Buying the Night Flight (45 page)

I had deliberately, as usual, made the questions quite general. Did he consider this a "holy war"?

"Yes," the answer came back through the Persian interpreter, "we consider this a holy war -- and by that we mean for the sake of Islam and for the sake of God and for the liberation of our own people."

How strange, I thought to myself, an ancient cry for a "holy war" going out from this snowy little French town, with its mewing cows outside and its faded wallpaper!

And the Marxists in the revolution? "Our aims and goals are different from those of Communists and Marxists," he said. "Our movement is based on Islam and monotheism, and they are against both of them. Thus there is no cooperation and compatibility between our movement and theirs." And all the while the strange, dark, expressionless eyes stared between us -- and far, far beyond us.

He talked of an Islamic state that is a republic, which "relies on the general vote of the public, neither capitalist nor socialist." He believed there were enough Iranian "experts" in exile to run a modern, industrialized state "in an Islamic way." When I mentioned Saudi Arabia or Libya, even in his impassive manner he was able to show an utter disdain.

And so it went on, for more than an hour, while I sat there covered over like some armchair during spring house painting. And when the time came, Khomeini just rose, his eyes still showing no emotion whatsoever, and ... floated out.

Interviews with Khomeini were certainly interesting, but hardly conclusive. The very next week after this call for a Moslem "holy war," he told Marvin Zonis, the fine Iranian specialist at the University of Chicago, that "No Moslem would kill another Moslem. The people doing the shooting in Iran are one thousand Israelis imported by the shah." So it went; every interview totally contradicted the other, something the Persians cleverly call "dissimulation."

Afterward we wandered back across the road, and while Yazdi translated the answers from Persian for me, I strolled (my enticing limbs and raging beauty still covered up) about the house. I was flabbergasted. Every room looked as though it had been set up for a moon shot. Electronic gear of every conceivable sort lined the walls. When I returned to Yazdi, I asked him what it was all about. "This is the way we operate," he told me. "When the ayatollah wants to send a message to Iran, we make twelve recordings of it. Then we put those on the telephones to different parts of Iran. There they are rerecorded onto cassettes and boys on Hondas carry them all over the country."

It was staggering. I had seen, I thought, every kind of revolution -- but never had I seen this very new, very modern phenomenon of using the modern technology at the service of such an ancient faith. It was a long time and a long way from the original countryside guerrillas in the mountains of Guatemala: one of many strange voyages I was to see and make in my lifetime of observing revolutions and revolutionaries without, while all the time going through my own woman's revolution within.

I had to ask myself, as honestly as I could, whether being a woman -- and being all bundled up by them, for my own protection, bothered me. I didn't like it, but it really didn't upset me unduly; after all
I
had the power to interpret them to the world, didn't I? What was an old rag compared to that? Had I been one of their women, a woman forced to live out her life under a black veil, I would have either rebelled totally or gone stark raving mad. But then, I asked myself, how to explain the Iranian women who, first as a mark of support for the revolution, and later for other reasons, themselves
adopted
the chador?

(Actually, as odd as that was, it was at that time also understandable. The women were taking up the sanctuary of the black robe as a defense of their personality, in the same -- yet apparently contrary -- manner as Western women were disrobing in defense of their personality. It is strange, but true.)

My position as an outsider -- as a Western woman -- was intensely clear to me. And yet I knew that men would talk to me, even (or perhaps more so) in places like the Middle East; I would remain "woman," the listener, the absorber, the understander, the unifier of elements. How lucky to be able, through journalism and writing, precisely to use those elements that are disadvantages for other women as an advantage in my work.

Indeed the first time I visited Saudi Arabia, in 1973,1 ran head-on into Moslem attitudes toward women in a classically dramatic way. I had a fine guide, a good man who was both smart and trying very, very hard to be honorable and fair. I knew I was somewhat of a problem for him, because they simply were not used to foreign women journalists. However, he was very tolerant and took me anyplace I asked, and the only time he allowed himself to show a distinct displeasure was when I insisted upon buying some Bedouin silver -- he waited outside the little shop, his back turned to me, because he could not sustain the idea that a Western "lady" would buy cheap country silver -- instead of "ladies'" gold.

Then, since the Friday holiday was coming, he invited me to go with him, his wife, and their little daughter out to "the creek," which is a great, meandering arm of the Red Sea that forms a nice "swimming hole" for Jedda. I was delighted -- it was a most unusual invitation.

Their house was a small one, protected by large fences, where no one could see us. So we -- he and I, for his wife was pregnant -- changed into swimsuits and walked out to the pier. The moment we emerged from changing clothes, I felt the most terrible shame sweeping over me. Ahmed himself had turned several shades of red. He did not -- could not -- look at me. I stared straight ahead, feeling that I was indeed (as I, too, had been raised to believe, though more subtly) the very incarnation of evil. Eve's supposed grave is in a wild field in downtown Jedda, so one might argue obscurely that it was the propinquity of the past evil that also was affecting me.

We both got quickly into the water, where I swam eagerly up and down, but I shall never forget those feelings. The shame that society cast on my body and thus soul had overtaken both of us, a man of goodwill and a woman of goodwill--but it had not destroyed our innocent attempt to ignore it. All my professional life I have deeply appreciated and revered people -- men and women -- who are trying honorably and sensitively to live out in their own brief existences, and despite the deep conflicts imposed by their pasts, the great epic changes of our times.

What we are talking about -- in all of this -- is a basic way of looking at societies, and then of analyzing them, and finally of writing about them. It is a process that proceeds on several levels, until it goes from your usual surface "reporting" of a society to a deep and mysterious and totally penetrating psychological portraying of it. It is a new kind of "reporting" and, to my mind and soul, an absolutely crucial one. But let me put it into practical form, with practical questions. Let me start again with Iran, because it became such a crucial example of the madnesses of nations in our time.

Was Iran difficult to cover and understand? No. When I started to cover Iran in 1968, basically I asked the same questions you would ask in Chicago: Who are his enemies? Would they kill him? The mullahs, you say? What do they want? What would they pay for it? Where do they get the money? Only ... I wasn't talking about Richard J. Daley, I was talking about the shahanshah of Iran -- and Ruhollah Khomeini.

Iran is in Central Asia, and for centuries before our beautiful little democratic experiment ever was dreamed of, Mongols, Tatars, Chinese, Persians, Medes, Assyrians, and all those other Central Asian folk had been overrunning whatever and whenever the slightest spirit moved them. Genocide there was not a fun word for intermissions at rock festivals -- this is where it really happened, as whole peoples disappeared from the face of the earth, leaving skeletal cities as mute reminders of whole civilizations that once were. This has been the single most brutal and convulsive part of the world throughout history, and it seemed clear to me that they weren't going to change just because some Rousseauian Americans thought people were basically good.

By reading Persian history you could know that because of all the invasions, the Persians were paranoically afraid of strangers -- and hostile toward them. You would see that taking hostages was their idea of a release of national tensions: their
Oktoberfest
, only they did it in November, without alcohol. You would have been able easily to predict that bringing eighty thousand Persian students to the United States, where they felt miserably inferior and alone and out of place, would only bring about, at the right time, a disastrous counter-effect. And you would have known that all throughout modern Persian history, the Shi'ite clergy took the lead again and again against all and any outside invaders.

But on top of all that there was something even more curious that was generally missed. R. K. Ramazani, the fine Iranian-born scholar at the University of Virginia, pointed it out to me after the hostages were taken, when I was interviewing him on
Meet the
Press
. "What they have done is so very odd," he told me. "They are pretending to be against us because we have not supported their democracy. But there is absolutely no tradition of democracy in Persia. They got this precisely from the United States. They are rebelling against us for not supporting there what we believe in." And even beyond this bizarre reasoning, you had to see what I had seen that December-cold, snowy morning in Neauphle le Château: the eerie juxtaposition of these ancient beliefs and modern technology. Yes, indeed, the ancient imam, Khomeini, learned one might say overnight -- as fast as the overnights of the Parisian playboys -- to use "Satan's Sonys," not to speak of the French telephone system, to try to carry his people back fourteen hundred years.

But it also seemed to me that what we were seeing in Iran was also something we were seeing in one form or another all over. I tried to analyze in a column as early as 1977 the roots of these seemingly incongruous new forces:

WE STILL CAN
'
T GO HOME AGAIN

LONDON
-- With very few people noticing it, key groups of people in important countries are psychologically and culturally trying to "go home."

It now seems devilishly clear that one of the political problems of today (and of the next 10 years) is how to deal with these masses of people who are determined to return to old cultural, political and religious forms.

In Israel, for instance, I was confused for a long time about the Gush Emunim, the ultra-orthodox who are determinedly settling on Arab lands they consider theirs because of ancient boundaries.

It seemed incredible that the government would allow a small and unrepresentative group to poison peace possibilities. A well-off businessman with very liberal views who had been raised on a kibbutz explained it to me.

"They remind us of what we were, so even we liberals rather yearn for them," he said. "Clean, wholesome, sure."

Much the same thing has been going on in Egypt, where, in frustration over the failures of both socialism and capitalism, young people in masses have been returning to traditional Islam. The key to the movement, which was one element behind the recent anti-Sadat riots, is a return to unity -- in this case, the ancient unity of Islam.

In Africa, it is a renascent tribalism, and the retreat to tribalism is not, interestingly enough, occurring only among African blacks.

Leroy Phillips, a young Jamaican-born black social worker in the London ghetto, told me recently that black power and "soul" had been superseded on a large scale by a "back to the roots" movement that has young black people meeting in basement study groups to reconstitute their tribal heritage.

The numbers of similar, emotionally irredentist situations are endless, ethnicity in the United States, the American Indian movement, Slavicism in the Soviet Union, the Palestinians' passion for "The Return."

But what does all of this really mean? Does it have any great importance?

Importance it certainly does have. The Palestinians could start a world war: the Gush Emunim could stop Israel from making peace: tribalism could cause untold suffering: ethnicity in the United States or in Russia could enormously weaken the countries' unity.

But, does it make any sense? Clearly, it does not. The transcendental experience, the "kick," is basically the same in all of them -- frustrated or psychically wounded by the demands of the modern world, all would like to "go home again," to go back to a time when life was sure and simple and encompassable.

Science and technology and ideologies are without soul. None of them turns out to be ultimately satisfying for everybody. If, in addition, as in Egypt and Africa, they don't even bring material well-being, then why bear them? ...

[But] the world has not stood still, even if ... imaginations and memories have. What [these people] are suffering and struggling for is something that no longer exists -- they can only come back to the future.

This is typical of the situation everywhere. What is needed is not impossible attempts to "go home," but attempts to develop post-"Era of Certainty" goals and reasons for living. What is needed is a combination of inner moral certainty and an outer sense of the relativism of an interdependent world.

What I am saying is that these new situations -- these Irans and the Jonestowns and the Cambodias and the brainwashing and the national psychoses -- pose levels of deep questioning for everyone, but particularly for the journalist. How do we journalists deal with these questions that are basically questions of national psychology, of pathology, of neurotic leadership? How can we interpret them in normal language, when they do not respond to normal language? How in the most practical terms can we apply a knowledge of cultural differences and relativeness within our work, incorporating that into our writings? First of all, we prepare our internal selves to understand.