The Last Great Revolution by Robin Wright

Author:Robin Wright [Wright, Robin]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-0-307-76607-6
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2010-09-28T16:00:00+00:00

* Iran has a handful of vice presidents, most of whom are assigned specific issues. All are appointed by the president.

CHAPTER 5

LOVE, MARRIAGE AND SEX

IN THE ISLAMIC REPUBLIC

We don’t teach rhythm because it’s not sure enough.

—DR. MOHSEN NAGHAVI

SHAHID NAMJOU CLINIC IS a modest building of pristine, whitewashed rooms in downtown Tehran where neighborhood families get their babies inoculated, their broken bones set and their fevers measured. Shahid means “martyr” and Mr. Namjou was either among the few hundred killed during the revolution or, more probably, among the tens of thousands who died during the grisly eight-year war with Iraq—no one at the clinic seemed to know which precisely. During the revolution’s first decade, martyrs were a common theme, as Tehran renamed streets, squares and schools that once honored the monarchy and its allies, both local and foreign. In their early zeal to purge the past, the revolutionaries dedicated even small government facilities such as clinics to Iranians who had died for the cause.

On a spring morning, as a cool rain tapped against the windows, I met Jalal Shahpasand at Martyr Namjou’s clinic. The tall, husky restaurateur with a groomed mustache was clearly in love. The object of his affection was Jila Abdolrasooly, a young woman with classically sharp Persian features whose raven hair was showing from under a bright royal-blue scarf. She sat next to him, closely.

“My family knew Jila’s family, so they introduced us. Then we started seeing each other,” Jalal explained as he glanced at her with a smile. Matchmaking still prevails in Iranian society, even among the small minority who end up marrying for love.

A year after they met, Jalal continued, he decided he was ready. So one night after dinner at Jila’s house, after family chaperones had finally gone off to watch television, he had escorted her to a settee, then picked up her hand and whispered, “Will you marry me?”

Jila, smiling, had nodded her assent.

“We had to be traditional because some of the family expected it,” Jalal recalled. “And actually it was quite romantic.”

I sat with the betrothed couple in the white-tiled clinic classroom as they waited for the one thing more important in Iran than a marriage license—a certificate proving they’d passed the nation’s family-planning course. No one gets married in Iran without it.

Just as the martyrdom of Namjou symbolized the revolution’s early years, the birth control class at the clinic named after him reflected what happened as the Islamic republic aged: Sober practicality had begun to replace frenzied emotions as the basis of policy. The government was becoming proactive about the future, not just reactive to the past.

The no-nonsense lecture on human biology and reproduction—in a society where Islamic modesty requires women to be covered from head to toe and prohibits men, at least in theory, from wearing tight trousers—also accentuated the colorful contradictions that make Iran an interesting, even intriguing place. There were no euphemisms in this classroom.

Abol Fazl Mohajeri, a fatherly figure with a thick fringe of white hair around his

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