Free Children of Paradise by Laura Secor

Islam are made up of idiots,” Khomeini said by way of consolation. “They drive the people to stronger unity with whatever schemes and intrigues they hatch.” Another bomb exploded in a Tehran square and a third, found on a city street, was defused.
    But the most spectacular attacks came the next day, on June 28, when the Islamic Republican Party convened for its weekly meeting. Two bombs, never claimed by any of the opposition groups, exploded in the party headquarters, one in a garbage can near a podium where Ayatollah Beheshti was speaking, and the other in the audience. The explosion brought the two-story building to the ground, twisting the steel beams of the roof and killing at least seventy officials and functionaries, including Beheshti himself. Two months later, on August 30, a bomb ripped through the office of the prime minister during a meeting of the defense council, killing the prime minister and four others.
    For the clerics, who had also recently put down a coup attempt from inside the armed forces, coexistence was definitively impossible. Bani-Sadr and the Mojahedin had to be eliminated from the political scene, and to do it the Islamic Republican Party unleashed a campaign of terror. Days after the blast that killed the prime minister, the judiciary authorized mass arrests and began executing oppositionists by firing squad. Firefights between the Mojahedin and the Revolutionary Guards intensified, particularly in the south of Tehran. Bani-Sadr and the leadership of the Mojahedinescaped to France, but altogether an estimated 2,665 of their followers—Mojahedin, Kurdish nationalists, leftists, and nationalists—were executed between June and November 1981. The deaths, declared the chief prosecutor, “are not merely permissible; they are necessary.”
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    A LIREZA H AGHIGHI WAS A SURVIVOR. One after another in those years, the young men he knew seemed to vanish. Some were executed, others killed in battle. He had a friend who was a brilliant physics student. After the revolution, this friend joined the Revolutionary Guard. A former SAVAK officer was brought in to educate his unit; outraged, Alireza’s friend left the Revolutionary Guard and joined the Mojahedin in search of a truer radicalism. He was killed in the turmoil surrounding Bani-Sadr. This young scientist had been used, Alireza felt, and disposed of. None of the armed factions cared about his education, his talents, his future promise.
    Alireza was only sixteen when the revolution came. He intended for university to catapult him out of southern Shiraz, through his activist milieu, and into the center of the new mainstream. But the year he earned his high school diploma, there were no universities to enter. Starting in 1980, at Khomeini’s behest, hezbollahis seized the university campuses to purge the faculties and student bodies and Islamize the curricula. The universities were closed for three years. Along with his entire cohort, Alireza found himself at loose ends. He might have studied abroad, but his mother could not afford it. He might have volunteered for the war, but his father beat him to it and asked Alireza instead to mind his shop while he was at the front.
    And so Alireza disappeared into the Shiraz bazaar. Over his father’s objections, he set up a desk in the shop and stocked it with books. Between customers, he read. The war was transforming Shiraz in ways Alireza did not approve of. Young men from Abadan, an oil-producing border city besieged in 1980, poured into Shiraz looking for girls, even while Iraqis occupied their homes. Alireza suspected that they cared little about the war. One knew a true revolutionary, he theorized, by his choices.Revolution was like love: between love and self-interest, the true lover chose love. But the young men who took war and revolution as seriously as Alireza did were mainly hezbollahis, foot soldiers of velayat-e faqih . From them, too, Alireza felt distant. He still belonged to