Persian Mirrors: The Elusive Face of Iran (40 page)

Afterward, a close friend who is a political scientist at the University of Tehran said only half jokingly that he was going to send me a video of himself.

“A video?”

“I thought I’d do a video of myself saying that if I confess I have cheated on my wife and committed treason, don’t believe it,” he said. “It’s forced. I thought I’d send it to a few of my friends.”

Then he had a better idea. “Maybe I’ll make two—one for my friends and one for my jailers. The one for my jailers will confess to everything. That way, they won’t have to bother torturing me first. They can just put the confession on television and set me free!”

At that moment, I understood why my Iranian friends always told so many jokes, even if some of them seemed inappropriate at the time they told them. Humor is a key to survival.

I also have realized that there is not room yet for everyone to feel free in the spaces being opened by President Khatami and the other reformers. There are, for example, castoffs from the revolution, faithful believers who were present at the creation but who have little or no place a generation later. Grayer and wiser, they refuse to abandon the revolution that took up so much of their youth or to be engulfed by bitterness and self-pity. Perhaps they make others uncomfortable with their presence. But they stand steadfast, pale but persistent reminders of the ideals of the past.

The late Houshang Golshiri, the well-known novelist, summed up this sentiment one day when he told me: “We have no wish for another revolution. We’re looking forward to a time when we can write in peace. We don’t want to leave the country. This time, it’s their turn to leave the country. We will kill them with our pen. We will kill them with our presence.”

Golshiri obviously was referring to forces opposed to change in the Islamic Republic. Not only have many of Golshiri’s books failed to win approval from the Ministry of Islamic Guidance over the years, but in late 1998, after the Forouhars and other political and intellectual activists were murdered, Golshiri heard that his name was on one of the master hit lists circulating clandestinely in Tehran. He took refuge at the homes of friends. Later, he arranged to have his new novel,
Jen Nameh
, published in Sweden rather than submit it to the censors in Iran. But he did not leave Iran. The space belonged to him, as it had for the Forouhars and the others who were murdered, as it does for my friend Farhad who has survived prison. All of them have created spaces for themselves not only behind closed doors but increasingly on public battlefields.

C H A P T E R   T H I R T E E N

The Tom and Jerry Game

We do not know where the red lines are.

— MASHALLAH SHAMSOLVAEZIN, EDITOR OF THE NEWSPAPER
JAMEAH
AND ITS SUCCESSORS

We Iranian filmmakers are like trapeze artists swinging back and forthwithout a net.

— DARIUSH MEHRJUI

To stay alive you must slay silence.

— SIMIN BEHBAHANI, TWENTIETH-CENTURY FEMALE POET

A
T THE HEART
of the Islamic Republic is a contradiction so deep it could keep theologians and political theorists in business for years: theocracy by definition imposes religious thinking on a secular society. Certain types of conduct and thought are not only illegal but also considered evil. So, free thought must be closed off, or at least restricted. But Shiite Islam thrives on debate and discussion in a particularly egalitarian style; it recognizes different interpretations and it welcomes argument, at least among its clerical scholars, and it is not rigidly hierarchical. So freedom of thought and expression is essential to the system, at least within the top circles of religious leadership. And if the mullahs can behave that way among themselves in places like the holy city of Qom, how can the rest of a modern-day society be told it cannot think and explore the world of experience for itself?

In fact, even when the clerics exercised the tightest control on free expression in the first two decades of Islamic rule, Iranians chafed against the limits imposed on their thinking. Of course, they have never allowed the state to crush their freedom of expression in private; but in recent years, particularly since the election of Khatami as President, Iranians have begun to converse fiercely and courageously in different forums in public. Journalists, television producers, and filmmakers have begun to push the limits of expression and debate, sometimes in the face of outright opposition and always in defiance of their own fears. And because the content of their conversations with a public hungry for more open political and cultural discourse is so provocative, it has given hope that the process will continue. By far the most astounding public conversations about the shape of society have taken place in an increasingly free press, which continues to expand public discourse despite the repeated closures of newspapers and magazines.

Events took a dramatic leap when the reformist newspaper
Jameah
published a whopping scoop just weeks after it started operating in early 1998. In a short article buried on an inside page, the newspaper reported on a closed-door meeting in Qom in which General Rahim Safavi, the head of the Revolutionary Guards, urged his commanders to silence those clerics whose promotion of democracy threatened the cult of martyrdom. “A new case of hypocrisy is taking shape with the use of mullahs’ costumes,”
Jameah
quoted Safavi as saying. “We must root out anti-revolutionaries wherever they are! We must use the sword to chop off the heads of some and cut out the tongues of some others! Our sword is our tongue. . . . We are seeking martyrdom!”

The article was a watershed. First of all, the newspaper had been leaked details of a top secret national security meeting of the Iranian state. These were verbatim quotes, not hearsay. If an American newspaper had published verbatim quotes from a top secret speech by, say, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Pentagon probably would have launched an investigation.

Second, the publication of the story was a daring, even dangerous act. Journalism traditionally has been a perilous profession in Iran and newspapers often censor themselves, for reasons of self-interest as well as for what they consider to be the public interest. But here was a newspaper taking on one of the most powerful people in the Iranian government by ripping open the curtain of secrecy that has shrouded Iranian politics since the revolution.

More significant than the actual story were its far-reaching ramifications.
Jameah
had set the standard for the new Iranian journalism of the Khatami era, in which newspapers play a number of roles: bearers of information, shapers of opinion, substitutes for political parties, engines for change. The conservative clerical establishment sees the new media outlets as the most subversive of its opponents.

But the impulse toward free debate hadn’t started with Khatami, however much his election has done to propel it forward. Even before his election, newspapers and journals had begun to use humor, call-in questions-and-answers, and editorials written in code to question the way the country was being run. Then
Jameah
suddenly introduced a level of clarity that hadn’t existed before. That clarity was certainly evident in the Safavi scoop and the debate it triggered. The general and his allies angrily responded to the
Jameah
article by accusing the journalists of having infringed the general’s right to privacy and free speech—a position rich in irony and portending even more daring challenges to the official line. Unwittingly, it conceded a point most important to any journalist, namely that there is a right to free speech in the first place.

It was a sweet moment for the fearless, freewheeling pair of journalists who ran
Jameah
: Hamid-Reza Jalaeipour, the publisher and chief columnist, and Mashallah Shamsolvaezin, the editor. Jalaeipour is a bear of a man with decent English from his years as a graduate student in political sociology at the University of London. He sports a three-day growth of beard, speaks with a slight lisp, studies civil institutions, and wrote his doctoral dissertation on the “causes of continuity” in Iran’s revolutionary experience. Like Khatami, he quotes the nineteenth-century French sociologist Alexis de Tocqueville more than the Koran. Even though he has never visited the United States, he sees it as a source of intellectual inspiration. “I want to see the land that de Tocqueville wrote about,” he once told me. “I want to see the libraries. I want to see Princeton.”

Jalaeipour also has impeccable revolutionary credentials, having learned political rebellion from his late father, a rice merchant in the bazaar who for years before the revolution had secretly visited the ayatollahs of Qom and poured money into their causes. Father and son both went to prison because of their political activities against the Shah. Two of Jalaeipour’s brothers were killed in the war against Iraq. A third brother was murdered by the Mojahedin-e Khalq opposition movement. A younger sister was one of the students involved in the seizure of the American embassy in 1979. For most of the 1980s, Jalaeipour served as governor of the Kurdish city of Mahabad and then deputy governor of Kurdistan province, where the Islamic Republic carried out operations first against Kurdish rebels and later against Iraq during the war.

Shamsolvaezin had witnessed political violence firsthand when he lived in Lebanon before the revolution. In the 1980s, he was on the editorial board of
Kayhan,
an established newspaper that turned militant and supported Ayatollah Khomeini’s brand of stern Islamic rule. In time Shamsolvaezin mellowed, and became convinced that reform was preferable to violent change.

For me, the offices of their newspaper have been a place of refuge. No matter how close to deadline they are, the two men have welcomed me with tea, a telephone, and the wire services—all of which are vital sustenance to a visiting reporter. If it is lunchtime, there is a hot plate of chicken kabob or
khoresht
(stew) from the newspaper’s kitchen. It may have been Iranian
taarof,
the practice of polite dissembling, but Shamsolvaezin likes to tell me that he models the paper on
The New York Times
and longs for a chance to spend a week in its headquarters near Times Square.

It didn’t surprise me that Jalaeipour personally took on Safavi. Writing in
Jameah
on behalf of “one martyr’s family,” the publisher-columnist declared that it was no longer possible to manipulate the memory of war martyrs in politics. Citing his own ill mother as representative of the changes in Iran’s political landscape, Jalaeipour told Safavi that she was tired of hearing about martyrdom and a war that ended years ago. “Mr. Commander, you might be fed up with life but there is a sparkle of life in the eyes of the mother whose life was wasted during the revolution,” Jalaeipour wrote. “She wants to live. She is fed up with bragging about martyrdom.”

With that commentary, Jalaeipour sought to end the use of martyrdom as a political instrument in the Islamic Republic. “The language of the revolution, the language of war doesn’t work anymore,” he explained to me in
Jameah’
s offices. “Everyone has to learn to speak in a civil and lawful manner now.” He pulled out a sheet of paper and drew a triangle on it. On the top he wrote the word “Government”; along the bottom, the word “People.” He left the space in between empty. “For me, civil society means this middle part. An independent press is a big part of it.”

The Judiciary didn’t agree with him. The following month, a court revoked
Jameah’
s license, calling the story about Safavi’s speech “distorted” and “reckless.” There were other crimes as well. An exposé on prison conditions revealing that prisoners had to pay four times the market price for eggs was declared untrue. A satirical column that made fun of clerics and political figures was deemed to be an insult to the state. The newspaper had also published color photographs of everyday life that were considered “immoral”: young people dancing in the streets after Iran beat the United States in the World Cup soccer competition in July 1998; middle-aged joggers looking as if they were clapping; a woman smiling broadly and wearing a colorful tribal costume.

In the past, a court’s closure of a newspaper might have silenced it forever, and inhibited other publications from taking risks. But the restrictive measures that worked in traumatic times of revolution and war—ransacking offices, destroying equipment, interrogation, threats, beatings, imprisonment—no longer fit. With the election of President Khatami, the fissures in the Islamic Republic became big enough to allow for the emergence of new players, many of them would-be politicians and state-builders who found that the press was an important institution for promoting reform.

In this regard, Jalaeipour and Shamsolvaezin and their fellow journalists represent a new corps of intellectual warriors, who are using their strong revolutionary credentials to push for peaceful reform in place of violent change. They fight on a strange new battlefield where the rules keep changing as new soldiers enter the fray and their enemies prove incapable of capturing all of them. This is not Tiananmen Square, in which Chinese reformers backed down in the face of brutal, sweeping repression. For Iran’s reformers, there is no turning back; the excitement is too great and the stakes are too high. “It is nothing less,” said Shamsolvaezin, “than a hot test of democracy.”

In a sense, the boldness is the continuation of a trend that began a century ago. Unlike most countries in the Middle East, Iran has episodically enjoyed a lively press. During the constitutional movement of the early twentieth century, 140 newspapers began publishing, most of them asking for the rule of law, justice, and a more representative form of government. In an extraordinary civics lesson and public service, one of them published proceedings of the Parliament.