Among the Believers

by V. S. Naipaul

  SHIRAZI’S house was in a blank-walled dirt lane in another part of the town. The lane sloped down from both sides to a shallow central trough, but this trough was only full of dust.

  We knocked at a closed door set in the wall; and children in the lane mocked the Pakistanis, threatening them with the anger of Shirazi when they got inside. It seemed a traditional form of play, a licenced mockery that in no way mocked belief: the “clerk,” the religious student in his student’s costume, a recognized butt, as he perhaps had been in the European Middle Ages. It was a difficult moment for the Pakistanis, though, trying to shoo away the children, keep their dignity, preserve their courtesy to Behzad and myself, and prepare for the grave reception ahead.

  The door opened. We entered a vestibule, took off shoes, went up carpeted steps to a gallery which ran right around a sunken paved courtyard to the left, with fig trees, all covered by a high white awning which cooled light and colour, so that, abruptly, after the dust and warmth of the lane, the midsummer desert climate seemed benign, perfect for men.

  I would have liked to pause, to consider the shaded courtyard with the fig trees. But wonder almost at once turned to shock: there was a barefooted man just a few feet ahead in the carpeted gallery with an Israeli-made submachine gun: Shirazi’s bodyguard. He stayed in the gallery. We turned into the carpeted, empty room on the right and sat down in silence beside an electric fan, to wait. The Pakistani students smiled, at once expectant and encouraging.

  “He is coming,” Behzad said. “Stand.”

  We all stood up. Ceremony assists an entrance, and Shirazi’s entrance was impressive, regal. He was a big man, with a full, fleshy face; his beard, as neatly trimmed as his moustache, made it hard to guess his age. His two-button gown was pale fawn; his black cloak was of the thinnest cotton.

  The students appeared to fall forward before him—a flurry of black cloaks and turbans. He, allowing his hand to be kissed, appeared to give them his benediction. And then we all sat down. He said nothing; he seemed only to smile. The students said nothing.

  I said, “It is very good of you to see me. Your students here have spoken of you as a man of great learning.”

  Behzad translated what I had said, and Shirazi began to speak slowly, melodiously, with an intonation that was new to me. He spoke for a long time, but Behzad’s translation was brief.

  “It was good of them to say what they said. It is good of you to say what you said.”

  Shirazi spoke some more.

  Behzad translated: “Education cannot begin too soon. I would like children to be brought as babies to school. There is a tape recorder in the human brain. Hitler had that idea.” And Behzad added on his own, “He wants to know what your religion is.”

  “What can I say?”

  “You must tell me.”

  I said, “I am still a seeker.”

  Shirazi, his face calm, his large eyes smiling, assessing, spoke at length. His enunciation was clear, deliberate, full of rhythm. His full-lipped mouth opened wide, his clean teeth showed.

  Behzad said, “He wants to know what you were before you became a seeker. You must have been born into some kind of belief.”

  It was of the Pakistani students that I was nervous. They had been told—with some truth, but more for the sake of simplicity—that I came from America but was not an American. For them to hear now that my ancestry was Hindu would, I thought, be unsettling to them; the Hindu-Muslim antagonisms of the Indo-Pakistani subcontinent went deep. They would feel fooled; and they had been so welcoming, so open. They had arranged this meeting with their great teacher, and even now never took their gaze—beatific rather than obedient or even awed—off Shirazi.

  I said to Behzad, “Can you tell him I never had any belief? Tell him I was born far away, in the Americas, and wasn’t brought up to any faith.”

  “You can’t tell him that. Say you are a Christian.”

  “Tell him that.”

  And as soon as Behzad began to talk, I regretted what I had asked him to say. Shirazi hadn’t been taken in by my equivocations; he knew that something was wrong. And I decided that I would never again on my Islamic journey, out of nervousness or a wish to simplify, complicate matters for myself like this, and consequently falsify people’s response to me. Strain apart, it would have been more interesting now—it would have served my purpose better—to get Shirazi’s response to me as a man without religion, and as a man of an idolatrous-mystical-animistic background.

  Shirazi spoke in his special rhythmic way, the mullah’s way, as Behzad told me later, his accent and intonation more Arabic than Persian. He made “Islam” into “Ess-lam”; and “Allah” became a word of three syllables, with a round, open-mouthed pronunciation: “Oll-lor-huh.”

  He asked, “What kind of Christian are you?”

  I thought. “Protestant.”

  “Then you are closer to the truth.”

  “Why?”

  “Catholics are inflexible.”

  He didn’t mean that. He was only giving a Shia twist to Christian divisions. The Shias, with their own line of succession to the Prophet disregarded by other Muslims, see themselves as an embattled minority.

  And conversation after that was as hard as I had feared. I asked whether history—the history of Islamic civilization—was something he had studied. He misunderstood; he thought I was asking a question about Muslim theology, and he said of course he knew Islamic history: when the Prophet first gave the message the people of his village didn’t want it, and so he had to go to the next village. And always—whether I attempted to get him to talk about the scientific needs of Muslim countries, or about his ideas for Iran after the revolution—we slid down his theology to the confusion of his certainties. With true Islam, science would flourish: the Prophet said that people should go out and learn. With true Islam, there was freedom (he meant the freedom to be Islamic and Shia, to be divinely ruled); and everything came with freedom (this idea of freedom quite separate from the first).

  There was a long pause.

  I said, “You look serene.”

  He said, “I thank you for that.” He didn’t return the compliment.

  I wanted to be released.

  I said to Behzad, “Tell him I feel I am taking up too much of his time.”

  Shirazi said, with his smile, “I am free until I break my fast.”

  It was only 7:30. I said, just to keep the conversation going, “Ask him when he is going to break his fast.”

  Behzad said, “I can’t ask him that. You’re forgetting. I am a Muslim. I am supposed to know these things.”

  Someone else came in, a holy man in a white turban, a Turkoman, pale from his Ramadan seclusion, not as sunburnt or as meagre as the Turkoman pilgrim families camped in the courtyard of the shrine. With him was a very pale little girl. Shirazi was warm and welcoming. We stood up, to take our leave. The students fell again before Shirazi and kissed his hand. Shirazi smiled, and he continued to smile as—our own audience over—the little girl rushed to kiss his hand.

  The awning over the courtyard and the fig trees had been taken down. The light was now golden; shadows were no longer hard. Our shoes waited for us at the bottom of the steps; and in the small room off the vestibule the barefooted bodyguard with the submachine gun was bending down to play with another child.

  Outside, in the dirt lane, where dust was like part of the golden evening, the Pakistani students turned bright faces on me, and one of them said, “How did you like him?”

  For them the meeting had gone well. They asked Behzad and me to dine with them, to break the fast together and eat the simple food of students. But that invitation (as the qualification about the simple food of students showed) was only a courtesy, their way of breaking off, of seeing us into the car and picking up again the routine of their Ramadan evening that we had interrupted.

  The lane and the street at the end of it were full of busy, black-cloaked figures: it was like an old print of an Oxford street scene.
But here the clerical costumes were not borrowed; here they belonged and still had meaning; here the Islamic Middle Ages still lived, and the high organization of its learning, which had dazzled men from the Dark Ages of Europe.

  And there was more than old Oxford in the streets. This desert town—with its blank walls that concealed sunken courtyards, its straight pavements lined with trees, its enclosed, thick-planted garden squares—was the pattern for small towns I had seen far away in Spanish America, from Yucatan in southeast Mexico to the pampa of Argentina. Spain had been the vehicle: conquered by the Arabs between 710 and 720 A.D., just eighty years after Persia, and incorporated into the great medieval Muslim world, the great universal civilization of the time. Spain, before it had spread to the Americas, had rejected that Muslim world, and gained vigour and its own fanaticism from that rejection. But here in Iran, five hundred years on, that world still existed, with vague ideas of its former greatness, but ignorant (as the article about Islamic urban planning in The Message of Peace showed) of the contributions it had once made, and of the remote continent whose fate it had indirectly influenced.

  The Pakistani students had given our Lur driver directions. As we drove to Ayatollah Khalkhalli’s, Khomeini’s hanging judge, Behzad said, “You know why I couldn’t tell Shirazi you hadn’t been brought up in any religion? He was trying to find out whether you were a communist. If I had told him that you had no religion, he would have thought you were a communist. And that would have been bad for you.”

  KHALKHALLI’S house was the last in a dead end, a newish road with young trees on the pavement. It was near sunset; the desert sky was full of colour. There were men with guns about, and we stopped a house or two away. Behzad went and talked to somebody and then called me. The house was new, of concrete, not big, and it was set back from the pavement, with a little paved area in front.

  In the verandah or gallery we were given a body search by a short, thickly built young man in a tight blue jersey, who ran or slapped rough hands down our legs; and then we went into a small, carpeted room. There were about six or eight people there, among them an African couple, sitting erect and still on the floor. The man wore a dark-grey suit and was hard to place; but from the costume of the woman I judged them to be Somalis, people from the northeastern horn of Africa.

  I wasn’t expecting this crowd—in fact, a little court. I had been hoping for a more intimate conversation with a man who, as I thought, had fallen from power and might be feeling neglected.

  A hanging judge, a figure of revolutionary terror, dealing out Islamic justice to young and old, men and women: but the bearded little fellow, about five feet tall, who, preceded by a reverential petitioner, presently came out of an inner room—and was the man himself—was plump and jolly, with eyes merry behind his glasses.

  He moved with stiff, inelastic little steps. He was fair-skinned, with a white skull cap, no turban or clerical cloak or gown; and he looked a bit of a mess, with a crumpled long-tailed tunic or shirt, brown-striped, covering a couple of cotton garments at the top and hanging out over slack white trousers.

  This disorder of clothes—in one who, given Shirazi’s physical presence, might have assumed Shirazi’s high clerical style—was perhaps something Khalkhalli cultivated or was known for: the Iranians in the room began to smile as soon as he appeared. The African man fixed glittering eyes of awe on him, and Khalkhalli was tender with him, giving him an individual greeting. After tenderness with the African, Khalkhalli was rough with Behzad and me. The change in his manner was abrupt, wilful, a piece of acting: it was the clown wishing to show his other side. It didn’t disturb me; it told me that my presence in the room, another stranger who had come from far, was flattering to him.

  He said, “I am busy. I have no time for interviews. Why didn’t you telephone?”

  Behzad said, “We telephoned twice.”

  Khalkhalli didn’t reply. He took another petitioner to the inner room with him.

  Behzad said, “He’s making up his mind.”

  But I knew that he had already made up his mind, that the idea of the interview was too much for him to resist. When he came out—and before he led in someone else to his room—he said, with the same unconvincing roughness, “Write out your questions.”

  It was another piece of picked-up style, but it was hard for me. I had been hoping to get him to talk about his life; I would have liked to enter his mind, to see the world as he saw it. But I had been hoping for conversation; I couldn’t say what questions I wanted to put to him until he had begun to talk. Still, I had to do as he asked: the Iranians and the Africans were waiting to see me carry out his instructions. How could I get this hanging judge to show a little more than his official side? How could I get this half-clown, with his medieval learning, to illuminate his passion?

  I could think of nothing extraordinary; I decided to be direct. On a sheet of hotel paper, which I had brought with me, I wrote: Where were you born? What made you decide to take up religious studies? What did your father do? Where did you study? Where did you first preach? How did you become an ayatollah? What was your happiest day?

  He was pleased, when he finally came out, to see Behzad with the list of questions, and he sat cross-legged directly in front of us. Our knees almost touched. He answered simply at first. He was born in Azerbaijan. His father was a very religious man. His father was a farmer.

  I asked, “Did you help your father?”

  “I was a shepherd when I was a boy.” And then he began to clown. Raising his voice, making a gesture, he said, “Right now I know how to cut off a sheep’s head.” And the Iranians in the room—including some of his bodyguards—rocked with laughter. “I did every kind of job. Even selling. I know everything.”

  But how did the shepherd boy become a mullah?

  “I studied for thirty-five years.”

  That was all. He could be prodded into no narrative, no story of struggle or rise. He had simply lived; experience wasn’t something he had reflected on. And, vain as he was (“I am very clever, very intelligent”), the questions about his past didn’t interest him. He wanted more to talk about his present power, or his closeness to power; and that was what, ignoring the remainder of the written questions, he began to do.

  He said, “I was taught by Ayatollah Khomeini, you know. And I was the teacher of the son of Ayatollah Khomeini.” He thumped me on the shoulder and added archly, to the amusement of the Iranians, “So I cannot say I am very close to Ayatollah Khomeini.”

  His mouth opened wide, stayed open, and soon he appeared to be choking with laughter, showing me his gums, his tongue, his gullet. When he recovered he said, with a short, swift wave of his right hand, “The mullahs are going to rule now. We are going to have ten thousand years of the Islamic republic. The Marxists will go on with their Lenin. We will go on in the way of Khomeini.”

  He went silent. Crossing his legs neatly below him, fixing me with his eyes, becoming grave, appearing to look up at me through his glasses, he said, in the silence he had created, “I killed Hoveida, you know.”

  The straightness of his face was part of the joke for the Iranians. They—squatting on the carpet—threw themselves about with laughter.

  It was what was closest to him, his work as revolutionary judge. He had given many interviews about his sentencing of the Shah’s prime minister; and he wanted to tell the story again.

  I said, “You killed him yourself?”

  Behzad said, “No, he only gave the order. Hoveida was killed by the son of a famous ayatollah.”

  “But I have the gun,” Khalkhalli said, as though it was the next-best thing.

  Again the Iranians rolled about the carpet with laughter. And even the African, never taking his glittering eyes off Khalkhalli, began to smile.

  Behzad said, “A Revolutionary Guard gave him the gun.”

  I said, “Do you have it on you?”

  Khalkhalli said, “I have it in the next room.”

  So at the very end
he had forced me, in that room full of laughter, to be his straight man.

  It was fast-breaking time now, no time to dally, time for all visitors to leave, except the Africans. For some minutes young men had been placing food on the verandah floor. Khalkhalli, dismissing us, appeared to forget us. Even before we had put our shoes on and got to the gate, he and the African couple were sitting down to dinner. It was a big dinner; the clown ate seriously.

  And at last our Lur driver could eat, and Behzad could repeat the sacramental moment of food-sharing with him. We drove back to the centre of the town, near the shrine, and they ate in the café where we had waited earlier in the afternoon, in a smell of cooking mutton.

  They ate rice, mutton, and flat Persian bread. It was all that the café offered. I left them together, bought some nuts and dried fruit from a stall, and walked along the river, among families camping and eating on the river embankment in the dark. Across the road from the embankment electric lights shone on melons and other fruit in stalls: a refreshing night scene, after the glare and colourlessness of the day.

  When I was walking back to the café, and was on the other side of the river, I passed an illuminated shoeshop. It had a big colour photograph of Khomeini. I stopped to consider his unreliable face again: the creased forehead, the eyebrows, the hard eyes, the sensual lips. In the light of the shop I looked at the handful of nuts and kishmish raisins I was about to put in my mouth. It contained a drawing pin. Without that pause in front of Khomeini’s picture, I would have done damage to my mouth in ways I preferred not to think of; and my own unbeliever’s day in Khomeini’s holy city of Qom would have ended with a nasty surprise.

  THE highway to Tehran was busy. There was a moon, but the lights of cars and buses killed the view. It was only in snatches that the desert and the moonlight and the outlines of hills could be seen. Behzad was tired; he dozed off. When he awakened he asked the driver to put on the car radio for the news.