Persian Mirrors: The Elusive Face of Iran (7 page)

When I got back to Tabriz, I wrote a feature for
The New York Times,
describing daily life in the remote community. After the story appeared, a number of officials called my friend Nosrat at the Ministry of Islamic Guidance to complain. “People didn’t like the story,” Nosrat explained to me later. “They said it was humiliating, that it made us look backward. It’s difficult for them to understand what was interesting about such a place.

“I told them,” he continued, “ ‘She went to Tabriz. This is what it’s like near Tabriz. All kinds of people live there. Why should we be ashamed of it?’” Still, Nosrat did not put my story on Kanduvan into the daily foreign press digest he prepared for the ministry that day.

RULE EIGHT: IRAN IS FIGHTING SEVENTH-CENTURY BATTLES IN THE TWENTY FIRST-CENTURY.
Iran’s leaders haven’t figured out what Islamic message to rely on in their struggle to build a modern society. Some insist on a strict version of Islam as they believe it was at its creation. Others want to interpret Islam to fit the modern era. All of this is colored by the Messianic nature of Shiite Islam, which predominates in Iran but which is in the minority in the rest of the Muslim world. Today, 99 percent of Iran’s population is Muslim, of which about 80 percent are Shiites and about 19 percent are Sunnis. (The remaining
1
percent are Christians, Jews, Bahais, and Zoroastrians.) The Shiites split from the mainstream Sunnis in a conflict over who should succeed the Prophet Mohammad as Islam’s political and spiritual leader when he died in
A.D.
632. The Sunnis, whose name comes from the Arabic word for “tradition,” argue that the leader should be selected in the pre-Islamic way: through consensus among the community’s elders.

But a minority believed that Ali, the Prophet’s pious first cousin and son-in-law, should replace him, because that’s what Mohammad decreed. These dissidents became known in Arabic as the Shiites, or “partisans” of Ali.

The conflict intensified in
A.D.
661, when Ali was stabbed to death while praying in Kufa, in Iraq. Then, nearly twenty years later, Ali’s followers, led by his son Hosein, rebelled against the ruling hierarchy. Hosein had been forewarned of his martyrdom in a vision—but still he set out for Kufa. The forces of the Sunni Caliph Yazid stopped him on the sun-scorched plain of Karbala. During a ten-day battle, Hosein was stabbed to death as he held a sword in one hand and a Koran in the other. His male relatives and their supporters were shot with arrows and cut into pieces. Their severed heads were brought to Yazid in Damascus. The Sunni caliphs continued to reign.

For Shiites, the death of Hosein is the seminal event in their history. And because few Shiites came to Hosein’s aid during the battle, their successors were left with both the burden of Sunni oppression and a permanent guilt complex.

But martyrdom and guilt are not the only pillars of Shiite Islam. Most Shiites recognize twelve historic Imams or rightful spiritual rulers. The infant twelfth Imam “disappeared” in a cave in
A.D.
874 and is believed to be not dead but somehow hidden. He will return one day as the Redeemer who will create the perfect, godly society. Until then, all temporal power is imperfect. Ayatollah Khomeini was always referred to as “Imam Khomeini,” and although it would have been blasphemy to draw a literal connection with the twelfth Imam, the title certainly gave Khomeini additional authority.

Khomeini wore a black turban and was called a
sayyid,
indicating that he was a descendant of the Prophet’s family. Night after night before the revolution, many people in Iran swore that they saw Khomeini’s face—his turban, his eyes, his nose, his beard—in the moon. Then, against all odds, he brought down the King of Kings.

It wasn’t just religion and tradition that triumphed in 1979. It was a long overdue popular revolution that just happened to have a leader in clerical robes at its head. Still, it was not surprising that in Khomeini’s war against Iraq in the 1980s, Iranian fighters dreamed of redeeming the martyrdom ofAli and Hosein in that same land thirteen centuries before.

More than a decade after the end of that war, Iran is still engaged in a battle over interpretations of Islam. The struggle is not only between Shiites and Sunnis but within Shiism itself. Contrary to the perception outside Iran that religious truth is monolithic and that dissent is not tolerated, one of the defining traits of Shiism is its emphasis on argument. Clerics are encouraged and expected to challenge interpretations of the Koran, even those of the most learned ayatollahs, in the hope that new and better interpretations may emerge. It is a concept little grasped in the West, but it is critical to understanding Iran’s current reformers and their leader President Khatami, who is the son of one of the most revered—and liberal-minded—of the ayatollahs in pre-revolutionary Iran.

RULE NINE: A TIME BOMB IS TICKING AND IT HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH EXPLOSIVES.
Iran’s clerics, like Muslim clerics everywhere, invoke the authority of the Prophet in explaining their positions and issuing orders. But, like interpreting the view from a fractured mirror, it is sometimes hard to figure out where those decrees will lead. That’s what happened with the policy on procreation.

Early in the revolution, Ayatollah Khomeini encouraged his people to breed. The policy would create a generation of soldiers for God. “My soldiers are still infants,” Khomeini explained. The policy worked better than even Khomeini could have envisioned. By 1986, the official annual growth rate was 3.2 percent—among the highest in the world.

When the war with Iraq ended in 1988, the ruling clerics realized that such a large birth rate was disastrous for the economy and reversed themselves. Sure, the Prophet Mohammad was on record as saying, “Marry and multiply, for I shall make a display of you before other nations on the Day of Judgment.” But Ayatollah Khomeini was also on record in 1980 as saying, in a little-noticed statement, that Islam allows some forms of birth control as long as the wife receives the consent of her husband and the chosen method does not damage her health. The statement was used to revive the government’s moribund national family-planning program. Later, Ayatollah Khamenei went further, proclaiming, “When wisdom dictates that you do not need more children, a vasectomy is permissible.”

In the late 1980s, Iran’s Health Ministry launched a massive nationwide family-planning campaign and by the late 1990s, the population growth rate had been more than halved to 1.47 percent. But the trend had been set. At the time of the revolution, Iran’s population was roughly 35 million. Today, it is approaching 65 million. And 65 percent of that population is under the age of twenty-five. The infants are growing up. Unlike their fathers, who lived the events of the revolution, most young people know it only through their history books. Many feel no particular love or hatred toward the Shah, or for that matter, toward Ayatollah Khomeini himself. But they know what they want: more jobs and fewer constraints on their personal lives. They can vote at sixteen, and that makes them a threat to the power of the clerics who had promoted the anti-contraception policy in the first place.

RULE TEN: IRAN IS THE BERMUDA TRIANGLE OF AMERICAN FOREIGN POLICY, SO DON’T LET YOUR GAURD DOWN.
Iran’s Islamic Republic is not a police state, but it is not a liberty-loving democracy either, at least not yet. Nowhere has that been more evident since the dawn of the Islamic Republic than in its political use of terror outside the country.

In fact, probably the deepest fear of Iran among decision-makers in Washington and among the American people is that Iran might sponsor terrorism against American targets, either in the United States or abroad. The seizure of the American embassy in Tehran in 1979 was the first but not the only time the United States was targeted. Shiite terrorists (believed by American and Israeli intelligence to have acted with Iranian support) were responsible for the bombing of the Marine barracks in Lebanon in 1983, in which 241 American servicemen died. In the 1980s, the holding of American and other Western hostages by Iranian-backed Shiite radicals in Lebanon culminated in the most embarrassing foreign policy scandal of the Reagan administration: the sale of weapons to Iran in violation of American policy and the illegal use of the profits to fund the contra rebels in Nicaragua.

Only some of the American hostages were freed as a result of the arms sales, but Iran eventually paid the captors between $1 million and $2 million to free each remaining hostage, according to American intelligence reports. Iran expected that economic and diplomatic rewards from the United States would follow, but by then the relationship was so sour that President George Bush decided against it, arguing that Iran should not be rewarded for doing something that should have been done years before.

Although Americans still fear that one day an Iranian bomb will blow up near the White House or on Wall Street, historically the most vulnerable targets of Iranian terrorism have been other Iranians. The attacks have tapered off in recent years, but opponents of the Islamic Republic anywhere in the world remain potential assassination targets.

One political assassination particularly affected me. For years, Abdol-Rahman Ghassemlou was the leader of Iran’s Kurdish autonomist movement. He spoke passable English and Russian and took money wherever he could find it. I first met Ghassemlou in August 1979, when a civil war was raging in Kurdistan and the new revolutionary government in Tehran had not yet suppressed it. For five days I traveled through Kurdistan with Ghassemlou and his
pesh merga
—ready-to-die guerrilla fighters—as he met with his commanders. We bounced along in a jeep that seemed to have lost its springs, and we slept on the floors of safe houses. On the fifth day, a group of Kurdish women drew a bath for me and washed my clothes. I was lent a Kurdish wedding costume with a sheer red veil and a black velvet vest trimmed with gold coins to wear until my clean clothes dried.

“Miss Sciolino,” Ghassemlou said when he saw me in full bridal regalia, “I think I’ll just call your editors at
Newsweek
and tell them you got lost somewhere in the rugged Kurdish hills.” We laughed. He sent me safely on my way the next day. I didn’t see him again.

One evening ten years later, Ghassemlou and two other Kurds were meeting with officials from Tehran in a borrowed apartment in Vienna to negotiate an autonomy agreement for the Iranian province of Kurdistan. The police later found Ghassemlou shot dead, his body propped up in an armchair, a baseball cap placed in his lap. His two associates were also killed. Austrian authorities assumed that the officials from Tehran were the assassins.

RULE ELEVEN: IRAN IS IN THE MIDDLE EAST, BUT NOT ENTIRELY PART OF IT.
Americans tend to think of Iran as a Middle Eastern country. But the word “Iran” comes from the word “Aryan.” The people who settled in this region in the second millennium
B.C.
were Indo-European nomads who migrated from Central Asia in the east, not from the Semitic lands of the west and south. The Persian language is Indo-European, a distant cousin of English, French and Sanskirit. It is barely related to Arabic, even though it is infused with Arabic words.

Looking at a map doesn’t solve the identity problem. Iran shares borders with Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Turkey, and three former Soviet republics: Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Turkmenistan. Iran is the only land bridge between the Caspian Sea and the Persian Gulf. Iran’s intellectuals and politicians have long debated the direction to which they should turn: South to the Persian Gulf? West to Europe? North to the Caucasus? East to Asia?

Iran is the land of one of the world’s oldest religions. Centuries before the birth of Christ, the prophet Zoroaster preached a message of monotheism, the central feature of which was a long battle between good and evil. (Good will ultimately win.) Judaism, Christianity, and Islam were influenced by the Zoroastrian belief in the devil and angels, heaven and hell, redemption, resurrection, and the last judgment. The word “paradise,” which means “pleasure park of the king,” comes from Old Persian.

Iran is also one of the world’s few civilizations that, like Egypt, has enjoyed cultural continuity since ancient times. The boundaries of most other countries in the Middle East were defined in the twentieth century by European colonial powers. “Tribes with flags,” is how the Egyptian intellectual Tahseen Bashir described them, insisting that Iran and Egypt are the only real countries in the region.

Even in its modern history, Iran has had an ambiguous relationship with the Arab Middle East. The issue is complicated by the fact that Iran is a Muslim country, but Muslim in its own way, and it has a small Arab minority.

Persia was the first—and fastest-growing—superpower of the ancient world. It started in the early seventh century
B.C.
as a small southern province named Parsa (now Fars). Hence the name Persia. It expanded through war, occupation, revolts, cruelty, and marriage, until under Cyrus the Great in the sixth century
B.C.
the empire stretched all the way from the Mediterranean to India. In victory, Cyrus was a tolerant ruler, allowing the Jews to return to Jerusalem after a long period of exile at the hands of the Babylonians.

His grandson Darius introduced a sophisticated administrative system, an empire linked by a 1,500-mile highway complex. Mail carriers used a relay system that became the model for the Pony Express, and the U.S. Postal Service adapted the original motto of the Persians: “Stopped by neither snow, rain, heat, or gloom of night.” The empire also pioneered irrigation techniques, codified commercial laws, and created a universal system of weights and measures.

As a lasting testament to his reign, Darius built Persepolis, a magnificent new ritual city and capital on a vast, sunbaked platform in the desert, a place where the peoples of the empire could come to pay tribute.