Drinking Arak Off an Ayatollah's Beard

by Nicholas Jubber

  30 These reservoirs, known as qanats, have been transferring water to Iran’s most arid districts since about 800 BCE. A shaft is sunk into the ground, communicating with an inclined tunnel carrying water from the mountains or any other water source. The system was spread to Egypt by Darius the Great and was used by the Conquistadors in the Americas.

  31 Under Reza Shah, most of the discriminatory laws against them were removed and a Zoroastrian was appointed deputy prime minister; and under his son, the Islamic lunar calendar was briefly replaced by the solar Zoroastrian version.

  32 I saw this for myself on a hop across the border later in the summer. Having camped on a hillside in northwest Iran, where the Azeri-speaking locals lit fires and sang songs at the foot of a ninth-century Zoroastrian hero’s fort, I trekked farther north to the country of Azerbaijan itself. There, sitting at a teahouse near Baku, I was unable to reply to my hostess’s inquiry as to whether I would like honey in my tea, because I was so stunned by the spectacle in front of me: flames, seeping through fissures in the rock, licking the air and framed in the black rings they had singed on the earth. “Oh, it’s been like that forever,” said my hostess. “No it hasn’t,” retorted her combative sister. “It’s only been there since World War Two.” Before that, she explained, the flames had been on the other side of the hill, “but they had to put them out because of all the bombing.”

  33 The old Persian for a walled garden—pairi daeza—became our word for paradise, a tribute to the many beautifully tended gardens that have been created in this part of the world. Carefully shaded, irrigated by underground tunnels, often divided by rivers and fountains, Persian gardens are synonymous with tranquillity and refinement. The most famous of them all is at the Taj Mahal, built in India by the Persian-speaking Mughals.

  34 Because of this he was said to have “a thousand eyes and a thousand ears,” operating a surveillance system as impressive as the current regime’s and attracting the praise of the historian Herodotus, whose description—“Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor night prevents them from completing their assigned task as soon as possible”—was adapted into the unofficial motto of the Central Post Office in New York, inscribed on its façade.

  35 Although they were known as “The Throne of Jamshid,” named for the king who is cut in half by snake-shouldered Zahhak in the Shahnameh. The same name is retained by Iranians today, underlining that it’s Ferdowsi’s version of history (and prehistory), rather than the drier—albeit more accurate—Western-researched version that sticks in the popular consciousness, like the names of the Zoroastrians.

  36 This figure is either Queen Shapurdokhtak, the wife of King Narseh from the late third century, or Anahita, the Zoroastrian water angel.

  37 This point was supported by the words of Iran’s Supreme Leader himself, on a visit to this part of the country in 2008. “Those ruins are the leftovers of tyrants,” declared Ayatollah Khamenei, refusing an invitation to visit Persepolis. “Iran achieved glory only after the arrival of Islam.”

  38 They wear, wrote Ibn Hawkal in his tenth-century geography, “caps, so that their ears are covered, the end hanging on their shoulders.”

  39 No legendary champion represents the people of the Persian-speaking world as much as Rostam. He’s a lone ranger, living a solitary life in which he is fated, as he laments, to be “an outcast . . . marked out for every kind of ill.” Such a lifestyle does have one advantage: Although he appears to bow to the kings, in reality he bows to no one. When he is sent an order to fight by the shah, he decides to have a feast instead; and when the shah ticks him off, he thunders back in fury, “I am slave to none but God alone!” This isn’t just pride: It’s a quality that recurs throughout Iranian history. It is shared by Prime Minister Mossadegh, defying Churchill to nationalize the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company; and by the Afghan mujahideen, fighting off the Russians. It explains why the Persian language survived the Arab invasion and why Iranians and Afghans are so antagonistic toward foreign intervention. Because Rostam’s defining quality—shared with the poem in which he is celebrated, and with the land it is celebrating—is independence.

  40 The Russians, furious at the insurrection, sent in their tanks and gunships, killing around 20,000 civilians, whose corpses were buried in the hills outside Herat, near the shrine of the Sufi saint Abdullah Ansari. Ismail Khan, however, survived and continued fighting the Russians throughout their ten-year stay in Afghanistan.

  41 Literally “place of worship,” referring to a religious compound built in 1417 by Queen Gowhar Shad.

  42 According to the eleventh-century scribe Nizami of Samarkand, the city boasted 120 varieties, which helped to make it a particularly fructiferous place—especially in the autumn, when eglantine, basil, and yellow rocket were in bloom. In the tenth century, Prince Nasr of Bukhara was so enchanted by Herat that he considered it superior even to the Garden of Eden.

  43 That king was Nader Shah, who was assassinated during a military parade about a year later. He was succeeded by his son, Zahir Shah, who became one of the country’s longest-serving monarchs, but also one of its most ineffectual. A studious nineteen-year-old with a passion for miniature paintings, he hardly welcomed the role that had been thrust upon him. He’d been walking with his father when the assassin’s shots rang out, and his trepidation may have been increased by the fact that, of the three previous kings, two had been forced to flee and the other murdered in his sleep. One of these, Amanullah, decided that Afghanistan needed westernizing. Advising his tribal chiefs to shave their beards and wear top hats and tails, he embarked on a series of reforms—including coeducational schools, a minimum age for marriage, and, most notoriously of all, a demand for women to shed the veil. To most Afghan men, a man whose wife let her hair out in public clearly didn’t deserve their obedience, so within a couple of years, Amanullah was fleeing the country in his beloved Rolls-Royce.

  Zahir Shah was more cautious, but like Amanullah he had a fondness for the ways of the West. Slowly, he introduced some of its better innovations, like free speech, the right to form political parties and women’s suffrage. But economic reform was slow and a three-year drought at the turn of the ’70s put him in a vulnerable position, which was exploited in 1973 by his cousin Daoud, who in traditional Afghan style arranged a coup and seized the royal palace, where he would be assassinated by his own air force five years later, as the Communist party and the Russians took control.

  44 Who emerged originally as a check to the immorality of some of the mujahideen (the guerrillas who had ousted the Russians and, in the early 1990s, started fighting against each other over who would rule the country). In 1994, a mujahideen leader paraded a small boy on his tank as his “bride” and squabbled over the boy’s possession with another mujahideen chief. Disgusted by this behavior, a half-blind cleric called Mullah Omar led a gang of his students on a raid of the mujahideen leader’s HQ, hanging him from the gun of his own tank.

  This, at least, is the legend. The students (or taliban) grew from strength to strength, providing order where there had previously been chaos, and at first they were welcomed, especially among Pashtun communities that shared the Taliban’s ethnicity. But gradually their policies (such as banning kite-flying, stuffed toys and laughter) and especially their punishments (such as cutting off women’s fingers and hanging people from lampposts) lost them the initial goodwill. In non-Pashtun, Persian-speaking Herat, they were always unpopular, as several conversations would reveal.

  45 One of the earliest recorded references to the Aryans is carved into a cross-shaped, rock-cut tomb from the fifth century BCE that I visited a few months earlier in Iran, near the old royal palace of Persepolis. There, King Darius the Great describes himself as “an Aryan, of Aryan lineage.”

  46 He aroused Sultan Mahmud’s ire when he correctly predicted how he would exit his summer house. The sultan thought he had Biruni outwitted by smashing a hole through a wall and making his exit that way. But Biruni knew the sultan pretty well by
this time, so he had written that outcome down on a piece of paper. As a result, the sultan did what any self-respecting megalomaniac might have done in his place—he had Biruni hurled off the rooftop, where he was saved by a conveniently placed mosquito net. When it turned out Biruni had predicted this too (he’d written in his almanac, “Today they will cast me down from a high place, but I shall reach the earth in safety, and arise sound in body”), Mahmud was so enraged he had Biruni incarcerated. It was six months before he finally relented and set the scholar free, presenting him with a gold-caparisoned horse, a slave and a hand-maid, along with gifts of money, a royal robe, and a satin turban—proof of how helter-skelter life at Mahmud’s court could be.

  47 He spent so much time in jail that he perfected the “Habsiya,” a genre of poetry specifically about jail. “Ever since I was born,” he wrote, “O wonder! I am a captive . . . How long, O heaven, will you continue every hour hammering on my brain? Why, I am not an anvil!”

  48 The dominance of Persian poets in Sufi literature is a testament to the language’s genius for poetry as well as its suitability for mysticism. Apart from Ibn Arabi, there are no Sufi poets in Arabic who reach the depth or lyrical beauty of the great Persian Sufis: poets like Rumi (who numbers Madonna in his modern-day fanbase), Hafez (the most revered of all poets in Iran), and my personal favorite among the Sufis, Farid ud-Din Attar (whose Conference of the Birds sprinkles tales of nonconformity into an overarching narrative about the flight of the world’s birds in search of their one true king). The great Perso-phile Edward Browne suggested there may be another reason for the popularity of Sufism among the Persians: that it was “a reaction of the Aryan mind against the Semitic religion imposed on it.” The same point is made by the Indian scholar Mohammed Habib, to whom “The development of mysticism in Islam was mainly the work of Persian thinkers.” If this theory holds, then Persian Sufism shares with the Shahnameh an impulse to steer away from the Sunni Arab hegemony.

  49 A collection of thoughts addressed to God, in which Ansari rejects the traditional boons of paradise, like the luxurious mansions and the black-eyed virgins, just as the dervishes around his tomb were rejecting the world as they called out God’s name—a practice evoked in The Intimate Conversations, in which every stanza opens with the cry “O God.”

  50 This isn’t strictly true: The pavilion over Ansari’s tomb was damaged on November 20, 2001, when a U.S. food drop landed on top of it.

  51 The Soviets had no inkling of the trouble Khan was going to cause them. Andrushkin, the Soviet general, dispatched a message of warning, insisting that Khan’s fate would be the same as the guerrilla Ibrahim Beg, who had resisted the Russians at the beginning of the century before his eventual demise. “You Russians still remember Ibrahim Beg after seventy years,” wrote Khan in defiant response. “I want you to remember me for two hundred!”

  52 For example, men caught drinking alcohol had their heads shaved, and women who had been found alone with an unrelated man (even if that man was a teacher, or a fellow passenger in a taxi) could be taken to the hospital and “inspected” to confirm their virginity.

  53 The Sufis would, I think, agree with this attitude. In one of their stories, a young Sufi disciple spots Death in a teahouse in Baghdad and overhears him talking about the calls he is about to make. Panicking, the disciple flees to faraway Samarkand to be sure of escaping a visit. Later, Death meets the disciple’s guru and asks about the disciple, but the guru doesn’t know where he’s gotten to. “Yes, it’s strange,” says Death, consulting his list. “It says here I’ve got to pick him up next week, in Samarkand of all places!”

  54 The Afghan dialect of Persian. It has roughly the same relationship to the Persian spoken in Iran that Scottish English has to the Queen’s English.

  55 Although Reza didn’t articulate it, many Iranians have, stressing the link between Imam Hossain’s story and the traditions preserved by Ferdowsi. “Why do Iranians ignore all the other imams?” wrote the founder of Iranian blogging, Hossain Derakhshan. “Why don’t we perform festivals filled with passion plays, color and music to commemorate them? Because they were all conservative; pragmatic but two-faced—all those things that are despised by our culture. Yet the characters surrounding Hossain could have come straight out of the Shahnameh.”

  56 Chadori is used as the collective name for women who wear the most severe and unrevealing clothes. Tahmineh was a manteaui—someone wearing the knee-length coat and loose scarf. The difference between the two styles tends to be the difference between conservative and liberal women (although the distinction is by no means exclusive).

  57 According to the theological scholar al-Ghazzali. One of Ferdowsi’s closest friends, the poet Asadi of Tus, expressed the medieval and the modern mullahs’ fear of women when he wrote, “Outside of women is green and lush as a tree, / But inside they have venom.”

  58 In 1983, Khomeini issued a fatwa authorizing “sex reassignment surgery” after a transsexual called Maryam Molkara was beaten up by the Supreme Leader’s security guards in an attempt to gain an audience with him. Molkara explained her situation to Khomeini and soon afterward sex-change operations were legalized.

  59 A typical example occurs in the twelfth-century Conference of the Birds by Farid ud-Din Attar. Mahmud, distraught when his slave falls ill, declares: “Ayaz, what could this Evil Eye not do / If it destroys such loveliness as you.”

  60 The poetry of Ferdowsi’s age is rife with homosexual references, which are often surprisingly direct, such as the words of the Sahib Ibn Abbad, one of the leading politicians of the age, who exhorted a favorite to “spend the night with a beardless youth, a wide-buttocked lad, a loved one, / For wine and copulation, after indulgence with him—these are the really good things of life.” Like the bachhe bazi or “child-playing” that is still common in Pashtun society, these medieval texts often veer on pederasty: hence the “beardless youth” who, in Abu Dulaf al-Khazriji’s Ode of the Banu Sasan, is given “a stewpot whose contents will send him into a drugged stupor,” after which “the penises of the beggar leaders go into him, without him being aware of it.” However, other medieval poets have a more romantic approach to same-sex relationships—such as Hafez, who wrote of a lover who “with looks disheveled, flushed in a sweat of drunkenness, / His shirt torn open, a song on his lips and wine cup in his hand . . . at midnight last night he came and sat on my pillow.”

  61 He was found dead in a hotel room in 1968. The government proclaimed his

  death a suicide, but popular belief blamed it on Savak, the shah’s secret police.

  62 This dual culture is summed up by a popular story about Imam Ali and Rostam. One day they meet in a strength house and take part in a friendly wrestling match. There is nothing to divide them, so the match looks like it will end in a draw, but in the closing stages, Imam Ali calls out to God for help and wins the match. The point of the story is that they are exactly equal in Iranian culture—only God tips the balance in the imam’s favor.

  63 Among numerous innovations, Turkmenbashy renamed the months after members of his family, built gold statues of himself throughout the country (including a twelve-meter effigy in the capital, revolving throughout the day to face the sun), and composed a national epic, the Ruhnameh, or Book of the Soul, with a day of the week set aside for the population to read it and questions set on it for anyone who wanted to pass their driving test.

  64 The lintel was studied by the Russian scholar V. I. Belyaev, who attributed it to Nasr, as did W. L. Treadwell in the Political History of the Samanid State.

  65 I had come across Ibn Sina several times on my journey—medieval Persia’s greatest physician, who impressed Europe enough for the Italian poet Dante to “honor” him with a place in the first circle of hell, as one of the “virtuous heathens.” In the city of Hamadan, I stepped inside his rocket-shaped mausoleum. Visitors filled up the tomb chamber and kneeled beside Ibn Sina’s tomb-slab to utter a prayer, while herbs from his medical prescriptions
were arranged in glass cases on the walls around them. “You know what these people are doing?” said a schoolteacher called Mehdi, sitting down beside me in the park beside the mausoleum. “They are going inside to have a look at Ibn Sina’s Qanun. Maybe they know someone who is ill so they are looking for a cure.” “But shouldn’t they go to a doctor?” I asked. “Ha! Don’t you know how much that costs? Let me tell you something. Last winter, my son had a problem with his stomach and the doctors could not make him better. So I looked in the Qanun and Ibn Sina told me to take cumin and a special flower and mix it with butter, and when I gave this to my son he became better.” As far as I could understand, his son was suffering from enteritis, for which Ibn Sina recommends “three drachms each of the nasturtium and cumin ground together, sieved and thoroughly mixed with cow-butter.”

  66 I came across this politicization of medieval history myself, in Tashkent (the capital of Uzbekistan), when I met some of the scholars at the prestigious Oriental Institute. Dr. Vakhma Alimova, apparently a medieval expert, informed me that Ibn Sina was of Turkic origin—like the Uzbeks themselves. Given that his mother’s name was Sitareh (Persian for “star”), he wrote several books in Persian (even though Arabic was the language of books at the time) and most of the population of the Samanid empire were Persian-speaking, this was a ridiculous claim. One of her colleagues, Dr. Mirsadiq Izkhakov, insisted Ibn Sina’s contemporary, Biruni, was also a Turk. They were rewriting the ethnic history of the region to bolster the Turkic agenda of President Karimov’s nationalist government.