Stephen Orth - Couchsurfing in Iran - Revealing a Hidden World

I try to be rational and to channel all my anxieties toward the approaching flight. I booked with Taban Air, a tiny company with seven planes. The maintenance problems in Iran’s air-traffic trade are well known. Imported spare parts are scarce, certainly for the American MD-88 plane onto which I am about to board. The country’s aircraft mechanics are the jazz musicians of engineers. Masters of improvisation, who also sometimes integrate unusual tones and waive conventional solutions. I deliberate about whether on my plane the onboard electronics, the hydraulics, or the engines are most likely to be cobbled together with parts from the Saipa automobile plant. Or all three. Whether some technicians, like musicians, are better at improvising than others after drinking a couple glasses of wine. It’ll fly all right, won’t it? Inshallah . I google Taban Air’s last crash landing. It was four years ago. Coincidentally, it was the Isfahan to Mashhad route, forty-two injured. Four years could mean one of three things:

a) As a reaction to the incident security has been improved considerably.

b) It’s about time it happened again.

c) I’m worrying too much.

The correct answer proves to be c. The pilot takes off elegantly, stays up in the air the intended amount of time, and lands as gently as a feather of a mynah bird on a Persian carpet.

“HAVE YOU GOTswimming gear with you? This afternoon there is a pool party,” says Elaheh. That isn’t the kind of sentence I expected to hear in strictly religious Mashhad. But actually I should have realized by now that Iran takes great pleasure in twisting expectations, crumpling them up, and then with great panache, dumping them in a huge garbage can marked: Prejudices, Official Perceptions, and Theocracy . So, to the holy shrine in the morning and to a party in the afternoon—the agenda appeals to me.

Elaheh is a dentist, and she looks a little like former world number one tennis pro Ana Ivanovic and has a friend named Ismail, who picks us up in an ancient Jeep without a windshield. To cruise around the holy city in this vehicle is pure pleasure—at last, the feeling of freedom outside walls and fences. With airflow in your face and the sun in your hair you begin wondering why on Earth cars are built with windshields. Mashhad is a rich city and seems to be more modern and cleaner than Tehran or Isfahan. Every year more than 15 million pilgrims come here. At the roadside there are huge billboards advertising real estate, and the pedestrian bridges seem to be brand new. Huge construction cranes numbered 1 to 9 herald the building of the largest shopping center in the country. At a subway station we change to a more modern form of transport, with more windows than we’ve become used to, and travel to the center.

Fifteen million pilgrims. Imagine a sold-out AT&T Stadium, more than 80,000 people. Now imagine ten or twenty AT&T stadiums, and you are not even close. Every year the number of Muslims arriving would fill 190 full AT&T stadiums. Some official sources speak of 20 million—250 football stadiums. But you should be a little careful with such figures. Maybe the state propaganda machinery would like to make the Iranians a bit more devout than they really are.

Imam Reza didn’t cause much of a stir during his lifetime 1,200 years ago. But he is the eighth of twelve imams, so for Shiites a legitimate heir of Mohammad and thus worthy of honor. They also believe that he was done away with by Caliph Harun al-Rashid using poisoned grapes (historians are less certain), which would allow him the status of martyr. The other ten imams (they are still waiting for the return of the twelfth imam, for whom there is no grave) were buried outside Iran. The mausoleum isn’t a cemetery but a palace. The whole complex, consisting of almost 20 million square feet, is, in terms of area, the largest mosque in the world, and one third larger than the equivalents in Mecca and Karbala.

We meet up with the architect Parisa, a friend of Elaheh and Ismail, and I’m left alone with her, as they are not interested in shrines. They take my camera, as I’m not allowed in with it, although, funnily enough, it’s okay to take pictures with a cell phone.

The next two hours Parisa and I spend walking from one huge courtyard to the next, passing mighty vaulted iwans and gilded entrances. Uniformed officials with color-coded dusters in their hands maintain order.

“Yellow stands for a guide specializing in general questions, green for religious ones,” explains Parisa. The guides are allowed to poke women (and men) with their dusters who go the wrong way. In many areas and entrances there are strict rules about gender segregation. There is supposed to be a waiting list of ten thousand men wanting to work here, which probably has more to do with the proximity to the holy shrine than the opportunity to poke people.

Time and again Parisa is warned by the watchdogs to completely cover her hair and fingernails, painted in mosque dome turquoise. In the whole shrine chadors are obligatory for women. The splendor of the gigantic complex is overwhelming. “I once showed a French tourist around, and he thought that the Palace of Versailles suddenly seemed small and modest,” says Parisa. The holy shrine is constantly being extended, for more than a thousand years already. In the meantime space has become scarce, forcing them to build underground praying areas whose access staircases resemble those of a subway station. They lead to mirrored halls with hundreds of prayer rugs and hundreds of chandeliers.

The chandeliers all have white bulbs except for one that is green. “That one is to mark the nearest to the grave,” says Parisa. Masses of pilgrims jostle toward a kind of golden cage behind which Reza’s sarcophagus is concealed. As a non-Muslim I am not permitted to go as far as the cage. Also, emotionally I would stick out—most of the visitors are praying and many are crying for the martyr. I am just stunned. In my mind I ask Imam Reza for an early trip to Germany for Sofia, for a decent husband for Massi, and for an extension to my visa, which is due in five days.

You don’t dare to think what such buildings must have cost. A business conglomerate consisting of mining concerns, a bus factory, textile companies, agricultural businesses, and a large proportion of the land on which the city stands funds the Imam Reza Shrine. The hotels accommodating the pilgrims have to pay a levy for the land. Such businesses are called bonyads and as official charitable trusts are exempt from tax and take donations. They are under the control of the Supreme Leader Khamenei, who was born in Mashhad. There are 120 bonyads in Iran, and they are a considerable economic factor. The largest of them runs the Imam Reza Shrine and has an annual turnover of US$14 billion; that’s more than Porsche.

ISMAIL DOESN’T HAVEa Porsche, but his old Jeep is just as much fun. In the afternoon we drive a short distance out north of the city. Our driver stops at a heavy iron gate that looks as if you would have to punch in a password and convince a boxing champion’s minder of your good intentions, but in fact, it swings gently open to let us in. We park behind two other cars on a gravel path; trance music warbles from a Peugeot.

“Have you got any weed?” asks a man who looks nothing like a Persian boxing champion but like a heavily tattooed gangsta rapper. In fact, he is a filmmaker.