CHRISTOPHER DE BELLAIGUE
In the Rose Gardenof the Martyrs

A Memoir of Iran

COPYRIGHT

HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

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This edition published by HarperPress 2005

First published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2004

Copyright © Christopher de Bellaigue 2004

Sections of this book have appeared in Granta, the London Review of Books and the Paris Review

Christopher de Bellaigue asserts the moral right to

be identified as the author of this work

Extracts from the poetry of Rumi reprinted

by permission of Threshold Productions

A catalogue record for this book is

available from the British Library

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DEDICATION

Each day more than yesterday,

and less than tomorrow

CONTENTS

COVER

TITLE PAGE

COPYRIGHT

NOTE TO READERS

DEDICATION

DRAMATIS PERSONAE

MAPS OF IRAN

1 Karbala

2 Isfahan

3 A Sacred Calling

4 Qom

5 Lovers

6 Reza Ingilisi

7 Gas

8 Parastu

9 Friends

10 Ashura

BIBLIOGRAPHY

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

AUTHOR’S NOTE

PRAISE

ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

DRAMATIS PERSONAE

Abdolrahman, Hassan: American convert to Islam who carried out an assassination on behalf of the Islamic Republic and then took refuge in Iran.

Alavi Tabar, Ali-Reza: Islamic revolutionary and holy warrior in the war against Iraq who later became an influential figure in Muhammad Khatami’s reform movement.

Amini, Reza: subordinate of the famous Isfahani commander Hossein Kharrazi.

Bani-Sadr, Abolhassan: the Islamic Republic’s first president, who later revolted against Ayatollah Khomeini and was forced into exile.

Bazargan, Mehdi: provisional prime minister after the Revolution, who resigned during the US hostage crisis.

Emami, Saeed: senior Intelligence Ministry figure of the 1990s, alleged mastermind of the ‘serial murders’ of dissidents.

Forouhar, Darioush: a minister after the Revolution, he fell out with the religious establishment and was one of the final victims of the ‘serial murders’.

Forouhar, Parastu: justice-seeking daughter of Darioush Forouhar.

Ganji, Akhar: investigative journalist, jailed for his part in exposing the ‘serial murders’ of dissidents in the 1990s.

Ghorbanifar, Manuchehr: arms dealer involved in the Iran – Contra scandal.

Hashemi, Mehdi: fanatical revolutionary whose rift with the establishment led to the exposure of the Iran – Contra scandal.

Hossein b. Ali: third Shia Imam, who was killed at Karbala in 680.

Khalkhali, Sadegh: revolutionary official, Iran’s ‘hanging judge’.

Khamenei, Ayatollah Ali: second president of the Islamic Republic and Khomeini’s successor as Supreme Leader, or Guide, of the Islamic Revolution.

Kharrazi, Hossein: inspirational Isfahani war commander.

Khatami, Muhammad: elected president in 1997, he failed to implement most of the democratizing reforms that he envisaged.

Khomeini, Ayatollah Ruhollah: father of the Islamic Revolution and the Islamic Republic’s first Supreme Leader, or Guide.

Makhmalbof, Mohsen: revolutionary film-maker.

Montazeri, Ayatollah Hossein-Ali: Khomeini’s designated successor, stripped of the succession for being too independent.

Muhammad Mossadegh: controversial prime minister who nationalized Iran’s oil industry and was deposed, in a CIA-run coup, in 1953.

Pahlavi, Muhammad-Reza: the final Shah of Iran, deposed in the 1979 Revolution.

Pahlavi, Reza: the founder of the Pahlavi dynasty, the Shah’s father.

Rafii, Muhammad-Ali: Isfahani cleric, subordinate of Hossein Kharrazi.

Rafsanjani, Ali-Akhar Hashemi: president between 1989 and 1997.

Rezai, Mohsen: Revolutionary Guards commander during the Iran – Iraq war.

Shirazi, Sayyad: army chief during the Iran-Iraq war.

Teyyeb, Haji-Rezai: Tehran mafioso.

Zarif, Sadegh: revolutionary, seminarian and, latterly, film-maker.

MAPS OF IRAN

CHAPTER ONE Karbala

Why, I wondered long ago, don’t the Iranians smile? Even before I first thought of visiting Iran, I remember seeing photographs of thousands of crying Iranians, men and women wearing black. In Iran, I read, laughing in a public place is considered coarse and improper. Later, when I took an oriental studies course at university, I learned that the Islamic Republic of Iran built much of its ideology on the public’s longing for a man who died more than thirteen hundred years ago. This is the Imam Hossein, the supreme martyr of Shi’a Islam and a man whose virtue and bravery provide a moral shelter for all. Now that I’m living in Tehran, witness to the interminable sorrow of Iranians for their Imam, I sense that I’m among a people that enjoys grief, relishes it. Iran mourns on a fragrant spring day, while watching a ladybird scale a blade of grass, while making love. This was the case fifty years ago, long before the setting up of the Islamic Republic, and will be the case fifty years hence, after it has gone.

The first time I observed the mourning ceremonies for the Imam Hossein, I was reminded of the Christian penitents of the Middle Ages, dragging crosses through the dust and bringing down whips across their backs. In modern Iran, too, there is self-flagellation and the lifting of heavy things – sometimes a massive timber tabernacle to represent Hossein’s bier – as an expression of religious fervour. The Christian penitents were self-serving; calamities such as the Black Death provoked a desire to atone, to save oneself and one’s loved ones from divine retribution. Iran’s grieving does not have this logic. This is no act of atonement, but a sentimental memorial. Iranians weep for Hossein with gratuitous intimacy. They luxuriate in regret – as if, by living a few extra years, the Imam might have enabled them to negotiate the morass of their own lives. They lick their lips, savour their misfortune.

I see Hossein alongside Tehran’s freeways, his name picked out in flowers that have been planted on sheer green verges. I see his picture on the walls of shops and petrol stations, printed on the black cloths that are pinned to the walls of streets. The conventional renderings show a superman with a broad, honest forehead and eyes that are springs of fortitude and compassion. A luxuriant beard attests to Hossein’s virility, but his skin is radiant like that of a Hindu goddess. He wears a fine helmet, with a green plume for Islam, and holds a lance. I once asked an elderly Iranian woman to describe Hossein’s calamitous death. She spoke as if she had been an eyewitness to it, effortlessly recalling every expression, every word, every doom-laden action. She listed the women and children in Hossein’s entourage as if they were members of her own family. She wept her way through half a dozen Kleenexes.

Every Iranian dreams of going to the town of Karbala, the arid shrine in central Iraq that was built at the place where Hossein was martyred. I went there myself, the camp follower of American invaders, and visited the Imam’s tomb. Inside a gold plated dome, Iraqis calmly circumambulated a sarcophagus whose silver panels had been worn down from the caress of lips and fingers. They muttered prayers, supplications, remonstrations. Suddenly, the peace was shattered by moans and the pounding of chests, splintered sounds of distress and emotion. Five or six distraught men had approached the sarcophagus. One of them was half collapsed, his hand stretched towards the Imam; the others shoved and slipped like landlubbers on a pitching deck. My Iraqi companion curled his lip in distaste at the melodrama. ‘Iranian pilgrims,’ he said.

It all goes back to AD 632, when the Prophet Muhammad died and All, his cousin and son-in-law, was beaten to the caliphate, first by Abu Bakr, the Prophet’s father-in-law, and then by Abu Bakr’s successors, Omar and Osman. Ali gave up political and military office, and waited his turn, and the modesty and piety of the Prophet’s time was supplanted, according to some historians, by venality and hedonism. After twenty-five years, following Osman’s brutal murder, Ali was finally elected to the caliphate. But his rule, although virtuous, lasted only until his murder five years later and gave rise to a rift between his followers and Osman’s clan, the Omayyids. The origin of the rift was a dynastic dispute, between supporters of the Prophet’s family, represented by Ali, and the Prophet’s companions, represented by the first three caliphs. It prefigured a rift that continues, between the Shi’as – literally, the ‘partisans of Ali’ – and the Sunnis, the followers of the Sunnah, the tradition of Muhammad.

After Ali’s murder, Hassan, his indolent elder son, struck a deal with the Omayyids. In AD 680 Hassan died and Ali’s younger son, Hossein, took over as head of the Prophet’s descendants. Hossein was pious and brave and he revived his family’s hereditary claim to leadership over Muslims. This brought him into conflict with Yazid, the Omayyid caliph in Damascus. When the residents of Kufa, near Karbala, asked Hossein to liberate them from Yazid, the Imam went out to claim his birthright, setting in train events that led to his martyrdom.

One night, on the eve of the anniversary of Hossein’s death, I put on a borrowed black shirt and took a taxi to a working-class area of south Tehran. The main road where the taxi dropped me was already filling with families and men leading sheep by their forelegs. Cauldrons lay by the side of the road. Everyone wore black; even the little girls wore chadors, an unbuttoned length of black cloth that unflatteringly shrouds the female body. I entered a lane with two-storey brick houses along both sides. There was a crowd at the far end of the street, their backs to us, and their silhouettes were flung across the asphalt. Black bunting had been strung between lampposts. Walking towards the crowd, I fell in step with a middle-aged man who was being followed by his family. I heard him mutter, ‘Hossein …’ He looked shocked and puzzled, as if he’d just received news of the Imam’s martyrdom.

At the far end of the street there was a stage marked out by pot plants. In the middle of the stage was a bowl of water, resting on a green cloth. The middle-aged man’s wife and daughters went to the opposite side of the stage, where the other women and children were gathered under an awning. His teenage son joined a group of young men with gelled hair on the right. To the left was backstage, and an orchestra that consisted of two tombak drums and a trumpet. I stayed on the near side. Suddenly, the men in front of us parted to allow a stream of piss, from a camel trembling bow-legged in the arc lights, to run down the street.

A young trumpeter played a riff and the obscene Damascene appeared stage left. (Everyone recognized Yazid: he wore a cape of red and yellow to accentuate his licentiousness, and he wasn’t wearing so much as a scrap of green, the colour of Islam.) His helmet was surmounted by yellow plumes. His fat face was expressionless. After prowling around, he started to shout evil words into the microphone he was holding, which was connected to a loudspeaker that in turn felt as though it was connected directly to my ear.

Although he ruled the lands of Islam in the name of Islam, Yazid was notorious for his depravity. Today, Iranians loathe him as if he were still malignantly alive. They recall the menagerie of unclean animals such as dogs and monkeys that he is believed to have kept at court. They talk disapprovingly of the ‘coming and going’ – a common euphemism for frenetic sexual activity – for which Damascus was known. It is said that he was as devious as he was deviant.

Perhaps Hossein had reckoned without the deviousness. By the time he and his companions bivouacked at Karbala, near the banks of the Euphrates, the caliph had bribed the inhabitants of Kufa to revoke their support for him. His small force was greatly outnumbered by the army that Shemr, Yazid’s commander, had raised. Shemr had cut off Hossein’s access to the Euphrates, and Mesopotamia in summer is as hot as hell.

Onstage, the players were relating the entreaties, negotiations and moral dilemmas that preceded Hossein’s martyrdom. The women and children in Hossein’s entourage were suffering from the heat. Since there were no women onstage, we learned this from a narrator, a slim, alert version of the man playing Yazid – his brother, perhaps. Suddenly, there was activity stage left and Yazid returned. The actor’s movements and expression were the same, but now he wore green from head to toe. He had changed character and had become Hossein.

As far as I could make out through the echo and distortion, Hossein was relating the anguish that he felt at his decision to fight to the death. In return for fealty to Yazid, he and his companions would be spared, but that would mean living in dishonour, indifferent to God’s will. Then Hossein’s half-brother, Abol Fazl, entered.

The portraits show Abol Fazl to be as god-like as his brother, albeit more windswept. The Abol Fazl before us was shifty and greasy; he would have been convincingly cast as a sheep rustler. He was much shorter than Hossein, whom he clasped repeatedly to his breast as they both wept. Hossein was asking Abol Fazl to fetch water from the river. Both knew that the younger brother stood little chance of surviving his mission.

Abol Fazl leaped onto a mangy grey standing at the side of the street, where the camel had been. (The camel was peripatetic and for hire; it was now appearing on other stages in the neighbourhood.) He steered the horse dexterously around the stage, calming it when its hind legs buckled as it turned on the greasy asphalt. Whenever Abol Fazl approached the awning, the women shrank, while he (holding the microphone in one hand and the reins in the other) declared his love for Hossein and for God. The young men in the audience grinned when the horse broke wind during a break in the music. Their fathers frowned.

The next bit of the story happened offstage. Fighting savagely – I had read this in the books – Abol Fazl reached the riverside. He bent down, cupped his hand and brought some water to his mouth. Then he stopped himself and the water flowed back through his fingers. His sense of chivalry wouldn’t allow him to slake his thirst before the women and children had slaked theirs. Having filled his leather water container, he remounted, but was cut down in the subsequent struggle, losing his hands and eyes. He cried out, ‘Oh brother, hear my call and come to my aid!’ Two arrows were dispatched. One pierced Abol Fazl’s water container. The other entered his chest.

Abol Fazl staggered onstage. The pierced flagon was between his teeth. An arrow protruded from his chest. His arms were two very long stumps. The stumps supported two bloody objects, which he dropped for us to see: his hands, sliced off in the fray. The Imam cradled the dying Abol Fazl. The men near me in the audience were beating their chests in time with the tombak. The women under the awning rocked inconsolably.

And that was the end of the play. It wasn’t time for Hossein to die; that would come tomorrow, the day that is called Ashura. The actors picked themselves up and left the stage. Among the audience, there was a rustling, a rearranging of positions and a collective, audible exhalation. And then, to my surprise, the inconsolable found consolation. Facial expressions brightened. The audience’s agony changed to equanimity, even satisfaction. The man in front of me greeted the person standing next to him agreeably; a few seconds before, both had been blubbing like children. In the women’s section, conversations began. Abol Fazl seemed to have been forgotten.

Had he been forgotten? Was this grief deceitful? Not deceitful, I think: simply not exclusive. The emotions in Iran haven’t been compartmentalised. They coexist; they thrive in public. The borders between grief, entertainment and companionship are porous. You can weep buckets, natter with a neighbour and take away memories of a farting nag. Stifled sobs, trembling upper lips – they don’t exist here. Emotion may be cheaply expressed, but that doesn’t mean the emotions are cheap.

Some members of the audience were starting to leave their places. The narrator strode into the middle of the stage. He addressed us fluently, softly. He craved our indulgence – he wanted to tell a story that would live in our memories. The people moved back to their places and he began.

A few years back, he started, after the troupe had performed the play we’d just seen, he’d been delighted when a man dropped a large sum of money onto the green cloth in the middle of the stage. As he was counting it after the performance, another man had approached and said, ‘Excuse me for interfering, but you can’t accept that money.’

The narrator had replied: ‘Why not? It’s a lot of money, and I’ve got a wife and kids to feed. It pleases God when money is accepted for good work.’ The man replied, ‘Believe me, sir, you can’t accept this money. Yours is Muslim work, and the man who gave you the money is a Christian. He’s Armenian.’

The audience was gripped. What a dilemma! What would you do in such a situation? The narrator went on: ‘The Armenian chap was driving off when I ran up to him and thrust the money through the open window of his car. I said, “I’m sorry; I can’t accept this money. Forgive me, by the soul of the Imam Hossein, I can’t accept.”’

When he learned why his money had been rejected, the Armenian had switched off the car ignition and said, ‘I have something to tell you.

‘Recently, I was driving with one of my employees, a Muslim, and the brakes failed as we were coming down from the mountains. There were valleys on both sides, and we were going faster and faster. I called out, “Oh Jesus! Save us!” and tried the brakes again, but they didn’t work. I called out a second time, louder, and rammed my foot down on the brakes. Nothing. A third time, I beseeched Jesus to save us. Again, no result.

‘Panic-struck, I looked across at my employee. He said quietly, “Call for Abol Fazl.” I was having trouble keeping the car on the road. I shouted, “Who’s Abol Fazl?” He said, “Sir, time is running out. Call him!” I had nothing to lose, so I shouted, “Save us, Abol Fazl!” and the brakes suddenly worked. We came to a halt just short of a cliff.

‘When we got out of the car, I asked my employee if he’d seen a man on the road, as we were braking. He shook his head. I told him that there had been a man wearing green, and that he had no hands.’

The narrator paused. He bowed his head and emitted three sobs. Then he wiped his eyes and his tone became diffident. ‘Estimable brothers and sisters, you may wish to express your appreciation, and it doesn’t matter how much you put on the green cloth …’ – he went on to list sundry denominations, all of which were beyond the means of those present. ‘No, the amount doesn’t matter. But if, during the course of the coming year, you request Abol Fazl’s intercession and he doesn’t answer, take the matter up with me …’

Nudged by their mothers, the little boys and girls came across to our side of the stage, to get money from their fathers. Then they went over to the cloth and knelt down to kiss and touch it – it had an association, however tenuous, with the Imam Hossein, and few in the audience had the means to go to Karbala. They dropped their money. Once the cloth was covered with notes, men appeared holding trays laden with refreshments. They’d been provided, we learned, by a local trader called Mr Naji. His philanthropy would earn him friends in this life and divine favour in the next.

There were cakes and cucumbers laden high on a copper plate, cinnamon-flavoured rice puddings and little stork’s bundles containing deep-fried white candies seasoned with rose water. There was a ewer pouring water into plastic cups, a loop of tea from the spout of a kettle. In her determination to get a rice pudding, a woman elbowed me in the face. I escaped from the crowd.

Rubbing my jaw, I walked away into a nearby side street. The piercing notes of the orchestra had been succeeded by a mellow, distant sound. Gradually, it grew closer and I was able to distinguish individual sounds within it: hands striking chests, a tremor of lamentation and the diesel motors on generators that were amplifying the lamentation. The processions had started.

Suddenly, I heard a scramble of words through a loudspeaker, and the boom of a bass drum. I looked back up the humdrum street, with its box-like parked cars and unsanitary smell coming from the drainage channels, and saw an army of mounted men on the brow of a hill. Their lances scintillated in the lamplight as they prepared to charge and meet their doom.

The army turned out to consist of a man carrying an iron standard, along whose considerable length oscillated swords and gargoyles and plumes of different colours. He was followed by two columns of men, marching in time with the base drum, flagellating their backs with chains on short handles – a strike for every ponderous beat. A man held up an unintended cross that was composed of two loudspeakers tied to a pole; they were wired to a microphone held by a wailing man a few paces behind.

I had to squeeze up against the wall to make room for the standard to pass. The bearer was thickset, bulging and tight-lipped in his task. He was bound to his panoply from a buckle on a thick belt around his waist. As he passed, he half-slipped, and the weight of the standard pulled him towards me. Thinking I might get hit, I ducked into a side alley.

Once the man had passed, I followed the procession to the main road, where it entered a string of processions, a dozen or more from different neighbourhoods. They were united, and also in competition with each other. The people along the pavements would decide which procession was biggest, and which had the most impressive standard. Had the flagellants been equipped with one chain or two? (From that, you could gauge the benefactor’s generosity.)

There was a mood of sombre recreation. More young men with heavily gelled hair held suggestive conversations with groups of unescorted girls – this being the only night of the year when young women, under the cover of piety, were allowed to roam without a chaperone. Families strolled. Young boys had been dressed in the white Arab robes of little Ali Akbar, Hossein’s nephew; Ali Akbar had fought bravely against Shemr’s men, before being cut down.

The more I walked, the better I understood the enormous size of this crowd; it extended as far as the eye could see. This main road was fuller, perhaps, than it would be at any other time in the year. The same was true of main roads across Iran; at that moment, tens of millions of people were in the streets. I reflected on the grief, and the entertainment that people made of that grief. Then I remembered another reason for the show: defiance.

The people on the streets were united by their love for the Imam Hossein, his father the Imam Ali and (to a lesser degree) the other ten Imams that are regarded by most Shi’a Muslims as the rightful inheritors of the Prophet’s mantle. Shi’as are an overwhelming majority in Iran, but only a small minority across most of the Muslim world. It was the forebears of today’s Sunni majority, Yazid and his followers, who rejected the hereditary principle and murdered its exponent, the Imam Hossein. (They also, Shi’as believe, murdered every other Shi’a Imam, apart from the twelfth.) Even now, in the twenty-first century, the Sunnis of neighbouring Pakistan are capable of launching murderous attacks on the Shi’as of that country, shooting up mosques and assassinating prayer leaders. In Saudi Arabia, a Sunni monarchy controls the holy places. Many Sunnis regard the Shi’as as heretics.

And so here, and in other streets across Iran, the people were showing that they would neither be extinguished nor ignored. They were showing, too, that they would not forget that dreadful sin, the murder of the Imam Hossein.

CHAPTER TWO Isfahan

One afternoon in the spring I set out from the Armenian quarter in the lovely city of Isfahan, towards the Seminary of the Four Gardens. The following day was the anniversary of the investiture of the Imam Ali as the Prophet’s successor. The people were in a good mood. They revered Ali for being modest and just, and looked forward to celebrating these qualities by visiting family members, stuffing themselves with beryan – a dish that features minced sheep’s lungs – and passing judgement on their hosts’ new daughter-in-law. They strolled in the mild afternoon sun, mothers and daughters arm in arm (and fathers in their wake), buying tulips to put in iced water to keep overnight, and sweetmeats to take as gifts.

I reached one of the main roads that head north towards the river, and hailed an old shared taxi. The back seat had its complement of three. The occupant of the front passenger seat stepped out so that I could sit between him and the driver; I was suspended over the gap between their seats. The driver sat hunched over the steering wheel, leaning slightly against the door. We moved off. The driver changed gears like a surgeon replacing dislocated bones.

We were soon stuck in traffic outside one of the big banks, in front of which was a shiny blue car mounted on a gantry. The car – new, French-made – was an incentive: every account holder stood a chance of winning it in a prize draw. It was caparisoned with bunting and flashing light bulbs. It had metallic paint that had been devised by a computer. The bank had put it on the gantry to publicize it – and to make it hard to steal.

I looked in the rear-view mirror and my eye was taken by a fat woman sitting in the middle of the back seat. She was staring longingly out of the window at the zippy French car. She caught me looking at her and pretended to be scandalized, tucking her fringe under her headscarf. ‘What’s happening up there. Mr Driver?’ she demanded, ‘Why aren’t we moving?’

A car, a Buick from the 1970s, was stuck at the intersection, having carried out half a U-turn. Another car, an Iranian-made Paykan, had grazed one of the Buick’s tailfins. The drivers had got out of their cars. The wife of the Buick driver was leaning out of the window, yelling.

‘Look at the wife, egging him on!’ said our driver. ‘What difference does it make? That poor Buick’s been wounded more times than I have.’ The side of the Buick was discoloured from dents that had been amateurishly smoothed out. The engine was still running. It emitted black smoke.

The taxi driver reached under his seat, pulled out a thermos and unscrewed the cap. He poured a little tea into a dirty glass that rested on the dashboard, swilled it around and poured it out of the window. He filled the glass with tea and, putting it back on the dashboard, closed the thermos and put it back under his seat. Then he held up the glass and said, ‘Please go ahead …’

He was offering us tea. In such instances, you don’t accept. It would be bad form. It’s his tea, but he has to offer it. It would be bad form not to. But he’d be put out if someone said, ‘Yes, I’d like some of your tea.’ No one does. The driver gets to drink his tea and appear courteous at the same time. Both ways he wins.

There was polite murmuring around the taxi: ‘Thanks, but no’ … ‘You go ahead and have some’ … ‘I don’t feel like tea’ … ‘I’ve just had some tea.’

Lies. We’d all enjoy a glass of tea.

The driver took out a packet of cigarettes and we went through the same rigmarole. We felt our breast pockets for imaginary packets of cigarettes. Eventually, the driver withdrew a cigarette from his packet, lit it and settled down to watch. A policeman had arrived at the intersection. He was trying to broker a reconciliation. The driver of the Paykan was a cocky brute, well-built, young enough to be the Buick driver’s son. He danced from one foot to another. Soon, the policeman seemed to make a breakthrough. The youth hugged the Buick driver.

During the argument, the traffic lights at the intersection had turned green several times, at which cars had surged forward from all directions. Lots of them wanted to turn, this way or that, but the Buick and the Paykan were blocking their way. The cars were revving, edging forward, kissing bumpers. Someone would have to reverse. Iranian drivers don’t like reversing. It’s a form of defeat. I felt sorry for the policeman.

He did a good job. He positioned himself in the middle – whistling, gesturing, occasionally giving a winning smile. He was a professional. In a little while, at his prompting, a car edged forward from the middle, and away. Another followed. The knot was untied.

‘Well done!’ the taxi driver murmured, and we moved forward. The protagonists stayed where they had been. They would wait for more policemen, who would take statements and measure angles to determine who was at fault. As we went past, the Buick driver’s wife, a woman in a red scarf, leaned out of the window and shouted at her husband, ‘I should have known you wouldn’t have the balls to stand up for yourself! You, who took the full brunt of the Iraqi attacks! Why don’t you stand firm, instead of letting some beardless chick trample your pride?’

The woman’s husband turned around. His face was full of anguish. His wife wasn’t much older than the Paykan driver.

The taxi driver sighed as we drove off. ‘You’ve got to show them who’s boss from day one. I mean, now it’s too late. He’s let her get out of control, challenge his authority. Nothing he can do now.’

A little further down the road, a man who was sitting next to the woman in the back seat got out. He was replaced by a thin woman who recognized the succulent woman: they were distant relatives. They didn’t seem pleased to see one another. They passed on regards to each other’s families, and extended invitations for tea and lunch.

The thin woman said, ‘Did you get much rain in Tehran?’

‘More than dear Isfahan, I can tell you! You know, what with struggling to combat the illness of my late husband – may God show him mercy – and the demands it’s made on my time and health, this is the first time I’ve been to Isfahan for five years. Oh! My heart burned when I saw the river – dried up like a burned courgette, with the wretched boatmen standing around in the mud, with nothing else to do but pray for rain. I mean, is it possible for a river to have no water? Our river? In this day and age?’

‘They sold our water to Yazd,’ the driver said. ‘They sent it off in a pipeline. Cost a fortune to build. The fathers of bitches.’

We were in a long queue of cars. The driver leaned out, far enough to see past the cars in front. He swung the wheel and pressed down hard on the accelerator. We emerged from the queue of cars, into the oncoming traffic. There weren’t many cars coming; the lights ahead were red. By the time the oncoming traffic started to move, we were elbowing our way into a gap between two cars, now much nearer the traffic lights. One of the other drivers raised his hand, but was too lazy to clench it.

‘I don’t know why everyone drives so fast,’ the fat woman said to her relative. ‘All they do when they get to their destination is drink tea.’

The driver grinned. ‘God forbid, madam, you were offended by my efforts to expedite you to your destination! Or perhaps it was what I said? Do you have Yazdi blood, by any chance?’

‘Lord, no! My parents – may God show them mercy – were from Isfahan, and proud of it. But the president is from Yazd, isn’t he?’ she said slyly. ‘That might explain why they’re allowed to drink our water. The Yazdis have always had it in for Isfahan. I should know; my son married a Yazdi. She won’t even iron his shirts. She says he gets through too many. He gives them to me, my poor darling. Too proud to iron an Isfahani’s white shirt, the Yazdis are!’

‘At least they opened the dam again, in time for the holidays,’ said the third passenger in the back seat. ‘There’s water in the river now, thanks be to God.’

‘Exactly!’ said the fat woman. ‘They were scared the Isfahanis would flay them if they didn’t open the sluices. But they’ll shut the dam again after the holiday, and say there’s no more water. They’ll send it to Yazd instead.’

‘And our poor Isfahani kids will carry on topping themselves,’ the man said. ‘Everyone knows the suicide rate goes up when the river’s dry. It’s bad for the soul.’

The man next to me stirred in his seat. ‘Pardon me, but you’re wrong. The problem is not Yazd, but the farmers in Isfahan province. They’re planting rice along the river banks, even though rice needs more water than almost any other crop. Only an idiot would plant rice when there’s a drought.’

‘And what would you have us eat if there’s no rice?’ the fat woman demanded. ‘You want us to get thin and weak?’

‘We should buy our rice from elsewhere.’

‘Sir, you’d prefer that we eat Pakistani rice that has no perfume? Or that sticky revolting stuff the Turks call rice? You can’t make a respectable polov with that.’

The man sitting next to her said, ‘She’s right; our rice is the best in the world. Everyone says so.’

‘And there’s another thing,’ said the woman, ‘our dear motherland has been dependent on foreigners for hundreds of years. Now you want to put our bellies at the mercy of Pakistan! Everyone knows who’s behind Pakistan: the English! It wouldn’t surprise me if the English had something to do with our water shortage. They always stir up trouble in countries they fear. That’s why they’re the best politicians, and we’ve never been any good.’

‘The English are indeed very devious,’ said the man next to me, ‘but I haven’t heard of them altering the climate.’

The woman snorted. ‘I wouldn’t put anything past them.’ Then she said, ‘With your permission. Mr Driver, I’ll get out here.’

The thin woman said, ‘I thought your brother lived further on.’

‘He does,’ the fat woman replied. ‘But I like to exercise before a holiday. I’ll walk the last half-kilometre.’ The taxi stopped. The thin woman got out to allow the fat woman to do so. The fat woman put out both her arms to try and lever herself from the hollow she had created in the back seat. For a moment, one of her hot hands gripped my shoulder. She stood at the window, and looked in.[*]

The fat woman said: ‘How much, sir?’

‘Be my guest,’ said the driver.

The fat woman said: ‘I beg of you.’

‘Whatever you like,’ he grinned. ‘Really, it’s not important.’

‘How much? I beg of you.’ The woman was getting out her purse.

‘I’m serious; be my guest.’

‘How much?’

The driver surrendered. ‘Seventy-five tomans, if you’d be so kind.’

‘Seventy-five tomans? I only got in at Hakim Street. It’s fifty tomans from there.’

The driver frowned. ‘Seventy-five. It’s been seventy-five tomans for three weeks now.’

‘I gave fifty tomans two days ago. I’m not giving more than fifty.’ She looked sharply at her relative who was examining her nails.

‘It’s seventy-five tomans,’ said the driver. His smile had disappeared.

Suddenly, the woman was angry. ‘Is this the correct treatment, the day before we celebrate the investiture of the Imam Ali, salaam to him and his family?’ She looked accusingly at me. ‘Is this the right impression to give foreigners, that Iran’s a country of unprincipled hat-lifters? I’m not giving a penny more than fifty.’ She threw the note in the window.

The driver picked it off my knee. As he put the car into gear, he said, ‘She eats my head with her worthless prattle. She’s too stingy to stay in as far as her destination. Then, she rips me off.’

‘We’re only related by marriage,’ said the thin woman.

I said: ‘I may as well get out here, Mr Driver. I want to cross the bridge.’

‘Where are you from?’ said the driver, as I gave him the fare.

‘France,’ I said.

He patted my shoulder. ‘Whatever you do, don’t marry an Iranian.’

I entered the bridge of Allahvardi Khan. Framed in one of the pierced arches was a middle-aged couple, staring at each other. I touched the bricks. They were warm and biscuity. When I reached the other side, I looked back. The Islamic arch had been repeated like the name of God in a prayer.

In the first years of the seventeenth century, these bricks were baking in the name of Shah Abbas I, castles of them hardening over smoking dung. Between 1598 – when Abbas moved his capital to Isfahan from the northern city of Ghazvin – and his death in 1629, they turned a provincial town into one of the world’s most opulent capitals.

By moving to Isfahan, Abbas changed the nature of a country whose extremities now roughly corresponded to the borders of modern Iran. (At its peak, his empire encompassed the Iranian plateau, with fingers reaching into Mesopotamia and Anatolia to the west, into the Caucasus to the northwest, and almost to the River Oxus, the northern boundary of modern Afghanistan, in the northeast). Rather than stay near the Caspian Sea, as his Turkmen ancestors had done, Abbas aimed at the centre.

The migration allowed Abbas to give up his former dependence on Turkmen tribesmen, and to set up a new confederation. His government and army contained not only Persians, Turkmens and Arabs, but also Georgian, Caucasian and Circassian converts to Islam. He forcibly imported three thousand Armenian Christian families to Isfahan, and encouraged them to prosper spiritually as well as economically. Foreign visitors found in Isfahan a suitable seat for a cosmopolitan empire – Ghazvin, by comparison, had been a draughty Turkish tent.

Abbas enjoyed the company of foreigners. They, confused by the name of his dynasty, Safavi, called him the Sophy. Like his near-contemporary, India’s Akbar, Abbas discussed religious questions with the Augustinians and the Carmelites. Like Akbar, he resisted their efforts to convert him.

The Balenciagas, Faberges and Dunhills of the age spoke Persian. During Abbas’s reign, Europe acquired a taste for Persian goods – for silken carpets brocaded with silver and gold, damasks and taffetas, bezoar stones and turquoises. They learned to trip on Persian opium. Abbas’s wealth was axiomatic; Fabian wouldn’t stop baiting poor Malvolio even ‘for a pension of thousands to be paid from the Sophy’.

Abbas was not a successful family man. He murdered his eldest son, Mirza, and blinded the second, Khodabandeh – ruling him out, according to Islamic law, of the succession. Jane Dieulafoy, a formidably disapproving French archaeologist and traveller of the nineteenth century, relates an account she heard of Khodabandeh’s revenge – apparently exacted on his own small daughter, in order to spite Abbas, who adored his grandchildren:

One morning, at the very moment when the child came to kiss his unseeing pupils, he seized her and slit her throat, in full view of his panic-struck wife. Then, he threw himself on his son, who had come running at the sound of the struggle, and tried to deal him the same fate. In vain; the child was snatched – still alive – from his father’s arms, and Shah Abbas was informed of what had happened. When he was confronted by the corpse of his granddaughter, the old king emitted exclamations of rage and desperation that filled the killer with an exultant and dastardly happiness; for a few moments, he savoured his horrendous revenge, before ending his own life by swallowing poison.

Abbas’s fear of his sons perhaps kept him alive; it also prevented promising princes from maturing into worthy rulers. Most of the Safavid Shahs who came after Abbas rivalled themselves only for despotism and sloth. For the remainder of the seventeenth century and the first quarter of the eighteenth, the empire was defended only by one or two competent grand viziers, and the structural excellence of Abbas’s state.

Today, Abbas’s paranoia has been forgiven. Even in a regime that hates and fears monarchs, people refer to him as Abbas the Great. Hard-line revolutionaries concede his achievements – though they are loath to admit that, were it not for him, their revolution could not have happened. Not only did Abbas help set the boundaries that delineate modern Iran, he also made Iran institutionally, irrevocably, a Shi’a state.

His uncle, the mystic Ismail, had imposed Shi’ism on Iran’s mostly Sunni population. But many orthodox Shi’as considered Ismail to be a heretic. His self-depiction as (variously) the harbinger of the twelfth Imam, the twelfth Imam, the Imam Ali, even God, drew to him deluded fanatics who believed he was immortal and impossible to defeat. (Until, that is, his army was smashed by the Turks.) His poetry was denounced as blasphemous. Even by the standards of the time, he drank and sexed immoderately.

Abbas was more conventional – and more inscrutable – than his uncle. He was tempted by flesh and wine, but he dropped Ismail’s claims to divinity. His zeal, though sincere, was complemented by his politics; his promotion of Shi’ism as a state religion helped set Iran apart from two predatory Sunni empires in the vicinity: the Ottomans and the Mughals of north India. One of his most important acts was to promote orthodox Shi’a clerics. State-sponsored mullahs were expected to be loyal and to counter the influence of mysticism. (They had a personal interest in doing so. Mysticism’s emphasis on the believer’s personal relationship with God undermines the mullahs’ perception of Islam as primarily a code of laws and behaviour, belittling the transmitters of that code – the mullahs themselves.) Abbas endowed Shi’a seminaries that attracted clerics from other Shi’a centres, like Bahrain and southern Lebanon; he himself married the daughter of one of these foreign clerics.

Scholars in the seminaries learned to understand and interpret Islamic law – through logic, grammar and rhetoric. They learned the relationship between Islamic law and their sources, the sayings and traditions of the Prophet Muhammad and the twelve Imams. They were taught a set of systematic principles for deriving one from the other, called jurisprudence. In time, senior mullahs started issuing new and comprehensive compilations of the sources.

Islam has no sacrament requiring ordained ministers; there is, strictly speaking, no ‘clergy’ – certainly not in the sense of a homogeneous group of professionals whose job is to mediate between people and God. In the Safavid period, however, Iran gained a clergy in all but name, and it became a social and political institution. Experienced mullahs were sent to the provinces as judges, dispensing Islamic law. They administered wealthy religious foundations. They systematized the collection of religious taxes that entered their own coffers. They became the state’s spiritual backer.

The expanding science of jurisprudence legitimized their influence. Jurisprudence allowed senior clerics to interpret religious rulings. The most senior of the jurists – the mojtahed – was deemed qualified to divine God’s will in areas where he had not expressed himself; this made the mojtahed a kind of divine legislator. As the Safavid era wore on, the Shah ceased in religious terms to be more than the titular head of Ismail’s old mystic order. He came to rely on the mojtahed for religious sanction of his policies and actions. The Safavid-era mullahs did not go as far as to demand political leadership; but that did not stop some of them acquiring a taste for worldly power.

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.[*]

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 shirin polov. 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.

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.

At lunchtime on Hoveida’s last day, Khalkhali reports in his memoir, the prisoner was treated to a repast of rice, lamb and broad beans. Khalkhali claims to have made do with bread and cheese. (Next to photographs of him, excessively crapulent, this ascetic self-portrayal is unconvincing.) During the afternoon session, Khalkhali didn’t allow Hoveida a defence counsel, nor was a jury present. As the presiding judge, Khalkhali didn’t pretend to be impartial; in the vehemence of his harangues, he rivalled the prosecutor.

By trying Hoveida, Khalkhali jabbed his finger in Bazargan’s eye. Bazargan disapproved of the revolutionary court – he was planning for Hoveida an exemplary trial that would establish the Revolution’s reputation for justice and moderation. But Khalkhali, who plausibly claims to have taken hints from Khomeini, had different ideas. He gave orders that no one was to be allowed out of the prison where the trial was taking place. To ensure that word didn’t reach Bazargan, he locked the prison telephones in a fridge. And so Hoveida was sentenced and shot in the prison courtyard. His final words were patrician, and a bit surprised: ‘It wasn’t meant to end like this.’

Khalkhali’s theatre travelled on. It gave perhaps its most memorable performance at a famous shrine in south Tehran. Khalkhali and two hundred revolutionary militiamen set out to destroy the Pahlavi family vault, which was in the shrine’s precincts. Khalkhali was opposed by the government and by the resilience of the granite structure. The spades and picks used by the Revolutionary Guard proved insufficient. Khalkhali called for reinforcements. (National television was already on site to record his endeavour.) Bulldozers and cranes arrived, but the tomb withstood. At ten o’clock that night, the valiant revolutionaries went home to bed.

In his memoir, Khalkhali craves his readers’ indulgence: ‘Perhaps you don’t grasp how strong they’d made this tomb.’ But he was not deterred; the tomb would have to be blown up, by degrees. And when, after twenty epic days, the job was done, and the dust of imperial bones blended with the smell of cordite, ‘the sound of cheers and joy rose from the people, and the enthusiasm and joy were indescribable’.

You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs. That might be Khal-khali’s epitaph.

Today, Mr and Mrs Zarif are coming to lunch with us, here in Elahiyeh. I wonder what they will make of Bita, my wife, and what she’ll make of them.

Elahiyeh is a desirable suburb on the slopes of north Tehran. It used to be so green that, even in midsummer, you had to sleep with a light blanket. The British and Russian embassies kept grand legations in Elahiyeh, to which their respective ambassadors decamped in the spring. Now, the compounds remain but most of the gardens have been built over. Elahiyeh is rarely more than two or three degrees cooler than the dustbowl of south Tehran.

Elahiyeh’s name is derived from the name of God in Arabic, Allah, but few places in Iran are more reputed for impiety. Behind entry gates crowned with barbed wire, illicit booze is consumed and dancing committed by mixed assemblies. Anecdotal evidence suggests that sex happens between men and women who aren’t married to each other. The Islamic Republic is an avoidable botheration.

In the Shah’s time, the area was inhabited by suave monarchists who built Swiss-style chalets. Fearing for their liberty after the Revolution – many of them had taken part in the Shah’s oppression, or dipped into the public purse – they fled. The new regime appropriated their houses and grounds, building on them or turning them into, say, a sports club for the families of a privileged caste of civil servants.

Elahiyeh’s present inhabitants are an uncouth upper class. They have done well in recent years out of high oil prices. They inhabit marble-clad apartments in escapist blocks and enjoy the view during the rare instances when smog hasn’t settled in the lap of the Alborz Mountains. Many of them have residence rights and property abroad – the Revolution taught them that it pays to keep your options open.

It’s difficult to ascertain exactly where their money comes from. Knowing the right people has a lot to do with it. They are terrific name-droppers. Having access to commodities beyond the reach of the common man – foreign currency at preferential rates, import licences – is also important. Their skill is acquiring what exists in artificially small quantities and selling it at a price reflective of this scarcity. Their wives take lovers and visit a French-educated psychologist downtown.

Their teenage daughters, matchsticks marinated in Chanel, are yanking up their coats; in recent years, hems have drifted above the knee for the first time since the Revolution. Their favourite activities are having nose jobs – there is one model: retroussé – buying illegally imported Italian shoes and rearranging their headscarves in public, by mistake on purpose exhibiting their hair.

The daughters gather on a Thursday night, outside pizza parlours and coffee shops, discharging arch glances and pollinating scents. They’re treading water while their parents find them a mate. (Likely as not, he will be their first cousin – the families know each other, and the mehriyeh, a kind of pre-nup, will not be prohibitive.)

They are courted, if the word is applicable, by boys who wear a minimalist variant on the goatee, driving Pop’s sedan. A chance meeting in a coffee shop; a telephone number flung into a passing car – such are the first moves. Oral sex is, of necessity, popular; there will be a great to-do if the girl doesn’t bloody her wedding bed. In case of penetration, however, all is not lost. A discreet doctor can usually be found to sew up the offending hymen.

There’s a hollow thrill to be got from bettering the morals police. (They cruise Elahiyeh in their Land Cruisers, looking for miscreants to shake down for a few dollars, smelling breath for alcohol, rummaging through handbags for condoms.) For the rich kids, it’s the best way of getting back at the state, at parents, at the predictability of life.

In a strange way, Elahiyeh’s social vacuum suits us, too. We like the traditional notion of an Iranian community, but are not sure we could inhabit one. Unlike almost everywhere else, you can live in Elahiyeh as you can in a Western city: in peace and anonymity.

Before 1979, Bita’s parents had nice ministry positions; both regarded a deputy ministership or another senior bureaucratic post as their due. Bita and her younger brother – a second brother was born on the eve of the Revolution – led blameless, privileged lives.

There were three choices when it came to educating your children: the French school, the German school and the American school. (You didn’t send your child willingly to an Iranian school; foreign languages and contacts were indispensable aids to getting on in the world.) The trouble with the American school was that its graduates spoke Persian with an American accent. There was no German connection in Bita’s family. Her mother, on the other hand, had studied law in Paris, so Bita was sent to the French school. It was run by nuns. Each year, on the anniversary of her martyrdom, the school commemorated the exemplary life of Joan of Arc.

Bita wore a dark-blue collarless tutu over a white T-shirt. In winter, she wore a roll neck jumper over the T-shirt. If the driver was late collecting her after school, she would wander down nearby Lalehzar, Tehran’s Pigalle, where there were whores and the smell of alcohol, and ornate cinemas with putti on the ceilings. In the summer evenings, when her parents were out, she would go swimming in pools that belonged to the parents of her friends. She and her friends danced to Googoosh, Iran’s answer to Shirley Bassey.

They admired Farah, the Shah’s third wife. It’s arguable that Farah was not as exquisite as wife number two, an Isfahani whom the Shah abandoned for failing to sire. But, she was tall, wore fabulous clothes and had an artistic eye. She was an alumna of the French school and came to visit.

In 1978, there were riots and atrocities. Bita got used to the sounds of firing and being sent home early from school – and the worried look on the face of Ma Soeur Louise. She didn’t realize that she and her friends, and Farah and the Shah and the whores of Lalehzar, were the reason for the hatred.

And so the Shah left. An old man with frightening eyes came. The French school was closed. (Of course it was; it was named after a Roman Catholic saint!) A lot of the girls, including Bita, were removed to an Iranian school where French was taught. Friends started leaving. First, the foreigners and the Jews, and the Bahais – members of a religious sect, originally an offshoot of Islam, that had been favoured by the Shah. One day, little Ziba would come to school. The next, she’d be gone. A few weeks later, her family would surface in Orange County, California.

It seemed to Bita that everything had been turned upside down. The people who were now giving orders looked like the people who had taken orders before. In the past, her mother and father had been on top. Now, they were at the bottom. If they wanted to get something done, they had to flatter coarse men with beards and rosaries. In the past, Bita had associated beards with building workers and dervishes. Now, everyone was growing them; you had to, if you wanted to get on.

A few months into the Revolution, Bita’s new school was closed and she went to another. They didn’t teach French at the new school. Arabic, the language of the Holy Qoran, was compulsory. The girls had to wear headscarves and long coats. They were told to despise the wearing of ribbons in hair, and bare ankles. In the streets, there were Hezbollahis patrolling, checking peoples’ adherence to Islamic rules concerning dress and behaviour. They threw acid in the faces of women who were inappropriately made up.

Bita had lived for colour. It was as important to her as the sun. The Revolution had killed colour, declared it to be evil.

Mr Zarif had delivered his school to the Revolution; in the precincts, he was unchallengeable. He turned his attention to a Qoranic injunction that Muslims promote virtue and prevent vice. It meant implementing Islamic law and practices, eradicating decadent ways of behaving. It meant starting at the bottom of society. He and the gang started hanging around parks and shopping centres. They would approach boys who were chatting to girls and ask, ‘What is your relationship? Is this woman your sister? Why are you talking to her?’ If they got an unsatisfactory answer, they’d hustle the boy away and tear off a few shirt buttons. They’d tell the girl: ‘Bleached jeans are a sign of American cultural corruption. Go home and put on Islamic clothes.’

The ban on booze was hitting the alcoholics. Liquor prices had rocketed. Every morning, a park or a vacant lot yielded up a new body, full of petrol, turpentine, meths – anything they could get their hands on. Mr Zarif felt that society was being cleansed, spewing harmful matter. He was learning Arabic, the language of the Holy Qoran.

Sometimes, he and his lads caught boys and girls flirting in shops, under the cover of deciding on a purchase. Mr Zarif and the gang would smash the windows of shops where such things went on and spoil some of the merchandise. If they saw girls flouncing in a park, they seized their handbags and tipped out the contents. ‘Who do you wear make-up for?’ they demanded. ‘What is that music cassette you’ve bought? Haven’t you heard what the Imam said about Western culture?’ If they came across a young man wearing a Led Zeppelin T-shirt, they said: ‘Your hair is longer than Islam permits. Everyone should groom himself as the Prophet did. Here; let us cut it for you.’

They would deliver serious offenders to the boys at the mosque. The boys would consult one of the mullahs and get a sentence passed. Whippings would be administered, in accordance with Islamic law. The gang’s effectiveness was enhanced by the recruitment of two middle-aged women with long nails; they seemed to enjoy scratching the faces of pretty girls who were resistant to the Islamic dress code.

The doorbell rings. It’s the Zarifs. We’ve cooked Indian food, because we reckon that Mr and Mrs Zarif should be open to new experiences.

Not too new. Bita is wearing her headscarf. She’s careful not to put out her hand to shake Mr Zarif’s. She helps Mrs Zarif get out of her black chador for outdoors, and into her colourful indoor chador. Mr and Mrs Zarif look around for indoor slippers to put on. But we don’t ask people to take off their shoes when they enter our house. There aren’t any slippers available. Mr and Mrs Zarif take off their shoes and walk on in their socks.

‘What a house!’ they both say it at the same time. They look at Bita. (She’s the interior designer.)

The hall is burgundy. (My father-in-law says it looks like a nightclub.) There is a batik wall hanging depicting the Hindu goddess Durga, wearing a necklace of human skulls.

The sitting room is two shades of tangerine. There’s a picture of a woman in a bright red dress and a challenging stare, standing next to an androgyne with diaphanous blue skin and yellow hair. There are red-backed chairs and an Indian sari turned into curtains, and a dark green sofa from the 1940s, and a green tribal tunic with red paisley lining put in a frame and attached to the wall. The bolsters are richly coloured and patterned. There are riotous Baktiari carpets, Armenian rugs.

Mr Zarif is wearing a grey shirt, and grey trousers, and white socks. His house has white walls.

As we sit down to eat, I wonder whether he ever threw acid in the face of a girl who had red on her lips, or hair escaping from her headscarf.

[*] ‘You should know about ta’aruf In Arabic ta’aruf means behaviour that is appropriate and customary; in Iran, it has been corrupted and denotes ceremonial insincerity. Not in a pejorative sense; Iran is the only country I know where hypocrisy is prized as a social and commercial skill.

Three examples:

When the taxi driver offered us tea and cigarettes, and we refused, this was ta’aruf. He had no intention of giving us tea and cigarettes, and we reacted accordingly. A man may propose that his son marry the daughter of his impoverished younger brother without having any intention of permitting the match; the son is already engaged to the daughter of an ayatollah, and the brother’s daughter is a repulsive dwarf. But the quintessence of ta’aruf can be found in the behaviour of a mullah I once observed entering a Tehran hospital in the company of several other men. As the mullah crossed the threshold, he said to the men waiting behind him, ‘After you.’

If, through some mistake or misunderstanding, an offer extended through ta’aruf is accepted, it will be retroactively countermanded. I remember reading somewhere of a foreigner who was arrested for theft after being denounced by a shopkeeper who had repeatedly refused to take his money.

[*] I have a book, Celebration at Persepolis, that commemorates this party, which was held in celebration of what the Shah arbitrarily judged to be the two thousand five hundredth anniversary of continuous Iranian monarchy. The book relates that some sixty tents the size of villas, designed by a Parisian firm in beige and royal blue, were erected to house the guests, and that a hatter was on hand should one of the guests squash his topper. Haile Selassie brought with him a Chihuahua wearing a diamond-studded collar. A breakfast of raw camel meat was made available for the Arab emirs. The dinner menu included quail eggs stuffed with Caspian caviar, saddle of lamb with truffles and roast peacock stuffed with foie gras. The vin d’honneur was Château Lafite Rothschild 1945. Representing the Vatican, I learned, was Cardinal Maximilian de Furstenberg, a relation of my Belgian grandmother’s. Although he was only a few years older than her, my grandmother always referred to him as Uncle Max, possibly because he worked for the Pope.

CHAPTER THREE A Sacred Calling

One morning in the autumn I found myself in the back seat of a stationary taxi, facing due south, inhaling exhaust fumes. The authorities call this road an autobahn, because it’s meant to be quick and efficient. They have flanked it with lush verges on which they squander the city’s meagre water resources. I don’t think the former mayor, Ghollam-Hossein Karbaschi, who built this and most of Tehran’s other freeways, listened to foreign experts when he was drawing up his ideas on public transport. Had he done so, he would have learned that more asphalt does not lead to less traffic, but to more. Karbaschi’s urban arteries do not race. They loop clownishly. During the rush hour they atrophy.

On the car radio, a woman greeted us. ‘To all you respected drivers and dear, dear bureaucrats, to you conscientious teachers and workmen, I say: Salaam and good morning! To all the beloved professors and students of the Islamic world, I say: Good morning!’

According to the scientists, we in Tehran take in seven and a half times the amount of carbon monoxide that is considered safe. This information starts to mean something only after ten days or two weeks without rain, without wind. One morning, you look towards the Alborz Mountains and they’re not there. Rather, they’re impressionistically there. They’re lurking behind a haze that’s pink-grey, like the gills of an old fish. If you go out for long, you get cruel headaches for which lemon juice and olives are the recommended cures. Windless weekdays are said to carry away scores of old people, all of them poisoned. In the town centre, there’s a pollution meter whose optimistic readings, naturally, no one believes. The sunsets look like nuclear winters.

The woman speaking on the radio sounded as if she was on LSD. She said: ‘I think it would be a good idea for us to perform some simple acts that enable us to start the day in fine fettle. If the window of the car you’re in is closed against the cool of the morning, start by asking the driver if he would mind winding it down. Actually, why don’t I ask him myself? “Mr Driver? Would you mind lowering your window a little?” And to all those housewives at home, I say: open the window a bit, the weather’s splendid!’

Tehran has too many cars and not enough buses. There’s a plan to replace fifteen thousand elderly taxis. There’s a plan to give out loans so that taxi drivers can run their vehicles on compressed natural gas. There’s a plan to extend the metro, which at present has limited reach and is overwhelmed by the rush hour. There’s a plan to increase public awareness, to tell the middle class it’s not below their dignity to use public transport. Plans, plans.

‘Take a deep breath, and keep it a few seconds inside your chest. Now, slowly let it out again. Exactly! During the next song, I want you to do this several times.’

There should be a plan to teach Iranians how to drive. On the road, there’s no law, no ta’aruf. There’s no inside or outside or middle lane; the heavier the traffic, the more lanes come spontaneously into being, and the narrower they are. There’s no indicating left or right. There are pedestrians who can’t be bothered to take the pedestrian bridges, crossing the motorway like morons. Some evenings, when the kids are out, with the ducking and weaving at extraordinary speeds, you might think you’re in a rally or a computer game. Or you could think of it this way: the vehicle you’re in is a laggard sperm and the end of the freeway is the last egg available to humanity.

I’ve seen cars prostrate over advertising hoardings; I’ve seen a compressed pedestrian dead like a slug in the middle of the road. I’ve seen cars skittle mopeds – no helmets of course, that would be sissy – and drive on regardless. Drivers communicate by leaning on their horns and flashing their headlights. They use symbols: the thumbs-up (a rough equivalent of the finger), the clenched fist (a bit worse). Tempers fray. Once, as a passenger in a taxi, I found myself leaning out of the window and deploying a Turkish profanity that I had learned while living in Ankara but had never, on account of its considerable obsceneness, dared to use.

The elderly taxis are Paykans. In winter, Paykan drivers stick a piece of cardboard across the grille, giving the car the appearance of an asthmatic with a hanky in front of his mouth. Paykan means arrow, but the Paykan is as unerring as the Hillman Hunter, its almost identical antecedent from the 1960s, was sharp-nosed and predatory. In the old days, Paykans were mainly British-made and assembled in Iran. But the British don’t make Paykan parts any more, and 97 per cent of every Paykan is Iranian. I have been told that every new Paykan rolls off the production line with an average of two hundred faults. This is the reason why a fifteen-year-old Paykan, which has more British parts, will cost you more than a new one.

‘And now it’s the turn of the smile. Everyone smile to everyone! The rose of a smile will beautify your face. The scientists have established that people who smile in response to daily challenges are more likely to retain their health. Don’t frown!’

Something happened and we started to move. Sometimes, it’s not obvious why these traffic jams happen, and why they stop. It’s one of the mysteries of Tehran.

In the 1990s, Karbaschi let the magnates into north Tehran, where they developed Elahiyeh and other neighbourhoods with little regard for taste or safety. (It’s not unknown for new buildings to subside as a result of vibrations from nearby building sites.) The city’s infrastructure couldn’t keep up with the pace of growth, and there was a bad smell of impropriety. When Karbaschi was jailed in 1998, everyone knew his trial was politically motivated. But no one suggested that his municipal empire wasn’t corrupt.

Now, four years after he was pardoned and freed, Karbaschi is infrequently criticized. His freeways, his skyline, his parks and his cultural centres: they symbolized a regeneration, Tehran’s version of the building boom that bulldozed and revived Europe’s cities in the 1950s. Karbaschi was announcing: the War’s over. Let us look to the future.

But a revolutionary state can’t look to the future. The Revolution is everything, and it has already happened. The War was the Revolution’s crescendo, so the authorities have preserved it. Living in Tehran is like listening to the sea in a shell.

The authorities made the War part of the fabric. They put it on the city maps. As casualty figures rose, so the localities started changing. Thousands of streets called after nightingales, angels and pomegranates were given new names. Martyr Akbar Sherafat (this was the street where he grew up; his parents still occupy a flat in number sixty-one); Martyr Soufian (his daughter was born a few days after an Iraqi shell scattered bits of him over the front); the Martyrs Mohsenian – two brothers whose faces, smiling down from heaven, have been painted on a wall.

In the process of finding a friend’s house, you commemorate heroes:

‘Excuse me, madam, where’s Martyr Khoshbakht Alley?’

‘Well, you go down Martyr Abbasian Street, turn right into Martyr Araki Street, and then turn left immediately after the Martyr Paki General Hospital …’

So much for the little men with their little places; the prestige memorials – the boulevards and autobahns – are reserved for the dead elite. In the north of Tehran, there’s Sadr Autobahn – that’s Iraq’s Ayatollah al-Sadr, Iraqi Shi’ite, whom Saddam Hussein executed for sedition. Sadr is tributary to the main north-south autobahn, Modarres (Ayatollah Modarres, who was known for his opposition to the last Shah but one). Closer to the Square of the Seventh of Tir, there’s Beheshti Avenue. (Ayatollah Beheshti was the Islamic Republic’s first chief justice.) Before the Revolution, Beheshti Street was called Abbasabad.

My taxi was going on slowly. I saw that scaffolding was up in front of a mural that had interested me since my arrival in Iran. Men in overalls were sitting on the scaffolding, under a canopy. There were pots that I assumed to be full of paint; they were preparing to paint over the mural.

The mural showed a dead man, a martyr, lying in his bier, with his daughter standing over him, holding a rose. The daughter couldn’t have been more than four years old, but she wasn’t looking down on her father with the exuberant grief that you might expect. Her expression said: ‘I understand. You were my father but, more important, you were a Muslim. Having weighed your competing responsibilities, you went off to defend the Revolution, and Islam, from the Iraqi rapists. Good for you.’

I couldn’t imagine the little girl giggling, or whining, or tugging at her mother’s chador and demanding ice cream. Her dress was fanatically Islamic; who ever heard of a four-year-old wearing a black smock to cover her hair, and a chador over that, with not so much as a lock on display? A four-year-old alive to the diabolical temptation represented by a woman’s hair? She wasn’t a girl, but an idea.

We passed Mottahari Street (former name: Peacock Throne Street) – that’s Ayatollah Mottahari, Khomeini’s colleague and friend, who was assassinated a few months after the Revolution. We reached the Square of the Seventh of Tir – former name: the Square of the Twenty-Fifth of Shahrivar, the date of the Shah’s accession to the throne. Not a square in the Western sense, or a grassy maidan in the Indian – more an oxbow for Karbaschi’s meandering freeway, with a scum of shared taxis and cars and buses.

On the Seventh of Tir 1360 – that’s the Iranian calendar date for 21 June 1981 – a huge explosion that is thought to have been planted by the Hypocrites killed seventy-two people, including Beheshti, four cabinet ministers and other bigwigs. (Two more later died of their wounds.) On a wall overlooking the square there is a mural of Beheshti with his wiry beard and olive-stone eyes. Underneath, there is his eccentric adumbration of Iran’s foreign policy: ‘Let America be irritated by us; let it be so irritated, it dies.’

The carnage of the Seventh of Tir convinced Khomeini that there could be no mercy. The enemy, the Communists, liberals and pseudo-Islamists, had to be destroyed. In the months that followed, thousands of members and sympathizers of the Mujahedin and other opposition groups were executed. On 18 and 19 September 1981: 182 (according to official figures). On 27 September 1981: 153.

We entered Roosevelt – it acquired a new name after the Revolution, but everyone still calls it Roosevelt. We passed the Nest of Spies. It’s the regime’s name for the former US Embassy. Low-slung walls: easy enough for the students to get over. I remembered pictures from Time magazine at the end of 1979, of the hostage-takers using an American flag to carry away rubbish from the embassy compound, and a lurid Khomeini, Hammer Horror with blood-red irises, on the cover.

A few months before I’d visited a temporary exhibition at the Nest of Spies. The people had come to smell America. They’d come to look at the eavesdropping equipment that the embassy staff had used, and the shredders and incinerators they’d fed with documents as the students took over the embassy. (The students then spent months piecing together the shredded material. Some of this, they were able to claim, implicated their domestic rivals in CIA plotting. This was helpful to Khomeini, who used the findings to discredit his opponents.)

The organizers of the exhibition had placed dummies of American diplomats around a table, in a soundproof room that had apparently been used for secret meetings. As a visitor to the exhibition, you stood outside the room, which was made of two thick panes of glass with a vacuum between them, and looked in at the Americans. They wore ties: a Western affectation. They were seated on chairs: a kind of enthronement. They had crossed their legs, or splayed them, showing off immodest American crotches: canine. As you stood there, pressed up against the glass, and viewed their washed-out complexions and ugly auburn hair, you could imagine them talking over ways to control Iran, to defeat Islam. At the end of the working day, you could imagine them drinking beer and taking a slut for the night. That was what Americans did, wasn’t it?

We carried on south. We crossed a flyover. On one side, the houses had not been fully demolished – just enough to allow the flyover to be built. They were half-houses. The upstairs rooms still had wallpaper. The grid of south Tehran started to take shape. Scraps of yellow and turquoise tile were visible on the older façades, and rust-coloured roofs. There was less building activity in this part of the town and more traffic. The women mostly wore chadors. A different town, conservative and claustrophobic.

Sometimes, I’ve wondered what it would be like to live here. There would be a mode of conduct, proximity to the neighbours, a feeling of impermanence. These old communities are under attack – by unemployment and highly adulterated heroin at fifty cents a hit, by women who aren’t family and the influx of migrants from the provinces. Nothing stays the same. A neighbour leaving, another taking his place, a divorce, a business success, an iron ball crashing into a corner shop.

The defences are religion and the watchful eyes of neighbours, the chador and Islam. If the community is an island, and if the roads and bazaars full of strangers are the sea around them, then people behave themselves on the island and swim free in the fathomless waters of moral decay.

Then, we were caught in the bazaar traffic. Small vans carrying carpets and cans and wooden palettes on their sides. Men pushing carts: the porters, the lowest form of bazaar life. The day before, the bazaar had closed its doors in protest at an aggressive speech made by President Bush. It was to show America that Iranians were united in their continued hatred for the Great Satan.

As we approached the South Terminal, I looked out for a large black building, a plant that produced vegetable oil, which I was used to seeing at the roadside. But the factory was doubled over – in pain, badly winded. The roof had collapsed. One of the chimneys had toppled.

I got out of the taxi, holding my bag, and turned to face the Peugeot drivers.

‘Isfahaaaan! Isfahaaaan!’

One of them came up to me. He had a bronze complexion, purplish lips. ‘Isfahan! Leaving right now!’ His face was convulsed by the opiate’s bonhomie. (In Iran, the masses have both religion and opium.) His hand gripped me insolently.

I picked another driver, one with a clean moustache and an ironed shirt. The back seat of his Peugeot was occupied by a man in his twenties and another chap with a beard. I took the third place. A young couple shared the front passenger seat and fed each other crisps.

We moved off. The driver shifted position in his seat, hunched over the wheel. He flicked the gears with his palms and ran his hands through his shiny hair. There was a short conversation about what music we would listen to. The field was narrowed down to the titans of Turkish pop: Tarkan or Ibrahim. Ibrahim won. The driver pushed Ibrahim into the cassette player with the tips of his fingers. He lit his cigarette, but not before putting it in a mahogany-coloured holder. Every elegant move seemed designed to beguile the senseless boredom of his hours. We left south Tehran.

The sun in my eyes; Ibrahim lamenting through his moustache; the proximity of the five others; cigarettes; the speed and a rococo driver.

I thought: why don’t I have a car? Now that baby’s on the way, well have to get a car. Must be air-conditioned. But expensive! Government monopoly over car making, and demand far exceeds output: prices artificially high. Paykan? Forget it; Bita would sooner walk. Best alternative? Eight grand for a Kia Pride, a Korean-designed paper cup set on Smarties.

I was feeling sick and we were pelting along. We were driving through Zahra’s Heaven, the main cemetery in south Tehran. Seventy thousand dead soldiers in there. Other fathers’ sons, other men’s exercise, mirth, matter.

Then we were speeding down dust tracks that had been thrown across fields of barley. We could follow the asphalt, but that would take us through the tollbooths at the beginning of the motorway. This way, we’d emerge onto the motorway a few kilometres beyond the tollbooths and cruise for free.

We skidded onto the motorway. One hundred and fifty kilometres an hour, in an Iranian-built GLX 2000. Tired driver, straight road; he could fall asleep at any moment. One careless bolt, cruelly loosening. That’s all it would take. I looked at the other passengers. The bearded chap was silently mouthing an invocation, again and again, using dead time to accumulate credit with God. The couple had fallen asleep entwined. No one was thinking about seat belts. If we had to brake suddenly, we’d be scattered over the tarmac.

MR DRIVER, HAVE YOU CONSIDERED THAT EVERY ACTION HAS A CONSEQUENCE? WHAT DO YOU THINK OF CAUSE AND EFFECT?

The thought of never seeing my wife again. Or the little one, when he/she emerged. Right now just walnut size or strawberry size or whatever. A thing, not a person, but promising. Something I will love, and will love me, even if I prove to be unworthy.

MR DRIVER, WHY ARE YOU DRIVING SO FAST?

I tapped the driver on the shoulder.

‘Mr Driver?’

He looked at me in the rear-view. He turned down the music a little bit and said: ‘You don’t like Ibrahim?’ The young man was looking at me.

‘No, no, Ibrahim’s fine, I was wondering, could you drive at a more … er’ – I groped for the word – ‘reasonable speed?’

The driver’s expression in the rear-view mirror was puzzled. What did ‘reasonable’ mean? What did I want him to do?

He put his foot down. The speedometer gave up the ghost.

I was in Isfahan, zigzagging towards the Shah’s Square. (New name: the Imam’s Square.) I was on my way to meet a cleric called Mr Rafi’i, to talk about the War. Bobbing above the surrounding houses was the blue dome of the Mosque of the Shah (new name: Mosque of the Imam), which dominates the southern end of the square. As I walked I passed iron gates that led into new tenements, or into an old courtyard that may have contained a fig tree and a tethered goat. The tight turning streets were still and baking, and my mouth was dry. I wanted to be close to the mosque, with its shadows and ablutions pool, and its moist revetments.

The normal way into the Shah’s Square is through the roads and lanes that feed it from east and west, or from the bazaar, which debouches into it from the north. But my hotel was south of the square and I didn’t feel like walking half its length before entering it from the side. I was trying a short cut. Having approached the mosque from behind, I would surely come across a passage or lane that ran alongside it, and that would take me into the square. I pursued the dome.

After a few minutes, I rounded a bend and met a massive brick wall. Lying in the dust, there were bits of broken tile – yellow and turquoise and blue. I realized I was under the tiled dome; it had moulted faience. I was standing at the foot of the rear wall of the main dome chamber.

If you approach the east end of a Gothic cathedral, you’ll come across the apse’s satisfying bulge, some gargoyles, a ribcage of flying buttresses. The Ottoman mosques are mystic spheres; whatever your viewpoint, there is always a painstaking accretion – of domes and half-domes, ascending to the main dome, and thence to heaven. Both have been conceived sculpturally. You’re allowed to approach from all directions. But here: this rude wall!

When I stood a little to one side of the wall, I could see much of the mosque’s skyline. From the Shah’s Square: a pageant. From this side: a chaos of features and perspectives, without colour. I made out the western vaulted portico, or aivan. Viewed from the mosque courtyard, it is dazzling; the lavish stalactite decoration is intensified by mosaics and tiles. Now, from behind, it was unkempt, pregnant with its own vault, made of old bricks.

I had always assumed that the upstairs bays over the small vaulted shop fronts that flanked the mosque were the façades for storerooms and cells. Viewing them from the rear, I realized they were a screen. The Shah’s Square was a theatre and I had blundered backstage.

There was no corridor past the mosque. I retraced my steps and walked north along the main road running parallel to the square. I turned right and felt the anticipation the architects intended I should feel. I entered the square where they plotted I should enter and saw what they wanted me to see. A vast bounded esplanade, bay upon bay, greatly monotonous. At the northern end: the entrance to the bazaar. At the southern end, the Mosque of the Shah. About two-thirds down, opposite one another: the Palace of Ali Qapu, and the Mosque of Sheikh Lutfollah.

The portico of Ali Qapu was crowned by a veranda with a roof supported by spindly wooden legs. From here, Abbas had watched polo matches, executions and military parades that took place in his honour. Beyond, at the southern end of the square, shivered the Mosque of the Shah. Slender minarets crowning the entrance portal; the dome’s colossal bulk and the harmonious disposition of traditional forms – four aivans, facing each other around a courtyard. With one renowned aberration: in order to face Mecca, the entire mosque after the entrance portal had been oriented obliquely.

In Iran, the beloved monuments are not buildings but gardens. The most respected engineer does not make roads but the underwater channels that carry the water that cools the houses and moistens the desert. The great mosques are clay cups, and the Mosque of the Shah has water to the brim.

Up close, the tiles are coarse. Their prodigious acreage is almost unattractive. From a distance, however, you long to be submerged.

Around the square, families were claiming the garden and pavements that had been laid over Abbas’s esplanade. There were picnics on the grass and girls playing badminton. Mothers chewed sunflower seeds and spat out the shells, while their husbands lit paraffin stoves. Urchin boys clung to the axle-bars of phaetons that propelled gently the well-to-do. Every now and then a shuttlecock would rise and fall before the dome of the little Mosque of Sheikh Lutfollah, like a tropical bird in front of a tapestry.

The Sheikh Lutfollah is one of the triumphs of all architecture. It has no courtyard, no minaret. The dome is low and made of pink, washed bricks, articulated by a broad, spreading rose tree inlaid in black and white. This dome catches the light shyly; the inlay is glazed, but not the bricks. The dome floats upon an aivan of typical ostentation – but askew, for the chamber has been placed twenty metres to the north. Why?

I crossed the square and went in. A small corridor opened off to the left: dark and dimly gleaming. I followed the corridor, and the darkness virtually obscured the tiles on the walls and vault. A few paces on, I was forced to take another turn, to the right, thick-wrapped in the corridor.

Ahead, a shaft of light, strained through window tracery, appeared from a wall two metres in girth. (The walls need muscle, to withstand the dome’s thrust.) The shaft of light pointed like a Caravaggio. I followed it, turning right and standing at the entrance to the dome chamber. The dark corridors had disoriented me and made me forget where I was in relation to the square outside. I’d taken no more than twenty-five paces.

A man and a woman and a little girl were standing under the dome, talking. There was one other person in the sanctuary, a heavy man.

The architect – whose name, Muhammad Reza b. Hossein, is inscribed in the sanctuary – skewed the dome chamber so it faces Mecca, but that is the extent of the Lutfollah’s resemblance to the Mosque of the Shah. In the Lutfollah, the dome chamber’s orientation is not an ostentatious oddity, but hidden, subordinated to the serenity of the whole.

The light in the sanctuary was more plentiful but dappled through the tracery of windows in the drum and by the glazed and unglazed surfaces around the chamber. It illuminated, seemingly at random, a section of the inscription bands and a bit of ochre wall inlaid with arabesques, and a clenched turquoise knuckle, part of a frame for one of the arches.

Imagine Abbas, at prayer in his oratory, his head bared and vulnerable, fluid sunlight catching his shoulder.

The little girl, idling while her parents examined the enamelled lectern, gazed up at the dome, put her arms out, and whirled.

The thickset man addressed me: ‘Mr Duplex.’

I said, ‘Mr Rafi’i?’

The man said: ‘Can you smell him?’

I sniffed.

He tried again: ‘Can you smell God?’

I followed Mr Rafi’i back along the corridor, towards the mosque entrance. He stopped outside a door that I hadn’t noticed and pushed it open. We looked in on a plain cell. ‘The Sheikh was Abbas the Great’s father-in-law,’ he said. ‘This is where he prayed, and where he was buried.’ Mr Rafi’i seemed to approve of the Sheikh’s simple tastes.

We entered the square, and I looked at Mr Rafi’i. In the half-light of the mosque, my attention had been drawn by his thick torso and neck – not a taut musculature but a ragged peasant virility. His face was red, bulging. He wore a check shirt and dusty baggy black trousers.

‘I just got in from my fields,’ he said, guiding me across the square. ‘Next week, we’re going to start harvesting. But it’s a busy time of year; I have to teach at the same time.’

Mr Rafi’i’s subject was the sayings, sermons and letters of the Imam All. For Shi’as, Ali is the supreme example of a just and generous sovereign. During his caliphate, he is said to have bought two shirts and offered the finer of the two to his servant. His judges were so independent, one found against him in a case.

As my ears got used to Mr Rafi’i’s rural accent, my eyes were drawn to his forehead. Many Shi’as have a purplish blotch there, from the baked tablet of earth they press down upon as they pray Mr Rafi’i’s blotch had gained a crust, with small features of its own. It seemed to laugh whenever he did – a wizened sprite, living in his head.

‘Here’s my horse, said Mr Rafi’i, pointing to an old motorbike with a hempen packsaddle that might have been designed for a donkey. ‘Get on.’

We went hoarsely down the little streets, into a main road that carried us, by way of one of the newer bridges, across the river. We strained up the hill on the other side, towards a shelf of mountains. We turned well before the mountains, continued for a couple of hundred metres and stopped at the gate of the Rose Garden of the Martyrs. We dismounted and Mr Rafi’i mouthed a greeting to the martyrs.

There are some seven thousand of them and each grave is surmounted by a metal frame that contains a photograph of the man in the grave. The graves are bunched, like copses, one copse for each major engagement. They represent a fraction of the martyrs from the province of Isfahan – I’ve heard of villages with a population of two or three hundred, and a score of graves in the War cemetery. The martyr’s families would come each week, Mr Rafi’i explained, usually on Thursday evenings. He said: ‘Come and meet my friends.’

He’d been their ally, their chaplain. He remembered the occupants of many graves; there was barely one whose name meant nothing to him. The photographs were formal, taken in a studio to commemorate earthly achievement – a school diploma, an engagement to be married. Perhaps a mother had sensed the coming martyrdom and requested a memorial pose.

‘These boys were nothing like the boys you see on the streets today. Nothing! They were clean! And they were fighting for God. They were fighting for the government of Ali; they longed for his caliphate.’

He pointed. The photograph depicted a very young boy with the beginnings of a beard. ‘He and his cousin died on the same day, coming back across the marsh. He was a good boy. They didn’t find his body.’

‘His grave’s empty?’

‘No, no … Listen! His parents tracked down some survivors from the operation, and got conflicting reports. One said he’d seen their boy being crushed by a tank. Another said he was electrocuted when the enemy diverted power into the marsh …’

Mr Rafi’i paused; he’d seen someone he knew, a bald man holding a watering can over a grave.

Mr Rafi’i called out: ‘Salaam Aleikum!’ The bald man smiled and beckoned us over. Mr Rafi’i introduced him: ‘This is Mr Mousavi, and that’s the grave of his nephew who died on the last day of the War. The great Creator saw fit to draw him to his breast …’

‘Thanks be to God,’ interrupted Mr Mousavi dutifully.

‘I was explaining to Mr Duplex here,’ said Mr Rafi’i, ‘the reason why these boys went.’ He turned back to me. ‘Boys like Mr Mousavi’s nephew – Amin, wasn’t it? – were in love with justice and God. Right, Mr Mousavi?’

‘That’s right,’ said Mr Mousavi. ‘The last time I saw him, he said – it was the end of the War, we thought he’d been spared … he said he was sorry that God hadn’t judged him worthy of martyrdom …’

‘Mr Duplex,’ Mr Rarf’i said, ‘you must know it’s an honour to be martyred; not everyone gets called.’

Mr Mousavi went on: ‘God heard him and took him on the last day of the War.’ His expression went dead. He was awed by the severity of God’s kindness. I looked at the photograph of Mr Mousavi’s nephew. A normal kid, with 1970s bouffant hair and a beard and a spiky shirt collar. I looked along the line of photographs, at his neighbours. They had the same confidence; God wouldn’t let them lose.

Mr Rafi’i and I went back to the grave of the boy whose body hadn’t been found. ‘At the end of the War,’ he said, ‘some of the old soldiers volunteered to go back to the battlefields and try and find the bodies of the missing lads. They even crossed the border, into Iraq. They used their knowledge of the sites, and their memories of the battles, to find the bodies. Then they dug them out and brought them back to their families.’

‘So they found him?’ I asked, gesturing at the grave.

He nodded. ‘Five years after he died, they found him – his father told me. His trench had taken a direct hit. The strange thing is, his face was preserved, perfect. There was no smell, either. You know, the body decomposes and produces a smell. There was none of that …’ He looked at me closely. ‘Do you believe what I am saying?’

I wanted to believe him. Perhaps. It was fantastic, no? I nodded vaguely.

He started to cough, weakly, like a kitten. His face had got redder. A sort of yellow scum had accumulated at the corners of his mouth.

I said: ‘Shall we sit down?’

We walked towards the trees. Mr Rafi’i laid his packsaddle on a grave. As we sat down, I said: ‘Among Christians, it would be considered offensive to sit on a grave or walk over someone’s grave.’

Mr Rafi’i was breathing a little easier. He grinned. ‘The soul cannot be sat on.’

Something made him remember a young seminarian, Hamid, during the War. ‘He was sixteen years old. He was a good boy: pure! They were all pure, back then.

‘I remember – such a fine looking boy! Like the moon! He had an accident – I’ve forgotten what it was – and his front teeth were smashed in. I said he should go to the dentist and get his teeth repaired, and he said: “I’m not going to bother, because I’ve been summoned.”

‘A few days later, we went out to try and get an idea of the enemy’s strength in our sector. We were twenty-two of us, in a column. As we set out, Hamid kissed me on both cheeks. He smelt of cologne, and he’d put on clean clothes.’ If you’re going to meet God, there’s a protocol to be followed.

‘The Iraqis were on the heights above us. When we came under fire, we hit the deck, and Hamid was next to me. I noticed my leg was hot and I thought, ‘I’ve been hit’, but something stopped me looking down. I was afraid. Then, a few seconds later, I felt that my groin and stomach were also hot and wet, and I looked down and I saw I hadn’t been hit. It was Hamid’s blood. I looked at his face. He smiled, and slept.’ Mr Rafi’i looked up at the sky, to the bending tops of the cypresses and pines. ‘You have to be clean, to be a martyr.’

Anticipating my next question, he said: ‘God didn’t want a grizzly old sinner like me.’ The sprite laughed with us.

I asked: ‘What did the men do, before they went off to battle? Did they pray? Were they silent? Did they chatter to try and settle their nerves?’

‘I remember, before one operation, my battalion was given leave to go to the nearest town, to the public bathhouse. Normally before an operation you do your martyrdom ablutions and ask God to let you come to him. At any rate, everyone went along to the baths – we must have been about four hundred people. And I got a shock, I can tell you, because the lads in the bathhouse started mucking around, splashing each other with cold water. Afterwards, someone told me you could hear the shouts and laughter from down the street.’

‘Did you joke around and splash, too?’

‘No, it’s not correct behaviour for a cleric to behave like that. I washed myself quickly and left.’

‘How many of the boys who went to the bathhouse are still alive?’

‘There can’t be more than a few dozen alive now.’

He got out a bottle of water from his pack and took a swig, making sure his lips didn’t touch it. Then he handed it to me. He said: ‘So, you’ve come to Isfahan to learn about the War?’

I said, ‘I hope to come to Isfahan several times.’

‘You should meet Hossein Kharrazi.’

‘Who’s that?’

‘He’s over there.’ He gestured behind him. ‘I’d take you myself, but I need to have my injection. With your permission, I’ll be on my way. Just go over there, and ask where Kharrazi is. Everyone knows.’

‘Does he work here?’

Mr Rafi’i smiled gently.

After he’d gone, I went over to the area he had pointed to. I started walking up and down the lines of graves, reading the inscriptions and trying to find Kharrazi. After a while, I came across a group of people standing in front of a grave. It was identical to the other ones, but had more flowers. Flowers from a shop, some wild flowers and some plastic ones, too.

Shortly after the Revolution, Iran’s mainly Sunni ethnic minorities started to demand administrative, religious and cultural autonomy – even, in some cases, independence. In the north-east, the Turkmens of Turkmensara; the Arabs of the south-western province of Khuzistan; the Baluchs on the border with Pakistan; Kurds living adjacent to Turkey and Iraq; all tried, using violent and diplomatic means, to persuade Khomeini to dismantle the centralized bureaucracy that the Shah had bequeathed him. Before the Revolution, Khomeini had promised freedom for all. That was before.

The worst violence was the Kurdish violence. The Kurds had welcomed the Revolution because they hoped to influence its course; the Shah’s departure would not serve them unless the new regime recognized their historic separateness. The Kurds have more ethnic and cultural affinity to the Persians than they have to the Arabs and the Turks, their other hosts in an ancestral home the size of France, but they have been taught by history to distrust them all. The Kurdish imagination is littered with memories of betrayal and misery, much of it self-inflicted.

There’s no reason to suppose that Khomeini rejected the regional stereo-type of Kurds as murderous and untrustworthy. A fear of separatism, as much as his hostility to left-wingers and liberals, had persuaded him, shortly after the Revolution, to set up the Revolutionary Guard. When the Kurdish violence broke, Bazargan and some of his allies favoured conciliation; Khomeini and the clerical hardliners wanted to send in the Revolutionary Guard. Hossein Kharrazi, along with some fifty friends and acquaintances, got ready to fight.

Kharrazi was the third son of a junior civil servant in Isfahan, and his father couldn’t pay for him to take up the university place he’d won before the Revolution. As a conscript in the Shah’s army, he’d spent part of his military service in the tiny sultanate of Oman, across the Strait of Hormuz from the southern Iranian port of Bandar Abbas. Iran had kept a military presence there since the mid-1970s, when the Shah’s troops had helped the Sultan suppress a guerilla uprising. Kharrazi went AWOL when, the day after the Shah’s flight, Khomeini called for a mass desertion from the imperial army. Compared to many of his friends, whose military experience amounted to lobbing Molotov cocktails at the former regime’s police stations, he was a seasoned soldier.

To Kharrazi and his friends, putting down the Kurdish rebels was a religious duty. He and most of the other lads had joined the Revolutionary Guard. (In time, the Guard would grow, allowing Khomeini to reduce his dependence on the regular army; he suspected it of remembering the Shah with fondness.) By a process of informal election, Kharrazi and another local boy, Rahim Safavi, became leaders of the group.

At twenty-two, Kharrazi was older than most of the others; being bright and fervent, he was able to articulate their ideals. America, the mortal enemy of the new Islamic Republic, was trying to turn Kurdistan into another Israel. Saddam Hussein, who feared the new Islamic Republic, was helping. As Shi’as and Iranians, it was their duty to fight. If they were killed – as long as they had not actively sought death, but rather the glory of Islam – they would be martyrs and go to heaven. (The Qoran and the sayings of the Prophet made that clear.) If they stayed alive, and won, they would recreate the Imam Ali’s perfect caliphate.

To the boys in Isfahan, and across the country, that seemed like a terrific deal. The new warriors were mostly poor boys; similar boys in other countries, on both sides of the Iron Curtain, would have been drawn to extremist politics. Many were illiterate. The Shah’s rule had disoriented them; the elite had been devoted to money, while much of the rest of society continued to profess its old attachment to spiritual rewards. These lads had a penury of both. Now, wealth was being measured in ways that favoured them. You were rich if you enjoyed the favour of God and the Imam, if you were going off to Kurdistan for a grand adventure – a love affair with the Revolution. You were worth a million if your mother shed tears of dread and pride on your shoulder: ‘God speed your return!’

There was a jackpot up for grabs: martyrdom.

A minority of the boys – the more thoughtful ones – conceived of heaven abstractly. It was a state of grace, God’s mingling with the soul. (By contrast, hell was regret, a longing for divine favour that throbbed into eternity.) Most of the lads, however, thought of heaven as a mild spring day, where the heavenly facilities could be smelt or touched.

Kharrazi, Safavi and the lads took a bus to Kermanshah, more than one hundred kilometres south of the war zone. They commandeered a helicopter and went to Sanandaj, the capital of the province of Kurdistan. As they touched down, the airport was being mortared. According to Muhammad – Reza Abu Shahab, who went on to become one of Kharrazi’s aides, ‘We had no knowledge of military operations, or military theory. God was helpful and gave us false confidence; we thought we’d beat them easily.’

The Kurds made insulting, overweening demands. (They were showing that they didn’t understand the Revolution, and put their own petty nationalism above the rule of God.) They boycotted the referendum on the new constitution. Meanwhile, some misguided or treasonous elements inside the government continued to promote a peaceful settlement. They came to the region for peace talks, bartering with the Islamic Republic, when they should have been killing and dying for it.

Kharrazi and the others hated the army and mocked its daintiness. (The army was known to balk at orders to bombard Kurdish villages.) But the army was essential to the struggle to put down the Kurds; the Revolutionary Guard were too few, inexperienced and ill disciplined to win on their own.[*]

Kharrazi’s men carried cumbersome old automatic rifles. These had been supplied – with great reluctance – by the regular army. If they wanted heavier weapons, they were told, they would have to steal them from the enemy. Gradually, as they killed more Kurds, they picked up their Kalashnikovs and Uzis.

There were cakes, presented to the Revolutionary Guard by local girls, which exploded once the girl was out of view. There was the beheading of a convalescing Revolutionary Guardsman in a hospital ward. There was the rape and disembowelling of boys whose fathers supported the government. There were government sentries found with their genitals stuffed in their mouths. There was the fear of fighting in tall valleys far from home, of depending on Kurdish guides who might be leading you into a trap. No one said the Kurds fought like gentlemen.

I don’t know whether Kharrazi’s group perpetrated what I, or you, might deem an atrocity. A bullet in the head for a Kurdish Sunni – punishment for refusing an invitation to join the Shi’a faith? A bastinado for a shepherd who failed to disclose the whereabouts of an enemy patrol? A shelling for a village whose inhabitants had given the rebels bread? Abu Shahab and others deny that such things happened. But the government’s campaign was famous for its savagery. Kharrazi and his lads were fighting the enemies of God, and nowhere in Islam does God prescribe for them a gentle rehabilitation.

That was perfectly understood by Khalkhali, scourge of Hoveida and destroyer of the Pahlavi tomb. For a while, he was in the rearguard of the advancing government forces, dispensing justice. His trials would last ten minutes or so. Verdicts depended on his whim. There was no appeal.

A magnificent society was being created. The unit was its microcosm. Men addressed each other as ‘brother’. Kharrazi and his aides were obeyed because their authority, everyone assumed, came from God. When there was a shortage of food, Kharrazi would pretend he wasn’t hungry and give his share to the younger lads. He took guard duty like everyone else, and went on dangerous reconnaissance missions. ‘No one missed the cities,’ one of his men told me, ‘because they were still full of sin; here, in the fields, we were fighting alongside God.’

Kharrazi taught them:

No drop of liquid is more popular with God than the drop of blood that is shed for him.

The best deed of the faithful is fighting for God.

Participate in holy war, so you will be happy and need nothing.

One hour of holy war is better than sixty years of worship.

The wives of those who have gone to war must be respected and treated as inviolable.

An ideologically pure army is better than a victorious army.

They didn’t realize it at the time, but it was all a preparation, a rehearsal for a grander struggle.

Even before the Revolution brought Iran’s Shi’a clerics to power, Iraq’s Baathist state had been suppressing its own discontented Shi’as. Although they constitute a majority of Iraqis, Shi’as had been underrepresented in the dictatorship that Saddam helped set up in 1968. They had been alienated by its espousal, variously, of secularism and Sunni nationalism. Saddam, who had been vice-president since 1968, but overshadowed the president in influence, regarded the new Iranian regime as a challenge – one that he might be able to turn to his advantage.

Before the Revolution, Iran and Iraq had been rivals, but the Shah had enjoyed the advantage. Being Arab nationalists, the Baathists had been furious when Iran, supported diplomatically by Britain and America, occupied three islands in the Persian Gulf in 1971. In response, Iraq expelled some seventy-five thousand Shi’as of Iranian origin and allied itself to the Soviet Union. But the Iraqis and Russians never built up the kind of intimate relationship that the Shah enjoyed with the US. In case of war, Iraq’s elderly Soviet kit would be no match for Iran’s expanding arsenal of sophisticated American weaponry. Access to US armaments was Iran’s reward for being the ‘third pillar’ – the other two pillars being Israel and Saudi Arabia – of America’s anti-Soviet policy in the Middle East.

In 1974, with American support, Iran intervened to help the Kurds of northern Iraq revive their intermittent insurgency against the government in Baghdad. As the likelihood of a destabilizing war between Iran and Iraq increased, so did international efforts to broker a lasting peace between the neighbours. In 1975, in Algiers, the Shah and Saddam signed an accord that required their respective governments to stop interfering in each other’s domestic affairs, and which ostensibly settled outstanding border disputes. Iraq conceded to Iran part ownership of the strategic southern reaches of their fluvial border, the Arab River. The Shah, and the Americans, ended their support for the Kurdish revolt.

Four months before the Revolution, the Iraqis complied with the Shah’s request that they expel Khomeini, who had been living in exile since 1965 in the Iraqi shrine city of Najaf. He went to Paris, which turned out to be a far better place from which to organize a revolution. On his return to Iran, he made it clear that he wanted political Islam to spread. In Iraq, thousands of Shi’a clerics, who remembered Khomeini from his period of exile, agreed. Ayatollah Muhammad Baqer al-Sadr, the most prominent of them, sent Khomeini a telegram in which he predicted that ‘other tyrants’ would also meet their reckoning. The Baathists put him under house arrest.

In June 1979, Saddam seized absolute power. He stepped up repression of militant Shi’a groups that Iran was arming and training. As the revolt in Iranian Kurdistan intensified, he took a leaf out of the Shah’s book, providing the insurgents with cash and arms. (The Islamic regime started supporting the remnants of the Iraqi Kurdish group whose rebellion had been crushed in the wake of the 1975 Algiers Accord.) Saddam also armed secessionist groups in the Iranian province of Khuzistan, which sits on most of Iran’s on-shore oil and gas.

In the first half of 1980, hostilities became overt. An Iran-backed Shi’a group made an unsuccessful attempt on the life of Tariq Aziz, Saddam’s foreign minister. Iraq bombed an Iranian border town and expelled more Shi’as of Iranian descent. When he learned that al-Sadr was planning to visit Tehran, Saddam had him executed. The following month, Iran foiled a coup attempt sponsored by exiled monarchists. The death of the deposed Shah deprived the monarchists of their figurehead. If the Baathists wanted to bring about Khomeini’s fall, it was clear that they would have to push him themselves.

In 1979, Egypt’s Anwar Sadat had become the first Arab leader to make peace with Israel, earning the gratitude of the US and the opprobrium of millions of Muslims. With that deal, Egypt was deposed as unofficial leader of the Arab world. A show of force and determination, Saddam calculated, would make the position his. He wanted to suck Khuzistan into his sphere of influence, and to have a say in the composition of a post-Khomeini government in Iran, a government that would be friendly to Iraq. Iraq’s state television was to describe the Iranians as ‘flies’; the hatred, amply requited, of Arabs for Persians may have facilitated his decision to attack.

For the first time since the Baathists assumed power in 1968, it seemed as though Iraq could win a war against Iran. The revolutionary regime was split between moderates and hardliners. Although the ethnic rebellions, with the exception of the Kurdish one, had been put down, other armed groups, some of them leaning to the left, seemed to be preparing to come into conflict with the new clerical establishment. The Iraqis, Saddam was advised, would be welcomed as liberators by the Arabs of Khuzistan. In the event of determined aggression, Khomeini’s republic would collapse.

Assessment of the two countries’ respective military capabilities suggested that Iraq had closed the gap on its neighbour. Executions, desertions, purges and reassignments had cut Iran’s army by 40 per cent. The US Embassy hostage crisis, along with Iran’s hostility to the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, had isolated the new regime from the world’s biggest arms producers. On the eve of war, about 30 per cent of Iran’s land force equipment, and more than half its aircraft, were not operational. Iraq’s armed forces, on the other hand, kept on growing.

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.

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