In the Rose Garden of the Martyrs. Christopher de Bellaigue

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