Christopher Bellaigue - In the Rose Garden of the Martyrs

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).