Free Among the Believers by V.S. Naipaul

the Western democracies, the hagiographies of the Shia Imams. This was where they read Schumacher and Toynbee and used their words—about technology and ecology—to lash the West.
    I said to the man with the woollen cap, “But I know your magazine.”
    He was thrown off balance. He looked disbelieving.
    “I’ve been reading Volume One, Number Two. The one with the article about Islamic urban planning.”
    He didn’t seem to understand.
    “I bought it in Tehran.”
    Grimly, he beckoned us in. And we went up to his office after taking off our shoes. The terrazzo steps were wide, the corridors were wide; the rooms were spacious, with carpet tiling.
    The man in the woollen cap—the director, as I now took him to be—sat behind his new steel desk. One of the students sat on his left. Behzad and I and the other student sat in a line on chairs against the far wall, facing the desk. And, as formally as we were seated, we began.
    The student on the director’s left said that Islam was the only thing that made humans human. He spoke with tenderness and conviction; and to understand what he meant it was necessary to try to understand how, for him, a world without the Prophet and revelation would be a world of chaos.
    The director picked at his nose, and seemed to approve. On his desk there were rubber stamps, a new globe, a stapler, a telephone of new design. On the shelves there were box files, the
Oxford English Dictionary
, and a Persian-English dictionary.
    There were fourteen thousand theological students in Qom, they told me. (And yet, arriving at the worst time of the day, we had found the streets empty.) The shortest period of study was six years.
    “Six years!”
    The director smiled at my exclamation. “Six is nothing. Fifteen, twenty, thirty years some people can study for.”
    What did they study in all that time? This wasn’t a place of research and new learning. They were men of faith. What was there in the subject that called for so much study? Well, there was Arabic itself; there was grammar in all its branches; there was logic and rhetoric; there was jurisprudence, Islamic jurisprudence being one course of study and the principles of jurisprudence being another; there was Islamic philosophy; there were the Islamic sciences—biographies, genealogies, “correlations,” traditions about the Prophet and his close companions.
    I had expected something more casual, more personal: the teacher a holy man, the student a disciple. I hadn’t expected this organization of learning or this hint of antique classical methods. I began to understand that the years of study were necessary. Faith still absolutely bounded the world here. And, as in medieval Europe, there was no end to theological scholarship.
    One of the great teachers at Qom, a man who still lectured and led prayers five times a day, had produced (or produced materials for) a twenty-five-volume commentary on a well-known work about the Shia idea of the Imam. Seven of those volumes had been published. A whole corps of scholars—no doubt collating their lecture notes: the medieval method of book transmission—were at work on the remaining eighteen. Khomeini himself, famous for his lectures on jurisprudence and Islamic philosophy, had produced eighteen volumes on various topics.
    That ordered life of prayer and lecture, commentary and reinterpretation, had almost perished towards the end of the Shah’s time. Khomeini had been banished; the security forces had occupied Qom; and even the Pakistani students had been harassed by the secret police.
    The student sitting on the director’s left said, his voice falling, “If there had been no revolution here, Islam would have been wiped out.”
    The students both came from priestly families in country towns in the Punjab, and had always known that they were meant to be mullahs. They were doing only eight years in Qom. They were taking the two-year Arabic course, with logic and rhetoric (rhetoric being no more