The Ayatollah Begs to Differ (30 page)

Walls surround the property, and two large guard dogs, unclean in Islam and rare in any house, barked up a storm whenever anyone entered the compound. The upper-class gathering included two young men, both born and raised in the United States, who had come to Iran in the last two years to work with their families, and their American-accented and faulty Farsi instantly gave away their background as members of the nonreligious and nonpolitical privileged class, a class that has managed to successfully engage in commerce, or at least successfully enough that these two young men had forsaken America for lucrative opportunities in Iran. Another couple, older and sharply dressed, the man wearing a bold tie, sat with me and told me of their great friendship with and admiration for Ardeshir Zahedi, the Shah’s son-in-law, foreign minister, ambassador to Washington, and possibly one of the most hated men of the Shah’s era, who is still alive in Switzerland. The husband, busy getting drunk as quickly as he could, explained that he had been in prison since 1992, and this particular evening he was on furlough, or, as they say in Iran, on “vacation” from jail. Although he held U.S. citizenship as well, he seemed resigned to his circumstance, one that he argued wasn’t really as bad as all that. “I’m home more often than in Evin,” he said.

“Evin?” I asked, knowing that it was Iran’s most notorious jail for political prisoners. “That’s pretty hard-core, no?”

“Nah,” he grunted. “It’s like a hotel for us nowadays. Hotel Evin!” He smiled and made a sweeping motion with his arm. “Everything you see here,” he said, already slurring just a little, “we have in there: liquor, drugs, whatever you want.” As he was a man of considerable means, I didn’t doubt his words, for although the expression “Hotel Evin” had been a macabre joke at one time, the government, in an effort to improve its image abroad and to stymie accusations of human rights abuses, had made substantial changes at the prison, at least for high-profile political prisoners. (The Abu Ghraib scandal, CIA rendition cases, and the Guantánamo detention facility gave Iran, but also its prisoners, an unexpected boost in the years after 9/11 in that Iran, in order to show its moral superiority, continually trumpets the treatment of its prisoners as comparing most favorably to those in American hands. Reporters are regularly given tours of the prison, and even Iranian-American political prisoners either released and allowed to travel back to the States or interviewed at the prison have spoken of a rather benign atmosphere in their cells. That is not to say that the less fortunate—Iranians unlikely to command any attention on the outside—are not treated as harshly as they always have been, including with alleged bouts of torture.)

“Really?” I said. “So when do you officially get released?”

“Who knows,” he said. “I’ve been told any day now for the last fifteen years.”

“And why were you arrested in the first place?” I asked, assuming it was for some sort of political or antirevolutionary infraction.

“Some business issues,” he said. “I was told, before I came back to Iran in ’92, that I’d be okay, but obviously I wasn’t.” A friend leaned over to me and explained that he had been a rather wealthy and successful businessman during the Shah’s era and that his businesses were taken over by the government when he fled during the revolution, apparently with quite a large sum of cash. “When I escaped prison the first time and went to the United States—”

“Wait a minute!” I interrupted him. “You escaped Evin and went back to the United States?”

“Yeah,” he said. “I just left during one of my ‘vacations’—”

“Wait,” I interrupted again. “Why on earth did you return, then?”

“To
fuck
these people’s mothers!” he exclaimed. “Why else?” I looked around uncomfortably, his wife blushed, and he burst out laughing. “Eighty percent of all Iranians born after Khomeini came to power will have to be killed,” he continued in a more serious tone, but one that reflected both a bitterness and a tacit admission that Iran, with most of its population born after the revolution, is unlikely to ever change in the way that he and his contemporaries may wish it to.
“Eighty percent,”
he said loudly, as if to emphasize the impossibility of his political dreams, and he headed to the dining table, rather stoically, I thought, despite his advancing state of inebriation.

If there’s any Thursday afternoon salon where the Iranian intelligence services must absolutely be present, even behind the garden walls, it would have to be at the home of Sadeq Kharrazi, nephew of the former foreign minister Kamal Kharrazi, a former ambassador to Paris himself, and a key member of the nuclear negotiating team under President Khatami. Kharrazi’s distaste for Ahmadinejad and his ilk is well-known; he is one of the most vocal of former government officials in openly criticizing the current administration to anyone who will listen. A charming, highly intelligent man with sophisticated tastes, he was a principal author of the infamous Iranian “proposal” to the White House in 2003, a proposal for steps Iran would be willing to take in order to normalize relations that was rejected by George Bush out of hand; and, if for no other reason than his efforts to reach out to the United States, the present government reserves for him a particular loathing.
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But Kharrazi is a child of the revolution too, from a clerical family (and his sister is married to the Supreme Leader’s son), and unless he strays too far from the principles of the Islamic Republic in his views or actions, Ahmadinejad can do him no harm.

Kharrazi’s house is, naturally, in the far reaches of privileged North Tehran, on a quiet street of unseen mansions behind the tall walls that surround their gardens. The entrance, a nondescript and very ordinary white metal door, properly disguises, as Persian tastes dictate, what has to be one of the finest homes in the capital: a house that could easily grace the pages of any American or European shelter magazine; a fully and authentically remodeled old Persian house, filled with Persian art and antiques, old rescued tile work on the interior walls and arches that look onto large, manicured gardens hidden from prying eyes by their tall walls. Kharrazi’s library, up a winding staircase that leads to the traditional second-floor formal quarters, and which he showed me on a short private tour, is possibly the largest antiquarian Persian library in private hands, with shelf after shelf lined with irreplaceable volumes of Iranian poetry, literature, and religious texts from before the printing press to more contemporary times. (Kharrazi donated some ten thousand contemporary Iranian books to the newly created Institute for Iranian Studies at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland in late 2006.)

The salon here, in 2007, is not about opium or indeed any other vice, for the guests are all from the revolutionary elite even if they’re not in power at present, and they cannot boldly exhibit un-Islamic behavior in each other’s presence. They do, however, relax with tea, coffee, and Cuban cigars, a favored status symbol of the more progressive among the establishment. Progressive, reformist, and even quite Westernized in some ways they may be, but there are no women (who must be hidden somewhere), for all the work of serving tea and sweetmeats, emptying ashtrays, and such is performed by two houseboys. It could be a Persian house of a century ago, except the houseboys are the most modern of the men, with long, gelled hair, fashionable jeans and T-shirts, and, unlike the guests, clean-shaven cheeks. Talk is almost always of politics and, with a number of Foreign Ministry types always present, of foreign relations, but the houseboys take no notice, only occasionally smiling if a ribald joke is inserted into the conversation by one of the guests. Despair at what everyone considers the sorry state of Iranian politics is evident in the conversation, and one guest, a former top official with extremely close ties to the Revolutionary Guards who has been written about in the West, even suggests that Iran would be better off without elections. “
This
is what happens when you let people vote,” he says emphatically. “The idiots elect an idiot.” He then turns to a colleague with banking connections and whispers, loud enough for me to hear a few feet away, “Do you think you can help with a $120 million transaction?” His colleague seems momentarily taken aback. “For the Guards, of course,” he adds nonchalantly, taking a puff from a long Cohiba. (Recent UN and U.S. sanctions against Iranian banks had made dollar transactions in Tehran somewhat problematic.)

If any of the fifteen or twenty men who drifted in and out of the house on a Thursday afternoon were indeed informants or intelligence agents, they’d have much to report, I thought, but nothing that could be particularly actionable. The judiciary and the intelligence services, independent of the executive branch, may indeed be the more conservative and hard-line bodies in the Islamic Republic, but they know better than to do anything more than listen in a gathering such as this. Populist presidents like Ahmadinejad, they know, will come and go, but the political elite (reform-minded or not but all with close ties to, if not relatives of, the clerics) and the Revolutionary Guards, of course, are the constants that the republic needs to survive.

In Iran today, the Iranian intelligence services are generally far more concerned with plots against the state, real or imagined, and political activism that spreads to the streets than with the conversations of Iranians behind closed doors, whether they be doors belonging to prominent citizens known to the state or more unassuming ones behind which anonymous middle-and working-class Iranians grumble about the country’s state of affairs. It is perhaps for that reason that some political activists have, consciously or unconsciously, taken their activism behind movable Persian walls, away from the prying eyes of the state.

One of the better-known groups who have done so are women campaigning for change in the discriminatory laws of the Islamic Republic (but who are careful to emphasize in their materials that what they are calling for is not against the laws of Islam) who come under the banner of “Change for Equality.”
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A campaign to gather one million signatures to present to parliament began in mid-2006, after a women’s demonstration was broken up by police and its leaders arrested (most received suspended sentences and were subsequently released), but the way the campaigners went about gathering the signatures and pursuing their activism made it almost impossible for the authorities to clamp down on their activities without breaching the figurative walls that Persians erect wherever they can. Women’s hair salons, for example, became places to promote their campaign, as did subway cars, buses, factories, and even picnic grounds, places not normally patrolled by government agents looking for treasonous activity, and although many women sympathetic to the cause were unwilling to put their names to a document out of concern that they might endanger themselves, by the summer of 2007 over a hundred thousand signatures had been compiled, an impressive number if one considers the handful of women who were active in collecting them and the lengths to which they went, including knocking on the doors of private homes, to do so.
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A million signatures, or even a hundred thousand, the organizers must’ve reasoned, could be a far more effective call for change, change in Iran’s laws that has the moral, if not vocal, support of many politicians and even clerics, than a public demonstration of a few hundred women that would immediately be broken up by the authorities and quickly forgotten, as such events always had been in the past.