Drinking Arak Off an Ayatollah's Beard

by Nicholas Jubber

  I picked up the book. For a moment it felt as light as one of Tahmineh’s fashion magazines, until reality expressed itself in the ache in my wrists.

  “I don’t know how I can thank you,” I said.

  The Professor was pulling himself out of his Louis XVI. He patted my arm and led me to the kitchen.

  “Come on,” he said, “let’s eat.”

  There were only a few days before I would be heading off.

  “You really must go to that country?” asked the Professor with a terrifying snort, one evening after supper. “You don’t know what an uncivilized people they are?”

  “Baba is right,” said Sina, turning away—at least for the moment—from the telly. “There are too many Afghans in Tehran and whenever there is a murder on the news, it’s always one of them.”

  They would have tried to discourage me wherever I was heading: Before I set off for Central Asia, they’d been preparing me for the “donkey-brained” Turkmen and the torture practices of the Uzbeks (such as removing people’s fingernails and boiling them to death—although the techniques of Iran’s prisons are hardly any better), and if I’d been turning west there would have been plenty of invective about the wildness of the Arabs.

  Still, there’s one thing you can say for all this jingoism—at least it’s consistent. Iranians have always enjoyed throwing barbs across their borders. In the Shahnameh, the Turks are described as “household slaves,” while the Arabs are “wretched ugly crows.” Jingoism has no place in the Islamic perspective—to the true Muslim, there is no such thing as national borders. It’s survived because the Shahnameh has survived, because so many Iranians still identify themselves, first and foremost, by their nationality.83

  The Professor was pouring us glasses of vodka. But there were creases on his brow as he asked why I needed to go there.

  “Well, that’s where Ferdowsi went,” I said, “and I want to follow him—you know, when he traveled to Ghazni to give the Shahnameh to Sultan Mahmud.”

  “You wish to experience what it was like for Ferdowsi?”

  “Yes, I think so.”

  There was a rip beside me as a new packet of Bahmans was torn open and the Professor tapped the bottom so the ends of a couple of cigarettes poked out.

  “And still you intend to go to the tomb of Sultan Mahmud?”

  “Yes. With Sultan Mahmud I am very angry!”

  I looked up from the sofa at the smoke rings blowing toward me from the other side of the table. The Professor was studying me, running his owl-like eyes over my face as if there was a verse written across it.

  “So you must go,” he said finally. “But I do not wish to hear that you were killed.”

  His head tipped downward, his eyes looking up—as if he were issuing a stiff warning against any such occurrence. I wasn’t quite sure how to frame my reply—but fortunately I didn’t have to. The clatter of wooden counters drew my attention to the floor, where Tahmineh was sitting cross-legged behind the backgammon board.

  “Nicholas, you are ready? I hope you have been practicing!”

  On my last evening, Khanom dragged a sack of rice out from under the sink.

  “You won’t get any decent food from those Afghans,” she said, “I can promise you.”

  She sprinkled turmeric into the pan, diced the mutton, and mixed it with onions to conjure up okra stew—one of my favorite dishes.

  There was a lively atmosphere at the table that night. Tahmineh had been cast as Lady Macduff in a semiprofessional production of Macbeth and she regaled us with stories about her fellow cast members—“the guy who’s Macduff plays with the same sex; he’s always hanging around at the park by the City Theatre!”; “the king who Macbeth kills, before the revolution he went on tour to Paris and they say he has a child there with a French actress!”

  “So,” exclaimed Sina—like his sister he was in high spirits—“Queen Elizabeth gave Nicholas his orders!”

  He was repeating a joke often made by a friend of the Professor’s—that I was really a spy in league with both the mullahs and the British government (at least, I think it was a joke).

  As for Khanom, she rounded off the meal with one of her favorite rituals, filling up a skillet with water and setting it on the stovetop.

  “Before you go,” she said, “we must know you will be safe.”

  Once I had finished my coffee, she took the cup, placed the saucer on top, and tipped it about, and after a few moments had passed she made a careful study of the grounds.

  “Oh yes, it is good,” she announced.

  I couldn’t see anything to warrant her appraisal. Just two muddy blobs. One stretched wide across the inside of the cup, the other hovering over it, with a tapered protuberance.

  “It is a bird,” announced Khanom, her lips rising in a smile so warmhearted I would remember it for weeks afterward. “A great bird,” she said.

  “Like the simorgh?”84 I suggested.

  “Oh yes,” she replied, laughing, “like the simorgh. A great bird, flying all over the world.”

  15

  Drinking Arak Off an Ayatollah’s Beard

  Mashhad. September.

  More than any other city in Iran, Mashhad has a heart. A beating, bead-clicking, prayer-chanting, chest-thumping heart. It bursts out of the market streets and the peeling-plaster apartment blocks in a fountain of blue faience and gold, catching the afternoon incandescence and glistening at night under strings of golden baubles. It explains all the pilgrims flowing along the streets, stopping at the kish-mish stores, getting themselves photographed in the “Fast Photo” shops, and buying posters of the imams off the pavement: men in checkered headdresses and long gowns, brushing against waistcoated long-beards in knee-length shirts and woolly pakol hats shaped like Yorkshire puddings; others in sheepskin busbies floating past men in gathered drawstring trousers and women in blue and white burkas or floral-print chadors. They are Arabs, Turkmen, Pakistanis, and Baluchis, and they’re all heading to the country’s holiest shrine—the martyrdom place of Reza, the eighth Shia imam and the great-great-great-great-great-grandson of the Prophet Mohammed, who was murdered in ninth-century Khorasan by a bunch of poisoned grapes.

  I spent many afternoons sitting outside the shrine. The patter of pilgrims’ footsteps rang through the marble courtyards and you could hear the hum of men reciting from the Quran under the mirrorwork alcoves. But to me it was like the castle of Bluebeard;85 as a non-Muslim, I was officially forbidden from entering its innermost precinct, and it wasn’t time to trespass there . . . yet.

  So I went elsewhere. I needed to waste time—and not just to delay going to Afghanistan. . . . Well, not entirely. I actually had a good practical reason for my dawdling: I’d decided to grow a beard. If I wanted to get myself through Afghanistan, if I wanted to fit in with the locals on the other side of the border, there was one essential accessory—my chin would have to be as furry as a billy-goat’s.

  So I tramped around Khorasan—the region in which Ferdowsi lived—delaying my trip each day as I sought out another tenuous link to the poet’s world. There were the old ramparts of medieval Tus, where you could climb under the webs of scaffolding poles and the bastions wrapped in sheets of plastic, and burrow among the streets of the medieval city. You could spot a barrel-vaulted house here, a shop in the recess over there, the pavestones where Ferdowsi himself might once have set his feet. These were the moments when the poet’s world would flicker in front of the eyes. You could squint and imagine a beggar shuffling toward you, with legs and arms tied in a bandage, while a nobleman rides past on a silk-frill saddle; and you could hear what sounds like the clatter of hammers in a coppersmith’s shop—only to realize it’s the wind rattling through the scaffolding above you.

  A couple of hours’ hitchhike away was the shrine of Sang Bast, officially the resting place of Arslan Jadhib, one of Sultan Mahmud’s most favored generals, who saw action from Central Asia to India. He was very much a man of his time, who recommended cutti
ng off the fingers of the Seljuk Turks to stop them from using their arrows but was also an admirer of poetry, who is said to have built Ferdowsi’s first mausoleum. Like many political figures of the era—among others, Sultan Mahmud—he balanced a keen ear for beautiful verse with the brutality you would expect of any self-respecting medieval military bigwig.

  “You think this is the tomb of Arslan Jadhib?” asked a farmer in a yellow turban.

  He was knitting his thick brows several dozen feet underneath me, as I climbed up the minaret behind the shrine. Quranic writing scrolled around its shaft, up to the cracked top, out of which I was popping my head to look over the scree and the brick dome of the shrine below.

  “Oh yes, this is what you strangers always say,” the farmer continued, “you say it is the tomb of Arslan Jadhib. But you are wrong—it belongs to Ayaz!”

  He was referring to Sultan Mahmud’s number-one slave—the man whose relationship with the sultan was the inspiration for mystic poems about “true love.” The reason for his high status in the sultan’s private chambers is suggested by the scribe Nizami of Samarkand. Ayaz, he tells us, was “mightily endowed with all the arts of pleasing; in which respect, indeed, he had few rivals in his time.”

  “They say,” the farmer explained—now in a small muddy hut next to the village mosque, “Sultan Mahmud’s wife had a problem with Ayaz.”

  I wasn’t surprised—if any of the rumors were true, she had good reason.

  “She wanted the sultan to kill him and Ayaz was sure he would die. So he fled to this place, built the minaret you see outside, and he called out from the top to Imam Reza. And the imam listened to him and saved him.”

  Now, the farmer told me, people visit the tomb when someone in their family is ill.

  “They place a stone on the tomb and walk around,” he said, “and often they take a sheep and cut its throat so the imam will hear their prayers.”

  Here was another figure from Ferdowsi’s time—like the Sufi poet Ansari of Herat or the physician Ibn Sina in Hamadan—to whom people still turn today in times of trouble, a sign of what a resonant era the poet inhabited. But there was one slight problem with this story. Sultan Mahmud was a strict Sunni, and Imam Reza was as Shia as they come. It’s almost inconceivable that Mahmud’s favorite slave would have been a Shia. But I would soon find reason to believe the sultan had a closer relationship with the Shia than is traditionally assumed—which is tied up inextricably with Ferdowsi’s journey to Ghazni.

  Wherever the day took me, the evenings would find me under a shopping street near Imam Reza’s shrine, at the “Thousand Stories” teahouse. A pair of parakeets sang on top of an empty wine barrel, in duet with a fountain gurgling at the center. Men and a few women sat cross-legged on carpet-covered bedsteads, and one evening, one of them nodded as I came in with Jahangir, a geology student at Ferdowsi University. I had befriended him on the Simorgh Top-Train (named after the mythical bird in the Shahnameh) on which I’d traveled to Mashhad, and he was putting me up in his dorm.

  “That’s my friend Piruz,” said Jahangir. “He’s a poet.”

  The teahouse certainly fitted someone of that description. A small boy was fumigating the air with a pan of wild rue, while a waiter in a brightly colored stripy chapan coat, like a courtier in a miniature painting, was carrying a tray of tea and a plate of faludhaj—a sweet of wheat and honey enjoyed by the Sassanian shahs. But this particular poet wasn’t the kind you’d expect to find in a Persian teahouse: He looked like he’d be more at home at a hip-hop night on White-chapel Road.

  “Hey, man, it’s cool!” said Piruz, in English—before asking in Persian who I thought was better—Eminem or the Iranian rapper Sandi. He had all the right gestures: His thumbs were tucked inside the waistband of his tracksuit and his baseball-capped head nodded even when there didn’t appear to be anything to nod to.

  “Hey man, it’s cool!” he said again. “I’m not a poet, exactly. I’m a musician. When I read my verse,” he added, chiming on his tea bowl with a spoon, “I do it with a drum.”

  He recited one of his songs, using the teaspoon to count the beat. Although he had shied from calling himself a poet, a lot of his imagery was familiar from medieval Persian verse: a girl with a “moonlike” face whose lips are “a rose” (he rhymed the Persian for flower, “gul,” with “bulbul,” the word for nightingale, a common rhyme in classical Persian verse), while the use to which he was putting his lyrics wasn’t exactly uncommon way back when.

  “Do you know how we find girlfriends here?” he said. “We go to the library. You have the discobar, we have the library! If we see a girl we like, we ask her, ‘Hey, pass us that book,’ and we write our telephone number in it. Sometimes I put my verses in the book.”

  I had a vision of shelves full of Piruz’s scribblings—entire sections of biography or perhaps (as this was his subject) mechanical engineering, with a couplet hidden in every textbook.

  “Do you have much success?” I asked.

  “Hey, man, of course! Because I say nice things about them—and girls like that.”

  Given the romantic content of Piruz’s lyrics, we were in an appropriate setting. The water pipe had passed to me, and as I closed my lips around the fipple, I gazed across the room at someone I recognized. Her hair was long, brown, and out in the open (which proves she wasn’t real, but painted onto a pillar) and she was leaning out of a crenellated tower. She was Rudaba, the princess of Kabul, waiting for her lover in a scene from my favorite of all the stories told in the Shahnameh.

  THE TALE OF ZAL AND RUDABA

  The story takes place early in Ferdowsi’s epic. Zal is the son of a great warrior, but his father doesn’t think much of him when he’s born, because he has a lock of white hair, and to avoid the ridicule of his peers he exposes him on Mount Alborz. Fortunately, the mystical giant bird, the Simorgh, takes pity on Zal and rears him as one of her own, at least until his father relents. Now that he’s a grown man and clearly of able parts, his father is prepared to overlook the aberration of his prematurely white hair, but what he isn’t prepared to overlook is Zal’s choice of a mate.

  It all goes wrong when Zal turns up at the city of Kabul. Hearing a description of the king of Kabul’s daughter, he is smitten, while she, receiving an equally florid account about Zal from her handmaids, is of the same mind. A meeting is arranged: Zal steps up to the tower where Rudaba lives and decides to climb to the top. But it’s several stories high, far too lofty for him to mount it with his hands and feet. Rudaba offers a solution—she happens to have extremely long hair, so she takes off her wimple, lets out her locks, and offers them as an alternative to a rope.

  This is the moment recorded in the painting on the pillar: when Zal climbs up to meet Rudaba. But he’s more of a gent than Rapunzel’s prince (proof that politeness isn’t only a modern-day Persian attribute), so instead of using her hair, he flings his lasso and does a Spider-Man job on the pinnacles.

  “Oh silver bosomed cypress!” he declares as he clasps her in his arms. “I swear by God I’ll never break my troth to thee.”

  Unfortunately, their parents get along about as well as Romeo’s and Juliet’s. Zal’s father is so angry he decides to wage war against Kabul. If he can grind it into the dust, then his son won’t have any rancid Kabuli to hanker after. There’s only one way around this dilemma: Zal must ride to the royal court and appeal to the shah.

  The current royal incumbent is no softie, so rather than accept Zal’s request, he puts him to the test of his high priests. His request will only be granted, says the shah, if he can solve their riddles.

  Their questions are not exactly transparent. “What are the dozen cypresses erect? ” they ask, and “those two steeds moving rapidly . . . Each one to catch the other, but in vain?” And what is “the meadow-land . . . To which a fierce man cometh, in whose hand/There is a scythe?”

  Fortunately, like any decent mythic hero, Zal is a master when it comes to a conundrum. It takes him just a few
moments of head-scratching to work out the answers. The dozen cypresses, he decides, are the twelve moons of the year, the steeds are night and day, the meadow is man, and the scythe is time. He’s right: The shah has no choice now but to grant his blessing.

  “So the war is stopped,” said Jahangir.

  “And for Zal and Rudaba,” added Piruz, with a cheeky grin, “finally it’s . . . ”

  He didn’t finish the sentence. Instead, he drove a fist into the open palm of his other hand—a signal for what would happen once the lovers reached their marriage chamber.86

  “You see,” said Jahangir, as we turned away from the pillar, “Ferdowsi is important for us, because he isn’t given importance by our government. So we want to celebrate him even more.”

  “The boy says it right,” added Piruz, who had been swaying over the pipe like it was a microphone. “You know what I say? The mullahs, they don’t know love.”

  Which was what my new friends were hankering for. Zal found it, but the riddles he’d faced were nothing to the obstacles imposed on young Iranians today.

  At the “Thousand Stories” we drank tea; back at Ferdowsi University, something stronger was located. Jahangir’s roommate, Hamid, had a friend known as taa’min kanandeh—“the Provider.” This was because he had a large supply of arak, which he provided in plastic bags to anyone with the cash. One night, Hamid burst into the dorm, holding the knotted end of a bag in his fist, like a boy holding a goldfish at the fairground. Careful measures were poured into plastic cups and a newspaper was spread on the floor. The front page showed a black-and-white photograph of the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, who would play the role of a doily as we rested our cups on his face. A toast was raised—

  “To your health!”

  “We drink,” announced Piruz, “to the Supreme Leader!”