by Terence Ward
The crowds of spectators know the plot by heart. Women surround the stage, shrouded in black. Tears welling inside, they know they will weep long and hard. The actors are divided into good and bad characters. Green and white are the colors for Hussein and his followers, who sing their parts. Red is the color reserved for the hateful general Shemr and his savage warriors, who recite their lines.
The play begins with a lonely caravan traveling east. Trudging across the desert of Arabia, noble Hussein is on a holy mission to the city of Kufa, in southern Iraq, which has beseeched him to return and rule like his father as the rightful heir to the Prophet. His small caravan numbers seventy-two, including women and children.
The legacy of the Prophet is at stake. The caliphate is now in the hands of a usurper, the tyrant Yazid. Hussein knows that Yazid plans to kill him, and yet he does not turn back. His act of defiance is harrowing. Hussein is prepared to die to save the purity of Islam.
Tragedy strikes on the tenth day of Moharram. The year is 680. Hussein and his followers are mercilessly slaughtered under the blazing sun at Kerbela. The few surviving women and children are dragged to Damascus along with Hussein’s head to be shown to the caliph Yazid. This butchery lives vividly in the Iranian psyche. It symbolizes the nobility of martyrdom, the never-ending fight against tyranny and injustice. It echoes the Jewish martyrs of Masada and Christ’s Passion.
The theater director Peter Brook described, in Parabola Quarterly, the intensity and immediacy of a taziyeh drama he once witnessed in Iran:
I saw in a remote Iranian village one of the strongest things I have ever seen in theater: a group of four hundred villagers, the entire population of the place, sitting under a tree and passing from roars of laughter to outright sobbing—although they knew perfectly well the end of the story—as they saw Hussain in danger of being killed, and then fooling his enemies, and then being martyred. And when he was martyred the theater form became a truth—there was no difference between past and present. An event that was told as a remembered happening in history, thirteen hundred years ago, actually became a reality that moment. Nobody could draw the line between the different orders of reality. It was an incarnation: at that particular moment he was being martyred again in front of those villagers.
The young men testing the platform outside the mosque had begun wrapping their heads with black bandannas as if preparing for Ashura. They were joking around, giggling and having fun, unaware that we were watching them.
In Tehran during the black month of Moharram, the mood even in our household changed. It was a ten-day buildup. A strange darkness settled over the city. Smiles disappeared. Tension filled the air. Fatimeh became surly with us, as if a cloud of melancholy covered her loom. In the evenings, Hassan would emerge in his black shirt bound for rowza—performances where the suffering and deeds of the Shia martyrs were narrated in the mosque or in private homes—and in the chanting congregation he would beat his chest with open palms in rhythm. As the days passed, Hassan and his loved ones plunged into sadness. He let his beard grow in a sign of mourning.
“Terry, it’s so sad to watch Imam Hussein and his children,” Fatimeh once said about the taziyeh, “when you know they will die.”
She described the tears that always flowed as Sakinah, Hussein’s youngest daughter, cries out in thirst. Holding a full lambskin sack of water, a young man called Abbas is seized by Yazid’s bullying soldiers. His hands are hacked off, yet Abbas bravely tries to carry the water by lifting it with his teeth. Young Qasem, who marries on the devastated plain, puts on a white cloak with his wife’s help. At that moment all gasp, for white is the color of martyrdom. Then it is Hussein’s turn to die by the sword. A headless figure appears and falls. Most painful of all, Fatimeh confessed, was the crying from the handful of orphaned children who survived.
At noontime on Ashura, Tehran exhaled with Hussein’s death. The mourning was over, but the intensity of the collective grief and guilt quietly lingered. For several days, Hassan was drained. Pious Fatimeh kept silent. It was no coincidence that the Ghasemis were named after Mohammad’s family: Hassan, Fatimeh and Ali.
This defining moment of Ashura rivals the agony of Christ. But unlike the Christian ordeal, for the Shia there is no resurrection, no deliverance, only suffering and tears. Iranians will never forget or forgive evil Yazid for his crimes. Yet the Sunnis do. This is why the divide between Shias and Sunnis is so irreversibly profound.
* * *
In a singular stroke of genius, Ayatollah Khomeini tapped into the potent symbolism of taziyeh. As early as 1963, when rioting first rocked the streets of Tehran, the future Supreme Leader broke with tradition and openly attacked the monarchy using the drama of Kerbela. Over the years, Khomeini had branded Mohammad Reza Pahlavi as none other than the ruthless caliph Yazid. This illegitimate Shah, he had said, embodied corruption and evil on earth. The suffering Iranian people had to rise against injustice. Like Hussein, they too had to prepare to fight for a noble cause. Yazid must go, he had demanded. The Shah must go.
And behind Yazid lurked, of course, evil incarnate: America, the Shah’s longtime backer, perfectly cast in the role of the “Great Satan.” Iran, Khomeini declared, had to be cleansed of plundering imperialists who acted with impunity, sucked away God-given oil, cultivated immoral pleasure and corrupted society. No compromise! This Shah, this puppet of America, must go!
In a nation scarred by centuries of foreign capitulation and humiliation, Khomeini’s words struck a sensitive chord. In 1964, the Majlis passed a law forbidding courts to prosecute American military staff charged with a crime. In return, Iran was promised a massive infusion of U.S. aid. Ayatollah Khomeini spoke out defiantly against the diplomatic immunity: “If the Shah should run over an American dog, he should be called to account, but if an American cook runs over the Shah, no one has any claims against him … I proclaim that this shameful vote of the Majlis is in contradiction to Islam and has no legality.”
This criticism went too far. The government sent him into exile, first to Turkey, then to Iraq’s holy Shia city of Najaf, shrine of Imam Ali, and finally to France. But Khomeini did not relent. His tape-recorded sermons, along with those of the fiery Islamic nationalist Ali Shariati, were smuggled into Iran and were heard in homes, buses, taxis and mosques across the country. This was music to the ears of the former prime minister Mossadegh’s followers, persecuted leftists, intellectuals, nationalists, Communists, students, traditionalists and the clergy. All these opponents of Pahlavi found their rallying cry in Khomeini’s uncompromising stance. United by their hatred for the “American-manipulated” Shah, the broad alliance needed a spark to light the fire.
The match was struck in January 1978 when a slanderous article denouncing Khomeini was published. Outraged theological students in the religious city of Qom marched in protest. Police responded by firing into the crowd. Several students died. According to the traditional mourning period, forty days later a procession was held for the fallen protesters. At the same time, in Tabriz, a similar procession took place and violence erupted. Again, the soldiers opened fire and riots broke out. More were killed, spawning mourning marches in other cities: Isfahan, Shiraz, Mashhad and Tehran.
Over the summer, wildcat strikes hit the oilfields and bazaars, and more processions brought temperatures to a boil. Rising discontent sent thousands of demonstrators into the streets. By December, events reached a climax during the month of Moharram. On Ashura, two million people paraded in downtown Tehran, shutting down the city. The lead marchers wore white, signaling their readiness to become martyrs. Many young women from the chic northern suburbs chose to wear the veil in protest. One month later, in January 1979, the Shah fled overseas as he had done twenty-seven years before, when Prime Minister Mossadegh nationalized Iran’s oil. Repeating the same pattern, the Shah abandoned his supporters to their uncertain fate. This time no foreign-inspired coup would rescue his rule. Khomeini would return in triumph from Paris. The Kerbela cycle was compl
ete. Yazid was gone.
The politicized taziyeh became a living theater. Mobilizing the ardor of the crowds, Khomeini and his revolutionary Komiteh committees turned on the wealthy Westernized Iranian elite, calling them idolaters, polluters, enemies of the people. Then he turned on his nationalist and leftist allies. When the dust finally settled over the land, his dream of an Islamic Republic had become an unassailable reality.
On November 4, 1979, a few students penetrated the U.S. embassy and seized hostages. For a moment, the revolutionary leaders were uncertain about the next step. But Khomeini understood the symbolic nature of their act. The hostage taking, the Revolution, the “Great Satan,” all were linked to the Kerbela epic of Imam Hussein. In the two decades since 1979, the Islamic regime’s moral role has centered around the clergy’s divine mission to purge the “Great Satan” and the “evil Yazid” from Iranian soil and soul.
In 1980, another event further fueled the Kerbela paradigm. Lightning assaults, missile bombardments on the southwestern oil province of Khuzestan: Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi armies invaded Iran by way of the Shatt al-Arab. Imam Hussein’s martyrdom was so potent in the Iranian psyche that Khomeini invoked it to rally the nation with his new battle cry: “Kull yawm Ashura, kull ard Kerbela. Every day is Ashura, every place is Kerbela.”
* * *
“Yes, we lost many young boys,” said Akbar, glancing at the youths jostling the platform. “So many volunteered and never came back.”
The fighting reached a stalemate early on, but for the clergy that war was a golden chance to capture the shrines of Najaf and Kerbela in southern Iraq. The dream of liberating these hallowed pilgrimage sites where Ali and Hussein were martyred turned into a holy crusade. After centuries of grieving, it was time to punish the shameless Arabs and to avenge the historic crimes. Iraq was invaded.
Six years of unspeakable carnage followed, leaving more than a million dead and crippling Iran’s petroleum centers of Abadan and Khorramshahr. The bitter stalemate ground on and on, like the horrific World War I trench warfare. Volunteers charged across no-man’s-land into a deadly haze of poison gas, minefields, barbed wire and raking machine-gun fire, often without any bullets to fire back. The cycle of martyrdom fueled their hearts and filled the cemeteries. Fierce patriotism silenced all internal critics of the regime. Streaming out from war-ravaged Khuzestan, millions of refugees trekked their way into slums and shantytowns, seeking safety in Shiraz, Isfahan and Tehran.
Finally, in 1988, Ayatollah Khomeini announced his greatest disappointment: “I drink the chalice of poison.” With those words, he ended the war.
* * *
We stopped at a coffeehouse. Rich ordered a dough, a thirst-quenching yogurt drink with sprinkles of mint. Looking knackered, Vaz lumbered in with the panting little soccer player, covered with dust. The boy carried his ball like a trophy. The old man walked over from the mosque and Akbar motioned for him to join us. He did so with the usual Iranian courtesy, offering us tea and shaking all our hands save my mother’s. Soon he was telling Akbar about his trip to Mecca.
These days, Radio Iran had ceased broadcasting its revolution across the Gulf’s waters. All the ruling families from Bahrain to Kuwait slept much better, no longer fearing the twitch of their necks on a wooden block. Harsh words had been toned down. For the mullahs, access to Mecca was more critical than spreading revolution. And our haji had just returned from the holy city of the Prophet.
By now, the Islamic Republic had made up with its Arab neighbors, even with the despised Saddam Hussein. After all, the most sacred Shia shrines were still in his territory. Ironically, many nationalists now accuse the regime of being Arab-intoxicated, or arabzadegi, for pushing Arabic language, music and culture on its people, to cement the Islamic identity on Iran for future generations.
* * *
In the 1970s, V. S. Naipaul witnessed a cultural shift in the opposite direction. Iran, he noted, was afflicted with “West-mad inanity”: “Everywhere are the spivs, the young men in tight trousers who call you Meestah, and who, in late afternoon, loiter outside the cinemas, gawking at the near-naked, lasciviously posed women festooning the posters advertising Western films. ‘They get very weird ideas about us,’ an English secretary complained.”
Tehran in those years, with its avalanche of oil wealth, fashioned a high-flying hybrid society with its foreign advisers and technicians, which ran counter to the traditional social fabric. Instead of stabilizing, it spun out of control. Norman Smith, my father’s colleague, gave us his description of the last days before the Revolution: “It’s one thing to be hit by a car every time you step into the street, but when it’s always a Mercedes, it simply adds insult to injury.”
“The new elite wanted to believe ‘they were part of Europe, that only a ghastly accident of geography had placed them in Asia,’ ” Naipaul wrote, quoting a bitter intellectual he had met in Iran.
When the Iranian writer Jalal Al-e Ahmad coined the now famous term gharbzadegi, or Westmania, it was soon on the lips of critics of the imperial regime. In his 1965 book, Occidentosis: A Plague from the West, he described the term:
An occidentotic who is a member of the nation’s leadership is standing on thin air; he is like a particle of dust suspended in the void … He has severed his ties with the depths of society, culture, and tradition. He is no link between antiquity and modernity … The occidentotic is effete … [He] hangs on the words and handouts of the West … Western products are more essential to him than any school, mosque, hospital, or factory. It is for his sake that we have an architecture with no roots in our culture.
“By the seventies, classical Persian music had collapsed,” an ardent musician, Gholam Hussein, said. “Western notation was the rage. The tradition of learning from the master was cast out the window.” Persian musical technique and its rich textures had influenced Arabic and North African music, flamenco, the Indian raga and even the melodic muezzin’s call, heard from Morocco all the way to Indonesia. “Orders came from the court,” Gholam added. “ ‘Only Beethoven, please. Fly in those violinists from Vienna. Inaugurate Rudaki concert hall with Mozart.’ ” Meanwhile, one of the world’s oldest and most sophisticated musical systems was classified as embarrassing folklore. Traditional musicians found themselves no longer in demand.
In the end, most Iranians began to feel like strangers in their own land. Leading dissident intellectuals openly called for a return to their roots. But what were Iran’s true roots? Ali Shariati made it clear: “For us a return to our roots means not a rediscovery of pre-Islamic Iran, but a return to our Islamic, especially Shia roots.”
This prophetic call positioned him as one of the leading ideologues of the Revolution to come. And in the wake of that Revolution, all pre-Islamic and Westernized emblems and symbols vaporized. Iranian culture stood cleansed, indigenous and alone. Some even argue that this was the developing world’s first backlash against American-led globalization.
A few years ago, a correspondent of the Parisian daily Libération asked a celebrated filmmaker, “What did the revolution give you?” The filmmaker, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, replied, “Pride and images.”
* * *
The words arabzadegi and gharbzadegi embodied the minefield of Iran’s identity. One needed a kind of Geiger counter to detect the trip wires, the booby traps, the explosive forces.
A friend of mine, a Berkeley graduate, passionately shed light on Akbar’s anti-Arab rhetoric, labeling many such arguments as simply conflicting emotions. Before I left New York, Mansur and I met for lunch in a Greek diner around the corner from Gramercy Park.
“What’s so great about pre-Islamic Persia?” he asked. “To be frank, it just doesn’t interest me.”
“Why not?” I asked.
“What’s there? Where is the literature? Nothing,” Mansur said. “They wrote in Aramaic, for God’s sake, not even Persian. Don’t forget, the Arabs gave us an alphabet. All these Iranians in America are lashing out at Islam, claiming it has
no role in their Persia. What are they talking about? Look at the history—how can they be so stupid?”
“They speak of patriotism, nationalism,” I offered.
“Of course, Iranian intellectuals always go back to the pre-Islamic period. But if you’re denying great Arabic poetry, you’re an idiot. What’s so great about pre-Islamic Persia? Everyone speaks about it like it was a golden age. They’re full of baloney. They just want to hang on to everything Persian. But the Arabs brought a beautiful language and a faith and a world empire.
“Western scholars in love with Iran have fallen under the spell of Iranian nationalism. It’s stupid! Look what happened to Spain after the Muslims and the Jews were expelled. A disaster. And no one ever mentions that for the last two hundred years the best Iranian literature has come out of New Delhi and Lahore. Mixing is important, so is new blood. Tamerlane opened up roads to China, and so in came all sorts of goods. Everything that we are now has been borrowed from elsewhere.
“I don’t consider myself an Iranian,” he then announced. “Who cares who did what? I call myself a Middle Easterner. I’d like to see us unite culturally, like in times past.”
Discounting the hypernationalism of most Iranians, he dreamt of the golden epoch, between the eighth and ninth centuries, when the Abbasid caliphate ruled the civilized world from Baghdad, the city of The Thousand and One Nights that lay upstream from the old Sassanid Persian capital of Ctesiphon. The enlightened caliph Harun al-Rashid—Charlemagne’s counterpart in the Islamic world—and his son Mamun oversaw the birth of great centers for translation and the study of Greek, Syrian, Persian and Sanskrit literature. This cosmopolitan state, staffed with scribes, intellectuals, artists and scientists, fueled Islam’s brightest flame. This was a time when the acquisition of knowledge was one of the highest ideals of the tolerant world religion.