Reading Lolita in Tehran_ A Memoir in Books - Azar Nafisi [134]
The government had set aside huge supplies of food and drink for the mourners. Alongside the frenzy of beating chests and fainting and chanting, rows upon rows of mourners were to be seen on the roadside, eating their sandwiches and drinking their soft drinks as if they were out on a holiday picnic. Many who actively disliked Khomeini in his lifetime attended the funeral. Dissatisfaction at the time of Khomeini’s death was so high that at first, the officials had thought of burying him in the night so as to cover the sparse attendance. But millions had come from all around the country. I remember talking to a middle-aged man on the staff at the university, who lived in the poorer, more traditional part of town. He described the busloads of neighbors, disenchanted with Khomeini and his revolution, who had gone nonetheless, like him, to the funeral. I asked him why he went. Was he forced to go? No, but it seemed the thing to do. Everyone was going—how would it look if he didn’t? He paused and then added, After all, an event like this happens only once in a lifetime, doesn’t it?
As the procession began to take Khomeini’s body through the streets to the cemetery on the outskirts of Tehran, the pressure of the crowd was so enormous that the officials changed their minds and decided to transport the body by helicopter. The crowd surged towards the helicopter, and as it took off, a golden dust rose up from the ground, like a flying skirt, and gradually all that remained were particles of dancing dust, whirling like minuscule dervishes in a bizarre dream.
In the Behesht-e Zahra cemetery, as an attempt was being made to carry the body out of the helicopter, the crowd rushed forward once more and this time actually got hold of its prize, tearing pieces of the white shroud from the dead man’s body, revealing a leg dangling from the white cloth. The body was finally retrieved, and rushed back to Tehran to be shrouded again. And when it was returned a few hours later, inside a metal case, the Revolutionary Guards and some members of the inner circle forced the people back. A friend remembered seeing Hojatol-Islam Nategh Nouri—who would later lose the election to President Khatami—standing near the container with a whip and lashing those who tried to approach the dead body. And thus they finally buried Ruhollah Khomeini, whose given name meant “the soul of God.”
The government, in a move to turn Khomeini into a sacred figure, tried to create a shrine for him close to the Behesht-e Zahra cemetery. It was hastily built, without taste or beauty: a country famous for some of the most beautiful mosques in the world now created the gaudiest shrine to this last imam. The monument was built close to the burial place of the martyrs of the revolution: a small fountain gushed sprays of red water, symbolizing the everlasting blood of the martyrs.
Khomeini’s death carried its own illuminations. Some, like me, felt like aliens in their homeland. Others, like the taxi driver I came across a few weeks after the funeral, were disillusioned with the whole religious fraud, as he put it. Now I know how fourteen hundred years back they created the imams and prophets, he said—just like this guy. So none of it was true.
At the start of the revolution, a rumor had taken root that Khomeini’s image could be seen in the moon. Many people, even perfectly modern and educated individuals, came to believe this. They had seen him in the moon. He had been a conscious mythmaker, and he had turned himself into a myth. What they mourned after a well-timed death—for