Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples (Vintage International) (30 page)

Mr. Parvez looked Indian rather than Iranian. When I asked him he said he was an Iranian of Indian origin. I thought this was a neat way of putting something complicated, and I assumed he was an Indian Shia who had migrated to Iran as to the Shia heartland.

He was a gentle man. He thought that, like many other visitors, I had come to see him to ask for a little job, and he must have been on the point of offering me one, because with a sudden tormented shyness, looking down at the proofs on his table, not looking at me, he asked in a round-about way, as though he couldn’t bear to put the question directly, what my “terms” were. When he understood that I simply wanted to talk about the situation in Iran, he sent me to Mr. Jaffrey, who was in the reporters’ room.

Mr. Jaffrey was a middle-aged man with flashing eyes and a wide, mobile mouth. He radiated energy. He had broken off from the copy on the high standard typewriter in front of him, and was eating a dish of fried eggs which the office messenger had just fetched for him. He was going at the eggs (it was Ramadan, but he wasn’t fasting) with zest; and I felt he had been going at the copy on his typewriter with a similar kind of attack.

Mr. Jaffrey, too, was an Indian. He was a Shia from Lucknow. He had left India in 1948, the year after independence, because he had been told “rather bluntly” that as a Muslim he wasn’t going to get far in the Indian air force. He went to Pakistan. There after ten years he had begun to feel unhappy as a Shia. So he had gone to Iran, where nearly everyone was Shia. But—religious ease ever receding, in this communal quest of Mr. Jaffrey’s—Iran under the Shah was a tyranny, and the great wealth when it came had led to corruption and sodomy and general wickedness.

Still, he had stuck it out. Then had come the revolution. Religion had made the revolution, had given it its overwhelming power. That, at last, was something good, something of which Mr. Jaffrey could approve. But already, in less than six months, the revolution had gone bad. The ayatollahs hadn’t gone back to their religious centers, as Mr. Jaffrey thought they should; they hadn’t handed over to the politicians and the administrators. Khomeini, Mr. Jaffrey said, had usurped the authority of the Shah, and the country was now in the hands of “fanatics.”

This no doubt was the kind of cantankerous copy that was on Mr. Jaffrey’s typewriter while he ate his eggs and talked: I felt he was talking out and amplifying, and making more intemperate, what he was in the process of writing. And perhaps, after a lifetime of rejecting things, the cantankerous or protest mode was what brought out the best in him as a journalist.

All his life Mr. Jaffrey had had a dream of the
jamé towhidi,
the society of believers. This was a dream of re-creating things as they had been in the earliest days of Islam, when the Prophet ruled, and the spiritual and secular were one, and everything that was done by the as yet small community could be said to be serving the faith.

It was like a dream of the ancient city-state, and in the modern world it was a dangerous fantasy. At its simplest it was a wish for security; it also contained an idea of exclusivity. Both these ideas in varying proportions had made Mr. Jaffrey reject India for Muslim Pakistan, and then made him reject Pakistan for Shia Iran. In another way it was a dream of a society ethnically cleansed (to use the words of a later time). Such a prompting had led to the partition of the Indian subcontinent and the creation of Pakistan; and yet the Muslim state that had been achieved, at such cost in human life and suffering, hadn’t been able to hold Mr. Jaffrey and his dream.

In Iran now Ayatollah Khomeini ruled politically and spiritually by almost universal consent. Such a figure wasn’t going to come soon again; and it was hard to imagine a country in a higher state of religious excitement. (Going by an item in the
Tehran Times,
there was even an Islamic way of washing carpets now.) Iran under the Ayatollah should have been very close to Mr. Jaffrey’s dream of the jamé towhidi, the society of believers, the oneness of government and faith.

But it was just at this point that Mr. Jaffrey’s Indian-British education and experience came into play, ideas of democracy and law and institutions, the separation of church and state, ideas that made him sit at his typewriter in the reporters’ room and rap out peppery calls for the mullahs to get back to the mosques and the ayatollahs to get back to Qom.

Mr. Jaffrey’s dream of the jamé towhidi was to him so pure and sweet that he hadn’t begun to go into its contradictions. He loved his faith; he had traveled from country to country because of it; he felt it entitled him to judge the faith of others. And it was just there, in fact, in his fabulous dream of an impossible, antique completeness, in his awareness of his own piety, which was like pride, his constant rejection of the impure, that the tyranny of the religious state began. Other people had their own ideas; they, too, felt they could judge the faith of others. Mr. Jaffrey was suffering now from the “fanatics.” But in his own way he was like them.

Six months later, when I went back to Tehran, it was winter, bitter weather, and that office was empty. A big bound folder, with file copies of the paper, had been cracked open and the file copies had fanned out on one of the desks. Mr. Jaffrey’s typewriter was there, empty, harmless.

The American embassy had been seized some weeks before by one Iranian group and the staff held hostage. This had killed business and economic life at one blow. The eight pages of the
Tehran Times
had shrunk to four, a single folded sheet. The staff of twenty had become two, Mr. Parvez and
one other person. Mr. Parvez was losing three hundred dollars with every issue he brought out. And yet he felt he had to keep on, because he thought that if he stopped publishing for even one day, the paper would cease being a going concern, and the fortune he had invested would be lost. He was tremulous with nerves. He could hardly bring himself to speak of his great fear: which was that the American hostages would be killed.

I asked after Mr. Jaffrey. “Is it hard for him?”

“It is hard for everybody.”

Outside the embassy it was like a fair: tents, stalls, books, food, hot drinks. The pavement outside the high walls was roped off. The gates were guarded. The students who had taken over the embassy called themselves, in careful language that seemed intended to conceal who they were, “Muslim Students Following the Line of Ayatollah Khomeini.” They were in guerrilla garb; they had pitched low khaki tents. They were perfectly safe here outside the embassy in North Tehran. They were only playing at war.

The real war was to come sooner than they thought, and was to last eight years.

Now, fifteen years later, I went looking, but without much hope, for Mr. Parvez and Mr. Jaffrey. The
Tehran Times
still existed; occasionally it was on the desk of the Hyatt. But it had lost the motto, “May Truth Prevail,” of which Mr. Parvez was proud; and typographically it was a little dilapidated and uncertain. In spirit it was like the Hyatt. Mr. Parvez would never have allowed that dilapidation; he was a professional; he knew how to bring out a paper. His name, in fact, wasn’t on the masthead.

But he had survived. He had lost the
Tehran Times,
but he was working on another English-language paper,
Iran News.
The offices were in a small building in Vanak Square in Central Tehran. They were finer than the offices of Mr. Parvez’s old
Tehran Times. Iran News
was up-to-date in every way. To enter the reception area was to feel that, in spite of their long isolation, and financial stringency, and in spite of the pretentious revolutionary shabbiness of places like the Hyatt, Iranians at a certain level could still do things with a style that was like a carryover from the—now glittering—time of the Shah.

There was nothing in Mr. Parvez’s face to speak of the stresses he must have lived through; and only a slight puffiness around the eyes, as though he had overslept, spoke of age. I wasn’t sure that he remembered me. Both our meetings had been brief; and the first time he was preoccupied and shy, and the second time he was tormented. Still, no doubt or hesitation
showed, and he led me to the top of the building, where we were to have lunch and where, he said, it would be easier to talk.

It was a spacious, well-lighted attic room. On the floor, almost in the middle, newspaper sheets had been spread at an angle to make the equivalent of a prayer rug aligned towards Mecca. At the head of this spread of newspaper was a cake of earth from some holy place: Shias when they pray touch their foreheads against such cakes of earth.

Mr. Parvez gave a little start when he saw what was on the floor. He must have reserved the room for our lunch. But he quickly recovered. “Ah,” he said, with a touch of weariness, picking his way around the newspaper sheets, “these Shias.”

And now it was for me to be surprised, by this weariness and distance, because I had always thought that Mr. Parvez was an Indian Shia, and that it was his Shia passion that had drawn him to Iran from Bhopal and India, and his early life there as a poet in Urdu, the Persianized language of Indian Muslims. But Mr. Parvez had lived through a lot. He had lived through the Shah’s time, and then he had survived fifteen years and more of the revolution, at heaven knows what cost; and certainties, if they had existed, might have dissolved.

We sat at white plastic chairs (of a stacking kind) at a white plastic table, with the newspaper prayer rug at our back. The table was decorated with a very bold pattern of bamboo leaves. Messengers brought up lunch, setting down the dishes in a no-nonsense way, as though that was part of their own style: rough, meaty, messy, oily food, which Mr. Parvez went at with the kind of relish Mr. Jaffrey had taken to the dish of fried eggs on that Ramadan afternoon sixteen years before. Eating a little of this and then a mouthful of that, enjoying his food, Mr. Parvez told me about Mr. Jaffrey.

The end had come for Mr. Jaffrey not long after my second visit to the
Tehran Times,
in February 1980, when I had found Mr. Parvez in a desolate office, full of nerves about the seizing of the U.S. embassy and the kidnapping of the staff by “Muslim Students Following the Line of Ayatollah Khomeini.”

The students were going through the embassy records and almost every day were making “revelations” about more people. They had even made “revelations” about the
Tehran Times.

One evening a student came to the
Tehran Times
office and asked Mr. Parvez for Mr. Jaffrey. The student didn’t give his name, but he was from the group holding the embassy and the hostages. Mr. Parvez said that Mr.
Jaffrey would be in the office the next day at eleven. The student went away.

Mr. Parvez was concerned. He knew that Mr. Jaffrey was a stringer for the Voice of America radio. What he didn’t know at the time was that Mr. Jaffrey’s money from the Voice of America came directly from the U.S. embassy. The receipts Mr. Jaffrey had given (or signed) never said what the money was for. They said only “Received from the U.S. embassy.”

Mr. Jaffrey was an old man. He had a heart problem and other ailments. Mr. Parvez telephoned him at his house.