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A friendly woman guard, neatly dressed in a blue coat and a matching hair covering, greeted me as I passed through Customs.
‘Welcome to Iran’, she said with a cheerful smile.
The Imam Khomeini International Airport looked desolate and abandoned from inside the aircraft when we landed in Tehran. There was little apparent movement. Just two planes, both Iranian, were parked on the vast tarmac. I was disconcerted. Five minutes later, we were inside the terminal building. Contrary to what I had feared, it was, by Indian standards, swank and immaculate and bubbling with activity. I had expected to be greeted with swarms of somber-looking burkha clad women and grave-faced men sporting bushy beards, for that is what the media effectively reduces Iran to; but I was in for a pleasant shock. A friendly woman guard, neatly dressed in a blue coat and a matching hair covering, greeted me as I passed through Customs. ‘Welcome to Iran’, she said with a cheerful smile.
I was in Tehran at the invitation of a Shia religious organization to attend a conference on the notion of messianism in different religions. My hosts had sent a car to pick me up at the airport. Ali, a student at a Shia seminary, was at the exit to receive me. Like most other Iranians, Ali knew little English, but we managed a minimal conversation by using words common to both Farsi and Urdu. ‘Maqam-e Imam’, Ali announced to me as the car sped down the smooth six-lane road towards Tehran, located almost eighty kilometers away from the airport.
Twenty minutes later a massive building stretching almost a kilometer from one end to the other, emerged into view. As we grew closer, I noticed its five massive gilded domes, several slender minarets, and literally hundreds of rooms that were built around its several vast courtyards. An exchange of a few Urdu-Farsi words with Ali thereupon informed me that we had arrived at the mausoleum of Ayatollah Khomeini.
Inside, soft woolen Persian carpets stretched from one end of a stadium-like building to the other. It was crowded with pilgrims, men and women, clutching the silver grills of the mausoleum and offering blessings on the soul of the departed Ayatollah. There were separate sections for men and women, but these were not hermetically sealed off, and both could see each other from either side of a low curtain. The Ayatollah’s grave was simple and modest, reflecting his own austere lifestyle.
Ali finished his prayers and then beckoned me back to the car. It took us barely half an hour to reach the hotel, located more than forty kilometers away. The broad road was as smooth as an airport tarmac, and the traffic impressively organized. The wastelands abruptly gave way to a forest of buildings as we passed through a toll-gate. This, explained Ali, was south Tehran, where most of the poor of this megapolis of more than 14 million people live. Yet, it struck me as remarkably middle-class by Indian standards, with no evident sign of desperate poverty. The buildings here were modest but neat, the roads wide, and the numerous gardens we passed by, well manicured. People seemed well-dressed and well-fed, too. As we drove towards north Tehran, the buildings grew progressively taller, bigger and more ‘modern’. Brightly decorated shops and boutiques ran along streets lined with majestic Chinar trees. Residential areas appeared that hosted massive bungalows guarded by high walls. This could have been any European city.
The plush five-star Estaghlal Hotel where we had been put up, was an enormous structure, many floors high. Hung on the wall at the entrance to greet visitors, was a framed poster that announced in clumsy English, ‘Dear Guest, In order to observe the Iranian and Islamic values, it will be pleased to follow the Islamic hijab and moralities’. This slogan appeared below an image of a demure young woman with a black hijab or head scarf draped around her head but leaving her face showing, with a crimson setting sun in the background. Presumably, the poster addressed itself to women, who were expected to wear ‘Islamic hijab’, although Islam requires that men, too, be dressed modestly, which is what the Islamic concept of hijab is about.
Accordingly, at the Hotel Estaghlal, as everywhere else in Iran, women were required to wear ‘Islamic hijab’, but no such strictures seemed to apply to men, all of whom, with the exception of religious clerics and a few Kurds whom I saw in their traditional baggy trousers, wore Western dress. But even here, the women are free to interpret the stricture about ‘Islamic dress’ within broad limits. Women from the poorer classes or from more pious families are more likely to be dressed in the full chador than are other women. Of the former sort, only a few were visible at the Hotel Esteghlal. Most of the women guests and visitors in the hotel, obviously from rich families, had made their own innovations in the ‘Islamic hijab’ that the law requires, draping their heads loosely with colourful scarves and wearing fashionable pastel hued coats and stilettos. Some, obviously seeking to circumvent the law altogether, had streaked their hair golden and let it provocatively fall well below their scarves onto their faces. Others wore such tight fitting coats that they miserably (and probably deliberately) failed to perform their supposed function of concealing the outline of the body. Quite a few sat at tables in the lobby, heavily powdered and their eyebrows neatly plucked, puffing away at slender cigarettes along with their male companions. Somber pictures of Ayatollahs Khomeini and Khameini and pious quotations from the Prophet Muhammad (Pbuh) and Imam Ali slung on the walls of the opulently decorated lobby made for a surreal contrast.
(The writer can be reached at ysikand@gmail.com)
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