Honeymoon in Tehran: Two Years of Love and Danger in Iran (25 page)

The young Korean saleswoman had worked with pregnant brides before, and helped me estimate how much weight I would gain by June, at which time I would be five months pregnant.

“So where’s your wedding?” she asked. Her dressing room was
covered with photos of brides posing at Napa wineries and on sandy beaches.

“Iran.”

She looked rather concerned upon hearing this, but did not probe.

My dress was sent away to be hemmed and joined me two weeks later in New York, my last stop before I flew back to Tehran. I spent a morning seeing my editors, then called on Javad Zarif, then Iran’s ambassador to the United Nations. He was one of the country’s most skilled diplomats, and always at the center of its negotiations with the West. Not only was I seeking his sophisticated analysis of Iran’s present bargaining position; I wanted to ask a favor.

“Could you help my best friend get a visa to Iran? I would usually never ask this, but it’s for my wedding.”

“That’s lovely news; congratulations. I wish I could help, but the visa process for Americans is complicated.” Visas were vetted by multiple state bodies, and the ambassador said he couldn’t easily intervene.

I said I understood, and we continued our discussion. As we talked, I wondered what it must be like for such a pragmatic, erudite, and worldly man to represent a country whose president sought only confrontation. Unspeakably frustrating, I imagined.

The next day, as I was packing to leave for the airport, an editor called to ask for my help. Could I please write a one-paragraph profile of Ahmadinejad for the
“Time
100”? This annual issue lists the world’s most influential people, at least according to the
Time
editors, and the magazine had been unable to find someone just right to cover Ahmadinejad. Ordinarily I would have agreed instantly. The prestigious issue drew millions of readers, and profilers were invited to mingle with their subjects at a black-tie party in New York. I wouldn’t be able to fly back for the event, but that didn’t trouble me. How could I profile Ahmadinejad, whose Holocaust denial had encouraged most in the West to consider him a monster, without offending the Iranian authorities? I would need to choose my words carefully. In the end, I agreed, if only so I could explain why Iranians had voted for him, a nuance that would surely be lost if some Washington pundit were to write the piece.

Pressed for time, I wrote it during my layover in Paris, keeping a close eye on the garment bag that contained my dress. An Iranian woman in the departure lounge listened curiously as I dictated over the phone, seemingly fascinated by the paragraph I read: “Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is a president unlike any Iran has ever known: belligerent, naïve, at once a fundamentalist and nationalist and a dark genius at mobilizing Iranian public opinion. In the first year of his presidency, he has risen out of obscurity to become one of the most troublesome and noteworthy leaders in the world. His uncompromising stand on his country’s right to enrich uranium has … brought the United States and Iran closer to a military confrontation than ever in recent times. His campaign slogan ‘We Can and We Will’ implied fighting corruption, not building the Bomb. …”

By the time my plane landed in Tehran, however, the short paragraph I had written along the way receded from my mind. I had briefly considered informing Mr. X about it, but decided this was unnecessary. It wasn’t a news story, after all, and I wasn’t obligated to let him know about every line that appeared under my name. If I kept in touch with him too assiduously, I reasoned, he would just expect more and more. Perhaps this was a useful occasion to assert some distance from Mr. X.

I made my way through the crowded terminal and found Arash waiting near the exit doors, a bouquet of irises in his hand. I was so excited to go home and show him my dress that I forgot about Mr. X entirely.

I
t was May, and the 2006 World Cup soccer tournament was quickly approaching. Although, as an American, I was not emotionally bound to soccer, I was aware of the imminent competition, which is of course the most widely watched sporting event in the world. That year, the Iranian director Jafar Panahi would release his controversial film
Offside
on the first day of the World Cup. The film told the story of Iranian women soccer fans who dressed as men to sneak into games at Tehran’s Azadi stadium.
Time’s
European edition, which often covered Iranian films closely, was running a story about
Offside and
the fate of cinema under Ahmadinejad. I had been asked to interview an
Iranian director and find out whether the new administration had stepped up censorship.

Many years ago, when he returned to Iran for a stint before starting university in Germany, Arash had worked as a film editing assistant. He had kept in touch with a handful of people from his cinema days, and suggested we talk to one of his old friends, the director Saman Moghaddam. One afternoon that week, we went to visit him together.

Like so many Iranian artists, Saman had moved to Dubai, but traveled back and forth to work on his films. His latest work,
Maxx,
had screened to packed cinemas for five weeks before being abruptly banned. A musical comedy of errors, in which an Iranian pop musician living in Los Angeles is accidentally invited to Tehran by the government,
Maxx
abounded with political humor. Everyone I knew, including Shirin khanoum, said it was one of the funniest Iranian films ever.

Though it had been pulled from cinemas after just five weeks, that it had been shown at all was promising. Under the Khatami government, Saman had spent four years trying to produce and screen
Maxx,
four years during which he was constantly at war with the film authorities.

“They quibbled with one hundred and forty points in an eighty-page screenplay,” he said, pausing to pour us coffee. “They faulted it for things that were entirely common in other films. I edited it and sent it back to them, and then they rejected it altogether without even explaining why.”

The Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance approved the film only two days before the end of the Khatami era, effectively passing the problem along to the Ahmadinejad administration. Many film directors said conservative governments tended to be more permissive when it came to moviemaking, because, unlike moderate administrations like Khatami’s, they had no one to answer to. Saman said he agreed.

“We had a very brief golden era under Khatami, but most of the time we faced endless restrictions. You’d expect that a conservative government like this one would restrict our work, but that hasn’t
really happened. The environment we’re working under now is certainly no more closed than before,” he said.

“That’s really counterintuitive, but it makes sense.” “You see, when there’s lots of internal conflict within the government, artists and filmmakers often get stuck in the middle. But that’s less the case when conservatives are in power, because they all agree with one another.”

While Saman and Arash caught up, I leaned back to reflect on what the director had said. How perplexing to think that film actually fared better under a conservative leader than a moderate. I wondered if this held true for other artists, whether censorship of music and literature, for example, was lighter under a hard-line president. It seemed unlikely. As we left Saman’s apartment, I thought briefly about Mr. X. I had no intention of telling him about our meeting with Saman, and I hoped he would not notice or mind. After all, I could always make the case that I was only contributing my reporting to the story, which someone else would write. Surely he would understand.

A
ll across Iran, at every hour of the day, I found people arguing about Islam. Our downstairs neighbors, an irreverent architect fond of nasty jokes about Islam and his pious wife, who nonetheless liked to show some cleavage, even had one of those routines married couples perform for company. “Islam is like a vast, imposing ocean …” he would intone gravely, spreading his arms wide, and pausing for effect. “An ocean that is … two centimeters deep!” She, who prayed five times a day and cooked saffron custards for the building on the death anniversaries of Shia saints, would swat at him. “But darling, Islam is not like this, not the real Islam. These mullahs have ruined it.” This conviction was popular among the portion of the middle class that did not wish to renounce its devotion, but could not reconcile it with the intolerant, decaying country around them.

Before I moved to Iran, my relationship to Islam was private and a source of rich intellectual and creative inspiration. My experience of Islam, of Shiism in particular, was intertwined with my study of Arabic, of Arabic literature and classical Islamic sciences, in my early
twenties. This scholarly curiosity in time gave way to a more meditative exploration. I found myself struggling to decipher not only the complex grammar and verses of the Koran but also the book’s moral meaning. Tariq Ramadan, a preeminent scholar of Islam, has written that in nearness to the Koran, “a woman or a man who possesses a spark of faith knows the path to follow, knows her or his own inadequacies.” For me, the path to follow was to further reading. I read the
Nabj ol-Balagba,
the sermons of the Imam Ali, which are dear to Shia Muslims, and found myself mesmerized by the cadence and power of the language. Was I responding only to the text’s rich literary charms, or had it aroused deeper, more spiritual feelings? I could not say myself, although I began preferring the silent company of these books to most any other pursuit. If you pushed me on the finer points of faith, I would still have claimed to be agnostic. Occasionally, I fasted during Ramazan; each night before going to bed I still whispered the
fatiba
prayer my grandmother had taught me; and I loved nothing more than staying up late reading Sufi parables. I wouldn’t think of sending off an important article to my editor without whispering “Besmellah rahman rahim” (“In the name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful”), the preamble to every Koranic sura, which practicing Muslims utter many times a day during prayer and before initiating many tasks. I had a set of flash cards denoting the chronology of the Shia imams, and when I traveled as a reporter through the Shia cities of Iraq where the dramas I had so long read about had unfolded, I felt an indescribable thrill.

When I moved to Tehran, I hoped to study classical Islamic philosophy or history with mullahs and scholars. Instead, Islam became a slipper with which I was frequently rapped on the head. Arash and I had yet to develop a public routine on the subject, but our most passionate arguments were over Islam. A particularly ferocious row arose one Friday morning over a wooden key holder I had bought in Lebanon. It was adorned with a patinated calligraphy that read “In the Name of God.” It had hung near my door in Beirut, and I did not think to ask whether I might install it in our apartment.

Arash examined the key holder coldly. “I do not want the Islamic Republic in my home.”
“This is not the Islamic Republic,” I said. “It’s a key holder that happens to bear a Koranic inscription.”

I wondered how my key holder differed from the antique
panjtan
he had given me as a gift, a metal amulet in the shape of a hand, each finger representing one of the five members of the Prophet Mohammad’s family. Or the CD of Kurdish Sufi music he had bought me the previous week, for that matter. The difference, he explained to me later, was between cultural tradition (Sufi dervishes, the poetry of Rumi, Isfahan’s mosque architecture) and Islam on its own. Islam as a watermark to Iran’s artistic heritage was acceptable; explicit religious symbols were to be held at arm’s length.

“It’s openly pious, and I don’t want anything like that in my secular home.”

“Don’t be such a philistine!” I couldn’t imagine why he couldn’t view my key holder as I did—a beautiful token that evoked a place where, among many other things, people believed in God.

“This has nothing to do with aesthetics,” he said. “For you, this is just an exotic, Oriental ornament. But for me, it’s a religious symbol, the kind I see painted on walls all over this country. I prefer to keep faith private, not something I advertise to guests as part of my décor.”

“Well, I just think you should recognize that Islam, apart from all these battles, has redeeming qualities. What about its ethos of justice?”

In these fights, we soon played predictable roles. Arash was the scarred veteran of Islamic theocracy, uninterested in abstract explorations of Islam’s core principles. He was convinced that the reality on the ground—a state that imposed Islamic penalties such as stoning and that sanctioned violence in the religion’s name—was the only relevant discussion. In our debates, I played the role of the western liberal, the lenient outsider who, in Arash’s eyes, judged Islam from the privileged, secure perch of the West.

“Justice?” he said. “You’re such an apologist. You’re infatuated with Oriental culture because you think it’s exotic. You come here and swoon over supposedly liberal clerics, but the moment you can’t unbutton your manteau on a hike, you fall apart.”

“Touchée. So I find the restrictions oppressive,” I said. “But I read
Arabic, I have read the Koran, I have read the hadith, I have talked to clerics from Qom to Najaf to Beirut, and I can tell you that
this,
this obscene dictatorship, does not reflect Islam at its essence.”

“Its essence is irrelevant. These are discussions you should have in cafés with your friends in New York. Do you notice how no one talks about such things here? No one apart from foreigners and western Iranians like you.”

Arash was right. No one in Iran talked seriously anymore about reconciling Islam with democracy, about whether Islam was even
compatible
with democracy. In the late 1990s, intellectuals and activists had talked about nothing else. But the rich debates about Islamic democracy withered away as their symbols—former president Khatami and his moderate allies in parliament—failed to bring about the broad changes Iranians expected.

That day, I vowed to avoid discussing Islam with Arash, and if I could help it, with anyone else in Iran. It occurred to me that I had come across as insufferably out of touch, like some champagne Marxist from New York in the 1950s lecturing a Russian victim of Stalin about the nobility of communism. Like Arash, most of my friends in Iran could not understand my preoccupation with Islamic learning. For them, politics and Islam, violence and Islam, were inseparable, and no amount of erudite reasoning could convince them otherwise.