Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey

  And I thought, when I went back to my hotel, that there was an unintended symbolism in the revolutionary poster on the glass front door. The poster was printed on both sides. The side that faced the courtyard was straightforward, a guerrilla pin-up of Yassir Arafat of the Palestine Liberation Organization in dark glasses and checkered red headdress.

  On the reverse was an allegorical painting of blood and revenge. In the foreground there was a flat landscape: a flat, featureless land bisected by a straight black road, marked down the middle by a broken white line. On this road a veiled woman, seen from the back, lay half collapsed, using her last strength to lift up her child as if to heaven. The woman had a bloodied back; there was blood on the black road. Out of that blood, higher up the road, giant red tulips had grown, breaking up the heavy crust of the black road with the white markings; and above the tulips, in the sky, was the face of Khomeini, the saviour, frowning.

  Khomeini saved and avenged. But the tulips he had called up from the blood of martyrs had damaged the modern road (so carefully rendered by the artist) for good; that road in the wilderness now led nowhere.

  Also, in this allegory of the revolution, personality had been allowed only to the avenger. The wounded woman, small in the foreground, with whose pain the upheaval began, was veiled and faceless; she was her pain alone. It was the allegorist’s or caricaturist’s licence; and it wouldn’t have been remarkable if there hadn’t been so many faceless people in the posters and drawings I had seen that day.

  In one election poster a faceless crowd—the veiled women reduced to simple triangular outlines—held up photographs of candidates of a particular party. In a newspaper the face of Ali, the Shia hero, the cousin and son-in-law of the Prophet, was shown as a surrealist outline, transparent against a landscape. In one poster Khomeini himself had been faceless, his features (within the outline of turban, cheeks, and beard) replaced by a clenched fist.

  Facelessness had begun to seem like an Islamic motif. And it was, indeed, the subject of protest in Iran Week (lettering like Newsweek), a postrevolutionary English-language paper I had bought in a kiosk. The paper was for the revolution, but it was protesting against what had begun to come with the revolution, all the Islamic bans on alcohol, Western television programmes, fashions, music, mixed bathing, women’s sports, dancing. The cover illustration showed a twisted sitting-room where walls had been replaced by iron bars. The family posing for their picture in this room—father, mother, two children—were dressed in Western clothes; but where their faces should have been there were white blanks.

  Individualism was to be surrendered to the saviour and avenger. But when the revolution was over, individualism—in the great city the Shah had built—was to be cherished again. That seemed to be the message of the Iran Week cover.

  IN the morning, traffic was heavy on the flyover to the left of the hotel. The mountains to the north were soft in the light, but fading fast in the haze.

  I telephoned the editor in chief of Iran Week and he asked me to come over right away. I had to be careful, though, he said: there were two buildings in the street with the same number, 61. And when I had found the right 61, I had to remember that if I took the lift, the office was on the sixth floor; if I walked up it was on the fourth.

  The hotel taxi driver had trouble finding any 61; and the one we did find, after doing a number of Iranian turnarounds in Iranian traffic, was the wrong one. So we hunted, the morning melting away; and then we saw the second 61. Sixth floor for the lift, the editor had said; fourth if I walked up. But the board in the lobby said the paper was on the fifth; and there was no sign of a lift. The driver and I walked up and up.

  The office was unexpectedly spacious, with a cool girl at a desk in the front room. And after all the time I had taken to get there, and after his own brisk invitation, Mr. Abdi, the young editor in chief, was frankly disappointed in me. I represented no English or American paper, as he had thought. He said he could give me ten minutes; I shouldn’t send the driver away.

  But then, in his own office, he softened his executive manner and, becoming more Iranian, graciously ordered tea, which came in small glasses. He said that to understand Iran I should go to the holy city of Qom and talk to the people in the streets. I said I couldn’t talk Persian; he said they couldn’t talk English. So there we were.

  Softening again, he said—but in a way which permitted me to see that nothing was going to happen—that he would try to get one of his researchers to make an appointment with me.

  Just then the head researcher came in. He promised to see what he could do for me. Underground work had kept them all very busy for three years, the head researcher said; and they were still very busy. He was tall for a Persian, and grave, and he had a pretty leather briefcase. But he wasn’t as stylish as his editor in chief, who was unusually handsome, and in whose executive manner there was a certain amount of mischievousness.

  I asked about the Iran Week cover. Were Iranian families, even middle-class families, as “nuclear” as the cover suggested? I had expected Iranian families to be more traditional, more extended. Sharply, as though to head me off the topic of Muslim polygamy, Mr. Abdi said that Iranian middle-class families were as the cover had shown them.

  There was a big map of the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico on the wall. I thought it might have been there for the sake of Cuba and Nicaragua, old and new centres of revolution. But no. Mr. Abdi had gone to Cayenne, French Guiana, to write about Devil’s Island for a Persian magazine that was doing a series on prisons.

  He said, “It’s bad to travel alone. You should have a girl.”

  He had had a girl on his Cayenne trip: West Indian women were lovely. West Indian? A black woman for Mr. Abdi? He said, “I am wrong. She wasn’t West Indian. She was mexique.” He raised his head a little, as if remembering; and his black eyes went hollow.

  This was the dandy side of the revolution. Even after a day in Tehran—and in spite of the advice to go and talk to the people in Qom—I felt it was far from the revolution of Khomeini and the streets. And six months later, when I returned to Tehran at the end of my Islamic journey, Iran Week was hard to find.

  THE next day was going to be a public holiday again—Constitution Day, to mark Iran’s first written constitution, achieved only in 1906—and the commercial streets were busy.

  On Nadir Shah Avenue—Nadir Shah was the Persian king who raided Delhi in 1739 and stole and broke up Shah Jahan’s Peacock Throne, the jewels of which are still part of the Iranian state treasure—pavement hawkers and the sun and the dust made India feel close. And in Firdowsi Street, where the moneychangers’ booths faced the long blank wall of the British embassy compound, the atmosphere was a little like that of a red-light district, with everybody on the prowl, accosting or waiting to be accosted.

  The moneychangers offered better rates than the banks. They had their nameboards, and some of them offered a window display of coins and facsimile notes; but, after that, their little booths were furnished strictly for business: desk, chairs, telephone, iron safes, a portrait of Khomeini. And their manners matched their rooms. They looked up, they said no, they looked away. They didn’t want my signed traveller’s cheques. Only Mr. Nasser was interested; but then he wanted all the cheques I had; and then he wanted to sell me the old silk carpet hanging on the wall for five hundred pounds.

  Some of the changers worked from what were literally gaps in the wall. Some had no offices; they, more carefully dressed, prowled up and down Firdowsi with their briefcases.

  At the top of the street, near a newspaper kiosk, I saw a small middle-aged man who looked more Indian than Iranian. At first I thought he was taking the air; then I thought he was a changer. I accosted him and he behaved as though I was a changer.

  He was an Indian, a Shia Muslim from Bombay, and he had been living in Iran for twenty years. He wasn’t a changer; he was a buyer; he had come to Firdowsi to buy dollars. He had been offered dollars at 115 rials. It was a good rate; but he
was a man of business and he thought that if he stood his ground, if he continued to show himself, he might eventually tempt one of the ambulant changers to come down a rial or two.

  A young man—Indian, Pakistani, or Iranian—came and stood anxiously near us. He was a friend or a dependent relative of the man from Bombay. He had been brought out to help with buying the dollars and had been making inquiries on his own.

  And, as though he felt some explanation was necessary, the man from Bombay said, “In the old days these shops used to be stuffed with foreign currency. Stuffed. Nobody cared for any foreign currency here. Everybody wanted rials.” But he wasn’t grieving for the Shah’s rule. “You must forgive my language. The Shah was a bastard.”

  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 passion.

  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 passion. 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 passed 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, prostitution, 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 jamé 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 institutions: 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 space 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 jamé 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-b
ye 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 title 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.