The Ayatollah Begs to Differ (21 page)

While women often organize a Roseh, hiring a mullah (and the good ones, those who can guarantee tears or your money back, cost a pretty rial) and putting on a party, men also do, usually during Moharram. This house in Shahrak-e Gharb was no exception on the seventh of Moharram, and it was going to be a lavish party. A heavy curtain separated the men from the women, who would be able to hear, but not see, the mullah when he was ready for his performance. Haj-Agha Bayan, the mullah and an accomplished veteran
Roseh-khoon
, or “Roseh reciter,” was a portly fellow who, despite the thousands of dollars in fees he commands, was dressed in rather shabby robes. The women weren’t missing much. While he waited for the room to fill up, we were served hot tea and fresh dates by our host’s servants, and I engaged in small talk, and plenty of ta’arouf, with my host as well as with the men who sat down on the carpet next to me. When Haj-Agha finally rose from the floor and sat down on the only chair in the room, everyone fell silent. A microphone was handed to him, and he began his Roseh. We listened carefully as he began to tell the story of the Battle of Karbala in a theatrical voice, occasionally smiling, occasionally emphasizing one or another aspect of Imam Hossein’s beautiful nature, and often employing gholov, the Persian art of exaggeration that fools no one but is accepted as poetic license and as a way of making a point.

The gholov, however, was too much for the gentleman sitting next to me, a religious man certainly but one who wore, of all things, a black necktie with his freshly pressed suit, which indicated some dissent with the notion of what is acceptable menswear in an Islamic Republic. When Haj-Agha told the tale of Imam Hossein’s anger at the death of his father, Imam Ali, he said, with much gusto, that Hossein immediately got on his horse and slew, in one continuous action and armed only with his sword, 1,950 soldiers from the Caliph’s army. He repeated the number and paused:
“One thousand!
and
nine hundred!
and
fifty!”
he said, unruly white hairs on his chubby cheeks quivering as he looked around the room.
“Can you imagine?”
he asked, before repeating the number once again, seemingly proud of Hossein’s ability to exact revenge on an unimaginable scale.

But the man in the necktie could not, apparently, imagine it. He leaned toward me and whispered in my ear. “If you should try to cut
flower
stems with the swing of a sword,” he said, “you would fall to the ground exhausted well before you’d even cut a hundred.” I nodded, trying to suppress a smile. “One thousand nine hundred and fifty men, indeed!” he snorted in my ear. The rest of the audience looked at Haj-Agha in awe. The story continued: fantastic tales of the absolute goodness of Hossein, the absolute justice of his cause, and the absolute cruelty and absolute wickedness of his enemies, the enemies of Islam. The mullah’s tone changed as he spoke of Hossein’s suffering, of his men’s suffering. “The thirst, my poor Imam Hossein’s
thirst
!” he cried. His body started shaking, and then tears started streaming from his eyes. He continued with the story, alternately sobbing gently and then convulsed with grief, his head moving from side to side, his voice straining to tell the world of the injustice of it all.

A man sitting cross-legged in front me, his huge belly covering his ankles, lowered his head into his hands. His shoulders heaved almost imperceptibly, but then, as the mullah shook with grief, he bawled like a baby. He wiped his stubble-covered face repeatedly with his thick fingers, a massive silver and agate ring, the sign of a true believer, glistening with his tears. Other men, young, old, burly, and thin, cried too, loudly enough to drown out any sobs and cries from the women’s section. Real Shia men
do
cry. The gentleman with the tie sitting next to me did not shed tears, but he (as did I) beat his chest with one hand when Haj-Agha’s tale ended and a group of men sitting in front of him stood up and began the self-flagellation phase of the evening. Haj-Agha, exhausted from his tour de force, had handed the microphone off with a sigh to a young man who immediately launched into a noheh, the religious song that positively demands physical audience participation, chest-beating claps providing the percussive beat.

Noheh singers are more in demand than even Roseh mullahs, and the very best, often handsome young men with stunning voices who could have been pop stars if they had chosen a different career in music or if their love of the Imams was, say, a little more figurative, command fees for a single short performance that can run as high as ten thousand dollars, and of course their CDs sell in the millions. My old college friend Khosro, sitting a few yards away, also tapped his chest, almost subconsciously, in about as distinguished a way as possible, befitting his princely demeanor as well as his heritage as a descendant of the Qajar kings. Looking straight ahead, right arm resting stiffly across his chest, and his hand moving only at the wrist, he tapped his heart with his palm in perfect time to the beat. The blood of Hossein sometimes boils in the veins of purely secular Iranians too. Western-educated Khosro, whose musical tastes lean to Ella and Billie rather than Sibsorkhi and Helali (famous noheh singers), comes from a family that has, like almost all Iranians, harbored deep religious beliefs for centuries. His father, he once told me, who was educated in Europe before World War II, a time when few Iranians even dreamed of traveling overseas, returned from abroad with his first wife, a Belgian woman. Khosro’s grandmother, who took the Muslim concept of what is
najess
, or “unclean,” perhaps a little too seriously, would rub clean the dishes and utensils used by the Belgian Christian outside in the garden with mud before washing them with the rest of the china used by the proper Shias of the family. The marriage did not last very long.

The ritual ended in a frenzy of chest beating. The tempo had picked up, the singer’s voice reached an emotional high, the men standing and hitting themselves with all the strength of two arms were visibly ecstatic, and the rest of us, myself included, were caught in an almost trancelike state. The most basic (and perhaps basest) human instinct came to the fore: the tribal instinct, the sense of oneness with one’s own kind, the sense of pride and power in a small community of men, strangers, yes, but of the same blood. We were a community of Persians, this was
our
cult, and screw the rest of the world, particularly the Arabs, if they didn’t like it. Idol worship, the Sunnis say, Sunnis who cannot abide the Shia obsession with one man, a man whose painting adorns many a Shia home and business contrary, they say, to true Muslim belief. No, this was not worship, not of idols or even of God. It was a remembrance, through the story of one man’s battle, of the injustices in this world, the injustices we face every day, and of the little bit of martyrdom in all of us. It felt good, almost orgasmic, one might even say. The cigarette afterward, outside on the street while watching servants rush into the room with huge pots of steaming fragrant rice and oversized platters of grilled lamb kebabs, felt even better. Self-flagellation and awakened tribal instincts can work up a real, and carnivorous, appetite.

Two nights later I watched a similar men’s Roseh on television. Channel 2 broadcast the event in its entirety, and for good reason. It was a traditional Moharram Roseh attended by the Supreme Leader and virtually the entire Iranian political establishment. Ayatollah Khamenei sat on the only chair, Ahmadinejad sat on the floor on his right, and Rafsanjani sat on the floor on his left. The camera panned around the room, showing Iran’s leadership in a state of deep grief. The Roseh-khoon, a bespectacled young mullah who was reciting the story of Imam Hossein, was standing and telling his tale, a tale told a thousand times, into a microphone, beads of sweat visible on his brow. As the story progressed, and as Hossein’s plight became apparent, men held their bowed foreheads with their hands, all except Khamenei, who was recovering from a serious bout of flu and looked sickly, and Rafsanjani, who had his usual pained expression on his face. Perhaps Rafsanjani felt that he should have, as the perpetual éminence grise of the Iranian political sphere, been given a proper chair too. President Ahmadinejad, in his trademark beige Windbreaker, soon began to cry. Tears, genuine tears, left streaks around his eyes, and he wiped them away unembarrassed. The mullah started crying himself, struggling to finish his story of woe, and as he described the death of Abolfazl (Hossein’s brother and protector, who had his hands chopped off before being killed at Karbala), Ayatollah Khamenei held his forehead, fingers covering his eyes as he shed a tear or two. Rafsanjani, ever the pragmatist even in matters of faith, remained stony faced while listening intently to a story he’d heard, and probably recited, thousands of times before.

The following night, the night of Ashura, state-run television broadcast a virtually identical Roseh, and again Khamenei was seated on the only chair, but this time Gholam Ali Haddad-Adel, the Speaker of the parliament, sat on the floor to his right and Ahmadinejad on his left. Rafsanjani was present, but not by the Supreme Leader’s side. If any old Kremlinologists who had diverted their study to mullah-ology were watching, they must’ve been furiously taking notes. Haddad-Adel and Ahmadinejad both dutifully beat their chests at the appropriate times, and I couldn’t help but wonder how the image of the weeping and self-flagellating leadership of Shia Iran could not be viewed by non-Persians in, as the Ayatollahs put it so eloquently, a negative light.

Earlier that day, I had gone to Taft, a village in Yazd province, to observe what is billed as one of the most spectacular Ashura ceremonies in Iran. One of the Imam Jomeh’s bodyguards, a former Revolutionary Guard and veteran of the Iran-Iraq war, picked me up in an old Peugeot, and we drove to Sadoughi’s house first, to fetch him and his family, before we headed off on the thirty-minute journey into the hills visible in the distance. When I got in the car and after a few bouts of ta’arouf—“I’m sorry to have bothered you, I could have taken a taxi,” and “No, no, it’s my pleasure, it’s my duty”—the bodyguard, who knew I was a guest from foreign lands, asked me whether I thought the United States might attack Iran. “Well,” I said, “it doesn’t look good. I suppose it’s quite possible.”

“No,” he said forcefully. “The Americans aren’t so foolish as to invade a country where ten-year-old boys will strap grenades to their bodies and hurl themselves under tanks.” He was referring to the eight-year Iran-Iraq war, and as a veteran he knew what he was talking about. During that war, tens of thousands of young volunteers, Basij, some not even ten years old, did exactly that and committed many other suicidal acts of extreme courage, such as charging the enemy in human waves, knowing they’d be cut down by heavy machine guns, or clearing mines the old-fashioned way—by running over them. The plastic keys given them, keys to heaven that they wore around their necks, have been well reported, but the would-be martyrs were also treated, right before battle, to tales of Ashura, the Battle of Karbala, and the supreme glory of martyrdom. In some cases, an actor (usually a more mature soldier) would mount a white horse and gallop along the lines, providing the child soldiers a vision of Imam Hossein himself on his famous white horse—the hero who would lead them into their fateful battle before they met their God. Witnesses have said that sometimes Iraqi soldiers, seeing the boys charge them in their Hossein-inspired frenzy, would abandon their positions and run away, not necessarily out of fear, but out of shock and amazement.
“If you want to understand Iran, you must become a Shia first.”
Rafsanjani’s supposed words rang in my head.

Taft is where one can see what could be called full-contact Shiism. Arriving in the Imam Jomeh’s car, I was fortunate enough to be driven right up to the entrance to the old square, and even more fortunate to be escorted, along with Sadoughi and his son, by Revolutionary Guards through a narrow and ancient passageway packed with sweaty bodies. In Iran one makes one’s way through a crowd the easy way—by forceful shoving—and I struggled with my balance as we squeezed through the men and boys who respectfully tried to get out of the way of their Imam Jomeh but showed no such respect to the rest of the party. Once inside the square, we were greeted by thousands and thousands of men packed tightly together, all wearing black, who turned to see our party make its way to a corner, by a door to a building, where a microphone had been set up on a makeshift lectern. Along the top of the ramparts that enclosed the square on three sides, women and girls, all in black chadors, gathered to watch from the safety of the thirty-foot height. Hanging on the walls immediately below them were large framed photographs of all of the town’s martyrs: young men and boys who had perished in the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s and whose mothers and sisters were undoubtedly still grieving as they stood watch over their portraits.

In the middle of the square sat a huge, two-story-high wooden structure known as the
nakhl
, covered in black cloth imprinted with passages from the Koran and a painting of the shrines at Karbala. The nakhl, which is meant to symbolize Imam Hossein’s
taboot
, or “coffin,” something he was denied in real death, is peculiar to Yazd province and can range in size from a few feet tall and wide to the size of a three-story building. Muslims use coffins only to carry the dead to their resting place, which is supposed to happen within twenty-four hours of passing, and bury the body in the earth only wrapped in white muslin fabric. Hossein’s body, sans head, was famously left in the desert for three or four days, another source of deep anguish for Shias today, some of whom carry as heavy a nakhl as possible to express their sorrow through even more pain, this time on their shoulders, than the chains and their arms have already inflicted on their backs and their chests.