Salmiya

As Oleg Grabar has stressed many times in his book about Esfahan’s Masjed-e Jomeh , the mosque itself is perfectly embedded in the fabric of the Old City. There are no well-defined boundaries of the huge, 170 by 140 meters, complex. The main entrance is rather hidden at the eastern side of the building. Only helicopters and birds (or angels) may get an immediate impression of the huge dimensions of the mosques. I asked the officer near the ticket seller whether I was allowed to climb to the roofs. He declined, of course. It was very early in the morning, the sun had just risen and the glazed tiles on the mosque’s façades were glowing like gold. It reminded me of the spectacular photos taken by Henri Stierlin . Pigeons were sitting on the South Dome and warming up in the sun. When entering the courtyard, the two domes of the mosque are not visible at first sight. In particular, the northern dome is not visible at all from here, one of the main reasons for having neglected this masterp...

I have reported on last year’s journey back to Esfahan many times on this blog. I had been invited by the Islamic Azad University at Khorasgan for giving a course for postgraduate students and then stayed in the University guest house. I later moved to the Dibaee House in Esfahan’s old city , close to my ever fascinating study object, Esfahan’s Great Mosque. When living in Kuwait, I had once read a supplement to the Arab Times describing the marvels of this gorgeous building, which is not on the must-see list of sights of the common western tourist. I had visited the site whenever in Esfahan, but usually I did not stay inside the courtyard longer than, say, half an hour. This time, I had informed myself in particular by reading the wonderful book about the mosque by Oleg Grabar who had studied the largest mosque in Iran, which some people consider as the Chartres of Iran, in the 1960s and 70s. Before retirement, Grabar was Aga Khan Professor of Islamic Art at Harvard. His book is bas...

A new beginning, indeed

On equinox today (astronomically, it occurs exactly at UTC 11:44 am), the sun is setting pretty much across the sund. Amazing to remember great emotions not even two months ago, when sun rose again (and set at the same time) after two long months of darkness at 69˚40’N 18˚56’E . The March equinox is the beginning of spring (or fall in the southern hemisphere of the world). For Iranians it might be the most significant time of the year. They (and many other people in Central Asia or, for instance, the Turkish Kurds) celebrate Nowruz , the beginning of a New Year (1388 H). To all of them Nowruz Mobarak!

These monkeys from Thailand clean their interdental spaces with human hair and, even more amazing, seem to teach this to their little ones (I have told my students a slightly different technique). There will be more surprises in Darwin Year 2009, I suppose.

When Cyrus the Great freed the Jews from Babylonian Captivity in 539 BCE, some of them did not return to Jeruslaem but eventually settled on the banks of the Zayandeh Rud in Central Iran, possibly founding the city of Esfahan. This is the beginning of Jewish life in Iran which thus started two-and-a-half-thousand years ago. While Cyrus is betoken as ‘the anointed’ in the Book of Isaiah, Jews seem to have lived for centuries in peace with the indigenous Persian populace . Persian religious tolerance was legendary as long as Zoroastrianism was the state religion. The alarming rhetoric in particular of the present president of Iran, who had openly questioned the Holocaust of the Jews by the Nazi’s terror regime in the early 1940s and the very right of Israel to exist, has caused considerable new concern about the safety of the Jews in the Islamic Republic. It raises again the question, what do we actually know about the relationship of Shi’a Muslims and other ‘people of the book’, o...

The ancient and still inhabited village of Mohammedieh with its huge Sassanid castle is located a couple of kilometers northeast to Na’in. Diligent farmers were working in fruit orchards and on the fields. In the beginning of January, there was a scent of springtime. An old man wanted to show me his carpet loom in his hut. Before taking the picture, he put on his coat and told me he was a mollah . Just kidding, I suppose. A qanat is a sort of artificial spring. The aquifer had been invented in ancient Persia and spread throughout the Middle East as far as Africa and Central Asia as far as China. Deep water tables at the foothills of mountains are approached by vertical access shafts and horizontal channels. They finally reach the surface and a small artificial runlet will transport the water miles into the desert for agriculture. Constructing qanats is a dangerous task and nowadays strictly regulated by the government. You may find the well-like openings and runlets as well as so call...