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

by Azadeh Moaveni

  I had grown enamored of Islam from afar, while he had grown skeptical from up close. Where I saw the potential for more democratic, modern interpretations in the work of Islamic reformists, he saw convoluted debates that whorled and led nowhere. In a way, our attitudes reflected the identities we had crafted for ourselves. I leaned toward Islam to anchor myself amid the distant culture of the West; he leaned away to anchor himself amid the chaotic culture of the Islamic Republic. With time, I hoped, each of us would feel enriched by the other’s outlook. After all, I told myself, couples didn’t need to feel the same way about everything.

  That year, Ashoura, the holiday that commemorates the Imam Hossein’s death, fell on a Friday in February. If you visit Iran, you will very quickly notice the imam everywhere. His name is planted in verdant letters on the banks of freeways; his portrait adorns kiosks, walls, and shopping centers. He plays a greater role in the Iranian and Shia consciousness than even the Prophet Mohammad himself, though to say so is considered heretical. The third in the line of Shia imams, the grandson of the prophet, Hossein died in 680 at the battle of Karbala, defending his family’s claim to leadership of the Muslims. The battle is a defining moment in Islamic history, and each year Shias enact passion plays of Hossein and his seventy-two followers being slaughtered by their enemies. For the Shia, Hossein represents courage and resistance to injustice. For the pious, his martyrdom is an intimate event, as fresh a memory as last night’s meal.

  On the occasion of Ashoura, Shias hold mourning processions that wind through the streets of modern cities and tiny villages. Each year, I looked forward to the ritual, the remarkable transformation that it effected in Iranians, softening even the most jaded cynics into humbled weeping spectators. How glorious it must be, I had always thought, to be transported to such depths of emotion by local passion play reenactments, by the neighborhood dry cleaner dressed up as Hossein. Arash, for his part, preferred to stay home. “You know what it’s going to be like,” he said. “The streets are going to be full of thugs looking for a fight, and I don’t feel like dealing with that.”

  Public space in Iran already bordered on violent. Traffic altercations often resulted in one party brandishing a pipe; walks through the park ended in confrontation, as angry young men ogled women visibly in the company of husbands or boyfriends, purposefully seeking out fights. This type of aggression, probably an outgrowth of the notion of manhood the state cultivated—Islamic, touchy, with “honor” easily offended—made even a trip to the bazaar a potential catastrophe. I had many girlfriends whose husbands refused to accompany them to such crowded places. Inevitably some sixteen-year-old with greasy hair would pinch the woman’s behind, puffing his chest out eagerly, waiting for a reaction. To do nothing at all was humiliating, while to brawl with a sixteen-year-old who was probably carrying a knife was foolish. Avoiding the situation, which meant avoiding crowds altogether, was the best option of all.

  “But I really want to go,” I said, disappointed. “Wait, I have an idea!” I suggested we drive out to Lavasan to watch the dasteks, the neighborhood mourning processions. The crowds in the suburb would be smaller than in Tehran, and less volatile. Arash agreed to go, and within a couple of hours we were walking toward the processions.

  The mourners, all wearing black, filled the narrow streets, weeping, wailing, and self-flagellating. They hoisted alams, towering metal structures adorned with Shia amulets that looked like giant ornate candelabras, high into the air. Their rhythmic chanting of “Hossein! Hossein! Hossein!” grew frenzied; the bodies pressed together with an almost sensual grief, soaked in the rosewater that was sprayed over the crowd.

  At twilight, we walked to the village’s main thoroughfare to buy groceries, and found the little shops busy, the weekend crowd preparing to hunker down in their villas for the holiday. Though they had spent the afternoon in the processions, it did not appear as though they planned to spend the evening in lamentation. They bought chips, creamy yogurt, pickles, and olives—traditional Iranian mezze (the term itself comes from Farsi, meaning “taste”) typically accompanied with homemade vodka. Having spent the afternoon commemorating the martyrdom of Imam Hossein, they would now retire to their homes and, in the company of friends, indulge. Like so many Iranians, they had worked out a way to reconcile their faith with a secular lifestyle. Very devout Muslims would call this hypocrisy (and so did Arash), but it seemed more like Islam lite to me, an altogether modern form of devotion that reflected the way people around the world accommodated a secular, modern lifestyle to religious and cultural tradition. They partook of religion as they would of a culture, rather than a faith with tenets, if you will. In the same way, my Jewish friends in America kept only a flimsy form of kosher but unfailingly attended their parents’ Passover seders.

  Arash looked at the groceries people were buying. He turned to me with a disdainful expression, as if to say, “See what company you are in.” My attraction to Ashoura incensed him no end. When we first met, perhaps assuming it was transient, or out of the magnanimity that characterizes the very beginning of relationships, he never mentioned his disdain for what he considered hypocrisy. But once we started living together, he would roll his eyes in bemusement whenever I spoke admiringly of Islam and call me a mullah. I tried to win him over. I spoke, in what I thought were moving terms, about how the beheading of the Prophet’s grandson on the plains of Karbala (whose name means “Land of Sorrow”) was a rich, multilayered legend that had animated Shia history for thirteen centuries.

  Ashoura shaped the temperament of Shia Islam, imbuing the faith with a passion for lamentation, saints, and martyrs (not unlike strains of Roman Catholicism, as some scholars have noted). In the twentieth century, radical Shia politicians in the Middle East recast the tale of Ashoura to kindle support for their modern political aims. In their opportunistic retelling, the defeat of Hossein’s small army became a lesson in political daring and rebellion. The new, combative spirit of Ashoura inspired a radical fervor that led to the Iranian revolution, as well as the militant movement in Lebanon that gave rise to today’s Hezbollah.

  I loved the folk mythology of the fallen Hossein as an erudite man who carried on the noble traditions of the Prophet’s family, standing against the villainous Yazid, a man fond of power and drink, whose Umay yad clan had opposed the Prophet. In times and places where Shias were still in opposition or perceived themselves as persecuted—in the south of Lebanon, or in the Shah’s Iran—Ashoura commemorations seethed with anger and resentment. They were political demonstrations shrouded in the history of Hossein, an expression of grievances given religious form.

  Young Shias throughout the Arab and Islamic world identified intimately with Hossein’s legend. Though many young middle-class Iranians still participated in Ashoura celebrations, they were less drawn to the ritual than their peers in other parts of the Shia world. Instead, they were attracted to the West and its traditions, which represented the freer lifestyle the clerical regime denied them. The government seemed to acknowledge this, and had developed a strategy in response.

  Instead of dealing with young people’s alienation from religious ritual only politically, by amplifying its Islamic propaganda in the media and the educational curriculum, it had recently begun to engage culturally as well. The religious murals throughout the city had been redesigned, staid Persian calligraphy replaced by edgy, modernist graphics that might have been done by a talented graffiti artist. And on the birthday of Fatemeh, the Prophet Mohammad’s daughter, the authorities had launched a new commemoration campaign dubbed Fatemieh, or the Week of Remembering Fatemeh. The stylish posters and billboards across the city were clearly meant to appeal to a more savvy, less traditionally pious demographic.

  In its own way, the campaign reflected a major evolution in the state’s goal of entrenching Islamic piety. Back in 1988, a state radio program in Tehran had interviewed women on the street on Fatemeh’s birthday. One young woman replied that she did not consider Fatemeh a role model at
all, and that she identified far more with Oshin, the heroine of a popular Japanese drama series being broadcast by Iranian television at the time. The Ayatollah Khomeini was enraged, and by different versions sent the head of state radio to prison and ordered the young woman found and killed.

  Compared to such times, the authorities today were handling Iranians’ piety deficit altogether more moderately. A glossy ad campaign to promote Fatemeh seemed just the thing for a society in which people mourned Hossein by day and had cocktails by night.

  I continued reporting and working on Shirin’s book, Arash continued working, and we both waited for life to darken in our respective and shared spheres, but it did not. The hook-nosed stalker who had followed Arash never reappeared, and neither did Mr. X intrude more into my life. The harsher social restrictions everyone had feared simply never materialized. See, people murmured among themselves, the time for such repression has passed. They know they can no longer control these young people. They have learned, become wiser.

  Even Shirin khanoum seemed more relaxed. Her bodyguards had disappeared, and on the clear, frosty night we finally went to dinner with her husband, her mood was almost effervescent. After dinner we took a walk along the road leading to Velenjak, in the foothills of the Alborz Mountains, discussing Iranian classical music in the moonlight and collectively agreeing that a holiday at the world’s first hotel built entirely of ice should become an immediate priority. She intended the evening to help nudge my relationship with Arash toward permanence, because even for independent-minded Iranian women, marriage was viewed as fundamental to a successful life. With all the time one would eventually lose while having children, the only answer was to hurry hurry hurry (waiting only meant that your mother and mother-in-law would grow too old to help raise your kids, so that you would waste precious time dealing with babies during the prime of your career rather than at its outset).

  Looking back, I view that evening with fondness but also a touch of amusement, for though none of us knew it, the question had already been sealed by a reality more immediate than career calculations or matrimonial ambitions. As I discovered later that week, I was pregnant. Had we lived in New York or Berlin or any of a number of other places, this would not have been cause for alarm. But in the Islamic Republic of Iran, one could not be unmarried and pregnant. That social category of individual simply did not exist. The crushing moral condemnation of a traditional culture aside, there were also practical considerations: if any matter arose requiring a hospital visit, my shenasname, or identification papers, would reflect my single status, at which point, depending on the whim of the hospital in question, this could either not be an issue, or it could be grounds for execution (or so I imagined at the time).

  “I could be stoned!” I wailed, waving the test stick in the air, aware that I was being dramatic, but unable to collect myself. I told myself that the worst could not happen to me, that such cases were restricted to a handful a year, that they befell helpless girls in the provinces who found themselves at the mercy of vengeful fundamentalist judges. I reminded myself that life in Iran was premised on the culture of “as if,” where everyone behaved as if the laws did not proscribe the behavior most Iranians considered natural. But all of this interior dialogue failed to soothe me, because wearing a short manteau “as if” the dress codes permitted individual choice was an entirely different matter from being pregnant, “as if” that reality did not qualify one for execution. And perhaps the crucial difference was that in matters of everyday concern, such as going to parties, dating, or dress, you still retained some measure of control, minimizing your vulnerability by carrying an extra scarf, skipping a party on an inauspicious evening, planning your dates for the middle of the week.

  But as a pregnant woman, you had no such room for maneuver. You could not ensure that you would not experience spotting, as so many women do, and require a trip to the emergency room. You could not with certainty avoid a car accident, a slip on a sidewalk, or the myriad of other circumstances that might necessitate an encounter with the doctors and police, who might or might not choose to shield you from harm. As if the potential mishaps common to daily life were not enough to consider, there was also the distant worry of falling into the hands of the morality police, who had the mandate to punish men and women with lashings for drinking alcohol or attending mixed parties. While such invasions of private life had lessened dramatically during the Khatami years, there were always exceptions. One still heard of parties being raided, and the implications of this happening to a pregnant woman were altogether more grave.

  My uncle worked as a doctor at one of Tehran’s more prominent hospitals, and I had heard too many tales of the emergency room to take the potential for trouble lightly. In particular I recalled him telling us of a woman who had been admitted one night after being whipped by the morality police. She had told them she was pregnant, but “we’ll beat the filth out of you,” one of them had said. She proceeded to miscarry. I remember hearing the story vividly, for it was one of the darker episodes in my uncle’s medical career. The night he returned from treating the young woman who had miscarried, he described her bloodied back, her anguished husband, in numb tones.

  If the authorities were capable of such cruelty toward a pregnant woman who was married, how might they treat a pregnant woman who was not? The harsh Islamic criminal codes that governed the Iranian judiciary, the lawless, random cruelty of the morality police, ceased being abstract material that I described in news stories or spun into dramatic episodes highlighting Shirin’s cases. And I ceased being an observer, a single, privileged, peripatetic social anthropologist who was protected from Iranian reality by her American passport and career. I suddenly glimpsed reality from the vantage of a nameless, faceless Iranian woman susceptible to the vagaries of her society, and my skin turned cold with anxiety. These were not the most romantic preludes to thoughts of marriage, but there were limits to living in Tehran as if it were Manhattan.

  Circumstance had intervened, so I tore up the cards of the Leb anese florists and caterers, made myself a cup of Turkish coffee, and stared out in the dark night, trying to absorb how in just a matter of hours nearly everything in my life had changed. I turned the cup over and examined the grainy streaks and suggestive outlines that had appeared in the grounds, unable to decide whether they resembled foreboding clouds, or tulips.

  CHAPTER 8

  The Islamic Republic of Iran

  Invites You to Chat About Sex

  The next day, I was sitting on the floor, surrounded by books on Islam, researching the provisions of the Iranian penal code that governed premarital sex. I assumed the law unambiguously prescribed stoning, but wanted to know for sure. Arash walked into the room and surveyed the books curiously. I explained my mission.

  “Of course you’re not going to be stoned. Why on earth would you think that? Everyone knows only adulterers are stoned.”

  I wasn’t so sure. But after I’d leafed through several more books, it seemed to me he was right. Only adultery was punishable by stoning, which fell under the category of punishment known as hudud, or mandated by God. Adultery was the only hudud punishment that didn’t appear in the Koran, I discovered; it appears only in the hadith, the record of the Prophet Mohammad’s life which supplies the source for much of Islamic practice as well as jurisprudence. Because the sources of hadith vary in reliability, and have been debated for centuries by Islamic scholars, this meant that the classification of stoning as hudud was an entirely open question. I also related to Arash a rather ghastly piece of information I had come across: the Iranian penal code laid out guidelines for such executions, including the types of stones that should be used. Article 104 states, “The stones should not be so large that the person dies upon being hit by one or two of them; neither should they be so small that they could not be defined as stones.”

  “You shouldn’t spend your time on such morbid stuff,” Arash said. “Why don’t you look through a baby name book instead?” H
e began putting the books back on the shelf and told me his mother had just dropped off some rice pudding. The thick grape syrup drizzled across the top, doshab, tasted of molasses and wine. Together we ate it out of the bowl, leaning against the kitchen counter.

  Arash’s first reaction to my pregnancy had been a frustratingly detached confusion. I was thrilled and wanted him to share my excitement. But he seemed to feel responsible for my welfare, and the uncertainty of the situation made him anxious. He worried that a hospital might refuse to admit me should some complication arise. But that nervousness soon gave way to anticipation, and he began looking forward to all the fun baby decisions we had to make. Did we want to know whether it was a boy or a girl? Should we paint its room with fairies or dinosaurs? What name would we choose?

  But now I was the one preoccupied with serious thoughts. No matter how much I tried, I couldn’t stop thinking about the more dramatic legal dimensions of being pregnant. Although I would be in no danger of death by stoning—no stone too big, none too small—the punishment for unadulterous premarital sex still proclaimed its origins in the tribal customs of seventh-century Arabia: a hundred lashes, and possibly a year of banishment. That was the legal reality, though in practice millions of Iranian young people engaged in premarital sex with no worry more serious than whether it would be enjoyable. Although, every year or two, some judge ordered a lashing, under ordinary circumstances the law was not enforced in any meaningful way. This was just one of the many respects in which the Iranian government had grown pragmatic. It also distributed clean syringes to heroin addicts, and condoms to prostitutes and prison inmates. This was rather astonishing, given that it also punished drug use and homosexuality with anything from flogging to death.