Free The Ministry of Guidance Invites You to Not Stay: An American Family in Iran by Hooman Majd Page A

was busy stuffing grass into his mouth and was by now hardly surprised by all the attention he received the moment he left the house.
    “Hands and knees on the ground,” it read,
Curious of everything, Smiling lips,
Golden hair and hanging cheeks,
Without a care for the miseries of life,
What a pure, delicate creature is a child!
Full of movement, full of happiness,
A child of humankind, I know
Maybe you’ll be the start of a new world …
    Okay, it’s not Milton, at least not in my translation, but his gesture was sweet and, more important, genuine. I felt bad for him, a young man, like many Iranian youth, sitting on a park bench on a weekday afternoon contemplating life. Unemployment is staggeringly high here—government figures in the low double digits are widely believed to be supremely optimistic—especially for the millions of university graduates, and with all the social restrictions in place under the Islamic system, such as the prohibition on the mingling of unmarried men and women and the absence of any bars, there’s very little hope for them to have any real pleasure in life. Other than sitting on a park bench, of course, occasionally inspired by a young child, or by the couples who do manage to find love and sit together, furtively holding hands and stealing a kiss now and then, away from the morality police, who patrol everywhere except, it seemed, this one park that we frequented almost every day.
    I struggled to read the rest of the poem. At the end the man had penned a little note, and signed his name. “I was sad,” it read, “so I came to the park. The smiling Khashayar’s playing around and his happiness brought a smile to my lips. Wishing everyone happiness, freedom, and love.” Indeed. Love to all. That was my Iran, and my Tehran—its warts receded just a little in the shadow of humanity.
    Much later in our stay, the overly fulsome greetings Khash received led to a more ominous encounter at a rest stop on the highway connecting Tehran with Qom, the religious center of power in Iran, acouple of hours south. (The road is well traveled by devout Tehranis who escape the havoc of the city more often for pilgrimage reasons than for any other.) As we were walking from the parking lot to the building, Khash and Karri hand in hand, a large, rotund, bearded man in his forties with his black chador–clad wife—signaling a religious family—a few paces behind, suddenly rushed over to Khash, bent down, and said a few words in Farsi. Karri shook her head, but he tried to force a kiss on Khash’s cheek, managing to get a peck in.
    From a few yards away, I yelled at him, “Stop! No, you cannot kiss my son! Go away!”
    He gave me a dirty look. “I was doing it out of kindness,” he snarled, “and I asked permission.”
    “You can see that my wife is foreign, that she’s not Iranian and doesn’t understand Farsi. Can’t you see that a stranger rushing up to her child will freak her out?” I said angrily, then grabbed Khash and walked away.
    I was furious, but also a little concerned. Getting into a fight with a religious man just outside Qom was not a good idea, not while our taxi driver was busy praying inside the building. As we approached the doors to the building, a family that had been watching glared at me. “It’s disconcerting to have strangers grab and kiss your child,” I said to the husband, a man in his thirties with jet-black hair, a finely trimmed thick beard, and a windbreaker, who looked very much like the Revolutionary Guards and the Basij—the volunteer ultrareligious militia, originally formed during the Iran-Iraq War, who in recent years have been employed by the Guards to crack down on protesters—who all seem to trim their hair and beards in the exact same style. His wife, under a black chador, pulled their two children close to her, as if it might be me who was the menace, and not the middle-aged man who grabbed my son and kissed him.
    “He was just doing it out of