Persian Mirrors: The Elusive Face of Iran (2 page)

In my years as a foreign correspondent for
Newsweek
and as a diplomatic correspondent for
The New York Times,
I have traveled to some one hundred countries around the world. Many of them were inhospitable and hard to crack. In Iraq, the omnipresence of intelligence police in every village, factory, mosque, office building, and classroom made honest interviews excruciatingly difficult. In Saudi Arabia, I was denied entry to the public restaurants of my four-star hotel because I was a woman traveling alone. In China, I accidentally discovered yards of mysterious wiring while searching for an outlet for the modem of my computer; when I tried to get into my hotel room at an odd hour the next day I discovered the lock on the door had been changed. In Syria, it was even worse: I once asked the wrong question of the country’s top religious leader and found myself in an unfurnished cell in the basement of a pleasant-looking villa that had been turned into a prison. My roommate was a Palestinian woman who obviously had been tortured.

But my expectations as a reporter have always been higher in Iran than in many other places. Iran is different. It may be hard to crack, but it is never inhospitable. As contradictory as it sounds, Iranians are both deeply suspicious of outsiders and extremely warm toward them. And it is that tension that allows for unexpected discoveries and endless possibilities.

No other country I have visited has seduced me the way Iran has. It is one of the most dynamic and exciting countries in the world, filled with surprises and complexity, sometimes even poetry and magic.

Imagine being able to live through one of the most important events of the twentieth century, a revolution that swept aside a powerful, repressive king who had sought power and prestige by linking his country to the industrialized West, replacing him with an old bearded cleric in a turban and cloak whose answer to the king’s injustice was to wrap the country in a populist message of promise and smother it with an intolerant version of Islam.

Then imagine seeing this human drama play out over the years, as the people’s yearning for a better life clashed with the clerics’ prescription for keeping their souls intact. It was as if an entire country was playing a game of chess in which the rules had been turned inside out. The game started once the king was off the board and the bishop with his pawns had taken over. Both sides were trapped in the memory that the clerics’ revolution had begun as a popular one. And everything was supposedly for the sake of the people. What brought me back time and again was not a story about politics or religion but a drama about human nature.

Even a generation later, the story of Iran’s revolution isn’t over. And I don’t know the ending.

As the world’s only modern theocracy, Iran is a contradiction, a traditional society wrestling to reconcile itself with the present. It offers living proof that a theocracy cannot thrive unchallenged where open thought is allowed, and that no government can keep out the rest of the world by decree. At the same time, Iran is also a place where many members of the theocracy themselves have become passionate proponents of the need for change. Iran’s revolution may have destroyed an old order and created a new one, but a generation later a great battle is raging like nothing seen since its early days. It is a battle not over control of territory but for the soul of the nation.

Iran has become an exciting, daring laboratory where experiments with two highly volatile chemicals—Islam and democracy—are being conducted: in politics, in the press, in the cinema, in the bazaar, in the mosque, in the courtroom, in the universities, in the beauty parlors, in private homes, in the streets.

Much of the drama is playing out in public, as Iranians begin to lose their fear and assert themselves. Much of the drama also plays out in the shadows, behind the veils and shutters that open to an outsider only slowly. Over the years, Iran has revealed itself to me in fragments, and even then the fragments often don’t fit together. It reminds me of what Robert Byron, the British travel writer, wrote about a trip to Iran in the 1940s: “The start of a journey in Persia resembles an algebraical equation: it may or may not come out.”

This is not a book about the mysterious East. Nor is it a chronicle of the political, diplomatic, and military dimensions of Iran’s revolutionary history. I have no prescriptions for how the United States should deal with Iran; there have been enough of those. I have no predictions for Iran’s future; there have been enough of those too. I try here instead to offer a portrait of my own encounters with Iran, and with the Iranian people, in the hope it can illuminate whatever choices or predictions others make.

One of the first things tour guides tell visitors to the Carpet Museum in Tehran is that the finest carpets are knotted with matching skeins of silk, the more knots per inch the better. This book is not like a finely knotted silk carpet. It is a more like a rough tribal
kilim
, woven with bits and pieces taken from more than two decades of notebooks and memories and stories.

For that reason, I have divided the book into parts that reflect the journeys I have taken—the movements back and forth between public and private realms, the travels to remote parts of the country, the transitions over time. I have relied on material gathered both from trips to Iran since 1979 and from years of writing about foreign affairs from Washington and the United Nations. Every person in this book is real, although in a few cases, at the individual’s request for anonymity, I have substituted fictional first names and omitted last names.

The Iran that I have seen is a nation that has chosen not to destroy the remnants of a 2,500-year-old empire but to preserve them for later. It is a place that long ago produced sensual romantic poetry that even the most austere clerics still read aloud, insisting it is about divine love, not the human variety. It is a country whose women—even some of its most religious women—adorn themselves with makeup and jewelry behind high walls, then cover themselves in black on the streets and struggle for their rights in the most creative and persistent ways. It is a state whose revolutionary system continues to defy those who proclaim its demise. It is a land whose geography, population, and quest for regional supremacy prevent it from being ignored, and that struggles, unevenly, for modernity and greatness.

One day not long ago, on a visit with a group of American tourists to the pale green Marble Palace built in the 1930s by Reza Shah Pahlavi, I came upon a place that captures the complexity of the country. It is a large reception room encased in thousands of tiny, angled bits of mirrors of a type used in many of Iran’s mosques and holy shrines. In Islam, mirrors symbolize purity and the light of God.
Ayeneh kari
, these mosaics of mirrors are called. In the mosques, there are also mosaics, made with tiles. But the pieces of tile in these mosaics are separated by putty, which is used not only to keep the pieces together but also to fill in the gaps between them. The mirror mosaics have no putty; the pieces have to fit neatly into each other. There can be no gaps.

The glittering fragments, sometimes set at angles to each other like facets on a jewel, reflect light and distort images at the same time. In Reza Shah’s reception room, we could not look in the mirrors and see our faces whole; we saw them shattered in pieces. For me, the mirror-mosaics are emblematic of Iran. Iran can be dazzling and light-filled, a reflection of its complexities; but it can also be cold, confusing, and impenetrable.

Iran has lured me and invited me in, over and over, for twenty years. But at the beginning of the twenty-first century, it is still the country of the mirror-mosaics, distorting reality and reflecting only parts of itself at any one time.

PART ONE

———

Navigating the Islamic Republic

C H A P T E R   O N E

Getting There, Getting In

TAXI DRIVER: I really shouldn’t be driving you into Tehran without an order from the Imam. I could get my hands chopped off.

ROBERT REDFURN: Well, I appreciate your accepting a bribe. I really do.

TAXI DRIVER: It’s been a while. We don’t get too many Westerners in town anymore. The only Americans we’ve seen in months are the liars and demons of the U.S. press. You hail from the Great Satan yourself, right?

ROBERT REDFURN: Uh, right. New York, actually.

TAXI DRIVER: I can always tell. How long you been working for the C.I.A.?

—
DOONESBURY
COMIC STRIP, MAY 30, 1980, IN THE MIDST OF THE HOSTAGE CRISIS

Persia is a country made for wandering onward.

— VITA SACKVILLE-WEST,
PASSENGER TO TEHERAN

I
HAVE NEVER LIKED
flying into Iran in the middle of the night. But after too many trips to count, I now have the drill down pat.

It isn’t easy to get there from the United States. Tehran is 6,337 miles from Washington, D.C., and no American carrier flies there. American economic sanctions, the absence of diplomatic relations, and common sense in the face of official Iranian hostility toward the United States preclude that.

Lufthansa is the most efficient way in: a seven-and-a-half hour overnight flight from Dulles to Frankfurt, a six-hour stay in a day room at the airport hotel, and a five-hour overnight flight that arrives at an ungodly hour in Tehran. Some people I know do the second leg on Iran Air, which is cheaper and whose aging American Boeing 747s are surprisingly safe. But Iran Air requires women to cover their hair with head scarves and serves no alcoholic beverages. I prefer to stave off the restrictions of the Islamic Republic as long as I can.

For security reasons, Lufthansa often changes the gate for Flight 600 to Tehran without explanation. The boarding pass lists one gate; the overhead monitor doesn’t list the gate at all. The actual gate is usually somewhere else, sometimes in an isolated area down an escalator that is inaccessible to the duty-free shops and the luggage carts.

After unloading its passengers in Tehran, the Lufthansa plane loads new passengers and heads straight back to Frankfurt. The airline considers it too much of a hassle, and too dangerous, to stay overnight in Iran. A German businessman, a non-Muslim, was once sent to death row after being convicted of having sex with an unmarried Iranian Muslim woman, although his sentence was later reversed and he was sent home.

Even on Lufthansa, the metamorphosis begins before the plane lands. The liquor bottles are quickly stored and the Lufthansa playing cards collected. Passengers are given a warning to leave behind the miniature bottles of Jack Daniel’s and Stolichnaya. A second warning is reserved for female passengers. “By the decree of the government of Iran, all female passengers are required to have their heads covered,” the steward announces. “For your own interest we ask you to put on a scarf before leaving the aircraft.” The dance of the veil begins. The women cover their heads and bodies. A woman sitting across the aisle in khaki pants, a low-cut black top, heavy gold necklace, gold bangle bracelets, big hair, and blood-red lips puts on a trench coat and a good knockoff of a Hermès scarf. A woman on the other side of me wraps herself in a black chador. I reach into my carry-on for a long, solid-colored, textured cotton scarf that doesn’t need to be tied under my chin.

Mehrabad International Airport was once state-of-the-art, a showpiece of the Shah’s campaign to transform Iran into one of the world’s most modern and prosperous countries. Even today, despite the worn runways, the airport functions fairly well. Planes arrive and leave remarkably close to their scheduled times. There are Western as well as Eastern toilets. A twenty-four-hour prayer room welcomes the pious. A twenty-four-hour restaurant serves tea and pastries. A duty-free shop sells cheap souvenirs, flowery carpets, and good but not cheap caviar. In 1998 the airport opened a huge new waiting hall with fancy tiles, a carpet shop, and a small bookstore that sells books like
Facial Yoga: No More Wrinkles.
The giant government-protected Foundation for the Oppressed and War Veterans has a piece of the action. It runs a shop called Shahed (Witness) that sells televisions, VCRs, telephones, even refrigerators at prices below those in the shops in Tehran.

There is nothing revolutionary about the airport lounge for Commercially Important Persons, my immediate destination upon arrival at Mehrabad. Access depends on money, not on gender, age, nationality, sacrifice in the war with Iraq, or revolutionary credentials. In fact the only way to get in is with cash—$50 to be precise, which represents a month’s salary for an average civil servant.

CIP, as the service is called, is a trip back in time. An airport official meets me on the tarmac, escorts me by car to a special area on the far side of the airport, and deposits me in a marble-floored lounge with recessed lighting and comfortable sofas. Waiters serve tea, cold drinks, and creamfilled pastries. Instrumental medleys from American musicals are interrupted by the predawn call to prayer. An English-speaking customs official takes my passport for stamping; a baggage handler fetches my luggage. The authorities justify the service on the grounds that it brings in hard currency and encourages foreign business executives to feel comfortable coming to Iran.

A photo of Ayatollah Khomeini stares down at me from the wall of the CIP lounge. He led a nation in revolution to rid Iran of places just like this. The revolution was supposed to empower and embolden the oppressed masses and make them independent of the dollar-carrying foreigner. It was supposed to disinfect the country of “Westoxication.” The existence of the CIP lounge illustrates that things didn’t work out as planned.