The Butterfly Mosque (19 page)

I began the complex visa application process. Once a week for almost two months, I took the metro downtown and walked to the Iranian consulate, which occupied a dignified Victorian-era house in Doqqi. Its employees came to know me by name. We played a courteous game in which I lied about having any knowledge of Iranian politics and they pretended to believe me. We talked instead about Safavid art. They seemed reassured by my religion and my willingness to cooperate, and in the end I obtained my one-month tourist visa with what was—despite the amount of time involved—far less hassle than Americans usually face in the application process.

One afternoon during this diplomatic project, Sohair called me from work with an intriguing question.

“Beloved, I need your help with a phrase.”

“Sure,” I said, “what are you working on?”

I heard papers rustling. “I'm translating the latest message from Al-Qaeda,” Sohair replied.

This took a moment to sink in. “The latest message from Al-Qaeda?”

“Yes, it was sent to some news agencies several days ago. It talks about Iraq, of course, and the bombings in Madrid. I have a phrase—'fie upon the hypocrites.' Does this make sense?”

I laughed. “Definitely. It's exactly the sort of thing people in the West expect Al-Qaeda to say. It sounds like a warped version of Shakespeare.”

She laughed, too. “Good. They use a very flowery, classical kind of Arabic, so I wanted it to sound the same in English. There is one more word I'm having trouble with:
ghazwa.
Do you know it?”

“No, I've never heard it.”

“It refers to the battles of the Prophet Muhammad against the pagans. It's used to describe an attempt of a Muslim force to overcome a non-Muslim one. I have
battle, siege, incursion, attack, foray
. . . what do you think?”

I chewed on my lip. We have very few words in English that convey multitiered meaning; usually we rely on adjectives to describe what a single noun can't.

“You might want to break it up into two words.
Holy battle
or
holy attack
or something.” I knew these were awkward phrases at best.

“Hmm. It isn't quite like that.”

“It's not as strong as
jihad?
”

“No no, not as strong as
jihad.
And
jihad
is more abstract; more about struggling than attacking. This is specific.”

I thought of something and brightened. “What about
crusade?
”

Sohair seemed surprised.
“Crusade?
Really?”

“I'm serious. It's the only word we have that conveys ‘attack' and ‘holy' at the same time.”

“I don't think it can be
crusade,
my dear,
crusade
has a very specific meaning for Muslims. Use of that word has caused all kinds of problems in the past. When George Bush used it in one of his speeches a couple of years ago, there was chaos in the Arab world.”

“But that's exactly what it is,” I said, more for my own benefit than Sohair's. “It's an attack for reasons that are specifically religious, whose end goal is to topple another faith from power. Al-Qaeda is on a crusade.”

Sohair was saintly at putting up with my unfashionable opinions, from the nature of a crusade to the reason you can't blame Israeli children for being born in Israel. “That may be,” she said, “but the word
crusade
will certainly be taken the wrong way. For an Arab reader,
crusade
could only mean an attack on the Muslim world from the West.”

“Then there are two crusades,” I said. “It's
crusade vs. crusade.
I wonder if we have a word for
that
in English?”

“I think you call it
war,
” said Sohair.

Shortly before I was due to leave for Iran, the war came to me. Looking back I see that it was inevitable. Ben, having recently completed his Arabic courses, had just returned to the United States. Less than twenty-four hours after Jo and Omar and I had seen him off at the airport, the phone rang in our apartment, and he was on the other end.

“Willow?”

“Ben? Are you okay? What's going on?” I thought for a moment that he might have left something important behind.

“I was just interrogated for an hour and a half by the FBI.”

My heart began to beat faster. “What? Why?” I heard a click; the call was being monitored. There is nothing subtle about a phone tap.

“They knew where I went to lunch last Saturday. In Cairo.”

“Here?
”

“They said they could take away my citizenship . . . because of the Patriot Act—”

“What?”

“Willow, they asked me about you. They asked me about you and about Mehdi.” Mehdi was a mutual friend of ours from college, who had the misfortune to be Persian, and who was, as far as I knew, a simple computer geek.

“Me and . . . why? What did we do?” As soon as the question was out of my mouth I recognized how self-evident the answer was.

“They wanted to know why I was flying back and forth from Egypt so much. They wanted to know where I got the money from—I told them my parents pay for my tickets, but—they think we're terrorists, Willow. They think we're fucking terrorists.”

“But we're the good guys,” I said weakly. It was the most coherent thing I was able to contribute to the conversation.

“It's so messed up. They asked for Ireland's information, I think they're going to talk to her—” Ireland was Ben's ex-girlfriend, and a daughter of two conservative Washington lobbyists—“and God knows who else is going to get dragged in. I called you as soon as I got home.”

“What should I do?” I asked.

“I don't know, I just thought I should tell you what was going on. I don't know.”

“But I'm leaving for Iran in two weeks.”

“Are you out of your damn mind?”

“I already have tickets,” I said. I remembered a conversation I had with a friend of mine who worked with asylum seekers back home—he told me that one of the questions the authorities ask to determine whether or not someone qualifies for asylee status is “Are you afraid to return to your own country?” I was afraid; at that moment, and for a long time afterward, I was afraid to return to my own country. It was a feeling so alien that I found myself unable to cope with it emotionally. I had always been a member of a comfortable majority—I was middle-class, educated, white, of no unusual political bent. I had always felt, though I would never have admitted it, that the laws protected me before anyone else.

I was online a few days later when Ireland sent me an instant message with more bad news: the FBI had been to see her and she was deeply disturbed by what had taken place.

“Okay, first of all, they can't take away your citizenship. That's bullshit. The Patriot Act doesn't give them that power,” she wrote. “They were just trying to scare Ben. Second of all, you can refuse to talk to them without a lawyer. Have one meet you at the airport when you go home this summer. Okay?”

“Okay,” I wrote, bewildered. For the first time in my life, I was glad to have a Republican on my side. I would come to appreciate how much the true conservatives had done to combat some of the more unconstitutional aspects of the Patriot Act: as much or more than their liberal counterparts.

“Please don't go to Iran. Okay? Please.”

“What would that prove?” I wrote. “I'm not doing anything wrong. I'm not out to hurt anybody. If I change my plans, it'll be like admitting I have something to hide. And I don't.”

“Willow . . . why are they watching you so hard? Just don't go!”

“I'm theoretically the citizen of a free country,” I wrote, with more cheerfulness than I actually felt, “and I'm going to act like it until they lock me up and tell me otherwise. Plus, the tickets are nonrefundable.” Smiley face.

I messaged Mehdi as well, to see if he had heard what was going on. He was melancholic.

“What gets me,” he said, “is that while they're on my ass watching my every move, that's one less real terrorist they're not watching. And that's depressing. And by the way, your e-mail is being monitored; I can tell because my encryption programs are bouncing off it.”

I had taken America for granted. It had been a safe haven in the back of my mind; it was home, it was where I could always go if things got really bad. I had never felt truly unsafe in the Middle East, but I realized that this was because I knew I would be evacuated, rescued, spoken for, and defended if there was ever real trouble. Now that the privileges afforded me as an American were under threat, I saw that I liked them just fine, and furthermore, that I had been relying on them without knowing it.

I began to have nightmares. I dreamed of getting shot and bleeding to death, of being lost in airports and unable to fly home, and once, that Omar and I were stuck in an
invented borderland between Egypt, the United States, and Israel without our passports. The entrance to each was blocked with the concrete barricades Egyptian police use at checkpoints. We couldn't remember which country we had come from or where we were going, and no one would let us in.

In an effort to be as transparent and cooperative as possible, I sent my complete Iranian itinerary to the American consulate in Cairo. Then, carrying $2,000 cash in my pocket and swathed from head to toe in a black polyester robe, I flew to Tehran, with a slight fever and the grim feeling that if I were the FBI, I would investigate me, too.

My first impression of Iran began in Dubai. I had a short layover there on the way to Tehran, and sitting at the gate waiting to board the plane, I began to wonder whether I had the right idea about the country I was headed toward. In my mind, I had envisioned Iran as like Egypt, but worse; I had cast it as an Arab Sunni country, and was expecting the specific militancy of Arab Sunni extremism. I didn't even need to be there to realize I was wrong. None of the women on my flight wore head scarves. I saw a slew of stylishly tailored jeans, highlighted hair, and lipstick, and felt extremely underdressed. The travel agency I was using suggested I wear a black manteau, the housecoatlike outer garment that the Council of Guardians made mandatory during the Islamic Revolution in 1979. There was no such thing in Egypt, so instead I wore an abaya, a long traditional robe that was roughly similar.

Based on the appearance of the other women on my flight, I began to wonder whether I should have bothered
with the unfamiliar garment. When we landed in Tehran the scarves came out and were draped over heads with obvious distaste. There was an edge of defiance among the younger women, who wore tiny scarves halfway back on their heads, ponytails peeking out the back. In Egypt, few of the women on the plane would be considered properly veiled. Compared to most of them, I was dressed like a fundamentalist. This was a strange turn of events. Having nothing but the press to rely on for an impression of Iran, I expected harrowing brutality: a regime bent on total domination, a people struggling against fanaticism. But the Axis of Evil was nowhere to be found in the cynical nonchalance of “mandatory Islamic dress,” and the catty girls from the plane looked less than revolutionary.

My guide met me at the airport. He was a kind-looking man of sixty or so, and was so courteous and mild as we started chatting about our schedule that I breathed a sigh of relief. I'd been dreading the situation that would inevitably have occurred in Egypt—getting stuck for a week with a desperate guy in his thirties who would make it his mission to get me into bed, despite the engagement ring on my finger and the scarf on my head. But Ahmad was married, with a daughter my age and a son slightly older, and seemed amused at the prospect of shepherding around someone so much younger than himself.

“Most tourists who come to Iran are middle-aged or older couples,” he said. “Not many young people come here because there are no bars, no discos. There are no healthy ways to get into trouble as young people like to do. It's sad, really.”

This was a phrase I was to hear many times from many people over the course of my time in Iran. What's happened to our country—it's sad, really.

Tehran was gray and overcast during my time there. The city bore few scars from the eight-year-long war with Iraq; I only saw one building with visible traces of shelling. A string of parks ran through the center of town and the streets were remarkably clean, the Elburz Mountains were beautiful in the background, and yet the air itself seemed low and listless as I wandered around with Ahmad. It took me several hours to realize that it was because I heard absolutely no laughter. In fact, the only raised voice I heard the entire day was in a restaurant, when a waiter called out food orders to the kitchen. The human stillness was so complete it was almost surreal. People were unfailingly kind as we visited museums and tea houses, and delighted to learn I was an American (Iranians don't hate Americans, they were all anxious to assure me), but the atmosphere was always solemn. “Ten years ago a woman could be thrown in jail for laughing too loudly,” Ahmad explained, “and unmarried men and women are still sometimes harassed when they go out together. Maybe this is the origin of what you are sensing.”

I shook my head, stunned. Maybe.

We passed by the old American Embassy on the way back to my hotel. “They left it exactly as they found it,” Ahmad said. “After the revolution they just locked the gate. And painted the slogans on the wall.”

The outer wall—institutional brick like the buildings inside—was covered in murals showing the Statue of Liberty with a skull for a face and an assortment of anti-American slogans. All the windows inside the compound were tiny and barred; a subtle and ominous suggestion that the United States knew the revolution was coming long before the storm broke.

“This is where they took the hostages?”

“Yes.” Ahmad followed my gaze toward the death's-head Statue of Liberty. “I have nothing to say.” He smiled helplessly.