Lipstick Jihad (11 page)

“Stop. Stop right there. You don't get it. The
Basij
are the
bad guys
.” I said.
“
Everyone hates them. They don't protect people, they abuse them. They're the ones who break up parties, and raid malls. They sell drugs, take bribes, and run rackets.”

Khaleh Farzi set a bowl of freshly sliced cantaloupe on the glass table, thanked God she'd never had children, and sat down to watch us argue.

“Listen, Daria. Can I just tell you what happened to me last night? Listen, and then afterward tell me if you still want to become a
Basiji
.”

I had been out with a friend, Nikki, her boyfriend, and one of his friends. Everyone had been raving about the new Chinese restaurant at the Jaam-e-Jaam mall food court, so we had gone over there for dinner. After eating, which involved much chopstick flirtation, we called a taxi to pick us up, and were waiting outside on the corner for it to come. As we chatted under the warm evening sky, one of the dark, menacing Land Rovers
driven by the morality police, known as the
komiteh,
rolled up, and three officers jumped out. (The
komiteh
were different than the
Basij
but performed the same functions.)

The two guys turned to face each other, and Nikki turned to me, our body language giving no indication we knew one another. One of the
komiteh
walked up to Nikki's boyfriend and asked how they were related. I don't even know who you're talking about, he replied. The
komiteh
then stepped in front of Nikki, got up within two inches of her face, and repeated the question. I've never seen him before in my life, she said coolly, without blinking. Don't lie to me, he hissed, I just saw you standing here together. You must've gotten me mixed up with someone else, she said, it's a busy intersection.

He tilted his head back toward her boyfriend. So if he's not your boyfriend, if you've never seen him before, you won't care if I hit him, right? And he punched Nikki's boyfriend in the cheek. I felt her body tense next to me, but her eyes didn't flicker. The
komiteh
watched her reaction closely. From behind him, one hand pressed against his face, her boyfriend shot her a look of warning: Don't give us away. The
komiteh
turned back again, and this time he punched him on the other side, on the ear. Nikki exhaled slowly. You can beat him till he's bloody, she said coldly, but I've already told you, and now I'm telling you again, I have no idea who he is. Her voice didn't even quiver.

She turned her back on them both, and dialed a number on her cell phone. Hey maman, yeah, we're still waiting for the cab. Do you need anything from outside? See you in a bit. By this time, the
komiteh
was livid. Okay, so maybe he's not your boyfriend. Was he bothering you? Because if he was, just tell me, and I'll make him pay for it. He stepped closer again, so close he was breathing on her, and she moved back. He wasn't. And I don't need anyone, especially you, to hit someone for me. Deflated by his failure to provoke an admission from either of them, the
komiteh
got back in the Land Rover and shot up Vali Asr Street.

It was, to me, an encounter of shockingly casual violence. I thought Nikki would need months of therapy to recover, and that her boyfriend would insist on meeting indoors forever after. Not at all, it turned out. To them, it was just another Friday night in the Islamic Republic. Young people anticipated these sorts of incidents, and had confronted them so
many times that they were almost taken for granted. They considered the morality police part of the geography of the city, like the Alborz Mountains and the long boulevards. They had perfected the art of inventing and synchronizing stories on the spot, how to predict what sort of policeman would take a bribe, and what sort would respond to a convincing argument.

As I recounted the story for Daria, he seemed genuinely puzzled. He made little rows of fork holes all over the slice of melon in front of him, morosely refusing to look up. That's fucked up, he said, a minute later. We had not been prepared to find the cosmologies of our universe so skewed. In California, where I was obsessed with Middle East politics and he was obsessed with the Iranian national soccer team, we had assumed here, in this country where people could pronounce our names, our world would expand. Instead, we felt constricted. Everywhere, it seemed, there were barriers. Of thought and behavior, of places and time. And most dizzying of all, a culture of transgression that could only be learned through firsthand experience. For women, there were eternal limits on dress and comportment, but they could be flouted easily—in the right neighborhood, at the right time of the day or month, in the right way. Young couples also faced endless prohibitions, but these too could be circumvented, with the right verbal pretexts, at the right times, in the right places.

Ignorance of this culture made you a victim, marooned at home with bad Islamic television. Knowing how to navigate its rules gave you freedom, to choose a lifestyle as sedentary or riotous as you pleased. As newcomers, Daria and I were only familiar with a simple, American sort of freedom. Confronted with an oppressive system, we instinctively viewed the Iranians around us as victims, because armed with only our knowledge of California highways and the mall, we had not the slightest idea how to exercise freedom, Tehran-style. We couldn't conceive of a life where you forcibly
took
your rights, through adept arguments and heaps of attitude. Where you lived “as if” the rules didn't exist, and took the skirmishes for granted. And so it felt that in Tehran, even the sky shrank, the streets twined in mazes, and the whole of existence retreated under imposing barriers.

Life in America came with its own set of frontiers, but they were familiar, and from the vantage point of Tehran, seemed more subtle, more bearable. As for a Middle Eastern person, they were symbolic barriers placed
between you and your culture, in the Islam-bashing and prejudice that seeped into everyday life, ephemeral barriers between you and your peace of mind, as you had to work to disregard the slights and political slander and ignorance that presented themselves so routinely, in so many guises.

The barriers here were overwhelming, in your face, physical and visual. There were walls and partitions, dour billboards and angry-looking
pasdars,
around at all times to enforce them. I wasn't sure which ones I preferred, or perhaps better, which ones I despised least. In America, I hadn't learned, really, how to scale the barriers. They were political and amorphous, and often I felt they existed only in my head, that I created and carted them about myself. For now, these Iranian barriers frightened me. They produced incessant confrontations between people itching to scream at one another, escalate, and let loose the brew of anger and resentment inside.

To conduct successful and active social lives in Tehran, young people devoted much energy to avoiding the police. These efforts created a sort of predictive science, similar to how people who live in traffic-congested cities try to plan their schedules around rush hour and congested neighborhoods. It was a complicated task. There were several different brands of police and militia, with distinct vehicles, dress, beat, and mandate. They sometimes behaved erratically, and made unexpected appearances at places like pizza parlors, with the obvious aim of keeping everyone in a permanent state of low-level anxiety.

One day, some enterprising Iranian-American from Los Angeles would move to Tehran and set up a radio with ten-minute updates on police flow around the city (“There's a heavy
komiteh
presence northbound on Modaress expressway, and a
Basiji
checkpoint on Aghdasieh Boulevard, but Mohseni Square is flowing”). Keeping this sort of thing in the back of your mind at all times was unpleasant.

It was the kind of emotional strain that I stopped thinking about consciously. Iranians didn't make a big deal out of it, and I didn't want to be like one of the strident European expatriates who perpetually complained about the harsh backwardness of life in Iran, as though they hadn't made the same comments ten times the previous day. Realistically, I should have admitted
to myself that adjusting to Iran was tough. I had family around and spoke the language, but that didn't make life in Tehran easy. In retrospect, I'd have been better off talking about how nervous everything made me. That way, I might have defused the pressure as it built up, rather than waking up one day and finding myself unable to get out of bed. But I was too busy pretending to be cool and brave, like the urban Tehrani girls who sailed through the tensions with poise, managing to look fantastic the whole time.

More often that not, though, the police behaved predictably. This bestowed a small sense of control upon the young and social. It helped, for one, to stay vigilant about the dates of the Islamic calendar. If the regime was liberal with one thing, it was the official celebration of Shiite holidays. The births, deaths, and key events in the lives of various imams and members of the Prophet Mohammad's family were occasions for public commemoration. Public displays of piety involved leaving the house, and provided handy excuses to proffer at checkpoints (“Really officer, I was just out celebrating/mourning the birthday/death of Imam _____!”) It also resulted in strange calculations, such as waiting for the birthday of a holy man born in the seventh century so you could throw a party.

A vivid illustration of how young people exploited the regime's Islam preoccupation for their social purposes fell each year during the month of Moharram. In this month in the seventh century, the prophet's grandson Hossein was martyred in the holy city of Karbala, a significant date in the early schism between Sunni and Shiite Islam. The Islamic regime took this holiday, called
Ashoura
, very seriously, and draped the whole of Tehran in black. Ubiquitous mosques blared sorrowful chants, and many other devices were used to produce a somber atmosphere that was roundly ignored.

Before the Islamic Revolution, people commemorated
Ashoura
tamely in their neighborhoods and went home by around nine P.M. But in recent years it had taken on grand, carnival-like proportions, with young people out in the traffic-jammed streets until two or three in the morning. Like everything else, it had been transformed into a battleground of wills between Iranians and the Islamic system.

I was still new to Tehran, dim to the social significance of
Ashoura
to hormonally fizzy teenagers, until one of my cousins informed me that the candlelight vigil marking its final night (called
sham-e ghariban
) was by far the most excellent night of the year to pick up guys. Young people from across
the city congregated for what they called a “Hossein Party” in Mohseni Square, in a busy neighborhood of northern Tehran.

The traffic en route inched along, as though the whole city of ten million was attempting to converge on this snug square. Initially, the scene seemed decorous and tame. Teenagers and families peered at the displays of gold in jewelry shop windows, and milled about the sidewalks, which were lined with police.

As I inspected the young women more closely—they were touching and ethereal, floating through the night in their gauzy veils, with perfect, glossy locks poking out—I realized the conceit of “Hossein Party.” Each one held a flickering candle in her palm, and had tucked underneath scraps of paper bearing her phone number; a great deal of preening went on, and lucky fellow “mourners” were slipped numbers as they passed.

The
Basij
stood aside and observed this decidedly unsorrowful behavior with surly faces. They are officially considered “volunteers,” but they enjoy the regime's tacit approval for enforcing Islamic morals, usually with a great degree of violence. Many are impossibly young, no older than fifteen, but their eyes shone with the eager rage of unrestrained bullies. Some, with their untucked shirts and trademark beards, strode around aggressively, eyeing the crowd and deciding what totally harmless transgression would finally provoke their attack.

I walked up to one of them, astride an idling motorbike, and asked him who had sent him here. He didn't answer. What, then, was his purpose? “They sit around with their candles pretending to mourn Hossein, when all they really want is to let out their sexual desires. It's our Islamic duty to control this,” he said, revving his engine and peeling off into the street.

I hid behind a tall, potted plant on the front stoop of an apartment building, from where I could safely watch the brewing confrontation. The
Basij
circled a street corner where a crowd of teenagers stood talking, bathed in the light of candles, and ordered them to leave. The crowd moved apart slowly, but some stood their ground. One, a young girl wearing clown-like make-up and a scant slip of veil over masses of long auburn hair, stuck a hand on her hip, and continued chatting into her cell phone.