Honeymoon in Tehran: Two Years of Love and Danger in Iran (16 page)

Ever since perhaps 2001, when the Internet took off as an arena for Iranians to express themselves, criticize the government, and organize around such issues as women’s rights, the government had sought to intervene. In 2004, it began arresting Web technicians and bloggers, and prosecuted at least twenty writers for posting “subversive” material online, handing them jail terms ranging from a few days to fourteen years. The recent campaign, which activists said had begun in June, targeted the websites and blogs themselves. Using keyword filters and censorship software pirated from U.S. firms, the government blocked thousands of websites containing news, political content, and satire.

The editor of the
Iranian Feminist Tribune,
who used to run a website devoted to women’s issues, told me that at its busiest, the site had attracted seventy thousand visitors a day; it ran news articles the country’s print press would never carry and spread the word about sit-ins and seminars. “The end result is a marginalization of women and women’s issues,” another activist told me. What she said seemed to confirm what I had observed myself, watching the government try to marginalize Shirin khanoum. Added together, all this amounted to a fresh, pernicious, and systematic campaign to repress the country’s vibrant women’s movement. Most Iranians, I knew, had no idea. Did I dare write the story? Of course not. I had no wish to jeopardize my press credentials, and clearly other journalists avoiding the story shared my caution. Instead, I chose to write about stepped-up Internet censorship in general. I could weave in the targeting of women’s activists, and attentive readers could work out for themselves what was afoot. When I began reporting in the Middle East, I had considered journalists who approached stories in such a roundabout manner as cowardly. But I had quickly learned that all governments, from
eastern dictatorships to western democracies, tend to blackball journalists who holler inconvenient truths too loudly. The real art was to convey as much of reality as possible while maintaining one’s access. That did not feel pleasant to me, but I believed subtle reporting about a repressive regime accomplished more than no reporting at all.

Hearing Arash’s key in the lock, I looked at my watch in surprise. He was home early, probably because I had been so eager for the antifilter software. I had meant to call Mr. X and tell him about my story before Arash arrived, and now I would need to make the call in front of him. Arash disliked my contacts with Mr. X; he thought I was too accommodating and should deal with him more firmly. This made me miserable. I wanted Arash’s sympathy rather than his judgment, and argued that being more assertive might make it impossible for me to do my work.

Arash smiled so sweetly upon opening the door, a box of my favorite cardamom cupcakes tucked under his arm, that I decided to postpone the call.

W
inter gently settled into Tehran, and the Alborz Mountains loomed over the city, sentinel-like and imposing in their fine coat of snow. In the windless cold, the pollution condensed into a thick, sickly gray mist that hovered across the capital, obscuring rooftops just three blocks away. The question that had preoccupied us in the fall, of whether life would change under Ahmadinejad, had been replaced by a more breathless query: What had we done to deserve him? His transformation from poorly regarded ideologue to national hero took place swiftly, taking all but his own supporters (who believed Allah shepherded his presidency) by surprise. His personal advisers and religious conservative backers held doctrinaire views, among them the belief that Ahmadinejad’s tenure was a proper “miracle.” The most influential of these supporters was Ayatollah Mohammad Taqi Mesbah-Yazdi, a leading cleric in Qom who had issued an election-time fatwa in support of Ahmadinejad and who, after his victory, declared that Iran finally had a proper Islamic government and could henceforth dispense with elections. But debates about theocracy did not concern the Iranians who had actually voted for the president. They cared mainly about redressing inequality, improving their lives, and if this happened on the watch of a president who understood the resonance of Shia Islam in their lives, then so much the better.

Though Ahmadinejad had filled his administration with personal friends, colleagues from his days as mayor or from the university where he taught, he still lacked real clout within the regime. His main authority, it was becoming clear, was the backing of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei, who found it expedient to support the novice president. This reflected not so much the Supreme Leader’s militant mood or beliefs, but the political nature of the Islamic Republic—an opaque system composed of plural, rival power centers. Though he occupied a position of vast, unchecked power, Ayatollah Khamenei faced opposition from senior clerics such as former president Rafsanjani, who held a different vision for Iran’s future than the ayatollah and had enough influence to compete with him. During the presidency of the moderate Khatami, the Supreme Leader had been thrust into the awkward role of opposing broadly popular change. With Ahmadinejad in the presidency, he no longer figured in the country’s imagination as a staid obstacle to progress, but as a wise balancer, the man keeping the brash new president in check.

But this dynamic also secured for Ahmadinejad all the potential that his administration would never have earned on its own merit, and it helped turn him into a leader of significance. First, the jokes ceased. Passed about by text message, repeated by taxi drivers, they had mocked the president’s hygiene, likening him to the monkey cartoon on bags of Iranian Cheetos. In their place, I heard instead exclamations of mild admiration, which soon developed into expressions of actual regard. The extent of Ahmadinejad’s sudden popularity became clear to me one sunny day at Shemshak, a ski resort just outside Tehran where we spent many weekends gliding down powdery slopes that rival any in the Rockies or the Alps.

Before the revolution, Shemshak would have been the last place where you could take the temperature of Iranian public opinion. Back then, it was exclusive to westernized, wealthy Iranians: the sort of exclusive, snobby place Arash would have refused to go, but in our generation, as in so many other ways, these distinctions were eroding. Arash’s mountaineering friends, young men and women from south Tehran whose parents had only scaled these mountains on foot, now bought secondhand skis and could be found on the slopes alongside
their more privileged peers. At Shemshak nowadays, you might encounter a tour guide or a bazaar merchant, as well as a venture capitalist who lived between north Tehran and Palo Alto.

As we waited in line for the lifts, a young man in an orange parka began chatting up a pretty engineering student from Yazd.

“He’s brilliant, defends our rights like no one else has,” the young man said.

“Yeah, he stood behind his word like a man,” the woman agreed. “I used to have doubts, but now I couldn’t be happier with him.”

They were talking about Ahmadinejad. Throughout the day, we heard many such expressions of nationalist ardor, as we glided down the slopes, as we sipped hot chocolate in the shadow of the dazzling sun. Everyone, it seemed, from secular Iranians to the traditional to the cosmopolitan wealthy, had concluded the president was doing something right after all.

History is full of undistinguished men pushing their way onto the world stage, leaving their grubby fingerprints on an era to which they should have been irrelevant. This was such a time. Under different circumstances, Ahmadinejad would have been remembered only by Iranians, and then only for his amateurish economic policies. But in the short months since he had taken office, he had begun using the increasingly tense standoff over Iran’s nuclear energy program to broaden his appeal at home and extend it abroad. He framed the West as an enemy bent on weakening Iran by denying it legitimate access to technology, and pitched a slogan (“Nuclear energy is our absolute right”) that Iranians first mocked, then concluded was Truth. The changing political climate in the Middle East since 2001 had left Iranians feeling vulnerable, concerned with bolstering their place in the region and receptive to the crass, assertive nationalism that Ahmadinejad peddled. With little evidence of American progress in rebuilding either Afghanistan or Iraq, Iranians had grown increasingly skeptical of U.S. power in the Middle East. Their fondness for the United States, which had reached its height in 2001 when an opinion poll found that 74 percent of Iranians supported restoring ties with America, had largely evaporated.

Although the removal of Iran’s most dangerous enemies, along
with the rise of a sympathetic Shia government in Iraq, had realigned the Middle East in a manner that favored the country, this state of affairs did not yet dominate perceptions among Iranians. A scarce few months had passed since the Baghdad regime came to power, and it was not altogether clear that Iran’s Shia friends would remain ascendant. The possibility that Iraq might fall apart altogether still loomed, with the accompanying refugee influx and border insecurity that would plague Iran. As for Afghanistan, vast stretches of it ran wild, outside the control of the central government, and Taliban groups hostile to Iran were reasserting themselves. The United States continued rattling the saber of regime change, and the mullahs were as convinced as ever that Washington was plotting their demise. The Arab states friendly with Washington—Jordan, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia—resented the reshuffling that had strengthened Iran’s position, and they broadcast alarmist propaganda about a “Shia crescent” taking over the region. This created all manner of political trouble for Iran, which did not wish to alienate the region’s Arabs. In short, Iran’s influence had grown, but so had its problems and insecurities. Most people did not feel emboldened so much as embattled.

This mix of insecurity, ambivalence toward the United States, and an embarrassed sense of decline created fertile ground for stoking Iranians’ nationalism over their nuclear program. Viewing themselves as inheritors of an ancient, sophisticated civilization stretching back thousands of years, they found Iran’s present-day condition a source of shame. When they looked around the region, they saw a modern Turkey leaning toward Europe, they saw the sleek commercial prosperity of Dubai, and they felt pangs of humiliation. Their own failing economy and shabby capital skyline offered no similar source of pride. But in nuclear power, they could have something those other nations did not. Or so Ahmadinejad convinced them. And he did so in a manner that appealed to a broad spectrum of society. “Let America get mad,” he once said. “Let it get mad and die of its anger!” These were the utterances of a petulant child, but Iranians, cornered by sanctions and by three decades of failed policies, found it easier to feel petulant than to take responsibility for the situation and take up the task of remedying it.

We were all taken in. I can’t count the dinner parties I attended where otherwise sensible individuals breathlessly said things like “He says what is in my heart.” Even Iranian businessmen, who should have been more wary, given the ten-billion-dollar drop in the Tehran Stock Exchange that accompanied the president’s election, shared these sentiments. Arash was finishing up an MBA program run by a German university in Tehran, and his classmates were, as the director liked to say, “the future leaders of Iranian industry.” The current leaders, their fathers, were seduced by Ahmadinejad’s rhetoric.

Some, among them people like Arash’s father, Mahmoud Agha, had specific and compelling reasons for giving the president the benefit of the doubt. In addition to his populist slogans, Ahmadinejad had emerged as a champion of Iranian industry, vowing in those early months to reshape the arthritic policies that hobbled domestic manufacturing. Before the revolution, Iranian industry, particularly in the textile sector, competed globally. Textile manufacturers provided the raw material for the uniforms of European police and delicate weaves that would be sewn into suits for Hugo Boss. But the economic chaos that accompanied the revolution undid Iranian manufacturing. A government indifferent to the economy looked away as smugglers flooded the country with imports, and exchange rates fluctuated wildly. Unable to compete with places like China, most Iranian industries ceased to turn profit and were veering toward extinction.

The textile business Mahmoud Agha founded in the late 1970s, called Laico, was one of the few exceptions. The creation of his company coincided with a fundamental shift in Iranian life, and its initial success lay in catering to the new needs that emerged. The migration of Iranians from the provinces to the cities, as well as the transformation of Tehran from a city of houses to one of apartment blocks, changed the way Iranians both lived and slept. As the population of Tehran grew beyond fourteen million, as traffic, long work hours, and the conventional rhythms of modern urban life took over the leisured pace of preindustrial Iran, extended families ceased to occupy physical space in each other’s lives. Families no longer required heaps of floor mattresses to accommodate visiting relatives. Couples bore fewer children; in the space of just one generation, the urban Iranian
family became a two-child, nuclear unit that slept in separate rooms on beds. Laico supplied the sheets, pillowcases, and assorted bedding the country needed for its evolving sleeping arrangements, with such dominance in the market that Iranians began using the word
laico
to mean a comforter.