There was not much mercy in the Iranian revolution: all the courts did was sentence men to death. But then there hadn’t been much mercy before the revolution, when the Shah’s imperial guard, the Javidan, or “immortals”, slaughtered the crowds. I remember another court, in Tehran, where a man shouted at a torturer from the notorious Savak security service: “You killed my daughter. She was burned all over her flesh until she was paralysed. She was roasted.” And the torturer looked back at the bereaved man and said quietly: “Your daughter hanged herself after seven months in custody.” The killers even had a few secrets for us – their close and friendly relationship, for example, with British agents and their Savak counterparts. Not unlike, I suspect, our relationship with Pakistan’s state torturers (or, I suppose, with America’s torturers). It was easy to hear evil. In fact, there was even a face-mask that you could buy for a few riyals, a grotesque version of the Shah’s face with horns sticking out of it. The moment I put it on, a whole crowd of Iranians started shrieking at me. So I took it off.
