I went to the Baghdad Book Fair looking for one book and ended up finding something I hadn’t been looking for.

Conversations.

‘Blood Meridian’ was nowhere to be found, so the original mission failed. In its place, I spent hours talking to journalists, writers and booksellers. The Iranian booksellers were particularly memorable, remarkably knowledgeable and many of them speaking fluent, polished Arabic.

Naturally, I asked them about Sadegh Hedayat.

Hedayat is not an easy writer to place neatly on a shelf…
Brilliant, influential, deeply pessimistic and controversial even in his own lifetime, he was fiercely critical of religion, particularly Islam and wrote about the decline of Persian culture through a chauvinistic, sometimes explicitly anti-Semitic lens, with particular hostility toward Arabs.

What surprised me was not that they knew him.
It was how warmly they spoke of him.

I was standing among shelves crowded with religious books, speaking with Shia Muslim Iranians and listening to them speak of Hedayat with something close to affection.

They spoke of his genius, his despair, his imagination. They looked past the mockery and provocation in his writing and tried to find the mind beneath it.

And there was something striking about hearing this from people for whom religion is not simply an idea, but part of the world they inhabit. Hedayat had placed Persian identity, at times, against Islam and against the Arabs he blamed for the erosion of an older Persian world. Yet here were people who did not seem threatened by that hostility. They could disagree with him profoundly and still recognize his brilliance.

And that is what makes literature different from belief…

We do not have to agree with a writer to recognize ourselves. We can reject his prejudices, despise his conclusions and still find something alive in his words.

So, Hedayat does not have to become a saint to remain a great writer, and the people who admire him, do not have to become Hedayat.