Philosophy, freedom and the wrong gender

We spent the next month or so speaking with people. And they were telling us stuff. 

The art of conversation and the taboos

We were drifting here and there across the country to visit all those who we had met somewhere and who had invited us to stay with. (We saw some of the famous places too, but people gained absolute priority.) In our friends' places we sometimes met other people and were invited to visit them too. 

And we spent hours and hours just talking. 

Our foreign faces, English language and our backpacks kept working as a magnet for philosophers. Every single person we could talk with was thoughtful and had intriguing things to say.

What was striking about all these people was how easily they were willing to talk with us about things such as their attitude to life or their faith. 

(The second thing that was striking was that they were willing to discuss these things sober. In Europe, I always find it difficult to engage in a genuine conversation. If it happens, it usually is when people are drunk, which necessarily - to put it mildly - dissolves the outcome of the conversation. Here, I enjoyed sober talks to the full.) And it seemed that in Iran it was possible to know a person more within one day than elsewhere in a very long time. 

At some point, we always necessarily came across religion and our attitudes to it. It was another occasion for me to be surprised. In the West, people tend to see Iran as a homogeneously Muslim country. In my experience, though, every single person we met had their own views and their own theories about the existence and nature of G(g)od, and about things people should or should not do. Sometimes, these views were Islamic; sometimes, they were far from it. And every time, even if our views were in opposition, our talk was friendly, full of respect and it always was a dialogue, not parallel monologues. 

Christian church in Esfahan

In one of the small hidden churches

We would also talk about environmental protection, democracy, evolution, Israel, Marxism, suicide, the definition of love, Russian and American imperialism, poetry, reason, the Iran-Iraq war, gender equality, prophets, existentialism, sex education, the Syrian crisis, knowledge, DAESH, the human nature, patriotism, the purpose of human life, freedom... 

There however was a taboo - the LGBT issues. It seemed that even very open-minded people had hard time talking about them. (Even though there still were people who would discuss it without difficulties and people whose views were humane and liberal.)

Even donkeys make philosophical stares in Iran. 

The handshaking question

I try to be as culturally open as possible. I really do. (Otherwise I wouldn't be hitchhiking across Asia and I would just comfortably sit in Europe.) But when I spend enough time in a country, there sometimes is a custom, a little thing that I find hard to digest. Something that makes me want to yell "you-guys-are-doing-it-wrong-for- f***'s-sake!"

In the USA, it was sniffling. (I got used to not blowing my nose in public, but regardless of how much I tried, I would always find hearing people sniffle downright disgusting.)

In Iran, it was the thing that I wasn't supposed to shake hands with guys. 

I like handshaking. To me, it's a beginning or a confirmation of a fair relation between two equals. 

I know that in Islam, not touching the other sex at all is a sign of respect or so. I know people don't do it because they find it wrong or they just aren't used to doing it. Or they don't do it because there might be a sneaky cop watching. I knew all that.

But after some time, it started annoying me.

Especially because we were meeting loads of guys and way fewer women. Out of those guys maybe just 40 or 30 % would shake hands with me and a couple of the others would explain they couldn't do it, which I found totally OK. The rest were gradually making me feel as if I had fleas or leprosy. 

Slowly, this rule was just pissing me off. It seemed to me that it presumed that people were animals unable to control themselves, and just shaking hands between people who happen to have different bodily organs necessarily makes them want to have sex together. Whereas I prefer to think better about the human nature. I like to believe - and my experience proves it - that we as a species are quite well capable of a civilized interaction even with a holder of a different set of reproduction organs.

Luckily, there still were the 30 or 40 % (and those who explained themselves). Every meeting with people like that made me feel as if we were members of a secret brotherhood, and a plain old handshake was a conspiracy sign. But it was kind of making us part of the same universe.

The khareji privilege 

As we were crisscrossing the country, hitchhiking and visiting different people and families, I realized how unfairly special our position was. And how difficult or even unbearable my life would be if I were part of the local social structures. 

We were guests, so everybody was helpful, was taking care of us and communicating with us. We were not part of the tight net of family and neighbourhood relations, so we were immune to gossip and things were pardoned and tolerated to us - we could hang out whoever we wanted to hang out with, we could go wherever and whenever we wanted, we could do unusual and strange things and we could wear unfashionable shabby clothes and dirty shoes. Last but not least, as foreigners we got some kind of a khareji gender, so the strict separation of different sexes didn't apply to us that much.

First of all, everybody accepted that Vojta and I were just travel buddies, which for the locals would be a no-go. (With people who could speak English we were not lying about being married or a couple. Eventually, we would stop lying about it completely because we kind of felt safe enough even if we would tell the truth.) 

Also, our friends, both girls and guys, were less afraid about getting into troubles for hanging out with us and having us at home than they would be if we were Iranian. And I was very often offered to take off my hijab indoors even if the locals would keep it. Even young guys from traditional families would tell me I could take it off if the older generation wasn't around, and nobody would ever give me offended, awkward or creepy stares. The only thing I ever got was one polite joke when I put my scarf back on ("You actually look cute with the hijab..."). It seemed that people found seeing other people without their headscarves pretty normal after all.

Poetry everywhere

And they were happily ever after

It seems that Iran is a huge, tight web of smaller family webs, and everyone has their fixed place in it. There is nothing like individualism in there (and in Iran I first realized how much individualist we are in Europe). Also, most of the social activities revolve around the family. That's why every time we met a couple, we were quite curious how they had met each other.

And sometimes we found out that people got married because it had been arranged by their families. At first I was surprised because I had always imagined that people who do arranged marriages live in remote villages, are covered by chadors and beards from head to toes and don't speak western languages. However, these were young, English speaking people, open to the outside world.

This is another thing that makes me think that in the Iranian society, family is the most important value. A value in itself. And individuals are devices whose purpose is to make the family machine work. In this light, the European notions of freedom, choice, happiness or rights of an individual become way more complicated and less self-evident.

As for personal happiness, it seems to be not valued or sought if it would be achieved to the detriment of the family (or the family's reputation) and is for many people not even possible without the family (because people are, also, so much dependent on their families and love them so much that with bad family relations it is hard for them to be happy). 

Also, it is necessary to say that it's always the guy and his family who initiates the marriage negotiation. The girl only has the right to say yes or no after a couple of weeks or even hours of talking with the guy (with other people around).

At first, I found this whole system just horrifying. 

However, the surprising thing was that the young people - who had, several years ago, married really quickly compared to the European standards - seemed to get along really well. We would spend several days with them and they would seem just content and happy. 

Once, we even heard a true love story about a girl and a boy who had secretly loved each other for years even though they were too shy to even speak to each other, and then ended up together in an arranged marriage and have been happy ever since. All fairytale characters could be jealous.

It seems that in Iran, people are somehow able not only to survive with almost a total stranger that one day pops up in their life, but can build a nice relationship with them. To my European brain it seems like a story from a different galaxy. For understanding better how the hell they do it, I just haven't been there long enough, so it stays a big mystery for me. 

The importance of having the Y chromosome and a big car

This post seems to be too much about social relations. I know I seem obsessed by them. But even though we were talking about so many things with our new friends, this was one of the most unfamiliar and strange ones. So I will keep talking about them in this post. 

Another thing that surprised me is that whereas in Europe, being an unmarried or a married couple makes no real difference - and there is no point in knowing whether people have an official paper to confirm their relationship or not - in the Iranian society there seems to be a huge gulf between these things. 

The gulf is so deep that some people seem to prefer marrying somebody who has not been their girlfriend or boyfriend - for the very reason they haven't been in relationship with them before. It also seems that for a girl it is socially unacceptable to be in a relationship without marriage whether for boys it doesn't matter (even though a relationship kind of usually needs a boy and a girl). And having been in a relationship in the past might be some kind of an issue for a girl - even in an environment that seems "liberal" - if she is about to marry someone or to start a new relationship.

I haven't been in Iran long enough to understand what kind of sense it makes, and that makes me feel sorry. So far I just suspect it might be some kind of sexist bullshit that doesn't really make sense.   

After all the liberal opinions we had heard, learning this was like a blow with a hammer in my head. It knocked me back down to Earth and reminded me how full of contrasts the Iranian society was.

However, marriage can be a big issue for boys too. Society pushes them to get married and expects them to have a nice job and to be rich in order to do so. (Nobody expects a girl to be rich and to have a nice job, though.) This requirement might be so oppressive that some boys feel their position in a society is worse than the position of girls. (This surprised me quite a lot because I have hard time imagining a more fatal oppression in a nowadays' society than not being allowed to leave the country or to marry without the permission of a random relative who happens to be male.) 

How to become Iran-sick

On this trip, we always have hard time leaving countries we get used to, but leaving Iran was especially difficult. Over a couple of weeks, we had become friends with more people than usually in years. 

Since we had extended our visa, we spent maybe two weeks just visiting our friends in different cities again, saying bye to them and being sad that we wouldn't see them for a long time. And we always stayed with our friends longer than planned and there always was a lot of things to do and to talk about.

When we left, I was Iran-sick. Being Iran-sick is something like being homesick, except that you miss a country which is not your home, where you only spent two months and where you would probably just go crazy if you had to live there. But you miss it anyway. A lot.

And there were several discussion that I couldn't stop thinking about - some of them were making me sad or just pissed, but it didn't make them any less interesting. 

Even Vojta who usually is just grumpy, doesn't like showing any positive emotions and hates being sentimental said something about one of the best experiences of his life. 

A riddle for those who don't understand Farsi