Over the course of that winter and spring, I saw how the Professor’s family negotiated the contrast between the different worlds of inside and out, and became used to negotiating it myself. I would address taxi drivers as “sir,” never shake hands with a woman outside, and keep mum about the latest joke on the Supreme Leader’s opium habit . . . until I was indoors. I learned how to dart like a bullet through the traffic and, when I needed a lift, how to haggle with a driver whose car was still moving; how to walk home at night without falling into the joob canals, and how to do so when I was too drunk to risk calling a taxi.

The contrast between public and private was most visible in Tahmineh. Inside, she rarely concealed her arms or midriff, but if she stepped outside the mosquito-net door, she always wrapped herself in a knee-length trench coat (the standard uniform for young women—although Tahmineh’s was the right size for a twelve-year-old) and covered her hair with a brightly patterned headscarf, her fringe carefully sprayed to curl out underneath.

“Eh baba!” she laughed when the Professor suggested one day that her choice of headscarf might attract trouble from the authorities (it was the size of a handkerchief). “If God wanted women to hide our hair, why did he make it longer than men’s?”

Sina and the Professor also changed their clothes when they were inside, taking off their trousers and schlepping about in loose cotton pajamas, although Sina, who was pretty casual about such things, could just as easily be seen in his black-market Calvin Kleins.

“But Nicholas,” he would object, when I persisted in wearing my khakis, “those trousers are for outside. You cannot be comfortable!”

This contrast between inside and out was reflected in the Professor’s own professional experience, which had been turned on its head by the revolution. As the weeks went by, we got into a habit of talking together over a postsupper glass of arak ¹¹ or vodka (or, when money was tight, the Professor would produce a bottle of industrial ethanol—the only alcohol sold openly in Iranian mini-marts—and mix it with lemon juice. “It has an excellent taste!” he would announce, somewhat unconvincingly, on those occasions). It was one such evening that he told me how his career had been shaped by political events.

“Before the revolution, you know what I was doing?” he said. “I was a rising star of our civil service! Ha! But when those onion-heads came to power, I said to myself, ‘Can you work under this system? Of course not!’ So I decided to study the history of my country and save our culture before it eats the dust.”

Even when he emerged in public, he was pushed back under the surface: intermittent teaching jobs at Tehran’s universities were canceled when the authorities got hold of poems he had published and came knocking at his door.

“I had the honor of spending forty days in jail,” he explained, to the tinkle of the ice in his vodka glass. “They put a blindfold on me and made me sit in a cell with a dozen other gentlemen. My wife was expecting Tahmineh at this time, so I worried I would be too late. I worried a lot, I am not ashamed to tell you this, and do you know how I comforted myself? I turned to stories. Stories I remembered from my childhood, stories that have been with me all my life. For example, you know the story of Bizhan? It is in Shahnameh; he is thrown in chains in a deep pit because of his love for the daughter of the king. Well, I thought of this story—I thought of others too, many stories, and they gave me comfort at this time. Then, after forty days, they let me out and that same week, what do you think happened? My daughter was born!”

Tahmineh was in her room, listening to her music. If she had seen her father’s smile as he uttered this last sentence, she could never have doubted his love for her. To him, this coincidence was proof that, however nasty the mullahs’ regime, there was enough goodness in the world with which to fight them. It enabled him to look back on his prison experience not as some scarring ordeal but as a proud moment that set him alongside his heroes in a brotherhood of victims.

“If you never went to prison,” he said another evening, “you are nothing.”

We were in the living room this time, sitting on the sofa, while Sina channel-hopped between MTV and the soccer.

“But I was not only in prison under the mullahs,” the Professor continued. “The shah was also an enemy of the bright-thinkers. The things he would do to people who disagreed with him! You know, the Savak¹² arrested many of my friends. Of course, these mullahs are monkeys, but they are not the first.”

To the Professor, tyranny was a constant in the country’s history. When his friends—scholars, magazine editors, a novelist—came over for poetry discussions and cake, they would back him up. There were stories of cruel censorship, forcing a book through a dozen variations to toe an ever-shifting government line; of cells full of cockroaches and urine; of someone’s niece, who had disappeared and was believed to be holed up in the dreaded Evin prison; of beatings at demonstrations either side of the revolution; and of an elderly poet who had been shot by a firing squad under the shah.

But there was a crucial difference between the tyrants. When Ayatollah Khomeini, flying back at the end of the revolution in 1979, was asked what he felt to be returning to his homeland after a fourteen-year exile, he gave a stony-faced reply: “nothing.” In contrast, the shah, leaving the country only a week and a half earlier, stooped to pick a handful of Iranian soil before boarding his plane.

“Even if the shah was bad,” said the Professor, “at least he believed he loved Iran. But these onion-heads, they want the Middle East to be one great Muslim empire, like it was in the time of the caliphs. To them, Iran means nothing, just like Khomeini said.”

The Professor and his family represented a particular kind of Iranian—against the government, but certainly not hoping the shah would come back; proud of Iranian history and lukewarm to the religion they outwardly professed.

“Most Iranians are spiritual,” he once told me, “but does this oblige us to attend the mosque every Friday and perform the fast in Ramadan? Of course not! These things are external rituals, they are not what matters.”

The Professor rarely talked about religion, but he frequently talked about being Persian. If I wanted to get in his good books, all I had to do was repeat the phrase “Farsi shirin e”—Persian is sweet.¹³

“The Persian culture,” he liked to say, “is the most important culture in this part of the world. Maybe if you are a religious fanatic you will disagree, but otherwise you cannot argue. We have poetry, we have music, we have philosophy! And medicine also—in fact, without the Persians, the history of medicine would be a disaster.”

He would dip into his walnut bookcase, introducing me to his favorite writers—most of whom were dead before the bubonic plague: Ibn Sina (known to the West as Avicenna), who produced the Qanun or “Code” of Medicine—the seminal medical text not only in the Middle East but in Europe too until the 1800s; the scholar Abu Raihan al-Biruni, who proved that light travels faster than sound and argued that the earth moves around the sun more than five hundred years before Copernicus (as well as, among his other observations, pointing out that flowers always have three, four, five, six, or eight petals but never seven or nine); the bawdy poet Abu Dulaf al-Khazriji, who suggested that beggars should stoke the sympathy of the crowd by inserting porridge up their rectums (so it oozed out as the suppurations of a wound) and whose company included “every person avid for copulation, for vulvas and anuses indifferently.” Together, these extraordinary authors expressed the amazing eclecticism of the medieval Persians—specifically, of the late tenth and early eleventh centuries, when this region was fizzing with more far-reaching ideas than the rest of the world put together.¹⁴

Figure 1: Persian Egg-Heads of the Late 10th/Early 11th Century

Many of the Professor’s books were poetry collections, spanning the gamut of Persian literature, from a blind medieval minstrel called Rudaki to Forough Forrukhzad, a heroine to thousands of Iranian women who was killed in a car accident in her early thirties. The Professor would quote from these poets at the dinner table, pointing out the particular genius of the Persian language for rhyme (“Bush mush!” he would say to prove this point. “(President) Bush is a mouse!”; “Anar e bustan, anar e pestan!”—“Pomegranate of the fruit garden, pomegranate of the breasts!”)—and this wasn’t because he was an intel - lectual, it was because he was Persian. As the film director Abbas Kiarostami puts it, “Poetry in Iran pours down on us, like falling rain, and everyone takes part in it.” Even Ayatollah Khomeini had been known to pen the odd couplet, composing mystical verses influenced by the medieval Sufi poets. Among his lines—somewhat surprising given the system he imposed on the country—is the following: “Open the door of the tavern before me night and day, / For I have become weary of the mosque and seminary.”¹⁵

Coming from a society in which poetry is often perceived as elitist and out-of-date, it was hard for me to recognize its importance to Iranians. But each time I heard a taxi driver, stuck in congestion, soothing his frustration with a quote from the mystical medieval poet Hafez, or the Professor’s wife, reciting from Forrukhzad while she was hanging up the laundry, another piece of my skepticism would be nibbled away. What had appealed to me at first about Iran was all the parties—the drink, drugs, and flirting—because they reminded me of home. It’s a way of saying, “Look, they’re just the same as us!” But the longer I stayed in the country, the more I was drawn to what made them . . . themselves. And foremost was their love for poetry. Over the coming months, I would hear verses recited in grocer shops, at the sauna, in a university dormitory. And I would realize that Iran isn’t ayatollahs and headscarves and nuclear centrifuges. It’s a butcher reciting verses from the national epic in his village shop, as everyone crowds around to listen, not caring at all if they will have to wait for their meat.

The Professor wasn’t alone in emphasizing the “national” over the “religious” culture. Several musicians, like the popular DJ Div or the band Kahtmayan, used pre-Islamic stories and characters in their songs. It was a way of marking themselves as rebels, against the status quo, but it was also a way of exploring their national identity—an issue, as I was to learn, that was very important to many young Iranians.

It was at the New Year (celebrated—with more logic than the Roman calendar—on the spring equinox) that this identity came to the fore. According to the tenth-century scholar Biruni, “It has been the custom of this day to sow around a plate seven kinds of grain on seven columns, and from their growth they draw conclusions regarding the corn of that year, whether it would be good or bad.” The custom is retained, even in the cities: For several weeks leading up to the festival, Khanom was tending a tray of wheat sprouts, which she kept on top of the fridge, and in accordance with tradition, a table was set up in the living room, under the print of Darius the Great. In keeping with the theme of “seven,” it contained seven items beginning with the Persian letter “sin” or s: an apple (sib), a sweet pudding called samanu, a clove of garlic (sir), a vinegar bottle (serkeh), a jujube fruit (senjed), a handful of sumac berries, and the tray of sprouts (sabzi).

The festival, known as Nowruz or “New Day,” was celebrated long before even Biruni was around, which is reflected in one of its most significant rituals: On the Wednesday before Nowruz, known as “Red Wednesday,” people set off firecrackers and leap over flames. I was itching to see this ritual, so Sina took me to a school playground, where a set of seven small fires had been stoked. Smoke was puffing at Spider-Man sneakers and singeing the odd sock as a gang of small boys chanted the traditional phrase “My red for your yellow and your yellow for my red.” The yellow is the chanter’s weariness, while the red signifies the power of the flames, which he hopes will refuel him for the coming year (although none of the boys, prancing over the flames and setting off Russian petards to scare the girls, looked like they were in need of an energy boost).

“We have been doing this since before the Arabs attacked,”¹⁶ said the father of one of the boys, passing around a plate of pistachio-flavored nougat, “since the time when we were Zoroastrian. We had a great love of fire because it can purify things, so on this day we brought out anything rotten from our houses and put it on the fire.”

“What do the mullahs think of it?” I asked.

“Oh, who cares? Sometimes they try to stop it. One of the ayatollahs made an announcement, he said it is un-Islamic.¹⁷ But why should we listen to them? This is the problem in our country, we act like sheep and let ourselves be pushed around by people who aren’t true Iranians.”

I was intrigued by the way he identified so closely with Zoroastrianism—a religion founded more than a millennium before Islam. Growing out of native folk beliefs, Zoroastrianism developed from the older veneration of nature its customs of worshipping in front of a fire and leaving the dead on mountaintop towers to be eaten by vultures. Equally striking was his dismissal of the ayatollahs as un-Iranian. Like many Iranians who were fond of the native culture, he despised the ayatollahs’ emphasis on Islamic traditions. It was an attack, as far as he was concerned, on the country’s identity—an individuality drawn principally from its pre-Islamic heritage.

“I do not consider this a good thing,” said the Professor, when I talked to him about the Red Wednesday ceremony.

I was surprised: I had thought he was keen on the pre-Islamic motifs—after all, this was the subject of his research.

“They are doing it for negative reasons,” he said, “to announce to the world they are not standing beside the mullahs. They jump over the fires but if you ask them about Zoroastrianism they will be unable to answer you. And if they are interested in Red Wednesday, then please tell me, where are the other old traditions, like the boys spoon-hitting or Hajji Firuz?¹⁸ What these young people are looking for is an opportunity to gather in large numbers—so the boys and girls can exchange their telephone numbers.”

The Pahlavi shahs exploited the pre-Islamic motifs to strengthen their power; the same traditions were being harnessed now by the powerless youth, hungry for the opportunities the mullahs’ regime was denying them.

I think the Professor was only partially right. I talked to a lot of young Iranians about the pre-Islamic motifs, and most of them expressed little interest in, or knowledge of, the historical background. But a surprising number of them did. For every three youngsters who treated Red Wednesday as a dating game, there was always one who wanted to tell me about the story behind it. Typical of these was Mehrdad, a twenty-year-old music student, who unbuttoned his shirt to show a metal figure resting on his chest.

“This is the faravahar,” he said.

It was a bearded man with wings and a disk around his waist, hanging from a silver chain around Mehrdad’s neck.

“It is the Zoroastrian symbol,” he said. “I am Muslim, that is my upbringing, but I am Iranian and this is more important for me. Iranians are Zoroastrians—we have only been Muslim for a few hundred years, but Zoroastrianism is natural to us. It is connected to being Iranian because it has a love for the sun and the mountains and trees, and these are all important things in our culture.”

In Britain you might hear of the odd pagan cult or a ritual in a Wiltshire field, but it’s hardly mainstream. Nor are views like Mehrdad’s in Iran—because if he were to express them in public he could be accused of apostasy, which is punishable by death. But he was far from alone in wanting to celebrate the pre-Islamic culture—it couldn’t be kept down, not even when it came to the biggest of all the country’s Islamic ceremonies . . .

“Look!” said Sina one cold night at the end of February. “You want to go and see?”

Leaning over the balcony railing, it was hard to work out what was going on. The black metal gate was acting as a screen—all I could make out behind it were the tops of brightly colored feathers and the curved iron tongues of a processional standard. It was the sounds that were drawing us out—the thunder of a bass drum, growing louder with every beat, and the chanting of the men.

“You see!”

Sina was grinning as the gate closed behind us, his head already buzzing with pickup lines.

“This is what happens on ashoura,” he explained, nodding at a row of girls wrapped in black cotton on the other side of the road. “The girls from the strict families are given permission to go outside because it’s a holy day, and they are hoping they will find a boyfriend.”

He dug a hand into his pocket, drawing out a piece of paper with his phone number, and cast his beam on the girls—he’d been expecting this. Even if it was a religious festival, it was still a large gathering, and in Iran, all large gatherings involve the number exchange. That night, Sina swapped details with three girls (a modest tally by his standards, although it made up for the loss of two of his girlfriends in the last fortnight). But, having accompanied him on every conceivable variation of the Tehran pickup tour, I found my attention was drifting from the girls; this time it was the men who engrossed me.

They were all wearing black trousers and shirts. They formed rows behind the standard, some of them carrying metal chains, which they gripped on short wooden handles and struck hard against their backs.

“Oh Imam Hossain!” they cried, to the rhythm of the drum, “oh Imam Hossain!”

There is no figure in Shia Islam as popular as Imam Hossain. He was as ubiquitous in Tehran as Ayatollah Khomeini: strung up on the roadsides and outside government buildings, painted onto the sides of apartment blocks, and raised over the marquees where the mourning songs were sold. He was usually depicted face-on, blood pouring from his forehead: a reference to his death on ashoura, the tenth day of the Islamic month of Mohurram, in 680 CE. It was the defining moment in the schism between the Shia and the Sunnis,¹⁹ when Imam Hossain, a grandson of the Prophet Mohammed, was besieged along with his entourage on the plains of Kerbala and struck down by the forces of the caliph Yazid. They were “treated in such a way as never in the whole world the worst criminals have been treated,” narrated the scholar Biruni. “They were killed by hunger and thirst, through the sword. They were burned and their heads roasted, and horses were made to trample over their bodies.” The caliph, on the other hand, “celebrated a feast, and gave banquets and parties, eating sweetmeats and various kinds of confiseries.”

The standard (known as an alam) is based on those carried on the battlefield, traditionally signifying the presence of the ruler. A verse from the Quran wove an openwork inscription around it, while fantastical metal beasts hung down around the lustrously bearded image of Imam Hossain.

A stocky man was buckled to it, lifting it like Atlas as he towed the procession forward. We followed them down a series of backstreets, between smog-blackened, plaster-dripping walls, across the City Park and under a motorway tunnel where the traffic, amazingly, stopped to let them pass. Black bunting fluttered over our heads in the bazaar district as we converged among other groups, one of which was followed by a pickup truck full of sheep. A couple of the sheep were being dragged off the truck and onto the street, where they were held down by burly men with rolled-up sleeves. The light from a lamppost struck the edge of a knife, sparkling on the drops of blood growing on the pavement, which spread around us and trickled down between the cracks in the paving stones.

A man on a motorbike had parked near one of the sheep corpses. He knelt down, dunking his fingers in the blood, then dabbed it on his rearview mirrors.

“You know why he is doing that?” asked Sina. “He thinks it will give him good fortune.”

And it wasn’t just bikers. Others did the same to the bumpers of their cars, dipping their fingers like Christians at a font and anointing their vehicles with mumbled words of prayer.

“We are doing this for Imam Hossain,” said one of the men, gripping his chain in his hands. “He was a good man, the best of men.”

But the “chain-hitter” next to him was more ambiguous about whom they were honoring.

“It is not only Imam Hossain,” he said, “it is also Siyavash. Before we became Muslims we did this for Siyavash. Now we do it for Imam Hossain, but in my heart I am thinking also of Siyavash.”

“Siyavash?” I asked.

I was puzzled. I’d read about Siyavash many times—he was perhaps my favorite character from all the Persian myths I’d absorbed over the past few weeks; but I was sure he was not a figure who would fit easily into an Islamic festival, so I wasn’t surprised when the first man told me to ignore him.

“Siyavash is a myth,” he snapped. “Imam Hossain is real; that is much better.”

It was too late—he couldn’t rub out what the other man had said: “Siyavash.” It was like a magic word, fracturing the surface of ashoura like the cracks through which the sheep’s blood had been trickling, pulling out the ghosts of Iran’s pre-Islamic past to stand alongside the great figures of Shiism.

“Siyavash,” I kept saying, repeating the talismanic word. “Siyavash. Siyavash! He said Siyavash . . . ”

But Sina was looking serious for once, squeezing my shoulder to shut me up.

“Don’t say it so loud,” he whispered. “Some people don’t like it.”

“But he said . . . ”

Siyavash was a pre-Islamic prince, a mythical character who has no place in the Quran. If he lived, it was nearly three millennia ago, probably in Central Asia. To toss his name into a Muslim festival is like turning up at a Christmas vigil and talking about Thor. But the same connection was made again, just a few days after ashoura, when I met the acclaimed theater director Pari Sabery.

She was an imposing figure—her eyes shining under the wisps of gray hair that peeked under her black headscarf. In the café underneath the City Theatre, she sat down in front of a poster for a play she’d directed about Siyavash’s story only a few months earlier.

“Imam Hossain is like Siyavash,” she explained. “Their blood purifies us.”

THE TALE OF SIYAVASH

Blessed with the sort of looks to make a woman melt like ice near a fire, Siyavash is the most sought-after of princes. Somewhat too sought-after, in fact. His stepmother invites him into the royal harem and offers him a lot more than a glass of rose water. He flees from her embraces, but she cries rape, tearing her garments and slashing her cheeks with her fingernails, and with the help of a witch she blames Siyavash for causing her to miscarry. There is only one way the prince can prove his innocence: He must ride his horse through a tunnel of flames.²⁰

“When Siyavash rides his horse through the fire,” said Pari Sabery, “it cannot touch him, because he is an innocent and pure human being. He is perfect.”

This innocence is Siyavash’s trademark, singling him out and exposing him to the manipulation of others. Sent out to lead the Iranian army against its rival, the Kingdom of Turan, he manages to secure a truce. But his father, wary of Afrasiyab, the wily Turanian king, demands that he break his word and fight. This is something Siyavash cannot countenance. Instead, fed up with all the machinations, he decides to live on his own, building himself a city on the Turanian border. He lives there in peace, at least until Afrasiyab’s jealous brother accuses him of plotting to take over the kingdom. Afrasiyab rides out to attack, but Siyavash knows what’s coming—like Imam Hossain after him, he can see his own future. He burns his treasury, sends his horse away, and sets out to meet his fate. Grabbed by the hair, he is thrown to the ground, a bowl placed under his chin and his throat cut “as if it were a sheep’s.”

The story of Siyavash is told by the poet Ferdowsi in the Shahnameh— an iconic story still remembered by many Iranians. Long before the ashoura festival there were mourning rituals for Siyavash, which are mentioned by the tenth-century historian Narshakhi in his “History of Bukhara” (the Central Asian city in which Siyavash was legendarily said to have lived).²¹ It is more than a coincidence, I think, that Ferdowsi was writing soon after ashoura was first publicly commemorated. The earliest records place it in 963 CE, when the poet was in his twenties (before then, the Shia were persecuted and unable to mark their holy days in public, but around this time a Shia dynasty called the Buwayhids wangled their way to control of the Sunni caliph in Baghdad). Shops were closed, women blackened their faces and tore their clothes, while the mourners beat their faces as they marched.

“The Shia people,” noted the scholar Biruni, “lament and weep on this day, mourning over the protomartyr in public.”

Standing on the pavement with Sina, watching the slashing of the knives on the sheep’s throats, their blood and their shiny white intestines glowing in the lamplight, I thought of Ferdowsi’s description: Siyavash, the martyr prince, grabbed by the hair and thrown to the ground, his throat cut “as if it were a sheep’s.” And I thought of the man who said he thinks of Siyavash “in my heart.”

It wasn’t the only pre-Islamic detail peeking out through ashoura’s Islamic surface. The beasts hanging from the processional standards included winged bulls like the creatures carved at the ancient shah’s city of Persepolis, in western Iran. Imam Hossain’s father, Imam Ali (the Prophet’s son-in-law), was presented on several banners with a flamemaned lion behind him, inadvertently suggesting the old royal symbol and the Zoroastrian importance of the sun (rather than the Islamic motif of the moon). And most significant of all was a shrine I visited, up a copper-colored cliff on the outskirts of South Tehran, where women tie rags and offer prayers outside the iron-grilled mouth of a cave.

“This is where Bibi Shahrbanu came when she was escaping from the Arabs,” said one of them—a young woman in floral printed voile, whose tears were threatening to put out the candle she was holding.

She was talking about the daughter of Yazdagird III, the last pre-Islamic shah. According to tradition, Imam Hossain took her as his wife after the Persian empire had been crushed; but the night before the siege of Kerbala, knowing she was pregnant with his son, he sent her away.

“When the Arabs came to catch her,” said the caretaker, offering me a glass of tea and a boiled sweet in a recess behind the shrine, “Imam Hossain had told her to cry out ‘Yahu!’ which means ‘oh God’ in Arabic, and then God would save her. But her Arabic wasn’t very good, so she cried out ‘Ya kuh!’ instead (which means ‘oh mountain!’) and she was eaten by the rocks.”

It’s a surreal tale that captures the ambiguity of Iran’s Islamic identity. Taken by Islam, the daughter of the shah fails to be absorbed by the Arab culture. She retains her Persian language up to the end and is rescued by the old Zoroastrian symbol—the mountain. This Zoroastrian connection is made even stronger because, before Bibi Shahrbanu was honored here, this spot marked a shrine to Anahita, the Zoroastrian water angel (which is why, according to some theories, Bibi Shahrbanu came here—to pray in a place long venerated by her ancestral faith). It’s her offspring who make this shrine so important to Muslim Iranians today: Her son would become the fourth Shia imam; so from her blood—the blood of the ancient Persian shahs—come the remaining imams, reconciling the “alien” faith of Islam to the native Persian tradition of kingship. Through Bibi Shahrbanu, Islam is Persianized and made palatable to the wider Iranian population.

“Is the story of Bibi Shahrbanu important for you?” I asked the caretaker.

He put down his tea and nodded, gripping the fingers of one hand in the fist of the other.

“Of course it is! Through Bibi Shahrbanu, Iran and Islam are one.”

Together, these festivals (the Zoroastrian Nowruz and the ostensibly Islamic ashoura) showed that, bustling behind the screen of the mullahs’ particular brand of Islam, there is a thriving native culture. Many Iranians, especially young, middle-class ones like Sina, were fed up with all the religion the authorities had forced down their throats—they wanted a different way of seeing themselves, a way that could distinguish them from their hated overlords. And there was one man, above all others, who stood at the heart of this identity. . . .

“There he is!”

One afternoon in early spring, when the crocuses were starting to come out in the parks and fresh white asphodels were filling up the glass florists’ shops on the roadsides, the Professor met me outside the Literature Faculty of Tehran University. Taking off his homburg and holding it in front of him, he stood, in a respectful bow. Above us, sitting cross-legged on a cushion, with the end of his turban draped over his shoulder, was the poet Ferdowsi. If he didn’t happen to be made out of bronze, you might imagine he was sitting in a teahouse, ready to recite one of his tales.

“So is he your favorite poet?” I asked.

“Favorite?” The Professor snorted. “Favorite has nothing to do with it. Look at him, he is more even than a poet, he is . . . ”

He stopped for a moment, as if he needed to work this one out.

“He is . . . the most Persian Persian who ever lived. Yes, that is it—the most Persian Persian. Do you understand?”

“I think so.”

There was a bench nearby. The Professor lowered himself onto it, holding the armrest as he looked at the poet.

“In your culture,” he said, “people do not remember poetry, do they?”

“Well, some people do.”

“But not everyone. You see, child? In Iran, everyone remembers poetry. Everyone can remember lines from Ferdowsi, for example. This is why he is so important! Without him, we would not speak Persian. Without him, we would have no history, no heritage. Without him, we would be like all the other countries the Arabs attacked—we would be extinct! An Iranian, a Persian speaker, would be the same as a dodo or a Phoenician. People would talk about it as if it was something from the past.”

As I stood looking at the bronze poet from a thousand years ago, it was as if I were watching him come to life. As if his toes were starting to twitch inside those curly-ended shoes and his lips were quivering over his long twisting beard. Without this extraordinary figure from the past, Iran would have no present. Which made him more important to the country today than any other aspect of its culture. Because Ferdowsi and his Shahnameh represent the national cultural DNA.

“He was a farmer from the east of our country,” said the Professor, “a province called Khorasan, near the border with Afghanistan.²²

He saw that our Persian culture was in decline—ever since the Arabs invaded, they tried to make us speak Arabic and even if they didn’t succeed, many Arabic words became stuck in our language, like mud on your shoes when you have fallen in the dirt. So he decided to do something about it. You have to understand who this man was! He loved everything that made us Persian. He loved drinking wine, he loved our literature and our history, he loved the land, the mountains, the rivers, the sun. Oh yes, he was a Muslim—but more than that he was Persian! So for thirty-five years he worked without stopping, purifying the language all the way to its roots and collecting the legends and the history of the days before the Arabs came, the time of the shahs. Then he took his book, the Shahnameh, to the richest lord in this part of the world—Sultan Mahmud of Ghazni.”

The Professor looked at me, his owl-like eyes expanding, his face lengthening like a shadow at dusk.

“The sultan had offered him a gold dinar for every couplet—well, he had toiled so hard he had lost all his wealth—his farm was no more than a few empty fields. So he traveled all the way to Ghazni, a journey of many days across the most dangerous lands, he presented the Shahnameh at Sultan Mahmud’s court, and do you know what happened?”

He was still looking at me, his thick dark brows building arches over his eyes, his furrows filling up with bold lines of shade.

“For sixty thousand couplets, for forty years’ work, for the greatest poem in our language—did Sultan Mahmud give him what he promised? Ha! He gave him a single sack of silver!”²³

At this, the Professor drummed the arm of the bench and, throwing back his head, exploded. It was a laugh, but one consisting less of mirth than a raw, maniacal anger. Several students, coming out of the Literature Faculty, stopped their chatting and turned to look at him, blinking in the sunlight and not daring to approach.

“Ferdowsi was furious!” he continued. “He went to the bathhouse and he threw away the money. He gave half of it to the bath attendant, and the other half to a sherbet-seller. Then he asked for one more look at his poem, and he wrote something in the back.”

A rueful smile crossed the Professor’s face, his eyes even brighter now as a defiant chuckle crept out of his mouth.

“Those words he wrote, how they made Sultan Mahmud boil! He told his soldiers, ‘Find that poet and trample him under my elephants! ’ But Ferdowsi could not be found—he was gone.”

“What were the words?” I asked.

The Professor nodded slowly, looking up at the statue with an expression of such intensity it was as if he were channeling the spirit of the poet himself. After a deep breath, the words of Ferdowsi’s wrath came bursting out, in such a thunderous tone that several of the students walking past stopped to listen:

Agar shah ra shah budi pedar	If only your father a true king had been
Besar bar nahadi mara taj e zar	Then wouldn’t your gold on my head have been poured?
Vagar madar shahbanu bedi	And as for your mother, if she’d been a queen
Mara sim va zar ta be zanu bedi.	Then I would be sunk to my knees in your hoard.²⁴

There was a long silence between us, punctuated by the Professor’s deep breaths, as I took in the age-old insult—the king derided for his low birth. So much of what I’d learned about Persian culture so far (the concern for birth, reflected in the ancestry of the Shia imams; the tradition of poets being crowned with gold) seemed to be evoked in these lines, along with something else I would learn more about in the coming weeks and months—the anger of a poet spurned by the ruling regime. Some of the students were still looking at us, drawn by the power of the Professor’s recital, but at last they moved on.

“You see?” said the Professor. His smile had fallen and in its place was a gentler, sadder expression. “He worked hard all his life and what did he ever get from the world? When people say we have troubles, I tell them, bright-thinkers in this country, we always had troubles! Look at Ferdowsi!”

Shaking his head, he pressed down on the arm of the bench to pull himself up. Then, holding his hands behind his back, he slowly made his way toward the university gates, whispering to himself as we walked: “the most Persian Persian who ever lived.”