Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples (Vintage International) (31 page)

Mr. Jaffrey said, “I am coming to the office.”

When he came, Mr. Parvez said, “Is there anything wrong? Did you have any contact with the embassy?”

Mr. Jaffrey said, “No. Except for the Voice of America. I used to send some stories. I used to get money through the U.S. embassy.”

I asked Mr. Parvez, “Do you know how much he got?”

“I think three hundred dollars a month. It was good money at that time. Seven
toumans,
seventy rials, made a dollar.”

It would have been even better money now: four thousand rials made a dollar.

Mr. Parvez said, “I advised him to go to the embassy and talk to the students there and explain. I said they looked very nice. He promised me he would go to the embassy.”

The next day Mr. Jaffrey didn’t come to the office. Mr. Parvez telephoned his house. Mr. Jaffrey wasn’t there. Mr. Parvez was greatly upset. He tried to tell himself that Mr. Jaffrey’s telephone was probably out of order. He sent his driver to the house. After an hour or so the driver came back and said, “The house is locked.” The driver had talked to a neighbor and the neighbor had said that during the night Mr. Jaffrey had dumped some household things in the boot of his car. Mr. Jaffrey had a big American car, a Chevrolet, an old one.

Mr. Parvez got in touch with Mr. Jaffrey’s friends. He couldn’t believe that Mr. Jaffrey was a spy. He also began to think that Mr. Jaffrey might have been arrested. He got in touch with the security people. They said they didn’t know about Mr. Jaffrey.

In the afternoon the student from the embassy came again and asked for Mr. Jaffrey. He became angry when Mr. Parvez said he didn’t know where Mr. Jaffrey was.

The student said, “Why did you tell me he was going to be here at eleven o’clock?”

Mr. Parvez said, “Look. He was a nice man, an old man. I know there was nothing wrong.”

The student became very angry, and Mr. Parvez learned later that that student and some others broke into Mr. Jaffrey’s house and took away some things.

The next day Mr. Parvez got a telephone call from Pakistan. It was from Mr. Jaffrey. He said, “I am here with my Chevrolet.”

Mr. Parvez asked him, “How did you manage that?”

Mr. Jaffrey said, “I had to pay some money to the border guards. On both sides. Iranian and Pakistani.”

“You made a mistake. You are a clean man. You shouldn’t have gone.”

“No, no. I am an old man, and I am sick.”

Mr. Parvez, eating in the attic room of
Iran News,
sitting at the white plastic table with the big bamboo-leaf pattern, recounting the events of fifteen years before, said, “Fortunately he had a son and a daughter already in Pakistan. Then he started work there, in Islamabad. And then in 1990, I think, I received another call from Pakistan, from his son, to inform me that he had expired.”

That was how it had ended for Mr. Jaffrey, that dream, so sweet in Lucknow in India in 1948, of the jamé towhidi, the pure society of believers, which seemed worth leaving home for.

Mr. Parvez said, in a kind of final tribute, “He was very fond of playing bridge. At that time there were
so
many people here who played bridge.”

The time Mr. Parvez spoke of was the Shah’s time. The playing of cards was now deemed un-Islamic and banned.

At the time of Mr. Jaffrey’s flight Mr. Parvez (according to what he had told me in 1980) was losing three hundred dollars with every new issue of the
Tehran Times.
He felt nevertheless that he absolutely had to go on, and somehow he was doing so. But revolution was revolution; disorder had its own momentum; there were no happier times just around the corner.

Just a few months after Mr. Jaffrey’s flight—and after the pretend war outside the American embassy, and the pretend battle dress of the “Muslim Students Following the Line of Ayatollah Khomeini”—the real war came: the eight-year war with Iraq, a war so terrible that the Iranian newspapers now referred to it in certain emblematic ways: “the imposed war,” “the Iraqi-imposed war,” “the sacred defense,” “the eight-year sacred defense.”

On a long front to the west, a great bloodletting. And, very soon after, a revolutionary bloodletting at home as well: the revolution beginning to cut down some of its makers.

Mr. Parvez said, “After 1982 all the good leaders began to be assassinated. The top people. The assassinations were by different groups. Then comparatively second-grade people began to come up. Only Beheshti was left. And then he was killed. He had his own ideas about the Islamic Republic. They were very clear. He wanted relations with all countries except Israel and South Africa. And he wanted to end the war.” After his death, and the death of some others, the opposition began to be “wiped out.”

Mr. Parvez said, “Now they want to control your way of sitting here”—he tapped the white plastic table with the bamboo-leaf pattern—“and your way of talking. It has to be Islamic.”

Beheshti was the ayatollah who was, or had become, Mr. Parvez’s patron (though Mr. Parvez didn’t use the word); and I felt it was Beheshti who had helped to keep the paper going during the difficult months of the hostage crisis.

“As long as Dr. Beheshti was alive nobody could touch me. He was supporting me. Please mention Beheshti. He was martyred in 1981. With a bomb. He was addressing a meeting of economic experts of the Islamic Republic party. That party was later closed down.”

Mr. Parvez’s regard and tenderness for Beheshti, fourteen years after his death, showed in the use of the word “martyred.” And he had reason to mourn Beheshti, because a few months later the paper was taken over by the authorities.

Mr. Parvez had started the
Tehran Times
in 1979, after the revolution. “
Tehran
‘May Truth Prevail’
Times,
” he said, speaking the title and the splicing motto as it had appeared on the front page. Sitting in the attic room of
Iran News,
having lunch, with the newspaper prayer rug and the cake of holy earth at our back, Mr. Parvez’s eyes brightened at the sweet memory; and he spoke the title and the motto again.

“That title was registered. They have changed it now. They just came one day to the office and asked me to sign this blank paper. I signed it. The person who came is now an important ambassador. Now he is a good friend of mine. But at that time I didn’t know him.”

After a few days this man said to Mr. Parvez, “It’s better you take out your name from the newspaper. It’s better for you. You have never been a revolutionary. You have been working with a newspaper that was close to
the Shah.” And it was true that Mr. Parvez had been associated with an English-language paper in the time of the Shah.

One day Mr. Parvez asked the new people in his office, “Is it possible that I have some compensation? Whatever I’ve earned here I have invested in the
Tehran Times.
”

Somebody in the accounts department said, “Don’t ask about money.”

Mr. Parvez said, “Why? I have no house. I have a son in America. I have to send him money. Look, the time when I was a journalist before the revolution, there was no journalist here. Either they fled from here, or they were in prison, or they were executed.”

The man from accounts didn’t take that as Mr. Parvez was expecting. He said, “Thank God that you are still alive and working.”

Mr. Parvez remained with the paper as editor. There was always a mullah in the office now. It helped that the mullah was a nice man, an open-minded man, as Mr. Parvez thought. The mullah would say, “Be moderate. Not extremist.” That was all. If he hadn’t been so nice, Mr. Parvez wouldn’t have stayed. And, in fact, the authorities treated Mr. Parvez with regard. On official occasions he would be introduced as “the father of English-language journalism in Iran.” Once he was even taken to meet Ayatollah Khomeini and Mr. Rafsanjani, the prime minister.

“They introduced me in a very refined way,” Mr. Parvez said. “Very respectably.” These forms mattered very much in Iran.

And Mr. Parvez was used to censorship. In the Shah’s time, until 1975, four years before the revolution, there used to be an intelligence man from SAVAK, the Shah’s secret police, in the office of the
Tehran Journal,
which was the name of Mr. Parvez’s paper at that time. The SAVAK man would come at three in the morning with an English-speaking team, and they would go through everything, even the advertisements. In its reports of anti-government demonstrations or marches the
Tehran Journal
wasn’t allowed to use the words “student” or “youth.” “Hooligans” was the word that had to be used. In 1975 this day-to-day censorship of the newspaper pages stopped. But the government still controlled; the top people in the newspapers were told what to do.

There was no formal censorship now, Mr. Parvez said; there was only self-censorship. Journalists now knew how far they could go. In the Shah’s time they didn’t. Nowadays they could go surprisingly far.

“We have criticized presidents, ministers, etc. But we know that if we even try to hurt or destroy the basic system, we would not be spared.”

“Basic system?” The words were new to me.

“That’s the institution of leadership and obedience.”

That, too, was new to me. Mr. Parvez leaned to his left and took up a copy of that day’s
Iran News.
He marked two items and said, “These two stories would explain.”

The first story, “Ayatollah Kani Underscores Importance of Ulama,” was from the paper’s “political desk.” The ulama are the clerics, the religious teachers, the men in turbans and gowns. “… Ayatollah Mohammad Reza Mahdavi Kani urged the ulama on Monday that they should remain active as politicians and executive officials and never think of abandoning these vital duties.… Speaking on the occasion of the start of the new academic year at Imam Sadeq (A.S.) University, Ayatollah Kani …”

The second story was more important: “Obedience to Leader Only Way for the Left Wing to Survive.” Though it was presented only as an interview with a “left-wing” deputy, it was an explicit re-statement of the principle of leadership and obedience. The writer first defined the Leader: “The highest authority in the Islamic Republic is the Leader—or alternatively the Leadership Council—who exercises the supreme political and religious powers and, indeed, is a manifestation of the integration of politics with religion, according to Article 5 of the Constitution of Iran.” And this was how the left-wing deputy defined his obedience: “The Left Wing believes in total obedience to the Leader without any terms or conditions, execution of government orders, implementation of pure Mohammadan Islam (
Islam-e Nab
) as the late Imam [Khomeini] wished, creation of social justice, implementation of the Article 49 of the Constitution.…”

The writer then quoted from Article 49: “The government has the responsibility to confiscate all wealth accumulated through usury, usurpation, bribery, embezzlement, theft, gambling, misuse of endowment, misuse of government contracts and transactions, the sale of cultivated land and other resources subject to public ownership, the operation of centers of corruption.…”

In spite of the punitive, religious tone, the aims of Article 49 might be said to be an aspect of the regulatory business of responsible government everywhere and in all times. What made it Islamic was “the integration of politics and religion,” a kind of institutional shortcut, since the integration was enshrined in the figure of the Leader, to whom absolute obedience was due. Islam meant “submission,” and in an Islamic republic, such as the people of Iran had passionately wanted and had voted for in a referendum, everyone had to submit. It could be said that the Shah also required people
to submit; but the Shah ran a secular and corrupt tyranny; whereas now, in return for their surrender of everything, the people were made a gift of the almost unbearable beauty of “pure Mohammadan Islam,
Islam-e Nab,
” which the Imam Khomeini had wished for them.

It was like a version of Mr. Jaffrey’s jamé towhidi. Poor Mr. Jaffrey had had only the sweet dream. It had ruled his whole life: the dream of being a Muslim among Muslims alone, a Shia among Shias, living in a restored antique world, when the Prophet ruled and the little community obeyed, and everything served the pure faith. Only the dream; and then, like a man who had never truly wanted what he had made so much trouble about, he had objected at the first sign of religious rule, Khomeini’s Imamate, and he had finally run away in his Chevrolet, before this very bold realization of his dream, with the Leader and the Leadership Council standing in for the Prophet.