Persian Letters

Three personal accounts of modern Iran.

Michael Young from the February 2006 issue

(Page 2 of 2)

Even though the book's style and editing are dreadful, Latifi, her sister, and her mother are remarkable people who overcame two traumatic experiences after their life of relative ease was wrecked by the revolution. The first was the execution of Latifi's father, an Iranian army officer; the second was Latifi's mother's decision to send her two eldest daughters to the United States, where the girls struggled for years to make ends meet while their mother faced hardship back in Iran. There is a happy ending, as the family is reunited in America, but theirs were very difficult moments, meriting admiration.

Where Moaveni is focused on Iran, Latifi's story is about growing up in America. Much like the first 28 pages in Lipstick Jihad, the account is a familiar culture-clash tale, with integration the ultimate goal and accomplishment. But there is almost nothing about the events surrounding the death of Latifi's father. Iranian politics are reduced to a description of the repulsive, cowardly treatment of Latifi's family by the post-revolution apparat, a few noncommittal paragraphs on the shah's flight and Khomeini's return, and this conclusion: "for the fanatics, [the revolution] wasn't about hunger...it was a religious war, and their religion was neither loving nor inclusive; it was hateful and exclusionary. The fundamentalists used religion to unite the masses against a common enemy, as people have been doing for thousands of years, and we were the enemy."

Doubtless this is true, but one expects that level of unfocused generalization from someone camouflaging his or her ignorance of Iran's affairs, not from an Iranian whose father was among the revolution's earliest prey. If Latifi doesn't care to know, or prefers to forget, that's understandable, but it means she missed an opportunity to better explore how and why many Iranians are, in a perverse way, far more intricately linked to America than many understand. Latifi's is an American story, one centered on her successful escape from a previous life. In that escape she has stifled part of herself--a fitting epitaph for what the mullahs have created.

Both Moaveni and Latifi tell interesting tales, but their books are fruits of editorial timidity in which Iranian society and politics are turned into backdrops for coming-of-age narratives. No sooner do we plunge into an aspect of Iranian life requiring efforts of comprehension and nuance than we are evacuated back to the safety of personal introspection.

In the Rose Garden of the Martyrs avoids that trap. In his beautiful, impressionistic book, Christopher de Bellaigue, a British writer living in Iran, focuses his attention on those Iranians from the middle-aged generation of the 1979 revolution, especially veterans of the Iran-Iraq war--men like Ahmadinejad, who lean toward social conservatism, continue to embrace Islam, and in many ways feel threatened by Iranian cosmopolitanism. The book jacket refers to this group as "a worn-out generation," which may be true. But that generation, or part of it, sees in the new president a revival of its fortunes.

The title's "rose garden of the martyrs" is a military cemetery in Isfahan where some 7,000 Iranian dead from the war against Iraq are buried. It is the figurative axis of the book, which begins and ends with a description of a passion play depicting an event at the heart of Shiite Islam: the martyrdom of Hossein, grandson of the Prophet Muhammad and son of Ali, Islam's fourth imam. In Shiite martyrology, Hossein falls victim to tyranny and injustice as he tries to affirm a leadership birthright Shiites believe was confiscated by the Umayyad line of caliphs, the first in Sunni Islam. Responding to the calls of the people of Kufa to help them rid themselves of the rule of the caliph Yazid, Hossein agrees to go, though his chances of survival at the head of a small band are nil. At Karbala, on the 10th day of the Muslim month of Muharram, commemorated today as Ashura, Hossein is killed by Yazid's men, his head cut off. Shiites still visit a room, echoing with cries of sorrow, in a wing of the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus, where the skull is said to lie.

The interplay between Hossein's martyrdom and that of Iran's revolutionary generation, decimated in the war against Iraq, is interesting. It is also reminiscent of Fouad Ajami's The Vanished Imam (1986), with its trans-temporal, metaphorical link between the Lebanese cleric Musa al-Sadr, who disappeared in 1978, and the last of the Twelver Shiite imams, whose return, it is believed, will bring a golden age. De Bellaigue conjures up an image of a society still bizarrely haunted by Hossein's death, 13 centuries later. "They lick their lips, savor their misfortune," he writes of those watching an Ashura passion play. Their mood is of simultaneous pain and pleasure. As De Bellaigue notes elsewhere: "The emotions in Iran haven't been compartmentalized. They coexist; they thrive in public. The borders between grief, entertainment and companionship are porous....Stifling sobs, trembling upper lips--they don't exist here. Emotion may be cheaply expressed, but that doesn't mean emotions are cheap."

There is much more than martyrdom in De Bellaigue's book. His intent is to describe post-revolution Iran largely through a series of portraits, encounters, and tangents on the politics of the Islamic Republic. His parables usually suggest more than meets the eye.

One character revisited frequently is the late Hossein Kharrazi, a senior Revolutionary Guards commander and brother of the former foreign minister Kamal Kharrazi. We eventually learn that the man hailed officially as one of the great martyrs of the war had become increasingly disillusioned with the reckless, bloody way the conflict was being conducted. Specifically, he had his doubts about an offensive known as Karbala Four. "Today is Ashura," he told his commander in the field, recalling Hos�sein's martyrdom and foreshadowing his own, "and this is Karbala." A few weeks after the offensive ended, Hossein was killed by an Iraqi shell. The moral of the story is that in turning Kharrazi into a plaster saint, Iran's leadership also absorbed him, robbing him of his distinguishing subversiveness. Revolutions are good at betrayal but also at the dissolution of individuality, sometimes through hollow beatification.

De Bellaigue does the grunt work in describing Iranian political realities under the monarchy and afterward, often using evocative set pieces. There is a beguiling passage, for example, on the calculations behind the execution in 1979 of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi's former prime minister, the stately Amir Abbas Hoveida, which De Bellaigue uses to shed light on Sadegh Khalkhali, a coarse cleric whom Khomeini appointed as judge of a revolutionary court. This court toured Iran on a fierce mission of elimination directed against the old order, of which Hoveida was a glittering vestige. The ultimate confrontation between Khalkhali and Hoveida epitomizes the classical conflict between a harsh revolution and its often refined victims, between a man who had been punished under the shah and a former grandee "whose Northampton brogues Khalkhali could not, before the Revolution, have dreamed of polishing."

The Rose Garden of the Martyrs works because De Bellaigue can write well (of a religious man describing the death of a soldier on the last day of the war, he notes: "His expression went dead. He was awed by the severity of God's kindness"); it also works because he knows what to write, so that he has managed to give Iran's specificities broader meaning even while taking a microscope to his adopted country. De Bellaigue's is not an obviously easy book; readers will find precision in the portrayals, but less in the overall narrative. Piecing it all together is worth the effort, however. Supremely ambitious, the book is also refreshingly modest in assuming that many questions are without answers.