A History of Iran

by Michael Axworthy

  . . . on the next day, 25 February 1221, the Mongols arrived before the gates of Merv. Tolui in person [the son of Genghiz Khan], with an escort of five hundred horsemen, rode the whole distance around the walls, and for six days the Mongols continued to inspect the defences, reaching the conclusion that they were in good repair and would withstand a lengthy siege. On the seventh day the Mongols launched a general assault. The townspeople made two sallies from different gates, being in both cases at once driven back by the Mongol forces. They seem then to have lost all will to resist. The next day the governor surrendered the town, having been reassured by promises that were not in fact to be kept. The whole population was now driven out into the open country, and for four days and nights the people continued to pour out of the town. Four hundred artisans and a number of children were selected to be carried off as slaves, and it was commanded that the whole of the remaining population, men, women, children, should be put to the sword. They were distributed, for this purpose, among the troops, and to each individual soldier was allotted the execution of three to four hundred persons. These troops included levies from the captured towns, and Juvaini records that the people of Sarakhs, who had a feud with the people of Merv, exceeded the ferocity of the heathen Mongols in the slaughter of their fellow-Muslims. Even now the ordeal of Merv was not yet over. When the Mongols withdrew, those who had escaped death by concealing themselves in holes and cavities emerged from their hiding places. They amounted in all to some five thousand people. A detachment of Mongols, part of the rearguard, now arrived before the town. Wishing to have their share of the slaughter they called upon these unfortunate wretches to come out into the open country, each carrying a skirtful of grain. And having them thus at their mercy they massacred these last feeble remnants of one of the greatest cities of Islam. . . .39

  Contemporary eyewitnesses at Merv gave estimates for the numbers killed ranging between 700,000 and 1.3 million. These figures are huge but credible, representing a high proportion of the population of northern Khorasan and Transoxiana at the time. The numbers were probably greater than normal because country people and refugees from tens and hundreds of miles around fled there before the siege began. When we talk of the magnitude of twentieth-century massacres and genocides as if they were unparalleled, we sometimes forget what enormities were perpetrated in earlier centuries with the cold blade alone. A skirtful of grain. The Nishapur of Omar Khayyam, Tus, Herat, and other cities in Khorasan suffered the same fate. The only option for the citizens other than massacre was immediate capitulation as soon as the Mongol columns hove into sight.

  Some places, encouraged by rumors of resistance by Sultan Mohammad’s son, Jalal al-Din, tried to hold their towns against the invaders, and suffered terribly as a result. But by the end of 1231, despite having achieved a string of brilliant victories against the Mongols and others, and a legend of razm o bazm to rival the heroes of Ferdowsi, Jalal al-Din was dead. It might have been better for the people of Iran, at this critical time, if the Khwarezmshah had been a wiser man with less panache.

  Khorasan suffered terribly again as the Mongols moved in to punish those who continued to resist, and to set up their occupation regime. In Tus, which they made their base, the Mongols initially found only fifty houses still standing.40 The golden age of Khorasan was over, and in some parts of the region agriculture never really recovered. Where there had been towns and irrigated fields, the war horses of the conquerors and their confederates now were turned out to graze. Wide expanses of Iran reverted to nomad pastoralism, but these nomads were more dangerous, ruthless mounted warriors of a different kind. Peasants were subjected to taxes that were ruinously high and were collected after the fashion of a military campaign. Many fled the land or were forced into slavery, while those artisan city dwellers who had survived the massacres were forced to labor in workhouses for their conquerors. Minorities suffered, too. In the 1280s a Jew was appointed as vizier by the Mongols, but his appointment grew unpopular, he fell from office, and Jews were attacked by Muslims in the cities, establishing a dismal pattern for later centuries: “[They] fell upon the Jews in every city of the empire, to wreak their vengeance upon them for the degradation which they had suffered from the Mongols.”41 It was a grim time indeed. Khorasan was more affected than other parts, but the general collapse of the economy hit the entire region.

  The Mongols, who made Tabriz their capital, spent the next few decades consolidating their conquests and destroying the Ismaili Assassins in the Alborz mountains, just as the Seljuks had tried and failed to do for many years before 1220. Some smaller rulers who had submitted to the Mongols were allowed to continue as vassals, and in the west the rump of the Seljuk Empire survived in Anatolia on the same basis as the Sultanate of Rum. In 1258 the Mongols took Baghdad. They killed the last Abbasid caliph by wrapping him in a carpet and trampling him to death with horses.

  Yet within a few decades, astoundingly, or perhaps predictably, the Persian class of scholars and administrators had pulled off their trick of conquering the conquerors—for the third time. Before long they made themselves indispensable. A Shi‘a astrologer, Naser od-Din Tusi, captured by the Mongols at the end of the campaign against the Ismailis, had taken service with the Mongol prince Hulagu, and served as his adviser in the campaign against Baghdad. Naser od-Din Tusi then set up an astronomical observatory for Hulagu in Azerbaijan. One member of the Persian Juvayni family became governor of Baghdad and wrote the history of the Mongols; another became the vizier of a later Mongol Il-Khan, or king. Within a couple of generations Persian officials were as firmly in place at the court of the Il-Khans as they had been with the Seljuks, the Ghaznavids, and earlier dynasties. The Mongols initially retained their paganism, but in 1295 their Buddhist ruler converted to Islam along with his army. In 1316 his son Oljeitu died and was buried in a mausoleum that still stands in Soltaniyeh—one of the grandest monuments of Iranian Islamic architecture and a monument also to the resilience and assimilating power of Iranian culture.

  Another important invasion took place a little earlier than the Mongol invasion of Khorasan—the invasion and conquest of India by Muslim Persians and Turks, establishing what became known as the Delhi Sultanate. We have seen already that the Parthians and Sassanids at different times invaded northern India and established dynasties that ruled there. The Ghaznavids and their provincial governors also raided into northern India, and one such governor, Mohammad Ghuri, took that practice a step further in the latter part of the twelfth century, conquering Multan, Sind, Lahore, and Delhi. A series of dynasties followed thereafter, expanding the reach of the Delhi Sultanate east into Bengal and south to the Deccan, creating a unique Indo-Islamic culture that fused Persian, Hindustani, Arabic, and Turkic elements, and—in the northwest—the Urdu language. Northern India came under strong Islamic influence. Sufi missionaries set to work, and it became an important region for the development of Persianate culture in the following centuries.

  CULMINATION: RUMI, IRAQI, SA‘DI, AND HAFEZ

  The reassertion of Persian influence over the conquerors is not the only extraordinary feature of the period following the Mongol conquest. One might have thought that the poetry would come to a halt, or at least a hiatus, in the grim, blackened aftermath of the Mongol conquest. But three of the very greatest Persian poets flourished at this time, to be followed by the fourth a little later. Rumi was born in 1207, Iraqi in 1211, Sa‘di some time in the same decade, and Hafez a century later. Iranians themselves normally consider Rumi, Hafez, and Sa‘di to be (with Ferdowsi) the greatest of their poets, and it is not possible in a small space to do more than give a sense of who they were and the merest taste of what they wrote. Iraqi is likewise an important figure, especially in Sufism. Together these poets represent the culmination of literary development in Persian since the Arab conquest.

  Jalal al-Din Molavi Rumi (normally called Mawlana by Iranians) was born in Balkh in 1207. It was not a good time or place. His father, like others fearing the ap
proach of the Mongols, left Balkh in 1219, initially for Mecca on the hajj, later to Konya in Anatolia. Rumi spent most of the rest of his life in Konya. Initially he lived, as had his father, as an orthodox member of the ulema, preaching and studying according to the Hanafi school. He also learned about Sufism, but around 1244 he turned to it entirely under the influence of another Sufi mystic and poet, Shams-e Tabrizi, with whom Rumi had an intense emotional friendship (at least). Then, three or four years later, Shams disappeared, perhaps murdered. Between that time and his own death in 1273, Rumi wrote about sixty-five thousand lines of poetry. His poetry is a world of its own—a highly complex mystical world that has become popular in the United States in recent years. Some say Rumi is the most popular poet in the United States today, at least in the sense that his books sell better than those of other poets. Some of Rumi’s most famous lines, which come from the opening of his masnavi, express the longing of the soul for union with God:

  Now listen to this reed-flute’s deep lament

  About the heartache being apart has meant:

  Since from the reed-bed they uprooted me

  My song’s expressed each human’s agony,

  A breast which separation’s split in two

  Is what I seek, to share this pain with you:

  When kept from their origin, all yearn

  For union on the day they can return . . .

  . . .

  The reed consoles those forced to be apart,

  Its notes will lift the veil upon your heart,

  Where’s antidote or poison like its song

  Or confidant, or one who’s pined so long?

  This reed relates a tortuous path ahead,

  Recalls the love with which Majnoun’s heart bled:

  The few who hear the truths the reed has sung

  Have lost their wits so they can speak this tongue . . .42

  And this is the simple idea at the core of Rumi’s thought—the unity of God, the unity of the human spirit with God, and the yearning for reunion with God (Plato puts a similar idea into the mouth of Aristophanes in the Symposium). Rumi expresses the same idea in a different way in the following ruba‘i (the Beloved was a common Sufi term signifying God):

  Ma‘shuq chu aftab taban gardad

  ‘Asheq bemesal-e zarre gardan gardad

  Chun bad-e bahar-e eshq jonban gardad

  Har shakh ke khoshk nist raqsan gardad

  The Beloved starts shining like the sun,

  And the lover begins to whirl like a dust-mote.

  When the spring wind of love begins to move,

  Any branch that is not withered starts to dance43

  Many of Rumi’s poems contain overt or concealed references to Shams-e Tabrizi: shams in Arabic means sun, and the reference is obvious. But this does not mean that the Beloved is simply Shams; the Beloved is also God, the sun, and in a sense Rumi himself.

  Fakhroddin al-Iraqi, despite his name, was an Iranian born near Hamadan in 1211. At the time that western province was known as Iraq-e Ajam—the Iraq of the Ajam, the non-Arabs—in other words, the Persians. Hence the name al-Iraqi. The stories about Iraqi’s life give us a vivid idea of his personality, which was unashamedly eccentric. This fits with and adds to the sense of his personality as conveyed by his poems. Iraqi showed an early facility for learning and scholarship, but his head was turned in his teens by the arrival in Hamadan of some Sufi qalandar—wild men. Iraqi joined them without hesitation:

  We’ve moved our bedrolls from the mosque to the tavern of ruin [kharabat]

  We’ve scribbled all over the page of asceticism and erased all miracles of piety.

  Now we sit with the lovers in the lane of the Magians

  And drink a cup from the hands of the dissolute people of the tavern.

  If the heart should tweak the ear of respectability now, why not?44

  In another poem he says:

  All fear of God, all self-denial I deny; bring wine, nothing but wine

  For in all sincerity I repent my worship which is but hypocrisy.

  Yes, bring me wine, for I have renounced all renunciation

  And all my vaunted self-righteousness seems to me but swagger and self-display.45

  Iraqi went traveling with the other beggars. He wrote many poems about the beauty of young men and boys, and the homoerotic strain in Persian poetry is especially plain in his work. But his contemporary defenders claimed that he only admired the boys longingly from afar. Eventually, he came under the influence of a follower of the Sufi philosopher Ibn Arabi, perhaps the greatest thinker of Islamic mysticism, who had died in 1240.

  Ibn Arabi’s thought—steeped primarily in the Qor’an and the traditions of the hadith, but influenced also by Neoplatonism and the thinking of earlier Sufis—elaborated what appears very like a version of Plato’s theory of forms: that phenomena in the material world are manifestations of original, essential truths in a higher sphere (itself an idea possibly derived from Iranian Mazdaism, as we saw earlier). Therefore true reality lay paradoxically in the spiritual, metaphysical world beyond, of which the physical world was a mere shadow. Central also to Ibn Arabi’s thinking were ideas of the oneness of God’s creation (wahdat al-wujud) and of the imagination (khiyal).

  Another very significant concept that Ibn Arabi developed from the formulae of earlier thinkers was the idea of the Perfect Man (al-insan al-kamil). According to this notion the sphere of existence that is not God is divided between the macrocosm, the world beyond Man, and the microcosm, the inner world of Man. These two worlds reflect each other, and through religious contemplation and self-development, Man can “polish his soul” until the two worlds are congruent. Man can improve and perfect himself until he takes on the form of the divine, becoming the Perfect Man.46 He can then become a conduit for the will of God in the world. This state is achieved by religious discipline and mystical devotion, an idea that was to have great significance in later Islamic thinking. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini was fascinated by these ideas and wrote one of his earliest books about a later commentary on the Fusus al-Hikam (Seals of Wisdom) of Ibn Arabi.

  Consider also the following extract, about the possibility of a mystic being able to visit the alternative Earth of True Reality:

  Then he meets those Forms who stand and keep watch at the entrances to the ways of approach, God having especially assigned them this task. One of them hastens towards the newcomer, clothes him in a robe suitable to his rank, takes him by the hand, and walks with him over that Earth and they do in it as they will. He lingers to look at the divine works of art; every stone, every tree, every village, every single thing he comes across, he may speak with, if he wishes, as a man converses with a companion. . . . When he has attained his object and thinks of returning to his dwelling place, his companion goes with him and takes him back to the place at which he entered. There she says goodbye to him; she takes off the robe in which she had clothed him and departs from him . . . 47

  The idea that the world of experience was a mere shadow of the real world of forms beyond had great potential for metaphor in spiritual poetry, and traces of this idea can be seen in many of the Persian poets. They reached their apotheosis with Shabestari, who in his Gulshan-e raz put forward a full-fledged aesthetic according to which eyebrows, curls, or the down on the beloved’s upper lip might represent heavenly or metaphysical concepts.

  Iraqi was devoted to the ideas of Ibn Arabi for the rest of his life. He wrote his Divine Flashes in exposition of them, and when he died in 1289 he was buried next to Ibn Arabi in Damascus. But he never settled down to a conventional life. One story says that when he arrived in Cairo on his travels, the sultan honored him by setting him on his own horse and giving him some splendid clothes; but as he rode through the streets accompanied by many other scholars and dignitaries on foot, Iraqi suddenly snatched off his turban and put it on the saddle in front of him. Seeing him traveling in such splendor, but bareheaded, the people watching laughed. When the sultan heard about it he w
as displeased, because it made him look ridiculous. Iraqi explained that he had removed the turban to avoid sin. As he rode along it occurred to him that no one had ever been so honored, and as he felt his ego rise up he had deliberately humbled himself.48

  Some commentators feel that Iraqi’s poetry was better and livelier before his encounter with the thought of Ibn Arabi—that it became overburdened metaphysically afterward. But there is something especially touching about Iraqi and his poetry, especially his early work. It shows perhaps more clearly than any other Sufi poetry the urge to dispense with the self-regarding piety and the holier-than-thou observance of mere rules pursued by the orthodox. It also shocks and provokes the orthodox by blatant flouting of their rules. In this, the impulse driving the Sufis is very close to the teachings of Jesus against the Pharisees (“Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!”). Jesus is revered by many Iranian Muslims (not just Sufis) for this trait—for speaking from the heart of spirituality and avoiding getting caught up in its trappings.

  With Sa‘di and Hafez we begin to run out of superlatives. Both have had a profound influence on the thinking of ordinary Iranians, and phrases from their poems are common sayings. Teachers of the Persian language used to use Sa‘di’s Golestan (Garden of Roses) to teach their pupils, having them memorize excerpts in order to help them absorb vocabulary and remember grammar and patterns of usage. His works were some of the first to be translated into European languages in the eighteenth century. One passage from the Golestan appears above the entrance to the United Nations in New York:

  Bani-Adam aza-ye yek-digarand

  Ke dar afarinesh ze yek gawharand

  Chu ‘ozvi be dard avarad ruzegar

  Digar ozvha ra numanat qarar