Lipstick Jihad by Azadeh Moaveni

Author:Azadeh Moaveni
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Published: 2010-06-01T04:00:00+00:00

The eve of the presidential election, held in the summer of 2001, was a turbulent season for reformists. Nearly every day, the hard-line judiciary banned one of their newspapers or arrested a pro-reform activist. This was bad for the country, and bad for dinner-table conversation. Before the regime made brutal assault of the reform movement a daily ritual, Iranians followed politics like Americans follow baseball—as national pastime.

There were so many newspapers to read that neighborhood businesses bought a morning stack as a pool; in my neighborhood, the butcher, the florist, and the baker each bought different papers, and traded them over the course of the day. Their radios were tuned into the news, and you could pass in and check on the day’s political developments, as you would the score of a game. Because at that moment most people still cared—it felt like a shared, national journey—and read the same satirical, critical papers, the news sparked flavorful and deep conversations.

But as the life was slowly pummeled out of the reform movement throughout 2000 and well into the spring of 2001, once reformist leaders lost nerve and direction, no one felt much like talking politics anymore. Though I now lived on my own, I was too lazy to cook and still went to dinner at Khaleh Farzi’s most nights. The number of newspapers she brought home had dwindled from five to one. Its fate was to end up on the tub, its crossword puzzle half worked out. Dinner debates, the one regular feature of our lives, ceased altogether.

Thus disillusioned, families stopped talking about the thrilling national journey, and returned to topics more familiar, like whether or not to emigrate to Canada. Sooner or later, most Iranians lost faith that this particular reform movement would achieve sufficient or imminent change. It was the inevitable conclusion that followed round after round of defeat—the steady hard-line process of banning, vetoing, arresting, intimidating, and torturing. The disillusionment was not terminal. Everyone knew the present system would come to an end. It might not collapse overnight, or collapse at all, for that matter, but it would slowly evolve until one day the revolutionary Islamic Republic’s ideology would die, in an age where ideology itself was outmoded. It was just a matter of time, the years it would take for the rancorous, powerful ayatollah-dinosaurs—mercifully an endangered species—to die off.

The shift in thinking, from a specific hope vested in recognizable figures, to the distant, abstract conviction that things would change because they must, occurred differently for everyone. It came for Siamak the week he stepped out onto a busy street with his baby niece and toddler nephew, and a car actually sped up.

He told me about it the next day, as we were having lunch at his office. He just stared at the feta cheese and cucumbers on the table, and I felt panicky at the grave look in his brown eyes, the disillusionment etched all over his face. “It doesn’t make a difference who takes over,” he said.

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