Exactly a hundred years ago the newly-established Iranian parliament passed a lawregulating administration of the capital, and Tehran officially acquired a mayor. Over thecourse of this century, forty-eight mayors were entrusted with administration of the capital.One was executed, thirteen ended up in prison, and twenty-three were dismissed becauseof corruption or incompetence.In the past hundred years this turbulent city has survived two revolutions and two coups.Four kings and one president were sent into exile. Tehran witnessed the assassinations of ashah, several prime ministers and a president; it was occupied once by foreign troops andseveral times by Persian soldiers.Even more amazing, however, is the fact that for some decades now this city hasexperienced rapid expansion, swallowing up all the surrounding villages and gradually alsoincorporating two neighbouring towns, Rey and Shemiran. These days it is reaching outtowards towns which not all that long ago were over a hundred kilometres away fromTehran. Perhaps in the not-too-distant future all that will remain of Iran will be Tehran anda huge desert, for the capital sucks in workers, capital, institutions, and much else besidesfrom all over the country without ever satisfying its appetite.
Encircled by islands
For centuries now hundreds of thousands of impoverished people seeking an existence fitfor a human being have been streaming endlessly towards Tehran from villages near andfar and from destitute little towns. However, the capital’s cultural and economic bulwarkshave kept these people on the periphery, where they have formed their own closedsocieties. Three decades ago, just before the Revolution, there were fifty such communities,unintentionally and unknowingly constituting a counterforce.
During the demonstrations on the streets of Tehran by the urban middle-classes calling for the overthrow of the Shah, and as the police yielded to their onslaught, a tremendousenergy was released. There was suddenly extensive freedom. Confronted with thisfreedom, people in need occupied plots of land on the outskirts of the city and started tobuild there, as part of a slow and instinctive movement towards change. Tehran suddenlyhad innumerable satellite towns, both large and small! Then settlers constructed roads,erected hospitals, mosques and libraries, and there came into being forms of unofficialexistence which constituted a new way of life. Revolutionary slogans spurred people on,strengthening their boldness and enthusiasm.
The peaceful migration of the islands
Some of these marginal settlers left their huts to newcomers and hatched plans for takingover unoccupied accommodation. Newspaper reports spoke of around 150,000 items ofreal estate – from palaces and hotels to villas and apartments ready for occupation or halfbuilt – standing empty in Tehran on the eve of the Revolution. Their owners had eitherfled abroad or were in hiding inside Iran. Just a few days after the definitive overthrow ofthe Shah and the establishment of a new regime, some marginal settlers issued a threat inthe name of the deprived and dispossessed to the Islamic authorities who had come topower, saying that they would occupy empty flats if appropriate accommodation wasn’tmade available. It is clear that no one expected to receive an answer in the prevailingrevolutionary circumstances. Two or three days later, three thousand mostly armedfamilies occupied the newly-built apartments in a half-completed settlement, putting in thedoors and windows. Each family received just one room, and during the days that followedthey brought chickens and even goats and sheep to their new dwellings. One daypassengers in a city bus passing this settlement saw the head of a cow poking out of a topfloor window, looking down onto the road.These marginal settlers thus imposed their personal interpretation of the IslamicRevolution, an interpretation founded on a sense of their own excellence in relation to theruling classes, one which was at the same time a reaction to Tehran’s most strikingcharacteristic: its modernity, expressed in cars, neckties, unveiled women, luxuriousapartments and villas. So everyone was ready to join revolutionaries’ demonstrations,deploying crowbars and steel pipes to remove existing street-names and establish new,revolutionary designations, endowing the city with a new identity.
Alongside occupation by the needy of 4,500 villas in the first month of the Revolution,students stormed a number of luxury hotels. The Shah’s literacy campaign, which had seenan ‘army of teachers’ enabling village youngsters to gain access to the capital’s universities,achieved completion with the occupation of these hotels that had previously existed for thewell-being of foreigners and the elite.
During the first university year after the Islamic Republic’s accession to power, a thousandstudents took over two large international hotels in Tehran’s most luxurious street. They were furnished with a reasonable argument: the government is incapable of providing uswith suitable hostel accommodation.
Other students adopted this strategy and one after another more hotels were occupied.Tehran succumbed to a dubious coalition consisting of Islamic revolutionaries, youngradical communists, street-traders and the unemployed, and the mob and marginal settlers.With the euphoria of retribution inspiring urban Tehran, a number of clergy joined themovement so as to gain mass support and at the same time weaken the provisionalrevolutionary government, which consisted of a number of tie-wearing Muslims.This practice soon received official sanction and a cleric set up a committee in support of‘Houses for Those Deprived of Their Rights’. A procedure was thus established. A workinggroup reconnoitred suitable hotels, houses, and undeveloped plots of land; the transfer ofownership was officially signed and sealed; little then remained to be done besidesoccupying these places. Scarcely an hour later men, women and children turned up,carrying their few possessions under their arms or on their backs, depending on their ageand stature: bundles of clothes, mattresses and bedding, headscarves and samovars,birdcages, brooms and buckets, petrol cans, chairs and cradles … At the heart of eachgroup was always a number of students from the provinces, obviously happy about theweakening of the rich, who with pride and satisfaction handed over to each occupier hisshare. The victorious population stood at windows observing their new neighbours. Theoccupiers really did feel they were equals, and distanced themselves from their pastwithout having the prospect of a future – yet of this they were unaware.Students and leftist activists took over the organisation of tasks. They formed groups ofguards and defenders to counter possible action by the forces who wished to repossessthese properties. They also set up literacy classes and workshops providing training inpractical skills.This revolution in the procurement of accommodation spread. Property rights were ignoredwithout difficulty, and Tehran was faced with a moral dilemma. The authorities decided toreact using different strategies. Initially they reprimanded house-occupiers and amicablycalled on them to return the property to its owner. One or two ayatollahs even issued afatwa declaring expropriation to be contrary to religious law. Obviously they were notaware that the house-occupiers had been encouraged by revolutionary slogans promisingrule over the country to those in need, not to mention the possession of doors and walls!The government set bulldozers to work, under the protection of the police, but people didnot leave the houses they had occupied. Sometimes there were even violentconfrontations, from which the house-occupiers usually emerged victorious. A city that fordecades had experienced an empty display of luxury and excess now revealed anotherattitude.The students capitulated earlier than anyone else. Occupation of the American embassy in November 1979 accelerated the evacuation of the hotels which had been turned intohostels. It stands to reason that an embassy – above all an American embassy – offeredgreater comforts than a hotel!After successfully securing a roof over their heads, the unemployed sought ways of earninga living. Of course there was no prospect of work for such an enormous number of people,so marginal settlers, the unemployed and the homeless took to the streets to scrapetogether a means of subsistence. Suddenly Tehran’s pavements were transformed intobright and colourful little shops: bakeries, butchers, haberdashers, and workshops forrepairing all kinds of worn-out objects. This situation offered further advantages to houseoccupiers who had settled in elegant districts in the north of Tehran, freeing them from thenecessity of shopping in the surrounding supermarkets and luxury shops. Ghettos thuscame into existence within the city in the form of autonomous islands with their owncustoms and usages, leisure occupations, preferences, and enmities. Their inhabitantscreated a personal environment for themselves, seeking to transform poverty into apowerful ideological force.Part of this multitude appropriated roadsides and established lucrative and easy earningsfor themselves by helping to park cars and receiving tips. The majority were convinced thatthe overthrow of the Shah had opened up the way for their betterment; they recognisedthat they now constituted an important element in the city’s cultural life. The ongoingpeaceful advance of an illegal population had achieved its objective.With the arrival of street-traders, Tehran’s unofficial living space was further extended. Ajoyous secular milieu ignored the grim and strict atmosphere prescribed by the religiousauthorities. This lively scene with its orally-transmitted anecdotes, its tiny mobile stallsoffering tea, ice creams and vegetable soup, with its music and youthful cheerfulness, wasessentially anti-totalitarian. A culture of minorities offered a kind of non-urban freedom,characteristic of villages and nomadic campsites, that did not accept peremptory religiouslaws. Nevertheless, the regime had declared laughter offensive and tears the source ofredemption.Direct confrontation was simply not possible, since that would have gone completelyagainst the slogans which had brought the new rulers to power and which were still muchin favour at well-attended political meetings. So thuggish militias, formed from anotherstratum of the huge army of unemployed now serving the new rulers, were set to work.That was the start of the organised suppression of the urban population of Tehran. Themilitias were not particularly successful in these confrontations, and as a result theauthorities were forced to set up permanent commercial spaces in small urban markets forthe majority of the street-traders.To keep the newly-founded militias busy, they were given new tasks: to begin with, theenforced dispersal of all opposition political groupings, and then the intimidation and disciplining of girls and young women who appeared in public dressed contrary to theIslamic Republic’s prescriptions. This mission has still not been completed after thirty yearsof Islamic rule.At that time the fact of being a woman in Tehran suddenly became an explosive issue(which it still is). Sometimes the laws passed by the new authorities were in totalcontradiction to what had been usual under the previous regime, and women recognisedthat they had become the object of discrimination. This coercion, launched with the slogan‘Headscarf or shaven head’, intensified in the silence for which the war with Iraq provideda pretext. The Islamic hijab for women completely changed the Tehran street-scene. Thenew authorities maintained that failure to adhere to clothing regulations aroused diabolicaldesires in men. Controls got under way with the employment of women from the lowerclasses. This was a new sphere of activity which endowed these women with a power andself-assurance they had never previously known. They stood at the entrances to publicbuildings sniffing the women going in and out to prevent the use of seductive perfumes.Differential exchange rates and annual distribution of foreign exchange (at a favourablerate) to all citizens generated jobs for a considerable number of people. Then the start ofthe Iran-Iraq war and rationing of basic foodstuffs created new full-time employment forthose previously without work. Buyers and sellers of ration coupons became a familiarsight on all of the city’s streets and squares. Nevertheless, some of these street-traders werecalled up to play their part in what was generally seen as the most important of socialcommitments. This war also supplied the governments of the time with an apparentlyconvincing reason for putting the entire city under the aegis of an effulgent spokesman forthe divine. Everyone had to maintain silence in time of war.A decade or two later the exchange rate was unified and currency for travelling abroadwithdrawn. In conjunction with other economic measures, this weakened trade in couponsfor basic food supplies. As a replacement another job market developed, the dimensions ofwhich probably exceed those of any other country: the extended network of the drugtrade. According to official statistics, the number of drug-takers across the country (themajority probably in Tehran) has now reached five million.The income from these shady dealings has brought a boom in illegal settlements aroundTehran. To assure the integration of their districts into urban structures, inhabitantsnegotiated with the city authorities, and once their demands were approved that led inturn to the development of new forms of illegal settlement. Tehran’s ongoing growth hasbasically become possible thanks to a cyclical process: immigration and the establishmentof illegal settlements, integration in a city that, like spilled oil, spreads ever further, and thefoundation of more illegal settlements.Tehran’s administrators have officially extended the city limits from a radius of 225kilometres to 520 kilometres (i.e. 2.3 times greater than previously), so that innumerable communities on the periphery have been granted a legal right to city services. Those inpower were spurred on to provide active support for this process of incorporation by theneed to regain political ground: paying people to keep quiet and thereby transforming thearmy of the dissatisfied into obedient citizens. However, this game will never come to anend. News of what former marginal settlers have gained brings new marginals to thecapital.Twenty-five years later Ahmadinejad achieved electoral victory with his slogan of‘Distribution of oil money to all’. This came as a surprise to Iranian intellectuals, becausethey are unaware of the make-up of their capital’s population. After several decades ofmarginal settlements around Tehran, the Islamic Revolution has made available to theirinhabitants new strategies for survival. These strategies have fundamentally changed themarginals’ structures of employment. By now they have established and consolidatedthemselves in the city with make-believe jobs, and it doesn’t seem as if they will allowthemselves to be removed from Tehran’s social configuration over the long term. Whoknows – perhaps petrol-rationing, which only recently came into force, will provide themwith the basis for new economic activities!
Tehran, an imaginary postcard
Tehran possesses the unusual talent of being able to seduce its poets, artists, and writersinto deceiving themselves. In this place you can detach yourself from reality, and onlypeople who are active creators can gauge the significance of that.In my early novels I described a city which no longer exists and perhaps never existed.This borrowed nostalgia, mingled with drowsiness and reverie, attributes to the city avanished power of attraction in order to endow us, the citizens of Tehran, with a legendaryand venerable past. I was seeking fleeting aspects of this city’s inner core: a conglomerateof photographs and memories, excerpts from now-vanished books, melodies recollectedonly on the border between dreaming and wakefulness, and scents and sounds once againbringing ancient echoes back to memory. This hotchpotch generates the Tehran ofnostalgia, a city whose most important characteristic is confusion, where the reverberationof its name in human remembrance does not accord with reality.I admit that I’ve borrowed part of this nostalgia from other people’s way of seeing things: acity of A Thousand and One Nights, with the blissful lethargy of shadow-filled alleys whereonly the plaintive murmur of dripping gutters is to be heard; with mysterious dark cornersin mosques, turquoise minarets, copper-roofed bazaars and sleepy traders, slanting beamsof light, the tangy aroma of spices, and shimmering silk; with carpet-weaving and greatpots of dyes and spindles filled with wool, inscrutable black-eyed women, and suddenly themuezzin’s call, earthy scents, an azure sky, and stillness and expectation.
The real Tehran
However, everyday reality makes such dreams vanish in a puff of smoke that covers thesky, and what remains is a city of confused geometry, constantly changing outlines, andirregular spaces and acute angles vanishing behind smog and mist. As the project of a city,Tehran will never be completed because it devotes much of its vital energy to trying totransform villagers into urban people – a role for which they don’t show any particulartalent.Nevertheless, for me Tehran is the only place in the world that fascinates me with brutal,multi-coloured, unexpected, and bizarre impressions. In my recent novels I invoke thisTehran, a city without a river, saturated with the beguiling allure of love and death, a fearinstilling city full of unsleeping adventurers akin to imaginary, fleeting shadows, whoconstantly suffer the torments of hell and yet are forced to lie and dissimulate. A citizen ofTehran looks out onto the world from this confusion, which shapes in depth his view oflife.I have described this Tehran in my most recent novel, The Morality of the Inhabitants ofRevolution Avenue, with the specific sensibility of a man describing the wounds on hisown body.Translated by Tim NevillAmir Hassan Cheheltan is one of the best-known contemporary Iranian writers. He lives inTehran.
Copyright: Goethe-Institut,
Fikrun wa Fann www.goethe.de/fikrun