Diary: Circular Squares: Tehran on the Eve of Ashura

As an American retiree living in Tehran, I often feel like a round peg in a square hole. Our neighborhood is modern and comfortable, once you get used to it, and our apartment has a lovely view of the mountains. When my mom says on the phone that she feels like we're so far away, I tell her to imagine we've just moved to Denver, except that the people talk a different language. But it's not just the language that makes me feel a little out of it (though it certainly doesn't help that Farsi is written in the Arabic alphabet). It's also that Iranian culture is more Eastern than it appears on the surface, even in this neighborhood with Western products in the shops, the sound of car alarms, and people who have relatives in California.

A few times a week, I conduct a small informal class in advanced English conversation. Recently I passed out a chart with at least 20 different translations of the multi-purpose polite expression befarmayid. We practiced what to say when holding the door for someone, offering food or drink or a gift, inviting someone in, and other situations. I also warned them not to offer something to an American just for the sake of politeness unless they really mean it, because Americans aren't familiar with that custom and might accept. In this class, we are getting so comfortable talking English together that sometimes I forget where I am. If the others are first to arrive at a doorway on the way out after class, they stop and wait, holding the door and saying "After you" to each other and to me. But if I get there first, I'm likely to just open the door and walk right through, only remembering afterwards that I didn't come here to undermine Iranian manners. (As if that were possible.)

Preparations for the Shia religious days of Ashura have been apparent all week, and finally the most important days of the festival have arrived. While I was writing this, a group of maybe 30-50 neighborhood folks dressed in black marched along the street below our window, carrying flags, banners, and heavy metal displays consisting of symbols related to the martyrdom of five saints in Karbala about 1,300 years ago. Teenagers were pushing a big speaker system, and one man was alternately singing and preaching while the boys and men rythmically swung small bunches of "chains," snapping them in the air and then brushing the chains over their shoulders to the beat of the big Yamaha bass drum. It's fascinating.

All over town, I've heard, crowds of not-particularly-religious youth follow along with these traditional processions, using them as an occasion to meet and greet. We joke that Ashura is the Islamic Republic's answer to the Greenwich Village Halloween Parade. But not. Downtown, some of the more fervent Ashura events involve sobbing, hyperventilating, going into trance. On Aljazeera English version TV, I saw pilgrims in Karbala (Iraq) itself slash their scalps with swords in a bloody rite that's outlawed in Iran. The relatively tame procession down our street joined up with other neighborhood marches for a feast-and yes, a live sheep was carried in (Iranians know where their meat comes from)-at the mosque in Medoon-e Kaj, which is translated to English for foreigners as "Kaj Square."

The fact that "Kaj Square" is not a square but a circle seems irrelevant to everybody but me. Despite the hundreds of signposts for various city "squares," I've yet to see a medoon (pronounced "May Dune") in Iran that's square or even rectangular in shape. Am I being too literal about geometric terms? Ask a New Yorker to describe Washington Square. Anyway, so far, 99.9% of the "squares" I've personally seen in Iran are circles, traffic circles.

Tehran is organized not according to a grid but as a pattern of interconnected medoons, or local centers. Directions are typically given starting with the closest medoon. Well-known medoons like Kaj are neighborhood business centers whose traffic circles enclose small but elaborate parks. The important downtown medoons cover several city blocks, just like Times "Square" and Columbus "Circle" in New York City. Small medoons may be just traffic circles, though even the humblest town will try to put some plants or a large cement sculpture of a flower or animal in the center. In Medoon-e Kaj, the pine trees, fountains, and sculptures are beautifully lit up at night in blues and greens to match the lighting on the mosque.

Everybody I know who isn't out-of-town is out-on-the-town for the two-day Ashura festival. Has Good Friday ever been so well attended? For people in today's Iran, it seems you don't have to be religious to commemorate this most defining event for the Shia sect of Islam, but perhaps you have to "be there or be square."