The House of the Mosque

The Cow

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.

‘I’ve never had the time to look through these trunks.’

‘That’s enough for today. Go and wash your hands. I’ve just made tea.’

He washed his hands and face in the hauz and went into the kitchen to drink tea with Fakhri.

‘Be patient,’ Aqa Jaan advised her, when she began to moan about her children’s future.

‘How can I be patient when all three of my children have left home with no future prospects and we don’t even know where they are half the time?’

‘Our children are not the only ones. Thousands of others are suffering the same fate. That’s how life has always been and always will be. The only remedy for that is patience.’

‘Your faith gives you the strength to be patient, but it doesn’t help me. I’m weak and filled with doubts. I hardly dare to say it, but I doubt if God sees our struggles.’

‘Be strong, Fakhri. Don’t stray into the darkness. You need to hold on to your serenity.’

‘Everyone acts out of self-interest, everyone tries to protect his own territory. You’re the only person who’s always been honest, and where has it got you? The cellar! You used to be the most important man in the bazaar, your word was gold, and how do you spend your time now? Rummaging through the junk in the cellar!’

‘I wish you wouldn’t put it like that,’ Aqa Jaan said, stung.

‘I’m sorry, but you know what I mean. My point is, where are your friends, the powerful men of the bazaar? Why aren’t they doing anything to help you?’

‘I don’t need their help,’ Aqa Jaan retorted.

‘Everyone has abandoned you. Where’s Zinat? Where’s Muezzin? And, most of all, where’s your brother Nosrat? Have you heard from him lately?’

At that very moment, Nosrat was standing in the shower, thinking about the contribution he could make to Persian cinema. He knew he’d never achieve anything without Khomeini’s approval.

Then, while the water was pounding on his head, he had a brilliant idea. ‘A cow!’ he shouted out loud. ‘That’s it!’ He turned off the water, grabbed a towel, dried himself, got dressed and hurried outside, where he hailed a taxi and had himself driven to the former palace that now served as Beheshti’s headquarters.

Nine months had gone by since the beginning of the revolution and Khomeini still hadn’t decided what he was going to do about the cinemas. They had been boarded shut and, like the brothels, declared unclean.

Nosrat and Beheshti had worked so closely together that they were on familiar terms. Beheshti had nothing against cinemas. When he lived in Germany, he used to sneak off occasionally to see a film. Still, he didn’t think this was the right time to broach the subject with Khomeini.

‘But I’ve got the perfect solution,’ Nosrat said to Beheshti. ‘All we have to do is take the imam to see a film. That way he can see for himself that a cinema and a brothel are two very different things.’

‘Be realistic,’ Beheshti said. ‘What film could we show him that would make him approve of the cinema?’

‘The Cow!’ Nosrat said.

‘The cow?’

‘The very first honest-to-goodness Persian film. I’d even go so far as to say that it’s an Islamic film.’

‘And it’s called The Cow?’

‘Yes, The Cow! It’s a Persian classic. It’s not a masterpiece, mind you, but it’s the best film to show the imam. After all, the archetype of the Cow is familiar to every Persian, even to Imam Khomeini. I’ll line up a cinema, and you can make sure the imam gets there. Islam could have a great influence on the film industry. I have big plans. If Khomeini approves of the film, an independent film industry will spring up from the heart of our culture. The Shiites have a unique way of looking at things. With our ancient Persian culture as our guide, we’ll soon conquer cinemas all over the world!’

‘We can talk about the rest of the world another time. First we have to convince the imam to see the film.’

‘We’d better hurry. There’s not much time. Now that the cinemas have been boarded up, the carpet merchants have launched a nationwide campaign to buy up the buildings and convert them into mosques.’

‘We’ll never get the imam to set foot in a cinema.’

‘Then we’ll do it the other way round. We’ll bring the cinema to the imam.’

Beheshti smiled. ‘That’s a good idea,’ he said.

‘This is history in the making. Khomeini will like the film. It takes place in the countryside. It’ll remind him of his youth.’

The next evening Nosrat showed up at Khomeini’s residence in the northern hills of Tehran, carrying a projector and balancing a screen on his shoulder.

Beheshti ushered him into the imam’s study. Khomeini was sitting on a rug, leaning against the wall with a cushion at his back.

Since the revolution, Nosrat had grown a beard and his hair had turned grey. He’d also started wearing an artsy kind of hat. People usually knelt before Khomeini and kissed his hand, but Nosrat was an exception. He took off his hat and gave the ayatollah a brief nod.

Beheshti introduced him. ‘This is the cameraman whose coverage of the revolution was broadcast all over the globe. He’s very reliable. He comes from a good, pious family and has interesting ideas about the cinema. I’ll leave you two alone.’

When Beheshti had gone, there was a silence.

Nosrat put down his things and looked for a place to hang up the screen. He took a hammer out of his pocket and, without asking permission, nailed the white screen to one of the walls with two small nails.

He moved a table away from the wall and set his projector on it. Then he placed a chair in the middle of the room and turned to Khomeini. ‘Would you please sit in this chair?’

‘I’m fine where I am,’ Khomeini said, somewhat irritated.

‘I know, but the chair is part of the experience.’

Khomeini stared at him in astonishment. No one had ever spoken to him like that before. But he knew that Nosrat was a photographer, and he also knew that there were two people you should always listen to: your doctor and the photographer. So he got up and seated himself in the chair.

Nosrat closed the curtains and turned off the light, plunging the room into darkness.

Then he switched on the projector.

The reel began to turn. It was an old black-and-white film. The first image to appear on the screen was that of a cow. It mooed — something Khomeini hadn’t been expecting. Then a farmer came into view. He kissed the cow on the head, stroked its neck and said, ‘You’re my cow. My very own sweet cow. Come, let’s go for a walk.’

The farmer set off, and the cow followed him to the pasture. There the farmer took out an old-fashioned pipe, sat down beneath a shady tree and began to smoke. He gazed contentedly at his grazing cow. Then a woman in a headscarf appeared.

‘Salaam aleikum, Mashadi!’

‘Salaam aleikum, Baji. Come and sit in the shade, it’s hot today. I was just about to take my cow to the river. It was too hot for the poor thing in the cowshed. How are you doing, Baji?’

The woman sat down beside him in the shade of the tree, and they stared at the cow in companionable silence.

There was nothing fanciful in the film, and yet there were several magical scenes, in which you could see ordinary village life. The story itself was simple, but what made it so moving were the villagers’ primitive living conditions.

It was a fitting film for Khomeini’s new Islamic Republic, because there wasn’t a single sign of modern life in the village. The women all wore chadors and the Koran reigned supreme. There was no running water or electricity. No music could be heard and no one owned a radio. It was the perfect film for Khomeini to begin with. He could recognise himself, his parents and his former fellow villagers in the film.

The story is about a childless farmer who adores his cow. One day the cow falls ill. The wise men of the village advise him to have the cow slaughtered before it gets worse, but he refuses to listen.

One day, when the farmer is away, the cow drops dead. The villagers decide to bury the animal at once, before the farmer returns.

When he comes home and asks about his cow, everyone tells him that it wandered off. The farmer panics. He spends days looking for the cow. When he doesn’t find it, he decides his life is no longer worth living, and he stops eating.

The wise men of the village go to his house to comfort him and explain that it’s not right for a human being to mourn the loss of a cow. But the farmer is so upset that he thinks he’s turned into a cow. As the wise men enter his house, he begins to moo with grief. The wise men take out their handkerchiefs and wipe away their tears.

When the film was over, Nosrat turned on the light, just in time to see Khomeini reach for his handkerchief.

On the following Friday every ayatollah in the country made an unusual announcement at the end of his sermon: ‘Tonight a film is going to be shown on television. The film is called The Cow, and it’s been approved by Imam Khomeini. Islamic believers are allowed to watch it!’

People who didn’t have televisions flocked to the teahouses that evening to watch the film. It was a red-letter day in the history of Iranian cinema.

Aqa Jaan watched the film along with Lizard in the shed on the roof. It was his first film too. After he saw the cow and the farmer and the poverty-stricken houses, he had a hard time believing that this was the highly acclaimed cinema he’d heard so much about.

Shahbal and Jawad saw it together.

Nasrin and Ensi watched the film along with their former classmate.

Sadiq saw it in the company of a handful of Islamic women in Tehran, where she’d gone for a visit. With his sister’s help, Khalkhal had arranged for Sadiq to spend some time in the capital.

Zinat Khanom was staying at the house of Azam Azam, who had hired her to work as her assistant in the women’s prison. She had recently denounced Ahmad, declaring publicly in the mosque that she was ashamed of her son.

Zinat wasn’t alone in her denouncement. The television was full of devout parents who turned their backs on any child of theirs who dared to oppose the ayatollahs. Everyone was talking about it; no one understood it. Were the parents motivated by religious conviction? Or had they been brainwashed by the mullahs?

The day after Zinat denounced Ahmad, Ayatollah Araki called her into his office for a private talk. ‘Zinat Khanom,’ he said, ‘you are an example of the kind of Islamic woman this city needs. You are a real mahajjabeh. Holy Fatima is pleased with you. Now listen carefully. I order you to turn the women of Senejan into model Islamic women. I want all of them to look and act like Zinat Khanom. Is that clear?’

‘Yes, Ayatollah!’ Zinat said, and she sprang to her feet.

Zinat and six other fanatical women set up a morals committee and began to Islamise the behaviour of women in public places.

Most of the women in Senejan put on a black chador when they went out, but many young women had no desire to obey the Islamic regime and refused to wear a chador. The city was patrolled by the newly formed morals police, who cruised around in jeeps and checked to see whether the women in the streets were dressed according to the hijab.

In each jeep were two veiled women and one armed man. The moment they spotted a woman who was wearing make-up or whose clothing didn’t meet Islamic standards, they leapt out of the jeep, raced over to her and stopped her for questioning. If she listened to their advice and adjusted her chador or headscarf, they let her go, but if she protested, they arrested her, threw her in a waiting van and drove her to an undisclosed location to teach her a lesson.

All of the women who were arrested were brought to Zinat. She and Azam Azam had devised various ways to terrorise the women. For example, Azam Azam would smear syrup on their legs and Zinat would lock them in a dark, cockroach-filled room. Girls who talked back would be put in another dark room, where squeaking mice would scurry over their bare feet.

Recently Zinat had taken a rough towel and scrubbed the lipstick off a woman’s mouth with such force that her lips had bled.

On the night that everyone was glued to the television, watching The Cow, a group of Islamic students, acting with Khomeini’s approval, climbed over the wall of the American Embassy compound and burst into the building. In a lightning raid, they arrested the ambassador and sixty-five employees, who had been staying in the embassy as a security measure. To make sure that the Americans couldn’t try to free them in a large-scale military operation, the hostages were later transported to a number of secret locations.

As an added precaution, the most important hostages were driven to Qom, Isfahan and Senejan.

In the middle of the night Ayatollah Araki of Senejan was awakened in his bed by his assistant.

‘Get dressed,’ the assistant whispered. ‘You have a visitor.’

‘Who?’ the ayatollah asked.

‘A very young imam who says he’s been instructed to tell you a state secret.’

The ayatollah flung on his clothes. The young man was standing in the living room, waiting for him.

The ayatollah held out his hand and the young man kissed it. ‘I’m a student at the University of Tehran,’ he said. ‘I have a secret message for you from Ayatollah Khomeini.’

The ayatollah brought his head close to the student’s.

‘There are three cars parked out front,’ the student whispered in his ear, ‘with seven blindfolded Americans inside.’

Ayatollah Araki put on his turban and grabbed his walking stick. ‘I’m ready,’ he said.

He got into one of the vehicles, and they drove off into the desert.

Representatives of the Iranian and American governments met, with the Swiss as mediators, to discuss the release of the hostages, but the negotiations dragged on for months with no result. Khomeini had two non-negotiable demands: the extradition of the shah, so he could be tried in an Islamic court, and the release of billions of dollars in Iranian oil revenues that had been deposited in American banks.

The Americans were unwilling to extradite the shah, since they knew he would be executed by the ayatollahs. Nor did they wish to release the Iranian assets, which had been frozen in America and elsewhere. Negotiations were broken off. After that there was a long silence.

One hundred and seventy-two days later, six American transport planes flew through the night sky above Senejan. No one saw them; no one heard them. Half an hour earlier they had taken off from the deck of an American aircraft carrier in the Persian Gulf and, with Saddam Hussein’s permission, flown to Iran through Iraqi airspace. They were headed for a secret air-force base in the desert.

The Americans had been informed of the hostages’ hiding places by a spy in Khomeini’s inner circle. The plan was for the shah’s former commando units to free the hostages, after which they would be brought to the base by helicopter and then flown out of the country in transport planes.

But the rescue attempt was a disaster. Khomeini was the only one with a ready explanation: divine intervention. ‘Allah stopped them!’ he cried the next morning when it was announced that America’s top-secret military operation had failed. ‘Our country is under the protection of Allah,’ he continued calmly. ‘Why can’t the Americans understand that? It’s very simple: God struck down the enemy!’

It seems that several helicopters, damaged by a dust storm, had landed on the runway. As one of them tried to lift off, it skidded into a transport plane, and the two aircraft had burst into flames. The desert had been the scene of a raging inferno, though no one had witnessed it.

Eight US servicemen died and four others were wounded. After the crash the remaining transport planes had flown directly back to the carrier.

A shepherd, curled up beneath a tree by an old water well at the edge of the desert, was jerked out of his sleep by an unfamiliar sound. He sat up and peered into the inky darkness. A column of smoke was rising into the starry sky.

He climbed into the tree and saw a distant fire. Realising that there must have been some kind of catastrophe, he left his flock and ran to the nearest village. Half an hour later the villagers were all standing on their roofs, staring at the blazing fire.

The village imam hurried over to the mosque, opened the door, picked up the phone — the only one in the village — and dialled Ayatollah Araki’s number. ‘Flames are shooting up out of the desert! Our village elders have never seen anything like it. Something terrible must have happened!’

The ayatollah immediately ordered the commander of the Islamic Army to drive into the desert and check out the fire. Forty-five minutes later the ayatollah picked up his red phone and called the Khomeini residence in Tehran. ‘Flames are shooting up into the sky! It looks like a couple of planes have crashed, but the heat is so intense we can’t get any closer!’

Before Tehran could put together a reconnaissance team and dispatch it to Senejan, the villagers had ridden out to the scene on their donkeys and tried to rescue the wounded.

The authorities still didn’t know exactly what had happened when Radio Moscow made an announcement on its six a.m. news: ‘Two US aircraft crashed in the desert of Iran near the city of Senejan.’

Muezzin, who always tuned in to the morning news, heard the announcement, but failed to grasp its significance. Only when he heard the word ‘Senejan’ in the repeat broadcast did he go to Aqa Jaan and say, ‘Two US aircraft crashed in the desert!’

Iran’s state-controlled television opened its two p.m. news with a live report from the crash site. First the camera zoomed in on the bodies of the Americans, then Ayatollah Araki appeared on the screen. Clutching a Kalashnikov in his right hand, he gave an impassioned speech. ‘Islam is a miracle,’ he began. ‘Even after fourteen hundred years, Islam is still a miracle!

‘Last night American planes entered our country from Iraq. They turned off their lights and flew in the dark, using the latest electronic equipment to avoid our radar. They planned everything down to the last detail and calculated everything on their super-intelligent computers, but they forgot to include one thing in their calculations: the Koran! We don’t need ultra-modern computers to make such calculations. We don’t need electronic eyes to monitor everything. There is One who watches over our country, there is One who protects us, there is One who takes care of things while we sleep, and that is Allah.

‘America has computers, we have Allah.

‘America has reconnaissance planes, we have Allah.

‘America! If you want to know who crashed your planes, read the Al-Fil surah:

A-lam tara kayfa fa‘ala rabboka be’as-habi alfeel.

Did you not see what your Lord did

To those who rode the elephants?

Did He not confound their treacherous plan?

He sent against them flocks of birds,

Which pelted them with clay pellets,

And left them like a field of half-eaten stalks.’