There were cakes and cucumbers laden high on a copper plate, cinnamon-flavoured rice puddings and little stork’s bundles containing deep-fried white candies seasoned with rose water. There was a ewer pouring water into plastic cups, a loop of tea from the spout of a kettle. In her determination to get a rice pudding, a woman elbowed me in the face. I escaped from the crowd.
Rubbing my jaw, I walked away into a nearby side street. The piercing notes of the orchestra had been succeeded by a mellow, distant sound. Gradually, it grew closer and I was able to distinguish individual sounds within it: hands striking chests, a tremor of lamentation and the diesel motors on generators that were amplifying the lamentation. The processions had started.
Suddenly, I heard a scramble of words through a loudspeaker, and the boom of a bass drum. I looked back up the humdrum street, with its box-like parked cars and unsanitary smell coming from the drainage channels, and saw an army of mounted men on the brow of a hill. Their lances scintillated in the lamplight as they prepared to charge and meet their doom.
The army turned out to consist of a man carrying an iron standard, along whose considerable length oscillated swords and gargoyles and plumes of different colours. He was followed by two columns of men, marching in time with the base drum, flagellating their backs with chains on short handles – a strike for every ponderous beat. A man held up an unintended cross that was composed of two loudspeakers tied to a pole; they were wired to a microphone held by a wailing man a few paces behind.
I had to squeeze up against the wall to make room for the standard to pass. The bearer was thickset, bulging and tight-lipped in his task. He was bound to his panoply from a buckle on a thick belt around his waist. As he passed, he half-slipped, and the weight of the standard pulled him towards me. Thinking I might get hit, I ducked into a side alley.
Once the man had passed, I followed the procession to the main road, where it entered a string of processions, a dozen or more from different neighbourhoods. They were united, and also in competition with each other. The people along the pavements would decide which procession was biggest, and which had the most impressive standard. Had the flagellants been equipped with one chain or two? (From that, you could gauge the benefactor’s generosity.)
There was a mood of sombre recreation. More young men with heavily gelled hair held suggestive conversations with groups of unescorted girls – this being the only night of the year when young women, under the cover of piety, were allowed to roam without a chaperone. Families strolled. Young boys had been dressed in the white Arab robes of little Ali Akbar, Hossein’s nephew; Ali Akbar had fought bravely against Shemr’s men, before being cut down.
The more I walked, the better I understood the enormous size of this crowd; it extended as far as the eye could see. This main road was fuller, perhaps, than it would be at any other time in the year. The same was true of main roads across Iran; at that moment, tens of millions of people were in the streets. I reflected on the grief, and the entertainment that people made of that grief. Then I remembered another reason for the show: defiance.
The people on the streets were united by their love for the Imam Hossein, his father the Imam Ali and (to a lesser degree) the other ten Imams that are regarded by most Shi’a Muslims as the rightful inheritors of the Prophet’s mantle. Shi’as are an overwhelming majority in Iran, but only a small minority across most of the Muslim world. It was the forebears of today’s Sunni majority, Yazid and his followers, who rejected the hereditary principle and murdered its exponent, the Imam Hossein. (They also, Shi’as believe, murdered every other Shi’a Imam, apart from the twelfth.) Even now, in the twenty-first century, the Sunnis of neighbouring Pakistan are capable of launching murderous attacks on the Shi’as of that country, shooting up mosques and assassinating prayer leaders. In Saudi Arabia, a Sunni monarchy controls the holy places. Many Sunnis regard the Shi’as as heretics.
And so here, and in other streets across Iran, the people were showing that they would neither be extinguished nor ignored. They were showing, too, that they would not forget that dreadful sin, the murder of the Imam Hossein.
One afternoon in the spring I set out from the Armenian quarter in the lovely city of Isfahan, towards the Seminary of the Four Gardens. The following day was the anniversary of the investiture of the Imam Ali as the Prophet’s successor. The people were in a good mood. They revered Ali for being modest and just, and looked forward to celebrating these qualities by visiting family members, stuffing themselves with beryan – a dish that features minced sheep’s lungs – and passing judgement on their hosts’ new daughter-in-law. They strolled in the mild afternoon sun, mothers and daughters arm in arm (and fathers in their wake), buying tulips to put in iced water to keep overnight, and sweetmeats to take as gifts.
I reached one of the main roads that head north towards the river, and hailed an old shared taxi. The back seat had its complement of three. The occupant of the front passenger seat stepped out so that I could sit between him and the driver; I was suspended over the gap between their seats. The driver sat hunched over the steering wheel, leaning slightly against the door. We moved off. The driver changed gears like a surgeon replacing dislocated bones.
We were soon stuck in traffic outside one of the big banks, in front of which was a shiny blue car mounted on a gantry. The car – new, French-made – was an incentive: every account holder stood a chance of winning it in a prize draw. It was caparisoned with bunting and flashing light bulbs. It had metallic paint that had been devised by a computer. The bank had put it on the gantry to publicize it – and to make it hard to steal.
I looked in the rear-view mirror and my eye was taken by a fat woman sitting in the middle of the back seat. She was staring longingly out of the window at the zippy French car. She caught me looking at her and pretended to be scandalized, tucking her fringe under her headscarf. ‘What’s happening up there. Mr Driver?’ she demanded, ‘Why aren’t we moving?’
A car, a Buick from the 1970s, was stuck at the intersection, having carried out half a U-turn. Another car, an Iranian-made Paykan, had grazed one of the Buick’s tailfins. The drivers had got out of their cars. The wife of the Buick driver was leaning out of the window, yelling.
‘Look at the wife, egging him on!’ said our driver. ‘What difference does it make? That poor Buick’s been wounded more times than I have.’ The side of the Buick was discoloured from dents that had been amateurishly smoothed out. The engine was still running. It emitted black smoke.
The taxi driver reached under his seat, pulled out a thermos and unscrewed the cap. He poured a little tea into a dirty glass that rested on the dashboard, swilled it around and poured it out of the window. He filled the glass with tea and, putting it back on the dashboard, closed the thermos and put it back under his seat. Then he held up the glass and said, ‘Please go ahead …’
He was offering us tea. In such instances, you don’t accept. It would be bad form. It’s his tea, but he has to offer it. It would be bad form not to. But he’d be put out if someone said, ‘Yes, I’d like some of your tea.’ No one does. The driver gets to drink his tea and appear courteous at the same time. Both ways he wins.
There was polite murmuring around the taxi: ‘Thanks, but no’ … ‘You go ahead and have some’ … ‘I don’t feel like tea’ … ‘I’ve just had some tea.’
Lies. We’d all enjoy a glass of tea.
The driver took out a packet of cigarettes and we went through the same rigmarole. We felt our breast pockets for imaginary packets of cigarettes. Eventually, the driver withdrew a cigarette from his packet, lit it and settled down to watch. A policeman had arrived at the intersection. He was trying to broker a reconciliation. The driver of the Paykan was a cocky brute, well-built, young enough to be the Buick driver’s son. He danced from one foot to another. Soon,