Among the Believers (6 page)

Mr. Parvez, the editor, was an Iranian of Indian origin, a gentle man in his mid-forties. Galleys were being brought to his table all the time, and I felt I wasn’t holding him with my explanation of my visit. Our conversation began to go strange.

He said, “Are you a Muslim?”

“No. But I don’t think it’s necessary.”

“Islam is a touchy subject here.” On the wall behind Mr. Parvez was a large, severe photograph of Khomeini.

“I know.”

“What is the money basis of this?” Mr. Parvez said, bending over a galley.

“Of what, Mr. Parvez?”

“Of what you want to write for us.”

We disengaged—in fact, as I learned later, money was the touchy subject in that office: there wasn’t much of it. And I was passed on to the next desk, to Mr. Jaffrey, an older man, who had a story or a feature or an editorial in his typewriter but broke off to talk to me.

Mr. Jaffrey, too, was an Indian Shia. He came from Lucknow. He said he was told “rather bluntly” in 1948 that as a Muslim he had no future in the Indian Air Force. So he migrated to Pakistan. In Pakistan, as a Shia, he had run into difficulties of another sort, and ten years later he had moved to Iran. Now he was full of anxiety about Iran.

He spoke briskly; everything he said he had already thought out. “All Muslim people tend to put their faith in one man. In the 1960s the Shah was loved. Now they love Khomeini. I never thought the time would come when Khomeini would usurp the position of the Shah.”
Khomeini should have stood down after the revolution in favour of the administrators, but he hadn’t; and as a result the country was now in the hands of “fanatics.”

Someone brought Mr. Jaffrey a dish of fried eggs and a plate of
pappadom
, crisp fried Indian bread.

I said, “What about Ramadan?”

He said in his brisk way, “I’m not fasting.”

He had been for Khomeini right through the revolution, because during the rule of the Shah the alternatives had become simple: religion or atheism. Every kind of corruption had come to Iran during the Shah’s rule: money corruption, prostitution, sodomy. The Shah was too cut off; he woke up too late to what was going on.

“And I thought, even in those days,” Mr. Jaffrey said, “that Islam was the answer.”

I couldn’t follow. Religion, the practice of religion, the answer to a political need?

I said, “The answer to what, Mr. Jaffrey?”

“The situation of the country. Islam stands for four things. Brotherhood, honesty, the will to work, proper recompense for labour.”

Still I didn’t follow. Why not call for those four things? Why go beyond those four things? Why involve those four things with something as big as Islam?

“You see,” Mr. Jaffrey said, and he became softer, “all my life I’ve wanted to see the true
jamé towhidi
. I translate that as ‘the society of believers.’ ”

It was the rule of Ali again: the dream of the society ruled purely by faith. But Mr. Jaffrey’s faith was profounder than the faith of the man from Bombay; for him the rule of Ali was more than getting women back into the veil. Mr. Jaffrey’s society of believers derived from an idea of the earliest days of Islam, when the Prophet handed down the divine laws, led his people in war and prayer, when every action, however worldly, served the true faith.

That was the kind of society that had to come to Iran. And Mr. Jaffrey—with his Indian-British education, and as if with another side of his personality—thought that such a society could be secured by institutions: by getting the mullahs back into the mosques, getting Khomeini to stand down, and putting politicians and administrators
into the administration. So, though Mr. Jaffrey didn’t say it, to secure his dream of oneness, church and state were to be divided. Faith, education, and political instinct had locked Mr. Jaffrey into that contradiction.

It was simpler for the man from Bombay. He was happy to see in the rule of Ali, and run. Mr. Jaffrey was anguished that a dream, which had come so close, had been dashed by Khomeini.

And I had also to recognize that that dream of the society of believers excluded me. In that newspaper office—typewriters, galleys, the English language, telephones, “May Truth Prevail”—nothing of the intellectual life that I valued was of account; the convergences of sentiment or reason that occurred from time to time were coincidental.

In the open space downstairs someone called out to me in an executive American voice, “Can I help you?”

It was one of the Iranian “directors” of the paper, and he was as unlikely a figure as could be imagined in the service of the
jamé towhidi
. He was young, handsome, well barbered, with a black moustache. With the tips of his fingers he was holding down a chocolate-brown jacket that rested square on his shoulders, setting off the fawn trousers, the biscuit-coloured shirt, and the wide-knotted wide tie.

He must have thought I was another Indian Shia with the gift of the English language and with a need for a few rials; and in his executivelike way he began to walk me up and down, firing off questions, frowning at the floor, his skin a little moist from all the clothes he was wearing, and saying, “Certainly, certainly,” to everything I said. When he understood that I didn’t want to write for the paper, he stopped walking with me. And when I said good-bye he said, “Certainly, certainly.”

Remember that director. Remember the busy newspaper office; Mr. Jaffrey at his typewriter; and the galleys falling onto the desk of the gentle editor who would have offered a stranger a job. Six months later, when I went back to Tehran, that office was desolate.

O
NE
of the English-language magazines I bought was published from the holy city of Qom. It was
The Message of Peace
and, as its title warned, it was full of rage.

It raged about the Shah; about the “devils” of the West and the evils of Western technology; it even raged about poor old Mr. Desai, the Indian prime minister, who banned alcohol (good, from the Muslim point of view) but drank urine (from the Muslim point of view, deplorable). But it wasn’t for its rages that I bought the magazine, or for the speeches of Khomeini, or for the biographies of the Shia Imams. I bought
The Message of Peace
for an article on Islamic urban planning.

Could there be such a thing? Apparently; and, more, it was badly needed. Islam was a complete way of life; it didn’t separate the worldly from the spiritual. Hence it was necessary, in addition to avoiding materialist industrial excess, to plan for “a theocentric society.” In this society women also had to be sheltered. Problems! But the very existence of these problems proved the need for sensible Islamic planning. And a solution was possible.

Build, at the corners of an imagined square, four residential areas. Give each a mosque, a clinic, and a nursery: that is where the women will busy themselves. The men will go to work. They will go to work in the centre of the square. At the very heart of this working area there will be a mosque large enough to hold all the male population. With the mosque there will be an alms-giving centre, since the giving of alms is as important in Islam as prayer, or fasting, or the pilgrimage to Mecca.

In a circle around the mosque there will be a bazaar; around the bazaar will be a circle of offices; and at the perimeter of this office circle there will be hospitals, maternity homes, and schools, so that men on their way to work can take their children to school, and on other occasions can rush to hospitals or maternity homes.

For recreation, women can meet and chat. Men can ride horses or take up flying. “The idea is not to encourage such games which distract the religious consciousness of the community.”

There are certain other Islamic requirements. Water from recycled sewage is not to be used, except for irrigation. “The concept of cleanliness, and water as the medium of bodily cleanliness, is strong in Islam. The purifying agent for water is water itself and the chemical and biological processes are not acceptable from the religious point of view.”

The houses in the residential areas are to be so aligned that the prayer call from the mosque can reach them without the use of an amplifier. There is a final detail. “The toilet fixtures like water closets
shall be so arranged as to make the user not to face the City of Mecca either from his front or back side.”

T
HE
mountains to the north of Tehran showed in the morning light, faded in the daytime haze, and at sunset became a faint amethyst outline. The lights came on; here and there neon signs did their little jigs. The traffic roared. But through all the hectic-seeming day the cranes on the unfinished buildings had never moved.

Technology was evil. E. F. Schumacher of
Small Is Beautiful
had said so:
The Message of Peace
quoted him a lot, lashing the West with its own words. But technology surrounded us in Tehran, and some of it had been so Islamized or put to such good Islamic use that its foreign origin seemed of no account.

The hotel taxi driver could be helped through the evening traffic jams by the Koranic readings on his car radio; and when we got back to the hotel there would be mullahs on television. Certain modern goods and tools—cars, radios, televisions—were necessary; their possession was part of a proper Islamic pride. But these things were considered neutral; they were not associated with any particular faith or civilization; they were thought of as the stock of some great universal bazaar.

Money alone bought these things. And money, in Iran, had become the true gift of God, the reward for virtue. Whether Tehran worked or not, seventy million dollars went every day to the country’s external accounts, to be drawn off as required: foreign currencies, secured by foreign laws and institutions, to keep the Islamic revolution going.

But some people were scratchy. They could be scratchy in empty restaurants where they didn’t have the food their old-time menus offered. They needed customers, but they couldn’t help hating those who came. They were scratchy at my hotel, for an additional reason. After the revolution the owners had left the country. The hotel had been taken over by a revolutionary
komiteh
, and it was important for everyone downstairs to display pride. (It was different upstairs. The chambermaid told me by signs one morning that I wasn’t to use the hotel laundry; she would wash my clothes. She did. When I came back in the afternoon I saw my damp clothes displayed in the corridor, hung out to dry on the doorknobs of unoccupied rooms.)

Nicholas, a young British journalist, came to see me one evening and—starting from cold—began absolutely to quarrel with the man at the desk about the hotel taxi charges. The quarrel developed fast in the empty lobby.

Nicholas, tall and thin and with a little beard, was jumpy from overwork: the long hours he kept as a foreign correspondent, the “disinformation” he said he had constantly to sift through, the sheer number of words he had to send back every day. He had also begun to be irritated by the events he was reporting.

The man at the desk was big and paunchy, with a sallow skin and curly black hair. He wore a suit and radiated pride. His pride, and Nicholas’s rage, made him lose his head. He went back to the manners and language of old times.

He said, “If you don’t like the hotel, you can leave.”

Nicholas, with the formality of high temper, said, “It is my good fortune
not
to be staying at the hotel.”

I took the car at the stated price, to calm them both down.

Nicholas leaned on the desk but looked away. The man at the desk began to write out the taxi requisition slip. In spite of his appearance, he was a man from the countryside. He had spent a fair amount of money to send his mother on the pilgrimage to Mecca; he was anxious about money and the future, and worried about the education of his children. During the boom an American university education had seemed possible for the boy, but now he had to think of other ways.

Nicholas was closed to pity. He remembered the boom, too, when hotels had no rooms, and he and many others had slept on camp beds in the ballroom of a grand hotel and paid five dollars a night.

He said, “For seven months no one in this country has done a stroke of work. Where else can you do that and live?”

The revolution continued. The election results showed—although there were charges of rigging—that the people had done as Khomeini had told them, and voted in mullahs and ayatollahs to the constitution-framing Assembly of Experts. A man was executed for having a two-month affair with a married woman. The Revolutionary Committee for Guild Affairs warned women hairdressers (mainly Armenian) to stop “wasting their youth” and cutting the hair of men. And some frightened carpet-washers began to advertise an “Islamic carpet-wash”—the carpet to be rinsed three times in water.

Five billion dollars’ worth of American F-14 jets were written off, their missile system too “difficult and uneconomical.” And other big prerevolutionary projects were cancelled, in addition to the two West German nuclear power plants on which a billion dollars were owed. The six-lane highway to the southern port of Bandar Abbas was taken away from an American consortium and given to an Iranian contractor: “In the first stage of the work two lanes will be constructed.” There were reports of sabotage: the Israelis had been sabotaging the “normal operations” of the Arya National Shipping Line. The Kurds in the northwest were in rebellion; the Arabs in the southwest were restive.

The speeches never stopped. The minister of labour and social welfare made one and got his picture in the papers: the mosque, he said, was not only a place of worship but also “a base for launching anticolonialistic movements in a display of unity, thought and action.” Unity: it was the theme of a big Friday sabbath feature in the
Tehran Times
, “Why has Islam the potential for revolution?”

Unity, union, the backs bowed in prayers that were like drills, the faith of one the faith of all, the faith of all flowing into the faith of one and becoming divine, personality and helplessness abolished: union, surrender, facelessness, heaven.