Everyday Iran

A Provincial Portrait of the Islamic Republic

Clarissa de Waal

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781780769080
• eBook ISBN: 9780857736635
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire du Moyen-Orient

Iran is a country which, despite its extensive coverage in the media, is often regarded as 'mysterious', 'exotic' and 'other-worldly'. This attitude often stems from a focus on the rhetoric of controversial figures in Iranian politics, rather than looking at the everyday lives of Iranians themselves. In this book, Clarissa de Waal uses her training as an anthropologist to examine the experiences of individuals, concentrating on the Fars province in southwest Iran. This serves to highlight contemporary Iran outside of the capital, which so often dominates western understanding of the country. De Waal interviews a wide range of subjects, from public sector workers and entrepreneurs to Qashqa'i (both settled and nomadic), from students to the unemployed and from hairdressers to university professors. Through these interviews, she offers insight into the commonplace rituals of family interaction, the economics of food and fuel subsidies (and their withdrawal), the pervasiveness of unemployment and the varying approaches to Islam. She explores the extent to which the government of Iran and state-sanctioned religion impinges on citizens at home, work and in their social lives. Yet despite intrusive state interventionism, de Waal encounters inconsistencies between official government strictures and daily life. Satellite dishes, though illegal, are owned by most households, enabling them to watch foreign television from Mexican telenovellas to CNN. Uniquely, by being there during the 2009 elections, de Waal is also able to examine first-hand the various reactions both to the debate in the run-up to the elections and the huge protests in the wake of the election, recording the diverse responses to the candidates and their political platforms. By focusing on the everyday existence of a variety of Iranians from different backgrounds, de Waal offers insightful analysis concerning ordinary Iranians' lives and the impact the state has on them economically, socially and religiously.

CHAPTER 1

2007:FIRST IMPRESSIONS IN AND AROUND SHIRAZ

First impressions

On the flight from London to Bahrain I found a cockroach in my otherwise delicious meal. I drew the cabin crew's attention to it and the Greek catering manager came along to reassure me that eating cockroaches is not bad for the health. A bottle of champagne was offered by way of compensation but this would have been confiscated on arrival in alcohol-free Iran. So with no sense of irony, they presented me with a book on airline cuisine, a heavyish hardback which I abandoned en route.

In the evening we arrived in Bahrain to be knocked back by the heat as we walked across the tarmac to the airport building for transit to Shiraz. In the Ladies I swapped my shirt and sweater for a manteau (in my case a long-sleeved below-the-knee black smock) worn over jeans, and got out a headscarf ready for arrival in Iran. Women may not appear in public without head- and body-covering in Iran even if they are foreigners getting off international flights. Swarming onto the small plane for Shiraz, oblivious of seating instructions, were dozens of Iraqi women pilgrims carrying bulky blue plastic bags and dressed in voluminous black chadors. The steward gave up trying to control them, and the few non-pilgrims were guided to the first-class area to avoid the chaos.

At Shiraz airport there was no waiting young man despite carefully made arrangements. The Iraqi women returning from Mecca sat in rows in the baggage hall waiting for their next flight. They were very cheerful and smiled at me a lot in a friendly rather self-mocking way as if they thought a foreigner might find their black ranks funny. I wandered out of the arrivals hall, which had no barriers, to look for my host. Outside there were little groups of people seated on the ground picnicking in the dark. Eventually Mr Jafari, a short, dapper 35-year-old, turned up, indicating as far as I could understand that the plane had arrived late and he had got bored with waiting. We drove to a suburb of Shiraz and descended into his open-plan basement flat. My bed was in a semi-partitioned area without a door. Segregation of the sexes evidently ended above ground. While he watched a Korean film dubbed at full volume into Persian until two in the morning I wondered how to escape from these less than satisfactory living quarters.

The next morning Jafari took me to see various sights in the centre of Shiraz. Our means of communication were extremely limited as I could speak very little Persian despite having worked at it intermittently for several months beforehand. However, outside the gates of the gardens called Bagh Eram he made clear that I was not to speak as we would get in cheaply if he said I was a relation. Foreigners pay more. The same strategy was enacted two years later when I revisited the gardens with an older man who told the ticket man that I was his wife. On that occasion the ticket man said disapprovingly: ‘You shouldn't have married a foreigner’. The gardens are a delight, full of tall trees, palms and cypresses, flowering shrubs, bougainvillea and plumbago. They are said to have been named after a legendary garden in southern Arabia built under the orders of a King Shaddad to compete with paradise. A few Iranian tourists were photographing each other in these beautiful surroundings. There is a very pretty three-storey palace pavilion in front of which is a long stone pool. Later I learnt that these gardens and the house within them had belonged to the Qashqa'i tribal leaders in the nineteenth century and again, following contentious relations between the tribal leaders and the Shah, in the 1940s and early 1950s. Now they belong to Shiraz University.

We then drove to the tomb of the fourteenth-century poet Hafez, Iranians' favourite poet, who lived most of his life in Shiraz. Hafez's poetry is sensuous, celebrating love, wine, roses and nightingales. But he was more than a romantic. He was a social critic as well, berating the mullahs of his time for their hypocrisy. In a poem (here translated by Elizabeth Gray in a collection of Hafez's poems called The Green Sea of Heaven) we read:

Preachers who display their piety in prayer and pulpit

Behave differently when they're alone.

It puzzles me. Ask the learned ones of the assembly:

‘Why do those who demand repentance do so little of it?’

It's as if they don't believe in the Day of Judgement

With all this fraud and counterfeit they do in his name.

As resonant for Iranian society today is another Hafez poem (translated by the Persian scholar Edward Granville Browne) written after a prohibition on alcohol was introduced in fourteenth-century Shiraz:

Though wines give delight, and the wind distils the perfume of the rose,

Drink not the wine to the strains of the harp, for the constable is alert.

Sadly, though there are many beautiful gardens and parks in Shiraz, this city of nearly two million is traversed by major highways filled with continuous streams of cars and almost devoid of traffic lights. The city of poets, wine and love has become a city of menacing traffic and breathtaking pollution. Somewhat mitigating this disappointment are the surrounding Zagros Mountains rising clean above the 1,500-metre plateau on which Shiraz stands. On this first day I saw picnickers on the grass verges beside the main roads, many with tents. Some days later, walking in a wonderful tree-filled, fountained park I saw tents belonging to visitors who were camping to save on hotel bills. Aspects of the nomadic tradition live on even in the city.

The heat was stifling and I was overdressed, so I reduced the layers to the manteau-like shirt over jeans before going to lunch with the uncle of a Cambridge-based Iranian friend. The uncle was a gentle kind man who lived, as do hundreds of thousands of diaspora Iranians, in California, and only came to visit every three or four years. His siblings and their children, some from Tehran, were enjoying an extended family reunion. The hosts were a well-off middle-class family who had just moved to this newly built suburb of Shiraz. They at once told me to take off my manteau and scarf, a sign of their sophistication as well as care for my comfort. As I was only wearing the shirt, I could not take it off. But they kindly insisted on lending me a too big low-cut top which the hezbollahi would surely have frowned on. We ate at a long table, as opposed to on a cloth spread on the ground, again a sign of cosmopolitanism, and were treated to the usual splendid platters piled high with rice plus dozens of delicious side dishes. With one or two exceptions the people I subsequently came to know well had not embraced this cosmopolitan style in their homes.

After lunch, two student nieces (over 60 per cent of all university students in Iran are women) were summoned to come and meet me. They were sophisticated young women, well informed and Western in their manners, who spoke good English. It was suggested that one of them might work for me as interpreter and fieldwork assistant. I wrote down her telephone number, not wanting to seem dismissive, but doubted if she realised what was involved – how many village houses she would have to spend the night in, how many outdoor lavatories she would be exposed to. I really needed someone who would not be perceived as an urban outsider, and this being Iran a man in any case would be more useful.

Jafari's family came from a different social stratum: in old-fashioned Western class terms, small-town petit bourgeois. Most of his relations lived in Marvdasht, a busy market town (pop. 130,000) in the plain, 45 kilometres north-east of Shiraz. Marvdasht has a petrochemical factory but is primarily an agricultural centre, its huge expanse of plain planted with wheat and maize, sugar beet, tomatoes and cucumbers. Nearing the town I was startled by large blood-red heaps in the fields beside the roads. These turned out to be cattle-feed, red as a result of mixing the fodder with tomato pulp. The town was teeming with villagers selling their fruit and vegetables beside the main street. Most of the streets behind the main road are so narrow that cars have to be parked elsewhere. I was to spend the day with Jafari's sister's family. At a one-storey house in a very narrow lane, we found Jafari's sister and nieces with a cousin and aunt. Inside, the living area of the house consisted of separate spaces semi-partitioned but without doors. There were no chairs or tables. Instead the living rooms were carpeted all over, and against the walls there were bolster-shaped cushions. In this house the kitchen was separate across a hall. Visitors were expected to keep on their hejab. The girls were very friendly and forthcoming and asked lots of questions. The elder daughter, Rokhsaneh, in her twenties, spoke some English. Their first question was: Is Iran Third World? So they were worried about Iran's image. In Shiraz I had seen none of the chaotic street life or begging associated with so-called Third World countries. The traffic was scary but the roads were good. Literacy and life expectancy were good; a very high percentage of university students were women; the birth rate had reduced drastically over the last decade. No, I said, without knowing what constituted Third World in their minds, but comparing what I had seen in two days of Colombia in the 1980s and Albania in the early 1990s. The girls were pleased. Pleased that they need not feel embarrassed about their country.

Next they wanted to compare England and Iran. They asked about married women who work, villagers moving to towns, drug addiction, culture, hair colouring and make-up. ‘We use make-up much more than you English and you drink coffee not tea,’ they asserted. They did not like the fact that Marvdasht had been overrun, as they saw it, by villagers. They were very clear as to villagers' inferiority, though less clear as to how they were inferior. Ideally, they would have preferred to live in Shiraz, a city. This was exactly in tune with attitudes I had found in 1970s provincial Greece.

When I got a turn at asking them questions it led to the older daughter saying she liked drawing and painting. You must come and see her paintings, cried the younger sister and cousin, she is really talented. The pictures were on the walls of the room where their father was now praying. But shouldn't we wait until your father has finished praying? No, and nor was quiet required. Laughing and chatting, they exclaimed loudly over each picture while the father continued imperturbably with his prayers, holding the round clay tablet, the mohr from the holy city of Kerbala, to his forehead.

At lunchtime the son together with the eldest daughter and her husband arrived. The son worked in his father's factory nearby. Here vegetables were pickled and flowers distilled for their scent or to make golab – rose water. The daughter's husband ran a stationery shop while the daughter did dressmaking, but only, it was stressed, for the family, not for sale. After lunch mattresses were unrolled on the floor and we all had a rest followed by a tea-drinking session. The girls and I went off to see the stationery shop leaving the father still sleeping underneath a beautiful black-and-white patterned sheet, which covered him from head to toe. I hoped to find notebooks with similar typical Persian patterns at the stationers. But the shop was full of school bags and notebooks, American style with Mickey Mouse motifs. The theocracy seems to have no problem with the Great Satan's aesthetic influence. Eventually from under the counter at the bottom of piles of more saleable articles the proprietors uncovered some pretty patterned notebooks made by Azadehco. State tolerance of Americana struck me again at a confectioner's in Shiraz where alongside the characteristic national sweetmeats were cakes decorated with ‘Happy Birthday’ messages in English. The municipal van collecting recycling stuff in Shiraz plays the ‘Happy Birthday’ tune to announce itself. Perhaps the politicians and clerics believe aesthetics to be dissociated from dangerous ideological influences, or perhaps these are just examples of strategically turning a blind eye. I recalled the word ‘westoxification’, gharbsadegi. It means cultural pollution through subscribing to Western cultural values, or indiscriminate borrowing from and dependence on the West. I concluded that the clerics must be more worried about Western ideas of democracy and secularism than Western popular art.

After visiting the shop, we went with Rokhsaneh's brother to the family's factory. Here we peered into dozens of barrels of torshi – pickles – some filled with cucumbers or aubergine or cabbage or a mixture, others with flowers whose essence was being extracted. On the way back we bought faloudeh, like ice cream but made of rice flour with rose water, and ended up at the grandfather's whom we found praying in the yard in front of his house. He stopped to be introduced and embarrassingly I forgot not to shake hands (a woman does not shake hands with a man). He resumed his prayers and we went inside, where we found his son-in-law, Rokhsaneh's father. On subsequent occasions when visiting other families in Marvdasht I was struck by the village-like closeness of family life, where relations were constantly popping in and out of each other's houses. The traditional preference for first-cousin marriage is clearly a big factor in this closeness; in-laws are usually cousins with whom one has grown up.

Some days later I returned to spend the day again with Rokhsaneh's family. On this occasion Jafari, whose job was installing lifts, had to repair a lift before driving to Marvdasht. He dropped me off at his office to wait, briefly, he said. This was quite an ordeal for his hospitable colleagues and for me as my Persian was very limited, and Jafari stayed away for three hours. Trying to make conversation, I asked one of the younger colleagues where he lived and was told in an old district in Shiraz called Sang e Siyah (‘black stone’). He looked nonplussed when I asked if it was pretty, until his boss explained that ‘old’ for foreigners is historically interesting and therefore nice. Again, this was reminiscent of 1970s Greece, a period when wooden balconies, stone houses and tiled roofs were replaced with concrete. I asked them to tell me about newspapers in Shiraz – which were government, which independent. There were three government papers and two private ones. I learnt later from Persian VOA television that Iran had seen a huge drop in newspaper readership over the past decade, a drop attributed to state censorship. After this topic both sides had grown so fed up with the tardy Jafari that we gave up conversation and his colleagues returned to what looked like a fairly desultory work schedule.

On the drive to Marvdasht we stopped to speak to an acquaintance, introduced as a farmer because Jafari knew that I was interested in village economy. This man owned a lot of arable land round Marvdasht but lived in Shiraz. The land was cultivated by Afghan workers. Jafari then took me to see his own piece of land on the outskirts of Marvdasht where he had a hectare of cucumbers, which were being picked by six very thin workers who turned out not to be Afghan as I had assumed, but poor locals. They picked amid raucous shouts and laughter, evidently not awed by their mostly absent employer. The foreman knew much more about the enterprise, its water requirements and income, than Jafari. Afterwards we visited a small factory for oxygen and metal parts belonging to a brother of Jafari's. The brother said there was big demand for oxygen at local hospitals, and the business was very profitable. The surrounding yards of both brothers' enterprises had been thoughtfully planted with young trees, but their pleasant aspect was marred by the slummy effect of litter left to lie about, also characteristic of picnic areas in and around Shiraz.

Jafari's sister had been praying before opening the door to us, so she handed us over to her daughters and resumed praying a little way from where we were sitting. Prayers are in Arabic and follow a set routine, like Latin prayers in the Catholic Church or second-century Greek in the Orthodox Church. Later Rokhsaneh asked me if I would excuse her while she went to pray. Her younger sister was instructed to play the setar (a three-stringed instrument) to me in the meantime. The sister, 14, had been learning the setar for a year and must have been a good pupil as her playing was a pleasure to listen to. After lunch, mattresses were unrolled and we all lay down to sleep, the father again completely covered by the beautiful black-and-white printed sheet.

Marvdasht is close to Persepolis and we had arranged for Jafari to drive us there that afternoon together with a school friend of Rokhsaneh's, Farzaneh, who was very eager to meet an English person. She arrived wearing a tight-fitting magh'nai, a wimple-like head-covering, which she had arranged so that it completely hid her hair. Women working in state organisations are required to wear this head-covering, but elsewhere many girls and women allow their hair to show, whether they are wearing a scarf (ru sari) or magh'nai. Those who make a point of hiding their hair, especially if they also wear a chador, may be ironically classified by the less religious as ‘hezbollahi’, meaning ultra-orthodox or, depending on the context, ostentatious toers of the government dress policy. Farzaneh spoke some English, rather stilted but with a good accent, each word separated very precisely, and told me: ‘I assure you Rokhsaneh and I are intimate friends.’

Persepolis was founded about 518 BC as the seat of Darius the Great's Achaemenian Empire and extended over the century by his son Xerxes. In Persian it is called Takht-e Jamshid, meaning Throne of Jamshid (Jamshid was a mythical Persian king). Darius was a relative of Cyrus the Great whose own palace was at Pasargad a few kilometres away. One approaches Persepolis along a wide tree-lined avenue at the end of which, on a raised platform, is the most stunningly beautiful site, dominated by huge, radiantly towering columns. The large complex of palatial architecture is reached by a long double staircase of shallow steps. The site backs on to the flinty honey-coloured mountainside, high up in which are some tombs. The precision of the carvings on the walls beside the staircases, the wonderfully vivid portrayals of visitors from vassal states processing, some with animals, camels, lions, donkeys, are unforgettable. Even the relentless pursuit by Farzaneh with a cine camera, determined to record this meeting with an English person, could not detract from the spellbinding magnificence of the place. I begged Farzaneh to stop and look at the marvels around her, but to no effect. And I myself was doing something I disapproved of. To further exoticise the photographs I was taking of the site, I wanted to capture tourists wearing chadors to give what was ultimately a false idea of Iran to the folks at home. There were no foreign tourists and there were very few chador-wearing Iranians. The majority of women were, as in Shiraz, wearing manteaus and headscarves.

That evening at dinner there were at least a dozen of us seated on the floor round the sofreh covered with wonderful dishes. The grandfather whose hand I had regrettably shaken was there with his wife. He sat opposite me across the cloth at quite a distance, but not too far away to miss the half inch of uncovered neck between my manteau and my headscarf. I caught him peremptorily signalling to his wife who was sitting next to me to see that I ended this improper exposure at once. I irritatedly consigned him to the ‘hezbollahi’ as I readjusted a safety pin. We talked about Persepolis. Rokhsaneh's father said that it might seem magnificent to me but in fact it had been robbed and vandalised and was sadly no longer the glorious place it had once been. He clearly was not referring to Alexander the Great's destruction and looting in 330 BC. But perhaps he was referring to the attempts to wreck Persepolis by post-1979 revolutionary fanatics such as Ayatollah Khalkhali, one of Khomeini's henchmen and chief justice of the Revolutionary Court. Fortunately in that case local villagers and Qashqa'i herders encamped nearby fought these vandals off. Khalkhali subsequently wrote a book in which he set out to vilify Cyrus the Great, portraying him as a liar, homosexual and tyrant. A bit rich coming from a man known as the ‘hanging judge’ who executed so many people that on suggesting to Khomeini that he would like to become prime minister, Khomeini allegedly said: ‘If I make you prime minister you'll execute half the country.’ Or, Rokhsaneh's father may have been indirectly criticising the government for its, some would say wilful, neglect – the lack of maintenance and looting insufficiently checked by the authorities responsible for the site. Wilfully neglected because pre-Islamic Persepolis is viewed ambivalently by the ayatollahs, who fear it as a nationalist distraction from Islam (and further tainted by the Shah's notorious extravaganza in 1971 to celebrate the 2,500th anniversary of the founding of the Persian Empire).

First acquaintance with Qashqa'i

Mr Jafari had told our mutual Iranian friend in England that he had found a village teacher who spoke English. I might be able to stay in the village and start on a pilot study of village life and economy. One day, following a number of increasingly desperate-sounding telephone calls, Jafari drove me about 50 kilometres west of Shiraz to a village called Chero. This region is largely the summer pasture area of the Qashqa'i pastoral nomads who have been migrating here from their winter pastures for several hundred years. In Chero, after more worried enquiries by Jafari, a young man joined us and guided us to a nearby village, Aliabad. On the way we passed through Hasanabad, a large village of mud-brick houses. Always on the lookout for a fieldwork village, Hasanabad immediately caught my attention...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Introduction
• 1. 2007: First Impressions In and Around Shiraz
• 2. 2008: Exploring Fars Province
• 3. 2009: Election Week
• 4. 2011: Political Repercussions
• 5. 2012: Sanctions and Their Impact
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Bibliography