Day 9 (5/3) Cartwheels, carpets and courtyards

Nothing like just getting here and then leaving again! Today Nick and I, as well as his brother Massoud and Massoud’s wife Mahshid, took mom and dad to the holy city of Mashad . We left for the airport around 8 am and arrived at our hotel in Mashad at 2 pm. The hotel is very nice inside, though it’s off a small alley, but it is quite close to the Shrine of Imam Reza, one of the holiest sites in Shia Islam. After a busy couple of days, we all needed a break, and took a siesta (there’s no equivalent word that I know of in Farsi!) in the afternoon. After getting a couple of wheelchairs for mom and dad to make it more comfortable for them, we headed to the shrine in the evening. Women and men have to enter the shrine complex through separate security entrances, though what security it really provides I’ve never quite figured out. As I had my purse with me with a compact and a lipstick, and because I look different, the women at the entrance gave me a bit of a hard time getting into the shrine, but mom and Mahshid argued with them and finally they let me go. The shrine has expanded since the last time we were there about 7 years ago. There is a huge new courtyard – when I say huge, I mean it is about the size of a football field. I was told the space for the new courtyard came from a graveyard. Apparently, they just built it over the graves. I tried to imagine the outcry if something like that happened in the U.S.! As mom and dad prayed inside, Nick, Massoud, Mahshid and I wandered around the complex. What I love about visiting the shrines in Iran is that in many ways, they are much less formal than the churches I grew up with. There are families sitting together on large Persian rugs, reading, praying or just talking. There are some areas that are separated men or women, but also many areas where men and women can sit together. I even saw children turning cartwheels amongst those who were praying or reading. Other than at the formal prayer times, it feels very relaxed. And when the call to prayer comes, the Shrine staff roll out wooden carts full of large Persian carpets and spread them out in the courtyards. Not everybody who comes to pray there can fit inside the shrine, so the carpets are laid out to accommodate the hundreds of people who wish to worship there. After the prayer time, the carpets are rolled back up and re-stored. I wondered where all the carpets came from. Many of them are made for the mosques to meet a person’s “nazr”. A “nazr” is when a person makes a promise to God that they intend to keep if their prayers are answered. And they do carry out their promises; people take their “nazr” very, very seriously. So, some of the rugs we saw at the mosque were woven to fulfill a “nazr”.