Rooyesh

On a sunny day earlier this summer, I took my 8-month-old baby boy Hourmazd for a walk in the foothills of Tehran’s Alborz Mountains. Families and young people crowded the tree-lined path ahead, chatting leisurely and snacking on crepes and barbecued corn.

As I pushed the stroller along, a policewoman in a black chador blocked my way. She fingered my plain cotton head scarf, pronounced it too thin and directed me toward a parked minibus. It took a full minute for me to realize that she meant to arrest me. “I’ve been wearing this veil for over five years,” I pleaded. “Surely it can’t be that unacceptable?” My husband soon caught up with us and began berating the policewoman for harassing a young mother. The commotion drew the attention of a bearded superior officer, who came over to inspect me. “The problems are not few,” he said, frowning at my sleeves, which fell a few inches above my unsteady wrists. He ordered me to sign a ta’ahod, a commitment that I would not repeat my mistake. “Now go home,” he said. “Go home, and don’t come back.” Iran’s rulers are notorious for their mercurial ways, cracking down on some social freedoms one season and tolerating the most outrageous pastimes the next.

The reliable exception has been standards of Islamic dress, which have been relaxed for years, allowing women to wear short coats and bright, pushed-back head scarves. But recently the rules changed overnight. As we inched out of the busy parking lot, I leaned out the window to warn a group of young women whose dress was sure to make them targets. “They’re arresting people up ahead,” I said. Only one nonchalantly tugged her veil forward a little. The others continued laughing, as though they didn’t believe me. It had been so long since women were rounded up in the streets that I didn’t blame them. Young men with long hair, women with jewel-toned veils filled the area. “Will they arrest the entire parking lot?” I wondered aloud. “The whole city?” When I moved to Tehran in 2005 to work as a reporter and start a family, life was difficult but bearable. The country my parents had left behind for the U.S. in the 1970s was on the mend. The economy was poor and the pollution stifling, but if you asked most Iranians whether things were better than in the past, most would have said yes. Although the election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad that year had prompted worries that the regime would enforce social strictures with renewed vigor, the suppression never materialized. Ahmadinejad declared that Iranians had more important issues to deal with than Islamic dress, so the system continued to deal permissively with the 48 million Iranians under the age of 30, who make up more than two-thirds of the population. Some continued leeway on social restrictions was all the government could offer this vast, disaffected young constituency, a small consolation for the absence of political freedoms and economic opportunities. It was not San Francisco–there could be no cocktail bars or nightclubs–but neither was it Saudi Arabia. In the past few months, however, Tehran has become a different place.

Convinced the U.S. is seeking to destabilize their Islamic system through economic pressure and covert infiltration of political life, the ruling clerics are retaking control of the public sphere ahead of next spring’s parliamentary elections. “The more threatened the hard-liners feel, the more paranoid they will become,” says Farideh Farhi, an Iran expert and professor of political science at the University of Hawaii. Things began falling apart in the spring when authorities raided neighborhoods all over the city to confiscate illegal satellite dishes, Iranians’ link to the outside world. The police swooped down on our building early one morning, kicking the devices down with their boots. Two of my neighbors, using their mobile phones, recorded footage of trucks carting off the dishes, only to have the phones confiscated as well. My 6-year-old nephew wept, desolate at the loss of his cartoon channel and angry that we had not called the police. “But the police were the ones who took the dish,” I explained. “It was against the law.” He naturally wanted to know why we had been breaking the law in the first place. This led to the sort of complicated discussion one hopes never to have with a young child–all about how we break the law at home while pretending to observe Islamic codes outside. In recent years, the gulf between public and private life in Iran had shrunk, a happy development, especially for parents, who saw their children more willing than at any time before the revolution to spend their lives inside the country.

But talking to my nephew, I could almost feel the gap being stretched wide open again, and the thought filled me with sadness. As news of what was happening on Tehran’s streets filtered in, it became clear that the authorities had launched a full-scale campaign of intimidation, the likes of which the country had not seen in a decade or more. In the course of a few weeks, state news reported that some 150,000 people had been detained at least briefly. All the women in my life went out and bought dark, knee-length, shapeless coats, the sort of uniform we had discarded in the late ’90s. The crackdown had everyone on edge, in part because it was so inexplicable. Many women avoided going out in public unless it was necessary. Even the pious considered the new mood egregious. As a friend of mine who wears the black chador out of conviction put it, “This is a mockery to focus on dress when our country has so many more urgent problems.” Within three weeks, the police vans disappeared from the streets, and women once again pushed back their veils, albeit with apprehension. To be on the safe side, I dressed conservatively for an appointment at a university in central Tehran. But at the gate a guard told me my manteau, a sort of Islamic overcoat, had “too few buttons,” and he refused me admittance. “You look appalling,” he said. A fellow guard rebuked him for addressing a “sister” so disrespectfully. The professor I was meeting, a reformer and onetime official, phoned to intervene, but the guards refused to budge. “Sorry, Doctor,” the offensive one said, pronouncing the title with a sneer. I wanted to burst into tears but told myself it was an educational experience.

It gave me a taste of what Tehran must have been like in the early days of the revolution, when Islamic ideologues took over universities, purging women and secular teachers. The professor told me later that he was lucky to still have his job. Two years ago, Ahmadinejad appointed a mullah as chancellor of the University of Tehran–the first move in what many called a second cultural revolution. Administrators forced scores of secular-minded professors into early retirement. Such pressures reflect the system’s growing obsession with security. Earlier this year, the system detained four Iranian-American academics for plotting to overthrow the regime through support for a civil society. (Authorities released one, Haleh Esfandiari, from prison on Aug. 21.) The message to Iranians was clear: Cut your ties with the outside world or face the consequences. Since the arrests, I, along with many of my journalist friends, have stopped meeting with foreigners altogether, worried that harmless socializing might be considered spying. I have canceled dinners with visiting American friends, screened calls from abroad and stopped giving interviews to foreign media. “I’m nervous,” I confessed in June to an official at the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance, which oversees the work of foreign journalists. “The red lines have all shifted, and I can’t figure out what to write that won’t get me in trouble.” The official sighed, advised me to report as I had for years–honestly but with caution–and talked of the concerns swirling in the halls of government. “The Western media are distorting the image of Iran,” he said.

“Why does no one write about how Iranian women are ahead of the whole region in education, in public life?” I agreed with him but said it was difficult to communicate such gains in the midst of widening human-rights violations. The next day, I attended a concert of Persian classical music at Niyavaran Palace, one of the former Shah’s residences in northern Tehran. A decade ago, there were no such concerts to attend in Tehran because the mullahs frowned on music as un-Islamic. This summer there were concerts scheduled across the country, several of them including orchestras with female musicians. At least 3,000 people, among them many women in black chadors, mingled before the candlelit steps of the palace under a velvet sky. The country’s preeminent poets and directors sat alongside government officials and their chador-clad wives, and gazing at the scene, you could be forgiven for imagining this was a society at peace with itself, run by men who appreciated the arts, reconciled with the role of Islam in daily life. The brutality of the previous month receded in my memory. Perhaps Iran was not caught in a downward spiral after all. My sunny outlook carried into the next week and was seemingly reflected in the changing billboards adorning Tehran. For years religious murals have lent the city a dismal air, a constant reminder to Iranians that they are living under an Islamic theocracy that is hostile to everything it considers Western, including beauty. Now the billboards display attractive black-and-white photographs of grinning revolutionaries and Islamic calligraphy that resembles urban graffiti. One morning a white van with PEYK-E KHORSHID (MESSENGER OF THE SUN) emblazoned on its sides rolled into my neighborhood, and two women in powder blue chadors opened its doors to unveil a portable library.

They smiled at passersby and handed out white gladioluses and free books as part of a municipal program to promote reading. I got children’s editions of epic Persian poetry to read to my nephew. “This is positive, at least,” said an elderly neighbor. “But people are so unhappy, no one notices when they try.” In past years, certain types of outreach had bought the state reluctant acquiescence from lower- and middle-class Iranians struggling with joblessness and record inflation. Low-interest loans and subsidies on basic foodstuffs have helped. High oil prices enabled this largesse. But oil’s munificence is not limitless. The government, nervous that the West may impose sanctions on Iran’s gasoline imports as punishment for its controversial nuclear activities, recently withdrew its subsidy of gasoline. Despite its vast oil reserves, Iran cannot produce sufficient gasoline to meet consumption, so in June the government imposed rationing. For days, gas stations saw long queues at all hours. On the way home from a dinner party the first night of the rationing, we were stuck in a three-hour traffic jam, the air filled with smoke from a gas station that rioters had set on fire. Even our local produce seller, a mellow, religious old man not prone to talk of politics, could not control his fury at Ahmadinejad. “He’s ruined this country,” he said, storming around a stand of figs and mulberries. “Why doesn’t someone stop him?” I was reminded of something an acquaintance of mine, a close relative of Ahmadinejad’s, once said. “Tehran is like a warehouse of cotton,” he told me. “One spark, and the whole place will burn.” Suddenly the disturbing prospects of Iran’s uncertain place in the world ceased to be an abstraction and became a reality disrupting our daily lives. The nightly news reported that gas stations had been set ablaze across the city. We spent three days at home without even going grocery shopping, reluctant to use up our gas and ruing the day we acquired an SUV. These strained times coincided with my family’s long-planned departure from Iran. My husband was starting graduate school in Europe, so we joined the tens of thousands of educated Iranians who make up the country’s enormous annual brain drain. On the eve of leaving, I couldn’t help feeling a profound sense of relief, as though we were rowing away from a sinking ship. The last time I moved away from Iran, back in 2002, the country was also in the throes of a crackdown, though nowhere near as all-encompassing as this one.

The pretext back then was that George W. Bush had labeled Iran part of an “axis of evil,” and when the rhetoric cooled, the regime resumed trying to placate its angry young people. Watching from afar, I will be eager to see how a hard-line government will woo back the vast middle class, alienated by the imposition of a more Islamic social order. In Isfahan angry citizens reportedly burned police buses used to round up flouters of “Islamic” dress. In Shiraz 2,000 university students demonstrated against new dress restrictions. It’s hard to see how Ahmadinejad and his supporters will retain control of parliament in next spring’s crucial elections. But “the hard-liners would rather rule over a population that fears them than one that likes them,” explains my friend Karim Sadjadpour, an associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. ONE EVENING DURING MY LAST WEEK IN Iran, I attended a 300-guest family wedding just outside Tehran. The women bared skin in spectacular evening wear, and young people filled the dance floor well past midnight, entertained by a female DJ. Few Iranians dare to host such events anymore for fear of raids by the authorities. I caught up with the bride and asked her how she felt about starting her married life in such uncertain times. “There are days when life feels normal and I am happy and proud to be living in my own country, whatever its problems,” she said. “And there are days when outside is like a nightmare. I just hope there will be more of the normal days.”

By: Azadeh Moaveni, Time 

As explosions boomed in the distance, a Kurdish woman stood outside her house and pointed to where shells scorched parts of her father’s grapes and plum orchards. “It was a bad day when some 20 shells hit our village in a single day last week. We were crying as

 we prayed to God to protect us from the bombs of the Islamic Republic of Iran,” said Serwa Ibrahim, one of the few remaining villagers in Mardow, about 25 miles from the Iranian border.

“Despite the shelling, I will stay in my village until the end,” Ibrahim, 33, said Thursday.

Separatist Kurds

Iranian troops have been accused of bombing border areas for weeks against suspected positions of the Free Life Party, or PEJAK, a breakaway faction of the separatist Kurdistan Workers’ Party. Iran says PEJAK — which seeks autonomy for Kurds in Iran — launches attacks inside Iran from bases in Iraq.

The Iranian shelling has been criticized by Iraqi officials and Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari warned it could have negative effects on the crucial relations between Iran and Iraq’s Shiite-led government.

Ari Yashir, a PEJAK member, took a reporter in a tour around several deserted villages and claimed the Iranian attacks only serve to harm civilians.

“The bombing is only targeting villages where we have no bases,” he said. “After three weeks of Iranian shelling none of our positions was hit and not a single member of our party was wounded.”

Most of the people who fled their homes have gathered in an area known as Shewe Hasow, a valley with water springs in the Qandil Mountain area that borders Iran and Turkey. Many of them stay in tents or under covers mostly supplied by the International Committee of the Red Cross.

“We are here because the refugees are in need,” said ICRC member Patrick Youssef, standing by a truck with canned food and bottled water. “We are helping them with needed stuff because most of them left their homes leaving their things behind.”

450 families displaced

The Kurdish region’s interior minister, Othman Haji Mahmoud, told the Kurdish regional parliament Tuesday that the Iranian shelling led to the displacement of some 450 families in 20 villages, adding that several people were wounded in addition to material damages.

He said the latest wave of shelling began Aug. 14.

In Baghdad, Zebari said Tuesday that the main areas struck are in the northern provinces of Irbil and Sulaimaniyah. Iranian shelling “has been ongoing and unfortunately has become a daily or a routine practice. Recently, we summoned the Iranian ambassador and handed him a note of protest.”

“PEJAK sometimes moves in border area, but this does not permit all this continuous, daily and intensive shelling,” said Zebari, a Kurd, who noted that Iraq was prepared to hold negotiations with Iran on the disputes over Kurdish rebel groups.

“We hope that these attacks will stop immediately.”

To some Kurds in the region, they have been living the war for decades, including widespread atrocities blamed on Saddan Hussein’s regime in the 1980s.

“We are the victims of a continuous struggle. My house was destroyed five times and I rebuilt it. Let this be the sixth time,” said Abdullah Wasou Ibrahim, who fled to the refugee camp with 10 family members.

Source: MSNBC

HE plays the setar, a traditional Persian lute, and is a master of classical Persian literature and poetry. But the sounds he draws from the instrument, along with his deep voice and his playful but subtly cutting lyrics about growing up in an Islamic state, have made Mohsen Namjoo the most controversial, and certainly the most daring, figure in Persian music today.

Some call him a genius, a sort of Bob Dylan of Iran, and say his satirical music accurately reflects the frustrations and disillusionment of young Iranians. His critics say his music makes a mockery of Persian classical and traditional music as he constantly blends it with Western jazz, blues and rock.

Mr. Namjoo, 31, is a singer, composer and musician, but most of all, his fans say, he is a great performer.

“I wanted to save Persian music,” he said in an interview at one of his studios in Tehran. “It does not belong to the present time and cannot satisfy the younger generation. The fact is that Persian music is very close to other styles, and it is possible to mix in other styles with a little shrewdness.”

His blending of Western and Persian music produces unexpected moments that jar the traditionalists but are thrilling to his fans, who are mostly young artists and intellectuals. His music sounds Persian, but the melodies take away the melancholy that often suffuses classical Persian music.

The Iranian singer Mohsen Namjoo is the most controversial figure in Persian music today.

But it is Mr. Namjoo’s lyrics, his fans say, that make his music so important. He sings old Persian poetry, such as works by the 13th-century mystic poet Rumi or the 14th-century poet Hafiz, with its connotations of love and lust. But with his mastery of Persian literature, he is able to write his own lyrics into the accepted forms, adding layers of meaning.

“The first time I listened to his music, I found it unexpected,” said Mahsa Vahdat, a 33-year-old singer. “It started with a laugh for me and ended with a cry. His music and his lyrics express the bitter situation of my generation, and they represent the society we live in.”

Defying Iran’s cultural police, he does not shy away from contemporary issues.

“What belongs to us is an apologetic government,” he sings in a song called “Neo-Kanti.” “What belongs to us is a losing national team.” Those are references to the widespread disappointment with the government of the former reformist president, Mohammad Khatami, and the constant losses of Iran’s soccer teams.

“What belongs to us, maybe, is the future,” he adds, in a voice that is more resigned than hopeful.

In another popular song he sings, “One morning you wake up and realize that you are gone by the wind, there is no one around you and a few more of your hairs have gone gray, your birthday is a mourning ceremony again.”

After throwing in an unexpected Western melody, he goes on in a lower voice, saying, “that you are born in Asia is called the oppression of geography, you are up in the air and your breakfast has become tea and a cigarette.”

Atabak Elyassi, a musician and a professor of music at the Music College at Art University in Tehran, said there was protest and satire in Mr. Namjoo’s music. “In the meantime, it is very Iranian,” he said, “because he constantly points to issues that are about the lives of Iranians.”

MR. NAMJOO was raised in the religious city of Mashhad in northeastern Iran, where he started learning classical Persian music when he was 12.

As he grew older, he said, he listened to Western music and became interested in Jim Morrison, Eric Clapton and the Irish pop singer Chris de Burgh. He read philosophy and Persian literature, and developed a fondness for a strain of modern Persian poetry that stresses phonetics over the meanings of words.

But what changed his approach more than anything, he said, was his experience in the theater. When he was admitted to the University of Fine Art in 1994, he was told that he had to wait a year before starting classes. So he decided to pass the time studying theater.

“A musical instrument is a medium for a musician to play music,” he said. “So is the voice of a singer — it is like a medium to sing through it. But neither of them is involved in building relations with a living creature.

“But when I studied theater I learned to connect with my audience, and that was when my poems changed,” he said.

It is hard to gauge Mr. Namjoo’s popularity, for he has come of age in a time of intense pressure on Iranian music.

Most music was banned after the 1979 Islamic Revolution, with only religious and revolutionary songs deemed appropriate. To this day, women are not allowed to sing. Over time the restrictions were eased, first on classical Iranian music and then, in the mid-1990s, on pop music. But after the election in 2005 of Iran’s current, conservative president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, music came under a cloud once again.

The authorities canceled a concert of rock and jazz music in Tehran in July. In August, more than 200 people who attended a private rock concert in Karaj, 30 miles west of Tehran, were arrested. The public prosecutor in Karaj, Ali Fallahi, called the concert “satanic,” local news agencies reported.

Mr. Namjoo himself has not yet been able to give a live, public performance, and he has not received a government license to sell his CDs. But he is able to perform privately, his CDs are sold on the black market and, in an inexplicable twist, his songs are played on Iranian radio stations. As of early August, his manager said, 1.6 million people had heard his music on YouTube.

In July, he did receive an invitation to a government ceremony to sing a few songs in praise of Imam Ali, the martyred son-in-law of the Prophet Muhammad and the man whom Shiite Muslims consider Muhammad’s legitimate successor. Yet, the room was filled with artists and musicians, rather than government officials.

BECAUSE of his cutting-edge style, Mr. Namjoo is under another kind of pressure. Most classical musicians are purists, insisting that the music not be altered in any fashion. They dismiss Mr. Namjoo’s music as absurd because of the way he has incorporated Western influences.

If you take Iranian classical music on one side, and Western music on the other, said one critic, Reza Ismailinia, who runs a small art gallery in Tehran, “then I think Mr. Namjoo’s music is like a caricature in between, or a kind of fantasy.”

But many disagree with Mr. Ismailinia.

“I think he will be remembered as a courageous artist who opened a window toward creating something new and for going beyond traditional barriers,” said Alireza Samiazar, the former director the Contemporary Museum of Art in Tehran. “I think his contribution to our music will be great.”

Undeterred by the critics, Mr. Namjoo says his next ambition is to study music abroad.

“I want to be challenged and get acquainted with Western music,” he said. “I was accepted too easily here.”

By Nazila Fathi, The New York Times