Children of Paradise Read Online Free

school, he spent his free time reading from his father’s two-thousand-volume library. One of his early teachers described Shariati as “a student who is more educated than all his teachers and lazier than all his classmates.”
    Shariati read Lenin and Dostoyevsky alongside Persian poets and Sufi dervishes. He would later take a particular interest in a school of Sufis known as the “self-blamers,” who deliberately committed public acts of immoral behavior in the hope of being ridiculed and humiliated. Their public disgrace was meant to stiffen their inner resolve; for a devout Muslim, it was a perverse form of self-sacrifice. Although Shariati dabbled in it only briefly, it was an uncanny fit for his sensibility, which all his life would draw him to play games with mirrors, to invent alter egos and revel in contradictions, to oscillate between a public life in lecture halls teeming with acolytes and one of mystical, melancholy, self-lacerating solitude.
    The early fifties were a time of political awakening, not only for Shariati, but for Iran. Following decades of repressive, autocratic rule, a young and diffident new king, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, had assumed the throne during World War II, in 1941. When the war ended, the young shah presided, by his passivity, over a brief window of relative openness that lasted from when Shariati was twelve until he was twenty. During these years,Britain continued to direct Iranian politics with a heavy hand and to treat the new shah like a despised vassal. But a labor movement stirred, and so did the parliament. Intellectuals, journalists, clerics, and politicians cast off the deferential silence the previous shah had imposed on them and filled the public space with lively debates and new political parties.
    Through the ranks of the newly energized parliament rose a liberal nationalist named Mohammad Mossadegh, who promised the Iranian people the rule of law and freedom from the interference of foreigners. Specifically, Mossadegh proposed that the oil industry should come under Iranian national ownership and control. Iran, a country awash in the world’s most valuable resource, should not suffer the humiliation of poverty while enriching foreigners. As prime minister from 1951 to 1953, Mossadegh effectively wrested Iran’s oil industry from Britain’s grip and outmaneuvered Mohammad Reza Shah at every pass, rendering the king nearly powerless despite his foreign backers and titular role. In 1953 the United States, fearing the prime minister’s relations with the communist Tudeh Party, helped Mossadegh’s domestic enemies topple him with a CIA-supported coup.
    Mohammad Reza Shah emerged from that crucible a hardened, brittle man. Fearful of court intrigue and insecure before his people, he grew ever more obsessive and tyrannical. He took an axe to the knees of his most effective opposition, the Tudeh and the nationalists, and would soon go on to crack down on the clergy as well. He turned the country’s oil industry over to an international consortium that split its profits with Iran but did not allow Iranians to audit its books or serve on its board of directors.
    Under Mossadegh, it had seemed possible that Iran would evolve along its own track, influenced by leftist and liberal ideas that originated in the West, perhaps, but defined by a powerful sense of national pride, the drive to own its own resources and command its own fate. Now the wind sweeping Iran from the West seemed both cruel and irresistible. Either one capitulated to it, as the shah had done, or one found some object to wrap one’s fists around—something supple yet firmly enough rooted to hold one’s weight against the storm.
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    T HESE WERE THE CIRCUMSTANCES OF Shariati’s late adolescence. He joined a religious group that supported Mossadegh on the grounds that monarchy was incompatible with Islam. At teacher-training school he became an activist for Mossadegh, and he continued these