Notes on Iran

I can’t pretend to have gathered anything like a satisfactory picture of
the forces at work in today’s Iran from a visit that lasted only 60 hours
and was anyway not designed primarily to be any kind of a “journalistic” enquiry.
Still, I’m really glad I got the chance to go there. I had some
intriguing glimpses into a few small slivers of the country’s life; and I
met some really interesting people. If (or rather, when) I go
back there, I’ll try to prepare for the trip more systematically, and it
won’t be so much like jumping in at the deep end. This little trip
I’ve just had feels more like an appetite-whetter.

From my one previous trip to Teheran, to do a “quickie” piece on the story
of mounting unrest there, for the London Sunday Times back in 1977,
I remember mainly the monochrome, yellowy-gray coloration of the city; the
complexity of the political story there; and the difficulty of covering it.
I didn’t leave the capital. I forget who exactly I talked to that time–
it was the “usual suspects”: some government people, some local journalists,
some professors, some diplomats… I certainly didn’t feel I had anything
like the same kind of the story there that I had, at that time, in Beirut
or Cairo, or even Amman.

This time, the city was exactly the same color as it was 27 years ago. The Alborz Mountains that ring the north side of it were capped with snow, but their view was obscured by a miasma of yellow-ish pollution, just as I remembered.

Most of the city slopes down from the north to the south, and beside the strees there are open water-runways down which gurgled plentiful runoff from the snow.

We
spent a lot of time driving around the city, or more accurately sitting in the
traffic jams that plague it today, just as they did in 1977. It seems
that nowadays it has a metro, though we didn’t ride on it. (I gather
it has sex-segregated cars.) There also seemed to be an extensive municipal
bus system; and in all the buses that I saw, women had to ride at the back.
Lots of things are sex-segregated in Iran that wouldn’t be in most western
countries: for example, there were completely separate security-check lines
for men and women at the airport.

I’m writing this on the flight back to the US, having had a plane-change
in De Gaulle airport in Paris. As I got onto this plane, I was picked
out of the line filing through the jetway and subjected to a very thorough
and very intimate pat-down– by a woman- but right there in the jetway with
everyone walking right past. It felt a little humiliating, yes.

On the other hand, in Iran, I also saw men and women working alongside
each other in a number of different service occupations. There were
women and men immigration officers staffing the desks in the airport. (The
female officers wore loose black chadors over baggy dark-green uniforms.)
Women and men were working together behind the counter in the “fast-food”
restaurant we went to Thursday. At a more formal restaurant we went
to in Teheran Tuesday, there was a female “host”, and women were running
the cash registers, though all the waiters were male…

In Iran, too, women drive. This is another big difference from Saudi
Arabia.

As we drove around, I didn’t see any murals or billboards bearing anti-US
or anti-Israeli images or messages. This isn’t to say there are none.
Bill the spouse said he saw a couple of boards with slogans that said
something about “Israel”. (We can both more or less read Farsi sript,
which is very close to Arabic. And though the languages are significantly
different, you can pick out words for proper nouns fairly easily.)

There were a fair number of big murals around the city– mainly, ones painted
onto the walls at the end of, for example, a three- or four-story-high housing
development. Most of them memorialized a shaheed — usually,
someone from either the regular armed forces or the Pasdaran who had died
during the punishing eight-year-long war that Saddam Hussein imposed on the
country (with Washington’s eager help), from 1980 through 1988. These war-hero
murals usually bore a large picture of the shaheed in question and
his name and position; a smaller representation of one or more forms of military
hardware– usually painted in sort of cartoonish, “live-action” mode; and
sometimes a picture of flowers or a small representation of the everywhere-recognizable
Dome of the Rock mosque in Jerusalem, which were there I guess to give some
pointers as to the kinds of values that the guy was said to have had died
fighting for.

(I think the number of Iranian war dead from that war was around 200,000?
I must find out that number. Actually, the whole question of
Iran’s losses from that war– both human and material– is one that is far
too rarely even mentioned in the US these days. Indeed, the whole war
is too ften forgtten, especially in the kinds of American locutions that
refer to the 1990-91 fighting involving Iraq as the “first” Gulf war.)

Other large murals in Teheran bear the images of Khomeini, or Khamenei, or
some other turbaned mullah or marja’, instead of a shaheed.

I saw a couple of large posters–one on a street and one in the airport–
that carried explicit AIDS-awareness messages. One looked very unclear
to me. It had writing in both Farsi and English. The English
said something like: “Women, girls, AIDS and HIV”. That was all. Even
more puzzling: I think the image there was of a man. What was it about?

The one at the airport was more clear. Also in both English and Farsi,
it carried the globally familiar message “ABC: Abstain; Be faithful; Condomize”.
Interesting that someone in the public health sector has enough clout
to get a risqué message like that posted in a public place. (The family
depicted in that poster looked generically western. Neither the woman
nor the girl in it was veiled.)

* * *

And while we’re on (or near) the subject of sexuality, I just want to add
something else significant into the description I wrote Friday of the conference
we went to Thusday afternoon. It was clear at one point in the discussion
there that one of the really hot-button topics in the debate over democracy
inside Iran these days is the question of the existence and visibility within
current discussions of democracy in the west of the whole gay-rights issue.
The conservatives– in Iran, and elsewhere in the Muslim world– seem
to have gotten a lot of mileage out of arguing that if the local democratizers
have their way, then rampant homosexualizing is going to happen all over
the country and no decent Iranian will be safe.

I think it was in reference to that issue (as well as, perhaps, other issues)
that Abdelkarim Soroush, in his presentation, took pains to say he wanted
to deal for that discussion only with questions of a (more limited) formal
or procedural democracy, rather than a full-blown “liberal” democracy.

I guess I hadn’t really given very much thought before then to the ways the
gay-rights discussion within the US has been heard and received in other
parts of the world. Then, on Saturday, I was reading The Daily Star
in Beirut, and there was an intriguing piece by a westerner who’s been working
as an English-language teacher at Damascus University who said that a large
poroportion of his Syrian students there had been rooting for Bush during
the recent US election– and that one of the principal reasons they gave
for doing that was because of what they understood to be Kerry’s much more
permissive position on gay rights.

H’mmm. Interesting. Perplexing. Challenging.

I think those of us in the west who are strong supporters of gay rights in
our own societies need to be aware of these international reverberations,
at the very least. Maybe, too, we need to be able to develop a global
discourse that doesn’t insist that every single “specialized” right that
we’re fighting for in our own societies also be held up as an essential litmus
test for the the “health and rectitude” of pro-democracy movements elsewhere.
After all, gay rights of the kind we’re fighting for inside the US is still
a highly contested –not to mention far from adequately achieved– goal there
as well. So it would be the height of arrogance for us to insist that,
for example, Iranian or Syrian democrats have to include gay rights fully
on their own agendas before we’re ready to give them our support.

Someone at the conference (I forget who; I don’t have my notes to hand right
now on this plane) said that there are a number of “specialized” issues that
Iranian democrats need to bracket, that is, to set to one side, for now.
I guess gay rights would be one of those. Women’s rights most
certainly are not. I do think, though, that developing strong protestions
for the privacy of what consenting adults do in their own homes is a strong
desideratum. Privacy that, I note, is still not protected so long as
anti-sodomy laws remain on the books of a number of the states inside the
US, including my own.

* * *

Well, privacy, there’s another handy segué in this slightly rambly
reflection here… I just wanted to write something about the relationship
between personal piety and theocracy (or, perhaps more accurately, the mullahocracy),
based on what I saw and learned in Iran.

Firstly, a number of the people we talked with there expressed very strong
criticisms of what they saw as the hypocrisy practised by many regime members
who, they said, condoned a lot of corrupt behavior by those in their own
families or entourages even if they didn’t engage in such behavior themselves.
Some we talked to railed against the coercive nature of, in particular,
the dress codes imposed on women. Others noted that the resistance
among younger Iranians to the publicly enforced female dress-code and to
other social strictures imposed by the regime had led to a widespread readiness
among the young to deride all forms of Muslim observance. Thus, we
met a number of people who seemed committed to living lives of personal piety
but who at the same time thought that the present mullahocracy seriously
complicates the attainment of that goal.

Interesting.

* * *

Okay, so I’ll just jot down a few more notes about how it felt for me to participate
in the whole hijab thing.

I just want to backtrack a little and recall that when I was interviewing
the Hizbullah guys in Beirut a few weeks ago, I got quite into the habit
of not shaking hands with them when I greeted them or bade them farewell.
The standard thing in those circs is you put your right hand vaguely
near your heart to express greeting or “heartfelt” thanks or farewells
or whatever.

So someone asked me, “Helena, how do you feel talking to men who won’t even
touch your hand?” I hought back to many harrassing incidents throughout
my career and replied, “Well I’d rather talk to a guy who
won’t touch my hand than to a guy who wants to tough considerably more than
my hand.”

Similarly, regarding dress-codes, my general position is that I would rather
deal with a dress code that mandates how many clothes you must wear than one that mandates how many you must take off. (This, especially after
Abu Ghraib.) I don’t seek to flaunt my body, since I view it more or
less as a tool that lets me do the things I want to do in life.

So as our Emirates Air flight touched down in Teheran Tuesday evening and
I saw the other unveiled women aboard start to put scarves over their hair
I was quite ready to shake out the scarf I had tucked around my neck for
just this purpose and drape it carefully over my short hairdo. No big
deal, I thought. I was wearing a pair of fairly baggy black pants and a black
cardigan that came down a few inches below my butt, which seemed as though
it should be adequate to meet the code (and indeed did… except at the shrine
in Qom.)

Once we were staying in the home of our kind and observant hosts F.H. and
Rana, there were still family-level dress-code issues to figure out. We
were staying in their guest apartment in the basement. On the first
floor of the home were semi-“public” rooms, as Rana later explained the set-up
to me. That is, the space where F. had his office and associated space
where he could do business-related entertaining. On the second floor
were the family’s own quarters.

F and Rana were extremely generous and welcoming in inviting us to come to
their family quarters to eat with them. But every time we did so, Rana
and her 14-year-old daughter would dress in full chadors, because
of the presence of an unrelated man (Bill) in the family space. Seeing
Rana trying to race around the kitchen putting the finishing touches to breakfast
gave me huge admiration for her skill in being able to manage that huge,
slithery piece of cloth as she did so. (The abayas that Iraqi women
wear in place of the chador are much easier to manage, since at least
they have fixed hand-holes in them that give the cloth some basis for stability.)

When Bill left, Rana would whip off the chador, take off the headscarf
she had on underneath it, and she would look like any western thirty-something
woman in jeans, a sweater, and a pony-tail.

Out of respect for the rules of their home I never took my scarf off except
in the privacy of the guest-space. It was okay. I had brought
to light cotton scarves with me that served the purpose.

The only complicated thing I experienced regarding the dress-code was wrestling
with the chador I had to wear in Qom. And the only uncomfortable
thing was wearing the hot, heavy monto (overcoat) during most of the
conference we went to Thursday. Bill later said he thought I could
have taken it off, and I think he was right. I did have the long black
cardigan thing on underneath.

But altogether, for me, the dress code thing was no big deal. I know
that many Iranian women feel differently. I talked to some female Iranian
professors whom I met at a conference in Beirut a few weeks back. They
were delightedly scarfless there, and said they really appreciated the atmosphere
on the campus of the American University of Beirut (and indeed, throughout
all the city), where heavily veiled, lightly scarved, and unscarved woman
mingle easily with each other in public. On the AUB campus, I might
add, back when the weather was warmer the number of bare belly-buttons and
even of belly-button rings easily exceeded the number of veiled women.

But even though th dress code was no big deal for me on the visit to Iran,
by the time our short visit was coming to an end I was getting tired of it.
In the airport terminal, there are numerous posters that remind women
travelers to stick to Islamic dress. But as soon as we entered the
door of the Dubai-bound plane, most of the headscarves started coming off.
Including mine. Why so fast? “I was beginning to feel like the
Hobbit’s grandmother,” I told Bill. I think it’s mainly just a question of
what you’re used to.