Intimidation In Tehran

By Azadeh Moaveni

On a sunny day earlier this summer, I took my 8-month-old baby boy Hourmazd for a walk in the foothills of Tehran's Alborz Mountains. Families and young people crowded the tree-lined path ahead, chatting leisurely and snacking on crepes and barbecued corn. As I pushed the stroller along, a policewoman in a black chador blocked my way. She fingered my plain cotton head scarf, pronounced it too thin and directed me toward a parked minibus. It took a full minute for me to realize that she meant to arrest me. "I've been wearing this veil for over five years," I pleaded. "Surely it can't be that unacceptable?" My husband soon caught up with us and began berating the policewoman for harassing a young mother. The commotion drew the attention of a bearded superior officer, who came over to inspect me. "The problems are not few," he said, frowning at my sleeves, which fell a few inches above my unsteady wrists. He ordered me to sign a ta'ahod, a commitment that I would not repeat my mistake. "Now go home," he said. "Go home, and don't come back."

Iran's rulers are notorious for their mercurial ways, cracking down on some social freedoms one season and tolerating the most outrageous pastimes the next. The reliable exception has been standards of Islamic dress, which have been relaxed for years, allowing women to wear short coats and bright, pushed-back head scarves. But recently the rules changed overnight. As we inched out of the busy parking lot, I leaned out the window to warn a group of young women whose dress was sure to make them targets. "They're arresting people up ahead," I said. Only one nonchalantly tugged her veil forward a little. The others continued laughing, as though they didn't believe me. It had been so long since women were rounded up in the streets that I didn't blame them. Young men with long hair, women with jewel-toned veils filled the area. "Will they arrest the entire parking lot?" I wondered aloud. "The whole city?"

When I moved to Tehran in 2005 to work as a reporter and start a family, life was difficult but bearable. The country my parents had left behind for the U.S. in the 1970s was on the mend. The economy was poor and the pollution stifling, but if you asked most Iranians whether things were better than in the past, most would have said yes. Although the election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad that year had prompted worries that the regime would enforce social strictures with renewed vigor, the suppression never materialized. Ahmadinejad declared that Iranians had more important issues to deal with than Islamic dress, so the system continued to deal permissively with the 48 million Iranians under the age of 30, who make up more than two-thirds of the population. Some continued leeway on social restrictions was all the government could offer this vast, disaffected young constituency, a small consolation for the absence of political freedoms and economic opportunities. It was not San Francisco--there could be no cocktail bars or nightclubs--but neither was it Saudi Arabia.

In the past few months, however, Tehran has become a different place. Convinced the U.S. is seeking to destabilize their Islamic system through economic pressure and covert infiltration of political life, the ruling clerics are retaking control of the public sphere ahead of next spring's parliamentary elections. "The more threatened the hard-liners feel, the more paranoid they will become," says Farideh Farhi, an Iran expert and professor of political science at the University of Hawaii.

Things began falling apart in the spring when authorities raided neighborhoods all over the city to confiscate illegal satellite dishes, Iranians' link to the outside world. The police swooped down on our building early one morning, kicking the devices down with their boots. Two of my neighbors, using their mobile phones, recorded footage of trucks carting off the dishes, only to have the phones confiscated as well. My 6-year-old nephew wept, desolate at the loss of his cartoon channel and angry that we had not called the police. "But the police were the ones who took the dish," I explained. "It was against the law." He naturally wanted to know why we had been breaking the law in the first place. This led to the sort of complicated discussion one hopes never to have with a young child--all about how we break the law at home while pretending to observe Islamic codes outside. In recent years, the gulf between public and private life in Iran had shrunk, a happy development, especially for parents, who saw their children more willing than at any time before the revolution to spend their lives inside the country. But talking to my nephew, I could almost feel the gap being stretched wide open again, and the thought filled me with sadness.

As news of what was happening on Tehran's streets filtered in, it became clear that the authorities had launched a full-scale campaign of intimidation, the likes of which the country had not seen in a decade or more. In the course of a few weeks, state news reported that some 150,000 people had been detained at least briefly. All the women in my life went out and bought dark, knee-length, shapeless coats, the sort of uniform we had discarded in the late '90s. The crackdown had everyone on edge, in part because it was so inexplicable. Many women avoided going out in public unless it was necessary. Even the pious considered the new mood egregious. As a friend of mine who wears the black chador out of conviction put it, "This is a mockery to focus on dress when our country has so many more urgent problems."

Within three weeks, the police vans disappeared from the streets, and women once again pushed back their veils, albeit with apprehension. To be on the safe side, I dressed conservatively for an appointment at a university in central Tehran. But at the gate a guard told me my manteau, a sort of Islamic overcoat, had "too few buttons," and he refused me admittance. "You look appalling," he said. A fellow guard rebuked him for addressing a "sister" so disrespectfully. The professor I was meeting, a reformer and onetime official, phoned to intervene, but the guards refused to budge. "Sorry, Doctor," the offensive one said, pronouncing the title with a sneer. I wanted to burst into tears but told myself it was an educational experience. It gave me a taste of what Tehran must have been like in the early days of the revolution, when Islamic ideologues took over universities, purging women and secular teachers. The professor told me later that he was lucky to still have his job. Two years ago, Ahmadinejad appointed a mullah as chancellor of the University of Tehran--the first move in what many called a second cultural revolution. Administrators forced scores of secular-minded professors into early retirement.

Such pressures reflect the system's growing obsession with security. Earlier this year, the system detained four Iranian-American academics for plotting to overthrow the regime through support for a civil society. (Authorities released one, Haleh Esfandiari, from prison on Aug. 21.) The message to Iranians was clear: Cut your ties with the outside world or face the consequences.

Since the arrests, I, along with many of my journalist friends, have stopped meeting with foreigners altogether, worried that harmless socializing might be considered spying. I have canceled dinners with visiting American friends, screened calls from abroad and stopped giving interviews to foreign media. "I'm nervous," I confessed in June to an official at the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance, which oversees the work of foreign journalists. "The red lines have all shifted, and I can't figure out what to write that won't get me in trouble." The official sighed, advised me to report as I had for years--honestly but with caution--and talked of the concerns swirling in the halls of government. "The Western media are distorting the image of Iran," he said. "Why does no one write about how Iranian women are ahead of the whole region in education, in public life?" I agreed with him but said it was difficult to communicate such gains in the midst of widening human-rights violations.

The next day, I attended a concert of Persian classical music at Niyavaran Palace, one of the former Shah's residences in northern Tehran. A decade ago, there were no such concerts to attend in Tehran because the mullahs frowned on music as un-Islamic. This summer there were concerts scheduled across the country, several of them including orchestras with female musicians. At least 3,000 people, among them many women in black chadors, mingled before the candlelit steps of the palace under a velvet sky. The country's preeminent poets and directors sat alongside government officials and their chador-clad wives, and gazing at the scene, you could be forgiven for imagining this was a society at peace with itself, run by men who appreciated the arts, reconciled with the role of Islam in daily life. The brutality of the previous month receded in my memory. Perhaps Iran was not caught in a downward spiral after all.

My sunny outlook carried into the next week and was seemingly reflected in the changing billboards adorning Tehran. For years religious murals have lent the city a dismal air, a constant reminder to Iranians that they are living under an Islamic theocracy that is hostile to everything it considers Western, including beauty. Now the billboards display attractive black-and-white photographs of grinning revolutionaries and Islamic calligraphy that resembles urban graffiti. One morning a white van with PEYK-E KHORSHID (MESSENGER OF THE SUN) emblazoned on its sides rolled into my neighborhood, and two women in powder blue chadors opened its doors to unveil a portable library. They smiled at passersby and handed out white gladioluses and free books as part of a municipal program to promote reading. I got children's editions of epic Persian poetry to read to my nephew. "This is positive, at least," said an elderly neighbor. "But people are so unhappy, no one notices when they try."

In past years, certain types of outreach had bought the state reluctant acquiescence from lower- and middle-class Iranians struggling with joblessness and record inflation. Low-interest loans and subsidies on basic foodstuffs have helped. High oil prices enabled this largesse. But oil's munificence is not limitless. The government, nervous that the West may impose sanctions on Iran's gasoline imports as punishment for its controversial nuclear activities, recently withdrew its subsidy of gasoline. Despite its vast oil reserves, Iran cannot produce sufficient gasoline to meet consumption, so in June the government imposed rationing. For days, gas stations saw long queues at all hours. On the way home from a dinner party the first night of the rationing, we were stuck in a three-hour traffic jam, the air filled with smoke from a gas station that rioters had set on fire.

Even our local produce seller, a mellow, religious old man not prone to talk of politics, could not control his fury at Ahmadinejad. "He's ruined this country," he said, storming around a stand of figs and mulberries. "Why doesn't someone stop him?" I was reminded of something an acquaintance of mine, a close relative of Ahmadinejad's, once said. "Tehran is like a warehouse of cotton," he told me. "One spark, and the whole place will burn." Suddenly the disturbing prospects of Iran's uncertain place in the world ceased to be an abstraction and became a reality disrupting our daily lives. The nightly news reported that gas stations had been set ablaze across the city. We spent three days at home without even going grocery shopping, reluctant to use up our gas and ruing the day we acquired an SUV.

These strained times coincided with my family's long-planned departure from Iran. My husband was starting graduate school in Europe, so we joined the tens of thousands of educated Iranians who make up the country's enormous annual brain drain. On the eve of leaving, I couldn't help feeling a profound sense of relief, as though we were rowing away from a sinking ship. The last time I moved away from Iran, back in 2002, the country was also in the throes of a crackdown, though nowhere near as all-encompassing as this one. The pretext back then was that George W. Bush had labeled Iran part of an "axis of evil," and when the rhetoric cooled, the regime resumed trying to placate its angry young people. Watching from afar, I will be eager to see how a hard-line government will woo back the vast middle class, alienated by the imposition of a more Islamic social order. In Isfahan angry citizens reportedly burned police buses used to round up flouters of "Islamic" dress. In Shiraz 2,000 university students demonstrated against new dress restrictions. It's hard to see how Ahmadinejad and his supporters will retain control of parliament in next spring's crucial elections. But "the hard-liners would rather rule over a population that fears them than one that likes them," explains my friend Karim Sadjadpour, an associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

ONE EVENING DURING MY LAST WEEK IN Iran, I attended a 300-guest family wedding just outside Tehran. The women bared skin in spectacular evening wear, and young people filled the dance floor well past midnight, entertained by a female DJ. Few Iranians dare to host such events anymore for fear of raids by the authorities. I caught up with the bride and asked her how she felt about starting her married life in such uncertain times. "There are days when life feels normal and I am happy and proud to be living in my own country, whatever its problems," she said. "And there are days when outside is like a nightmare. I just hope there will be more of the normal days."