by Lois Pryce
Into the Wild
WHEN REZA SHAH came to power in the 1920s, part of his modernisation plan for Iran was to take control of the various tribes that for centuries had been living a nomadic existence. This was what Eman had alluded to during our journey the night before. Many of these tribes, notably the Lurs of Lorestan and the Bakhtiari, made an annual migration to the Zagros Mountains, west of Isfahan, where they would settle during the summer months for grazing before heading to the warmer south-west of the country in the winter. Reza Shah saw the tribes as a threat to his master plan for Iran. To him they were trouble-makers, wild and self-sufficient with their own customs, dress and laws. They ruled over their territories, living in groups of large tents, trading and occasionally warring with other tribes as well as robbing passing pilgrims and traders’ caravans that crossed their land.
Their lifestyle and self-sufficiency meant that it was impossible for the government to extract revenue from them. So with his typical heavy hand, Reza Shah set about their destruction, arresting their leaders, forcing the young men into the towns and cities to take part in military service and training programmes, moving families into houses that they neither needed nor desired, and even issuing strict dictates about how they should dress and wear their hair.
Of these tribes the most significant were Eman’s ancestors, the Bakhtiari, many of whom landed important positions in government and Iranian society. Their tribal land included the southern oilfields, and, by the time Reza Shah took power, they had already made their own business arrangements with the British, who were busy drilling away and making their fortune in the Persian Gulf. Reza Shah was less than happy about this cosy set-up and his attack on the tribes was swift, unsparing and enforced by laws that he wrote to suit his aims. When his son, Mohammed Reza Shah came to power after the Second World War, his was a less forceful approach, using economic carrots rather than his father’s stick – he even ended up marrying the daughter of a Bakhtiari nobleman and appointing a prime minister, Shapour Bakhtiar, of tribal descent. Ultimately his father’s goal was achieved. Nowadays there are only a few true nomads left in Iran and most of the Bakhtiari, as well as the other tribes, are integrated in mainstream urban society.
I had first become aware of the Bakhtiari through the 1925 documentary, Grass, a black-and-white silent movie made by three Americans who accompanied the tribe on their gruelling annual migration to the Zagros Mountains in search of pasture – the all-important ‘grass’. Subtitled A Nation’s Battle for Life, it is a staggering and nail-biting account of their journey, as gripping as any action movie, but it is the sheer scale of the expedition that is so astounding. Led by one khan, the headman of the tribe, 50,000 people and a million animals make the move across the punishing terrain of the Zagros, climbing steep rocky goat tracks, swimming and using rafts to cross the raging Kārūn River and trekking barefoot through the snow. The American film-makers happily join the fray and intercut the end result with Charlie Chaplin-style caption cards, peppered with multiple exclamation marks, finding upbeat humour in what must have been a terrifying reality. Fifty years later, another documentary, People of the Wind, narrated by James Mason, followed the same story, this time with the Babadi people, a sub-tribe of the Bahktiari, on the same migration route. This more thoughtful, reflective film shows the nomads’ struggles of the intervening years, how their lives had had to adapt to the modern age, and their problems with in-fighting as well as the ever-present external threat of forced settlement.
Fascinated by the images and myths of these mountains, I decided to head west from Isfahan into the Zagros. It would be a meandering detour before turning east for the desert city of Yazd, my next stop for civilisation, 200 miles south-east of Isfahan. The Zagros had also been on my radar because of Freya Stark’s travels. As well as her exploration in the Alborz Mountains on her hunt for the Assassins’ castles, she had spent time in Lorestan, a tribal province in the Zagros that at the time was considered lawless and dangerous for outsiders. But she had good reason for going; in 1932, while living in Baghdad, she was approached by a young Lur tribesman with information about a cave in the province containing hidden treasure – twenty chests of jewels, daggers, idols and coins. But she had to move fast, he said, others were searching for the treasure and would stop at nothing – not even murder! – to get their hands on it. How could any sane woman resist? Her quest for this mysterious bounty made her the first western woman to visit Lorestan, but the treasure was never found and her passage through the province was constantly thwarted, not by the supposedly savage Lurs but from officious policemen, who as usual considered her antics to be dangerous and unsuitable for a woman. Although she described the tribes, in her usual blunt way, as ‘pathological thieves’, she found them on the whole to be more open to her ventures, maybe because Lur women had historically been more liberated than the Persians. Even now, the nomadic women in Iran do not cover their hair.
Leaving behind Isfahan’s glistening centre, its western outskirts could have belonged to any modern Iranian city – featuring as they did the usual strip of oily car repair shops, light industry and breezeblock mosques under construction. Ahead of me the land turned rugged. The Zagros range appeared in distant layers of brown, purple and grey, the road emptied and the air cleared. I had no particular place to go, just the urge to ride aimlessly, which turned out to be both a blessing and a curse. As soon as I left the main routes, it was the same old story; my maps failed to match the tangle of roads and the signs dwindled to Persian only, then hand-painted Persian, which was essentially illegible, and then to none at all. Roads, tracks and trails split off every which way, the sun and my compass my only guides. My initial reaction was mild panic at being lost so utterly and suddenly, but I had a whole day ahead of me, the rare luxury of nowhere to be at any time, and an entire mountain range to explore. I breathed deeply and decided to relish the uncertainty, Eman’s words ringing in my ears: ‘You are so free.’ This was the very essence of freedom, and to worry about the minor details of where exactly I was, or where I was going, was to waste the moment.
Riding through the small towns and villages, it was as though I had entered a completely different country to the Iran I had seen in the cities. More so than the Alborz Mountains, where wealthy Tehranis have holiday homes and head for recuperative weekend breaks, the atmosphere of the Zagros was wild and its conurbations makeshift and rundown. For the first time I felt as though I was in a Third World country. This was a land of improvisation, poor sanitation and no services for the traveller beyond the most basic petrol stations with nothing for sale except cheap fuel, hot water for tea and a hole in the ground for a toilet. Building and planning regulations were obviously open to interpretation, if not entirely ignored outside of the cities; houses were crumbling, newly built breezeblock walls often comically wonky, and electricity and plumbing either non-existent or improvised. The tarmac extended along the main highways but the side streets of the villages were just dirt tracks. Animals and children grubbed around in the dust and fires burned at the sides of the road, where old women in chadors boiled enormous blackened kettles of water.
One of the most striking aspects of these small towns was the proliferation of street art, murals and enormous sculptures, usually on roundabouts or approaching the town, at road junctions. The clunky eagle at the roundabout in the Alborz had been the first example I had seen, but now, having clocked up a couple of thousand miles, I realised it was a nationwide phenomenon. While a lot of the public art celebrated military endeavours with statues and murals of soldiers and war scenes, there was also a playful element to much of the sculpture. A huge flowery teapot dominated one remote traffic island while a stationery set comprising a stash of fifty-foot pencils, an eraser and a pencil sharpener big enough to crawl inside greeted me on the outskirts of a small town. In one village, an old Paykan had been painted red, loaded with vintage suitcases and jacked up to give the impression of being suspended by a cluster of multicoloured balloon
s. Often the choice of subject matter related to the town’s industry, such as the mammoth cartoon-like pistachio nuts bursting out of a paper bag or the mountaineer figures of the Alborz, but at other times they were comically inappropriate, like the vast, jolly snowman skiing along the central reservation of a parched desert town. Mixed with the moralising billboards and aggressive military murals, these examples of state-sponsored art epitomised Iran’s complex and contradictory worldview, as if the combative and the cute, the sombre and the absurd could all coexist without conflict.
Upon arriving in one of the small towns of the Zagros, this one heralded by a concrete soldier shoulder-launching an RPG, I made the mistake of trying to determine my whereabouts. It must be a natural instinct, this need to locate oneself, and I couldn’t help but stop at the crossroads that constituted the centre to examine my map. I made my second mistake when I made eye contact with the local policeman as he passed by on his little moped. He stopped, seeming helpful, and we peered and pointed at the map together, but he didn’t speak any English and although I had picked up a few words of Persian, it was limited to basic greetings and the standard requests for petrol, tea and water. A crowd had gathered now, emerging from their dark huts. This was probably the most interesting event to have happened in this village for years. My audience was made up entirely of men of every generation: the old and toothless, paunchy and middle-aged, handsome skinny teens, wide-eyed little boys, chattering toddlers. About forty examples of the Iranian male surrounded me, varying expressions on every face ranging from bemusement to wonder, to suspicion. This sudden appearance of his tribe had an effect on the policeman, himself not much more than a teenager, and he turned from inquisitive youth to officious authoritarian.
He puffed out his chest. Then he rapped his knuckles on my number plate and shouted instructions, pointing at my panniers. It could only be a request for money or paperwork, so I opted for the latter. I thought about Freya Stark and how she had dealt with the overbearing interference of the Iranian police as she explored this region. She usually took the bossy approach, and when reading her book I could almost hear her voice in the conversations she described, the commanding, cut-glass accent refusing to kowtow to the petty little men in uniform who believed they knew what was best for her. But these were different times. I did not have the weight of the British Empire behind me, or the breeding that naturally assumes authority over peasant policemen. I contemplated, ruefully, that in some ways this travelling business must have been easier when Britannia ruled the waves. My standard approach, much as it grated, was to smile patiently and employ excessive politeness. The explosion of swear-words I had unleashed on the Basij commander in Tehran was for emergencies only, and we were not at that stage yet. Playing nice and playing stupid were usually the best approaches, and to be fair, Freya Stark used this approach too. As she had observed dryly during her Persian travels, ‘The great and only comfort about being a woman is that one can always pretend to be more stupid than one is and no one is surprised.’
Another way to fox a village policeman is with piles of important-looking paperwork in a foreign language. Of this I had reams. His lips moved as he squinted at each page of official documentation, trying to hide his confusion. The men of the village were watching his every move, so he made an exaggerated fuss of comparing my registration plate with the papers, even though he clearly had no idea what he was looking at. Some of the men started calling out instructions or advice, or maybe they were taunting him. It was hard to tell. But his reaction was to start throwing his weight about even more, barking orders at me and waving the papers in my face. I was in the middle of a cockfight for which I had little enthusiasm. But what I lacked in upper-class bossiness I made up for in horsepower. Taking the papers from his hand, I stuffed them down the front of my jacket and before he knew what was happening, I was disappearing up the hill, safe in the knowledge that his little bike would never catch me. I could hear the jeers and a roar of laughter from the crowd as I rode away. I almost felt a bit sorry for him.
Alone again, apart from the occasional horn-honking trucker, I meandered deeper into the mountains, awed by their scale. This was a land where at last my bike could really come into its own, a land made for motorcycling with sweeping curves and enticing trails that were unlikely to lead to any contentious military outposts. It was as if I’d entered a whole new world, but on this little detour of mine I would see only a fraction of the Zagros’ thousand-mile range. From the north-west of the country, the mountains run parallel with Iran’s border with Iraq to the Strait of Hormuz in the Persian Gulf, and I was now deep in their central section. Bare hills swept up and away from the wide flat valleys where oaks and mulberry trees clustered around green pasture and wide rivers flattened out along the valley floors. Out on the open hills, and sometimes blocking the roads, were Bakhtiari shepherds, grazing their sheep and goats in enormous flocks. The nomads, who consider these mountains to be sacred, appeared out here as if from another age, dressed in their traditional clothing of black baggy low-crotch trousers with matching short jackets and skull caps, with no signs of modern life. Some of the older men wore a woollen tunic with a woven pattern in indigo and cream and carried tall wooden crooks. But there was nothing anachronistic about them; they were working men, walking and herding all day in these clothes, and I supposed they had looked like this for centuries.
The hills and roads were dotted with Bakhtiari men of all ages, the older guys on donkeys and the younger men on little motorbikes. But it wasn’t until I entered a particularly isolated valley that I came upon one of their encampments. Sited slightly away from the road, I spotted the large black tents and pulled over on the verge. Their wild, ragtag camp with a couple of beat-up old motorcycles, a fire and animals running freely reminded me of how I used to feel as a teenager when the fair came to town. The same seductive image of freedom, the physical connection with the outdoors and the exclusive tight-knit self-sufficiency of living and moving together in a group had stirred something in me as a child – a longing for the same autonomy in my own life – and had probably contributed to my decision to live a rootless lifestyle aboard a boat in my early twenties. Now, gazing at the Bakhtiari camp, I was thrilled to catch a glimpse of their world and inspired by their resistance to outside pressures. A woman stepped out of one of the tents to tend to the fire. Even from this distance I was awed by her presence; she stood tall, wild and bold. Her hair hung long and loose, a great cascade of black over her shoulders. After being surrounded by so many headscarves, it was almost a shocking sight, and the image of this unknown Bakhtiari woman remained with me.
The Bakhtiari were the main tribe in this region. Further north were the Lurs and north again were the Kurds, with their own Iranian province of Kurdistan. The general attitude to the tribal groups in Iran seemed to be positive; people spoke of them as gentle, noble people, the only exception being the Kurds, who seemed to be viewed as trouble-makers. An independent state of Kurdistan had been promised when the Ottoman Empire had broken up after the First World War, but this never materialised and when the land was carved up the Kurds ended up straddling the borders of Iran, Iraq, Turkey and Syria. They have never given up the fight for their own nation and occasional uprisings have flared up in all the territories over the last century. Their fight for independence, although not as strident in Iran as in Turkey or Iraq, has never gone away. ‘They all carry guns in Kurdistan,’ Omid had warned me, urging me to avoid the region, while inadvertently making it sound like an enticing adventure. I thought about Aheng, the teenage Kurdish girl I had met at the roadside hotel, with her sharp opinions and bold professional ambitions, and wondered how she fitted into the tribal stereotype. I came to the conclusion that it was impossible to classify anyone in Iran, and herein lay its fascination.
These days the few remaining true nomadic tribes were left to their old ways by the authorities, and even wheeled out on occasion for touristic duties. But there had not always been this respect for
their traditions. I recalled Freya Stark’s reports from the early 1930s of seeing government men who had been sent into the tribal lands by Reza Shah under instructions to cut the long hair of the nomadic men, dress them in western trousers and jackets and replace their turbans with his standard issue Pahlavi hat, a round peaked cap that was enforced by law on the male Iranian population to prevent their foreheads touching the ground during prayers. All part of Reza Shah’s wider move to westernise and secularise Iran.
Riding along the main routes, I would occasionally come across small villages of flat-roofed, blocky little mud-brown houses, nestled in the foothills and dwarfed by the mountains that loomed behind them. But the deeper into the Zagros I went, the sparser the land and the less frequent the signs of civilisation, until, after climbing for several miles, I was alone under a vast sky in a wide-screen panorama. I came to a stop, switched off the bike and soaked up the silence. In the distance I watched a shepherd moving his flock across the empty hills, tiny black and white specks disappearing over the horizon until they were gone and there was not another living soul in sight.
But allowing myself to get well and truly lost turned out to be harder than I imagined and I couldn’t quite give up hope of orientating myself. I slipped off the road down a small track to a stream, taking shade under an oak, where I decided it was probably safe to dare to bare my hair and feet while I studied the map. Late afternoon sun threw long shadows in the grass and I began casting my eyes over the jumble of routes and the multitude of little towns and villages, making uneducated guesses about a suitable destination for the night. I realised then, sitting silent and alone in the wilderness, that it wasn’t just the traffic, noise and pollution of the cities and highways that I’d found wearing, it was also the sensation of being constantly on display, even if the attention I attracted was almost always well-meaning. Iran is a country of, and for, extroverts, and although I would consider myself in that category most of the time, I could hear the repressed introvert in me crying out, Can we just hide away for a bit, please? The familiar oak leaves made me feel at home and I shut my eyes, leaning back against a grassy bank.