Among the Believers Read Online Free PDF Page A

paper did away with the liquor allowance; it was part of the Islamic welcome.
    The luggage track, which should have been rolling out our luggage, didn’t move for a long time. And the Iranian passengers (the physician and his family among them), with their London shopping bags, seemed to become different people. At London airport they had been Iranians, people from the fairyland of oil and money, spenders; now, in the shabby arrival hall, patient in their own setting and among their own kind, they looked like country folk who had gone to town.
    The customs man had a little black brush moustache. He asked, “Whisky?” His pronunciation of the word, and his smile, seemed to turn the query into a joke. When I said no he took my word and smilingly waved me out into the summer brightness, to face the post-revolutionary rapaciousness of the airport taxi men, who after six months were more than ever animated by memories of the old days, when the world’s salesmen came to Tehran, there were never enough hotel rooms, and no driver pined for a fare.
    The colours of the city were as dusty and pale as they had appeared from the air. Dust blew about the road, coated the trees, dimmed the colours of cars. Bricks and plaster were the colour of dust; unfinished buildings looked abandoned and crumbling; and walls, like abstracts of the time, were scribbled over in the Persian script and stencilled with portraits of Khomeini.
    On the outskirts of the city, in what looked like waste ground, I saw a low khaki-coloured tent, a queue of men and veiled women, and some semi-uniformed men. I thought of refugees from the countryside, dole queues. But then—seeing another tent and another queue in front of an unfinished apartment block—I remembered it was the day of an election, the second test of the people’s will since the revolution. Thefirst had been a referendum; the people had voted then for an Islamic republic. This election was for an “Assembly of Experts,” who would work out an Islamic constitution. Khomeini had advised that priests should be elected.
    Experts were necessary, because an Islamic constitution couldn’t simply be adopted. No such thing existed or had ever existed. An Islamic constitution was something that had to be put together; and it had to be something of which the Prophet would have approved. The trouble there was that the Prophet, creating his seventh-century Arabian state, guided always by divine revelation, had very much ruled as his own man. That was where the priests came in. They might not have ideas about a constitution—a constitution was, after all, a concept from outside the Muslim world; but, with their knowledge of the Koran and the doings of the Prophet, the priests would know what was un-Islamic.
    My hotel was in central Tehran. It was one of the older hotels of the city. It was behind a high wall; it had a gateman’s lodge, an asphalted circular drive, patches of lawn with shrubs and trees. It was in better order than I had imagined; there were even a few cars. But the building the driver took me to had a chain across the glass door. Someone shouted from the other side of the compound. The building we had gone to was closed. It was the older building of the hotel; during the boom they had built a new block, and now it was only that block that was open.
    A number of young men—the hotel taxi drivers, to whom the cars outside belonged—were sitting idly together in one corner of the lobby, near the desk. Away from that corner the lobby was empty. In the middle of the floor there was a very large patterned carpet; the chairs arranged about it appeared to await a crowd. There were glass walls on two sides. On one side was the courtyard, with the dusty shrubs and pines and the parked hotel taxis; on the other side, going up to the hotel wall, was a small paved pool area, untenanted, glaring in the light, with metal chairs stacked up below an open shed.
    The room to which I was taken up was of a