Children of Paradise (5 page)

A
BDOLKARIM
S
OROUSH WAS LIVING
in London when he heard, through a mutual acquaintance, that Shariati was to be smuggled into the United Kingdom. Soroush was a lay theologian and a student of chemistry from a scrappy neighborhood in the south of Tehran. In London he attended meetings of the expatriate Iranian student opposition. The students discussed Shariati’s books at these meetings as though they were textbooks at a study group.

Soroush admired Shariati, but he was also skeptical. There was a little too much Marx in Shariati, he thought. At the time, Soroush preferred Khomeini. But when he learned that Shariati was headed for Southampton, he relished the opportunity to exchange ideas with the great man face-to-face. He made an appointment to meet the celebrated orator in June of 1977.

Just before Soroush arrived in Southampton on June 20, Shariati was found dead of a heart attack in the doorway of his room. His daughters had arrived from Iran the night before. They were dressed in black, Soroush told an interviewer decades later, with their backs “
pressed to the wall like frightened sparrows.”

In photos taken throughout his life, Shariati was clean-shaven, with closely cropped hair under a slightly receding hairline and dark eyes at
once sharp and brooding. He had a round face and a glint of humor in his gaze, a gleaming smile of even, white teeth. He nearly always wore a jacket and tie in the Western style. If the jacket had fit more closely, if the shirt had been more carefully pressed, Shariati could have been a banker rather than a charismatic revolutionary thinker and spiritual seeker. And so Soroush’s description of Shariati’s body is arresting: “
He had long hair, down to his shoulders. I had never seen Shariati looking so imposing. He looked very serene.”

Shariati died on the very eve of Iran’s revolution, to which his ideas were indispensable. He embodied the anguish of his country at the fulcrum of its twentieth century, and he furnished a common point of origin for two generations of thinkers. They began in his thrall and ended in argument with him. They built their house to his design, and by the early 1990s they came to see it as a prison.

Among scholars, Shariati is variously described as a visionary and a charlatan, a revolutionary hero and a collaborator, a lyricist and a fabricator, even a plagiarist. But to many Iranians, Shariati is the little black fish who charted the course of freedom and cut the heron down from the sky. Much of his work survives in the form of lectures transcribed by his students, but he also wrote books, some of them works of mysticism, others peopled by a baffling array of fictive characters presented as real people—a scholar whose work he plumbed, but whom he had entirely invented; a lover who is not known to have existed.

Shariati was not yet forty-four when he died, but he was a heavy smoker and under considerable stress. Iranian revolutionaries would immediately and forever after claim that he was murdered by the shah’s secret agents abroad, but no evidence exists to substantiate this notion. After an autopsy, his body was transported to London, where his associates were to perform burial rites before flying the body to Damascus for interment.

Islamic funerary rites are typically performed by close relatives of the same sex as the deceased, and Shariati had none around him in Britain. And so four young men from the revolutionary movement washed Shariati’s body in the ritual fashion, wrapping it in the traditional white burial
shroud. They were Ebrahim Yazdi, Sadegh Ghotbzadeh, Mohammad Mojtahed Shabestari, and the chemistry student who had come that day to see him, Abdolkarim Soroush.

Yazdi and Ghotbzadeh would go on to be important figures in the first postrevolutionary governments of Iran. Shabestari, a young cleric who led prayers at a mosque in Hamburg at the time of Shariati’s death, would later become one of the leading clerical voices for religious reform in the 1990s.

As for Soroush, he would go on to become a lay theologian of far-reaching influence. Like Shariati, he would argue for a living Islam, flexible enough to accommodate contemporary ideas and concerns if not to become their vehicle. Like Shariati, too, Soroush would attract legions of young acolytes who sought to reconcile their anger at the Iranian state with their fealty to Islam. By the early 1990s, Soroush was Iran’s leading lay theorist of Islamic reform—Shariati’s heir apparent and one of his most potent posthumous critics.

  TWO  

I
SLAMIC
R
EPUBLIC

So our city will be governed by us and you with waking minds, and not as most cities now, which are inhabited and ruled darkly as in a dream by men who fight one another for shadows and wrangle for office as if that were a great good, when the truth is that the city in which those who are to rule are least eager to hold office must needs be best administered and most free from dissension, and the state that gets the contrary type of ruler will be the opposite of this.

By all means, he said.

—
P
LATO,
The Republic

I
N 1963,
in the city of Shiraz, Alireza Haghighi was born between worlds. His aristocratic mother had married a bazaar merchant who bled her of her fortune and took another wife, leaving mother and son to a hardscrabble life in the city’s southern slums. There the neighbors were gruff, poor, and devout. Alireza’s mother grew remote in her piety. From her, Alireza learned to read the Quran in Arabic, something none of his peers could do. She
tolerated no television, nor any other Western affectation. Alireza was a solitary child, and lonely but for the books he turned to for knowledge of humanity and of the world.

He was a hungry patron at the local library, where he checked out
The Count of Monte Cristo
and read it in one night, to the librarian’s disbelief. After school he prayed at the neighborhood mosque, Masjed-e No. The mosque, too, had a library, and it was there that Alireza discovered Samad Behrangi.
The Little Black Fish
spoke to him of the isolation of poverty and the occlusion of wealth. He felt himself swimming in both the mountain stream and the open waters, his gaze constantly forced on the confusing disparity between his life and the lives of his rich, secular, cosmopolitan cousins, whose homes were as lavishly appointed as Alireza’s was bare. He did not know it then, but he inhabited the very cleavage in Iranian society that would produce a revolution and its continuous aftershocks. He resolved to educate himself somehow. He had the intelligence and drive, and he had no father looming over him, pressing him into a family business or dictating the course of his education. He would compete with his cousins by the power of his mind.

In the south of Shiraz, there was no obvious haven for a restless intellect. But there was a shrine, in short walking distance from Alireza’s home, and a mosque surrounded by trees. At Masjed-e No, Alireza escaped the rough manners and profane language of his neighborhood and entered into a sort of polite society, one that prized courtesy, helpfulness, sensitivity to suffering, and Islamic morality. The refinement of the clergy mirrored the refinement of his educated cousins, but within the moral boundaries of his mother’s faith. For Alireza, the mosque was father and teacher, political conclave and spiritual home. In the waning decade of the shah’s rule, the mosque crackled with talk of social justice, an end to tyranny and to the inequality it was Alireza’s birthright to stare down.

He dreamed of becoming a clergyman. At fifteen he left high school to study at the nearest seminary. When the seminary’s headmaster, Ayatollah Hashemi Dastgheib, talked to the students about the Quran, Alireza, his
mind alight, would pepper the old cleric with questions. Why did the Quran say this? Why did it not say that? One night the ayatollah pulled Alireza aside. The seminary was not the right place for him, he explained. All the other students were from rural villages. Only Alireza was from Shiraz. It would be better for Alireza to return to his high school, earn his diploma, and then come back to study religion. From this conversation Alireza understood that his questions had been received as impertinence, that he had inadvertently undermined the authority of his elders and was being asked to leave.

Although his clerical ambitions dimmed, Islam remained one of Alireza’s two great loves. The other was cinema, a forbidden fruit from the West, secreted away from him in movie houses from which his mother forbade him entry and which he could not in any case afford. One of his neighbors had fashioned a homemade zoetrope, through which he would feed reels of Hollywood films while Alireza peered into the lighted box with just one eye. Like this, Alireza became entranced with cinema. He tutored neighborhood children, helping them with their schoolwork in exchange for bouts of television or glimpses of American movies. Years later, when he saw
Cinema Paradiso
, the 1988 Italian film about a movie director’s childhood obsession with cinema, Alireza felt it told the story of his life. Movies, he had determined as a boy, were a keyhole through which he could see the contents of other people’s minds, the very grain of life and love in worlds far away.

Had he lived in Tehran, had he been five years older, Alireza might have spent long evenings under Shariati’s spell at Hosseiniyeh Ershad. But it was 1977, near the time of Shariati’s death, when his works and those of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini began to circulate in Alireza’s Shiraz. When Shariati died, Alireza was fourteen. He knew just enough to eagerly accept when a friend’s brother, who was a university student, offered to take him to the memorial service and demonstration on campus marking the fortieth day after Shariati’s death.

The events of that day would brand themselves on Alireza’s memory, but not because of Shariati. When he arrived on campus, the friend’s
brother vanished almost instantly into the crowd, and a policeman stopped Alireza, still a slender boy, to demand his university ID. He thought quickly. He told the officer he was there to find his high school teacher, because he was looking for his grade. The officer struck him, and Alireza fell to the ground. Nobody came to his aid.

The police waved him to a spot behind a line of police cars and fire trucks near the Eram Garden, by the Faculty of Law. In that spot was another young man who had gotten into trouble. His name was Ahmad Meftahi. Some six months later, Meftahi would be murdered by the shah’s police. After the revolution, Alireza’s high school would be renamed for him. But that afternoon Meftahi and Alireza watched in silence as students spilled toward a dormitory where the memorial ceremony would be held. It was a place, a moment, heavy with tension, the anticipation of violence, the electricity of a cause deeply felt. And just then, in the road alongside Alireza, a young man pulled up in a Citroën.

“Mehri!” the man called. It was his girlfriend’s name. “Mehri! Come here.”

The young man saw Alireza and the outpouring of students, most of them in modest religious dress. “Why are all these people here?” he asked.

“For Shariati,” said Alireza.

“Shariati?” said the young man. “Who is Shariati?”

Mehri had broken through the crowd and approached the window of the Citroën. The young man kissed her, a long kiss hello, something Alireza had never seen anyone do in public.

At fourteen, there was a lot he had never seen. He had never been to a party, apart from the weddings of his rich cousins. He knew little of youthful levity and still less of the cosmopolitan adolescent culture of his day, charged with adrenaline and sexuality and revolt. Between his poverty and his mosque, he had spent even his childhood in serious discussions, in books and prayer. And now, in the movie rolling in Alireza’s mind, there at the Eram Garden was a brightly lit scene, a footloose young man and his girlfriend in a Citroën, and the somber boy by the side of the road, feeling in himself something monastic, the drive into politics as abstemious and
serious as his lost calling to the clergy. Some people, he understood in that moment, came to a scene like this one at the University of Shiraz for politics. Some people came for life. For Alireza, politics would have to
be
life, his source of meaning, his intoxicant of choice. Otherwise a person would give up, would fall instead for the girl and the car and the afternoon sun. There might not even be a price to be paid.

That night the Islamic Revolution began in Shiraz. At Masjed-e No there was a ceremony for Shariati, and as the crowd departed, it sent up a chant: “Hail to Ayatollah Khomeini.” It was the first invocation of the exiled cleric at an Iranian demonstration—the first, it would turn out, of a great many. There was no mention of the shah, only of Khomeini. When the police attacked the crowd, Alireza and Meftahi slipped away. The demonstrators surged toward Capri Cinema, the city’s movie house, shattering its plate glass window with rocks.