The Persian who buys in the bazaar is exigent. He expects nothing short of perfection ; the defects in machine-made things make him angry. My schoolmaster sent two waiters and a boy to protest against a small defect in a cheap imported machine-made tin opener, and the shopkeeper crawled with shame. The Persian is also displeased with foreigners who pay the first price asked, which is often double what would be paid at the end of half an hour’s bargaining—in which both parties put on an emotional act that might have come out of Othello. “You are choking me! Are you trying to assassinate me?” the schoolmaster said to a dealer in the Isfahan bazaar. His babyish voice had gone.
Isfahan is the home of the artist-craftsman, the makers of miniatures, inlay work, painters of porcelain and goldsmiths. For all work that is minute they are as fabulous as Leskov’s smiths of Tula, in Russia, who shod an invisible flea for one of the Tsars. The traditional Persian genius is for the small decorative detail, and it never breaks with the long tradition of design. This has led Westerners to find Persian art delicate but repetitious and monotonous ; yet one has only to see some silent youth sitting upright in his master’s shop, putting a lily on a vase ; or men on the floor of a mosque, cutting the pattern of a tile ; or again, girls sitting in the cradle of a carpet loom, slipping in the coloured threads at incredible speed and never making a mistake, to marvel at the skill and the trancelike absorption of their work and lives.
To go from these scenes to the great mosques of Isfahan is to realise that the mosques are the work of the same minute craftsmanship magnified on a vast scale. Hands, not machines, have built these grandiose yet airy blossomings of tile. Unhappily, the Persian style was imported into the bourgeois West during the nineteenth century, when Persian art was the fashion, and commercialised and vulgarised in café and hotel architecture, so that one may be at first repelled. But the mosques of Isfahan were built in the sixteenth century. If the sixteenth century was the glory of Europe, the same century saw the Persian renaissance under the Safavid dynasty, which created the third Persian empire from Isfahan. The great square, the Maidan-i-Shah, with its pinkish and yellowish stone and the great rectangles of its mosques and its royal pavilion, stands with the piazzas of the European Renaissance.
This architecture is as luminous as water and as sensuous as light. It is built to be seen in a strong, clear light, against brassy sun and hot blue sky, and to relieve the earthen monotone of the plain. Islam is a legalistic faith. Under the dome, the heart does not aspire to heaven, as it may in the Gothic cathedrals; you are enclosed by the moral formulae of the Law. You stand in a place that may be a worldly court; but if you are thinking of the afterlife, these mosques tell you precisely how it will be housed: in a palatial, mundane habitation.
The great mosques are simulations. Stone is made to look like silk, clay becomes lace or hangs like the honeycomb; tiled walls rising in elevations high and wide may be walls of handwriting, and indeed, in many, the words of the Koran are there in blatant pronouncement. Again, the glaze simulates a tangible sky or water, for the tiles reflect light and seem to flow. In the Sheik of Lotfollah mosque there is a floor of deep turquoise that one fears to walk on because it appears to be a pool ; it is strange to feel the hard tile under one’s feet. The paradox of the repetitious art of Persian mosaic is that what seems to be monotonously formal, opaque and mathematical should convey a total sense of passing transparent illusion. (That, in fact, is the achievement of all abstract art, when it is good.)
When you go outside the Lotfollah, your Persian friend will love to show you that the sun has moved and that now the pale dome is changing from pale blue and pink to the colour of some strong pollen, like the mimosa, and if you have been regarding the architecture as a collection of logical propositions pleasing only to the brain, you will now know that a proposition may glow and have the tenderness of nature. The Persians of the sixteenth century in Isfahan were building out of light itself, taking the turquoise from their sky, the green of the spring trees, the yellow of the sun, the brown of the earth, the black of their sheep, and turning these into solid light.
No matter where the Moslem prays, whether he puts down his mat in the garden, street or doorstep, or by the roadside, that is his convenient holy place for the moment—and a good Moslem should pray five times a day. The common sight in the courtyards is to see the solitary worshipper kneeling and bowing his forehead to the ground where he pleases, regardless of the friends he is with or the passers-by. He is obeying the Law. One is in a land of observances. The rug is his home, the mosque is his living-room open to the sky. In the evenings, just before sunset, students from the university will come to the quiet of these spacious courts to read their books as they walk up and down ; and in the Chahar Bagh Theological School, where a stream, crossing under the boulevard outside, passes through the courtyard, you see the young groups of bearded students, with their brown robes and shaven heads, sitting cross-legged round the mullah who is teaching them.
Stepping over the bodies of the servants sleeping on the floor in the restaurant of our little hotel, we left Isfahan and set off in the dark, at five in the morning, for Shiraz. Now we saw the nomad tribes beginning to get on the move from the south to the northern grazing territories. The mass movement would come later. Once more, a long day on the road. Sometimes a square black tent with donkeys, a pony or two, or a camel marked a resting place where there was water. The nomad men are tall, black-haired, fine-looking, with faces that seem to be carved out of stone. They wear a small, winged-helmet-like hat that makes them look like supermen who have flown down from outer space. Their faces are as dark as walnut. They hunt the gazelle and the lynx, and bring the skins into the cities for sale. They are also charcoal-burners. Occasionally they resort to banditry and, up on the Turkish frontier, to local raids and war.
These tribesmen come into the bazaar at Shiraz with their stocky women, who are unveiled and have stained, wind-polished faces that make them look like gypsies. They wear their dowry of gold coins across their foreheads and are dressed in gauzy shawls and rich layers of fine petticoats and skirts of brilliant green, gold, and red. They adore finery and everything that is fantastic in dress. One sees groups of them marching with their men through the crowds in the bazaar with the nomad’s long, intent loping strides and with the fierce, naïve look of wary people who live out on the plains. The nomads are used to the free life and the rule of their chieftains, the khans. They are virile and unperturbed, but, like the settled peasantry, they are poor. It is the women who do the heavy work while they carry their babies on their backs ; they make the rugs and bedding of their tents and all the clothes of the tribe.
Yet the tribes are not a decadent flotsam on the surface of the life of Iran. There are (it is estimated) about four million tribesmen, and only half of that number are relatively settled. Their chieftains are often men of great wealth, with fine houses in the cities. Many have been educated in France or Great Britain. They have been cabinet ministers, figures at the court of the Shahs, and some have made royal marriages. In Shiraz one can see the palace and superb gardens of one of them who now lives in luxury in California, in exile for his part in an armed rising against the central government.
The tribes are mobile nations, in some respects like the American Indian in the old days, but in a higher condition of development and culture at the top. For thirty years or more the Shahs have tried to subdue them and settle them on the land as agriculturists, in the interests of the peace and unity of Iran. The Iranian army failed to conquer them, or at any rate all of them. A peaceful and subtle approach is being tried now. In Shiraz I met young tribesmen and their sons—but not girls: they are required for manual work—who were being trained as teachers or studying modern husbandry. Mobile tent schools and clinics go up to the tribal territories in the intervals between the seasonal migrations. Like most Persians, these men are exceptionally intelligent; few can read or write, but they learn rapidly. Although their free life is fine, and they are
suspicious of anything that will alter the lives of their women, they are quick to see their ignorance in stock-breeding and planting. They listen with gravity, and their laughter is frank and independent.
“The tribes are on the move,” people say. Soon, in three or four weeks—this was in April—the mass migration would begin. We had seen only the first trickle. The government is at pains to keep any two tribes from meeting at the mountain passes that are the key points of the migrations, for their meetings have often been bloody. And, at the passes, the chieftain’s agent stands counting the sheep, for he collects a head tax on the flock. Landlordism is the great curse of Iranian life, and the chieftains are as exacting towards their people as the landowners.
We came out of the mountains and dropped in our cloud of dust to the long green valley where Shiraz lies.
“Welcome,” said a young student who met us there. “Welcome to what the guidebooks call ‘the city of poets and nightingales.’”
“He speaks,” said the schoolmaster scornfully, “with a Turkish accent.” Yet the young man had written a thesis on Jane Austen! In Emma, he told us, there was a disastrous error of taste: the novelist mentioned that Mr. Woodhouse was afraid of catching cold. The poet Hafiz would never have mentioned so low an affliction! As for Shakespeare—a very inferior poet, who was so poor in imagination that he had to borrow his plots. Firdausi never did that!
I met poets but heard no nightingales in Shiraz, but the orange blossom and the stock blow their fragrance across this lively city. It sparkles among its gardens under the mountains. It is a place of flowers and handsome avenues, already hot in April. It has a radio station, an airport, and one of the finest modern hospitals in Iran—with flat roofs designed to be pools of cooling water in the summer, for the heat is terrible. Instead of Dracula, which was being shown at the cinemas all over the country at this time, they were showing that excellent Russian film, The Storks Are Flying. I bought a very expensive French tie.
The governor of the province, a house-proud man, took me on a tour of the town’s bakeries, proudly pointing out that he had insisted on plants being put in their windows, and that each bakehouse now had a shower installed! It was one way of ensuring that the workmen were clean for the breadmaking. Cleanliness and sanitation were his enthusiasms. The water of Shiraz is good and plentiful, and he could not bear to see the women washing their crocks and their clothes in the roadside channels. He had built a public washhouse and a hostel for beggars.
The governor was very much the clever Sorbonne man; his beautiful young wife was educated in France. The mayor of the city had been at London University, the local general was educated at Harrow, and the young doctor in charge of settling and educating the tribes in this region had been at Harvard and at the University of Kansas. The doctor was an elegant young man with a vocation, and he had been sent down from Tehran on one of the most difficult problems that face the Persian government. He was torn between the boredom of provincial life and his interest in his job. Like all educated Iranians, he was also torn between the fact of belonging to the rich upper class, through whom everything is done, and his concern for drastic reform and his fear of revolution.
There is also a less-well-off middle class of small employees and officials who also live in Western style and are becoming a political force. They have pleasant houses, more barely furnished than ours, for they spend all their money on carpets; the life of their women is more restricted than with us, but they are anxious to pass as modern Westerners. The schoolmaster had a teenage niece at the local high school, and she was like any teenager in the rest of the world. Except that she had an ear for the latest Arab, Persian, Turkish and Pakistani music on the radio, and that under her school dress she wore tight-fitting trousers that came down over the knees to her calves like short jodhpurs, she might be any blurting, restless Western girl.
In Shiraz one lives in the scent of stock and cypress and magnolia. In the oldest of the mosques one notices that, with a gay lack of Moslem orthodoxy, the tulip, the rose and the nightingale have been introduced as motifs in the tiles.
You will be told a hundred times that this is the town of the poet Hafiz, and you will visit his tomb in its little garden. Persian visitors stand there murmuring lines of his verses or the prayer inscribed on the tomb. The superstitious bring a volume of his poems and, opening it at random, with eyes closed, put a finger on a line, open their eyes and get their guidance. My schoolmaster swore by it; a line of Hafiz, he said, was responsible for his second marriage.
More than seventy per cent of the Iranian people are said to be illiterate, but the oral tradition is strong, and I doubt if there is a single person in Shiraz who could not recite a poem by Hafiz or indeed by two even earlier great poets of Iran—Saadi and Firdausi. The taxi-driver could; so could the thin, unhappy waiter. The student who had met me sat on my balcony and, enlivened by a glass of Pepsi-Cola (for he was a strict Moslem and would not drink alcohol), declaimed Hafiz to me, rolling out the splendid Arabic words that are interspersed with the Persian. In revenge I read back a nineteenth-century English translation to him. The prestige of Omar Khayyám is low. They can’t understand what FitzGerald saw in him.
Later we went off to mortify our bodies and our knee joints by taking tea with some dervishes in their retreat. We entered a dusty neglected garden and in a stone room, bare except for the carpet, we took off our shoes and squatted in agony with a dozen dervishes, not all elderly, who sat by their samovar and gently gave us glasses of tea. They handed around a pipe to puff and spoke to us amiably of the vanity of human possessions and the desires of this world and of the necessity of contemplating death and attaining a mystical union with the divine—a state of mind the poet Hafiz sought by drinking the indifferent wine of the country and sublimating the distress of his love affairs. Hafiz and Khayyám both overrated the Persian grape.
In the middle of our chat, the sound of a heart-rending, groaning chant came from the room beyond us, where other dervishes were in prayer. The appalling sound, like the moan of a cow parted from its calf, was taken up by our friends. They rocked on their haunches and raised their eyes to heaven at the mention of the sacred name of Ali, and then suddenly took up conversation again as if nothing had happened.
One or two of these dervishes were married and had left their wives and families for three or four years in order to meditate. Quite a few people from Shiraz come and sit with the dervishes on Fridays—the Moslem Sunday—and meditate for the day. It is a therapy. In Turkey, Kemal Atatürk suppressed the dervishes; the Persians, more tolerant by nature, give freedom to the dervishes, as they do without a second thought to Jews, Armenians, or any religious group; outside the Lebanon, Iran must be the least fanatical country in the Middle East.
We left the dervishes for the teahouse and the hubble-bubble pipe.
There is the brown, burned-up Persia and there is the green country by the Caspian Sea. Green Persia begins the other side of the Elburz mountains north of Tehran. I went north by train, a smart diesel this time, across the eight-hundred-mile Persian desert. The sand blows in, fills your eyes, nose, and throat, and puts a film of grit on everything. The dining-car, full of high-ranking army officers, is luxurious. The train dies in long silences at village stations, dogs sniff at the wheels, a camel crosses the tracks.
After several hours you rise into a region of high, fantastic rock. At 8,000 feet the train moves around the outside of the mountains, through scores of tunnels and along precipices. It comes down in terraces and runs across a spectacular viaduct, five hundred feet above the valley, to the next range, and then sweeps down into the gorge. At either end of the mountains, east and west, is the barbed wire of the Russian frontier.
The air is moist and warm. The olive trees, the orange groves, the pasturage, rice-fields and tea plantations lie beside wide, fast, coppery rivers pouring over shingle beds toward the Caspian Sea. The fortified mud-wall villages have gone. Here the houses are white or blue, often timber-fro
nted and two or three storeys high, and they are not only in open villages of long streets ; there are houses scattered singly over the countryside—a thing unheard of in the south.
There is the sense of potential wealth here, of people who divide their lives between agriculture and the sea. There are crowds at the country stations. We got out at Chalus and were beset by dozens of men, women and children selling reed brushes and brooms, as if the first need of a traveller was to sweep up somebody’s house; and by the usual beggars and herb sellers. The cars waiting there are usually newish, but with fenders and sides bashed in by collisions. Half a mile out of Chalus, as we drove fast over the rough dusty roads, a large flint flew up from the road and smashed our windscreen. Then I noticed that the glass of nearly every passing car was smashed. We drove on with the glass in our laps and our fingers bleeding, passing the donkey loads of grasses and rushes that were coming home.
All Persians who can afford it send their families for months out of the heat of the tableland to the soft beaches of the Caspian. There are smart little resorts, and at Ramsar, where the Shah has a country estate, the hotels are luxurious and there is a casino. The country was hot and rich, and in April the air was honeyed with the scent of wistaria. Girls with beautiful eyes walked by with branches of wistaria in their hands.
Foreign Faces Page 19