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

by Azadeh Moaveni

  Epilogue

  Avrash, Hourmazd, and I arrived in London during the late summer of 2007. We rode a black hackney cab through the drizzly, overcast morning to our new apartment, and gazed eagerly at the exotic (at least to us) surroundings—red phone booths, mail trucks adorned with a crown, pubs with names like Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese. I was excited to arrive in our new neighborhood, Kilburn, where we would launch our new English life. We had chosen to live there because it was relatively affordable, an easy walk to the cafés and health food stores of gentrified West Hampstead, and most important, truly diverse. Kilburn traces its origins to the eleventh-century reign of King Henry I, when a community of Augustinian nuns built a priory near an ancient Celtic road. I had researched the history of London while still in Tehran and was fully prepared to fall in love with the city. From short holidays and my British friends’ accounts, I knew it was grandly beautiful, ethnically varied, and one of the most vibrant cities in Europe. I imagined that our neighbors would resemble the cast of Love Actually, the local Indian restaurant would serve delectable curries, and we would spend leisurely afternoons with our new friends at the local pub discussing Ian McEwan.

  But Little Riyadh, as Arash and I quickly dubbed the area, felt altogether more like a dour Muslim village than the charming London quarter I had expected. “We left Tehran for this?” I said, looking at the grocery shop down the street from our apartment in shock. Its sign read ASHOURA MARKET, and the words were flanked on both sides by a crescent moon and star, the symbols of Islam. The second time I went inside, I found the stern Pakistani owner arguing with several Muslim kids from the block. He was refusing to sell them gummy candy on the grounds that it contained un-kalal pig gelatin. I thought of intervening—if their parents didn’t care, what business was it of his?—but they were already trooping out and I figured I should wait at least a week before alienating the neighborhood grocer.

  As my friends had said, the area was indeed multiethnic. Our landlords were a Russian-Venezuelan couple, the flat upstairs was occupied by an Australian, and the street vendors on the main thoroughfare were Sri Lankan and Chinese. But the neighborhood’s sizable Muslim community seemed to exist in a separate sphere—it was as though everyone else came from a distinct country but they were from a besieged and borderless place called Islam. They seemed to project this sentiment, and others reflected it back to them. “The people who live on the corner, they are Mooslims,” a Spanish neighbor informed me with a meaningful look.

  The neighborhood’s Muslims, I soon found, seemed to share the Pakistani grocer’s strict sensibility. One afternoon, in search of Hourmazd’s favorite baby food, I wandered into a store called the Al-Mahdi Market (after the occulted twelfth Imam-messiah of Shia Islam). Al Jazeera blared from the wall-mounted TV, and when I tried to pay, the Lebanese clerk told me to put the coins on the counter. Puritanical Muslims consider it forbidden for unmarried men and women to touch one another, but it takes a real fundamentalist to cringe at the threat of a light grazing. In all the years I had spent in the Middle East, not once had a man refused to take money from my hand. I slammed the coins on the counter and walked out.

  When I began taking Hourmazd to the nearest playground, I found the mothers clustered according to civilization. The western moms congregated near the teeter-totter, discussing BBC specials on childhood, the Portobello Road market, and local museums. The Muslim women, some of whom even covered their faces and hands, assembled near the swings. The subjects of their conversations reflected the separateness of their world—husbands who vetoed breastfeeding because of the risk of exposed flesh, husbands who complained about their women taking English lessons, the strain of cooking four-dish meals each day for a bevy of extended relatives. Initially I alternated sitting with each group, but eventually found myself most at home with the western moms, who were on average at least a decade older than the Muslim homemakers. In addition to not having much to say to an eighteen-year-old Bengali speaker, I found it difficult connecting through the niqabs (full-face masks with slits for the eyes) that some of the Muslim moms wore. The niqab made it impossible to smile hello, as a preliminary to conversation; it made it impossible to share kindly, forgiving glances, as our sons filched each others’ spades in the sand pit. The Muslim women, and by their own accounts rigid husbands, were cleaving to a traditional, suffocating lifestyle, afraid of what might happen if the godless ways of the secular West permeated their lives.

  I assumed most of the Muslim mothers must be recent immigrants, until I heard a voice emanating from underneath a full-face black veil that might have belonged to Victoria Beckham. Some of the Muslims in the neighborhood, like the face-veiled Victoria, were second- or third-generation immigrants, born and raised in England. Others had recently come from places as far away as Somalia, Nigeria, and Bangladesh.

  I found the Muslim presence to be so assertive that I once even forgot I was in England altogether. One day, when I was on the tube, two women dressed in severe black, their faces concealed under imposing niqabs, boarded the train. They carried Korans and radiated such militancy that I thought they were morality policewomen and looked down to see whether I was dressed appropriately.

  I hadn’t lived in England very long and was aware that my views were unseasoned. I also knew that the problems Europe faced with the assimilation of its Muslim immigrants were very different from America’s—the Muslims who move to Europe, by and large, tend to be poorer and less educated, making integration more difficult. But that reality, as I saw it, made their assimilation especially urgent. If the Muslim women of my neighborhood were any indication, the country’s Muslim community was living entirely at odds with the society around them. And Britian seemed to be appeasing this tendency rather than confronting it head-on.

  This upset me, for I felt myself an immigrant as well—a recent immigrant from a repressive Islamic theocracy. I had deliberately left traditional, defensive Islam behind and did not wish to see it nurtured in the heart of my new home, a western democracy whose secular values I had come to treasure in an entirely new way. Everywhere I went, from the doctor’s office to playgroups, I saw evidence of England’s special sensitivity to Muslims’ needs. Signs asked: Do you require a chaperone while being seen by a male doctor? Do you wish to keep your head covering on for ID photos? Do you wish to attend sermons where radical clerics preach hatred and jihad? Of course, there was no sign for the latter, but there may as well have been. Britain’s recent history as a breeding ground for militant Islam numbered among the most controversial topics in Europe, and had led the French to devise the term “Londonistan.”

  Of course, nurturing the veiling and sequestering of women is not the same thing as allowing militants free rein to organize terror attacks. But they share one important aspect, and that is their willingness to accommodate antediluvian Islam rather than push the faith into a healthy acceptance of modernity. I had no doubt that this is what Islam needed, and living in Iran had stripped me of all my liberal California ambivalence about imposing western values on an “other” from elsewhere. I felt like a messenger from the land of radical Islam, sent to shake some sense into all these well-intentioned but deluded British people. Didn’t they realize that if the situation were reversed, if they were a secular minority in a country of deeply pious Muslims, there would be no signs asking, Do you require a beer on the weekend? Do you wish to bare your hair and arms?

  As weeks turned to months, however, my views softened slightly. I experienced both the subtle and visceral racism of British society toward its Muslim community, and this helped me understand part of why Muslims clung so defensively to their traditions. Some instances were slight, like the time I heard a well-dressed white British man sneer at a young Muslim girl, who cowered in fear of the pug puppy he held on a leash. “Is it a dog’s saliva, or what, that these people are supposedly scared of?” he asked, turning to me. “She’s probably just not used to dogs as pets,” I said.

  Another time, while trying t
o maneuver Hourmazd’s stroller off a crowded bus, an older white British woman rebuked me: “You should learn to say ‘excuse me,’ as the English do, when you get in people’s way,” she said, glaring with an open, disproportionate hostility. I had, in fact, apologized, she just hadn’t heard me, but was too shocked to say anything. A young, veiled woman rose to help me with the stroller, and later I was struck by the rush of feelings that had overcome me—fury at the white woman (for in that instant, that is what she became to me); fear that one day Hourmazd would hear such comments; and a profound sense of gratitude for and kinship with the woman in the veil.

  These experiences, and my life in England altogether, left me feeling confused and unmoored in a country whose racial and political dynamics I didn’t quite understand. Was racism alienating British Muslims, causing the Muslim part of their identity to take on a defensive, oversize importance? Or was it just stoking a tendency that had its roots elsewhere, in a stuffy, paranoid Islam that was already keeping Muslims sequestered and unhappy? How had the problem changed since September 11, and July 7, 2005, when a series of bombs left by Islamic extremists ripped through London? Whatever the reasons, I grew to accept the fact that I had not left Islam’s modern problems—its traditionalism, the frightening zeal of its radical adherents, its tendency to blame the West for its societies’ stagnation—behind when I left Iran. In new and different ways, the religion would remain a part of my life, and a part of the environment in which we raised Hourmazd.

  Regardless of what hemisphere we lived in, I would need to teach him that Islam could be tolerant as well as repressive, and that he should take ownership of the faith by dispassionately studying its history (its past glories, as well as its modern ignominy). If we had raised him in Iran, I would have tried to make him see that rejecting spirituality was no way to distance himself from the tyrannical Islam of the state. Here I would need to teach him that embracing Islam was no way to empower himself before racism. Whether he lived in London or in Tehran, he would need to grapple with these issues, which I supposed made him a citizen of the twenty-first century.

  Compared to the veiled women on the playground and their aggressively bearded husbands, we eased into British life comfortably. Arash was engrossed in his graduate studies and spent most of his hours at the university or the British Library in the quiet company of ancient manuscripts. The study of Zoroastrianism essentially involved the mastery of old Iranian languages; by deciphering the texts composed in these archaic tongues, scholars sought to understand the nature of ancient Persia. Busily immersed in such scholarship, Arash did not find himself, like me, questioning whether he was altogether happier than he had been in Iran. There were days when I was grateful for everything that London and life in the West offered—stability, a fast and uncensored Internet, and the luxury of worrying about toxicity in Hourmazd’s toiletries rather than in the propaganda murals on the street. On other days, usually cold, gray afternoons when the faces of Londoners rushing past seemed especially blank, I felt unbearably lonely. Just as I had suspected, being a working mom in the West was harder and infinitely less enjoyable than in Iran. In Tehran, the constant presence of relatives had meant that I had the pleasure of company, intellectual stimulation, and reassurance that was more steady than any parenting book, as well as time to shower, and even occasional moments of idleness. I was poised and rested, and I actually found both working and mothering fun. In London, I became the sort of woman, the sort of mother, who suddenly needed many extraneous and costly things—yoga classes, child-care gadgets, an agency-certified nanny, a housekeeper, bottled baby food—just to get through the week without becoming an exhausted wreck. Many days, as the rain splattered against the windows and the sky drew dark by four P.M., I felt that I would give anything to be back in Iran. I felt I would gladly tolerate the hell of living there in exchange for once again feeling connected to those around me.

  I told Arash one night: “Do you know what I miss? I miss the produce seller. I miss buying oyster mushrooms and having him ask me, ‘Now, Mrs. Zeini, how are you, and tell me, what do you cook with these strange mushrooms?’ To me that’s civilization, not the swiping of a club card.”

  “Wait until you’re next in Iran again. Tell me then what you think about civilization,” he said.

  That next trip happened to fall in April of 2008, when Hourmazd and I flew to Tehran for a brief holiday. I had been thinking of going back for a few months, for many reasons. For one, I was curious to see how things had changed since we left. But more important, we wanted to have Hourmazd examined by his Tehran pediatrician, as he had developed a lump under his arm as a result of his tuberculosis vaccine and the doctors in London were advising it be removed surgically. Since babies in the UK receive the vaccine far less frequently than in places like Iran, I figured the Tehran doctor might offer a valuable second opinion, and perhaps an alternative to the scary-sounding operation. As added incentive to go, I also needed to visit the dentist, get a haircut, and have my eyebrows threaded, all of which in London would have cost as much as my plane ticket.

  I was a touch worried about my safety going back, especially since I would be traveling alone with Hourmazd. But I figured that if we had been allowed to leave the country, returning should pose no great risk and that staying away would only suggest I had been permanently cowed. I had no intention of writing, so I would not need to let the press office know of my trip. And I refused to speak to Mr. X, that shameless emotional terrorist, ever again.

  We stayed with Arash’s parents, who were elated to welcome the grandson they had seen every day for nearly a year and then not at all. Hourmazd delighted in the company, finding incentive to turn his babble into near words, and was entertained enough to abandon his attention-thirsty naughtiness. Watching my transformed little son play, I wondered whether this is how it was supposed to be—big families living together, generations under one roof, a whole community of well-intentioned relatives helping raise one another’s children. I believe that children show you what they need in order to be happy, and if Hourmazd’s behavior was any measure, this is what he needed: cousins, aunties, honorary aunties, and grandparents to be in his life every day, not just twice a year for a week. Maybe I needed it, too.

  That first evening we sat on the balcony and ate sandwiches of roast wild boar on crusty baguettes, delivered by a beloved local sandwich shop that even just a year ago had not served the haram meat of the pig. Of course wild boar did not appear on the menu, but in response to the demand of Iranians who liked ham sandwiches, the shop had begun selling them in the guise of “lamb.” As I sipped my tea, gazing at the shadows cast by the Alborz Mountains, an accordion player passed by on the street below, filling the night with a croaking, familiar melody. The warm air carried the soft scent of night-blooming jasmine, and I felt so embraced by Tehran that I thought of calling Arash and telling him that our move had been a huge mistake. Instead I put on my nightgown, ate half a succulent water melon, and read the newspaper until I felt sleepy, sometime near dawn.

  Tehran had changed since we had left. The half-finished apartment buildings on the block were now completed, and new craters had appeared in other parts of the neighborhood. The city’s construction boom continued despite the staggering 150 percent rise in real estate prices, which meant a two-bedroom apartment in north Tehran now easily ran over $1 million. Hourmazd was ecstatic at seeing cement mixers and dump trucks at nearly every intersection, his Bob the Builder fantasies coming to real life. He would press his face against the window for long minutes and watch the cranes bobbing up and down across the neighborhood, and then he’d flap his arms when one of them lifted something particularly impressive or heavy.

  Though inflation had hit the housing market hardest, even basic commodities cost much more than the previous summer. The next day I picked up some groceries with Eshrat khanoum—a sack of potatoes, some green plums, two cantaloupes, and tomatoes—and the bill came to the equivalent of $40. “Do you realize this wo
uld be cheaper in London, the second most expensive city in the entire world?” I said.

  My depressive bouts in England aside, the fact was I doubted we could even afford to move back to Iran.

  Only the truly affluent were unaffected by Ahmadinejad’s demolishing of the economy—the corrupt, upper echelons of the regime, the private sector tycoons who flew business in and out of Imam Khomeini airport. For regular Iranians, money had never been so tight. Even middle- and upper-class Iranians, like many of my relatives, were finding their material lives deteriorating. Things they used to take for granted, like vacations and keeping the house in good repair, were now becoming insupportable luxuries. Low-income Iranians, like my former babysitter, could no longer afford to eat red meat and were being forced to relocate to cheaper neighborhoods.

  Before arriving, I had told my sister-in-law Solmaz that I wanted to see how Tehran had changed, especially everything that had opened since I left. She had taken this quite literally, and planned two days’ worth of outings that left me astonished at how decadent this city, the capital of Khomeini’s populist revolution, had become. We drank “virgin mojitos” in an exquisite garden café on the former Elahieh estate of Dr. Mahmoud Hessaby, the legendary, Sorbonne-trained scientist who studied with Albert Einstein. In the shade of the sycamore trees, matrons in Hermès scarves escaped the heat and a table full of Iranian-American entrepreneurs plotted a luxury bridal spa. We ate a proper brunch of fluffy pancakes and caviar toast, which was a first for Tehran, offered by the kabob empire of Nayyeb in a setting that evoked, well, Versailles. We dunked lobster tempura into delicate Japanese bowls at the remodeled Monsoon on Gandhi Street and enjoyed ravioli with truffle sauce at the new French restaurant La Cheminée, alongside the famous television actor Mehran Modiri and the singer Assar. As we flitted between these places, I noticed that the BMW SUV had been supplanted by another imported car of the moment: a magnolia white Mercedes-Benz with cartoonish curves.