deal with the Omayyids. In AD 680 Hassan died and Ali’s younger son, Hossein, took over as head of the Prophet’s descendants. Hossein was pious and brave and he revived his family’s hereditary claim to leadership over Muslims. This brought him into conflict with Yazid, the Omayyid caliph in Damascus. When the residents of Kufa, near Karbala, asked Hossein to liberate them from Yazid, the Imam went out to claim his birthright, setting in train events that led to his martyrdom.
One night, on the eve of the anniversary of Hossein’s death, I put on a borrowed black shirt and took a taxi to a working-class area of south Tehran. The main road where the taxi dropped me was already filling with families and men leading sheep by their forelegs. Cauldrons lay by the side of the road. Everyone wore black; even the little girls wore chadors, an unbuttoned length of black cloth that unflatteringly shrouds the female body. I entered a lane with two-storey brick houses along both sides. There was a crowd at the far end of the street, their backs to us, and their silhouettes were flung across the asphalt. Black bunting had been strung between lampposts. Walking towards the crowd, I fell in step with a middle-aged man who was being followed by his family. I heard him mutter, ‘Hossein …’ He looked shocked and puzzled, as if he’d just received news of the Imam’s martyrdom.
At the far end of the street there was a stage marked out by pot plants. In the middle of the stage was a bowl of water, resting on a green cloth. The middle-aged man’s wife and daughters went to the opposite side of the stage, where the other women and children were gathered under an awning. His teenage son joined a group of young men with gelled hair on the right. To the left was backstage, and an orchestra that consisted of two tombak drums and a trumpet. I stayed on the near side. Suddenly, the men in front of us parted to allow a stream of piss, from a camel trembling bow-legged in the arc lights, to run down the street.
A young trumpeter played a riff and the obscene Damascene appeared stage left. (Everyone recognized Yazid: he wore a cape of red and yellow to accentuate his licentiousness, and he wasn’t wearing so much as a scrap of green, the colour of Islam.) His helmet was surmounted by yellow plumes. His fat face was expressionless. After prowling around, he started to shout evil words into the microphone he was holding, which was connected to a loudspeaker that in turn felt as though it was connected directly to my ear.
Although he ruled the lands of Islam in the name of Islam, Yazid was notorious for his depravity. Today, Iranians loathe him as if he were still malignantly alive. They recall the menagerie of unclean animals such as dogs and monkeys that he is believed to have kept at court. They talk disapprovingly of the ‘coming and going’ – a common euphemism for frenetic sexual activity – for which Damascus was known. It is said that he was as devious as he was deviant.
Perhaps Hossein had reckoned without the deviousness. By the time he and his companions bivouacked at Karbala, near the banks of the Euphrates, the caliph had bribed the inhabitants of Kufa to revoke their support for him. His small force was greatly outnumbered by the army that Shemr, Yazid’s commander, had raised. Shemr had cut off Hossein’s access to the Euphrates, and Mesopotamia in summer is as hot as hell.
Onstage, the players were relating the entreaties, negotiations and moral dilemmas that preceded Hossein’s martyrdom. The women and children in Hossein’s entourage were suffering from the heat. Since there were no women onstage, we learned this from a narrator, a slim, alert version of the man playing Yazid – his brother, perhaps. Suddenly, there was activity stage left and Yazid returned. The actor’s movements and expression were the same, but now he wore green from head to toe. He had changed character and had become Hossein.
As far as I could make out through the echo and distortion, Hossein was relating the anguish that he felt at his decision to fight to the death. In return for fealty to Yazid, he and his companions would be spared, but that would mean living in dishonour, indifferent to God’s will. Then Hossein’s half-brother, Abol Fazl, entered.
The portraits show Abol Fazl to be as god-like as his brother, albeit more windswept. The Abol Fazl before us was shifty and greasy; he would have been convincingly cast as a sheep rustler. He was much shorter than Hossein, whom he clasped repeatedly to his breast as they both wept. Hossein was asking Abol Fazl to fetch water from the river. Both knew that the younger brother stood little chance of surviving his mission.
Abol Fazl leaped onto a mangy grey standing at the side of the street, where the camel had been. (The camel was peripatetic and for hire; it was now appearing on other stages in the neighbourhood.) He steered the horse dexterously around the stage, calming it when its hind legs buckled as it turned on the greasy asphalt. Whenever Abol Fazl approached the awning, the women shrank, while he (holding the microphone in one hand and the reins in the other) declared his love for Hossein and for God. The young men in the audience grinned when the horse broke wind during a break in the music. Their fathers frowned.
The next bit of the story happened offstage. Fighting savagely – I had read this in the books – Abol Fazl reached the riverside. He bent down, cupped his hand and brought some water to his mouth. Then he stopped himself and the water flowed back through his fingers. His sense of chivalry wouldn’t allow him to slake his thirst before the women and children had slaked theirs. Having filled his leather water container, he remounted, but was cut down in the subsequent struggle, losing his hands and eyes. He cried out, ‘Oh brother, hear my call and come to my aid!’ Two arrows were dispatched. One pierced Abol Fazl’s water container. The other entered his chest.
Abol Fazl staggered onstage. The pierced flagon was between his teeth. An arrow protruded from his chest. His arms were two very long stumps. The stumps supported two bloody objects, which he dropped for us to see: his hands, sliced off in the fray. The Imam cradled the dying Abol Fazl. The men near me in the audience were beating their chests in time with the tombak. The women under the awning rocked inconsolably.
And that was the end of the play. It wasn’t time for Hossein to die; that would come tomorrow, the day that is called Ashura. The actors picked themselves up and left the stage. Among the audience, there was a rustling, a rearranging of positions and a collective, audible exhalation. And then, to my surprise, the inconsolable found consolation. Facial expressions brightened. The audience’s agony changed to equanimity, even satisfaction. The man in front of me greeted the person standing next to him agreeably; a few seconds before, both had been blubbing like children. In the women’s section, conversations began. Abol Fazl seemed to have been forgotten.
Had he been forgotten? Was this grief deceitful? Not deceitful, I think: simply not exclusive. The emotions in Iran haven’t been compartmentalised. They coexist; they thrive in public. The borders between grief, entertainment and companionship are porous. You can weep buckets, natter with a neighbour and take away memories of a farting nag. Stifled sobs, trembling upper lips – they don’t exist here. Emotion may be cheaply expressed, but that doesn’t mean the emotions are cheap.
Some members of the audience were starting to leave their places. The narrator strode into the middle of the stage. He addressed us fluently, softly. He craved our indulgence – he wanted to tell a story that would live in our memories. The people moved back to their places and he began.
A few years back, he started, after the troupe had performed the play we’d just seen, he’d been delighted when a man dropped a large sum of money onto the green cloth in the middle of the stage. As he was counting it after the performance, another man had approached and said, ‘Excuse me for interfering, but you can’t accept that money.’
The narrator had replied: ‘Why not? It’s a lot of money, and I’ve got a wife and kids to feed. It pleases God when money is accepted for good work.’ The man replied, ‘Believe me, sir, you can’t accept this money. Yours is Muslim work, and the man who gave you the money is a Christian. He’s Armenian.’
The audience was gripped. What a dilemma! What would you do in such a situation? The narrator went on: ‘The
