Persian Mirrors: The Elusive Face of Iran (33 page)

Ayazi admitted that he expected to end up behind bars like Kadivar. Maybe Ayazi has a martyr complex; that would certainly fit with Shiite tradition. Maybe he knows that Kadivar doesn’t have it so bad in prison; after all, he had used the time to write his doctoral dissertation and had even been given a furlough to defend it. Or maybe Ayazi feels that he has no choice except to further the political movement that has been started by others.

In any case, Ayazi didn’t stop. He openly criticized the culture of violence that had become part of the Islamic Republic’s strategy for keeping order and unity. He spoke of the existence of “secret powers” in the country that committed violent acts, including the killing of dissidents and the beating up of outspoken clerics. He denounced what he called the “tyranny” of rigid interpretations of Islam. “We must go back to the correct Islam,” he said. “The Islam of 1,400 years ago is not what we mean by the correct Islam. Islam must be interpreted according to the needs of the time.”

Ayazi even called for structural changes that would take power away from the Supreme Leader and the conservatives who support him and put it into the hands of reformists like President Khatami. And yet Ayazi did not advocate abolishing the institution of the Supreme Leader; he said only that the institution has to change so that whoever holds the job is accountable to the people. “The people must supervise his performance, and his power must be divided among various institutions,” he said.

“Will there be a Supreme Leader ten years from now?” I asked Ayazi.

The cleric paused for a long time. “I don’t know,” he replied.

My chaperon from the Ministry of Islamic Guidance, Ali-Reza Haghighi, who had brought me to Ayazi’s house and was doing the translating, didn’t translate this last sentence. Instead, he asked the cleric, “Are you sure you want me to translate that?”

“I have no problem with what I am saying,” Ayazi said calmly.

Ali-Reza grimaced, but he told me what the cleric had said.

Ultimately the concerns of Ayazi and learned religious scholars like him go beyond the restrictions imposed on Montazeri and the kind of repressive religious rule that has overtaken the Iranian political system. Their main worry is whether modern life has room for a religious establishment that insists on absolute obedience to God and on adherence to rules and customs that developed centuries ago. Many people compare their struggle to the Protestant Reformation in sixteenth-century Europe. I see it differently, as a struggle to resolve the contradictions that have been inherent in the Islamic political system from the beginning.

The challenge, of course, is to find a way to allow for differences of opinion in a system built on the assumption that statements and interpretations of the Prophet, even about minute details of everyday life, are binding until Judgment Day. Some of the clerics—a minority, I am told—simply refuse to see the need for change. Others are ready to jettison long-standing religious edicts for the sake of present-day reality. Still others, like Ayazi, clearly believe that the problems that modernity presents for the traditional interpretation of Islam add up to a fundamental reformulation. For them, religious edicts are products of human understanding and therefore devoid of inherent sacredness. An Islamic tradition that does not adapt to historical change, they argue, is alien to the very nature of the religion itself.

My visit with Ayazi introduced me to a different style of cleric—one not afraid to reveal a human side even as he explained the deep divisions between theology and politics within the clergy. That sense of seriousness and dignity is not, unfortunately, always shared by his fellow clergymen. And when they reveal their more human side, it is not always so respectful.

Part of my problem in understanding the world of Qom, in fact, is that I feel personally uneasy with clerics. I don’t know exactly how to behave in their presence; in general they don’t know how to deal with a professional American woman. Ayatollah Khomeini and many other clerics didn’t look at me when I interviewed them, and I find the refusal of clerics to look at me disorienting. It is as if they want to make me feel unclean. Making eye contact is a basic tool of journalism as well as a natural instinct between human beings. It builds a relationship of trust. So I was relieved when the revolution softened, first after the death of Khomeini, whose stern demeanor had set the tone for a nation, and then again after the election of President Khatami, who liked to smile at both men and women.

Slowly, as my exposure to the world of Qom increased, I began to see more of the human face of the clerics. I found out that not all clerics are like Khomeini. But neither are they all like Ayazi, with his gentle, patient approach and hospitality. At a conference in Europe soon after Khatami’s election, I met a senior ayatollah in his fifties who is widely regarded as a forward-looking scholar on social issues. At his request, I met him after dinner, at eleven in the evening in the garden of the hotel where we were staying. A group of Iranian musicians flown in especially for the conference played classical Persian music that would have been banned only a few years before. Our conversation was theoretical and esoteric, in part because Olivier Roy, the French scholar of Islam, joined us. We covered the landscape of political Islam: whether Islam and democracy are compatible, the doctrine of the Supreme Leader and his relationship to the most senior ayatollahs, the durability of Iran’s Constitution. The ayatollah told personal stories about Khomeini—to prove how all-knowing and well-connected he was, I presumed.

“When I was with Imam Khomeini in France, a woman about fifty years old approached me,” he recalled. “She told me that she was a journalist from the Netherlands and that she had arranged to interview the Imam. But when Imam Khomeini saw her, he said, ‘I refuse to give you an interview. You are not a journalist. You are a spy.’ It turned out she was a Jew and her husband was a rabbi.”

There was nothing I could say. Should I tell the ayatollah that my husband is Jewish and that I found the anecdote offensive? Should I ask whether it was her Jewishness that made her a spy or how Khomeini knew she was Jewish? The ayatollah must have sensed my discomfort, so he broke the silence. “I want to tell a joke!” he exclaimed. “A joke about sex.”

He said it was a joke about a man who lived in the city of Rasht. “A Rashti man and his wife were in bed together and the man noticed that someone was under the bed,” he said. “The husband asked his wife, ‘Who is lying under the bed?’ She said she didn’t know. The husband looked and saw that it was a man lying very still. He asked his wife, ‘Who is this man who is not moving at all?’The wife explained, ‘When he is under the bed he doesn’t move. When he is on the bed, he moves a lot.’”

The ayatollah guffawed. He thought his joke was very funny. His Iranian assistant took the floor and told a joke about circumcision.

More uncomfortable than before, I moved the conversation back to a discussion of Islam and the Islamic Republic. I told the ayatollah that I had heard that his views on women’s rights were very progressive and asked why I had to cover my head in Iran when the Koran requires only Muslim women to cover themselves. The rule is cultural, he explained, not religious. “In an Islamic society a non-Muslim should observe the rules of the society,” he said. “As an Iranian, when I go to the West I observe the rules of the West.” But then he confused me. “If someone does not have Islamic dress, it is not a big sin,” he added.

To explain further, he talked about gazing. “In Islam there’s no ban for a man to look at a woman, even if her head isn’t covered,” the ayatollah said. “What’s forbidden is looking at a woman with sex on your mind. When I look at you and we are talking like
this,
I am not committing a sin.” The ayatollah paused and looked at me.

“But if I look at you like
this,
it is a sin,” he said. He leaned over close and leered. “That way of looking corrupts me. At the University of Tehran, most of my students are young women, and when I look at them, I don’t look at them like
this.
” He leered again.

I didn’t ask him if he was committing a sin with his leering. It was well past midnight and the interview was rapidly deteriorating. I excused myself and went to bed.

I learned later that after I left, the ayatollah began to recite sexually explicit tales and poetry, a kind of Islamic
Canterbury Tales.
One was a poem about an old man who was sexually obsessed with a seven-year-old girl. He watched her over the years as her body changed and her breasts developed. It was a poem of lament, as well as of missed opportunity. As her breasts got bigger, his penis got smaller. By the time she was old enough for him, he would be too old to enjoy her. A friend of mine, a serious academic from the United States who had joined the conversation after I left, was appalled. But he was also curious. “Why,” he asked the ayatollah in a scholarly sounding tone, “do all of your comments reflect an obsession with sex?”

“Because I do not have any of it,” the ayatollah replied.

I later asked a political science professor at the University of Tehran, who had once taught in Qom, about the ayatollah. “The clerics are the best jokers, especially in the religious schools,” he explained. “When they are by themselves they feel free and start joking to each other. Even serious ones do it. When I was teaching, my students would make jokes that were so dirty they made me speechless. So much of what they study are the details of these issues.” What the professor meant is that clerical students are required to study rules and interpretations of rules governing sex and personal habits including washing, urination, and defecation. There is a lot of room for dirty jokes.

Emaddedin Baghi, a former clerical student and writer who had studied for years in Qom, had a slightly different view. “The clerics are teachers,” he told me. “They have a public role to play. Clerics will only show you the public side. They will not use curse words with you. They behave very differently in their private space, not because they’re duplicitous, but because they play a different role there. In private they won’t feel they have to censor themselves. A sense of humor exists among the clerics. They even have books of dirty jokes. Many of the jokes are very serious jokes about the teachings of Islam.”

So that’s it. The clerics of Qom can make jokes about Islam—and even about the Prophet himself—as long as it’s done in private. What was unusual about the encounter with the joke-telling ayatollah wasn’t that he cracked dirty jokes; it was that he cracked them in the presence of outsiders.

*     *     *

But Qom is not only a city of men. When I heard that there was a seminary exclusively for women in Qom, I thought it might provide a way to understand the place better.

Hidden behind an ornately tiled entrance in dazzling deep blue and turquoise, the Women’s Seminary is a refuge of Islamic purity untouched by the ideological debate raging outside. It wasn’t easy to get into the seminary, despite my letter of permission from the Ministry of Islamic Guidance and the entreaties of a female escort from the ministry. One problem was my clothing. I was wearing only a coat and head scarf, not a black chador.

“Where’s your chador?” the old caretaker, a man, asked.

“Where does it say in the Koran that I have to wear a chador?” I asked in response.

“You can’t go in,” he said.

“I’m staying until you let me in,” I said.

“You can’t stand there! There are men inside! You may attract them!”

“I’m sure I won’t attract anyone.”

And so it went, back and forth, until the guard went back into his little guardhouse and slammed the door.

I pulled out my unofficial calling card, a color photograph of me and Ayatollah Khamenei during an interview years before. I was wearing the same black chiffon scarf with the red flowers that I had bought in Paris so long ago. “If it was good enough for the Supreme Leader, it should be good enough for the women inside,” I said.

The caretaker scowled. But he opened the door.

Inside I found a simple, small classroom with unadorned walls and Koranic verses on the blackboard. Nine students clutched the folds of their black chadors under their chins with one hand and furiously took notes with the other. I also saw something I had never seen before in a classroom in Iran: the professor, a white-turbaned male cleric, lectured from behind a white canvas screen. I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised. After all, the Koran describes how the Prophet’s wives should be dealt with: “If you ask his wives for anything, speak to them from behind a curtain. This is purer for your heart and their hearts.”

After the class, the women stayed behind to chat. So I asked them about issues raging in Iran at the time.

Should women be allowed to serve as judges in an Islamic Republic? One woman replied that she didn’t have the knowledge to answer such a question; the others nodded in agreement.

Should women be allowed to ride bicycles? One said absolutely not; another said that only when women have more religious knowledge could they answer such a question.

Should a woman be allowed to run for President? All ofthem said no.

Should polygamy be allowed? Of course, they replied. A number of the students extolled the joys and the justice of polygamy when a couple is infertile. They told the story of their female professor who had been childless for years. She found her husband a second wife, who then bore children for him. The female professor now feels liberated. She still has a husband and a family life, but she can focus on her work without all the distractions that come with them. “Her husband helps her prepare her lectures,” said one young woman. “And she and the second wife divide up the housework.” The students couldn’t have known it, but a couple of years later, the filmmaker Dariush Mehrjui would direct a powerful film called
Leila,
in which a young married woman suffering from infertility and under pressure from her mother-in-law encourages her husband to take a second wife and then feels betrayed by him.