Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples

by V. S. Naipaul

  Not long after the revolution the people of Iran had voted in a referendum for an Islamic republic. This was in 1979. The principles of the Islamic republic hadn’t yet been worked out, and most people thought that they were simply voting for freedom and justice. The principles of the Islamic republic had been worked out now by the scholars, and this rule by Qom was one of the principles. It was an aspect of the fundamental idea of the Islamic state, the idea of the Leader and obedience to the Leader, which was now never to be questioned, even indirectly.

  A later board, in three languages, was softer. It was about the shrine of the much-loved woman saint, Masumeh, “the innocent,” the sister of the eighth Imam.

  And now, after the desert, and in the holy city, the women in black chadors in the streets made an extra impression. They were brisk, solitary-seeming, noticeably small. Some of them held the chador over their face with their hands or bit an end of it between their teeth; they looked like people who were muzzling themselves. You didn’t think of the woman saint of Qom; you thought of the principle of obedience.

  Without the dull gold of the dome of the shrine the town would have been quite ordinary; but always there was the dome. And now, farther into the town, we began seeing the students with their turbans and variously colored tunics and their black robes. We saw more and more of them, and Qom became more than a town in the desert, more than a place with costumes.

  It was as though we had switched centuries. As though, by some cinematic or computer device, we had been taken deep into a play by Marlowe (say), had begun to walk old streets, live with old assumptions, and had gone back to an old idea of learning, with all its superseded emblems of color and dress.

  (Superseded, but oddly familiar: fragments of that academic idea, originally imported from the Islamic world, had survived in the Oxford I had entered, just like that, one afternoon in 1950, and was soon taking for granted: the long black gowns of lecturers and scholar-students, the shorter gowns of commoners, ordinary students.)

  The Marashi Library was not as well known to ordinary people as we had been told. Different people had different pieces of information. We began, almost, to be led on corner by corner. We had sped through the desert on the new road; we were losing time now; we were going to be late for Khalkhalli.

  At last we came to the library. And I could see why we had had such trouble getting to it. We had been asking about it as though it was a landmark. It wasn’t. It was a new building in brown brick, a little too Islamic in its arches and windows and decoration; and it wasn’t all that big or noticeable. Its upper façade had a Qom camouflage of strings of colored bulbs, and new posters and the remains of old ones were on its lower stone walls. The big board that stuck far out over the busy street was like the board of a commercial enterprise.

  We left Kamran in the car and went to look for the man who was going to take us to Khalkhalli. It was now past eleven, and eleven was the time Khalkhalli had given.

  As soon as we went through the arched entrance to the library, I knew we were in trouble.

  The tomb of the Ayatollah Marashi, the founder of the library, was just to the left after the entrance. It was in a curious kind of aluminum cage with a green cover, like a big parrot cage. (And the aluminum was for the modernity, Mehrdad said later; silver would have been more usual.) Even as we hurried in from the busy, bright street, some devout people in great need, and some very ill people, were leaning quietly against the cage. Next to this, and raised a little above the marble floor, was an open carpeted area, and more people were sitting or praying there, below a big color photograph of the Ayatollah Marashi in extreme old age.

  The Marashi Library, here, seemed to be also the Marashi shrine, with its own devotees and concerns. And it didn’t surprise me that in the little office at the end of the hall they knew nothing about us and our meeting with Ayatollah Khalkhalli.

  We were shown to another office, and there they didn’t know anything about us either. From there we were taken to the office of the son of the great Ayatollah Marashi.

  He—the director of his father’s library, and the guardian of his father’s busy shrine as well—was a big, dramatic man with a fine big black beard with two gray streaks. He had a black turban and a tunic and a robe, and his office was imposing, full of books and files and paper. He said he didn’t know who we were or why we had come. He knew nothing about talebehs or Ayatollah Khalkhalli. I said I had Khalkhalli’s address: it was the Kucheh Abshar. I showed it to him in my notebook, in case I had got the pronunciation wrong. He said it wasn’t an address; there was no number. I said the lane might be a short one and people there would almost certainly know where Khalkhalli lived.

  He was having none of that. He began to fire off questions. “What is your name? Where do you live? How many books have you written? What kind of books? What agency are you connected with? Are you from SOAS?” I didn’t know what SOAS was. He didn’t like that; he didn’t like anything I had said. He said I was to write down my name and address. Oddly civil after that, he made me sit down, while Mehrdad went out to telephone people in Tehran and to telephone Emami, the talebeh who should have been waiting for us at the library.

  Mehrdad wasn’t long. When he returned he said that Emami was going to telephone back. I thought that was bad news. But Mehrdad—anxious now to console me—said that while we waited for Emami we could go and have a look at the manuscripts in the library. We were going to be very late for Khalkhalli, but Mehrdad didn’t seem to mind.

  As we were going up the steps to the manuscript room Mehrdad said that the director of the library had stood up when we entered his office. This was a gesture of respect in Iran; the director wouldn’t have done that if he hadn’t known about us.

  And then, beyond an iron-barred door, we were in the quiet of the manuscript room, and among old things of great beauty. So that, abruptly, after the disorder of the streets, and my nerves, and the obstructiveness downstairs, we were again in another world.

  It was already half-past eleven. Even if Emami came now we would be an hour late for Khalkhalli. I began mentally to write that meeting off, and thought that, rather like the people downstairs leaning against the aluminum cage to get the healing emanations of the dead holy man, it might be good for me, after all, to linger here for half an hour or so, in the calmer emanations of an older world. I thought of the library of the University of Salamanca in Spain, another collection of idle learning, or its mirror image, almost from the same period. But without warning the English-speaking guide who had been deputed to show us round was taken away, and there came a young cleric in a tunic and gown who, small and frowning, saying nothing, marched us from case to case, the skirt of his robe swinging above his small, light-colored slippers, and finally marched us out of the manuscript room, closing the iron-barred door with a bang behind us.

  He led us then without speech or friendliness to other sections of the library: printed books, conservation, fumigation, copying. And then to rooms with more and more printed books: the unending stream of Islamic theology, elaborated without haste in places like Qom, and put out in “sets” of many volumes, uniformly and garishly bound: so many sets they made you wonder how far they had been checked and proofed, whether they were intended to find readers, or whether they were issued as sacred objects, the emanations of a revered ayatollah, their publication or manufacture being somebody’s act of piety or charity.

  So many sets to see, now, in the company of our surly attendant, that at last I said no and stopped. I felt that we should be content with the adventure we had had, should go and look at the shrine of Hazrat Masumeh, eat lunch or something, and drive back to Tehran. Mehrdad agreed. He thought we had drawn too much attention to ourselves. It worried him that I had written down my name and address; and he didn’t think that we should hang around.

  We broke off from our attendant, walked down two floors to where the library proper began. And found Emami, the talebeh.

  He was relaxed and easy, a tal
l and slender man of about thirty, and he didn’t seem to know that he had kept us waiting an hour. He wasn’t in tunic and robe and turban, but in trousers and a silky or shiny white shirt with a textured pattern. No word from him—or Mehrdad transmitted none—about how he happened to be where he was, or why he hadn’t telephoned, or even why he hadn’t been there an hour earlier. All that came from him, in his calm, soft way, was yes, he knew where Khalkhalli lived, and would take us there.

  I asked about his clothes. He said he was entitled to wear the tunic and the robe and the turban of the talebeh, but he didn’t like wearing them. He presented this—or so it came out in Mehrdad’s translation—as an aspect of his modernity; he saw himself as a modern man.

  We went to the director’s office to say good-bye. The big man in the black turban was civil but distant; his business with us was over. The white office pad with my name and address was still where I had left it on his desk, on a pile of papers and old books. It looked glaring and noticeable; I could understand Mehrdad’s worry.

  Downstairs, we passed the visitors to the shrine sitting or praying on the carpet below the photograph of Ayatollah Marashi or pressing their faces against the aluminum cage of his grave. Outside, on the busy sunlit street, we passed an open-fronted bookstall or shop: Persian books in a glass case, two very young students in turbans and tunics and gowns excitedly buying what appeared to be a concise textbook from the stall-keeper, and looking like people who had found treasure. Perhaps the little book was a simple question-and-answer book. The scene was like a stage set, with props—new books of antique learning, a shop of such books—that had ceased to be props, and with costumed actors—bookseller, students—who had become their roles. It would have been nice to stop and look, and to play with some of the fantasies the scene suggested. But we were already an hour late for Khalkhalli.

  We found Kamran and the car some distance away, on the sunny side of the street. When we were all inside, the car wouldn’t start.

  We all pushed, even Emami in his shiny white shirt, Kamran demonstrating even at this speed his capacity for handling his car recklessly, now steering out without warning into the traffic, now pushing directly against the traffic. He had Iranian luck; no one hit us. After about a hundred or a hundred and fifty yards the car bucked and started. And then Kamran and Mehrdad and Emami—in spite of what he had said, he didn’t absolutely know where Khalkhalli lived—asked and asked the way, doing what we should have done on our own earlier in the morning. Everyone knew the ayatollah’s house, and said it was very near. But it took some finding.

  At last we came to a short residential street: white houses, newish, the houses with high fences or walls in the Iranian way. Emami pressed the bell of one house. Nothing happened. Emami pressed the bell of a second house and talked for a little into the intercom. The gate of the first house opened, and a very old woman, not in the black chador of Qom, but with a light patterned scarf (which she was tying around her head), came out to the pavement and pointed to a third house.

  Emami pressed the bell there. Mehrdad also pressed, and after a while a man opened. He was not in uniform; but Mehrdad observed—and told me later—that the man had a gun at his waist, below his shirt. He said he didn’t know anything about a meeting, but he would go in and ask the ayatollah. The ayatollah was reading. He came out again after a while and said, “The ayatollah was expecting you. He was expecting you at eleven.” (But Mehrdad didn’t tell me that until the end of the day.)

  We went through the tall gate and found another guard. He was in dark green trousers and shirt, the old-style uniform of the Revolutionary Guard komiteh.

  A small front courtyard, short flight of steps, a verandah: I remembered something like that from 1979, but I couldn’t be sure that it was the same house, because the surroundings seemed to have changed so much. In 1979 Khalkhalli’s house was at the edge of the town, in a new street with young trees; the desert felt close. This lane looked established and was deep within the town.

  We took off our shoes and went into the reception area. To the right was a library or study with bookshelves packed with books in sets. To the left was the sitting room, a formal, almost empty area spread with carpets. The walls were a pale gray-green. Green-striped oblong cushions were propped against the inset radiators in one wall. A thin palliasse on the carpet, oddly intimate, showed where at one stage the ayatollah might have been resting (or waiting for us). On the other side of the room were four or five dark armchairs. On the lace doily on the side table next to one of the chairs were three or four toothpicks or tooth-sticks: the master of the house, no doubt. That must have been where he was, reading, when we pressed the buzzer on his gate.

  Hanging on the wall with the radiators was a ready-wrapped black turban, looking somewhat thin and squashed and pathetic; and, above that, were photographs of the ayatollah with Khomeini. The photographs were high up on the wall—perhaps to prevent them from being pilfered—and it wasn’t easy to see the details. One photograph was a candid-camera, black-and-white shot of Khalkhalli and Khomeini, both in turban and robe, both frowning, walking purposefully in snow at the back of a car: a street scene, no doubt. Khalkhalli’s robe came down almost to his ankles, outlined his belly, and didn’t stress his shortness; in fact, striding beside Khomeini, he didn’t look much shorter. A formal group portrait to the left of that was of Khomeini, his son, and Khalkhalli; Khalkhalli had been the teacher of Khomeini’s son and was proud of the distinction. Next to that was a color photograph of Khomeini and Khalkhalli, both men laughing this time: Khomeini on the right reclining on what looked like a chaise longue, Khalkhalli leaning conspiratorially over him from the left, Khalkhalli turbaned and black-gowned and with his thick-lensed, black-rimmed glasses. Khalkhalli’s black gown—like a protective wing over Khomeini—occupied much of the left side of the photograph. The photograph was not properly focused or had been badly enlarged: there was a kind of blue-white halo around Khomeini’s chair. It was a disturbing photograph: Khalkhalli the jester making his master laugh. It was the only photograph I had seen in which Khomeini was laughing, and the laugh altered the face, stressed the sensuality.

  Khalkhalli was now out of everything, people said; he had been pushed aside. The photographs on the wall were like proof of his power in the old days, his closeness to the Imam, the leader of the revolution. But in a time to come the photographs on the wall might say something else: the busy men of the revolution frowning in the street, laughing in private.

  He came in now. And it was an entrance. He was barefooted, in simple white, like a penitent, and he moved very slowly. A short-sleeved white tunic, wet with perspiration down the middle of his chest, hung over a loose white lower garment. Step by dragging step he came in, very small, completely bald, baby-faced without his turban, head held down against his chest, looking up from below his forehead, eyes without mischief now and seemingly close to tears, as though he wished to dramatize his situation and needed pity.

  He invited me to sit in a chair. He sat next to me. We were separated by the little side table with the lace doily and the tooth-sticks.

  I didn’t know how to start. I really wanted to hear about his work as a judge, and to hear what he had to say now about the revolution. But I didn’t know how to get to that. I thought an indirect approach, with questions about his childhood or his early days, would begin to take us there. But, as in 1979, he didn’t want to talk about his life.

  If we were to go back so far, he said, it would tire him. He had had a heart operation, a triple bypass. And, either because it was hard for him to sit on the chair, or because he wished to show he didn’t like my questions, he got up from the chair next to mine and moved to the palliasse on the carpet.

  I asked when he had become a revolutionary. He said he had always been a revolutionary, ever since he knew himself; he had always hated kings.

  The guards brought in tea in little glasses. They sat and listened to our talk. I felt they liked the break in their routin
e.

  And social graces came to Khalkhalli. He said he had learned a lot from Nehru. This was meant as a courtesy to me: he saw me as someone from India. He had especially liked Nehru’s book Glimpses of World History; in the Persian translation it was in three volumes. I reminded him of his interest in the Polisario movement in 1979, and asked what he thought would be the future of societies that were revolutionary today. He said, in Mehrdad’s translation, “Reality will always prevail.”

  Reality: for him it meant truth. It was to be set against false systems, false gods, fraudulence. It was hard, though, to get him to talk concretely; he turned everything to abstraction. As an ayatollah that was his talent. It pleased him to be baffling my purpose; and as he talked in his ayatollah’s way about reality and fraudulence his eyes—seemingly so close to tears when he entered—brightened, began to twinkle: a glimpse there of old mischievousness, with something of the man of 1979 showing through.

  He said to me, “Are you going to see Ayatollah Montazeri?”

  I said, “I don’t think so.”

  When Mehrdad had translated this, Khalkhalli looked at him and said, “He should see Montazeri.”

  Mehrdad set his face and did the translation. And it was only later, putting together various things I heard, that I understood that this question about Ayatollah Montazeri was a political question, and possibly even an attempt by Khalkhalli to involve me in his cause. Khalkhalli and Montazeri had both been important in the early days of the revolution (Montazeri at one time had even been Khomeini’s second-in-command); and both men had made themselves known for their virulence. If Khalkhalli was the hanging judge, Montazeri, as Khomeini’s second-in-command, had sometimes been even more zealous than his master. When Khomeini had said that the revolution should concentrate on the young, that people over forty were useless, Montazeri had gone one stage further. Pensions were useless, he had said; dead trees should be cut down. People still remembered that. Both those men, Khalkhalli and Montazeri, had been cast aside by a later generation of people in power; both were now kept quiet and harmless.