by Hooman Majd
The intellectual and fiercely secular classes of Iranian society, a minority limited to enclaves within the biggest cities, are today more likely than ever to embrace their pre-Muslim, their Persian, roots for obvious reasons, but there is a sense even among religious Iranians that the Arab invasion that brought them Islam brought them nothing else of any value and may have, in fact, initially hindered Persian progress in the arts and sciences. Compared with Persia and its self-described glorious empire, an empire that had cultivated the deserts of Iran with an underground irrigation system, qanat, which allowed them to build their beloved gardens just about anywhere a millennium before the invading Arab Muslims of centuries ago arrived, Arabs, according to Iranians, were an uncultured lot, barely literate, and their brute force persuaded the Iranians to convert to their religion but not their way of life. Why Allah would choose, in His infinite wisdom, to reveal His Word to an illiterate Arab in the desert is not a subject of debate in Iran, but then again, even for Iranians, Allah putatively works in mysterious ways.
Iran is, of course, smaller than an empire but still a geographically large country and counts among its inhabitants many of different ethnicities, including Arabs, who often complain of discrimination and oppression by those who are Fars, from the mid-and southern Iranian province (originally “Pars,” but changed because Arabic doesn’t have the p sound) that was the heart of the ancient empire. Oddly, though the Arabs come in for much derision as culturally inferior and their claims of discrimination are not without merit, they are not, like other ethnicities or even inhabitants of provincial cities, the butt of Persian humor. Much like the Polish in American jokes or the Irish in English jokes, the Turks of Iranian Azerbaijan seem to suffer the most in Persian jokes, followed closely by citizens of the northern city of Rasht, but perhaps it’s the real scorn Iranians reserve for Arabs that makes them unworthy even of mockery.
Iranians, as race conscious as any people on the planet, generally describe themselves as Fars, Turk, Kurd, Armenian, Arab, or Jew, although clearly today’s Persians are a mixed lot, having suffered invasion after invasion over the millennia, and invasions that often resulted in the invaders putting down roots and taking local women as wives, as Alexander and his armies did, in Persia. But some secular Persian intellectuals (who would absolutely deny that they are in any way racist) will not only exhibit racism toward Arabs or other minorities but reserve a special hatred for Ayatollah Khomeini, not just because he founded the Islamic Republic, but because to them he wasn’t even Persian. Since his paternal grandfather was an Indian who immigrated to Iran (to the town of Khomein) in the early nineteenth century, some Iranians feel that his “tainted” blood means that a true Persian was not at the helm of the revolution, the most momentous event in their country’s modern history, good or bad. And soon after that revolution, when the time came to change the symbol of Iran on its flag from the lion and sun (which the revolutionaries incorrectly associated with the Shahs), Khomeini himself chose a symbol among those submitted by artists—a stylized “Allah”—which his opponents, at least the more race-conscious ones, continue to insist bears a remarkable similarity to the symbol of the Sikhs.
Some of Khomeini’s enemies see it as proof of a foreign hand in the revolution, perhaps British because of their influence in India, or, worse, a secret conspiracy by an Indian religion to destroy Persia, and today when Iranian exiles and even some inside Iran want to disparage him, they sometimes refer to him as Hindi (which happened to be his grandfather’s surname but is also Persian for “Indian”). One such Iranian in Tehran, when he found out where I was staying, insisted that I take a short walk in my neighborhood past the Sikh center of Tehran, a large white compound with a garden surrounded, naturally, by high walls. “Look at the logo on the gates of the walls, and then tell me that Khomeini wasn’t a Sikh,” he said. I replied that I knew exactly what the Sikh emblem looked like (coming from New York, where it is often seen on the back windows of cabs and car service vehicles), but I did as he said anyway, curious about a Sikh center in Tehran, given that the religion is not one of the four—Islam, Christianity, Judaism, and Zoroastrianism—that is recognized by the state. I found that there was indeed a Sikh center, right in my neighborhood, and the emblem on the gates, I have to admit, does give one pause when viewing it in the Islamic Republic, where its own emblem is ubiquitous. But after a few moments reflecting on the coincidence of its uncanny similarity to the “Allah” of Iran, I moved on, reflecting instead on my compatriots’ love of and insatiable appetite for conspiracy theories.
Of all the criticisms one might make of Ayatollah Khomeini, his being a descendant of an Indian cannot, despite some of the more racist Iranians’ insistence, be included, for if the main criterion for ruling Iran rightfully or for starting a revolution is pure Persian race, then Zoroastrians should be in charge of Iran. They, who still practice the ancient religion of Iran from before the Muslim invasion, can probably claim the “purest” Aryan bloodline of any Iranians, for they rarely marry outside the faith and are excommunicated if they do, but the rest of us are, whether we like it or not, a mixture of all the racial minorities in Iran, including minorities that no longer exist, such as Macedonian and Mongol. And most Iranians do not like it. But what Iranians, no matter their racial makeup, share is a deep cultural tie to the walled garden, figuratively and literally. The four-walled Persian garden, or pairidaeza in Old Persian (pairi for “around,” daeza for “wall”), has existed since the time of Cyrus the Great, more than twenty-five hundred years ago, and not only inspired the future grand gardens of Europe but gave its name to our definition of heaven: “paradise.”
My own childhood pairidaeza was my grandparents’ home in Abbasabad-e-Einedoleh, in downtown Tehran. We visited some summers, and as my parents, who’d been living abroad since the 1950s, didn’t own a house in Iran and my father’s family was hundreds of miles away in the desert town of Yazd, we always stayed at my maternal grandparents’ house, the house my mother was born in. My grandfather Seyyed Kazem Assar spent most of his time in his rooms, reading or entertaining visitors who came often to see him, either students on a question of philosophy or neighbors for an estekhareh, a peculiarly Shia form of a reading, or divining answers to perplexing or simply mundane questions. He was a cleric but also a Sufi, and his estekhareh were well-known, and everyone I met, including my mother, believed with absolute certainty in the divinations. Sometimes he performed the estekhareh by closing his eyes and muttering prayers while he fingered his worry beads, stopping at a particular moment in the prayer and holding the beads up to count how many of them he had moved, thence proclaiming whether whatever was being contemplated was favorable or unfavorable. Other times he would hold a Koran in his hand and pray, again with eyes closed, and at the right moment stop and randomly open the book to a page, whereby he would ascertain from the passage his finger pointed to what answer to give the petitioner.
I always feared becoming sick in Iran, for no matter my malady, my mother would, along with a visit to a doctor, consult her father and his estekhareh, which for me only meant succumbing to the forced drinking of drafts of vomit-inducing tinctures, the tastes of which remain in my throat today and the likes of which I have yet to experience in my adult life. I did come to believe in estekhareh myself, however, or at least the Assar estekhareh, when my uncle Nasser—who also visited some summers from his home in Paris, where he was a painter and to which he had run away after he had finished high school—was cured of a skin disorder on his hands by his father’s prescription after a lengthy divination, which neither he nor his French wife believed could possibly help but, given the lack of success by his European doctors, believed would probably not hurt either. For the rest of his stay in Tehran, Nasser would urinate on his hands every day, and his skin cleared up nicely before his return to France.
Kazem Assar, though born of an Iraqi mother and therefore half-Arab, was Persian through and through when it came to love of his garden. Other than
during meals, which he sometimes took alone in his library, the only times he seemed relaxed were when he went for his daily stroll in the garden, walking on the stone path in the shade of the walls in his clerical garb and turban, pausing to rest, and I presume reflect, every now and then in front of a mulberry bush or cherry tree. His manservant Ali would wash down the path with a hose every hot, dusty afternoon, briefly cooling the air and adding a very slight and momentary humidity that Tehran normally suffers without. My mother tells me that when my brother, Saman, was born, Kazem’s first grandchild, he took great pleasure in pushing his baby carriage around the garden, a novelty pleasure that apparently quickly wore off, for there are no stories, photographs, or memories of him doing the same for me, born a mere eighteen months later.
The garden, surrounded by what I remember as impossibly high mud walls, although they were probably only twelve or fifteen feet, was where my brother and I lived during the summers, playing all sorts of games, trying to climb a pine tree, or taking a dip in the small pond in the center. The purpose of the pond in Persian gardens is twofold: it provides aesthetic pleasure and peaceful tranquillity, and it serves as a place to perform the ablutions required before prayers. For children playing on a hot summer day, it was merely an opportunity to cool down. On the far side of the pond, there was a large stone-paved area under two towering pine trees that extended almost to the back wall of the garden, and it was here that every night wooden beds and cotton mattresses would be set up for the entire family to sleep under the stars. Air-conditioning was rare in those days, particularly in older houses, and quite unnecessary at night in the dry climate, and I remember how exciting it was for an apartment-dwelling child to crawl into a bed in a huge garden and look up at the sky. Almost everyone in the household slept outdoors together during the long, hot summers—beds in a row as if in an army barracks—but I was much too young to wonder about the sex life of the adults and their lack of privacy at night. People must’ve had sex, but I certainly don’t remember hearing any sounds, so perhaps Persian modesty prevailed and sex was quietly confined to daylight hours indoors, or else everyone of an age simply bit down hard on their tongues in the middle of the night.
Sex, of course, was never discussed in my home, but it has always been a major topic of anxiety in an Islamic country with an erotic past. Sex in Iran has had a “don’t ask, don’t tell” quality about it that is only just beginning to be dispelled, and this despite the common misperception that the Islamic state and the Ayatollahs frown on all matters relating to sex. Shia Islam has always been quite understanding of sexual desire in both men and women; after all, it allows for temporary marriages as short as one hour, known as sigheh, for the very purpose of religiously sanctioned fun. Originally intended to alleviate the sexual needs of widows (preferably war widows) as well as unmarried men, it can in fact be a legal device for young men and women to, as we might say, “hook up.” It is hardly used, though, and Iranian society, once terrified of sex crawling over the walls of private gardens, today seems to be more comfortable with a rather more open attitude to sex. Condoms are now advertised openly in Iran, and AIDS is not a taboo subject in a country that, under even the progressive Shahs and a Westernized wealthy class in Tehran, was always a society in a state of sexual hypocrisy. Women were expected to remain virgins until they married, and certainly not get pregnant, and yet women did have sex with boyfriends, and sometimes some of them got pregnant. The plastic surgery practice of hymen reconstruction was so common in Tehran in prerevolutionary times that some doctors devoted their practice to it (and hymen-reconstruction expertise followed the large Iranian expatriate community to Los Angeles, where it is still performed), while abortion clinics were plentiful (and still are, discreetly, today). In a society where uttering the words khar-kosteh—literally “your sister fucks”—is the very worst of insults, though often merely a statement of fact in the West, men and women know very well that almost everyone has a sexual history, but there is never a reason to allow that history to be exposed outside of the home, and as long as appearances are maintained, all is forgiven.
In 2006 and even into 2007, however, there was a single incident beyond the issue of AIDS that brought sex out from behind the garden walls and right into the street, or, as some hard-line Islamists thought, the gutter. Television’s most famous actress, Zahra Ebrahimi, a demure young lady who portrayed a pious, properly Muslim girl on a popular soap opera, was, much like Paris Hilton, the subject of a sex video made by her boyfriend that found its way to every DVD and CD vendor in Iran. She immediately denied that the woman in the video was her, while her boyfriend initially fled the country, and then, when he returned, argued that they had performed a temporary marriage and therefore were not engaging in any illicit activity. Investigations were begun, the judiciary got involved, and then everyone in Iran, of course, had to see the video. Abdolghassem Ghassemzadeh, an editor at large of one of Iran’s largest dailies, Ettelaat, and the son-in-law of a very senior cleric, told me an anecdote about the affair one afternoon in his offices at the paper. “One day,” he said, tapping his pipe on the palm of his hand, “our reporters were excited by the news that the sex video had grossed about four billion rials [approximately half a million dollars] in sales, and at the editorial meeting they were looking for the story to get placement on the front page.” He paused while he puffed on his pipe for a few moments. “I said,” he then continued, “absolutely not; under no circumstances! The story will be buried deep inside the paper.”
“Why?” I asked him, a little confused.
“Because,” he replied, “and I had to explain this to the reporters too, if we made the profit on the sex video big news, Iran would be inundated with copycat videos by people hoping to make a killing with their own sex videos.”
“Really? So what happened?” I asked.
“It was buried in the paper, but my prediction was right anyway. A few weeks later, a video surfaced in the north of the country, but the couple had been too stupid to hide their faces, so the local police immediately identified them.” He chuckled. “The problem was, of course, that they were married, so it wasn’t clear if they had actually broken any laws.”
“So did they make any money with their video?”
“Yes, of course!” said Ghassemzadeh. “Not as much; but they made money.”
Despite the huge scandal and the impropriety in a society where not only Islam but also Persian culture deems that a woman must at least give the appearance of being chaste, the scandal faded away, no one was detained for long, and if the investigation even continued (as the government insisted), everyone, including the conservatives most outraged, lost interest. Sex, it seems, has made its way out of the garden with a big sigh, if not yet in rural Iran or among the poorest and most pious of Iranians, then at least in the urban centers, where Iranians of all classes consume the news with a voracious appetite.
Persian culture, the culture Iranians of all races deem superior to all others in the region and certainly superior to the locust eaters’, places a remarkable emphasis on the home, privacy, and private life, and perhaps no other civilization has delineated public behavior from private quite as much. Traditional Iranian houses, with imposing walls surrounding them that afford absolute privacy from roving neighbors’ and strangers’ eyes, were built around gardens that Persians value as much as the homes themselves. Often, wealthier families built compounds around the gardens that housed extensions of the family or, if there was no room, bought up adjacent lots or houses and connected them if possible. Today in big cities such as Tehran, where houses have ceded much ground to apartments, Iranian sensibilities still exhibit themselves in the thousands of four-and five-story apartment buildings where every unit is occupied by either members of the same family or, at the very least, good friends. High-rise apartment buildings have gained some ground, but they tend to be inhabited by the most Westernized of city dwellers, some of whom own, or have lived in, similar apartments in Europe or Ame
rica. It is perhaps because of the Iranian concept of the home and garden (and not the city or town it is in) as the defining center of life that Iranians find living in a society with such stringent rules of public behavior somewhat tolerable. Iranian society by and large cares very little about what goes on in the homes and gardens of private citizens, but the Islamic government cares very much how its citizens behave once they venture outside their walls.
Even in the early days of the revolution that brought mandated Islamic behavior to Iran, most Iranians felt secure enough in their homes to do as they pleased, whether it was Islamic behavior or not. Government or quasi-governmental raids on private homes where parties were being held and alcohol consumed were common enough in those days, but the truth is that the way the un-Islamic parties were known to the authorities was that they were loud enough to be heard on the streets or by neighbors, and not because the government was actively spying on the private lives of its citizens. (A bigger problem for partygoers then was the danger of being stopped on the drive home with alcohol on the breath.) Today, despite a deeply conservative government in power, there is no shortage of alcohol-and even drug-fueled parties in metropolitan areas, and there are, despite persistent fears of a crackdown, practically no attempts by the government to breach the walls of the Persian home.3 And it is behind those walls that one often finds the true Iranian character.