Preface

Summary

Every Friday evening during the early 1990s, my father would take my brother and me for a short stroll in the city of Isfahan. I was no more than seven years old, and do not remember anything more than the grim and dimly lit street, the one we always unquestioningly accepted to walk down. Every Friday evening, same time, same path, and the same wall painting. This latter snapshot is the only specificity I vividly remember, nothing spectacular, not that chromatically complex, not many characters in the picture, not at all scenic. The background was a more or less consistent light blue. On top of that blue were three cropped portraits of the most important people of the country. These are the names I would call them by at the time: Khomeini, Khamenei, and Rafsanjani. The first one had a black turban and a white beard and was positioned on the top. The second one was on His right and positioned slightly lower, and the third was placed on the opposite side, His lower left. I knew one of the lower ones was the president, a vague and shallow concept for me to fully understand. The other was not so clear, but the top one was very definitely clear: He was God. Every time we walked by that wall, I would react to it in the same way. I would raise my arms high up, as if in praying, and say in a deranged but assured tone, “Oh my dear God!”. No more than a moment later, I would snap out of it, run around a little more, get my promised snack, head back home, dart towards my game console and play video games. Every weekend, the same loop, the same image, the same reaction. I recalled those Friday strolls and the blurry context behind them many times when I was working on this book, especially that absurdly idolatrous expression directed at a wall painting and uttered with conviction and sincerity. In light of this childhood memory, this book can be read as an effort to indirectly understand how that painting could provoke such a reaction and to understand the culture that fueled the logic behind that expression.