La casa della moschea

«I wrote this book for Europe. I pulled back the veil to show Islam as a way of life... a moderate, domestic Islam, not the radical kind.» It is by returning to the Iran of his roots that the migrant author of Cuneiform acts as a bridge between cultures, recounting the epic of an influential Persian family whose destinies are intertwined with the history of their people. This saga allows us to experience from the inside and understand the crucial transformations of a country that has always been at the center of global balances, covering the years from the Moon landing to the end of the war with Iraq, and from the Shah’s regime to the post-Khomeini era.

This novel fascinated Dutch readers to the point that they voted it the second-best book ever written in their language, and with it, Abdolah marks his painful and complex reconciliation with his own past. Aga Jan is the central character—a wealthy merchant and head of the Senjan bazaar in the heart of Persia. He is the patriarch of the 'house of the mosque,' a centuries-old dwelling where the harmony of ancient traditions reigns. In the shadow of the minarets, loves, marriages, dreams, affairs, and prayers are knotted together like the threads of a carpet.

That is until the winds of History burst into the house, sweeping away the children of the mosque and making them protagonists of the most dramatic events. While the nephew Ghalghal eventually becomes Khomeini's right-hand man, no one escapes the responsibilities of the moment: some will fight against oppression, some will become its instruments, some will blow up cinemas, and others will use their cameras to record the facts that will travel around the world. Only the wise and patient Aga Jan remains in the eye of the storm—a witness to the present and guardian of the past, faithful to his roots and to a religiosity that offers an image of Islam quite different from the one broadcast by Western media: a deeply human faith.

Author: Kader Abdolah

Kader Abdolah is an Iranian-Dutch author. He fled Iran in 1988 as a political dissident and settled in the Netherlands. Remarkably, he learned Dutch and began writing his novels in his adopted language, becoming one of the most prominent contemporary Dutch writers.