Quotes from Roy Mottahedeh

Iranian high school students learned how to draw microscopes and how to write letter-perfect descriptions of the way in which microscopes worked, but the microscopes in Iranian schools usually remained locked up as property too valuable to be put in students' hands. The

introduced school songs, patriotic holidays, and nationalistic themes in textbooks, all of which made an ancient love of Iran into a modern nationalism.

The Shiah student of law, in attempting to reconstruct the subtext of premises and methods of reasoning that underlie these earlier books, is really attempting to reconstruct the mental process of their authors and ultimately, to read the minds of their inspirer, the true Legislator, God.

Here he found that European learning, like Oriental bookkeeping, had its useless intricacies designed to keep outsiders where they belonged.

For twelve hundred years Mullahs have been writing proofs of the existence of God. Believe me, I've taught theology for a long time - none of them is real proof. The only real proof can come through illumination.

Willingness to conform to Islamic law, even in the face of doubt, spiritual aridity, and dark nights of the soul, is the mark of a serious Muslim.

Yet even for al-Ghazzali the law is the indispensable beginning; and when completely internalized, the law also becomes an integral part of the end toward which the spiritual quest is directed. Ghazzali writes: "Know that the beginning of guidance is outward piety and the end of guidance is inward piety.

Ali, who had seen scores of his students go out to become mullahs of neighborhoods and villages, now thanked God he had the talent to remain in a life of learning, since he clearly lacked the courage - he was tempted to say the audacity - to tell other people how to live their lives.

Please excuse this slow-witted talabeh, who will have to read the text and the margins several times to make sure he gets today's lesson right.