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Shiraz. Chapter 0
The Theory of Everything
25 Bahman 1376 (February 14, 1998)
On the day Zahra turned fifteen, the house was filled with guests and the smell of saffron pilaf. Fifteen years old. The age when you no longer look up at the world, but stand on equal footing with it, and it reveals itself to you in all its complexity and fragility. Uncle Hossein and his wife came from Tehran, bringing French perfume and a silk scarf as gifts. Uncle Javad was there too. He looked better than he had in recent months—the medication was apparently helping. Or perhaps it was that deceptive remission that the disease sometimes grants before the final blow.
After dinner, when the women went to the kitchen, the men remained in the living room. And the conversation, as always, turned to its familiar course. But this time, it was not an argument. It was a report. Ali, Zahra’s father, was laying out their shared theory with Javad before Hossein, and his voice, usually soft and ironic, sounded with firmness and conviction.
“You don’t understand, Hossein,” he was saying. “This is not just politics. This is theology. This is a war for the soul of Iran.”
“There you go again,” the practical Hossein sighed. “What wars? Khatami is a weak president; the conservatives will eat him alive soon. It’s business as usual.”
“No,” Javad intervened. “He is not weak. He is a symptom. A symptom of a new disease. We are too deeply rooted in faith. That’s why they are creating a Trojan horse. A simulacrum. An ultraconservative ideology without Islam!”
“What do you mean, without Islam?” Hossein asked.
“It’s simple,” this was Ali’s voice. “They will take everything external—strict morality, patriarchy, traditional values, hierarchy, even antisemitism and xenophobia. Everything that makes us ‘backward’ in their eyes. But they will remove the most important thing—Allah. The transcendent. The sacred.”
Zahra, helping her mother in the kitchen, heard their voices through the slightly ajar door. The voices grew louder, more heated.
“The West has realized that direct secularization, atheism, doesn’t work in the Islamic world!” Javad was almost shouting. “So they create a ‘Trojan horse’! A simulacrum! They will offer us an ultraconservative ideology, but without Islam! Their goal is to replace our true, divine conservatism with their pseudo-traditionalism of a Western model! It’s a conspiracy against Islam itself!”
“We’ve named it ‘Moldbug’ (قالب کهنه),” her father’s voice chimed in, now serious, devoid of irony. “The ‘Old Mold.’ They take our old, familiar form—strict morality, patriarchy, traditional values—but fill it with a new, alien content. This is their Zulmati Roshangarī (ظلمتی روشنگری). Their ‘Dark Enlightenment.’”
“They want to give us everything that is in Islam,” Javad repeated, “but without Allah! Their god will be efficiency, progress, the market! It will look like our victory, like a triumph of tradition, but in reality, it will be their final victory! Our own culture, turned into a weapon against us!”
“Javad, calm down,” this was Hossein’s voice. “You’re scaring everyone.”
“I have to scare them! Fear is the last thing we have left! The fear of losing our faith!”
In the kitchen, Maryam was nervously cutting the cake.
“They’ve gotten too carried away. It gets worse every time.”
“It’s an illness,” Roxana said quietly. “Not just Javad’s. Ali is sick too. Sick with this idea.”
Uncle Hossein was silent—he was listening. Listening to two such different men who had unexpectedly found something in common, something that had truly brought them together.
“And for this plan to work,” Ali concluded, and his voice sounded so quiet and terrible that Zahra froze with the knife in her hand, “they need to eliminate those who see this substitution. They will kill the real traditionalists, the real theologians, to replace them with their own tame pseudo-conservatives. Those who will lead the people to the West, under the banner of tradition without God.”
The last words were so distinct that Zahra froze with her fork over the cake. She looked at her mother and saw genuine horror in her eyes. This was no longer a theory. It was a prophecy. A self-fulfilling prophecy.
And on that day, on her fifteenth birthday, she understood that her father and uncle were no longer playing intellectual games. They had written a new surah for their own, dark religion.
I am fifteen and it’s my birthday and Uncle Hossein gives me French perfume, “Poison,” and I think, what an irony, and I smell it and it smells not of poison but of flowers and honey, but maybe poison always smells like that, sweet and tempting, like Uncle Javad’s ideas, which are also poison, or medicine, I don’t know yet.
The Old Mold, qāleb-e kohneh, and I imagined a clay jug, ancient, covered in cracks, from which the old wine, the wine of faith, has been poured out, and a new, clear wine, without color or smell, but just as intoxicating, the wine of efficiency and order, has been poured in. And people will drink from this jug, thinking they are drinking the same wine as their ancestors, not noticing the substitution.
They had built it. Their theory. They had even named it in a way that let them hear both a foreign name and their own metaphor. And it was as elegant as Schrödinger’s equation, and just as frightening. It explained everything: Khatami’s victory, the books in the universities, the computer games, the silence of the West. It had no weak spots. It was a perfect closed system, flawless in its paranoid logic. They had created an intellectual machine that could digest any fact and turn it into proof of its own correctness. They had created a conspiracy against Islam, and now this conspiracy was more real than Islam itself.
“They will kill the real conservatives,” Papa said, and I knew, I felt, who he was talking about. He was talking about himself. And I knew that in a month and a half, before the end of spring, he would be gone. I knew it not as a prophecy, but as a fact from the future that had somehow invaded my present. I knew it would be a car crash. A truck, a sleeping driver, the oncoming lane. He would die instantly. He would not suffer. That was the only comfort in this knowledge, which was as cold as ice and as heavy as lead.
But until that day, they still had time. A month and a half. Time to finish writing their theory, to put it down on paper, to turn it from oral discussions into a coherent concept, a philosophical report, a document. Their joint last will and testament. And I knew they would do it. Because ideas, once born, demand to be written down. So that they can live on, even when their creators are gone.
And I think: maybe this is immortality? Not a soul that flies to paradise, but an idea that remains on earth and continues its work, sprouting in the minds of other people, changing the world, destroying it or saving it. And maybe Papa and Uncle, without knowing it, had created not just a conspiracy theory. They had created a virus. And even then, it was waiting for its moment to be unleashed.