Where God Was Born

by Bruce Feiler

  I hadn’t known this.

  “I don’t mean to hurt you,” I said. “I love you.”

  But hearing this had a curious effect on my trip, as day after day I reflected on those words: Shema Yisrael Adonai Elohaynu Adonai Echad. “Hear, O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is one.” When I was a boy, that prayer was a source of comfort to me, a simple yet elegant exhortation, chanted in the elegiac way favored at my childhood synagogue. Life could splinter; those words never did. Coming to Iraq was an exercise in human splintering. I chose to come, and risk hurting my family, in part to look at a fractured world directly along the cut line. And what I witnessed in the face of war was the face of God, in the dreams of the people, in the fears of the participants, and in the vastly different visions that motivated each side.

  Still, being surrounded by war did not make me want to blame God; it made me want to find in God the source of our discord and perhaps the path to our salvation, or at least our peaceful reconciliation. “Let us make man in our image,” God says in Genesis 1. And later, “Let us, then, go down and confound their speech.” In the verses of the Hebrew Bible most inspired by Mesopotamia, God clearly speaks of himself in the plural. Perhaps this language helps explain why, in the face of the Tower of Babel, God forces humans to live in a pluralist world. By becoming pluralistic, we become most like God.

  Out of many, we are made one with God.

  I had been thinking about this idea and how it relates to the Shema when suddenly I stumbled upon its words, written down, in Baghdad. As I was leaving Firebase Melody, Chaplain Messenger showed me his chaplain’s kit, a small nylon bag containing all the accoutrements needed to tend wounded soldiers on the battlefield. The kit had a crucifix, a screw-together chalice, communion wine and wafers, a rosary, a kippah, teffilin (Jewish prayer boxes), and Muslim prayer beads. Tucked into the bottom of the kit was a mimeographed booklet, “Prayers for Iron Soldiers,” with the red-yellow-and-blue insignia of the 1st Armored Division, “Old Ironsides,” on the cover. Inside was a list of prayers: The Prayer Before Battle; the Apostles’ Creed; For One’s Sweetheart, Wife, or Husband.

  The last pages were entitled “When Facing Death.” For Protestants the book advised saying the Lord’s Prayer or reading a commendation that began “Depart, O Christian soul, out of this world of pain and suffering.” For Catholics it counseled asking the person to make an Act of Perfect Contrition or repeat the Twenty-third Psalm. For Muslims it suggested saying the Prayer for the Dying that begins “Allah is great!” And for Jews it said to read a prayer that ends “O God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, O God of redemption, accept me into thy everlasting presence.” “And when the end is near,” the book said, “one can say the Shema.”

  As I said good-bye to Chaplain Messenger, he gave me his booklet. I started to choke up. I came to Iraq, above all, to look for the prophets, to learn how the greatest religious minds of antiquity coped with pain, disappointment, and fear. I came away with a babel of prayers. And in my imagination, when I think back on Mesopotamia, before Babylon and Assyria, before Sumer and Ur, before Abraham, I see God having wiped out the Tower of One, leaving behind the blessing of many. And maybe it’s out of my feeling of desperation, or maybe out of hope, but I see those many people, in those many kingdoms, not sitting by their rivers but climbing their many ziggurats. God may have demolished the Tower of Babel, but he didn’t destroy the human desire to touch God. And perhaps that’s why, sitting alone atop my tell, looking out across Iraq, I imagined a forest of towers, and atop each one a union of people reaching out with anguished hearts and outstretched hands. Not to challenge God. But to join him.

  B O O K T H R E E

  DIASPORA

  . 1 .

  LET THERE BE LIGHT

  Landing after an overnight, international flight has a certain ritual to it—the tucking in of clothes, the resetting of watches, the twittle twittle twittle of cell phones being turned on. But on this particular flight, it comes with another ritual, as all the women on British Airways Flight 6633 from Heathrow reach into their satchels, pull out scarves—mostly black, some mottled brown, none in color—and wrap them around their heads. I see a man take a swig from a flask. We have arrived at the dead end of freedom, the largest religious dictatorship in the world, the shining city on a hill for many Islamic extremists around the globe.

  The agonies of traveling to Iran are quite different from those of traveling to Iraq. For starters, the war with the West is cold here, not hot. I have returned my body armor, left behind my combat helmet. I am not carrying a satellite phone, PowerBars, or “accidental death and dismemberment” insurance. I am not worried about being beheaded.

  But that doesn’t mean coming here is without anxiety. I was fifteen years old when militants stormed the U.S. embassy in Tehran on November 4, 1979, held approximately seventy Americans hostage for 444 days, and sent legions of teenagers into the streets to chant “Death to America.” In many ways, my visceral fear of Iranians was greater than my instinctual fear of, say, Russians. The Cold War was waning by the time I came of age politically; the war with Islamic extremists was just getting started. Ask people of my generation to picture the face of evil, and a majority, I daresay, would pick Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. For me, that dense white beard, forbidding black turban, and deep, angry crosshatch of eyebrows is the haunting insignia of America-hating, Jew-hating, freedom-hating terror.

  On a sheer practical level, Iran has few of the fallback conveniences of other places. With relations with the United States never restored, credit cards do not work, getting a visa is a near impossibility, doing anything without being monitored is unthinkable. The Islamic Republic of Iran represents everything I had learned to decry: religion, elevated to political power, using its authority to impose dictatorial control over every aspect of the daily lives of 70 million people, then exporting its brand of revolutionary extremism to terrorists around the world.

  Yet the Bible presents a vastly different picture of ancient Iran. Persia, or Trans-Euphrates as it’s called in the Book of Ezra, is portrayed as a valiant and tolerant place that destroys Babylon in 536 B.C.E., frees the Israelites, and encourages them to return to Jerusalem and rebuild the Temple. Persia is the savior of monotheism. The Great Satan of today was the Great Messiah of antiquity.

  Coming here meant confronting this odd circumstance: First, why did the prophets suddenly glorify a place previously unmentioned in the story? Second, does a place the Bible holds dear now threaten to undermine everything the Bible holds dear? And finally, in my ongoing evaluation of religious conflict today, would Iran squash any fledgling cause for hope?

  I had one more reason to be cautious this morning. I wasn’t just putting my own fears to the test. One of the women reaching into her bag and wrapping her head in Islamic law was not a stranger to me.

  She was my wife.

  Some cities bustle; Tehran stands still. Built in a natural amphitheater, with a ring of the Alborz Mountains to the north that descend into the desert to the south, Tehran doesn’t have a natural, geographic raison d’être, like a river, bay, or mountain pass. It wasn’t even the capital until 1789, when it replaced Shiraz, in the south. But since then it has grown exponentially, particularly under the reign of Reza Shah, the army colonel who executed a coup in 1925, and his son, Mohammad Reza, the heavy-handed secular autocrat ultimately toppled by Khomeini in 1979. At the beginning of Reza Shah’s reign, Tehran’s population was 210,000; it increased tenfold by 1966, and quintupled, to 10 million, by 2000.

  The terrain simply can’t handle this many people. Smog hangs over the city like dirt around the Peanuts character Pigpen. The water that flows in open canals through the streets begins as melted snow in the mountains and ends as raw sewage in the slums. Cars are everywhere. The Iranian government doesn’t import cars; it brings in parts from foreign makers and assembles the final vehicles in the country, taking a cut from every unit. For a cash-strapped regime, selling cars has become a rare s
ource of profit and triggers endless hours of immovable traffic.

  Not only does the city not move now but it hasn’t really moved, economically, since 1979. Tehran is a time warp for 1970s architecture. Precast concrete is everywhere—museums, flats, sidewalks, curbs, monuments, and especially office buildings, many of which are painted with murals the size of Macy’s Parade balloons, all of them depicting Ayatollah Khomeini; his successor, Ayatollah Khamenei; martyrs who committed terrorist acts around the world; and slogans hailing death to Israel. Beside these, the Shia portraits I saw in southern Iraq pale in size, color, and ubiquity. The Iranian Revolution was inspired—and funded—in part by the Soviet Union; its leaders clearly took pointers from the socialist realist portraits of the 1930s. Stalin would have been proud.

  He might have liked the Laleh Hotel, too. Its drab furniture, lack of air-conditioning, and general brown demeanor reminded me of hotels I visited in Moscow in the 1980s, which were untouched by decades of modernity and countless bookshelves on customer service. Linda balked at leaving her passport at the desk. She insisted on whispering, assuming our room was bugged. And, at a nearby kebab house, she promptly dripped yogurt with shallots on her hijab, or head covering. Discovery: Iranian restaurants don’t have napkins.

  The truth is, I was a little nervous about bringing Linda on this trip. Born in Newton, Massachusetts, and educated at Harvard and Yale, she embodies everything that frustrated female pacesetters like my mother dreamed the women’s movement would produce. With huge black eyes, wavy brown hair, and caramel skin that makes her look almost Latin, as well as a beaming, lighthouse white smile that has been known to wile a billionaire or Third World potentate or two into donating money, she’s a pioneer by nature. Three years out of law school, she began a nonprofit organization designed to promote entrepreneurship in emerging markets; less than a decade later, Endeavor operated in seven countries on three continents.

  Linda achieved her improbable dream through a combination of vision, passion, and wearing down people who told her she couldn’t just change the economies of countries on the other side of the world. But she conducts herself as if she just might do it anyway, and most people, including me, soon learn not to deny her. Still, for all her travels, she had never been to Asia, where muteness sometimes serves, and except for our honeymoon in Morocco, she’d never been to the Muslim world, where women aren’t accustomed to getting their way. When I pressed her to buy some understated, long-sleeved clothing to wear during our trip, she came back with two outfits—one white cotton with elaborate embroidery, the other tangerine orange. I could only shake my head. “It’s my goal to teach you Muslim modesty,” I said.

  Though maybe I didn’t need to. We were struck at once that daily life was not as draconian as we had expected. The talk of Tehran was a satiric film, breaking box office records, about a petty thief who dresses as a mullah, or cleric, in order to escape prison. He ends up revitalizing Islam in the town where he hides. A woman next to me at an Internet café was using her fake fingernails to type instant messages to her lover across the country in hunt-and-peck English. Even on the streets, women of all ages seemed to test the limits of Muslim regulations and the patience of the social police, inching their hijab farther back on their hairlines and brushing makeup around their eyes. As we crossed the street one night to dinner, Linda grabbed my hand. I slapped it away. “We can be arrested!” On the way home, we saw several sets of lovers holding hands nonetheless. Linda grinned as only a vindicated wife can, then pecked me on the cheek.

  In Israel, because of the country’s existential uncertainty, talk often falls into a dialectic: Israeli versus Palestinian, land versus peace. In Iraq, perhaps because of its pall of dictatorship and war, conversations I had often veered toward the doomsday: O angel of the Lord, protect us; O religious conflagration, avoid us. In Iran, the constant threat of eavesdropping and tattletales make even the most intimate exchanges favor allegory.

  On our second afternoon, we drove to the foothills of the northern suburbs, in the shadow of the shah’s former palace, where pricey pistachio shops and French bakeries hint at the country’s onetime European-style sophistication. Behind a high stone wall, in the garden of a slightly crumbling estate, we were welcomed by a man whom a mutual friend described as “a grand member of the Iranian literati and a Socratic sage with more than forty books to his credit.” If possible, Dr. Fereydoon Forouzan exceeded his billing. In his seventies, he was built like an old oak bookcase, with broad shoulders and thick hands. He wore a Harris tweed blazer with elbow patches, a brown wool vest, and slacks. I checked but saw no pocket watch. His eyes exhibited an air of supreme confidence yet were tinged with defeat. Linda asked him to recommend a restaurant. “My wife and I just mostly eat at home now,” he said, forlorn.

  Dr. Forouzan was an aristocrat on the wrong side of history. Raised in Tehran, he was educated in France and the United States, receiving a B.A. and Ph.D. in philosophy from Columbia University. He wrote his dissertation on the tension between politics and morality in Kant. I asked him if, as a young man in Iran, he felt the presence of religion.

  “The same, I would say, as an American or French or anybody living in a secular country would feel about religion,” he said. “My mother was a religious Muslim. She said prayers three times a day. My father was not.” His accent was a rich baritone suitable for an English baron.

  “I had friends in Paris and New York,” he continued, “and our feeling was that religion was something that minded its own business. And coming back to this country, I had exactly the same feeling. That’s why, when the revolution came, it took almost everybody like myself by surprise. Even the religious intellectuals were surprised that they succeeded so easily.”

  The roots of the Iranian Revolution went back at least a century, to the Tobacco Protests of 1891, when Shiite clergy objected to the selling of the country’s rich tobacco stock to the British. Since then, the voices of the mullahs had steadily grown. They never warmed to Mohammad Reza Shah, in part because he refused to ban alcohol, gambling, or premarital sex. In 1963, under pressure from the United States, the shah announced a six-point reform plan called the White Revolution that stripped rich landholders of their property, gave women more power, and poured money into rural education. Among his innovations was to remove sworn allegiance to the Koran as a condition of public office.

  Ayatollah Khomeini, then a sixty-year-old senior cleric in the religious capital of Qom, south of Tehran, attacked the plans as anti-Muslim. Two days later the shah took a column of soldiers to Qom, and Khomeini was soon arrested. The following year Khomeini was exiled and ended up in Najaf, the Shiite holy city in Iraq, where he lived for the next thirteen years, issuing provocative sermons attacking the shah and the moral depravity of the West. By the mid-seventies, Muslim clerics across Iran canceled Friday services in protest of the government and smuggled in cassette recordings of Khomeini’s remarks, which they spread across the country.

  But the religious hierarchy wasn’t alone in its unhappiness with the shah. Rising oil prices exacerbated the gap between rich and poor, and both Marxists and pro-Westerners were horrified by the shah’s increasing brutality. His secret police, SAVAK, tortured dissidents and engaged in widespread secret executions. Under pressure from President Jimmy Carter, the shah released three hundred political prisoners in 1977, but that hardly quelled the anger. Massive protests broke out in September 1978, and the shah called in tanks and helicopter gunships, killing hundreds. On December 12, two million people filled the streets, and one month later the shah fled to Egypt. Dozens of revolutionary groups claimed victory, but Khomeini moved quickest. He arrived in the country on February 1 and promptly announced a replacement prime minister.

  A referendum in March endorsed the formation of an Islamic republic, and on April 1, 1979, Khomeini proclaimed the “first day of God’s government.”

  Dr. Forouzan had been working for the shah in the final years and found himself suddenly out of a job,
confused, and more or less expatriated within his own country. “Especially the first year,” he said, “when all the fighting was going on, I felt the loneliest in my life,” he said. “Almost everybody I knew felt the same way. Of course I was highly critical of the shah. But I told all my friends we had to fight for reform, not revolution.

  “There was a mania in Iranian society,” he continued. “Everyone—the young, the old, the middle class—felt that they had somehow been left behind by history because they had not had a revolution. They envied all the countries that had one, from the French in 1789 to the Russians in 1917. It was madness, really. Just intuitively, I didn’t believe a revolution would do anybody any good.”

  “Were you right?”

  “In most ways, yes. The only thing I can say in favor of the revolution is that it started a process that, once we pass this stage, will take us to a better life. I’m impressed by the tremendous boost it’s given to people’s social and political consciousness. Everybody is concerned about what’s happening, and this was not the case before. Many throughout society were sort of slumbering.”

  Since the revolution Dr. Forouzan had turned his attention to writing about art, history, and politics. “So,” I said, “as somebody who analyzed societies, how would you analyze the experiment of taking religion and using it as a basis of law?”