The House of the Mosque by Kader Abdolah

Ingenious, but complacent in their habits and religion, they are no match for the rough customers of the revolution. In the revolution of 1979, Aqa Jan and his family come painfully to grief. The best passage shows how the modernising autocracy of Shah Mohammed Reza – brutal, cynical, in a desperate hurry – all but overran even traditional Iranian towns in the first half of the 1970s. The story begins well in July 1969 with the introduction into the house of a portable television so that Aqa Jan and Aqa Alsaberi can watch the moon landing. They include Aqa Jan ('Dear Master', a title often given to the paterfamilias in Iran) his cousin Alsaberi, the unworldly imam of the mosque Muezzin, the muezzin troubled or rebellious children colourful domestics an occasional clairvoyant a crippled child and various half-fabulous fauna. The hereditary owners of the town's congregational mosque occupy a large, old house. The House of the Mosque unfolds in Senejan, a traditional carpet-weaving town that has affinities with Abdolah's home town, Sultanabad or Arak. The original of this novel has sold in its hundreds of thousands in the Netherlands, while an Italian critic has compared Abdolah, in his mastery of an alien literary language, to Nabokov and Conrad. His 2000 novel Cuneiform, published as My Father's Notebook in 2005, was praised in this country. K ader Abdolah is the nom de plume of an Iranian man who quit his native land in 1985, first for Turkey and then the Netherlands, and has since written novels and other works in Dutch.

The House of the Mosque by Kader Abdolah