Then Mustafa told me what it was all about. Tinted Lenses had spotted me outside the entrance to the shrine wielding a camera and taking photos, which was allowed in normal times, as Mustafa had told me. But these were not normal times. A little more than a week before, an unexpected spate of protests, driven largely by the frustrated working class, had erupted, first in Mashhad, but then quickly spread to other cities. It had been eight years since the Iranian streets had seen anything approaching open dissent. This time the security services were careful not to overreact, as they had been accused of in the postelection demonstrations in 2009. Still, itchiness was in the air. The regime couldn’t allow the protests to spiral out of control. It was an unenviable balancing act and a test for paramilitary forces that hadn’t had much practice in the intervening years.
In the closed quarters of the security office it was decided that it was Tinted Lenses who overreacted. “He didn’t know why you were taking photos,” Mustafa told me. “He kept saying we should look at your camera, see where you’ve been, maybe you’re a spy.”
“If I was a spy would I be taking pictures in front of the entrance?”
Mustafa shook his head in a way that said, I know, I know . . .
“These security people, some of them want to prove themselves. They think they will win points with their superiors, that they might catch a spy someday.”
“Standing in front of the entrance in the middle of the afternoon?”
More head shaking. “The other guys, they were more sensible. I showed them the papers stating that you were a tourist and that I was your guide. The second guy who appeared, he kept saying, ‘What are you bothering him for, he’s a tourist?’ The guy with the beard, he kept saying they should look at your camera, see where you’ve been. Maybe you were a spy. . . .”
I reminded Mustafa what he had told me, that it was fine to take pictures outside the entrance. It was a way of digging a little deeper, seeing if there was anything I wasn’t being told.
“I know, I know. . . . It is. This guy just got all crazy about it. The boss in the office, he thought the whole thing was silly.”
The experience carried an odd sense of déjà vu. On my first trip to Iran in 2009 I was taking pictures of signs mounted on a fence that circled a large villa in Esfahan. One of them read, “And you should treat all women with respect.” I had taken two or three shots when a hand tugged at my arm. This time it was a solider, who took me by the wrist and led me down the street toward the entrance. I loped alongside, like a dog on a leash, wondering, What is this all about?
At the entrance gate another soldier was stationed at a guard booth. Sohrab, my guide, who had wandered a little ahead, came running down the street. He chatted with the soldier at the gate but didn’t bother to produce any documents, and when it was all over the soldier at the booth spoke to me in Farsi, adding a deferential nod. The jumpy soldier also nodded my way and smiled, but grimly.
As we walked away I asked Sohrab what it was all about.
It turned out that the villa was the home of the governor of the Esfahan Province. Then, too, times were tense. The postelection riots were rocking city after city, and the jumpy soldier was hell bent on “maintaining security.”
I asked Sohrab what the soldiers had said to me when we left.
“They wanted to apologize.”
I asked him what he had said to produce such a turnaround.
“I just told them you were a guest in our country, and what the hell did that guy think he was doing, grabbing you like you were a criminal. I said you’re not a murderer, there’s no reason for him to behave like that.”
I heard an echo of Sohrab from a previous run-in with regime flunkies: “They push, you push back. Don’t take their shit.”
It might have been a simple exchange, and a surprising one, to walk away with an apology from a member of a security service, but there was also a lesson to be learned in the dynamics of a security state: The eyes of anyone pressed into the service of the state are directed upward, never outward. The aim of the lower-level functionary is to please the slightly less-lower-level functionary above him. Social and legal principles are abstractions not to be bothered with, for one quickly realizes that service means achieving the aims of the system, and one acts accordingly.
There was another lesson to be learned here, in Persian conflict resolution. The first rule is: The more direct the confrontation, the more restrained the debate. This allows each party some breathing room, a chance to maneuver, to adjust, to allow reflection to supersede emotion, and most important, to save face by not being driven into a position from which there is no retreat, where compromise and ultimately resolution become impossible.
In Esfahan we walked away with apologies. No apology was forthcoming from Mr. Tinted Lenses. As Mustafa and I left the security office he was still arguing with his boss, probably that I was likely a spy, that my camera should be confiscated, and who knows what else. But his boss wasn’t listening, and Mr. Tinted Lenses’ attempt to keep the Imam Reza Shrine free of wandering spies probably cost him more brownie points than he thought he had earned.
Even before this episode, I had not looked forward to Mashhad. I had heard that Mashhad was deeply conservative, due to the presence of the Imam Reza Shrine, and so I imagined it to be another Qom, where arrogant, self-assured mullahs strutted the streets with pompous certainty, holding their turbans high as an emblem of political and clerical authority. And that it would appear derelict and decrepit, an outward manifestation of the moral rot that almost forty years of Islamic rule had brought.
But I was all wrong about Mashhad. Around the shrine, pilgrims from all over the Shiite world passed in and out of the entrance gates, with the women displaying a kaleidoscope of colors and styles of dress. And there were more secular Shiites in contemporary, if conservative, clothing, from Iraq or Lebanon, Bahrain or Syria, paying respects to the imam without promoting any particular spiritual allegiance. A few blocks from the shrine Mashhad was a clean, orderly city laid out in a patchwork of geometric grids. Away from the shrine, and the pilgrims, the residents of the city went about their business, making ends meet in the nearby bazaar by catering to the everyday needs of the residents—selling spices, housewares, and coffee and tea—as well as the casual needs of the pilgrims and souvenirs for them to bring home.
I quickly learned that despite the presence of the Imam Reza Shrine, Mashhad is paradoxically one of the more liberal and socially tolerant cities in Iran. It is also the only major city facing Afghanistan and points east, and Iran’s second largest. Geography made Mashhad a crossroads throughout its history, and crossroads have always been just that—places where various races, religions, and belief systems cross, mingle, and mix, in the process gaining acceptance through familiarity, chipping away at the forces of tribalism and exclusion that would otherwise arise.
My arrival was equally smooth and trouble-free. Mustafa was waiting for me at Mashhad airport, holding up a printed paper with my name miserably misspelled. The sign helped me spot him, but he had little difficulty picking me out of the crowd of Iranians passing through the arrivals hall. As soon as I caught his eye, his hand went up, he folded up the sign with the jumble of letters, greeted me with typical Persian graciousness, and led me to his car, waiting in the parking lot.
The Mahan flight from Tehran to Mashhad was something of a milestone for me because it was the first internal flight I had ever taken in Iran. More important, for the one hour that the plane was aloft, I was free for the first time from the enforced guardianship of a tour guide. The guides I’d had on past trips had never felt like a burden, more like knowledgeable traveling companions, but for this single hour I was traveling solo, and began to feel something like all the other Iranians.
In Tehran, Mohammad, a driver hired by the tour agency, dropped me at Mehrabad Airport, the takeoff point for Iran’s domestic flights. At the moment the car door closed and he pulled away I was free to wander. I could have skip
ped the flight and disappeared into the subversive underground to plan the resurrection of the green movement, steal nuclear secrets, or start an underground newspaper. A million scenarios spun in my head as the taillights of Mohammad’s Khodro disappeared. But I had other plans. Mashhad was ahead. I grabbed my bag, entered the concourse, and moved to the check-in desk.
After we had buckled up and the plane was about to begin its sprint down the runway, an Islamic prayer sounded over the loudspeakers, customary on all flights on Iranian airlines. But where Iranian airlines are concerned, an Islamic prayer is not a spurious gesture. Iran Air, Mahan Airlines, and Aseman all have appalling safety records, largely due to the unavailability of spare parts for their aging fleets, almost solely resulting from the international sanctions slapped on Iran for decades due to suspicions about its nuclear program and—many Western governments contend—support for terrorist groups. In February 2018 an Aseman flight went down near Semirom, Iran, killing all 68 aboard. In January 2011 a Boeing 727 operated by Iran Air crashed in Orumieh, in northern Iran, killing 81 of the 105 passengers and crew. In February 2003 an aircraft operated by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard crashed in the desert near Kerman, killing all 275 onboard. In 2014 a Sepahan flight departing from Tehran crashed after takeoff, resulting in 38 deaths and 10 injuries. There have been many more accidents, crashes, and “incidents” over the years, making the skies over Iran among the most treacherous in the world. It should be no surprise that after the 2015 nuclear agreement was signed, Iran bought new planes from Boeing worth $166 billion.
My hour flight from Tehran to Mashhad was not added to the long list of Iranian air disasters. After we landed, all of the passengers trudged through the jetway safe and sound. I found my bag rotating on the baggage carousel and then Mustafa, holding up the misspelled name card. The anticipation of traveling unchaperoned over such a long distance became a nonevent.
Later, inside the entrance to the Imam Reza shrine, Mustafa and I were greeted by one of the official guides designated to lead non-Muslims around the site. For the next two hours Mustafa shared my role—the guide leading the guide assigned to me. Either way, Reza took the helm, leading us into the first courtyard and launching into his often-delivered account of the shrine’s history, sprinkled with autobiographical bits about the man who gives the complex its reason for being—Imam Reza.
To understand the significance of the shrine, and the man who received such a grand resting place, we have to backtrack, to 632 CE, when Islam divided into its Sunni and Shiite branches.
Theologically speaking, the gap between Sunnis and Shiites is no wider than that between Roman Catholics and the many strains of Protestantism and the Eastern Orthodox Church, or, we might say, as wide. Both Sunnis and Shiites agree on the fundamental principles of Islam but quibble over the fine points. In particular, Shiites believe in the Twelve Imams, inheritors of the spiritual message of Prophet Mohammad who have been assigned by God to guide the rest of the Islamic world. This line of succession began with Ali, both cousin and son-in-law to Prophet Mohammad, who married the Prophet’s daughter, Fatima. According to the Twelver doctrine, the last imam has already been born, in Samarra, Iraq, sometime around 868, is alive and well and roaming the world as we speak, and will announce himself when Jesus Christ returns to restore eternal peace and justice to the world.
In 765, Musa Ibn Jafar Al Kazim, the seventh of the Twelve Imams, had a son, Ali Ibn Musa Ar-Reza, or Ali Reza, who inherited the title of Eighth Imam. He was in his early twenties and not popular among the local religious powers, though in his religious studies he proved himself to be so ahead of his years that he was allowed to issue fatwas from mosques and interpret passages from the Quran.
Despite his lineage, it was not a good time for Ali Reza to be named Imam Reza. The death of Prophet Mohammad one hundred years earlier still sent battles raging between Persia and the Sunni Abbasid caliphate, seated in Baghdad. Conflicts erupted in other parts of the Islamic world, pitting faction against faction, powerful feuding tribes against one another. The situation had become so chaotic that Al-Massum, the Abbasid leader, offered to make Imam Reza his prime minister, all to project an aura of unity that would, hopefully, put the conflicts to rest. But Al-Massum had other aims: to give his corrupt leadership an air of legitimacy and use the union as a window into the goings-on in the Shiite world. Or, as Godfather Michael Corleone advised, “Keep your friends close but your enemies closer.”
Imam Reza accepted the offer, but Al-Massum’s plan backfired. The ascension of Imam Reza lifted Shiism’s popularity. Al-Massum’s bosses in Baghdad sought to depose him, prompting Al-Massum to head to Baghdad to argue his case. Imam Reza accompanied him. En route, the vizier, or primary minister, of Al-Massum was assassinated. Al-Massum believed it was time to unload Imam Reza, considering the political baggage he had become, and poisoned him in the town of Tous. Al-Massum had Reza buried in nearby Mashhad, which means “place of the martyr.”
This early in Islamic history, political power and religious influence were two strands of the same cord. Imam Reza was on track to become the most important leader in the Muslim world. And yet, in spite of the prestige and clout he was about to inherit, he had become well known for his humility and simplicity. He decorated his house to resemble that of a common villager. His food was equally simple, and he had the habit of eating with the household help, waiting until everyone was present before signaling that it was time to begin. A suggestion that the servants and members of the household eat separately was soundly rebuffed: “All are created by God. . . . Why should there be any discrimination in the world?”
Aside from his personal character, what I find admirable about Imam Reza is not his religious or political status, which was foist upon him, but his skill in maneuvering political minefields. What speaks for his character far more than the circumstances of his life are the values he adhered to, and these were often expressed in brief sayings, a measure of true wisdom:
Ignorance reveals itself in the following:
Being angry without cause,
Speaking without need,
Rewarding the undeserving,
Not distinguishing between friend and foe,
Revealing a secret,
Trusting everyone.
The ignorant never realizes his mistake
nor accepts advice.
And there is this:
A man’s folly is demonstrated in three ways:
Talking about matters that don’t concern him
Offering comments when not asked
Interfering in other people’s affairs without understanding.
And:
He who thinks he is the wisest is the most foolish.
A foolish man speaks without thinking;
A wise man thinks before he speaks.
Though Reza died at the age of fifty, he was able to step back and view life from an enlightened distance that only maturity can bring:
In the rise and fall of fortunes there are lessons to be learned.
And:
Stay with the truthful, no matter how few.
Stay away from the false, no matter how many.
As a reflection of his personal humility, Imam Reza also recognized the value of self-reflection:
The greatest defect is to point out a defect in others
Which you possess but fail to see in yourself.
As both thinker and wordsmith, he could also master metaphor and the aphorism:
Envy is to man what rust is to iron.
Some of my favorite quotes are the shortest, for to say the most in the fewest words is a true sign of a perceptive mind:
A favor is a trust that you must return.
And:
The best revenge is forgiveness.
The shrine of Imam Reza is a matrix of interlocking courtyards. The day we visited it was early afternoon and the day was bright and sunny, so the first courtyard, and the one we visited next, and the one we crossed into after that, were cr
owded with pilgrims mingling and gawking like any tourists would do, but some were actually praying. The afternoon sun sparkled off the tilework and brightened the turquoise domes in the clear, crisp air, but the strongest impression by far was of the absolute massiveness of the place. The eleven courtyards, some larger than a football field, had been knitted together beginning in the tenth century, when ground was first broken on the site of a former Zoroastrian fire temple. Over the centuries new courtyards were added and existing ones expanded, until the entire complex had grown, amoeba-like, to become the largest mosque in the world and the second largest in the number of supplicants it can hold, rivaling the Grand Mosque in Mecca, Saudi Arabia.
The Imam Reza Shrine survived the thirteenth-century Mongol invasion that devastated much of the Khorasan Province, as well as the incursion of Miran Shah, son of the Uzbek warrior Tamerlane, in the fourteenth century. The shrine’s fate was helped by the fact that local Mongol warlord Sultan Mohammad Ilgiatu converted to Shiite Islam, and that Miran Shah was too busy destroying the Persian capital of nearby Tous to be bothered with Mashhad.
Near the end of the sixteenth century the legendary Safavid ruler Shah Abbas managed to evict the Uzbek occupiers from all of the Khorasan Province surrounding Mashhad and set out to repair the damage that centuries of invaders had wrought. Throughout the 1800s the Qajar kings continued to tweak and tinker with the shrine, adding more courtyards, domes, and porches, a minaret or two, and splashing the interiors with mirrors, a Qajar decorative favorite. Considering all of the hands that have meddled with the shrine it’s a wonder that it hasn’t grown into an utterly grotesque monstrosity. Instead, the place has become a sprawling architectural labyrinth where no part bears any relationship to any other. The saving grace is that it covers such a vast area that each courtyard is self-contained, adjacent to another yet resolutely distinct, like mountain peaks of a single chain.
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