Drinking Arak Off an Ayatollah's Beard

by Nicholas Jubber

  “We use images like night and storms,” explains Haqiqi, “even now, although the situation is more open, because we have got into the habit of using symbols. So the poets who were using symbols in the Taliban time, now they have a chance to say it openly, but they can’t, because they are accustomed to writing in symbols.”

  When I turned up in his office, Haqiqi looked the archetype of Afghan cool. But now his chin is sinking between his hands as he explains how peculiarly his perspective has been skewered.

  “When the Taliban were in power,” he says, “I wrote two poems a day. But now I am lucky if I write one poem a month. You understand? The cause of my anger has gone.”

  “You mean—?”

  “The Taliban were really bad,” he says. “But I had so much to write—and I’m a poet!”

  How insane—and yet how much sense it makes—for a writer to long for the good old days when, okay, maybe people were being whipped in the streets and strung up on lampposts, but at least he was getting regular visits from his muse.

  Talking to Haqiqi makes me think about the Professor back in Tehran and all the troubles he’s suffered. I remember a friend of his, a magazine editor called Ardashir, who was imprisoned in the early days of the Iranian revolution for membership in the Communist Party (although in fact he wasn’t a member—his name was in the address book of someone who was).

  “Sometimes the guards would tie me to a bed,” he said, “and they whipped me with cable wires. Other times they just boxed me with their fists. I thought they would kill me, and then they would print my picture in the papers next day, saying, ‘this was an enemy of the Revolution.’ When I heard the gunshots at night, I thought it would be me next. But,” he said, lifting his hands as if to thank God, “I survived.”

  Stories like this are a reminder of how widely cultural oppression has cast its shadow in the recent history of the Persian-speaking world. But they take me back in time too: They add another shade to my image of Ferdowsi—of the ragged old man carrying his life’s work to Sultan Mahmud. I think of the Professor’s words that afternoon, several months ago, at the university in Tehran: “Bright-thinkers in this country, we always had difficulties. Look at Ferdowsi!” And that’s what I do—I look at Ferdowsi, and I see him at the front of a line stretching all the way to the writers I’m meeting now. It seems there is a little bit of Ferdowsi in these writers; and there’s a little bit of them in my image of Ferdowsi.

  If any of these writers captures the spirit of the tenth-century poet, it’s Jalali. Officially, he is a flower seller. Short and squat, with a blue waistcoat over his shalwar qameez, he has a bald, shiny head like an enameled egg, tufted around the sides with scrags of hair. There is something of the gnome about him as he waddles into his shop and hauls himself onto a stool. Strings of marigolds dangle off the shelves above him, while button daisies and begonias are lying in cellophane wrapping, alongside a bunch of plastic ferns, and the familiar smell of the florist’s—earthy as well as fragrant—wafts around us.

  “I write about the suffering of the people,” he announces, leaning close as he adds, “so of course in the Taliban time I had plenty of material! I had to distribute my poems in secret—after all, I didn’t want them to kill me. But they still took me to jail six times, once for seven months.”

  “Why?” I ask.

  “I wrote a poem about the Taliban—I said they are onions. Because their turbans look like onions and they are as brainless as vegetables. But they couldn’t prove it was me, so they only jailed me.”

  He shakes his head as the memories express themselves in his frown.

  “No radio, no paper . . . Oh! Can you imagine what this is like for a writer? And all we ever got to eat was bread, bread, bread!”

  His poems have the earthy, irreverent texture of the medieval satirists. One compares the Taliban’s moral police to “long-tailed donkeys.” Another mocks Mullah Omar (the Taliban leader), when he paraded the Prophet Mohammed’s sacred cloak in Kandahar, describing him as dung dressed in an ass hide.

  “I wrote whenever I could,” says Jalali, “as long as there was kerosene I would write throughout the night. And I hid my poems in a secret place in my house.”

  “But how did people read your poems?” I ask.

  “Sometimes they didn’t need to. The children would hear my verses and chant them behind the backs of the Taliban, and then they would run away before they were caught.”

  It wasn’t only the Taliban he criticized. He speaks of Ismail Khan and the other mujahideen leaders with equal contempt, because after the Soviets withdrew they went on pilgrimage to Mecca and announced the fighting was over.

  “But then,” he fumes, “they came back and the fighting started all over again! So I criticized them, because that is a writer’s duty, isn’t it? Throughout history, most poets were on the side of the leader. If you look at the kings and their courts, they were always full of poets, terrible poets—dishing out praise and groveling on their knees, just so the rulers would fill up their mouths with gold. But not all of them! You know about Sadi Salman? No? Well, let me tell you about him—he wasn’t on the side of the leader. He was for the people! And because of this he was in jail for twenty years in the time of the Ghaznavids.”47

  A customer has come in, asking for a funeral wreath. Jalali drops off his stool, taking me by the arm to the door, peering out onto the street to check the wrong people aren’t listening. I can hear the auto-rickshaws tuk-tuking past, and the cawing of the pigeon-doves in a plane tree over the road.

  “You know how many poets there were in Herat under the Taliban?” he says. “Maybe thirty. But I was the one in jail, because I was the one who spoke for the people. It’s the same with Ferdowsi. He was for the people, not for the leaders, and this is why he had such a big problem with Sultan Mahmud.”

  He rubs his palms together, filling the air with a long, resigned sigh and the earthy scent of his hands.

  “If you are for the people,” he adds, “you will always suffer.”

  Over several days in Herat, I meet up with many more writers, who all have their own tales of oppression under the Taliban. Few of them share Saeed Haqiqi’s ambivalence—most are happy to see the back of a regime that was so hostile to creative thinking, although wary of what the current regime has to offer. Among them is a stout, gray-bearded university lecturer, Dr. Mohammed Rahyab, who meets me on the university campus and tells me about the cunning ways in which he circumnavigated the Taliban’s restrictions.

  “Poetry is in our blood,” he exclaims, sitting down behind a wooden desk in his classroom, “so how could the Taliban stop us? A line of verse can bring an end to a family feud, or it can stop a fight. You know what they wanted me to do? They wanted me to teach only Islamic jurisprudence and the Quran. But they were ignorant fools—how would they know what I was teaching? I grew a very long beard and never criticized them in public, and I taught exactly the same subjects as before: stylistics, literary criticism, foreign writers like Shakespeare and Nabokov.”

  I think of the medieval poet Sa’di, who wrote, “If you cannot cut the hand of the king, then it is best to kiss it.” Dr. Rahyab has been practicing the old Persian knack for dividing the public and the private. This is emphasized, most of all, by the solution he found for one of his biggest dilemmas: the Taliban’s ban on teaching female students.

  “I wasn’t having it at all!” he exclaims. “Why should girls not be allowed to learn? I told them to come to my house, and if anyone asked what they were doing they said they were going to tailoring lessons. They carried needles and thread in case anyone checked, and when the officials looked in, my wife would pretend she was teaching them to sew.”

  One of these students is a young woman in her twenties, called Nadia Anjoman. She greets Dr. Rahyab on the creaking veranda outside his faculty, smiling shyly under eyelashes thick with mascara.

  “I wanted to shout when the Taliban were in power!” she fumes. Her lips are brightly rouged,
but as she talks, they stretch across her face, expressing her anger. “The poems I wrote in those days,” she says, “they were like shouting. I didn’t really know how to write so well, because how could I learn? Sometimes I would gather with other girls to discuss our poems, but even this was difficult because it was hard to leave our houses. The Taliban wanted us to be like cows in a shed. They didn’t want us to play any part in society, not even to do the shopping. But you know, it isn’t just the Taliban who don’t like poetry. Sometimes . . . ”

  She stops, flicking back a strand of hair that’s fallen from her scarf, and turns to a sheaf of papers in her hands. She starts sifting through them, as if she’s forgotten about our conversation, and it is only when Dr. Rahyab has led us into one of the classrooms that she speaks again.

  Among the papers in the sheaf are some of her handwritten poems. She is compiling a collection of them for a volume, called “The Crimson Flower.” She puts them down on a wooden desk, shaking her head as she holds on to them, her eyebrows drawing an arched, suspicious expression across her face.

  “Where could we even publish them?” she says. “For men in this time it was difficult, sure, but for a girl it was a hundred times worse.”

  She is frowning, but for a moment her face relaxes, her cheeks lifting ever so slightly, and she loosens her hold on the poems.

  “We did,” she says, “have one advantage—because the Taliban didn’t try to encounter women, so it was easy to go behind their backs. We would go to our teacher’s home and take lessons there, but always in secret. In those times, everything I wrote was about my rage. It’s only now that I am writing artistic poems.”

  I look at one of the verses, trying to work out its meaning, which I’m unable to fathom until later in my hotel room:

  “Don’t search for the meaning of joy in me, all the joy in my heart has died. / If you are looking for stars in my eyes, it is a story that doesn’t exist.”

  For the moment, all I understand is the sadness underpinning Nadia’s words. I imagine her, sitting alone in a tiny room, with a pencil and a sheet of paper, pouring herself—pouring all the expression that’s forbidden on the streets—into those pages.

  “Good luck,” I say.

  She smiles, stretching out a hand—a unique occurrence for me from a woman in Afghanistan—and lightly touching the ends of my fingers. I have jotted down some of her other verses in my notebook and I’m hoping I will be able to work out what they mean, but the journey distracts me. A whole year will pass before I look again at Nadia’s words—inspired to do so by a terrible piece of news.

  “I am caged in this corner / Full of melancholy and sorrow . . . / My wings are closed and I cannot fly . . . / I am an Afghan woman and so must wail.”

  The report is imprecise. Apparently Nadia’s family disapproved of her verse, and after her book came out they were ashamed. It is her husband who is arrested. He says she poisoned herself, but that doesn’t explain the bruises on her body. If her family permitted an autopsy perhaps the truth would be established, but they don’t. So Nadia is buried, just twenty-six years into her life, with so much left unlived and unwritten, and all that is left of her are those sad, claustrophobic verses.

  What should I do with a trapped wing,

  Which does not let me fly?

  I have been silent too long,

  But I never forget the melody,

  Since every moment I whisper

  The songs from my heart,

  Reminding myself of

  The day I will break this cage,

  Fly from this solitude

  And sing like a melancholic.

  Nadia Anjoman RIP.

  7

  Tea with a Warlord

  Herat. September.

  Of all the poets with whom Ferdowsi could have rubbed shoulders in Herat, by far the most significant wouldn’t have been tall enough to tug the poet’s beard. His name was Abdullah Ansari and he was the four-year-old son of a shopkeeper. Although the lack of children in the Shahnameh suggests Ferdowsi wouldn’t have been especially alert to his potential, it would have been clear he was a child of exceptional promise—only a couple of years later, he had succeeded in learning the whole of the Quran by heart. Encouraged by his father, who didn’t envisage a future for him stacking shelves at the family store, he tramped around Khorasan visiting the great Sufi mystics of his age. Inspired by these experiences, he composed the first mystical verses to be written in Persian48—dramatic, visual poems that captured the public imagination:I see breasts scorched by the burning separation from you;

  I see eyes weeping in love’s agony.

  Dancing down the lane of blame and censure,

  Your lovers cry out, “Poverty is my source of pride!”

  “A Sufi,” Ansari wrote, “is something that neither harms the soles of the feet nor leaves a trail of dust behind.” The tracks to their origin are certainly hard to trace. Some scholars connect them to neoPlatonism or ancient India. Ferdowsi agrees with the latter, linking them in the Shahnameh to the ascetics who hung around with Alexander the Great. But it is with Islam they are intimately associated, as the mystical expression of that faith. Although, since mysticism and orthodoxy have never been great friends, they have often found themselves in conflict with more literal-minded theologians.

  Ansari was accused of anthropomorphism and banned from teaching by an assembly of sheikhs—the Taliban of their day. He was also exiled and spent a short period in prison. But he was back in favor toward the end of his life—invested with a robe of honor by the caliph and the title “sheikh of Islam.” He retired to Herat and there, in a convent built by one of his own teachers, he died. And it’s there, as I am about to discover, that his memory lives on.

  The smell of resin is pinching my nose, wafting out of the umbrella pines soaring over the taxi. A plain of powdery white sand spreads underneath us, like we’re sliding into a giant sugar bowl. About three kilometers away is Mount Gazurgah, hunched over a pastry-colored tomb complex as if it’s made out of hard blocks of toffee.

  Marble headstones fill the court, framed in a horseshoe of brickwork with a hundred-foot iwan rising out of its groin. I clamber around the graves, toward a tree on which stones have been tied and nails driven into the branches, the latter ritual carried out as a traditional remedy for toothache. I can hear a tremendous grunt—a deep “aghhh!” Behind the tree is a group of dervishes, all dressed in dusty brown shalwar qameez. They are holding hands in a circle, and one of them is singing in counterpoint to the grunts. The “agh!” slows and stretches, an “l” forming between two vowels, and eventually clarifies as the word they are repeating: “Allah.”

  I’ve come across Sufis before, a few years earlier in Turkey—the Whirling Dervishes, who wore cone-shaped camel-hair hats and pirouetted in a sophisticated and dizzying dance. But these Afghan Sufis are much earthier (if one can describe a process designed to heighten your spiritual senses as earthy). There is no discernible art to what they are doing, instead an extreme concentration—a detachment from everything around them. This is Sufism at its most raw.

  At the foot of the iwan, decorative tendrils climb toward the stalactite drum of a carved headstone. The dry, silvery branches of an ilex tree reach out over it, to the worshippers who perch on the ledges of the graves, raising their hands, prayer beads, and voices, and bowing to the tomb of Ansari.

  One of them is reciting from a beat-up copy of Ansari’s most popular work, The Intimate Conversations,49 but his words are drowned by the grunt thickening beside him. It is coming from an old man with an enormous gray beard, who is rocking between a pair of headstones. His cheeks are smudged with tears as he repeats “Allah, Allah, Allah,” the words shooting so fast he barely has time to breathe. His torso is swinging so hard that he’s in danger of being knocked out by his own beard.

  What is going through his mind? There is no opportunity to ask: he has cocooned himself in the world of meditation and for him at least it is soundproof.
But as he swings to the name of God, I think of a contemporary of Ansari’s, Abu Sa’id, who described how his “breast was opened” by hearing that same word in a Sufi convent. “Whenever drowsiness of inattention arising from the weakness of human nature came over me,” he related, “a soldier with a fiery spear—the most terrible and alarming figure that can possibly be imagined—appeared in front of the niche and shouted at me, saying, ‘Abu Sa’id, say Allah!’ The dread of that apparition used to keep me burning and traveling for whole days and nights, so that I did not again fall asleep or become inattentive; and at last every atom of me began to cry aloud, ‘Allah! Allah! Allah!’”

  All around me, men are reciting it: “Allah! Allah! Allaghh! Alaghh! Aaghh! Agh! Agh!” If Ferdowsi had visited this convent a thousand years ago—and with his range of interests it’s tempting to imagine he could have done—this is the same sight and sound he would have encountered. I sit down on a headstone, switching on my Dictaphone to record the recitals and jotting in my notebook. But it’s hard to write, because several men are crowding behind me, apparently as intrigued by my scrawl of Roman script as I am by the clustered dots and coils of Persian and Arabic on the headstones.

  “You came here,” one of them asks, “to pray to Ansari?”

  “Well . . . ”

  “You have a problem with the law?”

  “Why would? . . .”

  “You are going on a difficult journey?”

  “Well . . . Yes! Yes, that’s it.”

  He is called Abdul Aziz. Around the same age as me, in his late twenties, he has more beard than me but less hair on top. Smiling with soft, watery eyes, he takes me by the hand and leads me into a small mud-brick hut near the entrance to the compound, where we cross our legs on the earthy floor and drink black tea sweetened with lumps of fudge. From the other side of the room, the fruity smell of a water pipe is seeping into our nostrils.