Iran: First Impressions

When I first approached the immigration desk in the Imam Khomeini Airport (IRA) after leaving the Turkish Airline plane, I grew nervous. My father’s friends constantly warned us about the government’s severe crackdown on journalists and activists in Iran, and there was a chance that they would see me as a threat. I am an aspiring journalist and political analyst on Middle-East politics, and have written many articles on the region, including Iran. While I have always been cautious, and kept my involvement around Iranian politics minimal in the US, it, nonetheless, was perceived as too much by my father’s friends.

The immigration officer behind the desk hardly looked at me as he scanned my passport and stared at my files on the computer. He had these remarkably icy blue eyes that clashed with his fading green uniform. “Esme to Dina?” He asked without looking up. I froze. After a few seconds of not responding, he looked up, annoyed. “Are…Baleh” I replied, correcting myself to answer in the formal tense. He handed me back my passport without saying another word.

There was no security to go through after that. I greeted my family I hadn’t seen for 11 years, and my cousins got my luggage for me. And that was that. All the paranoia, fear, and nervousness, for what turned out to be an easier time getting through immigration than in the US was for nothing. I would soon learn that Iran’s not as scary as a place as everyone makes it to be.

Although my family is more religious than the average for Tehran, I chose to wear the manteau (the mandated knee-length jacket) and roosari (a loose scarf), instead of the chador (a veil from head to two revealing only the face, but more flexible than the niqab) that the women in my family wear. As the days would pass, my roosari would go back further and further down my head to reveal more hair. I would soon begin to resemble the average Tehrani woman, pushing the limits of the state’s legal dress code. No one has ever given trouble for it. After multiple times of my roosari falling off without my realizing it in public, my cousin warns me of the “police hijab”, or morality police as we like to call them in the US. I’ve been in Iran for over a week and a half, and I have yet to see any hijab police. My cousin tells me ever since the election of the moderate cleric Hassan Rouhani, enforcement of the dress code is much more relaxed. Indeed, just before coming to Iran, thousands of religious hardliners took to the streets to demand stricter enforcement of the Islamic dress code.

Whenever I ask these girls my age, who are the daughters of our neighbors’ I’ve befriended questions about what I can wear (they too just wear the roosari), they answer “it’s okay!” to everything. It’s okay to wear your hair down. It’s okay to wear nail polish. It’s okay to wear make-up (and a lot of it). It’s okay! The women in the streets of Tehran look like women from any other country, just with more make-up, and a scarf (barely) on their head.

My family is different of course. I’m in this unique position where I get to navigate both worlds of Iranian society, the religious, and non-religious. Both worlds of politics–the reformers (liberals), and hardliners (conservatives). And by having all my family here, I get to experience living as an Iranian, and not as a tourist. That’s why I started this blog, to share stories and my experiences during my time here in Iran. To show you an Iran you wouldn’t see otherwise.