Things you shouldn't talk about

I admit it, I always violate one of the basic tenets of polite conversation in our modern world -one of pretty much universal validity: I talk about religion and politics with everyone, including people I've only just met. And I do so in the homes of people I've just met, as well as on parks and cafes in a country where you can land in jail for talking politics and religion in the 'wrong' way.

I just can't help it, I can't repress the urge to find out how other people make sense of the world and how they see their role in it. I suppose it's part of my nature as I human being. I'd be bored if I couldn't discuss such topics. With time, I've come to accept this proclivity, cherishing its joys whilst accepting the risk it implies. I've learned a lot by discussing religion and politics with all sorts of people, including those that I never saw again. But I've also made other people uncomfortable or perhaps even obsequiously offended them, most of the times without even realizing it (dear reader, please forgive me if I have ever put you in this situation!).

In any case, when I decided to go to Iran and to couch surf there I also knew that I would make the most out the trip to learn how Iranians see the world, how they think the world sees them, how they see their government and how they live their spirituality -be it islamic or else. I also prepared myself mentally for the always difficult task (for me at least) of hearing points of view that are either factually or morally wrong and not saying anything in return (other than further questions). My goal, like that of a journalist, was not to persuade people to abandon ideas that I regard as wrong, but to understand where these ideas come from. I think overall I handled it quite well, or at least I can say that I wasn't thrown out from any home, abandoned at a cafe by friends or handed over to the country's infamous religious police.

One reason why I was able to talk about this things is because Iranians are masters in the art of hospitality, they will make you feel comfortable immediately and treat you as a distinguished guest even if they have just met you. They love a good conversation and are curious about you, as a person and as a citizen of a different country. Under such circumstances, you will acquire the confidence to ask about sensitive topics because it has been established that you are friends, that they like you, and that there is mutual respect about each other. 

Now, below is a summary of the 'results' of many conversations that I had with Iranians about politics, religion and related topics.

DISCLAIMER! Please note that I am aware that the sample of Iranians that I met are probably not representative of the population as a whole, given the fact that almost all of them were educated, English-speaking and middle-class. So when I say "Iranians say" or "Iranians think", remember that I am only talking of the ones I met, or of stuff Iranians reported about other Iranians!

It's a longish article but bear with me, I promise that it is worth it:

1. The self-perception: "Tell your friends that Iranians are free..."

Let's start from the beginning. Iranians are well aware of the ghastly image that their government has projected to the rest of the world. It's one of the most oppressive regimes in the world, many laws are outright barbaric (which is what you'd expect if you picked up a 1400 year-old book choke-full with social norms and tried to transform them literally into laws in the 21st Century) and its management of international relations has been disastrous in the last 35 years. Iranians know all of this. And they know that you know.

My hosts in Tehran. Iranians are a proud people and won't
take any condescension -they remain in charge of their lives

However, they also want you to know that (a) they don't agree with their government and (b) they don't want to let the Ayatollah dictate them how to live. So they have devised an impressive array of techniques to bypass a lot of the laws imposed on them by the government, whilst avoiding trouble with the police. That is why all most a lot of Iranians have Facebook accounts, satellite TV, alcohol and girlfriends/boyfriends, all of which is forbidden. They carve their own freedom with their inventiveness, resilience and courage. This is how life is made bearable. And they also want you to be aware of this.

This is also why my couch surfing hosts in Tehran placed four different bottles of alcohol on their dining table as I arrived in their home. "Take photo... And tell your friends that Iranians are free!", said Safi. The Iranians that I met did not want to be pitied. They were actually quite proud of their country, of their millennial civilization, which is rich in cultural and intellectual achievements. This is why Iranians can simultaneously extoll the glories of their ancient nation whilst ranting about the Ayatollah. For most of history, Persians have matched, if not surpassed, the technical and intellectual achievements of the West, and they will quickly point out to you that many of the greatest contemporary thinkers and scientists are Iranian or of Iranian origin (a recurrent one is Firouz Naderi, the American-Iranian director of NASA's space exploration program).

Having said that, I also met Iranians who were not patriotic or who expressed critical views of their country (not just of their government but also of their history, social norms, thought patterns, etc.). But in general I perceived a heightened sense of national pride, backed up by a remarkable historical conscience, as you would expect from the heirs of one of the oldest continuous civilizations on Earth.

2. The perception of the Arabs

One of the easiest way to offend Iranians is to call them Arabs or otherwise to equate them with Arabs. They are different ethnic groups and their languages are very different, even if both use the Arabic script (and even though many Arabic loan words have been borrowed by Farsi). This is one of the first things that I heard from people I had just met. Some Iranian expressed outright derogatory views of Arabs, calling them barbaric, uncivilized and dumb, and at times even accusing them of oppressing women. I took these views with reservation, I do not endorse them because to me they represent stereotypes and also because I've never been to any of the Arab countries. But I became interested in understanding why they hold such views of the Arabs.

Don't even joke of calling it the Arab Gulf!
This little patriotic message was on the back of the lunch box
that I received upon boarding a bus from Esfahan to Yazd.

I think there are two explanations. The first one is that some Iranians regard the Arab world as a cultural sphere of less stature as the Persian one. They think, to put it plainly, that the civilizatory achievements of the Arabs fall short of those of historic Persia. The second one is that the Arabs conquered Persia in 651, defeating the Sassanid Empire and aggressively promoting the then new Islamic faith -which replaced the native Zoroastrian religion, one of the oldest monotheistic religions. I don't know how most Iranians view this historical event, or whether they have knowledge of it at all. But there are people who still bemoan the fact that the Arabs, a supposedly 'lesser' people, could conquer Persia and impose their religion.

Oh, there is a third element that creates tension in Iranian-Arab sympathies. It is the Sunni-Shia divide. I won't go into details here as to the differences between these two flavors of Islam (look up Wikipedia for more info!), for the purposes of this blog entry it is enough to mention that Iran is the foremost Shia country in the world while most Arabs are Sunni. Nowadays, Iran and Saudi Arabia are tied up in a struggle for the control of many parts of the Arab world (including Palestine, Lebanon, Yemen and Iraq).

(By the way, Arabs reciprocate Iran accordingly: a Pew Research Center survey shows that most Arabs also hold negative views of Iran. So it's a well-rooted rivalry)

3. Israel, the Jews and the US

We've come to a thorny topic. There's no beating around the bush here: most Iranians dislike Israel. First, because of what they perceive as the illegal seizure of Palestine by Jews in order to create the state of Israel (this view is standard in the Islamic world as far as I'm concerned). And second, because Iran feels deeply threatened by Israel (and Israel, of course, feels threatened by Iran). Iran has never accepted the right of Israel to exist (Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran's previous president, even announced in 2012 that Israel would be eliminated some day).

Meanwhile, Israel likes to remind Iran that it can destroy it any time. The thing is, Israel has nuclear weapons, and Iran does not. Iran is not allowed to develop nuclear weapons by the UN Security Council -the economic sanctions imposed on the country in the last decade were a response to Iran's secret nuclear program (now they've signed a deal that should guarantee that Iran does not have the capabilities to develop nuclear weapons, in exchange for the lifting of the sanctions). It's complicated.

Anyhow, the Iranian government is not only anti-Israeli but anti-Jewish. In school, kids are not taught about the Holocaust but instead told that the Holocaust was invented by the Jews to earn enough sympathy to be able to carve out Palestine and create their state. At the same time, many Iranians believe (with the active support of the government) that Jews orchestrate a global conspiracy to control everything. Even the United States.  I heard this thesis again and again. It is also depicted on the wall of the former American Embassy in Tehran:

This worldview (the USA as a puppet of Israel) is surprisingly
commonplace among Iranians, even educated ones

An extension of this conspiracy theory is that the Islamic State (Daesh) is an invention of Israel to destabilize the region and justify further Western intervention. I heard this myth several times. I always replied that the West had probably indirectly contributed to the radicalization of Islamist groups through the war in Iraq, but that did not seem too convincing for some Iranians.

In general, during my visit it dawned on me that all I could do was to try and make my Iranian friends aware of the fact that the way they learned History (particularly the chapter on the Second World War) differed drastically from what children learn in the West, including Latin America. I told them that in the West people who deny the Holocaust are generally regarded as charlatans, because the occurrence of the Holocaust is simply beyond doubt. They were moved when I told them that I knew people who lost relatives in the Holocaust: one to one human stories can sometimes have a much bigger impact than volumes of written books.

What I found perplexing was that people who espoused the theory of the Jewish global conspiracy were also very much wary of the machinations of the Iranian government. That is, they were critical in regards to their own country, but accepted a-critically some wacky theory coined up by rabid anti-Semites. I even had a self-declared Iranian atheist, who claimed to be too rational and critically minded to have religious beliefs, ask me whether as part of my Master's curriculum I studied the Jewish conspiracy to control the world! He could not understand why I laughed.

Having said that, I also encountered many Iranians who said they had no problem with Jewish people but rather with their government, in the same way that they like Americans but strongly dislike George W. Bush (whereas Obama, like elsewhere, remains highly popular).

4. Germany and the 'Aryan connection'

Iranians like Germany. A lot. They love their cars, their Mannschaft, their engineering prowess and... their Aryan-ness. What?! Yes. If you are German and are traveling to Iran, prepare to be reminded of your Aryan-ness a lot. Iran means "the land of the Aryan" in Farsi. In turn, Aryan is a Sanskrit word that means "noble". So Iran means the "Land of the noble".

However, in Europe "Aryan" came to represent something very different. As Wikipedia explains:

"During the 19th century it was proposed that "Aryan" was also the self-designation of the Proto-Indo-Europeans.^[5] Based on speculations that the Proto-Indo-European homeland was located in northern Europe, a 19th-century hypothesis which is now abandoned, the word developed a racialist meaning.^[5] It has been used in Nazi racial theory to describe persons corresponding to the "Nordic" physical ideal of Nazi Germany (the "master race" ideology)."

When I told Iranians that I live in Germany, a common reaction was "did you know that we and the Germans are the same race? We are both Aryans". I tried to explain to them that the meaning of Aryan was very different in Germany. I told them not to call Germans "Aryans" because of the Nazi misappropriation of the concept. Modern Germans don't want to be associated with Hitler and the Nazis.

At this point I was often met by blank stares. Don't Germans love Hitler? What do they think of him? Wasn't he a great leader? Even college-educated Iranians with no evident anti-semitic dispositions came up with these questions. I was flabbergasted. In contrast with their own historical conscience, Iranians' knowledge of the historical conscience of the West seems to be rather spotty. This is all the more surprising, because in many ways Iranians are very similar to Westerners. But I guess the sheer brunt of the lies they are told by the government (which clearly has a stake in keeping Iranians in the dark in relation to the Holocaust), combined with censorship of other sources of information, has contributed to a dismal level of knowledge of 20th Century Western History. (Of course, you can also ask why they should know much about Western History, since Westerners also don't have a clue about Iranian history... Things that are crucially for Western self-consciousness may not be relevant for Iranians and vice-versa).

Germans: don't be surprised if you come across many things
that have the word 'Aryan' in them, such as this barbershop

5. Religion: Who is with the Ayatollah?

We've come to the fifth and last section of this blog entry. I left the juiciest bit for the end. Religion is an ever-present element in a country whose name has the word Islamic in it. I will not repeat here what I've mentioned in previous entries about the omnipresence of religious symbols, commands, norms and prayers in Iran. We're talking about a country so carried away with a particular interpretation of the Qu'ran that men can't wear shorts, women can't sing, Western music is forbidden, and unrelated men and women can't be together on the streets. Anyone who believes in freedom, reason and the inherent dignity and autonomy of all human beings (which in the West is embodied in the concept of human rights) will find these rules outright repulsive. All the Iranians that I are also of this view. They agreed that it's annoying to have a government who claims to be enforcing God's rules, on His behalf.

Upon hearing this, I usually asked my friends whether they would still define themselves as Muslims. Most did, although often they added that they were culturally Muslims and that they believed in God in their own way. They did not see a problem with contravening the government's interpretation of their holy scriptures and pursuing their own spiritual path. They were adamant that the government does not have the monopoly over God's word, and that people have the right to choose a faith and to practice it as they see fit. They were also staunchly secularistic, observing that the mix of religion and state does not ever yield good results.

These attitudes were surprising for me. Far more liberal than I expected. What about the really conservative people, I asked? In Iran you can roughly guess how conservative is a women (or her family) by what she wears: a black chador reveals conservatism, whereas modern clothes plus a lightly tied headscarf reflects more liberal attitudes. Although in Tehran the latter type are perhaps more commonplace, in other cities the chador seemed to be the norm. So there are many conservative people. It is just that I didn't meet them, maybe because they're not the sort of people who are willing to meet foreigners (or maybe they just don't speak English and aren't on the internet, etc). I am quite sure that a regime like Iran's could not sustain itself without the support of a large number of hard-core conservatives who are willing to defend the legacy of the Iranian Revolution.

UPDATE!: I did some research on the web and it turns out that most Iranians are quite religious. A 2012 Pew Research Center survey found that only 15% of Iranians are against the implementation of the Sharia (Islamic law) in their country. And only 30% think that religious leaders should have little or no say on political matters. So this means that the group of Iranians that I met was disproportionately liberal and secular.

The conservative-liberal fault line might coincide
with generational gaps, judging from the female attire

Something that struck me about the spirituality of many Iranians is the way in which they continue to value Zoroastrianism, the ancient Persian religion and one of the world's first monotheistic religions. It is believed that Zoroastrianism heavily influenced Judaism, which in turned spawned Christianity, from whence Islam was developed. Some Iranian friends told me that it was unfortunate that the Arabs had conquered them in the 7th century, imposing a new religion (Islam) that replaced the ancient native one.

Zoroastrianism came up with concepts that were also replicated in Judeo-Christianism and Islam, such as the idea of a single god, the figure of the Messiah, the Judgement Day and the end of the world, the duality of good and evil on Earth and the existence of a demon who promotes evil. Today there are still Zoroastrians in Iran as well as fire temples where God (Ahura Mazda) can be honored. The Iranian government does not persecute the followers of this religion (although it also not encourage it).

A painting of a temple of fire and Ahura Mazda, the
God of the Zoroatrians