Children of Jihad: A Young American's Travels Among the Youth of the Middle East by Jared Cohen

Islam.
    Many young Iranians feel similarly about attending prayer services. While many youth in Iran would like to attend Friday prayer out of a commitment to their religion, they choose not to. In Shi’a Islam, the dominant sect of Islam in Iran, a senior ranking cleric in every major city gives two sermons at the central mosque. The first is a religious sermon, while the second usually focuses on political or social issues. Most of the Friday prayer leaders in Iran are conservative clerics, and the sermons therefore tend to have a strict Shi’a interpretation of the Quran. While they vary in their style of speech, each holds one of the three highest ranks in Shi’a Islam: grand ayatollah, ayatollah, or hojjatoleslam. The “Down with USA” and “Death to Israel” rhetoric that is often captured in the media usually comes from a Friday prayer.
    These political sermons are hardly the representative phenomena they are often made out to be: Less than 3 percent of the population attends Friday prayers. This is a shocking statistic for a country that claims to be an Islamic republic and that just a decade ago required people to attend by law. Many of those who do attend Friday prayer do so because they fear absence will result in the loss of a job or, for students, the loss of favor with the university. It is not uncommon for a bystander to see the Friday prayer venue emptying out just before the political sermon. Most Iranians view Friday prayer as a forum that has been hijacked by the conservatives, and they have no interest in endorsing the regime with their attendance. Many people in Iran view the Friday prayer as having lost its religious essence. Instead, they see it as a mere forum for the regime to galvanize its few supporters and reaffirm its ideology.
    Friday prayer in Iran is hardly the scene that it was in the initial years after the Islamic Revolution, when waves of Iranians washed into mosques throughout the country to hear the clerical icons who “liberated” Iran from the grip of the world’s superpowers. The brand of nationalism and religion that they advocated resonated in a revolutionary context. But it was not long before the prolonged Iran-Iraq War and the reality of economic hardships made everyday life virtually unbearable for the Iranian people. The leadership fruitlessly tried to use religion to keep a hold on their hearts and minds.
    Despite a massive decline in attendance at Friday prayer, the government continues to force a visible presence. Every Friday, crowds of people still walk as a mass through the streets, blocking traffic as they stroll to the mosque. But the genuine fervor that surrounded the Friday prayer in 1979 is long gone. Today, the politicization of Friday prayer in Iran attracts mainly the most devout and the coerced. The scene is almost a robotic display of indoctrination as crowds will throw their fists in the air, repeating the words of fiery clerics such as Ayatollah Jannati: “Markbar Ameerika! Inshallah! Markbar Ameerika! Inshallah!” Not surprisingly, it is often these same people chanting “Death to America, God willing,” and those the government pays, who participate in protests against the United States.
    Given the imposed regulation of wearing hejab, the sisters demonstrated to me that while removing the head scarf was not possible because of the legal consequences, the discomfort of compulsory dress codes could be mitigated. They took ownership of the repression: If the government forced them to wear hejab, they wore the hejab in a style and manner that was farthest from what Iran’s conservatives envisioned. They westernized the scarf and wore it on their own terms.
    The hejab is a fascinating topic of conversation, especially among youth. In every country in the Middle East, I encountered women with various interpretations of the hejab. In Islam, the Quran states the following with reference to concealing the body:
 
    And tell the believing women to subdue