Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples

by V. S. Naipaul

  In 1979 there were revolutionary posters and graffiti everywhere. The graphic art of the revolution was high, like the passions. There was almost none of that now; instead, there were the signs and exhortations of authority. DO NOT THINK THAT THOSE WHO ARE SLAIN IN THE CAUSE OF ALLAH ARE DEAD. THEY ARE ALIVE AND PROVIDED FOR BY ALLAH: this was the English sign on the left-hand side of the board above the main gateway to the Martyrs’ Cemetery.

  The avenue at the entrance was wide and well kept and watched over by soldiers in ceremonial uniform. That avenue led to other great avenues between plantings of pines and elms. The graves were there, below the trees, and among shrubs. Aluminum picture-holders, standing on two poles, like signboards, were close to one another. They were of varying sizes. At the top of each holder was a glass case with a photograph of the dead man; and these photographs were disturbing, because the men were all young and were like the young men you could still see on the streets. The Revolutionary Guards I had seen in Tehran in 1979, driving around with guns, as if only to show themselves, had seemed to me theatrical. They might have been that, but they also were as ready to die as they said; and they had died by the ten thousand in the war.

  The most famous martyr of the war was thirteen years old. He had strapped a bomb to himself and thrown himself below an enemy tank. Khomeini had spoken of his sacrifice in one of his speeches. A small hand-written sign, decoratively done, as if in celebration—the script in black, shaded with red—was nailed to a pine tree to point people to where the grave was.

  The young martyr’s brother had also died in the war, and they had been buried together. The plaque on the headstone had the logo of the Revolutionary Guards: like a gun. In the main section of the glass case there were framed photographs of the brothers, with artificial flowers on lace on either side. On a shelf below there was a mirror and a lace doily again, and more artificial flowers. Mehrdad told me that a mirror and lace were traditional gifts for a bridegroom. Khomeini’s famous tribute, in his famous literary style, was also there, done in white or silver on black: “I am not the leader. The leader is that boy of thirteen who, with his little heart which was worth more than a hundred pens [his faith, that is, was more valuable than any amount of writing], threw himself with a bomb under the tank and destroyed the tank, and drank the martyr’s glass and died.” This happened two months after the war began; no one knew at the time that the war would go on for eight years.

  The simple headstones, easy to recognize, had been provided by the government. Families had paid for the more ornamented ones. One very simple stone was seen again and again. It said, in beautiful Persian script, UNKNOWN MARTYR.

  Mehrdad said, “There are thousands here. Families who don’t know where their son is come and say their prayers over one of these stones.”

  Below the pines and the elms everything was close together, the lines of headstones and picture-holders, the spindly shrubs that grew in the sand, and the flags, hemmed in by the shrubs and trees and not able to flutter, and like part of the vegetable growth.

  Mehrdad said, as we picked our way through, “You can see the flags everywhere. The flags of Iran.” He meant the flag of the Islamic Republic: green, white, and red, with the emblem of Allah in the middle of the white, and, just below the white, a Koranic line in a script looking like a Greek-key pattern. He said, pointing to one, and then another, “Losing their color. Losing its meaning.”

  Mehrdad had done his military service in the army. What appeared to be irony in his words was a form of pain. The army and the flag mattered to him; and these flags, never moving, never meant to catch a breeze, put up by the families of martyrs, were coated with the dust of the desert.

  Pink oleanders grew among the shrubs. They were like the oleanders that grew between the parking lanes at Khomeini’s shrine. The crowds were there, at the shrine. There was hardly an attendance here. The few people who were about were mostly cemetery workers. The public came, Mehrdad said, on certain special days.

  The desert dust, kicked up by motorcars or by cleaning vehicles, had ravaged the aluminum picture-holders at the edge of the avenues. Some of them were absolutely empty now; sometimes the photographs had decayed or collapsed within the frame. It might have seemed impossible at one time, but no one from the families came any more, Mehrdad said. The mourners might themselves have died. Personal memorials last only as long as grief.

  Around one corner, above neglected gravestones and picture-holders, there was a signboard, still new-looking, with a saying of Khomeini’s: MARTYRS LOOK TOWARD ALLAH—THEY THINK OF NOTHING ELSE. THEY SEE ALLAH. THEY ARE CONCENTRATED ON ALLAH.

  We went to the blood fountain. It used to be famous. When it was set up, early on during the war, it spouted purple-dyed water, and it was intended to stimulate ideas of blood and sacrifice and redemption. The fountain didn’t play now; the basin was empty. There had been too much real blood.

  2

  MR. JAFFREY’S ROUND TRIP

  I WENT LOOKING for people from the past. One of them was Mr. Parvez. He was the founder and editor of the English-language Tehran Times (with the motto “May Truth Prevail,” of which he was proud); and in August 1979 he had seemed to me to be on the crest.

  His paper had well-appointed offices in central Tehran, and a staff of twenty, some of them foreigners, young English-speaking travelers pleased to be picking up a few rials for their English. The paper was doing so well that Mr. Parvez and his fellow directors were planning to expand it from eight pages to twelve in the new year. There was still enough revolutionary excitement in Tehran, and foreign coming and going, for Mr. Parvez to feel, like the hotel and restaurant people, that after the upheavals of the revolution, and the temporary stalling of the economy, things would pick up again, and the liberated country would soon once more be the boom country it had been at the time of the Shah.

  Mr. Parvez looked Indian rather than Iranian. When I asked him he said he was an Iranian of Indian origin. I thought this was a neat way of putting something complicated, and I assumed he was an Indian Shia who had migrated to Iran as to the Shia heartland.

  He was a gentle man. He thought that, like many other visitors, I had come to see him to ask for a little job, and he must have been on the point of offering me one, because with a sudden tormented shyness, looking down at the proofs on his table, not looking at me, he asked in a round-about way, as though he couldn’t bear to put the question directly, what my “terms” were. When he understood that I simply wanted to talk about the situation in Iran, he sent me to Mr. Jaffrey, who was in the reporters’ room.

  Mr. Jaffrey was a middle-aged man with flashing eyes and a wide, mobile mouth. He radiated energy. He had broken off from the copy on the high standard typewriter in front of him, and was eating a dish of fried eggs which the office messenger had just fetched for him. He was going at the eggs (it was Ramadan, but he wasn’t fasting) with zest; and I felt he had been going at the copy on his typewriter with a similar kind of attack.

  Mr. Jaffrey, too, was an Indian. He was a Shia from Lucknow. He had left India in 1948, the year after independence, because he had been told “rather bluntly” that as a Muslim he wasn’t going to get far in the Indian air force. He went to Pakistan. There after ten years he had begun to feel unhappy as a Shia. So he had gone to Iran, where nearly everyone was Shia. But—religious ease ever receding, in this communal quest of Mr. Jaffrey’s—Iran under the Shah was a tyranny, and the great wealth when it came had led to corruption and sodomy and general wickedness.

  Still, he had stuck it out. Then had come the revolution. Religion had made the revolution, had given it its overwhelming power. That, at last, was something good, something of which Mr. Jaffrey could approve. But already, in less than six months, the revolution had gone bad. The ayatollahs hadn’t gone back to their religious centers, as Mr. Jaffrey thought they should; they hadn’t handed over to the politicians and the administrators. Khomeini, Mr. Jaffrey said, had usurped the authority of the Shah, and the country was
now in the hands of “fanatics.”

  This no doubt was the kind of cantankerous copy that was on Mr. Jaffrey’s typewriter while he ate his eggs and talked: I felt he was talking out and amplifying, and making more intemperate, what he was in the process of writing. And perhaps, after a lifetime of rejecting things, the cantankerous or protest mode was what brought out the best in him as a journalist.

  All his life Mr. Jaffrey had had a dream of the jamé towhidi, the society of believers. This was a dream of re-creating things as they had been in the earliest days of Islam, when the Prophet ruled, and the spiritual and secular were one, and everything that was done by the as yet small community could be said to be serving the faith.

  It was like a dream of the ancient city-state, and in the modern world it was a dangerous fantasy. At its simplest it was a wish for security; it also contained an idea of exclusivity. Both these ideas in varying proportions had made Mr. Jaffrey reject India for Muslim Pakistan, and then made him reject Pakistan for Shia Iran. In another way it was a dream of a society ethnically cleansed (to use the words of a later time). Such a prompting had led to the partition of the Indian subcontinent and the creation of Pakistan; and yet the Muslim state that had been achieved, at such cost in human life and suffering, hadn’t been able to hold Mr. Jaffrey and his dream.

  In Iran now Ayatollah Khomeini ruled politically and spiritually by almost universal consent. Such a figure wasn’t going to come soon again; and it was hard to imagine a country in a higher state of religious excitement. (Going by an item in the Tehran Times, there was even an Islamic way of washing carpets now.) Iran under the Ayatollah should have been very close to Mr. Jaffrey’s dream of the jamé towhidi, the society of believers, the oneness of government and faith.

  But it was just at this point that Mr. Jaffrey’s Indian-British education and experience came into play, ideas of democracy and law and institutions, the separation of church and state, ideas that made him sit at his typewriter in the reporters’ room and rap out peppery calls for the mullahs to get back to the mosques and the ayatollahs to get back to Qom.

  Mr. Jaffrey’s dream of the jamé towhidi was to him so pure and sweet that he hadn’t begun to go into its contradictions. He loved his faith; he had traveled from country to country because of it; he felt it entitled him to judge the faith of others. And it was just there, in fact, in his fabulous dream of an impossible, antique completeness, in his awareness of his own piety, which was like pride, his constant rejection of the impure, that the tyranny of the religious state began. Other people had their own ideas; they, too, felt they could judge the faith of others. Mr. Jaffrey was suffering now from the “fanatics.” But in his own way he was like them.

  Six months later, when I went back to Tehran, it was winter, bitter weather, and that office was empty. A big bound folder, with file copies of the paper, had been cracked open and the file copies had fanned out on one of the desks. Mr. Jaffrey’s typewriter was there, empty, harmless.

  The American embassy had been seized some weeks before by one Iranian group and the staff held hostage. This had killed business and economic life at one blow. The eight pages of the Tehran Times had shrunk to four, a single folded sheet. The staff of twenty had become two, Mr. Parvez and one other person. Mr. Parvez was losing three hundred dollars with every issue he brought out. And yet he felt he had to keep on, because he thought that if he stopped publishing for even one day, the paper would cease being a going concern, and the fortune he had invested would be lost. He was tremulous with nerves. He could hardly bring himself to speak of his great fear: which was that the American hostages would be killed.

  I asked after Mr. Jaffrey. “Is it hard for him?”

  “It is hard for everybody.”

  Outside the embassy it was like a fair: tents, stalls, books, food, hot drinks. The pavement outside the high walls was roped off. The gates were guarded. The students who had taken over the embassy called themselves, in careful language that seemed intended to conceal who they were, “Muslim Students Following the Line of Ayatollah Khomeini.” They were in guerrilla garb; they had pitched low khaki tents. They were perfectly safe here outside the embassy in North Tehran. They were only playing at war.

  The real war was to come sooner than they thought, and was to last eight years.

  Now, fifteen years later, I went looking, but without much hope, for Mr. Parvez and Mr. Jaffrey. The Tehran Times still existed; occasionally it was on the desk of the Hyatt. But it had lost the motto, “May Truth Prevail,” of which Mr. Parvez was proud; and typographically it was a little dilapidated and uncertain. In spirit it was like the Hyatt. Mr. Parvez would never have allowed that dilapidation; he was a professional; he knew how to bring out a paper. His name, in fact, wasn’t on the masthead.

  But he had survived. He had lost the Tehran Times, but he was working on another English-language paper, Iran News. The offices were in a small building in Vanak Square in Central Tehran. They were finer than the offices of Mr. Parvez’s old Tehran Times. Iran News was up-to-date in every way. To enter the reception area was to feel that, in spite of their long isolation, and financial stringency, and in spite of the pretentious revolutionary shabbiness of places like the Hyatt, Iranians at a certain level could still do things with a style that was like a carryover from the—now glittering—time of the Shah.

  There was nothing in Mr. Parvez’s face to speak of the stresses he must have lived through; and only a slight puffiness around the eyes, as though he had overslept, spoke of age. I wasn’t sure that he remembered me. Both our meetings had been brief; and the first time he was preoccupied and shy, and the second time he was tormented. Still, no doubt or hesitation showed, and he led me to the top of the building, where we were to have lunch and where, he said, it would be easier to talk.

  It was a spacious, well-lighted attic room. On the floor, almost in the middle, newspaper sheets had been spread at an angle to make the equivalent of a prayer rug aligned towards Mecca. At the head of this spread of newspaper was a cake of earth from some holy place: Shias when they pray touch their foreheads against such cakes of earth.

  Mr. Parvez gave a little start when he saw what was on the floor. He must have reserved the room for our lunch. But he quickly recovered. “Ah,” he said, with a touch of weariness, picking his way around the newspaper sheets, “these Shias.”

  And now it was for me to be surprised, by this weariness and distance, because I had always thought that Mr. Parvez was an Indian Shia, and that it was his Shia passion that had drawn him to Iran from Bhopal and India, and his early life there as a poet in Urdu, the Persianized language of Indian Muslims. But Mr. Parvez had lived through a lot. He had lived through the Shah’s time, and then he had survived fifteen years and more of the revolution, at heaven knows what cost; and certainties, if they had existed, might have dissolved.

  We sat at white plastic chairs (of a stacking kind) at a white plastic table, with the newspaper prayer rug at our back. The table was decorated with a very bold pattern of bamboo leaves. Messengers brought up lunch, setting down the dishes in a no-nonsense way, as though that was part of their own style: rough, meaty, messy, oily food, which Mr. Parvez went at with the kind of relish Mr. Jaffrey had taken to the dish of fried eggs on that Ramadan afternoon sixteen years before. Eating a little of this and then a mouthful of that, enjoying his food, Mr. Parvez told me about Mr. Jaffrey.

  The end had come for Mr. Jaffrey not long after my second visit to the Tehran Times, in February 1980, when I had found Mr. Parvez in a desolate office, full of nerves about the seizing of the U.S. embassy and the kidnapping of the staff by “Muslim Students Following the Line of Ayatollah Khomeini.”

  The students were going through the embassy records and almost every day were making “revelations” about more people. They had even made “revelations” about the Tehran Times.

  One evening a student came to the Tehran Times office and asked Mr. Parvez for Mr. Jaffrey. The student didn’t give his name, but
he was from the group holding the embassy and the hostages. Mr. Parvez said that Mr. Jaffrey would be in the office the next day at eleven. The student went away.

  Mr. Parvez was concerned. He knew that Mr. Jaffrey was a stringer for the Voice of America radio. What he didn’t know at the time was that Mr. Jaffrey’s money from the Voice of America came directly from the U.S. embassy. The receipts Mr. Jaffrey had given (or signed) never said what the money was for. They said only “Received from the U.S. embassy.”

  Mr. Jaffrey was an old man. He had a heart problem and other ailments. Mr. Parvez telephoned him at his house.

  Mr. Jaffrey said, “I am coming to the office.”

  When he came, Mr. Parvez said, “Is there anything wrong? Did you have any contact with the embassy?”

  Mr. Jaffrey said, “No. Except for the Voice of America. I used to send some stories. I used to get money through the U.S. embassy.”

  I asked Mr. Parvez, “Do you know how much he got?”

  “I think three hundred dollars a month. It was good money at that time. Seven toumans, seventy rials, made a dollar.”

  It would have been even better money now: four thousand rials made a dollar.

  Mr. Parvez said, “I advised him to go to the embassy and talk to the students there and explain. I said they looked very nice. He promised me he would go to the embassy.”

  The next day Mr. Jaffrey didn’t come to the office. Mr. Parvez telephoned his house. Mr. Jaffrey wasn’t there. Mr. Parvez was greatly upset. He tried to tell himself that Mr. Jaffrey’s telephone was probably out of order. He sent his driver to the house. After an hour or so the driver came back and said, “The house is locked.” The driver had talked to a neighbor and the neighbor had said that during the night Mr. Jaffrey had dumped some household things in the boot of his car. Mr. Jaffrey had a big American car, a Chevrolet, an old one.