Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples

  The prison was so extensive, such a large part of North Tehran, that it took a long time to read.

  One afternoon, allowing my eye to follow the shadowed wall down the hill to the left, I saw that it led to another, between trees, and this wall led down to a wall running transversely from left to right at the foot of the hill. This wall at the foot of the hill was very high; and in it were high, blue gates, through which no doubt, after the revolution, the trucks came out at night with the bodies of the executed. Against the green and the brick and the concrete, the blue of the gates was noticeable; it made you wonder about the choice of the color.

  Below the beautiful, many-charactered mountains, this presence: the great prison of Tehran, more awful and frightening than the castle of Prague. What came to me when I found out was like what had come to me in the British embassy in Dakar in West Africa, when I found out that the wall of the embassy tennis court was the wall of the morgue next door, which explained the daily crowd of grieving Africans in Muslim caps and gowns.

  Ayatollah Khalkhalli, Khomeini’s hanging judge, used to sit in judgment in the revolutionary court, the Shah’s old military court, in Shariati Street, Ali had said. In the early days after the revolution that court used to be sitting almost round the clock, and Ali used to go every day to try to save people he knew. The prisoners would probably have been taken to Shariati Street from Evin.

  In August 1979, when I first went to Tehran, the court was still in full flow. Khalkhalli, in an interview with the Tehran Times—Mr. Parvez still the owner and editor, and Mr. Jaffrey sitting at his high standard typewriter and rapping out peppery calls for the ayatollahs to get back to Qom—Khalkhalli, in that interview in August 1979, said that he had “probably” sentenced three or four hundred people to death. On some nights, he said, the trucks had taken thirty or forty bodies out of the prison.

  They would have left through the blue gates.

  6

  THE MARTYR

  MEHRDAD AND I met Abbas in the office of a book publisher. Abbas was twenty-seven, and a war veteran. He had volunteered—giving up school to do so—when he was fourteen, in the second year of the war; and he had served right through. He didn’t seem now to have a settled vocation. After the war, driven by spiritual need, he had done theological studies at Qom for three years; but then he had felt let down by Qom. Later, to please his girlfriend’s family, he had done his high-school diploma and gone to the university. Now he was learning about films; he was making very short, poetic, haiku-like films, lasting no more than a minute. He was also traveling about the country, gathering interviews from war veterans like himself, for the publisher in whose office we were meeting. The publisher seemed to have a line in books about the war.

  There were any number of veterans, and Abbas, with his military training, had worked out his own procedures for getting many interviews at the same time. When he got to a new place he would call veterans to something like a public meeting, hand out printed questionnaires, and tell war stories of his own, deliberately simple stories, about simple things, to encourage the veterans to lose their shyness or self-doubt and write down their own memories.

  He told us now one of the stories he told the veterans. Mehrdad, still close to his military experience, was so fascinated he didn’t translate the story for me. Mehrdad’s eyes shone; he never took them off Abbas.

  Abbas was an arresting man, small, fine-limbed, classically handsome, with a neat trimmed beard and a full, barbered head of neck-length hair. He had dressed with care for this meeting with us in the publisher’s office. He was wearing a green shirt with broad, shiny vertical stripes over a patterned light-and-dark ground. His spectacle case, clipped to his waist, was part of his style. The style was affecting, because the man had been damaged in the head, and had clearly overcome a great deal to be still so much himself. His eyes were bloodshot, unemotional, strangely staring; he moved his head slowly; he said his legs still hurt.

  And yet, after an hour, of eating fruit and drinking tea and talking, I had got nothing new from Abbas, had not been able to get beyond his gaze and what seemed to be his formality and pride; had not been moved to make a note or even to take my notebook out from the breast pocket of my jacket. And when the electricity failed in the neighborhood, and everything was suddenly dark all around, it seemed time to leave.

  We stood up to say good-bye. It occurred to me, in the darkness, to ask whether in the course of his interviews he had met anyone from a martyrs’ battalion who had survived. He said a few had survived. When we asked whether we could meet one of them, he didn’t say anything. And then—it might have been the effect of the darkness, seeming to muffle life in the neighborhood, making us speak softly, with the voices of children still playing in the street below suddenly very clear against the roar of the boulevards not very far away—it might have been the drama of the power cut that made Abbas say, hesitantly, “I shouldn’t say this, but I was one.”

  And then we stayed and stayed. Abbas talked at first in the darkness, and then by candlelight. The publishing house had a stock of candles, for these power cuts.

  I made no notes. Later that evening in the hotel Mehrdad and I reconstructed what we had heard. I made my notes then.

  When Abbas said that he had been in one of the martyrs’ battalions, much of what he had been saying earlier fell into place. He had volunteered at the age of fourteen. He had been taken close to the war, and then, on his own initiative, he had picked his way to the murderous Dezful front—the frontier town of Dezful had been utterly destroyed by the fighting. What had made him volunteer? He said that a government organization for development had sent speakers to his school (and Mehrdad told me later, in the hotel, that this school was one of the very best in Tehran). The speakers said they wanted to take boys to the front to show them the war, and they asked for volunteers. So Abbas volunteered.

  He had no business, even as a Basiji, to be on his own in Dezful. The soldiers wanted to send him away, but he begged them, did things for them, and they allowed him to stay.

  He was at Dezful at the time of a big Iranian attack. For twenty-two days there was the sound of artillery and planes. And this was the time when Abbas had his first sight of death or martyrdom on the battlefield.

  An ambulance came back from the front—a glimpse there of Iranian organization—and people ran to it. Abbas ran with them. At first he thought the people in the ambulance were only wounded. When they were placed on the ground he saw they were dead. Two of the dead men he had seen alive only two hours before. And he thought: I was looking for my friends. But these are not my friends. My friends are somewhere else. He felt then that death was an exalting and wonderful thing, and he knew that one day he would have to have the same experience and go where his friends were.

  It was an intense spiritual moment, and it was heightened when he was washing the cartridge belts and harness straps of the dead men. That was one of the things he used to do at the front. Every day he used to go to the morgue—officially called meradj, the place of ascension—and collect the equipment from about forty dead men. He would clean the equipment in the evening. There was a shortage of equipment at this time because so many men were involved in this big attack. There was also a shortage of shoes. Another thing he did during the day was to help unload the supply trucks when they came up to the front. He did that unloading with a lot of zeal; it was one reason why the soldiers didn’t send him back.

  The cleaning of the equipment of the dead men was a spiritual exercise for him because he would think that the pieces he was cleaning belonged to men who had gone to a place which they didn’t quite know. And it was possible—Abbas’s words were ambiguous here—that he also meant that though the men didn’t know where they were going, they had gone there straight and with determination.

  A year later Abbas joined the army properly, and he was a member of one of the martyrs’ battalions. People who volunteered as martyrs proclaimed themselves ready for any job. They wore no spe
cial clothes when they were in ordinary battalions; they made themselves known to the officers by their extraordinary zeal. One martyrs’ battalion literally fought to the death; no one survived.

  Before an attack there was “a good-bye ceremony.” Someone might sing; someone respected in the battalion, like a clergyman, a commander, an old man, or a popular man, might address the men. This person would stand on a podium or a chair and say, “Tomorrow we have an attack.” That was how the good-bye ceremony began. Some people would burst into tears right then; others would cry later. Generally there was a lot of weeping and wailing. The speaker would say, “Some of you might not come back tomorrow. We might not see each other again. Some people will see God tomorrow.”

  Then there would be music and chanting. Abbas heard this as something in the background. Nobody could focus on it. Everybody was emptying himself of all feeling, pouring feeling into a common pool. In that pool there was a collection of miseries and worldly difficulties and family problems, a pregnant wife perhaps, a sick baby, financial problems, quarrels with parents. Everything went into that common pool and was disappearing. Joining this ceremony was like joining a ship. Whether you liked it or not you had to go with it.

  Abbas was wounded twice. Though it would be truer to say that he talked of the two occasions when he was wounded. The first time was during an Iraqi counterattack at noon (the Iranians had attacked early in the morning). The people who were caught up in that counterattack were the injured, the martyrs, and a few other fighters who wanted to delay the enemy advance. A rocket exploded near Abbas. He was hit in both legs and fell unconscious. It was night when he awakened. He heard Arabic voices and saw Iraqi soldiers apparently standing on guard at twenty-yard intervals. They were a picket line at the head of the Iraqi advance. Abbas found a hand grenade and a machine gun. He threw the grenade at the Iraqis and killed four of them, and then he ran the fifty yards to the Iranian side. He was fired at but he zigzagged and wasn’t hit.

  The second wound was more serious. It occurred a year later, at night, during one of the biggest Iranian attacks: attack after attack for more than a month. Again there was a rocket burst near him. A bit of shrapnel struck him on the back of the head, and he was thrown on the ground. He fell on his head and was hurt badly. He passed in and out of consciousness many times. Finally he was taken by plane to the big military hospital in Shiraz.

  There they inserted a bit of artificial bone in his head. After a while he lost his sense of balance; then he couldn’t see. He had a clot on his retina, and there was a danger that he might lose his sight altogether. A day came when the authorities wanted to take some of the patients to the shrine of Shah Cheragh, one of the famous shrines of Iran. Abbas wanted to go. He was in a wheelchair now. The doctor said Abbas wasn’t well enough to go, and Abbas shouted and began to quarrel with the doctor. The doctor relented, and Abbas was wheeled to the shrine at eight in the morning.

  There was singing and chanting as on the battlefield, and Abbas made a vow: “Allah, I accept whatever you wish, and I like whatever you like. But I cannot tell a lie to you. I need my eyes. If you give me back my eyes, I will use them to go back to the front.”

  At twelve Abbas left the shrine with the rest of the patients and went back to the hospital. At two the nurse came to his room; he was taking about twelve pills every six hours. As the nurse opened the door Abbas saw the light and shouted. Doctors and nurses ran up. They saw that the clot on the retina had gone, and they didn’t let him sleep. They called other doctors to look. None of them believed that that kind of religious miracle could happen. Word got around. Something got into the papers. But Abbas was nervous of letting too much be known.

  The publisher’s assistant, constantly serving us tea, said, “And a good thing, too. If people had got to know about his cure at the shrine they would have rushed to him and torn bits of his clothes for keepsakes and magical purposes.”

  I had heard something like that in 1979 about people who had been shot by the Shah’s police during the demonstrations before the revolution. Even a slight wound could be fatal, because when a man fell his fellow demonstrators ran to him to force their hands in the wound in order to stain them with the warm blood of a martyr.

  Some time after that evening in the publisher’s office I was in Shiraz. I went to the shrine of Shah Cheragh at dusk. It was like a fairground in the streets outside, with the lights and the stalls and the strolling crowd, and there was something of that atmosphere inside as well, with people walking about in the diffused light and soft shadows of the courtyard, while in the mosque proper, in the brighter light around the railed grave of the saint, other people were praying and asking for boons.

  To see what Abbas had seen, to enter the common pool of feeling here, you had to bring some feeling of your own. You had to bring the faith, the theology, the passion and need.

  A tall Indian on the road outside was asking for alms in his own way. He had spotted me when I was on the way in; and he had dropped everybody else and concentrated on me. “Bhaiya, bhaiya, brother, brother,” he had said, bunching up his soft lips and screwing up his small eyes like a film actor working at grief.

  He was young and fat, in white shoes that were quite startling in the dusk, and in loose cream-colored clothes that caught him on the protruding lower belly. He was dandling a screaming baby and appeared to be with a woman with many attendant children. He said he was from Dubai. He had come to Shiraz to pay his respects to the saint, but bad people had stolen all his money, many lakhs, and all his papers. As he spoke he dandled the baby against his cream-colored clothes and with every shake and dandle of his lower belly he twisted his thumb and finger against the poor baby’s bottom and the baby screamed.

  After I had walked about the shrine courtyard I went looking for him to find out how he had fared that evening. But he and his baby had vanished, and the woman with him and the children with her.

  In the publisher’s office, by candlelight now, Abbas spoke of the effect of his experience on his faith. I had asked him.

  He said, “It made me go deep in myself. I have some findings for the spiritual part that I think nobody has.” This was Mehrdad’s translation of a difficult idea, later in the hotel, and at the end of a long day: let it stand as it was spoken. “On the battlefield we could see a lot of things that cannot be described in a materialist way. When I saw people running with an arm blown away it was unbelievable. There are lots of people here on the street who have a little injury on their arms, and they lie down in the street. But over there, the enemy was coming, and this boy was running from the enemy with one arm blown off. It showed me what’s possible. And at the moment I don’t care about my aches at all. I pay no attention to it.”

  He wanted after the war to stay close to the spirituality he had discovered in himself. To him this spirituality was like a treasure. Not many people on the street possessed such a treasure. “People on the street,” mardom to khiyabom: it was the second time, speaking of his spirituality, he had used the words; as though spirituality was the true divider and differentiator of men. Of course those people on the street were not less than he was, but they cared about things he didn’t care for. Their idea of religion was not letting women be without the veil or the hijab headdress; which was something he didn’t mind about.

  “The Koran says that we do things according to our capacity. So I would do whatever I can, and they would do whatever they can.”

  He felt he should improve his spiritual feelings, and he thought he could do this with study and scholarship. Since childhood he had liked to study. So he went to the holy city of Qom, and enrolled in a five-year course. He completed it in three years. And by then he had had enough of study. He didn’t feel he had got in Qom what—perhaps innocently—he had been hoping for. Study was study; the spirituality he was concerned with was more personal; it didn’t come through study. There were many examples of people with much religious learning but without spirituality.

  In the o
utside world there was, a year or two later, another test for him. He fell in love with a girl and wanted to marry her. He went to her family and asked for her hand. They told him that he had to go to the university first; their daughter was a university student. This was a hard thing to ask of Abbas, Mehrdad said; because in Iran you couldn’t be considered for a university place if you didn’t have a high-school diploma; and Abbas had left his very good Tehran school at the age of fourteen to go to the war.

  But Abbas, always now with his spiritual idea of what men could do, always now with that picture of the half-dead boy with his arm blown off running away from the enemy, Abbas set to work. This was two years ago, and Abbas had already got his diploma and his university place; and his family and the girl’s family were getting ready for the wedding.

  It was only now that it occurred to me to ask about his family: Abbas had always seemed so absolutely himself, so secure, so handsome and fine.

  “My father worked for the bus company here in Tehran.”

  “What did he do?”

  “He was a simple worker.”

  Mehrdad, with his feeling for the social grades of Iran, said, “A mechanic?”

  And Mehrdad was right. He said later that the bus company for which Abbas’s father had worked was a poor company, a very poor company; and to be a mechanic there was to have a poor kind of job. But the mechanic had educated all his children. One now ran a factory; another was a professor at the university; the youngest was an engineer. So Abbas’s family was one of the success stories of the revolution.

  I wanted to know how he had discovered the spirituality in himself.