In the Rose Garden of the Martyrs

I ask: ‘Did you understand what you were doing, that you were taking part in a revolution? Or was it just a game?’

Mr Zarif smiles, a you-should-know-better-than-to-ask-that smile. Then he says, ‘Khomeini.’

Of course, Khomeini! There was something about him that called out, fathered you. It was impossible not to be scared of Khomeini – imagine him staring at you, like a torch shedding black light! He made you ashamed to breathe the same air as the officials of the King of Kings. Waiting for him to come back, willing his return from exile – first from Iraq, later on from France – people called him Master. The Master. A few months before the Revolution, they started calling him the Imam.

During the months that preceded the Revolution, a rhythm was established. There would be an atrocity – the use of machine guns to mow down demonstrators in Tehran, for instance. The atrocity would be followed by an emotional, politicized funeral, which would lead to a second atrocity. More mourning and outrage. A funeral, another atrocity, and so on. There was a second, parallel movement: a roller coaster of panicky sackings and appointments, imperial apologies and admonitions, relaxations and crackdowns.

In Isfahan, rumours spread that the masked soldiers putting down the demonstrations were Americans, helped by Israelis. News spread that someone had shot an American who’d tried to enter a mosque without taking off his shoes. The Americans and their families started going home. The newspapers were full of ads for second-hand washing machines.

On 16 January 1979 the King of Kings flew away, with Farah, a great many jewels and a clod of Iranian earth. Two weeks later, Khomeini returned from exile, dismissed the government that the Shah had left behind and announced a provisional administration.

Mr Zarif saw things clearly. This is what he saw:

History had restarted with the Revolution and Khomeini’s return from exile – just as it had restarted with the Prophet’s migration from Mecca to Medina in AD 622, and the establishment of the first Islamic administration. The Imam would recreate the pure Islamic rule that Muslims had only known under the Prophet and later on, for five years, under the Imam Ali. There would be social justice, for social justice is inherent in Islam. Society would be cleansed of Western influence. Whatever the Imam decreed, that would happen. There was no question of challenging the Imam’s authority, for that would be the equivalent of challenging God.

The Revolution would start in Iran, before moving on to the rest of the world. Muslim countries would be first. Islamic revolutionaries would sweep away the house of Saud and Turkey’s despotic secularism. They would liberate Iraq from the pseudo-Socialism of the Baath Party, and restore Iraq’s oppressed Shi’a majority to their rightful position of dominance. A column of revolutionaries, led by Iranians, would march into Jerusalem and say their prayers at the al-Aqsa Mosque. Israel would be destroyed, although some Jews would be allowed to stay on. (The Qoran makes provision for the coexistence of Jews, Christians and Muslims, so long as the Jews and Christians accept their inferior status.)

Not everyone saw things as clearly as Mr Zarif. You only had to look at the provisional government to realize that the Imam had been forced to share power with undesirables. Many in the government saw the future through a kaleidoscope that had been manufactured in the West. They defined Islam in Western terms. They shouted the same slogans as the ideologues, but they meant different things.

Take the prime minister, Mehdi Bazargan. Although Bazargan was personally pious, he was a professed ‘democrat’. He wore broad ties. Soon after Khomeini’s return, he called on the revolutionaries to have ‘patience’. (‘Isn’t that an oxymoron?’ the revolutionaries sneered.) He filled his government with liberals who were keener on nationalism than political Islam. He put oil, the resource on which the economy depended, in the hands of men who suggested that Islam couldn’t solve modern problems. Many of his ministers and bureaucrats were said to indulge in Western abominations, like the wearing of aftershave. Some of their wives walked about brazenly, with their hair uncovered. On the subject of the future Islamic Republic, they envisaged a tepid, Western-style democracy, scented with Islamic attar.

Such people couldn’t be trusted to keep the country in the state of motion that was essential if the Revolution was to succeed. They couldn’t be depended on to protect the Revolution’s cardinal principle: the rejection of foreign ideology. Under them, the country could easily slide back into the US’s sphere of influence. Bazargan and his friends might fudge the sacred duty of eliminating Israel. Their introspective, intellectual Islam was even more dangerous than secularism, because it assumed the garb of a friend. Bazargan was Iran’s Kerensky. Like the liberal Kerensky, he would have to be destroyed.

The Imam started to undermine the provisional government. His supporters – clerics, influential traders, revolutionary activists – worked to bring about the clergy’s supremacy. They sent their bullies to break up rallies staged by other groups: liberals, Kurdish nationalists, Marxists. Revolutionary committees were authorized to carry out arrests, executions and property confiscations.

Overseeing all this was the Imam’s kitchen cabinet, the Islamic Revolutionary Council. The council was composed mostly of clerics who carried out or anticipated the Imam’s wishes. They controlled revolutionary courts, which, independent of the justice ministry, handed out death sentences and prison terms to former officials from the Shah’s dictatorship. They promulgated legislation by decree. They turned Bazargan into a knife without a blade.

I’ve seen a picture of Mr Zarif taken at this time: he looks supple, jackal-like, and his eyes are insouciant, and it’s not the nihilistic insouciance of a Western boy, braving ideology – any ideology – to capture him. On the contrary: he has become pure ideology. God and Khomeini have let him into one of the most important secrets unveiled to humanity. Better still, he’s taking part, furthering its interests. Mr Zarif is smiling in the photograph, deliriously happy to be alive.

It’s after lunch. Persian after lunch starts after the nap that comes after the glass of black tea that comes after lunch. Mr Zarif won’t go back to the office after this lunch. He’ll go in tomorrow morning. He’s taking off his socks, slapping them against nothing, against the air.

‘You know, we saw everything from a revolutionary point of view, everything in revolutionary terms. I mean, if I said to someone: “Don’t go home tonight, because we’ve got work to do,” and they said, “Well actually we’ve got family coming round tonight and I really should be at home – perhaps another time …” Well, that would upset and shock me. I mean; what a strange set of priorities! Here we are, changing the world, and you want to go home and suck up to Aunt Maryam!’

He notices the socks in his hands. He goes over to the radiator and lays them on top. He’s rolling up his sleeves. He disappears.

He’s standing in front of the sink in the bathroom. He runs his right hand, soaking wet, down his face. He dribbles a little water over his widow’s peak. He drags his wet right hand down his left forearm (from a point not higher than the elbow). He drags his left hand down his right forearm (from a point not higher than the elbow). He lifts up his legs, one after the other, and rubs the tops of both feet (right foot with right hand, and left foot with left hand).

He comes into the sitting room. He says, ‘If I saw someone doing something suspicious, I’d immediately write a report on him, and if someone didn’t have a beard I’d skip school and follow him. There was one guy in my street and I thought he was a leftist. Three Fridays in a row I followed him. Each time, a man with a beard rode by on a bicycle – the same man, each time. Naturally, I thought he’d been sent by God to help me in my investigation. And later I found out; no, he was a guy who lived in the neighbourhood, who happened to have a beard.’

He kneels.

At Mr Zarif’s all-boys school, some of the female teachers believed that the Revolution had happened in the name of freedom – freedom of speech, thought, behaviour. (They had mistaken liberty – which means liberty from moral corruption and Godlessness – with a morality.) They took part in demonstrations that forced the Imam to back down on a decree that female civil servants cover their heads and wear shapeless clothes. There they were, persisting with their hip-hugging skirts and high-heeled boots.

The art teacher had cropped her hair, taking as an example one of the cops in Cagney and Lacey – Mr Zarif couldn’t remember which. The Cagney and Lacey woman had favourites among the older boys. People whispered about what she got up to with her favourites.

(Mr Zarif stands, head bowed. He whispers: ‘In the name of God the merciful and compassionate. Glory and thanksgiving be only to the God of the universe, who is merciful and compassionate and lord of the day of retribution. We worship none but you, and request help from none but you. Guide us along the right path, the path of those whom you have made secure, not the path of those who have lost their way. In the name of God, the merciful and compassionate, say that God is one. God needs nothing. He was not born, and did not procreate, and no one is like him.’)

The ideologues were saying that the Revolution required several steps; the Shah’s flight had been the first. Now, they said, it was the turn of the Communists and liberals and Westernized fun-lovers. There was a dangerous group, the People’s Mujahedin, which claimed to have reconciled Islam with Communism; the Prophet, they said, had been the first Marxist! (Later on, the Imam was to christen this group the Eclectics and, later still, the Hypocrites.) There were kids at school who daubed hammers and sickles on the playground wall. The head of the revolutionary committees said, ‘We must purify society in order to renew it.’ The question was: how?

One day, in a mosque that was known for its fervent and revolutionary congregation, Mr Zarif came across a group of people who had the answer. They were older than Mr Zarif – most of them were in their early twenties – and they called each other ‘brother’. They wore trimmed beards and kept their shirts untucked. Even on hot days, they never rolled up their sleeves. One or two of them wore silver rings, with a star in the middle. Some of them had the piebald Palestinian scarf, the kaffieh, around their necks, and mentioned the Bekaa Valley in conversation. They grinned when Mr Zarif asked them whether they had spent time in Lebanon. Some of them seemed knowledgeable about automatic weapons and explosive devices.

(Leaning forward, hands on knees: ‘The most elevated God is clean and pure.’)

They were lovers. They loved the truth. They loved God and the Prophet. They loved the Imam and the clerics around him. They loved the Imam Hossein and the Imam Ali. More than anything, they loved their enemies – the liberals and Marxists, the Americans and the British agents. And the Zionists, of course. They would destroy them with their love.

They said they took orders from some clerics in Isfahan. (The clerics seemed to take their orders from people close to the Imam.) They were doing useful work: spreading propaganda, harassing opposition groups, encouraging citizens to denounce apologists for the former regime. Some of them were members of the Revolutionary Guard. Others were linked to the revolutionary committees. Some, Mr Zarif guessed, were members of an unofficial action group, called Hezbollah, though they were coy if asked.

(Kneeling over, forehead on a tablet of baked earth from Karbala: ‘Great God is clean and pure.’)

One by one, they and their allies were getting into the local bureaucracy. There was an increase in trimmed beards in the municipal corridors. There were more chadors. The Imam’s supporters were making life difficult for civil servants who didn’t say their prayers, or failed to turn up for indoctrination classes. The secularists had a choice: change your ways, and your appearance, or get out.

One Thursday evening, they let Mr Zarif join them in a small room next to the mosque. One of the younger lads picked up a microphone that was attached to an amp and started singing about Hossein’s martyrdom. He had a fine voice. The others gathered in a tight circle, near the singer, and knelt inwards. In time with the lament, they brought their arms high above their heads, and down again, so that their hands thumped against their chests.

Gradually, the lament got faster. The arms rose and fell faster, like the pistons of a locomotive. Someone turned off the light and the men took off their shirts; their torsos glistened in the street light that came in from the window. Faster and faster, the lament went, until the singer’s voice cracked; he started sobbing into the microphone. Inside the circle, the arms were rising and falling more swiftly; when the hands hit the chests, they made the sound of bones hitting hide. Drops of sweat fell off the end of Mr Zarif’s nose. His arms ached. His chest felt raw.

Everyone was shouting: ‘Hosseinhosseinhosseinhosseinhossein!’ and hitting their chests as hard as they could.

After it was over, someone turned on the lights. Mr Zarif blinked. Everyone had red splotches on their chests. The room was humid. The lads put on their shirts. Then someone brought in tea and biscuits. Someone cracked a joke.

(Standing up, hands out in supplication: ‘God! Favour us in this life and the next, and save us from the torment of hell.’)

After they had tea, one of the men came over to Mr Zarif and introduced himself. He asked some questions, about Mr Zarif’s political and religious convictions, and the situation at his school. Mr Zarif gave him what seemed – from the man’s reactions – to be satisfactory answers. The man asked Mr Zarif to monitor the Communists, and the Mujahedin, at school. These groups had seized arms from armouries in the chaos that preceded and coincided with the Shah’s flight. Their paymasters in Moscow were trying to take advantage of the situation, to suck Iran into their zone of influence.

(Sitting on his heels, hands on knees: ‘In the name of God, on him be praise and glory. I bear witness that God is one and that Muhammad is his servant and Prophet. Greetings and the benediction of God on Muhammad and his followers.’)

The following week, Mr Zarif and the other members of the gang followed the Communist kids. They found out where they lived, and discovered that their dads wore big moustaches, and called one another ‘comrade’. Some of the dads worked at Isfahan’s big iron works, which had Russian managers. One or two of them socialized with Russian families. The Russian families were poor and ugly.

One day, a couple of men arrived at the school to start political indoctrination. The men told the kids how to think about God and the Imam, and America and the Zionist Entity. When the principal saw that Mr Zarif was a friend of these men, he conceived for him a shaming fear. A kid of fifteen had become more powerful than he was.

Mr Zarif neglected his studies. He started doing sport, pumping iron, sticking out his chest. (He was growing a beard, though not fast enough for his liking). In school, he delivered harangues, handed round pamphlets. He organized prayer meetings in the playground. If he wanted to pass on a message to another boy, he would walk into the boy’s class and whisper the message to him – the teacher would pretend not to notice.

Mr Zarif’s boys got two of Cagney and Lacey’s favourites into the school store, and asked them some questions. They learned that Cagney and Lacey was a closet Communist. Shortly after, quite a senior person from the Revolutionary Guard arrived at the school. He spent a long time in the principal’s office. Cagney and Lacey was called in and invited to resign. The following day, at his word, ten of Mr Zarif’s lads surrounded the Communists; there were bleeding noses. The hammers and sickles got fewer.

(Sitting on his heels: ‘The peace and munificence of God be on Muhammad. Greetings on us and the right-acting servants of God. The peace and mercy and munificence of God be on you.’)

A few months after the Revolution, the Communists planned a meeting that was to be addressed by a high-up Communist from Tehran. Thanks to a spy he had planted among them, Mr Zarif got wind of the meeting. He went early and got a good spot near the podium. Just as the speaker was being introduced, Mr Zarif ran onto the podium and landed a good one on his nose. Before anyone had time to react, he hurled himself into the section of the crowd that was thinnest. He was small enough, and fast enough, to get away with only a broken rib.

At the beginning of November 1979, radical students allied to the Imam seized the American Embassy in Tehran, taking the staff hostage. The students announced that they would release the hostages only when President Carter handed over the Shah, who had been allowed into America for cancer treatment. Bazargan resigned; his government had been trying to repair relations with the US. After Bazargan’s departure, the Imam placed the government directly under the control of his kitchen cabinet, the Islamic Revolutionary Council.

Mr Zarif was delighted: he remembered that the Revolution was made up of steps.

Nowadays, when people think of the mullahs’ revenge, they think of Sadegh Khalkhali. There were scores of clerics who were more important than him; they actually took decisions, rather than implemented and interpreted the decisions of others, as Khalkhali did. Many of these mullahs were easier on the eye than Khalkhali; they had politer turns of phrase, more impressive qualifications. Khalkhali was a poor kid from the Azeri northwest, short on education outside the seminary, rotund, bald and coarse.

During the Shah’s time, Khalkhali had upset people by writing a treatise depicting Cyrus the Great, founder of the Achaemenian empire and a figure whom the Shah admired, as a sodomite. He’d been imprisoned and internally exiled. Then, a few days after the Revolution, Khomeini appointed him to be a judge in the revolutionary court that was to try beneficiaries of the old regime and opponents of the new one. Khalkhali toured the country, trying monarchists and counter-revolutionaries. (Over a three-month period, he claimed to have condemned more than four hundred people to death. They included former senators, a radio presenter and a mob leader.) His pugnacious, fat face became as famous as his jokes, which often featured references to executions. V. S. Naipaul, who visited Khalkhali at the height of his notoriety, likened him to a jester at his own court.

Khalkhali made an indelible impression on Elaine Sciolino, an American journalist who witnessed one of the trials he presided over; she remembered him in a book she wrote two decades later. To counter the extremely hot weather, Sciolino recalls, Khalkhali removed his turban, cloak and socks, which must have made him look like a turnip. He sat on the floor and picked his toes while hearing the evidence against a defendant. He repeatedly left the room during the testimony of witnesses.

His most famous victim was Amir Abbas Hoveida, and Khalkhali must have enjoyed that bit of business. Hoveida was Khalkhali’s antithesis, thirteen years the Shah’s prime minister, a man whose Northampton brogues Khalkhali could not, before the Revolution, have dreamed of polishing. Hoveida was a francophone, but he also knew Arabic – the Arabic of Beirut society, not the Qoran. Even after their divorce, Hoveida’s wife made sure that a fresh orchid reached him every morning for his buttonhole. He’d not been personally venal or murderous, but he’d closed his eyes to the atrocities of others. Khalkhali charged him with waging war on God and corruption on earth. Over two court sessions, separated by several weeks, Khalkhali pounded the defendant’s moral ambivalence like saffron under a pestle.