Drinking Arak Off an Ayatollah's Beard

by Nicholas Jubber

  “They were throwing our books out onto the streets,” said Munira Shahidi.

  She was a striking woman in middle age with a moon-shaped face where a pencil line of brow ran above her eyes. Her father had founded the Tajik National Opera and her grandfather was a local folk hero who fought against the Bolsheviks before ending his days in a Siberian gulag. This made her a name in Dushanbe, but it was her father’s legacy she followed, borne out by the drums and two-stringed dotars and the photographs of bards in striped chapan coats surrounding her—fragments of the native Persian culture she had fought to preserve:

  “When I saw the Melody Music Shop on fire—by maybe Islamic fundamentalists, but I don’t like to use those terms—I bought everything in the shop—for nothing, about two thousand rubles. There were translations from Tajik into European languages that were being thrown away in the library, and they were so dear to me, so I collected them.”

  While the war was being waged, she held poetry and musical gatherings in her father’s old house and set up classes for the local children.

  “I even had classes for small girls who couldn’t go to school,” she said. “Many of the mullahs said girls shouldn’t go to school, and many of them still say that. Sometimes parents would take their girls away from the classes and when I asked them why, they would give funny explanations like, ‘We don’t have any shoes.’”

  She shook her head as she spoke.

  “It is because the mullahs are badly educated,” she said, “because the Soviets banned Islamic education. But this is where intellectual Islam was born—here, in Central Asia.”69

  Spilling out of a lush green valley under the icy peaks of Mount Hissar, Dushanbe belies its setting. Flyovers lunge over the cement mounds and high-rise Soviet concrete blocks soar between them. It’s the architectural equivalent of an old hag in a beautiful ball gown. And in this respect, it’s a far cry from desert-wrapped Bukhara. Where the latter is a has-been, Dushanbe is the wannabe. It’s only been around for eighty-odd years, so it’s barely out of infancy, but it really wants to start making some noise, and the best way it’s found to attract our attention is its statues. They’re everywhere—sculpted from plaster, beaten out of bronze, molded from gold. And guess what era most of them are from. . . .

  You walk past the Writers’ Institute on Prospekt Rudaki (the former Prospekt Lenina, now named after the tenth-century poet) and you see Ibn Sina with a towel over his legs, Rudaki raising a book, and Ferdowsi himself, twisting his body to face the viewer, with a scroll in his hands. The same characters are enmarbled at the Ferdowsi Library, where the poet appears in a bust in the lobby and in a pair of gabillin rugs (based on the technique of the Gobelin tapestry-makers of sixteenth-century France), while his turbaned head has been fashioned out of verses from the Shahnameh in an ink sketch. And in a park named after Ferdowsi, the statue that once took the place of Lenin now holds his flame over the ice-cream stalls. It’s a medieval orientalist’s Disneyland.

  The most prominent of all the statues is in the middle of Prospekt Rudaki. Framed in a triumphal arch and raising a star-shaped scepter like an Olympian’s torch is Prince Ismail, ruler of the Samanid empire in the late ninth century. He soars over ordinary mortals, eleven meters of iridescent gold, looking less like an icon of Persian identity than a Greek god. Water, which couldn’t be coaxed out of the taps in the apartment I’d rented for the week, sprays in grotesque abundance from the fountains behind him, spewing over a succession of pools all the way to the Radio Centre. If you step too close, a policeman blows his whistle and ushers you away. It’s as if Prince Ismail is a deity (and a double for the Tajik president, Imamali Rakhmonov, whose portrait is set beside the prince’s in government buildings as part of a strategy to bask in the glory of the Samanids). But in a country where the monthly minimum wage is barely enough to buy half a sack of flour, the question niggles: How much did the statue cost?

  In 1999 President Rakhmonov placed a capsule of soil from Bukhara under the statue of Prince Ismail. This wasn’t just a token gesture: According to Khodai Sharifov, a scholar whom I met at the Writers’ Institute, members of the Tajik government frequently repeated Prince Ismail’s apocryphal slogan—“As long as I live, I am the wall of Bukhara.”

  “They want Bukhara and Samarkand to be part of the Tajik state,” Sharifov said, “because most of their citizens are ethnic Tajiks.”70

  So the statue is more than just a celebration of the past—more than just a nice old fellow from yesteryear for everyone to look at on their way to work. It’s a needle to jab at the Tajiks and keep the conflict with the Uzbeks alive.

  “I have a pain in my heart!” said Davra, a young Tajik scholar, sitting next to me in Bahriddin Aliev’s office. “The Uzbeks, they organized the civil war here so the Tajiks in Uzbekistan would not want to join us. But Bukhara is ours. It belongs to the Tajiks.”

  He clenched a fist and held it over the table.

  “Why did God create the Turks?” he hissed. “They aren’t even human; they are more like wolves!”

  I was intrigued by the Uzbek-Tajik conflict. The ghosts of the region’s past were being harnessed on both sides to help them in the battle for supremacy—a battle in which history and culture were as significant as territory. It was a playground scrap in which two fledgling states were fighting for their identities.

  For the Persian-speaking Tajiks, Ferdowsi and the Shahnameh were essential to this identity: Hence I came across the poet’s image—carved in busts, painted in murals, erected in statues—in all sorts of unexpected places in Dushanbe. But there was a sinister shadow over this Ferdowsi love, and when I met the scholar Ustad Valli Samad, I learned about the mighty superpower that had cast it.

  “I dedicate my life to Ferdowsi!” he announced.

  To reinforce his claim, an image of the poet, in his trademark tufted turban, was pinned to the lapel of his jacket. But this small, stooped Tajik scholar with a round, gnomelike head wasn’t just a Ferdowsi-phile. He also had a surprising affection for the Russians.

  “When the Tajik republic was created in the 1920s,” he said, sitting at a cloth-covered table in a café in downtown Dushanbe, “Stalin telegrammed the Tajik government and said the Shahnameh was the source of Tajik culture and tradition. The Shahnameh saved our culture and our language, because if it didn’t exist, the Turks and the Arabs would have destroyed the Tajik nation. This is why, when independence came in 1991, the people took off the Lenin monument and put Ferdowsi in its place.”

  His bulbous head dropped down as he dug into his satchel and pulled out a proof copy of a book he was writing: The Shahnameh in the Destiny of Chernishevsky.

  “It is based,” he said, “on my research in many cities. Chernishevsky was one of the first great Marxists. He wanted to save the Russian nation, and he saw a way to do this in the Shahnameh because it explains how to fight foreign invaders. When Chernishevsky read the story of Rostam and Sohrab to his students, he had tears in his eyes, his students too. When he was exiled to hard labor in Siberia, he wrote a poem about Ferdowsi. And under his influence, Karl Marx also became an admirer of Ferdowsi.”

  “Marx?”

  They hardly seemed natural bosom buddies. However much Ferdowsi might criticize the shahs, it’s not for having too much private property. But Ustad Valli had “proof.”

  “Do you know what Marx called his daughter?” he said. “Eleanor Tussy. After Tus, Ferdowsi’s hometown.”71

  If Ustad Valli was trying to suggest the founding fathers of Bolshevism had a genuine admiration for Persian culture, then another scholar insisted it was more about realpolitik.

  I had met Azim Malikov in Uzbekistan, in the city of Samarkand, the extraordinary metropolis built around the great blue tiled pishtaqs of the Timurids. An expert on ethnic identity, he criticized many of his fellow Uzbek historians for their obedience to government ideology. Unlike many of them, he acknowledged the Persian/Tajik identity of the scholars who flourished in the Samanid era, and p
ointed out that Turkic tribes were only beginning to push into Central Asia in this period, sparking battles with the Samanid army.

  “After the fall of the Samanid empire,” he said (which happened at the very end of the tenth century—many of its lands were sucked up by the Ghaznavid empire of Sultan Mahmud), “Tajiks and Turks were starting to assimilate. By the end of the medieval period they were mixed up and getting on pretty well.”

  Blood was no longer being shed because blood was being mixed.

  “But in the nineteenth century,” he continued, “Persian- and Turkic-speaking people fought together against the Russians. So the Russians decided to split them. They encouraged the idea that Persian speakers had a different culture and the Tajiks had been robbed by the Turkic people. So they encouraged the Tajiks to celebrate their culture—especially any parts of it that were different from the Uzbeks.”

  A similar tactic was used by the British in India, to divide the Hindu and Muslim populations under their control, with similarly disastrous long-term results. I thought of Sadriddin in Bukhara, who had spoken angrily about the Uzbek “Turks,” and of the many Uzbeks I’d met in Tashkent a few days earlier, who derided the Tajiks as “without culture.” The Russian policy had clearly been effective.

  According to Malikov, it was this desire for divide and rule that prompted Stalin to praise the Shahnameh. The same tactic led, in the 1960s and ’70s, to the Soviet regime championing a trilogy of films based on Ferdowsi’s epic. They were directed by Boris Kimiyagarov, a former student of the great Russian auteur Sergei Eisenstein. Although Kimiyagarov died many years ago, I had heard that his assistant director, Zuad Dokteh, was still alive and living in Dushanbe. If I could talk to him, perhaps I would learn a little more about the politicization of culture in the region, so, on my last afternoon in the city, I set out to a metal-gated office complex to meet him.

  “You have seen those films?” he asked, leading me to a round hardwood table under a map of Tajikistan. “If you had seen them when they came out—the impact they had! When they were shown at the Moss Studio in Moscow, there were so many famous people watching and they were in awe—because it was so wonderful!”

  A plump, easygoing man in slacks, he sat back in his chair, nodding contentedly as he remembered the complicated shoots, which took the production team as far as the Balkans in search of the right castles for their scenes. Not only had he been the director’s technical assistant, he was also his general factotum—organizing the shooting schedule, carrying out the director’s research in the libraries of Moscow, and, on one occasion, teaching one of the actresses how to use a bow with her left hand.

  “We hardly ever had a weekend off!” he said breezily. “But Kimiyagarov got results—even if you only watch a few scenes, you will understand. When they first came out, everybody wanted to see them, and they loved them—in fact, they still do.”

  I did too. Thanks to a kind employee at the state TV studio, I had secured a copy of the third film in the trilogy, Under the Banner of Justice, about the life and death of Prince Siyavash, and back in London a few weeks later I lapped up the slightly dated spectacle. To see Rostam on screen, wearing his tiger-skin cape and swaggering under the flame torches of the court; to see hundreds of cavalrymen, with lances outstretched, charging off to battle against the backdrop of the sawtooth mountains; to see Prince Siyavash, dressed in white with a gentle, beardless face, riding through the crackling fire to disprove his lusty stepmother’s slander, was to see the Persian miniature paintings bursting to 16mm life. You didn’t have to imagine it anymore. You could hear it—the birdsong as the Iranian army passed through a wood, the thunder of the enemy Turanian hooves, the rattle of the chariots’ wheels. It might have lost that extra charge the imagination can conjure, but it was the most vivid realization I had encountered so far of Ferdowsi’s tales.

  As soon as I asked Dokteh why the films had been made, however, this historic live wire fizzled out. I winced at his words, proof that even this beautiful film had been a propaganda tool, which, in the end, is the only explanation for all the money the Russians poured into it.

  “The films were recorded,” he said, “because the Tajik nation has a relation with the Iranian people, and we have the right to this place—we have lived here for thousands of years. Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan are Turan,72 but Tajikistan is part of Iran. So the legends of Iran are our legends too.”

  In the Shahnameh, Ferdowsi describes Iran and Turan as “fire and water, they rage with each other / Deep down in their hearts.” Kimiyagarov’s films helped to make sure they still do. For all their visual brilliance and epic scale, they were grist to the mill of divide and rule: cinema as a wrench—to keep the squabbling nations of Central Asia apart.

  WHEN I THINK OF CENTRAL ASIA, I THINK OF . . .

  A pair of fat-tailed sheep looking over the Oxus—the fabled 1,578-mile river where Rostam and Sohrab fought their legendary battle, where Alexander’s phalanxes floated across on blown-up tent skins and Sultan Mahmud’s platoons built a pontoon bridge with iron chains and cowhide. I stepped between the sheep, gazing across the river’s breadth—almost still except for a faint ripple, the water curdling at the banks and lapping with a murmur at the stones. Here, on the banks of Turkmenistan, the Oxus hasn’t yet been bled dry.

  An old man on a donkey cart who rode me out to the copse of minarets and conical roofs where the scholar Biruni once lived—the ruins of Old Gurganj. His eyes were nearly hidden by the fabulous curls of his black lambswool hat, but he could see well enough to direct his steed and dig out a plastic sachet of nas—Central Asia’s narcotic of choice. He smeared the sludge across his gums, his gold teeth catching the sunlight as he waved me off.

  A Tajik wedding in Khojand, in a hotel still pitted with bulletholes from the civil war. Women in ceremonial gold headscarves shimmered as they swayed their arms in the air, taking care not to bump into the men, who executed manly fist-shakes on the other side of the dance floor. Long brass karnai horns (a frequent feature in miniature paintings of ancient battles, usually depicted in gold leaf) poked out of the mouths of apple-cheeked musicians, as if they had sprouted elephant trunks, while on a dais above them the groom pressed a hand to his tuxedo and the bride, in her sugary dress and veil, gazed mournfully into her lap.

  A “white-hair” in Panj Rud, the Tajik village where the poet Rudaki is buried. He was sitting among his fellow elders, with their sickles hanging behind them on the wall of the village shop. I knew this region was famous for its hospitality (“on the arrival of a stranger,” reported the tenth-century geographer Ibn Hawkal, “they contend, one with another, for the pleasure of taking him to their home”), but I was still overwhelmed when he invited me back to his homestead. A wooden gate swung back to reveal a square structure like a Scottish steading, with a goat nodding above a long drop loo and a set of stirrups draped beside his spare turban on the washing-line. We drank tea and ate fresh yogurt, courtesy of the goat, while he showed me a Cyrillic copy of the Shahnameh and lamented the decline of his former powers. “When I built this house I was as strong as Rostam,” he exclaimed, “but now my beard is white and my strength is ruined!”

  Perhaps, I wondered as I stretched out on my stiff bedding on the train back to Iran, his words could be taken as a lament for the region as a whole.

  I came back over the Oxus even more conscious of the importance of the Shahnameh in the psyche of the Persian-speaking people—but aware, too, of the ease with which Ferdowsi’s epic can be manipulated. And something else had been reinforced—that Persian culture is more than just Iran. There was still one more piece of the Persian puzzle to explore—the last piece. The piece that frightened me more than all the others put together. It was time to head to the unruly land to the east, billowing out of the cat’s behind—Afghanistan.

  I didn’t want to go there just to complete a personal Persian set—a quick pop over the border, like driving to Calais to stock up on booze. If I went to Afghanistan, if I w
as really going to cross the old Persian badlands, there was a specific route I wanted to take—to follow Ferdowsi’s own footsteps on an arc through the south of the country, ending up in the city where he presented his epic to Sultan Mahmud. There could be no more appropriate endpoint for my journey.

  The image of Ferdowsi—the old, broken-backed poet, his life spent putting together his treasure trove of stories—had been gnawing in my mind for months. The farmer in his seventies, setting out across the wastes of Afghanistan, hoping for a grand reward befitting his extraordinary work. With each new discovery, each new community of people who stored his epic in their hearts, this image had taken on more texture. I felt desperate for Ferdowsi—for the pain and rage consuming him as he stumbled out of Ghazni, for the sense of grievance that must have poisoned his final years, and for the doubts it must have sown, the fear that his life’s work would come to nothing and would be forgotten after his death.

  Over the past six months, I had been listening to Ferdowsi’s echo, hearing it around me—not only in the vitality the Shahnameh still has today, but also in the way other writers, struggling to pull together their own lives’ work, have been mistreated throughout this region. As the Professor had told me more than once: “Ferdowsi was not the only one.” To set out in his footsteps would be my own way of paying tribute to the tenth-century poet; but it would also, in a tiny sense, be a way of paying tribute to all the writers in this part of the world whose lives have been wrecked by the authority figures around them.

  But I didn’t simply want to offer homage. If I had learned anything about Persian culture over the past few months, it was this: Under the immaculate structure, the orderliness and refinement, there is blood and dirt and darkness. There is Shapur II, cutting off the Roman emperor’s nose, or Rostam, tearing off a doorman’s ears when he gets in his way, or the “dagger-strikers” in Tehran, slicing their heads with their blades. Afghanistan embodies the wilder side of the Persian myth, which is why it would make an appropriate setting for an act of revenge. If I ever reached Ghazni, if I ever found myself standing in front of the tomb of Sultan Mahmud, I vowed to myself that I would do something to avenge Ferdowsi, something to set me squarely on the poet’s side—not only against Sultan Mahmud but against all the other tyrants who have scuppered so many writers’ hopes in this part of the world.