Friendly, multilingual staff who live to assist foreign visitors with the shrine will show you a 20-minute video and shower you with books on all things Shiite. However, once you’ve visited this office there’s no escape from the free, friendly but over-protective guide/minder they assign you.
A good starting point for nonpilgrim visits is Falakeh Ab, from which several of the domes and minarets are tantalisingly visible in the middle distance. Enter through the vast, part-constructed Razavi Grand Courtyard , which should become grander once the blue, white and gold tiling has been affixed to the courtyard’s facades and concrete minarets. Curving east you’ll pass the Haram’s museums (the Main Museum and the Carpet Museum) after the unfinished Imam Khomeini Courtyard site. Beyond, look northwest across the gorgeous Azadi Courtyard to glimpse the exterior of the Holy Shrine building.
Notice the Naqqareh Khaneh , a blue-tiled bandstand platform perched above a clock tower gateway. Twice daily (before dawn and dusk) a mesmerising 10-minute fanfare is performed here by drummers and a heptet of hornblowers in faintly comical Salvation Army–style peaked-caps.
Non-Muslims aren’t supposed to transit the spectacular Enqelab Courtyard with its two gold minarets and fabulous tile-work. So to reach Jomhuri Courtyard , the setting for massed evening namaz (prayers), infidels should double back via Qods Courtyard , which features a miniature version of Jerusalem’s ‘Dome of the Rock’.
The gold-domed centrepiece of the Haram complex is the revered 17th-century Holy Shrine building. Amid tearful prayer and meditation, the emotional climax to any Mashhad pilgrimage is touching and kissing the zarih (gold-latticed cage), which covers Imam Reza’s tomb in the shrine’s spectacular interior. The current zarih, the fifth, dates from 2001. Non-Muslims are excluded, but can see the previous zarih in the Haram’s Main Museum.
You might catch a glimpse of the 50m blue dome and cavernous golden portal of the classic Timurid Azim-e Gohar Shad mosque (built from 1405 to 1418). However, non-Muslims aren’t allowed within to appreciate its splendid interior hosting the minbar (pulpit) where, according to Shiite tradition, the Mahdi (12th ‘hidden’ Imam) will sit on the Day of Judgement.
