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Clarissa de Waal is a research associate at the Department of Social
Anthropology, University of Cambridge, and a Fellow of Newnham
College. She is the author of Albania: Portrait of a Country in
Transition (I.B.Tauris, 2005).
EVERYDAY IRAN
A Provincial Portrait of the
Islamic Republic

CLARISSA DE WAAL
 Published in 2015 by
I.B.Tauris & Co. Ltd
London • New York
www.ibtauris.com

Copyright q 2015 Clarissa de Waal

The right of Clarissa de Waal to be identified as the author of this work has been
asserted by the author in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or any part
thereof, may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or
transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying,
recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

References to websites were correct at the time of writing.

International Library of Iranian Studies 50

ISBN: 978 1 78076 908 0

eISBN: 978 0 85773 663 5

A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
A full CIP record is available from the Library of Congress

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: available

Typeset in Garamond Three by OKS Prepress Services, Chennai, India

Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY
 This book is dedicated to the individuals and families I got to know in
Fars province. Their readiness to communicate and their generous friendship
made possible this account of everyday life in provincial Iran.
 CONTENTS

List of Illustrations ix

Introduction 1
1. 2007: First Impressions In and Around Shiraz 17
2. 2008: Exploring Fars Province 66
3. 2009: Election Week 96
4. 2011: Political Repercussions 114
5. 2012: Sanctions and Their Impact 154
Epilogue 182

Notes 184
Bibliography 188
Index 190
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 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

All images are the author’s own

Figure 1. Ashayer tent

Figure 2. Inside ashayer tent

Figure 3. Ashayer wedding

Figure 4. Village houses

Figure 5. Village house interior

Figure 6. Women with hookah (qaylan)

Figure 7. Folded bedding

Figure 8. Setar player

Figure 9. Village weavers

Figure 10. Naan bread making

Figure 11. Slaughtering a goat

x EVERYDAY IRAN

Figure 12. Little girls on a doorstep

Figure 13. Winnowing

Figure 14. Qanat

Figure 15. Pomegranate tree

Figure 16. Bazaar pomegranates for sale

 INTRODUCTION

Why Iran?
Perceived as at once exotic and frightening, Iran has never ceased to
arouse interest in the West. A theocracy to Western secularised eyes
is fascinating in itself. Rule by clerics so powerful that they can
impose hejab and hobble women’s rights is all the more striking
where such a large proportion of women are educated and in many
cases politically active. The Economist Intelligence Unit’s democracy
index in 2008 placed Iran 145th out of 167 countries, classing it as
‘authoritarian’. The 2011 index saw Iran fall to 159th place.1 Human
rights infringements by the Iranian state are chilling and attested.
Jailing and flogging peaceful protesters, hangings (including minors)
and torture are well documented. Women and men are not equal
in the eyes of the law. Religious tolerance even towards non-Shi‘ite
Muslims is limited, and certain faiths, most notably Bahai, are
brutally put down. Newspapers and television are censored. But
despite its repressive character Iran is not a totalitarian state. The
system of government maintains aspects of republicanism, and no
single institution and no one person holds absolute power. Iranian
authoritarianism is fragmented.
Authoritarian regimes and how they are sustained have interested
me since living in communist Hungary for two years as a small child.
The father of my best friend in Budapest was taken from his home in
the middle of the night and ‘disappeared’. My mother had to follow
2 EVERYDAY IRAN

circuitous routes when visiting Hungarian friends to avoid

endangering them. When I began research in Albania in 1991 the
effects of isolationist totalitarianism were pervasive. In 2007 I started
research in Fars province in south-west Iran with two objectives.
Firstly, I wanted to shift the focus away from the supposed nuclear
threat and the foreign media’s sometimes voyeuristic preoccupation
with black-chadored women and turbaned mullahs. I wanted to focus
instead on the everyday lives of ordinary Iranians and the degree to
which the theocracy impacts on them socially, ideologically and
economically. Secondly, I wanted to identify if possible the factors
contributing to the survival of theocratic authoritarianism.
Daily life as I experienced it with families in Shiraz, capital city
of Fars, and in the provincial towns and villages, revealed
inconsistencies and limits to the theocratic embrace. Satellite
television was banned by the government, but literally millions of
Iranian households, including the rural based Qashqa’i, settled and
nomadic, owned visible satellite dishes. American television channels
such as Persian Voice of America and CNN were widely watched. The
large, educated middle class had access to social media despite official
restrictions, and over 42 million citizens were internet users by
2012.2 Opium was smoked with impunity despite being illegal.
There were sporadic crackdowns by the authorities but these acted
more as irritants than deterrents. Asking in shops for illicit DVDs of
films by banned directors did not have to be done in whispered
secrecy. In public places there was less looking over the shoulder
when airing politically subversive views, little of the fear and
paranoia palpable in Stalinist regimes of the past. In 2008 I travelled
in a collective taxi from the market town of Marvdasht to Shiraz.
One of the passengers started criticising the Iranian government for
its lack of democracy, its denial of growing secularism and its
pathologising of sexuality. ‘The only democratic country in the
Middle East is Israel,’ he declared. The speaker was an Iranian
doctor, a lung specialist recently returned from practising in the
United States. What did I, an English woman, think of the Iranian
government? he demanded. I hedged, unsure as to the affiliations of
the others in the taxi and afraid of implicating the friend I was with.
 INTRODUCTION 3

What if one of those present was a member of the Basij, the state-
recruited vigilante guardians of Islamic morality and ideological
conformity? They would not have approved of this doctor at all.
I was beginning, however, to understand why the theocracy,
repressive and brutal in many respects, cannot be totalitarian.
Unlike in Stalinist communist states where all the jobs were state
jobs and every citizen officially employed, surveillance here cannot be
exercised from top to bottom; there is no clear chain of command.
Although a large proportion of the economy is still centrally planned
and hugely overstaffed, the public sector has been shrinking since the
mid 1990s and now employs only about 16 per cent of the country’s
workforce. There are twice as many workers in the private sector
(31 per cent)3, though much of this sector is now in the hands of the
Revolutionary Guard, the Army of the Guardians of the Revolution,
commonly referred to as the Sepah. The Sepah, while closely allied to
the government, enjoys a substantial degree of autonomy thanks to
its vast financial and military clout and its powerful intelligence
network. In addition to this non-totalitarian employment structure,
unemployment in Iran is notoriously high.
According to the Statistical Centre of Iran4 26 million citizens in
2009 were aged 15 to 29. Of these the jobless rate was estimated to
be 30 per cent for young men and 50 per cent for young women. The
number was actually higher than this, as jobs come and go while the
figures change less often. In a word, the government’s pro-natalist
policy of the 1980s has led to a catastrophic mismatch between job
opportunities and job seekers, with the new entrants outnumbering
the retiring by six to one. 800,000 young people were entering the
job market each year in competition for 200,000 jobs provided
annually by the government.5 The continuing mismatch leaves a lot
of the working-age population either working sporadically in the
private sector or the informal sector, or out of work. And here lies one
possible clue to the state’s low-key presence in certain aspects of
everyday life. If repression were directed at the whole population
rather than selectively at regime critics and criminals such as robbers,
rapists and drug peddlers, such a large number of unemployed
potentially disaffected youth could pose a serious threat to the state.
4 EVERYDAY IRAN

One might well wonder that social unrest has not been more of a
threat. Here an important factor has been the exit strategy open to
citizens. In contrast to the shoot-to-kill policies of regimes like that
of communist Romania or Albania, Iranians were able to leave the
country. Indeed, Ayatollah Khomeini is quoted as saying in 1980:
‘They say there is a brain drain. Let these decayed brains flee.’6 Later,
when the numbers leaving had soared, efforts were made to restrict
emigration. But it was not long before the exodus was seen as a safety
valve despite the brain drain, one of the highest in the world. An
estimated 200,000 graduates leave Iran annually to work abroad, and
according to the IMF one in four Iranians with college degrees works
outside Iran.7
What about the potentially disaffected from lower-income groups
who are in danger of becoming restive or worse? Here the huge
revenues from oil and gas enabled the government to turn rebels into
recruits for state support in the form of the Basij militia, the
Revolutionary Guard’s law enforcement body. Joining the Basij
brings the promise of perks including access to government jobs,
access to social housing and non-competitive entry to university. If
government-condoned emigration and Basij recruitment have acted
as safety valves reducing social unrest, opium addiction probably acts
as another. In 2006, according to a UN assessment Iran had the
highest per capita opiate use in the world.8 Iranian official figures
indicate about two million opium addicts. According to unofficial
estimates the figure may be as high as six million. The number of
households (of all classes) I came across where opium is smoked
suggests that the numbers are not getting any lower. Government
programmes for dealing with drug addiction have varied and are
most active in towns.9 The prevailing one in the countryside seems to
be laissez-faire: if religion does not work for those who stay, let opium
take care of the rest.
So the theocracy is not a totalitarian state; there are some limits to
its control and some escape routes for citizens. It is nevertheless a
brutal dictatorship whose authoritarianism, I would argue, has been
sustained to date by means of its policy of selective repression in
conjunction with its access to income from oil and gas. It helps that
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