A Pilgrimage



End of last year one of my Kuwaiti colleagues invited me to join her family and a group of Shi’a pilgrims heading for the city of Mashhad in the northeastern corner of Iran. For me it was to be the second visit of Emam Reza’s Holy Shrine after 2005 in hot summer. This time of the year, Christmas, the Christian New Year, Hajj, Eid-e Ghorban, Eid-e Ghadir, and the expected execution of Saddam Hussein would more or less coincide when I was in the wintry Holy City. It was a special experience I would not want to miss at all. I have heard that many Europeans nowadays follow the hype and hopes of hiking on St. James Way in Spain. A certain longing for spirituality and even mystic experiences may be the thriving force for bored Westerners searching for meaning. So, I was somewhat curious about what I could get from that trip.

The nowadays more and more emerging problems for Westerners of getting a visa for Iran were to be solved by the Shi'ite organizers, who were located in Bayan, close to the US Embassy. There were some direct calls by cell phone necessary until I eventually found the private house with the organizer’s office. Street addresses are not very reliable in Kuwait, and prominent landmarks (a mosque is not a landmark) were missing in that residential area. Sheikh Nusrallah’s smiling face in a frame was hanging in the office (fortunately, no current plans for visiting the US). Plenty of friendly and hospitable, middle-aged, short-bearded men in their dark winter dishdashas, offering me tea and cookies. They took it very seriously. My little concern that they might secretly smile about the crazy Westerner was probably not justified. I left my passport and KD 260 and was promised that everything would be in order, and the hotel in Mashhad which was owned by an honorable Kuwaiti and located close to the haram, would be nice.

At the airport, the group checked in for the charter flight directly to Mashhad. I noticed that my luggage erroneously wasn’t tagged. So, no wonder that I lost it finally. After arrival in the Holy City we were asked to a waiting hall until the immigration formalities had been accomplished. Then we entered the bus to the hotel, and a hired Seyyed from Iraq, who was supposed to explain the meanings of the various holy places the group wanted to visit in Khorasan, welcomed me, the Almani, cordially as a guest of honor. For several days I had some hope for eventually receiving my lost luggage. Finally, I was shown a similar suitcase which had been checked-in in Jeddah, and which obviously belonged to a Bangladeshi hajji who had been in Makkah. So, I had to buy some more clothes in cold and snowy Mashhad.









Snow was a special attraction for the Kuwaiti kids in the group. That they could create a snow man was kind of a sensation and many pictures were taken.


On our first trip (in our “Beuti Full Bas”) we took the road leading to Sarakhs at the Turkmenistan border. Near the little village of Miami (not in Florida!), the Friday prayer was to be held in the small Emamzadeh Yahiya, an obviously ancient site under some reconstruction. Yahiya was a grandson of the fourth Imam Zayn al-Abidin, who is also known as Al Sajjad. While threatened by the Umayyads, he migrated from Kerbala to Khorasan, where he was martyred at age 18. Snowball fights of the youths after the prayers in the mosque.









Then back to Mashhad. Strolling through the buzzing streets of Mashhad I found that beautiful Hezardestan traditional tea house again which I remembered as one of the coziest in Iran.





The huge 75 hectare complex of Astan-e Qods Razavi is seen at the end of Imam Reza St., heavily illuminated and decorated for the upcoming holidays. Construction work will not be finished for several years. Twelve million pilgrims a year demand a lot of space for worshipping.

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