The Ayatollah Begs to Differ (24 page)

Ayatollah Mousavi Bojnourdi, an Ayatollah who begs to differ with his government, with the Iranian delegation at a UNESCO conference, Paris, 2005.

Hojjatoleslam Mohammad Sadoughi (second from right), the Friday Prayer Leader of Yazd and the Supreme Leader’s representative in the province, with fellow clerics at a mosque, Yazd, 2007

A ten-story mural on a wall in downtown Tehran, by the side of a major elevated highway. The English is not a direct translation—the Farsi actually reads “
Death
to America.”

The former U.S. embassy in Tehran, now a museum and a Revolutionary Guards barracks, displaying an unsubtle message

Revolutionary Guards at Friday prayers, Tehran, 2007. The Guards, Iran’s elite military branch, are recruited from the religious and working classes. They report directly to the Supreme Leader and are fiercely loyal to the principles of the Islamic Revolution (of which they are the guardians). (Scott Peterson/Getty Images)

A newsstand in midtown Tehran, displaying the multitude of Iran’s dailies on the sidewalk in the morning, giving commuters a peak at the headlines

President Ahmadinejad greets a member of Neturei Karta, the Brooklyn-based anti-Zionist Orthodox Jewish group, with a traditional Muslim kiss, at the notorious Tehran Holocaust Conference, December 2006. (Atta Kenare/AFP/Getty Images)

I rode back to Yazd in Mrs. Sadoughi’s car. She had been unable to witness the pageantry, she told me, because it was far too crowded in the women’s section for her to make her way to the front. Lacking Revolutionary Guard escorts, or even someone to assist her, Maryam Khatami, wife of the Imam Jomeh of Yazd and sister of the former president, was just another anonymous chador-clad woman in the crowd. Islamic sensibilities, certainly in this case, strangely seem to show a lack of concern for the safety and well-being of the wives of dignitaries, and I witnessed the same situation in New York when President Ahmadinejad’s wife, who had accompanied him on a trip to the UN in 2006, wandered about the halls of the General Assembly in a black chador with no Iranian security (but with a lone U.S. female agent) visible. I say “strangely” because the Prophet Mohammad was married to Khadijah, his
boss
, who became the first convert to Islam, and Mohammad’s bloodline has been passed down solely through his
daughter
Fatima, wife of Ali, the first Imam of the Shias and their very raison d’être as a sect. But Maryam Khatami seemed unperturbed by the lack of attention given her by any of her husband’s guards, who are provided by the state to all Imam Jomehs, and in previous and subsequent conversations with her over tea, a water pipe, and plates of fruit, it was manifest that her view of Islam is formed by her study of the great Islamic philosophers and thinkers and not by blind obedience to the theocracy. Daughter of an Ayatollah, sister of a cleric president, daughter-in-law of a martyred conservative Ayatollah, and wife of the Imam Jomeh on whose thinking she has undoubtedly had quite an effect, Mrs. Sadoughi comfortably holds forth not just on Islamic philosophy but also on Greek and Western philosophy and thought, far more readily than I, and, inside her home at least, is not one to play second fiddle to anyone.

In one particular conversation on Sufism and philosophy, and knowing that I was writing a book, she ventured that perhaps my subject matter was somewhat pedestrian. “You should write a book on your grandfather,” she admonished me. “He was a great thinker, and not enough people know his works or know of him.”

“You’re right,” I said, with a modest and embarrassed smile that signified proper ta’arouf.

“Really,” she pressed on, “young people especially need to know him.”

“I don’t think I’m qualified,” I said. “I’m by no means an expert on the Philosophy of Illumination, if I even quite understand it.”
²

“You should do some research,” she replied. “If you want to do something
good
, write a book on Agha-ye Assar, and get his works translated into English.” Her husband listened as she spoke but ventured no opinion.

“Chashm,”
I said—“Upon my eyes”—another Persian expression of ta’arouf that is the polite and correct way to say “okay.” She looked at me knowing full well that it also meant I agreed with her but was in no way promising to actually do anything about it.

“Really,” she said softly. She smiled widely, and that was that.

Friday prayers the week of Tasua and Ashura take on added significance, with larger-than-normal crowds showing up at mosque (although it has never been an absolute obligation for Muslims to go to mosque, even on the Sabbath). In 2007, Friday prayers also coincided with the start of the ten-day celebrations of the Islamic Revolution of 1979, commemorating the ten days from Ayatollah Khomeini’s arrival in Tehran to the successful victory of his revolt against the Shah, lending the prayers even more weight and gravitas. In Yazd, the assembly on Fridays is held at the Molla Esmaeil Mosque, built by Esmaeil Aqdi, a famous Yazdi scholar and mullah of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. (The mosque was completed in
A
.
H
. 1222, which corresponds to 1807
C
.
E
.) I had discovered two years earlier, and there is no way to verify it because Iranians didn’t have surnames, let alone birth certificates or even records of births prior to the reign of Reza Shah in the 1920s, that I am a descendant of his and, more interesting, that he was a Jew: a brilliant mathematician and scholar who not only converted to Islam but became a mullah. In my father’s village of Ardakan, moreover, some people apparently still think of my family as “the Jews.” During my Ashura week visit to my cousin Fatemeh’s house, where a few people I hadn’t met before seemed to drop in from time to time, as is not unusual in small towns in Iran, I was introduced to one older woman who asked, “Majd? Ardakani Majd?”

“Yes, Majd-e-Ardakani,” I replied, using my grandfather’s original name (which just means “Majd from Ardakan,” and Majd actually being the single name of my great-great-grandfather).

“Oh,” she said. “The Jews.”

“I’d heard that,” I said after a momentary pause, a little surprised. I looked at Fatemeh’s father, my late aunt’s ninety-year-old husband and coincidentally also President Khatami’s uncle, who had rather triumphantly told me on a previous trip to Yazd that while his family was descended from the Zoroastrians (whom we had been discussing and who have always been a large minority in the region), I was descended from Jews. He said it somewhat gleefully because Iranians, whether pious Muslims or not, take great pride in their Aryan ancestry and revile the ancient Arabs who invaded their land, bringing them Islam, an Islam that they then molded to their Zoroastrian character. Even Seyyeds, descendants of the Prophet Mohammad, take pleasure in noting that their descent is through a Persian princess who married Mohammad’s grandson Hossein, whom they so faithfully mourn each year at Moharram. “Your ancestor is Molla Esmaeil,” he had said to me, and then he had gone on to explain who Esmaeil was. “God knows why he converted, though!” he had added at the end of his story.