Drinking Arak Off an Ayatollah's Beard

by Nicholas Jubber

  I had come across this conflict before—in the struggle of the Zoroastrians, for example, and the decay at Persepolis: the tussle between the mullahs and the national culture. I would encounter it several times again. Each time, it drew me closer to Ferdowsi’s epic, more conscious of the Shahnameh’s significance to the country’s blazing cultural conflict. And more angry at the way Ferdowsi—the old, broken-backed poet, wandering over the Afghan wastes—was treated by the miserly Sultan Mahmud.

  I might not have been able to attend a festival, but the number of Shahnameh-khwans I had met certainly made up for it. After struggling to find any in Tehran, it was as if I had been given the secret code to a magic cave: There were enough Shahnameh-khwans here to build an army.

  But there was one snag, one little drawback that made me wonder if the Shahnameh-khwan tradition could genuinely survive: All the Shahnameh-khwans I had met were over fifty. Was the trade of reciting from Ferdowsi’s epic really on its last legs? On my first night in Deh Cheshmeh, Shahrooz had shown me a video of Reza Heidari, whom he considered the greatest Shahnameh-khwan in the region.

  “Once,” he said, “a mullah was preaching in the mosque when Mr. Heidari started reciting. His voice was so strong, you know what happened? The mullah fell off his pulpit!”

  But Heidari had died last year, and the holes left by people like him were becoming harder to fill.

  “The young generation don’t have our interest,” said another Heidari, Mohammed, whose house Shahrooz took me to one afternoon. “When I was a child we would sit around the oil lamp and listen to stories from the Shahnameh. We were interested in our ancient stories. But now the young people want to play computer games and watch TV. And in their school textbooks there isn’t as much Shahnameh as there was before the revolution, so they don’t learn about it as much.”

  I wanted to find a young Shahnameh-khwan—to find out if the Shahnameh still had the power to stir a new generation. I felt this was an important issue. To people like Mohammed Heidari, the conflict wasn’t just between the mullahs’ regime and the national culture, it was a three-way contest that included the new entertainment coming in from the West, and the latter was at least as much of a threat to the national culture. But if there was a young Shahnameh-khwan, somebody for whom the old stories still mattered—it would suggest that the culture championed by Ferdowsi hadn’t yet run out of steam.

  Whenever I asked Shahrooz, he would shrug, reminding me of what Heidari had said:

  “It is the old Shahnameh-khwans who are interesting.”

  Perhaps the Shahnameh-khwans really were heading for extinction. I hoped this wasn’t so and kept asking if there were any younger reciters, but it wasn’t until my last evening with Shahrooz’s family that I was offered a chink of light. Big Dad Khamandar was pouring out the curdled milk, while his daughter passed the dishes from the kitchen, when Shahrooz came bursting into the room.

  “You still want to meet a young Shahnameh-khwan?” he asked.

  “Yes, of course!”

  “So tomorrow it happens!”

  Another mud-brick house, with potted plants and cushions against the walls. Sitting there, cross-legged on the carpet, was sixteen-year-old Mohammed Abbas. As we stepped through the door, he leaped to his feet, pressing a hand against his chest. His eyes were big and bright, but his face was pale, as if he spent a lot of time indoors, and it lengthened as he sat down, steadying his hands on the edge of a huge brown leather-bound Shahnameh. He was the grandson of Hajji Murad, one of the Shahnameh-khwans we’d already met, and after talking to the Hajji, Shahrooz had been granted permission to meet with Mohammed.

  As with the other Shahnameh-khwans, there was little variation in his tone. But rather than the military beat of Rahim the butcher, Mohammed’s had a nasal, mystical flavor—more incantation than chant, intoned rather than announced. He sank deep into the stresses, wheeling around the verse. The pitch rose suddenly, or fell in a dying cadence, or he held onto the last vowel for an age, the muscles of his face tense and his mouth almost closed, as if the death of the hero Sohrab was a physical object in his mouth and he was trying to keep it from getting out.

  “When Mohammed recited at the Old Cave,” said his father, “many people cried, even the famous scholar Dr. Junaidi.”

  “I also became sad,” said Mohammed, “because I was reciting a sad story. But,” he added, with a teenager’s defiant cock of the chin, “I never cry.”

  “Do your school friends read the Shahnameh?” I asked.

  “I am the only one. Sometimes in class the teacher says, ‘recite Shahnameh,’ and some of my classmates cry. I like to read Shahnameh . I learned it from my grandfather and I want to read it in the future. I will be reading it even when I am eighty!”

  He smiled as he said this, and I couldn’t help but smile back. Here, as much as Reza’s Zahhak painting, was proof of how alive Ferdowsi’s epic can be. His peers might be into computer games and TV, but I felt sure that Mohammed’s interest in the Shahnameh was genuine—he expressed it, after all, in the emotive cadences of his voice.

  As he dipped once again into the recital, everyone sat back to listen, mesmerized by the magic of the thousand-year-old words—the “power” Rahim the butcher had spoken about. It galvanized the fighters at Filabad, it helped Hajji Murad to reap his crops, it spurred Mohammed Bahdarvandi and his fellow soldiers in the war with Iraq, and a few months later, it would inspire me too, to take the sun-blistered road to Afghanistan. . . .

  PART TWO

  AFGHANISTAN

  “You who for others’ torment do not care Cannot the name of human rightly bear.”

  —SA’DI, THE ROSE GARDEN

  6

  The Prisoner Poets

  Herat. September.

  “The war began here!”

  I rub my eyes and try to concentrate. Thanks to the dogs, acting out King Kong versus Godzilla under my window at the Hotel Successful, I am in no state for an early-morning debate. But fortunately my breakfast partner isn’t looking for input.

  “How can the people tolerate a foreign power?” he exclaims, smearing cherry jam onto his bread.

  The crumbs dribble down his beard, which is performing the function of a napkin, collecting anything that hasn’t made it into his mouth.

  “So the people rose against the Soviets,” he continues, “and they killed the Communist agents and their families.”

  “Their families?”

  “Of course! Then the Soviets told the army commander to punish the people, but the commander was Ismail Khan. Ha! He was no Russian donkey! He took his men to the hills, and the war began!”40

  Standing in the plaster-shower of my room’s balcony after breakfast, I have a view right across Herat. You can tell it’s been through a fight. Not just because of the roadwide craters, the walls perforated like cheese biscuits and the belch of the jackhammers, but because of the very fact you can see right across it: multi-stories don’t last long in a war zone. This means I can take in the Paropamisus Mountains to the north and the musalla41 minarets—a copse of towers I passed last night on the way into the city. Still patched in parts with tiling as blue as the sky into which they have been leaning since the fifteenth century, they stand about eighty feet high. But what’s surprising is that they stand at all. They are characteristic of the city: Although much of it was smashed up by the Russians, the mujahideen, and the Taliban, its landmarks have been blessed with surprisingly good luck.

  Red woolen tassels swing off the bridles as tongas clip-clop past the Friday Mosque. Auto-rickshaws tuk-tuk past the florists’ shops and burka stores, a clatter to the chime of the bicycle bells, the buzzing of drills and the squawk from the chickens sold in plastic cages on the sidewalks. Medieval Herat’s most prolific export—grapes42—inspire a boom from the vendors, wheeling their produce on handcarts that squeak among the sellers of giant pumpkins and bright purple egg-plants, while on the roof terraces above them, soldiers silently tote their Kalashnikovs as the
y watch out for insurrection. Rising across a dried-up moat behind them, with fat round towers swelling at its corners, is the citadel. Plastic kites swoop among its ramparts, one of them trapping itself between the battlements as a small boy tugs helplessly at his string.

  This is the hub of old Herat. When Ferdowsi came by a thousand years ago, en route to the court of Sultan Mahmud at Ghazni, it’s here he would have stayed. Although the citadel has been rebuilt, it is in the same location as in the poet’s era, when Herat boasted “a castle with ditches . . . in the center of the town,” according to the tenth-century geographer Ibn Hawkal, “fortified with very strong walls.” Nearby is the Friday Mosque—another building that’s been rebuilt but is still in the same spot. I sit down on a cool marble ledge in its central courtyard and start jotting in my notebook.

  Men wearing turbans long enough to stitch a shroud are carrying their shoes as they march up the courtyard and prostrate themselves in a hall to the left of the main prayer niche. The tiles around them conjure a Persian garden—flowers, tendrils and fronds twisting up to the lancelike ligatures of the holy lettering, while geometric patterns swathe the minarets in the ceramic counterpart of a Persian carpet. It’s making me dizzy, so I jump off the ledge and set out to do some fieldwork.

  When Ferdowsi “alighted in Herat,” according to the scribe Nizami of Samarkand, he stayed “at the shop of (the poet) Azraqi’s father, Ismail the Bookseller.” He would have spent much of his time among the literati, and I’m hoping to do the same. Although Afghanistan’s political capital has shifted over the centuries, Herat has always been its cultural heart, beating with the lines of its poets and pumping out the new techniques to the rest of the country.

  There was a city here long before Alexander the Great turned up. He had it rebuilt, as “Alexandria of the Aryans,” and when Sultan Mahmud was taking charge of the region more than a millennium later, it was the capital of Khorasan, a playboy’s playground where Mahmud’s son had naughty pictures painted on the walls of his palace. But it was in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, under the Timurids—the dynasty started by the “world-shaker,” Tamerlane or “Timur the Lame”—that Herat reached its political and cultural peak.

  It’s hard to decide what or who was responsible for the city’s vitality at this time. Several fingers point toward Tamerlane’s daughter-in-law, Gowhar Shad, the “Happy Jewel,” who organized the construction of a college and mosque near the musalla minarets and whose influence in public matters suggests women were treated with a lot less contempt than they would be five hundred years later under the Taliban. Not only were mosques and minarets being raised: The court historian Mirkhwand was constructing an enormously influential “History of the World,” while the miniaturist painter Kamaluddin Behzad was running a world-famous academy. A master of light and dark, he soaked his paintings in the rich colors with which Persian culture is associated (as well as the spiritual imagery of Sufi mysticism). And when he wasn’t conjuring princesses in silver-leaf pools or ancient shahs in fields of malachite, he would mix with the cultural high society of the day—poets like Abdur-Rahman Jami and Alishir Navoi. Herat was so full of scribblers at this time that the latter objected, “You can’t stretch a leg without poking a poet in the arse.”

  Wandering through the cracked, dusty streets of Herat today, it’s hard to imagine the vibrant city of Behzad and Navoi, and even harder to imagine such a richness of culture ever being revived. In 1507, a tribe of Uzbeks came raiding from the north; just three years later, the Persian shah Ismail Safavi weighed in, drinking a victory toast from the Uzbek chieftain’s skull. Herat would never be at the center of things again—at least, not until the anti-Soviet uprising and Ismail Khan’s insurrection in 1979—the event described by my napkin-bearded breakfast partner. But even though recent years can hardly compete with the shining light of the Happy Jewel, I’ve heard that the Russian tanks and cluster bombs haven’t entirely snuffed this culture out. So I stroll past a row of bookshops behind the Hotel Successful, looking to find out what is left of it.

  “We were open even under the Taliban!”

  Ustad (or “Master”) Rajey, the gray-bearded chairman of Herat’s official “Literary Society,” is sitting on a back-buttoned sofa with a glass of green tea. The society, he says, has been around since 1932, when Afghanistan was run by a king.43 None of the tempests of the country’s turbulent late twentieth-century history have managed to finish it off—not the fall of the last king, Zahir Shah, in a coup, nor the Russian invasion, nor the civil war and the rise of the Taliban,44 although it wasn’t at its most active under the latter.

  “Women weren’t allowed,” he explains, “and you couldn’t write about politics. Or,” he adds, scratching his beard with a sigh, “print photos. Or write about foreign languages.”

  Those who did tended to find themselves on the wrong end of a Taliban whip. But one subject you could write about was the Shahnameh , and Master Rajey has published many articles about it.

  “Ferdowsi didn’t just write about the history of Iran,” he says. “It is the history of Afghanistan too, of the Aryan people and our Aryan culture. In fact, many of the most famous stories take place here, not in Iran. The people of Afghanistan love Shahnameh. In the winter, people sit in the villages and the Shahnameh-khwans recite the stories.”

  This talk about “Aryans” has recurred throughout my journey. “Iran” comes from the same root as “Aryan” and refers to the Aryan roots of the ancient Iranian people—migrants from the Eurasian steppes who emerged on the Iranian plains around 4,000 years ago.45 The Persian-speaking Afghans, who dominate the west and north of Afghanistan, share this root—and therefore the stories told in the Shahnameh. In one of the epic’s most romantic stories, the princess of Kabul lets down a tower’s length of hair so her lover can climb up to meet her—a parallel with Rapunzel, whose story was unearthed by the Brothers Grimm from Germany’s stock of ancient Aryan tales. Another story, the tale of Rostam and Sohrab (which I saw at the puppet opera in Tehran), shares a remarkable amount of detail with the Irish legend of Cú Chulainn, who also tricks his unknown son and kills him. It’s no coincidence that the names of Ireland (or Eire) and Iran come from the same root. Long before Hitler made Aryanism unpalatable, it suggested a shared ancestry spanning the Indo-European world.

  For me, here in Herat, what this talk of Aryanism emphasizes most of all is the close ethnic relationship between Iranians and Afghans. Both of Afghanistan’s dominant tribal groups—the Pashtuns and the Persian-speaking Tajiks—trace their origins to the Aryans (hence the national airline is called Ariana), although this didn’t stop them from falling out in the brutal civil war that scorched the country throughout the 1990s. Pashtun commanders burned the homes of Persian-speaking civilians, whose only crime was not being Pashtun, while the allies of the revered Persian-speaking commander, Ahmed Shah Massoud, raped Pashtun women in reply. To many people in Herat, what made the Taliban especially obnoxious was not their repressive laws (as several of the city’s literati pointed out, the Persian-speaking leaders such as Ismail Khan were only a little less severe) but the fact they were Pashtun; and they made themselves especially unpopular by banning the speaking of Persian in public.

  The link between Iran and Afghanistan is emphasized again when I step off a dusty alley, inside the metal gate of an elegant courtyard house. Sitting in a room at the top, spinning on a swivel chair in front of his computer, is a man with slicked-back hair and a leather jacket—like a rocker from the ’50s. He is Saeed Haqiqi, a correspondent for the BBC Persian Service, and also one of Herat’s most prominent poets.

  “Two hundred years ago,” he says, “the region of Khorasan was both Iran and Afghanistan. And we have people in Afghanistan who are living on this side of the border, but their relatives are on the other side. Our culture is the same.”

  It would certainly have been the same for Ferdowsi. For him, there would be no crossing between Iran and Afghanistan. Herat would be part o
f the same province as his own city, Tus, administered by the same governor—Amir Nasr, the brother of Sultan Mahmud. But it isn’t just geography that’s linked—so is time. As I talk to Haqiqi, I realize that whether we are talking about Ferdowsi’s era or now, the writers would still have difficulties to face.

  “The Taliban were such monsters,” exclaims Haqiqi, with a small tilt of his head. “They destroyed our library. In fact, the only books that were saved were the ones we moved before they could get to them. And if you wrote what you thought, you were in big trouble. There was one writer I knew who wrote about his ideas and he was given thirty lashes with a whip.”

  I wonder what the eleventh-century religious scholar Baghawi of Herat would think of this. “The ink of the learned is holier than the blood of the martyr,” he wrote, citing this as a saying of the Prophet Mohammed himself. Like the teachings of Jesus, misapplied by Crusaders and Conquistadors, Mohammed’s words have been twisted and abused by the very people who claim to be his closest followers. The ink of the learned is rarely deemed holy enough to spare their blood from being spilled.

  I think of Ferdowsi and the writers who suffered in his era. Men like the lyricist Farrukhi, who was for a long time one of Sultan Mahmud’s favorites, but ended his life in poverty; the polymath Ibn Sina, who was chased around the region for several years because news of Mahmud’s tempestuous attitude toward scholars had reached him before the sultan’s army; the scholar Biruni, who once spent six months in confinement for outsmarting the sultan.46 I think of the stories of Sultan Mahmud’s soldiers making bonfires of “heretical” books—which were matched a millennium later by the Taliban—and of the way by which writers in this area have always worked their way around censorship.