Lipstick Jihad by Azadeh Moaveni Page B

and I didn’t want to be like one of the strident European expatriates who perpetually complained about the harsh backwardness of life in Iran, as though they hadn’t made the same comments ten times the previous day. Realistically, I should have admitted
to myself that adjusting to Iran was tough. I had family around and spoke the language, but that didn’t make life in Tehran easy. In retrospect, I’d have been better off talking about how nervous everything made me. That way, I might have defused the pressure as it built up, rather than waking up one day and finding myself unable to get out of bed. But I was too busy pretending to be cool and brave, like the urban Tehrani girls who sailed through the tensions with poise, managing to look fantastic the whole time.
    More often that not, though, the police behaved predictably. This bestowed a small sense of control upon the young and social. It helped, for one, to stay vigilant about the dates of the Islamic calendar. If the regime was liberal with one thing, it was the official celebration of Shiite holidays. The births, deaths, and key events in the lives of various imams and members of the Prophet Mohammad’s family were occasions for public commemoration. Public displays of piety involved leaving the house, and provided handy excuses to proffer at checkpoints (“Really officer, I was just out celebrating/mourning the birthday/death of Imam _____!”) It also resulted in strange calculations, such as waiting for the birthday of a holy man born in the seventh century so you could throw a party.
    A vivid illustration of how young people exploited the regime’s Islam preoccupation for their social purposes fell each year during the month of Moharram. In this month in the seventh century, the prophet’s grandson Hossein was martyred in the holy city of Karbala, a significant date in the early schism between Sunni and Shiite Islam. The Islamic regime took this holiday, called Ashoura , very seriously, and draped the whole of Tehran in black. Ubiquitous mosques blared sorrowful chants, and many other devices were used to produce a somber atmosphere that was roundly ignored.
    Before the Islamic Revolution, people commemorated Ashoura tamely in their neighborhoods and went home by around nine P.M. But in recent years it had taken on grand, carnival-like proportions, with young people out in the traffic-jammed streets until two or three in the morning. Like everything else, it had been transformed into a battleground of wills between Iranians and the Islamic system.
    I was still new to Tehran, dim to the social significance of Ashoura to hormonally fizzy teenagers, until one of my cousins informed me that the candlelight vigil marking its final night (called sham-e ghariban ) was by far the most excellent night of the year to pick up guys. Young people from across
the city congregated for what they called a “Hossein Party” in Mohseni Square, in a busy neighborhood of northern Tehran.
    The traffic en route inched along, as though the whole city of ten million was attempting to converge on this snug square. Initially, the scene seemed decorous and tame. Teenagers and families peered at the displays of gold in jewelry shop windows, and milled about the sidewalks, which were lined with police.
    As I inspected the young women more closely—they were touching and ethereal, floating through the night in their gauzy veils, with perfect, glossy locks poking out—I realized the conceit of “Hossein Party.” Each one held a flickering candle in her palm, and had tucked underneath scraps of paper bearing her phone number; a great deal of preening went on, and lucky fellow “mourners” were slipped numbers as they passed.
    The Basij stood aside and observed this decidedly unsorrowful behavior with surly faces. They are officially considered “volunteers,” but they enjoy the regime’s tacit approval for enforcing