ONCE UPON A TIME…

…there was a young girl of twenty or so who lived in Iran and whose mother got cancer. The young girl, who had been brought up in a secular family, panicked, and did what everyone else around her did when they wanted something really really really badly- she made a religious pledge and swore to god that if her mother was cured, she would become a practicing Muflim, saying prayers five times a day and so on and so forth.

So, her mum rushed to England where she was treated for cancer, and she was cured. The mother herself had made a whole boatload of religious pledges, and after she returned, they became a happy family, saying prayers and attending religious lectures and so on and so forth. Their extended family -grandmother and aunt and uncle who had been devout and observant forever were delighted, and they all bathed in mutual support and appreciation.

And the young girl washed herself and donned a white chador five times a day and said her prayers- and oh god was it a mind-numbing process. She frequently forgot the order, and how many of the “rak’ats” she had done (not been drilled into it since childhood), and she hated the smell of socks in public prayer rooms and having to break up the day and constantly watching out whether the time had passed and trying to hold in farts immedietely after washing herself so her wash up wouldn’t “break” and she could get through the prayer in the proper period of time and so on and so forth.

Meanwhile, the religious fan club were becoming more and more excited and kept telling her that now she was saying the prayers, then she should observe the hijab and why not start saying all the prayers she had missed since childhood, you know, a few at a time, and do this and do that and so on, in the nicest way possible..

So one day, she arrived at the uncle’s house and it was close approaching the time when the afternoon prayers had to be said, so she lept to the bathroom, washed herself, flung on the white chador, and raced to the bedroom, where her aunt and uncle and a couple of others were already deep in prayers. The only free space in the room was a patch in front of her uncle, so she navigated through the bending and rising figures, and standing with her back to her uncle, raised her hands and began the Arabic recitations.

Suddenly she heard the sound of laughter. She stopped in mid prayer and saw her uncle and aunt and others had stopped praying and were rolling about in laughter.

After the general merriment ceased, they told her that women weren’t allowed to pray in front of men, and because I had done so, it meant that the whole prayers of the whole room had become invalidated. Null. Void. They thought it was very funny I didn’t know that

Screw you all, I thought. And screw the rules. I am not being submissive to a god. I am being submissive to men. (and the men are being submissive to other, more powerful men).

It was then I realised my mum’s cure had not much to do with my pledge, and I stopped praying.

Tags: Iranian society, Iranians, life, random, religion, women