The Butterfly Mosque (20 page)

That night I met Hussain at the hotel. As the director of the travel agency I was using, he wanted to welcome me to Iran and make sure everything was running smoothly; I also had to pay him. We had tea in the hotel lobby and he obliged me by talking politics.

“These places are always very crowded,” he observed, looking around at the arrangement of armchairs and coffee tables; the lobby was quite full. His English was flawless, only slightly clipped, with a vague untraceable accent. “Only about half of these people are actually staying in the hotel.”

“Really?” Hotels didn't strike me as entertaining places to hang out.

“Really. In the international hotels, you're less likely to run into the morality police. Boys and girls can come here to be together.”

“I guess that makes sense.” I paused, trying to find the words for what I wanted to say next. “When I was walking around Tehran today it seemed like most people were a little
bit . . . unhappy. Is this just the way Tehranis are? Like New Yorkers?”

Hussain pulled out a pipe and some tobacco, which smelled faintly of vanilla. “Are you familiar with the Russian novelist Gorky?”

“I kind of avoid Russian literature. It's depressing.”

“Gorky once said that a people who do not dance will die. We cannot dance, and look around.” He gestured with his pipe. “We are a dead people. No dancing, no big parties—women can't even sing. None of the things that help people to live, we have. Of course we're unhappy.”

I was mortified to have steered the conversation in such a depressing direction. I hadn't yet learned that despite the emphasis on privacy and discretion, Iranians are, unlike Americans, totally unembarrassed by sadness. “But it seems like the younger generation is able to get away with a lot,” I said. “I see girls who are barely in hijab hanging out with boys all over the place. They don't seem very worried.”

“That's because the government knows that if the young people wanted to stage a counterrevolution, all of this would be over in five minutes. Young people put this government in power, and young people could take that power away. Seventy percent of this country is under thirty.”

I lowered my voice so my next question would not be overheard. “So why don't they stage a counterrevolution?”

Hussain sighed. “Because Iranians are sick of war. In the last hundred years, we've fought two bloody wars, and had two revolutions, a coup, and a countercoup. No one wants to go through all that, not again. People want reform, not revolution.”

“I can understand that. I would, too.” I rolled a sugar cube around in my mouth—I wasn't used to the way Iranians drink tea, sucking it over a lump of sugar kept tucked inside one cheek. “But a lot of Persian expats I've spoken to seem to think a counterrevolution is about to happen.”

“Really?” Hussain smiled bitterly. “Well, you live in the Middle East. Something is always about to happen. Often the same thing is about to happen for years and years.”

I laughed and then blushed as several people turned to stare in my direction.

Tehran, the Unfunny City, capital of an Islamist hyper-reality, never quite became real to me. It seemed like a living novel; a story that was constantly inventing itself, often at the expense of the very real people who lived in it. The diffident way that fashionable Tehrani women wore their scarves; the rose-embellished murals of martyrs, two and three stories high, that were painted on the walls of buildings; the moralizing slogans; everything suggested to me that Iranian Islamism was less about religion than it was about a method of control. It functioned the way bureaucracy did in Egypt: a way to create hassles and delays so endless that people were too tired to fight back against the local tyrants. From what I could see, it was just as effective. I have never been less sorry to leave a place than I was to leave Tehran.

My next stop was Shiraz, a city about six hundred kilometers to the south. Beset by insomnia in Tehran, I was only half awake when I boarded the plane; I had my headphones
on and was listening to Delerium to cope with my dark mood, and when a prayer for safe travel came on over the plane's intercom I simply turned up the volume of my music. The woman in the next seat looked at me in alarm. Only later did it occur to me that I might have been doing something illegal. In Shiraz I was met by Azin, a cheerful, witty woman of thirty or so whose scarf slid around alarmingly on her head. Constructed in a horseshoe shape around a bend in a dry river, Shiraz was blooming improbably with rose gardens and cypress groves, and was dotted with blue-domed summer palaces and shrines. This is a common sight all over Iran; most of the country is mountainous and dry, but even the smallest villages I saw were lush with carefully tended plant life. Where the water and arable soil came from remained a complete mystery to me. Shiraz was no exception: a city of cultivated beauty in a feral, sweeping landscape.

Azin took me to the tomb of Hafiz, one of the most celebrated poets and mystics in Islamic history, who is revered in Iran as a saint. The tomb—a graceful domed mausoleum surrounded by a garden—was adjoined by a
chai khaneh
or teahouse, a small stone courtyard with a fountain set in the middle and niches with large pillows to sit on cut into the walls. When we entered, a group of chador-clad women looked at me over their shoulders, curious.

“Your husband is Egyptian?” asked Azin, deftly maneuvering tea and sugar cubes on a brass tray, when we were seated.

“Yeah, Palestinian-Egyptian.”

“And he let you travel by yourself?”

“Yes he did,” I said cheerfully.

Azin shook her head, incredulous. “We have a stereotype that Arab husbands are very conservative compared to Persian husbands.”

“I think most Egyptian men are more domineering than Omar, to be fair. When I finally convinced him to let me he was almost excited—he gave me a list of things to look for and asked me to find out whether there are any Sufis in Iran.”

“Sufis?” Azin looked doubtful. “Maybe before the revolution. But not now.” She adjusted her scarf absently, the way women in other countries might play with their hair. “Do you like living in Egypt?” she asked.

“I do.” It was true. And I was right; Tehran had normalized Tura.

“Why?”

“I guess it's because everything interesting or important, eastern or western, eventually passes through Cairo. It feels like the center of the world. It's been the center of my world, anyway, for a while.” It was the first time I had been able to articulate the reason I could no longer see myself severing my connection to the city. Even if my marriage failed, Cairo was the reason I could never again pretend that America was somehow separate from the rest of the world. In
The Prophet,
Khalil Gibran says we cannot leave the places in which we have suffered without regret, that these places become our second skins. Cairo was mine. It made me sick and dirty and endlessly hassled, and it had given me Omar, and gotten me in trouble, and gotten me out of trouble. It was now an indelible part of my history, and since we
love anything that is familiar, I could only think of it with affection.

Azin smiled. “The center of the world,” she repeated. “It sounds like a poem.” We sat in silence for a while, sipping tea through sugar lumps. Eventually the women in the corner rose, pulling their veils over their mouths, and left.

Later that day we visited a shrine erected for a brother-in-law of one of the imams. It was small and had a nondescript dome—I had a feeling I was going to have to feign the awe my Persian guides seemed to expect of me in everything. Egypt did everything on such a large scale—starting with the Pyramids and ending with the constant chaos of the streets—that it was hard for me to feel shocked anymore.

Azin and I had to wear chador inside the shrine; they were conveniently provided in a large box by the door. I pulled the garment over my head, swept the trailing end over one hand, and wished it wasn't strange for a foreigner to wear one in the street. Chador, a symbol of oppression to most non-Muslims, afford the wearer a kind of dignity totally lacking in the dumpy manteaux, which are, in the end, the mullahs' halfhearted compromise with western dress.

When we went inside my awe became unfeigned. The entire interior was covered in a mosaic of mirrors. I had never seen anything like it in my life. Each step was more disorienting than the last as my scattered image shifted around the interior. I stood in the center and swayed on my feet. A dozen people were seated on the floor, praying or reading.

“You can take a picture if you want,” whispered Azin.

I shook my head. “Not while people are praying.”

“It's okay, you're a foreigner. They understand.”

“No, I don't want to be rude. I wouldn't want somebody to do that to me.”

Azin nodded, pleased. “That's good. Really, that's excellent. It makes a big difference.” She reached out and squeezed my hand. I smiled at her. We left quietly, the mirror-shrine preserved only in memory.

We try men through one another.

—Quran 6:53

T
HAT EVENING
, A
HMAD FLEW DOWN FROM
T
EHRAN TO MEET
me. I
N
the morning he and I made the long drive north through the Zagros Mountains to the city of Isfahan. The mood I had caught in Tehran hadn't lifted in Shiraz, but the Zagros, all dusty high plains and craggy, mineral-streaked mountainsides, were eye-catching enough to distract anyone from culture shock.

“If I may ask,” Ahmad said at one point, “what made you want to come to Iran?”

I chewed my lip. “A couple of reasons. I'm interested in Persian history. I've been in Egypt for a while and wanted to see something else. I wanted to get a sense of another country.”

“A sense?”

“A feeling about how things work here, the way people think about things.”

“But you're very quiet.” He said this in a way that implied
very bored.

“Oh no,” I said, alarmed. “No, Iran is beautiful. It might be the most beautiful country I've ever seen. And the people are very nice.” I fumbled for the right words. “It's just that
I haven't had a break from new things in almost a year, so most of my awe has been used up.”

We were silent for a few minutes.

“You are becoming a little bit Arab, I think,” he said at last, gently.

The suddenness of the observation startled me. “What makes you say so?” I asked.

“The way you walk and speak to people. It's different from the way other Americans I have met behave.”

“Oh. God. I guess it's a habit now.”

“To please your new family?”

“To keep from sticking out. To keep from creating a scene wherever I go.”

Ahmad nodded, considering this. We drove for a while without speaking, feeling awkward at having been so frank with each other. There was pain in my lower back and I felt a bit feverish, so I let the scenery blur in front of me, hoping for a nap. It was not to be.

“Look to your right.”

Obediently I looked out the window and saw a cluster of domed black tents.

“Nomads?”

“Yes, tribespeople. Shahsevan, maybe.”

I came fully awake. “Really?”

Ahmad smiled. “Really. Shall we go say hello?”

We drove down a dirt path into the gulley in which the tribespeople were camped and stopped ten meters short of the first tent. A large dog sounded the alarm, circling the car as we got out. I saw a veiled head peek out of one tent, dart back in, and then emerge as a girl of sixteen or eigh
teen. She was wearing a heavily embroidered red dress, cut like a
salwar kameez.
A long scarf was draped over her forehead and hung down her back. She smiled as Ahmad approached and introduced us.

“She's invited us for tea,” he said.

We ducked into the first tent, which was pungent with the smell of unbleached wool. Inside, a circle of girls sat giggling into scarves. I smiled and sat where the girl in the red dress pointed, pressing my hand over my heart for
thank you.
She smiled back and busied herself with a small kerosene stove. I looked around at the other girls. Most were dressed like the first, in robes of bright green, red, or blue with gold embroidery. Their scarves were clearly meant to ornament, not hide, their hair, which they wore in thick braids across their foreheads. They fussed as they arranged themselves around us. Ahmad asked them a question that sent several of the girls into fresh fits of giggling.

“I asked if any of them are married,” he said.

Terribly forward in Egypt, this was a standard opener in Iran. It turned out that one of them was, and had an eight-month-old son. I looked at her closely. Exposure to sun and wind had carved premature lines in her face, making her age difficult to guess. Her body looked like it had, at one point, been emaciated by disease or malnutrition. I had a hard time picturing her carrying a child. But her expression was so sharp and open that I wasn't surprised, either.

“What tribe are they from?” I asked Ahmad.

He repeated my question in Farsi. One of the girls answered with a name that seemed to surprise him, and there followed a short conversation.

“They say they are Abd'el Khaneh, which I have never heard of, and they claim they are Arabs,” he said finally.

“They are?” It was a strange claim for a tribe in central Iran.
Abd
is an Arabic word for
servant,
and
khaneh
is Farsi for
house
(as in
chai'khaneh, teahouse),
so Abd'el Khaneh meant roughly
Servant of the House.
I wondered if the enigmatic “House” might refer to the family of the Prophet, which is known as “Ahl ul'Beyt,”
family of the House,
in Arabic.

“Yes,” said Ahmad, clearly bemused. “They say Arabic is their tribal language.”