The House of the Mosque
by Kadir Abdolah
With thanks to Susan Masotty whose translation enabled me to read Abdolah’s wonderful work.
The House of the Mosque heralds the triumph of generosity, gentleness and decency which persists despite intense encounters with dismissive savagery, institutional deception, and the discordant mayhem of public protest. Faithfully, courteously Kadir Abdolah calls us to praise Aqa Jaan and Fakhri Sadat, the couple who tend the hearth of the 800-year-old house of the mosque, a stone’s throw from the central bazaar in Senejan, a city in Iran’s mid-west.
Mostafa Meraji
Abdolah charts the demise of the house and the mosque, from civic prominence to marginal relevance, during the years before, and the early years of, Iran’s 1979 revolution. I don’t know if Abdolah adhered to an historically accurate selection and description of events and forces leading to the Shah’s fall and Khomeini’s rise. I suspect he is as loose about details as he needs to be for his story to ring true in the realms of sense and sensation. I’m not moved to research the revolution’s arc so I can judge the storyline’s serialisation of incidents and accidents. I am rarely engaged by historical fiction straight-jacketed by the ties of ‘one damned thing after another.’ The House of the Mosque is not that kind of historical novel.
Abdolah writes about how people feel as they are forced to trade one mix of good and bad for another, how their feelings ravel and unravel over time, how their feelings shed light and shadow on their shared lives. He recounts grim purposes behind the shenanigans and ineptitudes of the Shah’s state apparatus, and the attempts of the Ayatollah’s bludgeoning theocracy to hollow the Iranian soul. He recounts these life and death absurdities in ways that clear spaces for reflecting on the emotional logic of kindness, especially under duress. Abdolah presents us with a panorama showing how familiar patterns of family, community, and social interactions and hierarchies, accreted and cemented over decades and centuries, swiftly lose definition.
Then the threads are gathered up by knowing hands and woven again into known tesselations. This act of retrieval is always to be expected, whether the preceding disruption flows from theological or ideological zealotry. George Eliot reproached one Dr Cummings for his outrageous casuistry in the chauvinistic service of evangelical Protestantism. In the midst of a scathing demolition job, she wrote:
Fatally powerful as religious systems have been, human nature is stronger and wiser than religious systems, and though dogmas may hamper, they cannot absolutely repress its growth: build walls round the living tree as you will, the bricks and mortar have by and by to give way before the slow and sure operation of the sap.[1]
- George Eliot
Exquisitely handcrafted carpets with designs meticulously drawn from nature – the long-revered craft that has sustained Aqa Jaan’s inherited family business – no longer attract buyers. The guiding hand of Aqa Jaan’s family in Senejan’s public sphere is thrown off as imams take hold of the bazaar. The mosque and the house are sundered. All that was is now in tatters. All except for Aqa Jaan’s and Fakhri Sadat’s intuitive summoning of fairness and respect into their encounters with a family, community, and society that have lost intimate connection and civic coherence.
This instinctive cast of mind and heart they share with others who invest the present with hope rather than corral it with slogans and falsehoods. Aqa Jaan and Fakhri Sadat’s son, Jawad, is charged with riflefire and socialism. He is executed by order of a kangaroo court operating with the arrogant sanction of Iran’s revolutionary government. Aqa Jaan rescues Jawad’s body from the executioners, then desperately searches for a cemetery that will give ground to his dead child. But Senejan offers nothing. He travels to the nearby mountains, his son’s shroud sliding and bumping in the back of the station wagon, to Jirya where he is well-known. He is recognised immediately by the village’s carpet weavers. They turn him away, too fervid in or too frightened by the advent of religious intemperance to respond to his need and distress. But word reaches Khan, an old friend who lives in a sequestered valley further up the mountain. Khan chases Aqa Jaan’s car to a halt. Khan’s kindness is done quickly. He promises to bury the dead boy on his estate. It is almost dawn. They have time only to embrace and transfer the body.
Retributive justice too is alive in The House of the Mosque. Abdolah follows the deadly trail of violent political upheaval, with children of the house seeking out wrongdoers and visiting loss and death on them. Shabal, the son of the mosque’s blind muezzin, traces Jawad’s judge from Senejan to Kabul and there assassinates him. Violence begets violence. That one kind of violence is misbegotten and the other is just retribution does nothing to mitigate its horror. Abdolah leaves an open invitation to believe a course negotiated among untethered minds is bound, always, to be more equitable and inclusive than anything an authoritarian mob can ever devise.
That may be idealistic, but what is realistic for Abdolah is that kindness will reassert itself, and always be more universally venerated, than political violence or mind-numbing recitation of creeds. In The House of the Mosque kindness prevails. Kindness begets kindness, and recompense and reconciliation are more assertive than revenge. Years after Jawad’s death, and after Shabal has taken refuge in The Netherlands (as Abdolah himself did), Aqa Jaan and Fakhri Sadat take a break from broken Senejan. They travel to Jirya, planning to stay a day or so. To their surprise the villagers bring them gifts of cloth and tender apologies for refusing to bury Jawad in their village graveyard.
Their gifts are intended as a counter to the disregard and slights that wayward times excuse, and which consciously shared humanity eventually calls to account. There is barely a declamatory sentence in this novel. I recall but one, when Aqa Jaan accepts from his visitors a new shirt and an apology for their behaviour on that darkest of nights:
‘God is all-knowing and all-forgiving,’ Aqa Jaan said soothingly. ‘I’ve never blamed you. You have eased my pain. I have always believed in human goodness.’
One of the joys for me in reading The House of the Mosque is the tone of the telling. It is fabulous realism, related to its magical cousin but with a brace of measures drawn from fable. It is the real world made charming by grace notes heard in the Arabian Nights. Two grandmothers sweeping their way from Senejan to Mecca. A crow on constant alert for deviation. Ayatollah Khomeini furtively watching television. Adbolah rewards his readers by coddling us with fable and riffs on history.
Yet this fabulous tenor does not detract from the real world Abdolah portrays. The House of the Mosque unfolds much like a life. The predictable and the unpredictable commingle. They calm and startle our days. We are challenged to find and keep companions who will journey with us through the cheer and the despond, the order and the hubbub.
[1] George Eliot. ‘Evangelical teaching: Dr Cumming’. The essay had its first outing in the Westminster Review, October 1855. It is reproduced in George Eliot: Selected essays, poems and other writings, a Penguin Classics publication – mine is a 1990 edition. The publisher’s promo page is here. The collection (edited by A.S Byatt no less, along with Nicholas Warren) reveals the breadth of Eliot’s knowledge, the depth of her thought, and her downright cheekiness.
The House of the Mosque was first published in The Netherlands in 2005 by De Geus BV. First published in English, and translated by Susan Masotty, in 2010 by Canongate Books.
Cannongate’s promo page for The House of the Mosque is here.