Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples

by V. S. Naipaul

  He said it began with his name. His name had always been precious to him. The first Abbas in Islamic history was the cousin and principal commander of Imam Hussain, the son of the great Ali; and this Abbas was one of the seventy-two who had stayed and died with Imam Hussain at the battle of Kerbela. This Abbas had been, literally, the standard-bearer of Imam Hussain.

  So at the Mohurram celebrations when he was a child—Mohurram the blood month, the Shia mourning month for the martyrdoms at Kerbela—the young Abbas, even when he was six, had wanted to live up to his name. He wanted to carry the flag or standard at the Mohurram procession. He never wanted to put it down on the ground; to him that was a kind of sacrilege.

  Was that all? Hadn’t he been told something by his father or someone else? Were there books he had read?

  He said he couldn’t explain any more. His family was religious only in an ordinary way. There were books in the house, but they didn’t belong to his father.

  I asked, “If there had been no war, what do you think would have happened to you?”

  The publisher’s assistant said, “That’s the question we all ask. Without the war we might have gone to Allah in a roundabout or much longer way. Some of us mightn’t even have reached Allah in the end.”

  Abbas said, “I would have continued my studies. I loved pure physics. It is related to philosophy. The study of matter.”

  And this was interesting to me because it showed how, even within the rigidities of a revealed faith, a feeling for the spiritual might prompt wonder; and science and the search for knowledge would have begun. It was like the understanding that had come to me some years before, in India, in the south of the country, of the ways in which certain Brahmin families, priestly proponents of antique ritual and taboos, had in two generations in the twentieth century arrived at high science, made ready for that intellectual journey by the very complications and demands of their theology, and its curious, shut-away purity.

  I told Abbas something of this.

  He might not have followed. But he said (still with that battlefield picture of the boy with the blown-away arm), “I wanted to see how things were made. And what they are made of. I wanted to know about the essence of things.”

  The lights had come on again in the office and the streets. It was past eight, and we had been in the publisher’s office since four-thirty. The publisher’s assistant wanted to clear away the fruit plates and close the office. The children had long ago stopped playing in the streets; through the window, while the daylight lasted, I had seen them beating up and stripping a chenar sapling, climbing up the slender trunk and pulling down the branches.

  Abbas’s bloodshot eyes were almost friendly now. He said, “I have said more than I should. I have talked like a drunk man.” (That was Mehrdad’s first translation when we were in the hotel. But then right away he said, “No, that’s too strong. It wouldn’t be good for Abbas.” He thought and said, “ ‘A drunken man doesn’t know what he says, and I feel I have been like that.’ That would be better.” I didn’t see the difference, but Mehrdad said, “The second one is softer.”)

  The publisher’s assistant was switching off the lights, using this new darkness to push us outside. Abbas talked of the two one-minute films he had made. Each film had three sequences. The first began with a man making footsteps in the snow; another man walks in his footsteps; a third man begins to do so, but then hesitates, and finally turns off in another direction, leaving his own footsteps in the snow. In the second film a man is being married; then a farmer is tilling the land; and finally there is a field of waving wheat.

  Mehrdad said, “In Iran wheat is the symbol of generation.”

  The films were transparent in a way that Abbas might not have known. His own idea of himself showed through: he was the man who had struck out on his own, and he was the man to whom life had come again.

  In the taxi Mehrdad said, “You noticed? He didn’t mention Khomeini once.”

  I said, “When he was talking about Qom he said there were many examples of religious learning not going with spirituality. I would like to ask him a little more about that.”

  But Mehrdad didn’t think that was a good idea—he meant it was an idea with some danger—and I didn’t say any more about it.

  Mehrdad said a while later, “He is to me a real hero, Abbas. In the war and in civilian life. The way he does things.”

  Mehrdad was thinking especially of Abbas going back to school in his mid-twenties, to get his diploma, in order to go to the university, in order to marry his girl.

  On a wall in a side street we saw in very big letters the English words FAITH NO MORE. Mehrdad said it was an album of American “heavy-metal” songs. But the letterer knew English well, and his English or Roman letters were done in a way that no one knowing only the Persian script could manage. (Even Mehrdad wrote the English script awkwardly.) In spite of what Mehrdad said, I thought the words were a kind of protest, like the playing of the popular music of the Shah’s time, which you often heard coming out of flats and taxis.

  Then, on a pier of a road bridge there was a big daubed sign in Persian in red and green: MARTYRS SAY (in red): (in green) WHAT HAVE YOU DONE SINCE WE WENT AWAY? That was critical, Mehrdad said. But Basijis have that privilege. They could daub what they wanted on the streets; no one stopped them.

  In the hotel room—with the big window giving a clear view of the spread of lights, blue and brilliant white and orange, of Evin Prison—we reconstructed the evening. I asked Mehrdad, when we came to that stage of Abbas’s story, whether Abbas and his brothers, the mechanic’s sons, wouldn’t have moved forward anyway, even if the revolution hadn’t come; and whether the revolution hadn’t really been wasteful of talent.

  Mehrdad said, “People are like ships.” (Abbas had used the ship metaphor, too, but in a different way, when he was talking about the goodbye ceremony on the battlefield.) “When the first ship goes in one direction, the others just follow. It’s like the firing squad, when they have to shoot a thief.” (Memories there of Mehrdad’s recent military service.) “The first shot is the important one. The others just follow. They hear the sound and they all pull the trigger. I have seen it many times. For example, in the swimming pool. In the military service I was a lifeguard at a swimming pool. The little boys who came were all nervous, but the minute the first boy jumped in, all the rest jumped in, not caring how deep the water was or whether they knew how to swim. And at the university. A professor is teaching badly, is known to be a poor professor. Nobody does anything. But one day some student gets up and objects to something, and then there is chaos. Everybody starts objecting to the teacher.

  “That is my feeling about the revolution. My parents attended four or five demonstrations. But they didn’t know why. They didn’t know what they were doing. My father is not brave. He is not brave at all. Now when you ask him he says that he didn’t go to the demonstrations. But I remember it. We had a lot of books in our house. There was a pictorial one, full of colors. It was published by the Shah. It was about the royal family. It was a prize to my sister from her school. My father—I said he was not a brave man—he tore it up and put it in the dustbin. He said, ‘Maybe when the revolution comes they don’t want to see such things in my house.’ I said, ‘Nobody cares about your house.’ He was just doing what everybody else did. He was innocent—and frightened. Others had a lot of sin, but he was innocent.” Mehrdad thought of himself as iconoclastic, but his language could still be religious.

  I said, “There was something you didn’t translate. The story Abbas told the veterans when he handed out the questionnaires about their war experiences.”

  “There were two friends at the front. One of them was always talking about sport and the jobs he had done in the city. He didn’t feel he was at the front. The other man was a spiritual person. He didn’t want his friend to lose touch with the spiritual side. He thought a lot about how to turn the friend from town talk to spiritual concentration. At last he got a
notebook from one of the PBXs at the front. For ten days he wrote down whatever his friend said. At the end of the tenth day the sixty pages of the notebook were filled. He took the notebook to the friend and said, ‘Here you are. Here is your talk for ten days. I have written down everything. Read it and see whether you have been doing a good thing, a bad thing, or an indifferent thing.’ Two days later the friends met. The sportsman took the spiritual man to a silent and hidden place, brought out a plastic bag which was filled with burnt paper, and said, ‘This is my past. I understood what you wanted to say, and I won’t repeat the same mistake again.’ After a time, whenever he began to tell one of his old stories, he stopped himself and said, ‘Oh, forget it.’ And he was famous as ‘Mr. Oh, forget it.’ ”

  I said, “The story fascinated you.”

  “Abbas said that whenever he told this story to the veterans they began to laugh, but this laughter turned to weeping as they remembered the war and their own friendships. This story, Abbas said, was just to show the veterans that a simple story could be effective when they were filling in their questionnaires about their war experiences.”

  I said, “What do you think of the story now?”

  “I have no feeling at the moment.”

  A little later he said, “It’s an Iranian story, because of the affection between the two soldiers. It is hard to tell a friend about his failings. The story was about a friend who found a good way of doing that.”

  7

  QOM: THE PUNISHER

  WHEN I WENT TO TEHRAN in August 1979, Ayatollah Khalkhalli, the hanging judge of the revolution, was a star. The Islamic Revolutionary Court in Shariati Street was sitting almost round the clock, as Ali had said. People were being killed all the time in Evin Prison and trucks were taking away the bodies through the blue gates at night.

  There was nothing secretive or abashed about this killing. Some revolutionary official was keeping count, and regularly in the Tehran Times there was an update. In the beginning the counting was to show how clement the revolution was; later, when the killing became too much, the counting stopped. In those early days official photographs were taken of people before they were killed and after they were killed—killed and, as it were, filed away, naked on the sliding mortuary slab, in the giant filing cabinet of the morgue. These pictures were on sale in the streets.

  Ayatollah Khalkhalli, the ruler of the Islamic Revolutionary Court, was open to the press. He was giving many boastful interviews. I went with an interpreter to see him in Qom. It was Ramadan, the fasting month; and Qom was where the ayatollah had temporarily retired to fast and pray. It was August and very hot in the desert. When we got to Qom we had to wait for more than five hours until the ayatollah had finished his prayers and broken his fast. This was at nine in the evening. We found him then sitting on the floor of the verandah of his modest house, at the center of a little court also sitting on the floor: his guards, some Iranian admirers, and a respectful, formally dressed African couple (the man in a light gray suit, the woman in a chiffon-like, sari-like garment) who were visiting.

  The ayatollah was white and bald and very short, a clerical gnome, messily attired. He liked, perhaps because of his small size, to clown. His jokes were about executions, and then his court threw themselves about with laughter. He also liked—and this mannerism might have come with his hanging duties—abruptly to stop clowning and for no reason to frown and grow severe.

  He was from Azerbaijan in the northwest. He said he was the son of a farmer and as a boy he had been a shepherd. So, going by what Ali had said, Khalkhalli would have been just the kind of village boy for whom, fifty years or so before, the theological schools had offered the only way out: a room, food, and a little money. But Khalkhalli had almost nothing to say about his early life. All he said, with a choking, wide-throated laugh, was that he knew how to cut off a sheep’s head; and this was like another joke about executions, something for his little court. Perhaps, because he had never learned how to process or meditate on his experience, never having read widely enough or thought hard enough, his experience had simply gone by, and much of it had even been lost to him. Perhaps the thirty-five years (as he said) of theological studies in Qom had rotted his mind, pushed reality far away, given him only rules, and now with the revolution sunk him in righteousness and vanity. He was interested only in the present, his authority and reputation, and in his executioner’s work.

  He said, “The mullahs are going to rule now. We are going to have ten thousand years of the Islamic Republic. The Marxists are going to go on with their Lenin. We are going to go on in the way of Khomeini.”

  Revolution as blood and punishment, religion as blood and punishment: in Khalkhalli’s mind the two ideas seemed to have become one.

  And, in fact, that double idea, of blood, fitted revolutionary Iran. Behzad, my interpreter, was a communist, and the son of a communist father. Behzad was twenty-four; with all his Iranian graces, his scientific education, and his social ambitions, he had his own dream of blood. His hero was Stalin. Behzad said, “What he did in Russia we have to do in Iran. We too have to do a lot of killing. A lot.”

  On the way back through the desert to Tehran, in moonlight, we turned on the car radio. The news was about the closing down by the government of the liberal or non-religious paper, Ayandegan. The news caused Behzad’s mood to grow dark. Whatever was said by the communists at the top, however much for the next year or so they continued to claim the religious revolution as their own, Behzad knew that evening that the game was up.

  I thought now, sixteen years later, that I should go to Qom again, to look for Khalkhalli, and, if it were possible, to get from him some new angle on old times. It also occurred to me, after what I had heard from Abbas and Ali, that when I was in Qom I should try to talk to a student, a talebeh, to understand the kind of person who nowadays, after the revolution, was going to the theological schools.

  Mehrdad didn’t think I should go to see Khalkhalli. I had so far kept my nose clean; going to see Khalkhalli, or trying to see him, would be too political a thing to do, too intrusive, and there might be trouble. And, indeed, when I asked around I was told that for various reasons Khalkhalli mightn’t want to be disturbed. He had been cast aside by the revolution long ago as one of the old brigade, and was living in retirement; he had also recently had some sort of heart trouble.

  In spite of Mehrdad, I put out feelers. And the news that came back was good. There might have been official discouragement, but Khalkhalli had been reached. He was ready to see me in his house at eleven o’clock on a certain day. His house was in a little lane in Qom, the Kucheh Abshar; and the person who would take me there would be a talebeh. The talebeh had been a student in Qom for many years and would, besides, be willing to talk to me on his own. I was to meet the talebeh at the Marashi Library in Qom; it wasn’t far from where Khalkhalli lived. I would have no trouble finding the Marashi Library. It was very famous and everybody in Qom would know where it was.

  It was too complicated an arrangement; too many pieces had to fall into place. As a traveler I knew that much simpler arrangements, in simpler places, could unravel. So I went to Qom with a kind of half-faith.

  There was a new road to Qom. It went past the Khomeini shrine: the copper-colored dome, the decorated minarets. Kamran the driver, who had earlier taken Mehrdad and me to the shrine and the Martyrs’ Cemetery, asked ironically, “You want to go again?”

  We were in desert, but where there was irrigation there were green fields. The land was flat. Then we came to true desert, and the land, red-brown and bare, was more broken: now a series of cracked mud knolls, now a line of low cliffs worn down in certain places to rock, the rock showing in twisted, cracked layers. It was wonderful, from the car. But Mehrdad said, “We think it is very bad land. It is salt land.”

  To the left, far away, was the great salt lake. In 1979 Behzad, my guide and interpreter, had told me that SAVAK used to dump people in the lake from helicopters. I heard now from Meh
rdad that the lake was so salt nothing sank in it. Mehrdad talked more about the oil that was said to be below the land. Officially, Mehrdad said, it was given out that the oil in this salt land was of poor quality; but the story among Iranians was that there was a lot of oil there, and it was to be kept in reserve. So, though the land was salt and bare, it was fabulous, as Qom itself was fabulous, on a site no doubt ancient, since all sacred sites go back and back, to earlier religions.

  Sometimes now to the left we could see the old, slow, winding road to Qom. The hard land softened, opened out into a plain; scattered tussocks appeared. In the distance a jagged mountain range was amethyst-brown in the glare. Two or three times in the wilderness there were garage stops: black smears in the desert: the black of tires stacked one upon the other, the black of oil on the bare ground.

  Sheds like factory sheds along a local road some way to the right announced the nearness of Qom; and soon the dome and minarets of the famous shrine of Qom began to show above the nondescript spread of dust-colored brick houses. In 1979 Qom was a small town; now, after the revolution, it was three times the size and had a population of a million and a half.

  We came to a roundabout, well watered, green. It was the end of the desert and the beginning of the town.

  Kamran said in his ironical way, “We are entering the Vatican.”

  At the side of the road there was a big board that looked like a municipal welcome board. But it offered no welcome. What it stated had caused much distress, Mehrdad said. He gave this translation of what was written in the bold, flowing Persian script: “The whole practical philosophy of the law is governing.” The word used for “the law” was figha; it meant “jurisprudence” in a very wide way, and was one of the principal subjects studied in Qom. As with so many things in Persian, Mehrdad said, the statement on the board was ambiguous. The politer meaning was: “Our rule is based on study and religion.” The real meaning was more brutal: “We at Qom are here to rule you.”