by Hooman Majd
This immigrant is no radical: from my conversations with him I discovered that he believes in America, at least the America of his dreams; it’s an America he’ll one day make enough money in to bring his family to and an America where he, and his children, will have opportunities denied them in his native Egypt. An America where he can say what he wants, and do what he wants, even though he believes his religion (and he’s deeply religious) is under attack in some quarters. “I really like that man,” he told me that same day, referring to President Ahmadinejad, enemy of America in the day’s newspapers, and if our government was to be believed. But Ahmadinejad spoke to him in a language he understood—a simple language stripped of any elitism—and his message reverberated around the Islamic world, even if that world was in Queens, New York, where the vendor retired every night to a small shared apartment. It was a message of hope for many Muslims from the Third World, hope that they could guide their own destiny wherever they were. The Holocaust, incidentally, has always held little meaning to most of these Muslims who grew up with neither the benefit of a history lesson on it nor a sense of collective guilt. But of course Israel, to them the product of a war among Christians, does hold great meaning. And men like Ahmadinejad know it. But what Ahmadinejad knew better from the start of his presidency than many other Middle Eastern politicians was that the promise of his beloved Islamic Revolution, in the wake of war, corrupt leadership in the region, and declining American prestige, could hold sway even over men like the Sunni Egyptian kebab vendor in lower Manhattan.
In late August 2006, a week after the cease-fire in Lebanon, and a week after President Bush simply declared Israel’s victory over Hezbollah without a hint of irony, I happened to mention Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah during a brief conversation with the vendor, who had asked me a probing question about Shiism (presuming that I, to him a good Muslim—a notion I did not disabuse him of—would know). It was probably the first time in his life he had wondered about a sect that some Sunnis consider heretical, and when I mentioned Nasrallah, he held his hand up, signaling me to stop. I paused as he brought his hand to his chest. “When you mention his name,” he said, “I get emotional, I feel tears coming; I’m sorry.” I looked at him, somewhat surprised to see that his eyes were already moist. He then turned to sell a Snapple to a woman with a worried, no, nervous, look on her face, and then turned back to me and wiped his eyes with his fingers. “He is something!” he said. A Sunni man in tears of love and joy over a Shia cleric, a cleric whose power is a product of Iranian nurturing, had been, I thought, an impossibility until that day.
If we cannot understand the depth of feeling in the Muslim world toward Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood, and Islam as a political force, then we will be doomed to failure in every encounter we have with that world. True, the secular and intellectual classes we most come into contact with from that world are much like us, and often they would like us to believe that their countrymen would like to be too, but they make up a small percentage of the Muslim population on the planet and spend as little time with those who are in the majority of their countries as we do. But Iran and its Islamic society (or even Islamic democracy) are the adversarial powers we have to face in the coming years, and to understand Iran, we have to understand Iranians. Who are the Iranians? What is the Iranian mind-set, and, perhaps more important, what moves it? And what happened to Iranians like Fuad, including some thirty thousand other Iranian Jews who, unlike him, stayed in Iran and now make up its middle and intellectual classes?
Whether in exile abroad or inside Iran, Iranians rarely seem to behave the way we expect them to, and Iranian diplomacy and foreign policy have in recent years run circles around their Western counterparts. Iran is at the center of the United States’, if not the world’s, attention today, partly because of its nuclear program and the Bush administration’s labeling of it as an enemy (and part of the “axis of evil”) and partly because Iran’s power and influence, in the wake of the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Lebanon, have grown exponentially just as U.S. power and influence seem to be on the wane. It is important to understand Iran and Iranians, because American and Western conflict with Iran, armed or otherwise, is unlikely to abate in the next few years, and Iran will have the ability, as it surely does now, to directly affect all Americans through its vast oil reserves as well as its ability to stall, as it has now, American vital interests in a strategically vital region.
Iran today, despite what many Westerners think, bears very little resemblance to the Iran of the Khomeini years. And yet the Iran that Khomeini made famous, to many an Iran that had taken one giant leap backward, was always there, and probably always will be. Other than what we hear of Ahmadinejad, fundamentalist Islam, and Iran’s nuclear ambitions, what seems to be the most popular picture of Iran, one that appears in the media and on book jackets, is women in chadors, or at least in some form of mandatory hijab. It is understandable that Westerners should focus so often on Islamic dress as a symbol of oppression in countries such as Iran, Saudi Arabia, or the Afghanistan of the Taliban, whether it be for reasons of feminist outrage or the more subtle (and perhaps subconscious) colonialist notion of “white men saving brown women from brown men,” to borrow Professor Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s expression (in her description of the much earlier British abolition of the sati in India, the Hindu practice of a woman immolating herself on her husband’s funeral pyre).
But let me tell you a story about hijab. The last Shah’s father, Reza Shah, made the chador for women and the turban for men illegal in the mid-1930s: he wanted, fascist that he was (and he was a quite proud fascist—an open admirer of the Third Reich), to emulate Turkey’s Kemal Atatürk, who not only had banned the fez and the veil but had even changed the Turkish script from Arabic to Latin, rendering the vast majority of Turks illiterate overnight, to force his people into a modern, which he saw as European, world. As we’ve often heard, during the early days of the Islamic Revolution women were harassed and sometimes beaten and imprisoned for not wearing proper hijab, but the exact same thing, for opposite reasons, occurred on the streets of Tehran less than fifty years earlier. In the 1930s, women had their chadors forcibly removed from their heads if they dared wear them, and were sometimes beaten as well if they resisted. Of course, back then the vast majority of women in Iran could not imagine leaving the house without the chador, so the effect was perhaps even more dramatic than Khomeini’s subsequent enforcement of the hijab.
My grandfather Kazem Assar was a professor (who also happened to be an Ayatollah) who taught Islamic philosophy at the University of Tehran and was one of the foremost scholars of the great twelfth-century Sufi philosopher Sohravardi and the “School of Illumination.” He decided immediately that he preferred not to leave the house rather than to appear in public without his turban, so his students, some of whom would go on to become Ayatollahs themselves, simply moved their classroom to his house and he continued teaching as if nothing had changed. (This act of civil disobedience did not go unnoticed by the Shah, who sent emissaries to my grandfather’s door to try to persuade him, unsuccessfully as it happened, to return to the university campus.) My grandmother, meanwhile, was in despair. A very religious woman who spent almost every waking minute of the last years of her life reading the Koran or praying, but who nonetheless led a very social life, she couldn’t imagine venturing outdoors without her veil, especially as she was the wife of an Ayatollah. She sought her husband’s counsel, and he told her to go about her life: dress modestly, but obey the law, even if it meant wearing not the full veil but a simple scarf or even a hat instead that might attract less attention.
Neither of my grandparents was in any way political, but many other women and almost all of the religious establishment were vociferously against the Shah on this matter, and in the face of heavy resistance he eventually relented, instructing the government to cease enforcement of the law, even though it wasn’t officially changed until his forced abdication (by the Allies) in fa
vor of his son in 1941. The nonenforcement was a sort of acknowledgment that his people would not give up their beliefs on his command, and my grandfather once again ventured outdoors, and my grandmother resumed her chador-wearing or heavy-scarf-and-full-overcoat-wearing habit.
Years later, in the late 1960s, I was staying at my grandfather’s house one summer on a family visit back home. My mother, who had by this time spent years in the West, had a particular routine when she wanted to go out. If it was for a quick errand around the corner or in the immediate neighborhood, she would pull a chador over her head and go about her business. Not only was the neighborhood a religious one where the chador was common, but the idea of the Ayatollah’s daughter prancing about the streets bareheaded was anathema to both her family and herself. However, if my mother was going well outside the neighborhood, by taxi or by private car, she would go without the chador or even a scarf. One very hot day I remember my mother saying goodbye to me in the garden and telling me she would be back in a few hours. She was wearing a short-sleeved dress that I’m sure I had seen before. I went into the house, and a few minutes later I saw my mother, who I thought had already left, in tears. Alarmed, I asked her what was wrong. “My father thought I should change before I go out.”
“Why?” I asked, my preteen mind truly puzzled, since I knew that my mother worshipped her father and thought him the most intelligent, wonderful man in the world.
“He says the sleeves are too short!” My mother dutifully changed into a long-sleeved outfit and went out, bareheaded of course, and I realized for the first time how different Iranian culture was from what I had presumed was mine. My mother’s tears, even my young mind understood, were not because she objected to her father’s expressing displeasure at her outfit; she could, after all, ignore him, as her siblings seemed to do with impunity. No, they were tears of shame: she had, after all these years away from her country, embarrassed her father, her hero, by presuming that the Western culture that she had outwardly adopted could cause no offense in her house or in her country. Had she momentarily forgotten who she was or, more important, what the culture she was a product of was? The Shah certainly had, as he discovered with a rude surprise some ten years later.
Today, the chador or full hijab (completely covering every wisp of hair and skin except for the hands and face) is still worn in poorer neighborhoods and almost all the provinces (and by my mother in London every time she prays), even though it is effectively no longer mandatory. Although hijab is indeed a statute of the Islamic Republic, the definition of hijab, again, as with many Iranian concepts, is murkier and less absolute than ever before.
Every spring as the weather warms, the police crack down on what appear to be looser and looser interpretations as to what constitutes hijab, and therefore modesty, but the efforts often seem almost halfhearted (and are mostly forgotten within weeks, or by the middle of the summer). As a public relations scheme to appease the religious right, as well as the simply religious, though, it has its juicy moments. In the 2007 crackdown, an unusually severe one and highly publicized in the papers (and one that led to an unprecedented number of arrests), one M.P., Mohammad Taghi Rahbar, suggested that the crackdown was important because “the current situation is shameful for an Islamic government. A man who sees these models [women with minimal hijab] on the streets will pay no attention to his wife at home, destroying the foundation of the family.” Indeed. He must’ve wondered how on earth anyone in New York or Paris could ever stay married. But despite the occasional indignant calls by government officials to preserve the sanctity of Iranian marriage, in the chicer parts of Tehran (where the chador long ago gave way to the scarf and shapeless overcoat called the manteau) the women, many quite happily married, now wear hip-length mock-manteaus (that could have, for all intents and purposes, been sprayed on) along with a sheer piece of cloth casually draped over some very small percentage of their expensive hairdos. They would undoubtedly be thrilled if the last vestiges of enforced female modesty are one day removed, as many feel they must and will be. But then they may remember, if they ever bother to venture well outside their neighborhoods, what the culture they are a product of still is.
There have been many books and articles on Iran, on Iranians, and on the subject of Islam, particularly since 9/11 and Iran’s inclusion in the “axis of evil.” Some offer a critique and judgment of the nation’s politics or social mores. Some are travelogues, and yet others are memoirs that give a little bit of insight into Iranian life, usually a life in the immediate aftermath of the revolution. Iran under the mullahs is sometimes portrayed in the West as one-dimensional, usually because of the constraints of “news” reporting, and many American reporters who travel there for the first time say, some even with surprise, that it is not anything like what they expected. There are also, naturally, numerous newspaper articles and books on the subject of human rights and human rights abuses (whether recent or, in the case of books and memoirs, in the past), and they are important in bringing attention to the sad failures of the Iranian revolution. I refer to some of those failures, whether they be the imprisonment of student protesters or feminist activists or a crackdown on civil liberties, but this book is not about the injustices of Iran’s political system or, more important, the sometimes outrageous abuses in that system which many courageous Iranians, such as lawyers, journalists, and activists living in Iran, fight against every day. Rather, my hope is that this book, through a combination of stories, history, and personal reflection, will provide the reader a glimpse of Iran and Iranians, often secretive and suspicious of revealing themselves, that he or she may not ordinarily have the opportunity to see.
Iran is a nation of some seventy million people, the vast majority (90 percent) Shia Muslim but with Sunni, Jewish, Christian, Zoroastrian, and Baha’i minorities (though the Baha’is, officially unrecognized and often persecuted by the state as heretics, tend to keep their identities secret). Ethnically, it is made up of Persians, Turks, Turkmen, Arabs, Kurds, and a slew of other races, often intermingled to the point where it is impossible to say with any certainty what one Iranian’s heritage is, particularly since birth records and birth certificates (and even proper surnames) were only instituted in the 1930s. It is impossible to paint a picture of all Iranians, just as it is impossible to represent every aspect of Iranian culture or society, in any one book. There are, of course, Iranians in every socioeconomic class, and then there are the Iranians whom we most come into contact with, the ones who live in the West, many of whom have adopted Western culture while maintaining, to one degree or another, their own in the privacy of their homes, but who are not a relevant part of this story. The Iranians one encounters in this book come from all walks of life inside Iran (although I have chosen to feature stories that reveal something about the character of the Iranian people today without concern for their background), and I try to show how even the senior political and religious figures we meet are representative—perhaps far more so than in countries that have had a longer time to establish an entrenched political elite—of who the Iranian people are.
While American (and some European) politicians may often come from ordinary backgrounds, their lifestyles usually change dramatically when they are in office, and by the time they have reached the pinnacle of power, they are long removed from their more humble roots. Iranian leaders in the Islamic Republic, however, clerical or lay, continue to live their lives almost exactly as they always have, living in modest houses in their own neighborhoods surrounded by their social peers, driving nondescript cars, and maintaining their social networks. There is no presidential palace, no equivalent of the White House, in Tehran, and despite the wealth of the Islamic Republic, no fleet of limousines, or even the level of security one would assume, for Iran’s leadership. The presidential automobile is a Peugeot (albeit armored), and President Ahmadinejad lives in the same house he always has in a lower-middle-class neighborhood, while his predecessor, Mohammad Khatami, lives in a small villa, nice but no
t especially so, in North Tehran. It was Khatami who remarked to me, on a trip to the United States after his presidency, with genuine surprise and not a little admiration, that the security offered him by the State Department (as well as the limousines and SUVs) as an ex–head of state was far more comprehensive (and luxurious) than anything he had had as president in Iran. He also remarked how very much it resulted in his trip occurring inside a “bubble.”