Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples

  Such glory here; a kindred glory in India. Yet in less than a hundred years after Jehangir the Mogul glory was over in India; and a hundred years after that India was a British colony. Iran never formally became a colony. Its fate was in some ways worse. When Europe, once so far away, made its presence felt, Iran dropped off the map. Its great monuments fell into decay (and never became as well known as the Indian monuments). And by the end of the nineteenth century its rulers were ready to hand over the country, and its people, to foreign concessionaires.

  India, almost as soon as it became a British colony, began to be regenerated, began to receive the New Learning of Europe, to get the institutions that went with that learning. The first great Indian reformer, Raja Rammohun Roy, was born in 1772, before the French Revolution; Gandhi was born in 1869. Iran was to enter the twentieth century only with an idea of eastern kingship and the antiquated theological learning of places like Qom. Iran was to enter the twentieth century only with a capacity for pain and nihilism.

  There was glory in Shah Abbas’s Persia, but the glory was flawed. This, though, was not an idea I could put to my host and guide in Isfahan. He was a retired diplomat; he was full of his country’s pain. His life hung between two poles. In the 1960s his father had wished to turn him into someone of English education. In the 1980s, after the revolution, and after he had retired from the foreign service, he had rejected the idea of travel abroad: in the wider world the humiliations of having an Iranian passport were too great. He lived on the remnant of a private income; and he also did a little teaching. Revolution and war had damaged him and exhausted his country; the old diplomat knew that. But he was a divided man still; he saw both the revolution and the war as necessary, and his stories of pain were ambiguous.

  He had a friend, a teacher. The teacher was a Europeanized middle-class Iranian of the Shah’s time. When the revolution came the teacher was in his late thirties; and the teacher’s son was eleven. The boy’s name was Farhad; it was the kind of old Iranian name—rather than an Arab or Islamic one—that middle-class people had been giving their children since the time of the reforms of the Shah’s father.

  After the revolution the teacher began to feel that his son was drifting away from him. In the second year of the war, when he was fourteen, the boy finally rejected his family and their ways. He discarded the name of Farhad and gave himself the Arab name of Maissam. Maissam was one of the early followers of the Prophet; he died a martyr. That was the road the teacher’s son wished to travel.

  Khomeini had said that the revolution had to concentrate on children and the younger generation. People over forty (like the teacher) were useless. (And Ayatollah Montazeri, the second-in-command, had gone further and said in poetic metaphor that dry trees should be cut down.) The words were not idle. Much energy had gone into indoctrinating the young; with the war, the needs of the revolution were great.

  The old diplomat said, “Young boys like to play with guns. So they would take them to the mosques and they used to show them the Israeli Uzi submachine gun and other guns. These boys were fascinated, and at the same time they chanted slogans and prayers while someone related the story of the martyrs of Kerbala.” The unequal battle of Kerbala, the Shia tragedy and passion, unendingly rehearsed. “The victory of blood over the sword. Because the martyr wins eventually. And some of those young people used to inform on those of their friends who were mujahid or belonged to the communist groups. They would ask them to bring news from their house and the houses of their friends, as a sort of revolutionary act.”

  And then one day, without telling his parents anything, the teacher’s son went to the mosque and volunteered, and was sent to the front.

  “From what I heard later he became the commander of a small group defusing the land mines. He was a Basiji. In the beginning they didn’t know how to defuse the land mines and they would send hundreds of the Basiji to defuse the mines. They had special shows for them before they joined. They would make up a man with some phosphorescent material, to suggest that the Imam Mehdi had been seen at the front on a white horse galloping in the distance.” Imam Mehdi: the twelfth Imam of the Shias, for some centuries in hiding somewhere, waiting to return to the faithful. “And they would give the Basiji a key round their necks, which was a key to paradise. In those days there were jokes about the keys to paradise being made in Japan, mass produced and imported. But I should tell you that those boys wanted to go. I had some students who volunteered. I remember the day the bus took them away. The bus was waiting and one boy was trembling in my arms. I told him, ‘If you are not sure you don’t have to go.’ He said, ‘I have to go, but I’m scared.’ They would put them in the buses and drive them around the city, and they were heroes, going to fight Satan and open the way to Kerbala.” Kerbala, giving its name to the ancient sacrificial Shia battle, but still the name of a real place in Iraq.

  “It’s the custom in Iran when somebody goes on a journey that he should pass under the Koran two or three times. The Koran is kissed by the head of the family and held over the head of the person going away. But for those Basiji, when they were sending them to the front, a mullah would do that, kissing the Koran and holding it above the head. And then they would give them the headbands, red or green. Of course it’s a nice ceremony of farewell. When I was young and had to go away my mother would do that ceremony over me with the Koran. When I got into the car she would pour a vessel of water behind me on the ground. Prayers would be said over the water before it was poured, and they would blow over it. Water is a sacred element in Iran, and the ceremony is almost certainly pre-Islamic.”

  After some time the teacher heard that his son had been wounded and was in hospital in Tabriz. He went there and brought him home and nursed him. When the boy was well enough again he went back to the front. This happened many times.

  “After six years he finally returned home. The war was over. He was quite depressed. His parents didn’t know what to do with him. He spent most of the time in his room. He didn’t want to see other people. At last one day the teacher went into the room. He saw the boy sitting cross-legged in the center of the room, and the carpet was spread with photographs, group photographs and also single portraits. The boy just told his father, ‘All these people are dead.’ They were his friends at the front.”

  The war was receding; things were cooling down; there was less of the old frenzy or zeal. Slowly, yielding to his parents’ love, the boy recovered. He changed his haircut; he began to wear European or international clothes again. He joined a university. The Basiji were privileged; they could get into universities even if they didn’t pass the entrance examination. Piece by piece, then, the personality which he had discarded six or seven years before as a boy was restored to him as a young man. He went back to listening to pop music. He dropped the Arab name he had given himself and became Farhad once more.

  The diplomat said, “He thinks now he’ll be a doctor. It’s all been a dream. He doesn’t talk about the war. I know that many of them—boys like him—were disappointed. But as there were special privileges for them as Basiji they now have a split personality.”

  A split personality for Maissam-Farhad; and a split personality for the old diplomat as well, because to be Iranian was to have a special faith, a special version of the Arab faith; and the old diplomat knew in his bones—and it was part of his pain—that, draining and inconclusive and terrible as the war had been, it had to be fought.

  He said, “If those boys hadn’t done those sacrifices Saddam and the Iraqis would have eaten up a quarter of Iran. In a way Khomeini can be regarded as one of the makers of Iranian nationalism. He revived the old Arab-Iranian confrontation after so many years. One of the names Saddam had given himself was ‘Victor of Ghadessiah.’ That was the big Iranian defeat at the hands of Arabs in the very early days of the Muslim invasion. In the time of the caliph Omar, ten years after Mohammed. And Saddam called Iranians ‘Magis,’ Zoroastrians.” Worshipers at the fire temple, adherents of th
e principal pre-Islamic religion of Iran.

  The old diplomat was a wise and cultivated man; yet the Iraqi taunts—which were like taunts in a schoolyard—still had the power to wound him: the taunt about the Iranian pagan past, the past of fire worship and unbelief, the past before Islam, and the other taunt, about the way Islam had come to Iran, with conquest by the Arabs, energetically propagating their new faith. The battle of Ghadessiah had taken place in 637 A.D., but it was as fresh as the defeat at Kerbala. Persia had a long history; for close on a thousand years before Ghadessiah it had been a power; it had challenged Greece and wounded Rome. But that past was dead; it might have belonged to another people; it didn’t make up for the defeat at Ghadessiah. The Iran in people’s consciousness began with the coming of Islam, began with that defeat. It gave a special edge to the faith in Iran, and a special passion to the people.

  The teacher’s son had lived out the contradictions of that passion. Rejecting his family’s Shah-inspired Europeanized ways, embracing the faith, he had given himself the name of a very early Arab martyr. That had led to the Basiji headband, the key to paradise around his neck, and the war against the Arab who called himself the Victor of Ghadessiah.

  Children, too, had a split personality, the diplomat said. It was how they resisted whatever was too crushing and preserved some part of themselves.

  He told a story of a couple he knew, people like himself, suffering, disaffected, but still nationalist. They had a nine-year-old daughter in a local Hizbullah school. One day they received a summons from the school principal. When they went to the school they found that their daughter had become the best reciter of the Koran at school. She was so good the school had decided to give her a prize in the presence of her parents. The parents knew nothing of this talent of their daughter’s. In fact, when they had received the summons they had been frightened. They had no idea what their daughter might have been saying about them.

  The diplomat said, “It’s a strange way to live now.”

  These were the stories I heard while I walked and drove about Isfahan, while I considered domes and tiles, arches and vaulting, and, at night, the lights of the arcaded bridges on the river. Much had been restored; but much seemed perishable. Brick was perishable; and in some dirt alleys the bare brick back of fine buildings seemed about to return to clay. In some such unsettling way a great pain, physical and mental, lay below the civility of the old diplomat. Pain was really the subject of his stories; and sometimes a story, though presented as the experience of someone he knew, had a quality of folk myth, something fabricated out of the general need, just as, at certain times in communities, jokes appear and make the rounds, made up by no one but contributed to by everyone. Such a story was the story about the “piece of meat.”

  An eye specialist was asked by a middle-aged lady in a chador to examine the eyesight of a patient, a young man, who was in the local hospital. When the specialist was taken to the patient he saw that the boy was just “a piece of meat,” mutilated beyond rehabilitation, without hands, without feet. Every day the lady in the chador came to the eye specialist and took him to see this patient. The specialist wondered whether there was any point in restoring the sight of a person who would never get well again or return to any sort of life. But he didn’t want to wound the lady in the chador. She was always in the hospital ward. There were two or three like her, not more.

  The specialist made inquiries. He found out that the woman in the chador was not the boy’s mother; she was only a neighbor. The boy’s mother came to the hospital every day, but she didn’t stay long. After some time the specialist won the confidence of the lady in the chador, and one day he asked why she wanted the mutilated boy, who was not her son, to see again.

  The lady in the chador said, “My own boy, my own son, was executed because he belonged to an anti-revolutionary group. The person who reported him was this boy here, this neighbor’s son. I am happy that my own son is dead. He was executed, and that was all. I want to keep this piece of meat alive to take revenge. I want his mother to grieve for him every day.”

  The Shah had proclaimed the pre-Islamic past, in order partly to link himself to the great rulers of that past. Like Alexander two thousand years before, he had made a ceremonial pilgrimage to the tomb of Cyrus at Pasargadae. After the revolution gangs of revolutionaries had gone to the tomb and the palaces (and fire temple) nearby; but they had done little damage. It was also said (with what truth I don’t know) that Ayatollah Khalkhalli, Khomeini’s hanging judge, had been appointed to a committee to work out the best means of destroying (or simply defacing) the ruins of Persepolis. But then there had been the war, the long Sacred Defense. And now tourists came again to Shiraz and took a car to Persepolis and a few got as far as Pasargadae.

  The nihilistic revolutionary moment had passed. The revolution had taken hold; there were no more enemies; the world had been re-made (though Ayatollah Khalkhalli thought that only 30 percent of what had to be done had been done).

  There was an Islamic entrance examination for the universities. Mehrdad said it was getting harder. Five years ago students didn’t have to memorize parts of the Koran; now they had to. In all government offices there was now an Islamic organization; and all candidates for jobs have to be interviewed by that organization. They asked political questions, but they were also interested in how well people knew the Islamic rules.

  Mehrdad said, “Not the ordinary rules, but very detailed ones. They say that all Muslims must know these rules. They ask you about the prayers. We have five ordinary prayers a day. But you also have another kind of prayer—the frightened prayer, to be said in an emergency. Or the Friday prayers. Or the prayer for the dead. All of them have rules. And a man like me, who doesn’t say his ordinary prayers, he cannot know the extraordinary prayers.”

  At the universities a special subject was Khomeini’s Will. It was worth a credit and it was obligatory even for non-Muslims; it had to be done regardless of what subject was being offered.

  Mehrdad said, “The subject is called The Imam’s Will. I got twenty out of twenty. Our professor came to us with a summary in ten handwritten pages. Khomeini’s way of speaking is complicated. Even a simple sentence has a complicated grammar. A ten-year-old boy can see a sentence painted on a wall and know it’s from Imam Khomeini. On the whole it’s nice, but to read forty pages would have been tough. The professor’s summary made it easy. It is all about keeping the revolution alive. It cautions against America and imperialism, and it tells how to keep the mosque and Islam safe.”

  The world had been re-made. Where once Mehrdad’s father had photographs of the royal family on his wall he now had a silhouette of Khomeini (done by Mehrdad: he liked using his hands). The country had been turned inside out, eviscerated, by war and revolution. Some people had come up; very many more had been destroyed; and no one one could say for sure that a larger cause had been served. All that could be said was that the country had been given an almost universal knowledge of pain. There was no general will to action now; with the exhaustion that had come with their pain people were only waiting for something to happen. People like Mehrdad and his family were living on their nerves. It might have been like this in the time of the Shah. So that perhaps history here was curiously circular. Every great action—the war, the revolution—had to be. And every great action led back in a chain to itself.

  On my last day in Tehran I talked to Ali about the revolution against the Shah. Could something else have happened?

  People like him needed liberty, Ali said. They were well off under the Shah, but they had to live like mice. When they compared themselves with their counterparts in other countries they felt humiliated. No man could be at ease with that kind of humiliation. It was people like him, not the poor, who made the revolution. And there was the cultural side, the Islamic side.

  Ali said, “I have to go back. In the 1940s, when Iran was occupied by the Allies, a lot of people started migrating from the villages to the little towns.
And a lot of little businessmen in little towns moved to the bigger cities.”

  In the towns the migrants outnumbered the older population. This older city population was secular. The migrants had deep-set Islamic ways. They didn’t like what they saw in the cities: drinking shops, cabarets, women in short skirts, cinemas showing blue films, half-dressed women singing and dancing on television. Right through the 1940s and 1950s there was this movement from the villages to the cities.

  In the 1960s the Shah started his land reform. “The rich land was left in the hands of the old landowners. The infertile or semi-fertile land was divided among the farmers, the people who had always worked the land. Traditionally the farmers had a landowner they looked to. He sucked their blood, but he was their patron. He would lend them money, give them seed, and he would help when there was a disaster. When the land distribution happened the farmers lost their patron, and the government didn’t attempt to replace the patron by a banking system. The farmers couldn’t make ends meet. They left their farms and moved to the cities.”

  These people were also conservative and religious. Their sons grew up in the cities and became educated. They went to universities; they took advantage of scholarships given by the Shah’s government. But this second generation was still under the Islamic influence of its fathers. Ali thought it took two to three generations to change a village way of thinking. Iran didn’t have the time for that. Things were moving too fast. This second generation had no earlier generation to compete with and as a group became powerful. They got jobs in the government; they became teachers. Many of them went to the bazaar and became businessmen.