History/Travel Bookshelf:
Next book on the shelf is Persian Mirrors: The Elusive Face of Iran
But some of the images she shares in this book have stayed with me a long time – these crazy house parties in suburbs of Teheran – the women showing up in billowing black chadors – entering separate doors from the men – Then once they’re inside, off come the chadors, and everyone’s wearing teeny sundresses and platform sandals, all the guys in Western dress – and there’s booze and dancing all night. Then, when it’s time to go home – on go the full chadors, men and women leave separately – and it’s as though it never happened. How do the citizens navigate such a situation? It’s a strange thing when most of the citizenry is involved in just trying to FOOL their own government … the government being a big nasty moralistic prude. And the young kids are just trying to have a bit of fun, and “fool Daddy”, by sneaking out of the house, and raiding the secret liquor stash. Like – what happened to this pure Islamic Republic? People are OVER it. At least as described in Sciolino’s book.
The way she describes the city of Shiraz makes me yearn to go there. Argh. I just don’t know if it’ll ever happen.
Like I said, I don’t think Sciolino is completely reliable – but one of the things I get from her writing, is how much she loves that country, and how much she loves the people she has met there. That passion comes through in this book.
By the way, I was in an elevator with two guys. They were obviously co-workers. They were talking about something, and one guy said to the other, “So – you’re obviously a born-and-bred New Yorker, huh?” The other guy said, “Actually – no … I was born in Iran.” I could feel that word just LAND in the elevator. The guy who had asked the question said, “Really! That’s … interesting!” (He really did sound interested.) I wondered what was going through the completely Americanized Iranian man … if he knows that saying he is from THAT COUNTRY will … somehow make people feel differently about him? If he’s hesitate to share it?? I heard a bit of hesitation in the voice before he said, “Actually, no …” The guy who had asked the question said, “So when did you come here?” And it was not at all a surprise (of course) when the Iranian said, “My family came here in 1979.”
I’m going to post a bit of an excerpt about Qom, the theological center south of Teheran, where Khomeini got his start. It’s Mullah Central down there.
From Persian Mirrors: The Elusive Face of Iran
Qom, a gloomy, dusty thousand-year-old city on the edge of Iran’s great salt desert, is only ninety miles from Tehran. It might as well be nine thousand. Its main industry is producing mullahs, much as the industry of Vatican City is training priests. And like the Vatican, Qom is a sheltered, unhurried religious refuge, where clerics can debate without attention to time and without fear of interference from the state. In the Islamic Republic, Qom has assumed another role as well: it is the idea factory for a regime that seeks to regulate daily life with all the worldly tools of a modern state even as it tries to bring its people closer to God. That is the principal reason Montazeri was allowed to continue spreading his ideas, even after he had been stripped of power and liberty.
Before the revolution, Qom was a desolate place known as a center for study and worship and a producer of fine silk carpets and of sohan, a caramel and pistachio brittle. The more the Shah consolidated his own power, the less attention he paid to Qom, a guidebook published by his Ministry of Information and Tourism devoted just three paragraphs to the city.
Ayatollah Khomeini changed all that. His appeal was exceptionally strong in Qom, where he had lived and preached for years before he was sent into exile. In January 1978, a crowd there demonstrated against the Shah in the ayatollah’s name. According to some reports, clerics and Islamic militants set up street barricades, smashed buses, halted trains, and attacked banks and shops; they were not silenced even after the police opened fire. Many Iranians came to regard what became a two-and-half-hour shooting spree as the opening shots of the revolution. Afterward, the regime bused thousands of factory workers and low-level government employees to Qom for a counterdemonstration in support of the Shah. But the violent crackdowns sparked a cycle of mourning – and more demonstrations and violence – every forty days until, a year later, the Shah fled the country and Khomeini returned.
The first time I visited Qom I witnessed the slaughtering of a camel. It was a bright, cool, sunny day in February 1979, just a few days after the revolution, and the sacrifice was made to honor Khomeini’s triumphant return after an absence of more than fourteen years. His followers made a path of red carnations for him, filled the walls with his portraits, and strung revolutionary posters and banners between minarets and lampposts not only in Persian, but also in Arabic, English, French, and German (for the benefit of foreign journalist, I presumed). Khomeini had ordered that no camels were to be killed in his honor, but his followers paid no heed. The giant beast was forced on its side by a handful of men. One man swiftly slit the camel’s throat with a sword. Blood spurted high into the air. The crowd praised God and smeared their hands and faces with the blood. That day, Khomeini sat in the front seat of a white Chevrolet ambulance; members of the foreign media were put on a long flatbed truck. We made our way through a shrieking crowd of clerics who chanted slogans on megaphones, soldiers who had stuck carnations in their rifles, and hundreds of thousands of people who kept running to catch up. In my chador, I slipped at one point and grabbed the arm of a young bearded Iranian assigned to help us. “Don’t touch me like that!” he said. “You are in Qom.”
Yes, I was in Qom.
It was in Qom that Khomeini set up his government just days after the victory of the revolution. In thoseheady early days, Qom seemed like the center of the universe to its residents. No longer a religious backwater, it became very much like an eighteenth-century European court where people came and went and pleaded and waited for favors. Government officials made pilgrimages by helicopter from Tehran, often several times a week, to consult Khomeini. Courtiers and security guards shielded the ayatollah from most of the supplicants. Every day thousands of people crowded behind green metal barricades at the end of the street where Khomeini lived to get a glimpse of him, usually no more than a one-minute wave from his window. Among the throng one day was a woman who told me she had come with her blind daughter all the way from Isfahan to get Khomeini’s blessing, and a widow with seven children who said she had come from Mashad to ask for an increase in her pension.
After the revolution, the city emerged as an even more important Shiite pilgrimage site and the country’s most authoritative center of learning. “Islam has no borders,” Khomeini said, so the seminaries attracted religious scholars and students from around the world as the exportation of Iran’s revolution became one of the pillars of the new Islamic system. The religious teachers of Qom were assigned the task of indoctrinating foreign students with tales about the Islamic revolution and how to duplicate it back home. During the war with Iraq, the ranks of the seminaries swelled, in part because clerical students were exempt from military service. By the turn of the century, tens of thousands of students were enrolled in the Qom theological seminaries alone.
Over the years, I have made the drive from Tehran to Qom more times than I can count: with a group of American tourists, with officials from the Ministry of Islamic Guidance, with a nephew of Ayatollah Khomeini, with Nazila. The trip has gone faster since a six-lane highway was built. But I still don’t feel as if I fully understand the place. Even for many Iranians, Qom seems alien. Religion dominates the culture and the clerics don’t like outsiders. I have worked for a long time with secular Iranian women who hate to go there because of the way the clerics look at them. A foreigner can be spotted from miles away. I keep going back to Qom because I hope that each visit will reveal more. And indeed, it is different every time.
The distinction between what is public and what is private is drawn more starkly in Qom than in the rest of Iran; the curtain of privacy is far more tightly drawn around the clergy, making it especially difficult for an outsider to get inside. Hotels generally don’t welcome women traveling on their own, and restaurants are hard to find. Qom has only one main avenue; everything important is within walking distance – the central shrine, the seminaries, even a new Islamic computer center where Koranic teachings and interpretations are on the Internet. Even so, an outsider cannot navigate without a guide. To get anything accomplished, you have to be invited; someone who belongs has to lead you down the narrow streets and do the introductions. It is especially difficult to make appointments in advance. The trick is to start out from Tehran at about 6:00 a.m., arrive at eight, and work until noon. That’s when most clerics pray, eat, and nap. Most of the city shuts down until about 5:00 p.m., when work begins again.
The centerpiece of Qom is the grand, gold-domed shrine that houses the tomb of Massoumeh, the sister of Imam Reza, the eighth Imam, who died in the ninth century. Thousands of pilgrims come every day to say prayers, beg for favors, and leave wads of bills as donations. They solemnly finger the silver cage that houses Massoumeh’s tomb and then touch their faces, as if her aura will somehow rub off on them.
There is an air of informality in the shrine, as in mosques, that doesn’t exist in most churches and synogogues. The religious complex, like others throughout Iran, is more than simply a place of prayer; it is also a place of political mobilization. During the war with Iraq, the clerics set up enlistment centers for teenage volunteers and donation centers here where people could contribute their gold jewelry and coins to the war effort. The shrine is also a place for socializing, for getting out of the house. Women sit on the carpets and eat picnic lunches with their children. And the courtyard is known as a meeting place where the Shiite Muslim practice of sigheh, or temporary marriage, can be arranged by a lonely pilgrim and a woman who needs money.
Qom is a very different place than it was at the beginning of the revolution. It boasts recreational parks and movie theatres. Most of the bookstores sell only religious books, but I have also found English-language volumes: King Lear, Paul Kennedy’s The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, and a wide assortment of Persian-English dictionaries. Clerics drive motorbikes and some women even dare to go out on the streets in scarves and long coats, rather than black chadors.
