In the Rose Garden of the Martyrs

Shah Sultan Hossein, Abbas’s great-great-great grandson, came under the influence of mullahs who persuaded him to forbid alcoholic revels and to banish mystics from the capital. He endowed the Seminary of the Four Gardens in Isfahan, to propagate the theology of these mullahs. He authorized the persecution and forcible conversion of Sunnis under his control, as well as minorities such as Christians, Jews and Zoroastrians.

Sultan Hossein’s bigotry, combined with indecision and misrule, led to revolt. In 1722, an army of Sunni Afghans captured Isfahan. After keeping Sultan Hossein captive for a few years, they executed him, effectively extinguishing the Safavid dynasty. Iran sank into anarchy and the clergy withdrew from sight.

I walked up the Four Gardens. It had once been four recreational gardens that were laid out by Abbas, with arcades made up of plane trees bowing to one another and a track for horsemen. Now it’s a straight, modern road, with travel agents and cake shops. After about half a kilometre I came to a wall of arch shapes illuminated by tiles – the Seminary of the Four Gardens, Sultan Hossein’s endowment. I pushed open a door and went in.

After the movement and noise of the street, the seminary gave me an immense sensation of peace. It was laid around a courtyard, bounded by cells set in vaulted niches, with tiled porticos on three sides. A rectangular pool of water and a path divided the grass into four lawns. The cypress trees almost obscured the vivid blue dome over the prayer hall.

A mullah strolled along the pool of water, talking to a seminarian. When they reached the far end, they turned around and retraced their steps. Other seminarians were crossing the courtyard, on their way to class. A few were sunning themselves on the balconies of the first-floor cells. A door slammed, the way they do in institutions.

I walked to one of the corners of the courtyard. Its arch led into a roofless chamber with low stone platforms; in the old days, the mullahs would lecture from these platforms, the seminarians at their feet. I sat down in the shade.

Back in the 1970s, Isfahan was sinking under slime. The King Mother’s eastern wall kissed Iran’s most opulent hotel, the Shah Abbas. (The Shah Abbas had been a traditional travellers’ rest house; now, it had a slab of modern rooms stuck on the front, and a kind of unending feast of Balthazaar going on inside.) Outside the door of the seminary, in the Four Gardens, cars blared Western music. Their young occupants lusted for a US college education. Everywhere, there were signs of progress. Advertisements for washing machines; Old Spice aerosols in pharmacy windows; female arms sprouting downy hairs coming out of halter tops. You could buy foreign booze in the Four Gardens and go whoring round the back of the municipality.

The Shah was Muhammad Reza Pahlavi. He hated mullahs almost as much as he hated Communists; the mullahs were the forces of black reaction, sabotaging his attempt to make Iran modern. The King of Kings had put Isfahan’s religious foundations in the hands of a retired general. Perhaps the general had visited Notre Dame or the Duomo; he’d certainly heard how Europe was neutralizing its own black reaction by turning churches into museums. Christianity was changing from a religion into a secular way of appreciating beauty. Could Islam undergo a similar lobotomy?

The general threw open the seminary doors. Some of the mullahs protested. They argued that the seminary was an all-male place of study, whose architectural beauty was designed not to delight strangers but to inspire the seminarian. Why, they asked, had the seminaries been built looking in on themselves? (Answer: to protect the religious scholar from worldly temptation and to reflect his harmonious soul.)

Paying their price of entry, the tourists came into the Seminary of the King Mother, wandering around in shorts and Jesus sandals, peering into cell windows, hoping to catch a seminarian at prayer-whirling, perhaps? On hot days, they dangled their feet in the pool. They asked for postcards, ice cream, toilets.

Gradually, the seminarians were driven out. They found it impossible to concentrate on their studies. Some were lured by moral corruption. Rumours abounded of ghosts, restless mullahs from the days of Sultan Hossein, warning of defilement. Some of them took cells in other seminaries, off the tourist track. Their hatred for the Shah expanded; it became contempt for the Western model that he was trying to impose on them.

The tourists had been attracted by Iran’s antiquity and culture, and in some cases by the person of the Shah and his succession of lovely wives. The sportsmen and women among them may have seen the King of Kings from a distance – at St Moritz, perhaps, where he kept a chalet and skied beautifully.

The Shah was America’s friend. He was the West’s bulwark against Communism. You only had to open Time magazine to learn that America wouldn’t let him fall. As they toured the city, the tourists occasionally solicited the political opinions of a shopkeeper. There were broad smiles. A signed photograph of the Shah with his third wife, the tirelessly charitable Farah, was produced from a drawer.

The tourists were unaware that they and the shopkeepers were being monitored by Savak, the Shah’s US-trained secret police. They didn’t realize that everyone they came into contact with had been intimidated or bought. They didn’t know – perhaps they didn’t care to know – about the bastinadoes, the electrodes and the rectal violations that were the speciality of Savak safe houses.

One evening, the tourists gathered in the courtyard of the Hotel Shah Abbas. They raised their glasses to Isfahan’s beauty – to the Safavid architecture, to the Armenian and Jewish quarters.

‘And to the Shah!’ the smiling maître d’hôtel interjected.

The tourists were beside themselves. The Shah’s picture was in the lobby, and the restaurant, and at the entrance to the swimming pool. But this was different: a spontaneous show of fealty.

‘To the Shah!’ they cried.

There was a second set of foreigners, drinking in the hotel courtyard. They were based in the capital, Tehran, but sometimes spent the weekend in Isfahan. They were oilmen and arms dealers, petrochemicals salesmen and dam-builders. They had come to Iran to suggest to the Shah ways of disposing of his massive oil revenues. They spent a lot of time and money bribing ministers and bureaucrats, chasing contracts that would allow them to retire. They enjoyed smearing thick-grained Caspian caviar on crustless toast, posing a shard of lemon peel on top and shoving the whole lot into their mouths.

The third group of foreigners was composed of US Air Force officers. They worked as engineers, instructors, communications officers at Iran’s biggest air base, outside Isfahan. Every Isfahani girl had a crush on a US Air Force officer. Their brothers dreamed of piloting a Tomcat. In the bazaar, among the butch porters, blond American boys were all the rage.

The Revolution started sometime in the late twentieth century. Who knows when?

The leftists say it started at the party of 1971, when the world’s despots, dynasts and democrats dined with the King of Kings at repugnant expense in the ruins of Persepolis, the magnificent temple complex that was started by the Achaemenian King, Darius, in 520 BC.

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The economists say it started with the oil-price hike two years later, when OPEC quintupled the price of oil. It turned the King of Kings into a superstar, beloved of arms dealers and industrial development gurus, and set inflation on its upward trend.

A taxi driver once told me it started when the people saw the Shah drinking alcohol with his foreign guests, and heard the rumour that certain members of his family liked to swim in milk.

Everyone agrees it had started by the time the Shah made his final trip to Washington, in 1978, when he and Jimmy Carter wept in the White House rose garden – not out of love for each other but because of the tear-gas canisters being fired at anti-Shah demonstrators in Pennsylvania Avenue.

Perhaps it started in Isfahan, the day a boy spat in the face of a German woman who was immodestly dressed.

I’m sitting in a basement in Qom that belongs to Mr Zarif. He’s smoking his hookah: short sucks and clouds spreading over his face. He doesn’t smoke to relax. The in-out helps him concentrate. He talks faster when he’s smoking, and he talks pretty fast anyway. He shouldn’t smoke, the doctors have made that clear, but he enjoys doing things he’s not supposed to – as long as they don’t upset God. Mr Zarif is small and balding. He has a big head and a button nose and ironic eyes. He looks like a djinn, with scented smoke wings.

He folds the snake, as etiquette requires, so that the nozzle faces away from me, before handing it across. His wife will be down in a minute, bringing tea and fruit cut into triangles. She’ll tut-tut when she sees the hookah, and she’ll smile; the pleasure of watching her husband’s pleasure is more powerful than the fear that smoking will kill him. (If God has heavenly plans for you, living well beats living long any day.) Then – for this is an enlightened household, with no fanatical segregation of the sexes – she’ll join us, stuffing the end of her chador, which is adorned by a field of peonies, between her teeth as she passes around tea. I’ve known Mr Zarif for several months, and I think of him as a friend. But it’s hard, listening as he explains his past, not to feel as though he’s talking about someone else.

Perhaps, I think, he’s deliberately trying to give the impression that he bears no relation to the Zarif of two decades ago; the present Zarif can analyse dispassionately the actions of the former Zarif. Perhaps it’s a way of shoring up regret or bitterness. Or Mr Zarif is trying to be honest. I’ve been confronted by two Zarifs, so different as to be enemies, and I want to know what makes them one.

‘Have I shown you my nanchiko?’ Mr Zarif leaps to his feet – I’ve never known anyone rise from a cross-legged position so compactly and elegantly – and runs out of the room. He comes back holding two bits of wood joined by a chain.

‘You know how the Japanese invented this?’ I shake my head. It looks good for throttling people. ‘There was a time when they had a weak and paranoid Emperor who banned the people from bearing arms. So they went to the obvious place: the kitchen! Someone had the idea of joining two rolling pins with a chain.’ He limbers up, rolling his shoulders, crouching slightly. ‘Of course, I’m out of practice.’

He starts to whip the nanchiko in arcs about his body, threatening adversaries from every angle. The nanchiko buckles and snaps. One of Mr Zarif’s advantages is his low centre of gravity; knock him down and he’ll swoon like a top, bob up again. Wham! The nanchiko lashing at you, splitting your forehead, breaking your elbow.

You have to discount Mr Zarif’s eyes, which have been dappled by hindsight. Back then, they were … what? Angry? Crazy?

This much is certain:

The former Zarif would have had no Englishmen in the basement, smoking the hookah. The former Zarif divided the world into friends and enemies, and the outside world was composed almost exclusively of enemies. (Of course, the British; they occupy a privileged position in Iran’s demonology. The former Zarif had things to say about us.)

Mrs Zarif comes in with a tray. She piles my plate high with fruit, and then does the same to Mr Zarif’s. She teases me about my appetite, which is known to be insufficient and will be the cause of my enfeeblement. Mr Zarif says I’d better be hungry today, because his wife has made shirinpolov. It’s a feast of barberries, crushed pistachios, walnuts and lamb – on a bed of rice.

The front door slams. It’s Ali, the Zarifs’ ten-year-old son, back from school. Within a minute or two of being greeted by his parents, he’s challenged Mr Zarif to climb through the small hatch between the sitting room and the kitchen, through which Mrs Zarif will pass us lunch.

‘Of course I can do it,’ says Mr Zarif. He looks at me. ‘It wouldn’t be right, though, with Mr de Bellaigue here.’

‘You can’t do it,’ Ali smiles. ‘You’d get stuck.’

Mr Zarif is smiling, but infuriated. ‘Of course I can. Is it that I’m too fat, or too old?’

Ali shrugs viciously, as if to say: ‘Try.’

‘Well, if Mr de Bellaigue gives permission …’

Ali: ‘You can’t do it.’

Mrs Zarif tells her husband not to be so silly. It’s not a very elegant thing for a grown man to do, to climb through the hatch at Ali’s urging. I tell him not to hold back on my account.

Mr Zarif climbs onto the little table, puts his hands through the window and levers himself up. For a moment, he’s caught on the ledge; he’s having trouble manoeuvring his legs around and through the window. But his legs aren’t long and he eventually gets through, grunting as he goes. Mr Zarif disappears, and we hear him land on the kitchen floor. When he comes back into the sitting room, his face is red and he’s triumphant. Mrs Zarif says, ‘I’m sure Mr de Bellaigue is impressed.’ Ali is climbing over his dad, ruffling his hair.

In another country, at another time, Mr Zarif would have been called a delinquent, a thug, a menace to society.

He was brought up in Isfahan, and he set up his first gang in 1978, when he was twelve. He and his friends copied and distributed illicit pamphlets. They pasted flyers and photographs of dissidents onto walls, at night. (Making sure that no one was around to turn them in to Savak.) The following day, as the people walked to work, they’d see Khomeini looking at them. His eyes would demand: ‘What have you done for the morally upright and economically downtrodden?’ They would accuse: ‘Acquiescence to tyranny makes you an accessory!’

The local officials would be embarrassed; they’d phone the police, who would rush to the scene of the crime and start scraping the papers off the walls. ‘Quick, boys! The governor’s limousine is cruising up the street!’

The principal at Mr Zarif’s school hauled him up for daubing ‘Death to the Shah’ on a wall. Only the intercession of a friend of his father’s, a kind gent from the Education Ministry, saved him from Savak.