A Jew's Eye View of Iran

By Larry Beinhart, AlterNet. Posted May 15, 2008.

I was the designated Jew on our visit to the synagogue.

We were there on a mission for peace. I kid you not. Though every time I say it, I feel like John Belushi as a Blues Brother in dark sunglasses, "You don't understand, we're on a mission from God."

I had wanted to go to Iran for a long time.

It was a combination of two things.

One was the revolution. The sudden emergence of a theocratic state at the end of the 20th century. It was as if mankind had been swirled backwards by a demented djinn into an epic dream, a thousand years old, from the time when Islamic warriors swept East and West, spreading the caliphate across half the world, while armored knights clanked out of the forests of Europe with maddened peasant mobs alongside them, to meet in convulsive blood-lettings at the borders of their faiths.

The other was the Persian fellow, Ali Reza Sheikholeslami.

Reza was the holder of the Soudavar Chair in Persian Studies at the Oriental Institute, Oxford University, and a fellow at Wadham College, at the same time that I was there as the Raymond Chandler/Fulbright Fellow. Each was a wonderful endowment. I can't say what Reza actually did for his, but as for me, I played squash for my college and dined at high table.

Reza, who was among my best friends at the college, seemed to embody all that was the other side of Iran. He was sophisticated, urbane, international, genial and sensual, with a succession of entrancing wives. In the brief period I knew him, there were two, Sharee and Sheherizad, both quite beautiful, both with those communicative, distinctly Persian eyes.

This was in the mid-'90s, when many of the excesses of Islam were shocking the Western media, in particular, executions of women for adultery, sometimes by beheading and sometimes by stoning, as called for in the Koran.

After the public execution of a Saudi princess, Reza said to me, "We are really not so uncivilized as we appear. The law is that there must be four eyewitnesses to the adultery, and they must endeavor to pass a golden thread between the two parties, and only if it does not pass between them, can they be found guilty." Which is a perfectly Persian solution to an onerous and outrageous law against human nature: accept it, since it comes from God, or God's spokespeople, or whomever is running things at the moment, but make enforcement sufficiently impossible that it doesn't matter all that much.

It's a genial and elegant way to cope with the world, but insufficient when the fanatics are in charge.

There was something about those two warring impulses -- God's law vs. humanism, Iran's revolutionary fervor vs. 2,000 years of Persian live and let live -- that I felt was worthy of a novel. I decided I wanted to visit the world's first Islamic republic and went down to London to apply for a visa. My application was shipped off to Tehran and never came back. Why? No one can say.

My interest, and desire to go, remained. I continued to try to imagine the book I would write about a place that had emerged from Scheherazade's 1001 Nights to become the fierce, dour, black-clothed and bearded land of the Ayatollahs.

It continued to be difficult for Americans to get visas to Iran. To get a journalist's visa you usually have to be with a major media outlet. Even then, they are granted or rejected in fairly arbitrary ways. To get a tourist visa, it's necessary to book a tour with an Iranian tourist agency. I read about them and immediately nicknamed them KGB tours. They're like visiting the Soviet Union in the bad old days: you see the seven selected sites, you have to stay with your group and you presume that your guides are employed by the state security services.

I was in the midst of contemplating such a tour.

Then, at our Tuesday night poker game, Jeff Cohen, (founder of FAIR, Donohue producer, and author of Cable News Confidential: My Misadventures in Corporate Media), said, "Hey, I'm going to Iran with Scott Ritter."

I said, "Awesome. Can I go too?"

He was set to travel with an organization called Fellowship for Reconciliation. He figured that it was too late for me to go along, but he could help set me up for the next one, in February. I figured that only real danger in going to Iran would be if the United States started bombing the place. I was relatively certain that an attack would be scheduled for its impact on our domestic elections. Mid-winter seemed well within the window of safety. I said that would be perfect.

As it turned out, he and Scott never went -- because the Iranians wouldn't give Scott a visa -- but I did.

By the way, you can too. Put on your dark glasses, practice saying, "We're on a mission for peace," and contact www.forusa.org.

So there I was, in Shiraz.

The FOR tour was two weeks long. It was organized in cooperation with an Iranian government agency, the Center for Interreligious Dialogue, a part of the Organization for Islamic Culture and Relations, which made it the standard KGB Tour Plus. In addition to Persepolis, the great square of Esfahan, and an authentic Iranian meal at an authentic Persian restaurant, we had official meetings with mullahs, ayatollahs, the Armenian Christian prelate, and an official stop with a group of Iranian Jews.

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Larry Beinhart is the author of "Wag the Dog," "The Librarian," and "Fog Facts: Searching for Truth in the Land of Spin." All available at nationbooks.org.