Children of Paradise (10 page)

With Hakimi, Mostafa was a man perpetually in arguments, frustrated, and seized with regrets. Hakimi mirrored Mostafa’s heat and idealism, but this affinity only heightened his anxiety and self-reproach. And Hakimi’s was not the only pull on Mostafa in those years. The Mojahedin had recently suffered a rancorous split. Some of its members turned to secular Marxism-Leninism, and they trained the attentions of their recruiters on Mostafa. Despite the unifying promise of Shariati’s Islamism, to be Shariati’s follower was to have a foot in each of two rapids coursing through a fervid landscape. There Mostafa stood.

To be called for military service at that moment was almost a reprieve. In his barracks Mostafa read a book called
Dialectic Conflict
. It was a refutation of Marxism by an obscure young scholar named Abdolkarim Soroush who had found favor with Ayatollah Khomeini. In his book Soroush criticized dialectical reasoning as rigid, resistant to revision, and
too abstract to yield insight about societies as they actually existed. Soroush professed humility about the limits of human knowledge, and a stubborn preference for the rational over the visionary.

Clarity broke over Mostafa like a summer storm. Soroush dulled the lure of Marxism and cooled the fever Shariati once stirred. His authorial voice was the antithesis of Shariati’s or Hakimi’s—in fact, it was everything Mostafa thought he didn’t want. It was neither sublime nor enraging so much as it was restrained, analytical, and painstakingly precise. Soroush wrote about religion and politics—the very soul of history—but he wrote not like a guru but like a philosopher. For the first time Mostafa understood that his intensity did not thrive on a matching intensity. What it required was the balm of dispassionate logic. Because of Soroush, Mostafa forked from Shariati and the Mojahedin decisively toward Khomeini.

At Khomeini’s victorious command, Mostafa walked off his base into the giddy final days of revolt. He was one of the millions of Iranians who showed up at Mehrabad Airport to greet Khomeini’s flight home. And he spent the early revolutionary years in sympathy with the radical clerics of the Revolutionary Council and
velayat-e faqih
. His utopia was in the making. He would not disrupt this by quarreling with its triumphant mainstream. But Soroush had planted seeds in his intellect that would flower in ways neither Mostafa, nor even Soroush, could foresee.

The poetry circle Mostafa had joined in the late 1970s did not become the nucleus of the new Iranian literary scene the way he’d expected. Instead, it fractured, a microcosm of the revolutionary movement itself, its thirteen luminaries spanning the establishment and its adversaries. Some members, including Khamenei, had grown very powerful overnight. Others were Islamic radicals whose early influence was soon eclipsed, their parties fully outlawed by 1982. Mostafa, once the young acolyte in a circle of eminences, now groped through the wreckage of their alliances.

The revolution still belonged to him, its certainties steadfast and gleaming. His dream was to strike the timbre of the revolution’s voice, to fix the colors and the symbols that would announce Iran as the birthplace of a modern, religious avant-garde. To nurture such an intellectual milieu,
Mostafa believed, Iran’s revolution required an arts corps to match its corps of Revolutionary Guards.

From the shards of the poetry circle, Mostafa chose his allies and began to build a network into which he ushered militant painters, poets, novelists, graphic designers, and filmmakers. The days were heady and long. He circled Tehran collecting cameras, equipment, books, and supplies. He founded an institute, which he called Howzeh-ye Andisheh va Honar-e Islami, the Center for Islamic Thought and Art. The word
howzeh
also meant seminary, a play on words that pleased Mostafa. His institute would give Islamist Iran’s art world not only a cultural identity but a physical location, a productive hive. He got some funding from the Office of the Supreme Leader. But in the end Mostafa fell back on his own resources, selling his car to finance the work of his artistic army.

Howzeh produced theater and films; it hosted a weekly poets’ circle, held exhibits and writers’ workshops, and mobilized young artists and graphic designers to create the posters that would define Iran’s revolutionary aesthetic. The posters combined the bold colors and stark iconography of the left with a Shiite imagery of blood, suffering, and martyrdom. Iraq, Israel, and the United States loomed demonically as skulls and serpents, giant masks splintered by the righteous. Posters announced events and festooned demonstrations, mourned the war dead and incited young men to battle; they celebrated the victory of Islam, in gore and tears, over the corruption of the shah and the perfidy of empire; they indoctrinated, educated, seduced, and threatened, and they adorned every Iranian consulate in the world.

It was during this time that Abdolkarim Soroush, the anti-Marxist religious philosopher whose work had spoken so lucidly to Mostafa as a conscript, returned from London to Tehran. Between meetings and events at Howzeh, Mostafa attended Soroush’s lectures and seminars. He felt a strong tug of kinship toward the older philosopher, who came from Mostafa’s neighborhood and shared its customs and habits of mind. Soroush had even gone to school with Mostafa’s older brothers.

The calm and clarity Mostafa had admired in the writings was all the
more compelling in person. On the rare occasion when Mostafa was moved to question Soroush’s logic, the answer came without vitriol; it was elegant and convincing. More and more, Mostafa gravitated toward Soroush, and as he did so, he drifted from the magic and turbulence of Shariati and Hakimi, the lodestones of his youth. The drift inevitably brought conflict, and not only with Hakimi, who thought Soroush’s way of thinking was a threat to the very roots of belief. For Mostafa suffered the hazards of an independent mind. He was a builder of movements who recoiled from movements.

Howzeh grew so large and successful that, by 1981, the Islamic Republican Party wanted to fold it into the government. Khamenei repeatedly sent a mediator to Mostafa, inviting him to join the party, even offering him a position in charge of art and cultural affairs. It was not a far-fetched idea. In the clashes on the streets, Mostafa and the members of his Howzeh aligned themselves with the hezbollahis. They opposed Bani-Sadr and the Mojahedin; some of the artists even volunteered as security guards for local buildings during the turmoil. Mostafa was loyal, he held the line, but something in him chafed at the thought of belonging, of yoking culture so nakedly to power, of circumscribing intellectual independence—his own and that of his colleagues. He said no to the Islamic Republican Party. And in return, it choked off his funding, accusing him and his artists, incredibly, of supporting Bani-Sadr and the Mojahedin.

Mostafa quit. His brainchild fell into the hands of the Islamic Republican Party, effectively ceasing to exist as he had conceived it, and he contemplated moving abroad. But he had not exhausted his vision. Revolutionary Iran was still, now more even than before, the cradle of a new culture, one that married Islam to the art and philosophy of the late twentieth century, the politics of revolution, and Iranian national identity. There was so much work still to be done.

Under the Shah, Iran was home to the largest newspaper company in the Middle East. Now that newspaper,
Kayhan
, belonged to the revolutionary state. One of its top executives was a mid-ranking cleric named Mohammad Khatami, who happened to know the family of Mostafa’s friend Hassan. With Khatami’s support, in 1984 the friends started a
cultural supplement under the Kayhan umbrella called
Kayhan-e Farhangi
, with Mostafa as its editor. It was independent of the Kayhan newspaper group in all but name.

Now at last Mostafa began to realize his dream. In
Kayhan-e Farhangi
, Mostafa and his coeditors published interviews with prominent revolutionary intellectuals, who explained their ideas in their own words. The supplement suggested the existence of a vibrant scene of religious luminaries, and Khatami gave the editors a good deal of latitude.
Kayhan-e Farhangi
reached out to Soroush, inviting him to have his picture on the supplement’s cover and an interview in its pages. Soroush refused, but he agreed to write essays for the supplement. Mostafa disseminated these essays to a broader audience than Soroush had ever known.

• • •

T
HE MAN WHO WOULD BECOME
known as Abdolkarim Soroush grew up, like most Iranians, on poetry, the folk literature of his country, a canon that crossed social boundaries to a degree shared not even by Islam. Born in 1945 to a merchant family near the traditional, lower-middle-class Tehran neighborhood where Mostafa Rokhsefat also lived, Soroush did not have a single relative with a university education. But his father loved the thirteenth-century poet Saadi, a native of Shiraz who witnessed and wrote of the sufferings of Muslims displaced by the Mongol invasion. Every morning, after he performed his morning prayers, Soroush’s father would read Saadi aloud at the top of his voice. Soroush listened to these verses as he ate his breakfast before school. It was his first exposure to literary and intellectual life, and the only one that would come directly from his family home.

Soroush’s father may not have been an educated man, but he could see the intellectual potential in his young son. He strained the family budget to send Soroush to Alavi High School, an institution known in equal measure for its high academic standards and its traditional piety. In a country that prized scientific achievement as the key to social mobility, the Alavi school was particularly distinguished by its possession of laboratories
for chemistry, physics, and biology. Its headmaster had a background in both physics and Islamic philosophy, subjects to which the young Soroush also warmed. But Soroush found the school’s efforts to combine the two disciplines—by deriving scientific principles from religious texts—at once tantalizing and unconvincing. He argued as much with himself as with the headmaster; Islam, science, and philosophy were like puzzle pieces he knew must somehow interlock but whose master pattern remained obscure to him. Properly conjoined, surely they would explain the universe, but they repelled one another like incompatible magnets. They rattled in his pocket, calling him to ambition and frustration and at long last to understanding throughout the adult journey of his intellectual life.

The Alavi school, like most institutions of learning or religion in Iran, was awash in oppositional politics during Soroush’s high school years, the early 1960s. Soroush’s closest friend, an enthusiastic early member of the Mojahedin, invited Soroush to join the guerrilla struggle against the monarchy. But Soroush was not one to step in darkness, as he would later put it, and his friend had invited him to plunge into an obscurity beyond his daring. He told his friend that society did not need only revolutionaries. It needed many different kinds of people: physicians, poets, carpenters. Couldn’t Soroush be one of those?

It was not that Soroush was uninterested in politics. He was an avid if critical reader of the political literature of the Mojahedin, the Marxists, and other groups opposing the shah’s rule. But the Mojahedin were radical: they questioned the authority of the clergy and absorbed the ideology of the European left. Soroush was more conservative on both scores. He had admired Ayatollah Khomeini from the time of the senior cleric’s arrest in 1962—so much so that the young Soroush went to see the ayatollah upon his release from prison. Moreover, his temperament was scholastic, his mind suited more to the rigors of abstract logic than the raptures of ideology and self-sacrifice, the intrigue of conspiracy. By the end of high school, Soroush’s friend had disappeared into the Mojahedin’s most secretive inner circle. He would follow the guerrillas into battle against the shah and against
Khomeini; later he would follow the Mojahedin’s leadership to France and then Iraq, his friendship with Soroush long estranged.

Soroush, meanwhile, matriculated at the University of Tehran, where he studied Islamic philosophy and science side by side. He read Motahhari and Bazargan, electrified for a time by their insights; in Mulla Sadra he found a critique of Aristotelian essentialism that he would carry with him always; he pored over the Sufi poetry of Rumi; and when Shariati began lecturing at Hosseiniyeh Ershad, just as Soroush was called up for his two years of military service, he attended as often as he could. It was during these years, too, that
Soroush read Khomeini’s treatise on Islamic government and came to consider himself one of the ayatollah’s followers. In later years he would be a fierce critic of
velayat-e faqih
. But during his student days he thought the elderly cleric came closer than anyone else to unifying the crucial visions of philosophy, mysticism, and jurisprudence.

Soroush was an earnest and humble student. But between the realms of his curiosity a chasm stretched, and nothing in Islamic philosophy helped to bridge it. There should be, he thought, a discipline of thought to link the empirical to the unseen, a metaphysics that could explain, for example, the enormous disparity between past and present scientific understandings of the world. As a scientist, he yearned for answers to questions Shiite Islamic philosophy did not ask. After a yearlong stint as a laboratory supervisor overseeing food and drug research in the southern Iranian town of Bushehr, Soroush gathered his poetry books and a volume of Mulla Sadra’s and made for England to do his graduate work in 1973.

Compact, bearded, placid, and wry, Soroush was a man at once solitary and sociable, an intellectual wayfarer who carried nearly all his resources in his mind but was not averse to the company of others. He was animated by a fierce, even combative intellect, its edges softened somewhat by his penchant for metaphor and quotations from Sufi poetry. Where Shariati’s retreat into Gnosticism seemed to emanate from psychic anguish, Soroush’s peculiar combination of mysticism and cool rationalism produced in him a sort of serene detachment. And yet, in his youth, Soroush’s hunger for the
mastery of ideas was feverish. He spent his first year in London studying analytical chemistry. But he wanted also to ground himself in the Western philosophical tradition and to improve his English, so he bought a copy of John Passmore’s survey,
A Hundred Years of Philosophy
.