Drinking Arak Off an Ayatollah's Beard

by Nicholas Jubber

  Every year at Ghazni, Sultan Mahmud held a review. “A splendid pageant drawn up on parade,” as the poet Farid ud-din Attar described it, including 1,300 elephants and 54,000 soldiers, covered in mail and armed with all the weapons available at the time—from curved qalachur swords, sabers and spears to lances and lassoes, bows, battleaxes, and bull-headed maces.

  The sultan was fascinated by anything to do with combat, but nothing swelled his chest as much as the elephants—booty from his conquests in India—made all the fiercer by their metal headpieces, which the mahouts would strike to frighten the enemy. When Mahmud defeated the Central Asian Qarakhanids in 1008, one of his elephants lifted up their ruler’s standard-bearer with its trunk, hurled him on its steel-clad tusks, and cut him in two, while other elephants threw riders from their horses and trampled them to death. They were noticed by Abu’l Abbas of Tus, who saw “a big group of elephants” accompanied by 30,000 Indian troops.

  Now, standing on a hill over the citadel, I’m looking down on a more recent kind of elephant. Their smoothbore guns point up the hill and their glacis-plates are flaky with rust. They’re a token of the recent fighting, a striking visual sign that this city—once the crucible of an empire dedicated to war—is still very much in the fray. Is this why I really object to Sultan Mahmud? Because I see him as the symbol of war, destruction, and the trampling of culture? Yet, looming beside me as I sit on the hillside, soaring out of the earth like the trunk of an ancient oak, is a sign of how ambiguous this matter can be—that, in some cases, war can actually create culture.

  It’s one of a pair of victory towers, spearing eighty feet out of an underground pit. The lower trunk is plain, but as it rises the tower umbellates into floral patterns, delicately molded from terracotta, twisting into tendrils and breaking into star shapes, and near its crown the frippery is pushed down for an austere ring of Arabic. There is another tower farther up the hill, smaller, with panels of interweaving lines and elegant wriggle-work, but beautiful too.

  Why aren’t they ugly? That would make it easier: Art and war could be seen in comforting opposition, perfectly polarized. Instead, they are tangled together, like a pair of lovers who appear to outsiders to be ill-suited, but are clearly head-over-heels in love. They’re an example of the muddying of the water, something I will need to resolve if I am to carry out Ferdowsi’s revenge.

  “Come on, Mr. Nicholas,” says Hassan-Gul.

  He is standing by the taxi, using his spotted handkerchief to wipe the dust of the track off his trousers. There’s a mud stain just above his ankle, and as he wets his hanky to wipe it off, he is shaking his head irritably.

  “Your heart wishes to visit Sultan Mahmud?” he asks.

  “Oh yes.”

  I’m ready to do what I came here for. To prove it, my Dictaphone is shaking inside the waistcoat I’m wearing over my shalwar qameez.

  “So,” says Hassan-Gul, “let us place ourselves in the sultan’s path.”

  17

  Insultin’ the Sultan

  Ghazni. October.

  “I can’t believe it—a swing!”

  A short drive from the hill where we visited the victory towers, Hassan-Gul nudges open an iron gate, approaching the only playground installation I will see in Afghanistan. A small boy is whooping as his father gives him a push, and he isn’t the only one enjoying himself. On flat-weave rugs laid across the terrace above him, kebab sandwiches are being served by a man humming over a barbecue. Men sit around him, filling up their bellies, while the scent of burning meat and cardamom mixes with the sharp resin of the pines soaring above us. They act like a curtain, hiding the building at the top of the hill.

  So leisurely an atmosphere is absolutely fitting: After all, this hill was used by Sultan Mahmud himself, known as his “Garden of Victory.” It was here that he caroused with his favorite slave, Ayaz, challenged his ministers to drinking contests, and filled his most sycophantic poets’ mouths with gems. Hassan-Gul and I climb the steps, my Dictaphone rattling inside my waistcoat as if it knows its moment is about to come. The curtain of pines draws back, revealing a domed clay building with blue wooden doors. Here, in the spot where so many of his most pleasurable evenings took place, at the time of the evening prayer on April 30, 1030, Sultan Mahmud was put to rest.

  “Salaam,” announces Hassan-Gul.

  He presses a hand on his heart to greet two old men, snowy with turbans and icy with beards, who are sitting cross-legged on the floor inside the doorway.

  “These men,” he tells me, “are from the Sheikhan tribe. They are famous in Ghazni province.”

  “We have fifty families in our tribe,” says one of them. “And we have been guarding this tomb ever since our blessed sultan died.”

  “But,” I want to say, “that’s a thousand years!” I don’t say it—as I’m still officially mute, and given the saintly, sympathetic looks they’re giving me, I suspect Hassan-Gul is explaining to them my “trouble”—although, as he is speaking in Pashto, I can’t understand what he’s saying.

  “Every day,” one of them tells me, through Hassan-Gul’s translation, “two members from our tribe come here to clean and guard the tomb for twenty-four hours. Because we are many, it is not a difficult task. And it is a great honor because the sultan was a holy man.”

  Holy? This isn’t exactly the impression I’ve been receiving from the annals. A lot of Muslims might frown on Mahmud’s relationship with his favorite slave, Ayaz, and everyone in Iran appears to frown on his treatment of Ferdowsi. And what about the killing he made, literally as well as financially, on his expeditions to India? On second thought, yes—the last detail is exactly why he is considered to be holy. So says a man with a bifurcated beard, standing in the tomb chamber itself—a dusty, lime-plastered cavern, where the light squeezing through the doorway is flashing on the metal bars around the sultan’s sarcophagus.

  “Mahmud is so important in the Islamic history,” he explains. “He captured up to Uzbekistan and Pakistan, he attacked Iran, and he crushed the Hindus in Somnath.”

  He announces this last detail with relish, as if it’s the most wonderful thing anyone could possibly have done. But there’s a softer side to the sultan’s popularity, explained by a man dressed in black, who is standing on the other side of the tomb. He’s accompanied by a woman in a blue burka, swaying strangely as her hands quiver over the metal bars.

  “If people have a problem,” he says, “they come here to solve them. I pray here because I have a problem I wish to be solved. I understand Mahmud was a high-character person, a hero for Afghanistan.”

  “And a mujahid,” points out the other man, with the bifurcated beard.

  “Oh yes,” says the man in black, “he was Afghanistan’s first mujahid!”

  I hadn’t imagined this—a crowd. A medieval sultan’s tomb—I was expecting it to be empty. I thought I could come here, play the satire on the Dictaphone, and be on the road to Kabul after a few minutes. Revenge complete. Instead I’ve got an audience, and they’re addressing me in Persian—so they’ll know exactly what the words of Ferdowsi’s satire are about.

  The thousand-year-old insult.

  I remember the Professor, laughing at my plan when I revealed it to him in Tehran a few weeks ago: “Child, they are Afghans!” he said. “They will tear you to pieces!”

  So I look at the sarcophagus—the horrible, selfish, miserly sultan’s sarcophagus—and, keeping up with the politeness code, I nod in agreement to all the praise the men are heaping on its occupant. Oh yes, indeed, what a lovely man he was, that wonderful Sultan Mahmud.

  Robert Byron went wild for the “dancing foliage” of the tomb’s decorations. Nowadays, it’s only possible to sneak a peek by stretching between the metal bars and yanking up the green rugs in which the sarcophagus has been covered, when the guardians aren’t looking. Marble embossments swell into dagger shapes and floral lines crawl elegantly around them, as if they are engaged in a debate about which lifestyle the sultan pr
eferred—soft luxury or the sword. But before I am able to undress the tomb any further, I’m stopped by a terrible scream.

  It’s the woman in the burka. Although her face and body are hidden, you can see the convulsions as she thrashes and throws herself backward, smacking the top of her head with her hand, letting out a husky, drawn-out moan, as if she is finding it hard to breathe. The man in black pulls her against his chest, pressing an arm down on her shoulder. He speaks in a soothing tone, and although there is no question of him removing her burka, he appears to be trying to put her at ease. He guides her slowly outside, a palm pressed firmly against her back.

  “She has epilepsy,” explains Hassan-Gul, before following them out.

  So this is the problem the man in black wished to solve: He’s brought her here to pray for help.

  Everyone has gone. Everyone except me. Everyone except me . . . and Sultan Mahmud. It’s like a sign. Finally—the solitude I’ve been craving!

  I pace around the tomb. I rest my back against its side. I crouch by a carpet hanging from the limestone wall. In the days since Hajji Mohammed recited Ferdowsi’s satire in his shop near the poet’s house, I have thought many times about what I’ll do when I finally come head to headstone with the sultan. This wispy-bearded, clay-eating, yellow-faced tyrant, who scuppered Ferdowsi’s dreams, sent him out of Ghazni with a single sack of silver, and threatened to trample him under his elephants.

  He is the enemy.

  The fanatic.

  The one who massacred the Hindus and burned the books of rival sects.

  The one who hurled Biruni off a roof and chased Ibn Sina around the region.

  The one who didn’t care for the legends Ferdowsi heroically preserved.

  He is the Ayatollahs, Khomeini and Khamenei.

  He is the brutes of Dushanbe, ransacking the Melody Music Shop.

  He is the Taliban.

  He’s had it coming.

  I take the Dictaphone out of my waistcoat and set it on the ledge of the sarcophagus. I will play the satire, over and over and over again, reminding the sultan he is the “spawn of a slave” and sending his humiliation all the way to his no-doubt-long-established place in hell.91

  Except . . .

  People come here to pray, to ask Mahmud for help with a woman’s epilepsy. The eminent historian V. W. Barthold believed “the system of government in the Eastern Muslim lands reached its full development under him” and it’s doubtful Afghanistan ever enjoyed such efficient management again. In a story told in Nizam al-Mulk’s eleventh-century Book of Politics, a man complains to the sultan about the abuse of a judge, and Mahmud has the judge suspended from a pinnacle of his palace until he’s agreed to pay back the money he’s taken: proof, as far as the author is concerned, of the sultan’s sympathy for the poor.

  Another of Nizam al-Mulk’s anecdotes demonstrates not only Mahmud’s respect for rule-of-law, but also his love of a binge. At the end of a wild boozing session, his boon-companion was in such a “state of giddiness” he warned him not to walk the streets because he risked being thrashed by the censors—the Ghaznavid version of the Morality Police. His companion ventured out nonetheless and, despite having spent the evening with the sultan, he was beaten forty strokes with a stick. “Since the rules of administration and discipline were firmly established in the country,” writes Nizam al-Mulk, “the working of justice took this course.”

  Ever since learning about the conflict that split both Ferdowsi’s world and the Persian-speaking lands of today, between “nationalists” on one side and “religious people” on the other, I have seen Mahmud as the other side: the shadow of religious fanaticism, burning books and cutting the throats of the “bright-thinkers,” leaving a trail of blood that runs all the way to the present.

  But . . . As I’ve traveled around Ferdowsi’s world, I’ve learned it’s not so simple. The nationalists have used Ferdowsi for their own ends—the Pahlavi shahs in Iran exploited him to bolster their iron grip on power. In Tajikistan, President Rakhmonov has been championing the poet, along with other medieval “Persian” figures, to stoke a conflict with the Uzbeks, and the Russians harnessed the Shahnameh for their policy of divide and rule. Like the Quran or the Bible, it’s a very easy text to abuse.

  Conflicting arguments are jostling in my head, hurling me around the chamber in a state of confusion, knocking out another change of mind with every step I take, depriving me of the one thing the revenger needs above all: certainty. And in the middle of all this dithering, something else is calling out, ringing in my ears. It’s nothing as wishy-washy as my thoughts: It’s a sound, audible and clear—albeit with a slight crackling underneath it—coming from the other side of the sarcophagus. It pulls me away from my thoughts in a voice I remember from hundreds of miles away, just a few days before I set out on the road to Ghazni: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, if she’d been a queen

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

  How has it happened? The Dictaphone is playing out the satire, as if it’s lost patience with me and decided to punish the sultan all by itself. As if it’s able to operate itself, pushing down the play button and spinning the reels. I step around the sarcophagus, to find myself looking into two pairs of old hooded eyes.

  “She’er!”

  The two snowy-turbaned, icy-bearded guardians are gleaming at me, addressing me with the one word I know in Pashto—because it’s the same in Persian: “poetry.” The satire stops, but it is followed by more. They are fiddling with the fast-forward button, jabbing their bony fingers at “play,” filling up the space between us with sounds familiar from days and weeks and months ago.

  We hear the reciter at the mosque in Tehran, whipping up the crowd with the story of the martyrdom of Imam Hossain. Then the Shahnameh-khwan in the Bakhtiari mountains, telling of Rostam’s feats in his butcher’s shop. There is a cry of “Agh! Aaagh! Alaghh!” and the Dictaphone drops out of the guardians’ hands. But it carries on playing as the Sufis of Herat swing their beards in my head.

  Perhaps this is what I was meant to do. To play not just the words of scorn but all the words—the poems, the songs, the chants I’ve recorded, all of which were being recited a thousand years ago. There’s a minstrel in Tajikistan, reciting from the tenth-century poet Rudaki, a rendition of the eleventh-century Sufi poet Baba Taher by a dervish in Hamadan, a Zoroastrian prayer intoned by Siyavash at the fire temple in Yazd. It’s a variety show of verse, relayed to the guardians who are a living link to Sultan Mahmud’s court, just as Ferdowsi or his reciter Abu Dulaf would have recited at the court himself. Here, in the presence of the dead sultan, his living guardians are listening to what’s survived from the culture that flourished under his rule. He may not always have encouraged them, but they glowed under his auspices and have never been as bright again.

  It’s the moment when the flame of Persian culture lit up the world.

  Outside in the lobby, I press a hand on my heart to say farewell. The guardians do the same, but before I can move away, one of them leans toward me. His watery eyes sparkle as he nods, tapping a finger to his mouth. I think he wants to know if my voice has come back.

  Don’t say a word! To disappoint the sultan’s guardians—this will be my revenge for Ferdowsi. But the guardian’s watery eyes are pulling the word out of my throat and when it comes—the Persian for “Yes!”—it’s impossible to begrudge him his smile.

  My shoes are on the edge of the threshold. I am still tying up my laces when I hear the sound of heavy boots, crashing against the steps underneath me. My heart thumps. The pine trees seem to split as two men in camouflage uniform burst through the space between them. They are both holding Kalashnikovs, and they are pointing directly at my chest. . . .

  So why did it all go wrong? What happened to wreck Ferdowsi’s chances with Sultan Mahmud?

  We follow him into the sultan�
��s great hall. He kisses the ground in front of Mahmud and recites a verse of praise for the man he considers to be a revival of the ancient Persian shahs—“bright-souled Fereydoun alive again.” Perfect start—the sultan is now on the poet’s side. As the Shahnameh is being recited, he listens eagerly. With his military interests, he especially enjoys the detail of battle and is wowed by a description of Rostam stringing his bow. But something goes wrong—terribly wrong—and when Ferdowsi leaves the court, he is running away from a death threat.

  Scholars have come up with all sorts of different theories for Ferdowsi’s disappointment. In fact, the subject has more arms than the Hindu idols so ferociously demolished by Mahmud. Was it jealousy? Religion? Egotism? Race? Philosophy? Court rivalry? Ideology? (See Figure 3 overleaf.)

  It was none of them. What the sources suggest is something more complicated—a shift in policy driven by the sultan’s unquenchable drive for power and glory.

  At the beginning of his reign, Mahmud’s dynasty was newly established and naturally he looked to Iranian legends to shore up his authority among a primarily Iranian population. So he used Persian as the principal language of his administration, forged a genealogy linking himself to the last Iranian shah, Yazdagird III, and encouraged Ferdowsi to write a poem about Yazdagird and his predecessors. When Mahmud was battling against the Turkic Qarakhanids, who associated themselves with the mythical Turanians, he presented himself as an Iranian shah fighting against the villainous Turks. A poem describing those ancient battles, and comparing Mahmud to the ancient Iranian kings, would be fantastic propaganda, enhancing his support among the Persian-speaking population and (as Dr. Zabat hinted in Mashhad) gaining troops for the sultan’s army. It’s like George W. Bush casting himself as a Wild West cowboy—appealing to the heroes in vogue with his subjects.

  But, like most politicians, Mahmud’s interest in these heroes didn’t run very deep. In 1008, he defeated the Qarakhanids. So weakened (at least, temporarily) was the dynasty that when they later squabbled among themselves, they turned to Mahmud to arbitrate. The battle between Mahmud and the Qarakhanids, one presenting himself as an Iranian, the other as a Turk, was over, and the sultan’s attention was turning elsewhere.