Children of Jihad: A Young American's Travels Among the Youth of the Middle East (7 page)

What did surprise me was the digital freedom that Iranian youth experienced. The Internet is growing in Iran, and while owning a computer remains the luxury of the upper classes, the growing number of Internet cafés has made the Internet widely accessible to a broad swath of Iranians. The Internet is a place where Iranian youth can operate freely, express themselves, and obtain information on their own terms. As they communicate with one another, users of the Internet in Iran can be anyone and say anything they want as they operate free from the grips of the police-state apparatus. The Internet cafés allow young Iranians to interact over the World Wide Web without having to worry about the government tracing their IP address back to their homes. While many Iranians are still without Internet access, the number of those connected is rapidly increasing each day. Under the pretenses of an ambiguous or fake identity, young Iranians really do exercise a relative amount of autonomy in their thinking over the Internet. It is true that the government tries to monitor their online discussions and interactions, but this is a virtually impossible enterprise. The regime focuses most of its efforts on targeting the blogosphere and specific opposition Web sites for blocking. Resilient as they are, Iranian youth continue to find indirect ways to reach these sites that the regime blocks. The Internet is far too large and there are far too many sites for the government to effectively monitor what its youth say and do in this digital realm. The Iranian intelligence services have higher priorities, and simply put, they don’t have the capacity to effectively deal with the explosion of the Internet. At times, the regime has attempted to slow the Internet, so as to make it so frustrating to use that Iranians will simply not bother. But this underestimates the commitment Iranian people have to their digital freedom.

The Internet is their democratic society. Even though the Internet is monitored, the youth have become extremely sophisticated in getting around the surveillance. They have become digital revolutionaries, creating, participating in, and popularizing chat rooms, blogs, and forums for discussion about everything from sports to politics. It has been stated that there are more than seventy-five thousand bloggers in Iran, with the majority under the age of thirty. The more high-profile blogs get shut down and replaced with an announcement stating, “According to the rules of the Islamic Republic of Iran, access to this site is forbidden,” but the authorities cannot keep up with the volume.

Because the Internet is one of the newest sources of information and forums for expression, the government has tried to censor it. Despite the efforts of the Iranian regime, I actually found the authorities in Dubai—a city known for its relative social progressiveness, high technology, wealth, and entertainment—censored the Internet more successfully than those in neighboring Iran. One afternoon, while testing the limits of access in Iran, I was shocked to see that I could access the United States Department of Defense Web site, the CIA home page, and even the United States Department of State annual human rights report, where I read the following:

 

The Government [of Iran’s] human rights record remained poor, and deteriorated substantially during the year, despite continuing efforts within society to make the Government accountable for its human rights policies. The Government denied citizens the right to change their government. Systematic abuses included summary executions; disappearances; widespread use of torture and other degrading treatment, reportedly including rape; severe punishments such as stoning and flogging; harsh prison conditions; arbitrary arrest and detention; and prolonged and incommunicado detention.

 

As I surfed, I also found that a number of online networking sites were easily accessible, including the site where Pedram had met his girlfriend. I was also able to use online phone services, most notably Skype, which I actually found more useful than my wiretapped cell phone that my “guides” had given me. Many Iranians today are using Skype to practice English and make friends outside of the country. Using this program, users can search for other users from any country they want and actually call them.

In addition to telephone programs, most online messenger services were available, of which the two most popular were MSN Messenger and Yahoo Messenger. While these messenger services enabled youth to have hundreds of online contacts, I learned that these contacts rarely extend beyond the users’ socioeconomic sphere.

Young Iranians take full advantage of these opportunities for expression and unfiltered information, and young people in Iran are spending a vast proportion of their free time on the Internet. I was shocked by the number of Internet cafés, and where there was no café, I was even more shocked by just how far some traveled to use one. Internet cafés have actually come to serve as new meeting places for young Iranians.

A
s we drove down
the poorly lit streets of Tehran, Cirrus explained to me what he and his friends do in the evenings.

“It depends on the person,” he explained. “But there is something for everyone.” He told me that there are large parties for graduations, birthdays, and other special occasions, but there are also massive house parties. I heard hilarious stories about young people attending Halloween parties dressed as “clerics in the regime.”

Pedram then chimed in, explaining that the behavior at the parties depends on the hosts, and that while some parties are tame, others feature belligerent drinking, rampant drug use, and promiscuity.

Cirrus laughed, removing one hand from the steering wheel to punch his friend in the arm, “I just told him that! Were you not listening?” Pedram’s English wasn’t that good and Cirrus liked to make fun of him for “missing things.” Cirrus then told me that at these parties, it is not uncommon to see dancing, games of spin the bottle (called by a different name in Iran), and clothing that makes one instantly forget that one is in an Islamic republic. With these two as guides, I didn’t feel bad about missing the New Years’ parties back in the States.

But the nature of parties of Iranian youth also depends on the socioeconomic class of those participating. South Tehran is notoriously poorer than the northern part of the city and the youth from these regions tend to be stricter in how they dress, practice religion, and many of them also choose not to drink. But the youth in these largely poorer areas still know how to party. The parties are tamer, but nonetheless defiant of the regime, and take place behind the backs of the morals police. It is important to remember that the very existence of many of these parties violates the laws of the regime.

Youth in the slums of Iran are far more likely than their wealthier peers to use parties as opportunities to talk about politics and the status of their lives, and for many disadvantaged Iranian youth, parties are the only opportunity they have to express themselves freely and vent to me about their dire situations.

The underground parties in Iran are only one aspect of social recreation enjoyed by young people living under the harsh conditions. When they are not discussing politics, removing their traditional Muslim attire, or consuming alcohol at parties behind closed doors, Iranian youth gather in cinemas, restaurants, and hotel lobbies. They take day trips to the mountains, attend sports clubs, and meet for gatherings in public parks. Billiard halls are popular evening destinations and usually involve a stop at a local ice cream shop. Coffee shops and flavored-tobacco cafés have become the primary public meeting grounds for boys and girls looking to pass their phone numbers to one another from across the room.

The morals police do occasionally locate the underground parties and break them up. I heard stories about students getting lashes for either hosting or attending these parties. For young people in Iran, the parties are more than a source of entertainment. They are a forum for expression and a form of resistance. Every drop of alcohol they drink, every hejab that comes off, every beat of Western music they dance to, and every minute of entertainment they enjoy is representative of their rejection of the government in Iran. And it is a collective, if unspoken, effort.

W
hile many Iranians
have been practicing social resistance for years, their acts of defiance have taken on far greater importance than they did in the 1980s and 1990s. When the regime first came into power during the 1979 Islamic Revolution, it had overwhelming support from the Iranian people. The Islamic Revolution was first and foremost a nationalist revolution. Throughout the 1980s, the country fell into an eight-year war against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, keeping the country unified and supportive of the regime under the banner of nationalism. As the war dragged on—mostly at the behest of Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini—the realities of life under the Islamic Republic came to the surface. With the death of Ayatollah Khomeini in 1989, the regime lost its charismatic leader and architect of the Islamic Republic, and his original successor, Grand Ayatollah Ali Montazeri, was a dissenter against the continuation of the war. By this time, Iran’s economy was in shambles, its infrastructure destroyed, and the regime’s efforts to export its Islamic Revolution had been rebuffed at every attempt. What was left was a population that was traumatized by a war that had been raging for nearly decade, a nation suffering under a dire economy, and a population growing tired of waiting for the “better life” promised by the regime since 1979.

Because of the mass casualties of war and high birth rates, the next generation of Iranian youth emerged as the new majority. With the Iranian voting age set at fifteen, the mid-1990s saw an entirely new majority of young voters who began to express their frustrations with the regime. Unlike their parents, this generation had not lived through the shah’s government. They did not remember the notorious secret police known as the SAVAK; they didn’t remember all of the corruption. What they did know was that the regime they had been born under was failing to meet their needs and seemed unable to provide them with the life they deserved.

And in 1997 they voted for change and the reformist president Mohammad Khatami won an unexpected yet overwhelming victory. Since the creation of the Islamic Republic in 1979, the country had not seen any leader like Khatami actually win such a high elected office. Throughout the 1980s Iran’s presidents had all been hard-line conservatives. In 1989, Iran saw the ascension of pragmatist president Hojjatoleslam Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, but his promises for economic change and progress proved ineffective and instead revealed more about his corrupt tendencies than any patriotic commitment. Instead of presiding over a recovering economy, Rafsanjani, who was already extremely wealthy when he took office, moved onto the Forbes 400, the list of the wealthiest people in the world.

President Khatami, however, was of a different breed. He had come to the presidency promising reform, relaxation of restrictions on civil liberties, and economic change. He did not have his predecessor’s history of corruption. He owed his surprise victory over the conservative candidates to the widespread participation of the Iranian youth in the 1997 presidential election. Young Iranians had taken his victory as a green light to embrace what the new president pledged to be new freedoms. In the first years of his presidency, students protested over everything from clothes to censorship. Initially, they gained small victories as Iran became more relaxed than it had been since the days of the shah. For the first few years of Khatami’s presidency, it seemed that the voices of youth were louder than ever. This hope was short-lived.

In July 1999, more than twenty-five thousand students staged a riot at the University of Tehran after conservative hard-liners shut down a popular reformist newspaper. The response was harsh. Members of Tehran’s police force stormed into the student dormitories and fired on crowds of Iranian students who were chanting, “Khamanei must quit,” and “Ansar-e Hezbollah commits crimes and the leaders back them.” In fact, the worst phase of the crackdown did not come from the police; it came from Ansar-e Hezbollah, the regime’s quasi-official paramilitary organization tasked with punishing those who violate or disrespect the fundamental principles of Islam.

Within hours, the riots had spread to eight major cities outside of Tehran. In what is cited by Iranians as their version of the Tiananmen Square massacre in China, Ansar-e Hezbollah entered the university, where they undertook a violent suppression of the riots. Numerous students were injured, hundreds were arrested, and one student was even killed. The most demoralizing aspect of this experience was not the crackdown itself, but the response of the reformists on behalf of whom the youth were protesting. President Khatami refused to denounce the violent suppression and instead stood by the regime’s decision. Demonstrating even less support for the people who elected him, President Khatami did not attend that year’s annual opening of the University of Tehran. It was at this point that youth came to see the reformists as just another branch of the conservatives, masquerading under a different name. Following the riots, many young Iranians came to believe that the reformists had simply used them to get elected but had little regard for their interests. These suspicions led many of the youth to see all government factions as one and the same. They viewed the supposed opposition as yet another extension of the theocratic establishment.

This disenchantment led some young Iranians to dislike the reformist movement more than the conservatives, arguing that at least the conservatives did not provide them with false hope. When I asked one Iranian student in Shiraz what she thought of the reformists, she replied with disgust that “all they have done is get the marriage age raised from nine to thirteen and allow women to wear nail polish. The women were already wearing nail polish, and nobody wants to get married that young anyway!”