Among the Believers (11 page)

He showed me the city of the revolution. On this tree-lined shopping avenue, in that burnt-out building (its blackened window openings not noticeable at first in the fume-stained street), the Shah’s soldiers had taken up their positions. They had fired on demonstrators. And here, in this doorway, a man had died. After six months the blood was barely visible: just dark specks on the dirty concrete. In two places someone had written, with a black felt-tip pen, in Persian characters of a size that might have been used for a private note:
This is the blood of a martyr
. “Martyr” was a precise religious word; but Behzad could also read it politically.

On Revolution Avenue, formerly Shah Reza, opposite the big iron-railed block of Tehran University, were the publishers (mingled with men’s shops) and the pavement booksellers and cassette-sellers and print-sellers. The cassettes were of speeches by Khomeini and other ayatollahs; they were also—in spite of Khomeini’s ban on music—of popular Persian and Indian songs. Some booksellers had books in Persian about the revolution, its ideologues and its martyrs. Some had more solid piles of communist literature, Persian paperbacks, with hardcover sets of Lenin or Marx in English, from Russia. One revolution appeared to flow into the other.

And there were photograph albums of the revolution. The emphasis in these albums was on death, blood, and revenge. There were photographs of people killed during the Shah’s time; photographs of the uprising: blood in the streets, bodies in the morgues, with slogans daubed in blood on the white tiles; galleries of people executed after the revolution, and shown dead, page after page, corpse upon corpse. One corpse was that of Hoveida, the Shah’s prime minister, hurried out to death late one night by Khalkhalli’s orders and shot twice, first in the neck, then in the head: and the black bullet hole in Hoveida’s old-man’s neck was clear in the photograph.

These were the souvenir books of the revolution, put out by competing publishers. It was the other side of Iranian sentimentality, also available here, in the stock of the print-sellers: dream landscapes of water and trees, paintings of children and beautiful women with thick, inexplicable
tears running half-way down their cheeks. Behzad loved those tears.

All the buildings in the university block—founded by the Shah’s father—were disfigured with slogans. The university was the great meeting place of Tehran, and even on a day like this, a day without any scheduled event, it was full of discussion groups. Behzad said, “It goes on all the time.” What did they talk about? He said, “The same things. Islam, communism, the revolution.” It looked like a pacific campus scene; it was hard to associate these young men in jeans and pretty shirts with the bloodiness celebrated in the books and albums across the road.

But violence was in the air, and just after we came out through the main gate we saw this incident. A student in a white shirt, small and with glasses, inexpertly and with some comic effort taped a leaflet onto the iron rails of the gate. The leaflet was a protest about the closing down of
Ayandegan
, the paper of the left. A workman near a food stall at the edge of the pavement walked slowly over, drew a red hammer and sickle on the leaflet, crossed the whole sheet with an X, slapped the student twice in the middle of the pavement crowd, and then, without hurry, taped up the defaced leaflet more securely.

The student had ducked to save his glasses and his eyes. No one moved to help him. Even Behzad did nothing. He only said, as though appealing to me for justice, “Did you see that? Did you
see
that?”

The two revolutions appeared to flow together, the revolution of Khomeini and what Behzad would have seen as the true revolution of the people. But they were distinct. The previous weekend Behzad and some of his group had gone to a village to do “constructive” work. They had run into trouble with the Revolutionary Guards: every village had its
komiteh
, young men with guns who were now the law in many parts of Iran. The Guards, Muslims, didn’t want communists in the village.

Who were these Muslim militants? Behzad said, “They’re
lumpen
. Do you know the word?” The village Guards were
lumpen
, like the workman who had slapped the student. The doctrinal word helped Behzad; it enabled him to keep his faith in the people.

I
T
was a different scene at the university the next morning. It was the Friday sabbath again, and this was the third successive Friday on which there were to be mass prayers in the university grounds.

Behzad and I walked from the hotel, and when we got to Revolution Avenue it seemed that half Tehran was walking with us. No buses or trucks had brought these people in; they had walked. The crowd was thick outside the university; cars moved carefully; separate little groups among the walkers shouted slogans that were barely audible in the deep hubbub.

We passed the pavement booksellers and print-sellers and at the end of the block we turned off to the right, following the university rails. The wide side street, sloping up to North Tehran, was lined on both sides with plane trees and narrow water channels, flowing fast. A bearded young man outside the university rails, a book-pedlar, was holding up a booklet in each hand and shouting, “These books are against communism and imperialism.”

Behzad said pityingly, “To them the words are the same.”

We passed the man and were continuing along the rails when Behzad pulled me back. He said, “Here we must follow Islamic law. This side of the road is for women.”

We crossed the road, walked up some way beside the fast water channel, and for an hour or more, on the pavement reserved for men (as we thought), in the contracting, thinning shade of a plane tree, we watched the crowd coming up from Revolution Avenue, the women black-veiled and black-gowned on one side, the men on the other. Fervent, frenzied men squatted by the water channel, did their ritual wash, and then pelted on; it was as if there was a competition in frenzy or the display of frenzy. Whenever Behzad and I stopped talking we heard the sound of feet, the chatter of the walking crowd, the occasional cry of a baby. A faint dust rose above the university grounds.

From time to time groups came up shouting slogans about unity; once there was a group in paratroop camouflage clothes with G-3 rifles. Revolutionary Guards appeared, keeping the flow moving, keeping men separate from women. Once I saw a Kurd or a man in Kurdish costume: the loosest kind of belted dungaree, with very baggy trousers tapering off at the ankles. Once, amazingly, on our pavement there passed by a plump young woman in tight jeans and high heels bound on some quite different business. She walked as fast as she could on her heels, looking at no one.

The crowd thickened, men and women now in distinct streams, the men moving, the women slowing down, bunching, checked by the
crush at the women’s entrance some way up. A speech began to come over the loudspeakers, in a breaking, passionate voice; it added to the frenzy. The pavement on the women’s side filled up. Women began to settle down on newspaper and cheap rugs on the street itself, at first in the glare-shot shade of the plane trees, then anywhere. They invaded our pavement, or the pavement we had thought was ours. Indifferent to us, they dug into their baskets, spread their bits of rug and cloth and pieces of paper at our feet; and after being part of the anonymous, impressive, black-gowned flow, they turned out to be peasant women with worn faces, fierce about their patch of pavement or street.

A Revolutionary Guard came and spoke roughly to Behzad and me. Behzad said, “He says we must let the women pray.”

The Che Guevara outfit of the Guard—the dark glasses, the gun—the gear of revolution serving this cause: the incongruity was at that moment irritating. But Behzad said gently, “Let us walk with the people.”

We joined the walkers in the street, became part of the sound of feet, and Behzad said, “I like walking with the people.” Then he said, “This is not a religious occasion. It is a political occasion.”

At the gate for women it was black with women’s veils and gowns, women inside unable to move, women outside waiting to get in. Dust rose from the black mass. The intersection at the northern end of the university block was kept clear by men in battle dress, with guns. The northern side of the university was reserved for men; already they had spread over half the road. Every gate was guarded. And it was through one of the northern gates (many more gates for men than for women) that Behzad led me in, after telling a Revolutionary Guard, in reply to the Guard’s casual question, that yes, I was a Muslim.

Behzad wanted to see the crowd. I was nervous of being caught by the prayers. Behzad understood. He said it would look bad for us to leave when the prayers started; and, of course, if we stayed we wouldn’t know what to do, and it would look worse. But the prayers weren’t going to start for a while. It was still only time for the speeches, and they could go on and on, as this first warm-up speech (by a lesser ayatollah, and not worth translating) had been going on, booming out over the loudspeakers.

The true crowd was in the centre, around the university mosque.
But even a few yards in from the gates men had settled down for prayer in the half-shade of every little tree and shrub. Some had handkerchiefs or folded pieces of cloth on their heads; some wore newspaper hats and cardboard caps, like people in a sports stadium.

Two workmen came in, running, still acting out their frenzy. They jostled us deliberately as they ran, and one man shouted, “If the Shah’s father knew that the university was going to be like this one day, he would never have started it.”

The ayatollah at the microphone asked for chants from the seated multitude. And again and again the responses came, drowning the amplification from the loudspeakers. The chants were about unity. Unity, union, facelessness, in an immense human coagulation: what was joy to the crowd quickly became oppressive to me—if only because I had never before been in an enclosed space with nearly a million people—and it was a relief, when we went outside through one of the eastern exits and began to walk back to the hotel, to find that there were still other people about, doing other things.

We had something to eat in the hotel dining-room. A radio was on loud in the kitchen: the speeches at the university were still going on.

The only other people in the big dining-room were a party of stranded Italians who had been in the hotel for a few days. Their company must have been paying their hotel bills, and possibly they had no money of their own. They were elegant, in their thirties, and they all wore trousers of the feminine Italian cut: tight, high-waisted, hip-rounding. They seldom went out; they ate every meal in the hotel; and their liveliness and their consciousness of their style diminished from day to day, from meal to meal. The hotel, once known for its food, had lost its chef since the revolution.

And what, after the walking and the frenzy and the waiting in the sun, were the university crowds—and our uniformed waiters—hearing?

“Iranians should keep the flame of Islam burning.”

They had heard it before, but the familiarity was like ritual. And the speaker was the much-loved Ayatollah Taleqani, the leader of the prayers. It was Taleqani who had decreed these mass prayers at Tehran University as a demonstration of revolutionary unity, unity as in the days of the Prophet and the desert tribes. Taleqani was an old man, and he was to die a few weeks later. He was thought, even by the left, to be the most moderate and intelligent of the ayatollahs; but at his death
it was to come out that all this time he was the head of the Revolutionary Council.

The Prophet himself, Ayatollah Taleqani was saying, might have had the Iranian revolution in mind when he predicted that the Persians, the descendants of Salman-e-Farsi, were to be “the pioneers of Islam at a time when the world had deviated from the faith.”

In 637
A.D.
, just five years after the death of the Prophet, the Arabs began to overrun Persia, and all Persia’s great past, the past before Islam, was declared a time of blackness. Pride in Persia remained: the Persians had grown to believe that they were the purest Muslims. It was at the root of their Shia passion, their animosity towards what was not Shia.

T
HE
ayatollahs, great prelates, had dispersed for Ramadan, each man, like a medieval baron during this month of retreat, staying close to the source of his power. Khomeini ruled from Qom; and in Qom Khalkhalli was close to Khomeini. Taleqani led the prayers in Tehran. And in Mashhad, five hundred miles to the northeast, near the Russian and Afghanistan borders, Shariatmadari cultivated his Turkish following and was reportedly sulking. It was said that he didn’t like how the elections for the Assembly of Experts had gone.

Mashhad was a good base for an ayatollah. In Mashhad was a shrine more sacred than the tomb of the sister of the Eighth Imam in Qom; in Mashhad was the tomb of the Eighth Imam himself. He died in 817
A.D.
, one year after he had been nominated to succeed to the overlord-ship of the whole Muslim world; and the Shias say he was poisoned by a son of the Arabian Nights ruler, Harun al-Rashid. Dynastic conflict, palace intrigue, the ups and downs of Persian fortunes within the Islamic empire: they are the stuff of Shia theology.

Behzad and I should have been on our way to Mashhad that day. But there had been problems. First it seemed that Behzad’s mother was coming up to Tehran; then it seemed that Behzad’s girl friend was coming for the weekend. The girl friend was important. She was twenty-five, with a degree in economics, but with no job in postrevolutionary Iran; and, as I understood, she had gone to spend some time in the provinces. Then, oddly, it turned out that she was in Mashhad.

So we could go to Mashhad, after all; and Behzad and his girl could travel back to Tehran together. But Mashhad received a lot of visitors
during Ramadan, and the queues at the railway station at seven that morning had been for two days ahead. So we had decided to fly, and had been lucky, after waiting for Iran Air to open, to get the last tickets for the following day.