The Ayatollah Begs to Differ (25 page)

“Yes, everybody knows that,” he said, noticing my attention. “But tell me,” he continued, “why are you really here? Have you come to do a little spying?”

“No!” I said with a laugh. “I like it here.”

“Come on,” he said jovially, “nobody likes it here, especially if you’re from America. What’s there to like?”

“Plenty,” I replied, “and of course I’m going to participate in Ashura.”

“No. You’ve come to write a report,” he insisted with a broad grin. “Have you written it yet? Did you investigate the uranium plant in Ardakan?”
³

“Yes, that’s right,” I said. “I’m finishing my report on it soon.” He laughed, and I smiled. I knew he was only half-joking, though, for to someone like him, who has lived all his life in Ardakan and Yazd but has also seen Europe and America, the thought that anyone from those continents would find what he considers a backward place interesting enough to visit more than once, a place that would hardly merit a check mark for “worth a detour” if there were a
Guide Michelin
for Yazd province, was absolutely preposterous.

The Molla Esmaeil Mosque is anything but grand or ornate, although it does have its charms. Tall old walls surround the structure, so it’s hard to even see it from the street that runs adjacent to the bazaar. A large crowd, the women separated from the men by a rope that ran along one side of the tented courtyard, had already gathered two hours before the noon prayer, and yet another round of chest-and chain-beating ceremonies by various delegations marched along a path through the crowd kept clear by police and Revolutionary Guards. A man with what looked like an old insecticide sprayer attached to his back wandered around, spraying rose water on the congregants and marchers, one of whom, a toothless old man in clerical garb standing in front of me, was in desperate need of it to mask the body odor that caused me to back away when it hit me. A massive poster on one wall dominated all the other banners strewn about: a picture of a boy, perhaps ten or so and wearing a camouflage T-shirt, holding a photograph of Sheik Hassan Nasrallah of Lebanon and making the victory sign with the fingers of his other hand held in the air. In large black letters underneath were the words “The Party of God Is Victorious.” Hezbollah does indeed mean “party of God,” although the sentence did not employ that group’s moniker, one that has become almost a brand and that has lost its connotation in languages other than Arabic. The sign used the Persian
khoda
for “God” rather than the Arabic
allah
, and spelled out “party of” instead of using the conjunctive
o-.
It couldn’t be any clearer that it wasn’t a party or a political group or an army that was victorious (in the 2006 war with Israel): it was
God
.

Standing by the rope separating the women, who were all sitting on the floor, some trying to control their young children, from the men, who were preening about hitting themselves, I took out my camera and started taking photos. When I aimed at the women’s section, a young woman in full black hijab marched up to me. “Why are you taking pictures of the women?” she asked angrily. Sadoughi’s son, Mohammad, jumped in.

“He’s a writer,” he said. “It’s all right.”

The woman looked skeptical. “But why is he taking pictures of women?”

“What difference does it make?” said Mohammad. “You don’t seem to mind the television crews up there.” He pointed in the direction of the state TV cameras in the back of the courtyard. “He’s from the media too.”

“It’s still not right,” said the woman suspiciously as she stepped away, still staring at me. She stopped and leaned against a wall, keeping me in her view.

“I’m sorry,” I said to Mohammad. “I hope I’m not causing any problems.”

“Don’t worry,” he said, waving his hand. “It’s ridiculous. Take as many pictures as you like.” I put my camera away and headed for the exit. “I think I’ll go outside for a break,” I said.

“I’ll come too,” said Mohammad. We left the tented courtyard through a narrow passageway that led to the entrance of the mosque, a small courtyard drenched in the yellowish light of a fierce desert sun bouncing off the ancient mud and straw of the twenty-foot-high walls that fully enclosed it. Men loitered about, some smoking and others just leaning against the walls, waiting to enter the mosque when the actual prayers would begin.

“Right there,” said Mohammad, pointing to the center of the courtyard, “is where my grandfather was martyred.” Ayatollah Sadoughi, the current Imam Jomeh’s father and a conservative ally of Khomeini’s during the revolution, was killed by Mohammad Reza Ebrahimzadeh, a suicide bomber from the Mujahedin-e-Khalq (MEK), on July 2, 1982, during a wave of assassinations and terrorist operations against the Islamic Republic’s early leadership in a counterrevolutionary bid to assume power. “My father was standing right behind him,” he continued, “and he witnessed the whole thing.” Mohammad, who had just been born then, showed no grief, but he was solemn.

“Those days are long past,” I said, “and I don’t suppose there’s much of a terrorist threat these days, is there?”

“No,” said Mohammad, fingering his Motorola walkie-talkie, an item illegal for Iranians to own unless they’re with the armed forces, the police, or other government security services. “I suppose not.”

We lingered for a while; Mohammad went off and sat alone on a ledge built into the wall, and I walked around, thinking about how tenuous the clerics’ hold on power had been in the very early years after the revolution.

The Mujahedin had been an armed guerrilla group that were allies of Khomeini in bringing down the Shah, but had resented being excluded from power and had waged a bitter campaign, at first from within but eventually from their base provided them by Saddam Hussein in Iraq, against the Islamic Republic. A number of senior Ayatollahs, and even the republic’s second president, Mohammad Ali Rajai, were killed during their campaign, and the current Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, was injured in a bomb attack. Non-suicide operations were often carried out by men who fled as passengers on the backs of motorcycles, the most powerful of which were banned as a result and the reason that today still no motorcycle with an engine larger than 150 cc can be bought in Iran. But the Ayatollahs’ system had survived, and it was hard to imagine how anyone could have thought differently, particularly if he had bothered to attend a Friday prayer meeting at his local mosque, and especially during Moharram.

A few minutes before midday, Mohammad and I went inside the mosque, to where the actual prayers were to be held, and Mohammad escorted me to the front row, right in front of the lectern where his father would deliver his sermon. The room was filling up with rows of men kneeling, waiting for the Imam Jomeh to arrive, and making last-minute calls on their cell phones. I wondered what they could possibly be discussing, and it occurred to me that not a few may have been talking to others in the same hall or perhaps to their wives in the women’s section, for on Fridays, absolutely no business is conducted in the country and not even newspapers are published. It reminded me, though, to silence my own phone. I sat waiting, saying hello to every man who walked up to Mohammad to pay his respects, until one of Sadoughi’s guards showed up and stood right in front of me.
“Befarmaeed vozou, Haj-Agha,”
he said, gesturing with one outstretched arm while holding the other over his heart in the Iranian custom of showing respect.
“Vozou?”
He was pointing in the direction of a private area where dignitaries would perform their ablutions before prayer—the
vozou
, or washing of the hands, forearms, feet, and forehead with water—and he had referred to me as a hajji, someone who has made the pilgrimage to Mecca, which he assumed that I, being of a certain age, certainly had. I was about to stand up when Mohammad held my arm firmly.

“He’s going to take photographs,” he said to the guard. “He’s working.” He must have sensed my slight hesitation and wished to spare me any embarrassment, even though I had never told him that I was not accustomed to praying. “He’ll pray later,” he added, just to ensure that my Islamic credentials remained bona fide with his father’s guards. (Shias, unlike Sunnis, can perform their dawn, noon, or evening prayers either at the time itself or at any time up to the next mandated prayer. Which is one reason why driving around any Iranian city at prayer time, there is no break in traffic. Unlike Muslim cabbies in New York City, many of whom will pull over, usually to a gas station, and pray right on time, not even pious Iranian taxi drivers will pause when their radio broadcasts the thrice-daily call to prayer.) Taking my cue, I took out my camera and stood up. “You can go anywhere with your camera,” said Mohammad as the guard excused himself for his own vozou and left us. I was somewhat relieved that I wouldn’t have to stay in one place throughout the prayers, mimicking my neighbors’ gestures—sitting, kneeling, standing, and muttering, certainly in my case, unintelligible Arabic passages from the Koran.

The Imam Jomeh, Sadoughi, arrived as I started to wander, surrounded by his other guards and trailed by a large group of mullahs. He disappeared into a room next to the lectern and the mullahs arranged themselves on the floor in front, while I stood against the wall with my camera in my hands. When Sadoughi emerged a few moments later, in lieu of the cane he usually walks with, he had an automatic rifle, holding on to the tip of the barrel and bringing the butt down on the stone floor with every step. He positioned himself behind the microphone and held on to the rifle, leaning on it ever so slightly now and then, and began his sermon.

Friday prayer sermons in Iran, the world’s only state other than the Vatican that is run by clerics, tend to be more political than religious in nature, and this Friday, falling as it did at the beginning of the Ten-Day Dawn, was doubly so. Sadoughi recounted the story of leaving Paris and arriving in Tehran with Khomeini on his chartered Air France 747, himself sitting in the seat behind Khomeini, and the crowd listened intently. It was a story I had already heard; Sadoughi had told it to me himself with great excitement over tea one day, and I suspect he had also told it in previous years to the very men before us. Khomeini’s character, his fearlessness, and the glory of his revolution were the thrust of the speech, as well as his selfless dedication to his people. Women and children, Sadoughi said, were originally barred from the flight, as it was considered too dangerous. The women at Neauphle-le-Château, the suburban Parisian village where Khomeini was based, however, objected strenuously, and Khomeini relented, warning them, however, that the plane could be shot down in Iranian airspace by the Shah’s government even though the Shah had already fled into exile. (Neauphle-le-Château was deemed important enough to the revolution to be memorialized by a street name in Tehran, in the neighborhood where I stay and linking two major shopping avenues, but it took me many walks along it to finally decipher the meaning of the street signs, which inexplicably mangled, Persian-style, the village’s name to “Nofel Loshato.” We may honor a foreign and impure town, the authorities seemed to be saying, specifically to the French, but we’ll spell it
our
way.) When Khomeini and his entourage finally circled Tehran’s Mehrabad Airport, Sadoughi said, they were initially denied permission to land as they approached, and when the plane banked sharply, everyone thought they might be under attack. Khomeini, however, was calm and expressionless, a testament, the Imam Jomeh implied, to his faith in God’s will. Sadoughi also talked about the need for unity in the face of new threats—threats he didn’t need to spell out but were clearly a reference to the United States—his rifle with its loaded magazine (I was told) emphasizing the point that he, and other clerics, stood ready to defend the Islamic Republic from any enemy.

He made no mention of Ahmadinejad or the current government, and he didn’t need to: as the representative of the Supreme Leader, he was speaking for the velayat-e-faqih, not any elected government that by its nature would be temporary. It wasn’t a fiery speech, nor was it angry or hostile, and in fact at times when he talked about Khomeini and the revolution, it was anything but, but then again Sadoughi is not a firebrand and is, after all, close to Khatami, his brother-in-law in whose cabinet he once served as a vice president.
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However, as we on the outside and those in Iran need reminding every now and then, the most charming (and Sadoughi is certainly a charming man), the most moderate, and even the most liberal reformist clerics are united in their firm belief that the revolution was pure, that Khomeini’s views on a political system were sound, and that any democracy in Iran will always be an Islamic one.

When Sadoughi finished his sermon, he handed his rifle to a guard and stood, like everyone else, facing Mecca to lead the prayers. I stood facing him, from behind the lectern he had just vacated, and dutifully took pictures while his guards watched me, occasionally nodding their approval whenever I leaned forward to get a close-up. When the prayers were over, Mohammad stood up and signaled that I was to follow him. We left by a side entrance with his father and the guards, leaving the other mullahs behind, and were driven the short distance to Sadoughi’s office, a few doors down from his house. The office, on an impossibly narrow street designed for horses and donkeys and covered by sun-shielding archways over the tall mud walls on either side, had been Sadoughi’s father’s office and was in a building perhaps two hundred years old. We walked inside and into a square room, the walls covered entirely in intricate hand-carved mirror tiles depicting flowers, birds, geometric Islamic shapes, and calligraphic passages from the Koran. Stained-glass arched windows that touched the ceiling let light in, but allowed no view of the outside. An old attendant rushed to fetch some tea, and then set the huge Persian carpet with a plastic tablecloth and three place settings. “You’ll have lunch with us,” said Mohammad.