Cuttin' a Rug; She's Sold Shoes in John Lewis and Hot Dogs in Leith. Now Caroline Allan Is Selling More Than (Pounds) 2 Million Worth of Persian Carpets in Scotland. More at Home in an Iranian Bazaar Than Anywhere Else, Allan Is Obsessed with These Beautiful Creations That Have Reduced Grown Men to Tears

Summary

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As men go, Caroline Allan makes for an oddly hobbit-like one: short and shapeless in her loosely bagged shirts, hair squashed under a mud-green scarf. An almost absurd figure of a man. But in the eyes of the Iranian carpet traders, that is what she has been, an honorary man, a strange money-bearing eunuch, breastless, hairless, endocrinologically alien. "There's a merchant in Tehran," she says, "who hates dealing with me. But he loves my money more than he hates me." The bazaar is a rigidly conservative male domain, a sea of wool, silk, gossip and testosterone. Men kiss, hug, argue, barter; voices rising high in a chorus of haggling. But a woman like Allan can only stand and choose, give her prices and her money. She is not permitted to even shake hands. It's as if a social vacuum follows her. She is untouchable.

At least that was the case until one day last September when, in the bazaar in Hamadan, a wealthy merchant walked straight up and shook her by the hand, and it struck her that there must have been a significant slackening in the observance of social codes in Iran.

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Extract

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Cuttin' a Rug; She's Sold Shoes in John Lewis and Hot Dogs in Leith. Now Caroline Allan Is Selling More Than (Pounds) 2 Million Worth of Persian Carpets in Scotland. More at Home in an Iranian Bazaar Than Anywhere Else, Allan Is Obsessed with These Beautiful Creations That Have Reduced Grown Men to Tears

"It wasn't," she says, "a half-hearted shake. It was a grab by the hand and shake, the type of handshake I like. It was interesting. He had the courage of his convictions. I was a businesswoman, and he was happy to accept me. But it was more than that. I felt it said that people had the confidence that they could do something like that in a public space. That wouldn't have happened when I first went to Iran. They would have treated me with every bit as much respect and curiosity, because there's always curiosity. But nobody would have dared do that. The country had shifted enough for a man in a very, very public space, full of powerful people - because the merchants are powerful people - to feel comfortable enough to do...

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