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The Appearance of Change in Iran

January 15, 2004
The Washington Post
Karl Vick

TEHRAN -- The young woman dressed in a manner forbidden by law was complaining about something she saw on a television channel that's illegal to watch.

"The stuff on Euro News," said Nesa Hamlehdar, exasperated. "They show Iranian women in chador. Boys as soldiers. Old cars."

She rolled her eyes. "This is the image the West has of us!"

In Iran, reality looks a lot more like Hamlehdar. Pausing in a fashion mall on her way home from a day of college classes, the 22-year-old language student wore tight bell-bottoms under a tunic cut not like the all-enveloping chador, which translates literally as "tent," but more like the little black cocktail dresses that now pass for outer garments in some parts of Tehran.

There was eyeliner and nail polish. And her scarf was pushed back to reveal fully half her hair -- something officially prohibited shortly after then-President Abol-Hassan Bani-Sadr in 1981 explained that women's hair emits rays that drive men insane.

"The limitations that used to be," Hamlehdar said, "do not exist now."

That basic fact of Iranian daily life signals a fundamental shift in politics. The dramatic relaxation of the theocracy's strict official dress code is but the most visible aspect of a grudging yet steady expansion of what Iranians call "personal space." The term describes the realm of purely personal liberties that extends from holding hands in public to watching satellite television without fear of a police raid.

Initially championed by reformers who also demanded political freedoms, these personal liberties are being granted by the conservative Islamic clerics who control the most powerful institutions in Iran's government. The hard-liners, who wrote the rules in the first place, now see a political advantage in allowing them to be widely ignored.

Iranians elect a new parliament in February. And years before a hard-line election oversight body caused an uproar this week by summarily banning reformist candidates by the thousands, moderates in the conservative camp plotted a subtler route to victory, one based on giving people more of what they want.

"Already, we have plenty of freedoms on the street. Nobody can curb that," said Mohammed Javad Larijani, a senior official in Iran's judiciary, which is headed and staffed by conservative appointees. "We politicians have staked our future on that freedom. We are hopeful to gain power through that freedom."

Many Iranians, while embracing the new leeway, say they recognize that the gains are meant to relieve pressure for more fundamental political freedoms, which remain closely circumscribed. While taking morals police off the streets, for example, hard-liners have also closed more than 200 newspapers.

"It's like a safety valve to prevent an explosion in society," said Shadi Kohandani, 25, an accounting student. "They want to keep everyone amused so they don't think about more important things. They're investing for the next elections."

"At least we have these -- music, clothes," agreed Nazanin Derakhshanzadeh, shopping for a new overcoat in north Tehran.

The authorities' message, she said, was clear: " 'Don't think further. Don't ask about politics.' It works, because in the old days, people didn't have freedom in choosing clothes and styles of living. People think they are getting a lot."

The changes can be subtle. A young man smoking in public during the month of Ramadan goes unchallenged. A billiard parlor opens in the holy city of Qom. And on the street, vendors who six months ago stealthily hissed "Playing cards" to passersby now hold the forbidden instruments of gambling overhead. "I sold a deck to a cleric," said a dealer in Isfahan, the country's second-largest city.

In downtown Tehran, the feared court formerly known as the Office for the Prevention of Moral Crimes is now the Social Department of the Law Enforcement Teams. On a recent Monday morning, barely 20 people were waiting in a lobby that a few years ago was brimming with parents bailing out children caught up in weekend sweeps of parties featuring bootlegged liquor or forbidden music.

"It's a total defeat for the old methods the conservatives were using," said Mohammad Reza Khatami, a leading reformist legislator and brother of Iran's elected president, Mohammad Khatami, a reformer whose six-year challenge to the clerical establishment is widely seen here as a failure. "If you leave politics and go to every other area of the country, we see that the reformists have been successful."

But as the increasingly fractured reform movement has lost public confidence, conservatives have seized the opportunity to soften their reputation as being intolerant. An adviser to Iran's supreme leader said the new tolerance reflected the eclipse of cultural hard-liners who favored "mechanical methods" for encouraging piety.

"In an Islamic society, selling wines is forbidden, but if somebody is drinking wine in his house, the question is, do we enter the house to arrest him or not?" said the adviser, Amir Mohebian, editor of the conservative newspaper Resalat. "I think the system should apply only to the public sphere, not to the house. If somebody goes from the way of God in his house, that is a problem between him and God."

Mohebian called it "a kind of minimalistic idea of ruling an Islamic system."

Many others contend that the clerics had no choice. The intrusion of morals police into private life played a major role in the landslide election of Khatami as president in 1997 by an electorate largely too young to remember the 1979 Islamic revolution. Today, about 60 percent of the Iranian population is younger than 20, and the voting age is 16.

"They really didn't expect that the girls would put on such tight manteaux," said Shima Kohandii, 20, the accounting student's sister. She used the French word for "cloaks" that, in Tehran today, takes in any outer covering, no matter how slinky. "Suddenly, they're confronted with this."

The change is far from wholesale. The full black chador remains common in much of this country of 70 million, especially in working-class and rural areas. But in fashion-conscious neighborhoods, women venture out confidently in bright colors that show off their figures and wear scarves tugged barely to the top of the head, sometimes with hair cascading down the back.

"Please see to your hijab," reads the sticker on the door of Bossini, the boutique where Bahareh Akhavan, 21, works as a sales clerk. The accompanying graphic suggests a nun's habit. Yet Akhavan arrived in a cloak so tight the buttons strained.

"Most of the people who have beautiful bodies want to put these on," she explained. "Some intentionally go on a diet so they can wear tight clothes. I do that myself."

Iranian women report paying close attention to Fashion TV, a staple of the black-market satellite television common in the Iranian households that can afford it. Nominally outlawed, the dishes are now rarely hidden.

"They can't stop it. How are they supposed to stop it? They don't want to make fools of themselves," said Amir Tajrishi, a clerk in a software store where most of the video games are sold to young men who saw them advertised on satellite.

The new leniency also extends to romance. With morals police no longer on the streets, young couples hold hands in public even while passing Friday prayers in downtown Tehran.

"It has become common behavior," said Amirabbas Sari Aslani, 25, who had tucked his girlfriend's hand inside his jacket pocket on a chilly afternoon. "People need to show this behavior."

Some show more. Scandalized Tehran residents exchange reports of discovering couples necking in public parks -- widely considered outrageous behavior. Cohabitation before marriage is no longer rare, university students and others say.

In a nation that next year marks a quarter-century under clerical rule, deciding for yourself what can be worn in public is a new experience for many young women.

"Well, we put it on, we step outside. If you're bothered, it seems you've guessed wrong," said Mahdis Zare, 21.

"What I find," said Mahsa Nouruzi, 19, "is that the way people look at me determines whether I am crossing a line."

And by Western standards, those lines remain almost Victorian. Pausing in a Tehran mall, Hamlehdar, whose name translates to "woman attacking," gave a little shudder showing how much forearm she dared to show last summer.

"This is enough for us," Hamlehdar said. "We don't want anything special. We just want to live our lives. We're not involved in politics."

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