Persian Mirrors: The Elusive Face of Iran (6 page)

He added that even if he did allow me to stay, I couldn’t go to the war front. Why, I asked. “Because ladies aren’t allowed at the front.”

“But I went to the front two months ago,” I protested.

“Things were different then,” he explained. “The rules have changed.”

If Iran is a place of shifting lines, often the Iranians themselves don’t know where the lines are. The lines might shift in different circumstances, at different times of the day or year. The lines of ideology can move. The lines of institutions, of heritage, of gender, of public and private spaces, of the economy, of the relationship with the United States—all are fluid. Even the lines of leadership have some give.

In such an atmosphere, Iranians learn early to negotiate between extremes. There are negotiations between the sacred and the secular, between the public and the private, between the traditional and the modern. “Iranians are like wheat fields,” one saying goes. “When the storm comes, they bend; when the storm passes, they stand up again.” Another goes: “Iranians are like water in a vase. If the vase is a globe, they become a globe; if the vase is long-necked, they become long-necked.” The negotiations affect all areas of life—from gaining face time with a public official to avoiding a lashing for drinking alcohol to reclaiming land confiscated at the time of the revolution. In order to maneuver in a country of improvisers, I had to become an improviser myself, seizing opportunities wherever I found them and making mistakes and crossing invisible lines along the way.

RULE FOUR: BEING A WOMAN SOMETIMES MAKES THINGS EASIER.
I hate to admit it, but my stealth weapon in working in Iran is that I am a woman. As a female reporter I have access to half of Iran’s population in a way that men don’t. I can enter beauty salons, lingerie stores, fashion shows, aerobics classes, swimming pools—private spaces that are closed to men. I can unveil and be in the presence of any unveiled woman and not violate any law or religious tradition.

For the most part, I don’t feel that Iranian women are threatened by my presence. There is an unspoken bond among us that transcends culture, history, nationality, and language. It also helps that the women of Iran are steel magnolias, not shrinking violets. More than many women in the Islamic world, Iranian women occupy public spaces. Even as wives and mothers, they work, vote, drive, shop, and hold professional positions as doctors, lawyers, corporate executives, and deputies in Parliament.

I have been assisted over the years by a very special young Iranian woman in her twenties, Nazila Fathi, the sister of the calligrapher Golnaz Fathi. Educated in English translation, Nazila started out as a private English tutor until the journalism bug bit. Her small frame and delicate features are reminiscent of a Persian princess painted on a miniature. But they mask an iron will inherited from her mother, who taught her to regret nothing and find the way around closed doors. Nazila can recite entire conversations verbatim days later; she is truly gifted at simultaneous interpretation, and she is one of the hardest-working people I know. She is also a loyal friend. “I’m not a friend who would leave you in the middle of a trip,” she told me once when we were stuck after a particularly arduous assignment in Shiraz and there was only one seat on the plane back to Tehran that night.

The onetime CIA agent Reuel Marc Gerecht wrote a fascinating book,
Know Thine Enemy,
published in 1997 under the pseudonym Edward Shirley, about a five-day secret sojourn in Iran. In it he speculated that “Western women can often loosen the lips, if not gain the confidence, of even devout Muslim males more quickly than Western men.” He singled out Christiane Amanpour of CNN, Geraldine Brooks of
The Wall Street Journal,
Robin Wright of the
Los Angeles Times,
and me as “women not scared to project their femininity in the company of Muslim men.” He added, “They would very likely not be allowed as deep inside a Muslim man’s mind as an equally talented male observer, but they’d get through the heavily guarded front gate more quickly than even the most intrepid, clever, or duplicitous male colleague.”

I have never met Gerecht, and in my review of his book for
The New York Times
I took exception to his point. How did he know what kind of femininity I did or did not project? I asked. Moreover, all four of us have been serious war correspondents. We know the Middle East. What made him think that none of us would be able to gain as much depth of understanding as a male reporter would?

Still, Gerecht was on to something, if not for the reasons he thought. It is not flirtation with men that is important, but sisterhood with other women. And it is those relationships with other women that have helped educate me about how to navigate in a country still dominated by men.

RULE FIVE: EVEN SEEING IS NOT BELEIVING.
In his 1892 opus,
Persiaand the Persian Question,
the British journalist and diplomat Lord George Curzon came up with a harsh, cruel, and classically colonialist description of Iranians. “
Splendide mendax
might be taken as the motto of the Persian character,” he wrote.

A century later, Curzon is often considered a racist by Iranians and by scholars of Iran. And Iran is a very different place from the one Curzon discovered in his travels a century ago. But there is a kernel of truth in what he said. A number of Iranians I have met over the years know how to be splendidly deceptive. Even when the evidence is there for all to see, it could still be denied.

In 1995, I interviewed Reza Amrollahi, who was then the director of Iran’s nuclear program. He said that his country’s goal was to become less dependent on oil and that Iran had a concrete plan to build medium-sized nuclear reactors in the next twenty years—“something like ten of them”—if there was enough money and trained people. I wrote the story.

Two days later, he gave an interview to an Iranian newspaper saying that Iran was capable of building ten nuclear power plants in the next twenty years, but it had no such plan to do so. He also said that he had briefed
The
New York Times
on the issue, but it had “distorted” his assertions.

I ran into the same problem two and a half years later, after I did an interview with Mohammad-Reza Khatami, the British-educated brother of Iran’s newly elected President, Mohammad Khatami. I was writing a profile of the President and went to see his brother, a medical doctor, at his office at the Ministry of Health, where he was Deputy Minister. As we talked, he suggested ways that the United States could improve relations between the two countries. It was only fair to tell him in advance that his views merited a story. He seemed pleased. The story was published. Mohammed-Reza Khatami called me the next day. He was angry and denied that he had said any of the things I attributed to him. I reminded him that I had tape-recorded our conversation. “Even if I said those things, I deny them now,” he yelled. “You shouldn’t have printed what I said.” In one of the Iranian newspapers the following day was a story in which he denounced me for inventing quotes.

The incidents illustrate that often what happens can be tolerated, but the exposure of what happens cannot. A friend of mine once told me, “Talk is more important than reality. Everyone knows that dogs pee in graveyards. But one of the worst things you can say to someone is, ‘A dog peed on your father’s grave.’”

RULE SIX: BEING POLITE IS OFTEN BETTER THAN TELLING THE TRUTH.
Most of the Iranians I’ve met at least try to be polite when they are dissembling or stonewalling. Some prefer to invent stories rather than be rude and expose the whole truth. I asked Javad Larijani, a conservative member of Parliament and the head of Parliament’s research center, about this one day. I wanted to know why the Parliament had never publicized its investigation of the country’s giant foundations that ran vast swaths of the economy.

“There’s a hidden reality, a hypocrisy that keeps the peace,” Larijani told me. “It protects the dignity of the other. Architects don’t build glass houses in Iran. If you don’t speak of everything so openly, it’s better. Being able to keep a secret even ifyou have to mislead is considered a sign of maturity. It’s Persian wisdom. We don’t have to be ideal people. Everybody lies. Let’s be good liars.”

Even my most trusted friends in Iran are accomplished in what I consider the art of lying. Over tea at a diplomat’s house one afternoon, an American woman who had recently arrived in Iran modeled a full black robe and headdress that had been custom-made for her in Egypt. The headdress covered every strand of hair and part of her forehead; the sleeves came long and tight over her wrists. It was overkill. It told the authorities, “Not only do I accept your restrictions about women’s dress, I revel in them.” Nazila told her that it was lovely. “Maybe I should have one made for myself,” she added.

“Why would you ever wear something like that?” I asked Nazila after the encounter.

“I wouldn’t,” she said.

“Then why did you make such a fuss about it?”

“It’s
taarof,
” Nazila explained. “It’s exaggerated good manners that keep the peace. My mother always tells me I have bad manners because I usually don’t do
taarof
. But in this case, I felt I had no choice. No harm was done.”

Taarof
is reflected in everyday Persian expressions of excessive politeness that when translated literally diminish the self in front of others: “I sacrifice myself for you.” “I am your little one.” “I am your slave maiden.” “Step on my eyes.”

I heard a great
taarof
story from Ali-Reza Shiravi, from the Ministry of Islamic Guidance. A Canadian journalist went into a store to buy a hat. The journalist went to pay for it, but the shopkeeper said, “Be my guest,” indicating that the hat was a gift. The journalist insisted he should pay, but the shopkeeper insisted he should not. The journalist thanked the shopkeeper and left. A few minutes later, a policeman grabbed the journalist as a thief. The shopkeeper had turned him in.

RULE SEVEN: IRAN IS NOT JUST THE ISLAMIC REPUBLIC. IT’S NOT JUSTPERSIA EITHER.
Over the years I have discovered that Iran, even after a revolution in the name of religion, would not be simply an Islamic Republic. It would always be Persia as well. The austere spirituality of Shiite Islam meshes with the sensuous richness of Persia, even as the two clash. And Iran is even more varied than that. Yes, there is the Iran of austere Islam in the holy city of Qom. But I found another Iran in Shiraz, at Bagh-e Eram, or Garden of Earthly Paradise, a sprawling public garden filled with two-hundred-year-old cypress, pomegranate, salt cedar, and sour cherry trees, musk roses, coxcomb, and honeysuckle. I found a third Iran forty miles from Yazd at an abandoned caravansary where no one could see me slip off my scarf and jacket so that the breeze could touch my bare skin. And I found yet another Iran in Hamadan, at a mausoleum with a basket of yarmulkes at the entrance and the Ten Commandments mounted on a far wall. According to legend, Queen Esther, the biblical Jewish queen who saved her people from persecution in the fifth century
B.C.
, and her kinsman Mordecai are buried there.

I have discovered that only half of Iran’s estimated 65 million people are Persians. One fourth are Turks who filtered into the northwest Iranian province of Azerbaijan from Central Asia. Eight percent are Gilanis and Mazandaranis; 7 percent are Kurds; and the rest are Arabs, Lurs, Baluchis, and Turkmens. Only 58 percent of the people are native Persian speakers; 26 percent speak some sort of Turkish dialect. Most Iranians feel Iranian first, and their ethnic affiliation second. But it still startles me to visit Kurdistan and find people who speak only Kurdish or to enter the bazaar in Tehran and hear more Turkish than Persian spoken.

Even the climate and topography of Iran is a surprise to the uninitiated. Iran is susceptible to droughts and floods, sandstorms and snowstorms. It can be suffocatingly humid or desert dry. The weather can shift suddenly without warning. I once took a trip to the Caspian where I swam (on a women-only beach) in a bathtub-warm sea and then drove back to Tehran through snowstorms in the mountains. When people ask me if Iran has camels and deserts, I answer more deserts than camels. I also tell them that Iran has rice paddies, tea plantations, wetlands, wheat fields, and some of the best mountain climbing and snow skiing in the world. Try moving around Tehran when there’s three feet of snow on the ground.

Many Iranians revel in their ethnic diversity, but not if they think it makes them appear backward. Of all the stories I have ever written in covering Iran, the one that sparked the most criticism within the country was not about political infighting or repression or the private lives of women. It was a story about Azeri cave dwellers in a tiny village in the northwest corner of Iran called Kanduvan.

I knew that there were cave dwellers in Turkey, but I had never read anything about cave dwellers in Iran. So when a friend in Tabriz offered to show me, I accepted. We found an odd honeycomb of caves hidden in the side of a deep valley. There, hundreds of Turkish-speaking herders live in the damp dwellings dug into the steep, strangely shaped cones of porous volcanic rock. They do not get many foreign visitors and keep to themselves. But one old man named Hassan recognized my friend. Hassan had sold vegetables and walnuts to my friend’s father before the revolution.

In Hassan’s cave, we sat on thin, brightly colored woven carpets that served as floor coverings. Bookshelves and closets were chiseled into the walls of tufa stone, which had been painted white. There was a refrigerator in one corner; mattresses were hidden behind a colorful curtain. Hassan and his wife even had a working television.

Most of the caves have at least minimal electricity tapped from the main electrical lines below and cold running water pumped up from a spring. The most difficult time, Hassan said, is the brutally long winter, when the people use makeshift heaters to burn dried manure, the same fuel they use for cooking. There are no telephones, local newspaper, mail delivery, or hot running water.