Free Lipstick Jihad by Azadeh Moaveni Page A

years, public space had been the domain of Islamic vigilantes and the morality police, who arbitrarily terrorized people. Khatami reined them in, and under him Tehran became almost a normal city, with young couples strolling in the park arm in arm, licking ice cream cones.
    The demonstrations both fed off and propelled this energy. The hundreds of thousands of people who poured into the streets of Tehran and shouted “Death to the Supreme Leader!” collapsed the regime’s façade of invulnerability. More powerful than a mass referendum, as loud as the opening cries for change in 1979, the protests signaled that Iran’s nearly 70 million people wanted a different set of rules, a different kind of country. How the clerics in charge would respond, whether they were prepared to change, hung in the balance.
    The demonstrations of 1999 also played a central role in my own life. Captivated by the political drama, I knew I had to return and watch the rest unfold. Compared to the stagnant politics of Egypt, the electric, bold debates in Iran, and the open battle for the country’s future, were dream stories for a young journalist. A few months later, the regional bureau chief of Time suggested I go work in Tehran as the magazine’s stringer.
    At that time—before the second Palestinian Intifadeh, and well before September 11—Iran was the hottest news story in the region, and the regime didn’t allow U.S. publications to base American journalists in Iran. Because I was also Iranian, the regime politely ignored my American birth and passport, and allowed me to come and work. I would be the only American journalist permitted to base myself in Tehran, during what seemed at the time one of the most significant political transformations in the modern history of the region. I packed my bags, and prepared to leave Cairo behind.
    My preparations proceeded smoothly, until I announced the decision to my family in California, who were immediately horrified, convinced that torture and certain death awaited me. Relatives from all over the world, of all ages, were recruited to aid the effort of dissuading me. Scandalized Maman, with twenty-year-old visions of political repression of journalists, tried to prevent my going with alternating tactics of fiscal blackmail, admonition, and horror. (“You realize that the physical scars of the torture will
heal, but the nightmares of prison rape will haunt you forever. Your personality will never be the same. Be advised your father will cut you off entirely. No more ski vacations, nothing. You can fund your own foolishness.”)
    I tried to avoid the hysteria building around me, though at times I reminisced over the grimmer moments in our family lore—the uncle imprisoned by the revolutionary regime; the great-uncle who hurled himself from a third-story window to evade the Shah’s secret police—and wondered whether my identity could not be explored in, say, the Iran archives of a really good university library. During these moments of doubt I would leaf through Goldman Sachs recruitment literature, and contemplate whether I could endure life with, for example, a giant scar on my cheek slashed by a vindictive Islamic thug. The terror campaign shook me a little, because ultimately I didn’t really want to die in the course of covering a story, and didn’t know Iran well enough to know this was unlikely. But I reminded myself these were the same relatives who thought they would be murdered riding the subway through Manhattan, and went ahead and bought my ticket.

    During my first weeks back in Iran, in the spring of 2000, the family devoted much time and energy to ensuring I dressed properly. Among the most concerned was my Khaleh Farzi, who was in her mid-forties, petite, and marooned in Iran from her two favorite pastimes, jogging and drinking coffee at Starbucks. She and her husband had moved back to Iran in 1998, after long years in New