A lawyer friend of Ali’s had come into the room where we were and was sitting with us—it was a Friday morning, the Muslim sabbath—and I felt that the presence of this third person was encouraging Ali’s unusual passion.
I asked, “Did you give the man the job?”
“I didn’t give him the job. Because people of this kind can never be straightened. If they had the chance again, they would hurt me again. So they should be kept away.”
And now, a year into the revolution, Ali was being pushed from every side, by government people, by communists within the government, and by simple agitators. He was kidnapped three or four more times.
“I wasn’t much afraid to go with them, because I knew that my reasoning was stronger than theirs. The first time you think it’s a wild animal, it’s going to tear you apart. But once you tame this animal, you can order them around.”
There was now, too, a constant harassment from the Revolutionary Guards, jumping into the garden and looking through the windows to see whether anyone was looking at television or videos, or breaking into the house to search for alcohol or ham or women’s dresses or men’s neckties, all now forbidden things.
“And if you were cleanly dressed, they didn’t like it. They would attack you. It was like Pol Pot, but not so extreme. Ten percent. It was a full revolution.”
“A full revolution?”
“The reins of government went altogether out of the hands of government, out of control. It was anarchy and terror. The reason was Khomeini himself. About three months after the revolution I was taken by my ayatollah friend to meet Mr. Khomeini. The ayatollah friend had explained to Khomeini that I was a developer and a technical man and could help with housing problems. I and the ayatollah friend and Khomeini were sitting together on the ground in Khomeini’s house. The door opened. Some mullahs came in. Khomeini started talking with them. Later some more mullahs came in. And it went on and on until the room was full of mullahs, two hundred of them. And they all wanted money to take to their students and religious organizations in their own towns. Khomeini said he didn’t have money to give to all of them. Then he said, ‘Go to your own towns. Find the first man who is rich or the first man who has a factory or a huge farm. And force him to pay you.’ ”
This language from the head of the government shocked Ali. And this was when he realized that Khomeini was leading his people to chaos.
The lawyer sitting with us said, “His mental discipline was different from other people’s. He was a man of the people. He understood the majority of the people. The majority were not educated. They wanted to get money and things. They didn’t want revolution. They wanted money, and Khomeini knew that.”
Ali said, “The majority wanted to loot.”
The lawyer said, “So he made disorder in the country and let them loot. He did what they wanted.”
Ali said, “When he said, ‘Follow the law,’ it wasn’t the law of the country. It was his law, the law in his own mind. Before the revolution he said it was un-Islamic to pay taxes to the government. After, he said it was Islamic to pay taxes to the government. He wanted complete chaos. That day in his house I realized this man is not a man of government. He was still a revolutionary. He couldn’t control himself. Until the very last day he was making disorder.”
I wondered whether this disorder, this constant “revolution” (a word with misleading associations), wasn’t an aspect of Shia protest. But when I made the point neither Ali nor the lawyer took it up. They were disillusioned men; they spoke out of a great torment; but they were so deep in Shiism, it was so much part of their emotional life, that they couldn’t take this step back, as it were, and consider it from the outside.
They began to talk instead of the Islamic law of necessity, in whose name Khomeini, always acting religiously, had said and unsaid things.
Ali said, of this law of necessity, “To protect yourself, you can sometimes do something wrong. The ayatollahs can mediate between the first level of laws, which come from Allah, and the second level. When the need arises, the ayatollahs can for a short time issue secondary orders.” The example he gave was close to him. “In Islam the protection of people’s property belongs to the first level of laws. But during Khomeini’s régime, while he was alive, there was a shortage of land for housing. So Khomeini said, ‘Using my privilege of ordering the second order of laws, I am going to grab plots of land that belong to anybody in the town, without paying any compensation, and I am going to subdivide it and give it to the people who need it. Because there is necessity.’ ”
And now, to prove that this action of Khomeini’s was excessive, the lawyer began, as I felt, to take me down the lanes and ancient alleyways and tunnels of Islamic jurisprudence such as was taught in the theological schools of Mashhad and Qom.
The lawyer—delicately eating small green figs whole, and, in between, peeling and eating other fruit—said, “About a hundred years after the birth of Islam one of the caliphs in Mecca wanted to take land around the holy place. People were living in houses around this holy place, the Kaaba. But the law didn’t allow the taking of the land. Protecting people’s property was a duty of the caliph. So the caliph invited the big muftis to his house, to find some way. The best opinion was that of a direct descendant of Prophet Mohammed, the fifth Shia Imam, Bagher. He said, ‘You can take those houses around the Kaaba because the Kaaba came first. Value the houses, and pay the owners, and send them away.’ ”
Ali said, “Khomeini has set a bad example. Every ayatollah now can claim necessity, as Khomeini often did, and break the law.” And Iran was still living with his Islamic constitution, which gave him supreme power, and established the principle of leadership and obedience. The constitution provided for an elected assembly, but there was also a council, which could override the assembly.
Ali said, “He had an instinctive brain. He was instinctively intelligent. An instinctive, animal intelligence. Because of this he could command the people. He did not have an educated intelligence. He didn’t become emotional. He was very cool.”
At our next meeting Ali had a memory to add to his story of being in Khomeini’s house, three months after the revolution. The two hundred mullahs were in the room, asking Khomeini for money, and he had told them to go back to their districts and take it from the first rich man they met. That had appeared to satisfy most of the mullahs. But—as in an Arabian Nights tale—one of the mullahs had said, “My town is very poor. In my town there is no rich man.” Khomeini, in a kind of reflex, had touched Ali’s sleeve, and for a terrible moment—long enough for Ali to remember it sixteen years later—Ali had thought he was about to be sacrificially offered to that very poor mullah.
And, in fact, something like that happened fifteen months later. Ali was arrested by the revolutionary court in Kerman. A number of charges were made against him: strengthening the royal régime, grabbing millions of square meters of people’s land, exporting billions of U.S. dollars, directing a failed coup d’état against the government, directing an anti-revolutionary organization. The accusations were not specific; they were formal, standard accusations, and they were made against many people.
Ali said, “In the Kerman area, if you are a little active everybody knows you. I was very active before the revolution. I was known. I was a little Shah, the symbol of power there. When they set up a branch of the revolutionary court in that city they came after people like me. The Guards were all from rural backgrounds. They have their own special accent. They were very young, and happy with their trigger. Many of them later died in the war. I would say that there was a mixture of forty percent mujahidin, and sixty percent Muslim groups. The mujahidin, Marxists, had infiltrated the revolutionary courts from the very beginning. They didn’t identify themselves; they pretended to be Muslim.”
Ali could identify the mujahidin and the Muslims, because he, too, was pretending: he was pretending to be a Muslim revolutionary. “My life was in danger, and I had to make friendship with them regar
dless.” Very soon Ali discovered a third group who had infiltrated both the mujahidin and the Muslims. “They were people who simply wanted to grab some money for themselves. But they acted Islamic.” And they in their turn soon understood that Ali was also acting, and he was not a Muslim revolutionary. “These people became friends of mine because they knew I had money, and they told me gradually what is going on in the court, and who is who.”
Ali was arrested many times and held for four or five days. Once he was held for six months. The revolutionary prison was an old factory shed that had been divided up. There were a few cells for people being kept in solitary confinement; two big compounds for social prisoners, people like opium smugglers and thieves; and a big cell for political prisoners. Ali was put at first in a solitary cell, one yard wide by two and a half yards long, with only half an hour a day outside to go to the toilet and wash. The first day he read a sentence on the wall written by somebody before him: The prisoner will eventually be released, but the prison-keeper will be forever in the prison.
“And that was an encouraging sentence because it told me that the man before me had been released. Even now, after fifteen years, though I have been released for so many years, and have been so free to go on so many journeys anywhere in the world, and I have gone and enjoyed myself, even now, when I have certain things to do, and I go to the prison in that area, although the place has changed, and the prison is not the factory shed, I still see some of the prison-keepers there. So they are the prisoners. Not us. They were the prisoners.”
Some of the Revolutionary Guards in the factory-shed prison introduced themselves to Ali. He found out that they were the sons of laborers who had worked for him in his building projects.
They said to him, “In the past you wouldn’t look at us. You were so proud. Now you are behind bars here and we have to feed you. Allah ho akbar! God is so great!”
They went and told their fathers about Ali, and to their surprise their fathers said that they should do everything in their power to help Ali, because in the past Ali had helped them by giving them jobs.
“And those boys helped me a lot. They didn’t have a lot of power, but they could tell me things. They could post letters and bring letters from my wife. They would give me the best quarters in the prison and give me the best food.”
It was because of these new friends that Ali was taken from the solitary cell and put in the political section. All the anti-government people in the jail were there, forty-five or fifty of them. They talked about politics all the time because they had nothing else to talk about, and Ali found that people had political views according to their background. There were some people from the Tudeh communist party, athough their leaders were cooperating with the government. There were mujahidin groups, although the mujahidin had not yet started their war against the government. There were extreme Maoists. The government, in fact, was quietly beginning to destroy the left. There were also, in the political section, some generals and colonels of the Shah’s army; certain big landowners who had links with the Shah; and, curiously, two sexually corrupt mullahs who had flourished in the Shah’s time. One of these mullahs said he had a talisman for women who couldn’t bear children; he used to take the women to his house and have sex with them. The other was a fortune-teller.
“Both were actually executed. We used to see the executions from very far. When they had the executions somehow we would find out the night before. We would turn off the lights very early in the evening and pretend we were asleep. Then about twelve at night the lights would go on in the garden in the courtyard, and we could see the executions from far without the guards knowing about it. There was a local mullah who had those high powers in the revolutionary court—confiscation, imprisonment, or death.”
“What effect did the executions have on the prisoners?”
“No one liked it, whatever his group. They didn’t feel it was justice that was being done.”
From time to time the revolutionary inspectors would come to the jail and some of the political prisoners were taken away with them to be “investigated” (Ali used no stronger word). These investigations would last from two to five hours, and then the prisoners would go back to the jail. The investigations were polite.
Some of the prisoners became jealous of the privileges Ali appeared to be enjoying because of his new friends among the Guards. In fact, these friends were bringing Ali so much fruit and candy that he used to share it out with the cell.
The day came when some of the communist boys could stand it no longer. They said to Ali, “This is a wedding party for you. But wait. Wait until we take power. We don’t bring your kind of people to the court and to prison. We will take the court and the executioner to your street and to your house, and we will try you in front of your house and execute you right there.”
Ali said to them, “Thanks be to Allah that you are in prison, and you will stay in prison and cannot do anything to me.”
After some time Ali’s trial was announced. People were invited to make whatever charges they wanted to against him and submit whatever incriminating documents they had. There were seven sessions in the mullah’s court, and the case against Ali was dismissed.
The mullah-judge said, “I am not a man of Islamic revolution. But I have made this revolution to bring Islam. There is a distinction between the two. I want to make a house in heaven. I don’t want to make a house in hell. A rich man is not necessarily guilty, unless I find some guilt in him. You may not be a good Muslim, but I find you not guilty.”
Things became quieter for Ali after the trial. There were still problems, many problems. Life was never easy now, and perhaps he would never feel secure. But the kind of revolutionary who had pre-judged him as a rich man and tormented him during the first three years of the revolution was not so dominant now in the courts and government departments. The government had got rid of many of the wilder people, and those who had remained in office had become less hard with the years. Power had corrupted many of them. Some of them had made a lot of money and gone into business for themselves. People in power could still be obstructive; but they were easier to read now, and there were ways of dealing with them.
And after all of this there was melancholy in Ali’s house. It showed in his wife’s face, which spoke of an unassuageable grief for what had really been a lost life.
On the mountains to the north morning light cast shadows in the dips and hollows. Every irregularity, of abraded rock, or rockfall down a slope, was picked out. Morning light also showed the extent to which the lower mountains were built up; and, at various places, the cutting of new terraces—cement-colored below the beige—for further building. In the evening small broken lines of lights could be seen on what should have been bare mountainside. In the morning those lights disappeared, and there seemed to be nothing. Lower down, poplars looked fresh against the darker green.
5
THE JAIL
PAYDAR, GROWING UP in poverty in the poor northwest, was possessed by the idea of revolution from an early age. He was tormented by what he saw every day and every night of the suffering of his widowed mother. She stitched clothes and made socks and stockings for a living, and often sat at her machine until two in the morning.
In time Paydar joined the Tudeh communist party. The Tudeh hoped to ride to power on the back of the religious movement, and in the early days of the revolution it was the policy of the party to adopt an Islamic camouflage. That was easy enough: the themes of justice and punishment and the wickedness of rulers were common to both ideologies. But the Tudeh party destroyed itself. It gave a Soviet-style apparatus to the Islamic revolution, and then it was destroyed by that apparatus.
Ali, in his provincial factory-shed jail in 1980 and 1981, had seen the beginning of the roundup of the left. Though the enraged communists in the political section of Ali’s jail were still threatening to hang Ali outside his house when they came to power, their day in Iran was really over. Two years later, in 1983, the
Tudeh party was formally outlawed by the government. And two years after that, Paydar, who was in hiding, like the surviving members of the party, was hunted down and taken away to a jail outside Tehran.
Paydar didn’t know then in what part of the country the jail was; he didn’t know now. For two months, as he calculated, he was kept in something like a hole, without a window, “without a speck of light,” and questioned. And it was in that darkness and intense solitude, that disconnectedness from things—at first in the hole, and then in a cell with fourteen others, where he spent a further year—that he began to think dispassionately about the idea of revolution that had driven him for so much of his adult life. And he arrived at an understanding—especially painful in the circumstances—of why he had been wrong, and “why revolutions are doomed to fail.”
“I thought that people are much too complicated in their nature to be led in a simple fashion, with a few slogans. Inside ourselves we are full of greed, love, fear, hatred. We all carry our own history and past. So when we come to make a revolution we bring with ourselves all these factors in different proportions. Revolutions have always disregarded all these individual differences.”
So, in the jail, he had rejected the idea of revolution. It had been his great support, the equivalent of religion; and no other idea quite so vital had come to him afterwards. He was like a man in whom something had been extinguished. He was a big man from the northwest. It was possible to imagine him full of fire. Now he was strangely pacific; his suffering, old and new, was always there to make him watch his moods, consider his words, and make him take the edge off passion or complaint. He was trying now—exposed as he was, and liable to be picked up again at any time—to make a cause out of his privacy, his family life; though day-to-day life was hard, and in the economic mess of revolutionary Iran, and with the decline of the currency, the value of his earnings as a teacher went down and down.