Lipstick Jihad (8 page)

The revolution of 1979 had already frozen the country's development for two decades; another violent upheaval would only devastate yet another generation, they argued. I listened carefully, fiddling with my pen, realizing with deep disappointment that if these students' views were at all representative (they were middle class, from all around the country) the Islamic regime was here to stay.

Deep in the heart of every Iranian expatriate lurks a hope for another revolution, one that would reverse the catastrophe of 1979 overnight, swiftly and bloodlessly topple the mullahs, and return our country to us. There is a consensus—among Iranian television networks in Los Angeles, exiles who host dinners for congressmen in Beverly Hills and Bethesda—that Iranians will eventually overthrow this regime, and that it is simply a matter of time. That conviction underpinned our lives in the diaspora, and in its defense we saw revenge and redemption for everything we had lost.

I had always thought that way myself, in part because I knew very little about post-revolutionary Iran, but more importantly, because I
wanted
it to be true. As the demonstrations breathed life into my conception of Iran, I saw that the expatriate view—Iran as a static, failed state in unchanging decline—had little to do with the country itself, and everything to do with the psychology of exile. It was an emotional trick to ease the pain of absence, the guilt of being the ones who left, or chose to stay outside. It was a delusion that deferred a mournful truth: that we would never regain the Iran of before 1979, that we would never go back. That if we wanted to deal with Iran as patriots, it would have to be the Iran that existed now, wounded and ugly with its pimples and scars.

I lay awake at night, my old ideas about Iran shattered, with no new framework to understand any better what might happen. The society I had stepped into was precarious, that much was clear. One day, perhaps very near or very far, its current reality would collapse. But how would this happen, barring the bang of revolution? The uncertainty was transfixing, and I spent hours talking until I was hoarse, filling pages with notes, trying to understand.

The slogans the students chanted that summer of 1999, together with the gigantic outpouring of public discontent, fell two decades after the Islamic Revolution and marked an important turning point in its history. Two years prior—in 1997—a moderate cleric named Mohammed Khatami was elected president and promised to transform the Islamic regime into a more gentle, democratic system governed by the rule of law. I remember standing at the magazine stand of a chain bookstore in California, watching other Iranian-Americans cast curious, hopeful glances at the covers that screamed things like “The Beginning of the End” and “Iran's Second Revolution?”

An array of progressive intellectuals and activists of varying backgrounds, ranging from the ardently secular to the liberally Islamist, backed Khatami's efforts. The whole process, from the president's reforms to the grassroots activism, came to be known as the reform movement. The premise that held these disparate forces—socialists, secular intellectuals, both liberal and militant Islamists—together was that Iran could be, indeed must be, transformed from within, without another revolution. This absolutely everyone I talked to agreed with—from my elderly great-aunt who kept a photo of the Shah on her nightstand, to teenage punks who listened to rap and raced motorbikes.

Some of the reformers were concerned with internal political and civil rights, and sought to nudge Iran from autocratic theocracy toward tolerant democracy. If they managed to amend the Constitution, their thinking went, they could abolish or dramatically curtail the power of unelected clerical bodies that ran the country and controlled its economy. Many from this reformist camp, however, wanted to retain the revolution's anti-Western ethos and its commitment to religio-political causes such as the liberation of Palestine. It was a don of the reformist camp, for example, who organized the Palestinian Intifadeh conferences that would be held in Tehran, gathering young and old militants, among them notorious most-wanted-types, to munch on pastry and poke a collective finger in the eye of the West.

Another strand in the reform movement held a pragmatic vision for Iran's future. Their main objective was to redefine the system's mandate along conventional lines—economic growth and the welfare of Iranians. Promoting ideological causes, they felt, kept Iran in a state of fixed tension with the West, and retarded the country's potential as a great power in the region.

Had the reformists been able to agree on priority and strategy, their diversity could have been a source of strength rather than weakness. But they were unable to create a real coalition, and instead bickered among themselves over whether or not to engage with America, over the priority of domestic freedoms, over strategy in dealing with their conservative opponents.

Aligned against these forces stood the old-guard clerical establishment, known as the hard-liners. Just as “reformers” was an umbrella term for diverse political groups seeking change, the “hard-liners” were an equally diverse group, brought together by their allegiance to the status quo. Many were simply outright fundamentalists, Taliban-like in their rigid, backward attitudes toward women, society, and the world outside. Their commitment to exporting Khomeini's Islamic Revolution had not wavered, and they sought to extend Iran's regional influence through support for militant causes. Just as many, if not more, were motivated by money and greed, keen to preserve the rich patronage networks, privileges, and unbridled power the system in its current form allotted them.

The hard-liners, for all intents and purposes, controlled the country. They ran the army and the Revolutionary Guard, had foot militias at their service, held monopoly over state media, and supervised the economy through the
bonyads,
massive funds for the oppressed created after the Revolution. They were custodians of government and law as well, because the elected branches of government—the executive and parliament—were legally vulnerable to the decrees and vetting procedures of the clerical bodies, accountable to the country's supreme religious leader. This position, more powerful than president, was the brainchild of Ayatollah Khomeini, who passed it down to his successor, Ayatollah Khamenei. The photos of both men, with their twin black turbans and dour glares, wallpapered the country.

The history lessons I absorbed during this first visit back helped me understand the struggles revolutionary Iran was facing. But understanding the full splay of the history also complicated my work as a journalist, to document these events for the American media. In my files, generalizations like “reformist, liberal, progressive, moderate” appeared over and over again. My conscience bristled at this language, especially since news stories rarely had room for the historical context required to explain the nuances of these misleading labels.

Writing about Iran as an American journalist, in language that did not get one banned from the country, meant effacing history from the story. It was, to read most written accounts of the political schism, as though real liberals—secular intellectuals, technocrats, and activists with no ties to the clergy—either did not exist or were too irrelevant to be counted as political realities. A conservative politician whom I frequently visited in Tehran had the same complaint, though from a slightly different standpoint. “You journalists, you're painting this story as a fight between good and evil,” he said. “You're absolutely right,” I told him, though I finished the sentence silently this way: “It's actually a fight between evil and slightly less evil.”

President Khatami, perhaps aware that recasting the state's foreign policy would be a task for Sisphyus, set about transforming the style and culture of daily life. By restructuring the upper management of key ministries, he discreetly engineered a more relaxed official approach to Iranians' private lives. The morality police, charged with enforcing the strict social code, began to behave with less regular brutality, and the Culture Ministry issued permits for independent newspapers. In his speeches, he retired the inherited rhetoric of the revolution—martyrdom and death, struggle and enemies—and spoke instead of civil society, dialogue, and openness.

In the early years of Khatami's first term, from 1997 to 1999, Iranians experienced only modest change. I stayed on for a few weeks, during that chaotic, life-transforming first visit, and found the atmosphere decidedly Soviet. My female relatives and I wore dark veils and sandals with socks, wiped off our lipstick when we saw policemen in the distance. My aunt still came along for the ride, if a male cousin was dropping me off late at night, in case we were stopped at a checkpoint. In taxis, my relatives hissed me silent, when I jabbered away critically, suggesting Tehran seemed like a giant cemetery, with nearly every street and tiny alley named for a martyr.

From a purely moral and political vantage point, not to mention an emotional one (what Iranian didn't despise the revolutionary clerics, really, for all they had done?), we considered the reformists suspect, a choice of the less bad among the awful. But did they help transform the way we lived, our habits and sensibilities? They did.

By the end of 1999 and into 2000, the pressures lightened noticeably, and people felt more comfortable behaving in ways that had before seemed reckless. While the legal basis for the regime's oppressive ways stayed intact,
the open spirit of Khatami's presidency, and his relentless rhetoric about the rule of law, changed the culture of Iran. For years, public space had been the domain of Islamic vigilantes and the morality police, who arbitrarily terrorized people. Khatami reined them in, and under him Tehran became almost a normal city, with young couples strolling in the park arm in arm, licking ice cream cones.

The demonstrations both fed off and propelled this energy. The hundreds of thousands of people who poured into the streets of Tehran and shouted “Death to the Supreme Leader!” collapsed the regime's façade of invulnerability. More powerful than a mass referendum, as loud as the opening cries for change in 1979, the protests signaled that Iran's nearly 70 million people wanted a different set of rules, a different kind of country. How the clerics in charge would respond, whether they were prepared to change, hung in the balance.

The demonstrations of 1999 also played a central role in my own life. Captivated by the political drama, I knew I had to return and watch the rest unfold. Compared to the stagnant politics of Egypt, the electric, bold debates in Iran, and the open battle for the country's future, were dream stories for a young journalist. A few months later, the regional bureau chief of
Time
suggested I go work in Tehran as the magazine's stringer.

At that time—before the second Palestinian Intifadeh, and well before September 11—Iran was the hottest news story in the region, and the regime didn't allow U.S. publications to base American journalists in Iran. Because I was also Iranian, the regime politely ignored my American birth and passport, and allowed me to come and work. I would be the only American journalist permitted to base myself in Tehran, during what seemed at the time one of the most significant political transformations in the modern history of the region. I packed my bags, and prepared to leave Cairo behind.

My preparations proceeded smoothly, until I announced the decision to my family in California, who were immediately horrified, convinced that torture and certain death awaited me. Relatives from all over the world, of all ages, were recruited to aid the effort of dissuading me. Scandalized Maman, with twenty-year-old visions of political repression of journalists, tried to prevent my going with alternating tactics of fiscal blackmail, admonition, and horror. (“You realize that the physical scars of the torture will
heal, but the nightmares of prison rape will haunt you forever. Your personality will never be the same. Be advised your father will cut you off entirely. No more ski vacations, nothing. You can fund your own foolishness.”)

I tried to avoid the hysteria building around me, though at times I reminisced over the grimmer moments in our family lore—the uncle imprisoned by the revolutionary regime; the great-uncle who hurled himself from a third-story window to evade the Shah's secret police—and wondered whether my identity could not be explored in, say, the Iran archives of a really good university library. During these moments of doubt I would leaf through Goldman Sachs recruitment literature, and contemplate whether I could endure life with, for example, a giant scar on my cheek slashed by a vindictive Islamic thug. The terror campaign shook me a little, because ultimately I didn't really want to die in the course of covering a story, and didn't know Iran well enough to know this was unlikely. But I reminded myself these were the same relatives who thought they would be murdered riding the subway through Manhattan, and went ahead and bought my ticket.