Lipstick Jihad (39 page)

I was too proud to discuss how excruciating it had become, just getting through the day; how the beating had grafted itself on my consciousness, putting my senses on an exhausting, permanent danger alert. In the full light of day, at the produce market, the rev of a motorcycle engine sent my heart racing so fast I could hardly see.

Covering crowds, the vigils or lectures where confrontations with the
Basij
or the police were inevitable, was like rubbing gravel into an open wound. If a group of people began moving quickly, if a line of police shifted positions, if a
Basiji
raised his voice, I started to run away, my feet driven by raw, lizard-brain reflex. On multiple occasions, covering demonstrations, I sat trembling three blocks away, pestering my friend from the BBC on the mobile phone to tell me what was transpiring. “Don't be silly, Azadeh. Get back here,” he would say. “There's absolutely nothing happening.” But I couldn't. I had seen how you could go from absolutely nothing to having your neck smashed in bare seconds. There was no way to predict when things would spiral out of control. No way to know if that night the
Basij
had been instructed to intimidate or attack. I wasn't sure how to deal with this skittishness. How to forget the cockroaches.

When we saw the wounds of our country
appear on our skins,
we believed each word of the healers.
Our ailments were so many, so deep within us,
that all diagnoses proved false, each remedy useless.
Now do whatever, follow each clue,
accuse whomever, as much as you will,
our bodies are still the same,
our wounds still open.
Now tell us that we should.
you
tell us how to heal these wounds.

—FAIZ AHMED FAIZ

It was September 14, 2001. For three days, I had not budged from a twenty-yard perimeter of my television. A moat of empty water bottles and apple cores surrounded the couch, the single piece of furniture on which I now ate and slept and lived. It was as though a close friend that no one else here knew had been murdered, and suddenly all the nice people in my midst had been transformed into cold monsters, unmoved by death. The phone rang as it usually did, with invitations to dinners and lunches. Life proceeded as normal, though for me time had slowed, and even the tree outside my living room window somehow looked different.

One evening, a youth group organized a candelight vigil for the victims of the attack on the Twin Towers at a square in north Tehran. A decent and varied number of people turned out, the
Basij
attacked, and I, of course, hyperventilated. But the vigil, with its undercurrent of sympathy and openness to America, was just one strand of the Iranian reaction. It was only in the astounding indifference around me that the depth of accumulated resentment of American foreign policy in this region became apparent to me. The fraught, emotionally charged conversations I had in the days that followed left me stricken, but in their course I learned many things. The first was that the U.S. government was viewed as a greedy, heartless
uber
-power in pursuit of domination of the Middle East, indifferent to its civilians.

Reza and I fought heartily. Aren't you going to tell me you're sorry? I asked accusingly, overwhelmed and infinitely sad. Don't you want to ask me whether I have friends in New York, and whether they're okay? Did you know that two of my cousins live in lower Manhattan?

He lit a cigarette carefully and looked away, a flicker of anger passing over his freshly shaven face.

“Don't you care that thousands of people died?” I pressed on. I needed desperately for someone to register that this was tragic. My voice pitched high, and I hated its strident, hysterical tone. “Are you so dehumanized that you can't even feel sympathy for dead office workers?”

“Don't preach to me about dehumanization,” he said.

“Reza,
they jumped out of burning buildings,
” I said.

“Why did no one talk about dehumanization when America armed both Saddam Hussein and the mullahs, and allowed us to bloody each other during eight years of war,” he replied, his arms tightly folded across his chest.

“But these were civilians—” I interjected.

“Civilians!” he snorted. “What about our civilians? Do our lives count for less? There's no outrage in the West when we die, no one talks about civilian deaths, because by now our loss of life is ordinary. What about the Iraqi civilians dying because of sanctions? What about Palestinian kids who get shot in the street running out for candy?”

In all the instances he named, the injury inflicted on civilians was considered to be encouraged or abetted by America, the instigator of sanctions, the ally of Israel. Surely those deaths, the thinking went, could not have been silently facilitated by the United States unless it considered us, people of this region, animals, whose slaughter was less regrettable than that of Americans. It was from this sense of having already been dehumanized, counted for less, that the attitudes around me seemed to come. Understanding the origin of these views depressed me profoundly, because I saw they did not arise from cultural rage, jealousy, powerlessness, or religious hate, all the explanations that emerged to explain why anyone should feel anything other than absolute horror at what happened that day. The heartlessness was political, linked to specific events and places and ways in which America was seen as having behaved cruelly against the civilians of other nations. I saw only a reluctant satisfaction, as though a mirror was finally being held up—now
you
see what it feels like to die, you who have for years reserved death only for us.

Though Iran played no role in Sept. 11, it was, like Iraq and Palestine, contaminated by the fallout. President Bush declared Iran part of an “axis of evil,” which did not bode well at the time, since it was becoming clear that Iraq, our neighbor and fellow axis member, was going to be invaded. The term “axis of evil” sounded funny in English, but in Farsi it struck a bizarrely familiar note: It was ideological and inflammatory, the sort of
phrase a mullah would think up and bellow out during Friday prayer. For years the clerics behaved like madmen, screeching at the Great Satan from their pulpits, and suddenly there was an echo from the other side, someone screeching back in the same tone.

Do you want to throw an “axis of evil”-themed cocktail party in honor of our fresh national relevance? I asked Siamak. I pictured appetizers on skewers, and drinks with red and green food coloring, but he vetoed the idea. The Islamic Republic, of course, could not strike back against George W. Bush's Washington, and instead released its anger at home.

The newspaper headlines, their criticism tempered out of fear of the press court, became inane. Important acts of legislation, like a bill that would have allowed single women to study abroad, landed in the trash bin of a clerical adjudicating body. Being in the axis made reporting thorny, too. Sources were afraid to say anything at all, lest they be dragged before a court for endangering national security. It was as though an unspoken emergency law had gone into effect, terrifying the skittish and silencing the outspoken. It was a divine gift to the hard-liners, who were running out of excuses for their ongoing repressiveness.

The label seemed to signal no policy shift by the Bush administration, which before had refused to deal with Iran and continued to do so. The difference was that now there would be name calling. And so Washington said there should be “regime change” in Iran, but the task would be left to the Iranian people.

In the immediate months that followed, the already painfully slow process toward change ground to a halt. The sorts of organic debate that had been commonplace in 2000—on the role of
sharia
(Islamic law) in society or the degree of social freedom that custom could tolerate—were now muted, or avoided altogether. The country was under attack, said the hard-liners, and everyone needed to band together. Internal conflict would no longer be tolerated. If the ostensible goal of the Bush administration was to promote tolerance and democracy in the Middle East, thereby discouraging militancy and religious extremism, then its policies had neatly produced the opposite effect.

When the world's biggest superpower puts you on its top-three hit list and begins talking about regime change and the possibility of military attacks on nuclear power plants, the national attention span can scarcely focus
on a bill to adjust women's marriage dowry for inflation. I imagined the clerics sitting in Qom, rubbing their hands together with delight, cackling with glee. For two decades, they justified their neglect of Iran in the name of fighting “enemy plots.” Finally, the “enemy” was acting its part.

Many people, including some Iranians, said this was not such a bad thing. That given the failure of the reform movement, American pressure could push Iranian society to look more seriously for another option. Were there an alternative, they might have a point. But there was none. The Shah's son, sitting in Maryland, lunching with congressmen, and waiting for conservatives in Washington to install him as the next president of Iran, was out of the question.

Iranians did not take him seriously. He had no popular following, though lots of people enjoyed tossing his name about, as it made them feel like at least they had an option to reject. One day, if the plates underneath Iran shifted, the regime crumbled down, and the choice came down to a U.S. occupation force (à la Iraq) and Reza Pahlavi, then okay, Iranians would choose him. But it would be a choice of that order. An anti-choice. Like President Khatami.

Admitting there was no alternative to the reform movement deeply disappointed me. A devotion to a secular Iran ran through both sides of my family, and everything I had learned about religion and freedom convinced me secularism was the only way to safeguard people's basic rights. The reformists, in their agenda and its pursuit, were highly flawed, but there was no alternative waiting in the wings—no charismatic student leader with an organized following, no ambitious Boris Yeltsin-type figure who saw personal gain in rocking the system.