The trials of everyday life
 

Though some restrictions have been eased, and others are ignored, most people find survival a struggle

ONE aspect of Iranian life that might be said to be improving is the social condition of the people. The chart below shows that, as reflected by some indicators, life for the average Iranian compares reasonably well with that of others in the developing world. Moreover, statistics do not tell everything. Ask anyone in the street and, no matter what her political views may be, she will describe how the petty restrictions of life have been relaxed in the past few years, how the dress code is now freer and the morals police less fierce.

A walk up the trails into the mountains just north of Tehran provides confirmation. This is where Iranians old and (especially) young go when they want to escape the suffocating smog of the capital, and also, to some extent, the suffocating presence of the morals police. On a recent Friday morning you might have found on the Velenjak trail heading up Mount Tochal an unmarried couple listening to pop music and openly holding hands, no longer rehearsed to tell inquisitive busybodies a pack of lies about their spurious engagement. Most women will not be wearing the all-over covering that ensures female modesty and comes in all the colours of the model-T Ford. Here, jeans may nowadays protrude from below women's coats, not the black trousers that peep out from beneath the almost-all-encompassing chador, the shapeless uniform still worn in most other places. And a coloured headscarf, not too bright but perhaps patterned, may be worn; make-up too. Cosmetic surgery is also in fashion. It is not unusual to see young women with surgical tape stuck to their face as they gaze out from their head-covering maqnaeh. “Odalisque with Nose Job” might be the subject of many a portrait in modern Tehran.

Taraneh, aged 33, appreciates the new freedom. She remembers what life was like in the early years of the revolution. The hijab—covering up—was much stricter and more elaborate then and, at university, “It was an extraordinary event if a boy were even to ask you the time. Going out in public together was unheard of. Today's young don't know how lucky they are.”

No, they don't. The morals police may be less intrusive but they are still around, says Negah, a management student out with her boyfriend Arman on the trail north of Jamshidieh Park, where a public execution had taken place only a few days earlier. She has had one run-in with the vigilantes for being out with a boy, which led to her arrest for 24 hours and a sentence of a fine or 90 lashes. She paid the fine. Arman, training in computer science, wants to study abroad—to join the 200,000 young people who leave Iran each year.

For many young Iranians, a ramble in the mountains is one of the few ways of relaxing in public with friends, and even this can be done in only one part of the country's relatively sophisticated capital. For double-lived Iranians, though, all manner of things go on behind closed doors. There, the young do what they do in other countries: they play pop music, western as well as local, they dance with members of the opposite sex (strictly taboo), they log on to the internet, confer by e-mail and mobile phone, tune in to forbidden satellite television and watch illegal videos (almost everything, including porn, is available).

Their parents also do their best to have a good time. Some western movies are shown in cinemas, but all are bowdlerised, and the state rigidly controls all broadcasting, so entertainment-seekers must perforce turn to crime. They watch satellite television, and brew their own booze or buy it from bootleggers. Many people keep dogs—considered unclean in Islamic law—as pets, as well as for security; and though hounds cannot readily be exercised in public, the occasional calls from hardline clerics for their arrest (yes, dogs as well as owners) are seldom acted on.

Most middle-class Iranians, if asked about the restrictions, sigh and say they can live with them. But they can be more than an annoyance. The police may have to be paid off before a party, or bribed to overlook a satellite dish. And every now and again, despite all precautions, a raid is carried out that results in fines, imprisonment and flogging. Thus Iranians, young and old, live constantly in fear. Even when laws are not enforced, as nowadays sometimes they are not, there is always the possibility that they will be. Thus on hot evenings last summer, the cool place to be for the young of Tehran was the Gandhi shopping centre, where they could sit outside sipping what passes for a cappuccino in Iran—until, one night, the morals police arrived in their Toyota Land Cruisers, closed the offending cafés (what, no licence to serve fruit juice?) and arrested the revellers. Despite Mr Khatami's best efforts, the revolution remains determinedly joyless.

For some, it is far worse. In its annual survey for 2001-02, Freedom House, a human-rights watchdog based in New York, says: “The state continues to maintain control through terror: arbitrary detention, torture, disappearance, summary trial and execution are commonplace.” A few examples give the flavour. In 2000, for instance, scores of newspapers were closed down and journalists arrested. Members of the majlis who complained were taken to court accused of insulting the judiciary. Dozens of activists were arrested for inciting public opinion or endangering the state, and two reformist ministers were forced out of their jobs.

A group of intellectuals who attended a conference in Berlin in 2000 returned to a welcome of prison sentences of four to ten years. One was Akbar Ganji, a prominent journalist who had alleged that high-ranking clerics had been involved in the murders of about 100 dissidents between 1989 and 1997. Reporters Sans Frontières, a Paris-based monitoring group, said Iran had more journalists in prison in 2000 than any other country.

The repression continues. Two months ago, the supreme leader graciously pardoned Abdollah Nouri, a former interior minister who had been Mr Khatami's keenest pro-reform adviser until the Special Clerical Court had jailed him for publishing anti-Islamic articles and promoting friendly relations with America. Mr Nouri's brother had just been killed in a car crash. But the same day, November 4th, which happened to be the anniversary of the storming of the American embassy in 1979, also saw the arrest of another reformist, Abbas Abdi, who had played a leading part in the 444-day occupation of the “Den of Spies”. Mr Abdi's crime was to be a founder of a polling institute which had carried out a survey—commissioned by the majlis—that revealed 74% of respondents to be in favour of a dialogue with the United States. Three weeks ago Mr Abdi made a curious recantation, presumably under extreme pressure.

Iran has no independent trade unions, and workers have no right to strike. Religious minorities are tolerated, up to a point. The population is 89% Shia Muslim, 10% Sunni (mostly Kurds) and 1% Zoroastrian, Bahai, Jewish or Christian. Except for the Bahais, the minorities have seats in the majlis reserved for them and generally enjoy freedom of worship. But the 30,000 Jews know they have to watch their step—in 2000 ten Jews were imprisoned for spying for Israel—and no member of a religious minority can expect to hold a senior government or military position. Special mistrust is reserved for the 300,000 Bahais, because their movement broke away from and then rejected Shiism in the 19th century. They are thus regarded as heretics and blasphemers, and are given no place in the constitution. Moreover, their marriages are not recognised, which leaves their women open to charges of prostitution and their children “illegitimate” and without inheritance rights.

The curse of Westoxification

And the roots of discontent

CONCEIVABLY, Iranians could put up with their restricted civil liberties if they had other comforts, religious or material, or both. Many of them are, after all, both devout and, especially in the countryside, conservative. Yet there is no evidence that most observant Muslims believe civil liberties to be incompatible with Islam, still less with a comfortable life. And though Iran, perhaps because of its ferocious criminal code, is relatively free of violent crime, it is starting to show many of the manifestations of the modern, “Westoxificated” (a favourite word among the zealots) world.

Few of the social ills besetting Iran are in fact peculiar to the West: urbanisation, the breakdown of family life as people move from country to town and the new demands to which city life gives rise can be found as easily in Brazil or India or Nigeria. One consequence is intense pressure on the environment. Iran is a country of 70m people, 67% of whom live in cities, compared with just over 40% in 1970; at least 10m, some say 12m, live in Tehran alone. Three decades ago, when its population was just 2m, the capital, or at least its northern parts, used to be a city of handsome houses with shaded gardens. But planning laws have been disregarded, and building permits sold corruptly or to raise money for a cash-starved city council. Now nondescript high-rise buildings fill most of the old gardens in the north. Elsewhere shoddy development or plain disrepair is the order of the day. Many buildings are derelict, abandoned by owners who have fled abroad.

Other cities have suffered less. Kashan, a desert town between Tehran and Isfahan, is restoring some of its old merchants' houses with respectful care. But the countryside is not immune to a combination of drought and lack of attention. The forests of northern Iran, for example, are vanishing at an ever faster rate: by 9,250 hectares a year in 1955-67, 18,180 a year in 1967-94, and 29,000 a year since then. Some 90% of the sturgeon in the Caspian Sea have disappeared through overfishing (though Iranians are less guilty in this than their neighbours). Resalat, a conservative newspaper, reported recently that 50,000 villages are deserted, abandoned because of drought. Even within an hour of Tehran, around Damavand, 88 villages have been completely evacuated, and in Baluchestan and Sistan province 124 villages have recently been buried by sand.

The environmental horror that affects more people than any other, especially in Tehran, is air pollution. The cost of traffic congestion in the capital is put at 2 billion hours of time wasted each year. The cost of the pollution in terms of respiratory and other diseases must be far higher. Every day 1,200 vehicles and 600 motorbikes join the throng, clogging the streets with traffic and choking everyone with fumes.

The average age of Iran's cars is 17 years, and few have catalytic converters. Moreover, the fuel they burn so inefficiently is low-grade, high-sulphur, noxious stuff. The commonest vehicle is the Paykan, for years the only car made in Iran. It is based on the British Hillman Hunter, a car hardly at the cutting-edge of modernity even when it was last produced in Britain, which was in 1979. Like the revolution of the same year, it is now on its last legs.

Another traffic hazard in Iran is imminent death. Old, unlit, decrepit cars—the horn seems to be the only part that never fails—combined with anarchic driving make even crossing the road a terrifying experience. Red lights are for shooting, pedestrian crossings are for running people down, one-way streets are for treating as two-way death traps. The arm of the law, so long in almost all other respects in Iran, seems completely abbreviated on the roads. The newspapers declare almost with pride that “Iran has one of the highest rates of road accidents in the world, with an average of 200,000 reported annually, in which 15,000 people are killed.” Visitors are told breathlessly—and mathematically dubiously—that one person dies in a car accident every 26 minutes. The only surprise is that it is not every 26 seconds.

Iranians seem stoic, but the pressures of urban life take their toll. More and more people are, for instance, turning to drugs. Iran lies next door to Afghanistan, where most of the world's opium is produced, as well as morphine and hashish. Huge quantities are seized, but even the authorities admit that over 2m Iranians take drugs (four tonnes of narcotics a day, apparently), and the number of associated deaths is rising fast: 1,276 were reported in the six months to September last year, a 58% increase over the same period in 2001.

The fight against drugs costs Iran the lives of a dozen policemen a month, say officials, and some $800m a year. But the bigger cost is in rising crime and ruined lives: over 60% of crime is drug-related, and over 70% of AIDS cases, which are fast increasing, arise from contaminated syringes. A walk around southern Tehran or the outskirts of other cities confirms that drug addiction is a huge problem: crouched by walls or huddled in doorways are men with glassy eyes, ravaged features—and virtually no hope of assistance.

There, too, some of Iran's 200,000 officially acknowledged streetchildren can be found. Many are picked up at the bus terminals where the out-of-towners first arrive. They may be fleeing a violent father or, if they are teenagers, merely running away with a lover. If caught, they are liable to be taken to a reception centre where girls are given compulsory virginity tests. Failure—unless repairs can be done by one of the surgeons who specialise in “restoring” virginity—may mean forced marriage or even prison for a corrupting boy.

Many girls will take to prostitution, an activity widely practised though strictly illegal, unless it takes the form of a temporary marriage known as the sigeh. Peculiar to Shia Islam, the sigeh is a contract between a man (who can be married) and a woman (who cannot—she is usually divorced) for a union with a defined time limit, perhaps 99 years, perhaps 30 minutes. So long as it is registered, the authorities give their approval. Indeed, women offering sigeh services are reported to be freely available even at the holy shrine in Qom, where their partners may well be clerics. It is certainly a thriving institution: in the six months to last October, the number of temporary marriages rose by 122%, partly, suggested Iran's notaries' office, because of the rising cost of full-blown weddings, partly because the country's divorce rate had increased by 32%.

The sigeh, though, will not satisfy demand. Iran is reckoned to have 1.7m homeless women, 1m of them without any state support. No wonder it is also said to have 300,000 prostitutes. Their number is growing so fast that some reformists recently suggested legalising brothels, to be called, apparently without irony, Houses of Chastity. Conservatives were outraged, but Khosrou Mansourian, who runs two NGOs in Tehran, one for the physically handicapped, the other for runaways, drug addicts and streetchildren, believes that the legalisation of prostitution is the only hope for the women who have to engage in it. He plans soon to start a charity called Prostitutes Anonymous.

Sexual segregation is not as strict as it used to be

Most women, however, have other battles to fight first. Sexual segregation is not as strict as it used to be: women can sit with men on buses, though they form separate queues and the back of every bus is reserved for them. One of Iran's four vice-presidents is a woman, Masoumeh Ebtekar, once a student stormer of the American embassy, now a keen reformer. The head of the environment agency is a woman. But women still sometimes have to enter buildings through separate doors, cannot shake hands with members of the opposite sex in public, and are scarcely allowed to appear in television advertisements (children are used instead). More seriously, they find it much harder than men to get a divorce, are regarded as equivalent to half a man as a witness in a court of law, and need a man's permission to leave the country. Mr Khatami says he would like to have appointed a woman cabinet minister, but reckons the country is not yet ready for it. Afghanistan, meanwhile, has two.

Iranian women, it seems, must content themselves with lesser victories, such as a new bill that entitles them to the same blood money as men, and the hiring of the country's first female bus driver last year (to drive only women passengers). Yet their disabilities are less severe than in many Arab countries. Moreover, they are far from powerless. For a start, they are becoming educated. Of last year's university intake of 195,000 students, 63% were women. It will not be long before Iran's student body has more women than men.

Women are already being employed in jobs that would hitherto have been the preserve of men; though they make up only 12% of the active workforce, in offices and banks women may sometimes outnumber men. They are cheap, reliable and cause fewer problems. No wonder they are also marrying later, at an average age of 26 now. But, employed or not, if they have been educated, they are likely to be conscious of women's rights, and to be intolerant of the endless prospect of enforced social and legal inferiority.

Moreover, like men, they can vote from the age of 16. That right was granted, reluctantly, in recognition of the role played by the young Iranian men who went to their deaths in huge numbers during the war against Iraq. After the revolution, Khomeini discouraged birth control in an attempt to build up the Iranian nation. He succeeded. Two-thirds of Iran's 70m people today are under 30, and half are under 20. They constitute the bulk of the reform movement—and thus the hope of the present as well as of the future.