Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples (Vintage International) (45 page)

Now that we didn’t have to walk, Emami wanted us all to have lunch with him at his flat. He insisted. Mehrdad agreed, and we stopped at two or three shops in dusty streets to buy fruit and other things for the lunch. It was hot and still. There were twenty-five thousand students in Qom, Emami said. He showed us the big hostel for foreign students; they were mainly Indian, Pakistani, and African; there were few Europeans. There were also a fair number of Arabs. A little later, as if apologizing for the dustiness of the town, he said the Arabs made the place dirty. He spoke conversationally, without malice, like a man saying something that everyone would accept: always with Iranians, and in unexpected ways, this uneasiness about Arabs, who had been both their conquerors and the givers of their religion.

We passed Khomeini’s house, the house where he had lived when he was a teacher in Qom. It was at a bend in a busy street. A policeman was watching the traffic; the street might have been less busy when Khomeini lived in it. The house was low, unassuming, the color of dust, partly hidden by its street wall. But, as so often in Iranian houses, that blank, almost unnoticeable wall would have concealed a courtyard, with a pleasant play of sunlight and shade, removed from the racket and glare of the street.

Emami lived at the very edge of the expanding town, in a new development that seemed to have been set down just like that in desert and dust. The streets were not yet made. For some time we bumped over rubble and brickbats, and I began to worry about Kamran’s car, which had just been mended. At last we stopped. A scrap or two of plastic on the street, an
empty packet caught in broken brick and stone: the effect was, already, one of civic neglect. But behind the blank door of Emami’s house there was, even here, a little courtyard: shade, order after the unmade streets, and steps from the courtyard to the two rooms Emami rented: his home for the last four years.

The concrete front room was bare, apart from the shelves of books on one wall. Emami went and borrowed a chair from a neighbor for me. The bareness of the room—speaking not so much of poverty as of the simplicity of the theological student, concerned only to propagate the faith—so staggered Mehrdad that he made a note of it in his notebook. On the shelves were various sets of books on theology, philosophy, and jurisprudence, among them the five volumes (in cream-and-green binding) of Khomeini’s great work of jurisprudence on all aspects of buying and selling (not known to me until that moment). The philosophy books included a Persian translation of Bertrand Russell’s
Problems of Philosophy.
(No royalties for the Russell estate, though: Iran didn’t belong to the international copyright convention.) Emami said, when I asked, that the books students like himself used were published by various foundations, and the prices were reasonable. But his library would still have taken up a fair portion of the stipend he had got from his ayatollah.

Emami, now our host, and in his own dwelling, grew in graciousness and courtesy. The two-year-old son we had heard about was sleeping; otherwise, Emami said, the boy would have already been with us. He was busy but discreet in his attentions to Mehrdad and Kamran and me, and in his instructions to his wife, unseen, somewhere in the background, preparing the fried eggs and tomato that had been decided on by him and Mehrdad as the general dish, with Persian bread and white cheese (imported from Denmark, but
halal
) for me.

He brought in and spread an oilcloth on the floor. This oilcloth was a sacred thing, Mehrdad said, because bread was wrapped in it. It had to be clean and it had to be kept in a high place. Emami then began to bring in plates and other things. From time to time he stopped and talked with us, squatting on his knees and heels, his trousers tight over his muscular thighs, the silvery shirt showing his exercised shoulders and his flat stomach. He was content, he said again, when we began to eat. He was doing the work, the propagating of the faith, that he wanted to do.

I asked whether he knew about the loss of faith in some of the young, as was reported. He said it was no secret. “Our enemies know our weakness.”

A gentle knock on the door, as from someone who didn’t want to create too much of a disturbance. This time it wasn’t food that was being sent
in by Emami’s unseen wife, but her son, rested and at peace but a little shaky after his deep sleep, which still showed in his face.

Watermelon followed the egg and tomato. I asked Emami who were the enemies he had mentioned earlier. He said the countries of the West; they wanted to wipe out Islam. He said this with the same gentleness he had said everything else.

Our lunch was over. The dishes were cleared away, and Emami folded the oilcloth with deliberation, bringing the four corners together, twice over, before taking it outside. Then he passed his son back to his wife. After that—all distractions now out of the way—he and Kamran began to talk. They talked about the war. Emami said that in the last year of the war he went to do Islamic propaganda at the front. How often? He said he went on four occasions; altogether he was at the front for about two or three months. He gave some lectures. Kamran asked whether this was all that the clerics did, give lectures. Emami said no, he knew some clerics who fought. But he himself hadn’t fought. For him the war was a spiritual experience.

He was content, but he knew he hadn’t done enough. His house was far away from the teaching schools, and travel and household jobs took up much of his time. But recently he had got a bicycle; that was a great help.

Emami wanted to take us after lunch to one of the theological schools. We had no one to say good-bye to—his wife had remained unseen, and the boy had been taken away—and we stepped down without ceremony into the little courtyard, and then almost at once we were in the bright rubbled street in the desert. We drove back towards the center of the town, to the school Emami had in mind. The principal wasn’t there, and the guard couldn’t give permission for us to look around. Emami directed Kamran to another school. It was a modern building in yellow brick in a wide street lined on both sides with trees and a water channel. Some students—a flurry of gowns, tunics, and turbans in the yard beyond the water channel—had arrived for a class; some more were riding up on motor scooters. They looked clean and healthy and—there was no other word—prosperous. Emami came back. He had seen the principal: we could look around.

We took off our shoes in the entrance hall, put them in big pigeonholes for shoes, and walked up on fitted carpet to the floor above. All the time students came in. Some of them had a drink at the watercooler before they took off their shoes. They were soon quite a crowd. They didn’t talk; some of them looked anxious. The sound that came from them as they went up the wide carpeted steps in their socks was the sound of their clothes. In the
carpeted open area at the top of the steps students who had failed in a certain subject were sitting on the floor and writing their examination again. There was an element of punishment and public shame in this public rewriting of an examination. The students had no desk or writing boards, and some of them were in extraordinary writing postures: sitting on crossed legs and leaning so far forward to write on the floor that all the upper body seemed stretched out.

The principal was an old and kindly man, impressive with his turban and dyed beard, a figure of antique wisdom. He introduced us in his small office to three of his lecturers, sitting formally side by side. One lecturer did Christianity (and spoke English), another did Islamic Sects, and the third did Islamic Theology. Mehrdad said that “theology” was not a correct rendering of the Arabic word, and there was a little amiable dispute about this between Mehrdad and the three lecturers, the principal looking benignly on. What that subject was, rather, Mehrdad said, was an analysis of the traditions connected with the Prophet: old learning, hardening century by century, and commentary by commentary, into what might or might not be considered true traditions, important because they could be used to establish or challenge laws.

The principal then took us on a tour of his new college building. It was rich and splendid. In the lecture rooms the chairs and desks were new and solid. In the library there were sets and sets and rows and rows of new books, with here and there a student sitting on the floor beside the bookshelves.

The lower floor was for what the principal called special projects. One scholar and one special project to a room. After having gone through the lecture rooms one by one, I didn’t feel I could do the special-project rooms. I said so, but Mehrdad might have softened what I said, because the principal seemed to pay no attention.

He pushed open a door, the first in the corridor. We surprised the scholar resting or napping on the floor, with a blanket and a pillow. There were books and slips of paper everywhere, on the floor, on the table, on the shelves. The principal said the scholar in this room was an historian of repute (and someone I later talked to in Tehran said that this was so). The historian, horribly surprised, reached out for his white skullcap and pressed it on his head. He was middle-aged, even elderly. He scrambled up as best he could, gathered his brown blanket around him, and, slightly bowed, came to the door. He had a fine old face; his skin was light brown and smooth. He held the brown blanket around his middle the way the women in the streets held their black chadors below their chin.

The principal said that the historian was writing a book called
The Political History of the World.

The historian, recovering fast from his surprise, said to me, “Do you know a book about Gandhi and the Muslims?”

I didn’t know of any. But, to encourage the historian, I said, “It’s an interesting subject. The man who first called Gandhi out to South Africa in the 1890s was an Indian Muslim merchant. So you might say he started Gandhi on his political life.”

The historian paid no attention. He said, “Send me the book.” He went back a couple of steps and took a piece of paper from the top of a pile of books. “Here. Take my name and address. Send me the book.”

I said he might get the Indian embassy in Tehran to advise him.

He appeared not to hear. Coming close up to the door again, he said, “Take it as a memory. Take it as a gift. You know, I have been doing a certain amount of work on Zionism for my history of the world. I have begun to feel that while the Zionists made the United States their first idol or false god, they are turning India into their second idol. I don’t know whether you know that the crown of India was handed to the British by a Jew, Disraeli. The fact isn’t as widely known as it should be. The British sword was sharpened in India by Jews. I very much fear that the Zionists are going to wound India again. They will kill Gandhi again and exile his thought again.”

Mehrdad, translating, broke off to ask me, “Was Gandhi exiled?”

I said, “Perhaps he’s speaking symbolically.”

The historian, plucking at his blanket and cap, and politely stepping back during this exchange between Mehrdad and me, came forward again at the end of it and looked ready to go on. But we decided—to the principal’s clear, if well-mannered, relief—to get away and leave the historian to his rest.

We went to the shrine of Hazrat Masumeh. Kamran, in spite of his cynicism about things generally, had begun to grumble that in the morning, at the start of the journey, he hadn’t put anything in an alms box, hadn’t made that offering, as he should have done. That was why he had had the trouble with the ignition and had to do all that running about from garage to garage. Now, making it as much of a performance as he could, he stuffed a folded old banknote through the slot of one of the alms boxes in the street outside the shrine. And, as though that wasn’t enough, when we were in
the shrine courtyard he left us and went to the tomb, to say a prayer for a safe run back.

While Kamran was doing that, a man took Mehrdad to one side and asked about me. “Is he a Muslim?” (It might have been my dark glasses and Banana Republic felt hat.) Mehrdad said yes, to save trouble; and the man was satisfied. But there could have been trouble. Technically the shrine was a mosque, and non-Muslims shouldn’t have been there, not even in the courtyard. There had been no question like that from anyone in 1979; Behzad, my guide and interpreter, had taken me everywhere. I became unhappy in the courtyard after this. Revolutionary Guards were about, and I didn’t want to be stopped.