After the wed­ding, we trav­eled to Esfa­han and Shi­raz, two cities in cen­tral Iran about which I will write in more detail later. We spent three days in each place, tak­ing in as many sites as pos­si­ble. My one big regret is that we didn’t have the time to stop and really talk with the peo­ple who, once they found out that I was from the United States, wanted very much to talk with me. Very few Amer­i­cans go to Iran as tourists, and Ira­ni­ans are deeply aware of how they are demo­nized in this coun­try, and they want the chance to demys­tify them­selves. Almost every Iran­ian I met on the street asked me some ver­sion of this ques­tion, “So, you are Amer­i­can? What do you think of Ira­ni­ans? Are we really as bad as you have heard in your coun­try?” One high school psy­chol­ogy teacher was incred­u­lous that any­one would think Ira­ni­ans are a vio­lent peo­ple and he urged me to go back home and tell my fel­low cit­i­zens how wrong we are about them. I wish I’d had the chance to talk more with him.

There is, in fact, a great deal that can be said about how Iran and Ira­ni­ans are demo­nized in the US, and while I don’t want to turn this post into an analy­sis of that phe­nom­e­non, I do feel the need to give you my $.02: While some of the demo­niza­tion I have men­tioned is left over resent­ment from what we here called the Iran Hostage Cri­sis in 1979 – 1980 (also here), much of it now, in my expe­ri­ence any­way, is the result of both the “axis of evil” rhetoric employed by the Bush admin­is­tra­tion and the media to talk about Iran and the con­fla­tion of Iran, Ira­ni­ans and Iran­ian cul­ture with the nations, peo­ple and cul­tures of the Arab and wider Sunni Mus­lim worlds, at least as the lat­ter are por­trayed as our “ene­mies” in the so-called war on ter­ror­ism. Not that Iran’s gov­ern­ment and media have not employed (some­times extreme) anti-American and anti­se­mitic rhetoric, but the acts of vio­lence against indi­vid­ual Amer­i­cans that have so hor­ri­fied peo­ple here and that led some of my friends and acquain­tances, and even mem­bers of my fam­ily, to ques­tion the wis­dom of “a nice Jewish-American boy” who looks, as one friend put it, “so obvi­ously Jew­ish” even set­ting one foot inside Iran – the behead­ing of Daniel Pearl being per­haps the most famous exam­ple – have not taken place in Iran. Indeed, the extrem­ist vio­lence that does exist in Iran – and the only exam­ples I have been able to find so far have been attacks car­ried out by the Jun­dol­lah Sun­nis in south­east­ern Iran (here, here, here, here and here) – has been per­pe­trated almost entirely against other Ira­ni­ans. Lonely Planet’s guide to Iran does cite a few kid­nap­pings of for­eign­ers – by drug smug­glers – but they all took place in south­east­ern Iran and under cir­cum­stances that would not gen­er­ally apply to some­one trav­el­ing in the rest of the coun­try, espe­cially in the major cities. The Lonely Planet web­site also sug­gests that it’s a good idea to avoid ral­lies and demon­stra­tions because they could become vio­lent, but as far as I know that vio­lence has never been directed explic­itly at for­eign­ers; rather, it tends to be the gov­ern­ment vio­lently crack­ing down on the Ira­ni­ans who are ral­ly­ing. I never once felt threat­ened or in any kind of dan­ger when I was in Iran; even some mem­bers of the moral­ity police – about which more in a future post – made a point of wav­ing and say­ing, in Eng­lish, “Hello, wel­come to Iran,” and they seemed gen­uinely happy to see me.

Obvi­ously, two weeks and some days is too short a time to form any­thing but the most super­fi­cial impres­sions of a for­eign coun­try and the peo­ple who live there, but Ira­ni­ans and their cul­ture have been an inti­mate part of my life now for the 15 years I have been mar­ried, and so much of what I encoun­tered in Iran was not as alien to me as it might oth­er­wise have been. I under­stand a fair amount of Per­sian, even though I very rarely speak it, and so I was often able to under­stand what peo­ple said with­out hav­ing to rely on my wife or some other rel­a­tive as a trans­la­tor. All of which meant that there were moments when I expe­ri­enced a kind of dual vision, being able to see things simul­ta­ne­ously as the out­sider that I was and, if not as a true insider, then at least in part from the inside. I will write more about this when I write about the chador and the hejab and what it felt like to be in a place where adult women have to cover them­selves in public.

In the end, I found myself wish­ing not only that we’d had more time in Iran, but that I could have been there by myself so that I could, as one of our friends put it, be a trav­eler and not a tourist. I wanted to be able to go with the flow, fol­low the oppor­tu­ni­ties for meet­ing peo­ple and see­ing things that pre­sented them­selves to me – like the indoor women’s soc­cer team from Ahvaz (a city in south­ern Iran) that we met in Park-e Jamshidiyeh – with­out hav­ing to worry about my wife or my son or any­one else not want­ing to go, or about the sched­ule we had to keep to because we were there with fam­ily, etc.

I hope I will be able to make that trip some day.