Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples

by V. S. Naipaul

  Such a fortune would have been enough to keep most people calm. But Ali moved the other way. He became a supporter of the revolution. He said, “Now that we had the money, the financial security, we wanted liberty. It was the one thing we didn’t have.” As a student in the United States, in the 1960s, he had become passionate about politics, even local American politics; and he had grown to feel ashamed that he came from a country that wasn’t free. He had never lost that feeling. So when the revolution appeared to be coming in Iran Ali supported it morally and financially. He did this through an ayatollah who had become his friend.

  Ali’s ideas of revolution came from his reading, especially of history. But there was also—though he didn’t say it—a supporting or congruent touch of religion. He said, “We expected a revolution based on heavenly laws and laws of nature.” Heavenly laws: it was like his own version of Mr. Jaffrey’s jamé towhidi, and Arash’s search for the justice of Ali—Ali the fourth caliph, the Shia hero-saint.

  Many different ideas and impulses had appeared to run together in the making of the revolution. So when the revolution came there was—just below the apparent unanimity, the general feeling of release—any number of conflicting interests. And Ali, as a rich man, had suffered; the revolution had treated him roughly for three years. He had been kidnapped more than once; arrested and imprisoned many times; even tried. He had been bled of tens of millions of dollars.

  After three years he had learned how to live with the revolution, just as, in the time of the Shah, he had learned how to live with that régime. The business of survival, the dealing with the various strands and levels of authority, now took up a fair amount of his time. He knew his way now; in almost any situation he knew how to move.

  He was slender, of middle height, his Persian features quite regular. Physically he was not remarkable; it might have been part of his camouflage. His quality as a man was something that grew on you. His slenderness, for instance, might have seemed natural to him; in fact, it was the result of regular exercise. His work, his business, his almost angry wish to survive, had kept him healthy and alert. The strains of survival showed more on his wife, compelled now to live an unnatural, imprisoned life. She had lost much of her hair; she still had a graciousness, but it lay over a deep, wounded melancholy.

  His ideas of revolution, in the time of the Shah, had been touched with religion: a dream of heavenly laws and natural laws. And he came from a religious background. His father and his father’s father were mullahs; and there were mullahs in his father’s mother’s family as well. His mother’s family were what Ali called “city people.”

  His father was born in 1895 (though Ali wasn’t sure of the Christian year). When he was sixteen he went to the theological school in Mashhad. In those days (and for a long time afterwards) many boys from the villages went to schools like those at Mashhad and Qom, because they were given a small room of their own, food, and sometimes even a little stipend by the ayatollahs whose students they became. The ayatollahs got no money from the schools; such money as they had, or gave to their students, came from their followers. So there was a fairness about the system: the people gave, and the people got something back. In 1911, when Ali’s father went to Mashhad, the theological schools were, besides, the only places in Iran offering higher education. There were no universities or higher schools; Iran under the Qajar kings had fallen very far behind, had almost dropped off the map.

  After four years at Mashhad Ali’s father became a mullah and went to the town of Kerman. He became a teacher there, and that was how he might have ended, like his father before him. But the Qajars were overthrown; the Shah’s father, Reza Shah, came to power (with British help); and in the mid-1920s the legal system in Iran was changed by Reza Shah. A ministry of justice was set up, and the French code was incorporated, without much trouble, into the traditional Islamic system. The new system was more formal. It required courthouses, judges, lawyers.

  It was easy enough for Ali’s father, with his training in Islamic jurisprudence, to fit into the new system. He became a judge first of all—he was not yet thirty—and then a lawyer. He prospered. He began to speculate in land in various parts of the country. Because he knew the old law and the new law very well, and because many of the land titles were complicated, he was often asked to establish a title; and his fee would sometimes be a parcel of the land in question.

  So, in an unlikely turn of events, during the dictatorship of Reza Shah, the world opened up for Ali’s father in a way the mullahs of his family of earlier generations couldn’t have imagined. And, ironically, when Ali’s father seemed to have made himself quite secure, the world grew dark for Reza Shah. In 1941—the outside world breaking in, in every way—the Allied powers occupied Iran to keep it from falling under German influence. Reza Shah, thought to be too friendly to the Germans, was deposed, and taken by the British to South Africa, where he was soon to die: a strange prefiguring of his son’s own tragedy thirty-five years later.

  The occupation didn’t affect the rise of Ali’s father, and it wasn’t bad for the country. In the eleven years between the deposing of Reza Shah and the restoration of his son the country knew a semi-democracy, Ali said, and a semi-chaos as well, because the central government couldn’t impose its will everywhere. But Iran was free in a way it had never been before. So Ali, who was five or six when Reza Shah was deposed, grew up knowing nothing but freedom. And—the generations marching on—Ali, as the son of a rich and famous and admired father, was far more privileged than his father had been as a boy. But his father was strict; and Ali, with a remnant of old manners, accepted this strictness.

  When Ali was eighteen his father said to him, “I have been paying your expenses up to now. But now I want you to look after yourself. I am going to give you a sum of money. You can use it either to go into business or to go to a university.”

  Ali used the money to go to the United States. He did various technical courses; then, when the money ran out, he did a course in the humanities with the help of a scholarship from a university. Altogether he spent eight years in the United States.

  He was nearly thirty when he went back to Iran; and he had known nothing but freedom. It was a shock to go back to Iran, to the Shah’s autocratic rule, and to SAVAK, the Shah’s secret police.

  Ali said, “In this kind of régime you have to know how to manage. If you come new or raw to the situation, you make all kinds of errors and you can suffer.”

  I asked him, “What kind of errors did you make?”

  “One day I was trying to catch a taxi. A taxi stopped. There were two men in the back, one man in front. I was sitting also in the back. I got involved in heavy politics, criticizing Shah. Later on I found out it was a setup. They wanted to check me. They had started the political discussion deliberately. I was very naïve and expressed my ideas right away. I was glad the car stopped when it did. Otherwise I might have gone to a café with them and been made to say many things, and they would have got me into trouble. When things like this happened you realized this is not America; you can’t tell your mind right away. We learn we have to live a double life. So when the revolution happened here we already had the experience of living a double life.”

  What Ali learned especially, and very fast, was that the Shah was sacrosanct. Other very high people could be criticized; but not the Shah. “There was a saying: ‘If you leave out the Shah, you can do anything in this country.’ ”

  Ali’s job in Iran, when he got back, was with the government. He was in the planning department. His first duty was to make a report about a government cement plant that was losing three million dollars a year. He did some simple research and discovered that a successful private cement plant had been set up for three million dollars. He recommended that the government plant should be closed down; he said that the three million dollars the government spent every year on its own plant should be given to private people to start new plants. This made economic sense; but in every other way, as he
discovered, his advice was wrong. He was treading on too many toes. He should have thought about the managers of the plant, their families, their connections; he should have thought about the workers. These were considerations he had been expected to take into account.

  Soon he saw that the planning ministry was a sham; that, whatever its stated aims, it was required to do nothing or very little; and that, as an adviser, he was expected to abide by the old unspoken rules, the old ways of patronage and friendship and family. He saw, too, that one of the chief aims of the ministry was to keep its highly paid staff out of the mischief they might get up to elsewhere.

  He resigned, and became a translator. It wasn’t a step down. Because of the oil economy and the import-export boom there was a lot of translating to do. Ali did his translating mainly for Iranian exporters. He dealt with the consulates and high officials of many countries. He got to know the ropes as well as anyone, and it occurred to him that it was wrong for him to continue being a translator when with his accumulated knowledge he could do more. He set himself up as a kind of middleman. For 15 percent he offered to place the goods of an exporter with a foreign buyer. This suited everyone. At very little extra cost it simplified matters for the exporter; and it enabled Ali, who had no capital of his own, to go into business. He did so well that soon he was able to start a company of his own and secure warehouses at the southern ports. This enabled him to buy outright from exporters and to increase his margins.

  Then he had bigger luck. He bought the big tract of land in Kerman State. It was poor land, salty. But—he was a country boy—he knew its potential. He became a farmer. He took advice from the agricultural institute set up by the Shah. He began to “wash” the land of salt; it was a process that would take seven years. He did the washing in this way. He dug a trench a yard or two deep around a field; the winter rains washed the salt from the earth into the trench; and that trench led to another, which led to a salt river. While the land was being washed he could grow certain crops on it. The first year, for instance, he grew a sweet melon that did well on salt soil. (Some of that melon variety was on the table at the end of our dinner that day: white, firm, succulent, sweet, with a feeling of earth and summer.) He sold the crops he grew while they were in the ground; he sold wholesale and the price included delivery to the buyer; so he sold a lot. Later he grew alfalfa grass and became a cattleman.

  Then there was the oil boom of 1973. The income of the government, which had been three hundred million dollars in 1961, rose to twenty-two billion in 1976. The cities expanded. Land prices jumped, and Ali was able to sell portions of his salt land for four hundred times what he had paid for it. He also became a developer in his own right. As an amenity in one development he thought he should have a mosque—Ali’s religious background came out in many ways. He didn’t know how mosques had to be built, and he took advice from an ayatollah, a very educated man. The ayatollah introduced Ali to an engineer who specialized in building mosques. The mosque was built, and a friendship developed between Ali and the ayatollah. A year or two before the revolution the ayatollah, who was working against the government, got into trouble with the secret police and was imprisoned. The ayatollah’s followers brought the news to Ali, and Ali with his connections and money was able to do various things and to get the ayatollah released some months later. The friendship of this ayatollah became very important for Ali when the revolution came; without this friendship things would have been very hard for him indeed.

  Some people Ali knew, supporters of the revolution, turned against it after the first month. Ali thought he should give it a little more time. But then, about two months after the revolution, when the executions began, he had serious doubts. People who had done nothing were arrested and taken to jail. Many of them disappeared. “Then they started charging into people’s houses, confiscating their properties. We had no security for our property or our children or our wife.” I felt that the word in Ali’s mind was the word Mehrdad had introduced me to: namoos.

  A revolutionary court, the Court of Islamic Justice, had been set up about a month after the revolution. One of Ali’s best friends was second in command in that court, and Ali used to go every day to see what he could do to save people he knew.

  “That court was going almost twenty-four hours a day. Khalkhalli was the master of that court.” Ayatollah Khalkhalli, Khomeini’s famous hanging judge. “He used this court as the instrument of his executions. It was in Shariati Street. Before the revolution it was a military court. The Shah had set up this court to try his opponents. Almost the same people who had set up this court were now tried in it, in the same building. My friends were in the court for about two years.”

  But long before that time Ali had given up on the revolution, and he was deep in his own torments.

  “We expected something heavenly to happen, something emotional. When we were kids of twelve and thirteen we used to read accounts of the French Revolution, the American Revolution, the Glorious Revolution in England. And the Russian Revolution. But we were always fascinated with the French Revolution. It was something done by God, you know. In the last generation most of the Iranians who had studied abroad had French culture. We were hypnotized by their stories of the French Revolution. We all thought revolution was something beautiful, done by God, something like music, like a concert. It was as though we were in a theater, watching a concert, and we were happy that we were part of the theater. We were the actors now. For years we had been reading about Danton and Robespierre. But now we were the actors. We never thought that those killings would start afterwards.”

  It took a year for the communists and the Islamics to move away from one another. But the Tudeh, the communist party, had infiltrated every branch of the new government. They even went to the Friday prayers in the mosques. They showed themselves as people of God. The communist party in those early days put itself entirely at the service of Khomeini. They said, according to Ali, that they didn’t want executive power; they were content to be counselors. And they were behind the nationalization of banks, insurance companies, factories. They gave the Soviet-style aspect to government and official demeanor which the visitor could still notice.

  After six months of the revolution Ali was insecure and bitter. Life wasn’t easy. It was impossible to work. The new officials were hostile; they looked upon Ali as part of the old régime. Some people in Ali’s company began to agitate against him. Two or three of them would come to Ali’s office to “question” him. He had to buy them off. And at the end of the first year he was kidnapped.

  “This was in Kerman. I was on my land. We were building houses. They came in a car, three or four of them. They asked me to help them in a building project they had. I got in the car, and they drove me away. They kept me fifteen kilometers away in a desert area and questioned me as in a court. It was in a little shanty house, a shepherd’s shelter. They were young boys. They had seen a lot of cinema. Now they had guns in their hands and they felt really big.”

  The guns were from the armories of the Shah’s army. When the army collapsed, and it collapsed suddenly, many people ran to the armories to get guns. For four months after the revolution the guns were piled up in the university and were being given away to anyone who asked for one and could show an ID card. Many people offered Ali guns, but he soon realized that guns were no use to him, because he couldn’t kill anyone, even to protect himself. And perhaps if he had had a gun and had tried to use it at the time of his kidnapping, he might have been harmed by his boy kidnappers.

  He thought now to move carefully with these boys, in order to find out just how many more were behind them. Perhaps there was no one else. Perhaps there were four thousand, and they were planning to hold him for a ransom. They talked for ten hours in the shepherd’s hut in the desert. At last they said they were going to release him, but he had to pay them. He didn’t want to pay them too much; he didn’t want to encourage others. He promised very small sums. The boys were enraged. They threatened
to kill him. They threatened to destroy his building company. But he didn’t promise more.

  He said, “I was very strict.”

  And in the end he was released. But this kidnapping added to his insecurity. There were four million people in Tehran; and it seemed that any four of the four million could come with guns to demand money. And all the time now there was trouble with local officials. They began to occupy his land and housing developments. They said they were government property and had to be given to the people.

  “The local government man actually confiscated many properties in Kerman, mine and other people’s.”

  “What was he like? Did you get to know him?”

  “He was connected to the mujahidin group. Very leftist, one hundred percent against capitalists.”

  “What was he like physically?”

  “He was about thirty-four, short, fat. Full of resentment. An educated man, an engineer. I am sure he was beaten by SAVAK. And he was full of resentment. He caused me a lot of damage. Millions. Many millions. I met him a few years ago. He came to my office. He was poor. He had been kicked out of office. The government had put him in prison. He came to me and asked for a job. He came and kissed me and asked for pardon. He was then about forty-five. He had an old jacket. I told him that every kid had toys, but there is one toy that is the special toy. ‘I too have toys. I have been used to living well, to enjoy myself, and every night, all through my life, I have had lavish food. I am still doing that. And that is my favorite toy. If because of what you have done I didn’t have my lavish living for one night, I would never forgive you. I would never pardon you. But what you did was like a little fly walking on my skin. It couldn’t hurt me.’ ”