"They've Turned Iran Into One Big Prison" – My First Day in Tehran

(11/30/08: Edited by Richard to keep some material private.)

We arrived in Tehran very early in the morning on July 30th at the nearly brand-spanking new Imam Khomeini Airport, where we stood on line to have our visas checked by a very sour-looking woman, who did a double-take when she saw my son’s name on his passport and asked whether he was, in fact, really a boy. Many of the people we met in Iran responded to my son’s long hair in this way. Bazaar vendors, shop owners, people who stopped to talk to us on the street, almost every taxi driver who chatted with us while he drive–all assumed, until we told them otherwise, that my son was a girl. After a while, this assumption seemed odd to me, because while it was not very common to see young men with hair as long as my son wears his, neither was it such a rarity that it attracted stares–at least as far as I could tell. Not that Iran’s very strict and often violently enforced gender guidelines have somehow been widened to make uncontested room for long hair on men. Pictures posted on the web last year (here, here and here) showed members of the Gasht-e Ershad, Iran’s morality police–the name means, literally, something like “Guide towards Enlightenment”–beating young men up for having long hair and other appearance-related offenses. It just struck me that so many of the people we met, who did not seem to bat an eye at long hair on college-aged or older men, found it so remarkable that my son should wear his hair as long as he does. (Here is a video of someone telling the story of his sister’s arrest by the Gasht-e Ershad when he and his family went back to Iran to visit for the first time in 10 years; it’s not about long hair per se, but it will give you a sense of how the Gasht-e Ershad works. I will write in another post about my wife’s experience having to dress appropriately and about my experience/impression of being in a country where women have to cover themselves the way they do in Iran, because while it may be true that men have to be careful of the way they dress and look, the restrictions placed on women are far more stringent, and the consequences if women cross the line can be far more severe).

Imam Khomeini Airport was also where we had our first, very brief and very minor, and thankfully only, taste of how potentially complicated Iranian bureaucracy can be. When the woman checking our visas ran my wife’s information through the system, it popped up that, the last time she had been in Iran, my wife had not paid the airport tax, also called an exit fee, and she was told she would have to pay it before she would be allowed to enter the country. (The Wikipedia article on Khomeini Airport has an explanation of this tax.) Paying the tax, however, turned out to be more complicated than you would think, since the desk to which my wife was first directed turned out not to be the desk where the fee had to be paid. Instead the officers at that desk told my wife she had to go to a bank window somewhere else in the airport, pay the fee and bring back proof of payment for them to clear her records. In reality, I don’t think it took all that long to resolve this issue, but after nearly 14 hours in transit, it seemed to take forever, and while my son and I waited with our luggage for my wife to return from wherever it was in the airport she had been sent, I could not help but think about the horror stories I had read and heard about how difficult the Iranian government’s bureaucracy can be to navigate, especially when more than one office is involved. Eventually, though, my wife appeared, everything in order, and we put our suitcases onto the scanning machine’s conveyor belt, retrieved them at the other end, and walked out to meet my brother-in-law and his fiancee, my mother-in-law and one of her sisters. We got into the taxis they hired for us and, in what was one of only two completely traffic-free drives through Tehran–the other was also very early in the morning, when we went back to the airport for our flight home–rode the last leg of our journey to the brand new apartment where my brother-in-law lives in the village of Darakeh.

Darakeh is a small village on the northern outskirts of Tehran, right at the foot of the Alborz Mountains. Parts of the original village were built into the mountainside,

and I could see as we walked up the narrow trail on our first day in Iran–with my brother-in-law and his then wife-to-be as guides–how the mountain itself often served as the back wall of some of the structures that we passed. That first walk became an object lesson in how Iran is, at one and the same time, a country and a culture with a 5,000-some-odd year history and a very modern place, or at least a place struggling to be modern. At the bottom of the hill where we started our climb up the mountain is the apartment complex where my brother-in-law lives, newly built and part of a huge push to develop the area. On the way up, we passed a group of people hanging plastic grocery bags filled with someone’s shopping for the month on either side of a mule’s saddle, and just a very few short minutes later, we were passed by that mule, the bell on its forehead jingling with each step it took as its rider steered it along the trail; and then we passed it again, resting for a bit, its cargo unloaded somewhere else and its rider nowhere to be seen.

More examples of how the old and the new mingle in Iran came in the form of the English-language graffiti that we saw on the trail and in the old village of Darakeh itself. There was one wall that I unfortunately did not get a picture of on which someone had written “Fuck You!” in big black letters, along with people’s names and other slogans–though none provided quite the interest, or contrast, of the two pieces of Persian graffiti we saw on the same wall in Shiraz, one of which said something like, “The hejab [or chador; I don’t remember which] is not a limitation; rather, it is [the freedom of] innocence” and the other of which said, “Death to the Islamic Republic.” The most remarkable piece of graffiti we saw on the way into Darakeh, however, was the one which announced “Rap.Shahab.Mehran.Behman” and some version of which we saw in a couple of places. For my son, who is ten, this was particularly remarkable, since he shares a name–though he spells his with an O–with one of the rappers.

There have been a few articles written about rap in Iran, which is deeply political on at least two levels: the words and the music itself. My brother-in-law’s new wife told me that the music at their wedding–about which I will write in another post–was illegal, and couldn’t have gotten us all in trouble, had the morality police come, in two ways: because of the words, which would have been considered obscene, and because of the music itself, which violates the Islamic Republic’s sense of propriety. Here’s an example of Iranian rap. (There are others, but I’ve chosen this one because it has an English translation in the video.)

Aside from being a place where people come to escape the crowded hustle and almost overwhelming air pollution of Tehran, the area where my brother-in-law lives has another claim to fame: Evin Prison. This is the prison where political prisoners have been held, tortured and executed since the Shah’s time. (It is, also, a “regular” prison in that non-political prisoners are held there as well. More on Evin here, here, here, and here.) As we walked up the trail, we could see the prison wall in the distance, and my son took one look at it and, before we knew what it was, said, “Hey, look! The Great Wall of Iran!”

After my brother-in-law told us exactly what was on the other side of that wall, however, we all grew quiet. My wife’s family, like many, many others in Iran, lost a lot of people–friends, relatives, children, spouses–during the revolution in Iran if not to that prison itself, then certainly to the politics driving its use. Ervand Abrahamian’s Tortured Confessions: Prisons and Public Recantations in Modern Iran is an interesting, useful, important and even compelling book about what went on on the other side of the wall we saw during the Shah’s reign and under the Islamic Republic.

The Evin Prison wall was too far away to be a backdrop to what was the most compelling thing to happen on my first day in Iran, but knowing it was there provided a meaningful context. It was getting dark and we were on our way down the mountain when we passed a group of hikers–I think they were all men, but I am not sure–one of whom, a short, stocky guy with a receding hairline, a wide-brimmed cloth hat hanging down his back from the string around his neck and thick, muscular thighs revealed by the shorts he was wearing. The fact that he wasn’t wearing pants did not immediately register with me. had only been in the country some hours at this point; had I passed him by after a week or so (and I will write more about this in another post), the sight of his bare legs would have surprised me the way it surprised my wife and my mother-in-law, one of whom remarked about just how risky a thing he was doing by dressing that way. The man stopped and turned around, and I understood very little of what he said next, since it was in Persian, but it was impossible to miss the incredulity that filled his eyes as he spoke. “They’ve turned Iran,” he said, “into one big prison!” And he turned to the women and urged them to take off their head scarves and to live free, and then he held forth with deep, deep passion–I am summarizing the translation my wife made for me later–about how important it was to resist the government and its religious and other impositions onto and into people’s lives. I wish I’d been able to get a picture of him, but it was dark and our camera had run out of batteries.

I have been married to an Iranian for 15 years now, and while I have not gone out of my way to immerse myself in Iranian culture or history, it has been impossible for me not to learn something–other than what I have read in books–about what Iranian revolution meant to those who went through it, especially those who were on the wrong side of the Islamic Republic. Almost all my wife’s relatives, at least those whom I know–except for her father who was a colonel in the Shah’s personal guard–took part in the revolution against the Shah, and all of them are here in the US because once the revolution was hijacked by Khomeini and company (and whatever you think of the original revolutionary impulse, the mullahs did hijack the revolution itself), they found themselves on the side that the government was killing. My wife remembers living in her own house but being unable to use the electricity or to go out to play–basically they were in hiding in their own home–because they were afraid the kommiteh would come for her father. (They did not; or, rather, they did, but they let him go each time because the men who had served under him spoke so highly of him.) And she remembers how members of the family turned against each other, with those on the side of the revolution informing on, and doing worse to, the people who did not oppose the Shah. And I am thinking about a conversation, an argument really, that I had recently with my father and his wife, who claimed that the people of Iran must be perfectly happy with their government; if they weren’t, why were they not rising up in armed revolution to get the mullahs out of power? I wondered as they spoke, talking about the need to take risks and to be willing to die for your freedom, if they would have said the same thing about the people in the former Soviet Union, or the people of China or Cuba? And I am not here taking a position regarding capitalism vs. communism or any such thing; I am naming those countries simply because they are ones that my father and his wife oppose(d) as strongly as they oppose Iran, and they are countries, especially the Soviet Union, that practiced a particularly harsh kind of repression. Their line of argument was one that I have heard from some voices on the right here in the States, and I wonder just how much people who make it understand, really understand, what it means to live in a country where the government has so been able to insinuate itself into people’s minds, not in the sense of brainwashing, but in the sense of being a constant, feared and profoundly dangerous presence; what it means to come from a generation of people who, not a few of them, watched their entire family murdered by the government. I certainly don’t know what that means, what kind of trauma that sort of experience leaves you, both individually and collectively, to live with, and I would not presume to judge the people who do have to live with it.

But I thought also as my wife and I argued with my father and his wife of the people in Iran who are resisting. There have been student protests that we have heard about, and there have been those we here in the US have not; the blogosphere in Iran is huge. Last I read, Persian is something like the fourth most common language used for blogging worldwide, and being a blogger in Iran carries real risks. Especially if you choose to write about political issues, it can get you jailed, tortured and even killed. A good book to read about this–in the sense of it being informative; it is not always well-written and it is too partisan to be entirely trustworthy–is We Are Iran: The Persian Blogs, by Nasrin Alavi. Mostly, though, as we argued, I thought about this man in shorts and the personal act of resistance they represented, and I thought about how any real revolution needs to start there, with the personal. Not that there aren’t people, inside Iran and out, trying to organize for change–I will not even attempt, because I understand so very little of it, to talk about the politics involved with the different factions that want to bring their own kind of change to Iran. But it’s personal acts like wearing shorts, like wanting, simply, to sit comfortably on a bus, that I think motivate lasting cultural and political change. It’s hard for me to imagine, even though I was only there for two very short weeks, such change not coming to Iran.

Cross posted on It’s All Connected.