Then They Came For Me (5 page)

“Are you glad to be back home?” Davood shouted over the noise of the crowds and traffic. Knowing he could charge me twice the normal rate if he found out that I lived abroad, I had told him that I had been visiting Europe on business for a few weeks.

“Yes,” I said, “very much.” The truth was, I had never been so thrilled about being in Tehran. I’d first moved away in 1986, just a few months after graduating from high school, and since
then, I had never wanted to live permanently in the country of my birth. When I left, Iran was six years into the war with Iraq, and all men were required to serve in the military. I didn’t believe in the war, and knew I had to get out of the country. With the help of a smuggler, I snuck into neighboring Pakistan and made my way to Canada, where I studied film and journalism and, while retaining my Iranian citizenship, eventually became a Canadian citizen as well.

Once I’d begun my career as a reporter, I had been spending more and more time in Tehran and had grown to love working there more than anywhere else in the world, but I still felt that the city was not a place where I’d ever choose to settle down. Successive Iranian governments had destroyed many beautiful traditional houses with Persian gardens and had built gaudy, quasi-modern high-rises in their place. The mountains that surround the city trap the smog, and with a population of twelve million people and thousands of cars and motorcycles crowding the streets, Tehran is among the most polluted cities in the world. On the back of Davood’s motorcycle, I could feel the heat of carbon monoxide on my face and taste the diesel fumes on my lips. But as we whizzed between the cars, while young men and women wearing green danced on the sidewalks and in the middle of the streets, I didn’t wish to be anywhere else in the world.

The last time I had witnessed such exhilaration in the city was February 11, 1979, the day of the victory of the Islamic Revolution, when the shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, was removed from power. I was twelve years old and had gone to a demonstration at Tehran University with Maryam. My sister belonged to a generation of young Iranians who grew up learning about such progressive ideas as democracy and human rights, concepts the shah pretended to adhere to, though in truth he believed democracy would only hinder Iran’s move
toward industrial progress and could be allowed only once Iran prospered economically.

During the revolution, Maryam was studying Persian literature at Tehran University and was among the first students who staged strikes and took part in the demonstrations against the shah. Even though our parents did not agree with the idea of revolution itself, deep inside they despised the shah for what he had done to them and their comrades. Therefore, even though they were worried about Maryam’s safety, they quietly encouraged her to take part in the demonstrations and didn’t mind my accompanying her.

That day, as we had walked among the crowds of thousands that had gathered, Maryam began to grow worried. She feared that the demonstrations were going to get violent and said she thought we should go back home. I knew that she wanted to stay and take part, so I asked her to give me money for a taxi and stay behind without me. Of course, I had no intention of going straight home. I used the money to buy a hot dog—food my mother forbade us to eat—and walked home slowly as I ate it.

The whole city felt as if it were on fire. I saw young men in different neighborhoods attack police stations and take the guns they found there. As I got closer to our house, six blocks north of the former U.S. embassy compound, some teenagers were firing celebratory bullets into the air. I asked our neighbor’s son, Gholam Ali, to pass me a pistol. He put me on his shoulders and I shot into the air as well, feeling as powerful as an adult. The shah’s thirty-seven-year dictatorship had finally come to an end. “Tyranny is over,” we chanted. “Death to the shah! Long live Khomeini!”

A few years later, as soon as Khomeini fully secured his grip on power, he ordered the imprisonment and execution of many of the same young men and women who had risked their lives to
bring him to power. Their crimes—often punishable by death—included everything from possessing an “anti-revolutionary” leaflet to plotting against the “holy” government of the Islamic Republic. Gholam Ali, on whose shoulders I’d ridden in 1979, assassinated a government sympathizer in our neighborhood in 1983. He was caught and executed a few days later.

As important as the 1979 Islamic Revolution was in the history of Iran, I knew that the 2009 presidential election could be an even more historic occasion. A few decades ago, this fight would have occurred with guns and Molotov cocktails. This time around, young people were battling it out with posters, pamphlets, and discussions. They were tired of thirty years of the stringent rules of the Islamic Republic, and surely they were angry, but in their joyful faces, and in the air of the city, I also felt a certain sense of patience and a desire for peace. Unlike their fathers’ generation, these young Iranians valued life above violence. They supported Mousavi, but were not ready to die or kill for him. Through the Internet and satellite television, they had learned about the rest of the world. These young Iranians around me wanted simply to express themselves, to exercise their democratic rights, and to live a normal life like other young people around the world.

Davood stopped his bike near where a large group of young men and women were listening to loud music from a stereo on the sidewalk. The music was a medley of Beyoncé, Madonna, the Iranian pop singers Googoosh and Mansour, and the national anthem, “O Iran, O Bejeweled Land.” On any other day, these kids could have been arrested for the crime of disturbing the public morality. But this morning, as hundreds of foreign journalists walked the city covering the preelection campaign, the Iranian government was letting them be. The regime needed to show the world its capacity for tolerance and, even more importantly, needed the young Iranians’ votes in order to preserve its legitimacy.

As we approached the fashionable Sorkheh Bazaar shopping center, I asked Davood to pull over. This center was one of the locations where Tehran’s
bache marouf
—the “it” girls and boys—hung out. In November 2008, the Public Morality Office of the Tehran police had issued an order to all boutiques in Tehran banning the selling of “provocative, decadent Western clothes” such as miniskirts, tank tops, stiletto shoes, low-cut dresses, and shorts. But these items could still quite easily be purchased in the Sorkheh Bazaar. Laws in Iran are not made to be followed; they are made to be broken, albeit as surreptitiously as possible.

I got off Davood’s bike and walked around the bazaar. The shops had not changed much since I was a teenager. I approached a crowd of young men and women. The guys had strange, spiky hairdos and were wearing Tommy Hilfiger and Diesel shirts. The girls were in faux Versace and Gucci head scarves. Their toenails were painted green and blue, and they all wore green wristbands.

I introduced myself and told them I was writing for an American magazine, assuring them that their statements wouldn’t appear in any Iranian media; many people in Iran fear what the government may do to them if they express their opinions freely.

I said that I used to hang out here when I was a teenager. “They used to call us punks,” I told them. “What do they call you these days?”

“Devil worshippers!” a young man named Farzad told me.

“You look more like a member of Backstreet Boys than Judas Priest,” I said jokingly.

“Ahmadinejad and his people don’t need any basis to call you names,” Farzad said.

“They just know we look different, so they call us devil worshippers,” added a young woman named Tina, her messy, highlighted blond hair spilling out from underneath her faux designer scarf.

None of them thought that Ahmadinejad was the right representative for an educated nation like Iran, with a sophisticated ancient civilization at its roots. “How can this monkey be our president?” asked Tina. She pointed to the people nearby. “Look around you. Do you find anyone as ugly as Ahmadinejad? But the fact that he’s ugly wouldn’t matter, if only he were polite.” She then made a face as if she had bitten into a hard lemon. She wore a manteau, a tunic that many Iranian women prefer to the chador, a cloak that covers the whole body. Manteaus are more practical than chadors; while they still conceal the shape of a woman’s body from the gaze of strangers, they are less constricting, allowing greater ease of movement. Like most fashionable Iranian women, Tina had shortened her manteau—which was hot pink—and had stretched it tightly across her body, enhancing her curves.

The Islamic government’s intrusion into every aspect of people’s lives over the last three decades had made apolitical young men and women into political activists. In many countries, even authoritarian ones, young people can parade their vanities on the streets and express their youthful rebellion through fashion, dance, music, and other arts. But in Iran, all of these things are under severe government control. The police can arrest anyone they say looks un-Islamic. A woman who wears too much makeup or shows too much of her hair under her scarf or too much of her body—even an ankle or an elbow—can be punished with hefty fines, lashings, and months of imprisonment. The same rules are applied in dealing with boys with curious haircuts or tight T-shirts.

Members of the morality police stroll the streets looking for people to harass and arrest for these indiscretions. Police officers are assigned to these units only after they demonstrate a certain level of religiosity and ideological devotion to the system, and once chosen, they must go through an indoctrination process about Islamic values and the West’s subversive campaign to corrupt
Iran’s Muslim youth. Even though the morality police are asked by their superiors to avoid physical confrontation, they are ordered to force into submission those who argue with them.

To me, Farzad, Tina, and their friends were not silent victims of the Islamic government’s close-mindedness; they were loud rebels. They risked severe punishment for living the way they wanted to. “You remember Shamlou’s poem?” Farzad asked me. He then recited the Iranian poet Ahmad Shamlou’s lines about the erratic behavior of the Islamic government in the years following the revolution.

Everyone in the group became silent as Farzad repeated the poem’s refrain. “Our parents may have allowed the government thugs to smell their breath,” Farzad said defiantly. “But our generation fights back.”

Before I left the Sorkheh Bazaar, Tina tried to make sure that I would present them correctly in my article.

“Please don’t write that we don’t believe in religion because of the way we’re dressed,” she implored me. “We don’t want to turn Iran into a decadent place like Las Vegas. We love our religion, but we want to have some freedom.”

·   ·   ·

As I thought about the stories the young men and women had told me about trying to lead normal lives under the watchful eyes of the government, I remembered how it had felt to be
young and oppressed in Iran. The long hair and tight jeans I’d worn as a teenager came at a price. My friends and I often had to run away from the members of the local
komiteh
, or “committee.” These committees, which enforced moral values around the country, were separate entities from the Revolutionary Guards, but many of their members were Guards members as well.

I was arrested by committee officers once and, as my punishment, forced to sit down on the sidewalk and have my head shaved. The man who sheared off my hair told me that he hated the European and American tourists who had traveled to Iran in the shah’s time wearing tight jeans or miniskirts. He called all tourists and Western-looking Iranians hippies. “If it were up to me, I would behead all you hippie shah supporters,” he said as he wielded the old-fashioned, broken barber clippers. There was no point arguing with him or telling him that my father had spent many years in the shah’s prisons. Indoctrinated as he was, he saw any kid wearing tight jeans with long hair as a remnant of the shah’s decadence.

Back home, my father announced that he liked my new haircut. “It suits you better,” he said. “I never liked your long hair.” It was only when I told him about the circumstances behind my haircut that he launched into a barrage of insults against the Islamic Republic and how it was trying to shove its ideology down people’s throats. My parents never cared much for my sartorial and musical choices, but they never criticized me. They saw the fact that I wore tight jeans with white socks and Adidas sneakers and listened to Yaz and Depeche Mode as simply my generation’s expression of dissent. And even though they had long since given up on the usefulness of revolutions, my parents appreciated dissent much more than any other parents I knew. Whereas many of my friends were asked by their parents to do whatever they could to avoid incensing the authorities, my father
valued my attempts to live outside the government-enforced norms. As some of our relatives used to say, only half-jokingly: trouble was in my family’s blood, and each member of the Bahari family would get into trouble sooner or later.

·   ·   ·

It was not only the fashionable middle class, like the kids I met in the Sorkheh Bazaar, who supported Mousavi. In dozens of interviews I conducted at different local campaign offices in south Tehran and its poorer suburbs that day, I found that many lower-income people also supported Mousavi for the same reasons the middle class did. Rampant corruption in Ahmadinejad’s government and Iran’s status as an international pariah—that many nations distrusted and feared Iran—were the two main complaints Mousavi supporters had against Ahmadinejad. Both issues touched upon the basic concept of a citizen’s right to determine his or her destiny. Three days before electing their next president, many Iranians thought that it was finally time they had a right as a nation to decide their own future.