Eulogy to my grandmother Vajieh

 

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Have lost my last living grandparent, my paternal grandmother: Vajieh, i.e. my late father's mother. She was 92 years old. The mother to five children, one which she lost at child-birth. She married my late grandfather (d. 2016) just after the Second World War when Iran was still occupied by the British and Soviets. She was there when my late grandfather went through law school at Tehran University in the late 1940s and early 1950s and witnessed along with him the nationalization of oil, the Mossadegh era and the August 1953 coup d'etat which both she and my grandfather would reminisce about quite frequently. She also lived through the first year of the (anti-)Islamic (counter-)Revolution of Khomeini before emigrating with my grandfather to the United States in the summer of 1979.

           Born of Jewish-Baha'i parentage, Vajieh's father had been the son of a Tehran-based Jewish rabbi and wine-seller who had renounced Judaism for Bahaism at the turn of the 20th century and turned his entire Jewish family against himself. Her mother was the daughter of a Hamadani Jewish family who during the same period had also converted to Bahaism and subsequently (other than her and her baby brother) had been murdered in Hamadan inside their house by an enraged mob incited by a crazy, demonically-possessed local Hamadani mullah. Among other things, the late Musa Amanat claimed to me at their house during the 1990s when I was living in Los Angeles, that based on his research the Mottehedeh family of Hamadan (which my great paternal grandmother originally came from) may have been direct descendants of the famous 13th-14th century CE Iranian rabbi and kabbalist, Joseph of Hamadan, who along with Moses de Leon was responsible for the physical authorship of the Sefer ha-Zohar (the Book of Splendor).

        Vajieh married my grandfather, Muhammad, who originally hailed from a Kirmani Shaykhi Twelver Shi'i (and Musawwi siyyid) family hailing from one of the villages on the far outskirts of Kirman, Bahramabad (later renamed Rafsanjan). This is testimony to the secularization of Iran under the Pahlavis as well as to some degree the Baha'i pedigree of my late grandmother's family where sectarian barriers (albeit briefly) fell away and Muslims and non-Muslims were regularly marrying and producing families.

        My late grandmother briefly worked as a civil servant of the Pahlavi state during the 1950s up to the early 1960s, so she was both a professional as well as a mother to four children. She also traveled with my grandfather as he became a magistrate judge in Gonbad-e-Kavus (Golestan province, northeast Iran) and briefly Sanandaj in Iranian Kurdistan. Among many things, Vajieh was one of the greatest Iranian cooks I have ever experienced, and her ghormeh-sabzi, khoresh-e-fesenjan, khoresh-e-bademjan and torshi-e-bademjan recipes were something on the order of culinary Alchemy. She and my aunt also became surrogate mothers to me when I was small. In the mid 1980s she and my late grandfather settled in Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA from southern California.

        Vajieh leaves behind three living children, seven grandchildren and four great-grandchildren. May the Light of lights sheds Its Splendor upon her in every moment, before every moment and after every moment! Amin!

 

شَهِدَ اللَّهُ لَا إِلَٰهَ إِلَّا اللَّهُ حَقًّا حَقًّا إِنَّا لِلَّهِ وَإِنَّا بِاللَّهِ رَافِعُونَ وَرَاجِعُونَ