A trip across Iran reveals all that can’t be grasped at a distance. The real Iran lies its ambiguities
Iranians visit the spot in the courtyard of Imam Reza shrine in the northeastern city of Mashhad on April 6, 2022.The more I listened to my unnervingly fluent guide, Ali, as we drove across Iran together, the less I knew. Yes, he had to be careful, I realized, finding himself alone with a rare visitor from the United States.
My first night in the country, I slipped away from Ali, my official guide, and found a friendly young driver to take me to the central shrine in Mashhad, the largest mosque in the world. In its innermost sanctum, I saw his eyes welling with tears. His hand was on his heart as he stood in front of the grave of a saint dead for almost 1,200 years.
One day in Isfahan I saw a teenager with plucked eyebrows strutting through the streets in a T-shirt that announced “ONLY GOD CAN JUDGE.” Then I registered a tiny “me” at the end, transforming a declaration of piety into an assertion of near-arrogance.
Along the streets, stern billboards delivered Quranic admonitions, thoughtfully rendered into English for the visitor: “Verily, Allah does not love any self-conceited boaster.” Not far away, a girl was letting her hijab fall down from her long blond hair on a basketball court as she laughingly drove against her boyfriend. Lovers were exchanging whispers in shady corners of a park, indifferent to the latest edict from the morality police.
The truth of that came even deeper home 11 months later as I returned to North Korea after many years. I knew from an earlier trip that its showpiece capital, Pyongyang, is really just a stage set: Most of its illuminated skyscrapers are entirely empty, ghost-structures to go with the fake village the country’s leaders have erected near the demilitarized zone.
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