Like the image of a mirror mosaic, life in Iran is elusive, author says

Like the image of a mirror mosaic, life in Iran is elusive, author says

BY B.J. ALMOND
Rice News Staff

Iran is a “series of competing battlefields,”
according to New York Times reporter Elaine Sciolino, author
of “Persian Mirrors: The Elusive Face of Iran.”

“On every level of society there is a fierce battle
being fought out,” Sciolino told Rice students, faculty,
staff and other guests at the James A. Baker III Institute
for Public Policy Oct. 20.

Sciolino witnessed many of those battles firsthand during
the more than 20 years she has spent covering Iran. Currently
a senior writer at the Washington Bureau of The New York
Times and a former foreign correspondent for Newsweek, she
was one of the first female reporters assigned to the guarded,
male-ruled world of the Islamic Republic.

“My stealth weapon operating in Iran is that I’m
a woman,” Sciolino said. “That allows me access
to 50 percent of the spaces that women cannot go.”
Because most of the “meaningful” transactions
and conversations in Iran take place behind closed doors,
Sciolino often visited aerobic studios, beauty parlors,
homes, temples and other places where she was likely to
hear about matters not likely to be discussed in the open.

Describing Iran as a “grand experiment” with two
volatile chemicals, Islam and democracy, Sciolino said,
“Nobody can exactly figure out how much of each chemical
to stick into the beaker without having a massive explosion.”

She cited a number of situations in which those chemicals
are being mixed.
The press, for example, is one of the competing battlefields
in Iran. After Mohammad Khatami was elected president in
1997, hundreds of newspapers and magazines surfaced. “For
the first time, Iranians could read the truth—they
could see the political battles in print every single day,”
Sciolino said. However, most of the reformist newspapers
that challenged the basis of the Islamic Republic were shut
down earlier this year. “But there’s always a
way around the restrictions,” Sciolino said, noting
that an imprisoned journalist’s article criticizing
the regime was published in an Iranian reformist newspaper.

The parliament also is a battlefield. Earlier this year
70 percent of the elected parliamentarians were reformists. “This is a parliament that has fewer clerics than at
any time during Iran’s revolution,” Sciolino said.
Khatami prevented the parliament from reconsidering a restrictive
press law, so the reformists have not necessarily won the
battle.

Another battlefield is the courts. “We on the outside
see the court system of Iran as terribly repressive and
unfair and violating all the norms of the legal procedure,”
Sciolino said. But there are ways to prove how repressive
the courts can be, as evidenced by a politician who was
put on trial for corruption and embezzlement. He convinced
television producers to air his entire trial on television
and even rescheduled his testimony so that it would not
compete with coverage of Iran’s participation in the
World Cup soccer match. He used the trial to talk about
a taboo issue—torture—and questioned how the government
coerced confessions from some of the people who testified
against him. “Everyone in Iran was watching this trial,”
Sciolino said. “It was like the Iranian version of
the O.J. Simpson trial.”

The streets provide a battleground where women can confront
the Islamic restrictions on dress and where students can
demonstrate for their right to freedom of speech.
Sciolino said people sometimes ask her why Americans should
care about Iran, and she gives several reasons.

“On the crassest level, look at oil prices,” Sciolino
said, noting that Iran is the second-largest oil producer
in the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries
and that the country has the second-largest reserves of
natural gas. Because Iran is the only country that borders
the Caspian Sea and Persian Gulf, American sanctions and
policy are probably the only thing preventing Iran from
building a pipeline from the north to the south, Sciolino
said.

She also cited political reasons for Americans’ interest
in Iran. “Iran is one of our last enemies on earth
… and it also is in one of the most dangerous neighborhoods
in the world,” Sciolino said. Iran shares a 700-mile
border with Iraq—a country with nuclear weapons—and
is bordered on the other side by Pakistan—a country
that tested its nuclear weapons on Iran’s eastern border.
The administration of President Clinton classifies Iran
as “a state of concern,” and the country still
is developing weapons of mass destruction and using weapons
of terrorism, Sciolino said.

“But I would argue that the main reason we should care
about Iran is that its greatest resource is not its oil,
but its people,” she said. “I never have met a
more resourceful, hospitable people than the Iranian people.”

The tales of those people inspired Sciolino to write “Persian
Mirrors.”

“I wrote this book because of the extraordinary people
I had met,” she said. “I wanted to capture their
stories, such as the two sisters who at age 40 decided they
wanted to do something for women and also make some money,
so they transformed part of their house into an aerobics
studio.”

The book’s title refers to a room in Iran’s Green
Palace where the walls and ceilings are covered with thousands
of pieces of mirrors. “My first impression upon entering
this room of mirror mosaics was that it was very welcoming,
warm, life-filled and dazzling—until I tried to look
at myself in the mirror,” Sciolino said. “You
can’t see yourself in those mirrors. The image was
distorted and reality was elusive. I wanted the book title
to capture this complexity.”