Zoroastrians bequeathed to us a more influential legacy, too. They believed that those who fought on the side of good could hope after death to enter the House of Song, which they also called the Abode of Light. Egyptian wall paintings had portrayed a glorious afterlife, but only for the pharaoh and perhaps his servants. The Greeks fighting in the siege of Troy hoped for nothing after their death except fame: their shade might remain in Hades, but that was at best a shadowy existence. Zarathustra taught that any person who followed a certain code of conduct on earth could live forever, that the soul mattered, and that a good deity exerted power over the world. Those who served Angra Mainyu, on the other hand, would be punished with misery and darkness. These notions of good and evil, and heaven and hell, were to prove very influential.
In the early Jewish scriptures (the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Torah), for example, there is no reference to Satan. Evil is represented instead by a serpent in the garden. After death, all souls, without differentiation, went to a place called Sheol; there was no heaven and hell. When the Jews were liberated from Babylon by the Persian king Cyrus in 539 bc, this changed. In the Book of Job, perhaps written at around that time, Satan is a powerful being, able to intervene in the world, inflicting plagues on an innocent man—the exact kind of action that Angra Mainyu undertakes in Zoroastrian belief. In the second-century bc Book of Daniel, heaven and hell appear: “Many of those who sleep in the dusty ground will awake—some to everlasting life, and others to shame and everlasting abhorrence.”
Centuries later, Jesus’s description of Satan resembles Angra Mainyu, in that a good God sows wheat, but God’s enemy scatters weeds in the wheat field; only at the end of time can the weeds be separated from the wheat and burned. Similarly, it was after the Greeks encountered the Persians that the Greek philosopher Plato suggested souls went to reward or punishment after their death, depending on what they had done in their lives. Religion had been fundamentally changed. The nineteenth-century German philosopher Nietzsche, looking back at these events, judged that “Zarathustra created this most portentous of all errors—morality.” (Consequently, he wrote a book in which Zarathustra returns and abolishes moral law. Richard Strauss was so impressed by the book that he named a fanfare after it: in this roundabout way the name Zarathustra lives on in concert halls around the world.)
Laal and her fellow Zoroastrians knew that their community was small and vulnerable. From time to time they experienced disrespect and hostility from their neighbors: Laal’s brother was attacked once by boys throwing stones and shouting the word gabr, a derogatory term for Zoroastrians. But they had the consolation of knowing that their own ideas had shaped the way those neighbors thought.
They had also the sight of some very concrete achievements left by Zoroastrians long ago. Persepolis is a city of white marble with a royal palace at its heart, two hundred miles southwest of Yazd, built in the sixth century bc when the Persian Empire stretched from the west coast of Turkey to the deserts of Kazakhstan. The emperor Xerxes supposedly gave the order for the invasion of Greece while in the palace, and when Alexander the Great conquered the Persian empire in 330 bc he wrecked it in a drunken fit of revelry and revenge. Now, all around the marble staircase are scattered remains of pillars, half-destroyed walls, and the occasional fine sculpture that survived the fire because it was in storage at the time. As an inscription written by a medieval visitor on one of its pillars asked, “How many cities which have been built betwixt the horizons / Lay ruined in the evening, while their dwellers were in the abode of death?” To this day, Alexander has never been forgiven. The name Sekandar is common among Muslims in Kashmir, and in the Arab world Alexander is remembered as Dhu’l Qurnein, a heroic figure mentioned in the Koran. Not so in Iran, where Zoroastrians still call him “Alexander the Accursed.”
Even in its present ruined state Persepolis has a power to impress, as a monument to the onetime power of the Persian Empire. It was “the richest city under the sun,” according to the Sicilian historian Diodorus. All over its remains are the signs and emblems of Zoroastrianism, especially the bird-man motif, the fravahar. “Everything we have constructed that looks beautiful,” declared an inscription left at the top of the staircase by Xerxes, “we have constructed through the grace of Ahura Mazda.” When I visited this palace in 2006 these Zoroastrian symbols did not stop my guide, a young Iranian woman in a hejab, from taking obvious pride in the empire that had built it. She took special pleasure in explaining the meaning of the grand staircase, a masterpiece of carving with twenty-three panels, each representing one of the empire’s subject nations. “Twenty-three peoples,” she said. “Look, here are the Arabs . . . the Armenians . . . the Scythians . . .” Each delegation had a distinctive characteristic: Arabs bringing a camel, Armenians bringing wine, Scythians bringing horses. All were offering tribute to Persepolis as a sign that they accepted Persian hegemony. In the course of the few decades that preceded the making of these panels, Persian armies had conquered the great kingdoms of the known world—Babylon, Lydia, Egypt.
The fravahar, the winged figure that is a symbol of Zoroastrianism, atop the pillars of Persepolis—which was built by the emperor Darius in the sixth century bc. Photo by the author
The second and last of the Pahlavi shahs who ran Iran in the twentieth century, Mohammed Reza Shah, oversaw in 1971 an opulent celebration at Persepolis of 2,500 years of Iranian civilization. Kings, presidents, and an emperor were entertained with 2,500 bottles of wine, 92 imperial peacocks, and processions of soldiers dressed in historical garb, and the guests slept in 52 silk-lined, air-conditioned tents with marble en suite bathrooms, specially built for the occasion. The festival was intended to encourage Iranian national pride as an alternative to the religious sentiment on which the shah’s Islamic opponents, such as the Ayatollah Khomeini, based their appeal. It also was a reminder to Iranians that in their greatest era they had been ruled by monarchs. The sheer extravagance of the festival contributed to public disaffection and the shah’s downfall in the Islamic Revolution of 1979. Yet even under the ayatollahs, Iran has not forgotten its former empire. When Warner Bros. produced the film 300, which glorified the Greek resistance to the imperial Persian armies at Thermopylae in 480 bc, Iranians were outraged. “Three hundred against seventy million!” declared an Iranian newspaper headline at the time—meaning the seventy million citizens of Iran, almost all of them Muslim, united in nationalist outrage at the insult to their Zoroastrian predecessors.
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In the aftermath of the 2003 Iraq war I was sent to Basra, in southern Iraq. Driving along the coastal road south of Basra city, along the Shatt al-Arab—the vast estuary where Iraq’s rivers meet before they flow into the Gulf—I found that the road was decorated with a hundred statues of men pointing accusing fingers across the water toward Iran. A territorial dispute over the estuary waters had led to a state of near-warfare between Iraq and Iran in the 1970s, and when Iran’s secular ruler, the shah, was overthrown and Ayatollah Khomeini ascended to power, the dispute erupted into a war that cost a million lives. The statues were erected by Saddam after the war to encourage people to see Iran, not their own government, as the enemy. Each statue was modeled on an Iraqi soldier who had died in the war.
I knew that it would not be easy to visit the other side of that estuary. Just as the Persians, when they were Zoroastrians, would ritually execrate Angra Mainyu, the supernatural creator of all that was evil, so now the Islamic government of Iran organized demonstrations at which protesters recited, “Death to America! Death to Britain!” For Iranian revolutionaries, who overthrew the Western-backed monarchy in 1979, America was the “Great Satan” and Britain was the “Little Satan.” Yet Britain’s standing in the demonology was older than America’s, or Israel’s for that matter. A well-loved Iranian book, My Uncle Napoleon, features an eccentric old soldier who sees British plots everywhere. That book is set in the 1940s, and the old soldier’s
paranoia dates back to events at the start of the twentieth century, when Russia and Britain set up spheres of influence in Iran and dominated its economy. When the Islamic Revolution came in 1979, the Ayatollah Khomeini blamed the British for being a power behind his enemy the shah—even though the monarchy had already blamed the British for being the power behind the Ayatollah. (“If you lift up a mullah’s beard,” the shah of Iran had said, “you will find made in britain stamped on his chin.”)
In 2006, when I was working in Baghdad, I thought I might have my chance. I encountered the Iranian ambassador at a reception given by the president of Iraq, and introduced myself in rather bad Persian before lapsing briefly into Arabic. He thought I was Iraqi, and engaged in friendly conversation. But then he asked where I worked—and when I told him it was the British embassy, a grimace crossed his face, as though I had a contagious disease. He backed away. Someone might have seen him talking to me; the report might go back to Tehran and destroy his career. I guessed that it would be a bad time to ask him for a visa. I applied instead at the Iranian embassy in London (there was one at that time), where I was given a rather stiff interview and, to my surprise, a visa. The temporary thawing in the British-Iranian relationship must have helped: the reformists were still theoretically in power in Iran, under President Khatami. Still, when I visited I expected to be followed everywhere by intrusive Iranian intelligence agents and the infamously thuggish basij militia.
The border between Iraq and Iran runs along the Shatt al-Arab estuary northward, through the Iraqi Marshes, and then along the western ridge of the Zagros Mountains. Because it is aligned with these natural barriers to movement, it has always marked a division between cultures: to its east, for three millennia at least, have lived mostly Indo-European peoples; to its west the people have been and are predominantly Semitic. Today Iran still speaks Farsi, while the language of most Iraqis is Arabic. Ajami, meaning “Persian,” is still a derogatory term in parts of Iraq; nor is it hard to find Iranians who look down on their Arab neighbors. It does not help that both sides fought a terrible war in the 1980s in which a million people died.
In Zoroastrian tradition, human history is cyclical—the events of one era are repeated in some form in the next. And certainly the Iran-Iraq border has been a focus of conflict since long before the 1980s. The Persians crossed it westward in the sixth century bc, led by a king called Cyrus, to smash the kingdoms of Babylon and Anatolia and build the largest empire the world had yet known. The massive army, led by Cyrus’s grandson Xerxes, that fought the Greeks at Thermopylae marched across it. Only twice did armies come east across it to occupy Iran. The first was led by Alexander the Great in 331 bc; the second was sent by the Muslim caliph Omar in ad 642 and would ultimately subdue Persia completely and pave the way for its conversion to Islam. (Both men, as it happens, are reviled by Iranians today; a Muslim Iranian is more likely to be called Kouroush [Cyrus] than Omar.) Neither the Romans during their seven hundred years of war with the Persians nor the Turks who fought them for more than three hundred years succeeded in capturing any part of modern-day Iran. The Turks sacked an Iranian city once and then withdrew, while the furthest east the Romans ever reached was a port near Basra, where the emperor Trajan stood wistfully watching ships full of Indian spices as they docked and wishing that he might sail east on one of them, to reach India by sea, for he knew the way by land through Persia was impassable. The border has always been more than a line on a map.
I did not want simply to fly over this historic border, so I made my way to eastern Turkey and prepared to cross into Iran on foot. Just before the border crossing I exchanged my dollars for Iranian riyals. Within Iran itself international sanctions meant that I would have no access to my bank account and that my credit cards would be useless, so I had to take with me all the money I might need. The largest Iranian note they could give me was worth a dollar, and so I ended up with a plastic bag full of them. Carrying this bag of cash in one hand and with a rucksack on my back, I walked up to the Iranian frontier. A huge banner hung there, showing the Ayatollah Khomeini and his successor Khamenei scowling at those walking underneath, as if to say to those entering from liberal Turkey, “Here you leave secularism behind.”
“Welcome!” said a voice as I stepped onto Iranian soil. An old man sitting in a chair seemed to be the only border force deployed here. He looked delighted to see a foreigner among the small crowd of locals. Did he know, I wondered, that I came from the “Little Satan”? I fingered my British passport nervously as I moved on toward the customs queue. I was sure that the staff here, after seeing my passport, would summon the secret police, who would then have me tailed conspicuously wherever I went. But the customs police waved me through, and on the other side there was no sinister escort. In fact, I found myself in an emptying parking lot with no means of onward transport. It seemed I was beneath the Islamic Republic’s notice.
I walked from the terminal along the road. A driver passed by and called out to me, “Ten imams!” I was puzzled. Imam was a name for the Ayatollah Khomeini. But then the man stopped his car and took a 10,000-riyal note out of his wallet. It had a picture of Khomeini on it. “Ten of these,” he said, “to take you to the town.” I asked him instead to drop me at an old house nearby, now a museum, which once had belonged to a Kurdish aristocrat and whose reception rooms were decorated in best Iranian early-twentieth century style, with bright blue shutters and walls covered with shimmering mirrored glass. It had been built in 1912. Iran at that time was undergoing rapid social change, illustrated by two paintings on the ceiling of the dining room. In one, a turbaned patriarch eats with his hands from a bowl while all around him men with mustaches, beards, and black tarbush hats do likewise, or drink tea. In the other, a clean-shaven man in a dinner jacket raises a glass of wine, while his wife, who sits next to him, does the same. Their guests are men and women in smart European fashions. One of the women is shown looking over her shoulder at the tarbush wearers in the other painting.
The pictures were meant to celebrate the change from the old to the new. With hindsight it could be read differently: the Westernized elite were wise to be looking over their shoulders at the traditionalists, because the turbaned patriarchs would eventually take their revenge. In January 1979 Iran’s secular ruler, Mohammed Reza Shah, gave in to the demands of revolutionaries and went into voluntary exile. The following month, his longtime critic Ruhollah Khomeini returned from exile to Tehran, and moved swiftly to take power. As an ayatollah—a senior Shi’a cleric—he claimed divine authority for the new government he established. “The commandments of the ruling jurist,” he declared, meaning his own, “are like the commandments of God.” The shah and his father had done much to help the Zoroastrians; under the ayatollah’s rule, the authorities became more hostile to non-Muslims, and laws were changed in ways that disadvantaged them.
When I reached the nearest town I went to eat at its kebab shop, and two Muslim Iranians at the next table decided to adopt me. They were brothers. “Come to our village,” they said, and I said yes, hoping to see Iranian family life. As we drove through the cherry orchards near Lake Orumiyeh, with Iranian music of exquisite sadness playing on their stereo, I learned that the brothers were Azeris, a Turkish people who have been assimilated into Iran over the past seven hundred years. There were Kurds and Assyrian Christians and Armenians also living in this part of the country, and though each group had its own language, the majority spoke Azeri. At the village, my new hosts asked me to slide down in my seat to avoid being seen, because they were forbidden to entertain foreigners. “It is because I belong to the basij,” one of them told me. So, I realized, I was in the hands of the basij—if not in the way I had feared. The brothers gave me dinner and a bed for the night. I met their wives and small children, who ate with us.
The next morning, when I sat on the red woolen rugs that had been laid out on the floor of the living room and consulted my map, I saw that I was close to a Zoroastr
ian landmark. So after the brothers surreptitiously dropped me off at a bus stop (“Keep down!” they said as the car passed people they knew on the street), I caught a bus for a short ride out of town, past snow-capped peaks, to a steep, cone-shaped hill with dust-colored sides. On the winding track that led to its summit were various Iranian couples, some young boys, and an old man. I followed them, and at the top all of us stared down into the crater of an extinct volcano. This, they told me, was Zendan-e-Soleyman, Solomon’s prison.
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The Jewish king Solomon features prominently in the Koran, where he is said to have had power over the unseen spirits that Muslims call djinn. In one of the fables that make up the Arabian Nights, a fisherman opens a bottle that has the seal of Solomon on its stopper, and a djinni is released and tells how Solomon, “to punish me . . . called for this bottle and imprisoned me in it, and closed it with a leaden stopper, and he stamped the lead with the Most Great Name.” Apparently local tradition held that Solomon had done something similar at Zendan-e-Soleyman, imprisoning rebellious spirits within its deep, steep-sided crater.
The spirits of the place might well have resisted Solomon. Before the coming of Islam this volcano was one of the greatest and most important shrines of Zoroastrianism. It may have been a site for sacrifices: Herodotus tells us that when the Persians wanted to sacrifice to Ahura Mazda, they went up on a high mountain. They also then sacrificed, he added, “to the sun and the moon and the earth, to fire and to water and the winds.” I imagined them climbing the same path that I had come, exhausted from carrying a sacrificial lamb or goat all the way up the mountainside. Three of the four elements remained: wind still swept over the plain, bringing a chill even in springtime; the earth was there, brown and ungenerous; and a nearby lake was still a beautiful deep blue. But the fire had gone.
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