The Ministry of Guidance Invites You to Not Stay: An American Family in Iran

by Majd, Hooman

  The modernizing and Francophile shah of Iran (or as some Americans occasionally mistakenly wrote, the “Shaw of Iran,” unintentionally ascribing to him perhaps the one talent, playwright, that he didn’t claim) seemed to symbolize Iran, at least until the day he unceremoniously departed Tehran, and throngs of bearded men and chador-clad women flocked to the streets to celebrate his departure, along with whatever dreams he had of a Westernized Iran. When the revolution took hold and Ayatollah Khomeini became Iran’s new de facto “shaw”—unlike the shah, he actually did compose, in his case poetry—Americans moved on: How interesting could Iran be, now that its rulers wore robes and turbans, sat on the floor, and ate dates and yogurt for lunch? As long as the oil flowed, another backward country regressing even further wasn’t going to hold anyone’s attention for very long, and the culture was seemingly irrelevant to Western civilization in the twentieth century.

  Indeed, interest in Iran faded until the new Persian royalty and the masses of angry Iranians who worshipped them stormed the U.S. embassy and took American diplomats hostage, in contravention of international law and all notions of international relations, to say nothing of civilized behavior or common decency. Iran was not only no longer the charmingly exotic East we once imagined it to be; it was an implacable enemy forever at odds with not just us but the community of nations at large. Iran, Khomeini proclaimed, needn’t recognize international law since she hadn’t been consulted on its various aspects. The impudence of the world’s nations! Not only that, his declaration that “America cannot do a damn thing” about its hostages was proven true in the end, much to Americans’ dismay, and the revolutionary government extended that ideal to anything America wanted to do vis-à-vis Iran—Khomeini’s slogan is still emblazoned on the walls of the former U.S. embassy in Tehran, more than thirty years later. If the nuclear issue and Iran’s growing influence and power in the region (in Iraq and Afghanistan, for example, or even in Gaza) and beyond (in Africa and South America) are any indicators, Khomeini’s wish is still coming true, much to the chagrin of President Obama—the sixth American president to have to deal with a worrisome Iran.

  Thirty-plus years. Years marked by indifference, enmity, accusations, and recriminations, occasional flare-ups, and for the past few, deep disagreements over a nuclear program that appears to be leading inexorably to a nuclear-capable Iran at best and a nuclear-armed Iran at worst. What’s been happening in Iran in our absence? The population has more than tripled, and industry has grown to the point where Iran can be virtually self-sufficient in many ways, including militarily (albeit on a crude and somewhat outdated level), partly because unilateral (U.S.) and multilateral (UN) sanctions have forced Iranian industry to adapt in order to survive with little, if any, outside help. Superhighways crisscross the country, dotted with technical schools and universities, and Iranians have the greatest rate of higher education as well as Internet penetration in the region. Iranian artists sell their works at European and Persian Gulf cities’ auctions for millions of dollars, Iranian cinema is the nouvelle vague, and Iranian literature is slowly being recognized outside Farsi-speaking countries. Iranian cuisine is even making inroads in Western countries. “What’s the best Persian rice cooker?” a WASPy American customer asked the clerk at an international food store on Lexington Avenue in New York, not long after my experience with the Iranian Interests Section. I nosily volunteered a brand I own, whereupon he asked me, “Does it make good tahdig [crisped rice]?”

  We’re certainly much more aware of Iran today than ever before, I’ve discovered. Just about every American and European can identify the country on a map, even if they cannot identify their own neighboring states and countries or principalities, and as awareness has increased, so, for many, has curiosity. Iran’s cultural influence—political and otherwise—seems to be on the rise, certainly in places we worry about, such as Lebanon, Iraq, and Afghanistan; but can Iran, like China and to some degree India, become an influential economic and military power? One whose culture, from food to literature, from art to spiritual values, permeates Western civilization the way Chinese and Indian culture do? Today there are over one million Iranian Americans, and hundreds of thousands of Iranians in Europe and all over the Western world, and their influence (good and bad, admittedly) is already being felt. Iran hawks, both in the United States and Europe, as well as in Israel, certainly believe Iran can become a power to be reckoned with and advocate confronting Iranian ambitions before it’s too late; others claim that Iran’s power and influence, even its nuclear capability, are greatly exaggerated. But if Iran does achieve what it seems to be striving for—a reborn empire of sorts—and if it remains an independent Islamic force allied with “neither West nor East,” as it declares on the walls of its Foreign Ministry, what will that mean?

  Almost certainly Iran, regardless of whether its future government is fairly elected or otherwise, will continue along the path it forged in the early days of the Islamic Revolution. That path, one of modernity fused with religion—with very mixed results—is unique in the world today, but in the minds of the country’s leadership and of Iranians who believe at least half of its story, this path is the only one that can guarantee progress for Iranians. The Islamic Republic has raised the literacy rate to over 90 percent, educates far more women than men in its universities, and has made great strides in medicine, science, and the arts, all while insisting on a veneer of Shia Islam. A veneer? Yes, but not always a false front. Former president Mohammad Khatami, who served two terms, from 1997 to 2005, once said in a speech—at a time when he was under fire from progressives for not bringing about “change” fast enough; President Obama might relate—that in Iran, democracy would come about only if it were Islamic; otherwise, the country would be a dictatorship much like its neighbors. Perhaps he was right, or maybe over time Iran will become a democracy stripped of its religious veneer. Either way, Iran today is still mostly in the dark, much as China was until the 1990s, both in terms of opening up to the West and in terms of Western understanding of its culture. But Iranians are prepared to turn the lights back on at a moment’s notice. Until then, I hope that this book, born in Iran, might cast some light on their still-clouded story.

  1

  A TASTE OF THINGS TO COME

  At a few minutes before midnight on January 13, 2011, I strolled off a Lufthansa plane and into the one terminal of Tehran’s Imam Khomeini International Airport. The place was familiar enough to me, since it had finally opened to European airlines in 2008, after years of delays—at one point it had been shut down and then taken over by the Revolutionary Guards, the military force answerable exclusively to the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the ultimate authority in Iran. I was accompanying correspondent Richard Engel and an NBC News crew, who had short-term entry visas to interview Iran’s chief nuclear negotiator, Saied Jalili, the following morning. Or, this being Iran, the day after that, or whatever day his office decided would be appropriate. I had been to Iran many times in the previous few years; as a journalist on assignment for U.S. magazines, as a writer researching for my books, and as a consultant to, and sometime interviewee on, various NBC News programs. As the next morning was a Friday, the Muslim Sabbath, I had told Richard to expect at least a one-day postponement.

  Richard, his two cameramen, and I stood in line at immigration: the Americans in the foreigners’ line, and I, with my Iranian passport, in the much longer line for nationals. Iran is probably the only country in the world where the lines at immigration are much longer for citizens than for foreigners; just as airplanes flying to Tehran, no matter their place of origin, are mostly filled with Iranians who are less put off by the thought of traveling to the strict Islamic Republic than most Westerners are. As expected, the NBC crew were whisked off for further processing (all Americans are subject to fingerprinting, in the same way Iranians are at American ports of entry), and I expected to have a long wait at baggage claim while my colleagues were being slowly and methodically—in
a purposefully drawn-out procedure—checked over. Even when Iranian immigration officials have nothing further to do, after they’ve done every procedure and cleared Americans to enter, they seem to hold them back a little longer, making me wonder if they are basing the timing on the latest information about how long it takes Iranian citizens to get through U.S. immigration at busy airports.

  When it was my turn to approach the immigration officer, I handed my passport to him; he nonchalantly scanned and closed it, then got up from his chair and told me to wait one minute. A sudden fear came over me, the fear all Iranians who suspect that they are disliked (or worse) by the authorities in the Islamic Republic feel whenever they cross the border. I had reported enthusiastically on the Green Movement and the antigovernment protests in 2009 for a number of publications, including the Los Angeles Times, the Financial Times, and The New Republic, but after a year’s absence had returned to Iran in May 2010 for a short visit without any problems. In the interval, however, I had a published a book that was critical of the hard-liners in Tehran who had brutally crushed dissent, and supportive of reformist, even liberal presidential candidates Mir Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi, who were now under virtual house arrest. (They subsequently were put under official house arrest.) I was still, as the authorities well knew, related to former president Khatami, who had been under surveillance and barred from travel since the presidential election of 2009. But I was traveling with an NBC News crew, and the Iranian mission to the UN had secured their visas and the interview with one of Iran’s top leaders (Jalili was also the secretary of the Supreme National Security Council, the powerful body reporting to the Supreme Leader), so the government was aware of my work with NBC on what was intended to be a short trip. Clearly, the government had been looking for me at the airport. I was perplexed: had there been any issues with my welcome in Tehran, surely the UN mission would have told me before I boarded my flight. It was the first time I hadn’t breezed through immigration in Tehran, and thoughts of arrest and interrogation, as had happened to other Iranians, swam through my head. This is a good start, I thought, to moving to Iran with my family in a few weeks.

  The immigration official returned after a few minutes and told me to sit down in an area off to the side, in full view of the passengers making their way through passport control and who, being Iranians, couldn’t help but stare at me, either in pity or perhaps in fear that but for the grace of Allah, they too would be subject to uneasy detention at their country’s border. I waited for what seemed a long time, but checking my watch as a tall, bearded man walked purposefully toward me, I realized that less than ten minutes had passed. The man was wearing light gray pants and a nubby gray sweater, and as he approached, his shoes, the hard plastic sandals many Iranians wear at home, clip-clopped loudly on the marble floor. I was certain he enjoyed making the sound, and equally certain that he enjoyed looking like a disheveled working-class stiff—in contrast to the well-manicured and well-coiffed ladies in their designer head scarves and the men in the latest Western fashions who were still waiting to pass through immigration—and although he didn’t look around, I could sense his smugness at the enormous power he wielded over these “westoxified” Iranians who only hours before had surely been cavorting in a Western capital. Not here, I imagined him thinking. No, you’re in my country now, the country of the mostazafin, the oppressed.

  “Hooman Majd?” he asked as he stood over me, my passport open to the photograph.

  “Yes.” I stood up.

  “Follow me,” he said sternly. Holding my passport in one hand, he led me down a long corridor. He turned at one point and said, rather than asked, “You’re a journalist.”

  “Yes,” I said, “but I’m not here to work as a journalist.”

  “You’re a journalist,” he repeated, saying the words as an accusation rather than a statement of fact.

  We reached an area of the airport I’d not seen in previous visits, a corridor with a number of offices with the doors open and white plastic chairs lined up outside.

  “Sit here,” he commanded, pointing to a chair, and disappeared into one of the offices and closed the door.

  I sat down and wondered how long I would be held up, or if I would be sent to a different place, perhaps even a prison, for interrogation. What would NBC do? Would they wait for me until they realized I had disappeared and then try to find out what had happened to me? Or would they carry on with their assignment? They had only forty-eight-hour visas, after all, so maybe they’d just carry on. It wasn’t as if I was their employee, I reasoned, just a consultant. And I was their consultant in part because of my access to Iranian officialdom—to Khatami, naturally, but even to the administration of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, whom I had met a number of times and with whose Foreign Ministry I had cordial relations. If, with my access, I got into trouble, how could I expect NBC to think it might help?

  I didn’t have long to ponder my fate, though, as the man soon came out of the office and approached me, still holding my passport. “You are to report to the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance on Saturday at nine a.m. At the foreign journalists’ division. Do you know where that is?”

  “Yes,” I said, standing up, familiar with the Orwellian-sounding ministry that is responsible for culture but also the kind of “guidance” that most journalists, Iranians and foreign, and artists seeking permission to film, exhibit their art, record or play music, or put on a play, abhor. “But who do I ask for?”

  “They’re expecting you,” he replied with a smirk.

  “Just the accreditation department?”

  “Yes. Be sure to be there, or else you’ll have a problem leaving the country,” he said, a little menacingly. “Let’s go.”

  I followed him as he shuffled back along the corridor, his sandals as loud as before, maybe louder, on the marble floor. At passport control, he handed my passport to a bored official who stamped it, and as he turned to leave, he said, “Don’t miss the appointment.”

  I still got out of the airport before Richard and the NBC crew did, and found the waiting van hired by NBC. Suddenly my plan to move to Iran with my wife and son, and to spend a year living among my countrymen, seemed rather too optimistic, if not downright stupid. I was certain I wouldn’t be jailed on Saturday—surely if they wanted to imprison me, they would have led me out of the airport in handcuffs—but the Ministry of Intelligence might not look as kindly on my next trip. I felt an antipathy for the man who had seemingly derived pleasure from making me sweat. If living among my countrymen meant living among the likes of him, I thought, then perhaps I wouldn’t, after all, want to expose my family to my people.

  As I waited for Richard and his crew to clear customs, I contemplated the irony of having to confront simultaneously the two fears I have harbored since the Islamic Revolution toppled my father’s employer from power and drove my family into exile: that I would never again see the country of my birth, and that if I did, I would never be allowed to leave. Even after I started to travel to Iran regularly, these fears never completely left me: from the moment I stood in line to board a flight to Tehran from the safety of a foreign airport, to the moment I’d hand over my passport at immigration, to the hours I’d spend at Tehran’s airport waiting to leave, I never quite felt safe, for I knew (and my father and other family members constantly reminded me) that Iranian administrations—indeed, the country’s entire political climate—could be capricious no matter who, king or cleric, was in charge. Yes, the fear had subsided over the years, as I made numerous uneventful trips back and forth, but I now realized that whatever allowances the bureaucracy made for West-based Iranians (including for a son born out of wedlock), they did not extend to writers who might publish something the state viewed as not just uncomplimentary but actually treasonous. Not in post–2009 elections Iran. I had already decided not to tell any intelligence officers, or officials of the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance, that my extended stay in Iran might involve writing a book on my e
xperiences. Although such a plan was not technically illegal or even a reason to secure advance permission, I knew that telling them about it might cause them to monitor my activities with greater zeal than they might otherwise have done.

  My traveling companions finally made it to the van, and as we rode into town, I reflected on what I would say to my interrogators when I met with them in less than forty-eight hours. The signs weren’t good for a friendly meeting over a cup of tea: NBC in Tehran (the only U.S. network with a full-time bureau in the Islamic Republic) informed me that the hotel we were booked at, the Laleh, had refused to take my reservation at first, under orders from the ministry, and had finally relented only after back-and-forth phone calls and discussions.

  Signs that my appearance in Tehran was more than a little unwelcome grew the next morning. The Laleh, like Soviet-era Moscow hotels, was essentially a spying apparatus for the state, but I had failed to realize before (perhaps because of the relative ease with which I had traveled to and from Iran) just how good that apparatus actually could be. I was sitting in the lobby lounge having coffee with the American news crew and discussing the best tack to ensure a productive interview, as well as how to get Dr. Jalili to agree to let NBC into a nuclear facility, when one of the doormen (who had not been present when we checked in) approached us. “Mr. Majd,” he said, “may I have a word?”