Tehran or Bust

The drive from Yazd to Isfahan, along highways 71 and 62W through the vast desert, can be a colorless, mind-numbing journey, punctuated by occasional patches of green as one crosses villages and towns, and green highway signs every few miles praising Allah or offering a Shia exhortation. If one has any doubt that the common people of Iran are as pious as their government, one need only read the signs painted on virtually every private truck and bus traversing the highway, which all spell out the same messages. They often compete with absurd images of Mickey Mouse or misspelled English words like "rode warrier," and even Shia expressions written in the Latin alphabet.

Along the highway, I passed through two police checkpoints, one ostensibly to catch illegal immigrants (Afghans, mostly, who cross the border almost as frequently as Hispanics do the Mexican border with the United States), the other to catch smugglers (mostly opium and heroin, again from Afghanistan). The magnitude of Iran's drug problem—more than 1 million Iranians are estimated to be addicted to narcotics—was visible not just from the checkpoint but also at a teahouse I stopped at near Naien, where a young man in his 20s was dozing off on a bench by the door. Every few minutes he would open his eyes and stare absent-mindedly into the distance, ignoring my driver and me, and then nod off again. When the proprietor brought out our tea, he looked at me apologetically and gestured to a third cup on his tray. "When they smoke a pipe, they get sleepy," he said, shaking his head as he placed the cup in front of the young man and exhorted him to drink.

Built by the 16th-century Safavid dynasty (which first declared Shia Islam the national religion) as its capital, Isfahan is perhaps Iran's most beautiful city. Famous for its large town square and the mosques and palaces that surround it, the city is also known for its bazaar and for the business acumen of its citizens, some of whom trade in the exquisite Persian carpets that, along with its stunning architecture, make Isfahan world-renowned (or at least that's what the Isfahanis think). Isfahanis seem to other Iranians the way Iranians often seem to the rest of the world: they can be a prickly lot and fiercely chauvinistic, not least because they view their city as the epitome of culture, and have, for as long as can be remembered, referred to Isfahan as "nesf-e-jahan," or "half the world." This self-regard is evident almost from the moment one enters the city, as first my Yazdi driver asking directions complains about the surly reaction from locals, and then the clerk at my hotel, after having a few words in English with an irate European tourist, turns to me and says, in Farsi, "They ride us over there and want to ride us here too."

Our image of a bazaar—a maze of tiny shops and shopkeepers hawking inferior goods or preying on unsuspecting and often lost customers—is only partially accurate. Isfahan's bazaar houses not just hundreds of stalls but offices, often hidden away, where the real business is done: the coppersmith hammering pots and pans may be working for a man engaged in the wholesale trade of copper wire and piping. When the bazaar goes on strike (as it did during the revolution, contributing greatly to the fall of the shah) or threatens to do so (as it did more recently, in reaction to a planned new tax) it's not just shoppers who are inconvenienced; the entire economy of the country can grind to a halt.

At one dark shop selling shoes, not too far from the bazaar's grand entrance, I noticed some traditional slippers interspersed among cheap Iranian- and -Chinese-made shoes. They are hard to come by, since most Iranians prefer Western styles, and I engaged the shopkeeper, asking him which style he thought was best. This threw him for a moment. He sized me up, wondering if I might be a tougher negotiator than he'd imagined. "Who do you want them for?" he asked. "Yourself?" I told him I was just wondering, and he then listed the relative advantages of each style, told me which city they were from and why each of them might be best suited to my ambiguous purpose. He guided me to one pair that I'd paid a little more attention to than the others, rather nice, and told me they were particularly fine, and only $40. I picked up the pair next to it, identical to the ones the doormen at my hotel wore, and he launched into a sermon on how they were the finest shoes, completely handmade and indestructible. They happened to cost only $60, he said, but I knew they could be had for less than $40 in Tehran. I also knew, of course, that I could bargain him down to $40, but I thanked him and left.

Contrary to the perception that bazaar merchants will follow a customer out of the store, as some do in tourist-heavy Arab countries such as Morocco, in Iran a bazaari would consider that kind of behavior beneath his dignity and a sign of weakness and desperation. The shoe salesman knew two things: one, that if I really wanted a pair of Persian slippers I would be back, and two, if I came back he'd negotiate in earnest and make a sale. He did not need to waste time with someone he wasn't sure was serious, and he would not enter into negotiations unless he felt both he and the customer could and would deliver, and part satisfied with the transaction. Negotiating, in the bazaar or elsewhere, is a practical matter for Iranians. As Ali Larijani, Iran's former chief nuclear negotiator and now speaker of Parliament, said when asked if he'd been moved by Obama's video message: "Our problems with America are not emotional."