Children of Jihad: A Young American's Travels Among the Youth of the Middle East

by Jared Cohen

  The Government [of Iran’s] human rights record remained poor, and deteriorated substantially during the year, despite continuing efforts within society to make the Government accountable for its human rights policies. The Government denied citizens the right to change their government. Systematic abuses included summary executions; disappearances; widespread use of torture and other degrading treatment, reportedly including rape; severe punishments such as stoning and flogging; harsh prison conditions; arbitrary arrest and detention; and prolonged and incommunicado detention.

  As I surfed, I also found that a number of online networking sites were easily accessible, including the site where Pedram had met his girlfriend. I was also able to use online phone services, most notably Skype, which I actually found more useful than my wiretapped cell phone that my “guides” had given me. Many Iranians today are using Skype to practice English and make friends outside of the country. Using this program, users can search for other users from any country they want and actually call them.

  In addition to telephone programs, most online messenger services were available, of which the two most popular were MSN Messenger and Yahoo Messenger. While these messenger services enabled youth to have hundreds of online contacts, I learned that these contacts rarely extend beyond the users’ socioeconomic sphere.

  Young Iranians take full advantage of these opportunities for expression and unfiltered information, and young people in Iran are spending a vast proportion of their free time on the Internet. I was shocked by the number of Internet cafés, and where there was no café, I was even more shocked by just how far some traveled to use one. Internet cafés have actually come to serve as new meeting places for young Iranians.

  As we drove down the poorly lit streets of Tehran, Cirrus explained to me what he and his friends do in the evenings.

  “It depends on the person,” he explained. “But there is something for everyone.” He told me that there are large parties for graduations, birthdays, and other special occasions, but there are also massive house parties. I heard hilarious stories about young people attending Halloween parties dressed as “clerics in the regime.”

  Pedram then chimed in, explaining that the behavior at the parties depends on the hosts, and that while some parties are tame, others feature belligerent drinking, rampant drug use, and promiscuity.

  Cirrus laughed, removing one hand from the steering wheel to punch his friend in the arm, “I just told him that! Were you not listening?” Pedram’s English wasn’t that good and Cirrus liked to make fun of him for “missing things.” Cirrus then told me that at these parties, it is not uncommon to see dancing, games of spin the bottle (called by a different name in Iran), and clothing that makes one instantly forget that one is in an Islamic republic. With these two as guides, I didn’t feel bad about missing the New Years’ parties back in the States.

  But the nature of parties of Iranian youth also depends on the socioeconomic class of those participating. South Tehran is notoriously poorer than the northern part of the city and the youth from these regions tend to be stricter in how they dress, practice religion, and many of them also choose not to drink. But the youth in these largely poorer areas still know how to party. The parties are tamer, but nonetheless defiant of the regime, and take place behind the backs of the morals police. It is important to remember that the very existence of many of these parties violates the laws of the regime.

  Youth in the slums of Iran are far more likely than their wealthier peers to use parties as opportunities to talk about politics and the status of their lives, and for many disadvantaged Iranian youth, parties are the only opportunity they have to express themselves freely and vent to me about their dire situations.

  The underground parties in Iran are only one aspect of social recreation enjoyed by young people living under the harsh conditions. When they are not discussing politics, removing their traditional Muslim attire, or consuming alcohol at parties behind closed doors, Iranian youth gather in cinemas, restaurants, and hotel lobbies. They take day trips to the mountains, attend sports clubs, and meet for gatherings in public parks. Billiard halls are popular evening destinations and usually involve a stop at a local ice cream shop. Coffee shops and flavored-tobacco cafés have become the primary public meeting grounds for boys and girls looking to pass their phone numbers to one another from across the room.

  The morals police do occasionally locate the underground parties and break them up. I heard stories about students getting lashes for either hosting or attending these parties. For young people in Iran, the parties are more than a source of entertainment. They are a forum for expression and a form of resistance. Every drop of alcohol they drink, every hejab that comes off, every beat of Western music they dance to, and every minute of entertainment they enjoy is representative of their rejection of the government in Iran. And it is a collective, if unspoken, effort.

  While many Iranians have been practicing social resistance for years, their acts of defiance have taken on far greater importance than they did in the 1980s and 1990s. When the regime first came into power during the 1979 Islamic Revolution, it had overwhelming support from the Iranian people. The Islamic Revolution was first and foremost a nationalist revolution. Throughout the 1980s, the country fell into an eight-year war against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, keeping the country unified and supportive of the regime under the banner of nationalism. As the war dragged on—mostly at the behest of Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini—the realities of life under the Islamic Republic came to the surface. With the death of Ayatollah Khomeini in 1989, the regime lost its charismatic leader and architect of the Islamic Republic, and his original successor, Grand Ayatollah Ali Montazeri, was a dissenter against the continuation of the war. By this time, Iran’s economy was in shambles, its infrastructure destroyed, and the regime’s efforts to export its Islamic Revolution had been rebuffed at every attempt. What was left was a population that was traumatized by a war that had been raging for nearly decade, a nation suffering under a dire economy, and a population growing tired of waiting for the “better life” promised by the regime since 1979.

  Because of the mass casualties of war and high birth rates, the next generation of Iranian youth emerged as the new majority. With the Iranian voting age set at fifteen, the mid-1990s saw an entirely new majority of young voters who began to express their frustrations with the regime. Unlike their parents, this generation had not lived through the shah’s government. They did not remember the notorious secret police known as the SAVAK; they didn’t remember all of the corruption. What they did know was that the regime they had been born under was failing to meet their needs and seemed unable to provide them with the life they deserved.

  And in 1997 they voted for change and the reformist president Mohammad Khatami won an unexpected yet overwhelming victory. Since the creation of the Islamic Republic in 1979, the country had not seen any leader like Khatami actually win such a high elected office. Throughout the 1980s Iran’s presidents had all been hard-line conservatives. In 1989, Iran saw the ascension of pragmatist president Hojjatoleslam Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, but his promises for economic change and progress proved ineffective and instead revealed more about his corrupt tendencies than any patriotic commitment. Instead of presiding over a recovering economy, Rafsanjani, who was already extremely wealthy when he took office, moved onto the Forbes 400, the list of the wealthiest people in the world.

  President Khatami, however, was of a different breed. He had come to the presidency promising reform, relaxation of restrictions on civil liberties, and economic change. He did not have his predecessor’s history of corruption. He owed his surprise victory over the conservative candidates to the widespread participation of the Iranian youth in the 1997 presidential election. Young Iranians had taken his victory as a green light to embrace what the new president pledged to be new freedoms. In the first years of his presidency, students protested over everything from clothes to censorship. Initially, they gained small v
ictories as Iran became more relaxed than it had been since the days of the shah. For the first few years of Khatami’s presidency, it seemed that the voices of youth were louder than ever. This hope was short-lived.

  In July 1999, more than twenty-five thousand students staged a riot at the University of Tehran after conservative hard-liners shut down a popular reformist newspaper. The response was harsh. Members of Tehran’s police force stormed into the student dormitories and fired on crowds of Iranian students who were chanting, “Khamanei must quit,” and “Ansar-e Hezbollah commits crimes and the leaders back them.” In fact, the worst phase of the crackdown did not come from the police; it came from Ansar-e Hezbollah, the regime’s quasi-official paramilitary organization tasked with punishing those who violate or disrespect the fundamental principles of Islam.

  Within hours, the riots had spread to eight major cities outside of Tehran. In what is cited by Iranians as their version of the Tiananmen Square massacre in China, Ansar-e Hezbollah entered the university, where they undertook a violent suppression of the riots. Numerous students were injured, hundreds were arrested, and one student was even killed. The most demoralizing aspect of this experience was not the crackdown itself, but the response of the reformists on behalf of whom the youth were protesting. President Khatami refused to denounce the violent suppression and instead stood by the regime’s decision. Demonstrating even less support for the people who elected him, President Khatami did not attend that year’s annual opening of the University of Tehran. It was at this point that youth came to see the reformists as just another branch of the conservatives, masquerading under a different name. Following the riots, many young Iranians came to believe that the reformists had simply used them to get elected but had little regard for their interests. These suspicions led many of the youth to see all government factions as one and the same. They viewed the supposed opposition as yet another extension of the theocratic establishment.

  This disenchantment led some young Iranians to dislike the reformist movement more than the conservatives, arguing that at least the conservatives did not provide them with false hope. When I asked one Iranian student in Shiraz what she thought of the reformists, she replied with disgust that “all they have done is get the marriage age raised from nine to thirteen and allow women to wear nail polish. The women were already wearing nail polish, and nobody wants to get married that young anyway!”

  With the reformists virtually eradicated from government and their lack of loyalty exposed, many youth do not believe that there are any officials in the government who can be influenced, nor do they feel that there are any politicians who will protect them if they speak out on their behalf. By the time hard-line conservative Mahmoud Ahmadinejad ascended to the presidency in June 2005, the conservatives could claim a monopoly over all major branches of the government. This left little room for resistance and created a tremendous reach for the government to implement unopposed restrictions.

  While these realities paint a grim future for the prospect of resistance in Iran, it would be inaccurate to suggest that Iranian youth have lost the desire to resist. While students and other young people are less inclined to engage in political protests, their willingness to participate in a passive resistance is paramount. This passive resistance is an underground and widespread social resistance that extends to every echelon of Iranian society. As the passive resistance in Iran presents an increasingly serious challenge to the regime, the leadership has become more and more adept at cracking down on offenders. The regime is under no illusion that it commands widespread support from the people and they recognize that this is unlikely to change in the future. Even so, they are committed to containing the social behavior of the youth. Their strategy is simple: The government of Iran keeps a certain arsenal of social concessions it has made that it will renege on if the population becomes too politically active. The government, for example, has generally looked the other way with regard to the stylish adaptations of the hejab, yet it has not been uncommon for them to tighten restrictions on attire after public protests or riots.

  Cirrus, Pedram, and I arrived at their friend’s house for the party. The house was located on a steep side street in one of the Tehran suburbs. It was a modest middle-class home, decorated with Persian carpets and a few decorations on the walls. The most prominent decoration in the house was the big-screen television, clearly the centerpiece of the house. Many Iranians do not get their news from the state-run television or radio but from CNN, BBC, Voice of America, Radio Israel, and a variety of other channels and radio stations. One of my Iranian friends joked with me that there is no reason to get a color television if you are going to watch Iranian state TV. When I asked why, he said, because “all you need to see is if the turban is black or white.” The state-run television is mostly propaganda spewed by clerics, who wear either a black or white turban depending on whether or not they are descendents of the Prophet.

  The satellite dish may be the biggest antipropaganda tool. The growing prevalence of satellite television is a phenomenon in Iran. Every time I stood on the roof of a building and looked down, there were clusters of dishes. Even in the slums of south Tehran, I saw satellite dishes that were larger than the metal or concrete shacks that people lived in. When I asked young people in the slums how people afforded satellite dishes, they would explain that communities pooled together resources to buy a few dishes for each cluster of houses. Even in the slums of Iran, young people can have access to the hit FOX drama The OC via Italian satellite! The program is undoubtedly risqué: Teens are shown using drugs, having sex, and abusing alcohol. An Iranian friend of mine told me over coffee that he was glad that they were able to get The OC by satellite because he thought it really showed the culture of youth in America. I met so many young people who told me that they watch Voice of America every day to learn English and hear what is going on in the news. They get movie channels, CNN, and BBC. Television watching is often a family affair, as dinner has moved from the dining-room table to tables in front of the big screen. The prevalence of satellite dishes in Iran led me to believe that this was the single most common technology that youth use for information; just about every young person in Iran has access to satellite TV.

  Satellite dishes enter Iran illegally from Iraqi Kurdistan in the west and from the United Arab Emirates across the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman. I actually saw smuggling, although not of satellites, when I was in eastern Iraq. Not far from the Iraq-Iran border, I watched mules make journeys up the switchbacks of mountains with cartons of cigarettes, bottles of alcohol, movies, and noncensored news. I didn’t know it at the time, but apparently these mules also bring satellite dishes over the mountains of Iraq into Iran. In Iran, there are safe houses for the satellite dishes, which, if they can stay open long enough, serve as the distributor in different parts of the country. Black-market agents get dispatched throughout the cities, slums, and even rural communities to bring the satellite dishes and install them. An Iranian student I met in south Tehran told me, “You would never ask them where they got the dish and even if you did, they would never tell you.”

  Despite all of the cloak-and-dagger activity surrounding satellite-dish smuggling in Iran, the prevailing opinion among young people is that the regime itself is responsible for much of the black market business. While not officially taking part in it, mullah entrepreneurs privately run the black markets, or so the rumors go. An Iranian friend of mine in Kashan told me, “You should always know something about Iran: Any kind of illegal and forbidden things which are entered to this country surely have a strong protection by a powerful person. Otherwise they cannot move here.”

  Cirrus introduced me to about fifteen other young Iranians at the house party. Our evening consisted of card games and drinking. After about an hour, we heard a knock at the door. The girls had arrived. None of the girls wore a hejab and all but one of the girls was drinking. The large coats came off as well as the sweaters, revealing rather scantily clothed women
. They were pretty good-looking. The hip-hop music followed and as at any party, the more people drank, the more they danced.

  By four A.M., the party wasn’t slowing down but I was beginning to fall asleep. Cirrus looked over his shoulder from a corner of the room and got everyone’s attention. He raised his cup and said, “Jared, isn’t it your New Year tonight?”

  Startled, I raised my nodding head.

  “Yes,” I replied.

  “We hope you are having a Happy New Year!” he exclaimed rather jubilantly. Others followed suit. I heard from one side of the room, “Welcome to Iran.”

  Not once did I witness any indication that these young Iranians were afraid of getting caught. These parties are important moments for them, giving them a feeling of freedom that they could not express during the day. For Iranians, this was their democracy after dark.

  After-hours activity isn’t limited to house parties. Two days after Cirrus’s house party, I faked my minders and headed out for another evening adventure.

  The streets of Tehran were virtually deserted. Instead of a luminous sky emanating from the lights of a vibrant downtown, the smog from a day of heavy traffic still lingered, and the cold of winter weather sent a chill through the air. In the evenings, there was an ominous calm that always reminded me that Iran is a police state. This atmosphere was not restricted to Tehran; I experienced the same eerie calm in Shiraz, Esfahan, Natanz, Kashan, and Qom. I was not surprised that some of the smaller cities had a quiet nightlife, but Tehran was supposedly the beating heart of Iran.