Children of Paradise (69 page)

In 2012, Iran was above all a country under pressure. International tensions over its nuclear program had reached a nearly intolerable peak. The worst of the sanctions were just then taking hold, and the possibility of a military confrontation was never far from anyone’s mind. Iranians lived as though under a swollen cloud that never burst and never passed. They got no relief from their own government, which had squeezed the air out of the country’s political and expressive spaces. Inflation spiraled. In scant months, the value of the currency would take a vertiginous dive. The situation didn’t seem sustainable, but the more frightening possibility was that it was.

• • •

B
Y NOW IT WILL PROBABLY BORE YOU
to hear that there is no such thing as a boring presidential election in Iran. But I submit that this is true. In 2013, it seemed that the Leader had handpicked a candidate who was as rigid as he was extreme. Saeed Jalili was the head of the country’s foreign policy–making body and a former nuclear negotiator for Ahmadinejad. A European diplomat described him to me as little more than a robotic dispenser of talking points.
Kayhan
praised him as a “super-hezbollahi” in what many took to be an endorsement.

I can’t say for sure that the Leader had committed himself to Jalili’s support. I’ve always wondered whether Khamenei had for his own reasons entertained the idea of changing course. He had the upper hand now, having decisively crushed his domestic opposition. He could afford to be flexible. At the very least, he left an opening.

In the first presidential debate, a close aide of Khamenei’s—himself not
a very convincing candidate—tore into Jalili’s stance on foreign policy, pointing out that intransigence on that front had won Iran nothing but sanctions. After that, foreign policy, usually off-limits to public debate, was fair game. The field opened to the race’s dark horse, Hassan Rouhani, a pragmatic foreign policy hand who was so close to the disfavored Rafsanjani that hardly anyone believed he stood a chance.

More than any other candidate, Rouhani was the face of diplomatic engagement with the world. He had agreed to freeze Iran’s nuclear program back in 2003, when he was Iran’s lead negotiator under Khatami. (Ahmadinejad, presumably with the Leader’s blessing, had reversed that stance.) Rouhani was no reformist. He was a long-standing pillar of the security establishment, well remembered for his hostility to the student movement in 1999, and never sympathetic to the reformist intellectual project. But he spoke of national unity at a time when Iran needed nothing more. He pledged to draw up a civic charter delineating the people’s rights, and he even said he would work to secure the release of the Green Movement leaders from house arrest.

“
Just let go of reformism,” Saeed Hajjarian is said to have advised his former Mosharekat colleagues. “We are Iranian and Muslim. Let’s participate in the elections to decrease the suffering of the people.’” Both Khatami and Rafsanjani endorsed Rouhani. Three days before the vote, they persuaded the only reformist in the race to stand down in Rouhani’s favor. The dark horse surged.

I later heard from a source close to the Iranian regime that Khamenei voted for Jalili, but that he instructed the security apparatus to accept the outcome of the election, whatever it might be, because he did not want another 2009. If this was true, it was remarkable, not least as a backhanded admission that there had indeed been interference in 2009. In any case, Rouhani carried the election in a single round, with a commanding 51 percent of the vote. The conservative vote splintered among the hardline candidates, with Jalili coming in third. This time, the results were declared not Friday night, upon the closure of the polls, but Saturday afternoon, as usual. And they met with jubilation rather than protest.

• • •

R
OUHANI REKINDLED MANY
I
RANIAN HOPES.
They were not the same hopes Khatami once stirred. Perhaps, as one analyst told me, the reformists had at last been chastened: once they had traded revolutionary utopianism for liberal utopianism, but now they saw that real politics is compromise. Or maybe they were playing the long game. They wouldn’t have been the first. The Rouhani administration made it clear that any domestic agenda must await the resolution of the nuclear file, which promised relief from sanctions and a factional win for the president.

The nuclear accord between Iran and six world powers held out hope not only for bringing Iran’s nuclear program under significant international oversight, but ultimately, for ending the country’s isolation and ratcheting down the tensions that had ensnared Iran and the United States for more than three decades. An Iran that was connected to the world, rather than severed from it, would surely be a safer, better place for its citizens. By most measures, Iranian civil society, along with the overwhelming majority of the populace, supported that outcome. So did many in the United States who believed, as I did, that there was no possible solution to Iran’s problems, or to America’s problems with Iran, that would come at the barrel of a gun. Bloodshed and privation would do less to stymie Iran’s hard-liners than to damage its most promising resource, which was the goodwill and civic energy of its people.

Under Rouhani, by many accounts, the spectrum of public debate widened, with new moderate and centrist newspapers filling the space. But the needle did not move much on human rights.
In a record year for executions in the Islamic Republic, 753 Iranian prisoners were put to death, nearly half of them drug offenders and at least thirteen juveniles.
By a 2014 tally, Iran held thirty journalists in prison, second only to China. Mir Hossein Mousavi, Zahra Rahnavard, and Mehdi Karroubi were still under house arrest. The two major reformist parties, Mosharekat and Etemad Melli, had been banned since 2009. When a new reformist party emerged after six years, within a week one of its members was arrested. In February
2015, the judiciary pronounced it illegal to publish former president Mohammad Khatami’s image or even his name.

In times of renewed optimism and civil peace, it became inconvenient, not to say impolite, to talk about human rights or democratic reform. Too much had been vested not just in the diplomatic process but in the pragmatic centrism of the Rouhani administration. To some extent, this was the counterintuitive legacy of 2009 and the years of polarization that followed. To go on participating in the Iranian political system and hoping for it to produce constructive change—to go on, in the strictest sense, being a reformist—meant, for many,
making peace with the events of 2009 and finding a new equilibrium.

And yet, to the extent that the reform movement of the late twentieth century has now passed into history, it is a history of dignity and sacrifice that encompasses Iran’s revolution and stretches forward, beyond the visible horizon. Iran does not have a culture of passive citizenship, despite the best efforts of its rulers, past and present, to produce one. What it does have in many quarters is a restless determination to challenge injustice and to seize control of its destiny.

The Iranians whose stories I’ve told in this book did not try to overthrow the Islamic Republic. Rather, they endowed it with their dreams. They imagined it could accommodate their philosophical challenges and electoral participation, their efforts to organize communities and their insistence on speaking their minds. They believed there were truths that needed to be told and dead who deserved to be grieved. Some of them envisioned an Iran freed of its demons because it had confronted its past. Nearly all of them were eventually forced to leave Iran. But there will be others. Because the impulse that moved them is one that rarely rests for long. Like a little fish of any color, it darts on, and then on, and on.

A
CKNOWLEDGMENTS

I owe a special debt to those Iranians who shared their stories with me in detail for publication, among them Ali Afshari, Asieh Amini, Hossein Bashiriyeh, Akbar Ganji, Alireza Haghighi, Mostafa Rokhsefat, Aida Saadat, and Abdolkarim Soroush. To say that Omid Memarian, Roozbeh Mirebrahimi, Shahram Rafizadeh, and Solmaz Sharif spent innumerable hours in interviews with me, and made themselves available for often wrenching follow-ups, would not begin to do justice to what they allowed me to put them through, together and separately, as they repeatedly relived the most painful experiences of their lives for the public record. I am grateful for their candor, their courage, and so much more.

This book would not exist without
The New Yorker
, which in 2005 took a chance on a little-known reporter who was determined to go to Iran. I am in–debted to David Remnick for placing that trust in me, and to Daniel Zalewski, my friend and editor, for setting it all in motion and seeing me through the human and reportorial complexities. I am grateful to Dorothy Wickenden, also at
The New Yorker
, and to Scott Malcomson, who sent me to Iran for
The New York Times Magazine
at the end of 2006. My agent, Sarah Chalfant of the Andrew Wylie Agency, helped me conceptualize this book in 2007 and has been an unflagging source of support, good counsel, and sanity since.

I feel enormously lucky to have landed at Riverhead, where my editor, Becky Saletan, has given this book—and me—the great benefit of her clear vision, literary sensitivity, warm friendship, and enthusiasm for history and the ideas that move it. Thanks to her, a sprawling, obsessive manuscript became a book. I am grateful to many others at Riverhead too, particularly Anna Jardine, Katie Freeman, Jynne Martin, Kate Stark, Karen Mayer, Hea Eun Grace Han, and Marysarah Quinn.

Over the course of my research, many Iranians and Iran experts shared their time and expertise with me, offering advice, insight, introductions, translation, analysis, and the benefit of their research or experience. I cannot name the friends and sources who still reside in Iran, but I hope they know who they are and how deeply they are appreciated. Here I extend my thanks to Mahboubeh Abbasgholizadeh, Morteza Abdolalian, Ervand Abrahamian, Anisa Afshar, Ramin Ahmadi, Masih Alinejad, Maryam Amuzegar, Bahman Baktiari, Amir Barmaki, Mehrzad Boroujerdi, Kaveh Ehsani, Haleh Esfandiari, Hadi Ghaemi, Hossein Ghazian, Roya Hakakian, Kevan Harris, Masood Hooman, Mohsen Kadivar, Hosein Kamaly, Mahdis Keshavarz, Nika Khanjani, Azam Khatam, Abbas Milani, Maryam Mirza, Shaya Mohajer, Manouchehr Mohammadi, Afshin Molavi, Javad Montazeri, Nahid Mozaffari, Nouradin Pirmoazen, Ali Rahnema, Ahmad Sadri, Mahmoud Sadri, Karim Sajadpour, Djavad Salehi-Isfahani, Mohsen Sazegara, Nahid Siamdoust, Evan Siegel, Ebrahim Soltani, Kambiz Tavana, Roberto Toscano, Parvaneh Vahidmanesh, and Lila Azam Zanganeh.

This project has benefited from the support and generosity of the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, where Jean Strouse was wise and wonderful; the American Academy in Berlin, where Gary Smith’s enthusiasm buoyed my work at crucial moments; and the Institute for Advanced Study, where Joan Scott offered guidance and challenge.

Thanks, too, to Stephen Heintz and William Luers for including me in the edifying meetings of their Iran Project; to David Patterson, now of the Stuart Krichevsky Literary Agency; and to Justin Vogt at
Foreign Affairs
. Thank you, Carol Jack. And a huge thanks to my resourceful and exacting fact-checkers: Matthew Sherrill, Darragh McNicholas, and Lara Zarum.

I am grateful to all my friends, but especially those who have listened at length to tales of Iranian intrigue and bucked me up through periods of writer’s block: Kira Brunner Don, Sonia Katyal, Nicholas Kulish, Daniel Bergner, Gary Bass, Alexander Star, Amy Waldman, Susie Linfield, Alissa Quart, Alissa Levin, Rinne Groff. Most of all, Eyal Press, who read the manuscript from beginning to end and offered valuable support and feedback.

My love and thanks to my family, for everything: Marie Secor, Robert Secor, Anna Secor, Nancy Packer, Ann Packer. My children, Charlie and Julia Packer, for making me happy.

There remain two people to whom I am grateful above all. Mohammad Ayatollahi Tabaar has been beyond generous with his knowledge and insight. He lent this work meaning and purpose and kept me company in the forest of its details. I only hope the finished product is worthy of all he has given me.

I come now to thank my husband, George Packer, my inspiration and ballast, my love. And yet, having spilled so many words in the foregoing pages, here I find that every last one fails.

N
OTES

A N
OTE ON
S
OURCES

With a very few exceptions, I have not included citations for material that comes from my own reporting and interviews, some of which were the basis of my previously published articles on Iran for
The New Yorker
,
The New York Times Magazine
, and other publications. I traveled to Iran five times between 2004 and 2012, and have conducted interviews with more than one hundred sixty Iranians residing inside and outside the country—intellectuals, politicians, journalists, activists, clergymen, economists, businesspeople, and ordinary citizens. I was able to directly observe rallies, panel discussions, speeches, and polling stations related to elections in 2005, 2006, 2008, and 2012.

C
HAPTER
O
NE.
L
ITTLE
B
LACK
F
ISH

The Little Black Fish
:
Samad Behrangi,
The Little Black Fish and Other Modern Persian Stories
, trans. Eric Hooglund and Mary Hooglund (Washington, DC: Three Continents Press, 1976), 1–19.

Behrangi noted in an early essay
:
Brad Hanson, “The ‘Westoxication’ of Iran: Depictions and Reactions of Behrangi, Al-e Ahmad, and Shariati,”
International Journal of Middle East Studies
15, no. 1 (Feb. 1983), 1–23.