Children of Paradise (3 page)

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N
OBODY ASKS ANYMORE
why Iran had a revolution in 1979. Western powers had robbed Iran of its resources and made puppets of its leaders. Iranians suffered political repression and glaring inequality. Iran’s religious leaders and its merchant class saw the culture and economy they held dear slipping away, displaced by arrangements suitable to foreigners. With all we now know, the Islamic Revolution of 1979 seems overdetermined. But what we forget, or underestimate, or maybe never knew, is that the Iranian Revolution was not a simple act of refusal—of modernity; of the West; even, in the end, of absolute rule. It emerged in impassioned, ambivalent dialogue among passionate, ambivalent people. And the state it produced is passionately ambivalent, too.

Outside Iran, we have come to associate the Islamic Revolution with the severe, otherworldly face of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and the return of theocracy in the twentieth century. Behind and within this story is another history—of a revolutionary impulse as complexly modern as the society that produced it, and which has yielded a culture of civic engagement as imperishable as the quest of the little red fish. To the extent that the postrevolutionary state has tried to deny the multiplicity of its origins and to suppress the engagement of its people, its course has followed an arc of tragedy.

The story of Iran’s Islamic Revolution and the republic it spawned is not only—perhaps not even primarily—a story about religion. It is a story
about politics and identity, about social division and cohesion, about the forces that move history everywhere in the world. It is also the story of individuals who have quested ceaselessly, pressing against seemingly impermeable barriers, for the open sea.

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I
RANIAN REVOLUTIONARIES
sometimes describe their revolution, in terms resonant with Behrangi, as the convergence of many streams of thought and activism. Some of these streams were religious. Others were secular. Where the basin widened, the religious and secular ideas became, if not indistinguishable, inextricable. That did not occur right away. But when it did, history happened, and has been happening ever since.

To make a myth of Samad Behrangi’s eerily resonant death by drowning was nearly irresistible. The man who did so was Behrangi’s friend and champion in Tehran’s intellectual circles, Jalal Al-e Ahmad, an essayist active against Iran’s autocratic king, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. Al-e Ahmad had hosted Behrangi at his Tehran salon, and he wrote affectionately about the teacher, storyteller, and folklorist he called his younger brother.
It was Al-e Ahmad who floated the legend that Behrangi was murdered by the shah’s secret police, even persuading the friend who was with Behrangi the day he drowned to keep quiet about the details of the accident.

That fall Al-e Ahmad wrote in an essay, “
Now we must mourn in our agony for this younger brother and eulogize him? And anyway, how many Samads do we have? . . . No, it’s no good. Now it’s better if I . . . instead of mourning this younger brother’s death or carrying a cane, start a rumor that Samad, just like that
Little Black Fish
, has made his way through [the] Aras to the sea so that he may reappear one day.”

With Behrangi, Jalal Al-e Ahmad was one of the most important fish in the secular stream. His most famous work was an extended essay called
Westoxication
, published underground in 1962.
Westoxication
excoriated Iranians for what Al-e Ahmad saw as their self-loathing worship of the West. This plague ate away at Iranian industry, culture, power, and self-esteem. The machine, invented in the West and controlled by the West,
was devastating Iranian pastoral life. The old arrangements, economic and social, had been upended, but the new ones, devised elsewhere and evolved to suit an alien history and culture, made no sense for Iran’s largely rural people. There was no use trying to rewind modernity; the only hope was for Iranians to seize control of the machine themselves, to bring it to their villagers not as a replacement for their labor but as a tool for their betterment.

Westoxication
would become the foundational text of revolutionary Iran’s anti-Americanism. But it was a cry less of hatred than of anguish. That Iran had borrowed too heavily from the West, that it had adopted an alien intellectual tradition that lacked roots in local culture or history—that Iranians consequently saw themselves as inferior to Westerners, and saw themselves through the eyes of Westerners who looked down on them—was a nearly inevitable critique at that time. But Western influence on Iranian philosophical thought was too deep to cast off completely, its attraction too profound. Iran was enmeshed as though in a relationship with an abusive lover, self-loathing bound up with the contempt in which it was held. For the very fact of loving its abuser, Iran hated itself.

The solution to this problem was not obvious. The Western intellectual tradition was intertwined with the Persian one from its root. The Shiite seminaries of Najaf and Qom taught the same ancient Greek philosophy that lay at the foundation of European thought. Generations of Iranian students abroad soaked up European ideas and brought them home. Iranian thinkers had built on, around, and against these schools of European thought. Al-e Ahmad himself ended his anti-Western manifesto by appealing to the works of Albert Camus, Eugene Ionesco, and Ingmar Bergman. Was there really any such thing as a separable Western tradition? If so, was it something alien, adapted from and to foreign cultures and different circumstances, or was it, even so, as much an Iranian birthright as a French or German or American one? The Iranian thinkers of the 1960s embodied this dilemma. In their effort to create a native, Iranian intellectual language and political ideology, they drew on Western sources, because those
sources were as natural to them as the native ones—as available, as meaningful, as useful.

Jalal Al-e Ahmad died in 1969. And when he did, perhaps the most influential thinker of all stood ready to carry the revolutionary relay to its finish. Ali Shariati would fashion an ideology that was the stuff of a generation’s dreams: militant, transcendent, and inalienably, authentically, Iranian.

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S
HARIATI
, a charismatic orator and Islamist ideologue in the eastern shrine city of Mashhad, had met Al-e Ahmad earlier that year. Younger, wilder, more imaginative—already holding sway over rooms of students who sat, hypnotized, well after the bell that marked the end of class—Shariati must have known at some level that the light Al-e Ahmad carried would soon pass into his own hands. When the author of
Westoxication
died, Shariati wrote, “
I completely forgot all the memories, ties, friendship, intimacy and harmony that existed between me and dear Jalal. His face faded away in my memory and instead another loomed. It was my own face! It was as if I had heard the news of my own death.”

Shariati called for casting off what he saw as the courtly, superstitious, passive Islam of the clergy and reviving what he considered the true Islam—one that was militant and justice-seeking, and which contained the answers to nearly all of man’s problems. He married the language and concerns of Iran’s secular opposition to the identity of its Shiite masses. He might as well have split the atom.

Shariati’s charisma was legendary. He habitually arrived late to his lectures, smoked while he spoke, and held forth for as many as six hours at a stretch. But the oratory was so powerful that one of his students told his biographer, “
During his lectures, you would be so carried away with his performance that you wouldn’t even feel the chair you were sitting on.” Even some of his bitterest critics, today, wax sentimental at the mention of his name. As it turned out, he was a dangerous man, they say. But oh, you should only have heard his voice.

Shariati was born in 1933 to a traditional lower-middle-class family in a northeastern desert town not far from the Turkmen border. His father was a local religious teacher who founded an important Islamic center in the city of Mashhad. In many ways Shariati’s thinking would follow a clear line from his father’s. Shariati’s father spoke of shaking off superstition and passivity to make religion into a more active force in Iranian life. He modeled for Ali the study of Western ideas as well as Islamic ones: the capacity to swim in two streams, one traditional and religious, the other modern and rationalistic, in order to speak a single language to a divided society—perhaps even to his divided self.

According to his biographer, Shariati was a rebellious, indolent student. He skipped class, dashed off his homework just before school, and disrupted lectures with sly remarks and practical jokes. Although he achieved little in school, he spent his free time reading from his father’s two-thousand-volume library. One of his early teachers described Shariati as “
a student who is more educated than all his teachers and lazier than all his classmates.”

Shariati read Lenin and Dostoyevsky alongside Persian poets and Sufi dervishes. He would later take a particular interest in a school of Sufis known as the “self-blamers,” who deliberately committed public acts of immoral behavior in the hope of being ridiculed and humiliated. Their public disgrace was meant to stiffen their inner resolve; for a devout Muslim, it was a perverse form of self-sacrifice. Although Shariati dabbled in it only briefly, it was an uncanny fit for his sensibility, which all his life would draw him to play games with mirrors, to invent alter egos and revel in contradictions, to oscillate between a public life in lecture halls teeming with acolytes and one of mystical, melancholy, self-lacerating solitude.

The early fifties were a time of political awakening, not only for Shariati, but for Iran. Following decades of repressive, autocratic rule, a young and diffident new king, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, had assumed the throne during World War II, in 1941. When the war ended, the young shah presided, by his passivity, over a brief window of relative openness that lasted from when Shariati was twelve until he was twenty. During these years,
Britain continued to direct Iranian politics with a heavy hand and to treat the new shah like a despised vassal. But a labor movement stirred, and so did the parliament. Intellectuals, journalists, clerics, and politicians cast off the deferential silence the previous shah had imposed on them and filled the public space with lively debates and new political parties.

Through the ranks of the newly energized parliament rose a liberal nationalist named Mohammad Mossadegh, who promised the Iranian people the rule of law and freedom from the interference of foreigners. Specifically, Mossadegh proposed that the oil industry should come under Iranian national ownership and control. Iran, a country awash in the world’s most valuable resource, should not suffer the humiliation of poverty while enriching foreigners. As prime minister from 1951 to 1953, Mossadegh effectively wrested Iran’s oil industry from Britain’s grip and outmaneuvered Mohammad Reza Shah at every pass, rendering the king nearly powerless despite his foreign backers and titular role. In 1953 the United States, fearing the prime minister’s relations with the communist Tudeh Party, helped Mossadegh’s domestic enemies topple him with a CIA-supported coup.

Mohammad Reza Shah emerged from that crucible a hardened, brittle man. Fearful of court intrigue and insecure before his people, he grew ever more obsessive and tyrannical. He took an axe to the knees of his most effective opposition, the Tudeh and the nationalists, and would soon go on to crack down on the clergy as well. He turned the country’s oil industry over to an international consortium that split its profits with Iran but did not allow Iranians to audit its books or serve on its board of directors.

Under Mossadegh, it had seemed possible that Iran would evolve along its own track, influenced by leftist and liberal ideas that originated in the West, perhaps, but defined by a powerful sense of national pride, the drive to own its own resources and command its own fate. Now the wind sweeping Iran from the West seemed both cruel and irresistible. Either one capitulated to it, as the shah had done, or one found some object to wrap one’s fists around—something supple yet firmly enough rooted to hold one’s weight against the storm.

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T
HESE WERE THE CIRCUMSTANCES OF
Shariati’s late adolescence. He joined a religious group that supported Mossadegh on the grounds that monarchy was incompatible with Islam. At teacher-training school he became an activist for Mossadegh, and he continued these activities even after the coup, when they became dangerous. By that time Shariati had graduated and started work as a primary school teacher; he also substituted for his father from time to time as the main speaker at the family’s Islamic center. Once during those years, his biographer recounts, Shariati was caught in the dead of night scrawling pro-Mossadegh graffiti on city walls. He was forced to lick the graffiti clean, until his tongue was swollen and black.

Amid the lengthening shadows of the late 1950s, the nationalist movement spent or crushed, Shariati retreated into Gnosticism, a mystical search for illumination based on the view that divinity resides within humans, who must somehow liberate their better nature from the debased material world—the “
stinking mud,” as Shariati called it. He wrote poetry and attended poetry circles while he studied literature at the University of Mashhad. He attended the same poetry circle as a young Mashhadi cleric named Ali Khamenei.

Shariati won a scholarship to Paris, where he studied sociology in the late fifties and early sixties and joined a circuit of politically active Iranian students abroad. During those years he grappled ferociously and publicly with his country’s vexed relationship with foreign influence. In one essay Shariati lamented that Iran’s modern, educated elite belittled itself by elevating foreign ideas. While these Iranians rejected their own history and imagined a future modeled on the West, he wrote, the common people, wedded to local tradition, embraced the past and felt the future didn’t belong to them. Shariati diagnosed the problem astutely: “
A futureless past is a state of inertia and stagnation, while a pastless future is alien and vacuous.” And so he set about inventing both a useful past and a utopian future.