Honeymoon in Tehran: Two Years of Love and Danger in Iran (48 page)
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Authors: Azadeh Moaveni
Indeed, Arash and I were joining the great stream of educated Iranians who each year abandoned (yes, abandoned) their country for
better jobs and better futures abroad. Iran had one of the highest rates of brain drain in the world, according to official Iranian figures. Each year, at least 150,000 educated Iranians emigrated, taking their considerable talents with them to enrich the economies and key industries, the software, banking, and aerospace sectors, of other nations. Iranian state media lovingly, even gloatingly recounted their achievements abroad on the nightly news. Scarcely a night went by when the anchor did not intone something like “And today! An Iranian scientist in Australia decoded the human genome, a monumental breakthrough that will revolutionize modern medicine!” As though the state that ran the news broadcast with such nationalist relish were not the same state that willfully chased its most talented citizens away.
Economic instability being a hallmark of authoritarian states, the week we decided to sell our apartment real estate prices in Tehran jumped 40 percent. The swing in the market, just the latest bit of mayhem wrought by Ahmadinejad’s catastrophic economic policies, frightened off buyers, overwhelming Iranians already struggling with high rent and home prices. The president, who now referred to U.N. sanctions against the country as a “piece of torn paper,” did not appear overly concerned. He took his inspiration from the Ayatollah Khomeini, who once famously remarked that “we did not make a revolution to slash the price of watermelon.” This nonchalance infuriated many Iranians, and the taxi driver who drove me to the doctor that week complained bitterly about the president, whose name was now synonymous with “This costs more.” The driver had taken out loans and saved for three years to buy a one-bedroom apartment in Shahrak-e Gendarmarie, a district in western Tehran. In the space of just one week, his plans had been dashed.
For a whole month, I patiently stayed home in the evenings in case the local real estate agent wanted to bring over a prospective buyer. In Tehran, people often conducted their real estate dealings in the evenings, and the agent called only five minutes ahead of arrival. Just two people came to view our apartment. Though only eight years old, it was considered ancient—undesirable in a market saturated with brand-new buildings—and it had suddenly become expensive. Not surprisingly, most people who could afford such prices were either
well-placed bureaucrats or those connected to them. One woman who arrived in full black chador immediately sniffed at being shown an apartment so “old.” The real estate agent introduced her as a surgeon, referred to her ingratiatingly as “khanoum doktor,” Madam Doctor, and tried to placate her by pointing out the building was built to western earthquake safety standards, an unheard-of feature in all the marble-encased luxury high-rise towers she was doubtless also viewing. These boasted lobbies with vaulted ceilings lined with vases of orchids, and seemed much more in keeping with her Islamic-oligarch tastes.
She strode about the apartment, eyeing Arash’s instrument collection and our shabby antique furniture, curling her lip in distaste. “Your décor is so … so Iranian,” she said, pronouncing the final word with particular contempt. She paused in front of a painting, a piece of modernist calligraphy based on the Rumi verse “Pour nothing on my grave but wine.” It seemed to cause her physical discomfort. Her hands twitched around her chador and she turned to leave. “You should sell this place to foreigners. They would like such a place,” she said on her way out the door.
We phoned the agent and told him to stop advertising the apartment to such people. In a building compring only five apartments, even one assertively conservative tenant could change the atmosphere. First they would demand the shared swimming pool be gender segregated. Then they might take issue with the satellite dishes and with parties. They could easily impose the culture of the regime on the building, as they had the law on their side. We couldn’t inflict such neighbors on Solmaz or on Arash’s parents. The real estate agent grumbled that he was doing his best; people were too skittish to buy in such an unstable market, because they expected that prices would fall again. And, he informed us, “People don’t want earthquake safety. They want a sauna and whirlpool in the master bath. Your place is going to take months to sell.” We told him to bring the price down. We started packing, hoping buyers would come. We finished packing. We bought airplane tickets. Still no one came.
S
moke filled the night sky, billowing through the trees and coating our windshield in fine soot. Rioters had torched the main gas station on Niavaran Street, creating a traffic jam that we had been sitting in for over two hours. It was the first night of the government’s new gas rationing scheme, and gas stations across the city had been set ablaze. We were on the way home from a goodbye dinner party, and I called home every thirty minutes from my mobile phone, checking whether Hourmazd was still asleep. The government, nervous that the West might impose sanctions on its import of gasoline, had decided to withdraw the longtime subsidy that enabled Iranians to buy gas at the absurd price of about 35 cents per gallon. You may wonder why Iran, sitting atop such vast oil reserves, had to import gasoline in the first place. The answer is that the government had failed to build a sufficient refining capacity to meet the nation’s consumption needs. The subsidy was unsustainable and officials had long talked of canceling it, but successive governments, wary of the short-term protest and job losses it would entail, had delayed the move. The timing now, however, was more auspicious. Officials could blame the West, claiming they were forced to abrogate people’s God-given right to cheap gas because of the threat of unjust sanctions. But if the evening’s violence was any indication, this calculation had backfired. In addition to torching gas stations, rioters set fire to cars, smashed shop windows, and attacked a supermarket and bank. They hurled stones at police and chanted that Ahmadinejad should be killed.
The authorities informed the nation at nine that evening, an ordinary Tuesday in June, that the rationing would go into effect at midnight. They neglected to notify the Tehran police in advance, so the force had taken no special precautions ahead of an announcement that would so obviously trigger an outpouring of anger. The regime also failed to explain to the nation’s seventy million people exactly how rationing would work. Would people have access to gas at all beyond their ration? If so, at what price? If not, would the authorities offer recourse? Naturally, everyone panicked, and the country descended into full-scale mayhem. People began storing gasoline in their houses, which promptly burned to the ground. In one day, 300,000
people registered applications for taxi licenses, since taxis would be allotted a larger ration (it was common for people to use unmarked, private vehicles as taxis). The next day the authorities announced that all taxis would have to bear a taxi placard, and most of the applications were withdrawn. For days, gas stations saw five-block-long queues at all hours. We were all down to the last drops in our tanks, and even at midnight the lines were still too long. “Why do we have an SUV?” I asked Arash peevishly on our third day at home.
Taxis wouldn’t come at all, and when they did, they charged three times the normal fare. The last place I had seen such astonishingly long lines for gasoline was Baghdad immediately after the fall of Saddam (though I’m told those lines persist even now), and it struck me that if Tehran was beginning to resemble Iraq, perhaps we had chosen an appropriate time to leave. Iran’s uncertain place in the world had ceased to be an abstraction and become a reality disrupting our daily lives.
It was the first time I had seen the square’s produce seller, usually mellow and not prone to talk of politics, unable to control his fury at the president. “He’s ruined this country,” he yelled, storming around a stand of figs and mulberries. “Why doesn’t someone shoot him?”
I
had secretly hoped our last day in Iran would be marred by another spate of gasoline rioting or an ugly encounter with the police. I wanted to depart with the memories of such hardships fresh in my mind, so that instead of feeling sad during our final hours I might think instead of the daily humiliations we were leaving behind. Instead, the day passed smoothly, and the evening was one of incomparable, poig nant beauty. Arash had carefully planned the date of departure so that we might catch, on our very final evening, the opening night of Ostad Lotfi’s concert series. Lotfi had not played in Iran for over a decade, and Tehran had been abuzz with anticipation and excitement for weeks. What did it mean that authorities were permitting open air performances by the nation’s preeminent musicians? To Arash’s keen disappointment, that summer concerts were to be held across the country, several of them including orchestras with female musicians.
It would be a summer of music, probably the richest, most diverse array of fine performances held since the revolution. Did such official leniency suggest the brutality of the previous weeks would now ease out of the foreground? Certainly not. It was just a continuation of the perverse reality of Iranian life, which fluctuated between extraordinary brutality, commonplace routine, and unexpected, fleeting instances of real openness.
As the sun set, we drove to Niavaran Palace. Built out of concrete and stone, the palace is architecturally unimpressive, but I was sentimentally attached to its bland modern lines. Here Arash and I had whispered through a concert of Indian music on our first real date. The Supreme Leader, a devotee of
tar and
classical Persian music, was rumored to live nearby, and several people in line to enter the palace joked that he could listen from his garden for free. As Solmaz handed her ticket to an attendant, a woman in chador asked her to pull her veil forward, then she whispered into her ear, “Just pull it back when you’re inside, no one will say anything!”
At least three thousand people, among them many women in black chadors, mingled under a velvet sky before the palace steps, which were lined with flickering candles. The country’s most distinguished poets, musicians, film stars, and directors occupied the front row, and giant video screens displayed their faces as they entered and took their seats. “It’s like the Oscars!” I whispered to Arash. These celebrities sat alongside government officials and their chador-clad wives, and gazing at the scene, you could be forgiven for imagining this was a society at peace with itself, run by men who appreciated the arts, reconciled over the role of Islam in daily life. The crowd rose to its feet in excitement as Lotfi took the stage, dressed in plain white. He played with sublime beauty, even reaching for an instrument he rarely played in public, the
daf.
This is a round frame drum that Iranians have played for almost two millennia, long before the Moors introduced it to Spain, before it was adopted by Sufis in their rituals, before the mullah regime banned it from television. I gazed around me, at the faces of those I would miss lit by moonlight, and wished for them many more of such evenings.
A
vrash, Hourmazd, and I arrived in London during the late summer of 2007. We rode a black hackney cab through the drizzly, overcast morning to our new apartment, and gazed eagerly at the exotic (at least to us) surroundings—red phone booths, mail trucks adorned with a crown, pubs with names like Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese. I was excited to arrive in our new neighborhood, Kilburn, where we would launch our new English life. We had chosen to live there because it was relatively affordable, an easy walk to the cafés and health food stores of gentrified West Hampstead, and most important, truly diverse. Kilburn traces its origins to the eleventh-century reign of King Henry I, when a community of Augustinian nuns built a priory near an ancient Celtic road. I had researched the history of London while still in Tehran and was fully prepared to fall in love with the city. From short holidays and my British friends’ accounts, I knew it was grandly beautiful, ethnically varied, and one of the most vibrant cities in Europe. I imagined that our neighbors would resemble the cast of
Love Actually,
the local Indian restaurant would serve delectable curries, and we would spend leisurely afternoons with our new friends at the local pub discussing Ian McEwan.
But Little Riyadh, as Arash and I quickly dubbed the area, felt altogether more like a dour Muslim village than the charming London
quarter I had expected. “We left Tehran for
this
?” I said, looking at the grocery shop down the street from our apartment in shock. Its sign read
ASHOURA MARKET,
and the words were flanked on both sides by a crescent moon and star, the symbols of Islam. The second time I went inside, I found the stern Pakistani owner arguing with several Muslim kids from the block. He was refusing to sell them gummy candy on the grounds that it contained
un-kalal
pig gelatin. I thought of intervening—if their parents didn’t care, what business was it of his?—but they were already trooping out and I figured I should wait at least a week before alienating the neighborhood grocer.
As my friends had said, the area was indeed multiethnic. Our landlords were a Russian-Venezuelan couple, the flat upstairs was occupied by an Australian, and the street vendors on the main thoroughfare were Sri Lankan and Chinese. But the neighborhood’s sizable Muslim community seemed to exist in a separate sphere—it was as though everyone else came from a distinct country but they were from a besieged and borderless place called Islam. They seemed to project this sentiment, and others reflected it back to them. “The people who live on the corner, they are
Mooslims,”
a Spanish neighbor informed me with a meaningful look.
The neighborhood’s Muslims, I soon found, seemed to share the Pakistani grocer’s strict sensibility. One afternoon, in search of Hourmazd’s favorite baby food, I wandered into a store called the Al-Mahdi Market (after the occulted twelfth Imam-messiah of Shia Islam). Al Jazeera blared from the wall-mounted TV, and when I tried to pay, the Lebanese clerk told me to put the coins on the counter. Puritanical Muslims consider it forbidden for unmarried men and women to touch one another, but it takes a real fundamentalist to cringe at the threat of a light grazing. In all the years I had spent in the Middle East, not once had a man refused to take money from my hand. I slammed the coins on the counter and walked out.
When I began taking Hourmazd to the nearest playground, I found the mothers clustered according to civilization. The western moms congregated near the teeter-totter, discussing BBC specials on childhood, the Portobello Road market, and local museums. The Muslim women, some of whom even covered their faces and hands, assembled
near the swings. The subjects of their conversations reflected the separateness of their world—husbands who vetoed breastfeeding because of the risk of exposed flesh, husbands who complained about their women taking English lessons, the strain of cooking four-dish meals each day for a bevy of extended relatives. Initially I alternated sitting with each group, but eventually found myself most at home with the western moms, who were on average at least a decade older than the Muslim homemakers. In addition to not having much to say to an eighteen-year-old Bengali speaker, I found it difficult connecting through the
niqabs
(full-face masks with slits for the eyes) that some of the Muslim moms wore. The
niqab
made it impossible to smile hello, as a preliminary to conversation; it made it impossible to share kindly, forgiving glances, as our sons filched each others’ spades in the sand pit. The Muslim women, and by their own accounts rigid husbands, were cleaving to a traditional, suffocating lifestyle, afraid of what might happen if the godless ways of the secular West permeated their lives.
I assumed most of the Muslim mothers must be recent immigrants, until I heard a voice emanating from underneath a full-face black veil that might have belonged to Victoria Beckham. Some of the Muslims in the neighborhood, like the face-veiled Victoria, were second- or third-generation immigrants, born and raised in England. Others had recently come from places as far away as Somalia, Nigeria, and Bangladesh.
I found the Muslim presence to be so assertive that I once even forgot I was in England altogether. One day, when I was on the tube, two women dressed in severe black, their faces concealed under imposing
niqabs,
boarded the train. They carried Korans and radiated such militancy that I thought they were morality policewomen and looked down to see whether I was dressed appropriately.
I hadn’t lived in England very long and was aware that my views were unseasoned. I also knew that the problems Europe faced with the assimilation of its Muslim immigrants were very different from America’s—the Muslims who move to Europe, by and large, tend to be poorer and less educated, making integration more difficult. But that reality, as I saw it, made their assimilation especially urgent. If the
Muslim women of my neighborhood were any indication, the country’s Muslim community was living entirely at odds with the society around them. And Britian seemed to be appeasing this tendency rather than confronting it head-on.
This upset me, for I felt myself an immigrant as well—a recent immigrant from a repressive Islamic theocracy. I had deliberately left traditional, defensive Islam behind and did not wish to see it nurtured in the heart of my new home, a western democracy whose secular values I had come to treasure in an entirely new way. Everywhere I went, from the doctor’s office to playgroups, I saw evidence of England’s special sensitivity to Muslims’ needs. Signs asked: Do you require a chaperone while being seen by a male doctor? Do you wish to keep your head covering on for ID photos? Do you wish to attend sermons where radical clerics preach hatred and jihad? Of course, there was no sign for the latter, but there may as well have been. Britain’s recent history as a breeding ground for militant Islam numbered among the most controversial topics in Europe, and had led the French to devise the term “Londonistan.”
Of course, nurturing the veiling and sequestering of women is not the same thing as allowing militants free rein to organize terror attacks. But they share one important aspect, and that is their willingness to accommodate antediluvian Islam rather than push the faith into a healthy acceptance of modernity. I had no doubt that this is what Islam needed, and living in Iran had stripped me of all my liberal California ambivalence about imposing western values on an “other” from elsewhere. I felt like a messenger from the land of radical Islam, sent to shake some sense into all these well-intentioned but deluded British people. Didn’t they realize that if the situation were reversed, if they were a secular minority in a country of deeply pious Muslims, there would be no signs asking, Do you require a beer on the weekend? Do you wish to bare your hair and arms?
As weeks turned to months, however, my views softened slightly. I experienced both the subtle and visceral racism of British society toward its Muslim community, and this helped me understand part of why Muslims clung so defensively to their traditions. Some instances were slight, like the time I heard a well-dressed white British man
sneer at a young Muslim girl, who cowered in fear of the pug puppy he held on a leash. “Is it a dog’s saliva, or what, that these people are supposedly scared of?” he asked, turning to me. “She’s probably just not used to dogs as pets,” I said.
Another time, while trying to maneuver Hourmazd’s stroller off a crowded bus, an older white British woman rebuked me: “You should learn to say ‘excuse me,’ as the English do, when you get in people’s way,” she said, glaring with an open, disproportionate hostility. I had, in fact, apologized, she just hadn’t heard me, but was too shocked to say anything. A young, veiled woman rose to help me with the stroller, and later I was struck by the rush of feelings that had overcome me—fury at the white woman (for in that instant, that is what she became to me); fear that one day Hourmazd would hear such comments; and a profound sense of gratitude for and kinship with the woman in the veil.
These experiences, and my life in England altogether, left me feeling confused and unmoored in a country whose racial and political dynamics I didn’t quite understand. Was racism alienating British Muslims, causing the Muslim part of their identity to take on a defensive, oversize importance? Or was it just stoking a tendency that had its roots elsewhere, in a stuffy, paranoid Islam that was already keeping Muslims sequestered and unhappy? How had the problem changed since September 11, and July 7, 2005, when a series of bombs left by Islamic extremists ripped through London? Whatever the reasons, I grew to accept the fact that I had not left Islam’s modern problems—its traditionalism, the frightening zeal of its radical adherents, its tendency to blame the West for its societies’ stagnation—behind when I left Iran. In new and different ways, the religion would remain a part of my life, and a part of the environment in which we raised Hourmazd.
Regardless of what hemisphere we lived in, I would need to teach him that Islam could be tolerant as well as repressive, and that he should take ownership of the faith by dispassionately studying its history (its past glories, as well as its modern ignominy). If we had raised him in Iran, I would have tried to make him see that rejecting spirituality was no way to distance himself from the tyrannical Islam of the
state. Here I would need to teach him that embracing Islam was no way to empower himself before racism. Whether he lived in London or in Tehran, he would need to grapple with these issues, which I supposed made him a citizen of the twenty-first century.
C
ompared to the veiled women on the playground and their aggressively bearded husbands, we eased into British life comfortably. Arash was engrossed in his graduate studies and spent most of his hours at the university or the British Library in the quiet company of ancient manuscripts. The study of Zoroastrianism essentially involved the mastery of old Iranian languages; by deciphering the texts composed in these archaic tongues, scholars sought to understand the nature of ancient Persia. Busily immersed in such scholarship, Arash did not find himself, like me, questioning whether he was altogether happier than he had been in Iran. There were days when I was grateful for everything that London and life in the West offered—stability, a fast and uncensored Internet, and the luxury of worrying about toxicity in Hourmazd’s toiletries rather than in the propaganda murals on the street. On other days, usually cold, gray afternoons when the faces of Londoners rushing past seemed especially blank, I felt unbearably lonely. Just as I had suspected, being a working mom in the West was harder and infinitely less enjoyable than in Iran. In Tehran, the constant presence of relatives had meant that I had the pleasure of company, intellectual stimulation, and reassurance that was more steady than any parenting book, as well as time to shower, and even occasional moments of idleness. I was poised and rested, and I actually found both working and mothering
fun.
In London, I became the sort of woman, the sort of mother, who suddenly needed many extraneous and costly things—yoga classes, child-care gadgets, an agency-certified nanny, a housekeeper, bottled baby food—just to get through the week without becoming an exhausted wreck. Many days, as the rain splattered against the windows and the sky drew dark by four
P.M.,
I felt that I would give anything to be back in Iran. I felt I would gladly tolerate the hell of living there in exchange for once again feeling connected to those around me.
I told Arash one night: “Do you know what I miss? I miss the produce seller. I miss buying oyster mushrooms and having him ask me, ‘Now, Mrs. Zeini, how are you, and tell me, what do you cook with these strange mushrooms?’ To me that’s civilization, not the swiping of a club card.”
“Wait until you’re next in Iran again. Tell me then what you think about civilization,” he said.
T
hat next trip happened to fall in April of 2008, when Hourmazd and I flew to Tehran for a brief holiday. I had been thinking of going back for a few months, for many reasons. For one, I was curious to see how things had changed since we left. But more important, we wanted to have Hourmazd examined by his Tehran pediatrician, as he had developed a lump under his arm as a result of his tuberculosis vaccine and the doctors in London were advising it be removed surgically. Since babies in the UK receive the vaccine far less frequently than in places like Iran, I figured the Tehran doctor might offer a valuable second opinion, and perhaps an alternative to the scary-sounding operation. As added incentive to go, I also needed to visit the dentist, get a haircut, and have my eyebrows threaded, all of which in London would have cost as much as my plane ticket.
I was a touch worried about my safety going back, especially since I would be traveling alone with Hourmazd. But I figured that if we had been allowed to leave the country, returning should pose no great risk and that staying away would only suggest I had been permanently cowed. I had no intention of writing, so I would not need to let the press office know of my trip. And I refused to speak to Mr. X, that shameless emotional terrorist, ever again.