Guests of the Ayatollah

hope among the more liberal-minded that real change will eventually come. Meanwhile, they cope by getting out. Iranians are free to travel, if they can afford it. Many well-to-do citizens spend large portions of their year overseas, free of petty religious dictates, and when they return home they live in relatively unharassed enclaves on the mountain slopes at the north side of the city. Inside shopping malls and food courts in this part of town the only obvious difference with the West is the reduced number and variety of retail shops. The same products and brand names—clothing, electronics, sporting goods—line the shelves. The women in these places turn hijab into a fashion statement. They wear sheer, colorful head scarves and sleek, clinging roupoosh, or “manteaus,” that mock the intent of vice laws. In one popular food court I observed a rainbow of lovely roupoosh in pink, white, orange, turquoise, and powder blue. The merchants pay a reshveh to the local morality thugs to keep them at bay, but if a camera crew records such excesses, perhaps catching pictures of couples actually holding hands, then the Basij in their “Mobile Units of God’s Vengeance” descend with long sticks and fines and restore Islamic order. This usually lasts for just a few weeks, when divine vigilance relaxes and, for the usual fee, standards are allowed to quietly slip again.

There is a similar pattern to bordbari on a larger scale. Near the end of his two- term presidency, Rafsanjani was permitted to loosen the political bonds countrywide in 1996, when the ruling mullahs decided to allow the relatively liberal Mohammed Khatami to run for president with a slate of reform- minded Majlis candidates. By all accounts, the balloting was allowed to proceed unmolested; Iran held an honest election. It produced a walloping landslide for Khatami and reform, and the newly elected legislators and president felt emboldened enough to seek real change. There was a brief blossoming of free speech and debate, opposition newspapers sprang up, and Iran began to smell the prospect of real freedom. There was heady talk of Iran “evolving” peacefully toward democracy. Khatami encoded the hopes of many in legislation that would have freed Iran’s law-makers from the veto power of the Guardians Council.

The mullahs stopped that fast. Ayatollah Khamenei vetoed the legislation, which provoked some rioting on college campuses in 2003 and some spontaneous heretical pro-American displays, but such outbursts were quickly subdued. Early in 2005, the Guardians Council simply crossed all reform candidates off the ballot. The conservatives were back in the saddle. The elevation of the blunt true believer Ahmadinejad, who as of this writing had called the Holocaust a myth and urged the destruction of Israel, has for a time stripped the kindly mask from the face of the regime.

Writers and artists must be licensed to work for any of the major news outlets, or for their work to be published or shown. A jury representing the ministries of information and culture weighs applicants and decides which pass political and religious muster. To be “authorized” supposedly means that you have the talent, the skills, and the experience to be taken seriously in your field, and to the extent that a broad range of journalism, literature, and art are tolerated, it lends credibility to the link between “authorized” and “qualified.” An unauthorized writer might even have some things published here or abroad and be tolerated for a time. Nothing might happen to him if the climate is right, or if he or she has important enough friends to be “well tolerated.” But if the climate changes, as it has recently, licensed publications live in daily fear of being shut down. In the current crackdown more than a hundred reform newspapers and magazines have been banned. Many formerly tolerated journalists are out of work. To attempt any unlicensed work means risking being hauled in to chat with a polished but unyielding middle-management Information Ministry zealot with the power to fire, arrest, torture, and even execute enemies of the state, although in the Land of Bordbari, such measures are no longer frequently required. Some writers are silenced by threats to keep their children from acceptance at universities, a critical path to future success.

Without a free press it is hard to know how most people feel about progress toward the umma. There are without doubt many true believers in Iran who see their nation as the seed of future worldwide salvation. David and I visited a small retail mall adjacent to Tehran University filled with shops selling pro-regime literature and Islamic fundamentalist knickknacks, cassette tapes of inspirational sermons and chants, and paintings of the familiar whitebeards and martyrs—the rough Iranian equivalent of Elvis portraits on black velvet. One of the merchants stepped out and handed us a small sample of what looked like holy cards, which they were, but of a different sort than I was familiar with. The Catholic holy cards I had seen often enough depicted saints and martyrs, but in romantic, classical paintings. These were grisly little battlefield snapshots, one showing a young martyr with half his head blown away, another with just a gory severed foot in a high-topped tennis shoe—“American” atrocities, we were assured.

Then again, later that day, when we stopped to buy cans of cold orange juice from a small store, the two men behind the counter asked our translator, Ramin, who we were. He told them we were American journalists.

“Why are they here?” one of the men asked.

“They are writing about the gerogan-giri,” Ramin said.

The men nodded appreciatively. Then one said, “Tell them that the thieves that did it are now in power, robbing all of us blind. Tell them we love America.”

Ramin passed this along and we thanked them for the kind words. Both men bowed, pressing their hands to their chests in a gesture of sincerity.

We Americans would like to believe that such sentiments are in the majority, and that, given time, Iranians will shrug off the smothering hold of religious dogma. But there is no way to tell. A determined tyranny can last for many lifetimes no matter how unpopular. I did note that on both flights out of Tehran (admittedly an affluent sample), all of the women aboard quickly shed head scarves and roupoosh the moment the plane left the ground.

The Gerogan-girha

The complicated role the hostage crisis plays in current Iranian politics was suggested after Ahmadinejad’s election in July 2005. News reports from the United States linked him to the embassy takeover. Former hostages Roeder, Scott, Daugherty, and several others claimed that they recognized the president-elect from still and moving pictures and named him as one of their captors. Roeder was particularly adamant, saying that Ahmadinejad was one of those who, in an effort to get him to talk, threatened to kidnap his disabled son in suburban Virginia and begin cutting off his fingers and toes. The diminutive, bearded former appointed mayor of Tehran promptly denied it, and members of the Muslim Students Following the Imam’s Line, clearly encouraged by the regime, held press conferences to help him put distance between himself and the takeover.

The denial itself was revealing. There was a time in Iran when any association with the gerogan-giri would have been a tremendous boon to a politician. In the past, a politician might be expected to exaggerate his connection rather than downplay it. Instead, Ahmadinejad admitted, as I have reported in this book, that while he was one of the original five members of “Strengthen the Unity,” the student coalition led by Ibrahim Asgharzadeh that initiated the embassy takeover, he identified himself as one of the two members who preferred directing political action against the Soviet Union and who had backed away from the protest when he was voted down and the United States embassy became the target. He said he subsequently supported the takeover when Khomeini blessed it, which took place shortly after the embassy was seized, but denied personally invading the grounds or holding and interrogating hostages. An old photograph showing a bearded student resembling him was widely reprinted, but it’s impossible to tell if it is the same man. Without any doubt Ahmadinejad was one of the central players in the group that seized the embassy and held hostages.

The new president’s prompt disavowal was a tacit acknowledgment that the episode today comes with distinct political liabilities, both foreign and domestic. This despite the fact that many of those involved in the takeover have risen to the highest positions in Iran’s government. Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani, the former president and losing candidate in the most recent election, were directly involved in endorsing the gerogan-giri and in supervising negotiations for its eventual end. Habibullah Bitaraf, Iran’s minister of energy, was one of the leaders of the takeover and lists his connection proudly on his Web site. Nilufar Ebtekar, the notorious spokesman for the students who has since changed her first name to Massoumeh, now serves as a vice president of Iran and minister for the environment. Her husband,