Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples (Vintage International) (46 page)

We didn’t stay long. Kamran came out from the illuminated tomb, his prayers said, his expression tight and chastened. We started for Tehran. The sun went down round and red behind the salt cliffs. When we were closer to Tehran than to Qom, Kamran began to talk about Emami and his trips to the front. He said, “They”—the clerics—“didn’t get the real meaning of the war. Let’s even say Emami went six times to the front. Two days going, two days coming back. So he would have spent twenty-four days traveling. The rest of the time he would have been preparing people to fight. He would have been talking. He would have simply been doing his job.” When we got nearer Tehran Kamran became more irreverent about Emami. He said, “Emami is doing quite well, in that little flat, whatever he says. He is living there on his own. I am still living with my parents.”

A little later, the lights of Khomeini’s shrine now beginning to be seen, he raised the matter of his payment for the long day. I thought Mehrdad had settled that beforehand, but Mehrdad now said he hadn’t. He said in English, “It is better to do these things in a friendly way.”

Mehrdad said something in Persian to Kamran. Kamran didn’t reply. Instead, he put on the car’s roof light, pulled back his left sleeve, and raised his forearm to show a long, jagged shrapnel wound.

Mehrdad said to me in English, “We must do this in a friendly way.”

We made certain calculations, pricing miles and then hours, adding the two figures up, and knocking a little off the rather large sum that resulted. For a while—Khomeini’s shrine now behind us—Mehrdad kept this figure secret, kept Kamran dangling. When the lights of Tehran began to show he put the figure to Kamran. It was immediately accepted. I counted the notes out and put them in an envelope. Mehrdad gave Kamran the envelope. Kamran put the envelope on the dashboard and talked no more about money.

8
 

M
EHRDAD HAD A FRIEND
called Feyredoun. Feyredoun, who was in his early twenties, like Mehrdad, was doing his military service in the air force. He came home to Tehran at weekends. He was tall and slender and sharp-faced. His English (like Mehrdad’s, all acquired in Iran) was fluent, once he got going, and capable of great complexity. Feyredoun, having grown up in the isolation of revolutionary Iran, was hungry for books, ideas, philosophical discussion.

After one such discussion I said to Mehrdad, casually, when we were talking of something else, that his friend Feyredoun was a religious man. I meant only that he was a man of faith; but the word
religious
rankled with Mehrdad. He raised the matter some days later when we were driving about Tehran; and it was one of the things I thought we should talk about more fully when I went to his house.

We went there late one afternoon. We surprised his mother. From the reception room, as we entered, we could see straight through an open door to a side room where she was lying on a bed. She knew we were coming, but she must have misjudged the time. She half stood up, half rolled off the bed. Her head was bare, and she bit at the lower end of her chiffon-like
head cover. She was short and plump and matronly, though she might have been only in her forties; she radiated kindliness. She came from the northwest and was light-eyed.

Mehrdad’s father was there, too, just for a little, to be introduced to his son’s guest. He was tall, darker than his wife, as handsome as his son, but a little more frail, even willowy. I might have thought him a man of low energy, perhaps with a medical condition. But his son had said, twice, that his father was not a brave man, was a man who always looked for safety and ran with the crowd (now displaying pictures of the Shah, now destroying a book of his daughter’s, a school prize, which had pictures of the royal family). And this was the man I saw, the man who was not brave; though, really, he had shown himself a man of resource after the revolution had done away with his safe banking job. He had picked himself up and gone into business in a small way, buying and selling, and had done well enough to give his family this middle-class house in an outer district of Tehran. But the difficult everyday things that people do can sometimes be taken for granted by their children.

The reception room was big, with carpets spread side by side—a confusion of pattern and color, as in some Persian painting—to cover all the floor. The dining table, with flowers and fruit, was in a corner, and it was there, until dinnertime, that Mehrdad and I sat and talked.

Mehrdad said, “What do you mean by a religious person? I have a problem with the word you use. You called Feyredoun religious, and he himself thinks he is a pagan.”

I asked, “What does he mean by pagan?”

“A pagan is someone outside the public religions. Here we have ways of judging whether a person is religious. The first way is their appearance. Beards. It has been recommended in Islam that men must have beards. There are special rules about shaving the beard and cutting the moustache. You can cut the beard with scissors, but not razor blades.”

“It’s in the Koran?”

“No. Hadith, the traditions connected with the Prophet.”

“Did you hear about it when you were growing up?”

“Yes. But the recommendation became more known after the revolution. I have known people who, when they have to send in photographs for job applications, especially grow their beard. There are other rules. If they are growing a moustache it mustn’t be so long that it gets wet when they drink water. This is also a hadith. All these things are written in
Bahar-al-Anvar
and other hadith books. In the old days religious people had long hair. But now they don’t.”

“Why?”

“Nobody knows. There is something else. It isn’t general. If you bow down to pray you rest your forehead on a cake or tablet of earth from one of the holy sites of the faith. Even in Qom they make a lot of these cakes of earth. After a time your skin darkens or alters color where it rests or falls on these earth cakes. They say their prayers five times a day, and sometimes there are special night prayers. These special night prayers involve a lot of bowing and rubbing of the forehead against the earth.”

It was something he had pointed out to me in Qom about Emami, the darker central part of his forehead, another aspect of Emami’s piety as a talebeh, like the bare concrete front room of his apartment. But you had to know about the practice before you could look for signs of it. Once you knew, it was easy to spot. Some very pious people had something like a scorch mark on their forehead; this was because they heated the cakes of earth for their prayers.

Mehrdad said, “There is something else. Religious people use rosewater on their body. They smell of it, during Mohurram especially.” Mohurram, the Shia mourning month. “And they are shy people—for the sake of appearances. When they are talking to a woman they put their head down. Of course, looking at a woman has special rules. Let me see how many rules there are about it in Khomeini’s book.”

He went and brought back a big paperback: yet another book of rules by Khomeini, in addition to the five volumes I had seen in Emami’s library about buying and selling.

Mehrdad said, “This one is called
Resaleh
or
Tozih-al Masa-el. Rescript
or
Explanation of Problems.
There are ten basic rules about looking at women in this book of Khomeini’s. The book itself deals with three thousand problems.”

“Are people looking up things all the time? Do those rules really help people?”

“To me the rules about beards have no logic. They don’t say why. They just say, ‘Do it.’ And I cannot be a religious person because I listen to most kinds of prohibited music. We have asked them a lot about it. They say that music is prohibited if it changes your mood or feelings. That’s nonsense. Because you cannot listen to music of any sort and keep your mood.”

“What kind of music is prohibited?”

“Music for dancing. The music of love songs. Western music is prohibited, apart from the classics. Indian popular music is also prohibited. There
was a time when buying musical instruments was prohibited. Let me look it up. Here. It is Khomeini’s problem number 2,067. And I don’t say prayers. So I’m not a religious person. I never fast. I never go to a mosque. And I don’t obey any of the rules, though I know most of them. I have studied law and know most of them. Some of the rules I make fun of. For example, there is the rule about blood money. This is: if you kill somebody you pay blood money to his family. The rule now is that a woman is worth half as much as a man. If you kill a man you pay the full price. At the moment the full price is two million toumans, twenty million rials. About five thousand dollars. You pay half of that if you kill a woman.”

“You think people need these rules?”

“I’m coming to that. After we see the problems of life we begin to think. We try to stand on our own feet and try to get to some kind of resolution. Religious people don’t like it. Because it means we are putting the whole system away. We believe in God most of us, but we think like Voltaire.”

That was what I had meant when I had said that Feyredoun was a religious man. But in Iran, as I now saw, words like “religious” and “pagan” had Iranian meanings.

Mehrdad said, “God is needed for life. But not those meaningless rules. People don’t worry about it. We have rules about young people being together. It is illegal, but people do it. I have a friend. She is having troubles with her boyfriend. She is not a virgin. By this same fellow. He is now going away; he is going to leave her. And she is praying regularly. When the pressure is on, people turn to religion. We need God. In a poor country with a lot of problems we need someone at the top.”

“Why do you think the religious people place such stress on rules?”

“They are the rule-makers. If you deny the rules you are denying the rule-maker. If you put the rule-maker away you are against the Leader. If you oppose the Leader you are against the Holy Prophet. If you are against the Holy Prophet you are against the Holy Book, and the Holy Book comes from God. Someone against God must be killed. But who does the killing? Only the rule-maker. Not God.”