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Shiraz. Chapter 9
Califates of Glass and Code
27 Azar 1376 (December 18, 1997)
Winter in Isfahan greeted them with a cold, piercing clarity. The sky was high and pale, and the air, free of summer dust, felt as fragile as thin glass. On the train, her father barely spoke. He sat engrossed in his papers—now no longer just a collection of his uncle’s clippings, but a thick folder filled with his own neat handwriting, full of diagrams and cross-references. He was no longer looking for refutations. He was looking for confirmations.
“Look,” he said to Roxana, pointing to one of the diagrams. “Javad traces a connection from the Knights Templar through the Masons to modern financial groups. At first, it seems like madness. But if you think about it… The Order of the Knights Templar was like the first transnational corporation. They had branches all over Europe, their own banking system, a fleet. They were richer than kings.”
“And that’s precisely why they were destroyed,” Roxana noted. “Not for heresy, but for money.”
“Exactly. Now look at modern companies. They are also richer than states. And also accountable to no one but themselves.”
Javad met them in Isfahan. He looked pale but animated, as if being close to the solution was giving him the strength to fight his illness.
“Hossein sent a gift for the future student,” he said, handing Zahra a package.
Inside was a paperback book. Une brève histoire de la chimie—Isaac Asimov’s A Short History of Chemistry. In French.
“Your uncle said you wanted to learn a beautiful language,” Javad smirked. “Here is the beauty of science in the language of revolutions.”
Zahra took the book, feeling its weight—not just physical, but symbolic. Asimov, an American science fiction writer of Jewish descent, writing about science. In French. A gift from her carpet-merchant uncle, via her paranoid uncle. It was their whole world in a single object.
The Isfahan University of Technology was unlike either the old University of Tehran or the crystalline Sharif. It looked new. Too new. Built from scratch, it still smelled of paint and concrete in places, and its architecture had a sense of scale, of ambition. This was not just a training ground. It was an incubator for the future.
At the conference for Unification Day, two worlds mingled. Respected imams in turbans walked the corridors alongside young, Western-dressed professors with laptops in hand. They nodded politely to each other, but it was clear they spoke different languages, even when uttering the same words in Farsi.
“Look at them,” Javad said quietly to Ali. “Do you see the contradiction? The imams speak of eternal truths. The professors, of progress. But what if it’s not a contradiction, but a synthesis? What if the universities are the new madrasas, with some new religion, as yet unknown to us?”
After the official part, they met in the cafeteria with old acquaintances—the theologian Morteza Tabrizi and Colonel Hashemi from the IRGC.
“The world is changing,” Tabrizi said, stirring sugar in his tea. “Look at the West. General Electric, Shell, Microsoft, Exxon—these corporations effectively rule the world. Desert Storm—the Americans went to war not for Kuwait’s freedom, but for oil for Exxon and Shell.”
“But that’s changing,” Hashemi interjected. “Microsoft doesn’t produce oil, it doesn’t extract resources. They produce… what? Programs? Ideas? Code? And they’ve already become one of the most valuable companies in the world. Bill Gates is richer than many states.”
“There!” Javad grew animated. “Tech companies don’t need wars for resources. They will fight for brains. For knowledge. For data. And in that knowledge, there will be no room for God.”
Ali nodded thoughtfully.
“Corporations as new caliphates… An interesting thought. The Chief Executive Officer, the CEO, is the new caliph. He is not elected. He is appointed by a council of initiates—the shareholders. And CEOs run their empires more effectively than elected presidents run countries. Look at Khatami. Seventy percent elected him, and he can’t pass a single reform. And Gates? No one elected him, but he is changing the world.”
“Maybe that’s the plan?” Javad picked up. “The West realized that direct secularization doesn’t work in the Islamic world. So they support weak leaders like Khatami. Through an indecisive president, they want to implement their model here. A model of ‘enlightened government’ that will actually be run not by the people, but by efficient managers, technocrats. And the universities, built in their image, will become their training grounds.”
“But efficiency is not always a virtue,” Roxana intervened, having listened in silence until then. “What will happen to those who are inefficient? The disabled, the sick, the elderly? If a state thinks only of efficiency, it will turn into a corporation. And a corporation gets rid of unprofitable assets.”
“Roxana is right,” Colonel Hashemi unexpectedly supported her. “Islam teaches mercy. Care for the weak. That is our strength, not our weakness.”
“Mercy is a luxury only the strong can afford,” Tabrizi countered. “First, we must become strong.”
“And Zahra?” Javad asked, turning to his niece. “You will enter this world of universities and corporations. How will you keep your faith?”
Zahra looked at him, then at her father.
“Papa taught me to look for God in numbers. Maybe I will find Him in formulas, too?”
“Don’t worry about her,” Ali said with a smile, placing a hand on his daughter’s shoulder. “She’s too smart to fall for simple temptations. And besides, she was raised by a theologian, not a merchant.”
But there was anxiety in his voice. As if he could see a future where his daughter would have to choose between her father’s faith and the world’s knowledge.
Isfahan in winter, snow on the mosque domes like powdered sugar on Eastern sweets, and we are driving through the desert, which sleeps under patches of a white blanket, and Papa is laying out his papers, like laying out Tarot cards, trying to read the future, but the future is already written, we just don’t know how to read it, or don’t want to, because knowing the future is a curse, not a blessing.
Asimov in French, A Short History of Chemistry, and I thought: why short? How can you briefly tell the story of how man learned to turn one substance into another, how Chinese alchemists searched for the elixir of immortality and found gunpowder, how Marie Curie searched for radium and found death from radiation, how chemistry gave us medicines and poisons, plastic and napalm, how it changed the world more than all the revolutions and wars?
Imams and professors at the same table, black turbans and European ties, and it’s like a meeting of two eras, speaking different languages but about the same thing—power over minds, only the imams appeal to eternity, and the professors to progress, but what is progress, if not movement toward an unknown goal that we invent as we go?
General Electric, Shell, Microsoft, Exxon—the names of the new gods the world worships, and each has its own domain: GE—electricity, Shell—oil, Microsoft—information, and they divide the world as the Olympian gods divided the sky, the earth, and the underworld, only now it’s not mythology, but economics, but isn’t economics a new mythology, where the invisible hand of the market has replaced the finger of fate?
CEOs as caliphs, and I imagined Bill Gates in a turban, sitting on a throne of computers, and it’s funny, but not very, because power is the same everywhere, it just changes its clothes, and maybe Uncle is right, and soon there will be no difference between a president and a director, between a state and a corporation, between a citizen and an employee.
Mama talked about the sick and disabled, and I thought: what if the corporate caliphates don’t fight dissenters? It’s much easier, and cheaper, to let them build their own state—socialist, communist, whatever, let them live in their own preserve, like Native Americans on reservations, like the Amish in Pennsylvania, like hippies in communes, as long as they don’t interfere with the main flow, don’t reduce the overall efficiency.
And maybe that’s not so bad? A world divided not by nationality or religion, but by choice: if you want efficiency, go to a corporation; if you want justice, go to a commune; if you want faith, go to a community of believers, and everyone will find their place, their niche, their heaven or hell, depending on what they consider heaven and what they consider hell.
But Papa says I’m too smart, and that he raised me, a theologian, not a merchant, and I think: but is intelligence a defense? Don’t the smartest people make the most terrible mistakes? And will being raised by a theologian protect me from the temptations of science, from the beauty of formulas, from the elegance of equations that describe the world without any need for God?
I will find Him in formulas, I said, but what if formulas are the language God uses to explain His absence? What if E=mc² is not a revelation, but a farewell note: “I have given you the laws; now, you’re on your own”?
Efficiency versus mercy, progress versus tradition, knowledge versus faith, and we are sitting in the cafeteria of the Isfahan university, and I know that in a few years I will be sitting here again, but as a student, and I will study physics, and I will start a family, and I will work with uranium, and one day I will be interrogated about how I knew about the death of a man who is not yet at this table, Rustam, who will appear in my life later, much later, the way a radioactive isotope appears—unseen, but inevitably changing everything around it.