The Ayatollah Begs to Differ

by Hooman Majd

  A well-built young man, clean shaven and with gelled hair, entered the room in soccer gear and was introduced as the son-in-law; he sat down quietly and stared at me with a furrowed brow as if I had just arrived from Mars. His young bride, the daughter of the house, followed him in, said a quiet hello, and sat down on the floor next to him, also staring, but averting her eyes whenever I glanced in her direction. She switched on the old television set perched on a low table and tuned the channel to PMC, the Persian Music Channel, a satellite station beamed in from Dubai and received illegally by just about every household in Iran. PMC features nothing but Iranian pop music videos from Los Angeles, and the young woman pulled her chador tight across her cheeks as she watched other young Iranian men and women, sans chadors or scarves, sexily cavorting across the Southern California desert in a vintage American convertible.

  No one but me in this house seemed terribly interested in the nuclear crisis with the West that was all the news in Europe and back home in the States, and had been a major topic of conversation in middle-class Tehran homes since I had arrived a few days before President Ahmadinejad’s inauguration in 2005. Iran had just angrily rejected a European proposal to end the nuclear stalemate and was heading rapidly toward a major confrontation over its plans to restart the uranium fuel cycle, something the United States claimed would lead to nuclear-armed Ayatollahs, perhaps as frightening an image as can be planted, post-9/11, in the minds of ordinary Americans. Ahmadinejad’s new hard-line government, perhaps picking up on a cue from President Bush’s own lexicon, seemed to be saying, in so many words, “Bring it on” to the entire world. But in this household, there was little concern with the possibility of armed conflict. A middle-class family, religious but educated and wise to the ways of the world, if only through their television screen, they were far more concerned with the more mundane aspects of life, even though they stubbornly continued to live in a house that should have long ago given way to a modern apartment building, with perhaps a nice penthouse for them, the owners of the land underneath.

  A noise from the yard signaled the arrival of other guests; an older man and his toothless young companion carrying a heavily crumpled plastic bag pushed aside the sheet and entered the room. Grateful that I wasn’t to be the sole source of amusement, I stood up as introductions were made and as the young daughter quickly fled to the safety of other rooms where strange, meaning nonfamilial, men are not allowed. The men shuffled in, the younger one saying his hellos and nodding while the older man gestured, apologizing for the lack of vocal cords, I understood. Although they had been removed recently in an operation, our host told me, the man seemed quite nonchalant about it and even accepted a cigarette proffered by his companion. He sat down on the carpet, lit his cigarette, and began to prepare for what I knew was to be the afternoon activity and part of the reason for the lifestyle of the family: smoking shir’e.

  Shir’e is made from the charred remnants of previously smoked opium and is the preferred method of drug taking among the hardest of hard-core opium addicts in Iran, who number in the hundreds of thousands. Boiling the burned opium in water, removing the scum, and then straining the gooey residue results in an opiate perhaps tens of times more potent than fresh, raw opium, itself by far the most popular drug in Iran. Always plentiful and almost a part of Iran’s heritage (and widely used in the courts of previous dynasties), opium under the fanatically pro-Western and anti-traditionalist Shah was mainly used by provincial Iranians, the lower classes, and a handful of the landed gentry who stubbornly clung to the past and the seductive habit inherited from their forefathers. The modernism the Shah promoted in the 1960s and ’70s (along with a huge increase in tourist and student travel to Europe and the United States) meant that among the young at least, Western, and therefore cool, drugs such as marijuana and cocaine replaced the backward, and now plebeian, domestic high. In my maternal grandfather’s house in the 1960s, as traditional a household as there could be in Tehran, I had witnessed my great-grandmother, well over ninety years old, eating, yes, eating, her daily dose of opium. Her dementia, quite advanced as far as I was concerned since she never seemed to recognize me, not even a few minutes after I told her whose child I was, was noticeably improved after she swallowed the little brown pellets, although I now think it may have been more because she was just too high to be a nuisance to anyone. My mother used to tell me she was taking her medicine, but I heard enough about her taryak, “opium” in Farsi, to know better.

  My father’s father, who died quite young of a heart attack when I was in first grade abroad, was an opium user of some repute in Ardakan, the provincial village he was from: the lengthy afternoon sessions at his bagh, or “garden,” as grand homes (which are presumed to have extensive gardens) are known in the provinces, were attended by village notables who, like him, were landowners not in need of a day job, I later discovered. But people of my generation stayed away from opium or, if they indulged, preferred to keep it private lest they be viewed by their ganja-smoking friends as hopelessly square. The Islamic Revolution, which inverted class distinctions and frowned upon anything Western, changed things a bit when it inadvertently caused a resurgence in the use of opium as a recreational activity, perhaps because of the ban on alcohol and the ready availability of opium (although illegal) as a substitute, but also perhaps because the old-fashioned, and particularly Iranian, customs were now in vogue. Drug use in general, though, has escalated dramatically since the revolution first intentionally created a modern republic without bars, pubs, or real public entertainment, and unintentionally a birthrate that has produced far more employable youths than the economy can provide jobs for. And although opium tops the list in terms of favored drugs, heroin, crack, and even crystal meth, known as sheesheh, or “glass,” are becoming commonplace among the working and middle classes. According to the almost boastful headline in an issue of the English-language daily Iran News during my stay in 2005, “Iranians hold the 1st spot among world countries regarding narcotics consumption. Moreover, 4–6% of Iranians are drug addicts.” Yes, “moreover,” although most Iranian experts put the figure as high as 10 percent and some even at 15 percent and higher.

  Shir’e is the traditionalist’s hard drug, not too dissimilar from the heroin preferred in the West. Smoking it is a labor-intensive process, though: a small homemade paraffin burner is set on the floor, and the shir’e, a brown paste the color of a Tootsie Roll, is carefully kneaded onto the tip of a homemade pipe that looks something like an elongated kazoo. (Regular opium smokers often use beautiful pipes, sometimes made to the owner’s specifications, and handsome tongs, usually in pure silver, to lift white-hot charcoal briquettes from extravagantly decorated ash pits to their pipes.) Lying on the floor, one smokes shir’e upside down: unless you’re an expert, you need an assistant to guide the inverted pipe to the open flame. One puff and your head starts floating, pain now an adversary that appears vulnerable to conquest; two or three puffs and you experience a high that is serenely beautiful: problems fade completely away, anxiety and pain surrender, and nothing, you think, can take away the beauty. Not even a full-scale invasion by the U.S. military.

  When it was my turn at the pipe, I lay down on the carpet and rested my head on a dirty pillow. The voiceless man painstakingly prepared the makeshift pipe by kneading and twisting a thick paste on its tip over and over, softening the shir’e by bringing it close to the flame and then quickly pulling it away several times. A gentle prod was my signal that the pipe was ready: I drew the smoke in short inhales until it completely filled my lungs, and then exhaled slowly. The cooler had been switched off to avoid any twentieth-century interference with the purity of the occasion, and although the heat in the room was now the equivalent of a turned-up sauna, I felt surprisingly comfortable. I begged off a third drag and instead moved away and sat up on the carpet, mumbling profuse thank-yous. I tried unsuccessfully to cross my legs, but they were happier stretched out, so I leaned on a big pillow and slowly drank a cup o
f tea with a few sugar cubes, sugar that I knew would be the only guarantee that I wouldn’t throw up, for opium, like heroin, dramatically lowers the blood sugar level—perhaps the one side effect that can diminish the seductiveness of the drug.

  The owner of the house was up next. He didn’t put down the pipe until he’d taken five good hits of shir’e, carefully exhaling the sweet-smelling smoke in what seemed to me an impressive performance. The TV was still blaring: a long-haired young man was dancing by a tree surrounded by California blondes and Persian girls in skimpy outfits competing for his interest by swaying seductively to his song. I struggled to keep my eyes open, but my eyelids were uncooperative, the opiate seemingly having taken over some of my motor functions, so I decided to give in and quickly nodded off. Not quite asleep, but definitely not fully awake.

  After a few minutes, or at least what I thought were a few minutes but could have been much more, I spoke, and with some difficulty managed to ask about the latest news. I was still curious about the reaction in this house—middle-class, although admittedly by no means ordinary—to Iran’s threat to resume its nuclear activity, but rather than offer a reply, the owner of the house quietly switched the TV to IRNN, the Iranian CNN, and left it at that. I thought that his fatalistic disinterest in the nuclear crisis, shared by many other Iranians but in his case fortified by the calming effects of the shir’e, could be best understood in the context of faith: “The will of Allah will prevail.” The news network offered no new news, and I willingly went back to my altered state between consciousness and deep slumber. Some time later I stirred, and was politely informed by the younger man that it was again my turn at the pipe. By now the TV was back to PMC, and despite my protestations that my delicate Western constitution would surely be overwhelmed by the shir’e, I found it hard to argue with the fact, repeatedly mentioned, that I had only taken two drags so far and a third couldn’t hurt. When I finished, not one but two long drags, I again popped some sugar cubes into my mouth and slurped a fresh cup of tea. My eyes closed again involuntarily, and I only half-listened to conversations of lost business opportunities and the general state of economic affairs, which are in present-day Iran characterized by inflation, joblessness, and stagnation. Three hours a day at the shir’e pipe could certainly mean lost business opportunities, I thought, particularly for these men, who seemed like they could use a few extra rials, but I kept quiet. I wasn’t sure I could speak coherently anyway.

  The conversation continued, and the women of the house occasionally stole into the kitchen to brew a fresh pot of tea. I excused myself to go to the bathroom, and when it was confirmed that there was no indoor plumbing, I went into the yard and entered the outhouse. It was exactly like the outhouse at my grandfather’s house, and even the odor, a unique mixture of mud and human waste that I remembered well from my curious visits as a child, gave me a sense of nostalgia rather than disgust.

  When I returned to the house after washing my hands under a faucet by the pond, I could infer from the conversations all around me that another guest was due any minute. I sat down on the carpet again and lit a cigarette to keep myself awake. When the curtain was swept aside just a short while later, a tall young mullah walked into the room. He quietly removed his turban and abba, or “cloak,” and sat down to a steaming-hot glass of tea quickly delivered by the twelve-year-old boy. My astonishment at his presence, for all the Ayatollahs agree that opium and other drugs are haram, “forbidden” by Islam, grew to amazement as I watched him finish his tea and go over to the pipe and burner. He calmly spent the next hour puffing away, drinking tea, fingering his beads, and occasionally answering questions of religious philosophy, none of which I fully understood. And while he was busy pontificating, the other men, one by one, took the opportunity to perform their afternoon prayers: facing Mecca, they bowed and kneeled in the cramped room, carefully avoiding my outstretched limbs, and mumbled verses from the Koran as PMC blared the latest Iranian pop hit, the cleric calmly smoked away, and I continued to struggle to stay fully awake. Eventually, though, I felt the effects of the opiate recede and I stood up to leave. Despite the protestations of my host, who with traditional Persian ta’arouf insisted I stay for dinner, I managed—after many exchanges of “I wouldn’t dream of imposing,” “I couldn’t possibly,” and “I’ve already been a tremendous burden on you and your family”—to say my goodbyes, assuring the man that I would be back sometime to further impose on him but this evening I simply had to rush to the Shrine of Fatima for a quick zeeyarat, or “pilgrimage,” before the night was through.2

  It was my first visit to Qom and my first experience with shir’e, or “extreme opium,” as I now think of it. When I was a child, my parents would never have thought of bringing me here, a city that had very little to offer other than religious schools, the Shrine of Fatima Masoumeh (Imam Reza’s sister), and salty desert water. Back then the only tourists would have been rather pious pilgrims, and even today there are few Iranians from abroad who travel there unless it is out of pure curiosity, and many secular Iranians who live in Tehran avoid the city as if it harbors the plague. It has, however, become the de rigueur stop for foreign journalists and writers who understand not only that it is the spiritual capital of the Islamic Republic but that if Shia Islam is woven into the body politic as well as the soul of Iran, then Qom is its weaver. Qom of course has always been the most religious city in Iran (probably more so than even Mashhad, which houses a more important Shia shrine), and it merely took on a political significance after the Islamic Revolution of 1979 that it hadn’t had in centuries. This was where Ayatollah Khomeini lived before he was sent into exile by the Shah, this is where he resided part-time on his return, and this is where many Ayatollahs, Grand and otherwise, live, teach, and pray. Qom is where legions of young would-be Shia student clerics from around the world, talibs, come to study to one day become the religious authorities that hold political and social sway over this nation and, in their dreams, over other Muslim nations too.

  Some foreign and Iranian writers who visit Qom come to see and speak with dissident clerics such as Ayatollah Hossein-Ali Montazeri (once heir to Khomeini but later imprisoned for his dissent and now living quietly in a closely watched house) and Hossein (not to be confused with Hassan) Khomeini, grandson of Ayatollah Khomeini who has dramatically broken with the regime (but commands little attention), for clerics who are fundamentally opposed to the political system of Iran make for good headlines, particularly for those readers who want to believe that they are not Islamophobic by nature; but the Islam of the less combative reformist clerics and certainly the more conservative ones and the legions of ordinary people who support them is what really holds sway in this nation. Yes, it’s interesting that not all the religious figures in Iran are comfortable with the policies of the Islamic Republic, or even with the concept of velayat-e-faqih, and many of the disapproving mullahs are based in Qom, a city that, as a religious center of study, affords them some protection from charges of treason. But Iran, as one person told me in Tehran, has always been Islamic, if not a republic, and anyone who thinks that Islam entered politics with the 1979 revolution wasn’t paying attention to the past fourteen hundred years of Persian history.

  What both conservative and reform mullahs share is an understanding of that Islamic history and a strong belief in an Islamic Republic (and even Islamic democracy, however they define it), and contrary to the hopes of secularists everywhere, Islam lite, or a secular society with a nod to Islam, is not a part of anyone’s vocabulary. The reform Ayatollahs and even the dissident ones are allowed a measure of freedom to say what they please partly to show off the democratic nature of Islam (and the regime) and partly because the Ayatollahs in actual power know that to mess with another Ayatollah too much, dissident, reform, or otherwise, is to mess with the stability and legitimacy of the regime, to mess with the basic precepts of Shiism, and maybe even to mess with God. And it is Allah who rules Iran and the lives of most Iranians.

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p; There is an overwhelming sense of Shia Islam as soon as one enters Qom. Shia Muslims, believing only men from the Prophet’s bloodline should lead the Muslim nation, or ummah, revere two martyred Imams above all the others: Ali, who was murdered, and his son Hussein, who died in battle against the prevailing rulers of Islam at Karbala in present-day Iraq. These two deaths play a central part in Shia life, and the concept of struggle, pain, woe, and martyrdom is derived from centuries of mourning for these two souls, whose elaborately painted portraits, contrary to the common Sunni Muslim belief that depicting the human form is forbidden, adorn many a storefront, building, and private home in Shia towns in Iran, Iraq, and Lebanon, but are all the more visible in a town such as Qom. Sunnis, the orthodox of Islam if you will, believe in a strict Islam that takes the Koran as the literal word of God, not to be interpreted by man, whereas Shias, with their clergy, Ayatollahs and others, have, contrary to popular belief, a much more liberal view in that the church can interpret the Koran and the Hadiths (the sayings and deeds of the Prophet Mohammad according to witnesses and scholars who wrote them down) for the masses who might not have the educational and religious qualifications to do so. Qom and Najaf (in Iraq) are the two towns where the clerics go to learn how to do so.

  One of the first things one notices in Qom—a dusty old city with minarets and mosques visible from a great distance—apart from the many mullahs on the streets (which one would not see in a Sunni town), is that women are barely visible. Women in Qom, unlike their counterparts in Tehran, do not strut about in colorful headscarves and the latest denim fashions from Europe, nor are they seen much behind the wheels of automobiles. The women one does see in Qom seem to venture outdoors only fully enveloped in jet-black chadors, generally scurrying from one errand to another or in the company of what one must presume are their husbands.