The Ayatollah Begs to Differ Read Online Free

unsuccessfully as it happened, to return to the university campus.) My grandmother, meanwhile, was in despair. A very religious woman who spent almost every waking minute of the last years of her life reading the Koran or praying, but who nonetheless led a very social life, she couldn’t imagine venturing outdoors without her veil, especially as she was the wife of an Ayatollah. She sought her husband’s counsel, and he told her to go about her life: dress modestly, but obey the law, even if it meant wearing not the full veil but a simple scarf or even a hat instead that might attract less attention.
    Neither of my grandparents was in any way political, but many other women and almost all of the religious establishment were vociferously against the Shah on this matter, and in the face of heavy resistance he eventually relented, instructing the government to cease enforcement of the law, even though it wasn’t officially changed until his forced abdication (by the Allies) in favor of his son in 1941. The nonenforcement was a sort of acknowledgment that his people would not give up their beliefs on his command, and my grandfather once again ventured outdoors, and my grandmother resumed her chador-wearing or heavy-scarf-and-full-overcoat-wearing habit.
    Years later, in the late 1960s, I was staying at my grandfather’s house one summer on a family visit back home. My mother, who had by this time spent years in the West, had a particular routine when she wanted to go out. If it was for a quick errand around the corner or in the immediate neighborhood, she would pull a chador over her head and go about her business. Not only was the neighborhood a religious one where the chador was common, but the idea of the Ayatollah’s daughter prancing about the streets bareheaded was anathema to both her family and herself. However, if my mother was going well outside the neighborhood, by taxi or by private car, she would go without the chador or even a scarf. One very hot day I remember my mother saying goodbye to me in the garden and telling me she would be back in a few hours. She was wearing a short-sleeved dress that I’m sure I had seen before. I went into the house, and a few minutes later I saw my mother, who I thought had already left, in tears. Alarmed, I asked her what was wrong. “My father thought I should change before I go out.”
    “Why?” I asked, my preteen mind truly puzzled, since I knew that my mother worshipped her father and thought him the most intelligent, wonderful man in the world.
    “He says the sleeves are too short!” My mother dutifully changed into a long-sleeved outfit and went out, bareheaded of course, and I realized for the first time how different Iranian culture was from what I had presumed was mine. My mother’s tears, even my young mind understood, were not because she objected to her father’s expressing displeasure at her outfit; she could, after all, ignore him, as her siblings seemed to do with impunity. No, they were tears of shame: she had, after all these years away from her country, embarrassed her father, her hero, by presuming that the Western culture that she had outwardly adopted could cause no offense in her house or in her country. Had she momentarily forgotten who she was or, more important, what the culture she was a product of was? The Shah certainly had, as he discovered with a rude surprise some ten years later.

    Today, the chador or full hijab (completely covering every wisp of hair and skin except for the hands and face) is still worn in poorer neighborhoods and almost all the provinces (and by my mother in London every time she prays), even though it is effectively no longer mandatory. Although hijab is indeed a statute of the Islamic Republic, the definition of hijab, again, as with many Iranian concepts, is murkier and less absolute than ever before.
    Every spring as the weather warms, the police crack down on what appear to be looser and looser interpretations as to