The Ayatollah Begs to Differ

by Hooman Majd

  President Ahmadinejad, the son of a blacksmith and often derisively referred to as such, may come from the underclass and take pride in the fact, but he long ago elevated himself above what would have been his social status in the Iran of yesteryear. He indeed grew up in a lower-middle-class neighborhood and still lives in one, but his intelligence and hard work secured him a place at university during the Shah’s time, a time when the nationwide university entrance exams filtered out all but the brightest students in Iran. Wealthier Iranian students who couldn’t pass muster went abroad for their studies, usually to the United States, where getting into a college, any college, was no great feat, but for ordinary working-class high school students (and assuming they even bothered to finish high school) the twelfth grade was the end of the line.

  Ahmadinejad, by virtue of his university degree (and Iranians at the time understood very well that a Tehran university degree said a whole lot more about the student than a degree from a U.S. college, unless that college was Ivy League), was destined to break out into at least the working middle class, but he understood early that the Islamic Revolution was as much a social revolution as it was political, and he cultivated his working-class image along with his piety to good effect as he slowly worked his way up through the ranks of the Islamic government. His style, the bad suits, the cheap Windbreaker, the shoddy shoes, and the unstylish haircut, a style he proudly maintains well into his presidency, is a signal to the working class that he is still one of them. Many Iranians may aspire to wear European designers, and often do, but Ahmadinejad, president of the republic, knows his clothes send a message directly to those neighborhoods he most counts on for support—neighborhoods where the Basij are recruited, neighborhoods where there still are knife fights and the laats roam the streets if they’re not persuaded to join the Basij, and neighborhoods where you can still buy your suit, if you really need one, from the kot-shalvary.

  The kot-shalvary was a common enough presence in working-class neighborhoods when I was a child: I remember at my grandfather’s house in Abbasabad-e-Einedoleh, a house he bought in the 1920s in a neighborhood that had by the 1960s already become unfashionably working-class, hearing the cries of “Kot-shalvary-e!”—“It’s the suit man!”—on Fridays, the Muslim weekend. A vendor with a slow donkey-drawn cart would make the rounds of a particular neighborhood or two and announce his presence and the availability of men’s suits with a staccato rhythm, a rhythm my brother and I would gleefully imitate throughout the day to the annoyance of anyone within earshot. Growing up in the West with only occasional summer visits to Tehran, we found it amusing that our compatriots might actually buy their clothes from someone with a donkey cart, and as the years passed, I assumed that the kot-shalvary had gone the way of the camel caravans.

  The nasal twang of the kot-shalvary of Abbasabad-e-Einedoleh, however, was still in my ears when I woke up one morning in 2007 on Safi Alishah, a street much grander than my grandfather’s in his day but only marginally so today, to the similar twang of a kot-shalvary advertising his suits for sale. His was a hand-drawn cart, and I saw no customers rushing up to him in the brief instant I looked out the window, but his suits could not be much worse than those of the president, who buys his from a shop in Shams Al Emareh (and the suits are commonly and disparagingly known as “Shams Al Emareh” suits for the building that houses the many stores they’re sold from), not far from the Tehran bazaar, specializing in locally made and cheap Chinese-made men’s clothes. And the president knows it. It must have come as a great disappointment to him when the Western press mockingly referred to the suits provided the British sailors arrested by Iran in the Persian Gulf in 2007 and released two weeks later as “ill-fitting Ahmadinejad-style suits,” the assumption being that they were perhaps purchased by the Iranian government at Shams Al Emareh. In fact, the suits came from E Cut, a men’s mini-chain that is quite a few steps up from Shams Al Emareh, at least in the minds of ordinary Iranian men, and the government’s outfitting of the British prisoners in better suits than the president’s was intended to show off Persian hospitality and a little ta’arouf: the best for your guest. (Ahmadinejad, like many Iranians who’ve spent their entire lives in Iran, is blissfully unaware that ta’arouf, or “social ritual,” particularly as it’s practiced in Iran, is an alien concept in the West.) Based on Western reaction to the drape of its suits, a reaction that can’t have escaped E Cut (the name signifying an Iranian fascination with all things technological), the company will have to reprogram its computers for the “electronic cut” of its clothes, at least if it wishes to be considered for any future government gift-giving contracts.

  Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s style, sartorial and otherwise, permeates the upper and certainly the lower echelons of his government. The president’s office, the Iranian White House if you will, sits smack in the center of downtown Tehran and is in a large compound that shares acreage with the Supreme Leader’s office. Unlike his predecessor, Mohammad Khatami, who spent two days a week at Sa’adabad, one of the Shah’s palaces in the northern reaches of chic North Tehran and who entertained foreign dignitaries there, Ahmadinejad spends all of his working hours in Tehran in this compound. Only a few days after his inauguration in 2005 and while I was in the country, President Assad of Syria flew to Tehran for a state visit, signaling his country’s continued close alliance with Iran despite the somewhat radical change of government. He was greeted by Ahmadinejad on Pasteur Avenue in the bright sun and hundred-plus-degree heat (Sa’adabad is at least ten degrees cooler and sits in an expansive hillside park); Iranians everywhere commented on how uncomfortable he looked, while some claimed to have heard that the Syrians were deeply offended by the very pedestrian reception they received compared with previous visits. But Ahmadinejad had promised to do away with the luxurious and even royal trappings of his office, and that included closing the presidency rooms at Sa’adabad and even evicting Khatami, who had been promised space there for his International Institute for Dialogue Among Cultures and Civilizations by no less an authority than the Supreme Leader himself. Presumably, Ahmadinejad wanted to avoid comparisons drawn between visits to him by foreign ambassadors and leaders and visits to Khatami, who would still be the subject of the occasional courtesy call.

  On the winter morning I visited the presidential compound, a light snow was falling in North Tehran, where I had spent the night. I had called a taxi, or agence, as hired cars and the agency that employs them are known in Farsi (French words for which there is no Farsi equivalent have more readily been adopted in Iran than English ones, mainly because they are much easier to pronounce for Persian speakers), and was mildly surprised when a slightly overweight woman, probably in her thirties and dressed in all black and a hijab, greeted me on the curb. “Are you the agence?” I asked, trying not to sound surprised.

  “Befarma’eed,” she said, gesturing to her gray Iranian-made Peugeot and using one of the most common phrases in the Persian language, one that means almost everything, such as “please take a seat,” “come/go,” “speak/say/go on,” “please help yourself,” and “there you are.” Normally I sit in the front seat of taxis in Iran, but I hesitated for a moment, thinking I’d better ask before I got in. “However you’re comfortable,” she said dismissively as she went around to the driver’s door. “And where is it you’re going?” she asked, buckling her seat belt and putting the manual shift lever into gear.

  “Pasteur,” I said.

  She turned the wipers on. “Downtown,” she said. “Where exactly on Pasteur?”

  “President’s office,” I replied. She edged into traffic with a “Be’sm’allah” and a “Ya Ali!” and turned the wipers off, even though snow was still coming down. In Iran, it seems, many working-class drivers are loath to use anything electrical unless absolutely necessary, and often not even then. A friend told me the reason: lights, wipers, and batteries are expensive spare parts, even in a country with thirty-five-cent-a-gallon gasoline. We drove in heavy traffic in silence w
hile I tried to think of something to say that wouldn’t offend. “Unfortunate weather,” I said. “Not a nice day for work, I imagine.”

  “Yes,” she replied, “but it’s not a problem. You know, the men at work don’t want me to work when it snows; kam-lotfi meekonand, they’re being discourteous, unkind.” Apparently, if I correctly understood her, I was being discourteous too, even though I hadn’t meant anything sexist by my remark. So much for not offending.

  “Of course!” I said. “Why shouldn’t you drive when it snows?”

  “Exactly. I have to support my kids somehow. Doesn’t everybody else drive when it snows?” She turned on the radio and selected a news channel. The snow was turning to drizzle as we descended the steep hills of North Tehran, and she turned the wiper on once to clear the windshield. Between snippets of the day’s news read alternately by a man and a woman, an instrumental song, the theme of the network, played over and over, and I struggled to think where I’d heard it before. A bus swerved in front of us, and my driver brought her fist down on the horn.

  “Bus drivers!” I said, suddenly remembering where the song was from. It was the theme from Beverly Hills Cop, a not entirely inappropriate choice for a news network. “They’re the same in New York,” I continued, giving away where I live, or so I thought.

  “Yes, the bus drivers are really impossible,” she said, turning to take a look at the person who claimed to know what bus drivers are like in New York, of all places. “I was going to Jamkaran last week,” she continued, “and you should have seen the buses; they nearly ran me off the road a few times!” Jamkaran is a mosque outside of Qom, a two-hour drive from Tehran and an important pilgrimage site for Shias. She paused for a few seconds. “So, you’ve been to New York?” The beard must have confused her, I thought. Very few ordinary Iranians imagine that an Iranian man who lives in the West might wear a beard. Although common enough in Iran, the beard signifies not style but either government affiliation (and what branch of government depends on the form of the beard) or piety, neither of which should apply, the reasoning goes, to Iranians who’ve chosen to live in the Judeo-Christian and secular West. I had grown my beard for precisely that reason: so that I wouldn’t be immediately identified, as one is by one’s mannerisms, dress, and general demeanor, as someone who lives abroad, and therefore someone one might treat differently.

  “Yes, I actually live there,” I said. “Did you go to Jamkaran with a fare?”

  “No,” she replied. “I went on Friday [the Iranian and Muslim Sabbath], on my day off. I try to go as often as I can. It’s so important.” The snow and drizzle had stopped, and she turned the wiper on once more for good measure. “You know it snowed on Christmas,” she said, as if searching for something to say to someone who lived among the Christians. “A beautiful, white snow,” she continued, “and it made me think that Christians must be good people and God must love them.”

  “Yes,” I said. She downshifted and sped up, almost touching the bumper of the car in front, refusing to let a car cut in front of her.

  “Do women drive taxis in America?” she asked. “Have they progressed like us?”

  “Yes,” I replied. “But most women don’t really want to drive cabs.”

  “When my husband died, I had to work somehow,” she said. “I have two kids. I could have emigrated, and I even thought about it, but I didn’t, because I couldn’t leave my mother alone. Perhaps it would have been better if I had.” She was quiet for a few moments, as if thinking about a life abroad. “But, no,” she finally said, “God knows best.” We had reached Pasteur, and she slowed down. “Where do you want me to stop?”

  “The president’s office,” I said.

  “Yes, but I can’t go any farther than the gate,” she said, gesturing up ahead.

  “As close as you can get, then,” I said. “Traffic was light, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes, a lot of people don’t like to drive when it snows,” she said with a knowing smile. My cabdriver, I thought when I got out, hijab and all, can certainly hold her own with any of the laats in her neighborhood.

  When one enters the presidential compound on Pasteur Avenue (named after the French chemist Louis Pasteur but, curiously and unlike many other Tehran streets with foreign but not foreign revolutionaries’ names, never renamed after the revolution), a street closed to through traffic, one immediately senses that this might be the scruffiest presidential compound of any wealthy country, even some very poor ones too, in the world. After leaving the taxi, I walked along the sidewalk past the car checkpoint, looking for some indication of which of the many buildings lining the street I should be headed for. There were no signs anywhere, so I simply walked into the first building that showed any sign of life, wrongly, it turned out, but—when I emptied my pockets at the metal detector—at least I realized that I had forgotten to check my cell phone at the gate, to the clear disapproval of the guard. No, not the gate, I was told, an office just a few doors down in the direction I came from. “Is there a sign?” No, there is no sign, it’s not necessary. Just two or three doors down. Maybe four. I walked out and scrutinized every door as I retraced my steps until I saw a half-opened one and walked into what can best be described as a run-down shack. A Revolutionary Guard, behind a makeshift wooden counter, smiled at me. “Is this where I check my cell phone?” I asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Do you know where Mr. Javanfekr’s office is?”

  “No.”

  “Do you know who Mr. Javanfekr is?”

  “No.”

  “He’s in the president’s office. Which building would that be?”

  “Straight ahead.” The Guard handed me a token for my phone, put the phone in a wooden cubbyhole, and then asked if it was off, to which I replied yes. “Can you imagine,” he said, “if people didn’t turn their phones off before handing them in? I’d go crazy in here!” It was my turn to smile. I headed back in the direction I had just come from, past the building with human activity, or actually a few people dozing in plastic chairs waiting for something or someone, and to the corner of Pasteur, where there was another building with another security guard. “I’m looking for Mr. Javanfekr’s office. He’s supposed to have left my name at the gate,” I said to the guard.

  “Who?”

  “Mr. Javanfekr,” I said slowly. “The president’s office.”

  “Turn left and go to the end of the street,” said the guard. I walked out and followed his instructions, walking under towering pine trees and listening to the frequent cries of the hundreds of black crows that seemed to have made the compound, possibly the quietest and most traffic-free part of the metropolis, their home. At the end of the abandoned street there was another gate with buildings beyond, and I nodded to the security guards inside their glass-enclosed booth as one of them activated the switch for the barrier to lift. I paused for a moment and turned back to their booth.

  “Do you know which building Mr. Javanfekr is in?” I asked, leaning toward the small window.

  “Who?”

  “Mr. Javanfekr.”

  “I don’t know. Where are you going?”

  “To the president’s office,” I replied.

  “I think you’re in the wrong place. Who are you? If you go in through this gate, you can’t come back out.”

  “What?”

  “You can go in, but you can’t come back.” For a moment I could only think of the song “Hotel California,” but it dawned on me that perhaps I was trespassing in the Supreme Leader’s territory. But why hadn’t anyone stopped me? And why were these guards willing to let me go through the gate as long as I didn’t try to check back out? Perhaps it was the two-week-old beard that made me look like I belonged; perhaps it was the gray suit and tieless white shirt that identified me as a government official. The suit, incidentally, was a cut above Ahmadinejad’s, English bespoke but hardly identifiable as such to any Iranian in Tehran, particularly not to government officials or the Revolutionary Guards. There’s an En
glish affectation, picked up by pretentious or merely Anglophile Americans, including myself (although I like to think of myself as more of an Anglophile-phobe), where one leaves one button on the left cuff of one’s suit jacket undone, presumably for the sole purpose of showing off the fact that one’s suit has working buttonholes on the cuffs and is therefore custom (a trick many ready-to-wear designers who must read the Robb Report have employed). In Iran, I found that doing so elicited either comments that I was missing a button or stares from those who noticed but were too polite to point out the apparent scruffiness of this visitor from abroad. Beard, gray suit with one undone button, old loafers on the feet. Yes, I belonged here.

  “Can you call someone and find out for me where Mr. Javanfekr’s office is, then?” I asked, trying to sound authoritative. The guard picked up a phone and turned his back.

  “Go back to the corner building,” he said after he hung up.

  “But they told me to come here,” I said.

  “That’s the president’s office,” he said, pointing behind me. “If you go in here, you can’t come out.” “Hotel California,” again. I walked back down the street and stepped into the corner building.

  “Mr. Javanfekr,” I said to the guard. “I have an appointment, and he’s left my name at the door.”

  “What’s his number?” he replied this time, forgetting that he’d sent me on a long detour from which I may not have returned had I not asked where I was going. I gave the guard the extension, and he dialed it. “It’s busy. Have a seat.”

  I sat down on one of three chairs and looked at my watch. The door behind me opened and four men walked in, dressed remarkably much as I was. On closer inspection, their gray suit jackets didn’t quite match their gray trousers, their white shirts were slightly graying, and their loafers weren’t horsehide. And the buttons on their cuffs were all intact, neatly and immovably sewn into place. “Salam,” they said to me one by one, short nods of the head in my direction, the Persian gesture of respect, as they huddled in front of the guard. I was too busy examining their clothes to hear whom they were there to see, but when the guard asked for a telephone extension, two of the men whipped out their cell phones and began dialing. I stared enviously; they must be vastly more important than me, I thought, before realizing that I could have also easily bypassed the cell phone ban by simply coming straight to this office rather than making the unintended stop in the first building.