by Terence Ward
“We’ve left the spiritual and plunged into the material,” I moaned, loading the van.
“Yes, but the prices were so low, Ter, it was spiritual,” Kev pointed out.
Heavily burdened, we drove back to Bi-sim Street for our final farewell. I rang the bell and, as the small metal door opened, Mom presented blushing Fatimeh with a bright bouquet of yellow roses.
“Shoma gol hastid?” Fatimeh said. “You are a flower yourself. Why did you bring flowers?”
We all sat on the porch for a family portrait, and Hassan pulled out his gift: a light blue Styrofoam picnic basket packed with fried chicken, rice, fresh tomatoes, tangerines and yogurt.
“Promise you won’t stop in any place to eat until you get to Tehran.” He wagged his finger in warning, proud purveyor of home cooking that he was.
We promised.
“Inside, you have enough for the whole family, even for Vaz.”
“Whenever I tell my friends Mrs. Ward went to my village to find me, after so many years, they don’t believe,” Fatimeh gushed. “But I tell them it’s true.” She took my mother’s hand in hers.
“Well,” Mom replied, “in the end, we hoped and prayed. And here we are together at last. Insha’allah, we’ll return soon.”
“We’ll be here waiting for you.”
“We’ll be back, Fatimeh, we will.” Her voice breaking, Mom spoke for all of us.
Hassan threw his arms around us. “We never forget you. Never. We wait and think, and never forget.”
In a flurry of waves, our heavily laden van coughed into gear. Lurching down the street past the neighborhood mosque, we turned back to look for the last time. They had vanished, slipping back inside their walls. Isfahan—its rivers and bridges, gardens and mosques, bazaars and boulevards and sprawling suburbs—quickly faded behind us. Tehran lay 240 miles north. Our track crossed a rugged range with its snowy peak, Kuh-e Karkas, or Mount Vulture, staring fiercely down at us.
Millennia of high winds and flash floods had gashed and riddled the copper-gold land. These high steppes bore their ancient scars artistically, each finely carved by snaking river traces: ornate fractals, veins of a leaf, pointed tridents. Cracked-open plateaus floated by, all barren except for a dusting of green where a spring burst through the arid crust. These were the solitary signs of man’s humble addition to nature’s complex geometry. Somewhere to our left, hidden in the ocher folds of rising hills, lay the pomegranate-stained village of Abiyaneh.
Hassan and Terry at the Ghasemi home.
We turned off the main highway, left the wasteland and came upon a narrow river valley. The weaving road climbed along a gorge, curling left and right past groves of poplar and mud huts. We met a shepherd tending his flock.
“Where is your town of Abiyaneh?” Vaz asked.
With his walking stick he pointed up the mountain.
“What’s up there to see?” Vaz asked.
We didn’t hear the shepherd’s answer.
“What did he say?” my father asked.
“Mr. Ward, he said he hasn’t been there in eight days, so he’s not sure.”
“What the hell, Vaz, did you think there might be an arts festival?” Dad looked exasperated.
We drove on for another twenty minutes until, tucked away from the world, we found it, between arid peaks and lush groves of apricot, cherry and plums well watered by melting snows. Two fortresses guarded the entrance to a mountain river valley. Tall plane trees triggered memories of rushing streams and patches of meadow.
“I’ve had dreams about a place like this,” Kev said.
Radiating a burnt sienna hue, the adobe village of Abiyaneh clung to the cliffs, one house stacked atop another, each growing out of the roof below like the ancient pueblo dwellings in Mesa Verde. And what of Abiyaneh’s rare sunset glow? The skin of pomegranates, we were told, mixed with earth before building, gave the adobe walls their reddish stain.
At the end of the road, a shaded meadow welcomed us. Hassan’s picnic lunch was soon devoured, and then an elderly forest nymph appeared in a white headscarf. Here, apparently, black scarves were traded in for white ones with red roses. Curiously, she told me her name was Fereshteh, which means angel. Fereshteh slowly opened her stash of fresh pressed apricot and cherry rolls, called lavoshak, wrapped in a flowery cloth.
Chris couldn’t resist. “May I buy some?”
“Of course,” she slyly said.
“All of it?” Immediately, Chris bargained for the entire supply.
“Oh, no,” Fereshteh whispered. “Here he comes. Don’t speak to him. He’s really crazy.”
She pointed at a gangly, big-footed man walking in our direction, then quickly collected her money and fled back into the grove.
When the man arrived, he asked where Fereshteh was. We gave no answer. He scratched his head, rubbed his shoe in the grass.
“She’s crazy, you know,” he said. “You shouldn’t talk to her.”
We felt we had somehow stumbled upon a scene from Waiting for Godot. Two people stop and talk to strangers, each calling the other mad. Yet at the end only they remain on the stage. “Maybe,” Rich suggested, “they’re both hopelessly in love, just too shy.”
In that idyllic place we felt lifted, light as a feather, under the trees by a rushing stream. “What more could we want?” my father asked. Our reunion with Hassan had filled us with a giddiness, a warm certainty, a bold confidence. Humanity and grace were very much alive. We felt newly born.
* * *
Every country has its Newark. Between bare, scruffy hills by the great Salt Lake sat Qom. It was a gloomy, polluted place. We visited Qom because it held the gold-domed shrine of Masumeh, sister of Reza, the eighth imam. Qom was Iran’s Vatican, the heart of the Shia clergy and the axis mundi of the Islamic Republic. It was here that Ayatollah Khomeini spoke out against the Shah in 1963, provoking his own arrest and inflaming rioting crowds in Tehran. It was here that, a year later, he spoke against the shameful bill approved by the Majlis that gave American military personnel blanket immunity from the courts. And it was here, in January 1978, that the first shots were fired on seminary students protesting a newspaper article slandering Khomeini. Qom was the epicenter. It was here that the spark of revolution was lit.
The city sprawled like a massive low-budget stage set. Women were covered completely—no mere scarves here. It felt tense, full of hectic confusion, no lightness like the cities we had left behind. Every passing police or army officer stared at us. No smiles. No waving. I lowered my camera. Two minarets rose above the bazaar, and we followed the signs of Allah.
True to form, our driver Hussein—who, as Vaz said, “loved danger”—stopped right in front of the mosque and beckoned us to go inside. Mom remained on board, apprehensive about the unwelcoming vibes coming from the holy place.
“More ayatollahs here than any place on earth,” Vaz warned. “Now, for God’s sake, don’t get me into trouble.”
This time he was right. Clerics, in their black or white turbans, streamed out the doors. When we tried to enter the mosque’s courtyard, guards stopped us. Were we Muslims? We said no. The call to prayer echoed in rich, piercing cadence. We could go no further.
* * *
In his penetrating and sympathetic book The Mantle of the Prophet, Roy Mottahedeh explores the world of Qom through the life of a young mullah, Ali Hashemi, who comes of age during the Islamic Revolution. Mottahedeh, a professor of Middle Eastern history at Harvard, maps out the unique theological education of Iran’s seminaries. The Islamic colleges he describes focus on grammar, rhetoric, Arabic and logic; on the philosophers Aristotle and Avicenna; and, most importantly, on the Koran.
Like the Catholic clergy, the Shia have their hierarchy as well. Talebehs are students or “seekers” who come to Qom’s colleges. After years of study, a student hopes to become a mujtahid, a “jurist” with the right to interpret Islamic law. A higher level is hojjat al-Islam, “proof of Islam.” At the top, ayatollahs are t
he “light of God.”
Calling these mullahs “the last true scholastics alive on earth,” Mottahedeh greatly admires the intellectual rigor required by the students who master the ancient texts and intricate interpretations of Islamic law. However, he has little sympathy for those scholars who betray their traditional vocation of teaching to enter politics. At the end of The Mantle of the Prophet, Ali Hashemi abandons the political arena and returns to Qom, where he will teach once more. This is Mottahedeh’s strong plea, that other mullahs will do the same. And he is not alone.
“Back to the mosques” was a constant refrain during our journey. Iranian society and the clergy were torn by that debate. In the ongoing struggles between the clergy and secularists, traditionalists and modernists, Mottahedeh appealed for reconciliation. But this was Iran’s political quandary: those in power had too much to lose.
The Islamic Republic’s constitution, passed in a 1979 referendum, enshrined the concept of valeyat-e faqih, governance by an Islamic jurist. This cemented the clerics’ hold on the Islamic Republic. Yes, the president and parliament would be elected in voting far freer and more democratic than that of any regime in the Arab world. But at the top, the Supreme Leader—first Ayatollah Khomeini and now his appointed successor, Ayatollah Khamenei—had the final say on all matters.
Appointed for life, the Supreme Leader represented God’s voice on earth. In Khamenei, along with the Council of Guardians—which made judgments on key issues, such as approving candidates for election and laws passed by parliament—there existed an institutional check on any attempts to reform the system through democratic means. The Supreme Leader maintained control of the state-run radio and television, the police, the military, the courts and the prisons.
After two decades, the Islamic Republic had reached a crossroads with the election of the new president, Khatami. Foreign diplomatic visits would attract promises of investment and technology, the benefits of the global economy that the country so desperately needed. But internally, the president had only limited influence. He could, for example, give permission to publish a newspaper. And he did. An explosion of dailies flooded the newsstands during our visit. A new, powerful voice of open questioning, critical analysis and investigative journalism was taking the country by storm. The Islamic Republic was reshaping its identity.
* * *
Vaz tried admirably to bluff our way into the luminous gold-domed shrine of Masumeh. The gap-toothed guard simply told us to leave at once. We had come to the one religious site in Iran where nonbelievers were not admitted. The courtyard was filled with mullahs and theological students, strolling and speaking in hushed tones. We backed away and silently boarded the van, feeling thoroughly unwelcome. Hussein drove on.
My mother broke the silence by reminding us about our previous visit to Qom many years ago. “Probably only Kevin was old enough to remember, but last time we were here, we—”
“Were stoned,” Kev said with a grin.
“This was before Hassan came to work for us. Otherwise, it would never have happened. It was our fault. We didn’t realize it was Moharram.”
She described our ordeal. Our blue Opel was packed to the brim for a camping trip in the south. When we reached the outskirts of dusty Qom, we saw black bunting and flags fluttering in the wind, signaling the period of mourning. Then the streets narrowed and traffic slowed to a crawl. Limping along a boulevard, we came to a red light. As we stopped, we heard a loud thump on the car, then another. Rocks were flying. One came through the window. Dad panicked. He flipped the car in a U-turn and sped out of town.
“The choice of Moharram for a family outing was not a bright idea,” Mom said. “Had Hassan been with us, he would never have let us go.”
“What did we know? We’d only just arrived,” Dad said defensively. “How could we know that religious fervor, resentment of foreigners and kids’ joy of target practice all peaked during Moharram?”
“The blind leading the blind.” Kev sighed.
“And so,” my mother continued, “we drove west into the hills.” She recounted how we left the car parked on the road and hiked up, carrying a food basket and water with us. We found a lovely place to picnic. “There was this beautiful tree,” she remembered. “But as soon as we had sat down to eat, Daddy realized we weren’t alone.” In the distance he saw five figures in dark clothes walking in our direction. He looked through binoculars and said they might be trouble. “Then he told me, ‘They’ve cut off our path to the car. It’s too far to run. Wait here with the boys.’ Before I could say anything, he was running down the hill toward the road.”
“Oh great!” Chris said. “Dad abandoned us.”
“My only hope was to stop a passing car for help,” Dad said.
“A mile away?” Rich needled.
“While we’re up on the hill like sitting ducks,” Chris added.
“And once Dad disappeared from sight …” Mom was about to continue when my father felt he had to explain.
“Look, guys, we were alone in the desert. The threat was clear. We had no protection. But I was lucky, a truck pulled over. I was frantic and don’t remember what I said, but the driver gave me his tire iron.”
Armed with the weapon, my father told us that he ran back to Mom and prepared for a confrontation. One against five. As the minutes ticked away, the squinting eyes and beaded sweat on the approaching black-shirted thugs signaled ill intent. My father held the tire iron firmly at his side.
“And then loud bleating erupted behind us,” Mom said. “We all turned around, and there was a huge flock of scruffy sheep surrounding us in a sea of glorious, stinking dirty wool. And they began munching away at our picnic!”
“Thank God for those hungry mutton mouths,” said Dad.
“Their shepherd kept pushing and thwacking them, but his sheep just wouldn’t budge.”
“Of course not. There was more food in our picnic basket than in all the burnt scrub for the next three miles. It was feeding time!”
With his red cheeks shining, Dad went on, “So when the thugs arrived, they saw us engulfed in this herd that wouldn’t move. You should’ve seen their faces. All of a sudden they burst into gales of laughter. They loved seeing the sheep trampling our picnic blanket. Mom held baby Rich above the flock while you all were hugging those smelly sheep.” His eyes were brimming; my mother was laughing.
“We quickly thanked the shepherd,” Mom said, “and headed back down to the car as fast as we could. Daddy made a U-turn and drove back half a mile to the waiting truck driver who had helped us. As he handed back the tire iron, the man told him, ‘Very lucky. Dangerous for you, so easy to disappear and be thrown down a qanat.’ From then on, we always stayed at home during Moharram.”
* * *
Qom’s eeriness lingered as we nibbled on sohan, that holy city’s severely addictive pistachio brittle that Pat had bought outside the Masumeh shrine. At sunset, we enjoyed one last view of the magnificent gold dome, gleaming in the fading light. Under the shrine’s walls children played on seesaws in a park built along a dry riverbed. We watched as prayers ended and mothers, daughters, mullahs, ayatollahs and students streamed out of the mosque to begin their evening walk home for their waiting supper.
An hour later, Hussein’s van was hurtling along a six-lane highway toward Tehran, city of our memories. Rich lay down in the back, Kev stared to the west at the last glimpses of light on the gray horizon, my parents dozed with their heads resting on each other while Chris pored over an enormous map of Tehran with his flashlight.
We all remained quiet. A dreadful storm brewed before us, sweeping down from the northern mountains, blackening our route ahead. Lightning split the sky. Thunder followed. Dark rain started to fall in broad sheets as we drove into the brooding monsoon.
After we had passed through the deluge, magically the clouds lifted and an ocean of lights flickered in the distance. Tehran! Before us blazed four Disney-like spires of shimmering light.
“An
oil refinery?” Rich asked.
“No,” Vaz answered solemnly. “Imam Khomeini’s tomb.”
A debate immediately broke out over whether to stop or drive on. Rich and I were adamant about pulling over. It was late, Chris said, and he was exhausted. My father nodded. After a vote of four to two, we arrived at a large parking lot that held a few buses, a handful of cars and an all-night convenience store. Starkly immense, flooded with light, the memorial shrine with its four airy minarets stood with no rival structure in sight. Next to a vast cemetery of the war dead, this ground held magnetic power. It was near the slums of south Tehran, where the regime drew its greatest support for mass rallies and demonstrations. Pilgrims flocked to pay their respects to the founder of the Islamic Republic. A busload of turbaned Afghans with Mongolian features joined us as we entered the mosque. Vaz and my father had finally agreed on something: they both remained in the van.
Removing our shoes at the door, we padded in. As we passed through a metal detector, a guard told us not to take pictures. Green marble with cream streaks appeared here and there between the carpets covering the vast floor. Tiny pieces of mirror, like mosaic, lined the dome. Stained-glass red tulips, a symbol of martyrdom, circled the rim. Erected hastily after the ayatollah’s death, the structure in its immensity reminded me of New York’s Javits Center with its acres of interconnected aluminum roofing. Two children scooted past holding their soccer ball. Families sat on the carpets, nibbling snacks. Others napped soundly wrapped in blankets.
Under the monumental dome rested the sarcophagus, surrounded by a silver protective enclosure. A massive crystal chandelier, suspended from the dome, dangled over it. I approached with Kevin. Worshippers huddled close and prayed. One woman was sleeping with her fingers gripping the bars of the enclosure. A white-haired grandfather spoke softly to a child in quiet reverence. A middle-aged man in a gray suit came toward us.