Persian Mirrors: The Elusive Face of Iran (24 page)

Nazila’s sister, Golnaz, who was with us, kept her black scarf tightly tied under her chin. “Why don’t you take it off?” I asked her. After all, I had seen Golnaz at private parties dressed to kill.

“I can’t,” she replied. “I’m Iranian. You can. You’re not.”

“Doesn’t that make you angry?”

“It’s sad that I cannot choose what to wear,” she said. “But I save my anger for bigger things. If I get angry every minute of my life, I won’t survive.”

I began to conduct my own unscientific experiment. I began wearing a black, round-brimmed straw hat made in Italy and covered my neck with a scarf that matched my long black and white rayon dress. The combination gave me perfectly acceptable Islamic coverage. Some people smiled; others stared; others pretended not to notice.

I wore the hat to breakfast in the Laleh’s coffee shop. “Very nice, your hat,” the waiter told me.

I wore the hat to Persepolis. “I want to wear a hat,” a woman told her husband as they passed by.

I wore the hat to an interview with Mohammad-Ali Abtahi, the cleric who was President Khatami’s chef de cabinet. “You look . . .” he said, stopping himself in mid-sentence.

I wore the hat to the offices of the reformist newspaper
Neshat.
“You’re a counterrevolutionary,” joked Mashallah Shamsolvaezin, the editor. Hamid-Reza Jalaeipour, the publisher and chief columnist, had a different take: “As a sociologist, the hat tells me the atmosphere here is very secure.”

I wore the hat to the Ministry of Islamic Guidance, where my friend Hosein Nosrat acted as if it was perfectly normal that I came dressed that way. In Islam men are not supposed to look at a woman so I guess he figured he shouldn’t notice that anything was different.

One time I showed Nosrat a photo of my daughters. He had been trying to persuade me to bring them to Iran for a visit, and in the photo, they happened to be wearing hats and long skirts. That was all the ammunition he needed. “They can dress like this!” he said. “No problem.”

Many Iranian women have launched their own revolution over dress—a revolution of the toes. There is nothing in the Koran that says that women have to cover their feet, and indeed, traditional women in Iran routinely expose their feet. So anti-
hejab
women began to paint their toes, first in white and pink, then in blood red, then in shades of purple and brown and gold.

Of course, it would be foolish to trust the new freedom that allows women to go bare-toed. Sure, there are fewer arrests of women for
bad-hejab
these days and fewer lashings to endure and fines to pay. But there are some. At one point, the reformist newspaper
Sobh-e Emrouz
reported that a woman and two of her daughters were attacked and injured by security forces for their
bad-hejab
as they emerged from their Koran-reading class. Ayda, the sixteen-year-old daughter, was quoted as saying that the security forces began threatening and cursing them until a group of bystanders intervened on their behalf. They told the security forces that if the women had done anything wrong, they should be arrested, not insulted. The paper said that the three women were eventually released. But during the scuffle with police, the women’s handbags were “lost.”

So there remain reasons to follow the rules. One big one is that other Iranians can get into trouble when one uses dress as a way to make a political statement. A room service waiter can lose his job, for example, if he enters the hotel room of a bareheaded woman. A tour guide can be hauled in for questioning for allowing tourists to take off their scarves.

Late one evening over tea in her apartment, I asked Faezeh Hashemi whether she ever wanted to go out bareheaded and let the wind blow through her hair. She paused for a long time. “Maybe when I was younger,” she said. “But it’s been years since I felt that way. Maybe that’s why I wanted to be a boy when I was growing up.”

Her words reminded me of a fascinating story I once read in a Tehran newspaper. It told of a seventeen-year-old girl named Leila, who cut her hair short and disguised herself as a boy. She ran away from her home in Kermanshah in western Iran and took a bus to Tehran. When she ran out of money four days later, she sought refuge in a police station. “I disguised myself as a boy because I always wanted to be a boy,” the newspaper quoted her as saying. “Boys are freer than girls. I am very happy that I did what I did.”

Girls dressed as boys get off easy. Not surprisingly, it’s harder the other way around. In July 1999 a man in Mashad was given twenty lashes for wearing eye shadow and plucking his eyebrows. The following month a young man of eighteen dressed in a flowing overcoat and scarf was arrested in a park in Mashad. He told police that the cross-dressing allowed him to go out in public with his seventeen-year-old girlfriend without being noticed by the vice police. On the other hand, men disguising themselves as women are nothing new in Iran. After Abol-Hassan Bani-Sadr was ousted as President in 1981, the regime claimed that he fled the country by shaving off his mustache and disguising himself in a chador. Bani-Sadr insisted he had worn an air force military uniform, but when he arrived in France, his mustache was gone.

What seems incongruous to me about the rules is that the regime allows representations of unveiled women to be shown in the public space. Photos of bareheaded foreign women regularly appear in the newspapers. In 1998 one paper carried a photo of a group of angry Afghan women in exile—unveiled—their fists raised, protesting the excesses of Taliban rule. It used to be possible to print such images of Iranian women; early in the revolution Tehran’s newspapers ran photographs of women marching bareheaded with their fists raised, to protest the order that they wear Islamic dress.

Today the Shah’s palaces, transformed by the Islamic Republic into government-run museums and government offices, are full of paintings of unveiled women. A palace in north Tehran that is used by the presidency to receive important foreign visitors displays Western paintings of peasant girls and aristocratic ladies with exposed hair, neck, and shoulders.The
Joy of Wine
fresco inside the seventeenth-century Chehel Sotun Palace in Isfahan shows a woman in a gold-trimmed rust-colored robe, her gold cap revealing her right ear and some of her black hair. She is reclining, and holds a large flask of wine in one hand and a cup in the other.

In 1999, Tehran’s Museum of Contemporary Art mounted a show of the best of its Western paintings and sculptures purchased under the Shah. Early in the revolution, a bronze statue of a woman watering plants at the main entrance was altered with a crude bronze scarf to cover her hair; it reminded me that the Catholic clergy in Italy used to alter Renaissance marble sculptures to cover exposed penises with fig leaves. Now, in this show there appeared a Picasso,
Peintre et son modèle,
a 1927 abstract painting. And indeed, it showed the angular figure of the painter and his curved model—with two pendulous breasts, a navel, and a vagina in clear view. The clerics allowed the show to proceed unimpeded, or more likely the museum director had just smuggled the painting in.

I have often asked women friends what would happen if on International Women’s Day every woman opposed to compulsory veiling marched bareheaded in the name of choice. Some women say it wouldn’t be a big deal because most Iranian women in Iran would choose to keep on their scarves and chadors—either out of choice or out of fear. Some women say they have bigger battles to fight, such as equal rights in matters of employment, divorce, inheritance, and child custody. Some say they have even learned to have fun with the
hejab,
constantly testing the limits. Others say that there would be no safety in numbers. They predict that women would be arrested, beaten, even killed en masse. Sometimes I think that the era of the forced head covering has passed, but that no one really knows how to deal with it. It seems that even those in power know that the policy of forcing women to wear
hejab
has not created believers. If anything, it has added to cynicism and the questioning of Islam itself. Still, when it comes to dress, fear appears to be all that is needed to keep women in line—at least for now.

It isn’t just women’s dress that is complicated. Negotiating the space between men and women is also hard work. The existence of the
hejab
is apparently not enough to separate men and women, and male-female relationships work themselves out in public spaces in irrational ways. There is no clear-cut definition of a sexually integrated public space. Women may be segregated from men in government offices, but are squeezed close to them in the buildings’ overburdened elevators. Men and women are required to use separate entrances at airports, but they sit next to each other on domestic flights. Buses are segregated (women ride in the back), but communal taxis are not. In fact, men and women can sit so tightly packed in taxis that there is a popular expression for going on a date: going for a taxi ride.

Even public toilets can turn out to be integrated. I once was directed to a public toilet at a mosque in Sanandaj not knowing that it was unisex. There was no artificial light inside and it was hard to see. I was about to open the door of a stall when I spotted the head of a man over the top of the door. He turned to look at me, nonplussed, as he urinated.

Even worse than not knowing when to stand near a man is not knowing whether to shake his hand. There isn’t a specific law or a line in the Koran about handshaking, but a ban on handshaking is part of the defined distance between men and women. Only the most Westernized Iranian men reach out to shake a woman’s hand. In fact, it is considered impolite for a man to reach out first. That is always the woman’s prerogative. It is also considered impolite for a man not to accept the outstretched hand of a woman. So it took a while for me to figure out how to function. I have never shaken the hand of a cleric, although I have to admit that when I met President Khatami for the first time I was tempted to stick out my hand to see what would happen.

I find the no-handshaking rule particularly distasteful at the Foreign Ministry. Here is a collection of men who know the rest of the world and are supposed to have mastered the rules of diplomatic protocol. One evening, Hamid-Reza Asefi, the official spokesman at the Foreign Ministry, and I got into a debate about Iran’s tortured relationship with the United States. Asefi is no diplomatic ingenue. He told me all about his background, his doctorate from the University of Essex, his stints as ambassador to East Germany and France. As we parted, he gestured as if he was going to shake my hand. Then he pulled back. “How long will it be until you can shake my hand?” I asked him, laughing. He paused, and then closed up. “I have never done such a thing,” he said curtly.

Mohammad-Ali Abtahi, Khatami’s chef de cabinet, was more gracious about the handshaking question. At the end of a particularly lively conversation one evening he put his hand on his heart as he said goodbye. So I said to him, “I wish I could shake your hand the way I would with any man outside Iran, but I know you won’t. So I’ll shake your hand with my heart.”

“I do the same with you,” he said, smiling. It was a moment of extraordinary intimacy. Yet he hadn’t broken the rules.

I always shake the hands of foreign diplomats in Iran but sometimes even they hesitate. One evening a diplomat from a Western embassy met me in the lobby of my hotel and I reached out to shake his hand. He recoiled as if my hand was covered with sores. I kept my hand out and said sweetly, “George, you shake my hand. We have to show everyone that’s how we do it where we come from.” He shook my hand and apologized. He had been so conditioned about handshaking that he had to be reminded it was okay.

Then one evening after dinner I got the sense that things were changing. Nazila’s father, Jaafar Fathi, drove me back to my hotel, got out of the car to open my door, and shook my hand in front of the porters and bellmen. I forgot where I was for a moment. I moved closer to kiss him on both cheeks, the way I do when I say hello or goodbye to him at their home. “Don’t do it!” he warned in a booming voice. Yet at Mehrabad Airport, people who are not close blood relatives kiss hello and goodbye all the time.

Over the years, I have found that even the most traditional and religious Iranian women chafe at the intrusion of the Islamic Republic into their private space, particularly when the intrusion is enforced by men they don’t know. Take twenty-year-old Leila, for example. An assistant in my favorite beauty salon, she has thick, braided, thigh-length black hair, a chiseled profile, and a slender frame. Because she comes from a very religious family, she never wears makeup, plucks her heavy eyebrows, or removes the hair that darkens her upper lip. All that will have to wait until her wedding day, when the other employees in the shop where she works will spend the entire day making her beautiful. Leila told me that her father, a gatekeeper at a school, was so conservative that he forbade her to have her photograph taken, even if she was swathed from head to toe in the black chador she always wears on the street. Her fiancé, a soldier doing his compulsory military service, would also disapprove. Leila didn’t know why there had been a revolution or a war with Iraq. She didn’t understand exactly why she had to chant “Death to America” every day when she was in school. She did know, however, that she didn’t feel free.

But what does freedom mean for someone like Leila, who prays five times a day, who obeys her father and fiancé without reservation, and who has no intention of abandoning her Islamic dress? She defined it for me one day: “I’m a very religious person and I always wear a scarf and a chador over it. But when some stranger comes up to me and says, ‘Lady, fix your
hejab,
’ it hurts me. Because inside I know I am very religious. Who is he to tell me I’m not?”

PART THREE

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The Spiritual, The Mystical

C H A P T E R   E I G H T