Persian Mirrors: The Elusive Face of Iran (11 page)

The hostage crisis would last 444 days. Khomeini found it useful to keep relations with the United States in permanent crisis, which in turn helped him purge the liberals from the regime and to Islamicize and radicalize his government.

Many of Khomeini’s associates were surprised by the methods he used to consolidate power. One such aide was Mehdi Bazargan, a genteel, French-speaking Islamic liberal with impeccable revolutionary credentials who served as Prime Minister in the Provisional Government created just after the revolution. Bazargan lamented the swift, secret trials and executions, opposed the Islamic Constitution as undemocratic, and tried to forge good relations with other countries, even the United States. Two days after the American hostages were seized, the student militants holding the embassy condemned Bazargan for “sitting down with the American wolf”—specifically, Brzezinski—at a conference in Algiers the previous week. Bazargan immediately resigned, saying bitterly, “I was always the last to know what was going on.” Later, he told me he blamed himself for not seeing Khomeini as the authoritarian leader he would become. “We should have known better,” he said. “The evidence was there all along.”

I heard about the embassy takeover on French radio in my Paris apartment and happened to have a valid Iranian visa in my passport. I knew I had to get on a plane right away, but it didn’t seem like a big deal. The embassy had been taken once before and had been liberated after a few hours. My main concern, I told my editors at
Newsweek,
was not how dangerous Tehran might be. It was whether there would still be a story by the time I got there the next morning. I sure got that wrong.

This time, arriving at Mehrabad Airport felt unreal. My own embassy was under siege, and the diplomats I would have turned to in times of trouble were hostages of the host government. Yet the airport was so normal. The passport official found my visa in order and wished me a good stay.

The impact of the embassy seizure had not yet sunk in. The embassy property, larger than Rockefeller Center, attested to the unique position the United States had enjoyed with the Shah. Its dozen buildings included a big but ugly chancery building, a warehouse, an enormous commissary, a football field, a swimming pool, a parking lot, a cultural center, tennis courts, an elaborate rose garden, and landscaped wooded lawns dotted with fountains and intersected by winding paths.

But its bulk and seeming permanence were no match for the single, well-planned act of hatred and rage with which the hostage-takers shattered the image of American prestige in Iran. The immediate provocation for the hostage-taking was a decision by the Carter administration to allow the deposed Shah to enter the United States for medical treatment. In protest, a group of young Islamic militants, many of them university students, occupied the embassy.

In those first days, the embassy became the focal point for thousands—sometimes tens of thousands—of Iranians eager to vent anger at the United States. But the scenes of these crowds broadcast around the world told only part of the story; there were also hints of ordinary life amid the orchestrated hatred. The embassy became Tehran’s top tourist attraction, a place to take the kids for a living civics lesson, meet friends, grab a snack, or watch free street theater for an hour or two. Enterprising street vendors sold boiled eggs, baked beets, fava beans, sticky cakes, coconut slices, ice cream, color photos of the ayatollahs, fur hats, vinyl shoes. My all-time favorite banner was: “Iran was like a kidney for America. With the help of our leader Imam Khomeini, we have severed this vital link.” My all-time favorite slogan was shouted by a vendor: “Death to Carter. Eat eggs.”

And just a block away Iranians went about their business. People went to work, shopped, dined out, and visited relatives on weekends; students went to school. In time, even the demonstrators became so weary—or perhaps so hoarse—that they withheld their shouting and cursing until the cameras started rolling. When pencil pushers like me and still photographers arrived, the demonstrators sometimes only punched the air with their fists in silence.

And then one day, the hostage crisis was over. The hostages had outlived their usefulness and after long and complicated negotiations were sent home. The world of which Iranians thought they were the center had changed, sometimes in ways they had neither anticipated nor wanted. Yes, the crisis had helped Ayatollah Khomeini consolidate his revolution. And certainly it had humiliated America. But it also had forced Jimmy Carter to freeze Iran’s assets, break diplomatic relations, put aircraft carriers on alert, change his reelection strategy, and order a rescue mission that failed, leaving eight servicemen dead. All of this damaged relations with the United States and frightened the international community in ways that left it unsympathetic when, during the hostages’ captivity, Iraq invaded Iran and triggered eight catastrophic years of war against the new Islamic Republic.

Even so, the ayatollahs defied the doomsayers and endured. The revolution built a domestic policy around national pride, religious fervor, and self-sacrifice and a foreign policy independent of both the United States and the Soviet Union. It used every crisis to exterminate or marginalize enemies, and to strengthen the system of direct clerical leadership. It built a powerful government based on the Shah’s institutions while simultaneously creating parallel revolutionary ones. So garbage got picked up; traffic tickets got written; telephone bills got sent out; mail got delivered. The two most powerful unofficial structures of Iran, the mosque and the bazaar, survived intact.

Terrorist bombings and assassinations only strengthened the resolve of those leaders who survived. The war against Iraq became the glue that held Iran’s revolution together and, in the minds of its people, excused the new regime for demanding so many sacrifices. Khomeini’s decision in 1988 to stop the fighting snuffed out his dream of propagating his revolution throughout the Muslim world. That decision shifted the course of Iran’s own revolution, but it did not kill it.

Then, less than a year after the war ended, Khomeini was dead. Visiting the ayatollah’s tomb years later, I recalled the frenzy of his funeral, when mourners tipped over his coffin and Khomeini’s frail corpse slipped out of its white shroud and was passed along by the crowd. The crowds moved forward toward the sarcophagus with such force that paraplegics were pitched out of their wheelchairs and crushed; dozens of mourners suffered heart attacks.

More than being a brilliant theoretician of revolution, Khomeini had been smiled on by circumstance. Iranians of all classes and levels of religiosity had been searching for change. In that atmosphere, he became all things to all revolutionaries: a democrat to the liberal nationalists and the intellectuals, a devout man of God to the clerics, a believer in free trade to the bazaar merchants, a standard-bearer of economic justice to the leftists and workers, a protector of family values to fathers and mothers, a savior to the nation.

Khomeini is often seen from the outside as a fierce, rigid leader who never budged from a fixed position and was determined to drag Iran back to the seventh century. That is what we in the United States focused on. But in truth, he was a highly political master improviser, particularly supple when the survival of the Islamic Republic was at stake.

There were little things—like caviar. At first the Islamic Republic ruled that the sturgeon was a fish without scales and therefore its flesh and eggs could not be eaten. But then the loss of hard currency began to be felt. So Khomeini changed his mind. Sturgeon and caviar were relegitimized.

There were big things too. One of Khomeini’s major concessions dealt with the Islamic nature of the state itself. In 1988 he declared that the state had the right to suspend Islamic laws (even observance of the five principal pillars of Islam) if the preservation of the Islamic order was at stake. Of course, the Constitution had to be changed accordingly, showing once again that Khomeini and the Islamic Republic were not rigid followers of their own self-made rules. Like all revolutions, this one was made by mortals.

Not just a victory of religious piety and justice, this was also a revolution of the dispossessed—and a realignment of those who possessed. But by the late 1990s, Khomeini’s cult had faded. The photographs still hung in most government offices; the billboard portraits still appeared in some town squares. But it was a struggle to keep alive the memory of a stern old man who preached a message of self-denial and vengeance.

One day early in 1999 I went looking for the legacy of Khomeini in Iran’s holy city of Qom. At 435 Moalem Street, not far from the main shrine, I found the yellow-brick house where he had lived in the 1960s and again after the revolution. Visitors were rare, and the house was open to the public only a few hours a day. In the courtyard, the fountain was dry; the Iranian flags were soiled; the plants needed water. The house itself was a warren of small rooms with musty carpets layering the floors. A room that looked as if it might have been Khomeini’s library was locked behind glass doors.

A cleric in a crooked turban and a stained robe tight around his belly told Ali-Reza Haghighi, an acquaintance from the Ministry of Islamic Guidance who accompanied me, that there was no one to answer any questions.

On the way out I asked the guard, who was twenty-seven, what it meant to him to guard the house where Khomeini had lived. “Khomeini means nothing to me or my life,” he said. “The mullahs promise; they don’t deliver. There is no country here.” The guard said he had neither time nor energy to ponder the meaning of his proximity to history. He had a wife and two children to support. He even worked another full-time job as a night watchman. So I asked him what would make him happy. “I want a house of my own,” he said. “I want a car, a good car to take trips in.”

I was in Iran that spring, twenty years after Iran’s revolution, to watch the nation celebrate. Not for the ten days of government-organized festivals memorializing the ayatollah’s return, but for
Nowruz,
the Persian New Year.
Nowruz
is the celebration not of any Islamic event, but of something older than Islam itself, something rooted deep in Iran’s heritage and sense of national dignity: the sense that somehow, they, as inheritors of the Persian empire, are located at the center of the universe. Everyone who had ruled Iran before the ayatollahs had adapted to that legacy.

Initially, the revolutionary purists of 1979 tried to stamp out the ancient festivities surrounding
Nowruz,
which date back more than 2,500 years, to the time of the religious leader Zoroaster. The purists call the celebrations “superstitious” and “anti-Islamic.”

But the people of Iran prevailed. Despite the official disapproval,
Nowruz
festivities have grown louder and more ambitious each year since the revolution.

What I found on my trip in 1999 is that even the most religious Iranian families thoroughly clean their houses and buy new clothes for their children at
Nowruz
. They set their tables with a mirror, a goldfish in a bowl, colored eggs, and seven items whose names begin with the letter S in Persian. The difference between religious and secular families is telling: the pious put a Koran on the table, the secular a copy of the works of the fourteenth-century poet Hafiz. Banks, government offices, and schools are closed for as many as fourteen days. Most newspapers do not publish. Most people do not work. On the thirteenth day of
Nowruz,
people pack lunches and go out with their families—to the countryside, to the mountains, to the sea, even to the landscaped dividers between the highways—for a nationwide picnic.

Nowruz
in 1999 was actually a very special New Year, because, for the first time since Iran’s revolution, the Interior Ministry issued a safety advisory and officially allowed the festivities to proceed. On the Tuesday evening before the New Year, known as
Charshanbeh Suri,
I watched with fascination and horror as children and teenagers in an apartment complex I was visiting built seven raging bonfires in the courtyard and then proceeded to jump over them in a symbolic purification rite meant to replace illness with health. “My yellowness to you and your redness to me,” they chanted as they jumped. Astonishingly, their clothes didn’t catch fire, although a number went home with singed eyebrows. Trick-or-treating, fireworks, bottle rockets, Roman candles, sparklers, and other small explosives were also de rigueur.

The reformist newspaper
Khordad
praised the festivities as an authentic manifestation of nationalism that countered the cultural invasion of the West. But others did not approve. In Mashad, six people were sentenced to eighteen months in jail and 228 lashes of the whip for disrupting public order and goading people to dance in the streets. The conservative newspaper
Jomhouri-ye Islami
called the ritual dangerous and “a superstitious tradition promoted by the Shah’s regime.” Ayatollah Khamenei, the Supreme Leader, condemned the fire jumping and criticized the Ministry of Islamic Guidance for “making a mistake” in allowing the public celebration to proceed.

But the facts could not be denied: a generation later, the secular coexists with the Islamic in revolutionary Iran. And the Islamic Republic is faced with a choice: reinvent itself or face the wrath of its population. Amid prayer and sacrifice and praise for martyrdom, there is a yearning, indeed a demand, for Roman candles and picnics.

C H A P T E R   F O U R

The Mullah Wore Beautiful Shoes

What the nation wants is an Islamic Republic. Not just a Republic, not ademocratic Republic, not a democratic Islamic Republic. Do not use theword “democratic” to describe it. That is the Western style.

— AYATOLLAH RUHOLLAH KHOMEINI HIS RETURN TO QOM IN MARCH 1979

We are at the key phase of the transition toward an Islamic democracy inIran. No one should hide behind the principles of the 1979 revolution, oruse them as a cover for ousting political rivals. Everyone must respect andrecognize differences.