Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey

by V. S. Naipaul

  I said, “Why don’t you suspend publication until times are normal?”

  “No, no. I say that if we miss one issue—”

  He didn’t finish the sentence. To speak of disaster was to bring disaster closer.

  He was forty-nine. In August I had understood him to say that he was an Iranian from India. Now, less professionally pressed, more nostalgic, he said he was from Bhopal in Central India. He had begun his literary career in that country as a poet, in Urdu, the half-Persian, half-Indian language that is especially dear to Indian Muslims. Parvez was his pen name from that Indian time. In Iran, where he had become naturalized, he had turned to English-language journalism. All the money he had made from earlier ventures he had put, after the revolution, into the Tehran Times. He hadn’t got any of that money back so far. “I haven’t touched a rial.” To fail now would be to lose everything.

  “We will borrow some money, find money somewhere, and continue until the New Year.”

  The Iranian New Year, in the third week of March, five weeks away: it was the magic date of which many people in Tehran spoke. On that good day, it was felt, things might change. Something might be worked out and the American hostages might be released, and the country might get started up again. The revolution within the revolution had laid the country low. The students who were holding the hostages had become a law unto themselves. They called themselves “Muslim students following the line of Imam Khomeini,” but there was no telling who controlled them and what they might do. They were critical of everybody; they were using embassy documents to make “revelations” about everybody; they had even made “revelations” about the Tehran Times.

  Mr. Parvez said, “They might hold the hostages for a year.” His voice went very thin. “The hostages might even be killed.”

  He sat quite still in his chair. But his face, not always turned to me, quivered with nervous little movements: the grey eyebrows, the eyes, the corners of the mouth. He spoke softly, surprise always in his voice, as though from minute to minute he awakened afresh to his calamity.

  He said, “We were thinking of expanding to twelve pages. We had a meeting in October. From the first of January we were going to have twelve pages. Then this happened.”

  Posters were still on the windows facing the street. Everybody is reading the Tehran Times. Ask for it everywhere every day. We’ve got news for you.

  Uncovered typewriters were still on the empty desks. Across the room was the standard typewriter at which Mr. Jaffrey had worked in August. It was to Mr. Jaffrey that Mr. Parvez had passed me when he understood that I only wanted to talk to someone. And Mr. Jaffrey, though with a half-finished column in his machine, had given me a little time.

  “How is Mr. Jaffrey?”

  “I’ve had to let him go. I’ve had to let them all go. There used to be twenty of us.”

  Like Mr. Parvez, Mr. Jaffrey was a Shia from India. He had migrated to Pakistan before coming to Iran, the Shia heartland. It was Mr. Jaffrey who had introduced me to the queer logic—as queer to me at the end of my journey as it had been at the beginning—of the Islamic revival. Speaking of the injustices of Iran, Mr. Jaffrey had said he had begun to feel, even in the Shah’s time, that “Islam was the answer.” This had puzzled me. Religious assertion as an answer to political problems? Why not work for fair wages and the rule of law? Why work for Islam and the completeness of belief?

  But then Mr. Jaffrey had revealed his deeper longings, the longings that had lain below his original, political complaint. As a Muslim and a Shia, he said, he had always longed for the jamé towhidi; and he had translated that as “the society of believers.”

  That society had come to Iran: ecstasy in the possession of a true imam, mass prayer rallies, the perfection of Islamic union. But out of that society had not come law and institutions; these things were as far away as ever. That society had brought anarchy, hysteria, and this empty office. And now Mr. Jaffrey’s typewriter, out of which Islamic copy had rolled, was still: uncovered, askew on the empty desk. (No office boy now, bringing a plate of fried eggs to the desk of the harassed journalist.) That typewriter, the modern office, the printing equipment, advertisers, distributors, readers: that required the complex, “materialist” society—of which, unwittingly, Mr. Jaffrey was part. This complex society had its own hard rules. It required more than faith; it required something in addition to faith.

  I said to Mr. Parvez, “Is it hard now for Mr. Jaffrey?”

  “It is hard for him. It is hard for everybody.”

  “His typewriter is still there.”

  Mr. Parvez considered the office. His eyelids trembled. He said, and his voice broke, “That—that was a special area.” With a slow, Indian swing of the head, he said, speaking as of a very old and very sweet memory, something that might have been the subject of his Urdu verses, “It used to be our city room. And that”—the room at his back—“was our reporters’ room. Now there are only two of us.”

  “Who writes the editorials?”

  “I write them.”

  “They’re good.” And, in the Iranian minefield, they were.

  “I can’t concentrate. The financial problems are too great, too complicated.”

  “This is where you need your faith.”

  But after three months he had been worn down. Every day since the embassy had been seized, there was some statement or incident that encouraged him to think that the crisis was about to end; every day that hope was frustrated. And there were family problems as well. He had a son who was studying in the United States; fortunately, the boy had written that he didn’t need money from home just yet. Another son had been about to get a student visa for the United States when the embassy was seized.

  I said, “Mr. Parvez, you are a good Muslim and a good Shia. Your paper used to be full of criticism of materialist civilizations. Why are your sons studying in the United States?”

  It wasn’t the time to push the question. He was too weary. He said, speaking of the second son, the one who hadn’t been able to get the visa, “It’s his future. He’s studying computer engineering. And Britain—it’s expensive.”

  So, deep down, he was divided. With one part of his mind he was for the faith, and opposed to all that stood outside it; in a world grown strange, he wished to continue to belong to himself for as long as possible. With another part of his mind he recognized the world outside as paramount, part of the future of his sons. It was in that division of the mind—as much as in the excesses of the Shah—that the Islamic revolution had begun in Iran. And it was there that it was ending.

  In the Tehran Times the next day there was an interview with a visiting Indian Muslim. Non-Muslims, the visitor said, were always impressed by “the comprehensive system of Islam” when it was outlined to them; but then they always asked in what Muslim country the system was practised. “The answer to that important question could best be given by Iran,” the Tehran Times said, reporting the visitor’s words, “because the Iranian nation launched the unique and most courageous revolutionary movement in the history of mankind to establish the rule of Islam.”

  HIGH words still; but in Iran and elsewhere men would have to make their peace with the world which they knew existed beyond the faith.

  The life that had come to Islam had not come from within. It had come from outside events and circumstances, the spread of the universal civilization. It was the late twentieth century that had made Islam revolutionary, given new meaning to old Islamic ideas of equality and union, shaken up static or retarded societies. It was the late twentieth century—and not the faith—that could supply the answers—in institutions, legislation, economic systems. And, paradoxically, out of the Islamic revival, Islamic fundamentalism, that appeared to look backward, there would remain in many Muslim countries, with all the emotional charge derived from the Prophet’s faith, the idea of modern revolution. Behzad the communist (to whom the Russian rather than the Iranian revolution was “the greatest turn in history”) was ma
de by Islam more than he knew. And increasingly now in Islamic countries there would be the Behzads, who, in an inversion of Islamic passion, would have a vision of a society cleansed and purified, a society of believers.

  August 1979–February 1981