“They’ve Turned Iran Into One Big Prison” - My First Day in Tehran
1.
We arrived in Tehran very early in the morning on July 30th at the nearly brand-spanking new Imam Khomeini Airport, where we stood on line to have our visas checked by a very sour-looking woman, who did a double-take when she saw my son’s name on his passport and asked whether he was, in fact, really a boy. Many of the people we met in Iran responded to my son’s long hair in this way. Bazaar vendors, shop owners, people who stopped to talk to us on the street, almost every taxi driver who chatted with us while he drive–all assumed, until we told them otherwise, that my son was a girl. After a while, this assumption seemed odd to me, because while it was not very common to see young men with hair as long as my son wears his, neither was it such a rarity that it attracted stares–at least as far as I could tell. Not that Iran’s very strict and often violently enforced gender guidelines have somehow been widened to make uncontested room for long hair on men. Pictures posted on the web last year (here, here and here) showed members of the Gasht-e Ershad, Iran’s morality police–the name means, literally, something like “Guide towards Enlightenment”–beating young men up for having long hair and other appearance-related offenses. It just struck me that so many of the people we met, who did not seem to bat an eye at long hair on college-aged or older men, found it so remarkable that my son should wear his hair as long as he does. (Here is a video of someone telling the story of his sister’s arrest by the Gasht-e Ershad when he and his family went back to Iran to visit for the first time in 10 years; it’s not about long hair per se, but it will give you a sense of how the Gasht-e Ershad works. I will write in another post about my wife’s experience having to dress appropriately and about my experience/impression of being in a country where women have to cover themselves the way they do in Iran, because while it may be true that men have to be careful of the way they dress and look, the restrictions placed on women are far more stringent, and the consequences if women cross the line can be far more severe).
Imam Khomeini Airport was also where we had our first, very brief and very minor, and thankfully only, taste of how potentially complicated Iranian bureaucracy can be. When the woman checking our visas ran my wife’s information through the system, it popped up that, the last time she had been in Iran, my wife had not paid the airport tax, also called an exit fee, and she was told she would have to pay it before she would be allowed to enter the country. (The Wikipedia article on Khomeini Airport has an explanation of this tax.) Paying the tax, however, turned out to be more complicated than you would think, since the desk to which my wife was first directed turned out not to be the desk where the fee had to be paid. Instead the officers at that desk told my wife she had to go to a bank window somewhere else in the airport, pay the fee and bring back proof of payment for them to clear her records. In reality, I don’t think it took all that long to resolve this issue, but after nearly 14 hours in transit, it seemed to take forever, and while my son and I waited with our luggage for my wife to return from wherever it was in the airport she had been sent, I could not help but think about the horror stories I had read and heard about how difficult the Iranian government’s bureaucracy can be to navigate, especially when more than one office is involved. Eventually, though, my wife appeared, everything in order, and we put our suitcases onto the scanning machine’s conveyor belt, retrieved them at the other end, and walked out to meet the members of my wife’s family who had come to pick us up.
Now that I think about it, though, my wife’s airport tax was the second administrative bullet we had to deal with. The first, far more serious one, which we dodged, was the question asked of my brother-in-law when he went to do his half of the work that applying for my visa required: Why, despite the fact that my wife and I have been married for fifteen years, have we not yet registered our marriage with the Iranian government? As I understand it, marriage registration in Iran is, at least structurally, not so different from obtaining a marriage license here in the States; it’s something you do as a matter of course when you get married. Unlike obtaining a marriage license in the United States, however, because Iran is a theocracy, Iranian marriage registration is not a purely civil matter. Part of what registering does is certify that your marriage is a religiously valid one. I don’t know what this means in practical terms for Iranian Jews, Christians, or the members of any other faith that is practiced in that country, but I do know a little bit about what it means for Muslims because there could have been real consequences for my wife if the question of her marriage came up while she was traveling in Iran and she could not prove that her marriage was registered. Precisely what those consequences might be, I am not sure–I have heard that the authorities could take away her passport and make difficult, if not impossible, to leave Iran–but let me first explain why, despite the fact that my wife has not lived in Iran for almost twenty years, that we were married here in NY and that my wife is a United States citizen, we even had to worry about registering our marriage with a foreign government in the first place.
To begin with, Iran does not consider it a termination of one’s Iranian citizenship when one becomes a citizen of another country. So, in the eyes of the Iranian government, when someone like my wife is in Iran, the fact that she is also a United States citizen is irrelevant when it comes to her liabilities and obligations under Iranian law. The Iranian government will treat her as if she’d never left Iran. When my sister-in-law’s husband, for example, decided some years ago to go back to Iran for the first time since he’d left as a teenager, he had to buy his way out of the military service the Iranian government could still have drafted him into, despite the fact that he had been a US citizen for some time. (Iran has obligatory military service for all men.) Similarly, when my wife’s nephews reach the age when they would have to enlist were they living in Iran, they will probably have to buy out their service as well; since both their parents are Iranian and therefore Iranian citizens, the Iranian government considers the boys to be citizens as well.
When my wife married me, she violated the Islamic prohibition against Muslim women marrying non-Muslim men, a prohibition the Iranian government takes into account on the form one has to use to register a marriage between an Iranian woman and a non-Iranian man: the husband in such a marriage must provide “a certificate of declaration of Islamic faith [...] if the woman is a Muslim.” I got a sense of how seriously some Muslims take this prohibition when a friend told me what happened when she told some religious Muslim friends of hers about my marriage. She wanted to make the point, she said, that it is possible for Jews and Muslims to get along. Her friends, however, reacted by insisting quite seriously that my wife should be stoned. Their argument, according to my friend, was not an emotional one rooted in the way that the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is often understood as a proxy for some global, essentialized and therefore inescapable mutual hatred between Jews and Muslims, which is where most of the surprise at the religiously mixed nature of my marriage comes from, but rather a religious one, based on their understanding of the marriage restrictions placed on women within Islam. (A Muslim man, on the other hand, is permitted to marry a non-Muslim woman, as long as she is Christian or Jewish. To be fair, as far as the Iranian government is concerned, it does not matter whether it is the husband or wife who is not Muslim; in each case, the couple must present evidence of having been married within Islam, meaning that the non-Muslim spouse converted. I have heard a couple of different explanations for this double standard, including the fact that religious identity in Islam flows from the father and so his marriage to a non-Muslim does not put the religious legitimacy of his children into question, but whatever other explanations might be offered, it’s hard not to see the double standard as, first and foremost, the result of good ol’ patriarchal values that have been given the veneer of religious legitimacy.)
Please note what I am not saying: I am not saying that my friend’s friends were speaking for all of Islam, that their understanding of Muslim law was correct and can therefore be used as an accurate representation of Muslim beliefs or that what my friend’s friends said represented in any way shape or form the beliefs of any Muslims other than themselves. There are, after all, fanatics within all religious groups, and no one should judge any group by its most extreme members. Imagine, though, if someone who did believe what my friend’s friends believed happened to be the Iranian official who asked to see proof that my wife’s marriage had been registered and she had been unable to provide that proof. (I will leave aside, for the moment, the question of when and why anyone would think to ask in the first place.) I doubt very much that my wife would have been sentenced to stoning, but who knows how that official might have chosen to make life difficult for her, and since Iran is a country where, especially if you are Iranian, you want to do as little as possible to call the authorities’ attention to yourself, my wife and I had decided, when she was pregnant with our son, that it would be better to register our marriage than to chance consequences we could not foresee on some future trip she, or we, might take to her country.
I don’t want to give the impression that the government of Iran makes a concerted effort to police the marriage registrations of mixed couples visiting Iran, because, as far as I know, they don’t, but fully to understand why registering our marriage did not become an issue until my wife became pregnant, you need to recognize that, as long as she could pass as a single woman, no one in an official capacity in Iran would even have thought to ask for her marriage registration, and if they asked if she was married, she could simply have answered no. Thus, in the early years of our marriage, when my wife traveled back to Iran to visit her family, we did not give the issue of registering our marriage a second thought. Once she was pregnant, however, and the possibility of a trip to Iran presented itself–we really thought she was going to go–the fact that our marriage was not registered became a much more pressing issue, since my wife’s body would announce itself as one that, in Iran, needed to be properly married in order to be considered law abiding and legitimate. In other words, my wife’s pregnant belly itself would invite questions about her husband, the father of her child, and since, according to Islam, a wife needs her husband’s permission to travel, we decided it would be prudent for her to have all the proper documents ready just in case someone did ask to see them.
Before we could register our marriage, however, we had to obtain a Muslim marriage certificate, which we did; but because my wife ended up not traveling to Iran at that time, we didn’t take the next step of filing the registration documents with the Interests Section of the Islamic Republic of Iran in Washington, DC. My wife did travel to Iran with our son after he was born, but we decided to rely on the Muslim marriage certificate as proof that everything was, so to speak, kosher; and, in fact, we didn’t even think about registering our marriage again until I filed my application for a visa so we could travel to Iran to be at my brother-in-law’s wedding this past August. That application took place in two parts: I submitted forms to the Iranian Interests Section here, and my brother-in-law filed papers for me in the appropriate offices in Tehran. The official who reviewed my application there asked my brother-in-law why, especially given the fact that my wife and I have been married for fifteen years, we never registered our marriage. This question touched off a series of phone calls–from my mother-in-law to my wife, from us to the Iranian Interests Section in DC–trying to figure out whether I would be denied a visa on these grounds. As it turned out, though, my visa arrived without a problem and we flew out of John F Kennedy International Airport on July 28th, arriving in Tehran, as I said at the beginning, early in the morning of July 30th. My brother-in-law and his fiancee, my mother-in-law and one of her sisters were at the airport to greet us. After dealing with my wife’s exit fee, we got into the taxis they hired for us and, in what was one of only two completely traffic-free drives through Tehran–the other was also very early in the morning, when we went back to the airport for our flight home–rode the last leg of our journey to the brand new apartment where my brother-in-law lives in the village of Darakeh.