Read Online Among the Believers by V.S. Naipaul - Free Book Online

KHOMEINI IS OUR LEADER
—and they must have been meant for the foreign television cameras. The second slogan was a direct translation of
Khomeini e Imam
, but as a translation it was incomplete, suggesting only (with the help of the first slogan) a transfer of loyalty from the Shah to Khomeini, not stating the divine authority of the leader or the access to heaven that he gave. In Iran, where for eleven hundred years they had been waiting for the return of the Twelfth Imam,
Imam
was a loaded word; and especially here at Qom, where the sister of the Eighth Imam was buried. Access to heaven, rejection of nondivine rule, was the purpose of the “republic” proclaimed here.
    Behzad, opening the door of the telephone booth, the telephone in his hand, waved me over.
    When I went to him he said, “The secretary says that Khalkhalli is praying. He will see you at nine this evening, after he has broken his fast.”
    It was 3:30. We had told the driver we would be only three or four hours in Qom.
    Behzad said, “What do you want me to tell the secretary?”
    “Tell him we’ll come.”
    Then we went to break the bad news to the impatient Lur—or the good news: he was charging by the hour. He said something that Behzad didn’t translate. And he drove off to look for food, leaving Behzad and me to think of ways of spending five and a half hours in the torpid, baking city, where nothing could be eaten or drunk for the next five hours.
    The shops opposite the shrine sold souvenirs—plates with Khomeini’s face, cheap earthenware vases—and sweets: flat, round cakes, brown, soft, very sweet-looking, breaking up at the edges. Food could be sold to travellers during Ramadan, Behzad said; but it wasn’t worth the trouble. Not many people were about. A crippled old woman, a pilgrim no doubt, was wheeling herself slowly past the shops. We surprised a plump boy in a booth taking a nibble at a brown cake, part of his stock; but he judged us harmless and smiled (though a couple of people had been whipped some days before for eating).
    The souvenir shops also sold little clay tablets stamped with Arabic lettering. The clay was from the Arabian cities of Mecca and Medina (good business for somebody over there); so that the faithful, bowing down in prayer and resting their foreheads on these tablets, touched sacred soil. High on the shrine wall, in glazed blue-and-white tiles, there was, as I supposed, a Koranic quotation. Behzad couldn’t translate it; it was in Arabic, which he couldn’t read.
    Arabia! Its presence in Iran shouldn’t have surprised me, but it did. Because with one corner of my mind I approached Iran through classical history and felt awe for its antiquity—the conqueror of Egypt, the rival of Greece, undefeated by Rome; and with another corner of my mind I approached it through India, where, at least in the northwest, the idea of Persia is still an idea of the highest civilization—as much asFrance used to be for the rest of Europe—in its language, its poetry, its carpets, its food. In Kashmir,
Farsi khanna
, Persian food, is the supreme cuisine; and of the
chenar
, the transplanted plane tree or sycamore of Persia (so prominent in both Persian and Indian Mogul painting) it is even said that its shade is medicinal. In Qom these ideas had to be discarded. Here they looked to spartan Arabia as to the fount.
    Behzad suggested that we should visit the shrine. If anyone asked, I was to say I was a Muslim. I said I wouldn’t be able to carry it off. I wouldn’t know how to behave. Was it with the right foot that one entered a mosque, and with the left the lavatory? Or was it the other way round? Was it the Sunnis who, during their ablutions, let the water run down their arms to their fingers? Did the Shias, contrariwise, run the water down from their hands to their elbows? And what were the gestures of obeisance or reverence? There were too many traps. Even if I followed Behzad and did what he did, it wouldn’t look