Kader Abdolah - The House of the Mosque

Aqa Jaan was so upset that he began to chant the Al-Mursalat surah like a madman:

Woe, that day, deniers of truth!

By the tempests tempestuous!

By the dispersers dispersing!

By the sunderers sundering!

What you are promised shall come to pass.

When the stars become dim.

When the heavens are torn asunder.

When the mountains are scattered to the winds.

Woe, that day, deniers of truth.

The donkey moved off. Ahmad was weeping soundlessly. Someone threw a stone that hit him in the head.

Aqa Jaan could bear it no longer. He ran after the donkey and hurled himself in front of it. ‘Stop!’ he said to the crowd. ‘You can’t throw stones! He hasn’t been sentenced to a stoning! Where’s that accursed judge?’

One of the guards gave Aqa Jaan a shove, which sent him sprawling to the ground. But he got back up again, with surprising agility for a man of his age, and ran towards the donkey.

The guard stuck out the lower end of his rifle and blocked the way.

Another stone was thrown. This one struck Ahmad’s right ear. Aqa Jaan took out his Koran, thrust aside the guard and ran over to Ahmad. Positioning himself in front of his nephew, he held up his Koran and shouted, ‘In the name of this book, do not stone him!’

The guard snatched the Koran out of his hand and hit him across the face with it. The blow sent Aqa Jaan reeling, but he quickly regained his balance. He grabbed Ahmad round the waist and tried to drag him off the donkey, pulling so hard that they both fell to the ground.

While two of the guards were lifting Ahmad back onto the donkey, the other guards were kicking Aqa Jaan. Their heavy boots thudded into his stomach, back and legs.

The donkey trotted off towards the mosque, and the crowd followed along behind.

Aqa Jaan lay curled up in agony, chanting:

Oh, you cloaked in your mantle!

Oh, you muffled in your garment!

You may lie

On the ground no longer.

Stand up!

By the moon,

And by the morning when it dawns!

He placed his palms on the ground and rose painfully to his feet.

In the beginning was the Cow. The rest was silence. At least that’s what the ancient Persians believed, which is why the columns in the old Persian palaces in the province of Fars are crowned with the heads of cows.

When the Cow died, the rest of creation emerged from her body. Plants and animals sprang up out of her flesh.

After a while this belief disappeared and was replaced by others. Fire became sacred and the Cow faded into the background.

Fires were still burning brightly in the fire temples in the mountains when Zoroaster, the first Persian prophet, was born in Yazd. Zoroaster announced that neither the Cow nor Fire was to be worshipped. There was one supreme deity, he said, and he gave him a name: Ahura Mazda. Fire became the symbol of Ahura Mazda on earth. The prophet also presented his people with the holy book of Zoroaster, the Avesta.

Centuries later, Muhammad proclaimed Islam. The ancient Persian beliefs were suppressed and the Fire was extinguished.

The Cow and the Fire have not been worshipped for fourteen hundred years, but they still live on in the Persian spirit.

Islam had created a rift in Aqa Jaan’s family. For the past eight centuries the house had been united in its struggle against the enemies of Islam, fighting the battle from the pulpit of the mosque. Now, for the first time, the family’s foe was Islam itself.

The revolution had more or less ended, but Shahbal still hadn’t come home.

Nosrat was doing well, working day and night to carve out a position for himself as an Iranian filmmaker in the new Islamic Republic. He didn’t have time to come home. He didn’t phone any more either.

Zinat had thrown herself so zealously into Khomeini’s brand of Islam that she was rarely at home. She broke off all contact with the family. They had no idea what she was doing.

Muezzin, who didn’t feel well, went on trips more and more often.

Jawad was often away from home. Though he didn’t tell his family, he was spending much of his time in Tehran, where he was in touch with Shahbal. He’d always secretly sympathised with the leftist movement and with the struggle that Shahbal was now actively engaged in.

‘Why don’t you come home?’ Jawad asked Shahbal.

‘When Khomeini was living in Paris, he promised to tolerate others. Now that he’s in power, he’s forgotten his promise. To him, leftists are blasphemers. There’s no room for dissent in his regime, so we’ve toned down our rhetoric and gone underground. Khomeini can’t be trusted.’

Nasrin and Ensi, the daughters of Aqa Jaan, also decided to leave. They were hoping to find a place in Tehran. No woman in the family had ever lived on her own before, but Nasrin and Ensi were no longer content to sit at home and wait for a husband.

Fakhri Sadat had always been protective of her daughters. She hadn’t insisted that they attend mosque regularly, and she had sent them to the best schools in Senejan. After secondary school, both girls had gone on to teacher’s training college. In the normal course of things, they would have graduated by now and be working as teachers. But schools and universities had shut down when the revolution began. When they re-opened, Nasrin and Ensi weren’t allowed back in.

The new regime had unleashed a cultural revolution in factories, offices, schools and universities. Anyone not considered Islamic enough was sent home. Nasrin and Ensi were the first students in their class to be dismissed, mostly because of Ahmad’s disgrace and Aqa Jaan’s spirited defence of him.

For a while the girls went on living at home, but there was no future for them in Senejan.

‘Nasrin and Ensi want to move to Tehran,’ Fakhri Sadat announced to her husband one night as they were getting ready for bed. ‘They’ve come to me to ask me what I think.’

‘We can’t send two young girls to Tehran by themselves!’ Aqa Jaan said.

‘What are you planning to do? Keep them here for ever?’

Aqa Jaan didn’t reply.

‘They have no future here. You’ve got to let them go.’

A few days later Nasrin and Ensi went to see Aqa Jaan in his study and told him that they wanted to find jobs in Tehran and that he shouldn’t try to stop them.

‘All right,’ said Aqa Jaan, ‘I won’t stand in your way.’

So they moved to Tehran, where they found rooms with a former classmate.

Aqa Jaan continued to go to the bazaar every day, but things had changed. The men, who had all grown beards, spent most of their time competing for the mullahs’ favours. Insolence had become the norm; no one showed Aqa Jaan the slightest bit of respect. Ever since his office boy had started coming to work in a militia uniform, Aqa Jaan didn’t dare phone anyone when he was in the room.

In the past, when he had gone to the villages to check up on his workshops, he had always been given a royal welcome. Now the villagers didn’t even come out to say hello.

One day an old friend of his from Isfahan stopped by and found him bent over the papers on his desk. Aqa Jaan had aged so much he was unrecognisable. He had turned into a broken, grey-haired old man.

He tried to keep working as usual, but his heart wasn’t in it. He didn’t have the energy he once had either, so he started going home earlier and pottering about the garden. Sometimes he went down to the cellar and spent hours poking around. One day Fakhri Sadat went looking for him. ‘What have you been doing down here all this time?’ she asked.