Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples (Vintage International) (34 page)

He broke off then and, in the same tone of voice, asked Mehrdad, “He is asking about brainwashing?”

We decided he was a troublemaker, and got rid of him.

Afterwards Mehrdad and I flagged down a route-taxi. It had one passenger, a plump and very clean-looking young man, well dressed and with a full beard. He was in the backseat. Without saying anything he got out and sat next to the driver, so that Mehrdad and I could sit together—it was taxi etiquette in Tehran.

I wanted to talk about the man who had written his will in verse. Mehrdad brought his brows together and nodded towards the back of the bearded young man. Soon afterwards the young man got out; and it was Mehrdad who pointed out to me that as soon as the young man had gone the driver had turned on the car speakers: jumpy music, either on a cassette or on the radio, from the Voice of America or from Israel. Music was un-Islamic and illegal now, and men with beards were on the side of the law.

One morning my breakfast was brought up by the chambermaid. She was fat and brassy, with a shiny, unwashed face, and a definite smell from wearing so many clothes, some of them perhaps of synthetic material. The Persian cheese (from Denmark) came with a slice of toast, a thick piece of purple-tinted, lackluster onion, cut some time before, and a leaf of lettuce, curiously supine, which might also have been laid out some time before. Onion and lettuce leaf (typhoid was about) immediately suppressed appetite; and the Nescafé sachet was good only for one lukewarm cup. Hip-swinging and aggressive in her monk-like garb, the maid came in again after a little while to take away the tray; and when, not long after, she came for the third time, to ask whether I wanted the bed made up, she was
chewing toast—everything in her mouth showing, though she was over-covered everywhere else—and I believed the toast was from my breakfast tray.

Early that afternoon—I was working in my room—the laundry came back, the shirts laundered and nice in plastic bags. The other clothes came in a fancy cardboard box printed with the name of the hotel. The box was new to me. I thought it out of character with the austere style of the hotel and the Foundation for the Oppressed; and when I opened it I found my clothes unlaundered, absolutely as I had sent them in the morning. I telephoned the concierge. He sent the laundry manager up. The laundry manager was embarrassed. He took away the clothes and, in absurdly quick time, brought them back again, ironed and warm (even if not washed) and in new plastic bags.

When at last I went down to the lobby I found that the
DOWN WITH U.S.A.
sign was no longer above the Omega clocks. After fifteen years the awkward, angular characters had been unscrewed, leaving spectral impressions along the screw marks. The moment seemed to me historic; perhaps it meant that things were going to change in some way. But the next day a much longer, flowing, copper-colored line of Persian went up above the clocks, and it apparently said the same thing with more style.

Variable sun and moving clouds modeled and re-modeled the mountains to the north, lighting up this section, then that, showing up spaces between ranges, revealing an unsuspected ridge here, a valley there, revealing range behind range, and the textures of rock abraded by winter snow. Sometimes a rain cloud, shredding on a high range and filling the indentations and striations of rock, looked like snow.

4
 

A
LI, A MAN OF ABOUT SIXTY,
had made his fortune as a developer in the Shah’s time. At some time in the early seventies, before the great oil boom, he had had the luck—and wisdom, and money—to buy a big tract of salt land in Kerman. He bought at one touman a square meter, ten rials, about fifteen U.S. cents; three or four years later, when the boom had come, and cities all over Iran were growing fast, he sold some of his salt land as building land for four hundred toumans a square meter. So—just to play with extraordinary figures—an investment of no more than ten thousand dollars, say, had turned after three or four years into a little fortune of four million dollars.

Such a fortune would have been enough to keep most people calm. But Ali moved the other way. He became a supporter of the revolution. He said, “Now that we had the money, the financial security, we wanted liberty. It was the one thing we didn’t have.” As a student in the United States, in the 1960s, he had become passionate about politics, even local American politics; and he had grown to feel ashamed that he came from a country that wasn’t free. He had never lost that feeling. So when the revolution appeared to be coming in Iran Ali supported it morally and financially. He did this through an ayatollah who had become his friend.

Ali’s ideas of revolution came from his reading, especially of history. But there was also—though he didn’t say it—a supporting or congruent touch of religion. He said, “We expected a revolution based on heavenly laws and laws of nature.” Heavenly laws: it was like his own version of Mr. Jaffrey’s jamé towhidi, and Arash’s search for the justice of Ali—Ali the fourth caliph, the Shia hero-saint.

Many different ideas and impulses had appeared to run together in the making of the revolution. So when the revolution came there was—just below the apparent unanimity, the general feeling of release—any number of conflicting interests. And Ali, as a rich man, had suffered; the revolution had treated him roughly for three years. He had been kidnapped more than once; arrested and imprisoned many times; even tried. He had been bled of tens of millions of dollars.

After three years he had learned how to live with the revolution, just as, in the time of the Shah, he had learned how to live with that régime. The business of survival, the dealing with the various strands and levels of authority, now took up a fair amount of his time. He knew his way now; in almost any situation he knew how to move.

He was slender, of middle height, his Persian features quite regular. Physically he was not remarkable; it might have been part of his camouflage. His quality as a man was something that grew on you. His slenderness, for instance, might have seemed natural to him; in fact, it was the result of regular exercise. His work, his business, his almost angry wish to survive, had kept him healthy and alert. The strains of survival showed more on his wife, compelled now to live an unnatural, imprisoned life. She had lost much of her hair; she still had a graciousness, but it lay over a deep, wounded melancholy.

His ideas of revolution, in the time of the Shah, had been touched with religion: a dream of heavenly laws and natural laws. And he came from a religious background. His father and his father’s father were mullahs; and there were mullahs in his father’s mother’s family as well. His mother’s family were what Ali called “city people.”

His father was born in 1895 (though Ali wasn’t sure of the Christian year). When he was sixteen he went to the theological school in Mashhad. In those days (and for a long time afterwards) many boys from the villages went to schools like those at Mashhad and Qom, because they were given a small room of their own, food, and sometimes even a little stipend by the
ayatollahs whose students they became. The ayatollahs got no money from the schools; such money as they had, or gave to their students, came from their followers. So there was a fairness about the system: the people gave, and the people got something back. In 1911, when Ali’s father went to Mashhad, the theological schools were, besides, the only places in Iran offering higher education. There were no universities or higher schools; Iran under the Qajar kings had fallen very far behind, had almost dropped off the map.

After four years at Mashhad Ali’s father became a mullah and went to the town of Kerman. He became a teacher there, and that was how he might have ended, like his father before him. But the Qajars were overthrown; the Shah’s father, Reza Shah, came to power (with British help); and in the mid-1920s the legal system in Iran was changed by Reza Shah. A ministry of justice was set up, and the French code was incorporated, without much trouble, into the traditional Islamic system. The new system was more formal. It required courthouses, judges, lawyers.

It was easy enough for Ali’s father, with his training in Islamic jurisprudence, to fit into the new system. He became a judge first of all—he was not yet thirty—and then a lawyer. He prospered. He began to speculate in land in various parts of the country. Because he knew the old law and the new law very well, and because many of the land titles were complicated, he was often asked to establish a title; and his fee would sometimes be a parcel of the land in question.