The furies had been unleashed and had taken hold of the soul of the nation. After so many centuries of invasions, battles and conquests, so much blood spilt in the same streets from so many innocent Iranian veins for so many thousands of years, this time it was Iran’s own sons and daughters who were wreaking the havoc, running forward to have their blood spilt, preferring death and this new word being bandied about, in reference to the battle at Kerbala of Imam Hossein – martyrdom – to living one moment longer under this regime, this tyranny of the shah, the modern-day Yazid who was oppressing the people and drinking the country’s resources in order to bedeck himself and his wife in ermine and furs and strut and pose on the global stage. ‘Nothing,’ they said, rushing towards death, ‘could be worse than this.’ They were naïve, they did not know what was to come.
During the holy month of Muharram, Khomeini, already so proficient at using language that the simplest souls could understand, called on Iran to show its opposition to this new Yazid and so, in the processional marches of Ashura, it seemed the whole of Iran came out on to the streets. Two million people converged on Tehran’s wide boulevards, the ritual self-flagellation and religious songs joined by revolutionary slogans and chanting. The ayatollah called on Iranians to show their resistance to the decadent monarchy by taking refuge in Islam and, as well as the two days of protests – as the marches of Ashura had become – and their attendant violence and casualties, the populace protested peacefully by praying in public. Suddenly from every rooftop at the hours of the day appointed for prayers, scores of the faithful would bend and straighten and beseech God in unison, an unearthly dance ensemble choreographed from afar by the exiled leader. At night, the streets would echo with two words as the people, again directed by Khomeini – stood on their rooftops and chanted, over and over again, Allah-o akbar – God is great. The words echoed through the city under cover of night which shielded them from SAVAK’s eyes, and this eerie new sound added to the hum of normal city noises, this beseeching of God, this offering up of prayers for change.
Khomeini was the answer to the prayers of the oppressed, who were already calling him Imam. In a world that was rapidly changing into something the traditional majority of Iran did not recognise, with everything shifting and changing shape, Khomeini’s particular brand of nationalism offered what the shah’s new world did not: certainty. And the certainty was built on a return to Iran’s traditional culture, of which Shiism was a vital part. The shah’s brutal oppression of political opposition had left the country with no other viable leaders and Khomeini’s long years in exile had kept him untainted by the changes that had swept through the country so quickly. After Saddam Hussein, at the shah’s request, removed Khomeini from Iraq (the shah rejected the Iraqi government’s offer to have the turbulent priest assassinated), he settled in a suburb of Paris from where, although now many thousands of miles further away from Iran, mass media coverage meant that his message was more available to people in both Iran and the rest of the world than it could have been at home.
The various factions who were clamouring for change – the Marxist groups, the socialist groups, the students, elites and intellectuals – united under Khomeini, seeing in his uniquely austere charisma and ability to communicate with the ordinary people an expedient leader who would, once the harj-o-marj – the peculiarly Iranian brand of chaos – was over, quietly step aside and allow those best qualified for the job of running the country to take over. The Western media flocked to Khomeini’s headquarters, desperate to understand this new phenomenon. Khomeini, an old man, humble in his robes and turban with an authority in both Islamic jurisprudence and, allegedly, Western philosophy, gave interviews that assured a nervous world that he had no intention of ruling Iran, that the Islamic system of government he proposed would be one based on social justice and freedom of expression, where everyone would be equal.
Far from being a throwback to medieval Islam, Khomeini’s ideas were, in fact, radically modern, adapted from young radical Islamic thinkers such as Ali Shariati, who had been frequently arrested and jailed by the shah until he died in 1977. Shariati, educated in Paris like so many young Iranian intellectuals, had synthesised ideas of Marxism – of class war and revolution – with resurgent ideas of Islam and had in the process revitalised Jalal Al-e Ahmad’s ideas of gharbzadegi – Westoxification. Shariati harmonised his ideas into strains that resonated with Shiism and advocated that Muslims, instead of just waiting for the return of the Twelfth Imam, should instead work to bring about his return – by fighting for social justice – ‘Red Shiism’. After Shariati’s death in Southampton where he was exiled from Iran – and which his supporters maintained was the work of SAVAK in spite of the British coroner’s verdict of a heart attack – Khomeini came to represent the marriage of modern and traditional that Iran was looking for, a modernity that sat more comfortably in this deeply devout society. In his unyielding figure Khomeini managed to embody the two themes that had haunted Iran for nearly a century – tradition (he was a man of God) and modernity (in the Marxist Islam of his followers). With the vitriolic sermons and the uncompromising exterior, Khomeini led the dispossessed and the traditional sections of society, the bazaaris with all their money and influence and the passionate young intellectuals with their burning ideas of freedom and equality.
To most of his followers, political philosophy and theory were not what Khomeini was about. He had appeared to lead them out of oppression, of poverty, of exploitation, and, dispatching with reason altogether, they chose instead to believe that he was the manifestation of an eigth-century Shiite prophecy: ‘A man will come out of Qom and he will summon the believers to the right path. There will rally to him pieces of iron, not to be shaken by violent winds, unsparing and relying on God.’
For them Khomeini was this man, this unshakeable man with the uncompromising stare whose coming had been foretold. The people of Iran were furious and they were possessed by righteousness. There was a full moon that winter which, it was promised, would bear the face of the Imam Khomeini. His spin machine promised that the moon would show the face of the implacable priest and the people of Iran, in a sort of heinous love with this dark energy that flowed through their veins, looked up at the moon that night and saw – actually were sure they saw – the face of the priest shining down on them.
The next day, Daiey Pardis was at work as usual in Ahvaz and he told me that all around him he could hear the buzz. ‘Did you see it?’ went the whispers, whipping around the office. ‘Did you see it? The imam’s face in the moon?’ And so convinced were those who believed, their faces shone with such a strange light of zealotry and demented passion, that Pardis heard even those who still had hold of their reason hesitantly admit that yes, yes in fact, they too had seen the face of the imam, they just hadn’t been quite sure at first.
‘Besmelah-o rahmane rahim,’ chanted the faithful, and those who still had their reason had reason enough to sense the folly of not joining in. Pardis saw many of his beloved friends and colleagues mutter the salavat under their breaths, afraid to appear at odds with these burning-eyed devotees. A new energy had been unleashed in Iran and those who first spotted that it was like nothing they had seen before, started to worry and assess their own positions. Many of those who still believed in socialist principles, in the equality of man, in the rights of the workers and the prerogative of self-determination and self-rule of Iran without the barely disguised colonialism of foreign powers, they looked about them at the white-hot energy of these zealots and, preferring not to cross them, told themselves that for the sake of the revolution that now surely must come – could no longer be held back, was roaring towards them like an unstoppable train – they could let these fearless ‘martyrs-in-the-making’ take the initiative, bring down the shah, change the order of things. Then, they told themselves, reason would prevail and they would step in to take over, to make new laws and build a new paradise for all of Iran along socialist, nationalistic and Marxist principles. And t
hese Iranians who should have stayed upright, who should have stood firm in their secular principles, instead like my great-grandfather’s fabled cypress tree they too bent to the prevailing wind order not to break, and they let the scruffy youth that made up the armies of Khomeini take the country through revolution to even more horror beyond.
The shah, beleaguered and already suffering from the cancer that would soon take his life, prevaricated. On the one hand, he instituted martial law and his troops continued to kill their own people. On the other hand, he tried to mollify the nation by sacking and arresting anyone within reach who had wielded any political power, landing all society’s ills squarely on the shoulders of his own ministers. He brought in a new government that made concessions to the protestors, and enacted Islamic laws that were supposed to please the people. He went on television to acknowledge his mistakes and even tried to install himself at the head of the revolution, assuring his people that, like a good father, he had heard their cry of anguish and wanted nothing more than to salve the people’s pain. Always so free and easy with that word, the shah himself was the one who, having prepared the ground by promising the people ‘revolution’ for so many years, now referred to the protests and confrontations as a revolution before anyone else thought to. And so this mighty movement for social justice was now officially a revolution, a force of such electric energy that it lit up the land.
The shah’s attempts to conciliate Iran were rejected. It was too little, too late and his children now had the confidence to spurn this bad father of theirs and let him know that what he offered, after so many years of repression and killing, after so many people tortured and destroyed, was simply too late. The masses had found someone else to look up to, another strong man who would lead them to paradise, a better father who would stand firm no matter how strong the gales blew. The elite peeled away from the shah, abandoned him as easily as he had abandoned them, everyone busy bending to the prevailing wind as the shah was himself; the wind was ushering in the era of Khomeini and even those whose aims seemed at odds with the ayatollah’s chose to be carried along. Khomeini’s peculiar detachment and his great care in making statements meant that, like the moon itself, his was a reflective radiance. The vastly differing factions that he was now leading could all look into the unmoveable face and have reflected back at them what they wanted to see. The socialists, Marxists, communists, liberals and intellectuals saw someone who could be discarded once the monarchy was overthrown, a simple priest with no desire for a public role, a man of faith, a mystic who was not interested in the minutiae of government. His followers, the Islamists and simple people, saw a saviour. The liberal Western media saw a man devoted to his country, his God and his ideals, someone who was leading a revolution for social justice in curious clothes.
The revolution had turned everything upside down and for a while it seemed as though no one dared to think of anything, had no space to imagine anything other than the great happenings that were changing the very shape of everyone’s existence. My khaleh Yassi, who by now had started her career at IranAir, had chosen this moment to fall in love with a work colleague. The first time I returned to Iran in 1996, Khaleh Yassi sought me out and told me, as if still a teenager, about her husband Seini whom I had just met for the first time, about their meeting and courtship in Abadan. Yassi’s was the most modern khastegari of the family, her husband a boy she met at work in 1978, fell in love with against the backdrop of the revolution and married in the early days of the war with Iraq when they were first refugees in Shiraz. It was clear Khaleh Yassi still adored her husband, she visibly thrilled at everything he said, bestowed liberal caresses and endearments on him and, believing like everyone in the Abbasian family that food equalled love, she fed him to within an inch of his life.
During the revolution itself, Yassi and Seini were caught up in the unrest too. There had been a fire at the Cinema Rex in Abadan, the doors locked deliberately from the outside and the people trapped in the cinema while the building burnt to the ground. It was such a horrific event that it turned everyone in Abadan into a revolutionary – everyone it seems knew someone who had been inside the cinema. The screams of those trapped inside haunted the town for months, and those who had actually heard them could get no peace from the memory of the bloodcurdling anguish of those people as they burnt alive. Even those who did not hear the screams could smell the aroma of the charred burning flesh which was whipped around Abadan by one of those famous winds that could pierce the soul. It seemed to Abadan as if hell had really come to them on earth. Khaleh Yassi described it all to me, explaining how the feverish atmosphere of those days had infected her too.
Although Fatemeh Bibi and Mina refused to let Yassi and Seini go to the protests, they slipped out and joined the 10,000 people who marched through Abadan the day after the blaze, protesting that the fire, far from being the work of revolutionaries (although they regularly attacked cinemas) had been engineered by SAVAK – how else had the doors been locked so no one could escape?
And somehow, in the middle of the harj-o-marj, Seini one day called around with his mother, first to Fatemeh Bibi’s house and then to Khaleh Mina’s (because he knew that nothing would happen without Mina’s blessing) and asked for Yassaman’s hand in marriage. Yassi’s two mothers concurred with much delight and congratulations, subsequent meetings were set up to agree terms and the lovebirds were free at last to go out together alone, albeit only in strictly portioned chunks of time.
While Abadan burnt and their friends were killed, while the country lit up with the zeal of change and revolution, Yassi and Seini fell in love.
12
Covering Up
Women had fared well under the shah. Although Iran was still a deeply patriarchal society and sharia-governed family relations meaning that a man could have four wives and a woman needed her husband’s permission to travel outside the country, women in Iran had the same rights as men when it came to education, employment, the protection of the law and political participation; they could hold property, vote and work as they wished.
The culture was more advanced than the laws in most cases, and in practice it was unknown for men to take more than one wife. In 1975 the Family Protection Law had made it mandatory for a husband to get written permission from his original wife if he wanted to get married again, had raised the marriage age for women to eighteen and given them crucial equal rights in the divorce courts and when it came to the custody of children – the most progressive such law in the Middle East. Now these politicised, educated, working women were also clamouring for change from the shah’s repressive regime, some even donning a headscarf or more elaborate Islamic hejab in order to reject what they saw as the Western objectification of women. Forty years after Reza Shah’s dress reforms had forced them out from under the veil, Iran’s women were now themselves politicising the Islamic hejab.
Mehry would phone us in Ahvaz to report to us on the protests in Tehran, telling us of the scores of chador-clad women who were now fronting the marches, protecting the men from the gunshots, of the new chants that could be heard: ‘Esteghlal, azadi, jomhooriy-e Eslami’ – Independence, Freedom and an Islamic Republic. She was astonished by those of her peers who had taken to wearing headscarves, their faces suddenly clean of make-up, their shoes flat, those radical feminists who were now making this innocent scrap of fabric a political issue. But she told herself, as so many others did, that this was all for the overthrow of the shah, that what was important was the common goal they shared. Afterwards reason would prevail again, but in this moment, whether in miniskirts and false eyelashes or scrub-faced in chadors, the women of Iran banded together to join their voices to the demand for the end of the monarchy and the removal of the shah.
At Khomeini’s behest, workers all over the country had been holding strikes and in October the oil workers went on strike for over a month, paralysing the national industry. Bagher, who had been promoted to a director of the oil company in January of that year,
saw it as his duty to continue working and management, for all the concessions made and wage increases offered, could not prevail on the revolutionaries.
We had returned from our long European trip to a different world. Although my parents tried to protect us from what was going on, the power cuts caused by the strikes and the rushing back from evening visits to beat the curfew had their effect and the violence that had taken the streets burst into the Company compound when three senior managers were shot on their way to work. Soon the many foreign expats working for the consortium were ordered by their respective countries to leave and these farangis, our friends, neighbours and parents of our playmates, left literally overnight for Kuwait, their houses abandoned, still filled with all their possessions.
Every day more of our friends would be missing – spirited away by their parents to Paris, LA, London – and after school, we would find ourselves increasingly restricted to playing indoors or in our own garden, the rooftops and streets we had roamed so freely now out of bounds. Our parents told us nothing but we watched the shah addressing us all on television and, unbeknown to me, my beloved younger uncles and Kurdish cousins were all in the revolutionary movement, either as socialist activists or Kurdish separatists who had also been co-opted by Khomeini’s promises of more Kurdish autonomy. My daiey Pardis was a member – some even said a leader – of the Komiteh that was now policing Ahvaz, the revolutionary committees that had sprung up and were taking power, inspired by the way the French Revolution had organised itself so many centuries before.
On the dark, candlelit nights, I would pore over the latest book I was reading, as compelled by Oscar Wilde and Charlie Brown by torchlight as I was by events outside the compound and the wild scenes I saw on the television every night. After school, the neighbourhood kids would gather on the street corner and exchange whatever information we had managed to glean from the adults, who were trying so hard to shelter us from the storm. We heard from the Company staff who worked for our families, tended our gardens and cleaned our houses, that soon they wouldn’t have to come to work at all, that Khomeini had said that there would be oil wells spouting black gold in their back yards. I asked my mother about this, thinking she would answer or laugh but instead she grew tense and hushed me, telling me not to talk in front of the staff about anything. What ‘anything’ meant I didn’t know – the people who worked for us were part of our lives and our Arab guards, the driver and couple who cooked and gardened for us were too much enmeshed in our daily life for me to suddenly freeze them out. And so I started to become quietly divorced from the impetuousness of my gregarious personality, started watching what I said and to whom I said it. It was the end of spontaneity and the start of the watchfulness that was to become second nature to me.
The Cypress Tree Page 12