Just before the revolution in 1979, Kapu?ciński noted that among the Iranians’ fiercest complaints were those directed at the thousands of foreign servicemen on their soil, all of them, especially Americans, operating with full diplomatic immunity. The Ayatollah Khomeini said, in one of his most famous speeches, “Our dignity has been trampled underfoot … If some American’s servant, some American’s cook, assassinates your marja in the middle of the bazaar, or runs over him, the Iranian police may not arrest him. Even if the Shah himself were to run over a dog belonging to an American, he would be prosecuted. But if an American’s cook runs over the Shah, the head of state, no one will have the right to interfere with him.” America and NATO had this diplomatic immunity arrangement in many countries, including Turkey, and it was deeply insulting to local people. The Shah’s “Great Civilization” was for many Iranians another grand humiliation.
Living under such a dictatorship, with the secret police and an army of informants watching one’s every move, Iranians found in the mosque a kind of sanctuary. The forceful and accelerated push for modernization amplified the power of the mosque. West-loving Turks feared that Turkey would become Iran under Erdo?an, but whenever I asked if they knew about the horrors of the Shah’s era, they didn’t believe me: “But it was modern.” “It looked so much more Western.” “Women didn’t have to cover.” All they could see, somewhat understandably, was visual evidence that a country could regress on women’s rights. But Kapu?ciński saw this:
The Iranian who has been harassed at work, who encounters only grumpy bureaucrats looking for bribes, who is everywhere spied on by the police, comes to the mosque to find balance and calm, to recover his dignity. Here no one hurries him or calls him names. Hierarchies disappear, all are equal, all are brothers, and—because the mosque is also a place of conversation and dialogue—a man can speak his mind, grumble, and listen to what others have to say. What a relief it is, how much everyone needs it. This is why, as the dictatorship turns the screws and an ever more oppressive silence clouds the streets and workplaces, the mosque fills more and more with people and the hum of voices. Not all those who come here are fervent Muslims, not all are drawn by a sudden wave of devotion—they come because they want to breathe, because they want to feel like people.
If the Shah represented modernity to the Americans, his downfall to them was, according to the Palestinian intellectual Edward Said, a “casualty to what was looked upon as medieval fanaticism and religiosity.” The Ayatollah Khomeini was just that medieval figure.
But within this paradigm, what were the Americans? During the Iranian hostage crisis of 1979 and 1980, in which fifty-two Americans were held captive at the U.S. embassy for 444 days, President Jimmy Carter pleaded with a French lawyer working for the Iranians: “You understand that these are Americans. These are innocents.” The French lawyer recalled:
I said to him, yes, Mr. President, I understand that you say they are innocent. But I believe you have to understand that for the Iranians they aren’t innocent. Even if personally none of them has committed an act, they are not innocent because they are diplomats who represent a country that has done a number of things in Iran …
But to Carter, as Said explains, “Americans were by definition innocent and in a sense outside history.”
Some years after my Mississippi trips, I visited Iran as a tourist. In Tehran, I went to the SAVAK museum, which features in its exhibits the forms of torture and murder once devised and carried out between those very walls. Dummy models of Iranians are displayed: deranged-looking prisoners marching with right hands on shoulders in front of them; bloodied and scarred plastic faces of men in isolation cells; crazed-seeming figures with arms contorted behind their backs; enormously muscled prison guards administering electric shocks; naked, whipped, bloodied, wounded plastic dummies hanging from the walls. Over the loudspeakers, screams echoed through the halls. There was what appeared to be blood on the walls, and it was hot and musty inside. It went on and on, room after room of reenactments of torture, death, bloodletting: pouring hot water and sticking broken glass in the rectum, pulling out fingernails and teeth, beating people with copper whips, pinning them down on scalding bedsprings. There were helmets that magnified one’s own screams, so that when an Iranian was being tortured all he heard was his own endless terror. The SAVAK museum had all the aesthetic and olfactory details of a haunted house—it smelled in fact like the inside of a rubber Halloween mask—which made the walls filled with the photos of all of its prisoners, men and women, religious and leftist, all the more powerful. A special showcase had been done for the jails of prominent Iranian dissidents; in a corner cell sat a weak but defiant-looking plastic dummy of the Ayatollah Khamenei.
The tour guides, recognizing that my friend and I were Americans, wanted us to know, judging by how many times they said it, that SAVAK had been supported by the United States, that in fact the techniques were taught to SAVAK by the Americans. (There was no mention of the current regime’s ugly record of torture.) I was feeling faint, my coat and head scarf suffocating me, but I could hardly cut through the line—what if I offended the memory of the Ayatollah and drew attention to myself, the callous American, who didn’t care about what we had done to the people of this country? The man leading the tour made eye contact with me with a sense of urgency.
When I told this story recently to a wealthy Turkish journalist in her seventies, a real grande dame, she said to me, smiling, with a good dose of condescension and anger: “I hate to tell you this, but your CIA taught our generals their torture techniques as well.” She was referring to Turkey’s 1980 coup.
To the Iranians, “modernity” had meant Americans on their soil, billions of dollars in weapons, dictatorship and poverty, the SAVAK museum. In the region, “modernization” is, according to Said, “connected in the popular mind with foolish spending, unnecessary gadgetry and armaments, corrupt rulers, and brutal United States intervention in the affairs of small, weak countries.” Yet to this day, when a journalist like myself arrives in a foreign country, modernity is the measurement through which all standards of “success” or goodness are judged, and the rejection of modernity by men such as the Iranian ayatollahs or those in al-Qaida or in the Islamic State is reviled as barbarism and backwardness, with complete disconnection from what modernization projects actually meant to that country’s hapless subjects. Kapu?ciński seemed to have been writing about the imperial bloodlust of the Islamic State when he said almost forty years ago, of revolutionary Iran: “A nation trampled by despotism, degraded, forced into the role of an object, seeks shelter, seeks a place where it can dig itself in, wall itself off, be itself … This is why the gradual rebirth of old customs, belief, and symbols occurs under the lid of every dictatorship—in opposition to, against the will of the dictatorship. The old acquires a new sense, a new and provocative meaning.”