Among the Believers (9 page)

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 telephoning 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
.

S
HIRAZI’S
house was in a blank-walled dirt lane in another part of the town. The lane sloped down from both sides to a shallow central trough, but this trough was only full of dust.

We knocked at a closed door set in the wall; and children in the lane mocked the Pakistanis, threatening them with the anger of Shirazi when they got inside. It seemed a traditional form of play, a licenced mockery that in no way mocked belief: the “clerk,” the religious student in his student’s costume, a recognized butt, as he perhaps had been in the European Middle Ages. It was a difficult moment for the Pakistanis, though, trying to shoo away the children, keep their dignity, preserve their courtesy to Behzad and myself, and prepare for the grave reception ahead.

The door opened. We entered a vestibule, took off shoes, went up carpeted steps to a gallery which ran right around a sunken paved courtyard to the left, with fig trees, all covered by a high white awning which cooled light and colour, so that, abruptly, after the dust and warmth of the lane, the midsummer desert climate seemed benign, perfect for men.

I would have liked to pause, to consider the shaded courtyard with the fig trees. But wonder almost at once turned to shock: there was a barefooted man just a few feet ahead in the carpeted gallery with an Israeli-made submachine gun: Shirazi’s bodyguard. He stayed in the gallery. We turned into the carpeted, empty room on the right and sat down in silence beside an electric fan, to wait. The Pakistani students smiled, at once expectant and encouraging.

“He is coming,” Behzad said. “Stand.”

We all stood up. Ceremony assists an entrance, and Shirazi’s entrance was impressive, regal. He was a big man, with a full, fleshy face; his beard, as neatly trimmed as his moustache, made it hard to guess his age. His two-button gown was pale fawn; his black cloak was of the thinnest cotton.

The students appeared to fall forward before him—a flurry of black cloaks and turbans. He, allowing his hand to be kissed, appeared to give them his benediction. And then we all sat down. He said nothing; he seemed only to smile. The students said nothing.

I said, “It is very good of you to see me. Your students here have spoken of you as a man of great learning.”

Behzad translated what I had said, and Shirazi began to speak slowly, melodiously, with an intonation that was new to me. He spoke for a long time, but Behzad’s translation was brief.

“It was good of them to say what they said. It is good of you to say what you said.”

Shirazi spoke some more.

Behzad translated: “Education cannot begin too soon. I would like children to be brought as babies to school. There is a tape recorder in the human brain. Hitler had that idea.” And Behzad added on his own, “He wants to know what your religion is.”

“What can I say?”

“You must tell me.”

I said, “I am still a seeker.”

Shirazi, his face calm, his large eyes smiling, assessing, spoke at length. His enunciation was clear, deliberate, full of rhythm. His full-lipped mouth opened wide, his clean teeth showed.

Behzad said, “He wants to know what you were before you became a seeker. You must have been born into some kind of belief.”

It was of the Pakistani students that I was nervous. They had been told—with some truth, but more for the sake of simplicity—that I came from America but was not an American. For them to hear now that my ancestry was Hindu would, I thought, be unsettling to them; the Hindu-Muslim antagonisms of the Indo-Pakistani subcontinent went deep. They would feel fooled; and they had been so welcoming, so open. They had arranged this meeting with their great teacher, and even now never took their gaze—beatific rather than obedient or even awed—off Shirazi.

I said to Behzad, “Can you tell him I never had any belief? Tell him I was born far away, in the Americas, and wasn’t brought up to any faith.”

“You can’t tell him that. Say you are a Christian.”

“Tell him that.”

And as soon as Behzad began to talk, I regretted what I had asked him to say. Shirazi hadn’t been taken in by my equivocations; he knew that something was wrong. And I decided that I would never again on my Islamic journey, out of nervousness or a wish to simplify, complicate matters for myself like this, and consequently falsify people’s response to me. Strain apart, it would have been more interesting now—it would have served my purpose better—to get Shirazi’s response to me as a man without religion, and as a man of an idolatrous-mystical-animistic background.

Shirazi spoke in his special rhythmic way, the mullah’s way, as Behzad told me later, his accent and intonation more Arabic than Persian. He made “Islam” into “Ess-lam”; and “Allah” became a word of three syllables, with a round, open-mouthed pronunciation: “Oll-lor-
huh.
”

He asked, “What kind of Christian are you?”

I thought. “Protestant.”

“Then you are closer to the truth.”

“Why?”

“Catholics are inflexible.”

He didn’t mean that. He was only giving a Shia twist to Christian divisions. The Shias, with their own line of succession to the Prophet disregarded by other Muslims, see themselves as an embattled minority.

And conversation after that was as hard as I had feared. I asked whether history—the history of Islamic civilization—was something he had studied. He misunderstood; he thought I was asking a question about Muslim theology, and he said of course he knew Islamic history: when the Prophet first gave the message the people of his village didn’t want it, and so he had to go to the next village. And always—whether I attempted to get him to talk about the scientific needs of Muslim countries, or about his ideas for Iran after the revolution—we slid down his theology to the confusion of his certainties. With true Islam, science would flourish: the Prophet said that people should go out and learn. With true Islam, there was freedom (he meant the freedom to be Islamic and Shia, to be divinely ruled); and everything came with freedom (this idea of freedom quite separate from the first).

There was a long pause.

I said, “You look serene.”

He said, “I thank you for that.” He didn’t return the compliment.

I wanted to be released.

I said to Behzad, “Tell him I feel I am taking up too much of his time.”

Shirazi said, with his smile, “I am free until I break my fast.”

It was only 7:30. I said, just to keep the conversation going, “Ask him when he is going to break his fast.”

Behzad said, “I can’t ask him that. You’re forgetting. I am a Muslim. I am supposed to know these things.”

Someone else came in, a holy man in a white turban, a Turkoman, pale from his Ramadan seclusion, not as sunburnt or as meagre as the Turkoman pilgrim families camped in the courtyard of the shrine. With him was a very pale little girl. Shirazi was warm and welcoming. We stood up, to take our leave. The students fell again before Shirazi and kissed his hand. Shirazi smiled, and he continued to smile as—our own audience over—the little girl rushed to kiss his hand.

The awning over the courtyard and the fig trees had been taken down. The light was now golden; shadows were no longer hard. Our shoes waited for us at the bottom of the steps; and in the small room off the vestibule the barefooted bodyguard with the submachine gun was bending down to play with another child.

Outside, in the dirt lane, where dust was like part of the golden evening, the Pakistani students turned bright faces on me, and one of them said, “How did you like him?”

For them the meeting had gone well. They asked Behzad and me to dine with them, to break the fast together and eat the simple food of students. But that invitation (as the qualification about the simple food of students showed) was only a courtesy, their way of breaking off, of seeing us into the car and picking up again the routine of their Ramadan evening that we had interrupted.

The lane and the street at the end of it were full of busy, black-cloaked figures: it was like an old print of an Oxford street scene. But here the clerical costumes were not borrowed; here they belonged and still had meaning; here the Islamic Middle Ages still lived, and the high organization of its learning, which had dazzled men from the Dark Ages of Europe.

And there was more than old Oxford in the streets. This desert town—with its blank walls that concealed sunken courtyards, its straight pavements lined with trees, its enclosed, thick-planted garden
squares—was the pattern for small towns I had seen far away in Spanish America, from Yucatan in southeast Mexico to the pampa of Argentina. Spain had been the vehicle: conquered by the Arabs between 710 and 720
A.D.
, just eighty years after Persia, and incorporated into the great medieval Muslim world, the great universal civilization of the time. Spain, before it had spread to the Americas, had rejected that Muslim world, and gained vigour and its own fanaticism from that rejection. But here in Iran, five hundred years on, that world still existed, with vague ideas of its former greatness, but ignorant (as the article about Islamic urban planning in
The Message of Peace
showed) of the contributions it had once made, and of the remote continent whose fate it had indirectly influenced.

The Pakistani students had given our Lur driver directions. As we drove to Ayatollah Khalkhalli’s, Khomeini’s hanging judge, Behzad said, “You know why I couldn’t tell Shirazi you hadn’t been brought up in any religion? He was trying to find out whether you were a communist. If I had told him that you had no religion, he would have thought you were a communist. And that would have been bad for you.”

K
HALKHALLI’S
house was the last in a dead end, a newish road with young trees on the pavement. It was near sunset; the desert sky was full of colour. There were men with guns about, and we stopped a house or two away. Behzad went and talked to somebody and then called me. The house was new, of concrete, not big, and it was set back from the pavement, with a little paved area in front.

In the verandah or gallery we were given a body search by a short, thickly built young man in a tight blue jersey, who ran or slapped rough hands down our legs; and then we went into a small, carpeted room. There were about six or eight people there, among them an African couple, sitting erect and still on the floor. The man wore a dark-grey suit and was hard to place; but from the costume of the woman I judged them to be Somalis, people from the northeastern horn of Africa.

I wasn’t expecting this crowd—in fact, a little court. I had been hoping for a more intimate conversation with a man who, as I thought, had fallen from power and might be feeling neglected.

A hanging judge, a figure of revolutionary terror, dealing out
Islamic justice to young and old, men and women: but the bearded little fellow, about five feet tall, who, preceded by a reverential petitioner, presently came out of an inner room—and was the man himself—was plump and jolly, with eyes merry behind his glasses.