The Ayatollah Begs to Differ (20 page)

There’s an old joke in Iran about Moharram, the holy month, one that is told even by the pious who mourn with genuine emotion. A foreigner, it seems, arrives in Iran during Moharram and is witness to the multitude of public grieving ceremonies, the crying, the chest beating, and of course the black flags adorning almost every building and house. “What’s happened?” he asks an Iranian. “We’re mourning Hossein’s death” is the reply. “Oh,” says the foreigner, “I’m so sorry. When did he die?” “Fourteen hundred years ago,” says the Iranian. “Boy,” says the foreigner, “news sure travels slow around these parts!”

On the eve of Ashura, which simply means “tenth” in Arabic and which is the actual day of Imam Hossein’s martyrdom, Iranian television is chockablock with religious programming. Apart from showing Tasua ceremonies across the nation, and apart from broadcasting various
Rosehs
, “communal grief gatherings,” on a night in 2007 (and as they do every year), reporters on different channels combed the streets of Tehran and other cities interviewing various people on the subject of their love of Hossein. “Why are you crying?” asked one young male reporter of a five-year-old girl. “For Imam Hossein” was the reply. “Do you like Imam Hossein? Why?” asked the reporter. The girl didn’t hesitate. “Because he died thirsty!” she exclaimed, as if speaking to an idiot. (Legend has it that Yazid, Hossein’s nemesis in the battle for control of the caliphate, cut off Hossein’s men from water supplies at Karbala before the final battle and the men died fighting, but never quenching their thirst.) Another asked an older man on the streets of Tehran what he thought of Hossein. “For fourteen hundred years we’ve been mourning Imam Hossein,” he replied. “My one-and-a-half-year-old grandson beats his chest. Why? Because the blood of Hossein boils inside all of us.” Indeed. Iranian identity is very much tied up in the story of Hossein, the story of his martyrdom in the cause of justice, and the concept of what is right (and just) and what is wrong (and unjust).
“Yeki-bood; yeki-nabood”—
“Other than God, there was no One.” Except, perhaps, Hossein.

Many of the contradictions (or what we think of as contradictions) of Iran play out during the holy month of Moharram. A nation is in mourning, yes; but the Iranian penchant for turning every solemn occasion into a festivity is also on display. Ancient ritual and pageantry, reviled by orthodox Sunnis as paganism and idolatry, are set against a backdrop of modernity and a quest for technology. Public displays of grief, apparently sincere, are quickly followed by sumptuous feasts in the privacy that exists behind Persian walls. Weeks of practicing carefully choreographed mass self-flagellation culminate in an ecstatic, and even at times erotic, display of male machismo. Laughter follows tears, happiness comes from sorrow. And the people often described as the most Western in the Muslim Middle East continue to live their Western-influenced lives, going to restaurants and cafés, taking the kids to amusement parks, watching movies and listening to music, and surfing the Internet, all the while surrounding themselves with symbolic solemnity. The black flags hanging outside of many homes and offices, even secular ones, are not only for show: inside the home a television may be blaring a European program (even dolorous Iranians, it seems, want their MTV); inside the office there might be a cheerful celebration of a successful business deal; but a certain lugubriousness often punctures the mood, almost as a reminder that without sorrow, happiness cannot be measured.

It was during the month of Moharram that I witnessed another contradiction of Islamic Iranian life, not one directly attributable to the month of mourning, but one I likely wouldn’t have witnessed any other time. It is considered auspicious by some to donate blood during the month, and a friend took me to a government donation center in Tehran where we both were eager to spill blood more for our fellow man than for ceremonial purposes. We took numbers from a ticket machine, were given a short form to fill out by a courteous woman behind a desk, and sat down on plastic chairs with a dozen or so others to wait our turn. Our numbers came up within seconds of each other, and we went into separate rooms as indicated by an electronic sign. I closed the heavy wooden door behind me and sat down in front of another woman behind a desk, young and wearing a proper hijab, who took my form and starting making notes. She asked for my national identity card (which unlike my passport gives no clue as to where I reside) and confirmed the personal details I had written down one by one. She finally looked up at me and stared straight into my eyes, holding her pen aloft for effect. “And when was the last time you had sex?”

“Excuse me?” I replied, blushing, I’m sure.

“The last time you had carnal relations?” I had written that I was unmarried, and since sex outside marriage is technically illegal, a government official was asking me to either condemn myself or lie.

“Uh, I’m not sure,” I said. “Maybe a month or two?”

“I’m sorry,” she replied, after holding my gaze for a few moments, her expression unchanging. “You can’t donate blood today.”

“Really?” I asked, surprised. I knew that all donated blood is checked for the AIDS virus, so it seemed an unreasonable precaution, particularly since I could have easily lied.

“If you’ve had sex in the last year and are not married, you can’t donate blood.” She typed something into her computer terminal, presumably marking me as someone to be rejected by all donation centers for the next twelve months, even if I returned and lied. “Thank you anyway,” she said pleasantly, looking me in the eyes again. I couldn’t discern any judgment in her eyes, whether she thought I was a sex fiend or whether she was wondering with whom I had managed to have illicit sex.

“Thank you,” I also said, standing up and feeling a little embarrassed.

“Have a good day,” she replied, pressing the button on her desk signaling the next donor and going back to her computer. I walked out to see my friend sitting on a chair in the waiting room.

“Did you already give blood?” I asked.

“No,” he replied. “I was rejected. And you?”

“Me too, for having had sex less than a year ago. I’ll tell you, that was embarrassing!”

“Same here. I should have lied, but the girl caught me off guard.”

We left the building with our heads lowered, as if others watching, particularly the women, would think us sexual deviants, and hastily jumped into a cab and headed home. Here was the Islamic Republic in all its glorious contradictions, I thought, as we made our way through heavy traffic in silence. A republic that openly recognizes the perils of AIDS (and even hands out free condoms) but that maintains the fiction of Islamic sexual innocence, an innocence that dictates a married man only ever has sex with his wife (and vice versa), that unmarried men only have sex with themselves, and that unmarried women don’t know what sex is. And then, to borrow a Ronald Reagan Cold War notion, the Islamic Republic trusts, but also verifies (verbally, and then later scientifically). Apart from the undoubtedly unintentional titillation factor of being asked about one’s sex life by a pretty young girl, a girl that if Muslim and unmarried (and I saw no ring on her finger) should not have experienced sex herself, the business of asking about sex appears to serve no purpose whatsoever other than to afford the examinee the opportunity to wonder whether he or she should be truthful or not (for most Iranian men would hardly like to admit, even if it were true and particularly to a young woman, that they had had no prospects for a year, while no unmarried Iranian woman would like to admit publicly that she had succumbed to the advances of one of those men). But in reality it encapsulates the very Persian, pragmatic approach to living under the sexual constraints of Islam: men might all be Muslims, but all Muslim men are, well,
men
. And women, after all, just
might
fall under their spell.

Having been denied the opportunity to shed blood, to self-sacrifice at a time when sacrifice is pondered, on the seventh of Moharram, the day that Hossein’s armies were first denied water all those centuries ago, I attended a Roseh at a house in North Tehran. The blood of Hossein boils even in the veins of the Armani crowd, it seems, for my host, a young businessman dressed in a beautiful suit, lives in an upscale neighborhood, Shahrak-e Gharb, in a multimillion-dollar home. The Benzes and BMWs parked outside would have seemed to indicate a more common North Tehran form of entertainment inside: a party with liquor, dancing, and mingling of the sexes, but no, this was Moharram, after all. Businesses and homes all over Tehran, even some in the wealthy and more secular neighborhoods, were draped with black flags and salutations to Imam Hossein, and on the drive north a red neon sign on the top of an incomplete high-rise by the Hemmat Expressway that could be seen for miles proclaimed Iran’s love of its Imam with a simple
“Ya Hossein,”
an expression that was also mowed, in huge letters, into the grass embankment of another highway connecting North and South Tehran.

At the house, what appeared to be a huge ten-car garage but was just the covered courtyard entrance to the main house was fully carpeted with expansive Persian rugs, and I sat along the edge of one wall facing a mullah who was sitting and talking to a few men leaning against the opposite wall. Roseh is a tradition I remember from my childhood, when on yearly visits to my grandfather’s house my mother would attend the almost weekly women-only Roseh thrown by my grandmother for her friends and family. Roseh is a sort of passion play, actually a passion play
monologue
; the story of Hossein’s martyrdom (or the martyrdom of other saints) is recited by a mullah who is an accomplished actor and who deftly manipulates the audience into tears simply by telling them of the injustice of it all.

I remember the shock I felt the first time I saw my mother come out of the living room at my grandfather’s house, crying hysterically, and my wondering if someone had died or some other terrible calamity had just occurred. “No, no,” my mother had assured me, “it was just a Roseh, and I feel much better now.” I must’ve been five or six years old and fresh from San Francisco, where, needless to say, the handful of Shias who may have lived there in the 1960s did
not
organize Rosehs. I came to understand, even though I wasn’t allowed to witness the passion plays, although I did hide outside the closed door on numerous occasions and listen in awe to the mullah’s cadences and the spectacular crying of the women, that it served a definite purpose beyond religion and faith, for those who emerged from the Roseh after a heavy round of communal crying seemed to have hefty appetites (all the cakes and biscuits disappeared before we kids had a chance to steal one or two) and left my grandfather’s house in great spirits, usually with beaming smiles framed by colorful chadors. My own mother, wiping away tears, always seemed so
relieved
. Hossein’s martyrdom was
the
supreme example of injustice: one’s own martyrdom (and every Iranian is a martyr) paled by comparison. Go ahead, have a good cry: cry for Hossein, for Abolfazl, and for all the other martyrs, including, of course,
yourself
.