Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples

by V. S. Naipaul

  The figure of Kali Jaga, covered by vines, but loyal to his duty, is a magical and simplified version of the Hindu-Jain saint, Gomateswara, meditating on the infinite. The most spectacular rendering of the vine-wrapped Gomateswara is a fifty-seven-foot freestanding nude statue at Sravana Belgola in the southern Indian state of Karnataka. It dates from the tenth century and still looks new. At the statue’s feet, disturbingly, as if in a further testing of the saint, real rats run about. It was strange to find him in this fifteenth-century Javanese story, sitting on a riverbank with a quite different purpose.

  Budi’s world, still at a time of crossover between faiths, was more full of ghosts than he knew.

  PART TWO

  IRAN

  The Justice of Ali

  1

  THE FOUNDATION OF THE OPPRESSED

  IN JAKARTA the new wealth could at times feel oppressive. It was changing landscape and lives too fast, or so it seemed: the past was too close. Every weekend, from the disorganized new city created by the new wealth, rich people, rich Chinese especially, looked to get away, for rest, cleanliness, cool air, order. They went, with their families and maids, to the new fivestar hotels; these were now the city’s weekend sanctuaries. In 1979 some Jakarta Chinese had used city hotels in that way, but they had done so mainly during the important holidays. Now the new money, the new luck, made every weekend festive; and on Sunday mornings, in the Borobodur Hotel, the rich folk, Chinese and others, from the Bethany Successful Families, one of the new American evangelical faiths, met and sang hymns and clapped hands in one of the larger public rooms, praying for the luck to last. It felt like luck, this wealth that could bless even the uneducated, because the technologies and the factories that produced it had been imported whole. For that reason, too, it felt like plunder, something that had to end. In the authoritarian state, where luck and licenses came only to the obedient, every idea of development—including “technology”—went with that idea of plunder. Even the rich could be made anxious. So on Sunday mornings they met in the sanctuary of the hotel and sang hymns and clapped hands with sabbath abandon; on the rear window of their cars there were stickers, BETHANY SUCCESSFUL FAMILIES, like a fixed prayer to ward off the evil eye.

  I often felt in Jakarta that it was a version, less elegant perhaps, of what Iran might have been like before the revolution: so grand and overwhelming that it seemed wrong to see the sham or to imagine the great city collapsed or decayed.

  But the Tehran I went to in August 1979, six months after the revolution, had been like that imagined city: like a modern metropolis, the creation of untold wealth, whose life had been miraculously suspended: the international advertisements still up, but the goods not always there (and Kentucky Fried Chicken angrily re-lettered to Our Fried Chicken, with the face of the Southern colonel smudged and redrawn); the cranes arrested on a dozen unfinished towers; the bad meals in empty restaurants, the rubbery sturgeon in brown sauce in the almost empty but still impeccably laid-out dining room of the hotel still called the Royal Tehran Hilton on its crockery and bills and menus, where the sullen black-tied waiters whispered and grumbled together, like people who knew their talents and style were no longer needed. Premonitions of decay there; but, outside, the excitement of the immense crowds at Friday prayers at Tehran University (crowds so great that their footsteps roared like the sea, and dust could be seen to rise above them as they walked), with the famous preachers shown live on television; and the Revolutionary Guards, in the guerrilla gear that was now like an attribute of the faith, driving round very fast in open small trucks to proclaim their possession of the city.

  I was staying this time at the Hyatt. It wasn’t absolutely the Hyatt now: it was the Azadi Grand Hotel (ex-Hyatt). Azadi meant “freedom.” All the five-star hotels of Iran had been taken over by the state and re-named and handed over to the Foundation of the Oppressed (the name mocking the Shah’s Pahlavi Foundation). But people still spoke of the Hyatt. It was on the outskirts of the city, in North Tehran, up in the mountains.

  The polished marble floor of the big lobby was reassuring, and there were people at the desk even at three o’clock in the morning. But the piece of carpet in the lift was dirty and stained and didn’t absolutely fit. The gilt of the lift doors, part of the original Hyatt glamour, had been torn away or worn away in places, and could be seen now to be only a laminate, like the laminate that covers a credit card. The hotel porters were all in open-necked shirts; this was one of the badges of the revolution. The collars had sagged into irregular folds below the jacket lapels, and looked at this dead time like a kind of grubby low ruff. Many of the porters were unshaved; this was Islamic. Some were shiny-faced and dirty. This was a form of social defiance: the two styles of revolution, the political and the religious, running together. And when later I came down again, to look for a hotel safe box, the porters were sitting unabashed and sullen and unhelpful on the upholstered chairs in the central part of the lobby, like a little conclave of the oppressed in whose name hotels like the Hyatt had been taken over.

  Later, in daylight, there was reassurance of a sort. A waiter brought up coffee. And then two women came to do the room. Their ankle-length gowns, of a glaucous blue color (perhaps to hide the dirt), and their black headdress, like black hoods, made them look like monks of a service order. But they were friendly; they even had some words of English. Nothing there to prepare me for the man who brought up my lunchtime omelette. He was surly from start to finish, looked at me with absolute hatred, and never said a word. Still some revolutionary rage, I thought; and when in the late afternoon I went down to the lobby I saw something I had missed in the semi-stupor of arrival that morning: a big sign on the atrium wall above the lobby: DOWN WITH U.S.A. It had been there (and in the lobbies of all the five-star hotels) since the revolution.

  Below this sign people were having tea and coffee and cakes, middle-class-looking people, with many women among them. On the mezzanine floor there must have been a party of some sort for children: young women of elegant bearing and with elegant shoes (elegance overcoming the long gowns and the black headdress) were going up the winding staircase to the mezzanine with little girls in brightly colored dresses; suggesting a society more open than one would have thought from the announcement by the Lufthansa steward on our arrival that women should keep their head covered.

  But the man to whom I said that—coming to take me to a performance of The Conference of the Birds, Sufi rhythms, Sufi dancing, in the Versailles-style open-air theater below the chenar trees in the grounds of the Shah’s palace—the man to whom I said that about the people in the lobby of the Hyatt said that the true middle class of Iran, the class that had taken a century, and incalculable wealth, to produce had been destroyed or scattered. What I had seen in the lobby of the Hyatt were the sad beginnings of a new middle class.

  Things unfolded. The traffic was as I remembered, driving still a power game at every intersection, some games won, some lost, cars bashed up either way. Every day the fumes built up into a darkening bank; you looked down on it from the mountains of North Tehran; from the city center it hid the mountains.

  The bookshop in the Hyatt had a good, educated selection of new and old English books, old paperbacks, pre-revolutionary stock, somehow still there. Unlikely titles had been censored, and sometimes in unlikely detail: a small black girl, sitting outside her Southern hovel, in a grainy photograph in a school edition of Black Boy, had had her shins scratched over by the black marker.

  Outside the café area of the Hyatt lobby there was a framed poster of a woman with her head covered. Mehrdad, the university student who was my guide and interpreter, read the caption for me: “This is the picture of an innocent woman.” The poster was in many public places in Tehran.

  And there was the war, the eight-year war with Iraq. It was the inescapable theme. It was close, but it was also like something mythical, like something that had occurred a hundred years ago. Mehrdad, when he first talked about it, used strange language
. He said, “It is a war that was lost.” When I asked what it meant to him he said, “Nothing.” He didn’t mean that; it was his way of speaking of an almost inexpressible pain.

  Mehrdad’s sister was in her early thirties. She was educated and not bad looking, but there was no husband for her: there was a shortage of men because of the war. She had a job in a publishing house. In that she was lucky; many young women didn’t have that opportunity of leaving the house; it wasn’t easy in revolutionary Iran for unmarried women to have a social life or even to move about. When Mehrdad’s sister left the office she came home and stayed home. She stayed in her room much of the time. She was moody, Mehrdad said; she had become heavy, and had rages and often cried; their mother didn’t know what to do for her.

  Mehrdad’s father worked in a bank before the revolution. After the revolution the banks were nationalized, and he had lost his job. He had managed to build up a little haberdashery business; that was how he had kept his family. Mehrdad—going back a long way now, going back to when he was eight: the revolution was all that many young people knew—Mehrdad remembered that at the beginning of the revolution the cry was the communist one of “Nun, Kar, Azadi,” “Bread, Work, Freedom.” Within a year it had changed to “Bread, Work, and an Islamic Republic.”

  There were religious rules now about every kind of public behavior, and there were green-uniformed Revolutionary Guards—their beards and guerrilla gear now the sign of authority, and not young rebellion—to enforce the rules. Mehrdad took me late one afternoon to a pleasure park not far from the Hyatt. Young men and women went to the park to look at one another; the Guards also walked there, to catch them out. The girls, in small groups, were in black gowns and chadors. They were easy to see; black now, in this park, the quite startling color of female sexuality, making signals from afar. Mehrdad, thinking no doubt of his sister immured at home, said that the girls, some of them already women, were older than they should have been, because men were scarce after the war.

  On either side of very wide steps in one part of the park there were busts, remarkably alike, of the great men of Islamic Iran: the Islamic revolution producing here a kind of Soviet art in a park for the people.

  Just as, in the old communist countries, the news in the neutered papers was principally of other communist countries, so the news in the English-language Tehran Times was of the Muslim world. In between there were local items: the trial of three terrorists of the Mujahidin Khalq Organization; a shortage of spare parts in the oil industry because of the United States trade embargo; the currency going down.

  There was censorship, of course; there was no secret about that. There was an especial cruelty about book censorship. Every book had to be submitted to the censors, not in typescript, but in its printed and finished form, and after the full print run. It made for a passionate and searching self-censorship. However much you wanted to be in the clear, though, you couldn’t always be sure that you were. Was music all right? There were different opinions. Was chess all right, or was it a form of gambling? After much uncertainty and argument, the Imam Khomeini had said it was all right; and that had become the law.

  The lifts with the peeling gilt doors had never been in good shape. They broke down from time to time, and sometimes, after mending, the sequence of their grating journeys up and down the shaft became disordered. The air-conditioning in my room failed. “Kharab,” the man downstairs said. “Bad.” And that was all. I was prepared to stick it out, but when Mehrdad heard he got the hotel to give me a room at the back, out of the afternoon sun, and with a view of the mountains to the north.

  Khomeini’s shrine and its adjunct, the Martyrs’ Cemetery (the martyrs of the war with Iraq), were in the desert south of Tehran, off the road to the holy city of Qom. Both Mehrdad and the driver thought that we should get there before the heat of the day, and we left Tehran while it was still dark.

  Abruptly in the darkness, and from far away in the flat desert, a low, wide spread of lights appeared: the blue and gold lights of the shrine, and the lights of the stretch of the highway leading up to it. Slowly then, like an optical illusion being undone, details began to show through the lights and against the pre-dawn sky: the very high dome, of a curious bronze color, and the four minarets like telecommunication towers, each with a coronet of yellow lights, and above that a kind of spire topped by the symbol for Allah, and above that again a blue light, as though the designers (like the designers of the Albert Memorial in London) wanted to go on and on.

  The parking area was very big. Oleanders grew between the lanes, and there were many old vans and cars in the parking places. The desert light quickened from minute to minute, and more and more people could be seen: whole families asleep or lying on the pavement beside their cars or vans, country people with sunburnt faces, in dark clothes and with ragged-looking bedding, and with their goods in plastic bundles.

  A signboard said, unnecessarily, HOLY SHRINE. And beyond that was clutter: a number of low sheds for receiving offerings; a lost-and-found shed; a tea shed that offered free tea and sugar and said in a sign that it welcomed gifts of tea and sugar and cups. All this ancillary construction was basic, everyday, even casual, as though piety was well enough served by the big dome and the four minarets with the coronets of lights: all done, Mehrdad told me, in four months, so great was the need for the shrine to the Imam.

  In the flat land and below the high sky people looked small. They looked small in the mausoleum too. Their unshod feet made almost no sound. They looked through the bars at the tomb of the Imam; every kind of vow and hope was in that looking. That was what they had come to find. What was outside was incidental.

  In front of the mausoleum was a big courtyard paved with concrete slabs, and in the middle of this was a pool for ablutions. The half-finished dust-colored concrete structures at the side of the courtyard were going to be hostels. Everywhere there was concrete, rough concrete spreading over the desert. The concrete platforms at the side of the main building were already crumbly. The paving slabs of the courtyard in its extension here were broken in places, or abraded down to the aggregate, and finally at the outer edge worn back to simple earth, with puddles of water here and there, and patches of loose gravel.

  Mehrdad said, “They clean it only for the anniversaries.”

  The recesses in the brick wall around the mausoleum, traditional sleeping places for pilgrims, were screened, some of them, with blankets and sheets hung on lines. The dawn breeze caused the sheets to lift above the recesses, exposing the families with their blankets and bedding and goods. People without the privacy of screens were already up and about. Many of them were poor-looking village people. Some of them were saying their prayers. The chadors of the black-clad women flapped in the breeze and made the women seem taller than they were. Seen from close to, many were very small and thin, and some were starved-looking. They would have come from far: old village distress, not yet reached by any idea of reform.

  Orange-colored drums were stenciled with the Persian for “garbage.” Scattered about the main courtyard, and looking like a kind of post-box, were fancifully shaped blue-and-yellow alms boxes. The box said at the top, in Mehrdad’s translation, ALMS MAKE YOU RICHER. On two sides were stylized hands, one holding or receiving, one giving. The hands were colored yellow and the giving hand was stenciled in red BEGIN YOUR DAY WITH A GIFT, WITH ALMS. The business or collecting bit of the box was colored blue; the message there was TO GIVE ALMS IS TO PROTECT YOURSELF AGAINST SEVENTY KINDS OF ILLNESS. The whole thing rested on a yellow pillar about three or four feet high. The concrete paving slab of the courtyard had been dug through for the pillar and then mortared up again; so the alms boxes looked like somebody’s afterthought.

  The alms from the boxes were for the “Helping Komiteh of Imam Khomeini”; this komiteh, or revolutionary committee, had been set up in the first year of the revolution. There was a joke in Tehran about those komiteh alms boxes, Mehrdad said. A rustic Turk (an Iranian Turk: many jokes ar
e made about the community) went and gave his alms and almost immediately was run over by a pilgrim bus.

  Mehrdad said, “For the Turk it was like a telephone booth that didn’t work.”

  There were also suggestion boxes in the courtyard, unexpected in a shrine, but perhaps they, too, had been put up by the komiteh; and the idea behind them might have been only that all public places had to have suggestion boxes. These were like little birdhouses on pillars. The pillars, like the pillars for the alms boxes, had been set in holes dug through the concrete and roughly mortared in again; so that they too looked like an after-thought.

  The sun began to come up. It was time to leave for the Martyrs’ Cemetery. The three-branched metal lamp standards at the entrance to the concrete courtyard were damaged already. I had missed them on the way in. The dome-shaped tops of the lamps, looking like a kind of high ecclesiastical hat, had been done in aluminum. The plinths, too, were damaged.

  It had all been run up very quickly, as Mehrdad had said. Perhaps it was how shrines had always begun, to meet an immediate need, to absorb some overwhelming public emotion or grief. Perhaps this shrine, or its ancillary buildings, would be built over and over as long as there was the need. I felt that for most of the people who had come there would always be the need; the world would always be outside their control.

  On the pavements now, beside the cars and the vans in their parking places, and among the oleanders, families were sitting round a formal spread of the flat bread and white cheese they had brought. Some of them had samovars.