Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples

by V. S. Naipaul

  The principal then took us on a tour of his new college building. It was rich and splendid. In the lecture rooms the chairs and desks were new and solid. In the library there were sets and sets and rows and rows of new books, with here and there a student sitting on the floor beside the bookshelves.

  The lower floor was for what the principal called special projects. One scholar and one special project to a room. After having gone through the lecture rooms one by one, I didn’t feel I could do the special-project rooms. I said so, but Mehrdad might have softened what I said, because the principal seemed to pay no attention.

  He pushed open a door, the first in the corridor. We surprised the scholar resting or napping on the floor, with a blanket and a pillow. There were books and slips of paper everywhere, on the floor, on the table, on the shelves. The principal said the scholar in this room was an historian of repute (and someone I later talked to in Tehran said that this was so). The historian, horribly surprised, reached out for his white skullcap and pressed it on his head. He was middle-aged, even elderly. He scrambled up as best he could, gathered his brown blanket around him, and, slightly bowed, came to the door. He had a fine old face; his skin was light brown and smooth. He held the brown blanket around his middle the way the women in the streets held their black chadors below their chin.

  The principal said that the historian was writing a book called The Political History of the World.

  The historian, recovering fast from his surprise, said to me, “Do you know a book about Gandhi and the Muslims?”

  I didn’t know of any. But, to encourage the historian, I said, “It’s an interesting subject. The man who first called Gandhi out to South Africa in the 1890s was an Indian Muslim merchant. So you might say he started Gandhi on his political life.”

  The historian paid no attention. He said, “Send me the book.” He went back a couple of steps and took a piece of paper from the top of a pile of books. “Here. Take my name and address. Send me the book.”

  I said he might get the Indian embassy in Tehran to advise him.

  He appeared not to hear. Coming close up to the door again, he said, “Take it as a memory. Take it as a gift. You know, I have been doing a certain amount of work on Zionism for my history of the world. I have begun to feel that while the Zionists made the United States their first idol or false god, they are turning India into their second idol. I don’t know whether you know that the crown of India was handed to the British by a Jew, Disraeli. The fact isn’t as widely known as it should be. The British sword was sharpened in India by Jews. I very much fear that the Zionists are going to wound India again. They will kill Gandhi again and exile his thought again.”

  Mehrdad, translating, broke off to ask me, “Was Gandhi exiled?”

  I said, “Perhaps he’s speaking symbolically.”

  The historian, plucking at his blanket and cap, and politely stepping back during this exchange between Mehrdad and me, came forward again at the end of it and looked ready to go on. But we decided—to the principal’s clear, if well-mannered, relief—to get away and leave the historian to his rest.

  We went to the shrine of Hazrat Masumeh. Kamran, in spite of his cynicism about things generally, had begun to grumble that in the morning, at the start of the journey, he hadn’t put anything in an alms box, hadn’t made that offering, as he should have done. That was why he had had the trouble with the ignition and had to do all that running about from garage to garage. Now, making it as much of a performance as he could, he stuffed a folded old banknote through the slot of one of the alms boxes in the street outside the shrine. And, as though that wasn’t enough, when we were in the shrine courtyard he left us and went to the tomb, to say a prayer for a safe run back.

  While Kamran was doing that, a man took Mehrdad to one side and asked about me. “Is he a Muslim?” (It might have been my dark glasses and Banana Republic felt hat.) Mehrdad said yes, to save trouble; and the man was satisfied. But there could have been trouble. Technically the shrine was a mosque, and non-Muslims shouldn’t have been there, not even in the courtyard. There had been no question like that from anyone in 1979; Behzad, my guide and interpreter, had taken me everywhere. I became unhappy in the courtyard after this. Revolutionary Guards were about, and I didn’t want to be stopped.

  We didn’t stay long. Kamran came out from the illuminated tomb, his prayers said, his expression tight and chastened. We started for Tehran. The sun went down round and red behind the salt cliffs. When we were closer to Tehran than to Qom, Kamran began to talk about Emami and his trips to the front. He said, “They”—the clerics—“didn’t get the real meaning of the war. Let’s even say Emami went six times to the front. Two days going, two days coming back. So he would have spent twenty-four days traveling. The rest of the time he would have been preparing people to fight. He would have been talking. He would have simply been doing his job.” When we got nearer Tehran Kamran became more irreverent about Emami. He said, “Emami is doing quite well, in that little flat, whatever he says. He is living there on his own. I am still living with my parents.”

  A little later, the lights of Khomeini’s shrine now beginning to be seen, he raised the matter of his payment for the long day. I thought Mehrdad had settled that beforehand, but Mehrdad now said he hadn’t. He said in English, “It is better to do these things in a friendly way.”

  Mehrdad said something in Persian to Kamran. Kamran didn’t reply. Instead, he put on the car’s roof light, pulled back his left sleeve, and raised his forearm to show a long, jagged shrapnel wound.

  Mehrdad said to me in English, “We must do this in a friendly way.”

  We made certain calculations, pricing miles and then hours, adding the two figures up, and knocking a little off the rather large sum that resulted. For a while—Khomeini’s shrine now behind us—Mehrdad kept this figure secret, kept Kamran dangling. When the lights of Tehran began to show he put the figure to Kamran. It was immediately accepted. I counted the notes out and put them in an envelope. Mehrdad gave Kamran the envelope. Kamran put the envelope on the dashboard and talked no more about money.

  8

  CANCER

  MEHRDAD HAD A FRIEND called Feyredoun. Feyredoun, who was in his early twenties, like Mehrdad, was doing his military service in the air force. He came home to Tehran at weekends. He was tall and slender and sharp-faced. His English (like Mehrdad’s, all acquired in Iran) was fluent, once he got going, and capable of great complexity. Feyredoun, having grown up in the isolation of revolutionary Iran, was hungry for books, ideas, philosophical discussion.

  After one such discussion I said to Mehrdad, casually, when we were talking of something else, that his friend Feyredoun was a religious man. I meant only that he was a man of faith; but the word religious rankled with Mehrdad. He raised the matter some days later when we were driving about Tehran; and it was one of the things I thought we should talk about more fully when I went to his house.

  We went there late one afternoon. We surprised his mother. From the reception room, as we entered, we could see straight through an open door to a side room where she was lying on a bed. She knew we were coming, but she must have misjudged the time. She half stood up, half rolled off the bed. Her head was bare, and she bit at the lower end of her chiffon-like head cover. She was short and plump and matronly, though she might have been only in her forties; she radiated kindliness. She came from the northwest and was light-eyed.

  Mehrdad’s father was there, too, just for a little, to be introduced to his son’s guest. He was tall, darker than his wife, as handsome as his son, but a little more frail, even willowy. I might have thought him a man of low energy, perhaps with a medical condition. But his son had said, twice, that his father was not a brave man, was a man who always looked for safety and ran with the crowd (now displaying pictures of the Shah, now destroying a book of his daughter’s, a school prize, which had pictures of the royal family). And this was the man I saw, the man who was not brave; though, really,
he had shown himself a man of resource after the revolution had done away with his safe banking job. He had picked himself up and gone into business in a small way, buying and selling, and had done well enough to give his family this middle-class house in an outer district of Tehran. But the difficult everyday things that people do can sometimes be taken for granted by their children.

  The reception room was big, with carpets spread side by side—a confusion of pattern and color, as in some Persian painting—to cover all the floor. The dining table, with flowers and fruit, was in a corner, and it was there, until dinnertime, that Mehrdad and I sat and talked.

  Mehrdad said, “What do you mean by a religious person? I have a problem with the word you use. You called Feyredoun religious, and he himself thinks he is a pagan.”

  I asked, “What does he mean by pagan?”

  “A pagan is someone outside the public religions. Here we have ways of judging whether a person is religious. The first way is their appearance. Beards. It has been recommended in Islam that men must have beards. There are special rules about shaving the beard and cutting the moustache. You can cut the beard with scissors, but not razor blades.”

  “It’s in the Koran?”

  “No. Hadith, the traditions connected with the Prophet.”

  “Did you hear about it when you were growing up?”

  “Yes. But the recommendation became more known after the revolution. I have known people who, when they have to send in photographs for job applications, especially grow their beard. There are other rules. If they are growing a moustache it mustn’t be so long that it gets wet when they drink water. This is also a hadith. All these things are written in Bahar-al-Anvar and other hadith books. In the old days religious people had long hair. But now they don’t.”

  “Why?”

  “Nobody knows. There is something else. It isn’t general. If you bow down to pray you rest your forehead on a cake or tablet of earth from one of the holy sites of the faith. Even in Qom they make a lot of these cakes of earth. After a time your skin darkens or alters color where it rests or falls on these earth cakes. They say their prayers five times a day, and sometimes there are special night prayers. These special night prayers involve a lot of bowing and rubbing of the forehead against the earth.”

  It was something he had pointed out to me in Qom about Emami, the darker central part of his forehead, another aspect of Emami’s piety as a talebeh, like the bare concrete front room of his apartment. But you had to know about the practice before you could look for signs of it. Once you knew, it was easy to spot. Some very pious people had something like a scorch mark on their forehead; this was because they heated the cakes of earth for their prayers.

  Mehrdad said, “There is something else. Religious people use rosewater on their body. They smell of it, during Mohurram especially.” Mohurram, the Shia mourning month. “And they are shy people—for the sake of appearances. When they are talking to a woman they put their head down. Of course, looking at a woman has special rules. Let me see how many rules there are about it in Khomeini’s book.”

  He went and brought back a big paperback: yet another book of rules by Khomeini, in addition to the five volumes I had seen in Emami’s library about buying and selling.

  Mehrdad said, “This one is called Resaleh or Tozih-al Masa-el. Rescript or Explanation of Problems. There are ten basic rules about looking at women in this book of Khomeini’s. The book itself deals with three thousand problems.”

  “Are people looking up things all the time? Do those rules really help people?”

  “To me the rules about beards have no logic. They don’t say why. They just say, ‘Do it.’ And I cannot be a religious person because I listen to most kinds of prohibited music. We have asked them a lot about it. They say that music is prohibited if it changes your mood or feelings. That’s nonsense. Because you cannot listen to music of any sort and keep your mood.”

  “What kind of music is prohibited?”

  “Music for dancing. The music of love songs. Western music is prohibited, apart from the classics. Indian popular music is also prohibited. There was a time when buying musical instruments was prohibited. Let me look it up. Here. It is Khomeini’s problem number 2,067. And I don’t say prayers. So I’m not a religious person. I never fast. I never go to a mosque. And I don’t obey any of the rules, though I know most of them. I have studied law and know most of them. Some of the rules I make fun of. For example, there is the rule about blood money. This is: if you kill somebody you pay blood money to his family. The rule now is that a woman is worth half as much as a man. If you kill a man you pay the full price. At the moment the full price is two million toumans, twenty million rials. About five thousand dollars. You pay half of that if you kill a woman.”

  “You think people need these rules?”

  “I’m coming to that. After we see the problems of life we begin to think. We try to stand on our own feet and try to get to some kind of resolution. Religious people don’t like it. Because it means we are putting the whole system away. We believe in God most of us, but we think like Voltaire.”

  That was what I had meant when I had said that Feyredoun was a religious man. But in Iran, as I now saw, words like “religious” and “pagan” had Iranian meanings.

  Mehrdad said, “God is needed for life. But not those meaningless rules. People don’t worry about it. We have rules about young people being together. It is illegal, but people do it. I have a friend. She is having troubles with her boyfriend. She is not a virgin. By this same fellow. He is now going away; he is going to leave her. And she is praying regularly. When the pressure is on, people turn to religion. We need God. In a poor country with a lot of problems we need someone at the top.”

  “Why do you think the religious people place such stress on rules?”

  “They are the rule-makers. If you deny the rules you are denying the rule-maker. If you put the rule-maker away you are against the Leader. If you oppose the Leader you are against the Holy Prophet. If you are against the Holy Prophet you are against the Holy Book, and the Holy Book comes from God. Someone against God must be killed. But who does the killing? Only the rule-maker. Not God.”

  There were rules; everything was controlled. It wasn’t only the chador and headdress for women; or boys and girls not walking together; or women not singing on the radio and television; or certain kinds of music not being played. There was a complete censorship, of magazines, newspapers, books, television. And helicopters flew over North Tehran looking for satellite dishes; just as the Guards walked in the park to watch the boys and girls; or entered houses to look for alcohol and opium; or, as I was to see in far-off Shiraz, the local morals police did the rounds even of the tourist hotels to make their presence felt.

  In 1979 and 1980 the missionaries of the Islamic revival, echoing one another, as though their copy had been provided by a central source, had endlessly said that Islam was a complete way of life; and in Iran now it was possible to see political Islam as a complete form of control. Mr. Parvez, the founder-editor of the Tehran Times, had said to me not long after I had arrived, “They want to control your way of sitting here, and your way of talking.” I don’t think I had understood what he was saying. It took time to understand how far the restrictions reached, though it was easy enough to state what they were; and it took time to understand how they were deforming people’s lives.

  Mehrdad’s sister was unmarried, and had little chance of getting married, since too many men of suitable age had been killed in the eight-year war. She simply stayed at home when she came home from work: silent, full of inward rage, her unhappiness a shadow over the house and a source of worry for her parents, who couldn’t work out a future for her. It was too difficult for her to go out; and now she had lost the will. In this she was like the fifteen-year-old daughter of a teacher I had got to know. This girl had already learned that she could be stopped by the Guards and questioned if she was alone on the street. She hated the humiliat
ion, and now she didn’t like to go out. The world had narrowed for her just when it should have opened out.

  In February 1980 I had seen young women in guerrilla garb among the students camped outside the seized U.S. embassy: Che Guevara gear, the theater of revolution. I remembered one plump young woman, in her khakis, coming out of a low tent on this freezing afternoon with a mug of steaming tea for one of the men: her face bright with the idea of serving the revolution and the warriors of the revolution. Most of those young people, “Muslim Students Following the Line of Ayatollah Khomeini,” would now have been dead or neutered, like all the other communist or left-wing groups. I don’t think that young woman with the mug could have dreamed that the revolution to which she was contributing—posters on the embassy wall and on trees were comparing the Iranian revolution with the Nicaraguan, making both appear part of a universal movement forward—would have ended in this way, with an old-fashioned tormenting of women, and with the helicopters in the sky looking for satellite dishes.

  The very gear and style of revolution now had another meaning. The beards were not Che Guevara beards, but good Islamic beards, not cut by razors; and the green guerrilla outfits were now the uniform of the enforcers of the religious law.

  No one I met spoke of any kind of revolution as a possibility. That idea, so loved by Iranians of an earlier generation, had been spoilt now, as in the old USSR; revolution was a word that had been taken over by the religious state. No one ever spoke of the possibility of political action. There were no means, and no leaders in sight. No new ideas could be floated. The apparatus of control was complete. The actual rulers, though their photographs appeared everywhere, were far away; government here, as someone said, was “occult.” And still, in the general inanition, there was a feeling that something was about to happen. It made people nervous.