Drinking Arak off an Ayatollah's Beard

I could hear Khanom as I stepped out of Sina’s room—she stretched the long vowel of “jaan,” or “dear,” as if it were a lasso to draw her daughter back toward her. But Tahmineh was already approaching me in the corridor: She wasn’t going to be swayed.

“You will have to tell us one day,” said Khanom. “They only ask because they care about you.”

She was holding the kitchen phone against her apron—I guessed she had been talking to one of the many aunts who were always ringing up for family gossip. But Tahmineh wasn’t going to be caught out by any cheap tricks: This, after all, was the girl who was invincible at backgammon, even against her father.

“Your shirt is missing a button,” she said to me—it was a common tactic of hers to point out other people’s dishabille when she was backed into a corner, and I was a hapless target. “Mama—Nicholas wants a needle.” There was a loud chuckle, the bang of her door, and she had disappeared.

A few minutes later, while I was trying to work the needle through a spare button, I could hear the sound of Googosh, Iran’s favorite diva, singing in her rich, fruity soprano. Her most popular songs were recorded before the revolution, when she was the country’s number-one style icon. But even though they predated Tahmineh’s birth, she played these songs as often as the more recent hits by stars like Binyamin and Arash. Like many young Iranian women, she looked on that earlier era with the rose-tinted nostalgia of never having lived through it, and no one, as far as I could tell, represented it for Tahmineh as much as Googosh.

“I think she’s beautiful,” she said, when a friend of hers was mocking her for not being more familiar with the new “in” acts. “She always dresses in an interesting way,” she explained, “and she was at her best when our country was good.”

It was only when I saw her film collection that I realized why Tahmineh looked on the earlier era with such affection. She would watch the films in the evenings, when she came back from her acting classes (or more recently, rehearsals—for a play based on Persian literature’s most famous romance, which I was looking forward to seeing in a few weeks’ time). Tucking her feet under an armchair in front of the TV, she would dig a spoon into a tub of ice cream. Some of the films starred the B-movie heartthrob Mohammed Fardin, famous for playing hard-drinking, hard-playing heroes in black-and-white boy-gets-girl adventures. He could rip off his shirt and dive off a bridge as easily as he could break into song or flirt with a woman in a tiny dress whose car had just broken down.

“I love Fardin!” Tahmineh exclaimed one night, when the Professor was criticizing the “Fardin cinema” for being crass.

Trashy these films might have been, but when characters in current soap operas had to wear the veil even in kitchen scenes, the films of Fardin were a glimpse of a more fun-loving, but still Persian-speaking, world.

The films of Googosh were more complicated. The ones I saw were all tearjerkers that were attempting to engage with the social problems of Iran under the shah. In one of them, Googosh played a young woman who discovered she was pregnant and traveled to Tehran with her boyfriend to get an abortion, staying at the house of an opium addict. For Tahmineh, however, far from being a gritty account of prerevolutionary Iran’s social problems, the film was about one thing above all, which set it apart from any film made since the revolution: It was all about the hair.

“I wish I could look like that,” she announced during one scene, in which an abandoned Googosh, sporting a glorious golden bob, was sprinkling her flat with tears.

Living in a country where films were so strictly censored, Tahmineh had adopted a censorship of her own—so she could pick out from any film she watched precisely the qualities she was looking for.

“Nicholas, come!”

The Professor was standing by the walnut bookcase, sliding back the glass door to take out his copy of Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh.

“I know just the story to start with,” he said.

The puppet opera wasn’t alone in drawing me toward Ferdowsi. Many other incidents had pushed the epic closer, nudging it up time’s narrow corridor.

A friend of Sina’s who had been hoping to avoid military service by paying a $10,000 bribe, had only been able to produce the necessary funds when it was too late. “Like the elixir that came after Sohrab’s death,” sighed his father. He was using a popular proverb, referring to a potion that Rostam is given in Ferdowsi’s story, but only after it’s too late to save his son’s life. When I mentioned this encounter to the Professor, he exclaimed, “Ha! You see—you are starting to understand. Shahnameh isn’t just in that book in the bookcase—it’s everywhere.”

Now, while Khanom was hard at work in the kitchen—fashioning a giant ball out of several pounds of ground lamb—the Professor was setting his copy of the Shahnameh on the glass table in the living room. It was the same green-jacketed volume that, many months later, I would show to my companions on the bus to Afghanistan. The so-called Moscow edition, it has a hundred lines to the page, and more than 60,000 verses in total: four times the length of the Iliad and the Odyssey combined.

The Professor leaned forward eagerly, like the pages were pieces of cake and he was greedy to gobble them up, licking a finger each time he turned them. As I sat down beside him, the smells from the kitchen—the buttery rice, the garlic and parsley, a tingle of turmeric—were seeping into the living room—a teaser of the meal to come, adding their aroma to the atmosphere of the verses.

Strictly speaking, the Shahnameh is a chronicle: the story of fifty kings, or shahs, from the prehistoric Gaiomart to Yazdagird III, whose defeat at the hands of the invading Islamic army in the seventh century CE brings the Persian empire to its calamitous end. Although the shahs would be revived many years later, there is no need, in the minds of many Iranians, for their reigns to be chronicled—they are simply repeating the original cycle, right up to their demise at the hands of the “Islamic army” of the ayatollahs.

In many ways—especially in the mythical first half—Ferdowsi’s epic takes place in an unfamiliar world. A world that is flat and supported on the horns of a bull, where a dragon is just as likely to swoop over your head as a buzzard and demonic divs²⁶ are always lurking in wayside ruins. It’s a brutal world, where troops become so caked in blood “that none knew another until they had bathed”; but it’s also a sensuous world, where tulip-cheeked princesses smell of jasmine and ambergris and the sun shines “like the ruby of Badakhshan.” For the English-speaking reader, these tales evoke the legends of King Arthur, the epics of Homer and the magic of The Lord of the Rings. Many of the storylines have a familiar ring to them: the youth Zal, brought up Mowgli-like in the wild; the hero Rostam, who has to perform a series of labors like Hercules; the prince Siyavash, tempted and slandered by his wicked stepmother, like Joseph by Potiphar’s wife; the nearly invincible Asfandiyar, whose eyes are his Achilles’s heel. The best stories transcend the national history for a global appeal, so it’s no wonder they have traveled so far and wide—entertaining the courts of Mughal India (where Emperor Akbar was advised by his chief minister to read them), painted in miniatures that now hang in Windsor Castle and the National Library of Russia, filmed in Central Asia, retold in the novels of the Nobel-winning Turkish author Orhan Pamuk, and most recently printed in comic books in California. But in the principal homeland of the Shahnameh itself, they have been out of favor ever since the Islamic Revolution.

When the mullahs came to power in 1979, Ferdowsi’s epic was an inevitable casualty. Under the Pahlavi shahs, it had been recited on television and at coronation ceremonies; papers were delivered on it by an acting prime minister; and in 1929 a government edict forbade the teahouse storytellers from reciting anything else. It was as public as a poem could be. But in the wake of the revolution, Ferdowsi’s bronze statue was taken off its plinth in Tehran, his tomb was attacked, and the Shahnameh was written out of the school curriculum. There were even reports of copies of the epic being burned in the streets. Like so many other pleasures in Iranian life, the Shahnameh had gone private.

What turned it into a pariah? Well, the title didn’t help. Book of Kings isn’t the best choice if you want to get on with the regime that’s just pushed the kings out. Under the Pahlavi shahs, the Shahnameh had been the official state poem, endorsed by a regime that fired on demonstrators in the nation’s holiest shrine, tried to ban the headscarf, and whose secret police once raped a leading mullah’s daughter (and forced the mullah to watch by burning his eyelids with cigarettes). A regime that used every opportunity to associate itself with the sort of kings Ferdowsi was writing about—most ostentatiously in 1971, when the shah celebrated the so-called 2,500th anniversary of the Persian monarchy at the ancient palace complex of Persepolis. Serving foie gras and stuffed peacock to the likes of Nicolae Ceaucescu and the Duke of Edinburgh, pouring the Chateau Lafite into Limoges crystal and decorating the air-conditioned hospitality tents with Italian drapes, the shah was fueling the mullahs’ argument: that he was more interested in abroad and had lost touch with real Iranian values.

There is another critical reason for the mullahs’ antagonism: The Shahnameh doesn’t celebrate holy men fighting for God. Ferdowsi’s heroes are national—not religious—champions, men who fought for king and country. And even when God is invoked, he isn’t the God of Islam. Ferdowsi might have been a Muslim living in Muslim times. But his stories are not.²⁷

They are, above all, the stories of the Zoroastrians—the faith that preceded Islam and grew out of the folk religions of Iran’s earliest history. In this sense, the Shahnameh offers an alternative account of the country to the Islamo-centric narrative of the mullahs, an account whose greatest strength is that it grew out of the very roots of Iranian civilization. By preserving these Zoroastrian and pre-Zoroastrian stories, Ferdowsi shows that Iran doesn’t just mean Islam. He keeps alive many of the traditions that Islam succeeded, and shows that Islamic culture—of which the Shahnameh is the supreme poetic achievement—is not as exclusive as fanatics on either side of East-West warmongering would have us believe. Pushed underground by the mullahs, hidden in the subculture with pop music and alcohol, the Shahnameh became a symbol of what the mullahs are not. This was underlined to me by the best-selling author and scholar Nodushan Eslami, over tea and slices of melon one afternoon in his elegant North Tehran apartment.

“The government,” he said, “has been against the Shahnameh because they are more interested in Islam than Iran. But for the young generation today, Ferdowsi is more alive now than ever before. They are very curious about Ferdowsi and they consider the Shahnameh as a symbol of Iranian nationality and independence.”

Ferdowsi’s epic was spread too thickly across Iran’s cultural landscape to remain underground—and as impatience with the current regime was growing, it was breaking out.

“You understand?” asked the Professor, leaning over the living room table as I gripped my forehead between my fingers.

The thousand-year-old diction wasn’t exactly a pushover, so I was dependent on his modern translation.

“One day it will strike you as fast as if it was in your own language,” he said, with a gentle smile.

I was grateful for his optimism, although I knew my Persian would never reach that level. But there was something intriguing about the attempt. Over the coming weeks, I would take part in many similar sessions with the Professor. I enjoyed them as much for the bond they gave me with this remarkable man—in the absence of Ferdowsi, the most Persian Persian I ever met—as for any insight they offered into the linguistic nuances of the poet’s verse.

Today we were looking at the first of the great tales in the Shahnameh—the story of a villain called Zahhak (who, like many baddies in Iranian culture, is an Arab). Once the prince of a Bedouin tribe, he has sold his soul to the devil and now has a couple of snakes writhing out of his shoulders. At first alarmed, he slowly grows accustomed to this dramatic change in his body. The snakes have an exacting diet: Every day, without fail, they must feed on the brains of two young men. Whatever vitamins this sustenance provides, it’s just what you want if you’re a megalomaniac—strengthened by his surreal appendages, Zahhak marches out from the Arabian desert, taking over the Kingdom of Iran and splitting the shah in two. The people cower before his snake-swollen prowess, and for a thousand years he is their hated ruler, draining their youth to satisfy the appetite of his sinuous shoulder pads.

“You understand this?” said the Professor, hurriedly lighting up another Bahman cigarette, as if he needed to soothe himself from the calamity he was reading. “Maybe Zahhak never lived; it is too long ago to know for sure. But we can feel that it is true because we know what it is like to suffer under tyranny.”

He jerked his chin at a newspaper on the table in front of us, which was carrying a photograph of Ayatollah Khamenei, in his heavy black turban and oversized glasses. Towing an ashtray across the table, the Professor set it on the paper, so the Supreme Leader’s solemn gaze was slowly obscured by the mound of his ash.

I tried to be skeptical. A monster with snakes in his shoulders? Puh-leeze. But the puppet opera had loosened Ferdowsi’s epic from its medieval chains; it was lunging forward through time, insisting on its place in the present. I thought of the girl at the party a few weeks ago: “The past times and today,” she had said, “they are like a tortoise and its shell.” Any lingering doubts were slowly being smothered. And after an encounter with Sina’s friend Reza—a ponytailed artist with a fondness for smuggled scotch—I would never doubt the significance of the Shahnameh again.

Reza’s place was an anomaly: the kind of hideaway that showed how distinct Iran’s public and private worlds could be. It was in the heart of the bazaar district, the most conservative area in town, where machine-produced carpets displayed the profile of the Supreme Leader and fortune-telling parakeets picked out medieval verses to tell your fortune. The street itself was a crumbling alley where the pipes were as caked in lime scale as the rolling shop-fronts in rust. An intercom crackled above a chipped stoop and if you stood there long enough your head would be gunked in plaster. Then up, around the newel post, up the stairs, and through a door with splashes of paint on the jamb like multicolored spit—and finally we were in.

People came to Reza’s for a release, to unwind, to listen to music and drink and share jokes, knowing they would never be caught. Persian House would spin on the stereo as a dozen young men swung under a Chinese paper lantern. The smoke from a water pipe would shroud Sina’s head while he tamped down the charcoal with a pair of rusty tongs. Ring-pulls would crack on 330ml cans of “London” gin (made in Turkey but labeled “London” because that was the most popular brand, just as whiskey was called “Scottish” even if it wasn’t); a Yamaha would twang to someone’s riff, or someone else would toot on a flute; and occasionally there would be a peal of female laughter and a headscarf or two hanging on the hook by the door.

“Hey, Nicholas, you know what you’re drinking?” asked Reza, approaching me through a curtain of smoke and placing a can of “London” gin in my hand. On my first appearance at his flat, we had joked about the can’s alleged provenance and from that moment on, “London” gin became my drink.

“Thanks!” I said.

I took a swig, then grabbed a Maz-Maz crisp and dipped it in a pot of yogurt, before accepting a roll-up from Mustafa. No one was going to say the British don’t know how to party!

Drinking behind closed doors wasn’t particularly hard to get used to: It took me back to the monastic boarding school where I was incarcerated as a teenager. Once again I was ruled by men of the cloth, wasn’t allowed to drink or have any liaisons with women. When I visited Reza’s, I was a schoolboy again, hiding out behind the fire escape, where my friends and I used to guzzle our bottles of cheap Cinzano, watching out for the monks or one of the wilier lay-teachers—who looked on such activities with only a little more mercy than the basijis of Tehran.²⁸

There was another reason why going to Reza’s made me feel like a naughty schoolboy. Because even though the Professor liked a drink himself, he was far from liking Reza.

“That painting boy!” he huffed one afternoon when he had wheedled out of Sina where we were headed.

“Baba doesn’t like Reza’s uncle,” explained Sina, having assured his father we would be giving “the painting boy” a wide berth. “He thinks Reza has a bad family. Now come on, Mustafa, let’s go to Reza’s!”

Reza’s uncle was a high-profile artist who had been a friend of the Professor’s before the revolution. But he’d accepted several commissions from the regime to design a set of murals that were displayed in prominent places in the center of town—all red-headbanded basijis and long-bearded ayatollahs. As far as the Professor was concerned, he’d sold out. The scorn the Professor poured on Sina’s friendship with Reza was something I would encounter on several occasions—and it would have a massive impact on my Iranian experience a few weeks later.

If I felt like a rebel going to Reza’s, it was he who really carried it off. Most Iranian men wore their hair short, but Reza’s crashed down his neck and splayed across his shoulders. Bearish stubble prickled his chin, which hung low on a pale face where the light of a smile rarely flickered. His work, which was scattered around the flat—half-finished plaster-of-paris busts tottering between the cutting mats and canvas boards leaning against the walls (among which was a sketch for a poster of one of Tahmineh’s plays)—shared the same sadness etched on his face.

It was on this occasion that I took a good look at them. A couple of drinks had left everyone else on the floor (as usual they drank with one clear purpose—to knock themselves out as quickly as possible—and achieved the feat in half an hour.) But Reza and I were more accustomed to alcohol—he as an artist and me as a Brit, so we climbed up a wooden stairwell for a look at what he called his studio, where he kept all his finished paintings.

“If your heart really wants to see,” he said, his loosened hair swinging across his shoulders and the treads creaking under his feet, “then I will show you.”

At the top of the stairs, a naked bulb cast a dim glow around a small, shabby room, where the first noticeable feature was a frayed carpet lying under a clay prayer tablet.

“Is this where you come to pray?” I asked, half in jest.

“Actually, yes.”

Reza’s expression was serious, even though his breath reeked of gin.

The paintings were set against the walls, sometimes two or three together, many of them united by a shared motif: a bird. Small and sparrowlike, they appeared in a series of wintry scenes painted in thick, dark oils on canvas boards, looking out of a window set among spindly trees or sitting on a branch beside a mosque.

“The bird represents me,” said Reza. His soft maroon eyes were fixed to the bird as he added, in his most disenchanted voice, “because I am divided from society.”

Somehow—maybe it was the length and pallor of his face, which gave a certain conviction to what he was saying—he was able to carry off this introspective angst. I think it was partly because of the political dimension, which he explained as we sat down on the floor, nursing our cans.

“You heard about the 18th of Tir?” he asked.

He was talking about a square in the city center, where thousands had raised banners over a week and a half in the summer of 2003.

“They sent in the basijis,” he explained, “because they’re tough and everyone’s scared of them. They had clubs and knives and they cut some of the women on their hands and faces, and they took some of us—hundreds of us. I was in prison for ten days, in solitary confinement. They came into my cell every day at least two times, and they beat me.”

“Will you demonstrate again?” I asked.

His eyes fell to the wood-paneled floor, his face dappled by the light from the bulb.

“I always demonstrate,” he said, “through my art. If you go to a demonstration, it’s dropped the next day and nothing comes of it. But art . . . it can last.”

He slid back down the stairs in search of more booze, leaving me alone with the paintings. I’d had enough of all the birds, but as I sifted through the boards there was one picture that struck me—and not just because it was avian-free.

Two black forklike stakes rose up beside an ethereal figure—a mass of copper-colored metallic coils that spiraled around each other and framed a domed shape curving inward like a snake’s head. The impression was alien and hostile, the circular motion suggesting powerful sophistication and the spikes on the end of the stakes conveying an atmosphere of danger. But there was something familiar in the form—the towers on either side of a dome.

“You know what this is?” asked Reza.

He was standing behind me as I stared at the painting, two fresh cans in his hands.

“I can’t say it publicly, of course,” he added, “so I have to say it in symbols. The towers are the minarets and between them is a dome. It’s a mosque.”

Here was something genuinely, dangerously rebellious. It wasn’t just the hostile atmosphere of the painting; it was the name Reza had given it—a name that, had he presented it in public, would have gotten him arrested.

“I call this picture Zahhak,” he said.

As soon as he uttered the name, I could feel the breath sweeping up my throat. Zahhak—the evil prince with the snakes in his shoulders: the tyrannical ruler from the story I had read with the Professor.

It was only now, as I looked at Reza’s painting, that I realized how alive Ferdowsi’s thousand-year-old epic actually is. Because this was the first time I saw a story from the Shahnameh brought to life for today—to explain the way people were living right now. Its significance to the present wasn’t simply a matter of interpretation—it was the whole point of the painting.

By calling it Zahhak, Reza was sending out a clear message. To many Iranians, the mullahs, like Zahhak, are draining the Iranian youth (most directly in the eight-year war with Iraq in the 1980s, when Ayatollah Khomeini encouraged as many young people as possible to be “martyrs” and exhorted women to bear more children for the battlefield) and many consider the mullahs to be “Arabs”—as Zahhak is—because they are more interested in Islamic culture than in the indigenous Iranian traditions.²⁹

Reza wasn’t using Ferdowsi’s tale to make himself look clever, or as a gimmicky nod to the past; he was using it because it illustrated just how badly the Iranian youth have been let down by their leaders. Because Ferdowsi’s tale, a thousand years after it was written and many more thousand since it was set, has a powerful contemporary resonance.

As hatred of Zahhak spreads across the land of mythical Iran, an underground resistance movement is formed, led by two unlikely heroes. The first is a blacksmith called Kawa, who strips off his leather apron, sticks it on a spear-point, and raises it as a revolutionary flag. Much as in the 1979 revolution, the bazaaris turn against the king. The second hero is the noble-born Fereydoun, whose father was killed by Zahhak and who is eager for revenge. Marching on Zahhak’s palace, supported by Kawa and the rioting bazaaris, he smashes the heads of Zahhak’s guards and binds the tyrant with lion-hide straps, to be locked for eternity in a cave under Mount Damavand—the now-dormant volcano that tapers to the north of Tehran.

“Hopefully,” said Reza, as we stood looking at his canvas, “we can find a new Fereydoun and drive those fathers-of-bitches away.”

I thought he meant getting rid of the mullahs altogether. In fact, I would later discover that he had a more complicated relationship with the theocracy; but that evening, as he poured the gin and we clinked, I remember the giddy feeling of having stumbled across something magical—a rope dangling into the past. It was there in Reza’s flat, with a can of “London” gin in one hand, that I became conscious of what a mighty figure Ferdowsi is in the Iranian psyche. And it was there, in Reza’s flat, that the seeds of my mission to Afghanistan were sown.