Among the Believers (14 page)

Behzad hadn’t slept well; he remained tormented. When we were almost in the city—air-conditioning units set into the backs of the unlikeliest houses—we saw the
komiteh
man in the corridor: boyish, very small, unfussed, with no apparent memory, when he looked into the compartment, of his intrusion the night before.

Behzad’s girl said good-bye without seeming to see me. Through all the hours we had been together she had never looked directly at me. I let them walk ahead on the platform at the Tehran station: she small and limping, he tall and athletic, protective, slightly inclined towards her. Friends were waiting for her; they took her away from Behzad. Young people of the revolution, people carrying danger with them; but the city they had come back to was for them that day a city of calamity.

T
HERE
had been riots over the weekend, between Muslims and people of the left, and the left had suffered badly.

A week before, when Behzad and I were driving back from Qom, we had heard on the car radio about the closing down of
Ayandegan
, the newspaper of the left. Leftist protests had built up during the week; and Muslim groups had begun to counterattack.

After the prayers at Tehran University on Friday—which Behzad, out of his own revolutionary emotion at the sight of the multitude, had seen as a political occasion, not a religious occasion—hundreds of Muslims had marched on the offices of
Ayandegan
. Thirty of the paper’s press workers had refused to leave the building; now they were ejected by Revolutionary Guards. Five of the ejected
Ayandegan
men were injured and had to be taken to the military hospital; twenty were arrested. On Sunday, at a leftist demonstration at Tehran University, there had been serious fighting with sticks and knives; many more people had been injured. On Monday—while we were getting ready to take the train from Mashhad—Muslim groups had stormed the headquarters of Behzad’s communist organization, thrown everybody out, thrown documents out, seized all the arms—grenades, mortars, tear-gas canisters, Belgian and Russian rifles.

This was the news Behzad and his girl returned to. They heard about it—as I learned later—from the friends who had come to meet the girl. But Behzad, after his humiliation of the previous evening, told me nothing. He saw me back to the hotel and—his own obligations to me then over—left me to find the news out myself, from the
Tehran Times
.

Newspaper items: set language, set phrases, that left everything to the imagination. But just a little while later, when I was on my way to the Intercontinental Hotel for their buffet lunch, the news items took on an actuality that was scarcely believable.

A skyscraper, with a garden and sculpture; a side road barred by a car with a flashing roof light; men in camouflage battle dress with guns; sandbags at the corners of the skyscraper plot, with mounted machine guns. And across the busy road, the dispossessed communists, young men looking like city workers, in trousers and open shirts. A Persian battle arrangement; both sides waiting and intently watching; the life of the town flowing around, as peasants in the old days attended to their peasant tasks while the armies fought, to decide who was to rule.

That afternoon on Firdowsi Street, the street of the moneychangers, I heard a siren, and an open truck with Muslims with guns raced by, followed by a police-style car. Later, on the Avenue of the Islamic
Republic, formerly Shah, the siren sounded again, and again I saw the Muslims with guns. No emergency had called them out. They were just driving fast round the town, the siren their battle horn; and they were doing it, as Behzad might have said, to show their power.

Two days later, on my last evening in Tehran, I saw Behzad for a few minutes. He was dark with sunburn. He had been standing with the dispossessed communists across the road from the sandbags and the machine gun. He was sad but calm. He had found his battle. I asked after his mother, who had come to Tehran and was staying with him. But—old constraints still—he said little about her; and he said nothing about his girl.

Such emotion, such bravery; and, unavoidably in Iran, his cause was as simple as his enemy’s, and in the end really no more than a version of his enemy’s. Both sides depended on revealed truth and a special reading of historical events; both required absolute faith. And both were fed by the same passion: justice, union, vengeance.

I
was going on to Pakistan. My first plan had been to go by bus, to drop down south and east in stages, through old towns with beautiful names: Isfahan, Kerman, Yazd (important to Zoroastrians, Persians of the pre-Islamic faith, long since expelled, their descendants surviving in India as Parsis, Persians), Zahedan. But Qom and Mashhad had given me enough of desert travel in midsummer; I didn’t want now to run into
komitehs
in out-of-the-way places; and I could get no certain information about transport across the Pakistan border. I decided to go by air, straight to Karachi.

There were not many flights. The one I chose left at 7:30 in the morning, and Pakistan International Airlines said it was necessary to check in three hours before. I was on time, and I thought I had done the right thing. I was quickly through, with my little Lark bag. Half an hour later, when dawn was breaking, the queue was long and moving very slowly.

Just as, at London airport, the flight pen for Iran had been full of Iranians who had done their shopping in Europe and the United States, so now Tehran airport was full of Pakistani migrant workers who had done their shopping in Iran. They were taking back a lot: boxes, trunks, big cardboard suitcases tied with rope, brown cartons stamped with
famous names, Aiwa, Akai, Toshiba, National, names of the new universal bazaar, where goods were not associated with a particular kind of learning, effort, or civilization, but were just goods, part of the world’s natural bounty.

The plane that was to leave at 7:30 didn’t arrive until 10:00. We began to taxi off at 11:25 but then were halted for a further hour, while American-made Phantoms of the Iranian Air Force took off. I thought they were training. They were in fact taking off on Khomeini’s orders to attack the rebel Kurds in the west. Later, in Karachi, I learned that two Phantoms had crashed, and the news was curiously sickening: such trim and deadly aircraft, so vulnerable the inadequately trained men within, half victims, yet men that morning obedient to the will of God and the Twelfth Imam and full of murder.

To Kurdistan, following the Phantoms, went Ayatollah Khalkhalli, Khomeini’s Islamic judge, as close to power as he had boasted only ten days before in Qom. In no time, moving swiftly from place to place in the August heat, he had sentenced forty-five people to death. He had studied for thirty-five years and was never at a loss for an Islamic judgement. When in one Kurdish town the family of a prisoner complained that three of the prisoner’s teeth had been removed and his eyes gouged out, Khalkhalli ordered a similar punishment for the torturer. Three of the man’s teeth were torn out on the spot. The aggrieved family then relented, pardoned the offender, and let him keep his eyes.

It was Islamic justice, swift, personal, satisfying; it met the simple needs of the faithful. But we hadn’t, in the old days, been told of this Iranian need. This particular promise of the revolution had been blurred or fudged; and we had read, mostly,
Down with fascist Shah
. Only Iranians, and some foreign scholars, knew that when Khomeini was a child—while the Qajar kings still ruled in Iran—Khomeini’s father had been killed by a government official; that the killer had been publicly hanged; that Khomeini had been taken by his mother to the hanging and told afterwards, “Now be at peace. The wolf has attained the fruit of its evil deeds.”

In his advertisement in
The New York Times
in January 1979, when he was still in exile in France, Khomeini had appealed to “the Christians of the world” as to people of an equal civilization. It was a different Khomeini who said in August, on Jerusalem Day (the day the Phantoms were sent against the Kurds): “The governments of the world should
know that Islam cannot be defeated. Islam will be victorious in all the countries of the world, and Islam and the teachings of the Koran will prevail all over the world.”

That couldn’t have been said to the readers of
The New York Times
. Nor could this, spoken on the last Friday of Ramadan (and a good example of the medieval “logic and rhetoric” taught at Qom—certain key words repeated, used in varying combinations, and finally twisted): “When democrats talk about freedom they are inspired by the superpowers. They want to lead our youth to places of corruption.… If that is what they want, then yes, we are reactionaries. You who want prostitution and freedom in every matter are intellectuals. You consider corrupt morality as freedom, prostitution as freedom.… Those who want freedom want the freedom to have bars, brothels, casinos, opium. But we want our youth to carve out a new period in history. We do not want intellectuals.”

It was his call to the faithful, the people Behzad had described as
lumpen
. He required only faith. But he also knew the value of Iran’s oil to countries that lived by machines, and he could send the Phantoms and the tanks against the Kurds. Interpreter of God’s will, leader of the faithful, he expressed all the confusion of his people and made it appear like glory, like the familiar faith: the confusion of a people of high medieval culture awakening to oil and money, a sense of power and violation, and a knowledge of a great new encircling civilization. That civilization couldn’t be mastered. It was to be rejected; at the same time it was to be depended on.

THE SALT HILLS
OF A DREAM

The Tempest

  1
Displacements

T
he rule of Ali had come to Iran: the Iranian state was disintegrating. The outsider could make the connection. But the man of faith could juggle with these great events and keep one separate from the other; and even while he prepared to run he could continue to rejoice at the victory for Islam. Pakistan could be contemplated in the same way. It could be seen as a fragmented country, economically stagnant, despotically ruled, with its gifted people close to hysteria. But Pakistan was also the country that had been founded more than thirty years before as a homeland for the Muslims of India, and for that reason was to be cherished as a pioneer of the Islamic revival.

An article in the
Tehran Times
linked the two countries. “The history of Pakistan and the Islamic Revolution in Iran is a reminder of the power of religion and the hollowness of secular cults. How the world works is the concern of science, and how society is to be governed is the affair of politicians, but what the whole thing means is the main concern of Iran and Pakistan. Politics is combined with religion in Islam. Iran and Pakistan can join hands to prove to the world that Islam is not just a faith of the past, practising ancient rituals.”