Drinking Arak Off an Ayatollah's Beard

by Nicholas Jubber

  Figure 3: The arms of Ferdowsi’s disappointment.

  If you wanted to get rich quick in the eleventh century and happened to have an army at your disposal, the contemporary alternative to robbing a bank was to head to India. Not only was there no Interpol in those days, but since the caliph of Baghdad was no friend of the Hindus, you were in with a good chance of supplementing your plunder with a bonus from Baghdad. By the time Ferdowsi turned up in Ghazni, Mahmud had already invaded India several times, winning a great victory in 1008 against a super-squad of Rajas, when explosions of naphtha oil caused the chief Raja’s elephant to take fright, leading to a mass flight of the Indian troops. The sultan had already collected millions of dinars’ worth of gold, unbored pearls, gems and rubies, diamonds as heavy as pomegranates, slaves, elephants, and (if the rumors are to be believed) a collection of the beaten Rajas’ fingertips. But this was only the cusp of India’s coffer. There was so much more to be reaped from the subcontinent, and now that he was secure on his western flank, the sultan was ready for the big time.

  The historian Edmund Bosworth has described Mahmud’s empire as “essentially a military machine,” and this is how his treatment of Ferdowsi makes sense. His wars in India had no relationship to the Iran-Turan conflict. The propagandists saw them as holy wars between God’s mujahideen—wagers of jihad—and the Hindu infidels. Endorsed by the caliph, these campaigns helped Mahmud to earn the fame, prestige, and wealth he always craved. They would have a huge effect on later Islamic history—the first major instance of war carried out in the name of Islam, away from the central authority of the caliph. Perhaps the man in black was right: Mahmud and his troops were, indeed, the original mujahideen.

  The sultan’s army was growing with every campaign, not only in numbers but also in ethnic diversity—filling up with Turks and Pashtuns, Indian elephant drivers, Turcoman sharpshooters, and “daredevil” Arab cavalrymen. He took his generals mostly from the Turks, his greatest weapons—his elephants—from the Indians, and his authority from the Sunni Arab caliph. So a poem about Persians by a Shia poet, in which Turks and Arabs were the fall guys, had lost the appeal it once held. If Ferdowsi had finished the Shahnameh a few years earlier, his reward would have been enormous. But he had the misfortune to invest his hope in the early Mahmud, only to find his patron in the form his later career would follow. It was a case of terrible timing.

  And what happened next? According to the scribe Nizami of Samarkand, the poet “was bitterly disappointed, went to the bath, and, on coming out, bought a drink of sherbet, and divided the money between the bath-man and the sherbet-seller.” On the pretense of making some corrections, he lifted the Shahnameh out of the royal library, scribbling his satire into the back. Then he left it for all to see, and disappeared.

  The men are wearing combat uniforms and black flak jackets. They are hunched, like lions on the prowl, their fingers poised on their triggers. They step toward me, and around me, then somewhat to my surprise they continue their steps until they are inside the mausoleum.

  Is there a renegade hiding in the tomb? Watching them as they hunch around it, I don’t notice the crowd: a dozen men, with waistcoats and jackets over their shalwar qameez, who sweep past me and fill up the mausoleum, where they lift their hands in the air and raise a Quranic chant. One of the soldiers is creeping out. As he scans the pine trees through his gun’s rear sight, I tap him on the shoulder and, since this is far too interesting to keep mum (not to mention that Sultan Mahmud has officially given me back my voice), I utter my first public sentence since Herat.

  ME: Please tell me who are these people?

  SOLDIER: You don’t know?

  ME: No.

  SOLDIER: But this is Assadullah Khalid!

  ME: And he is? . . .

  SOLDIER: You don’t know?

  ME: No.

  SOLDIER: But he is the governor of Ghazni!

  It’s hard to tell exactly which one he is, since there’s nothing in his shalwar qameez to distinguish him from his companions (it would have been a lot easier in Ferdowsi’s time—when the governors of Sultan Mahmud’s empire always wore pointed hats, girdles, and cloaks to mark them out from the riff-raff). But the soldier nods toward the man at the front as the group proceeds into the lobby, and with one hand on my chest I announce: “Peace be upon you.”

  “You are a foreigner?” he asks in Persian.

  That convincing, huh? I offer a meek nod and press a hand on my chest, to which he responds by asking what the hell I’m doing in Ghazni.

  “I am a traveler,” I say. “I have come a great distance to . . . um . . . well, to give to Sultan Mahmud . . . my respect. Yes, that’s it . . . my respect and great regard.”

  I’m trying to think of the most flowery Persian words I know: Once again, I’m leaning on code, acting up to get on someone’s good side.

  He looks me up and down, slowly. “You are mad?”

  Now he turns to Hassan-Gul, who is standing beside me. I say standing; in fact, he’s bent nearly double with his eyes on the floor.

  “You are his guide?” asks the governor.

  Hassan-Gul mumbles, “By the will of God.”

  “And you let him go to these places?”

  The governor has pulled himself so high over my guide that I think for a moment he’s going to beat him. But he shifts his shoulders back and turns to me instead.

  “You do know that two mullahs have been killed in our province in the last two weeks?” he says. “The enemy is attacking anywhere it can.”

  “Well, yes, I suppose,” I say, trying to curry his favor with a smile. “But what about Sultan Mahmud?” This is what I really want to know. “Why are you praying at his tomb?”

  For a moment, the governor looks at me with the same ferocity he’s shown to Hassan-Gul, and I wonder if he will beat me instead. But his frown melts and his face flattens into the model of stiff-jawed, statesmanlike pride.

  “Sultan Mahmud,” he announces, “is the greatest person in Afghan history. He is the greatest for religion, and for empire. When he ruled, Ghazni was the capital of a great empire. In India they don’t like him because he conquered them, and in Iran because of Ferdowsi, but here in Afghanistan you will find he is liked very much.”

  The gate swings open and his lackeys usher him toward a jeep with blacked-out windows.

  “Now—you,” he says, turning on Hassan-Gul, “take this foreigner and leave Ghazni at once!”

  A cloud of dust sprays us as the jeep sweeps onto the road. Hassan-Gul is pulling out his spotted handkerchief to start working at the blemishes on his blazer. Only when he has tidied himself up properly is he able to throw back his shoulders, lift up his head, and give it a good shake. He is back to his normal height.

  “This is an honor for you,” he says flatly. “You have met the governor of Ghazni.”

  “I know.”

  I look at him from the side, trying to draw out a smile. “Look, Hassan-Gul, I’m really . . . ”

  “No, no, no, Mr. Nicholas, please! I ask only one thing.”

  “Anything.”

  I step closer, looking for reassurance in his face.

  “This time, Mr. Nicholas, I ask that we must do exactly as we have been told.”

  We stroll out toward the market, with Sultan Mahmud’s pleasure garden to our backs, and for a moment—for just the shortest of moments—Hassan-Gul presses a hand on my shoulder, the closest he will give me to a smile.

  Epilogue

  Iran. The Year After.

  After fleeing from Ghazni, Ferdowsi went into hiding. Sultan Mahmud had heard his satire and was determined to trample him under his elephants, but his soldiers couldn’t find him. As soon as the coast was clear, the poet left the house of his friend Ismail Warraq in Herat and traveled on, offering the Shahnameh to the wonderfully titled Sipahbad Shirzad of Buvand, who ruled a fiefdom on Iran’s Caspian coast. But the Sipahbad refused. “You are a Shiite,” he pointed out to the poet, “and to one who loves th
e family of the Prophet nothing will happen which did not happen to them.” In short: Suffering is a Shia’s lot.

  Ferdowsi had neglected his estate to work on the Shahnameh, and having left Ghazni empty-handed, he was reduced to poverty. A man both broke and broken, he lived out his last days in his home city of Tus, looked after by his daughter. One day, it is said, he heard a small boy reciting a line from the Shahnameh. His heart soared, lifted by the hope his verse would survive after all, but it was too much for him, and he dropped dead on the spot.

  The boy wasn’t alone in quoting from the Shahnameh. Thousands of miles east, in India, a line from the epic was recited during the middle of a siege by the minister of Sultan Mahmud.92 So impressed was the sultan, he regretted his earlier mistreatment of the poet and decided to make amends. Around the same time Ferdowsi heard the small boy reciting from his work, 60,000 dinars’ worth of indigo was being dispatched to Tus.

  It was too late. As the sultan’s camels were carrying the gift through one gate, Ferdowsi’s body was being borne out through another. The poet’s daughter, it is said, refused to accept this late reward on her father’s behalf, maintaining his proud fury.

  It is telling that Ferdowsi’s body was buried outside the city. Sheikh Jurjani, the chief religious figure in Tus and a Sunni zealot, had forbidden his body from being interred within the city walls, so he was put to rest in a garden on the city outskirts. Tus itself would fall, but the poet’s grave remained, attracting visitors over the years, and in the 1930s, the shah had a new mausoleum fashioned out of marble and decorated with motifs from the tomb of Cyrus the Great. Ferdowsi had truly come out of the wilderness: Once rejected by a king, he was now being celebrated by another, in the style of the greatest of all Iran’s kings.

  One day in early spring, several months after my journey to Ghazni, I take a train to Mashhad and travel by bus to the poet’s tomb. The smell of roses tints the air in a classic Persian garden, where the poet sits on a plinth, wearing a gown with frogged buttons and his trademark turban (with the tuft at the back, like many of the men I saw in Afghanistan). Canna lilies frame a rectangular pool, at the end of which, plump on its steps like a freshly iced cake, is the poet’s mausoleum. It’s dizzy with decorations—the Zoroastrian faravahar spreading his wings at the front, the closing verses of the Shahnameh framed between ribbed pillars with double bulls on top. A stairwell pitches underground to the tomb chamber, passing a row of bas-reliefs: Rostam slapping his head as he weeps over a slain Sohrab; the Sassanian king Anushirvan, sitting on his throne surrounded by lance-bearers; a curly-bearded Darius the Great. I am less impressed by Darius’s regal pose than the fact he’s lost his nose, so I ask one of the curators where it’s gone.

  “You know about our revolution?” he whispers. “Well, at the beginning, many of the mullahs said bad things about Ferdowsi. They told their followers to attack the tomb, and they did. Look!”

  He stubs his finger in front of a panel of writing on the wall facing Darius, which is broken in half.

  “They used stones,” he says, “and they tried to smash many of the pictures.”

  There was even, according to a retired teacher I meet in Mashhad, a plan to destroy the poet’s tomb altogether.

  “In the early days after the revolution,” explains Ahmed Ansari, “there was a mullah called Abdullah Hajji who wanted to destroy Ferdowsi’s tomb and burn his book in the streets. He said the Shahnameh was praising the shahs, so it was the work of enemies, and there was no difference between Ferdowsi’s tomb and Reza Shah’s. And he would have succeeded. You saw the statue in Ferdowsi Square? He wanted to pull it down and he was coming to attack it. But there was a scholar at the university, called Master Yusufi, who made a speech. He said, ‘Was Ferdowsi a Savaki?93 No! He was a good man and he criticized the bad kings.’ So many people came to the square when the mullah was trying to pull it down, and they drove him away.”

  “What about the tomb?” I ask.

  “Well,” says Ahmed, “the mullah and his followers came and they damaged some of the pictures, but the people came out to stop them—because they knew Ferdowsi was a great poet and a good person.”

  History has repeated itself. Just as a religious leader refused the poet burial in the first place, now religious leaders have been trying to disturb his rest. And just as the ordinary people—represented by the small boy reciting Ferdowsi’s verse—saved his reputation the first time, now, nearly a thousand years later, they saved the poet’s tomb.

  It’s all change in Tehran. President Ahmedinejad has introduced a new law to stop two passengers from sharing the front seat in a taxi and half the cars are barred on any given day from driving, after a period of particularly noxious smog. The government’s nuclear program is headline news around the world, prompting a million people to demonstrate outside the upturned Y of the “Freedom” monument in central Tehran.

  “How can the Americans tell us not to have nuclear power?” exclaims a man called Mehdi. “Do they not have nuclear power?”

  His four-year-old son is sitting on his shoulders, holding a papier mâché effigy of President Bush. He’s about to throw it into a street fire, where Tony Blair is already burning alongside a blue and white Israeli flag.

  It’s all change at the Professor’s too. Tahmineh has let her hair grow back to its natural black, and apparently she has a new boyfriend—although I don’t mention this to Reza. I assume Tahmineh is still barred from seeing him, so it’s a surprise when the Professor asks if I keep in touch with him. Eventually he has it out of me.

  “When you next meet this young man,” he declares in his most formal tone, “you must inform him that he is invited.”

  It’s hardly a full-on reconciliation, but it’s close. The Professor is organizing a literary event in association with the annual Fajr Theatre Festival, and the artist who was supposed to be designing the poster has fallen sick. I assume Reza will refuse—he’s far too proud, I think. But a week later he is back at the house, carrying a brightly colored rolled-up sheet.

  This is one of my last evenings in Tehran—and one of the happiest. Tahmineh and Reza joke with each other, laughing about the beard I was trying to grow last summer. There is a serious moment when the Professor holds up the poster—showing a minstrel with a flute in his mouth and a shepherd’s crook in his hand—and everyone makes the appropriate noises.

  “It’s very pretty,” says Khanom. “Perhaps we can ask Reza to decorate the living room!”

  The Professor smiles. Leaning toward his wife, he whispers something in her ear and plants a kiss on the top of her head.

  “Now,” he announces, “it is time to give our guests a drink.”

  Sina has written a song about the president, which he recites as we sip, slicing a finger through the air like a rapper: “You preach to us youngsters like proud old Farun,94 / Well, shave off your beard, you repulsive baboon!”

  “You think I can get some music for it?” he asks, then raises his glass and declares a toast: “To the president!”

  “And,” adds the Professor, “to whoever has to clean his bath!”

  Late in the evening, the Professor steps over to the walnut bookcase and takes out the Shahnameh. It’s a new copy, the cover showing the poet’s face in white and black swills on a blood-red background. With Tahmineh sitting beside him to turn the page, he starts reading from the tale of Prince Siyavash. At first, Tahmineh is exchanging glances with Reza, while Sina is trying to distract me by flicking my earlobes. But slowly, we all turn toward the Professor and let ourselves be sucked into the story. The light from the lamp is glistening on his hair, and as the hero takes up his horse’s reins to ride through the flame of judgment, the Professor looks like he is on fire himself. There is the odd chime when someone puts down a glass, but apart from that, all you can hear are the thousand-year-old words, binding us together as the hero rides out to glory.

  Acknowledgments

  Given the political situation in Iran, and the politi
cal matter contained in this book, I’ve decided to stick to first names for my Iranian acknowledgments. I’ve also disguised the identities of many people in the book, for the same reason. I really hope that no one, in Iran or any of the other countries I visited, suffers because of anything I’ve written.

  For their hospitality, I am especially grateful to Guitti, Amir, Farid, Fariba, and Siyavash and his family. Thanks also to Leila, Vahideh, Reza and all his friends in Yazd, Ehsaan and his friends, Mehmorali, Peyman, Farshid and all their brothers, Vali and Ahmed in Mashhad, Dr. Abbas and his family, Arash H., Mohammed Y. N., Mustafa, Masa, and the dozens of kind people who helped me in so many ways during the course of my travels. Thanks also to my teachers at the Dekhodeh Institute in Tehran and all the staff there. Most of all thanks to Ramin, the kindest and most hospitable of friends.

  My travels in Central Asia owed a lot to Habibullah Ibragimov and his family, whose generosity and kindness was extraordinary. I’m also grateful to Professor Bahriddin Aliev, Azim Malikov, Jurabek Sidikov, Dr. Farid Alakbarov, Betty Blair, and Edmund Hayes for his hospitality in Khojand. In Afghanistan, I was very fortunate to meet the teachers at the Afghan English Language Centre in Herat, and I’m grateful to Christina Lamb, Fraidoon Afzali, Vanni Capelli, Partaw Naderi, Sadiq Osian, Dr. Ghani Barzinmehr, and Professor Homaioun at Kabul University for their kindness. There were a great many other people who helped me during the course of my journey—I’m sorry to anyone I’ve missed.