Children of Paradise by Laura Secor Page B

calling. To be recruited by someone of Hakimi’s stature was a great honor, but Mostafa balked. He made regular trips to Qom, less than two hours’ drive from Tehran, and he thrived on the vigor and abstraction of its intellectual life. But he did not think he wanted to be a cleric, and the more he hesitated, the more Hakimi insisted.
    With Hakimi, Mostafa was a man perpetually in arguments, frustrated, and seized with regrets. Hakimi mirrored Mostafa’s heat and idealism, but this affinity only heightened his anxiety and self-reproach. And Hakimi’s was not the only pull on Mostafa in those years. The Mojahedin had recently suffered a rancorous split. Some of its members turned to secular Marxism-Leninism, and they trained the attentions of their recruiters on Mostafa. Despite the unifying promise of Shariati’s Islamism, to be Shariati’s follower was to have a foot in each of two rapids coursing through a fervid landscape. There Mostafa stood.
    To be called for military service at that moment was almost a reprieve. In his barracks Mostafa read a book called Dialectic Conflict . It was a refutation of Marxism by an obscure young scholar named Abdolkarim Soroush who had found favor with Ayatollah Khomeini. In his book Soroush criticized dialectical reasoning as rigid, resistant to revision, andtoo abstract to yield insight about societies as they actually existed. Soroush professed humility about the limits of human knowledge, and a stubborn preference for the rational over the visionary.
    Clarity broke over Mostafa like a summer storm. Soroush dulled the lure of Marxism and cooled the fever Shariati once stirred. His authorial voice was the antithesis of Shariati’s or Hakimi’s—in fact, it was everything Mostafa thought he didn’t want. It was neither sublime nor enraging so much as it was restrained, analytical, and painstakingly precise. Soroush wrote about religion and politics—the very soul of history—but he wrote not like a guru but like a philosopher. For the first time Mostafa understood that his intensity did not thrive on a matching intensity. What it required was the balm of dispassionate logic. Because of Soroush, Mostafa forked from Shariati and the Mojahedin decisively toward Khomeini.
    At Khomeini’s victorious command, Mostafa walked off his base into the giddy final days of revolt. He was one of the millions of Iranians who showed up at Mehrabad Airport to greet Khomeini’s flight home. And he spent the early revolutionary years in sympathy with the radical clerics of the Revolutionary Council and velayat-e faqih . His utopia was in the making. He would not disrupt this by quarreling with its triumphant mainstream. But Soroush had planted seeds in his intellect that would flower in ways neither Mostafa, nor even Soroush, could foresee.
    The poetry circle Mostafa had joined in the late 1970s did not become the nucleus of the new Iranian literary scene the way he’d expected. Instead, it fractured, a microcosm of the revolutionary movement itself, its thirteen luminaries spanning the establishment and its adversaries. Some members, including Khamenei, had grown very powerful overnight. Others were Islamic radicals whose early influence was soon eclipsed, their parties fully outlawed by 1982. Mostafa, once the young acolyte in a circle of eminences, now groped through the wreckage of their alliances.
    The revolution still belonged to him, its certainties steadfast and gleaming. His dream was to strike the timbre of the revolution’s voice, to fix the colors and the symbols that would announce Iran as the birthplace of a modern, religious avant-garde. To nurture such an intellectual milieu,Mostafa believed, Iran’s revolution required an arts corps to match its corps of Revolutionary Guards.
    From the shards of the poetry circle, Mostafa chose his allies and began to build a network into which he ushered militant painters, poets, novelists, graphic designers, and filmmakers. The days were