Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples

by V. S. Naipaul

  One afternoon, as we were driving up into the mountains above Tehran, Mehrdad, after seeming to say that people had learned how to live with the restrictions, abruptly said the opposite. He said, “Everybody is frightened. I am frightened. My father and mother are frightened.” (Poor father, again.) “They are not sure what the future will bring for them or for us, their children. They are not so worried for me. I am an adult now and can look after myself. But my brother is very young. The eight years or so he has to live before he becomes an adult are going to be very dangerous years.”

  With this insecurity, certain fantasies had taken hold. The most extraordinary was that Khomeini had been a British or European agent. I had heard it first from Mr. Parvez, and had thought it part of his paranoia. But then I had heard it from many other people. There had been a meeting in the French West Indian island of Guadeloupe, according to this story, and the Powers had decided to foist Khomeini on the Iranian people. The Iranians were simple people; they could be persuaded by skilled propaganda to demonstrate for anything; people had joined the demonstrations against the Shah not out of conviction, but simply to do what everybody else was doing. The establishing of an Islamic state in Iran was an anti-Islamic plot by the Powers, to teach Muslims a lesson, and especially to punish the people of Iran. And, as if answering those fantasies, there were even signs of the faith being questioned in certain aspects.

  Mr. Parvez had said, “The war [against Iraq] was fought in the name of Islam. It was a blessing in disguise. Without the war people wouldn’t have got so fed up with Islam.” That had seemed extreme. But then I had detected wisps and shadows of religious uncertainty in some people’s conversation. Just as—in these fantasies issuing out of a people stretched to the limit by revolution, war, financial stringency, and the religious state—it was said that Iranians were not really responsible for the Iranian revolution, so I heard that Iranians were not really responsible for the more dramatic aspects of the Shia faith. The bloody scourgings of Mohurram, the mourning month: the idea was really imported from Europe, from the Catholics; it had nothing to do with the original faith.

  I talked about this to Mehrdad. He said, “It’s something habitual. Our enemies are always responsible. Blaming others, not ourselves.”

  I had been given the name of Mrs. Seghir. She lived abroad now, part of the Iranian dispersion. She had returned to see her elderly parents, and had been in Tehran for some time. When I telephoned she invited me to lunch; and she and a woman friend came to the hotel to take me to the apartment. This was to conform to the rules: it wouldn’t have done for Mrs. Seghir or the friend to come alone to meet an unknown man.

  The apartment was in an American-style block where things had decayed. The lift opened into a narrow little lobby that served two apartments. The lobby was more than shabby; it was dirty, with a nasty scrap of carpet. The gloom continued inside. In the sitting area of the open-plan room old Louis XVI reproduction chairs and a settee were like things not sat on. A wall, ridged with old lines of electric cord, was hung with a set of European miniatures of no value, flower pieces or landscapes, one to a frame, in two unsteady, widely spaced rows. A long dining table was at the other end of the room, next to the kitchen. The kitchen looked very much used.

  In a small room beside the kitchen a man was sitting at a table just inside the open door. He was very old—but very old—with the pigment gone in irregular patches from his face. He sat at an angle to the table, with his back half to the door, and with the side of his face showing. This was Mrs. Seghir’s father; he was ninety-one. Mrs. Seghir’s mother, in the sitting area of the room, told me that; she herself was eighty.

  Mrs. Seghir’s friend, who had come with her to the hotel, was now busy in the kitchen with Mrs. Seghir. The friend was divorced. She was friendly and fat, bursting out of her long skirt, and she had fat, greedy lips, made for food alone. She was delighted to help in the kitchen, and was fast on her high heels.

  There was a French window from the sitting area to a balcony. It was half open, and the traffic noise was very loud. I looked out. One side of the balcony was a jumble of old cardboard and brooms and cleaning material, and on the other side there was a covered easel or chest, or so it appeared. This was the satellite dish. Mrs. Seghir needed it for the news; she would be quite lost in Iran without the world news. The camouflage was to protect the dish from the helicopters; they were searching even now.

  The food was laid out, in a smell of warm oil: coo-coo, which was a kind of Iranian quiche, rice, mashed eggplant. The old man—his face dreadfully damaged by age, his eyes very dark and shadowed below the pigmentless forehead and beside the blotched cheeks—came to the table, a belt around the trousers, some inches below the waistband and the belt loops. He was helped by his wife, Mrs. Seghir’s mother. She, very small and thin, her eyes weak behind her glasses, was still wifely and solicitous: such emotions go on to the end: it was affecting.

  The fat lady talked about the north of England. A relation of hers lived there, a professional woman married to a professional man from Bangladesh. She had gone to visit the couple and had been taken with the good manners of the English. She spoke as though she really knew; yet I felt that what she was saying about England hadn’t come so much from her own experience as from the television she might have watched when she was over there.

  The coo-coo was cut up for the old man by his wife. He helped himself to other things; but at the very end he lost control and, holding his head low over his plate, appeared to have an accident, to be a little sick. He got up after that—he had never spoken—and made his way back to his room. Carefully, he eased himself down into his chair, sitting again at an angle to the table, with his back to the open door. He had become very slow; the accident had wearied him; and now with painful deliberation—his world reduced to the performing of these small acts—he took out a pen, took up a folded newspaper, undid one fold, was content with that, held the paper down, and seemed ready to go on with the crossword puzzle.

  I now noticed a Qom silk carpet on the floor, and a purple velvet cover on the coffee table with heavy, old embroidery, three lines of roses and vines done in silver thread mixed with gold: something done a long time ago for the extravagance, the luxury, the expense. Mrs. Seghir said that the embroidered velvet cover had been a gift to her from her mother. There were cut-glass dishes on the cover with sugared jelly balls and a saffron-colored candy made in Qom.

  Later, when Mrs. Seghir was in the kitchen again, helping the fat lady with the dessert, the mother pointed to the chandelier and said, “Qajar arms.” I had seen the chandelier and, as it were, not seen it, finding it too oppressive. Mrs. Seghir’s mother said again, “Qajar arms.” The Qajars, the dynasty overthrown in the 1920s by the father of the late Shah. I got up and looked at the engraving of the Qajar arms, quite hard to see, on the many glass chimneys of the chandelier. There was a circle of those chimneys, and they were like the chimneys of old-fashioned oil lamps; and within and below that circle were tinkling cut-glass pendants of varying size, intricately worked. Mrs. Seghir’s mother said, “Baccarat.” I saw for the first time that—in this small low room that needed paint and less clutter on the balcony and less noise from the traffic—there were two of these chandeliers. They filled the upper space. To be aware of the two was to feel choked.

  Mrs. Seghir, her smock dancing over her chunky hips and her black hose, finished her kitchen work at last and came and sat with me. I asked about her husband. He had died from cancer, she said. I had touched a grief that was still raw. He had become frightened after the revolution, she said. He was an engineer, highly trained, with an important job with the government. He hadn’t lost his job, but the stress had destroyed him. Five years or so after the revolution he had complained one day of not feeling well, and they had gone to the doctor, as they would have done for some minor complaint. Cancer was diagnosed in the colon. It called for immediate surgery. The operation was done within days, and was successful. But then a later
X ray showed that there was cancer in the lung as well.

  On a little oval table, a reproduction piece, set not far from the half-open French window, were photographs of the family: Mrs. Seghir herself at different ages, her daughters, and, in a large frame, a photograph of her husband taken some time before his illness (he hadn’t wanted his children to see him when he became very ill). The photograph was of a handsome, good-natured man, immediately attractive and fine. The photographs, in varying frames, were close together on the little oval table, like the picture-holders among the elms and pines and oleanders and the fading flags in the Martyrs’ Cemetery. And they too, in a way, were martyrs of the revolution.

  Feyredoun was going to be home on leave that afternoon, and Mehrdad and I went to his family flat. The flat, in a city street, was much smaller than Mrs. Seghir’s. It was darker, much less opulent in intention, and now clearly with little money; but it had something of the same atmosphere. It had too much furniture, the remains of old family style. The flat was on the first floor, and it was full of traffic noise, not the roar that came to the top of Mrs. Seghir’s block and through her half-open French window, but a more immediate and more jagged noise that came in all the time through the open metal windows. There were two dining tables in the small sitting room. The longer one, which was at right angles to the other, was prepared for us. It had chocolates in a glass dish, fruit in a larger dish, and tea in small, gilt-decorated glasses with handles.

  Feyredoun’s mother was in the kitchen. She called Mehrdad. He went to her, and they talked for a while. When Mehrdad came back to the sitting room he was distressed.

  He said, “I’ve been hearing miseries. Sometimes I think I can’t bear any more.”

  Feyredoun’s mother worked as a pharmacist in a hospital. There was a gardener there whose son had gone to the war. The boy hadn’t returned, but the gardener never believed that his son was dead. He always said that his son was going to come home again. The gardener was a devout, bearded man, so bearded and devout that people at the hospital thought he might be an ideological spy, keeping an eye on the staff. The war at last ended. Prisoners began to return. Lists of returning prisoners were printed, and the gardener always came to ask Feyredoun’s mother whether his son’s name was among them. The name never was.

  About three months before, there had been a mass funeral for three thousand unknown martyrs whose remains had been recovered from old battlefields. The air force had flown the boxes to the Martyrs’ Cemetery. Each box was covered with the Iranian flag (green, white, and red with the emblem of Allah in the middle). The boxes were stacked up in pyramids. Mehrdad had seen the ceremony on television and had been overwhelmed. The men whose remains were being buried had died in army uniform; Mehrdad, doing his military service, had worn that uniform; he had felt linked to the dead men. Telling the story in the sitting room, he plucked at his shirt, to indicate how much the uniform had meant to him.

  One of the boxes contained the remains—“two bones,” as Mehrdad said—of the gardener’s son. Up to that moment the gardener had been fortified by his faith. Now he began to grieve. Just a week or two ago the gardener had died. There had been an autopsy at the hospital a few days before; it showed that the gardener’s stomach had been eaten up with cancer. That was what Feyredoun’s mother had wanted to talk to Mehrdad about. That was what had sent Mehrdad out to me saying, “I’ve been hearing miseries.”

  When, many days before (which now seemed to me like many weeks before), I had asked Mehrdad what he felt about the war, he had said, “I feel nothing about it.” He hadn’t meant that. What he had meant was what he had just said: “Sometimes I feel I can’t bear any more.”

  There were rules and more rules. But young people, those who had known nothing but the religious state, were learning their own ways of disobedience. They had their bodies; their bodies were their own. There were stories of a sexual revolution among the young; and there were other forms of disobedience.

  Feyredoun’s brother was nineteen. He was just five or six years younger than Feyredoun, but he belonged to a different generation. Feyredoun was a philosopher, a doubter, intellectually curious. Only a wall, he said, separated him from his brother. But while there were serious books on Feyredoun’s side of the wall, on his brother’s side there were photographs of football teams and a “heavy-metal” pop group, and a swastika. Feyredoun’s brother was a Nazi. He said that as an Iranian he was Aryan; therefore he was a Nazi. And he took being a Nazi seriously.

  Sitting at the big table in the main room of the flat, Feyredoun told me that his brother and his friends had driven out the Jewish family who used to live next door. They had slashed the tires of the family’s car and broken their windows. The family had not only left Tehran; they had left the country.

  Iran was not Europe or the United States. Iran had its own stresses, and the story Feyredoun was telling, with his own strange innocence, wasn’t just about young Iranian Nazis. His story was more about the difference now between the generations, the difference that five or six years had made. There was another aspect of this difference: Feyredoun’s Nazi brother and his friends were not frightened. Their principal sport now was to go out taunting the Guards, challenging them to arrest them. There were consequences: Feyredoun’s brother had often spent a day or so in jail.

  The brother had been in the sitting room when Mehrdad and I arrived. He was sallow and very thin. I didn’t know anything about him then, and hadn’t thought about his black clothes. He had been polite but withdrawn, and I had seen him as someone else deprived and poor and lost, without an idea of a future, and more desperate than his brother or Mehrdad. Now that I had heard about him I wanted to talk more to him. But—and this, as Feyredoun said, was another sign of cultural change, a break with the past—the boy had gone out of the flat without telling anyone.

  The revolution had bred strange children.

  Feyredoun and Mehrdad took me to a new part of Tehran that was booming. It was like another city. It served the new rich, the people who had done well out of the revolution. It was in the northeast of Tehran, and was about ten years old. There was a new commercial center with expensive shops that served the new condominiums going up on one side. The people who lived there were traders and people who were cutting deals, Mehrdad said; not productive people. But in the commercial center their daughters moved with an ease and an allure that were immediately noticeable: high heels, slender legs in stone-washed jeans, stylish short chadors.

  “And the skin,” Mehrdad said, with his own sensitivity to the beauty of young girls. The good skin that came with good air and good food and an idea of the future: the skin his own sister didn’t have.

  Another kind of person, another kind of disobedience. In the high, well-lighted watch-post at the entrance to the commercial center, a young girl stood blank and unabashed before the Guard. “He’s got her,” Feyredoun said. Some un-Islamic behavior; something against the rules, something perhaps about showing too much of her hair. Mehrdad said, “He’ll talk to her and let her go.”

  When we were in the coffee shop Mehrdad showed a girl in the reflection in the glass. He said, “She’s drugged.” The girl’s eyes were blurred, unfocused; her scarf had fallen very low at the back of her head. In the corner a khaki-clad Guard was talking to the proprietor. It was the big, yellow-jacketed waiter who came to the girl and told her to watch her chador. She merely touched the top of her head; and after a while the Guard, perhaps not wishing to make a scene, or to appear to have been challenged, went away. A little later, when the girl staggered out, I saw that her long chestnut hair was hanging out of her scarf at the back. It was a fashion, Mehrdad had told me some days before, and also a display of disobedience.

  Later, on the road outside the commercial center, we saw a group of young people who had just been searched by the motorcycle Guards—for videos, compact discs, drugs, or other forbidden things.

  9

  THE TWO TRIBES

  ISFAHAN AND SHIRA
Z, famous cities with romantic names, were receiving foreign tourists once again. I went to Isfahan first. I had no idea what to expect. No special tourist or cultural motif attached to the name. Java, much farther off, had the mystical Buddhist pyramid of Borobudur and the Hindu towers of Prambanan; India had the Taj Mahal and the sculptured temple towers of the south. But Isfahan, like Samarkand, was its romantic name alone. Such ideas as I had of its glory had come indirectly, through Indian painting. From certain over-wrought imperial Mogul pictures I knew that for the emperor Jehangir (who ruled from 1605 to 1627) the India of his empire and the Persia of Shah Abbas (who ruled from 1587 to 1629) were the central powers of the globe; no other country really mattered. Britain (even after Queen Elizabeth, and the defeat of the Spanish Armada, and Shakespeare) was far away, on the margin; the ambassador sent by King James in 1618 had a hard time getting attention from Jehangir.

  A Hindu artist of Jehangir’s court spent six years with a Mogul embassy in Isfahan doing portraits of Shah Abbas, to enable Jehangir to understand, and at the same time to be at ease with, his great rival. It was those—sometimes deliberately shrunken—portraits of a short-legged Shah Abbas (with a curved sword almost too big for him), rather than any concrete idea of his great city, that I carried in my head. So—such is the power of caricature—I was not ready for the splendor and extent and cosmopolitanism of Isfahan, its breathtaking confidence and inventiveness and, always, the rightness of its proportions: the immense main square (bigger than St. Mark’s in Venice), the bridges, the domes of both mosques and churches, the delicately colored tiles in whose color and pattern and effects large and small one could lose oneself, the mighty halls of audience. It was possible to understand Jehangir’s uneasiness: so much of Indian Mogul architecture was already here, in Shah Abbas’s Isfahan, in addition to so much else.