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

Author:Majd, Hooman [Majd, Hooman]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
ISBN: 9780385535335
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2013-11-04T20:00:00+00:00

Many Iranians have simply given up on the system but are unwilling to do anything about it, fatalistically resigned to a political order they mostly cannot abide. Fatalism, a strong trait of Persians, has partially prevented them, and their many governments, from making the progress they might deserve. Our baby-sitter was one such person; young and educated, she was living at home with her parents after a stint abroad and was making the best of a life she didn’t believe she had the power to change. Karri asked her one day if she wanted kids of her own, and she replied, “Not here, never in Iran. There’s no life or future for them here, so only if I move abroad.” The morality squads had stopped her many times, even impounding her car for a month for a skimpy-scarf-while-driving offense, but unlike some of her peers, she had never been to prison; nor did she seem eager to join in any form of activism, even on Facebook. She complained, but she showed no interest in Iranians who were still fighting the system from prison, house arrest, and occasionally in the streets. She told me she thought Iran needed sweeping change, of the kind that came with revolution, but she wasn’t going to be around to see it. Many other Iranians too complain loudly but seem otherwise inactive.

The loudest complainers in public are often older Iranians. One rush-hour evening, after I’d waited at the stop for a long time, the bus pulled up, and people began boarding. When it could no longer accommodate a single additional passenger, the driver closed the doors. Suddenly, at the top of his lungs and within earshot of traffic cops—young men doing their military service—an old man who had been waiting with me yelled at the driver, “This is what happens when a two-bit mullah becomes the Supreme Leader!”

The regime is not afraid, and with good reason, of the old man who expresses his frustration in public or of our baby-sitter, who will leave Iran to the clerics and their supporters when the right opportunity presents itself or continue to live quietly, her fatalism growing stronger by the day, unable to bring herself to leave the only home she really knows and that, despite her protestations, I suspect she loves.

The Iranian sense of fatalism is often intertwined with a voracious appetite for conspiracy theories, perhaps adding to the inertia of would-be revolutionaries. The old man at the bus stop, who’d vituperated the not-so-supreme leader, took a seat with me on the next bus that would let us board, then let loose a refrain of complaints about how the very bus he was riding was part of the regime’s conspiracy to control the population. I heard the same complaint time and again by people both on and off the bus.

Soon after the 2009 elections, Vali Asr, the long boulevard that the bus plied, had been turned into a one-way street with separate BRT (rapid transit) bus lanes, ostensibly

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