Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples (Vintage International) (42 page)

Revolution as blood and punishment, religion as blood and punishment: in Khalkhalli’s mind the two ideas seemed to have become one.

And, in fact, that double idea, of blood, fitted revolutionary Iran. Behzad, my interpreter, was a communist, and the son of a communist father. Behzad was twenty-four; with all his Iranian graces, his scientific education, and his social ambitions, he had his own dream of blood. His hero was Stalin. Behzad said, “What he did in Russia we have to do in Iran. We too have to do a lot of killing. A lot.”

On the way back through the desert to Tehran, in moonlight, we turned on the car radio. The news was about the closing down by the government of the liberal or non-religious paper,
Ayandegan.
The news caused Behzad’s
mood to grow dark. Whatever was said by the communists at the top, however much for the next year or so they continued to claim the religious revolution as their own, Behzad knew that evening that the game was up.

I thought now, sixteen years later, that I should go to Qom again, to look for Khalkhalli, and, if it were possible, to get from him some new angle on old times. It also occurred to me, after what I had heard from Abbas and Ali, that when I was in Qom I should try to talk to a student, a
talebeh,
to understand the kind of person who nowadays, after the revolution, was going to the theological schools.

Mehrdad didn’t think I should go to see Khalkhalli. I had so far kept my nose clean; going to see Khalkhalli, or trying to see him, would be too political a thing to do, too intrusive, and there might be trouble. And, indeed, when I asked around I was told that for various reasons Khalkhalli mightn’t want to be disturbed. He had been cast aside by the revolution long ago as one of the old brigade, and was living in retirement; he had also recently had some sort of heart trouble.

In spite of Mehrdad, I put out feelers. And the news that came back was good. There might have been official discouragement, but Khalkhalli had been reached. He was ready to see me in his house at eleven o’clock on a certain day. His house was in a little lane in Qom, the Kucheh Abshar; and the person who would take me there would be a talebeh. The talebeh had been a student in Qom for many years and would, besides, be willing to talk to me on his own. I was to meet the talebeh at the Marashi Library in Qom; it wasn’t far from where Khalkhalli lived. I would have no trouble finding the Marashi Library. It was very famous and everybody in Qom would know where it was.

It was too complicated an arrangement; too many pieces had to fall into place. As a traveler I knew that much simpler arrangements, in simpler places, could unravel. So I went to Qom with a kind of half-faith.

There was a new road to Qom. It went past the Khomeini shrine: the copper-colored dome, the decorated minarets. Kamran the driver, who had earlier taken Mehrdad and me to the shrine and the Martyrs’ Cemetery, asked ironically, “You want to go again?”

We were in desert, but where there was irrigation there were green fields. The land was flat. Then we came to true desert, and the land, red-brown and bare, was more broken: now a series of cracked mud knolls,
now a line of low cliffs worn down in certain places to rock, the rock showing in twisted, cracked layers. It was wonderful, from the car. But Mehrdad said, “We think it is very bad land. It is salt land.”

To the left, far away, was the great salt lake. In 1979 Behzad, my guide and interpreter, had told me that SAVAK used to dump people in the lake from helicopters. I heard now from Mehrdad that the lake was so salt nothing sank in it. Mehrdad talked more about the oil that was said to be below the land. Officially, Mehrdad said, it was given out that the oil in this salt land was of poor quality; but the story among Iranians was that there was a lot of oil there, and it was to be kept in reserve. So, though the land was salt and bare, it was fabulous, as Qom itself was fabulous, on a site no doubt ancient, since all sacred sites go back and back, to earlier religions.

Sometimes now to the left we could see the old, slow, winding road to Qom. The hard land softened, opened out into a plain; scattered tussocks appeared. In the distance a jagged mountain range was amethyst-brown in the glare. Two or three times in the wilderness there were garage stops: black smears in the desert: the black of tires stacked one upon the other, the black of oil on the bare ground.

Sheds like factory sheds along a local road some way to the right announced the nearness of Qom; and soon the dome and minarets of the famous shrine of Qom began to show above the nondescript spread of dust-colored brick houses. In 1979 Qom was a small town; now, after the revolution, it was three times the size and had a population of a million and a half.

We came to a roundabout, well watered, green. It was the end of the desert and the beginning of the town.

Kamran said in his ironical way, “We are entering the Vatican.”

At the side of the road there was a big board that looked like a municipal welcome board. But it offered no welcome. What it stated had caused much distress, Mehrdad said. He gave this translation of what was written in the bold, flowing Persian script: “The whole practical philosophy of the law is governing.” The word used for “the law” was
figha;
it meant “jurisprudence” in a very wide way, and was one of the principal subjects studied in Qom. As with so many things in Persian, Mehrdad said, the statement on the board was ambiguous. The politer meaning was: “Our rule is based on study and religion.” The real meaning was more brutal: “We at Qom are here to rule you.”

Not long after the revolution the people of Iran had voted in a referendum for an Islamic republic. This was in 1979. The principles of the Islamic republic hadn’t yet been worked out, and most people thought that they
were simply voting for freedom and justice. The principles of the Islamic republic had been worked out now by the scholars, and this rule by Qom was one of the principles. It was an aspect of the fundamental idea of the Islamic state, the idea of the Leader and obedience to the Leader, which was now never to be questioned, even indirectly.

A later board, in three languages, was softer. It was about the shrine of the much-loved woman saint, Masumeh, “the innocent,” the sister of the eighth Imam.

And now, after the desert, and in the holy city, the women in black chadors in the streets made an extra impression. They were brisk, solitary-seeming, noticeably small. Some of them held the chador over their face with their hands or bit an end of it between their teeth; they looked like people who were muzzling themselves. You didn’t think of the woman saint of Qom; you thought of the principle of obedience.

Without the dull gold of the dome of the shrine the town would have been quite ordinary; but always there was the dome. And now, farther into the town, we began seeing the students with their turbans and variously colored tunics and their black robes. We saw more and more of them, and Qom became more than a town in the desert, more than a place with costumes.

It was as though we had switched centuries. As though, by some cinematic or computer device, we had been taken deep into a play by Marlowe (say), had begun to walk old streets, live with old assumptions, and had gone back to an old idea of learning, with all its superseded emblems of color and dress.

(Superseded, but oddly familiar: fragments of that academic idea, originally imported from the Islamic world, had survived in the Oxford I had entered, just like that, one afternoon in 1950, and was soon taking for granted: the long black gowns of lecturers and scholar-students, the shorter gowns of commoners, ordinary students.)

The Marashi Library was not as well known to ordinary people as we had been told. Different people had different pieces of information. We began, almost, to be led on corner by corner. We had sped through the desert on the new road; we were losing time now; we were going to be late for Khalkhalli.

At last we came to the library. And I could see why we had had such trouble getting to it. We had been asking about it as though it was a landmark. It wasn’t. It was a new building in brown brick, a little too Islamic in its arches and windows and decoration; and it wasn’t all that big or noticeable.
Its upper façade had a Qom camouflage of strings of colored bulbs, and new posters and the remains of old ones were on its lower stone walls. The big board that stuck far out over the busy street was like the board of a commercial enterprise.

We left Kamran in the car and went to look for the man who was going to take us to Khalkhalli. It was now past eleven, and eleven was the time Khalkhalli had given.

As soon as we went through the arched entrance to the library, I knew we were in trouble.

The tomb of the Ayatollah Marashi, the founder of the library, was just to the left after the entrance. It was in a curious kind of aluminum cage with a green cover, like a big parrot cage. (And the aluminum was for the modernity, Mehrdad said later; silver would have been more usual.) Even as we hurried in from the busy, bright street, some devout people in great need, and some very ill people, were leaning quietly against the cage. Next to this, and raised a little above the marble floor, was an open carpeted area, and more people were sitting or praying there, below a big color photograph of the Ayatollah Marashi in extreme old age.

The Marashi Library, here, seemed to be also the Marashi shrine, with its own devotees and concerns. And it didn’t surprise me that in the little office at the end of the hall they knew nothing about us and our meeting with Ayatollah Khalkhalli.

We were shown to another office, and there they didn’t know anything about us either. From there we were taken to the office of the son of the great Ayatollah Marashi.

He—the director of his father’s library, and the guardian of his father’s busy shrine as well—was a big, dramatic man with a fine big black beard with two gray streaks. He had a black turban and a tunic and a robe, and his office was imposing, full of books and files and paper. He said he didn’t know who we were or why we had come. He knew nothing about talebehs or Ayatollah Khalkhalli. I said I had Khalkhalli’s address: it was the Kucheh Abshar. I showed it to him in my notebook, in case I had got the pronunciation wrong. He said it wasn’t an address; there was no number. I said the lane might be a short one and people there would almost certainly know where Khalkhalli lived.

He was having none of that. He began to fire off questions. “What is your name? Where do you live? How many books have you written? What kind of books? What agency are you connected with? Are you from SOAS?” I didn’t know what SOAS was. He didn’t like that; he didn’t like anything I had said. He said I was to write down my name and address.
Oddly civil after that, he made me sit down, while Mehrdad went out to telephone people in Tehran and to telephone Emami, the talebeh who should have been waiting for us at the library.

Mehrdad wasn’t long. When he returned he said that Emami was going to telephone back. I thought that was bad news. But Mehrdad—anxious now to console me—said that while we waited for Emami we could go and have a look at the manuscripts in the library. We were going to be very late for Khalkhalli, but Mehrdad didn’t seem to mind.