My Prison, My Home: One Woman's Story of Captivity in Iran

by Haleh Esfandiari

  He told me he held two jobs. He was a fireman by day and a cabdriver at night. He had a university degree in engineering from one of the provincial branches of Iran’s Azad, or Free, University, but could not get an engineering job. A relative found him a slot in the fire department. The pay, benefits, and pension were very good, he said, and he had lots a free time. I commented that firefighting must be a dangerous job. “Living in Tehran is more dangerous,” he said. “It’s like living in a burning hell. You face death twenty times a day, driving a cab in this traffic, in your home, or coming face-to-face with the Revolutionary Guards, the morals police, or the basij [the paramilitary forces that are charged with maintaining public order and also enforce public morality]. As to work, once in a while there is a fire and we have to go and extinguish it. At least the job is rewarding, and you help people.”

  He told me his mother wanted to marry him off but he refused to wed any of the women his mother chose for him because they were too traditional and too religious. He also would not marry any of the girls he dated because they were too aggressive and modern. “I would rather go to Dubai or Thailand with my friends and have fun and come back to work here.” He abhorred marriage. “No matter how sensible your fiancée, once you are married, she turns your life into a nightmare.” All this talk about women’s rights had transformed society, he said. “Women no longer know their place, and they have disoriented us men, too. They are taking our place everywhere: in the universities, the ministries, on the streets. Wherever you turn, there are aggressive women ready to push you aside. You are lucky if they don’t trample you under their feet.”

  I laughed and asked him whether he preferred women to be invisible. He said he preferred a “segregated” society. How come, then, I asked, he approved of Dubai and Thailand? He said he went to Dubai for its nightclubs and to drink, and he went to Thailand to womanize. “I don’t drink here. Why should I endanger myself? I think people who drink here are stupid. They risk being lashed or having their homes raided and searched by the komitehs,” the neighborhood watchdog committees. What does he hope for in life? I asked. “To emigrate to Australia, marry an Iranian girl who lives there, and never to have to look back,” he said. I got off at the corner of our street. I wished him luck.

  NO GROUNDS FOR COMPLAINT

  My mother opened the door with her usual question. “Is it over?” I shook my head. No. More than for myself, I was concerned about her. “My mother’s last year is turning into hell on earth,” I had e-mailed Shaul. She had survived the raid on her apartment; but I did not know how much longer she could bear the fear and anxiety or what would happen to her if I were arrested. Fortunately, many friends called her regularly; a few visited her. Michael Postl, the Austrian ambassador, though fifty years younger than my mother, had proved to be a very good friend. He telephoned her almost every afternoon and called on her once a week. He kept looking for ways to be of help to me.

  After dinner, I sat down to write the “report” that Hajj Agha had wanted from me on the benefits of exchange of scholars and NGOs between Iran and the United States and ways of improving the Iran-U.S. relationship. What was there to say? I had consulted two friends, Baqer and Farideh. Baqer was a retired United Nations development economist who informally assisted the UN in their work with Iranian NGOs. Farideh was an academic and Iran analyst who lived in the United States but who traveled frequently to Iran and knew the country well. Both had been questioned in the past by the intelligence services about American and European think tanks and on the subject of scholarly exchanges between Iranians and Americans. Both, like me, had been asked for their views. Farideh had even spent a couple of nights in prison, when she was arrested while observing a women’s rights demonstration in which she was not taking part. When Ja’fari first pressed me about the “model” and the “mechanism” for velvet revolutions, it was to Farideh that I turned for clarification, using Shaul as an intermediary. She understood his jargon better than I.

  Based on the advice of Baqer and Farideh, I wrote a few pages for Ja’fari. I once again stressed that the Wilson Center served as a forum for discussion of a broad range of views on Iran; I expressed my belief that continued exchanges between American and Iranian scholars, journalists, and institutions were the best way to calm tensions and address misunderstandings between the two countries. It was, I realized, fairly ordinary advice and certainly not the dramatic revelation or “key to the puzzle” that my interrogators were seeking. But I could think of little else to say. As I e-mailed Shaul that evening, “They want recommendations, and I don’t have much to offer except to continue along the same path.” I did believe dialogue between Iranians and Americans was beneficial and certainly better than no contacts at all.

  At my meeting with Ja’fari the next day, February 14, I read my “report” to him, and he then read it for himself. I had imagined that Hajj Agha’s request for “recommendations” meant my ordeal was at an end. But Ja’fari’s facial expressions and body language told me otherwise. This was not what he had wanted. He looked up and said, “Oh, so you think conferences and inviting scholars to America should continue.” His voice dripped with sarcasm, as if I were brazenly suggesting that we persist in the very activities aimed at regime change in Iran he had been accusing me of supporting. For three hours, he questioned me about my recommendations. His tone remained hostile. He ended the session by saying, “We have proof against you, and we will show it to you at the appropriate time and place.”

  Three days later, Ja’fari telephoned. He said Hajj Agha had reported to his superiors. “They are not satisfied with your answers. They want to know about the hidden layers.” He then added: “We have warned you. There should be no grounds for complaint on your side. We will produce documents and show them to you where you will not be free to come and go.”

  “Do you mean you will arrest me?” I asked.

  “Perhaps,” he said.

  That night, Haleh, Shaul, and my sister, Hayedeh, called for the latest news. I brought them up to date. I tried to sound calm, but I sensed that, across the continents, they could hear my despair.

  6.

  THE LULL

  JA’FARI’S LAST PHONE CALL WAS followed by eleven weeks of silence. It was a period of anxious waiting, which I tried to fill in various ways. I spent most of my time with my mother. I visited older members of the family. I went for walks with one or two friends who would still be seen with me. With another friend, a publisher and historian, I started working on a series of profiles of prominent nineteenth-century Iranian women. But I knew the lull was not a good omen. I feared a sudden arrest and show trial on false charges. I feared imprisonment at Evin. I spent my days in a figurative crouch, my head hunched down between my shoulders, waiting for the blow to fall.

  My e-mails to Shaul and Haleh mirrored my mood. At times I seemed to be saying good-bye for good. “I want you both to be strong and get on with your lives. I had a good life, thanks to Dad and a wonderful supportive family,” I wrote on February 18; and then again, in early March, “I sometimes think I will never see either of you again; just lingering away here. I am petrified of this.” I wrote to Hayedeh, telling her to look after Haleh and Mother.

  Shaul tried to boost my morale. “They will never dare arrest you,” he told me on the phone and added in an early-February e-mail: “I know that you are tired; but you have been magnificent in handling this, including the interrogations. I’m really proud of you.” But in an e-mail to Hayedeh, he conveyed his anxieties about me. “She is very down. I don’t blame her. She wants finality, and all she gets is more uncertainty and waiting…. She feels alone and abandoned.”

  Mother and I often spent evenings looking for some step or misstep on my part that could explain my predicament. But nothing I had done during my weeklong visit prior to the “robbery” had been even slightly out of the ordinary.

  TAMING THE REVOLUTIONARY TURMOIL

  For fourteen years after the revolution, I had avoided ret
urning to Iran. In the immediate aftermath, the country was in turmoil, as the revolutionaries dismantled and replaced the old regime. Revolutionary committees roamed the streets and neighborhoods, entering homes, arresting people. Power was fragmented, and various agencies—the regular government, the Revolutionary Council, the Revolutionary Committees, the revolutionary courts, Khomeini’s lieutenants, clerics in the provinces—vied for power. The Islamic Republic’s first prime minister compared the country to “a city with a hundred sheriffs.”

  The headlines were dominated by random arrests, trials, and executions. A fierce power struggle erupted, first between Khomeini’s men and their rivals for political power, such as the old National Front and radical left-wing movements, then among Khomeini’s own lieutenants. In 1982, the first president of the Islamic Republic, Abol Hassan Bani-Sadr, was impeached and fled the country. When his supporters took to the streets, pitched battles ensued and thousands were killed, many executed in prisons, but others executed on the streets, in full public view.

  In the meantime, Saddam Hussein, trying to take advantage of what he thought was a prostrate country, invaded Iran in September 1980. In the eight-year war that ensued, much of southern Iran was devastated, leaving the cities of Khorramshahr and Abadan, where I had spent a part of my childhood, and towns along the border in partial or total ruin. Refugees from the war zone flocked to cities farther north. Large slices of the south were occupied before Iraqi forces were driven back by counteroffensives and expelled from Iranian territory. In 1985 “the war of the cities” began, as Saddam Hussein rained down missiles on Tehran and some thirty other urban centers. Shaul and I were sick at heart at the destruction visited on our country. I stayed in touch with my parents by mail and phone, writing three times a week, telephoning at least once a week. Fortunately, Tehran Airport remained open and my mother and father were able to travel. They visited us in Princeton and later in Washington, and were in Princeton during our daughter’s graduation from high school. I worried about them, especially when Iraqi missiles began to hit Tehran. But my father was rooted in Iran; nothing could make him leave. For ten years, there was never a period of calm durable enough for me seriously to consider going back.

  In 1992, however, my father fell seriously ill and the decision to return was more or less forced on me and Hayedeh. By then, the internecine fighting was long over, and the clerical party closest to Khomeini had triumphed. The Iran-Iraq War had ended in 1988. Khomeini died the following year, and the transition to the new order took place without a hitch. Ali Khamenei, then president, replaced Khomeini as supreme leader. Ali Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani, the speaker of the Majlis, or parliament, became president. Khamenei lacked Khomeini’s immense prestige, scholarly standing, and charisma; but the constitution vests ultimate authority and vast powers in the supreme leader. Khamenei gradually came to exercise these powers in his own right.

  Initially, however, Rafsanjani, wily and worldly, shaped the character of the post-Khomeini regime. He was relatively pragmatic. He took steps to reduce state involvement in the economy and to encourage the private sector. He showed little interest in opening up the political arena, but he eased social controls. The Islamic hijab, an ample headscarf that covered head, hair, and neck, along with a robe, invariably black, that covered a woman from shoulders to ankles, was less strictly enforced; women started wearing loose head covers and robes in pastels and brighter colors. Young men and women could mix more easily in public. Iranians could listen to Western music without fearing consequences—most of the time. Rafsanjani’s first minister of culture, Mohammad Khatami, took a more liberal attitude toward the non-political press, cinema, theater, and book publishing. Imaginative directors skirted the censors and made films that went on to win international prizes. Publications carried out spirited discussions of literary and broad political issues.

  In all this, Rafsanjani was yielding to the inevitable. The middle class and especially the young, weary of restrictions, were pushing back. Pirate tapes and CDs of Western music and Hollywood films circulated semi-clandestinely. Young men and women could not openly mix on university campuses, but they did so during popular Friday-morning walks along the foothills of northern Tehran. Young girls and women were already challenging the dress and social code in subtle ways, entering universities in record numbers, and pushing to return to the workplace. The intellectually restless were using pen and speech to push against the parameters of the permissible.

  Abroad, Rafsanjani resumed diplomatic relations with Saudi Arabia and also with Jordan and Morocco, monarchies with whom Iran had not had relations for a decade. He reached out to the United States by using Iranian influence to secure the release of American hostages held by Iranian-supported groups in Lebanon.

  These developments were already under way when I chose to make my first trip back to Iran in the summer of 1992; but from abroad I did not have a full sense of the changes that were stirring in the country. I returned with both trepidation and anticipation. Arbitrary arrests were still common. At the same time, I was eager to see my parents and family, and I ached to return to the country of my birth.

  RETURN OF THE NATIVE

  Tehran had changed dramatically. The hijab in its various forms, even if under siege, was prevalent everywhere, and I had to conform to it myself. I had to get used to the bearded men and a certain scruffiness on the streets and to an erosion of public civility. But much else was achingly familiar. My parents still lived in the same house where I had grown up. On a clear day, the sky was still the brilliant blue I remembered. Looking north from my parents’ house, I could see the brown hills that I loved, and Mount Damavand, snow-capped, magical, and majestic in the distance. Despite the political uncertainty, I felt secure in these familiar surroundings, among friends and family; the skeins that tied me to Iran seemed as strong and reliable as ever. I felt, as we say in Persian, that “the ground under my feet was firm.”

  Other trips home followed in short order. I was excited by what I saw. On the streets, young women, beginning to show a bit of hair, daring to wear tighter clothes and some makeup, seemed self-confident, uncowed by the morals police; and they were visible everywhere: in the workplace, on university campuses, hiking in the hills above Tehran, in cafes and restaurants. I attended a university class with the literature professor Azar Nafisi, and another class with the sociologist Changiz Pahlavan, and was taken with the articulateness of their young students, their familiarity with Western literature and socio-political concepts, their eagerness to learn and explore new ideas, their easy interaction with their professors.

  I met a number of professional women who were breaking new ground in their fields. Shahla Sherkat, then in her mid-thirties, was the plucky founder and editor of the women’s magazine Zanan. She had turned the monthly into a forum for the discussion of issues relevant to women: legal equality, problems with the Islamic laws of divorce, spousal violence, child marriage, and the like. Mehrangiz Kar, whom I knew from my work at the Women’s Organization before the revolution, was a lawyer. She had become an expert on women’s rights under Islamic law, and spoke with great courage about expanding those rights. Shahla Lahiji had started her own publishing firm and specialized in feminist literature.

  In journals like Kiyan and Goft-o-Gou intellectuals were exploring broader ideas about civil society, individual rights, and limits on the authority of the state. The ideas of the Islamic thinker Abdol-Karim Soroush, who argued for an Islam that was open to change and reinterpretation and that engaged with the problems of modernity, were gaining wide currency with university students. I did not know it then, but I was witnessing the early stirrings of the reform movement that would propel Mohammad Khatami to the presidency a few years later.

  I happened to be in Tehran during the presidential elections of 1997, when Khatami scored his first, stunning victory, and again during the legislative elections of 2000, when his supporters won a respectable majority in the Majlis, shutting out dozens of prominent f
igures associated with the conservatives. These elections fascinated me; understanding them dovetailed with my work at the Wilson Center. In that first campaign, the excitement Khatami generated was palpable. Friends of mine who had never before voted under the Islamic Republic went to the polls in that election. In the house of a friend, I discovered all the teenage children in the family had campaigned for Khatami. The eleven-year-old younger daughter told me she had campaigned, too. “I went round defacing Nateq-Nuri’s posters,” she said, referring to the cleric who was running against Khatami. Khatami won the election on a huge turnout with a resounding majority.

  In the 2000 parliamentary election, in a cab with Modarress at the wheel, I toured the polling stations all over Tehran. I saw long lines of men and women, many in chadors, waiting patiently to vote. I found myself devouring four and five newspapers a day and reading thoughtful and intelligent discussions of the political issues before the country. In the editorial offices of the journal Kiyan I ran across Akbar Ganji, already prominent as an intrepid, reformist journalist, who told me excitedly of the election slogan that the reformists had agreed on. “Iran for all Iranians” was meant to convey the idea of an Iran that included men and women of all political persuasions and ethnic groups and that would bridge the chasm that had opened up between Iranians in the country and those living abroad.

  In the end, Khatami did not prove the man of the hour; he lacked the means and the will to withstand the ferocious right-wing backlash that followed these electoral mandates. The hard-liners, who opposed easing up on press and political restrictions and argued for a crackdown on the reformers, had retained control of the instruments of repression: the security services, the secret police, the Revolutionary Guards, and the judiciary. They dominated the Council of Guardians, a body of mostly senior clerics who could veto parliamentary legislation. They enjoyed the support of the supreme leader. They used these instruments to close reformist newspapers, arrest journalists, clamp down on university students, tamper with elections, and block legislation to free up the press or uphold constitutionally mandated liberties. These were years when the possibility of fundamental change seemed real and when Iranians believed, for a brief moment, that they could take charge of their own lives and government. It was not to be, and it was heartbreaking to me to witness the snuffing out of so much promise and hope.