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Shiraz. Chapter 8
The Architecture of the Invisible
15-16 Shahrivar 1376 (September 6-7, 1997)
That evening, the house was filled with a silence, but it was not the silence of peace, but of intense mental labor. Before going to bed, Zahra peeked into the living room to wish her father goodnight. And she froze in the doorway.
Her father, Ali, was sitting on the carpet, a game of solitaire laid out before him. But it was not a solitaire of playing cards. It was a solitaire of ideas. Newspaper clippings, pages from philosophical treatises, photocopies of some old magazines. And in the center, the photographs and papers that Uncle Javad had left. Zahra saw her father trace a line with his finger on a diagram connecting Hegel’s name to a Masonic symbol, and his face wore the same focused expression with which he read sacred texts. He wasn’t mocking. He was analyzing. He was searching for logic in the madness.
“Papa?” she called out softly.
Ali looked up. His eyes held the expression of a man trying to solve an equation with too many unknowns.
“I’m trying to understand, Zahra-jan. To understand where your uncle’s insight ends and…” he trailed off. “Look, here he writes about the connection between twelfth-century Sufi orders and the Knights Templar. And here, about how the patterns on the Isfahan mosques replicate the Kabbalistic tree of life. A coincidence? Or is he seeing something that isn’t there?”
“Or something that is, but we don’t want to see it,” Zahra replied.
Her father looked at her in surprise.
“Go to sleep, philosopher. Tomorrow, after the morning prayer, we’ll go for a walk. Your mother told us to get some fresh air, not to sit at home building conspiracy theories.”
At the Nasir al-Mulk Mosque, whose stained-glass windows flooded the interior with a kaleidoscope of colored light, they saw a group of tourists. Europeans. They were enthusiastically photographing the patterns on the walls, not understanding their meaning.
“Look,” Uncle Javad whispered, nodding at the tourists. “They only see the beauty. They don’t see the code. Every one of these patterns, every girih, is not just an ornament. It’s mathematics. It’s theology. It’s an encrypted message about the unity and infinity of Allah. Our ancestors spoke the language of symbols. And our enemies have learned to read it. And use it against us.”
“What do you mean?” Ali asked.
“I’ve dug up something here,” Uncle lowered his voice. “Khatami’s advisors recently held a closed meeting with the leaders of the Zoroastrian community. Why? Officially, for an interfaith dialogue. But Zoroastrianism is not just a religion. It’s a matrix, the original source. Light and darkness, Ahura Mazda and Angra Mainyu. A dualism that later passed into Manichaeism, into Gnosticism, into Catharism. All European heresies have Zoroastrian roots.”
“So what?” Ali asked. “Zoroastrians are part of our history. They were here before Islam.”
“Exactly! Before Islam. And some want them to be after Islam. Do you understand? A return to the ‘origins.’ To a ‘pure’ Persian tradition without Arabic influence. This is their plan—to divide us from within, to pit the Persian against the Islamic… Or they are looking for a basis for a new, syncretic religion. They want to take our ancient, pre-Islamic wisdom, mix it with Western philosophy, and create an ‘Islam-lite.’ A religion without sharia, where Zoroastrianism becomes the foundation and Islam is merely the facade.”
One of the Europeans, noticing their attention, nodded and smiled. Javad turned away.
They sat down in a teahouse nearby. Javad ordered his tea without sugar.
“And the French,” Javad continued. “The very same French intellectuals who welcomed Khatami’s victory. André Glucksmann, Bernard-Henri Lévy. You know what they have in common? They are all connected to the Grand Orient de France lodge. The most influential Masonic organization in Europe. They are not helping Khatami. They are guiding him.”
“And guiding him into a digital caliphate,” her father chimed in, and Zahra couldn’t tell if he was joking anymore. “I’ve read about it. The computer technologies that Khatami is promoting, the internet for all—it’s the perfect tool for control. Not our state control, but their global control. A new ‘World Government’ will know our every step, our every thought.”
Zahra listened, trying to grasp the logic in this stream of connections.
“Yes!” Javad grew animated. “Imagine a game that millions of our children will play. A game where they will build empires, fight, make decisions. But the rules of the game will not be written by us. They will be written in California. And these rules will imperceptibly shape their consciousness, their values. It will be the perfect system of programming. And the president says: internet in every school! Do you know what the internet is? It’s a web. The World Wide Web. And who is the spider? Who sits in the center and feels every vibration of the threads?… Or who will sit in that center?”
“Tim Berners-Lee?” Ali suggested with irony. “The inventor of the web?”
“Not a person. A system. An artificial intelligence that will inevitably emerge. They are creating a global brain, and we will all become its neurons. Computer games are training. They teach children to live in a digital world, like a virtual reality… and to obey rules that someone else has written.”
Ali sighed.
“You know, Javad,” he said, looking at the tiled floor of the teahouse as if at a gravestone. “Any theory is like the pattern on these tiles. You can look at it and see just geometry. Or you can see hidden letters in the intertwining lines, words, entire messages. And not only see them, but find confirmation for them. That’s how man is made. He seeks meaning. And if he doesn’t find it, he creates it himself.”
“So you don’t believe me?” There was a note of hurt in his uncle’s voice.
“I believe that you see what you see,” the father answered evasively. “But I want to understand if it’s a real pattern or just a play of light and shadow. We need more data.”
They were silent for a moment. Then Ali said:
“On the Day of Unification of Islamic Seminaries, the 27th of Azar, there will be a conference in Isfahan. Will you come?”
“Of course. It’s a showcase of the future. All the universities will show their faces. And Zahra can finally make her choice.”
Javad looked at his niece.
“Choose physics, Zahra. The exact sciences. There’s less room for manipulation in them. Although…” he smirked, “even Einstein’s equation can be read as a Masonic formula. Energy equals mass times the speed of light squared. The speed of light squared—what is that? The light of light? Absolute enlightenment?”
Papa was laying out his solitaire, and I watched his fingers, accustomed to turning the pages of sacred books, now touching the newspaper clippings, the photographs, Uncle’s papers, as if they were poisonous insects. He didn’t believe, no, he didn’t believe, he just wanted to understand, to understand the logic, the structure, the architecture of this invisible building that Uncle was constructing in his head. But to understand the architecture, you have to go inside, and I was afraid that once inside, he wouldn’t be able to find his way out.
The tourists, Uncle said, but I didn’t see tourists, I just saw people, a man and a woman, who were looking at the mosque as one looks at a miracle, with wonder, and their cameras were clicking, trying to steal a piece of this beauty, this light, to take it with them, but can you steal light, or can you only steal its reflection?
The Grand Orient, and I imagined a sun rising not where it’s supposed to, but somewhere else, in France, and it was the wrong sun, an artificial one, that shines but gives no warmth, as Papa used to say about the smiles of some politicians.
Computer games, and I see myself, sitting at a screen and controlling an entire army, an entire civilization, and it was so tempting, to be a god in a small world where everything obeys your will, and I understand why Uncle is so afraid of it: because once you learn to be a god in a game, you might want to become one in life. Or, even worse, you might forget that there is a real God, because your pixelated god will be simpler and more understandable.
December 18th, Isfahan, Unification Day, and I don’t know yet that this will be the last trip for the whole family, the last time we will be together—Papa, Mama, Uncle, and I, and that in four months Papa will die, and Uncle will blame the Masons, or the Zoroastrians, or the computers, or all of them at once, until his own death, and Mama will just cry, because when the love of your life dies, it doesn’t matter who is to blame, all that matters is that he is gone. But we will go to Isfahan, to that half of the world, to the city where science met faith, where observatories stood next to madrasas, and I thought: maybe there, at that point of equilibrium, Papa will find the answer he is looking for. Or lose himself completely.
The patterns on the tiles, Papa said, and I looked at those interweavings of blue, turquoise, and gold, and I saw everything at once in them: the geometry of Euclid, the spirals of galaxies, the map of a conspiracy, and a prayer frozen in stone. And I realized that he was right. The world is not as it is. The world is as we see it. And the most terrifying conspiracy is the conspiracy of our own minds, which makes us see what we fear most.