Drinking Arak Off an Ayatollah's Beard

by Nicholas Jubber

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  1 Hajji is the honorific title given to any Muslim who performs the hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca.

  2 United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.

  3 The name of this region on both the Iranian and Afghan sides of the border.

  4 There are so many ex-pat Iranian musicians producing pop and distributing it back home through under-the-counter sales and Internet downloads that their community is known locally as “Tehrangeles.”

  5 Esfand or wild rue is a strong-smelling, herbaceous plant burned in many traditional ceremonies in Iran, whose fumes are said to keep away evil spirits.

  6 Medieval Persian poetry has a habit of turning up in Iranian pop lyrics. Banyan and Manizeh, the Sonny and Cher of 1950s Iran, had a hit when they sang a poem by the tenth-century minstrel Rudaki, while the rock band O-hum, which is big on the Iranian scene today, uses the mystical verses of the fourteenth-century poet Hafez in its songs and has even released an album named after the poet—Hafez in Love. In this case, the band was called Kahtmayan and had made a point of their enthusiasm for Ferdowsi’s tenth-century epic.

  7 Literally “sign of God,” the rank of ayatollah is the highest in Twelver Shiism, given to experts in Islamic law and philosophy.

  8 This is the one detail in which Iranians tend to compliment their neighbors across the Gulf. There’s an old Persian joke about Arabs leaving three tracks in the sand, which Sina was fond of repeating. As will become clear over the ensuing pages, there is no love lost between Iranians and Arabs and even this example (similar to the white man’s joke about black men) barely hides a Persian perception of Arabs as a race of beasts, several rungs down the evolutionary ladder from the refined and courteous Iranians.

  9 The name Pahlavi was taken from the word for the ancient Persian language, underlining the dynasty’s emphasis on Iran’s pre-Islamic heritage and disregard for Islam. The latter would be one of the principal causes of the dynasty’s downfall.

  10 Who disappeared in the early tenth century. He was the only one of the twelve Shia imams—all of them descendants of the Prophet Mohammed—who wasn’t killed. They were all persecuted by the caliph (leader of the Sunnis) of their time, and denied what the Shia considered to be their rightful rank. As a result, the Shia—who represent more than 90 percent of Iran’s population—are known for their suspicion of authorities.

  11 A colorless, distilled alcoholic drink. Although arak is usually made with anise, the Iranian version has to be different, of course, so it’s made with raisins. It’s one of the cheapest drinks available on the black market, and as a result it tastes like something you should put in your car, not your mouth.

  12 The shah’s secret police.

  13 The terms “Persian” and “Iranian,” often used interchangeably, can be tricky to define. “Persian” was coined by the Macedonians in the fourth century BCE, from “Fars” or “Pars,” the name of the province in which the capital stood at this time, which they took to account for the country as a whole. To the natives, however, the land was always “Iran”—from “Aryana Vaejah,” “land of the Aryans.” As the scholar Richard Frye puts it, “Aryan, with an approximate derived meaning ‘noble, lord,’ seems to ha
ve been the general designation of these people speaking Indo-European tongues or dialects, who migrated into the lands between the Ganges and Euphrates rivers at the end of the 2nd and the beginning of the 1st millennium BCE.” The name “Persia,” however, stuck in the West until the early twentieth century. It was Reza Shah, father of the last shah, who introduced “Iran” to the outside world.

  An imposing 6-foot-3 ex-Cossack trooper, known in the army as Reza Maxim for his expertise with the British machine gun, he seized power in a British-backed coup in 1921 and turned into the ultimate nationalist snob. He banned people from photographing camels (because they might provoke associations with the Arabs), ripped

  up the power of the mullahs, and when people protested the brimmed hats he wanted them to wear or his banning of the veil, he had them shot. By insisting on his country’s name as “Iran,” he was trying to evoke the image of an older civilization, part of a campaign in which lines from the national epic, the Shahnameh, were quoted at his coronation ceremony, ancient heroes were invoked at military parades, and an academy was set up to purify the Persian language. Ironically, rather than calling to mind an older civilization, in the West “Iran” tends to evoke the country in its postrevolutionary, theocratic phase—the modern-day Iran, while “Persia” is associated with a less threatening, magical land—a place of silk carpets, wine-drinking poets, and fluffy cats. So the meaning of the terms has flipped: Many people who oppose the regime of the mullahs—the Professor among them—now prefer to think of themselves as Persians, to distinguish themselves from the official regime. Evolving from its original sense, the term “Persia” now suggests, for many Iranians, the land they would like it to be, and the land they believe it once was.

  Throughout this book, “Persian” will be used in this sense, the sense in which it is used by people like the Professor—to describe the non-Islamic side of the country, its culture and history, and “Persian” will denote anyone who speaks the Persian (or Farsi) language (which includes not only most Iranians, but also many Afghans and the Tajiks of Central Asia) as their mother tongue.

  14 To put the achievement of this era in context, it’s worth noting how backward the West was at this time. While Britain was a forest of stinking tribesmen, where street lamps and carpets were a long way off and dysentery was treated with a recital of the miserere me deus and a bowl of boiled mugwort, the people of the Persian-speaking world were perfuming themselves with ambergris, lit their way with kerosene, had been weaving carpets since the Bronze Age, and were analyzing tuberculosis, measles, and even cancer in ways that would take Europe several hundred years to match. We tend to look down on the Middle East now, but the achievements of this time show how much we’re indebted to the medieval Persians (and Arabs too, whose accomplishments are similarly staggering). Equally, many Iranians today insist on “basking proudly in Rostam’s reflected glory,” as the twentieth-century writer Jalal al-e Ahmed put it (referring to a character from Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh to symbolize the tendency to dwell on long-ago achievements), overlooking the failure to match these feats in more recent times. Both perspectives could do with more balance.

  15 Published in a collection called “A Jug of Love: Eight Ghazals of Imam Khomeini.” The “forbidden” imagery is a common convention in mystical Persian poetry, emphasizing the importance of internal belief over outward appearances.

  16 He was referring to the Arab invasion of the seventh century CE, which brought Islam to Iran and destroyed the Persian empire.

  17 This was Ayatollah Safi Golpaigani, who insisted in a speech that “superstitious customs such as Red Wednesday do not befit the dignity of the Muslim people of Iran.”

  18 Traditionally, “spoon-hitters” would be young boys who dressed up in cloaks and visited people’s houses during Char-shanbe Suri, to be given sweets and nuts, like trick-or-treaters in the West. Hajji Firuz was a man dressed in red satin and a blacked-up face, who would dance in the streets with a tambourine and a trumpet. He is spoken of as an “Iranian Santa Claus.”

  19 A schism that began in the immediate aftermath of the death of the Prophet Mohammed and revolved around who was his true successor—his son-in-law Ali or his companion Abu Bakr. It was the latter who was chosen, but Ali’s followers resented this, and when Ali was murdered, after becoming the caliph himself, his cause fell to his sons, Hasan and Hossain.

  20 Some people trace the fire-jumping tradition of Red Wednesday to this story (although there are a number of other theories on the source of that custom). Whether or not it’s a direct descendant of Siyavash’s challenge, it certainly shares the same ancient Iranian belief in the redeeming power of flames. Before he spurs his charger, Siyavash is convinced the fire won’t harm him, because it reflects the will of the Almighty.

  21 Sir Richard Burton, the great nineteenth-century explorer, was one observer who thought “the wailings for the death of Siyavash” had been “transferred to the pathetic tales of Hasan and Hoseyn,” while the prominent Iranian scholar Nodushan Eslami told me that both Siyavash and Imam Hossain recall an earlier tradition, “a mourning for the death of spring—of rain and trees.”

  22 He was a dehkan, a member of a squire class that traced its ancestry back through the centuries. “The dehkans’ houses were libraries,” according to Ustad (or “Master”) Homaioun, founder of the Ferdowsi Seat at Kabul University, “and their minds were full of the customs and heritage of ancient Iran.” Nizami of Samarkand, the poet’s first biographer, wrote in the eleventh century that he “enjoyed an excellent position, so that he was rendered quite independent of his neighbors by the income which he derived from his lands.” Among these neighbors were a fellow poet, Asadi of Tus, who specialized in “strife” poems about opposites (such as the moon and the sun, the land and the sea, and, in one controversial work, the Persians and Arabs), and the reciter Abu Dulaf, who accompanied Ferdowsi on his journey to the court of Sultan Mahmud.

  23 This is generally reckoned at 20,000 dirhams. Because of the lack of silver at the time, it is difficult to confirm exactly what this amount was worth, but it was certainly no more than one thirtieth of what Ferdowsi was originally promised. According to the contemporary historian Baihaqi, an elephant would have cost five times as much.

  24 And there are more than a hundred couplets of equally bitter vituperation in the published version of Ferdowsi’s satire (although scholarly doubt has been cast on their authenticity). During the course of the satire, Ferdowsi derides Sultan Mahmud for his lack of sense, justice, or honor, but mostly he has a go at his parentage—a subject on which Mahmud was especially sensitive, since his father had been a slave. But he was somewhat more successful than the majority of slaves usually are, taking over his master’s realm (which amounted then to little more than a chunk of eastern Afghanistan) and expanding it to incorporate much of eastern Iran. Under Mahmud, it would become the largest empire ever controlled from what is now Afghanistan.

  25 This is known as taarof, or “offer,” and while it is uniquely Persian, it corresponds to politeness codes common in other cultures—for example, the tendency among middle-class English people to say “Oh, I shouldn’t” when they’re keen for another slice of cake, or the “Have a nice day” ritual of the Deep South.

  26 The divs are horned creatures, usually depicted with shaggy, spotted coats, who battle against the heroes in many of the ancient Persian legends.

  27 This is underlined by a story told by Ibn Ishaq, the Prophet Mohammed’s first biographer. One Nadr bin Harith, a member of the same tribe as the Prophet, had picked up tales “about Rostam the Hero and Isfandiyar and the kings of Persia” (the same tales that would later make their way into the Shahnameh) and narrated them at the assembly in Mecca. Nadr used his stories to mock the Prophet, claiming, “By God, Mohammed cannot tell a better story than I and his talk is only of old fables which he has copied as I have.” And it was Nadr who appeared to have won their rivalry—the Prophet was forced to flee to Medina, while Nadr gained a
high position in Mecca. But the last laugh would be the Prophet’s. Condemning the “man who buyeth an idle tale, that in his knowledge he may mislead others from the way of God,” he captured him at a pivotal battle, at the wells of Badr in 624 CE, where Nadr was one of only two prisoners to be put to death. Several hundred years before Ferdowsi was even born, the tales of the Shahnameh and the Quran were already vying for attention.

  28 I only met the basijis once. I was sitting with Sina on the roof of Mustafa’s Peugeot, slurping up bowls of wheat groat porridge from a street stall, when we were approached by a couple of basijis—the brown-shirts of the ayatollahs’ Iran, who are often spotted tearing down the highway on their motorbikes. They ticked off Mustafa’s girlfriend because her headscarf was red and told us we should all be at the mosque. “Why are you so polite to them?” I asked. Sina and Mustafa shook their heads as if I was crazy. “You don’t know?” said Mustafa. “They carry knives and chains, and if you don’t show them respect, you get cut.”

  29 An example of this attitude was expressed when I was in a taxi one afternoon with Sina. Noticing the enormous mural of Ayatollah Khomeini on a nearby apartment block, I said jokingly to Sina, “your blessed leader,” knowing what his response would be. “Blessed?” The driver’s eyes looked demonic in the rearview mirror. “He was no Iranian, he was Arab. All these mullahs are Arabs! They came here with fire and sword hundreds of years ago and since then they haven’t left us alone.” He was referring to the Arab invasion of Iran in 637 CE, when the Persian empire was destroyed—an event that many Iranians are still unable to forgive. Among the booty won by the Arabs on that occasion was a flag known as the drafsh-i Kavyan, the legendary leather apron raised by a blacksmith called Kawa to rouse the people against Zahhak, which was traditionally carried by five Zoroastrian priests at the head of the Persian army.