Free Among the Believers by V.S. Naipaul Page A

than the classical way of laying out an argument); but they weren’t doing literature. History was no part of their study, but they were free to read it privately. It was for Islamic philosophy that they had come to Qom. In no other university was the subject gone into so thoroughly; and their attendance at Qom, Khomeini’s place, and Marashi’s, and Shariatmadari’s (all great teaching ayatollahs), would make them respected among Shias when they got back to Pakistan.
    The student on Behzad’s left said, in Behzad’s translation, “I compare this place to Berkeley or Yale.”
    I said to Behzad, “That’s a strange thing for him to say.”
    Behzad said, “He didn’t say Berkeley and Yale. I said it, to make it clearer to you.”
    The three Pakistanis, the director and the students, talked among themselves, and the student at the director’s desk lifted the telephone and began to dial.
    Behzad said, “They want you to meet their teacher. Ayatollah Shirazi. He’s telephoning him now to get an appointment.”
    With the child’s part of my mind I was again amazed, in this world of medieval schoolmen I had walked into, at this telephoning of ayatollahs, great men, for appointments. And I was nervous of meeting Shirazi—as I would have been at the sudden prospect (assuming such a thing possible) of a disputation with Peter Abelard or John of Salisbury or even some lesser medieval learned man. I knew nothing of Shirazi’s discipline; I wouldn’t know what to say to him.
    The student who was telephoning put the modern receiver down. His shyness and reverence were replaced by elation. He said, “Ayatollah Shirazi will see you at seven o’clock. As soon as I told him about you he agreed to meet you.”
    The director’s face lit up for the first time, as though Shirazi’s readiness to receive me had at last made it all right for me to be in his own office, talking to guileless students. He had been picking his nose constantly, in a way that made me feel that the Ramadan fasting that had dried and whitened his lips was also affecting his nostrils and irritating him. Now he relaxed; he wanted to show me over the building. We all stood up; the formal interview was over.
    I tried to find out, as we left the room, about the fees and expenses of students. But I couldn’t get a straight reply; and it was Behzad who told me directly, with an indication that I was to press no further, that it was the religious foundation at Qom that paid for the students, however long they stayed.
    In a room across the wide corridor a calligrapher was at work, writing out a Koran. He was in his forties, in trousers and shirt, and he was sitting at a sloping desk. His hand was steady, unfree, without swash or elegance; but he was pleased to let us watch him plod on, dipping his broadnibbed pen in the black ink. His face bore the marks of old stress; but he was at peace now, doing his new-found scribe’s work in his safe modern cell.
    The director showed photographs of a meeting of Muslim university heads that had taken place in Qom two years before. And again, though it oughtn’t to have been surprising, it was: this evidence of the existence of the sub-world, or the parallel world, of medieval learning in its Islamic guise, still intact in the late twentieth century. The rector of Al-Azhar University in Cairo, the director said, had been so impressed by what he had seen in Qom that he had declared that Qom students would be accepted without any downgrading by Al-Azhar.
    We walked down the steps. Against one wall there were stacks of the centre’s publications—not only
The Message of Peace
, but also two new paperback books in Persian. One was an account of the Prophet’sdaughter, Fatima, who had married the Prophet’s cousin, Ali, the Shia hero; this book was called
The Woman of Islam
. The other book or booklet, with a sepia-coloured cover, was written, the director said, by an Iranian who had spent an apparently shattering year in