Children of Paradise by Laura Secor

true that Amirentezam had had contact with the American embassy, but it was entirely in line with his duties and authorized by the prime minister.
    “If anyone has to be tried,” Bazargan told the court, “it should be myself.”
    In the postrevolutionary tumult, Iran’s counterintelligence apparatus had been in disarray, so Bazargan had dispatched men to the embassies of both the United States and the Soviet Union to ask each superpower to supply intelligence about the other. “The Americans gave us plenty of information,” said Bazargan, mainly about Iraqi troop movements near the Iranian border and internal affairs in Afghanistan. “The Soviets gave usnothing.” (The Soviets, it would turn out, were talking not to Bazargan’s government but to the clerics.)
    The Amirentezam trial became a battle of the newspapers, with the vast publicity machine of the regime continuing to excoriate the former official as a spy for the imperialists, a traitor whose crimes were punishable by death, and Bazargan’s small newspaper, Mizan , publishing detailed accounts of Amirentezam’s courtroom objections. The accused had not seen the documents being used against him, nor had they been translated into Persian for the public to know what they contained. The indictment against Amirentezam was published in its entirety by the state media, but Bazargan’s and Amirentezam’s courtroom statements were expunged from the published record. Mizan reported that a frustrated Amirentezam told the court, “They have turned me into a devil . . . and you must know that here I have been referred to as an enemy of God, the Prophet, the Imam and Iran . . . They are lies and there is no document to support them. Let me defend myself.”
    Bazargan’s rhetoric grew even hotter. He called the radical clerics “opportunists and criminals” who had “no conscience,” and he declared, “The time has come when each of us must publicly pronounce his decision to do all he can, with the help of Allah, to redeem the country from this holocaust.”
    The editor of Mizan was arrested, the newspaper permanently shuttered on June 7, scant days before Amirentezam was sentenced to life imprisonment for espionage. Amirentezam would go on to serve twenty-seven years—longer than any other Iranian political prisoner and as long as Nelson Mandela. His smuggled letters and memoirs would provide vivid testimony to the conditions in Iranian prisons over the course of three decades, and his story would inspire some members of a generation not yet born when he first entered Evin.
    The tale of Iran’s movement for liberal reform ought to begin with Bazargan, but it does not. The men who would become the reform movement’s protagonists, its ideologues, its adherents, and even its bureaucratsbehind the scenes were Bazargan’s antagonists. They had no interest in the moderate, technocratic, liberal strain of revolutionary thought. Rather, they were Shariati’s children, utopian, ecstatic, extreme. They believed in the Shiism of Ali, in universal social justice and emancipation through Islam. Most aligned themselves with the radical clerics, Khomeini, and the Islamic Republican Party, even as these forces consolidated single-party rule. They little imagined that one day they and their friends would find themselves in shoes that looked suspiciously like Bazargan’s, or that some of their own children would look past them for wisdom, to men like Amirentezam.

  THREE  
    T HE P ERIOD OF C ONSTANT C ONTEMPLATION

    M OSTAFA R OKHSEFAT’S MEMORY always returns to a scene that is inexplicable to him in retrospect. He is at a bookstore in front of the University of Tehran. The revolutionary hour approaches. He is an undergraduate student, active against the shah, affiliated with the militant Islamist left. He sees another young man there, also an activist, a member of the armed opposition. In those days the militants survived on the prudence of their silence.