Lipstick Jihad (18 page)

The doorbell rang, and I raced to answer it, before it rang again and interrupted the meditating Tandiss. It was my cousin, picking me up for lunch. “Shhhhh,” I hissed, opening the door. “Tandiss is with the guru.” He tiptoed in, giving me a dirty look. Kami also followed Sai Baba and didn't appreciate being teased about “Guruji.” He too had visited the ashram outside Bombay (“Even heads of state were kissing his feet”) and returned with stories of Sai Baba's miraculous feats. Apparently, with nothing more than his touch, gaze, and blazing internal holiness, Sai Baba had: turned dirt into gold dust, healed lepers, moved a piece of paper across the table, cured blindness, banished tuberculosis from lungs, and rid a village of cholera. Mocking my cousins' faith
in Guruji's miracles, I reminded myself, was insensitive. They respected Sai Baba, and respect was an important cornerstone of faith.

It was impossible to respect the Islamic Republic, and for many Iranians, contempt for the system tainted their traditional esteem for Islam. Everyone agreed that official Islam was a perversion, but this rational recognition didn't preclude them from emotionally wanting to distance themselves from things clerical and Islamic altogether.

People relished making their distaste for Islam—the tool of their subjugation—and its self-proclaimed custodians—their oppressors—known. When I lived downtown with my grandfather, our alley was right off a busy street, and I took public taxis frequently. Even at unrushed midday, when the taxis were half full, drivers took a special pleasure in ignoring clerics standing in turbans and robes trying valiantly to hail a cab. They were pariahs, an untouchable class. Clerical robes had come to symbolize one thing: corruption.

Eastern spirituality, with its internally directed, pacifist sensibility, was the ideal antidote to the militant, invasive brand of Shiite Islam imposed by the regime. And that is the story of how Iranian housewives, unadventurous by nature, began turning East, rather than toward Mecca, to nurture their belief in a higher power.

Since the sixteenth century, the era of the Safavids, the dynasty that instituted Shiism as the state religion of then Persia, the clergy have wielded significant influence over internal affairs. Though they never formally took charge until the revolution, their intimate relations with pious, powerful merchants,
bazaaris,
and moral authority at Friday prayers made them a major political force for centuries. Consecutive governments had been careful to accommodate the mullahs, or at least disguise their efforts to curtail clerical authority.

Resistance to injustice is the central theme of Shiite Islam, and during times of political unrest or oppression, clerics traditionally raised their voices against the imperial or local oppressor of the moment. In times of chaos, when emotions flared and events spiraled, few could calm or incite masses of Iranians like the mullahs, who spoke in the familiar tones of, and on behalf of, ordinary people.

Though there was a long tradition of mocking the clergy for gluttony and sloth, they were at heart venerated by traditional Iranians. Even my grandmother in California, sitting upon the ruins of a family dispersed and dispossessed by a clerical revolution, had refused to curse Khomeini, who like it or not was still an ayatollah. Loath to destabilize his government by alienating the mosque, the Shah of Iran, like his father and predecessor Reza Shah, had been reluctant to modernize and secularize Iran at the same time, as Mustafa Kamal Ataturk had done in nearby Turkey.

Raised on this history at home, and again at university, I chronically underestimated the decline of religiosity evident all around me in Tehran. Every branch on both sides of my family is ardently secular, and if the revolution taught us anything, it was not to assume that two-thirds of Iranian society felt and thought as we did.

Eventually, though, I came to see how two decades of mismanagement by mullahs had perhaps definitively squashed the clerics' historical prestige. Most societies that have flirted with Islamic politics, where religious parties win votes in elections, have not had the chance to watch their Islamist crush play itself out. A full and lasting conversion to secularism could only be reached after clerics were permitted to rise to power—as in Iran and Afghanistan—and make a gigantic mess of things. History had shown that this, ultimately, was the only way to test and discard the religious model.

Though Iranians alternately loathed and pitied themselves for their ill-fated revolution, they had at least come full circle. A secular government, a full separation between mosque and state, they were able to conclude, was the only answer. This conviction could be traced informally through voting records. Politicians who talked about a more accountable, less ideological government roundly won elections. But it was such a palpable truth, so implicit and freely discussed, that it scarcely required documentation. I absorbed it fully on my first visit to Qom, the power capital of the mullahs, the seat from where Khomeini ruled Iran.

Qom, a somber, dusty city 120 km south of Tehran, is the Vatican of the Islamic theocracy. Most Iranians—who derisively called it a “mullah factory”—did not bother to visit, and thought of it only as the place where
sohan,
a buttery brittle of pistachios and saffron, originates. As a child, I thought the name of the city meant “gham,” the Farsi word for gloom, and
heard it discussed as the epicenter of clerical evil, the Death Star from which the mullahs plotted their takeover of Iran.

When I told Khaleh Farzi I was going there with Scott, the
Time
magazine correspondent, to talk to dissident clerics who opposed the Islamic regime, her face pinched with worry. Hamid, she's going to Qom, she called out to my uncle. What if they steal her? Promise you'll head back before sunset!

I pulled my inkiest, roomiest
roopoosh
out of the back of the closet for ironing, and wondered whether I was sick, looking forward to a trip that should instill a normal person with dread. I wasn't, I decided. It was actually a very positive sign. It meant I preferred the distraction of work (fat clerics and all) to staying home all day feeling sorry for myself. The pace of a weekly magazine meant the last three days of our production week were a flurry of activity, and the first two or three of the next week a dead zone, too early to predict or begin chasing the next issue's news. Inevitably, these days at home meant lying on the couch with a bowl of cherries watching Oprah on satellite television, then feeling great remorse for such indolence, when I could have been interviewing freedom-fighting student activists or visiting my father's high school or learning how to make baklava, or some other edifying activity.

So often, my days off didn't measure up to the lofty, soul-enriching life I had expected to live in Iran, and this was depressing enough that it made me stop taking days off altogether. If a story demanded four interviews, I did ten. I typed up my handwritten notes, printed them out, and filed them with pretty page markers. Then I made a thimble of Turkish coffee, sat down to read the papers, and made a list (typed with bullet points) of more story ideas. Work had no equal as a balm to anxiety. I even took my laptop to family lunches, where relatives looked at me pityingly and remarked that American journalism was really a form of indentured servitude. Then they asked for the hundredth time why I didn't become a broadcast journalist (better for finding a husband), as though newspapers were pastures for unattractive reporters who didn't make the grade aesthetically for television.

No, Qom was an excellent idea. Between the drive, the reporting, and the filing of notes, it would consume two whole days.

The road from Tehran was flat and dusty, as was the city, which from the distance appeared like a few bumps in the desert, with splinters poking out
into the sky. If a world beyond existed, there was little evidence to prove it—no colors, just lots and lots of mosques.

On this winter afternoon, Qom seemed very much an antique land, its streets filled with turbaned clerics of all ethnicities, carrying religious texts under their arms, as they had for centuries. But the debates inside those brown walls were current—secularism, democracy, Shiite militancy and jurisprudence. Unlike most other parts of the Middle East I had traveled, where hardly anything of note was debated in public, let alone Islam, in Qom the clerics were busy fighting about the soul of the religion, and the future of the Islamic Republic.

Many believed that Iran would only survive as an Islamic Republic if it embraced a democratic tradition of Islam, one that tolerated political dissent and freedom of speech, and granted full rights to women. They said that over the years Iran had swayed too far into the realm of Islamic theocracy, and that it should be returned to the original vision of a true Republic, loosely based on the spirit of Islam, but functioning as a modern democracy. The roots of all these debates extended into Shiite political and religious philosophy, and the rather central question of whether rulers should derive their authority from God, or the electoral mandate of citizens.

We visited one of the city's computer centers, elaborate places designed by the clerics to prove that Islam's seventh-century ideology can coexist with modernity. The government loved to promote the centers, and every foreign journalist who visited Qom was dragged through one of the fluorescent-lit rooms where turbaned clerics stared at screens and listlessly clicked away at mice. Scott wanted to know if Qom's clerics were trying to export Shia revolution by CD-ROM. The immense cleric who was showing us his archive of
hadith
was puzzled by the question and asked me to repeat it.

“So, are you trying to export revolution by doing this?”

For a minute he just looked at me, squinting through the fleshy folds of his sleepy eyes. He was clearly not used to sitting up straight. His work, as he might say, taxed the mind, not the body. My father always said clerics were the laziest species on earth. But this one in particular, oozing out of his chair like Jabba the Hut, one slipper hanging off his toe, seemed to prove him right. The thought of exporting anything at all, let alone revolution, seemed to tire him.

I tried again.

“Er, my colleague here would like to know, if perhaps these tools could ever be, or do you conceive them as possibly ever being, helpful in the export of the Shia Revolution.”

“Um, no, they're just for Muslims to study with. So, you said you live in Cairo?”

“No, he says no exporting going on,” I told Scott in English and turned to hiss at the cleric, in Farsi: “No, I
used
to live in Cairo.”

“Because I come to Cairo occasionally for conferences. Maybe I could call you? Do you have a phone number?”

“What's he saying?” demanded Scott, pen poised above his notebook.

“Oh, the same thing. That these are study tools for the faithful.”

The cleric walked us to the door, readjusting the black turban—which marked him as a direct descendant of the Prophet Mohammad—along the way. “Did you say you live all alone in Cairo? No family there or anything?”

I brought my scandalized account of this encounter to the dinner table that night. My aunt and uncle both snorted with laughter, as they typically did when I came home and breathlessly pronounced an insight that was, apparently, a cultural platitude. My father had taught me that clerics were lazy; more specifically, that they were unsuited to run a country because their work kept them in seminaries, sipping tea in robes, and that sort of languid profession did not lend itself to the more challenging task of administering a government. Convinced their worst sin was sloth, I had not assumed they were equally lecherous. One really could not have a proper conversation with a cleric. They were absurd. A one-hour interview with a mullah inevitably cycled like so:

First fifteen minutes: Gaze averted, stares at own feet, wall, space, anywhere but two-foot radius around opposing female.

Second fifteen minutes: Slowly casts glances in direction of head and talking voice.

Third fifteen minutes: Makes eye contact and conducts normal conversation.

Last fifteen minutes: Begins making googooly eyes, smiling in impious fashion, and requesting one's mobile phone number.

I didn't understand why they did this with me, since they are supposed to favor round women and fair women, and I was neither. Some actually
complained about this, with mock concern for my health (“Miss Moaveni, have you been ill? You've lost so much weight. . . . Don't you like Iranian food?”). How they could detect a body underneath the billowing tent I wore, let alone its fluctuations, was beyond me. I asked Khaleh Farzi, who explained that clerics had x-ray vision. That was why they didn't mind keeping women veiled.

It was only over time, after repeated exposure to womanizing clerics, clerics who stole from the state and built financial empires, who ordered assassinations like gangsters, who gave Friday sermons attacking poodles, that I came to understand the virulence of my father and my uncle's hate for the Iranian clergy. Perhaps their flaws were no greater than those of ordinary mortals, but ordinary mortals did not claim divine right to rule, ineptly, over seventy million people. As the gravity of the Islamic Republic's hypocrisy revealed itself, I came to the slow, shocking realization that Iranian society was sick. Not in a facetious, sloganny way, exaggerating the extent of culture wars and social tensions, but truly
sick.
The Iran I had found was spiritually and psychologically wrecked, and it was appalling.