Drinking Arak Off an Ayatollah's Beard

by Nicholas Jubber

  “When Siyavash rides his horse through the fire,” said Pari Sabery, “it cannot touch him, because he is an innocent and pure human being. He is perfect.”

  This innocence is Siyavash’s trademark, singling him out and exposing him to the manipulation of others. Sent out to lead the Iranian army against its rival, the Kingdom of Turan, he manages to secure a truce. But his father, wary of Afrasiyab, the wily Turanian king, demands that he break his word and fight. This is something Siyavash cannot countenance. Instead, fed up with all the machinations, he decides to live on his own, building himself a city on the Turanian border. He lives there in peace, at least until Afrasiyab’s jealous brother accuses him of plotting to take over the kingdom. Afrasiyab rides out to attack, but Siyavash knows what’s coming—like Imam Hossain after him, he can see his own future. He burns his treasury, sends his horse away, and sets out to meet his fate. Grabbed by the hair, he is thrown to the ground, a bowl placed under his chin and his throat cut “as if it were a sheep’s.”

  The story of Siyavash is told by the poet Ferdowsi in the Shahnameh— an iconic story still remembered by many Iranians. Long before the ashoura festival there were mourning rituals for Siyavash, which are mentioned by the tenth-century historian Narshakhi in his “History of Bukhara” (the Central Asian city in which Siyavash was legendarily said to have lived).21 It is more than a coincidence, I think, that Ferdowsi was writing soon after ashoura was first publicly commemorated. The earliest records place it in 963 CE, when the poet was in his twenties (before then, the Shia were persecuted and unable to mark their holy days in public, but around this time a Shia dynasty called the Buwayhids wangled their way to control of the Sunni caliph in Baghdad). Shops were closed, women blackened their faces and tore their clothes, while the mourners beat their faces as they marched.

  “The Shia people,” noted the scholar Biruni, “lament and weep on this day, mourning over the protomartyr in public.”

  Standing on the pavement with Sina, watching the slashing of the knives on the sheep’s throats, their blood and their shiny white intestines glowing in the lamplight, I thought of Ferdowsi’s description: Siyavash, the martyr prince, grabbed by the hair and thrown to the ground, his throat cut “as if it were a sheep’s.” And I thought of the man who said he thinks of Siyavash “in my heart.”

  It wasn’t the only pre-Islamic detail peeking out through ashoura’s Islamic surface. The beasts hanging from the processional standards included winged bulls like the creatures carved at the ancient shah’s city of Persepolis, in western Iran. Imam Hossain’s father, Imam Ali (the Prophet’s son-in-law), was presented on several banners with a flamemaned lion behind him, inadvertently suggesting the old royal symbol and the Zoroastrian importance of the sun (rather than the Islamic motif of the moon). And most significant of all was a shrine I visited, up a copper-colored cliff on the outskirts of South Tehran, where women tie rags and offer prayers outside the iron-grilled mouth of a cave.

  “This is where Bibi Shahrbanu came when she was escaping from the Arabs,” said one of them—a young woman in floral printed voile, whose tears were threatening to put out the candle she was holding.

  She was talking about the daughter of Yazdagird III, the last pre-Islamic shah. According to tradition, Imam Hossain took her as his wife after the Persian empire had been crushed; but the night before the siege of Kerbala, knowing she was pregnant with his son, he sent her away.

  “When the Arabs came to catch her,” said the caretaker, offering me a glass of tea and a boiled sweet in a recess behind the shrine, “Imam Hossain had told her to cry out ‘Yahu!’ which means ‘oh God’ in Arabic, and then God would save her. But her Arabic wasn’t very good, so she cried out ‘Ya kuh!’ instead (which means ‘oh mountain!’) and she was eaten by the rocks.”

  It’s a surreal tale that captures the ambiguity of Iran’s Islamic identity. Taken by Islam, the daughter of the shah fails to be absorbed by the Arab culture. She retains her Persian language up to the end and is rescued by the old Zoroastrian symbol—the mountain. This Zoroastrian connection is made even stronger because, before Bibi Shahrbanu was honored here, this spot marked a shrine to Anahita, the Zoroastrian water angel (which is why, according to some theories, Bibi Shahrbanu came here—to pray in a place long venerated by her ancestral faith). It’s her offspring who make this shrine so important to Muslim Iranians today: Her son would become the fourth Shia imam; so from her blood—the blood of the ancient Persian shahs—come the remaining imams, reconciling the “alien” faith of Islam to the native Persian tradition of kingship. Through Bibi Shahrbanu, Islam is Persianized and made palatable to the wider Iranian population.

  “Is the story of Bibi Shahrbanu important for you?” I asked the caretaker.

  He put down his tea and nodded, gripping the fingers of one hand in the fist of the other.

  “Of course it is! Through Bibi Shahrbanu, Iran and Islam are one.”

  Together, these festivals (the Zoroastrian Nowruz and the ostensibly Islamic ashoura) showed that, bustling behind the screen of the mullahs’ particular brand of Islam, there is a thriving native culture. Many Iranians, especially young, middle-class ones like Sina, were fed up with all the religion the authorities had forced down their throats—they wanted a different way of seeing themselves, a way that could distinguish them from their hated overlords. And there was one man, above all others, who stood at the heart of this identity. . . .

  “There he is!”

  One afternoon in early spring, when the crocuses were starting to come out in the parks and fresh white asphodels were filling up the glass florists’ shops on the roadsides, the Professor met me outside the Literature Faculty of Tehran University. Taking off his homburg and holding it in front of him, he stood, in a respectful bow. Above us, sitting cross-legged on a cushion, with the end of his turban draped over his shoulder, was the poet Ferdowsi. If he didn’t happen to be made out of bronze, you might imagine he was sitting in a teahouse, ready to recite one of his tales.

  “So is he your favorite poet?” I asked.

  “Favorite?” The Professor snorted. “Favorite has nothing to do with it. Look at him, he is more even than a poet, he is . . . ”

  He stopped for a moment, as if he needed to work this one out.

  “He is . . . the most Persian Persian who ever lived. Yes, that is it—the most Persian Persian. Do you understand?”

  “I think so.”

  There was a bench nearby. The Professor lowered himself onto it, holding the armrest as he looked at the poet.

  “In your culture,” he said, “people do not remember poetry, do they?”

  “Well, some people do.”

  “But not everyone. You see, child? In Iran, everyone remembers poetry. Everyone can remember lines from Ferdowsi, for example. This is why he is so important! Without him, we would not speak Persian. Without him, we would have no history, no heritage. Without him, we would be like all the other countries the Arabs attacked—we would be extinct! An Iranian, a Persian speaker, would be the same as a dodo or a Phoenician. People would talk about it as if it was something from the past.”

  As I stood looking at the bronze poet from a thousand years ago, it was as if I were watching him come to life. As if his toes were starting to twitch inside those curly-ended shoes and his lips were quivering over his long twisting beard. Without this extraordinary figure from the past, Iran would have no present. Which made him more important to the country today than any other aspect of its culture. Because Ferdowsi and his Shahnameh represent the national cultural DNA.

  “He was a farmer from the east of our country,” said the Professor, “a province called Khorasan, near the border with Afghanistan.22

  He saw that our Persian culture was in decline—ever since the Arabs invaded, they tried to make us speak Arabic and even if they didn’t succeed, many Arabic words became stuck in our language, like mud on your shoes when you have fallen in the dirt. So he decided to do something about it
. You have to understand who this man was! He loved everything that made us Persian. He loved drinking wine, he loved our literature and our history, he loved the land, the mountains, the rivers, the sun. Oh yes, he was a Muslim—but more than that he was Persian! So for thirty-five years he worked without stopping, purifying the language all the way to its roots and collecting the legends and the history of the days before the Arabs came, the time of the shahs. Then he took his book, the Shahnameh, to the richest lord in this part of the world—Sultan Mahmud of Ghazni.”

  The Professor looked at me, his owl-like eyes expanding, his face lengthening like a shadow at dusk.

  “The sultan had offered him a gold dinar for every couplet—well, he had toiled so hard he had lost all his wealth—his farm was no more than a few empty fields. So he traveled all the way to Ghazni, a journey of many days across the most dangerous lands, he presented the Shahnameh at Sultan Mahmud’s court, and do you know what happened?”

  He was still looking at me, his thick dark brows building arches over his eyes, his furrows filling up with bold lines of shade.

  “For sixty thousand couplets, for forty years’ work, for the greatest poem in our language—did Sultan Mahmud give him what he promised? Ha! He gave him a single sack of silver!”23

  At this, the Professor drummed the arm of the bench and, throwing back his head, exploded. It was a laugh, but one consisting less of mirth than a raw, maniacal anger. Several students, coming out of the Literature Faculty, stopped their chatting and turned to look at him, blinking in the sunlight and not daring to approach.

  “Ferdowsi was furious!” he continued. “He went to the bathhouse and he threw away the money. He gave half of it to the bath attendant, and the other half to a sherbet-seller. Then he asked for one more look at his poem, and he wrote something in the back.”

  A rueful smile crossed the Professor’s face, his eyes even brighter now as a defiant chuckle crept out of his mouth.

  “Those words he wrote, how they made Sultan Mahmud boil! He told his soldiers, ‘Find that poet and trample him under my elephants! ’ But Ferdowsi could not be found—he was gone.”

  “What were the words?” I asked.

  The Professor nodded slowly, looking up at the statue with an expression of such intensity it was as if he were channeling the spirit of the poet himself. After a deep breath, the words of Ferdowsi’s wrath came bursting out, in such a thunderous tone that several of the students walking past stopped to listen:

  Agar shah ra shah budi pedar If only your father a true king had been

  Besar bar nahadi mara taj e zar Then wouldn’t your gold on my head have been poured?

  Vagar madar shahbanu bedi And as for your mother, if she’d been a queen

  Mara sim va zar ta be zanu bedi. Then I would be sunk to my knees in your hoard.24

  There was a long silence between us, punctuated by the Professor’s deep breaths, as I took in the age-old insult—the king derided for his low birth. So much of what I’d learned about Persian culture so far (the concern for birth, reflected in the ancestry of the Shia imams; the tradition of poets being crowned with gold) seemed to be evoked in these lines, along with something else I would learn more about in the coming weeks and months—the anger of a poet spurned by the ruling regime. Some of the students were still looking at us, drawn by the power of the Professor’s recital, but at last they moved on.

  “You see?” said the Professor. His smile had fallen and in its place was a gentler, sadder expression. “He worked hard all his life and what did he ever get from the world? When people say we have troubles, I tell them, bright-thinkers in this country, we always had troubles! Look at Ferdowsi!”

  Shaking his head, he pressed down on the arm of the bench to pull himself up. Then, holding his hands behind his back, he slowly made his way toward the university gates, whispering to himself as we walked: “the most Persian Persian who ever lived.”

  3

  The Snake-Shouldered Tyrant

  Tehran. March.

  I was falling in love with all things Persian. With the food—the marinated kebabs, the rice speckled with barberries, the hot stews full of okra or spinach, the boxes packed with crunchy, syrupy, pistachio-sprinkled pastries that guests always presented when they turned up for dinner. With the language—its long, drawn-out vowels suggesting a languorous, philosophical people, while its compound words were earthy and resonant—like “earth-apple” for potato, or “fire-fountain” for volcano. I was falling in love with the music—the traditional orchestras (I loved going along to concert rehearsals with a friend of Sina’s who was a flautist, matching the sounds to their instruments—the sigh of a horsehair bow sawing across a camancheh; the copper rattle on a giant duhul, a drum as big as a truck tire, beaten with a large wooden rod by a woman in a turquoise gown; the hoot on the neyanban—the Iranian bagpipes—as a man in a sailor suit blew into an inflated goatskin) or the endless spirals and unworldly melodies of the late Fereydoun Farughi on the Professor’s favorite CD.

  Most of all, I was falling in love with the wonderful family who, with classic Persian generosity, had welcomed me into their home. Sina would always have some new activity to set out upon—fishing at the Karaj Dam, taking the cable car up Mount Alborz (often with a lemonade bottle filled up with vodka), or setting off for the forests of Mazanderan, where a friend of his had a house in the hills. We would grill the lamb on the slope and warm ourselves up with a log fire, while playing blackjack over glasses of arak. There would be afternoons at the house when the Professor’s literary friends turned up, sharing jokes and the verses of poetry that spilled out of their mouths as easily as the crumbs of pastry falling down their lapels; or evenings of frustration trying to beat Tahmineh at backgammon. “I carried!” she would holler each time she won (which was almost always). And every so often the Professor would tell me to put on my best shoes for an evening excursion.

  “No more questions, child!” he snapped on one occasion, when I asked where we were heading.

  Khanom and Tahmineh were waiting on the balcony in their best headscarves (Tahmineh’s was a knockoff of a Hermes), and Tahmineh was teasing her brother for his getup.

  “Don’t you have a clean shirt?” she asked with a sniff.

  “Eh!” he retorted, stiffening his collar between his fingers. He threw back his head, which was the one item of his apparel that was always immaculate—wherever he went, he always wore enough wax on top to make a candle.

  Our taxi rattled around a cypress tree on a traffic roundabout and screeched under the webbed green leaves of the plane trees. Perhaps we were off to the Rudaki Music Centre, or was there a poetry recital at Vahdat Hall? But nobody would tell me this afternoon’s destination until we arrived.

  “I saw this show once before,” announced the Professor, leading us through a chain-link gate toward the small, ungainly concrete building ahead of us. “In fact, the composer is an acquaintance of mine. I believe you will enjoy it—if,” he added, with an arch of his brow, “you English have a heart.”

  Bursting out of a billboard above us was a flame-haired beefcake. Two horns were spiking out of his helmet, while an ox-headed mace swelled in his hand. I’d spent long enough under the Professor’s roof to recognize him—Rostam, the most popular figure in Persian legend, whose feats include plucking the liver out of a ferocious monster called the White Div, slaying a dragon, and disguising himself as a merchant to sack an enemy fort. To be a champion worthy of admiration in this region, you need the cunning of Odysseus and the strength of the Incredible Hulk.

  We were on the steps of a small theater in the center of town, where the red velvet curtain was about to rise for an operatic performance of Ferdowsi’s most popular tale—“The Tragedy of Rostam and Sohrab.”

  “Don’t you know this story?” asked the Professor as we took our seats. “It is the most famous of them all.”

  I told him about the English poet Matthew Arnold, who composed a loose translation of the tale in
the nineteenth century. Coming across Arnold’s atmospheric version at university was my first experience of the Shahnameh—filling my head with a sumptuous land far closer to the world of Shakespearean drama than the Iran I would see on the news.

  “Ha!” said the Professor, with a wry smile. “You English took all those other things from us, why not take our stories too!”

  Just like the rest of the world, going to an Iranian opera is as much a social as a cultural experience. While Rostam was strutting about in his double-horned helmet and dancers in brightly colored bodices were sashaying around the court of the far-away kingdom of Samangan, Sina and Tahmineh were introducing me to their friends in the row behind us. To anyone who saw us, the only charitable explanation would have been that we had recently acquired eyes in the backs of our heads and were showing off our new abilities (although the whispering might have hinted at our less than absolute concentration on the show).

  “See that guy there,” whispered Sina, nodding to a fellow with bushy eyebrows, “he’s the best one to know if you want to smoke ganga. Eh! And you see that girl there? . . . No, not that one, the one to the left. Don’t stare, Nicholas, just look! She’s going out with the guy two rows behind, the one who’s reading the note she just passed him. But she’s also going out with the guy in front of us, the one whose head is so big he’s blocking the stage. . . . ”

  Tahmineh was being especially vocal: A couple of times she even received a tongue-click from Khanom (“I think you spent the whole performance gossiping with your friends,” she said later, adding pointedly, “I don’t suppose you want to share any of this gossip with the rest of us?”). The only time in the first act that Tahmineh appeared to be paying attention to the stage was when she tugged at my arm.