My Prison, My Home
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“Well, and are you happy with your husband?” he asked with a twinkle in his eye.
I had taken to Shaul immediately. He was already a prominent journalist, covering all the major stories for his newspaper and writing for the Financial Times and the Economist. He had a sharp intellect, fierce integrity as a journalist, and was infectiously enthusiastic about newspaper work. Covering stories with him was always an adventure. We were both interested in Iranian politics; we both loved literature. When we first met, he was deeply into the German playwright Bertolt Brecht, and he soon presented me with several of Brecht’s plays in the original German, which would not have been easy to locate in Tehran’s bookstores. He had studied in America and opened up to me a whole new world of American history, literature, and politics.
The decision to marry was not an easy one. We came from two different communities, and marriages between Jews and Muslims were extremely rare, virtually unheard of, in our two societies. Both Shaul’s family and mine were deeply unhappy. We were breaking all sorts of taboos, and, looking back, I am amazed at our audacity. But we were young and determined, and once we were married, I was warmly accepted into Shaul’s family and Shaul into mine. Shaul and Mutti grew especially close to each other.
Two years into our marriage, in 1966, Shaul decided he would like to return to Harvard, where he had gone to college, to study for an MA in Middle Eastern studies. He was covering the Middle East and wanted to study the region more seriously. Besides, he was unhappy with the creeping censorship of the press. We spent two years in Cambridge, Massachusetts, basically exchanging our comfortable life as professional journalists for the more cramped circumstances of graduate students. Shaul’s scholarship hardly covered our expenses, especially once our daughter, Haleh, arrived.
Shaul received his MA in 1968, but student life continued for the next three years as Shaul pursued his PhD, in Iranian history, at Oxford University. I taught Persian while he completed his doctorate.
We returned to Iran and to our newspaper jobs in 1972. The Kayhan organization was enjoying a period of considerable success and expansion. Kayhan continued to be more “liberal” than Tehran’s other large-circulation daily, Ettela’at, but it was no longer the bold and risk-taking newspaper I had joined nearly a decade earlier. The weight of censorship had grown heavier, and the freedom to write and publish more restricted. Mesbahzadeh’s own liberal preferences remained in place, and as the publisher, he was always admirably protective of his editors and reporters. Pressured to fire journalists who had stepped on the censors’ toes, he continued to pay their salaries and brought them back to the newsroom at the first opportunity. He kept jobs open for colleagues who went to jail, took care of their families, and reemployed them once they were released. He allowed reporters who were banned by the shah’s secret police, SAVAK (the Persian acronym for Organization for State Security and Intelligence), to write for Kayhan under assumed names.
But the organization’s very success was a kind of vulnerability, since the financial stakes were now huge. The staff and employees numbered in the hundreds. “If we are closed down, who is going to pay all these people?” Mesbahzadeh once asked Shaul, who was insisting he stand up more aggressively to the censors. The government was a source of advertising revenue, and it set policies that could affect everything from Kayhan’s ability to purchase newsprint abroad to Mesbahzadeh’s considerable land holdings. Increasingly the shah and the government showed less tolerance for even the mildest criticism, and the grip on the media of the emboldened Information Ministry grew tighter. Dr. Mesbahzadeh continued to allow his editors considerable autonomy, but the editors were being hounded daily by the censors.
In 1973, rumors circulated at Kayhan that Mesbahzadeh was under pressure from Prime Minister Amir Abbas Hoveyda to name his protégé, Amir Taheri, a Kayhan reporter, as editor of the newspaper. Taheri, who seemed all too willing in his reporting to do the prime minister’s bidding, was to replace the highly respected, independent-minded Mehdi Semsar. The rumor proved true. One morning Taheri’s appointment was announced to the staff. When he walked into the newsroom a few minutes later and took his seat behind the editor’s desk, one colleague and I gathered up our belongings and walked out of the newsroom and the building. We quit. I subsequently had a long meeting with Mesbahzadeh, who tried to convince me not to leave. Editors come and go, he said, but Kayhan will endure. I was not persuaded; and I have never regretted my decision. Leaving Kayhan was difficult for me. It was the country’s leading newspaper; I took pleasure in the work and in being part of the Kayhan family. Shaul and I needed both our salaries to make ends meet. But I am proud of having refused to work under a government-imposed editor who represented everything I disdained in a profession I loved.
AN UNREPENTANT FEMINIST
I had grown interested in women’s issues during my last years at Kayhan. When my friend Mahnaz Afkhami, the secretary general of the Women’s Organization of Iran (WOI), invited me to join her team, I welcomed the opportunity to work with her.
The WOI, established in 1966, was the umbrella organization for almost all women’s groups and women’s activity in Iran. Mahnaz, a dynamic American-educated feminist, had taken over a dormant organization in 1970 and turned it into an effective instrument to promote women’s causes.
The struggle for women’s rights in Iran began in the late nineteenth century. Women took an active part in the Constitutional Revolution of 1906, but the constitution that was wrested from Mozaffar al-Din Shah of the former Qajar dynasty did not give women the right to vote. A handful of women campaigned for women’s education, and established the first schools for girls in the early years of the twentieth century. Under Reza Shah, the government established a system of public elementary and secondary schools for girls as well as boys. When Tehran University, the country’s first modern university, was established in 1936, it admitted both men and women. Reza Shah had already ordered the abolition of the veil. He saw it as a symbol of Iran’s backwardness and a barrier to the education of women and their introduction into the workforce and society. The marriage age for girls was raised from nine to thirteen—a radical step at the time. Women entered the workforce, initially in the civil service.
This process continued under his son, Mohammad Reza Shah, much to the discomfort and sometimes the fierce opposition of traditional members of the clergy, who, for example, forced the government in 1962 to withdraw a modest proposal to allow women to vote in local council elections. In his commitment to the principle that traditional restrictions on women should be removed, the shah was encouraged by his wife, Queen Farah, and by his twin sister, Princess Ashraf. Women in Iran’s burgeoning and better-educated middle class pushed for change as well. Similar movements were under way in other countries of the region, including Egypt and Tunisia, but Iran was breaking new ground.
Despite clerical opposition, women received the right to vote in 1963. The 1967 Family Protection Law, amended and expanded in 1975, restricted the ability of men to take more than one wife and to secure divorce on demand. It gave women the right to seek divorce, and strengthened women’s rights in child-custody cases. The marriage age for girls was raised from thirteen to fifteen, and then to eighteen. Women’s employment grew fairly rapidly in the 1960s and 1970s, and the number of girls in schools and higher education expanded dramatically. Whereas women had made slow, steady progress in previous decades, the WOI accelerated this process, giving it direction and taking it into new fields.
During the period when I was involved with the organization, the WOI made working-class women its focus. It established branches and family welfare centers all over the country. These provided working-class women with literacy classes and vocational training, helping them earn a living independent of their husbands. It ran family-planning clinics; it provided women with legal advice; and guided them on their rights in child custody, divorce, and spousalabuse cases. It made inroads at establishing day-care centers for working-class women. It lobbied with the government and the private sector to open up more executive and managerial positions to women.
None of this was easy. Resistance to change and skepticism that it was necessary or practicable were widespread. Both phases of the family-protection law required patient negotiation with cabinet ministers and members of parliament. The endorsement or acquiescence of leading members of the clergy was crucial for new legislation affecting women. In 1967, the minister of justice journeyed to the shrine city of Najaf in Iraq, the center of Shi’ism’s most prestigious religious seminaries, to persuade Ayatollah Kho’i, then the highest ranking and most eminent clerical leader in the Shi’ite world, to lend his support to the new family-protection law.
My responsibilities as deputy director for international affairs included disseminating information about the WOI’s activities and sponsoring programs to educate both men and women on women’s issues. I traveled fairly widely inside the country. I found the women eager, but the men resistant. On one trip, for example, the driver of the car that was taking me to Qom was loud in his praise of the cleric, Ayatollah Khomeini, then living in exile in Iraq, for his opposition to the 1962 attempt to extend limited suffrage to women. I was also responsible for the WOI’s relations with international organizations and women’s groups abroad, which enabled me to travel to China, Thailand, and the United States for meetings and international conferences, and I established links between Iran and the international women’s movement.
Just before I left the WOI in 1976 to accept a new position, I took part in drafting the National Plan of Action on the Improvement of the Status of Women in Iran. Approved by the cabinet, the plan called for the full integration of women into all aspects of social and economic life. It was, of course, a statement of goals that were yet to be accomplished, but it committed the government itself to work toward women’s equality in several areas.
The WOI was subsequently criticized for a strategy of change from above, for relying too much on official support, rather than organizing middle- and working-class women. But the criticism was misplaced. We were not in the business of organizing mass political movements, which would have been impossible in Iran at the time. As an activist organization, the WOI was in its infancy. Opposition, especially from the clergy, was considerable; and the support of the shah, his wife, and his sister was crucial if the government was to be persuaded to risk taking measures that challenged tradition. Much of the WOI’s work in the last decade before the revolution benefited working-class women far more than members of the elite. Elite women had education, were aware of their rights, knew how to get divorces, understood birth control, and could obtain employment. It was working-class women whose lives were changed the most by the WOI’s victories.
After the revolution, the clerics sought to undo as many of our accomplishments as they could. But even Ayatollah Khomeini and the clerics who had fiercely opposed the extension of suffrage to women in 1962 and 1963 realized they could not turn back this particular clock. They continued to allow women to vote. The new government, however, suspended the Family Protection Law, encouraged women in the civil service to take early retirement, and discouraged women in general from working. It barred women from judgeships and certain fields of higher education and specialization; lowered the marriage age for girls to nine (the age of puberty in Islam); tried to dictate what women wore; and segregated men and women in university classrooms, beaches, ski slopes, and public transportion. It even inserted clauses into the constitution defining the principal role of women as mothers and housewives.
Iranian women, young and old, from all classes, courageously resisted these measures. Young women fought the Islamic dress code, wearing loose headscarves rather than the chador or the maghan’eh, showing a bit of hair under their scarves, the bottoms of bluejeans underneath their robes, and a hint of lipstick on their lips. In this, they risked arrest, even lashings, but gradually won for themselves more freedom in matters of dress. Women voted in large numbers. Working-class and traditional women continued to be at the forefront of the struggle to reinstate the Family Protection Law. It was principally women from working- and lower-middle-class families who embraced opportunities for education, pushed for places in the universities, and demanded and seized opportunities for employment. That women fought back was partly the result of the revolutionary upheaval itself, which politicized society and, contrary to the intention of the clerics, thrust women into the public sphere. But I believe the WOI played a role in making a new generation of women conscious of their rights, and these women were determined not to be relegated to second-class status again. For these reasons, my three years at the WOI remain among the most rewarding of my working life. I became, and remain, an unrepentant feminist.
In 1975, I was thrust into the world of art and public culture when I accepted an offer to join the Shahbanou Farah Foundation, established under the sponsorship of the queen, which oversaw a number of major museums and cultural centers. The museums in my charge included the Carpet Museum of Tehran, the Tehran Museum of Ancient Iranian Ceramics and Glassware, the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Arts, and the Khorramabad Museum of Ancient Lurestan Bronzes. We were also running cultural centers in the capital, where we organized art exhibitions, art workshops, lectures, and seminars. I was only in my second year at the foundation when the clouds of revolution began to loom over the country.
REVOLUTION
In the 1960s and 1970s, Iran seemed to be prospering. The country was stable. The economy was booming, and while wealth distribution was uneven, Iranians in general were better fed and clothed. Increasing numbers of people had access to education as well as cars, refrigerators, TV sets, and other modern conveniences. The shah had managed his foreign relations well and, in a much-divided world, enjoyed good relations with both the United States and the Soviet Union, as well as with China, India, and Pakistan, and Israel and the Arab states.
Yet political stability had been purchased at a price—repression. A growing educated middle class chafed at the lack of freedoms and input regarding how the country was run. The explosion in oil prices in 1973-74 dramatically boosted government revenues, but the rapid injection of that money into the economy led to inflation, rising food prices, and a real estate boom that pushed affordable housing out of reach for most ordinary families. Rural migrants crowded into the capital and other major cities in search of jobs and found themselves living in crowded shantytowns lacking electricity and piped water. For newcomers, life in Tehran, a messy, sprawling metropolis, meant a bewildering sense of cultural dislocation and a shock to traditional and religious sensibilities.
Since other avenues for the expression of discontent—political parties, trade unions, an independent press, professional associations—were suppressed or strictly controlled, people flocked to mosques, where clerics used a religious vocabulary to preach barely disguised condemnations of the state and its policies. When the shah responded to these murmurs of discontent by easing up on controls over speech and political activity, opposition elements quickly seized on the opening.
By 1977, for example, Tehran’s “poetry nights” at the German sponsored Goethe Institute had taken on a decidedly political color. Large gatherings listened while poets read from works praising liberty and criticizing oppression. Lawyers and intellectuals addressed open letters to the prime minister and the shah calling for the reinstitution of basic freedoms and the release of political prisoners. These letters circulated widely in Xerox form, even if they could not be published in the daily press. In January 1978, under government pressure, one of the two leading newspapers in the country published an article scurrilously attacking Ayatollah Khomeini, the shah’s principal opponent abroad. The article led to protests by seminary students and clashes with the authorities in the shrine city of Qom. Khomeini had risen to prominence in the early 1960s for his uncompromising denunciations of the shah’s policies. He rapidly achieved a name for himself.
His arrest in 1963 had led to widespread riots, shaking the government to its foundations. The following year, free again, Khomeini used a sermon to denounce the status-of-forces agreement (SOFA) Iran had signed with the United States. It gave American military personnel and their families in Iran immunity from prosecution in Iranian courts, and was hugely resented by politically inclined Iranians. He was sent into exile and eventually made his way to Najaf, in Iraq, where he took up teaching, attracting a wide circle of seminary students with his learning and his ability to give potent political meaning to traditional Islamic teachings. He continued his attacks on the shah’s regime, eventually describing monarchy as hateful to Islam and calling for the establishment of an Islamic republic under clerical leadership. In Iran, he gained a wide if not always public following and a clandestine network of clerical devotees who spread his message.
When demonstrations against the government broke out in January 1978, triggering further protests, Khomeini was well poised to seize control of the nascent opposition movement. In February, demonstrators in Tabriz went on a rampage, trashing government offices and the headquarters of the ruling party. They also attacked the symbols of “modernity”: nightclubs, cinema houses, liquor stores, and banks. The protests accelerated with astonishing speed. Six weeks later, similar riots erupted in half a dozen major cities. In September, over a hundred thousand joined in a protest march and communal prayers in Tehran. On Friday, September 8, after martial law had been declared in the capital, dozens were killed in clashes between protesters and troops. “Black Friday,” as it was instantly dubbed by the shah’s opponents, proved a watershed in the trajectory of the growing protest movement, which brought together varied political organizations and social classes: traditional and radical clerics, centrists from Mossadegh’s old National Front, Communists of the Tudeh Party, as well as men and women associated with underground guerrilla movements, civil servants hurt by inflation and stagnant salaries, intellectuals eager for more freedom, and shopkeepers and bazaar merchants chafing at government attempts to control prices.
Khomeini’s clerical lieutenants came to dominate the movement, and Khomeini emerged as its undisputed leader. Charismatic, adept at a rhetoric that resonated powerfully with the public, rejecting every compromise, and unrelenting in his determination to unseat the shah, he transformed what began as a call for the restoration of constitutional guarantees into a call for revolution. He united this disparate collection of opposition groups behind one goal: the overthrow of the monarchy.
In the fall and early winter of 1978, the shah’s regime seemed to be unraveling before our eyes. Heavily armed troops appeared helpless to stop the mounting demonstrations and the imaginative forms of civil disobedience adopted by a thoroughly roused public. Civil servants went to work every day, but sat in their offices and did nothing, gradually bringing much of the government to a standstill. The mail could not be delivered, nor could imported goods be processed through customs. Oil-industry workers went on strike, reducing production to a trickle, which caused massive shortages of fuel and grounded truck transport. Factories shut down. Workers at Tehran’s major electric power plant turned off the city’s electric supply at will, plunging the capital into darkness. Schoolboys in Tehran stalled cars in the middle of major crossroads, snarling traffic and causing massive traffic jams. Tehranis took to their rooftops at night to cry out Allah-o-Akbar, God is Great, into the December night, as if calling on God to rid the country of the shah.
Many of our friends were caught up in the revolutionary fervor, somehow imagining that the regime could be overthrown, the shah replaced by Khomeini, and that their own lives—comfortable, privileged—would remain unchanged. “Let him go,” one of our friends said. “Anything will be better than the shah.” Shaul and I, and a small circle of our closest friends, however, witnessed these momentous events with mounting trepidation. A political earthquake was taking place. The future seemed full of uncertainties. Deep down, Shaul and I sensed that that our lives would never be the same again. Shaul returned from a trip to London in early November. I could not pick him up at the airport because martial law had been declared and a curfew was in force. He took a cab home. No one at the airport seemed to be in charge at passport control or customs, he said. Troops patrolled the nearly deserted night streets, but they were lackadaisical in enforcing the rules of martial law. Back home, Shaul silently took in the familiar objects of our living room and library—the books, the frames of Persian calligraphy on the walls, the glow of lamps on the sofas. He seemed moved by the sense of calm and order inside the house, compared with the rising chaos on the streets. I could read his thoughts from the look on his face. “Are we going to have to give all this up?” he finally asked.
Clerical and other opposition leaders called for massive protest rallies on December 10 and 11, to coincide with the days of religious mourning. The government banned the marches, and fear of violence and bloodshed was widespread. Shaul and I decided that, as a precaution, I should take our daughter Haleh to London for two weeks and wait things out. I left Tehran for London in early December. The exodus of the middle class had already begun, and the airport was jammed with Iranians and foreigners leaving the country. Panic was in the air. Still, I did not feel I was leaving Iran for good.
In London I waited anxiously for news. The regime, hammered by strikes, shutdowns, demonstrations, and violence on the streets, was in a hopeless situation. Shaul and I spoke on the phone; repeatedly we postponed my return, our mood wildly gyrating between unrealistic hopes that things would calm down and mounting evidence that the regime was near collapse. My two-week stay stretched into three, then four and five weeks. The shah left Iran on January 16, never to come back; Khomeini returned to Iran on February 1, 1979, greeted by a crowd of more than a million. Ten days later, with the army having declared its “neutrality,” people in Tehran rose up and overran government ministries, military barracks, police stations, and the radio and TV broadcasting centers. The monarchy had collapsed; an Islamic republic had taken its place.
Revolutions such as Iran’s are huge upheavals in the life of nations, overturning not only governments and institutions but the lives of every individual and family caught in the vortex. Both Shaul and I were deeply rooted in Iran. Everything we had built over a lifetime was there. On the other hand, the country was in turmoil. Armed revolutionary committees roamed the streets. Every day, grisly pictures appeared in the Tehran papers of executed members of the old regime—many I had known personally or had covered as a journalist. Farrokhrou Parsa, the first woman cabinet minister in Iran and a former minister of education, was charged with “prostituting young girls,” placed in a sack, and executed by firing squad. Prime Minister Hoveyda, a friend of my parents whom I had known as a child, was given a summary trial and shot—in the middle of the night, on the rooftop or backstairs of a prison, it was reported. The Kayhan Organization, where Shaul worked, had been seized by the revolutionary government. Shaul had been offered a one-year visiting professorship at Princeton; reluctantly we decided that he would accept. Without admitting it to ourselves, we had agreed to leave Iran.