Friday Prayers

I noted that several of our peace delegates blogged about attending Friday prayers at Tehran University last week. Here is a roundup with links to each of their blogs for more. Read on for thoughts from Mark Johnson, Le Anne Clausen, Dan Smith, and Jane Harries.

Ayatollah Kashani was already well into his teaching as we arrived. With clear reverence and affection in his voice, he was describing a meeting he had attended as a young boy with his father, when he sat at the feet of Ayatollah Khomeini. He spoke of Khomeini’s gentle voice and of his soft hand on his head. The moment was an aside in a long but fairly coherent explication of a Sura from the Koran, which is interpreted to mean that Allah created the earth and all therein not simply to be left untouched, but to be used by human beings. Starting with a geological creation story that captures the magma rising through the earth to become the Ka’aba in Mecca, to a defense of the Iranian goal of using nuclear fuel to generate electricity, it was an intricate argument, not unlike the Biblical rationale commonly used to defend extractive practices by our political and economic leadership.

It was a wet Friday morning as we set out from our hotel for Friday prayers, so we had some problems keeping our “chadors” in place – an extra layer of black cloth which we was draped around us, but required careful clutching to keep it in place and out of the puddles. We felt that this immediately marked us out as Westerners, as the local women seemed to wear their chadors with ease and dignity.

As a new mosque is being constructed which is large enough to hold the number of people who attend Friday prayers, they are at the moment being help in Tehran university. Once off the bus the women were ushered in a separate direction to the men. We were shown into a small booth warmed by a kerosene stove to await security clearance. The lady guarding the booth was in the middle of her tea break, but offered to share with us the cake and tea she had – and then engaged us in conversations, curious to know where we were from.

Friday Prayers at Tehran University: Photo by Daniel Smith

Friday prayers at Tehran University’s converted, covered football (soccer) stadium places us at the heart of the intersection between Iran’s public and its political and religious leadership. There would be few places in American society where Church and State, politics and society, preaching and teaching would be so closely linked since the pre-revolutionary days of the 16th and 17th Centuries, when the Puritan pulpit would have played a similar role of defining values, creating cohesion, and admonishing adherence.

It's Friday in Iran, which is the holy day, and therefore the Fellowship of Reconciliation's peace delegation will spend a fairly quiet day. In a message to FOR yesterday, delegation leader Mark Johnson reported:

"This morning six of us began the day at St. Peter's Evangelical Church and the synod offices of the Evangelical Church, a short walk from our hotel. We visited with Rev. Saygez Benyamin, one of three ordained Evangelical Pastors in Iran today. We had nearly an hour's discussion on the status of Christians in Iran today, the aspirations and interests of those in his community, and a tour of their library of some 5,000 volumes (which is currently being catalogued by interns from the Islamic University studying library sciences).