Mohammad Reza in Jolfa, Esfahan

Mohammad Reza in Jolfa, Esfahan
Originally uploaded by rastapopolos

This is Mohammad Reza, enjoying food and conversation with us in the old Armenian quarter of Esfahan. Dinner with random strangers? Only in Iran could you contemplate such a thing.

We were standing on a street corner in Jolfa in the dark, looking in the guide book for a restaurant that wasn't there anymore. I was wearing my tourist beacon. Mohammad Reza approached us and asked did we need help. We got into the usual introductory chat ("Where are you from, what do you do?") and after we'd wandered around for a bit and consulted the map several times, he confirmed that the restaurant we were looking for was definitely closed.

We asked him to suggest another restaurant to us and invited him to join us for some food. After protestations, he politely took us up on our offer.

Mohammad Reza is a material sciences student, studying in Esfahan but also a native of the city. He'd spend a year living in Vancouver when he was fifteen (his dad is a university professor) and going to school there. He'd loved it. He's 22 now and almost finished his course. We'd learned all this before we'd even found the restaurant. His English is excellent and he's a funny guy with a quirky sense of humour.

We had a great evening chatting about all kinds of subjects; towards the end of the evening, Mohammad told us how, as a rational fellow, he'd weighed up the evidence for and against God and had decided that Islam was the religion for him. Yes, he admitted, he was born into a Muslim family, but on balance he reckoned it was the religion with the best moral code.

He explained that Muslims don't believe in the Christian notion of the Trinity or in the divinity of Jesus ("There no God but Allah and Mohammad is his prophet") and when we got onto the topic of heaven and hell, I asked about the fate of unbelievers.

"Well," he said with a grin, "there are good Muslims who go to heaven and there are bad Muslims who go to hell. If you're born a Muslim, it's impossible to be unbeliever!"