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

by Majd, Hooman

  We did become friends with the Polish ambassador, his deputy, and their families. They, more than most foreign observers of Iran, seemed to genuinely want to understand Iran, to forge better ties between it and their own country, and to defuse in whatever way possible the crisis between Iran and the West, which always threatens to end in an unnecessary and fruitless war. But they found it almost impossible to do much of anything: no Iranians who mattered, even those no longer allied to the government, could or would meet with them; nor did the higher-ups at the Polish Foreign Ministry follow any advice they might provide. Poland, which at one point during our stay held the rotating presidency of the European Union, could do little that was inconsistent with general European policy on Iran, particularly in light of pressure that the United States brought to bear on its European allies to toe the American line. Policy making on the ground was all but impossible.

  Ambassador Gojlo hosted two more dinners for us during our stay, which we very much enjoyed, both in the company of a number of other European ambassadors and diplomats. At one, where I was the guest of honor, an ambassador, recently appointed to Iran, said to me that he and the other diplomats in his embassy had to be careful in their reports back home not to appear to be defending Iran or its policies too much; otherwise they would be accused of having “gone native.” Colonialism seemingly lives on, if only in the corridors of the foreign offices of former colonial powers. At the same party, the ambassador cracked open bottles of his finest Polish vodka—bison grass vodka, which had recently become available in Brooklyn, too. That was the most exciting part of the evening for both Karri and me, and for whatever reason it made me feel more at home in my second home than I ever thought a bottle of booze might do.

  Karri saw the Polish ambassador’s wife on other occasions, and they shared stories of their annoyance at having to ride in the back of buses alone (yes, the ambassador’s wife rode the buses, making her and Karri two of the very few expats or even well-off Iranians who did), at wearing the hijab, and generally at life in Tehran. Through the Polish couple, Karri also became friends with the wife of the Canadian envoy to Iran, who, after the downgrading of ties between Ottawa and Tehran, held the title not of ambassador but of chargé d’affaires. She and her husband had served in Iran before, many years earlier, and she knew and loved the place despite the difficulties inherent in representing a country that Iran viewed as little more than a servant of the United States, and an enemy to boot. (Canada’s relations with Iran reached their lowest ebb in September 2012, when Canada unilaterally and controversially broke off diplomatic relations, for reasons not fully explained, evacuated its remaining diplomats from Tehran, and expelled the Iranian diplomats in Ottawa.)

  Later in our stay we also got acquainted, at yet another party, with the newly appointed British ambassador, Dominick Chilcott. He had previously served as deputy ambassador at the British embassy in Washington, presumably a suitable preparation for one who was to represent the Anglo-American view of affairs to the Iranians firsthand. He had only recently arrived in Tehran, and a few days after we met, he invited us to a dinner party at the British embassy. I had not been overly concerned with our connections to European diplomats while going to their homes and drinking their vodka, although I probably should have been. The British, however, and their embassy were a different story.

  At least from the time of the Qajars—the dynasty that preceded the last shah’s Pahlavi dynasty, from 1785 to 1925—Iranians of all political stripes have viewed Great Britain with great suspicion. They have not forgotten the British Empire’s designs on Iran (or Persia, as the empire called it)—motivated geopolitically when India and parts of the Middle East were in the empire, and motivated economically once oil was discovered. Indeed, at one time Iranians believed that Britain controlled everything in their country, from politics to the mosque, to the benefit of its interests, not theirs. In the early 1950s, Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadeq dared to defy Great Britain by insisting that Iran receive its fair share from its own oil (or at least more than what the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, later BP, paid in taxes to the British government); in reward he was overthrown by the CIA on the urging and with the assistance of the British.

  Today many Iranians, and particularly revolutionary Iranians, hate the British more than any other nation in the world, still consider them to have designs on Persia, and accuse them of interfering in Iran on a daily basis, yet ironically have allowed them to maintain a large embassy in Tehran; the American one, a few blocks away, was long ago ransacked and occupied and remains shuttered to this day, except for the Revolutionary Guard base set up on its grounds. Some Iranian regime haters, both inside and outside Iran, claim that the British in fact still do control Iran—that they brought the mullahs to power and keep them there; others, even high officials, claim that the British deviously block any attempt by either the United States or Iran to mend ties, in an attempt to keep Iran for themselves. It is the only strategically valuable country in the world where they, and not the Americans, have a presence, and where the Americans have to rely on the British for on-the-ground information and intelligence. Whatever one’s taste for conspiracy theories, the British embassy in Tehran, at the intersection of two grand boulevards in the heart of the city, is often the scene of protests against Her Majesty’s government, and the garden party the embassy throws every year is an occasion not just for protest but for the intelligence and security services to harass Iranian partygoers, and of course to photograph them.

  Only a day or two after we received our invitation to the dinner party at the embassy (which we accepted), the British government unilaterally imposed sanctions on Iran’s Central Bank. Needless to say, the government viewed it as a hostile act, and Parliament took up the issue of how to retaliate. I was now a little concerned about attending a function at the ambassador’s invitation, particularly because the occasion was the anniversary of Churchill’s birthday:

  The British Ambassador and his wife,

  Dominick and Jane Chilcott,

  Request the pleasure of the company of

  MR HOOMAN MAJD & MRS MAJD

  At a dinner to celebrate the 137th birthday of Sir Winston Churchill,

  At 8:30pm on Wednesday, 30 November,

  At their residence,

  Around the same table and in the same room as the

  Great Man celebrated his 69th birthday,

  In the company of the leaders of our Soviet and American allies,

  Marshal Stalin and President Roosevelt,

  During the Tehran Conference of November 1943.

  After dinner, the Ambassador will propose a toast to

  Sir Winston Churchill on his birthday and

  deliver a short oration.

  Winston Churchill is not viewed sympathetically in Iran, and the authorities could not possibly see a party to celebrate his birthday and the Tehran Conference as an appropriate place for any nationalistic, let alone revolutionary, Iranian to be seen. The fact that Stalin was to be represented by the Russian ambassador and Roosevelt by the Swiss (in the absence of an American envoy) would probably be the icing on the cake of any accusations of antirevolutionary sentiments or, worse, activity. I discussed whether we should cancel with Karri, who at this point didn’t feel too threatened living in Iran, despite her run-ins with the Gasht-e Ershad; she left it to me, whom she did worry about, to decide whether going would be too serious a political faux pas. (She was less keen on the menu, which Ambassador Chilcott promised would be exactly the same one that was served in 1943—presumably not vegetarian, and certainly not gluten-free.)

  But within a few days, the Iranian parliament, the Majles, passed a law expelling Ambassador Chilcott, who had been in Tehran all of two months and whose party for Churchill would have been his first big event in the country. The order to expel him in two weeks left him free to carry on with his party plans, but I grew increasingly nervous about going, even though the guest list had probably already been scrutinized by Ira
nian intelligence and I had received no warning phone calls from the authorities, who are always quick to call with “suggestions.” So I asked around, getting advice from former officials and from people connected to the Supreme Leader. All of them said that it was a bad idea for me—no, a very bad idea—to be seen at the party. I finally e-mailed the ambassador, apologizing for having to cancel at the last minute—for obvious reasons, I wrote—and he replied that he understood. The very next day protesters stormed the British embassy and looted and trashed it. The entire staff, including the ambassador (but not his dog, which was subsequently shuttled around to various friendly embassies before being sent home), was evacuated back to London. Before the party could take place. One day before, in fact.

  The Persian year 1390, which had started out horribly for the regime with the big sulk, was going from bad to worse. The storming of the British embassy, reminiscent of the 1979 occupation of the U.S. embassy, was assumed to be the work of the regime, although it hurriedly denied it. The Foreign Ministry even issued a rare apology, or as close to an apology as the Islamic government has ever issued about anything. The police had allowed the protesters, Basij students mostly, to enter the embassy grounds, then arrested a few of them later and cleared the compound within three or four hours, so either it had been planned carefully or some elements of the regime, without approval from the very top, had decided to embarrass both the British and the Ahmadinejad government, which had been against intensifying the conflict with Britain and had earlier opposed expelling the ambassador. Even for veteran observers, it was getting hard to follow the machinations of the government, and the regime.

  The attack on the embassy was shown live on state TV—itself an indication that state media had advance notice of something—and it was the talk of the town for a few days. But the protesters’ ignorance of world affairs, and therefore probable lack of high-level state sponsorship, was betrayed by the graffiti they scrawled on the embassy’s walls: “Down with Elizabeth.” The queen, I have to think, would be flattered that in at least one country in the world she is still viewed as the supreme leader of an empire. Many Iranian politicians (with the glaring exception of the president himself), eager to outdo one another with their revolutionary credentials in advance of parliamentary elections, stopped short of praising the mobs but noted with satisfaction that the Iranian people were sick of Britain and its anti-Iran policies. Even opponents of the regime have very little sympathy for the British, though they might make an exception for the impuissant queen herself. One antiregime Iranian said to me the day after the attack that he thought the British themselves were behind the assault—it was obvious to him, he said—because it would validate their actions in sanctioning Iran’s Central Bank and show the world what savages the Iranians were. Besides, he said, the British control the mullahs. In any event, few in Tehran, even pro-Western citizens, showed much concern over the loss of a British outpost in the capital, beyond wondering how Iranians would now go about applying for and receiving visas to travel to Great Britain, ironically one of the most coveted destinations for perennially visa-hungry Iranians, Islamist or not.

  Karri and I were both unsettled by the British embassy affair, but we were also a little disappointed that we never got a chance to witness a celebration there. Not that there was any shortage of parties. On any given Thursday night, there are parties in parks, in good weather; along the streets, where fast-food and pizza joints give youth who have nowhere else to gather a place to hang out; and even in cars, where kids cruising avenues and boulevards create a party atmosphere with such regularity in some neighborhoods that patrols are set up to block them and in some cases arrest and fine them. Every time we went out on a Thursday night, we would witness these parties in one part of Tehran or another, including our own neighborhood, and Karri was a little annoyed by the fact that traffic, normally run-of-the-mill gridlock, would come to a complete standstill on holidays. Getting out of town was no better, for many Iranians party in the mountain resorts or at the Caspian, making the Long Island Expressway on a Friday afternoon in the summer feel like an empty Indy speedway compared to the highways and roads leading out of Tehran. Three hours for a fifteen-mile trip to a ski resort? Check. Seven, sometimes as many as eleven hours to travel a couple hundred miles to the beach? Check. (At public beaches, incidentally, it is all but forbidden for women to swim, even in full chador, but many jump in anyway.) Party on they do, the Iranians, and nothing—not even the roadblocks, where machine-gun-toting Basij, so young that the fluff on their upper lips signals that their mustaches have yet to grow in, check to see if the women and men in the cars are related and open the trunks to check for booze—will stop them.

  We went, en famille, to the mountains a number of times, both in the spring and in the summer, when the weather was a pleasant twenty or so degrees cooler and 100 percent cleaner than Tehran’s, and in the winter, when snow blankets the area and some of the finest skiing anywhere is to be enjoyed, mostly by Iranians. (Few tourists venture to Iran in the first place, but those who do seem unaware that skiing is a possibility anywhere in the Middle East except in the indoor malls of sweltering Dubai.) We would leave early on Thursday, before the traffic made it impossible to get out of town, and drive along winding mountain roads with hundreds of other cars filled with all kinds of Tehranis: from young people looking to escape their parents for the weekend to families of bearded men and chador-clad women with screaming babies impossibly packed into impossibly small cars. We’d go to spend the night at a cousin’s lodge or another cousin’s apartment, but not to party.

  Entertainment is limited if you’re not a skier or aren’t throwing or attending a party, but just leaving Tehran for twenty-four hours is a pleasure few will understand until they’ve spent a good amount of time in the overcrowded, perpetually smoggy, and sprawling metropolis. (Even in my mother’s childhood, when Tehran had only a couple hundred thousand residents, her family would pack up their house and move to the mountains, or at least the foothills, for the entire summer. And they would party, although in her religious family’s case, without alcohol.) In the warm months, while going for walks in the country, we would encounter religious families picnicking, even camping, by streams and rivers, partying within Islamic norms; they would stare in amazement at the blond, blue-eyed woman with the blond, blue-eyed baby who had just come into view. But we weren’t privileged to attend the parties, wild or not, of those Tehranis who had surmounted the roadblock obstacles and were holed up in the villas, lodges, and apartments that many Tehranis, owners and renters alike, use as their weekend getaways.

  To leave our apartment for the country, we always had to circle around Tajrish Square, a busy shopping district with its own covered bazaar and stalls that sell some of the best fruits and vegetables in Tehran and which is jammed with shoppers on weekdays but even more so on the eve of the Muslim Sabbath. The only people lounging about are the idle taxi drivers, who stand outside their cabs and in a loud, nasal clamor announce destinations they are willing to serve for three or more customers. But most passersby ignore them, having less business to attend to, on a semiofficial half-day holiday, than shopping to do for the weekend. Unlicensed drivers in personal cars, many of them college graduates with no other job opportunities, drive slowly around the traffic circle, their passenger-side window open, slowing down and leaning slightly toward it whenever they spot someone standing at a corner in the hope that perhaps he or she might be looking for a cheap ride. But on Thursdays business is slow. These taxi entrepreneurs will do good business later, when partygoers head out and then return, sometimes drunk and unable to drive themselves, from their parties.

  The sidewalk vendors do brisk business, but the little children who hawk playing cards, chewing gum, batteries, or more often fal-e-Hafez, popular fortune-telling cards containing verses and stanzas by the beloved poet Hafez, seem even more forlorn than usual. One child, a small, thin boy of indeterminate age but certainly no older than ten, would sit on t
he sidewalk on one corner of the square, on his knees with his hands on his thighs, his cards laid out in front of him. I saw him almost every day, passing by with Khash in his stroller as I went to the bazaar for fresh yogurt or farm eggs, or to the vegetable and fruit stands for our daily produce supply. The boy was always silent, never touting his goods. I would give him a little something, which he would wordlessly accept, handing me a card, which I more often than not refused. Unlike some of the other street urchins, he didn’t have the energy to argue that he wasn’t looking for charity. Maybe his dignity had been crushed, or he simply couldn’t be bothered. On rainy and colder days he would sit there getting wet, a dirty piece of plastic covering his goods, shivering as he stoically manned his little corner of the sidewalk, and breaking my heart as he did so.

  Khash would stare at the boy, and all I could think was how very different life would always be for the little blue-eyed boy in a fancy stroller, the likes of which the street boy probably had never seen. Islamic Iran has successfully instituted compulsory education for its children, achieving a very high rate of literacy compared to that of any other developing country, but some children are left behind: illegal Afghan immigrants without the papers necessary to register at school, or the children of impecunious parents—some drug addicts and others just plain poor—who are sent out to the streets to make a few rials to help with the family finances. I found it astonishing that in a busy square, with a perpetual police presence, as well as frequent appearances by security forces and surly hijab minders, children like this boy could escape the scrutiny of a state that proclaimed its devotion to Allah and justice. The mostazafin, the downtrodden, may not be as numerous as in India, but they exist nonetheless.