Visiting Khomeini's Tomb (Oct. 17th)

Visiting Khomeini's Tomb (Oct. 17th)

Comments 0 Comment

Today is a Friday, which means that it’s a holiday in Iran; Thursday and Friday are the equivalent of Saturday and Sunday back in Europe. It’s strange how the different religions around the world have chosen different days of the week for their holidays: Muslims on Friday, Jews on Saturday and Christians on Sunday.

In any case, I had decided that today I wouldn’t go to the IPM and I would let the students get on with their projects. They had a fair idea, I hoped, of how to continue with their projects without me. So with my colleague Marc (also here to teach at the school) we took the Tehran metro south to the very last station, the Tomb of Imam Khomeini.

It took almost an hour to ge there. Our train passed above ground, and we travelled through kilometers of long low buildings which spread out from Tehran and into the cities around it. Leaving the metro station, a dry desert heat rolled over us, and with each breath I could sense the moisture evaporating from my throat, not something I could not remember experiencing since I had been in the deserts of New Mexico. It was the end of October: I couldn’t imagine what it would be like to come here at the height of summer.

khomen.jpg

In front of us, under the burning desert sun, stretched a large open square; beyond, were the unfinished dome and minarets of the mausoleum where Khomeini’s tomb lay. Around us, in the distance, we could see a few trees, a road or two, but nothing more: we were really on the edge of the desert. Families, men, children, black-clad women, passed by us returning from the shrine, and under the nearby trees we could see many tents, some with families. The immense open spaces around the made the place feel strangely empty, even though there was a fair amount of people. I realised that for the first time in ten days, thanks to the twenty kilometers separating us from Tehran, I could no long hear the sound of traffic, and I felt oddly relaxed and calm.

We walked a few hundred meters under the arcaded passageways until we reached the entrance to the shrine, taking off our shoes as we went in. Inside, I was surprised how confined it seemed; the walls were covered by blue plastic sheeting and the ceiling reminded me oddly of the Centre Pompidou in Paris, full of exposed pipes and wires. Six green concrete columns surrounded the shrine. To the right and the left were other large unpainted concrete columns. The floors were covered with carpets where many people were praying. In the middle was the shrine itself; a glass box with a white metal grid and a green carpeted roof. The faithful pressed their hands against the metal and muttered a few prayers. To one side, a separate side of the box was reserved for women. I realised that, completely hidden from view, behind the blue plastic sheeting and directly overhead was the unfinished skeleton structure of the shrine’s central dome.

We spent around fifteen or twenty minutes sitting on the carpets before the shrine. “Before the man who had made the west tremble” as my friend remarked. In the shrine, the atmosphere was strangely flat; it was not crowded, and I heard no wailing passionate professions of faith. We left, put our shoes back on and stepped back into the desert sun.

Once outside again, we visited vast the inner courtyards of the shrine which were completely deserted apart from a few workmen. There were certainly no tourists other than us! To the north, listening carefully, we could hear traffic on the motorway rushing towards the airport. Above, a crane made a fifth minaret next to the skeleton of the shrine’s unfinished dome. We had seen all that there was to see, and we returned towards the metro.

Today at the University, when I told the students where we had been, no-one could understand why we had gone there. “You went where“? they all asked us with an air of incredulity. Most of them had only been there on school trips, if they had been at all. Well, you know, I replied, Khomeini was such a important and influential figure in the politics of the 20th century. I was surprised to have tell this to an Iranian! Someone who casts a long shadow over Iran and someone who shaped in a very profound way Iran’s relationship with the west. For us, from the West, Khomeini was for decades someone indelibly associated with Iran. “And do you have tombs like that in the west?” one of them asked me. Well, the only thing I could think of was the tomb of Napoleon at Les Invalides; an enormous marble coffin seemingly half the size of the golden dome of les Invalides. Hubristic. “But that was two hundred years ago”, was the indignant response. And I must agree that “Les Invalides” is nothing beside this enormous structure on the edge of the desert.

Technorati Tags:

In Tehran (Oct. 14th)

In Tehran (Oct. 14th)

Comments 0 Comment

My first full day in Tehran I spent at the offices of the Iranian National Observatory … Project. Project, because the observatory does not exist yet. The building itself has just been constructed, and people have moved there only a few weeks ago; arriving at the front door I was greeting by a paint-stained astronomer, and I almost half expected to be asked to help out with the building work. The building is even further north than the guest house, in a hilly wooded area at the end of a long dirt track. The building grounds were taken from the Shah after the revolution, like so much of the land now belonging to the IPM (The institute for physics and mathematics).

But … Tehran? Although the area around the guest house is filled with expensive and modern apartment blocks, the dramatic backdrop of dry desert mountains and the black-clad women crossing the street made it clear to me, leaving the IPM that morning, that this was not a European city. I admit that I was perhaps just a little apprehensive when I was first invited to a workshop in Iran, almost three years ago; that trip never happened because of Ahmadinejad’s election and a subsequent mass resignation of University staff. With the exception of the traffic, however, Iran seemed to me one of the most unthreatening places I have ever visited. But what did people really think?

We had lunch at large table in the INO gardens. I ate a delicious kebab with rice (which I would soon become very familiar with) and a very interesting yoghurt drink. We admired the large blackboard extending all along the outside wall of the building, perfect for those long difficult equations but perhaps less useful for an observational astronomer. Perhaps a clear giveaway that the institute’s director is a theoretical cosmologist.

Everyone was talking about Ahmadinejad’s television appearance the previous evening. In fact, his face was the first I saw on an Iranian television set: arriving late at night at the IPM guest house I found the guards at the gate house intently watching the presidential broadcast. At the lunch table, although I don’t speak Farsi, it was clear from the tone of the conversation that Ahmadinejad’s pronouncements were not taken very seriously. They also told me that there was a certain apprehension each time one of these television appearance was scheduled — who knows what ridiculous pronouncement would be made which would damage even further Iran’s standing in the outside world?

I thought of Viktor Strum, nuclear physicist living in totalitarian Russia in Vassily Grossman’s epic ‘Life and Fate’ which I had just finished reading, and I even went so far to tell a little of his story to those at the dinner table. Thankfully however the parallels with that epoch and today in Iran are slender. “We can say anything we want here” affirmed one of the physicists at the dinner table, “it’s just not so certain anyone will pay any attention to us.”

Lunch was over, and returned to my computer to continue preparing the course which I would have to give in a few days.

Arriving in Tehran – in the taxi!

Arriving in Tehran – in the taxi!

Comments 0 Comment

The cavernous Imam Khomeini airport seemed almost deserted. I disembarked from the plane, retrieved my bag and passed through customs control without incident. But I had a lingering doubt in my mind — would there be someone to meet me at the airport? I had been told by the astronomer who had invited me that there would, but the secretary who booked my flight never mentioned this to me. There would be someone there, right? I had no map; “Google maps” for Tehran shows the intricate, sprawling mess of Tehrani streets as a single crossroads. No data.

In the end I need not have worried. As soon I left the baggage area I was met by a smiling pot-bellied man holding up a big card with ‘Dr. McCracken’ written on it in 40-point type. This was my driver to the institute. Hello welcome! Where are you from? Well, I am from Ireland, but I live in Paris. Ireland! I worked in England for two months, in London, with my brother. (We were walking down the echoing empty halls of IKA. We took the lift. My driver talking into his mobile phone. He passes me his mobile phone.) Here is my brother, Amir, he says, I speak to the voice on the telephone: Hello! How are you? Are you in London? No, I am in Tehran. We can meet! My brother will give you my number, he says. Nice to speak to you, I reply. Thank you! I hand back the mobile phone. These people like to speak — and to speak to foreigners!

In the taxi, we rolled through a maze of empty roads and autoroutes in the middle of what as far as I could tell was open desert. Through the window, I saw a lone planet and the moon’s pale disk low on the horizon following our taxi faithfully towards the city. It was around ten o’clock in the evening.

By ten thirty, soon after I had seen the first few buildings of Tehran, we had stopped: gridlock. Our taxi idled in heavy fumes of very incompletely combusted petroleum products, and I reluctantly rolled up my window, because the night air was pleasantly warm. I was beginning to get an inkling of Tehrani traffic. Beyond the cars I could see a maze of buildings most of which seemed to have been built in the last fifty years or so, but even so there was still that wonderful feeling of strangeness that always comes after an aeroplane flight to a country you have never been to before. In only five hours, everything changes.

After another half an hour or so, a gleaming, glittering tower appeared on the horizon. From a disk near the gracefully tapering peak needles of light shone and flickered. Was this the Iranian Tour Eiffel? My taxi driver became more and more exited. Very nice, very nice, beautiful, he muttered to himself repeatedly under his breath, all the while craning his neck to see the tower, like an excited child approaching the north pole just before Christmas. There is a very big party there tonight, he told me. Tonight is opening night. Then I realised we were actually driving right towards the tower. We passed the security barrier, drove to the foot of this immense luminous tower. Here is my brother! my driver exclaimed. I shook hands with small man in a dark suit. Hello! I said, Nice to meet you. I won’t take up your time, he told me. Welcome. If you need to contact me, here is my card. Have you eaten? He will take you to a restaurant. I thanked him, but I wanted to see my bed before my dinner. And we left the tower, and in an another half an hour I had arrived at the IPM.

Arriving in Tehran – In the aeroplane

Arriving in Tehran – In the aeroplane

Comments 0 Comment

I’m now a good five thousand kilometers to the east of Paris, in the Iranian capital city, Tehran. Tehran! I am here to teach at a school in observational astronomy. The Iranians have ambitions to build a three-metre class telescope, but almost no-one here has any experience with real data; most astronomy in either the hard-maths variety of theoretical cosmology or observations of nearby stars using detectors at least a generation out of date. So a change of culture is needed, really; modern observational astronomy with modern detectors and modern data reduction software. And no matter there is no telescopes just yet: there are gigabytes of data freely available over the internet — the only problem is downloading it. Despite the fact that the IPM (Insitute for Physics and Mathematics, where the school is being held) has amongst the fastest network connection in the country, we struggle get above a few hundred kb/second. But then I am used to my office in Paris not far from the centre of Renater, the French networking agency, so I am a bit spoiled. I will be spending almost two weeks in Tehran before flying to Shiraz for a few days.

So that is why I am here, but I didn’t talk about how I got here — at the very comfortable IPM guest house, from where I am writing these words. Well — by aeroplane of course. Iran Air run a direct flight from Paris Orly to Tehran twice a week. I thought for about two seconds about Nicolas Bouvier and his trip to Tehran from Geneva in his Fiat Tupelino — but i wanted to arrive this year at least, and I had sadly sold my opel ascona many years ago.

The aircraft cabin seemed modern at first: the plane’s age was revealed by an ancient in-flight entertainment system. I was reassured by the presence of it seemed at least half a dozen airline pilots in the seats in front of me. I felt strangely relieved that there was no useless in-flight magazine that I would waste my time idly flipping through. I watched attentively (at first) the in-flight film, in Farsi with English subtitles, but as the flight wore on it became harder and harder to follow. (After the extremely tedious ‘man from London’ by Bela Tarr which I subjected Marie-Laure to last weekend I felt I could sit through anything). It seemed to be the story of a young girl, a psychology student, who works with old people and who becomes intrigued by the painting of a veiled woman who may or may not be connected with one of her patients. The film shows many broad tree-lined boulevards, elegant buildings and also features a lot of driving (something normal in Tehran — as I am sure I will describe in the next few days). Noticing the odd colour cast of the film (surely a feature of the in-flight entertainment system), the cars that most people seemed to be driving and all the chunky cream-coloured plastic telephones everyone used, I was convinced that the ‘action’ of the film took place sometime in the 1970s — until an e-mail address was exchanged, and I realized that we were really some time in the last decade or so. But — as I said — my attention wandered. This I realised was partly because of the English translations (and partly because of the extremely wooden acting), which seemed to be almost transliterations more than translations. Given the very different word order in Farsi, almost everyone spoke like they were reciting lines of poems, with the subject buried at the end of each sentence. But very soon after we arrived in Tehran, at the Imam Khomeini Airport.