Then They Came for Me_ A Family's Story of Love, Captivity, and Survival - Maziar Bahari [15]
Davood stopped his bike near where a large group of young men and women were listening to loud music from a stereo on the sidewalk. The music was a medley of Beyoncé, Madonna, the Iranian pop singers Googoosh and Mansour, and the national anthem, “O Iran, O Bejeweled Land.” On any other day, these kids could have been arrested for the crime of disturbing the public morality. But this morning, as hundreds of foreign journalists walked the city covering the preelection campaign, the Iranian government was letting them be. The regime needed to show the world its capacity for tolerance and, even more importantly, needed the young Iranians’ votes in order to preserve its legitimacy.
As we approached the fashionable Sorkheh Bazaar shopping center, I asked Davood to pull over. This center was one of the locations where Tehran’s bache marouf—the “it” girls and boys—hung out. In November 2008, the Public Morality Office of the Tehran police had issued an order to all boutiques in Tehran banning the selling of “provocative, decadent Western clothes” such as miniskirts, tank tops, stiletto shoes, low-cut dresses, and shorts. But these items could still quite easily be purchased in the Sorkheh Bazaar. Laws in Iran are not made to be followed; they are made to be broken, albeit as surreptitiously as possible.
I got off Davood’s bike and walked around the bazaar. The shops had not changed much since I was a teenager. I approached a crowd of young men and women. The guys had strange, spiky hairdos and were wearing Tommy Hilfiger and Diesel shirts. The girls were in faux Versace and Gucci head scarves. Their toenails were painted green and blue, and they all wore green wristbands.
I introduced myself and told them I was writing for an American magazine, assuring them that their statements wouldn’t appear in any Iranian media; many people in Iran fear what the government may do to them if they express their opinions freely.
I said that I used to hang out here when I was a teenager. “They used to call us punks,” I told them. “What do they call you these days?”
“Devil worshippers!” a young man named Farzad told me.
“You look more like a member of Backstreet Boys than Judas Priest,” I said jokingly.
“Ahmadinejad and his people don’t need any basis to call you names,” Farzad said.
“They just know we look different, so they call us devil worshippers,” added a young woman named Tina, her messy, highlighted blond hair spilling out from underneath her faux designer scarf.
None of them thought that Ahmadinejad was the right representative for an educated nation like Iran, with a sophisticated ancient civilization at its roots. “How can this monkey be our president?” asked Tina. She pointed to the people nearby. “Look around you. Do you find anyone as ugly as Ahmadinejad? But the fact that he’s ugly wouldn’t matter, if only he were polite.” She then made a face as if she had bitten into a hard lemon. She wore a manteau, a tunic that many Iranian women prefer to the chador, a cloak that covers the whole body. Manteaus are more practical than chadors; while they still conceal the shape of a woman’s body from the gaze of strangers, they are less constricting, allowing greater ease of movement. Like most fashionable Iranian women, Tina had shortened her manteau—which was hot pink—and had stretched it tightly across her body, enhancing her curves.
The Islamic government’s intrusion into every aspect of people’s lives over the last three decades had made apolitical young men and women into political activists. In many countries, even authoritarian ones, young people can parade their vanities on the streets and express their youthful rebellion through fashion, dance, music, and other