French Hats in Iran by Heydar Radjavi

Author:Heydar Radjavi [Radjavi, Heydar]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Mage Publishers
Published: 2013-11-04T23:00:00+00:00

GOOD SONGS, EVIL SONGS

MY BEST FRIEND MAMADALI AND I, aged about five and six respectively, were waiting impatiently for the short weekly pleasure ride on our favorite mule. It was a bright Thursday afternoon in the second full summer of World War Two, but the war wouldn’t come to Iran for another month or two.

Ordinary folks in my district of the city took the neutrality of the country for granted. Those men who could read newspapers, and especially those rich and modern enough to own the newly imported magic box called radio, sometimes abstractly discussed world affairs. With the single exception of an army officer’s wife, no grown-up woman on my block could read and write; some could read, but only their sacred books, without understanding a word. The children of Tabriz under twelve, unlike their elders, had not yet experienced a war or a riot.

While Mamadali and I waited for the mule to arrive in the outer courtyard of a neighbor, the neighborhood women, having gathered in the much larger inner courtyard, were getting ready for the arrival of the owner and rider of the mule, a cleric known by his informal but respectful name of Amirza Hasan. The occasion was the good women’s weekly marsia, a periodic commemoration of tragic deaths of the Great Martyrs of the Faith in 680 A.D. During a marsia meeting the audience would listen to such preachers and singers of lamentations as Amirza Hasan, and then sob and wail along with the singer. Marsia sessions were of course segregated by gender. This gathering was for women only, who would, theoretically, prefer the sessions to be led by a female marsia khan, unfortunately a very rare specimen. Thus the women would usually have to settle for the male variety. This entailed for every participating adult the slight inconvenience of covering not only her body, but also her face and hair while a marsia khan was on duty. If one of us young kids, in an emergency, needed to speak to a mother or grandmother during a seance, we would face a problem: entering the large inner courtyard, which was elaborately prepared for the occasion, we would encounter fifty or sixty dark, small tent-like objects distributed uniformly all over the thickly carpeted floor. Inside each tent, actually a loose robe called a chadra or a charshub, depending on the style, there would be an invisible woman crying to the tune of the presiding singer. To distinguish them from each other, we kids would have to go by each tent’s size and color or the sounds emanating from it. My mother did not usually attend marsias except on the holy occasions of the lunar year, but, as a neighborhood kid, I had the privilege of inclusion among the young hangers-on every Thursday afternoon.

The devout and relatively well-to-do household hosting the current gathering could afford to pay several marsia khans each week to lead the religious seances. The leading men came one at a time, more or less on schedule.

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