encounter with the basiij

An Encounter with the Basîj

The evening of the day after Jens and I arrived in Tehran, his cousin with the cutsie sobriquet of Shu-shu showed up to demand that she be taken to Tehran's one and only sushi restaurant. It had just opened to cater to the small foreigner community in the city. A long-time resident of Paris and extravagantly spoilt brat who had been in Iran for the past year and thus denied the pleasures of sushi, she longed to devour the stuff. But I didn't really want to have sushi. After all, why the hell should I have sushi in Tehran of all places?

All the same, Jens, his sister Mina, Shu-shu and I went out in the car to the Japanese restaurant. The meal was good -- one unusual item we were served was sturgeon sushi, something I had never eaten before and definitely not Japanese. Now, the idiot Shushu was high on something, if not on drugs, then perhaps on an exitement as small as being at a sushi restaurant. All evening she would play with the food, or throw brazen flirtatious glances at me (no big deal but we were in public in Iran), or would talk at speeds no one could follow. Her cousins couldn't understand why, but suspected she must have had a bit to drink at home before coming out with us. (She didn't look drunk to me, more like she was on speed.) Whatever might have been the cause, she was acting in a way which suggested she was reckless and unbalanced. Who knows, maybe living in Iran for a year after a whole life in the West had unhinged her.

Unfortunately, she was driving. She drove, shall we say, exuberantly in Tehran's dark empty streets, now past midnight. She would zigzag in the road without purpose and turn at corners at speeds producing intolerable g-force. Despite the tribulations, we managed to leave behind the ugly concrete jungle of downtown Tehran and found ourselves driving through the narrow leafy streets of the city's posh northern suburbs. But the erratic driving continued, and soon it caught the attention of an ancient Mercedes minibus (the kind with the smooth rounded corners) behind us. We had no idea who or what they were.

The minibus raced ahead, built up a distance of perhaps twenty metres in front, and suddenly swerved to stop. One side of the minibus now blocked our path completely.

Jens said, "Shit, I think it's the Komité". The Komité is Iran's notorious moral police, the enforcers of the Islamic law. Toting machine guns, they're visible everywhere in Iran at checkpoints, airports and train stations. In the cities, they stop women on the street for violations of the hejaab (the Islamic dress code); investigate suspected cases of elopement and other illicit romances; censor books, films and television shows; and otherwise set the moral tone for Iran. Well, at least that's the ideal. Most Tehranis will tell you that they only stop women to get their addresses and come on to them.

But why should we be worried that we're being stopped by the Komité, I wondered aloud. After all, the two unmarried women among us were accompanied by a male relative (Jens), and I had my passport & visa with me, showing that I was the legal guest of Jens's father. "Don't be naive", Jens warned, "they'll assume we're just illegal lovers. I don't have any papers with me to prove I'm their relative!" Soon after uttering these words rather nervously, we learnt that the minibus did not harbour the agents of the Komité, but perhaps something a bit worse.

What stepped out of the minibus were two slight figures wearing headgear rather like those sported by the Palestinian Intifada rioters. They carried rifles, not machine guns. They were young, not more than 18 or 19. They were the Basiij.

The best analogy for what they are is Maoist youths of the Cultural Revolution. They are the "beloved of Iran", a semi-official volunteer revolutionary militia with no defined role in society. But they take it upon themselves to maintain the revolutionary tone and will under the right circumstances take the law into their own hands. These "beloved of Iran" mostly hail from the dregs of rural Iranian society who had been recruited to the madrassas (Qu'ranic schools) in the cities but were not really good enough to see through their education. Thus they are generally uneducated, none too bright, seriously unsophisticated lumpenproletarians. If you recall the young child soldiers of the Iran-Iraq War, those very ones were Basîj. For God and Iran, they cleared the landmines laid by Saddam Hussein by walking over them.

Of course I was only told all this later and wasn't aware that our car was being approached by a bunch of lunatic teens who would walk on landmines for God and country.

One of the chin-wipers knocked on the driver's window and demanded that Shushu explain herself. "Are you an unmarried woman?" he asked. Shushu replied yes but also that she was accompanied by a male relative.

Punk: What about the other woman?
Shushu: My cousin's sister.
Punk: She doesn't look like your cousin. She looks like a foreigner. Papers.

Mina certainly gets her looks more from her German half than her Iranian half.

Punk [pointing to me]: Who the hell is this?
Jens: He is my guest in the country, a businessman.

Of course I was not a businessman, but that's what he said anyway. Investors are better than frivolous tourists.

Punk: Get out of the car. [We all got out.]
Punk [Pointing to Shushu]: Cousins do not count as relatives. You are in violation of the law.

In Iran, primarily among the lower classes, cousins get married all the time, so in the minds of these bumpkin punk militiamen, Jens didn't count as a proper chaperone for Shushu. Of course nobody else would have thought twice about it.

At this point, Jens, not the most aggressive person in the world, stepped out of character completely and demanded in stern, unforgiving tones that this punk show him an ID. The punk produced a wilted, faint piece of paper. After examining it, Jens remarked boldly, "There isn't even a photo, and it's past its expiration date!" The punk grew enraged and replied: "Expired? Why don't you come to the station and I will show you expired!" Jens stood his ground: "You are going to arrest me on what charge? In the morning your superiors will release us and you will be humiliated for thinking cousins don't count as relatives." This went on for a little bit longer, but eventually Jens's bluff overcame the punk's bluff. Nothing happened. Perhaps the ardour of the Iran-Iraq War was ancient history for these saplings.

Shushu waited until the Basiij punks sped away before she started the engine again. But just as soon as the minibus disappeared into the night and we set off in the same direction, there came a horrific screech from the front, the sound of the minibus making an abrupt halt. The punks had perhaps changed their mind. They reemerged and approached our car, only this time they didn't bother with Shushu. Instead they sidled up to my window. Prompted by the thud on the glass, I nervously opened the window in response. The punk exhorted: "Either marry this lady immediately or leave the country!"

The pious message delivered, he and the other punk sped off into the night.

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