An antique town in central Iran, Yazd is poised between two deserts that stretch to the Afghan border. Its low skyline is disturbed only by blue-tiled mosques, mud-brick domes and badgirs, box-like wind towers that have for centuries caught hot desert breezes and transformed them into cool interior ventilation.
You can lose yourself in Yazd’s meandering alleys, so I’m grateful that my new friend Mohsen helps me find my hotel, the old Malek O Tojar—once a merchant’s house—in the belly of the Panjeh-Ali Bazaar.
Mohsen and I met on the bus from Shiraz to Yazd; a country boy, he’s heading home for a few days’ leave. At age 25, his computer studies have been interrupted by two years’ national service: ‘All young Iranian men must do this because, you know, the Americans ...’
We head for an old caravanserai in the desert, now under restoration. Mohsen points out a qanat, or water channel, running underneath us and surfacing in the courtyard. ‘We have had this system for 2000 years. The water comes down from the mountains underground, the channels all dug by Yazd men.’
In the Desert of Emptiness, munching on pashmak, a local spun sugar sweet, Mohsen talks of love and marriage. ‘Does a man in Australia have to provide a house and a car for a woman before he can marry her?’
I laugh and shake my head.
‘I don’t want a girlfriend,’ he says, ‘that’s just for sex and fun. I want a wife and children, but how can I think about this? There’s no work for young people and jobs pay very low salaries. I am homesick for Yazd, but there are no jobs here.’
Like three-quarters of Iran’s population, Mohsen is under 30, a child of Ayatollah Khomeini’s social revolution that spent big on literacy, education and primary health care. In the revolution’s early days authorities encouraged big families to create an army of Islam. Instead it got an army of unemployed young.
That night at a teahouse I chat with a young man who can’t wait for the Americans to come. ‘You don’t know how I hate these people—the mullahs and their Swiss bank accounts, their big Mercedes.’
I was gobsmacked. ‘You see Iraq next door and you want Americans here?’
‘You know, my cousin is learning Persian dancing. If the government finds out they will close it down. Persian dancing! Governments do what they like, what can we do to change things?’
Next morning I am