In the Rose Garden of the Martyrs

On 22 September 1980 Iraq invaded Iran. The land offensive, launched at four points along a seven hundred-kilometre border, was strikingly similar to an exercise that had been devised forty years before by British instructors at the Baghdad War Academy. An inefficient command structure, excessive caution and unfamiliarity with combined arms operations slowed the advance. After four days it came to a temporary halt.

For the first two days of the War, the advancing Iraqis were not met by any large unit. Iran’s mobilization, when it finally got underway, was calamitously managed. It took one division six weeks to get from a base in eastern Iran to the theatre in the west. Many volunteers who went to the front were armed with Molotov cocktails. A plan, predating the Revolution, for the Americans to computerise Iran’s spare parts inventories, had not been completed. The Iranians didn’t know what they had in their stores.

It’s a few weeks into the Iraqi violation. Saddam’s expectations have been confounded. Rather than divide them, the invasion has united normal Iranians; they’re rushing to enlist in a kind of euphoria. The Iraqi advance has been slower and more costly than anyone expected. The Arabs of Khuzistan have reacted sullenly to their Iraqi ‘liberators’. In a couple of weeks, when the front stabilizes, the Iraqis will have overrun more than ten thousand square miles of Iranian territory, including a third of Khuzistan, but only one important Iranian city, the port of Khorramshahr.

It’s a cold day, and the Imam is sitting on a dais, underneath a sign that reads Allah. The men in front of him, most of them wearing military uniform, are crying. They’re crying because their Imam is praising them and they consider themselves unworthy of his praise. ‘I feel admiration,’ he’s saying, ‘before these smiling celestial faces, before these heartfelt sobs.’ The fighters, killers of Iraqis, convulse, tears pouring down their faces. ‘I feel insignificant,’ the Imam goes on. The weeping reaches a crescendo.

He’s the greatest communicator. He understands television instinctively. ‘In the Name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate,’ he starts his speeches, and then … silence. Fifteen seconds, or twenty: the Imam looking at you, through you, and the hairs on the back of your neck rise. His frail head slightly bowed, thick black brows like guillotines about to fall.

Marvel at his contempt, his contempt for Saddam’s accounting of power and advantage, for the unmanliness of his assault. When the Imam talks to his people, it’s without the histrionics of the actor Saddam, or Carter’s wheedling. You learn to love, and fear, his inviolable monotone.

Like the imamate of Hossein, or Ali, his leadership is supranational. When he speaks, the world listens. (Before, when Kennedy and Nixon and Carter spoke, the Shah listened.) America, mighty America, quakes. As he addresses the people, the Imam inlays the War into the marble of Islamic endeavour. When he finishes, you realize it’s impossible – morally, logically, physically – for Iran to give in.

‘The difference between our army and theirs,’ he says, ‘is that ours is constrained. For our army, it’s Islam that lays down responsibilities, whereas the other side has a free rein. They launch their shells and their ground-to-ground missiles … and they destroy an entire city. And they get congratulated. Our men don’t do that. They can’t. They won’t.’

There will be no compromising the principles of Islam. How, then, can there be compromise with Saddam Hussein? What use is it to live, unless God is smiling and your conscience is at peace?

Having invaded, and got bogged down, Saddam is in the mood to settle. His first negotiating position: complete control of the Arab River, autonomy for Arabistan (that’s Saddam’s name for Khuzistan), and some tinkering with border areas. Impossible for the Iranians to accept, but a basis, some people think, for discussions that could go somewhere.

Now look at the Imam’s (strictly rhetorical) counterproposals: Saddam’s resignation; the surrender of all Iraqi arms to Iran; the handing over of Basra, Iraq’s vital southern hub, to Iran … the Imam enjoys delivering these insults, these unconscionable conditions. They show the completeness of his contempt. Saddam can only be rattled by his placid fury.

‘What motive,’ the Imam asks, ‘did he have in doing – without studying the subject, without understanding what the consequences would be, without taking into account our people – what a few devils like himself, whispering into his ear, told him to do? … What is his motive, rushing from pillar to post and inviting us to make peace with him?’

The Imam’s questions aren’t meant to be answered.

‘How can we make peace? With whom? It’s like someone telling the Prophet of Islam to go and make peace with Abu Jahal. In the final analysis, that’s not someone you can make peace with.’ Abu Jahal was Muhammad’s uncle. He planned to have the final Prophet of God assassinated. He’s the only one of God’s enemies wretched enough to merit a verse in the Holy Qoran.

Khomeini draws himself up, pulls his heavy brown gown of camels’ wool around him. It’s a cold day. He’s frail, elongated, monochrome in his white beard and black turban. He berates the arch-pipsqueak:

‘You’re the one who committed all these murders in your own country, and in ours, you’re the one who had all those Muslims killed … Now! Imagine that our president and our parliament and our prime minister sit down and give you the time of day, and say: “Come in the name of God: the Arab River’s yours, just leave us alone!”’

Khomeini, chuckling inwardly at Saddam’s naivety: ‘Is that what it’s all about?’ Across Iran, in villages and small towns, the people, looking at the TV, know that it’s not.

At the end of our lives we must compile a log of our activities and present it to the authorities. Points are totted. Heaven, purgatory or hell; you go to one, and your performance on earth determines which. If we let God down in this world, he’ll catch up with us in the next. Where’s the gain in that?

‘How are we to answer the downtrodden of the world, and what are we to say to the people of Iraq? If we get a missive from Karbala, and it says: “What are you doing, making peace with a person who killed our holy scholars, who jailed our intellectuals … ?” What peace does that leave us with?’

Here, the Imam is laying out the second big responsibility of the Muslim – to the community at large, to the oppressed. ‘The question’s one of religion. It’s not one of volition. Our dispute is over Islam. You mean we’re to sacrifice our Islam? What … Islam is land?’

No, Islam is not land.

‘We shouldn’t imagine that our criteria are material, or define victory and defeat in terms of what is organic and material. We have to define our objectives in sacred terms, and define victory and defeat on the holy battlefield … even if the whole world rises against us, and destroys us, we will still have prevailed.’

(This is just as well. The Gulf States and Jordan; some western European countries; several members of the eastern bloc; they’re helping Iraq, militarily, diplomatically, morally. In Resolution 479, which calls for a cease-fire, the UN Security Council didn’t even name Iraq as the aggressor!)

Iran is alone, like the fulfilment of a prophecy. The Imam rises and the men shout: ‘Khomeini! You’re my spirit! Khomeini! The smasher of idols!’

The day I returned from Isfahan to Tehran, I went from the terminal to the office of Ali-Reza Alavi Tabar. In 1997, Alavi Tabar had opened a newspaper that argued that the Islamic Republic should be reformed. In 1999, the judges, who had different ideas, had closed it down. Shortly afterwards, he’d started a second newspaper, with more or less the same staff and typeface. That, too, had been closed. Later, he’d opened a third newspaper, with the same staff and typeface, and a name that was facetiously similar to that of the first newspaper. And so on. A few weeks before I visited him on my return from Isfahan, a judge had banned Alavi Tabar’s sixth newspaper, after eight issues.

Alavi Tabar was plump. He would talk about the sport he was doing: mountain walking, running and swimming. He said he ate only yoghurt and salad leaves for lunch. But he was puffy round the chops and his eyes were watery. When I first knew him, he trimmed his beard, rather than shaved it, for revolutionary grooming contends that shaving is a Western effeminacy. Later on, perhaps reflecting his alienation from orthodox thinking, he’d shaved his cheeks and jaw, sparing only a severely shorn goatee.