Drinking Arak Off an Ayatollah's Beard

by Nicholas Jubber

  He spat out of the window, as if he’d spotted an ayatollah on the verge.

  “‘That castle,’” he recited, “‘where Jamshid the king drank his wine / Is now where gazelles and the foxes recline.’”

  He was quoting from Omar Khayyam, the eleventh-century poet and mathematician, whose Rubaiyat sat on coffee tables all over Victorian London. The verse is a comment on the decay and abandonment of Persepolis in Khayyam’s own day, another case in which those long-ago times appear to echo the present.

  For several days, Farzin kept up his image as Cool Dude No. 1. He would strum on his guitar (and took us one evening to a hilltop teahouse, where a friend of his sang along to the Eagles’ “Hotel California” between inhalations on a water pipe). He introduced me to the beats of the Iranian rapper Sandi and showed me the creamy marble tomb of the fourteenth-century poet Hafez (whose diwan is, next to the Quran, the most likely book to be found in an Iranian home), where couples were secretly holding hands in the surrounding alcoves.

  “This is where I bring all my girlfriends,” he said, preening around the compound with his gelled bouffant sticking over his shades, while we lost track of Sina, last seen handing his phone number to several of the local girls. But a few nights in, Farzin’s cool-dude image was shattered—when he showed me his stamp collection.

  “This is a good one!”

  You could see the excitement burning on his face as the slipcase came off. His finger rested on Reza Shah (the last king but one), with a feather sticking out of his cap and a ferocious expression (which caused ladies of his court to faint in his presence).

  “What about that one!” exclaimed Sina.

  He was pointing to a stamp of the last shah with Queen Farah, commemorating their wedding in 1959.

  “Eh, my mother loves Queen Farah,” said Sina. “She has a thousand magazines about her!”

  Farzin was cautious about letting me take hold of the album—even with the plastic sheet protectors to stop me from touching the stamps—but eventually he handed it over.

  I was struck by how many of the images were historical. The eleventh-century polymath Ibn Sina appeared numerous times, as did his rival Biruni, with a folded turban and a fuzzy beard. There was a postmarked set showing the winged bull-men of Persepolis, printed for the shah’s 1971 celebration. And there were even stamps displaying bare-chested men in leather plus fours—pahlavans practicing the sport of the ancient Iranians (a sight I would see in force only a few weeks later). Most striking of all was the age of the stamps: Very few of them had been printed any later than 1979.

  “Do you have any from after the revolution?” I asked as Farzin lifted the album back out of my hands.

  “Sure, but they aren’t good for my collection. Now it’s only flowers and mosques. It’s the ones from the shahs’ time I like.”

  There was one surprising exception: a set of stamps printed in 1990, which were the most beautiful of them all. They were mini reproductions of miniature paintings, showing scenes from the Shahnameh . Here was snake-shouldered Zahhak, chained to a cave in the Alborz Mountains; there was the devious Akvan Div, hoisting Rostam on a rock, ready to hurl him into the sea; and here was Siyavash, riding his black horse through the flames to disprove his stepmother’s slander. They were printed in tandem with an international congress, hosted by the incumbent president, Ali Akbar Rafsanjani, who had been forced into this rare public endorsement after UNESCO declared the “year of Ferdowsi.” It marked a thawing in the government’s attitude toward the Shahnameh—although the Professor and his peers considered it to have been nothing more than a token gesture.

  The next afternoon we continued our journey in the Persian glory days, driving sunward between cliffs the fleshy pink of lobster meat. Shining everywhere, under the heavy glaze of the heavens, were the vivid colors of a Persian miniature—the orpiment of buttercups, the vermilion of tulips. The mountaintops turned the indigo in which they are painted in miniatures, and bushes sprouted on their foothills, as if the artist had stuck his thumb in ground malachite and dabbed it across the scene.

  As we trundled toward the ancient site of Bishapur, Qashqa’i nomads appeared on the banks above a flashing silver-leaf river. The women’s multilayered dresses and floral-print scarves were so bright I couldn’t take my eyes off them. They were like rainbows reassembled as people. As for the men—their rich, thick brows flexed under double-eared felt hats identical to those worn by the ancient Medians on the reliefs at Persepolis as well as the magistrates of medieval Fars38—a glimpse of the past on the heads of the present.

  Wriggling under their goatskin tents, the road stretched toward the fawn cliffs of the Pass of the Polo-Stick. There, orange-blossom scent drifted among the steam from the samovars as picnicking families sat cross-legged on their rugs and pulled feasts out of their hampers: rice in plastic-lidded tubs, chicken cutlets wrapped in cling-film, saucers of kidney beans and plastic bags full of barbari bread.

  Our picnic had been supplied courtesy of Farzin’s mother. We sat down to enjoy it, swapping items with a family from Esfahan, who (as Sina whispered in my ear several times) all had their city’s lilting singsong accent. Behind us were the pictures that have made this such a popular spot, carved into the wrinkled cliffs above the banks about 1,700 years ago. Families wandered underneath them, speculating over which king was which—“That must be Ardashir!” “Which one is Bahram?” “This must be Shapur.” “How do you know?” “Because the Roman emperor is under his foot!”

  They were all kings from the Sassanian dynasty—the last before the Arab invasion of the seventh century CE. Although many Iranians blame them for failing to defeat the Arabs, they were hugely successful, lasting for more than four centuries and presiding over an extraordinary range of innovations that have made life easier, more efficient, and in several cases more fun all over the world—from the architectural squinch to the banker’s check, along with heraldry, windmills, polo, backgammon, and tennis.

  Among the shahs in the reliefs was a swashbuckler called Shapur II. He cut a proud figure, holding his sword between his legs, with Indian prisoners and Persian soldiers below and beside him, one of them leading a horse and another one carrying a decapitated head. He isn’t the most famous of the Sassanian kings, but he does star in my favorite tale from the historical second half of the Shahnameh. He’s a classic adventurer-prince, whose escapades read like an ancient version of a James Bond story:

  THE TALE OF SHAPUR II

  Like many of the best kings, Shapur likes to go about in disguise. But one day he overreaches himself. He treks out all the way to the enemy kingdom of Rome (which is actually Byzantium), dressed as a silk merchant—although not dressed very well, by the sounds of it, because he is unmasked. Rather than kill him, the emperor of Rome adopts the ploy of a Bond villain—he is going to make Shapur suffer before he dies. So he has him stitched into an ass-hide, which will slowly contract and squeeze him to death. Just one little mistake: The emperor leaves a young woman as Shapur’s jailer, and Shapur has the same effect on her as Bond might have done—she falls in love with him, provides hot milk to loosen the hide, and rides with him back to Iran, where he gives her the impossibly romantic name “dilafruz farrukhpai”—“lucky-footed heart-luster.”

  Slowly, Shapur’s army is gathered together. He burns the Roman fleet, before pouncing on the Roman emperor and exacting retribution. It isn’t pretty: Still enraged by the way he was treated, Shapur has the emperor’s ears split, his nose bored, and a horse’s bit hammered into his mouth. The Persian kings might have been fond of beauty and orderly refinement, but if you crossed them their revenge could be brutal.

  The bas-reliefs of the shahs, like the billboards of the ayatollahs in Tehran, declared the power of the rulers. But the Sassanians lost that power, along with the goodwill of their subjects, thanks in large part to their reliance on their priests. The previous day, at one of the cliffs near Persepolis, I had seen a figure with a downturned mouth, carved into t
he rock. He was strangely familiar—the sour-lipped cleric lording over the people. But this was no ayatollah.

  He was Kartir, chief Zoroastrian priest in the reign of Shapur I, who boasts (in an inscription that would have horrified Cyrus the Great) that he has caused other creeds and sects to be “smitten” and the “heretical” to be “punished with corporal punishment.” Kartir is Iran’s original religious fundamentalist, one of many priests who sucked the spirit out of Zoroaster’s faith, turning it into a series of ecclesiastical codes and ensuring the mobeds a major role at the court (in a foreshadowing of Khomeini’s theocracy a millennium and a half later). But they served ultimately to distance the shahs from their subjects. By the time the Arabs invaded in the seventh century, the Sassanians had lost the goodwill of the people, who no longer had the stomach to fight on their behalf.

  All this is forgotten at Bishapur, where the intention of the original sculptors still holds—to celebrate the glory of the shahs. Sitting there by the banks of the Shapur, I turned to the Esfahani family’s patriarch and asked why they came to this spot—it was, after all, about half a day’s journey from their city.

  “Is it not obvious?” His eyes were glowing like candles. “These pictures were made when we were a great country. All the world was afraid of us and our empire spread many times over what we have today. Oh yes, I know what you are thinking—the world despises us now, they think we are fanatics. But when the shahs were in power, they all looked at Iran and admired.”

  His family nodded their agreement, as did Farzin and Sina. Lying down on the bank, with the grass lisping between their toes, they basked in the sun and their nation’s former glory.

  I would be leaving Sina in a few days, heading up the Zagros Mountains in search of some of Iran’s most extraordinary storytellers. But there were a few more adventures to be had before we parted. . . .

  Riding on the back of a hay cart, we made our way to the “Throne of Taqdis,” a ring of limestone walls around a tower of scaffolding, where the Nazis sent a team of archaeologists to search for the Holy Grail. It’s the only surviving building described in the Shahnameh—although sadly it doesn’t boast the beaver-skin roof, gold and turquoise tiles, or seats decorated with rams’ heads that Ferdowsi locates here. What it does have is a volcanic lake, fed by the thermal springs bubbling underneath it, where we dipped our feet beneath the burned brick ruins of an ancient fire temple.

  Farther north, traveling among Kurdish villages, we hooked up with another of Sina’s friends and set out in his dodgy Paykan to find the inscription of a tenth-century Kurdish chieftain on an old lichen-crusted bridge. We found the bridge (though sadly not the inscription, which had been removed to the nearby Khorramabad Museum), but the car broke down on the way back and we had to catch a lift with a noble-looking Kurd in a pickup, who had a tasseled turban and a thick twirling mustache like the man on cans of Pringles.

  And something else I remember, one of those beautiful, isolated moments that occasionally happen on a journey: being woken up by the reedy whistle of a flute in the early hours of the morning in a house in Khorramabad. Sitting there in the courtyard, on the step outside the guest room, was a beautiful girl, whose eyelashes might have been likened by a medieval poet to “the blades of Kabuli daggers.” As soon as she saw me, the flute popped out of her mouth and she wrapped herself up in a scarf. Here in the provinces, the codes of conduct were stricter than in North Tehran, and there was no question of talking to the daughter of the house.

  5

  Minstrels in the Mountains

  Iran. April.

  “Get up!”

  I was lying on a rug-covered floor high up in the Yellow Mountain—one of the highest points of the Zagros Mountains, which run down the west of Iran like a backbone. I should have known this was a dangerous place to be—after all, I’d been warned: “Undoubtedly they rob,” wrote the nineteenth-century explorer Isabella Bird about the Bakhtiari people who inhabit this area, “when and where they can, and they have a horrid habit of stripping their victims, leaving them with but one under garment, if they do not kill them.” The point of a pistol was staring me in the face, and the fellow on the other end looked like he meant serious business.

  “I want to kill you,” he hissed.

  He wasn’t even going to let me have a last request. He pulled the trigger and I went down. It was the fourth time I’d died that day.

  Fortunately, the pistol was made out of plastic and my assailant was four-year-old Behzad, whose grandfather happened to be my host. What a fantastic place! Sina had taken the bus back to Tehran to prepare for next term, while I traveled on alone, passing a few lazy days in the riverbank teahouses of Esfahan before riding up the mountains and stumbling into the village of Deh Cheshmeh, with my backpack and a phone number scribbled down by a friend of the Professor’s.

  “Mr. Nicholas,” announced Behzad’s grandfather, Khamandar, on my first night, “you stay for a day or a year, it is no difference!”

  Deh Cheshmeh is an idyll, thick with the gurgle of its streams and the cries of the swifts wheeling over the roofs, full of hearty shouts as men with fat red cheeks hail each other through the windshields of their beat-up Paykans and carry firewood down the muddy alleys. At the back of the village, the cliffs raise a protective tower, a waterfall crashing down between hanging spears of ice. A stone victory slab is set beside the “Old Cave,” recording the triumph of the Bakhtiari chieftain, Sardar-e Assad, who marched on Tehran in 1909 and caused the abdication of the shah; and on the side of a nearby street stands a carved stone lion, the traditional gravestone for a Bakhtiari warrior.

  Back in Tehran, I’d heard all sorts of tales about the Bakhtiaris and their wild ways. They were said to be fond of storytelling and to have retained customs long lost everywhere else; as well as being huge aficionados of the Shahnameh. I was eager to meet them. But Bakhtiari country wasn’t the kind of place where you could just turn up and ask for the nearest hostel. I needed a calling card—and once again, it was Ferdowsi who provided it.

  Khamandar and his family lived in a rickety old brick house just off the village’s main street, where the railings teetered off the third-story balcony like they weren’t sure to which floor they belonged, and carpets lay scuffed and frayed on the splintering floorboards. Everywhere there was rust and dust and cracked tiles, and when you ventured outside through the abandoned ground floor, it was like you were wading through a ship that’s got itself stuck on the mud-flats. But no household could ever have been as warm.

  I stayed for a fortnight, and when I wasn’t dancing with Khamandar’s youngest, flute-playing Roozbeh, mock-wrestling with one of his brothers, or being shot at by Behzad’s space gun, I spent my time with the fourth son, Shahrooz. He was a plump, round-faced music graduate, who made his living from reciting at public ceremonies like weddings and funerals and was working on a book about Bakhtiari folklore. He was wonderful company, full of information about the local customs, and like so many Iranians, he had a strong line in bawdy jokes. We would often sit together over a paraffin stove on the top floor—which was where the men of the house had their hangout (the women—Shahrooz’s mother and a solitary sister—would always be found on the floor below, surrounded by the ingredients for the next meal). There, we would drink tea served by whoever was the youngest brother in the room and discuss Bakhtiari funeral traditions or the nomadic chants Shahrooz had recorded in the mountains. The Simpsons would be playing on the satellite TV, or sometimes something more salacious; once, when a cousin of Shahrooz’s had been fiddling with the satellite dish, we spent the night watching naked Dutch mud wrestling.

  “But these women must have male relatives!” exclaimed Shahrooz’s cousin, seizing a moral high ground that had hardly been conspicuous when he was tuning the TV. “How can you allow them to behave in this way?”

  I shrugged: Apparently I was responsible for the moral shortcomings of an entire continent.

  “Shut up, you arse-baiter!” yelle
d Shahrooz with a laugh, launching a drumstick at his cousin and throwing a collegial arm around my shoulder. “Nicholas isn’t here for this filth, are you? He’s here for Ferdowsi. Now go on, there are plenty of dogs outside if you’re getting excited. Me and Nicholas have got poetry to read!”

  “When Ferdowsi had completed the Shahnameh,” records the eleventh-century scribe Nizami of Samarkand, “it was transcribed by Ali Daylam and recited by Abu Dulaf . . . and Ferdowsi, taking with him Abu Dulaf, set out for Ghazni.” Abu Dulaf would be the first in a long line of re citers—Shahnameh-khwans (or “readers of the Shahnameh”), as they would come to be known. No other poet was recited so widely that his reciters spawned their own title: proof of the high status of the Shahnameh in Iranian culture.

  Even in Ferdowsi’s own era, there were enough Shahnameh-khwans for the name to be commonly used. They are mentioned by one of the poet’s rivals, the lyricist Farrukhi, and despite his initial disregard for the Shahnameh, Sultan Mahmud is said to have had a Shahnameh-khwan of his own. According to a preface in a medieval Shahnameh manuscript, “Sultan Mahmud was so fond of him as to always keep his company.”

  Over the years, the Shahnameh-khwans flourished. The fifteenth century found them sitting on a chair and holding an axe. In the seventeenth, the German traveler Olearius noted them standing on stepstools and carrying small canes. More Western visitors spotted them, like the Victorian diplomat Sir Lewis Pelly, who saw them on a “rude dais” in the bazaar, and in the twentieth century, Virginia Woolf’s lover, the poet Vita Sackville-West, observed a dervish with a “high hat and orange nails and fierce little eyes flashing out of his hairy face” narrating epic tales in Esfahan.