Of Mullahs and Magic

In the driest of desert towns, Ali Hashemi leaves his bed to say his night prayers. The young man sits in the parched garden of his family’s home, an enclosed courtyard that’s mostly a place of dust, with a pomegranate tree, a mulberry and a trough of still water. The dawn sky and its brim of lemon-pink colouring passes unnoticed, because Ali is busy with the task set by his teacher.

As he has done for each of his waking hours over the last forty days, Ali repeats the same words over and over: ‘There is no might and no power except in God.’ The words have become a dirge, a mechanical movement of the lips. ‘There is no might and no power except in God.’ The repetition and monotony are meant to strip away anything unnecessary, to reduce his awareness to the bare existence of things. That way, only God is left. And it’s only now, when both he and the world around him are at their emptiest, whittled down and attenuated, that Ali sees everything differently, in a magical light.

It was not a slowly rising light like that of the dawn; it was not an isolated light like that of the moon or a spotlight. It was everywhere; in fact, it was everything. The pool glowed with light, the garden beds glowed, the sky glowed, the very walls and arches around the courtyard were made of light.

This episode of mysticism lies at the heart of Roy Mottahedeh’s absorbing story of the making of an Islamic priest, a mullah, in pre-revolution Iran. It’s not really what we, in the West, first think of when Iran is mentioned. Our image of the country is one of archaic ways of thinking and repression, of a place stunted by the Ayatollah Khomeini’s 1979 revolution and the ensuing decades of governance mixed up with fundamentalist religion. To us, Iran is the anti-normal: a place where women’s rights are restricted, public displays of affection are a criminal act, dogs are unclean and cannot be kept as pets, where the heroes of films must be given the names of Islamic saints (and can never be seen wearing a tie), where teams of censors are employed to scour books for the smallest mention of the inappropriate, like references to wine or pork. Iran does have its own major book fair, but this may be held in only one location: the Grand Mossalah mosque. Mottahedeh’s The Mantle of the Prophet (1985) explains how, beneath the forbidding image of the black-robed Ayatollah and a regime of naysaying, there lies a very old, thoughtful, human comedy. I was made to read this wonderful book for a course in cultural history and the sight of its pages still comes with a particular resonance from those student days (the murmur and hiss of a gas fire, the crack of warming metal that’s enough to make me want to check my pockets for 50 pence pieces to feed the meter). It was on a reading list – a long, fat reading list – as an example of how cultural history should be done, and it turned out to be an immensely readable and richly peopled excursion into Iranian culture, free from the burden of flashy theorizing. Mottahedeh was born in America to an Iranian family and attended Quaker schools as a boy, but his homeland remained an irresistible puzzle, rich in romance, and he went on to use part of his first Fellowship award to visit the Middle East, as well as spending time at the University of Cambridge learning Persian and Arabic. For his book, he drew on many long conversations with Iranians about their lives and experiences, reworking those stories into the composite character of Ali Hashemi and his coming-of-age in the town of Qom, a holy shrine and Iran’s highest seat of religious learning. We follow him through the stages of his education – part-awakening, part-disillusion – on a lamp-lit journey, moving from one rough-walled chamber to another, through the innermost workings of Iranian culture. One of the first surprises is how much of the curriculum of the madrasas, the Islamic schools that some young people attend in addition to their traditional classes, is built on rational argument. The madrasas were set up in the eleventh century – before Europe’s universities – as a way of protecting Islam from foreign influence, but they share the same roots: classical logic and reason, grammar and rhetoric. These tools were used to make a good case for the rule of God and his laws, a practical rationality that was at the same time touched with wonder at the magic of existence. The madrasa pupils themselves were known as talabehs, meaning ‘seekers’. They were not preparing to pass exams, they were on a quest for truth – more like trainee wizards in a world of near-sighted Muggles. As we follow Ali’s progress we discover how everyday Iranian life shaped the character of much Islamic thought. First comes the influence of communal family living: homes without doors; sitting under the same large quilt together on cold evenings; using a tactful code of coughs and heavy footsteps to make sure relatives knew you were coming. It was this lack of privacy that made private, separate moments of contemplation all the more important and affecting. Then there’s the role of gardens in the mental vocabulary of Iranians. Walled gardens: enclosed from the world and its dust and dirt, where any flowers and fruits that grow are a vivid treasure. The Koran itself was one big promise of entry into a ‘heavenly garden’, and its words weren’t seen as a series of arid lessons but rather they had the appeal of myth and legend, as the stories of King Arthur or Middle Earth do for us. The sometimes bloody tales of the Prophet and his descendants felt like living history with a personal significance for individuals and their family line. An age-old problem for religions has been the demand on ordinary flawed human beings to behave like angels at all times, not just when they’re feeling holy. There have to be compromises, and Mottahedeh is particularly good at showing how Iranians approached (and enjoyed) the ambiguities involved, summed up by the Iranian saying: ‘God willing, it’s a goat.’ It comes from a story about a mullah who is late for prayers. Hurrying on his way to the mosque he comes across a dog, soaking wet from a ditch. The dog shakes mud over the mullah’s robes. It’s his duty under Islamic law to return home and change out of clothes sullied by an unclean creature; but instead the mullah sighs and pretends it might not be a dog after all: ‘God willing, it’s a goat.’ The same approach was taken when it came to a forbidden pleasure like drinking wine. Omar Khayyám was able to write such luxuriantly ripe and lusty poetry about booze (‘Let us make up in the tavern for the time we have wasted in the mosque’) because ambiguity was so appealing and so healthy. To satisfy other sensual appetites, mullahs were able to arrange a strictly temporary marriage in exchange for filling out the right forms and a fee. Devotion to Islam in the twentieth century became a kind of consolation. Successive secular governments in Iran had brought in technical expertise from Britain, France and America in order to modernize the country. Increasing numbers of young people, and a greater proportion than in any other nation, were being sent to the West for a university education in order to train as engineers and scientists. It came to feel like a capitulation to Western culture, a sense of defeat known as ‘West-stricken-ness’. By the 1960s many more of the country’s secular intellectuals were returning to the embrace of Islam, tired of seeing their children indoctrinated into what was still an alien culture. Even if they didn’t and couldn’t believe in the dogma, Islam worked for them as a native folklore. Cassette tapes of Ayatollah Khomeini’s sermons became a fashionable acquisition, a signal of their modish rebellion. So the rise of a religious state didn’t come about through force, the success of a strategic campaign, lobbying or political shenanigans, but because there was an emotional surge of support from the mass of Iranians. ‘It had been a victory of the word,’ wrote Mottahedeh. Combining religion with politics on a day-to-day level of expediency, though, led to an unfortunate mangling of Iran’s delicate, messy cultural poetry. There was a need to put an end to the ambiguity, to start fixing laws and punishing offenders; to stop the flow of more open-ended learning and thinking in order to enforce rules of behaviour. A dog was a dog, a goat was a goat. Reading the book again made me wonder, though, how different we really are from the narrow-minded regimes we tend to criticize. We assume we’re right in just the same way that they do. We want to bulldoze through in the name of ‘modern’ rights and freedoms (it’s good for business, after all), without stopping to consider the subtleties, depths and qualities that other cultures (and communities of people) might have. By the end of the book, Ali Hashemi knows that becoming a mullah isn’t much of an end in itself, he’s not ‘made it’ professionally or booked himself an upgrade in heaven. If anything, it means a more fragile faith, more doubt and scepticism. There is no certain knowledge to rely on, only a cycle of book-reading, a slow evolution of thought, an ebb and a flow; and that was the only way to understand God – whatever that term might mean. When anti-Shah protests begin to bubble over in the streets of Tehran, a friend asks Ali what he would do with his money if he needed to withdraw it from the bank quickly, and his answer is unequivocal: ‘Now and always – buy books.’

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 78 © Tim Blanchard 2023