Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey

  Behzad, opening the door of the telephone booth, the telephone in his hand, waved me over.

  When I went to him he said, “The secretary says that Khalkhalli is praying. He will see you at nine this evening, after he has broken his fast.”

  It was 3:30. We had told the driver we would be only three or four hours in Qom.

  Behzad said, “What do you want me to tell the secretary?”

  “Tell him we’ll come.”

  Then we went to break the bad news to the impatient Lur—or the good news: he was charging by the hour. He said something that Behzad didn’t translate. And he drove off to look for food, leaving Behzad and me to think of ways of spending five and a half hours in the torpid, baking city, where nothing could be eaten or drunk for the next five hours.

  The shops opposite the shrine sold souvenirs—plates with Khomeini’s face, cheap earthenware vases—and sweets: flat, round cakes, brown, soft, very sweet-looking, breaking up at the edges. Food could be sold to travellers during Ramadan, Behzad said; but it wasn’t worth the trouble. Not many people were about. A crippled old woman, a pilgrim no doubt, was wheeling herself slowly past the shops. We surprised a plump boy in a booth taking a nibble at a brown cake, part of his stock; but he judged us harmless and smiled (though a couple of people had been whipped some days before for eating).

  The souvenir shops also sold little clay tablets stamped with Arabic lettering. The clay was from the Arabian cities of Mecca and Medina (good business for somebody over there); so that the faithful, bowing down in prayer and resting their foreheads on these tablets, touched sacred soil. High on the shrine wall, in glazed blue-and-white tiles, there was, as I supposed, a Koranic quotation. Behzad couldn’t translate it; it was in Arabic, which he couldn’t read.

  Arabia! Its presence in Iran shouldn’t have surprised me, but it did. Because with one corner of my mind I approached Iran through classical history and felt awe for its antiquity—the conqueror of Egypt, the rival of Greece, undefeated by Rome; and with another corner of my mind I approached it through India, where, at least in the northwest, the idea of Persia is still an idea of the highest civilization—as much as France used to be for the rest of Europe—in its language, its poetry, its carpets, its food. In Kashmir, Farsi khanna, Persian food, is the supreme cuisine; and of the chenar, the transplanted plane tree or sycamore of Persia (so prominent in both Persian and Indian Mogul painting) it is even said that its shade is medicinal. In Qom these ideas had to be discarded. Here they looked to spartan Arabia as to the fount.

  Behzad suggested that we should visit the shrine. If anyone asked, I was to say I was a Muslim. I said I wouldn’t be able to carry it off. I wouldn’t know how to behave. Was it with the right foot that one entered a mosque, and with the left the lavatory? Or was it the other way round? Was it the Sunnis who, during their ablutions, let the water run down their arms to their fingers? Did the Shias, contrariwise, run the water down from their hands to their elbows? And what were the gestures of obeisance or reverence? There were too many traps. Even if I followed Behzad and did what he did, it wouldn’t look convincing.

  Behzad said, “You wouldn’t be able to follow me. I don’t know what to do, either. I don’t go to mosques.”

  But we could go into the courtyard, and to do that we didn’t have to take off our shoes. The courtyard was wide and very bright. At one side was a clock tower, with an austere modern clock that had no numerals. On the other side was the entrance to the shrine. It was high and recessed and it glittered as with silver, like a silver cave, like a silver-vaulted dome cut down the middle. But what looked like silver was only glass, thousands of pieces catching light at different angles. And here at last were the pilgrims, sunburnt peasants, whole families, who had come from far. They camped in the open cells along the courtyard wall (each cell the burial place of a famous or royal person), and they were of various racial types: an older Persia, a confusion of tribal and transcontinental movements.

  One Mongoloid group was Turkoman, Behzad said. I hardly knew the word. In the 1824 English novel Hajji Baba (which I had bought at the hotel in a pirated offset of the Oxford World’s Classics edition), there were Turkoman bandits. I had once, in a London sale room, seen a seventeenth-century Indian drawing of a yoked Turkoman prisoner, his hands shackled to a block of wood at the back of his neck. So the Turkomans were men of Central Asia who were once feared. How they fitted into Persian history I didn’t know; and their past of war and banditry seemed far from these depressed campers at the shrine. Small, sunburnt, ragged, they were like debris at the edge of a civilization that had itself for a long time been on the edge of the world.

  Near the mosque was the two-storey yellow brick building where Khomeini had taught and lectured. It was neutral, nondescript; and nothing was going on there now. Behzad and I walked in the bazaar. For most of the stall-keepers it was siesta time. In one bread stall, stacked high with flat perforated rounds of sweet bread, the man was stretched out on a shelf or counter on the side wall and seemed to be using part of his stock as a pillow. Behzad bought a paper. It was very hot; there was little to see; Qom’s life remained hidden. We began to look for shade, for a place to sit and wait.

  We came upon a small hotel. It was cramped inside, but newly furnished. The two men seated behind the desk pretended not to see us, and we sat in the little front lounge; nobody else was there. After some minutes one of the men from the desk came and told us to leave. The hotel was closed for Ramadan; that was why, he added disarmingly, he and his friend hadn’t stood up when we came in.

  We went out again into the light and dust, past the souvenir shops again, with the brown cakes and the tablets of Arabian clay; and were permitted to sit in the empty café opposite the KHOMEINI IS OUR LEADER slogan. It was a big place, roughly designed and furnished, but the pillars were clad with marble.

  There was nothing to drink—a bottled “cola” drink seemed only full of chemical danger—and the place was warm with the raw smell of cooking mutton. But the shade was refreshing; and the relaxed exhaustion that presently came to me, while Behzad read his Persian paper, helped the minutes by.

  At the table in the far corner, near the serving counter, there was a family group, as I thought: father, two boys, and a little girl in a long black dress and veil. So small, I thought, and already veiled. But she was active; she talked all the time and was encouraged by the others, who seemed to find everything she said funny. From time to time the man smiled at me, as though inviting me to admire. Shrieking at one stage, the girl ran up the steps to the upper gallery, shrieked some more up there, encouraging fresh laughter downstairs. She came down again, showed the others what she had brought down. She turned—and for the first time we could see her face—and she came to Behzad and me.

  She wasn’t a girl. She was very small, about four feet, very old, and possibly mad. She showed us what she had brought down from upstairs: a plate of white rice with a little lozenge of brown-black mutton. Was she pleased with what she had been given, or was she complaining? Behzad didn’t say. He listened while she spoke, but he said nothing to her. Then she went out.

  I said to Behzad, “I thought they were a family. I thought they owned the place.”

  Behzad said, “Oh, no. They’re not the family. They’re workers.”

  WE went out ourselves, to telephone Khalkhalli’s secretary again to see whether the appointment couldn’t be brought forward. It was about half past five, and a little cooler. There were more people in the street. Our driver had come back; he hadn’t found anything to eat.

  Behzad telephoned. Then, coming out of the booth, he got into conversation with two bearded young men who were in mullah’s costume. I hadn’t seen them approach; I had been looking at Behzad.

  I had so far seen mullahs only on television, in black and white, and mainly heads and turbans. The formality of the costume in real life was a surprise to me. It made the two men stand out in the street: black turbans, white collarless tunics, long,
lapel-less, two-button gowns in pale green or pale blue, and the thin black cotton cloaks that were like the gowns of scholars and fellows at Oxford and Cambridge and St. Andrews in Scotland. Here, without a doubt, was the origin of the cleric’s garb of those universities, in medieval times centres of religious learning, as Qom still was.

  The costume, perhaps always theatrical, a mark of quality, also gave physical dignity and stature, as I saw when Behzad brought the young men over. They were really quite small men, and younger than their beards suggested.

  Behzad said, “You wanted to meet students.”

  We had talked about it in the car but hadn’t known how to go about it.

  Behzad added, “Khalkhalli’s secretary says we can come at eight.”

  I felt sure we could have gone at any time, and had been kept waiting only for the sake of Khalkhalli’s dignity.

  The two young men were from Pakistan. They wanted to know who I was, and when Behzad told them that I came from America but was not American, they seemed satisfied; and when Behzad further told them that I was anxious to learn about Islam, they were immediately friendly. They said they had some books in English in their hostel that I would find useful. We should go there first, and then we would go to the college to meet students from many countries.

  Behzad arranged us in the car. He sat me next to the Lur driver, who was a little awed by the turbans and gowns and beards; Behzad himself sat with the Pakistanis. They directed the driver to an unexpectedly pleasant residential street. But they couldn’t find the books they wanted to give me, and so we went on, not to the college, but to an administrative building opposite the college.

  And there, in the entrance, we were checked by authority: a middle-aged man, dressed like the students but with a black woollen cap instead of a turban. He was not as easily satisfied as the students had been by Behzad’s explanation. He was, in fact, full of suspicion.

  “He is from America?”

  Behzad and the students, all now committed to their story, said, “But he’s not American.”

  The man in the woollen cap said, “He doesn’t have to talk to students. He can talk to me. I speak English.”

  He, too, was from Pakistan. He was thin, with the pinched face of Mr. Jinnah, the founder of that state. His cheeks were sunken, his lips parched and whitish from his fast.

  He said, “Here we publish books and magazines. They will give you all the information you require.”

  He spoke in Persian or Urdu to one of the students, and the student went off and came back with a magazine. It was The Message of Peace, Volume One, Number One.

  So this was where they churned it out, the rage about the devils of the Western democracies, the hagiographies of the Shia Imams. This was where they read Schumacher and Toynbee and used their words—about technology and ecology—to lash the West.

  I said to the man with the woollen cap, “But I know your magazine.”

  He was thrown off balance. He looked disbelieving.

  “I’ve been reading Volume One, Number Two. The one with the article about Islamic urban planning.”

  He didn’t seem to understand.

  “I bought it in Tehran.”

  Grimly, he beckoned us in. And we went up to his office after taking off our shoes. The terrazzo steps were wide, the corridors were wide; the rooms were spacious, with carpet tiling.

  The man in the woollen cap—the director, as I now took him to be—sat behind his new steel desk. One of the students sat on his left. Behzad and I and the other student sat in a line on chairs against the far wall, facing the desk. And, as formally as we were seated, we began.

  The student on the director’s left said that Islam was the only thing that made humans human. He spoke with tenderness and conviction; and to understand what he meant it was necessary to try to understand how, for him, a world without the Prophet and revelation would be a world of chaos.

  The director picked at his nose, and seemed to approve. On his desk there were rubber stamps, a new globe, a stapler, a telephone of new design. On the shelves there were box files, the Oxford English Dictionary, and a Persian-English dictionary.

  There were fourteen thousand theological students in Qom, they told me. (And yet, arriving at the worst time of the day, we had found the streets empty.) The shortest period of study was six years.

  “Six years!”

  The director smiled at my exclamation. “Six is nothing. Fifteen, twenty, thirty years some people can study for.”

  What did they study in all that time? This wasn’t a place of research and new learning. They were men of faith. What was there in the subject that called for so much study? Well, there was Arabic itself; there was grammar in all its branches; there was logic and rhetoric; there was jurisprudence, Islamic jurisprudence being one course of study and the principles of jurisprudence being another; there was Islamic philosophy; there were the Islamic sciences—biographies, genealogies, “correlations,” traditions about the Prophet and his close companions.

  I had expected something more casual, more personal: the teacher a holy man, the student a disciple. I hadn’t expected this organization of learning or this hint of antique classical methods. I began to understand that the years of study were necessary. Faith still absolutely bounded the world here. And, as in medieval Europe, there was no end to theological scholarship.

  One of the great teachers at Qom, a man who still lectured and led prayers five times a day, had produced (or produced materials for) a twenty-five-volume commentary on a well-known work about the Shia idea of the Imam. Seven of those volumes had been published. A whole corps of scholars—no doubt collating their lecture notes: the medieval method of book transmission—were at work on the remaining eighteen. Khomeini himself, famous for his lectures on jurisprudence and Islamic philosophy, had produced eighteen volumes on various topics.

  That ordered life of prayer and lecture, commentary and reinterpretation, had almost perished towards the end of the Shah’s time. Khomeini had been banished; the security forces had occupied Qom; and even the Pakistani students had been harassed by the secret police.

  The student sitting on the director’s left said, his voice falling, “If there had been no revolution here, Islam would have been wiped out.”

  The students both came from priestly families in country towns in the Punjab, and had always known that they were meant to be mullahs. They were doing only eight years in Qom. They were taking the two-year Arabic course, with logic and rhetoric (rhetoric being no more than the classical way of laying out an argument); but they weren’t doing literature. History was no part of their study, but they were free to read it privately. It was for Islamic philosophy that they had come to Qom. In no other university was the subject gone into so thoroughly; and their attendance at Qom, Khomeini’s place, and Marashi’s, and Shariatmadari’s (all great teaching ayatollahs), would make them respected among Shias when they got back to Pakistan.

  The student on Behzad’s left said, in Behzad’s translation, “I compare this place to Berkeley or Yale.”

  I said to Behzad, “That’s a strange thing for him to say.”

  Behzad said, “He didn’t say Berkeley and Yale. I said it, to make it clearer to you.”

  The three Pakistanis, the director and the students, talked among themselves, and the student at the director’s desk lifted the telephone and began to dial.

  Behzad said, “They want you to meet their teacher. Ayatollah Shirazi. He’s telephoning him now to get an appointment.”

  With the child’s part of my mind I was again amazed, in this world of medieval schoolmen I had walked into, at this telephoning of ayatollahs, great men, for appointments. And I was nervous of meeting Shirazi —as I would have been at the sudden prospect (assuming such a thing possible) of a disputation with Peter Abelard or John of Salisbury or even some lesser medieval learned man. I knew nothing of Shirazi’s discipline; I wouldn’t know what to say to him.

  The student who was telepho
ning put the modern receiver down. His shyness and reverence were replaced by elation. He said, “Ayatollah Shirazi will see you at seven o’clock. As soon as I told him about you he agreed to meet you.”

  The director’s face lit up for the first time, as though Shirazi’s readiness to receive me had at last made it all right for me to be in his own office, talking to guileless students. He had been picking his nose constantly, in a way that made me feel that the Ramadan fasting that had dried and whitened his lips was also affecting his nostrils and irritating him. Now he relaxed; he wanted to show me over the building. We all stood up; the formal interview was over.

  I tried to find out, as we left the room, about the fees and expenses of students. But I couldn’t get a straight reply; and it was Behzad who told me directly, with an indication that I was to press no further, that it was the religious foundation at Qom that paid for the students, however long they stayed.

  In a room across the wide corridor a calligrapher was at work, writing out a Koran. He was in his forties, in trousers and shirt, and he was sitting at a sloping desk. His hand was steady, unfree, without swash or elegance; but he was pleased to let us watch him plod on, dipping his broadnibbed pen in the black ink. His face bore the marks of old stress; but he was at peace now, doing his new-found scribe’s work in his safe modern cell.

  The director showed photographs of a meeting of Muslim university heads that had taken place in Qom two years before. And again, though it oughtn’t to have been surprising, it was: this evidence of the existence of the sub-world, or the parallel world, of medieval learning in its Islamic guise, still intact in the late twentieth century. The rector of Al-Azhar University in Cairo, the director said, had been so impressed by what he had seen in Qom that he had declared that Qom students would be accepted without any downgrading by Al-Azhar.

  We walked down the steps. Against one wall there were stacks of the centre’s publications—not only The Message of Peace, but also two new paperback books in Persian. One was an account of the Prophet’s daughter, Fatima, who had married the Prophet’s cousin, Ali, the Shia hero; this book was called The Woman of Islam. The other book or booklet, with a sepia-coloured cover, was written, the director said, by an Iranian who had spent an apparently shattering year in England. This book was called The West Is Sick.