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In the Rose Garden of the Martyrs. Christopher Bellaigue de
Читать онлайн.Название In the Rose Garden of the Martyrs
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9780007372812
Автор произведения Christopher Bellaigue de
Издательство HarperCollins
‘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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