Remembering a night of Ramadan prayer in Iran
By Janet Rae Brooks
The Salt Lake Tribune
ISFAHAN, Iran -- I am shrouded in a chador, anonymous in a crowd of women wrapped in identical swathes of black. For hours, the crouched figures around me have been crying and rhythmically beating their chests. Their anguish is raw, seemingly bottomless. But they are not lamenting lost children or dead husbands.
They are grieving for a man who died more than 1,300 years ago.
An Iranian friend had invited me to this special night of Ramadan prayer to commemorate the murder in 661 of the prophet Mohammed's son-in-law Imam Ali. Centuries later, posters sold at kiosks on Isfahan streets portray Ali as a baby-faced man with a sweep of dark hair.
I was on a whirlwind tour of Tunisia, Iran and Pakistan to study how the monthlong fast of Ramadan was observed in the Islamic world. Muslims had been amazed by my interest and generous with their invitations. Tina's eyes had sparkled as she described tonight's prayers as one of her favorite nights of the year.
"We Iranians," she said, "love our martyrs." Late that night, as I approached the illuminated mosque, I heard a voice calling my name.
Only Tina's face showed between the folds of the chador clutched at her throat. Over one arm, she carried another jumble of black. Earlier she had asked if I had a chador, and when I told her I didn't, she had offered to bring one.
"You'll be more comfortable," she said.
I drew the chador around me, securing it over my forehead with a built-in circle of elastic. Tina had correctly assumed I didn't possess the knack of holding a slippery piece of cloth around my head, so she had brought her 13-year-old sister's training chador. Already, the elastic was cutting into my temples.
We joined the crowd streaming into the mosque, a white-domed structure augmented by a ramshackle collection of baked-brick houses.
"Are you a Christian?" asked the imam greeting the throngs entering the mosque.
I hadn't attended a church service in years. My parents had purposely not baptized their children, so we could chose our own religion as adults. I had found this out one day after my friends at school starting talking about their godparents, and I had come home to ask why I didn't have any. But I had studied Scripture every morning at a school in Quebec for several years, and earned a Girl Guide badge that required spotless church attendance for a year.
"Yes," I said.
"Then welcome," he said. "We are a crowd of love."
We climbed the stairs to the darkened women's section above the mosque and knelt on the wood-plank floor where Tina's mother and sister had saved a few inches of space. Soon, the imam's voice boomed over the loudspeakers. Tina leaned toward me every few minutes to translate from his Farsi monologue.
"He just mentioned you," she said. "He said, 'There's a Christian among us.' "
Then a deeper voice began reciting a long prayer in praise of Allah. It went on for more than an hour. Tina knew it by heart. Stanza after stanza, Allah was intoned as "the one who is not obeyed, and then accepts an apology; the one who is hidden and is quite aware; the one who needs no one and nothing."
"That's sad," I said.
"No, it's not," said Tina. "He doesn't need anyone."
When the prayer ended, the lights flicked on and we huddled together to suck oranges and wet our mouths with water. Woozy from the heat, I discretely flapped my chador, which I had put on over my coat. In a country where women are required by law to cover themselves in public with or shapeless robes, a street corner had been no place to remove a coat, even to replace it with a chador.
When the lights dimmed again, Tina indicated she would move off to the left.
The thumping started first. Throughout the mosque, thousands of clutched fists began striking chests. Slowly and rhythmically, right hands beat relentlessly on left breasts.
Tina hadn't mentioned this. The THWACK, THWACK, THWACK was as regular as a heartbeat, as hypnotic as a legion of jack-booted soldiers. My chest reverberated with each pounding.
Then the weeping started. Whimpers at first, then aching sobs and full-throated wails. Just a few hours earlier, Tina had been talking about her boss, her husband, her aching back, her hopes of getting pregnant. Now she and the others seemed to have slipped back centuries.
Should I join in? What do I feel that sorrowful about? Imagine staying up all night to beat your breast in public. I've never wailed like this about anything in my life, even the death of my father. I just don't have it in me. Why don't I? Why do they?
My culture of self-help books and positive thinking offered no touchstones for mass sorrow. On and on it went: THWACK, WAIL, THWACK, WAIL, THWACK, WAIL. I hunkered on the floor, utterly alone amid thousands, feeling as if I had been trapped in some inverse celebration of all the miserable lives and senseless deaths of the eons.
It was after 4 a.m. before we were rummaging for our shoes and fleeing the mosque, Tina fretting about having to get up at 7 to go to work.
Salt Lake City Shia Muslims will mark the same special night of prayer tonight that the writer observed three years ago in Iran. Imam Ali, whom Shia Muslims consider the successor to the prophet Mohammed, was struck on the head by an assassin while praying in a mosque on the 19th day of Ramadan in 661 and died two days later.
http://www.sltrib.com/2003/Nov/11152003/saturday/111119.asp