Children of Jihad: A Young American's Travels Among the Youth of the Middle East by Jared Cohen Read Free Book Online Page B

that it occasionally even leads to the closure of schools. Women seem to cover more of their faces when walking near the road; using their hejab to keep smoke out of their mouths.
    The sisters sensed my fear and Gita, who laughed as if this was the funniest thing she had ever seen, grabbed my arm and said, “Careful, my baby, come with us.” She would jokingly repeat this every time we crossed the street for the next month. In Iran, it is often considered rude to use somebody’s name, so direct addresses are often qualified with “my baby” or “my dear.”
    We arrived at a restaurant that the sisters assured me would be a typical Persian experience. A few paces inside, we descended a flight of stairs and I could smell the aroma of the cuisine. We walked along beautiful and intricately designed Persian carpets and were escorted to a corner table. The smell of saffron and cinnamon competed with a mixed aroma of mint and diced lime. My eyes searched the surrounding tables for the source of the delicious scent that filled the room. The tables were filled with lamb and chicken kebabs, rice dishes with vegetables, white yogurt, and beef dishes. I didn’t know what they were called, so I would have to describe what I wanted to the sisters. Hopefully, I could try a little bit of everything during my stay in Iran.
    Not long after sitting down, Gita and her sister, Leila, excused themselves to use the wash closet. They insisted that they would be right back and emphatically asked me if I would be fine while they were gone. Either they thought I was completely incapable of handling myself or they were anxious to demonstrate hospitality. I’d like to believe it was certainly the latter, as most Iranian youth I met were extraordinarily courteous.
    Five minutes passed and the sisters returned. Only now, they were not the girls I remembered. In fact, I barely recognized them. The black hejabs were gone and the long black chadors had vanished. Gita returned wearing a red jacket and jeans. Her beautiful face was the same, but my eyes were immediately drawn to her hejab. I don’t think I could even call it that: It was an ornate pink scarf with elaborate designs and blue flowers draped from her head. Her black hair poured out from the front of her scarf, which she had pushed to the back of her head. The scarf was so far back that I wondered how she kept it from falling off her head. She strutted back to the table, showcasing her transition from suppressed subject of the Iranian regime to liberated woman.
    I hadn’t thought much about the female attire at this point, but then again I had only met youth in the mountains and at the university. At the university, girls seemed to wear a black hejab, which is the head scarf, and a black chador, which is the long robelike attire that women were forced to wear after the Islamic Revolution. It never occurred to me that this might simply be their school uniform.
    Even more remarkable than the transformation I witnessed with Gita and Leila in their physical appearance was the change in their personalities that seemed to accompany the new attire. When they sat down on both sides of me wearing their bright pink and blue head scarves, they seemed more comfortable, playful, and frivolous than before. They sensed I was intrigued by the metamorphosis I had just witnessed. Their sense was right.
    Gita looked at me. “You know we don’t like to wear these. The government makes us and we hate it so much. The black we have to wear for school uniform is so ugly and if I have to wear this I will at least have it be my own.” It was remarkable; in just a few spoken words and a change in attire, the sisters showed me a powerfully yet subtle form of social resistance. While many Muslim women choose to wear the hejab, the Iranian women are not given any choice at all. In the absence of this choice, they feel as though wearing hejab or chador is forced endorsement of the regime, rather than adherence to