by Stephen Orth
“Oh, so you’re staying with Ahmad,” says Massi. “He’s crazy. I don’t think anyone in Isfahan has as many guests.” Massi is also very actively involved with couchsurfing and has organized many meetings. “Ahmad was arrested once because he was walking through the city with a foreign girl. The police threatened to withdraw the license for his shop, which is why he erased his profile. Now he only gets guests through friends.”
“Have you ever had trouble with the police?” I ask.
“Not up to now, luckily. I don’t think about it much. But some policemen showed an acquaintance of mine photos of one of our meetings in the park. That kind of thing is intimidating.”
We are served Caesar salad and brightly colored smoothies. We could have been in any trendy neighborhood in any European city.
“I have a problem, and I would like to hear your opinion,” says Massi suddenly.
“Sure, what is it?”
“I’m wondering if I should get married soon, I’m twenty-nine. I have gotten to know a nice man; he has a good job. He has just applied for a position with the State Department in Tehran.”
“So, what’s the problem?”
“He is quiet, and I’m an extrovert. We can’t get along with each other so well. We’re too different. He loves me, but I don’t love him. At least not yet. I have no idea how I can make a decision. In Iran it’s always the men who make the first move. Who knows if there’ll be another opportunity.”
“How long have you known each other?”
“We’ve met three times.”
I almost choke on a salad leaf.
“And when did he propose?”
“Before the first date, on Facebook. We met at an official function and then became Facebook friends.”
“Why are you in such a rush to get married?”
“When an Iranian woman lives alone, there’s a lot of gossip and rumors. I’m getting pressure from my family. I shouldn’t wait more than two years.”
“But then you can take your time.”
“Maybe he will lose interest.”
“If he’s serious about it, he can be patient for a couple months.”
I find it difficult to give good advice because as far as the meaning and concept of marriage is concerned I come from a different planet.
In Iran the bride becomes all but the possession of the groom in marriage. As compensation he is required to finance the mutual apartment, and in the case of divorce he is obliged to pay a handsome divorce dowry. According to civil law, this is “the price for the woman for sleeping with the man during married life, for running the household and for obeying him.” Without his permission she cannot even leave the house, let alone the country.
According to the law, if a man wants a divorce, he just has to say, “I divorce you” three times to his wife. A woman with the same intention needs a court and her husband’s signature. Subsequently, the man has the fundamental right to child custody. Prenup agreements that at least give some extra rights to women have become fashionable among young couples.
Anyway, remaining unmarried is not a solution, not only because of financial insecurity. The family and social pressures are strong, so very few women dare to stay single. Even those who are well educated and have top jobs, like Massi.
“You know that in Iran there are two weddings,” she explains. “The first takes place within the inner circle, and afterward both partners still live with their families but start looking at apartments and furniture. In the process they get to know each other for the first time, since there are few opportunities otherwise. If you get divorced before the proper, big wedding ceremony, then it’s not too dramatic. But it is still a divorce.”
The male perspective on the subject is supplied by a chance encounter on the way back to Ahmad. I’m waiting on the roadside for a cab when a young man asks me if I want a lift. He is twenty-three, studies electronic technology, and introduces himself as Arash. “We are the lost generation,” he says. “We have hardly any chance of a good job, and everything is getting more expensive. If I want to buy a house in a bad area, I have to work twenty years for it. For a house in a good area, one hundred years. To get married I have to own a bank.”
All that is missing is a statement from Sofia. We meet up the next day in the park next to the Zayanderud riverbed. She says that she doesn’t understand how Europeans can have children without marrying. “The commitment is missing, isn’t it? The man can do as he likes.” If, however, you sign a contract and have a huge party with all your friends, then it is a real commitment. She has had a number of dates that were arranged by her parents. Her father is a very devout man who works as a tour guide for groups of pilgrims visiting sacred Shiite sites in Iraq. “Once there was a guy where absolutely nothing clicked. He just babbled such dumb stuff, I couldn’t even look at him.” Talking about the right age for having dates with the opposite sex, she thinks that kids younger than twenty should not get into it yet—it must be the teacher in her: “It distracts them from their schoolwork.”
Once she almost stopped using the Couchsurfing portal because there was too much flirting. “At those meetings many people look for partners, and they try to persuade you to drink alcohol, put you under pressure, saying stuff like: ‘Oh, so you’re not a modern girl.’ But, in effect, no girls are really modern. You just have to see them at home. The next problem is that many people want to be ‘Western’ when it’s about parties and boys but not when it’s about discipline and punctuality. They just cherry-pick.”
DRUNK TO THE IMAM
ON THE HIGHWAY to the airport I feel pretty modern; I’ve just remembered that I still have a bottle of the best wine in western Iran in my backpack. Sofia’s uncle Akbar is behind the wheel (actually, he’s not her uncle, but in Iran a good friend from a generation above is often called “uncle”), next to him his wife, and behind her Sofia. He is an engineer and recently had a job offer from a telecommunication company called 3s Network in Irvine, California. In a few months he will emigrate to the U.S., and he’s happy to be able to practice a bit of English with me.
On his cell phone he has stored 120 questions that he can expect to be asked at the interview for his visa application in Tehran—and the answers. He knows almost all of them by heart, as shown by the following role-play in which I become the stern consulate official.
“Who interviewed you for the job, and how many interviews did you have?”
“I had three phone interviews with Mr. Hawkins.”
“How did you hear about the company?”
“The CEO is from Iran; he is a friend of my brother-in-law.”
“How do you know the company is real?”
“I talked to some employees, and I checked the website.”
“Why will you come back to Iran?”
“Because of my family.”
“Why do you want to change?”
“I will earn more money and learn more in my field.”
He explains that in Iran you won’t get rich from engineering. “Here I earn $350 a month, and in the U.S. more like $5,000.” He really wants to make it happen. Only a year ago he could say little more than “Hello” and “How are you?” Now he does nothing other than practice English with his private tutor. I wish him luck when I say my goodbyes.
“Pray for me at the shrine of Imam Reza in Mashhad,” says Sofia and shakes my hand. “Tell him that I want to go to Germany, and that he should make it happen.”
“Will do. You are the best dictator in this country,” I say.
I have an hour to wait before my flight to one of Islam’s most sacred cities. The wine has to go. In my mind I beg forgiveness from His Majesty Ehsan, prince and master wine-maker of Marivan. There are a thousand better places to relish the pleasures of a fruity 2013 vintage than the toilets of the Shahid Beheshti Airport in Isfahan. In two minutes I manage two thirds of the bottle; the rest I tip into the bowl. A mighty fine wine. I have to flush twice until there’s no more evidence of red. Now I
just have to dispose of the bottle, pop some chewing gum into my mouth, and voila. I walk as straight as possible to the counter, and my drunken mind realizes that you just need to swap two letters to turn “check in” into “chicken.” I show my ticket and wait in line for the security controls.
From: Sofia Isfahan
Sorry I couldn’t have even a small hug with u @ airport in front of my friends U know maybe they find it strange;-) Was nice meeting u. U r so kind:)
To: Elaheh Mashhad
Hi elaheh, i m on my way now, i will arrive at the airport in around 3 hours. see you soon!
From: Elaheh Mashhad
My address is manouchehri st. call me when you get to the cab.
From: Massi Isfahan
Have a great rest of trip. please pray for me at imam reza shrine!:)
An announcement crackles through the loudspeakers: “Mister Stephan, please come to the information desk.” I’m not sure whether I heard the name correctly. Have I lost something? Passport and ticket are in my hands, so I don’t think so. Did the security cameras film me disposing of the bottle, and they have found traces of wine in the garbage? I decide not to go to the information desk. In the waiting room at the gate the announcement is repeated, but again it’s not really understandable. They must mean someone else. The wine is making me confused.
I try to be rational and to channel all my anxieties toward the approaching flight. I booked with Taban Air, a tiny company with seven planes. The maintenance problems in Iran’s air-traffic trade are well known. Imported spare parts are scarce, certainly for the American MD-88 plane onto which I am about to board. The country’s aircraft mechanics are the jazz musicians of engineers. Masters of improvisation, who also sometimes integrate unusual tones and waive conventional solutions. I deliberate about whether on my plane the onboard electronics, the hydraulics, or the engines are most likely to be cobbled together with parts from the Saipa automobile plant. Or all three. Whether some technicians, like musicians, are better at improvising than others after drinking a couple glasses of wine. It’ll fly all right, won’t it? Inshallah. I google Taban Air’s last crash landing. It was four years ago. Coincidentally, it was the Isfahan to Mashhad route, forty-two injured. Four years could mean one of three things:
a) As a reaction to the incident security has been improved considerably.
b) It’s about time it happened again.
c) I’m worrying too much.
The correct answer proves to be c. The pilot takes off elegantly, stays up in the air the intended amount of time, and lands as gently as a feather of a mynah bird on a Persian carpet.
MASHHAD
Population: 2.6 million
Province: Razavi Khorasan
RELIGION AND MONEY
“HAVE YOU GOT swimming gear with you? This afternoon there is a pool party,” says Elaheh. That isn’t the kind of sentence I expected to hear in strictly religious Mashhad. But actually I should have realized by now that Iran takes great pleasure in twisting expectations, crumpling them up, and then with great panache, dumping them in a huge garbage can marked: Prejudices, Official Perceptions, and Theocracy. So, to the holy shrine in the morning and to a party in the afternoon—the agenda appeals to me.
Elaheh is a dentist, and she looks a little like former world number one tennis pro Ana Ivanovic and has a friend named Ismail, who picks us up in an ancient Jeep without a windshield. To cruise around the holy city in this vehicle is pure pleasure—at last, the feeling of freedom outside walls and fences. With airflow in your face and the sun in your hair you begin wondering why on Earth cars are built with windshields. Mashhad is a rich city and seems to be more modern and cleaner than Tehran or Isfahan. Every year more than 15 million pilgrims come here. At the roadside there are huge billboards advertising real estate, and the pedestrian bridges seem to be brand new. Huge construction cranes numbered 1 to 9 herald the building of the largest shopping center in the country. At a subway station we change to a more modern form of transport, with more windows than we’ve become used to, and travel to the center.
Fifteen million pilgrims. Imagine a sold-out AT&T Stadium, more than 80,000 people. Now imagine ten or twenty AT&T stadiums, and you are not even close. Every year the number of Muslims arriving would fill 190 full AT&T stadiums. Some official sources speak of 20 million—250 football stadiums. But you should be a little careful with such figures. Maybe the state propaganda machinery would like to make the Iranians a bit more devout than they really are.
Imam Reza didn’t cause much of a stir during his lifetime 1,200 years ago. But he is the eighth of twelve imams, so for Shiites a legitimate heir of Mohammad and thus worthy of honor. They also believe that he was done away with by Caliph Harun al-Rashid using poisoned grapes (historians are less certain), which would allow him the status of martyr. The other ten imams (they are still waiting for the return of the twelfth imam, for whom there is no grave) were buried outside Iran. The mausoleum isn’t a cemetery but a palace. The whole complex, consisting of almost 20 million square feet, is, in terms of area, the largest mosque in the world, and one third larger than the equivalents in Mecca and Karbala.
We meet up with the architect Parisa, a friend of Elaheh and Ismail, and I’m left alone with her, as they are not interested in shrines. They take my camera, as I’m not allowed in with it, although, funnily enough, it’s okay to take pictures with a cell phone.
The next two hours Parisa and I spend walking from one huge courtyard to the next, passing mighty vaulted iwans and gilded entrances. Uniformed officials with color-coded dusters in their hands maintain order.
“Yellow stands for a guide specializing in general questions, green for religious ones,” explains Parisa. The guides are allowed to poke women (and men) with their dusters who go the wrong way. In many areas and entrances there are strict rules about gender segregation. There is supposed to be a waiting list of ten thousand men wanting to work here, which probably has more to do with the proximity to the holy shrine than the opportunity to poke people.
Time and again Parisa is warned by the watchdogs to completely cover her hair and fingernails, painted in mosque dome turquoise. In the whole shrine chadors are obligatory for women. The splendor of the gigantic complex is overwhelming. “I once showed a French tourist around, and he thought that the Palace of Versailles suddenly seemed small and modest,” says Parisa. The holy shrine is constantly being extended, for more than a thousand years already. In the meantime space has become scarce, forcing them to build underground praying areas whose access staircases resemble those of a subway station. They lead to mirrored halls with hundreds of prayer rugs and hundreds of chandeliers.
The chandeliers all have white bulbs except for one that is green. “That one is to mark the nearest to the grave,” says Parisa. Masses of pilgrims jostle toward a kind of golden cage behind which Reza’s sarcophagus is concealed. As a non-Muslim I am not permitted to go as far as the cage. Also, emotionally I would stick out—most of the visitors are praying and many are crying for the martyr. I am just stunned. In my mind I ask Imam Reza for an early trip to Germany for Sofia, for a decent husband for Massi, and for an extension to my visa, which is due in five days.
You don’t dare to think what such buildings must have cost. A business conglomerate consisting of mining concerns, a bus factory, textile companies, agricultural businesses, and a large proportion of the land on which the city stands funds the Imam Reza Shrine. The hotels accommodating the pilgrims have to pay a levy for the land. Such businesses are called bonyads and as official charitable trusts are exempt from tax and take donations. They are under the control of the Supreme Leader Khamenei, who was born in Mashhad. There are 120 bonyads in Iran, and they are a considerable economic factor. The largest of them runs the Imam Reza Shrine and has an annual turnover of US$14 billion; that’s more than Porsche.
PARTY
ISMAIL DOESN’T HAVE a Porsche, but his old Jeep is just as much fun. In the afternoon we drive a short d
istance out north of the city. Our driver stops at a heavy iron gate that looks as if you would have to punch in a password and convince a boxing champion’s minder of your good intentions, but in fact, it swings gently open to let us in. We park behind two other cars on a gravel path; trance music warbles from a Peugeot.
“Have you got any weed?” asks a man who looks nothing like a Persian boxing champion but like a heavily tattooed gangsta rapper. In fact, he is a filmmaker.
“Sorry,” answers Ismail.
“Something to drink?”
“Also no.”
Mina, a friend of Elaheh, is already there, as well as three men. The party location is in a garden behind a fifteen-foot-high wall concealing all from prying eyes. An acidic fruit called “green tomatoes” and mulberries grow here, and directly next to the entrance there is a swimming pool some 30 feet long and 6.5 feet deep. In a small outhouse with a kitchen and living room we change, one after the other. Soon, two women in bikinis and five men in shorts are hopping into the ice-cold water. Ismail uses a GoPro camera with a watertight case and film, especially when the women are swimming. In particular the well-built Mina seems to relish the interest that her body arouses. I am astonished by her trust in Ismail not to do something stupid with the film, like posting it on Facebook. I feel like a reporter who has been invited to a secret porn shooting location. The difference is that being caught at a porn shoot in Europe would cause you considerably less trouble.