Ahmadinejad had promised to address all of this. His predecessor, Mohammad Khatami, for all his civilizing rhetoric about open and civil society, chose to overlook the economy altogether. The other major heavyweight in Iranian politics, Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, had made commercial trade his priority, enriching thousands of businessmen close to the regime through lucrative import and export deals that undermined local industry. For all his exaggerations and irresponsible fulminations, Ahmadinejad’s focus on domestic industry seized the attention of manufacturers like Mahmoud Agha.
I hoped for his sake, for Arash’s as well, that matters would improve. The factory was growing increasingly unmanageable, and each day they both came home gray and exhausted, tired of pouring their energies into an enterprise that, on its merits, should have been a success. The story of their company mirrored that of most Iranian private enterprise—a long, slogging struggle to stay competitive in an inhospitable, corrupt economy that sent foreign investors fleeing and that catered mainly to firms run by regime officials or linked to its military’s engineering arms. An uncle of mine had helped found one of Iran’s largest petrochemical firms back in the 1970s, and while it fared better than Laico (in technical fields, government firms needed to outsource their lucrative contracts to outfits with real professional expertise, while the decline of domestic manufacturing was mainly felt by ordinary Iranians forced to buy more expensive imported goods), it, too, suffered from the unfriendly economic climate.
When I first began reporting in Iran in 1999, I found stories about the economy, about the fate of such businesses, deadly boring, and preferred to report on flashier subjects, like reform-minded Islam and student politics. I thought the fate of the country would be determined in lofty struggles dominated by colorful clerics and rebellious students, rather than in gray realities of business competition. But in the intervening years, I discovered how utterly wrong I had been. The real story of modern Iran, what would drive the country’s politics and future, was its failing economy and how it was sinking the prospects of millions of young people, who cared far more about finding jobs and raising their living standards than about whether Islam would become compatible with western-style democracy during their lifetime. In the years and months I spent in the offices of my uncle’s firm, I watched teenage secretaries grow into young women on the verge of marriage, graphic designers struggle to manage their monthly rent, junior programmers drive taxis at night, burn out and then seek to emigrate.
That evening, after our day of skiing, we settled in to watch Shabhaye Barareh (“Barareh Nights”), a new comic soap opera that according to state television was being watched by 90 percent of the country. We adored it, as did all our friends and relatives, as did the whole neighborhood. Between eight and nine P.M., when it was broadcast, traffic actually dwindled and shopkeepers frowned when you distracted them from their televisions. The village of Barareh offered a microcosm of modern-day Iran, complete with rigged elections, a corrupt city council, a grouchy gendarme who censored the town newspaper, and a strident women’s rights group. The village, like Tehran, was divided into “Upper” and “Lower” districts that reflected the social status of their residents. In Barareh, reporters were jailed for criti cizing the government, the local poet was openly gay, and everyone supported the village’s right to enrich nuclear peas, a thinly veiled subplot that took on the country’s fracas with the West over nuclear power. Not only did the show offer clever writing and quality production; it also reflected Iranians’ cynicism over the state of their country and its place in the world.
When I first watched Barareh, I found it refreshing and important that a government program so candidly voiced the country’s ills. I thought it meant the state was growing aware of its weaknesses, admitting them before the public, and implying through the story line that it, too, might change. It hadn’t occurred to me that Barareh might function as a pressure relief valve, until a family friend, an adviser to a very senior ayatollah, made the point. He believed the show encouraged Iranians’ worst tendencies—an empty cynicism that pushed critique aside, a worldly sort of passivity. “This show, it’s one of the savviest things this regime has ever done,” he said. “It teaches people to think the worst, but not do anything about it. Daily life should be full of resistance, where people defend their rights. But people sit home at night laughing, and release all their frustration. The next day they’re laughing in the street, not angry.”
I called Mr. X one morning to inform him that I had begun reporting a new story, a chronicle of Ahmadinejad’s transformation from marginal ideologue to national hero. I anticipated little resistance: Mr. X would surely appreciate such a narrative. But his reaction, to my mind, was a touch cool, and he quickly changed the subject.
“It is my responsibility to tell you that times are changing. The atmosphere no longer tolerates articles such as what you wrote last summer,” he said, speaking in the vague, bureaucratic terms he reserved for uncomfortable matters.
Though he most likely had a reason for saying this, I saw no immediate cause for concern. That Ahmadinejad’s new minister of culture had not replaced the director of the foreign press department signaled a willingness to treat journalists as Khatami’s administration had. It was the first time Mr. X had mentioned my pre-election essay, and if all he meant was that I should desist from writing about the public consumption of cocktails, well, that was hardly worrisome. I filed away his warning, and proceeded with my story.
To better understand Ahmadinejad, Arash and I both turned for guidance to our acquaintance Mr. Tabibi, the president’s close relative. He spent most evenings in Ahmadinejad’s company, privy to closed-door conversations that when repeated sounded deceptively simple. “You shouldn’t worry so much, he’ll take care of all this,” Mr. Tabibi assured us regularly, in reference to whatever catastrophe the president had recently unleashed. Whenever we were puzzled by the news, unable to make sense of Ahmadinejad or the direction in which he was taking the country, we relied on Mr. Tabibi as some sort of oracle.
He worked in the marketing department of a major rug exporter, and I had met him while reporting a story long ago, before his kinsman became president. He usually wore the oddly fitting green suits associated with bureaucratic Hezbollahis, religious Iranians who advertise their piety through lax grooming and purposefully unfashionable attire. But he seemed to spend most of the working day in pious flirtation with secretaries.
When Mr. Tabibi recounted to us the aims of the Ahmadinejad administration, he spoke of what “we” were trying to accomplish, and “our” challenges. Though he knew I was a journalist, he had never asked for which publication, and I never told him. This was perhaps unfair, because I knew he assumed I worked for an Iranian newspaper. But I worried that mention of Time would make him think I was a spy or an agent of imperialist powers, which inevitably would inhibit our discussions. I wasn’t sure whether he conveyed Ahmadinejad’s thoughts precisely, but his convictions mirrored the rhetoric of the president and his closest aides, and his mood rose and fell with the administration’s successes and failures. He was a consummate insider, even if prone to adding his own interpretation.
The morning that the United States agreed to participate in European negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program (it had refused for years, and Iranians considered the reversal a concession), his excitement was uncontainable. “This man is touched by God,” he had said, thumping the newspapers on his desk. “He has brought the world to its knees!”
What I remember most about Mr. Tabibi’s confidences was that they seemed at the same time sincere and lunatic. “Come on,” I whispered to Arash one morning, when Mr. Tabibi had left his office to order tea. “Does he really think anyone besides college students is going to buy into this talk of ending corruption and helping the little person battle the bogeyman of globalization?”
“Of course he believes it,” Arash said. “He thinks corruption is eroding the Islamic Republic’s legitimacy. And he’s right
.” The problem was that corruption, like a creeping vine, was intertwined in the innermost workings of the system, in its very structure.
When Mr. Tabibi returned with the office tea server, he looked dejected and uncharacteristically failed to look up as a young secretary in a peach headscarf lingered near his door.
“It’s floundering,” he said, shaking his head mournfully. Ahmadinejad’s anticorruption drive, he continued, seemed doomed. The president had asked his aides to identify the most corrupt officials in key positions of urban management and had replaced them with inexperienced but in his view incorruptible individuals whose only credentials were war records and religious devotion.
“We placed a senior Basiji in the Saveh municipality. How long do you think it took for him to be bought out? In a month he was driving a Mercedes, as were his wife and sister.”
As he spoke, Mr. Tabibi’s face grew long and ashen, as though the story of the bribable Basiji wounded him personally. In his sensitive display of distress, I caught sight, just for a moment, of the appeal Ahmadinejad must have had in his pre-election television address. Corruption had indeed gutted Iran’s economy, and it was indeed inhumane for a tiny clique of regime cronies to grow more conspicuously wealthy each day, while the tension and resentment of coping with runaway inflation stamped themselves on the faces of ordinary Iranians. Ahmadinejad had offered curatives for these woes, and Mr. Tabibi, like so many millions, believed they would work. He believed God would help the president help the people, a sentiment that sounded naïve in the modern world of 2005 but that somehow still resonated with a minority of Iranians.
That winter, I flew to Beirut to pack up my apartment and have my things shipped to Tehran. It had been clear to both Arash and me when we moved in together that I would be relocating to Iran permanently. But my lease ran through the beginning of 2006, and I had lazily put off the physical act of rearranging myself. I spent scarcely a week in Beirut, just long enough to have movers put all my belongings into boxes, see my friends, and pick up leaflets for wedding caterers. Ever since visiting Lebanon together at the beginning of our relationship, Arash and I had lovingly nurtured plans for a Beirut wedding.
We had already picked out a faded, exquisite old palace in the cobblestoned Christian quarter, decided on the Lebanese wine that our guests would drink, and figured out how to make the garden overlooking the Mediterranean glow with the light of candles. Arash and I had explored the grounds together and found them perfectly suited to an Iranian ceremony. I was intent on Beirut because it was the only city in the world where the disparate strands of my life came together. The Mediterranean evoked the beaches of California where I had grown up; the Shia slums, adorned with pictures of Khomeini and loyal to Hezbollah, were like a pocket of the modern Iran that had become my home; and in the memories of my elderly Lebanese neighbors, with whom I would sit discussing the fashion sense of Farah Diba, the former empress of Iran, even Iran’s past was alive.
My Lebanese friends loved the idea, and we spent my final dinner in the city immersed in girlish talk of wedding details. This warded off the pall of impending separation that usually hangs over farewell evenings, and supplied us with a pretext for drinking too much champagne (we needed to choose a variety for the as yet unscheduled reception). I returned to Iran in high spirits, eager to redecorate our apartment around all my soon-to-arrive belongings, and to subtly remind Arash that our Beirut wedding could not proceed unless he first proposed.
It was eight A.M., and we were already at nine thousand feet, eating date omelets at the small canteen of Shirpala, the first station in the ascent to Tochal peak. We had met Arash’s mountaineering friends at Darband, the mountain’s base, before dawn to begin our ascent. It would take most of the day to reach the summit—perhaps even longer, for the winter winds and waist-high snow would slow our climb. I uncomfortably twisted my veil to cover the North Face logo on my parka. Iranian mountaineers are familiar with such international brands of trekking gear, but most cannot afford them. Our group that day numbered only six, because the snow levels required hiking boots, and at least three of those present shared their boots with others, who would take their turn the following weekend. Arash and I were the only ones wearing crampons, because the machismo of the rest of the group did not permit them to use such a sissy accessory. Most of them lived in south Tehran, and subscribed to the virile conceptions of manhood that still held sway in that traditional, working-class quarter of the city. On the way up, a ten-year-old boy selling snacks in a village along the way had even taunted Arash for wearing them, “A mountaineer who’s afraid of snow better stay off the mountain!”
For much of our group, climbing this mountain was a chief source of pleasure in life. It was the only soul-lifting pursuit available in this city that did not cost anything, at least no more than the gear it required. On the windy peaks, they could spend private time with their girlfriends, away from nosy families and the prying eyes of those who roamed the city’s parks, to say nothing of policemen and sometimes Basij. Arash and I parted ways with the group halfway up the mountain, taking a detour to what was known as the fifth station. There we wrapped our hands around mugs of hot cocoa and reclined on chairs by the window, gazing out across the snowy peaks. I don’t recall precisely how our conversation turned to religion—perhaps we were gossiping about one of the religious couples in the group—but I found myself describing to him for the first time how I felt about Islam.
It all started, I like to believe, in a dark auditorium in Oakland, California, in the early eighties. With the lights low, a small assembly of Iranians began chanting rhythmic lamentations and thumping their chests, creating an almost trancelike atmosphere in the warm room. Six years old, I was accompanying my veiled grandmother to an Ashoura commemoration, though I scarcely understood that at the time. I clutched my strawberry-shaped purse nervously. I don’t recall the moment I actually fainted, just the fluorescent glare of the building’s lobby where I was being revived, and the soothing voice of my grandmother, as she gently pressed a cup of lemonade to my lips. I hadn’t been scared, exactly, just overwhelmed by the heat and the atmosphere of passionate flagellation. And once I finished my lemonade and ate a cookie, I remember being very impatient to go back inside.
That memory is how my lifelong fascination with Shia Islam began, and in many ways it is inseparable from my memories of my grandmother. It was only as I recounted this to Arash that I realized my grandmother is a construct for me, a way of avoiding my more messy adult relationship with Islam, which became complicated in earnest when I first moved to Tehran. Until then, I had associated the faith with the cozy, warm lap of my grandmother, who taught me the fatiha, the opening sura of the Koran, and let me crawl on her back when she was kneeling in prayer. She never chided me for stealing her prayer tablet (Shia Muslims touch their foreheads to a piece of clay during prayer), but scooped me a bowl of yakh dar behesht (“ice in heaven”), my favorite rice custard with rosewater and pistachios, and recounted the tale of Imam Hossein’s martyrdom at Karbala, where the piece of clay had originated. My grandmother, whom we called Madara, was devout in the most appealing way. Though she prayed five times a day, wore a scarf over her hair outside, and never drank or smoked, she maintained a wry composure when her children drank whiskey and devoured sweet-and-sour pork in her presence. She even indulged in the occasional lotto ticket, though I was the only one who knew (she didn’t speak English, so we negotiated the transaction together at 7-Eleven) and was bound to secrecy. In the fuzzy sunlight of her San Jose living room, where her nylon knee-highs rolled into doughnuts usually sat atop my grandfather’s books of poetry, she taught me the principles of Islam as she saw them, and entertained my childish doubts.
“A true Muslim’s heart must be pure, and free from hatred,” she would say.
“But don’t you hate the Ayatollah Khomeini? You must.” If there was one lesson I had learned by the age of six, it was that we must all hate the ayatollah, the cause of our exil
e.
“No, not even him.”
“But why not? He is a bad man.”
“He has never done any harm to me personally,” she would say. And I would lay my head on her chest, trying to feel her pacemaker, and fall asleep in the sun, contemplating what a noble spirit she must have. I adored my grandmother—her soapy smell, her serene doting, her impish humor. She died at our house one spring day when I was in junior high, and at the exact hour of her passing, I doubled over with stomach cramps in science class. She left me a knitted periwinkle purse that contained a handwritten version of the Ayat ol-Korsi, a verse of the Koran, and I felt thereafter that only the prayers she had taught me would keep me connected to her. That her legacy to me was Islam is not something I chose, or that I always liked. There were times when I lay awake in bed at night, refusing to recite the prayers, but sleep would elude me until I muttered them into the pillow, unsure whether I resented my grandmother or my own confusion.
While my attitude toward Islam grew out of my love for my grandmother and, later, out of my liberal American college education, Arash’s, he told me as we finished our hot chocolate, was formed under more dramatic circumstances. He was nine in 1979, and the revolution had captured his preadolescent imagination. He fell in love with the dashing revolutionaries, especially the guerrillas. He built himself a wooden rifle out of popsicle sticks and marched around the backyard practicing maneuvers. On the occasion of Norouz, the Persian new year, which falls on the first day of spring, he collected in a brown envelope all the crisp new bills he had received as gifts, and took the money to the guerrilla headquarters to donate to the revolutionary cause. He lectured his sister, Solmaz, then five, about the importance of revolution, and convinced her to donate her Norouz cash as well. When the revolution turned bloody, when the Islamic radicals began executing people in droves and terrorizing the populace, Arash felt betrayed to the depth of his boyish heart. Naturally, this history shaped his attitude more than it had mine, since at the time I was playing with Barbies and building sand castles in California.
Honeymoon in Tehran: Two Years of Love and Danger in Iran Page 13