Iran: Intimidation In Tehran

On a sunny day earlier this summer, I took my 8-month-old baby boy Hourmazd for a walk in the foothills of Tehran's Alborz Mountains. Families and young people crowded the tree-lined path ahead, chatting leisurely and snacking on crepes and barbecued corn. As I pushed the stroller along, a policewoman in a black chador blocked my way. She fingered my plain cotton head scarf, pronounced it too thin and directed me toward a parked minibus. It took a full minute for me to realize that she meant to arrest me. "I've been wearing this veil for over five years," I pleaded. "Surely it can't be that unacceptable?" My husband soon caught up with us and began berating the policewoman for harassing a young mother. The commotion drew the attention of a bearded superior officer, who came over to inspect me. "The problems are not few," he said, frowning at my sleeves, which fell a few inches above my unsteady wrists. He ordered me to sign a ta'ahod, a commitment that I would not repeat my mistake. "Now go home," he said. "Go home, and don't come back."

Iran's rulers are notorious for their mercurial ways, cracking down on some social freedoms one season and tolerating the most outrageous pastimes the next. The reliable exception has been standards of Islamic dress, which have been relaxed for years, allowing women to wear short coats and bright, pushed-back head scarves. But recently the rules changed overnight. As we inched out of the busy parking lot, I leaned out the window to warn a group of young women whose dress was sure to make them targets. "They're arresting people up ahead," I said. Only one nonchalantly tugged her veil forward a little. The others continued laughing, as though they didn't believe me. It had been so long since women were rounded up in the streets that I didn't blame them. Young men with long hair, women with jewel-toned veils filled the area. "Will they arrest the entire parking lot?" I wondered aloud. "The whole city?"

When I moved to Tehran in 2005 to work as a reporter and start a family, life was difficult but bearable. The country my parents had left behind for the U.S. in the 1970s was on the mend. The economy was poor and the pollution stifling, but if you asked most Iranians whether things were better than in the past, most would have said yes. Although the election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad that year had prompted worries that the regime would enforce social strictures with renewed vigor, the suppression never materialized. Ahmadinejad declared that Iranians had more important issues to deal with than Islamic dress, so the system continued to deal permissively with the 48 million Iranians under the age of 30, who make up more than two-thirds of the population. Some continued leeway on social restrictions was all the government could offer this vast, disaffected young constituency, a small consolation for the absence of political freedoms and economic opportunities. It was not San Francisco--there could be no cocktail bars or nightclubs--but neither was it Saudi Arabia.

In the past few months, however, Tehran has become a different place. Convinced the U.S. is seeking to destabilize their Islamic system through economic pressure and covert infiltration of political life, the ruling clerics are retaking control of the public sphere ahead of next spring's parliamentary elections. "The more threatened the hard-liners feel, the more paranoid they will become," says Farideh Farhi, an Iran expert and professor of political science at the University of Hawaii.

Things began falling apart in the spring when authorities raided neighborhoods all over the city to confiscate illegal satellite dishes, Iranians' link to the outside world. The police swooped down on our building early one morning, kicking the devices down with their boots. Two of my neighbors, using their mobile phones, recorded footage of trucks carting off the dishes, only to have the phones confiscated as well. My 6-year-old nephew wept, desolate at the loss of his cartoon channel and angry that we had not called the police. "But the police were the ones who took the dish," I explained. "It was against the law." He naturally wanted to know why we had been breaking the law in the first place. This led to the sort of complicated discussion one hopes never to have with a young child--all about how we break the law at home while pretending to observe Islamic codes outside. In recent years, the gulf between public and private life in Iran had shrunk, a happy development, especially for parents, who saw their children more willing than at any time before the revolution to spend their lives inside the country. But talking to my nephew, I could almost feel the gap being stretched wide open again, and the thought filled me with sadness.

As news of what was happening on Tehran's streets filtered in, it became clear that the authorities had launched a full-scale campaign of intimidation, the likes of which the country had not seen in a decade or more. In the course of a few weeks, state news reported that some 150,000 people had been detained at least briefly. All the women in my life went out and bought dark, knee-length, shapeless coats, the sort of uniform we had discarded in the late '90s. The crackdown had everyone on edge, in part because it was so inexplicable. Many women avoided going out in public unless it was necessary. Even the pious considered the new mood egregious. As a friend of mine who wears the black chador out of conviction put it, "This is a mockery to focus on dress when our country has so many more urgent problems."

Within three weeks, the police vans disappeared from the streets, and women once again pushed back their veils, albeit with apprehension. To be on the safe side, I dressed conservatively for an appointment at a university in central Tehran. But at the gate a guard told me my manteau, a sort of Islamic overcoat, had "too few buttons," and he refused me admittance. "You look appalling," he said. A fellow guard rebuked him for addressing a "sister" so disrespectfully. The professor I was meeting, a reformer and onetime official, phoned to intervene, but the guards refused to budge. "Sorry, Doctor," the offensive one said, pronouncing the title with a sneer. I wanted to burst into tears but told myself it was an educational experience. It gave me a taste of what Tehran must have been like in the early days of the revolution, when Islamic ideologues took over universities, purging women and secular teachers. The professor told me later that he was lucky to still have his job. Two years ago, Ahmadinejad appointed a mullah as chancellor of the University of Tehran--the first move in what many called a second cultural revolution. Administrators forced scores of secular-minded professors into early retirement.