The Ministry of Guidance Invites You to Not Stay: An American Family in Iran Read Online Free PDF Page A

circumstances, that it would be wise for me to pay ex-president Khatami a visit on this short trip, either for him or for me. Ali agreed, and I wondered whether he was more worried about me or his brother. I suspect it was both.
    The Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance, the overseer of all cultural activities in the Islamic Republic (and always known to Iranians simply as Ershad, or “guidance”), including news media activities, keeps its foreign media offices on Eighth Street and Ghaem Magham, across from the Tehran Clinic, a famous hospital in central Tehran. I had made many visits to Ershad in the past, but today for the first time the Tehran Clinic’s proximity struck me as convenient in case of a serious medical emergency following a summons to the ministry. From the taxi window I looked out at the bustle of the city, wondering how ordinary Tehranis could appear to be so completely unconcerned with what Iran had become since the elections of 2009: a police state behind a veneer of freedom—“Islamic” freedom, that is—that the regime claimed to offer its citizens. A police state hadlong existed in Iran, of course, but now it had taken on a malicious and bellicose form unseen or felt since the early 1990s.
    I arrived a few minutes before nine, and I was indeed expected. The guards in the lobby took my Iranian national ID card and told me to go upstairs to the journalists’ office. So even the guards—who normally would ask with suspicion what I was there for and whom I wanted to see—knew I had been summoned. Were they intelligence ministry informers, too? I took the stairs to the second floor and stepped into the office I had visited on previous trips to obtain my press passes. The young male secretary was also expecting me, it seemed, and politely asked me to take a seat. Tea arrived out of nowhere.
    After about half an hour, the deputy head of the foreign reporters’ bureau, the gentle and ever polite Mohammad Shiravi, walked in and said hello. Holding a glass of tea himself and wearing an Ahmadinejad-style windbreaker, he wandered in and out of the reception area looking a bit uncomfortable, then finally told me that I should wait in his office. I had known Shiravi to be a liberal—by Islamic Republic standards—and I wondered if his choice of jacket had shielded him from the purges at the ministry after the 2009 elections and the appointment of the president’s arch-conservative ally Mohammad Hosseini to the post of minister. (Mohammad Javad Aghajari, Shiravi’s immediate boss and the man ultimately responsible for foreign correspondent activity in Iran, was a reliable conservative with no suspicious liberal leanings.)
    I followed Shiravi into his office and sat down on a sofa. He left, closing the door firmly behind him. Again, a glass of tea appeared, this time with a plate of biscuits. He was not going to be the one to interview me, and whoever was had to be important enough in the intelligence services to kick him out of his own office. I waited another fifteen or twenty minutes, staring at the large jug of ice water on the coffee table before me: large drops formed on its outsidesurface in the overheated room, trickled slowly down the side, and plunged into the saucer under the jug. Sweat.
    The door opened and two men walked in, an older one with a full beard and a younger one almost clean-shaven, both wearing badly mismatched gray jackets and trousers that seemed to be the uniform of choice for government employees below the rank of minister (and sometimes minister, too, depending on how much he wanted to associate himself with the downtrodden of society). I rose to shake their hands and noticed the younger one had a deformity on one hand. Injured in the Iran-Iraq War? I wondered automatically. Nah—he was too young to have fought. They sat down in armchairs across from me without introducing themselves, not even with a fake name like Mohammadi or some other commonplace but very Islamic