An Arrest By Iran’s Morality Police Forces Woman To Embrace Her Hyphen

To learn more about Pardis Mahdavi and read her book “Hyphen (Object Lessons)” go to her website.

It’s A Sign

In 1984 Pardis Mahdavi and her family lived in Minneapolis. One day when she was six she came home from school to discover a sign on their front door.

PARDIS: And the sign said, ‘Burn this house. Terrorists live here.’ And I remember I was with my little brother, who was only three at the time. He couldn't read and he said, ‘read this.’ And I said, ‘I'm not sure I'm reading it correctly.’ But all I remember was feeling chilled to my bone because my father was a doctor. He helped people and my mom worked at a hospital. So this idea that we were terrorists didn't make sense. 

Pardis and her little brother went inside to tell their grandmother about the sign.

PARDIS: The look on my grandmother's face told me that something was wrong and that those words that I was struggling to understand had caused her enough fear to call her father to come home from work at 3 p.m. on a Wednesday.

While the adults had a loud intense discussion about the sign, Pardis turned to her brother.

PARDIS: I distracted myself by being there for him because I didn't want him to be upset. And I sensed that my mom needed my grandma more than I did, that the adults needed to be together to formulate a plan and that it was probably best for my brother to be out of earshot. So we went down to the basement and started playing with our toys. 

Upstairs, Pardis' father made the difficult decision to move.

PARDIS: We had to leave Minnesota. He felt very fearful. He was worried that his practice was about to be blacklisted. This was during the Iran-Contra and after the Iran hostage crisis. And my father made the difficult decision to move to California because he heard there were more Iranians and more people who look like us in Southern California. 

At the time Pardis didn’t understand why they were packing up and moving their lives across the country but there’s one thing she remembered very clearly.

PARDIS: He said, ‘you know, Pardis, people can take everything from you. They can take your belongings, they can take your home, they can even take your country. But the one thing no one can ever take from you is your education. Don't ever let anyone take your education or your mind.’ 

Later in life Pardis realized this was the moment that inspired her to study anthropology and become an educator. Instead of running from the controversy between Iranians and Americans, Pardis sought a way to make sense of her dual heritage. 

This is 2 Lives. I’m Laurel Morales.

Never Fit In

Even after they moved to California, Pardis never felt like she fit in. The worst was lunchtime.

PARDIS:]I remember I would open my lunchbox at school and there's aromatic herbs, stew would you know, the scent would fill the room and kids would make fun of me. You know, I was too Iranian in America. 

Pardis grew up shy, awkward, and uncomfortable. But at the same time, she was curious about the world around her. 

PARDIS: I've always been somebody who wants to make meaning and wants to make sense of the things that I'm seeing and experiencing.

She was observant. She noticed the little things like the fact that her parents always kept a suitcase packed, ready to go back to Iran.

PARDIS: So I had this unsettled feeling because I that I didn't belong I didn't fit in in California. And so I had this idea of an imagined homeland in Iran. 

But it was complicated: She remembered seeing images on TV of people burning American flags in Iran.

PARDIS: So hearing Iranians refer to my adopted homeland as the Great Satan. Hearing Americans refer to my ancestral homeland as, you know, later axis of evil ...if my two countries were at war, what did that mean for someone like me who was Iran and America in one body. 

When she talked to aunts and uncles back in Iran, she heard bits and pieces of their reality.

PARDIS: So-and-so's been arrested and had a public flogging in the square. You know, my cousins, my age, you know. You know, and I remember being a teenager, being 14 and thinking, gosh, like the biggest problems are who am I going to go to the Christmas formal with? And then having the phone call where my aunt talked about my cousin who was my age, being arrested for being at a party because she was dancing and then having to face the whip.

Discovering Activism

She was upset by the injustices. But it wasn’t until she went away to college that she learned how others had responded to the abuse.

PARDIS: I started to learn the language around activism and around justice. I went to Occidental College in Los Angeles, and that was a formative experience for me because I started taking courses on human rights, justice studies, critical theory and justice studies. And that's when I learned about the injustices people face around the world and how people organize.

LAUREL: How did that feel for such a shy kid as you describe yourself? PARDIS:  ]It felt liberating in a way to just be part of something and part of something, part of a cause that I believed in with like body, mind and soul. And that was really liberating. 

Pardis was a graduate student at Columbia University working at the school newspaper in New York on September 11, 2001. She was in the newsroom with an Egyptian American colleague when they saw the first plane crash into the World Trade Center on TV.

PARDIS: I looked up and I said, ‘is that a movie?’ I remember seeing this movie. And he said, ‘that's not a movie. That's the news.’ We watched after the first tower had been hit. And then we watched the second tower be hit. And I just remember his face when he looked at me and my face and he said, ‘Pardis, this is going to be really bad for people who look like you and me.’ 

Not long after the 9-11 terrorist attacks Pardis and her brother decided to fly home from New York to California to visit their parents.

PARDIS: We entered the airport at JFK and I saw the face of the TSA agents as they looked at my brother and I and my brother had worn, you know, like a baseball hat to be like I'm you know, I'm all American because he had like, you know, he's a very middle Eastern looking face. And, you know, I saw how uncomfortable people at the airport were. And I started to feel uncomfortable. And then I saw the passengers who on the plane, as soon as my brother and I were getting on the plane, we got on the plane and we started walking down the aisle. And I saw the faces of people as they looked at my brother and I and they looked at us, terrified. The mixture of fear and hate. 

Once again Pardis did not fit in. But now, she was even feared.

Falling In Love With Iran

During the summer of 2000 Pardis interned for the LA Times magazine and convinced the editors there to let her go to Iran to write a story about the women's movement. As an anthropology major and a young Iranian American she was fascinated with this place she’d heard so much about.

She was aware of Iran’s problems. In the 1980s the Islamists worried about the death toll from the Iran Iraq War and encouraged families to have more children. As a result in the early 2000s ⅔ of Iran’s population was under 21. Realizing it did not have jobs to support them the government did a complete turnaround and pushed family planning messages. Women had to cover their bodies. Drinking and dancing could lead to an arrest by the morality police and a punishment up to 70 lashes. Consequences for sex outside marriage could lead to public execution. 

PARDIS: And at the same time, there was this burgeoning youth movement going on and people talk to me about parties were engaged in the sexual revolution. This is a regime that's so overly focused in our on our bodies. We're speaking back by using our body. And I was fascinated by this. 22 All my images of Iran were, you know, women in black chadors wailing or burning flags and whatnot. And I got to Iran, and here was this powerful youth movement with people literally risking their lives to speak back to a government with which they did not agree. And I felt inspired to my core.

Pardis couldn’t help but fall in love with Iran.

PARDIS:I loved the smell of dirt and grass, you know, in the parks. I loved the soundtrack of Tehran. You know there was this burgeoning underground music scene. Iranian, you know, Persian rap…The soundtrack of Iran, the smell, the food. You know, it was like I'd grown up eating Persian food, but here was like this whole added layer and and and the city. Tehran had this pulse, this vibrant pulse that pulled me in.

She thought finally she’d come to a place where she would fit in. She was going to belong.

PARDIS: I couldn't have been more wrong. My headscarf was constantly slipping off my head … my accent gave away the fact that, you know, my accent, my use of street Persian, my kitchen Farsi revealed just how American I was … I'm like, okay, I'm too Iranian in America. I'm too American in Iran. Like, what's happening? 

But the more time she spent there the more fascinated she became. She interviewed people who found ways around the strict laws.

PARDIS: You can get married anywhere from one hour to 99 years. You can do temporary marriage. And many sex workers work in the mosques because they can meet people and then they can go and be married for an hour. Engage in sexual activity and then the marriage dissolves after or a week or whatever. 

Pardis wound up writing her anthropology dissertation about the sexual revolution. And in 2006 her dissertation turned into a book titled: “Passionate Uprising.” Her friends and cousins, and the people she had interviewed, insisted she present her findings in Iran before taking her book on a wider tour in the U.S.

When she began her fieldwork a reformist president had been in office. The ministries of health and education knew of her research and welcomed her. But when she planned to present her results in 2007, the conservative Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was in office.

PARDIS: I knew it was risky to be doing a public lecture at a university in Tehran. But I also felt that everybody who encouraged me to do so with correct that I owed it to them to present the results first…I didn't realize just how dangerous the work was until 2007. 

Point Of No Return

Pardis remembers taking the stage at a university lecture hall in Tehran. She stood behind the podium excited to finally share her findings to friends and people brave enough to be interviewed by her over last six years.

PARDIS: I was 13 minutes into my lecture on Iran sexual revolution when the auditorium doors banged open, and I can't remember if I saw them, smelled them or heard them first. I just remember boots clanking, the smell of rosewater and sweat, and then the auditorium erupting in pandemonium, chaos as 12 members of the morality police infiltrated the room. I should have been shredding my lecture notes or I should have run or something. But I was frozen. I was gripping the podium with both hands kind of in a state of suspended animation. As I watched the auditorium erupt and I watched almost in disbelief as four members of the morality police climbed the four or five stairs I had climbed 13 minutes earlier to get on stage. And then they walked towards me. And I looked up. And all I remember was seeing a fist coming down. And the next thing I knew, everything went to black. PAUSE

She awoke in the back of a car in a panic. She had no idea where they were taking her but soon found herself back in her apartment.

PARDIS: Only it wasn't my apartment anymore. It had been ransacked. Everything. Every one of my belongings had been removed and taken. All of my furniture had been taken. All that remained was a plastic folding table, almost like a card table and a couple of plastic chairs. And then a bed with a sort of scratchy orange blanket and in my closet were two Islamic pre approved uniforms. 

She was under house arrest and soon after, she was interrogated by the armed morality police.

PARDIS: I had been interviewing sex workers and they asked me if I was somehow running a prostitution ring. No, I didn't even know how this all worked here, you know, And I just had just been learning about temporary marriage in Iran.

The men interviewed her 12 hours at a time for many days. Those days turned into weeks. 

PARDIS: I thought. Am I ever going to get out? Anyone ever going to come for me? Yeah. No, I was. I was trying to figure out what I was going to be charged with. Am I ever like? Do people know this is happening? Am I ever going to get out of here?

She did what she did best as an anthropologist; she observed her guards. She got to know one in particular.

PARDIS: I call him Sumac in my head because he always had flecks of that spice, sumac and its teeth. He'd come back from his lunch, long lunch of smelling like kabob and onions and the crack in his teeth. But we'd had this long conversation actually, about feminism and justice and human rights.

Pardis thought she had convinced him that she had hit a breaking point with the guard. But the next day Sumac didn’t return. Three other guards came into her apartment and told her to get up, they were leaving.

And I was so I was so afraid I actually vomited all over myself. They put me in a car and were driving. I realize I thought first, Oh, maybe they're taking me to Amin prison. Like, now I'm going to be locked up. Right? But then I realized we were driving towards the airport, and then we drove right onto the tarmac. And I thought, well, maybe. Maybe there's a holding cell here. 

Two of the guards took her from the car and escorted her onto a plane and sat her down.

PARDIS: And I said. Oh, I guess I'm not going to Amin Prison. And they said you were not worth a spot there. But they also said. Never come back here. This isn't your country anymore. Never come back here. Because if you do, that will be a one way ticket to prison. And I just sat there and I just looked at him. I was sort of taking it all in like, I am being stripped of my citizenship, but I'm going home. But am I going home? Or am I going to an island? Like what's happening? And I just locked eyes with with the one guard and he just said, Pardis, remember, there is no God but God and Muhammad is his prophet. I was on the plane. I didn't know where I was going until the flight attendant came on the sound system and said, Welcome to Swissair flight to Geneva. And I just I just started crying, and I just started bawling. 

She had no money, no documents, no phone. 

A flight attendant handed her a paper bag and an envelope. Inside the bag was a change of clothes and inside the envelope, a burner phone, $100 cash and the address to the American embassy in Geneva.

PARDIS: And honestly. There's a lot of details. I don't remember…as soon as I got to New York City, soon as I got to JFK. I locked everything away. I locked the whole experience. I. And I refuse to talk about it for about a decade. 

…until last September, when a 22 year-old woman by the name of Mahsa Amini was arrested by morality police and died in custody.

PARDIS: And I remember thinking so many of us could have been Mahsa. And also. Wow, Look at how the world has changed that. The world is talking about Mahsa Amini.

Embracing The Hyphen

It took several years to make sense of what had happened to Pardis in Iran. Back in the States, she had married an Iranian man but the marriage eventually fell apart.

PARDIS: There was this expectation that like to be a good Iranian girl. You're not going to date. You're going to marry an appropriate Iranian man. And like, I could never make any of that work. I was always trying to be like the perfect American. And that's why when 911 happened, I was like, okay. But suddenly I realized absolutely a hyphenated American is an American. There's a lot of us who live in this in-between. And guess what? We have that perspective. We have the ability to zoom out and say, okay, here's here's the great things we can take from all these different cultures. When you live on the bridge, you can see these different islands rather than getting really hunkered down in. 

So once again she made sense of it the best way she knew how – she studied the phenomenon in others and wrote a book about it. She titled it “Hyphen (Object Lessons).”

PARDIS: It took being kicked out of my ancestral homeland to, as I say, wrap my limbs around the hyphen. So, so much of my life, I was trying to fit in on one side or the other of the hyphen. So I was always, you know, trying to be American or in America trying to be super American. In Iran I was trying to be Iranian, but I was too American. Iran, too Iranian to be American. Then I realized that tiny little piece of punctuation was the bridge…And I suddenly saw the hyphen as that bridge, and I suddenly realized I can live inside the hyphen that actually being in here is a powerful space, that living on the bridge is a powerful space to live.

Pardis decided to embrace the space in-between.

PARDIS: Rather than rushing through a bridge or rushing from one side to the other or rushing from one island to another, I could exist inside a bridge…I could love you know, Iran and America. 

Teaching Her Children To Be A Bridge 

Pardis has three kids ages 7, 10, and 12. And she wants them to understand the advantages to being a bridge.

PARDIS: I want them to know that they can take the best of all worlds rather than feeling a single bit like we get to celebrate Persian New Year. [01:00:48]my boy's father is Chinese, and we also celebrate Chinese New Year. And we get we don't have to be ashamed here. Now we share our culture. I go to her class and I talk about Persian New Year and, you know, her her classmates say, oh, my Persian food, you know, we we love your food. And, you know, when I was her age, I was always trying to, like, hide these things. But but what what we talk about is celebrating them and inviting people into our culture and sharing our music, our poetry, our food with people.

She doesn’t want her children to be afraid as she was when she was their age.

PARDIS: I've let that seed grow and planted it in my children to approach the world not with judgment or fear, but to approach with curiosity and to remind them that they're also hyphenated and they live on the bridge. And the bridge is a place too.  

And if that sounds like the premise to a children’s book, it’s because it is. Today Pardis is working on a kid’s book when she isn’t consumed with her tasks as provost and vice president of the University of Montana.

This is 2 Lives. I’m Laurel Morales.