Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples (Vintage International) (40 page)

The second wound was more serious. It occurred a year later, at night, during one of the biggest Iranian attacks: attack after attack for more than a month. Again there was a rocket burst near him. A bit of shrapnel struck him on the back of the head, and he was thrown on the ground. He fell on his head and was hurt badly. He passed in and out of consciousness many times. Finally he was taken by plane to the big military hospital in Shiraz.

There they inserted a bit of artificial bone in his head. After a while he lost his sense of balance; then he couldn’t see. He had a clot on his retina, and there was a danger that he might lose his sight altogether. A day came when the authorities wanted to take some of the patients to the shrine of
Shah Cheragh, one of the famous shrines of Iran. Abbas wanted to go. He was in a wheelchair now. The doctor said Abbas wasn’t well enough to go, and Abbas shouted and began to quarrel with the doctor. The doctor relented, and Abbas was wheeled to the shrine at eight in the morning.

There was singing and chanting as on the battlefield, and Abbas made a vow: “Allah, I accept whatever you wish, and I like whatever you like. But I cannot tell a lie to you. I need my eyes. If you give me back my eyes, I will use them to go back to the front.”

At twelve Abbas left the shrine with the rest of the patients and went back to the hospital. At two the nurse came to his room; he was taking about twelve pills every six hours. As the nurse opened the door Abbas saw the light and shouted. Doctors and nurses ran up. They saw that the clot on the retina had gone, and they didn’t let him sleep. They called other doctors to look. None of them believed that that kind of religious miracle could happen. Word got around. Something got into the papers. But Abbas was nervous of letting too much be known.

The publisher’s assistant, constantly serving us tea, said, “And a good thing, too. If people had got to know about his cure at the shrine they would have rushed to him and torn bits of his clothes for keepsakes and magical purposes.”

I had heard something like that in 1979 about people who had been shot by the Shah’s police during the demonstrations before the revolution. Even a slight wound could be fatal, because when a man fell his fellow demonstrators ran to him to force their hands in the wound in order to stain them with the warm blood of a martyr.

Some time after that evening in the publisher’s office I was in Shiraz. I went to the shrine of Shah Cheragh at dusk. It was like a fairground in the streets outside, with the lights and the stalls and the strolling crowd, and there was something of that atmosphere inside as well, with people walking about in the diffused light and soft shadows of the courtyard, while in the mosque proper, in the brighter light around the railed grave of the saint, other people were praying and asking for boons.

To see what Abbas had seen, to enter the common pool of feeling here, you had to bring some feeling of your own. You had to bring the faith, the theology, the passion and need.

A tall Indian on the road outside was asking for alms in his own way. He had spotted me when I was on the way in; and he had dropped everybody
else and concentrated on me. “
Bhaiya, bhaiya,
brother, brother,” he had said, bunching up his soft lips and screwing up his small eyes like a film actor working at grief.

He was young and fat, in white shoes that were quite startling in the dusk, and in loose cream-colored clothes that caught him on the protruding lower belly. He was dandling a screaming baby and appeared to be with a woman with many attendant children. He said he was from Dubai. He had come to Shiraz to pay his respects to the saint, but bad people had stolen all his money, many
lakhs,
and all his papers. As he spoke he dandled the baby against his cream-colored clothes and with every shake and dandle of his lower belly he twisted his thumb and finger against the poor baby’s bottom and the baby screamed.

After I had walked about the shrine courtyard I went looking for him to find out how he had fared that evening. But he and his baby had vanished, and the woman with him and the children with her.

In the publisher’s office, by candlelight now, Abbas spoke of the effect of his experience on his faith. I had asked him.

He said, “It made me go deep in myself. I have some findings for the spiritual part that I think nobody has.” This was Mehrdad’s translation of a difficult idea, later in the hotel, and at the end of a long day: let it stand as it was spoken. “On the battlefield we could see a lot of things that cannot be described in a materialist way. When I saw people running with an arm blown away it was unbelievable. There are lots of people here on the street who have a little injury on their arms, and they lie down in the street. But over there, the enemy was coming, and this boy was running from the enemy with one arm blown off. It showed me what’s possible. And at the moment I don’t care about my aches at all. I pay no attention to it.”

He wanted after the war to stay close to the spirituality he had discovered in himself. To him this spirituality was like a treasure. Not many people on the street possessed such a treasure. “People on the street,”
mardom to khiyabom:
it was the second time, speaking of his spirituality, he had used the words; as though spirituality was the true divider and differentiator of men. Of course those people on the street were not less than he was, but they cared about things he didn’t care for. Their idea of religion was not letting women be without the veil or the hijab headdress; which was something he didn’t mind about.

“The Koran says that we do things according to our capacity. So I would do whatever I can, and they would do whatever they can.”

He felt he should improve his spiritual feelings, and he thought he could do this with study and scholarship. Since childhood he had liked to study. So he went to the holy city of Qom, and enrolled in a five-year course. He completed it in three years. And by then he had had enough of study. He didn’t feel he had got in Qom what—perhaps innocently—he had been hoping for. Study was study; the spirituality he was concerned with was more personal; it didn’t come through study. There were many examples of people with much religious learning but without spirituality.

In the outside world there was, a year or two later, another test for him. He fell in love with a girl and wanted to marry her. He went to her family and asked for her hand. They told him that he had to go to the university first; their daughter was a university student. This was a hard thing to ask of Abbas, Mehrdad said; because in Iran you couldn’t be considered for a university place if you didn’t have a high-school diploma; and Abbas had left his very good Tehran school at the age of fourteen to go to the war.

But Abbas, always now with his spiritual idea of what men could do, always now with that picture of the half-dead boy with his arm blown off running away from the enemy, Abbas set to work. This was two years ago, and Abbas had already got his diploma and his university place; and his family and the girl’s family were getting ready for the wedding.

It was only now that it occurred to me to ask about his family: Abbas had always seemed so absolutely himself, so secure, so handsome and fine.

“My father worked for the bus company here in Tehran.”

“What did he do?”

“He was a simple worker.”

Mehrdad, with his feeling for the social grades of Iran, said, “A mechanic?”

And Mehrdad was right. He said later that the bus company for which Abbas’s father had worked was a poor company, a very poor company; and to be a mechanic there was to have a poor kind of job. But the mechanic had educated all his children. One now ran a factory; another was a professor at the university; the youngest was an engineer. So Abbas’s family was one of the success stories of the revolution.

I wanted to know how he had discovered the spirituality in himself.

He said it began with his name. His name had always been precious to him. The first Abbas in Islamic history was the cousin and principal commander of Imam Hussain, the son of the great Ali; and this Abbas was one of the seventy-two who had stayed and died with Imam Hussain at the battle of Kerbela. This Abbas had been, literally, the standard-bearer of Imam Hussain.

So at the Mohurram celebrations when he was a child—Mohurram the blood month, the Shia mourning month for the martyrdoms at Kerbela—the young Abbas, even when he was six, had wanted to live up to his name. He wanted to carry the flag or standard at the Mohurram procession. He never wanted to put it down on the ground; to him that was a kind of sacrilege.

Was that all? Hadn’t he been told something by his father or someone else? Were there books he had read?

He said he couldn’t explain any more. His family was religious only in an ordinary way. There were books in the house, but they didn’t belong to his father.

I asked, “If there had been no war, what do you think would have happened to you?”

The publisher’s assistant said, “That’s the question we all ask. Without the war we might have gone to Allah in a roundabout or much longer way. Some of us mightn’t even have reached Allah in the end.”

Abbas said, “I would have continued my studies. I loved
pure
physics. It is related to philosophy. The study of matter.”

And this was interesting to me because it showed how, even within the rigidities of a revealed faith, a feeling for the spiritual might prompt wonder; and science and the search for knowledge would have begun. It was like the understanding that had come to me some years before, in India, in the south of the country, of the ways in which certain Brahmin families, priestly proponents of antique ritual and taboos, had in two generations in the twentieth century arrived at high science, made ready for that intellectual journey by the very complications and demands of their theology, and its curious, shut-away purity.

I told Abbas something of this.

He might not have followed. But he said (still with that battlefield picture of the boy with the blown-away arm), “I wanted to see how things were made. And what they are made of. I wanted to know about the essence of things.”

The lights had come on again in the office and the streets. It was past eight, and we had been in the publisher’s office since four-thirty. The publisher’s assistant wanted to clear away the fruit plates and close the office. The children had long ago stopped playing in the streets; through the window, while the daylight lasted, I had seen them beating up and stripping a chenar sapling, climbing up the slender trunk and pulling down the branches.

Abbas’s bloodshot eyes were almost friendly now. He said, “I have said more than I should. I have talked like a drunk man.” (That was Mehrdad’s first translation when we were in the hotel. But then right away he said, “No, that’s too strong. It wouldn’t be good for Abbas.” He thought and said, “ ‘A drunken man doesn’t know what he says, and I feel I have been like that.’ That would be better.” I didn’t see the difference, but Mehrdad said, “The second one is softer.”)

The publisher’s assistant was switching off the lights, using this new darkness to push us outside. Abbas talked of the two one-minute films he had made. Each film had three sequences. The first began with a man making footsteps in the snow; another man walks in his footsteps; a third man begins to do so, but then hesitates, and finally turns off in another direction, leaving his own footsteps in the snow. In the second film a man is being married; then a farmer is tilling the land; and finally there is a field of waving wheat.