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Shiraz. Chapter 6
The Garden of Forking Paths
24 Khordad 1376 (June 14, 1997)
The universities in summer were like abandoned cities, like sets for a play that had already been performed. The students had left, and in the long, echoing corridors, silence reigned, broken only by the hum of the lamps and the footsteps of a few rare professors. It was the perfect atmosphere to discern not the people, but the very essence, the architecture of these two worlds.
The empty corridors and echoing auditoriums of the University of Tehran, where the sound of footsteps bounced off the walls, created the illusion of invisible companions. The June sun pierced through the high windows, painting geometric patterns on the floor—parallelograms of light in which dust motes danced, like atoms in Brownian motion.
They were met by Professor Morteza Ahmadzadeh, an old friend of Zahra’s father. Thin, with a gray Vandyke beard and glasses with thick lenses, he looked like a character from a Borges story—a librarian lost in his own library.
“Ali-jan, welcome to the temple of knowledge, temporarily abandoned by its parishioners,” he said, shaking the father’s hand. “The summer holidays turn the university into an ideal place for reflection. No one disturbs your thinking.”
They walked down the corridors of the humanities faculty, and the professor spoke, measuredly, as if delivering a lecture to an invisible audience:
“Yes, the youth seem to have awakened. They read everything. They form clubs, they put out wall newspapers. They speak of Khatami as a messiah. The president has opened the floodgates for them, and ideas have poured through. They read everything—Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze. But…” he lowered his voice, “strange things are appearing, too.”
“What kind of things?” Ali asked.
“Some new movements. Semi-secret societies. They discuss not politics, but… metaphysics. They speak of ‘tradition,’ but not in our Islamic sense. Of ‘castes,’ of a ‘hierarchy of the spirit.’ They quote Europeans I’ve never even heard of. Guénon, Evola. One of my students brought me their manifesto. You know what it looked like? The charter of a Masonic lodge, only without the compass and apron. Another found a connection between Sufi orders and the European Templars. They are searching for some primal tradition, a primordial wisdom that supposedly underlies all religions. It’s very alarming.”
“Is this the influence of Guénon?” Ali asked. “The French traditionalist?”
“His, too. But it’s broader. They are creating their own synthesis—they take Islamic esotericism, add Western philosophy, and season it with ancient Persian mysticism. The result is… a cocktail. A dangerous cocktail, because it looks like a return to the roots, but in reality, it is a path to nowhere. To an imaginary past that never existed.”
Sharif University of Technology was different. It was not a garden, but a crystal. The perfect geometry of glass and concrete buildings, straight lines, precise logic. There was no room for ambiguity here. They were met by Dr. Amini, an acquaintance of Uncle Javad, a specialist in cybernetics, a man with eyes as cold as a monitor screen.
Short, energetic, with eyes that never rested in one place, he spoke quickly, as if afraid of being interrupted:
“Welcome to the forge of Iranian technocracy! Here, we don’t philosophize—we create. Computers, programs, algorithms. The future belongs to digital technologies, and we must not fall behind.”
He led them to a computer lab. Rows of monitors stared with blind eyes.
“Do you know what’s happening in America right now? They are creating social networks. Classmates.com—where people find their old classmates online. Can you imagine? Millions of people voluntarily sharing information about themselves, posting photos, sharing their thoughts. It’s an ideal tool!”
“A tool for what?” Roxana asked.
“For everything! For control, for influence, for shaping public opinion. In the past, intelligence agencies had to spend years building a dossier on a person. Now, he tells you everything himself. And not only tells—he shows his connections, friends, interests. It’s a revolution in the understanding of society.”
Ali listened attentively. As a theologian, he understood the world of numbers, but not the digital world.
“And games,” Amini continued. “Computer games. They teach strategy, but they also program behavior. A child playing a war game on a screen gets used to violence. Or, conversely, learns to resolve conflicts. It all depends on who creates the game and for what purpose.”
“By the way,” he added, turning to Zahra, “why don’t you consider Isfahan? It has an excellent university, especially the faculty of physics and technology. And…” he lowered his voice, “there are great prospects there. Very great. The country is investing serious resources in Isfahan. Scientific projects of national importance.”
“Isfahan!” she exclaimed. “That’s a wonderful idea! It’s right in the middle, between Shiraz and Tehran. Zahra will be equidistant from us and from her restless uncles. A perfect point of equilibrium.”
She said it half-jokingly, but Zahra saw a flicker of interest in her father’s eyes. A perfect point of equilibrium. A formula that could reconcile two worlds.
“The golden mean,” Ali smiled. “As in Greek philosophy.”
The universities are like gardens of forking paths, each path leading to its own future, and you don’t know where you’ll end up until you’ve walked the whole way, but by then it’s too late to go back and choose another path, and I walk through the empty corridors of the University of Tehran, where the professor talks about students searching for a primordial tradition, a primal wisdom, and I think: what if they’re right? What if there really is a knowledge older than all religions, older than all civilizations, encrypted in patterns, in numbers, in ratios?
Classmates.com, and uncle’s friend says people are telling everything about themselves, voluntary surveillance, Bentham’s panopticon, where the prisoners don’t know if they’re being watched or not, so they behave as if they are always being watched, but now we are both the prisoners and the wardens, we watch each other and ourselves, and this is the future that will come, I know, I can see my daughters on Instagram and TikTok, and the whole world watches the whole world, and no one can hide, not even in Iran, not even under a chador.
Social networks are more powerful than states; back then, in that computer lab, looking at the dead monitors, I didn’t know it yet, but now I know: one day they will come to life and swallow us all, and states will fight not with armies but with likes, not with cannons but with memes, and the winner will be the one who creates the most viral content, the most contagious idea, and maybe Uncle Javad was right, and it’s all part of a conspiracy, only it’s not a conspiracy of Masons, but of technology itself, which uses us for its own development.
Isfahan, Mama said, the perfect point of equilibrium, and I didn’t know then, not yet, that this phrase, thrown out casually as a joke, would define my entire life. That it would be in Isfahan, at this point of equilibrium, that I would meet Amirkhan, a young man with eyes that could see hidden patterns. That in Isfahan, this city of turquoise domes and ancient bridges, I would give birth to two daughters, Nasrin and Zeynab, my two vectors, the centrifugal and the centripetal. That in Isfahan, in a laboratory hidden from prying eyes, I would build a machine that could either save or destroy the world, and I myself would become this point of equilibrium between creation and destruction.
But back then, I didn’t know any of this; I was just a girl who loved numbers and was looking for her place in the world, and the world seemed like a vast garden with a thousand paths, and each one led somewhere, and I didn’t know that most of them led to a dead end, and some to an abyss, and only one, maybe, led home, but home is not a place, but a state, when you are at peace with yourself, and I was never at peace with myself, because there are too many contradictions in me, just as there are too many neutrons in uranium.