I'm Writing You from Tehran Read online

  “Papa, Iran has changed!” I insisted.

  But my father didn’t see things that way; he was entrenched in the past. His response was categorical:

  “I have just one piece of advice for you. Beware of Iranians. As the Persian saying goes, ‘When they slit your throat, it’s with cotton thread.’”

  What was he trying to say? That they open the door to you so they can better stab you afterward? His rusty proverbs exasperated me. If he chose to wear blinders, that was his problem. In my head, I had already crossed the border. My suitcases were packed. I wanted to leave as soon as possible. Make my pilgrimage to Iran, that land that was yours and that was whispering for me to come back. I was impatient to plumb the past so I could better understand the present.

  * * *

  Back in Tehran, Emadeddin Baghi, a former revolutionary, taught me the best lesson about modern-day Iran, one that neither you nor Papa had given. At thirty-six years old, Baghi was one of those ex–Che Guevaras of Islam, one who had swapped his Kalashnikov for a pen. That autumn of 1998, I hurried to knock on the door of the daily Tous, the latest addition to the reformist press, for which Baghi wrote articles denouncing the very system he had helped put in place twenty years earlier. The building was understated, lost in the haze of traffic jams on the Haft-e Tir Square, in the heart of the capital. In the lobby, a young receptionist signaled for me to follow her. Framed by the customary headscarf, her nose was covered in a bandage, the sign of a nose job—or merely her way of faking rhinoplasty so she could seem up on the latest fashion.

  The wooden door opened onto a pretty room encircled with a crystalline light. The room had also clearly had a quick facelift; it smelled of fresh paint and wallpaper paste. Positioned around a large table, the chairs were still in their plastic slipcovers, their price tags hanging from the armrests. Around the table, a dozen young reporters were tapping away on brand-new computers. Their articles broached subjects that had been taboo until now: gender equality, greater freedom of speech, a revision of the Constitution. In the absence of real political parties, the newspapers had become the spillway for all demands, the forum for discussion. An older man, his head bent over a screen, was proofreading, commenting out loud as he read the articles. He had a helmet of brown hair and was wearing an elegant white shirt and linen pants. “That’s Baghi,” the secretary whispered in my ear. Amid his exchanges with his young colleagues, I managed to make out a few familiar words, directly borrowed from a Western vocabulary: laïc, démocratie … Unfamiliar jargon had been springing up recently in the new papers.

  “Welcome,” Baghi said to me politely, lifting his head.

  His voice was warm, at once gentle and controlled. I sat down in a chair at the other end of the table. Watching him disappear into the kitchen and come back with a steaming cup of tea, I had a hard time imagining that this same man was one of the people who had “kidnapped Iran,” as my father used to say. Questions were piling up in my notebook. Who was he really? Why had he chosen the path of radicalism twenty years earlier? Did he regret it? And most important, what had made him switch sides? Baghi seemed almost amused by my astonishment. I must not have been the first journalist to subject him to this kind of questioning. In a friendly tone, he responded to me enthusiastically:

  “I was only seventeen years old when the revolution happened. I was young and full of illusions. My friends and I formed a guerrilla group that we baptized Maysam. We went from university to university, we forced the students to scream slogans against the shah, we passed out Ayatollah Khomeini’s cassettes. We thought we could change the world. We wanted to create the first Islamic Republic on earth, and we believed in it one hundred percent.”

  Islam had rapidly become Baghi’s raison d’être, which was understandable, because he had bathed in it since early childhood. Born in the holy Iraqi city of Karbala, he descended directly from a family of religious dissidents. His grandfather was a cleric who was very respected in traditional circles. Upon the family’s return to Iran in 1962, his father was immediately arrested and tortured by the SAVAK, the shah’s secret police. From then on, Khomeini became, in his eyes, the only way out.

  “He was the only one who dared to say no to the shah, no to corruption, no to excessive Westernization! He promised to give Iran back its dignity and independence. He was a spiritual leader. And so charismatic! A sort of savior fallen from the sky. When he spoke, we drank up his words without even thinking.”

  At the time, the zealots weren’t the only ones to make Ayatollah Khomeini their new hero. As soon as he returned to the country, on February 1, 1979, he quickly assembled a motley crew: Islamists, secularists, nationalists, Communists. Seduced by his promises of equality between the sexes, many women took a chance on this new kind of leader. They would quickly be disillusioned. As the sacred Supreme Leader, he became the key figure of the state, the source of all political legitimacy. He even appropriated the title of imam, like the Mahdi, the messiah the Shiites have been awaiting for centuries.

  During these first months of collective euphoria, the revolutionaries attacked the symbols of the former regime: statues, villas of important civil servants, administrative buildings. Baghi chose as his target the infamous Evin Prison, where a number of his close friends had been rotting away for so many years.

  “When the doors of the prison finally opened, I was as giddy as a child! I wanted to go see, scour the cells, understand the horror of torture—saying to myself: Never again! I thought: We need to turn this place into a museum, so we never forget, so it never happens again.”

  Speaking these words to me in that moment, Baghi was far from imagining that he would end up, years later, behind those same bars. But we weren’t there yet. Submerged in his memories, he continued his story:

  “Infected with Islamic fever, I left to go live in Qom, the Vatican of Shia Islam, where I enrolled in theological school. For years, the Quran was my only companion, my road map.”

  Disillusionment wouldn’t arrive until ten years later, in 1989, with the death of Khomeini and the end of the Iran-Iraq War. Religious ecstasy, which had been spurred on by the Supreme Leader’s speeches and by the battle in the name of Shia Islam against the Sunni enemy, began to peter out. Previously bonded around the Supreme Leader, the actors from the various factions started to tear one another apart. Those who had monopolized power were advocating an outrageous conservatism. The others, left in the margins, took refuge in philosophical and sociological studies. They were Saeed Hajjarian, Abdolkarim Soroush, Akbar Ganji … Former members of the security apparatus and the Revolutionary Guard, these previously powerful, shadowy figures became the new architects of political change. It was this same group that would later give rise to the reformist wave.

  “So I decided to follow the stream,” Baghi continued. “I went back to Tehran and enrolled in Allameh Tabataba’i University, to study sociology. Then I started to write.”

  Listening to him, I was reminded of Abbas Abdi, another of Khomeini’s disciples. While Baghi was studying the Quran, Abdi was participating in the attack against the U.S. embassy in Tehran. After years of hard-core militancy, that former hostage taker had become one of Khatami’s closest advisers. At the end of July 1998, he even crossed the line by accepting a face-to-face with Barry Rosen, one of the American hostages. The historic meeting took place in front of the cameras of the entire world within the safety of the UNESCO headquarters in Paris. I remember closely following that exchange, which unfolded, coincidentally, in the same place of dialogue and culture where you used to work. That was the first face-to-face of its kind in twenty years. A thinly veiled mea culpa.

  And Baghi? Did he regret shouting all those anti-imperialist slogans, thinking he was forever closing the door on a tyrannical system?

  “You know, even Michel Foucault, one of your greatest thinkers, sang the praises of the Islamic Republic. Today, the most important thing is to admit our mistakes and listen to the demands of the people. It’s our Iranian Th
ermidor.”

  This parallel with postrevolutionary France, when liberals kept their distance from the Terror enacted by Robespierre, captured my full attention. Baghi had read widely, had gathered information to better understand his country in a historical context. From then on, he wanted to take advantage of that new forum, the press, to help his country overcome this period of change. Leaving Tous, I knew immediately that we would see each other again. His candor, his analytical method, would guide me for years through the inextricable labyrinth of Iran.

  On the way home, I stopped at a newspaper kiosk in the neighborhood where you used to live with Grandmother, a daily ritual since my return to Tehran. From seeing me hang around his stand so often, the vendor had learned my habits. Each day, he saved me the best articles, gleaned from reformist publications, whose summaries he translated for me with the help of a small English–Farsi dictionary wedged between the packs of cigarettes and the boxes of chewing gum. That day, it was a satire by Ebrahim Nabavi that had caught his attention. Nabavi, a confounding character, had gone from anti-shah militancy to anti-mullah satire. Now that journalists could breathe again, he had started writing a scathing chronicle that was published daily in Tous. It was called “Fifth Column,” a mockery of the conservative claim that behind every journalist is a potential “spy”! It shamelessly ridiculed the extremists. The column was such a big success that the best of Nabavi’s articles made their way around the universities, where they evolved into jokes that people told in lecture halls. I plunged into the small text meticulously circled in red by the newspaper seller. Dripping with irony, the satire of the day mimicked a conservative speech: “We are against the politics of the Taliban, except where it concerns women, youth, politics, and war.”

  His irony read like prophecy.

  TO RESEARCH YOUR country’s history was to uncover your own story, too. The story of a scholar whom I knew almost nothing about. On the top of the list of important figures I couldn’t wait to meet, I had underlined the name Dariush Forouhar. At seventy years old, he was an intellectual of your generation. Since that crazy party, Niloufar had often talked admiringly of him. “A man with integrity, a true secular democrat who has always fought for his country … My spiritual father … I’ll introduce you,” she had promised me. His old age had instinctively caught my attention. I said to myself that he alone would be able to talk to me about your Tehran, the Tehran of your youth. I was thrilled to speak with him.

  And then, a few days before our meeting, the news of his death dropped like a bomb.

  It was an autumn morning in 1998, the time when the trees begin to lose their first leaves. Grandmother had gone out to run an errand. I was eating breakfast when Niloufar called:

  “They killed Forouhar! They killed Forouhar!”

  She uttered these few words in a broken voice. Then her voice transformed into a metallic buzzing, before being swallowed up by silence.

  “Hello? Hello?” I repeated, with no response but a succession of beeps.

  I immediately redialed her number, but the line was always busy. Nestled against the window, I stared for a long time at the mountains, lightly covered with snow, before finally putting down the phone. Dariush Forouhar had been assassinated! Confused, I turned on the TV in search of a news bulletin. “In the name of God the Almighty and Merciful,” said the newscaster in a voice as monotone as the rumble of a dishwasher. Impatient, I flipped through the channels. On the TV: a Quran lesson, an episode of the German TV series Derrick dubbed in Farsi, and a piece on the Iran-Iraq War … Not a single word about Forouhar. Seda va Sima (Voice and Vision)—the official name of the state broadcaster—neglected even to mention the controversial thinker’s name. I knew from my journalist friends’ stories that this mouthpiece of the regime was used to target writers and opponents on a program called Hoviyat (Identity), broadcast in the ’90s. A dark age that everyone now believed to be over.

  I decided to call my friend Leyla, the queen of the night. Hardly had I spoken Forouhar’s name when she curtly replied that she was in a rush. She who usually spent hours glued to the phone didn’t have a single minute for me. Hastily, I tried another number. On the phone, another friend immediately changed the subject: “Now that I think of it, the next time you go to France, don’t forget to bring me back a copy of Elle.” Her reaction was odd. Why such paranoia?

  Worried, I left to go question an Italian colleague, Nadia Pizzuti, one of the few female news correspondents in Tehran.

  “Something’s not right,” she said to me, opening her door.

  She had guessed right away the reason for my visit.

  “Do we know anything else?”

  “Apparently, he was stabbed to death … His wife, too … It happened in their home … One of the family friends found their bodies … disfigured, bloody…”

  A few hours later, the information was confirmed bit by bit. With even more sordid details: the couple had been brutally stabbed dozens of times and mutilated before the killers dumped their bodies facing Mecca. The evidence showed that the crime had been premeditated and that it bore the signature of a religious fanatic. But how to justify such an inhumane act in the name of Islam? And why Forouhar, of all people? I clearly knew very little about the elderly dissident.

  Nadia, who had lived in Iran longer than I had, explained to me that he was one of those men who never renounce their ideals. Under the monarchy, he had already paid a high price for his fight for freedom of speech, spending fifteen years behind bars. Then, with the fall of the former regime, he briefly held the post of minister of labor before switching again to the opposition. Since then, he had been the leader of a party that was illegal but tolerated: the National Front, a democratic movement. But to turn him into a target for that …

  “He wouldn’t have hurt a fly,” Nadia continued. Apart from distributing among his acquaintances a newsletter on human rights violations, he wasn’t very active anymore.

  “If his ideas displeased certain extremists, why weren’t they content to put him in prison, like they usually do?” I asked my colleague.

  A thick silence pervaded Nadia’s office. Since the beginning of the ’90s, the Islamic Republic seemed to have renounced assassinating its opponents. The last time it had happened was in 1992, when four Kurdish dissidents were killed in a restaurant in Berlin. Neither of us could find an explanation for this sudden resurgence in violence.

  “Clearly, I’ll never understand this country,” I murmured, distraught.

  However, I persisted. The day of the funeral, I didn’t hesitate. I picked out the longest of my black coats and paired it with a raven-colored shawl. In my go-to uniform, I hopped onto a public bus. It was packed. Without saying a word, I climbed into the rear compartment, the one for women. At the stop closest to the Fakhr al-Dawla Mosque, where the services were being held, I disembarked along with the crowd. With slow and solemn steps, the passengers poured into the street, which was already filled with a dense, silent crowd. The Forouhars had lived modestly for years in this neighborhood south of Tehran.

  The atmosphere was heavy with sadness. Eyes on the alert. No one dared say a word, as if fear had once again muzzled every mouth. Then, after a few minutes, indignation gained the upper hand. Shattering the sober melody of footsteps on pavement, a man in his sixties started chanting to the glory of the deceased. Carried by the rhythm, he raised his hands toward the sky, brandishing portraits of Dariush Forouhar, mustache smoothed and pointed, and of Forouhar’s wife, Parvaneh, locks of gray hair flowing out from under her scarf. The couple had been inseparable, Niloufar told me. While he was fighting obscurantism, she would write poems. Back hunched, leaning over his cane, an old supporter let a tear escape his eye. He was wearing a tie and a small beret. “Long live freedom of thought!” hummed a frail voice. I turned around. It was an Iranian woman of about thirty, Forouhar’s party button pinned to her black coat. I was immediately moved by the scene. Before my eyes, two generations were defying the forces of anti-enl
ightenment. I thought of you, Babai, of the duo we could have formed. That impossible tandem.

  In a flash, the procession transformed into a protest, carrying in its wake hundreds of other young people, who had discreetly assembled on the sidewalk. “I had never heard of Forouhar,” one of them admitted to me. “But when they killed him, they turned him into a symbol of our resistance!” Behind him, students were sobbing, heads lowered. “Do you see this crowd?” one of the organizers exclaimed. “This is the sign that our battle for freedom is still alive. They can’t snuff it out!” And then something unexpected happened. Instead of piling onto the buses parked along the avenue to go directly to the Behesht-e Zahra Cemetery, where the couple would be buried, the procession went first toward the Majlis. With a determined gait, the crowd approached the headquarters of the Iranian Parliament, created after the 1906 constitutional revolution against the Qajar king. A vital symbol of a long fight—still being waged—for democracy.

  The police were there, on the lookout. They formed a barrier around the Majlis, ready to draw their guns at the slightest provocation. The Forouhar supporters continued their march nevertheless. They advanced cautiously, hand in hand, carried along by their stubborn desire to honor, to the end, the memory of the deceased. They weren’t there to provoke; they just wanted to get their message across. “The killers think, in vain, that through atrocious acts they can discourage the Iranian people from pursuing the fight for democracy and justice,” a pamphlet being discreetly circulated warned in black letters; I kept a copy of it for myself.

  Apparently, the killers hadn’t received the message. In the following days, other victims would fall, one after another. Like autumn leaves, noiselessly. Majid Sharif, Mohammad Mokhtari, Mohammad Jafar Pouyandeh—what these intellectuals all had in common was that they had advocated for freedom of speech. Initially reported missing, they were later found dead in the middle of the street. Lifeless. Strangled. The criminals didn’t leave a trace. Not a fingerprint or a statement. Gratuitous acts, cowardly, without apparent motive, apart from wanting to sow confusion and alarm among writers and defenders of democracy. Who was behind the death squad decapitating the intellectual community? And why such savagery?