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

by Azadeh Moaveni

  “Free?” I had repeated, confused. I didn’t see any connection between marriage and freedom.

  “Yes, free. You can finally leave your parents’ house, no one telling you what to do.” Adding in a mimic of a maternal whine, “‘Wake up, eat, sleep, come, go!’”

  When the only escape from suffocating parental love was marriage, it was entirely reasonable, even if unrealistic, to imbue that institution with the charm of long-awaited autonomy. The eternal compromises of marriage, the need to continually adapt oneself to the demands of life with another human being, occupied no corner of this idealized picture.

  Though I never expected marriage to bestow on me a new independence, I did believe that it would, in one important respect, secure my freedom: it would be my rescue from Mr. X. This conviction dated back to my earliest conversations with Shirin khanoum, when I inquired about how she managed the invasive presence of the state’s security agents in her life. If they pestered me, an ordinary journalist, with such dogged zeal, then surely they must have terrorized the country’s outspoken Nobel laureate. I had been deeply surprised to learn this had not been the case.

  “I explained to them that as a proper, married woman, I could obviously not be seen having coffee with strange men in the lobbies of hotels,” she told me. Since it was Islamically improper to meet them alone, on one occasion Shirin khanoum had even brought her husband along to the meeting. The agents had been mortified—something to do with one Iranian man respecting another man’s territory—and afterward they had ceased to demand she meet with them.

  Arash resented the presence of Mr. X in my life, though not out of any sense of encroachment on his namoos, the Islamic term for the honor and sanctity of a man’s family. Arash simply considered my minder scum and wished I were not obliged to maintain contact with someone who bullied and intimidated people on behalf of a despotic state. When I told him that I could, in the manner of Shirin khanoum, use Islamic propriety and his purported displeasure as a pretext to end, or at least modify, the relationship, Arash readily agreed. Thus prepared to finally disrupt the years of menace and intrusion, I awaited Mr. X’s inevitable phone call with much excitement.

  The morning the numbers “1111111” appeared on my phone’s caller ID—Mr. X phoned from the Ministry of Intelligence, I assume, with a blocked number—I picked up eagerly.

  “May you not be tired. Are you well?” I said. We exchanged robotic pleasantries for a minute, before Mr. X asked when I might be free.

  “There is something I must tell you,” I said. “My husband does not consider it appropriate for me to meet men alone in an empty hotel room.” I would wait to bring out the real ammunition, the word namahram, the term for someone who is not an immediate family member. Strict Muslims believe that men and women who are namah ram should not be alone in each other’s company. Any pedestrian mullah could tell you this; it was an edict as direct as the one about pork being haram. “He would be more comfortable if we met in an official government office, or at the very least in a public place, such as a hotel lobby. Alternatively, he would be happy to accompany me, if you preferred to continue to meet in seclusion.”

  “What right does your husband have to interfere in our work?” he asked. “Our work is amneeat, security.” He emphasized this as if talking to a small child. “Do you think we can conduct sensitive intelligence work related to the nation’s security in the lobbies of hotels?”

  I felt like asking him whether the sorts of things he liked to know and that I refused to tell him—what the Irish third secretary had said at the Maldivian ambassador’s tea party—truly protected Iran from grave and insidious threats. Instead, I remained civil. “That is for you to determine. But my husband’s sensitivities must be respected.”

  “Has your husband not been in the West? How can it be that he has such a closed mind?”

  I wished I were recording this. A henchman of the Islamic Republic was lecturing me on liberality. “My husband, regardless of his time abroad, is an Iranian man. And that means he has firm beliefs regarding the propriety of his wife’s meetings with other men. As an Iranian man yourself, working for an Islamic government, I would presume you could appreciate that.”

  “I regret to hear that you’re just not serious about work anymore.” Mr. X sighed. “Maybe now that you’re married you would just like to retire?”

  Mr. X held veto power over my press credentials, as he often reminded me. I was on the verge of tears. Nothing was going as I had expected. Why had it worked for Shirin khanoum?

  “You know that I’m very serious about work,” I said, softening my tone. “Haven’t I shown that by staying in regular contact? And the last time I was at the foreign press office, everyone was very pleased with my stories.”

  “Forget the foreign press office. They do not have security responsibilities.” Apparently my file was on a par with negotiating rights over nuclear enrichment at the United Nations. Mr. X was very sensitive about the ministry’s reputation, and puffed up regularly when discussing its myriad “responsibilities.”

  “What I’m asking is not so unreasonable,” I pleaded. “Surely we can come to an agreement. There must be a room somewhere at the ministry, anywhere official, that we can use? Or perhaps you would like to meet my husband, and get to know him? He is very discreet.”

  But Mr. X was not interested in meeting Arash. “You should think again about these silly excuses you are making. I will make discussions on my end,” he said, hanging up.

  Perhaps it had been too much to hope that I could extricate myself from dealing with Mr. X altogether, but I had imagined I could at least negotiate a more balanced relationship. Meeting in public, or at least in a government building, would deny Mr. X the psychological weapon of creepy seclusion. Reducing my vulnerability in these meetings had been my central aim, and it had failed.

  I wanted to call Shirin khanoum and tell her that her approach had not worked, but obviously I couldn’t say such things over the phone. Mr. X had said in stark terms that security concerns, whatever that meant, took precedence over Islamic correctness. That pretty well summarized the ethos of the regime: security over everything—over development, over the ethical values of Islam, over the rights of its people. Although the state ruled in the name of Islam, had taken power through a revolution that was termed “Islamic,” in its behavior it had everything in common with a dictatorship. When a government derived its authority from Islam, one had no other language with which to defend oneself. Mr. X defended his right to interrogate me in seclusion like the agent of a secular state, but I could not call upon any universal, secular values to challenge him. Neither, apparently, could I call upon Islamic ones.

  “You won’t need to meet Mr. X after all,” I told Arash that evening, as we walked London and Geneva to the neighborhood vet to be dewormed. They stopped every two minutes, sniffing the leaves and candy wrappers floating down the sidewalk canal, best friends despite their ill-matched sizes—an elephant and a teacup, as the Farsi expression went.

  I resolved to speak to someone, perhaps at the foreign press office Mr. X had dismissed, about my minder’s wanton disregard for Islamic morality. There had to be someone in this Islamic state who would care.

  Less than three weeks after our wedding I was in a taxi on the way to my monthly doctor’s appointment, and for one disorienting moment thought I was back in Beirut. Not central Beirut, mind you, but the southern suburbs, where every intersection and thoroughfare is bedecked with the canary yellow flags of Hezbollah. The same government-supplied flags were now decorating the Tehran freeway. Banners depicting the militia’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, hoisting a rifle into the air flew from hundreds of lampposts.

  Earlier that week, the group had kidnapped two Israeli soldiers on the Israeli-Lebanese border, provoking a ferocious Israeli response that had quickly erupted into the worst Arab-Israeli border conflict in over two decades. The Iranian government was cheering for Hezbollah.

  Iran helped found
Hezbollah in the early eighties, when the Ayatollah Khomeini was seeking to export Islamic revolution to places like Lebanon. Today radicals in both Tehran and Beirut had largely abandoned the ayatollah’s fantasy; they acknowledged that the Lebanese, Christian and Muslim alike, had no desire for an Islamic state in Iran’s image, and that one could not be imposed on them by force. Iran’s modern relationship with Hezbollah reflected different ideologi cal and political realities. Iran continued to serve as the group’s primary patron. But through its military, financial, and political support for Hezbollah, Iran now sought influence in the Levant more ob liquely: by ensuring that Lebanese Shia, who had no wish to become a western ally friendly with Israel, dominated the country’s politics. For its part, Hezbollah used its Iranian patronage to supply much-needed social services to Lebanon’s neglected Shia population. With Iranian aid and Hezbollah’s leadership, Lebanese Shia began for the first time in decades to exert political influence commensurate with their numbers. Both sides benefited, to the West’s chagrin.

  How much control Iran exerted over Hezbollah was a vexed question. Israel and the West charged that Iran directed the militia as if by remote control, while Iran and Hezbollah allies like Syria insisted it was entirely independent. The truth lay somewhere in between. While Iran certainly had some sway, Hezbollah tended to conduct its own affairs, mainly consulting with Tehran ahead of major operations that it knew would reverberate around the region.

  Whatever the nature of this relationship, however, most ordinary Iranians resented it. Each and every one of my friends and relatives—the pious and the secular, the anti-American and the westernized—perceived Iran’s support for Hezbollah as a colossal waste. A couple of my acquaintances voiced ambivalence rather than outright disapproval, but they were equally concerned about how aiding Hezbollah compromised Iran. The secular-minded, like my friend Neda, objected to the state’s nurturance of Islamic ideology beyond its borders. Many people, like my cousin at Tehran University and her classmates, lumped aid to Hezbollah with Iran’s habit of building schools in Arab countries and sending forces to “help” the Palestinians. They disapproved of all these practices, arguing that as long as Iranians at home were in dire need, not a toman should be spent abroad. One of my relatives worried that if democratic forces in Iran ever gained power through an election, the hard-liners would call on Lebanon’s Hezbollah to stomp them down. Yet another argued that Hezbollah was a paper ally, that its fighters would sit back and watch in the event Iran was attacked. For all these various reasons, consensus held that the Iranian government should attend to its duties at home, and abandon its nosy, fundamentalist meddling elsewhere.

  None of this is to say, of course, that Iranians did not sympathize with Hezbollah and the Palestinians, on whose behalf the militant group partly fought. Many of my friends, and indeed most Iranians, considered Israel an unjust state, one that kept the Palestinians confined to hellish settlements while its own citizens luxuriated in the trappings of an ultra-modern society. These sentiments meant that many Iranians, from secular leftists to the deeply religious, commiserated with Hezbollah’s anti-Israel stance and thrilled to the group’s vigorous response to the far better equipped Israeli army. For the majority of Iranians, though, such feelings were tempered by a cool practicality—however just the militia’s fight, it was not Iran’s. A small number of people, those whose devout faith included a strong measure of political militancy, felt otherwise. But these Iranians, ideological enough to sacrifice their immediate quality of life for a distant cause, remained a distinct minority.

  The mood in Tehran was swinging between indifference—the fighting hadn’t made newspaper headlines a single day that week—and irritation over the regime’s ideological links to distant Arab causes. Even my taxi driver that day, who judging from the hefty Koran on his dashboard was a faithful Muslim, turned off his radio impatiently when the announcer started in on the latest “Zionist atrocity.”

  “Don’t you think it’s our duty as Muslims to help Lebanon?” I asked. I would be writing a story later that evening, and no journalist is above asking the opinion of his or her taxi driver.

  “What’s happening is horrible. I saw charred bodies of children on the news last night. But did they consider it their Islamic duty to help us when we were fighting our war with Iraq?”

  “No,” I admitted. “That was an Arab fight against the Persians, and they picked their own side.”

  He nodded. “Well maybe, technically, it is our Islamic duty. But there are also realities.”

  “Like what?”

  “I have to work a second shift every evening to make an extra five thousand toman,” he said. This was the equivalent of $5. “It’s just not right for us to be helping other people when our own are suffering.”

  I understood how he felt. But I knew some Iranians saw things differently and wanted to be sure that I was adequately portraying those who felt proud of Iran’s support for Hezbollah. I used to volunteer at a Palestinian refugee school in Beirut, where the four-year-olds clamored around me in happy excitement because I was Iranian. In their eyes, Iran was the only country in the region to stand up to Israel, and a living, breathing Iranian deserved their most breathless thanks. I thought of the pride I witnessed all around me on that cloudless day in central Beirut in 2000, when the Israelis withdrew after twenty-two years of occupation. On that day, all of Lebanon—Christians and Muslims alike—considered Hezbollah heroes and rejoiced in their national victory. It was the first time I had seen anyone take pride in something that modern Iran, or perhaps I should say Islamic Iran, had accomplished. But now, in Tehran, I realized what an outsider’s perspective that was: the reaction of someone who did not have to live with the consequences of the nation’s foreign policy.

  “So you’re absolutely sure that you don’t feel any pride that Iran helped the Lebanese push out the Israelis?” I asked. It was one of those moments when I felt I had to triple check, to make sure that Iranians truly were sensible and moderate on such questions. As a westernized, secular Iranian, I was surrounded by people who were predictably critical of the government’s radical policies; because of this, I often tried to be exhaustively certain that my background didn’t influence my work. This meant I generally did two or three times the amount of reporting that was necessary, crisscrossing Tehran and talking with the widest range of people I could find. I did this so I could later defend my stories, which were often criticized by those who had a stake in Iran’s anti-American, anti-Israel image (a range of people who included many politically conservative Americans, as well as liberal Iranian Americans who enjoyed the defiant rhetoric the mullahs dished out to the Bush administration).

  The driver inspected me in the mirror, as though noticing for the first time that I was a bit alien, despite my familiar manners. “I’m not proud at all. Do you know what would make me proud? If we could solve our own problems. Like unemployment. That would be the greatest help of all.”

  Soon we approached the immense floral clock the government had created on the western bank of the Modarres freeway. It proudly proclaimed itself the largest clock in the world, as though this might invite tourism, enhance the appearance of the capital, or serve any other useful function. While it was indeed the largest flower clock in the world, it contended with two other giant clocks (one in New Jersey, the other in Istanbul) for the title of biggest all around.

  “I think you’re quite right,” I said, shamefaced.

  “Remember,” he said, quoting a Persian proverb, “If the lantern is needed at home, it is haram to donate it to the mosque.”

  In the days that followed, the government continued to proclaim its support for Hezbollah, dispatching honking cars full of young men waving yellow flags. One evening, Arash and I were out eating ice cream across the street from Mellat Park when one of these cars drove past. In Beirut such a sight was common, but it simply did not register here, the fanfare of this distant group, embroiled in its distant conflict. The famili
es picnicking on the lawn, pouring each other tea and passing around mortadella sandwiches, failed to even look up. Later that evening, state television broadcast an infomercial urging Iranians to boycott what it called “Zionist products,” including Pepsi, Nestlé, and Calvin Klein. It warned that profits from these products “are converted into bullets piercing the chests of Lebanese and Palestinian children.” As evidence, the voiceover intoned: “Pepsi stands for ‘Pay Each Penny to Save Israel.’”

  As was their way, Iranians ignored all this, being accustomed to the government’s raving rhetoric, in which anger with Israel often blurred into a crude anti-Semitism. To me, and to many Iranians, such statements resounded with self-serving bias; while Palestinian children doubtless suffered in the crossfire of the conflict with Israel, the Iranian government had lost the legitimacy it needed to advocate on their behalf.

  As the conflict in Lebanon wore on and Iran’s reputation in the world as a backer of terrorism spread, many Iranians grew angry. One morning I walked to the square near our house to buy fresh bread for breakfast, but arrived to find the bakery doors locked and the stone oven cold. The early risers in my neighborhood milled about for a while and then began speculating about why the bakery should mysteriously be shut. Before long, they had settled on an explanation: the Iranian government had sent all the country’s flour to Lebanon. After congregating briefly to vent their irritation (“What will they give them next, plasma TVs?”), everyone ambled back home.

  That morning, though it had involved nothing more than griping with the neighbors over the country’s politics, marked a turning point for me. When I first began reporting in Iran, I had assumed that my background as an upper-middle-class Iranian raised in the West was an obstacle to understanding the country properly. I imagined that, since my views were shaped by people of a similar class background, they were unrepresentative of Iran as a whole. Surely it was only a small minority of society, the affluent denizens of north Tehran, who held secular opinions about government, were open to the West, believed in democracy, and held the regime in contempt. To remedy what I considered a dangerous myopia, I began embracing all that stood in opposition to such a worldview. In 2000, during my first stint living in the country, I started hanging out with religious fundamentalists, convinced they represented the “real” Iran.