Distant friends and intimate strangers: On the perils of friendship in a Malaysian apartment building

Friendship in the high-rise

‘She is dangerous. The way she dresses, talks and acts – she’s a dangerous person. I should have been more careful about being friends with her’, Fariba ¹ told me. She was referring to Farzaneh, a fellow Iranian woman whom Fariba had befriended over the previous months. Like so many Iranians, Fariba and Farzaneh had come to Malaysia to study and they both lived in Penang, in an infamous high-rise building called Palm Leaves that had undergone significant diversification in recent years as a result of international student migration.

The conversation with Fariba was significant in that it expressed a deep anxiety over the nature, intensity and authenticity of friendships, an anxiety that was shared by many Iranians living in and around the estate – in particular when friendships between Iranians were concerned. In other words, and despite the fact that they were living in close proximity to people from all over the world, it was relations with co-nationals that were the most worrying. Indeed, for Iranians living in and around the high-rise, friendship was at the same time highly valued and strongly problematised: personal stories of a friend’s betrayal, rumours about illicit relations between men and women or the political infiltration of false friends circulated widely, and the context of urban high-rise living facilitated moral policing and the circulation of gossip. Fariba, for instance, had grown increasingly concerned about her friendship with Farzaneh because the latter had become the target of gossip in and around Palm Leaves, because of her indecent dress style, but also because she talked ‘too much’ and asked too many questions. Indeed, Fariba explained, ‘a friend is someone who doesn’t ask questions’.

In anthropology and related social sciences, ‘friendship’ has received relatively little attention for a long time (Beer, 1998: 191). In recent years, however, there has been an increase in research on friendship, leading towards a more complex understanding of what friendship means in different contexts (see e.g. Bell and Coleman, 1999; Desai and Killick, 2013; Guichard et al., 2014). In her introduction to a recent edited volume, Martine Guichard has usefully defined friendship as ‘a socially constructed form of relationship governed by norms serving as cultural scripts specifying from among whom to choose friends, how to act toward them and what is appropriate to expect from them’ (Guichard, 2014: 2). Taking on this definition, and following the call for more research into the meaning of friendship in the context of urban coexistence (Bunnell et al., 2012; Kathiravelu, 2013), I will explore the negotiation of friendship in Palm Leaves, a specific apartment building that will be further introduced below.

Importantly, friendship is not dependent on locality: like most of their neighbours, my Iranian interlocutors in and around Palm Leaves had friends all over the world, and they stayed in touch with them by phone, email or social media. Hence, life in Palm Leaves was intimately related to ‘multiple elsewheres’ (Gidley, 2013: 365). Tellingly, most of the residents who lived in Palm Leaves had been allowed to enter Malaysia under a specific visa regime that precluded the possibility of permanent residence. Migration scholars have shown how visa categories are productive of certain practices – in this particular case, the temporariness induced by visas generated constant orientation to an ‘elsewhere’. Many foreign residents, many among them students, saw Malaysia as a space of transit and imagined their futures abroad, mostly in the West. Yet especially for Iranians, increasingly restrictive migration regimes meant that many were denied visas to other countries and ended up staying in Malaysia – and in Palm Leaves – for much longer than they initially planned. They were, in other words, ‘stuck in transit’ (Missbach and Tanu, 2016). Consequently, and despite transnational connectivity, many residents were much more pinned down locally than they would have liked to be. While they were living in and around Palm Leaves, often thousands of miles away from their families, daily face-to-face contact with other urban residents turned into an important source for sociality and friendship. As one Iranian resident put it, ‘Sometimes it’s really hard to be alone. Sometimes you really need someone to hug.’ This confirms Laavanya Kathiravelu’s point that ‘regular face-to-face contact is still seen as central in many urban residents’ relationships’ (Kathiravelu, 2013: 14). Although transnational social relations with friends and family continued, daily life in the estate was also very much shaped by the kind of localised, face-to-face friendships that were formed in and around campus and the apartment building.

Located close to the campus of a state-owned university on the island of Penang, Palm Leaves refers to a 32-storeys high, four-block long high-rise building containing almost 1000 apartments. From the little shop on the first floor that sold so-called ‘Arab bread’, to the Iranian beauty salon, the Chinese food court or the Yemeni women dressed in long black abayas, sitting in the garden and looking after their children, everything pointed to the fact that this Malaysian high-rise building had become a very diverse site of everyday coexistence. While the island of Penang has long been an important point of contact in the Southeast Asian region and has attracted traders and travellers from all over the world for centuries (Loh, 2009), the multi-ethnic living environment of Palm Leaves has nevertheless prompted all sorts of negative narratives about the place – it was mostly seen as a dangerous site of mixity.

As Laura Ring (2006: 14) has noted, high-rise living brings about distinct ‘forms and problems of sociality’, because high-rise apartment buildings are generally multi-ethnic and multi-religious – and hence more diverse than the more ethnically segregated residential areas of large cosmopolitan cities. In Palm Leaves, diversity was not only about ethnicity and religion, however, but also about national citizenship and migration status, about age and class: elderly Chinese Malaysians lived door-to-door with young Nigerian students or middle-class Iranian families. Palm Leaves was characterised by both diversity and mobility – with so many residents from all over the world temporarily living in Palm Leaves, there was a constant turnover of residents. Ring argues that in such a context, neighbouring ‘requires a kind of vigilant labour, under conditions of imperfect information and undetermined expectations’ (Ring, 2006: 22). Iranians living in the high-rise were preoccupied with neighbouring, but even more with the formation of friendships. In contrast to neighbouring, there is an element of ‘choice’ in friendship, and to my Iranian interlocutors, choosing a friend was a time-consuming process that involved careful inquiry into other urban residents’ suitability as friends.

Iranians were indeed positioned in specific ways in the micro-politics of coexistence in Palm Leaves, and this specific positionality was largely related to the geopolitical position of Iran in the Middle East. Indeed, for Iranians in Malaysia, forming close social ties always held the risk not only of personal betrayal but also of political infiltration, and thus making friends was risky. In the context of both formal state surveillance and informal moral policing, Iranian students often chose to ‘keep their distance’ with other Iranians. In contrast, engaging in convivial relations with people from other – especially Western – countries was constructed as an easier endeavour. As one Iranian living in Palm Leaves put it: ‘In Malaysia, we are free – except when we are with other Iranians’.

Student visas were among the visas most readily available to Iranians, and many Iranians that I encountered in Malaysia were ‘studying in order to travel’, as one friend put it. Some were in their 30s or 40s, thus significantly older than ‘average’ students. Iranian students started to arrive in Malaysia following the tightening of migration regimes in North America and Western Europe in the wake of the global ‘war on terror’. At around the same time, the Malaysian government launched campaigns in various parts of the world to attract international students and as a result, Malaysia developed into a significant destination country for students from Asia, the Middle East and Africa (Daniels, 2014; Mandal, 2014; Sirat, 2008; Wong and Wen, 2013). During my fieldwork, the largest group of postgraduate foreign students at Malaysian universities came from Iran: visa policies allowed them easy and quick entry, relatively low academic registration fees contributed to the relatively low cost of living, and English-language education made Malaysia an attractive destination. In 2013, more than 100,000 Iranians were living in the capital of Kuala Lumpur alone, many (but not all) of them as students (Marcinkowski, 2013).

Grounded in 12 months of non-consecutive ethnographic fieldwork carried out between 2012 and 2014 in and around Palm Leaves, the material presented here is characterised by a specific historical conjuncture, namely a time marked by international economic sanctions against Iran, the ensuing economic turmoil in Iran, and the tightening of Malaysian immigration regulations. Importantly, my research was not, from the beginning, focused on Iranians living in the high-rise – rather, this focus developed in the research process. Indeed, carrying out ethnographic fieldwork in diverse sites of urban coexistence challenges ‘ethnographic ideals of “immersion” and wholeness’ (Berg and Sigona, 2013: 347) – it is impossible for a single researcher to ‘see’ from the vantage points of all the inhabitants of such a diverse site (Berg and Sigona, 2013: 347; see also Gidley, 2013: 368). While multi-group research carried out by a collective of ethnographers seems a promising possibility to approach such sites (Gidley, 2013), this paper aims at understanding the specific positionality of Iranians in the negotiation of intra- as well as trans-ethnic sociality and suspicion in an extraordinarily diverse site of urban coexistence. By focusing on Iranians’ living in and around Palm Leaves, I do not assume that Iranians form an internally homogeneous ‘community’, nor that national citizenship erases other forms of difference, such as those along the lines of ethnicity or class. ² I do argue, however, that in the context of temporary dwelling in a Malaysian high-rise, national citizenship matters in more than one way: while nationality is a powerful identity marker and often the first thing that fellow residents in the high-rise enquire about, the specific national history of Iran, too, has important bearings on the argument that will be developed in this paper. Indeed, the formation of friendships in Palm Leaves is not just shaped by this specific site of urban coexistence, but also by the contexts of origin of its inhabitants, especially when return is an option that they (have to) consider. Contemporary migration regimes made it impossible for Iranians in Malaysia to know for how long they would be able to stay, whether they would succeed to move on to other destinations, or whether they would return to Iran (see also Fozi, 2013). Consequently, a possible return to Iran remained an important point of reference and shaped everyday life – and the formation of friendships – in the diaspora. As Martine Guichard has pointed out, and as will become clear in the following sections of this paper, friendships are shaped both by the specific times and spaces in which they take place (see Guichard, 2014: 2).

Under suspicious eyes: Iranian friendships in Palm Leaves

Completed in 1997, Palm Leaves was built during the construction boom that Malaysia experienced in the early 1990s, and it can be seen as a material remainder of past projects of nationalist development. The period of the early 1990s was marked by the fact that Malaysia officially ‘joined the ranks of the dragons of the Asia-Pacific economic rim’ (Goh, 2011: 144). At the same time, the then prime minister Mahathir Mohammad launched his Vision 2020, a nationalist project which envisioned Malaysia as ‘a fully industrialized nation by the year 2020’ (Goh, 2011: 144) – economic liberalisation and large development projects followed. In Penang, property development companies aggressively transformed the urban landscape by investing massively in high-rise condominiums (Goh, 2002). Although the economic prosperity of the early 1990s was short-lived, the high-rise apartment blocks built in that period are now an inherent part of the cityscape.

When I first arrived in Palm Leaves in 2012, the building was partly run down, ceilings were leaking, staircases were in dire need of restoration, and facilities such as the fitness centre were defunct and out of use. The material decay of the building was also reflected in its fading prestige. At a student gathering, one Malay guest retold how Palm Leaves was different in the past, how it was a ‘high-class condominium, with very good security’. The argument about ‘good security’ often referred to the idea of keeping the place safe from ‘dangerous outsiders’ and the prestige of a place was also defined by its exclusivity of access (see Fischer, 2008). I soon understood that Palm Leaves had the reputation of not being particularly safe, nor, for that reason, particularly prestigious and it was mostly seen as a dangerous site of mixity.

Although apartments were owned by Malaysians, only a few Malaysians actually lived in Palm Leaves. Because of its proximity to campus, most apartments in Palm Leaves were indeed rented out to international students who had come to Malaysia to pursue a degree. As such, this high-rise was similar to so many high-rise apartment buildings across the country that had undergone significant diversification in the wake of international student migration to Malaysia (see e.g. Daniels, 2010). In Penang, housing estate agents routinely directed Middle Eastern – including Iranian – as well as African students to available apartments in Palm Leaves. Western students, in contrast, were generally offered flats in other condominiums. Property agents’ practices thus reproduced and reinforced the ethnic segregation of urban living environments, something that confirms broader observations about the perpetuation of ethnic divides in the urban built environment in Malaysia (Bunnell, 2002; Daniels, 2010; Fischer, 2008). On campus and around, it was common to find ethnicity or nationality explicitly mentioned in adverts for rooms or flats, a fact not very surprising given the persistent, state-led ethnicisation of the Malaysian citizenry (Holst, 2012): ‘Chinese only’, ‘Malay female only’, ‘no international students’. Among international residents, African students are particularly discriminated against, as Timothy Daniels has demonstrated in his work on African students in Klang Valley (see Daniels, 2014).

However, Palm Leaves was not merely marked as a site of ethnic diversity in a larger racialised urban environment: to my Iranian friends, it was the diversity amongst Iranians living in and around the high-rise that was particularly tormenting. When I first met her at university on a rainy day, Shahnaz, a young Iranian woman, approached me by saying that she felt very lonely in Penang, and that she was homesick. Shahnaz considered it important to make friends in the migratory context, but making friends was a complicated endeavour. Shahnaz was sharing her flat in Palm Leaves with a fellow Iranian student, went to one of the Iranian beauty salons in Palm Leaves, travelled with an Iranian taxi driver, and entrusted her computer to yet another Iranian student when something did not work. In her account of these relations, utilitarian aspects were key – one could here speak of a ‘community of convenience’ (Kathiravelu, 2013: 11). Indeed, some spaces within and around the high-rise specifically catered to the Iranian diaspora and interactions taking place within the context of these commercial exchanges were generally characterised by friendly exchanges and courteous small talk. Like Shahnaz, many Iranians hence encountered each other around the practicalities of everyday life in a foreign country.

Nevertheless, Shahnaz explained that she was literally ill from the perpetual suspicion and fear, and that she constantly had to watch herself when in the company of other Iranians – what she said and to whom, where she went, whom she met, and how she dressed. In contrast, Shahnaz asked me whether I had not noticed that ‘Arab’ women were often sitting together in the garden of Palm Leaves, watching their children play, or that ‘Arab’ men usually gathered at the top of the parking lot at night and talked until the wee hours of the morning. ³ Shahnaz commented that ‘Arab people are so united. It’s impressive. But Iranians, wherever they go, it is the same: they don’t trust each other easily, they start friendships very slowly’. The diversity of life in Palm Leaves prompted my Iranian interlocutors to compare themselves with other communities, and to reflect on the lack of sociality between Iranians. Another Iranian living in Palm Leaves summarised it in this way: ‘Iranians meeting each other in the lift will not even say hi to each other’.

Indeed, as these quotes illustrate, the formation of friendships among Iranians was highly problematised, something that needs to be understood in the broader context of post-revolution Iran. The Iranian students that I encountered in Malaysia were indeed all part of the so-called nasl-e sevoum, literally ‘the third generation’ (Khosravi, 2008). What distinguishes the members of this generation from earlier generations in Iran is that they have no memory of the Islamic revolution – they see the latter as their parents’ project (Khosravi, 2008: 5). The so-called ‘third generation’ was educated and socialised under the rule of the Islamic Republic. One Iranian student living in Palm Leaves explained how this socialisation, she thought, led Iranians in general to be suspicious of each other:

When we were kids, our parents taught us: we are talking like that at home, but when you go to school, you shouldn’t talk like this. As a kid I was very careful because I knew that if I said something wrong, my family could be in danger for that (…). At school they would ask us: are your parents practising, do they pray? Whether or not your parents did, you had to say ‘yes’. It was very stressful as a kid, but we had to do this. We grew up like that. It forced us to have two faces. This is why we cannot trust Iranians. Because we know they are also … two-faced.

In Malaysia, not only did the kind of suspicion that young Iranians had grown accustomed to in Iran persist – it was amplified by the context of migration and life in a diverse site of urban coexistence. One of the reasons that was mentioned for this was that it was much more difficult to actually situate people outside of Iran:

Here we cannot know the background of people. If I talk to an Iranian, in the back of my mind I will always wonder whether he or she is from the government. And I don’t know, so that becomes a problem for me … Inside Iran, we know each other … we know each other’s homes, lifestyles, where we are from (…). But in Malaysia you cannot see the family, you cannot see the background history from that person – this is what makes you worry all the time: what if they are from the government (…)? In Malaysia, there is no proof.

Iranians thus felt that the diversity within the Iranian diaspora in Malaysia – and consequently, in Palm Leaves – was the most worrying, and the Iranian diaspora in Malaysia was undeniably an exceptionally heterogeneous one (Fozi, 2013). Indeed, until 2014, Malaysia’s liberal visa policies towards Iranians allowed Iranian citizens both relatively easy and quick entry – a rather exceptional opportunity, as most countries require Iranian citizens to undergo lengthy visa procedures. As Navid Fozi (2013) has explained, these liberal visa policies became particularly important after the contested Iranian elections of 2009, when huge protests followed the re-election of Mahmud Ahmadinejad: many political activists were forced to leave Iran quickly, as the regime cracked down on its opponents. At that time, Malaysia seemed like an ideal first destination and within months, the numbers of young, dissident Iranians in Malaysia increased. Some claimed that the seat of the Iranian political opposition was now no more in France – where it had been for years – but in Malaysia. At the same time, however, Navid Fozi has argued that the uncertain residence status of Iranians in Malaysia and the likelihood of having to return to Iran puts those activists who have fled persecution in an extremely vulnerable position: ‘It is therefore not surprising that Iranian political activism in Malaysia is generally limited to a reformist agenda as opposed to calls for regime change, which are prevalent in other Iranian diasporas’ (Fozi, 2013).

Furthermore, by the time I came to Malaysia in 2012, the international sanctions against Iran and the subsequent devaluation of the Iranian rial clearly had changed the topography of the Iranian diaspora in Malaysia. Whereas previously, Malaysia was known as an affordable destination for Iranians, at the time of my fieldwork, many people struggled to stay on (see also Fozi, 2013). Iranian students who had been in the country for a few years argued that those who could still afford to leave Iran and come to Malaysia around that time were likely to be sponsored by the Iranian government: ‘After the devaluation of our money, not everyone could afford to come to Malaysia. Only certain people, those working for the government, are now able to come’.

So while in the wake of the contested elections of 2009, many political activists and artists had entered Malaysia, by 2012, the international sanctions against Iran had transformed the topography of Iranian immigration. Now, I was told, ‘there are so many veiled Iranian women around in Penang. That was not the case before’. In other words, and as Shahram Khosravi (2008) has shown, the so-called nasl-e sevoum is not a homogeneous group of young people, and there is a wide spectrum of political and religious orientation among young Iranians. The fact that in Palm Leaves, these different groups were all united under one roof gave rise to deep anxieties: precisely because the different migration streams to Malaysia had rendered the Iranian diaspora so diverse by this point in time. Constant mobility made it impossible to know (and to situate) everyone in and around Palm Leaves all of the time.

In order to navigate the uncertainties of everyday life, Iranians living in and around Palm Leaves actually resorted to a certain number of ‘certitudes’ – when suspicion is, as it were, suspended (see Bozzini et al., 2014). The first of these ‘certitudes’ involved a close reading of someone’s clothing and appearance. The veil, a constant source of anxiety and concern among Iranian women in Malaysia, was an attribute of key importance: many unveiled Iranian women would routinely warn each other against the ones who were wearing the veil. Identifying people ‘working for the government’ thus involved identifying people who ‘follow the rules of the government and wear the scarf and definitely they are religious’, one Iranian friend explained.

Another ‘certitude’ that helped Iranians to navigate the intimacies of high-rise living in Malaysia is probably shared by most citizens of authoritarian regimes – it is a form of ‘state fetishism’ (Hertz, 1998, cited in Bozzini, 2011: 108), that attributes to the state an almost unlimited power and influence (Bozzini, 2011: 108). In a very similar fashion to what David Bozzini described in the context of state surveillance in Eritrea, discussions with Iranian students in Malaysia often emphasised the power of ‘the state’. There was a sense of a highly authoritarian police state that was effectively omniscient. As one of my research partners unequivocally put it:

I think Iran has one of the best developed systems of espionage: everywhere you go, from the phone to sms, to skype and viber … whatever you can think of, they will get the data from. So that’s why, and even though it doesn’t make you happy, in your heart … that’s why you decide to be quiet.

Institutions of state surveillance exist, of course. The Iranian government has an official bureau that supervises its students overseas, a bureau that is under the direct supervision of the Ministry of Information (Intelligence). As Malaysia became the new hub for Iranian students, this institution was transferred from Japan to Kuala Lumpur, and the activities of Iranian students in Malaysia were closely monitored. Furthermore, the Malaysian government has always been ambivalent about the Iranian opposition. Malaysian police cracked down on the protests that were carried out in front of the building of the United Nations in Kuala Lumpur following the Iranian elections in 2009. Rumours spread that activists participating in these demonstrations had been arrested by Malaysian intelligence and sent back to Iran. It has also been reported that the Malaysian government allows Iranian intelligence to monitor Iranian expatriate activities in the country (Fozi, 2013).

For Iranians’ everyday life in and around Malaysian campuses, and especially for social relations with other Iranians in Palm Leaves, such a context of state surveillance has important consequences. Like in the case of Eritrea (Bozzini 2011: 108) secrecy and dissimulation are not just directed towards explicit state institutions, such as the Iranian embassy, but also more generally towards other Iranians:

It’s a matter of insecurity. You always have to be scared of the fact that the things that you have said can be used against you … you prefer not to even try making friends with them.

In contrast to expressing oneself, risking one’s words to be used against oneself, dissimulation – answering evasively, not mentioning whom one is going to meet or where one is going to go – is considered socially acceptable. Asking too many questions about precisely such things, is, however, considered out of place: ‘a friend is someone who doesn’t ask questions’.

Ethnography and suspicion

For obvious reasons, such an atmosphere of suspicion bears consequences for the production of anthropological knowledge. As David Bozzini, Anne Lavanchy and Valerio Simoni (2014) have argued, we should ask ourselves what happens when doubts and suspicion shape the field we try to account for: how can we know what is going on when everybody else does not know for sure?

During my fieldwork, I was repeatedly warned against particular people, advised by Iranian informants not to talk to other Iranians, or not to get ‘too close’ to them. I was, in other words, asked to be just as careful in the formation of social relations as my interlocutors and just as wary of friendship. At times, I was given advice that involved very direct warning of a person’s alleged ties to the Iranian government or that emphasised the powers of the Iranian secret services. The line between well-meant suggestions and subtle threats was not always easy to identify.

I did not take any of this advice lightly. Asking questions in an environment where people avoid asking questions of course arouses suspicions about the anthropologists’ motives. Following the ethical standards of the anthropological discipline, I tried to be transparent about my research endeavours, something that was rendered difficult also because the focus of my research gradually shifted. Yet if we are to believe Harry West and Todd Sanders (2003), ‘transparency’ itself is an ideological formation, and I could not avoid being part of circles of gossip myself. One consequence of this atmosphere of suspicion is that I became very secretive myself when met with questions about whom I had met or talked to. This need to be secretive was enhanced by the fact that I often did not know what kind of information could potentially be considered ‘dangerous’: in a context of suspicion, we can trust people have good reasons to be suspicious about each other, and that they are, to quote George Marcus, ‘paranoid within reason’ (1999). Hence, the prevalence of suspicion in a particular field affects the anthropologist’s fieldwork, but it also tells us ‘relevant “information” about the social milieu’ (Bisztrai, 2014) of our research partners and the daily reality they live in.

Gossip and moral policing in the high-rise

The constant worry about being under surveillance deeply affected the friendships that Iranians could engage in while they were living in and around Palm Leaves – despite the fact that most expatriate Iranians were not part of an activist political movement. Why were friendships so worrying to my informants and what kind of information was considered ‘dangerous’, in the sense that it could do harm? In Young and Defiant in Tehran (2008), Shahram Khosravi describes campaigns that specifically target Iran’s younger generation and their lifestyle. There is, according to him, a criminalisation of youth culture that erases the distinction between the illegal, the immoral and the sinful (2008: 18). Consequently, young Iranian men and women who violate the norms of the regime – with its emphasis on veiling and its idealisation of the figure of the modest, Islamic basiji youth (Khosravi, 2008: 38) – could be prosecuted. Indeed, drinking alcohol or attending parties that are attended by both men and women can be serious legal infractions (Khosravi, 2008: 38). Even in Malaysia, such practices were not benign and hence had consequences for the formation of social relations. Marjane, an Iranian friend my age, gave the following example:

Let’s imagine a scenario: you and I, we are both Iranian, we get to know each other, we go out together, maybe we drink alcohol … the next day I realize that you are from the embassy, and you just wanted to test me. You report me. It’s because of this: we don’t know. We don’t know what is in people’s hearts, we don’t know what is in people’s minds.

Because of this insecurity, Marjane argued that she kept her distance from other Iranians. In the context of Palm Leaves, women were particularly wary of whom they socialised with, and very much aware of the risks of gossip, as the following statement by another female Iranian student exemplifies:

Palm Leaves: yes, it has the beautiful view, it is cool and windy, it has security guards. But I couldn’t trust anyone. So I didn’t feel like I was safe. And I couldn’t invite any friends to my home. My neighbours were Iranian. Even now, I have friends who live there, I am still worried. Like if I go there on a visit and there is a mixed group, women and men, I feel scared. I think ‘again they will make a story about me’.

The constant worry about living under the surveillance of co-nationals produced a topography of fear, affecting the friendships that Iranians (and Iranian women in particular) could engage in while they were living in and around Palm Leaves. In the context of high-rise living, consequences of gossip – often stereotyped as banal and inconsequential (see e.g. Farrer, 2002) – were felt to be serious, and it was hence crucial to contain. One possible implication of gossip concerned the possibility of return to Iran: Among Iranians, it was a well-known fact that if the Iranian government had proof that a citizen was not behaving according to the rules of the Islamic Republic while abroad – for instance, by not wearing the veil – this would seriously impact her chances of finding a job back in Iran (see also Mir-Hosseini, 2010). Several Iranian women that I knew also had been accused of being ‘friends’ with men, a serious allegation, especially if they were married, and that represented a real threat to their reputation – not just in Palm Leaves, but also back in Iran. Consequently, and although friendship was generally positively valued, it could be dangerously connoted with sexual promiscuity when friendships between women and men were concerned.

The intimacies brought about by high-rise living were particularly conducive to moral policing and the circulation of gossip. Yet another Iranian woman who lived in Sunnyside, one of the two high-rise buildings situated across Palm Leaves, illustrated this point very well: ‘No need to watch sitcoms on TV when you live in Sunnyside: you can simply look out of the window and watch your neighbours’. The material site of the high-rise placed the practice of friendship under the suspicious eyes of neighbours.

Hence, for most Iranians, the perils of daily coexistence in the high-rise were not related to a lack of social control; rather, by pointing out the continuous moral policing by neighbours, they problematised the absence of urban anonymity and questioned the very urban nature of high-rise living on the island of Penang. In contrast with larger cities such as Tehran, the dangers of gossip loomed large precisely because Penang was, according to my Iranian research participants, not a ‘real’ city. As one of my friends put it: ‘Penang is like a village: people gossip so much’. Thus, the large, anonymous city as ‘city of strangers’ was seen as positive and contrasted to the Malaysian high-rise, which was associated with village life, gossip and backwardness.

Cosmopolitan friendships in Palm Leaves

Since life in Palm Leaves was characterised by post-migration diversity, the centrality of suspicion in the negotiation of friendships between Iranians that I have described so far obviously raises the question as to how relations with non-Iranians – including with the anthropologist – were negotiated by my research participants. Indeed, superficially, it seemed that relations with non-Iranians allowed for the formation of easier and less distrustful social ties. As one Iranian student put it: ‘Once I came here, it was funny, so many [Iranians] told me: “Here [in Malaysia], don’t talk with Iranians, just try to make relationships with foreigners”’.

Engaging in convivial relations with non-Iranians was something that many of my Iranian friends strived for, and many argued that they had never experienced such national, ethnic and religious diversity back in Iran. Simin, an Iranian woman in her mid-30s, argued that living in Palm Leaves had really changed her, precisely because it had made it possible for her to befriend foreigners whom she would never had met back in Iran. She said:

Thank God I came here. It really changed me. You know, thirty years ago we were at war with Iraq […]. Back home I had very negative feelings about Iraqis – I felt that they had attacked us, that they were aggressive, violent people. Now [in Palm Leaves], my neighbour is Iraqi, and I really love her.

Despite such positive accounts, the increasing politicisation of the Sunni/Shia divide in Malaysia tended to inhibit friendly relations with non-Iranian Sunni Muslims more and more. On campus, public events organised under the banner of the university were openly criminalising Shias as ‘deviant Muslims’, and many Iranians feared that the spectre of religious sectarianism would change Malaysian society, and their own place within it, in the near future. In Palm Leaves, too, these divisions could increasingly be felt: one Iranian tenant recalled how a Libyan neighbour had approached him in the lift, and after having asked him about his faith, said: ‘We [Sunnis] do not consider you Shias as Muslims’. Hence, Iranians generally did not join the Friday prayers in the Mushollah of Palm Leaves and felt excluded from the broader Muslim umma in Malaysia. With widely publicised crackdowns on Shia practices, key rituals such as ashura could not be carried out in the open anymore: Shia believers were forced to retain a low profile and to retreat into private apartments in high-rise buildings such as Palm Leaves, hoping not to arouse the suspicion of distrustful Sunni neighbours.

In this context, friendships with non-Muslim Malaysians and non-Malaysians seemed more unproblematic, and the desire to entertain friendships with Western students in particular was quite common. These aspirations also showed in the relations that Iranians developed with me as a researcher. While we were discussing friendship amongst Iranians and the prevalence of suspicion, one of my interlocutors told me the following: ‘Like you, you are a foreigner, and that’s why you can be close, because you are not Iranian. We sit here, and I am telling you all of this … but if you were Iranian, I would be worried’. Being non-Iranian was thus considered to be an advantage by most of my interlocutors, and this was true of relations with other non-Iranians, too. At the same time, Iranians’ friendships with non-Iranian, non-Sunni Others around campus and in Palm Leaves often involved a specific type of conviviality, mostly around going out and clubbing, and both dancing and drinking alcohol were not uncommon. Nur, one of my Iranian friends, argued that she had ‘different groups of friends for different situations: some friends can be just for wasting time, when you want to have some fun’. Speaking of some non-Iranian friends, she said that she ‘would never want to spend most of my time with these friends, because that’s just for having fun’. Clearly, these friends were not very ‘close’ ones and belonged to a very specific part of Nur’s life, as she well explained. The fact that these cosmopolitan friendships were often quite superficial was also pointed out by Mira, another Iranian friend, when we were discussing my research. She argued that Iranians certainly were suspicious of each other and that friendships were very much problematised among Iranians. However, she asked: ‘But then, at the end of the day, who are the people you can count on? Who are your real friends? Who is driving you to hospital in case of emergency?’.

Mira’s questions point to the important ideal of mutual help and assistance in friendship, an ideal that gained particular valence among Iranians in the context of everyday life in a foreign country. Earlier on, I have hinted at the fact that in relations between Iranians in the diaspora, utilitarian aspects were key, and that one could speak of a ‘community of convenience’ (Kathiravelu, 2013: 11) – in fact, ‘helping’ one’s friends was a very important dimension of friendship discourses and practices, and it became even more important as the environment for Iranians in Malaysia became increasingly less hospitable. In the following sections of this paper, I want to follow up on Mira’s questions by zooming in on occasions when Iranians did form friendships with other Iranians, despite the context of uncertainty, moral policing and suspicion that I have described thus far.

Friendship behind closed doors

When she visited my apartment in Palm Leaves, the first thing that my friend Marjane told me to do was to buy curtains to impede strangers to peep into my flat. This was rather uncommon in the Malaysian context, and Malaysian residents in Palm Leaves often left windows and doors open onto the common corridor, allowing for some breeze in the hot and humid climate. Marjane’s own apartment was beautifully decorated with Iranian carpets, wooden furniture – and thick curtains. Hence carefully protected from the outside world, her flat was turned into an intimate, private space, and only very few people had been given access to it.

When talking about friendships, Marjane pointed out that in four years, she had only invited three women, and never had she invited a man. I experienced girls’ gatherings at her place a few times: two or three Iranian women would spend the evening together, talking, dying their hair, doing their eyebrows or painting their nails together. Sometimes, someone would smoke a cigarette or drink some wine. Letting people come into this private space occurred very rarely, and it was considered a great proof of trust to invite someone to one’s home – also because the private realm revealed something about its inhabitants.

It is in such small friendly gatherings that I witnessed how the discourse of surveillance was not just constraining, but also enabling sociality and friendship. ⁴ Indeed, the common experience of defying social norms could also draw people together. Sharing secrets – such as an unmarried couple letting an Iranian friend know that they were living together by inviting her to their place – or inviting an Iranian to a party where everyone would collectively drink alcohol could be read as a proof of friendship, and it was very important for all those who attended to engage in these ‘cultural crimes’ together. Often, such small parties were still talked about months later by those who had attended them: they were tokens of friendship, precisely because they had taken place in contexts of surveillance.

Importantly, such gatherings were informal in nature and it would be emphasised that an invitation to such a gathering was ‘without ta’arof’, which comes down to saying that it is completely sincere, and that it should therefore be accepted without risking a faux pas (Vivier-Muresan, 2006: 9). Indeed, the notion of ta’arof – a complex code of courtesy governing social relations between Iranians – establishes shared moral values such as humility, generosity and altruism and ensures their respect in public (Vivier-Muresan, 2006: 13; see also Beeman, 1986). It is widely acknowledged by Iranians, however, that to ‘do ta’arof’ (ta’arof kardan) requires ruse and the art of dissimulation – something that is considered legitimate following the widely shared idea that one should seek to protect one’s inner, private life (baten) from the influences of a corrupt outside world (Vivier-Muresan, 2006: 16). With ‘true’ friends, however, the artificial character of ta’arof etiquette is criticised and it is a proof of friendship to argue that one’s relationship does not need ta’arof as it is based on genuine affection (Vivier-Muresan, 2006: 17). Indeed, as Graham and Khosravi have argued, ‘Ta’arof and intimacy (sammimiyat) are inversely related to each other’ (Graham and Khosravi, 2002: 237).

Accordingly, the intimate spaces of sociality located behind the closed doors of private apartments were most vulnerable: carefully monitoring whom one allowed into this space – and into one’s heart – was a source of constant preoccupation that required the kind of ‘vigilant labour’ that Laura Ring has so eloquently described (2006). As a matter of fact, the need to protect one’s private life was a common thread in discourses on friendship, a thread that draws on a duality of the self (zaher/baten) that has been described at length in scholarship on Iran (see e.g. Beeman, 1986). A quote by Sina illustrates this point very well:

When you are too connected with other people, when you don’t have any privacy for yourself, when you don’t keep your secrets or your private life for yourself and everybody knows … this will create too many problems. I have one or two close friends and I know what I told them, anytime, I can fix it. But even with those close friends, I don’t speak about all the details of my life.

Seen in the light of the duality of zaher/baten, the injunction to protect one’s secrets and privacy seems to draw on a wider, more long-standing ambivalence about non-kin relations. ⁵ Although these insights deserve further exploration, they point to the fact that something more than state surveillance governs friendship among members of the nasl-e sevoum in Malaysia, and hence contributes to shape the form that friendship takes for Iranians living in and around Palm Leaves.

Conclusion

Engaging with the specific position of Iranians living in transit in Malaysia, in this paper, I have sought to tease out the ambiguities in the making of friendships in the context of urban high-rise living. My ethnographic data have revealed that to Iranians living in and around Palm Leaves, an extremely diverse urban estate, friendships are informed by practices and discourses of suspicion, anxiety and ambivalence – particularly when friendships with fellow Iranians are concerned. I have traced back the fact that Iranians both want and fear friendships with fellow Iranians to the political context of post-revolution Iran, and in particular, the constant fear of state surveillance: this fear, amplified by the uncertainty of life in transit and the likelihood of a return to Iran, deeply affected Iranians’ social relations in and around the high-rise. Yet the materiality of the apartment building in itself – and in particular the intimacy of high-rise living, conducive to gossip and moral policing – also added to the feeling of being under surveillance: the fact that the Iranian diaspora living under one roof in Palm Leaves was a very heterogeneous one led to widespread suspicion towards other Iranian residents and to intense vigilance towards potential friends. Furthermore, the very urban nature of high-rise living on Penang was being seen as problematic: the dangers of gossip loomed large in Palm Leaves precisely because Penang was, according to my interlocutors, not ‘a real city’.

By zooming in on the formation of friendships amidst suspicion, I have shown when and how Iranians risked friendships in and around Palm Leaves, also with non-Iranians, and pointed to the ways in which the spectre of state surveillance could also enable sociality. By teasing out the ambivalence in Iranian migrants’ negotiation of friendship – by emphasising both the aspiration for close intimacy and the injunction to keep one’s secrets – I have argued that friendship was ultimately always an exercise in keeping the ‘right’ distance. Referring to the notion of the duality of the self as well as to ta’arof, I have argued that my interlocutors’ conflicted narratives draw on a wider ambivalence about non-kin relations: long-standing ideas about the self, intimacy and friendship have gained new valence in the current political context and contribute to shape the formation of Iranians’ friendships as they are dwelling in a diverse Malaysian high-rise building.