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.
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."
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.
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.
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