Aspectos básicos de la comunicación en serie

There is such missionary zeal to Zahra’s invitation that, the third time it is proffered, I feel obliged to accept. Perhaps, too, I feel that if I want my claim to be an anthropologist taken seriously it would be remiss of me to pass up the opportunity to, in Zahra’s words, ‘Ask any questions you have.’ On a Wednesday afternoon I make my way from the Shah Cheragh shrine to the Taleghani neighbourhood. Here the roads are wider and the high

173

brick walls are topped not in broken glass (as is a familiar sight in poorer neighbourhoods) but in curved wrought iron bars. Reza and Zahra live at the end of a short laneway that opens up between a bakery and a shop selling plastic goods and cheap home furnishings. I introduce myself through an intercom set into the wall and somebody buzzes me in to a small paved courtyard. Where there would usually be a garden bed, here there is a square pond with half a dozen goldfish swimming sluggishly in shallow water. Somebody has laid the decorative metal grating of a window frame over the water, resting it on four evenly-spaced bricks, but whether it is there to stop a child falling in or to save the fish from the stray cats of the neighbourhood, I can’t be sure.

When I arrive there is already an array of shoes left messily at the front door— fashionable sneakers and high heels. A hum of conversation wafts out of an open window. If I didn’t know better, I would suspect that a party was underway. Once a week Reza and Zahra host a gathering to discuss topics around religion. These are not the same group of young people you might see at a neighbourhood mosque on a Friday morning. There are no dark chadors or scruffy beards in sight. Male and female guests mingle, if not easily, at least openly. In my notebook I describe ‘an edgily democratic air’—although, as I will come to discover, Reza ultimately pronounces his verdict and his guests, at least outwardly, fall into line.

I am something of a curiosity here and all eyes are on me as I stumble through a truncated version of the themes of my fieldwork. Zahra is true to her word and invites me to ask my questions of the group. My first, a query about Islamic hospitality, sparks a dizzying discussion about the nature of the host. Somebody recites a snatch of poetry, something about a doorway and the beloved. It is a segment altogether too brief and

174

too generic in its imagery for me to place. Eventually, though, we descend to the mundane: ‘When it was required of us Iran threw open [its] borders and welcomed our Afghan and Iraqi brethren.’ Reza nods in agreement at this assessment and declares with a finality that brooks no disagreement, ‘The shade of charity is the sign of a true Muslim.’

In a harsh desert environment hospitality evokes the imagery of shade. Shrines have always had the quality of an oasis, a place that rises up out of its surroundings, offering a form of refreshment for those who step into the cool, shadowed interior. The multiple mirrors, green-tinged light and muted sounds create the effect of being submerged in water. In the city of Shiraz, shrines function as spaces of refuge and sites of hospitality that straddle the divine and the mundane. In this chapter I have traced the (hidden) history of hospitality at the shrine and its diverse iterations in the present. I have explored the notion of the shrine as a ‘threshold’ over which all Shia Muslims are (in theory) invited, without fear or favour, to pass. At the same time, I have pointed to the inherent hostility of the threshold as a bordering device that at once invites and repels. I have shown how Iranians and Afghans make use of shrines in diverse ways, such that hospitality is differentially experienced.

I have used the Shiraz shrines as a launching pad to explore the idea of the open door and to point to its limitations as a metaphor for hospitality. Hospitality, in Iran, is intimately entangled with ideas about Islamic identity. Indeed, following the revolution the Islamic government explicitly articulated notions of hospitality as, at once, a religious obligation and a characteristic of Iranian personhood. However, as the shrine precinct of Shiraz is reconfigured as a space of culture and drawn into the project of national identity formation, it is paradoxically rendered inhospitable. Afghan refugees in Iran find

175

themselves caught between the expressed ideal of Islam as a global (or borderless) identity and a political project which draws Islam into constructions of national selfhood.

In the following chapter I look to the way in which notions of Islamic identity are challenged by alternative renderings of Iranian selfhood that draw on Iran’s pre-Islamic history. I trace oases of hospitality that arise in those narratives of nationhood that adhere to the Achaemenid ruins of Persepolis and intersect with mythologies of Perso- Iranian origins in the Fars province.

176