Children of Paradise (29 page)

For Ali, the revolution came to Qazvin one night in late fall. The shah’s army had battened down the streets in a kind of martial law, but his father disobeyed curfew to attend to Ali’s grandfather, who was very sick. Naghi returned home badly beaten, his eyeglasses broken. Ali was six years old. Two months later, the shah fell. Ali felt a tremor of something between excitement
and fear. Within the larger clan of his family, there were Khomeini supporters and also critics; the debates among them were electric. But Ali did not know anyone so far outside the political mainstream as to be affected by the purges of that first turbulent decade. From time to time Iraqi warplanes passed overhead, anxiety on great black wings, headed someplace just beyond.

Ali would remember the wartime rationing, the long lines for basic household goods. In those years of political upheaval and economic collapse, Naghi’s salary from teaching was barely adequate to the needs of his wife and three children. The atmosphere of repression was an uneasy one, even to those disinclined to press its boundaries. Ali’s classmates wanted to go to parties and to dress as they pleased. Ali didn’t want these things for himself, but he didn’t understand why others should be denied them.

Shariati once waxed lyrical in the cause of social justice, although he was not himself abjectly poor. For Ali Afshari, the cause was liberty, although he was not himself oppressed. Liberty was a kind of justice, too. He bridled against a system that used intimidation, force, and favoritism to impose its values. He was a creature unimaginable to the revolutionary generation just behind him: one who came to political activism—a ruinous vocation in postrevolutionary Iran—not to defend his own rights but to defend those of others.

In his father’s library in Qazvin, young Ali Afshari read history, particularly from the time of Mossadegh. He read literature, both foreign and Iranian—Dostoyevsky, Dickens, Balzac, but also Hedayat, Saadi, Al-e Ahmad. He read poetry. He read about Islam, and about Persia before and after its advent. Above all, he read Shariati. In Shariati he found an Islam that was modern and invigorating, one that furnished a call to political action. But, next to Shariati, Ali also read
Iran’s Revolution in Two Steps
by Mehdi Bazargan, the Islamic Republic’s expelled and disdained first prime minister. Ali tried to reconcile Bazargan’s brand of liberal rationality with Shariati’s exhortation to action. When
Kayhan-e Farhangi
began to publish Abdolkarim Soroush’s essays, Ali was fifteen. He devoured the new publication, and after it,
Kiyan
. Soroush supplanted Shariati in his esteem, and he determined to follow the exciting new thinker when he reached university.

Ali went to Amirkabir University, formerly Tehran Polytechnic, to study industrial engineering in 1992. One of Iran’s most prestigious technical schools, Amirkabir served some ten thousand students in the flat, congested center of Iran’s sprawling capital, where the sky hung close and acrid with exhaust but the streets pulsed with restless energy. With its low-slung, poorly maintained concrete buildings, its deep, littered gutters for mountain runoff perilously sluicing between curb and street, its nearly unbreathable air, Tehran was not a beautiful city. But its color and vital force, its ferocious daily momentum, marked it as one of those cities that did more than host millions of lives but somehow channeled their promise and menace through arteries of its own.

Ali Afshari went to Tehran knowing he would become an activist. No one else knew it. His high school teachers remembered him as a mild, traditional young man who had every reason to be satisfied. He was not an angry person. But he was a solid one, physically and mentally. Once he was planted in your path, you could hardly expect to push him aside.

• • •

I
NDEPENDENT STUDENT ACTIVISM
had all but died after the Iranian revolution. The Islamic Students Associations on university campuses were arms of the leadership under Khomeini. They were powerful, but only insofar as they were obedient. Each university’s Islamic Students Association sent a representative to the national coordinating board that oversaw all the associations, in an effort to keep them in line with Khomeini’s views. That board had the awkward, off-putting name of Daftar-e Tahkim-e Vahdat, or the Office of Consolidating Unity. Students knew it as Daftar Tahkim. Until Khomeini’s death, it was a pillar of the then powerful Islamic Left.

By the time Ali Afshari entered university, at the start of Rafsanjani’s presidency, Daftar Tahkim, and the Islamic Students Associations it represented, had begun to assert their independence from the state. Khomeini was gone, and with him the object of “consolidating unity.” The Islamic Left was gone, and with it the student movement’s purchase on power. The Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc were gone, and with them the gravitational polarity of the Cold War.

Moreover, President Rafsanjani was a troublesome figure, as much for the student movement as he had been for the Islamic Left. Daftar Tahkim welcomed his overtures toward political and cultural liberalism, but resented his exclusion of the Islamic Left from power and adamantly rejected what it feared was a free market agenda. In the first three years after Khomeini’s death, the Islamic Students Associations felt their way toward an ambivalent new role, from cheerleader to cautious critic of the Islamic Republic. The Islamic Republic responded by establishing its own organizations that would serve as reliable instruments of control over the universities. These included special campus Basij details, as well as Ansar-e Hezbollah and the Office of the Supreme Leader in the Universities.

Ali Afshari might have joined the Basij. Nothing in his background would have led to his exclusion. He was popular, a leader in sports—he was the head of the climbing club—as well as in culture and politics. But Ali’s agenda was—quietly, modestly at first—subversive. He felt that the students at Amirkabir did not all enjoy the same rights. Those who supported the regime had privileges. They went on school-sponsored field trips to other cities, to the mountains, to visit shrines. The less-favored students were not permitted to go. The atmosphere that Ansar, the Basij, and the Office of the Supreme Leader enforced was abstemious, punitive: male students were not permitted to listen to music with women singers, nor Western music or any music from the shah’s time, even in the privacy of their dorm rooms, and the library was censored beyond what was required by the state. Male and female students could not speak to each other on campus, even to discuss their studies or to share notes or books. On some days students from the Office of the Supreme Leader in the Universities would block the doors of buildings, refusing entry to boys who dared to wear short sleeves. Sometimes they took those students’ names and punished them with two semesters’ suspension.

Ali Afshari made these inequities and restrictions the first objects of his activism. He got involved in his dormitory’s cultural office, within which
he formed an organization that offered field trips for all comers, and he used his clout as a religious student to persuade the head of the dormitory not to punish students for the music they listened to or the books they read, but rather to welcome a spirit of debate among the students. The hezbollahis, he knew—because he knew them well—could ignore a secular liberal malcontent, or a child of the defeated, frightened secular left; but they could not ignore Ali Afshari. He could as easily be one of theirs.

Ali was elected first to his department’s student union and then, in 1994, to the university-wide Islamic Students Association. He was thrilled. Among his colleagues in the Islamic Students Association were veterans of the Iran-Iraq War and very religious, traditional young people from families close to the regime. But, like Ali, they were looking for a new political model, an idea that might free them from the sterile factional bickering between the right and left wings of the ruling establishment. They found Abdolkarim Soroush.

Soroush spoke to them within the idiom of Islam, with respect for its commitments. But he was modern, democratic, and, the students felt, nonideological. “We wanted to distribute the ideas of Dr. Soroush, to move from Islamic jurisprudence to Islamic modernism, liberty rather than justice, civil society rather than government,” Ali would later reflect.

Amirkabir University was a trendsetter. Some universities’ Islamic Students Associations embraced the hardline policies of Khamenei; others pressed for a return to the Islamic Left orthodoxies of the 1980s; and at first only Amirkabir promoted the new ideas emanating from
Kiyan
and the Center for Strategic Research. Within three years, however, Amirkabir’s reformism would be embraced by the majority.

• • •

N
OTHING COULD HAVE MARKED
a clearer break with the recent past than the students’ rehabilitation of Mehdi Bazargan, the embattled liberal prime minister forced from office by radical students, among others, in the revolutionary tumult. It was, after all, the forerunner of Daftar Tahkim that took over the American embassy, humiliating Bazargan’s
provisional government and demonstrating the overweening power of the radical clerics after 1979.

When Bazargan died in early 1995, Ali helped organize a memorial at Amirkabir. It was, he felt, his duty to show Bazargan the respect he had been denied by students in his time. But the campus Basij disrupted the program, threatening the speakers and forbidding them from taking the podium. Ali would later identify the memorial as the event that turned him into an activist for the opposition. From that moment on, he was a person of interest to the Ministry of Intelligence.

When Ansar-e Hezbollah assaulted Soroush at a lecture at the University of Tehran, Amirkabir’s Islamic Students Association issued a statement urging the interior ministry to step up: “
What need is there to guard the country by night when the law is breached in daylight?” the students demanded. “What meaning do claims of power have when the cultural realm of a university is violated by some while the law enforcement forces act as mere spectators?” Ali Afshari and his fellow student activists determined that Soroush should speak at Amirkabir and that the students there would defend him. They organized the lecture for May 12, 1996.

Some five thousand students were to attend. Ali was in charge of security, and he organized two hundred liberal students into a fighting force that blocked Ansar-e Hezbollah from entering the amphitheater. The students had control of the sound system of the campus mosque, and they used it to broadcast revolutionary songs. But the militias interpreted the songs as an incitement against the Islamic Republic, and they cut the power to the mosque. They seized Soroush and prevented him from entering to speak at the event. Ali Afshari and his fellow student activists were determined to carry on with their program, even if they had only their introductory speaker. They found an alternative source of electricity from a neighboring university building. The state security forces cut the power to the whole campus in response. The students had a generator but no gas; they used their motorcycles to fire up the generator, and this allowed them to turn on the lights and the microphones. The speaker finished his
remarks. Soroush never took the podium, but the Islamic Students Association of Amirkabir University had announced itself as an oppositional force to be reckoned with.

The activists who’d organized the Soroush speech started to disappear two months later, whisked one by one to prison or interrogation. Ali Afshari knew his turn was coming. A representative of the intelligence ministry showed up at the Islamic Students Association’s office and asked to speak with him. Ali and the agent walked as they talked. Little by little, Ali found himself surrounded by men who quietly escorted him through a back door and into a car, where he was blindfolded and driven to Towhid Prison, a detention center associated with the intelligence ministry.

Ali had a solitary cell. His interrogators didn’t touch him. Instead they screamed insults and curses: he was stupid, retarded, an imbecile. He had created turmoil among the masses and acted against national security. President Rafsanjani had a railroad project he’d hoped to unveil, with great fanfare, on the very day of Amirkabir’s Soroush debacle. Ali had orchestrated a distraction from the government’s great achievement, his interrogators admonished. Surely he’d done so under the direction of the Mojahedin-e Khalq. Surely the student activists were under the control of the reform movement that was then emerging from the defunct Islamic Left. Ali confessed to nothing. After ten days he was brought before a judge. Shariati and Bazargan had founded a deviant religion, the judge sneered. He ordered Ali to spend the night in Evin Prison. In the morning Ali was released on bail.

• • •

T
HAT FALL
, a heavy security atmosphere pervaded Amirkabir University. But the Islamic Students Association drew energy from its embattlement. It nominated Ali Afshari as its representative to Daftar Tahkim. At the national level, Ali now represented the students who considered themselves Islamic modernists—the ones who read and admired Soroush. Moreover, it was an election year. Ali and the reformists in Daftar Tahkim supported Khatami over the conservative candidate, parliamentary speaker Ali Akbar
Nategh-Nouri. Students drove the Khatami campaign, and as the campaign’s student coordinator, Ali Afshari drove the students.

Daftar Tahkim had a car with government plates, a vestige of the Khomeini era. Ali was not supposed to use the car for campaign purposes, but he did. He drove through the city to check in with the student campaigners. In Islamshahr, a poor community to the south of Tehran, he saw volunteers working all night long on a hundred-meter-long banner of Khatami’s name. In the north he saw students tossing Khatami postcards into the windows of moving cars late at night. Ansar-e Hezbollah sometimes broke the windows of cars displaying Khatami’s photo, and so Ali helped organize what he called “antipressure groups,” which would physically defend Khatami supporters against Ansar. In the final days of the campaign, Daftar Tahkim had four buses of students circling the city, campaigning for Khatami. Eventually, all four busloads were arrested and accused of creating a “carnival of propaganda.”