Fourteen hundred miles of open frontier with the Soviet Union, a feudal economy built on the backs of poor peasants, and the traditional hatred of Russia present the Iranians with a difficult dilemma. They have, however, always been in this situation. It has become sharper since Iraq withdrew from the Baghdad Pact. The only answer they see is rapid Westernisation—dam-building, modernising of agriculture, industrialisation, social reform; they rush into this, hoping somehow to escape, on the one hand, violent social revolution and possible invasion and, on the other hand, bankruptcy. The old feudal order and its habits are very tenacious. The Shah refuses merely to reign; he rules. His popularity is uncertain. He has given away his own land. He is trying to break up the big estates; and although his programme was endorsed heavily by referendum, he has a tricky time steering a course between the old order, with its powerful family interests, and the young unemployed intellectuals, who have been created by Westernisation. I met few of the younger generation who think the next decades will be peaceful.
The single uniting force—and in a crisis it overrules— is nationalism, or rather, since no Nasser has appeared, pride in the Iranian tradition. “We are an ancient race who have had a great culture; now we must make a civilisation”—how often I have heard that said. The Greeks—their opposite numbers in Europe—say the same; and all one can say is that of all the Middle Eastern peoples, the Iranians speak in a voice that is closest to our own in the West—maybe misleadingly so. Under the polish, the boundless hospitality and natural courtesy, under the subtlety, the cleverness, the rapid power of assimilation, is something tough, obstinate, explosive, and headlong. Their oil makes them rich, and if the wealth could be kept out of the fortune-hunter’s private pocket and honestly and ably managed, they would succeed in creating a stable modern society.
Tehran is the home of the Westernising movement in Iran, the movement begun by Reza Shah, the father of the present Shah, after 1921. Reza Shah was a young officer in the Persian cossacks who threw out the old feudal régime, acting very much in the manner of Kemal Atatürk in Turkey; he abolished the political and juridical privileges of the foreign communities—British, French, Russian, and German—the so-called “capitulations”— saw to the building of the first railway, opened mosques to non-Moslems, broke the power of the mullahs or “teachers of the sacred law”, forbade the wearing of the veil. The enormous British and Russian embassies standing opposite each other like fortified citadels in the middle of Tehran are reminders of foreign dominance during the Victorian age. Sanctuary is a traditional resort in times of political unrest—nowadays all Persian politicians are considered to be “untouchable” in the telegraph offices!— and in one of the crises of the nineteenth century, 20,000 Persians took refuge in the enormous grounds of the British embassy.
In Turkey, Atatürk proclaimed a republic; but Reza Shah mounted what has always been called the Peacock Throne. This is not a figure of speech: the throne can be seen in the Golestan Palace, jewelled and shimmering. The palace is a tiled confection glittering with glass mosaic, and its floors are covered with immensely valuable Persian carpets. To connoisseurs of what Théophile Gautier called l’ennui royal, Golestan, with its huge collection of the awful presents royalty give to each other, is a startling example of Oriental hodge-podge. The courtesies of power politics fossilise rapidly, and royal taste was running down fast in the nineteenth century.
There are one or two pleasant buildings in neo-Persian style in Tehran; but for the rest, it has deeply shaded avenues which half conceal an architecture that is a jumble of American, German, the Boulevard Raspail, and Ben Hur. The general colour is the pale yellow or pink of dusty brick, and the city is, in the main, built low. From the plain outside, all you can see are the dozens of tall chimneys of the outlying brickfields. The native Persian things in Tehran—apart from the bazaar, which is not as interesting as the bazaars of Isfahan and Shiraz—are the small houses.
I am writing this in one of them. You go down a side lane, avoiding the metal rings on the sewage traps in the middle, and knock at a closed door. A tiny servant girl, aged twelve, rushes to you, kisses both your hands, and leads you across a small, tiled courtyard in which young apricot and cherry trees are flowering. In the middle is a pool of turquoise-blue tiles with goldfish in it and a little fountain. The house is a yellow brick box three storeys high. There are tens of thousands of little houses in Tehran like this one, and all the charm of Persia is in their carpeted quiet and in the flowering courtyards. There people sit, there the neighbours come—people are always in and out of one another’s houses and lives, for they delight in inquisitive friendship—there the continual glasses of tea are brought. Every time I go down to telephone, the child brings me a glass of tea or I am offered something sweet to eat. In a downstairs room, another servant, an old woman in a spotted chadar, is sitting cross-legged on the floor ironing, surrounded by gossips. There is, thank heaven, no radio or television. If I want these, I go around to another house like this one, to one of the prime minister’s secretaries: he has both and turns them on together—and he drinks whisky!
Life in Tehran has this easygoing gregariousness. At night you go for walks, go to see the wrestlers, or visit the Zur Khaneh, the House of Strength, where teams of a dozen men, dressed in embroidered knee-length trousers, dance, stamp, leap into the air holding staves across their shoulders, juggle, and whirl round like spinning tops to the beat of drums. These are virile feats. You sometimes see these masterful acrobats at the popular music-hall, the Shokufeh-No, down in the slum quarter of Tehran, where the Arab belly dancers also perform. The Persians go out en famille, wife, aunts, children, all together, to see these shows and eat an enormous meal of mutton and rice as they watch. The ladies, I noticed, discreetly look the other way when the Arab belly dancers come on ; the traditional Persian dances are much more beautiful in costume and are more spirited.
In Tehran one can forget the dramatic emptiness of the Persian road. One can fly now to most big towns in the country, looking down on the dry, yellow, leathery land ripped across by mountains, or crawl across it by bus. It is difficult to travel alone because all your friends want to come with you or to send you to stay with their relations. I travelled with an official who had been a schoolmaster. He had what I can only describe as a “call” to visit all his in-laws and cousins and the scenes of his past life. He was the son of a mullah—a monogamous mullah too—very sentimental, affectable, possessive, kind, given to moralising, stern with beggars, and the hottest bargainer in bazaars I have ever met. He tried to teach me Arabic and Persian at once; grammar delighted him. Every time the bus skidded, he would rise up and harangue the driver and the rest of the passengers as if we were pupils in his class. We quarrelled once, when I refused to inspect some Girl Guides. He was very hurt.
From Tehran we went south to Qum, one of the two fanatical cities in Iran; the other is Meshed, near the Russian frontier. The emptiness begins almost at once. For hours you jolt in a cloud of dust over a dead-straight road that begins well, but is soon rough, flinty, and potholed. It is a switchback ride from plain to pass and plain to pass again. Nothing could be more monotonous, and yet, because of the mountain horizon, it is dramatic. The signs of life are few ; the telegraph posts marching across the vacant space add to the sense of distance and loneliness. Rarely are there trees, and then they are enclosed in a little mud-walled orchard. Never is there a bush; the only growing things are the tufts of camel grass, and it is astonishing that the flocks of black, heavy-tailed sheep find enough to eat.
It is rare to see a car on the road, and rare, too, to see a human being. There may be a shepherd or two; some nomad in the distance ; or the tall blind men in rags whom one would observe two miles away on the brow of a hill, a long staff in one hand and the other held out for alms. In a day’s journey, from sunrise to sunset, we saw no more than a dozen. But for me the symbol of the loneliness of the Persian road was a figure who came sadly out of his mud hovel waving a ha
ndful of straw at us. “He is signalling that he wants a match to light his fire,” the schoolmaster said.
Vast stretches of this tableland are dust bowl. The top soil has gone; in the winter the surface is a sea of mud. The goats long ago destroyed the trees, as they have so often in the Middle East, and the sun burns up everything else. Occasionally there is the distant flash of what might be lake water—but it is salt pan. Very often we passed the ruined mud walls of a village that had been abandoned, or of some caravanserai no longer used, or the blue-tiled dome of a small shrine; and if, in some fortunate spot, the ground was cultivated, or a few cherry trees were in flower, it was walled in from the barren land around. Twice an eagle swooped in ragged elegance over our bus. We saw few inhabited villages, but moved from plain and pass into regions of rock that looked like the remains of a fantastic incineration; rock ochred, reddened, whitened, or metallic and cindery, scalloped into strange cones and tors, or sliced into bleak and sandy mesas. They are the outcrop of mountains over which glaciers have slid. The jagged mountains of Iran are young and savage.
Hour after hour the bus plugs away at the road before it passes an inhabited village. In these villages the millions of Iran live in the winter snow, the spring mud, and the oven heat of the dry summer. They are surrounded by low mud-and-straw walls built around a large central court where the life of the community goes on. There is a single gateway, and the wall is for defence; until very lately, villages were often raided by the nomad tribes of Iran. Although they look squalid to the eye and the latrines stink, the village houses are clean, and the people are famous for their honesty and fine bearing.
Many of Iran’s leaders spring from humble village stock, for Persian society, unlike India’s, has never been caste-ridden. In spite of absolute kings and feudal lords, an able villager can rise to great influence. Persian despotism has been oddly democratic. The villagers are sharecroppers under the big landowners, the so-called “thousand families” who own Iran. I have heard landowners saying things like, “I have three villages there; they bring me rice, corn, silk, tea”, according to the region, as if they owned these people. The landowner is not necessarily a remote personage even if he is rich (in general, the system becomes oppressive when the landowner is an absentee and is represented by an agent), and there is more mixing of classes on an intimate human level under this feudal system, and less master-man or impersonal corporation-employee relationship, than in advanced industrial societies. Politically, of course, landlordism is now violently unpopular. It is economically beyond the powers of the wealthiest landlord to modernize Iranian agriculture, at any rate on the tableland.
Water is the key to the life of these villages. In vast areas it is not to be had; in others it has to be piped from the snow mountains, often for very long distances. The Iranians solved the engineering problem two thousand years ago by the system called the qanat. As you drive along, you see a belt of holes leading like tracks across the plain for miles, to the foot of the mountains. These are the ventilation holes of a deep underground water tunnel which must constantly be kept clear by manual labour, and which runs from a shaft in the mountains that may go down five hundred or a thousand feet. It has been cut by hand. This method of water-piping (the Persians say) is unknown in any other land, though one hears of occasional imitations.
The villages of Iran are almost invisible, for they are the colour of the earth. The houses are like boxes, though sometimes the roofs are built in the cupola style and look like settings of duck eggs. The tea-houses or inns are far apart built for need and not for the pleasure of travel. You push aside the carpet that hangs over the door and find yourself in a cobbled and high-raftered, blue-washed hall. Around the walls are what seem to be wide plank beds, railed off, with carpets on them. In a corner are stacked the bed-rolls for those who are staying the night. The rich family in its American car, the poor labourer and the lorry driver crowd in, take off their shoes and sit cross-legged on the plank couches. There are also chairs and rough tables.
You go straight to the primitive kitchen, helping yourself to a couple of raw eggs on the way, and ask for your chelow kebab, the standard dish. First a huge plate of rice is brought—Persians really know how to cook rice—then a strip of lamb. It is tender, if sweetish in taste, and also lean because the fat of the Persian sheep is concentrated in a large wad at its tail. You chop the meat into the rice, add a slab of sheep’s butter, mash in the raw eggs, pour a cup of yogurt on top, season with saffron or red condiment, mix the whole lot together and eat with a spoon and the help of a thin strip of rubbery bread that is essentially an over-sized pancake. This bread is excellent, and after a hard journey begun at five or six in the morning, you find your chelow kebab excellent, too, though a little monotonous to my taste. The inn is crude, but it has been like that for a thousand years or more.
You can generally get a stewed marrowbone of beef to finish up with and some radishes, tarragon and parsley for salad, but no dressing. They eat the meat the day it is killed. They can generally find a little bottle of Persian vodka, a soft sour-sweet drink, rather sickly, but on the whole Iranians drink little alcohol. Their vodka is very weak stuff compared with the Anglo-Saxon firewaters.
These rough meals on the road are good. One is told not to eat beef because it is likely to be full of parasites. In spite of the terrible stories of “Persian tummy” and amoebic dysentery that travellers bring back, I suffered no ill-effects. Good Persian cooking is far better than any other in the Middle East, and not as hotly spiced as the Indian.
The inns are always crowded. The women in their chadars squat in the courtyard. At one place there was a resident dervish, a holy beggar—there are a good many unholy ones—who lived in a hole in the wall. The old man claimed to be a hundred and twenty years old and squatted on his plank, tending a little charcoal brazier in which two pots of tea were stewing. He whined out a few prayers, gave us a little white sweet to eat, and expected a few coins.
The holy city of Qum is the only town on the road to Isfahan; it is a busy place, out of tune with the general Persian tolerance. The Great Mullah who lived there had lately died, an old man of ninety, and the town was in a state of religious tension, all strangers being sharply watched, for the stranger is ungodly or detestably Christian. The golden dome of Qum’s great, greenish, garish mosque—it is the shrine of Fatima—dominates the flat, dusty, angry city. We called at the governor’s office to see if he could smuggle me into the mosque, which is forbidden to strangers, but over the usual glasses of tea he said I was too red-faced to pass as a Persian. We were driven off by an angry crowd when we got up on a roof that commanded a view of the mosque’s inner courtyard. Hundreds of drearily chanting schoolboys in long trousers were filing into the place. There is a tendency to religious revival in Iran since the father of the present Shah reduced the power of the mullahs thirty-five years ago. Qum was full of these tall, bearded mullahs stalking about indignantly in their brown cloaks.
Bleaker and more desolate the stretches of land became; snow lit up the peaks of the mountains that barred the way every twenty miles or so. And then the lifeless miles began to liven up with strips of green, processions of thin poplars began, there were long ditches of water—and at last the full, fresh green of Isfahan. To the dust-choked traveller, the sight of the green valley and the brown roofs of Isfahan through the curtains of trees is a delight.
“How nice is this city! How nice are those trees! How nice is that cow! How nice is this water!” the schoolmaster cried. The top of his brown, bald head wrinkled with pleasure ; his voice, which was usually argumentative and swaggering, softened, giggled and became even babyish, and this stern man wriggled with pleasure. The Persian tends to be an expressionless man of strong features, but the small delights of life make him crinkle his face with childish happiness.
Isfahan is the heart of the country, a true Iranian (that is to say, Aryan) city. Like all the towns of the desert and tableland, it is an oasis. A wide yellowish
river washes around it, streams run across or under the streets ; by the roadside dozens of women and children are washing clothes, plates, knives and spoons and themselves, too, in the deep and gushing gutter channels. (They do this even in the streets of Tehran.) The Persians speak of a town as a collection of pools, water channels and gardens shut behind its walls; and although there are public gardens and palace gardens of some pretension, a garden to them is any place where there is a mud wall, a few poplars, a little green and a little water. There may be grass during the spring, and flowers, too, but spring soon goes. There is rich lyrical poetry in Persian literature and the garden always comes into it; but for most of the year a garden is simply the shade and the scent of shrubs and trees. The cypress, admired above all for its womanish shape, appears again and again in Persian love poetry.
Isfahan is too conventionally Moslem to allow representations of nature in the mosaics of its mosques, but their coloured domes seem to float like flowers above the low mud walls and flat roofs of the city. I climbed one of the turquoise minarets of the great Masjid-i-Shah mosque—it was like climbing inside the stalk of some tall, alarming plant—and saw that, except for the coloured domes, the city had no skyline. It was as flat as one of those pancakes of Persian bread.
People from other towns—the regional spirit is strong in this country—think Isfahan set in its ways, strict in religion and glum, despite the grace and the nobility of its mosques and the elegance of its palaces and bridges. It is in fact an industrious city, a place of weavers who have the large textile industry of Persia in their hands, of carpet-makers and of tens of thousands of craftsmen who are the backbone of the place.
The bazaar of Isfahan brings home to one that outside, say, 100,000 people, the rest of Persia lives by a very large number of things made by hand. Cheap fabrics come out of the textile factories, but the hand printers squatting on the floors of the bazaars are colouring them ; the potters are potting and painting. I doubt if there are many items of machine-made metal kitchenware in Isfahan. The metal workers are hammering all day at elaborate trays, samovars, grills and stoves. The fingers of children and young girls have worked on the carpets you see; the task is exacting, for even a coarse rug has sixty knots to the square inch; the making of a single rug goes on for months, and wages are very low. All jewellery is hand-made. So are hats, shoes and slippers.
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