Free Children of Paradise by Laura Secor Page B

oversaw the universities after the revolution; he had connections Alireza scarcely understood. He offered to shepherd Alireza’s university application through the correct political channels. Alireza applied in cinema and in political science, and he was accepted in both.
    To study cinema would have been a dream, a luxury. But Alireza chosepolitics at the prestigious University of Tehran. It was a fateful choice that he would sometimes regret in later years. To study politics in Iran was to be subject, always, to ideological scrutiny, even while it was to practice a profession in which every housewife, taxi driver, and corner grocer considered himself an expert. But politics lay at the core of his being. He had chosen it, time and again, over everything else.
    Alireza was a true believer in his revolution, as radical as he was devout, and he had a shrewd head for politics. But as a teenager he bet on the wrong horse—Shariati over Khomeini—and this set the course of his life. Shariati, for whom streets were named in the Islamic Republic, whose use of Islam as an ideology had made the epoch, and whose clarion call for social justice Khomeini even co-opted for himself, was at once unmentionable and beyond criticism. The clerics knew only too well the power Shariati had unleashed. They rode it like a wild bronco they would eventually put down.
    A man like Alireza would work for the bureaucracy of state but never be wholly trusted by it. He would circle political factions but never be absorbed by them. When trouble came, there was no one to fight for him or to vouch for him. He was canny enough to look out for himself. By middle age, Alireza was an exile in Canada, still loyal to a revolution he had never owned or disowned, despite all the revolutionary ardor in his heart.
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    I N THE FULLNESS OF TIME, Bani-Sadr and the paroxysm of violence that ended his tenure would trouble Iran’s center of power less enduringly than the story of Bazargan. The Islamic Republic’s first prime minister was politically overmatched, but he stood for an idea that did not fade so much as grow stronger with time. He seemed to believe that there was, or should be, room for people like him within the new Islamic state, and that the rule of law was not incompatible with the revolution Iranians had wrought.
    Toward the end of the Bani-Sadr period, in the month of March, the Revolutionary Court opened a trial for Bazargan’s former deputy primeminister, Abbas Amirentezam, at Evin Prison. The trial would return Bazargan to the national stage, this time as a furious and uncompromising voice for the opposition.
    Based on documents they found in the embassy, the hostage takers had accused Amirentezam, a debonair diplomat fluent in English, of meeting with American diplomats and of harboring doubts about the course the revolution had taken. The trial was a gruff, informal affair, dispensed in a nondescript chamber hastily converted into a courtroom, where Bazargan, a witness for the defense, was the only attendee wearing a tie. A prison official in a brown T-shirt called the court to order by commanding those assembled to praise God. Amirentezam, and the eighty members of the audience, rose and chanted, “God is Great. Khomeini is our leader. Death to Saddam, the infidel.” A court official in blue jeans read from the Quran.
    The judge, a cleric named Mohammad Mohammadi Gilani, turned to Amirentezam and asked, “Did you ask for a defense lawyer?” When Amirentezam said he had, the judge snapped, “Mr. Bazargan gave evidence and spoke on your behalf. You don’t need a defense lawyer.”
    Bazargan, loyal to his deputy to the end and clearly pained by his own experience in government, followed by Bani-Sadr’s unfolding drama, delivered a stinging performance there in the weeks that followed. The allegations against Amirentezam—that he was conspiring with the CIA against Khomeini—were baseless, said the former prime minister. It was