The Mantle of the Prophet

By Roy Mottahedeh. Pantheon Books, 1985. 416 pp. List: $9.95; AET: $7.95 for one, $9.95 for two.

Reviewed by Catherine Willford

In The Mantle of the Prophet, Roy Mottahedeh recounts the life and education of Ali Hashemi, a contemporary mullah of Qom, the Iranian shrine city where traditional Shi'i learning is taught. Ali Hashemi is the alias of a mullah from the University of Tehran who visited Mottahedeh at Princeton, he is no relation to Iran's current president. Incidents in the narrative on Hashemi illustrate prominent themes in Iranian culture and history, as well as trends that led to the 1979 Revolution. For example, an account of Hashemi's childhood memories of shopping in Qom segues into a discussion of the role played by the bazaar and the mosque, the "twin lungs of public life in Iran," in the 1905 constitutional revolution. The bazaar functioned as the "precinct of public discourse" and the mosque became "virtually the only precinct in which personal opinion could be publicly proclaimed."

The clashes between secular and Islamic learning are explored. For Mottahedeh, the heart of Iranian culture is ''two-heartedness—Persian for ambiguity. He presents dozens of examples of contrasts and dichotomies inherent in the national culture: mullahs battling secularists, the traditional resisting the westernized, Islamic jurisprudence which disdains religious mysticism, reverence for the Persian/pagan history of Cyrus and Darius in tandem with an Arabic/Islamic heritage. Persian poetry and the language represent the emotional home of this ambiguity. Mottahedeh suggests that an ambiguous culture is the fate of the Western Asian experience, due to its geopolitical role as a crossroads for East and West. Therefore, throughout its history, Iran has had a destiny of change and re-definition born in upheaval, while its culture possessed a flexible exterior and a private interior.

The Mantle of the Prophet not only contains a fully realized portrait of the young mullah Ali Hashemi. but also cogent sketches of a variety of prominent Iranians, historical and contemporary. These include Isa Sadiq, the foremost historian of modern Iranian education, the 11th century physician and philosopher Ibn Sina (known to his European contemporaries as Avicenna), Mohammad Mossadegh, the prime minister who defied the US and Britain to nationalize Iranian oil in 1951, and Jalal Al-e Ahmad, the gadfly author whose 1962 book, Euromania, deploring Iranian lust for all things Western at any cost, signaled a new alliance between the mullahs and the intellectual left. The Ayatollah Khomeini galvanizes Ali Hashemi's generation of seminary students with his vision of an activist clergy. But later he uses his learning and power to become "the ultimate jurist who not only discovers the law for others but has responsibility for controlling his application, land] for whom Islam is equal parts politics and ritual purity."

The latter half of the book concentrates on the forces that move inexorably towards revolution in the late '70s. The Algerian revolution and the nationalism of Egypt's Nasser lead young seminary students to question why the Shah courts the US, Israel and Britain instead of facing the changing Third World. The dowah, or informal discussion groups, in Tehran begin to protest the role of SAVAK, the Shah's lethal (and Israeli trained) secret police. Intellectuals deplore the "junk culture" wrought by love of machines and the West. The new urban poor, peasants uprooted through land reform and industrialization, realize the constant building of the infrastructure has yet to produce public housing, paved roads and sewers for their neighborhoods. It is ultimately these urban masses, organized through local religious councils called hay'ats and led by activist mullahs, who will take to the streets and bring the Shah's ouster.

The book's intertwining of narrative, history and analysis makes it accessible to a wide audience. The passages on Ali Hashemi have a novelistic quality that allow him to emerge as a flesh-and-blood character.

No one who reads this book will ever again be able to accept the media stereotype of the Shi'i as kill-crazy fanatics. The joy of religious mystery and the search for knowledge, reason and justice are shown to be the inspiration of the Shi'i faith, which has suffered much for its survival. An image that lingers on long after the reader finishes the book is that of Hashemi's elderly mullah teacher Marashi, who rises two hours before dawn to follow the example of the Fourth Imam by crying "Forgiveness!" three hundred times during his prayers.

Catherine Willford is circulation director for the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.