Lipstick Jihad

by Azadeh Moaveni

  No, Qom was an excellent idea. Between the drive, the reporting, and the filing of notes, it would consume two whole days.

  The road from Tehran was flat and dusty, as was the city, which from the distance appeared like a few bumps in the desert, with splinters poking out into the sky. If a world beyond existed, there was little evidence to prove it—no colors, just lots and lots of mosques.

  On this winter afternoon, Qom seemed very much an antique land, its streets filled with turbaned clerics of all ethnicities, carrying religious texts under their arms, as they had for centuries. But the debates inside those brown walls were current—secularism, democracy, Shiite militancy and jurisprudence. Unlike most other parts of the Middle East I had traveled, where hardly anything of note was debated in public, let alone Islam, in Qom the clerics were busy fighting about the soul of the religion, and the future of the Islamic Republic.

  Many believed that Iran would only survive as an Islamic Republic if it embraced a democratic tradition of Islam, one that tolerated political dissent and freedom of speech, and granted full rights to women. They said that over the years Iran had swayed too far into the realm of Islamic theocracy, and that it should be returned to the original vision of a true Republic, loosely based on the spirit of Islam, but functioning as a modern democracy. The roots of all these debates extended into Shiite political and religious philosophy, and the rather central question of whether rulers should derive their authority from God, or the electoral mandate of citizens.

  We visited one of the city’s computer centers, elaborate places designed by the clerics to prove that Islam’s seventh-century ideology can coexist with modernity. The government loved to promote the centers, and every foreign journalist who visited Qom was dragged through one of the fluorescent-lit rooms where turbaned clerics stared at screens and listlessly clicked away at mice. Scott wanted to know if Qom’s clerics were trying to export Shia revolution by CD-ROM. The immense cleric who was showing us his archive of hadith was puzzled by the question and asked me to repeat it.

  “So, are you trying to export revolution by doing this?”

  For a minute he just looked at me, squinting through the fleshy folds of his sleepy eyes. He was clearly not used to sitting up straight. His work, as he might say, taxed the mind, not the body. My father always said clerics were the laziest species on earth. But this one in particular, oozing out of his chair like Jabba the Hut, one slipper hanging off his toe, seemed to prove him right. The thought of exporting anything at all, let alone revolution, seemed to tire him.

  I tried again.

  “Er, my colleague here would like to know, if perhaps these tools could ever be, or do you conceive them as possibly ever being, helpful in the export of the Shia Revolution.”

  “Um, no, they’re just for Muslims to study with. So, you said you live in Cairo?”

  “No, he says no exporting going on,” I told Scott in English and turned to hiss at the cleric, in Farsi: “No, I used to live in Cairo.”

  “Because I come to Cairo occasionally for conferences. Maybe I could call you? Do you have a phone number?”

  “What’s he saying?” demanded Scott, pen poised above his notebook.

  “Oh, the same thing. That these are study tools for the faithful.”

  The cleric walked us to the door, readjusting the black turban—which marked him as a direct descendant of the Prophet Mohammad—along the way. “Did you say you live all alone in Cairo? No family there or anything?”

  I brought my scandalized account of this encounter to the dinner table that night. My aunt and uncle both snorted with laughter, as they typically did when I came home and breathlessly pronounced an insight that was, apparently, a cultural platitude. My father had taught me that clerics were lazy; more specifically, that they were unsuited to run a country because their work kept them in seminaries, sipping tea in robes, and that sort of languid profession did not lend itself to the more challenging task of administering a government. Convinced their worst sin was sloth, I had not assumed they were equally lecherous. One really could not have a proper conversation with a cleric. They were absurd. A one-hour interview with a mullah inevitably cycled like so:

  First fifteen minutes: Gaze averted, stares at own feet, wall, space, anywhere but two-foot radius around opposing female.

  Second fifteen minutes: Slowly casts glances in direction of head and talking voice.

  Third fifteen minutes: Makes eye contact and conducts normal conversation.

  Last fifteen minutes: Begins making googooly eyes, smiling in impious fashion, and requesting one’s mobile phone number.

  I didn’t understand why they did this with me, since they are supposed to favor round women and fair women, and I was neither. Some actually complained about this, with mock concern for my health (“Miss Moaveni, have you been ill? You’ve lost so much weight. . . . Don’t you like Iranian food?”). How they could detect a body underneath the billowing tent I wore, let alone its fluctuations, was beyond me. I asked Khaleh Farzi, who explained that clerics had x-ray vision. That was why they didn’t mind keeping women veiled.

  It was only over time, after repeated exposure to womanizing clerics, clerics who stole from the state and built financial empires, who ordered assassinations like gangsters, who gave Friday sermons attacking poodles, that I came to understand the virulence of my father and my uncle’s hate for the Iranian clergy. Perhaps their flaws were no greater than those of ordinary mortals, but ordinary mortals did not claim divine right to rule, ineptly, over seventy million people. As the gravity of the Islamic Republic’s hypocrisy revealed itself, I came to the slow, shocking realization that Iranian society was sick. Not in a facetious, sloganny way, exaggerating the extent of culture wars and social tensions, but truly sick. The Iran I had found was spiritually and psychologically wrecked, and it was appalling.

  By winter, when Ramadan, the month of fasting, rolled around, I had no idea what to expect from this nation of ambivalent Muslims. During its first week, the most active student organization organized a pre-iftar (breaking of the fast) lecture at a university in central Tehran. Undeterred by the chill, and the oppressive, gray sky, the students huddled in patient bunches outside the main auditorium, waiting for the speakers to arrive.

  In the several months that had passed since the pro-reform parliament convened in the middle of 2000, the reformists had suffered setback after setback. The hard-line judiciary had shut down at least twenty-five independent newspapers and magazines, under the pretext that their strident criticism of the ruling clergy jeopardized national security. Several key reformist intellectuals had been dragged before the court on similarly empty charges and sentenced to lengthy prison terms for their ideas.

  The already fractured coalition of reformists was in full disarray, and the student movement was equally split about how to proceed. Many believed the reformists were moving too cautiously, and accused them of abandoning their vision for sweeping change (full civil and political rights) in favor of micro-progress (a few degrees less of international isolation). They too, by that point, had concluded that no real progress could be achieved without severing the mosque from the state. But with fundamentalist mullahs heading the judiciary, the armed forces, and state institutions, they saw no way of realistically moving this agenda forward.

  The film being screened at the university was produced by the most radical student organization, whose members had started calling on President Khatami to resign. It was simply a stark, silent sequence of footage: vigilantes attacking student meetings, activists being driven to prison, bustling newsrooms suspended by a judicial decree, culminating in a shot of the smiling president waving at a crowd, a beauty queen’s wave, at a pageant of persecution.

  After it concluded, the auditorium remained dark for the opening scenes of the play to follow. The auditorium was pitch black and silent for several moments, until a powerful flashlight cast a beam of light down the aisle. “I’m going to find you,” growled a s
cratchy, furious voice, as the light hunted through the rows of students. Everyone stiffened visibly, unsure whether this was part of the play or an actual raid. I looked for exit signs and saw none.

  Finally the light shone onto the stage, on a desk where a bookish young man sat writing. The bearer of the flashlight came into a view, a bearded, angry youth meant to represent in his speech the rhetoric of the hard-liners, and in his bearing the thuggishness of their vigilante shock troops. The play was one long encounter between a reformist journalist and the hard-line vigilante—a parable for the deadlocked state of the country—and at the very end, the writer turned to face the audience. “I know this is the part in the plot where a poem should be read to give people hope . . . but the end hasn’t been written yet.”

  And then the lights went on. That line, I thought, best captured the mood of Tehran in 2000—a fundamental uncertainty over how to view the future, whether to consider the system immune to change, or simply averse. At the sound of the call to prayer, the auditorium emptied into the university cafeteria, where long tables were set with dates, bread, and tea for the breaking of the fast.

  The next afternoon, Khaleh Farzi phoned me to suggest we meet at her cousin’s house for lunch. Back in California, fasters were rare—apart from the occasional old lady or depressive middle-aged woman, the community conveniently forgot Ramadan existed. But I assumed this was a Westernized diaspora habit and had resolved to fast, naively expecting to spend the month in harmony with the daily rhythm of the millions of Iranians around me. I imagined that, as it did in Egypt, regular life would slowly grind to a standstill, interrupted by disturbed sleep and work schedules and a flurry of iftar socializing. Eating on the street for the duration of the month was illegal anyway, and there were psychedelically colored billboards celebrating the month along the expressways. But the first couple of days were disappointingly like any other. Some schools forced students to fast, but often their parents weren’t, and so observance felt like a public/bureaucratic duty—what students had to do to get their report cards, or civil servants to pick up their salaries, unmolested. I resolved to persevere.

  As it turned out, not eating all day was actually not that hard, once you got used to the idea of being a being that did not eat. But to not eat, and not smoke, and not drink coffee was a human rights abuse. There was clearly a conceptual problem with this holiday, which essentially imposed a month of calorie, caffeine, and nicotine withdrawal on a half-hearted nation ambivalent about its Islamic faith. Without any hint of festivity or communal spirit of fasting to brighten the days ahead, the holiday loomed like one long rehab program. I snipped at everyone, returned to bed at noon, and whimpered into the pillow, willing the sun to set.

  It didn’t help that no one else was bloody fasting. I suspected at first that my family was unrepresentative in their flip disregard for the fast. But then I began to notice that Iranians of all walks of life, of all levels of education, were sneaking sips and bites during daylight hours. The guy at the corner shop hid a cup of tea behind the cash register. My driver, Ali (a believer whose favorite holiday was Ashoura), took back roads and shortcuts the whole month, so he could smoke behind the wheel. The ratio of non-fasters to fasters was something like 6:1. When I realized this, my resolve faltered. What was wrong with this place? Everything was inverted. Observing Ramadan was in bad taste, the revolutionary class (champions of the mustazafin, the oppressed) lived in white-columned mansions, and young people planned raves in chat rooms.

  I calculated the hours of daylight remaining, and traffic, and figured this would work. Before leaving, I surfed the Internet for an hour in search of the ayatollah who had decreed that smoking was permissible during the fast. Tobacco was not a food substance, this enlightened cleric argued, as it was not being consumed, but inhaled. If I could just find him, I could declare myself his follower, and puff away for the rest of the month. In Shiite Islam, extremely learned clerics eventually ascend to a rank called marja-e taqlid (source of emulation) and develop their own set of approaches to piety and religious observance. Individual Shiites have the right to choose which marja (senior cleric) they wish to follow (often members of a single family will follow different marjas), and whose particular scriptures they will be bound by. I needed to find my nicotine-friendly marja, and make him my source of taqlid (practice). But I found nothing online but a bunch of preachy Sunni anti-Ramadan-smoking rhetoric and gave up.

  I can’t come to lunch, I said to Khaleh Farzi, I’m fasting, thank you very much. She laughed merrily. All this time you spend with mullahs is going to your head, she said. I gritted my teeth. What was the point of enduring this deprivation, if it wasn’t even a community ritual? Why don’t you just come over, take a nap, and then break your fast, she suggested.

  The nap appealed, so I changed my mind and called a taxi. On the way there, a good two hours before the call to prayer, the taxi driver did the unthinkable. He lit a cigarette, holding it low near the gearshift so it couldn’t be seen from the other cars. Ahem, agha, I cleared my throat. Aren’t you fasting? No, I haven’t had anything to eat all day, but it’s accidental. I overslept and missed breakfast. Clearly, I concluded, in modern Iran not fasting was as authentic a tradition as fasting. And then I asked the driver for his lighter, took a protein bar out of my purse (an emergency reserve, in case I changed my mind) and split half with him, and two days into Ramadan called it a month.

  Toward the end of the month, on the anniversary of the death of Imam Ali (Shiism’s central figure), a handful of the non-fasters observed the one day and fasted. Ali, my driver, showed up for work that day wearing all black, and fasted grumpily. Even I fasted. Don’t you have a family iftar to attend, I asked him, as the sky darkened and we grumped our way through the city. No, he said, me and my dad both have to work late, and my sister isn’t fasting. We stopped at a grocery store, and held iftar—chocolate milk and cigarettes—amid the twinkling lights of the highway’s stalled traffic.

  As we sat on that highway, it occurred to me that ironically, and against all odds, the Islamic Republic had actually served to make a huge segment of Iranian society more tolerant. Before the revolution, millions of newly urbanized Iranians, still traditional in their provincial mindset, had been offended by the modern mores of the city-dwelling, secular classes. By taking rigid moralism to such a bloated, extreme level, the regime had shown definitively that minding thy neighbor’s religiosity was an ugly way to live. During a month like Ramadan this remarkable tendency for broad-mindedness was evident. It was one of those many ways in which Iranian society was evolving from the bottom up, becoming more sophisticated and progressive, while the mullahs on top remained exactly the same.

  When I went to visit Ibrahim Asgharzadeh, one of the reformist candidates who would run for president in the 2001 election, all I knew about him was that he was a former city council member and a former hostage taker. Like many reformists, he was ready to embrace democracy as long as it ensured that men like him would be at its helm. Democracy as it furthered his political future, not democracy as it benefited the country.

  As we sipped tea in his elegant, modern office, his polished manner impressed me—a fusion of Bill Clinton and the Ayatollah Khomeini. The birds chirped in the park outside his window, bagh-e ferdows, garden of paradise, and I started imagining how someone like Asgharzadeh could guide the Islamic Republic out of its reactive, ideological posture in the world. Someone like him stood a chance, even more so than President Khatami, who at the end of the day still symbolized the clergy more than the future. Asgharzadeh’s Westernized style—beige tweed blazer, frameless glasses—would appeal to young people who instinctively distrusted men in turbans, and his militant credentials would help him maneuver within the system.

  As he droned on, I daydreamed about quitting journalism and becoming his press aide, writing speeches for his trips abroad. I could be the female George Stephanopolous, and he could devise a Clinton-like “third way” for Iran, assembling a team of cl
ever, savvy young Iranians who would work exhaustive hours, trying to rehabilitate Iran’s image in the world. My American side would stop being a mark of difference, but an asset to the nation. But as I translated his Farsi in my head, and jotted down notes in English, I noticed most of his sentences began with a strange phrase: in my country. Not words one would use in conversation with another Iranian.

  As we wrapped up the interview, I asked what he thought about the closing of a newspaper that morning, and he made a smooth reference to this being natural, one of the many pitfalls “his country” would face evolving into a democracy. It’s hard for foreigners to understand these kinds of growing pains, he said with an oily smile, turning to the mutual friend who’d arranged our meeting. I stared at him in shock. Foreigner! How could Mr. Hostage Taker, ruiner of Iran’s international reputation, call me, an upstanding citizen, a foreigner?

  He turned to an oak bookshelf, and reached for a glossy book of photographs of Iran, the sort that’s sold at the Tehran airport to tourists. For you, he said, beaming in the manner of a tourist guide, and holding the book outstretched. Talk about nerve, I thought. What sheer audacity. No matter how many ideological twists you take, I wanted to say, no matter how modern and reformed and improved you appear to be, you with your tweed and your spectacles, you will always be considered a thief. Iranians will never trust you, because you—not the nation—are your own first priority. People know this, and they despise you for it. Do you think people have ever forgiven you for what you did twenty-three years ago? For the people you executed on rooftops? The only reason you are in a position of influence, sitting here in this office you neither earned nor deserve, is because everyone is exhausted and terrified and can’t think of a way to bring you down without turning their lives inside out all over again. You ruined my country. And you stand there, calling me a foreigner?