Shah of Shahs (8 page)

The Shiites have indeed had a tragic fate, and the sense of tragedy, of the historical wrongs and misfortunes that accompany them, is encoded deep within their consciousness. The world contains communities for whom nothing has gone right for centuries—everything has slipped through their hands, and every ray of hope has faded as soon as it began to shine—these people seem to bear some sort of fatal brand. So it is with the Shiites. For this reason, perhaps, they have an air of dead seriousness, of fervent unsettling adherence to their arguments and principles, and also (this is only an impression, of course) of sadness.

As soon as the Shiites (who constitute barely a tenth of all Muslims, the rest being Sunnis) go into opposition, the persecution begins. To this day they live the memory of the centuries of pogroms against them, and so they close themselves off in ghettoes, use signals only they understand, and devise conspiratorial forms of behavior. But the blows keep falling on their heads.

Gradually they start to look for safer places where they will have a better chance of survival. In those times of difficult and slow communication, in which distance and space constitute an efficient isolator, a separating wall, the Shiites try to move as far as possible from the center of power (which lies first in Damascus and later in Baghdad). They scatter throughout the world, across mountains and deserts, and descend step by step underground. So the Shiite diaspora, which has lasted till today, comes into being. The epic of the Shiites is full of acts of incredible abjuration, courage, and spiritual strength. A part of the wandering community heads east. Crossing the Tigris and the Euphrates, it passes through the mountains of Zagros and reaches the Iranian desert plateau.

At this time, Iran, exhausted and laid waste by centuries of war with Byzantium, has been conquered by Arabs who are spreading the new faith, Islam. This process is going on slowly, amid continual fighting. Until now the Iranians have had an official religion, Zoroastrianism, related to the ruling Sassanid dynasty. Now comes the attempt to impose upon them another official religion, associated with a new and, what's more, a foreign regime—Sunni Islam. It seems like jumping from the frying pan into the fire.

But exactly at this moment the poor, exhausted, wretched Shiites, still bearing the visible traces of the Gehenna they have lived through, appear. The Iranians discover that these Shiites are Muslims and, additionally (as they claim), the only legitimate Muslims, the only preservers of a pure faith for which they are ready to give their lives. Well, fine, say the Iranians—but what about your Arab brothers who have conquered us? Brothers? cry the outraged Shiites. Those Arabs are Sunnis, usurpers and our persecutors. They murdered Ali and seized power. No, we don't acknowledge them. We are in opposition! Having made this proclamation, the Shiites ask if they might rest after their long journey and request a jug of cold water.

This pronouncement by the barefoot newcomers sets the Iranians thinking along important lines. You can be a Muslim without being an establishment Muslim. What's more, you can be an opposition Muslim! And that makes you an even better Muslim! They feel empathy for these poor, wronged Shiites. At this moment the Iranians themselves are poor and feel wronged. They have been ruined by war, and an invader controls their country. So they quickly find a common language with these exiles who are looking for shelter and counting on their hospitality. The Iranians begin to listen to the Shiite preachers and finally accept their faith.

In this adroit maneuver one can see all the intelligence and independence of the Iranians. They have a particular talent for preserving their independence under conditions of subjugation. For hundreds of years the Iranians have been the victims of conquest, aggression, and partition. They have been ruled for centuries on end by foreigners or local regimes dependent on foreign powers, and yet they have preserved their culture and language, their impressive personality and so much spiritual fortitude that in propitious circumstances they can arise reborn from the ashes. During the twenty-five centuries of their recorded history the Iranians have always, sooner or later, managed to outwit anyone with the impudence to try ruling them. Sometimes they have to resort to the weapons of uprising and revolution to obtain their goal, and then they pay the tragic levy of blood. Sometimes they use the tactic of passive resistance, which they apply in a particularly consistent and radical way. When they get fed up with an authority that has become unbearable, the whole country freezes, the whole nation does a disappearing act. Authority gives orders but no one is listening, it frowns but no one is looking, it raises its voice but that voice is as one crying in the wilderness. Then authority falls apart like a house of cards. The most common Iranian technique, however, is absorption, active assimilation, in a way that turns the foreign sword into the Iranians' own weapon.

And so it is after the Arab conquest. You want Islam, they tell the conquerors, so Islam you'll get—but in our own national form and in an independent, rebellious version. It will be faith, but an Iranian faith that expresses our spirit, our culture, and our independence. This philosophy underlies the Iranian decision to accept Islam. They accept it in the Shiite variant, which at that time is the faith of the wronged and the conquered, an instrument of contestation and resistance, the ideology of the unhumbled who are ready to suffer but will not renounce their principles because they want to preserve their distinctness and dignity. Shiism will become not only the national religion of the Iranians but also their refuge and shelter, a form of national survival and, at the right moments, of struggle and liberation.

Iran transforms itself into the most restless province of the Muslim empire. Someone is always plotting here, there is always some uprising, masked messengers apt pear and disappear, secret leaflets and brochures circulate. The representatives of the occupying authorities, the Arab governors, spread terror and end up with results opposite to what they'd intended. In answer to the official terror the Iranian Shiites begin to fight back, but not in a frontal assault, for which they are too weak. An element of the Shiite community from now on will be—if one can use such a term—the terrorist fringe. Down to the present day, small, conspiratorial terrorist organizations that know neither fear nor pity operate in Iran. Half of the killings blamed on the ayatollahs are performed on the sentences of these groups. Generally, history regards the Shiites as the founders of the theory and practice of individual terror as a means of combat.

Fervor, orthodoxy, and an obsessive, fanatic concern for doctrinal purity characterize the Shiites as they characterize every group that is persecuted, condemned to the ghetto, and made to fight for its survival. A persecuted man cannot survive without an unshakeable faith in the correctness of his choice. He must protect the values that led him to that choice. Thus, all the schisms—and Shiism has lived through dozens of them—had one thing in common: They were all, as we would put it, ultra-leftist. A fanatical branch was always springing up to accuse the remainder of its co-religionists of atrophied zeal, of treating lightly the dictates of faith, of expediency and taking the easy way out. Once the split took place the most fervid of the schismatics would take up arms to finish off the enemies of Islam, redeeming in blood (because they themselves often perished) the treachery and laziness of their backsliding brothers.

The Iranian Shiites have been living underground, in the catacombs, for eight hundred years. Their life recalls the suffering and trials of the first Christians. Sometimes it seems that they will be extirpated completely, that a final annihilation awaits them. For years they have been taking refuge in the mountains, holing up in caves, dying of hunger. Their songs that survive from these years, full of rue and despair, prophesy the end of the world.

But there have also been calmer periods, and then Iran became the refuge of all the oppositionists in the Muslim empire, who arrive from all corners of the world to find shelter, encouragement, and support among the plotting Shiites. They could also take lessons in the great Shiite school of conspiracy. They might, for example, master the principle of dissembling
(taqija),
which facilitates survival. This principle allows the Shiite, when he finds himself up against a stronger opponent, seemingly to accept the prevailing religion and acclaim himself a believer as long as doing so will save him and his people. Shiism also teaches
kitman,
the art of disorienting one's enemies, which allows the Shiite to contradict his own assurances and pretend that he is an idiot when danger threatens. Iran thus becomes a medieval mecca of malcontents, rebels, strange varieties of hermits, prophets, ecstatics, shady heretics, stigmatics, mystics, and fortunetellers, who pour in along every road to teach, contemplate, pray, and soothsay. All this creates the atmosphere of religiosity, exaltation, and mysticism so characteristic of the country. I was very devout in school, says an Iranian, and all the kids thought I had a radiant halo around my head. Try imagining a European leader who writes that once when he was out riding he fell over a cliff and would have died except that a saint reached out a hand to save him. Yet the last Shah described such a scene in a book of his and all Iran read it seriously. Superstitious beliefs, such as faith in numbers, omens, symbols, prophecies, and revelations, have deep roots here.

In the sixteenth century the rulers of the Safavid dynasty raised Shiism to the dignity of official religion. What had been the ideology of mass opposition became the ideology of a state in opposition—for the Iranian state opposed the Sunni domination of the Ottoman Empire. But with time the relations between the monarchy and Shiism grew worse and worse.

The point is that Shiites not only reject the authority of the caliphs; they barely tolerate any lay authority at all. Iran constitutes the unique case of a country whose people believe only in the reign of their religious leaders, the imams, one of whom, the last, left this world (according to rational, if not to Shiite, criteria) in the ninth century.

Here we reach the essence of Shiite doctrine, the main act of faith for its believers. Deprived of any chance to win the caliphate, the Shiites turn their backs on the caliphs and henceforth acknowledge only the leaders of their own faith, the imams. Ali is the first imam, Hassan and Hussein his sons the second and third, and so on until the twelfth. All these imams died violent deaths at the hands of caliphs who saw them as dangerous rivals. The Shiites believe, however, that the twelfth and last imam, Mohammed, did not perish but disappeared into the cave under the great mosque at Samarra, in Iraq. This happened in 878. He is the Hidden Imam, the Awaited One, who will appear at the appropriate time as Mahdi (The One Led By God) to establish the kingdon of righteousness on earth. Afterward comes the end of the world. The Shiites believe that if the Twelfth Imam were not a living presence, the world would cease to be. They draw their spiritual strength from their faith in the Awaited One, they live and die for that faith. This is the simple human longing of a wronged, suffering community that finds hope and, above all, its sense of life, in that idea. We do not know when that Awaited One will appear; it could happen at any moment, even today. Then the tears will cease and each will take his seat at the table of plenty.

The Awaited One is the only leader the Shiites are willing to submit themselves to totally. To a lesser degree they acknowledge their religious helmsmen, the ayatollahs, and to a still lesser degree, the Shah. Because the Awaited One is the Adored, the focus of a cult, the Shah can be at best the Tolerated One.

From the time of the Safavids a dual authority, of the monarchy and the mosque, has existed in Iran. The relations between these two forces have varied but have never been overly friendly. If something disturbs this balance of forces, however, if, as happened, the Shah tries to impose total authority (with, to boot, the help of foreign backers), then the people gather in the mosques and the fighting starts.

For Shiites, the mosque is far more than a place of worship. It is also a haven where they can weather a storm and even save their lives. It is a territory protected by immunity, where authority has no right to enter. It used to be the custom that if a rebel pursued by the police took refuge in a mosque, he was safe and could not be removed by force.

There are marked differences in the construction of a mosque and a Christian church. A church is a closed space, a place of prayer, meditation, and silence. If someone starts talking, others rebuke him. A mosque is different. Its largest component is an open courtyard where people can pray, walk, discuss, even hold meetings. An exuberant social and political life goes on there. The Iranian who has been harassed at work, who encounters only grumpy bureaucrats looking for bribes, who is everywhere spied on by the police, comes to the mosque to find balance and calm, to recover his dignity. Here no one hurries him or calls him names. Hierarchies disappear, all are equal, all are brothers, and—because the mosque is also a place of conversation and dialogue—a man can speak his mind, grumble, and listen to what others have to say. What a relief it is, how much everyone needs it. This is why, as the dictatorship turns the screws and an ever more oppressive silence clouds the streets and workplaces, the mosque fills more and more with people and the hum of voices. Not all those who come here are fervent Muslims, not all are drawn by a sudden wave of devotion—they come because they want to breathe, because they want to feel like people. Even Savak has limited freedom of action on the grounds of the mosque. Nevertheless, the police arrest and torture many clerics who speak out against the abuse of power. Ayatollah Saidi dies during torture, on "the frying pan." Ayatollah Azarshari dies soon afterward, when Savak agents throw him into a pot of boiling oil. Ayatollah Teleghani emerges from prison with only a short time to live because of the way he has been treated. He has no eyelids. As he watched, Savak agents raped Teleghani's daughter, and when the ayatollah closed his eyes, they burned his eyelids with cigarettes so he would have to watch. All this goes on in the 1970s. But in his policy toward the mosque, the Shah entangles himself in no small web of contradictions. On the one hand he persecutes the clerical opposition and, on the other—always courting public favor—he declares himself a fervent Muslim, perpetually makes pilgrimages to the holy places, immerses himself in prayer, and solicits the blessing of the mullahs. How, then, can he declare open war on the mosques?