Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples (Vintage International) (50 page)

The specialist made inquiries. He found out that the woman in the chador was not the boy’s mother; she was only a neighbor. The boy’s mother came to the hospital every day, but she didn’t stay long. After some time the specialist won the confidence of the lady in the chador, and one day he asked why she wanted the mutilated boy, who was not her son, to see again.

The lady in the chador said, “My own boy, my own son, was executed because he belonged to an anti-revolutionary group. The person who reported him was this boy here, this neighbor’s son. I am happy that my own son is dead. He was executed, and that was all. I want to keep this piece of meat alive to take revenge. I want his mother to grieve for him every day.”

The Shah had proclaimed the pre-Islamic past, in order partly to link himself to the great rulers of that past. Like Alexander two thousand years before, he had made a ceremonial pilgrimage to the tomb of Cyrus at Pasargadae. After the revolution gangs of revolutionaries had gone to the tomb and the palaces (and fire temple) nearby; but they had done little damage. It was also said (with what truth I don’t know) that Ayatollah Khalkhalli, Khomeini’s hanging judge, had been appointed to a committee to work out the best means of destroying (or simply defacing) the ruins of Persepolis. But then there had been the war, the long Sacred Defense. And now tourists came again to Shiraz and took a car to Persepolis and a few got as far as Pasargadae.

The nihilistic revolutionary moment had passed. The revolution had taken hold; there were no more enemies; the world had been re-made (though Ayatollah Khalkhalli thought that only 30 percent of what had to be done had been done).

There was an Islamic entrance examination for the universities. Mehrdad said it was getting harder. Five years ago students didn’t have to memorize parts of the Koran; now they had to. In all government offices there was now an Islamic organization; and all candidates for jobs have to be interviewed by that organization. They asked political questions, but they were also interested in how well people knew the Islamic rules.

Mehrdad said, “Not the ordinary rules, but very detailed ones. They say that all Muslims must know these rules. They ask you about the prayers. We have five ordinary prayers a day. But you also have another kind of prayer—the frightened prayer, to be said in an emergency. Or the Friday prayers. Or the prayer for the dead. All of them have rules. And a man like me, who doesn’t say his ordinary prayers, he cannot know the extraordinary prayers.”

At the universities a special subject was Khomeini’s Will. It was worth a credit and it was obligatory even for non-Muslims; it had to be done regardless of what subject was being offered.

Mehrdad said, “The subject is called The Imam’s Will. I got twenty out of twenty. Our professor came to us with a summary in ten handwritten
pages. Khomeini’s way of speaking is complicated. Even a simple sentence has a complicated grammar. A ten-year-old boy can see a sentence painted on a wall and know it’s from Imam Khomeini. On the whole it’s nice, but to read forty pages would have been tough. The professor’s summary made it easy. It is all about keeping the revolution alive. It cautions against America and imperialism, and it tells how to keep the mosque and Islam safe.”

The world had been re-made. Where once Mehrdad’s father had photographs of the royal family on his wall he now had a silhouette of Khomeini (done by Mehrdad: he liked using his hands). The country had been turned inside out, eviscerated, by war and revolution. Some people had come up; very many more had been destroyed; and no one one could say for sure that a larger cause had been served. All that could be said was that the country had been given an almost universal knowledge of pain. There was no general will to action now; with the exhaustion that had come with their pain people were only waiting for something to happen. People like Mehrdad and his family were living on their nerves. It might have been like this in the time of the Shah. So that perhaps history here was curiously circular. Every great action—the war, the revolution—had to be. And every great action led back in a chain to itself.

On my last day in Tehran I talked to Ali about the revolution against the Shah. Could something else have happened?

People like him needed liberty, Ali said. They were well off under the Shah, but they had to live like mice. When they compared themselves with their counterparts in other countries they felt humiliated. No man could be at ease with that kind of humiliation. It was people like him, not the poor, who made the revolution. And there was the cultural side, the Islamic side.

Ali said, “I have to go back. In the 1940s, when Iran was occupied by the Allies, a lot of people started migrating from the villages to the little towns. And a lot of little businessmen in little towns moved to the bigger cities.”

In the towns the migrants outnumbered the older population. This older city population was secular. The migrants had deep-set Islamic ways. They didn’t like what they saw in the cities: drinking shops, cabarets, women in short skirts, cinemas showing blue films, half-dressed women singing and dancing on television. Right through the 1940s and 1950s there was this movement from the villages to the cities.

In the 1960s the Shah started his land reform. “The rich land was left in the hands of the old landowners. The infertile or semi-fertile land was divided among the farmers, the people who had always worked the land. Traditionally the farmers had a landowner they looked to. He sucked their blood, but he was their patron. He would lend them money, give them seed, and he would help when there was a disaster. When the land distribution happened the farmers lost their patron, and the government didn’t attempt to replace the patron by a banking system. The farmers couldn’t make ends meet. They left their farms and moved to the cities.”

These people were also conservative and religious. Their sons grew up in the cities and became educated. They went to universities; they took advantage of scholarships given by the Shah’s government. But this second generation was still under the Islamic influence of its fathers. Ali thought it took two to three generations to change a village way of thinking. Iran didn’t have the time for that. Things were moving too fast. This second generation had no earlier generation to compete with and as a group became powerful. They got jobs in the government; they became teachers. Many of them went to the bazaar and became businessmen.

“Mentally they were Muslims. And since they were from poor families they had the mentality of leftist socialism. That is why the mujahidin had a good appeal: Marxism and Islam was their ideology. An irony: materialism and Allah. These people, first and second generations of people who had migrated to the cities, had links with their farmer families who were left in the farms and little towns and villages. These people were the leaders of the new movement. I knew so many of them in Kerman. So when the revolution started the leaders were already in the cities, and the masses they needed for revolt and demonstrations were in the villages and little towns.”

Away from this, and as if in another world, were the Shah’s people. They were the sons and daughters of the older city population. Many of them were wealthy and had been educated in European or American schools. They spoke many languages; they could talk about Western philosophy and European politics. They knew the history of France and Spain and Germany better than they knew the history of Iran.

“They were about five percent of the population. Maximum. The others, below, were the ninety-five percent, reading Koran, Arabic—the real people, the masses. They had no communication with the five percent. They were two tribes living in one country. The Shah was surrounded by this five percent. Especially later, when he married his last queen, educated in France, with complete French culture. They resented the Islamic tradition
exactly as the other group resented the Western tradition that was forced on them.”

In the 1970s there was the oil boom. Iran’s income became fifty times what it had been. This was wealth beyond imagining, and it made matters worse.

“This new wealth came to the cities, and the majority of the people lived in the rural areas. The younger generation of the farmers who had migrated to the cities realized that they were being cheated. More and more, from 1970 on, Islamic organizations started mushrooming in universities and in every city. And especially in the bazaar. The Islamic organizations were acting as a replacement for political parties. The Shah didn’t allow political parties to take root. And these Islamic groups also expressed people’s ideas about the Shah and his group, that they were not Islamic. The Shah and the Queen and her group started having artistic festivals. They invited musicians, poets, dancers, and all kinds of artists from abroad. There was one group that was completely nude, and they danced. There were many of those occasions. It was like putting gas on fire.”

Now, almost two decades later, the Shah and his group had disappeared. The color photographs of the religious leaders were everywhere. They, too, required absolute obedience. The country was full of Islamic rules, and the Guards and Basiji were there to enforce them, in the afternoons in the park, at night on the highways. Young people like Feyredoun’s brother had known nothing but religious rule. He had become a Nazi, in his innocent, dangerous way; he and his friends went out on some nights to mock the Guards. There was a sexual revolution among the young, and a falling away from the too-strict, too-pervasive faith. Of that falling away Emami, the talebeh, had said in Qom: “Our enemies know our weakness.” After all the pain, a new nihilism seemed to be preparing.

Ali said, “The two tribes of Iran still exist. If there is no marriage between them, I don’t know where they are going.”

PART THREE