Visit to Imam Khomeini's House and Jamaran

Last Monday, as a friend and I were leaving a meeting somewhere in Niavaran Avenue, in the north of Tehran, she asked if I had ever visited Jamaran, the village at the foot of the Alborz mountains where Imam Khomeini lived and where several members of his immediate family, including his widow, still live.
I said that, like millions of people, I had only seen the interior of the Hosseiniyeh (prayer hall) on TV broadcasts.
“Well, then, we must go! It’s only five minutes away,” my friend said.
We drove to the end of the road and turned left. Immediately the feel of the place changed: in place of the wide Niavaran avenue with its luxurious blocks of flats covered in ochre marble and granite, we found ourselves in a village road lined with one-storey mud-brick houses and little shops. We parked the car and turned into a narrow alley with more brick houses. A half-open iron gate revealed a curtain with a flowery curtain billowing in the breeze. Next to it, ivy flows over a high brick wall, telling of life inside the humble courtyard. A few metres beyond, an ancient plane tree overshadows the alley. It is, obviously a couple of centuries old, since new sprouts sprung from its trunk and grew stout and gnarled in turn, next to the mother trunk. A group of boys played football in its shade.
Just beyond the tree, tucked at the end of another narrow alley lies a small heart disease unit, where the Imam was hospitalised when he suffered a heart attack in 1980. After the heart attack, his physicians recommended that he move from Qom to Tehran, where the weather would be more beneficial. But he had no house, so Ayatollah Jamarani, who had in his endowment a small house adjacent to the Hosseiniyeh Jamaran, gave it to the Imam and it has been the Imam’s family home ever since.
The Hosseiniyeh and Imam’s house are literally next door to the heart unit. As we crossed the entrance to the complex, the call for the midday prayer was being broadcast. We carried out our ritual ablutions and entered the Hosseiniyeh.

For those friends who are not familiar with prayers, these are the two Quranic surahs (chapters) used during every prayer. The first one is compulsory, but the second one can be substituted by any other, usually short, surah.

Surah 1: Fatiha (The Opening)

In the name of Allah, Most Gracious, Most Merciful.
Praise be to Allah, the Cherisher and Sustainer of the Worlds;
Gracious, Most Merciful;
Master of the Day of Judgment.
Thee do we worship and Thine aid we seek.
Show us the straight way,
The way of those on whom Thou hast bestowed Thy Grace,
those whose (portion) is not wrath, and who go not astray.

Surah 112: Ikhlas (The Purity of Faith)

In the name of Allah, Most Gracious, Most Merciful.
Say: He is Allah, the One and Only;
Allah, the Eternal, Absolute;
He begetteth not, nor is He begotten;
And there is none like unto Him.

(Translation by Abdullah Yusuf Ali)

The Hosseiniyeh is quite unlike any other place of worship I have seen. The walls are finished with a mixture of mud and hay, like peasant houses and there are no carpets, only thin, woven traditional kilims in blue and white, called zilou. I was told that the Imam resisted any move that could be seen as luxury, such as plastering and painting the walls or replacing the zilous with thicker carpets. He eventually agreed to lining the lower parts of the walls with marble slabs, but only because people who came to listen to him leant on the walls and got their clothes dusty.
To the right, the raised platform famous from TV broadcasts on which the Imam appeared to speak to his followers is never used now. His chair is covered with a white sheet, just as it used to be.
“What is that door on the left side of the platform?” I asked my friend.
We put on our shoes, walked up to the back of the Hosseiniyeh and turned left through a metal gate into a small yard. The other side of the door to the platform, now locked, is linked to the eivan (terrace) in front of the Imam’s reception room, by means of a raised ironwork bridge covered with a length of cheap fitted carpet.
Large French windows open on to the eivan from the reception room. Actually, ‘reception room’ is too grand for this room; I only call it so because this is where the Imam received his guests, otherwise it’s a smallish room lined with a coarse carpet in green background, with a sofa at one end covered in a white sheet and a mantelpiece with a round mirror and a stack of books. His worn-out slippers are paired next to the sofa.
“And to think,” my friend mused, “that from this little room he shook the world.”
The place has such an air of utter simplicity and homeliness that although I had never been here before, I had the feeling I was visiting the house of a beloved grandparent. I thought of how much he could see that we never even dream of and how far we are from his vision of the world.
By the front gate, as I turned my face inwards to take in a last image of the yard, I caught a scent of roses.