The Ayatollah Begs to Differ (11 page)

The conversation continued, and the women of the house occasionally stole into the kitchen to brew a fresh pot of tea. I excused myself to go to the bathroom, and when it was confirmed that there was no indoor plumbing, I went into the yard and entered the outhouse. It was exactly like the outhouse at my grandfather’s house, and even the odor, a unique mixture of mud and human waste that I remembered well from my curious visits as a child, gave me a sense of nostalgia rather than disgust.

When I returned to the house after washing my hands under a faucet by the pond, I could infer from the conversations all around me that another guest was due any minute. I sat down on the carpet again and lit a cigarette to keep myself awake. When the curtain was swept aside just a short while later, a tall young mullah walked into the room. He quietly removed his turban and
abba
, or “cloak,” and sat down to a steaming-hot glass of tea quickly delivered by the twelve-year-old boy. My astonishment at his presence, for all the Ayatollahs agree that opium and other drugs are
haram
, “forbidden” by Islam, grew to amazement as I watched him finish his tea and go over to the pipe and burner. He calmly spent the next hour puffing away, drinking tea, fingering his beads, and occasionally answering questions of religious philosophy, none of which I fully understood. And while he was busy pontificating, the other men, one by one, took the opportunity to perform their afternoon prayers: facing Mecca, they bowed and kneeled in the cramped room, carefully avoiding my outstretched limbs, and mumbled verses from the Koran as PMC blared the latest Iranian pop hit, the cleric calmly smoked away, and I continued to struggle to stay fully awake. Eventually, though, I felt the effects of the opiate recede and I stood up to leave. Despite the protestations of my host, who with traditional Persian ta’arouf insisted I stay for dinner, I managed—after many exchanges of “I wouldn’t dream of imposing,” “I couldn’t possibly,” and “I’ve already been a tremendous burden on you and your family”—to say my goodbyes, assuring the man that I would be back sometime to further impose on him but this evening I simply had to rush to the Shrine of Fatima for a quick
zeeyarat
, or “pilgrimage,” before the night was through.
²

It was my first visit to Qom and my first experience with shir’e, or “extreme opium,” as I now think of it. When I was a child, my parents would never have thought of bringing me here, a city that had very little to offer other than religious schools, the Shrine of Fatima Masoumeh (Imam Reza’s sister), and salty desert water. Back then the only tourists would have been rather pious pilgrims, and even today there are few Iranians from abroad who travel there unless it is out of pure curiosity, and many secular Iranians who live in Tehran avoid the city as if it harbors the plague. It has, however, become the de rigueur stop for foreign journalists and writers who understand not only that it is the spiritual capital of the Islamic Republic but that if Shia Islam is woven into the body politic as well as the soul of Iran, then Qom is its weaver. Qom of course has always been the most religious city in Iran (probably more so than even Mashhad, which houses a more important Shia shrine), and it merely took on a political significance after the Islamic Revolution of 1979 that it hadn’t had in centuries. This was where Ayatollah Khomeini lived before he was sent into exile by the Shah, this is where he resided part-time on his return, and this is where many Ayatollahs, Grand and otherwise, live, teach, and pray. Qom is where legions of young would-be Shia student clerics from around the world,
talibs
, come to study to one day become the religious authorities that hold political and social sway over this nation and, in their dreams, over other Muslim nations too.

Some foreign and Iranian writers who visit Qom come to see and speak with dissident clerics such as Ayatollah Hossein-Ali Montazeri (once heir to Khomeini but later imprisoned for his dissent and now living quietly in a closely watched house) and Hossein (not to be confused with Hassan) Khomeini, grandson of Ayatollah Khomeini who has dramatically broken with the regime (but commands little attention), for clerics who are fundamentally opposed to the political system of Iran make for good headlines, particularly for those readers who want to believe that they are not Islamophobic by nature; but the Islam of the less combative reformist clerics and certainly the more conservative ones and the legions of ordinary people who support them is what really holds sway in this nation. Yes, it’s interesting that not all the religious figures in Iran are comfortable with the policies of the Islamic Republic, or even with the concept of velayat-e-faqih, and many of the disapproving mullahs are based in Qom, a city that, as a religious center of study, affords them some protection from charges of treason. But Iran, as one person told me in Tehran, has always been Islamic, if not a republic, and anyone who thinks that Islam entered politics with the 1979 revolution wasn’t paying attention to the past fourteen hundred years of Persian history.

What both conservative and reform mullahs share is an understanding of that Islamic history and a strong belief in an Islamic Republic (and even Islamic democracy, however they define it), and contrary to the hopes of secularists everywhere, Islam lite, or a secular society with a nod to Islam, is not a part of anyone’s vocabulary. The reform Ayatollahs and even the dissident ones are allowed a measure of freedom to say what they please partly to show off the democratic nature of Islam (and the regime) and partly because the Ayatollahs in actual power know that to mess with another Ayatollah too much, dissident, reform, or otherwise, is to mess with the stability and legitimacy of the regime, to mess with the basic precepts of Shiism, and maybe even to mess with God. And it is Allah who rules Iran and the lives of most Iranians.

There is an overwhelming sense of Shia Islam as soon as one enters Qom. Shia Muslims, believing only men from the Prophet’s bloodline should lead the Muslim nation, or
ummah
, revere two martyred Imams above all the others: Ali, who was murdered, and his son Hussein, who died in battle against the prevailing rulers of Islam at Karbala in present-day Iraq. These two deaths play a central part in Shia life, and the concept of struggle, pain, woe, and martyrdom is derived from centuries of mourning for these two souls, whose elaborately painted portraits, contrary to the common Sunni Muslim belief that depicting the human form is forbidden, adorn many a storefront, building, and private home in Shia towns in Iran, Iraq, and Lebanon, but are all the more visible in a town such as Qom. Sunnis, the orthodox of Islam if you will, believe in a strict Islam that takes the Koran as the literal word of God, not to be interpreted by man, whereas Shias, with their clergy, Ayatollahs and others, have, contrary to popular belief, a much more liberal view in that the church can interpret the Koran and the Hadiths (the sayings and deeds of the Prophet Mohammad according to witnesses and scholars who wrote them down) for the masses who might not have the educational and religious qualifications to do so. Qom and Najaf (in Iraq) are the two towns where the clerics go to learn
how
to do so.

One of the first things one notices in Qom—a dusty old city with minarets and mosques visible from a great distance—apart from the many mullahs on the streets (which one would not see in a Sunni town), is that women are barely visible. Women in Qom, unlike their counterparts in Tehran, do not strut about in colorful headscarves and the latest denim fashions from Europe, nor are they seen much behind the wheels of automobiles. The women one does see in Qom seem to venture outdoors only fully enveloped in jet-black chadors, generally scurrying from one errand to another or in the company of what one must presume are their husbands.

Coming by car from Tehran on a hot summer morning, I was stuck in an unusually heavy traffic jam that allowed me much time for observation: a camel had been sacrificed on the road, its neck slit wide open and its blood staining the road a bright red, in honor of a caravan of buses taking pilgrims to Mashhad, the other great Shia shrine, in northeast Iran. Iran’s second-largest city, Mashhad is home to Fatima’s brother’s grave, the Imam Reza Shrine, and pilgrims regularly travel from one city to the other as part of their Shia duties. (When Iraq is stable, and sometimes even when it’s not, such as now, Najaf and Karbala, which are the other two holy Shia cities, complete the pilgrimage set, and the truly pious shuttle between the four as often as they can.) Animal sacrifice plays a big part in Islam (more for the purpose of feeding the poor on auspicious religious occasions than for reasons of superstition), but rarely is it on such open display, even in Iran. The culture of Qom, however, is unabashedly medieval. The long line of buses, adorned with religious exhortations such as
“Ya Abolfaz!”
(Imam Hossein’s half brother and a man known for his great strength, so invoking his name is an appeal for strength), as well as somewhat less religious slogans such as “Texas,” was slowly making its way past the camel (whose flesh would later be donated to the needy), and a crowd of well-wishers had gathered to wave at the caravan.

My first stop on this, my first, trip to Qom, after tiptoeing my way through fresh camel blood, was at the office of Grand Ayatollah Hajj Sheikh Mohammad Fazel Lankarani, a frail archconservative cleric in his seventies and one of the seven Grand Ayatollahs in Iran (there are four in Iraq), a man who rarely met with Westerners (and never any writers) or even, for that matter, any Iranians who weren’t his followers. (After a prolonged illness, the Ayatollah passed away in June 2007 in, of all places, a London hospital, ironically on the very same day that Salman Rushdie was knighted by the queen. Ironic because Lankarani was one of the senior clerics who begged to differ with their government and continued to call for Rushdie’s death, a duty for all Muslims, he said, even after the Iranian government, in a 1998 compromise with the British government that led to the normalization of relations, promised that it would not act upon Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa calling for the “apostate” author’s murder.)

Although it would seem that Lankarani would have been a strong supporter of the conservative government taking power after Khatami’s retirement, he famously refused for weeks to meet with President Ahmadinejad in early 2007 while I was in Iran. It was an open secret in Tehran that Ahmadinejad, beleaguered and under fire from even his conservative base, was attempting a public meeting with the Grand Ayatollah to deflect the conventional wisdom that he had lost the support of the most senior clerics, but he had been constantly rebuffed. The reason, paradoxical as it may appear, wasn’t that Ahmadinejad, religiously ultraconservative, had shown incompetence in managing the economy or that he was endangering Iran’s security with his foreign policy, nor was it that he had not bettered the lives of the poor, the working class, and the unemployed, the very base of religious support in Iran. No, the reason for dissatisfaction with Ahmadinejad among some senior clerics was that he had had the audacity to interfere in an area they viewed entirely as theirs, that is, Islam.

Ahmadinejad’s proclamation in 2006 that women should be allowed into soccer stadiums, a proclamation he made without consulting the clerics, was quickly overruled by them, with an unsubtle message that, as a layman, he should stay out of issues that deal with Islam, Islamic law, and Muslim rules of behavior. And prior to his proclamation on women spectators at soccer stadiums, he had said in a visit to a group of Ayatollahs in Qom immediately upon his return from the UN General Assembly in 2005 that he had felt a halo over his head while he had been giving his speech and that a hidden presence had mesmerized the unblinking audience of foreign leaders, foreign ministers, and ambassadors. This, to conservative Ayatollahs, amounted to blasphemy, for an ordinary man cannot presume a special closeness to God or any of the Imams, nor can he imply the presence of the Mahdi, the disappeared twelfth Imam, who will reappear and reveal himself on earth only at Armageddon, and not, presumably, at an ordinary meeting of the UN General Assembly. The Ayatollahs could not abide the president’s halo claim when they, “signs of God” after all, had never made such claims themselves. Needless to say, on his subsequent trip to New York, Ahmadinejad did
not
sense a halo over his head, nor were the delegates mesmerized, but Lankarani and some of the other Ayatollahs were slow to forgive, and in the spring of 2007, when Ahmadinejad publicly kissed the (gloved) hand of his childhood schoolteacher, an old woman in proper hijab, conservatives once again were infuriated by his seemingly lax adherence to their strict rules of modesty.