The Butterfly Mosque

by G. Willow Wilson

  I was online a few days later when Ireland sent me an instant message with more bad news: the FBI had been to see her and she was deeply disturbed by what had taken place.

  “Okay, first of all, they can’t take away your citizenship. That’s bullshit. The Patriot Act doesn’t give them that power,” she wrote. “They were just trying to scare Ben. Second of all, you can refuse to talk to them without a lawyer. Have one meet you at the airport when you go home this summer. Okay?”

  “Okay,” I wrote, bewildered. For the first time in my life, I was glad to have a Republican on my side. I would come to appreciate how much the true conservatives had done to combat some of the more unconstitutional aspects of the Patriot Act: as much or more than their liberal counterparts.

  “Please don’t go to Iran. Okay? Please.”

  “What would that prove?” I wrote. “I’m not doing anything wrong. I’m not out to hurt anybody. If I change my plans, it’ll be like admitting I have something to hide. And I don’t.”

  “Willow . . . why are they watching you so hard? Just don’t go!”

  “I’m theoretically the citizen of a free country,” I wrote, with more cheerfulness than I actually felt, “and I’m going to act like it until they lock me up and tell me otherwise. Plus, the tickets are nonrefundable.” Smiley face.

  I messaged Mehdi as well, to see if he had heard what was going on. He was melancholic.

  “What gets me,” he said, “is that while they’re on my ass watching my every move, that’s one less real terrorist they’re not watching. And that’s depressing. And by the way, your e-mail is being monitored; I can tell because my encryption programs are bouncing off it.”

  I had taken America for granted. It had been a safe haven in the back of my mind; it was home, it was where I could always go if things got really bad. I had never felt truly unsafe in the Middle East, but I realized that this was because I knew I would be evacuated, rescued, spoken for, and defended if there was ever real trouble. Now that the privileges afforded me as an American were under threat, I saw that I liked them just fine, and furthermore, that I had been relying on them without knowing it.

  I began to have nightmares. I dreamed of getting shot and bleeding to death, of being lost in airports and unable to fly home, and once, that Omar and I were stuck in an invented borderland between Egypt, the United States, and Israel without our passports. The entrance to each was blocked with the concrete barricades Egyptian police use at checkpoints. We couldn’t remember which country we had come from or where we were going, and no one would let us in.

  In an effort to be as transparent and cooperative as possible, I sent my complete Iranian itinerary to the American consulate in Cairo. Then, carrying $2,000 cash in my pocket and swathed from head to toe in a black polyester robe, I flew to Tehran, with a slight fever and the grim feeling that if I were the FBI, I would investigate me, too.

  My first impression of Iran began in Dubai. I had a short layover there on the way to Tehran, and sitting at the gate waiting to board the plane, I began to wonder whether I had the right idea about the country I was headed toward. In my mind, I had envisioned Iran as like Egypt, but worse; I had cast it as an Arab Sunni country, and was expecting the specific militancy of Arab Sunni extremism. I didn’t even need to be there to realize I was wrong. None of the women on my flight wore head scarves. I saw a slew of stylishly tailored jeans, highlighted hair, and lipstick, and felt extremely underdressed. The travel agency I was using suggested I wear a black manteau, the housecoatlike outer garment that the Council of Guardians made mandatory during the Islamic Revolution in 1979. There was no such thing in Egypt, so instead I wore an abaya, a long traditional robe that was roughly similar.

  Based on the appearance of the other women on my flight, I began to wonder whether I should have bothered with the unfamiliar garment. When we landed in Tehran the scarves came out and were draped over heads with obvious distaste. There was an edge of defiance among the younger women, who wore tiny scarves halfway back on their heads, ponytails peeking out the back. In Egypt, few of the women on the plane would be considered properly veiled. Compared to most of them, I was dressed like a fundamentalist. This was a strange turn of events. Having nothing but the press to rely on for an impression of Iran, I expected harrowing brutality: a regime bent on total domination, a people struggling against fanaticism. But the Axis of Evil was nowhere to be found in the cynical nonchalance of “mandatory Islamic dress,” and the catty girls from the plane looked less than revolutionary.

  My guide met me at the airport. He was a kind-looking man of sixty or so, and was so courteous and mild as we started chatting about our schedule that I breathed a sigh of relief. I’d been dreading the situation that would inevitably have occurred in Egypt—getting stuck for a week with a desperate guy in his thirties who would make it his mission to get me into bed, despite the engagement ring on my finger and the scarf on my head. But Ahmad was married, with a daughter my age and a son slightly older, and seemed amused at the prospect of shepherding around someone so much younger than himself.

  “Most tourists who come to Iran are middle-aged or older couples,” he said. “Not many young people come here because there are no bars, no discos. There are no healthy ways to get into trouble as young people like to do. It’s sad, really.”

  This was a phrase I was to hear many times from many people over the course of my time in Iran. What’s happened to our country—it’s sad, really.

  Tehran was gray and overcast during my time there. The city bore few scars from the eight-year-long war with Iraq; I only saw one building with visible traces of shelling. A string of parks ran through the center of town and the streets were remarkably clean, the Elburz Mountains were beautiful in the background, and yet the air itself seemed low and listless as I wandered around with Ahmad. It took me several hours to realize that it was because I heard absolutely no laughter. In fact, the only raised voice I heard the entire day was in a restaurant, when a waiter called out food orders to the kitchen. The human stillness was so complete it was almost surreal. People were unfailingly kind as we visited museums and tea houses, and delighted to learn I was an American (Iranians don’t hate Americans, they were all anxious to assure me), but the atmosphere was always solemn. “Ten years ago a woman could be thrown in jail for laughing too loudly,” Ahmad explained, “and unmarried men and women are still sometimes harassed when they go out together. Maybe this is the origin of what you are sensing.”

  I shook my head, stunned. Maybe.

  We passed by the old American Embassy on the way back to my hotel. “They left it exactly as they found it,” Ahmad said. “After the revolution they just locked the gate. And painted the slogans on the wall.”

  The outer wall—institutional brick like the buildings inside—was covered in murals showing the Statue of Liberty with a skull for a face and an assortment of anti-American slogans. All the windows inside the compound were tiny and barred; a subtle and ominous suggestion that the United States knew the revolution was coming long before the storm broke.

  “This is where they took the hostages?”

  “Yes.” Ahmad followed my gaze toward the death’s-head Statue of Liberty. “I have nothing to say.” He smiled helplessly.

  That night I met Hussain at the hotel. As the director of the travel agency I was using, he wanted to welcome me to Iran and make sure everything was running smoothly; I also had to pay him. We had tea in the hotel lobby and he obliged me by talking politics.

  “These places are always very crowded,” he observed, looking around at the arrangement of armchairs and coffee tables; the lobby was quite full. His English was flawless, only slightly clipped, with a vague untraceable accent. “Only about half of these people are actually staying in the hotel.”

  “Really?” Hotels didn’t strike me as entertaining places to hang out.

  “Really. In the international hotels, you’re less likely to run into the morality police. Boys and girls
can come here to be together.”

  “I guess that makes sense.” I paused, trying to find the words for what I wanted to say next. “When I was walking around Tehran today it seemed like most people were a little bit . . . unhappy. Is this just the way Tehranis are? Like New Yorkers?”

  Hussain pulled out a pipe and some tobacco, which smelled faintly of vanilla. “Are you familiar with the Russian novelist Gorky?”

  “I kind of avoid Russian literature. It’s depressing.”

  “Gorky once said that a people who do not dance will die. We cannot dance, and look around.” He gestured with his pipe. “We are a dead people. No dancing, no big parties—women can’t even sing. None of the things that help people to live, we have. Of course we’re unhappy.”

  I was mortified to have steered the conversation in such a depressing direction. I hadn’t yet learned that despite the emphasis on privacy and discretion, Iranians are, unlike Americans, totally unembarrassed by sadness. “But it seems like the younger generation is able to get away with a lot,” I said. “I see girls who are barely in hijab hanging out with boys all over the place. They don’t seem very worried.”

  “That’s because the government knows that if the young people wanted to stage a counterrevolution, all of this would be over in five minutes. Young people put this government in power, and young people could take that power away. Seventy percent of this country is under thirty.”

  I lowered my voice so my next question would not be overheard. “So why don’t they stage a counterrevolution?”

  Hussain sighed. “Because Iranians are sick of war. In the last hundred years, we’ve fought two bloody wars, and had two revolutions, a coup, and a countercoup. No one wants to go through all that, not again. People want reform, not revolution.”

  “I can understand that. I would, too.” I rolled a sugar cube around in my mouth—I wasn’t used to the way Iranians drink tea, sucking it over a lump of sugar kept tucked inside one cheek. “But a lot of Persian expats I’ve spoken to seem to think a counterrevolution is about to happen.”

  “Really?” Hussain smiled bitterly. “Well, you live in the Middle East. Something is always about to happen. Often the same thing is about to happen for years and years.”

  I laughed and then blushed as several people turned to stare in my direction.

  Tehran, the Unfunny City, capital of an Islamist hyper-reality, never quite became real to me. It seemed like a living novel; a story that was constantly inventing itself, often at the expense of the very real people who lived in it. The diffident way that fashionable Tehrani women wore their scarves; the rose-embellished murals of martyrs, two and three stories high, that were painted on the walls of buildings; the moralizing slogans; everything suggested to me that Iranian Islamism was less about religion than it was about a method of control. It functioned the way bureaucracy did in Egypt: a way to create hassles and delays so endless that people were too tired to fight back against the local tyrants. From what I could see, it was just as effective. I have never been less sorry to leave a place than I was to leave Tehran.

  My next stop was Shiraz, a city about six hundred kilometers to the south. Beset by insomnia in Tehran, I was only half awake when I boarded the plane; I had my headphones on and was listening to Delerium to cope with my dark mood, and when a prayer for safe travel came on over the plane’s intercom I simply turned up the volume of my music. The woman in the next seat looked at me in alarm. Only later did it occur to me that I might have been doing something illegal. In Shiraz I was met by Azin, a cheerful, witty woman of thirty or so whose scarf slid around alarmingly on her head. Constructed in a horseshoe shape around a bend in a dry river, Shiraz was blooming improbably with rose gardens and cypress groves, and was dotted with blue-domed summer palaces and shrines. This is a common sight all over Iran; most of the country is mountainous and dry, but even the smallest villages I saw were lush with carefully tended plant life. Where the water and arable soil came from remained a complete mystery to me. Shiraz was no exception: a city of cultivated beauty in a feral, sweeping landscape.

  Azin took me to the tomb of Hafiz, one of the most celebrated poets and mystics in Islamic history, who is revered in Iran as a saint. The tomb—a graceful domed mausoleum surrounded by a garden—was adjoined by a chai khaneh or teahouse, a small stone courtyard with a fountain set in the middle and niches with large pillows to sit on cut into the walls. When we entered, a group of chador-clad women looked at me over their shoulders, curious.

  “Your husband is Egyptian?” asked Azin, deftly maneuvering tea and sugar cubes on a brass tray, when we were seated.

  “Yeah, Palestinian-Egyptian.”

  “And he let you travel by yourself?”

  “Yes he did,” I said cheerfully.

  Azin shook her head, incredulous. “We have a stereotype that Arab husbands are very conservative compared to Persian husbands.”

  “I think most Egyptian men are more domineering than Omar, to be fair. When I finally convinced him to let me he was almost excited—he gave me a list of things to look for and asked me to find out whether there are any Sufis in Iran.”

  “Sufis?” Azin looked doubtful. “Maybe before the revolution. But not now.” She adjusted her scarf absently, the way women in other countries might play with their hair. “Do you like living in Egypt?” she asked.

  “I do.” It was true. And I was right; Tehran had normalized Tura.

  “Why?”

  “I guess it’s because everything interesting or important, eastern or western, eventually passes through Cairo. It feels like the center of the world. It’s been the center of my world, anyway, for a while.” It was the first time I had been able to articulate the reason I could no longer see myself severing my connection to the city. Even if my marriage failed, Cairo was the reason I could never again pretend that America was somehow separate from the rest of the world. In The Prophet, Khalil Gibran says we cannot leave the places in which we have suffered without regret, that these places become our second skins. Cairo was mine. It made me sick and dirty and endlessly hassled, and it had given me Omar, and gotten me in trouble, and gotten me out of trouble. It was now an indelible part of my history, and since we love anything that is familiar, I could only think of it with affection.

  Azin smiled. “The center of the world,” she repeated. “It sounds like a poem.” We sat in silence for a while, sipping tea through sugar lumps. Eventually the women in the corner rose, pulling their veils over their mouths, and left.

  Later that day we visited a shrine erected for a brother-in-law of one of the imams. It was small and had a nondescript dome—I had a feeling I was going to have to feign the awe my Persian guides seemed to expect of me in everything. Egypt did everything on such a large scale—starting with the Pyramids and ending with the constant chaos of the streets—that it was hard for me to feel shocked anymore.

  Azin and I had to wear chador inside the shrine; they were conveniently provided in a large box by the door. I pulled the garment over my head, swept the trailing end over one hand, and wished it wasn’t strange for a foreigner to wear one in the street. Chador, a symbol of oppression to most non-Muslims, afford the wearer a kind of dignity totally lacking in the dumpy manteaux, which are, in the end, the mullahs’ halfhearted compromise with western dress.

  When we went inside my awe became unfeigned. The entire interior was covered in a mosaic of mirrors. I had never seen anything like it in my life. Each step was more disorienting than the last as my scattered image shifted around the interior. I stood in the center and swayed on my feet. A dozen people were seated on the floor, praying or reading.

  “You can take a picture if you want,” whispered Azin.

  I shook my head. “Not while people are praying.”

  “It’s okay, you’re a foreigner. They understand.”

  “No, I don’t want to be rude. I wouldn’t want somebody to do that to me.”

  Azin nodded, pleased. “That’s good. Real
ly, that’s excellent. It makes a big difference.” She reached out and squeezed my hand. I smiled at her. We left quietly, the mirror-shrine preserved only in memory.

  The Shrine of Fatima

  We try men through one another.

  —Quran 6:53

  THAT EVENING, AHMAD FLEW DOWN FROM TEHRAN TO MEET me. IN the morning he and I made the long drive north through the Zagros Mountains to the city of Isfahan. The mood I had caught in Tehran hadn’t lifted in Shiraz, but the Zagros, all dusty high plains and craggy, mineral-streaked mountainsides, were eye-catching enough to distract anyone from culture shock.

  “If I may ask,” Ahmad said at one point, “what made you want to come to Iran?”

  I chewed my lip. “A couple of reasons. I’m interested in Persian history. I’ve been in Egypt for a while and wanted to see something else. I wanted to get a sense of another country.”

  “A sense?”

  “A feeling about how things work here, the way people think about things.”

  “But you’re very quiet.” He said this in a way that implied very bored.

  “Oh no,” I said, alarmed. “No, Iran is beautiful. It might be the most beautiful country I’ve ever seen. And the people are very nice.” I fumbled for the right words. “It’s just that I haven’t had a break from new things in almost a year, so most of my awe has been used up.”

  We were silent for a few minutes.

  “You are becoming a little bit Arab, I think,” he said at last, gently.

  The suddenness of the observation startled me. “What makes you say so?” I asked.

  “The way you walk and speak to people. It’s different from the way other Americans I have met behave.”

  “Oh. God. I guess it’s a habit now.”

  “To please your new family?”

  “To keep from sticking out. To keep from creating a scene wherever I go.”