"This way." The large man blocking the doorway pointed back inside. I couldn’t understand what he was saying but to judge by the nervous look on the face of my otherwise unflappable guide, something wasn’t right: “The manager wants to see us.” Across the marble floor of the monumental entrance to the shrine of Fatima, a tall, stern-looking official in rimless glasses stood framed in an archway.

We followed him into his office, a high-ceilinged, octagonal chamber dominated by a portrait of Ayatollah Khomeini, from where he administers the holiest site in the city of Qom, and one of the most important in Shia Islam. We were not invited to sit. For several minutes my ashen-faced friend was given a quiet, relentless lecture, the upshot of which was that I, a non-Muslim and a Westerner, wasn’t supposed to be there, and, above all, wasn’t supposed to have done what I had just done.

Qom is not usually on the tourist itinerary for a visit to Iran. The city, south of Tehran, is a dusty, conservative stronghold with a forbidding reputation as the base from where Khomeini inspired the revolution that swept the Shah from power in 1979, humiliated the West, and consigned the country to the pariah status from which recent events seem about to release it.

But it was on the way and I wanted to see this place from the television headlines, a site of pilgrimage for millions who flock to venerate the 16th-century silver sepulchre of Fatima, the sister of Ali Reza, the eighth imam of Shiism. Its privileged position as the spiritual home of the 1979 revolution has brought benefits: an impressive monorail through the city centre is nearing completion and the shrine is served by giant underground car parks that play George Michael’s Careless Whisper in lifts jammed with pilgrims.

The idea of a holiday in Iran might sound unlikely, but despite the Foreign Office’s advice against all but essential travel, tourists are rushing to discover the riches of Iran and the surprises this modern theocracy unleashes at every turn. Even Americans, admittedly under controlled conditions, are welcome.

And so I found myself, in the week when Iraq went up in flames, travelling through the heart of its neighbour and bitter enemy, amazed by how relaxed the country I first visited more than 20 years ago has become. Back then, on a tour of the same cities in 1992, the revolution and the war with Iraq were vivid memories, Khomeini had died just three years before and Iran was far more outwardly conservative.

This time, despite stringent economic sanctions and the extremist policies of its unpleasant security state, there was scant evidence of either dislocation or tyranny: no queues outside petrol stations, no armed men in the streets or roadblocks. Everywhere I went the mood was informal, curious, welcoming. We could have been in Istanbul, Beirut or even Rome. Travel to Iran is a moral rather than physical challenge: as with China, Burma or Zimbabwe, does the nature of the state make it a no-go destination?



A local welcome: (Picture: Wild Frontiers)

In Qom, I was stopped by people who wanted to test their English, or sell me boxes of sohan, the local delicacy, a moreish form of pistachio brittle. There was curiosity, indifference, but no hostility. As we approached the shrine’s ornamented doors, the women, in the black chadors required for the occasion, were flicked aside, with much loud protesting, towards their own entrance by attendants waving what turned out to be fluorescent, pink and green household dusters.

In the vast courtyard before the twin minarets, the sound of milling people was overlaid by the steady click-click of pilgrims pulling paper cups from clusters of silver dispensers to drink from the water fountains. We followed the growing crowds through the men-only entrance, handed in our shoes and, carried along by the throng, worked our way through the giant carpeted prayer hall .

And then I found myself in a narrow, high-ceiling room packed with men struggling to touch the silver cage protecting the tomb of Fatima and press money through its polished fretwork. Hands that touched the tomb were reverentially rubbed across faces. A few registered surprise at seeing me. At intervals a voice would shout “Muhammed!” at which point the crowd intoned the traditional Arabic answer “peace be upon him”. As the men eddied around the tomb and moved towards the exit, their eyes showed deep emotion and in some cases tears.

The crowd carried us to the door, and with a flick of another duster, we were out. It was then we were taken aside to be told that non-Muslims and Westerners were not usual at the shrine, and were forbidden from the tomb. There was a nervous pause. The punishment? The manager offered me a consultation with the duty imam on the finer points of Shia Islam, and smiled. I thanked him for the enormous privilege, and apologised for the confusion. He offered sweets, and the ritual good wishes for England in the World Cup that I heard everywhere. With a sly grin my guide marched me out as quickly as he dared.

There are two distinct Irans to discover. There is an ancient, sumptuous civilisation that boasts some of the greatest treasures of ancient and Islamic architecture and art: the dramatic ruins of Persepolis, the ethereal beauty of Isfahan, the imperial palaces of Tehran.



Shah Cheragh Mausoleum (Alamy)

The other is the modern Iran we hear much about, but do not really know. A country of mullahs and morality police where courting couples now openly hold hands, young women display their skinny jeans, make up and nose-jobs (it is a world centre of cosmetic surgery), parking fines are paid electronically, and commuters on the Tehran underground are reminded that it is impolite to walk up the escalators.

For a week I had the services of a well-connected young man with reliable English who, with a friend, drove me from Shiraz in the south to Tehran. Much of that time I spent being jolted in the back of his Iranian Samand saloon, watching the interminable rocky desert slide by along toll motorways, listening to the latest in electro-Persian folk, and wishing the belching lorries wouldn’t drift quite so close to the window.

We shared meals in traditional restaurants, seated on carpeted platforms around dishes of grilled chicken and mutton, rice, cabbage salad and a salty and strangely addictive yogurt drink called doogh. The food was always good but fairly repetitive, and occasionally surprising: the bowl of custard that turned out to be sweet yogurt flavoured with lamb meat and coloured with saffron.

Shiraz is a city of gardens, luscious fruits and bijou palaces. The vines of the eponymous grape were grubbed out by the revolution, but its greenery still attracts Iranians who delight in its parks and the pleasure of picking pomegranates, limes, and figs. Groups of art students sketch and fiddle with Facebook on their smartphones. It is possible to spend a happy day strolling about its thronged streets, eating small green tomato plums coated in salted herb paste followed by a bowl of the local faloodeh, a lemon noodle ice cream.



The remains of a palace at the Persepolis archeological site, near Shiraz (Pic: Alamy)

In the evening the Shirazis gather at the tombs of Hafez and Saadi, revered Persian poets, to study their verses and amble in the cool of the evening. At the entrance men offer to let the tame budgies or canaries on their wrists pluck a slip of paper with a lucky verse of the poets from a little box – for a donation. I found Shiraz pleasant, if a bit boring, its parks not quite compensation for the absence of any knockout sites.

Its main advantage is as a pleasant jumping-off point into the desert to one of the wonders of the classical age. Persepolis, the monumental religious capital built by Darius, Xerxes and Cyrus from about 550 BC, dazzles by its scale, beauty and location. Perched on a platform of rock against the mountains, for centuries it was a place of pilgrimage where the subject people of the Persian empire, that stretched from the Nile to the Oxus, came to pay homage.

Stone frescoes record the Babylonians, Gadarians, Ethiopians and others who came from across the known world bearing tributes, from furs to giraffes. The imposing gate of nations they were ushered through still stands, the graffiti of more recent visitors recording the wonderment of 19th-century British, German and Russian explorers, including Stanley and Curzon.

On the stones of the palace of Darius it is possible still to see the scorch marks left when Alexander burned Persepolis to the ground in 330 BC. Efforts to make the site more accessible to coachloads of visitors and tidy it up have stripped some of the romance out. The large corrugated hangar erected over the main carvings is a terrible eyesore intended to protect works that have withstood two millennia of desert storms. Yet Persepolis is so striking, its setting so jaw-dropping, that it can absorb any amount of tinkering.

Nearby, the tented city erected by the last Shah in 1971 to boast of his links with the Persian empire is falling slowly into ruins, scarcely 35 years after the Islamic revolution consigned him to history.

To my eyes Iran’s show-stopper attraction is Isfahan, “Half the World” as it is known, because it encompasses so much beauty. City of ancient mosques and palaces, it captures what the scholar of Persia Arthur Upham Pope said was Iran’s “love of beauty”. It is possible to walk around the elegant central square, under the arches of the 17th-century bazaar, soaking in the smells and sounds of a bustling market free of any of the wheedling hassle so familiar in places like Egypt. Out on the maidan, where polo was played for the benefit of the king reclining in the loggia of the Ali Qapu palace, families now stroll in the balmy evening and the night air is stirred by the jingling of the horse carts full of visitors.



Isfahan - "Iran's real show-stopper"

Within walking distance are three of the most significant achievements of Islamic architecture: the Friday mosque, a Seljuk marvel of the early 11th century, with vaults of delicate bricks and domes of mesmerising mathematical perfection that remind us that the architectural revolution in Europe of the Gothic era was more than matched elsewhere; dominating the square, the 17th-century Imam or Shah mosque, its domes and arches covered in limpid blue mosaics that create a haze of beauty; and the Sheikh Lutfullah mosque of the same period, the jewel built by the great Shah Abbas for his private use across the maidan from his palace.

André Malraux said it was impossible to claim to have seen the most beautiful city in the world without having seen Isfahan, and he was right. And yet the city is above all a bustling, successful regional centre, where tourists are welcome but incidental. Most shoppers are Iranian, and so the prices for the vivid enamel dishes, delicate painted camel-bone jewellery boxes and Isfahan’s irresistible gaz nougat are by any standards cheap. Negotiations are courteous. I could happily have spent days wandering its streets or sitting in its mosques’ courtyards.

Tehran, by contrast, is an exhausting, turbulent force, addled by pollution, insane traffic and extremes of wealth and poverty. It is surprisingly modern, its residents living off cashpoints and the clean and efficient metro system. The revolutionary murals depicting Khomeini, the current supreme leader Ayatollah Khamenei, and countless martyrs of the Iran-Iraq war of 1980-88 are somehow not as ominous as in the past.

A reformist government, combined with easier access to the internet and a worldly sophistication, mean it is possible to see a culture that does not need the extremes of its revolutionary state to be strong and confident. Or well-disposed to the West. Facebook is ubiquitous, as is Coke. The American embassy still has “Death to USA” murals on its walls, but it’s now a museum – off limits to most visitors. The streets teem with shops that would not look out of place in European capitals. The central bazaar is worth a few hours’ leisurely stroll for its exoticism, spectacle and welcoming sense of cosmopolitan sophistication.

The complication of the inflation-racked currency – rials and tomans with more zeros than it is possible to manage – makes everything cheap and negotiable. Persia’s wonders are spellbinding, but modern Iran, with its surprises and contradictions, is endlessly fascinating.

One woman, two wheels and Iran's open road

Essentials

Benedict Brogan travelled with Wild Frontiers (020 7736 3968; wildfrontierstravel.com), which offers group tours and tailor-made holidays to Iran, including the eight-day Persian Insights tour, which takes in Tehran, Shiraz, Isfahan and Persepolis, and costs from £1,675 per person, including accommodation with breakfast, guided sightseeing and transfers, but excluding international flights. Brogan flew with Turkish Airlines (turkishairlines.com), which operates regular services from London Heathrow to Tehran, Shiraz and Isfahan via Istanbul, from £450 return .

Foreign Office advice on Iran: gov.uk/foreign-travel-advice/iran

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