But nearly all of this I got to know later. So when Khalkhalli asked whether I was going to see Montazeri I missed the point of what he was saying, and I couldn’t take it up. Instead—and it would have been disappointing to him—I asked what he had been reading when we came: I said that the guard who had come out to us had said that he was reading. Was it a religious work?
It was only the paper. He said, in his lecturer’s way, “The world doesn’t stand still. There are always new things. That is why I read the papers.”
The words he was using were not meaning much. They didn’t tax him and they were enabling him to assess me. Sitting on the palliasse on the carpet, he had been looking up at me from below his forehead, and I became aware now of his counter-probing, between his rambling, abstract talk. How old was I? Did I have children? I said no. He asked why. I said if I had had children it would have been hard for me to do my work. He said many Persian writers had had a hundred children and written a hundred books. How many books had I written? Did I make a living? It was hard for a writer in Persian to make a living. Was I connected with some agency? What was my religion? He asked about India and Kashmir, and paid no attention to what I said.
He had become unhappy about me. He had been used to another kind of interview, something more political and immediate (and perhaps something offering more immediate publicity). He didn’t know what I was after. And perhaps I had lost my way. Perhaps the misadventure at the Marashi Library had made me too cautious. It might have been better if I had asked him directly about his reputation as the hanging judge of the revolution. But I didn’t want to do that; I thought that a question like that would have made him close up or give a set answer or grow hostile, and would have achieved only the obvious. I could have asked him about the photographs on the wall. The photographs interested me, and they were important to him; he might have wanted to talk about them, and that might have led to other things. But that idea, about the photographs, came to me only many weeks later, when I was considering my notes.
I went on in my groping way. I asked how he assessed the revolution now. He talked for some time, clearly using a lot of meaningless words, and Mehrdad’s short translation of what he said was that a beginning had been made. How much of a beginning? Thirty percent. I saw an opening; and he must have seen what was going to come. Because, before I could ask about the 70 percent that still had to be done, he said he was tired. The eyes that twinkled while he talked or lectured became dead, the expression melancholy, empty. He dropped his head, pressed his chin against his chest, stood up slowly, the sweat showing on the front and back of his short-sleeved white tunic. Step by step he moved to a side room.
The interview was over. And now we had a problem. We had no car. Kamran had gone off to find a garage to mend his ignition. He had said he would be back in half an hour, but that wasn’t meant literally. We could only wait for him. It was the middle of the day and it was too hot to wait in the lane outside. So, waiting for Kamran, Emami, Mehrdad, and I continued to sit in Khalkhalli’s reception room with his guards, and we talked.
To talk to Emami had been part of my purpose in coming to Qom, to find out about the talebeh or students who were coming nowadays to Qom. Emami had already spent fourteen years as a student. He had started at a Tehran theological school when he was sixteen, and he had moved to Qom after being accepted by an ayatollah. He was married now, with a two-year-old child. His grant from his ayatollah was two thousand toumans a month, about fifty dollars. He earned a little extra doing a little teaching himself, and doing translations from Arabic. It wasn’t an easy life. Qom was dusty and hot. He endured it because from an early age he had wanted to be a propagator of the faith. He wasn’t the classical talebeh, he said, the son of the poor family looking in Qom for free food and lodging. His father was a businessman; they were middle-class people.
But when was all this studying going to end? When was he going to go out into the world? It wasn’t like that, he said. Some people could remain students for fifty years. Khomeini used to say that he was learning every day. But that didn’t explain how movement might come to a cleric’s life. How did people begin to stand out? He said people stood out because of their learning and personality. There was no end to learning. And with all the commentaries, and the commentaries on the commentaries, on theology and philosophy and jurisprudence, all those book sets in the Marashi Library, it was possible to see what Emami meant. People could also stand out because of their ability, in this thicket of scholarship, to make fresh or interesting judgments. Khomeini, for example, did that with his statement that the game of chess was not against the law, provided there was no betting on the outcome. That was a judgment that people in Qom still talked about.
He himself wasn’t famous, Emami said. He was content to be what he was, one of the foot soldiers, as it were, of the faith, one of the propagators. That was his vocation. He wasn’t rich, but he didn’t mind. He didn’t care too much about eating. I said I thought he was putting it too strongly. I didn’t think he was too deprived. He had a fine physique; I was sure he played some sport. He smiled; he said he exercised every morning.
There was little more to be got out of Emami. He had this idea of the vocation; it was sufficient explanation of his fourteen years of study; he couldn’t step outside himself to consider his life and motives. His world had rigid limits. What passed with him for learning was really only a way of learning the rules. To know the rules was to simplify life, and Emami was a profoundly obedient man. It was what was required by the faith and the revolution; every day in the newspapers there was a message like that.
We had been talking for about half an hour or forty-five minutes in the ayatollah’s reception room, below the ayatollah’s turban and photographs, waiting for Kamran, listening for the sound of a stopping car, and going out from time to time to the verandah to check. And then Khalkhalli came in again, slow, sad, his loose top tunic wet down the middle. Mehrdad explained about the driver and the car. Khalkhalli asked whether we wanted some bread and cheese, Persian bread, Persian cheese.
This seemed to me a good idea; it might give me a chance to talk in another way to the ayatollah. But Mehrdad said with some firmness that the offer of bread and cheese was just a form of words, a courtesy, that the ayatollah was asking us to leave.
We stood up to say good-bye. If we wanted to see him again, Khalkhalli said, we would have to make an appointment. It would have to be next week, on Thursday; that was the day he wasn’t teaching. And this time we were to keep to the hour. His melancholy face began to alter with irritation. And we were to make notes. Nobody could remember everything. Talk without notes was a waste of time. We had been playing with him. I said that I made notes, but not right away; I hadn’t felt that our earlier conversation had got to the note-taking stage. Next week, he said, his irritation beginning to melt; and we were to telephone beforehand. He gave the number and pointed to one of the guards: he would answer the telephone.
I began to feel that if we hadn’t been so delayed, and if things had gone better, he really wouldn’t have minded talking. But the moment had passed. We went out to the verandah, put on our shoes, and went out of the gate in the high wall. We crossed the street to the little strip of shade near the corner, and we stood there, waiting for Kamran.
Mehrdad said, “Did you see the gun?”
Emami said, “He has many enemies now.”
Mehrdad said, “They are like enemies to each other. The old timers and the new people.” Then Mehrdad said to me, “He asked you about Montazeri. I hope you are not going to try to see him. That is the way of death.”
He spoke with genuine dread. I did what I could to calm him down.
I said, “But these men are back numbers. They are very old, and they can’t be dangerous to anybody now.”
He said, “In this situation even the dead are dangerous.”
And standing there, opposite Khalkhalli’s house, I thought that even if I did come next Thursday—and if e
verybody remembered, and there was a meeting—there would perhaps be little to add to what I had seen that early afternoon: the justicer of the revolution, old and ill and anxious, subjected himself now to various controls, sitting below his photographs, which were more sinister and condemning than he knew, and with guards with guns, one of the guards wearing the old dark green uniform of the early komiteh and making it look like old clothes.
There had been guards in 1979. I could still remember—the desert sunset all around us at the end of the long August day—the heavily built man with a gun at the low front gate of the exposed house in the half-made lane; and the heavy frisking hands of that man; and his closed, foolish, exalted face. The revolution still belonged to the country as a whole, and all that business of guards and searching had been principally for the drama: the pretend idea of the revolution in danger, part of the excitement and celebration of the early days of the revolution. Now—though it was part of his restraint—he needed the high wall and the man with the gun.
Mehrdad said, unexpectedly, “It was very nice of him to say that he was tired. Iranians don’t do that. They don’t say things so openly. He is very old. But very clever.”
We waited in the shade at the corner. Mehrdad thought we should walk to where we could get a taxi, do what we had to do with Emami, and arrange to meet Kamran at four-thirty on one of the well-known bridges of Qom. We could leave a message with Khalkhalli’s guards. We pressed Khalkhalli’s buzzer again, and the guard who came out, the bigger man with the moustache, didn’t mind at all being disturbed again.
We began to walk in the glaring white streets, Emami guiding us and talking at the same time about what was wrong with the philosophy course at Qom: too much old philosophy, not enough about contemporary matters, too much about Farrabi and Avicenna (an enchanted name to me: strange to hear it spoken so casually), who had taken their ideas, many of them wrong ideas, from ancient thinkers like Ptolemy and Aristotle. This criticism of Qom was approved thinking; Emami, though he saw himself as a modern man, ready to dress in a modern way, was not a rebel.
Surreally, as in a dream, after some minutes of walking, we saw Kamran’s car coming down the empty white street towards us. He had had his troubles with that ignition; he had gone from garage to garage, and then from car shop to car shop, looking for a replacement.
Now that we didn’t have to walk, Emami wanted us all to have lunch with him at his flat. He insisted. Mehrdad agreed, and we stopped at two or three shops in dusty streets to buy fruit and other things for the lunch. It was hot and still. There were twenty-five thousand students in Qom, Emami said. He showed us the big hostel for foreign students; they were mainly Indian, Pakistani, and African; there were few Europeans. There were also a fair number of Arabs. A little later, as if apologizing for the dustiness of the town, he said the Arabs made the place dirty. He spoke conversationally, without malice, like a man saying something that everyone would accept: always with Iranians, and in unexpected ways, this uneasiness about Arabs, who had been both their conquerors and the givers of their religion.
We passed Khomeini’s house, the house where he had lived when he was a teacher in Qom. It was at a bend in a busy street. A policeman was watching the traffic; the street might have been less busy when Khomeini lived in it. The house was low, unassuming, the color of dust, partly hidden by its street wall. But, as so often in Iranian houses, that blank, almost unnoticeable wall would have concealed a courtyard, with a pleasant play of sunlight and shade, removed from the racket and glare of the street.
Emami lived at the very edge of the expanding town, in a new development that seemed to have been set down just like that in desert and dust. The streets were not yet made. For some time we bumped over rubble and brickbats, and I began to worry about Kamran’s car, which had just been mended. At last we stopped. A scrap or two of plastic on the street, an empty packet caught in broken brick and stone: the effect was, already, one of civic neglect. But behind the blank door of Emami’s house there was, even here, a little courtyard: shade, order after the unmade streets, and steps from the courtyard to the two rooms Emami rented: his home for the last four years.
The concrete front room was bare, apart from the shelves of books on one wall. Emami went and borrowed a chair from a neighbor for me. The bareness of the room—speaking not so much of poverty as of the simplicity of the theological student, concerned only to propagate the faith—so staggered Mehrdad that he made a note of it in his notebook. On the shelves were various sets of books on theology, philosophy, and jurisprudence, among them the five volumes (in cream-and-green binding) of Khomeini’s great work of jurisprudence on all aspects of buying and selling (not known to me until that moment). The philosophy books included a Persian translation of Bertrand Russell’s Problems of Philosophy. (No royalties for the Russell estate, though: Iran didn’t belong to the international copyright convention.) Emami said, when I asked, that the books students like himself used were published by various foundations, and the prices were reasonable. But his library would still have taken up a fair portion of the stipend he had got from his ayatollah.
Emami, now our host, and in his own dwelling, grew in graciousness and courtesy. The two-year-old son we had heard about was sleeping; otherwise, Emami said, the boy would have already been with us. He was busy but discreet in his attentions to Mehrdad and Kamran and me, and in his instructions to his wife, unseen, somewhere in the background, preparing the fried eggs and tomato that had been decided on by him and Mehrdad as the general dish, with Persian bread and white cheese (imported from Denmark, but halal) for me.
He brought in and spread an oilcloth on the floor. This oilcloth was a sacred thing, Mehrdad said, because bread was wrapped in it. It had to be clean and it had to be kept in a high place. Emami then began to bring in plates and other things. From time to time he stopped and talked with us, squatting on his knees and heels, his trousers tight over his muscular thighs, the silvery shirt showing his exercised shoulders and his flat stomach. He was content, he said again, when we began to eat. He was doing the work, the propagating of the faith, that he wanted to do.
I asked whether he knew about the loss of faith in some of the young, as was reported. He said it was no secret. “Our enemies know our weakness.”
A gentle knock on the door, as from someone who didn’t want to create too much of a disturbance. This time it wasn’t food that was being sent in by Emami’s unseen wife, but her son, rested and at peace but a little shaky after his deep sleep, which still showed in his face.
Watermelon followed the egg and tomato. I asked Emami who were the enemies he had mentioned earlier. He said the countries of the West; they wanted to wipe out Islam. He said this with the same gentleness he had said everything else.
Our lunch was over. The dishes were cleared away, and Emami folded the oilcloth with deliberation, bringing the four corners together, twice over, before taking it outside. Then he passed his son back to his wife. After that—all distractions now out of the way—he and Kamran began to talk. They talked about the war. Emami said that in the last year of the war he went to do Islamic propaganda at the front. How often? He said he went on four occasions; altogether he was at the front for about two or three months. He gave some lectures. Kamran asked whether this was all that the clerics did, give lectures. Emami said no, he knew some clerics who fought. But he himself hadn’t fought. For him the war was a spiritual experience.
He was content, but he knew he hadn’t done enough. His house was far away from the teaching schools, and travel and household jobs took up much of his time. But recently he had got a bicycle; that was a great help.
Emami wanted to take us after lunch to one of the theological schools. We had no one to say good-bye to—his wife had remained unseen, and the boy had been taken away—and we stepped down without ceremony into the little courtyard, and then almost at once we were in the bright rubbled street in the desert. We drove back towards the center of the town, to the school Emam
i had in mind. The principal wasn’t there, and the guard couldn’t give permission for us to look around. Emami directed Kamran to another school. It was a modern building in yellow brick in a wide street lined on both sides with trees and a water channel. Some students—a flurry of gowns, tunics, and turbans in the yard beyond the water channel—had arrived for a class; some more were riding up on motor scooters. They looked clean and healthy and—there was no other word—prosperous. Emami came back. He had seen the principal: we could look around.
We took off our shoes in the entrance hall, put them in big pigeonholes for shoes, and walked up on fitted carpet to the floor above. All the time students came in. Some of them had a drink at the watercooler before they took off their shoes. They were soon quite a crowd. They didn’t talk; some of them looked anxious. The sound that came from them as they went up the wide carpeted steps in their socks was the sound of their clothes. In the carpeted open area at the top of the steps students who had failed in a certain subject were sitting on the floor and writing their examination again. There was an element of punishment and public shame in this public rewriting of an examination. The students had no desk or writing boards, and some of them were in extraordinary writing postures: sitting on crossed legs and leaning so far forward to write on the floor that all the upper body seemed stretched out.
The principal was an old and kindly man, impressive with his turban and dyed beard, a figure of antique wisdom. He introduced us in his small office to three of his lecturers, sitting formally side by side. One lecturer did Christianity (and spoke English), another did Islamic Sects, and the third did Islamic Theology. Mehrdad said that “theology” was not a correct rendering of the Arabic word, and there was a little amiable dispute about this between Mehrdad and the three lecturers, the principal looking benignly on. What that subject was, rather, Mehrdad said, was an analysis of the traditions connected with the Prophet: old learning, hardening century by century, and commentary by commentary, into what might or might not be considered true traditions, important because they could be used to establish or challenge laws.