Drinking Arak Off an Ayatollah's Beard

by Nicholas Jubber

  67 Especially in medieval Muslim lands, where the ninth-century polymath Jahiz describes “singing-girls” who knew 10,000 verses by heart, but remarks, “their origins in pimping-houses throw them into the arms of fornicators.”

  68 I knew the poem because a musical version of it, recorded in the 1950s by the Iranian duo Banyan and Manizeh, was often played on a tape at the Professor’s house in Tehran. A few weeks later, in the Tajik city of Khojand, I would hear it again. This time it was in a very different setting: a sugar market. Among stalls selling rock crystal, boiled sweets, and bags of sugar cubes, an old man was seated on a metal cart. His jacket was tied around his waist with a sash and was in as threadbare a state as his trousers, while a pair of pointy-toed shoes dangled off his feet. Underneath him, a cap lay in the mouth of a large leather bag, filling up with the banknotes of the passersby. But he didn’t appear to notice: He was too carried away with his song, his head tilted back and his eyes like gems. The rounded end of a dotar rested in the crook of one arm, while the fingers of his other arm plucked its strings as if he were picking the petals of a flower. He had been a minstrel, he told me, for sixteen years and had traveled widely in Tajikistan, performing not only Rudaki but many of the other Persian greats. “I sang in many villages during the fighting,” he said, “and my songs gave comfort to many people in this time.”

  69 It was in Bukhara, especially, that many of the early important Islamic scholars resided, such as Imam al-Bokhari, a ninth-century theologian whose work on the hadiths (anecdotes and sayings about and by the Prophet Mohammed) are considered the most authentic of all. To many Muslims, his book is second in importance only to the Quran.

  70 When the Tajik government asked UNESCO to declare 1999 the “Year of the Samanids,” the Uzbeks were apoplectic. A meeting was arranged in Paris to defuse the dispute, in which Uzbek President Karimov’s representatives insisted it was insensitive for the Tajiks to celebrate as a “state” an empire that included the best-known cities of a neighboring country.

  71 This was the nickname “by which she was to be known even outside the family” (according to Eleanor’s biographer, Chushichi Tsuzuki, who suggested that it “seems to have been derived from pussy, for she was very fond of kittens”). However, Marx was certainly known to have studied Chernishevsky’s writings and to be fond of epic literature (the tales of Homer, Shakespeare, and the 1001 Nights were among the bedtime stories with which Eleanor was entertained as a child).

  72 This association of the mythical land of Turan (the kingdom of the Iranians’ great enemy in the Shahnameh) with the Turkic peoples of Central Asia was shared by many of Ferdowsi’s contemporaries. Mahmud of Kashgar, who compiled the first Turkic dictionary in the eleventh century, identified Alp er Tonga, ancestor of the Turks, with the great Turanian king of the Shahnameh, Afrasiyab (the same king who slays Siyavash and has Bizhan imprisoned in a pit). In the early twentieth century, in the wake of nationalist movements around the world, the concept of a mother-land for all the Turkic-speaking peoples, from Istanbul to China, was pinned to Turan. “The country of the Turks is not Turkey, nor yet Turkestan,” wrote the Turkish ideologue Ziya Gökalp. “Their country is a broad and everlasting land—Turan.” Although nowadays more commonly known as “pan-Turkism,” the notion of a united Turkic nation still has plenty of support, especially in Central Asia. “We Turks have to be united,” said a prominent Uzbek writer called Alishir Ibadinov, whom I met in the Fergana Valley, “if we don’t want problems with our borders, economy, and security. Maybe in the future we will have a confederation of Turkic countries.”

  73 Nuristan is a province in northeastern Afghanistan, where many of the inhabitants have blue eyes, fair hair, and light skin. Traditionally this has been attributed to Alexander the Great and his men, who camped here in the fourth century BCE, although the arrival of the Aryan tribes several centuries earlier is just as likely a source. By calling myself a Nuristani, I wasn’t really fibbing—well, not entirely, if we’re to go with one Afghan theory (recorded by Doris Lessing in The Wind Blows Away Our Words). According to this point of view, the ancient “Angles” or “English” originated in Nuristan and only left the region because of the pressure on grazing.

  74 Some legends trace them back to the Bani Israel, one of the lost Jewish tribes expelled from Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar. Others associate them with the Sakai, who beat the Greeks in the second century BCE and who have been linked by some scholars to the feats of Rostam.

  75 He was known as “durr-e durran”—“pearl of pearls,” because of a looted pearl earring he was fond of wearing. Like many a Pashtun ruler, Ahmad Shah liked his rocks shiny—among his stash was the Koh-i Noor diamond, which would later famously come into the possession of Queen Victoria. His other adornments included a silver nose mask, to cover up a wound caused by a piece of flying brick in a gunpowder explosion. The wound, which would eventually kill him, grew so gangrenous that maggots fell into his mouth when he was eating—so his dining companions, as well as Ahmad Shah himself, must have been grateful for the mask.

  76 Although he might not have been so keen to endorse it if he’d known that an opium overdose, administered by a treacherous slave, would lead to his death.

  77 According to the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, the area of poppy cultivation in Afghanistan had grown from 7,606 hectares in 2001—when the Taliban reduced it with harsh penalties—to 131,000 in 2004. Many of the Afghans I spoke to insisted that in an arid land it has a practical value. “You don’t need so much water to grow opium,” said Nasrullah, “so it is easier to grow, and in some places it is not possible to grow anything else.”

  78 Which takes its name—“Soldiers’ Place”—from the eleventh-century Ghaznavid barracks on which the city was founded.

  79 For example, when they took Kabul, the Taliban seized ex-president Najibullah from his hiding place in the UN compound and strung up his castrated body on a traffic post; while stonings replaced soccer in the city’s main stadium. The best-known Ghaznavid execution was suffered by the ex-minister Hasanak and is described by the chronicler Baihaqi: “He fastened the string of his trousers,” narrates the historian, “and tied up his drawers. He took off his coat and shirt and threw them away, and there he stood naked with only his turban and trousers on, and his hands clasped together. . . . The executioner fastened him tight and the robes hung down. It was proclaimed that he was to be stoned, but nobody touched a stone. . . . At last a band of vagabonds were hired with money to throw stones; but the man was already dead, for the executioner had cast the rope around his neck and suffocated him. . . . ”

  80 I hoped to see these frescoes at the National Museum in Kabul. But when I was there a week later, the acting manager explained that they had been destroyed in a fire caused by fighting between rival mujahideen factions. These murals cast a beam of light on the world of Afghanistan’s greatest empire, a light extinguished by the infighting of the civil war.

  81 He appears in the Shahnameh, as one of its wisest and therefore most boring rulers, who fills up dozens of pages with his aphorisms and judicial decisions. “Praise be the Sun and the Moon,” writes Ferdowsi, who shares the reader’s eagerness to get past him, “that at last I have escaped from Buzurjamihr (Anushirvan’s minister) and the King.”

  82 Both are etched into their respective national consciousnesses, and just as Ferdowsi sought in the Shahnameh to bring back to life the culture Qadisiya swept aside, so in Britain an antiquarian epic writer would also rail against the influx of foreign culture after Hastings, and seek to imagine the world that was lost, albeit with a heavy dose of fantasy—J. R. R. Tolkien, in The Lord of the Rings.

  83 Ayatollah Khomeini underlined the “Islamic” perspective on nationalism in a speech on Radio Tehran on December 17, 1979: “There is no difference between Muslims who speak different languages,” he said, “for instance, the Arabs and the Persians. It is very probable that such problems have been created by those who do no
t wish Muslim countries to be united. . . . They create the issues of nationalism . . . and such-isms which are contrary to Islamic doctrines.” This is the exact antithesis of Ferdowsi’s point of view—and of the point of view of most of the Iranians I met.

  84 The simorgh is a magical bird that appears several times in the Shahnameh, providing a home to Rostam’s abandoned father Zal, and when Rostam is injured in a battle with a metal-plated evangelist-warrior called Asfandiyar, he rubs his wounds with the simorgh’s feather to heal himself.

  85 Or, more appropriately, the Caliph Mansur’s storeroom. In a similar story to the tale of Bluebeard, he gave a key to his daughter-in-law and told her that it could only be used when he was dead. Unlike Bluebeard’s wife, she bided her time, but when she opened it up, she too found a chamber filled with dead bodies—in this case, the caliph’s Shia enemies, each with a label in the ear providing their name and ancestry.

  86 The fruit of which, delivered by cesarean section (with a steel dagger for the surgeon’s knife and wine as the anesthetic), is the greatest of all the epic’s heroes—Rostam.

  87 According to the contemporary chronicler Baihaqi.

  88 It is said, in the Collections of Stories by Mohammed Awfi, that Alptigin was given an opportunity to show his leadership skills when some villagers pressed him to punish the thieves who had stolen their fowls. He had the thieves’ ears bored and the birds suspended from them by strings, with the result that whenever the birds flapped their wings, blood gushed out of their ears. This, apparently, was exactly what the people of Ghazni were looking for, so they decided to make him their ruler.

  89 The sultan’s susceptibility to flattery is suggested by a story from one of his conquests in India. Besieging the fort of Kalinjar, Mahmud finally raised the siege when he was offered (along with three hundred elephants and a promise of annual tribute) some verses composed in his praise by the Indian prince.

  90 This example of history being hijacked for colonial divide-and-rule was underlined a few weeks later, when I continued my travels into Pakistan. “The real founder of Pakistan is Sultan Mahmud,” said Professor Homaioun at Kabul University. But according to the popular Pakistani historian Dr. Mubarak Ali, his fame had faded over the centuries. “Mahmud was just a part of history, he disappeared,” declared Dr. Ali, as we sipped milky tea under Mughal miniature paintings in his flat in Lahore. “But he was resurrected in the colonial period. The British wanted to show how the Hindus suffered from Muslims and how they were blessed to be rescued from their tyranny by the British.” Another historian, Dr. K. K. Aziz, suggested that Mahmud’s popularity was symptomatic of Pakistan’s present-day troubles. “Mahmud of Ghazni,” he said, “is put before Pakistani students from class one as a great general and iconoclast who came to India seventeen times and took a lot of jewelery and all this is applauded as a great Islamic hero. If in the textbooks you wrote that he was a great tyrant, had no business coming to India, and committed a sin because a Hindu temple is a place of worship—well, most probably the government would ban this book.”

  91 Ferdowsi himself declares this is where Mahmud will be, calling on God in his satire to “burn this miscreant’s soul in hell.”

  92 The verse is a famous one (I heard it recited in Herat, by Abdul Aziz’s father) and a motto for political hawks: “And should his reply with my wish not accord / Then Afrasiyab’s field, the mace and the sword!” According to the scribe Nizami of Samarkand, on hearing these lines, Mahmud asked, “Whose verse is that? For he must have the heart of a man.”

  93 i.e., a member of the shah’s secret police.

  94 Farun is a character in the Quran, famous for his wealth. The Persian rhyme matched “Farun” with “meimun,” the Persian for “monkey.”

  Copyright © 2010 by Nicholas Jubber

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. For information, address Da Capo Press, 11 Cambridge Center, Cambridge, MA 02142.

  The author is grateful for permission to quote from

  A Poem by Nadia Anjoman, translated by Mahnaz Badihian.

  Set in 11.5 point Minion by the Perseus Books Group

  First Da Capo Press edition 2010

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Jubber, Nicholas.

  Drinking arak off an ayatollah’s beard : a journey through the inside-out worlds of Iran and Afghanistan / Nicholas Jubber.—1st Da Capo Press ed.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references.

  eISBN : 978-0-306-81901-8

  1. Iran—Description and travel. 2. Afghanistan—Description and travel. 3. Jubber, Nicholas—Travel—Iran. 4. Jubber, Nicholas—Travel—Afghanistan. 5. Firdawsi. Shahnamah. 6. Iran—Social conditions—1997- 7. Afghanistan—Social conditions—21st century. 8. Social conflict—Iran. 9. Social conflict—Afghanistan. I. Title.

  DS259.2.J83 2010

  915.504’544—dc22

  2009048191

  Published by Da Capo Press

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