Honeymoon in Tehran: Two Years of Love and Danger in Iran

by Azadeh Moaveni

  We idled in traffic near Argentine Square, whose adjoining boulevards reflected the worst of Tehran’s haphazard, lowbrow architecture—buildings modeled after the Parthenon sat awkwardly alongside business complexes that resembled Transformer toy robots. The taxi sped through a tunnel that had just opened after years of construction, its impressive Persepolis motifs capped by an overwrought tribute to the Prophet Mohammad’s daughter: “Would that my heart had a route to hers! Would that Fatemeh too had a shrine of her own!”

  The tunnel knit a major expressway into a busy central avenue, and I wondered whether the roads I was traveling on were those mapped by my paternal uncle Khosrow and his cousin Mansour. They were among the chief architects of modern Tehran, responsible for the city’s master plan before the revolution; the roadwork constructed later followed their original lines, which were intended for a population of 6.5 million, not the over twelve million who inhabited the city today. The modern, western city my relatives designed, with wide avenues and properly located and zoned residential, commercial, and industrial areas, had been transformed after the revolution into a haphazard sprawl of unappealing suburbs.

  On a secluded side street just south of the new tunnel, I found the office of Emadeddin Baghi, a former pro-reform journalist and prominent dissident who had spent time in prison for his political writing. That experience had convinced him that Iran needed basic respect for human rights before it could benefit from political journalism. As the author of some twenty books and innumerable articles that advocated secularism and revealed the regime’s brutal treatment of its opponents, Baghi considered himself a “religious intellectual;” this meant he was devoted to Islam, but believed the faith could accommodate democracy and should be removed from politics.

  In 2000, when I had last seen Baghi, he was lying prostrate in a hospital bed. During his trial for apostasy, the judge had kept Baghi on his feet for long hours, which worsened a preexisting condition he delicately avoided naming. I remembered the sweaty evening vividly, how a young woman in chador, a student activist, found her way into Baghi’s hospital room and pressed a bouquet of flowers into his hands. Student organizers considered him a hero, and the emotional young woman asked him, “Why do you write these articles, when you know it is like holding a gun to your chest?”

  “If Iran takes one step in the direction of democracy, isn’t that a precious thing? Precious enough that my ceasing to exist is a very small price in comparison,” he told her. The young woman choked up and ran out of the room. It occurred to me that in 2005—only five years later—you surely would not find college students loitering outside the hospital rooms of political dissidents. That short, breathless period during which change seemed possible and Tehran felt as intellectually and politically animated as Prague in the spring of 1968, was resoundingly over.

  “I can’t believe how apathetic young people are these days,” I said. Baghi agreed that the Tehran spring had petered out, and that most Iranians now coveted Bosch vacuum cleaners more than freedom. “Politics has become like a soccer game: people just watch and applaud from the sidelines. They don’t actually do anything.” He looked dejected, running a hand across his black seminarian’s beard.

  In the past, Baghi and I had often discussed his mentor, Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri, once Khomeini’s favorite and designated successor, who was cast aside by the revolutionary leadership for speaking out against its human rights abuses. The octogenarian cleric lived under virtual house arrest in the holy city of Qom, but remained a guide and inspiration for Islamic intellectuals like Baghi. His name did not come up once that day. Instead, we talked about home appliances. I asked him what he thought preoccupied young people these days, and he said getting married. He told me about the government’s marriage loan scheme, a low-interest advance of about $1,000 that covered a wedding dress and a middle-class wedding party.

  Just as it had transformed so much of Iranian life, the revolution had changed how and when Iranians married. Inflation and the lack of viable jobs had pushed the marriage age up by nearly a decade. Now couples found it took until at least their thirtieth birthdays before they could approach financial independence. Young people tended to blame their leaders for the economic straits that put early marriage out of reach, and the government’s marriage payment was designed to curb this resentment. “Lots of couples use the loan to buy appliances for their new life, or the first month of rent for an apartment.

  “Are you following this pyramid scheme business?” he continued. “The newspapers are full of stories warning people to stay away from them. Parliament is trying to outlaw them altogether. This just shows how desperate people are to get rich without effort, because making money legally requires connections.”

  The clock on the wall announced I needed to leave for my next interview, so I gathered my things. Baghi asked whether I could help him submit an “opeedee” to some American newspapers, and it took me a second to realize he meant an “op-ed.” I corrected him gently and promised to try. We exchanged e-mail addresses and I rushed off to find a taxi and sit in the stagnant traffic.

  I arrived a few minutes late at Café Shoka, a coffee shop where the ex-student activist Amir Balali had suggested we meet. But Amir sent a text message to say he would be late, too, so I ordered a milk shake and watched young couples whisper over banana splits, as the speakers purred French lounge music. At least two couples had their heads bent closely over the table, whispering intimately and oblivious to their surroundings. Young people desperate to be alone together often resorted to spending time in coffee shops, among the few public places where they could sit tête-à-tête without drawing attention or being harassed by police. In fact, a whole genre of dimly lighted coffee shops tucked away in the city’s numerous mini-malls catered exclusively to this young clientele.

  Amir strode in half an hour later, dropped his mobile phone on the table, and sat down with arms crossed across his Umbro soccer jersey Most student activists were painfully shy young men from the provinces who could barely look a woman in the eye, but Amir was clearly more urbane. He explained that he was semiretired, and that activism no longer interested him very much. This was not, he insisted, because of his 2002 imprisonment, during which he was kept standing—sleepless, facing a wall—for seventy-two hours straight, and beaten. I must have looked very grave as he described this horrific experience, for he looked up from his latte and said, “They didn’t pull out my nails or anything.” Nor, he said, was the imprisonment the reason for his withdrawal from political life. He did not say what the reason was; I inferred, from his other comments, that he saw no use in trying to reform a system that needed to be rebuilt from scratch.

  Earlier he had called Iranian society a “social catastrophe,” so I asked him what he thought was the greatest social challenge facing young Iranians.

  “This sick double life we lead,” he said. “Everyone wears masks, and no one trusts each other. This whole society is a lie. You realize, I can buy liquor at the pharmacy or get tabs of E at the juice stand.”

  I knew pharmacies sold a mysteriously expensive brand of rubbing alcohol that was intended as a base for drinks, but I was slightly scandalized to hear a popular chain of juice stands might also vend a party drug. “You mean Juice Javad sells Ecstasy?”

  He nodded knowingly. My ignorance of this important fact apparently signaled a lack of information about the degenerate ways of Iranian youth, and Amir wearily set about enlightening me.

  “At this very moment, there are thousands of garçonnières [bachelors’ flats] across Tehran. Young men save up their money, pool their resources, and share the keys. The marriage age has gone up, and no one can afford to get married. Young people have needs, of course. The regime has no answer to this crisis, so young people find solutions themselves.”

  Given how busy they must be coordinating their garçonnières and buying illicit drugs from Juice Javad, I wondered if the young people he knew were going to vote. “Nah, not reall
y interested. I thought about organizing around one of the opposition candidates, thought maybe we could pull a sort of Ukraine-style thing here. But then I decided against it. No one cares about anything besides their own prospects right now. Their idol isn’t Che Guevara anymore, it’s Bill Gates.”

  We chatted a while longer about this new self-centeredness, and then headed our separate ways. It was nearly six o’clock, and it would take me an hour to get back to my aunt’s house in traffic. That would leave me just enough time to shower and change before her dinner guests arrived. As I stood on the crowded street shouting out my destination to passing taxis, disjointed thoughts flitted through my mind—why were Tehran buses painted in such peculiar sanatorium shades of powder blue, buttercup, and tea rose pink? When had young Iranians started to care more about home appliances than freedom of speech?

  I wondered whether the authorities had successfully stanched young people’s despair by purposefully dispensing more social liberties. After all, the regime had never seemed less able to control young people’s lives than it did today. Perhaps this explained why the political rage I chronicled back in 2000—the impulse that brought that young chadori woman to Baghi’s hospital bedside—seemed to have evaporated.

  My aunt’s dinner party that evening did little to illuminate these matters. Her friends were mostly in their fifties, and their twenty-something children had already been dispatched abroad, to western universities. Nearly all Iranian parents—from the affluent to the financially strained working class—shared the ambition of sending their offspring to peaceful societies where they could live meaningful, evolved lives of material ease. Of my aunt’s friends, one (an oil executive married to an aristocratic heiress) had managed this with little trouble, another (a documentary filmmaker) with great hardship. I sat on the couch among them, selected a ripe peach from the fruit bowl, and asked whether they planned to vote. Most, convinced that eight years of reform government had failed to improve their lives, said they had no intention of voting at all. Two said they would vote for Rafsanjani, in hopes that he would balance the regime’s warring moderate and right-wing factions, and perhaps even improve ties with the West. The discussion petered out rather swiftly, and my aunt summoned us to eat kookoo, a sort of frittata dense with herbs, walnuts, and barberries. I took this opportunity to drift away from the living room unnoticed, eager to organize my notes from the day’s interviews, and refine what I would ask Iranians, my eternally unsatisfied people, tomorrow.

  CHAPTER 2

  To Vote or Not to Vote

  On my fourth day in the city, I was sitting in a soundproof room the size of a minivan, hidden in the back of a greenhouse. Nasrine had fetched me earlier that morning and escorted me to a rehearsal by the underground band 127. Next to me, a young man in a tasteful plaid shirt and faded Converse sneakers was offering Nasrine a cigarette and explaining how in Iran dictatorship could not quash creativity. “It’s like in Soviet Russia, all the writers just kept writing, right?”

  One of the most surprising aspects of Iran in 2005 was its alternative music scene, the explosion of bands like 127 whose music the government considered a symptom of toxic western culture but tacitly tolerated. Of the many cute bands whose music carried tame political undertones, 127 was a particular success. Its members labored to cultivate an audience over the Internet (a difficult feat in a country where YouTube and MySpace were banned), and its inspired act, fusing jazz with Iranian music, was the first in Tehran to attract attention in the West.

  The members were most excited over their newest single, “My Sweet Little Terrorist Song,” in which the vocalist airs a sentiment perhaps universal in Iran (“Legally I’m nobody, but when I cross the border I’m somebody new”) and complains in English that he should be granted a U.S. visa to visit his pretty cousin in California. He promises that if let in, he will “not fly into the Pentagon alive.” Before they began rehearsing, I tried to get Sohrab, the band’s lead singer, to describe how he felt living in Iran. He would not oblige me, though. “Life abroad also seems very sad, and not all that much better,” he said. “People in the West seem to pop Prozac day and night, and it’s not as though we’re entirely cut off here. We’re connected to the world, in our own way.”

  The band was composed of art students and the children of moderately well-off Iranian intellectuals. Yet, although they were not fighting off poverty, or shackled to parents who rejected their sideburns and choice of artistic pursuit, their music resonated with a very contemporary Iranian despair, the frustration of living in a nation with the world’s largest brain drain: “As the new sky’s falling, no one’s running. No one’s running but me.”

  As the musicians began tuning their instruments, I whispered to Nasrine that she should ask for the guitarist’s phone number. “He looks about eighteen,” she sighed.

  “No, he’s twenty-six! I asked all their ages while you were parking the car.”

  The theme of Nasrine’s love life, her dire mismanagement of all affairs of the heart, dominated most of our conversations. By the base calculations of the Tehran dating scene, she should have been a highly desirable partner—she had a successful career and was financially independent; she was fluent in two western languages (English and French); and she was willing to date before marriage. Her wide smile, sensuous proportions, and penchant for tight clothing made her appealing to a wide range of men, and I could never understand her catastrophic choices. Partly, I suspected, she believed a sound relationship would mean the end of her lively youth, of all those Friday nights she spent drunkenly tossing her long black hair around on party dance floors. Partly, she just seemed lost, uncertain of how someone of her middle-class background might negotiate that party scene, dominated as it was by worldly, upper-caste Iranians. Nasrine had recently discovered the phenomenon of Bridget Jones—the novels and films whose protagonist, a female journalist, celebrates her romantic haplessness—and concluded there was no shame in her single plight.

  Nasrine wouldn’t approach the guitarist, and when the band was done practicing we filed out of the soundproof bunker, blinking in the glare of the midday sun. She headed off to run an errand, and I retired to Café Mint, a coffee shop on Gandhi Street that served “frippu-cino,” to wait for my next interview. Kambiz Tavana, a hyperverbal young journalist in black wire-rimmed glasses, had worked for the reformist newspaper Etemad (“Trust”), which like more than a hundred other publications had been shut down by judicial decree since 2000. While the assault on independent journalism had inspired a would-be democrat like Baghi to dip his toe into “civil society,” it seemed to have propelled Tavana into the Rafsanjani camp. I wanted to know how a liberal who reported on student uprisings had ended up serving a heavyweight mullah, despised by most intellectuals for his brutal record of harassing dissidents.

  “Let’s be realistic here,” Tavana said, in the unruffled, confident tone of someone whose boss partly ran the country. “Rafsanjani has a dark history, sure. But he has power, and power can achieve things. What is the lesson of the U.S. invasion of Iraq? That quick change is not possible in the Middle East. We need to adjust our expectations to fit reality. Things have improved here. Ten years ago, you couldn’t take a test in jeans. There were no shopping malls in Qom. Now look at how much more open life has become. There are openly gay areas in Mashad, teenagers on the bus listening to rock music on their mp3 players.”

  When I asked whether this was not just the result of a demographic wave, the regime softening before the pressure of an immense generation of young people, Tavana disagreed: “Rafsanjani is the architect of all this. These changes were a strategy, and just look how it’s bought everyone’s consent. Once, they asked him at a university speech what was wrong with men and women sharing notes. He said, ‘Nothing,’ and they gave him a standing ovation. Rafsanjani realizes everyone’s top priority is himself. Comfort, normalcy, a decent economic life.”

  Tavana told me he did not see much point in pursuing an open society or hold
ing the powerful ayatollahs accountable for gutting the economy of an oil-rich nation. “Civil society, democracy, human rights, these are all just buzzwords. You can’t do human rights unless you teach people what rights are, and right now that’s not part of the curriculum.”

  The Rafsanjani strategy of Islamic dictatorship lite—of buying young people’s acquiescence by doling out more social freedoms, while hounding pesky critics who demanded political change—did not disturb Tavana. He neatly outlined how the U.S. invasion of Iraq had ended young Iranians’ dreams of being rescued by tanned and polite American soldiers, who would deliver a shiny latest-model de moc racy. Forced to accept a grim yet stable future in the arms of their ayatollahs, he said, people were making the best of their disagreeable situation. Tavana’s summation depressed me, but he remained in good spirits, energetically poking a straw into the dregs of his iced mocha. I could imagine him in ten years’ time as the speechwriter for an Iranian president. Young people like Kambiz Tavana seemed curiously able to mold themselves to the demands of the political moment: one day, a disgruntled democrat; the next, a pragmatic, pro-regime hack. He embodied for me the state’s own inability to define its postrevolutionary identity. Was Iran destined to become a model of Islamic de mocracy? A regional player with superpower ambitions? Or would it just remain a shabby dictatorship stuck between East and West?