Friday Prayers at Tehran University

Friday prayers at Tehran University’s converted, covered football (soccer) stadium places us at the heart of the intersection between Iran’s public and its political and religious leadership. There would be few places in American society where Church and State, politics and society, preaching and teaching would be so closely linked since the pre-revolutionary days of the 16th and 17th Centuries, when the Puritan pulpit would have played a similar role of defining values, creating cohesion, and admonishing adherence.

“Substitute Friday prayer leader” Ayatollah Mohammad Emami Kashani stands behind a raised podium in the corner where corner kicks would have been sent into the midfield when it was a soccer field. The stadium ground is covered with carpets. We are in the press gallery, fifty feet from the Ayatollah, at eye level, though he never looks our way. TV cameras and photojournalists sweep back and forth between the Ayatollah and the worshippers whose numbers grow from a few hundred when we arrive, to more than 5,000 by the time “noon” prayers are held to conclude the gathering nearly an hour later.

Kashani speaks into a bank of four microphones and we listen to simultaneous translation through U.N.-like translation devices around our necks. I am taking pictures and scribbling notes at the same time. My SONY digital-audio recorder is capturing the Farsi of the Ayatollah. While we were screened and patted down as we entered through a special gate for government ministers, journalists, and dignitaries, we were allowed to bring all our recording devices with us. I was asked by a Mullah and a plain-clothesed security guard to erase one picture which had accidentally caught the Mullah in the background. But pictures of the Ayatollah, the front rows of Cabinet Ministers, the banks of war veterans and current military, and the rows and rows of worshippers were all photographed without objection.

(The five women in our delegation went through a second gate. Their cameras were taken from them and held until their exit. They had no direct view of the Ayatollah, and reported afterward that there were perhaps 1,000 women in attendance. The required modesty of the gathering meant that they wore chador over their manteau and head scarves, a wardrobe that made the handling of cameras a challenge at any rate.)

Ayatollah Kashani was already well into his teaching as we arrived. With clear reverence and affection in his voice, he was describing a meeting he had attended as a young boy with his father, when he sat at the feet of Ayatollah Khomeini. He spoke of Khomeini’s gentle voice and of his soft hand on his head. The moment was an aside in a long but fairly coherent explication of a Sura from the Koran, which is interpreted to mean that Allah created the earth and all therein not simply to be left untouched, but to be used by human beings. Starting with a geological creation story that captures the magma rising through the earth to become the Ka’aba in Mecca, to a defense of the Iranian goal of using nuclear fuel to generate electricity, it was an intricate argument, not unlike the Biblical rationale commonly used to defend extractive practices by our political and economic leadership.

The step from the Allah-sanctioned use of nuclear fuel to the political contest with a U.S.-led coalition to restrict Iranian experiments and developments in this area will be expected by the reader, and it came closely on the heals of a mantra-like chanting of “Death to America.” The chants were in Farsi, included the tomahawking movement of the hand, and were both perfunctory and passionate at the same time, much like the calls for “Defense, Defense, Defense” by a stadium full of fans at a Washington Redskins game.

Earlier in the week, we understand from a somewhat news-starved status, the U.S. Federal Government had released a report held for more than a year that acknowledged Iran had discontinued experiments on uranium enrichment some years ago as they had been maintaining for some time. The flurry of political response from U.S. Congressmen and the press vindicated the Iranian leadership in the Ayatollah’s opinion. But it did not lessen a cautionary response to the remarks of Joe Biden which were lifted up in particular. Biden’s attributed remarks — that the Bush administration did not understand Iran or the Muslim world — affirmed the Ayatollah’s views. Biden’s warning that if elected President he would use “cracks” in the Islamic world to advance an agenda of reform, was noted in particular by the Ayatollah. “Are you listening Islam?” he said repeatedly, calling Iran and the Muslim world to a more coherent, less divisive stance.

Large posters throughout Tehran also announced a conference of 40 Islamic nations gathered to address the jurisprudence of human rights and human expectations this week. Front-page stories reported Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s remarks, which Ayatollah Kashani used to wind down his remarks before leading the prayers. Kashani noted that the Koran and Islam offered a broad and logical framework of respect for human rights and actually guided the behaviors and decisions of the government, unlike Western democracies where there was no concern for human rights, in his view, only the use of torture and bloodshed to advance self interests and economic goals. He also noted that Shi’a Islam offered the deepest of all thought in Islam on the issue of how Islamic law can meet the demands of modern-day human expectations and might profitably be mined by their Sunni brothers to support “a return to the Divine judicial law and renovate the sublime foundation of Islamic jurisprudence.”

So there we have it, an appeal from the highest levels of political and religious leadership, in a nation of vibrant economic activity, engaging arts and advancing science, open minds articulating a wide range of views, to look to the highest courts and the rule of law to guide us to a recovery of our core values and a path through the challenges of modernity. It really could have been a message at the National Cathedral with the President and members of Congress casually in attendance on a routine Sunday morning in Washington D.C.

The Ayatollah descended into a niche in the floor of the stadium constructed like a chevron pointed toward Mecca. The assembled worshippers placed a small tile of earth from Karbala, a holy site of Shi’ism in Iraq, on the carpet where their forehead’s would rest in prostration, and rotated through a litany of verses from the Koran, rising, kneeling and bowing, then stood as one, many shaking hands, and left quickly to the world of weekend with family or a reopened shop.

Another perspective from the FOR delegation on the Friday worship service can be read on Rick Zand's "Discovering Iran" blog, in his recent entry, "Death to America, Death to Iran."