A Different Face on Iran

I admit to having been “busy” of late; perils of being a long term Iran watcher. Yet I, for one, am delighted at the prospect of the former Iranian President visiting Charlottesville and Thomas Jefferson’s legacy here this week – hopefully more than once.
Speaking of TJ, I have also been “busy” this past week starting my studies as a “Fellow” at the Robert H. Smith International Center for Jefferson Studies, at Monticello, where I will be researching and writing about just what Thomas Jefferson meant in the first sentence of the Declaration of Independence by “a decent respect for the opinions of mankind.”
Imagine that…. a “decent respect” for the opinions of humanity. (!)
Much more on both subjects, TJ & Khatami, in upcoming posts, as well as on the (over)-loaded subjects of Iran’s nuclear aspirations and Iran’s not so simple relationship to Lebanon….
For the moment though, I begin my own Iran reflections by highlighting a compelling, if all too easily missed, essay found in yesterday’s Washington Post – in the Travel Section – written by Steven Knipp.
Knipp’s nicely written account of multiple ironies he encountered during a recent fist journey inside Iran mirrors my own experiences, travels that began fifteen and a half years ago. Never mind that he is an experienced international journalist, well accustomed to reporting from the most difficult venues, Knipp begins with the admission of “being slightly uneasy about going to Iran.”
I know that feeling well; I first went to Iran in late January 1991. Back then, the diplomatic hostage saga had “only” ended a decade before, Iran’s devastating war with Iraq had stopped just over two years previously – and the effects were still widely visible. Adding to my jitters, American bombs were falling – the first time – on Saddam’s Iraq. So even though I had long studied Iran, I too worried that I might face hostile treatment for being a citizen of “The Great Satan.” (Shatan-e Bozorg)
Yet like me, Knipp encounters just the opposite:

Everywhere I went — from the traffic-choked streets of Tehran in the north to the dusty desert town of Yazd in central Iran, to the elegant cultural centers of Isfahan and Shiraz — I was overwhelmed by the warmth and, dare I say it, pro-Americanism of the people I met.
Ponder the irony of that last statement for a moment. While much of the rest of the world seems to be holding their collective noses at us Americans, in Iran people were literally crossing the road to shake an American’s hand and say hello. Who knew?

Knipp then recounts how he was initially coy about where he was from – America. He marvels at how Iranians time and again would react warmly to discovering that he was from America, and observes, “For better or worse, Iranians are avid fans of America: its culture, films, food, music, its open, free-wheeling society.”
I too learned the same lesson on my first visit, while at the shrine to Ayatollah Khomeini. I had lost track of time as I stood very close to Khomeini’s remains – mesmerized by the ornate setting, the families on picnics, and by the many earnest pilgrims leaving donations and requests in the lattice structure surrounding the coffin.

Startled out of my trance, I found myself surrounded by a score of young, rather scruffy-looking men, mostly in Army jackets. One asked me where I was from – to which I started to apologize in garbled Persian for offending anyone, while trying to remember, in vain, the word for Canadian…. Yet a smiling chap in the center of the group cut me off with his arms wide open and a huge grin, as he said, “It’s ok, It’s ok… I’m from Georgia Tech.”
I recognized then that being known as an American in Iran was a potential genuine asset – and preferable it seemed to the alternatives of other fair-skinned foreigners, the English especially. (Alas, the “perfidious” British betrayal of a century ago during Iran’s “constitutional revolution” is still resented, despite a fine tradition of British scholarly cooperation with Iran.) I remember too how one cleric in Mashad muttered at me with a stern growl; I found out later he mistakenly thought I was Russian.
There are many historic reasons for this deep-rooted Iranian cultural affinity towards America. My own assorted discoveries of its manifestation included a Disney “themed” park behind the former Hilton Hotel in Tehran and Beatles “muzak” on state television My equivalent of Knipp’s Brando-loving carpet bazaari was a director of a magnificent cultural center in South Tehran who happened to be a scholar on the American playwright, Arthur Miller.
During a later trip, while assisting Sandra Mackey with a book on Iranian political culture, I found myself the object of intense curiosity on a packed late-night economy-class bus going from Qom to Esfahan. Amid the din, one younger man approached me and asked, “Koja-e hastaem?” – or, where are you from? The bus went quiet — as I paused and then said blandly, “Maen Amrika’i hastaem.” As his eyes widened, I then impishly declared, “you know – Shatan-e Bozorg!”
The bus burst into laughter…. All manner of sweats and treats came my way; my bus driver later proudly took me around a bus caravanserai, introducing me to his fellow drivers. The last thing he said to me in the few English words he could muster was, “Please tell Americans – we not terrorists.”
To be sure, being an American did not insulate me from getting an earful of complaints about US policies or perceived unjust treatment in the American media. Knipp too heard it:

Iranians — from high school students to middle-aged taxi drivers — repeatedly asked me: “Why does America call us Evil Axis?” Then they would indignantly add: “We are good people — we are Persians! Iran is a good country, some are bad, but most people here are good.” They seemed genuinely wounded by the political rhetoric of the White House.
When told I was a reporter, college kids asked me to tell Americans: “Please know this: We are not Saudi Arabia. We are not Iraq. We are not Yemen. Please tell them we are not the same as these places!”

In my earlier visits, I too heard a lot of outrage about the sensational book and movie, “Not without my Daughter” – which many Iranians thought unfairly trashed all Iranian males and family life for the sins of one. Similar complaints might be heard today about Azar Nafisi’s awful “Reading Lolita in Tehran.”
But despite such stereotypical, neocon-fed images here in the west, I was startled by, well,… Iranian women, as was Knipp:

What astonished me the most about Iran were its women. I met and spoke with scores of them from all parts of the country. And everywhere they were wonderful: vivid, bold, articulate in several languages, politically astute and audaciously outward-looking. While some men demurred, the women weren’t afraid to voice opinions about anything under the sun.
In fact, women in Iran can work and drive and vote, own property or businesses, run for political office and seek a divorce. The majority of Iran’s university graduates are women.

Even in the early 1990’s, over half of all Iranian law students were women – and quite sharp and as outspoken as any of my brightest American women students. I remember getting grilled by female audience members at a presentation I gave at Tehran University’s law school; no shy deference there to male colleagues.
Of course, many problems persist, and Iranian women continue to campaign for further reforms and/or resist pending reversals – even as their status remains well ahead of women in many neighboring states, particularly in certain American “friends.”
Iranians, then and now, remain quite opinionated about their own political leaders. Back in the early 1990’s, there was still a hesitance about being too bold. I often heard the euphemism, “the weather has changed” to reference significant changes in the space allowed for dissent.
By 1997, that small weather change had become a political hurricane, sweeping Mohammad Khatami and his reformers to the Presidency. One of Khatami’s first major international acts was to reach out to America via an interview with CNN.
Yet Iranian populism – like that in America – blows in multiple directions. Rising expectations for further reforms were dashed, and those who had anticipated mutual gains from a lessening of tensions with America were left empty-handed by an unresponsive US cold shoulder. Worse for the reformers, President Bush’s blatant interference in Iran’s Presidential elections last summer back-fired in the form of a classic nationalist sentiment that helped catapult the more hard-line Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to the Iranian Presidency.
That said, Knipp suggests yet another possible unfolding irony:

And to me, few young Iranians seemed happy with their own government. I seriously doubt that if Iran had opinion polls, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s popularity ratings would be any higher than George W. Bush’s.

Compounding this paradox, we could also note that President Ahmadinejad’s standing up for Iran’s nuclear energy rights may be just as popular inside Iran as President Bush’s stand to fight terrorism. At the popular levels, Iranians wouldn’t understand why they should give up nuclear energy any more than Americans would think they should “give in” to terrorism.
At least not in the abstract.
Alas, such parallels may falter, on Knipp’s distinction between people and government:

Iranians seem readily able to separate in their minds the difference between the American people and America as a nation, with a U.S. government whose policies they strongly oppose.

I think Knipp is quite right here. Yet I am not very confident about the ability of my fellow Americans to distinguish between the Iranian people and their government. Maybe I watch too much CNN and listen to too much Alan Jackson. (the country music star who made a fortune singing about how he “didn’t know the difference ‘n Iraq and Iran.”)
Still, I rather like the idea of more American reporters and tourists going to Iran. Why not? Neoconservatives and Iranian monarchists of course won’t like it, as they will rightly fret such travel will muddy their black and white image of a “totalitarian” Iran on the march, with America in a “them or us” fight with Iran to the death.
Yet it is quite possible for both ordinary and distinguished Americans to visit Iran, even mindful of course of the standard “warnings.” I know a retired globe-trotting US colonel here in Charlottesville, quite the patriotic conservative gentleman, who visited Iran two years ago, as part of a California tourist group. He told me he had a wonderful trip. May his lot increase.
Even a former US Secretary of Defense, William Perry, managed to tour Iran this past spring and remarked on the “friendliness” of the Iranians he met there. (I’m not making this up – see Financial Times of May 31 – sorry, no link.)
Hey, what a concept. Who’s next? James Baker? Chuck Hagel? Jimmy Carter? George H.W. Bush (the President who once said to Iran, “Good will begets good will”)?
Bring ’em on over.