A History of Iran

by Michael Axworthy

  All men are fellow-members of one body

  For they were created from one essence

  When fate afflicts one limb with pain

  The other limbs may not stay unmoved

  And it continues:

  Tu kaz mehnat-e digaran dighami

  Nashayad ke namat nahand adami

  You who are without sorrow for the suffering of others

  You do not deserve to be called human

  Sa‘di was born in Shiraz (a city saved from Mongol destruction by the wise decision of its ruler to submit to them early), probably sometime between 1213 and 1219. In his poems there are many stories about his travels, some of which are dubious. He was back in Shiraz by around 1256, and died there in 1292. He was familiar with Sufism but was not openly a devotee. His Bustan (The Orchard) is an extended poem of moral tales, not only encouraging wisdom and virtue, humility and kindness, but also common sense and pragmatism. Some of these features emerge in the following story of Omar and the beggar (Omar was the second caliph, after Abu Bakr—one of the four Righteous Caliphs of Sunni Islam):

  I’ve heard there was a beggar in a narrow place,

  On whose foot Omar placed his own;

  The hapless pauper, knowing not who he was

  (For in anger one knows not enemy from friend),

  Flew at him, saying “Are you blind, then?”

  At which the just commander, Omar, said to him:

  “Blind I am not, but I did slip

  Unwittingly; pray, remit my sin.”

  How even-handed were the great ones of the Faith

  To deal thus with subordinates.

  Much will be made tomorrow of those who cultivate humility,

  While the heads of mighty men hang low for embarrassment;

  If you’re afraid of the Day of Judgement,

  Remit the slips of those afraid of you;

  Oppress not your subordinates with impunity,

  For over your hand lies a hand likewise49

  Some have thought that Sa‘di’s pragmatism strayed too far in the direction of relativism and amorality, citing for example the well-known dictum from the first story in the Golestan that “an expedient falsehood is preferable to a mischievous truth.”50 But Sa‘di is not the only literary figure to have made such a suggestion—one could draw a similar moral from playwright Henrik Ibsen’s Wild Duck without concluding that Ibsen was an amoral relativist. Sa‘di’s views are diverse and sometimes appear contradictory, but that is a reflection of the complexities he addressed. It is right that Sa‘di became known for his epigrams because he had a gift for communicating pithy thoughts in vivid language:

  Ananke pari-ruy o shekar goftarand

  Hayfast ke ru-ye khub penhan darand

  Fi’l-jomle neqab niz bifayede nist

  Ta zesht bepushand o niku bogzarand

  Those nymph-faced, sugar-speaking ones,

  What a pity they should hide their fair faces.

  But the veil is not worthless either;

  The ugly should put it on, and the beautiful, off.51

  And:

  Ya ru-ye bekonj-e khalvat avar shab o ruz

  Ya atash-e ‘eshq bar kon o khaneh besuz

  Masturi o ‘asheqi beham nayad rast

  Gar pardeh nakhahi ke darad dideh beduz

  Either choose a corner of seclusion day and night

  Or light love’s fire and let the house burn.

  Concealment and love do not get on well.

  If you do not want the veil torn, seal up your eyes52

  Hafez too was born in Shiraz, but a century later—about 1315. “Hafez” is a pen name, signifying that he had learned the Qor’an by heart; his real name was Shams al-Din Mohammad Shirazi. Little is known of his life. He died around 1390, when the impact of Timur (Tamerlane) was beginning to be felt—another round of invasions, warfare, and mass killings to rival that of the Mongols in ferocity and misery. The scholar A. J. Arberry believed that one of Hafez’s last ghazals was prompted by these new disasters:

  Again the times are out of joint; and again

  For wine and the Beloved’s languid glance I am fain.

  The wheel of fortune is a marvellous thing:

  What next proud head to the lowly dust will it bring?

  ’Tis a famous tale, the deceitfulness of earth;

  The night is pregnant: what will dawn bring to birth?

  Tumult and bloody battle rage in the plain:

  Bring blood-red wine, and fill the cup again.53

  But before the skies darkened again with the smoke of war and massacre, Hafez took the previous patterns of Persian poetry and elevated them to new, unsurpassed heights of expression. In the following ghazal the familiar images of wine and the Beloved ripple, interfere, overlap, reflect each other, and thereby transcend the immediate eroticism, pointing beyond desire to the world of the spirit. It is saying that if love is offered, it must be taken; and if taken, it must be drunk to the dregs because love demands full commitment. Only then can its true significance be grasped—that love is the essential gift, the essence of life, given to us before time:

  Her hair was still tangled, her mouth still drunk

  And laughing, her shoulders sweaty, the blouse

  Torn open, singing love songs, her wine cup full.

  Her eyes were looking for a fight, her lips

  Ready for jibes. She sat down

  Last night at midnight on my bed.

  She put her lips close to my ear and said

  In a whisper these words: ‘What is this?

  Aren’t you my old lover—Are you asleep?’

  The friend of wisdom who receives

  This wine that steals sleep is a traitor to love

  If he doesn’t worship that same wine.

  Oh you prudes, go away. Stop arguing with those

  Who drink the bitter dregs, because it was precisely

  This gift the divine ones gave us before Eternity.

  Whatever God poured into our cup

  We drank, whether it was the wine

  Of heaven or the wine of drunkenness.

  The laughter of the wine, and the dishevelled curls of the Beloved

  Oh, how many nights of repentance—like those of Hafez

  Have been broken by moments like this?54

  Poems like this unsettle many Iranians even today.55 Some religious Iranians will say directly that these poems are not really about wine or erotic love at all—that the meaning is entirely on a spiritual level, and that the poets themselves never touched wine. Whether or not that is true (and personally I doubt it), the fact is that the poems only work if the eroticism and the alcoholic intoxication are real. Rather, they work because they are real, because they ring true and speak directly to our own experience as only great literature can. They seem to remind us of something we had always known but had somehow forgotten. Otherwise the metaphors would be just a device, the rebellion against convention no more than a pose. This poetry has more bite, more impact than that. Hafez wrote the following in a period of officious imposition of religious orthodoxy (and some have pointed up its relevance in contemporary Iran):

  Bovad aya ke dar-e maykadeha bogshayand

  Gereh az kar-e forubaste-ye ma bogshayand

  Agar az bahr-e del-e zahed-e khodbin bastand

  Del qavi dar ke az bahr-e khoda bogshayand

  Might they open the doors of the wine shops

  And loosen their hold on our knotted lives?

  If shut to satisfy the ego of the puritan

  Take heart, for they will reopen to please God.56

  In later times Hafez was appreciated and translated by Goethe, whose enthusiasm for this poetry reflected that of many other Europeans. As for the Persians, they so revered Hafez that his Divan (the conventional term for a book collecting a poet’s work in one volume) was used as an oracle, and sometimes is still. People wanting to know their fortune open it at random in the hope of texts that can be interpreted as optimistic predictions. The
only other book used in that way is the Qor’an.

  Ay bad, hadis-e man nahanash migu

  Serr-e del-e man be sad zabanash migu

  Migu na bedansan ke malalash girad

  Migu sokhani o dar miyanash migu

  O wind, tell her my story secretly.

  Tell her my heart’s secret in a hundred tongues.

  Tell her, but not in a way that may offend her.

  Speak to her and between the words tell her my story.57

  Persians did not stop writing poetry in the fifteenth century. There were many important poets after Hafez—notably Jami, and later Bidel. By that time a body of literature of unparalleled importance had been created. It is literature of almost inconceivable quantity, great diversity, and sublime quality. One could compare this body of literature to a human brain and think of it in the way that some theorists now consider human consciousness—that consciousness is not located in any one part of the brain, but is instead the consequence of the impossibly complex interaction of millions of different cells and their sparking synapses. Somehow, out of this poetry and the combinations and interactions of the ideas and metaphors contained within them emerged the Iranian soul.

  Every hundred years or so, the reading public in the West discovers another of these Persian poets. In 1800 it was Hafez, in 1900 Omar Khayyam, in 2000 it is Rumi. The choice depends not so much on the merits or true nature of the poets or their poetry, but more on their capacity to be interpreted in accordance with passing Western literary and cultural fashions. So Hafez was interpreted to fit with the mood of Romanticism, Omar Khayyam with the aesthetic movement, and it has been Rumi’s misfortune to be befriended by numb-brained New Agery. Of course, an attentive and imaginative reader can avoid the solipsistic trap, especially if he or she can read even a little Persian. But the mirror of language and translation means that the reader may see only a hazy but consoling reflection of himself and his times, rather than looking into the true depths of the poetry—which might be more unsettling.

  On the surface, the religion of love of these Sufi poets from eight hundred years ago might seem rather distant and archaic. That is belied less by the burgeoning popularity of Rumi and Attar than by the deeper message of these poets. Darwinists who, like Richard Dawkins, believe Darwinism ineluctably entails atheism might be upset by the idea, but what could be more appropriate to an intellectual world that has abandoned creationism for evolution theory than a religion of love? Darwinism and evolutionary theory have demonstrated the intense focus of all life on the act of reproduction, the act of love. The spirit of that act and the drive behind it are the spirit of life itself. What could be more fitting than a religion that uses the emotional drive behind that act as a metaphor for a higher spirituality, and its longing as a longing for union with the Godhead—“This gift the divine ones gave us before Eternity.”

  TIMUR

  After about 1300 (notably under the ruler Ghazan Khan) the Mongol Il-Khans, becoming Islamized and Persianized, reversed their extractive, destructive, slash-and-burn style of rule. They began trying to reconstruct cities they had destroyed, trying to resurrect systems of irrigation and agriculture that had been abandoned. They had some success, and the new capital Tabriz certainly prospered. Azerbaijan, with its wetter climate, was favored generally by the conquering horsemen for the better pasture it offered. The great historian Rashid al-Din (a converted Jew) enjoyed the patronage of the Il-Khans and, building on the earlier works of Juvaini and others, wrote a huge and definitive history. The cultural flow was not all one way—Persian miniature painting was permanently influenced by an imported Chinese aesthetic, and there were other examples. But Iran under the Il-Khans, for all the signs of regeneration, was a poorer, harsher place than before. The empire of the Il-Khans began to fragment with an almost deterministic inevitability. Local vassal rulers slowly made themselves independent of the center, as had happened before under the Seljuks and the Abbasids.

  In the mid-fourteenth century in Khorasan, around Sabzavar, a rebel movement called the sarbedari (heads-in-noose) arose. It displayed egalitarian tendencies and co-opted Shi‘a and Sufi elements.58 Like some later and earlier movements, the sarbedari show the eclectic nature of popular, provincial religion in Iran at this time. Elsewhere, the Shi‘a and the Sufis tended to be in opposition, but the sarbedari seem to have had little difficulty fusing the apparently contradictory tenets of the different beliefs involved, and this creative ferment of popular religion was to prove important later, too. The sarbedari are also significant in another way—they represent again a spirit of popular resistance to the invaders, independent of contingent dynastic leadership. This same spirit was there after the Arab invasion, at the beginning of the Mongol period,59 and it appears again later in Iranian history. This might prompt questions about nationalism that could easily absorb the rest of this book.60 What we call nationalism today is in my view too specifically a constructed phenomenon of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to be considered without anachronism in the fourteenth century or other earlier periods. But we have seen that there was a sense of Iranianness, beyond local or dynastic loyalty, in the time of the Sassanids and before; it was part of what later inspired the shu‘ubiyya, the Samanids, and Ferdowsi. Nationalism is the wrong word, but to deny any Iranian identity in this era requires some serious contortions of evidence and logic.

  From 1380, the hopeful vassal dynasty builders, the resurgent cities and peasants, and the bold sarbedari were all alike submerged by the next invading surge of steppe nomads under Timur (Timur-e lang—Timur the Lame—Tamerlane or, in Marlowe, Tamburlaine). Timur was the son of a minor Turkic vassal in Transoxiana, who set up a following of warriors and built a tightly disciplined army explicitly on the model of the great Mongol, Genghis Khan. He married a princess from the great Khan family and called himself Güregen (which means son-in-law) to draw on the prestige of his predecessor. He also took Mongol precedent as a precedent for terror.

  Timur established himself first in the cities of Transoxiana, with a base at Samarkand, and then invaded Persia. Cities were razed, their citizens massacred, and the plunder sent with any valuable survivors back to Samarkand, to adorn a new paradise of gardens and grand buildings. To intimidate his enemies, Timur raised up pillars of human heads as he marched through the Persian provinces—outside Isfahan alone (where the people had been foolish enough to attack the Timurid garrison) he lopped off seventy thousand heads, which were then set in 120 pillars. In his bloody wake the desert again encroached on abandoned farmlands and irrigation works. Unlike the Mongols, Timur conquered in the name of orthodox Sunni Islam, but this in no way moderated his conduct of war. After taking Persia and defeating the Mongols of the Golden Horde in the steppe lands around Moscow, he moved into India and took Delhi. Then he turned west again, where he conquered Baghdad (another ninety thousand heads), defeated the Ottoman sultan, captured him, and returned to Samarkand. He died in 1405 in the midst of preparations for an attack on China.

  There is a story that Timur met Hafez, but it is probably apocryphal. But Timur did meet the Arab historian and thinker Ibn Khaldun. No historian looking at the history of the Islamic world in the period covered by this chapter could avoid noticing the cyclical pattern of dynastic rise, decline, and nomad invasion. But Ibn Khaldun came up with a theory to explain it.61 His theory began with the asabiyya, the strong solidarity or group feeling of nomad warriors, fostered by the interdependence that was necessary in mobile tribal life in the harsh conditions of desert, mountains, and the margins of the steppes. This was the cohesive spirit that made the nomads such formidable warriors, that enabled them to invade and dominate areas of sedentary settlement, and conquer cities. But having done so, their leaders had to consolidate their support. They had to protect themselves against being supplanted by other members of the tribe, and therefore gave patronage to other groups—city dwellers, bureaucratic officials, and the ulema. They also used building projects and a magnificent court to impress
their subjects with their prestige, and employed mercenaries as soldiers, because they were more reliable. So the original asabiyya of the conquerors was diluted and lost. Eventually the ruling dynasty came to believe its own myth and spent increasingly on vain display, weakening its strength outside the capital city and within it. The ulema and ordinary citizens, disillusioned with the dynasty’s decadence, became ready to welcome another wave of conquering nomads, who would start up a new dynasty and set the cycle off all over again.

  The theory—of which the above is a greatly simplified version—does not address all the elements of the cycle of invasions as they affected Iran. We have seen how the prosperity of the Silk Route encouraged plundering invasions as well as trade, and how the vulnerability of Iran (and particularly Khorasan) flowed from its central geographical position, just as geography gave it great economic and cultural advantages. The Abbasids and their successors were weakened repeatedly by the measures they used to try to overcome the difficulty of gathering taxes. Officials tended to become corrupt and siphon off tax revenue, so the rulers gave the responsibility to tax farmers instead; they then tended to plunder the peasant farmers, quickly running down the productivity of agriculture. The rulers could grant land holdings (iqta, soyurgal) to soldiers in return for military service, but this tended to mean in time that the soldiers came to think of themselves as farmers or landowners rather than soldiers. Or they could do a similar thing on a grander scale and grant whole provinces to trusted families in return for fiscal tribute and military support. But as we have seen, the likelihood then was that the provincial governors would grow powerful enough to become independent and even take over the state themselves.

  Ibn Khaldun’s theory does not fully explain the history of this period on its own, and it may apply better to the Islamic states of North Africa, where the historian lived for most of his life. But it is a useful model nonetheless, and it also accounts for some deep attitudes among the people themselves. Ibn Khaldun did not invent those attitudes, he observed them. The nomads often were regarded (especially by themselves, of course) as having a primitive martial virtue. The court was regarded as a decadent place that tended to corrupt its members. The ulema might often be regarded as authoritative arbitrators in a crisis. These were mental, social, and cultural structures that in themselves helped to influence events.