God wants to manhandle us,
Lock us up in a tiny room with Himself
And practice His dropkick.
The Beloved sometimes wants to do us a great favor:
Hold us upside down and shake all the nonsense out.
—Hafez
A few years ago a Greek friend of mine, well versed in the ups and downs of travel in distant parts of the world, decided to spend a month in Iran. Her starting point was Shiraz, and when she arrived at her hotel, the concierge greeted her with characteristic Persian hospitality: “Welcome to Iran,” he said. “You can have anything you like!”
“Can I take this off?” she asked, fingering the edge of the headscarf.
He leaned close and whispered, “Maybe in a few months—the bastards will be gone.”
That was her introduction to Iran, and it was an appropriate one, for it conveyed the general attitude of Iranians toward the Islamic regime. A few hours later she was riding in a taxi, and the driver started talking politics. The conversation led, as conversations with foreign visitors often do, to the government.
“The shah was bad, but these fucking bastards are worse, a thousand times worse!” he shouted. The window was open, his words free for all the world to hear. She expected the security forces might appear out of nowhere and haul him off to jail, but no. This was Iran, where the government is well aware of the people’s loathing and can only hope that their acts of rebellion are confined to outbursts from car windows. In fact, they may even welcome them, for they let air out of a balloon that might otherwise burst.
Shiraz is an ideal entry point to Iran, and it is also the best place to end a journey, for this city more than any other expresses the love of beauty and the pleasures of the senses that the Persian culture has long embodied. First impressions are lasting ones, but so are final ones, and one could not take away a truer and more accurate impression of the Persian culture and the values it has celebrated for several thousand years than in Shiraz.
“The spring is beautiful in California. The valleys in which the fruit blossoms are fragrant pink. . . . The full green hills are round and soft as breasts,” wrote John Steinbeck, describing his native state in The Grapes of Wrath. But he could have been just as easily describing the fertile, undulating landscape that surrounds Shiraz.
The world’s earliest remnant of wine, dating to 5000 BCE, was discovered here, and by the ninth century BCE the city had become the primary exporter of wine in the Middle East. The semi-arid climate, with its soft spring rains and searing summer heat, could not have been more perfectly designed for the cultivation of the grapes that for seven thousand years have been the prime ingredient of fine Shirazi wine.
A book of verses underneath the bough
A flask of wine, a loaf of bread and thou
Beside me singing in the wilderness
And wilderness is paradise now.
So wrote Hafez, widely regarded as Iran’s greatest poet. Many of his well-known ghazals, or love poems in the Persian sonnet form, praise the ruby elixir that made his city famous. Hardly a poem ends without his mention of it, and hardly one neglects to mention his love of it.
For those outside Iran, it might be surprising that, despite the ban on alcohol under the Islamic Republic, the love of wine, and the passions it inspires, have not vanished from Persian life.
“I don’t have to go to Dubai to drink. My family makes our own wine in the bathtub at home, and it’s better than anything you can buy,” a friend in Tehran told me.
Shiraz was home to another of Iran’s greatest poets, Abu-Mohammad Mosleh Al-Din Saadi Shirazi, or simply Saadi. His tomb lies in a compound northeast of the city center. The first time I was here I decided to make it my first destination because the peaceful setting would offer a connection to the Persian culture I could carry with me for the succeeding days.
Like Avicenna, Saadi was a bit of a wanderer and lived a life kaleidoscopic in color. He was born in Shiraz near the end of the twelfth century. His father died when he was very young, and a life of relentless poverty forced him to flee to Baghdad, where he studied science, law, theology, and literature. In 1219, the Mongol invasion again sent him on the road, and he would spend the next thirty years of his life wandering through central Asia, Turkey, Egypt, Syria, and Palestine. But the life of a vagabond gave him an education a more settled and comfortable existence never could have equaled. The sources for his work were refugees of war, traveling merchants and thieves, vagrants, farmers, and teahouse philosophers, in other words, common people, who in many cases wove elaborate tapestries of wisdom from their everyday lives.
There is much of the common touch in the works of Persian poets, and many of Saadi’s lines read like the drops of two-penny wisdom found in Benjamin Franklin’s Poor Richard’s Almanack:
Whatever is produced in haste goes hastily to waste.
And:
A grateful dog is better than an ungrateful man.
A master of the quip Saadi was, but the hardships he endured early in life were later reshaped into mature wisdom:
Two things define you:
Your patience when you have nothing,
And your attitude when you have everything.
Saadi’s marble bier stands in a small, six-sided, tower-like chamber topped with a high dome. Blue tiles, hand-painted with quotes from his works, fill the inner walls. A colonnaded hall extends from the tomb alongside a rectangular pool that stretches beneath a canopy of trees. The setting is quintessentially Persian: elegant but modest, blending air, water, and light into a work of art that ties the creative world to the natural as well as the spiritual.
By the time we got to the tomb it was late afternoon, and the early summer sun was streaming through the arches of the colonnade, deepening the blue of the tiles while sparing us the searing summer heat that was yet to come. In a mark of respect, visitors, one by one, placed the traditional two fingers on the cool stone surface as they passed through the room that held his bier. According to custom, the visitor also prays for the peace of the soul of the deceased by reciting verses from the Fateheh, the first chapter of the Quran. For today’s Iranians, the gesture is a way of reaching across the ages to touch, quite literally, the heart of the Persian culture and those who have best expressed it.
Leaving the tomb, I took a stroll around the garden and stumbled on the top of a circular staircase, where a handwritten sign with an arrow pointed downward from the top stair. Down I went, following the twisting spiral deep underground until it touched bottom. There a café had been carved out of the rock, and in the center was a fishpond. Cozy niches had been dug into the walls and lined with thick cushions for seats. Paintings of birds, a favorite image of Saadi, hung on the walls.
I ordered a mint tea and settled into one of the niches to scan the crowd, mostly Shirazis who sought this underground warren to hold on to a bit of Saadi while sipping cappuccinos and watching the fish scuttling around in the pond. But there was a puzzle. How did twenty-first century Iranians come to terms with the works of these literary greats, when so many of their verses paid homage to physical beauty, sensual pleasure, and even drunkenness, facts of human experience that the clerical establishment had spent the better part of forty years trying to deny? How could their poems even be read in schools, when every book had to be approved by religious authorities? I recalled a conversation I’d had with an Iranian American literature professor:
“They tried to tell us that none of those references—to wine, pleasure, beauty—none of them were to be taken literally. The poets were really talking about spiritual beauty, spiritual pleasures, but they had to communicate these to the common people and so they used earthly imagery. Even Hafez—they told us he used wine as an image for spiritual intoxication. But we all knew this was nonsense.”
The parents of her generation had attended school during the liberal reign of the Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, when alcohol flowed freely and Tehran teemed with bars and nightclubs. Surely they had to know that the ruling mullahs’ attempt at literary interpretation was a bit clouded, and not by drink. Even so, the mullahs were claiming that Hafez, Saadi, and Omar Khayyam were trying to direct their readers’ eyes toward heaven, not the wine bottle.
She added: “A lot of young people today are quite confused. They see no alcohol or other pleasures in society and think that maybe it’s true, that the poets weren’t talking about the pleasures they want to have. But they’re young. They want to drink and dance and enjoy themselves.”
I was a foreigner with no confusions other than those that come with wandering in a foreign land, so I was content to watch the fish circling in the pond and listen to the clinking of the teacups and the soft sounds of the ney, the Persian flute, that drifted from the café’s CD player. And there also were the curious gazes of the other customers watching this foreigner listening to the strains of the ney and watching the fish circling in the pond and observing the curious gazes of the other customers.
As tranquil as the setting was, I couldn’t stay forever because I did have other plans for the evening: to dine at the Sharzeh restaurant, famous for its live Persian music, and then to make it to the tomb of Hafez by closing time. So I left the café and the images of Saadi’s beloved birds and headed back to the hotel to relax a bit before going out for the evening.
There was little reason to do so, except to put my feet up. The café on the mezzanine advertised “Happy Hour,” but of course there were no drink specials, only tea, coffee, fruit juices, and the usual selection of boozeless beers. I went to my room and tried to find CNN, BBC, or any other satellite news channel but got only the state-run Press TV and its English-fluent anchors bashing Saudi Arabia and reporting cherry-picked stories that reflected negatively on the United States, Europe, and “the West.” With gun violence running riot through American society and Brexit problems in the United Kingdom, their job was not hard. After a few minutes I set out for the Sharzeh.
It was close by, and in a few minutes I was at its doors, tucked down a passage just outside the entrance of Shiraz’s grand Vakil Bazaar. But the Sharzeh was still shuttered, and a sign indicating eight o’clock in Farsi numerals hung in the window. I had to wait, and if there was any doubt, the owner of a spice stall on the other side of the passage flashed a smile and held up eight fingers.
The Vakil is one of those garishly elegant Middle Eastern bazaars that has fiercely resisted the advances of time. The arched ceiling is cathedral high, and its narrow stone passageways crisscross through densely packed vendors’ stalls. True to its timelessness, the Vakil is both luxury boutique and Persian Walmart, with stalls selling everything from precious stones and gold jewelry to underwear and kitchenware and other household goods. The design is part of the genius of the Middle Eastern bazaar: Endless variety means endless choice, and endless choice guarantees a constant stream of customers. So at seven o’clock, at the end of a workday, the aisles were jammed. Office workers on their way home were picking up new wallets and handbags. Housewives finishing the day’s shopping were dipping into spice sacks and picking through bins of pistachios. Bolts of colored silk were crammed onto shelves that rose to the ceiling. Brassware dangled from metal hooks, and the scent of olive oil soap and perfumes of lavender and lilac floated from hidden corners.
I wandered right and left and left and right and learned, once again, that the Middle Eastern bazaar doesn’t only challenge the senses but all frames of reference. Instead of heading deeper into the Vakil, as I had intended, after a riot of twists and turns I found myself dumped back onto Zand Street. Rather than try again, with still time to kill I headed west, toward a row of contemporary storefronts.
Zand Street is the main boulevard that bisects the center of Shiraz, and it is also the city’s primary shopping street—but only after the stores have closed. Its legitimate traders do legitimate business during the day, selling mobile phones and athletic gear and other goods that make up the bulk of the consumer trade, but after 6:00 p.m. the black marketers arrive, spread plastic tarps on the sidewalk, and set cardboard boxes on folding tables. Then the real dealing gets going, for most of the goods for sale are not to be found in the conventional retail market: Western pop music, Hollywood movies, and box sets of pirated American TV series. More commonplace items are also on offer—cheap electronics and kitchenware, household tools and secondhand books—but most of the shoppers are here for the contraband.
I prowled through the stacks of CDs and DVDs, but the pickings were uninspiring—a few Hollywood westerns, more than a few romantic comedies, and troves of CDs by Iranian pop bands, mostly refugees from the Islamic Revolution that have established a Persian counterculture in Los Angeles. But there were a few finds. I bought copies of The Strange Case of Benjamin Button and Saving Private Ryan for a dollar each. But I had been taken. Later I learned that that was the “foreigner’s price.” An Iranian could have had each for fifty cents. But the fault was really my own, because they were so cheap I didn’t bother to bargain.
More than a simple contraband bazaar, Zand Street offers insight into the government’s failure to repress the liberal inclinations of many Iranians, particularly the urban youth, and the allure of cultural products from the West. Sometime between the liberal presidencies of Hashemi Rafsanjani in the late 1980s and Mohammad Khatami in the 1990s, and after repeated failures to crack down on Western movies and music, the Iranian government made a tacit bargain with the country’s youth: Do what you want behind closed doors but at least pretend to obey us in public. Arbitrary crackdowns used to keep the black marketers looking over their shoulders, but as the underground traffic has risen to street level, even the crackdowns have proven futile.
The blatant openness of the trade, and the hypocrisy it signifies, reminded me of a story told to me by a psychologist friend who has lived outside of Iran for more than thirty years. On a trip back to Shiraz she had to call on one of the city’s mullahs at the request of a friend.
“I thought I should dress even more conservatively than I usually would, but when he picked me up at the station he was wearing Levi’s and a new pair of Nikes, and when we got to his house he had CD racks full of jazz and pop music. I caught a glance into his daughter’s bedroom. There was a poster of Britney Spears on the wall, and lying on the bed was a Barbie doll in a bikini.”
All this would have greatly depressed Karim Khan Zand, for whom Zand Street was named. Zand was not a tried-and-true conservative Muslim in the image the ruling regime would like to pretend. Zand was the first ruler of a dynasty that came to power in the middle of the eighteenth century, and he was known for his humble lifestyle and the transparency with which he ran his government. In a gesture of humility, he never assumed the title of shah, preferring to be referred to as a simple vakil, or local ruler. But the qualities for which he was most widely known were honesty and personal integrity. He sold the gifts he received from doting admirers and gave the proceeds to the state treasury. Forty years of destructive internal wars preceded his reign, and while the Shiraz was being rebuilt, a group of workers found a pot of gold coins in a pile of rubble. Zand let the workers divide it among themselves.
Having survived decades of war, Zand built the stark, imposing citadel that still stands on Zand Street, just a short walk from the storefronts that line the street that bears his name, and he reconstructed the bazaar, which indirectly bears his name and was largely destroyed during the years of war.
I became so absorbed in the black-market pickings that I lost track of the time. By the time I got back to the Sharzeh the doors were open and the first diners were filing in. Most were from the Persian middle and upper class—men in neat slacks and suits and women trying to outdo themselves in layers of makeup, jewelry, and headscarves with color-coordinated manteaux. The fashion parade was also a political statement, a way for women to thumb their noses at the authorities. It said: You try to suppress us, we will use whatever we have—our faces, our clothing, our figures—to fight back. And these kinds of fashion statements were de rigueur in Shiraz, which leans distinctly liberal on the Iranian social spectrum.
The host showed me to a table on the mezzanine near a railing that overlooked the stage below. The rest of the tables filled up quickly. But there would be a downside to the evening: Any true celebration of Persian culture would be muted, and literally, because all of the performers, singers included, would be limited to men.
Of all the deprivations of human rights suffered by women all over the world, the ban on women singing in public in Iran has long struck me as one of the most odious. At the beginning of the Islamic Revolution, the new ruling mullahs believed that men could be corrupted by the sound of the female voice. Ayatollah Khomeini went even further, linking the influx of all Western music to the incursions of British and Russian forces in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, calling Western music a form of “cultural colonialism.” “Music is said to unsettle the soul,” he wrote, “to lead people to indulge in the pure sensuality of the physical expression of their bodies.”
Hafez would have taken great exception to Khomeini’s puritanism. He wrote:
Come with your tender mouths moving
And your beautiful tongues conducting songs
And with your movements, your magic movements
Of hands and feet and glands and cells—dancing!
Know that to God’s eye,
All movement is a wondrous language,
And music—such exquisite, wild music!
But Hafez was not leading the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Khomeini and his fellow mullahs were, so women’s mouths were shut and Tehran’s nightclubs were closed. Popular female singers like Marzieh, Homeyra, Hayedeh, and Mahasati were driven underground or into exile. In the years to come, “cultural freedom” would become a political football to be bandied about by would-be moderates seeking popular support. It is hard not to see more than a little misogyny at play. Mahsa Vahdat, who has rendered the verses of Rumi and Hafez into mystical tunes, has said, “Who could be sexually aroused by Hafez’s poetry? The government has a political problem with women’s voices. Singing will give women power and political influence.”
But no Homeyra nor Googoosh would be appearing at the Sharzeh that night. Instead, a group of male musicians and two singers took to the stage, and while the diners dug into their plates of grilled fish and lamb kebabs they pumped out folk tunes that roused the clapping of the crowd and was enough to create the illusion that Iran was, once again, a place where creative expression was not a crime.
Halfway through the first set and my plate of polo-mahi, accompanied by the usual mountain of saffron rice, a young couple nearby used a pause between songs to ask, as if there were any surprise: “Where are you from?” and “Why did you come to Iran?”
They quickly introduced themselves. Jamshid had grown up on a farm near Shiraz where his father grew barley and wheat. He had thick hands and arms, and his girth was another sign of his former athleticism: He had been a champion heavyweight wrestler, winning bronze and silver medals in regional competitions. He graduated from Shiraz University with a degree in biochemical engineering and was working in eco-agriculture. Parisa had a degree in internet technology but had been having a hard time finding a job.
“These days there are none,” Parisa lamented. “You can get an advanced degree in an important field but still there are no opportunities.”
I asked—Were the sanctions to blame? The rial had lost more than 60 percent of its value, and inflation had propelled the prices of everyday goods into the stratosphere, beyond everyday budgets. Pistachios, a staple snack of rich and poor, had become a luxury.
I expected Parisa to rail against the European Union, the Western powers, and all the other forces in the world that were, in the regime’s view, trying to cripple Iran. But no, she didn’t know if the sanctions were the prime cause of the country’s economic woes. She didn’t know if government mismanagement were more to blame. What’s more, she didn’t care. The hardships of life were painfully simple: Prices were high and rising higher. Money was tight and getting tighter. International politics was an abstraction, alien to the more immediate frustrations of Iran’s young professionals and the struggling middle class.
“I don’t know why there is so much talk about Iran,” she continued. “All we hear about is Iran and Syria, Iran and terrorism, Iran and Saudi Arabia, Iran and the nukes. Everywhere it is Iran, Iran, Iran. Doesn’t anybody wonder how such a country can have so much power when it can’t even provide jobs for its people?”
For a generation of Iranians whose constant aim was to shut the government out of their lives, it was hard to understand how Iran could command so much global attention. For Parisa and many young Iranians the regime was responsible for so much of the misery that people endured, and it was not going to go away. It couldn’t be voted out of office, like an unpopular government in a “normal” country. With no escape at hand, except for those lucky enough to emigrate to Canada, the U.S., or Europe, the regime and its corruption and anti-Western rhetoric had become an inescapable constant, like subzero weather above the Arctic Circle.
The music break ended, the band returned to the stage, and the singing was met with rounds of applause. It was a welcome change from talk of Iran’s doldrums. I told Jamshid and Parisa that after dinner I was planning to head to the tomb of Hafez, and then Parisa’s eyes brightened. I asked her if it was true, that every household in Iran has a well-worn copy of Hafez’s poetry tucked away somewhere in a bookshelf.
“I don’t have a Quran,” Parisa acknowledged, “but I have three copies of Hafez. One has been in our family for generations. My father gave it to me.”
She smirked. “Sometimes when we have to make an important decision or want to know what will happen in the future we’ll take a copy of Hafez off the shelf and open it to any page and read what it says. They say that’s the only way to uncover the truth.”
“What about all the old female pop stars—Googoosh and Marzieh?” I asked. “Does every household also have a collection of vinyl beside their volume of Hafez?”
“My brother has a collection of all the old pop singers, the women too, and he also has a copy of Hafez,” Parisa said.
“When he has to make an important decision, does he open his Hafez or play a track of Googoosh?”
Jamshid cut in: “I don’t know about Googoosh, but I bought an entire collection of Elvis Presley off the internet. I only paid a dollar for it. A friend downloaded it for me.”
“Does Elvis tell your future?”
“Now that’s silly,” Parisa concluded.
“So is letting Hafez do it,” Jamshid added.
“Who cares? We still do it,” Parisa concluded.
It was time to go. The band was still running through its repertoire of pop tunes and folk melodies, hopping neatly from one to the other to keep the crowd happy, but Hafez was waiting. My bill came, but Jamshid and Parisa insisted on paying it, and I let them, but only after the expected and customary exchanges of taarof:
“Of course you mustn’t . . .”
“Don’t be silly, it’s nothing . . .”
It was a battle I was sure to lose, but one that had to be waged. I was a visitor, a guest at their table, and a foreigner, three reasons why it would have been an inexcusable breach of Persian hospitality for them to allow me to pay, as it would have been a breach of Persian hospitality for me to refuse. So I thanked them profusely, which was also expected, and then made my way to the door and hopped into a taxi.
Ten minutes later I was at the entrance to the resting place of Iran’s most revered poet. Call these the Big Five, the voice of each occupies a special place in Persian literature: Ferdowsi, the historian; Rumi, the mystic; Saadi, the wise advisor; Omar Khayyam, the philosopher-scientist; and Hafez, the voice of the commoner—humble, flawed, and self-effacing, but also longing and searching, a victim of human frailties and self-indulgence, but always joyful, always hopeful—a Persian Everyman:
Look inside my playful verse,
For Hafez is barefoot and dancing
And in such a grand and generous,
In such a fantastic mood.
A biography of Hafez would be one of the shortest Persian books because almost nothing is known about his life. Scholars claim he was born in Shiraz in 1315, maybe 1317, and he died there, probably in 1390. And that is where the facts of his life begin and end, and the mystery is partly what makes him so mythic.
It is not hard to understand Hafez’s grip on Persian culture. If there is any word that appears more often in Hafez’s poetry than wine, it is love, and throughout his poetry it is continually shapeshifting, at times representing physical beauty, at others sensual emotions, sometimes the deeply spiritual or profoundly mystical. Whatever its source, for Hafez it was the force that drives all existence:
We are people who need to love,
Because love is the soul’s life,
Love is simply creation’s greatest joy.
If Hafez were nothing more than a gauzy sentimentalist, his works would be gathering dust in some literary archive, but he could also be the gadfly of entrenched government elites and religious pretenders, a role far more useful in Iran today than in its medieval past, and this is one of the reasons his works resonate so loudly in contemporary Iran:
The dregs of society are godly compared to you pompous poseurs.
I would rather frequent infamous hovels
Such as a tavern or a cabaret
Than places infested with you hypocrites.
I would rather choose an abject wine seller or a debauchee
As my spiritual guide than any one of you liars and cheats.
It was after ten o’clock, but the gates were still open and dozens of visitors were wandering around the grounds. At the entrance a handful of vendors were selling steaming bowls of aash and warm slices of barbari bread. A late-night chill had settled in, hinting that winter had yet to fully yield to spring. Women with delicately made-up faces and displaying carefully groomed locks of hair pulled their veils more snugly over their heads.
It is no accident that the tombs of both Saadi and Hafez have gardens as their settings. Gardens are as central to Persian culture as they are to all the great civilizations of the East—China, Japan, and Mughal India—and the glory of the natural world spills out of Persian poetry. And like the transcendentalist philosophers Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, Hafez saw nature as a gateway to eternal truths:
How did the rose ever open its heart,
And give to this world all its beauty?
It felt the encouragement of light against its being,
Otherwise we all remain too frightened.
The modernist design of Saadi’s tomb would never have been fitting for the burial place of Hafez. His is a modest, walled enclosure. Beside the garden stands a grove of orange trees, surrounded by reflecting pools and flowerbeds. In the middle of it all, under a circle of columns that support a stone gazebo, stands a marble bier. As at the tomb of Saadi, visitors approach and place a finger or hand on the surface. With a simple touch, those who have been nurtured on the verses of Hafez, which means almost the entire Iranian population, are able to touch the beauty of his simplicity, and the simple beauty of his wisdom.
I wandered the grounds for an hour or so, taking in the delicate strains of the santour and dutar as they tinkled from the speakers. The site seemed designed so that love, the emotion Hafez prized most, could never leave him. With no bars or nightclubs or any of the usual places where young people meet, Iran’s parks and gardens have become venues where young couples may sit and discreetly nuzzle, taking inspiration from Hafez’s lines in ways the ruling mullahs would frown upon. Toward the end of my walk, the music was cut and replaced with an announcement stating that the gates would be closing. It was time to leave. On the way to the exit, I met three young women, and one threw out a question: “Where are you from?”
“Oh, we just love America!” one tittered, after I responded.
“What do you like about it?”
“Everything!” the third said.
“The freedom!” the first one threw in.
I asked what they meant by freedom.
“From this!” the second girl chirped, fingering the edge of her veil.
The girls rattled off more reasons for their love of the U.S.—the culture! democracy! everything about it!—and then, of course, they wanted to know: Why had I come to Iran? What did I think of Iran?
I answered with my timeworn script—that the country had always interested me, that I always knew it was much different from the Arab world but wanted to see it firsthand. One of the women concluded: “Isn’t it strange, as long as you’ve wanted to come to Iran, we’ve only wanted to go to the U.S.”
It was all a little sad. For all the affection for America among young people, there is still very little understanding of what “America” is all about. For some it is everything that Iran isn’t, but to actually articulate its appeal is a tougher task. None of the girls had been to the U.S., but all were dying to go. One had cousins living in suburban Los Angeles, and the brother of another was studying at the University of Miami. The women were art students and had set their sights on doing graduate studies at an American university. I admired their dreams but didn’t have the heart to tell them that their chances of receiving a student visa were almost nil. Back in the pro-American days of the shah, fifty thousand Iranians were studying at American universities. Now there are only about eleven thousand. The girls might be accepted at any of a number of graduate art programs, but the odds of a young, single Iranian woman being granted a student visa were, as the saying goes, worse than hitting the lottery.
I wished them all the best and caught a taxi outside the gate and was soon back at the hotel. It was late. The Happy Hour café had closed for the night, so I checked my email at the computer set up in the lobby. The connection had become ornery, though it had been working fine earlier in the day. I asked Mahmoud, the night clerk, for help. He fiddled with the connections and restarted the terminal but could not cajole it into cooperation.
“No freedom!” he sighed. “They do this”—by “they” he could only mean the government—“to let us live a normal life, for a while, but then they turn it off. It’s a way of reminding us that they control our lives, that they can do whatever they want.”
“What about your guests?” I asked. “Don’t they ever complain?” I knew it was a stupid question, and he replied as expected.
“It wouldn’t matter. The guests from Iran, they know there’s nothing we can do. We say anything, they will put us in jail, kill us, torture us.”
I knew that nothing like that would happen over a fluky internet connection, but his point was made.
Like hotel night clerks everywhere in the world, Mahmoud’s constant battle was how to pass the hours of interminable boredom, and there was no better relief than a late-night chat with a night-crawling guest. With no guests to pander to (“Welcome to Iran! You can have anything you like!”), he could drop his professional pose. We moved to the sitting area in the lobby and dropped into two overstuffed chairs.
“You know what we want?” Mahmoud began, leaning forward. “We just want to be a normal country. So many countries want to be important in the world. We’d like to be completely unimportant for a change, for no one to care about us at all. These leaders talk about Iran being a power in this part of the world, but the power they want, they only want it for themselves. They don’t care about the people. You’re from America?”
I nodded, but Mahmoud kept going.
“You know what we don’t want? We don’t want to compete with anyone, not even America. Power only brings trouble. Everywhere in the world, they hear ‘Iran’ and we know what they think: ‘Iran wants a nuclear weapon, Iran supports terrorism, Iran does this, Iran does that.’”
I listened to Mahmoud’s gripes with much empathy, but he was only repeating the chorus of a song I had heard too many times, and it always came down to complaints about the government. A sullen Mahmoud, sitting alone in the gloom of the lobby with a fitful internet connection, was the entire situation’s sad but fitting representation.
The next morning Sohrab and I drove to Bagh-e Eram, or Eram Garden. It was a relief to get out of the hotel. Mahmoud’s lament still hung in the lobby area like the stench of burnt coffee. The other guests in the breakfast room, daintily eating their croissants and jam, sipping from teacups with the practiced elegance of Victorian aristocrats, again seemed like a group of dinner guests who had been taken hostage and had no choice but to defy their captors with all the dignity they could muster.
Day-to-day reality in Iran may be as glum as Mahmoud described, but Iran’s gardens, dating to Achaemenid times, have always served as a representation of paradise, originally a Farsi word meaning “enhanced space.”
In the Persian view, paradise, as represented on Earth, is an expanse of green neatly divided into linear water channels and pathways, with a rectangular pool to reflect the sunlight and provide cooling relief in the heat of summer, but at this time of year to serve as a launching pad for the burst of spring. It is a setting that represents natural beauty as a mystical arrangement of balance and order, where geometric symmetry expresses balance and harmony, a concept that dates to the ancient Greeks and found resonance in the Christian world in the design of its massive cathedrals and the altarpieces that decorated them.
The Bagh-e Eram is more than a garden. Situated in the center is the Qavam House, a rambling thirty-two-room villa decorated with painted tiles inscribed with lines of verse by the only Persian who could honor such a place—Hafez. The house was built by the ilkhanate, or leader of the Qashqai tribes that inhabited the Shiraz region in the middle of the nineteenth century. Cultural influences from eastern and central Europe were filtering into Iran at the time, and the result was a building that borrowed heavily from Bulgarian and Turkish design.
It had rained in the night. Not much, just enough to dampen the grass and turn the leafy canopy into a latticework through which the hanging droplets could fall. I was lucky enough to get to the Bagh-e Eram before the sun had risen high enough to burn off the moisture from the overnight rain, so the grass was still glistening in the sunlight and the flowers were freshly aromatic, as flowers should be in the morning, and as any Persian poet, classic or modern, would agree.
I had circled the Qavam House and was crossing in front of the rectangular pool below the façade when a voice called out from a short distance away in smooth, unaccented English: “Hey, are you an American?”
The man looked about fifty and had the same stocky build as the wrestler Jamshid. Before I could reply, he strode over with very un-Persian-like nonchalance.
“I can tell. I just love Americans.”
A little stunned by his forwardness, all I could reply was “have you been there?”
“Have I been to America?!” he replied.
His name was Arash, and as we stood under the drooping fronds of the palm trees he told me the story of his life in America. He had one to tell, and he wanted to unburden it to the only person in the Bagh-e Eram, or probably all of Shiraz, or all of Iran, who might understand.
Arash had gone to the U.S. in 1976 on a student visa, when Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi still held a firm grip on power and the U.S. and Iran were at least nominal allies. In 1980 Arash graduated from the University of Texas into a different world. The exiled shah was dying of cancer in Egypt, and Ayatollah Khomeini had become the Supreme Leader of the new Islamic Republic of Iran. Despite the turmoil back home, Arash’s life continued relatively unruffled. He married and had a son. I didn’t ask him what kind of work he did because it didn’t matter. Years passed, and then came the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.
“To be honest, the year before I got in a little trouble with the IRS,” he said. “My bank accounts were audited, and I thought that was the end of it. But then my house was raided. They came at about four o’clock in the morning. An FBI SWAT team broke the door down, took my computer and all my files, and they arrested me. A couple of days later they charged me with supporting a terrorist organization—Al-Qaeda. I couldn’t believe it. Didn’t they know, Al-Qaeda is Sunni and almost all Iranians are Shiites?
“The next few months were a nightmare. They took everything I had. My son had just gotten out of college and had a couple of job offers from the federal government, but they were withdrawn. My wife was a high school principal and up for a promotion, but she was passed over.
“That wasn’t the worst. For a year I was held in a federal prison in Texas, and then they moved me to another one in Louisiana. A couple of months later I was moved again, this time to the CIA prison in Big Springs, Tennessee. I was there four and a half years. They tortured me, but whatever they wanted to know I don’t have any idea. After a while I think they didn’t know what to do with me, so they said they would drop all the charges if I agreed to return to Iran and give up any chance of returning to the U.S. I had lived in the U.S. for twenty-eight years, and my wife and son are still there, but what was I going to do, sit in prison the rest of my life? So I came back here. It’s not over though. I have a lawyer who works in human rights, and we’re trying to take this to the International Criminal Court.”
What he’d said thus far wasn’t all that surprising. What followed, though, was.
“You know,” he said, with surprising ease, “I’ve got nothing against the American people. I can’t say much for the government, but the American people, they’re the best in the world. I just love Americans.” A grin appeared on Arash’s face. “You know, I still follow the Dallas Cowboys.”
Arash wished me a very pleasant stay in Iran—“I hope you like it here, this is a great country, you know.” And then he turned away, and as he retreated under the canopy of tree limbs, the blooming flowers, the morning sunlight, the decorated façade of the pavilion, and even the water in the reflecting pool left with him. I didn’t know if Arash’s story was more startling, sad, or admirable, or an odd mixture of all three. I was finally able to sort it out this way: The pitiful treatment he received from the country where he had made his home spoke for itself. It was surprising that it didn’t color his entire view of America and Americans, and that he was still able to feel affection for the people he had lived among helped to prove the power of human relationships to overcome the divisive world of geopolitics.
After the encounter with Arash I needed something to brighten the day and knew where to find it—the Shah Cheragh Mosque.
According to Persian folklore, sometime in the early fourteenth century the cleric Ayatollah Dastghaib saw a light from the top of a hill and followed it to a nearby cemetery. A newly dug grave was discovered, and a body was unearthed wearing a coat of arms. A ring identified the body as that of the warrior Ahmad Ibn Musa. He and his brother Mohammad were the sons of the seventh of the Twelve Holy Imams, Musa Al-Khadim. The two holed up in Shiraz while on the run from Abbasid persecution at the end of the eighth century. It was in Shiraz where the two met their end. Many mosques in Iran are grand edifices with a history behind them to match, but the Shah Cheragh is relatively small and has no historical significance whatsoever. This is all to its credit, for it celebrates the beauty of light and color and nothing more. It is a poem in architectural form. It is also called the Pink Mosque because of the pink tiles that cover the interior, but the most brilliant color is found in the prayer hall facing the courtyard. Lined with arched windows of colored glass that catch the sunlight early in the morning, they transform the interior into a shimmering, kaleidoscopic display. Mirza Hassan Ali, the ruler of Shiraz at the time, built the mosque to create the unusual light effect and configured the design so that it would be strongest in the morning.
The beauty of light often finds expression in Persian poetry, and when it does it is usually linked to the spiritual world. In his Rubaiyat, Omar Khayyam wrote:
Wake! For the Sun, who scattered into flight
The stars before him from the field of night,
Drives night along with them from Heaven,
And strikes the sultan’s turret with a shaft of light.
I was a little late getting to the Shah Cheragh. The sun had risen so high that the light in the prayer hall had dimmed, though flickers were still streaming through the windows and dancing off the carpet and the vaulted ceiling, enough to resemble the last glimpse of the sun at evening.
Back at the hotel, the diversions to round off a day of sightseeing were the same as the day before: the room TV offered nothing in English except predictable Press TV, and the “Happy Hour” crowd consisted of a handful of couples sipping fruit juices and munching on tasteless snacks.
Instead of returning to the Sharzeh for dinner I decided to try its satellite branch across the Roodkhaneye Khoshk, the dry river that cuts through the heart of the city. The Sharzeh II was located in an upscale neighborhood where the young were known to frolic, and therefore a good place to witness what passes for Iranian nightlife.
But Sharzeh II was no match for Sharzeh I. The plastic-coated menus displaying photos of each dish gave it a coffee shop feel, and the two musicians—again both male—were crowded onto a tiny stage in a corner of the dining room. The only touch of cultural flavor was the open-mouthed oven at the entrance, where arriving guests could watch flat slabs of dough being slapped against the inner walls and quickly transforming into steaming, sweet-scented taftoon loaves.
There wasn’t much reason to linger once I had finished my dinner, so I paid the bill and returned to the street. It was Wednesday night, the beginning of the Iranian weekend. The stores were open, and moneyed Shirazis were out on the town: Top-end BMWs and Mercedes backed up the traffic, and women in form-fitting manteaux and hair-revealing headscarves paraded, catwalk-style, between the jewelry stores and cosmetic boutiques as they attempted to stretch their greatly devalued rials.
Not only women expressed resistance to the regime through their appearance. A few young men sported odd haircuts that the religious authorities had condemned as “un-Islamic” and added thick black belts embellished with metal studs to bell-bottom jeans that had disappeared from the global fashion scene in the 1970s. All this was simply to irk government hardliners, who viewed such things as symbols of “corrupt” Western fashion. At a pizzeria down the street from the Sharzeh a throng of young Shirazis filled its two levels to do what they could to create a nightclub atmosphere. Pop tunes—banned, tolerated, officially sanctioned, it made no difference—blasted into the night.
Around the corner from the pizzeria was a small supermarket, so I ducked in to see what goods could be had in a sanctions-afflicted country. American laws may prohibit any commercial relationship with Iran, but the shelves were stocked with Heinz ketchup and Breck shampoo, Kellogg’s cereals, Revlon cosmetics, and Johnson & Johnson bandages. In the soft-drink coolers the Pepsi cans were curiously printed in Farsi.
The store was a tribute to the Iranian entrepreneurs who had set up shop in Dubai and other cities on the other side of the Persian Gulf. Sanctions may drain the bank accounts of most of the population where they are applied and pinch some of the ruling, moneyed elite, but they are almost always a boon to black marketers, smugglers, and anyone else who thrives on illegal trade. In Dubai, for example, they typically ordered more than they could ever deliver to the local markets and shipped the surplus to Iran. International sanctions may have halted the sale of airplane parts, medical equipment, and other goods easy to monitor, but the flow of consumer items continued, ready to be snapped up by Iranians hankering for a taste of America.
“Sanctions? All they are is good for business—for Iranians doing business,” a correspondent for Radio Farda, the Iranian branch of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, told me.
It was after midnight, but still the traffic hadn’t thinned. The streets had become a parade route for late-model cars inching their way between the lights. With no taxis in sight, I began walking along the line of cars, when a large SUV pulled up beside me. A young woman poked her head out of the window and asked, in clear, crisp English, where I was trying to go.
Looking for a taxi on a Wednesday night in Shiraz was a fool’s errand, she said, though not in those exact words. But she knew of a taxi stand about a mile away and offered to take me there. She opened the back door, and I got in. Her name was Fereshteh, and piloting the enormous rig was her brother, Saeed. Saeed had lived in Los Angeles for two years, working in public relations, but had returned to Iran to get married. Fereshteh had spent six months in California and had wanted to stay longer, but her visa had been about to expire, and hiding from American immigration officials among family members with American citizenship was not an appealing option, as attractive as a new life in America appeared. So she, too, returned to Iran.
“You’re American, aren’t you?” she asked, in smooth, unaccented English, echoing Arash from the Bagh-e Eram.
Answering without answering, I asked how she could tell.
“The way you were walking,” Saeed cut in. “We saw you from the end of the street. Ferri did. She said, ‘Look, there’s an American.’”
I asked them how Americans walk.
“Like you . . .” Saeed equivocated.
“How do I walk?”
“. . . Like an American.”
I asked Saeed about his life in LA and living in the U.S.
“Once you get past the politics and religion there are a lot of similarities to Iran,” he began. “We are also a society with a lot of different cultures. You have all the Spanish-speakers and everyone else who came before, the Europeans. We aren’t much different. My father is Azeri, but his father was part Kurdish. My mother is Persian—mostly. She thinks there’s also some Turkish in there somewhere. You line up a group of Iranians and there’s no one you can say that looks ‘Iranian.’ There are Azeris, Baluchis, Arabs, Uzbeks, Persians, Armenians . . .”
I felt like prodding a little. “So multiculturalism and diversity link the two?”
“No, that’s not all. We also know what it means to be a superpower. We were also a superpower once.”
“Once” was more than two thousand years in the past, but in the Persian mind, when seeking respect and affirmation, two thousand years may as well be yesterday. But there was no point in quibbling. There was a subtext here, and I knew what it said—that Iran didn’t feel inferior to the U.S., that it believed its seven thousand years of civilization, while not outweighing America’s military and economic power, at least put Iran on an equal footing. In economic terms, Iran was “old money,” slightly faded but still holding its regal air; America was nouveau riche—young, glossy, even promising, but still quite “young,” naive, and inexperienced. Seen in this light, the Iranian position in the nearly four-decade-old standoff could be summarized as follows: “You have global economic, military, and political power beyond anything the world has ever seen. We have seven thousand years of history and artistic development and cultural achievements, and we don’t need an empire anymore. We’ve ‘been there and done that.’ See us as an equal and we can do business.”
We never found the taxi stand, so Saeed and Ferri offered to take me back to my hotel. In expected, obligatory taarof, I told them they didn’t have to put themselves out, and in expected, obligatory taarof, they said it was no problem at all, that it was on their way—more or less—but the last part wasn’t expressed directly, it was what I inferred. Where Persian protocols are concerned, little to nothing is directly expressed. The subtext is all that matters, but sometimes the subtext is as transparent as waxed paper.
Zigzagging through the empty streets of Shiraz’s residential neighborhoods, we continued to dissect the American-Iranian impasse. It was self-defeating and foolish, we concluded. If the Russians and Americans could maintain diplomatic relations all through the Cold War, and in doing so avoided a nuclear holocaust, why couldn’t the Americans and Iranians?
Back at the hotel, there was still a little life left in the “Happy Hour Café.” The sleepy waiter was tending to his last customers, so I ordered a mint tea and settled back to ponder the relationship between the United States and Iran. Forty years of Cold War diplomacy, as much as they avoided nuclear holocaust, never improved relations between the Soviet Union and the United States to a significant degree. The two continued to talk past each other but learned to agree to disagree. Nevertheless, the relationship did foster a degree of understanding, if not agreement.
The lesson from all this was that better relations between countries, even the most adversarial, do not need diplomatic relations to improve. In fact, relationships might have a better chance of improving if the diplomats simply got out of the way.
The following morning offered an affirmation of my view. I had just returned to my room from breakfast when the maid rapped on the door, but a little hastily, as hotel maids do. Once she saw me she started to back out, but I waved her in. As she puttered around the room, she finally got up the courage to ask, in practiced but pidgin English, “Where—are—you—from?”
I told her.
“Oooh . . .” she oozed, her eyes widening. I sensed surprise, admiration, envy, possibly a combination of all three.
The next morning I was heading to breakfast when a voice at the end of the hall called out: “Good—morn—ing!” she cooed, as smooth and as sweet as any of the birds portrayed in Saadi’s garden.