The Ayatollah Begs To Differ (2008) - Plot & Excerpts
That’s how all Iranian stories, at least in the oral tradition, have begun, since as long as anyone remembers. “There was one; there wasn’t one,” as in “There was a person (once upon a time); but on the other hand, no, there was no one.” Often, the saying continues with “Gheir az Khoda, heech-kee nabood,” or “Other than God, there was no One,” a uniquely Persian obfuscation of the Muslim Arabic “La’illa ha il’allah” (There is no God but Allah), and which one might think makes much less sense than the original, but is in a way perfectly reasonable. Introduce a young mind to the paradoxes of life with a paradox, you see, which is what most of the Iranian folk stories are about in the first place. As a child, I heard those stories alongside English equivalents (which of course began with the seemingly far more sensible “Once upon a time”), but it never occurred to me then that the simple “Yeki-bood; yeki-nabood” said so much about the inherited culture that so deeply penetrated my otherwise Western life.
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