Persian Mirrors: The Elusive Face of Iran (5 page)

“How can you be so calm about it?” I wanted to know.

“It’s political life,” Nosrat said. “You win. You lose.
Finito
.”

Nosrat saw the system for what it was—deeply flawed, but full of potential. He knew that this was just one battle in a long war, and that today’s losers may well be tomorrow’s winners. He was determined to stick with the Islamic Republic. Deep down, he was a believer.

C H A P T E R   T W O

Splendid Deception

There is perhaps some peculiar suppleness, some inherent flexibility in the Iranian character which has enabled it to withstand shocks which would have sent more rigid people reeling or would have broken their national spirit.

— ROGER STEVENS,
THE LAND OF GREAT SOPHY

These Persians are very strange people; they are ever on the watch to discover each other’s intrigues, falsehoods, and finesses. A movement of the finger, a turn of the eye, is not left unnoticed, and receives an interpretation. Yet each man invariably thinks that his own plots and intrigues are the acme of human ingenuity, wholly unfathomable by the rest of mankind.

— LADY SHEIL, WIFE OF SIR JUSTIN SHEIL, THE BRITISH AMBASSADOR TO IRAN, IN 1856

W
HENEVER I THINK
I understand Iran, it throws me a curve. That’s what happened on New Year’s Day in 1999. Three parties, three curves.

The first day of
Nowruz,
the traditional Persian New Year, is a kind of nationwide family get-together in which families visit each other’s homes throughout the day and into the night to eat, sit, and talk. It is the day that is most universally celebrated throughout the country, the beginning of thirteen days of joy surrounding the spring equinox.

The first party was an elegant buffet lunch and a lively political debate for about thirty people at the home of my close friend Fereshteh Farhi, a microbiologist whose husband, Farhad Behbahani, is both a chemist and a political writer. She is a middle-class, professional, secular woman educated in the United States, but no alcohol was served. Farhad, who is very religious, never would have allowed it in his home.

We sat in a large semicircle, balancing plates piled high with grilled fish, herbed rice, lamb stew, and a variety of salads. Flowers and sweets poured in; phone calls came from faraway relatives. The women took off their coats and scarves at the door, and I saw that most were dressed in tailored suits, tasteful jewelry, and high-heeled pumps. The men were in business suits, white shirts, and ties. In my black pants and sweater and sensible shoes, I felt underdressed. After lunch was picture-taking time in the garden by the pool. That’s when the curve came. None of the women put on their head scarves. Here was a group of otherwise law-abiding, professional women, most of them middle-aged mothers, bareheaded in public! We were in full view of the neighbors’ houses, smiling and posing. We might as well have been naked.

“Aren’t you scared going out in public dressed like this?” I asked.

“This isn’t public!” said Fereshteh. “It’s our garden. It’s our private space!”

Because the garden was outdoors, I considered it public space; for my friend, it was part of her private world.

After that party, I met my friend Sadegh and his wife and daughter, who brought me to an uncle’s house for an early supper. Sadegh and his wife, Massoumeh, are American-educated professors at the University of Tehran. Their teenage daughter has never lived abroad but speaks excellent English. The curve came when mother and daughter put on full black chadors over their head scarves. And when we got to the uncle’s house, the mother kept on her chador, gripping it tightly under her chin with one hand. Her sisters and female cousins poked fun at her and tried to pull it off when she wasn’t looking. But because the party was not sexually segregated, they all kept their heads covered with scarves, their bodies in long, loose clothing, which made me feel as if I had to keep on my head scarf as well. Once again, in my black pants and sweater, I felt underdressed.

“You’re shocked that I’m wearing a chador, aren’t you?” Massoumeh asked me.

I was, but I was too embarrassed to say so, especially since I was the family’s guest. “It all comes down to choice,” I replied. “If you choose to dress like this, that’s fine. I wish I had that choice to wear whatever I want.” What I didn’t say is that many outsiders regard the chador as a bad choice.

From there I went with my friend Farnaz to the biggest surprise of all: a late-night party at the home of a woman who supports herself and her unemployed son by running a gambling operation from her living room. It was an ordinary living room with sofas and chairs and end tables and a large round table covered in green baize in one of the corners. The table was the only equipment she needed for high-stakes card games that could net her thousands of dollars in one evening, every evening.

But this was the New Year, and the gambling operation was closed. Instead, the night was reserved for heavy drinking and dancing. I was there because I had been told I could meet Farnaz’s friend, formerly named Mohsen, who had changed his sex—legally—and become a woman named Maryam. Maryam never showed up, but about forty other people did, and their demeanor and behavior were enough of a curve to startle any Westerner. The women’s dresses were too short and too low-cut, their makeup too heavy, their hair too dyed and teased. The heavy-metal music was too loud, the cigarette smoke too thick. The drinking was too heavy, and by midnight, most of the guests were obnoxiously drunk. The children who had been dragged along were up too late, witnessing scenes on the makeshift dance floor that were too raunchy. Fellini would have felt right at home.

The star of the evening was an Iranian woman of about forty with long straight blond hair and a diaphanous white dress. Widowed with two young children years before, she had abandoned her children (they went to live with her parents) so that she could marry a man twelve years her junior who didn’t want the burden of children. For the third time that day, I felt inappropriately dressed.

The surprises of that day remind me of a type of calligraphy done by my friend Golnaz Fathi, a brilliant young painter. Golnaz is one of the few women in Iran to have mastered what is traditionally a man’s art. In 1997, when she was twenty-four, she was honored as the country’s top female calligraphist. But she found the classic form too confining and began to improvise with a radical type of calligraphy called
siah mashgh
, “exercises in black.” Her calligraphist’s pen began to move in radically different directions on the page. The letters grew and stretched until the words no longer came together to form lines from poets like Hafiz or Saadi. In fact, the words meant nothing. The result was a storm of calligraphic curves.

So how to deal with all these curves? Over the years, I have developed a code of twelve rules that have helped me survive the setbacks and embrace the surprises of Iran.

RULE ONE: NEVER SAY NO TO AN INVITATION.
Iranians by habit operate in two worlds, the public and the private. Traditionally just about everything meaningful in both social and political life happens behind closed doors. That is the way Iran has always been, whether its leaders were kings or ayatollahs. The contrast is much sharper, however, under the ayatollahs, who have set strict limits on what constitutes acceptable behavior in public and sometimes even in private spaces. An outsider can’t just open the door and peer in. The only way to get the door to open is to be invited in first.

I once went all the way to Bijar in Kurdistan to look for the famous carpets that bear the town’s name. I didn’t find any. A carpet dealer in Sanandaj laughed at me when I told him what I had done. “You can’t just go to Bijar for carpets,” he said. “All the good ones are in private homes. You have to get invited.”

That was what my twenty years of visiting Iran has been: one long struggle to get invited in—or to invite myself in. I’ve shamelessly asked for invitations to mosques and churches and synagogues; to the homes of clerics and to the homes of fashion designers; to Koranic classes and to aerobics classes; to weddings and to funerals. Along the way has come the delight of discovery. I have found real people with needs and desires even as the Islamic Republic tries to make them faceless servants of orthodoxy, and an outside world remains receptive to that stereotype.

It is common to meet people for the first time and have them invite you to their homes for lunch or dinner. But “Come to my house for dinner” is the Iranian version of “Let’s do lunch.” It’s not usually meant literally. The polite response is to reply, “I really don’t want to be a burden,” and then wait to see whether the invitation is extended again. After three or four times, it is appropriate to accept. I, on the other hand, always accept as soon as the invitation is offered. It might be withdrawn and it might not come again. I am, after all, a reporter.

RULE TWO: HOSPITALITY DOESN’T MEAN OPENNESS.
Concealment is part of normal life in Iran. Veils and scarves conceal women in public. Both the bazaar and the mosque function as private clubs for the initiated. The bazaar is not only the commercial heart of an Iranian city; it is also a densely built community center—with mosques, public baths, back rooms—that serves as a meeting place and center of communication. The mosque is not only a place of worship; it is also a vehicle for political mobilization.

Concealment makes Iranians very different from Americans. Americans live in houses with front yards that face out to the street. They sit on their front porches and watch the world go by. Iranians live in houses with front gardens hidden behind high walls. There is no connection to the street life outside. It is no accident that figures in Persian miniatures are often seen peering secretly from behind balconies or curtains or half-closed doors.

America’s heroes are plainspoken, lay-it-on-the-line truth-tellers who love relating their life stories. For Iranians, Jimmy Stewart would be a chump. Self-revelation often is seen as a sign of weakness, or at least of self-indulgence. The only people who can be truly trusted are family. Iranians remind me of one of my Sicilian grandfathers, who used to curse the
stranieri,
the “foreigners,” the outsiders who could not be trusted. My grandfather saw the world as a series of concentric circles with himself as the center, then the family, then people who had emigrated from his hometown, then Sicilians, then other Italians, then everyone else. Anyone in authority is to be avoided.
Gharibeh,
the Iranians call such outsiders.

Hassan Habibi is emblematic of the concealer who found success in the Islamic Republic. I first met him in Paris before the revolution, when Ayatollah Khomeini was in exile in France. Habibi said so little whenever I was with him that I didn’t realize until much later that he even spoke French. Soon after the revolution he was named the spokesman for the ruling Revolutionary Council. I went to see him one evening and told him the job didn’t seem like a good fit. “I am the silent spokesman,” he said. “That’s why they gave me the job.” Twenty years later, he was a Vice President, with a big portfolio to accompany his closed mouth.

The award-winning filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami might talk within Iran about problems like censorship, but never outside. “Even if we have censorship in Iran, we should deal with it ourselves,” he said in an interview that was appended to one of his films. “As my father used to say, ‘If your head breaks, it is better that it breaks in your own hat.’ Nobody can untie our knots or solve our problems. For that reason, I never speak about censorship outside of Iran, especially to foreign reporters.”

RULE THREE: RULES TO EXIT TO BE CHANGED AND ALMOST ANYTHINGCAN BE NEGOTIATED.
The Islamic Republic is a fluid place where the rules are hard to keep straight because they keep changing. What is banned one day might be permitted the next. I’ve heard it said that Iranian political leaders are terrific chess players, always plotting their strategy ten steps ahead. To me they are more like players in a jazz band, changing the rhythm and the tempo and picking up spontaneous cues from each other as they go along. Knowing how to improvise is the only way to get things done—and sometimes even to survive.

In 1982, during the Iran-Iraq war, I went to Iran to interview the president, Ali Khamenei. (He later succeeded Khomeini as Supreme Leader.) His aides told me that my magazine,
Newsweek,
would have to publish every word he uttered during the seventy-five-minute interview. That was impossible for a magazine with space constraints, but as a courtesy, I spent hours with Khamenei’s interpreter and chief aide to ensure that the translations were accurate and that the cuts did not distort his words.

After the interview was published, the official Iranian news agency ran an article in its English-language service under the headline: “Incorrigible
Newsweek
Mangles President’s Words.” “
Newsweek,
a foremost Zionist and imperialist publication, finally printed in its February 22 edition a highly censured [
sic
] and distorted version of the interview which Iran’s President Khamenei had granted with the magazine’s reporter,” the article said.

As if that were not confusing enough, consider what happened next. A few weeks later, a large group of Western journalists—myself included—was invited to tour the war front. But when I presented myself at the Ministry of Islamic Guidance for credentials, the official in charge of our group said bluntly, “You again. Who let you in here?” So I was expelled.

The official asked me to move to a small, secure room where he pulled out a file with my name on it and rattled off the “lies” I had written about the revolution. But as expulsions go, it was pretty civilized. I was not arrested or put on the next plane out of the country. I was allowed to stay overnight to recover from jet lag. The official said politely, “You are our guest. You can enjoy our country, but you cannot work. We would kindly appreciate it if you would leave the country in the next twenty-four hours.”