Baghdad without a Map and Other Misadventures in Arabia

by Tony Horwitz

  It was a bewildering thought. We began a quick thumb backward through history. Hitler. Napoleon. The Crusaders. Genghis Khan. The Roman legions. Jesus Christ. Alexander. None seemed likely to have ever assembled anything close to this many people at one time in one place.

  The Brit nodded blankly. “I suspect, gents, that Khomeini takes the cake.”

  The helicopter set down in a sunbaked field near Behest-e-Zahra, a mammoth cemetery, the centerpiece of which is a cascade of crimson-colored water known as the Fountain of Blood. For reasons that were never made clear, Khomeini’s grave lay in the open plain adjoining the cemetery, perhaps because he had already filled Behest-e-Zahra to overflowing with war martyrs. Also unclear was why the helicopter had dropped us in the middle of nowhere, an hour’s hike through brambles and dust from the gravesite. The other helicopters were nowhere in sight.

  We trudged across the plain and up to a corral composed of enormous freight containers that were roughly the size and shape of truck trailers. We didn’t know it then, but this odd fortress enclosed Khomeini’s grave. In fact we didn’t know a thing. Our black-shirted escort from the Ministry of Islamic Guidance waved ahead and we followed him through a tunnel and into the corral.

  The Iranians were renowned for throwing journalists “into the shit.” Trips to the war front had often ended within range of Iraqi guns; a German reporter had died of a heart attack while running for cover. Our leader at the funeral seemed guided by the same kamikaze impulse. At the mouth of the tunnel, a tidal wave of mourners crashed back and forth, tumbling bodies in its wake. Those still standing beat their hands on their heads and wailed, “Khomeini! Khomeini!” One man’s forehead was cut open and still he flagellated himself, drenching his palm with blood. Another man was passed from shoulder to shoulder, having fainted or died. The scene was beyond frenzy. The mourners were wild-eyed and oblivious. They didn’t seem human at all.

  Our guide, followed by a few journalists, edged forward and was swallowed up by the maelstrom. The rest of us hung back, unsure what to do. The day before, eight mourners had been crushed to death while clambering to peek at Khomeini’s body. To move ahead now looked like a quick way to become martyr number nine. Or worse, to get trapped in there and miss our deadline. We retreated.

  Crouching in a narrow strip of shade, munching cucumbers given to us at the airfield, we waited until the other journalists staggered out of the tunnel, bruised and bewildered, to tell us what we’d missed. A helicopter bearing Khomeini’s coffin had set down in the eye of the storm. Mourners mobbed the craft, toppled the casket and tore at the imam’s shroud. Most of the reporters hadn’t been able to see anything. But one cameraman thought he’d spotted Khomeini’s body tossed unceremoniously on the ground. Then the imam was shoved back in his coffin and piled onto the helicopter, which lifted off as revolutionary guards fired guns in the air to clear the crowd.

  It took us an hour to hitch a helicopter ride back to Tehran. As Geraldine ran for the aircraft, a blast from the helicopter’s rotors blew her chador in the air, revealing the modest black trousers and shirt she wore underneath. The man from the Ministry of Islamic Guidance looked at her with disgust. “Cover yourself!” he shouted. “Cover yourself!”

  We reached the hotel in midafternoon, exhausted and sweaty. Meanwhile, the reporters who’d skipped the helicopter ride had seen the funeral much more clearly than we had, on Iranian television. They were already filing their stories while we waited for the TV to replay the scene, hours later, of mourners grasping at Khomeini’s legs as a stunned announcer shouted, “The imam is in the people’s hands!”

  I felt cheated, though a little wiser as to the reality of “historic events.” Slumped in the Laleh lobby, watching the funeral on television, I could already hear friends quizzing me in the months ahead, as indeed they did. “You were really there in the middle of that madhouse?” Yes, I was, munching a cucumber and worrying about my deadline, without the faintest notion of what was going on just a hundred yards away.

  Islamic law requires that the dead be buried before sunset, and the Iranians accomplished the task by dispersing the crowd and delivering the body in an aluminum casket. The grave was quickly sealed with shipping crates so mourners wouldn’t unearth the corpse as they grabbed for handfuls of holy dirt. “Oh stars stop shining!” the Iranian newscaster wailed. “Oh rivers stop flowing!”

  “Oh go to hell,” a Canadian journalist said, turning down the volume and shouting through the lobby, “He’s in the ground!” The crowd of reporters surged toward the telex room, as frenzied as head-slapping mourners, to punch out the news on three antiquated machines which had the keys in all the wrong places:

  TEHRAN—In a sceme of astnishing chaos, more than two nillion people thronged . . .

  TEHRQAN—Qyatollqh Khomeini went out Tuesdqy the sqme wqy he came in 10 years agop . . .

  TEHRAN—Ayxxxatollah Ayqtollxxxxx Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini nver ruled Irnaxxxx Iran xxxxx in peace and his grievong followrs wouldn’t let him rest in peac either . . .

  It was almost midnight before the job was done. “Fuck me!” exclaimed the New York Times correspondent, John Kifner, wading through the ankle-deep tangle of telex tape and scanning a few dispatches. “This is the worst load of dreck I’ve ever seen.”

  In the past twenty-four hours, most of us had had no more than a few minutes’ sleep and nothing but cucumbers to keep us going. In another seven hours the buses would reappear at the hotel to carry us to another round of prayers, eulogies and demonstrations. And just so sleep wouldn’t interrupt our grieving, a syrupy voice intoned a single word over the loudspeaker, again and again and again: “Imam. Imaaaaaam. Imaaaaaaaaaaaaam.”

  16

  TEHRAN

  Searching for the Twelfth Imam

  There is no fun in Islam.

  —AYATOLLAH RUHOLLAH KHOMEINI

  Over weak tea the following morning, we discovered that we’d gotten the story all wrong. “Those trumpets of arrogance,” stated the Tehran Times, referring to the Western media, “have tried another clumsy attempt to mislead world opinion.” Several arrogant trumpets had been caught “red-handed” by the Iranians, tootling to the world that the funeral crowd had numbered a mere million or two when the actual figure was “over ten million.”

  We had also erred in portraying the riotous funeral as a macabre embarrassment for the regime. The paper announced with apparent pride that “several people had been killed during the funeral, 438 admitted to hospital and 10,879 given outpatient treatment.” The paper printed a picture of trampled corpses as proof.

  Another paper, Kayhan, reveled in the gore still more. The path laid down by Khomeini, it said, “passes through a sea of blood in order to reach the coast of salvation. Its message is: Islam is nourished with blood.”

  The reporter reading this aloud put down her stale croissant. “I guess they’ve got to nourish the people on something,” she said.

  * * *

  A bus was waiting at the hotel door. The arrogant trumpets were to be given a second chance, this time as witnesses to a massive rally at Tehran University. I opted instead for an unsupervised stroll through the streets. Not that it mattered. The government had declared a forty-day mourning period, closing shops and offices, and the only thing to do was grieve and demonstrate. Five minutes from the hotel I was gridlocked in the morning rush hour. Men marched in tight formation, slapping their chests, then their heads, then raising their fists and chanting. It looked like an outdoor aerobics class, with black shirts and black armbands in place of gym clothes.

  One of the demonstrators peeled off to rest by the curb, and I edged over to ask him what the mourners were shouting.

  “Death to America,” he said.

  “Oh.” I reached for my notebook as self-protection and scribbled the Farsi transliteration: Margbar Omrika.

  “You are American?” he asked.

  “Yes. A journalist.” I
braced myself for a diatribe against the West and its arrogant trumpets.

  “I must ask you something,” the man said. “Have you ever been to Disneyland?”

  “As a kid, yes.”

  The man nodded, thoughtfully stroking his beard. “My brother lives in California and has written me about Disneyland,” he continued. “It has always been my dream to go there and take my children on the tea-cup ride.”

  With that, he rejoined the marchers, raised his fist and yelled “Death to America!” again.

  * * *

  Sloganeering was such a fixture of the landscape that it was hard to tell if Iranians heard the words anymore. Since the shah’s overthrow, every Western landmark in Tehran had been reincarnated as a symbol of revolution. The Hilton became “Independence” Hotel and a U.S. flag was painted onto the steps so that guests trod on the stars and stripes each time they entered the lobby. Queen Elizabeth Street was renamed Peasant Farmer Boulevard; Los Angeles Boulevard became Hejab Street, the word for Islamic dress. And the former Israeli embassy had originally been turned over to the PLO (though Iran later fell out with the organization, considering Arafat too moderate).

  Fleeing the demonstrations, I took shelter in a lush park near the city center. Once named for the shah, it was now known as People’s Park. Men sat on benches in the shade, and I walked from group to group, looking for English speakers. Of the first dozen I approached, three spoke English and two had attended university in America; Iran’s anti-Western venom was of very recent vintage.

  Most of the men quickly declared their devotion to the deceased imam, but one young technician spoke up and said, “Khomeini too much bad and I am more happy he dead.” This was translated into Farsi—presumably, with syntax corrected—for the huddle that had formed around our bench. The others shook their heads in disagreement, but they heard the man out. I asked him if another group could govern Iran better.

  “Of all the organisms I like Mujahadeen,” he said, referring to the most militant of the underground movements in Iran. “Mujahadeen use bombs.”

  Two armed men edged over from their post by the gate. This didn’t seem to bother anyone. When we’d finished chatting, I asked the technician if I could quote him. He shrugged and said a name that began and ended with Z, with six unpronounceable syllables in between. No doubt a common Iranian name. I asked Mr. Z if the eavesdropping soldiers caused him any concern.

  “We scared, but only some little,” he said. “Persians too much proud to scare.” I tried to imagine another country in the Middle East where someone would speak so openly to a foreign journalist in front of security forces. Egypt on a good day. I couldn’t think of any others.

  Of course, talk was one thing, action quite another. Members of the Mujahadeen and other “organisms” were routinely imprisoned and executed. Shooting and hanging were the preferred methods. Iran’s penal code also included crucifixion, as a punishment for the “corrupt on earth,” which was a catch-all phrase for enemies of Islam. There were no recorded instances of crucifixions being carried out, although stonings and floggings were not uncommon.

  Even so, the regime was unable—and, to a degree, unwilling—to muzzle its citizens to the same degree as other Middle East autocracies. In the seven days that followed, wandering the streets of Tehran, I collected more on-the-record comments than I would have gathered during a month in most Arab countries.

  Not that the comments were always straightforward. Persians, like Arabs, are fond of frustrating journalists by substituting long-winded parables for simple, juicy sound bites. One student said he’d once thrown Molotov cocktails at the shah’s tanks and subsequently become disillusioned with the revolution. He illustrated his feelings with a story about two men in adjoining hospital beds. One patient, whose bed is by the window, passes each day telling the other man about all the fantastic things he can see through the glass. Trees. Beautiful women. Spectacular night skies. Gradually, the other man wishes his companion dead so he can inherit the bed by the window. His wish comes true. Then, drawing aside the curtain, he finds that the window looks out on a wall. Then he dies.

  “Before the revolution, we were like this man, filled with dreams,” the student concluded. “Now we have seen the wall.”

  * * *

  There was another wall, ten feet high and made of brick, which explained a good deal about the revolution. The wall ran for several city blocks and enclosed what had once been the U.S. embassy. Inside the wall were grounds vast enough to accommodate a suburban shopping mall, with space left over for parking. The embassy building itself was at least three times larger than any other American mission in the Middle East, and it dwarfed every other structure in downtown Tehran.

  “You see how America controls everything,” said a young man named Ibrahim, who guided me to the embassy. We had met on the street twenty minutes before, and he’d spent the intervening time reciting a catalogue of U.S.-inspired conspiracies. America started the Iran-Iraq war to divert Arab and Persian attention from Israel. America and its allies perpetuated the war to enrich their arms merchants and drain the two sides of manpower. America engineered Khomeini’s death, just as it had once controlled the shah’s every breath.

  “You seem like nice man,” he told me, “but you probably CIA.” Standing before the massive edifice of the U.S. embassy, it wasn’t hard to see how such notions had taken root.

  The Iranians had revenged themselves, of course, first by holding U.S. hostages in the embassy and then, with characteristic perversity, by turning the mission into a training center for Revolutionary Guards, the cadres of the Islamic Republic. They had also transformed the embassy wall into the world’s biggest billboard for anti-imperialist graffiti.

  “We Will Make America Face a Severe Defeat!”

  “This Century Will be the Period of Victory of the Oppressed over the Oppressors!”

  “The Superpowers’ Law Is Worse Than the Law of the Jungle!”

  We followed the man-high letters for fifty yards before coming to one of the compound’s gates. Several soldiers stood guard beside a sign that said “The Center for the Publication of the U.S. Espionage Den’s Documents.” The documents had been pieced together from shredded cables left behind by the Americans and published in a set of slim volumes, the book jackets of which were displayed on the embassy’s wall. A sample title: Leaders of the Arabian Peninsula: Puppets of the Great Satan.

  Ibrahim chuckled, and so did I. There was an exuberant, “in-your-face” quality to Iranian propaganda that resembled the lyrics of incendiary black rap groups. Here, the street revolution had come and the formerly oppressed were determined to have some fun.

  * * *

  Fun wasn’t a word that otherwise came much to mind in Tehran. In addition to banning booze, the Islamic Republic had outlawed popular music. A nine-year ban on the sale of most musical instruments had recently been lifted—so long as the tunes they produced “don’t make you tingle,” said an official from the Ministry of Islamic Guidance. Dancing also was prohibited; at weddings among Iran’s small Christian community, even the bridal waltz was off-limits. The two-station television system, called Voice and Vision of the Islamic Republic, offered such a monotonous diet of Koran readings and fundamentalists that irreverent Iranians called it Mullah Vision, Khomeini 1 and Khomeini 2, or Fiberglass (glass for the box, fiber for the beard of almost everyone on it). Even the Iranian national passion, chess, had been banned. Chess, like cards and other games, offered an occasion for gambling, and its pieces flouted the Islamic prohibition on image-making.

  Policing of the sexes was severe. A man and a woman alone together—in a restaurant, in a car, or just walking on the street—could be accosted by roving revolutionary enforcers, called Komitehs, and asked to show proof of marriage. The Komitehs also harassed and occasionally imprisoned women who wore bad hejab—clothes too tight, too colorful, or revealing of anything other than their face and hands. Nor w
ere visiting Westerners exempt from these restrictions. One female journalist had her nail polish rubbed off at the airport, and Geraldine was confronted at the entrance to a bank because the three inches of stocking showing beneath her chador were judged too sheer.

  “Believe it or not,” an Iranian dissident later told us, “Khomeini was a feminist compared to the most conservative mullahs.” Other clerics, for instance, believed that veiling wasn’t sufficient; women should also stick coins or fingers in their mouths when speaking, lest their voices distract men from spiritual thoughts. “If these mullahs had their way,” the dissident added, “they’d drag Iran back to the seventh century instead of the eleventh.”

  But nothing in Iran was quite as medieval as it first appeared. One afternoon a twenty-four-year-old student named Payon took me to a coffee shop in north Tehran, a neighborhood of leafy boulevards where signs such as “Piaget” and “Patisserie” still clung to Parisian-style shopfronts. Millions of Tehran’s taghoutis, the “idle rich,” had fled since the revolution. But the regime, desperate to retain the money and skills of those who remained, turned a blind eye to remnants of shah-era high life.

  At first, the coffee shop appeared subject to the same strictures as every other public place I’d visited in Iran. A sign on the glass door showed the outline of a woman’s head with an X through her hair and proper hejab superimposed. “Sister,” the sign said, “please be quiet about yourself.” Cafés whose patrons wore bad hejab risked closure by the Komitehs.

  Inside, couples sat at tables well spaced from one another, speaking in virtual whispers. The women wore calf-length coats with long sleeves and head scarves tied beneath their chins. The costume was less severe than the tentlike chadors common among the poor, but it was, if anything, even more uncomfortable in the hammering heat of midsummer.

  Payon scanned the café and glanced at me meaningfully. Iranians were always glancing at me meaningfully. “Do you see?” he whispered.