Where God Was Born

by Bruce Feiler

  “Oh, it’s disastrous. I can’t say anything in favor of it. Besides, experience has proven that this sort of union between religion and politics is most harmful to religion itself. Though we had a secular society, I think that people here were actually more religious before the revolution. And this worries me. Because especially for the younger generation, the turning away from religion with bitterness, leaving no hope for coming back, is a big threat to society. Government can be remedied quickly, but when something happens to the faith of the people, to their basic beliefs, it’s not corrected very easily.”

  “But you said you weren’t that religious. What are you worried about?”

  “Moral chaos. Because if you can’t have a just, credible system of administering justice, then the only guarantee you have that people will respect one another’s rights and refrain from harming one another is religion. Once that is destroyed, what are you left with? What’s interesting now is that religious intellectuals are advocating more and more separation of church and state, having in mind the interests of religion more than state.”

  “Might this be a harbinger for Islam in general?”

  “I believe so, because Iran has been on the leading edge of the Islamic resurgence in recent decades. If you look back to 1979, the kind of fundamentalist revolution that took place here was unheard of. And it’s clear that the revolution in Iran played a great part in inaugurating a renewed self-confidence among other Muslims.” The Iranian example, led by Shias, was so powerful, he said, that even Sunnis like Osama bin Laden were influenced by it.

  “It helped Muslims throughout the world gain a certain consciousness,” he explained, “making them combative and willing to fight for their place in the world. Muslims felt they had been treated unjustly by the West for several centuries, but they had always blamed European colonialism. After the Iranian Revolution, Muslims started viewing their situation more as a war between Christianity and Islam.”

  Given this open hostility to the West, I asked him if he believed Islam and democracy could coexist.

  “In this country, yes. But the prospects in other parts of the Muslim world are rather slim, because they haven’t had the experience we’ve had here.”

  “And will it happen in Iran in your lifetime?”

  “It won’t be a counterrevolution, certainly. Nobody has the appetite for that. Most people are hoping that this change will be gradual and nonviolent. And I don’t think it will take that long, really, because even the people in power are feeling extremely insecure, despite their shows of strength.”

  “And if that change happens, will your pain have been worth it?”

  “Historically, yes. Besides, anybody taking after Kant, like myself, can’t separate politics from morality.”

  Though perhaps his dream might not happen quite yet. The next day Dr. Forouzan telephoned. He hoped I would understand the sensitivity of his situation and not use his name. Our meeting was an allegory for Iran today; Dr. Forouzan exists, but he has another name.

  Leaving Tehran made Linda very happy; in a place with less smog she could finally breathe. But it also raised a challenge, because Muslim law is more strictly enforced in the provinces. Our first stop would be Qom, the political capital of Shia Islam and possibly the most conservative city in the Middle East.

  We set off southward, past a string of roadside vendors hawking watermelons, into the desert flats. A salt lake, with turquoise water ringed by white deposits, appeared to our west. Low mountains began to rise. We were traveling in a Toyota four-wheeler, stuffed with water and pistachio nuts, driven by Kamran, a wry, fifty-something bookshop owner from Tehran who satisfied his penchant for the wilderness by leading occasional expeditions. He called himself “Strong Man of the Desert.” He called Linda “Khanoom,” or madame, and brought along for a chador a single piece of black cloth that ran from her head to the ground. “I don’t like Qom,” he said. “It’s too religious for me. The women are all closed up.”

  The veil was the first symbol I encountered in Iran that began to reshape my religious geography. Before coming on this trip, I’d viewed the history of Islam as a relatively straightforward narrative. Mohammed was born in the small oasis town of Mecca in 571 C.E., received the dictated Koran, and established the Islamic religion before his death in 632. Over the next century, Islam spread rapidly from Arabia east across Asia as far as India and China, west across the Mediterranean as far as modern-day Morocco, south into sub-Saharan Africa, and north into eastern Europe. Islam was not always unified; a violent disagreement over who would succeed the Prophet—an appointed caliph or his nearest relative—divided the religion into Sunni and Shiite sects. But Islam, at its core, was still an Arabian faith; Arabic was its lingua franca, and nomadic life was its chief cultural influence. The lingering importance of the desert was most visible in its use of carpets for praying (no wood is required) and in the presence of green in so many of its decorations (the enduring hope of an oasis to a people trapped in sand).

  Persia tells a different story, beginning with the veil. The idea of covering women when they went outdoors in order to shield their sexuality predates Islam by almost two millennia. The custom was first recorded by the Assyrians in the thirteenth century B.C.E. Brutal by nature, the Assyrians undid many of the more enlightened laws toward women that Hammurabi had put in place. It became harder for a woman to get a divorce, and a man could offer his daughters or his wives as temporary slaves to his creditors until he repaid his debts. Assyrian laws also contained regulations on which women could wear a veil. The custom was limited to upper-class women and was used to indicate they were respectable. Prostitutes were expressly excluded.

  Veiling spread around the world via the Greeks and Romans and became particularly common with Byzantine Christians and with Zoroastrians in Persia and India. But the custom was not adapted by the Arab world until Islam reached these countries. Arabian women were at first eager to adopt the veil as a sign that they were as sophisticated as the rest of the world. The Koran advises modesty for men and women but specifically orders women to cast garments over their bodies when they go outside. The custom of wearing a veil was widely adopted in the early centuries of Islam, but it became less popular during the Ottoman Empire and under the shahs. Ayatollah Khomeini reinvigorated veil wearing, in part to distinguish Islam from the profanity of the West. After the revolution, he originally wanted to require the full chador, or tent, but accepted the lesser version of a scarf along with loose clothing and nontransparent stockings.

  Qom was full of chadors, as well as almost every other kind of traditional clothing. Mullahs in brown cloaks strolled the narrow streets, some in black turbans, indicating they were descended from Mohammed; others in white turbans were ordinary clerics. The city is a bastion of religious schools, libraries, and sanctuaries, with a population of 750,000, though it feels more intimate, with most people coming for the same purpose: to study Shia Islam. The combination of bookshops on every block and students from around the world in national garb made the community feel like Oxford or Cambridge, industry towns where the industry is ideas.

  The centerpiece of the city is an elaborate shrine built to honor Fatima, the sister of the eighth of twelve imams honored by most Shiites. Fatima died here in 816, and the golden-domed shrine was constructed over her tomb in the seventeenth century. Non-Muslims are forced to stop at the entrance, but Kamran tipped the guard to let us enter. Linda tightened the chador under her chin, and I bowed slightly. A policeman shadowed us.

  The front of the three-story shrine, with its enormous arched entrance, was covered in a mosaic of thousands of mirrored tiles that reflected the sun in every direction, filling the courtyard with a transcendental, disorienting light. Men washed their feet in a line of low faucets. Families held picnics. A lone woman, draped in black, sat yoga-style, with her hands on her knees, praying in the direction of the shrine. I raised my camera to snap a photograph, and an angry man approached. “He’s taking pictures o
f our women,” the man said in Arabic. “No, he’s not,” Kamran said. “He’s taking pictures of the men washing their feet.” Within seconds we were on our way.

  Qom was a bastion of Shiism long before Iran formally adopted the religion in the sixteenth century. Influenced by the spirituality of the imams, Shiism became a more mystical, meditative branch of Islam, in which politics were mostly kept separate from spiritual matters. Feeding off Christianity, the twelfth and final imam was said to have disappeared and would return at the Last Judgment to battle the forces of good and evil and inaugurate a reign of justice. Outside the shrine a billboard reads, in English, SOMEDAY HE WILL COME. It could easily have fit in many parts of America.

  Ayatollah Khomeini bucked this tradition by returning Shiism to a proactive role in civic life. But as soon as he assumed power, he became as autocratic as his predecessor, insisting on a uniformity of belief (a position counter to Islamic tradition) and calling for the death of anyone who threatened Islam. In a move that would eventually backfire, he also ordered families to have more children for God. Two decades later, nearly 60 percent of the population was under twenty-five, a population time bomb that the underperforming economy could barely control. Reform seemed to flower with the landslide election of Mohammad Khatami in 1996, but he soon bowed to the lingering grip of hard-liners. Iran was at a standstill.

  Though not entirely. On the outskirts of town, we parked our vehicle in front of a modest two-story building, left our shoes at the door, and were ushered into a small library. Three women soon strode through the door. Two were in pants with long-sleeved coats; one was in the most elegant chador I had ever seen. Fahimeh Moussavi-nejad is a vision of religion at the start of a new millennium. The wife of one of Iran’s vice presidents and a distant relative of Khomeini, Mrs. Moussavi-nejad took Islamic law seriously. She wore not one modest garment but three: a long-sleeved shirt, covered by a lightweight tan chador, on top of which was a thick, beautifully made raven-colored chador, which hung down over her eyebrows and inched halfway up her chin. Underneath, she had one scarf wrapped around her hair and another around her neck. The only things visible on her entire body were her eyes, nose, and mouth, as well as her hands, which she used constantly to wrap the yards of fabric over her face.

  But boy, did those eyes shine. They leapt from the blackness like diamonds from velvet and, along with her big-toothed grin, emitted as much wattage as the mirrored front of Fatima’s shrine. Anyone who says a chador conceals a woman’s personality has never seen my wife and Fahimeh Moussavi-nejad beaming at each other through impenetrable fabric like two sixteen-year-olds showing off their brand-new bikinis. At least one other person might have understood the feeling I had watching them. Mrs. Moussavi-nejad’s husband, an Islamic cleric imprisoned by the shah who became vice president under Khatami, kept an English-language blog on the Internet, in which he detailed everything from his dabbling in Super 8 filmmaking to his service in the diplomatic corps. In a revelation of his private life unheard of in Iranian politics, his online bio ends: “I married Mrs. Fahimeh Moussavi-nejad in 1980. We have three issues. They are all girls—Faezeh, Fatemeh, and Farideh. I am happy with my marital life and have no complaint whatsoever.”

  After his election, the vice president began the Institute for Interreligious Dialogue, an unrivaled step in the Islamic Republic. He appointed his wife president, an even more stunning move. “Our goal was to provide some information for the public,” she said, “promote a culture of dialogue, and publish books.”

  “Has the work been easier or harder than you expected?” I asked.

  “Rather than say it was harder or easier, I would say some care should be taken in this work. I have been satisfied. Conditions are good for this kind of dialogue, but we have to view the situation realistically.” In their first five years, they opened a library, began issuing a journal, and held the first-ever conference of religious minorities in Iran, including Assyrian and Armenian Christians, Zoroastrians, and Jews. Perhaps most astounding, they published a book on the rise of anti-Semitism in Europe.

  “Twenty-five years ago, everything in Iran was going to be Islamic,” I said. “Now you are holding meetings with religious minorities. What happened?”

  She laughed and pulled her chador over her face. “I was a child then,” she demurred.

  I had no intention of letting her off that easily. “But you are a student of history.”

  She relented. “After the revolution, our society was involved in some internal problems. A big revolution had occurred, and the society was not that...firm, shall we say. It was not stable enough to get involved in ideological debates. After a while, the society turned normal again. This dialogue became possible because spirituality had earned a special place in society, whether it was Jewish people, Armenians, Assyrians, or Muslims.”

  “Many people around the world wonder whether an Islamic country can be open to different religions,” I said. “You’re suggesting it took twenty years but that the answer is yes.”

  “I think Iran is a good example of this. Different religions are living here with much respect. We have religious minorities in parliament.”

  “But until recently, Islamic law said a Jew, Christian, or Assyrian was worth only one-eighth of a Muslim.”

  “You’re talking about blood money,” she said, “which says the compensation a minority can receive from a Muslim in the case of murder is equal to one-eighth of that which would be paid if the victim was Muslim. Our constitution says our country should be based on Muslim law but that we can change it. We just eliminated that law, so now all people are equal.”

  “If you excuse me for being direct,” I said, “I notice in this conversation that all of you are women.”

  She laughed again and clutched her chador. “It’s a coincidence,” she said.

  “I don’t believe you,” I said.

  “Well, you can say that, in the university, more than 70 percent of religion majors are women.”

  “I look at you,” I said, “and I see a woman in a chador. But your smile and your eyes burst with light. In ten years, which side will win? The chador or your sense of hope?”

  “I see no conflict between these two things,” she quickly shot back. “What’s wrong with a chador? I believe in Islamic covering, which is law in my religion. I like it. And since I obey all my religious laws, I like this one as well. Wherever I go, even in Europe, I wear this chador. I drive with this, and I climb mountains in this.”

  “But you said you have to take care in these matters,” I said. “You said your work is difficult. Will you prevail?”

  “There is no definite answer to this question, but I believe that whatever happens in the world will happen in Iran as well. Like everywhere, there are fundamentalists here, as well as open-minded people. Some may prevail at one time, but then others will succeed, just like in American elections.”

  “So when I read in the paper that the conservatives have prevailed in parliament . . .?”

  She chortled. “Why should you be so disappointed? Nothing happened when the reformers were in power.”

  “But wasn’t your husband one of those reformers?”

  Now she laughed. “I believe this movement will be better if we separate the spiritual aspects of religion from the political aspects of religion. It’s good for Islam to do that, and good for other religions as well. If you read history, whenever religion has been used as an instrument for government, the religion has been destroyed. Religion is too important for a few men to destroy.”

  We got up to say good-bye, and suddenly a moment of awkwardness arose. Mrs. Moussavi-nejad stared at the table where we’d been sitting. A cup of coffee, one of tea, a piece of chocolate cake, and some cookies had been served during our conversation. I had touched none of them. “You must eat something,” Kamran whispered. “She thinks you don’t like her food.” I sat down and hurriedly took a few bites of cake and a few sips of tea. This was the allegory of Qom: Even among t
hose committed to sweeping change, small gestures still matter.

  We headed south, farther into the hinterlands and even deeper into the spiritual roots of the Ancient Near East. Our destination was Yazd, a wilderness city on the main road to Afghanistan that is the de facto geographic center of Iran. Known for its textiles, Yazd is perched halfway between the northern and southern deserts, in the foothills of the mountains that divide the country between east and west. When Marco Polo came here in 1272, he called it a “good and noble city.” Then, as now, it was known as the home of a religion whose leader is a shadowy gleam but whose ideas played a much bigger role in the history of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam than I had ever fathomed.

  If Iraq had felt more familiar than I’d expected, Iran, at first blush, seemed more exotic. To begin, it’s huge. At 636,000 square miles, Iran is six times larger than the United Kingdom and three times larger than France. It’s larger than Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, and Egypt combined, which means the newest force to enter Near Eastern geopolitics during the latter half of the Hebrew Bible had more land than the entire Fertile Crescent put together. It’s also lofty, surrounded by mountains and built on an elevated plateau set between two depressions, the Caspian Sea and the Persian Gulf. Two-thirds of Iran gets snow in the winter.

  Closer to India than to Israel, Iran is part of a different ecosystem than much of the Middle East and a different cultural tradition as well, with a language unrelated to the Semitic tongues, closer to Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, and English. The first Iranian cities were set up in the Susa plain, on the western border with Iraq. The Elamites, as they were called, had a tug-of-war with Mesopotamia in the third millennium B.C.E., linked by trade but also by rivalry. During the tumultuous twelfth century B.C.E., while the Sea Peoples were invading the Fertile Crescent from the west, the Elamites were attacking from the east, defeating Babylon and Assyria and bringing back the copy of the Code of Hammurabi that eventually ended up in the Louvre.