Drinking Arak Off an Ayatollah's Beard

by Nicholas Jubber

  To the Professor, tyranny was a constant in the country’s history. When his friends—scholars, magazine editors, a novelist—came over for poetry discussions and cake, they would back him up. There were stories of cruel censorship, forcing a book through a dozen variations to toe an ever-shifting government line; of cells full of cockroaches and urine; of someone’s niece, who had disappeared and was believed to be holed up in the dreaded Evin prison; of beatings at demonstrations either side of the revolution; and of an elderly poet who had been shot by a firing squad under the shah.

  But there was a crucial difference between the tyrants. When Ayatollah Khomeini, flying back at the end of the revolution in 1979, was asked what he felt to be returning to his homeland after a fourteen-year exile, he gave a stony-faced reply: “nothing.” In contrast, the shah, leaving the country only a week and a half earlier, stooped to pick a handful of Iranian soil before boarding his plane.

  “Even if the shah was bad,” said the Professor, “at least he believed he loved Iran. But these onion-heads, they want the Middle East to be one great Muslim empire, like it was in the time of the caliphs. To them, Iran means nothing, just like Khomeini said.”

  The Professor and his family represented a particular kind of Iranian—against the government, but certainly not hoping the shah would come back; proud of Iranian history and lukewarm to the religion they outwardly professed.

  “Most Iranians are spiritual,” he once told me, “but does this oblige us to attend the mosque every Friday and perform the fast in Ramadan? Of course not! These things are external rituals, they are not what matters.”

  The Professor rarely talked about religion, but he frequently talked about being Persian. If I wanted to get in his good books, all I had to do was repeat the phrase “Farsi shirin e”—Persian is sweet.13

  “The Persian culture,” he liked to say, “is the most important culture in this part of the world. Maybe if you are a religious fanatic you will disagree, but otherwise you cannot argue. We have poetry, we have music, we have philosophy! And medicine also—in fact, without the Persians, the history of medicine would be a disaster.”

  He would dip into his walnut bookcase, introducing me to his favorite writers—most of whom were dead before the bubonic plague: Ibn Sina (known to the West as Avicenna), who produced the Qanun or “Code” of Medicine—the seminal medical text not only in the Middle East but in Europe too until the 1800s; the scholar Abu Raihan al-Biruni, who proved that light travels faster than sound and argued that the earth moves around the sun more than five hundred years before Copernicus (as well as, among his other observations, pointing out that flowers always have three, four, five, six, or eight petals but never seven or nine); the bawdy poet Abu Dulaf al-Khazriji, who suggested that beggars should stoke the sympathy of the crowd by inserting porridge up their rectums (so it oozed out as the suppurations of a wound) and whose company included “every person avid for copulation, for vulvas and anuses indifferently.” Together, these extraordinary authors expressed the amazing eclecticism of the medieval Persians—specifically, of the late tenth and early eleventh centuries, when this region was fizzing with more far-reaching ideas than the rest of the world put together.14

  Figure 1: Persian Egg-Heads of the Late 10th/Early 11th Century

  Many of the Professor’s books were poetry collections, spanning the gamut of Persian literature, from a blind medieval minstrel called Rudaki to Forough Forrukhzad, a heroine to thousands of Iranian women who was killed in a car accident in her early thirties. The Professor would quote from these poets at the dinner table, pointing out the particular genius of the Persian language for rhyme (“Bush mush!” he would say to prove this point. “(President) Bush is a mouse!”; “Anar e bustan, anar e pestan!”—“Pomegranate of the fruit garden, pomegranate of the breasts!”)—and this wasn’t because he was an intel - lectual, it was because he was Persian. As the film director Abbas Kiarostami puts it, “Poetry in Iran pours down on us, like falling rain, and everyone takes part in it.” Even Ayatollah Khomeini had been known to pen the odd couplet, composing mystical verses influenced by the medieval Sufi poets. Among his lines—somewhat surprising given the system he imposed on the country—is the following: “Open the door of the tavern before me night and day, / For I have become weary of the mosque and seminary.”15

  Coming from a society in which poetry is often perceived as elitist and out-of-date, it was hard for me to recognize its importance to Iranians. But each time I heard a taxi driver, stuck in congestion, soothing his frustration with a quote from the mystical medieval poet Hafez, or the Professor’s wife, reciting from Forrukhzad while she was hanging up the laundry, another piece of my skepticism would be nibbled away. What had appealed to me at first about Iran was all the parties—the drink, drugs, and flirting—because they reminded me of home. It’s a way of saying, “Look, they’re just the same as us!” But the longer I stayed in the country, the more I was drawn to what made them . . . themselves. And foremost was their love for poetry. Over the coming months, I would hear verses recited in grocer shops, at the sauna, in a university dormitory. And I would realize that Iran isn’t ayatollahs and headscarves and nuclear centrifuges. It’s a butcher reciting verses from the national epic in his village shop, as everyone crowds around to listen, not caring at all if they will have to wait for their meat.

  The Professor wasn’t alone in emphasizing the “national” over the “religious” culture. Several musicians, like the popular DJ Div or the band Kahtmayan, used pre-Islamic stories and characters in their songs. It was a way of marking themselves as rebels, against the status quo, but it was also a way of exploring their national identity—an issue, as I was to learn, that was very important to many young Iranians.

  It was at the New Year (celebrated—with more logic than the Roman calendar—on the spring equinox) that this identity came to the fore. According to the tenth-century scholar Biruni, “It has been the custom of this day to sow around a plate seven kinds of grain on seven columns, and from their growth they draw conclusions regarding the corn of that year, whether it would be good or bad.” The custom is retained, even in the cities: For several weeks leading up to the festival, Khanom was tending a tray of wheat sprouts, which she kept on top of the fridge, and in accordance with tradition, a table was set up in the living room, under the print of Darius the Great. In keeping with the theme of “seven,” it contained seven items beginning with the Persian letter “sin” or s: an apple (sib), a sweet pudding called samanu, a clove of garlic (sir), a vinegar bottle (serkeh), a jujube fruit (senjed), a handful of sumac berries, and the tray of sprouts (sabzi).

  The festival, known as Nowruz or “New Day,” was celebrated long before even Biruni was around, which is reflected in one of its most significant rituals: On the Wednesday before Nowruz, known as “Red Wednesday,” people set off firecrackers and leap over flames. I was itching to see this ritual, so Sina took me to a school playground, where a set of seven small fires had been stoked. Smoke was puffing at Spider-Man sneakers and singeing the odd sock as a gang of small boys chanted the traditional phrase “My red for your yellow and your yellow for my red.” The yellow is the chanter’s weariness, while the red signifies the power of the flames, which he hopes will refuel him for the coming year (although none of the boys, prancing over the flames and setting off Russian petards to scare the girls, looked like they were in need of an energy boost).

  “We have been doing this since before the Arabs attacked,”16 said the father of one of the boys, passing around a plate of pistachio-flavored nougat, “since the time when we were Zoroastrian. We had a great love of fire because it can purify things, so on this day we brought out anything rotten from our houses and put it on the fire.”

  “What do the mullahs think of it?” I asked.

  “Oh, who cares? Sometimes they try to stop it. One of the ayatollahs made an announcement, he said it is un-Islamic.17 But why should we listen to them? This is the problem in our coun
try, we act like sheep and let ourselves be pushed around by people who aren’t true Iranians.”

  I was intrigued by the way he identified so closely with Zoroastrianism—a religion founded more than a millennium before Islam. Growing out of native folk beliefs, Zoroastrianism developed from the older veneration of nature its customs of worshipping in front of a fire and leaving the dead on mountaintop towers to be eaten by vultures. Equally striking was his dismissal of the ayatollahs as un-Iranian. Like many Iranians who were fond of the native culture, he despised the ayatollahs’ emphasis on Islamic traditions. It was an attack, as far as he was concerned, on the country’s identity—an individuality drawn principally from its pre-Islamic heritage.

  “I do not consider this a good thing,” said the Professor, when I talked to him about the Red Wednesday ceremony.

  I was surprised: I had thought he was keen on the pre-Islamic motifs—after all, this was the subject of his research.

  “They are doing it for negative reasons,” he said, “to announce to the world they are not standing beside the mullahs. They jump over the fires but if you ask them about Zoroastrianism they will be unable to answer you. And if they are interested in Red Wednesday, then please tell me, where are the other old traditions, like the boys spoon-hitting or Hajji Firuz?18 What these young people are looking for is an opportunity to gather in large numbers—so the boys and girls can exchange their telephone numbers.”

  The Pahlavi shahs exploited the pre-Islamic motifs to strengthen their power; the same traditions were being harnessed now by the powerless youth, hungry for the opportunities the mullahs’ regime was denying them.

  I think the Professor was only partially right. I talked to a lot of young Iranians about the pre-Islamic motifs, and most of them expressed little interest in, or knowledge of, the historical background. But a surprising number of them did. For every three youngsters who treated Red Wednesday as a dating game, there was always one who wanted to tell me about the story behind it. Typical of these was Mehrdad, a twenty-year-old music student, who unbuttoned his shirt to show a metal figure resting on his chest.

  “This is the faravahar,” he said.

  It was a bearded man with wings and a disk around his waist, hanging from a silver chain around Mehrdad’s neck.

  “It is the Zoroastrian symbol,” he said. “I am Muslim, that is my upbringing, but I am Iranian and this is more important for me. Iranians are Zoroastrians—we have only been Muslim for a few hundred years, but Zoroastrianism is natural to us. It is connected to being Iranian because it has a love for the sun and the mountains and trees, and these are all important things in our culture.”

  In Britain you might hear of the odd pagan cult or a ritual in a Wiltshire field, but it’s hardly mainstream. Nor are views like Mehrdad’s in Iran—because if he were to express them in public he could be accused of apostasy, which is punishable by death. But he was far from alone in wanting to celebrate the pre-Islamic culture—it couldn’t be kept down, not even when it came to the biggest of all the country’s Islamic ceremonies . . .

  “Look!” said Sina one cold night at the end of February. “You want to go and see?”

  Leaning over the balcony railing, it was hard to work out what was going on. The black metal gate was acting as a screen—all I could make out behind it were the tops of brightly colored feathers and the curved iron tongues of a processional standard. It was the sounds that were drawing us out—the thunder of a bass drum, growing louder with every beat, and the chanting of the men.

  “You see!”

  Sina was grinning as the gate closed behind us, his head already buzzing with pickup lines.

  “This is what happens on ashoura,” he explained, nodding at a row of girls wrapped in black cotton on the other side of the road. “The girls from the strict families are given permission to go outside because it’s a holy day, and they are hoping they will find a boyfriend.”

  He dug a hand into his pocket, drawing out a piece of paper with his phone number, and cast his beam on the girls—he’d been expecting this. Even if it was a religious festival, it was still a large gathering, and in Iran, all large gatherings involve the number exchange. That night, Sina swapped details with three girls (a modest tally by his standards, although it made up for the loss of two of his girlfriends in the last fortnight). But, having accompanied him on every conceivable variation of the Tehran pickup tour, I found my attention was drifting from the girls; this time it was the men who engrossed me.

  They were all wearing black trousers and shirts. They formed rows behind the standard, some of them carrying metal chains, which they gripped on short wooden handles and struck hard against their backs.

  “Oh Imam Hossain!” they cried, to the rhythm of the drum, “oh Imam Hossain!”

  There is no figure in Shia Islam as popular as Imam Hossain. He was as ubiquitous in Tehran as Ayatollah Khomeini: strung up on the roadsides and outside government buildings, painted onto the sides of apartment blocks, and raised over the marquees where the mourning songs were sold. He was usually depicted face-on, blood pouring from his forehead: a reference to his death on ashoura, the tenth day of the Islamic month of Mohurram, in 680 CE. It was the defining moment in the schism between the Shia and the Sunnis,19 when Imam Hossain, a grandson of the Prophet Mohammed, was besieged along with his entourage on the plains of Kerbala and struck down by the forces of the caliph Yazid. They were “treated in such a way as never in the whole world the worst criminals have been treated,” narrated the scholar Biruni. “They were killed by hunger and thirst, through the sword. They were burned and their heads roasted, and horses were made to trample over their bodies.” The caliph, on the other hand, “celebrated a feast, and gave banquets and parties, eating sweetmeats and various kinds of confiseries.”

  The standard (known as an alam) is based on those carried on the battlefield, traditionally signifying the presence of the ruler. A verse from the Quran wove an openwork inscription around it, while fantastical metal beasts hung down around the lustrously bearded image of Imam Hossain.

  A stocky man was buckled to it, lifting it like Atlas as he towed the procession forward. We followed them down a series of backstreets, between smog-blackened, plaster-dripping walls, across the City Park and under a motorway tunnel where the traffic, amazingly, stopped to let them pass. Black bunting fluttered over our heads in the bazaar district as we converged among other groups, one of which was followed by a pickup truck full of sheep. A couple of the sheep were being dragged off the truck and onto the street, where they were held down by burly men with rolled-up sleeves. The light from a lamppost struck the edge of a knife, sparkling on the drops of blood growing on the pavement, which spread around us and trickled down between the cracks in the paving stones.

  A man on a motorbike had parked near one of the sheep corpses. He knelt down, dunking his fingers in the blood, then dabbed it on his rearview mirrors.

  “You know why he is doing that?” asked Sina. “He thinks it will give him good fortune.”

  And it wasn’t just bikers. Others did the same to the bumpers of their cars, dipping their fingers like Christians at a font and anointing their vehicles with mumbled words of prayer.

  “We are doing this for Imam Hossain,” said one of the men, gripping his chain in his hands. “He was a good man, the best of men.”

  But the “chain-hitter” next to him was more ambiguous about whom they were honoring.

  “It is not only Imam Hossain,” he said, “it is also Siyavash. Before we became Muslims we did this for Siyavash. Now we do it for Imam Hossain, but in my heart I am thinking also of Siyavash.”

  “Siyavash?” I asked.

  I was puzzled. I’d read about Siyavash many times—he was perhaps my favorite character from all the Persian myths I’d absorbed over the past few weeks; but I was sure he was not a figure who would fit easily into an Islamic festival, so I wasn’t surprised when the first man told me to ignore him.

  “
Siyavash is a myth,” he snapped. “Imam Hossain is real; that is much better.”

  It was too late—he couldn’t rub out what the other man had said: “Siyavash.” It was like a magic word, fracturing the surface of ashoura like the cracks through which the sheep’s blood had been trickling, pulling out the ghosts of Iran’s pre-Islamic past to stand alongside the great figures of Shiism.

  “Siyavash,” I kept saying, repeating the talismanic word. “Siyavash. Siyavash! He said Siyavash . . . ”

  But Sina was looking serious for once, squeezing my shoulder to shut me up.

  “Don’t say it so loud,” he whispered. “Some people don’t like it.”

  “But he said . . . ”

  Siyavash was a pre-Islamic prince, a mythical character who has no place in the Quran. If he lived, it was nearly three millennia ago, probably in Central Asia. To toss his name into a Muslim festival is like turning up at a Christmas vigil and talking about Thor. But the same connection was made again, just a few days after ashoura, when I met the acclaimed theater director Pari Sabery.

  She was an imposing figure—her eyes shining under the wisps of gray hair that peeked under her black headscarf. In the café underneath the City Theatre, she sat down in front of a poster for a play she’d directed about Siyavash’s story only a few months earlier.

  “Imam Hossain is like Siyavash,” she explained. “Their blood purifies us.”

  THE TALE OF SIYAVASH

  Blessed with the sort of looks to make a woman melt like ice near a fire, Siyavash is the most sought-after of princes. Somewhat too sought-after, in fact. His stepmother invites him into the royal harem and offers him a lot more than a glass of rose water. He flees from her embraces, but she cries rape, tearing her garments and slashing her cheeks with her fingernails, and with the help of a witch she blames Siyavash for causing her to miscarry. There is only one way the prince can prove his innocence: He must ride his horse through a tunnel of flames.20