Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples (Vintage International) (32 page)

This “basic system”—of a leadership mysteriously evolving, and the people obeying—explained the official photographs of the three top men that appeared in many places. It explained the sometimes enormous painted portraits on the side of buildings, linking the present spiritual leader to the Imam Khomeini, and making a simple call for obedience.

Mr. Parvez said, “I never thought it would be like that in 1979. I thought that the régime of the Shah would go, and we would have a Western-style democratic government, as we had in India. I have never been Islamic as such.” His paper gave another impression in 1979. “That has made it difficult. My background was not religious at all. I voted in 1980 in the referendum. I voted for the Islamic Republic. It was a yes-or-no referendum. The people gave eighty-five percent for the Islamic Republic, without knowing what the Islamic Republic would be.”

Mr. Parvez was attracted to Khomeini because he spoke about the oppressed and the third-world countries. He especially remembered Khomeini’s famous speech in the cemetery when he returned from exile. Many promises were made in this speech: kerosene brought to houses, free electricity, free water.

“He promised employment, saying he would take away employment from the Americans. In the Shah’s time about one or two million people were unemployed or half-employed. Today there are ten million unemployed. But I will tell you one thing. The Imam was very sincere. He wanted to have good relations with all the third world. But he could not implement his plan. Because of the war.”

And then the cemetery had other associations.

As for himself and his own future, Mr. Parvez was trying to get the
Tehran Times
back. He was taking his case to court.

“But financially I will always be in trouble. Hostage crisis—if it hadn’t been there, my paper wouldn’t have been in trouble. The businessmen and foreign companies left, and there were no ads.”

So many things had happened in the world. So many things had happened to me. He endlessly re-lived the hostage crisis. It was strange to think of him—if the metaphor wasn’t too unsuitable—as nailed to that cross now as he had been fifteen years before. He had gone through a great deal; he would have done many things to survive. It would have been unfair to go too far into the uncertainties I had noticed in his narrative.

They want to control your way of sitting and your way of talking, Mr. Parvez said. And Tehran at night, in some of its main roads, was like an occupied city, or like a city in a state of insurrection, with Revolutionary Guards and, sometimes, the more feared Basiji volunteers at roadblocks. They were not looking—on these almost personal night hunts—for terrorists so much as for women whose hair was not completely covered. And not so much for weapons as for alcohol or compact discs or cassettes (music was suspect, and women singers were banned).

The people of Tehran could spot these roadblocks before the visitor did. One night, when we passed some people who had been picked up, the lady driving us said it was all a matter of knowing how to talk to the Guards. Once, when she was stopped, she had said, as though really wishing to know, “What is wrong with my hijab [headdress], my son?” And the young man, of simple background, not feeling himself rebuffed or challenged by the lady, but thinking he was being treated correctly, had let her go. Such were the ways of obedience and survival that people had learnt here.

But parallel with this was a feeling that this kind of humiliation couldn’t go on. Though all the capacity for revolution or even protest had been eradicated after forty years of hope and letdown, and people were now simply weary, after all the bloodletting—first of protesters in the Shah’s time, and then of the Shah’s people after the revolution, and the communists, together with the terrible slaughter of the war—there was a feeling now, with that weariness, that something had to snap in Iran. And, almost as part of wishing for that breaking point, stories were being told now that Khomeini had really been foisted on the Iranian people by the great powers; and that
certain important mullahs were making their approaches to people to ask for their goodwill when things changed, and the Islamic Republic was abandoned.

From my new room in the Hyatt I had a view of the mountains to the north. On sunny days light and cloud shadows constantly modeled and remodeled the ridges and the dips of the bare, beige-colored mountains. On cloudy days the farther hills faded in color, range by range; and the low hills in the foreground seemed to come forward, defined by the paleness behind, and became brown or tawny or gold. The cropped or sun-beaten vegetation sometimes appeared very soft. The green of trees going up the hills stopped abruptly. The lower hills seemed leveled for further building.

3
 

S
IMPLE BLACK-AND-WHITE POSTERS
on roadside metal poles in Central Tehran announced the third seminar on Ayatollah Khomeini’s thoughts on defense. The posters were quite plain, with nothing of the graphic fury of revolutionary days; in spirit they were like the unplaying fountain of blood in the Martyrs’ Cemetery. An item in
Iran News
from the Iranian News Agency said more. The seminar was being arranged by a high cleric, Hojjatoleslam Qaemi, who was the head of the Ideological and Political Department at Defense and Armed Forces Logistics Ministry. The religious people were in everything now, and their political titles could be as resonant as their religious titles. Five hundred “personalities” were going to be at the seminar and—the department dealt in figures—fourteen papers were going to be presented, out of the hundred and thirty that had been sent in. “A photo show of the eight-year-long sacred defence (1980–88) and an exhibition of the documents of the imposed war are to be set up on the sidelines of the seminar.”

Arash, who was going to talk to Mehrdad and me about his war experiences, didn’t know about the seminar. Like so much else in government, it was happening very far away.

Arash was twenty-seven. He had been at the front for the last four years of the war. For the first two years, when he was sixteen and seventeen, he
had been a volunteer; after that he had been a conscript. Now he was a taxi driver, like the officer who used to be his best friend. And Mehrdad wanted me to catch the special words Arash used for “taxi driver,” and the way he spoke them. The former officer, like Arash, was not a driver for an agency, which would have given him a certain standing; he drove his personal car back and forth along certain fixed routes, picking up fares, using his car like a bus, and he almost certainly had no taxi license.

Arash said, “This war didn’t have anything for me. Let’s see whether my memories of it have something for others.”

We went to a café in North Tehran, a middle-class place, glass-walled, on a busy chenar-lined avenue. The chenar is the Iranian plane tree, loved for its beauty there and in Kashmir (where its shade is even said to be medicinal), and it is often naturalistically rendered in Persian and Mogul painting.

It was mid-afternoon, and the café—serving ice cream, sorbets, tea—was full of women in black chadors, family women. (At this time, in the amusement park, there would be the young girls in black, and the Guards in green watching them and walking among them.) About the café and the women there was a latent elegance. It was as though the yearning in women for beauty and style couldn’t now, at this level, be suppressed in Iran; it was like a kind of disobedience.

We sat in a window alcove, and it was part of the civility of the place that though we sat there a long time, and though after a while I began to make notes, no one looked at us or made us feel uncomfortable.

Arash’s family had been in Tehran for only two generations. They had been a farming family, and there was still a distant branch of the family on the land, which was to the west of Tehran. They kept cattle and sheep and had two
ghanat
wells, without which there could be no farming in the desert. These wells follow old underground watercourses running down from the mountains; Arash said the watercourses had to be repaired and cleaned four times a year.

Arash’s father’s father, when he came to Tehran, became a military man in the service of Reza Shah, the father of the last Shah. This was in 1931. Afterwards, when his military service was done, he ran a housing or real estate agency in Tehran.