freely patrolling the streets, sending with a slightly heavier application of makeup, flamboyant jewelry, and a few straying strands of hair the same message sent by spike heels and a G-string in Atlantic City.
Nowhere is the inverse nature of Iran more evident than in its memory of the gerogan- giri, the “hostage taking.” The different ways this event is remembered in Iran and in the United States illustrate how nations invent their own pasts, and how the simplification of history can create impossible gulfs between peoples. To Americans, for whom the incident has become little more than an embarrassing historical footnote, it was an unprovoked kidnapping carried out by a scruffy band of half-crazy Islamist zealots driven by a senseless hatred of all things American. It was a terrifying ordeal for the hostages and their families, fatal for eight of the would-be rescuers and some of the Iranians who had taken American money to spy, and a political disaster for Jimmy Carter—perhaps the single most important factor in making him a one-term president. It was a protracted public humiliation.
For many Iranians, however, the hostage crisis was an unalloyed triumph. From the earliest moments of the takeover, artists, poets, journalists, politicians, mullahs, and historians began wrapping it in the cloak of legend, shading the actual incident with historical and mystical significance. It remains for the true believers a keystone of the national mythology, the epic tale of a small group of devout young gerogan- girha who, armed only with prayer and purity of heart, stormed the fortress gates of the most evil, potent empire on the planet, faced down the infidels’ rifles and tear gas, and secured it without shedding a drop of blood, reclaiming the heart of Iran from the clutches of the devil himself. The poignant and poetic story continues, telling how these innocent servants of Allah treated their often crude and abusive captives with kindness and respect even as they pieced together shredded embassy documents to expose and thwart their plots to destroy the revolution and reinstate the criminal shah. And when the Great Satan dispatched its deadly commandos to slay these young heroes (this is the part that fires the blood of the faithful), Allah stirred haboobs in the desert to down the infidel helicopters and turn back the invaders. This is the story taught to schoolchildren who are bused in to see the “Great Aban 13th” exhibition, where they can measure the reality of the miracle for themselves by touching remains of the aircraft that Allah scorched while the innocent gerogan-girha slept.
Apart from the fantasy, and aside from the heavy price the country continues to pay, the embassy takeover served an important purpose during revolutionary days. For those Iranians who were waiting for the Islamist fervor to die down and for the forces formerly allied with the United States to reassert themselves, it crushed any hope for a return to Western-style normalcy. The standoff and the allegations of American plotting purveyed by the students undermined every political faction in Iran except the Islamists and, as we have seen, carried them firmly into power. It also was a wildly popular assertion of national pride, a symbolic casting-off of colonial subservience and a reassertion of that nation’s greatness and distinction.
In this sense, the fairy tale of the gerogan-giri may still manage to stir a piece of the Persian soul, but many (if not most) Iranians today aren’t buying it. When I was posing before a Khomeini mural for a snapshot one afternoon in the winter of 2003, a young Iranian passerby asked me in English, “Why do you want a picture of that asshole?”
On arriving at the airport in Tehran, my American passport—unusual in Iran these days—provoked a grimace and an annoyed grunt from the customs agent. My traveling companion, the filmmaker David Keane, and I were both waved back into the waiting area while various officials argued spiritedly in Farsi over the correct protocol for ushering two vipers of iniquity across their borders. We sat while extra forms were prepared, inspected, signed, and stamped, and we were fingerprinted, every finger. Everyone was polite but we passed through customs hours after the rest of our flight had departed.
Traveling to Iran isn’t really hard, just expensive. Early in 2002 I applied for a visa to the Iranian UN mission in New York, then waited for months. When I learned that sometimes years are spent in limbo following this procedure, I sought other means. In Iran there is no such thing as a bribe, but happily there is something called reshveh, or a “success fee”—just as in Iranian banking there are karmozd, or “banking fees,” because usury is forbidden by the Koran. It turns out that in the right hands, a reshveh can generate a visa application within hours. The engineer of this miracle in our case was one Kamal Taheri, an oily gentleman with a great soft belly and perpetual week-old gray stubble who directs something called Reseneh Yar, the “Foreign Media Guide Centre.” For roughly five thousand dollars (Taheri will dicker), he will produce a perfectly valid visa and, to facilitate reporting in Iran, an able fixer and translator (who does all the actual work). On arrival, a few hundred dollars more is extracted for the mandatory “press pass,” a laminated photo ID decked with elaborate Farsi that is good for startling cops in rural Pennsylvania but which serves no purpose whatsoever in Iran; in my two trips, no one ever asked to see it. Taheri is a former mid-level intelligence ministry official with friends in high places, hence he gets to run this “business,” which has effectively privatized the ministry’s tradition of assigning a “minder” to visiting journalists. All our requests for interviews went through Taheri, and taped copies of them must be turned over to him. Privatization is a big deal right now in Iran, but it just serves as an excuse for flagrant cronyism. Taheri and a few smaller, less well connected rivals operate as gatekeepers and babysitters for all foreign journalists in Iran.
The country is governed in a way that differs fundamentally from any conventional Western power structure. Most hierarchies can be diagrammed in a pyramid; Iran’s is more like a string of prayer beads suspended vertically. The beads are of various sizes so that one’s rank in the descending row does not necessarily indicate one’s power. Nepotism and friendship count for a lot in Iran, and even if someone holds a relatively unimportant office, or none at all, he may wield disproportionate clout. Many areas of authority overlap. Plotting the overall design is a little like trying to trace the pattern on a Persian rug.
The use of the term “republic” is double-talk. The elected government is run by a small group of privileged clerics who decide what candidates and what laws are acceptable, who control the military and the secret police, and whatever else they wish, and who stifle dissent, beating up or locking up those they don’t like. The ruling clerics are led by Khamenei, who in the years since he made periodic visits to the hostages has become an avuncular old ayatollah with big glasses and the mandatory long white beard. He was appointed by an “assembly of experts” after the death of the Imam Khomeini in 1989 and, by all accounts, is comfortable seeing himself as the hand of Allah Himself in Iran. All laws and candidates for any public post must be approved by him and the Guardians Council, a twelve-member body of clerics and judges that he appoints. The elected government of Iran is a kind of toy democracy that serves at his pleasure. It consists of an elected president, currently the populist ultraconservative former mayor of Tehran, Ahmadinejad, the Majlis, and a judiciary. The mullahs tolerate just enough of a semblance of democracy and freedom to maintain the pretense of democracy.
It is a clever despotism, a combination of full oppression leavened with an appreciation for appearances. Iran’s leaders have learned from the mistakes of past dictators. Stalin and Mao were brutal and unapologetic; they saw communism as the wave of the future and were molding a so-called new man. Those who opposed or disagreed were dealt with summarily. Saddam Hussein, who ruled Iraq next door for decades through sheer terror, was unapologetically in business for himself and his family. The mullahocracy is kinder and gentler. Iran is the land of bordbari, or “toleration.” If you are not a true believer, or even if you are but you disagree with official policy, you are tolerated by the regime provided you don’t make too much trouble. Indeed, certain kinds of criticism from certain quarters, so long as it does not deal with religion or politics, are duly licensed and authorized and are “well tolerated.”
Bordbari is something the government takes seriously, as with the case of a literary scholar who sought to publish a Farsi translation of James Joyce’s Ulysses. The story was told to me by an Iranian friend, and is so delicious that it must be apocryphal, but it illustrates a point. A censor predictably objected to some of the steamier passages in the novel, which offended Islamic moral standards. The scholar refused to cut the passages. “The book is a classic,” he told the censor. “I refuse to publish it with pieces cut out.” He was prepared to leave it at that but the censor persisted. “This is a great book, let’s find a solution,” he said. The scholar then proposed publishing the objectionable passages, exactly as Joyce wrote them, in English. But the censor objected again, saying that too many Iranians could read English. It was decided that the sexy bits would be printed in Italian, an oddly appropriate solution that I suspect would have especially amused the novel’s famously multilingual author.
Flexibility and compromise make this system palatable for the educated upper middle class, and nurtures
