Persian Mirrors: The Elusive Face of Iran (28 page)

Khatami had come a long way from where Khomeini had stood on the question of Iran’s identity and history. Still, Iran’s history was now more than merely the distant past, whether Persian or Islamic. Khomeini’s years themselves—the years of single-minded devotion to Islam, struggle, and martyrdom—were within living memory. And in those years there had not been an aversion to war.

C H A P T E R   N I N E

Martyrs Never Die

The distinctive characteristic of a martyr is that he charges the atmosphere

with courage and zeal. He revives the spirit of valor and fortitude . . .

among the people who have lost it. That is why Islam is always in need of martyrs.

— UNDATED IRANIAN HANDBOOK IN ENGLISH,
THE MARTYR

When Imam Hosein decided to leave for Kufa, some prudent members of

his family tried to dissuade him. Their argument was that his action was

not logical. They were right in their own way. . . . But Imam Hosein had a

higher logic. His logic was that of a martyr, which is beyond the comprehension of ordinary people.

— UNDATED IRANIAN HANDBOOK IN ENGLISH,
THE MARTYR

H
AMID RAHIMIAN
lives for the dead.

As the director of the martyrs’ section of the biggest necropolis in Iran, he is driven by one goal: to keep alive the memory of his fallen comrades until he can join them. They were the lucky ones, he said. They had died on the battlefield during Iran’s war with Iraq and had gone to paradise.

Hamid had only been wounded. And survival means that the twenty-nine-year-old veteran is condemned, psychologically, to the living hell of waiting for his own death. He would have committed suicide had the Koran not forbidden it. “I dream of martyrdom,” he told me over tea and biscuits in his small, airless, run-down office. “I am waiting for it to happen. To prepare myself, I have eliminated all personal relationships. I have no attachment to my wife or son, only to God.”

Much of Hamid’s life has revolved around suffering. He was only nine when the revolution triumphed. And four years later, when he was in seventh grade, he forged his birth certificate, ran away from home, and headed for the war front as a member of the
baseej
(“mobilized”), the volunteer corps drawn primarily from devout, poor families and dedicated to serving in God’s war.

As Hamid’s story unfolded, his body seized up as he stuttered and choked out the words. His pale face twisted in pain. “I was in a truck with twenty-one others,” he said with difficulty. “We were on the road between Khorramshahr and Ahwaz. The Iraqis surrounded us with tanks. One tank hit us hard. Five of my comrades were martyred immediately. Cut into pieces. The rest of us were badly injured.”

Hamid’s lungs were seared and permanently scarred. His heart was damaged. Both arms and legs were badly broken. The cruel irony is that the attack came on September 9, 1988, after Iran and Iraq had signed a cease-fire ending their eight-year war. “These are my last days,” Hamid told me more than a decade later. “The doctors don’t have hope anymore. I know that I will die soon. That is when I’ll begin my new life.”

Every day for five years he has come to his office in the House of Martyrs in the center of Behesht-e Zahra, Tehran’s vast cemetery, to fall under death’s spell. The job pays the equivalent of $45 a month. Still, Hamid feels privileged. “I came here to work because my friends are buried here,” he said. “They told me that if they died I must follow their path. The Koran says, ‘Those who die for God are martyrs, and the martyrs never die. They live forever.’”

Hamid is a Shiite, and he fervently believes in the Shiite version of history, its lore and its rituals. Ayatollah Khomeini had told the Hamids of Iran that martyrdom was a perfect death, and they believed him. If they couldn’t die, at least they could keep that spirit alive.

So every year, in speeches, passion plays, and processions of penance, the Shiites of Iran celebrate the ten days in which Hosein, the grandson of the Prophet Mohammad, defended his family and followers at the battle of Karbala. Every year for centuries on the anniversary of Hosein’s death, men and boys like Hamid have flagellated themselves with chains and beat themselves over the head. Those at the front of the procession dress themselves in white burial shrouds and chant the story of the slaughter. In 1640, a Turkish traveler to Iran described the ceremony: “Hundreds of Hosein’s devotees beat and wounded their heads, faces, and bodies with swords and knives. For the love of Imam Hosein they make their blood flow. The green grassy field becomes bloodied and looks like a field of poppies.”

Under the Islamic Republic, however, the practice has come to resemble an officially condoned carnival as much as an act of religious mortification. The ceremonies are organized through neighborhood congregations called
hey-ats
and for nights beforehand participants practice their walk, their rhythm, and their chain-beating. They learn a trick to halt the movement of the chains and soften the blows. They take their practicing seriously, and since it is all in the name of religion, their wives can hardly complain. In fact, in recent years women and girls have tagged along to march and watch the spectacle—and even party.

For Shiites, the battle of Karbala is the equivalent of the passion and crucifixion of Jesus, the self-flagellation reminiscent of the medieval practice of self-mutilation, carrying of the Cross, and physical deprivation that survives in parts of the Christian world today. In recent years during Moharram, the month of mourning, Iran’s authorities tried to ban the most excessive ritual in which worshippers shave their heads and carve them open with swords. As Ayatollah Khamenei said in denouncing the ritual in 1999, it “gives the impression that Shiite Muslims are superstitious and irrational.”

Even so, the cult of martyrdom has deep roots in Iran’s Shiite culture, and Khomeini was a master at manipulating the homegrown strain of martyrdom and its lust for sacrifice. During a sermon in Qom for Moharram in 1963 Khomeini likened the oppression of the Iranian people under the Shah’s monarchy to Hosein’s martyrdom. When Khomeini was arrested shortly afterward, men and women alike wrapped themselves in white funeral shrouds as symbols of their readiness to die for him.

Once the struggle for power was joined, the spilling of blood came to be embraced, not avoided. As Iran’s revolution was unfolding during the Moharram ceremony in 1978, demonstrators caught in a battle with the Shah’s troops smeared their hands with the blood of the victims and raised their palms toward heaven. In the months before the revolution Khomeini said, “Our movement is but a fragile plant. It needs the blood of martyrs to help it grow into a towering tree.” The Black Friday Massacre in Tehran on September 8, 1978, in which hundreds of demonstrators were killed by the Shah’s troops, was a key event in precipitating the downfall of the Shah. Khomeini called that day the “victory of blood over the sword.”

When Khomeini returned to Iran in 1979 he had his priorities right, Hamid told me. The first thing Khomeini did was to fly by helicopter to this very cemetery to mourn the victims of Black Friday. He was hoisted onto a platform, where he raised a fist before tens of thousands of his followers. “For those of you who have given up so much for God, God must soon give you the prize,” he told them.

But now, more than two decades later, Hamid was still waiting for the prize.

Hamid seemed to know every road, every monument, every grave in Behesht-e Zahra, even though it extended for miles over a vast plain off the busy highway leading out of Tehran to Qom. The cemetery had been built in the 1950s and had expanded over the years to become Tehran’s principal burial ground. As one of the few public spaces in Tehran safe from attack by the security forces before the revolution, it became, in addition, a meeting place for opponents of the Shah.

Today, a sculpture of a great white hand holding a red tulip, the flower of martyrdom, beckons visitors at the entrance of the complex. Inside, men and women gather to lay wreaths, pour rosewater, and recite verses of the Koran as they caress the tombstones of their dead husbands in an effort to make contact with their spirits. The cemetery is well organized for visitors, with a playground, park benches, public toilets, a convenience store, a computer center for locating graves, a kebab restaurant and a planned Metro station.

A walk through Behesht-e Zahra is a walk through the Islamic Republic’s political history. One section houses the bodies of the National Front leaders, Islamic liberal intellectuals who opposed the Shah and joined forces with Khomeini. A second section is reserved for the victims of the Shah’s secret police and military during the revolution. A third is assigned to officials killed in the terrorist bombing of the headquarters of the revolution’s Islamic Republic Party in 1981. The section where Hamid works houses acres of graves for the martyrs of the Iran-Iraq war.

From 1980 through 1988, when the country was at war with Iraq, the wide, tree-lined roads at Behesht-e Zahra seemed perpetually clogged with mourners. Professional flagellators-for-hire wandered about in those days, prepared with wooden-handled bunches of chains to whip across their backs and shoulders in frenzied rituals of mourning. Military musicians playing saxophones, clarinets, trumpets, and drums sometimes accompanied the caskets of particularly important martyrs. Visiting the cemetery became a form of recreation, with extended families picnicking on the graves amid the evergreens and junipers and along the canals as they watched the spectacles. Mullahs told stories about martyrdom—for pay— in singsong voices that made people cry.

On the day I met Hamid, the martyrs’ section was nearly deserted. But that didn’t diminish his enthusiasm. He led me through rows and rows of graves of small slabs of gray stone set into concrete. Marking each grave is a framed glass case containing both religious icons and intensely intimate mementos: Koranic texts, green banners bearing religious inscriptions, worry beads, and prayer stones, next to plastic childhood toys and figurines from wedding cakes. Some of the cases include bits of tattered and bloody clothing worn by the victims at the time of their deaths. But there is something else, startling to an American: photographs of the dead that stare back.

The war martyrs look so hopeful. And so young. The colored polyester flags that fly from the metal cases—for the Islamic Republic, for Islam, for mourning, for martyrdom, for the army, for the ready-to-die volunteers—add a macabre festive look. Hamid showed me the grave in plot twenty-six that he said sometimes gives off the smell of perfumed flowers, seven though no flowers grow there. And the grave in plot twenty-seven where the spirit of Fatemeh, Mohammad’s daughter, comes and cries out in the middle of the night. (“Behesht-e Zahra” means “Paradise of Zahra,” one of the names given to Fatemeh.) And the grave in plot twenty-four where a mother of a martyr named Ali Derakhshani built a tiny house of green metal for herself years ago, enabling her to live above her son’s grave. An empty grave nearby awaits the woman.

Hamid showed me another grave in plot twenty-four where Hosein Fahmideh, a thirteen-year-old suicide bomber, is buried. In 1981, the story goes, Fahmideh strapped a bomb to his belly, crawled under an Iraqi tank, and blew himself up. Khomeini later called the boy “our leader,” adding, “The value of his little heart is greater than could be described by hundreds of tongues and hundreds of pens. . . . He drank the sweet elixir of martyrdom.” In 1986, Iran celebrated his martyrdom by issuing a commemorative stamp. The occasion was the annual Universal Day of the Child.

Hamid showed me the high, wide-tiered fountain built for the martyred war dead. The fountain had once cascaded crimson-colored water dyed to look like blood. As more war dead came home, the cemetery grew bigger, so big that satellite fountains of martyrs’ blood had to be built. The martyrs are “irrigating the revolutionary seed,” officials liked to say. But after the war, the fountains were turned off. On the day of my visit, the main one was dry. When I asked Hamid why, he shrugged and said, “There are many things that have lost their color after twenty years. One of them is the color of the fountain. Some traitorous officials claim that the red color is a reminder of the blood shed during the war and since there is no war the fountain should not run red anymore. If it were up to me, I would build fountains in every single square in the country and fill them with red water to remind people of the sacrifices of the martyrs.”

Hamid took me to the martyrs’ store, where he sold cards with photos of the war dead. Some of the victims wore uniforms. Others wore civilian clothes. One young man smiled from a field of flowers. The cards had backings like stickers and could be put on the side of a car fender or the barrel of a rifle. I assumed the cards were supposed to be collected, and they did look a bit like baseball cards.

The most creative and enduring personal memento of martyrdom I have ever found in Iran was not at the martyrs’ store. Walking through Tehran’s main bazaar just a few weeks after the revolution, I came upon a Swiss-made wristwatch for $20 with a built-in sun sensor that allowed Ayatollah Khomeini’s face to appear twice a minute. In English along the bottom of the face were the words, “Souvenir of Islamic Republic Revolution 1979.” The second hand was a red splotch—a symbol of a drop of martyr’s blood. More than two decades later, the watch keeps perfect time.

The Iran-Iraq war began in the fall of 1980, at a time when Saddam Hussein felt threatened by Iran’s revolution and by Khomeini’s appeal to the world’s Muslims to rise up against their “oppressive” secular regimes in the name of Islam. Khomeini’s call resonated strongly in Iraq, where the majority of the population is Shiite. “What we have done in Iran we will do again in Iraq,” he declared shortly after his triumphant return in February 1979.