by Terence Ward
The Shah’s portrait followed us everywhere. His titles—King of Kings, Shadow of the Almighty, Center of the Universe, Light of the Aryans—framed his harvest of military ribbons, drooping off his chest like trophy animals hanging from sportsmen’s walls. In 1968, the country braced itself for his coronation, and he crowned himself and his empress, the Shahbanou, in a ceremony of bejeweled narcissism. Strangely, I never heard his name spoken in public. Like a land mine, if touched, it could explode.
At a party, one of my father’s Iranian friends, after drinking several glasses of wine, popped off with a joke about the Shah. The next morning, he disappeared. When my dad asked about him, fingers were raised to lips. “SAVAK,” they whispered. It was the name of the Shah’s secret police. His friend was held for a week. When he returned, my father said, he was a broken man.
In Iran’s vast countryside, the poverty could only be described as inhumane. The vaunted land-reform program, called the White Revolution (hailed by Washington), failed to deliver on its promises. Forlorn villages—stripped of their feudal owners, who once injected capital to maintain complex irrigation systems—saw their all-important water networks collapse. Unprepared farmers cashed out, sold their “new” land and headed for the cities. Agribusiness and mechanized farming rushed in to fill the gap, pushing even more people off their lands. Imported machinery broke down in the fields, and there were no spare parts. By the 1970s, Iran could no longer feed itself. Prices skyrocketed, and food from abroad and inflation became facts of life. Abandoned in the Shah’s ambitious plans, thousands of villagers began to pour into Tehran like sharecroppers from the Dust Bowl.
And in south Tehran, they stayed. It was a disaster waiting to happen. Anger was deep and simmering. Corruption within the royal family was common knowledge. Western-educated patriots felt betrayed by the reckless profiteers surrounding the imperial court. Expensive technology came with foreign experts, who got paid high salaries, drove up rents and lived in Tehran’s best neighborhoods. The 1973 OPEC windfall hadn’t reached the man in the street. Fortunes were rumored to be stashed in Switzerland. University students abroad staged protests against the Shah in European capitals. Cultivated democrats argued for a pluralistic society. The lit fuse would soon explode.
When the Revolution thundered through the streets, trampling the peacock throne, everyone was shocked by its massive, almost unanimous support. From the slums, shantytowns and even the wealthy northern suburbs, millions marched in the capital and across the country. Kleptocrats in the Pahlavi court packed their bags and scurried off to Europe. Then the Shah did the unthinkable. He abandoned his country and fled into permanent exile. The Shah’s “Great Civilization” fell apart like a flimsy Hollywood set.
On its tattered remains the Shia clergy began erecting the first purely theocratic state since the prophet Mohammad’s rule in Medina. Uncompromising in tone, Khomeini’s inspiration, veleyat-e faqih, “rule by Islamic jurists,” soon became enshrined in the new constitution. Bitter disenchantment set in as middle-class technocrats and Western-educated intellectuals—once so intoxicated by and hopeful for the Revolution—felt betrayed by the clerics. They fled by the thousands. Many arrived in Europe and the United States, having lost everything. Tenaciously, they pieced their lives together, physically cut off from the country they loved, knowing they could not return.
Iran’s portal to the world slammed shut.
* * *
As the years passed, occasionally I reminisced with Iranian friends, and in those moments a forgotten scent of roses would usher back a memory, like the rose water in Fatimeh’s room.
One taste and, like a river, other memories would flow: crisp sangak bread pulled hissing from a baker’s oven; tart bursts of a pomegranate sharbat, ruby-red syrup poured over crushed ice during hot summer days; a bowl of rice at dusk by Fatimeh’s loom; the soft breathing of a reed flute; rust-colored mountain passes lost in clouds; teahouses lit with yellow lanterns; little Ali and I watching a mustard dawn; the sounds of Colonel Shaki’s stallions galloping to a dying dynasty; Hassan’s eyebrows as black as crow wings; the bitter smell of taryak, opium smoked by a grinning white-haired grandfather; burgundy tribal carpets drying on river stones; long black cloaks brushing over knee-deep winter snows; rose petals crushed under departing feet.
All would come back to me.
Even the sight of Hassan’s heels disappearing through walls of fire.
4. Pasargadae’s Stones, Zoroaster’s Flame
The Iranian plateau is a “soft centre” that panders to megalomaniac ambitions in its rulers without providing the genius to sustain them.
—BRUCE CHATWIN, INTRODUCTION TO ROBERT BYRON’S ROAD TO OXIANA
Tucked inside a craggy mountain gorge in northern Fars, along the Shiraz–Isfahan trunk road, lies Sivand, a sleepy village that still speaks a Persian dialect predating the Arab invasions. For millennia, this road has connected the Persian heartland with the ancient seat of power in Pasargadae, the original home of the Aryans. A rushing river carved a natural fortress for the people of Sivand within these bleak canyon walls. Slender poplar trees guarded their stone-and-mud homes that lay across a footbridge. Lining the main auto route, dozens of tin-roofed, plywood-walled stalls leaned against one another like a shaky house of cards, beckoning passing drivers with their wares.
It was midmorning. Truckers pulled over for a brief respite from their cross-country marathons, hauling cargo north from the Gulf to Tehran. For them, Sivand offered forbidden treasures: a bounty of banned tapes recorded by exiled Iranian singers in Southern California. The roadside stalls were full. Tables overflowed with boxes of cassettes. I listened to the cadence and syllables of the vendors. The guttural sounds of Arabic’s throat-grabbing vowels had disappeared. No trace. Words sounded crisp and clipped.
“History, like a badly constructed concert hall, has occasional dead spots where the music can’t be heard,” the American poet Archibald MacLeish once wrote. In our search for Hassan, we had resolved to seek out the nation’s dead spots. For twenty years, the Islamic Republic had offered its version of truth, yet other truths existed. Only by listening to the past could we hope to reach beneath the surface. And where better to begin than at the dawn of civilization, when first stirrings sprang into myth. Not far from Sivand, two thousand five hundred years ago, a young and vigorous Persian Empire, shaped by Cyrus the Great, entered history’s concert hall. We had resolved to drive first to his tomb. Our pilgrimage in the south was long overdue. During all our years in Tehran, we had never ventured south to the sacred site of Cyrus. Now it was time to pay our respects.
Passing a booth plastered with pro-Khatami election posters, I asked the young shopkeeper to speak into my tape recorder in his tongue, called Pahlavi or Middle Persian, not the usual Farsi of modern Iran. He did so with gusto and laughter. I understood nothing. “I’m sure he called you some funny names,” said Vaz, our official companion, who was standing next to me. Which beasts in the animal kingdom did he compare me to? “I don’t know,” Vaz said. “Actually, he seemed very respectful.” Sipping cherry juice, I returned the favor and browsed through his collection of bootleg cassettes.
“They’ve always been anarchists here in Sivand,” Akbar, our guide, explained in his fluent English. “They’ve always done whatever they want. Everyone knows that, but no one does anything to stop it.”
“And the music?”
“It comes from Tehrangeles,” he said. “You know, L.A.”
“And what about that?” Two raspy speakers pounded away with a noxious Abba sound, pop synthesizers, bass, a disco beat.
“Especially that.”
On sunny California shores, an entire music industry flourished around the half-million expatriate Iranians in Los Angeles. This Iranian-American culture had produced a few legitimate stars. The downside was a host of flashy pseudoromantic MTV trendies. Their politics, taste and love of glitter seemed to mirror those of another American tribe in exile, Miami’s Cubans. To
be fair, however, the commercial tunes spun out of L.A. studios offered these shoppers a fresh alternative to the cleric-scrutinized music of contemporary Iran.
A few minutes of listening were more than enough. Rich and I preferred the shopkeeper’s brogue with its deep Persian roots, free of any Arabic words. There was ancient defiance in this stubborn mountain village.
* * *
Akbar hailed from Shiraz. His handlebar mustache pointed grandly to the sky, and his eyeglasses and windblown hair gave him a bohemian look. A ruggedly handsome fellow resembling Omar Sharif, Akbar had spent his university years in Southern California. After the Revolution, he returned to Iran to start a family, whom he proudly showed us in a wallet photo. Working at the local refinery, Akbar moonlighted as a guide, bringing foreign visitors to ancient Persian sites while explaining his country’s curious proto-religion, which he pronounced “Zorro-astarian.” Thankfully, Akbar’s breadth of knowledge easily balanced Vaz’s deficiencies, which were glaring.
Our travel agency, Caravan Sahra Tours, had assigned us Vaz, a slim, nervous thirty-five-year-old bachelor with expressive eyes and a puzzled air about him. Continually vacillating between disbelief and shock, bold smugness and conspiratorial intrigue, Vaz knew nothing of history and didn’t seem to care. Although his father ran a construction company in Tehran, Vaz said he had decided to go out on his own. In Toronto, he had worked as a night manager in a convenience store. But after a few years he returned home and moved back in with his parents. His English was impeccable. We were his second assignment, he said. Six months had passed since his last job, when he led a group of Japanese through Tehran’s bazaar. “They didn’t understand a thing,” he explained matter-of-factly. “Of course, it would have helped if I spoke some Japanese.” A master of irony, Vaz delivered most of his lines with a deadpan look.
* * *
At Sivand’s roadside stalls, I gravitated over to Akbar to speak about the roots of Iran’s so-called Aryans, which cannot be traced in bloodlines or genetics, as Nazi ideologues falsely claimed. In fact, the only place to search is in language—linguistic paleoanthropology, to be exact. In the study of vanished peoples and their voices, fossils emerge of a massive trunk, a proto-language called Indo-European, spoken eight thousand years ago, from which sprouted branches of Persian, English, Sanskrit, Swedish, Latin, Greek, Italian, Spanish, French, Russian and German. In Genes, People, and Languages, the Italian geneticist Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza reached even further back to the earliest mother tongue of all—Nostratic.
Since the source of all these related Indo-European languages has been agreed upon, more or less, scholars have been arguing over another mystery: its place of origin. Most scholars opt for the Russian steppes. Cold northern climates help explain the common words for snow, wolf and bee. The Mediterranean and Black Sea regions are rejected out of hand. It seems that no prehistoric word for sea ever existed. Colin Renfrew, the British archaeologist, has lobbied for central Anatolia as the home of the proto-language. Others have pointed to the Danube Valley. We will never know precisely, but the source is surely embedded in chilly Eurasian soil.
More than two centuries ago, on the evening of February 2, 1786, a shocking revelation ruffled a buttoned-up, sweaty gathering of the Asiatick Society in Calcutta. Sir William Jones, an English judge and amateur linguist, had stumbled upon evidence in his studies of Sanskrit that he could no longer deny. To everyone’s surprise, he noted striking similarities among ancient Sanskrit, Latin and Greek. The word for father in Sanskrit, pitar; he said, differed little from the Greek and Latin pater. The word for mother, matar, was no doubt a sister to the Latin mater. And his list of cognates grew. Before the audience—all functionaries of the East India Company and the British raj—he concluded, “No philologer could examine all three without believing them to have sprung from some common source which, perhaps, no longer exists.”
When Hassan first uttered the Farsi word baradar, meaning brother, I recalled being pleasantly surprised by the resemblance. I had no trouble learning the words for father, pedar, and mother, madar. A quick scan of the Indo-European family for similar words for baradar reveals: phrater in Greek, brathair in Irish, and bhratar in Sanskrit. From the tip of J. M. Synge’s Western world, the Wards’ ancestral Donegal lashed by Atlantic storms, to Rabindranath Tagore’s humid, cyclone-prone Bengal on the Indian Ocean, I realized that Irish, Iranians and Indians sang, cursed and told stories from ancient dreams that once shared a mother tongue.
* * *
Before Cyrus the Great’s Persian epoch, there were wonderful creations forged by a people called the Elamites. Bronze figurines of cows, deer, griffins and sphinxes, earth goddesses and chariots colored by the turquoise patina of time have been found in the province of Luristan, on the western side of the Zagros Range. Each evokes “a world of mystery, magic symbols, savagely conflicting powers,” wrote Roman Ghirshman, the noted archaeologist. He compared the first Iranian art that blossomed on the plateau with Greek art of the eighth century B.C. The influence of this art form may have spread wider than we imagine. So formidable were these Luristan bronzes that Ghirshman asked, “Have we here the ultimate source of Etruscan art, whose iconography was destined in the course of time to enrich Celtic art, then the art of the Völkerwanderung, and finally Romanesque sculpture, which has been described as ‘steeped in the glamour of Eurasia’?”
The Aryan migration into Iran is pervaded by myth. Legend has it that Aryan tribes first arrived from the north after the fabled King Jamshid ordered his people to seek the sun. From the scrub and thistle steppes of Russia they moved to warmer places, to India, onto the Iranian plateau and westward into Greece and Italy. For three millennia the people of the plateau have called their land Iran. It is thought to be derived from the ancient name Aryanam, meaning Land of the Aryans. Persia, or Persis, was the Hellenized mispronunciation of Pars, the original name of the southwestern province, homeland of the rulers of the Persian Empire. The absence of the p sound in the Arabic alphabet led the Arab conquerors to call it “Fars.”
I reflected on the linguistic archaeology that Hitler abused to create his biogenetic “Aryan” nation. By hijacking the concept of a communal Indo-European tongue to feed his pathology of “blood purity,” he pushed social Darwinism to horrific limits.
Akbar, in our minivan, tried to clarify the muddle. In 1932, he told us, Reza Shah Pahlavi, the father of the last Shah, dismissed the internationally accepted name of Persia and officially replaced it with the centuries-old name of Iran, in tribute to the country’s Aryan ancestry. Foreign ambassadors objected. Reza Shah announced that it was the ancient Greeks, and not Iranians, who first called his country Persia. In similar fashion, the Chinese more recently rejected British-named Peking for Beijing. This is now, and that was then. Bulldog Churchill characteristically resisted. “The Shah may call it whatever he likes,” he growled, “it will always be Persia.”
Today, perhaps the only people still using “Persian” are scholars and expatriate Iranians who resurrected the term during their long days in exile. Desperately hoping to renounce any connection to the Islamic Republic of Iran and its actions, the expats proclaim “I am Persian” as their collective refrain. At cocktail parties from Manhattan to London, Paris to Santa Monica, self-styled “Persian princes” speak only of the past. All the same, an upcoming soccer match scheduled in France, pitting archenemy America against Iran in the World Cup final, would put all their rejection to the test. At kickoff, I sensed, heart flurries would spark a renewed patriotism that few could disown.
* * *
As we drove away from Sivand’s Iranian-American musical roadside bazaar, Nasrollah, our driver, slipped my newly purchased cassette into his tape deck. Mournful wailing: an old favorite. Crackling through worn-out speakers, a heady woman’s alto pierced its way into soprano range. Nasrollah signaled with a thumbs-up. His stubble-faced grin greeted my approval. A veteran warrior of Iranian highways, Nasrollah gripped the steering wheel with
large strong hands and supreme confidence. He had two families, he told me—his wife and two children, and now us.
Instead of looking ahead like a proper navigator, Vaz began talking loudly with Nasrollah, distracting him from the winding road. An argument was heating up. The driver’s face reddened. In their tense exchange, Nasrollah glowered at Vaz, who by now was clearly upsetting him.
“Vaz, let him drive,” Rich said from the back.
“Richard, it’s OK,” Vaz said. “I am your guide. Driver must take my orders.”
“We hate accidents.”
“Don’t worry, I’m in charge.”
“That’s what we’re afraid of.”
“We’re safe, baba, don’t worry.”
“Not if you keep jabbering to Nasrollah on these mountain roads.”
“He’s only driver. I am the boss.”
Suddenly, to our left, a fierce engine growl poured through our open windows. A bus full of terrified faces passed our battered minivan. Along its flanks, red calligraphy trumpeted the company name: “Rasool,” or Prophet. Vaz began yelling at Nasrollah, who turned his head and flashed a violent look of rage at him. Then, around a blind curve, an oncoming car appeared, blowing its horn. The bus swerved into our lane, narrowly missing our front fender. Nasrollah screamed, braking. As he jerked on the steering wheel, we all howled. Over the road curb, I peered at the river raging in the gorge forty feet below. The bus roared past. On its tailgate, in bright green lettering, we all read: One Way to Paradise.