There is another critical reason for the mullahs’ antagonism: The Shahnameh doesn’t celebrate holy men fighting for God. Ferdowsi’s heroes are national—not religious—champions, men who fought for king and country. And even when God is invoked, he isn’t the God of Islam. Ferdowsi might have been a Muslim living in Muslim times. But his stories are not.27
They are, above all, the stories of the Zoroastrians—the faith that preceded Islam and grew out of the folk religions of Iran’s earliest history. In this sense, the Shahnameh offers an alternative account of the country to the Islamo-centric narrative of the mullahs, an account whose greatest strength is that it grew out of the very roots of Iranian civilization. By preserving these Zoroastrian and pre-Zoroastrian stories, Ferdowsi shows that Iran doesn’t just mean Islam. He keeps alive many of the traditions that Islam succeeded, and shows that Islamic culture—of which the Shahnameh is the supreme poetic achievement—is not as exclusive as fanatics on either side of East-West warmongering would have us believe. Pushed underground by the mullahs, hidden in the subculture with pop music and alcohol, the Shahnameh became a symbol of what the mullahs are not. This was underlined to me by the best-selling author and scholar Nodushan Eslami, over tea and slices of melon one afternoon in his elegant North Tehran apartment.
“The government,” he said, “has been against the Shahnameh because they are more interested in Islam than Iran. But for the young generation today, Ferdowsi is more alive now than ever before. They are very curious about Ferdowsi and they consider the Shahnameh as a symbol of Iranian nationality and independence.”
Ferdowsi’s epic was spread too thickly across Iran’s cultural landscape to remain underground—and as impatience with the current regime was growing, it was breaking out.
“You understand?” asked the Professor, leaning over the living room table as I gripped my forehead between my fingers.
The thousand-year-old diction wasn’t exactly a pushover, so I was dependent on his modern translation.
“One day it will strike you as fast as if it was in your own language,” he said, with a gentle smile.
I was grateful for his optimism, although I knew my Persian would never reach that level. But there was something intriguing about the attempt. Over the coming weeks, I would take part in many similar sessions with the Professor. I enjoyed them as much for the bond they gave me with this remarkable man—in the absence of Ferdowsi, the most Persian Persian I ever met—as for any insight they offered into the linguistic nuances of the poet’s verse.
Today we were looking at the first of the great tales in the Shahnameh—the story of a villain called Zahhak (who, like many baddies in Iranian culture, is an Arab). Once the prince of a Bedouin tribe, he has sold his soul to the devil and now has a couple of snakes writhing out of his shoulders. At first alarmed, he slowly grows accustomed to this dramatic change in his body. The snakes have an exacting diet: Every day, without fail, they must feed on the brains of two young men. Whatever vitamins this sustenance provides, it’s just what you want if you’re a megalomaniac—strengthened by his surreal appendages, Zahhak marches out from the Arabian desert, taking over the Kingdom of Iran and splitting the shah in two. The people cower before his snake-swollen prowess, and for a thousand years he is their hated ruler, draining their youth to satisfy the appetite of his sinuous shoulder pads.
“You understand this?” said the Professor, hurriedly lighting up another Bahman cigarette, as if he needed to soothe himself from the calamity he was reading. “Maybe Zahhak never lived; it is too long ago to know for sure. But we can feel that it is true because we know what it is like to suffer under tyranny.”
He jerked his chin at a newspaper on the table in front of us, which was carrying a photograph of Ayatollah Khamenei, in his heavy black turban and oversized glasses. Towing an ashtray across the table, the Professor set it on the paper, so the Supreme Leader’s solemn gaze was slowly obscured by the mound of his ash.
I tried to be skeptical. A monster with snakes in his shoulders? Puh-leeze. But the puppet opera had loosened Ferdowsi’s epic from its medieval chains; it was lunging forward through time, insisting on its place in the present. I thought of the girl at the party a few weeks ago: “The past times and today,” she had said, “they are like a tortoise and its shell.” Any lingering doubts were slowly being smothered. And after an encounter with Sina’s friend Reza—a ponytailed artist with a fondness for smuggled scotch—I would never doubt the significance of the Shahnameh again.
Reza’s place was an anomaly: the kind of hideaway that showed how distinct Iran’s public and private worlds could be. It was in the heart of the bazaar district, the most conservative area in town, where machine-produced carpets displayed the profile of the Supreme Leader and fortune-telling parakeets picked out medieval verses to tell your fortune. The street itself was a crumbling alley where the pipes were as caked in lime scale as the rolling shop-fronts in rust. An intercom crackled above a chipped stoop and if you stood there long enough your head would be gunked in plaster. Then up, around the newel post, up the stairs, and through a door with splashes of paint on the jamb like multicolored spit—and finally we were in.
People came to Reza’s for a release, to unwind, to listen to music and drink and share jokes, knowing they would never be caught. Persian House would spin on the stereo as a dozen young men swung under a Chinese paper lantern. The smoke from a water pipe would shroud Sina’s head while he tamped down the charcoal with a pair of rusty tongs. Ring-pulls would crack on 330ml cans of “London” gin (made in Turkey but labeled “London” because that was the most popular brand, just as whiskey was called “Scottish” even if it wasn’t); a Yamaha would twang to someone’s riff, or someone else would toot on a flute; and occasionally there would be a peal of female laughter and a headscarf or two hanging on the hook by the door.
“Hey, Nicholas, you know what you’re drinking?” asked Reza, approaching me through a curtain of smoke and placing a can of “London” gin in my hand. On my first appearance at his flat, we had joked about the can’s alleged provenance and from that moment on, “London” gin became my drink.
“Thanks!” I said.
I took a swig, then grabbed a Maz-Maz crisp and dipped it in a pot of yogurt, before accepting a roll-up from Mustafa. No one was going to say the British don’t know how to party!
Drinking behind closed doors wasn’t particularly hard to get used to: It took me back to the monastic boarding school where I was incarcerated as a teenager. Once again I was ruled by men of the cloth, wasn’t allowed to drink or have any liaisons with women. When I visited Reza’s, I was a schoolboy again, hiding out behind the fire escape, where my friends and I used to guzzle our bottles of cheap Cinzano, watching out for the monks or one of the wilier lay-teachers—who looked on such activities with only a little more mercy than the basijis of Tehran.28
There was another reason why going to Reza’s made me feel like a naughty schoolboy. Because even though the Professor liked a drink himself, he was far from liking Reza.
“That painting boy!” he huffed one afternoon when he had wheedled out of Sina where we were headed.
“Baba doesn’t like Reza’s uncle,” explained Sina, having assured his father we would be giving “the painting boy” a wide berth. “He thinks Reza has a bad family. Now come on, Mustafa, let’s go to Reza’s!”
Reza’s uncle was a high-profile artist who had been a friend of the Professor’s before the revolution. But he’d accepted several commissions from the regime to design a set of murals that were displayed in prominent places in the center of town—all red-headbanded basijis and long-bearded ayatollahs. As far as the Professor was concerned, he’d sold out. The scorn the Professor poured on Sina’s friendship with Reza was something I would encounter on several occasions—and it would have a massive impact on my Iranian experience a few weeks later.
If I felt like a rebel going to Reza’s, it was he who really carried it off. Most Iranian
men wore their hair short, but Reza’s crashed down his neck and splayed across his shoulders. Bearish stubble prickled his chin, which hung low on a pale face where the light of a smile rarely flickered. His work, which was scattered around the flat—half-finished plaster-of-paris busts tottering between the cutting mats and canvas boards leaning against the walls (among which was a sketch for a poster of one of Tahmineh’s plays)—shared the same sadness etched on his face.
It was on this occasion that I took a good look at them. A couple of drinks had left everyone else on the floor (as usual they drank with one clear purpose—to knock themselves out as quickly as possible—and achieved the feat in half an hour.) But Reza and I were more accustomed to alcohol—he as an artist and me as a Brit, so we climbed up a wooden stairwell for a look at what he called his studio, where he kept all his finished paintings.
“If your heart really wants to see,” he said, his loosened hair swinging across his shoulders and the treads creaking under his feet, “then I will show you.”
At the top of the stairs, a naked bulb cast a dim glow around a small, shabby room, where the first noticeable feature was a frayed carpet lying under a clay prayer tablet.
“Is this where you come to pray?” I asked, half in jest.
“Actually, yes.”
Reza’s expression was serious, even though his breath reeked of gin.
The paintings were set against the walls, sometimes two or three together, many of them united by a shared motif: a bird. Small and sparrowlike, they appeared in a series of wintry scenes painted in thick, dark oils on canvas boards, looking out of a window set among spindly trees or sitting on a branch beside a mosque.
“The bird represents me,” said Reza. His soft maroon eyes were fixed to the bird as he added, in his most disenchanted voice, “because I am divided from society.”
Somehow—maybe it was the length and pallor of his face, which gave a certain conviction to what he was saying—he was able to carry off this introspective angst. I think it was partly because of the political dimension, which he explained as we sat down on the floor, nursing our cans.
“You heard about the 18th of Tir?” he asked.
He was talking about a square in the city center, where thousands had raised banners over a week and a half in the summer of 2003.
“They sent in the basijis,” he explained, “because they’re tough and everyone’s scared of them. They had clubs and knives and they cut some of the women on their hands and faces, and they took some of us—hundreds of us. I was in prison for ten days, in solitary confinement. They came into my cell every day at least two times, and they beat me.”
“Will you demonstrate again?” I asked.
His eyes fell to the wood-paneled floor, his face dappled by the light from the bulb.
“I always demonstrate,” he said, “through my art. If you go to a demonstration, it’s dropped the next day and nothing comes of it. But art . . . it can last.”
He slid back down the stairs in search of more booze, leaving me alone with the paintings. I’d had enough of all the birds, but as I sifted through the boards there was one picture that struck me—and not just because it was avian-free.
Two black forklike stakes rose up beside an ethereal figure—a mass of copper-colored metallic coils that spiraled around each other and framed a domed shape curving inward like a snake’s head. The impression was alien and hostile, the circular motion suggesting powerful sophistication and the spikes on the end of the stakes conveying an atmosphere of danger. But there was something familiar in the form—the towers on either side of a dome.
“You know what this is?” asked Reza.
He was standing behind me as I stared at the painting, two fresh cans in his hands.
“I can’t say it publicly, of course,” he added, “so I have to say it in symbols. The towers are the minarets and between them is a dome. It’s a mosque.”
Here was something genuinely, dangerously rebellious. It wasn’t just the hostile atmosphere of the painting; it was the name Reza had given it—a name that, had he presented it in public, would have gotten him arrested.
“I call this picture Zahhak,” he said.
As soon as he uttered the name, I could feel the breath sweeping up my throat. Zahhak—the evil prince with the snakes in his shoulders: the tyrannical ruler from the story I had read with the Professor.
It was only now, as I looked at Reza’s painting, that I realized how alive Ferdowsi’s thousand-year-old epic actually is. Because this was the first time I saw a story from the Shahnameh brought to life for today—to explain the way people were living right now. Its significance to the present wasn’t simply a matter of interpretation—it was the whole point of the painting.
By calling it Zahhak, Reza was sending out a clear message. To many Iranians, the mullahs, like Zahhak, are draining the Iranian youth (most directly in the eight-year war with Iraq in the 1980s, when Ayatollah Khomeini encouraged as many young people as possible to be “martyrs” and exhorted women to bear more children for the battlefield) and many consider the mullahs to be “Arabs”—as Zahhak is—because they are more interested in Islamic culture than in the indigenous Iranian traditions.29
Reza wasn’t using Ferdowsi’s tale to make himself look clever, or as a gimmicky nod to the past; he was using it because it illustrated just how badly the Iranian youth have been let down by their leaders. Because Ferdowsi’s tale, a thousand years after it was written and many more thousand since it was set, has a powerful contemporary resonance.
As hatred of Zahhak spreads across the land of mythical Iran, an underground resistance movement is formed, led by two unlikely heroes. The first is a blacksmith called Kawa, who strips off his leather apron, sticks it on a spear-point, and raises it as a revolutionary flag. Much as in the 1979 revolution, the bazaaris turn against the king. The second hero is the noble-born Fereydoun, whose father was killed by Zahhak and who is eager for revenge. Marching on Zahhak’s palace, supported by Kawa and the rioting bazaaris, he smashes the heads of Zahhak’s guards and binds the tyrant with lion-hide straps, to be locked for eternity in a cave under Mount Damavand—the now-dormant volcano that tapers to the north of Tehran.
“Hopefully,” said Reza, as we stood looking at his canvas, “we can find a new Fereydoun and drive those fathers-of-bitches away.”
I thought he meant getting rid of the mullahs altogether. In fact, I would later discover that he had a more complicated relationship with the theocracy; but that evening, as he poured the gin and we clinked, I remember the giddy feeling of having stumbled across something magical—a rope dangling into the past. It was there in Reza’s flat, with a can of “London” gin in one hand, that I became conscious of what a mighty figure Ferdowsi is in the Iranian psyche. And it was there, in Reza’s flat, that the seeds of my mission to Afghanistan were sown.
4
In the Land of Fire
Iran. April.
“You’re drawing a cat?” asked Sina.
I was sitting over the desk in his room, with my pencil on a sketch pad. It was a map of Iran, in fact—but there was something unmistakably feline about the form. Its ears were poking into the Caucasus, while Afghanistan, tellingly, was coming out of its rump. Given the volume of secondhand goods sent across Iran’s eastern border every day, that was appropriate.
I was drawing the map to work out the places I wanted to visit—my term at the language institute was coming to an end, so I would have plenty of time to tour the country. At the top of my list was Yazd—a desert city famous for a minority community who, I imagined, would be able to lift up the curtain on the roots of Persianness.
“You must go to Fars as well,” said Sina.
“Really?”
“Yes, of course, Nicholas! This is where all the most important shahs were. The Achaemenians, the Sassanians . . . The ones when Iran ruled the whole world. So—when shall we leave?”
“We?”
I had been planning o
n going it alone. But Sina’s term at law school was about to end too and his enthusiasm was infectious. One afternoon on the cusp of summer, when the desert outside Tehran was baking to the texture of an overcooked pie crust, we set out on a sleeper train for Yazd. Sharing our cabin were a couple of chain-smoking soldiers, who offered us their Bisotun cigarettes and puffed out of the window with us as we tried to identify the stars over the Great Desert. The soldiers had a hip flask, which they’d filled up with what tasted like a combination of orangeade and whiskey. It was one of the most disgusting drinks I’ve ever had, but we still knocked it back, and it gave a certain frisson to the images we saw outside—the silhouettes of the mountains and the egg-shaped domes swelling over the ancient water reservoirs, which ran like veins under the stretched-skin canvas of the sand.30
The best view of Yazd is from the roof of the Friday Mosque. Sitting there browning in the blaze, with our backs to the beige brick dome, we took in the vista: buff and ocher hulks of rock, muscling out of the sandy plain that sweeps back into the city and matches its coloring—its domes, its walls of sun-dried brick, its badgirs or “wind-catchers”—vented turrets that suck the air and exhale it into the rooms underneath to keep them cool.
“We stay with Siyavash,” announced Sina, striding into a neighborhood of curved streets where groined arches hung over us like hoods and the houses pressed toward each other but were kept from intimacy by their thick wooden gates.
An atmosphere of secrecy whispered through these streets. The mud-brick walls were high and instead of windows there were glass bottles embedded as spyholes, while the wooden doors sported thick brass knockers dating back to medieval times. There were two kinds—one round and one rectangular, so the sex of the visitor could be identified. Approaching the house of Sina’s friend, I stepped forward to swing the brass phallus in front of me—but an electric ring stopped me in my tracks. There was a bell and Sina had pressed it.
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