The Ayatollah Begs to Differ

by Hooman Majd

  Coming by car from Tehran on a hot summer morning, I was stuck in an unusually heavy traffic jam that allowed me much time for observation: a camel had been sacrificed on the road, its neck slit wide open and its blood staining the road a bright red, in honor of a caravan of buses taking pilgrims to Mashhad, the other great Shia shrine, in northeast Iran. Iran’s second-largest city, Mashhad is home to Fatima’s brother’s grave, the Imam Reza Shrine, and pilgrims regularly travel from one city to the other as part of their Shia duties. (When Iraq is stable, and sometimes even when it’s not, such as now, Najaf and Karbala, which are the other two holy Shia cities, complete the pilgrimage set, and the truly pious shuttle between the four as often as they can.) Animal sacrifice plays a big part in Islam (more for the purpose of feeding the poor on auspicious religious occasions than for reasons of superstition), but rarely is it on such open display, even in Iran. The culture of Qom, however, is unabashedly medieval. The long line of buses, adorned with religious exhortations such as “Ya Abolfaz!” (Imam Hossein’s half brother and a man known for his great strength, so invoking his name is an appeal for strength), as well as somewhat less religious slogans such as “Texas,” was slowly making its way past the camel (whose flesh would later be donated to the needy), and a crowd of well-wishers had gathered to wave at the caravan.

  My first stop on this, my first, trip to Qom, after tiptoeing my way through fresh camel blood, was at the office of Grand Ayatollah Hajj Sheikh Mohammad Fazel Lankarani, a frail archconservative cleric in his seventies and one of the seven Grand Ayatollahs in Iran (there are four in Iraq), a man who rarely met with Westerners (and never any writers) or even, for that matter, any Iranians who weren’t his followers. (After a prolonged illness, the Ayatollah passed away in June 2007 in, of all places, a London hospital, ironically on the very same day that Salman Rushdie was knighted by the queen. Ironic because Lankarani was one of the senior clerics who begged to differ with their government and continued to call for Rushdie’s death, a duty for all Muslims, he said, even after the Iranian government, in a 1998 compromise with the British government that led to the normalization of relations, promised that it would not act upon Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa calling for the “apostate” author’s murder.)

  Although it would seem that Lankarani would have been a strong supporter of the conservative government taking power after Khatami’s retirement, he famously refused for weeks to meet with President Ahmadinejad in early 2007 while I was in Iran. It was an open secret in Tehran that Ahmadinejad, beleaguered and under fire from even his conservative base, was attempting a public meeting with the Grand Ayatollah to deflect the conventional wisdom that he had lost the support of the most senior clerics, but he had been constantly rebuffed. The reason, paradoxical as it may appear, wasn’t that Ahmadinejad, religiously ultraconservative, had shown incompetence in managing the economy or that he was endangering Iran’s security with his foreign policy, nor was it that he had not bettered the lives of the poor, the working class, and the unemployed, the very base of religious support in Iran. No, the reason for dissatisfaction with Ahmadinejad among some senior clerics was that he had had the audacity to interfere in an area they viewed entirely as theirs, that is, Islam.

  Ahmadinejad’s proclamation in 2006 that women should be allowed into soccer stadiums, a proclamation he made without consulting the clerics, was quickly overruled by them, with an unsubtle message that, as a layman, he should stay out of issues that deal with Islam, Islamic law, and Muslim rules of behavior. And prior to his proclamation on women spectators at soccer stadiums, he had said in a visit to a group of Ayatollahs in Qom immediately upon his return from the UN General Assembly in 2005 that he had felt a halo over his head while he had been giving his speech and that a hidden presence had mesmerized the unblinking audience of foreign leaders, foreign ministers, and ambassadors. This, to conservative Ayatollahs, amounted to blasphemy, for an ordinary man cannot presume a special closeness to God or any of the Imams, nor can he imply the presence of the Mahdi, the disappeared twelfth Imam, who will reappear and reveal himself on earth only at Armageddon, and not, presumably, at an ordinary meeting of the UN General Assembly. The Ayatollahs could not abide the president’s halo claim when they, “signs of God” after all, had never made such claims themselves. Needless to say, on his subsequent trip to New York, Ahmadinejad did not sense a halo over his head, nor were the delegates mesmerized, but Lankarani and some of the other Ayatollahs were slow to forgive, and in the spring of 2007, when Ahmadinejad publicly kissed the (gloved) hand of his childhood schoolteacher, an old woman in proper hijab, conservatives once again were infuriated by his seemingly lax adherence to their strict rules of modesty.

  Lankarani’s office was a converted old house with a large drawing room covered in Persian rugs but no furniture. As I sat waiting for him on the floor, I was served a continuous supply of tea and fresh watermelon slices by an old male attendant. The clock in the room was an hour behind mine. It is, I learned there, a sign of piety in Qom to reject daylight savings time. If the Ayatollahs say it’s 11:00 a.m., it’s 11:00 a.m., for in their world only God has the power to change time, and by the grace of Allah, I was an hour early for my appointment. An hour later the room started bustling with activity, men scurrying about, my tea glass refilled after almost every sip. The Ayatollah’s nephew Javad Abutorabian, whom I’d been talking to, suddenly rose and ushered me in for my audience. The Ayatollah’s room was identical to the drawing room with the exception of two chairs placed by a window in the corner: one for the Grand Ayatollah and one for his highest-ranking disciple. After a few polite pleasantries, I was formally introduced by his nephew as an Iranian writer from the United States who was looking to understand Qom and the meaning of Islam in Iranian life, although I had not actually expressed my reasons for requesting an audience in those terms.

  Lankarani smiled and looked me straight in the eye. “It is very difficult,” he said slowly, “to understand.”

  I remarked that I understood how difficult it was to understand, and after an uncomfortable silence I suggested that despite the difficulty, I’d still like to ask him some questions.

  “Very difficult,” he said, chuckling mischievously, “to understand,” apparently amused by my naïveté.

  I smiled at the Ayatollah, trying to come up with some words that might break the ice, and I even thought about bringing up Salman Rushdie’s name, albeit without mentioning that despite having crossed paths with him on the sidewalks of the Upper East Side of Manhattan, I had been negligent in my duty as a Muslim to kill him on the spot. But before I had a chance to form the words in my head, he turned and sternly looked at one of his aides. The meeting was over. The aide pulled me aside and explained that the Ayatollah was tired and sick, and I retreated to the drawing room, hoping I might get another chance to chat after the Ayatollah received the main group of visitors who had started gathering in the room, for Tuesdays are visiting days and noon is the appointed hour. The men—young, old, soldier, civilian—all sat cross-legged on the carpet waiting for their turn to get a glimpse of the Ayatollah. Many of these supporters had traveled from Tehran or other cities just for a chance to spend a few seconds in his presence, and they all seemed serious and eager. When the doors to the anteroom opened, the men made an orderly queue. One by one they filed into the room, kissed the Ayatollah’s hand, and walked out, beaming as they left his presence.

  Lankarani’s followers, indeed the followers of some of the other Grand Ayatollahs in Shia Islam, truly believe in a government of God, and God’s representative, their Ayatollah, tells them how to live in God’s favor. And they number in the millions, mostly across Iran and Iraq, but also in other countries of the Middle East and Asia, and they give generously to their Ayatollahs. Whether in an Islamic Republic or not, they don’t stray from their Ayatollah’s teachings, and their faith is inseparable from the governance of their daily lives. I was told by one of Lankarani’s aides that day that approximately ten
million dollars a month flows into his treasury from his supporters alone. Ten million means either a few very rich supporters or millions of poorer ones; in this case it was a combination of the two. The money was apparently spent on the numerous projects, such as building mosques (a more recent one is in Moscow) and religious schools, that the Ayatollah had going all over the world. The schools, unlike the Wahabi Sunni madrassas that we hear so much about, don’t preach hatred for the West or Westerners. But they do preach the supremacy of Shia Islam and for those who believe in a theocracy, as Lankarani did, the concept of velayat-e-faqih, which means rule of the Ayatollahs.

  As the Ayatollah quietly left the building, another of Lankarani’s aides, sensing my disappointment, suggested that I visit his library and the nerve center of his Web operation in, appropriately, Iran’s only city with fiber-optic connections. At a nicely air-conditioned building a few blocks away, a pleasant and self-taught computer-literate young man gave me a tour of the library and explained how Lankarani’s Web site operated in seventeen languages, including Swahili and Burmese, for all of his followers. It was updated daily with the Ayatollah’s proclamations, fatwas, or religious commands, if he’d issued any recently, and general information, but, most important, it was a place to ask questions: e-mails poured in every day in all seventeen languages and were carefully printed out, one by one, and arranged according to language in mailboxes for Lankarani’s Iranian and foreign talibs (Arabic for “students,” and where the word “Taliban” comes from) to translate, so that they could be answered by one of the senior staff, such as his son, but always reviewed by the Ayatollah himself. I was shown e-mails in English, translated by hand into Farsi, where the Ayatollah had crossed out an answer and written his own, to be retranslated and transmitted back electronically. Most of the questions in the e-mails I saw related to sex; for example, a sixteen-year-old boy from England had written about his “friend” who had had oral sex with a fourteen-year-old boy and was worried that his prayers would be nullified and that he might be punished by God. The Ayatollah’s answer was refreshingly short and simple: repent, and don’t do it again. No mention of homosexuality, no judgments—who said the conservative Ayatollahs weren’t compassionate? I read the same thing, “repent,” page after page, for almost without exception the questioner had committed some kind of sin, or at least thought he had, or claimed to have a “friend” who had. I looked around at the banks of computers and the dark, highly polished wooden mail slots filled with printed e-mails: Digital confession, I thought. The Vatican should get in on this.

  The early evening crowd at the Shrine of Hazrat Fatima in the center of Qom was dense, as it is on every other day of the week, 365 days a year. The mosque around which the tomb is built is magnificent, and the crowd, Shia men, women, and children from all over the world but these days including a large number of Iraqis, milled about in the courtyard, either waiting their turn to go inside, touch the tomb with their fingers, and say a few prayers or unwilling to leave quite yet after they had already done so. The truly faithful will spend hours here, sometimes days, praying inside the mosque, touching and kissing the silver and gold latticework encasing the tomb, and pausing only to shop for religious souvenirs at the hundreds of little stores that surround the shrine. Some, particularly those Shias with a strong belief in the imminent coming of the Mahdi, the Messiah, will, particularly on Tuesdays but also on Fridays, the Muslim holiday, make a second pilgrimage to a site a few miles outside of Qom: Jamkaran.

  On this Tuesday, before I drove back to Tehran, I also stopped at Jamkaran and visited the gargantuan mosque that had been built on the site of an alleged vision of the twelfth Imam, the Imam Mahdi. (In Shia Islam, the twelfth, or last, Imam is believed to have never died, merely disappeared, and will one day reveal himself to us as the Messiah. The Muslim Messiah, that is, and according to believers Jesus Christ will appear at the same time by his side as his follower.) On Tuesday evenings the faithful come to Jamkaran to pray and to drop a note to the Imam in a well (near which the vision of or encounter with the “Hidden” Imam actually occurred in 974 C.E.), asking him to solve their problems, as Tuesday is apparently the day the vision appeared and therefore the day of the week that he, although invisible, takes requests. Some also believe that he appears on Tuesdays not just to read the notes but to mingle with the crowd anonymously, which means one is subject to even more intense stares than are normal in a country of starers. (Staring is not considered bad manners by most Iranians, for anyone who ventures outside is considered to have put him-or herself in the public eye, which is partly why men, and even many women, vehemently defend a woman’s obligation to cover herself and a man’s obligation to dress modestly.)

  Tuesday nights at Jamkaran resemble a huge tailgate party where vendors set up in the parking lots and families set up picnic rugs and tens of thousands wander about the grounds as if waiting for a main event to happen, which of course never seems to. There was a long line of pedestrians making their way to the well, the holy spot, as well as busloads and carloads of people, coming from near and far, to pray and to ask a small favor of the missing Imam. As dusk turned to night, thousands, probably hundreds of thousands, prayed outside the over-flowing mosque, women separated from the men in their own special cordoned-off area, and wandered about the grounds, dropping pieces of paper into the well (the women in their own well) and partying with their families. The men’s well, which I naturally went to, was crowded with all sorts of people, including Arabs in headdresses and many holding children and babies in their arms, some of whom also dropped their very own little notes into the stone well. Everyone I asked had a story about how a short note to the Imam on a Tuesday night had resulted in some kind of favorable outcome for the petitioner. The occultation of the twelfth Imam speaks as much to Shia thought and behavior as the martyrdom of the Imams does, and salvation plays as big a part in Shia belief as it does for evangelical Christians.

  President Ahmadinejad, who had only been in office a few days the night I went to Jamkaran and is closer than one might imagine to Christian evangelicals in thought, is a big believer not just in the Hidden Imam (whom he refers to in every speech, including at the UN, pleading that he show up as soon as possible) but also in Jamkaran as the site of his coming reappearance. Since his election, Ahmadinejad has donated millions of dollars from government funds to the Jamkaran mosque, and expansion projects already started took on an added urgency during his presidency. Ahmadinejad also brought attention to a site that was little known outside devout Shia circles, attention that is not always welcome, particularly if it comes from non-Muslims. When I was in Iran in 2007, an Italian photographer friend had just arrived on assignment from Newsweek, and he asked what he should see when he traveled to Qom. I immediately told him the highlight of a trip to Qom would be a Tuesday night romp at Jamkaran, and he followed my advice but was allowed near neither the main mosque nor the well, and was instructed not to shoot any photos in the vicinity. That Jamkaran would become a major Iranian Shia attraction well after a revolution brought the clergy to power is unsurprising, for evenings there resemble a festive party as much as they do a religious ceremony, and the combination is irresistible to believers.

  It was not always that way, and my mother, a thoroughly Westernized but pious woman who has made the hajj pilgrimage as well as visited the Imam Reza Shrine in Mashhad (before the revolution) and is hoping to make it to Karbala before she dies, had never heard of the place until I told her about it. The idea that the twelfth Imam might be roaming about the place on Tuesday nights seemed to her rather ridiculous, even though she believes in him and his eventual return to the realm of the living. (My cousin Fatemeh, far and away the most religious in my family and a woman whose hair I’ve never seen, whose hand I’ve never shaken, knows of Jamkaran but has never bothered to visit. She believes in the Savior, the Hidden Imam, but she comes from the educated middle class, surrounded by many relatives who are secular and by clerics who are, like her cousi
n President Khatami, rather less superstitious, so to her the Imam’s presence at Jamkaran is a little too fanciful a notion.)

  Before the Ayatollahs and mullahs took over the running of the country, many of the more fanciful concepts of Shiism were largely ignored by the masses, religious though they might have been. The idea of a missing Messiah was just that: an idea, and one that few thought to take literally. But with encouragement from the state, no aspect of Shia theology or mysticism is left to the imagination, and an entire generation of Iranians, certainly those from deeply religious families, has grown up with a far more literal interpretation of Shia mythology than previously. To imagine it from an American view: it is in some ways as if evangelical Christians had had their way in the White House, in Congress, in state governments, on the Supreme Court, and in the schools for over a generation. Perhaps not a perfect analogy, for America is far more diverse than Iran and the majority probably less religious, but an analogy of sorts nonetheless. (The fact that little public entertainment exists in Iran might also be a contributing factor to the popularity of, and the carnival atmosphere that surrounds, a site such as Jamkaran on a Tuesday or Friday night, but one supposes that if evangelicals had their way in America, far less nonchurch entertainment might be available there as well.)

  One must see Qom and Jamkaran in another light too, not just as places of government-sponsored and encouraged pilgrimage, but as places of hope. The government need not make much effort to persuade an already religious populace that salvation is around the corner, that the Mahdi will solve all their problems, even if only on Tuesdays and Fridays until he decides to take the job full-time. The female cabdriver who took me to the presidential offices on a snowy morning and who braves the errant bus drivers when she drives to Jamkaran, a young widow raising two children and caring for an ailing mother and a woman who mused whether she should have immigrated to a better life, may have little else to look forward to besides salvation. A population that suffered the chaos of revolution followed quickly by a brutal eight-year war—a war that rained missiles down on Tehran and that (oh so!) unjustly killed a generation of Iran’s youths—a population that struggles every day with unemployment, financial issues, rampant drug abuse, and the notion that its rights have been trampled, well, this is a population that is somewhat more susceptible to the notion that salvation might be at hand.