Drinking Arak Off an Ayatollah's Beard

by Nicholas Jubber

  But where were the Shahnameh-khwans now? From the moment mobile cinemas started trundling through Iran’s villages in the 1930s, the nation’s original entertainers had gone into decline.

  “In the past the audience for our stories was huge,” declared Abbas Zariri, one of the country’s most celebrated twentieth-century reciters. “In those days the Western musicians and the fake heroes of foreign movies had not mesmerized the population yet, and the people naturally liked the national stories and considered them important. . . . Now our art form is approaching dissemination. I have no hopes for the future, nor do I see a way to save this art.”

  For several weeks, I had been on a Shahnameh-khwan hunt. Having encountered so many characters and stories from Ferdowsi’s epic—in ancient ruins and religious festivals, in paintings, a puppet opera, and everyday proverbs—I wondered if it could be heard as it was originally intended: in public recital. The way it was heard by Sultan Mahmud when Ferdowsi brought his epic to the royal court of Ghazni all those centuries ago.

  So I’d been scouring the teahouses of downtown Tehran, asking if there were likely to be any recitals. The odd fortune-teller came in—aged women with skin like walnut bark and mirror shards in their hands—and there were often paintings of scenes from the Shahnameh hanging on the walls. But there was no sign of the reciters themselves. I asked on Molavi Street, as the bazaaris scooped out painted chicks from cardboard boxes and sold scraps of paper, picked out by parakeets, on which were written 650-year-old verses by Hafez, which people would take as portents of their future. And when I traveled outside Tehran, every time I stopped at a teahouse I would ask again. But the response was always the same. A palm was slapped against the other and rubbed down the fingers: the Iranian’s emphatic sign of completion: “Finished!”

  Apparently, the Shahnameh-khwans were dead.

  “I have 1,650 verses in my heart!”

  In a butcher’s shop in the small town of Farsian, where gambrels hung over our heads and soggy mounds of fat and bones were piled in buckets at our feet, Shahrooz introduced me to Rahim e-Yadullahi. The hand stretching over the counter was coarse and sticky, as you’d expect a butcher’s hand to be: He’d just finished disemboweling a sheep.

  “I have been reciting the Shahnameh from the age of seven,” said Rahim.

  He smoothed his baggy black trousers, cleared a spot on the counter for me to place my Dictaphone, and sat down on a stool.

  “I learned it at school,” he said, “along with the Quran. When I was ten I was invited to a party at ‘the Old Cave,’ which is where our people often go when we have celebrations. I read from the Shahnameh in front of many people and they liked me.”

  His favorite story was about the mighty hero Rostam,39 who often turns up, like Clint Eastwood in an old western, to succor the good people of ancient Iran when all other hope is lost. Here, he faces a steel-clad warrior called Ashkabus, to whom “arrows were just like the wind on his tunic.” It was a perfect story for someone like Rahim—a macho tussle between two daredevil warriors, a tale that needed to be expressed in a big, earthy baritone, by a reciter with a chest big enough to provide one. There were several customers in the shop, but they all fell silent as Rahim took a theatrical, air-swooshing draw of breath. Next, his tongue started rattling, like the kettle drum to which Ferdowsi compares Ashkabus’s own. He prodded the air with one hand, hauling back his fist as Rostam strung his bow, rapping the other hand on his thigh to count the beat. It was a tough, macho tone, occasionally softened as the warriors take stock, then plunging into the fray at such a tempo you could almost see Rostam throwing himself into his opponent behind the counter. Drawing out the last beat of each line and hurtling through to the climax, Rahim filled up the shop with his rolling delivery, reciting more than fifty couplets without ever hesitating to remember a line, pausing only once, to wipe the saliva off his lips.

  More men were gathering in the shop—some after joints of meat, but most of them drawn by Rahim’s voice. As Rostam’s spearlike arrow was plucked from his victim’s breast, all eyes turned to the area around Rahim’s feet, as if the defeated Ashkabus were lying there in front of us. A deep-pitched chorus resounded among them: They were pronouncing the salavat—“Peace be upon Mohammed and Mohammed’s lineage”—the Shia alternative to a round of applause. Unlike the Professor and many of the intellectuals I’d met in Tehran, the Bakhtiaris found no contradiction between their Islamic identity and the pre-Islamic legends narrated by Ferdowsi. It was all mixed up, like the sheep’s entrails in the bucket. They turned to each other, their faces glowing, and gasps came out along with their praise.

  “The Shahnameh is the best poem we have,” said Rahim, leaning toward me on his stool. “Some people, I know they say it is old, what is its purpose for now? But they do not understand its power.”

  I wondered what he meant by “power”—something in his tone suggested he wasn’t talking about literary effect.

  “You want an example? You want to know about the power of the Shahnameh?” He beamed at his audience, drawing out a murmur of anticipation. “Then let me tell you about our disputes,” he said.

  I thought he was going to tell me about a petty argument—perhaps, if a customer was querying the price, Rahim would shut him up with a line from the epic. But, as the Shahnameh-khwan continued, it became clear the “disputes” he was talking about were on a far more spectacular scale.

  “Five years ago,” he explained, “there was a war between two families over who owned some land in a place called Filabad. One of the families, they were related to me, so they asked me to come over to their house and recite for them. There were a hundred people there, all gathered together in the house, getting ready to fight. They needed something to inspire them, to make them ready. So I recited from ‘Rostam and Sohrab’—that’s the best story for getting people motivated. When I had finished reciting, you could see in their faces they were ready to take part in battle, and they went out onto the plain with sticks and fought against the other family. My recital, I can tell you, it made them ten times stronger! The other side, we scattered them like chaff!”

  Rahim laughed as he remembered the occasion, as if it had only been a playground scrap. Lowering a sheep’s carcass from one of the gambrels, he started cutting a joint for one of his customers.

  “No one was killed,” he continued, “thanks to God, and only five people had to go to hospital. When the leader of the other side came up to me afterward, you know what he said?”

  He shook his head, chuckling as he carved.

  “He said, ‘Why did you recite the Shahnameh? You made those people very powerful and they hit me very hard.’ And he had a scar on his head to prove it!”

  Rahim’s account of the battle at Filabad was proof of how alive the Shahnameh can be, and what a dramatic effect it can have on people’s behavior—even if it wasn’t being used for an especially peaceful purpose. Over the next few days, Shahrooz introduced me to many more Shahnameh-khwans, who all had their own stories of how the epic mattered to them. They lived in different parts of the Bakhtiari province, on farmsteads where the sweet smell of manure followed us up the rattling iron steps into their guest rooms. Their wives and daughters would rearrange their chadors to keep them from slipping and slink off to the kitchens to make the tea, while the shiny buttonlike eyes of their grandchildren flashed in the doorjambs. Like Rahim, many spoke of the Shahnameh as a motivation for action. One of them, an octogenarian called Hajji Murad, who had once performed for the shah, said he used to recite from the epic when he was reaping his crops.

  “We would be out in the fields,” he explained, “and everyone was tired. So I recited from the Shahnameh and at once everybody would work much faster. If it wasn’t for the Shahnameh, we would have been out in those fields a lot longer!”

  The idea that a medieval poem could act so directly on people—a Mr. Motivator of the farms—was incredible: Imagine British farmers accompanying the harvest to renditions of t
he Canterbury Tales. I’d expected to hear comparisons between the poem’s stories and people’s own experiences—stories similar to Reza’s motivation for painting Zahhak. What surprised and enthralled me was the direct association between Ferdowsi’s epic and the way people actually behaved . For the Bakhtiari, Ferdowsi’s verses had the same effect as a performance-enhancing drug.

  The most remarkable of the Shahnameh-khwans I met was Mohammed Bahdarvandi. A lean man in his fifties, with a whiskery, ferretlike face, he sat in his armchair, behind a cloud of cigarette smoke and tea steam. Twenty years before, he explained, he had been a soldier in the long, terrible war with Iraq.

  “We were on the border at Shahramshahr,” he said, “about a hundred of us in the division. We had to fight a lot—if we stopped concentrating even for a moment they would wipe us out. I remember filling up my rucksack with grenades and crossing the bridges the Arabs had built, running through the marshes with our rusty old Kalashnikovs.

  “When we were in the trenches, we would be leaning over the sandbags with our Kalashes, shooting at the enemy, and you could hear the sound of the bullets all around you. Sometimes the enemy got close and we needed encouragement, so I knew what would work. I recited from the Shahnameh. I raised my voice as loud as I could, so everyone could hear it over the sound of the fighting, and I recited from ‘Rostam and Sohrab.’ I recited from other stories too, but ‘Rostam and Sohrab’ was always the best one for getting people in the mood. I would be shooting at the same time, trying to concentrate on my Kalash and looking out for the enemy, reciting maybe twenty or thirty couplets at once. And I have to tell you, there was a great difference. The men became so much stronger—they were inspired!”

  I thought of Toghral Arsalan, prince of the Seljuk Turks in the eleventh century, who is said to have quoted from the Shahnameh as he rode out to battle. But that was centuries ago, soon after the verses had been composed. With Mohammed, the talk was of burning tanks and trenches filled with corpses, of barbed-wire entanglements and minefields, of mortar dropping like rain and a mustard bomb that put him in hospital for several months. He was speaking about a modern, brutal, technologically sophisticated war. Yet he and his comrades still drew inspiration from the thousand-year-old verses of Ferdowsi.

  Reciting long-ago stories is hardly strange when it comes to the Iran-Iraq war. The basijis, who now have a high profile as the regime’s moral enforcers, rose to prominence for their chanting about the seventh-century Islamic hero Imam Hossain, and the war propaganda machine insisted the men at the front were inspired by the examples of the early Shia martyrs. Journalists have recounted legions of stories about men who were coaxed to extraordinary bravery by these religious narratives. What Mohammed’s story showed was that there were more shades to this war than are usually assumed—the national stories had their place alongside the religious tales, as a powerful motivation for the soldiers in the trenches.

  “Because of my voice,” said Mohammed, “they always asked me to recite at the death ceremonies. I read the Nawheh mourning prayer, and many times I also read from Shahnameh. There is so much in Ferdowsi—things to make you angry, things to help when you are sad. When I was reading Shahnameh, everyone listened. We were fighting for Iran, so what is better to read than the book of our history? I remember once, the Iraqis attacked and we shot some of them and dragged the wounded back to our camp. They shouted, ‘God is Great! Khomeini help us!’ and we made them our prisoners. When they heard me reciting from Shahnameh, they became very scared. They didn’t understand Persian, but they knew it was epic poetry and it made us strong. They didn’t need to know the words to understand that!”

  Staying in Bakhtiari country was a constant adventure. One day Shahrooz tossed a Beretta pistol into the back of his brother’s old Paykan, along with a microphone and a speaker system.

  “Is that really necessary?” I asked.

  “Of course!” Shahrooz threw an exasperated arm in the air. “When the bandits attack, you want to fight them with your hands?”

  In the event, the biggest obstacle was the ice: We had to stick grapnels to the wheels to steer ourselves through, emerging after half a day of motorized toboganning at a mud-brick farmstead near the town of Bazoft. There in the yard, protected from the snow by a cotton shroud, was a corpse. It was lying on a tripod of logs, with a cockerel perched on the dead man’s ankles. A string was tied to the bird’s claws and its wattles were vibrating as the other end was wrapped around the dead man’s feet. It jerked forward to take in its audience, its buttonlike eyes expanding, as if it had been waiting all day for its cue and was determined not to let anyone down.

  “This is an old custom,” said Shahrooz. “It’s from the time when people here were Zoroastrian. They believed the cockerel would protect the dead person’s soul from the devil, because a cockerel stays awake all night.”

  Even though the Bakhtiari people are now Muslim, the pre-Islamic traditions had been preserved—part of the same impulse that made the stories of the Shahnameh so popular in this region.

  A large group of men had gathered around the cockerel, but the cold gradually drove them back, biting through their black-and-white lamb’s-felt coats. Only one of them remained: the dead man’s youngest son, squatting in front of the corpse. His grief lit up his face, which was red from the slaps as he struck his cheeks. We were called inside to eat, and as I turned back, he was still crouching by the wooden tripod, his hair pasty with dust and his tears pouring out between his fingers.

  A Bakhtiari funeral is a spectacle, full of color and noise, in which everyone has a part to play. We set off at dawn, about fifty of us, in two clearly segregated columns of men and women. Among the latter, several tossed flatbreads into the air, which scattered on the grass like cow pies.

  “You know what those are for?” asked Shahrooz, jostling me along with a hand on my arm. “They are to distract the dogs of the devil so they don’t disturb the corpse.”

  Had Ferdowsi himself been walking alongside us now, much of the detail—the sheep running after the corpse as it was carried out of the farmstead; the division of the men and women, the former entrusted with the corpse, while the latter did most of the keening; the corpse itself, wrapped in a blanket and raised by three pallbearers—would have been familiar. Only the Kalashnikov, wielded by a man at the front of the cortege and blasted in the air like a trumpet, would have knitted the poet’s brow.

  The tenth-century writer al-Hamadani describes “a house whose master had just died . . . It was filled with men . . . whose shirts terror had rent; and with women who had unloosed their hair, and were beating their breasts, cutting their necklaces and slapping their cheeks.” I didn’t see any necklaces, but some of the women around me were slapping their hands against their chests, and when the procession came to a halt, many of them struck their faces. Some of them were so immersed in grief they had scratched their cheeks, which were slit by dark red lines as if they’d been attacked with razor blades.

  Boulders and scree forced a zig-zag down the hill to a river valley, where the dead man’s brother and nephew washed the corpse in the stream. Squatting on the bank nearby, the women raised their voices for a ritual song. Their pitch was softer than before, the syllables flowing like they were keeping time to the stream; as if grief’s initial stomach punch was mutating into something more mild and accepting, but no less unhappy.

  Above us loomed a hillock, where embossed headstones peeked out through the gorse. Here, Shahrooz strapped his speaker to the branches of a tamarisk tree. His song was nasal—a soothing tune spinning around the hillock, drawing the mourners in for the final ritual. Reciting “God is great,” they raised their hands in the air, then crammed by a freshly dug pit as the corpse was lowered and the earth piled on top. I retreated to the back, where an old woman was fitting a pile of joss sticks into the niche of a headstone. She struck a match and as a box of dates was passed around, to symbolize the end of the ceremony, the aromatic smoke gently dispersed among
the slowly diminishing cries.

  Events like the funeral, and my meetings with the Shahnameh-khwans , had made my visit to Bakhtiari country a fascinating experience. But there were other days when there was little to do. These I would often spend with Shahrooz’s older brothers, Mehran and Faraz. They both had their own houses a few roads down from the family pile, where they often had me over for supper.

  “I’ve got just the film for you tonight!” said Faraz, lying down on the carpet of his living room one evening, while his son Behzad was scrambling about with his space gun.

  He switched on the video player, nodding to the overture as we settled over a bowl of okra stew. On the screen in front of us was the mighty hero Rostam, riding at the head of an army under the high peaks of ancient Iran. We were watching The Timeless Story of Rostam and Sohrab, a film version of the tale from the Shahnameh. It was made in the 1970s by the Tajikistani film director Boris Kimiyagarov, and I had told Faraz many times how much I would love to see it.

  Like Shahrooz, Faraz had plenty of contact with the Shahnameh-khwans . Working as a teacher and theater director, he’d been involved three years earlier in organizing a province-wide Shahnameh festival.

  “It was here in Deh Cheshmeh,” he explained. “It was a big success and more than a thousand people came, but afterward a mullah complained. He said, ‘We have martyrs from the war with Iraq, so it is not suitable to have festivals.’ Then, the following year, we organized the festival again. But the Head of Prayer in Farsian told us not to do this. He came to stop the festival, but three thousand people had come to hear the Shahnameh-khwans and he was frightened they would attack him, so he ran away. When we wanted to organize the festival again last year, we were forbidden by the municipality. Some of the mullahs, they think the Shahnameh is all about the shahs, so they are frightened.”