BELFAST TELEGRAPH: I heard them in a narrow street in north Tehran, not one of the rich villa-lined avenues we associate with the Iranian middle classes but a tired thoroughfare of overheated plane trees and shabby, two-storey offices in grey concrete.
The sound was of a scratched record, a 78-rpm rather than a 33-and-a-third, and when I turned to my driver, he assured me there must be some morning party up the road with an old gramophone. But I used to play the violin, and I didn't believe him. And sure enough, down the street came the troubadours.
Yes, real live troubadours in the real live Islamic Republic, two of them, hacking at a violin and beating on a “zarb” drum, the work of the classical Persian musicians, a combination — for a westerner — of gypsy and nursery melodies, a sudden revelation of 14th and 15th century music in a regime which aspires to the purity of the 8th. Habibullah Zendegani introduced himself very quietly and said he was only 26 but had been playing for 15 years.
Beside him, Ramezan Souratipour banged away happily on the drum under his arm, one of a thousand little drummers in Iran — he is 32, but a diminutive figure — whose fingers dab three to a second to Zandegani's violin.
But I am old enough to remember Ruhollah Khomeini banning Mozart and Haydn. So how do the Revolutionary Guards, praetorians of the Ayatollah's spirituality in President Ahmedinejad's oh-so-chaste republic, react to these ghosts of culture past?
“I play music to earn money,” Zandegani replies, a little shiftily I think. “We earn maybe $40 or $50 a day.”
In theory, all music must pass Iran's censorship authorities; a female singer, for example, is not allowed to sing solo lest her lone voice be too arousing for male listeners.
But music and Islam have a dodgy relationship. In Saudi Universities the most sanctimonious of students have assaulted music enthusiasts; when a professor at King Saud University, Hamzah Muzeini, condemned this brutality in the daily Al-Watan newspaper, he was convicted by a Sharia court — a ruling later overturned by King Abdullah. Yet according to journalist Rabah al-Quwai'i, some sheikhs encourage youths to burn instruments and books in public. >>> Robert Fisk | Monday, December 07, 2009
