Drinking Arak Off an Ayatollah's Beard

by Nicholas Jubber

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Preface

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  PART ONE - IRAN

  Chapter 1 - The Inside-Out City

  Chapter 2 - The Most Persian Persian

  THE TALE OF SIYAVASH

  Chapter 3 - The Snake-Shouldered Tyrant

  Chapter 4 - In the Land of Fire

  THE TALE OF ZOROASTER

  THE TALE OF SHAPUR II

  Chapter 5 - Minstrels in the Mountains

  PART TWO - AFGHANISTAN

  Chapter 6 - The Prisoner Poets

  Chapter 7 - Tea with a Warlord

  PART THREE - IRAN AND CENTRAL ASIA

  Chapter 8 - Tahmineh’s Secret

  TEHRAN. APRIL.

  THE TALE OF BIZHAN AND MANIZEH (PART ONE)

  Chapter 9 - The Man in the Moon

  THE TALE OF BIZHAN AND MANIZEH (PART TWO)

  TEHRAN. A FEW WEEKS LATER.

  Chapter 10 - Poets, Polymaths, and Pleasure-Daughters

  WHEN I THINK OF CENTRAL ASIA, I THINK OF . . .

  PART FOUR - AFGHANISTAN

  Chapter 11 - The Adventures of Abbas

  Chapter 12 - How to Walk Like an Afghan

  Chapter 13 - A Holiday House in Helmand

  THE TALE OF ROSTAM’S SEVEN COURSES

  PART FIVE - IRAN

  Chapter 14 - The Bird in the Coffee Cup

  Chapter 15 - Drinking Arak Off an Ayatollah’s Beard

  THE TALE OF ZAL AND RUDABA

  PART SIX - AFGHANISTAN

  Chapter 16 - The Road to Ghazni

  Chapter 17 - Insultin’ the Sultan

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  Glossary

  Bibliography

  Copyright Page

  For my mother and in memory of Sylvia Jubber

  Preface

  In June 2009, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran was re-elected by a landslide.

  Or, to put it another way: in June 2009, hundreds of thousands of people marched through the streets of Tehran, demanding a recount.

  This, after all, is the land where there are always two sides to the story.

  As usually happens in Iranian history, the demonstrators were suppressed: knocked down with chains and batons, pepper spray and gunfire, carted off in SUVs, and in some cases tortured or killed.

  And, as usually happens in Iranian history, they found subtler, more secretive ways of expressing their outrage. They voiced their opinions on social networking Web sites and uploaded protest songs. They released green balloons from their rooftops, declaring their support for the defeated candidate, Mir Hossain Mousavi, who had chosen green—the color of Islam—as his emblem. And one day they gathered in large numbers in downtown Tehran around the statue of a medieval poet and tied a green scarf around his neck.

  That poet was Ferdowsi, whose Shahnameh, or Book of Kings (an epic completed 999 years before the demonstrations), tells of the many rulers who, like President Ahmadinejad, dismissed their opponents as “dirt and dust”—and usually wound up as the victims of a coup or a popular uprising.

  This is the story of my journey in Ferdowsi’s world, both past and present, a few years before the protests broke out. It was a time when the presidency was passing from the ineffectual Mohammed Khatami to the volatile Ahmadinejad; when across the border Afghanistan was dipping its toes, hesitantly, in a new democracy; while in neighboring Turkmenistan the world’s oddest dictator was nearing his last breath.

  In the summer of 2009, images of the demonstrations would burst onto news screens around the world. But they were hardly new. Iranians had been protesting for much of the past decade. And, as the statue in the green scarf in downtown Tehran quietly underlines, their leaders had been abusing them for longer.

  IRAN & CENTRAL ASIA TODAY

  “Tavana buvad har ki dana buvad”—“All who had power had knowledge”

  —WRITTEN ON THE GATE OF TEHRAN UNIVERSITY, FROM FERDOWSI’S SHAHNAMEH

  Prologue

  Mashhad, Eastern Iran. September.

  “Oh. My. God.”

  One glimpse is enough to rip out my optimism—like someone came along and extracted it with a knife.

  The bus is the last in its row, each more battered and less brightly painted than the one before, its roof more heavily crushed by boxes and buckets strapped on with string, and a larger pool of water rising around the wheels to trap them in a glue of mud. All the buses in the station look decrepit, but this one is a parody of the rest. It looks like the worst bus in the world.

  A man is standing over me, wrinkling his nose at my ticket. It turns out he’s the driver.

  “Why do you go to Afghanistan?” he exclaims. “You think this is a country for tourists?”

  His laugh is throaty and thoroughly disconcerting. Had the old man behind me not set his arm on my shoulder, I might be making a dash for the bus back to Tehran.

  “I am a traveler like you,” he whispers.

  This man has skin like walnut bark and wears a gray waistcoat over his knee-length shirt, under a brimless woolen cap that looks like it’s been woven from his beard.

  “I have been on a pilgrimage,” he continues, “to the Holy City.”

  “You are a Hajji?1 You’ve just come back?”

  “No, no, no!” His teeth gleam gold between his parched lips. “I went thirty years ago. I couldn’t afford to go now!”

  His small gray eyes shine through the creases of his skin. He seems to be kind, so I decide to stick with him.

  “Afghanistan is a good country,” he says, poking his nose between the headrests in front of me—we have settled inside the bus now. He squinnies his brow for a moment, before adding, “It was a good country.”

  “When?” says a man in an ocean-colored polo shirt who’s taken the seat across the aisle from mine. He looks like he should be on vacation in Hawaii.

  The Hajji looks up, frowning, then in a burst of inspiration he declares, “In Kaiser Wilhelm’s day!” He raps the headrest as he explains, “There was a train.”

  We wait an hour for movement. When it finally comes, there is a terrible groan underneath us, as if some wild beast has been stretched out under the chassis, then a tick-tick as the engine rattles to a stop. Is this bus not even capable of forward propulsion? But I can hear a noise swelling around us, suggesting another cause for our pause. Gingerly, the Hajji lifts a pleated nylon curtain to peer through the window. I notice an anxious expression creeping across his face.

  “Mujahideen,” he whispers.

  A wave of sunlight washes through the door: a swamp of flailing limbs, enormous beards, long torn gowns. Boxes fly down the aisle; burlap sacks pile on the seats and around the steps in the middle. Buckets clatter on top of them, all the way up to the Formica ceiling, as do more sacks, plastic bags, and finally—shunted through the door, defying the tiny space that’s left—a Honda motorcycle.

  “They are fighting men,” whispers the Hajji. “Do not say you are a foreigner.”

  All of them are dressed in baggy trousers and knee-length shirts—the traditional Afghan costume known as shalwar qameez. I bought a set for myself only yesterday, knowing I would need it in Afghanistan’s troubled south, but I haven’t put it on yet, so it will be easy to identify me as an outsider. Hiding my tell-tale Roman-scripted notebook in the overhead rack, I excavate an enormous green-jacketed hardback out of my pack. It’s the only Persian book in my possession—the language not only of the Iranians whom I’m leaving, but also of a large number of the Afghans among whom I’ll be traveling. Tooled across its spine—a gorgeous cluster of golden dot
s, elaborate curls, and long barbed stalks—is the word Shahnameh—Book of Kings.

  “You are reading that?” asks the Hajji, his gold teeth flashing in his gasp.

  The man in the ocean-colored polo shirt, whose name is Wahid, is more proactive.

  “Here,” he says, leaning across the aisle and reaching for the book, “give it here.”

  He turns its pages delicately, and familiarly—as if he’s caressed these very pages in the past—and when he comes across a verse he likes, his mouth expands to the size of a tea saucer:

  Mayaazaar muri ke daneh kash ast Oh stamp not the ant that is under your feet

  Ke jaan daarad u jaan e shirin khush ast. For it has a soul and its own soul is sweet.

  The Hajji smiles, his eyes as bright as his gold teeth, repeating the verse in a whisper, as if to memorize it for himself. I have come across plenty of poetry aficionados in Iran—on a few occasions I’ve even attended poetry circles where traditional instruments were played as people recited from their favorite authors. But I was advised not to expect this sort of thing in Afghanistan. “They are murdering brutes” was one of the less cryptic descriptions I heard. So to watch polo-shirt-wearing Wahid, his eyes glued to the pages and his lips quivering to the rhythm of the thousand-year-old words, is hugely reassuring. Maybe the Afghans won’t be as formidable as I’ve been warned.

  We are near the border. You can tell because the landscape is growing less and less friendly. A medieval traveler would have known the “abundant fruit-trees, streams and mills” spotted here by the great Muslim globe-trotter Ibn Battuta in the fourteenth century. But now the fertility has dried up. Low-slung mud-brick farmsteads slumber behind bald fields and mountain scarps scissor the sky like dragon scales. As the Afghan border draws ever closer, even these features grow scarce. It’s as if the land is stripping itself of possessions in preparation for bandit country.

  I had spent eight months in Iran before I finally set out for Afghanistan. Eight months of incredible comfort with the kindest of families in a gated house in North Tehran. For more than half of this time, I was actively planning a journey to Afghanistan—a grand old romp through that distant and seemingly treacherous land. But whenever I was on the verge of setting out, something astonishing would happen: I would stumble, quite by chance it seemed, on an absolutely unavoidable reason to delay. Well, there’s a film festival coming up in Tehran and my host’s daughter has been teaching me all about the Iranian film industry, so it would be a crime to miss it. . . . Oh, I should really go and visit the eighth imam’s footprint. . . . And what about the Quran museum, where the nation’s Supreme Leaders (the Ayatollahs, Khomeini and Khamenei) have been embroidered on velvet, composed out of wheat, or depicted in oils by an armless war veteran who paints with his mouth? . . .

  Even when I did finally set out, I decided not to let my fellow passengers in on what I was up to.

  “If you tell the Afghans your plan,” said my host in Tehran—his brown owl-like eyes gleaming with the warning—“they will tear you to pieces!”

  So I’m keeping my mission under wraps, hidden in my backpack, and when they ask me what I am doing here, I only give them a vague indication of my route.

  “I suppose,” I say, when the Hajji asks me, “I want to find out if Afghan and Iranian culture have much in common.”

  “Oh yes,” he says excitedly, “we are the same. We are both Aryan, we have the same poets—Hafez, Ferdowsi, for example—and our music is also similar.”

  “No we’re not!” declares Wahid, stamping his foot on the runner. “You know what we call the Iranians? You know?”

  His mouth twists into a scowl and he screws up his nose, preparing me for the most offensive put-down in history.

  “We call them,” he announces, “sandwich-eaters!”

  It isn’t quite the slap-down I was anticipating, although it makes sense—given all the sandwich restaurants I’ve encountered on the Iranian streets. Afghans, as I will learn, do not generally indulge in “Westernized” snack food, preferring to stick to their traditional dishes.

  “They aren’t tough like us,” continues Wahid. “They don’t know what it means to be a man!”

  As if to underline his point, he drops the green-jacketed copy of the Shahnameh directly onto my lap. It’s hard not to be winded by the direct plunge of a 1,500-page weight—but I dare not utter a sound, lest he decide I’m another sandwich-munching sissy. Now, drawing closer to me on the seat, he appears to be continuing his test of my physical endurance, by squeezing my shoulder under his paw. His face, however, is turning softer, his eyes lighting up with a new thought.

  “Mind you,” he says, “have you been to Shiraz?”

  “Yes.”

  “The women!” He chuckles, looking round to check the Hajji isn’t listening. “I went to Shiraz,” he whispers. “I thought I was in paradise!” He squeezes my shoulder even harder, before drawing back to his seat, shaking his head as he adds in a loud voice, “a country of sandwich-eaters!”

  I’m not the only one who’s been trying to delay the inevitable. The driver is in no hurry to reach Afghanistan himself—a few miles before the border, we stop at a roadside canteen. Buckwheat grits are scooped onto tin plates as men hunch over the tables, while the women wait patiently on a veranda outside. Sitting among them are an old man trilling on a ney flute and another with a bandaged stump for a leg, who stretches out a hand for alms. It’s the musician who is receiving the most attention, but neither has the crowd for long. At the hoot of the air horn, they turn into a scrum and charge the bus, where the boxes and buckets already clinging to the rusty bars of the roof are now jostled by a cooker, a metal safe, and a dozen gas-pump poles.

  “I walked across this border once,” says Wahid, as we watch the last few parched kilometers of Iran in the window. “It was in the war. When the Russian tanks came to Herat I decided to escape. I walked over the mountains for a day and a night and came out on the other side.”

  “Where did you go?” I ask.

  “Germany. I lived there for twenty years. Now I’m back in Afghanistan but I still have business with Germany—I sell secondhand BMWs in Kabul.”

  He leans toward me, his sharp eyes peering through the glare of sunlight coming from the window.

  “Where in my country do you want to go?” he asks.

  “Well,” I whisper, “I really want to go to Ghazni.” I’m referring to a city on the other side of the country, roughly between Kandahar and Kabul, which was once the fulcrum of Afghanistan’s mightiest empire. “Do you think it’s possible?”

  “Ghazni?” His voice has turned to a gasp. “But that’s in Taliban country.”

  One of the mujahideen has overheard us. His beard is dangling over the headrest in front of me as he studies my face, like it’s a map for hidden treasure.

  “You can’t go to Ghazni,” he says.

  “But I’ve got to!”

  The Hajji leans forward, his chin snug in the crook of his hands: “There is no reason he can’t go to Ghazni. I am from Ghazni myself. In Ghazni it is secure. It is the road to Ghazni that is the problem.”

  Sweat is dripping off my brow and trickling down my glasses—although I’m not sure if it’s been caused by my anxiety or the heat. The driver is sweating too; he dabs his face with his handkerchief, having braked to allow a policeman inside.

  “Anyone who has a passport,” says the policeman, “get down.”

  Apart from Wahid and me, everyone stays put.

  The border post is a vast encampment, spread across the scrub desert. A dozen UNHCR2 buses are parked outside makeshift tents, near the mud-brick customs huts, which spew out a crowd of Afghans in their baggy trousers and long shirts. They aren’t much taller than me, but they look enormous, enlarged by their beards and the hauteur with which they stride. I feel like an Oompa-Loompa at a convention for giants.

  “Come on,” says Wahid.

  He hangs an arm over my shoulder, as warmly as a lover, leading
me to a hut where an officer in a navy uniform is sitting behind a wooden counter. The officer’s face is impassive, his thumb pressed down on the business end of his Kalashnikov (otherwise known as an AK-47).

  “You are a child of where?” he asks.

  “Britain.” I want to say “Great Britain,” but giants and Kalashnikovs have whittled down my national pride.

  He seizes my passport, thumping his stamp onto my Iranian visa.

  “That’s Iran,” I say.

  He snatches the passport back, stamps the right page, and throws it directly at my head.

  Back at the bus, a problem is brewing. A relay of mujahideen are carrying bottles and bowls of water to cool down the radiator, while the driver and a lackey are bustling under the chassis, hammering away with the contents of a toolbox. As I watch them at work, I’m struck by the thought that we might end up having to stay here all night.

  “It is in the hands of God,” declares the Hajji, his palms raised and his gold teeth catching the last flashes of the dying sunlight.

  I crouch down on the tarmac beside him, too nervous to enjoy the attention I’m receiving from the mujahideen. But I’d better make their acquaintance, that much is becoming clear—because one of them is flicking through the pages of a familiar green-jacketed hardback. He’s picked up my copy of the Shahnameh—the thousand-year-old epic Persian poem, which I had left on my seat.

  “This is yours?” he asks, one heavy brow inching up his forehead.

  I nod firmly—remembering what Wahid said about Afghan toughness, I don’t want the mujahid to think I’m a pushover:

  “You have read it?”

  “Of course! It is the story of my country.”

  The book is presented on his outstretched palms, as if he were an upmarket waiter offering a rare delicacy.