Heirs to Forgotten Kingdoms: Journeys Into the Disappearing Religions of the Middle East

by Gerard Russell

  This ruined temple at the foot of Zendan-e-Soleyman once housed the Gushnasp fire, sacred to warriors, which was visited by Persian emperors prior to their battles with the Romans. Photo by the author

  Herodotus adds that the Persians rejected the common practice of depicting gods in human form and worshiping them in temples: “They have no images of the gods, no temples nor altars, and consider the use of them a sign of folly.” Later, though, the Zoroastrians did build temples, perhaps under the influence of Babylonians and other peoples they conquered, but they housed no statues of gods, only an ever-living flame. As I looked down from the crater’s brim I could see the ruins of one of the greatest of these temples. It had been built nearly two millennia ago to house what must have seemed a truly supernatural fire—a flame that was kept perpetually alight by the natural gas seeping from the volcano’s base. The Zoroastrians called this fire Gushnasp and regarded it as one of the three most sacred fires of Persia.

  Gushnasp was known as the warriors’ fire, and Zoroastrian tradition held that it was as old as the world. Persian kings would visit it to make an offering before going out on campaigns against the Romans and later the Byzantines. By the seventh century ad constant warfare had exhausted the Persian Empire. A successful campaign that took the Persians as far west as Egypt proved to be their empire’s last gasp. In ad 627 the last royal visitor came to the Gushnasp fire. His name was Khosro, and he made his visit at a time of despair. He and his forces were in retreat from the advancing Byzantines, who were employing local Arab tribes as mercenaries. The Byzantines were Christians who were known to treat the holy fire with disrespect, and rather than let it fall into their hands Khosro removed it from the shrine and took it with him. Fifteen years later his empire fell—not to the Byzantines but to the Arabs, unified now by Islam.

  The Arabs did not want to confront the Persian armies, which they feared would win any military encounter. But when the Arabs were finally drawn into a battle with the Persian army they successfully pressed their opponents back to a place called Nihavand, where the Persians decided to make a stand. As the great Persian epic the Shahnamah describes the scene, an Arab envoy in rags comes to deliver an ultimatum to the Persian knights, all of them dressed in splendid gold armor, a sign of their glory and decadence. Rustam, son of the Persian king, reads the stars and sees into the future: “The stars decree for us defeat and flight. / Four hundred years will pass in which our name / Will be forgotten and devoid of fame.” After their defeat the emperor and the remnants of his court did indeed flee eastward into central Asia, taking their religion with them. It survived there as the dominant faith for another generation or so. From Nihavand onward, Islam became the state religion in Iran. The fire of Gushnasp was never rekindled.

  Opinions differ over how fast the Iranians abandoned Zoroastrianism, but some members of the royal family appear to have become Muslims early on. Converts would have found that some aspects of the new religion meshed well with Zoroastrian custom. Both religions required their followers to pray several times a day (Zoroastrians three times, Muslims five), revered cleanliness, and were based on a set of divine scriptures. Islam offered an escape from the Zoroastrian caste system, in which priests and warriors were at the top; the lower castes were taught less about the religion and were quicker to abandon it, as is apparent from the high proportion of priestly families among those who have remained Zoroastrian. Converts could have it both ways, adopting Muslim practices but also keeping up some of the most popular traditions of Zoroastrianism, such as the celebration of the New Year (Nowruz), which is still a major two-week festival in Iran. During my visit, I spotted many Iranian families sitting outdoors with picnics in celebration of Sizdah Bedar, the last day of Nowruz.

  Whether the Iranians adopted Islam quickly or slowly, they clearly did not easily accept being ruled by Arabs. In countries further to the west, the Arab invasion transformed the entire culture of the conquered peoples, many of whom eventually began to call themselves “Arabs” and forgot their former identities and languages. It likely helped that the conquered peoples were also Semites, with languages that resembled Arabic, not to mention that they were already subjects of the Byzantine Empire and, with the Arab conquest, were only swapping one set of rulers for another.

  Persia was different. An imperial people now were reduced to subservience. The Arab poet al-Ja’di gives us a poignant image of their changed fortunes: “O men, see how Persia has been ruined and its inhabitants humiliated: they have become slaves who pasture your sheep, as if their kingdom was a dream.” The worst insult that the Zoroastrian priests could throw at someone who left their religion for Islam was that he or she had “ceased to be Iranian.” The Arabs in turn regarded Zoroastrianism with suspicion, often denouncing it as fire worship and hesitating to extend to its followers the same level of tolerance they offered to Christians and Jews.

  As an early Arab governor in Iran warned his fellow Muslims soon after the conquest: “This is the religion of the Persians—to kill Arabs.” In Bukhara the Arabs attempted to spread Islam by offering money to those who came to prayers, and by forcibly settling Arabs among the inhabitants; the city repeatedly rebelled nonetheless, and those who adopted Islam apostatized. The man who was caliph of Islam at the time of Iran’s conquest, Omar ibn al-Khattab, was assassinated by an Iranian slave. Even in subsequent centuries a spirit of rebellion seems to have persisted, especially in the havens that rebel movements could find in the Iranian mountains. Two centuries after the Arab conquest a group called the Khorramiyah and its leader, Babak, operated north of Maku, preaching redistribution of property and free love and waging war on the government. Then in the twelfth century a dynasty that claimed to be descendants of the Prophet Mohammed operated from a fortress called Alamut on a formidable pinnacle of rock standing high above a remote valley. From their mountain stronghold they sent out their followers, known as the Assassins, to kill senior figures in the government that ruled Iran at the time. One of the dynasty declared the abolition of all religious laws: “What was forbidden is now licit,” he said, “and what was licit is now forbidden.”

  Iran was in those days mostly Sunni rather than Shi’a. It became majority Shi’a only in the sixteenth century. Yet it seems more than a coincidence that this fallen empire has ended up with a version of Islam that has embedded within it a sense that all is not right with the world—that the true order of things has been inverted. Shi’a Islam began with twelve imams, who were meant to be the successors to the Prophet Mohammed (from whose family they were all descended; one of the points on which the Shi’a insist is that the rulers of Islam must be from the Prophet’s family). Only the first of these Shi’a imams was accepted by the majority of Muslims, and many of them died amid accusations of foul play. For the Shi’a this embedded in their faith a contempt for worldly governments and a pious hope that the last of the twelve imams would one day return as the Mehdi—the equivalent of the Jewish and Christian Messiah—to usher in the end of the world. The medieval rulers of Iran even had a horse always ready in their stable for the Mehdi to ride, should he return.

  Thinking about this belief of the Shi’a, I was tempted to compare it to music in a minor key, like the haunting Iranian song I had heard earlier that day on the car stereo. The notes of the elegiac melody of the twelfth imam might have been familiar to any Zoroastrian, pining for the restoration of the old order. And the Mehdi, according to legend, will be descended from the ancient emperors of Persia. For Shahrbanu, daughter of the last emperor of independent Persia before it became Muslim, was said to have married Hussein, grandson of the Prophet Mohammed: had this been true, all the subsequent imams would have been descended not only from the Prophet but also from the Persian royal family. Perhaps this story helped shore up support for Islam among Iranians who pined for the old order.

  The Avesta, too, prophesied a Messiah—the Saoshyant, the redeemer who will lead the armies of good in their final ba
ttle, after which will come the end of the world and the resurrection of the dead. This Zoroastrian concept, which fits neatly into their belief that the world is a battlefield for the forces of good and evil, appears to have predated both the Jewish belief in the Messiah and the Muslim belief in the Mehdi; some scholars think that it inspired them both, though in truth the idea of a historical figure rising from the dead to rescue his people is one that might appeal to any society whose past was greater than its present. In later legend, a great lake in southeastern Iran was said to contain the seed of Zarathustra, capable of giving the world seven more prophets like himself to bring the world to a new level of wisdom each time. This concept was adopted by some Muslim groups, which sometimes suggested that Mohammed was the seventh prophet. Breakaway groups from Islam claimed that Mohammed had only been the fifth or sixth, and that their own founder was the seventh.

  In the ninth and tenth centuries the Arab Abbasid Empire’s grip on Iran weakened and local dynasties gained control over parts of the country. It was one such dynasty, called the Samanids, who sponsored the writing of the Iranian national epic, the Shahnamah. The writer, Ferdowsi, was officially a Muslim, but the poem is saturated with Zoroastrian ideas. The history it tells of the Iranian people, for example, begins with a battle against Angra Mainyu. The poet may also, by using the Persian language, have helped to preserve it. Iran never adopted Arabic for everyday speech and continues proudly to enjoy its own quite separate literature, especially a rich corpus of poetry.

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  From Zendan-e-Soleyman I headed for a city that represents more than any other the Shi’a Islamic side of Iran. Qom is home to the country’s premier shrine and seminary, where Muslim clerics are trained. The shrine in the city was built around the tomb of the sister of the eighth imam, Fatimah al-Maasoumah. It is not as important a site as the cities of Najaf and Karbala in Iraq, where the Prophet’s son-in-law Ali and grandson Hussein are buried. Qom, however, has often been much easier for Iranian pilgrims to reach, and so has become immensely popular. The green lights of the shrine illuminated the parking lot where we stopped, and I could see where devout pilgrims had pitched tents among parked cars, to get as near as possible to the shrine. At a hotel overlooking the square, where I hoped to find a room, the receptionist—after showing me my room—told me not to stay there. “It’s much too expensive here,” he said confidentially; “you should stay instead with my friend Mr. Jehangir. He loves to meet visitors!” He placed a call and confirmed that the mysterious Mr. Jehangir could give me a bed for the night, and then told me how to find him. I wandered off down a series of little roads and alleyways till I found Mr. Jehangir’s cellar apartment.

  Mr. Jehangir turned out to be a newly fledged Shi’a cleric, though he was not wearing his clerical clothes. After ushering me into his home he introduced me to three of his friends who were all sitting on his floor (his wife, wearing a white face veil, sat demurely in the background, but his toddler daughter was less restrained). They were all at various stages of clerical study in one of Qom’s seminaries: he was the most senior of them and proudly showed me a picture of himself in the white turban of a sheikh, the title for a man who has attained a certain level of religious learning but who does not have the extra distinction of being a black-turbaned sayyid, a descendant of the Prophet. I was quizzed for hours by the clerics about Britain—though more about society, and how to get a visa, than politics. We didn’t finish until around 1:00 a.m., and even then they clattered away on their laptops for another hour as I lay on a nearby mattress trying to sleep. At five in the morning they rose to pray. I had to rise with them and—bleary-eyed but delighted to have this opportunity—made myself ready to be shown around Iran’s top seminary by its own students.

  First they gave me a tour of the shrine, whose golden domes and shiny new blue ceramic tiles were visible signs of how much support and funding it received. Non-Muslims were not allowed to enter, but my companions ushered me in. They went to pray; I stood waiting for them as the crowd of worshipers flowed past me. When they returned, they said they had another place to show me. We filed out of the mosque and walked along a tree-lined street to a large seminary. This seminary was special: it was where the Ayatollah Khomeini once studied. The two-story arcade that surrounded its wide, leafy courtyard was topped by a picture of the ayatollah. My new friends guided me to the room that once had been Khomeini’s small bedroom-cum-study, and they stood as Westerners might when their national anthem is played, reverently gazing at the simple furniture and the ayatollah’s picture on the wall. I fidgeted uncertainly. By resisting the temptations of wealth and power as an absolute ruler, Khomeini had shown great strength of character. Yet he was no friend to the Zoroastrians of Iran, who had prospered under the secular monarchy he overthrew.

  We sat in the seminary courtyard for a while; a black-clad sayyid and a black cat walked slowly by, as if in stately procession. One of Mr. Jehangir’s friends told me he hoped to study at the seminary. First he had to pass his entry exams; Plato’s philosophy was one of the core subjects on which he would be tested. In the seminary he would study Aristotle, attending tutorials in which he learned through debating with fellow students (a technique that itself resembles that of the Greek philosophers). It was years since I had studied Aristotle and Plato myself, and I had not expected to find them a useful introduction to the Ayatollah Khomeini’s classmates, since that was what my friends had turned out to be. There was a certain historical irony to it: the classical philosophers, who had inspired the European Enlightenment, were fashionable with the reactionary clergy of Iran? Plato the Athenian, and Aristotle the mentor of Alexander, were popular in Persia—which famously had been the enemy of Athens and Alexander?

  But this was ignorance on my part, because as I learned, the much-hated Alexander the Great did in fact leave a legacy in Persia of affection for Greek culture. Iran’s Parthian rulers in the first century bc were addicted to Greek theater. (When the unlucky Roman general Crassus was killed at Harran, his head was brought to the emperor and used as a stage prop in Euripides’s Bacchae.) Greek science was so much revered in Persia that even after the West had adopted newer ideas, the Persians continued to follow the Greeks. Into the nineteenth century, anyone going to a doctor in Persia would have had his or her humors analyzed, based on the prescriptions of the second-century Greek doctor Galen. (Unani-tibb—Arabic for “Greek medicine”—has now been abandoned in Iran, though it is still practiced in India.) The astronomy that Iranian clerics were still being taught at the start of the twentieth century was that of Ptolemy, a second-century Greek scientist. A man called Ahmad Kasravi once studied to be a cleric and then went on to become one of the major anticlerical writers of modern Iran—and his disillusionment with Shi’a Islam began not with the Koran but rather with a flaw he spotted in Ptolemy.

  Because of this enthusiasm for Greek learning, it was natural that when in the sixth century ad the last pagan members of Plato’s Academy—whose practice it was to teach students first Plato’s philosophy and then Aristotle’s—were expelled by the Byzantine emperor Justinian, the Persians offered them refuge. They were housed at a town called Gundeshapur, where they joined scholars from one of the Byzantine Empire’s religious minorities, who had likewise been expelled; in later years the Persians brought Chinese and Indian scholars to join them. Gundeshapur became a great university whose curriculum included Greek, Sanskrit, and Chinese texts; it had a hospital that was the greatest medical center in the region, and doctors even took examinations there (a startling innovation at that time). Byzantium’s intolerance became Persia’s gain.

  Khomeini would have studied Plato in the seminary. In fact, his idea that Iran should be run by the “most learned cleric” not only marked a sea change from the traditional Shi’a view that government was intrinsically wicked but is not found in the Koran. Instead it is perhaps the closest approximation on earth to Plato’s vision, set out in his Republic, of a
state that is run by the “wisest philosopher.” Khomeini always denied that there was a connection, although he approved of Plato and once said that he considered him “sound.”

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  My journey from Qom took me through the fabulous city of Esfahan, whose central square was designed to double as a polo field, whose blue faience mosques are among the most beautiful buildings in the world, and in whose bazaar artists carefully paint tiny china boxes with love scenes and images of poets. And south from Esfahan I went to Shiraz, a city where in the 1840s a conservative Muslim sayyid called Ali Shirazi declared himself to be the Mehdi and won a hundred thousand followers before he was brutally put to death by the authorities, who regarded him as a blasphemer. His followers, who included Zoroastrians, declared that he was also the Saoshyant. They called themselves the Babis, because Shirazi was the “Bab,” the mystical gateway to God. In the late 1880s, the British scholar Edward Browne visited Iran. Later one of the greatest Western experts on the country (and still the only British man to have a street named after him in modern Tehran), he went deep into Iranian society and became adept at deciphering the secret codes Iranians used—such as the code that Iranian men employed when puffing smoke from their water-pipes, each series of puffs representing a letter. Despite his skill and his keenness to meet the Babis and quiz them about their beliefs, he was unable to penetrate the secrecy with which they surrounded themselves. Every time he approached someone who seemed plausible, the man would claim to be an orthodox Muslim.