(11÷30÷08 — Edited by Richard to keep some mate­r­ial private.)

We arrived in Tehran very early in the morn­ing on July 30^th 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 fiancée, 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 Alas.