Then They Came for Me_ A Family's Story of Love, Captivity, and Survival - Maziar Bahari [16]
Members of the morality police stroll the streets looking for people to harass and arrest for these indiscretions. Police officers are assigned to these units only after they demonstrate a certain level of religiosity and ideological devotion to the system, and once chosen, they must go through an indoctrination process about Islamic values and the West’s subversive campaign to corrupt Iran’s Muslim youth. Even though the morality police are asked by their superiors to avoid physical confrontation, they are ordered to force into submission those who argue with them.
To me, Farzad, Tina, and their friends were not silent victims of the Islamic government’s close-mindedness; they were loud rebels. They risked severe punishment for living the way they wanted to. “You remember Shamlou’s poem?” Farzad asked me. He then recited the Iranian poet Ahmad Shamlou’s lines about the erratic behavior of the Islamic government in the years following the revolution.
“They smell your breath
lest you have said: I love you,
They smell your heart:
These are strange times, my dear.…
They chop smiles off lips,
and songs off the mouth.…
These are strange times, my dear.”
Everyone in the group became silent as Farzad repeated the poem’s refrain. “Our parents may have allowed the government thugs to smell their breath,” Farzad said defiantly. “But our generation fights back.”
Before I left the Sorkheh Bazaar, Tina tried to make sure that I would present them correctly in my article.
“Please don’t write that we don’t believe in religion because of the way we’re dressed,” she implored me. “We don’t want to turn Iran into a decadent place like Las Vegas. We love our religion, but we want to have some freedom.”
· · ·
As I thought about the stories the young men and women had told me about trying to lead normal lives under the watchful eyes of the government, I remembered how it had felt to be young and oppressed in Iran. The long hair and tight jeans I’d worn as a teenager came at a price. My friends and I often had to run away from the members of the local komiteh, or “committee.” These committees, which enforced moral values around the country, were separate entities from the Revolutionary Guards, but many of their members were Guards members as well.
I was arrested by committee officers once and, as my punishment, forced to sit down on the sidewalk and have my head shaved. The man who sheared off my hair told me that he hated the European and American tourists who had traveled to Iran in the shah’s time wearing tight jeans or miniskirts. He called all tourists and Western-looking Iranians hippies. “If it were up to me, I would behead all you hippie shah supporters,” he said as he wielded the old-fashioned, broken barber clippers. There was no point arguing with him or telling him that my father had spent many years in the shah’s prisons. Indoctrinated as he was, he saw any kid wearing tight jeans with long hair as a remnant of the shah’s decadence.
Back home, my father announced that he liked my new haircut. “It suits you better,” he said. “I never liked your long hair.” It was only when I told him about the circumstances behind my haircut that he launched into a barrage of insults against the Islamic Republic and how it was trying to shove its ideology down people’s throats. My parents never cared much for my sartorial and musical choices, but they never criticized me. They saw the fact that I wore tight jeans with white socks and Adidas sneakers and listened to Yaz and Depeche Mode as simply my generation’s expression of dissent. And even though they had long since given up on the usefulness of revolutions,