Drinking Arak Off an Ayatollah's Beard

by Nicholas Jubber

  “On the third day after death,” said Siyavash, “the priests come to the house and say the prayers. Before it was banned, the body would be washed, wrapped in white, and carried to the Tower. The pallbearers placed it inside, they wore special white clothes, and they put the body on a stone. Then everybody went outside and waited for the wild birds to come, except for the guardian of the Tower. The birds ate the flesh and stripped its meat until only the bones were left.”

  Now the practice is illegal, so the Zoroastrians have to use a cemetery instead. But the Tower, Siyavash insisted, had its uses:

  “It’s a way to feed the birds, it doesn’t occupy much area, and the earth doesn’t get dirty. But we are forced not to do this.”

  “So if you had a choice,” I asked, “would you prefer to be buried or eaten?”

  “Well, we would be eaten anyway, if not by the birds then by worms. But I certainly prefer the Tower, of course. It is the Zoroastrian way.”

  As I looked at his earnest expression, I felt I had an inkling of what he was concerned about: The Zoroastrians would lose their heritage. They would be sucked up by the wider Muslim culture, melted down and stripped of their distinct identity. They were one of many specifically “Persian” subcultures I would come across in my travels, all connected in some intimate way to the Shahnameh, and all in danger of extinction.

  Ferdowsi’s epic poem is full of stories about fire: Siyavash riding through a ring of fire to prove his innocence, his son Kai Khusrau taming a land where fire spurts out of the ground (as it still does in nearby Azerbaijan, which is where that story is set),32 the prophet Zoroaster hurled into a holy fire by the invading soldiers of Turan. Nothing symbolizes Zoroastrianism more, and there is none more sacred than the fire of Bahram. It was lit in the time of the ancient kings, drawing the shahs in prayer and kept alive in hidden places after the Arab conquest until it was established, in the medieval era, in Yazd. I was eager to see it. It would be a glimpse of history, of where the past and the Zoroastrian present came together. But there was one ever-so-slightly niggling obstacle: Non-Zoroastrians weren’t allowed to look at it.

  “Oh no, you certainly cannot visit the fire,” said Siyavash with a pious gasp, when I mentioned it early in our stay in Yazd.

  But this was before he’d started talking to me, so after another excursion with his father I decided to ask again. Which takes us to my last afternoon in Yazd, standing at the end of a narrow street, with Siyavash placing a white cotton prayer cap on my head. In front of us was a wooden gate, with a board fixed to the brick archway above it:

  ENTRANCE ONLY FOR ZOROASTRIANS

  The gate was ajar; behind it, the sort of garden Alice could have visited. Pink roses were peeking out of the bushes, pomegranates hung in the groves like baubles, and the high tapering cypress trees soared over everything: a secret, walled Persian garden.33 A brick wall contained them at the back, decorated with floral-patterned tiles and spilling out with steps, which carried a priest dressed in a white coat and cap—like a British milkman. He nodded to Siyavash and frowned at me, but Siyavash and the prayer cap reassured him of my credentials.

  The Zoroastrian scripture, the Avesta, contains prayers and hymns to Ahura Mazda—the Zoroastrian God—as well as ecclesiastical codes, penances, ways to defeat evil spirits, and blessings, all composed over several centuries in the first millennium BCE. A copy lay on a shelf in the prayer chamber. Siyavash flicked through its pages, at the same time untying the koshti, a plaited cord at his waist. Moments later, the light from a row of metal bars gleamed on his face as slow, respectful steps carried him toward the silver urn protected behind them.

  Here it was—the sacred cipher of the Zoroastrians. The ancient flame that burned not only when Ferdowsi was alive, but when many of the kings from his tales were breathing too. I had been anticipating the most spectacular of pyres. Instead . . . I was standing in front of a little yellow glimmer that wouldn’t have been able to withstand a birthday-cake blow. After all I had read and heard about sacred Zoroastrian fires—what a letdown! I’d come here to meet the King of the Kindling, and instead I’d found an old dying crone.

  But something was happening in the chamber. A wizened man in white (the priestly caretaker, known as the herbad) was dawdling around the fire. He picked up a metal spade, shoveled the ash aside, and lifted a spare billet onto the urn, stripped of its bark to remove impurities. It was only now—and only slowly—that the flames started to expand. They swelled and stretched, spreading their arms like an old dancer who’s just remembered she still knows all the moves, tilting and swaying and belly-dancing over the crackling wood. Red embers sparkled above them like the rings on the dancer’s fingers, disappearing among the puffs of smoke that flattened themselves against the ceiling.

  Looking at it now, it was easy to imagine the VIPs who had stood before this fire in the past. I saw them kicking off their boots after a day on the hunt, ritually washing themselves before they prayed. I thought of all the fire-themed stories I’d read in the Shahnameh, and, more generally, of the importance of light in Persian culture: the light shining off the facets of mirrorwork in the mosques, the candles at ashoura events, the image of the sun, used as a symbol for the shahs as well as Imam Ali.

  Siyavash’s fingers were gripping the metal bars. His lips barely moved as he whispered his prayers, the ancient words mixing with the smoke. His eyes were fixed on that extraordinary, resilient, 1,400-year-old flame, dancing before him now as it had once danced, so many centuries ago, for the ancient kings.

  Half a day’s bus ride away, on the other side of the Zagros Mountains, in an iron-roofed house on the outskirts of Shiraz, Sina had lost the use of his legs.

  “Salaaaaam, Nicholassssh!” he slurred, arms raised high and a big, broad smile splashed across his face.

  “Drink!” came the order. Not from Sina—not even from his friend Farzin, who had invited us to stay—but from Farzin’s whiskery, red-haired father. A glass of arak found its way into my hand and, lest anyone impugn me for a teetotaler, I drained it in one.

  “Well done!” exclaimed Farzin’s father. “Now—another!”

  He had a history of drinking himself. Before the revolution, he’d been a teacher at a school in Shiraz.

  “But after the mullahs came to power, I got drunk,” he said, sitting in his pajamas on the sofa, with a tumbler of arak for a night-cap. “I went in front of the police station. I was so drunk! I shouted, ‘Khomeini, I want to do you up the arse!’”

  He took a sip of his arak and shrugged, as if it were just one of those things.

  “Well, I never taught again,” he said.

  The Iranian education system’s loss was our gain: There was plenty to see around Shiraz, and thanks to Farzin’s father, we were easily able to get around.

  The Shahnameh might purport to tell the story of Iran’s ancient kings, but when it comes to the most famous of them all, it’s strangely silent. Cyrus the Great was the “anointed one” of the Old Testament, author of the world’s first declaration of human rights in the sixth century BCE and liberator of the Israelites from their Babylonian captivity. His reputation for justice was recognized even by his enemies (“no matter whom he conquered,” wrote the Greek historian Xenophon, “ . . . they found themselves longing to be guided by his rulings”); and he was also a supremely successful general, establishing a realm that stretched for 2 million square miles, from the Nile to the Ganges: the first transcontinental empire.

  But Cyrus would soon be forgotten. By the age of Ferdowsi, his feats had been swallowed up by the earlier Aryan myths, as had his grandson Darius the Great (who built a 1,600-mile-high road that could be covered by dispatches in a week—the first large-scale postal system).34 Having lost track of the shahs, Ferdowsi is only able to pick up the story with the demise of the Achaemenian dynasty. He may know nothing of Cyrus, and little of Darius too, but there was no way of shielding him from the man who would come stomping onto the Iranian plateau two centuries la
ter. . . .

  The taxi moves along the river Pulvar, on a road as straight as a line of longitude. The land around us is lush and green. Poplar trees are shimmering in the foothills and a wave of red tulips is flowering beside a stream. After the aridity around Yazd, it’s like breaking open a cardboard box full of delicious sugary pastries. If you scrubbed out the pencil shapes of the village minarets and the odd nomad’s tent, you could imagine you were driving through Tuscany.

  Ahead of us, under the giant hood of Mount Mercy, a limestone terrace lips out of the cove, fifty feet above the ground, covering more than a million square feet. Spiking into the air—one of Iran’s most iconic and spectacular sights—are the ribbed limestone pillars of the ancient palace of Persepolis, the jewel not only in the crown of the Achaemenian dynasty, but of Iranian kingship at large (as the last shah declared to the world when he used it as the venue for his grand party in 1971). The pillars needle the sky like the pieces of a gigantic chessboard that’s been set up for the gods.

  Giant winged bull-men guard them, soaking up the early afternoon sun at the top of the entrance stairway, while griffins and lions prowl in the bas-reliefs, bulging out of the walls. All around them is order on a fantastic scale. The straight lines and right angles of the platforms and stairwells, the gates and palaces and the rock-cut tombs carved above the site, pay tribute to the formalism of Persian architecture. You see delicately fluted pillars, columned porches, and processional stairwells of a kind you’ll meet again in mosques and palaces all over the country—but rarely from so early a date.

  Even the living creatures carved into the walls are tightly organized. The bull-men are less savage, more regal than their famous Assyrian counterparts; the shah sticking his dagger into the belly of a lion is doing it with the poise of a dancer. And most of all, the tribute bearers on the sides of the stairwells, carrying their gifts to the supersized shah (dozens of them, from all over the empire: Greeks offering wool, Nubians with an elephant’s tusk, Indians in dhotis bearing pans of gold) are processing in organized rows, with none of the terror that permeates similarly themed Pharaonic reliefs. The great 1930s travel writer Robert Byron criticized Persepolis for its lack of passion—but that’s the point. Like the elegant but emotionally restrained miniature paintings, like the geometrical patterns on a Persian carpet or a typical Persian garden, like the courtesy of an old-fashioned Persian, Persepolis is about order, refinement, and unimpeachable manners. No wonder Sina’s eyes are so bright—it’s the spirit of his country expressed in stone.

  “Again, come on!” he exclaims, racing up the steps onto the esplanade. “Did your heart not become happy?”

  He is addressing Farzin, who flashes a smile in response. He’s one of those too-cool-for-school characters you often meet among the Iranian youth—all dark glasses, jangly wristwatch, and as much emotion as the courtiers on the bas-reliefs.

  Sitting on the stump of a stone griffin’s foot, they’re both smiling, looking around with pride—as if the old bronze-plated doors have risen out of the dust, the ivory-inlaid ceiling has slid back into place above the pillars, and Darius the Great himself (who built Persepolis in the sixth century BCE) is parading up the stairwell in front of us, its treads shallow enough to be mounted by his richly caparisoned horse.

  Traveling in nineteenth-century Egypt, the French author Gustave Flaubert noticed that “a certain Thompson from Sunderland has described his name in letters six feet high on Pompey’s pillar. You can read it a quarter of a mile away. You can’t see the Pillar without seeing the name of Thompson, and consequently, without thinking of Thompson. This cretin has become part of the monument and perpetuates himself with it.” For me at Persepolis, it’s Major Harvey-Kelly, T. M. Cloyne of the Light Dragoons, and even Henry “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?” Stanley—all of whom have etched their names on the bellies of the bull-men. But I don’t feel as put out as Flaubert, because these colonial types aren’t alone—Persepolis has been attracting the graffiti of its guests for at least a millennium.

  In one of the palaces, Prince Adud ad-Dawleh of the Buwayhids—self-styled “Shah-an-shah,” who ruled most of western Iran when Ferdowsi was a boy and presented himself as a revival of the ancient kings—scribbled a notice. Barbed tips spike the ends of his letters, telling how he came here in 955 CE and “fetched someone who read the inscriptions on these ruins.” It’s a significant piece of graffiti—historians tend to argue that Persepolis, and most of Iran’s pre-Islamic history, was forgotten by the locals until it was “discovered” for them by Western archaeologists in the nineteenth century. Adud ad-Dawleh’s panel reminds us that in Ferdowsi’s time—a millennium and a half after the compound was built—these ruins were still very much alive.35

  Looking at Adud ad-Dawleh’s inscription, I wonder whether Sina is tempted to etch a few words of his own.

  “Of course not,” he snaps with a flare of indignation. “We must respect this place.”

  But, whatever the faults of the signatures so many people have scratched into the stones, they don’t amount to a hill of chickpeas compared with what Persepolis’s most famous visitor did.

  “Sikandar,” announces a man in a parka, standing in the basalt wreckage of one of the palaces, “was a monster, a barbarian. . . . Actually,” he adds, nodding at the scorched walls around us, “he was Bush.”

  He’s talking about Alexander the Great, who turned up here in the fourth century BCE, sozzled himself on wine, and treated Persepolis like one giant party hall. He was never going to leave the place as he’d found it. Goaded by an Athenian prostitute (who was eager to avenge the Persians for their burning of the Acropolis a century and a half before), he hurled a torch into the Hall of a Hundred Columns and set it on fire. The Zoroastrian scriptures were turned to ash, marble statues were smashed, the contents of the royal vaults—which Michael Wood has described as “the greatest treasure in history”—were carted off on 7,000 pack beasts, and the land was subjected to a couple of centuries of Hellenic rule. It’s the sort of behavior you’d expect a “nationalist” like Ferdowsi to berate—but, surprisingly, when he comes to this episode in the Shahnameh, he has few bad words to say about Alexander. Instead, he gets back at him by rewriting history. He tells us Alexander’s father was in fact Iranian (the shah, no less) and the only reason he wasn’t born in Iran himself was that his mother had bad breath and was sent back to Europe in disgrace.

  Historically, it’s a gaff and a half—although it’s a cunning way of saving national face. But it does express a truth of sorts. Alexander famously fell in love with the culture he’d conquered (or, some would argue, exploited it), dressing himself in Persian-style tunics, recruiting Persian nobles to his court, adopting the hand-kissing gesture of the Persian kings, and marrying a woman from Bactria (in what is now Afghanistan) who spoke an old Iranian dialect. Several centuries later, the medieval Persians would show that their talent for alchemy wasn’t confined to the laboratory. The Mongols, who started off by trashing every town they visited (in Nishapur, they even killed the cats), ended up wrapping themselves in Persian finery and sponsoring sumptuous miniature paintings on thick cream paper based on the tales of the Shahnameh. The Abbasid caliphs (infiltrated and overwhelmed by their Persian courtiers) and Ferdowsi’s intended sponsor, the Turk-born Sultan Mahmud of Ghazni (adopting Persian as the language of his court) were similarly transmuted. It’s an extraordinary phenomenon—proof of how attractive Persian culture can be to the outsider. And it’s continued into the twentieth century. Donald Wilber, one of the CIA spies sent to topple Prime Minister Mossadegh in the 1950s, fell in love with Persia. When he wasn’t collecting Persian carpets, he was usually to be found studying and scribbling about Persian architecture. In fact, for my own visit to Persepolis, it was Wilber’s account that was my chief point of reference.

  There are many more shahs, carved into the gullies around Persepolis—warrior-kings in bas-relief, with pleated cowboy trousers and sausage curls of hair half-hidden by their
balloon-shaped korymbos crowns, impaling their enemies on the ends of their lances or trampling them under their horses’ hooves. Among them was a lone female, in a loose ribboned dress and a beaded necklace, with long ringlets of hair falling over her shoulders36—the only woman in the vicinity who was allowed to air her hair. It was boiling—a lot of the female visitors were fanning themselves by flapping the sides of their headscarves. So, after clambering among the reliefs and strolling through the wheat fields between them, among nomads’ tents and the bull-head capitals recycled for the Buwayhids’ medieval court, we bundled into Farzin’s father’s taxi as lumps of dust and sweat.

  For Sina and Farzin, these ruins were the country’s most powerful visual symbol of national pride. It’s all very well promoting mosques as the mascots of the mullahs’ regime, but they can’t hold a candle to Persepolis—the greatest remnant of a time when Iran ruled the world.

  “You know how many of these statues have been stolen from Persepolis?” asked Farzin’s father as the highway tapered ahead of us. “And what does this government do about it? Nothing, of course! They want these things to be stolen, it is the wish of their hearts! They want these things to be in the museums of New York and London. They don’t want to have these things here, because they remind us how our country was great long before the Muslims came.”37