The House of the Mosque

by Kader Abdolah

  Ahmad, summoning all his strength, raised his arms in the air and addressed the crowd. ‘I swear by the Holy Koran that I am innocent!’ he cried.

  ‘Be quiet!’ the judge ordered.

  ‘I swear by the mosque that I’ve never been a henchman of the shah!’

  ‘Shut up!’ the judge roared, truly angry now.

  ‘I have never—’ Ahmad began. Just then two guards grabbed hold of him and started to lift him onto the donkey, but the animal shied away. One of the guards jabbed it so hard with his rifle that the donkey stumbled and fell, then scrambled to its feet again.

  An old man wearing a green headband and holding a weapon stepped forward. He stroked the donkey’s head, then held the animal still while the guards hoisted Ahmad into the saddle.

  Aqa Jaan couldn’t believe his eyes. The old man in the uniform was Am Ramazan! Their former gardener had become a soldier in the Army of Allah! It was inconceivable. Am Ramazan had not only let them use his donkey to humiliate Ahmad and break his will, but he had even volunteered to hold the animal still.

  He ought to be ashamed of himself. Why, he still had the key to their house! How could people change so quickly?

  Aqa Jaan was so upset that he began to chant the Al-Mursalat surah like a madman:

  Woe, that day, deniers of truth!

  By the tempests tempestuous!

  By the dispersers dispersing!

  By the sunderers sundering!

  What you are promised shall come to pass.

  When the stars become dim.

  When the heavens are torn asunder.

  When the mountains are scattered to the winds.

  Woe, that day, deniers of truth.

  The donkey moved off. Ahmad was weeping soundlessly. Someone threw a stone that hit him in the head.

  Aqa Jaan could bear it no longer. He ran after the donkey and hurled himself in front of it. ‘Stop!’ he said to the crowd. ‘You can’t throw stones! He hasn’t been sentenced to a stoning! Where’s that accursed judge?’

  One of the guards gave Aqa Jaan a shove, which sent him sprawling to the ground. But he got back up again, with surprising agility for a man of his age, and ran towards the donkey.

  The guard stuck out the lower end of his rifle and blocked the way.

  Another stone was thrown. This one struck Ahmad’s right ear. Aqa Jaan took out his Koran, thrust aside the guard and ran over to Ahmad. Positioning himself in front of his nephew, he held up his Koran and shouted, ‘In the name of this book, do not stone him!’

  The guard snatched the Koran out of his hand and hit him across the face with it. The blow sent Aqa Jaan reeling, but he quickly regained his balance. He grabbed Ahmad round the waist and tried to drag him off the donkey, pulling so hard that they both fell to the ground.

  While two of the guards were lifting Ahmad back onto the donkey, the other guards were kicking Aqa Jaan. Their heavy boots thudded into his stomach, back and legs.

  The donkey trotted off towards the mosque, and the crowd followed along behind.

  Aqa Jaan lay curled up in agony, chanting:

  Oh, you cloaked in your mantle!

  Oh, you muffled in your garment!

  You may lie

  On the ground no longer.

  Stand up!

  By the moon,

  And by the morning when it dawns!

  He placed his palms on the ground and rose painfully to his feet.

  The Cow

  In the beginning was the Cow. The rest was silence. At least that’s what the ancient Persians believed, which is why the columns in the old Persian palaces in the province of Fars are crowned with the heads of cows.

  When the Cow died, the rest of creation emerged from her body. Plants and animals sprang up out of her flesh.

  After a while this belief disappeared and was replaced by others. Fire became sacred and the Cow faded into the background.

  Fires were still burning brightly in the fire temples in the mountains when Zoroaster, the first Persian prophet, was born in Yazd. Zoroaster announced that neither the Cow nor Fire was to be worshipped. There was one supreme deity, he said, and he gave him a name: Ahura Mazda. Fire became the symbol of Ahura Mazda on earth. The prophet also presented his people with the holy book of Zoroaster, the Avesta.

  Centuries later, Muhammad proclaimed Islam. The ancient Persian beliefs were suppressed and the Fire was extinguished.

  The Cow and the Fire have not been worshipped for fourteen hundred years, but they still live on in the Persian spirit.

  Islam had created a rift in Aqa Jaan’s family. For the past eight centuries the house had been united in its struggle against the enemies of Islam, fighting the battle from the pulpit of the mosque. Now, for the first time, the family’s foe was Islam itself.

  The revolution had more or less ended, but Shahbal still hadn’t come home.

  Nosrat was doing well, working day and night to carve out a position for himself as an Iranian filmmaker in the new Islamic Republic. He didn’t have time to come home. He didn’t phone any more either.

  Zinat had thrown herself so zealously into Khomeini’s brand of Islam that she was rarely at home. She broke off all contact with the family. They had no idea what she was doing.

  Muezzin, who didn’t feel well, went on trips more and more often.

  Jawad was often away from home. Though he didn’t tell his family, he was spending much of his time in Tehran, where he was in touch with Shahbal. He’d always secretly sympathised with the leftist movement and with the struggle that Shahbal was now actively engaged in.

  ‘Why don’t you come home?’ Jawad asked Shahbal.

  ‘When Khomeini was living in Paris, he promised to tolerate others. Now that he’s in power, he’s forgotten his promise. To him, leftists are blasphemers. There’s no room for dissent in his regime, so we’ve toned down our rhetoric and gone underground. Khomeini can’t be trusted.’

  Nasrin and Ensi, the daughters of Aqa Jaan, also decided to leave. They were hoping to find a place in Tehran. No woman in the family had ever lived on her own before, but Nasrin and Ensi were no longer content to sit at home and wait for a husband.

  Fakhri Sadat had always been protective of her daughters. She hadn’t insisted that they attend mosque regularly, and she had sent them to the best schools in Senejan. After secondary school, both girls had gone on to teacher’s training college. In the normal course of things, they would have graduated by now and be working as teachers. But schools and universities had shut down when the revolution began. When they re-opened, Nasrin and Ensi weren’t allowed back in.

  The new regime had unleashed a cultural revolution in factories, offices, schools and universities. Anyone not considered Islamic enough was sent home. Nasrin and Ensi were the first students in their class to be dismissed, mostly because of Ahmad’s disgrace and Aqa Jaan’s spirited defence of him.

  For a while the girls went on living at home, but there was no future for them in Senejan.

  ‘Nasrin and Ensi want to move to Tehran,’ Fakhri Sadat announced to her husband one night as they were getting ready for bed. ‘They’ve come to me to ask me what I think.’

  ‘We can’t send two young girls to Tehran by themselves!’ Aqa Jaan said.

  ‘What are you planning to do? Keep them here for ever?’

  Aqa Jaan didn’t reply.

  ‘They have no future here. You’ve got to let them go.’

  A few days later Nasrin and Ensi went to see Aqa Jaan in his study and told him that they wanted to find jobs in Tehran and that he shouldn’t try to stop them.

  ‘All right,’ said Aqa Jaan, ‘I won’t stand in your way.’

  So they moved to Tehran, where they found rooms with a former classmate.

  Aqa Jaan continued to go to the bazaar every day, but things had changed. The men, who had all grown beards, spent most of their time competing for the mullahs’ favours. Insolence had become the norm; no one showed Aqa Jaan the slightest bit of respect. Ev
er since his office boy had started coming to work in a militia uniform, Aqa Jaan didn’t dare phone anyone when he was in the room.

  In the past, when he had gone to the villages to check up on his workshops, he had always been given a royal welcome. Now the villagers didn’t even come out to say hello.

  One day an old friend of his from Isfahan stopped by and found him bent over the papers on his desk. Aqa Jaan had aged so much he was unrecognisable. He had turned into a broken, grey-haired old man.

  He tried to keep working as usual, but his heart wasn’t in it. He didn’t have the energy he once had either, so he started going home earlier and pottering about the garden. Sometimes he went down to the cellar and spent hours poking around. One day Fakhri Sadat went looking for him. ‘What have you been doing down here all this time?’ she asked.

  ‘I’ve never had the time to look through these trunks.’

  ‘That’s enough for today. Go and wash your hands. I’ve just made tea.’

  He washed his hands and face in the hauz and went into the kitchen to drink tea with Fakhri.

  ‘Be patient,’ Aqa Jaan advised her, when she began to moan about her children’s future.

  ‘How can I be patient when all three of my children have left home with no future prospects and we don’t even know where they are half the time?’

  ‘Our children are not the only ones. Thousands of others are suffering the same fate. That’s how life has always been and always will be. The only remedy for that is patience.’

  ‘Your faith gives you the strength to be patient, but it doesn’t help me. I’m weak and filled with doubts. I hardly dare to say it, but I doubt if God sees our struggles.’

  ‘Be strong, Fakhri. Don’t stray into the darkness. You need to hold on to your serenity.’

  ‘Everyone acts out of self-interest, everyone tries to protect his own territory. You’re the only person who’s always been honest, and where has it got you? The cellar! You used to be the most important man in the bazaar, your word was gold, and how do you spend your time now? Rummaging through the junk in the cellar!’

  ‘I wish you wouldn’t put it like that,’ Aqa Jaan said, stung.

  ‘I’m sorry, but you know what I mean. My point is, where are your friends, the powerful men of the bazaar? Why aren’t they doing anything to help you?’

  ‘I don’t need their help,’ Aqa Jaan retorted.

  ‘Everyone has abandoned you. Where’s Zinat? Where’s Muezzin? And, most of all, where’s your brother Nosrat? Have you heard from him lately?’

  At that very moment, Nosrat was standing in the shower, thinking about the contribution he could make to Persian cinema. He knew he’d never achieve anything without Khomeini’s approval.

  Then, while the water was pounding on his head, he had a brilliant idea. ‘A cow!’ he shouted out loud. ‘That’s it!’ He turned off the water, grabbed a towel, dried himself, got dressed and hurried outside, where he hailed a taxi and had himself driven to the former palace that now served as Beheshti’s headquarters.

  Nine months had gone by since the beginning of the revolution and Khomeini still hadn’t decided what he was going to do about the cinemas. They had been boarded shut and, like the brothels, declared unclean.

  Nosrat and Beheshti had worked so closely together that they were on familiar terms. Beheshti had nothing against cinemas. When he lived in Germany, he used to sneak off occasionally to see a film. Still, he didn’t think this was the right time to broach the subject with Khomeini.

  ‘But I’ve got the perfect solution,’ Nosrat said to Beheshti. ‘All we have to do is take the imam to see a film. That way he can see for himself that a cinema and a brothel are two very different things.’

  ‘Be realistic,’ Beheshti said. ‘What film could we show him that would make him approve of the cinema?’

  ‘The Cow!’ Nosrat said.

  ‘The cow?’

  ‘The very first honest-to-goodness Persian film. I’d even go so far as to say that it’s an Islamic film.’

  ‘And it’s called The Cow?’

  ‘Yes, The Cow! It’s a Persian classic. It’s not a masterpiece, mind you, but it’s the best film to show the imam. After all, the archetype of the Cow is familiar to every Persian, even to Imam Khomeini. I’ll line up a cinema, and you can make sure the imam gets there. Islam could have a great influence on the film industry. I have big plans. If Khomeini approves of the film, an independent film industry will spring up from the heart of our culture. The Shiites have a unique way of looking at things. With our ancient Persian culture as our guide, we’ll soon conquer cinemas all over the world!’

  ‘We can talk about the rest of the world another time. First we have to convince the imam to see the film.’

  ‘We’d better hurry. There’s not much time. Now that the cinemas have been boarded up, the carpet merchants have launched a nationwide campaign to buy up the buildings and convert them into mosques.’

  ‘We’ll never get the imam to set foot in a cinema.’

  ‘Then we’ll do it the other way round. We’ll bring the cinema to the imam.’

  Beheshti smiled. ‘That’s a good idea,’ he said.

  ‘This is history in the making. Khomeini will like the film. It takes place in the countryside. It’ll remind him of his youth.’

  The next evening Nosrat showed up at Khomeini’s residence in the northern hills of Tehran, carrying a projector and balancing a screen on his shoulder.

  Beheshti ushered him into the imam’s study. Khomeini was sitting on a rug, leaning against the wall with a cushion at his back.

  Since the revolution, Nosrat had grown a beard and his hair had turned grey. He’d also started wearing an artsy kind of hat. People usually knelt before Khomeini and kissed his hand, but Nosrat was an exception. He took off his hat and gave the ayatollah a brief nod.

  Beheshti introduced him. ‘This is the cameraman whose coverage of the revolution was broadcast all over the globe. He’s very reliable. He comes from a good, pious family and has interesting ideas about the cinema. I’ll leave you two alone.’

  When Beheshti had gone, there was a silence.

  Nosrat put down his things and looked for a place to hang up the screen. He took a hammer out of his pocket and, without asking permission, nailed the white screen to one of the walls with two small nails.

  He moved a table away from the wall and set his projector on it. Then he placed a chair in the middle of the room and turned to Khomeini. ‘Would you please sit in this chair?’

  ‘I’m fine where I am,’ Khomeini said, somewhat irritated.

  ‘I know, but the chair is part of the experience.’

  Khomeini stared at him in astonishment. No one had ever spoken to him like that before. But he knew that Nosrat was a photographer, and he also knew that there were two people you should always listen to: your doctor and the photographer. So he got up and seated himself in the chair.

  Nosrat closed the curtains and turned off the light, plunging the room into darkness.

  Then he switched on the projector.

  The reel began to turn. It was an old black-and-white film. The first image to appear on the screen was that of a cow. It mooed – something Khomeini hadn’t been expecting. Then a farmer came into view. He kissed the cow on the head, stroked its neck and said, ‘You’re my cow. My very own sweet cow. Come, let’s go for a walk.’

  The farmer set off, and the cow followed him to the pasture. There the farmer took out an old-fashioned pipe, sat down beneath a shady tree and began to smoke. He gazed contentedly at his grazing cow. Then a woman in a headscarf appeared.

  ‘Salaam aleikum, Mashadi!’

  ‘Salaam aleikum, Baji. Come and sit in the shade, it’s hot today. I was just about to take my cow to the river. It was too hot for the poor thing in the cowshed. How are you doing, Baji?’

  The woman sat down beside him in the shade of the tree, and they stared at the cow in companionable silence.

  There
was nothing fanciful in the film, and yet there were several magical scenes, in which you could see ordinary village life. The story itself was simple, but what made it so moving were the villagers’ primitive living conditions.

  It was a fitting film for Khomeini’s new Islamic Republic, because there wasn’t a single sign of modern life in the village. The women all wore chadors and the Koran reigned supreme. There was no running water or electricity. No music could be heard and no one owned a radio. It was the perfect film for Khomeini to begin with. He could recognise himself, his parents and his former fellow villagers in the film.

  The story is about a childless farmer who adores his cow. One day the cow falls ill. The wise men of the village advise him to have the cow slaughtered before it gets worse, but he refuses to listen.

  One day, when the farmer is away, the cow drops dead. The villagers decide to bury the animal at once, before the farmer returns.

  When he comes home and asks about his cow, everyone tells him that it wandered off. The farmer panics. He spends days looking for the cow. When he doesn’t find it, he decides his life is no longer worth living, and he stops eating.

  The wise men of the village go to his house to comfort him and explain that it’s not right for a human being to mourn the loss of a cow. But the farmer is so upset that he thinks he’s turned into a cow. As the wise men enter his house, he begins to moo with grief. The wise men take out their handkerchiefs and wipe away their tears.

  When the film was over, Nosrat turned on the light, just in time to see Khomeini reach for his handkerchief.

  On the following Friday every ayatollah in the country made an unusual announcement at the end of his sermon: ‘Tonight a film is going to be shown on television. The film is called The Cow, and it’s been approved by Imam Khomeini. Islamic believers are allowed to watch it!’

  People who didn’t have televisions flocked to the teahouses that evening to watch the film. It was a red-letter day in the history of Iranian cinema.

  Aqa Jaan watched the film along with Lizard in the shed on the roof. It was his first film too. After he saw the cow and the farmer and the poverty-stricken houses, he had a hard time believing that this was the highly acclaimed cinema he’d heard so much about.