Adventure Divas

by Holly Morris

  “But I must say when we talk about religious beliefs in our country, there are at least two different kinds of beliefs: One is of the extremely backward conservative traditionalists and the other, of innovators that have an intellectual understanding of religion. My religious beliefs are of an intellectual nature because I have observed freedom, beauty, and art in religion. I believe that an ideal democracy can exist in religion if we approach it correctly,” she says with calm confidence.

  “What do you mean?” I ask.

  “Religion can only be in harmony with democracy when we accept that it rises from the heart of the people. When it rises from the heart and holds love in it, everything will naturally start and end with the people. The important thing is that governments leave people free in choosing religions of their own will. If it is forced, then they will not succeed.”

  Love? Freedom of religious choice? Democracy? This is a kind of Islamic thinking we don’t hear enough about in the popular press. But what Dr. Rahnavard describes is hard to understand for a West that sees Islam only in monolithic religious terms, rather than as integral to the traditions, culture, and everyday life of much of the world.

  That Dr. Rahnavard changed from secular to religious after the revolution, and took this stand against her family’s wishes, is fascinating. Maybe she was influenced, like many of her generation, by the writings of philosopher Ali Shariah, who proposed Islamic behavior as an antidote to mindless Western copycatting. In any case, something happened to her spiritually between the miniskirt and the chador. Perhaps she decided that in order to make change, she needed to do it from within the establishment. Perhaps her religious conversion made her able and willing to operate within the theocracy. One thing is clear: Despite her conservative hejab and formal manner, Dr. Rahnavard’s position on the relaxing of hejab is radical, given her establishment status. I wish we could have had dinner at her home, or gone to her personal art studio, rather than talk with her in this office. Public guardedness and political savvy are necessarily a way of life here. Getting behind closed doors helps tell a fuller story, but that’s pretty difficult, with a camera, in Iran.

  Or in D.C. for that matter.

  Dr. Rahnavard leaves for her next appointment, and we stay a few minutes longer so Orlando can shoot b-roll of some of her small sculptures in her office. I notice a lone business card under the plate of glass that covers Dr. Rahnavard’s wooden desktop. I walk over to see who gets this coveted position, then nudge Orlando to zoom in: It is the business card of the New York Times bureau chief in Iran. I show it to Persheng. “Politicians are politicians,” she says, “and for some here, chadors are power suits.”

  The next day we pile into our white van, which Vresh has waiting for us outside our hotel. Armed with a pound of pistachios and nine lukewarm orange sodas, we are happy to leave the congestion of the city behind and be road-tripping to the city of Shiraz to meet some entrepreneurial lady cabdrivers. On our way we stop at the tomb of his holiness, the mausoleum of Ayatollah Khomeini, which is forty-five minutes outside of Tehran.

  The mausoleum suddenly rises like a mirage out of the flat, arid landscape, as if insisting that it must exist. I will be here, dammit, the structure seems to say.

  The mausoleum has been a work in progress for ten years and although still unfinished, it already looks past its prime. Many consider it an eyesore and not in the tradition of the beautifully crafted mosques of Iran. We pull into a parking lot and the whole scene reminds me of a Six Flags amusement park—a giant complex grossly bowing under the weight of its own ideology. But, unlike Six Flags, here there are no trolleys to take us to the front gate, so we have to lug our equipment a quarter mile.

  Maryam and Persheng have the honor of doing battle with officials who do not want us to film inside. The rest of us pass through metal detectors and are quickly pulled aside by a posse of black-chadored women who hustle us behind private curtains for a very thorough once-over. Having been in production for months on end, always battling exhaustion, having given up a personal life, this frisk by dexterous women in black—up, down, around, exploring folds and nooks and crannies—is by far my most intimate moment in many, many months. They don’t coddle you with “I’m going to touch your calf now, okay?” rhetoric, like American airport security. These very serious women pat and search with gusto, and with the erotic bar as low as it is, I relax and quite enjoy the moment.

  “Where’s Holly?” I hear Orlando ask Julie on the other side of the curtain.

  “I don’t know, she went behind the curtain about five minutes ago. Maybe they’re working over her gear.”

  The atmosphere inside Khomeini’s mausoleum is part mosque, part picnic, part memorial. Women tend children and pray on the left side of the large room; men are aligned on the right, facing Mecca and prostrating themselves. In the back and on the edges children play, women chat, and men gossip. A lone old man sings a loud, elegiac tune to nobody in particular. A few men sleep in the far back. Scores of people cluster at a room-size glass cage at the fore of the vast interior of the building, which holds the tomb of Khomeini. The glass chamber, surrounded by a fence, emits an eerie green glow and mourners in black look at his closed sarcophagus, praying and wailing and clinging to the fence. Offerings of Iranian bills are pressed with a prayer through the links in the fence.

  There were ten million people at Khomeini’s funeral in 1989. I remember television images of the crushing crowds that stopped the progress of the hearse. I also remember how creepy it was when people ripped off pieces of the shroud, hoping for a holy relic.

  The mausoleum is a place of pilgrimage and deep feelings, especially, it seems, to the formerly disenfranchised who gained access to power for the first time after the revolution. (A similar power shift happened in Cuba after its revolution.) But for the most part, it seems the Khomeini cult is a fading minority. An old woman comes up to us and sings the praises of Khomeini, but after the initial pitch, she realizes we are not a government television crew and starts to complain about her dire conditions and difficulty making ends meet. Persheng gives her a thousand tomans and she goes away. I can’t help thinking that the millions of dollars being pumped into this shrine might be better spent in this country where half the population lives in poverty.

  I walk outside to meet the rest of the crew. The Middle Eastern sun beats down on Sky Prancer, who is perched on the hood of a car. Julie is using the Flexfill (a silver disk used to reflect light on interviewees) to bounce a glow onto her pink cheeks, and Orlando is taking still pictures.

  “That’s it, Sky darling, show us some sass,” he says in pitch-perfect British lech.

  It is a slightly perverse scene to be taking place here. We are honoring a leggy, buxom, six-inch American doll with big, unveiled, blue hair. In Texas, “the bigger the hair the closer to God” might hold true, but not in the Islamic Republic of Iran. “You know, the shah’s granddaughter was a Dallas Cowboy cheerleader,” I say to Julie as she repositions the Flexfill.

  “Nooo!” she responds.

  “Yeah, swear,” I say. “She could get three months in jail for that cheerleading outfit here.”

  I glance two auto rows over and see the woman with the baby from the coffeehouse in Tehran, sitting in a car. A surge of adrenaline zips up my spine. “Julie,” I say, nodding toward the car. Julie’s eyes widen. “I knew we were being followed,” she whispers. Persheng scans the parking lot suspiciously and her eyes stop on the woman. “Yeah, I saw her when we were leaving Dr. Rahnavard. We’ve got a minder. Let’s get out of here. Now.”

  We cover up Sky Prancer and continue south to Shiraz, a city once famous for its wine, which is now only drunk behind closed doors. Thankfully, somebody transplanted the Shiraz grape to Australia, where it flourishes.

  We are not going to Shiraz to taste wine, but to visit the Ladies of Paradise cab company, run by demi-diva Zahra Moussavi, an entrepreneurial taxi magnate. The Ladies of Paradise cab company grew out of a transportation need for
women and female students who were not allowed to ride alone with male drivers or were not comfortable doing so. We pull up outside the Ladies of Paradise office in Shiraz and see two covered heads bent under the hoods of cabs, cranking on things with white-gloved hands that stand in contrast to their black chadors. One of the people with her head under a hood is Zahra Moussavi.

  “I started with five drivers two years ago, now I have thirty,” says Zahra, a lively woman with a quick smile, dressed in a conservative chador. She walks us to meet her staff at HQ. In a small room we find seven high-spirited ladies, all dressed in black except for the white gloves, sitting around the dispatcher’s radio and talking to one another.

  “What’s your favorite part of this job?” I ask the group with the help of Maryam’s translation.

  “That we can drive fast and take the ladies where they want to go!” says one woman, smiling. All heads nod in agreement.

  “In America there are a lot of bad jokes about women drivers. Is that the case here?” I ask.

  The women don’t get my gist, so Zahra explains to them. “You know, like when they say, ‘Don’t forget the brake is in the middle . . . and the gas is in the kitchen!’ ” All the women laugh, and a few white gloves slap black-clad thighs.

  Zahra offers to drive us an hour out to the twenty-five-hundred-year-old ruins of Persepolis, which is one of the seven modern wonders of the world and offers a symbolic representation of Iran’s regal past. Orlando, Maryam, and I gladly accept and hop into her Peykan. Along the way Zahra explains that while she is the boss and founded the company, she still had to get her husband’s written consent before she could start the business. While it is common for women to drive in Iran (unlike in Saudi Arabia, for example where it is illegal), it is highly unusual for a woman to own a cab company. Then again, it’s unusual for a woman to run a cab company anywhere in the world.

  I admire her entrepreneurial spirit, which is not unlike that of Islam’s top prophet, Muhammad, who was a merchant. Zahra is in good company, sharing both capitalist and spiritual savvy with Muhammad, who scholars say was sympathetic toward women and forwarded ideas like banning female infanticide and granting inheritance rights to women. Indeed, before he was a full-time prophet, Muhammad worked for his wife Khadijah, who was fifteen years his senior, and he is said to have adored her. (He never took a second wife until after Khadijah’s death, at which point he took several.) Over time, scholars say, Muhammad’s concepts have been perverted by law and government. Makes sense. Certainly Khadijah didn’t have to get her husband’s permission to start her business.

  “This is the entrance for this palace that was built for the first time by Darius the First,” Zahra tells me. “We bring many passengers here,” she says as we pull up to Persepolis and park in an empty gravel lot. “The palace was built from stone by hand and it took them many years using hammers and chisels.”

  Persepolis was once a magnificent complex of palaces that was the summer capital first for Darius, and subsequently for a number of other kings. Even though a fraction of the original city remains, these ruins are much more impressive than any others I’ve seen. “Puts the Acropolis to shame,” says Orlando, as he pans across a bas-relief of a lion devouring a bull. Giant pillars lunge toward the sky and are capped, seventy-five feet up, with intricate sculptures. Slabs of the rocky mountainside are cut away for huge terraces. An ornate staircase once led to the royal apartments, which had two official entrances and one secret doorway that opened into the harem. Only thirteen of the original seventy-two pillars still exist, but Persepolis is still awesome.

  I realize how much I have been fixating on the “cold, impenetrable” images of the Islamic Republic back in modern Tehran and everywhere in the media: the looming clerics looking down from billboards, the silhouetted signs commanding the exercise of “good hejab.” But here, in Persepolis, I see Iran as Persia—a rich, pastiched culture originally made up of tribes of people from northwest Asia who settled here three thousand years ago. Together these tribes started what became the Persian Empire.

  Persepolis was largely destroyed around 330 B.C.E., when Alexander the Great first pillaged and then burned it down over the course of eight years. In recent decades these ancient ruins have created a quandary for ruling clerics because they represent a pre-Islamic imperial past that the theocracy has not been keen to embrace. Nonetheless, with a small but budding Iranian tourism industry, Persepolis has become a source of much-needed income.

  Persepolis is in austere silhouette by the time we leave and drive back to Shiraz. Zahra tells us she ends most of her days at the mosque. “You can join me, but,” she says, not unkindly, her eyes cast down toward our feet, “we must stop somewhere first.” She stops the Peykan at a store and runs in. Two minutes later she returns and hands me a pair of socks. While we (as Westerners) can get away with bare feet in sandals (though it is technically illegal) in Iran, bare feet are neither acceptable nor respectful in a mosque. Before we enter the mosque Zahra cinches up my scarf, extra tight, and pulls it down my forehead, making absolutely sure not a single strand of hair is showing.

  I follow Zahra into the mosque’s walled, stone-floored courtyard, which is brightly lit on this dark, moonless night. Women on the left, men on the right, separated by a curtain, which ever so slightly flutters in the evening breeze, allowing worshippers, should they so choose, to take tiny glimpses into each other’s domain. I follow Zahra into the left side, the women’s side, with the camera and fall back as I’ve always done when it is time for communion in church.

  A constant, incantatory prayer accompanies the scene: Allaho akbar. (God is great.) And then in lower tones: Besmellah rahmane. Alhamdollallah rab’el alamin. (In the name of the compassionate God, the God of all worlds.)

  Halfway through the prayers I notice Zahra stand and begin to make her way through the lines of women who are tapping the crowns of their covered heads, not in unison, but with a common spiritual undulation, toward Mecca. As the line of heads rises, Zahra scuttles down the aisle sliding business cards onto the ground in front of them. And as the heads bow, they do so right onto THE LADIES OF PARADISE. Target marketing, Muslim style.

  “Are you networking at mosque?” I whisper to Zahra, slightly incredulous.

  “Yes,” she smiles, and tilts her head with a laugh.

  Allaho akbar. Besmellah rahmane. Alhamdollallah rab’el alamin.

  The Persian sun beats through the white eyelet curtains that cover the windows of the hotel restaurant back in Tehran two days later. It is a May afternoon, ninety-eight degrees, and we are having lunch: chicken kabobs and orange sodas all around. “Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire” croons over the hotel sound system.

  “Any luck with Operation Beauty?” I ask Persheng, who has been trying all week to get us permission to film in a beauty parlor.

  “It’s very difficult,” Persheng explains to me, “no headscarfs means no cameras.” Beauty parlors are one of the few public spaces where women can be unveiled.

  “I called the parlor that I’ve been going to since I was a teenager. She’s supposed to call me back tonight. We’ll see,” adds Maryam.

  Wherever I travel I try to spend a bit of time at the beauty parlor as I find that it is a hotbed of frank information and, here in Iran, it would seem, ground zero for the beauty rebellion. Furthermore, it’s a chance to make an entry in my catalog of masochistic beauty regimens the world over. In my youthful, unshaven, Birkenstocked days of yore, I condemned beauty parlors with a Khomeini-like fervor. “Dens of corruption,” I might have called them, as the ayatollah called any place espousing Western values. At best, I thought beauty parlors were the realm of The Vain and The Bored. I attributed their nefariousness to the beauty standards pressed on American females (fashion magazines being the worst offenders) that keep them barfing up dinner and hating their bodies.

  But times change, and now any sort of orthodoxy tires me out. Now I consider beauty parlors the estrogen-charged answer to th
e Elks Club.

  That night we get the green light from Maryam’s beauty parlor connection, but it’s going to have to be a top-secret operation.

  “She says we can come in the morning, though we have to be discreet,” she tells me over the phone. I call Orlando’s room. “You’ve got the morning off. No men allowed in beauty parlors. I’ll be right over to get the camera,” I say and hang up.

  The next day we are staked out around the corner from the beauty parlor in our nondescript white van.

  “Cotton,” I say to Julie, mopping up the sweat that trickles out from under my polyester veil. “Why didn’t Jeannie tell us to bring cotton?”

  Our cell phone rings and it is Maryam, who has gone ahead of us into the plain brick building with drawn curtains. On her cue, Julie and I scurry across the street with our equipment hidden under our layers.

  We are buzzed through the first giant white metal door and into a bleak off-white foyer reminiscent of 1950s institutional architecture. The first door clanks behind us and locks with a not-very-customer-friendly thud.

  “So ‘Women of Cell Block H,’ ” I whisper to Julie.

  “I know. In the name of God, who knew beauty was criminal?”

  Another startling buzz; the sound of a cascade of locks; a second door opens slightly and a set of eyes peers out at us.

  We’re in.

  The shop owner wears a blue smock and pauses from the hot iron to hand us glasses of tea and a plate of cookies. Someone flips on the sound system, and upbeat Persian music fills the parlor. The room is filled with smiles and chatting and not a trace of reserve. As we have discovered repeatedly in Iran, once behind closed doors the famous Iranian hospitality and warmth come forth. The coverings and scarves that draw the line between public and private hang on a row of pegs on the wall.

  I start shooting.

  “You can only film from the neck down,” reminds Maryam, which strikes me as somehow ironic. Customers are poised under stunning 1950s pink egg-shaped hair dryers, finger- and toenails becoming fuchsia and cherry red and purple. Hair is being worked over with a vengeance I haven’t seen since the mid-eighties, and even then usually reserved for local TV anchors. A bin of pastel-colored hot rollers flanks every beauty station.