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Shiraz. Chapter 7
The Formula of Fear
15 Shahrivar 1376 (September 6, 1997)
The summer was burning out, leaving behind a gray sky and air that smelled of dust and decay. The euphoria of the first months after the election had given way to a quiet, dull disappointment. Khatami spoke of freedom, but newspapers were still being shut down, and students who demanded change too loudly were summoned for “chats.” The opponents of reform, having recovered from the shock, began a slow, methodical counter-offensive. The reforms were stalling. The conservative clergy blocked the president’s initiatives. Newspapers that had just yesterday been singing hosannas to change were now cautious, weighing every word. The pendulum, having swung in one direction, was now inexorably moving back.
On that September day, Uncle Javad arrived without warning. He looked changed—thinner, with a feverish glint in his eyes. He explained that he had been in Tehran on official business. Ali greeted him with his usual hospitality, but Zahra noticed how her father was carefully studying his brother-in-law, as if seeing him for the first time.
They sat in the living room, and the conversation, which began with banalities about the weather and market prices, inevitably turned to politics.
“They think he’s weak. That they’ve outplayed him,” Uncle was saying to Zahra’s father. “They don’t understand that this is part of the plan. He’s deliberately showing weakness to lull our vigilance. Did you listen to his last speech at the university?”
“I read it,” Ali replied.
“Don’t read it. Listen! Look at the structure! He uses triads—thesis, antithesis, synthesis. Pure Hegel! And Hegel, as we know, was connected to the Illuminati through his friend Schelling. This has been documented!”
“Hegel himself didn’t write like that, Javad. But yes, arguing in three steps is convenient,” Ali remarked, not looking up from his book. “But it’s also documented that Hegel loved beer. Maybe Khatami is also a secret beer lover? That would explain his vague formulations.”
“Ali, I’m serious!” Javad leaned forward. “Look: he talks about a ‘dialogue of civilizations.’ Dialogue is two. Two sides. But which ones? The Islamic and the Western? That’s what we’re supposed to think. But what if there are three sides? Islam, the visible West, and some third force that pretends to be the West but is actually much older? The very ‘Order of Light’ you yourself mentioned.”
Javad spread photographs on the carpet. Zahra, sitting in the corner with her physics textbook, saw images of some buildings, people in strange clothes, symbols.
“Khatami lived in Germany. He studied philosophy. And what is modern Germany? It’s the center of European Freemasonry. They have the United Grand Lodges, which are thriving now. They have a museum of Freemasonry in Bayreuth! In the very same Bayreuth where Wagner built his festival theater for his mysteries! It’s all connected, Ali!”
“Hitler, when he came to power, banned Freemasonry,” Ali reminded him, putting his book aside. “He saw them as a threat. He was afraid of their ‘secret knowledge,’ their idea that the world should be ruled not by fuhrers elected by the people, but by initiates who possess the truth.”
“There!” Javad’s eyes shone with a feverish light. “You said it yourself! Hitler fought them because they were his competitors! He understood their danger. And you know what’s most ironic? The Nazis themselves came to power through elections! His party became the largest, and then came the decrees and repressions! Hitler used democracy to destroy democracy. They were fighting for the soul of Germany, for the soul of the West! And now they are coming for our soul.”
He fell silent, but the meaning was clear. Khatami was a Trojan horse. He had come through elections to destroy the system from within.
“Javad,” Ali leaned forward, and an uncharacteristic seriousness entered his voice, “do you really believe there’s a worldwide conspiracy? That a handful of men in aprons are running the world?”
“Not in aprons, Ali. In business suits. In academic robes. They’ve evolved. Adapted. They used to meet in basements; now they meet at international conferences. They used to transmit knowledge through symbols and rituals; now it’s through university programs and computer codes.”
At that moment, Roxana entered the room. She placed a tray with glasses of tea and a small bowl of figs on the table.
“Javad-agha,” she said quietly but firmly. “The only ancient force at work in this room right now is the power of caffeine in your blood. And nicotine in your lungs. Drink some tea with cardamom; it calms the nerves.”
She looked at her brother with such a mixture of love and pain that Zahra, watching the scene, felt a pang in her heart. Something was wrong. Not just with the world, but with her uncle himself.
We didn’t know then, or maybe only Mother knew, as a doctor, or maybe no one knew, that another, even more secret lodge had already taken root in Uncle Javad’s body, cancer cells, which were also building their own state, their own empire, following their own inscrutable plan. We didn’t know that his long business trips to Tehran were not only meetings at the ministry but also visits to the oncology center, that his sleepless nights were not only thoughts of conspiracies but also pain, and his feverish energy was not only an obsession with an idea but also chemistry, powerful drugs that fought the disease but also burned the soul, making the shadows thicker and the fears more real.
Cancer, the constellation Cancer, and Uncle was born in July, under the sign of Cancer, and he would die of cancer, an irony of fate or a pattern, and I thought: maybe we all carry the seeds of our death within us, just as we carry in our DNA the information about our eye color and the shape of our nose, and maybe Uncle’s obsession with conspiracies is also a cancer, a mental cancer that grows and devours his mind, and soon there will be nothing left but paranoia, as pure as a crystal, as a formula.
Secret knowledge, he talks about secret knowledge… But what if all knowledge is secret? What if E=mc² is also a Masonic formula, an encrypted message about how to turn matter into energy, into light, and Einstein was an initiate, and Oppenheimer, who created the bomb and then quoted the Bhagavad Gita: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds,” and that too is a secret knowledge, coming from India, where the Aryans, our ancestors or not, wrote the Vedas thousands of years before the Quran.
Hegel and beer, Papa was joking, but Hegel wrote about the world spirit, Weltgeist, which moves through history, using people and nations as its instruments, and maybe the Masons are agents of the world spirit, or they think they are, but in reality, the spirit is using them, just as cancer uses the body’s cells, forcing them to divide and divide until the body dies, but the cancer dies with it, the paradox of the parasite that kills its host.
Bayreuth, the museum of Freemasonry, and I imagined that city, where Wagner wrote his operas about German gods and heroes—that’s what Uncle was talking about. Wagner also tried to create a new elite, a new aristocracy of the spirit, based on myth. And Hitler loved Wagner. All these people—Hitler, Wagner, Hegel, the Masons, Uncle Javad—they were all searching for the same thing. They were looking for a formula that would explain the world and give them the right to remake it. They were alchemists, trying to turn the chaos of history into the gold of order.
And Mama just makes tea. And maybe in that simple act—taking the teapot, adding the tea leaves, adding the cardamom—there was more wisdom than in all their theories. Because it was an act not to remake the world, but to make it, for a moment, a little warmer and cozier. And maybe that is the only “secret knowledge” that matters.