Читать книгу In the Rose Garden of the Martyrs - Christopher de Bellaigue - Страница 10

One afternoon in the spring I set out from the Armenian quarter in the lovely city of Isfahan, towards the Seminary of the Four Gardens. The following day was the anniversary of the investiture of the Imam Ali as the Prophet’s successor. The people were in a good mood. They revered Ali for being modest and just, and looked forward to celebrating these qualities by visiting family members, stuffing themselves with beryan – a dish that features minced sheep’s lungs – and passing judgement on their hosts’ new daughter-in-law. They strolled in the mild afternoon sun, mothers and daughters arm in arm (and fathers in their wake), buying tulips to put in iced water to keep overnight, and sweetmeats to take as gifts.

I reached one of the main roads that head north towards the river, and hailed an old shared taxi. The back seat had its complement of three. The occupant of the front passenger seat stepped out so that I could sit between him and the driver; I was suspended over the gap between their seats. The driver sat hunched over the steering wheel, leaning slightly against the door. We moved off. The driver changed gears like a surgeon replacing dislocated bones.

We were soon stuck in traffic outside one of the big banks, in front of which was a shiny blue car mounted on a gantry. The car – new, French-made – was an incentive: every account holder stood a chance of winning it in a prize draw. It was caparisoned with bunting and flashing light bulbs. It had metallic paint that had been devised by a computer. The bank had put it on the gantry to publicize it – and to make it hard to steal.

I looked in the rear-view mirror and my eye was taken by a fat woman sitting in the middle of the back seat. She was staring longingly out of the window at the zippy French car. She caught me looking at her and pretended to be scandalized, tucking her fringe under her headscarf. ‘What’s happening up there. Mr Driver?’ she demanded, ‘Why aren’t we moving?’

A car, a Buick from the 1970s, was stuck at the intersection, having carried out half a U-turn. Another car, an Iranian-made Paykan, had grazed one of the Buick’s tailfins. The drivers had got out of their cars. The wife of the Buick driver was leaning out of the window, yelling.

‘Look at the wife, egging him on!’ said our driver. ‘What difference does it make? That poor Buick’s been wounded more times than I have.’ The side of the Buick was discoloured from dents that had been amateurishly smoothed out. The engine was still running. It emitted black smoke.

The taxi driver reached under his seat, pulled out a thermos and unscrewed the cap. He poured a little tea into a dirty glass that rested on the dashboard, swilled it around and poured it out of the window. He filled the glass with tea and, putting it back on the dashboard, closed the thermos and put it back under his seat. Then he held up the glass and said, ‘Please go ahead …’

He was offering us tea. In such instances, you don’t accept. It would be bad form. It’s his tea, but he has to offer it. It would be bad form not to. But he’d be put out if someone said, ‘Yes, I’d like some of your tea.’ No one does. The driver gets to drink his tea and appear courteous at the same time. Both ways he wins.

There was polite murmuring around the taxi: ‘Thanks, but no’ … ‘You go ahead and have some’ … ‘I don’t feel like tea’ … ‘I’ve just had some tea.’

Lies. We’d all enjoy a glass of tea.

The driver took out a packet of cigarettes and we went through the same rigmarole. We felt our breast pockets for imaginary packets of cigarettes. Eventually, the driver withdrew a cigarette from his packet, lit it and settled down to watch. A policeman had arrived at the intersection. He was trying to broker a reconciliation. The driver of the Paykan was a cocky brute, well-built, young enough to be the Buick driver’s son. He danced from one foot to another. Soon, the policeman seemed to make a breakthrough. The youth hugged the Buick driver.

During the argument, the traffic lights at the intersection had turned green several times, at which cars had surged forward from all directions. Lots of them wanted to turn, this way or that, but the Buick and the Paykan were blocking their way. The cars were revving, edging forward, kissing bumpers. Someone would have to reverse. Iranian drivers don’t like reversing. It’s a form of defeat. I felt sorry for the policeman.

He did a good job. He positioned himself in the middle – whistling, gesturing, occasionally giving a winning smile. He was a professional. In a little while, at his prompting, a car edged forward from the middle, and away. Another followed. The knot was untied.

‘Well done!’ the taxi driver murmured, and we moved forward. The protagonists stayed where they had been. They would wait for more policemen, who would take statements and measure angles to determine who was at fault. As we went past, the Buick driver’s wife, a woman in a red scarf, leaned out of the window and shouted at her husband, ‘I should have known you wouldn’t have the balls to stand up for yourself! You, who took the full brunt of the Iraqi attacks! Why don’t you stand firm, instead of letting some beardless chick trample your pride?’

The woman’s husband turned around. His face was full of anguish. His wife wasn’t much older than the Paykan driver.

The taxi driver sighed as we drove off. ‘You’ve got to show them who’s boss from day one. I mean, now it’s too late. He’s let her get out of control, challenge his authority. Nothing he can do now.’

A little further down the road, a man who was sitting next to the woman in the back seat got out. He was replaced by a thin woman who recognized the succulent woman: they were distant relatives. They didn’t seem pleased to see one another. They passed on regards to each other’s families, and extended invitations for tea and lunch.

The thin woman said, ‘Did you get much rain in Tehran?’

‘More than dear Isfahan, I can tell you! You know, what with struggling to combat the illness of my late husband – may God show him mercy – and the demands it’s made on my time and health, this is the first time I’ve been to Isfahan for five years. Oh! My heart burned when I saw the river – dried up like a burned courgette, with the wretched boatmen standing around in the mud, with nothing else to do but pray for rain. I mean, is it possible for a river to have no water? Our river? In this day and age?’

‘They sold our water to Yazd,’ the driver said. ‘They sent it off in a pipeline. Cost a fortune to build. The fathers of bitches.’

We were in a long queue of cars. The driver leaned out, far enough to see past the cars in front. He swung the wheel and pressed down hard on the accelerator. We emerged from the queue of cars, into the oncoming traffic. There weren’t many cars coming; the lights ahead were red. By the time the oncoming traffic started to move, we were elbowing our way into a gap between two cars, now much nearer the traffic lights. One of the other drivers raised his hand, but was too lazy to clench it.

‘I don’t know why everyone drives so fast,’ the fat woman said to her relative. ‘All they do when they get to their destination is drink tea.’

The driver grinned. ‘God forbid, madam, you were offended by my efforts to expedite you to your destination! Or perhaps it was what I said? Do you have Yazdi blood, by any chance?’

‘Lord, no! My parents – may God show them mercy – were from Isfahan, and proud of it. But the president is from Yazd, isn’t he?’ she said slyly. ‘That might explain why they’re allowed to drink our water. The Yazdis have always had it in for Isfahan. I should know; my son married a Yazdi. She won’t even iron his shirts. She says he gets through too many. He gives them to me, my poor darling. Too proud to iron an Isfahani’s white shirt, the Yazdis are!’

‘At least they opened the dam again, in time for the holidays,’ said the third passenger in the back seat. ‘There’s water in the river now, thanks be to God.’

‘Exactly!’ said the fat woman. ‘They were scared the Isfahanis would flay them if they didn’t open the sluices. But they’ll shut the dam again after the holiday, and say there’s no more water. They’ll send it to Yazd instead.’

‘And our poor Isfahani kids will carry on topping themselves,’ the man said. ‘Everyone knows the suicide rate goes up when the river’s dry. It’s bad for the soul.’

The man next to me stirred in his seat. ‘Pardon me, but you’re wrong. The problem is not Yazd, but the farmers in Isfahan province. They’re planting rice along the river banks, even though rice needs more water than almost any other crop. Only an idiot would plant rice when there’s a drought.’

‘And what would you have us eat if there’s no rice?’ the fat woman demanded. ‘You want us to get thin and weak?’

‘We should buy our rice from elsewhere.’

‘Sir, you’d prefer that we eat Pakistani rice that has no perfume? Or that sticky revolting stuff the Turks call rice? You can’t make a respectable polov with that.’

The man sitting next to her said, ‘She’s right; our rice is the best in the world. Everyone says so.’

‘And there’s another thing,’ said the woman, ‘our dear motherland has been dependent on foreigners for hundreds of years. Now you want to put our bellies at the mercy of Pakistan! Everyone knows who’s behind Pakistan: the English! It wouldn’t surprise me if the English had something to do with our water shortage. They always stir up trouble in countries they fear. That’s why they’re the best politicians, and we’ve never been any good.’

‘The English are indeed very devious,’ said the man next to me, ‘but I haven’t heard of them altering the climate.’

The woman snorted. ‘I wouldn’t put anything past them.’ Then she said, ‘With your permission. Mr Driver, I’ll get out here.’

The thin woman said, ‘I thought your brother lived further on.’

‘He does,’ the fat woman replied. ‘But I like to exercise before a holiday. I’ll walk the last half-kilometre.’ The taxi stopped. The thin woman got out to allow the fat woman to do so. The fat woman put out both her arms to try and lever herself from the hollow she had created in the back seat. For a moment, one of her hot hands gripped my shoulder. She stood at the window, and looked in.^[*]

The fat woman said: ‘How much, sir?’

‘Be my guest,’ said the driver.

The fat woman said: ‘I beg of you.’

‘Whatever you like,’ he grinned. ‘Really, it’s not important.’

‘How much? I beg of you.’ The woman was getting out her purse.

‘I’m serious; be my guest.’

‘How much?’

The driver surrendered. ‘Seventy-five tomans, if you’d be so kind.’

‘Seventy-five tomans? I only got in at Hakim Street. It’s fifty tomans from there.’

The driver frowned. ‘Seventy-five. It’s been seventy-five tomans for three weeks now.’

‘I gave fifty tomans two days ago. I’m not giving more than fifty.’ She looked sharply at her relative who was examining her nails.

‘It’s seventy-five tomans,’ said the driver. His smile had disappeared.

Suddenly, the woman was angry. ‘Is this the correct treatment, the day before we celebrate the investiture of the Imam Ali, salaam to him and his family?’ She looked accusingly at me. ‘Is this the right impression to give foreigners, that Iran’s a country of unprincipled hat-lifters? I’m not giving a penny more than fifty.’ She threw the note in the window.

The driver picked it off my knee. As he put the car into gear, he said, ‘She eats my head with her worthless prattle. She’s too stingy to stay in as far as her destination. Then, she rips me off.’

‘We’re only related by marriage,’ said the thin woman.

I said: ‘I may as well get out here, Mr Driver. I want to cross the bridge.’

‘Where are you from?’ said the driver, as I gave him the fare.

‘France,’ I said.

He patted my shoulder. ‘Whatever you do, don’t marry an Iranian.’

I entered the bridge of Allahvardi Khan. Framed in one of the pierced arches was a middle-aged couple, staring at each other. I touched the bricks. They were warm and biscuity. When I reached the other side, I looked back. The Islamic arch had been repeated like the name of God in a prayer.

In the first years of the seventeenth century, these bricks were baking in the name of Shah Abbas I, castles of them hardening over smoking dung. Between 1598 – when Abbas moved his capital to Isfahan from the northern city of Ghazvin – and his death in 1629, they turned a provincial town into one of the world’s most opulent capitals.

By moving to Isfahan, Abbas changed the nature of a country whose extremities now roughly corresponded to the borders of modern Iran. (At its peak, his empire encompassed the Iranian plateau, with fingers reaching into Mesopotamia and Anatolia to the west, into the Caucasus to the northwest, and almost to the River Oxus, the northern boundary of modern Afghanistan, in the northeast). Rather than stay near the Caspian Sea, as his Turkmen ancestors had done, Abbas aimed at the centre.

The migration allowed Abbas to give up his former dependence on Turkmen tribesmen, and to set up a new confederation. His government and army contained not only Persians, Turkmens and Arabs, but also Georgian, Caucasian and Circassian converts to Islam. He forcibly imported three thousand Armenian Christian families to Isfahan, and encouraged them to prosper spiritually as well as economically. Foreign visitors found in Isfahan a suitable seat for a cosmopolitan empire – Ghazvin, by comparison, had been a draughty Turkish tent.

Abbas enjoyed the company of foreigners. They, confused by the name of his dynasty, Safavi, called him the Sophy. Like his near-contemporary, India’s Akbar, Abbas discussed religious questions with the Augustinians and the Carmelites. Like Akbar, he resisted their efforts to convert him.

The Balenciagas, Faberges and Dunhills of the age spoke Persian. During Abbas’s reign, Europe acquired a taste for Persian goods – for silken carpets brocaded with silver and gold, damasks and taffetas, bezoar stones and turquoises. They learned to trip on Persian opium. Abbas’s wealth was axiomatic; Fabian wouldn’t stop baiting poor Malvolio even ‘for a pension of thousands to be paid from the Sophy’.

Abbas was not a successful family man. He murdered his eldest son, Mirza, and blinded the second, Khodabandeh – ruling him out, according to Islamic law, of the succession. Jane Dieulafoy, a formidably disapproving French archaeologist and traveller of the nineteenth century, relates an account she heard of Khodabandeh’s revenge – apparently exacted on his own small daughter, in order to spite Abbas, who adored his grandchildren:

One morning, at the very moment when the child came to kiss his unseeing pupils, he seized her and slit her throat, in full view of his panic-struck wife. Then, he threw himself on his son, who had come running at the sound of the struggle, and tried to deal him the same fate. In vain; the child was snatched – still alive – from his father’s arms, and Shah Abbas was informed of what had happened. When he was confronted by the corpse of his granddaughter, the old king emitted exclamations of rage and desperation that filled the killer with an exultant and dastardly happiness; for a few moments, he savoured his horrendous revenge, before ending his own life by swallowing poison.

Abbas’s fear of his sons perhaps kept him alive; it also prevented promising princes from maturing into worthy rulers. Most of the Safavid Shahs who came after Abbas rivalled themselves only for despotism and sloth. For the remainder of the seventeenth century and the first quarter of the eighteenth, the empire was defended only by one or two competent grand viziers, and the structural excellence of Abbas’s state.

Today, Abbas’s paranoia has been forgiven. Even in a regime that hates and fears monarchs, people refer to him as Abbas the Great. Hard-line revolutionaries concede his achievements – though they are loath to admit that, were it not for him, their revolution could not have happened. Not only did Abbas help set the boundaries that delineate modern Iran, he also made Iran institutionally, irrevocably, a Shi’a state.

His uncle, the mystic Ismail, had imposed Shi’ism on Iran’s mostly Sunni population. But many orthodox Shi’as considered Ismail to be a heretic. His self-depiction as (variously) the harbinger of the twelfth Imam, the twelfth Imam, the Imam Ali, even God, drew to him deluded fanatics who believed he was immortal and impossible to defeat. (Until, that is, his army was smashed by the Turks.) His poetry was denounced as blasphemous. Even by the standards of the time, he drank and sexed immoderately.

Abbas was more conventional – and more inscrutable – than his uncle. He was tempted by flesh and wine, but he dropped Ismail’s claims to divinity. His zeal, though sincere, was complemented by his politics; his promotion of Shi’ism as a state religion helped set Iran apart from two predatory Sunni empires in the vicinity: the Ottomans and the Mughals of north India. One of his most important acts was to promote orthodox Shi’a clerics. State-sponsored mullahs were expected to be loyal and to counter the influence of mysticism. (They had a personal interest in doing so. Mysticism’s emphasis on the believer’s personal relationship with God undermines the mullahs’ perception of Islam as primarily a code of laws and behaviour, belittling the transmitters of that code – the mullahs themselves.) Abbas endowed Shi’a seminaries that attracted clerics from other Shi’a centres, like Bahrain and southern Lebanon; he himself married the daughter of one of these foreign clerics.

Scholars in the seminaries learned to understand and interpret Islamic law – through logic, grammar and rhetoric. They learned the relationship between Islamic law and their sources, the sayings and traditions of the Prophet Muhammad and the twelve Imams. They were taught a set of systematic principles for deriving one from the other, called jurisprudence. In time, senior mullahs started issuing new and comprehensive compilations of the sources.

Islam has no sacrament requiring ordained ministers; there is, strictly speaking, no ‘clergy’ – certainly not in the sense of a homogeneous group of professionals whose job is to mediate between people and God. In the Safavid period, however, Iran gained a clergy in all but name, and it became a social and political institution. Experienced mullahs were sent to the provinces as judges, dispensing Islamic law. They administered wealthy religious foundations. They systematized the collection of religious taxes that entered their own coffers. They became the state’s spiritual backer.

The expanding science of jurisprudence legitimized their influence. Jurisprudence allowed senior clerics to interpret religious rulings. The most senior of the jurists – the mojtahed – was deemed qualified to divine God’s will in areas where he had not expressed himself; this made the mojtahed a kind of divine legislator. As the Safavid era wore on, the Shah ceased in religious terms to be more than the titular head of Ismail’s old mystic order. He came to rely on the mojtahed for religious sanction of his policies and actions. The Safavid-era mullahs did not go as far as to demand political leadership; but that did not stop some of them acquiring a taste for worldly power.

Shah Sultan Hossein, Abbas’s great-great-great grandson, came under the influence of mullahs who persuaded him to forbid alcoholic revels and to banish mystics from the capital. He endowed the Seminary of the Four Gardens in Isfahan, to propagate the theology of these mullahs. He authorized the persecution and forcible conversion of Sunnis under his control, as well as minorities such as Christians, Jews and Zoroastrians.

Sultan Hossein’s bigotry, combined with indecision and misrule, led to revolt. In 1722, an army of Sunni Afghans captured Isfahan. After keeping Sultan Hossein captive for a few years, they executed him, effectively extinguishing the Safavid dynasty. Iran sank into anarchy and the clergy withdrew from sight.

I walked up the Four Gardens. It had once been four recreational gardens that were laid out by Abbas, with arcades made up of plane trees bowing to one another and a track for horsemen. Now it’s a straight, modern road, with travel agents and cake shops. After about half a kilometre I came to a wall of arch shapes illuminated by tiles – the Seminary of the Four Gardens, Sultan Hossein’s endowment. I pushed open a door and went in.

After the movement and noise of the street, the seminary gave me an immense sensation of peace. It was laid around a courtyard, bounded by cells set in vaulted niches, with tiled porticos on three sides. A rectangular pool of water and a path divided the grass into four lawns. The cypress trees almost obscured the vivid blue dome over the prayer hall.

A mullah strolled along the pool of water, talking to a seminarian. When they reached the far end, they turned around and retraced their steps. Other seminarians were crossing the courtyard, on their way to class. A few were sunning themselves on the balconies of the first-floor cells. A door slammed, the way they do in institutions.

I walked to one of the corners of the courtyard. Its arch led into a roofless chamber with low stone platforms; in the old days, the mullahs would lecture from these platforms, the seminarians at their feet. I sat down in the shade.

Back in the 1970s, Isfahan was sinking under slime. The King Mother’s eastern wall kissed Iran’s most opulent hotel, the Shah Abbas. (The Shah Abbas had been a traditional travellers’ rest house; now, it had a slab of modern rooms stuck on the front, and a kind of unending feast of Balthazaar going on inside.) Outside the door of the seminary, in the Four Gardens, cars blared Western music. Their young occupants lusted for a US college education. Everywhere, there were signs of progress. Advertisements for washing machines; Old Spice aerosols in pharmacy windows; female arms sprouting downy hairs coming out of halter tops. You could buy foreign booze in the Four Gardens and go whoring round the back of the municipality.

The Shah was Muhammad Reza Pahlavi. He hated mullahs almost as much as he hated Communists; the mullahs were the forces of black reaction, sabotaging his attempt to make Iran modern. The King of Kings had put Isfahan’s religious foundations in the hands of a retired general. Perhaps the general had visited Notre Dame or the Duomo; he’d certainly heard how Europe was neutralizing its own black reaction by turning churches into museums. Christianity was changing from a religion into a secular way of appreciating beauty. Could Islam undergo a similar lobotomy?

The general threw open the seminary doors. Some of the mullahs protested. They argued that the seminary was an all-male place of study, whose architectural beauty was designed not to delight strangers but to inspire the seminarian. Why, they asked, had the seminaries been built looking in on themselves? (Answer: to protect the religious scholar from worldly temptation and to reflect his harmonious soul.)

Paying their price of entry, the tourists came into the Seminary of the King Mother, wandering around in shorts and Jesus sandals, peering into cell windows, hoping to catch a seminarian at prayer-whirling, perhaps? On hot days, they dangled their feet in the pool. They asked for postcards, ice cream, toilets.

Gradually, the seminarians were driven out. They found it impossible to concentrate on their studies. Some were lured by moral corruption. Rumours abounded of ghosts, restless mullahs from the days of Sultan Hossein, warning of defilement. Some of them took cells in other seminaries, off the tourist track. Their hatred for the Shah expanded; it became contempt for the Western model that he was trying to impose on them.

The tourists had been attracted by Iran’s antiquity and culture, and in some cases by the person of the Shah and his succession of lovely wives. The sportsmen and women among them may have seen the King of Kings from a distance – at St Moritz, perhaps, where he kept a chalet and skied beautifully.

The Shah was America’s friend. He was the West’s bulwark against Communism. You only had to open Time magazine to learn that America wouldn’t let him fall. As they toured the city, the tourists occasionally solicited the political opinions of a shopkeeper. There were broad smiles. A signed photograph of the Shah with his third wife, the tirelessly charitable Farah, was produced from a drawer.

The tourists were unaware that they and the shopkeepers were being monitored by Savak, the Shah’s US-trained secret police. They didn’t realize that everyone they came into contact with had been intimidated or bought. They didn’t know – perhaps they didn’t care to know – about the bastinadoes, the electrodes and the rectal violations that were the speciality of Savak safe houses.

One evening, the tourists gathered in the courtyard of the Hotel Shah Abbas. They raised their glasses to Isfahan’s beauty – to the Safavid architecture, to the Armenian and Jewish quarters.

‘And to the Shah!’ the smiling maître d’hôtel interjected.

The tourists were beside themselves. The Shah’s picture was in the lobby, and the restaurant, and at the entrance to the swimming pool. But this was different: a spontaneous show of fealty.

‘To the Shah!’ they cried.

There was a second set of foreigners, drinking in the hotel courtyard. They were based in the capital, Tehran, but sometimes spent the weekend in Isfahan. They were oilmen and arms dealers, petrochemicals salesmen and dam-builders. They had come to Iran to suggest to the Shah ways of disposing of his massive oil revenues. They spent a lot of time and money bribing ministers and bureaucrats, chasing contracts that would allow them to retire. They enjoyed smearing thick-grained Caspian caviar on crustless toast, posing a shard of lemon peel on top and shoving the whole lot into their mouths.

The third group of foreigners was composed of US Air Force officers. They worked as engineers, instructors, communications officers at Iran’s biggest air base, outside Isfahan. Every Isfahani girl had a crush on a US Air Force officer. Their brothers dreamed of piloting a Tomcat. In the bazaar, among the butch porters, blond American boys were all the rage.

The Revolution started sometime in the late twentieth century. Who knows when?

The leftists say it started at the party of 1971, when the world’s despots, dynasts and democrats dined with the King of Kings at repugnant expense in the ruins of Persepolis, the magnificent temple complex that was started by the Achaemenian King, Darius, in 520 BC.^[*]

The economists say it started with the oil-price hike two years later, when OPEC quintupled the price of oil. It turned the King of Kings into a superstar, beloved of arms dealers and industrial development gurus, and set inflation on its upward trend.

A taxi driver once told me it started when the people saw the Shah drinking alcohol with his foreign guests, and heard the rumour that certain members of his family liked to swim in milk.

Everyone agrees it had started by the time the Shah made his final trip to Washington, in 1978, when he and Jimmy Carter wept in the White House rose garden – not out of love for each other but because of the tear-gas canisters being fired at anti-Shah demonstrators in Pennsylvania Avenue.

Perhaps it started in Isfahan, the day a boy spat in the face of a German woman who was immodestly dressed.

I’m sitting in a basement in Qom that belongs to Mr Zarif. He’s smoking his hookah: short sucks and clouds spreading over his face. He doesn’t smoke to relax. The in-out helps him concentrate. He talks faster when he’s smoking, and he talks pretty fast anyway. He shouldn’t smoke, the doctors have made that clear, but he enjoys doing things he’s not supposed to – as long as they don’t upset God. Mr Zarif is small and balding. He has a big head and a button nose and ironic eyes. He looks like a djinn, with scented smoke wings.

He folds the snake, as etiquette requires, so that the nozzle faces away from me, before handing it across. His wife will be down in a minute, bringing tea and fruit cut into triangles. She’ll tut-tut when she sees the hookah, and she’ll smile; the pleasure of watching her husband’s pleasure is more powerful than the fear that smoking will kill him. (If God has heavenly plans for you, living well beats living long any day.) Then – for this is an enlightened household, with no fanatical segregation of the sexes – she’ll join us, stuffing the end of her chador, which is adorned by a field of peonies, between her teeth as she passes around tea. I’ve known Mr Zarif for several months, and I think of him as a friend. But it’s hard, listening as he explains his past, not to feel as though he’s talking about someone else.

Perhaps, I think, he’s deliberately trying to give the impression that he bears no relation to the Zarif of two decades ago; the present Zarif can analyse dispassionately the actions of the former Zarif. Perhaps it’s a way of shoring up regret or bitterness. Or Mr Zarif is trying to be honest. I’ve been confronted by two Zarifs, so different as to be enemies, and I want to know what makes them one.

‘Have I shown you my nanchiko?’ Mr Zarif leaps to his feet – I’ve never known anyone rise from a cross-legged position so compactly and elegantly – and runs out of the room. He comes back holding two bits of wood joined by a chain.

‘You know how the Japanese invented this?’ I shake my head. It looks good for throttling people. ‘There was a time when they had a weak and paranoid Emperor who banned the people from bearing arms. So they went to the obvious place: the kitchen! Someone had the idea of joining two rolling pins with a chain.’ He limbers up, rolling his shoulders, crouching slightly. ‘Of course, I’m out of practice.’

He starts to whip the nanchiko in arcs about his body, threatening adversaries from every angle. The nanchiko buckles and snaps. One of Mr Zarif’s advantages is his low centre of gravity; knock him down and he’ll swoon like a top, bob up again. Wham! The nanchiko lashing at you, splitting your forehead, breaking your elbow.

You have to discount Mr Zarif’s eyes, which have been dappled by hindsight. Back then, they were … what? Angry? Crazy?

This much is certain:

The former Zarif would have had no Englishmen in the basement, smoking the hookah. The former Zarif divided the world into friends and enemies, and the outside world was composed almost exclusively of enemies. (Of course, the British; they occupy a privileged position in Iran’s demonology. The former Zarif had things to say about us.)

Mrs Zarif comes in with a tray. She piles my plate high with fruit, and then does the same to Mr Zarif’s. She teases me about my appetite, which is known to be insufficient and will be the cause of my enfeeblement. Mr Zarif says I’d better be hungry today, because his wife has made shirin polov. It’s a feast of barberries, crushed pistachios, walnuts and lamb – on a bed of rice.

The front door slams. It’s Ali, the Zarifs’ ten-year-old son, back from school. Within a minute or two of being greeted by his parents, he’s challenged Mr Zarif to climb through the small hatch between the sitting room and the kitchen, through which Mrs Zarif will pass us lunch.

‘Of course I can do it,’ says Mr Zarif. He looks at me. ‘It wouldn’t be right, though, with Mr de Bellaigue here.’

‘You can’t do it,’ Ali smiles. ‘You’d get stuck.’

Mr Zarif is smiling, but infuriated. ‘Of course I can. Is it that I’m too fat, or too old?’

Ali shrugs viciously, as if to say: ‘Try.’

‘Well, if Mr de Bellaigue gives permission …’

Ali: ‘You can’t do it.’

Mrs Zarif tells her husband not to be so silly. It’s not a very elegant thing for a grown man to do, to climb through the hatch at Ali’s urging. I tell him not to hold back on my account.

Mr Zarif climbs onto the little table, puts his hands through the window and levers himself up. For a moment, he’s caught on the ledge; he’s having trouble manoeuvring his legs around and through the window. But his legs aren’t long and he eventually gets through, grunting as he goes. Mr Zarif disappears, and we hear him land on the kitchen floor. When he comes back into the sitting room, his face is red and he’s triumphant. Mrs Zarif says, ‘I’m sure Mr de Bellaigue is impressed.’ Ali is climbing over his dad, ruffling his hair.

In another country, at another time, Mr Zarif would have been called a delinquent, a thug, a menace to society.

He was brought up in Isfahan, and he set up his first gang in 1978, when he was twelve. He and his friends copied and distributed illicit pamphlets. They pasted flyers and photographs of dissidents onto walls, at night. (Making sure that no one was around to turn them in to Savak.) The following day, as the people walked to work, they’d see Khomeini looking at them. His eyes would demand: ‘What have you done for the morally upright and economically downtrodden?’ They would accuse: ‘Acquiescence to tyranny makes you an accessory!’

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).

He comes into the sitting room. He says, ‘If I saw someone doing something suspicious, I’d immediately write a report on him, and if someone didn’t have a beard I’d skip school and follow him. There was one guy in my street and I thought he was a leftist. Three Fridays in a row I followed him. Each time, a man with a beard rode by on a bicycle – the same man, each time. Naturally, I thought he’d been sent by God to help me in my investigation. And later I found out; no, he was a guy who lived in the neighbourhood, who happened to have a beard.’

He kneels.

At Mr Zarif’s all-boys school, some of the female teachers believed that the Revolution had happened in the name of freedom – freedom of speech, thought, behaviour. (They had mistaken liberty – which means liberty from moral corruption and Godlessness – with a morality.) They took part in demonstrations that forced the Imam to back down on a decree that female civil servants cover their heads and wear shapeless clothes. There they were, persisting with their hip-hugging skirts and high-heeled boots.

The art teacher had cropped her hair, taking as an example one of the cops in Cagney and Lacey – Mr Zarif couldn’t remember which. The Cagney and Lacey woman had favourites among the older boys. People whispered about what she got up to with her favourites.

(Mr Zarif stands, head bowed. He whispers: ‘In the name of God the merciful and compassionate. Glory and thanksgiving be only to the God of the universe, who is merciful and compassionate and lord of the day of retribution. We worship none but you, and request help from none but you. Guide us along the right path, the path of those whom you have made secure, not the path of those who have lost their way. In the name of God, the merciful and compassionate, say that God is one. God needs nothing. He was not born, and did not procreate, and no one is like him.’)

The ideologues were saying that the Revolution required several steps; the Shah’s flight had been the first. Now, they said, it was the turn of the Communists and liberals and Westernized fun-lovers. There was a dangerous group, the People’s Mujahedin, which claimed to have reconciled Islam with Communism; the Prophet, they said, had been the first Marxist! (Later on, the Imam was to christen this group the Eclectics and, later still, the Hypocrites.) There were kids at school who daubed hammers and sickles on the playground wall. The head of the revolutionary committees said, ‘We must purify society in order to renew it.’ The question was: how?

One day, in a mosque that was known for its fervent and revolutionary congregation, Mr Zarif came across a group of people who had the answer. They were older than Mr Zarif – most of them were in their early twenties – and they called each other ‘brother’. They wore trimmed beards and kept their shirts untucked. Even on hot days, they never rolled up their sleeves. One or two of them wore silver rings, with a star in the middle. Some of them had the piebald Palestinian scarf, the kaffieh, around their necks, and mentioned the Bekaa Valley in conversation. They grinned when Mr Zarif asked them whether they had spent time in Lebanon. Some of them seemed knowledgeable about automatic weapons and explosive devices.

(Leaning forward, hands on knees: ‘The most elevated God is clean and pure.’)

They were lovers. They loved the truth. They loved God and the Prophet. They loved the Imam and the clerics around him. They loved the Imam Hossein and the Imam Ali. More than anything, they loved their enemies – the liberals and Marxists, the Americans and the British agents. And the Zionists, of course. They would destroy them with their love.

They said they took orders from some clerics in Isfahan. (The clerics seemed to take their orders from people close to the Imam.) They were doing useful work: spreading propaganda, harassing opposition groups, encouraging citizens to denounce apologists for the former regime. Some of them were members of the Revolutionary Guard. Others were linked to the revolutionary committees. Some, Mr Zarif guessed, were members of an unofficial action group, called Hezbollah, though they were coy if asked.

(Kneeling over, forehead on a tablet of baked earth from Karbala: ‘Great God is clean and pure.’)

One by one, they and their allies were getting into the local bureaucracy. There was an increase in trimmed beards in the municipal corridors. There were more chadors. The Imam’s supporters were making life difficult for civil servants who didn’t say their prayers, or failed to turn up for indoctrination classes. The secularists had a choice: change your ways, and your appearance, or get out.

One Thursday evening, they let Mr Zarif join them in a small room next to the mosque. One of the younger lads picked up a microphone that was attached to an amp and started singing about Hossein’s martyrdom. He had a fine voice. The others gathered in a tight circle, near the singer, and knelt inwards. In time with the lament, they brought their arms high above their heads, and down again, so that their hands thumped against their chests.

Gradually, the lament got faster. The arms rose and fell faster, like the pistons of a locomotive. Someone turned off the light and the men took off their shirts; their torsos glistened in the street light that came in from the window. Faster and faster, the lament went, until the singer’s voice cracked; he started sobbing into the microphone. Inside the circle, the arms were rising and falling more swiftly; when the hands hit the chests, they made the sound of bones hitting hide. Drops of sweat fell off the end of Mr Zarif’s nose. His arms ached. His chest felt raw.

Everyone was shouting: ‘Hosseinhosseinhosseinhosseinhossein!’ and hitting their chests as hard as they could.

After it was over, someone turned on the lights. Mr Zarif blinked. Everyone had red splotches on their chests. The room was humid. The lads put on their shirts. Then someone brought in tea and biscuits. Someone cracked a joke.

(Standing up, hands out in supplication: ‘God! Favour us in this life and the next, and save us from the torment of hell.’)

After they had tea, one of the men came over to Mr Zarif and introduced himself. He asked some questions, about Mr Zarif’s political and religious convictions, and the situation at his school. Mr Zarif gave him what seemed – from the man’s reactions – to be satisfactory answers. The man asked Mr Zarif to monitor the Communists, and the Mujahedin, at school. These groups had seized arms from armouries in the chaos that preceded and coincided with the Shah’s flight. Their paymasters in Moscow were trying to take advantage of the situation, to suck Iran into their zone of influence.

(Sitting on his heels, hands on knees: ‘In the name of God, on him be praise and glory. I bear witness that God is one and that Muhammad is his servant and Prophet. Greetings and the benediction of God on Muhammad and his followers.’)

The following week, Mr Zarif and the other members of the gang followed the Communist kids. They found out where they lived, and discovered that their dads wore big moustaches, and called one another ‘comrade’. Some of the dads worked at Isfahan’s big iron works, which had Russian managers. One or two of them socialized with Russian families. The Russian families were poor and ugly.

One day, a couple of men arrived at the school to start political indoctrination. The men told the kids how to think about God and the Imam, and America and the Zionist Entity. When the principal saw that Mr Zarif was a friend of these men, he conceived for him a shaming fear. A kid of fifteen had become more powerful than he was.

Mr Zarif neglected his studies. He started doing sport, pumping iron, sticking out his chest. (He was growing a beard, though not fast enough for his liking). In school, he delivered harangues, handed round pamphlets. He organized prayer meetings in the playground. If he wanted to pass on a message to another boy, he would walk into the boy’s class and whisper the message to him – the teacher would pretend not to notice.

Mr Zarif’s boys got two of Cagney and Lacey’s favourites into the school store, and asked them some questions. They learned that Cagney and Lacey was a closet Communist. Shortly after, quite a senior person from the Revolutionary Guard arrived at the school. He spent a long time in the principal’s office. Cagney and Lacey was called in and invited to resign. The following day, at his word, ten of Mr Zarif’s lads surrounded the Communists; there were bleeding noses. The hammers and sickles got fewer.

(Sitting on his heels: ‘The peace and munificence of God be on Muhammad. Greetings on us and the right-acting servants of God. The peace and mercy and munificence of God be on you.’)

A few months after the Revolution, the Communists planned a meeting that was to be addressed by a high-up Communist from Tehran. Thanks to a spy he had planted among them, Mr Zarif got wind of the meeting. He went early and got a good spot near the podium. Just as the speaker was being introduced, Mr Zarif ran onto the podium and landed a good one on his nose. Before anyone had time to react, he hurled himself into the section of the crowd that was thinnest. He was small enough, and fast enough, to get away with only a broken rib.

At the beginning of November 1979, radical students allied to the Imam seized the American Embassy in Tehran, taking the staff hostage. The students announced that they would release the hostages only when President Carter handed over the Shah, who had been allowed into America for cancer treatment. Bazargan resigned; his government had been trying to repair relations with the US. After Bazargan’s departure, the Imam placed the government directly under the control of his kitchen cabinet, the Islamic Revolutionary Council.

Mr Zarif was delighted: he remembered that the Revolution was made up of steps.

Nowadays, when people think of the mullahs’ revenge, they think of Sadegh Khalkhali. There were scores of clerics who were more important than him; they actually took decisions, rather than implemented and interpreted the decisions of others, as Khalkhali did. Many of these mullahs were easier on the eye than Khalkhali; they had politer turns of phrase, more impressive qualifications. Khalkhali was a poor kid from the Azeri northwest, short on education outside the seminary, rotund, bald and coarse.

During the Shah’s time, Khalkhali had upset people by writing a treatise depicting Cyrus the Great, founder of the Achaemenian empire and a figure whom the Shah admired, as a sodomite. He’d been imprisoned and internally exiled. Then, a few days after the Revolution, Khomeini appointed him to be a judge in the revolutionary court that was to try beneficiaries of the old regime and opponents of the new one. Khalkhali toured the country, trying monarchists and counter-revolutionaries. (Over a three-month period, he claimed to have condemned more than four hundred people to death. They included former senators, a radio presenter and a mob leader.) His pugnacious, fat face became as famous as his jokes, which often featured references to executions. V. S. Naipaul, who visited Khalkhali at the height of his notoriety, likened him to a jester at his own court.

Khalkhali made an indelible impression on Elaine Sciolino, an American journalist who witnessed one of the trials he presided over; she remembered him in a book she wrote two decades later. To counter the extremely hot weather, Sciolino recalls, Khalkhali removed his turban, cloak and socks, which must have made him look like a turnip. He sat on the floor and picked his toes while hearing the evidence against a defendant. He repeatedly left the room during the testimony of witnesses.

His most famous victim was Amir Abbas Hoveida, and Khalkhali must have enjoyed that bit of business. Hoveida was Khalkhali’s antithesis, thirteen years the Shah’s prime minister, a man whose Northampton brogues Khalkhali could not, before the Revolution, have dreamed of polishing. Hoveida was a francophone, but he also knew Arabic – the Arabic of Beirut society, not the Qoran. Even after their divorce, Hoveida’s wife made sure that a fresh orchid reached him every morning for his buttonhole. He’d not been personally venal or murderous, but he’d closed his eyes to the atrocities of others. Khalkhali charged him with waging war on God and corruption on earth. Over two court sessions, separated by several weeks, Khalkhali pounded the defendant’s moral ambivalence like saffron under a pestle.

At lunchtime on Hoveida’s last day, Khalkhali reports in his memoir, the prisoner was treated to a repast of rice, lamb and broad beans. Khalkhali claims to have made do with bread and cheese. (Next to photographs of him, excessively crapulent, this ascetic self-portrayal is unconvincing.) During the afternoon session, Khalkhali didn’t allow Hoveida a defence counsel, nor was a jury present. As the presiding judge, Khalkhali didn’t pretend to be impartial; in the vehemence of his harangues, he rivalled the prosecutor.

By trying Hoveida, Khalkhali jabbed his finger in Bazargan’s eye. Bazargan disapproved of the revolutionary court – he was planning for Hoveida an exemplary trial that would establish the Revolution’s reputation for justice and moderation. But Khalkhali, who plausibly claims to have taken hints from Khomeini, had different ideas. He gave orders that no one was to be allowed out of the prison where the trial was taking place. To ensure that word didn’t reach Bazargan, he locked the prison telephones in a fridge. And so Hoveida was sentenced and shot in the prison courtyard. His final words were patrician, and a bit surprised: ‘It wasn’t meant to end like this.’

Khalkhali’s theatre travelled on. It gave perhaps its most memorable performance at a famous shrine in south Tehran. Khalkhali and two hundred revolutionary militiamen set out to destroy the Pahlavi family vault, which was in the shrine’s precincts. Khalkhali was opposed by the government and by the resilience of the granite structure. The spades and picks used by the Revolutionary Guard proved insufficient. Khalkhali called for reinforcements. (National television was already on site to record his endeavour.) Bulldozers and cranes arrived, but the tomb withstood. At ten o’clock that night, the valiant revolutionaries went home to bed.

In his memoir, Khalkhali craves his readers’ indulgence: ‘Perhaps you don’t grasp how strong they’d made this tomb.’ But he was not deterred; the tomb would have to be blown up, by degrees. And when, after twenty epic days, the job was done, and the dust of imperial bones blended with the smell of cordite, ‘the sound of cheers and joy rose from the people, and the enthusiasm and joy were indescribable’.

You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs. That might be Khal-khali’s epitaph.

Today, Mr and Mrs Zarif are coming to lunch with us, here in Elahiyeh. I wonder what they will make of Bita, my wife, and what she’ll make of them.

Elahiyeh is a desirable suburb on the slopes of north Tehran. It used to be so green that, even in midsummer, you had to sleep with a light blanket. The British and Russian embassies kept grand legations in Elahiyeh, to which their respective ambassadors decamped in the spring. Now, the compounds remain but most of the gardens have been built over. Elahiyeh is rarely more than two or three degrees cooler than the dustbowl of south Tehran.

Elahiyeh’s name is derived from the name of God in Arabic, Allah, but few places in Iran are more reputed for impiety. Behind entry gates crowned with barbed wire, illicit booze is consumed and dancing committed by mixed assemblies. Anecdotal evidence suggests that sex happens between men and women who aren’t married to each other. The Islamic Republic is an avoidable botheration.

In the Shah’s time, the area was inhabited by suave monarchists who built Swiss-style chalets. Fearing for their liberty after the Revolution – many of them had taken part in the Shah’s oppression, or dipped into the public purse – they fled. The new regime appropriated their houses and grounds, building on them or turning them into, say, a sports club for the families of a privileged caste of civil servants.

Elahiyeh’s present inhabitants are an uncouth upper class. They have done well in recent years out of high oil prices. They inhabit marble-clad apartments in escapist blocks and enjoy the view during the rare instances when smog hasn’t settled in the lap of the Alborz Mountains. Many of them have residence rights and property abroad – the Revolution taught them that it pays to keep your options open.

It’s difficult to ascertain exactly where their money comes from. Knowing the right people has a lot to do with it. They are terrific name-droppers. Having access to commodities beyond the reach of the common man – foreign currency at preferential rates, import licences – is also important. Their skill is acquiring what exists in artificially small quantities and selling it at a price reflective of this scarcity. Their wives take lovers and visit a French-educated psychologist downtown.

Their teenage daughters, matchsticks marinated in Chanel, are yanking up their coats; in recent years, hems have drifted above the knee for the first time since the Revolution. Their favourite activities are having nose jobs – there is one model: retroussé – buying illegally imported Italian shoes and rearranging their headscarves in public, by mistake on purpose exhibiting their hair.

The daughters gather on a Thursday night, outside pizza parlours and coffee shops, discharging arch glances and pollinating scents. They’re treading water while their parents find them a mate. (Likely as not, he will be their first cousin – the families know each other, and the mehriyeh, a kind of pre-nup, will not be prohibitive.)

They are courted, if the word is applicable, by boys who wear a minimalist variant on the goatee, driving Pop’s sedan. A chance meeting in a coffee shop; a telephone number flung into a passing car – such are the first moves. Oral sex is, of necessity, popular; there will be a great to-do if the girl doesn’t bloody her wedding bed. In case of penetration, however, all is not lost. A discreet doctor can usually be found to sew up the offending hymen.

There’s a hollow thrill to be got from bettering the morals police. (They cruise Elahiyeh in their Land Cruisers, looking for miscreants to shake down for a few dollars, smelling breath for alcohol, rummaging through handbags for condoms.) For the rich kids, it’s the best way of getting back at the state, at parents, at the predictability of life.

In a strange way, Elahiyeh’s social vacuum suits us, too. We like the traditional notion of an Iranian community, but are not sure we could inhabit one. Unlike almost everywhere else, you can live in Elahiyeh as you can in a Western city: in peace and anonymity.

Before 1979, Bita’s parents had nice ministry positions; both regarded a deputy ministership or another senior bureaucratic post as their due. Bita and her younger brother – a second brother was born on the eve of the Revolution – led blameless, privileged lives.

There were three choices when it came to educating your children: the French school, the German school and the American school. (You didn’t send your child willingly to an Iranian school; foreign languages and contacts were indispensable aids to getting on in the world.) The trouble with the American school was that its graduates spoke Persian with an American accent. There was no German connection in Bita’s family. Her mother, on the other hand, had studied law in Paris, so Bita was sent to the French school. It was run by nuns. Each year, on the anniversary of her martyrdom, the school commemorated the exemplary life of Joan of Arc.

Bita wore a dark-blue collarless tutu over a white T-shirt. In winter, she wore a roll neck jumper over the T-shirt. If the driver was late collecting her after school, she would wander down nearby Lalehzar, Tehran’s Pigalle, where there were whores and the smell of alcohol, and ornate cinemas with putti on the ceilings. In the summer evenings, when her parents were out, she would go swimming in pools that belonged to the parents of her friends. She and her friends danced to Googoosh, Iran’s answer to Shirley Bassey.

They admired Farah, the Shah’s third wife. It’s arguable that Farah was not as exquisite as wife number two, an Isfahani whom the Shah abandoned for failing to sire. But, she was tall, wore fabulous clothes and had an artistic eye. She was an alumna of the French school and came to visit.

In 1978, there were riots and atrocities. Bita got used to the sounds of firing and being sent home early from school – and the worried look on the face of Ma Soeur Louise. She didn’t realize that she and her friends, and Farah and the Shah and the whores of Lalehzar, were the reason for the hatred.

And so the Shah left. An old man with frightening eyes came. The French school was closed. (Of course it was; it was named after a Roman Catholic saint!) A lot of the girls, including Bita, were removed to an Iranian school where French was taught. Friends started leaving. First, the foreigners and the Jews, and the Bahais – members of a religious sect, originally an offshoot of Islam, that had been favoured by the Shah. One day, little Ziba would come to school. The next, she’d be gone. A few weeks later, her family would surface in Orange County, California.

It seemed to Bita that everything had been turned upside down. The people who were now giving orders looked like the people who had taken orders before. In the past, her mother and father had been on top. Now, they were at the bottom. If they wanted to get something done, they had to flatter coarse men with beards and rosaries. In the past, Bita had associated beards with building workers and dervishes. Now, everyone was growing them; you had to, if you wanted to get on.

A few months into the Revolution, Bita’s new school was closed and she went to another. They didn’t teach French at the new school. Arabic, the language of the Holy Qoran, was compulsory. The girls had to wear headscarves and long coats. They were told to despise the wearing of ribbons in hair, and bare ankles. In the streets, there were Hezbollahis patrolling, checking peoples’ adherence to Islamic rules concerning dress and behaviour. They threw acid in the faces of women who were inappropriately made up.

Bita had lived for colour. It was as important to her as the sun. The Revolution had killed colour, declared it to be evil.

Mr Zarif had delivered his school to the Revolution; in the precincts, he was unchallengeable. He turned his attention to a Qoranic injunction that Muslims promote virtue and prevent vice. It meant implementing Islamic law and practices, eradicating decadent ways of behaving. It meant starting at the bottom of society. He and the gang started hanging around parks and shopping centres. They would approach boys who were chatting to girls and ask, ‘What is your relationship? Is this woman your sister? Why are you talking to her?’ If they got an unsatisfactory answer, they’d hustle the boy away and tear off a few shirt buttons. They’d tell the girl: ‘Bleached jeans are a sign of American cultural corruption. Go home and put on Islamic clothes.’

The ban on booze was hitting the alcoholics. Liquor prices had rocketed. Every morning, a park or a vacant lot yielded up a new body, full of petrol, turpentine, meths – anything they could get their hands on. Mr Zarif felt that society was being cleansed, spewing harmful matter. He was learning Arabic, the language of the Holy Qoran.

Sometimes, he and his lads caught boys and girls flirting in shops, under the cover of deciding on a purchase. Mr Zarif and the gang would smash the windows of shops where such things went on and spoil some of the merchandise. If they saw girls flouncing in a park, they seized their handbags and tipped out the contents. ‘Who do you wear make-up for?’ they demanded. ‘What is that music cassette you’ve bought? Haven’t you heard what the Imam said about Western culture?’ If they came across a young man wearing a Led Zeppelin T-shirt, they said: ‘Your hair is longer than Islam permits. Everyone should groom himself as the Prophet did. Here; let us cut it for you.’

They would deliver serious offenders to the boys at the mosque. The boys would consult one of the mullahs and get a sentence passed. Whippings would be administered, in accordance with Islamic law. The gang’s effectiveness was enhanced by the recruitment of two middle-aged women with long nails; they seemed to enjoy scratching the faces of pretty girls who were resistant to the Islamic dress code.

The doorbell rings. It’s the Zarifs. We’ve cooked Indian food, because we reckon that Mr and Mrs Zarif should be open to new experiences.

Not too new. Bita is wearing her headscarf. She’s careful not to put out her hand to shake Mr Zarif’s. She helps Mrs Zarif get out of her black chador for outdoors, and into her colourful indoor chador. Mr and Mrs Zarif look around for indoor slippers to put on. But we don’t ask people to take off their shoes when they enter our house. There aren’t any slippers available. Mr and Mrs Zarif take off their shoes and walk on in their socks.

‘What a house!’ they both say it at the same time. They look at Bita. (She’s the interior designer.)

The hall is burgundy. (My father-in-law says it looks like a nightclub.) There is a batik wall hanging depicting the Hindu goddess Durga, wearing a necklace of human skulls.

The sitting room is two shades of tangerine. There’s a picture of a woman in a bright red dress and a challenging stare, standing next to an androgyne with diaphanous blue skin and yellow hair. There are red-backed chairs and an Indian sari turned into curtains, and a dark green sofa from the 1940s, and a green tribal tunic with red paisley lining put in a frame and attached to the wall. The bolsters are richly coloured and patterned. There are riotous Baktiari carpets, Armenian rugs.

Mr Zarif is wearing a grey shirt, and grey trousers, and white socks. His house has white walls.

As we sit down to eat, I wonder whether he ever threw acid in the face of a girl who had red on her lips, or hair escaping from her headscarf.

[*] ‘You should know about ta’aruf In Arabic ta’aruf means behaviour that is appropriate and customary; in Iran, it has been corrupted and denotes ceremonial insincerity. Not in a pejorative sense; Iran is the only country I know where hypocrisy is prized as a social and commercial skill.

Three examples:

When the taxi driver offered us tea and cigarettes, and we refused, this was ta’aruf. He had no intention of giving us tea and cigarettes, and we reacted accordingly. A man may propose that his son marry the daughter of his impoverished younger brother without having any intention of permitting the match; the son is already engaged to the daughter of an ayatollah, and the brother’s daughter is a repulsive dwarf. But the quintessence of ta’aruf can be found in the behaviour of a mullah I once observed entering a Tehran hospital in the company of several other men. As the mullah crossed the threshold, he said to the men waiting behind him, ‘After you.’

If, through some mistake or misunderstanding, an offer extended through ta’aruf is accepted, it will be retroactively countermanded. I remember reading somewhere of a foreigner who was arrested for theft after being denounced by a shopkeeper who had repeatedly refused to take his money.

[*] I have a book, Celebration at Persepolis, that commemorates this party, which was held in celebration of what the Shah arbitrarily judged to be the two thousand five hundredth anniversary of continuous Iranian monarchy. The book relates that some sixty tents the size of villas, designed by a Parisian firm in beige and royal blue, were erected to house the guests, and that a hatter was on hand should one of the guests squash his topper. Haile Selassie brought with him a Chihuahua wearing a diamond-studded collar. A breakfast of raw camel meat was made available for the Arab emirs. The dinner menu included quail eggs stuffed with Caspian caviar, saddle of lamb with truffles and roast peacock stuffed with foie gras. The vin d’honneur was Château Lafite Rothschild 1945. Representing the Vatican, I learned, was Cardinal Maximilian de Furstenberg, a relation of my Belgian grandmother’s. Although he was only a few years older than her, my grandmother always referred to him as Uncle Max, possibly because he worked for the Pope.