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

by Azadeh Moaveni

  “Something like that,” Neda said, running to answer the door. By around eleven, most of the other guests had arrived. I served the over-spiced curry at eleven-thirty, early by Tehran dinner-party standards. The conversation, led by Neda, centered around the creeping restrictions everyone had noticed in their respective corners of city life.

  Arash had invited Majid Derakhshani, his tar teacher, and Majid had brought his orchestra’s ney player, and the ney player’s wife, who played the kamancheh. They had all just returned from a concert in the town of Sari, in northern Iran.

  “So the official comes up to me, and asks, ‘Can your female musicians play behind a black curtain?’” Majid said. “I told him, ‘Why would they fly here all the way from Tehran, to play behind a curtain?’“

  The ney player said, “It’s better than the concert in Tabriz. Remember? They asked if the females could just not play. Not behind a curtain. Just not at all.”

  “I myself am horrified,” announced the wife of one of Arash’s MBA classmates. She wore a silk scarf patterned with a designer logo around her neck in a sort of ascot, and I shifted nervously, wishing I had not tried to pay off my dinner party debt all at once by inviting people who would not ordinarily find themselves in one another’s company. I hoped the musicians, who were all straining to meet their rent, would not be offended. “I met friends this morning for coffee, and we were told women could not smoke anymore in cafés. And, afterward, I went to the beauty salon and I asked my manicurist, ‘What happened to all the photos on the wall?’ She said the police had come and demanded that they be taken down, because images of unveiled women are illegal.”

  My first impulse was to tell the woman that there were far graver examples of the growing campaign of repression to worry about. Did anyone really care if the coiffed women of Tehran could smoke their European airport duty-free cigarettes with their cappuccino? I felt mortified, until I looked around and realized the other guests were listening to her respectfully. I detected no censure in their understanding expressions. They seemed to absorb her anecdotes as just another instance of the new and worrisome restrictions. There was no regime that would limit its violations to the affluent; a Taliban outlook would target musicians and schoolteachers, not only the well-heeled. Iranians, accustomed for three decades to the vagaries of the Islamic regime, understood that very well.

  “The problem,” concluded the only western guest, a diplomat trained in summing up our daily travails under the mullahs in clever, brief formulations, “is that your old regime viewed religion as an obstacle to modernity, and this regime views modernity as an obstacle to religion.”

  We all chewed on this for a while in silence. He continued a moment later, explaining that layered identities were richer, and that Iran’s government should try to harmonize society’s westernized and religious elements, rather than excising the parts deemed destructive or threatening. This was wise, measured thinking, but I wondered when, if ever, it might become Iranian reality. The revolution, as is the nature of such upheavals, took bloody revenge for the years in which Islam was marginalized by the secular Pahlavi monarchy. The revolutionaries murdered secularists, and even religious Iranians it considered opponents. Part of the reason the regime today brooked no opposition was, I imagined, fear. The authorities worried that if they loosened their grip even just a tiny bit, all those whom they had wronged—secular intellectuals, Muslim modernists, technocrats—would rise up together and seek their own revenge, as well as their right to participate in government.

  These were heavy musings for two in the morning. Unable to think of any insight to add, I poured another round of tea in slim-waisted cups. The ney player blew into his flute, the notes dispelling the conversation with their own melancholy beauty.

  CHAPTER 14

  A Turn for the Soviet

  Mr. Hashemi would like to meet you today at one o’clock.” The tone was polite, but it was quite evident that I was being summoned rather than invited. I had never met Mehdi Hashemi, the son of former president Rafsanjani and could not fathom why he would want to see me, let alone with such urgency. I canceled my lunch date with a girlfriend, and redirected my taxi toward Hashemi’s office at a private university complex in north Tehran, opposite Niavaran Palace. I was wearing a longish button-down shirt, ankle-length linen trousers, and sandals, an outfit that wasn’t suited for such a meeting, but I figured that wasn’t my problem. I had not, after all, been given ample notice to prepare myself. At the door, a security guard scanned my attire and told me curtly that I wasn’t “going anywhere at all, dressed like that.”

  I adjusted my scarf, trying to decide what to do. Clearly, the guard believed I was a college student dressed inappropriately for an institution un-ironically called the Islamic Free University. If I imperiously announced myself as a correspondent for Time magazine going to see the former president’s son, I would likely be treated with a bit of respect. I was spared that when a moment later, the man who had set up the meeting appeared, assessed the situation, and brushed off the security guard. “She’s a foreigner! Of course she’s not dressed properly … but she’s a visitor in our country—we must be hospitable! You know how they are.”

  He ushered me into Hashemi’s private office immediately. Usually Iranian officials make you wait for at least half an hour as a way of underscoring their influence, but Hashemi’s influence was so vast that it required no such airs. Over the years, he had held positions in various state bodies active in the oil and energy sectors, but his real power came from being Rafsanjani’s son.

  He wanted to chat about my profile of Ayatollah Khamenei, which had just recently been published. Although he did not say so directly, I presumed he was displeased by the scantness of the space devoted to his father, whom many people considered the preeminent power player in Iranian politics. My article had alluded to the lavish life styles of certain corrupt clerics, and it seemed Mr. Hashemi had taken the reference personally.

  “People say the silliest things about us,” he said, smiling defensively. He smoothed a hand over thick black hair, and leaned his softly sloped shoulders back in his chair. His appearance surprised me. Unlike his sister, who was notorious for wearing Chanel suits under her chador, and unlike the daughter of that sister, known for parading through Tehran’s jet-set parties in designer clothes, Mehdi Hashemi did not look like Islamic Republic royalty. His white shirt was neatly pressed, but apart from his tidy grooming, he resembled an ordinary, mid-ranking official. “They say we have ranches overflowing with Thoroughbreds. The Supreme Leader rides; how come no one mentions that?” A popular joke that captured the extent of the Rafsanjani wealth had the former president discussing how he had amassed his fortune: “We had this bit of land in the family. A country called Iran happened to fall within its borders.”

  We talked seriously for the next half hour about President Ahmadinejad and the implications of his foreign policy. It remained unclear, to the outside world as well as to many Iranians, whether Ahmadinejad devised policy and had any real influence, or whether he was a marionette executive controlled by powerful ayatollahs who ruled from the shadows. Mr. Hashemi’s real opinion of the president was impossible to deduce; he seemed to consider him both contemptible and effective, a phenomenon that simply needed to be waited out. He said the president’s defiant stand had paid off, and that Iran was now ahead in its nuclear confrontation with the West. He predicted that Tehran would not accept the most recent European proposal.

  After the meeting I climbed into the waiting car. Almost immediately my phone rang, “1111111.” Mr. X had not called in a month, and it could not possibly be a coincidence that he should ring at that precise moment. I began looking out the window, wondering if I might spot him hiding behind a bush, or directing traffic, concealed behind a pair of dark glasses and an officer’s hat.

  “Che khabar?” he asked. What’s new?

  My first instinct was to say nothing about whom I had just met, but I figured he must already k
now. “I’m doing well, thank you! … How are you? … May you not be tired. … You should know that I have just met Mr. Hashemi, but that the meeting was at his request, not mine, and that nothing of great sensitivity was discussed.”

  “What right does Mr. Hashemi have to summon you for a meeting? And why did you not consult with us before agreeing to see him? What use is our consultative relationship if you only alert us to such matters after the fact, when our sentiments can no longer bear any weight on your decisions?”

  Mr. X always referred to himself in the first-person plural. In Farsi, the formal “we,” usually the prerogative of kings, is also used in conversations that demand particular correctness. According to strict Islamic norms, it was deeply inappropriate for Mr. X and me—neither relatives nor husband and wife—to consort with each other so familiarly, to be in regular phone contact and meet sometimes in the absence of a third party. This impropriety called for an excessive formality in our speech, the extra distance afforded by “we,” rather than the intimacy of “I.” Of course, Mr. X also intended his plural to signify the institution of the state. “We,” as in “my ministry,” “the government,” “the totality of the Islamic state,” disapprove of little, singular “you.”

  “I was made to believe the meeting was very urgent,” I said. “Had I been informed in advance, you can be certain that I would have consulted you.” This was a lie—I would never have asked Mr. X’s permission to meet anyone—but after the fact, it seemed harmless to suggest otherwise. I regretted telling him about the meeting. Perhaps he had not known, after all; perhaps the timing of his call had been coincidence. Certainly he would have found out eventually, since my mobile phone was surely tapped, but I could have worked out at my leisure what to tell him.

  He made some reply to the effect that I was being disingenuous and that I had better start to recall in much more vivid detail the content of my conversation with Mehdi Hashemi. I wished desperately for the line to cut out. The Tehran mobile network was barely functional. It often took several attempts to make a call, and even then the connection often died. Once I rang an Interior Ministry official back repeatedly in the course of a phone interview; picking up after the fourth interruption, he exploded, “A curse upon the fools in this government, who can’t even fix something as elementary as a mobile network!” That day, however, the reception was crystal clear and the line never wavered. Mr. X chastised me in severe tones, and I could tell from his displeasure that he would soon request a meeting to hector me in person. Once he hung up, I paid the taxi driver and decided to walk part of the way home so I could stop at Juice Javad and console myself with an extra-large pomegranate slushie and a pomegranate fruit roll. The morning’s events signaled growing tension within the political establishment; the infighting was growing more serious. I fretted over how this might affect my life, whether I might now be considered a tool or a favorite of Mr. Hashemi, and therefore a reporter whose work required more scrutiny.

  In the last month, Ahmadinejad’s dwindling popularity had for the first time become the subject of people’s daily conversations. After nearly a year in office, he had failed to deliver on any of his economic promises, and the prices of basic commodities from cigarettes to tomatoes to butter had risen 20 percent. Though inflation was a longstanding problem of the Iranian economy, most experts blamed the sharp and sudden rise on Ahmadinejad’s fiscal policies. The president continued to flood the economy with cash (a tactic known to economists as increasing liquidity) in the form of loans promised on his trips to the provinces. He intended these measures to stoke his popularity among the provincial poor, but he was ignoring the pleas of the nation’s economists, who warned he was imperiling an already debilitated economy.

  In particular, fruit—as central to the Iranian diet as bread—had grown prohibitively expensive. Many of our comfortably middle-class relatives had stopped buying fruit regularly, and so had we. Our weekly fruit bill had grown to around the equivalent of $25, outrageous by local standards. We either shopped at the discount Hajji Arzouni fruit shop, which sold bruised fruit in bulk, or, when we grew tired of bananas, pilfered from the fruit bowl at Arash’s parents’.

  The nuclear negotiations with the West had stalled, and the government’s defiant position was beginning to look more destructive than heroic. This created an opening for Ahmadinejad’s opponents, most importantly Rafsanjani, to begin forming an alliance against him. At such times of shifty maneuvering, the regime felt itself less stable and monitored all sorts of activity with an even more paranoid degree of vigilance than usual. This did not bode well for my hopes of leniency from Mr. X. I crossed to the other side of Niavaran Street, threading between the moving cars, confident, for no reason besides local custom, that at the last moment they would brake or swerve.

  I knew I would regret it later, but when the police skipped our street one day during a swoop to confiscate satellite dishes, I was gleeful. Of course at some point they would come for ours, too, and in the interest of karmic solidarity with those whose dishes had been taken away I should have felt more sympathy. But short-sighted, naked self-interest is an unpleasant habit of people who live under dictatorships, and I was no exception. “Lucky, lucky us!” I told my sister-in-law, Solmaz, happily that evening, settling into her couch and reaching for a slice of cheesecake. Like many women in Iran, Solmaz devoted much of her free time to cooking. The two of us had a standing date to watch The Perfect Dinner, a German cooking-cum-reality TV show, and without it the fall evenings would have loomed bleak indeed.

  Back in 2000, as part of President Khatami’s drive to keep the state out of Iranians’ private lives, the police had stopped carting away people’s satellite dishes regularly. Iranians had grown accustomed to this laxity and had gradually begun setting up their dishes in more conspicuous places. More and more people acquired satellite dishes, until by unofficial estimates the majority of the country owned one. The recent sweeps were a disagreeable reminder that until such rights were enshrined in law, they could be plucked away at the whim of a mid-level bureaucrat. But given how adept the regime had become at jamming signals, especially of networks airing programming by opposition groups, I had a difficult time understanding what there was to gain by such heavy-handed tactics. When I met with Mr. Tabibi, President Ahmadinejad’s relative, later that week, I put this to him.

  “Don’t you think rounding up people’s dishes is so 1999?”

  “No. It is a sagacious and timely move.”

  “Is it sagacious to cut off people’s access to the outside world?”

  “Television is trouble. Nothing but trouble. Don’t look at yourself. For someone like you, educated, who has lived abroad, you have an appropriate context through which to filter what you watch. But for people with no education, whose world before satellite was limited to state television and their local neighborhood, it’s corrupting. Suddenly, right there in your living room—women! expensive cars! vacations! appliances!—all this stuff you can’t afford. None of this bothered you when you didn’t know it existed, but suddenly Hassan Ali from Karaj is comparing himself to the people he sees on the screen. His expectations are tripled, quadrupled! …”

  “Quintupled?”

  “Exactly! So you understand!”

  “Of course I don’t understand. The answer is not to deny Hassan Ali CNN and Persian music videos, but to improve the economy so he can buy his wife the Korean refrigerator that the channels advertise, and additionally benefit from exposure to global culture.”

  “You are very idealistic,” he said soberly. “You do not speak as someone who feels responsible for the welfare of the nation.”

  Mr. Tabibi, though by no means a perfectly reliable instrument, reflected the broad preoccupations of the Ahmadinejad administration. And right now, the impatience of ordinary Iranians with inflation and unmet promises of redistributed oil wealth weighed heavy. Although I disagreed with Mr. Tabibi, he was not exactly wrong. Our doorman, Yehya, who lived in the basement with
his family, embodied the plight of the hypothetical Hassan Ali. Two years prior, in hopes of better wages, he had moved his family from a small village in the province of Khorasan to Tehran. Plowing the family farm in his village, where satellite dishes were uncommon, he had been unexposed to the wicked ways of city people. But in consultations with the other doormen on the block, he discovered that most of his urban colleagues had such devices, and he asked the building if he could run an extra cable from the dishes on the roof to his television.

  The cable transformed Yehya and his wife, in the short space of six months, to urbane Tehranis modern in appearance and expectations. She doffed her floral village chador and began wearing a city manteau; he bought a motorcycle and started wearing black for religious holidays. She began going to the beauty salon for threading and blow outs; he began knocking at our door late in the evenings for buckets of ice and aragh. Such a couple would naturally develop material aspirations that when unmet would turn into discontent. On satellite television, they would get the news in Persian on Voice of America, always critical of Ahmadinejad’s nuclear policy, as Iranian commentators linked the troubled economy to his defiant stance. In six months, bucolic contentment blossomed into urban resentment.

  To prevent the metastasis of the urban Yehya phenomenon, the president preferred Band-Aid solutions, such as the confiscation of satellite dishes. Though it deserved much criticism for such shortsighted policies, the clerical regime had left itself no other way out. The only genuine solution to the Yehya problem would be to repair the economy and create real jobs, steps that in turn required Iran to address its political problems. It would need to fix its ties with the West and in general desist from behavior that angered the international community. For this to happen, the revolution would need to sort itself out. Would the pragmatists prevail? Would the ideological sacred cows finally be slaughtered? The history of revolutions teaches us that they take decades to mellow and settle into coherent forms of new governance. If historical precedent held, then Iran’s problems would not be solved soon.