Among the Believers

by V. S. Naipaul

  Mashhad was a good base for an ayatollah. In Mashhad was a shrine more sacred than the tomb of the sister of the Eighth Imam in Qom; in Mashhad was the tomb of the Eighth Imam himself. He died in 817 A.D., one year after he had been nominated to succeed to the overlord-ship of the whole Muslim world; and the Shias say he was poisoned by a son of the Arabian Nights ruler, Harun al-Rashid. Dynastic conflict, palace intrigue, the ups and downs of Persian fortunes within the Islamic empire: they are the stuff of Shia theology.

  Behzad and I should have been on our way to Mashhad that day. But there had been problems. First it seemed that Behzad’s mother was coming up to Tehran; then it seemed that Behzad’s girl friend was coming for the weekend. The girl friend was important. She was twenty-five, with a degree in economics, but with no job in postrevolutionary Iran; and, as I understood, she had gone to spend some time in the provinces. Then, oddly, it turned out that she was in Mashhad.

  So we could go to Mashhad, after all; and Behzad and his girl could travel back to Tehran together. But Mashhad received a lot of visitors during Ramadan, and the queues at the railway station at seven that morning had been for two days ahead. So we had decided to fly, and had been lucky, after waiting for Iran Air to open, to get the last tickets for the following day.

  They were first-class tickets, but Behzad (who said he carried most of his wardrobe in his little briefcase) spread himself in the wide seat without embarrassment. There were stewardesses, unveiled: on Iran Air, at least up in the sky, a prerevolutionary style still prevailed.

  The land over which we flew was mainly brown. The flat green fields to the east of Tehran quickly went by; and soon we were flying over bare mountains, now with centipedelike ranges, now cratered, now hard and broken, now with great smooth slopes veined from the watercourses created by melted snow. The patterns and the textures changed continuously; the colours varied from ochre to dark red to dark grey. It was astonishing to see occasional green patches, to see the meandering of a road in a valley, or to see a road scratched straight across a brown waste. Everywhere that men could live was known; the land was old. An hour out of Tehran the fields occurred more often, dusty green on brown, or dusty green on pale red; and then, the mountains over, there was the wide plain where Mashhad lay: remote, isolated, and in this old part of the world perhaps always a meeting place and a centre of pilgrimage, long before Islam and the Eighth Imam.

  The Hyatt Omar Khayyam Hotel was in business, in spite of its name. Upper-class pilgrim traffic maintained it in all its American-international opulence: a big marble hall, elaborate lighting, a swimming pool (different hours for men and women), a sunny coffee shop separated by glass from the green, unmatured garden, a darker, carpeted, formal restaurant with a black-suited maître. Strange, this style in the holy city of Mashhad; and then stranger, in this hotel setting, to find among the give-aways in the room a cake of Meccan or Medinan clay tastefully folded over in a brown face-towel: the sacred soil of Arabia, courtesy of Hyatt.

  But what was incongruous to me was less so to Behzad. In the restaurant he said, “Look at that family. The old woman is holy or religious. Nobody else. The old woman has come here for the Imam. The daughters and the sons-in-law have come for the hotel, to swim and to relax and to eat. They can eat during this Ramadan period because travellers can eat, and in Mashhad they are travellers.”

  So the Hyatt Omar Khayyam lived on in old splendour—in the bookshop there were still books in English that praised the Shah. But other hotels in the Hyatt chain were not so lucky; and, amid the bits and pieces of hotel literature in my room, the jaunty copy for the Hyatt Regency Caspian was like a sad American voice from a past that had hardly lasted. Remember when the Caspian Coast had no meeting place? BUT NOW THERE’S HYATT.

  Behzad couldn’t get through to his girl. So we went out after lunch. Much money had been spent by the Shah on the beautification of Mashhad. The great public works around the shrine area at the other end of the town were incomplete. The domes and minarets and courtyards stood at the heart of an immense, dusty, sun-struck circle.

  Within the rails, but before the courtyards, we saw a drunken man being hustled off by Guards or policemen to a police building. A small crowd watched. Behzad said the man would probably be whipped, but not in public. Just after the revolution there had been public whippings, as part of the revived Islamic way, but the effect on the public hadn’t been good.

  “Not good?”

  Behzad said, “People didn’t like the man doing the whipping. It became hard for him afterwards.”

  The courtyards of the mosque and tomb were full of mountain people, camping in the open cells above the burial vaults at the side, sprawling in the shade, small, sunburnt, poor, perhaps poorer than the pilgrims we had seen in Qom.

  Central Asia felt closer here, with the mountain faces. And into the shrine courtyard there came a vision: a tall, half-veiled woman in a short, flounced skirt of bright yellow, walking with her back arched, her shoulders thrown back, each high-heeled step measured, precise, steady, her gorgeous yellow skirt and all her under-skirts flouncing straight up from the thigh, swinging slowly then to one side, and then swinging back to the other: a dancer’s steps, a performance. The Caucasian world of Lermontov and Tolstoy, still here!

  Behzad didn’t know where she came from; he knew only that she was poor, and from a village. We watched her cross the courtyard—an older, unveiled woman was with her, and a man—and saw her enter the booth beside the entrance to the shrine, to leave her high-heeled shoes with the attendant. We waited for her to come out, but in vain: there was a side door from the booth to the shrine. So many people from the mountains here, so many hard journeys; yet a journey for which, at least at the end, a village girl would put on her best flounced skirt.

  Behzad said, “You know what they pray for? They pray for money, a job, a son.”

  In the museum, on the old brass gate of the shrine of the Imam, we saw relics of old, and still-living, prayers. When a visitor to the shrine offered a prayer or asked a special boon, he tied a strip of cloth to the gate; and all the lower rungs or struts—brass cylinders linked to brass globes—were thick with these strips of cloth. When the cloth became untied, the prayer was granted; and even in the museum people rubbed their hands over the cloths, to cause one or two to fall off, to help a fellow Muslim get his wish. The floor behind the gate was littered with fallen pieces of cloth that had gathered dust. The lower parts of the gate had been handled so often that some of the brass sections had fallen off.

  Some people with especially difficult prayers or wishes had put cheap padlocks (most of them made in China) high up, attaching them to holes in the brass globes. How would the padlocks be undone without the key? Had they thrown away the key? Wouldn’t that be tempting providence? Behzad wasn’t sure. He thought it more likely that the key would be given to a friend, who might one day come to Mashhad and, out of all the padlocks, pick the right one.

  BEHZAD didn’t have the address of his girl friend. He had only a telephone number, and that number never answered, not at lunchtime, and not now, in the evening.

  The telephoning that he did on my behalf was just as fruitless. I had been given the name of an Islamic scholar at the University of Mashhad, but he was nervous of foreigners. He said he had been transferred to Tehran and was busy packing and couldn’t receive. When I invited him to have coffee he said he was developing a migraine and was at that moment lying flat on his back. He might be better in two or three days; I should telephone in the morning.

  So Behzad and I didn’t separate in the evening, as we had planned. We went, after dinner and after more telephoning, to Ayatollah Shariatmadari’s Ramadan headquarters. The Ayatollah’s secretary said that the Ayatollah received between ten and eleven at night, after breaking his fast. Then he lectured; then he went to sleep, to be up again for prayers before the pre-fast meal, at 4:30 sharp. Ramadan imposed on the pious this rhythm of food and fast and sleep and food.

  The smili
ng, friendly maître said, when he heard where we were going, “Be careful. Mashhad is a place where something bad can happen to foreigners at any moment.” The warning was good and well intentioned. But then courtesy made the maître add, “Not you, though. Indians are all right. Egyptians, Pakistanis—all right. Americans, Germans—that’s bad. The Shah brought them here and made them lords of the country. He was bad.” He smiled again—moustache tilting up, eyes twinkling. “Or stupid.”

  The house where Shariatmadari was to receive was in a little many-angled lane off the main road. After the evening traffic and the lights, it was dim and quiet. Dirt and dust muffled the footsteps of the faithful; but there was no crowd, no hurry.

  The gate was guarded, but casually, by two young men who sat on chairs outside and didn’t show their guns. They let us in after Behzad explained. And it was like entering a little fairyland: an enclosed garden with electric lights in white globes illuminating peach trees in fruit, flowers, roses, patches of lawn. The level ground at the near end was carpeted and was being used for prayer by a few men; a strip of red carpet ran down one side of the garden, next to the high, ivy-covered wall. At the far end, beyond a shallow, blue-tiled pool, was a tent with more lights, and on carpets there people were sitting.

  We took off our shoes and went right up, beyond the pool, and sat opposite the black cushions against which Shariatmadari, when he came, would recline. The house at the side of the tent was new, of concrete and glass; modernistic wrought-iron rails went up the tiled steps. It might have been Shariatmadari’s own house, or the house of a religious foundation, paid for by the tithes of the faithful: Behzad wasn’t sure. An old man and a young man went around offering tea and sugar and water; there were bowls with sugar lumps on the carpet.

  Behzad said, “Shariat wants to make himself more popular. He is using his opportunity. Khomeini is busy with the government. So Shariat is here, making himself more popular.”

  We all stood up when Shariatmadari arrived. And it was hard to attribute political wiliness to the benign old man who came up the red carpet and appeared to be smiling but perhaps wasn’t: it might have been no more than the combined effect of the glasses, his beard, and the set of his mouth. His beard was white, his complexion pink and white, his cast of face oddly Scottish. His clerical costume was spotless. Among the mullahs in the crowd, so many of them paunchy and grubby and perhaps also (as in folk legend) over-wived, he was like a prince. His black gown was of very thin material, embroidered or patterned, with elegant tie-on ribbons at the top; the pale-fawn under-gown showed through.

  He looked like what he was, a figure of high medieval learning. Philosophy and astronomy had been among the subjects he had studied in Qom in the 1920s under a famous divine: astronomy part of the Muslim intellectual expansion of centuries before, but long since frozen, with philosophy, into a theological discipline.

  As soon as he sat down against his black cushions, people ran to kiss his hand. Two men became crowd-controllers, marshalling the queue that went out of the tent and turned down the red carpet beside the ivy-covered wall. Boys and men took his right hand to their lips, their forehead, their eyes. One man kissed Shariatmadari’s hand twice, the second time for the camera of a friend; there were many cameras.

  Shariatmadari seemed to smile all the while, hardly seeing the people who dropped before him and did as they pleased with his hand. He was already preoccupied with the petitions that two or three people, braving the crowd-controllers and the mullahs, had given him. Mullahs with their fancy turbans, black and white, and beards, black and white, pressed around him. The leaning bodies, the pale colours of the gowns, the angled heads, the turbans, the beards, all against the blank end wall, in strong light: the effect was pictorial, almost posed.

  Faith like this—faith in the faith, faith in the guidance of the good man—had made the revolution. Shariatmadari, in the conflict with Khomeini, was now on the losing side, the victim of the faith of others. But he had been one of the leaders of the revolution; and even Behzad was awed to be in his presence.

  The queue of hand-kissers stopped moving when Shariatmadari began to write on one of the petitions. It was hard, while the Ayatollah wrote, to lift and kiss his writing hand—though one or two people tried.

  We were sitting right up at the front, and we had no clear cause. We had no petition, no camera; we weren’t kissing the hand. We began to attract attention; once or twice Shariatmadari himself gave us a brief, questioning look. Behzad thought it was time to move. We recovered our shoes and picked our way to the back of the garden. Mullahs were still coming in. One was blind. He was doing the tiniest shuffle down the red carpet while making wide, circular gestures with both hands. No one paid him any attention; people just ducked his hands and let him be. On the other side of the garden, in something like darkness, women had gathered in their special area.

  We waited until Shariatmadari began to speak. And after the splendour of the setting, the garden and the water and the lights and the peach trees with their illuminated furry green fruit, after the splendour of the man himself, Shariatmadari had little to say. The Shah was bad and he had done bad things. He had forbidden polygamy and had thereby damaged women. Islam protected women; it protected them especially in cases of divorce. It had been said many times before; it could have been said by any mullah.

  But the occasion remained an occasion—a Ramadan evening with a lecture by an ayatollah; and when we went out, past the men with guns, into the alley, we found it full of people just arriving.

  The main street was busy with cars and scooters; a shop selling all the Iranian varieties of nuts and dried fruit was dazzling with fluorescent lights and glass; exhaust fumes hung in the air like foul cooking smoke.

  Again, when we got back to the hotel, Behzad telephoned and got no answer from his girl.

  Next morning he could not hide his distress. He had stopped believing that the line was out of order.

  He said, “I hope she hasn’t done something and been arrested. In a place like Mashhad it can be dangerous, with these Revolutionary Guards.”

  “Why should they arrest her?”

  “She’s a communist.”

  My own scholar, the man who had been transferred to Tehran and was packing and had migraine and was flat on his back, still had his migraine.

  He said, “You know The Encyclopaedia of Islam? A Dutch publication. It will give you all the information you want about Islam and Mashhad.”

  Migraine or no, I didn’t think I had come to Mashhad to be told to go away and read an old book.

  The scholar said, “My head is bad. You’ve been to the shrine? The museum? The library? Go to Firdowsi’s tomb. Yes, go to that tomb.”

  And that was where we went. It was some miles out of Mashhad, in the wide, dry plain that turns green when irrigated: a desolate burial place for Persia’s great poet, who, four hundred years after the Arab conquest of Persia, wrote without Arabic words and, as Behzad told me, was against the imposition of Arabian culture on Persia.

  The tomb was not old, as I had expected. It was new, built by the Shah: a square marble tower with pre-Islamic columns at the corners, part of the Shah’s attempt to recall the pre-Islamic Iranian past. On the wall beside the steps going down to the vault there were sculptures in a version of the old style of famous scenes from Firdowsi’s epic. But all the inscriptions had been defaced; every reference to the Shah or the royal family or the monarchy had been obliterated. Where the letters were raised they had been covered over with rough slaps of cement or plaster. And there were photographs of Khomeini everywhere on the marble.

  It was as though the scholar in Mashhad had sent me to Firdowsi’s tomb less for the sake of Firdowsi than for this evidence of the people’s rage. And rage was what I saw—more clearly in this rich, reconstructed town than in Tehran—when we returned to Mashhad: the burnt-out buildings (among them the Broadway cinema, with its English lettering and Las Vegas façade), the ruined, burnt pedestals in the gar
dens without their royal statues, all the Persepolitan, pre-Islamic motifs of the Shah’s architecture mocked. The holy city was also a city of rage.

  Behzad was happier at lunch.

  He said, “I’ve spoken to my girl’s sister. She’s all right. The telephone’s out of order. I talked to the operator and he gave me the number of the sister. I’m going to see them this evening. I was worried.”

  “Is the sister communist, too?”

  “My girl is the only communist in the family. All the others are religious.”

  You were religious or communist: there was no middle, or other, way in Iran.

  We decided after lunch to go and buy tickets for the Tehran train that left on the following day. But the taxi driver told Behzad that the railway station booking office opened at six and closed at twelve.

  Behzad said, “I will go and queue at six tomorrow morning.”

  I said, “Do you think it’s true, what the driver says?”

  “Why should he lie?”

  “I didn’t mean that. I only wanted to know whether what he said was correct.”

  We didn’t go to the railway station. We went to the shrine, to the library. It was closed.

  Behzad said, “What should we do?”

  “Shall we go to the railway station?”

  We went there. The booking office was open and they were selling tickets for the Tehran train. Behzad made no comment. There were four sleepers in a compartment. I thought we should buy all four. Behzad appeared to agree. But then he said, “You don’t like the poor classes, do you?”

  Poor classes! Was it the poor who travelled first class? But I gave in to his blackmail, and we bought three tickets, Behzad paying for the third, for his girl.