Shah of Shahs

by Ryzard Kapuscinski

  ***

  When the committees discussed what to do next, everyone agreed on one point: Revenge came first. So the executions began. They found some sort of satisfaction in this activity. The newspapers carried front-page photographs of blindfolded people and the boys who were taking aim at them. The papers described these events at length and in detail. What the condemned said before death, how he behaved, what he wrote in his last letter. These executions evoked great indignation in Europe, but few people here understood such complaints. For them the principle of revenge was older than history. A Shah ruled, and then he was beheaded; a new one came along and he was beheaded. How else could you get rid of a Shah? He's not going to resign on his own, is he? Leave him and his supporters alive? The first thing you know, he'll organize an army and make a comeback. Put them in prison? They'll bribe the guards, make an escape, and start massacring whoever toppled them. In such a situation, killing is some sort of elementary reflex of self-preservation. This is a world in which the law is not understood as an instrument to protect man, but as a tool to destroy the adversary. Yes, it sounds cruel; there is a ghastly, implacable ruthlessness about it. Ayatollah Khalkali told us, a group of journalists, that after passing a sentence of death on former Prime Minister Hoveyda he suddenly became suspicious of the firing squad that was to carry out the sentence. He was afraid that they might let Hoveyda get away. So he took Hoveyda into his car. It was night, and, according to Khalkali, they sat talking in the car. About what, he did not say. Wasn't he afraid the condemned man would escape? No, no such thought occurred to him. Time passed. Khalkali was trying to think of someone he could entrust Hoveyda to. Finally he remembered some members of a particular committee near the bazaar. He took Hoveyda to them and left him there.

  I am trying to understand them, but over and over again I stumble into a dark region and lose my way. They have a different attitude to life and death. They react differently to the sight of blood. At the sight of blood they become tense, fascinated, they fall into some sort of mystical trance; I can see their animated gestures and hear their cries. The owner of a nearby restaurant pulled up in front of my hotel in his new car. It was a brand-new Pontiac, gold, straight from the dealer. There was some commotion and I could hear chickens being slaughtered in the courtyard. First the people sprinkled the chicken blood over themselves, and then they smeared it on the body of the car. In a moment the automobile was red and dripping blood. This was the baptism of the Pontiac. Wherever there is blood, they crowd around to dip their hands in it. They could not explain to me why this is necessary.

  For a few hours a week they manage to attain fantastic discipline. This happens on Friday, at the time of common prayer. That morning the first, most fervent Muslim walks into the vast square, spreads his rug, and kneels on its fringe. Then the next one comes and spreads his rug beside the first one's, even though the whole rest of the square is empty. Then comes the next believer, and the next. Later there are a thousand more, and then a million. They spread their rugs and kneel. They kneel in even, orderly rows, in silence, facing Mecca. Around noon the leader of the Friday prayer begins the ritual. They all stand, bow seven times, straighten up, squat on their haunches, fall to their knees, prostrate themselves, sit on their heels, and prostrate themselves once again. The perfect, undisturbed rhythm of a million bodies is a sight difficult to describe and—for me—rather an ominous one. When the prayers end, fortunately, the ranks break up at once, everyone starts gabbing, and pleasant, free-and-easy confusion dispels the tension.

  Dissent soon broke out in the revolutionary camp. Everyone had opposed the Shah and wanted to remove him, but everyone had imagined the future differently. Some thought that the country would become the sort of democracy they knew from their stays in France and Switzerland. But these were exactly the people who lost first in the battle that began once the Shah was gone. They were intelligent people, even wise, but weak. They found themselves at once in a paradoxical situation: A democracy cannot be imposed by force, the majority must favor it, yet the majority wanted what Khomeini wanted—an Islamic republic. When the liberals were gone, the proponents of the republic remained. But they began fighting among themselves as well. In this struggle the conservative hardliners gradually gained the upper hand over the enlightened and open ones. I knew people from both camps, and whenever I thought about the people I sympathized with, pessimism swept over me. The leader of the enlightened ones was Bani Sadr. Slim, slightly stooping, always wearing a polo shirt, he would walk around, persuade, constantly enter into discussions. He had a thousand ideas, he talked a lot—too much—he dreamed incessantly of new solutions, he wrote books in a difficult, obscure style. In these countries an intellectual in politics is always out of place. An intellectual has too much imagination, he tends to hesitate, he is liable to go off in all directions at once. What good is a leader who does not know himself what he ought to stand up for? Beheshti, the hardliner, never behaved in this way. He would summon his staff and dictate instructions, and they were all grateful to him because now they knew how to act and what to do. Beheshti held the reins of the Shiite leadership, Bani Sadr commanded his friends and followers. Bani Sadr's power base lay among the intelligentsia, the students, and the mujahedeen. Beheshti's base was a crowd waiting for the call of the mullahs. It was clear that Bani Sadr had to lose. But Beheshti too would fall before the hand of the Charitable and Merciful One.

  Combat squads appeared on the streets. These were groups of strong young people with knives sticking out of their hip pockets. They attacked students, and ambulances carried injured girls out of the university. Demonstrations began, the crowds shook their fists. But against whom this time? Against the man who wrote books in a difficult, obscure style. Millions of people were out of work, the peasants were still living in miserable mud huts, but what did that matter? Beheshti's men were engaged elsewhere—fighting the counterrevolution. Yes, they knew at last what to do and what to say. You don't have anything to eat? You have nowhere to live? We will show you who is to blame. It's that counterrevolutionary. Destroy him, and you can start living like a human being. But what sort of a counterrevolutionary is he—weren't we fighting together only yesterday against the Shah? That was yesterday, and today he's your enemy. Having heard this, the feverish crowd attacked without pausing to think whether the enemy was a real enemy, but you can't blame the people in the crowd. They want a better life and have wanted it for a long time without knowing, without understanding how it is that, despite continuous effort, sacrifice, and self-denial, that better life is still beyond the horizon.

  Depression reigned among my friends. They predicted an imminent cataclysm. As always when hard times are coming, they, the intelligent ones, were losing their strength and their faith. They were filled with fear and frustration. They, who once would not have missed a demonstration for anything, now began to fear crowds. As I talked with them, I thought of the Shah. The Shah was traveling around the world and his face would appear in the papers occasionally, each time more wasted. Until the end he thought he would return to his country. He never did, but much of what he had done remained. A despot may go away, but no dictatorship comes to a complete end with his departure. A dictatorship depends for its existence on the ignorance of the mob; that's why all dictators take such pains to cultivate that ignorance. It requires generations to change such a state of affairs, to let some light in. Before this can happen, however, those who have brought down a dictator often act, in spite of themselves, like his heirs, perpetuating the attitudes and thought patterns of the epoch they themselves have destroyed. This happens so involuntarily and subconsciously that they burst into righteous ire if anyone points it out to them. But can all this be blamed on the Shah? The Shah inherited an existing tradition, he moved within the bounds of a set of customs that had prevailed for centuries. It is one of the most difficult things in the world to cross such boundaries, to change the past.

  When I want to cheer myself up, I head for Ferdousi St
reet, where Mr. Ferdousi sells Persian carpets. Mr. Ferdousi, who has passed all his life in the familiar intercourse of art and beauty, looks upon the surrounding reality as if it were a B-film in a cheap, unswept cinema. It is all a question of taste, he tells me: The most important thing, sir, is to have taste. The world would look far different if a few more people had a drop more taste. In all horrors (for he does call them horrors), like lying, treachery, theft, and informing, he distinguishes a common denominator—such things are done by people with no taste. He believes that the nation will survive everything and that beauty is indestructible. You must remember, he tells me as he unfolds another carpet (he knows I am not going to buy it, but he would like me to enjoy the sight of it), that what has made it possible for the Persians to remain themselves over two and a half millennia, what has made it possible for us to remain ourselves in spite of so many wars, invasions, and occupations, is our spiritual, not our material, strength—our poetry, and not our technology; our religion, and not our factories. What have we given the world? We have given poetry, the miniature, and carpets. As you can see, these are all useless things from the productive viewpoint. But it is through such things that we have expressed our true selves. We have given the world this miraculous, Unique uselessness. What we have given the world has not made life any easier, only adorned it—if such a distinction makes any sense. To us a carpet, for example, is a vital necessity. You spread a carpet on a wretched, parched desert, lie down on it, and feel you are lying in a green meadow. Yes, our carpets remind us of meadows in flower. You see before you flowers, you see a garden, a pool, a fountain. Peacocks are sauntering among the shrubs. And carpets are things that last—a good carpet will retain its color for centuries. In this way, living in a bare, monotonous desert, you seem to be living in an eternal garden from which neither color nor freshness ever fades. Then you can continue imagining the fragrance of the garden, you can listen to the murmur of the stream and the song of the birds. And then you feel whole, you feel eminent, you are near paradise, you are a poet.