Searching for Hassan

by Terence Ward

  Yet power politics caused deep rifts in Islam. The patriarchs of the largest tribes bypassed Ali and chose their leader—the first caliph, Abu Bakr—through tribal consensus. These multitudes, their descendants and converts would call themselves Sunnis, derived from sunnah, the tradition.

  Those in opposition looked upon the Prophet’s family as the only legitimate heirs, led by his son-in-law, Ali, and his grandchildren, Hassan and Hussein. This branch of Islam came to be known as Shia Ali, partisans of Ali. Because of his nonviolent nature, Ali accepted the first three community-appointed caliphs. But growing resentment exploded into a bloody uprising against the decadent third caliph, Uthman, in Damascus. Finally, Ali was chosen as the fourth caliph, yet five years later he was assassinated. With his death, the corrupt son of Uthman proclaimed his rule over the Muslim world from Damascus, founding the Umayyad dynasty.

  Since then, Ali’s Shia followers have rejected all caliphs as usurpers. For this reason, the Arab Sunni, who now comprise 90 percent of the Muslim world, came to view the Shia as a dissident sect—revolutionaries to be persecuted and subjugated. Iran and southern Iraq remained Shia strongholds.

  * * *

  From the blazing sands of Arabia, Islam swept into Iran only five years after the Prophet’s death. Under the fearful command of Omar, the second caliph, sun-baked men in rags, riding camels and flashing lances, appeared on the southern horizon. In 637, on the battlefield of Qadisiyyah, the vaunted Sassanian imperial army of Persia was smashed. It was a humiliating finale to the glittering four-hundred-year dynasty that had even humbled Rome. Almost overnight, twelve hundred years of Persian rule on the plateau came to a halt. In the patriotic epic of Ferdowsi, the invasion is lamented as “a national catastrophe.” Henceforth, Iran became a subject nation of foreign conquerors, a piece of the Islamic mosaic that would stretch from stormy Atlantic breakers to frigid Himalayan snows to the South China Sea, along an archipelago called the Ring of Fire.

  Omar’s brutal conquest of Iran was followed by a migration of Muslims to the city of Kufa in southern Iraq, which soon became a refuge for Ali and his followers. Wandering Shia poets, merchants and other dissenters escaping Sunni persecution spilled into Iran, sowing Ali’s teachings and the legitimacy of Mohammad’s sacred bloodline. Ali came to occupy a special place in the hearts of Iranians. He preached social justice and respect for truth. His exemplary life is still a clarion call to faith.

  Ali’s heroic son Hussein took as a bride the last Sassanian princess, the Shahbanou, who had been captured by Omar’s troops. Their union symbolically tied the Prophet’s family to Persia’s royal lineage. Over the centuries, Shia opposition became the rallying cry for the politically and socially discontented in the Muslim community. A revolt in 760 led by Abu Muslim, from the eastern Iranian province of Khorasan, finally destroyed Umayyad power, giving birth to the glittering Abbasid caliphate in Baghdad, with its heavy Persian Sassanian influence. But another eight hundred years passed before the Shia faith was officially embraced by Iran’s ruling elite. Today, Iran stands as the only Shia nation in the world.

  As contentious as the historic rivalry between the Catholic papacy and Luther’s Protestants, the Sunni-Shia religious divide has fueled great bitterness over the centuries. Standing at opposite poles, each still views the other as the antagonist. Sunni Arabs will tell you that all Shias are heretics.

  While Shias condemn as illegitimate all caliphs after Ali, their faith is grounded in their belief in saints, called imams, all descendants of the Prophet. Ali and his two sons, Hassan and Hussein, are the first three imams. Various Shia schools differ in the number of recognized saints: five among the Lebanese Druze, seven for the Ismailis, led by the Agha Khan. Iranians believe in twelve imams. The twelfth, Imam al-Zaman, or the Saint of All Time, mysteriously disappeared in the tenth century. He is the Shia messiah, or madhi, living in hiding, who will reemerge on judgment day to restore justice on earth. Throughout Iran, silent prayers are offered for his return.

  Sunni Arabs consider this sheer apostasy. For all Western fears of Muslim unity, in the end Iranian Shias will always stand in direct conflict with the more numerous Arab Sunnis. Ultimately, it is a chasm that can never be bridged.

  * * *

  Like most Iranians, Akbar, with his passionate spirit, could not hide his distaste for Arabs.

  “Ignorant and uncultured,” he said emphatically. “The Arabs sent by Omar were true barbarians.” He scoffed at those ancestral Muslim brothers who had destroyed all Persian books and libraries. “Illiterate camel drivers, they couldn’t read, and so they tore all the books and threw them into rivers.”

  “No,” gasped Mom.

  “And as an intellectual, I protest,” Akbar said.

  “Hear, hear!” said groggy Kevin, wrapped in a red scarf now moistened with water. Nasrollah lay outstretched in his van, the doors left open to catch the desert breeze. Rich and Vaz carried on their debate about snow and salt. Vaz still wasn’t budging.

  “You can never trust Arabs,” Akbar went on. “All they want is our carpets and our women! Barbarians, they are only barbarians.” His face turned red. “Today the Arab sheiks laugh and say, ‘We have the money. We can buy anyone, and let them do the thinking.’ ”

  “Amen,” Richard said.

  In Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, my younger brother had already endured five years of frustration with a tempestuous boss who shamelessly took credit for all of Rich’s ideas. In return for his acquiescence, Rich received a healthy salary and a suburban split-level house close to an oil-soaked dirt-brown golf course.

  “Imagine, they destroyed all the books.” Akbar’s eyes flared. “Barefoot lizard eaters!”

  His voice became more shrill as he quoted the conquering caliph Omar: “If the books agree with Islam, then we don’t need them. And if they don’t, they are haram, forbidden.”

  “What a huge blunder,” my mother said. “Unforgivable.”

  “Our prophet Mohammad told us, ‘Seek knowledge even unto China.’ He truly valued learning. But Omar was so blinded by his fanaticism that he ordered all books to be destroyed here and in Egypt.”

  When Arab troops rode into Alexandria, the famous library was seized. Legend tells us that seven hundred thousand papyrus scrolls went up in smoke, stoking the city’s bathhouse fires for six months. Some scholars believe that rampaging Christian zealots may have done the senseless act two centuries earlier. Mysteriously, in Iran, Omar’s legions missed one library.

  The medical university of Gundeshapur in the southern region of Fars, held perhaps the world’s greatest treasure trove of Greek scientific and philosophical manuscripts. The collection was discovered over a hundred years after Omar’s invasion. Caliph Mamun, whose enlightened reign was considered the Augustan Age of Islamic literature and science, quickly ordered translations of all the texts into Arabic. Stored in Baghdad’s famed Bayt al-Hikma, House of Wisdom, these precious works slowly made their way west.

  One surviving first-century classic serves to illuminate that perilous journey. The Syntaxis of Ptolemy, the renowned Greek-Egyptian astronomer, listed 1,022 stars observed by him in Alexandria. A papyrus copy of his collection of stars later traveled from Baghdad across Africa, through the Pillars of Hercules and into multicultural Muslim Spain. In Toledo, King Alfonso the Wise ordered the work translated yet again, this time from Arabic into Latin.

  By the mid-thirteenth century, the Syntaxis had reached Europe. Navigators adopted it as an essential tool. Armed with the astrolabe, another Islamic invention, Portuguese argonauts sailed south across uncharted seas in their cannon-loaded carracks filled with Madeira wine. They rounded Africa’s Cape of Good Hope and dropped anchor off Persia’s southern coast, only a few miles from Gundeshapur. It was the dawn of the Age of Discovery. These were the first rumblings of the global economy. Multinational trading companies and colonial powers would soon divide up the world.

  * * *

  We were sitting in the shade when a wiry, energe
tic little boy suddenly appeared holding a deflated soccer ball.

  “Let’s play!” Rich called out. Seconds later, the boy was kicking the ball and running with my brothers. Two stones marked each goal. They booted the ball to and fro, and then my father joined in. While the ball spun between cartwheeling legs, I remembered the day when Hassan first brought us out onto the lawn and presented us with a small yellow ball he had found.

  Since that spring afternoon, we had played with kids in many places: on the beaches of the Caspian, in the Tivoli Gardens of Copenhagen, on the meadows of Central Park and in the bush of Kenya. In this universal game, we all made the same head fakes, bad passes and wild scrambles. Raw enthusiasm coupled with the grace of ballet tossed off flashes of elegance that could elevate the most rustic sandlot into the clouds. Chris’s skill as a goalie had won him national acclaim at Cornell, first as all-Ivy, then as all-American.

  The boy scooted out to the left. Richard let him slip by. With a gift pass from my dad, the boy dribbled, then booted the ball toward the goal. A generous Chris leapt in slow motion, deliberately letting it go through his arms and between the two stones.

  “Gooo-aallll!” the boy called out triumphantly, rushing over to my father to give him a hug. “Gooo-alll!” Vaz cheered.

  Mom, Akbar and I watched the game while Kev sat with his eyes closed as if in deep meditation. A long kick sent the ball flying down the hill. The boy and Vaz chased after it.

  This simple game of kicking around a single ball has captured the imagination of the world, even in remote outposts like Abarqu. This scruffy ball has connected more people than any cellular phone. It has reached every corner of the earth. It is understood in every language and more global than a Big Mac.

  “Sure hope we can see a match in Tehran when we get there,” said my dad. The World Cup countdown and Team Iran’s debut were soon on everyone’s lips. Akbar, though, was sulking.

  “Mrs. Ward,” he asked, “why do Americans keep mistaking us with Arabs? When will they understand we are not the same people?”

  She sighed. “Akbar, America is like an island, cut off from the world,” she replied. “Most don’t know any better.”

  I shrugged. “And don’t seem to care.”

  But to label Akbar an Arab was not only a blunder. It was an insult. Like insisting that an Irishman is the same as a Brit, or calling a Greek a Turk, or thinking that a New Yorker is like a Texan. Divided by history, culture, language, cuisine and, above all, by their branch of Islam, Iranians and Arabs have never been friends. While Greece and Turkey are neighbors, all Greeks will remind you that the border is all they share with Turks. So it is with Iranians and Arabs.

  “How can Americans get it so wrong?” Akbar asked again.

  “The reasons are many,” Mom said. “Arrogance, smugness, narrow-mindedness, naiveté. They get all their answers from CNN and the Internet. You should know, Akbar, you lived there. It’s Fantasy Island.”

  “So,” Kevin asked, lifting off his bandanna and wiping his brow, “what actually is an Arab?”

  The definition, I told him, was simple. “A person whose mother tongue is Arabic.”

  Only a handful of Iranians living along the Persian Gulf fell into that category. The other sixty million citizens did not.

  “You see, Kevin,” Akbar said. “We are not Arabs.”

  * * *

  We strolled along Abarqu’s empty streets with Akbar. We entered a small grocery store, where a raven-beaked shopkeeper lazily tried to interest me in a few onions, cigarettes, two bags of rice and his plastic bowls. I bought some bottled water and an apple, and complimented him on his town. He spoke of the weather. He called it “the month of heaven.” Cooler now, he said, but wait until summer. Asphalt melts, tires explode.

  “When were you last in Tehran?” I asked.

  “I’ve never been, al-hamdulillah. They tell me to go. But I say no thank you. Not even to Paris would I go!”

  He hated big cities—too much traffic. Here, a car passed every half hour, just the right pace. There was little hope of increased movement any time soon. One could read all of Tolstoy certain that nothing and no one would ever bother you.

  Across the square stood an impressive adobe mosque, whose two domes mirrored the pleasing shape of a Bactrian camel’s double hump. I admired the pure geometric harmony: the absence of lines, the clean rounded corners, the tan-colored domes, the circular walls blending into the roof.

  Akbar and I went to have a closer look. The door swung open wide. Inside, we took off our shoes. I ran my hand along the wall, a cool membrane of gold-red clay smoothed by human touch. The light was dim, the silence palpable.

  In the far corner, a black-robed mullah nodded slowly, facing the mihrab, a small marble arch that points, in every mosque, toward Mecca. A sleepy old man sprawled on a reed-thin mat lifted his head. He gave me an encouraging grin, then rolled over to continue his nap. Stress was not an endemic problem in Abarqu.

  We sat in the coolness of the mosque, and Akbar described the profound appeal of the Shia faith for the ever-suffering Iranians.

  “Our patron saint, you know, is Imam Ali.”

  “Of course,” I replied.

  “Yes. In all our hearts, Ali lives on like a hero. He lived simply, in poverty, following the words of the Prophet. He did not fight for power, he fought for social justice. You see, he loved and defended Iranian converts who had been cruelly treated by Omar’s Arab conquerors.”

  Through Ali, Iranians were welcomed into Islam, he told me. In him they found their spokesman, their defender, their martyr. As partisans of Ali, they could mourn their historic tragedies and pray for justice.

  “Ali would ask his Arab followers battling the Zoroastrians, ‘Have you read their holy book, Avesta? They have their own faith and worship only one God just as we do.’ He even tried to stop the Bedouins itching to wage war against us,” Akbar whispered.

  “Then what happened?” asked Rich, who had joined us in the mosque.

  “His Arab brothers turned against him. ‘He loves the foreigner,’ they said. They killed him first, then his sons, Hassan and Hussein. Terrible deaths.”

  The Prophet’s bloodline was savaged.

  “Ssshhhhh,” Akbar admonished Rich, whose curiosity about the early days of Islam had provoked yet another question. The dozing man had now awakened, and he stretched into a kneeling position. Time for namaz, prayer. He turned his hands upright, seeking to receive Allah’s grace. A silent offering. Eyes closed. A breath. Then his body bent over, his head gently touching the carpeted floor.

  “Remember Hassan’s namaz?” Rich asked me.

  How many times had I watched Hassan kneel in prayer? One afternoon, he and I were coming home from the Tajrish bazaar, his bicycle loaded down with bags of eggplant, cucumber, yogurt and lamb, and long loaves of hot fresh bread. We stopped by the Imamzadeh Saleh—the mosque and shrine—attached to the bustling market next to the Darband River.

  “Terry jan, wait for me here. I must go in and pray.” Hassan handed me the plastic sacks before slipping off his sandals and padding across the rugs to find his special place for meditation.

  Peering inside, I sat next to the rows of shoes, nibbling on the warm bread, guarding the shopping bags and his sturdy black bicycle. The warm carpeted floor, turquoise-colored walls and glancing mirrors enveloped his simple act of devotion. Hands turned upward to the sky, he knelt in quiet recitation. He lowered his head to the floor, in obeisance to the Almighty, his forehead touching the small disk believed to be made of earth from Kerbela that Shias use in worship—Kerbela is the place, in southern Iraq, where Ali’s son Hussein was savagely murdered. He rose and kneeled three times.

  Later, walking home along the tree-lined streets, he spoke. “It was for baby Mahdi,” he murmured. “God must help us, he’s so sick.”

  After visits to the doctor with my mother, the child was still in jeopardy. When we came home, Fatimeh lifted her little coughing Mahdi and passed the frail
child into Hassan’s firm hands, then rose from behind her loom, washed and silently moved to her mother Khorshid’s room. There, she prayed.

  * * *

  In Abarqu’s mosque, the kneeling old man lifted his head again and the mullah rose to stand.

  “Quick, let’s go.” Grabbing my arm, Akbar gestured for us to exit. In the fierce sunlight, we stumbled down the steps and put on our shoes. An enormous wooden structure in the shape of a dome rested against the mosque’s clay walls. Some young men stood next to it, testing the planks.

  “On Ashura, the tenth day of the month of Moharram, many young men will carry this platform, where someone in the role of Hussein will be dying,” he explained excitedly.

  “Baleh, yes.” I remembered the vivid scenes as a child.

  “Everyone watching will be crying.”

  In eastern Bali, where my wife and I had lived under the sacred volcano Gunung Agung, every funeral features a procession led by musicians in which a lofty tiered platform is carried by dozens of young men. In a heated drama, invisible forces try to thwart their advance to the cremation ground. Raucous shouts and passions seize the marchers. Some are overcome with emotion, and the platform shifts and buckles as if gone amok. Fearful cries pour out from the crowd. Many forces are at work, and everyone knows it. Each participant becomes an actor in a timeless struggle.

  A similar spectacle of mourning happens all over Iran. “It’s almost time,” Akbar said. “Ashura is just five weeks away.”

  Every year, a passion play called a taziyeh is reenacted during the first ten days of Moharram. It’s the timeless Shia tragedy that centers on the martyrdom of Hussein, the Prophet’s grandson and the son of Ali. This event anchors the faithful. It is played out not by professional actors but by local people in a kind of theater in the round.