The Ayatollah Begs to Differ (5 page)

The laats who joined a komiteh or even the Revolutionary Guards in the dramatic aftermath of the revolution may have thought of themselves as finally empowered politically, but they quickly learned that in an Islamic government, all real authority would rest with the clergy. In one of the first acts of the post-revolution government, ostensibly for Islamic reasons but also as a show of just who was in charge, Tehran’s infamous red-light district, Shahr-e-No, or “New City,” the stomping ground of many a jahel and laat, was shut down and razed. Today, the old district is bordered by a broad avenue lined with shops selling surplus military wear, including, as I saw myself, U.S. Desert Storm boots in mint condition and an assortment of other U.S. military clothes and footwear newly liberated from Iraq. On the day I was there, and as I was examining the various articles for sale in a storefront, an old man shuffled by slowly, wearing a dirty black suit and loafers with the heels pushed down. “See him?” asked the friend who had brought me, a child of South Tehran who spent many a day of his youth in the Shahr-e-No neighborhood. “He used to walk up and down this street, just like he is now, in the old days. But he was a big guy then.”

Today, while laats still abound in urban areas, the jahel is but a fragment of memory for most Iranians, to be seen in the occasional old Iranian movie or to be talked about nostalgically. Once in a while, one can bump into one (or someone who at least affects the look) on the streets of downtown Tehran or farther south, as I did on Ferdowsi Avenue, just off Manouchehri, a street lined with antiques dealers, on a few occasions in the past few years. Among the Jewish shop owners and other stall vendors, one heavyset older man works out of an impossibly narrow shop carved into the side of a building.
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His dusty window displays an array of old rings, bracelets, and other jewelry, the odd off-brand man’s watch here and there, and he himself sits on an old stool just outside on the pavement. He wears a black suit, a slightly discolored white shirt, and a narrow-brimmed black fedora one size too small on the top of his obviously balding head. His thick black mustache, from which years ago he may have dramatically plucked a hair with his fingers to show good faith in a deal, is dyed, the reddish tint of the henna showing on the outermost hairs. His only concession to the Islamic state of affairs is the day-old growth of beard surrounding the mustache: snowy white growth that betrays the dyed mustache even more startlingly than the henna hue. I don’t know if he was ever a jahel, but it seems likely that he was. He sits there on Ferdowsi, keeping his own hours, like a toothless old cat, a reminder for those who might care that the neighborhood’s top laat is not what he used to be.

The Javadieh neighborhood of South Tehran was once the city’s roughest; to the young male residents it was known as “Texas,” presumably because of the association in Iranian minds of that state with the lawless Wild West. A rough neighborhood, though, meant poor and run-down but not necessarily dangerous in the way we might think in the West. Upper-class Iranians would never have ventured into Javadieh; they still don’t, but not out of fear, rather because of the strict Iranian delineation between the classes. Some upper-class wealthy young males may want to affect the macho posturing of the lower-class laat, but they would never sit down with one and have a chat over a cup of tea. Nor would they know how to deal with a
chaghoo-kesh—
“knife-puller” literally, but someone who lives by his knife. Guns have never been popular among Iranian toughs, mainly because they kill more often than maim, but also because guns in Iran have been associated with armed struggle or revolution rather than self-defense or criminal activity. As such, governments, whether under the Shahs or in the Islamic Republic, have zero tolerance for guns, which they have viewed as threats to their power, but have had a wide tolerance for knives and other fighting equipment.

Knife fights, common enough even today, rarely end with serious injury, although on occasion death does occur, as it did recently on the street where I was staying when a fight broke out between two young men over the affections of a local girl, with whom neither had relations but whom each felt was his. The thrust of a knife, a little too hard and a little too close to the heart, probably unintentional, resulted in death, and the onetime chaghoo-kesh was transformed from street thug to murderer in an instant. But usually a knifing is meant to cut rather than kill, and in the old street tradition a knife fight begins with one or both of the men cutting themselves on the chest, to draw blood and to demonstrate the fearlessness of the fighter. That disregard for one’s own well-being extended easily into the practice of fearless suicide missions performed by the all-volunteer Basij forces during the Iran-Iraq war.
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The Basij (“mobilization” force), who come under the authority of the Revolutionary Guards, are recruited from lower-class neighborhoods where laats once flourished, and they serve as paramilitary protectors of the Islamic Revolution. In the past they have been mobilized to enforce Islamic behavior on the streets and even in homes; they can be counted on to break up demonstrations and show up in force at pro-government rallies, and of course they will be in the forefront of any military conflict that involves action in Iranian territory. The local mosque serves as their base, but loyalties that were once localized to a gang or just a neighborhood have been transferred to Islam and the
velayat-e-faqih
, the “rule of the jurisprudent,” which is the very basis of the Islamic Republic.
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Upper-class Iranians have a particular disdain for the Basij; it’s as if the lower-class laats have been given the authority to rule over their lives, or, to use a Western expression, the lunatics have taken over the asylum. The laats and jahels that the Shah once relied upon to support his rule had very little opportunity for advancement in a strictly class-based society with few institutions of higher education, and as such formed an underclass that contented itself with functioning within its own boundaries, venturing afar only to commit the occasional burglary or car theft. The Islamic Republic, however, now with hundreds of colleges and universities that are happy to recruit Basij onto their campuses, has given the underclass a significant role in society, and one that they won’t easily give up.

President Ahmadinejad, the son of a blacksmith and often derisively referred to as such, may come from the underclass and take pride in the fact, but he long ago elevated himself above what would have been his social status in the Iran of yesteryear. He indeed grew up in a lower-middle-class neighborhood and still lives in one, but his intelligence and hard work secured him a place at university during the Shah’s time, a time when the nationwide university entrance exams filtered out all but the brightest students in Iran. Wealthier Iranian students who couldn’t pass muster went abroad for their studies, usually to the United States, where getting into a college, any college, was no great feat, but for ordinary working-class high school students (and assuming they even bothered to finish high school) the twelfth grade was the end of the line.

Ahmadinejad, by virtue of his university degree (and Iranians at the time understood very well that a Tehran university degree said a whole lot more about the student than a degree from a U.S. college, unless that college was Ivy League), was destined to break out into at least the working middle class, but he understood early that the Islamic Revolution was as much a social revolution as it was political, and he cultivated his working-class image along with his piety to good effect as he slowly worked his way up through the ranks of the Islamic government. His style, the bad suits, the cheap Windbreaker, the shoddy shoes, and the unstylish haircut, a style he proudly maintains well into his presidency, is a signal to the working class that he is still one of them. Many Iranians may aspire to wear European designers, and often do, but Ahmadinejad, president of the republic, knows his clothes send a message directly to those neighborhoods he most counts on for support—neighborhoods where the Basij are recruited, neighborhoods where there still are knife fights and the laats roam the streets if they’re not persuaded to join the Basij, and neighborhoods where you can still buy your suit, if you really need one, from the
kot-shalvary
.

The kot-shalvary was a common enough presence in working-class neighborhoods when I was a child: I remember at my grandfather’s house in Abbasabad-e-Einedoleh, a house he bought in the 1920s in a neighborhood that had by the 1960s already become unfashionably working-class, hearing the cries of
“Kot-shalvary-e!”—
“It’s the suit man!”—on Fridays, the Muslim weekend. A vendor with a slow donkey-drawn cart would make the rounds of a particular neighborhood or two and announce his presence and the availability of men’s suits with a staccato rhythm, a rhythm my brother and I would gleefully imitate throughout the day to the annoyance of anyone within earshot. Growing up in the West with only occasional summer visits to Tehran, we found it amusing that our compatriots might actually buy their clothes from someone with a donkey cart, and as the years passed, I assumed that the kot-shalvary had gone the way of the camel caravans.

The nasal twang of the kot-shalvary of Abbasabad-e-Einedoleh, however, was still in my ears when I woke up one morning in 2007 on Safi Alishah, a street much grander than my grandfather’s in his day but only marginally so today, to the similar twang of a kot-shalvary advertising his suits for sale. His was a hand-drawn cart, and I saw no customers rushing up to him in the brief instant I looked out the window, but his suits could not be much worse than those of the president, who buys his from a shop in Shams Al Emareh (and the suits are commonly and disparagingly known as “Shams Al Emareh” suits for the building that houses the many stores they’re sold from), not far from the Tehran bazaar, specializing in locally made and cheap Chinese-made men’s clothes. And the president knows it. It must have come as a great disappointment to him when the Western press mockingly referred to the suits provided the British sailors arrested by Iran in the Persian Gulf in 2007 and released two weeks later as “ill-fitting Ahmadinejad-style suits,” the assumption being that they were perhaps purchased by the Iranian government at Shams Al Emareh. In fact, the suits came from E Cut, a men’s mini-chain that is quite a few steps up from Shams Al Emareh, at least in the minds of ordinary Iranian men, and the government’s outfitting of the British prisoners in better suits than the president’s was intended to show off Persian hospitality and a little
ta’arouf
: the best for your guest. (Ahmadinejad, like many Iranians who’ve spent their entire lives in Iran, is blissfully unaware that ta’arouf, or “social ritual,” particularly as it’s practiced in Iran, is an alien concept in the West.) Based on Western reaction to the drape of its suits, a reaction that can’t have escaped E Cut (the name signifying an Iranian fascination with all things technological), the company will have to reprogram its computers for the “electronic cut” of its clothes, at least if it wishes to be considered for any future government gift-giving contracts.