It doesn’t matter what compelled to travel that day. What matters is that at 1:00 am I ended up at Tehran’s empty train station, asking the employees for a ticket to anywhere. They were amazed by a man randomly showing up at the train station with his sudden overflow of wanderlust. They informed me that no trains would depart Tehran before 5:00 am, and I asked but wouldn’t any train pass Tehran on its route from another city? And they told me yes, there’s a train from Qazvin – a city to the north of Tehran – going to Mashhad.

It was a nice opportunity. A very dear friend of mine, with whom I used to be romantically involved at some point, currently resides in Mashhad. I always wanted to pay her a visit there. But I also wanted to pay a visit to Imam Reza’s shrine for some time now, so I gladly requested to board that train.

Imam Reza is the eighth Imam of the Twelve Imam Jafari Shiism. The shrine includes Reza’s (alleged) tomb, many mosques, four seminaries, a library, and a museum. To Iranians it is the most important holy Shia site, because it’s located in Iran, and it is frequently visited. It alone makes Mashhad one of the major Iranian cities. There’s a dark side to this as the organization in charge of the shrine is headed by the conservative cleric Abbas Vaezi Tabbasi, and it has usurped large amounts of land in Mashhad and other cities through legal and illegal means, and is a vast corrupt financial power player with great political influence used to curb freedoms and reform.

Many of my friends, Muslims and atheists friendlier towards religion than me, had told me “if you just go to a holy place of worship, like Imam Reza’s shrine, you’ll see why people value religion, and your stance towards religion will be softened and you’ll understand some of its value.”

So, why not and go see for myself? It would be fun, I guess.

I was waiting to board the train with a couple and a gentleman. We were told that the train director would be the one in charge, and he would decide whether we can board the train or not. So we waited on the platform, and he came, and he was a perfectly nice and polite man. The couple had missed their train in Karaj (a city very close to Tehran) and the man had missed his plain to Mashhad. I was the only one who had missed nothing. Anyway, all three of us boarded the same train.

The man who had missed his plain engaged me in a discussion. He told me that he was originally from Shiraz, but lived in Tehran, and had a wife and two children. He also had a temporary wife in Mashhad.

In traditional Islam, a man can have up to four permanent wives. Shias add an infinite number of temporary wives, through a process Iranian calls sigheh, where the marriage lasts only a period and some money is paid to the woman. It’s the most sexist form of legalized prostitution possible, because the woman is completely treated like a commodity with no rights here.

So this was the beginning of my holy pilgrimage. The man informed that the woman had taken 300 thousand tomans to the woman, and 200 thousand tomans to the priest who “wedded” them, and she was his “wife” for a month, and now 4 days remained from that month, and he was travelling to Mashhad to use these last four days. This was pathetically low amount of money and he was nagging about having to pay it.

This man was extremely religious, his vocabulary was steeped with the vocabulary of religious conservatives and he frequently digressed from his narrative to pay verbal tribute to Allah. And this man was so easily using his religiously justified sexism to partake in a prostitution arranged in way it was demeaning to a woman, and yet he would completely feel justified to call consensual relationship between two adults “sinful”. I know because he did nag about men and women doing sinful things.

And I already knew that Mashhad, the holy city, was the best place to pursue such a “marriage”. There I saw actual advertisement for them all around the shrine. Even before entering Mashhad, my anti-theist antenna was already up.

I was mercifully separated from this man and went to the first-class cabin I shared I had paid for. There, I shared lodgings with a man and his mother. The man told me he suffered from insomnia. He had went to the doctor and he wasn’t cured, so now he was going to the shrine for the cure.

This attitude always came across as a bit weird to me. If your belief in the healing abilities of Imam Reza is so strong, why bother with the doctor anyway? Why the doctors should fail you first? Why should it be a last resort? I don’t say to myself “I’ll first try these shitty doctors to see if they can cure me then if they all fail I’ll go to the excellent doctor who has more medical power than them”.

Anyway, at least I’m glad this man was going to Imam Reza for a non-lethal disease.

I laid down on the sheets and pillow provided to travelers, and I tried to go to sleep futilely, but at the same time, I love the sensation of a moving shaking train and being on the verge of sleep. I was rudely pulled away from this stage of consciousness when someone working for the train began walking down the hallway and shouting “TIME TO PRAY! TIME TO PRAY!” in an annoying voice.

I still don’t know why Muslims need to wake everyone up when they want to pray. Most probably I was the only non-Muslim on that train, but the same shit happens in cities and universities and all over the place. It’s a sign of non-Muslim erasure in public sphere.

I managed to fall asleep around 6:00 am, and woke up around 10:30. I called my friend at 11:00 and surprised her. We met in Mashhad, and we had lots of fun together. It doesn’t matter what we did, but I found the city itself an interesting place. It was completely distinguishable from Tehran. The buildings were shorter, streets were wider, it was much less crowded, there were more boulevards and less highways. It would a nicer city than Tehran, if it were like 80 times less religious. Also people there have a really badass delicious way of cooking chicken kebab.

Before visiting the shrine, I just had one important with a friend of my friend. He was a native of Mashhad and an atheist. He claimed that at least 25% of people of Mashhad are atheists. I don’t think that number is anything near accurate. I’m sure there are much less atheists in Mashhad than Tehran, and Tehran is ten times more secular and open a city than Mashhad.

However, I think this observation from a native resident of the city is very important, and despite the city’s suffocating religiosity which I could easily feel that there’s a strong secular subculture of progressive Muslims and atheists residing in coffee shops and universities, and I know the same sub-culture exists in the other religious city, Qom, the house to Iran’s most important seminary and the clerical hierarchy.

I think this observation is important because it shows that atheists can be a prominent minority in Iran one day, even in its most religious places.

So, I finally drag my ass to the shrine. I’m searched to see if I’m not carrying a gun, I walk a bit and I have to take off my shoes. Then I enter the main mosque.

To summarize: I thought the architecture was beautifully sublime and a masterpiece, but I found the religiosity displayed in the place extremely absurd and ridiculously backward. It didn’t create any sympathy towards religious experience in me. It destroyed some sympathy I didn’t even know I still had.

Firstly, people kept kissing doors and walls. Not only kissing like the doors and the walls very close to the actual tomb – they’d kiss doors and walls which were in the shrine but in random places far from the main tomb. They’d hang on metal railings and kiss them no matter where they are positioned, and I just shudder to think how dirty and covered with germs and viruses these railings are and how many diseases are spread by people French kissing them.

By god, doors are not for kissing, people.

I have already talked about how impatient I was at such displays of superstition and idolatry even when I was religious, so much that it caused to me to convert from Shia Islam to Sunni Islam. As an atheist I found nothing profound or awe-inspiring about these acts either. It’s naked and unapologetic superstition, glorified needlessly, it’s the concept of sacred in its most vulgar and repulsive form.

Is it harmful? It is. Apart from sick people probably getting sicker from kissing the furniture and exposing themselves to the germs, and those not seeking proper medical attention, it’s simply harmful because if the attitude it encourages – of raising a mortal politician who lived around 1400 years ago into such absurd holiness, to treat idol worship and the cult of personality and blind faith like things that are encouraged. These are harmful attitudes.

But nothing could prepare me for the actual shrine. People surrounded it and it was so crowded, and they pushed each other, hit each other, acted like a savage crowd trying to eat a dead raw deer, just so that they could hang on or touch or kiss the metal railings erected around the grave of someone who’s most probably some random loser and not even the actual bones of Imam Reza.

There was this dude who had raised his infant above his head and was trying to somehow slam dunk the child above the angry crowd into the metal railings of the shrine. It was disturbing.

I have absolutely no idea why this grotesque sight should have softened my stance towards religions. I would never support or condone something that moves people to kiss fucking doors.

It’s not even that spiritual. Like most other aspects of Iranian culture, it’s vicious, competitive, and for decoration. It’s not people overcome in spiritual ecstasy and feeling overcome with the touching of God, it’s people kicking and pushing each other to touch metal.

I’m glad I’m back in Tehran now, still as anti-theistic as ever.

Image credits:

Iahsan from Wikimedia

By Argooya from Wikimedia