Ten Days in Iran!

Don't miss Peter Hitchens' Persian diary - part one

Some excerpts:

The more the Islamic Republic tells them to loathe the Shah or America, the more they yearn to have the Shah back, and to live in America. In this country, America is probably more popular, even now, than in any other country on the planet.
Some people here, the Westernised intellectuals, have always despised a regime they see as backward and stupid. It is gospel among them that Khomeini was not specially clever. They refer scornfully to the regime's supporters - usually poor state employees or tradesmen - as 'Hizbollah'. Women who wish to join the West's drive for sexual equality also loathe the state and are loathed back. One woman I met had been arrested for her feminist views and is now facing trial. Her likely fate is a suspended prison sentence, which will be imposed if she steps out of line again. Remember, this is a country that does have elections and those elections don't always go according to plan, despite ruthless official rigging. I asked those present if they had supported Ahmadinejad in the presidential poll. All hands but one went up. Would they do so again? No hands went up. By the way, the women dominated this conversation.

'We were hoping he would be different,' one said in justification. This kind of hope that something or someone will turn up is at the heart of Iran's Shia Islam, a religion of mourning and loss, whose adherents still feel woe over the defeat and murder of the three great Imams, Ali, Hossein and Reza.
These martyrdoms took place 1,300 years ago but are still grieved over, especially at the shrine in Mashhad where Reza's tomb lies. The real zealots mark this each year by beating themselves bloody with chains and slashing their scalps with swords. It is rumoured that people die at these events.
In a belief rather like the ancient British one that King Arthur will one day come back and save his people, Shias constantly await the return of the 'hidden Imam', who disappeared in 878 AD, and may reappear at any time, with Jesus at his side, to restore peace and goodness to the world. I know how this sounds in cold print, but even the modest 39 Articles of the Church of England look pretty extravagant when seen from the outside.

It would be hard for anyone to see the devotion of the pilgrims at Mashhad and not come away respecting the force of this faith, which is a living, normal thing among Iranians, as natural a part of their lives as the low passions of football and the Lottery are in ours. Who is to say they do not have the better part of the bargain? I have never been anywhere with such a sense of generous hospitality and consideration to strangers.
At the evening prayers, the sense of deep human emotion is electric. But it is important to realise Sunni Islam, the great majority of the Muslim world, regards Shia Islam as a serious, idolatrous heresy, much as Ian Paisley regards the Pope and all his works.
The austere brand of Islam favoured in Saudi Arabia is specially displeased by the Shia love of relics and glitter. When Iranian Shias go to Mecca, they are said to be treated with cold hostility. The only Shia beloved in the Sunni world is President Ahmadinejad, whose noisy, disreputable hostility to Israel and whose support for Holocaust denial has made him the taxi-drivers' favourite in every Sunni Muslim country from Indonesia to Morocco.

Which brings me to Friday prayers in Tehran, the weekly festival of loathing for the West that takes place in a hangar-like building in the university. Many of the thousands who attend are bussed in, and one of them, a soldier in uniform, confessed to a friend of mine that if he didn't bellow 'Death to America!' at the appropriate moment he wouldn't eat that day. A middle-ranking mullah presides, starting with a sermon on family values, and then moving on to political matters...