Among the Believers (70 page)

So, deep down, he was divided. With one part of his mind he was for the faith, and opposed to all that stood outside it; in a world grown strange, he wished to continue to belong to himself for as long as possible. With another part of his mind he recognized the world outside as paramount, part of the future of his sons. It was in that division of the mind—as much as in the excesses of the Shah—that the Islamic revolution had begun in Iran. And it was there that it was ending.

In the
Tehran Times
the next day there was an interview with a visiting Indian Muslim. Non-Muslims, the visitor said, were always impressed by “the comprehensive system of Islam” when it was outlined to them; but then they always asked in what Muslim country the system was practised. “The answer to that important question could best be given by Iran,” the
Tehran Times
said, reporting the visitor’s words, “because the Iranian nation launched the unique and most courageous revolutionary movement in the history of mankind to establish the rule of Islam.”

H
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words still; but in Iran and elsewhere men would have to make their peace with the world which they knew existed beyond the faith.

The life that had come to Islam had not come from within. It had come from outside events and circumstances, the spread of the universal civilization. It was the late twentieth century that had made Islam revolutionary, given new meaning to old Islamic ideas of equality and union, shaken up static or retarded societies. It was the late twentieth century—and not the faith—that could supply the answers—in institutions, legislation, economic systems. And, paradoxically, out of the Islamic revival, Islamic fundamentalism, that appeared to look backward, there would remain in many Muslim countries, with all the emotional charge derived from the Prophet’s faith, the idea of modern revolution. Behzad the communist (to whom the Russian rather than the Iranian
revolution was “the greatest turn in history”) was made by Islam more than he knew. And increasingly now in Islamic countries there would be the Behzads, who, in an inversion of Islamic passion, would have a vision of a society cleansed and purified, a society of believers.

August 1979–February 1981