Scattered Pearls

by Sohila Zanjani

  One of the strangest things to happen that year was one night in late November. One of our friends came to our house in a very excited state. She was crying with happiness that she had seen the face of the exiled religious leader Imam Ruhollah Khomeini in the full moon. I would learn later that many millions of Iranians had ‘seen’ the same thing, having been convinced that only those with pure faith could do so.

  On 16 January 1979, Mohammad Reza Shah and his wife, our beautiful and kind Princess Farah, left Iran. The government reported that he had left for a vacation and for health reasons, though I think most Iranians – even those of us taking little interest – understood that he was gone forever. The government of Prime Minister Shapour Bakhtiar, with the support of the Imperial Army, held on to the remnants of power for only a few weeks, despite Bakhtiar being well liked by the general population. Khomeini returned to Iran on 1 February and immediately set up an alternative government, the so-called ‘Interim Government’; within a fortnight Bakhtiar was in hiding and the army had declared itself neutral.

  (In the West, Khomeini was known as Ayatollah Khomeini. The title ‘ayatollah’ is given to high-ranking religious leaders in Shia Islam. Use of this term is also a sign of respect, and as such I prefer not to apply it to Khomeini, a man who became responsible for the deaths of a great many Iranians.)

  While my family were still ambivalent about the Shah’s departure and the revolution as a whole, I do remember a nagging sense of comfort that perhaps this would also be the end of SAVAK and the constant unspoken fear that to do or say something against the government would lead to imprisonment or worse. When I reflect on this now, I realise our feelings were much like those associated with the removal of an unpopular government in a ‘normal’ democracy: life going on as usual but with an air of relief that they had finally gone, and a sense of hope and possibility. It remained that way for a few months after the revolution as various religious and secular interests attempted to gain control of the country’s administration, Khomeini being the most prominent among them.

  The closest I came to seeing the revolution in action was a single convoy of trucks driving past our house in early February 1979. The trucks carried workers – men who held their shovels in the air and chanted slogans as they drove past. We all stood out the front of our houses and waved, though I’m sure we didn’t know why.

  A significant side effect of the revolution was the departure of almost all Americans from Iran. While the future was uncertain immediately after the Shah’s departure, it was clear that in the near future Iran would not be as hospitable to Western companies as it had been under the Shah’s regime. Wealth – American wealth, in particular – left the country quickly. At Helicopter Sazi, for example, a steady stream of Americans started returning home from about September 1978. In January 1979 all the remaining American employees of Bell Helicopter, over 1400 of them, left Iran in the space of just 11 days. In my political naivety, I didn’t really know what was going on. Helicopter Sazi kept operating, so I still had a job. If anything changed I was just more ineffective than I had been before, but I was still getting paid. My clothing changed too . . . but that was later.

  ~

  Something in the revolution did ignite a spark of interest in me. The name of Ali Shariati kept coming up. His face appeared on posters that demonstrators were carrying, and his books were suddenly everywhere at the end of 1978.

  Ali Shariati was a sociologist and religious teacher and was widely seen at the time as an intellectual. As a student in the 1940s he had become a champion of the poor and an advocate for a traditional form of Islam with an emphasis on social justice. As a teacher, he spoke out against the excesses of the Iranian monarchy; this led to his being jailed for eight months in 1952. After studying sociology in Paris, his ideas firmed and he continued to lecture widely and to criticise the administration in Tehran. He was jailed again in 1964 and in 1972, then placed under house arrest. In 1977 he was released and travelled to London, where he died soon afterwards of an apparent heart attack. His supporters continue to believe that he was assassinated by SAVAK.

  Shariati was idolised by educated young Iranians, particularly university students, who were disenfranchised by the Shah and the lack of political freedom imposed by his rule. We had no understanding then of what real democracy is or how to guard our personal freedoms. In a closed society like this, Shariati’s ideas offered what seemed to be the only viable alternative.

  I started reading Shariati’s books around the time of the revolution and suddenly the world opened up for me.

  As well as being ignorant of politics and current affairs, my family had never been practising Muslims. We were Muslims by name only, like the majority of Iranians. If asked, we would have applied that label to ourselves, much as many in the West call themselves Christian because they were born into that religion, but we never discussed or thought about Islamic values. We didn’t understand them. Our values and our pride came from our Persian culture: values such as hospitality, generosity and trust, along with tolerance of minorities with different beliefs to our own.

  With Shariati as my teacher I gained, for the first time, a sense of myself and my place in society. I felt that I had found an ideology I could believe in, and that felt liberating. I read and read. I guess my mind was so empty of ‘ideas’ that Shariati’s words poured in to fill the vacuum. I felt a new sense of direction and became extremely idealistic and full of energy to make a difference for the better. I questioned nothing of what I read, and perhaps I should have: none of my friends or family read Shariati or, if they did, they were not spellbound by him.

  I started attending meetings of a Shariati Kanoon (society) hosted by the son and daughter of Shariati, at which lively discussions of our hero’s books would take place. There was an enormous sense of excitement at these meetings – simply the freedom to hold a meeting without the risk of arrest was something new to us. The removal of the Shah from power had brought an end to hundreds of years of rule by monarchy, and an end to autocracy (if only briefly). It was as though a veil had been removed from our eyes.

  For the first time in my life there was also a new energy to contribute. A fever of activity spread around the country as young Iranians looked for ways to help each other and our newly emancipated nation.

  I joined a group called Jahad-e Sazandegi. This was a nation-wide movement of volunteers originally established in the countryside to help with the harvest, though the group I joined was more informal and made up of computer department employees at Helicopter Sazi. We called ourselves Enfagh, which means ‘almsgiving’, and dedicated ourselves to raising funds and helping the poor. Once a week a group of us would travel down to Tehran’s poorest areas in the south of the city. Most of us had never been to such a place before. We provided donations of cash and material goods (food, heaters, etc.) to some and social support to others. I visited the family of a lady called Zahra, who was 38, and her much older husband Hassan. They had five children and lived in a single room – a tiny, but exquisitely tidy room. The room was furnished with a small carpet in its centre, a very small refrigerator and a roll of bedding stored in a corner. Zahra’s youngest child was ill with the chicken pox and her husband was also sick. They really had nothing, yet they would not beg or even ask for assistance. This is typical Iranian pride. It took me a long time to convince Zahra to accept the donated money.

  I then visited an old lady called Robob. She was half crippled and spent her days lying on a very worn mattress. The room was freezing. I clearly remember that the woman had a chamber pot for a toilet, and there was a hole in the bed to access it. Robob had a friend, Akram, whom I also met though she was not on our donation list. In her room was just a threadbare mat and a tiny coal heater. I remember buying chelo kabob, the traditional Iranian dish of rice with barbecued meat, which we all ate together in one of the rooms. On one occasion Robob’s brother appeared. He was a short man with a broken, wrinkled face; he was probably about 50 yea
rs old but looked 70. I offered him noon khamei (cream puffs, similar to profiteroles) that I had brought that day. He told me that first he must wash the plates, so took three plates and went downstairs to wash them in the pond. Half an hour later I found him still washing those plates – over and over again in the icy water. I discovered that he suffered from vasvas – obsessive compulsive disorder – something surprisingly common in Iran, mostly because Islam categorises certain things as najes (unclean). For instance, many Muslims think dogs are najes and hence hate and disrespect this most kind, loyal animal. Robabeh’s wealthy husband washed his paper money obsessively, thinking that it was not clean; the wife of Laya’s nephew washed the television over and over to the point that she apparently destroyed it; and a friend of Laya’s used to hang her clothes on a tree because she could never be satisfied that the clothes line was clean enough.

  I enjoyed the work with Enfagh. I had always had an inclination towards doing small things to help others, whether lending a hand to the rubbish collector or giving money to beggars, especially when I had money myself. Enfagh gave this aspect of my personality the chance to apply itself to a broader community. I was left more aware than ever of the gap between rich and poor in Iran. While my family were never rich, we lived in luxury compared with the people I was helping. Yet for most people in my class this poverty was invisible.

  Not far from Helicopter Sazi, and on my bus route home, was Tehran’s largest square. It was originally called Shahyad (meaning ‘remembrance of the Shahs’) but was renamed Azadi Square (‘Freedom Square’, somewhat ironically) after the revolution. It is a very large, oval-shaped ‘square’, dominated by a tall memorial tower at its centre and ringed by several lanes of traffic. The tower is modelled on the tomb of Cyrus the Great of Persia, the Persian king who wrote the first charter of human rights. The square was the scene of many protests prior to the revolution and of more recent protests (in 2009) following the controversial re-election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as Iran’s president.

  One day on my way home I noticed an area close to the square was suddenly occupied by about 30 dark green tents. My community consciousness prodded me to find out what was going on, so I asked the bus driver to drop me off at a nearby service station. Walking back, I found that the tents were pitched closely together and were occupied by a large group of Iranian Kurdish refugees. The Kurds are an ethnic people who have no official state of their own but whose traditional homeland, Kurdistan, occupies an area around the border regions of northern Iraq, south-eastern Turkey and north-western Iran. At regular intervals over hundreds of years, ordinary Kurds have had to escape oppression or war. When I asked one woman why this group was here, she replied: ‘What should we do? War has taken everything from us. We have no security. We have no place. God has guided us here.’

  Many of the men in this group seemed to use their utility vehicles to provide an informal taxi service around Tehran. Some worked as labourers or set up stalls selling cigarettes or other basic items. Most would have been farmers at home but in the city they had no relevant skills.

  What was most troubling for me were the children. There were many of them and they clearly had nothing to do. When I asked how they were to be schooled I was told that they were illiterate – they had had no opportunity to attend school. This made me very sad so I decided to do something. The next day I returned with pens, pencils and notebooks, and set up a small classroom in one of the tents. For the next few weeks I stopped at the camp for a couple of hours after work each day and taught about a dozen young children their alphabet.

  Before long I found another stranger who wanted to give me a lift in his car. While waiting for a taxi outside the camp after my teaching one evening, a black BMW pulled up and the man inside offered to drive me home. As we drove, the man introduced himself as Khosro. He was very polite, about 30, short (which did not appeal to me), with green eyes and light-brown hair. He showed real interest in what I was doing with the Kurds. A few days later, while I was doing my teaching, Khosro arrived with some biscuits, pastries, toothbrushes and toothpaste for the children. The children rushed up to him with much joy, which brought smiles to all our faces. From then on Khosro kept coming to the camp quite often to help with my teaching and to drive me home. It was all very nice until one time when he was telling me about himself as we drove home. I was tired and only half listening to him, absentmindedly staring out the side window at the same time. Eventually he said, ‘What are you doing? I don’t like that the girl I intend to marry would be so indifferent to me.’

  After that I never saw Khosro again. Not that it really bothered me – I didn’t really have any feelings for him and, in the end, I clearly had not been very good at hiding this!

  Not everything worked out at the camp as I had imagined – perhaps not surprising as I had dived in without completely thinking it through. I had no previous experience as an aid worker, of course. The problem was that, while it was a beautiful experience, I could never help everyone. This was brought home to me all of a sudden on the day I arrived at the camp to be greeted by glares from one of the women. She told me to go away and that if I ever came back she would break my leg. Apparently her child had missed out on getting any of the stationery that I had been bringing. I doubt that her threats were real, but not long after that I felt I had probably outstayed my welcome and so stopped visiting the tents.

  ~

  The energy for people-driven change did not last long – or rather, it was not allowed to.

  After returning to Iran, Khomeini moved quickly to take advantage of the strong national sentiment against the Shah and towards his idea of an Islamic state. In a referendum on 31 March 1979, over 98 per cent of voters supported the establishment of Iran as an ‘Islamic republic’. The question put was a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’, with no explanation of what ‘Islamic republic’ would mean. The widespread lack of political awareness meant that few people thought to question this; most people had no idea that Khomeini’s Islamic state would turn out to be very different to anything they had imagined. Iranians wanted freedom of the press, separation of the judiciary from the executive arm of government, a democratically elected parliament and an end to political prisoners. Liberty, human rights and the rule of law. What we got was a plague of theocracy and sharia law.

  A few months after the revolution it was decided that one evening a group of us from the Kanoon would go to Shoosh Square, a large public area in downtown Tehran, and show our support for Shariati’s ideas by putting posters of his sayings on the walls. This is something we could never have done under the previous regime and so there was an air of high anticipation about our mission. Shariati advocated Islam, after all, and we were now living in an Islamic state. At the same time, I also felt a lot of apprehension. A public demonstration was something I had never dreamed of being involved in until now.

  When it came to the day, I found myself almost overcome by fear. I gave myself reasons to stay back at work so when I eventually arrived at Shoosh Square it was later than we had agreed. And the square was packed with people. I don’t think they were all protesters, just a normal evening crowd, but it felt stifling. Either way it only made me even more scared; I felt suffocated. I slowly made my way to our meeting point and was horrified to see that three girls from our group had been apprehended by two members of the Pasdaran, the new Revolutionary Guards. I decided to keep my distance and follow to see where the girls were taken, which was an office of the Komiteh, a sort of secret police also established by the new regime. I then found a phone and called the Kanoon to tell them what had happened.

  We learnt later that the girls were released, but it was the first sign that perhaps our new freedom would be short lived. Shariati may have been pro-Islam, but it was quickly becoming apparent that his version of Islam (I call it ‘romantic Islam’) was too moderate or idealistic for the new leadership.

  Eventually I would come to believe that Shariati was not the intellectual we made him out to be. H
e made a huge mistake by placing Islam at the centre of his ideas for a new Iranian identity. How could we ever find our identity in Islam? It is a religion belonging to Arabs, for their culture, language and environment. As Persians, Iranians have our own culture, language and environment. Our ancient culture is based on ‘good words, good deeds and good thoughts’ – it is about being proactive, happy and constructive. By planting the seed of Islam in the wider population, all Shariati did was make it easier for Khomeini to implement his much more fundamentalist ideas. Islam is what we got instead of democracy.

  Fundamental Islamic values soon started to become more pervasive as women were expected to wear head scarves and manteau. This was first instigated by a decree from Khomeini that all government-employed women must wear a black chador. This was not a big concern for people like my mother who was used to wearing chador anyway, as I described earlier (though hers were always light grey or white/silver and patterned, not black, and worn loosely rather than tight). But it was something strongly opposed by many Iranian women. The only women comfortable in black chador were those who benefited from the Islamic regime or ultra-conservative religious women. There were widespread protests about this move. (At some protests Khomeini supporters would attack the women, yelling ‘ya rosari ya tosari’ – literally ‘head wrap or head rap’: wear a scarf or you will be hit on the head.) Ultimately the protests were in vain, the wearing of a veil becoming law later in 1980.

  The dress code was not the only change. Commercial advertising disappeared from our televisions, replaced by government statements; revolutionary songs played on the radio. Over time streets, buildings, hospitals and other public places were given traditional Islamic names or named after personalities either no one associated with Iran (often Arabs we had never heard of) or who had even done harm to Iran. Khomeini’s face replaced the Shah’s on banknotes.