The savari taxi driving me the next day through the foothills of the Zagros to Kermanshah was packed full of fierce-looking Kurds with chiselled faces, all in the traditional dress which they wear as much as a symbol of cultural identity as through habit. Once in Kermanshah, I found a suitable room to rent and, it still being Ramadan, feasted illicitly on a banana. Refuelled, I set off for the city’s northernmost point and the series of bas-reliefs known as Tagh-e Bostan.
A large pool fed by a spring considered sacred by Zoroastrians reflects the dramatic cliff-face and its two arched alcoves standing side by side, one taller than the other. Inside these alcoves are incredibly well-preserved 1,700-year-old rock carvings, considered amongst the finest and most intricate in Iran, commemorating the coronations and hunting feats of some of the great Sasanian kings, including the 3-metre figure of Shapur II (309–79 CE), the longest-ruling monarch of the dynasty. His reign was defined by wars on every frontier of the empire. Around 325 CE, he marched south to subdue the Arabs who had been attacking the Gulf coast from Bahrain and successfully drove them back into the Arabian heartland. To the north, Armenia’s conversion to Christianity under King Tiridates III, supported by Rome, posed a grave problem. Shapur led a campaign against Rome in 337 CE, when Constantius II was proclaimed emperor. Despite initial successes, he was forced to leave this campaign in a stalemate in 350 CE because central Asian nomadic tribes had invaded the east of the empire. With these Hunnic tribes successfully subdued by 359 CE, Shapur turned his attentions back to Rome and the West by launching an attack on Syria. In 361 CE Rome, now under the rule of Emperor Julian, retaliated, winning a number of battles with the Sasanians. These victories culminated in the Romans laying siege to Ctesiphon, but, with victory seemingly in their grasp, they contrived to lose the city thanks to the disorganisation and pillaging of their own troops.1 The Persians rallied and, now equipped with elephants, defeated the Roman Army in June 363, mortally wounding Julian in the process.
The larger of the two alcoves houses a bas-relief depicting four figures whose identities have been a source of much debate amongst historians. It is now believed that they depict Shapur II and his successor, Ardeshir II (379–83 CE), with a figure thought to be Mithra standing on a lotus flower. The two Sasanian kings are trampling on the figure of a vanquished foe thought to be the Emperor Julian. It was Ardeshir who ordered these rock carvings alongside one of the main caravan routes of ancient times, with the presence of Shapur and the sacred figure of Mithra designed to demonstrate the legitimacy of his succession, the vanquished Roman emperor underfoot to lend it glory.
* * *
The streets of Kermanshah had been deserted when I had left my hotel shortly after arriving in the town. Hardly a soul stirred and all the metal shutters of the shops were pulled down throughout the daylight hours of the fast. I returned several hours later to find the same streets awash with activity. The shutters had been thrown open, various honeyed delicacies were being carefully stacked on stalls or in window displays, industrial vats of ash soup were being heated and sweet breads and dates seemed to appear from every angle as shopkeepers braced themselves for the wailing of the evening azzan call to prayer, especially sweet to a Muslim’s ear in the month of Ramadan, for the hour of prayer signals the setting of the sun and the end of the day’s fast.
My wanderings in the heat of the day had been draining, especially so because of my reluctance to eat or drink. Despite being exempt as a traveller, it is disrespectful to break the fast in front of others. I had repeatedly been warned that tempers would be short during Ramadan and such perceived irreverence could lead to a severe beating. As I was on the road for the entirety of the month-long fast, I, for the most part, adhered to its strictures. But while most Muslims rest during its days, my schedule obliged me to be out making the most of the daylight hours. By the time I was ready to settle down for a meal, hungry fasters had cleared out nearly every restaurant and snack bar. Luckily there were street vendors aplenty, barbecuing skewers of liver or corn on the cob, selling pistachios so fresh they still had their skin on and plenty of other Iranian treats that I gorged on before washing them all down with a glass of fresh melon juice.
* * *
Bisotun is a small, light-industrial town 30 kilometres from Kermanshah. I made my way there by means of a string of savaris and a minibus ride with a sinister-looking driver who would have looked more at home in a black cape and armed with a scythe than in his ill-fitting brown trousers and sweat-stained shirt. The passengers also looked fit to be crossing the Styx but in place of their two pieces of silver, this ragged collection of rural antiques handed over a grubby 2,000-rial note to their Iranian Charon.
Being left at a crossroads seemingly in the middle of nowhere, I was baffled as to where to go. I had assumed, this being one of the country’s major tourist sites, that there would be a sign or at least some visible evidence of a place of major historical interest. As an old man ambled into view, I approached him with a big smile and hands raised in greeting. I asked for directions and his answer was literally startling – he slapped me three times in the face. The first slap was intended as a friendly pat on the cheek but age and faulty sight had thrown his aim and the second blow bent the arm of my glasses and another left my nose smarting. He then grabbed my wrist firmly and dragged me towards the cliff-face I had come to see that lay on the road from the Mesopotamian plain to Ecbatana (modern Hamedan), a road thought to have been in use for more than 10,000 years. My new friend said he would show me all I had come to see. For the next hour or so he revealed all about his erectile shortcomings, feeling the need to animate his pained monologue with frequent, unedifying and wholly unnecessary hand gestures. Having sympathised with his predicament, I insisted he tell me something about the sites I had come to see. With a sweep of his hand he declared, ‘These carvings are very old. They were made about one hundred years ago. And that sitting in the middle is an old shah.’ Then, undeterred, he proceeded to bemoan how unsympathetic his young wife – his third, whom he had only recently married – was to the woes of an old man.
The ‘one-hundred-years-ago’ immense rock carving had in fact been chiselled into the side of the mountain nearly 2,500 years ago. It is arguably the first manifestation of massive political propaganda and certainly the most dramatic expression of barefaced power in the ancient world, dwarfing that of Ardeshir at Tagh-e Bostan. The ‘old shah’ was Darius I, depicted in this ancient bas-relief being honoured as king by both his subjects before him and by the winged Zoroastrian symbol of the Fravahar above his head representing divine accreditation. In the foreground is Gaumata, a Magian priest who spuriously presented himself as Bardiya – son of Cyrus and heir to the Achaemenian throne – who had in fact been surreptitiously slain by his brother Cambyses. As a result partly of the size of the boots he had to fill and partly of incompetent campaigns in Egypt, Cambyses has come to be thought of as the weak link in the Achaemenian dynasty. In one of the most dramatic episodes of early Iranian history, Gaumata, posing as the murdered Bardiya, usurped the throne whilst Cambyses was on what proved to be the last of his ill-fated campaigns in Egypt. The dethroned king died whilst attempting to conquer the African kingdom, leaving the Magian imposter as undisputed ruler. At this point Darius, an Achaemenian but not of Cyrus’s direct lineage, burst onto the scene and overthrew Gaumata, claiming the throne as his, declaring: ‘The kingdom which had been taken away from our family … I re-established it on its foundation, as before.’2 Whether these events are historically accurate or whether this was one of the most elaborate propaganda campaigns in history – the 15 metre by 25 metre inscription dominating one of the key ancient trade routes like a giant stone billboard – designed to justify Darius’s claim to the throne, we will never know. What we do know is that the rule of Darius I (522–486 BCE) combined imperial expansion with serious state-building and is considered the pinnacle of the Achaemenian dynasty, earning him the moniker ‘the Great’.
It was a truly memorable experience to be awestruck by the mighty mountainsides and their 2,500-year-old carvings, history coming to life 100 metres above my head, whilst having a decrepit Don Juan declaring it had been twenty years since he had had any semblance of an erection, ‘And probably another ten before that since uunngh …’ he said excitedly, ramming his right arm, fist tightly clenched, into the air in an unmistakable gesture of virility.
‘Youth is not appreciating what you’ve got; old age is regretting not having appreciated what you had,’ said he, shaking his head dejectedly as he contemplated his lyrical pearl of wisdom. As we parted company he gave me a bawdy smack of the lips farewell, pinched my backside excruciatingly hard and threw in a wrinkled wink for good measure.
* * *
I left Kermanshah for a day and a night’s detour to Khorramabad, the capital of Lorestan province. I could not resist a foray into Lorestan, having been beguiled by Freya Stark’s account of her daring archaeological adventures in the region. In the early 1930s Stark left her adopted home of Baghdad, clandestinely crossed the Iranian border with a forged passport and swept through the Lorish mountains in search of buried bronze and hidden gold. Her inspiring book The Valleys of the Assassins and Other Persian Travels had painted a picture of wild mountain tribes and cutthroat brigands roaming areas where even the police force of the mighty new shah of the time, Reza Pahlavi, feared to tread. Even today Lors retain their reputation for savagery and banditry, hence my mother’s warning that I would be decapitated there. ‘A mule track leading into the heart of Luristan from the north,’ writes Sir Roger Stevens, ‘passes two mountains named Chia Dozdan (the hill of thieves) and Pir-e-Dozd (the old thief [or ‘the thieving old man’]). “There is no-one like us for stealing in the world,” Freya Stark’s guide told her proudly; and she describes “their expressive way of sucking their forefinger and holding it up to illustrate the complete destitution in which one is left” after receiving their traditional attentions.’3
* * *
The town of Khorramabad is nestled in the bosom of the Zagros Mountains, dwarfed by dramatic rocky peaks and hemmed in by dark-green rows of firs doing their best to climb the rugged slopes. The town was bigger and more prosperous than I had expected and I was instantly taken by its vivacity. The open-air bazaar was abuzz with black-clad chadori women busy with their evening shop, old men pottering aimlessly whilst fingering prayer beads, peddlers offering unbeatable prices ‘just for you’ and caged chickens clucking pleadingly at passers-by. Younger men were hosing down the pavements in front of their shops and houses to settle down the dust. A dwindling river cut through the lively streets and meandered past the Falak-ol-Aflak fort, originally built in the third century CE by the Sasanian king Shapur I, which to this day keeps a watchful eye over the river valley.
The Lors have their own dialect that, to my untrained ear, resembled Persian much more closely than the Kurdish language, which, despite having been traced back to ancient Persian origins, sounded more guttural and similar to Arabic. The Lors are no newcomers to the Persian table either; their origins can be traced back to the Kassites – an ancient tribe that settled in the region between 4000 and 3000 bCE, coming to prominence in the eighteenth century bCE with a daring attack on Babylonia.
Looks were wild yet refined, hard yet attractive. Young boys had a steely countenance that added to their years and attractive young women strode purposefully through the crowds. I was surprised by the quantity of manteaux and fashionable headscarves on parade, not having seen such a concentration of these since Tehran. I soon discovered this was thanks to Lorestan University and its thriving campus. Khorramabad was just one of the many remote towns I visited that housed a recently opened or expanded university campus to cater for the dramatic surge in people seeking higher education. Many of these students hail from Tehran and its suburbs and have started to bring the modern ways and attitudes of the capital to these more conservative areas of the country.
As I reached the entrance to the fort I saw that the gate was padlocked shut. A group of soldiers was lounging on the grass under the shade of a stone wall that spanned the fort’s perimeter. I approached them to ask about opening times and was soon ensnared in a long conversation during which all the usual questions were fired at me about my origins. In these parts tourists were enough of a curiosity in themselves, but to have one who looked like an Iranian and spoke Persian but was clearly a foreigner caused quite a stir. In no time a crowd of passers-by had joined the soldiers, swarming around the foreign curiosity. One old man kept prodding me as if to make sure I was present in the flesh. I was surprised to have drawn so much attention so quickly and so inadvertently. It was a bizarre, slightly uncomfortable feeling, being the centre of such scrutiny, but the friendly, fascinated nature of the crowd and the encouragement for the nature of my trip soon had me feeling slightly more at ease.
As was so often the case, the interrogation turned from amusing questions such as ‘Can Western women cook?’ and ‘Is it true they drive as well as the men there?’ to some of the more sensitive topics of Western liberalism. The young soldiers were soon asking nervously, between giggles, questions like: ‘Do ladies show their hair in the streets?’; ‘Is it true that boys and girls kiss in public?’; and ‘What else do they do before they get married?’ Even though they were conscripts, young men just like me who had been forced into military service and not Basij or Pasdars, the feared draconian enforcers of Islamic morality, I was reluctant to indulge them too much. I was acutely aware of saying the wrong thing, which, in staunchly conservative provincial towns like this, could land me in hot water.
When eventually released by my interrogators I strolled around town, taken in by the infectious energy of the townspeople going about their daily lives. As with Kurdistan, though, I could sense a distinct tension in the air. With the Kurds it was politics, whereas the Lors simply seemed untamed – as though beneath the veneer of a prosperous, modern town still beat the heart of a fearsome mountain tribe. Here conventions seemed to function as a constraint. Below the surface, I got the impression that every male Lor I came across had the capacity to switch his joviality into a deadly confrontation if slighted or not shown the right respect. These people certainly seemed to have far less time for the restrictions and policing that were taken for granted in other parts of the country. Another passage from Freya Stark kept coming to mind:
[The tribesman’s] treasure is the freedom of his spirit: when he loses that, he loses everything. And if civilization is that state in which the unshackled mind bows voluntarily to Law, freedom and discipline are the two wheels on which it runs. The tribesman does bow to a law of his own, but his apologists must admit that discipline is in him the less developed of the two fundamentals: his freedom is more lawless than it should be. It is, however, genuine; it emancipates his being.4
* * *
The following morning I made it to the Late Antiquity-era Falak-ol-Aflak fortress, where construction was started by the Sasanians in 226 CE but which was only completed in its present form more than four centuries later. Its commanding position and towering walls gave it a sense of grandeur not reflected by its interior. Its most intriguing internal feature was a dehumidifying system that the Sasanians had engineered to keep the stone and wood foundations dry. A network of metre-deep trenches runs underneath the fortress, designed to channel air currents that create a dehumidifying effect, and it was for this reason, along with the more usual defensive benefits of an elevated position, that the fortress was built on the highest point of the city.
Access to much of the fortress was limited. As with many buildings of this type, it had been taken over by the local government and was being used simultaneously as office space and as an anthropological museum. What piqued my interest in the museum were the extensive photographs and reconstructions of traditional Lori tribal life, including a three-part model of a traditional wedding. The groom, sporting what looks remarkably like a kimono, waits in the village as the mounted bride is led to him by her father at the head of a procession. Once in the village, she is handed over to the groom amidst a chorus of cheers and festive cries from the crowd. With the wedding ceremony completed, the newlyweds are then escorted to a partitioned circle which the villagers swarm excitedly around whilst the bride and groom do their best to consummate their marriage.
* * *
At dawn the following morning, I took a cab to the town’s bus terminal to hunt down a savari bound for Ilam province, Lorestan’s westerly neighbour. I pulled up at the terminal to find it swamped by a large, surly crowd. My cab driver muttered something about Ramadan, heat and short fuses and left me to ‘God’s will’ with a wry smile. Pulling on my backpack, I took a deep breath and stepped into the mêlée of hirsute brawlers just as a scrawny little guy stepped in to break up the fight only to receive a fist square on the jaw. When he picked himself up and shook himself down, he did the only obvious thing: he steamed back into the crowd with flailing fists, attempting to land a few blows of his own.
In the meantime I managed to navigate the throng unscathed and stood on the other side of it, unsure what to do next. For the first time in my travels I had arrived at a town’s terminal and not become the subject of squabbles among all the drivers around bidding for my custom. Everyone was so engrossed by the fight that I was left scratching my head, stranded in a sea of unmanned Paykans.
I then spotted a lanky young man watching the whole scene unfold from a distance, perched James Dean-like on the bonnet of his car. His oversized white collar, flared jeans and long, pointed shoes tied in perfectly with the thick, stylised sideburns he was sporting. I sidled over and told him I wanted to go to Ilam. He told me to wait, disappeared into the still agitated crowd and returned a few minutes later with a full complement of passengers.
* * *
The two-hour drive swept us down into plains and up through rugged mountains. Soft fields of golden yellow, nestled between tree-covered hills, gave way to barren stretches of desiccated earth and jagged rock formations. The road wound around the edge of a ridge that reminded me of a sheep’s jaw-bone, complete with craggy teeth. Around the other side of this jaw-bone, about 20 kilometres from Ilam town, we drove past a conical mound that I was later to learn was the scant remains of an ancient fort.
Ilam was smaller, quieter and greyer than I had expected. The town is the capital of the recently formed province of the same name that borders Iraq. It is through Mehran, a border town a short journey from Ilam itself, that a constant stream of pilgrims flows into Iraq and on to the holy cities of Najaf and Karbala that house the tombs of the two most revered Shi‘i Imams, Ali and Hossein. My young cab driver laughed when I told him I had come to visit Ilam itself. ‘You came all the way from Tehran to visit this graveyard?’ was his baffled response. It seemed that only those passing through to Mehran and on with their pilgrimage came to Ilam. He dropped me off outside a surprisingly smart hotel in which the receptionist took one look at my scruffy appearance and my backpack with its array of items dangling from it and, before I had even managed to utter a greeting, informed me there were no rooms available. She directed me to a ‘more suitable’ choice of accommodation. This turned out to be a derelict building with a dilapidated neon sign hanging limply on its side. Through the broken front door held up by an uninviting padlock, I could see a floor carpeted with bottles, cans, crisp packets, syringes and all the other detritus of contemporary urban life. I was wondering whether this really was the only other place in town or whether the receptionist had taken one look at me and assumed I was destitute when a passer-by stopped to tell me that there was one other hotel just around the corner. I promptly headed there and managed to get a comfortable, if overpriced room (steeper prices are a norm on pilgrimage routes and cannot be avoided). The hotel had that air of decrepit grandeur that many of Iran’s once fine hotels now languish in.
I asked the receptionist what there was to see in town. He looked at his colleague and they both laughed. When I asked the same question of the scruffy man sitting by the door wearing what was once a white coat – it would be too generous to call him the doorman – he eagerly pointed me towards the park. This turned out to be a concrete square with a couple of grassy banks, a few dusty benches and the obligatory Islamic sculpture of Qur’anic verse that adorns most squares, roundabouts and open spaces in Iran. Unmoved, I continued my walk around town determined to find something to redeem its reputation and self-esteem. It proved difficult. The town of Ilam was as grey and drab as the weather that day, which did not help my mood. I trudged around gloomily until I was once again lost. There is no better way of coming to terms with a town or city than to simply be swallowed up by it. As the strange roads twist and turn in on themselves, parts of the labyrinth start to become recognisable; streets and landmarks slowly fit together like pieces of a vast urban puzzle.
A rudderless wander proved the ideal tonic for my funk and I was soon contentedly observing the characteristics and contradictions of Ilam town. Poverty, provinciality and pilgrims seemed to dominate, yet there was verve about the youth. The boys outdid each other with their various gelled hairstyles as they strutted with purpose through garbage-filled streets. Young women darted smouldering glances from beneath chadors, unblushingly holding gazes and flashing provocative smiles. So, fresh young blood did flow through the greying veins of Ilam. The streets of Tehran are ablaze with youthful energy but there is something far more telling, more exciting about a smouldering look from under a provincial chador; it speaks volumes more than the cosmetic-caked faces and tight manteaux of the capital.
* * *
I was drawn into an internet café by the sound of cheering. A young lad of no more than fifteen was peering at a computer screen through an enormous pair of glasses held together by masking tape. A group of men in their late twenties and early thirties swarmed around him goading him on. As I attempted to peer over the huddle, I felt a hand on my shoulder. ‘This guy is a genius!’ said a stranger as I was drawn into the crowd. The bespectacled kid had bypassed the government firewall blocking access to any websites deemed unsuitable for a good Muslim. On one side of the screen I could see the gyrations of Shakira in her latest music video and on the other the kid was exchanging lewd quips with a young woman in Canada. His rudimentary grasp of English was not hindering him in getting his point across.
The influence of technology on Iranian society is phenomenal. Nearly every house now has a television, even in small rural communities – and caves, as in Kandovan. Many of these have satellite dishes wired into them. Mobile phones, digital cameras and MP3 players have all played their part in enabling the computer-literate youth of today to reclaim some of the social freedoms denied them these past thirty years and for which they have been pining. Nothing, though, can compare with the explosion of the internet onto the Iranian scene, undoubtedly the most influential event in the country’s history since the Islamic Revolution.
Despite governmental restrictions, the internet is an uncontrollable source of global information and culture, and the myriad social networks and chat rooms provide a platform for the social life which has until recently eluded the youth of Iran. It was no surprise to learn that Iranians are among the most frequent users of chat rooms on the planet. The significance of the internet, and more specifically social media, in Iran’s struggle for reform was most effectively highlighted by the so-called ‘Twitter Revolution’ that followed the 2009 elections. Even so, the use of the internet as a political vehicle is still not being maximised either by opponents or supporters of the regime despite the ever-growing number of blogs.
* * *
The following morning I went in search of the Ministry of Culture of the Province of Ilam. The Ministry turned out to be two partitioned desks side by side in a ramshackle building some twenty minutes’ walk from my lodgings. I was greeted by a beaming Lori woman, delighted that an actual tourist had turned up. With the fierce features of a tribal princess, her aquiline nose framed by strong arched eyebrows and darting eyes, she fired out her words so quickly I was barely able to decipher them. Before I had a chance to ask her to repeat herself a little more slowly, she had thrown a selection of posters and pamphlets into my outstretched arms and sent me on my way. There was, I discovered, a whole host of historical sites and points of beauty in Ilam. All, though, were a considerable drive away from town and there were no organised tours. Dropping pamphlets with every other step, spilling posters as I bent to pick them up, I made my way back to the hotel to try and digest the barrage of information that I had been assaulted with. As I stood at a crossroads waiting for a break in the flow of traffic, a cab driver caught my eye and I spontaneously hopped into his rusty red Paykan.
‘Hello, sir, khaste nabashi,’ I said. This literally means ‘may you not be fatigued’ but conveys a conventional politeness more like ‘I hope you’re having a nice day’. ‘Could you take me to the dam or the waterfall please?’
‘Ghorbane shoma.’ Literally, ‘I’m willing to sacrifice myself for you’ but in reality something closer to ‘Yes, if you like’. ‘The dam is over 30 kilometres away. The waterfall is another 25 or so beyond that.’
We negotiated a price for the trip to the dam and decided to take it from there. That was about as far as our conversation stretched until we were a good fifteen kilometres out of town and in the middle of nowhere on a dirt track winding into the deserted foothills, when the cab driver suddenly slammed on the brakes and sent my posters and pamphlets flying off my lap. He turned to me with an odd look.
‘You know you really shouldn’t hop into a cab with just anyone and trust them to drive you out into the middle of nowhere. Half the cab drivers in town would cut your throat and leave you out here for little more than your cab fare.’
‘So which half do you belong to?’ I countered nervously.
This bizarre exchange was the start of one of the most fascinating encounters of my travels. It turned out that my cab driver was a Kurd who happened to double as the town historian. He gave a brief but obviously well-informed synopsis of Ilam’s history, explaining that the original settlers in the fourth millennium BCE had split from a lesser Lori tribe to inhabit the other side of a mountain that now straddles the provincial border, eventually making their way down to what is now Ilam town. He listed the four previous names of the town, the various feuds that made up its history right up to the Revolution. He recounted how the townspeople fled to the mountains where they camped for years during the war with Iraq, watching as bombs rained down on their homes, reducing them to dust and rubble. He informed me that the conical mound I had spotted just outside the town was in fact a fort known as the Ghaleh Ghiran, lengthily expounding a theory of twin forts and the various systems of defence used against marauding tribes. He recounted historical fables involving local rulers I had not come across, donkeys ringing bells and magic trees. All this he did eloquently and passionately.
As he span out his information, he suddenly switched from history to the present without a second’s respite, pouring advice on me about life, my project, marriage and children. He explained to me the importance of seeing things through to their completion using the allegory of a pomegranate tree. I followed him down this path for a while only to lose him completely when, five minutes into his musings, he was comparing the price of pomegranates with the fictitious stall-owner next door in an imaginary bazaar. Though I had lost track of his metaphors and allusions I was charmed by the man and grateful for his company. I reflected on my good fortune thus far on my trip, including such chance encounters. ‘You are a good person trying to do a good thing. Providence is smiling on you,’ he pronounced. Whether providence or serendipity, I was certainly thankful for it.
We wound our way along a dusty road and through some barren hillsides. The car strained its way up a final climb, barely making it to the peak. At the top of the hill we stopped, to give the engine a break as much as to take in the breathtaking view. Opposite was the dam nestled in the folds of a series of cliffs straight from a lunar landscape, perfectly reflected in the cyan-coloured water. My new friend relished the chance to reel off countless statistics about the dam. Seeing my bewildered expression, he replied, ‘I should know all this. I spent four years working on it.’
This man’s pride in his hometown was touching. ‘Ilam is a good town, a traditional town, a religious town,’ he said furrowing his brows. ‘It has kept its values when the rest of the country is becoming an increasingly alien place. The women here all keep the chador and their modesty. I have heard all about the girls in Tehran, may God have mercy on their souls.’ I asked about the young blood I had seen in town. ‘We have four universities now. The two big ones have brought in 6,000 new students this year alone.’ He stressed, above all else, the importance of history and cultural awareness. To this end he was pleased that such a fast-growing number of the youth attended university but pointed out the fact that traditional artistry and handicrafts were suffering as a result, as was rural life in general. ‘There are not enough jobs for all these graduates and someone with a university degree is not going to sit down and make carpets or weave baskets for a living. It is below their expectations, below their dignity. All of these traditional skills will die out in a generation and with them a large part of our heritage.’
This sudden increase in further education has had many a knock-on effect on Iranian society. It has certainly contributed to the rapid urbanisation of the country, leaving rural communities made up entirely of children and elders struggling to cope with the daily strains of agricultural life. This gravitation towards urban centres began with the last shah’s failed White Revolution, in which land was taken from the landowning elite and redistributed to the farmers themselves. Although well intentioned, this was a myopic move destined to fail. Without money the newly propertied farmers were unable to effectively farm their land, so many of them ended up selling their plots back to the landowners and taking the money to town with them. With such an unbalanced population, the jobs-to-graduates ratio is worsening by the year, creating both unemployment and a brain drain as the best students stream abroad in search of better opportunities.
The desire to flee to kharej (abroad) is endemic in Iranian society. Anywhere outside Iran is viewed as the Promised Land where all woes magically disappear. This false image is perpetuated by the myriad American television shows and Western movies beamed into households by satellite television. So caught up in the idealised world outside Iran are they, full of its apparent freedoms and opportunities, that Iranians automatically dismiss the world they live in. This attitude even stretches to consumerism. ‘Kharejiye ya Irooniye?’: is it foreign or Iranian, they ask of everything from hairbrushes to headache pills. An obvious question in a culture in which everything Iranian is deemed second class.
Conversation with my historian-driver eventually and inevitably turned to life in England. He listened carefully to what I had to say about the place: security, stability, a pleasant, predictable life. He looked sceptical. ‘They say it rains a lot there and everything is expensive. You are Iranian. You belong here. You have family here. This is your country.’