Pico Iyer
speaker
117 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 17 Jul
Pico Iyer’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Five million people had gathered from every corner of the Shia world, he said, from Yemen and Pakistan and Beirut and Iraq, from all the provinces of Iran, to mark the auspicious occasion.
As we pushed through a tiny entrance behind a wall of bodies, all we could make out was celebration.
The crowds here were so intense that little boys were being passed from shoulder to shoulder so they could arrive at the front and kiss the golden grill behind which lay the saint.
A man wailed and a great sound rose up around us.
More than 30 million pieces of silver on the walls and chandeliers turned us all into a shiver of reflections.
I was humbled as I moved among the sobbing bodies.
Men were running their hands down their faces and weeping as at their mother's funeral.
More people pressed in, and the whole crowd seemed to sway and tremble, as if we were truly part of a single massed body.
I'd lost contact by now with my driver, but then I caught sight of him across the room.
And I saw that there were tears in this young driver's eyes.
His hand was on his heart and he was literally moving backwards, walking backwards, so he would never present his back to the long dead saints.
And I thought, my goodness, this is a perfect image of Islamic piety.
But then when we were out of the shrine and walking back towards his car, he started telling me about his wife, who was a blonde Yorkshire woman, waiting for him in England and expecting their first child.
And then he told me that he had paid a human trafficker $2,500 to smuggle him into England in the back of a truck, breathing through a tube so he wouldn't be detected.
And then he told me how the British government had very generously offered
given him a court-appointed lawyer and translator, and they had worked night and day for three years in order to win him asylum in Britain.
Yes.
In other words, he'd risked his life to flee Iran and to make a new life for himself in England, and yet having done that, every single summer, he stole back into Iran,
to see the hometown and the mosque and most of all, the mother that he loved so much.
So having risked his life to flee Iran, he risked his life every single year to come back to Iran.
Showing 41–60 of 117 · page 3 of 6
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