Ahmad nodded, considering this. We drove for a while without speaking, feeling awkward at having been so frank with each other. There was pain in my lower back and I felt a bit feverish, so I let the scenery blur in front of me, hoping for a nap. It was not to be.
“Look to your right.”
Obediently I looked out the window and saw a cluster of domed black tents.
“Nomads?”
“Yes, tribespeople. Shahsevan, maybe.”
I came fully awake. “Really?”
Ahmad smiled. “Really. Shall we go say hello?”
We drove down a dirt path into the gulley in which the tribespeople were camped and stopped ten meters short of the first tent. A large dog sounded the alarm, circling the car as we got out. I saw a veiled head peek out of one tent, dart back in, and then emerge as a girl of sixteen or eigh teen. She was wearing a heavily embroidered red dress, cut like a salwar kameez. A long scarf was draped over her forehead and hung down her back. She smiled as Ahmad approached and introduced us.
“She’s invited us for tea,” he said.
We ducked into the first tent, which was pungent with the smell of unbleached wool. Inside, a circle of girls sat giggling into scarves. I smiled and sat where the girl in the red dress pointed, pressing my hand over my heart for thank you. She smiled back and busied herself with a small kerosene stove. I looked around at the other girls. Most were dressed like the first, in robes of bright green, red, or blue with gold embroidery. Their scarves were clearly meant to ornament, not hide, their hair, which they wore in thick braids across their foreheads. They fussed as they arranged themselves around us. Ahmad asked them a question that sent several of the girls into fresh fits of giggling.
“I asked if any of them are married,” he said.
Terribly forward in Egypt, this was a standard opener in Iran. It turned out that one of them was, and had an eight-month-old son. I looked at her closely. Exposure to sun and wind had carved premature lines in her face, making her age difficult to guess. Her body looked like it had, at one point, been emaciated by disease or malnutrition. I had a hard time picturing her carrying a child. But her expression was so sharp and open that I wasn’t surprised, either.
“What tribe are they from?” I asked Ahmad.
He repeated my question in Farsi. One of the girls answered with a name that seemed to surprise him, and there followed a short conversation.
“They say they are Abd’el Khaneh, which I have never heard of, and they claim they are Arabs,” he said finally.
“They are?” It was a strange claim for a tribe in central Iran. Abd is an Arabic word for servant, and khaneh is Farsi for house (as in chai’khaneh, teahouse), so Abd’el Khaneh meant roughly Servant of the House. I wondered if the enigmatic “House” might refer to the family of the Prophet, which is known as “Ahl ul’Beyt,” family of the House, in Arabic.
“Yes,” said Ahmad, clearly bemused. “They say Arabic is their tribal language.”
In modern standard Arabic, I asked the girl in the red dress whether she could understand me. She gave me a sideways glance and said something that sounded like Arabic and Farsi played over a radio with lots of static. I understood none of it.
“It might have been Arabic once,” I said to Ahmad, “but now it sounds like some kind of mixed dialect.”
“She doesn’t understand you, either,” Ahmad said, and then chuckled. “It’s because of what we were speaking about. We’ve found Arab nomads in the middle of Shiraz province.”
We had tea with the girls, whose brothers, back from their shepherding duties, slowly trickled in. Several of the boys had startling pale blue eyes. Most of them looked like they were between thirteen and eighteen, and crouched instead of sitting to drink tea, as though a sudden move might send them bolting out the door. One wore an old U.S. Army jacket. It must have been prerevolutionary, a surreal remnant of a time when Iran was a valued U.S. ally.
We thanked the girls for the tea and Ahmad promised to pass this way again with the pictures I’d taken of them. We got back on the road and drove to a mountain pass south of Isfahan, where I stood on a rock and looked west toward Iraq, and beyond it, to the Mediterranean, the Atlantic, and home. Though so many things had changed, the mountains, so like the landscape I’d left behind in Colorado, were too familiar for me to feel afraid.
There’s an old Persian rhyme that goes like this: “Isfahan nisf-e jahan,” Isfahan is half the world. Even today it might as well be true; though the trade routes have mostly been given up and the poets and royal courts have mostly left, the energy and the architecture remain. Built on the Silk Road, Isfahan at its height might as well have been synonymous with Persia. It had everything—the favorite palace of a string of shahs, two universities and several small colleges, an enormous bazaar, and artists from across the globe courtesy of the polished Safavid empire. It also supported, and still supports, one of the most developed teahouse cultures I have ever encountered. A string of ancient stone bridges is home to a series of waterside chai’khaneh, many of which are built right into the bottom of the bridges themselves, so that sitting in one feels like being in a boat.
But the heart of the city is the Maidan Imam Khomeini, a circle of Safavid-era palace and mosque structures fronting a large bazaar. It was there that Ahmad and I went to hunt down a sehtar, a traditional Persian instrument Omar had begged me to look for. After interrogating a couple of bazaari cloth merchants, we got directions to an instrument shop near the maidan. When we found it, I was surprised to find it was run by a pair of guys close to my own age who, with their band T-shirts, corduroy jackets, and cargo pants, would not have been out of place at a Pixies concert. They both smiled in a certain way as Ahmad and I walked in, and it all came together. The stick-it-to-the-mullahs fashion, the music shop—they could only be Sufis. Azin had led me to believe that Sufism had been driven underground by the revolution. Yet here we all were.
Our conversation was stifled by an almost complete language barrier; they spoke very little English and no Arabic, and my Farsi was limited to the polite expressions Ahmad had been teaching me. So Ahmad translated for us.
“Their names are Isma’il and Javad,” he said. “They say they are members of the Ni’matullahi order.”
It was a Sufi path I’d never heard of before, but after Ahmad explained I had been hoping to run into Persian Sufis, they filled in the gaps with enthusiasm. Music, they said, was central to their dhikr—a type of prayer like a cross between a hymn and a mantra—which was why they ran a music shop. Both were curious about the way Egyptian Sufis performed dhikr, and how many paths there were, and what they were named. I answered their questions as best I could, wishing Omar were there to do the subject better justice.
When I told them I was looking for a sehtar for my husband, Isma’il ran out of the shop, saying that none of the sehtars they stocked were good enough. He came back about ten minutes later with another one, picking out a melody that we heard floating down the street in front of him. He and Javad packed it in a case with great tenderness, tucking in picks and extra strings and bridges, giving Ahmad instructions about tuning. As we left, so did the uneasiness that had been plaguing me since Tehran. The fact that I could travel halfway across the world and meet people like Javad and Isma’il made me feel, in a strange way, safe; they reminded me that it was possible to encounter home in many different places.
Though I was free of my bad mood, there was still something deeply sad about Iran. Ahmad told me story after story about tourists he had chaperoned who were brought to tears over something. Sometimes it was simply the dome of a mosque that did it, but more often it was a strange feeling of loss or regret. One wealthy American man in his sixties found himself suddenly devastated by the fact that he had never found lasting love. A British diplomat, who spent thirty years in Iran as an ambassador before the revolution, wept openly about everything that had been lost in the last thirty years. It was uncanny. One evening in Isfahan, as Ahmad and I
were sitting in a rose garden drinking tea, he himself began to look downcast. I asked him what was wrong.
“Nothing really,” he said. “I was just remembering the past.” He shook his head and smiled, then launched into a story about a British woman who, upon seeing the golden dome of the Hazrat-e Masumeh, was so undone by the current aggression against the Muslim world that she cried in front of thousands of pilgrims—in the end, nothing to be embarrassed about, as many of them were weeping, too.
“For God’s sake,” I said, “what is it about Iran that makes everyone cry?”
It was the first and only time I saw Ahmad laugh. “I don’t know,” he said when he recovered, “but now I wonder myself.”
We went to an Indian restaurant for dinner that night. I ate with greater appetite than I had in several days, glad for a change from Persian cuisine, which rarely varied from meat cooked on a stick. At one point, Ahmad asked me how I had come to like Indian food.
“I’m not sure,” I said. “I wasn’t that into it before a friend and I found this amazing Indian restaurant in Boston, during college. It was expensive, but we ended up having these huge feasts there at least once a month—” Like magic, my throat closed up. I was bewildered. Surely this wasn’t a dangerous topic. Yet I was on the brink of sobbing into my lamb masala. It was as if I saw, by virtue of the vast physical distance between Boston and Isfahan, how over my former life really was. I was momentarily overwhelmed by the magnitude of the break I had made with my own history. The world was too big, I was too small; I couldn’t contain so many contradictions. I suffered through the rest of the meal and went back to my hotel, where I drew a bath and cried for half an hour.
The next day coincided with the anniversary of the martyrdom of one of the imams. Black flags flew all over the city, no cheerful music was permitted to play, and everyone looked even more downcast than usual. I felt exhausted but strangely peaceful. Something had clicked. I finally had a sense of what separated Shi’a from Sunnah on an emotional level. There had been a lot about Shi’a and its effect on Iranian culture that I found vaguely unsettling—the focus on sacrifice, the intense ritual mourning—but there was something ecstatic about this cultivation of sadness. After my own minibreakdown, it made more sense. Like Buddhism, Islam encourages spiritual detachment from material things. In Sunni Islam, this is accomplished through intense personal discipline and strict iconoclasm. But in Iran, Shi’a seemed to accomplish the same thing in a different way. Somehow, by making sadness an ecstatic, transformative experience, the fear of loss was annihilated. It reminded one that the only permanence is through God; everything else begins to fade as soon as it is created. I felt like I could finally understand the air of melancholy that surrounded Iran’s beautiful gardens and palaces and mosques, making them seem humble—as if they said, in the same breath that they glorified art and nature, it doesn’t matter, it is lost, it has already passed away.
We left Isfahan that day, driving out along the city’s empty black-shrouded boulevards. Before arriving back in Tehran, we stopped in Qom, a holy city that had grown up around the shrine of what I mistakenly referred to as “one of the Fatimas,” somewhat to Ahmad’s dismay. I had a Sunni’s indifference toward members of the Prophet’s family further removed than his grandchildren. Beyond Imam Husayn and Sayyida Zaynab, I didn’t bother to keep the prophetic lineages straight; I did not, and still do not, know which Fatima is buried in Qom. The Shi’i did know, and built an immense blue and gold mosque complex in her honor during the sixteenth century, and made the city one of the centers of Shi’i learning. To enter the shrine of Fatima one has to be both Muslim and, in the case of women, wearing a chador. In most parts of Iran any all-encompassing garment passes muster; the Arab galibayya and head scarf I had worn during my stay were accepted without a batted eye, and were, in fact, far more conservative than what most women wore. But at the shrine of Fatima the traditional Persian chador was enforced. Of the hundreds of women who pressed around me at its gates, a large number were not Persian—many looked southeast Asian, some were pale and blue-eyed—but all wore the black or blue-and-white-printed sarilike garment. I would have had no problem wearing a chador myself, but as I was swept along in the human river of pilgrims, I realized that the only way out was forward, into the shrine. I would have to enter it as I was. At the entrance, Ahmad caught up with me, just as I was stopped by a tall grim-looking man of thirty-five or forty: a member of the religious police. Ahmad gestured toward me and spoke to him. The policeman observed me closely, trying to decide, it seemed, whether to believe what Ahmad was saying. I dropped my eyes and looked politely at his shoes.
“You’re American?” the policeman asked in English. There was no malice in the question, only a deep unease.
“Yes.”
“And Muslim?”
“Yes.”
He said something to Ahmad, who repeated emphatically what he had said before.
“Are you really a Muslim?” he asked me again.
I looked up at him. “I can say the shaheda right now, if you’d like,” I said. I meant to be accommodating, but as soon as I said it I realized it sounded like a challenge. And maybe it was.
The policeman frowned, his unease increasing. For a long minute we stood like a tableau. I looked down again, waiting for his permission to enter; he thought silently. Ahmad, who I saw from the knee down, shifted from one foot to the other. I wondered how much trouble we were actually in—I wasn’t sure how much power the religious police had in Iran. It occurred to me what this was and what it meant: an American Sunni Muslim, dressed like an Arab, waiting at the door of the very Shi’ite, very Persian Hazrat-e Masumeh; in the city that had been the birthplace of the Iranian Revolution. Can I come in? became, in this context, an extremely provocative question. It was a question of which agenda would swallow which. If there was an Islam that was larger than sects and nationalities, an Islam that could accommodate contradictions, and if I could be judged as an individual and not as the representative of an idea, then I would see the inside of the shrine. I was different, but I had done nothing wrong. Sometimes following the rules is a more radical act than breaking them.
“Go ahead.”
I looked up, surprised. On the policeman’s face was the barest hint of a smile. “Go ahead,” he said again, and then, “You are welcome.”
I stepped over the threshold into the stone-flagged courtyard. Ahmad trailed after me, smiling and shaking his head. I looked over my shoulder at the policeman, who was watching me with a thoughtful expression; forgetting myself for a moment, I caught his eye and grinned.
El Khawagayya
It’s a rather nasty word even by the standards of Arabic, starting with a throat-clearing kh and continuing with wAAga!, like spitting phlegm.
—gnOsis, on everything2.com
“SO WHAT WAS THE MOST UNUSUAL THING YOU SAW IN Iran? Tell me about something you weren’t expecting.”
“Carrot jam.”
Jo laughed. “Seriously.”
“I am serious. Who makes jam from a vegetable? It explains everything. The revolution, the hostage crisis—everything.” We were sitting in the living room of our flat, near the window, watching a flushed sun disappear into the dust on the horizon. The Pyramids jutted up like teeth at the edge of the Giza Plateau, throwing shadows east toward the Nile. The room was a mess. Jo was packing, preparing to leave for the States. Gifts I had bought in Tehran and Isfahan littered the table in pools of brown paper: enamel pencil cases, tiny painted boxes, printed cloth. I was on a strong course of antibiotics to combat the infection in my kidneys, but the accompanying back pain would linger for a year. On arrival in Cairo I found an e-mail in my inbox from Hussain, the director of the travel agency, thanking me for being one of his “good” clients—which I assumed meant one who didn’t cause trouble with the testy Iranian authorities—and inviting me to come back soon with Omar.
“Don’t go,” I said to Jo as she bundled books into a suitcase. “If you go
, who’s going to play Punch Fundie with me?” Omar found Punch Fundie undignified.
“I don’t know, muffin,” she said. “I guess you’ll have to find some other game.” She held a kitten at bay with her foot as he sniffed around one of her bags, wondering if it might be a good place to pee. Though born in captivity, the kittens were never what I would call tame—they tolerated our affection grudgingly, proved difficult to house train, and looked at people with serious, predatory little stares. They were only sociable when they were sleepy, when they would curl up into spotted pools on the nearest lap. Jo clucked her tongue at the one that was now chewing on her toe. Withdrawing her foot, she flopped onto the couch with a sigh.
“I thought this was going to be a fun one-year-adventure-type thing,” she said, “but I really feel different. This place has had a much bigger impact on me than I thought it would.”
“Good or bad?”
“All experience is ultimately good.” She saw my grimace and smiled. “No, no, I’m not just being polite. I will actually miss this city. I’ve learned a lot, being knocked around here.”
The larger of the two kittens scooted out from under a chair and pounced on the smaller.
“I’m afraid that if I’m knocked around too much more I’ll become a completely different person,” I said. “Especially if you’re not here to remind me who I was.”
“This is your story now,” Jo said gently. “You’ll know what to do. You’ll have Omar and Sohair and Ibrahim and your father-in-law and Sameh and lots of other people. Plus, we’ll come and see you, and you’ll come and see us—”
What she was saying was sensible but I couldn’t help feeling a stab of anxiety. Jo’s departure would mark a new season of my life in Egypt, one in which I would go for months at a time without seeing another westerner. As Omar and I saw her off to the airport, I was conscious of the bright sun on my shoulders and the wind coming down from the Mediterranean. They seemed like heralds of good news. I hoped I was ready for whatever they brought.