Honeymoon in Tehran: Two Years of Love and Danger in Iran (32 page)

L
ess than three weeks after our wedding I was in a taxi on the way to my monthly doctor’s appointment, and for one disorienting moment thought I was back in Beirut. Not central Beirut, mind you, but the southern suburbs, where every intersection and thoroughfare is bedecked with the canary yellow flags of Hezbollah. The same government-supplied flags were now decorating the Tehran freeway. Banners depicting
the militia’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, hoisting a rifle into the air flew from hundreds of lampposts.

Earlier that week, the group had kidnapped two Israeli soldiers on the Israeli-Lebanese border, provoking a ferocious Israeli response that had quickly erupted into the worst Arab-Israeli border conflict in over two decades. The Iranian government was cheering for Hezbollah.

Iran helped found Hezbollah in the early eighties, when the Ayatollah Khomeini was seeking to export Islamic revolution to places like Lebanon. Today radicals in both Tehran and Beirut had largely abandoned the ayatollah’s fantasy; they acknowledged that the Lebanese, Christian and Muslim alike, had no desire for an Islamic state in Iran’s image, and that one could not be imposed on them by force. Iran’s modern relationship with Hezbollah reflected different ideologi cal and political realities. Iran continued to serve as the group’s primary patron. But through its military, financial, and political support for Hezbollah, Iran now sought influence in the Levant more ob liquely: by ensuring that Lebanese Shia, who had no wish to become a western ally friendly with Israel, dominated the country’s politics. For its part, Hezbollah used its Iranian patronage to supply much-needed social services to Lebanon’s neglected Shia population. With Iranian aid and Hezbollah’s leadership, Lebanese Shia began for the first time in decades to exert political influence commensurate with their numbers. Both sides benefited, to the West’s chagrin.

How much control Iran exerted over Hezbollah was a vexed question. Israel and the West charged that Iran directed the militia as if by remote control, while Iran and Hezbollah allies like Syria insisted it was entirely independent. The truth lay somewhere in between. While Iran certainly had some sway, Hezbollah tended to conduct its own affairs, mainly consulting with Tehran ahead of major operations that it knew would reverberate around the region.

Whatever the nature of this relationship, however, most ordinary Iranians resented it. Each and every one of my friends and relatives—the pious and the secular, the anti-American and the westernized—perceived Iran’s support for Hezbollah as a colossal waste. A couple
of my acquaintances voiced ambivalence rather than outright disapproval, but they were equally concerned about how aiding Hezbollah compromised Iran. The secular-minded, like my friend Neda, objected to the state’s nurturance of Islamic ideology beyond its borders. Many people, like my cousin at Tehran University and her classmates, lumped aid to Hezbollah with Iran’s habit of building schools in Arab countries and sending forces to “help” the Palestinians. They disapproved of all these practices, arguing that as long as Iranians at home were in dire need, not a toman should be spent abroad. One of my relatives worried that if democratic forces in Iran ever gained power through an election, the hard-liners would call on Lebanon’s Hezbollah to stomp them down. Yet another argued that Hezbollah was a paper ally, that its fighters would sit back and watch in the event Iran was attacked. For all these various reasons, consensus held that the Iranian government should attend to its duties at home, and abandon its nosy, fundamentalist meddling elsewhere.

None of this is to say, of course, that Iranians did not sympathize with Hezbollah and the Palestinians, on whose behalf the militant group partly fought. Many of my friends, and indeed most Iranians, considered Israel an unjust state, one that kept the Palestinians confined to hellish settlements while its own citizens luxuriated in the trappings of an ultra-modern society. These sentiments meant that many Iranians, from secular leftists to the deeply religious, commiserated with Hezbollah’s anti-Israel stance and thrilled to the group’s vigorous response to the far better equipped Israeli army. For the majority of Iranians, though, such feelings were tempered by a cool practicality—however just the militia’s fight, it was not Iran’s. A small number of people, those whose devout faith included a strong measure of political militancy, felt otherwise. But these Iranians, ideological enough to sacrifice their immediate quality of life for a distant cause, remained a distinct minority.

The mood in Tehran was swinging between indifference—the fighting hadn’t made newspaper headlines a single day that week—and irritation over the regime’s ideological links to distant Arab causes. Even my taxi driver that day, who judging from the hefty Koran on his dashboard was a faithful Muslim, turned off his radio
impatiently when the announcer started in on the latest “Zionist atrocity.”

“Don’t you think it’s our duty as Muslims to help Lebanon?” I asked. I would be writing a story later that evening, and no journalist is above asking the opinion of his or her taxi driver.

“What’s happening is horrible. I saw charred bodies of children on the news last night. But did they consider it their Islamic duty to help us when we were fighting our war with Iraq?”

“No,” I admitted. “That was an Arab fight against the Persians, and they picked their own side.”

He nodded. “Well maybe, technically, it is our Islamic duty. But there are also realities.”

“Like what?”

“I have to work a second shift every evening to make an extra five thousand toman,” he said. This was the equivalent of $5. “It’s just not right for us to be helping other people when our own are suffering.”

I understood how he felt. But I knew some Iranians saw things differently and wanted to be sure that I was adequately portraying those who felt proud of Iran’s support for Hezbollah. I used to volunteer at a Palestinian refugee school in Beirut, where the four-year-olds clamored around me in happy excitement because I was Iranian. In their eyes, Iran was the only country in the region to stand up to Israel, and a living, breathing Iranian deserved their most breathless thanks. I thought of the pride I witnessed all around me on that cloudless day in central Beirut in 2000, when the Israelis withdrew after twenty-two years of occupation. On that day, all of Lebanon—Christians and Muslims alike—considered Hezbollah heroes and rejoiced in their national victory. It was the first time I had seen anyone take pride in something that modern Iran, or perhaps I should say Islamic Iran, had accomplished. But now, in Tehran, I realized what an outsider’s perspective that was: the reaction of someone who did not have to live with the consequences of the nation’s foreign policy.

“So you’re absolutely sure that you don’t feel any pride that Iran helped the Lebanese push out the Israelis?” I asked. It was one of those moments when I felt I had to triple check, to make sure that Iranians truly were sensible and moderate on such questions. As a westernized,
secular Iranian, I was surrounded by people who were predictably critical of the government’s radical policies; because of this, I often tried to be exhaustively certain that my background didn’t influence my work. This meant I generally did two or three times the amount of reporting that was necessary, crisscrossing Tehran and talking with the widest range of people I could find. I did this so I could later defend my stories, which were often criticized by those who had a stake in Iran’s anti-American, anti-Israel image (a range of people who included many politically conservative Americans, as well as liberal Iranian Americans who enjoyed the defiant rhetoric the mullahs dished out to the Bush administration).

The driver inspected me in the mirror, as though noticing for the first time that I was a bit alien, despite my familiar manners. “I’m not proud at all. Do you know what would make me proud? If we could solve our own problems. Like unemployment. That would be the greatest help of all.”

Soon we approached the immense floral clock the government had created on the western bank of the Modarres freeway. It proudly proclaimed itself the largest clock in the world, as though this might invite tourism, enhance the appearance of the capital, or serve any other useful function. While it was indeed the largest
flower
clock in the world, it contended with two other giant clocks (one in New Jersey, the other in Istanbul) for the title of biggest all around.

“I think you’re quite right,” I said, shamefaced.

“Remember,” he said, quoting a Persian proverb, “If the lantern is needed at home, it is
haram
to donate it to the mosque.”

In the days that followed, the government continued to proclaim its support for Hezbollah, dispatching honking cars full of young men waving yellow flags. One evening, Arash and I were out eating ice cream across the street from Mellat Park when one of these cars drove past. In Beirut such a sight was common, but it simply did not register here, the fanfare of this distant group, embroiled in its distant conflict. The families picnicking on the lawn, pouring each other tea and passing around mortadella sandwiches, failed to even look up. Later that evening, state television broadcast an infomercial urging Iranians to boycott what it called “Zionist products,” including Pepsi, Nestlé,
and Calvin Klein. It warned that profits from these products “are converted into bullets piercing the chests of Lebanese and Palestinian children.” As evidence, the voiceover intoned: “Pepsi stands for ‘Pay Each Penny to Save Israel.’”

As was their way, Iranians ignored all this, being accustomed to the government’s raving rhetoric, in which anger with Israel often blurred into a crude anti-Semitism. To me, and to many Iranians, such statements resounded with self-serving bias; while Palestinian children doubtless suffered in the crossfire of the conflict with Israel, the Iranian government had lost the legitimacy it needed to advocate on their behalf.

As the conflict in Lebanon wore on and Iran’s reputation in the world as a backer of terrorism spread, many Iranians grew angry. One morning I walked to the square near our house to buy fresh bread for breakfast, but arrived to find the bakery doors locked and the stone oven cold. The early risers in my neighborhood milled about for a while and then began speculating about why the bakery should mysteriously be shut. Before long, they had settled on an explanation: the Iranian government had sent all the country’s flour to Lebanon. After congregating briefly to vent their irritation (“What will they give them next, plasma TVs?”), everyone ambled back home.

That morning, though it had involved nothing more than griping with the neighbors over the country’s politics, marked a turning point for me. When I first began reporting in Iran, I had assumed that my background as an upper-middle-class Iranian raised in the West was an obstacle to understanding the country properly. I imagined that, since my views were shaped by people of a similar class background, they were unrepresentative of Iran as a whole. Surely it was only a small minority of society, the affluent denizens of north Tehran, who held secular opinions about government, were open to the West, believed in democracy, and held the regime in contempt. To remedy what I considered a dangerous myopia, I began embracing all that stood in opposition to such a worldview. In 2000, during my first stint living in the country, I started hanging out with religious fundamentalists, convinced they represented the “real” Iran.

I spent those days sitting in a sparsely furnished living room, on
couches whose pattern I would have described as tacky except that, trying to conquer my distaste, I made myself call it bright. The walls were bare save for a few Koranic inscriptions, and the table was covered with lace-patterned plastic. This was the home of my Arabic teacher in Tehran, who was the second wife of a Lebanese-Iranian political figure. Her husband was a revolutionary who had worked to start Hezbollah in Lebanon and now, although he spoke Farsi with an Arabic accent, held various positions of influence in the Tehran government. I had happily agreed to his suggestion that his wife tutor me—he did not mention at the time that she was one of two—and found myself snugly admitted into a world quite unlike any I had known. Here, in the company of radicals and their chador-wearing wives, I thought I had finally discovered the authentic soul of the country, the people who I assumed were steering the country’s politics.

Most people called the second wife Um Hassan, or the mother of Hassan, but this form of appellation sounds peculiar in Farsi, so I simply called her Mrs. Khalil. In time I discovered that Mr. Khalil was a polygamist not by intention but by circumstance. His brother had died, or been martyred, during some clandestine military operation in the 1980s, and Mr. Khalil married Mrs. Khalil to rescue her from widowhood. I never mentioned Mrs. Khalil I to Mrs. Khalil II; and we kept our conversation focused on political and social issues of the day, reading aloud from Arabic magazines so I could hone my pronunciation. After my lesson we would chat over tea and baklava, and I would discover her sentiments about the day’s news (“I’m really with bin Laden!”), which sounded especially chilling coming from a kind, roly-poly woman who made delicious salads.

Her views reflected, to my mind, her Arab background. Even among Iran’s most highly religious, you would hear no such support for Osama bin Laden; to put it most bluntly, the malignant strain of anti-Americanism that produced support for Al Qaeda in the Arab and Muslim world did not exist in Iran. Iran’s authoritarian regime was not aligned with the United States, whereas in places like Jordan, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia, people resented America for propping up their local dictator, and that made bin Laden popular.

In time, I learned that Mrs. Khalil considered fighting jihad the moral duty of all Muslims, interpreted the Koran in ways that justified political violence, and considered the death of innocent victims, American, Israeli, or otherwise, an unavoidable consequence of the just war. My Arabic faltered during discussions involving abstract conceptions like justice and morality, and so I did not press her on these views.