Among The Believers Part 2

It was a hard word; it encouraged the young man to shed his anxiousness and talk. The topic of foreign currency was laid aside; it was of the injustices of the Shah that the two men spoke, each man supporting the other, leading the other on, until-in that dusty street with the plane trees, the shoeshine men, the pavement coin-sellers-they were both at the same pitch of pa.s.sion.

When the Shah ruled, everything in Iran had been for him. He had drained the country of billions; he had allowed the country to be plundered by foreign companies; he had filled the country with foreign advisers and technicians. These foreigners got huge salaries and lived in the big houses; the Americans even had their own television service. The people of Iran felt they had lost their country. And the Shah never really cared for religion, the precious Shia faith.

"What a nice thing it is now," the man from Bombay said, "to see the rule of Ali! Getting women back into the veil, getting them off television. No alcohol."

It was astonishing, after the pa.s.sion. Was that all that there was to the rule of Ali? Did the Shia millennium offer nothing higher? The man from Bombay and his companion could say nothing more, had nothing more to say; and perhaps they couldn't say that the true rewards of the revolution-as much a matter of undoing dishonour to Ali and the true faith, as of overthrowing the wicked-lay in heaven.

And the man from Bombay had another surprise for me. He wasn't staying with the rule of Ali. He was leaving Iran, after his twenty good years under the bad Shah, and going back to Bombay. That was why he had come to buy dollars in Firdowsi. His excess air baggage-and I gathered there was a lot-had to be paid for in dollars.

He said, and it was like another man speaking, "I don't know what's going to happen here now."

AT Iran Week I had been given ten minutes. At the Tehran Times I was almost offered a job. The Times was the new English-language daily; its motto was "May Truth Prevail." The office was new, well equipped, and busy, and there were some American or European helpers.

Mr. Parvez, the editor, was an Iranian of Indian origin, a gentle man in his mid-forties. Galleys were being brought to his table all the time, and I felt I wasn't holding him with my explanation of my visit. Our conversation began to go strange.

He said, "Are you a Muslim?"

"No. But I don't think it's necessary."

"Islam is a touchy subject here." On the wall behind Mr. Parvez was a large, severe photograph of Khomeini.

"I know."

"What is the money basis of this?" Mr. Parvez said, bending over a galley.

"Of what, Mr. Parvez?"

"Of what you want to write for us."

We disengaged-in fact, as I learned later, money was the touchy subject in that office: there wasn't much of it. And I was pa.s.sed on to the next desk, to Mr. Jaffrey, an older man, who had a story or a feature or an editorial in his typewriter but broke off to talk to me.

Mr. Jaffrey, too, was an Indian Shia. He came from Lucknow. He said he was told "rather bluntly" in 1948 that as a Muslim he had no future in the Indian Air Force. So he migrated to Pakistan. In Pakistan, as a Shia, he had run into difficulties of another sort, and ten years later he had moved to Iran. Now he was full of anxiety about Iran.

He spoke briskly; everything he said he had already thought out. "All Muslim people tend to put their faith in one man. In the 1960s the Shah was loved. Now they love Khomeini. I never thought the time would come when Khomeini would usurp the position of the Shah." Khomeini should have stood down after the revolution in favour of the administrators, but he hadn't; and as a result the country was now in the hands of "fanatics."

Someone brought Mr. Jaffrey a dish of fried eggs and a plate of pappadom, crisp fried Indian bread.

I said, "What about Ramadan?"

He said in his brisk way, "I'm not fasting."

He had been for Khomeini right through the revolution, because during the rule of the Shah the alternatives had become simple: religion or atheism. Every kind of corruption had come to Iran during the Shah's rule: money corruption, prost.i.tution, sodomy. The Shah was too cut off; he woke up too late to what was going on.

"And I thought, even in those days," Mr. Jaffrey said, "that Islam was the answer."

I couldn't follow. Religion, the practice of religion, the answer to a political need?

I said, "The answer to what, Mr. Jaffrey?"

"The situation of the country. Islam stands for four things. Brotherhood, honesty, the will to work, proper recompense for labour."

Still I didn't follow. Why not call for those four things? Why go beyond those four things? Why involve those four things with something as big as Islam?

"You see," Mr. Jaffrey said, and he became softer, "all my life I've wanted to see the true jame towhidi. I translate that as 'the society of believers.' "

It was the rule of Ali again: the dream of the society ruled purely by faith. But Mr. Jaffrey's faith was profounder than the faith of the man from Bombay; for him the rule of Ali was more than getting women back into the veil. Mr. Jaffrey's society of believers derived from an idea of the earliest days of Islam, when the Prophet handed down the divine laws, led his people in war and prayer, when every action, however worldly, served the true faith.

That was the kind of society that had to come to Iran. And Mr. Jaffrey-with his Indian-British education, and as if with another side of his personality-thought that such a society could be secured by inst.i.tutions: by getting the mullahs back into the mosques, getting Khomeini to stand down, and putting politicians and administrators into the administration. So, though Mr. Jaffrey didn't say it, to secure his dream of oneness, church and state were to be divided. Faith, education, and political instinct had locked Mr. Jaffrey into that contradiction.

It was simpler for the man from Bombay. He was happy to see in the rule of Ali, and run. Mr. Jaffrey was anguished that a dream, which had come so close, had been dashed by Khomeini.

And I had also to recognize that that dream of the society of believers excluded me. In that newspaper office-typewriters, galleys, the English language, telephones, "May Truth Prevail"-nothing of the intellectual life that I valued was of account; the convergences of sentiment or reason that occurred from time to time were coincidental.

In the open s.p.a.ce downstairs someone called out to me in an executive American voice, "Can I help you?"

It was one of the Iranian "directors" of the paper, and he was as unlikely a figure as could be imagined in the service of the jame towhidi. He was young, handsome, well barbered, with a black moustache. With the tips of his fingers he was holding down a chocolate-brown jacket that rested square on his shoulders, setting off the fawn trousers, the biscuit-coloured shirt, and the wide-knotted wide tie.

He must have thought I was another Indian Shia with the gift of the English language and with a need for a few rials; and in his executivelike way he began to walk me up and down, firing off questions, frowning at the floor, his skin a little moist from all the clothes he was wearing, and saying, "Certainly, certainly," to everything I said. When he understood that I didn't want to write for the paper, he stopped walking with me. And when I said good-bye he said, "Certainly, certainly."

Remember that director. Remember the busy newspaper office; Mr. Jaffrey at his typewriter; and the galleys falling onto the desk of the gentle editor who would have offered a stranger a job. Six months later, when I went back to Tehran, that office was desolate.

ONE of the English-language magazines I bought was published from the holy city of Qom. It was The Message of Peace and, as its t.i.tle warned, it was full of rage.

It raged about the Shah; about the "devils" of the West and the evils of Western technology; it even raged about poor old Mr. Desai, the Indian prime minister, who banned alcohol (good, from the Muslim point of view) but drank urine (from the Muslim point of view, deplorable). But it wasn't for its rages that I bought the magazine, or for the speeches of Khomeini, or for the biographies of the Shia Imams. I bought The Message of Peace for an article on Islamic urban planning.

Could there be such a thing? Apparently; and, more, it was badly needed. Islam was a complete way of life; it didn't separate the worldly from the spiritual. Hence it was necessary, in addition to avoiding materialist industrial excess, to plan for "a theocentric society." In this society women also had to be sheltered. Problems! But the very existence of these problems proved the need for sensible Islamic planning. And a solution was possible.

Build, at the corners of an imagined square, four residential areas. Give each a mosque, a clinic, and a nursery: that is where the women will busy themselves. The men will go to work. They will go to work in the centre of the square. At the very heart of this working area there will be a mosque large enough to hold all the male population. With the mosque there will be an alms-giving centre, since the giving of alms is as important in Islam as prayer, or fasting, or the pilgrimage to Mecca.

In a circle around the mosque there will be a bazaar; around the bazaar will be a circle of offices; and at the perimeter of this office circle there will be hospitals, maternity homes, and schools, so that men on their way to work can take their children to school, and on other occasions can rush to hospitals or maternity homes.

For recreation, women can meet and chat. Men can ride horses or take up flying. "The idea is not to encourage such games which distract the religious consciousness of the community."

There are certain other Islamic requirements. Water from recycled sewage is not to be used, except for irrigation. "The concept of cleanliness, and water as the medium of bodily cleanliness, is strong in Islam. The purifying agent for water is water itself and the chemical and biological processes are not acceptable from the religious point of view."

The houses in the residential areas are to be so aligned that the prayer call from the mosque can reach them without the use of an amplifier. There is a final detail. "The toilet fixtures like water closets shall be so arranged as to make the user not to face the City of Mecca either from his front or back side."

THE mountains to the north of Tehran showed in the morning light, faded in the daytime haze, and at sunset became a faint amethyst outline. The lights came on; here and there neon signs did their little jigs. The traffic roared. But through all the hectic-seeming day the cranes on the unfinished buildings had never moved.

Technology was evil. E. F. Schumacher of Small Is Beautiful had said so: The Message of Peace quoted him a lot, lashing the West with its own words. But technology surrounded us in Tehran, and some of it had been so Islamized or put to such good Islamic use that its foreign origin seemed of no account.

The hotel taxi driver could be helped through the evening traffic jams by the Koranic readings on his car radio; and when we got back to the hotel there would be mullahs on television. Certain modern goods and tools-cars, radios, televisions-were necessary; their possession was part of a proper Islamic pride. But these things were considered neutral; they were not a.s.sociated with any particular faith or civilization; they were thought of as the stock of some great universal bazaar.

Money alone bought these things. And money, in Iran, had become the true gift of G.o.d, the reward for virtue. Whether Tehran worked or not, seventy million dollars went every day to the country's external accounts, to be drawn off as required: foreign currencies, secured by foreign laws and inst.i.tutions, to keep the Islamic revolution going.

But some people were scratchy. They could be scratchy in empty restaurants where they didn't have the food their old-time menus offered. They needed customers, but they couldn't help hating those who came. They were scratchy at my hotel, for an additional reason. After the revolution the owners had left the country. The hotel had been taken over by a revolutionary komiteh, and it was important for everyone downstairs to display pride. (It was different upstairs. The chambermaid told me by signs one morning that I wasn't to use the hotel laundry; she would wash my clothes. She did. When I came back in the afternoon I saw my damp clothes displayed in the corridor, hung out to dry on the doork.n.o.bs of unoccupied rooms.) Nicholas, a young British journalist, came to see me one evening and-starting from cold-began absolutely to quarrel with the man at the desk about the hotel taxi charges. The quarrel developed fast in the empty lobby.

Nicholas, tall and thin and with a little beard, was jumpy from overwork: the long hours he kept as a foreign correspondent, the "disinformation" he said he had constantly to sift through, the sheer number of words he had to send back every day. He had also begun to be irritated by the events he was reporting.

The man at the desk was big and paunchy, with a sallow skin and curly black hair. He wore a suit and radiated pride. His pride, and Nicholas's rage, made him lose his head. He went back to the manners and language of old times.

He said, "If you don't like the hotel, you can leave."

Nicholas, with the formality of high temper, said, "It is my good fortune not to be staying at the hotel."

I took the car at the stated price, to calm them both down.

Nicholas leaned on the desk but looked away. The man at the desk began to write out the taxi requisition slip. In spite of his appearance, he was a man from the countryside. He had spent a fair amount of money to send his mother on the pilgrimage to Mecca; he was anxious about money and the future, and worried about the education of his children. During the boom an American university education had seemed possible for the boy, but now he had to think of other ways.

Nicholas was closed to pity. He remembered the boom, too, when hotels had no rooms, and he and many others had slept on camp beds in the ballroom of a grand hotel and paid five dollars a night.

He said, "For seven months no one in this country has done a stroke of work. Where else can you do that and live?"

The revolution continued. The election results showed-although there were charges of rigging-that the people had done as Khomeini had told them, and voted in mullahs and ayatollahs to the const.i.tution-framing a.s.sembly of Experts. A man was executed for having a two-month affair with a married woman. The Revolutionary Committee for Guild Affairs warned women hairdressers (mainly Armenian) to stop "wasting their youth" and cutting the hair of men. And some frightened carpet-washers began to advertise an "Islamic carpet-wash"-the carpet to be rinsed three times in water.

Five billion dollars' worth of American F-14 jets were written off, their missile system too "difficult and uneconomical." And other big prerevolutionary projects were cancelled, in addition to the two West German nuclear power plants on which a billion dollars were owed. The six-lane highway to the southern port of Bandar Abbas was taken away from an American consortium and given to an Iranian contractor: "In the first stage of the work two lanes will be constructed." There were reports of sabotage: the Israelis had been sabotaging the "normal operations" of the Arya National Shipping Line. The Kurds in the northwest were in rebellion; the Arabs in the southwest were restive.

The speeches never stopped. The minister of labour and social welfare made one and got his picture in the papers: the mosque, he said, was not only a place of worship but also "a base for launching anticolonialistic movements in a display of unity, thought and action." Unity: it was the theme of a big Friday sabbath feature in the Tehran Times, "Why has Islam the potential for revolution?"

Unity, union, the backs bowed in prayers that were like drills, the faith of one the faith of all, the faith of all flowing into the faith of one and becoming divine, personality and helplessness abolished: union, surrender, facelessness, heaven.

"How did you like the Hilton?" one of the hotel desk clerks asked me. He was less b.u.t.toned up than the others: he dealt in a small way in silver coins and was on the point of selling me two.

"It was empty."

"All the hotels are empty. It will change in two months. There is no government now. In two months we will have a government. At least that's what we say."

He was a devout man, like the others in the hotel. No sermon on television was too long for him.

They spoke, in Iran, of the oneness of faith and deed. That oneness had overcome the Shah and his armed forces. That oneness was all that was still needed. But they were fooling themselves. What, after the centuries of despotism, they really believed was that the state was something apart, something that looked after itself and was ever restored. And even while, with their faith, they were still pulling it all down-hotel, city, state-they were waiting for it to start up again, to be as it was before.

I decided then to go to the holy city of Qom; and that was when I met Behzad. He led me through the traffic and said, "You must always give your hand to me." I liked the words; they answered my need. Without the language, and in the midst of these Iranian contradictions, I needed now to be led by an Iranian hand.

Then Behzad translated the legend in the revolutionary poster-"Twelfth Imam, we are waiting for you"-and I was taken to another level of wonder.

3.

The Holy City

Behzad and I went to Qom by car. It was past noon when we got back to the hotel, and the hotel taxi drivers, idle though they were, didn't want to make the long desert trip. Only one man offered-he was the man who had made me listen to the Koranic readings on his car radio one evening-and he asked for seventy dollars. Behzad said it was too much; he knew someone who would do it for less.

We waited a long time for Behzad's driver, and then we found that between our negotiations on the telephone and his arrival at the hotel his charges had gone up. He was a small, knotty man, and he said he wasn't a Muslim. He didn't mean that. He meant only that he wasn't a Shia or a Persian. He was a "tribesman," a Lur, from Luristan in the west.

Qom had a famous shrine, the tomb of the sister of the Eighth Shia Imam; for a thousand years it had been a place of pilgrimage. It also had a number of theological schools. Khomeini had taught and lectured at Qom; and on his return to Iran after the fall of the Shah he had made Qom his headquarters. He was surrounded there by ayatollahs, people of distinction in their own right, and it was one of these attendant figures, Ayatollah Khalkhalli, whom I was hoping to see.

Khomeini received and preached and blessed; Khalkhalli hanged. He was Khomeini's hanging judge. It was Khalkhalli who had conducted many of those swift Islamic trials that had ended in executions, with official before-and-after photographs: men shown before they were killed, and then shown dead, naked on the sliding mortuary slabs.

Khalkhalli had recently been giving interviews, emphasizing his activities as judge, and a story in Tehran was that he had fallen out of favour and was trying through these interviews to keep his reputation alive. He told the Tehran Times that he had "probably" sentenced four hundred people to death in Tehran. "On some nights, he said, bodies of thirty or more people would be sent out in trucks from the prison. He claimed he had also signed the death warrants of a large number of people in Khuzistan Province." Khuzistan was the Arab province in the southwest, where the oil was.

He told another paper that there had been a plot-worked out in the South Korean emba.s.sy-to rescue Hoveida, the Shah's prime minister, and other important people from the Tehran jail. As soon as he, Khalkhalli, had heard of this plot he had decided-to deal a blow to the CIA and Zionism-to bring forward the cases. "I reviewed all their cases in one night and had them face the firing squad." He told the Tehran Times how Hoveida had died. The first bullet hit Hoveida in the neck; it didn't kill him. Hoveida was then ordered by his executioner-a priest-to hold his head up; the second bullet hit him in the head and killed him.

"Would this man see me?" I had asked an agency correspondent, when we were talking about Khalkhalli.

"He would love to see you."

And Behzad thought it could be arranged. Behzad said he would telephone Khalkhalli's secretary when we got to Qom.

The telephone, the secretary: the modern apparatus seemed strange. But Khalkhalli saw himself as a man of the age. "He said"-this was from the Tehran Times-"the religious leaders were trying to enforce the rule of the Holy Prophet Mohammed in Iran. During the days of the Prophet swords were used to fight, now they have been replaced by Phantom aircraft." Phantoms: not American, not the products of a foreign science, but as international as swords, part of the stock of the great world bazaar, and rendered Islamic by purchase.

There was a confusion of this sort in Behzad's mind as well, though Behzad was not religious, was a communist, and had been kept away from religion by his communist father. Behzad's father had been imprisoned during the Shah's time, and Behzad had inherited his father's dream of a "true" revolution. Such a revolution hadn't come to Iran; but Behzad, employing all the dialectic he had learnt, was forcing himself to see, in the religious fervour of Khomeini's revolution, the outline of what could be said to be true. And as we drove south through Tehran-at first like a bazaar, and then increasingly like a settlement in a polluted desert-it was the city of proletarian revolt that he was anxious to show me.

Low brick buildings were the colour of dust; walls looked unfinished; bright interiors seemed as impermanent as their paint. Tehran, in the flat land to the south, had been added and added to by people coming in from the countryside; and cl.u.s.ters of traditional square clay-brick houses with flat roofs were like villages.

We pa.s.sed a great factory shed. Some kind of beige fur had adhered to the walls below every window. Behzad told me it was a cloth factory and had been a centre of the revolution. The army had gone in, and many workers had been killed.

After the oil refinery, puffing out flame from its chimney, we were in the true desert. There were no trees now, and the views were immense: mounds, hills, little ranges. The road climbed, dipped into wide valleys. Hills and mounds were smooth, and sometimes, from a distance and from certain angles, there was the faintest tinge of green on the brown, from tufts of gra.s.s and weeds, which were then seen to be really quite widely scattered.

From the top of a hill we saw, to the left, the salt lake marked on the map. It looked small and white, as though it was about to cake into salt; and the white had a fringe of pale green. Behzad said that sometimes it all looked blue. Many bodies had been dumped there by the Shah's secret police, from helicopters. And the lake was bigger than it looked. It was a desolation when we began to pa.s.s it; the green water that fringed the white was very far away. The land after that became more broken. Hills were less rounded, their outlines sharper against the sky.

It was desert, but the road was busy; and occasionally there were roadside shacks where soft drinks or melons could be had. Behzad thought we should drink or eat something before we got to Qom; in Qom, where they were strict about the Ramadan fasting, there would be nothing to eat or drink before sunset.

We stopped at a bus-and-truck halt, with a big rough cafe in Mediterranean colours and a watermelon stall on a platform beside the road. The watermelon man, seated at his stall below a thin cotton awning that gave almost no shade, was sleeping on his arms.

We woke him up and bought a melon, and he lent a knife and forks. Behzad halved the melon and cut up the flesh, and we all three-the driver joining us without being asked-squatted round the melon, eating as it were from the same dish. Behzad, I could see, liked the moment of serving and sharing. It could be said that it was a Muslim moment; it was the kind of sharing Muslims practised-and the driver had joined us as a matter of course. But the driver was a worker; Behzad was sharing food with someone of the people, and he was imposing his own ritual on this moment in the desert.

Two saplings had been planted on the platform. One was barked and dead; the other was half dead. Between them lay an old, sunburnt, ill-looking woman in black, an inexplicable bit of human debris an hour away from Tehran. Sc.r.a.ps of newspaper from the stall blew about in the sand and caught against the trunks of the trees. Across the road a lorry idled, its exhaust smoking; and traffic went by all the time.

We squatted in the sand and ate. The driver spat out the watermelon seeds onto the road. I did as the driver did; and Behzad-but more reverentially-did likewise. Abruptly, stabbing his fork into the melon, saying nothing, the square-headed little Lur jumped off the platform. He was finished; he had had enough of the melon. He walked across the dingy desert yard to the cafe to look for a lavatory, and Behzad's moment was over.

I had imagined that Qom, a holy city, would have been built on hills: it would have been full of cliff walls and shadows and narrow lanes cut into the rock, with cells or caves where pious men meditated. It was set flat in the desert, and the approach to it was like the approach to any other desert town: shacks, gas stations. The road grew neater; shacks gave way to houses. A garden bloomed on a traffic roundabout-Persian gardens had this abrupt, enclosed, oasislike quality. A dome gleamed in the distance between minarets. It was the dome of the famous shrine.

Behzad said, "That dome is made of gold."

It had been gilded in the last century. But the city we began to enter had been enriched by oil; and it seemed like a reconstructed bazaar city, characterless except for the gold dome and its minarets.

Behzad said, "How shall I introduce you? Correspondent? Khalkhalli likes correspondents."