Children of Paradise (20 page)

As early as November 1992, Soroush understood that he was in physical danger. A group of militiamen from a pressure group that called itself Ansar-e Hezbollah threatened Soroush’s life when he gave a talk in Isfahan that year. It would come out much later that Ansar was almost certainly affiliated with the power structure, if not directly with the Office of the Supreme Leader, and that it tended to act on Ayatollah Mesbah-Yazdi’s bloodthirsty fatwas. Three years after this first incident, in 1995, a group of Isfahani students invited Soroush to come give a talk about Shariati’s legacy. When again the threats streamed in, the university administration canceled the talk. Not to be dissuaded, the students found an off-campus venue, where an audience of more than a thousand convened to hear Soroush speak. But no sooner had Soroush opened his remarks than the militiamen surged from the audience, pummeling the philosopher in the face and head and tearing his shirt from his chest. A student rescued Soroush and hid him in the building’s basement until the Hezbollahis dispersed.

In those days it was still possible to imagine that the authorities did not endorse such thuggery, particularly against someone so closely associated
with the Islamic Republic in its early years. President Rafsanjani himself was thought to be largely sympathetic to the reformers. Soroush wrote Rafsanjani an impassioned letter, imploring him, “
I have come to you in humility to seek justice, not for myself, but on behalf of our cultural pride and our dignity that have been subjected to these atrocities.” More than a hundred intellectuals also petitioned Rafsanjani on Soroush’s behalf. But Rafsanjani was silent, the hard-line newspapers continued to vilify Soroush, and Ansar-e Hezbollah announced its intention to silence the philosopher anywhere he tried to speak.

That October, Soroush attempted to lecture on Rumi at the University of Tehran. Ansar-e Hezbollah stormed the auditorium, throwing chairs onto the stage where Soroush stood, blocking the doors, and claiming they had come to debate Soroush. Soroush retorted that he could not debate under duress. Still, the following spring, when Soroush was invited to speak at an event commemorating Ayatollah Motahhari’s death, Ansar showed up in force, wielding clubs and daggers and demanding a debate at knifepoint. Soroush wrote again to Rafsanjani: “
The triumph of worshippers of darkness conveys the defeat of our culture, the depletion of our hopes, and the decline of our thoughts. Remaining silent is not permissible, do not allow them to win.”

But if the president had the power to halt the attacks, he did not use it. Soroush found no safe quarter during Rafsanjani’s era or after it. In 2000 he was invited to speak in the eastern provincial capital of Khorramabad alongside Mohsen Kadivar, a dissident cleric who had been a student of Ayatollah Montazeri and who criticized
velayat-e faqih
from the standpoint of Islamic jurisprudence. As soon as Soroush, Kadivar, and Soroush’s adult son disembarked in the two-room airport, they realized that the building was surrounded by members of Ansar-e Hezbollah, who threw stones and brandished knives. For seven hours the militiamen held out, and the reformist intellectuals remained inside the building, unable to move in any direction. At long last, Khorramabad’s police chief entered the airport. He suggested that he procure army uniforms for Soroush and Kadivar so that they could steal away from the airport in disguise.

Kadivar erupted. What was the police chief suggesting? Wasn’t it the job of the police to save their lives—to protect them from the mob of hooligans?

The police chief, by Soroush’s recollection, calmly replied: “We have the names of the people whose lives we are responsible to save, and yours are not among them.”

Kadivar refused the uniforms. In that case, the police chief told the men, they could leave the building at their own risk, passing through the armed mob to a bus. Once on the bus, the police chief said, they should not sit by the windows, because he could guarantee nothing: the militiamen might be all along the road, throwing stones or even firing guns. The bus took the intellectuals to an army barracks, where Soroush and Kadivar passed two tense hours before they were ushered into cars and driven back to Tehran, their lecture never given.

During that period, the intelligence ministry called Soroush in three times for lengthy interrogations. Years later, he’d remember the blank sheets of paper on which he was made to write out answers to question after question, and the classic routine of alternating interrogators, one polite and one spitting obscenities at Soroush as he wrote. But there was one incident above all that stayed in Soroush’s mind, a parable of his country’s recent history and a sign of the growing divisions within the Islamic Republic itself.

Soroush had been arrested on the street, forced into a car, and taken to the intelligence ministry. The man who arrested him and the driver of the car sat with him in a small room where he awaited his interrogator. After a long silence, the man who had arrested him spoke. “I will leave this room soon, and the interrogator will come to you. But there is one thing I would like to tell you before I leave you alone.”

In the 1980s, the agent explained, he and his colleagues were quite happy working with the intelligence ministry. They felt they were confronting real evils: “Saddam’s people,” as he put it, along with the Mojahedin and the leftists. The agent and his colleagues were content even to kill or be killed in the line of these duties. They knew how to do their jobs and they understood the philosophy behind it all. But something now, the agent said, “has broken our backs. And that is arresting people like you. Because we know you.”

“How do you know me?” Soroush asked.

“Oh, I have been to many of your lectures and talks,” said the man ruefully. “This is something indigestible to us.”

  SIX  

T
HERMIDOR

I
T IS EASY TO IMAGINE WHY
, in the aftermath of its revolution, France adopted an entirely new calendar—one in which the week lasted ten days and the months had pseudo-Latinate names, like “Pluviôse” and “Ventôse” in winter, “Germinal” and “Floréal” in spring. History, the revolutionaries surely felt, ruptured at the end of the eighteenth century. For once, it moved not in increments, seconds upon seconds of infinitesimal change, but in a single propulsive heave. Even the past was new, now that it no longer sat cheek by jowl with the present. British onlookers mocked the ponderous novelty of the revolutionary French calendar as though its months named twelve dwarves in a pretentious fairy tale: Wheezy, Sneezy, Freezy, Flowery, Showery, Bowery. The calendar’s use lasted just twelve years. How long the revolution lasted is another matter. But it is perhaps fitting that one calendrical coinage from that era has since become a term of art among those who have studied or lived through revolutions.

Named for the heat of the summer, Thermidor began in late July and ended late in August. Maximilien Robespierre, the Jacobin leader of the Reign of Terror, met his end by guillotine on the ninth of Thermidor, year two, elsewhere known as 1794. His death marked the beginning of a period of reaction, one that followed revolution as surely as summer followed
spring, and which came to be called Thermidor as far away as Russia and eventually Iran. In Thermidor, the fever of revolution broke and the extremists were executed or driven from power; utopianism was abandoned, order restored, and a technocratic new elite gathered up the pieces of the old bureaucracy. From the chaos and violence of rupture, a new dictatorship was born, promising stability. In 1938 a Harvard professor named Crane Brinton devoted a chapter of his book
The Anatomy of Revolution
to Thermidor, limned as a kind of convalescence from the fever of crisis and a precursor to the restoration of something like the old order.

Brinton was a scholar of the Jacobins and of Talleyrand, and he would go on to serve as chief analyst for the CIA’s predecessor, the Office of Strategic Services, in Britain during World War II. In
The Anatomy of Revolution
, which he revised and updated in 1965 (three years before his death, and just two years after Hannah Arendt published
On Revolution
), Brinton compared the French, British, American, and Russian revolutions, looking for parallels that might explain how such upheavals progressed. He wrote with a sort of Hobbesian detachment; he was not so much moved by the bathos of human striving, its euphoria and wreckage, as he was interested in understanding revolution’s underlying mechanism. Perhaps not surprisingly, his book found a hungry readership in post-utopian Iran during the Rafsanjani presidency, when intellectuals began to apply its model to the revolution they’d effected.

Up to the point of Thermidor, Brinton’s narrative fit Iran’s revolution with uncanny precision. Revolutionaries, Brinton noted, tended not to be miserably oppressed people in desperate places, where the wealthy lived in excess unimaginable to the wasting, wanting poor. Rather, they tended to be uncomfortable people in countries whose economies were improving—people who felt they had a right to expect more. “
These revolutions are not worms turning,” he wrote, “not children of despair. These revolutions are born of hope, and their philosophies are formally optimistic.” They tended to occur in societies where the social classes were relatively close together but in which the divisions among them were nonetheless bitter; countries whose governments reacted with laxity or ineptitude to rapid
modernization, and where the elites began to distrust themselves, losing faith in the “traditions and habits of their class.”

Brinton pointed with particular emphasis to the role of intellectuals in the pre-revolutionary state. In a stable society, like the post-1960s United States, alienated intellectuals might decry, say, modern capitalism, but they lacked a positive agenda and were in no way serious about upending the routines and privileges of their own daily lives. In pre-revolutionary states, however, intellectuals went so far as to transfer their allegiance to another, better world: “
What differentiates this ideal world of our revolutionaries from the better world as conceived by more pedestrian persons is a flaming sense of the immediacy of the ideal, a feeling that there is something in all men better than their present fate, and a conviction that what is, not only ought not, but need not, be. And, one must add, a gut-deep hatred for the way things are.”

The revolutionary state, once achieved, seemed to follow a predictable calendar of its own. Its first political leaders, according to Brinton, would be moderates—like Iran’s Bazargan or even Bani-Sadr—but these men would soon be executed or driven into exile by the rising extremists of the left. The extremists would then centralize power, suspend civil liberties, and crush dissent, using extraordinary courts and revolutionary police. Then, in the grip of moral zeal and the conviction that the world and its inhabitants could truly be made new, they would use their police power to pry into citizens’ everyday lives, punishing ordinary vices and extolling an ascetic notion of virtue that came naturally to no one. Brinton called this the Reign of Terror and Virtue. When its dark, fanatic energy was spent—when it had at last arrived at the logical point of executing the extremists who once led it—Thermidor began.

The anatomy of Iran’s revolution may not have matched Brinton’s sketch in every particular, but the parallels were striking. Thermidor, it could be said, began with the death of Khomeini. True to Brinton’s prediction, the original cast of extremists—like the Bolsheviks in Russia and the Jacobins in France—were expelled from power with the remnants of the Islamic Left. But they were not hounded to execution or exile as their European
analogs had been, and their colleagues who remained in office were every bit as culpable for the Terror as the Left had been—probably more so. Iran did not pretend to repent for its Reign of Terror and Virtue, nor to sacrifice any Robespierre of its own; rather, the bloodshed of the 1980s would not be spoken of again. Like all repressed traumas, it would exert a force of irresolution and guilt from a place no one could see.

• • •

A
FTER THE REVOLUTION
, a certain look prevailed in Iranian government circles. In men, as proof of faith, it required facial hair: a full beard, or better still, the shadowy insinuation of one. Even thirty years later, young men could not get government jobs without that stubble. But President Rafsanjani, a portly man with small, intelligent eyes and a nearly identical, mirthless expression in every photo, was a conspicuous exception. He disdained the rumpled Basiji look, saying, “
If it becomes a cultural phenomenon that being a Hezbollahi means looking unbearable, this is a sin and Islam has fought this.” Rafsanjani was famous for his wide, doughy, hairless face; he was fair-skinned and even a little shiny. The public nicknamed him “the Shark,” not after the vicious sea creature, but because in Persian the same term neutrally denoted a man who could not grow a beard. As it happened, the name would adhere to the president for reasons beyond the visual.

Just as Brinton might have predicted, Rafsanjani signaled the new era by renouncing the harsh abstemiousness of the Reign of Terror and Virtue. He urged Iranians to stimulate the economy by consuming more goods, and he cautioned that ostentatious shows of piety invited hypocrisy: “
Asceticism is necessary only under emergency situations,” the president said; otherwise, “pretension to piety and poverty will become pretentious.” He admonished Friday prayer imams to ease up on young people, because “
through suppression, pressure and threat we can only partially preserve the outer façade of our society.”