Persian Mirrors: The Elusive Face of Iran (30 page)

“Is the country going on the wrong path, then?” I asked.

“One hundred percent,” Hamid replied. Then he stopped himself. “This conversation may get too political.” Hamid did not want me to see his reflection in the mirror too clearly. I knew that I had pushed far enough, and backed off.

Hamid acknowledged that he was fighting on a more mundane battlefield now, to keep his job as the cemetery hired new employees with different ideas. “The new ones are bureaucrats who just come to the office and sign papers,” he complained. “They haven’t seen their friends die in a sea of their own blood.”

The grisly footage in the hot auditorium had made me sick to my stomach. I asked to be shown to the ladies’ room. Hamid proudly showed me a sign that read, “This way to the American and Israeli embassies.” That’s what the toilets at the martyrs’ museum are called.

“So show me to my embassy,” I said.

“What do you mean?” he asked.

“The American embassy.”

“You’re American?” he asked in disbelief. “I didn’t know. They said you were French. I’m so, so sorry.”

With much fanfare, Hamid ordered a subordinate to take down the sign. Hamid tore it up in little bits as he led me down the stairs.

When I came back up to say goodbye, we talked about the war front again. I told him that I had covered the war as a reporter and had also seen the carnage, from both sides of the border, including the aftermath of a battle in which the Iraqis had used chemical weapons against the Iranians.

“What a tragedy that you could not have found martyrdom at the battlefield,” he said.

“But I don’t want to die,” I protested. “My kids need me. And your son needs you too.”

“I try not to love him too much, so that he will not miss me when I die,” Hamid said of his two-year-old son, Mohammad.

“Well then, love him until you die,” I said.

It was then that Hamid let down his guard. Proud like any father, he said, “Oh, sometimes I take him to the playground. He’s a great kid. Maybe you can come to our house and meet him one day.”

“Inshallah,” I said, “God willing,” knowing it would never happen.

Hamid then surprised me again. The man who hated and cursed America wanted to visit. “Maybe I can take some time off and learn English,” he said. “Can you help me get a passport and a visa?”

I suddenly found myself connecting with Hamid. I had gotten him to admit he was proud of his son. Now he was talking about visiting the United States. “Would you come?” I asked incredulously.

“Yes,” he replied.

“Would you really come?”

The significance of his confession finally sunk in.

“Uh, no, no,” he said. “There’s too much corruption there.”

But perhaps Hamid wasn’t quite ready to die.

Iran came out of the war sobered, convinced of the futility of armed force as a means of settling its international conflicts. When an American-led coalition went to war against Iraq in 1991, Iran stayed out.

Keeping alive the spirit of martyrdom in the minds of the Iranian people became harder. “The major casualty of the war,” wrote the Iranian-born historian and author Shahram Chubin in 1989, “has been the credibility of the Islamic Republic among its own rank and file. It will no longer be able to effectively call upon its populace for crusades and sacrifices, but will have to act more like a normal state.” Some critics of the system even called for the abolition of the
baseej
volunteer corps. Within the next decade, Iran’s economy was in such crisis that the government began to sell exemptions to the two years of compulsory military service. A complex sliding scale was created: a Ph.D. paid three times what a high school dropout did. Mehdi Mahdavi-Kia, a star on the national soccer team, was exempted from the draft as a reward for scoring a spectacular second-half goal in Iran’s World Cup soccer victory over the United States in 1998.

To preserve what is left of the war mentality, pockets of resistance within the leadership, hard-core believers, continue to train a new generation of would-be martyrs. Every summer, hundreds of teenage boys and girls from all over the country are brought to the Bahonar Camping Center, a sprawling, beautifully landscaped estate in the mountains high above Tehran, for an all-expenses-paid week of prayers, revolutionary songs, and inspiration. Most of them are the sons and daughters of men who died in the war with Iraq.

On a recent visit, I attended a rally in a vast auditorium decorated with photos of Ayatollahs Khomeini and Khamenei. The boys sat in front, the red kerchiefs of the
baseej
around their necks. A young woman sitting next to me in the back showed me her spiral notebook. On the front, where an American teenager might tape a picture of a rock star, she had taped a photo of Khomeini.

A short, bearded middle-aged man in glasses whipped up the group’s emotions. Holding up a photograph of an unnamed martyr, he shouted, “I saw the bullets hitting his face and his body and I wanted to throw myself into the war.” He told the story of a young woman who scooped up soil from the battlefront. “The soil was bloody, bloody, bloody,” he sobbed. “She put it into a flower bed to help the flowers grow.” He told the stories with the same long laments used by the mullahs in the mosques to encourage the faithful to weep on special days of mourning, and each reminiscence drove him and his audience to weeping. One teenage girl uttered a piercing cry. She fainted and was carried from the hall. Even the boys were sobbing now.

Sometime after the visit, I asked Khatami’s chef de cabinet, Mohammad-Ali Abtahi, about the
baseej
camp and what purpose it serves. “These are the same types of people who beat their chests at the mourning rituals,” he said. “But we can’t expect our youth to beat their chests and mourn every day. Even if they insist on doing this we shouldn’t all follow it because it leads to extremism. Joy and happiness is a part of youth too.”

“But these are government-funded camps,” I replied. “Why not shut them down?” He answered with a shrug. Clearly this is a part of the Islamic Republic that the President does not control. The camp represents a side of Iran that seems to have been made permanently sad and twisted, one that remains stuck in the grisly psychology of a cult of martyrdom.

Yet it is hard for me to believe this war fever can be sustained. That’s because there are so many other pieces in the mosaic that is Iranian society, illustrating that flexibility and improvisation can bring renewal even after so dark a period of horror. One such discovery was a war-heroturned-yuppie in a travel agency that catered to European and American tourists. I wasn’t looking for heroes there, but one day, Taghi Aghaei found me.

Taghi is the head of an Iranian tour company named Ziggurat, which had helped to organize a tour I was taking with a group of Americans. His story unfolded over a slow-moving multicourse lunch in Isfahan.

In 1983, when he was nineteen years old and an infantryman in Khomeini’s army, he was sent to the Iraqi border. One day, during a secret operation, an artillery shell exploded in front of him, sending hundreds of pieces of metal flying into the air. One piece pierced his head and became permanently embedded behind his eye. Another piece of metal sliced off his right hand. Taghi was given medals for heroism and discharged from the military. But as a believer in the call to sacrifice, he taught himself to write with his left hand and reenlisted. He wrote war propaganda pamphlets and taught recruits about the Koran.

Today, he is a forward-thinking businessman. Unlike Hamid at the cemetery, Taghi doesn’t feel sorry for himself or dwell on stories from the battlefield. As a war hero, Taghi has become part of the elite and is determined to capitalize on it.

He chose a growth industry, tourism. So what if Khomeini didn’t make a revolution so that people like him could make money helping foreigners have a good time in Iran? Taghi bought himself an advanced English-Persian dictionary and some language tapes. “For six months, I imprisoned myself to prepare for the entrance exam for the university,” he said.

Jobs and positions for university students are held open for war veterans and the families of martyrs even if they aren’t quite as good as other applicants. Taghi easily made it into Alameh Tabatabai University in Tehran, where he studied English. When Iran’s state-run Tourism Organization sent a representative to the university to seek out its best student to become a first-class tour guide, Taghi was chosen. But there was the problem of the missing hand. “They said to me: ‘Listen, Taghi, you can’t be a tour leader,’” he recalled. “ ‘Because of your hand. Guests want to enjoy themselves. They will see you. Maybe they will pity you.’

“Two days later was the first day of the training course. I showed up anyway. They wouldn’t let me in. So I went to the general manager and told him how much I love people. I told him I could be a great tour guide. He finally relented. I loved reading all the texts about the monuments. I developed twenty different itineraries and produced a forty-two-minute film called
Iran at a Glance.
Pretty soon foreign tour operators were asking for me by name.”

Taghi was promoted over and over, and in 1997 he started his own tour company. He became so successful that he ran twenty foreign tour groups in his first year and had to turn clients away.

Part of the reason for Taghi’s rapid success is his special status as a war hero. And a tour operator with special status can do very well indeed. It can take weeks for an ordinary tour operator to book tickets on Iran’s heavily subsidized, overbooked domestic air routes. But a certain number of seats are always reserved for war heroes. When flights are booked, Taghi can always bump other passengers. Hotels that do not give discounts to ordinary tour operators have no choice except to slash their prices for him. Restaurants open their doors when he asks. “Rules are bent,” he boasted. “People always tell me, ‘You defended the country so we owe it to you.’ So I have an advantage.”

His missing hand has become his calling card.

When I went to see Taghi in his new suite of offices in Tehran a few months later, he was expanding his business. “I was the first tour operator to start with the Americans,” he bragged. He had begun to teach prospective tour operators courses like “The Art of Conducting a Tour” and “Strategic Marketing in Tourism.” He offered me an assortment of fancy pastries and fresh brewed coffee, which was scarce in Iran. When I opted for tea, it came Western style with a teaspoon and a bowl of granulated sugar. Taghi knew that not many Americans take their tea the Iranian way—by clenching a sugar cube in the mouth and sipping the scalding tea through it.

After the bombast wore off, Taghi turned somber. His business was in danger of falling apart, he said, pointing to a list of two dozen tours he had scheduled for Americans in 1999—all of them canceled. America was bombing Iraq at that time, and American tourists didn’t seem to know the difference between the two countries. Worse, a band of thugs had attacked a bus carrying a group of American businessmen in Tehran with stones and threats the November before.

“There is a Prophet named Ayoub, and God tested his patience,” Taghi told me.

“It’s Job,” I said.

“Oh my God, I hope I’m not Job!” Taghi said. “They say that the destination is not important, it’s the journey that counts. Like the war, they say, ‘Okay, we didn’t win but we fought proudly and bravely.’ I love this job and I love this country. But I get frustrated. My wife pities herself and asks God why didn’t she die when she was a nurse at the front. Sometimes I feel like I’m going mad.”

I thought a lot about Hamid and Taghi after that. For all their differences in outlook, they have something important in common. More than a decade after the end of the war, the Hamids and the Taghis of Iran are still struggling to figure out where they fit. Were the warriors heroes or victims and dupes?

I went to the Ministry of Islamic Guidance to ask that question of Ali-Reza Shiravi, the deputy director for the foreign press. Shiravi is a believer in the system. At the age of sixteen, he stopped going to school and went on a hunger strike until his parents let him join the military. Then he watched as his comrades threw themselves over land mines in suicide missions to clear the path for soldiers in the rear. And for eight years in Iraqi prison camps, he suffered through beatings, electric shock, extremes of temperature, deprivation of food and sleep.

Shiravi said he didn’t feel cheated or duped. “If you plant a cherry tree you wait a long time before it gives fruit,” he said. “But once it gives its fruit it also gives other things. It freshens the air. It gives shade. It’s pretty to look at. It was the same with the war. Maybe it never bore fruit. Maybe there were goals that never were reached. But the war brought us other benefits. Our children will not tell us, ‘You did not defend our country.’ And for a while at least, we sacrificed our needs and forgot about the materialistic aspects of life.”

Shiravi had healed, but it would probably take another generation before the country would.

C H A P T E R   T E N

The World of Qom

Some are preoccupied with matters of religion
,

And some are beset by doubt on their course of conviction;

I fear the day when a divine voice may call out:

You ignorant people, the true course is neither of your ways.

— THE
RUBÁIYÁT
OF OMAR KHAYYAM, TWELFTH-
CENTURY PERSIAN POET

God has given us all the rules of the game.

— AYATOLLAH RUHOLLAH KHOMEINI

A
YATOLLAH
H
OSEIN-
A
LI
M
ONTAZERI
is the invisible man of Qom. He is never seen on the streets. He doesn’t preach to the faithful. He Qom. He is never seen on the streets. He doesn’t preach to the faithful. He most of his time imprisoned in his modest home on a small street in the center of town, with a large contingent of armed security police stationed center of town, with a large contingent of armed security police stationed in a bulletproof trailer outisde. The windows of the trailer are one-way mirrors; the police can look out, but passersby can see only a single red light bulb inside. And yet Montazeri’s presence looms large over Qom, a place of pilgrimage and the center of clerical learning in Iran. From behind closed doors, he runs a kind of underground training camp for reform-minded bureaucrat-theologians, giving them religious and political support for their various causes.