Don’t ta’arof me! – The fine line between mooching and disrespecting

With some carpet sellers in Kashan

If you compliment an Iranian on his shirt, he may offer it to you. Don’t accept the offer! He’s merely being courteous, following the traditional form of Iranian etiquette known as ta’arof. As a general rule of thumb, if they continue to offer after being declined three times, you can assume the ta’arofer is being genuine.

Iranians, if you talk to anyone who has been there, are almost absurdly hospitable. As a traveler on a budget, this is a fantastic feature of travel here in the Middle East. But in the wrong hands, it becomes a dangerous force that can easily be abused in what can only be described as rich-world-mooching-off-poor-world nincompoopery. A thin line is walked: allowing them to play the traditional role of host becomes pillaging from those who can’t afford it. Refusing to accept their generous offers too frequently is tantamount to turning your nose up at your host.

How does ta’arof play out for guests in Iran?

One: They will fight you away when you try and pay for anything. Shadi, a product manager and karate student who took me to go buy a power convertor to charge my electronics, tried to pay for the convertor herself. Ahmad, the guy who sat next to me on the plane from Kuwait and shared a taxi into town, fought me off from paying my share of the hour-long cab ride.

A bus stop in Tehran - note the young woman's rebelliously-displayed hair

Two: Shop owners or taxi drivers will decline your payment or give you discounts. Some cab drivers have charged me less than locals, simply because I am foreign. One must spend time in India, where foreigners are universally charged between two to one hundred times more for taxi rides (simply because they are unknowing enough to be cheated so severely), to know how nice such a gesture feels.

Dried apricots at a shop selling foodstuffs (Kashan)

Three: Dinner invitations flow like (metaphorical) wine. You only need to have met an Iranian and exchanged nary a few sentences before the invitation to eat at their home follows. On Eid-al-Fitr, which celebrates the end of the month of fasting, Ahmad, the one from the plane ride, invited me to his home, where we feasted on mixed lamb-chicken kebabs, tabouleh garnished with lemon and mint, long-grain rice with potatoes and this wet, slow-cooked lamb dish I’d never seen before but sure hope to see plenty more of. After dinner, he drove me home, accompanied by his childhood friend and two sons.

At Ahmah's home, enjoying a dinner feast thrown for me

With younger, English-speaking friends, I’ve attempted to use the guise of introducing them to the Western tradition of “going Dutch,” with mixed results. All of this kindness has had me wondering what it is that makes us in the West so ginger about inviting guests in for a meal? Is it some legacy of frosty Anglo-Saxon social code? Maybe we’re simply too caught up in our own, self-centred lives to want to make time for guests. Whatever the reasons, I think we could do with a little bit of ta’arof, though perhaps not to such Persian lengths, in our increasingly atomized, eating-lunch-at-our-cubicle, existences.