by Rory Maclean
I’m shaken by their display, anxious of its impiety, denied my moments of both reflection and ‘absolute peace’.
As the clear echo reverberates a dozen times around the sanctuary, a stranger pushes forward, not meeting our eyes. He puts down his mobile phone and, as if to nullify their irreverence, chants up into the dome, ‘Allah Akbar.’ God is Great. Now, his words ring around the dome.
The agitated caretaker is at our side, hissing at the students in Farsi, shepherding them out of the mosque.
‘Mister, you know there is no dark side of the moon really,’ one of them calls back to me, paraphrasing Pink Floyd’s lyrics. ‘It’s all dark.’
13. Hooked on a Feeling
Salt stains leech across the earth. Sand dunes pool around mountains, stranding mouse-brown islands in a waterless sea. A tarred road slithers between scorched fields like a black serpent searching for water.
The Simorgh Top Train – air conditioned, on time and with a flask of tea by each padded seat – slices out of the stark Salt Desert, a gritty cyclone in its wake, and east into Khorasan province, ‘the land of the sunrise’. Ahead on the wide plain lies Mashhad, Iran’s most sacred and remote city. Its name means Place of Martyrdom, for here the eighth Shi’ite imam, Reza, a direct descendant of Mohammed, was interred in AD 817. Here, too, in 1970, Penny ate a noxious banana pancake.
I’m sharing this leg of the trail with 15 million pilgrims who every year cross the flat and featureless plain to pray at the Holy Shrine. But this Friday morning, the city’s streets are almost deserted. I walk alone from the station. Beneath leafy chenar trees, a grocer lays out his trays of aubergines and carrots. A baker shapes a ball of dough, pounds it flat, then tosses it in the oven. A single mullah, in long, collarless gown, rides past me on a motorbike.
At the reception desk of my hotel, a dozen Turkmen girls with bulging suitcases and boxes of new kitchen appliances are checking out. I assume they are religious tourists, escaping both the paucity of consumer goods and restrictions of Islam at home. Until the loud-mouthed Turjik beside me nods at them and asks the porter in Farsi, ‘Do they use arz?’ Meaning foreign currency.
‘Not arz,’ the porter replies, lowering his eyes, ‘but darz.’ Meaning slot.
Not every hotel guest uses their complimentary prayer-mat.
*
‘Shall we just bum around together?’
Mashhad’s broad, baking avenues burst from the Holy Shrine like the points of a star. I’m jostled by the crowds, trying to make notes, when Nazzer Poor spots me, drives up on to the pavement and almost knocks down a white-robed Afghan in his rush to shake my hand.
‘You are my guest,’ he says.
Which won’t mean his services are free.
Nazzer is a professional tour-guide, a sweet-tongued humanist who arouses my interest at first sight. He’s about sixty, devout and ebullient, with unblemished good looks. His beaming face is punctuated by jet-black eyebrows between a white goatee and groomed, silver hair.
‘What can I show you of our sacred city?’ he asks.
I tell Nazzer I want to see the shrine and the Martyrs’ Cemetery.
‘So you are writing the new Koran.’
‘I’m writing a travel book, not a guidebook.’
‘Lonely Planet, Rough Guide, Let’s Go: they are the travellers’ bibles.’
‘You make them sound blasphemous,’ I say.
‘Not at all. Our government wishes foreign tourists to be our political envoys, so to speak, to show the world that life in Iran is good.’ He’s quoting the official line, looking at the reflection in a shop window, but whether of himself or the people around us, I cannot tell. ‘You are most welcome here.’
Nazzer manages to park his car without injuring another worshipper and we join the press of rich Bahrainis and impoverished Azerbaijanis converging on the vast, walled complex. He launches into a routine history of ziyarah as we push towards the golden domes of the shrine.
‘Ziyarah or pilgrimage is probably the most important act of a Shi’ite’s life… a deeply significant expression of faith… ensuring a place in paradise…’
On woven carpets, barefoot Kuwaiti pilgrims in voluminous robes sing, drink green tea, read the Koran. Bands of Caucasian Turkmen hustle between the airy courtyards. Three boys brandish plastic revolvers, chasing one another around a clutch of mourners and an open wooden coffin. In the low concrete crypt, the deceased are laid to rest on payment of a $10,000 fee. The air – and the devotion – are hot. The Holy Shrine has little of Isfahan’s beauty, none of its peace or humility, but I am moved by the outpouring of prayer.
‘Constructed between 1405 and 1416, this exquisite building…’ Nazzer babbles, leading me around the eight gold-tiled minarets, through grandiose arched doorways and into the Great Mosque of Gohar Shad. He rattles off historical dates and hands me a souvenir prayer disc of Meccan clay. In the Qods Courtyard with its carved drinking fountain dedicated to Palestinian martyrs, he recites the improvements made to the shrine since the Revolution. Then he moves on to criticize the Shah.
‘That snake was an empty drum, the grasping puppet of America. He banned the chador and allowed girls to wear tight blouses that showed off their overhead lamps.’ He shakes his head on cue. ‘The idiot tried to westernize Iran.’
‘Westernize or modernize?’ I ask him.
‘This is not New York, you know,’ he answers, disregarding the distinction. ‘The Shah never understood that ours is a traditional society.’
In this most reverent place, I suddenly want to tease impiety out of him. I want to shake him – and myself – out of regurgitating a complacent, unquestioning view of the world. So I tell him about Penny.
His diatribe falters.
‘The word “hippie” entered our language,’ he says in a different tone, ‘to mean an idealist who takes life easy.’
‘Did the hippies help to spark the Revolution?’ I ask, again trying to provoke him.
Nazzer laughs in shock, holding his hand over his mouth. He searches for the correct response from the prepared text.
‘The hippies who crossed Iran were… on a kind of pilgrimage,’ he says.
I shake my head. Pilgrimage seems to be a means of reinforcing certainties of faith. Independent travel can be about challenging one’s idea of living.
Nazzer’s mouth moves but no words escape. He considers my question again. A perplexed look crosses his face. He glances around the courtyard. He presses his lips together. ‘Let’s go somewhere else,’ he replies.
The air in the Hezardestan Tea House is as cool and still as the ornamental fish in its central blue-tiled pond. Its walls and pillars are decorated with scenes from Ferdosi’s Shah-namah, the Iranian Iliad which harks back to an older, pre-Islamic Iran. Guests descend a discreet flight of stairs, settle themselves cross-legged on sofas, wait for tea and qalyan water pipes, moving as infrequently as the fish. If a guest does stir himself to talk, he – or she, for there are a handful of couples here – does so in the lightest voice.
‘In 1967, I was a young conscript at Do-qaram on the Afghan border,’ says Nazzer, letting drop both hyperbole and facade. ‘One day, a group of hippies – three boys and a girl – came through in a van. They wanted to relieve themselves, but there was no toilet, only one small bush. So when the woman crouched behind it, I turned my binoculars towards her.’
‘What did you see?’ I ask him.
‘Nothing. Apart from another bush.’
He smiles as if to hide his embarrassment, though I’m sure he feels none. According to the Koran, men and women should not let their pubic hair grow longer than ‘a grain of wheat’.
‘That sight was like the first bite of a forbidden fruit,’ he hurries on. ‘Next, I heard about an oasis, a little paradise fed by artesian wells near the border, where hippies often stopped to sunbathe and swim.’
‘And you spied on them there too?’
‘Who does not love to see a naked woman? Who can ignore such
perfection?’ he says, pleasure in his voice. ‘An Iranian man may have seven or eight children, yet he will never have seen his wife unclothed. I went there often.’
Again, I wonder aloud if the hippies had in some small way strengthened the traditionalists’ anti-Western resolve; the vaunting of personal freedom helping to send an unsettled nation reeling back towards an antique world.
‘Their revolution changed my life,’ Nazzer concedes, his eyes now shining. ‘After the army, I had decided to go into law. One day in Vahdat Park I met – what did you call him? – an Intrepid? In our short encounter, he taught me that one of the best subjects in the world is human science: that is, human relations, human rights, how complicated it is to be a human.’
Before my eyes, Nazzer Poor is transformed from the dutiful, rote-reeling guide. His smile is no longer forced.
‘That philosophy moved me,’ he nods in agreement. ‘I realized then that under the Shah our lawyers were cowards. They didn’t try to protect those who were less than equal. They only wanted power and influence for themselves. A door opened and I walked through it to find – as you said – a different idea of living.’
‘How?’ I ask.
‘By moving to a commune in Yorkshire.’
Now I laugh out loud. Few places on earth could be more different – and damper – than sun-struck Mashhad.
‘A nudist commune,’ he adds.
Iranians will never cease to amaze me.
‘To walk naked in the open air, to allow the body its natural allocation of sunshine.’
‘In Yorkshire?’ I repeat.
‘Not far from Wetherby,’ he says. ‘In those days, many of us – in Iran and the West – believed that a sickness hung over society, a society based on the accumulation of capital and the suppression of the underprivileged. I joined a community of equals and waited for the next revolution.’
‘Didn’t you get cold?’ I ask.
‘I grew Elvis Presley sideburns.’
In the late sixties, at the height of the commune movement, many hundreds of co-operatives, kibbutzes and collective squats operated around the world. In Welsh valleys, on the West Bank and in Nicaraguan jungles, dreamers, escapists, radical Shakers and naturist-socialists built earthly utopias, experimenting in post-modern survival, group marriage and ‘non-acquisitive contentment’. Publications like Resurgence, Akwasasne News and Country Bizarre held the movement together, linking the isolated communities. But by the end of the seventies, the euphoria of most communards became bogged down in mud and jealousy. Some communes even found themselves in the middle of war zones.
‘In 1979, I came home. Joyfully. During the Shah’s years, a million Iranians – engineers, intellectuals, artists – had left the country. After the Revolution, many of us came back.’
‘Only to emigrate again in even greater numbers,’ I say.
‘We thought we were putting our ideals into practice. We trusted in perfection, in equality, in jamé tohidi – a pure society of believers. I shared the dream of living and working in a community where everyone served a common good. At the beginning it was altogether superior to Yorkshire.’
I try to imagine this devout, dutiful guide, after striding naked across the Moors in the name of one revolution, donning green battle fatigues to help to fight another. In both cases, he believed himself to be healing a sick society. I raise my glass of tea to Nazzer and to his dreams.
‘That was our utopia,’ he smiles. ‘But within a year I wanted to run away into the ground like water.’
The waiter brings us a plate of macaroons. Nazzer leans back on the cushions, falling silent as the sugar dissolves in the tea.
‘Thousands of people were executed when Khomeini revealed the true nature of his interpretation of God’s will,’ he says after a moment, afraid to raise his voice, unable to contain himself. ‘Newspapers were closed, politicians disqualified, the “just and pious” Council of Guardians became our new masters. The Holy Shrine here in Mashhad became a $2-billion business, running farms, mines, carpet factories, in fact, most of Khorasan province. It, like the Foundation for the Oppressed and War Veterans, is among the biggest employers in the Middle East. Who controls them?’ He looks around the room and whispers, ‘The clerics – and their lawyers.’
He goes on, ‘Twenty-five years ago we made a choice. The people welcomed Khomeini. We championed the Islamic state. We died for it. But we never expected our choice to last for ever. Today, if every simple man and woman in Iran voted for a secular state, our wish would not be respected.’
Nazzer is speaking so quietly now – and with such taut anger – that to hear I must press my head towards him.
‘You ask me if the hippies caused the Iranian Revolution. I tell you no, my friend, because there was no revolution. Only betrayal. Today, we still live in a dictatorship; the only difference is, the new version hides its greed behind beards and turbans.’
He falls silent. He chooses a macaroon. For a time, the only noise is of his eating.
‘We were all idealists once,’ he adds, reaching for another sweet.
It’s not just lost ideals Nazzer shares with the West. I ask him, ‘You no longer believe you can change the world?’
‘Our high-minded leaders think they are ordained to govern until the Hidden Imam reappears, along with Jesus Christ.’
In Shi’ite Islam the Twelve Imams are believed to have been sent by God as guides to mankind.
‘But you told me the Hidden Imam disappeared into a cave in the ninth century,’ I say.
‘And so we wait for his return,’ he replies, at once bitter, detached and defeated. ‘We wait.’ The waiter returns to refill our glasses. ‘Now,’ Nazzer announces in his energetic, official voice, ‘do we still need to visit the Martyrs’ Cemetery?’
At the evening market on Modarres Street, bookstalls sell copies of the Koran and out-of-date L. L. Bean mail-order catalogues. A beggar leans on a broken wall, cracking sunflower seeds with his teeth. I walk back to my hotel, past a fresh, talkative Turkman girl loitering in the foyer, and return to my room. I set the chair by the window and, within sight of the gilded resting place of Imam Reza, begin to type up my notes.
After a few minutes, I realize I’m staring at the blank screen, unable to find the right words. I stand, pace up and down the room, return to my chair. Again nothing. I look at my notepad. My thoughts dwell on Nazzer, Sahar and Babak, on their disillusionment and the power of dreams. I think of the calm order of my private striving. I get out of the chair again. Look out the window. Gaze at my face in the mirror. In my weakness, I grasp for the familiar, turning on the television. Harry Potter is showing. In Farsi.
In the grey dawn, the Holy Shrine is swathed in ruby-red spot lamps and strings of fairy-lights. Hotel cleaners in full black chador and yellow Marigold rubber gloves mop marble banquet halls. A neon-lit bronze of Khomeini – cold eyes, sensuous lips, imperfect – growls at a segregated queue of locals waiting in line for thin, platter-size loaves of bread pinned to boards on line of nails.
As my coach pulls away from Mashhad, a passenger walks down the aisle offering dates to fellow travellers. A Bugs Bunny Santa Claus dances from the rear-view mirror, around quotations from the Koran. A student lawyer sits next to me. He’s distracted by my tattered photocopy of the first trail guidebook.
‘Hippie?’ he says, leafing through its heady pages. ‘In my language, the word means a wastrel, a messy person who has no plan for life.’
My magic bus heads towards the border.
Afghanistan
14. Get off of My Cloud
Three days I’ve been here in limbo. Three times I’ve hired a car and driver and headed out of Herat. Each morning at the same time, I’ve pulled up outside the remaining walls of Maslakh camp, called out to the Pashtuns in the fields, ‘Senga ye?’ – ‘How are you?’ – then climbed back in the car and returned to my hotel. Yesterday, three white beards – spingera – awaited me, squatting on the ground at my usual spot, t
heir long, loose, cotton shirts gathered over their knees. I greeted them with phrasebook in hand. My driver helped me to exchange a few pleasantries.
‘Are you a journalist?’ they asked me.
‘I’m a seeker,’ I answered – borrowing from V. S. Naipaul – then drove away.
I want to speak to the Pashtuns, proud, independent and largest of Afghanistan’s four ethnic groups. The Taliban, with Pakistan’s contrivance, sprang from their number. I want to understand the origins of their idealistic religious fantasy, to create a perfect global caliphate on a model of Mohammed’s seventh-century Arabia. I’m also curious to see what remains of Maslakh, until last year the largest refugee camp in Asia. But I need to be invited as a guest, not to force my way in like an intruder. Then, this morning, I broke through, catching a glimpse of a hidden world. I was invited to tea.
Twenty-five years of war – first against the Soviets and then amongst themselves – displaced more than five million Afghans. One-third of the population fled to Iran, Pakistan and other neighbouring countries. Near the Iran–Afghanistan border, Maslakh, which means slaughterhouse, was at its peak home to 160,000 displaced men, women and children. After my experience in Turkey and Iran, I realize that I can’t sail past this bleak outpost.
The driver drops me off at the gate. A hawk-nosed raisincleaner, English-speaking and carrying a Kalashnikov, leads me into the mud-brick alleys. A cobbler sells single shoes for one-legged mine victims. Barefoot children play a game like marbles with the vertebrae of small animals. Boys carry scraps of firewood and greasy plastic bottles of river water past cell-like bakeries. In a bare courtyard a woman in frayed blue burqua blows on a cooking fire. In the last months, much of the sprawling, five-mile-square clay city has been flattened by bulldozers, the dispossessed given ploughs and money to go home, their irises scanned to prevent them from returning and making a second claim. My hosts are among those too frightened to leave the camp.
A wooden door opens in the street wall on to a plain yard. Above us hangs a grape trellis. The vine has withered and died. In a corner stands the hujdura, the male guest-room.