I finished Kader Abdolah’s The House of the Mosque on the same day that organised celebrations (and crackdowns on civil unrest) took place in Tehran to mark the anniversary of the 1979 revolution which swept Mohammad-Rez? Sh?h Pahlavi from power and led to the establishment of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

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Looking at the pictures broadcast, of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his supporters, one could be forgiven for thinking that the population of Iran consists solely of bearded men, sharing single-mindedly one monotheistic culture. A revolution dominated by men, for the benefit of men.

Against that backdrop, there seemed little in Abdolah’s Iranian fable to excite my interest. Does the world really need yet another big (male-written) sweeping epic? Sweeping up, in this case the period before and after the revolution, and doing so in a fairly traditional narrative voice – using the trials and tribulations of one family to cast light on the society around them.

Surely you’d be better off spending your time reading works like Nazar Afisi’s ‘Reading Lolita in Tehran‘ or Marjane Sartrapi’s wonderful graphic novel/autobiography ‘Persepolis‘, which both constitute a complex alternative narrative to the simple ‘Muslims seize power’ story beloved of both neo-cons and islamisists alike. Both of which not only tell a story about Iran, but do so in a clever and innovative way.

But Abdolah’s book (which has become one of the biggest selling novels of all time in his adopted home country of the Netherlands) is, in its own way, also an alternative history. The protagonists may be largely male – the story has a wide range of characters, but all revolve in one way or another around the patriarchal figure of Aqa Jaan – and Muslim, but they are by no means in charge of their own destiny. Because while the two books mentioned above (or indeed the excellent journalistic account of the last days of the shah, Shah of Shahs by Ryszard Kapu?ci?ski) are firmly centred in Tehran, this novel is set outside the twin power bases of first Tehran and then Qom.

In the town of Senejan Aqa Jaan’s family have been custodians of one of the mosque’s for centuries. Aqa Jaan, a businessman, manages the Mosque – his family are privileged and well-to-do as the novel opens. They are neither servants or opponents of the Shah’s regime. By the end of the novel their world will have been turned upside down. The large list of characters will have been trimmed down savagely, and various themes will have been explored.

One of the strengths of the novel is that it carries the reader along, through a series of vignettes of small town life (Fellini, were he still alive, could work wonders with a film version), that keeps its eye on the big picture (feminism, the tension between institutional religion, power and popular faith) without ever sounding like a history or sociology lesson.