Children of Paradise by Laura Secor Page A

SAVAK walked among them. They did not share their names or addresses even with one another. But that afternoon, with that particular young man, Mostafa introduced himself, and against every rule, every instinct of their movement, he and Hassan exchanged addresses. They would become literary collaborators and great friends until Hassan’s untimely death in an accident.
    Mostafa came from the Shariati wing of the revolutionary movement. Hosseiniyeh Ershad was the only place he knew where he could extinguish his thirst in all its complexity—for answers, for dignity, for pride. He was the fifth of seven sons of a carpet and lumber merchant at the Tehran bazaar. The family was comfortably middle-class yet traditional in its habits, its values, its Islam. They lived in one of Tehran’s most religious neighborhoods,called Maydan-e Khorasan, not far from the city-within-a-city that was the bazaar.
    Of the Rokhsefat boys, only Mostafa took an interest in the life of the mind. But the secular leftism that was fashionable among intellectuals of that day did not stir his passions, and Mostafa was a young man of strong feeling, quick to anger and to intimacy, unshielded by his formidable intellect from the searing heat of his emotions.
    The times—adolescence and the late 1970s—called for radicalism. Mostafa knew Mehdi Bazargan personally through neighborhood connections, but the Freedom Movement was too stodgy and moderate for Mostafa’s tastes. He preferred the charged lyricism of Shariati, the righteousness of Khomeini. To live in the prism of their words was to refuse to be subject, either to the shah or to the irreligious ideologies of elsewhere. Decades later, Mostafa would return to those texts and wonder how he had ignored, or even embraced, their invitation to tyranny.
    For all its luminary novelty, the Islamist movement lacked a literature, and it was that absence that Mostafa found himself discussing with Hassan on the afternoon of their unlikely bookstore encounter. Iran’s great novelists and poets were largely leftists. They disdained religion as the superstition of the peasantry, and they looked down on the literature of the Arab and Muslim world because of its religious content. Instead they looked to Russia for inspiration. Russian novels, banned under the shah, circulated furiously in Tehran’s underground press, distributed hand to hand, within white covers.
    Mostafa and his new friend dreamt of building an institution that would cultivate a rightfully modern, even avant-garde literary voice for the movement of Islamic radicals to which they belonged. They brought this idea to a poet they knew. The poet informed them that this association already existed in the form of a literary circle around a mid-ranking Mashhadi cleric named Ali Khamenei. The circle had thirteen prominent members. Mostafa and Hassan, instead of starting their own circle, orbited Khamenei’s.
    They met a charismatic and eccentric cleric during that time. Mohammad Reza Hakimi did not wear clerical robes or turbans. Instead, his baldhead glistened above its frenetic white fringe and wiry beard, and he dressed in long, loose, pajama-like shirts. Ferocious passions coursed through him and took root in those he taught, like electricity seeking the quickest route to the ground; he was given to poetic rhapsody and mystical visions, musical language and urgent persuasion. Hakimi had ties to nearly all the major clergymen of his time, including Khomeini and Khamenei. He was protégé, mentor, muse. There were grand ayatollahs who would lecture only if Hakimi was in the room to take down their words. Shariati made Hakimi his literary executor, with the exclusive power to posthumously edit his words.
    Hakimi drew close to Mostafa, in whom he saw potential for religious learning. Mostafa must come to Qom and take up Islamic study, Hakimi urged. Only by joining the clergy could Mostafa accomplish anything. It was not a choice; it was a necessity, a