Among the Believers Read Online Free PDF

good size, with sturdy wooden furniture, and with wood panelling three or four feet up the side walls. The glass wall at the end faced North Tehran; a glass door opened onto a balcony. But the air-conditioning duct was leaking through its exhaust grille, and the blue carpet tiling in the vestibule was sodden and stained.
    The hotel man—it was hard, in the idleness of the hotel, to attachthe professional status of “boy” to him, though he wore the uniform—smiled and pointed to the floor above and said, “Bathroom,” as though explanation was all that was required. The man he sent up spoke about condensation; he made the drips seem normal, even necessary. And then—explanations abruptly abandoned—I was given another room.
    It was furnished like the first and had the same view. On the television set here, though, there was a white card, folded down the middle and standing upright. It gave the week’s programmes on the “international,” English-language service of Iranian television. The service had long been suspended. The card was six months old. The revolution had come suddenly to this hotel.
    It was Ramadan, the Muslim fasting month; it was Friday, the sabbath; and it was an election day. Tehran was unusually quiet, but I didn’t know that; and when in the afternoon I went walking I felt I was in a city where a calamity had occurred. The shops in the main streets were closed and protected by steel gates. Signs on every floor shrieked the names of imported things—Seiko, Citizen, Rolex, Mary Quant of Chelsea, Aiwa—and on that closed afternoon they were like names from Tehran’s past.
    The pavements were broken. Many shop signs were broken or had lost some of their raised letters. Dust and grime were so general, and on illuminated signs looked so much like the effect of smoke, that buildings that had been burnt out in old fires did not immediately catch the eye. Building work seemed to have been suspended; rubble heaps and gravel heaps looked old, settled.
    On the walls were posters of the revolution, and in the pavement kiosks there were magazines of the revolution. The cover of one had a composite photograph of the Shah as a bathing beauty: the head of the Shah attached to the body of a woman in a bikini—but the bikini had been brushed over with a broad stroke of black, not to offend modesty. In another caricature the Shah, jacketed, his tie slackened, sat on a lavatory seat with his trousers down, and with a Tommy gun in his hand. A suitcase beside him was labelled
To Israel
and
Bahama;
an open canvas bag showed a bottle of whisky and a copy of
Time
magazine.
    Young men in tight, open-necked shirts dawdled on the broken pavements. They were handsome men of a clear racial type, small, broad-shouldered, narrow-waisted. They were working men of peasantantecedents, and there was some little air of vanity and danger about them that afternoon: they must have been keyed up by the communal Friday prayers. In their clothes, and especially their shirts, there was that touch of flashiness which—going by what I had seen in India—I associated with people who had just emerged from traditional ways and now possessed the idea that, in clothes as in other things, they could choose for themselves.
    The afternoon cars and motorcycles went by, driven in the Iranian way. I saw two collisions. One shop had changed its name. It was now Our Fried Chicken, no longer the chicken of Kentucky, and the figure of the Southern colonel had been fudged into something quite meaningless (except to those who remembered the colonel). Revolutionary Guards, young men with guns, soon ceased to be surprising; they were part of the revolutionary sabbath scene. There were crowds outside the cinemas; and, Ramadan though it was, people were buying pistachio nuts and sweets from the
confiseries
—so called—that were open.
    Far to the north, at the end of a long avenue of plane trees, an avenue laid out by the Shah’s father, was the Royal