Descendants of Cyrus

by Thornton, Christopher;

  It was the time of day to take pleasure in a sundowner, so I ordered a beer from the young waiter, who offered me a bowl of crunchy nibbles after I had plopped myself down. Of course the beer contained no alcohol, the only kind available in Iran—legally, that is. I had tried several of the alcohol-free brews before, and some were downright undrinkable, but a few offered a strained resemblance to the real thing, not hard to achieve after I had been wandering around a desert city like Yazd on a blazing summer afternoon. This one made the grade.

  On the Iranian landscape Yazd sits in what might be called the middle of nowhere. One of the few urban outposts in Iran’s remote southeast, it is at least four hours north of Kerman and three hours east of Esfahan, on the fringe of Iran’s fertile farmland and the beginning of the central desert that spills over into neighboring Afghanistan.

  We had driven from Esfahan across two hundred miles of parched and barren landscape that one unfamiliar with the beauty of the desert might describe as sensory depriving and monotonous, but for anyone who has traveled across New Mexico or Arizona at any time of year, the slowly changing palette of colors and shifting shadows as the sun arcs across the sky can delight the eyes, providing a range of stimulation all the more enticing because of its subtlety. The air was growing noticeably warmer each time we emerged from our air-conditioned cocoon, to fill the gas tank or stock up on road snacks, so the breaks became increasingly brief, until we made only mad dashes to and from the car, where the cool air pumped from the vents was matched by the mellow chords of Dave Brubeck’s Take Five drifting from the CD player.

  None of this was surprising, Yazd being one of the hottest cities in Iran in the summertime. But it is also one of the most arid in a country one friend described to me as being “as dry as a potato chip.” For four hours I had traipsed around the center of the city in the midday heat, when most of the merchants had either shuttered to take their long lunch break, Mediterranean style, or dropped the blinds in front of their windows to protect against the punishing sun, and all that time I felt not a drop of perspiration. Now, though the intense heat had passed, a wave of exhaustion rolled over me. But not a drop of sweat.

  Yazd’s remote location has saved it, time and again, from the blood-spilling terror of the many invaders that have swept across the country through the centuries. Arguably, the most ruthless were the Mongols under Genghis Khan, who arrived in the middle of the thirteenth century. But slaughter elsewhere may have been a boon to the city, for many of Iran’s elites—scholars, writers, and artists—fled to remote Yazd to escape the carnage to the north and west.

  Like so many cities in Iran, Yazd took its turn serving as the capital, but only briefly, under the Muzaffarid dynasty in the fourteenth century. But for centuries it played a role as a welcome stopover on the Silk Road, hosting traveling merchants passing between Afghanistan to the east and Turkey to the west. Marco Polo passed through in 1272 and paid the city polite compliments:

  It is a good and noble city, and has a great amount of trade. They weave there quantities of a certain silk tissue known as Yasdi, which merchants carry into many quarters to dispose of. . . . There are many fine woods producing dates upon the way, such as one can easily ride through; and in them there is great sport to be had in hunting and hawking, there being partridges and quails and abundance of other game, so that the merchants who pass that way have plenty of diversion.

  Today, in the raucous world of Iranian politics, Yazd wears no particular political stripes, for it has been home to Iranians from both ends of the spectrum, reformers and hardliners. Mohammad Ali Jafari, the current leader of the Revolutionary Guard, was born in Yazd, but so also was former president Mohammad Khatami, whose attempts at reform were stonewalled by conservative forces in the 1990s, and Mohammad Payandeh, a thorn in the side of the ruling order who was assassinated in 1998. Payandeh was a member of the Writers Association of Iran, a banned organization that has long campaigned for freedom of expression.

  The boozeless beer was going down quite easily, thanks to the high-powered fridge in the interior of the café that had kept it ice cold. I ordered another, not having to worry about any debilitating surge of alcohol in the late afternoon heat. Behind me, the rattling of an air conditioner said that cooler and more comfortable seating could be had inside, but the sun had almost set, and the gentle breeze blowing across the rooftops took the edge off the heat, so I decided to stay put on the terrace and reflect on the day.

  Hours earlier I had checked into the hotel and was eager to explore the city. Sohrab was content to enjoy the comfort of the hotel’s air conditioning, so he left me to wander on my own, dropping me at the looming façade of the Amir Chakhmaq Complex and then skedaddling back to his room. It wasn’t a bad idea. The Amir Chakhmaq, and the broad square laid out in front, was the best place to begin a tour of Yazd. Today the mammoth structure, with its two tapered minarets stretching ever skyward, dominates what amounts to Yazd’s central square. It was built during the fourteenth-century Teymourian dynasty by the region’s governor, Jalal Al-Din Amir Chakhmaq, with the advice and guidance of his wife, Fatemeh Khatoon. In its prime the complex contained a bazaar where passing traders would stock up on much-needed supplies as they made their way along the Silk Road, and there was a caravansary where they could rest their camels, and themselves, before pushing on.

  The Amir Chakhmaq Complex started as a mosque, and as it evolved it retained the two towering minarets. Inside one, a circular staircase rises and twists as it gradually narrows, until it reaches a vantage point that looks out on the city and the desert beyond. Never mind the heat—the promise of the view was too tempting—so I began the climb, rising step by step as the cylinder became tighter and narrower but provided a needed buffer from the afternoon heat. Suddenly the steps ended, and the stairway gave way to an uninterrupted view of the city and open desert that swept in all directions.

  A view from any height can draw everything around into focus. From the minaret’s almost tip-top it was possible to see, in literal terms, the importance of a place like Yazd and what it must have meant to tired traders making their way between the green, fertile provinces of western Iran and the raw, rugged mountains of Afghanistan. Just beyond the longer, broader streets of the newer sections of the city lay the tight, twisting lanes of the original city of Yazd, the pathways and snug mud-and-plaster buildings wrapping around each other to guard against the vast, forbidding, and frightening void that encircled the city on all sides.

  Medieval Yazd would have been the Manhattan of Iran, or Persia, as Iran was then known, if prominence was measured by the height of its buildings and the dramatic skyline that they created. The minarets of Amir Chakhmaq, as imposing as they appear, are not the tallest structures in Yazd. That honor goes to the minarets of the central mosque, tucked within the side streets in the center of the city. The mosque dates to the twelfth century and is still the primary place of prayer for the city’s faithful. In keeping with the spirit of conquest that reigned over Yazd in medieval times, the mosque was built on the site of a Zoroastrian fire temple constructed in the fifth century during the Sassanid era of pre-Islamic Persia. It was constructed by Ala’oddoleh Garshasb at the beginning of Persia’s fertile medieval period, but two hundred years later the civic powers decided it needed an overhaul, which took forty years. Over time, which means centuries by Iranian time, three mosques were constructed on the site, the first dating to the tenth century. Three hundred years later a second was added, and in the fifteenth century Rokn-el-din Mohammad Ghazi added a third. But in the nineteenth century the Qajar rulers decided enough was enough, and rather than add a fourth, they incorporated them all into one.

  It was worth a look. I climbed down from the balcony of the minaret one careful step at a time and left the cooling comfort for Yazd’s blazing streets. I walked slowly, looking for patches of shade under the shop awnings, but found myself detouring through Yazd’s traditional market. I had been to Yazd before, in the summer of 2009, w
hen the country was rocked by a widely disputed presidential election. The U.S. had just been rocked by the election of the country’s first African American president. I was wearing a T-shirt with “NYC” stitched in bold letters on the chest, and after I had passed the market stalls, one of the shopkeepers emerged to shout, “I like your president!” But no shopkeepers greeted me today, perhaps because my T-shirt didn’t point to any American identity. Or perhaps today was simply hotter.

  After some twists and turns through Yazd’s back streets I found the mosque. But the circular, soaring minarets aren’t its most impressive feature, even if they do soar above the skyline of Yazd. No, they are outdone by the façade, a masterpiece of tile work elaborately decorated in geometric patterns of blues ranging from deep cobalt to turquoise and soft ermine. The designs begin at the base and extend up the front of the entrance, shifting patterns several times all the way to the top of the minaret. Just inside the entrance, Quranic verses in rigid Kufic script decorate the iwan, extending up one side of the enormous archway and down the other. I have always thought this was one of the most attractive features in any mosque, not only in Iran but anywhere in the Islamic world. Whether I could read the text or even grasp its meaning didn’t matter. What was important was not what the words said but what they symbolized—the fusion of beauty and thought, artistry and ideas, into a single expression in which each served the other and represented a level of beauty that neither could achieve on its own.

  I passed through the portal and entered the shabestan, or small foyer, that separated the inner courtyard from the prayer hall. Immediately the temperature dropped ten degrees. The dark gloom was another sharp change from the afternoon sun. It took a moment for the eyes to adjust, and as they did, the mosque’s caretaker appeared—an old man in a tattered sport jacket, his head topped with a lace prayer cap. He shuffled so slowly his shoes barely came off the ground. His eyes, accustomed to the dark, widened with a hint of surprise upon greeting a foreigner—or he could have been shocked by seeing anyone around and about in the middle of a summer afternoon. He shuffled closer, raised his eyes, and asked, “Your country?” He made it sound like the answer was a password to gain entrance, or that he collected the nationalities of visitors like some people collect bottle caps.

  I told him, and his face dropped a little. He looked almost weary.

  “You like Obama?” he asked.

  “I like Obama.” I told him.

  “Obama was good,” he added.

  I gave a thumbs-up.

  “America and Iran—don’t have to fight,” he continued. “America and Iran—friends.”

  I gave another thumbs-up.

  “Iran doesn’t want fight, not anyone, not America. Obama no fight. Obama was good.”

  Another thumbs-up.

  “Friends,” I said, and extended a hand. He raised a limp palm and shook, and a little brightness came into his eyes.

  Satisfied that Barak Obama’s popularity had held up among mosque caretakers, I removed my shoes and padded around the prayer hall. Above the shabestan, a dome was decorated in blue geometric patterns. The mehrab, the semicircular niche in the wall pointing toward Mecca, stretched toward the ceiling in the manner of a gothic cathedral. The interior was at least as stunning as the outside, and I thought it a shame that so much beauty had been hidden away. But this could be seen another way—that the architect had so many beautiful plans for the mosque that, once the exterior was wrapped in glittering blue geometric designs, he could afford to discard the leftover, like a dressmaker tossing away useless fabric.

  I returned to the sunny streets, where the occasional errand-goer, darting from air-conditioned shop to air-conditioned shop, was the only sign of life. Yazd can be a quiet, sleepy place, especially in the middle of a summer afternoon. But whenever I was about to write it off as nothing more than a quiet, sleepy place, I remembered Sohrab’s reply when I asked where in Iran he would prefer to live. We were driving across the desert and had seen many cities, and he knew next to everything about them, the nooks and crannies of their history, both ancient and recent, and what they were all about in the present day. It was only natural to wonder, did he have a favorite? After returning from the U.S., he had settled in Shiraz, where the liberal environment allowed him to keep his extensive wine collection out of view of the authorities. But the city was never his first choice.

  “Probably Yazd,” he said.

  I was surprised, asked him to elaborate.

  “It’s quiet and a little more traditional. It’s far away from the big cities. It has more of the feel of the real Iran.”

  Yazd is definitely quieter and more “traditional” than Tehran and many of the other major cities, but of course that depends on how one defines “traditional.” However this is worked out among the sociologists who try to define contemporary Iran, Yazd does offer an experience that is quintessential in the Middle East—getting lost in the torturous, winding lanes of the Old City.

  Yazd dates to Sassanid times, and during the medieval period the centers of towns were purposely designed to create labyrinthine confusion to befuddle invaders who managed to pierce the city’s fortifications. In this way the local residents would have a distinct advantage over an invading army, which would inevitably get lost in the illogical array of alleys and lanes.

  Fortified by two pleasantly cool but boozeless beers, I felt enough confidence to plunge into Yazd’s Old City, if only to see if I could find my way to the main street on the other side. I quickly learned that the scourge of any Old City is uniformity. After a few twists and turns, everything looked alike. The plain, dun-colored walls of the houses that lined the crooked lanes had no distinctive features except for the occasional electrical box or dual door knockers—a larger one for men who came calling, a smaller one for women, to alert the residents of the gender of the guest they were about to receive. The wood-carved front doors showed a hint of individuality, but only for a trained eye, one that can identify a pattern of design from a particular part of the country, not an overheated foreigner trying to find his way through the tanglework of streets.

  Centuries ago, Silk Road travelers would rely on the stars to guide them, and so they often traveled at night, when the punishing afternoon heat had abated and the skies were aglow with celestial signposts. But now the sun had yet to set, and so the sky was still a uniform, cloudless blue. For me, it offered little help. I crisscrossed and doubled back over familiar ground and recognized landmarks I had passed several times—the shape of a door knocker, the colors of the flowers in a window box.

  Then something changed. I remembered the advice of the Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu: “A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent on arriving.” Then it became a pleasure to be utterly, completely, and totally lost. I turned right and left, and left and right, without feeling a hint of embarrassment seeing couples zipping by on motorbikes, brazenly sure of their destinations as well as the quickest ways to reach them. Usually the men straddled the driver’s seat, while the women, their flowing black chadors flapping in the breeze, held tight from behind as the horn beeped to warn any traffic approaching from the blind corners.

  Another realization appeared—that I wasn’t lost at all, except in terms of geography. I was beginning to appreciate what Lao Tzu had advised—to dismiss the notion of a destination and appreciate the journey itself. And I was moving closer, deliberately, and without any twists or turns to an important observation—that in the midst of the most maddening disorder, human beings will establish their own patterns to overcome any chaos that threatens them. In American mythology this came to be called “taming the frontier.” In today’s Iran it means finding a way to live in the Islamic Republic.

  I kept winding through the Old City, trying to find the way out to the main street, where I could find a taxi back to my hotel. The stone maze was little different from other “Old Cities” in other parts of the Middle East. Cats skittered across the burning pavement in search of a patch
of shade or a few scraps of food. Whenever the alleys converged to form a pint-size square, a group of boys could be found kicking a football against an empty wall while their sisters watched from surrounding front stoops.

  I turned down another lane that appeared empty, but then spotted a middle-aged woman shrouded in a full chador and face veil sitting on a plastic chair outside the door of a bungalow. At first I went unnoticed because she was popping the stems off a pile of green beans and dropping the beans into a plastic bowl sitting on a small table. When the sound of my footsteps grew close, she looked up and showed no surprise at the sight of a foreigner traipsing through her neighborhood. As I passed, she nodded politely and extended a soft greeting: “Salaam,” she said.

  “Salaam,” I replied.

  It was the simplest of moments, but one that said a great deal about gender relations in Iran and the Arab world. I had traveled to many Arab countries in the Middle East and North Africa, and I could never imagine a local woman extending a greeting to a foreign man, certainly not a woman dressed in conservative garb. One could stretch the imagination to conceive of something like this happening in one of the more cosmopolitan cities, like Cairo, Damascus, or Beirut, where social codes are more relaxed and foreigners abound, but in the backstreets of a remote regional city? Hardly.

  It reminded me of another incident that occurred earlier that day. At the intersection in front of the Amir Chakhmaq Complex, a woman crossed the street and approached a taxi driver waiting for a fare. She wasn’t looking for a ride, she just needed directions, and after she had posed her question, the driver pointed down the street and then to the left and then to the right and finished with a gesture that indicated stop. The woman thanked him and left. He resumed his chat with another driver. It was a simple interaction that occurs a million times a day all over the world, but here it resonated. In conservative parts of the Arab world I couldn’t imagine a local woman casually speaking to a taxi driver, or any strange man, for any reason. If she needed directions, and there were no women in sight, she would have wandered lost before she would have approached an unrelated male. Here, there were many women she could have sought directions from, but she didn’t, obviously, and correctly, thinking a taxi driver would have the most reliable answer. That he was a male, and an unrelated male, didn’t matter.