Kader Abdolah - The House of the Mosque

Then Khalkhal changed tack and switched over to the Victory surah:

You will see them bow and prostrate themselves.

The marks of prostration are on their foreheads.

In the Torah and the Gospel they are likened

To a seed that sends forth shoots

And is made strong.

It then becomes thicker

And rests firmly on its stalk,

Which fills the sowers with delight.

Aqa Jaan and Shahbal exchanged glances.

Khalkhal didn’t linger by the Victory, but moved smoothly on to the Rome surah:

The Romans have been defeated

In a land that is close by.

But after this defeat they shall be victorious,

Soon as well as later.

And on that day you shall rejoice.

He is Almighty.

And that was the end of his sermon.

His sermon had been highly suspect, open to various interpretations, and yet it had been worded in such a way that the secret police wouldn’t be able to lay a finger on him. He’d started out with the Prophet Muhammad, then slipped in the word ‘America’ and finally mentioned the decline of the Roman Empire. Clearly, he had no intention of explaining what he meant or where he was headed.

Aqa Jaan realised that the mosque was in for another exciting time — something he had long been waiting for.

Khalkhal got to his feet and stepped down from the pulpit. Hundreds of worshippers stood up for him. Aqa Jaan walked over to him, took him in his arms, kissed him on the left shoulder and proudly escorted him to the door.

Khodaa ya tu busideh-ye hich gah

labb-e sorkh-e faam-e zani mast-ra?

Be pestane kaalash zadi dast-ra?

God, have you ever kissed

the blushing lips

of a drunken woman?

Have you ever touched

her unripe breasts?

One day when Aqa Jaan was walking by Khalkhal’s desk, he happened to see a poem lying there. He picked it up and read it. He couldn’t believe his eyes: Khodaa ya tu busideh-ye hich gah…

It was a shocking poem. God, kisses, a drunken woman, unripe breasts — and all of that on Khalkhal’s desk!

The poet’s name was printed at the bottom: Nosrat Rahmani. Aqa Jaan had never heard of him.

Who was he?

How dare he write such blasphemous words?

‘Things are out of hand,’ Aqa Jaan mumbled to himself. The shah encourages this kind of rubbish, but what’s Khalkhal doing with it? And why does he bring such things back to the library?

There were other poems on the desk. Aqa Jaan began to read one. It was a remarkable poem, because it had been written by a woman:

My thirsty lips

Search yours.

Take off my clothes,

Embrace me.

Here are my lips,

My neck and burning breasts.

Here is my soft body!

He heard Khalkhal’s footsteps in the courtyard. There wasn’t time to finish reading the poem, so he swiftly put it back on the desk and hurried over to a bookcase, where he pretended to be searching the shelves.

Khalkhal came in. Aqa Jaan removed a book at random and quickly left the library. Still mulling over the poems, he went into his study. He couldn’t get the last one out of his mind. It bothered him so much he couldn’t concentrate on his work:

Here are my lips,

My neck and burning breasts.

Here is my soft body!

Who was this female poet?

Had the country changed so much that women could talk openly about themselves and express their innermost feelings? Had it changed so much that they could now talk intimately about their bodies? Why hadn’t he noticed the change? Who were these women? Why hadn’t he ever met them? What did they look like? And where did they live? In Tehran?

The shah! It was all the fault of the shah and the Americans! American culture came pouring into their homes via radio, television and film.

The regime did whatever it could to lure young people away from the mosque and transform them into supporters of the shah and his ideals.

The shah had launched his ‘White Revolution’. He had published a thin volume in which he’d outlined his hopes for the country. In an effort to combat illiteracy, he’d sent young women to the villages to work as teachers. They’d taken off their veils, donned hats, and gone into the mountains, much as the shah’s soldiers had done, to set up schools in remote villages.

Yes, everything had changed. Aqa Jaan hadn’t noticed… or hadn’t wanted to. The country was being industrialised at a rapid pace, which is why so many foreign investors had been granted permission to build factories in Tehran and other major cities.

Senejan was no exception. Dozens of Japanese and European companies had seized the opportunity to take part in this new development. A tractor factory was being built on the outskirts of the city. Soon it would be employing hundreds of young people from Senejan and the nearby villages.

The management of the factory would be in the hands of the world-famous Japanese manufacturer Mitsubishi. The idea was to produce a small tractor that could be used in the mountains. Thanks to a government subsidy, every farmer would soon have one of those tractors. And so the farmer and the shah would be bound together by Mitsubishi.

No, Aqa Jaan wasn’t up on the latest trends; on the contrary, he was far behind. He never listened to the radio and had never owned a television. If he’d seen the shah’s wife, Farah Diba, on television, he’d have a better idea of what was going on in his country. She was working hard to improve women’s lives. Aqa Jaan didn’t realise how popular she was with women, even those who went to mosque every day.

Farah Diba was the shah’s third wife — the one who finally bore him a son. His first two wives had failed to give him the crown prince he longed for. He’d met her at a party in Paris, where she was a student, and now she was the queen of Iran. She was hoping to improve the position of women, to free them from their bonds.

Until now things had gone well, and it seemed as if the shah was managing to keep the ayatollahs in line. Secure in this knowledge, Farah Diba flew to Paris once a month to shop at the famous boutiques where Hollywood celebrities bought their clothes.

While the New York Times described the country under the shah’s rule as an oasis of peace, Farah Diba made an appointment with a clinic in France to have her Persian nose shaped into a French nose. She came back home with a new hairdo as well.

No newspaper dared to mention the nose job, but every hairdresser in Iran had immediately set about imitating the hairstyle. Farah’s hair was the talk of the town. Even Fakhri Sadat, the wife of Aqa Jaan, had succumbed to the Farahi — the Farah cut — though Aqa Jaan hadn’t even noticed.

In Senejan people were busy setting up a women’s clinic. According to the latest statistics, the numbers of women suffering from female disorders were higher in the more religious cities and villages, and yet devout women refused to be treated by male doctors. As a result the authorities in religious cities decided to open a clinic staffed exclusively by female physicians. The clinic in Senejan was to be the first and largest women’s clinic in the country.

Farah Diba’s royal cultural institute supported the plan, and Farah herself was scheduled to come to Senejan to open the clinic.

Khalkhal, who kept abreast of developments across the country, had gradually started including the everyday life of the city in his sermons. Recently he’d criticised the mayor because there wasn’t a decent public library in Senejan and the kiosks were selling Farsi translations of trashy American novels.