An Iranian police officer tells a woman to get into a police vehicle in eastern Tehran, Iran in April of 2007. Iranian police launched a crackdown on women's dress during the summer season when soaring temperatures typically tempt many to flout the strict Islamic dress code.
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Such pressures reflect the system's growing obsession with security. Earlier this year, the system detained four Iranian-American academics for plotting to overthrow the regime through support for a civil society. (Authorities released one, Haleh Esfandiari, from prison on Aug. 21.) The message to Iranians was clear: Cut your ties with the outside world or face the consequences.
Since the arrests, I, along with many of my journalist friends, have stopped meeting with foreigners altogether, worried that harmless socializing might be considered spying. I have canceled dinners with visiting American friends, screened calls from abroad and stopped giving interviews to foreign media. "I'm nervous," I confessed in June to an official at the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance, which oversees the work of foreign journalists. "The red lines have all shifted, and I can't figure out what to write that won't get me in trouble." The official sighed, advised me to report as I had for years--honestly but with caution--and talked of the concerns swirling in the halls of government. "The Western media are distorting the image of Iran," he said. "Why does no one write about how Iranian women are ahead of the whole region in education, in public life?" I agreed with him but said it was difficult to communicate such gains in the midst of widening human-rights violations.
The next day, I attended a concert of Persian classical music at Niyavaran Palace, one of the former Shah's residences in northern Tehran. A decade ago, there were no such concerts to attend in Tehran because the mullahs frowned on music as un-Islamic. This summer there were concerts scheduled across the country, several of them including orchestras with female musicians. At least 3,000 people, among them many women in black chadors, mingled before the candlelit steps of the palace under a velvet sky. The country's preeminent poets and directors sat alongside government officials and their chador-clad wives, and gazing at the scene, you could be forgiven for imagining this was a society at peace with itself, run by men who appreciated the arts, reconciled with the role of Islam in daily life. The brutality of the previous month receded in my memory. Perhaps Iran was not caught in a downward spiral after all.
My sunny outlook carried into the next week and was seemingly reflected in the changing billboards adorning Tehran. For years religious murals have lent the city a dismal air, a constant reminder to Iranians that they are living under an Islamic theocracy that is hostile to everything it considers Western, including beauty. Now the billboards display attractive black-and-white photographs of grinning revolutionaries and Islamic calligraphy that resembles urban graffiti. One morning a white van with PEYK-E KHORSHID (MESSENGER OF THE SUN) emblazoned on its sides rolled into my neighborhood, and two women in powder blue chadors opened its doors to unveil a portable library. They smiled at passersby and handed out white gladioluses and free books as part of a municipal program to promote reading. I got children's editions of epic Persian poetry to read to my nephew. "This is positive, at least," said an elderly neighbor. "But people are so unhappy, no one notices when they try."
In past years, certain types of outreach had bought the state reluctant acquiescence from lower- and middle-class Iranians struggling with joblessness and record inflation. Low-interest loans and subsidies on basic foodstuffs have helped. High oil prices enabled this largesse. But oil's munificence is not limitless. The government, nervous that the West may impose sanctions on Iran's gasoline imports as punishment for its controversial nuclear activities, recently withdrew its subsidy of gasoline. Despite its vast oil reserves, Iran cannot produce sufficient gasoline to meet consumption, so in June the government imposed rationing. For days, gas stations saw long queues at all hours. On the way home from a dinner party the first night of the rationing, we were stuck in a three-hour traffic jam, the air filled with smoke from a gas station that rioters had set on fire.
Even our local produce seller, a mellow, religious old man not prone to talk of politics, could not control his fury at Ahmadinejad. "He's ruined this country," he said, storming around a stand of figs and mulberries. "Why doesn't someone stop him?" I was reminded of something an acquaintance of mine, a close relative of Ahmadinejad's, once said. "Tehran is like a warehouse of cotton," he told me. "One spark, and the whole place will burn." Suddenly the disturbing prospects of Iran's uncertain place in the world ceased to be an abstraction and became a reality disrupting our daily lives. The nightly news reported that gas stations had been set ablaze across the city. We spent three days at home without even going grocery shopping, reluctant to use up our gas and ruing the day we acquired an SUV.
These strained times coincided with my family's long-planned departure from Iran. My husband was starting graduate school in Europe, so we joined the tens of thousands of educated Iranians who make up the country's enormous annual brain drain. On the eve of leaving, I couldn't help feeling a profound sense of relief, as though we were rowing away from a sinking ship. The last time I moved away from Iran, back in 2002, the country was also in the throes of a crackdown, though nowhere near as all-encompassing as this one. The pretext back then was that George W. Bush had labeled Iran part of an "axis of evil," and when the rhetoric cooled, the regime resumed trying to placate its angry young people. Watching from afar, I will be eager to see how a hard-line government will woo back the vast middle class, alienated by the imposition of a more Islamic social order. In Isfahan angry citizens reportedly burned police buses used to round up flouters of "Islamic" dress. In Shiraz 2,000 university students demonstrated against new dress restrictions. It's hard to see how Ahmadinejad and his supporters will retain control of parliament in next spring's crucial elections. But "the hard-liners would rather rule over a population that fears them than one that likes them," explains my friend Karim Sadjadpour, an associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.