The House of the Mosque is an extraordinary book, presenting Islam at the crossroad of modernity.
On the one side one sees the traditional rural type of Muslim family living following the centennial Islamic and local customs rhythms. This traditional Muslim family ordinates its life between cardinal events of existence: birth, childhood, marriage and death. The community is cohesive, the people are sympathetic, respectful to each other and sensible to others sorrows. Nosrat, the modern and antitraditionalist photograph, tells Lizard, the disabled boy of the family: 'Still you're lucky. (') This family gives you love and people need love. But in many ways they're backward.' This all too boring, maybe completely foreign, style of life for a modern individual is the center of a solidarity type, which I lived personally in a Christian traditional village in my childhood. This human warmth is impossible to recreate in the individualist modern societies.
Aqa Jaan, the custodian of the mosque and an important merchant in Senejan is the prototype of rural traditionalism. He is righteous in his heart and deeds, a monument of human dignity and honesty and so is his wife. He is a devout Muslim, ready to forgive and to close an eye to sins derived from the inherent human weaknesses. Aqa Jaan is making everything in his power to maintain the unity of the family and to protect them. Nothing wrong should happen to such a honest and peace loving family, for Allah is protecting the righteous.
Nevertheless the unthinkable happens. The Iranian Islamic Revolution thorns the Iranian society apart, unimaginable horrors take place. Absurd scenes of violence and immorality shake unexpectedly the traditional Muslim communities to the core. The new ideological regime is in no sense different in its atrocities from the Stalinist Russia or the Nazi Germany.
The author writes: 'Islam had created a rift in Aqa Jaan's family. For the past eight centuries the house had been united in its struggle against the enemies of Islam, fighting the battle from the pulpit of the mosque. Now, for the first time, the family's foe was Islam itself'. That is, Aqa inadvertently faced the dual character of the Islamic dogma, the one which spawns fundamentalist movements all over the world. A despaired Aqa, does not recognize the fault in his religion, and confronted with abuses enters a moral dispute with the fundamentalist Zinat. He asks her: 'Which Allah do you mean? Why don't I know that Allah?'
The moral hazard of the Islamist regime of the Ayatollahs is strictly based on the Islamic dogmas. Khalkhal explains the right of the regime to arbitrarily suppress and kill people referring to Islamic dogma: 'Allah has two faces: a merciful one and a cruel one. Now is the time for the cruel, terrifying face. It's the only way to keep Islam alive'. Moreover, the Islamic repression turned soon from anti-shah actions and anti-American slogans to actions against Muslims themselves.
The main question remains unanswered. Will ever Islam be able to reconcile with modernity, human rights? Although the author suggests the house continues its life as before. I doubt it badly. The traditional way of living was forever compromised and burried with the arrival of television, radio, cinema. Even the fundamentalists in power till today lost contact with traditional Islam, they were unwillingly affected by modernity and science applications in our dayly life. Aqa Jaan was for me the last mohican, the last samurai, a late statue of bygone ages. This living monument endured till the late XXth century, a record in itself.
