Lipstick Jihad (10 page)

My arrival in Tehran had captivated the family's attention for weeks, until I was deposed in relevance by none other than PJ. One day, on a perfectly ordinary summer afternoon, catastrophe struck. PJ was dognapped. He was abducted while waiting in the car for my aunt, who was calling on her cousin in a neighborhood nearby. Probably he was sporting one of his dog accessories, which alerted the potential thief to his owner's excessive devotion. His disappearance both thrilled and devastated the household.

There's a
fatwa
out against poodles, I said the next day over lunch, which was served at precisely the same time each day, when the grandfather clock downstairs chimed noon. What's a
fatwa,
asked Kimia, poking a French fry into ketchup, and painting red circles around her plate. It's like a law, I said. PJ is un-Islamic. Maybe even counterrevolutionary. It was mean, but I couldn't help it. The clerics' hatred for miniature poodles, which they considered bourgeois lapdogs, was one of those ridiculous things about Iran. An aghast ayatollah in the provincial city of Orumieh had even devoted a portion of his Friday sermon to condemning canines. “Happy are those who became martyrs and did not witness the playing with dogs!” he had bellowed, referring to those killed in the war with Iraq, who had luckily been spared the lapdog trend.

Wobbly tears formed in Kimia's eyes, and she fled to her room. Khadijeh Khanoum, who had been instructed to wait on PJ as a “member of the
family,” hid a smile as she cleared the table. That afternoon, Khaleh Zahra, who had, by that time, mastered the skill of throwing money at problems, hired a pet detective to track PJ down. Dognapping, it emerged, was the hot new crime in Tehran. The thieves preyed on thoroughbreds and poodles—the kind of dogs that obviously belonged to women who could afford to indulge their whims—and subsequently held them for ransom, or sold them in the exotic pet bazaar on Molavi Street. To this smelly, loud alley, hopeful owners would come to root out stolen pets amidst monkeys and iguanas.

One lazy afternoon, in that hallowed space between lunch and tea when everyone is meant to be napping and it is exceptionally rude to call people's homes, the phone rang. “We've got the dog,” said a deep male voice. “Oh, well I thank you very much for your help, but we don't want it anymore,” said Pedar Joon. “Don't bother to call again; we won't be changing our minds.” By that point, Kimia was high-strung enough about her nascent social life that she could hear the phone ring from several blocks away, and since it was common practice in our household to listen to each other's conversations, she intercepted Pedar Joon's attempt at exiling the recovered dog. After shadowy negotiations conducted by the pet detective, PJ was returned to our household, and for a few days ignored Kimia in a sullen, Patty Hearst-like manner, but then reverted quickly to his nervous, French-fry guzzling ways.

PJ's recovery, in all its glorious absurdity, revealed a great deal to me. I had suspected the regime's revolutionary Islamic ethos would be floundering. But I hadn't expected that mocking mullahs, long a cultural tradition, had become a national sport. Iranians felt a harsh contempt for the clerics, who had taken over an oil-rich country in the name of Islam, sunk its economy, and now spent their days railing against poodles. As Iranians saw it, the revolution had failed in most of its grand ideals—poverty persisted, the Zionist enemy thrived—and yet the clerics hung onto power, accountable only to God. In a hundred small ways, the bankruptcy of this extreme, Islamic ideology manifested itself in people's lives.

I reeled, not because the chaos of Iran was shocking, but because it was, of all things, terribly foreign. In the twilight hours of those early days, when we gathered in the atrium and played backgammon or cards till it grew dark, I made silent inventory of my conflicting reactions. In private places,
inside homes, I felt perfectly at home as an Iranian. At dinners, I knew the ideal texture and color of
fesenjoon
sauce, a dish of walnut-pomegranate chicken; I could predict the tribal origin of a kilim; I could sing
tarof,
the flowery, elaborate expressions of courtesy native to Persian conversation. In California, these Persian sensibilities had distinguished me as Iranian. But in Iran, in the bosom of homeland, they were tangential, and reached not even a fraction of the savvy required to live in the Islamic Republic.

It was ten A.M. on a day like most, the hour I usually rolled into the BBC office, where I had a desk and often wrote my stories. I spread the newspapers out before me, traded story ideas with the other journalists in the office, and then started making phone calls. Between an analyst and a diplomat, I checked in with a student activist, and then hung up quickly in time for the official news bulletin. Throughout the morning, I tracked the news of Iran from the office, chatting with my sources and planning longer stories on the dissident clergy, the student movement, foreign policy, and social and cultural trends.

After lunch, a few of us piled into a car to drive to Tehran University, for a meeting of student organizers. Someone always stayed in the office, to alert us by mobile phone in case a newspaper was shut down or an intellectual was arrested in our absence. On the way there, I huddled in the passenger seat over my mobile phone, setting up interviews for the rest of the week. It was late afternoon by the time I got back, and editors in New York and Cairo would be at their desks, dispatching reporting assignments and considering story suggestions. The Cairo bureau chief and I conferred over when I should fly to Lebanon, because quickly my duties had expanded to include Iran's neighbors as well.

In all respects, it was a typical day, except for the phone call that came late in the afternoon. A mysterious voice instructed me to show up at a government office near the house the next afternoon. I left the office early that day, and arrived at the appointed time. For about fifteen minutes I waited in a stark office until two men entered and sat behind the metal desk. One of them promptly fell asleep, while the other leaned forward, and began dissecting my past with exquisite politeness. It was my security interview,
required before the Ministry of Culture could officially grant me a press card authorizing me to work. I thought it was a one-time session, but it ended up being the first in a long series of meetings designed initially to ensure I was not a CIA agent, and later to control my reporting and torment me as a person.

Because I had no idea what to expect, and was covered in cold sweat, my rational brain abandoned me, leaving me prey to a scared and impish imagination. I wondered whether they had a folder of grainy black and white photos of me drinking cocktails and eating ham in New York. “Miss Moaveni, was this or was this not you, drinking a mimosa at an unknown location in lower Manhattan?” I imagined the awake one demanding, waving the evidence in the air. Silently I prepared my plea. “It was, Mr. X, a painful but ingenious strategy on my part, of promoting a tolerant image of Islam and Iran in America. I
pretended
to enjoy mimosas to gain the trust of influential Americans, to better enable me to defend Iran by stealth.”

Lost in this imaginary defense, I didn't notice Mr. X had actually asked me a much more mundane question, like, What were you doing in Cairo? As I answered, I could see that he was disappointed in my Farsi, which was too basic for the sophisticated word play of his questions. Do you consider yourself Iranian? What would you do if you were asked to write a story that would damage Iran's reputation in the world? Do your editors change your work? How much influence do you have over your own coverage? Where are your parents? Why aren't they here?

It was fair enough that he was asking these questions. The media shaped public opinion, and politicians and powerful interest groups influenced the media, and it was natural enough to wonder how the mechanics of it worked. But couldn't they try to discover such things in a more subtle way? Couldn't they put some slick intellectual on their payroll, and send him out to ask these questions at a dinner or a conference? This Soviet-style questioning in a bare room seemed so dated and clumsy. And it was less effective, too, because it freaked me out and inclined me to lie.

The barrage of questions lasted for over an hour, and I stumbled through my Farsi to find words like ambivalence, editorial oversight, and spiritual reservation. Searching my Farsi vocabulary didn't take very long, I discovered, because it was tiny, limited to the domain of family gossip. I could have easily explained why someone had married above or beneath themselves,
or whether the stew was seasoned properly, but the articulation of abstract thought was beyond me.

I searched his expression for signs of approval, but he was impassive, scribbling down notes at everything I said, leaving me with no sense of what was interesting or important. I tried to explain how the urge to return to Iran had come to shape my life, and that they shouldn't judge my family—the diaspora, for that matter—unpatriotic simply because circumstance had taken us to America. That I, too, wanted to see Iran strong and thriving, not isolated and imperiled. But the sentences came out wobbly and incomplete, in the language of an insightful but illiterate adolescent. His expression remained blank.

You haven't touched your tea, he said finally, and I obediently raised the cup to my lips. It was flavorless brown water, like all office tea. Finally, several tortured answers later, I saw a flicker of approval pass over his face, and tried to remember what I had just said. I had begun a sentence with “We Iranians think”—not in Iran it's thought, or just Iranians think, but
we
Iranians.

Soon after, he ended the meeting, and I rushed home, clanging the white iron door shut behind me. My unconscious choice of pronoun intrigued me, and just as my interlocutor had, I held it up as proof that my subconscious self considered itself Iranian. But that very night, while speaking English on the phone, I found myself saying “We should . . . ” to make a point about U.S. foreign policy, and realized that my word choice was fickle. In truth, the language I was speaking directed my reference points, invoking a set of experiences and accompanying beliefs particular to an American or an Iranian context. In Farsi, the kitchen-table politics of my childhood rumbled quietly in the back of my mind; in English, the countless tracts of philosophy and political science I had absorbed as a student. Depending on what I did on a given evening, the company I kept and what I ate for dinner, I could spend the night dreaming in either language.

Just a handful of weeks after my arrival in Tehran, a cousin from California came to visit. Daria and I had grown up together in San Jose, and like me, he was convinced he was entirely Iranian. His friends in America included other second-generation children of Latin American and Middle
Eastern immigrants, Latinos and Lebanese, who were born and raised outside their countries of origin, and chose to identify with African-American culture in America. His friends called him Perz, short for Persian. They wore their jeans low on the hips, and listened to hip hop, the anger and alienation in rap music resonating with their own resentment at being the brown-skinned children of immigrants.

When Daria showed up in Tehran, he brought with him an Eminemflavored American attitude toward guns and the streets—cops were bad, the muscle behind a racist system, and people who took their safety into their own hands were good. He noticed the
Basij
on the streets of Tehran, the Islamic vigilante thugs used by the regime to harass people, and concluded they were something akin to the Guardian Angels. He didn't know they were the regime's shock troops. Who would suspect that, really? Why should a regime that had a standing army, and considerable formal police and security forces, also employ a ragged, thug militia whose only purpose was the crude harassment of ordinary people?

One afternoon, Daria strode into Khaleh Farzi's living room, paced back and forth between the wooden columns that held up the high ceilings, and announced he wanted to join the
Basij
. “Those guys have it going
on,”
he said. “I went up to one of them today, and he told me they protect the streets. . . . I'm down with that . . . He was right . . . He said women get harassed . . . That's not cool. . . .”