Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey Read online

  In London the man at the travel agency told me that Iran was a country people were leaving. Nobody was going in; I would have the plane to myself. It wasn’t so. The Iran Air flight that day had been cancelled, and there was a crowd for the British Airways plane to Tehran.

  Most of the passengers—the international mishmash of the airport concourse sifting and sifting itself, through gates and channels, into more or less ethnic flight pens—were Iranians; and they didn’t look like people running away from an Islamic revolution or going back to one. There wasn’t a veil or a head-cover among the women, one or two of whom were quite stylish. They had all done a lot of shopping, and carried the variously designed plastic bags of London stores—Lilly-white, Marks and Spencer, Austin Reed.

  In the plane I sat between two Iranians. The middle-aged woman in the window seat had a coppery skin and golden hair. Her hair looked dyed, her skin seemed stained; and the effect was Eastern and antique, Egyptian: antique cosmetics aiding an antique idea of beauty. She spoke no English and didn’t behave like someone used to air travel. She was unhappy about the ventilation and spoke to the man on my left. She was big, he was small. I thought I was sitting between husband and wife, and offered to change seats with the man on my left.

  He demurred, and said in English that his family were in the seats across the aisle: his young son and daughter and his handsome wife, who couldn’t speak English, but smiled forgivingly at my error.

  He was a physician. He and his family had just been to the United States to see their eighteen-year-old son.

  I recognized that we were beginning to fall into an Eastern, Indian kind of conversation, and I responded as I thought I should. I said, “But that must have been expensive.”

  “It was expensive. For the fare alone, eight hundred pounds per person. Except for the girl. She’s under twelve. Over twelve you pay full fare. Have you been to the United States?”

  “I’ve just spent a year there.”

  “Are you a physician?”

  I didn’t feel, going to Iran, I should say I was a writer. I said, “I am a teacher.” Then I felt I had pitched it too low, so I added, “A professor.”

  “That’s good.” And, as though he drew courage from my calling and my time in America, he said, “The revolution is terrible. They’ve destroyed the country. The army, everything. They’ve killed all the officers. Tehran was a nice city. Restaurants, cafés. Now there’s nothing. That’s why I sent my son away.”

  The boy had been sent to the United States after the revolution, and he had already done well. He had got into a premedical college programme in Indiana. But the United States was more than a place to get an education. It was also—for the Iranian physician, as for the newly rich of so many insecure countries, politicians and businessmen, Arab, South American, West Indian, African—a sanctuary.

  The physician said, “I’ve bought a house there.”

  “What did you pay?”

  “Sixty-four thousand. Forty-four down, twenty on a loan.”

  “Can foreigners buy property in America?”

  “I will tell you. I bought it in my brother’s name.” So the sanctuary had been prepared, and the migration begun, before the revolution. “But now I’ve transferred it to my son’s name. It’s being rented now. Four hundred a month. Paying off the loan. How much do professors get?”

  How much did they get? What figure could I give that would seem reasonable to a man who had just spent six thousand dollars on air fares for a family holiday? I said, “Forty thousand dollars. How much do you make?”

  “I have this government job in the mornings, in a hospital. I get fifteen hundred a month for that.”

  “I thought they paid doctors more in Iran.”

  “But then I have my own clinic in the afternoon, you see. I make about thirty thousand a year from that.”

  “So you make about forty-eight.”

  To the forty I had quoted for myself.

  He said defensively, “But I work hard. I am a man of forty-four. And now,” he added, wiping away his advantage, equalizing our chances, “I don’t know what will happen. These Muslims are a strange people. They have an old mentality. Very old mentality. They are very bad to minorities.”

  What was he, then? Christian, Armenian, Zoroastrian, Jew? Eastern as our conversation had been, I couldn’t bring myself to ask; and in the end, judging me to be safe, he told me. He was a Bahai. I knew the name, nothing more.

  He had not lowered his voice when he had talked about the revolution and the wicked ways of Muslims. I assumed that he was sure of his fellow passengers, that I was among a group of Bahais. And in the stained-looking face and dyed gold hair of the woman beside me I saw a further, disquieting remoteness.

  He said, “We’re international. We have a temple in America. Nice little temple.”

  But, though open with me about money and job, the physician was less than frank about his religion. The Bahais—as I learned later from Behzad—had their own secret frenzy, and it derived from the Shia frenzy of Iran. The Shias were waiting for the Twelfth Imam; the Bahais believed that in the nineteenth century a deputy or surrogate, or the Twelfth Imam himself, had come and gone, and only they, the Bahais, had recognized him. Behzad told me that in the beginning they had been revolutionary, but then they had been corrupted by the British, competing with the Russians for control of Iran.

  It seemed fanciful—I knew that Behzad valued only what was revolutionary. But it wasn’t wholly fanciful. The Shia protest, occurring in the earliest days of the Islamic empire, was a political-racial protest among the subject peoples of that Arab empire; and the faith that had evolved with that protest had remained political, or liable to political manipulation. Recognizing their own line of succession to the Prophet, wailing every year for their martyrs, the men whose rightful claims had been denied, the Shias have remained suspicious of the authority of the state. The Bahai movement in the nineteenth century was subversive. An early call was for “heads to be cut off, books and leaves burnt, places demolished and laid waste, and a general slaughter made”; in 1852 there was an attempt to kill the king.

  Politically, though not in doctrine, the movement was like Khomeini’s against the Shah. Politically, it didn’t take; and the Bahais were left, or stranded, like many other Muslim sects, with the almost unapproachable intricacies of their faith: revelation within revelation, divergence within divergence.

  The physician was right about the persecution, though. The Bahais’ claim about the Twelfth Imam is to the Shias of Iran the most punishable kind of blasphemy; and after the Islamic revolution—proof of the rightness of the true faith—there were to be joyful popular outbursts against the Bahais, and sporadic “revolutionary” executions. The sanctuary in the United States was necessary.

  WE made a technical stop at Kuwait, to refuel; no one left the plane. It was dark, but dawn was not far off. The light began to come; the night vanished. And we saw that the airport—such a pattern of electric lights from above—had been built on sand. The air that came through the ventilators was warm. It was 40 degrees Centigrade outside, 104 Fahrenheit, and the true day had not begun.

  Tehran was going to be cooler, the steward said. It was an hour’s flight to the northeast: more desert, oblongs of pale vegetation here and there, and here and there gathers of rippled earth that sometimes rose to mountains.

  After all that I had heard about the Shah’s big ideas for his country, the airport building at Tehran was a disappointment. The arrival hall was like a big shed. Blank rectangular patches edged with reddish dust—ghost pictures in ghostly frames—showed where, no doubt, there had been photographs of the Shah and his family or his monuments. Revolutionary leaflets and caricatures were taped down on walls and pillars; and—also taped down: sticky paper and handwritten notices giving a curious informality to great events—there were colour photographs of the Ayatollah Khomeini, as hard-eyed and sensual and unreliable and roguish-looking as any enemy might have portrayed h
im.

  The airport branch of the Melli Bank—rough tables, three clerks, a lot of paper, a littered floor—was like an Indian bazaar stall. A handwritten notice on the counter said: Dear Guests. God is the Greatest. Welcome to the Islamic Republic of Iran. Bits of sticky brown paper dotted the customs notice boards that advised passengers of their allowances. The brown paper did away with the liquor allowance; it was part of the Islamic welcome.

  The luggage track, which should have been rolling out our luggage, didn’t move for a long time. And the Iranian passengers (the physician and his family among them), with their London shopping bags, seemed to become different people. At London airport they had been Iranians, people from the fairyland of oil and money, spenders; now, in the shabby arrival hall, patient in their own setting and among their own kind, they looked like country folk who had gone to town.

  The customs man had a little black brush moustache. He asked, “Whisky?” His pronunciation of the word, and his smile, seemed to turn the query into a joke. When I said no he took my word and smilingly waved me out into the summer brightness, to face the post-revolutionary rapaciousness of the airport taxi men, who after six months were more than ever animated by memories of the old days, when the world’s salesmen came to Tehran, there were never enough hotel rooms, and no driver pined for a fare.

  The colours of the city were as dusty and pale as they had appeared from the air. Dust blew about the road, coated the trees, dimmed the colours of cars. Bricks and plaster were the colour of dust; unfinished buildings looked abandoned and crumbling; and walls, like abstracts of the time, were scribbled over in the Persian script and stencilled with portraits of Khomeini.

  On the outskirts of the city, in what looked like waste ground, I saw a low khaki-coloured tent, a queue of men and veiled women, and some semi-uniformed men. I thought of refugees from the countryside, dole queues. But then—seeing another tent and another queue in front of an unfinished apartment block—I remembered it was the day of an election, the second test of the people’s will since the revolution. The first had been a referendum; the people had voted then for an Islamic republic. This election was for an “Assembly of Experts,” who would work out an Islamic constitution. Khomeini had advised that priests should be elected.

  Experts were necessary, because an Islamic constitution couldn’t simply be adopted. No such thing existed or had ever existed. An Islamic constitution was something that had to be put together; and it had to be something of which the Prophet would have approved. The trouble there was that the Prophet, creating his seventh-century Arabian state, guided always by divine revelation, had very much ruled as his own man. That was where the priests came in. They might not have ideas about a constitution—a constitution was, after all, a concept from outside the Muslim world; but, with their knowledge of the Koran and the doings of the Prophet, the priests would know what was un-Islamic.

  My hotel was in central Tehran. It was one of the older hotels of the city. It was behind a high wall; it had a gateman’s lodge, an asphalted circular drive, patches of lawn with shrubs and trees. It was in better order than I had imagined; there were even a few cars. But the building the driver took me to had a chain across the glass door. Someone shouted from the other side of the compound. The building we had gone to was closed. It was the older building of the hotel; during the boom they had built a new block, and now it was only that block that was open.

  A number of young men—the hotel taxi drivers, to whom the cars outside belonged—were sitting idly together in one corner of the lobby, near the desk. Away from that corner the lobby was empty. In the middle of the floor there was a very large patterned carpet; the chairs arranged about it appeared to await a crowd. There were glass walls on two sides. On one side was the courtyard, with the dusty shrubs and pines and the parked hotel taxis; on the other side, going up to the hotel wall, was a small paved pool area, untenanted, glaring in the light, with metal chairs stacked up below an open shed.

  The room to which I was taken up was of a good size, with sturdy wooden furniture, and with wood panelling three or four feet up the side walls. The glass wall at the end faced North Tehran; a glass door opened onto a balcony. But the air-conditioning duct was leaking through its exhaust grille, and the blue carpet tiling in the vestibule was sodden and stained.

  The hotel man—it was hard, in the idleness of the hotel, to attach the professional status of “boy” to him, though he wore the uniform—smiled and pointed to the floor above and said, “Bathroom,” as though explanation was all that was required. The man he sent up spoke about condensation; he made the drips seem normal, even necessary. And then—explanations abruptly abandoned—I was given another room.

  It was furnished like the first and had the same view. On the television set here, though, there was a white card, folded down the middle and standing upright. It gave the week’s programmes on the “international,” English-language service of Iranian television. The service had long been suspended. The card was six months old. The revolution had come suddenly to this hotel.

  It was Ramadan, the Muslim fasting month; it was Friday, the sabbath; and it was an election day. Tehran was unusually quiet, but I didn’t know that; and when in the afternoon I went walking I felt I was in a city where a calamity had occurred. The shops in the main streets were closed and protected by steel gates. Signs on every floor shrieked the names of imported things—Seiko, Citizen, Rolex, Mary Quant of Chelsea, Aiwa—and on that closed afternoon they were like names from Tehran’s past.

  The pavements were broken. Many shop signs were broken or had lost some of their raised letters. Dust and grime were so general, and on illuminated signs looked so much like the effect of smoke, that buildings that had been burnt out in old fires did not immediately catch the eye. Building work seemed to have been suspended; rubble heaps and gravel heaps looked old, settled.

  On the walls were posters of the revolution, and in the pavement kiosks there were magazines of the revolution. The cover of one had a composite photograph of the Shah as a bathing beauty: the head of the Shah attached to the body of a woman in a bikini—but the bikini had been brushed over with a broad stroke of black, not to offend modesty. In another caricature the Shah, jacketed, his tie slackened, sat on a lavatory seat with his trousers down, and with a Tommy gun in his hand. A suitcase beside him was labelled To Israel and Bahama; an open canvas bag showed a bottle of whisky and a copy of Time magazine.

  Young men in tight, open-necked shirts dawdled on the broken pavements. They were handsome men of a clear racial type, small, broad-shouldered, narrow-waisted. They were working men of peasant antecedents, and there was some little air of vanity and danger about them that afternoon: they must have been keyed up by the communal Friday prayers. In their clothes, and especially their shirts, there was that touch of flashiness which—going by what I had seen in India—I associated with people who had just emerged from traditional ways and now possessed the idea that, in clothes as in other things, they could choose for themselves.

  The afternoon cars and motorcycles went by, driven in the Iranian way. I saw two collisions. One shop had changed its name. It was now Our Fried Chicken, no longer the chicken of Kentucky, and the figure of the Southern colonel had been fudged into something quite meaningless (except to those who remembered the colonel). Revolutionary Guards, young men with guns, soon ceased to be surprising; they were part of the revolutionary sabbath scene. There were crowds outside the cinemas; and, Ramadan though it was, people were buying pistachio nuts and sweets from the confiseries—so called—that were open.

  Far to the north, at the end of a long avenue of plane trees, an avenue laid out by the Shah’s father, was the Royal Tehran Hilton. It was “royal” no longer. The word had been taken off the main roadside sign and hacked away from the entrance; but inside the hotel the word survived like a rooted weed, popping up fresh and clean on napkins, bills, menus, crockery.

  The lounge was nearly empty; the silence there, amon
g waiters and scattered patrons, was like the silence of embarrassment. Iranian samovars were part of the décor. (There had been some foreign trade in these samovars as decorative ethnic objects; two years or so before, I had seen a number of them in the London stores, converted into lamp bases.) Alcohol could no longer be served; but for the smart (and non-Christian) who needed to sip a nonalcoholic drink in style, there was Orange Blossom or Virgin Mary or Swinger.

  Chez Maurice was the Hilton’s French restaurant. It was done up in an appropriate way, with brownish paper, a dark-coloured dado, and sconce lights. On the glass panels of one wall white letters, set in little arcs, said: Vins et Liqueurs, Le Patron Mange Içi, Gratinée à Toute Heure. In the large room, which might have seated a hundred, there was only a party of five, and they were as subdued as the people in the lounge. The soup I had, like the sturgeon which followed it, was heavy with a brown paste. But the waiters still undid napkins and moved and served with panache; it added to the embarrassment.

  Every table was laid. Every table had a fresh rose, and prerevolutionary give-aways: the coloured postcard (the restaurant had been founded four years before, in 1975); the little ten-page note pad that diners in places like this were thought to need: Chez Maurice, Tehran’s Most Distinctive Restaurant, Le Restaurant le Plus Sélect de Tehran. Six months after the revolution these toys—pads, postcards—still existed; when they were used up there would be no more.

  The pool at the side of the hotel was closed, for chemical cleaning, according to the notice. But the great concrete shell next door, the planned extension to the Royal Tehran Hilton, had been abandoned, with all the building materials on the site and the cranes. There were no “passengers” now, the waiter said; and the contractors had left the country. From the Hilton you could look across to the other hills of North Tehran and see other unfinished, hollow buildings that looked just as abandoned. The revolution had caught the “international” city of North Tehran in mid-creation.