Persian Mirrors: The Elusive Face of Iran (23 page)

A garlic in chador or praying shawl?

You who’re the mirror of God’s Divine Splendor,

A turnip sack of undetermined gender?

Bound at both ends when down the lane you careen,

Not like a lady—maybe aubergine?

By contrast, some people find veiling erotic. An entire industry sprang up in the nineteenth century devoted to erotic photography of semiclothed but veiled Middle Eastern women. There is one well-known nineteenth-century photograph of the wife of a carpet merchant from Isfahan shown in a veil that covers her hair, ears, throat, shoulders, and the right side of her torso. She also wears a knee-length slip and calf-length stockings. But her entire left side—from her breast to her hip—is naked. A diplomat friend who was single and male and lived in Iran told me he found the process of unveiling women arousing. “It’s like opening a Christmas package,” he said. Indeed.

Certainly there is something unsettling about taking off the scarf after wearing it for so many hours on end. I get so conditioned to keeping my hair covered in Iran that whenever I take off my head scarf in an outdoor space like a church courtyard or an embassy garden where bare-headedness is allowed I feel as if I am doing something unlawful.

The first time I wore a chador was as a member of the press corps accompanying Ayatollah Khomeini to Qom early in the revolution. I customized a black and white print chador with a piece of elastic to secure it on my head and a zipper to keep it closed. That gave me the ability to take notes. Then I discovered a novel use for the chador: bathrobe. In my hotel, the only bathroom on my floor was down the hall. It was tiny, and I didn’t want all my clothes to get wet when I showered. So I wore nothing down the hall except my quick-drying rayon chador.

Within a couple of years of the revolution, customized chadors with pieces of elastic sewn in became common. Or they could be fastened with straight pins on the side of the head, just as the Catholic nuns of my childhood wore their wimples before Vatican II allowed nuns to unveil.

The black chador undercut Iran’s official campaign to look modern in the eyes of the world. When he was ambassador to the United Nations, Kamal Kharrazi, who later became Iran’s Foreign Minister, asked Iranian women not to wear chadors on official business there. Fatemeh Hashemi, the elder daughter of President Rafsanjani (and Faezeh’s older sister), followed the ambassador’s request, appearing chador-less in some meetings at the United Nations in 1995. To Iranian eyes, her large royal blue scarf tied with a bow, fake Gucci handbag, and long black coat trimmed in black satin lapels and black-and-white-checked cuffs were a political statement of just how modern she could be, though she undoubtedly looked extremely Islamic to New Yorkers.

Fatemeh took an even bolder step months later when she invited me to an official dinner in Tehran. A white-gloved honor guard saluted a parade of women swathed in black as they hurried inside. But once there the women handed their chadors to a female servant. Beneath the black, the women were clearly ready for a party, with lacquered hair, careful makeup, and stylish clothes. One wore a black taffeta party dress with a plunging neckline and a big black bow at the shoulder; another, a-formfitting black suit trimmed in fake zebra.

This event, it turned out, was for women only. Fatemeh herself dispensed with her chador, and her head scarf and coat as well, and stood revealed. With her perfectly tailored lime green and white Chanel-style suit, pale hose and pumps, and a single strand of pearls, she looked, well, modern.

The theme was underscored by the guest of honor, Hamideh Rabbani, the daughter of Afghanistan’s former President, Burhanuddin Rabbani, who had recently been ousted by the fundamentalist Muslims known as the Taliban. Over caviar and grilled fish Rabbani held the audience spellbound with tales of horror about women under Taliban rule: how they could not leave their homes to go to work, how they could not send their daughters to school, how they were denied medical care in hospitals. Fatemeh gasped. Iranian women had it so much better, she said. “The image of Iranian women is so distorted around the world,” she lamented. “How unfair it is.” It was not an act.

To the outside world, the unveiling by Fatemeh in front of a female foreign journalist may seem insignificant. But I saw it differently: as part of a mission by women who now had the connections and the skills to reclaim their place in society. Still, the boundaries of dress could be dangerous to cross. “Do not write too many details—what my hair looks like or the shape of our bodies,” she said to me at the evening’s end, as her guests said affectionate goodbyes and wrapped themselves again in black to reenter the public space of men. Two days later, in her office, we negotiated what could be written. Her suit, her pearls, her hose, her shoes could be described; the shape of her body and the color and length of her hair could not. “Don’t talk about hair,” she said. “That’s going too far.”

Even for women like Fatemeh, who has worn the chador since childhood, it is a difficult garment to wear. During a sixty-second goodbye to a group of male doctors in her office one day, she performed a sort of Islamic dance of the veil, even if her scarf, worn under the chador, prevented her hair from showing. She pulled the chador forward on her head. It slipped back. She pulled it down again and secured it at her waist. It slipped. She pulled it down again. She held it under her chin with her right hand. It slipped, this time exposing the top of her khaki-colored coat and black and white scarf underneath. The chador almost fell off her left shoulder. She pulled it down again. It opened. She closed it and pulled it down again. She tugged on the scarf underneath. She held the chador under her chin with her right hand. She pulled it down again. She held one side, then finally both sides of it with her left hand under her chin.

As a foreign visitor, I had my own ongoing battle to fight with the veil. Once in early 1982 I flew into Tehran from Rome wearing a gray Borsalino hat over my head scarf. I never had had to cover my head before in the Islamic Republic, but the rules had changed. This was a small protest. It didn’t work. The Passport Control officer ordered me to take off the hat.

“The hat gives me more coverage than just a scarf,” I argued.

“Take it off,” he said.

“It’s my national dress,” I protested.

He was not amused. He said he would not stamp my passport if I didn’t take off the hat. I took it off.

Forcing women to dress in a certain way also gives the enforcer a sense of power and keeps women off guard. When I turned up at the trial of Gholam-Hosein Karbaschi, then the mayor of Tehran, in the summer of 1998, I was initially denied entry. I was wearing a green head scarf and loose gray pants under a long patchwork tunic covered by a loose jacket with multicolored appliqués. So it was not a question of coverage. It was a question of color. I was wearing too many colors.

“Where does it say in the Koran that a woman can’t wear colors?” I asked the security guard blocking my entry. “Where does it even say that a non-Muslim has to dress like this at all?”

The guard was not in the mood for a discussion of the Koran. “You can’t go in like that,” he said, and moved on to the next person waiting for entry.

It took more than an hour for Ali-Reza Shiravi, my escort from the Ministry of Islamic Guidance who was responsible for getting me in, to accomplish the task. A year later, I understood a bit more about why I had been turned away. It was not just the colors. It was also that in some Iranian eyes, I looked bizarre. Once when I was traveling with Shiravi to a rural area, he and the driver, Mr.Salimi, laughed when I showed up wearing a purple coat and a yellow scarf. “Purple is the worst color you can wear,” Shiravi explained. “It’s like orange. It’s a peasant’s color. Peasants wear a lot of colors and prints inspired by nature with flowers and trees. It doesn’t matter for them whether the colors match or not. City people wear more somber, elegant colors.”

“So that day in the courtroom, I looked like a peasant?” I asked.

Shiravi and Mr. Salimi burst into howls of laughter.

I found the dress code for women particularly onerous at the beach. Once, Nazila and I found ourselves at a private beach restricted for foreigners on Kish Island in the Persian Gulf. The beach was an isolated anomaly in revolutionary Iran, intended as a place where non-Muslim non-Iranian men and women could sunbathe openly and securely in their bathing suits. Even though Nazila is both Iranian and Muslim, the guard let her in after I told him I didn’t feel comfortable alone.

I needn’t have worried. Three young Iranian men who had come from the public beach just the other side of a barrier were already there. They refused the caretaker’s request to leave. They wanted to sit in the sun, they said. They wanted to collect shells and coral. “I’m Iranian and it’s my property,” one of them said simply.

The caretaker turned to us. “It’s your decision if you want to stay,” he said. When we said we would, he looked horrified. “Are you going to take off your clothes?” he asked, and looked even more horrified when we said we might. So that left Nazila and me, sitting on plastic lounge chairs on a delightfully sunny day, gazing at a crystal clear sea, swathed in long robes, head scarves, and socks. The hell with it, I told her. We ripped off the layers of clothing covering our bathing suits and ran into the water. It was then that we discovered that we had more than three men staring at us. Carloads of young men had a perfect view from a hill nearby.

Nazila likes to say that if the authorities want to find fault with your dress, they will, no matter how covered you are. She told me about once trying to cover an event at the shrine where Khomeini is buried. She was dressed in a black scarf and ankle-length coat but not a chador. Not a strand of hair was showing. “Four times the security women came up to me,” she recalled. “Once they complained that my hand was showing. I didn’t know what I was supposed to do with that! Once they said they didn’t want to see me while they were praying so I had to sneak into a corner where they would not see me. And twice they thought I was standing too close to a crowd of men. My feeling was that they could not stand a woman who was not like them.”

So
hejab
can be not just a lever of power but a means to humiliate. Nazila told me a story of showing up for a two-hour English exam when she was fifteen, wearing a coat that the dean of the school considered too short. “She pulled me by my
maghnaeh
and wouldn’t let me take the exam. She ordered me to rip my coat and then rip my pants underneath so that I could never wear them again. I begged her to let me take the exam. She refused. One of the older students called my mother. She rushed to the school but they wouldn’t let her in. My mother stood outside and yelled at them, ‘If you don’t let me in, I’ll kill you!’ The dean waited until there were only fifteen minutes of exam time left. Then she let me in.” They hadn’t reckoned with Nazila’s intelligence. She got an A minus.

Humiliation is often motivated by class, carried out by lower-class morals police—both men and women—against higher-class Westernized women. A friend of mine was once stopped by the morals police because she was wearing pants and a parka that covered only her hips. But she was not wearing makeup; her head was covered with a small cotton scarf; she didn’t dye her hair and a few gray strands were showing; she was wearing the cheap blue plastic sandals favored by the poor. “The notion of a
‘bad-hejab
woman’ is a loose, Westernized woman,” she recalled. “I was just badly dressed. He was totally confused. And so he gave up.”

Many women interpreted Khatami’s election as President to mean that they could loosen up in the way they dressed. So more hair began to show in Tehran than at any time since the early years of the revolution. A lot more makeup too. The President’s mother and his wife wore makeup, so why not other women?

I have seen that easing in the rules at the Laleh Hotel. For years, the security guard there would greet me politely every day in Persian with the same message: “Fix your
hejab,
madam.” I would smile and tell him I was not a Muslim. In early 1998, months after after Khatami’s election, he just said hello. So, I even dared to shed the appliquéd raw-silk coat I normally wear (already a stare-getting getup) for a pantsuit. No one seemed to mind that I had legs. Then I tried it on the streets. There were no consequences.

For years, I asked people in authority whether women—foreigners in particular—could wear hats. I never found a religious scholar who could cite a specific ban in the Koran against hats for women. And I never got a consistent answer. Former President Rafsanjani’s wife, Effat Marashi, once told me I didn’t even have to wear a scarf. “If it were up to me, I wouldn’t have forced you,” she said. “Non-Muslim women can go out any way they want in our religion. They should dress just the way they always dress.”

“May I go around Iran with no scarf, then?” I asked.

“You may,” she giggled. “But you wouldn’t.”

By contrast, President Khatami’s wife, Zohreh Sadeghi, took a harder line. “Our culture requires the scarf,” she told me when we met. “Usually it is unacceptable that foreign women wear hats.”

Foreign tourists visiting Iran also began to test the limits. On a tour I took with some Americans in the fall of 1998, the guide made the mistake of telling our group that women did not have to wear the poorly sewn, ankle-length polyester coats handed out to us at orientation. Some women donned their husbands’ shirts over pants. One woman began wearing a floppy canvas hat from one of those fishing-and-camping catalogues. And she got away with it. Some of us even dared to go bareheaded on the tour bus, which caused major rubbernecking.