The Ayatollah Begs to Differ (17 page)

Students at university have been an exception, and their protests have often been violently broken up by the government or quasi-governmental forces (and by Basij fellow students), but, strangely, many ordinary Iranians view the students as hopelessly naive, forgetting that it was students, inside and outside Iran, who were in the vanguard of the Islamic Revolution.
⁷
The Islamic government, keenly aware of university students’ role in bringing it to power and aware of the potential for unrest on campuses spreading elsewhere, has always taken a two-pronged approach to ensuring that a new revolution does not start in academia. The obvious approach has been to crack down on any student movement that has the gall to publicly challenge the government, whether by expelling protesting students, arresting and jailing them, or shutting down their newspapers and limiting their speech. The other approach has been to populate universities with the children of the children of the revolution, with the Basij, and with underprivileged and deeply religious youths from working-class families: exactly the kinds of people that the government can reasonably rely on to counter any threat to an Islamic Republic that has taken extremely good care of its own. And reliable they are, for every time a student pro-democracy movement crops up on any campus, other
Islamic
student organizations are there to challenge it, even violently. (It mustn’t be forgotten also that the government mounts its biggest and most influential public gathering, weekly Friday prayers attended by thousands of pro-regime Iranians as well as every foreign journalist, on the campus of the University of Tehran.) The situation contrasts sharply with prerevolutionary times, when pro-democracy students—and all the Islamic students’ organizations were “pro-democracy” then—faced no challenge from royalists (or strict secularists), who either kept quiet in the face of the increasingly overwhelming odds against them or in some cases couldn’t believe that their all-powerful Shah might one day be gone.

Students looking to assert their “rights” today face a measure of public apathy as well as the wrath of the government, a wrath that was unchecked even under reformist Khatami’s rule. In one of the biggest challenges to the government, at a time when Khatami had ushered in reforms unthinkable to hard-line conservatives, student protests in 1999 led to street riots, causing a level of unrest that conservatives viewed as threatening to the regime. The students themselves were in reality hardly a threat to the regime, for the peaceful protests had started in
support
of Khatami, who after all was a part of the system, and against the closure by the judiciary of a reform newspaper,
Salam
, that was closely associated with him. The protests extended into the dormitories and across the nation’s universities, but the police, along with pro-government students and vigilantes, brutally broke up any demonstrations or sit-ins, burned dorm rooms, and made hundreds of arrests. While the violence and unrest continued for a week, resulting in conflicting accounts of numbers killed and injured, a top Revolutionary Guard (who is today the commander of the force) sent an ominous letter to President Khatami warning him that if he didn’t crack down on the students, the Guards certainly would. Khatami’s enemies saw an opportunity to both reverse some of his reforms and discredit him with his supporters, and Khatami’s powerlessness in the face of government brutality—his weak stand on the haq of students—did indeed lead to a loss of prestige for him (but not enough to deny him a landslide reelection two years later) and constant challenges to his policy of promoting his vision of “Islamic democracy” in Iran.

But despite student dissatisfaction, and perhaps a reason for the apparent public apathy toward the student protesters, the Islamic Republic has been astute in understanding what “rights” Iranians cherish above all others, and is careful not to trample on those, as various Shahs’ governments did. One important right for Iranians is that of being free to do as one pleases inside the walls of one’s home or garden. Other than liquor raids in the early days of the revolution by overzealous komiteh or Basij members, intrusions into private life are extremely rare, and Iranians have no fear of expressing their opinions in what they deem private space, their “movable walls” if you will, which can include a café table or a taxi and which would have been unthinkable under the so-called progressive last Shah.

Publishing is a different matter, for that is public expression, but Iranians who have long been used to very specific codes for public behavior, whether Islamic, cultural, or political under the Shahs, have adjusted to the newer limitations on free speech. They have done so partly by taking to the Internet with hundreds of thousands of Farsi blogs, and partly in the constant game of chicken that newspaper editors play with the government, pushing the envelope to the point of being shut down, only to emerge under a different name, sometimes just days later, often to be closed yet again.

The intellectual elite of Tehran and other big cities chafe under Islamic rules and under suppression of free speech, but for the majority of Iranians they are issues that pale in comparison to their “rights” to employment, a decent wage, or fair consumer prices, rights Ahmadinejad was particularly adept at convincing voters he was the strongest proponent of (while dismissing, with some success, accusations that his religiously conservative side might be tempted to intrude behind Persian walls). Liberal Iranian women, and certainly some Iranian men, would agree with their Western counterparts that their “rights” include dressing as they please when they venture into public space, but I have heard from pious Muslims, including some women, that if that right offends the majority, as some conservatives claim it does in Iran, then it is not an automatic “right.” Although the mandatory-hijab question resonates emotionally for some, what resonates more for women activists in Iran is the larger issue of rights as they compare with those of men and fighting discriminatory Islamic laws, which they frame as issues of haq that have sent some progressive clerics searching for Islamic solutions.

Westerners can be forgiven if they often confuse haq with another aspect of Iranian culture that looms large: the much-talked-about “Persian pride.” The reason Iranians, even those most opposed to their government, seem to support their country’s nuclear program, despite the hardships that they may have to endure in order for it to achieve success, is put forward by many analysts as pure, fierce nationalism and excessive Persian pride, as if Iranians have rejoiced in their scientists’ ability to overcome technological hurdles as much as their presidents and other leaders have seemed to. To accept that conclusion is a mistake that betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of the Iranian psyche and of Iranian society. Iranians are indeed proud, sometimes to the point of arrogance, but pride is not what is driving the nuclear issue as far as the majority of Iranians are concerned. The often-mentioned nationalism and pride that Iranians exhibit, much to the discomfort of other Middle Easterners, are mostly related to their history, and the pre-Islamic one at that, rather than any “made in Iran” sentiments. No, the nuclear issue is another matter of haq, basic rights that deeply resonate for a Shia people that has long suffered from inferiority and superiority complexes, often simultaneously.

Iranians deserve their reputation for being annoyingly proud, but they have never exhibited the characteristics of fiercely nationalistic societies when it comes to material goods, and to them nuclear fuel is just another material good. Iranians do not “buy Iranian” if anything, they go out of their way to “buy” American, European, or even Asian. Billboards in Tehran for consumer goods will often proclaim in big letters “Made in France” or “Made in Korea” as a sign of the obvious superiority of the goods, even when there are Iranian equivalents, sometimes as good and less expensive. Iranians buy Iranian-made cars not out of pride that their nation has a strong automotive industry but because import tariffs mean that a Camry or a Maxima is a luxury car out of reach of ordinary workers, who grudgingly settle for an Iranian-made Peugeot, Kia, or even the completely Iranian-engineered and crudely styled (but well-made) Samand. But goods that are
khareji
, or “foreign,” have always commanded a premium as well as bragging rights.

A few years ago in Tehran when I first got into my cousin Ali’s car, a Peugeot 206 hatchback, I looked around as I fastened my seat belt and said, “This is a Peugeot, huh?”

“Yes, but this one is made in
France
,” he said with great satisfaction, lest I wonder what he was doing driving an
Iranian-
made car.

Much as the government tries to sing the praises of Iranian industry and science, one would be hard-pressed to find a single Iranian who does not believe that foreign-made goods and Western technology are not superior. Even cheap goods from China, such as shoes and clothing that are sold at discount shops, are more popular than equivalent Iranian ones, which sadly are becoming scarcer and scarcer. If the nuclear issue was sold to Iranians by their government as only a matter of pride in Iran’s accomplishments, very few Iranians would be willing to suffer economic sanctions or even war as a consequence, and yet the Western media are constantly filled with stories of how ordinary Iranians take great pride in the nuclear program. While the Iranian government has indeed pushed the pride button, most often at rallies and in President Ahmadinejad’s speeches (pride is also alluded to at every occasion—say, a tractor factory opening or a new auto assembly plant—that involves Iranian industrial progress), Iranians by and large focus on the other aspect of the issue that is also touched upon by government officials defending their obstinacy on the nuclear question: basic national and, by extension, individual rights.

The question of rights is fundamental to Shia Islam, the very founding of which was a struggle for rightfulness. And Shia Iran, with a history of centuries of perceived injustice toward its religion and sect, and the trampling of its sovereignty by foreign powers, cannot easily accept any attempt to deprive its people of their rights. The sense of rights and justice is so deeply ingrained in the Iranian psyche that when Iranians mourn Imams martyred fourteen centuries ago, as they do during the month of Moharram, they are consumed by paroxysms of weeping, not necessarily for the dead, but for the cruel injustice perpetrated on their saints and, by extension, on them still today. The Iranian government plays up the injustice of the Western position on Iran’s nuclear program (which is viewed essentially as to arbitrarily deny them advanced technology), and unjust it is as far as the people—who consider neither themselves nor even their leaders particularly aggressive or violent—are concerned.

Iranians, like all other people, have differing ideas of what their rights are, what constitutes haq, but they do generally agree on the most basic. Thomas Jefferson may have declared that our rights include life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and the French Revolution may have given France the motto
“Liberté, égalité, fraternité,”
but the Iranian motto, if there were one, might simply be “Don’t trample on my rights,” without defining what those rights are. But the concept of haq is such a part of the Iranian vocabulary, within or without Islam (and Iran is a religious society, after all), that it can sometimes border on the risible.

A man who works for one of my friends in Tehran as a sort of man Friday, doing odd jobs here and there, which have included giving me rides on the back of his motorcycle when Tehran traffic has been at its worst and when I needed to get somewhere fast, is someone who has never set foot outside the country but is nonetheless so obsessed with America and all things American that his nickname for years has been Ali-Amrika-y, or “Ali the American.” He naturally quizzes me on all things related to America whenever he sees me, often with the wide-eyed enthusiasm of a child and to the annoyance of his employer, who gently reminds him that he has work to do beyond sitting and conversing with his boss’s friend. On one occasion, presumably after something I said must have confirmed to him the absolute greatness of the United States—and he tends to ignore me or not hear whenever I mention anything critical—he shook his head slowly. “I was destined to go to America and become an American, or even to have been born there,” he said.
“Haq-e-moon’o khordan”—
“My rights were taken from me” (literally, “My rights were eaten”). I looked at him and started laughing, and he chuckled too, for he realized how absurd his statement was, but I couldn’t help wondering how many nights he had spent awake in his bed thinking about how his “right” to be an American had been wrongfully denied him, whether by God, by Iran, or by the United States itself.