During my ten days in Iran I kept a diary, which was the basis for the long article published in the Mail on Sunday on April 22. I thought readers of this site might be interested in knowing a little more detail and background, and in discussing it. So here is that diary. I should also add that, to my surprise, some people were puzzled by my use of the phrase 'a short break in Mordor' in the article.
I wrongly assumed that everyone was by now familiar with Tolkien's 'Lord of the Rings' trilogy, especially since it was filmed, in which Mordor is the night-shrouded, evil, blasted and barren land in which the Dark Lord, Sauron, plots the downfall of the world. I was intending to make a satirical reference to those in the West who think that Iran is a sort of real-life Mordor.
Saturday 7th April
At Heathrow. A lot of people are surprised to find that there is a regular British Airways flight between London and Teheran.
It seems strange that travel should be so easy between here and the country we claim to fear so much. But like so many flights to awkward places, it leaves in the middle of the night, furtively, and arrives in the miserable early morning, so one feels a little furtive using it.
Following my own advice to readers, I have recently renewed my passport, in the hope that we shall have abolished the sinister identity card scheme by 2017, when it expires. If not, then I really don't know how I'm going to travel abroad after that.
Though I haven't had to provide my fingerprints for the new document, or have my eyeballs scanned, it is a slightly worrying object. For a start is much more politically correct than any previous passport I've held. the words 'European Union' on the cover are bigger than they were on the old one.
The title page is in English, Welsh and Gaelic, for the benefit of whom, exactly? Was there any British subject who, hitherto, couldn't understand English? What will an Italian passport officer make of this?
And the old 'request and requires' rubric on the inside front cover looks even more out of place than before. Actually, this was doctored back in the 1980s, and hardly anyone noticed.
It used to be 'Her Majesty's Principal Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs' requesting and requiring that we should be allowed to pass freely. But then the Home Office took over passports (Why? Was the Thatcher government even then thinking of merging passports and identity cards? 'Passport Officers' in embassies had always been MI6 men until then. They had to find a different cover after this change), and it just became 'Secretary of State', so it might have been Secretary of State for Trade and Industry, for all anyone knew.
Even more perplexing is the actual page containing my personal details. I say 'page', but it is in fact an embryo identity card, a stiff plastic rectangle with a microchip embedded in the back. There's a funny little symbol on the front cover, to show that it's an electronic passport. The microchip actually transmits your personal data, and if you damage it, the authorities will not be pleased. But a thought occurs to me. Should I be allowed to take this supposedly secure thing to the dreaded Islamic Republic of Iran? Should their London consulate be allowed (as they have been) to retain this object for some days while they stamp their visa in it? Surely, if they're any good at all, they can penetrate its secrets and work out how to make one of their own? In which case, so much for 'security'.
I look fondly at my Iranian visa, which has taken so long to obtain. Will they let me in when they get there? What will it be like to arrive in the fabled capital of the Ayatollahs? I imagine a vast, unfriendly and dim-lit arrivals hall in a remote and scrofulous airport, where men in beards and turbans scan arrivals for signs of heresy and camels slumber on the steps.
But in fact Mehrabad turns out to be a little shabby but perfectly convenient. I queue for no more than five minutes before having my visa stamped. I have often waited far longer in the 'EU passports' queue at Heathrow, to get into my own country alongside all the Eastern European secret police retirees who have exactly the same right to get into Britain as I do.
Whereas here I have a rather smart high-tech Iranian visa and - as one of the few foreigners on the flight - I do not have to join a longnline. And the place is so informal that my friends from Teheran are able to meet me at the baggage carousel, where my luggage turns up with commendable speed.
I have heard plenty about Teheran, the pollution, the deadly traffic. But the Persian New Year, a long, Christmas-like holiday break, has just finished, and the sky is still clean enough for me to see the enormous snowy mountains which lie to the north of the City.
My hotel, small and friendly, is as good as any Western hotel and better than many (even providing that rarity in Iran, good coffee. This is a country conquered by tea). The feeling grows that I am culturally in Europe, not in the middle east. The only glaring difference is that the women on duty at reception are wearing uniform headscarves, with rather jaunty pillbox hats on top of the scarves. The dress regulations are most rigidly enforced at workplaces, and the scarves are well forward, covering all hair.
It is a remarkably short distance from the airport, and the traffic is as bad as I had thought. You need a special sort of nerve to drive in these streets, even more than was the case in Moscow where I lived in the 1990s, and many cars show the scars of sideswipes and territorial disputes.
The public manners of Iranians are pretty much like this. In a shop, or in a railway station, you are quite likely to be gently but firmly pushed or barged. But it is not meant rudely, and as soon as you enter a private zone - an office or a home - the good manners are elaborate and touching.
There are pictures everywhere of Ayatollahs in beards and rather ugly glasses - why do they all wear these very Western, very 21st century accoutrements for their official photographs?
If you like the middle ages so much, then surely you should stick to them in all things - or at least get contact lenses to avoid looking odd. The combination of turban, long white beard and spectacles just doesn't work.
At lunch, in a busy self-service cafeteria on a tree-line avenue, I have my first brush with Islamic beer, a strange, wistful acknowledgement of the fact that a real beer would be nice. It is often served in frozen glasses, which make it much bearable than it is at higher temperatures.
Astonishingly, there is even a Russian non-alcoholic lager which is actually quite palatable. It is not done to drink Islamic beers of any kind in religious households, as they regard even this yeasty, unintoxicating liquid as an affront to the faith. But in many restaurants it makes a pleasant alternative to the sweet fizzy drinks that are the only other choice.
Actually, if I wanted to, I could easily obtain real beer, wine or whisky and drink them in private places There is a huge bootlegging industry in the city. One young man tells me what fun it is to drink In Iran, because of the ever present feeling of slight danger.
He emigrated to Canada and came back partly because legal, open boozing wasn't half as much fun as drinking behind heavy curtains, wondering if the police would raid the joint.
One of his friends has been whipped - he says, with electric cables - after being caught. But he seems to have been unlucky. The police, I am told, are more than happy to be bribed to go away.
Since I am here as a tourist, while actually working, I think I have taken quite enough risks, and decide that 10 days without a drink will be perfectly bearable. As it happens, this is so. The place is so interesting and invigorating that I hardly ever miss my daily few glasses of wine or beer - except during meals, where they would have enhanced the pleasure.
It is Easter Sunday, and I had hoped to attend an Easter service in one of Tehran's several Armenian Christian churches. I had hoped for a mysterious, dark building illuminated with candles and full of rich, deep singing and gorgeously-robed priests. But the only church I can find is bare and modern, like a school gym, and the 'service' is a sort of rock mass which I would have taken a lot of steps to avoid in Britain. The only striking thing is that many of the women in the choir have their heads uncovered. They can do this because it is a private place.
Most Iranians, whose identity cards identify them as Shia Muslims, are legally barred from entering churches. Apparently, the Armenian Christians also have a club where scarfless women can be seen.
On the way to church, our unofficial taxi is stopped by a traffic cop who says it is not licensed to drive on Sundays (in an effort to reduce pollution, people with odd-numbered licence plates can drive on some days, and people with even-numbered ones on others.
But when the driver tells the officer that he is taking an Englishman to church, the policeman smiles, salutes, apologises for not knowing it was Easter and forgets the fine.
By this time I am almost wholly obsessed by the women's great rebellion against the Ayatollahs. The unintended effect of all this imposed covering up is to make Persian women - most of whom are very attractive anyway - seem even more alluring. Their bearing is unlike the hunched, submissive carriage of black-clad Muslim women in Europe or the Arab countries.
They do not shield their gaze (on the contrary, they are very bold) , and they all look quite likely to burst into flames with passion at any moment. Many have spent colossal amounts of money on having huge hair, or going blond, or even having cornrow plaits, the front few inches of which are displayed while the obligatory scarf is pushed back as far as it will go without falling off. Many of these styles are verging on the insane, including an Elvis-type quiff about eight inches high, and are what they imagine are the height of fashion in the beloved country, ie America, where all middle-class Iranians want to go.
Having been tipped off. I also began to notice that it is a kind of badge of honour to have had a nose job. I have in one afternoon counted 11 women and one man walking about the streets with bandages all over their noses. This is a status symbol. Quite often they even wander around with post-operative black eyes, anxious to let their friends know they can afford the surgery.
At the University, we find a bunch of girls smoking , un-Islamically but far from furtively - in front of an anti-American mural, of a type (the Statue of Liberty with the face of a skull so common that I don't think they are even aware it is there. This is obviously a sort of recognised bad girls corner.
In the middle of the university is the large covered, heated forum where the weekly Friday prayers are held, and thousands of voices chant 'Death to America' . But then I am stopped and ordered off the premises by a group of officious, scowling bearded young men, who seem to have some sort of authority.
I believe these are the feared and disliked 'Basiji', the Ayatollahs' musclemen. Recruited from among poor, working class zealots, these characters appear, sometimes swinging heavy chains in a menacing manner, when the authorities want to intimidate demonstrations or gatherings they dislike.
In modern Teheran they are fairly restrained, but a few years ago, and even today in provincial cities, they are a force to be feared.
I have dinner in a basement Persian restaurant, with band and rather nice kitsch murals of old Persian scenes, involving much wine-drinking in mixed company, which I thought deliberately subversive. My companion is a very smart Iranian who grew up in the USA and who refers to supporters of the regime as 'Hezbollah'. He says his six-year-old nephew already knows that he cannot talk about home life when he is at school, that he knows adults who drink wine, or adults who do not revere Khomeini. He has never been TOLD to keep quiet. He just knows.
But private conversation is pretty free, even so. Here, to get into trouble, you usually have to issue a public challenge to the authorities, by publishing a criticism in a newspaper. One nasty feature of this arrangement is that lawyers who dare to defend dissidents are themselves punished and imprisoned.
Over coffee in a small cafe, we discuss the likelihood that Iranian Shia Islam is in fact a disguised survival of the much more ancient and Persian faith of Zoroastrianism, the grandfather of all monotheistic religions. The coffee shop (which like everywhere else contains subversively dressed women) displays a poster (supplied free to all retail outlets by the police) advising women on how to dress like bats.
On the way back to the hotel, we have a hilarious discussion of Iran's nuclear
programme, reaching the conclusion that a people who cannot finish the Teheran TV tower in 20 years, take 30 years to finish a new airport, and cannot get a jammed hotel lift fixed in two days, are most unlikely to be able to build an atom bomb, let alone drop it on anyone else. I am inclined to agree.
Competence here is not in much evidence, and even the most modern and Europeanised street is full of gaping manholes into which I have nearly fallen.
A worry. Is this like the 'cardboard tanks ' story told by pre 1939 visitors to Germany? This was a famous urban myth of late 1930s Britain. A couple would come back from a motoring holiday in the Reich and recount how they had driven straight into a huge tank on a winding mountain road, only to discover that the thing was made of bamboo and cardboard. Or is it true? From what I can gather about the official exaggeration of the uranium-enriching facilities at Natanz, Iran's nuclear programme is in fact being boosted both by the Ayatollahs and the Washington neo-conservatives.
Each thinks they will benefit from the resulting panic and hostility.
On the way to the car we are accosted by a beggar who is plainly a heroin addict. The intellectual gives him money saying he knows perfectly well it will be spent on drugs, but what the heck? Serious drug-taking is apparently more and more common, and most blame it on the very widespread joblessness among the young, who have no expectation of ever getting homes of their own or starting families. Maybe.
It strikes me that it is a grave failure, by the Islamic republic, to create a moral regeneration from on high.
And it may also have something to do with after-effects of the war with Iraq, which destroyed so many families and took away so many fathers, husbands, brothers and sons.
Monday April 9th
A visit to old Shah's palace in lovely gardens in foothills of mountains, rather bad-taste furniture all very 1970s, but magnificent carpets. The Shah's statue has been sawn off at the knees, leaving a huge pair of boots. I think immediately of Shelley's 'Ozymandias', and wonder if the Ayatollahs did too, or if it is just an accident? I used to know this poem by heart:
"I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: ”Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shatter'd visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp'd on these lifeless things,
The hand that mock'd them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away"
Later, at Persepolis, I shall be reminded of it again.
The mid-day call to prayer is broadcast over loudspeakers all across the rather delightful hillside park where these relics are displayed. Nobody, not one visitor, not one employee, pays any attention - though one gardener pauses for a quick smoke.
Then I go on to a mountainside shrine where the 'Hidden Imam' (an important figure in Shia Islam who disappeared more than a thousand years ago but whose reappearance is constantly awaited, especially on Tuesdays) is supposed to visit soon after he arrives. Like so many Iranian shrines, it is curiously informal.
People smoke on the steps before going inside to pay their respects and poke banknotes into the holiest part. The site provides a tremendous view of the mega-city below, estimated to contain 12 million of Iran's 70 millions. It is not beautiful at all, but greatly impressive because of its majestic size and its situation beneath real mountains. There are, interestingly, very few mosques, unlike the comparable mega-city of Istanbul which is speckled with them.
In the afternoon I visit the Khomeini shrine, a surprisingly tatty place. The polished stone floor is quite impressive, but otherwise it is about as spiritual as the Birmingham Exhibition centre, with girders and exposed concrete everywhere. Though shabby, and unimpressive, the actual tomb chamber is carpeted with piles of paper money pushed through a special slot.
From here you can glimpse the segregated section for women, which is both busier and more devout. The site has been poorly chosen, since it is constantly enveloped in a strong agricultural smell - camel dung?
Then on to the enormous Iran-Iraq war cemetery where a blood-red fountain plays on special anniversaries, but in these more normal times just thousands and thousands of very touching graves, with little boxes above them displaying photographs of lost sons, brothers, fathers, husbands, all very recent, as if World War One had happened 20 years ago.
Back to North Teheran for a toasted sandwich of 'Islamic Ham' (Chicken) and cheese, and a passable cappuccino in a cafe full of yet more rich women, a wander round a shopping mall full of affluent, luridly expensive frocks, shoes and bags, with veiled ladies and schoolgirls staring hungrily through the windows, then a tour of Western embassies, the American still occupied, the British with a brand-new steel fence in front of it, to deal with the stage-managed crowds who have been complaining about our alleged violation of Iranian waters.
It is an interesting sort of society where thengovernment puts up barriers to protect diplomats from demonstrations that it has orchestrated itself.
Then to an Armenian cafe, a sort of dissenters' gathering place, even more animated than anywhere else we've been, men and women conversing on equal terms, excellent Turkish coffee, a beautiful garden (the parks of Teheran are verdant and carefully tended in the ancient Persian tradition) at twilight, the loveliest time of day in middle eastern cities with the call to prayer drifting over the traffic and the lights bright in the sweet and cake shops.
But it is wholly different here from the evening atmosphere in Arab cities because the women are out and about and it is not all-male.
On the way back to the hotel in the dark, discuss hand amputations andpublic hangings with the taxi-driver, who lives in rough, fundamentalist, working class South Teheran and knows what's going on. He says Sharia punishments such as hand removal happened at the start of the revolution. But they don't any longer. Public hangings are reserved for outrageous crimes, such as child murders, and the last he recalls was of such a person two years ago. Drug dealers are also occasionally hanged in public, but none recently.
Tuesday April 10th
The following day we visited the South of Teheran, taking the metro system to get there. This has taken decades to build and is impressively modern, though nothing like big enough or extensive enough. Each train has a 'women-only' carriage at either end, with the result that the men crowd into the coaches next to the women-only cars, so that they can leer through the window in the connecting door, at all the girls.
The atmosphere down in the South is much poorer, much brusquer, much more middle-eastern than the smooth European north. You even see women wearing the full face-covering niqab veil. All revolves round the enormous and ancient bazaar, with a mosque in the middle of it. The trades are grouped as in a mediaeval city, with all the blacksmiths, all the bookshops, all the spice shops, in their own quarter.
That evening I took the train to Mashhad. The day had begun with a meetingwith a veteran of the Iran-Iraq war and his older (and devout) business colleague in a tenth-floor flat with a lovely north view of the Alborz mountains. What is quite clear from these reasonable, experienced people is that Iran would fight if attacked, whatever doubts anyone might have over the current regime, but also that the self-same people who feel this way are broadly pro-western in their views and attitudes.
The war united Iran as a nation as never before, and that unity still exists, much as the old USSR was united by the war against Hitler, which gave it a legitimacy it would never otherwise have had, and allowed it to pose as patriotic.
Tehran railway station is almost entirely run by women, is far cleaner and brighter than most equivalent British stations. Our train is one of many expresses that run to Mashhad, the main route in the country. There are two reasons for this. One, Mashhad is the Shia Mecca, the only major Shia shrine within the borders of Iran. The others, at Najaf and Kerbala, are in Iraq, making a pilgrimage dangerous and unpleasant. The other is that Mashhad, in the far North-East near Turkmenistan and Afghanistan, is full of refugees from the Iran-Iraq war because it is as far away from the threat of invasion and bombing as you can get. The city expanded hugely during the war.
Once again, we are almost in Europe. The comfortable sleeping car is Chinese made, modern and clean, hauled at some speed by a powerful modern diesel. We are brought a very decent chicken kebab and the usual mound of rice, plus limitless tea and soft drinks.
It is dark as we leave Tehran, but still possible to see just what a vast city it is. Later we pass through many small provincial stations, all rather neat and built on the French model, a long low platform and attractive white buildings, but made definitely Iranian by the prayer rooms (one for men and one for women) always provided.
In the morning we are speeding across an enormous, surprisingly green, plain, with the mountains still to the north, the occasional rather primitive-looking villages with houses made of mud-bricks, a strong feeling of being very far to the East on the old Silk Road, the loom of China almost detectable over the North-Eastern horizon, beyond Turkmenistan and what used to be Soviet Central Asia.
Our express arrives an hour early in Mashhad, where the golden domes and towers of the Shrine of the Imam Reza are visible across miles of new suburb and modern roads. The giant concrete station has clearly been designed to cope with endless trainloads of pilgrims.
The shrine itself is astonishing, both for its size and the fervour and piety on display, for the richness of its decoration and carpeting. It is a kind of independent principality in Iran, as powerful and wealthy as a medieval university in England. But it is also rather modern, surrounded by ring roads and served by underground car-parks, the combination of devotion and modernity that you find all over Iran.
I am very much reminded of Najaf in Iraq, which I visited four years ago when it was safe to do so - especially by the raw, almost angry funerals which pass through, sometimes attended by weeping women.
There is a lot of passion written on the faces of the funeral parties, and a feeling of being very close to death. The bodies are carried in and out of the shrine in very plain wooden boxes, covered only by a piece of sacking. Later, some of the mourners will have to climb down into the grave to lift the body into the earth - there is no lowering of the coffin in Shia funerals. To be buried here is a great honour, costing a great deal of money. Most simply carry the deceased in and out, to obtain some benefit from Imam Reza's shrine.
As a fairly austere Protestant Englishman, who even so regrets the loss of some of the beauty and intensity of worship at the Reformation, I do not know what I am supposed to make of this place. I find it rather moving, and constantly see similarities between the gorgeous buildings and our ancient Cathedrals, which were once also decorated and full of precious metals, and bustling with pilgrims crowding round glittering shrines, as this place is.
It seemed perfectly natural to treat the place with reverence, though I am most definitely not a Muslim.
It is also a lot easier to make connections with Shia Islam, which is nothing like as puritan as the majority Sunni faith. Everywhere, even on cars, you see pictures of the faces of the Shia Imams - mainly Ali and Hossein - looking remarkably like European representations of Christ. The Shia prophecy, that the hidden Imam will return with Jesus at his side, has a lot in common with Christian beliefs about the Second Coming.
And it is startling to see Shias still in mourning over the lost battle of Kerbala, lost more than a thousand years ago - in which their heroes died.
As I watched the courtyards fill for prayer, I wished I could be there to see the emotional summit of this, the Ashura commemorations when men lash themselves with chains and cut themselves with swords, in memory of that great defeat.
People in our rational world try to ignore the force of such illogical passions. But they exist, and it is foolish to pretend they do not.
If we try to stamp them out, or pretend that such feelings no longer exist, we may well find that they simply reappear in another - and perhaps more dangerous - guise.
I was two days in Mashhad, most of the time spent in private homes being feasted and bombarded with Iranian hospitality. My curiosity about Iran was matched by my hosts' curiosity about Britain and I think we all ended the visit feeling that we were a good deal closer to each other, and had more in common, than either had imagined.
I've recorded in my article the burden of what was said. I very much hope to go back before too long, to visit my hosts (who put me through a rather touching and very ancient farewell ceremony when I left). If we have succeeded in defusing the silly, manufactured hostility which some in authority wish to create between us, then that can only be good.
On a walk by myself at dusk, I see a shop in which the entire window is taken up with models, from tiny child to adult and all sizes in between, dressed in black chadors. It is surprisingly creepy, and reminds me of the less attractive aspects of Islam. Who would want to shroud a tiny little girl in this stuff? I snatch a few photographs with my small camera, just the sort of equipment a wicked British spy might have, and the proprietor of the shop becomes suspicious so I head swiftly off.
Back to Teheran, on an aged and alarming Russian aircraft. A modern, oil-producing country like this is in trouble if its main transport network cannot afford better planes.
Friday 13th April
It is the Muslim Sabbath and Tehran's streets are almost empty. For breakfast, we drive to a baker, where I buy a loaf of Sangak bread, which I have watched being made in a fiery oven, where the slabs of dough are laid out on beds of superheated pebbles, cooked to a lovely golden colour and then hooked out of the furnace and placed in your hand, almost too hot to touch. It is delicious, but you have to watch out for the pebbles, which sometimes stick to the bread.
Then we go to the University for Friday prayers. The zone is surrounded by good-humoured and very secular police, and you cannot drive too close. I join the throngs converging on the covered hangar, noticing the elaborate arrangements made so that worshippers can check in their mobile phones before passing through three rings of security.
At each of these checks I worry about being detected and denounced as a wicked infidel, but at last I am in the rug-covered central area, able to listen to the sermon (described in the article) and to observe the curious decoration next to the pulpit - quotations from the Koran, in sparkly coloured lights like something on Brighton beach. One of my companions, more cynical than most, says the congregation is made up of several separate groups - the real zealots, with their beards and glares, soldiers and other state servants there to make sure they keep their jobs, and young men trying to impress the devout fathers of girls they fancy.
Judging by the general lack of fervour, the last group are there in strength that day.
After a wander round a pleasant city park, full of people eating ice-creams or taking rides on swan-boats on the lake, I head to the airport for a flight to the southern city of Shiraz. I arrive in time to visit the tomb of the poet Hafez, where there is almost as much reverence as there was at the shrine in Mashhad. But this is not religious passion.
Shiraz is famed for its relaxed atmosphere, and Hafez is a subversive poet of love and wine. People are weeping quietly as they touch his tomb. Just as in Russia, and other countries where they produce more history than they can consume locally, poets are tremendously important, allowing people to express feelings which are officially decried or banned.
Saturday April 14th
I am told I must visit Persepolis, the ancient ceremonial capital of Persia, 2,500 years old.
This lies a few miles outside Shiraz and, in pouring rain, I looked in amazement at its dark grey marble sculptures from before the time of Christ, and the beautiful inscriptions in ancient languages, many of them as perfect as if they had been done a week ago. It is a reminder that this is not just a blob on the map, but a continuous civilisation almost as old as China's, with a tremendous patriotic pride in its past.
Incidentally, I fell quite ill on this visit (I blame some undercooked chicken), and the young woman who was acting as my guide became so concerned that she insisted on taking me to her house to rest. This is entirely typical of Persian generosity and hospitality
My evening plane to Esfahan was hopelessly delayed by violent thunderstorms, and for all I know hasn't left yet. so I got a taxi to drive me the 300 miles (costing roughly the same as the plane) through the night. Awake for most of the time, I was struck by the way that small Persian towns are so green and spacious, and generally clean and well-ordered.
Dont miss part two of Peter's remarkable diary from Iran on Wednesday...
Picture captions: (All images - aside from numbers 1 to 4 - by Yalda Moaiery)
1) The great spire in Esfahan, Iran's ancient cultural capital.
2) Even the very young must obey the dress code, but these Tehran schoolgirls are noisy and animated - not subdued.
3) A shop entirely devoted to selling black chadors in Mashad. Note the extra smalls ones for young girls.
4) The Shah's boots are all that remains of a giant statue in his former palace in Tehran.
5) 'Death to the English!' A cheerleader tries to enthuse the crowd at a staged demonstration outside the British Embassy in Tehran.
6) Pro-nuclear propaganda written in English is plainly designed for Western consumption. The sign in yellow reads: 'Nuclear energy is our indisputable right'
7) Devout black-clad women gather for a pro-government rally beneath the minarets of the Holy City of Qom.
8) 'No division between mosque and state'. This Mullah is at the heart of a pro-government rally in Qom.
9) The Great Satan is constantly baited. This is a prominent anti-American display in the centre of Tehran.
10) War still unites people and Ayatollahs. A poster recalls the bravery and carnage of the war with Iraq.
11) The walls of the former US embassy are decorated with macabre anti-American murals.
12) Modern and medieval. Veiled women wait for the women-only carrage on the Tehran Metro.
