Children of Paradise (9 page)

Alireza arrived in Khorramshahr on the last day of battle. He stayed a month in the broken city. With Khorramshahr, Iran had successfully repulsed the Iraqi invasion just a year and a half after it began. Khomeini was in a good position to wrest a favorable peace from the Iraqis, who might have slunk back to Baghdad without further hope of annexing Iranian territory. Iran might have turned, then, to its internal troubles: political violence, social unrest, an economy in free fall. But that was not Khomeini’s choice. Instead, the Islamic Republic went on the offensive, resolving to topple the Baathist regime of Saddam Hussein. Six more years of war would ravage the two countries.

Alireza returned to the navy base, and from there to civilian life. He had other obligations. His mother had fallen and broken her pelvis. At the hospital in Shiraz, Alireza was certain she would be neglected, a poor woman with little recourse. He would need to sit at her bedside to be sure she got proper care. But since the revolution, the hospitals were segregated by sex, and he was not technically permitted to stay in the women’s section. And so he struck a deal with the nurses, one that allowed him to split his time between his father’s shop and his mother’s bedside, where he sat reading Gabriel García Márquez—and tending to all the patients on the ward when they buzzed, while the nurses talked and laughed among themselves.

One day, by chance, Alireza ran into the mosque librarian who had introduced him to
The Little Black Fish
when he was a child. The librarian was surprised to learn that the pious boy who had devoured books with such intensity now worked in the bazaar. The librarian served on one of the committees that oversaw the universities after the revolution; he had connections Alireza scarcely understood. He offered to shepherd Alireza’s university application through the correct political channels. Alireza applied in cinema and in political science, and he was accepted in both.

To study cinema would have been a dream, a luxury. But Alireza chose
politics at the prestigious University of Tehran. It was a fateful choice that he would sometimes regret in later years. To study politics in Iran was to be subject, always, to ideological scrutiny, even while it was to practice a profession in which every housewife, taxi driver, and corner grocer considered himself an expert. But politics lay at the core of his being. He had chosen it, time and again, over everything else.

Alireza was a true believer in his revolution, as radical as he was devout, and he had a shrewd head for politics. But as a teenager he bet on the wrong horse—Shariati over Khomeini—and this set the course of his life. Shariati, for whom streets were named in the Islamic Republic, whose use of Islam as an ideology had made the epoch, and whose clarion call for social justice Khomeini even co-opted for himself, was at once unmentionable and beyond criticism. The clerics knew only too well the power Shariati had unleashed. They rode it like a wild bronco they would eventually put down.

A man like Alireza would work for the bureaucracy of state but never be wholly trusted by it. He would circle political factions but never be absorbed by them. When trouble came, there was no one to fight for him or to vouch for him. He was canny enough to look out for himself. By middle age, Alireza was an exile in Canada, still loyal to a revolution he had never owned or disowned, despite all the revolutionary ardor in his heart.

• • •

I
N THE FULLNESS OF TIME,
Bani-Sadr and the paroxysm of violence that ended his tenure would trouble Iran’s center of power less enduringly than the story of Bazargan. The Islamic Republic’s first prime minister was politically overmatched, but he stood for an idea that did not fade so much as grow stronger with time. He seemed to believe that there was, or should be, room for people like him within the new Islamic state, and that the rule of law was not incompatible with the revolution Iranians had wrought.

Toward the end of the Bani-Sadr period, in the month of March, the Revolutionary Court opened a trial for Bazargan’s former deputy prime
minister, Abbas Amirentezam, at Evin Prison. The trial would return Bazargan to the national stage, this time as a furious and uncompromising voice for the opposition.

Based on documents they found in the embassy, the hostage takers had accused Amirentezam, a debonair diplomat fluent in English, of meeting with American diplomats and of harboring doubts about the course the revolution had taken. The trial was a gruff, informal affair, dispensed in a nondescript chamber hastily converted into a courtroom, where Bazargan, a witness for the defense, was the only attendee wearing a tie. A prison official in a brown T-shirt called the court to order by commanding those assembled to praise God. Amirentezam, and the eighty members of the audience, rose and chanted, “God is Great. Khomeini is our leader. Death to Saddam, the infidel.” A court official in blue jeans read from the Quran.

The judge, a cleric named Mohammad Mohammadi Gilani, turned to Amirentezam and asked, “
Did you ask for a defense lawyer?” When Amirentezam said he had, the judge snapped, “Mr. Bazargan gave evidence and spoke on your behalf. You don’t need a defense lawyer.”

Bazargan, loyal to his deputy to the end and clearly pained by his own experience in government, followed by Bani-Sadr’s unfolding drama, delivered a stinging performance there in the weeks that followed. The allegations against Amirentezam—that he was conspiring with the CIA against Khomeini—were baseless, said the former prime minister. It was true that Amirentezam had had contact with the American embassy, but it was entirely in line with his duties and authorized by the prime minister.

“If anyone has to be tried,” Bazargan told the court, “it should be myself.”

In the postrevolutionary tumult, Iran’s counterintelligence apparatus had been in disarray, so Bazargan had dispatched men to the embassies of both the United States and the Soviet Union to ask each superpower to supply intelligence about the other. “
The Americans gave us plenty of information,” said Bazargan, mainly about Iraqi troop movements near the Iranian border and internal affairs in Afghanistan. “The Soviets gave us
nothing.” (The Soviets, it would turn out, were talking not to Bazargan’s government but to the clerics.)

The Amirentezam trial became a battle of the newspapers, with the vast publicity machine of the regime continuing to excoriate the former official as a spy for the imperialists, a traitor whose crimes were punishable by death, and Bazargan’s small newspaper,
Mizan
, publishing detailed accounts of Amirentezam’s courtroom objections. The accused had not seen the documents being used against him, nor had they been translated into Persian for the public to know what they contained. The indictment against Amirentezam was published in its entirety by the state media, but Bazargan’s and Amirentezam’s courtroom statements were expunged from the published record.
Mizan
reported that a frustrated Amirentezam told the court, “
They have turned me into a devil . . . and you must know that here I have been referred to as an enemy of God, the Prophet, the Imam and Iran . . . They are lies and there is no document to support them. Let me defend myself.”

Bazargan’s rhetoric grew even hotter. He called the radical clerics “
opportunists and criminals” who had “no conscience,” and he declared, “The time has come when each of us must publicly pronounce his decision to do all he can, with the help of Allah, to redeem the country from this holocaust.”

The editor of
Mizan
was arrested, the newspaper permanently shuttered on June 7, scant days before Amirentezam was sentenced to life imprisonment for espionage. Amirentezam would go on to serve twenty-seven years—longer than any other Iranian political prisoner and as long as Nelson Mandela. His smuggled letters and memoirs would provide vivid testimony to the conditions in Iranian prisons over the course of three decades, and his story would inspire some members of a generation not yet born when he first entered Evin.

The tale of Iran’s movement for liberal reform ought to begin with Bazargan, but it does not. The men who would become the reform movement’s protagonists, its ideologues, its adherents, and even its bureaucrats
behind the scenes were Bazargan’s antagonists. They had no interest in the moderate, technocratic, liberal strain of revolutionary thought. Rather, they were Shariati’s children, utopian, ecstatic, extreme. They believed in the Shiism of Ali, in universal social justice and emancipation through Islam. Most aligned themselves with the radical clerics, Khomeini, and the Islamic Republican Party, even as these forces consolidated single-party rule. They little imagined that one day they and their friends would find themselves in shoes that looked suspiciously like Bazargan’s, or that some of their own children would look past them for wisdom, to men like Amirentezam.

  THREE  

T
HE
P
ERIOD OF
C
ONSTANT
C
ONTEMPLATION

M
OSTAFA
R
OKHSEFAT’S MEMORY
always returns to a scene that is inexplicable to him in retrospect. He is at a bookstore in front of the University of Tehran. The revolutionary hour approaches. He is an undergraduate student, active against the shah, affiliated with the militant Islamist left. He sees another young man there, also an activist, a member of the armed opposition. In those days the militants survived on the prudence of their silence. SAVAK walked among them. They did not share their names or addresses even with one another. But that afternoon, with that particular young man, Mostafa introduced himself, and against every rule, every instinct of their movement, he and Hassan exchanged addresses. They would become literary collaborators and great friends until Hassan’s untimely death in an accident.

Mostafa came from the Shariati wing of the revolutionary movement. Hosseiniyeh Ershad was the only place he knew where he could extinguish his thirst in all its complexity—for answers, for dignity, for pride. He was the fifth of seven sons of a carpet and lumber merchant at the Tehran bazaar. The family was comfortably middle-class yet traditional in its habits, its values, its Islam. They lived in one of Tehran’s most religious neighborhoods,
called Maydan-e Khorasan, not far from the city-within-a-city that was the bazaar.

Of the Rokhsefat boys, only Mostafa took an interest in the life of the mind. But the secular leftism that was fashionable among intellectuals of that day did not stir his passions, and Mostafa was a young man of strong feeling, quick to anger and to intimacy, unshielded by his formidable intellect from the searing heat of his emotions.

The times—adolescence and the late 1970s—called for radicalism. Mostafa knew Mehdi Bazargan personally through neighborhood connections, but the Freedom Movement was too stodgy and moderate for Mostafa’s tastes. He preferred the charged lyricism of Shariati, the righteousness of Khomeini. To live in the prism of their words was to refuse to be subject, either to the shah or to the irreligious ideologies of elsewhere. Decades later, Mostafa would return to those texts and wonder how he had ignored, or even embraced, their invitation to tyranny.

For all its luminary novelty, the Islamist movement lacked a literature, and it was that absence that Mostafa found himself discussing with Hassan on the afternoon of their unlikely bookstore encounter. Iran’s great novelists and poets were largely leftists. They disdained religion as the superstition of the peasantry, and they looked down on the literature of the Arab and Muslim world because of its religious content. Instead they looked to Russia for inspiration. Russian novels, banned under the shah, circulated furiously in Tehran’s underground press, distributed hand to hand, within white covers.

Mostafa and his new friend dreamt of building an institution that would cultivate a rightfully modern, even avant-garde literary voice for the movement of Islamic radicals to which they belonged. They brought this idea to a poet they knew. The poet informed them that this association already existed in the form of a literary circle around a mid-ranking Mashhadi cleric named Ali Khamenei. The circle had thirteen prominent members. Mostafa and Hassan, instead of starting their own circle, orbited Khamenei’s.

They met a charismatic and eccentric cleric during that time. Mohammad Reza Hakimi did not wear clerical robes or turbans. Instead, his bald
head glistened above its frenetic white fringe and wiry beard, and he dressed in long, loose, pajama-like shirts. Ferocious passions coursed through him and took root in those he taught, like electricity seeking the quickest route to the ground; he was given to poetic rhapsody and mystical visions, musical language and urgent persuasion. Hakimi had ties to nearly all the major clergymen of his time, including Khomeini and Khamenei. He was protégé, mentor, muse. There were grand ayatollahs who would lecture only if Hakimi was in the room to take down their words. Shariati made Hakimi his literary executor, with the exclusive power to posthumously edit his words.

Hakimi drew close to Mostafa, in whom he saw potential for religious learning. Mostafa must come to Qom and take up Islamic study, Hakimi urged. Only by joining the clergy could Mostafa accomplish anything. It was not a choice; it was a necessity, a calling. To be recruited by someone of Hakimi’s stature was a great honor, but Mostafa balked. He made regular trips to Qom, less than two hours’ drive from Tehran, and he thrived on the vigor and abstraction of its intellectual life. But he did not think he wanted to be a cleric, and the more he hesitated, the more Hakimi insisted.