Every few months, a drug smuggler was hanged in public, a woman murdered for dressing immodestly. Sometimes the system staged and managed the spectacle, as it did with the public lashings, other times it bore responsibility obliquely—by fostering a culture of vigilantism that encouraged individuals to punish “offenders.” A passage in the Koran exhorted believers to be proactive in maintaining the purity of their communities. The dictum “Amr be marouf, va nahi be monker” (Promote virtue and contain vice) was embraced by the regime, and gave powers akin to a citizen’s arrest to pious, local bullies.
That day, the crowd was composed mostly of older people tense with disgust. Teenagers ducking into the mall, or in and out of the nearby coffee shop, chose to ignore the grotesque spectacle. If they must do this, seethed an elderly woman who stood watching, why not to thieves and murderers? They’re the ones who menace society, not young people who drink. She gripped her handbag tightly as she whispered, as though restraining herself from smacking the “volunteers” meting out the whipping. Old women were circumspect in Tehran. Gone were the days when they could say anything, do anything, cross the street anywhere, and be treated with cordial courtesy. In the Iran of the Islamic Republic, the deference to the elderly so central to Persian culture had collapsed, along with general civility. People didn’t hold doors for one another, mothers heaved strollers up and down stairs unassisted.
Since the middle of the summer of 2001, Tehran had witnessed a baffling revival in the practice of public flogging, a form of punishment prescribed by Islamic sharia (criminal law) but abandoned by the Islamic Republic for over two decades. In the parks and squares of the capital, young people found guilty of petty social offenses like drinking alcohol, attending parties, and selling pornography were being rounded up every few days and lashed before crowds in busy squares.
The Tehran police released a statement meant to explain: “Regarding the spread of decadent Western culture in the society, police have seriously risen up against the propagators of corruption.” The corruption described included: shop owners selling pets such as dogs and monkeys; clothes bearing pictures of Western movie and rock stars; coffee shops serving women dressed immodestly and wearing heavy makeup; malls playing “illegal” music; and shops that displayed women’s underwear or nude mannequins in their windows.
The head of the judiciary declared “an all-out fight against social vices” and said “the people” had thanked the judiciary for carrying out the punishments. Both the police and the judiciary were run by hard-liners, while the Interior Ministry, which was loyal to President Khatami, publicly opposed the floggings. The standoff illustrated how the Islamic Republic worked, or more aptly, did not work: one powerful semi-official body implementing a policy that another sphere of government opposed and tried to obstruct.
Privately, reformists said Islamic criminal law, with its seventh-century origins and arcane punishments such as stoning and lashings, should be abolished. But discarding Islamic law would definitively secularize Iran. What sort of Islamic Republic, after all, could be run without Islamic legal codes? How else could Shiite clerics justify their divine right to govern without religious law?
The hard-liners were anticipating the upcoming presidential election and feared massive voter turnout, which would bolster Khatami—the bee in their turban—with a second popular mandate to carry forward reform. Somewhere in some dusty, dirty-carpeted room in Qom, some wily hardliner understood the psychology of electoral politics. Television attack ads—or in this case, public floggings—disgusted voters enough to keep them at home. Khatami’s opponents staged such spectacles to discourage fence sitters, already unsure whether to support a maimed-duck president, from voting.
In the weeks that followed, the lashings sparked an open debate about the role Islamic law should play in modern society—a crucial and thorny question many Muslim societies are facing today. On many important issues in Islamic law—like stoning as punishment for adultery, or the killing of apostates, or a woman’s blood money equaling half a man’s—the Koran is largely silent. Historical records of the Prophet Mohammad’s teachings, called hadith, offer some guidance, but because they are open to interpretation, the calculations depend on the philosophical and moral worldview of clerics. A skillful cleric can convincingly argue that a given punishment, like stoning, should be abolished, or upheld. Purely in theological terms, it can be argued either way.
The progressive clerics in the reform movement searched for a way out of the impasse. They argued that since Islam is silent about 95 percent of the matters people face in daily life, people should be free to determine their own behavior, adjusting to the changing times. But the hard-liners interpreted this domain of the 95 percent as their own, a chance to shape society in their own image, by prescribing rules by fatwa. This debate, obscure as it may sound, was the basis for the political battle over the Islamic Republic’s soul, if not the role of Islam itself in modern life: In the realm of the Koran’s silence, are people free, or subject to the fatwa of clerics?
While the debate was significant—unique in a region that as a rule stifled candid talk on sensitive religious issues—it couldn’t have mattered less to ordinary Iranians. They were light years ahead of such conversations (the need for secularism being as obvious to them as the blue of the sky), and it only irritated them to watch the country’s rulers engage in esoteric theological bickering.
Young people were busy launching weblogs (by 2003, Iran ranked number three in the world in number of weblogs); intellectuals were writing innovative, sparkling satire, graphic designers were creating websites for the West. Their interest was turning intensely outward, to the world of ideas outside, and they didn’t have the patience for this conversation among men of religion.
Although the reform movement had a far more intimate sense of people’s actual desires than the conservative clergy, its leaders were still disconnected. They made the same miscalculation that the conservatives had, and it was ultimately this that cost them people’s support. They assumed people would always back them, simply because there was no better alternative. In a competition between violent, fundamentalist ayatollahs, and religious-minded moderates, surely the Iranian people would choose the latter. For a couple of years this logic held, but as the regime stayed the same, and as it became more and more apparent that official change would be slow and undetectable, the distinction between religious conservatives and religious moderates (both functionaries of a dinosaur regime) ceased to matter at all.
They’re all the same, complained student activists who had once passionately delineated their difference. In the end, reformists and conservatives had more in common politically with each other than with ordinary Iranians. The gulf between a mullah and an Iranian civilian was far wider than between a mullah and a reformist.
That much became clear when I began reading the daily newspapers in earnest. Each day I had to skim at least ten, because the political cliques that lined the spectrum from hard-line to reformist each had their own mouthpiece. They included the Super-fundamentalist But Non-Violent Clerics of Qom; the Pragmatic Anti-U.S., Pro-Europe Technocrat Hard-liners; the Fascist Anti-Western Hard-liners Prone to Assassinations; the Classical Anti-Western, Pacifist Clerics; and the Society of Combative Clerics, not to be confused with the Society of Clerical Combatants.
These factions had risen up together through the ranks of the Revolution, studied together at the feet of the Ayatollah Khomeini, ordered executions and then dined on chelo-kabob. They were the architects of this system, and now they were bickering over its structure and its spoils. “Reformist” and “conservative” were the labels they used when fighting amongst themselves—and though they fought each other like cats, they still considered themselves khodi (insiders) and everyone else gheir-khodi (outsiders).
The eve of the presidential election, held in the summer of 2001, was a turbulent season for reformists. Nearly every day, the hard-line judiciary banned one of their newspapers or arre
sted a pro-reform activist. This was bad for the country, and bad for dinner-table conversation. Before the regime made brutal assault of the reform movement a daily ritual, Iranians followed politics like Americans follow baseball—as national pastime.
There were so many newspapers to read that neighborhood businesses bought a morning stack as a pool; in my neighborhood, the butcher, the florist, and the baker each bought different papers, and traded them over the course of the day. Their radios were tuned into the news, and you could pass in and check on the day’s political developments, as you would the score of a game. Because at that moment most people still cared—it felt like a shared, national journey—and read the same satirical, critical papers, the news sparked flavorful and deep conversations.
But as the life was slowly pummeled out of the reform movement throughout 2000 and well into the spring of 2001, once reformist leaders lost nerve and direction, no one felt much like talking politics anymore. Though I now lived on my own, I was too lazy to cook and still went to dinner at Khaleh Farzi’s most nights. The number of newspapers she brought home had dwindled from five to one. Its fate was to end up on the tub, its crossword puzzle half worked out. Dinner debates, the one regular feature of our lives, ceased altogether.
Thus disillusioned, families stopped talking about the thrilling national journey, and returned to topics more familiar, like whether or not to emigrate to Canada. Sooner or later, most Iranians lost faith that this particular reform movement would achieve sufficient or imminent change. It was the inevitable conclusion that followed round after round of defeat—the steady hard-line process of banning, vetoing, arresting, intimidating, and torturing. The disillusionment was not terminal. Everyone knew the present system would come to an end. It might not collapse overnight, or collapse at all, for that matter, but it would slowly evolve until one day the revolutionary Islamic Republic’s ideology would die, in an age where ideology itself was outmoded. It was just a matter of time, the years it would take for the rancorous, powerful ayatollah-dinosaurs—mercifully an endangered species—to die off.
The shift in thinking, from a specific hope vested in recognizable figures, to the distant, abstract conviction that things would change because they must, occurred differently for everyone. It came for Siamak the week he stepped out onto a busy street with his baby niece and toddler nephew, and a car actually sped up.
He told me about it the next day, as we were having lunch at his office. He just stared at the feta cheese and cucumbers on the table, and I felt panicky at the grave look in his brown eyes, the disillusionment etched all over his face. “It doesn’t make a difference who takes over,” he said. “It doesn’t matter whether Khatami is cloned or granted three more terms, or whatever. It doesn’t matter who comes, because fixing the culture created by the system is now the problem. I used to take such pride, Azi, in my Iranian identity. I don’t see that culture I was proud of anymore, that respect for elders, for children. These are the effects of lawlessness. If you do business and don’t take bribes, you’re considered strange, behaving outside the norms. Being corrupt is normal. The country’s ethical code has gone mad. It’s going to take so much more than politicians to fix that, this culture of lying, deception, and corruption.” He pushed his lunch away in disgust. I had never seen my friend so dejected.
My own creeping loss of faith fell on a late spring afternoon when President Khatami registered his candidacy for re-election. It was meant to be a short photo opportunity, a few words, and a smile as he dropped the formal paperwork into a box at the Interior Ministry, in a basement room stuffy with reporters, and other hopefuls, including a dairy farmer whose opinions were disturbingly saner than those of the mainstream candidates. Khatami walked behind the table that served as a makeshift podium, and from the folds of his auburn robes removed a scrap of paper with notes. He began by addressing the obstacles the government had faced during its first term, and the importance of working toward a religious democracy.
Like most Iranians who voted him into office in 1997, I had fallen under the spell of his difference from the ruling ayatollahs: a smile over a frown, an Italian loafer over a flip-flop, a belief in lawfulness over anarchy, talk of dialogue rather than martyrdom. To understand how easy it was to fall for Khatami, you had to view him in the trajectory of his predecessors—a long line of slatternly, corrupt, unworldly clerics, with village accents and scant ambitions; they had held meetings on the floor, sat slouched before the cameras, and mumbled about “foreign enemies.”
Khatami was the benign face of the clergy. He spoke three languages, studied Western philosophy, stood up straight, and spoke eloquently about rights and individual dignity. He wore the same clerical robes, but immaculately tailored, in refined fabrics and colors like pear and chocolate. He promised that Iran was for all Iranians, and even drew the attention of the diaspora, which was immune to taking Iran’s clerical leaders seriously. No one thought him charismatic, but he radiated charm, and left everyone he encountered—from pedantic scholars to swooning schoolgirls—with the satisfying sense of having, finally, been understood.
For most of his first term, from 1997 to 2001, Khatami was a speck of light in over two decades of revolutionary darkness. The millions of Iranians who had lost a relative or several to exile, to war, to prison, to firing squads, projected their hopes for change onto this mid-ranking cleric with the sweet smile. Young girls showed up at campaign rallies as though for rock concerts, decked out, breathless, and screaming his name. When we traveled to the provinces, wizened old women, clutching their chadors close, came out to see him.
Once, when the press traveled with him to Khorramshahr, a desolate town on the western border that was bathed in the blood of young soldiers during the Iran-Iraq War, I saw just how far and wide his appeal extended. Under the crushing assault of the summer sun, a group of hunched, ancient women swathed in black, who had been unable to approach his motorcade, came up to me, and pressed their wrinkled, hot hands against mine. You’re a good girl, you came here with him, you’ll talk to him for us, won’t you? And they sat there for the whole of his speech, hanging onto my roopoosh all the while, stuffing letters they had written him into my pockets, and detailing their troubles—water shortages, daughters widowed by the war struggling to raise sick children. A little girl in a white head scarf, who couldn’t have been more than six, trotted over, and cupped her hands around my ear. Can you tell him, please, my baba needs a job.
I thought of all this, as I leaned back in the metal folding chair, waiting for him to start. It had become clear, by the twilight of his first term, that he was neither a leader nor a strategist. By nature, he was risk averse and deferent to clerical authority, the last person capable of the ruthless jousting that regime politics demanded. His notes fell to the table, and he began to speak freely, abandoning the speech.
“If I had it my way, I would try to serve Iran outside government,” he began, his voice low without a microphone. I lifted my eyes from my notebook in surprise. “My assets are limited. I have a tiny bit of capital, and that’s people’s regard for me.” Mullahs rarely spoke like this, clearly and proudly. They usually lost themselves in whorls of rhetoric, and atmospheric, labyrinthine thoughts empty of meaning.
Khatami’s voice was scratchy, and tears welled up in his eyes, then overflowed down his cheeks. When he came to office in 1997, he infused his speeches with visions of an Islamic democracy, tributes to freedom, and the civilizing force of art. With bright eyes and his head held high, from podiums around the world, he repeated his belief that the revolution could be rescued, its nobler sentiments resurrected. Now, four years later, his body language radiated defeat. He had put on weight, and his face looked puffy and tired. It was as though he was acknowledging—internally and for the first time—a double failure: that of the revolution and his attempt to salvage it. On that day, the day he registered (against the urgent advice of many he respected) for re-election, he did not campaign so much as grieve.
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nbsp; “The road ahead is difficult, but as long as I feel a step forward can be taken, I will be at the people’s service. When I feel that is no longer possible, then I prefer to serve them, and the revolution, elsewhere,” he continued. As he uttered these words, it was evident how scarcely he believed them, and a moment later he began crying in earnest. I found myself crying too. For all the pain and sacrifice—the families torn apart, lives wrecked and a generation traumatized, a diaspora permanently displaced—that had achieved nothing, arrived at no place more significant than this moment. Khatami stepped away from the podium.
Embarrassed to be brought to tears by a mullah (what would my father say?), I pulled my head scarf forward and lowered my head. Looking side-long and back, I saw that most of the women in the room were also crying. The men stood rooted, staring into space in shock.
I fumbled in my bag for a pack of cigarettes, and hurried to the back of the room, where Mr. Abtahi, the president’s chief of staff, stood against a wall, all trace of his usual merriment wiped from his face. I flashed him a look of I told you so, and crossed my arms, waiting silently for an answer. I always teased him that a tsunami could wash over Iran, and he would predict a sunny outlook for reform. Mr. Khatami messed up, he said. He’s too emotional. He gets carried away with himself.
Finally, the week of the election arrived. It would be the sixth presidential election since the Shah was toppled in 1979, and unlike most countries in the region—where elections were such shams that they passed with little remark—people actually discussed whether or not they would vote. The question was on everyone’s lips, though, ever mercurial in their political outlook, most would only really decide the morning of the election.
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