Free Lipstick Jihad by Azadeh Moaveni

for the oppressed created after the Revolution. They were custodians of government and law as well, because the elected branches of government—the executive and parliament—were legally vulnerable to the decrees and vetting procedures of the clerical bodies, accountable to the country’s supreme religious leader. This position, more powerful than president, was the brainchild of Ayatollah Khomeini, who passed it down to his successor, Ayatollah Khamenei. The photos of both men, with their twin black turbans and dour glares, wallpapered the country.
    The history lessons I absorbed during this first visit back helped me understand the struggles revolutionary Iran was facing. But understanding the full splay of the history also complicated my work as a journalist, to document these events for the American media. In my files, generalizations like “reformist, liberal, progressive, moderate” appeared over and over again. My conscience bristled at this language, especially since news stories rarely had room for the historical context required to explain the nuances of these misleading labels.

    Writing about Iran as an American journalist, in language that did not get one banned from the country, meant effacing history from the story. It was, to read most written accounts of the political schism, as though real liberals—secular intellectuals, technocrats, and activists with no ties to the clergy—either did not exist or were too irrelevant to be counted as political realities. A conservative politician whom I frequently visited in Tehran had the same complaint, though from a slightly different standpoint. “You journalists, you’re painting this story as a fight between good and evil,” he said. “You’re absolutely right,” I told him, though I finished the sentence silently this way: “It’s actually a fight between evil and slightly less evil.”
    President Khatami, perhaps aware that recasting the state’s foreign policy would be a task for Sisphyus, set about transforming the style and culture of daily life. By restructuring the upper management of key ministries, he discreetly engineered a more relaxed official approach to Iranians’ private lives. The morality police, charged with enforcing the strict social code, began to behave with less regular brutality, and the Culture Ministry issued permits for independent newspapers. In his speeches, he retired the inherited rhetoric of the revolution—martyrdom and death, struggle and enemies—and spoke instead of civil society, dialogue, and openness.
    In the early years of Khatami’s first term, from 1997 to 1999, Iranians experienced only modest change. I stayed on for a few weeks, during that chaotic, life-transforming first visit, and found the atmosphere decidedly Soviet. My female relatives and I wore dark veils and sandals with socks, wiped off our lipstick when we saw policemen in the distance. My aunt still came along for the ride, if a male cousin was dropping me off late at night, in case we were stopped at a checkpoint. In taxis, my relatives hissed me silent, when I jabbered away critically, suggesting Tehran seemed like a giant cemetery, with nearly every street and tiny alley named for a martyr.
    From a purely moral and political vantage point, not to mention an emotional one (what Iranian didn’t despise the revolutionary clerics, really, for all they had done?), we considered the reformists suspect, a choice of the less bad among the awful. But did they help transform the way we lived, our habits and sensibilities? They did.
    By the end of 1999 and into 2000, the pressures lightened noticeably, and people felt more comfortable behaving in ways that had before seemed reckless. While the legal basis for the regime’s oppressive ways stayed intact,
the open spirit of Khatami’s presidency, and his relentless rhetoric about the rule of law, changed the culture of Iran. For