Persian Mirrors: The Elusive Face of Iran (58 page)

When I shared this comment in early 2000 with Mohammad-Javad Zarif, the Deputy Foreign Minister, he had a different take on it. “Your friend has it backward,” he said. “I hope one day the American government will wake up and say, ‘Why haven’t we understood the political realities in Iran?’

“Look at it this way,” he added. “The United States and Iran are playing a long card game. The United States has most of the cards. We discarded our rhetoric card when Khatami reached out and called for a dialogue among civilizations. The United States discarded its rhetoric card when it abandoned its negative tone toward us. Now the United States wants to keep the rest of its cards but wants us to discard all of ours. It wants us to open a dialogue while it still is keeping a number of sanctions against us. We’re saying, ‘You can’t keep all your cards. It’s not in our interest and it’s not in your interest.’”

“So is there a winner in this card game?” I asked.

“There are losers,” Zarif replied. “The American people.”

He paused for a moment, then added, “The Iranian people too.”

E P I L O G U E

The Bride Has Gone to Pick Flowers

Do not be sad, my dear, winter will soon be over.

The spring will come, the rice will be put out, and everything will grow.

We shall be happy together, my dear, we shall be happy then.

— TRADITIONAL SONG FROM THE CITY OF RASHT

Have patience, and I’ll make halvah for you from unripe grapes.

— PERSIAN PROVERB

A
T A CONFERENCE
on Iran in Cyprus in the summer of 1999, I asked a panel of Iranian scholars a straightforward question: would an Islamic Republic and the office of the Supreme Leader exist ten years from now?

The panelists—and the audience—bobbed and weaved. I was asking a question that was much too direct. I knew it myself, but we had been talking around the issue for two days and I wanted to get it squarely on the table. No one answered the question. Next to me sat Rasoul Asghari, an Iranian journalist who at the time worked for the newspaper
Entekhab
. Rasoul leaned over and whispered in Persian, “The bride has gone to pick flowers.”

The people sitting around us laughed out loud.

When an Iranian couple gets married, the person officiating at the wedding—usually a cleric—asks the bride whether she agrees to marry the groom. The bride stays silent, but the wedding guests answer the question for her. “The bride has gone to pick flowers,” they say in unison. The question is asked a second time, and a second time the guests give the same answer. Only after the question is asked a third time does the bride respond affirmatively to a cheering crowd.

Rasoul’s response was a very Iranian one. Don’t ask such a direct question, he was saying. This is an open-ended process and we don’t know the answer. Even if we know the answer, it is unwise to tell you. So let it go. Keep things in the shadows. Improvise. This is the time for the bride to pick flowers.

Rasoul was also saying something important about navigating in the Islamic Republic. Resist the impulse to make predictions. In a fluid society like Iran, predictions are dangerous. First, they are likely to be wrong. Second, if they are made at the wrong time, they may alter the course of events in a way that sabotages the desired outcome. So even Iranians who live and breathe politics every day don’t make them.

That’s hard for us Americans to understand. Predicting the future lies at the core of American politics. Plotting long-term strategies keeps armies of analysts occupied in the bowels of the Pentagon and the CIA. Take away predictions and where would American pollsters and pundits be?

But I will resist the temptation to make predictions. I cannot say that Iran is destined to be an Islamic democracy; I cannot forecast the demise of the Islamic Republic. All I can do is point to what I’ve learned in writing about Iran for more than twenty years.

I’ve learned that it is impossible to talk about a monolithic Iranian “regime” any longer; the struggle for the country’s future is far too intense for that. Today there is no unified leadership or all-powerful governmental superstructure that makes and executes all decisions. Rather, power is dispersed among and even within many competing power centers, with varying agendas and methods of operation and degrees of authority. Even as I write, alliances are shifting. Players are adapting. Coalitions are building.

I’ve learned that democracy is being born at the grassroots level and that Iran today is more democratic than at any time in its history. The era of exclusionary politics that has dominated Iranian life since the beginning of the revolution, when Khomeini and his lieutenants marginalized all those who did not adhere to their vision of an Islamic state, is over. The slogan “Iran for all Iranians” adopted by the reformists during the parliamentary elections of 2000 is the ultimate symbol of that trend. It means that Iranians who don’t believe in the Supreme Leader, Iranians who are not religious, Iranians who left the country years before—all have a place, however limited, in their country. Granted, there is no roadmap for how to get there. But recognition of the need to get there has become part of everyday politics.

But I also have learned that Iran remains a country of cultural apartheid, where people are punished for their lifestyles as well as their crimes. It is still a place with a dark side, where unpredictable repression and vengeful acts of violence are carried out by sometimes unknown power centers intent on remaining in the shadows and keeping themselves in control and the population at bay.

And while I do not dare predict the outcome of this struggle, I have a sense of just how fundamental it is. It could change the mirror Iranian leaders hold up for the world (and for their own citizens) to see them in; it could mark the passage from centuries-old habits of intrigue and suspicion into a more modern trust in openness and rational give-and-take.

In a sense politicians like Mohammad Khatami have challenged the practice of ruling through a splintered, dazzling, but ultimately mystifying mosaic of mirrors. Their goals are, above all, transparency, coherence, and predictability. These concepts take a number of other names in Iran today—the rule of law, democratic freedoms, easing of social restrictions, accountability—concepts that in the West are taken for granted as the critical tools of a just society, a modern economy, and a trustworthy foreign policy. In Iran, however, achieving them would signal a transformation, because the image of how and why the state does what it does would, at last, be easier to understand.

I have learned that the key to understanding the Islamic Republic is to get to know the people of the country—behind their closed doors. This is a country with a population and a history too complex to remain confined in a revolutionary mold forever. Most Iranians I know have no intention of abandoning the place of their birth. My friend Mina at the aerobics studio in Tehran put it best: “If a thief comes into your house, what do you do? Do you leave or do you stay? It’s still your house. You stay. If you have a retarded child, what do you do? It’s your child. You love it.”

Finally, I have learned that the Iranian revolution still hasn’t run its course. It took some scholars of the French Revolution two centuries to finally declare that revolution dead. Many of the battles fought in the Islamic Republic today are the unfinished battles begun during the revolution’s early days. There is energy to fight these battles, but not to foment another revolution. One was enough.

*    *    *

Ehsan Naraghi, an Iranian intellectual and sociologist, got it right in his 1991 memoirs,
From Palace to Prison.
Caught up in the revolution’s brutal power struggle in the early 1980s, Naraghi was thrown into Tehran’s formidable Evin prison, where he was beaten, threatened with death, and allowed almost no contact with his family until he was released nearly three years later for lack of evidence.

In one of his many moving stories of prison survival, Naraghi explains how a kind prison guard allowed him and his fellow inmates to use an oil stove to make tea and even to cook. On Thursday evenings, when many of the prison staff left for a day at home, Naraghi made omelets for his cellmates. “The secret was to use the whole range of ingredients at our disposal: potatoes, tomatoes, onions, and even apples and dates,” he wrote.

“A useful rule was never to turn away food offered by the prison administration but instead to try to improve it. For example, once a week our supper ration was a kind of stew. It was inedible in itself, but the ingredients were not of bad quality if taken separately. So we would take the carrots from the stew and recook the potatoes and meat on the oil stove, adding a few onions and some tomato sauce which we could buy at our small prison cooperative. In this way the stew would be transformed into a completely different meal for our collective. Then there were the awful kidney beans, which the prisoners refused to eat. . . . I was quite happy to use the rejected beans and to fry them with a ‘white sauce.’ They were consumed with delight by everyone.” Naraghi said he was such a good cook that some of the prison guards sometimes hung around to eat dinner with them.

When his politically radical cellmates congratulated him on his innovative cooking, Naraghi replied, “Unlike you, I am not a revolutionary, and I don’t advocate that we reject everything and start again from scratch. Instead I try to improve what I have, using the ingredients at my disposal. But this is precisely the kind of reformist approach that fills you with horror.”

And it is that reformist approach that just might allow the Islamic Republic to survive. Of course, it might not work out that way. Demographics and economics may combine to spark an explosion of incalculable force—of instability, civil unrest, popular revolt, or anarchy that could in turn produce a new era of repression.

But in the twenty-first century, many Iranian officials, politicians, women, clerics, journalists, filmmakers, intellectuals, entrepreneurs, and young people throughout the country are trying to do what Naraghi did with his oil stove in his prison compound: improve what they have, based on the ingredients at their disposal. Starting again from scratch is not an option for them. One revolution in a lifetime is enough, they say. Now is the time to pick flowers—and to plant more.

Acknowledgments

A
ND NOW FOR
the fun part.

This book has been a long time coming. I first wanted to write a book on Iran in 1982, when I was the Edward R. Murrow Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. But the time was not right. The United States had not recovered from the trauma of the hostage crisis. So I put away my notebooks and my letters of rejection from publishers and moved on to other things.

I couldn’t kick the Iran habit. I kept going back to the country until, in 1998, I decided I had no choice except to write this book.

When it comes to writing, I play tennis, not solitaire. I can’t play alone. I need to bounce ideas off friends, colleagues, and family. Even my pre-adolescent daughters read my leads and edit my copy. So I can honestly say that writing this book has been a process that would never have been started or finished without the help, friendship, and love of others.

I first must thank the editors of
The New York Times.
Joseph Lelyveld, the executive editor, and Bill Keller, the managing editor, generously gave me time off from the paper to write this book. They both truly understood that the passion I had for the subject would not subside until the book was written. Joe shared with me some of his own wisdom about successful book writing: write early and leave time for revision; don’t fret about breaking news; write for yourself, not an imaginary audience.

Michael Oreskes, the Washington bureau chief, helped me throughout the process both as an editor and a friend, cutting through red tape, urging me on, and heeding every call for help. R.W. Apple Jr. has been a marvelous mentor since I first met him on the streets of Tehran during the revolution. Andrew Rosenthal, the foreign editor, was supportive in ways I will always cherish. Andy, his predecessor, Bernard Gwertzman, and Jack Rosenthal, Adam Moss, and Gerald Marzorati of
The New York Times Magazine
sent me on several assignments to Iran that convinced me that the time was right to write this book. Kyle Crichton, my editor at the magazine, helped me look at my material on Iran in a new way. Nancy Newhouse encouraged me to write a personal story for the Travel section on touring Iran with a group of American tourists. Jill Abramson, the Washington editor, helped me to think strategically about my material. William Schmidt, whom I have known since we worked together in the Chicago bureau of
Newsweek
in the mid-1970s, was on my side throughout the process.

This book was written with the help of fellowships and grants from various institutions. The Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars hosted me as a Public Policy Fellow. I call Robert S. Litwak a magician; he knows why. Lee H. Hamilton, Michael Van Dusen, Samuel F. Wells Jr., and Bahman Amini all made me feel part of the Wilson family.

The United States Institute of Peace hosted me as a Senior Fellow after that, giving me a marvelous collegial atmosphere in which to work. Richard H. Solomon let me do my own thing; Jon B. Alterman shared his wonderful insights on the Middle East; John Crist and Sally Blair cut through the bureaucratic thicket; Kerry O’Donnell tried to teach me how not to break the rules. I owe a very special thanks to Joseph L. Klaits, who was always full of ideas and helpful analysis, even though we did at times end up discussing a mutual passion: eighteenth-century France.