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Shiraz. Chapter 2
The Algebra of Defeat
6 Khordad 1376 (May 27, 1997)
The euphoria was almost palpable. It hung in the Shiraz air like the sweet pollen of blossoming acacia trees. Khatami’s victory was not just a victory. It was a miracle, a violation of the laws of political physics. Seventy percent. A number whispered in bazaars and university lecture halls. A number that meant the unseen, silent Iran had suddenly found its voice. Zahra’s mother, Roxana, walked around the house with a smile Zahra hadn’t seen in years. She put records of forbidden, pre-revolutionary music on the player, and the sounds of the violin seemed to heal old wounds in the walls of their home.
But a few days later, when Uncle Javad returned from Tehran, a different air entered the house. A cold one. Saturated with the smell of the capital’s anxiety.
Uncle Javad did not share in the general jubilation. He sat in the living room, drinking tea in small, nervous sips, and his eyes, usually full of an ironic sparkle, were like two dark, dry wells.
“Seventy percent. Twenty million votes,” he said, addressing Zahra’s father. “In Tehran, it’s a carnival. The youth are celebrating in the streets as if we’ve won a war. Women are pushing back their headscarves, revealing their hair. Music from tape recorders—Western music! They are not celebrating Khatami’s victory. They are celebrating the system’s defeat.”
“Don’t exaggerate, Javad,” Ali, Zahra’s father, gently countered. “The system has shown flexibility. The capacity for change. That is a sign of strength, not weakness. And the people… the people have made their choice. Allah gave them that right.”
“The people?” Uncle Javad scoffed. “The people are clay. The question is, who is the potter? Did you see how they rejoiced in the Western embassies? They were opening champagne. They are celebrating our weakness.”
He took a stack of newspapers from his briefcase and threw them on the carpet. Salam, Hamshahri. The headlines screamed of a “spring of freedom” and a “dialogue of civilizations.”
“Dialogue…” Javad hissed. “Do you remember how Gorbachev’s dialogue with the West ended? A great empire, our ‘Lesser Satan,’ fell to pieces in a few years. He spoke of ‘glasnost’ and ‘perestroika,’ and what he got was humiliation and poverty. He wanted to reform the system and became its gravedigger. And now the Soviet Union is not an adversary, but a humbled supplicant, the stepchild of the ‘Great Satan.’ They want to pull the same trick on us.”
“But we are not the Soviet Union,” Ali said. “We have faith.”
“Faith is a fortress. But they are not going to storm it. They are going to bribe the guards and open the gates from within. They are offering us a temptation—democracy. As if it were a panacea for all ills.”
“Democracy is better than the Shah’s tyranny,” the father noted.
“Undoubtedly. But it has its own poisons,” Uncle Javad leaned forward, his voice becoming quieter, more confidential. “Have you read Carlyle? An Englishman, nineteenth century. He said that history is not moved by the masses, not by parliaments. It is moved by heroes. Exceptional individuals. Prophets, poets, conquerors. Napoleon. He spoke of a ‘cult of heroes.’ That one man, endowed with will and genius, can change the world, fulfilling a divine destiny. He rises above the crowd, above its petty interests.”
“On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and The Heroic in History,” Ali nodded. “Strange that you would bring up a British reactionary.”
“Not a reactionary. A visionary. He understood the main thing: democracy is the rule of mediocrity. The crowd will never choose the best. It will choose the one who promises what it wants to hear.”
“And where did Napoleon lead France?” Roxana asked softly. “To Waterloo. And Cromwell? To the restoration of the monarchy. Carlyle’s heroes all ended in ruin.”
“But they changed the world! The West itself!” Javad raised his voice. “And what will Khatami change? He speaks of a ‘dialogue of civilizations.’ Dialogue! With those who want to destroy us! It’s as if a sheep proposed to a wolf that they discuss the dinner menu.”
He looked at Roxana.
“We overthrew the Shah because he imagined himself such a hero, but he did not have God behind him. But what if they offer us a new ‘hero’? Charismatic, smiling, saying all the right words. And the people, tired of hardships, will follow him, like the children after the Pied Piper of Hamelin. And this hero will lead us not to paradise, but to a new, even more sophisticated form of slavery. Slavery to the West.”
“I agree! Democracy is, of course, better than the Shah’s regime we grew up under,” Ali said calmly. “But you are right about one thing—it can be dangerous. Especially when people vote with their hearts and not their heads.”
“There!” Javad grew animated. “That’s exactly what I’m trying to explain. Khatami is a Trojan horse. The West celebrated his victory more than the Iranians themselves. The BBC, CNN—they’re all trumpeting a ‘new era.’ Why? What do they know that we don’t?”
“Maybe they’re just happy that the world is becoming a less dangerous place?” Roxana suggested.
Javad looked at her with pity.
“Sister, for them, the world will only be safe when there is no one left in it who can say ‘no’ to their order. Khatami is the first step. Then there will be a second, a third… And one day we will wake up in a country where daughters do not wear the hijab, sons do not know their prayers, and universities teach Darwin instead of the Quran.”
“You’re painting an apocalypse over an election,” Ali remarked. “Is our faith so weak that it cannot withstand the test of freedom?”
“Freedom…” Javad stood up and walked to the window, beyond which the pomegranate garden was in bloom. “You know what I realized in Tehran? There are two kinds of conspiracy. The overt one—when enemies come with weapons. And the covert one—when they come with ideas. The second is more dangerous. There is armor against bullets. Against ideas—there are only other ideas. But where do we get them, if the best minds are busy with ‘dialogue’?”
Zahra, sitting in the corner with her algebra textbook, looked up. She didn’t fully understand the meaning of the words, but she felt their weight. She saw the confidence on her father’s face give way to a shadow of doubt. Uncle Javad wasn’t arguing. He was sowing seeds. Seeds of fear.
I was doing my algebra homework, quadratic equations, x² + px + q = 0, and listening to Uncle Javad talk about percentages, seventy percent, and I thought: that’s 7/10, an irreducible fraction, just as what happened is irreducible, twenty million votes, 20,000,000, a number with seven zeros, like the seven circles of hell in Dante, whom I hadn’t read but I knew there were seven circles, because seven is a special number, seven days of the week, seven notes, seven colors of the rainbow, although in reality there are infinite colors, we just agreed to see seven.
Uncle was talking about Gorbachev, and I remembered his picture in an old newspaper, the birthmark on his forehead, like a map of a nonexistent country, and I thought: maybe all reformers are marked by something, some seal, like Cain, but what marked Khatami? His smile? His glasses? Or something invisible that only Uncle Javad could see?
Mother was smiling, and her smile was like an integral—it gathered all the small joys into one big one, and Father was serious, like a differential—he broke big questions into small parts to understand each one, but Uncle, Uncle was like the imaginary number i, the square root of negative one, impossible, but necessary to solve some equations.
Carlyle, they were talking about Carlyle, and I imagined an old Englishman with a beard, though I didn’t know what he looked like, but all old Englishmen in my imagination had beards, like Darwin, who couldn’t be taught in school, but I read about him in the encyclopedia, natural selection, survival of the fittest, but Uncle was talking about heroes who are stronger than the strongest, who change the rules of the game, like in chess, if a queen suddenly decides to move like a knight, which is impossible, but Napoleon did it, and Cromwell, and the Prophet, peace be upon him, but can they be put in the same category?
A Trojan horse, Uncle said “Trojan horse,” and I thought of a wooden horse full of soldiers, but how can a president be a horse? Or is the horse his smile, and the soldiers are the ideas hiding behind the smile, waiting for night to come out and open the city gates? But what city? Shiraz? Tehran? Or the city in our heads that we believe to be impregnable?
Seventy percent, I went back to that number, 0.7 as a decimal, 7×10⁻¹ in scientific notation, but why did it scare Uncle? In mathematics, 70% is a clear majority, it’s a consensus, it’s almost unanimity, but Uncle saw in it not unity, but a schism, as if 70% “for” meant there were invisible percentages “against,” who didn’t vote, didn’t show up, didn’t believe in the very possibility of choice.
The BBC was celebrating, CNN was celebrating, and I imagined people in suits somewhere in London and New York drinking champagne for Khatami’s victory, even though alcohol is haram, but they aren’t Muslims, they’re allowed, and maybe that’s the problem—they are happy about something we should be happy about ourselves, but why does their happiness scare Uncle more than their anger?
Father asked about faith and freedom, whether faith can withstand the test of freedom, and I thought: that’s like asking if ice can withstand the test of fire; it can, but it will cease to be ice, it will become water, then steam, then disappear, but is disappearance a defeat, or just a change of state?
I was solving a quadratic equation, and it had two roots, x₁ and x₂, two answers to one question, which exist simultaneously, and maybe Khatami was one root, and Nateq-Nouri the other, and they are both correct, just on different sides of zero, positive and negative, but when squared, they give the same result.