July 21, 2013
As I
was turning thirteen, I packed up everything I had to embark on a new life in
Tehran with my Iranian mother and stepfather. In 1999, I left behind everyone
and everything I knew in Los Angeles, including my American father. The culture
shock was massive, to put it mildly. I had only been to Iran a couple times,
including a trip as a child in 1991, the year Hollywood released Not Without
My Daughter, the film starring Sally Field depicting the real-life story of an
American woman who makes a daring escape from Iran with her child amid a
custody dispute with her Iranian husband. About the only other thing I had
learned about Iran was that a man called “The Shah” once lived there, and that
he’d had an arch nemesis named Khomeini.
I’m
happy to report that I’m much better informed today; I’m writing a Master’s
thesis on Iran at the American University in Cairo. But back then, being a
politically naïve teenager complicated my feelings of displacement and
melancholy. One day reading aloud from the textbook about the Iranian
revolution in my seventh grade history class, I got to the passage about
Ayatollah Khomeini’s death in 1989. I pointed out the mistake to my teacher. After
all, how could the man be dead when his image decorated every street and public
building in Tehran? My classmates erupted in laughter. It took me a while to
distinguish the morality enforcers of the komiteh from other branches of Iranian security; at the sight of
ordinary conscripts, I would hurriedly tuck my hair under my headscarf, and put
the sleeves of my manteau all the way down so not even my nails would show.
Being
an American in Iran initially filled me with paranoia. Somehow I believed that
if my nationality was discovered, I could be taken hostage—like the Americans
at the U.S. embassy in 1979. The bars on the windows of the Tehran
International School reinforced my sense of dread. My young mind would wander
to fantasies of American marines rescuing me from an Iranian prison. At the end
of my first year of school in Tehran, I wrote “I Love Mullahs” in my textbooks
before handing them back in—my own little insurance policy in case the Islamic
Republic ever came for me. Whenever I saw American flags set ablaze or
protesters chanting “Death To America” on state television, it confirmed my
fear that Iranians hated the United States and everything about it.
Gradually
I began to realize that as an American in Iran, I actually got a free pass from
the komiteh when they caught glimpses of my fuchsia-highlighted hair sticking out
of my headscarf. Until then, nobody had bothered to fill me in on the long and
complicated history of American-Iranian relations, such as how the Central
Intelligence Agency was involved in the 1953 coup d’état that toppled Mohammad
Mossadegh, the democratically elected Iranian prime minister. Coming of age in
Tehran, I discovered that Iranians in fact loved Americans. As a
fifteen-year-old American, the Iranian reaction to the September 11 attack on
the United States made a deep impression on me; thousands of Iranians took to
the streets, not to protest against the “Great Satan,” but to hold candlelight
vigils for the lost American lives.
I
started to realize that as the tumultuous events of 1979 receded into history,
the hemlines of our manteaux became shorter and our headscarves inched further back.
Young people spent more time just hanging out in public, wedding
celebrations grew louder, and cafés reverberated with Western pop music. It
turned out that I didn’t miss too much in my adolescent years. I had my first
kiss, and a couple of heartaches, in Iran. Well, I didn’t get to go to a prom,
given that schools segregated the sexes. But we had house parties at the
residences of ambassadors and diplomats, and I even hosted a few—with no komiteh in sight.
What
touched me the most about Iran was the kindness and resilience of Iranians.
Repeatedly they extended their hands to me, sharing the stories of their lives
and country. Their capacity to survive and even in many cases thrive under
difficult circumstances continues to astound me. After the upheaval of the
revolution, Iranians have experienced an horrific eight-year war with Iraq, an
economy crumbling from mismanagement and sanctions, witnessing a reform
movement crushed, and, most recently, increasingly explicit threats of a
foreign military attack on Iran’s nuclear program.
Through
it all, Iranians have demonstrated a remarkable national pride, bound by a
history and culture dating back several thousand years. They have taught me a
great deal. And, that includes some street smarts: knowing how to operate in
post-revolutionary Iran certainly helps navigating life here in
post-revolutionary Egypt.