Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey

by V. S. Naipaul

  Behzad said, “The people you see in these photographs are all left-wing people. Some were executed four hours after they had been arrested. Khomeini sent in Khalkhalli and he arrested everybody.”

  Khalkhalli, the judge, the hatchet man of the revolution: the fat, jolly peasant from Azerbaijan who had never had any doubts about himself, who, from being a shepherd boy (yet never thinking of himself as poor), had risen to power, and killed Hoveida, the Shah’s prime minister.

  I said, “In August you told me Khalkhalli was a clown, that he had no power.” But that was in August, when Behzad had his own idea of where the revolution might still go.

  “I was wrong. You remember he told you he had the gun with which Hoveida was killed. You know who actually killed Hoveida? It was a mullah, one of these men with beards and turbans. A young man, in his thirties. He is known.”

  The photographs of the execution were official photographs, but Behzad’s copies were holy documents, perhaps at some future date to be put into another Iranian album of revolution and martyrs. In the official photographs the blindfolded men were anonymous, just rebels. In Behzad’s copies there was an Arabic numeral above each blindfolded man: they were all known. They were middle-class, city people. And though Behzad didn’t tell me, they were (as I learned from another source) that section of his group that had opted for guerrilla activity, attaching themselves to various ethnic minority movements. The leaders had gone underground; one of them was a woman.

  Friends had died, and—having broken with his girl friend—he had remained in Tehran doing his studies and earning what money he could. Since October Behzad had fretted over his own inactivity.

  He pointed to the Persian pamphlet. “There are fifteen hundred political prisoners in Iran right now. I tell you, printing and selling the communist literature is nothing.”

  The hot tea had been welcome in the cold apartment. He went to the kitchen and filled the glasses again. He dropped the sugar cubes in his tea and stirred.

  I said, “Don’t you hold the sugar in your mouth and drink the tea through it?”

  He smiled. “Sometimes.”

  “What was your girl like intellectually?”

  He paused. It seemed he hadn’t understood. But then he said, “She was all right. We were all right, in every way. It was just what I told you. The personalities.”

  “You told me her family was very Muslim.”

  “Only her brother. He didn’t get on with me. He’s a businessman. But he had nothing against me. He just thought I was a boring man, always interested in politics.” His face brightened; he smiled. “Her father liked me, though. I think he liked me a lot.” He pointed to the booklet on the low table between us. “You remember we talked about that man?”

  The booklet was in Persian. It had a photograph of Stalin on the front cover, and another picture of Stalin, a Russian-realist pencil portrait, on the frontispiece. I had seen the booklet without taking it in: it looked so much like the books and booklets on Revolution Avenue, opposite the university.

  I said, “Where was this one printed?”

  “Tabriz.” In Azerbaijan, in the far northwest.

  “What do you think of him now?”

  “I love him!” Behzad said. “The more I read about him, the more I love him. He was one of the greatest revolutionaries. Do you know his speech at the beginning of the war?”

  “Nineteen thirty-nine, or forty-one?”

  “When the Germans invaded Russia.”

  “Nineteen forty-one.”

  “ ‘The Motherland calls …’ Don’t you know that speech?”

  “Why do you say he was one of the greatest revolutionaries?”

  “Because he constructed socialism in Russia. That was the first socialist revolution in the world, and it was the greatest turn in human history. Maybe he made some mistakes. But I can say he was the most suitable man to do what he did. What he did in Russia we have to do in Iran. We, too, have to do a lot of killing. A lot.” He began to smile, as though he was worried that I might think him ridiculous, dreaming, in his present helplessness, of such a big task. “We have to kill all the bourgeoisie. All the bourgeoisie of the oppressor class.” And he smiled as he had smiled when he said that his former girl’s father had liked him.

  He couldn’t walk back with me to the Avenue of the Islamic Republic, to put me in a line taxi. He had to stay with his books. He called a hire car for me.

  He said, “Someone’s giving a party tomorrow. I know my old girl friend is going to be there. And the person giving the party telephoned me to ask me to come. I said, ‘But you know I don’t see her any more.’ She said, ‘That’s why I’m asking you.’ What do you think of that?”

  I left him to his books and papers. His mathematical work was in his fine Persian script, with Western (or Arabic or Indian) numerals. Many of his textbooks were American. He had been fed by so many civilizations; so much had gone into making him what he was. But now, at what should have been the beginning of his intellectual life, he—like the Muslims to whom he was opposed—had cut himself off.

  Behzad—and the other students of Iran, and the estimated three hundred thousand Iranian students abroad—were all really the Shah’s children, the first intellectual fruits of the state he had tried to build. But they were too new, too raw, unsupported by an intellectual tradition; they were too many; and neither they nor the state had been able to cope.

  THE Royal Tehran Hilton, high up in the north of the city, and with snow on the ground, was now the Tehran Hilton International. In August it had only ceased to be Royal. The word—in Oriental-style lettering—had been taken down from the sign over the drive and from the marble wall at the entrance; but in both places the raised letters had left a ghostly impression. That was no longer so. The marble wall at the entrance had been polished up and fitted out with the new name; and winter rains had washed away the dusty shadow of the old word from the white sign over the drive.

  The hotel had a new monogram. But THI had been made to look so like the old RTH that it took some time to see that the paper napkins in the coffee shop were still Royal. They must have been part of some vast stock—like the currency notes, most denominations of which still carried the Shah’s picture.

  In August the Hilton had appeared a place of gloom. Now it had revived. It advertised a one-hour laundry service. The shirt I gave in was returned to me in the coffee shop (where the china was Rosenthal) half an hour later, laundered and ironed and packed.

  Behzad had told me that the hoteliers of Tehran had grown anxious since some students had occupied a well-known hotel. People who had been complaining about empty rooms had begun to jump about a bit, switched on lights at night in empty rooms, and generally tried to suggest—like the people in my own hotel—that things were all right with them.

  But real life had come to hotels like the Hilton, and it had been given by the journalists and television teams who had flown in for the American-embassy story—the American television networks had been especially extravagant. It was strange: Americans held hostage in one part of the city, Americans made more than welcome in other parts. And not only Americans: there were Japanese and French and British and Spanish correspondents. Some of them, the newspapermen, had been ground down by the story, which now hardly seemed to move. The television people, with all their attendants and all their equipment, could appear to be more exciting than the events they reported on. Like the French correspondent I saw one day speaking his piece to his camera right in front of the Intercontinental: the scene oddly inconsequential to me, coming out of the hotel only after the buffet lunch.

  The drama of the seized embassy and the hostages behind the walls was always available. It was a short drive away; the hire cars were always ready to take you there. And—as with some too-famous tourist spot—it seemed a little shaming to go for the first time. The old hands no longer went; after three months there was nothing for them to see.

  A long red brick wall; the low embassy build
ings behind the wall; a background of snow-covered mountains—and here, in the north of the city, the mountains were quite close, with no smog or tall buildings to block the view. The long embassy wall was daubed with slogans in Persian and English; and there were more slogans on cotton banners, grey and dingy after more than three months. The pavement was roped off, the rope running from tree trunk to tree trunk, and armed young men in khaki trousers, black boots, and quilted khaki jackets stood at every gate. Outside the main gate the pavement ropes gave way to tubular steel scaffolding, erected less for security, it seemed, than as a form of crowd control.

  The first day I went, at sunset, prayer time, there was a little demonstrating group, chanting responses to a leader as they might have responded to a mullah in a mosque; and the responses were mixed with the sounds, on many radios, of a broadcast call to real prayers. The guards remained unsmiling in the face of the indirect tribute of the little crowd. Evening clouds built up in the cold sky; evening light fell on the snow-covered mountains. The demonstration, like the radio prayers, ended. The crowd chatted and drank tea.

  Except for the government crafts shop, which was, curiously, having a one-week bargain sale, the shops on the other side of the road seemed to have closed down, and some windows were blanked out on the inside with paste or paint. On the pavement on that side of the road, and on part of the road itself, there was a fairground atmosphere: book stalls, food stalls (mainly buns), tea stalls (tea bags dipped in glasses of hot water).

  Beyond the scaffolding at the main gate, the embassy wall was hung with a polythene-covered display of photographs of revolutions and atrocities: Vietnam, Africa, Nicaragua: the late-twentieth-century causes to which these Muslim students wished to attach their own cause. There were sandbags at the angle of the embassy wall, and the lane that ran down that side of the embassy compound was barred off and guarded.

  Across that lane, there was another book stall, then a picture stall: the beauty of tears again, inexplicable tears running down the cheeks of beautiful women and innocent children. But that Persian sentimentality, the other side of Shia misanthropy, here served the revolution: one picture, all in brown, was of a crying, ragged child, eyes blurred with tears, shirt cuffs frayed, jacket worn out at the elbow, resting a small hand on Khomeini’s shoulder. He, Khomeini, frowned, and seemed to look beyond the child; he was like a man meditating revenge. It was a powerful picture. A middle-aged woman in a black chador, catching sight of it in the near-darkness, gave a start and put her hand on her left breast.

  The television service ended that evening with a five-minute camera study, without comment, of Khomeini resting in his Tehran hospital room after his heart attack. He was sitting in an easy chair; his legs and feet were covered with a yellow blanket. The camera moved slowly from the man to his bed and the simple furnishings of the room and back to the man. Once the camera rested on his left hand: long fingers, the skin extraordinarily smooth for a man of eighty. Once or twice the little finger lifted, as if involuntarily, and then fell back. There was no other movement from him during the five minutes of this camera study, no sign of any emotion. He was not a man meditating revenge; he was a man whose work had been done. And all the time, in the background, a male choir sang a three-word song: “Khomeini e Imam! Khomeini e Imam!” “Khomeini is the Imam.” The ruler above everyone else, the deputy of the hidden Twelfth Imam, the regent of God.

  The second time I walked past the American embassy there was a smaller crowd, and no demonstration. In a green tent not far from the main gate a young man and a young woman in quilted military clothes were selling big four-colour posters: the hands of the Iranian people around President Carter’s throat, the president’s mouth opening wide to half-disgorge a small Shah, leaning out of the president’s mouth with a moneybag in each dangling hand.

  A tall foreign photographer in a brown leather jacket, with his equipment slung from his shoulder, was talking to a guard at the main gate, apparently pleading to be let in. The gate opened, but it was only to let another guard in. No drama, nothing more to see.

  That came later, on my way back to the hotel. On Revolution Avenue, one cross-street down, in an area of once-elegant shops, part of the great middle-class city the Shah had created in North Tehran, a small boy sat on the pavement not far from plastic sacks of store rubbish. He had lit a fire in the middle of the pavement, using rubbish from the sacks.

  The fire was new. Sparks and burning paper blew onto passers-by. The boy, who was about ten, sat right up against his fire. But he wasn’t warming himself. With a face of rage, he was tearing at his shirt; and he was already half naked from the waist up. It was very cold; there was a wind. The boy, sitting almost in his fire, with two boxes of matches beside him, tore and tore at his shirt. His bare feet were grimy; his face was grimy. People stopped to talk to him; he looked up-staring eyes in a soft, well-made face—and continued to tear at his shirt; and the people who had stopped walked on. A hunchback, mentally defective, appearing out of the pavement crowd, walked around the boy and the fire, hands dangling, mouth agape; and walked uncoordinatedly on.

  A fire in the middle of the rush-hour crowd: a signal of distress, but there was no one who could respond. It was only in pictures that the tears of children were beautiful. The hysteria of this child, stretched to breaking point, would have matched the mood of many of the passers-by; and was too frightening.

  It was frightening to me, too. And without the language I could do even less than the people who had, at the beginning, stopped to talk to the boy. I walked on along Revolution, turned down Hafiz, dodging the traffic in the cross-streets (one, formerly France, now relabelled Neauphle-le-Château, after the French town from which Khomeini, in exile, directed the revolution); walked past the long brick wall of the Russian embassy (something like a water tower being installed on the top of a modern apartment block: the embassy compounds of the nineteenth-century powers, Britain, Russia, France, Turkey, occupy great chunks of central Tehran); and at length, after the boutiques and the shops and typewriter shop and the French bookshop and the shop with a big stock of electrical goods (a little girl, wrapped in a flowered cotton chador, sitting in the doorway and selling chewing gum from one little box), came—in the shadow now of the very big traffic flyover whose pillars marched down the middle of a much-dug-up Hafiz Avenue—to my hotel, behind its own high wall.

  If I had followed my original plan, if I hadn’t been put out by the boy with the fire, I would have walked down Revolution Avenue to Tehran University. And there I would have come upon the big event of the day. Sixty thousand Mujahidin students had gathered in the university grounds. The Mujahidin, “soldiers of the faith,” were Muslims, but they were also of the left, and for that reason not acceptable to everybody. Elements of the Tehran street crowd, “the people,” had set upon the Mujahidin, and there had been fighting with sticks and knives and stones. Thirty-nine people had been injured.

  Of that great disturbance just a short walk away not a ripple reached the hotel. And if I hadn’t heard about it later that evening from a foreign correspondent, I might never have known. The next day was Friday, the sabbath, and the English-language Tehran Times didn’t publish on that day.

  One year after the revolution Tehran was still drifting. Everybody was free; everybody was waiting; everybody was nervous. The city could appear to be without event. But it was a battlefield, full of private wars.

  THE drama—of the American embassy—that had brought hundreds of journalists to Tehran had, ironically, shattered the local English-language press. Where was The Message of Peace, so combative in August, so full of the rightness of the faith and the wrongness of everything else? And Iran Week (cover lettering like Newsweek)—such new offices, and the people inside a little vain of their revolution—why was Iran Week so hard to find? The Iranian (New Statesman-like) was considered the better weekly, but the issue I bought turned out to be the last. The decision to close must have been taken in a hurry: the back cover invited subs
criptions, the half-filled editorial column said good-bye.

  The daily Tehran Times had shrunk. It was now four pages, a single folded sheet. In August it had been a paper of eight pages, bright with advertisements and writers and religious features. It had been a paper of the revolution and the faith. The office had been busy; there were even some Europeans or Americans giving a hand (one American, reportedly a Shia convert, out-Shiiteing them all). Mr. Parvez, the editor, busy with his proofs, had thought, when I went to see him, that I wanted a job. And, kindly man that he was, he seemed ready to give me one.

  No such mistake could be made now. There was no such busyness. Mr. Parvez wasn’t sitting at a proof-strewn desk. He was walking listlessly about the empty room. He didn’t remember me, but he seemed glad to see someone, glad to talk. He sat down at his bare desk and invited me to sit on the desk.

  Things were bad, Mr. Parvez said, very bad. Since the students had seized the embassy, many foreign firms had closed. He had lost advertisements and readers. The circulation of the paper was now only thirteen thousand, and he wasn’t even recovering his printing costs. He lost three hundred dollars with every issue. So that for him, and his business associates, Friday, the sabbath, when the paper wasn’t published, was truly a day of rest.