Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples (Vintage International) (37 page)

Ali said to them, “Thanks be to Allah that you are in prison, and you will stay in prison and cannot do anything to me.”

After some time Ali’s trial was announced. People were invited to make whatever charges they wanted to against him and submit whatever incriminating documents they had. There were seven sessions in the mullah’s court, and the case against Ali was dismissed.

The mullah-judge said, “I am not a man of Islamic revolution. But I have made this revolution to bring Islam. There is a distinction between the two. I want to make a house in heaven. I don’t want to make a house in hell. A rich man is not necessarily guilty, unless I find some guilt in him. You may not be a good Muslim, but I find you not guilty.”

Things became quieter for Ali after the trial. There were still problems, many problems. Life was never easy now, and perhaps he would never feel secure. But the kind of revolutionary who had pre-judged him as a rich man and tormented him during the first three years of the revolution was not so dominant now in the courts and government departments. The government had got rid of many of the wilder people, and those who had remained in office had become less hard with the years. Power had corrupted many of them. Some of them had made a lot of money and gone into business for themselves. People in power could still be obstructive; but they were easier to read now, and there were ways of dealing with them.

And after all of this there was melancholy in Ali’s house. It showed in his wife’s face, which spoke of an unassuageable grief for what had really been a lost life.

On the mountains to the north morning light cast shadows in the dips and hollows. Every irregularity, of abraded rock, or rockfall down a slope, was picked out. Morning light also showed the extent to which the lower mountains were built up; and, at various places, the cutting of new terraces—cement-colored below the beige—for further building. In the evening small broken lines of lights could be seen on what should have been bare mountainside. In the morning those lights disappeared, and there seemed to be nothing. Lower down, poplars looked fresh against the darker green.

5
 

P
AYDAR, GROWING UP
in poverty in the poor northwest, was possessed by the idea of revolution from an early age. He was tormented by what he saw every day and every night of the suffering of his widowed mother. She stitched clothes and made socks and stockings for a living, and often sat at her machine until two in the morning.

In time Paydar joined the Tudeh communist party. The Tudeh hoped to ride to power on the back of the religious movement, and in the early days of the revolution it was the policy of the party to adopt an Islamic camouflage. That was easy enough: the themes of justice and punishment and the wickedness of rulers were common to both ideologies. But the Tudeh party destroyed itself. It gave a Soviet-style apparatus to the Islamic revolution, and then it was destroyed by that apparatus.

Ali, in his provincial factory-shed jail in 1980 and 1981, had seen the beginning of the roundup of the left. Though the enraged communists in the political section of Ali’s jail were still threatening to hang Ali outside his house when they came to power, their day in Iran was really over. Two years later, in 1983, the Tudeh party was formally outlawed by the government. And two years after that, Paydar, who was in hiding, like the surviving
members of the party, was hunted down and taken away to a jail outside Tehran.

Paydar didn’t know then in what part of the country the jail was; he didn’t know now. For two months, as he calculated, he was kept in something like a hole, without a window, “without a speck of light,” and questioned. And it was in that darkness and intense solitude, that disconnectedness from things—at first in the hole, and then in a cell with fourteen others, where he spent a further year—that he began to think dispassionately about the idea of revolution that had driven him for so much of his adult life. And he arrived at an understanding—especially painful in the circumstances—of why he had been wrong, and “why revolutions are doomed to fail.”

“I thought that people are much too complicated in their nature to be led in a simple fashion, with a few slogans. Inside ourselves we are full of greed, love, fear, hatred. We all carry our own history and past. So when we come to make a revolution we bring with ourselves all these factors in different proportions. Revolutions have always disregarded all these individual differences.”

So, in the jail, he had rejected the idea of revolution. It had been his great support, the equivalent of religion; and no other idea quite so vital had come to him afterwards. He was like a man in whom something had been extinguished. He was a big man from the northwest. It was possible to imagine him full of fire. Now he was strangely pacific; his suffering, old and new, was always there to make him watch his moods, consider his words, and make him take the edge off passion or complaint. He was trying now—exposed as he was, and liable to be picked up again at any time—to make a cause out of his privacy, his family life; though day-to-day life was hard, and in the economic mess of revolutionary Iran, and with the decline of the currency, the value of his earnings as a teacher went down and down.

He said, “I was attracted to revolutionary thinking when I was eighteen.” This would have been seven or eight years before the revolution. “There was a man in our town who had just come out of prison, and we loved to go and talk to him. But he didn’t want to talk to us because of security problems. Finally he must have had a good impression of me, because he chose me to talk to. He was thirty-eight, and a close friend of a famous writer who was drowned in our river. He trusted me and started to talk to me.”

I asked Paydar, “Where did he live? What sort of house?”

“A very small and ordinary house, such as you get in the northwest, with a little yard and two bedrooms. He lived with his mother and his two sisters.
He told me lots of things about injustice and how he would eliminate it.”

“Were you working at the time?”

“I had just left school and was working in the bazaar market. At the same time I was writing little stories for the magazines. I wrote about thirty, and most of them were published.”

“What did you write about?”

“About poverty, about people suffering. My father had died when I was twelve, and I experienced poverty afterwards. My mother worked sixteen hours a day to keep us. There’s a gloomy picture I have of her: waking up at two and seeing her dozing at the machine.”

Paydar’s new friend, the former political prisoner, gave Paydar books by Russian writers. Paydar was especially moved by Maxim Gorki; he was fascinated by the novel called
Mother.
The friend also introduced Paydar to revolutionary Iranian writers, some of whom had been in prison. The friend didn’t want to talk about his own time in jail. He had done three years, and Paydar would have liked to hear about it. But the friend preferred to talk about his political ideas.

He said they were Marxist ideas. Paydar understood later that they were Marxist ideas of a very crude sort; but at the time he was excited, and those crude ideas became his. Still later it became clear to Paydar that those were the only political ideas the friend had; the friend had not tried to find out more.

I said to Paydar, “And yet he had a saintliness in your eyes?”

“Yes. What I felt was pure emotion. I felt, yes, that what the man was saying about revolution could be done, but it required sacrifice. So I started to prepare myself for revolution. I started even to think that I might lose my life.”

“How long did it take you to get to that stage?”

“All this took just a year.”

“And your mother?”

“She knew. She knew he was teaching me his way, and she didn’t say anything. She was the type of mother we do have here. They believe in their sons and believe in what they are doing. This usually happens in those families where the father has died and the son has replaced the father. The mother—not strictly obeys—yields to her son.”

“You talked of revolution and sacrifice almost in a religious way.”

“I am not sure about my religious feeling. My father was atheist. My father was not a religious man. Nor was my mother. It couldn’t be typical Iranian. My mother did believe in God, but she believed more in humans.
I remember something very nice from her. ‘If you ask a little child not to do a bad thing, and reward him if he doesn’t do that, it is O.K., because he’s a child. But if he grows up and understands himself, and you still reward him for the good things he has done, you are insulting him.’ ”

In the late 1970s Paydar went to England to do a higher degree at a provincial college. He went with his wife and their two children, and he might have done so on a scholarship, though he also had his savings. In England they lived in rented rooms. And—though he didn’t see it then, and didn’t say it now—this course of study in England was a tribute to the Shah’s Iran. It spoke of the mobility that had come to people like Paydar, born in poor and backward areas; it spoke of the economy that had kept him in work, and given him savings; and it spoke of the strength and purchasing power of the currency.

I wanted to know what was the first unusual thing about England that Paydar noticed.

“In England I looked at things with a sort of pre-judgment. I thought they were capitalists. I was very cynical. I thought they were responsible for our miseries in history. Which of course to some extent they were.”

“Did you notice the buildings? Did you like any of them?”

“I closed my eyes to lots of things. Those revolutionaries who thought like me did the same thing.”

And soon enough the revolution came.

“It was 1978. People were on the streets and I had to take sides. As someone who had always wished to be with people in the streets for freedom and equality my side was chosen. I took part in demonstrations in England. I handed out leaflets to people passing. At that time Khomeini was getting popular with the revolution.”

I said, “We heard about him quite late in England. I felt the religious people were keeping him secret.”

“He wasn’t there at first, in the revolution. It was only in 1978 that people started to hear about him.”