I took one of these bridges, the Si-o-se Pol, across the Zayandeh River to Jolfa, commonly known as the Armenian Quarter. Shah Abbas had brought thousands of Armenians from the original town of Jolfa, now on Iran’s northern border, to his capital, Esfahan, where he reasoned that their skills as merchants would be more useful. Their Christian faith was respected. Afghan invaders massacred thousands when they sacked Esfahan and brought down the Safavid dynasty in 1722, but today Jolfa remains predominantly Christian and contains several understated but elegant churches and cathedrals. It’s also home to Esfahan’s trendiest café scene, which was why I was there.
I ordered a tea in a coffee house panelled in dark wood and filled with cigarette smoke and tiny Parisian-style circular tables. Young men and women sat around them, leaning toward each other so that their foreheads were only inches apart as they drank their espressos. Several of the patrons sported white bandages across the bridges of their noses — evidence of recent cosmetic surgery. All the women wore headscarves perched so far back on the top of their heads that it seemed that the fabric would slide onto their necks if they moved suddenly. A stereo blasted Green Day’s “Time of Your Life.”
I hadn’t been seated for more than a few minutes when three young men at a nearby table beckoned me to join them. One, Nasser, a burly veteran of the Iran-Iraq war with a wide, slightly pudgy face and thinning hair, was drinking non-alcoholic beer. He gestured at it almost apologetically.
“It’s no problem for us to get liquor,” he said. “Myself, I like beer, brandy, wine, everything. But it’s illegal. We need to drink it in our homes. Muslims like us sometimes make it ourselves, but we usually come here to get it from the Armenians. They have it smuggled over the mountains from Kurdistan. We drink in our homes, but sometimes it’s nice to get together with friends at a coffee house like this. I like this place. Half the people here are Christians, half Muslims. We’re all together.
“But you know,” he continued, “ten years ago this wouldn’t be possible — men and women sitting side by side and smoking so late at night. The police would harass us. Change is coming. Slowly. Our best parties are still private ones. Sometimes I’ll have one in my apartment. There is a lot of music and dancing. My neighbour calls the police but it’s not a problem.” He rubbed his thumb and finger together to indicate a bribe. “I give them something and they go away.”
Nasser invited me to the apartment of his uncle, Farouk, who lived nearby. We picked up some ground beef kebabs and chicken wings dressed with onions, bitter herbs, and yoghurt from a street-side shop that blasted pulsating Persian dance music from its open windows.
“Should we get something to drink?” I asked Nasser.
“My uncle will take care of that.”
We climbed the stairs to Farouk’s apartment. A neatly dressed elderly man with walnut-coloured skin and a sad and gentle face opened the door. His expression lit up when he saw Nasser. Farouk embraced him and, after the briefest explanation of who I was, hugged me, too.
“Come in, come in,” he said.
Farouk’s shelves were lined with books of poetry and philosophy. He had written several himself, but they were all unpublished. He was a committed leftist and had clashed with the Islamic Republic since its foundation. It landed him in jail several times. Now a white-haired septuagenarian, he was mostly left alone.
“Do you believe in God?” Farouk asked me.
“Yes.”
“You shouldn’t. Religion is a racket.”
Nasser spread the food we had bought on the kitchen table, while Farouk went to his fridge and retrieved two large pop bottles. One was filled with smuggled Kurdish moonshine. The other looked as though it contained Coke. The label had the same familiar red background and white script. But Iran’s ruling clerics periodically tie themselves in knots because of Coca-Cola’s supposed connections to the governments of Israel and the United States. So instead of Coke, we were drinking Mecca-Cola, the founder of which, a French Muslim entrepreneur named Tawfiq Mathlouthi, launched the brand with the claim that it would contribute to the “fight against American imperialism and the fascism of the Zionist entity.” A small message on the bottle asked that drinkers avoid mixing the cola with alcohol.
Farouk poured some of the smuggled moonshine, which smelled and tasted like paint thinner when consumed straight-up, into each of our glasses and added the Mecca-Cola. We worked our way through both bottles over the course of the evening — the booze and the anti-Zionist soda. Farouk preferred to talk about religion and poetry. His favourite poet, appropriately enough, was the fourteenth century Persian icon, Hafez, who wrote odes to earthly pleasures and who mocked the hypocrisy of self-declared guardians of virtue. A painting on Farouk’s wall depicted a drinking party celebrated in verse by Hafez.
Farouk also made me memorize, in Farsi, the lyrics of a traditional Persian nomad’s song. Years later I can still remember the translation of its repeated chorus: “Spring is coming/The flowers are here/I am going to the desert.”
“It’s about hope,” Farouk said. “It’s about believing that all winters end and that dry earth will bloom again.”
Nasser’s politics were less subtle. He became more animated as the evening progressed. He desperately wanted an end to Islamic rule in Iran but rejected the idea of an invasion or of any sort of outside interference to achieve this end. “If people have problems with their government, it is up to them to change it. If the Americans come here, I will fight them.”
Nasser paused and clenched his jaw, slicing at the air with an open palm. His rising frustration was evident before he continued.
“But they must go, the mullahs. They must go. I don’t know how. Maybe we will have another people’s revolution. I think our spirit is like that of France. A French democracy is best for us.”
Sometime after midnight, Farouk shuffled from the kitchen into the living room, his slippers slapping on the tile floor. He looked back and beckoned us to follow before turning on his illegal satellite television and flipping through the channels until he found one showing pornography. He sighed, sank into his chair, and raised a glass to his lips.
“All men and all women are like that,” he said. “There is something of an animal in them. They desire each other like they need food and sleep. It’s normal.”
In truth, though, I don’t think Farouk cared one way or the other about the mechanically coupling bodies on screen. He barely looked at them. I think he simply wanted to demonstrate his disdain for the Muslim theocracy that had been running his country for the last three decades, and getting drunk on moonshine and Mecca-Cola while watching porn was a neat and tidy way of accomplishing this.
“I am seventy-one years old,” Farouk said. “All my life I have been lucky to continue learning as if I were a young man. If you don’t learn, if you don’t continue to learn, you are frozen. They mullahs are frozen. They are trapped 1,400 years ago.”
I left a short while later. Farouk took one of the paintings off his wall and pressed it into my hands as I walked out the door with Nasser.
By now it was very late, and most of the streets were deserted. On our way back to the cheap guesthouse where I slept, we passed by the Kjaju bridge, another architectural gem. Candlelight was glowing from beneath its vaulted arches, where a group of middle-aged men had gathered to take advantage of its acoustics. One played a flute. Another earnestly belted out the lyrics of a song by Googoosh, an Iranian pop singer and actress who was silenced by the Islamic Republic’s ban on female performers for twenty years before she finally left the country in 2000. She’s sung for enormous crowds in Europe, the United States, and Canada. But her fame never diminished in Iran. Earlier that evening Nasser had played for me a bootlegged video of Googoosh performing in Toronto.
The men beneath the bridge were scruffily dressed but sober. “Of all the men in the world,” one sang, “you’re the one for me.”
Iran’s double life was a strange and sometimes intoxicating thing to e
xperience. Everywhere there seemed to be a visible chasm between the government’s official slogans and restrictions, and how its citizens wanted to live. It was evident in the simple act of a woman removing her headscarf the moment she stepped indoors; in the Muslim teenagers who held hands in an Armenian coffee shop; in the hidden satellite dishes, the alcohol, the over-the-top hospitality.
It was also apparent in the city of Shiraz, where, despite the poisonous anti-Semitic rhetoric of Iran’s government, there is a large community of Jews. There are more Jews in Iran than any country in the Middle East outside of Israel. And while some have been the targets of trumped-up charges of spying for Israel, most are integrated into the wider community. They have, after all, been in Iran for some 2,500 years. When I asked a carpet seller on Shiraz’s main street if any of his colleagues were Jewish, he pointed to three or four fellow merchants within shouting distance. I asked a cab driver in mangled Persian to take me to the “Jewish church,” and he easily found the nearest synagogue. Worshippers there were a little wary when I showed up, and our lack of a common language made communication difficult, but I was encouraged by the synagogue’s existence and the apparent lack of security around it.
That might not seem like much. And it’s also worth noting the horrendous treatment suffered by practitioners of the Bahá’í faith in Iran. Still, the bigotry of the Iranian government doesn’t appear to be widely reflected in its citizens. In this, as in so many things in Iran, there is a disconnect between those in power and those they rule.
In a small village near Mahabad, in the Kurdish region of Iran, I attended the wedding of a friend’s friend that was a riot of energy and joy. Women wearing beautiful, brightly coloured dresses and no headscarves danced hand-in-hand with men to form a line moving in a counter-clockwise circle, while a band of horns and strings drove a furious beat. A sinewy, white-haired man stood in the centre of the dancers and sang into a microphone, working praises to everyone present into his lyrics. Guests encouraged him by slipping a bill into his hand while whispering their names in his ear. The man leading the dancers spun a handkerchief above his head, inadvertently knocking blossoms from the branches of an overhanging tree that fell amongst the dancers like confetti. Exhausted, I stepped out from the line of dancers and found a friend watching on the sidelines.
“We Kurds dance together,” he said. “It causes some problems with the Islamic people, but I don’t care. We Kurds are Muslims, too. But Islam isn’t telling women to cover their faces. We don’t do that.”
A Kurdish wedding near Mahabad, Iran.
The bride and groom.
Still, I knew there was another side of Iran. Someone, after all, was painting slogans on city walls demanding that immodestly dressed women be murdered. I wasn’t naïve enough to believe that the entire country consisted of closet liberals. The Islamic Republic had persisted for twenty-five years by the time I got there. It had its supporters. I wanted to talk to them.
Ali, a man I had gotten to know at the guesthouse where I stayed in Esfahan, seemed like a promising candidate. He had a sad face and an eye that looked as if his pupil was leaking into his iris. His beard was thick, black, and long, in a style that I tended to associate with Islamists. I asked him to take me to some of the mosques and madrassahs in the city. We had barely left the guesthouse when, unprompted, he dove into politics. I had misjudged him.
“Religion and government should not be together,” he said. “Most of us feel this way. But the government doesn’t want what the people want. Iran today is like Europe of the Renaissance. We want to become secular. It’s happening, but slowly. Very slowly. I think if we can change slowly, bit by bit, we can do it without conflict.”
We were entering the tightly-packed streets of Esfahan’s old city. “Come on,” he said. “I’ll take you to a religious teaching centre and we’ll talk to some mullahs. They don’t like to be called mullahs there. They think it makes them sound like Osama bin Laden. But there really isn’t much difference.”
We spent the afternoon in a madrassah. A mullah named Mohammad greeted us. He had a boyish face and only the tiniest of wrinkles around the corners of his eyes. He seemed happy to have a guest from the West at the madrassah and motioned for us to follow him through its courtyard. In shaded spaces, under low, vaulted roofs, mullahs sat with their students cross-legged in front of them, books scattered and opened amongst them. Mohammad found us a deserted corner and sent one of his students to bring us tea.
“The Quran gives us guidance for all parts of our lives — culture, science, family — so it is natural for religion to be part of government,” he said. “The two are connected.”
One of the students, Hussein, invited us up to his quarters. We climbed a steep and narrow staircase to his room, the white walls of which were bare except for loaded bookshelves and a photograph of Hussein when he was a boy. There was a loft sunk into the wall about six feet off the floor, where Hussein slept. He was twenty years old and said he would stay and study at the madrassah for another twelve years. “I want to spend all the days I am given promoting Islam — in a mosque or school. It’s all part of the same life.”
Hussein was now fiddling with a butane burner on the floor of his room, near the balcony where it was safe to have gas and flame. He got it lit and began boiling water for tea. Through the window I could see the madrassah courtyard below. Poplar trees grew through square holes cut in the courtyard floor. Their leaves seemed to shimmer when a breeze gusted through them. Hussein wanted to talk about Christianity.
“Do people in Canada know that we Muslims respect Jesus?” he asked.
“I’m not sure,” I said.
“Why did Jesus die?”
“I’m not really a religious expert.”
“But you must know.”
Hussein was adding hot water to an extra-concentrated brew of tea to make it more drinkable and handed me a small, bulbous glass already thick with sugar.
“Christians believe he died to take away men’s sins, so they can go to heaven,” I said.
Hussein wet his upper lip with his tongue before bringing the scalding liquid to his mouth. He winced, swallowed, and whistled air through pursed lips.
“Is it true that the three wise men came from Iran?” Hussein asked.
“Yes.”
Later that evening, I sat with Ali in a teahouse and ate abgusht, a lamb stew served in the clay pot in which it was baked.
“You have to admit they were welcoming,” I said to Ali.
He snorted. I tried to change the topic. “It’s hard to believe that Mohammad guy is a mullah. He looks like he’s still a teenager.”
“Of course he looks young,” said Ali. “Mullahs never do any work.”
We talked a bit about Canada. Ali had friends and distant relatives who had emigrated. “I hear the temperature can get to forty degrees below zero,” he said. “How can anyone live there?”
Ali continued talking before I could answer.
“Never mind. Your country is a paradise compared to this one.”
I left Esfahan and travelled south to Shiraz, and from there to the ancient Persian capital of Persepolis. Here, a local historian with the improbably appropriate name of Darius guided me through its glorious and sadly deserted ruins. Persepolis’s stone stairways and walls are still covered with ancient carvings depicting messengers from the far corners of the Persian Empire — from Ethiopia to Kandahar — arriving to pay tribute to King Darius during Nowruz, the Persian New Year. Elsewhere in the Middle East I had sought out or, in Afghanistan, simply stumbled across places that had been marked by Alexander as he conquered so much of the known world before he was thirty-three years old. It was always a thrill. Alexander had fascinated me since I was a boy. He was a military genius who tried to merge the cultures of East and West. But his destruction of such a magnificent city was a crime. Visiting it was a wistful experience.
That night I received an email message from an Iranian I’ll call Amir. We had
spoken many times before my trip to Iran. I was hoping he could arrange for me to interview democratic dissidents in Iran. I liked Amir, and he was always forthcoming, but our conversations were inconclusive as far as him putting me in touch with anyone. He later told me he wasn’t initially sure he could trust me. Midway through my trip, he decided to take the risk.
“You need to get back to Tehran,” Amir wrote. “There are some people I want you to meet.”
Six
Resistance
When Zahra Kazemi was a young nursing student in Shiraz, in the years before the Islamic Revolution toppled the Iranian monarchy, the shah of Iran came to visit her school. All the students were expected to turn out to greet him, but two refused. Kazemi was one of them.
“She got in big trouble for that,” her son, Stephan Hachemi, told me some three decades later.
Kazemi was never the sort to defer to authority, he said. She challenged others. She challenged herself. Kazemi left Iran in 1974 at the age of twenty-four and later, in 1993, moved to Canada, settling in Montreal as a single mother. “It wasn’t easy,” said Hachemi. “But she was a strong woman, even though she had modest resources.”
Kazemi, known to her friends as Ziba, began working as a freelance photographer. Her personality hadn’t changed much since her student days when she snubbed the shah. She wasn’t interested in politicians or other powerful people and didn’t feature them in her work. What mattered to Kazemi were those who are often forgotten and overlooked: the poor; women in Islamic countries; children everywhere. She travelled throughout the developing world, usually selling her photographs to Recto Verso, a small Montreal magazine whose fees did not come close to covering her costs. That didn’t bother her. Travelling on a budget allowed her to get closer to the people she was photographing. The money was an afterthought.
Is This Your First War? Page 11