Honeymoon in Tehran: Two Years of Love and Danger in Iran (7 page)

In the long hours we had spent together tracing her fascinating, rich life, from her early years as one of Iran’s first female judges, to the loss of her judicial career after the revolution and her emergence as a defender of human rights, our relationship had deepened. I looked to her for guidance in many areas, especially those confusing junctures in Iranian political life where the wise choice and the ethical choice seemed entirely at odds. These moments were Shirin khanoum’s specialty, and she handled them decisively and swiftly, with great skill.

She opened the door looking more rested and animated than usual. The last time we met, she had been suffering from all the stress and exhaustion of her work—padded braces had encased both her neck and wrists (pinched nerves), and she was on medication for high blood pressure. I was relieved to see the braces gone, and the comfortable way she padded around in her house slippers. We needed to work on her book’s final chapters, and I pulled out the questions I had prepared.

I felt we hadn’t explained quite fully what drew her, a young woman in her early twenties, to become a judge. “Did you have any role models, anyone you looked up to?” I asked.

I could tell from her impatient expression she thought this was a silly question. “I’ve never wanted anyone to be my role model, because that’s close to hero worship, something I’ve always been wary of,” she said sternly.

“But is there no one whose work you admire?”

“I suppose I can’t hide my affinity toward people like Indira Gandhi,” she conceded. “She was defeated once, but she didn’t withdraw. She pulled herself back up and returned to the ring.”

I sped through the rest of my easy questions, and gathered my thoughts for what I knew would be difficult.

“I think we need to help readers understand better what kind of democracy you envision for Iran, and how you see Iranians getting
there. You’ve talked so much about Islamic democracy in the early pages, but later you tell us that because Islam is forever open to interpretation, it’s difficult to use religion as a foundation for legal rights. How do you square these views? Also, if the Iranian government has shut down most of the legal avenues for criticism, how are Iranians supposed to bring about an Islamic democracy, anyway?”

Shirin shook her head impatiently. “Do we really need to get into this? This is supposed to be a book about my life. I’m not a political scientist; why should I have to explain something even political analysts can’t figure out?”

“Because people look to you for guidance,” I said gently. “You symbolize the possibility of peaceful change, and they expect to hear your thoughts on what they wonder themselves.”

“Well, I just don’t know what you expect me to say. Should I say armed struggle? That’s all that’s left when peaceful movements go nowhere. But obviously I don’t think that. Iranians are ready to go to prison, to be killed for dissent, but they’re not ready to pick up weapons.”

“I’ve heard you say many times that change is going to take a long time. Why don’t you just explain both the limits and importance of working within an Islamic context, and be honest about your own frustrations?”

She nodded in assent, and I could tell by the glint in her eyes that she was already honing her thoughts, that I had convinced her. Often she felt she had to respond to my questions with answers—with the solution to a complex, unworkable situation—when all I wanted were her candid thoughts.

We paused for a break mid-morning; Shirin poured us coffee and cut slices of a moist swirl cake with creamy icing and raisins. I asked whether she was still planning to boycott the election, and whether that might not backfire as a strategy. I already knew why she had no intention of voting. The Guardian Council, a powerful, unelected cleri cal body charged with vetting elections and legislation, had intensified its interference in domestic politics, barring many reform-minded candidates from the last parliamentary elections. In this election, it had approved only eight of the thousand people who had applied to
run, and disqualified every single female candidate. Shirin khanoum believed that such interventions in the process rendered Iran’s elections a sham.

“But what about the consequences of not voting at all? Would that not be abandoning the fight, leaving the political theater open to unpopular radicals?” I asked.

“My daughter asked me the same thing,” she said. “They held a debate in her college class, and decided that it’s better to vote, if only to prevent Rafsanjani from being elected by a wide margin.” Almost everyone believed that Rafsanjani would win, and a common concern among liberal Iranians was that he not win with a landslide. They believed he should win in a manner that reflected the ambivalence of the electorate, the fact that he was primarily an alternative to the conservatives. If we all agreed that was important, her daughter had wanted to know, then why was it right for Shirin khanoum not to vote? “Not voting is also right, as an act of civil disobedience. The world is not black and white, and some choices are subjective,” she explained to me. “From my perspective, something may be entirely right, but from yours it will still be wrong. What I happen to think is that by voting, I add another drop to the bucket of the regime’s legitimacy. You, of course, are free to think differently, for it is in this way that we represent different aspects of reality.”

Our discussion about the election drew to a close, and I gathered my things to leave. On the way back to my aunt’s, I reviewed what we had talked about and tried to piece together my thoughts. By instinct, I found myself closer to Shirin khanoum’s daughter’s opinion, inclined to shape the outcome by active choice rather than by abstention. There was something to be said for staving off the greater evil—a position shared by many in Muslim societies. But the clarity of Shirin khanoum’s moral position also resonated with me, and though she had never said so outright, I felt there was a rare dignity in choosing not to vote, particularly in not voting for Rafsanjani, a man who had presided over Iran during an era that had witnessed numerous extra-judicial killings, as attested to by files Shirin khanoum had seen with her own eyes.

If I had lived Shirin’s life, perhaps I too would refuse to vote. Her
work involved daily entanglement with unimaginable evil, and that had shaped her judgment of how best to deal with Iran’s rulers. Earlier that year, when we were in New York working on her memoirs, we sat facing each other in her hotel’s breakfast room, for twelve hours each day, poring over her life. We sorted through the details of cases she had defended, and events in Iran’s history about which she held special, privileged information.

She told me about the hundreds of young people the revolutionary regime executed in the early 1980s, most of them members of the Mojahedin-e Khalgh. This group, which opposed the leaders who had taken power, had targeted top officials for assassination. Many believed that the Mojahedin’s campaign, together with the state’s brutal response, actually enabled the regime to consolidate its power. In the years that followed, survivors and families of victims had sought out Shirin in numbers; she had more information than I could ever have imagined. They told her about how women were raped before execution, a brutality the state justified by its belief that virgins cannot go to hell (a final condemnation these women, they felt, deserved). They told her about how the authorities even forbade relatives from holding funerals for their dead kin. Much of this testimony we did not include in her memoir: we would collaborate again in the future, Shirin told me, and talk about these things “another day.”

But she wandered through the painful memories all the same, recounting the story of her young brother-in-law, who numbered among the executed. The prison wardens used to call his mother and inform her of injuries he had suffered during interrogation—once a broken jaw, another time a fractured arm—so that she could send money for his medical treatment. “What had he done? His only crime was selling newspapers. There wasn’t any law anymore. … People’s lives had become so cheap.” Shirin’s eyes filled with tears. So did mine.

On another of those days in New York, she told me about how the government recruited and trained special teams for assassinating dissidents. “They usually didn’t kill people the same way. Some were killed in car ‘accidents,’ others in fake robberies. … Others were stabbed; some were gunned down. One other method was to inject
them with a drug that would later result in a heart attack, a seemingly natural death.” The assassins, of course, belonged to the Ministry of Intelligence, Mr. X’s employers. That night I had nightmares of being stabbed as I left a meeting with Mr. X, of being chased down dark alleys.

She told me many stories of prison torture, of inmates being blindfolded and led to mock executions. But these did not terrify me as much as her account of Zahra Kazemi, an Iranian-Canadian photo-journalist who died in 2003 of injuries sustained while in police custody. I had heard she had also been raped, but had dismissed it as a rumor. Police rape was Iran circa 1989, not 2003. This was my denial at work, of course. Zahra Kazemi—the holder of a western passport, a resident of North America—could have been me. Shirin had represented the family in court.

“Zahra’s mother visited her in the hospital,” Shirin told me. “She saw her under an oxygen mask, and realized she was being kept alive by machines. She pulled back the sheets and saw dark bruises all over her breasts, her arms, and her thighs.”

I put down my pen, and bit down hard on my tongue, to hold back my tears. We went downstairs, so I could smoke a cigarette on the street outside the hotel.

Since those days, I had come to view Shirin as a repository of the regime’s darkest secrets. Her decision to boycott the election arose partly out of this history, but for most Iranians, the impulse to boycott reflected more prosaic concerns. By 2005, the status quo permitted considerable space for criticism in the cultural sphere. Those who felt the need to comment on their society did so by producing films, becoming activist photographers, and pursuing other cultural endeavors that reflected and commented on the country’s dire reality. Frustrated young people started underground bands like 127 and penned lyrics that ambiguously communicated their despair. Though rock music was still semi-taboo, they often managed to hold small concerts on university campuses or other closed venues. A few years earlier, young people had had no such outlets for artfully expressing the dark, complex reality of their lives. That they were able to do so now made Iran more tolerable. The government denied them many things, but it permitted
them to articulate their deepest selves in ways that actually encouraged their creativity.

It seemed as though Iranians had reached a tacit accommodation with the government over which taboos might be reconsidered. Women novelists dominated the best-seller lists with personal tales of romance and sex, topics that a few years earlier they could not even broach. The government still censored more literary fiction, especially novels by western writers such as Flaubert, but this had resulted in a minor renaissance of literary journalism. Journals and magazines flourished, creating an outlet for accomplished writers to publish essays and criticism and exposing Iranians to international literary figures like Orhan Pamuk and Umberto Eco.

Meanwhile, entrepreneurs with some capital found society ripe for new forms of consumption. Seemingly over night, the ice cream chain store called Ice Pack, which served American-style milk shakes, had established itself across the city. The numbers of Internet providers across the country continued to grow, striving to keep up with a popu lation that despite government censorship used the Internet at astonishing rates (by various accounts, Farsi numbered among the top four languages used in the blogosphere). Bootleggers provided alcohol with unprecedented ease, dispatching cases ordered by callers to their mobile phones. When one of Tehran’s top liquor dealers decided to retire, he sold his mobile phone number for a reported ten million toman, the equivalent of ten thousand dollars.

The last three years of living outside Iran brought 2005’s contrast with the past into sharper focus. Today, it seemed to me, Iranians accustomed to a bland, mullah-controlled existence lacking in entertainment and retail prospect had never faced so much choice. There were more novelties than ever to buy; there was more to watch, more to do. I had never seen so many ads for household products as on this trip, had never seen couples so tranquilly bent close over milk shakes. For the culturally inclined, there were more galleries than ever to attend, more magazines to read, more plays to see. On the whole, it did not amount to a great life, but it was less miserable than before. And for the religious—well, it was their country, after all. They were as pleased as ever with the stability of living under Khomeini’s legacy, in
God’s grace. Scarcely anyone considered this state of affairs precarious, or thought of it as attributable to a set of political variables subject to change. Iran still left so much to be desired in the hearts of its citizens (the acknowledgment of basic human needs for a lawful society, a functional economy, real social and political freedoms) that it occurred to no one to fight for this status quo. Surely what was just decent, the bare minimum, hardly good enough, did not, could not, require upkeep.