Honeymoon in Tehran: Two Years of Love and Danger in Iran (33 page)

Mr. Khalil was never present at our sessions, for which I was grateful, particularly since he had once phoned me at seven
A.M.
and proposed that we take a trip together. Through a sleepy fog, I worked up severe indignation, informing him that I was not accustomed to taking trips with male acquaintances. To be propositioned at such an ungodly hour by a married man would have been offensive enough, but coming from a polygamist it was especially infuriating. The nerve! As though two wives did not suffice. Since then, ill at ease with Mrs. Khalil, I had been wishing to extricate myself from her kindness, but I thought my access to her clique of devout friends was worth the discomfort. As the months passed, however, I began reconsidering this conviction; perhaps this corner of Iran was not the aid to a deeper understanding of the country, as I had originally believed.

In their militant politics, rigid devotion, and narrow worldview (they interpreted the world through the prism of Al Jazeera and Iranian state television) they were a minority, a small bubble of radical conservatism in a country teeming with worldly, sophisticated, and open young people. To the Khalil family, abstract values mattered more than anything. They would have Iran back their radical ideals—support for Islamic militant groups who resorted to terror tactics—at any price, from international isolation to the failing economy and joblessness that such policies created. Even the most pious, politically conservative Iranians I knew did not feel this way. They sympathized with the suffering of the Palestinians, with the Iraqis who were dying each day in the aftermath of the botched U.S. invasion, but they would not sacrifice their own quality of life for the sake of these remote Arabs. Perhaps the difference was that the Khalil families, both households, were subsidized by the Iranian state. It was a government body, after all, that provided Mr. Khalil’s income. They didn’t feel the
costs of their politics the way ordinary Iranians did, so their militant opinions existed in a vacuum: the government had bought their radicalism.

Out of habit, I had continued seeing Mrs. Khalil occasionally, but that morning, standing outside the closed bakery, I decided it was time to stop courting the militant minority. I was now a married woman with years of experience in Iran to my credit, and I could finally stop trying to make up for my social background. Yes, I lived in north Tehran, and yes, I was far more privileged than most Iranians. But most of my friends, the people who composed my Iranian world and shaped my perceptions, belonged to the middle class, who in scope and significance were the core of the nation.

My friends in the western press corps, accustomed to reporting in nations like Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia, where the capital stood in stark contrast to the rest of the country, often asked me, “But what about the rest of Iran?” The divide that matters in Iran, I would tell them, is not between city and town, or wealthy and working-class. In any Iranian city, be it Isfahan, Yazd, or Shiraz, the relevant divide was between a minority of religious militants, many of whom had political and financial ties to the government, and the majority of moderate Iranians, who longed for stability and prosperity. The latter included many devout believers, who revered Islam and lived according to its edicts. But they had grown to consider their faith a private matter, altogether separate from the sort of accountable, democratic, secular government they had hoped for.

That I had begun reporting in Iran, and had published my first book about the country, at a young age had left me especially vulnerable to criticism about my work and perspective. Iranians living in America, many of whom had not spent significant amounts of time in Iran for decades, often accused me of conflating affluent north Tehran with the rest of the country. Reviewers of my book sometimes made a similar case. They were wrong. Secular Iranians—those who fasted during Ramazan but who during the rest of the year also enjoyed an occasional drink; those who believed that the mullahs should get out of politics—composed a sizable part of the population. This was a simple fact of Iranian society, as real as its more conservative, traditional
spectrum. I knew it well. But I felt I needed to prove my perspective valid.

The doubts I had entertained along the way had been instructive. Apart from what it revealed about the inner lives of doctrinaire militants, my time with Mrs. Khalil had taught me how she and her family differed from my own devout friends and relatives. The latter might love to visit Mecca and fast during Ramazan, but they considered Osama bin Laden a murderous monster and believed Iran should repair its ties with the United States. This difference, between religious militants and ordinary believers with moderate politics, was the real key to understanding Iran, in my view.

Every country includes a radical minority. Although this is imperative to recognize, it is not through that minority that one can grasp the aspirations and reality of the country as a whole. Life, in the end, is not lived at the extremes. It is the wide, yawning middle that contains the real multitudes. That was a truth I had gleaned long ago from the novels of the Czech writer Milan Kundera, who wrote that “extremes mean borders beyond which life ends, and a passion for extremism, in art and politics, is a veiled longing for death.” Perhaps Mr. and Mrs. Khalil did not long for death, but they certainly did not view it with the same trepidation and dread as ordinary people.

I sat at my computer that night, composing an e-mail to my editor in New York. I wanted to write a story that illustrated these experiences and the conclusions to which they had led. I tried to imagine my editor’s response to my proposed article. Would the average American reader care? I wasn’t altogether sure, but of course that’s where the challenge always lay—to beguile those who might not ordinarily care into understanding the nuances of a distant, vaguely suspect nation.

I
n July, two stories vied for prominence in the national headlines. The first concerned the imminent stoning of a thirty-seven-year-old woman convicted of adultery, a case taken up by a prominent women’s rights lawyer. The condemned woman, a mother of four, had petitioned for a divorce years earlier; a local judge had denied it, insisting she must endure the marriage for her children’s sake. She had also retracted the confession she had made under police interrogation. Sharia (classic Islamic law) held that stoning verdicts could not be implemented in cases where the accused retracted his or her confession. But a cruel judge might overlook the finer points of Sharia in the rush to mete out such harsh punishments. Feminist lawyers argued that, given this tendency, sentences such as stoning needed to be abolished. Back in 2000, progressive lawyers and other moderates had advocated a more liberal interpretation of Sharia. But in the intervening years, many had abandoned this position in favor of a wholesale adoption of secular civil and criminal law. They had realized that only responsible judges overseen by an accountable political system could be relied on to implement humane readings of Sharia. As they saw it, it was easier to rewrite problematic laws than refashion the structure of Iran’s government.

The other story dominating the month’s news was the country’s
first women’s polo tournament in more than a century. Polo originated in Iran about twenty-five hundred years ago as the sport of kings and queens. The royal polo ground in Isfahan, a city in central-north Iran, where the queen and her ladies-in-waiting competed against the king and his court, provided the original dimensions for polo fields across the world. After the 1979 revolution, the authorities barred women from playing polo in public, but eased the ban in 2005. The polo federation sought to recast the game as a national sport rather than the pastime of aristocrats, and the regime had begun to make concessions. Female players were still barred from competing against men, and women had to wear manteaus and headscarves on the field. I had ridden horses in Iran in 2003, overheating while wearing a veil under a helmet. But I imagined that in their excitement at finally being able to compete publicly, the women’s team did not dwell on such discomforts.

Each morning in the week after our wedding, I drank coffee and read these news stories, pondering how it was possible for a nation to stride forward and back at the same time. What I cared about most, though, was usually buried somewhere in the back section: the pollution barometer, advising whether pregnant women could safely go outside.

Newspapers often report that Tehranis breathe in seven and a half times the amount of carbon monoxide considered safe. If you lived in Tehran, your nose was constantly filled with black gunk and you awoke from eight hours of sleep exhausted. You developed a head ache if you spent more than a couple of hours in central Tehran, which is especially congested and where it is not uncommon to see people wearing masks. During winter, a typically windless season, polluted air is trapped over the city; in one recent winter, at least eighteen hundred people died each month from pollution-related ailments. One official likened living in the capital to “mass suicide.” The Alborz Mountains unhelpfully impeded the winds that blew over the city during the spring, summer, and fall. But the chief source of the pollution—fumes from old Peykans and spluttering buses—lent itself to easy remedy. Each year, a host of strident environmental groups challenged the government more and more. In 2007, the authorities
began offering free air filters to Peykan drivers, but the capital’s toxic blanket had never seemed so thick.

The city’s pollution even comes in second, after the Iran-Iraq War, in somber subjects that inspire the work of young artists. In 2000, three artists I knew produced a collection of paintings, statues, and installation videos called “The Children of Dark City,” illustrating the pollution’s impact on children. In one video segment, young girls filed down hazy school stairs, while in the background a little boy held a tissue against his mouth and slowly blurred into oblivion.

For three days that July, the city had been suffocating in especially dense muck-colored smog. The physically vulnerable—old people, babies, and the pregnant—were being warned to stay indoors. The pollution entirely obscured the Alborz Mountains, which on clear days perched with postcard vividness before our living room windows. After three days of being trapped indoors with a 1970s Lamaze DVD and annoyingly censored Internet, I was restive and ill-tempered. I was accustomed to running aground on the government’s Internet filters, which blocked a vast array of content—numerous Farsi blogs, pro-reform websites, social networking sites, political opposition groups, Farsi news portals, and many American think tanks were all filtered. Arash had recently found he could not access the site for the typesetting software he was using to format his MBA thesis; the software was called LaTeX, which no doubt was a filtering term used to block pornography.

Sometimes I could guess why a term triggered the filter, but sometimes the censorship seemed entirely random. I often found myself cut off from medical information about pregnancy. Could I eat a certain type of cheese? Was it safe to take cough syrup? The answers were to be found on sites which, as the pop-up page informed me, “In accordance with the laws of the Islamic Republic of Iran and at the decree of judiciary officials” were not permitted. I began jotting down terms and sites that were blocked, hoping to find a rationale behind the censorship, but my list did not illuminate matters: “Lufthansa”
+
“pregnant travelers,” “Bloomingdale’s,” “circumcision,” “adult”
+
any noun/adjective, “women”
+
any noun/adjective/verb,
The New York Times
Style section, “varicose veins,” “Pablo Neruda sonnets.”

These distractions occupied my time, and it was with some dismay that I realized I was five months pregnant and had yet to settle on an obstetrician. I had already met five doctors, but had been forced to cancel two recent appointments with prospective candidates because of the pollution.

“You can’t keep interviewing doctors forever,” Arash said, practically, before leaving for work. He thought my pursuit of the ideal doctor was becoming obsessive and that I should just settle on someone reasonably experienced and personable.

“I know that.” I frowned, envious of his ability to leave the house. “I just want to find someone I’m comfortable with.”

The first doctor I interviewed, an elderly woman with thick glasses and a tasteful watch, seemed very capable, but her severe manner put me off. Her great advantage was that she opposed elective cesarean sections, which had become tremendously popular in Iran.

As my pregnancy progressed, the question relatives and total strangers asked most frequently was not whether I was having a girl or a boy, but whether I was having a c-section. Vaginal childbirth was very out these days in Tehran. The c-section had quickly edged out the nose job as the dominant medical trend among Iranians, a people very fond of surgery. No longer the provenance of last-minute complications, cesarean delivery was now viewed in Tehran as the modern woman’s choice. My friends had all lined up to convince me to get sliced open. They cheerfully tugged up their shirts and flashed me their discreet little c-section scars, always pointing out how these fell under the bikini line. One, a slightly more intellectual type, advocated the procedure in nationalist and literary terms.