Clearly enough, the Babis were watching him during this time, because they eventually decided that they could trust him. “The ‘Friends’ are everywhere,” a Babi man told him after revealing his own affiliation, “and though hitherto you have sought for them without success, and only at last chanced on them by what would seem a mere accident, now that you have the clue you will meet them wherever you go.” He learned about their customs, some of which showed clear Zoroastrian influences: Babi men took only one wife each, Babi women did not veil, and Babis adopted a new fast in place of Ramadan, held in the run-up to Nowruz. The secrecy was justified: Iran’s nineteenth-century government slaughtered thousands of Babis and enslaved their wives. The Babis’ religion eventually morphed into Baha’ism. In recent years the Baha’i leaders have been imprisoned and their followers systematically harassed, excluded from government jobs, and sometimes arrested on the grounds that they are apostates from Islam. Since the Islamic Revolution, two hundred Baha’is have been killed.
Shiraz is a city much celebrated in Iranian poetry, and most of all in the poems of the fourteenth-century Hafez, Iranians’ favorite poet—though one whose work does not survive well in translation. “Oh, come to Shiraz when the north wind blows! / There abideth the angel of Gabriel’s peace / With him who is lord of its treasures; the fame / Of the sugar of Egypt shall fade and cease, / For the breath of our beauties has put it to shame.” Hafez’s Diwan is one of the two books that every traditional Iranian family owns—the other being the Koran. His tomb in Shiraz is a place of pilgrimage. I saw a young man kneel at it and stay there for a long time in silent prayer, while several women stood nearby, heads bowed. Perhaps it was not just Hafez they honored and longed for but the vivacious and liberated culture that he proclaimed: “Hail Sufis! Lovers of wine, all hail! For wine is proclaimed to a world athirst.”
Hafez’s poetry is rife with references to wine. Embarrassed by this, because wine is forbidden in Islam and Hafez was the favorite poet of Iranian Muslims, the pious interpret these references as being metaphors for spiritual delight. On that basis even the Ayatollah Khomeini wrote a poem declaring, “Let the doors of the tavern be opened, and let us go there day and night.” Hafez’s taverns, however, were kept by the Zoroastrian priests, the Magi. As one of his poems says, “I placed my difficulty before the old Magi last evening, / Who with the help of his glance could solve the problem. / I found him happy and smiling with a glass of wine in his hand.” It shows that Hafez’s mentions of wine are references to the Zoroastrian belief that drinking wine is a way to communicate with God. At a Zoroastrian prayer ceremony, wine is among seven fruits of creation that are placed in front of a priest (who is sometimes also called a Magus). In Zoroastrian tradition Zarathustra gave the saint-king Vishtaspa wine to drink, which put him into a trance. In that trance he ascended to heaven and glimpsed the glory of God. Herodotus said that the Persians made a decision only if they had considered it twice—once when sober and once when drunk. So if they made a decision while sober, they would then get drunk and see if it still seemed a good idea. If it did, they would go ahead. When I first read this, I assumed it was a joke—but in fact it makes sense. If wine gives a special kind of mystical insight, then it would seem to be a good idea to get drunk before making decisions. And a few bad experiences would have taught the value of thinking the decisions over when sober, too.
The verses quoted above are just one example of how Hafez’s writing was deeply suffused with Zoroastrian thought. No wonder, then, that a Zoroastrian named Khosro wanted to honor Hafez. When he saw an earlier memorial to him in a shabby state, he tried to build a new one around his grave. That was back in 1899, and the effort came to an end when a local Muslim cleric led a mob to destroy the monument because it had been built by a Zoroastrian. The tomb has since been rebuilt magnificently by the poet’s Muslim admirers. Where, I wondered as I stood by the stone pillars of this new tomb, were Hafez’s Magi now? As I did so, a dervish in ragged clothes walked past me and proceeded to circumambulate seven times around the monument. It is an old Zoroastrian custom. But as well as brown robes and a tall round hat, this holy man was wearing a green scapular, the color of Islam. He was a Muslim, not a Zoroastrian; Iran has been deeply influenced by Sufism, and some Sufis pay respect to dead saints by walking around their tombs. Of course, there might have been some Zoroastrians among the young men and women who were praying at the tomb or sitting in the café attached to the tomb. But I did not think so. Hafez’s Magi had shut their taverns long ago.
A dervish circumambulates the tomb of the poet Hafez, in Shiraz, Iran. Photo by the author
There was one place where I was confident of finding the Zoroastrians: Yazd, where Laal had been born. The road there went for a hundred miles through the desert, past jagged ridges of rock and fields of sand and dust, before it reached Yazd’s oasis. A huge tiled façade of pointed arches called a tekyeh, several stories high, greeted me on arrival; it was decorated in light blue and cream-colored Iranian faience, and next to it was a wicker wheel called a nakhl. These were used to stage the yearly Shi’a passion plays that commemorate the death of Ali’s son Hussein, who in Shi’a eyes was the third imam and who fell in battle with his Sunni Muslim opponents.
Browne came to Yazd and described his delight when he “had at length succeeded in isolating myself not only from my own countrymen, but from my co-religionists,” and was mistaken for a Zoroastrian himself. He reported that the community was “less liable to molestation now than in former times,” though they “often meet with ill-treatment and insult at the hands of the more fanatical [Muslims], by whom they are regarded as pagans.” When a bad governor held office, or when there was nobody in charge at all, he added, they were treated worse.
Browne was encountering the Zoroastrians at a time when their fortunes were on the mend. Despite the pervasive influence of their ideas, they had been treated with great harshness through the Middle Ages and beyond. A visitor to Iran in 1854, Maneckji Limji Hataria, wrote, “I found the Zoroastrians to be exhausted and trampled, so much that even no one in this world can be more miserable than them.” The community then was subject to a special jizya tax, imposed on all non-Muslims. Zoroastrians were also denied the right to testify against a Muslim in front of a judge, which put them at a great disadvantage in disputes over land or trade. In addition, they were reeling from what has been called “the last mass forcible conversion of Zoroastrians to Islam”—an episode that saw a mob attack a village in the 1850s and threaten its residents with death if they did not convert. Hataria was from a family of Parsees, descendants of Zoroastrian refugees who had left Iran a thousand years before for Gujarat in northern India. The Parsee community had originally looked to Iran for religious guidance, but it had become larger and wealthier over the centuries, and Hataria was there not to receive aid but to give it. He and his fellow Parsees sent money to the poorest Zoroastrians in Iran, founded modern schools, and helped persuade the Iranian government to abolish the jizya in 1882.
More improvements in the situation of Yazd’s Zoroastrians soon followed, and after 1906, when a constitutional revolution forced the monarchy to accept a set of liberalizing measures, including the creation of a parliament, one Zoroastrian was elected to the new body. The monarchy reasserted itself soon afterward but was eventually replaced by the dictatorship of Reza Khan, who took the title of shah and the surname Pahlavi. Despite these political changes, the community continued to flourish for the next seventy years. Zoroastrians entered government, and one of their own, Farhang Mehr, even rose to become deputy prime minister. They were particularly successful in business. As a result, fewer and fewer went into the priesthood, a profession that paid little and involved spending much time learning texts in ancient Avestan (an archaic language that itself could take years to learn). Laal’s father—the priest who used to stand on the roof of his house studying the stars—told her brothers to become doctors, not priests, if they wanted to es
cape a life of poverty. Other Zoroastrians clearly felt the same way. In the 1930s there were two hundred priests in Yazd; by 1964, there were fewer than ten.
Laal’s father was not only a priest—who eked out a small income as an itinerant preacher and small trader—but also a poet and thinker who took enthusiastically to the new ideas that were then spreading in Iran. When Reza Shah forbade the wearing of the head scarf in Iran in the 1930s, Laal’s mother wanted to stop her from attending school—for, though not a Muslim, she had her own strict idea of how a girl should dress in public. It was Laal’s father who insisted that she should be schooled again. When Laal chose to be a midwife, a profession that involved regular contact with human blood—taboo in a religion that placed great value on ritual cleanliness—he supported her, as he did when she chose for her husband Shahriar after being introduced to him by her brother.
It was a traditional courtship: at her first meeting with her future husband, she was accompanied by her mother and sister and did not look him in the face. She had to ask her sister what he looked like. Eventually she sneaked a look at him when they were sitting together on their third date, at a cinema, when she hoped that he was concentrating on the film and would not notice her sideways glance. She liked what she saw, and agreed to marry him. The family by that time had moved to Tehran, but after their marriage Laal and Shahriar did return occasionally to Yazd, to visit a small house they owned in the mountains; they rented out its lands to local farmers in return for a yearly supply of almonds and fruit. Their move to Tehran was a trend followed by many Zoroastrians as the Pahlavi shahs liberalized Iranian society. Laal’s brother no longer had to hear shouts of gabr—he went on to be a doctor in Iran’s air force. Shahriar was an army officer, later decorated for valor. For the first time since Nihavand, Zoroastrians could fight for Iran.
I saw no priest on the roof of any Yazdi house in 2006. At first I struggled to find any trace of Zoroastrians at all. Obituaries pasted to lampposts on every street had the Arabic Muslim heading bismillah (in the name of God) above photos of the recently dead. On one street corner, though, I found a notice with a different heading. Ba nam-e-Ahura Mazda, it declared in Persian: “in the name of Ahura Mazda.” Beneath it was the symbol of the bird-man, a man with a Persian cap and wings to his left and right and beneath him. I had seen the same symbol at Persepolis. Here at last were the Zoroastrians. A grocery shop along that road was festooned with pictures. Just as Middle Eastern Christians plaster images of St. George or the Virgin Mary to their walls and Muslims display photos of the shrine at Mecca or (in Iran) of Hussein, these pictures were of Zarathustra and the fravahar. They were stuck on the glass of the counter, the cash register, and the walls of the shop. At the end of the road there was even a shop selling Zoroastrian souvenirs. I contemplated whether to buy a clock with the Zoroastrian motto “Good thought, good word, good deed” written on it in Persian.
Opposite the shop, set back from the road behind a small garden, stood a fire temple. I was allowed inside, into a small clean room: behind a glass window, I could see a small flame burning. A picture of Zarathustra was on the wall of the room, and alongside it ran various excerpts from Zoroastrian scriptures—reminding the visitor that the Zoroastrians, too, have a holy book, which, along with belief in a single God, is traditionally a prerequisite for toleration under Islam. The “people of the book” are spoken of highly in the Koran, and in Iran the Zoroastrians are counted among their number. The regime derides them, however, because of their reverence for the sacred fires in their fire temples, alleging that they “worship fire.” This is something that the Zoroastrians deny, saying that they do not consider the fire God, but instead worship God by means of the fire. I asked the temple’s caretaker how many Zoroastrian families remained in Yazd. Very few, he said. Life was hard: the economy was bad and the government unfriendly. The numbers of Zoroastrians in the whole country, I later learned, had dropped since the revolution from thirty-three thousand to ten thousand (these are approximations, as no definitive statistics exist).
Perhaps it was appropriate that after visiting the fire temple, my next appointment was with the dead. On the opposite side of the city were two dusty hilltops surmounted by ruined towers. Called “towers of silence” by tourists, these were known to Zoroastrians as dakhmas. The road leading up to these hills, along which young men were racing all-terrain vehicles, used to be the route for Zoroastrian funeral processions. The body of the deceased would lie in the family home for three days, while a dog was kept nearby to deter evil spirits. Then the body would be carried on an iron bed, by men specially trained for the task, up this road and into the dakhma. Here the bier carriers would address the dead man: “Fear not and tremble not! This is the place of your ancestors, and of our fathers and mothers, and the pure and good, for a thousand years.”
An ateshkadeh, or fire temple, at Yazd. Photo by the author
“What follows,” Herodotus wrote in his account of this ceremony, “is reported about their dead as a secret mystery and not with clearness, namely that the body of a Persian man is not buried until it has been torn by a bird or dog.” In fact, the body was exposed until it was wholly eaten by birds or dogs. The birds, usually crows or vultures, could pick a body clean within minutes. The custom was abandoned in Iran some decades ago, apparently by choice, though it continues to be practiced among Parsees in India. The practice may predate the Zoroastrians by centuries. At Catalhuyuk in Turkey, where a human settlement from the eighth millennium bc has been excavated, there is some archaeological evidence that dead bodies may have exposed to the elements before burial.
A dakhma in Yazd, where Zoroastrians once exposed their dead for the birds to eat. Photo by the author
I climbed the dakhma nearest to the road, and from its wall looked down to see a Zoroastrian funeral in progress down below. Since the dakhma had now been abandoned, the funeral was heading instead for a nearby cemetery. There bodies were placed in stone and concrete to prevent them from polluting the earth. After the funeral, the participants would go home and wash themselves with bull’s urine. (The ammonia this urine contains makes it a good disinfectant, and apparently after years of storage it loses its smell—which is just as well, as sometimes Zoroastrians are expected to drink it, for example during coming-of-age ceremonies, although the squeamish now substitute pomegranate juice for the urine. Plutarch, in the first century ad, refers to this ceremony, so it is certainly very old.)
I tried to imagine what it would be like to see the collision of cosmic forces in one’s daily life. All people, I suppose, have a conceptual understanding of pure and impure. Few people are comfortable buying a house where someone has died a violent death, and not many of us would like to be on an airplane journey seated next to a corpse. Immorality has been discovered by scientists to elicit the same physical reactions as physical disgust; indeed, sin and immorality are often described in terms of uncleanness (“immaculate” literally means “unstained”). Zoroastrians believe that the impurity in the world has been put there by an active and malign supernatural power, so cleanliness has a moral force, and the uncleanness of a burial ground must be taken very seriously. The death of a good person represents a great victory for Angra Mainyu and his servants, and makes the place of the burial especially unclean. A dead body attracts the corpse demon, the nasu. Wandering about in a dakhma would not be the Zoroastrians’ idea of a holiday: to them it is one of the most supernaturally polluted places on earth.
I rode in a taxi from the dakhma back to the center of Yazd. “Zoroastrians are good people,” said the driver, Hassan. Hassan was a devout Muslim, wearing a purple shirt to mark the fact, he told me, that the day was the anniversary of an Islamic martyr. “Islam came to Iran through war,” he said, “from the Arabs. Before that we were all Zoroastrians.” Every year people like Hassan are reminded of their heritage when they celebrate Nowruz, the spring festival, when the day becomes longer than the night (in Zo
roastrian thinking, this marks a victory by good over evil). The spring festival lasts two weeks in modern Iran, and Muslims celebrate it more exuberantly than the Zoroastrians’ own quiet and more religiously oriented ceremonies. Common to both groups is the custom of placing on a table seven fruits of creation, corresponding to seven virtues and the seven planets. For Zoroastrians the fruits can include wine, milk, water, sprouting cereals, the oleaster berry, and sweets; a mirror and coins can also be included, the former representing the future and the latter prosperity. Muslim Iranians tend to use wheat, apples, lotus fruits, garlic, a spice called somak, a pudding called samanu, and vinegar. A lesser festival called Charshanbeh-e-Suri, which occurs just before Nowruz, involves leaping over fire. It, too, is practiced by Muslims. The Iranian religious establishment has tried to discourage Nowruz, and in 2010 Ayatollah Khamenei tried to completely ban Charshanbeh-e-Suri on the basis that the celebrations “have no basis in Islam,” but Hassan and many other Iranians across the country, though many of them are deeply religious, ignored him. I could see why. The event is fun, deeply entrenched in society, and distinctively Iranian: it is not celebrated by any culture that has not been influenced by Iran.
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Laal’s husband, the army officer Shahriar, was sent after World War II to fight a Soviet-backed insurgency in northwestern Iran (the province where I first entered the country, near Zendan-e-Soleyman). During the fighting he was wounded and left for dead on the battlefield; when he was finally found to be alive and taken to a hospital, he had lost his sight. The shah decorated him and sent him to Britain for treatment. A war veterans’ charity adopted him, taught him Braille, and helped him find a job as a telephone operator. There were few Zoroastrians in Britain at this time: their daughter Shahin was brought up singing Christian hymns at school (“My father wanted us to fit in,” she told me) and could explain to her puzzled classmates what her religion was only by talking about the Three Wise Men of the Bible.
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