Qom



I had some eight hours left for my domestic flight, from Mehrabad, scheduled to Shiraz, where the conference was about to take place. I made a quick decision. A friendly taxi driver would rather take me to the Holy City of Qom, about 100 kilometers southwest of Tehran. Qom is the home of the Holy Shrine of Fatema Masumeh, a sister of Imam Reza, who died on her journey for visiting her brother and was buried here. From here the decline of Persia’s Shahs began. Legend has it that one day in 1928, Reza Shah’s wife visited the Shrine of the Innocent and when showing her face was dispraised by an ayatollah there. Next day, Reza entered the Shrine showing his anger and contempt and did not remove his boots. He even maltreated the mullah whom he had identified. They never forgot. Later Qom became the residence of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the father of the Islamic Revolution.

The center of the city is the marvelous Meydan-e Astan, from where the golden dome of the Holy Shrine can be seen very well. I had stayed overnight here a year or so ago in the Aria Hotel, a place under heavy renovation, as I noticed. Pilgrims inhabit the city all around the year. Qom is a main religious center with plenty of theological seminaries. The output of new mullahs is high; they are visible all over the place.

Reza, the friendly taxi driver, and I searched some time for a small restaurant which was still open. It was 3 o’clock in the afternoon, not really lunchtime. Iranians are fond of eating kebab. Reza was in a very good mood. The trip gave him the opportunity of praying at two of the holiest sites in Iran on the same day, Jamkaran and Hazrat-e Masumeh. When I paid for the meal, Reza’s mild protest was of course taroof. Taroof, that is not so seriously meant invitations, may be a dangerous field full of land mines as long as you don’t know. But don’t even think about traveling in the Middle East with not having at least some sort of intercultural competence!

Three little boys asked me if I could take a picture. Very self-confident, at least two of them.

After lunch, Reza 'adopted' me without further ado and guided me to the men’s entrance of the Haram. I guess Hazrat-e Masumeh is open for the pilgrims 24 hours a day for 365 days a year. In large waves one climax of mourning after the other is reached, while people push themselves to the golden, grated shrine, which they touch and kiss. Ten minutes, at most, the non-Muslim can stand this picture without feeling too uncomfortable in the environment. But the faithful are occupied, of course, with other sorrows than watching the foreigner and outsider.

On the way back to Tehran, we passed Qom’s salt lake in the near-by Dasht-e Kavir and had a short excursion to the mausoleum of Imam Khomenei with its 91 m high minarets. Reza admitted that he didn’t like the Ayatollah. Nevertheless, he wanted to pray there again. A complex as impressive as a hangar.

It was the next day, when Iran tested the new Shahab-3, a medium-range ballistic missile in the desert next to Qom. I read about the exercise only when I had returned to Kuwait after the conference in Shiraz. That might have been the reason why it was so difficult to get the visa.







Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Lady Shatita

Image
In order to learn more about Shi’a Islam and the piety of ordinary people it would have been most helpful to visit at least some of the plenty of Emamzadehs (holy sites) all over Iran. So, it was a most welcome opportunity and, in fact, great honor when my Kuwaiti friends invited me to accompany them on their several bus trips in Khorasan on the occasion of their 2006 pilgrimage to the Holy City of Mashhad. Achaemenid, Parthian, and Sasanian Empires each embraced half of the then known world when they climaxed. And even when Iran was under the reign of Seleucids, Arabs, Seljuks, or Mongols, the Iranians imprinted their lifestyle and culture on the non-welcome invaders, who in any sense immensely benefited. So, the austere new religion Islam, which replaced Iran’s state religion Zoroastrianism, was fundamentally reorganized, and, as I see it as an outsider, filled with life. The rapid and shocking decline of the Sasanid Empire at the end of a century-long fight with Byzantium, and the ...
Read more

Persianization

Image
Kuwait’s Arab Times had attracted my attention to Esfahan’s gorgeous Great Mosque in an article in 2003. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find so far a webpage of the article which praised the wonders of Iran’s largest mosque and one of the most significant and finest buildings of the Islamic world. I visited the site the first time at my second trip to Esfahan in late spring of 2004. I took some pictures in the vast courtyard, soaked the peaceful atmosphere there, and watched the few visitors from Iran and elsewhere. I had forgotten about the many details of the article and faintly had read some of the notes in my travel guide. My second visit in late 2007 was driven by scientific interest. I had recently posted (at Freelance ) my rather amateurish studies and thoughts about a suggested ‘conceptual breakthrough’ in Islamic architecture and art in the late 15th century, i.e., quasi-crystalline tessellations, which had led to world-wide attention due to its publication in the Science magazine...
Read more

Buyid Architecture in Esfahan

Image
Older than what is now visible in Esfahan’s Great Mosque (although the first mosque there was built in the 7th century) is what has remained of the Jurjir Mosque . The fragmentary façade of the Jurjir Mosque had been discovered during restoration work at Masjed-e Hakim in 1955. The fragment had been hidden for centuries behind a mud wall. The beautiful Hakim mosque itself is a Safavid mosque from the 17th century. The Jurjir façade is the only remains of a 10th century mosque which was commissioned by the Buyid (Buwayhid) vizier Al-Sahib ibn Abbad (d. 995), a Mutazilite scholar. The Buyid Dynasty, who ruled in Iraq and Iran, effectively brought the Abbasids era in Baghdad to an end. Although the Abbasids retained the caliphate, they were deprived of all secular power. Buyids were originally Zaydi, or Fiver Shi'as. They later began to lean closer to the nowadays dominating Twelver Shi'a branch of Islam. In general tolerant in religious matters, the Buyid rulers in Baghdad even ...
Read more