Payvand, Iran
Feb 16 2007

Tehran, a city of surprises

By Fatima Bhutto
First published by Pakistan’s The News International

I began my day in Tehran on the subway. The Tehran Metro is, if you
will pardon my overzealous language, an absolute wonder. Situated in
central parts of the city, it runs on three lines. I bought a ticket
on the Imam Khomeini line, the red line, and queued up with Tehranis
on their way to work at the Hafte Tir station to embark on some
sightseeing.

"Do we have to sit in the women’s only cabins?" I asked my
interpreter Samira as we waited on the platform equipped with TV
screens announcing the arrival of the next trains. She waved her
hands, "If you like". The grey subway announced its arrival with some
music, which was conveniently replayed at every single stop
accompanied by the station’s name. We hopped on and I felt like I was
on the London tube. Samira had to push me off the subway; I was quite
willing to hang on to my seat for the rest of the day.

We walked to Sarkis Cathedral on Karim Khan-e-Zand Street, an
Armenian Orthodox church built in the late 1960s. Unlike the gothic
churches hidden away in Saddar and under heavy Ranger protection,
Sarkis Cathedral was a prominent landmark in Tehran. It is said to be
the most visible non-Islamic building in the city; just in case you
miss it, across the street painted on a large building is a mural of
the Virgin Mary holding the baby Jesus in her arms, angels sprinkled
around their halos. I asked Samira (whose name is pronounced
saam-ee-raah, which I kept butchering by not properly elongating my
vowels) if religious minorities felt safe practicing their religion
in an Islamic Republic. "They are the same as all of us, they speak
Farsi, we look the same, we have the same names – there’s no way of
telling us apart". "Except that they speak Armenian" I ventured.
Samira waved her hands again. She spoke a little Armenian too.

There is so much to discover in this megalopolis of 14 million
people; it even makes Karachi look quaint and small. The landscape of
Iran is said to have been continuously inhabited by a single nation
of people longer than any other part of land the world over. Single
nation of people sounds difficult to stomach in an age where
nationalism, identity, and ethnicity dominate much of our politics,
but Aryans aside, Iran is home to Azeris, Kurds, Arabs, Lors (said to
be descendants of those single nation people) and Balochis. Safak
Pavey, a Turkish woman who heads the United Nations High Commission
for Refugee’s external relations office, told me that in the early
1990s, after the Gulf War (part one) Iran was home to 4.5 millions
refugees from Iraq and Afghanistan. "Iran should receive thanks for
that; can you imagine a European country giving 4.5 million refugees
asylum?" While the number of Iraqis and Afghani refugees is slowly
decreasing with repatriation projects UNHCR and the Iranian
government are initiating, Iran remains a veritable melting pot.
Tehran itself is composed of a diverse and unusual mix of
ethnicities, nationalities, and religions and those people -including
Jews, Christians, and Zoroastrians – live safely and comfortably
alongside Muslims and have done so for thousands of years. In Tarjish
Square there is even a Little Pakistan where immigrants have set up a
small bazaar of Pakistani made textiles, embroideries, and shoes.
What can’t you find in Tehran?

My rigorous sightseeing program continued with a stop at the Sa’d
Abad Palace, once a summer home for the last Pahlevi Shah. It was a
summer home the size of Malir and everything inside, except for the
carpets, was French. Marie Antoinette looks down at you from every
lamp, every table top, and every chest of drawers. It was a bit much.
We toured the offices where Pahlevi senior is said to have plotted
the CIA sponsored coup against the populist and democratically
elected Mohammad Mossadegh, who nationalized Iran’s oil, took
photographs by the boots of Pahlevi junior’s statue (the only
remaining part, it was cemented to the ground and couldn’t be torn
off with the rest of his monstrous bronze image) and marveled at the
fully equipped dentist’s chair installed in the Shah’s Niyavaran
Palace, feet away from his bedroom, just in case such an emergency
would arise. It’s a miracle the Pahlevis left in one piece, so
opulent was their grandeur.

I met with Mitra, a journalist, later in the day still disturbed by
the ostentatious lifestyle of Iran’s monarchs. How can these two very
extreme histories, Western and Islamic, exist in one country? "Look,"
she explained "Instead of instinctively bashing the post
revolutionary period, we should be able to acknowledge the positive
gains brought by the Revolution. The Revolution helped spur on
today’s feminist movement – in the Shah’s days only affluent families
would send their daughters to universities for higher education. The
poorer classes did not. This," she gestured tugging at her head scarf
"made it more acceptable for women to attend large co-ed universities
and pursue higher learning. It doesn’t have to be celebrated – it’s
not an ideal situation – but it needs to be acknowledged. Today 65%
of university students in Iran are women".

Mitra is an elegant and professional woman, the weekend before
Muharram she was wearing red; I wouldn’t have pegged her as having
Revolutionary sympathies. And she didn’t necessarily, but like most
Iranians she was willing to balance the difficult and sometimes
frustrating changes of the Revolution with its benefits. It is
impossible to essentialize in Iran, impossible to paint things black
or white – or red – there are so many facets to life in this country.
Those diametric opposites do share the same space in Iran and its
people, and perhaps Mitra, are examples of its dynamism.

Mitra continued "Did you know that at government health centers you
can receive free contraceptives? Or that the topic of birth control
is spoken about openly?" I didn’t. Women in mosques are permitted to
discuss reproductive rights, there are no taboos surrounding it, and
in recent years counseling dealing with sexual and physical health
has become compulsory for couples before marriage. Before receiving a
marriage license, couples have to attend not only a counseling
session but must also pass a university class centering on sexual
health, HIV, and addiction.

There was more that deserved acknowledgement and I struggled to write
as quickly as Mitra continued down the list. Government health
centers are setting up rehabilitation centers for the country’s large
number of heroin addicts, even offering needle exchanges and
methadone doses to those in need. Female circumcision was banned by
Khameini years ago, and while practiced dangerously in neighboring
African and Arab countries, it is virtually non-existent in Iran.
Religious minorities now receive the same amount of blood money in
the case of bereavement that Muslims do, whereas before the
Revolution they were only offered half the amount that Muslims could
claim.

Mitra told me incredulously that sex change operations are legal in
Iran. Though the procedures are sanctioned as a way of warding off
homosexuality, a major crime in the country, it was the Imam Khomeini
who gave his approval to gender reassignment while in exile in Iraq.
This was light-years before the very topic became acceptable, and
even fashionable, in Western countries. If Mitra and I had not spent
the previous hour discussing the freedom of the press and Marxist
blogs (very popular in Iran) I would have thought I was being taken
for a ride. Even my liberal bearings could not absorb this last piece
of information. "You can’t be serious" I said, half expecting her to
tell me she was just having a go at a foreign journalist for fun.
"No, I am absolutely serious" Mitra insisted, amused at my look of
utter disbelief. After medical and psychological evaluations, he or
she is given a temporary permit which allows them to dress as the
gender they will soon become without any fear of punishment. "Once
the operation is done, sometimes in government hospitals, he or she
can legally get married and live officially as the gender they have
chosen for themselves". Gender reassignment is not as openly
discussed as birth control, Mitra went on, ignoring my stumped look,
but you can see interviews with such people in the newspapers and
even advertisements sometimes. Does any of this happen in Pakistan?
She reasonably asked since I hadn’t stopped talking about Iran and
Pakistan’s similarities from the moment we sat down. "Not exactly…"

Before Mitra and I parted ways I thanked her for her time and for
opening up new windows to Iran for me. Every hour spent in Tehran is
an education; ideas are debated freely and openly, past and present
shared without prejudice, politics and gender reassignment equal
fodder for conversation.

This is so much more than the Iran of my imagination. I cannot wait
for tomorrow’s lesson.

About the author: Fatima Bhutto is a 24 year old Pakistani woman. She
graduated with a Bachelor’s degree in Middle Eastern and Asian
Cultures and Languages from Columbia University and received a
Masters at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in South
Asian Government and Politics. Fatima comes from a political
background, her father Mir Murtaza Bhutto – an elected member of
Pakistan’s parliament – was assassinated by state police in 1996. His
sister, Benazir Bhutto, was Prime Minister at the time of his
killing. Fatima is the author of two books, a volume of poetry
published when she was 15 years old in her father’s memory a year
after his death called ‘Whispers of the Desert’ and a collection of
first hand survivor’s accounts from the October 8, 2005 earthquake in
Pakistan entitled 8:50 am. Both were published by Oxford University
Press. The proceeds from ‘8:50 am’ will be given back to child
survivors of the quake. Fatima currently writes a weekly column for
Pakistan’s largest Urdu daily newspaper, Daily Jang, and its English
sister paper, The News International. Her diary from Tehran is the
second the papers printed; Fatima also wrote a weekly diary from
Lebanon this past summer during the Israeli invasion.