Honeymoon in Tehran: Two Years of Love and Danger in Iran (review)

Azadeh Moaveni, a California-raised Iranian-American, has tried hard to make a go of it in her ethnic homeland. Twice, this accomplished young journalist has spent lengthy periods in Tehran, writing for Time magazine, building a social life and, on her second time around, falling in love with and marrying another hyphenated Iranian and giving birth to a son. In Honeymoon in Tehran, Moaveni experiences again the predicament of so many Iranians forced to decide which is worse: to live with the capricious cruelty of the Islamic Republic or live without extended family, Persian culture, and the smell of jasmine in the air.

In her first book, Lipstick Jihad, Moaveni vividly described Iran’s rebellious youth and the daring way in which they defied Islamic regulations and lived “as if” they were in a normal country. Her new book is also full of surprising details, even for those familiar with the contradictions of modern-day Iran. Once again, she merges the personal and political and depicts a country that bears little resemblance to the stereotypes conveyed by the “Axis of Evil” moniker. In Moaveni’s Tehran, she and her fiancé live together openly before marriage, and she attends government-mandated prenuptial classes where young women are told that “you must also derive pleasure from sexual interactions” and are handed starter packets of birth control pills. “Paradoxically,” she writes, “authoritarian laws had somehow made Iranian society more tolerant,” in matters of dress, religious observance, and class consciousness.

Life seems more than tolerable as she plans her Tehran dream wedding in the garden of a villa owned by her prospective in-laws. Her husband, working for his family’s textile business, and Moaveni, churning out interesting articles for Time, seem determined to stick it out in Iran even as the relative social freedoms of the Muhammad Khatami era give way to the Neoconservatism of Mahmud Ahmadinejad.

But the downsides of life in Iran never fully disappear and eventually prove unbearable. Ahmadinejad, after briefly trying to curry favor with women by announcing that they can attend mixed soccer games, retreats under pressure from conservative clerics and presides over a new crackdown on un-Islamic dress and satellite television. The Iranian government, reacting to the Bush Administration’s strident democracy campaign, begins locking up Iranian-American academics and censoring the press even more heavily. A government minder to whom Moaveni must periodically report — the mysterious “Mr. X” — threatens her with judicial proceedings if she continues to work.

The apparent tipping point comes when she, her husband, and young son try to go for a walk in the foothills of the Alborz Mountains, only to be stopped by a female teenage morality enforcer who bars Moaveni on the grounds that her headscarf is too thin. Moaveni and her husband move to London, rejoining the great Iranian brain drain, which deprives Iran yearly of 150,000 university graduates seeking the opportunity and predictability that their homeland — three decades after the revolution — still cannot provide.