Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples

by V. S. Naipaul

  It was mid-afternoon, and the café—serving ice cream, sorbets, tea—was full of women in black chadors, family women. (At this time, in the amusement park, there would be the young girls in black, and the Guards in green watching them and walking among them.) About the café and the women there was a latent elegance. It was as though the yearning in women for beauty and style couldn’t now, at this level, be suppressed in Iran; it was like a kind of disobedience.

  We sat in a window alcove, and it was part of the civility of the place that though we sat there a long time, and though after a while I began to make notes, no one looked at us or made us feel uncomfortable.

  Arash’s family had been in Tehran for only two generations. They had been a farming family, and there was still a distant branch of the family on the land, which was to the west of Tehran. They kept cattle and sheep and had two ghanat wells, without which there could be no farming in the desert. These wells follow old underground watercourses running down from the mountains; Arash said the watercourses had to be repaired and cleaned four times a year.

  Arash’s father’s father, when he came to Tehran, became a military man in the service of Reza Shah, the father of the last Shah. This was in 1931. Afterwards, when his military service was done, he ran a housing or real estate agency in Tehran.

  Mehrdad broke into his own translation to say, “They were exactly middle-class people.”

  When Arash volunteered to fight in 1984 he became what was known as a Basiji. Basijis were known by the headbands they wore. These headbands could be red, or green, or white, or black; though what was usually shown on television in Iran and abroad was the red headband. Red was the symbol of blood and sacrifice and the faith.

  Arash took part in eleven advances as a Basiji. For seven of these he was at the front. At the start of his time, in 1984, at the midpoint of the war, there was still the custom for religious chanters to come to the front before every advance and whip the men up. The chanters would chant, and the men would beat their chests rhythmically with one hand or—if the war situation was serious—with two hands together. Sometimes the chanters could be very famous, known all over Iran. A very famous chanter came to Arash’s section before Arash’s fourth or fifth attack.

  Even if no professional chanter came before an attack, there would always be someone among the men who could do the chanting and lead the others in the ceremony. The chanting was done in as melancholy a voice as possible. What was being chanted was not the Koran, but devotional songs, and often devotional songs made famous by famous singers.

  Mehrdad said, “If you go to a school there is always somebody who knows these rhythms, these sad songs. And he can lead others in chanting.” (Later that evening, in the hotel room, when I was checking my notes with Mehrdad, he gave me a demonstration of the kind of chest-beating Arash was talking about. In less than half a minute, and even as he was talking to me, explaining what he was doing, he made the room seem small with his hypnotic drumming.)

  The chanting ceremony usually lasted two hours. When the very famous chanter came to Arash’s section the chanting went on for six hours, because this famous man had the voice and lungs and stamina.

  The chanting filled the men with thoughts of death and martyrdom and going to paradise and having freedom. After this the men were quiet for half an hour or longer, but never for more than ninety minutes. And then the attack began, usually at two-thirty in the morning. In the quiet period between the end of the chanting and the start of the attack the men wrote letters and wills, and fixed their shoes and made sure their underpants were clean.

  Mehrdad said, “Many people had religious ablutions before an attack, because they thought that an attack was a holy action, and that one should be nice and clean for it. And since it could end in martyrdom, they would see their God in a clean body and clean clothes.”

  There were officers among the Basiji, but they had no badge or epaulets or distinguishing mark; though of course the bushiness of the beard—the Prophet was said to have spoken against taking a razor to the skin—told who the higher men were. The Basiji, Arash said, were always informed about their situation; their questions were always fairly answered.

  After two years of voluntary service as a Basiji, Arash went home, and then almost immediately it was time for his regular military service. After two months of training he went to the front again.

  I asked Arash, “You were going to do your military service anyway. Why did you volunteer as a Basiji?”

  “It was what my friends did. Twenty-five percent of them. They put it in our heads.”

  “They?”

  “The television and radio, and the speakers outside mosques. Magazines, newspapers, everything.”

  They made him feel he was fighting for Islam, first of all. And then nation and family, both together.

  Mehrdad said, “The word he is using is a very strong word. It is namoos. It suggests a protective feeling for the women of one’s family. It is a word that might be used for one’s feeling about one’s country—or one’s gun. There is a funny story. It comes from the time of the Shah’s father, Reza Shah. He was inspecting some soldiers. He asked one of them, lifting up the man’s gun, ‘What is this in your hand?’—‘This is a gun.’ Reza Shah became angry and said, ‘Akbar, this isn’t a gun. It is your namoos. It is your mother, your wife, your daughter. You must keep it and protect it.’ He goes farther down the line and reaches Ahmed. Ahmed is a Turk from the north, or something like that. Iranians make jokes about the Turks. Reza Shah lifts Ahmed’s gun and says, ‘What is this?’ Ahmed says, ‘This is Akbar’s namoos. This is Akbar’s mother, wife, daughter.’ ”

  When he left the Basiji and joined the army for his military service, Arash was selected, after his two months’ training, for a special commando regiment. He went to the supporting line about twelve miles from the front. He slept that first night or day until noon. He was on a hill. He woke up and began to go up the hill to the “assembling place.” (Mehrdad had trouble with the last word: his first rendering was “yard.”) A rocket hit about twenty feet down the hill from him, and he was blown thirty-five feet away. He was unconscious for about a day. When he came to, there were drips stuck into his arm, and he felt a numbness down his side.

  He said, in the window alcove in the café, with the traffic outside, and the middle-class ladies in black chadors having ice cream and tea at the other tables, “And I still feel something.” And—nine and a half years after his wound—he passed a searching, caressing hand down his left thigh.

  He was in the field hospital for seventeen days. They didn’t let him go back to Tehran. He said to them that the Basiji could go back to their home cities when they wanted. They didn’t listen. They sent him back to the assembling place. The very first day he got there he thought there was “the smell of an attack being prepared.” He decided to escape.

  He knew the area from the previous year. He knew that the mountains were in the north, and he knew there was a village or small town behind the mountains. He thought it was twenty miles away. In the afternoon he took his money and his things and began to walk to that village. He walked until nightfall. He came to a shepherd’s tent. The shepherd was driving sheep to pasture. In the winter the sheep were driven down the mountains; in the summer they were driven up. They were driving the sheep up now.

  In the tent there were an old man, a baby, a woman, and six young girls. They gave him hot milk and some traditional animal-fat ointment for his aches. He told them that he had got separated from his regiment and become lost in the mountains, and was now walking to the town or village on the other side of the mountains. They said to him, “It’s a long walk. There are a lot of wolves about. And you’re walking in the wrong direction.” They made him sleep that night there, in the tent, with everybody else.

  At six in the morning he left them. He walked until two in the afternoon. He came to the village. He stopped a van and offered to pay for a ride. He had money on him, because—before t
he rocket fell and damaged him—he had just come back from two weeks’ leave. He reached a big city. He took a bus there and came to Tehran. His father was shocked by his condition and didn’t want him to go back to the front.

  It was fourteen days before Nowruz, the Persian new year, an ancient, pre-Islamic festival, and he stayed with his family until the end of the holiday.

  Mehrdad said to me, “One reason he probably decided to escape was that he didn’t want to be engaged in an attack with Nowruz coming. Everybody here wants to celebrate Nowruz with his family, in his own way. I say this, because he is now saying that immediately after the holiday he went back to the front.”

  And there Arash found that there had been no attack after all. But there was going to be one now. It was a very big one, and it started four days after he got back.

  Altogether Arash walked away from the war on three occasions, and there seemed to have been no trouble for him when he went back.

  A special memory he had was of the time when for some days they were directly facing the Iraqi positions. He saw a glint from the Iraqi side: the sun catching a wristwatch, he thought. He saw the glint again, and decided it wasn’t an accident. He flashed back with his own watch; and there was an answering flash. They played that game for a while. On later days they used binoculars to flash at each other.

  It was like the stories from the First World War of the passing fraternization between men fighting one another on the western front. Arash wouldn’t have known about that. His story spoke of the great weariness on both sides towards the end. But he didn’t make the point; he made no point at all. He told the story simply as an oddity of the war.

  When his obligatory military service was over he stayed on in the army voluntarily for four more months. He had made friends there, and he left with one of his friends. They went together to Shiraz. They slept in a park. In the morning they heard that the Imam Khomeini had died. That was the saddest moment of the war for Arash, and for other people as well.

  Arash said, “I remember my friend being rebuked by his mother for eating an apple. Just as though Khomeini’s death had created something like Ramadan.” Ramadan, the fasting month.

  And Tehran now, at the end of the war, was a great letdown, just as it had always been during the war. “In Tehran it was wedding parties. Two of my friends had been martyred. And there, in the same alley, with that funeral, there was a wedding party. At the front it was Islam and war. Here in Tehran people were talking about fashions and music. On the Voice of America we could hear Iranian people asking for new records to be played. In Tehran nobody cared about the war. Everybody was looking for money.”

  Worst of all, he found that in Tehran the Basijis had a bad reputation. They hounded people for violating Islamic rules and they extorted money from them.

  Mehrdad said, “They are people who think they have lost something. They think the rich people have stolen it from them. So they can be aggressive.”

  Arash had spoken with great openness. But something was missing. The war he had told us about was a war without death, and with very little blood. He had spoken of his own wound from the rocket; he had spoken of sheep being driven across minefields to detonate the mines. But that was all. Even when we asked him about the martyrs’ battalions he said only that during the attacks the martyrs’ battalions went first, then the regular battalions, and behind them the supporting battalions. He wanted to talk about the war, but he didn’t want to talk about death.

  Later, when we had left the café and were in the car, and daylight had gone, I asked him directly, “Did you see many people killed?”

  He really didn’t want to answer. But he said after a while, “A regiment of fourteen hundred men went on an attack. And only four hundred came back.”

  “What do you think of that now?”

  “I am indifferent.”

  It was like what Mehrdad had said to me; and, as with Mehrdad, Arash was really saying that he couldn’t express his pain.

  “I feel you are a lonely man.”

  “I prefer to be alone.” A little later he said, “Everyone was looking for Ali’s justice. But after a while they saw it wasn’t getting done.” Ali, the son-in-law of the Prophet, the fourth caliph of Islam, known for the wisdom of his judgments, murdered on his way to the mosque in A.D. 661, and ever since the focus of Shia reverence and grief.

  I said, “Do you think you can get such a thing as Ali’s justice in the world again?”

  “Never. Even in those days he had many difficulties. He was a great man, and in a short period of time he had many enemies, and he couldn’t do it. It is always like that.”

  He had reached that conclusion when he was twenty. Mr. Jaffrey, the Indian Shia, had had intimations of the same thing at the end of his active life; and his sweet dream had, indirectly, caused untold misery to the coreligionists he had left behind.

  Mehrdad said later, when we were talking of Arash, “Don’t you think he was a simple man?”

  I hadn’t thought of Arash in that way at all, simple or not simple; but I didn’t have Mehrdad’s Iranian eye. I had liked Arash’s openness, and had seen him as a stoical man, perhaps even a good man, whose goodness could have been used in other ways.

  He was altogether different from the other fellow we tried to talk to about his war experiences. This man was sent to us by a publisher who was bringing out books about the war. The veteran, if indeed he was that, was a small, neat man with a neat black beard and bright, unreliable eyes. He thought he had been sent to us to lie, and he lied and lied about everything. He was an architect, he was a doctor; he had held dying martyrs in his arms. There was no concrete detail in anything he said, and I doubted whether he had even been at the front.

  He began after a while to make religious signals to us. He made us see that his sleeves were buttoned at the wrist; that was a sign of piety. Before he sipped his tea he bent low over the table, shifty eyes swiveling away, and very clearly spoke the word of grace, bismillah. I asked him about the devotional songs that had been chanted at the front. He said Iranians were a poetic people; poetry came easily to them. He himself, when he was at the front, had written his will in verse. A soldier at the front, if he was by himself, could chant religious songs all day.

  He broke off then and, in the same tone of voice, asked Mehrdad, “He is asking about brainwashing?”

  We decided he was a troublemaker, and got rid of him.

  Afterwards Mehrdad and I flagged down a route-taxi. It had one passenger, a plump and very clean-looking young man, well dressed and with a full beard. He was in the backseat. Without saying anything he got out and sat next to the driver, so that Mehrdad and I could sit together—it was taxi etiquette in Tehran.

  I wanted to talk about the man who had written his will in verse. Mehrdad brought his brows together and nodded towards the back of the bearded young man. Soon afterwards the young man got out; and it was Mehrdad who pointed out to me that as soon as the young man had gone the driver had turned on the car speakers: jumpy music, either on a cassette or on the radio, from the Voice of America or from Israel. Music was un-Islamic and illegal now, and men with beards were on the side of the law.

  One morning my breakfast was brought up by the chambermaid. She was fat and brassy, with a shiny, unwashed face, and a definite smell from wearing so many clothes, some of them perhaps of synthetic material. The Persian cheese (from Denmark) came with a slice of toast, a thick piece of purple-tinted, lackluster onion, cut some time before, and a leaf of lettuce, curiously supine, which might also have been laid out some time before. Onion and lettuce leaf (typhoid was about) immediately suppressed appetite; and the Nescafé sachet was good only for one lukewarm cup. Hip-swinging and aggressive in her monk-like garb, the maid came in again after a little while to take away the tray; and when, not long after, she came for the third time, to ask whether I wanted the bed made up, she was chewing toast—everything in her mouth showing, though she was over-covered everywhere else—and
I believed the toast was from my breakfast tray.

  Early that afternoon—I was working in my room—the laundry came back, the shirts laundered and nice in plastic bags. The other clothes came in a fancy cardboard box printed with the name of the hotel. The box was new to me. I thought it out of character with the austere style of the hotel and the Foundation for the Oppressed; and when I opened it I found my clothes unlaundered, absolutely as I had sent them in the morning. I telephoned the concierge. He sent the laundry manager up. The laundry manager was embarrassed. He took away the clothes and, in absurdly quick time, brought them back again, ironed and warm (even if not washed) and in new plastic bags.

  When at last I went down to the lobby I found that the DOWN WITH U.S.A. sign was no longer above the Omega clocks. After fifteen years the awkward, angular characters had been unscrewed, leaving spectral impressions along the screw marks. The moment seemed to me historic; perhaps it meant that things were going to change in some way. But the next day a much longer, flowing, copper-colored line of Persian went up above the clocks, and it apparently said the same thing with more style.

  Variable sun and moving clouds modeled and re-modeled the mountains to the north, lighting up this section, then that, showing up spaces between ranges, revealing an unsuspected ridge here, a valley there, revealing range behind range, and the textures of rock abraded by winter snow. Sometimes a rain cloud, shredding on a high range and filling the indentations and striations of rock, looked like snow.

  4

  SALT LAND

  ALI, A MAN OF ABOUT SIXTY, had made his fortune as a developer in the Shah’s time. At some time in the early seventies, before the great oil boom, he had had the luck—and wisdom, and money—to buy a big tract of salt land in Kerman. He bought at one touman a square meter, ten rials, about fifteen U.S. cents; three or four years later, when the boom had come, and cities all over Iran were growing fast, he sold some of his salt land as building land for four hundred toumans a square meter. So—just to play with extraordinary figures—an investment of no more than ten thousand dollars, say, had turned after three or four years into a little fortune of four million dollars.