Descendants of Cyrus

by Thornton, Christopher;

  The city that Shah Abbas created became a veritable melting pot of cultures from Asia and beyond. Chinese porcelain masters were brought to Esfahan to teach their trade to local craftsmen. The Armenians mingled with Indians, Turks, Georgians, and Christian missionaries. Naqsh-e Jahan Square became the center of civic life. Merchants bought and sold goods that passed through Iran on the camel caravans traveling along the Silk Road. After sunset, the square became Esfahan’s entertainment central. Puppeteers and jugglers performed for children, Esfahanis relaxed in coffeehouses, and to provide the needed touch of the risqué, prostitutes combed the crowd in search of clients. The square was also an occasional polo ground, with the shah watching the matches from the third-floor balcony of his Ali Qapu Palace.

  Today it would seem ironic that, given its liberal history, Esfahan would become one of Iran’s more religiously conservative cities. This is not owing to an abundance of shrines to draw the Shiite faithful, as in Mashhad, or being recognized as an important center of Islamic learning, like Qom. What Esfahan still has are madresses, or teaching centers, where aspiring mullahs cut their teeth on the fine points of Islamic law and Islamic principles. In the medieval period, the golden years of Islamic learning, a student’s curriculum included studies in theology, philosophy, natural science, and metaphysics.

  In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, one of the most prominent madresses was the Chahar-bagh, an expansive complex that had its own mosque, bazaar, and caravansary to accommodate passing traders. Like the monasteries and convents in medieval Europe, the madresses also functioned as business enterprises. Profits from the Chahar-bagh bazaar helped to fund the school, representing the interweaving of religion, politics, and economics that drove civic life not only in Esfahan but in much of Iran. Today the Chahar-bagh is still a functioning madresse, a quiet haven set apart from the urban calamity but residing, quite contentedly, in the middle of it. Shade trees rise over a rectangular pool that connects two brilliant blue-tiled iwans. The dome above the prayer hall is a circle of blue-and-gold-patterned tile work, like other domed ceilings meant to represent the beauty of the heavens.

  The way to the mosque follows one of Esfahan’s primary shopping streets. At a glance it looks like a commercial thoroughfare from anywhere—DVD outlets and electronics stores adjacent to shops for men’s suits and children’s toys, mobile phones and furniture, kitchen appliances and jewelry, and somewhere in-between a beauty salon and a one-stop shop for athletic wear. But look a little closer and differences appear. The womenswear boutique has an array of manteaux, or thigh-length jackets to meet the guidelines for proper Islamic wear, and a blizzardy array of headscarves and a wide variety of slacks, slacks being a garment of choice for Iranian women, because for a skirt to be worn in public it must extend to the ankles. None of the DVDs on display promoted American movies—all the latest releases are available, but in pirated form—and the choices of music rule out hip-hop and rap, Eminem and Beyoncé. But what is most striking is the lack of well-known international brands. There is the occasional Samsung store and a Sony outlet, and here and there a sign for Bata and Braun, Mango and Sephora, but they are infrequent waystations on the retail landscape. Strolling along any shopping street in Iran one is tempted to ask, What is wrong with this picture?

  The answer is international sanctions. Sanctions have restricted outside investment in Iran, keeping many European retailers waiting at Iran’s borders. For several years galloping inflation has made shopping in Iran more like a scavenger’s hunt, as penny-pinching consumers flock to bazaars for daily essentials and keep a close eye out for sales on everything else. Consequently, many of the upper-middle class will do their high-end spending in the shopping malls of Dubai and Istanbul, but for Iran’s upper crust, who are immune to the impact of sanctions, designer-brand shopping malls in North Tehran serve their needs. Other fashion-conscious Iranians will order favorite items from catalogs and have them delivered to local stores. A friend of mine in Tehran outfitted most of her apartment from Dubai’s Ikea outlet. She was the head accountant for the French oil giant Total in its Tehran office, before Total pulled out of Iran entirely following American president Donald’s Trump’s withdrawal from the 2015 nuclear deal. Till then, she made monthly trips to Dubai to close the accounts for the Dubai office, and used the trips to pick up rugs and kitchenware and do-it-yourself furniture.

  If I had been an Esfahani out running my weekly errands, the walk would have been a march of humiliation and frustration. Daily necessities were now priced as luxuries. The rial was snowballing downhill so quickly that many Iranians chose the only option for psychological stability—to stick their heads in the sand.

  “We don’t even check the exchange rate anymore,” one friend told me. “We don’t want to know how bad things are.”

  Fortunately, as I walked, the sun was out to add a bit of lightness to even the wan looks of disgruntled shoppers, and before this stretch became too depressing the street emptied into the grand bazaar.

  Esfahan’s bazaar sweeps around Naqsh-e Jahan Square in a mile-long arcade where almost anything in the city can be bought and sold, and even the stall keepers do their part to push the boundaries of the regime’s Islamic codes. The female mannequins don manteaux that would be too tight for the morals police had they been worn by real women, and other mannequins are given a makeup treatment that puts them in the company of real women who use their faces as counterrevolutionary weapons and thumb their noses at the regime.

  The bazaar is also an ideal place to people-watch Iranian expatriates, those who fled the country during the tumultuous years of the revolution and have spent the bulk of their lives in Europe, Canada, or the United States. When they return they visit places like the Esfahan bazaar to pick up souvenirs to retrieve a taste of their former lives, to reclaim a fading identity.

  In a stall selling decorative glazed tiles I watched three young women poring over the pieces, moving on to pearl-inlaid jewelry boxes and lacquered pencil cases. They pulled at the corners of their headscarves, tugged at their manteaux wherever they bound up. It was obvious they hadn’t learned to move in one smoothly, gracefully, like the local divas with decades of experience. Their facial features were clearly Persian, and I could have been fooled into thinking they had lived in Iran all their lives, but then one called out, in unaccented American English, “Niloo, I think these are marked down!”

  Then I was caught at my own game—I had fallen under the gaze of a man on the other side of the corridor.

  “Hey, you’re an American, aren’t you?”

  His genuine Nikes and neatly stitched Levis said he hadn’t been doing much shopping in Iran.

  Masoud had been living in suburban Los Angeles for more than thirty years. He had gone to the U.S. to study physics at Texas A&M University during the Iran-Iraq War and later earned a PhD at the University of Utah. From there he began working on hydrology projects for the State of California. The prospect of his returning to Iran faded with the years. He became an American citizen, but what had not diminished were his views of the Islamic regime.

  “I never liked the shah,” Masoud told me. “He became too self-centered. He thought he was Iran. But these bastards [referring to the ruling mullahs] I hate everything about them. They’ve tried to wipe out everything that is important to the Iranian identity, everything that means something to be Iranian, everything except Islam. They’ve stolen the history and culture of the country.”

  Being a foreigner, especially an American, serving as a sounding board for passionate denunciations of the ruling order from angry Iranians wasn’t at all uncommon, but hearing them so soon in conversation was. I doubted that Masoud spent much time in suburban Los Angeles stewing over the regime. More likely, his return had stirred up long-dormant resentments, and running into a fellow American gave him license to release them. It added a new spin to the tired phrase, “You can’t go home again.” For an Iranian expatriate, you can’t go happily, anyway.

&
nbsp; “You know,” Masoud went on, “most of the mullahs don’t even support the government. You’ll never hear it, but probably 80 percent are against it.”

  A claim like that seemed boggling, but nothing on the Iranian political landscape is impossible. I asked why.

  “They see it as betraying true Islamic principles, and they see its hypocrisy, and then there’s all the corruption.”

  Still, Masoud’s view clashed with another I’d heard regarding the loyalty of the country’s mullahs: “Of course they love the powerful position they hold. Why wouldn’t they?”

  To be sure, a touch of arrogant self-assurance could be seen in the body language of the mullahs strutting the streets, in Qom, and in Esfahan, and wherever their political power could assert itself. Once newly acquitted, political power was now a part of their role, and one they had gladly settled into. So they carried the air of self-entitlement one sees in the nouveau riches, with little humility and even less concern for the consequences of the power they hold. With so little popular support, their primary interest is not in learning how to use their power for the good of society but to simply preserve it.

  Which view was closer to the truth? Did the mullahs on the street see through the ruling mullahs, or did they relish in the power they held by association? There was no reason to haggle over this, for it would have taken the rest of the afternoon and concluded nothing. Instead, Masoud shared a popular joke that had been circulating among the disaffected: “A woman stops at a traffic light and sees a mullah on the corner about to cross the street. She leans out of her window and yells, ‘I want to piss on your turban!’ ‘You’ll have to wait your turn,’ the mullah replies. ‘There’s a long line.’”

  We both laughed, and, as we parted, Masoud, as expected, wished me a very pleasant stay in Iran and then added, a bit wistfully, “You know, there are a lot of beautiful things to see here.”

  “I know,” I said, with all honesty, and headed out.

  Two of Iran’s most stunning mosques stand on Naqsh-e Jahan Square—the Imam and Sheikh Lotfollah. Both are masterpieces of both Persian and Islamic architecture. Both were built in the early seventeenth century in the early reign of Shah Abbas. Both had to be constructed at oblique angles to the square so that they could face qibla, the direction of Mecca, since the square was aligned on a north-south axis. Today, both are UNESCO World Heritage Sites boasting beautiful blue tile work in their interiors and on their domes, and both are symbols of the Esfahan skyline. And that is where the similarities end.

  Shah Abbas intended the Imam Mosque—called the Shah Mosque before the revolution—to be a grand place of prayer for all of Esfahan’s faithful. Thus the massive, towering iwan at the entrance, welcoming all who entered, and the massive courtyard beyond. Each side features a large iwan, with the one facing Mecca the largest, though, in true iwan symbolism, all are intended to represent gateways to the spiritual world.

  The four-iwan design of the Persian mosque was developed in the eleventh century and soon spread throughout central Asia. But Shah Abbas wanted his mosque to stand for far more than heavenly greatness. Consolidation of his political power was also to be expressed in the plan, so he built four minarets, each 120 feet in height, adding a political statement to his capital’s skyline. It may have taken eighteen years to build, but there is nothing grand or monumental about the Sheikh Lotfollah Mosque. It is a dark, gloomy space accessed through an equally gloomy tunnel that takes a few twists and turns before opening into a dimly lit prayer hall decorated with dazzling tile work, and it is topped by a dome with the image of a peacock in the center. The shah didn’t build the Sheikh Lotfollah to impress. It has no minarets, because the purpose of the minaret is to call the people to prayer, and the Sheikh Lotfollah was meant for private worship. Its purpose was to be used solely by members of the royal family and the court, and as a place for the women to pray in private. It was not named for any noteworthy Persian but for a traveling Lebanese preacher who happened to be visiting Esfahan. Despite its modest scale, the mosque’s beauty was enough to impress the twentieth-century travel writer Robert Byron, who wrote in The Road to Oxiana (1937):

  I have never encountered splendor of this kind before. Other interiors came into my mind as I stood there, to compare it with: Versailles, or the porcelain rooms at Schönbrunn, or the Doge’s Palace, or St. Peter’s. All are rich; but none so rich.

  Curious as to whether I’d be treated to the same magic, I zigzagged down the dimly lit tunnel until it opened up into the prayer hall. It was as dark as a dungeon, but, through the small window grills high near the dome, sharp shafts of light splashed across the blue-and-gold tiles on the opposite walls, recreating the arc of the sun as it passed across the sky. The light was enough to illuminate the rest of the hall with a dim glow that resembled moonlight. The dark blue tiles turned the room into a sanctuary of perpetual nightfall, resembling a forest under a full moon, while the golden tiles were able to catch the light, flickering like distant stars.

  The room was as quiet as it was dim. A few more visitors entered. Voices were lowered to a whisper. The only resonant statements came from the verses of the Quran that rose up and down the sides of the mihrab and around the base of the dome in bands of swirling white calligraphy. There was no need for a display of clocks indicating the times for prayer, because the room was a hallowed space set apart from the busy square and the public world it represented. It was an intensely private refuge that even for an unbeliever would encourage a retreat into the realm of the spirit.

  Back in the square, I had to pop my sunglasses back on to let my eyes readjust to the afternoon light. I had only been in the mosque for fifteen or twenty minutes, but I felt as though I had been jarred out of a deep sleep. Everywhere life was humming. Shoppers loaded down with bags were leaving the bazaar, and around the pool the fountain spouts were spraying water in parabolic arcs. Sweating locals had removed their shoes and were sitting poolside, cooling their feet.

  I strolled over to the Imam Mosque. While the Sheikh Lotfollah provided privacy and seclusion, the Imam provided grandeur. Entering the courtyard, I stumbled into a world of giants. The courtyard stretched into the distance like the surface of the open sea. The tops of the iwans poked the highest heights of the skies. But the most beautiful feature of the mosque was its central dome. It was Persian architects who added the dome to mosque design, beginning in Iran and eventually spreading throughout the Islamic world. Sheikh Bahai Ad-Din Al-Amili, responsible for the creation of Naqsh-e Jahan Square, made sure that the crest of the dome of the Imam Mosque would be the highest point in the city. He covered the interior with the customary gold and blue tiles, but here they were arranged in seven concentric circles, to represent the divisions of the heavens, which embrace the sun, the moon, and all of the stars.

  Persian architects also understood that buildings couldn’t be all show and no tell. With such a large congregation to preach to and without the aid of amplified sound, acoustics mattered. Consequently, the dome and its supporting walls were constructed so that the preacher could speak at any volume higher than a whisper and his voice would carry to its furthest corners. To test it, I stood beneath the exact peak of the dome and pretended I was blowing out a birthday cake full of candles. I waited. There was a second of silence—and then a hollow “hush” echoed from the back of the hall.

  With such stunning settings to send their prayers to the heavens, it might seem surprising that Iranians are the least-frequent mosque-goers in the Muslim world. The BBC has estimated that only 1 to 2 percent of Iranians attend Friday prayers. Only about one-fourth bother to pray at all. The Islamic regime may have only itself to blame. Decades of enforced Islamic dogma have alienated the once moderately religious not only from Islam but religion itself.

  Back in the sixteenth century, the square had more than mosques to offer. Across from the Sheikh Lotfollah Mosque was Ali Qapu Palace, the digs that Shah Abbas set up for himself in his new capital. In the ancient world symbol
ism mattered, so he, too, followed the common practice of building on the ruins of former rulers, as a way of replacing one imperial domination with another. Thus, the foundation of Ali Qapu was constructed on the site of a former Uzbek palace. But Ali Qapu was built in fits and starts, with bits and pieces of the palace cobbled together over seventy years. Nevertheless, Ali Qapu as it stands today is largely the house that Shah Abbas built, with a view of the entire city from its upper floors, which made the entire square his front lawn.

  Ali Qapu means “Imperial Gate,” but the prime feature of the palace was, again, acoustics. Back in Safavid times Ali Qapu straddled one of the entrances to the square, and the archways were designed to preserve sound as it traveled within its four corners. To give it a try, I stood beside one of the pillars supporting the entrance arch and spoke so quietly that I could hardly hear my own voice, but it could be heard with crisp clarity on the other side. I had tried the same in the Whispering Gallery of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, the balcony that hangs high over the altar, but here at Ali Qapu there were open archways through which the sound could escape while still holding tight, like a balloon with holes that did not leak. Even Sir Christopher Wren would have been impressed.

  The acoustic feat for which Ali Qapu is most well known lies much higher up, on the sixth floor, known as the Music Room. During the reign of Shah Abbas it was the setting for music and choral performances when royal guests were on hand to be entertained. I started the climb, up a narrow staircase that wound up through the center of the palace past dim, fusty rooms in need of a sprucing up, and ended where it opened up into an attic-like room that was spacious enough to serve as an intimate salon.