The Rub of Time: Bellow, Nabokov, Hitchens, Travolta, Trump

by Martin Amis

  Which brings us to two other hasteners of theocratic doom: globalized modernity (instant communications) and the future imposed by demography. For Iran, one of the oldest nations on earth, is getting younger and younger.

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  “In the history of the Iranian plateau,” writes Sandra Mackey in her stylish and magisterial classic, The Iranians: Persia, Islam, and the Soul of a Nation, “the sun has risen and set on nearly a million days.” And a million days is longer than we think—2,739 years. If we date the birth of the country from its unification in 625 BCE, then the millionth dawn will come in 2114. What will the sun see as it patrols that Iranian plateau?

  Let us examine the three main lies that undergird the Islamic Republic.

  The 1979 revolution wasn’t an Islamic revolution until it was over. In its origins, it was a full-spectrum mass movement, an avalanche of demonstrations and riots, and strikes so relentless that they blacked out the Peacock’s palace; the military, moreover, was sustaining a thousand defections per day. The June Events of 2009 constitute a mere whisper of demurral when set against the unyielding crescendo of 1978. The noise was not made for clerical rule; the noise was made because a decadent monarchy had lost the farr—the inherent aura of kingship.

  It is instructive to compare the Iranian revolution with the two Russian revolutions of 1917: the February revolution, a popular revolt, and the October revolution, a Leninist coup (with an impotent Provisional Government in the interim). Trotsky said that the Bolsheviks found power lying in the street and “picked it up like a feather.” And then, of course, the really warm work began—against the Whites, against the Greens (the peasantry), against the trade unions, against the church, and so on, until every alternative center of power (and opinion) was eradicated, down to and including any gathering of three. The popular revolution gave way to a clique; in Iran it gave way to an echelon led by one of the great charismatics of the twentieth century.

  On January 16, 1979, Muhammad Reza Pahlavi flew out of Tehran—to exile in Cairo. On February 1, Ayatollah Khomeini flew into Tehran—from long exile in Paris (where one of his more regrettable neighbors, I feel obliged to mention, was Brigitte Bardot). Thus the political revolution was over; now the cultural revolution began. The Provisional Government was successively eroded by the komitehs (mosque-based militias, later the Basij), by the Revolutionary Guard (later the Pasdaran, or the Iranian army), and by the revolutionary tribunals (which dealt out rough justice to survivors of the old regime and to various other undesirables). On November 4, a group of pious students spontaneously infiltrated the US embassy and seized the fifty-two hostages. Khomeini manipulated this V-sign directed at the Great Satan to such effect that in the imminent referendum on the new constitution, “99.5” percent of a turnout of 17 million gave their blessing to Islamic autocracy.

  But there was still that “0.5” to deal with. And Khomeini faced vigorous opposition from almost every quarter—most formidably from the Mujahedin-e Khalq. Established a decade and a half earlier, in opposition to the Shah, the Mujahedin (Marxist, left-Islamic, and committed to women’s rights) had half a million adherents and could field a guerrilla army of 100,000 experienced fighters. When Khomeini excluded them from the new political order as “un-Islamic,” they rose up.

  In 1981, if you recall, the Mujahedin were blowing mullahs to bits by the dozen (seventy-four in a single strike in Tehran); and they went on to assassinate more than a thousand government officials in the latter months of that year. What followed was terroristic civil strife. By September, Khomeini’s Revolutionary Guard were executing fifty people a day for “waging war against God” (the same crime, and the same punishment, being invoked by the clerics of 2009). Fired by a zeal both revolutionary and religious, the mullahs bloodily prevailed.

  Revolutions, almost by definition, are fiercely anticlerical. As late as 1922 (to take the fiercest possible example), Lenin executed 4,500 priests and monks, plus 3,500 nuns, in that year alone. Contrarian Iran, on the other hand, swam upstream. By December 1982, Khomeini had more or less secured the monopoly of violence, and the Iranian people found themselves living under the world’s only revolutionary theocracy. The Islamic Republic was Islamic now, but it was no longer a republic. And by 1982, besides, they had something newly pressing to think about. When the eight-year war began, the Iranians were the defenders of their homeland; now they were the invaders of Iraq.

  The Iran–Iraq War can rightly be thought of as the Imposed War, but only if we understand that the war was imposed by Khomeini. It tests the historical imagination to get a sense of the horrified dismay engendered, throughout the region, by the advent of the meshuga ayatollah. Stalin, after a while, was content with “socialism in one country.” Khomeini proclaimed he wanted Shia theocracy in every country on earth. Throughout the course of the Iran–Iraq War, Khomeini put himself about elsewhere, with bombings, assassination attempts, and armed subversion, in Bahrain, Kuwait, Lebanon, and Saudi Arabia. In Mecca, the hajj became the scene of annual agitation; in 1987, a clash between Iranian militiamen and Saudi riot police left more than four hundred dead.

  And Iraq? In 1979 Saddam Hussein reached out a trembling hand of friendship to the new Iran, and was clearly hoping for the continuation of the détente he had established with the Shah. Iran responded by resuming support for the separatist Kurds (suspended since 1975) and for the Shia underground; there were assassination attempts on the Iraqi deputy premier and the minister of information, and the successful murder of at least twenty prominent officials in the single month of April 1980. Khomeini, meanwhile, withdrew his ambassador from Baghdad; in September, Iran shelled the border cities of Khanaqin and Mandali.

  In The Iran-Iraq War, 1980–1988, Efraim Karsh lists in his chronology eight Iraqi offers of cease-fires, the first on October 5, 1980, twelve days after the war began, the last on July 13, 1988, five weeks before it ended. Khomeini’s war aim was the theocratization, or de-Satanization, of Iraq; thus the war became a (failed) test of Islam, and devolved, in Sandra Mackey’s words, into “a daily enactment of Shia themes of sacrifice, dispossession, and mourning.” So: twelve-year-olds were attacking Iraqi machine-gun emplacements on bicycles, and 750,000 Iranians filled the multiacre cemeteries, and perhaps twice that number were left crippled in body or mind. Eleven months later, Khomeini himself joined the fallen in the land of the dead.

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  What remains, then, visitors might wonder, as they deplane at Tehran’s Imam Khomeini International Airport and enter a city where no cabdriver will stop for a cleric—what remains of the legacy bequeathed by the Father of the Revolution, or (alternatively) by “that fucking asshole,” as he is reflexively called, in loud English, by the youth of the cities of Iran? Khomeini’s notion of the Velayat-e Faqih, or rule by the vice-regent of God (i.e., the top mullah, namely himself), was so unhistorical that many of its angriest opponents came from the clergy. Political participation, in Shia theology, is seen as a contaminant. And with good reason: power corrupts, and absolute power (absolute corruption) combined with absolute self-righteousness, define the insane nightmare of Khomeini’s rule.

  His moral imbecilities provide a rich field. I will confine myself to two examples. After President Carter’s “fiasco in the desert,” the failed “Entebbe” raid of April 1980, Khomeini announced that God had personally thrown sand into the helicopters’ engines to protect the nation of Islam. To hear this kind of talk from an eight-year-old is one thing; to hear it from a bellicose head of state, on public radio, is another. The second example comes from Mackey (the time is 1981):

  A film run on government-controlled television showed a mother denouncing her son as a Marxist. The son, sobbing and grabbing for his mother’s hand, desperately tries to convince her that he has given up Marxist politics. The mother rejects his pleas saying, “You must repent in front of God and you will be executed.” The picture fades to Ayatollah Khomeini telling the people of Iran,
“I want to see more mothers turning in their children with such courage without shedding a tear. This is what Islam is.”

  Well, it may or may not be what Islam is. But it is not what Iranians are.

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  Iran is one of the most venerable civilizations on earth: it makes China look like an adolescent, and America like a toddler. And its 2,600-year history is sliced almost exactly in two by the rise of Islam. Accordingly, the Iranian heart is bipolar, divided between Xerxes and Muhammad, between Persepolis and Qom, between the imperially sensuous (with its luxury and poetry) and the unsmilingly pious. You will, I think, acknowledge that dividedness when I tell you that the author of this quietly beautiful quatrain—

  I am a supplicant for a goblet of wine

  From the hand of a sweetheart.

  In whom can I confide this secret of mine,

  Where can I take this sorrow?

  —is the Ayatollah Khomeini.

  Not Ferdowsi, not Rumi, not Hafiz, not Omar Khayyam: Khomeini. It is perhaps the most beguiling single feature of Iranian life that its people go on pilgrimages, not only to the shrines of their martyrs and imams, but also to the shrines of their poets. The Iranian-Persian soul resembles the goddess Proserpina in Ted Hughes’s masterly Tales from Ovid:

  Proserpina, who divides her year

  Between her husband in hell, among spectres,

  And her mother on earth, among flowers.

  Her nature, too, is divided. One moment

  Gloomy as hell’s king, but the next

  Bright as the sun’s mass, bursting from clouds.

  In 1935, Iranians found themselves living in a different country—not Persia but Iran, the specifically pre-Islamic “land of the Arians.” This was the work of Reza Shah Pahlavi, the army strongman who seized the throne in 1925. Reza Shah was a modernist and secularizer, Iran’s Ataturk or Nasser. He was also a friend of Nazi Germany (and was deposed by the Allies in 1941). In 1976, Iranians found themselves living in a different millennium, not 1355 (dated from the time of the Prophet) but 2535 (dated from the time of Cyrus the Great). This was the work of Reza Shah’s son. Installed by the coup of 1953 (the West’s very grave historical crime, whose sequelae are still with us), Muhammad Reza Pahlavi was a “miserable wretch,” as Khomeini rightly called him; but he was quite closely attuned to Iran’s divided self. Reza Shah beat women who wore the veil; Khomeini beat women who didn’t; Muhammad Reza Shah beat neither.

  After 1979, Iran was subjected to militant and breakneck re-Islamization. The Zoroastrian era was declared to be jahiliyyah, a benighted slum of ignorance and idolatry, and a dire embarrassment to all good Muslims. In the mid-1990s, for example, the historian Jahangir Tafazoli was put to death simply because he was the best-known specialist on ancient Iran. We would call this “killing the messenger,” and we would call the entire tendency “delusional denial.” The thirty-year suppression of the mixed Iranian soul—which says yes to freedom and tolerance, yes to love and life and art, yes to Islam, and yes to modernity—provided the energy and courage of the June Events, and entrained the hideous murder of Neda Soltan.

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  So now we have another four years of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who will be more purple-gummed with insecurity than ever, and another four years of troubled dreams about the Iranian bomb. I find that the one thing Ahmadinejad mandates, with full legitimacy, is a tone of ridicule—because it is impossible to write solemnly about the man who, among other absurdities, clinched the 2005 election by the simple feat of not having a Jacuzzi. And you needn’t reread that sentence: the “Jacuzzi moment,” or the no-Jacuzzi moment, when the candidate revealed that, yes, he had no Jacuzzi, was broadly credited with securing his majority. This was enough, apparently, to make him shine out in the smog of pelf and hypocrisy that passes for the Islamic Republic.

  The American politician whom Ahmadinejad most closely resembles—in one vital respect—is Ronald Reagan. General similarities, I agree, are hard to spot. Ahmadinejad doesn’t live on a ranch with a former starlet. Reagan didn’t have a degree in traffic control. Ahmadinejad doesn’t use Grecian 2000 (as his rapidly graying hair triumphantly attests). Reagan, as a young man, wasn’t involved in the murder of political adversaries. And so on. But what they have in common is this: both figures are denizens of that stormlit plain where end-time theology meets nuclear weapons.

  Now we can return, for a while, to dissimilarities. Ahmadinejad is not checked and balanced by democratic institutions. Reagan did not actually spend public money on civic preparations for the Second Coming, and was not the product of a culture saturated in ecstatic fantasies of morbid torment. Ahmadinejad does not have a temperament in which “simple-minded idealism” (in Eric Hobsbawm’s formulation) might lead him to recognize “the sinister absurdity” of the arms race. And Reagan was not answerable to some millenarian vicar in the holy city of, say, Lynchburg. Finally, whereas Reagan wielded enough firepower to kill everyone on earth several times over, Ahmadinejad does not yet have his Button.

  Jesus Christ, according to both presidents, is due very shortly, but in Ahmadinejad’s vision the Nazarene will merely form a part of the entourage of a much grander personage—the Hidden Imam. Who is the Hidden Imam? In the year 873, the bloodline of the Prophet came to an end when Hasan al-Askari (in Shiism, the eleventh legitimate imam) died without an heir. At this point, among the believers, a classic circularity took hold. It was assumed that there must be an heir; there was no record of his existence, they reasoned, because extraordinary efforts had been made to conceal it; and extraordinary efforts had been made because this little boy would be an extraordinary imam—the Mahdi, in fact, or the Lord of Time.

  In Shia eschatology the Mahdi will return during a period of great tribulation (during, say, a nuclear war), will deliver the faithful from injustice and oppression, and will then supervise the Day of Judgment. Not only Ahmadinejad but members of his cabinet have been giving the Hidden Imam “about four years”—well within the president’s second term. And where has the Hidden Imam dwelt since the ninth century? In “occultation,” wherever that may be. The Hidden Imam is at least intelligibly called the Lord of Time: he is 1,136 years old.

  Rule number one: no theocracy can ever be permitted to get its hands on nuclear arms. And Iran, we respectfully suggest, is not yet ready for the force that drives the sun. We all know what Ahmadinejad thinks of Israel (and we remember his Islamists’ conference, in Tehran, on the historicity of the Holocaust). Yet this is what Ali Rafsanjani thinks of Israel—Rafsanjani, the old, much-jailed revolutionary chancer, a pragmatist and reformer, hugely worldly, hugely venal: “The use of even one nuclear bomb inside Israel will destroy everything,” whereas a counterstrike on Iran will merely “harm” the Islamic world; “it is not irrational to contemplate such an eventuality.” Indeed, given the Shia commitment to martyrdom, mutual assured destruction, as one Israeli official put it, “is not a deterrent. It’s an incentive.”

  Nuclear weapons, it seems, were sent down here to furnish mankind with a succession of excruciating dilemmas. Until recently the mullahs’ quest for the H-bomb seemed partly containable: the nuclear states could give face to Tehran, and begin to scale back their arsenals toward the zero option. But now those states include North Korea (already the land of the living dead); and the Islamic Republic, in any case, no longer seems appeasable. Equipped with weapons of fission or fusion, the supreme leader may delegate first use to Hezbollah, or to the Call of Islam, or to the Legion of the Pure. Or he may himself become the first suicide bomber to be gauged in megatons.

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  Meanwhile, the memory of the June Events, and of Neda Soltan, will do its work, and add weight to the mass of unendurable humiliations meted out to the Iranian people. Meanwhile, too, the senescent regime (I again warily predict) will reach beyond crackdownism for the supposedly unifying effects of war. Not a war against someone its own size, or someone bigger. Tin
y Bahrain, which is 60 percent Shia, looks about right.

  As for apocalyptic Islamism, in all its forms, I cannot improve on the great Norman Cohn. This is from the 1995 Foreword to Warrant for Genocide (1967), where the subject is the tsarist fabrication The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and what Jewry calls the Shoah, or the Wind of Death.

  There exists a subterranean world where pathological fantasies disguised as ideas are churned out by crooks and half-educated fanatics [notably the lower clergy] for the benefit of the ignorant and superstitious. There are times when this underworld emerges from the depths and suddenly fascinates, captures, and dominates multitudes of usually sane and responsible people, who thereupon take leave of sanity and responsibility. And it occasionally happens that this underworld becomes a political power and changes the course of history.

  The Guardian 2009

  The Crippled Murderers of Cali, Colombia

  1. EXIT WOUND

  It was a bala perdida that almost did for little Kevin: the stray bullet went in through his nape and came out through his brow. That was a year ago, when he was four. The incident took place a few yards from where we now sat: in a front room that felt like a carless garage, with its damp cement floor, and a series—almost a pattern—of scorched light fixtures along its walls and ceiling. Kevin’s grandmother runs a modest line in secondhand clothes; there was a stretched wire with some coat hangers on it, and a plastic bag stuffed with espadrilles and flip-flops. The family dog, small, frazzled, and elderly, was still growling at us after half an hour, even while scratching its ear with a raised hind paw.

  Kevin was playing in the street when the car sped by (it never became clear to me what, if anything, the muchachos were trying to hit). At the hospital, his twenty-year-old mother was told that Kevin had five minutes to live. They operated; and, after a five-day coma, a silent and unsmiling spell in a wheelchair, and a course of rehabilitation, Kevin seems to have reemerged as a confident, even a stylish little boy.