Drinking Arak Off an Ayatollah's Beard

by Nicholas Jubber

  “No, no,” said Hamid, “we drink on the Supreme Leader!”

  We all pressed a hand on our chests and made ceremonial bows to the photograph of Khamenei, then necked our drinks and slammed the cups back down. Something I’d never thought I would do: drinking arak off an ayatollah’s beard.

  It was only later, when I was traveling in Afghanistan, worrying my way across Helmand, that I would think about the significance of that moment. Not just that moment but many others—the scribbled phone numbers Sina would pass through car windows in Teh - ran, the “London” gin Reza served at his parties, the poetry meetings at the Professor’s, when his friends would recite from banned under-the-counter books. Like the Shahnameh itself, they were ways of fighting the homogenization of the mullahs’ regime. Too private and secretive to be protests, they were proof, at least, that the government couldn’t force its citizens into its own narrow straitjacket. They were small sips of freedom.

  But inevitably, it was the lack of freedom that my friends talked about most—in particular, the restrictions when it came to girlfriends. That night Piruz bragged, to howls of disbelief, about a girl he’d kissed one night at the back of the women’s gym.

  “He is a cunt-ogre!” cried Jahangir.

  “He only says that,” retorted Piruz, “because he knows it never happens to him!”

  But when Hamid started talking about his experiences, the atmosphere grew heavy.

  “I was walking with my girlfriend in the street,” he said, “and the police took us. I was in prison for a day and a half and I got beaten twenty lashes with a whip. The police were very angry and her parents said she must never see me again.”

  He poured out another measure from the plastic bag and raised a toast: “To the girls!”

  It didn’t take the students much to get drunk. Soon they were kicking out their feet, spidering their arms, peeling off their shirts, and unzipping their trousers, then wheeling around the room in their underpants. So this is what it’s like to get mashed in Mashhad.

  “Request golden liquor if goblet is near,” wrote Ferdowsi in the Shahnameh, “For that is no sin if it gives the heart cheer.” Hardly a sentiment that would meet with the approval of Iran’s regime today. Yet in the poet’s era, the Ghaznavid rulers were as fond of a drink as anywhere in the medieval world: represented by such figures as the general Ariyaruk, who “had the habit that when he once sat down to drink he would continue boozing for three or four entire days.”87 Sitting on the floor of the dorm, it felt like the thousand-year-ago poet was more in touch with the people I was meeting than the old men in power.

  Pulled back to the present by a refill of the Provider’s arak, I have a vague memory of being part of an all-singing, all-dancing merry-go-round. Piruz was our axle, cross-legged in the center, sticking out his fingers like Eminem as he chanted his verses:So down this road I’m riding in my Peugeot 206

  I see this girl so hot it’s like I went to paradise!

  She’s driving on the other side her lips they’re like a rose

  She’s singing to herself, her voice it’s like a nightingale . . .

  That was my last night in the dorm. The university police burst into the room in the morning and insisted that foreign guests were forbidden.

  “It’s an insult!”

  “The police have no idea about hospitality.”

  “You must stay with Piruz.”

  At my slightest mention of a hotel, Jahangir and Hamid were practically tearing their hair out. But the university police were a nudge, reminding me that it was time to move on. The Afghan border was calling.

  My beard wasn’t exactly what you’d call full. Patchy at best, in several spots it was turning an alarming shade of ginger. But it was thick enough to rub out my one remaining excuse for waiting. I spent my last couple of nights in Mashhad at a shabby hostel where the lobby had a familiar, acrid smell and the manager wandered around with a flute of rolled-up paper and a bleary-eyed expression. My association with the students, however, wasn’t over just yet. I would meet up with Jahangir one last time, on my final evening in Mashhad. First I wanted to embark on a short but essential pilgrimage, to an obscure village called Pazh.

  It was hot, but the wind was impressive. It rattled in the rooftop water tanks and sent dust spirals over the road. Even the clouds were struggling against it: torn rags of cirrus clinging to the mountains. It picked at the black rayon chadors so the women were gripping their ends more tightly between their teeth, waddling into their mud-brick farmsteads like the penguins to which Iranian men often compare them. A motorcyclist vroomed past my bus, wrapped in a turban so he exposed no more flesh than the women. But in his case, it was to keep out the dust, not disgrace.

  “You came for Ferdowsi?” asked a man called Hajji Mohammed.

  He had stubble on almost every part of his face and big brown eyes darting around like a squirrel’s. He had come out of his shop—a flat-roofed mud-brick building like most of the others. Striding ahead of me as if we had made an appointment, he guided me up the tapering hillock at the center of the village, past battered medieval ruins gaping around us like eggshells. Nudged by the wind, we found ourselves at the top in no time at all, standing under a two-tiered house of sun-dried brick: like a tower made out of nutmeg.

  “Is this,” I asked, “where Ferdowsi lived?”

  Hajji Mohammed nodded. “He wrote the Shahnameh here.”

  Flat-roofed and thin, the house was pincered between its neighbors, as if to keep it from flying up into the clouds. The wind held back as we climbed a ridge to the doorway, but it welcomed us in with a ruffle of our hair. Dust and soil were threading a carpet under our feet, and there was more dust on the niches sunk into the wall, which spun around us before being sucked out through a row of empty arched windows.

  “I take it nobody lives here now,” I said.

  Hajji Mohammed turned his squirrel eyes on me. “Of course not! This is Ferdowsi’s house.”

  Down in the courtyard underneath us, a fat-tailed sheep was sticking its head into a trough, and two boys were dueling with a couple of sticks. Dipping and swelling far behind them were the mohair caps of the mountain peaks, known locally as “the Thousand Mosques.” I breathed in the dusty air, feeling the sun on my neck and the wind on my nose, and tingling with the excitement of where I was standing.

  “You have read the Shahnameh?” said Hajji Mohammed later that afternoon, squatting over a paraffin stove in his shop.

  “I’ve been trying,” I replied.

  “Then you know. You heard of Zal? Huh? You must have heard of Zal! He was one of our great warriors, he grew big in a bird’s nest. And his son Rostam—the greatest warrior of all! Ha! One swing of his mace would kill a thousand men. And Asfandiyar, of course, he was made from metal so you could never kill him, not unless you shot him in the eye. And . . . ”

  Living just down the hill from where Ferdowsi grew up, it was no wonder Hajji Mohammed was so proud of the poet. But when I mentioned Sultan Mahmud, his pride transformed into a terrible fury—a stretched mouth, arched brows, and eyes like gimlets. The squirrel had become a tiger.

  “Son of a dog!” fumed the Hajji. “You know what he did? What that son-of-a-dog sultan did?”

  He narrated the same story the Professor had told me, many months earlier, sitting under Ferdowsi’s statue in Tehran: how the poet labored on the Shahnameh for more than three decades, how he took it to the sultan in the hope of a spectacular remuneration, how he was given a single sack of silver for his pains.

  “One sack of silver!” exclaimed the Hajji. “Ha! Well, we all know what Ferdowsi thought of that, don’t we?”

  The anger rushed out of his face—and in its place emerged a look of bitter triumph. He sipped his tea slowly, before reciting the same words I had heard from the Professor, all those months ago in Tehran:If only your father a true king had been

  Then wouldn’t your gold on my head have been poured?

  And as for your mother, i
f she’d been a queen

  Then I would be sunk to my knees in your hoard.

  I took a Dictaphone out of my jacket. “Can you repeat that?”

  Sitting in my room in the shabby hostel, later in the evening, I listened to those verses again. The reels of my Dictaphone were turning, Hajji Mohammed’s voice crackling through the grille: the words of Ferdowsi’s thousand-year-ago wrath, repeated at different ends of my time in Iran. They summed up the anger felt by people toward the sultan for rejecting their poet, toward all the sultans and authority figures who have rejected all the poets in this part of the world—the perfect weapon for my mission of revenge.

  Sultan Mahmud was a fanatical Sunni—this much is attested in the annals. He slaughtered the Shia in numerous battles and burned their books. So why would a Shia poet like Ferdowsi have traveled all the way to the sultan’s court at Ghazni with a poem in which there are numerous references to Shiism?

  This was the last thing I needed to find out before I set off for Ghazni. I wanted an explanation for why the poet ventured there. If I was to travel across Afghanistan, I didn’t want to be following a fairy tale—I needed evidence for the historical facts. If I really had to go to Afghanistan, if that really was where Ferdowsi went, I needed something tangible to tell me why.

  Which led me to Professor Haidar Reza Zabat. A jovial scholar with a rich, thick beard, he worked at the Islamic Research Foundation, an institute near the shrine of Imam Reza. He was an expert on Iran’s medieval religious history who believed, contrary to the image of Sultan Mahmud as a die-hard Sunni, that the sultan was in fact much more ecumenical.

  “We have a story,” said Dr. Zabat, “that Sultan Mahmud saw Imam Reza in a dream and after this he became a lover of Imam Reza and built the shrine to the imam here in Mashhad.”

  There was a practical explanation, he added:

  “Mahmud’s most important projects were his invasions of India, and it was from there he gained the wealth to enrich his empire. In order to attack India, he needed manpower, and many people in Iran had a great love for Imam Reza, especially in Tus. So Mahmud constructed the shrine here and said he had seen Imam Reza in a dream and the imam supported his actions.”

  But the medieval shrine was knocked down by the Mongols in the thirteenth century and the present-day structure dates from the seventeenth. The sultan’s rapprochement with the Shia has, apparently, been wiped out.

  “Well . . . ” said Dr. Zabat. “There is something, in fact. You can still see it—it’s an oratory built by Sultan Mahmud—it is still there, in the shrine of Imam Reza itself.”

  He paused, nibbling the end of his pen.

  “But of course,” he added, “you are not a Muslim, so unfortunately you are not permitted to see it.”

  I nodded respectfully from the other side of his desk.

  “Oh yes,” I said, “I realize that would be . . . very wrong.”

  When the lights are as bright and blurring as at the shrine complex that night, the effect is like emerging from underwater. Pigeons roosted on a cupola like seagulls on a rock and men clung to the silver grille outside the shrine, like they couldn’t let go for fear of being sucked away. A golden dome rose ahead of us, light spinning off its rim and gleaming on tiles that smeared the portal in the ninety-nine names of God.

  “Hopefully they won’t notice you,” whispered Jahangir, “because you look a little like us.”

  Our shoes slipped off and floated beside us in the bubbles of plastic bags, while a guard turned the other way just before we dived through the cranny of a doorway behind him.

  We were sucked in among them: surfing on a thump of bare feet, down a mirrorwork corridor, through a succession of glass-framed gilded doorways; choked sobs, breathless gasps, hysterical cries, chanted prayers, and the echoes of hundreds of bare feet—surging together, threaded with the smell of sweat and of smoke winding in a watery spiral above a tin thurible. A man tripped and the shoals of worshippers hurtled against his back. Others swept forward, squeezing through the gaps and spurting over the marble, as the golden cage of Imam Reza’s shrine keeled into view.

  It was like some fabulous casket at the heart of a whirlpool, hauling men against its sides, forcing them to cling to its gilt bars and rub their hands against the cornice, while on the other side of a glass screen that made them look like they were in an aquarium, women flung against the shrine with so much feeling a female guard had to yank them away. Lamentations were pulled out of the pits of their stomachs, screams blasted in our ears, and a chorus of Quranic recitation floated up, up to the vault of colored glass.

  The excitement of being within touching distance of Mashhad’s holiest of holies was all the stronger knowing I wasn’t supposed to be there at all. Prohibitive edicts are a godsend for the modern traveler. With the world becoming so much more accessible every day, it’s great to have a few spots that are still, officially, off-limits. When you sneak into a shrine like Imam Reza’s, you get a tiny whiff of what it must have been like for travelers of the past—men like Sir Richard Burton, stealing into Mecca disguised as an Afghan.

  But it wasn’t Imam Reza’s shrine I was looking for. Avoiding the glances of the worshippers around me, I was hunting for the oratory of Sultan Mahmud, the structure mentioned by Dr. Zabat. It was like trying to find a treasure in a storm, what with all the bustle around me, and I was swept too fast by the crowd to be sure if the simple glazed-brick structure I spotted was actually a thousand-year-old relic—the last tangible evidence of Sultan Mahmud’s rapprochement to the Shia.

  Was it really made under the auspices of the sultan? The experience of being in the shrine was too fast and dizzying to tell. But it didn’t really matter—I needed something to believe in, a talisman to cling to, just as the men around me needed to believe in Imam Reza. The oratory was rare evidence of a softer approach to the Shia by Sultan Mahmud, an explanation for the hope a Shia poet like Ferdowsi could have invested in this Sunni monarch.

  Mahmud was “the world-lord,” as Ferdowsi puts it in the Shahnameh , “bright sun in light, / A lion with scimitar ready to fight.” Setting off for Ghazni, the poet was convinced he would be set free “from every want on earth” by this mighty king—the new incarnation of the ancient Persian shahs—“whose treasuries groan / With his munificence.” He would turn out to be sorely mistaken, but the oratory at Mashhad underlines why he believed he was about to be rewarded beyond his wildest dreams, and why he set out on his ill-fated journey.

  According to the great physician Ibn Sina, before you set out on a journey you should purge yourself by bleeding, rub your body with oil, and wind a binder around your loins. Sound advice, no doubt, but on my last night in Iran, I was looking for emotional, rather than physical, comfort, which I suppose is why I found myself loitering around the Haram.

  The evenings always brought groups of men together in the courtyards around Imam Reza’s shrine. Their hands struck their chests and their voices croaked as they recited the mourning songs. One group was standing behind a wire fence, in a nest of concrete slabs and scaffolding poles where a new mosque was being constructed.

  “You think America will attack Iran?” asked a young man called Mohammed. He wore a blazer over his jeans like a brand of sophistication, and his mobile phone was clipped to his belt.

  “I hope not,” I said.

  “So let them attack.” He hunched down beside me on a pipe. “They think because they occupy Iraq they can take Iran! They surround us on every side, but they cannot occupy us. Remember—Iraq is Sunni and Shia, they are divided. But in Iran, we are all Shia. We are brothers!”

  One of his friends joined us. He was a soldier called Mustafa, still in uniform, and after the previous conversation I expected more military discussion, so I was surprised by the question he asked.

  “What can you tell me,” he said, “about love?”

  “Well . . . ” I racked my head for something really profound. “It’s . . . good, isn’t it?”

&nbs
p; “Good?”

  “Um, beautiful?” No, no, no, this really wouldn’t do. Right at the moment, love was the last thing on my mind. “Well . . . ” I reached for the ultimate cop-out. “I suppose it depends on what kind of love.”

  Mohammed nodded sagely, and Mustafa rapped my knuckles.

  “What is the most important kind?” he asked.

  “I don’t know; there are so many. What do you think?”

  “Love,” declared Mohammed, “of Imam Reza!”

  In front of us, a dozen men were standing in a circle, rhythmically beating their chests while one of them sang. Others hunched against a wall, one sobbing into his hand, which was cupped as if to catch his tears, while his friend’s arm was gripped, consolingly, on his shoulder.

  “You know,” said Mustafa, “if we ever want anything, we pray to Imam Reza.”

  “You can do this too,” added Mohammed.

  “Whatever you want,” said Mustafa. “If he likes you, Imam Reza will make it possible.”

  As they stood in the circle, they cupped one hand over their mouths to stifle their sobs, at the same time beating the other hand against their chests. The chanting dropped, fading through the air like a falling leaf, and they kissed each other three times on the cheeks.

  “Do you feel God here?” asked Mustafa.

  “Yes.”

  I was trying to please him, but I wasn’t lying—I did feel something. It was hard to rationalize—an electric current of faith. With my head full of Afghanistan, I think it was fed by my fear of the coming journey, which had prompted me to say the rosary every morning for the past week.

  “God is everywhere,” announced Mustafa.

  “And he is in all of us,” added Mohammed.

  “Even in me?” I asked.

  “Yes, he is in you,” said Mohammed. “But . . . ”

  “But I won’t be saved unless I become a Muslim?”

  “A Shia Muslim,” said Mustafa. “The Sunni, they will also go to hell. In fact, they are even worse than the Christians!”