Among the Believers (2 page)

I telephoned Behzad. Behzad had also been recommended to me as an interpreter. But there had been some trouble in finding him—he was a student, footloose in the great city of Tehran—and when the previous evening he had telephoned me, I had already closed with Sadeq. I told Behzad now that my plans had fallen through. He made no difficulties—and I liked him for that. He said he was still free, and would be with me in an hour.

He didn’t think we should take a car to Qom. The bus was cheaper, and I would see more of the Iranian people. He also said that I should eat something substantial before leaving. It was Ramadan, the month when Muslims fasted from sunrise to sunset; and in Qom, the city of mullahs and ayatollahs, it wasn’t going to be possible to eat or drink. In
some parts of the country—with the general Islamic excitement—people had been whipped for breaking the fast.

Behzad’s approach, even on the telephone, was different from Sadeq’s. Sadeq, a small man on the rise, and perhaps only a step or two above being a peasant, had tried to suggest that he was above the general Iranian level. But he wasn’t, really; there was a lot of the Iranian hysteria and confusion locked up in his smiling eyes. Behzad, explaining his country, claiming it all, yet managed to sound more objective.

When, at the time he had said, we met in the lobby of the hotel, I at once felt at ease with him. He was younger, taller, darker than Sadeq. He was more educated; there was nothing of the dandy about him, nothing of Sadeq’s nervousness and raw pride.

We went by line taxis—city taxis operating along fixed routes—to the bus station in South Tehran. North Tehran—spreading up into the brown hills, hills that faded in the daytime haze—was the elegant part of the city; that was where the parks and gardens were, the plane-lined boulevards, the expensive apartment blocks, the hotels and the restaurants. South Tehran was still an Eastern city, more populous and cramped, more bazaarlike, full of people who had moved in from the countryside; and the crowd in the dusty, littered yard of the bus station was like a country crowd.

Somebody in a grimy little office told Behzad that there was a bus for Qom in half an hour. The bus in question was parked in the hot sun and empty. No bags or bundles on the roof, no patient peasants waiting outside or stewing inside. That bus looked parked for the day. I didn’t believe it was going to leave in half an hour; neither did Behzad. There was another bus service from Tehran, though, one that offered air-conditioned buses and reserved seats. Behzad looked for a telephone, found coins, telephoned, got no reply. The August heat had built up, the air was full of dust.

A line taxi took us to the other terminal, which was in central Tehran. Boards above a long counter gave the names of remote Iranian towns; there was even a daily service, through Turkey, to Europe. But the morning bus to Qom had gone; there wouldn’t be another for many hours. It was now near noon. There was nothing for us to do but go back to the hotel and think again.

We walked; the line taxis had no room. The traffic was heavy. Tehran, since the revolution, couldn’t be said to be a city at work; but
people had cars, and the idle city—so many projects abandoned, so many unmoving cranes on the tops of unfinished buildings—could give an impression of desperate busyness.

The desperation was suggested by the way the Iranians drove. They drove like people to whom the motorcar was new. They drove as they walked; and a stream of Tehran traffic, jumpy with individual stops and swerves, with no clear lanes, was like a jostling pavement crowd. This manner of driving didn’t go with any special Tehran luck. The door or fender of every other car was bashed in, or bashed in and mended. An item in a local paper (blaming the Shah for not having given the city a more modern road system) had said that traffic accidents were the greatest single cause of deaths in Tehran; two thousand people were killed or injured every month.

We came to an intersection. And there I lost Behzad. I was waiting for the traffic to stop. But Behzad didn’t wait with me. He simply began to cross, dealing with each approaching car in turn, now stopping, now hurrying, now altering the angle of his path, and, like a man crossing a forest gorge by a slender fallen tree trunk, never looking back. He looked back only when he had got to the other side. He waved me over, but I couldn’t move. Traffic lights had failed farther up, and the cars didn’t stop.

He understood my helplessness. He came back through the traffic to me and then—like a moorhen leading its chick across the swift current of a stream—he led me through dangers that at every moment seemed about to sweep me away. He led me by the hand; and, just as the moorhen places herself a little downstream from the chick, breaking the force of the current which would otherwise sweep the little thing away forever, so Behzad kept me in his lee, walking a little ahead of me and a little to one side, so that he would have been hit first.

And when we were across the road he said, “You must always give your hand to me.”

It was, in effect, what I had already begun to do. Without Behzad, without the access to the language that he gave me, I had been like a half-blind man in Tehran. And it had been especially frustrating to be without the language in these streets, scrawled and counterscrawled with aerosol slogans in many colours in the flowing Persian script, and plastered with revolutionary posters and cartoons with an emphasis on
blood. Now, with Behzad, the walls spoke; many other things took on meaning; and the city changed.

Behzad had at first seemed neutral in his comments, and I had thought that this was part of his correctness, his wish not to go beyond his function as a translator. But Behzad was neutral because he was confused. He was a revolutionary and he welcomed the overthrow of the Shah; but the religious revolution that had come to Iran was not the revolution that Behzad wanted. Behzad was without religious faith.

How had that happened? How, in a country like Iran, and growing up in a provincial town, had he learned to do without religion? It was simple, Behzad said. He hadn’t been instructed in the faith by his parents; he hadn’t been sent to the mosque. Islam was a complicated religion. It wasn’t philosophical or speculative. It was a revealed religion, with a Prophet and a complete set of rules. To believe, it was necessary to know a lot about the Arabian origins of the religion, and to take this knowledge to heart.

Islam in Iran was even more complicated. It was a divergence from the main belief; and this divergence had its roots in the political-racial dispute about the succession to the Prophet, who died in 632
A.D.
Islam, almost from the start, had been an imperialism as well as a religion, with an early history remarkably like a speeded-up version of the history of Rome, developing from city-state to peninsular overlord to empire, with corresponding stresses at every stage.

The Iranian divergence had become doctrinal, and there had been divergences within the divergence. Iranians recognized a special line of succession to the Prophet. But a group loyal to the fourth man in this Iranian line, the Fourth Imam, had hived off; another group had their own ideas about the seventh. Only one Imam, the eighth (poisoned, like the fourth), was buried in Iran; and his tomb in the city of Mashhad, not far from the Russian border, was an object of pilgrimage.

“A lot of those people were killed or poisoned,” Behzad said, as though explaining his lack of belief.

Islam in Iran, Shia Islam, was an intricate business. To keep alive ancient animosities, to hold on to the idea of personal revenge even after a thousand years, to have a special list of heroes and martyrs and villains, it was necessary to be instructed. And Behzad hadn’t been instructed; he had simply stayed away. He had, if anything, been instructed in
disbelief by his father, who was a communist. It was of the poor rather than of the saints that Behzad’s father had spoken. The memory that Behzad preserved with special piety was of the first day his father had spoken to him about poverty—his own poverty, and the poverty of others.

On the pavement outside the Turkish embassy two turbanned, sunburnt medicine men sat with their display of coloured powders, roots, and minerals. I had seen other medicine men in Tehran and had thought of them as Iranian equivalents of the homoeopathic medicine men of India. But the names these Iranians were invoking as medical authorities—as Behzad told me, after listening to their sales talk to a peasant group—were Avicenna, Galen, and “Hippocrat.”

Avicenna! To me only a name, someone from the European Middle Ages: it had never occurred to me that he was a Persian. In this dusty pavement medical stock was a reminder of the Arab glory of a thousand years before, when the Arab faith mingled with Persia, India, and the remnant of the classical world it had overrun, and Muslim civilization was the central civilization of the West.

Behzad was less awed than I was. He didn’t care for that Muslim past; and he didn’t believe in pavement medicines. He didn’t care for the Shah’s architecture, either: the antique Persian motifs of the Central Iranian Bank, and the Aryan, pre-Islamic past that it proclaimed. To Behzad that stress on the antiquity of Persia and the antiquity of the monarchy was only part of the Shah’s vainglory.

He looked at the bank, at the bronze and the marble, and said without passion, “That means nothing to me.”

Was his iconoclasm complete? Was he Persian or Iranian in anything except his love of the Iranian people? Had his political faith washed him clean?

It hadn’t. Tehran had had a revolution. But normal life went on in odd ways, and amid the slogans and posters with their emphasis on blood there were picture-sellers on the pavements. They offered blown-up colour photographs of Swiss lakes and German forests; they offered dream landscapes of rivers and trees. They also offered paintings of children and beautiful women. But the women were weeping, and the children were weeping. Big, gelatinous tears, lovingly rendered, ran half-way down the cheeks.

Behzad, whose father was a teacher of Persian literature, said, “Persian poetry is full of sadness.”

I said, “But tears for the sake of tears, Behzad—”

Firmly, like a man who wasn’t going to discuss the obvious, and wasn’t going to listen to any artistic nonsense, he said, “Those tears are
beautiful.
”

We left it at that. And from the topic of tears we turned once more, as we walked, to the revolution. There were two posters I had seen in many parts of the city. They were of the same size, done in the same style, and clearly made a pair. One showed a small peasant group working in a field, using a barrow or a plough—it wasn’t clear which, from the drawing. The other showed, in silhouette, a crowd raising rifles and machine guns as if in salute. They were like the posters of a people’s revolution: an awakened, victorious people, a new dignity of labour. But what was the Persian legend at the top?

Behzad translated: “ ‘Twelfth Imam, we are waiting for you.’ ”

“What does that mean?”

“It means they are waiting for the Twelfth Imam.”

The Twelfth Imam was the last of the Iranian line of succession to the Prophet. That line had ended over eleven hundred years ago. But the Twelfth Imam hadn’t died; he survived somewhere, waiting to return to earth. And his people were waiting for him; the Iranian revolution was an offering to him.

Behzad couldn’t help me more; he couldn’t help me understand that ecstasy. He could only lay out the facts. Behzad was without belief, but he was surrounded by belief and he could understand its emotional charge. For him it was enough to say—as he did say, without satirical intention—that the Twelfth Imam was the Twelfth Imam.

Later on my Islamic journey, as difficult facts of history and genealogy became more familiar, became more than facts, became readily comprehended articles of faith, I was to begin to understand a little of Muslim passion. But when Behzad translated the legend of those revolutionary posters for me I was at a loss.

It wasn’t of this hidden messiah that Iranians had written on the walls of London and other foreign cities before the revolution. They had written—in English—about democracy; about torture by the Shah’s
secret police; about the “fascism” of the Shah.
Down with fascist Shah:
that was the slogan that recurred.

I hadn’t followed Iranian affairs closely; but it seemed to me, going only by the graffiti of Iranians abroad, that religion had come late to Iranian protest. It was only when the revolution had started that I understood that it had a religious leader, who had been in exile for many years. The Ayatollah Khomeini, I felt, had been revealed slowly. As the revolution developed, his sanctity and authority appeared to grow, and at the end were seen to have been absolute all along.

Fully disclosed, the Ayatollah had turned out to be nothing less than the interpreter, for Iranians, of God’s will. By his emergence he annulled, or made trivial, all previous protests about the “fascism” of the Shah. And he accepted his role. It was as the interpreter of God’s will that he addressed “the Christians of the world” in an advertisement in
The New York Times
on 12 January 1979, three weeks before he returned to Iran from his exile in France.

Half the message consisted of blessings and greetings from God. “The blessings and greetings of Almighty God to the Blessed Jesus … his glorious mother … Greetings to the clergy … the freedom-loving Christians.” Half was a request for Christian prayers on holy days, and a warning to “the leaders of some of the Christian countries who are supporting the tyrant shah with their Satanic power.”

And it was as the interpreter of God’s will, the final judge of what was Islamic and what was not Islamic, that Khomeini ruled Iran. Some days after I arrived in Tehran, this was what he said on the radio: “I must tell you that during the previous dictatorial regime strikes and sit-ins pleased God. But now, when the government is a Muslim and a national one, the enemy is busy plotting against us. And therefore staging strikes and sit-ins is religiously forbidden because they are against the principles of Islam.”

This was familiar to me, and intellectually manageable, even after a few days in Tehran: the special authority of the man who ruled both as political head and as voice of God. But the idea of the revolution as something more, as an offering to the Twelfth Imam, the man who had vanished in 873
A.D.
and remained “in occultation,” was harder to seize. And the mimicry of the revolutionary motifs of the late twentieth century—the posters that appeared to celebrate peasants and urban
guerrillas, the Che Guevara outfits of the Revolutionary Guards—made it more unsettling.