Over six years have passed since the great marches of the autumn of 1978. Looking at their present situation, many Iranians could repeat with conviction Saadi’s line, “I am not mounted on a camel, nor, like an ass, am I saddled with a load; I am not the lord of subject people, nor am I the slave of any monarch.” Saadi meant this line to express the speaker’s happiness at his freedom from real burdens and from the even heavier imagined burden of placing himself subject to or in authority over others. An Iranian, repeating the line in the winter of 1984, might see an irony in its application to his own situation, in which it is unclear to what extent he is or might hope to be the master of his own fate.
The intoxicating euphoria of those scenes in which the Iranian masses saw themselves for the first time as actors on the stage of history lasted through the first five years after the revolution. In some moods and on certain occasions it still lives vividly among the masses in this sixth year of the revolution. Neighborhood leaders turn out in large numbers for Friday prayers; tens—and in Tehran hundreds—of thousands march on great religious holidays. In Shiah communities outside Iran, particularly in Lebanon and the Arab countries of the Gulf, the Iranian revolution inspired radical political movements that included men who, convinced they had assimilated the spirit of Imam Hosain, carried out suicide bomb attacks against the American embassy in Kuwait and the American Marine headquarters and embassy in Beirut. In Iran itself in the summer of 1984 the state television showed queues of young men approaching the doors of buses, where each would kiss the edge of a Koran held by a mullah, then touch the Koran to his forehead, and finally enter the bus to go to fight Iraq. The anger at Iraq for starting the war and the readiness for martyrdom, repeatedly praised in messages from Ayatollah Khomeini, have kept the heroic image of the fearless devotee constantly before the Iranian public in spite of the hundred and fifty thousand Iranian lives lost in that war.
The attraction to and repulsion from the heavy burden demanded by the image of the martyr is creating a drastic change in the self-conceptions of many Iranians. Among every category of Iranian there seem to be large numbers who see the love of ambiguity that gave Iranian culture a flexible exterior and a private interior as something no longer tenable, a freedom that history no longer permits. That dawn six years ago when the whole earth wore the beauty of promise and it was bliss to be alive was followed by another dawn in which Iranians saw the cultural goods and values of their two and a half millennia of history in a new and harsher light and felt an urgent longing for the open and unambiguous definitions that this new light demanded. They saw their past in the lines of Mowlana in which he describes people seeking for the qebleh, the direction of the Kaaba of Mecca and focus of prayer, in the dark of night:
Like people who diligently search about,
turning every which way they fancy the qebleh to be;
When at dawn the Kaaba appears,
It is revealed who has actually lost his way.
Or, like divers under the depth of the sea’s waters,
Each one plucking something in haste …
When they come from the bottom of the deep sea
It is revealed who now owns the exquisite pearl
And who has brought the little pearls
and who the tiny stones and worthless shells.
During the sixth year of the revolution many Iranians are telling each other by indirection that the heroic image of the selfless devotee is a role, even a pose, that they can no longer maintain without interruption. Not only the Iranians in exile, and royalist Iranians who remained in Iran after the revolution, and the anti-mullah revolutionary Iranians who claimed their revolution was hijacked but, also the religious, revolutionary Iranians now sometimes say, with a slight smile, when referring to a death mentioned in the newspaper, “And he died a martyr.” Some of these Iranians seem to be able to shift roles from devotee to cynic without difficulty, but others shift with evident self-consciousness, or not at all. For the Iranians who shift with difficulty or not at all the inner spaces created by ambiguity no longer exist, and the attraction of ambiguity is forever dead.
In the great shifting of official cultural goods and values through the revolution, it is still far from clear who got what. The mullahs got the state cult of monarchy removed—not, of course, in favor of the older arms-length coexistence of the ethos of government and the ethos of religion—but in favor of the complete absorption of the ethos of government by religion. Some mullahs have attacked the task of bending the state to their will with a vengeance. As judges in courts, as ministers and plenipotentiary supervisors of ministries they have ordered the execution of thousands and purged tens of thousands. After all, the new constitution, in force since 1980, unambiguously established the principle of “the guardianship of the Islamic jurist,” which Khomeini had been developing from its nineteenth-century sources for at least twenty years before the outbreak of the revolution.
Yet strange things have happened to the theory of “the guardianship of the jurist” on its way to enshrinement in the constitution. In his book Islamic Government, which Khomeini published in 1970, he roundly attacked the constitution of 1906 and asked, “What connection do all the articles of the Constitution … have with Islam?” He went on to explain:
The fundamental difference between Islamic government, on the one hand, and constitutional monarchy and republics, on the other, is this: whereas the representatives of the people or the monarch in such regimes engage in legislation, in Islam the legislative power and competence to establish laws belongs exclusively to God Almighty. The Sacred Legislator of Islam is the sole legislative power. No one has the right to legislate and no law may be executed except the law of the Divine Legislator. It is for this reason that in an Islamic government, a simple planning body takes the place of the legislative assembly that is one of the three branches of government.
Nevertheless a new constitution was written, and (in seeming contradiction to the clauses that established the authority of the Islamic jurist), it declared that the source of legislative authority was “the will of the people.” Moreover, it reestablished a parliament, now called (as Fazlollah Nuri had wanted) the Islamic Consultative Assembly rather than the National Consultative Assembly. While elections to this Assembly are very far from being free and open—some parties are forbidden, the media is controlled, vote counting sometimes remains in the hands of dubious local officials—they have nevertheless been hard-fought. Moreover, debate among those candidates allowed to run for election has been remarkably open. The atmosphere of open debate and of due procedure within parliament has been even more remarkable. Parliament has both debated and acted as if it has the power to make law, and the mullah speaker of the house follows the very evident will of the members that points of order (first and second readings of bills and so forth) be punctiliously observed, almost always in accordance with the procedures established by the parliament under the old constitution.
In this sense the generation of 1906 has established a victory for their constitution—so hated by Khomeini—which was never unambiguously clear under the Pahlavi shahs. The Iranian constitution of 1906 was a little over seventy years old when it was abolished. It may have been a dead letter in most of its provisions for many of those seventy years, but the mere existence of a parliament remained emotionally a very important fact for very many Iranians, and time had given this fact its own sanctity.
This sanctity is felt by many of the mullah as well as the nonmullah members of parliament, whatever Ayatollah Khomeini may have said in his book. The talabehs who grew up in the years of the Second World War and in the time of Mossadegh, and who avidly read the newspaper accounts of the hard and comparatively open debates of those periods, insist on a parliament of this nature without second thoughts. When the parliamentary recorders presented summaries of debates in the first sessions of the new parliament, the publishers of the official gazette told them that nothing less than full accounts of the debates had ever been proper; and parliament agreed. When, on June 28, 1981, a bomb blew up the headquarters of the Islamic Republic party (the party favored by Khomeini and the majority of politically active mullahs) and several members of parliament were killed (exactly seventy-two, the same number as were killed at Kerbela, Ayatollah Khomeini insisted), those mullah members of parliament who survived managed to leave their hospitals temporarily a few days later, some on crutches, some carried by attendants, to attend a meeting of parliament in which their votes were needed to carry a critical bill. To these mullahs a parliamentary majority seems to be as important as a closely reasoned argument about the intention of the Divine Legislator.
And yet the parliament, whatever it is called or however it is composed, is far from sovereign. The Council of Guardians, a body of jurists appointed in accordance with the constitution to judge in terms of Islamic law the legality of acts of parliament, has turned down some of the most important legislation passed on land reform and family law. Not for nothing do the faces of Ayatollah Kashani, who left the camp of Mossadegh, and Fazlollah Nuri, who opposed the Constitutional Revolution, and Nawab Safavi, who led the Devotees of Islam who shot Kasravi, now appear on postage stamps.
For that portion of the population of Iran that was culturally Shiah and vaguely religious the last six years have been a rediscovery of what Shiah Islam as taught in the madresehs really is. Some of this discovery has come through education. At first enthusiasts proposed that maktabs, the old Koran schools, be reestablished. The proposal failed, and the state school books were carefully revised to include ample information about Islam, although the rest of their contents and, in fact, the whole preuniversity state educational system, including a revised set of Persian songs, have remained much the same. Some parts of the work of the generation of Isa Sadiq proved as hard to expunge as did the idea of a parliament. Universities are in a sort of limbo, half functioning, half idle. Nevertheless university teachers who want to keep their posts are more or less obliged to go to Qom for special summer courses taught by mullahs.
On a personal level, rediscovery of the interpretation of Islam in its fully elaborated form as taught in the madreseh has been a shock to many middle-class Iranians. Some young Iranians have accepted the jot and tittle of the law with enthusiasm and have joined the patrols of vigilantes who go around enforcing the dress codes for women (all hair must be covered) and smelling out “corruption” wherever they can find it. But many Iranians who were laxly religious before the revolution, and who were strongly attracted by Khomeini’s repeated statements that politically passive mullahs had made Islam into a religion preoccupied with ritual purity in order to avoid its political message, have since found out that, for Khomeini, Islam is most emphatically about both politics and ritual purity, a subject on which Ayatollah Khomeini has conservative views. He is, for example, one of the “models” who hold that the touch of non-Muslims is impure, requiring a major ritual washing.
This shock has been greatest among the intellectuals, who at first had loved the revolution as their own, believing that the masses under the leadership of Khomeini had finally spoken up for what they, the intellectuals, had always wanted. They soon learned otherwise. About three years ago a poem was passed hand to hand throughout the intellectual community of Tehran in which the poet exalted Zoroaster as the prophet who “never killed nor ordered anyone to be killed.” The poem is addressed to “our ancient land and soil”:
You, O ancient elder, eternally young,
It is you I love if anything I love;
Of Ferdowsi, that castle of legend that he raised
to the heavens of might and glory I love;
Of Khayyam, that anger and complaint that eternally
affects the heart and soul I love.
These words echo one of the most self-consciously dramatic episodes in the intellectual history of the nineteenth century. Ernest Renan had been trained to be a learned priest, an “Orientalist” who could study the textual evidences of Judeo-Christian origins not only in Greek and Latin but also in Hebrew, Syriac, and Arabic. Philology proved his religious undoing; he decided that the Bible had conflations and misascriptions of texts that made its divine origin intellectually untenable. In the 1860s he wrote in French a rationalist life of Jesus that was one of the storm centers of the debate of religion versus irreligion in the nineteenth century.
In his memoirs Renan describes how, while standing at the foot of the Acropolis in 1865, he suddenly realized that all the peoples he knew about—Orientals, Germans, Romans, Slavs, and Celts—were to some degree barbarians and that this Greek temple was the revelation of the only nonbarbarian beauty he believed to exist. Renan addressed to the Acropolis his famous “prayer” to “the goddess whose worship means reason and wisdom.” And he confessed the difficulty of cleansing himself and others from accretions such as Christianity behind which history had half hidden the rationality once worshiped there. Quoting Saint Augustine’s moving apostrophe to God in the Confessions almost word for word, Renan wrote: “Late have I come to love thee, beauty ever ancient and ever new.” Similarly, the Iranian poet who praised Zoroaster had also come to feel that what he loved in his land, that “ancient elder, eternally young,” was its partly rediscovered ancient past, which to him no longer seemed emotionally unconnected. For some Iranians, particularly among the intellectuals, this past had at last taken root; they had been forced by the dialectic of events finally to say whether the Iranian image of the hero was Cyrus or Hosain, and they had answered: Cyrus.
For the leftist intellectuals the revolution is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. The earth had moved, and when it settled again it seemed that—however ingeniously they sought to prove that the masses had been deceived—the masses had acquiesced in the leadership of the new elite in place of the old elite. This was an elite, because mullahs, they claimed, were more often than not the sons of mullahs, and mullahs were in disproportionate numbers sayyeds (certainly all the living “models” are sayyeds). In the view of the leftists the revolution had brought to power an old semihereditary elite, the last elite remaining after the landlords, the great men of the bazaar, and the shah’s technocrats had been broken. And this elite had found its henchmen in the lumpen bourgeoisie, the disappointed, such people as the young man who had found no place at the university after completing his high school or the factory foreman who had found no political outlet after becoming the organizer of a hay’at. Now the lumpen bourgeois tasted power by serving the new regime as a member of a revolutionary committee or as a member of the paramilitary Revolutionary Guard. For all that there had been some redistribution of land and much nationalization of large companies, the intellectuals could not understand how a revolution so popular in origin should be so conservative in outcome.
Isa Sadiq died in 1978 surrounded by news of the enormous demonstrations and outbursts of popular emotion that would lead the revolutionary opposition to victory. He was not surprised at the demonstrations; he had grown up amidst the revolution of 1906 and knew firsthand the power of the mullah and the mosque in Iranian life, particularly in periods when no other channels of protest were available. Had he survived a few years longer, he would probably have found the orientation of the revolution less puzzling than it seemed to Iranian leftists who had come to maturity in the forties and fifties; unlike Al-e Ahmad, he had actually known men like Fazlollah Nuri and seen their impact on the course of the previous revolution.
Isa Sadiq believed that the protests of 1978 were in large part the result of the nation’s failure to create the kind of educational system for which he had labored. It had created, he said, a lot of people who wanted the prestige of paper degrees in order to sit behind desks, and a lot of people who resented their lack of degrees and exclusion from desks; it had never succeeded in creating respect for working with one’s hands. Moreover, the educational system had never created “the man in society,” an idea of John Dewey’s to which Isa Sadiq had remained faithful for nearly half a century. Although a loyal and veteran servant of the Pahlavi dynasty, he privately complained about the shah. The shah, he said, wanted too much Westernization, while he, Isa, wanted that never-fully-described but recurrently sighted fascination of Iranian intellectuals: a truly Iranian modernization of Iran.
In many ways Isa Sadiq was right to see the failures of the educational system as, at the very least, symptomatic of the comparative fragility of the social order that existed under the shah. Perhaps, in his appeal to the ideal of John Dewey, Isa Sadiq sensed the confusing disjunction between the communalism of Iranian family life and the different, even if imperfectly assimilated, ethic of individual possession and loyalties to state-created corporate entities that the secular educational system tried to cultivate. Perhaps he sensed that the mental geometry and discipline that secular education sought to instill in hundreds of thousands was even more unrelated to the lives of many Iranians than the more self-instilled geometry and discipline learned through reading set texts under teachers at the madresehs. Perhaps he sensed that the disrespect that lay just beneath the reverential obedience of students to the teachers in the state schools was somehow analogous to the disrespect that lay just beneath the awe many Iranians felt for the shah.
And yet if Isa Sadiq saw Iranian secular education as a stepchild, it was a stepchild in whom he could feel much genuinely paternal pride. Not only had it made millions literate and created tens of thousands of highly trained specialists, it had also created a fair number of Isa Sadiqs. Isa Sadiq, who emerges in his One Year in America as a great counter of objects, foreshadowed a growing number of Iranians who discussed the future of Iranian society in terms of statistical results and probabilistic solutions. For them such considerations formed the primary source of law, which should be endlessly modified according to the changing human perceptions as to the results that laws had achieved or might be expected to achieve. For them, as for Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, “The life of the law has not been logic: it has been experience.”
The new Isa Sadiqs were not necessarily without religion, at least in their own eyes. Isa prayed regularly and did not drink; he would probably have considered Kasravi’s irreligion emotionally unacceptable. But he regarded religion as a personal thing, somewhat in the manner of a Western religious secularist. Some of the tens of thousands of Isa Sadiqs are as religious as Isa, some less. The belief of the great majority of Iranians almost certainly falls somewhere between the belief of the Isa Sadiqs in a law shaped by “experience” and the belief of the Islamic jurisconsults in a law shaped according to the most “learned” surmise of divine intention. It is clear which group at present has the upper hand; it is not clear to which group, if either, belongs the future.
Sometimes, when he is in the andaruni of the family home in Qom, it seems to Ali that very little has changed. The cypresses in the four parterres of the andaruni died in the extreme cold of the winter of 1963, and four flowering ornamental pomegranate bushes have been planted in their place, but otherwise the garden looks as it always did. Now that neither of Ali’s parents is alive, he shares the house with his brother, and his library has taken over his half of the andaruni, leaving him and his wife only two rooms, which they use as a bedroom and a sitting room. Occasionally Ali still takes a hand in the garden, and there are times when, leaning over a seedling next to a bush in the andaruni, Ali feels that the quiet and privacy he loved while sitting under the bush as a child has remained there undisturbed in the shade of the bush for thirty-five years.
Sometimes the world outside seems unchanged too, but mostly Ali is aware of how changed it is, how painfully unsure he is of the direction in which the change is going, and how relieved he feels when he has returned home and reentered the world of his books. Physically, of all parts of Qom, the bazaar seems least changed. Sometimes when he walks in the lane of the spice dealers and sees some of the old men nod to him from behind the open sacks of turmeric and coriander, he half expects to see his mother come around the corner and lead him to one of these shops as she did years ago. And twice a year Hamid comes around to prune the trees; he has a motor bike now, but the saw is still in his hand.
In most places, however, he notices the changes. Villagers have continued to move to Qom, as they have to every city of Iran, regardless of the revolution and the disappearance of Brigitte Bardot films, and the open fields he would cross to walk to nearby shrines are now covered with small houses. Qom also has a considerable population of refugees from Khuzestan, the southwestern province that the Iraqis partly occupied, and from Iran’s neighbor, Afghanistan, where the war against the Soviet-supported regime has been especially brutal to the Shiah province in the center of the country. And there are well over ten thousand—some say fifteen thousand—talabehs in Qom instead of the former five thousand. Training to be a mullah, as one says in Persian and in English, ‘has taken on a considerable luster.’
Teaching is much as it used to be, and the really apt and serious pupils, despite the increase in the number of talabehs, are just as few. His old teacher of elementary logic has remained at his job, and, while thirty years ago he looked near fifty, he looks virtually the same now that he is seventy. Marashi, who is about eighty, is much the same—generous, always eager to hear about new books even though his sight has almost failed, and a great tease. When old pupils come to him he indicates his opinion of mullahs who have gone in for government in a big way by saying to them, “Well, are you involved in the murder-and-plunder side of things or have you chosen to lead souls astray and make other people’s prayers null and void by your presence?”
It is when Ali thinks about Iran outside Qom that he feels most aware of the change. Davudi is dead, Parviz may be dead, Parviz’s talabeh cousin is a notorious “hanging” judge, and his study partner from Yazd is dead. The death of Davudi, his professor of Aristotle, is not absolutely certain; as a leading Baha’i he was among the first people arrested after the revolution. But it is hard to imagine that five years later he is alive and among the seven hundred-odd Baha’is in prison and has not been executed along with the nearly two hundred Baha’is whose executions have been acknowledged. At the end of 1984 there was a new wave of arrests of Baha’is and fourteen more executions of those already in prison. As a condition of release Baha’i prisoners are now asked to sign a statement that reads: “I, the undersigned, have undertaken not to have in my possession any book, pamphlet, document, symbol, or picture of this misguided Zionist, espionage group of Baha’is. If any of the above-mentioned articles belonging to this hated underground movement is found on my person or in my home, this will be tantamount to being of those who ‘war against God’ [a capital crime] and the attorney-general will be free to give a decision against me in the manner he sees fit.” So far no Baha’i prisoner has chosen to sign this strange document in exchange for the flimsy protection offered. Ali holds no particular brief for the Baha’is, but he considers the vendetta of some of the mullahs against them, which has caused them to be thrown out of schools, ousted from their jobs, and in some cases even stripped of their bare possessions, a breach of the honor one owes to one’s fellow Iranians.
In fact, honor and a strong distaste for violence have separated Ali and some like-minded mullahs from the mullahs who have thrown themselves, from their giveh shoes to their turbans, into politics and into other people’s business. Ali keeps telling mullah friends who share his distaste for the purges and killings other mullahs have directed, “But I know for a fact that years ago they would walk out of their way to avoid stepping on an ant.” Maybe the cousin of Parviz would still avoid stepping on an ant, but he has turned into a vindictive judge who orders flogging and execution with abandon. He was one of the vocal supporters of the reintroduction by parliament of Islamic criminal law, and he was openly pleased at the official “removal” of Shariatmadari (supposedly for treason) from his position as a “model” because Shariatmadari said the drastic punishments of the criminal law, like the chopping off of hands, were to be applied only when a perfect society was constructed so that no temptation other than the inner whisperings of Satan could be held to have misled the criminal.
The uncertain fate of Parviz has created a great vacuum in Ali’s life, a hollow well into which he can reach without ever feeling its bottom. Parviz was very much in evidence during the revolution, a leader among the armed Islamic radical groups that skirmished with police and the army during the last critical months. After the return of Khomeini, Parviz had been everywhere, speaking in public and trying to organize groups in all parts of Iran. Then, in 1981, the government decided to stop the Mojahedin and other leftist groups from operating publicly, and these groups—believing that there was no more hope of constitutional opposition—had declared war on the government. In the violence that followed, Ali’s study partner from Yazd had been killed by a bomb in his mosque. Parviz simply disappeared, like the elderly storks of Qom (who were reputed to go on pilgrimage to Mecca and die in the sand near the Holy City). He wasn’t in exile, he wasn’t known to be underground, he wasn’t known to be among the over six thousand Mojahedin reportedly killed in shoot-outs or executed in prisons. Ali’s prayer for him is that, if he is alive, he will have a copy of the Sermons of Imam Ali, which he loved so much, and pencil and paper. God willing, as a mathematician, he might not need more.
Ali sees his life as a long ascent from the world of pure learning into the world where learning and politics mix; and then, from the point of zenith he had reached at the time of his imprisonment, a slow descent back into pure learning. Ali’s companions think it ironical that Ali, who had once burned with a fire of fellow-feeling for the Algerians, has steadfastly resisted the flame of the new revolution; Ali thinks it ironical that the long-awaited Iranian revolution has happened and—in one sense—nothing has happened. He is outstandingly learned now; he is a jurisconsult who has written so well and so extensively on Islamic law that everyone calls him an ayatollah. But Ali is conscious that he has worked principally to clarify and reclassify the existing tradition and has avoided writing opinions on the law because he is waiting for an innovator. He is waiting for another Ansari, who will reach deep into the Shiah legal traditions and show new points at which possible lists of contraries may be constructed and the flexibility and humanity of the law demonstrated. Otherwise the revolution, he says, may leave the Shiah community as divided as the Constitutional Revolution did, or even give birth to a new wave of anti-jurisconsult Shi’ism, as happened in the later Safavi period.
Ali desperately cares that the intellectual tradition he has so painstakingly mastered should not be lost in the storm. And because he is proud of his descent, he hopes that the innovator who can safeguard this tradition will be a sayyed. Then, he says, the famous saying of the Prophet will be fulfilled: “The likeness of the people of my family is the likeness of the ark of Noah; the one who embarks on it is saved, and the one who holds back from it will drown and sink.” God willing, he says, the ark will appear before the water rises much higher.