My aunt Farzi poured me coffee at breakfast, and began her attempt to fill my precious two weeks in Iran with social activities. My reporting trips in the past had often lasted a month or longer, and she was accustomed to planning multiple dinners for me with all her friends.

“I’m going to be very busy this time, so please don’t make any plans for me,” I said. I hurried my way through a chewy piece of
barbari
bread, and went to dress.

Certain I would be pressed for time, I had begun scheduling appointments the first day of my arrival, assuming I could keep or cancel them pending the outcome of my encounter with Mr. X. That foresight meant I already had two full days of interviews arranged and could start working immediately. My editor at
Time
had assigned me only one piece, a long essay illustrating how young Iranians lived and how they saw their futures on the eve of this important election. Given the striking apathy I had already encountered, this kind of article seemed to me the real story, a gritty look at what young Iranians actually cared about, since they didn’t care about politics at all. I would spend two or three days talking with young people, and then stitch their stories together.

I rifled through my suitcase and pulled out a wrap dress, which I pulled on over a pair of jeans. I slid on a pair of sandals, kissed my aunt goodbye, and ran out to the waiting taxi, arranging my headscarf in traffic. The Khatami government had eased restrictions on women’s dress so thoroughly that I gave little thought to what I should wear. When I first visited Iran as an adult, back in 1998, I spent the entire stay in a shapeless black manteau (literally, a coat, after the French word for the same) that reached my knees. I was twenty-one at the time, and wearing baggy folds of black made me keenly unhappy. By 2000, however, the women on the streets of Tehran had shed their dark robes for slim, fitted manteaus in brilliant colors and chic styles, simple tunics, and clingy ensembles of halter dresses worn over turtlenecks. This development, though perhaps superficial, brightened my spirits considerably. It was one of the myriad small things that when stacked together made daily life lighter and more livable. Back in 1979, Khomeini had urged Iranians to procreate wildly to bolster the revolutionary nation, creating a demographic bulge; the millions of young Iranian women in their late teens and early twenties shared my sentiments. That was one reason why they reelected Khatami in 2001 with such a wide majority.

Although the permissiveness mattered deeply, Iranian women were concerned about far more than their head covering. Not a single one of my Iranian girlfriends would have said her life was more meaningful simply because she enjoyed more flexibility in matters of fashion. The loosening of strictures on dress, however, reflected the Khatami government’s tolerance of women pushing for equitable legal rights and access to public space. Women had begun doing aerobics in parks, petitioning for equitable legal rights in parliament, and organizing around issues from polygamy to domestic abuse. In short, the government that tolerated the pink veil also tolerated a grassroots women’s movement of considerable vigor. It was this that women cared about, rather than whether their veils were now brighter, transparent, pushed back on the head, or designer.

But I, like so many women, took for granted what had changed under Khatami. This was for two simple reasons: I didn’t know Iran at the height of the revolution’s repression, in the 1980s; and it was not nearly enough. It was not enough for a society with 90 percent female literacy, whose women received 60 percent of the college degrees awarded each year. They considered themselves entitled to all the freedom and opportunity women enjoyed in the world’s most advanced countries. The gap between their expectations and reality still loomed so great that a few millimeters of progress, on most days, hardly seemed to merit notice. When I arrived at Café Naderi in downtown Tehran for my appointment that day, for example, I sat by myself in the central room, lit a cigarette, and leafed through an independent newspaper that provided a reasonably balanced window onto both Iran and the world. Back in 1998, when I first tried the café’s Turkish coffee, a girlfriend and I, dressed in our black sacks, were relegated to the back room, reserved for women unaccompanied by men.

Now I sipped my coffee and scanned the room. Bookish young men with goatees occupied nearly half the tables, but nowhere did I see the student activist I was there to meet. The café, situated on a crowded stretch of Revolution Street, still attracted artists, professors, émigrés, and freelance intellectuals, drawn to its rose-colored walls, vaulted ceilings, and leafy garden, as well as its literary legacy: Sadegh
Hedayat, Iran’s foremost modern novelist, had frequented the place in the 1940s, back when they served perfectly thick Turkish coffee, and the United States had an embassy nearby.

“Ms. Moaveni, I’m sorry I’m late.” Mr. Amini sat down opposite me, arranging his hands formally on the table, and assumed a resolute expression.

We ordered slices of buttery tea cake, and talked about how the student movement—once influential enough to spark the student riots of 1999, the most serious wave of unrest since the revolution—had fizzled out, its leaders terrorized by the security apparatus into abandoning their activities, or going abroad. Mr. Amini, like my relatives and so many other Iranians, had passed through the cycle of hope, anger, and boredom that these days characterized people’s attitude toward politics.

He described friends who had spent time in prison, how they endured solitary confinement and modern forms of torture—weeks’ worth of sleep deprivation, mock executions, heads stuck in vats of sewage, fake newspapers that reported the arrest of Khatami himself.

“I’m not voting,” he said flatly, stubbing out a thin Bahman cigarette, named after the Iranian month in which the revolution “became victorious,” in the regime’s parlance. “I want to give a signal to the reformists. I want to tell them that they no longer reflect what people want. Not voting shows that I don’t accept a system where the president doesn’t even have the power to direct a budget.”

As we stepped out into the street, pausing near a tree where a hawker sold contraband DVDs of American and pre-revolutionary films, Mr. Amini turned to look at me. “Do you realize how impossible it is to compete in Iran, in a place with no rules? Everything in this country is based on connections, on your relationship to people in power. People like me, we can’t even compete in this game. Do you realize that at the current salary of a university graduate, it would take me eighty years to buy a flat in a decent part of town?”

I didn’t know what to say. I only wished that I had paid for our coffee, though he had refused. Mr. Amini was right about his pros pects. A modest flat was now beyond the budget of the average middle-class couple; only Iranians supported by their parents, or those few who
belonged to the upper middle class, could afford to own their own place before their forties. I wished we had spent more time discussing this, a matter that most young people thought about every day and that was surely more pressing than the question of Islamic reform.

Mr. Amini waved goodbye and disappeared into the bustle of Revolution Street, a yawning thoroughfare north of Islamic Republic Avenue. In the ten minutes it took to find a taxi, the polluted air seemed to coat my contact lenses with a grainy, oily film. As we drove north, I could scarcely see the Alborz Mountains before me, for the city, as usual, was trapped beneath a noxious brown haze. The Alborz range runs like a wall across the north of the country, and its lofty peaks include the world’s fifth highest ski resort, complete with gondola lift and rustic stone hotel. While the mountains mitigate the ugliness of the endless expanse of low-rise apartment blocks, they also block the Caspian winds blowing from the north, producing a thermal inversion of pollution that annually kills thousands of Iranians from respiratory diseases.

We idled in traffic near Argentine Square, whose adjoining boulevards reflected the worst of Tehran’s haphazard, lowbrow architecture—buildings modeled after the Parthenon sat awkwardly alongside business complexes that resembled Transformer toy robots. The taxi sped through a tunnel that had just opened after years of construction, its impressive Persepolis motifs capped by an overwrought tribute to the Prophet Mohammad’s daughter: “Would that my heart had a route to hers! Would that Fatemeh too had a shrine of her own!”

The tunnel knit a major expressway into a busy central avenue, and I wondered whether the roads I was traveling on were those mapped by my paternal uncle Khosrow and his cousin Mansour. They were among the chief architects of modern Tehran, responsible for the city’s master plan before the revolution; the roadwork constructed later followed their original lines, which were intended for a population of 6.5 million, not the over twelve million who inhabited the city today. The modern, western city my relatives designed, with wide avenues and properly located and zoned residential, commercial, and industrial areas, had been transformed after the revolution into a haphazard sprawl of unappealing suburbs.

On a secluded side street just south of the new tunnel, I found the office of Emadeddin Baghi, a former pro-reform journalist and prominent dissident who had spent time in prison for his political writing. That experience had convinced him that Iran needed basic respect for human rights before it could benefit from political journalism. As the author of some twenty books and innumerable articles that advocated secularism and revealed the regime’s brutal treatment of its opponents, Baghi considered himself a “religious intellectual;” this meant he was devoted to Islam, but believed the faith could accommodate democracy and should be removed from politics.

In 2000, when I had last seen Baghi, he was lying prostrate in a hospital bed. During his trial for apostasy, the judge had kept Baghi on his feet for long hours, which worsened a preexisting condition he delicately avoided naming. I remembered the sweaty evening vividly, how a young woman in chador, a student activist, found her way into Baghi’s hospital room and pressed a bouquet of flowers into his hands. Student organizers considered him a hero, and the emotional young woman asked him, “Why do you write these articles, when you know it is like holding a gun to your chest?”

“If Iran takes one step in the direction of democracy, isn’t that a precious thing? Precious enough that my ceasing to exist is a very small price in comparison,” he told her. The young woman choked up and ran out of the room. It occurred to me that in 2005—only five years later—you surely would not find college students loitering outside the hospital rooms of political dissidents. That short, breathless period during which change seemed possible and Tehran felt as intellectually and politically animated as Prague in the spring of 1968, was resoundingly over.