by Hooman Majd
Teenagers in recognizably Western dress at an outdoor café in the hills north of Tehran, 2005. Although it is technically illegal for unmarried girls and boys to socialize, Tehran youth comfortably ignore such Islamic regulations, even under a staunchly conservative government like Ahmadinejad’s.
The “Bobby Sands Hamburger” stand in North Tehran, 2005. The irony of naming a hamburger stand after a famous hunger striker is lost on most Iranians.
A woman with revealing hijab being given a warning by a morals policewoman in Tehran during the government’s annual Spring crackdown, which was more severe than usual in 2007 (Majid/Getty Images)
A typical street scene in North Tehran, 2007, where both men and women continue to stylishly defy Islamic dress codes (Atta Kenare/AFP/Getty Images)
A religious woman viewing decidedly un-Islamic Iranian art, Khaneh-ye-Honar gallery, Tehran, 2005
A female-only car on the Tehran subway. Each train has one car reserved for the exclusive use of women; all other cars are mixed gender. Many women prefer the segregated car for its relative peace and quiet.
A difficult-to-parse but friendly sign at Tehran’s Mehrabad airport picturing the founder of the Islamic Revolution, Ayatollah Khomeini (left), and his successor as the Supreme Leader of Iran, Ayatollah Khamenei (right)
A Tehran billboard portraying Khomeini, Khamenei, and a young Basij (volunteer) fighter from the Iran-Iraq war. It says, essentially: “Our mission is to raise a generation of committed basijis.” The symbol of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards (of which the Basij are a division) is in the bottom-left corner.
A mural in Tehran, one of countless walls emblazoned with the image of Ayatollah Khomeini
A young, rather casual-looking shopkeeper in a store that sells religious flags and banners, Yazd, 2005. The banner on the wall behind him portrays the Shia saint Imam Hossein on his famous white horse.
A camel is sacrificed by the road in Qom, the religious capital of Iran, as buses pass by taking pilgrims to Mashhad, home to the Imam Reza shrine.
Men performing their pre-prayer ablutions outside the famous mosque at Jamkaran, site of a vision of the Mahdi over a thousand years ago, Qom, 2005
Women watching Ashura ceremonies from a rampart in the Taft main square, Yazd province, 2007. The photographs are of the boys and men of Taft martyred in the Iran-Iraq war, in which nearly one million Iranians died.
Men self-flagellating with chains, expressing their grief at Imam Hossein’s martyrdom, during a Tasua commemoration in a mosque in Yazd, 2007. Unlike in some other countries, here Iranians are not permitted to break the skin when self-flagellating; nonetheless, many of the men whip the chains at their backs with a ferocity that would astound Western onlookers.
Ayatollah Mousavi Bojnourdi, an Ayatollah who begs to differ with his government, with the Iranian delegation at a UNESCO conference, Paris, 2005.
Hojjatoleslam Mohammad Sadoughi (second from right), the Friday Prayer Leader of Yazd and the Supreme Leader’s representative in the province, with fellow clerics at a mosque, Yazd, 2007
A ten-story mural on a wall in downtown Tehran, by the side of a major elevated highway. The English is not a direct translation—the Farsi actually reads “Death to America.”
The former U.S. embassy in Tehran, now a museum and a Revolutionary Guards barracks, displaying an unsubtle message
Revolutionary Guards at Friday prayers, Tehran, 2007. The Guards, Iran’s elite military branch, are recruited from the religious and working classes. They report directly to the Supreme Leader and are fiercely loyal to the principles of the Islamic Revolution (of which they are the guardians). (Scott Peterson/Getty Images)
A newsstand in midtown Tehran, displaying the multitude of Iran’s dailies on the sidewalk in the morning, giving commuters a peak at the headlines
President Ahmadinejad greets a member of Neturei Karta, the Brooklyn-based anti-Zionist Orthodox Jewish group, with a traditional Muslim kiss, at the notorious Tehran Holocaust Conference, December 2006. (Atta Kenare/AFP/Getty Images)
I rode back to Yazd in Mrs. Sadoughi’s car. She had been unable to witness the pageantry, she told me, because it was far too crowded in the women’s section for her to make her way to the front. Lacking Revolutionary Guard escorts, or even someone to assist her, Maryam Khatami, wife of the Imam Jomeh of Yazd and sister of the former president, was just another anonymous chador-clad woman in the crowd. Islamic sensibilities, certainly in this case, strangely seem to show a lack of concern for the safety and well-being of the wives of dignitaries, and I witnessed the same situation in New York when President Ahmadinejad’s wife, who had accompanied him on a trip to the UN in 2006, wandered about the halls of the General Assembly in a black chador with no Iranian security (but with a lone U.S. female agent) visible. I say “strangely” because the Prophet Mohammad was married to Khadijah, his boss, who became the first convert to Islam, and Mohammad’s bloodline has been passed down solely through his daughter Fatima, wife of Ali, the first Imam of the Shias and their very raison d’être as a sect. But Maryam Khatami seemed unperturbed by the lack of attention given her by any of her husband’s guards, who are provided by the state to all Imam Jomehs, and in previous and subsequent conversations with her over tea, a water pipe, and plates of fruit, it was manifest that her view of Islam is formed by her study of the great Islamic philosophers and thinkers and not by blind obedience to the theocracy. Daughter of an Ayatollah, sister of a cleric president, daughter-in-law of a martyred conservative Ayatollah, and wife of the Imam Jomeh on whose thinking she has undoubtedly had quite an effect, Mrs. Sadoughi comfortably holds forth not just on Islamic philosophy but also on Greek and Western philosophy and thought, far more readily than I, and, inside her home at least, is not one to play second fiddle to anyone.
In one particular conversation on Sufism and philosophy, and knowing that I was writing a book, she ventured that perhaps my subject matter was somewhat pedestrian. “You should write a book on your grandfather,” she admonished me. “He was a great thinker, and not enough people know his works or know of him.”
“You’re right,” I said, with a modest and embarrassed smile that signified proper ta’arouf.
“Really,” she pressed on, “young people especially need to know him.”
“I don’t think I’m qualified,” I said. “I’m by no means an expert on the Philosophy of Illumination, if I even quite understand it.”2
“You should do some research,” she replied. “If you want to do something good, write a book on Agha-ye Assar, and get his works translated into English.” Her husband listened as she spoke but ventured no opinion.
“Chashm,” I said—“Upon my eyes”—another Persian expression of ta’arouf that is the polite and correct way to say “okay.” She looked at me knowing full well that it also meant I agreed with her but was in no way promising to actually do anything about it.
“Really,” she said softly. She smiled widely, and that was that.
Friday prayers the week of Tasua and Ashura take on added significance, with larger-than-normal crowds showing up at mosque (although it has never been an absolute obligation for Muslims to go to mosque, even on the Sabbath). In 2007, Friday prayers also coincided with the start of the ten-day celebrations of the Islamic Revolution of 1979, commemorating the ten days from Ayatollah Khomeini’s arrival in Tehran to the successful victory of his revolt against the Shah, lending the prayers even more weight and gravitas. In Yazd, the assembly on Fridays is held at the Molla Esmaeil Mosque, built by Esmaeil Aqdi, a famous Yazdi scholar and mullah of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. (The mosque was completed in A.H. 1222, which corresponds to 1807 C.E.) I had discovered two years earlier, and there is no way to verify it because Iranians didn’t have surnames, let alone birth certificates or even records of births prior to the reign of Reza Shah in the 1920s, that I am a descendant of his and, more interesting, that he was a Jew: a brilliant mathematician and scholar who not only conv
erted to Islam but became a mullah. In my father’s village of Ardakan, moreover, some people apparently still think of my family as “the Jews.” During my Ashura week visit to my cousin Fatemeh’s house, where a few people I hadn’t met before seemed to drop in from time to time, as is not unusual in small towns in Iran, I was introduced to one older woman who asked, “Majd? Ardakani Majd?”
“Yes, Majd-e-Ardakani,” I replied, using my grandfather’s original name (which just means “Majd from Ardakan,” and Majd actually being the single name of my great-great-grandfather).
“Oh,” she said. “The Jews.”
“I’d heard that,” I said after a momentary pause, a little surprised. I looked at Fatemeh’s father, my late aunt’s ninety-year-old husband and coincidentally also President Khatami’s uncle, who had rather triumphantly told me on a previous trip to Yazd that while his family was descended from the Zoroastrians (whom we had been discussing and who have always been a large minority in the region), I was descended from Jews. He said it somewhat gleefully because Iranians, whether pious Muslims or not, take great pride in their Aryan ancestry and revile the ancient Arabs who invaded their land, bringing them Islam, an Islam that they then molded to their Zoroastrian character. Even Seyyeds, descendants of the Prophet Mohammad, take pleasure in noting that their descent is through a Persian princess who married Mohammad’s grandson Hossein, whom they so faithfully mourn each year at Moharram. “Your ancestor is Molla Esmaeil,” he had said to me, and then he had gone on to explain who Esmaeil was. “God knows why he converted, though!” he had added at the end of his story.
“Yes, everybody knows that,” he said, noticing my attention. “But tell me,” he continued, “why are you really here? Have you come to do a little spying?”
“No!” I said with a laugh. “I like it here.”
“Come on,” he said jovially, “nobody likes it here, especially if you’re from America. What’s there to like?”
“Plenty,” I replied, “and of course I’m going to participate in Ashura.”
“No. You’ve come to write a report,” he insisted with a broad grin. “Have you written it yet? Did you investigate the uranium plant in Ardakan?”3
“Yes, that’s right,” I said. “I’m finishing my report on it soon.” He laughed, and I smiled. I knew he was only half-joking, though, for to someone like him, who has lived all his life in Ardakan and Yazd but has also seen Europe and America, the thought that anyone from those continents would find what he considers a backward place interesting enough to visit more than once, a place that would hardly merit a check mark for “worth a detour” if there were a Guide Michelin for Yazd province, was absolutely preposterous.
The Molla Esmaeil Mosque is anything but grand or ornate, although it does have its charms. Tall old walls surround the structure, so it’s hard to even see it from the street that runs adjacent to the bazaar. A large crowd, the women separated from the men by a rope that ran along one side of the tented courtyard, had already gathered two hours before the noon prayer, and yet another round of chest-and chain-beating ceremonies by various delegations marched along a path through the crowd kept clear by police and Revolutionary Guards. A man with what looked like an old insecticide sprayer attached to his back wandered around, spraying rose water on the congregants and marchers, one of whom, a toothless old man in clerical garb standing in front of me, was in desperate need of it to mask the body odor that caused me to back away when it hit me. A massive poster on one wall dominated all the other banners strewn about: a picture of a boy, perhaps ten or so and wearing a camouflage T-shirt, holding a photograph of Sheik Hassan Nasrallah of Lebanon and making the victory sign with the fingers of his other hand held in the air. In large black letters underneath were the words “The Party of God Is Victorious.” Hezbollah does indeed mean “party of God,” although the sentence did not employ that group’s moniker, one that has become almost a brand and that has lost its connotation in languages other than Arabic. The sign used the Persian khoda for “God” rather than the Arabic allah, and spelled out “party of” instead of using the conjunctive o-. It couldn’t be any clearer that it wasn’t a party or a political group or an army that was victorious (in the 2006 war with Israel): it was God.
Standing by the rope separating the women, who were all sitting on the floor, some trying to control their young children, from the men, who were preening about hitting themselves, I took out my camera and started taking photos. When I aimed at the women’s section, a young woman in full black hijab marched up to me. “Why are you taking pictures of the women?” she asked angrily. Sadoughi’s son, Mohammad, jumped in.
“He’s a writer,” he said. “It’s all right.”
The woman looked skeptical. “But why is he taking pictures of women?”
“What difference does it make?” said Mohammad. “You don’t seem to mind the television crews up there.” He pointed in the direction of the state TV cameras in the back of the courtyard. “He’s from the media too.”
“It’s still not right,” said the woman suspiciously as she stepped away, still staring at me. She stopped and leaned against a wall, keeping me in her view.
“I’m sorry,” I said to Mohammad. “I hope I’m not causing any problems.”
“Don’t worry,” he said, waving his hand. “It’s ridiculous. Take as many pictures as you like.” I put my camera away and headed for the exit. “I think I’ll go outside for a break,” I said.
“I’ll come too,” said Mohammad. We left the tented courtyard through a narrow passageway that led to the entrance of the mosque, a small courtyard drenched in the yellowish light of a fierce desert sun bouncing off the ancient mud and straw of the twenty-foot-high walls that fully enclosed it. Men loitered about, some smoking and others just leaning against the walls, waiting to enter the mosque when the actual prayers would begin.
“Right there,” said Mohammad, pointing to the center of the courtyard, “is where my grandfather was martyred.” Ayatollah Sadoughi, the current Imam Jomeh’s father and a conservative ally of Khomeini’s during the revolution, was killed by Mohammad Reza Ebrahimzadeh, a suicide bomber from the Mujahedin-e-Khalq (MEK), on July 2, 1982, during a wave of assassinations and terrorist operations against the Islamic Republic’s early leadership in a counterrevolutionary bid to assume power. “My father was standing right behind him,” he continued, “and he witnessed the whole thing.” Mohammad, who had just been born then, showed no grief, but he was solemn.
“Those days are long past,” I said, “and I don’t suppose there’s much of a terrorist threat these days, is there?”
“No,” said Mohammad, fingering his Motorola walkie-talkie, an item illegal for Iranians to own unless they’re with the armed forces, the police, or other government security services. “I suppose not.”
We lingered for a while; Mohammad went off and sat alone on a ledge built into the wall, and I walked around, thinking about how tenuous the clerics’ hold on power had been in the very early years after the revolution.
The Mujahedin had been an armed guerrilla group that were allies of Khomeini in bringing down the Shah, but had resented being excluded from power and had waged a bitter campaign, at first from within but eventually from their base provided them by Saddam Hussein in Iraq, against the Islamic Republic. A number of senior Ayatollahs, and even the republic’s second president, Mohammad Ali Rajai, were killed during their campaign, and the current Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, was injured in a bomb attack. Non-suicide operations were often carried out by men who fled as passengers on the backs of motorcycles, the most powerful of which were banned as a result and the reason that today still no motorcycle with an engine larger than 150 cc can be bought in Iran. But the Ayatollahs’ system had survived, and it was hard to imagine how anyone could have thought differently, particularly if he had bothered to attend a Friday prayer meeting at his local mosque, and especially during Moharram.
A few minutes before midday, Mohammad and I
went inside the mosque, to where the actual prayers were to be held, and Mohammad escorted me to the front row, right in front of the lectern where his father would deliver his sermon. The room was filling up with rows of men kneeling, waiting for the Imam Jomeh to arrive, and making last-minute calls on their cell phones. I wondered what they could possibly be discussing, and it occurred to me that not a few may have been talking to others in the same hall or perhaps to their wives in the women’s section, for on Fridays, absolutely no business is conducted in the country and not even newspapers are published. It reminded me, though, to silence my own phone. I sat waiting, saying hello to every man who walked up to Mohammad to pay his respects, until one of Sadoughi’s guards showed up and stood right in front of me. “Befarmaeed vozou, Haj-Agha,” he said, gesturing with one outstretched arm while holding the other over his heart in the Iranian custom of showing respect. “Vozou?” He was pointing in the direction of a private area where dignitaries would perform their ablutions before prayer—the vozou, or washing of the hands, forearms, feet, and forehead with water—and he had referred to me as a hajji, someone who has made the pilgrimage to Mecca, which he assumed that I, being of a certain age, certainly had. I was about to stand up when Mohammad held my arm firmly.
“He’s going to take photographs,” he said to the guard. “He’s working.” He must have sensed my slight hesitation and wished to spare me any embarrassment, even though I had never told him that I was not accustomed to praying. “He’ll pray later,” he added, just to ensure that my Islamic credentials remained bona fide with his father’s guards. (Shias, unlike Sunnis, can perform their dawn, noon, or evening prayers either at the time itself or at any time up to the next mandated prayer. Which is one reason why driving around any Iranian city at prayer time, there is no break in traffic. Unlike Muslim cabbies in New York City, many of whom will pull over, usually to a gas station, and pray right on time, not even pious Iranian taxi drivers will pause when their radio broadcasts the thrice-daily call to prayer.) Taking my cue, I took out my camera and stood up. “You can go anywhere with your camera,” said Mohammad as the guard excused himself for his own vozou and left us. I was somewhat relieved that I wouldn’t have to stay in one place throughout the prayers, mimicking my neighbors’ gestures—sitting, kneeling, standing, and muttering, certainly in my case, unintelligible Arabic passages from the Koran.