Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples

by V. S. Naipaul

  He said, “I was attracted to revolutionary thinking when I was eighteen.” This would have been seven or eight years before the revolution. “There was a man in our town who had just come out of prison, and we loved to go and talk to him. But he didn’t want to talk to us because of security problems. Finally he must have had a good impression of me, because he chose me to talk to. He was thirty-eight, and a close friend of a famous writer who was drowned in our river. He trusted me and started to talk to me.”

  I asked Paydar, “Where did he live? What sort of house?”

  “A very small and ordinary house, such as you get in the northwest, with a little yard and two bedrooms. He lived with his mother and his two sisters. He told me lots of things about injustice and how he would eliminate it.”

  “Were you working at the time?”

  “I had just left school and was working in the bazaar market. At the same time I was writing little stories for the magazines. I wrote about thirty, and most of them were published.”

  “What did you write about?”

  “About poverty, about people suffering. My father had died when I was twelve, and I experienced poverty afterwards. My mother worked sixteen hours a day to keep us. There’s a gloomy picture I have of her: waking up at two and seeing her dozing at the machine.”

  Paydar’s new friend, the former political prisoner, gave Paydar books by Russian writers. Paydar was especially moved by Maxim Gorki; he was fascinated by the novel called Mother. The friend also introduced Paydar to revolutionary Iranian writers, some of whom had been in prison. The friend didn’t want to talk about his own time in jail. He had done three years, and Paydar would have liked to hear about it. But the friend preferred to talk about his political ideas.

  He said they were Marxist ideas. Paydar understood later that they were Marxist ideas of a very crude sort; but at the time he was excited, and those crude ideas became his. Still later it became clear to Paydar that those were the only political ideas the friend had; the friend had not tried to find out more.

  I said to Paydar, “And yet he had a saintliness in your eyes?”

  “Yes. What I felt was pure emotion. I felt, yes, that what the man was saying about revolution could be done, but it required sacrifice. So I started to prepare myself for revolution. I started even to think that I might lose my life.”

  “How long did it take you to get to that stage?”

  “All this took just a year.”

  “And your mother?”

  “She knew. She knew he was teaching me his way, and she didn’t say anything. She was the type of mother we do have here. They believe in their sons and believe in what they are doing. This usually happens in those families where the father has died and the son has replaced the father. The mother—not strictly obeys—yields to her son.”

  “You talked of revolution and sacrifice almost in a religious way.”

  “I am not sure about my religious feeling. My father was atheist. My father was not a religious man. Nor was my mother. It couldn’t be typical Iranian. My mother did believe in God, but she believed more in humans. I remember something very nice from her. ‘If you ask a little child not to do a bad thing, and reward him if he doesn’t do that, it is O.K., because he’s a child. But if he grows up and understands himself, and you still reward him for the good things he has done, you are insulting him.’ ”

  In the late 1970s Paydar went to England to do a higher degree at a provincial college. He went with his wife and their two children, and he might have done so on a scholarship, though he also had his savings. In England they lived in rented rooms. And—though he didn’t see it then, and didn’t say it now—this course of study in England was a tribute to the Shah’s Iran. It spoke of the mobility that had come to people like Paydar, born in poor and backward areas; it spoke of the economy that had kept him in work, and given him savings; and it spoke of the strength and purchasing power of the currency.

  I wanted to know what was the first unusual thing about England that Paydar noticed.

  “In England I looked at things with a sort of pre-judgment. I thought they were capitalists. I was very cynical. I thought they were responsible for our miseries in history. Which of course to some extent they were.”

  “Did you notice the buildings? Did you like any of them?”

  “I closed my eyes to lots of things. Those revolutionaries who thought like me did the same thing.”

  And soon enough the revolution came.

  “It was 1978. People were on the streets and I had to take sides. As someone who had always wished to be with people in the streets for freedom and equality my side was chosen. I took part in demonstrations in England. I handed out leaflets to people passing. At that time Khomeini was getting popular with the revolution.”

  I said, “We heard about him quite late in England. I felt the religious people were keeping him secret.”

  “He wasn’t there at first, in the revolution. It was only in 1978 that people started to hear about him.”

  “They had kept him secret even from you?”

  “Even from us, who were struggling. And at this time I had to make a difficult decision. I was not a religious person. I was a Marxist. But Khomeini was a religious man who was heading the revolution. The only party which would side with Khomeini at that time was the Tudeh party. And automatically I was attracted to that party. Which of course—apart from taking sides with Khomeini—had lots of popular intellectuals in its leadership. Some of them we loved, for their intellectual work, before we knew what they were politically. I was stuck in a conflict at that time. I decided in the end to be with Khomeini. But I had a lot of misgivings. I would tell friends, ‘We may win the revolution, but culturally we will go back a thousand years.’ ”

  “What did your mother say?”

  “She was very pessimistic. She said, ‘You will never gain anything following these religious people. We have known them. We have seen them. These are the people who didn’t let me learn reading and writing.’ She was right, because a clergyman went to my grandfather’s house and said, ‘You should never send your daughter to one of these schools. These schools are satanic centers for women.’ This would have been in 1925, when my mother was seven years old. And my mother never forgave them because my mother loved knowledge and books.”

  But Paydar managed to convince her. He was her son, and she loved him. And then he gave up his studies—he thought it was a waste of time studying while the revolution was going on—and went back to Iran. He wanted to be in the arena, with the people.

  The revolution was over when he got back. The Shah was in exile, and Khomeini was in power. Paydar found a job as a teacher. He had had his doubts about the drift of the revolution, and soon things began to be bad. There were religious regulations. Women had to wear the chador and the full headdress; music and cultural events were banned. There were restrictions on the press. In August 1979 Ayandegan, a non-religious, liberal opposition newspaper was closed down. And after two years Paydar’s teaching job came to an end. There was a “cultural revolution,” as it was called; all the universities were closed.

  He took a series of temporary jobs in different parts of the country. It was the start of a wandering life for him and his wife and their two children. He worked mainly as a translator for private import-export companies.

  Paydar said, “The tragic point here is that I came to a conflict with the Tudeh party as well.”

  “What about the man who had first talked to you about revolution? When you were eighteen. The man who gave you the Gorki books.”

  “He was not active after the revolution. And that was very strange—if I had paid attention. He got a teaching job. Still he is a teacher. And now I know that he was very wise.”

  “But he didn’t advise you?”

  “He didn’t do that. Maybe he thought I was too young. Maybe he had his own doubts. Maybe he was ashamed he himself wasn’t taking part. Actually I went to him long afterwards and said, �
�You were very wise. Why didn’t you advise me?’ He said, ‘I myself was not so sure about what I was doing. After the Shah’s régime this was a new régime, and I had no ideas about it, no certainty about it. I was just living through it.’ ”

  “What do you think of that now?”

  “It was a fair answer.”

  “Your mother?”

  “She surrendered to what I thought. She accepted what I said.”

  The conflict he had with the Tudeh party was about their unquestioning support of the Khomeini government. When he objected they said that Khomeini was heading a popular movement; since the party believed in the people, they couldn’t be far from the people. So the party had to be with Khomeini; internationally that had always been their strategy. This was in 1983, the very year when the Tudeh party was outlawed, and people from the party began to be arrested.

  “I was in great turmoil. I was in danger. They started to search my lodgings. At the university I had made some statement. I had said I was with the Tudeh party. They searched for me in the town where I was and I just managed to escape. Just by accident. Someone had been arrested there, and he had later told his family that the Guards were talking about me. That family came to me to let me know, and I escaped with my family. Those days! Yes! From that time on I was living in hiding. I used to come and see my family once a month and bring money. I took different jobs. I disguised myself. I took jobs in restaurants. Manual jobs, simple jobs. Always in a far place. My relations and friends helped me. My mother was the center of information.”

  After two years of this life he thought that things had settled down, and that he could come out of hiding. No one appeared to be following him. The newspapers reported fewer arrests. So he began to live with his family again and took teaching jobs. He lived like this for a year. One night there was a telephone call. It was from the Revolutionary Guards. They said they wanted him to come to their headquarters for a few minutes to answer a few questions. Later he discovered that they had been going through his records and had found out where he was living.

  He asked the man on the telephone, “Will it be really a few minutes?”

  The Guard said, “Oh, yes. Surely you won’t be here for more than an hour.”

  Paydar kissed his wife and children. He told them he was saying goodbye for a long time. His wife told him he was wrong. But he was right: he didn’t come back for a year.

  He went to the Guards headquarters, and introduced himself. He was sent to a room. The Guard there was expecting Paydar. He gave Paydar a questionnaire and asked him to fill it. One of the questions was: Have you engaged in any political activities in the past?

  I asked Paydar, “What was the Guard like?”

  “A strongly built, bearded, tall man with a cruel face. He had big hands with very thick fingers. They were the first thing I noticed, the thick fingers. Maybe I was thinking of his beating me.”

  “How old would you say? And in uniform?”

  “About thirty. In uniform. Khaki.”

  “Educated?”

  “Not educated. Not at all. This was quite obvious from the way he spoke.”

  “And the office?”

  “One of those oridinary komitehs. It’s what we call them. I said to that question about political activities: ‘No.’ He said, ‘Are you sure you didn’t have another kind of belief?’ And then I told him fully about the way I thought. No other information. And he grinned. He said, ‘We knew that.’ He blindfolded me and put me in a small room. It was nine in the morning.” (In Paydar’s narrative time had jumped: the whole night seemed to have been taken up with this interrogation. But I didn’t notice this jump until much later.) “And it was spring. April or May. From there the next day I was sent to prison. First to Evin.” The great prison of Tehran. “After a week I was sent to another place. Where it is I still haven’t discovered. And there I was questioned for two months, and I was sentenced to a year. In Evin it was tolerable. It was a modern place. The other place was terrible. It was very old. Just like a hole. Then the prison was all right for the rest of the year. It was a commune of fifteen people in the room. That year it was better because they didn’t have so many prisoners. It used to be very bad. And the situation outside had cooled down.”

  That was when Paydar began to think, in solitude, and from a distance, about revolution. He considered it was the most important year in his whole life.

  “Your mother?”

  “She had died two years before that. Fortunately quite quickly. I started to think about the revolutionary stuff and all my beliefs. Now it was the time to think for myself, and to think of subjects that to some extent were forbidden to me.”

  “You had forbidden them to yourself.”

  “I had forbidden myself. For instance, for me Arthur Koestler was a reactionary. So I didn’t read anything by him. That’s it. It was as simple as that. And George Orwell was a reactionary. I had people in two groups only. Revolutionary people, and reactionary people. Now I thought especially of my mother and what she had done without being aware of these ideologies. For me she was the symbol of the real human being. She was loved by everyone. Anyone who knew her loved her. It was something very strange. When she died in the hospital all the nurses and the doctor himself cried. The reason was, she cared about everyone there. She would say, ‘Nurse, what happened to your gentleman caller? Did he come?’ And she would ask another nurse, ‘How’s your mother? Is she getting better?’ All the time she was busy with them, helping them, although she was ill.

  “I thought that ideologies are only a small part of our intellect which can help us in life. The main source lies in our cultural way of thinking. And natural behavior of people like my mother. The revolution I worked for didn’t understand me as an intellectual or my mother as a person.”

  There was no systematic physical maltreatment in the jail. Paydar was handled badly only twice. The first time was when Khomeini had died, and there was a nervousness in the Guards about a possible attempt to free the prisoners. They blindfolded all fifteen and led them out to a minibus and ordered them to bend down and keep quiet. The man next to Paydar asked in a whisper, “Where are they taking us?” Paydar put his finger to his lips and said, “I don’t know.” But the Guard heard. He came and hit Paydar with his gun on the back of the neck; and he began to beat Paydar with such frenzy that Paydar thought he would die. He was ill for a week afterwards. He lay in the cell without attention. They just brought his food. Somehow he lived through it.

  On another occasion he was slapped. He had said something about the mujahidin, the left-wing religious people who had once been with the Guards (and were among Ali’s tormentors in the early days). A Guard slapped Paydar and said he was never to use that word mujahidin again. He was to say monafegheen, which was a bad word and meant “hypocrites.”

  Paydar said, “I devote myself to my teaching work and am more useful to my people in this way, just trying to educate them. I wish I had thought that right at the beginning. But we were in the middle of things, with the dust above us. And the earlier régime is responsible for what has happened now. They deprived us of freedom and good education, and enabled these others to come up.”

  On the low hills to the north, tawny in certain kinds of light, and with a soft texture, there were terracings, sometimes with little green dots of recent tree planting, and with retaining walls, marking the site of future development, as I had thought. And then I learned one day, walking in the area, that one of the low tawny hills, to the left of my hotel window, was Evin Prison, the scene of many executions. The address of the Azadi Hyatt was Evin Crossroads.

  I had noticed the beginnings of terraces in one place, had seen a path winding up in another; a kind of stepped great wall going up and disappearing around one side of the hill; and reappearing far away on the other side. I had felt that the stepped walls on both sides were linked, but I didn’t know what I had been looking at. This was partly because of the play of light on the mountains that had s
o enchanted me.

  It was only in the morning (when the eastern sun filled the valleys and dips with shadow) that the stepped wall to the right—its height now revealed—cast a broad diagonal of shadow tapering up to the top and there disappearing. At other times, when no shadow was to be seen from where I looked, the high stepped wall was like the color of the hill, showing at the top only as the merest serration, which was what had made me think that it was a retaining wall, to prevent landslips and movements of earth.

  If the stepped wall to the right showed up plainly only in early morning shadow, it was just past the middle of the day when the wall to the left became in its turn a wall of shadow, and showed in a great toothed curve where before I had seen no wall.

  And now that I had seen, I always saw; and the serrations of the wall to the right and left, and the half-hidden tips of serration in places in the middle, were to me like the iron teeth of a giant old mantrap.

  Now that I knew it was a prison, I was amazed that though I had looked at it for many days, I had seen it merely as part of the view and hadn’t wondered about it: a monstrous concrete hangar of a building, sand-colored, rising above the green of poplars and chenars. Over the next two or three days the plan of the prison and the prison grounds became clearer, detail by detail. The asphalt road winding up through the deceptive green to the guardhouse at the entrance; the long low buildings like railway sheds—perhaps workshops—at the foot of the hangar; and, a little lower, concrete apartment blocks, staff quarters no doubt, not quite as residential as they had seemed to me. I had thought of those blocks as developers’ clutter on a beautiful hillside; they—or the idea I had had about them—had helped to camouflage the prison.

  At night there were further clarifications of the mountain view, and they seemed more sinister, if only because sinister things happened in prisons at night: the big zigzag of blue road lamps marking the climb of the asphalt road to the prison; the high, big, very white prison lights above the hangarlike building; and, everywhere else, lights.