The Ministry of Guidance Invites You to Not Stay: An American Family in Iran (17 page)

Our cable, excuse me,
satellite
guy took an immediate liking to Khash, who played with him on the little terrace outside our living room in his brand-new
ro-ro-ak
, a child’s rolling walker, while the technician smoked and tut-tutted to me about the miserable state of the economy. He’d disappear onto the roof from time to time, claiming he had to adjust the satellite dish, but I suspect he was just taking the opportunity to waste time and perhaps make a few phone calls on one of the two cell phones he carried. He was curious, though, about this family from New York who had decided to live in Iran, and his friendliness and familiarity almost made me think he’d ask to stay for dinner, although I knew an Iranian could never be so bold.

Our building, like many others in Tehran, actually already had a couple of satellite dishes on the roof, and all he had to do was connect one to our TV. But in the hours that seemed to take, he told me everything about his family, asked everything about mine, and complained about his life—the life of a tradesman whose trade is illegal. “Just on the drive here,” he said, “I was stuck on Modaress [highway], and a motorcycle drove up, and the driver peered at my electronic equipment in the backseat. So he was a Basij, I figured, but what the hell is their problem? I mean, he wants to harass me? What, am I not supposed to work? Why, is it my problem that everyone wants foreign TV? Go fix Iranian TV, and then I won’t be necessary!”

He went on and on about the government, about the media, and about the Gasht-e Ershad patrols, which were much more widespread in 2011 than ever before. “And they harass women for bad hijab?” he said. “Bad TV and bad hijab. Like our country doesn’t have other problems. What is this place coming to? You’re lucky you’re only here for a while, but god knows why you’re here at all, when you
could be in New York of all places.
New York!
” He left a cell phone number when he finished, and I suspected he wanted me to call, but our satellite always seem to work, and I never did.

The Gasht-e Ershad he complained about, as so many other Iranians did, even very religious ones, had always been somewhat invisible to me in my previous, much shorter visits to Iran. Recognizing them by the minivans they drive and their patrol car escorts, I had seen them only occasionally, and no one I knew thought of them as much more than a minor annoyance. Their job, of course, is to stop women who are
mal
-veiled (a wonderful and purely Iranian term). They also stop men who are inappropriately dressed and groomed, but their primary targets are women. Often they will only issue a warning, but they can also haul their victims away to a police station, where the offending woman must pay a fine and promise to never dress that way ever again. Like all Iranians, I’ve had friends and family picked up in the past and family members stopped while driving, but the frequency of the morality squad patrols decreased significantly during President Khatami’s terms in office, picked up under Ahmadinejad’s first term, and then significantly increased in the past two years. While the squads—overseen by the national police—are most visible at the start of spring, when the weather turns warmer and heavier coats and scarves are shed, in 2011 the seventy thousand men and women assigned to the
gasht
were a ubiquitous presence on Tehran streets, especially in North Tehran, no matter the weather. (While we were staying downtown, we didn’t see any patrols, and given that we were in a religious and conservative neighborhood, south of Vanak Square—the unofficial line dividing North Tehran from downtown and points south—the cops would have had little to do there.)

It probably didn’t help that Ahmadinejad had come out publicly
against
the morality patrols, for it seemed that in his later years as president and because of his tiff with the clerical leadership—and his big sulk of 2011—everything he was against, at least from a social and
religious aspect, the authorities were
for
. While we were in Tehran, he complained that the morality squads harassed the youth unnecessarily and argued that, aside from the issue of hijab, the state shouldn’t care if boys and girls hung out together, something the patrols were also on the lookout for. Music to the ears of the very people who voted against him in 2009, but no one was under any illusion that he could change things. In fact, I suggested to friends, if Ahmadinejad really wanted to stop the harassment of women and the youth, he’d come out and say there wasn’t
enough
of it, for if he did, the authorities would doubtless relax their efforts just to spite him. He undeniably knew that his proclamations on what is or isn’t acceptable in Islam would be ignored—as they were when, after he was first elected, he pronounced female spectators at soccer stadiums to be
halal
(kosher, in Islam)—and might even promote a backlash by the clerics and a redoubled effort to remind him of his lay status.

His opinions on the morality police and the strict separation of the sexes were perhaps a cynical attempt to ingratiate himself with the more secular-minded segment of the public and future young voters who might give him, along with his base of poorer rural voters, a platform to be relevant in politics once his second and final term ended in 2013. Few were buying it. Even his publicly stated opinion that Messrs. Mousavi and Karroubi—his two challengers in the 2009 presidential poll, who were now under house arrest in Tehran—should be freed barely registered among those who despised him, perhaps because they knew that if he meant it, he could at least engage in another big sulk to try to force the issue, and maybe he’d even get away with it this time.

So the Gasht-e Ershad continued their rounds, and remarkably, Iranians continued to defy them, as they always have. They refused to adjust their attire to the preference of the state, and, as I witnessed, heatedly argued with the chador-clad policewomen who stopped them, unwilling to be intimidated. Some women even put up a
fight—literally, as evidenced in the many videos posted to YouTube, which, as expected, is filtered by the Iranian ISPs. Not that that would ever stop Iranians from using it. For Iranians, after all, the autocratic system—extant from the time of shahs and viziers—is plainly there simply to be defeated.

7
A FUNNY THING HAPPENED ON THE WAY TO THE REVOLUTION

During my prior visits to the Islamic Republic, Tehran’s zealous morality squad had never directly affected me, and I hadn’t thought that the men in green berets and fatigues and the women in full black chadors, only their disapproving and scolding eyes visible, would be relevant even if I traveled to Iran with my wife. Despite their presence, the revolution had surely matured, and the wearing of the hijab couldn’t possibly be taken quite as seriously, or literally, as it once was, could it? Karri had always said that if she ever went to Iran, she would be happy to abide by the Shia Iranian concept of sartorial decorum, but she had seen films and photographs of scantily hijab-ed women, and her idea, and mine, of what was fully acceptable was actually a little too optimistic, especially in 2011.

A few days after we moved into our apartment off Saadabad Street (renamed Ayatollah Maleki Street after the revolution but still referred to as Saadabad), we were walking on Vali Asr near Tajrish Square when we came upon the Gasht-e Ershad, their van and patrol car parked in front of Ladan, a famous patisserie. The women officers were busy pulling young women aside for questioning, but as we walked by, one of the men, a dour-looking fellow who seemed to
be doing his best to appear menacing, gestured to me as he caught my eye.

I stopped and tried to act surprised, asking if it was me he wanted to talk to. I was pushing a baby stroller, after all, and Karri, Khash, and I were the most unlikely of candidates to be targeted by the morality police.

“Yes,” he said firmly. “Is that your wife?”

I replied in the affirmative, adding that the baby was my son.

“Her manteau is too short,” he said.

It was close to 100 degrees, and Karri, like many Iranian women, was not wearing a manteau at all, but rather a loose-fitting cotton shirt over a tank top, one that covered her posterior but not most of her thighs. Those were, however, covered by her jeans, for skirts are a big no-no in Iran unless they’re long enough to cover the ankles, in which case one might as well go for the chador.

Before we left for Iran, Karri had scrutinized images of Iranian women on the Web and some days had returned home with shopping bags full of what she thought might pass for manteaus, holding them up for me and asking my opinion. They were inexpensive long cotton shirts that looked fine to me; plenty of young Iranian girls appeared to be wearing them on the streets, at least based on my own observation and the numerous photos on the Web. Since we arrived, we had seen similar ones in shops in Tehran, though not in proper manteau shops, which specialized in the heavier, more concealing tops that my cousins, but not their daughters, wore.

“I’m sorry,” I said, “but she’s
farangi
, a foreigner.”

“It doesn’t matter,” he said sternly. “Tell her to cover up.”

Karri’s blond hair, meanwhile, was more than peeking out from under her very loosely wrapped scarf, but that didn’t seem to trouble the officer, or at least he didn’t mention it.

“I tell her all the time,” I said, in a feeble attempt at humor, “but you know women.”

“Just a warning this time,” he said, unsmiling and without a hint of emotion. “Tell her to cover up.”

Karri was furious. It was ridiculous, she said, that in the summer weather these men were deciding what a woman should wear—especially a Western woman who hadn’t been raised in a culture where covering oneself completely was common among some women in every family, of every class. “I don’t care if I get arrested,” she said to me defiantly. Before we arrived, the idea of having to wear a scarf hadn’t bothered her, but then she actually had to wear one every day in stifling heat and had to deal with it falling off her head every time she lifted Khash, played with him in the park, or bent down to pick something up, which happened numerous times a day.

From then on, though, we watched for the Gasht patrols, which could be spotted from a distance, and either crossed the street to avoid them or spiffed ourselves up as we walked by. (Like many of her Iranian sisters, Karri was far less intimidated by the patrols than I was.) We lived only a hundred yards or so up the hill from Tajrish Square, a busy traffic circle that seemed to be a permanent location for one or more patrols, even during winter snowstorms, and while walking down the hill, we could easily spot the green-and-white vans and patrol cars.

Karri was stopped another time, alone with Khash, as she walked through the square on her way home. Again, a male officer gestured for her to approach him, and she simply yelled, “No Farsi!,” even though she understood well enough. He kept pointing to her scarf and manteau and saying something while the women officers yelled at him to give it up. “
Khareji-e!
”—“She’s a foreigner!”—they shouted back at him, she told me, and “
Velesh kon!
”—“Leave her alone!” He finally did give up, throwing his arms in the air and getting into his squad car, probably more convinced than ever that foreign women were a bad influence on all the girls, not just the scofflaw
duffis
and
fenches
, of the Islamic Republic.

The days went by quickly once we had our own place and settled into our routine. We were indeed settled in Tehran, or as much as one might be, knowing that it was not a permanent condition. We had what we needed to live as middle-class or upper-middle-class Iranians do, except, in a city geographically much like Los Angeles, perhaps a car: we had satellite television, not-so-high-speed wireless Internet, a DVD supplier, a couple of good sources of liquor, a cell phone each (both with the Tehran emergency number, 115, stored in case in an actual emergency we accidentally dialed 911), bank debit cards, and an apartment that was small but comfortable.

Our building even boasted a swimming pool in the basement, which had to be reserved in advance for use, for although it was large enough to accommodate multiple families, the building owner could not risk allowing unrelated men and women to cavort there, let alone cavort together unveiled, as the sexes are not permitted to mingle on the beaches or in any public space. That is certainly why it was built in a basement in the first place—so no stray eyes could fall on it, through a window or a crack in the wall. Karri at first thought the segregated swimming hours and windowless pool amusing but annoying, yet she soon got used to having the whole pool to herself and Khash. (In the heat of the long summer, the Islamic restrictions on life in Iran were an outright nuisance, since the same pool outdoors would not only have been a luxury that made Tehran far more bearable, but would also have provided a form of relaxed entertainment where it scarcely existed.) But as the cooler months were upon us—we even had a surprise October snow—the heated pool in the basement, even without windows, became more and more attractive a proposition for wasting an afternoon.