The Ayatollah Begs to Differ (28 page)

In 2006 and even into 2007, however, there was a single incident beyond the issue of AIDS that brought sex out from behind the garden walls and right into the street, or, as some hard-line Islamists thought, the gutter. Television’s most famous actress, Zahra Ebrahimi, a demure young lady who portrayed a pious, properly Muslim girl on a popular soap opera, was, much like Paris Hilton, the subject of a sex video made by her boyfriend that found its way to every DVD and CD vendor in Iran. She immediately denied that the woman in the video was her, while her boyfriend initially fled the country, and then, when he returned, argued that they had performed a temporary marriage and therefore were not engaging in any illicit activity. Investigations were begun, the judiciary got involved, and then everyone in Iran, of course, had to see the video. Abdolghassem Ghassemzadeh, an editor at large of one of Iran’s largest dailies,
Ettelaat
, and the son-in-law of a very senior cleric, told me an anecdote about the affair one afternoon in his offices at the paper. “One day,” he said, tapping his pipe on the palm of his hand, “our reporters were excited by the news that the sex video had grossed about four billion rials [approximately half a million dollars] in sales, and at the editorial meeting they were looking for the story to get placement on the front page.” He paused while he puffed on his pipe for a few moments. “I said,” he then continued, “absolutely not; under no circumstances! The story will be buried deep inside the paper.”

“Why?” I asked him, a little confused.

“Because,” he replied, “and I had to explain this to the reporters too, if we made the profit on the sex video big news, Iran would be inundated with copycat videos by people hoping to make a killing with their own sex videos.”

“Really? So what happened?” I asked.

“It was buried in the paper, but my prediction was right anyway. A few weeks later, a video surfaced in the north of the country, but the couple had been too stupid to hide their faces, so the local police immediately identified them.” He chuckled. “The problem was, of course, that they were married, so it wasn’t clear if they had actually broken any laws.”

“So did they make any money with their video?”

“Yes, of course!” said Ghassemzadeh. “Not as much; but they made money.”

Despite the huge scandal and the impropriety in a society where not only Islam but also Persian culture deems that a woman must at least give the appearance of being chaste, the scandal faded away, no one was detained for long, and if the investigation even continued (as the government insisted), everyone, including the conservatives most outraged, lost interest. Sex, it seems, has made its way out of the garden with a big sigh, if not yet in rural Iran or among the poorest and most pious of Iranians, then at least in the urban centers, where Iranians of all classes consume the news with a voracious appetite.

Persian culture, the culture Iranians of all races deem superior to all others in the region and certainly superior to the locust eaters’, places a remarkable emphasis on the home, privacy, and private life, and perhaps no other civilization has delineated public behavior from private quite as much. Traditional Iranian houses, with imposing walls surrounding them that afford absolute privacy from roving neighbors’ and strangers’ eyes, were built around gardens that Persians value as much as the homes themselves. Often, wealthier families built compounds around the gardens that housed extensions of the family or, if there was no room, bought up adjacent lots or houses and connected them if possible. Today in big cities such as Tehran, where houses have ceded much ground to apartments, Iranian sensibilities still exhibit themselves in the thousands of four-and five-story apartment buildings where every unit is occupied by either members of the same family or, at the very least, good friends. High-rise apartment buildings have gained some ground, but they tend to be inhabited by the most Westernized of city dwellers, some of whom own, or have lived in, similar apartments in Europe or America. It is perhaps because of the Iranian concept of the home and garden (and not the city or town it is in) as the defining center of life that Iranians find living in a society with such stringent rules of public behavior somewhat tolerable. Iranian society by and large cares very little about what goes on in the homes and gardens of private citizens, but the Islamic government cares very much how its citizens behave once they venture outside their walls.

Even in the early days of the revolution that brought mandated Islamic behavior to Iran, most Iranians felt secure enough in their homes to do as they pleased, whether it was Islamic behavior or not. Government or quasi-governmental raids on private homes where parties were being held and alcohol consumed were common enough in those days, but the truth is that the way the un-Islamic parties were known to the authorities was that they were loud enough to be heard on the streets or by neighbors, and not because the government was actively spying on the private lives of its citizens. (A bigger problem for partygoers then was the danger of being stopped on the drive home with alcohol on the breath.) Today, despite a deeply conservative government in power, there is no shortage of alcohol-and even drug-fueled parties in metropolitan areas, and there are, despite persistent fears of a crackdown, practically no attempts by the government to breach the walls of the Persian home.
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And it is behind those walls that one often finds the true Iranian character.

The walls of the Persian garden are, in their figurative sense, movable. Anywhere there is privacy, a Persian feels surrounded by his walls and therefore at ease. And the very top levels of Islamic Iranian officialdom are no exception. In September 2006, former president Khatami made a private visit to the United States, symbolically significant because he was the highest-ranking Iranian official to be allowed into the United States on anything other than official UN business in more than twenty-seven years. His first stop was New York, where the Islamic Republic has its only diplomatic outpost (accredited to the UN) in America, and where he sat in the drawing room of a stately mansion on Fifth Avenue across from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, just minutes after arriving, courtesy of a full NYPD and State Department escort, at Kennedy Airport. The limestone mansion is the residence of Iran’s ambassador to the UN and is a little bit of Islamic Persia in Manhattan, complete with a flat-screen television in one room broadcasting live Iranian television and fanciful paintings of words from the Koran or the word “Allah” on the walls that seem to be the artwork of choice in government offices throughout Iran. The flagpole above the entrance on Fifth Avenue was bare, an indication of both Iranian hesitancy to draw attention to an Islamic Republic not particularly popular in the United States and traditional Persian guardedness when it comes to privacy behind the walls of the home. Khatami and his entourage, which included a number of his ex-ambassadors, sat on ersatz Louis Quinze sofas and armchairs, a much-favored Iranian upscale furniture style that for some strange reason never lost its popularity despite a revolution that banished all symbols of grandeur as
taghouti
, or “royalist,” but they were unguarded and relaxed in the privacy of their Persian home away from home. A number of staff from Iran’s UN Mission were there too, thrilled, it seemed, to be hanging out with a president whom they had all wholeheartedly supported and who had probably made their lives easier, at least in terms of relations with other countries, in the eight years of his two terms.

The conversation was mostly about Khatami’s schedule in America, and what he should or shouldn’t agree to do, publicity-and otherwise. Jimmy Carter had sent a fax inviting Khatami down to Atlanta, and I seemed to be, as a consultant, adviser, and sometime translator for Khatami during his U.S. sojourn, the only advocate for a positive response. The Iranian diplomats—worried that Ahmadinejad’s government and supporters, who all despised Khatami, would have a field day in attacking him for meeting with the U.S. president who had allowed the Shah to enter the United States after abandoning the Peacock Throne (what led to the 1979 hostage crisis)—argued forcefully and successfully that the reform movement in Iran would suffer, but Khatami seemed genuinely disappointed.

Khatami’s voluntary trip to the “Great Satan” had already come under fierce attack in the conservative Iranian press, and also in the conservative U.S. press and among conservative U.S. politicians, but the reformists hadn’t lost their sense of humor or daring, as members of Khatami’s delegation explained with some delight. One writer in Tehran, the wife of a senior member of President Ahmadinejad’s administration (Fatemeh Rajabi, wife of his spokesman Gholam-Hossein Elham), had published an article decrying Khatami’s U.S. visit as blasphemous and had gone so far as to suggest that he be defrocked; in response, the highly regarded reform newspaper,
Shargh
, published a piece the next day subtly pointing out that her views were shared and fully endorsed by the “Zionist” groups in America, a dig that Khatami, who finds his successor’s politics somewhat distasteful, savored.

From then on the conversation turned to humor, and as cup after cup of tea was consumed, the Iranian diplomats and former government officials, not known for mirthful expressiveness, howled with laughter at every story told—stories that mostly involved poking fun at the customs of their very own Islamic Republic. One ambassador recounted his days as envoy to Sweden, and his difficulties in explaining to the protocol officers at the Royal Court why he couldn’t wear tails to the yearly king’s reception, let alone why he would have to refuse to shake the hand of the queen. His tone in describing the ridiculousness of his predicament was what had the others in the room in tears of laughter, presumably because every one of them could relate to the story. Another recalled a colleague, an ambassador in Europe in the days soon after the revolution, who had instructed his junior staff to wear ties. Tehran, furious about reports that Iran’s employees overseas were ignoring the Islamic Republic’s new dress codes, demanded an explanation. “Don’t worry,” the ambassador apparently wrote back in a telex, “my senior staff and I still dress like peasants and laborers; however, I have asked my local staff, chauffeurs and the like, to wear ties so that we preserve a little bit of dignity for the embassy.” Khatami laughed heartily along with everyone else, and one couldn’t help but think of our unfortunate times, when outside the walls of the mansion most Americans believed that officials of the Islamic Republic were a dour, austere, and inflexible lot who did little else but try to undermine U.S. interests wherever and whenever they could. These same people, of course, once outside their gardens, would show a very different face to the world, but it wasn’t simply a matter of their toeing an official line in public; it was their very personalities that would be hidden away, reappearing only in the private company of friends and family behind their Persian walls.

In Tehran, those walls have grown even taller since the founding of the Islamic Republic in 1979. While Persians had always made a clear distinction between their public and their private faces, under twentieth-century secular, Westernized, and modernizing Shahs there were fewer and fewer reasons not to bare all outside the home. Except for political opinion, of course, which was the one subject that was absolutely forbidden in those times. Because of a secret police, the SAVAK, that managed, like the Stasi of East Germany, to recruit informers in just about every Iranian neighborhood, Iranians feared speaking out on politics even in the privacy of their own homes. The intelligence services of the Islamic Republic, although sometimes as brutal as the Shahs’, spend far less effort in policing free political expression, as long as, of course, that expression cannot be heard beyond the walls, both literal and figurative, of the Persian garden. As a child, and because I lived outside of Iran, I had been unaware of the SAVAK and the fear it could instill in Iranians; but when I reached sixteen or so, the uncomfortable truth, if you will, hit me.