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Private Lives and Public Domains in Contemporary Iran1
Back home after a decade-long stay in America on a short visit in 1973
to find an Iranian wife, my uncle wondered aloud why so many pedestrians
here enjoyed rambling along the street (not only on the pavement, but in
the motorists’ route as well), watching the people in passing cars. I
had to remind him that it had been a youngsters’ pastime when he grew up
here. Nothing new.
Eying the people around may be regarded as an impropriety in some
cultures. The outlandish habit of staring at total strangers sometimes
irritates foreign visitors to countries where people do not see anything
wrong with unsolicited eye contact. To the natives, being looked at may
be a sign of due attention, recognition and even respect. Many prefer a
probing gaze to being politely ignored.
Looking straight into each other’s face as a daily behaviour is far from
an invasion of privacy in Iran. Things, however, are changing. Once
shooting a film on location in the streets of Iran was almost impossible
–– a crowd of curious onlookers would make a mockery of the supposed
realism of the scene. Nowadays, rarely does anyone slow down on the
streets of Tehran to peep into digital movie cameras shooting soap
operas for domestic television channels (coming across a top celebrity,
of course, would be a different story, even in San Francisco). Rather
than bother to watch the boring chores of filming crews, one could watch
the equally boring end result on TV screen.
Old photos dating back to Europe’s belle epoch depict the gentry,
dressed elegantly and even ceremonially, sauntering along the boulevards
of Berlin, London and Paris. Years ago, we were horrified to read that
Los Angeles had no place for walking along its endless highways. As
youngsters beginning to develop a picture of the world, we took it for
granted that strolling down a park avenue, where people could solemnly
scrutinize who is wearing what and which girl’s contours are
flourishing, was an indispensable part of civilized, modern life.
Only one generation later, the middle class citizens of Tehran are
accustomed to driving their cars to parties, preferably through highways
that have no place for strollers but are invariably congested with
impatient, often careless, motorists. These parties are irrigated by
bootleggers who provide not only home-made arak distilled from raisins,
but also deliver to the buyers’ homes smuggled bottles of spirit. Though
Swedish bottles of vodka, French wine and more expensive brands of
whisky look and taste genuine, the labels of some bottles overemphasize
their being produced in Scotland (price: US$ 15-20 a bottle). From among
boozers, even those who have bought or seen bottles of Scotch when
abroad, very few seem to doubt the genuineness of the brands very likely
bottled in Turkey, Jordan or other nearby places. People tend to assume
stoically that, 1) when something is boldly declared in English, there
must be sort of truth to it; 2) having a good time is more a matter of
inner joy and good company than the quality of the consumed liquid,
whether or not it meets the EU’s mandatory standards.
Soon after the 1979 Islamic revolution of Iran, there was an ironic joke
in currency that once people used to pray at home and wetted their
whistles outside of it, while they now drink behind closed doors, but
say their prayers in public places. The late Ahmad Shamlu, renowned
Iranian poet, sadly wrote in 1979: ‘‘Love, light, gusto and God should
be kept hidden in the closet,’’ so to save them from impounding by
morality police.
One can never be sure to what extent alcohol has been part of Persian
life through ages. The majority of common folk see sobriety as a
requisite to warding off temptations to wrongdoing. Even under the
former regime, when beer was available round the corner, taverns were
ordered to remain firmly closed on public holidays, lest intoxication
turn repressed whims into outbursts of aggression. To devout Moslem
believers, alcohol is a sinful filth one should strictly avoid.
Nonetheless, some Western observers who have stayed in Persia long
enough note the impulsive craving of the people for alcoholic drinks.
Friedrich Rosen, Germany’s chargé d’affaires in Tehran in 1890s, wrote:
On the whole, the Persians were a most sober nation. Most of them lived
and died without ever tasting wine. Persia is in every respect a ‘dry’
country. But when a Persian drinks, he generally does so with the idea
of getting totally intoxicated. The sin, he argues, is anyhow committed,
therefore it is advisable to make the best of it. . . . Most of the
Persian poets extol wine and praise the pleasure of revelry, but all
these songs also admit of a mystical interpretation which makes them
appear harmless.2
The impression of booze-avidity, as Rosen notes, could have been partly
inspired by the unqualified admiration for wine interspersed in Persian
poetry. Persian poets, even when known as teetotallers, tend to idolize
inebriety as an existential experience through which man attains
emancipation from the degrading dullness of routine life. The
transcendence is an all-male club to which women are not admitted.
Although there are instances in classical Persian literature of
precocious female emancipation in which women express carnal love for a
man, never ever are they depicted as transgressing into the off-limit
domain of drinking, despite the literary simile that grape is the
celebrated daughter of the vine.
The shift of cultural patters and the inversion of inside-outside
activities seem to have affected this exclusivity too. The confinement,
under the Islamic regime, of religiously prohibited activities to the
private domain has brought with it, though in a thin, Westernised social
strata, some gender equality in the consumption of alcoholic beverages,
a ‘privilege’ many women would shun merely out of concern for the
unpredictable consequences of drunkenness, rather than any religious
inhibitions. By contrast, smoking seems to be on the decline. In line
with the changing world attitude, gone are the smoke-filled rooms and
the Feminist days of the 1960s and ‘70s when lighting up a cigarette was
taken as sign of intellectual emancipation.
One other case of change in gender attitude is notable in modern Persian
literature. In the 1960s and ‘70s, harsher literary critics denigrated
the romanticist poets and novelists of the time as providers of
sentimental sob stuff to schoolgirls. Nowadays, thanks to millions of
educated young women and their purchasing power, using such a label
would amount to an irredeemable self-inflicted blow to one’s cultural
credibility.
Novels and collections of poems authored by women often
lead the bestseller lists and win top prizes, and women editing journals
or running publishing houses are remarkably active, though with their
numbers still is small in proportion to men in these professions.
As the share of girls passing the university entrance examinations has
passed the 60th percentile mark, some observers have begun to wonder
aloud as to the marriage prospect of millions of women with university
education who may find the corresponding number of men far from
sufficient. The concern led even to a suggestion on the part of some
higher education authorities to enact sort of reverse affirmative action
so as to equalize the number of boys and girls admitted to universities.
Warned that it would be undue, discriminatory intervention in a natural
process, the idea was soon abandoned.
Another major achievement for women was won not by the educated middle
class, but thanks to aggressive grass-root pressure. Widows of
militiamen killed in the 1980-1988 war with Iraq found not only their
allowances going to the deceased man’s parents, but the latter’s having
the right to take away the children from their mothers, since Islamic
law invariably grants the right of custody to the man and his next of
kin. After intensive lobbying, women Majlis deputies and the surviving
mothers managed to convince the judiciary that an automatic right of
custody was neither fair nor practicable. Now in all divorce suits, it
is up to the court to decide which parent is more eligible for the
custody right.
As the physical body of cities is changing together with the
disappearance of extended families under paternalistic hierarchies, the
box-like, jerry-built apartments have hardly space for more than a
nuclear family. Also gone are the patriarchs who could support several
youngsters at subsistence level until they made it on their own. Hence,
there is an overflow of townsfolk into big cities where the young are
left to themselves in a daily struggle for survival.
At the other end of the spectrum, Tehran’s better off boys and girls
take to the streets where they are seen and see others in motorized
promenades. Readers often complain in the press that the traffic
congestion caused by young motorists who keep driving up and down Africa
(formerly, Jordan) Street, in a posh quarter of Tehran, makes life
difficult for local residents and businesses. Some observers believe
young people in expensive cars abuse the street as a sort of communal
catwalk for finding dates.
Attempts by police and vice squads to stop
what religious conservatives label as immoral conduct in public have
failed due to the social repercussions of arresting a large number of
young people merely for cultural reasons. Years ago, one of the vice
squads, under the pompous title of ‘‘Propagation of Virtues and
Prohibition of Vices,’’ used to storm parties and arrest drinkers and
dancers. The detainees would be released the next day if they paid huge
fines for which no receipts were given. The squad was disbanded in late
1990s.
The adventure-seeking well off youth is not to blame for the entire
traffic problem afflicting the Iranian capital. Unlike Paris that is
composed of circles, or London with its semi-tartan pattern of
neighbourhoods, Tehran has been sprawling in the vacant spaces between
small suburban villages, agricultural lands, gardens and orchards in a
haphazard manner. Two centuries after its being chosen as the capital,
new highways may end up in the bottleneck of tightly packed old quarters
that have to be bulldozed for the sake of the road. As more and more
cars roll daily off the country’s assembly plants (Iran now produces
more than a dozen European and East Asian brands), levelling the old
quarters has proved hardly effective in easing the traffic congestion.
Narrow access roads built for middle class neighbourhoods only a
generation ago have turned into main thoroughfares connecting major
sections of the city. Urban planners warn of the ruinous consequences of
compulsive demolition. As an example, when built in 1960s, Jordan was
supposed to be a side street leading to a geographically limited
neighbourhood. Now it is a conduit to far away destinations. Widening
the streets as buildings are renovated, experts warn, leaves the city
with disposable constructions in which architectural sophistication has
no chances of flourishing.
Aesthetics is another problem. A big city cannot be beautiful if
developed by unsophisticated immigrants from smaller communities who
only aggrandize their own familiar small-scale architecture into huge
concrete buildings. Traditional ways of urban land ownership in Iranian
cities aggravate the problem of aesthetical naivety. Many builders tend
to care only for the street façade, presumably regarding the three other
sides as the problem of adjacent plots’ owners. They are, in effect,
bringing the culture of small-town architecture into a far bigger
milieu. No wonder the mountains wrapping Tehran to the north, capped
with snow usually up to late June, increasingly seem to remain the
city’s only site of genuine, natural beauty. |