Well-heeled guests stepping across the porch of a palatial apartment in one of North Tehran’s exclusive neighborhoods surrender their coats to servants dressed in jacket and tie. After being served an alcoholic drink at the makeshift but well-stocked bar, they take their seats in the Louis XVI-style armchairs and sofas scattered around the large living room. In the corner, a group of musicians play on traditional Persian instruments. The house belongs to a wealthy Iranian family from the central Iranian city of Isfahan, a self-consciously pious city that was one of the leading centers of recruitment for the front during the Iran-Iraq war. But living in North Tehran, a largely secular enclave of the rich and agnostic, this family represents another Isfahan, one whose Westernized commercial upper class reflects the city’s pre-Islamic Persian culture. The gentlemen wear suits and ties and the ladies tailleurs and low-cut dresses, items of clothing frowned upon by the Islamic Republic. In the dining room, the servants arrange traditional Persian dishes prepared by a chef who is said to have been in the shah’s employ. An hour into the party, a dark-haired woman in a long orange dress enters the salon. She announces that she will perform the dervish soome dance. Stepping into the center, she begins a whirling ballet, raising her hands to the sky, then shakes her long hair back and forth in a quickening gesture of supplication. It is highly unorthodox for women to perform Sufi dances, much less at a private party and before men and women mixing freely and sipping on alcoholic drinks. Sufi orders themselves are controversial in Islam because of their tendency to escape the canons of orthodoxy and because they follow practices such as the recitation of poetry, dancing and the drinking of wine. “I’ll never start dancing at the beginning of the gathering, before the young people have had the opportunity to mingle, get a bit tipsy and flirt with each other,” says the dancer. “I don’t want them to feel that I’m forcing them into doing something they’d rather not. I want them to see it as an opportunity rather than an imposition.” Sufi practices like the dancer’s run to the extreme in the western and northeastern provinces of Kordestan and Khorasan, where practitioners swallow swords and knives, walk over burning coals and mutilate themselves. Even in Shi’ism, the dominant branch of Islam in Iran, devotional fervor sometimes spills over into excess. During the festival of Ashura, devotees whip themselves bloody with metal chains or cut themselves with swords. Orthodox Sunni doctrine condemns such practices, but in Iran religious life customarily escapes such strictures. Paintings of the Prophet Mohammed, for example, are commonly found in Sufi meeting halls. New life. In a Greek Orthodox monastery in the southeast Mediterranean a dawn liturgy is in progress. Biblical scenes cover the walls and the air is thick with incense. Candles cast a soft light on a group of monks reciting Byzantine texts. One of the monks stumbles over the words. He is a newcomer to the faith, a Shi’ite Muslim who embraced Greek Orthodoxy barely a month ago. His baptism in a Greek Orthodox church in Istanbul was an essential precondition to his being granted a religious residency and a new life in the isolated Mediterranean island monastery. Adopting the Greek name Theophilos, he knows he must shed his former Iranian Muslim identity if he is to fit into the austere confines of monastic life. Reza has grown his beard long and cultivated his long hair into a mane that he ties behind his head with a band. He peers at the world uncertainly from behind unfashionable spectacles and covers his frame with long, loose-fitting clothes. When he finishes his recitation, he melts back into the dark of the pews, drawing little attention to himself. “My parents aren’t what you’d expect traditional Muslims to be like - beards and chadors,” Reza says. “But they’re strict. And they don’t know that I’ve converted. [If they did] they would not be happy.” A 20-something converting to Greek Orthodox Christianity is far less exotic for this younger Iranian generation than for their parents, who had fewer cosmopolitan points of reference. The products of a post-Revolution baby boom that coincided with the Iran-Iraq War, under-25 year olds now make up more than half of the Iranian population. After an Islamic Revolution that introduced a purist form of Shi’ism into traditionally heterodox Iran and ten years of war and recession, there followed another 16 years that witnessed desperate efforts to restructure the country but which have left discontentment in their wake. Now, feeling discomfited by state-sanctioned official Islam, an increasing number of Iranians are turning toward more mystical forms of spiritual expression. Describing themselves as disgusted with an orthodox doctrine heavy on mourning and preoccupied with the martyrdom of those who died in the war with Iraq, these mostly well-off metropolitan Iranians are turning instead to Eastern religions that emphasize peace, serenity and release. Risk and revival. Their choice is not without risk. In Iran, apostasy is punishable by death. At least three Iranian church leaders have been charged since 1990 with the crime, found guilty and sentenced to death. One was hanged, the second recanted even as the noose was being placed around his neck, while a strong international outcry forced the release of the third. He was discovered murdered six months later. Reza escaped Iran to find a new faith, but back in Tehran his contemporaries are participating in a religious revival that, rather than having them flock back to the mosques and the orthodox Shi’ism of their parents’, is seeing them turn toward mystical Islam and Sufism. Nowhere is this, and the government’s growing acceptance, more evident than beneath Tehran’s Grand Bazaar in the tradition-bound neighborhoods of South Tehran. On Thursday nights, hundreds of Sufi devotees of the Gonabadi order flock into a hosseiniyeh, or religious hall. Splendidly mustachioed men wearing fluorescent yellow vests direct the traffic outside the hall, giving the occasion an air of official legitimacy rare for a Sufi gathering. It is clear that this order is regarded differently from those that are forced to meet secretly. Here, among the elders practicing their devotions, are a large number of younger, distinctly chic-looking men. Sporting trimmed goatees and trendy shirts, they participate in the order’s introspective “inward prayer” with concentration. “The guys here are either [people who were] completely irreligious or who tried everything, and I mean everything - drugs, alcohol, promiscuity - before trying this too,” says Pirouz, a former reformist journalist in his late 20s who belongs to the order. “Or they are former Basij [a branch of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps]. They are the new generation of Basij, those who are turning dervish.” Shying away from the knife piercing and coal walking of the Naqshbandi Sufis of Kordestan, the Gonabadis are accepted because of their quietist practices and the large number of influential Islamic Republic insiders who attend their prayer meetings. Still influential. Today, three large Sufi orders survive in Tehran. The Safi Ali Shah order possesses the best-known khaneqah (Sufi retreat) in the capital and appears more open to foreign visitors than other orders. The Nematollahi’ha, whose khaneqah was shut following the Revolution, is more reserved, but remains one of the most influential Sufi orders in the world. A third khaneqah that attracts Azeri Iranians living in Tehran is active, and then there is the Khaneqah’e Ghaderi based in Karaj and reputed to be extremely snobbish, in line with the exclusive atmosphere cultivated by many urban khaneqahs. One Iranian now living in the United States remembers his brother-in-law’s reaction after being invited to join one. “These ‘dervishes’ were coming to the khaneqah in Mercedes,” he says, “and he [the brother-in-law] felt embarrassed driving his modest Peykan [Iran's mass-produced, national car] to the meeting.” Times changed, the Islamic Revolution swept all before it and many of the “champagne Sufis” of the Shah era fled to Western capitals or reinvented themselves as orthodox Shi’ites. In addition to the closure of the Safi Ali Shah and Zorreyasatein branches of the Nematollahi’has, specific Sufi masters were also suppressed, both in the early years and as recently as last year, when up to a thousand Sufis were arrested by the authorities in a crackdown. But the passing of time and the growing popularity of Sufi orders have made the religious atmosphere a world removed from the early days of the Revolution, when ayatollah orthodoxy drove Sufism underground. Iran’s Cultural Revolution shut universities, and secular intellectuals and heterodox religious practitioners went into hiding. In rural areas, far away from the centers of power, the suppression was less noticed. Traditionally, certain sections of Shi’ite clergy remain hostile to mysticism, because of its freethinking tendencies. Institutional clergy actively discourage the faithful from joining khaneqahs. Still, direct attacks on Sufism by high-level clerics are rare, a reflection of the established nature of Sufism in Iran. Many of its adherents are clergy who have left a life of structured urban religiosity for the more freewheeling spirituality that mystical Islam offers, especially in more traditional, rural areas. Misgivings. Back on the Mediterranean island, Reza lets on that he has some private misgivings about his new faith, and that he has an uneasy feeling that his spiritual hunger will go unfulfilled. “I notice the monks racing through the liturgy without any emotion in their words and wonder why they’re in such a hurry to be done with it. Why do they sit down on their creaking chairs after and groan with pretend-exhaustion and scratch themselves?” Reza asks. He may have arrived in the notionally freer West but, he says, he feels more stifled by his religion-saturated surroundings than he did in Tehran, where his fellow art students availed themselves of black-market copies of European and Chinese films dubbed into Farsi and where European classics of literature could be found in translation. He says he used to watch MTV and American movies on the illegal satellite dish his parents had installed on the roof. It is a scene replicated in hundreds of thousands of homes across Iran, where private life differs dramatically from the public one. The son of civil servant parents rich enough to live in Tehran’s prosperous northern suburbs, Reza studied graphic design at university. On evenings and weekends he rode the artistic underground, roaming the drug-soaked urban badlands in the south of the city with his photographer friends. Their guide was a reformist journalist local to the area. Their excursions provided them with compelling visual evidence of the social breakdown gripping Tehran’s working class cement sprawl. Already disillusioned with the Islamic Republic he grew up in, Reza’s time in the army provided the final proof that he did not belong in it. Those who refused to pray were punished with additional weeks of service and socially ostracized. “In the army you’re forced to pray, you’re forced to beat your chest and recite prayers loudly,” says Reza. “Every day we had to say prayers publicly in which I had no faith. I got depressed.” For today’s young, the past quarter century of living in an Islamic republic of corruption and limited vocational horizons has prompted a search for alternative forms of religious expression. Tired of what they call the religion of the mullahs, they dabble in Sufi mysticism, make trips to India or participate in the increasingly popular yoga retreats held inside Iran. Coming of age. “Our generation matured during the war,” says Reza, who was born in 1981 during the start of the Iran-Iraq conflict and still dreads every September 22, when sirens are sounded to mark the date of the war’s declaration. “I remember the bombing of our house and cringe or hide under the furniture when I hear the sirens.” On the island, there are no private realities to offer a temporary escape. But rare forays outside the monastery throw up confusing cultural contrasts that perplex Reza. The sight of young couples on a date crossing themselves as they pass churches shocks him. Coming from a country where couples going on dates can be whipped or jailed, Reza struggles with what to make of it. A few kilometers outside Marivan, in the Sufi heartland of Iran’s Kordestan province, a single khaneqah rises out of the hilly wilderness. On Fridays pilgrims are bused in from nearby villages for the afternoon dhikr, or ceremony. After a somewhat frugal meal, they file into the prayer-room and prepare for the ceremony with chanting and drum beating. As the music grows more insistent, members of the congregation loosen their hair and begin tossing it to the beat, which gradually builds to an ecstatic climax. Afterward, they line up for a traditional prayer, kiss the hand of the pir (Sufi elder) who has sat impassive through the ceremony, and disperse. It is a touch of the more authentic Sufism that survives in the countryside, away from the mystical fads of the capital and impervious to the passage of governments, religious or not. The swing toward secularism or more liberal forms of religious expression - whether it is joining a Sufi brotherhood or taking an annual trip to India - has accelerated since the election of hardliner Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to the presidency. Ahmadinejad represents a literalistic, intensely pious reading of popular Shi’ite Islam, freed from the openness of the Khatami era and infused with an apocalyptic strand of messianism. When Ahmadinejad traveled to New York last October to address the United Nations, he is reported to have told a close aide that he felt around him the presence of the Mahdi, a mythical figure in Islamic theology whose advent is awaited. A recent trip to Iran’s close ally Syria was noteworthy more for Ahmadinejad’s visit to a Shi’ite shrine than the substance of his meeting with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Khatami’s administration kept religiosity to the bare minimum, but Ahmadinejad has reinstated it at the heart of political life. His literalism has cast a chill among Sufis, who wonder if they will be subjected to a new round of harassment.

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