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6 Stories of Other Lives: Documentaries Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions among the Converted Peoples Pakistan On his second visit to Iran, Naipaul saw for the ¤rst time historic Isfahan, now again open to tourists. He was familiar with the magni¤cent seventeenthcentury imperial Moghul paintings that presented the emperor Jehangir (1605– 27) with images of his great rival Shah Abbas (1587–1629). For Jehangir, the India of his empire and the Shah’s Persia were by far the most important powers on the globe, their wealth and might re®ected in the splendor of their cities. He was not happy to see what to Naipaul, many centuries later, still appeared the “breathtaking con¤dence and inventiveness” of Isfahan’s architecture.1 In both cases cultural ®owering was of short duration, but the ravages of time were somewhat mitigated by the British colonial administration in India that helped to protect its great historic monuments from oblivion and decay—the fate of much of historic Iranian architecture. Colonial rule, a complex, differentiated experience, has had its positive aspects in certain situations in certain areas of India at certain periods. Despite the irritations and frictions caused by it, the presence of Western educational and political institutions contributed to the development of Indian reformist, democratic politics. Without it, Iran’s attempts at political modernization have met with many more obstacles, partly due to the steadily growing in®uence of conservative Islam through the migrations since the 1940s of the Iranian rural poor to the cities, where they soon outnumbered the more secular urban population. Retaining their Muslim identity , their sons gained in®uence as businessmen and civil servants in rapidly and eclectically modernizing Iran, but unlike the small Western educated old urban elites that supported the Shah, these sons also tended to assimilate Marxism into their Islam. When they became revolutionary leaders, their links with the villages and small towns provided the revolutionary masses, and the Shah’s despotic resistance to the development of political institutions helped the growth of Islamic organizations that criticized his regime for its un-Islamic social and political policies. Naipaul’s host in Isfahan, a European-educated, retired diplomat, was deeply divided over the issue of the revolution and the war and like many former supporters of the Shah was disaffected but still nationalist. His haunting stories about the war showed what it had done to the children who willingly sacri¤ced themselves, yet he also “knew in his bones” that this terrible, inconclusive war “had to be fought” to stave off the Iraqis (p. 236). Khomeini’s reviving of the old Arab-Iranian confrontation could be seen as a necessary creation of Iranian nationalism. Calling himself “Victor of Ghadessiah,” Saddam Hussein exploited the memory of the disastrous Persian defeat at the hands of the Arabs in a.d. 637, the beginning of the Muslim invasion—a memory the Shah had sought to neutralize by claiming for Iran the greatness of the pre-Islamic Persian past to establish a Western (progressive) cultural continuity. Like his civilized host, Naipaul thinks the collective memory of Persian defeat destructive to contemporary Iran because it obscures a positive historical memory of the successes of Shah Abbas’s Persia (p. 234). Under his rule order was established in Persia, and its dominions reached from the Tigris to the Indus . He distinguished himself not only by his military power and high-cultural achievements, but also by his progressive administrative reforms and support of commerce through the building of highways and bridges and his openness to foreigners, especially Christians. In the terms of his time, he was an extraordinarily successful and in many ways enlightened ruler. The issue here is not to prove or disprove a causal connection between the memory of the mythical Persian defeat in battle and the historical decline of Abbas’s stabilized, “modernized ” Persia. Myths have often been more powerful than historical memories, and their connection in this case might illuminate the centrality of battle in Islamic fundamentalism, its energizing thought-image and bloody reality. In order to remake himself in the absolutist terms of the pure faith that promises the metahuman future of paradise, the convert has to turn away completely from the person he has become over time in contacts with others. The man-children, going to battle intoxicated by this promise, wearing the key to paradise around their necks, are a deeply unsettling proof of the power of pure faith, converts to its radicalism. Since the believer’s reinvention...

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