Five

Double Lives

The war was good for my career. I quickly landed a job at a national newspaper. But I had also applied to the University of Oxford shortly after returning from Afghanistan, and when I was accepted and offered a scholarship to pursue a doctorate in modern history, it seemed too good an opportunity to turn down. That fall I quit my job and moved to Britain. I threw myself into academic life at Oxford. But the growing certainty of war in Iraq was impossible to ignore, especially at my college, Saint Antony’s. Its professors specialize in international relations and the Middle East, and their numbers included exiled Iraqis with memories that stretched to the days of the Hashemite monarchy.

Unlike most students there, I backed the toppling of Saddam Hussein. This was a man who had committed genocide against his fellow citizens and who continued to brutalize and oppress them. I don’t think liberty can be imposed, but Iraqis had already risen up against Saddam themselves and died in the thousands for trying. I couldn’t conceive of a likely scenario in which his rule — or that of his equally malevolent sons — would end without force and foreign intervention. A million people demonstrated in London that February to protest the coming war, but it was hard for me not to notice how little most of them had to say about Saddam’s ongoing war against his country. While other students marched and drew up resolutions, I sought out and interviewed Kurdish Iraqis exiled in London for decades, waiting for a chance to go to a home free of Saddam.

I also found myself missing Afghanistan — or, more specifically, the war there. Covering it was difficult. But I relished the excitement, the freedom that came from a war zone’s lack of order and structure, and the feeling that what I was seeing and writing about mattered. I didn’t enjoy the thought of spending the next big war in a faraway classroom. And so the prospect of Iraq’s invasion triggered perversely selfish concerns. I worried that it would kick off in the midst of the academic term, rather than during vacation, when I’d have a better chance of being there. Fortunately, all the diplomatic wrangling ran its course about the same time as Oxford’s Hilary term, affording me a window — I thought — to nip over to Iraq, cover its liberation, and be back at Oxford in time for the resumption of classes in May.

I wasn’t officially working for anyone at the time, but I reasoned that if I made it into Iraq, someone would buy my stories. This meant I had to finance the trip myself. I rented a satellite phone and took from my bank line of credit a cash advance of a few thousand American dollars, mostly in hundred-dollar bills, which I stuffed into a money belt. Unlike my first foray into Afghanistan, I by now had a better idea of what reporting from a war entailed. I hauled my tub of camping gear out of the closet and packed a sleeping bag, warm clothes, detailed maps, and water purification tablets into a backpack and flew to Istanbul.

I planned to travel to Turkey’s far east, and from there across the border to Iraq’s Kurdish north. First I needed permission papers from the Turkish government to report from its frontier region, but when I arrived, the relevant government offices were closed because of a public holiday. I had a free day and spent it relaxing in Sultanahmet, Istanbul’s magnificent old city. I was sitting on bench in a park near the Blue Mosque as dusk fell. A Turkish woman and her young son broke up pieces of pita bread that had moments earlier held their dinner kebab and threw them to the white pigeons that wheeled around them. Small groups of Australian and European backpackers strolled through the park on their way to pubs and youth hostels in the neighbourhood. Sandals and T-shirts. A few years earlier I had been one of them. Now I was clean-shaven, wore a white dress shirt, and tried to look professional. A man with close-cropped black hair and a sports jacket approached and addressed me in Arabic.

“I don’t understand,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

“Ah, you are English. I thought you were an Arab, like me.”

The man said his name was Ali and that he was a banker from the United Arab Emirates in town for business. He too was killing time until everything opened the next day.

“So we’re both here alone,” Ali concluded after we had been chatting for a few minutes. “I like to drink. It’s hard at home. We should get a drink. Would you like one?”

I had been to Istanbul before and thought I knew the city well — its beauty and its tawdry scams. But when, instead of ducking into one of the many nearby bars, Ali hailed a cab and had us driven across the Golden Horn to the European side of Istanbul and the nightclub-filled district of Beyoglu, I wasn’t sharp enough to leave him. Instead, I followed Ali into a darkened bar with lounge seating next to the wall and an almost deserted dancefloor in the middle of the room.

A couple of women in miniskirts and tube tops were slowly swaying on it wearing bored expressions. They weren’t dressed like North American strippers, but they looked out of place in Istanbul, and not just because of their blonde hair and almost translucent pale skin. Ali ordered us beers. They arrived a few minutes later with a plate of carrot and celery sticks, and two more women who sat one on each side of us. I looked at Ali. He raised his eyebrows. The woman beside me, who wore a silver tank top, squeezed in, pressing her breasts against my shoulder. She said something, but because of the loud music I couldn’t make it out. She put her lips closer to my ear. Her perfume was strong and mixed with the smell of licorice from the candy in her mouth.

“My name is Svetlana,” she said. “I’m from White Russia — Belarus.”

“Hi.”

“What’s your name?”

“Michael.”

“Michael. I like that name, Michael. Where are you from?” She spoke slowly and deliberately, as if she were testing the words in her mouth before voicing them.

“Canada.”

“Canada. I like Canada.”

It occurred to me that this wasn’t a regular nightclub. I drained my glass of beer in two or three swallows.

“Michael, move your jacket so you can cuddle,” Ali said as I sat there with my back pressed straight into my seat and my jacket rolled up beside me.

The barman came and leaned over to speak to Ali. “The woman you were with last night is asleep,” he said. “Do you want me to go wake her?”

I stood up. “I’m leaving, Ali,” I told him.

“What’s wrong? You don’t like women?”

“I’ll see you later.”

I headed for the exit but was intercepted by the doorman.

“You go?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Come this way.”

It was dark and I was a little disoriented. Even had I bolted, I’m not sure I would have found or reached the door in time. He ushered me into an office, where a middle-aged man with a suit stood from his desk to face me. There was a lamp in the corner that filled the room with soft light, and walls that looked as though they were covered in leather.

“You owe us five hundred dollars.”

I looked around the room. There was a third man there, besides the doorman and the guy who had just demanded my money. He too was wearing a suit, but was younger and much bigger than either of them. Our eyes met. He squared his shoulders slightly. I decided not to fight but was sure I would get beaten up just the same. Most of the money I had brought with me was at the moment hidden under my shabby hotel room mattress.

“I don’t have that much money,” I said, and clenched my teeth.

Then, strangely, the owner’s demeanour changed and became less threatening. He pointed to my breast pocket, where I kept a little bit of money to pay for taxis, street food, and the like. Clearly he had been watching me as I sat at the table.

“How much you have in there?”

I pulled out the wad of Turkish lira. There was the equivalent of about eighty dollars. He took it, counted the bills, and stuffed them into his pocket. The big man stood away from the door, and I walked out into a now-bustling street. The whole process, from entering the place with Ali to leaving with empty pockets, had taken less than five minutes. I still had a bit of cash on me and used it to pay for a tram back to Sultanahmet. It wasn’t until I saw the familiar spires of the Blue Mosque, near where I had met Ali, that I realized he was part of the shakedown from the start.

I got my press pass signed in the morning and was soon on a flight to Diyarbakir, the Kurdish capital of Turkey’s southeast. A violent insurgency, led by the Marxist Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), had raged here since the 1970s, killing thousands, but was at a low ebb in 2003. Dozens of villages in the surrounding countryside, however, were still abandoned. Some had been razed. The residents of others had fled either the PKK or the Turkish military’s often brutal attempts to defeat it. Many now lived in cramped and poor quarters inside Diyarbakir’s black basalt walls. They had suffered decades of low-intensity war. Some complained of discrimination at the hands of the Turkish state. Others cursed the fanaticism of the PKK. Many were jealous of their Kurdish kin in Iraq who now, with the defeat of Iraq’s genocidal dictator, had a chance to build something Kurds never had before — a country of their own.

When I got to the village of Silopi, on the Iraqi frontier, the border was officially closed to journalists. But Kurdish smugglers agreed to sneak me across for $3,000. I called Scott at the Citizen and made my pitch, but he wasn’t willing to cover the cost. No matter how I crunched the numbers, I couldn’t justify the gamble of spending that much money, with more surely to follow once I was in Iraq, without a guaranteed payoff. I felt angry and stranded. I could see Iraq — its green hills rising above the border checkpoint and the lines of trucks waiting to cross — but I couldn’t reach it.

Going to Turkey wasn’t a total waste. I travelled through the southeast of the country, which is too often ignored by the tourists who hug Turkey’s Aegean coast. I spent Easter in Midyat, an Assyrian Christian village of soft light and honey-coloured stones. In Diyarbakir, I met one of the few remaining Armenian families in the city. Tens of thousands of their compatriots had been murdered and driven out during the genocide almost a century earlier. They lived near the skeletal ruins of an Armenian church, its vaulted archways now supporting only sky. And I was awestruck by Urfa, Abraham’s reputed birthplace, the name of which was quite appropriately amended to Sanli or “glorious” Urfa in the 1980s. I sold a couple of stories to the Citizen and returned to Oxford with money in my pocket.

Still, between getting robbed in a brothel and missing out on covering the big war, the trip felt like a bust. It did, however, set a precedent for the four years I spent at Oxford. I was a student, and I took my studies seriously. But I never stopped reporting. I freelanced for several newspapers in Canada and ultimately for Maclean’s, Canada’s national news magazine. I also got a job with the BBC World Service in London. It was odd, sometimes, to spend long days holed up in a drafty, seventeenth-century library where, looking out from leaded windows, I could see only spires, rooftops, and dull English rain, and then catch a bus for Heathrow Airport for a flight to Lebanon or Belarus. But I managed to juggle both lives.

By late 2003, America’s focus seemed to be shifting from Iraq to Iran. The insurgency in Iraq was a low rumble, and Washington was emboldened. President George W. Bush had said that Iran was part of an “axis of evil” the previous January, raising expectations of air strikes or even an invasion. Like many Western journalists, I wanted to see the country up close. The problem was that visas for journalists were difficult to obtain. Those few who got one were often only allowed to stay for a week and could count on being shadowed by a government-approved “translator,” who would of course try to control who the journalist met and would report everything back to the Interior Ministry. Iranians a journalist might try to interview understood this game, which would affect anything they might say. It was a lousy way to do any real reporting.

Knowing all this, I didn’t tell Iranian embassy officials in Ottawa that I was a journalist when I applied for a visa in January 2004 — shortly after Janyce and I were married. I concocted a wide-ranging itinerary that included many of Iran’s ancient archeological sites and that would take a long time to complete. I said I was a student and wanted to learn more about Iran’s history. It was risky and dishonest and, I felt, completely justified. I wanted to learn the truth and didn’t think this would have been possible with a government spook behind my shoulder everywhere I went. Whoever approved my application evidently neglected to type my name into an Internet search engine. I got the visa. It was valid for one month. Scott agreed to buy three stories from Iran but backed out of the deal a week or two before I was scheduled to leave. His boss at the newspaper chain feared they would be legally liable were anything to happen to me — which, given the furtive nature of my trip, was not unlikely. I fumed about it but decided to go anyway.

Tehran’s glittering nighttime cityscape filled my field of vision as Lufthansa Flight 600 from Frankfurt dropped through a thin covering of clouds over the city a little after midnight. Passengers went through the usual pre-landing preparations. A few looked out the window and pointed; others nervously stared ahead. A baby cried as the air pressure increased in her ears. Her mother held and tried to calm her. There was a difference, though. All around me women whose hair had been uncovered for the previous four hours pulled headscarves out of their purses or lifted them from their necks to cover their heads as required by Iran’s Islamic laws. In the cabin of the jetliner, even as it hurtled through Iranian airspace, they were free to dress as they wished. On the ground there were rules and morality police to enforce them. By the time we filed through customs, it was impossible to tell who was wearing a veil by choice and who by compulsion. It was my first glimpse into the double life many Iranians are forced to lead. There is how they choose to live and dress when they have that freedom, and the compromises they make when they don’t.

I got a cab to my hotel just northwest of Tehran University, then and now a flashpoint for democratic unrest. Students rose up here in 1999 to demand greater press freedom and again in 2009 to protest a stolen election. In both cases Iranian authorities, especially the Islamist Basij militia, responded with murderous violence. It was still night when I got to my hotel. In the morning, eager to look the part of a naïve and earnest tourist, I tried to engage the young woman behind the check-in counter in a conversation about things to see in Tehran.

“What about Ayatollah Khomenei’s mausoleum?” I asked, referring to a massive shrine complex devoted to the founder of Iran’s Islamic Revolution. “Is it nice? Have you been there?”

The young woman looked up from the reservation book she was writing in, her eyebrows furrowed and quizzical. “Why would I ever want to visit such a place?”

I skipped the mausoleum and instead wandered through central Tehran. The same contradictions in Iranian society that were so apparent when my plane landed were still evident. In many of the predominantly Muslim areas of London, bookstores are full of religious texts and, often, anti-Zionist and anti-Semitic polemics. In Tehran, the titles most prominently displayed included Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground, Shakespeare’s Henry IV, and Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë. But graffiti spray-painted on nearby walls urged death for women who don’t wear hijabs, and when I tried to reach a contact by phone, misdialing, a recorded voice informed me, “In the name of God, the number you have dialed does not exist in our networks.” Everywhere people were surprised and happy to see a foreign tourist. One shop owner chased me down the street to return change — the equivalent of a few cents — that I had inadvertently left on the counter. Another refused my money altogether.

There were people I had planned to meet in Tehran. By chance, though, I ended up spending much of my first couple of days there with Mir Waiz, a twenty-two-year-old Afghan businessman from Kabul. Most of Mir’s once-wealthy family had fled Kabul before the Taliban’s advance, but he had stayed behind. The family chef woke him up days later to warn him that the Taliban had taken the city and begged him to hide indoors. But Mir, who had a strong anti-authoritarian streak even as a teenager, refused. “Why should I hide?” he said. “Kabul was my home. Not theirs.”

He left his house and was promptly confronted by a Talib who seemed capable of speaking only in short, barking sentences. He pointed his rifle at Mir’s face and ordered him to grow a beard. Mir had several run-ins with the Taliban over the next few years, almost always because of his insufficient beard, or his hair, which he liked to style like a Western skateboarder — long on the top and front, short on the back and sides. He was thrown in jail for two days because he had applied for permission to travel to Iran using a photograph in which his head was uncovered. Once released, he asked a friend with Adobe Photoshop to manipulate the photo so it looked like he was wearing a cap and returned to the same Taliban official, who let him leave the country. “You see how stupid they are?” he asked me. “They probably don’t even know what computers are.”

Mir was happy to see the backs of the Taliban and said he liked Hamid Karzai, then Afghanistan’s interim president. But he was suspicious of any government that might come to power in his country and liked to say “Only business is free.” That was why he was in Iran: to develop trading contracts. He had been back and forth many times, and unlike the many Afghan refugees who provided Iran with a pool of cheap construction labour, Mir could make decent money here. But he still didn’t like its Islamic system of government.

“Iran is not like the Taliban, but it is not free. Here they have secret freedoms when no one is watching. But officially nothing is allowed,” he said. “Most of my Iranian friends are young. They are the new generation. They think religion should be their own business, and I think so, too. I don’t care about religion. I’m Sunni. They’re Shia. People should be free to decide on their own. This is what they think, and they want a government that respects that.

“But I also have an older friend. He is a mullah in Mashad, in northeast Iran. You get there from Herat in Afghanistan. You know it? Very beautiful place. You should come. I tell this mullah that change is coming to Iran, more freedom is coming, and that people will fight for it. He says that he too will fight for his religion, for an Islamic government. But this man is also a hypocrite, and I tell him so. I say, ‘You like to drink beer and have girlfriends, so why don’t you let anyone else have these freedoms?’ I tell him he’s like the Taliban. He just laughs. We’re friends, so I can say these things. But he knows it’s the truth.”

Iran’s Islamic Revolution of 1979 brought with it countless tragedies for Iran and for the rest of the world. And compared to the mass murder of political prisoners, the oppression of women, and the export of radical Islam, it is a small thing to lament that Iran’s three decades of isolation have meant that few foreigners, at least in the West, can see for themselves how jaw-droppingly beautiful the place can be. And yet that was all I could think about when I first saw Esfahan. Once the capital of Shah Abbas the Great’s Safavid dynasty in the sixteenth century, Esfahan is exquisite. It is a city of blue-tiled mosques and madrassahs, and arched bridges that, while beautiful, somehow make you feel sad — as if they were songs composed in a minor key.

I took one of these bridges, the Si-o-se Pol, across the Zayandeh River to Jolfa, commonly known as the Armenian Quarter. Shah Abbas had brought thousands of Armenians from the original town of Jolfa, now on Iran’s northern border, to his capital, Esfahan, where he reasoned that their skills as merchants would be more useful. Their Christian faith was respected. Afghan invaders massacred thousands when they sacked Esfahan and brought down the Safavid dynasty in 1722, but today Jolfa remains predominantly Christian and contains several understated but elegant churches and cathedrals. It’s also home to Esfahan’s trendiest café scene, which was why I was there.

I ordered a tea in a coffee house panelled in dark wood and filled with cigarette smoke and tiny Parisian-style circular tables. Young men and women sat around them, leaning toward each other so that their foreheads were only inches apart as they drank their espressos. Several of the patrons sported white bandages across the bridges of their noses — evidence of recent cosmetic surgery. All the women wore headscarves perched so far back on the top of their heads that it seemed that the fabric would slide onto their necks if they moved suddenly. A stereo blasted Green Day’s “Time of Your Life.”

I hadn’t been seated for more than a few minutes when three young men at a nearby table beckoned me to join them. One, Nasser, a burly veteran of the Iran-Iraq war with a wide, slightly pudgy face and thinning hair, was drinking non-alcoholic beer. He gestured at it almost apologetically.

“It’s no problem for us to get liquor,” he said. “Myself, I like beer, brandy, wine, everything. But it’s illegal. We need to drink it in our homes. Muslims like us sometimes make it ourselves, but we usually come here to get it from the Armenians. They have it smuggled over the mountains from Kurdistan. We drink in our homes, but sometimes it’s nice to get together with friends at a coffee house like this. I like this place. Half the people here are Christians, half Muslims. We’re all together.

“But you know,” he continued, “ten years ago this wouldn’t be possible — men and women sitting side by side and smoking so late at night. The police would harass us. Change is coming. Slowly. Our best parties are still private ones. Sometimes I’ll have one in my apartment. There is a lot of music and dancing. My neighbour calls the police but it’s not a problem.” He rubbed his thumb and finger together to indicate a bribe. “I give them something and they go away.”

Nasser invited me to the apartment of his uncle, Farouk, who lived nearby. We picked up some ground beef kebabs and chicken wings dressed with onions, bitter herbs, and yoghurt from a street-side shop that blasted pulsating Persian dance music from its open windows.

“Should we get something to drink?” I asked Nasser.

“My uncle will take care of that.”

We climbed the stairs to Farouk’s apartment. A neatly dressed elderly man with walnut-coloured skin and a sad and gentle face opened the door. His expression lit up when he saw Nasser. Farouk embraced him and, after the briefest explanation of who I was, hugged me, too.

“Come in, come in,” he said.

Farouk’s shelves were lined with books of poetry and philosophy. He had written several himself, but they were all unpublished. He was a committed leftist and had clashed with the Islamic Republic since its foundation. It landed him in jail several times. Now a white-haired septuagenarian, he was mostly left alone.

“Do you believe in God?” Farouk asked me.

“Yes.”

“You shouldn’t. Religion is a racket.”

Nasser spread the food we had bought on the kitchen table, while Farouk went to his fridge and retrieved two large pop bottles. One was filled with smuggled Kurdish moonshine. The other looked as though it contained Coke. The label had the same familiar red background and white script. But Iran’s ruling clerics periodically tie themselves in knots because of Coca-Cola’s supposed connections to the governments of Israel and the United States. So instead of Coke, we were drinking Mecca-Cola, the founder of which, a French Muslim entrepreneur named Tawfiq Mathlouthi, launched the brand with the claim that it would contribute to the “fight against American imperialism and the fascism of the Zionist entity.” A small message on the bottle asked that drinkers avoid mixing the cola with alcohol.

Farouk poured some of the smuggled moonshine, which smelled and tasted like paint thinner when consumed straight-up, into each of our glasses and added the Mecca-Cola. We worked our way through both bottles over the course of the evening — the booze and the anti-Zionist soda. Farouk preferred to talk about religion and poetry. His favourite poet, appropriately enough, was the fourteenth century Persian icon, Hafez, who wrote odes to earthly pleasures and who mocked the hypocrisy of self-declared guardians of virtue. A painting on Farouk’s wall depicted a drinking party celebrated in verse by Hafez.

Farouk also made me memorize, in Farsi, the lyrics of a traditional Persian nomad’s song. Years later I can still remember the translation of its repeated chorus: “Spring is coming/The flowers are here/I am going to the desert.”

“It’s about hope,” Farouk said. “It’s about believing that all winters end and that dry earth will bloom again.”

Nasser’s politics were less subtle. He became more animated as the evening progressed. He desperately wanted an end to Islamic rule in Iran but rejected the idea of an invasion or of any sort of outside interference to achieve this end. “If people have problems with their government, it is up to them to change it. If the Americans come here, I will fight them.”

Nasser paused and clenched his jaw, slicing at the air with an open palm. His rising frustration was evident before he continued.

“But they must go, the mullahs. They must go. I don’t know how. Maybe we will have another people’s revolution. I think our spirit is like that of France. A French democracy is best for us.”

Sometime after midnight, Farouk shuffled from the kitchen into the living room, his slippers slapping on the tile floor. He looked back and beckoned us to follow before turning on his illegal satellite television and flipping through the channels until he found one showing pornography. He sighed, sank into his chair, and raised a glass to his lips.

“All men and all women are like that,” he said. “There is something of an animal in them. They desire each other like they need food and sleep. It’s normal.”

In truth, though, I don’t think Farouk cared one way or the other about the mechanically coupling bodies on screen. He barely looked at them. I think he simply wanted to demonstrate his disdain for the Muslim theocracy that had been running his country for the last three decades, and getting drunk on moonshine and Mecca-Cola while watching porn was a neat and tidy way of accomplishing this.

“I am seventy-one years old,” Farouk said. “All my life I have been lucky to continue learning as if I were a young man. If you don’t learn, if you don’t continue to learn, you are frozen. They mullahs are frozen. They are trapped 1,400 years ago.”

I left a short while later. Farouk took one of the paintings off his wall and pressed it into my hands as I walked out the door with Nasser.

By now it was very late, and most of the streets were deserted. On our way back to the cheap guesthouse where I slept, we passed by the Kjaju bridge, another architectural gem. Candlelight was glowing from beneath its vaulted arches, where a group of middle-aged men had gathered to take advantage of its acoustics. One played a flute. Another earnestly belted out the lyrics of a song by Googoosh, an Iranian pop singer and actress who was silenced by the Islamic Republic’s ban on female performers for twenty years before she finally left the country in 2000. She’s sung for enormous crowds in Europe, the United States, and Canada. But her fame never diminished in Iran. Earlier that evening Nasser had played for me a bootlegged video of Googoosh performing in Toronto.

The men beneath the bridge were scruffily dressed but sober. “Of all the men in the world,” one sang, “you’re the one for me.”

Iran’s double life was a strange and sometimes intoxicating thing to experience. Everywhere there seemed to be a visible chasm between the government’s official slogans and restrictions, and how its citizens wanted to live. It was evident in the simple act of a woman removing her headscarf the moment she stepped indoors; in the Muslim teenagers who held hands in an Armenian coffee shop; in the hidden satellite dishes, the alcohol, the over-the-top hospitality.

It was also apparent in the city of Shiraz, where, despite the poisonous anti-Semitic rhetoric of Iran’s government, there is a large community of Jews. There are more Jews in Iran than any country in the Middle East outside of Israel. And while some have been the targets of trumped-up charges of spying for Israel, most are integrated into the wider community. They have, after all, been in Iran for some 2,500 years. When I asked a carpet seller on Shiraz’s main street if any of his colleagues were Jewish, he pointed to three or four fellow merchants within shouting distance. I asked a cab driver in mangled Persian to take me to the “Jewish church,” and he easily found the nearest synagogue. Worshippers there were a little wary when I showed up, and our lack of a common language made communication difficult, but I was encouraged by the synagogue’s existence and the apparent lack of security around it.

That might not seem like much. And it’s also worth noting the horrendous treatment suffered by practitioners of the Bahá’í faith in Iran. Still, the bigotry of the Iranian government doesn’t appear to be widely reflected in its citizens. In this, as in so many things in Iran, there is a disconnect between those in power and those they rule.

In a small village near Mahabad, in the Kurdish region of Iran, I attended the wedding of a friend’s friend that was a riot of energy and joy. Women wearing beautiful, brightly coloured dresses and no headscarves danced hand-in-hand with men to form a line moving in a counter-clockwise circle, while a band of horns and strings drove a furious beat. A sinewy, white-haired man stood in the centre of the dancers and sang into a microphone, working praises to everyone present into his lyrics. Guests encouraged him by slipping a bill into his hand while whispering their names in his ear. The man leading the dancers spun a handkerchief above his head, inadvertently knocking blossoms from the branches of an overhanging tree that fell amongst the dancers like confetti. Exhausted, I stepped out from the line of dancers and found a friend watching on the sidelines.

“We Kurds dance together,” he said. “It causes some problems with the Islamic people, but I don’t care. We Kurds are Muslims, too. But Islam isn’t telling women to cover their faces. We don’t do that.”

A Kurdish wedding near Mahabad, Iran.

The bride and groom.

Still, I knew there was another side of Iran. Someone, after all, was painting slogans on city walls demanding that immodestly dressed women be murdered. I wasn’t naïve enough to believe that the entire country consisted of closet liberals. The Islamic Republic had persisted for twenty-five years by the time I got there. It had its supporters. I wanted to talk to them.

Ali, a man I had gotten to know at the guesthouse where I stayed in Esfahan, seemed like a promising candidate. He had a sad face and an eye that looked as if his pupil was leaking into his iris. His beard was thick, black, and long, in a style that I tended to associate with Islamists. I asked him to take me to some of the mosques and madrassahs in the city. We had barely left the guesthouse when, unprompted, he dove into politics. I had misjudged him.

“Religion and government should not be together,” he said. “Most of us feel this way. But the government doesn’t want what the people want. Iran today is like Europe of the Renaissance. We want to become secular. It’s happening, but slowly. Very slowly. I think if we can change slowly, bit by bit, we can do it without conflict.”

We were entering the tightly-packed streets of Esfahan’s old city. “Come on,” he said. “I’ll take you to a religious teaching centre and we’ll talk to some mullahs. They don’t like to be called mullahs there. They think it makes them sound like Osama bin Laden. But there really isn’t much difference.”

We spent the afternoon in a madrassah. A mullah named Mohammad greeted us. He had a boyish face and only the tiniest of wrinkles around the corners of his eyes. He seemed happy to have a guest from the West at the madrassah and motioned for us to follow him through its courtyard. In shaded spaces, under low, vaulted roofs, mullahs sat with their students cross-legged in front of them, books scattered and opened amongst them. Mohammad found us a deserted corner and sent one of his students to bring us tea.

“The Quran gives us guidance for all parts of our lives — culture, science, family — so it is natural for religion to be part of government,” he said. “The two are connected.”

One of the students, Hussein, invited us up to his quarters. We climbed a steep and narrow staircase to his room, the white walls of which were bare except for loaded bookshelves and a photograph of Hussein when he was a boy. There was a loft sunk into the wall about six feet off the floor, where Hussein slept. He was twenty years old and said he would stay and study at the madrassah for another twelve years. “I want to spend all the days I am given promoting Islam — in a mosque or school. It’s all part of the same life.”

Hussein was now fiddling with a butane burner on the floor of his room, near the balcony where it was safe to have gas and flame. He got it lit and began boiling water for tea. Through the window I could see the madrassah courtyard below. Poplar trees grew through square holes cut in the courtyard floor. Their leaves seemed to shimmer when a breeze gusted through them. Hussein wanted to talk about Christianity.

“Do people in Canada know that we Muslims respect Jesus?” he asked.

“I’m not sure,” I said.

“Why did Jesus die?”

“I’m not really a religious expert.”

“But you must know.”

Hussein was adding hot water to an extra-concentrated brew of tea to make it more drinkable and handed me a small, bulbous glass already thick with sugar.

“Christians believe he died to take away men’s sins, so they can go to heaven,” I said.

Hussein wet his upper lip with his tongue before bringing the scalding liquid to his mouth. He winced, swallowed, and whistled air through pursed lips.

“Is it true that the three wise men came from Iran?” Hussein asked.

“Yes.”

Later that evening, I sat with Ali in a teahouse and ate abgusht, a lamb stew served in the clay pot in which it was baked.

“You have to admit they were welcoming,” I said to Ali.

He snorted. I tried to change the topic. “It’s hard to believe that Mohammad guy is a mullah. He looks like he’s still a teenager.”

“Of course he looks young,” said Ali. “Mullahs never do any work.”

We talked a bit about Canada. Ali had friends and distant relatives who had emigrated. “I hear the temperature can get to forty degrees below zero,” he said. “How can anyone live there?”

Ali continued talking before I could answer.

“Never mind. Your country is a paradise compared to this one.”

I left Esfahan and travelled south to Shiraz, and from there to the ancient Persian capital of Persepolis. Here, a local historian with the improbably appropriate name of Darius guided me through its glorious and sadly deserted ruins. Persepolis’s stone stairways and walls are still covered with ancient carvings depicting messengers from the far corners of the Persian Empire — from Ethiopia to Kandahar — arriving to pay tribute to King Darius during Nowruz, the Persian New Year. Elsewhere in the Middle East I had sought out or, in Afghanistan, simply stumbled across places that had been marked by Alexander as he conquered so much of the known world before he was thirty-three years old. It was always a thrill. Alexander had fascinated me since I was a boy. He was a military genius who tried to merge the cultures of East and West. But his destruction of such a magnificent city was a crime. Visiting it was a wistful experience.

That night I received an email message from an Iranian I’ll call Amir. We had spoken many times before my trip to Iran. I was hoping he could arrange for me to interview democratic dissidents in Iran. I liked Amir, and he was always forthcoming, but our conversations were inconclusive as far as him putting me in touch with anyone. He later told me he wasn’t initially sure he could trust me. Midway through my trip, he decided to take the risk.

“You need to get back to Tehran,” Amir wrote. “There are some people I want you to meet.”