Children of Jihad: A Young American's Travels Among the Youth of the Middle East (8 page)

With the reformists virtually eradicated from government and their lack of loyalty exposed, many youth do not believe that there are any officials in the government who can be influenced, nor do they feel that there are any politicians who will protect them if they speak out on their behalf. By the time hard-line conservative Mahmoud Ahmadinejad ascended to the presidency in June 2005, the conservatives could claim a monopoly over all major branches of the government. This left little room for resistance and created a tremendous reach for the government to implement unopposed restrictions.

While these realities paint a grim future for the prospect of resistance in Iran, it would be inaccurate to suggest that Iranian youth have lost the desire to resist. While students and other young people are less inclined to engage in political protests, their willingness to participate in a passive resistance is paramount. This passive resistance is an underground and widespread social resistance that extends to every echelon of Iranian society. As the passive resistance in Iran presents an increasingly serious challenge to the regime, the leadership has become more and more adept at cracking down on offenders. The regime is under no illusion that it commands widespread support from the people and they recognize that this is unlikely to change in the future. Even so, they are committed to containing the social behavior of the youth. Their strategy is simple: The government of Iran keeps a certain arsenal of social concessions it has made that it will renege on if the population becomes too politically active. The government, for example, has generally looked the other way with regard to the stylish adaptations of the hejab, yet it has not been uncommon for them to tighten restrictions on attire after public protests or riots.

C
irrus, Pedram, and I
arrived at their friend’s house for the party. The house was located on a steep side street in one of the Tehran suburbs. It was a modest middle-class home, decorated with Persian carpets and a few decorations on the walls. The most prominent decoration in the house was the big-screen television, clearly the centerpiece of the house. Many Iranians do not get their news from the state-run television or radio but from CNN, BBC, Voice of America, Radio Israel, and a variety of other channels and radio stations. One of my Iranian friends joked with me that there is no reason to get a color television if you are going to watch Iranian state TV. When I asked why, he said, because “all you need to see is if the turban is black or white.” The state-run television is mostly propaganda spewed by clerics, who wear either a black or white turban depending on whether or not they are descendents of the Prophet.

The satellite dish may be the biggest antipropaganda tool. The growing prevalence of satellite television is a phenomenon in Iran. Every time I stood on the roof of a building and looked down, there were clusters of dishes. Even in the slums of south Tehran, I saw satellite dishes that were larger than the metal or concrete shacks that people lived in. When I asked young people in the slums how people afforded satellite dishes, they would explain that communities pooled together resources to buy a few dishes for each cluster of houses. Even in the slums of Iran, young people can have access to the hit FOX drama
The OC
via Italian satellite! The program is undoubtedly risqué: Teens are shown using drugs, having sex, and abusing alcohol. An Iranian friend of mine told me over coffee that he was glad that they were able to get
The OC
by satellite because he thought it really showed the culture of youth in America. I met so many young people who told me that they watch Voice of America every day to learn English and hear what is going on in the news. They get movie channels, CNN, and BBC. Television watching is often a family affair, as dinner has moved from the dining-room table to tables in front of the big screen. The prevalence of satellite dishes in Iran led me to believe that this was the single most common technology that youth use for information; just about every young person in Iran has access to satellite TV.

Satellite dishes enter Iran illegally from Iraqi Kurdistan in the west and from the United Arab Emirates across the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman. I actually saw smuggling, although not of satellites, when I was in eastern Iraq. Not far from the Iraq-Iran border, I watched mules make journeys up the switchbacks of mountains with cartons of cigarettes, bottles of alcohol, movies, and noncensored news. I didn’t know it at the time, but apparently these mules also bring satellite dishes over the mountains of Iraq into Iran. In Iran, there are safe houses for the satellite dishes, which, if they can stay open long enough, serve as the distributor in different parts of the country. Black-market agents get dispatched throughout the cities, slums, and even rural communities to bring the satellite dishes and install them. An Iranian student I met in south Tehran told me, “You would never ask them where they got the dish and even if you did, they would never tell you.”

Despite all of the cloak-and-dagger activity surrounding satellite-dish smuggling in Iran, the prevailing opinion among young people is that the regime itself is responsible for much of the black market business. While not officially taking part in it, mullah entrepreneurs privately run the black markets, or so the rumors go. An Iranian friend of mine in Kashan told me, “You should always know something about Iran: Any kind of illegal and forbidden things which are entered to this country surely have a strong protection by a powerful person. Otherwise they cannot move here.”

C
irrus introduced me
to about fifteen other young Iranians at the house party. Our evening consisted of card games and drinking. After about an hour, we heard a knock at the door. The girls had arrived. None of the girls wore a hejab and all but one of the girls was drinking. The large coats came off as well as the sweaters, revealing rather scantily clothed women. They were pretty good-looking. The hip-hop music followed and as at any party, the more people drank, the more they danced.

By four
A.M
., the party wasn’t slowing down but I was beginning to fall asleep. Cirrus looked over his shoulder from a corner of the room and got everyone’s attention. He raised his cup and said, “Jared, isn’t it your New Year tonight?”

Startled, I raised my nodding head.

“Yes,” I replied.

“We hope you are having a Happy New Year!” he exclaimed rather jubilantly. Others followed suit. I heard from one side of the room, “Welcome to Iran.”

Not once did I witness any indication that these young Iranians were afraid of getting caught. These parties are important moments for them, giving them a feeling of freedom that they could not express during the day. For Iranians, this was their democracy after dark.

A
fter-hours activity
isn’t limited to house parties. Two days after Cirrus’s house party, I faked my minders and headed out for another evening adventure.

The streets of Tehran were virtually deserted. Instead of a luminous sky emanating from the lights of a vibrant downtown, the smog from a day of heavy traffic still lingered, and the cold of winter weather sent a chill through the air. In the evenings, there was an ominous calm that always reminded me that Iran is a police state. This atmosphere was not restricted to Tehran; I experienced the same eerie calm in Shiraz, Esfahan, Natanz, Kashan, and Qom. I was not surprised that some of the smaller cities had a quiet nightlife, but Tehran was supposedly the beating heart of Iran.

In what became an almost daily tradition, I found myself once again mistaking appearance for reality in Iran. There was so much happening behind the façade of this repressed society; without the right guide to show me the scene, however, I would never have experienced that reality. Tonight, my guide was a woman named Mariam, a twenty-five-year-old engineering student from Yazd, now studying at the Polytechnic University in Tehran. It was the students from this university that seized the United States Embassy in November 1979 and held fifty-three American diplomats hostage. Now, more than twenty-six years later, students from this same university were among some of the most hospitable people toward me, an American Jew.

Mariam and I had met the week before, during a chance encounter in southern Iran. She had come to Shiraz for the first time in several years to attend her cousin’s wedding and we found ourselves in the same café. The coffee shop resembled a carefully built cave, adorned with Persian artifacts, elegant carpets, and booths for customers to enjoy a cup of tea or the taste of a flavored tobacco pipe. I sat alone in a booth and made eye contact with a group of kids in another booth. The girls huddled up and giggled before one of them stood up. Mariam soon approached me.

She had dark skin, long eyelashes, and rosy cheeks. Her attire was very stylish and while her head was adorned with a hejab, her dark hair—with blond highlights—concealed most of the green striped pattern. She wore a long blue coat with a white scarf that had frays at both ends.

“Where are you from?” she asked.

“I am from the United States.”

She invited me to join her and her friends. They had an arsenal of questions for me. They wanted to know what life is like in America and they wanted to know what Americans think of Iranians. It was an entertaining exchange, but what really got me going was Mariam’s insistence that I explain to her and her friends the whole phenomenon of using toilet paper, rather than water, when we use the bathroom. She seemed truly mortified by what she thought was just plain dirty. I didn’t really have a good rebuttal because, frankly, it was a pretty good question. The best I could do in response was to explain that we do our best to shower from time to time.

“What are the three things that you want the world to know about you?” I asked, very curious to see how they viewed foreign perceptions of Iranians.

Mariam adjusted her hejab and looked right at me.

“One: We are not Arabs; we are Iranian. Two: We are not terrorists. Three: We like and we do everything like other youth around the world.”

She reiterated this last point several times during the conversation and before I left she said, “You need to make sure you see Iran before you leave. Just wait until I get back to Tehran next week. I will show you.”

M
ariam wasted little time
getting in touch with me after she got back to Tehran. In fact, she called me just as she was arriving back into the city limits, insisting that she wanted to take me out that night. Mariam picked me up on Taleqani Avenue in Tehran right in front of the mural at the old United States Embassy that depicted the Statue of Liberty with a skull. Mariam greeted me with the traditional three kisses on the cheek and insisted that I take the front seat, so I crawled into the front seat of her friend’s Pontiac and introduced myself to her friend Nassim in the back.

Nassim was studying to be a teacher. She wore a long wool beige coat, a light hejab tied underneath her chin, and blue jeans underneath her jacket. From underneath the front of her hejab, I could see that her dark hair was lightened by blond highlights just like her friend Mariam’s. This seemed to be the trend. Her skin was smooth and radiant from the makeup; her eyes were pronounced with blue mascara and her eyelashes were accentuated by thick black eyeliner. Nassim didn’t care how the regime told her to dress; she did things her own way.

Wherever Nassim and Mariam were taking me, it was clear their purpose was to show me something special and different. If there was one thing I had learned in Iran, it was to expect nothing, and be surprised by everything.

I was itching with curiosity. “Nassim, where are we going?” I implored.

Mariam looked at me and answered on her behalf. “Don’t worry, my baby, I think you will like this. You need to see all the sides of Iran.”

We turned onto Fereshteh Street. Before my eyes caught a glimpse of the scene, I could hear the revving of motors, the beats of hip-hop music, and the repetitious sound of horns as if this evening was a cause for celebration. But as I would later learn, every night for the Iranian youth is a celebration. Fereshteh was more than a street; it was a phenomenon. The long street was packed bumper-to-bumper with cars and there was not an adult in sight. It reminded me of a high-school parking lot; each young person competing to see whose sound system is louder, whose windows are a darker tint, and whose window decals mark the hipper band. The rambunctious youth didn’t constrain themselves to the confines of their souped-up vehicles. Confident boys, with their carefully sculpted hair, sat atop the roofs of their cars, doing what many adolescent males do in this situation: They ogled, pointed, and heckled. I saw three guys sitting on the hood of what looked like a blue sports car holding a large boom box that clearly had the volume pumped all the way up, as I could hear the distortion from the speakers’ reaching more than their maximum sound capacity. Despite the time of night, these three boys sported dark sunglasses in an expression of coolness.

The girls were equally hip. Each face I saw was meticulously painted with mascara, blush, eyeliner, and lipstick. They all wore the hejab, but it was hardly noticeable. Each hejab was so elaborately decorated and pushed so far to the back of the girl’s head that it looked more like a scarf than a head covering. Their fashion was the latest: designer blue jeans, stunning jackets, and shirts that were no different from what I might see in a night out on the town at home. In addition to the fashion and makeup, I kept noticing that some of the girls had white bandages over their noses, which was something I had also seen when I was in Shiraz. When I facetiously asked Mariam and Nassim whether nose jobs were the “in” thing in Iran, they explained that most of the girls who adorn themselves with the white bandages do so for status rather than healing. Mariam and Nassim were entertained by my disbelief that someone would actually pretend to have gotten plastic surgery.