Salmiya

Ramadan had always amazed me when I was living in the Middle East. The whole society voluntarily synchronized, and for days before the beginning of the month preparations took place in order to store enough food at home for the upcoming days of fasting during daylight. I remember one Thursday morning, the last day of the month Sha’aban, when, as usual on weekends, I drove my car to the huge industrial areas of Shuwaikh in order to do my weekend shopping. Besides the Sultan Center’s wholesale grocery store there, I loved to visit the two Al Mirah Markets close-by. It was unfortunately too late when I realized that tens of thousands of Kuwaitis in their huge four-wheel-drives had exactly the same idea of shopping food. I was standing for several hours in the car queues with stop and go. During Ramadan it was, of course, tolerated that we Westerners did not strictly follow the religious rules. Many of us had, at least in their closed offices, a sandwich for lunch. Our Bangladeshi coffee b...

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 v...

Six kilometers east to the center of the holy city of Qom, at the fringes of the great Dasht-e Kavir desert, lies the mosque of Jamkaran. It is a holy place where it is said that Mohammad Mahdi, the 12th Shi’a Imam, had appeared in 373 AH, together with Al-Khidr. There is a well where the faithful drop their letters with wishes and desires. Not from Jamkaran but Samarra in what is now Iraq, the Mahdi will reveal himself at the end of all time. One of the first acts of the government of the new Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was to donate $10 million to the mosque in Jamkaran. My visit of Jamkaran was mainly inspired by an article by Ulrich Ladurner in the German weekly DIE ZEIT from October 2006. Ladurner painted a most strange picture of Iran and the Iranians, emphasizing special features of Shi’a beliefs in the return of the Mahdi. The article conjured up a completely irrational society waiting, and indeed preparing for, an apocalypse. He argued that the current President of ...