Stranger to History (20 page)
‘They didn’t like us having a satellite dish and receiver so they broke into the building,’ she said, eyes wide, reliving her surprise at their arrival. Tehran was full of satellite dishes and the crackdowns were more a moneymaking enterprise than a concerted effort at stopping their spread. ‘They came in and broke everything,’ she continued, looking about the place as though making an inventory of what ‘everything’ meant to her. ‘When they began to search the flat, I said, “If it’s the satellite dish you want, then take it, here.” But they said, “Maybe you have guns or something.” Then they took my husband and made him spend the night in jail. We had to buy his lashes. Forty lashes. The government has a little package.’
‘Buy his lashes’: the phrase brought back the feeling from Vanak Square, the anachronism of Islamic punishment, so clearly outlined in the Book, and its savagery amplified by the modern bureaucracy that dealt it out. Her husband managed without faith, but Nargis, naturally inclined to spiritual quests, rejected it for a philosophy derived from Hinduism. Nargis grew up in a religious family. Her mother was a believer and her aunt a servant in one of the most sacred mosques in the country, the Shrine of the Imam Reza in Mashhad. It wasn’t easy for Nargis to reject Islam. ‘She cries for me,’ Nargis laughed, speaking of her mother. ‘She doesn’t understand why I would worship what she thinks of as pieces of wood. She tells me she prays that I won’t go to hell.’
‘What drew you to Hinduism?’ I asked, watching her put teabags into mugs of hot water.
‘Before we were Zoroastrians,’ she said, ‘and that is so close to Krishnaism and so far from Islam. Both use nature. Krishnaism is more natural in its eating, its culture. It uses the sun and the moon, and for me that is so much more comfortable than the government’s version of Islam where they just do whatever they want and say it is Islam.’
Nargis was too open, too spiritual in a real sense, to damn any faith, but she couldn’t have gone on with the republic’s religion. The tea made, she stared at it vacantly, and shrugging her shoulders, said, ‘Real Islam is not like what we have in Iran. We have Shiite Islam here, which people made after the Prophet, and it’s totally different from the real Islam. During Muharram [the Shia month of mourning] we have half the Muslims celebrating and the other half beating themselves and crying. It confuses me. Just because some people did something fifteen hundred years ago we don’t have to go on doing it. Shias don’t like to be happy, they prefer to be angry.’ My amazement made her smile. One really needed to come to the Islamic Republic of Iran to hear a Shia Muslim speak in this way. The ability to look hard at your own faith, to reject it, to consider another: I sometimes thought I must have travelled through a good part of the Muslim world in search of this intellectual openness and not found it until now. It made it possible for Nargis to think of herself as once Zoroastrian and to care as much about Tibet’s freedom as Palestine’s; it made it possible for her to overcome the agony at the deaths of Ali and Hussein; it freed her judgements from the motives of faith.
Gulbadi, her teacher, had reached her through vegetarianism. He gave cooking classes in extreme vegetarianism in which eggs, onions and garlic were prohibited as well as meat. Nargis didn’t seem to know it, but the diet was classically Jain, a derivative religion of Hinduism that practises extreme non-violence. For fear of the regime Gulbadi devised an ingenious way of reaching people – ingenious because the emphasis on eating meat, especially red meat, was part of the culture of the faith, part of its seemingly limitless compass. And yet, vegetarianism was not prohibited; it was just unusual for Muslims. Gulbadi, knowingly or not, walked the finest line between the commandments of the faith and its culture. He drew people to his classes who, if considering extreme vegetarianism, would in all likelihood have also had doubts about Islam.
‘What is the punishment for apostasy?’ I asked Nargis, who was watering the plants now. I was trying to broach the subject of the risk she took in embracing ‘Krishnaism’.
Her eyes showed white. She looked at me in disbelief as if
I
were considering this path. ‘In Iran,’ she whispered, looking up from a money plant, ‘they kill you for it. If Muslims change their religion, they are killed. They believe here,’ she added, by way of gentle explanation, ‘that Islam is the last religion, so if you are a Muslim, you have the best religion. That is their mentality.’
Nargis slipped on a white muslin ‘manteau’, a long coat with buttons down the front, and threw a purple scarf over her springy black hair. She was ready to take me to meet the other Hare Krishnas. We went down to the ground floor in a very small lift, then raced across a cemented driveway in the rain. Nargis drove a jeep, which was parked in the street. The sight of her wet, white manteau clinging to her, the coils of black hair pushing up the purple scarf and the dark, delicate Nargis behind the wheel made me wonder if we weren’t committing some kind of offence; cars had been pulled over for much less.
The rain made the traffic worse and I stopped paying attention to where we were going. On a busy main road, Nargis veered left and parked at the side. A gushing open drain, clean as ever, divided the main road from a narrow service lane. Nargis moved stealthily across the lane. I followed her as she slipped behind a black gate on to the paved drive of a low, double-storey bungalow with tinted sliding doors. The rain fell lightly around us and there wasn’t a sound. It was still very early and it felt as though everyone was asleep in the house. We made our way round an empty swimming-pool in the garden towards the sliding doors. Outside them, on a veranda, were the first signs that the house was not asleep: dozens of shoes and sandals were strewn about.
As Nargis approached, the doors opened and we were ushered into a dark anteroom by a tall, smiling man with a short grey beard. The little house was crowded, and after the silence outside, I suddenly found myself in a warren of rooms alive with murmurs, chanting and clashing cymbals. My eyes had not adjusted when I lost Nargis. The man who showed us in took my wrist and led me into a blue room with a dim green chandelier. Inside, forty or fifty people sat, rotating rhythmically, in front of a painting of the blue god, his head cocked to one side, a peacock feather in his crown. At one end of the room, two women in white, one with a drum round her neck, were singing and gently rocking forward and back on the balls of their feet. ‘Hare Krishna, hare rama’ went through the room again and again. Some faces watched the women, feeding off their ecstasies, others looked ahead at Gulbadi, a little bespectacled man with a greying crew-cut and a youthful face, chanting behind a low desk with a book on it. Outside, through the tinted glass doors, the garden was quiet and wet, revealing nothing of the warmth and throng within.
From Nargis, I had gained the impression that the Hare Krishnas would be like her, young, rebellious, slightly new age. But the faces I saw in the blue room were nothing like what I expected. Though there were several young people, there were also older women, mothers and wives, some fully covered. On the other side of the room, I saw balding, middle-aged men, who looked like bankers and shopkeepers, in beige trousers and checked shirts, with gold rings on their fingers. The average age of the men was well over forty. Somehow the middle-aged, middle-class aspect of the crowd, the men’s slightly embarrassed faces, brought vulnerability to the group – the vulnerability of people making a great change late in life. As though submitting to some hidden desire, balancing something that felt right yet seemed wrong, they let their voices catch the increasingly rapid pace of the chanting. One or two eyed me with suspicion. The energy between Gulbadi’s chanting and the two musicians was building.
The room was covered with stylised pictures and icons in vivid colours, of Swami Prabhupada, the twentieth-century founder of the Hare Krishnas; of Krishna as a child playing with butter; Krishna, in a Bollywood-style love scene with his girlfriend, Radha; Krishna with his flute; Krishna in grand format; Krishna in a small, makeshift temple with fake yellow flowers placed outside; and, most significantly, a picture of Narasimha, the god Vishnu’s half-lion, half-man incarnation tearing to pieces a king who won’t allow his son freedom of worship. It was not an image I had seen often, even in India, and I couldn’t help but think that its presence in Tehran was Gulbadi’s own private stab at the Islamic Republic.
Gulbadi, caught up in a chanting fever, was now hardly able to separate consonant from vowel. The ‘Hare’ had gone and the blue god’s name was now just a breathy whisper: ‘Krishna, Krish-na, Krish-na, rama, rama, rama.’ Just at the point when it seemed the momentum had to break, it got faster and louder. I was watching Gulbadi when someone walked into the room behind me. It was the expression on his face, of fear and resignation, that made me turn. I saw a tall man with a stoop, and a short, salt and pepper beard, come in and sit down. His entry coincided with Gulbadi upping the ante: ‘Krishna, Krishna, Krishna, rama, rama, rama, Ali, Ali, Ali, Allah, Allah, Allah.’
What?
I didn’t know it then but the man who’d just walked in was the regime’s spy. Gulbadi had been closed down, put in jail, faced court trials, but he hadn’t given up. The Islamic Republic, at last, acting always with the subtlety of which Amir had spoken, decided to use him rather than silence him.
Soon after his arrival, the chanting died down and Gulbadi began a sermon in Farsi. I got up and went to find Nargis. A number of people were sitting round a dining-table next to a refrigerator, listening to the sermon; it was just an ordinary house when it wasn’t a temple. Nargis was listening from just outside the room. When it was over, Gulbadi fielded questions. He made a comparison between Kalki, the final incarnation of Vishnu, who comes on a white horse to bring in a better age and the Shia Mahdi, who also comes on a white horse at the end of the world. A schoolteacher was asking if, perhaps, they might come sooner. ‘No,’ Gulbadi said, and Nargis translated, ‘He must take his time.’ With this, the meeting was dismissed and tea and sweets were served on the dining-table. Nargis took the opportunity to introduce me to Gulbadi.
He was nervous. He gave me a long, involved speech on how he hadn’t rejected Islam. ‘People in India ask me if I converted,’ he said, ‘but Prabhupada’s instruction is about the love of God and he has many names. I am a Muslim, I love God and Muhammad. I didn’t reject one for the other, I accepted them all.’ Then he came out with what was really on his mind. ‘He is a judge of the courts,’ he whispered, looking at the man who had come in late, ‘and a very Islamic person. He became interested in our classes. I had a case in the courts, but by his mercy he talked to the other officers and saved us.’
This was not quite true. The man was a government monitor.
On the way to Gulbadi’s vegetarian restaurant, Nargis told me that the judge often disrupted Gulbadi’s sermons by saying that Islam was superior to Krishnaism and suggested books that showed how the Koran was more powerful than the Bhagavad Gita. That morning his presence led Gulbadi to make an energetic sermon cast in Hindu terms against democracy, America and the material world. ‘How can they bring democracy when they don’t even have it in their own countries?’ he had asked. ‘They are in passion, and passion makes anger, which makes war. That’s why America makes these wars against Afghanistan and Iraq.’
Gulbadi’s vegetarian restaurant was on the veranda of an attractive red-brick building, near the embassies. This was an older part of town, with wide boulevards and low, heavy bureaucratic buildings. The old American embassy was just next door, its walls now covered with vivid, anti-American murals and slogans, the faint outline of its defaced crest still visible at the gate. Houshmand, a friend of Nargis, had joined us. He was a slight, fine-featured student with dark, intelligent eyes.
‘In this country, the government can do what they like,’ Nargis explained, referring to the earlier episode of the government spy.
‘Did Gulbadi switch to saying “Ali” because he came in?’
‘You can make this connection,’ she laughed.
Houshmand looked at me intently. Minutes ago he had also been laughing, telling me how they had picked up his brother and given him a full eighty lashes because they had found a picture of him at a party from the year before in his car glovebox. ‘We have a thousand experiences like this. Maybe I do a business with the government and make them whips for lashing.’ Now, becoming serious, he said, ‘You must understand the difference between the real Islam and what you see here, which is not Islam, and the real Muslims and these Muslims you see here. All religions try to give you inner peace, but only a few intelligent people understand the real religion. Even with Hindus, you have the bad ones, who tell me to go out of the temple, but with our Muslim religion, we have more of a problem.’
‘Why?’
They talked between themselves for a few seconds, Houshmand arranging the words he wanted to give me. Then he looked up and said, ‘I think Muslims are more strict because, I don’t know when this happened, they started to feel danger from other religions, maybe three or four hundred years ago. And the father started telling his son that you must fight the other religion and the son tells his son the same thing. And now, today, we have this.’ Arm outstretched, he pointed at the city around us, still drying after the morning shower.
The ‘other religion’ was the growth of the West and the dates were roughly right: between two and three hundred years ago European powers, charged with new learning, grew stronger and Muslim empires everywhere began to fail. The faith’s response was to retreat behind the purity of its Book and Traditions and to assert its simplicities more forcefully. Wilfred Blunt, writing in the interim between what seemed like the end of the Wahhabis and their resurgence in the twentieth century, had seen in their literalism a spirit of reform, but felt that their two mistakes, which were really the same mistake, were an over-insistence on trifles, the letter of the Book, and the attempt to Arabianise the world. But to be in Iran, and Saudi Arabia, more than a century after Blunt was writing, it seemed as though the trifles, rather than holding back the literalist imposition of Islam, had become the instrument by which regimes that sought to execute these programmes could control their population. But an entity like the Islamic Republic, perhaps many hundreds of years in the making, had, in imposing the modern tyranny of trifles, opened itself up to the charge of not representing the ‘real faith’ and, more importantly, of being mired in the corruption that lay behind the insistence on trifles.