Persian Mirrors: The Elusive Face of Iran (31 page)

As a teenager in the 1930s, Ayatollah Montazeri came to Qom from his native town of Najafabad, near Isfahan, to study with the most learned clerics of the day. It was in Qom that Montazeri became a student and close confidant of Ayatollah Khomeini, before he became one of the country’s top religious figures. As a leader of the religious opposition against the Shah, Montazeri was sent to prison. After the revolution, Khomeini named him to the secret Revolutionary Council, making him one of the most powerful people in Iran.

For years Montazeri was the regime’s favorite son, designated to be Khomeini’s successor after his death. “The fruit of my life,” was how Khomeini frequently referred to his younger charge. Montazeri also seemed more human than holy. His poor public speaking skills, his squeaky voice, and his round face and grizzled beard earned him the nickname Gorbeh Nareh, the Persian name for the cat in a cartoon serial of
Pinocchio.

In the early years of the Islamic Republic, Montazeri was one of the architects of the clauses in the Constitution calling for rule by an Islamic jurist. On foreign policy, he advocated exporting the Iranian revolution and succeeded in channeling money, weapons, and other support to Islamic political movements around the world. He blasted Saudi Arabia as a “filthy” regime that was guilty of “colonialism and global Zionism.” He routinely condemned the United States as evil, and after the USS
Vincennes
incident in 1988, he called for retaliatory attacks on American military, political, cultural, and economic installations.

But even as Montazeri railed against Iran’s external enemies, he was growing uncomfortable with what he considered the revolution’s excesses at home. In the late 1980s he went public with his complaints. In a series of open letters to Khomeini and other officials, Montazeri broke the code of silence that largely governs the ruling clerical elite. In doing so, he became the most important critic of the Islamic Republic.

When, for example, the judiciary, upon Khomeini’s orders, punished hundreds of political opponents with swift execution, Montazeri lamented that “people in the world got the idea that our business in Iran is just murdering people.” When officials blamed Iran’s economic woes on foreign powers, he openly faulted government policies for creating “shortages, injustices, inflation, depressed incomes” that had paralyzed the economy. When Khomeini issued his ruling calling for the assassination of novelist Salman Rushdie, Montazeri refused to endorse it.

Qom is accustomed to theological arguments articulated behind closed doors, and if that had been all that Montazeri’s tirades had amounted to, Khomeini might have tolerated them. But the clerics had now become politicians, and the arguments smacked of temporal politics.

Apparently not all the differences between the two men were ideological. There was also the case of Mehdi Hashemi, who was related to Montazeri by marriage. As a senior official in the Revolutionary Guards, Hashemi had his own foreign policy agenda, at home and in Lebanon; it was said to have included murder, sedition, and involvement in the Irancontra scandal. Even after he was convicted of violating state security and executed in 1987, Montazeri fiercely defended him.

In March 1989, without warning, Khomeini unceremoniously stripped Montazeri of his position as designated successor. His portraits, which had hung beside those of his mentor in government offices and shop windows throughout Iran, were quickly removed. Montazeri was barred from delivering sermons or conducting public activities. Only relatives were allowed to visit him.

In accepting the dismissal, Montazeri didn’t apologize to Ayatollah Khomeini. He had never wanted Khomeini’s job in the first place. He asked only to be left alone as “a small teacher.” Khomeini replied to Montazeri that the leadership of the Islamic Republic required “endurance more than your capacity.”

At first, the dismissal seemed like a Kremlinesque purge in which a political figure simply disappears one day. But Montazeri didn’t disappear. He was marginalized, but he wasn’t put on trial as a traitor or sent to prison. He still had room for maneuver and remained an important player. His private classes remained popular; his followers were generous with their charitable contributions. He was, after all, a
marja,
one of the highest-ranking Shiite theologians. And he enjoyed considerable respect from the clerics of Qom, even if they disagreed with his politics.

Qom, a gloomy, dusty thousand-year-old city on the edge of Iran’s great salt desert, is only ninety miles from Tehran. It might as well be nine thousand. Its main industry is producing mullahs, much as the industry of Vatican City is training priests. And like the Vatican, Qom is a sheltered, unhurried religious refuge, where clerics can debate without attention to time and without fear of interference from the state. In the Islamic Republic, Qom has assumed another role as well: it is the idea factory for a regime that seeks to regulate daily life with all the worldly tools of a modern state even as it tries to bring its people closer to God. That is the principal reason Montazeri was allowed to continue spreading his ideas, even after he had been stripped of power and liberty.

Before the revolution, Qom was a desolate place known as a center for study and worship and a producer of fine silk carpets and of
sohan,
a caramel and pistachio brittle. The more the Shah consolidated his own power, the less attention he paid to Qom; a guidebook published by his Ministry of Information and Tourism devoted just three paragraphs to the city.

Ayatollah Khomeini changed all that. His appeal was exceptionally strong in Qom, where he had lived and preached for years before he was sent into exile. In January 1978, a crowd there demonstrated against the Shah in the ayatollah’s name. According to some reports, clerics and Islamic militants set up street barricades, smashed buses, halted trains, and attacked banks and shops; they were not silenced even after the police opened fire. Many Iranians came to regard what became a two-and-a-half-hour shooting spree as the opening shots of the revolution. Afterward, the regime bused thousands of factory workers and low-level government employees to Qom for a counterdemonstration in support of the Shah. But the violent crackdown sparked a cycle of mourning—and more demonstrations and violence—every forty days until, a year later, the Shah fled the country and Khomeini returned.

The first time I visited Qom I witnessed the slaughtering of a camel. It was a bright, cool, sunny day in February 1979, just a few days after the revolution, and the sacrifice was made to honor Khomeini’s triumphant return after an absence of more than fourteen years. His followers made a path of red carnations for him, filled the walls with his portraits, and strung revolutionary posters and banners between minarets and lampposts not only in Persian, but also in Arabic, English, French, and German (for the benefit of the foreign journalists, I presumed). Khomeini had ordered that no camels were to be killed in his honor, but his followers paid no heed. The giant beast was forced on its side by a handful of men. One man swiftly slit the camel’s throat with a sword. Blood spurted high into the air. The crowd praised God and smeared their hands and faces with the blood. That day, Khomeini sat in the front seat of a white Chevrolet ambulance; members of the foreign media were put on a long flatbed truck. We made our way through a shrieking crowd of clerics who chanted slogans on megaphones, soldiers who had stuck carnations in their rifles, and hundreds of thousands of people who kept running to catch up. In my chador, I slipped at one point and grabbed the arm of a young bearded Iranian assigned to help us. “Don’t touch me like that!” he said. “You are in Qom.”

Yes, I was in Qom.

It was in Qom that Khomeini set up his government just days after the victory of the revolution. In those heady early days, Qom seemed like the center ofthe universe to its residents. No longer a religious backwater, it became very much like an eighteenth-century European court where people came and went and pleaded and waited for favors. Government officials made pilgrimages by helicopter from Tehran, often several times a week, to consult Khomeini. Courtiers and security guards shielded the ayatollah from most of the supplicants. Every day thousands of people crowded behind green metal barricades at the end of the street where Khomeini lived to get a glimpse of him, usually no more than a oneminute wave from his window. Among the throng one day was a woman who told me she had come with her blind daughter all the way from Isfahan to get Khomeini’s blessing, and a widow with seven children who said she had come from Mashad to ask for an increase in her pension.

After the revolution, the city emerged as an even more important Shiite pilgrimage site and the country’s most authoritative center of learning. “Islam has no borders,” Khomeini said, so the seminaries attracted religious scholars and students from around the world as the exportation of Iran’s revolution became one of the pillars of the new Islamic system. The religious teachers of Qom were assigned the task of indoctrinating foreign students with tales about the Islamic revolution and how to duplicate it back home. During the war with Iraq, the ranks of the seminaries swelled, in part because clerical students were exempt from military service. By the turn of the century, tens of thousands of students were enrolled in the Qom theological seminaries alone.

Over the years, I have made the drive from Tehran to Qom more times than I can count: with a group of American tourists, with officials from the Ministry of Islamic Guidance, with a nephew of Ayatollah Khomeini, with Nazila. The trip has gone faster since a six-lane highway was built. But I still don’t feel as if I fully understand the place. Even for many Iranians, Qom seems alien. Religion dominates the culture and the clerics don’t like outsiders. I have worked for a long time with secular Iranian women who hate to go there because of the way clerics look at them. A foreigner can be spotted from miles away. I keep going back to Qom because I hope that each visit will reveal more. And indeed, it is different every time.

The distinction between what is public and what is private is drawn more starkly in Qom than in the rest of Iran; the curtain of privacy is far more tightly drawn around the clergy, making it especially difficult for an outsider to get inside. Hotels generally don’t welcome women traveling on their own, and restaurants are hard to find. Qom has only one main avenue; everything important is within walking distance—the central shrine, the seminaries, even a new Islamic computer center where Koranic teachings and interpretations are on the Internet. Even so, an outsider cannot navigate without a guide. To get anything accomplished, you have to be invited; someone who belongs has to lead you down the narrow streets and do the introductions. It is especially difficult to make appointments in advance. The trick is to start out from Tehran at about 6:00
A.M.
, arrive at eight, and work until noon. That’s when most clerics pray, eat, and nap. Most of the city shuts down until about 5:00
P.M.
, when work begins again.

The centerpiece of Qom is the grand, gold-domed shrine that houses the tomb of Massoumeh, the sister of Imam Reza, the eighth Imam, who died in the ninth century. Thousands of pilgrims come every day to say prayers, beg for favors, and leave wads of bills as donations. They solemnly finger the silver cage that houses Massoumeh’s tomb and then touch their faces, as if her aura will somehow rub off on them.

There is an air of informality in the shrine, as in mosques, that doesn’t exist in most churches or synagogues. The religious complex, like others throughout Iran, is more than simply a place of prayer; it is also a place of political mobilization. During the war with Iraq, the clerics set up enlistment centers for teenage volunteers and donation centers here where people could contribute their gold jewelry and coins to the war effort. The shrine is also a place for socializing, for getting out of the house. Women sit on the carpets and eat picnic lunches with their children. And the courtyard is known as a meeting place where the Shiite Muslim practice of
sigheh,
or temporary marriage, can be arranged by a lonely pilgrim and a woman who needs money.

Qom today is a very different place than it was at the beginning of the revolution. It boasts recreational parks and movie theaters. Most of the bookstores sell only religious books, but I have also found English-language volumes:
King Lear,
Paul Kennedy’s
The Rise and Fall of the
Great Powers,
and a wide assortment of Persian-English dictionaries. Clerics drive motorbikes and some women even dare to go out on the streets in scarves and long coats, rather than black chadors.

New Koranic libraries on the Internet compete with each other to create databases for the writings of Islamic scholars, sayings of the Prophet, and Koranic interpretations. One of the libraries functions both as a research center and a producer of Islamic software. Its Web site, in Persian, English, and Arabic, includes such subject headings as “Infallible Imams” and “Shiite Geniuses.” Another has transferred thousands of Koranic interpretations onto CD-ROM and onto its Web site. Sheikh Ali Korani, the director of that computer center, has acknowledged that the Internet can be either a dangerous weapon or a useful tool. “Many things have a double nature,” he likes to tell visitors. “Take a knife. You can use it in the kitchen or you can use it to commit crimes.”

Still, Qom remains a place where ideas of good and evil are fixed, and at times even put on public display. From time to time newspapers run small items about executions there: a thirty-one-year-old bus driver was publicly hanged after he was found guilty of raping a six-year-old girl; a married Iranian woman with children was stoned to death after she was convicted of adultery and working with a “gang of corruption.”

But the illusion that time stands still in Qom is just that—an illusion. In fact, the Shiite tradition of relying on argument within the clergy keeps it bubbling with intellectual energy and political ferment. In late 1997, Ayatollah Montazeri, by then well into his seventies, did something no other senior religious leader had ever done, at least not in public. In a lecture to a group of students visiting his home, he directly attacked Ayatollah Khamenei, who he said lacked the necessary religious credentials for the job of Supreme Leader. The autocratic rule that Khamenei and his supporters exercised, Montazeri said, had made people “disgusted with the clerics.”