Drinking Arak Off an Ayatollah's Beard

by Nicholas Jubber

  “Salaam!” came a gruff call from the other side of the door.

  Behind it stood a young man with floppy hair that nearly hid his eyes. The contrast with Sina was striking: Whereas Sina bounded onto the courtyard on the spring of his bonhomie, Siyavash’s body language was slow and stiff, and he didn’t smile.

  “Come in,” he said, adding in a strangely abstracted tone, “welcome.”

  We sat down in a broad, carpeted living room with bolsters to rest our arms. I knew that Siyavash’s father had a connection with the Professor, but I didn’t know much more. I was intrigued: Siyavash was the first Zoroastrian I had met and I hoped he would teach me about their hidden, secretive world. . . .

  THE TALE OF ZOROASTER

  A man called Zoroaster turns up at the court of the shah with a brazier of fire from paradise. “Your messenger I am,” he tells the shah, “and guide to God.” Domed temples are built across the land, in front of the first of which Zoroaster plants a holy cypress tree, while pictures of Fereydoun (vanquisher of the snake-shouldered Zahhak) and other great kings of the past are painted on its walls.

  The new faith ripples across the land and Zoroaster becomes its chief priest. But he has a violent end. The army of Turan, in its last gasp before it’s crushed for good by the champion Asfandiyar (the heir to the throne and a hero as mighty in his own way as Rostam), sweeps out and converges on the main fire temple, where Zoroaster, along with eighty of his fellow priests, is hurled into the sacred flame he has tended for so many years.

  Imagine . . . You’re on holiday in Rome and heading for the main basilica. Instead of Catholic priests, crucifixes, and the pietà, you find Zoroastrian priests, or mobeds, carrying sacred twigs and worshippers tying prayer cords at the waist, standing around a gigantic urn, reciting prayers in ancient Persian in front of a sacred fire. When you step outside, you see the faravahar bird-man, wings outspread, emblazoned over the entablature. You head to any other European city and there, instead of a cathedral, you find a fire temple, instead of the cross a bird-man, and instead of the Virgin Mary a statue of the water angel, Anahita.

  Who could have predicted the bumps that tipped Zoroastrianism off the road to global preeminence? That the squabbling Greek city-states would band together to defeat the Persians at Salamis and Plataea? That Constantine the Great would have a vision of the cross at the Milvian Bridge (when the Roman armies were flirting with a Zoroastrian cult, introduced to them by Cicilian pirates off the coast of Anatolia)? That the Arabs would erupt from the desert and grind the Persian empire into the dust? Several times Zoroastrianism was on the doorstep of global domination, but each time it tottered on the step and the door slammed in its face. It is now uncertain whether the Zoroastrians will even make it through another century.

  The miracle is that they’ve made it at all. Persecuted, forced to convert, and sporadically subjected to pogroms, they were reduced to such a desperate condition that, in the 1850s, the French ambassador wrote, “Only a miracle may save them from extinction.” The twentieth century brought relief in the Pahlavi shahs’ enthusiasm for Iran’s pre-Islamic heritage.31 But they weren’t likely to benefit from a revolution that called itself “Islamic.” Ayatollah Khomeini branded their scripture “a harmful book,” and his successor, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, condemned Zoroastrians as “apostates,” while strict rules against mixed marriages haven’t helped to boost their numbers. So diminished have they become that now they account for less than a single percent of Iran’s total population. But even if Zoroastrianism does go the way of the Olympian gods (with whom it was once contemporary), it will survive in the ideas it has given to the wider world.

  The most famous Zoroastrians in Christian culture—with all due respect to Freddie Mercury—are the three “magi” who visited Jesus. The latter’s halo was inspired by the rings of light that appear above Zoroastrian images, and baptism is derived from a Zoroastrian ritual in which children bathed in the rivers; while the water angel, Anahita (known to Zoroastrians as “the Lady”), gave birth to her son Mithra as chastely as Mary would do much later to Jesus, and combined with Mithra and the sun god Mehr to form a trinity that preceded its Christian counterpart by a millennium. Resurrection, Satan, and the very idea of heaven and hell (first transmitted to the Israelites during their Babylonian exile) all have their origin among the Zoroastrians, and Mithra’s birthday, which traditionally fell on the 25th of December, was turned by Constantine the Great into Christendom’s most popular festival—incorporating the old Zoroastrian customs of candles and a decorated cypress tree.

  Zoroaster’s ghost might be hard to see, but he haunts Western culture to its core.

  Sina hadn’t told me a lot about Siyavash, so I didn’t have any particular expectations, but he had described him as a friend. Which made the coldness of our reception slightly discomfiting. On our first evening, Siyavash didn’t even stay in, so I asked Sina if there was a problem.

  “Nicholas, you don’t expect him to drop everything for us?” he said.

  “No, I didn’t mean it like that,” I protested, shamed by the way Sina had phrased his response. “No, it’s just . . . ”

  But I couldn’t work out how to express it: After all the hospitality I’d enjoyed in Tehran, it was hard not to feel we were being snubbed, in some subtly coded but quintessentially Persian way.

  When it came to supper, a tray was brought into the guest room by Siyavash’s mother, but no one sat with us; so when Siyavash’s father asked if we would like to watch TV, Sina and I exchanged a smile. At last, we were being accepted! As soon as we were comfortable, Siyavash’s father left the room, and the only interaction we had with the family over the next couple of hours was when his wife brought us tea and a bowl of pomegranates. As I write this I feel like I’m being churlish—they had, after all, allowed me, a complete stranger, into their home. But I did hope it would be easier to talk to them over the next few days.

  “What’s the connection with your father?” I asked Sina that night, as we lay on our mattresses in the guest room.

  “It’s baba’s folklore work,” he said. “Siyavash’s father is an expert on Zoroastrian history. He’s not actually a historian—he used to be a cameraman for documentary filmmaking, but he’s read a lot of books and there are lots of things that only the Zoroastrians know.”

  The following evening, when I found myself alone in the house with Siyavash’s father—Siyavash was at the youth club again, and Sina had gone to an Internet café to catch up with his girlfriends—I decided to try and win him over. There was only one weapon at my disposal. I’d used it once before to thaw a glacial Iranian, and I wondered if the same trick might work again. . . .

  “You want to know about Shahnameh?”

  Siyavash’s father put down his glass of tea, his eyes expanding under his thick gray brows.

  “Well, well,” he said. “I did not expect this. You really want to know about Shahnameh?”

  “Oh yes, definitely!” I exclaimed.

  A few moments earlier, we had been on opposite ends of the room, but now we were so close that I could smell the patchouli oil in his hair.

  “There is one important thing you must understand about Shahnameh ,” he said. “It is our culture. It is not about Muslims, oh no no. They will tell you it is, but they are wrong! It is about us—the Zoro - astrians. And it is full of secrets that are only understood by Zoroastrians, because we have a closer relationship to these stories.”

  Siyavash’s father spoke an older version of Persian than I had encountered before, with few Arabic loan-words—closer to the “pure” Persian spoken by Ferdowsi. Instead of “salaam,” he said “dorud,” the old Persian word Ferdowsi uses. He said “sipos” for “thank you” instead of the Arabic “motashakerram”; and he called children “farzand,” as Ferdowsi would have done. These linguistic connections intrigued me, because they suggested a larger link to the Shahnameh— and the ancient Persian culture—as a whole.

  “Well,” sai
d Siyavash’s father, “if you want to know how close we are to Ferdowsi and Shahnameh you only have to ask our names. For example, my son is Siyavash—the name of a famous prince in Shahnameh. I myself am Manouchehr, the name of a famous king.”

  In fact, in the week I spent in Yazd, all the Zoroastrians I met took their names from Ferdowsi’s epic. Although many of these characters also appear in the Avesta (the Zoroastrian scriptures), they are spelled differently there: Siyavash, for example, is Syavarshana. It is Ferdowsi’s spelling that has been kept: proof of the epic’s popularity with Zoroastrians, over and above their most sacred texts.

  “The Shahnameh was written to save the real Iranian culture,” said Siyavash’s father. “It shows a proud, independent people who held on to our culture even when the Arabs attacked. Of course most of them are Muslims now—but they are not Arabs.”

  He pressed a hand on the rug, stroking it through the wine-colored pile.

  “Many things,” he said, “have stayed the same. They like gardens, they have respect for fire, and if you look at the domes of the mosques you will see they are giving honor to our mountains. You understand? Even if they became Muslim, at least they are still Iranian.”

  He looked up at me, nodding.

  “The Shahnameh is still closed,” he said. “It has not yet been opened. Only if you take out the Arabic words can you find the true meaning. It is like our Zoroastrian dialect, Dari, which includes many words the Muslims cannot understand—which helps us to avoid persecution.”

  Here was another layer to the Shahnameh—a book of secrets, as hard to decipher as the codes of Persian conduct or the occlusive Zoroastrian streets. Once again, Ferdowsi’s epic was the key to unlocking other secrets, opening another door on modern Iran. The shell of Siyavash’s father’s formality had cracked, and for the rest of my stay I was treated with an attentiveness that made me ashamed of the negative thoughts I’d harbored on the first night:

  “Your favorite story? . . . No! ‘Rostam and Sohrab’ is for the masses; the battle with Asfandiyar is much the greater tale! And did you not read about King Ardashir’s vizier? . . . Or the adventures of Bahram Gur? Or Kai Kavus when he tries to fly to heaven? . . . Or the wise King Anushirvan? . . . ”

  Talk like this carried us on trips around Yazd. Driven by a friend of his, who had an ancient battered Paykan, we visited his old village, Cham. There, dog roses trailed honeysuckle around the barrel-domes of the houses and a candle, lit by a sacred fire, bobbed in a pool of water under an ancient plane tree.

  “Everyone is leaving now,” he said sadly as a pack of small, well-groomed dogs followed us down the otherwise deserted street (a giveaway that this was Zoroastrian territory—although I came across guard dogs in Muslim villages, it was rare to see them in this condition, since Islamic tradition regards them as unclean; though I did spot the odd poodle in the handbags of North Tehran fashionistas).

  Another afternoon, we crossed the sun-scorched salt desert and climbed up a mountain slope where lime-painted huts hung from the cliff like nests in a tree. Near the top, a brace of spear-wielding soldiers was standing sentinel, embossed on a brass door, which opened to reveal a marble-floored cavern. The shrine is called Chak-Chak, or “Drip-Drip,” because of the water seeping out of fissures in the rock, which is said to represent the tears of Nikbanu, a daughter of the last pre-Islamic shah. Like her sister, Bibi Shahrbanu (whose shrine I had visited in Tehran), she was eaten up by the mountain, while she was escaping from the invading Arab army; and the cane she used to climb to the top became the giant plane tree that soars out of the cavern’s marble floor.

  Standing there, under the pink fleshy rock where Nikbanu’s legendary occultation took place, we watched the sparks of light on the damp rock around us, struck by a candelabra hanging surreally above us.

  “If I had a choice,” said Siyavash’s father, as the light played magically around us, “I prefer the mountain to take me than to let the Arabs defeat me.”

  I could see why he and the Professor were such good friends.

  Siyavash himself was harder to thaw. There was little rapport between him and Sina, despite the latter’s best efforts; and as for me, I was rarely even able to make eye contact with him. But all this changed after Sina left. He wanted to go on to Shiraz early, to meet up with various friends he was itching to see, and as Siyavash’s father had invited me to visit the Chak-Chak shrine the next day, I stayed behind.

  That last evening, Siyavash came back from the youth club and asked if I would like to go for a walk.

  “My baba told me you are interested in Shahnameh,” he said.

  “Oh yes!” I exclaimed, thrilled at this opening, then settled into a more relaxed tone. “Well, I do really like it, but I’m interested in Iranian culture in general.”

  “Hmmm.”

  He placed his hands behind his back, looking at the ground as we paced down those narrow, secretive streets.

  “I suppose,” I said tentatively, “I’m quite interested to know what it’s like . . . for Zoroastrians, I mean. Nowadays.”

  You could see the sun sliding down to the horizon—a giant pomegranate sucked into one of the “wind-catchers,” the last of the light wiped away by the shadows sweeping down the street.

  “A few years ago we couldn’t even choose our names,” said Siyavash. “If we wanted Darius, for example, the government would not allow this because it was the name of a shah. But it is still difficult to get a good job. My uncle works in an office and is suitable for a manager, but they don’t give him the job because he is Zoroastrian.”

  We sat on a ledge and looked down the street. Outside one of the thick wooden gates, a woman in a plum-red headscarf was brushing her doorstep with a handleless broom.

  “Why must this woman wear hijab?” asked Siyavash. “It is not our religion, it is Islam. But we are forced to do this. And in Ramadan, if we eat in the street, the government arrests us—but we have our own religious fast every month.”

  He pressed a finger on the ledge, tracing a winding path through the dust. “You mustn’t talk to Sina about these things.”

  “But . . . ” I wanted to laugh—surely he didn’t think Sina was the same as the people he was complaining about. “Sina isn’t really . . . well, he’s not religious,” I said. “He certainly wouldn’t support any persecution. They’ve got a picture of King Darius in their living room.”

  “You don’t understand,” said Siyavash softly.

  “But . . . ”

  I thought of what his father had said, about the Muslim Iranians still being “Iranian,” still fond of fire and mountains.

  “Aren’t they still Iranian?” I asked. “Persian, perhaps. Isn’t there a shared culture?”

  He turned to me, wrinkling his nose, looking at me with small, narrow eyes.

  “So why do they attack us?” he asked.

  I think that, for Siyavash, there was too much bad history between Zoroastrians and Muslims for him to open up in front of any Muslim—not even one as unjudgmental as Sina. I looked at him and smiled, but there wasn’t even the slightest flicker of a smile in response. In fact, in all the time I spent with him, he didn’t so much as grin. And yet he was a Zoroastrian—a member of a religion whose prophet is legendarily said to have been laughing when he came out of his mother’s womb; a religion once famous for its happiness. “Happiness is a good in itself,” wrote the scholar R. C. Zaehner of Zoroastrian philosophy, “and without it the other virtues are sterile.” This vein of happiness is what gives Persian culture its sumptuousness, its love of life’s finer things—like wine and poetry, music and soft carpets. But there was no sign of this “happiness” in Siyavash’s face, nor in any of the Zoroastrians I met in Yazd. “There is no fun in Islam,” Ayatollah Khomeini once said, and he’d taken the fun out of the Zoroastrians too.

  “You know something else?” asked Siyavash. “If a Muslim converts to a Zoroastrian, you know what they do? They kill him—not the government but the vigilantes.
And because the law is Muslim it means the life of a non-Muslim is not as precious. If a Zoroastrian is killed in a car accident, the driver has to pay only half the blood money.”

  I thought of Ferdowsi. In the Shahnameh, he tells us he knew many Zoroastrians, so he would have been familiar with their complaints. At the time, their communities were vanishing fast; for many, life had become so tough they sailed down the Persian Gulf, establishing the “Parsee” community in India. But in some senses, the tenth-century Zoroastrians were a lot better off than their counterparts today. “Zoroastrians (preserve) scriptures, fire temples, and rites from the days of their kings,” wrote the tenth-century geographer al-Istakhri, adding, “They maintain their ancestral customs and conform to them.” Several Zoroastrians managed to secure important positions—Prince Adud ad-Dawleh of the Buwayhids, the most powerful man in this part of the country at the time, employed Zoroastrians as his treasurer and his physician, and some towns were still run by Zoroastrian governors. And in one particular respect, the Zoroastrians of the medieval era could count themselves lucky. Because if it is hard for them to live in a strict Islamic system today, it’s even harder to die in it.

  “You remember the Towers of Silence?” asked Siyavash.

  We had visited them two days earlier. On the outskirts of Yazd, a circle of mud-brick spun around the crest of a sandy hillock, glowing in the sun like a ring in a forge. Sina had run to the top and pelted us all with sand. It just seemed like a game at the time, but now I remembered how Siyavash had shaken his head, refusing to join in. Maybe he resented Sina for making light of such a holy site. Because this was the place where the Zoroastrians used to follow the Avesta’s injunction to lay their dead “on the highest places where corpse-eating dogs and corpse-eating birds shall most surely know it.” The Towers were banned by the shah just before the revolution and are now out of use. But there were rumors that not all of them had been abandoned. On the powdery plain outside nearby Ardakan, we climbed through the shored-up doorway of another tower—round and squat and embedded in the sand like a giant stone tube drilled into the earth—where scattered shards of bone lay in the dusty bowl of a circular pit, like pieces of meat in a broth.