Nine Parts of Desire (5 page)

But by the time I met her, ten years later, the revolutionary thrill had started to wear off. Every time we got out of the sight of men, she’d shrug off the big black cloth with relief. “I wish I’d never put it on,” she confided one day. “In the beginning, it was important, to prove your revolutionary views. But now we don’t have to prove that. You can be a revolutionary with just a scarf and coat.”

When I went to visit her at home, Hamideh looked preppy in pleated skirts, silk blouses and discreet gold jewelry. But when she went out, she donned the full uniform of revolutionary Islam. For me, it was easier to deal with Hamideh in her chador. The things she said somehow seemed less jolting coming out of that anonymous darkness. In her family’s tastefully furnished living room, as we chatted about neutral subjects like Persian poetry or the difficulty of meeting eligible men, it was easy to begin to see her as just another smart woman my own age with whom I had a lot in common. Then she would run a hand through her bobbed chestnut hair and deliver an opinion devastating in its extremism. “Israel has to be obliterated,” she would say, reaching for her teacup and taking a delicate sip. “I’m looking forward to taking part in the war for its destruction.”

While Sunni Muslims assume a direct relationship between believers and God, Shiites believe in the mediation of a highly trained clergy. Usually, each Shiite chooses a high-ranking clerical thinker and follows any religious ruling, or
fatwa,
from that person. Hamideh had chosen Khomeini, which meant that she ordered every detail of her life according to the opinions he set out in his eighteen volumes
of religious interpretation. “Some ayatollahs say women must wear gloves,” she explained, “but Imam Khomeini says that the lower part of the hand can be uncovered.” Other ayatollahs considered the female voice arousing and barred women from speaking in mixed gatherings unless they first put a stone in their mouths to distort the sound. Khomeini, citing the prophet’s meetings with mixed groups of men and women, had no problems with the female speaking voice.

I asked Hamideh if Khomeini could ever be wrong in a religious ruling. “For sure,” she said. “We don’t believe any human being is infallible. But if I follow his fatwa, and it’s wrong—say I kill someone he orders me to, and the person is innocent—the person I killed will go to paradise, and the sin of the killing is on the one who issued the fatwa, not on me.”

Now that Khomeini was dead, Hamideh felt she couldn’t abandon the chador. To suddenly stop wearing it after his death might look as if her commitment to his line had weakened. Articles in newspapers constantly reminded women that the chador was a “trench against Western values.” And men in positions of power believed it. One friend had gone to an interview for a government job covering her hair and curves with an Islamically impeccable coat and scarf. “You’re naked,” the interviewer snarled, and declined to hire her.

At first, I’d naively assumed that hijab would at least free women from the tyranny of the beauty industry. But at the Iranian Women’s Conference, locked up day and night with a hotelful of Muslim radicals, I soon learned I’d been mistaken.

I’d asked Hamideh to arrange a meeting for me with the women of Lebanon’s Hezbollah. The group’s strongholds were the Bekaa Valley and Beirut’s southern suburbs—no-go areas for Western journalists since the kidnapping of the Associated Press bureau chief, Terry Anderson. I wanted to ask about Anderson, who was spending his days chained to a radiator in a lightless Beirut basement. To meet the women said to be married to his captors seemed like the best chance I’d ever have to get information for his desperate family.

In the end, I learned nothing about his plight, but meeting the women was instructive in other ways. They invited me to join them
that evening for tea in their suite, provided that I promised not to name them in any articles I wrote. When the door opened to my knock, I thought I had the wrong room. The woman in front of me had frosted blond hair streaming to her waist. She wore a silk negligee with a deep plunge neckline. On the bed behind her, another woman lay languidly in a bust-hugging, slit-sided scarlet satin nightgown. Through the filmy fabrics, it was obvious that their bodies were completely hairless, like Barbie dolls. It was, they explained,
sunnat,
or Islamically recommended, for married women to remove all body hair every twenty days. The traditional depilatory was a paste of sugar and lemon that tugged the hairs out by the roots. Muslim men, they said, also should remove their body hair. For men, the recommended time between depilation is forty days.

It took a few minutes to recognize the bleached blonde as the same woman who had wailed the emotional eulogy at the Khomeini house. When I mentioned my surprise at the way she looked, she laughed. “This is how we are at home,” she said, striking a seductive pose. “Islam encourages us to be beautiful for our husbands.” I suddenly understood why Khadija, Khomeini’s widow, had hennaed her hair to carrot-orange, and why an inch of gray had grown in since she stopped doing it on her husband’s death.

Her daughter Zahra somehow didn’t seem like the carrot-curl type, or the plunge-neck negligee type, for that matter. Under her chador, she wore matronly twin sets and tweedy skirts—donnish clothes for a donnish woman who taught philosophy at the University of Tehran.

It took me three years and many meetings before she relaxed enough to allow me to see her in anything but her chador. Even in a room full of women, she rarely let the chador fall from a clenched-fist grip that kept it pulled down past her brows and up over her lips. The style led to confusing graphics in the Women’s Society literature. The Society liked to promote its prominent women—its members of Parliament, artists and authors. But in photographs everyone came out looking exactly the same: a little white triangle, apex down, inside a big black triangle, apex up.

Once, during the Tehran conference, Zahra momentarily let go of her chador, revealing some lip and chin. Someone’s flash bulb popped. Consternation. Could whoever had taken the picture please hand over the film? The Women’s Society would develop it, excise the offending picture and send back the rest of the shots on the roll, along with an appropriate picture of Mrs. Mostafavi. All eyes in the room turned to me. As a journalist, I was the prime suspect. Flapping my chador to prove there was nothing up my sleeve, I explained that I didn’t have a camera with me. A sheepish Khatima Ma confessed to being the culprit. As she handed over the film, she looked a little crestfallen at the Hong Kong
Muslim Herald’s
lost scoop.

Zahra Mostafavi was a heavy-set woman, pallid and jowly, with the same fierce profile and intense expression as her father. Austere wire half-spectacles perched on her nose and an elaborate diamond-encrusted gold ring flashed on her hand. As head of the Women’s Society, she was the most politically active of Khomeini’s three surviving daughters. Sedigheh, a widow, lived quietly with her seven children. Farideh, a theology scholar, was married to a rug merchant in Gum.

Zahra’s position as a philosophy professor was quite an achievement for a woman who had never been to school. Like many religious Iranians before the revolution, Khomeini refused to send any of his children to what he felt was the corrupt state-run education system. Zahra was educated at home by handpicked men of religion. Every day, at her request, her father tutored her himself for half an hour. Zahra found herself drawn toward metaphysics and to Western philosophers such as Bertrand Russell and Immanuel Kant.

Khomeini, she said, was an easygoing parent most of the time, but unyielding on Islamic issues. “If I wanted to play at a house, and he knew there was a boy there, he would say, ‘Don’t go there, play at home,’” she recalled. “You couldn’t say, ‘Come on, Dad, let me go,’ because what he said was based on Islam, not on his own opinion.”

Once she finished her studies, Khomeini began to scrutinize potential husbands. Zahra turned down three suitors he suggested before accepting the fourth. “My father would come to me and say, ‘I’ve chosen one, I think he’s not bad, he has this and that characteristic, but it’s up to you.’” All were men she had met through the
family. “It wasn’t as if they were strangers. I knew what they were all like; I waited for the one that I knew would suit me.” She chose an academic, who now heads an educational think tank. As a married woman, she stayed behind when the shah ordered her father into exile. But she would visit him each year, returning with revolutionary tracts and tapes hidden in her clothes. Back in Tehran, she would go out at night to distribute them. “I’d take my son and have him scramble up trees and drop copies over people’s fences,” she recalled.

Her own daughter, coming of age after the Islamic revolution, didn’t face the kinds of restrictions that had kept Zahra mostly at home. Once the revolutionaries gained control and purged institutions such as schools, universities, banks and businesses, Khomeini had no objection to the participation of women (correctly veiled) in politics and the economy. So his granddaughter went to law school, married a cardiac surgeon, and wound up living in London while her husband completed his training.

In the winter of 1993, when Khadija needed specialist medical care, Zahra didn’t hesitate to bring her to London. I had moved from Cairo to London by then, and was surprised to get a call inviting me to lunch with her at the Iranian consulate. It was the week of the fourth anniversary of her father’s death sentence on Salman Rushdie, and to mark British displeasure the foreign secretary had met with Rushdie. The Iranians, miffed, had immediately raised the visa fee for British travelers to Iran to a staggering £504.

But Zahra waved all that off with a flick of her plump wrist. She had never been an easy person to chat with: every conversation I’d ever had with her started with the words
“Bismillah al rahman al rahim
[In the name of God, the compassionate, the merciful]”—always a disincentive to small talk. As well, the combination of growing up in a preacher’s home and working as a university lecturer had left her with a tendency to monologue. Once she got going it was hard to interject a question, much less hold anything that resembled a conversation.

But over lunch in London she seemed much more relaxed. Encouraging me to take more rice, more chicken, more kebab, and piling her own plate with healthy portions, she talked merrily about the pleasures of London: the trees, the wide avenues, the polite people. I
knew that Khomeini, when he went into exile in France, had averted his eyes on the drive from the airport to his residence, so as not to be contaminated by a Western environment. At his house outside Paris he’d had the pedestal toilet removed and a humbler, oriental-style squat version installed. Zahra smiled when I asked if the un-Islamic atmosphere of London bothered her. “I have no problems here,” she said. The only slight unpleasantness had occurred when an Iranian exile who recognized her in the street had shouted an abusive remark about her father. “Of course, I don’t like anyone to insult my father, but he was always ready to forgive anything aimed at him personally. It was attacks on Islam that he couldn’t forgive.”

In her chador, Zahra stood out on the streets of London. Many devout Iranian women didn’t wear their chadors in the West for that reason. One of the main objectives of hijab is to make a woman
less
eye-catching. In London, a chador drew many more stares than a scarf and coat would have. But for Zahra the chador was like a second skin that couldn’t be discarded.

One reason she had invited me to the consulate was to show off the women diplomats working there. One handled international law, another studied the status of women in Britain. Their presence was something of a triumph for the Women’s Society, which had pushed to have women assigned abroad.

These women were an entirely different group from the modern, middle-and upper-class minority who had thrived under the shah’s liberalizations, many of whom were destroyed by the revolution. One, Esfand Farrokhrou Parsa, the first woman in the Iranian cabinet, had been wrapped in a sack and machine-gunned for the crimes of “corruption on earth, expansion of prostitution and warring against God.” What she had done was direct schoolgirls not to veil and order textbooks revised to present a more modern vision of women. Hundreds of women had been imprisoned for refusing to follow revolutionary dictates; thousands fled into exile.

But others, from poor, conservative, rural families, emerged for the first time from behind the high walls of the
andarun
—the women’s quarters of traditional homes where the vast majority of Iranian women used to live their entire lives. Khomeini encouraged
these women to come into the streets, where they had never been welcome, to demonstrate for the revolution. He even stated that they didn’t need their male guardian’s permission to leave the house for such a purpose. His views on the matter weren’t, he said,
his
views at all, but the literal laws of Islam. If Muhammad’s sunnah was that women could marry at nine, then of course they could marry at nine. If it said they couldn’t be judges, then of course they’d be banned from the bench. But if it said they could do other things—run a business, as the prophet Muhammad’s first wife had done, or tend the sick, or even ride into battle, as women of the prophet’s era had—then of course Iranian women must be permitted to do the same. Suddenly, because the imam had spoken, conservative fathers, husbands and brothers had to listen. To women who would have spent their lives in seclusion, wearing a head covering was a small price to pay in return for the new freedoms.

Still, it intrigued me that, while public pressure and state laws could be brought to bear to force women into hijab, no one seemed to pay much attention to Islam’s dress code for men. The Koran urged men, as well as women, to be modest. Muhammad’s sunnah was unambiguous on the matter: as women must cover all but hands and face, men were obliged to cover the area of the body from navel to knee. The covering had to be opaque and loose-fitting enough to conceal the bulge of male genitals.