Persian Mirrors: The Elusive Face of Iran (46 page)

Some students study for an entire year for the university entrance exam. Even if they pass, they can be denied entry if they fail the Islamic morality tests. That happened to a young friend of mine and her best friend. “From morning to night we studied,” she recalled. “There were thousands and thousands of applicants and thirty spaces. The two of us made it. But we were disqualified. We didn’t pass the test for morality. We never found out why. You cannot know how depressed I was, how much I cried. I worked so hard and they took it away.”

I often think how odd it is that the first unofficial rule of ethics of the theocratic revolution is that it is acceptable—even necessary—to lie in order to survive. From the time they are in elementary school, many young people learn to live two lives, a private life inside their homes, a public life that they profess to on the outside. In public, they have to act as though their fathers and mothers love the Islamic Republic and don’t drink alcohol, even when that is not true. They say they do not like Western music or satellite television even when they do. In this imaginary world, their mothers wear black chadors and pray. Their fathers wear beards and pray. They all go to the mosque together every Friday at noon.

A highly respected government official I know couldn’t get his son into the school of his choice—one of the best in Tehran—because his family wasn’t Islamic enough. “When my son passed the entrance exam, they called us for an interview and told my wife she’d have to wear a chador,” he said. “My wife said, ‘No way.’ She’d wear a scarf but not a chador. A few weeks later I found out my son had been rejected, so I went to the school to find out why. They told me, ‘Your son said, “I play the saxophone and my father likes music.” He said your wife doesn’t wear a chador.’ I asked them, ‘Who gave you the right to ask my kid about me?’ I fought the decision for two months. I told the school, ‘I’ll donate two PCs to the school out of my own pocket. I’ll bring in some people who can train the kids in the Internet and know how to control the access to it.’ The school said no. They said they didn’t want the Internet.”

Undeniable truths are also shaping this generation. Young people see, for example, how important making money has become for the older generation. The sermons they hear broadcast every Friday seem nothing more than background noise without emotional resonance. Many young people believe they know how their counterparts on the outside live, because they have seen a version of it in the fantasy world created by Hollywood.

The response of the government has been to try to persuade its young to reject what others have. They have tried to wall off Iran from the rest of the world. It hasn’t worked. That alternative requires too much sacrifice, too much austerity, and too little joy. The young-at-heart simply are no longer ready to die.

Jobs are scarce. Several hundred thousand young people enter the job market every year; fewer than half get jobs in an economy marked by isolation, underinvestment, unpredictable regulations, corruption, inefficiency, and overdependence on oil. Many young people are forced to defer marriage because they cannot afford the cost of a proper wedding and setting up house. In dealing with the natural restlessness of youth, other societies have a hard enough time making a “Just say no” approach work against obvious dangers like lethal drugs and sexually transmitted diseases. The ayatollahs still think they can make “Just say no” work against puppy love; and so they struggled to keep the barriers in place against socializing, holding hands in public, watching foreign television via satellite, and, of course, drinking alcohol. For twenty years, young people have been beaten up, put in jail, lashed, and forced to sign confessions about their moral misdeeds and “high” crimes—like getting caught in mixed-gender parties, being improperly dressed in public, or listening to the wrong kind of music.

The social restrictions of the Islamic Republic have begun to backfire. The ban on public dating means that more encounters between young people are taking place in private spaces. Paradoxically, it also encourages young people who might have dated casually to have sexual intercourse because an active sexual life is one way young people can rebel against the system. I know one young man who enjoys picking up young women in a particular Tehran parking lot—and sometimes ends up in bed with them.

Many young people have little hope that permanent change will come. They find their inspiration outside—in the West in general and America in particular—and in creative ways of trying to maintain dignity in confronting what they consider impossible odds. That’s how Jaffar Azadi copes.

Azadi is a taxi driver and part-time mechanic in Tabriz, the capital of the northwestern Iranian province of Azerbaijan. He dresses in neatly pressed black gabardine pants and stylish sports shirts and slicks back his curly black hair. In his cab he plays the music of Dariush, the popular middle-aged Iranian-born singer who lives in exile in Los Angeles and whose music is banned in Iran.

Nazila and I found ourselves in the backseat of Azadi’s taxi one afternoon and asked him about the music. “Dariush is my hero,” he said. “I’m really a singer.” Indeed, in the evenings, Azadi is a performer like his hero.

Azadi invited us to a chic, lace-curtained ice cream parlor in the northern part of the city, where he gave us a brief demonstration of the kind of music he sings, mostly about love and longing. He and his friends perform exclusively at weddings and private parties. Even so, singing can be a dangerous profession. Azadi’s music inspires joy and a desire to move the body in unseemly ways, clearly still not acceptable in Iran, and he has been arrested many times. At one wedding reception, the police fired pistols in the air. But Azadi makes good money: $200 to $300 a wedding. More often than not, the police or the vigilantes will settle for a generous bribe and go away. In fact, he considered himself fortunate. Unlike his fellow band members, he had never been lashed with a whip.

Even though he was twenty-seven when we met in 1998, Azadi still lived with his elderly parents. And his family was so traditional that he had met his fiancée, Maryam Massoumi, through the custom of
khastehgari,
in which the family of the groom visits the home of the bride to ask her parents for her hand. “I didn’t want to get married,” he said. “But I knew when I met her that she was a clean woman.”

“What do you mean, a clean woman?” I asked, thinking it might have something to do with hygiene. It did, but it meant something else as well.

“She is not the type to flirt with men,” Azadi explained. “I told her I don’t care what kind of head covering she wears, but she can’t have socialized with other men.” Like most residents of Tabriz, Azadi is not a Persian but a Turk, so he told me a Turkish proverb: “The man who marries a woman who has mingled with men marries a woman with a dark heart.”

Although Jaffar and Maryam had signed their marriage contract and recited the Koranic marriage verses in front of a cleric, they still did not live together. They would have to wait until they had a formal ceremony and a big family party, and like many other young people in Iran, they couldn’t afford it. All Azadi could think about, he said, was getting married. Politics was not on his radar screen. He voted not because he cared about who was running, he said, but because it was the only way he could get his identity card stamped to make him eligible for food ration coupons. And yet something political was bubbling underneath. “We loved the Shah,” Azadi said suddenly. “But we don’t like this regime. This is not true Islam. They don’t practice the things they make us do.”

Azadi has heard stories about how wonderful it was in the old days. In fact, for many young people, pre-revolutionary Iran has become an idealized, imaginary paradise. They ask, longingly, why they couldn’t have been born back then. “That’s what Dariush is good for,” Azadi said. “He understands sadness, depression.” What Azadi didn’t seem to realize was that Dariush sang about depression and sadness during the Shah’s time too.

And then, over coconut-topped strawberry sundaes in the middle of the ice cream parlor, Azadi sang softly from a song Dariush made famous years ago:

The year of 2000

The year of silence and escape

The year of running away and patience

The season of the dead-end street

The dark age of 2000.

I caught up with Azadi again in the year 2000. He and his wife had been formally married and now had a baby daughter. There was not enough money for their own apartment so they all lived with his parents. Though he still could not perform legally, he was elated that the ban on many other musicians and styles of music was being eased. He and the other members of his band voted in the February parliamentary election this time to support the reformists running from Tabriz. “What’s been done in Khatami’s name is better than nothing,” he said. “Actually, that’s too negative. I see some changes. Things are getting better.”

However, some children of the highest-ranking and most deeply conservative revolutionaries have turned their backs on their fathers and the values they represent. One is Ahmad Rezai. He is the son of one of the revolution’s heroes, Major General Mohsen Rezai, who had been commander of the Revolutionary Guards for seventeen years, and then became the secretary of the Expediency Council, a powerful overseeing body headed by former President Rafsanjani that advises the Supreme Leader, settles Constitutional disputes, and mediates disagreements between the Parliament and the Guardian Council. When I met the young Rezai in the fall of 1998, he was twenty-three. He came to see me in my office in Washington one day, unshaven, carrying a cell phone, smiling and relaxed. He had defected to the United States a few months before, after turning up one day at the American embassy in Vienna. The CIA took over, putting him on a plane to New York, debriefing him, and giving him political asylum, he said. He hired an immigration lawyer and rented a room from a friend in Hollywood.

It is extraordinarily difficult for an outsider to penetrate the inner circle of Iran’s political leaders, especially those involved with security issues. But here in front of me sat the son of one of the highest-ranking officials of the Islamic Republic. Except that the young Rezai wanted to talk less about the country’s repression, and more about the repression in his own life. The CIA thought it was getting a big-time defector; it got a young man who wanted to play music and wear blue jeans.

Rezai had been groomed to be a standard-bearer of the Islamic Republic. At the age of five, he was taken by his father to visit the war front with Iraq. He accompanied his father on missions to the homes of the country’s top officials, even to the home of Ayatollah Khomeini himself. Because of his father’s status, Rezai led a sheltered childhood, growing up in a villa on a large compound inhabited exclusively by the families of senior Revolutionary Guards. He was not allowed to listen to music of any kind. “My mind was a complete blank,” he said. “I didn’t even know how a baby comes into the world.”

When Rezai was nineteen, his parents sent him to study mathematics at a teachers college in Tehran. They also chose a wife for him, the daughter of a close friend of his father’s. The young Rezai said he saw his wife unveiled for the first time on their wedding night. He said that life got worse after marriage. “My wife,” he said, “just didn’t like sex. In a way that turned out to my advantage. It gave me a reason to separate. My wife went back to her parents. I stayed alone in the apartment. I had a car. I had videos, mostly American movies. I bought a big stereo set and listened to all the cassette tapes my friends brought. But I couldn’t really date or go out. Too many people knew who my father was.”

Rezai had been given a governmental job as a “special inspector,” which gave him, among other things, the right to stop and search any private car he wanted. But he hated the work. “I told my father, ‘If you treat young people this way you’re doomed,’” the young Rezai said. “But people like my father do not mingle with the people. They live within their own world.”

Rezai felt trapped. So he sought refuge in the country of his videos and cassette tapes. Back in Iran, Rezai’s defection was greeted with disbelief and suspicion, and it was excruciatingly humiliating for his family. His younger brother, Ali, gave interviews calling Ahmad emotionally disturbed and claiming that he had been kidnapped and brainwashed by the United States. Fatemeh Hashemi, a daughter of former President Rafsanjani, dismissed him as “unbalanced, abnormal.

“He had a car accident with his wife,” Fatemeh told me. “She lost an eye. Then he just left her.” Rezai had never mentioned that part of the story, and I didn’t know if it was true. But more than a year later, Mohsen Rezai, the young man’s father, confessed in a speech that he had been a neglectful father, and that his neglect had played a part in his son’s decision to leave. During the long war with Iraq, he said, “I, like most commanders, deliberately avoided forming close emotional ties with family members in order to prevent doubt and weakness during battle.” This was one confession that sounded authentic.

Jaffar Azadi and Ahmad Rezai are Iranian baby boomers, born into a generation with the power of sheer numbers but without any real outlet for rebellion or social inventiveness. So despite their demographic weight, they don’t truly enjoy power. Not yet, at least. And many of the youth are in the grip of a low-level depression.

That is a frightening phenomenon for some older Iranians. Sadegh Zibakalam, a political scientist at the University of Tehran who was imprisoned during the time of the Shah, explained the generation gap this way: “My generation is not going to turn its back on the revolution because if we did, we would be like mothers saying goodbye to our children, we would be saying goodbye to our existence. But the younger generation has no attachment, no feeling for the revolution. They were just babies. When I teach the revolution in my classes, many of my students just look out the window and watch the clock for the lesson to end. They say, ‘What about us? You had your revolution and your war. What’s in it for us?’ And I can’t tell them the answer.”