DREAMING OF BAGHDAD.(Iran)

Tehran is an enormous city, and the roads tangled through and around it are filled with cars barrelling along at high speeds, straddling dividing lines, and running red lights. The plethora of automobiles, which are fuelled by gas sold at government-subsidized prices, makes for hellish smog and traffic jams. After a particularly nasty crash recently--one that required a helicopter rescue squad--cars were backed up for four miles. Young boys darted among them, hawking newspapers and bouquets of fresh-cut white tuberoses, narcissi, and red roses to frustrated drivers. Iranians are fond of flowers. Grimy billboards and murals painted on the sides of buildings often have floral motifs. Tulips float through vaguely celestial backgrounds in scenes that depict prominent martyrs or the late Ayatollah Khomeini. One billboard shows a blissful boy of about fourteen, kneeling in a field of wildflowers, his head leaning against his rifle. He wears the black headband of a basiji, one of the young volunteers who ran by the tens of thousands onto mined battlefields during the war with Iraq in the nineteen-eighties.

Many of the basijis are buried in the Behesht-e-Zahra cemetery, on the outskirts of the city, a large section of which is dedicated to Iran's martyrs. I went there one day and wandered among the gravestones and altars. A few families, but mostly groups of women, were picnicking; other people collected water in jugs from spigots to wash the tombs. It was a Thursday, the day when Shiites customarily give out sweets in honor of the Hidden Imam, who they believe will reappear shortly before the Final Judgment and the end of history, and women in black chadors offered passersby little cakes and candy from paper boxes.

The next day, I attended Friday prayers in a large, open-sided structure on the grounds of Tehran University, where sermons are delivered by high-ranking Shia clerics. The sermons are about politics as well as religion, and provide useful insights into the current views of Iran's ayatollahs. The day I was there, the sermon was delivered by Ayatollah Mohammad Yazdi, one of the twelve members of the Council of Guardians, which insures that all government legislation adheres to the council's interpretation of Islamic sharia law. Security was tight. We were frisked, and bags were put through metal detectors. Yazdi was well into a harangue by the time the three or four thousand faithful, mostly older men, had filled the place. A small group of women were sequestered nearby, behind a partition.

"The first and most important victory of the revolution," Yazdi said, "was the unity of the Iranian people. And that is what Imam Khomeini always wanted. But now our enemies are trying to divide us." The crowd chanted "Allahu Akbar!"--"God is great!"--three times, in a great baritone roar, and then "Khomeini is our leader." Yazdi went on, speaking about a bitter debate currently under way in the parliament between clerics and reformers. "The reformers want to define in a law what it is that constitutes a political crime. Well, for us in the Council of Guardians there can be differences of opinion within Islam, but no opposition to Islam. All those who oppose Islam are heretics."

Yazdi said that the religious segment of his sermon was over, and that he would turn to politics. He became more animated. "The only supporter of the U.S. in starting a new war in the region is Israel," he exclaimed. "And the only reason that I can see for this war is to gain control of the oil in the region and to oppose Islam." The crowd yelled "Death to America!" Yazdi continued, "Another goal is to distract international public opinion away from the Palestinian issue. Bush and Sharon are among the most criminal characters in the world! We hope that their crimes may be blocked by the Islamic movements in the region."

Yazdi spoke for about thirty minutes and then descended the stairs from the pulpit, flanked by bodyguards. The crowd shouted "Death to Israel!" as he walked to a cordoned-off V.I.P. section, where several dozen high-ranking clerics and government officials knelt on a carpet. Yazdi climbed down into a recess in the floor in front of them and began to pray. All the men followed suit, standing and kneeling repeatedly, their heads bowed. The man just behind Yazdi, in the front row of the V.I.P. section, was Ayatollah Muhammad Bakr al-Hakim, the exiled head of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, or SCIRI. Hakim leaned forward on his knees and touched his forehead to a small tablet of pressed earth from the Iraqi holy city of Najaf, where he was born and where Ayatollah Khomeini lived for fourteen years, after the Shah expelled him from Iran in 1964.

Hakim went into exile in Iran in 1980, a year after Saddam Hussein became President of Iraq and Khomeini returned triumphantly to Iran as the country's Supreme Leader. Hakim's father was the Grand Ayatollah of the Shiites, who make up about sixty per cent of the Iraqi population (and about ninety per cent of Iranians), and he had been at odds with the secular government of Iraq since the nineteen-fifties. Several of his students founded Al Dawa, a party dedicated to the establishment of an Islamic state in Iraq and opposed to the rising Baath and Communist Parties. The Baath Party, which came to power in 1968, was controlled by Sunni Arabs from provinces in northwestern Iraq--among them Saddam Hussein--who had strong kinship ties and little regard for the values of religious Shiites. In 1969, Hakim's father issued a fatwa against membership in the Baath Party. The younger Hakim was imprisoned and tortured for Islamist activity. In the nineteen-eighties, after he fled to Iran, he organized a militia made up of other Iraqi exiles and Army deserters and sent them to fight on the side of the Iranians in the war against Iraq. More than a hundred members of his family still in Iraq were subsequently arrested and tortured, and many of them were killed.