Drinking Arak off an Ayatollah's Beard

Hajji is the honorific title given to any Muslim who performs the hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca.

United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.

The name of this region on both the Iranian and Afghan sides of the border.

There are so many ex-pat Iranian musicians producing pop and distributing it back home through under-the-counter sales and Internet downloads that their community is known locally as “Tehrangeles.”

Esfand or wild rue is a strong-smelling, herbaceous plant burned in many traditional ceremonies in Iran, whose fumes are said to keep away evil spirits.

Medieval Persian poetry has a habit of turning up in Iranian pop lyrics. Banyan and Manizeh, the Sonny and Cher of 1950s Iran, had a hit when they sang a poem by the tenth-century minstrel Rudaki, while the rock band O-hum, which is big on the Iranian scene today, uses the mystical verses of the fourteenth-century poet Hafez in its songs and has even released an album named after the poet—Hafez in Love. In this case, the band was called Kahtmayan and had made a point of their enthusiasm for Ferdowsi’s tenth-century epic.

Literally “sign of God,” the rank of ayatollah is the highest in Twelver Shiism, given to experts in Islamic law and philosophy.

This is the one detail in which Iranians tend to compliment their neighbors across the Gulf. There’s an old Persian joke about Arabs leaving three tracks in the sand, which Sina was fond of repeating. As will become clear over the ensuing pages, there is no love lost between Iranians and Arabs and even this example (similar to the white man’s joke about black men) barely hides a Persian perception of Arabs as a race of beasts, several rungs down the evolutionary ladder from the refined and courteous Iranians.

The name Pahlavi was taken from the word for the ancient Persian language, underlining the dynasty’s emphasis on Iran’s pre-Islamic heritage and disregard for Islam. The latter would be one of the principal causes of the dynasty’s downfall.

Who disappeared in the early tenth century. He was the only one of the twelve Shia imams—all of them descendants of the Prophet Mohammed—who wasn’t killed. They were all persecuted by the caliph (leader of the Sunnis) of their time, and denied what the Shia considered to be their rightful rank. As a result, the Shia—who represent more than 90 percent of Iran’s population—are known for their suspicion of authorities.

A colorless, distilled alcoholic drink. Although arak is usually made with anise, the Iranian version has to be different, of course, so it’s made with raisins. It’s one of the cheapest drinks available on the black market, and as a result it tastes like something you should put in your car, not your mouth.

The shah’s secret police.

The terms “Persian” and “Iranian,” often used interchangeably, can be tricky to define. “Persian” was coined by the Macedonians in the fourth century BCE, from “Fars” or “Pars,” the name of the province in which the capital stood at this time, which they took to account for the country as a whole. To the natives, however, the land was always “Iran”—from “Aryana Vaejah,” “land of the Aryans.” As the scholar Richard Frye puts it, “Aryan, with an approximate derived meaning ‘noble, lord,’ seems to have been the general designation of these people speaking Indo-European tongues or dialects, who migrated into the lands between the Ganges and Euphrates rivers at the end of the 2nd and the beginning of the 1st millennium BCE.” The name “Persia,” however, stuck in the West until the early twentieth century. It was Reza Shah, father of the last shah, who introduced “Iran” to the outside world.

An imposing 6-foot-3 ex-Cossack trooper, known in the army as Reza Maxim for his expertise with the British machine gun, he seized power in a British-backed coup in 1921 and turned into the ultimate nationalist snob. He banned people from photographing camels (because they might provoke associations with the Arabs), ripped

up the power of the mullahs, and when people protested the brimmed hats he wanted them to wear or his banning of the veil, he had them shot. By insisting on his country’s name as “Iran,” he was trying to evoke the image of an older civilization, part of a campaign in which lines from the national epic, the Shahnameh, were quoted at his coronation ceremony, ancient heroes were invoked at military parades, and an academy was set up to purify the Persian language. Ironically, rather than calling to mind an older civilization, in the West “Iran” tends to evoke the country in its postrevolutionary, theocratic phase—the modern-day Iran, while “Persia” is associated with a less threatening, magical land—a place of silk carpets, wine-drinking poets, and fluffy cats. So the meaning of the terms has flipped: Many people who oppose the regime of the mullahs—the Professor among them—now prefer to think of themselves as Persians, to distinguish themselves from the official regime. Evolving from its original sense, the term “Persia” now suggests, for many Iranians, the land they would like it to be, and the land they believe it once was.

Throughout this book, “Persian” will be used in this sense, the sense in which it is used by people like the Professor—to describe the non-Islamic side of the country, its culture and history, and “Persian” will denote anyone who speaks the Persian (or Farsi) language (which includes not only most Iranians, but also many Afghans and the Tajiks of Central Asia) as their mother tongue.

To put the achievement of this era in context, it’s worth noting how backward the West was at this time. While Britain was a forest of stinking tribesmen, where street lamps and carpets were a long way off and dysentery was treated with a recital of the miserere me deus and a bowl of boiled mugwort, the people of the Persian-speaking world were perfuming themselves with ambergris, lit their way with kerosene, had been weaving carpets since the Bronze Age, and were analyzing tuberculosis, measles, and even cancer in ways that would take Europe several hundred years to match. We tend to look down on the Middle East now, but the achievements of this time show how much we’re indebted to the medieval Persians (and Arabs too, whose accomplishments are similarly staggering). Equally, many Iranians today insist on “basking proudly in Rostam’s reflected glory,” as the twentieth-century writer Jalal al-e Ahmed put it (referring to a character from Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh to symbolize the tendency to dwell on long-ago achievements), overlooking the failure to match these feats in more recent times. Both perspectives could do with more balance.

Published in a collection called “A Jug of Love: Eight Ghazals of Imam Khomeini.” The “forbidden” imagery is a common convention in mystical Persian poetry, emphasizing the importance of internal belief over outward appearances.

He was referring to the Arab invasion of the seventh century CE, which brought Islam to Iran and destroyed the Persian empire.

This was Ayatollah Safi Golpaigani, who insisted in a speech that “superstitious customs such as Red Wednesday do not befit the dignity of the Muslim people of Iran.”

Traditionally, “spoon-hitters” would be young boys who dressed up in cloaks and visited people’s houses during Char-shanbe Suri, to be given sweets and nuts, like trick-or-treaters in the West. Hajji Firuz was a man dressed in red satin and a blacked-up face, who would dance in the streets with a tambourine and a trumpet. He is spoken of as an “Iranian Santa Claus.”

A schism that began in the immediate aftermath of the death of the Prophet Mohammed and revolved around who was his true successor—his son-in-law Ali or his companion Abu Bakr. It was the latter who was chosen, but Ali’s followers resented this, and when Ali was murdered, after becoming the caliph himself, his cause fell to his sons, Hasan and Hossain.

Some people trace the fire-jumping tradition of Red Wednesday to this story (although there are a number of other theories on the source of that custom). Whether or not it’s a direct descendant of Siyavash’s challenge, it certainly shares the same ancient Iranian belief in the redeeming power of flames. Before he spurs his charger, Siyavash is convinced the fire won’t harm him, because it reflects the will of the Almighty.

Sir Richard Burton, the great nineteenth-century explorer, was one observer who thought “the wailings for the death of Siyavash” had been “transferred to the pathetic tales of Hasan and Hoseyn,” while the prominent Iranian scholar Nodushan Eslami told me that both Siyavash and Imam Hossain recall an earlier tradition, “a mourning for the death of spring—of rain and trees.”

He was a dehkan, a member of a squire class that traced its ancestry back through the centuries. “The dehkans’ houses were libraries,” according to Ustad (or “Master”) Homaioun, founder of the Ferdowsi Seat at Kabul University, “and their minds were full of the customs and heritage of ancient Iran.” Nizami of Samarkand, the poet’s first biographer, wrote in the eleventh century that he “enjoyed an excellent position, so that he was rendered quite independent of his neighbors by the income which he derived from his lands.” Among these neighbors were a fellow poet, Asadi of Tus, who specialized in “strife” poems about opposites (such as the moon and the sun, the land and the sea, and, in one controversial work, the Persians and Arabs), and the reciter Abu Dulaf, who accompanied Ferdowsi on his journey to the court of Sultan Mahmud.

This is generally reckoned at 20,000 dirhams. Because of the lack of silver at the time, it is difficult to confirm exactly what this amount was worth, but it was certainly no more than one thirtieth of what Ferdowsi was originally promised. According to the contemporary historian Baihaqi, an elephant would have cost five times as much.

And there are more than a hundred couplets of equally bitter vituperation in the published version of Ferdowsi’s satire (although scholarly doubt has been cast on their authenticity). During the course of the satire, Ferdowsi derides Sultan Mahmud for his lack of sense, justice, or honor, but mostly he has a go at his parentage—a subject on which Mahmud was especially sensitive, since his father had been a slave. But he was somewhat more successful than the majority of slaves usually are, taking over his master’s realm (which amounted then to little more than a chunk of eastern Afghanistan) and expanding it to incorporate much of eastern Iran. Under Mahmud, it would become the largest empire ever controlled from what is now Afghanistan.

This is known as taarof, or “offer,” and while it is uniquely Persian, it corresponds to politeness codes common in other cultures—for example, the tendency among middle-class English people to say “Oh, I shouldn’t” when they’re keen for another slice of cake, or the “Have a nice day” ritual of the Deep South.

The divs are horned creatures, usually depicted with shaggy, spotted coats, who battle against the heroes in many of the ancient Persian legends.

This is underlined by a story told by Ibn Ishaq, the Prophet Mohammed’s first biographer. One Nadr bin Harith, a member of the same tribe as the Prophet, had picked up tales “about Rostam the Hero and Isfandiyar and the kings of Persia” (the same tales that would later make their way into the Shahnameh) and narrated them at the assembly in Mecca. Nadr used his stories to mock the Prophet, claiming, “By God, Mohammed cannot tell a better story than I and his talk is only of old fables which he has copied as I have.” And it was Nadr who appeared to have won their rivalry—the Prophet was forced to flee to Medina, while Nadr gained a high position in Mecca. But the last laugh would be the Prophet’s. Condemning the “man who buyeth an idle tale, that in his knowledge he may mislead others from the way of God,” he captured him at a pivotal battle, at the wells of Badr in 624 CE, where Nadr was one of only two prisoners to be put to death. Several hundred years before Ferdowsi was even born, the tales of the Shahnameh and the Quran were already vying for attention.

I only met the basijis once. I was sitting with Sina on the roof of Mustafa’s Peugeot, slurping up bowls of wheat groat porridge from a street stall, when we were approached by a couple of basijis—the brown-shirts of the ayatollahs’ Iran, who are often spotted tearing down the highway on their motorbikes. They ticked off Mustafa’s girlfriend because her headscarf was red and told us we should all be at the mosque. “Why are you so polite to them?” I asked. Sina and Mustafa shook their heads as if I was crazy. “You don’t know?” said Mustafa. “They carry knives and chains, and if you don’t show them respect, you get cut.”

An example of this attitude was expressed when I was in a taxi one afternoon with Sina. Noticing the enormous mural of Ayatollah Khomeini on a nearby apartment block, I said jokingly to Sina, “your blessed leader,” knowing what his response would be. “Blessed?” The driver’s eyes looked demonic in the rearview mirror. “He was no Iranian, he was Arab. All these mullahs are Arabs! They came here with fire and sword hundreds of years ago and since then they haven’t left us alone.” He was referring to the Arab invasion of Iran in 637 CE, when the Persian empire was destroyed—an event that many Iranians are still unable to forgive. Among the booty won by the Arabs on that occasion was a flag known as the drafsh-i Kavyan, the legendary leather apron raised by a blacksmith called Kawa to rouse the people against Zahhak, which was traditionally carried by five Zoroastrian priests at the head of the Persian army.

These reservoirs, known as qanats, have been transferring water to Iran’s most arid districts since about 800 BCE. A shaft is sunk into the ground, communicating with an inclined tunnel carrying water from the mountains or any other water source. The system was spread to Egypt by Darius the Great and was used by the Conquistadors in the Americas.

Under Reza Shah, most of the discriminatory laws against them were removed and a Zoroastrian was appointed deputy prime minister; and under his son, the Islamic lunar calendar was briefly replaced by the solar Zoroastrian version.

I saw this for myself on a hop across the border later in the summer. Having camped on a hillside in northwest Iran, where the Azeri-speaking locals lit fires and sang songs at the foot of a ninth-century Zoroastrian hero’s fort, I trekked farther north to the country of Azerbaijan itself. There, sitting at a teahouse near Baku, I was unable to reply to my hostess’s inquiry as to whether I would like honey in my tea, because I was so stunned by the spectacle in front of me: flames, seeping through fissures in the rock, licking the air and framed in the black rings they had singed on the earth. “Oh, it’s been like that forever,” said my hostess. “No it hasn’t,” retorted her combative sister. “It’s only been there since World War Two.” Before that, she explained, the flames had been on the other side of the hill, “but they had to put them out because of all the bombing.”

The old Persian for a walled garden—pairi daeza—became our word for paradise, a tribute to the many beautifully tended gardens that have been created in this part of the world. Carefully shaded, irrigated by underground tunnels, often divided by rivers and fountains, Persian gardens are synonymous with tranquillity and refinement. The most famous of them all is at the Taj Mahal, built in India by the Persian-speaking Mughals.

Because of this he was said to have “a thousand eyes and a thousand ears,” operating a surveillance system as impressive as the current regime’s and attracting the praise of the historian Herodotus, whose description—“Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor night prevents them from completing their assigned task as soon as possible”—was adapted into the unofficial motto of the Central Post Office in New York, inscribed on its façade.

Although they were known as “The Throne of Jamshid,” named for the king who is cut in half by snake-shouldered Zahhak in the Shahnameh. The same name is retained by Iranians today, underlining that it’s Ferdowsi’s version of history (and prehistory), rather than the drier—albeit more accurate—Western-researched version that sticks in the popular consciousness, like the names of the Zoroastrians.

This figure is either Queen Shapurdokhtak, the wife of King Narseh from the late third century, or Anahita, the Zoroastrian water angel.

This point was supported by the words of Iran’s Supreme Leader himself, on a visit to this part of the country in 2008. “Those ruins are the leftovers of tyrants,” declared Ayatollah Khamenei, refusing an invitation to visit Persepolis. “Iran achieved glory only after the arrival of Islam.”

They wear, wrote Ibn Hawkal in his tenth-century geography, “caps, so that their ears are covered, the end hanging on their shoulders.”

No legendary champion represents the people of the Persian-speaking world as much as Rostam. He’s a lone ranger, living a solitary life in which he is fated, as he laments, to be “an outcast . . . marked out for every kind of ill.” Such a lifestyle does have one advantage: Although he appears to bow to the kings, in reality he bows to no one. When he is sent an order to fight by the shah, he decides to have a feast instead; and when the shah ticks him off, he thunders back in fury, “I am slave to none but God alone!” This isn’t just pride: It’s a quality that recurs throughout Iranian history. It is shared by Prime Minister Mossadegh, defying Churchill to nationalize the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company; and by the Afghan mujahideen, fighting off the Russians. It explains why the Persian language survived the Arab invasion and why Iranians and Afghans are so antagonistic toward foreign intervention. Because Rostam’s defining quality—shared with the poem in which he is celebrated, and with the land it is celebrating—is independence.

The Russians, furious at the insurrection, sent in their tanks and gunships, killing around 20,000 civilians, whose corpses were buried in the hills outside Herat, near the shrine of the Sufi saint Abdullah Ansari. Ismail Khan, however, survived and continued fighting the Russians throughout their ten-year stay in Afghanistan.

Literally “place of worship,” referring to a religious compound built in 1417 by Queen Gowhar Shad.

According to the eleventh-century scribe Nizami of Samarkand, the city boasted 120 varieties, which helped to make it a particularly fructiferous place—especially in the autumn, when eglantine, basil, and yellow rocket were in bloom. In the tenth century, Prince Nasr of Bukhara was so enchanted by Herat that he considered it superior even to the Garden of Eden.

That king was Nader Shah, who was assassinated during a military parade about a year later. He was succeeded by his son, Zahir Shah, who became one of the country’s longest-serving monarchs, but also one of its most ineffectual. A studious nineteen-year-old with a passion for miniature paintings, he hardly welcomed the role that had been thrust upon him. He’d been walking with his father when the assassin’s shots rang out, and his trepidation may have been increased by the fact that, of the three previous kings, two had been forced to flee and the other murdered in his sleep. One of these, Amanullah, decided that Afghanistan needed westernizing. Advising his tribal chiefs to shave their beards and wear top hats and tails, he embarked on a series of reforms—including coeducational schools, a minimum age for marriage, and, most notoriously of all, a demand for women to shed the veil. To most Afghan men, a man whose wife let her hair out in public clearly didn’t deserve their obedience, so within a couple of years, Amanullah was fleeing the country in his beloved Rolls-Royce.

Zahir Shah was more cautious, but like Amanullah he had a fondness for the ways of the West. Slowly, he introduced some of its better innovations, like free speech, the right to form political parties and women’s suffrage. But economic reform was slow and a three-year drought at the turn of the ’70s put him in a vulnerable position, which was exploited in 1973 by his cousin Daoud, who in traditional Afghan style arranged a coup and seized the royal palace, where he would be assassinated by his own air force five years later, as the Communist party and the Russians took control.

Who emerged originally as a check to the immorality of some of the mujahideen (the guerrillas who had ousted the Russians and, in the early 1990s, started fighting against each other over who would rule the country). In 1994, a mujahideen leader paraded a small boy on his tank as his “bride” and squabbled over the boy’s possession with another mujahideen chief. Disgusted by this behavior, a half-blind cleric called Mullah Omar led a gang of his students on a raid of the mujahideen leader’s HQ, hanging him from the gun of his own tank.

This, at least, is the legend. The students (or taliban) grew from strength to strength, providing order where there had previously been chaos, and at first they were welcomed, especially among Pashtun communities that shared the Taliban’s ethnicity. But gradually their policies (such as banning kite-flying, stuffed toys and laughter) and especially their punishments (such as cutting off women’s fingers and hanging people from lampposts) lost them the initial goodwill. In non-Pashtun, Persian-speaking Herat, they were always unpopular, as several conversations would reveal.

One of the earliest recorded references to the Aryans is carved into a cross-shaped, rock-cut tomb from the fifth century BCE that I visited a few months earlier in Iran, near the old royal palace of Persepolis. There, King Darius the Great describes himself as “an Aryan, of Aryan lineage.”

He aroused Sultan Mahmud’s ire when he correctly predicted how he would exit his summer house. The sultan thought he had Biruni outwitted by smashing a hole through a wall and making his exit that way. But Biruni knew the sultan pretty well by this time, so he had written that outcome down on a piece of paper. As a result, the sultan did what any self-respecting megalomaniac might have done in his place—he had Biruni hurled off the rooftop, where he was saved by a conveniently placed mosquito net. When it turned out Biruni had predicted this too (he’d written in his almanac, “Today they will cast me down from a high place, but I shall reach the earth in safety, and arise sound in body”), Mahmud was so enraged he had Biruni incarcerated. It was six months before he finally relented and set the scholar free, presenting him with a gold-caparisoned horse, a slave and a hand-maid, along with gifts of money, a royal robe, and a satin turban—proof of how helter-skelter life at Mahmud’s court could be.

He spent so much time in jail that he perfected the “Habsiya,” a genre of poetry specifically about jail. “Ever since I was born,” he wrote, “O wonder! I am a captive . . . How long, O heaven, will you continue every hour hammering on my brain? Why, I am not an anvil!”

The dominance of Persian poets in Sufi literature is a testament to the language’s genius for poetry as well as its suitability for mysticism. Apart from Ibn Arabi, there are no Sufi poets in Arabic who reach the depth or lyrical beauty of the great Persian Sufis: poets like Rumi (who numbers Madonna in his modern-day fanbase), Hafez (the most revered of all poets in Iran), and my personal favorite among the Sufis, Farid ud-Din Attar (whose Conference of the Birds sprinkles tales of nonconformity into an overarching narrative about the flight of the world’s birds in search of their one true king). The great Perso-phile Edward Browne suggested there may be another reason for the popularity of Sufism among the Persians: that it was “a reaction of the Aryan mind against the Semitic religion imposed on it.” The same point is made by the Indian scholar Mohammed Habib, to whom “The development of mysticism in Islam was mainly the work of Persian thinkers.” If this theory holds, then Persian Sufism shares with the Shahnameh an impulse to steer away from the Sunni Arab hegemony.

A collection of thoughts addressed to God, in which Ansari rejects the traditional boons of paradise, like the luxurious mansions and the black-eyed virgins, just as the dervishes around his tomb were rejecting the world as they called out God’s name—a practice evoked in The Intimate Conversations, in which every stanza opens with the cry “O God.”

This isn’t strictly true: The pavilion over Ansari’s tomb was damaged on November 20, 2001, when a U.S. food drop landed on top of it.

The Soviets had no inkling of the trouble Khan was going to cause them. Andrushkin, the Soviet general, dispatched a message of warning, insisting that Khan’s fate would be the same as the guerrilla Ibrahim Beg, who had resisted the Russians at the beginning of the century before his eventual demise. “You Russians still remember Ibrahim Beg after seventy years,” wrote Khan in defiant response. “I want you to remember me for two hundred!”

For example, men caught drinking alcohol had their heads shaved, and women who had been found alone with an unrelated man (even if that man was a teacher, or a fellow passenger in a taxi) could be taken to the hospital and “inspected” to confirm their virginity.

The Sufis would, I think, agree with this attitude. In one of their stories, a young Sufi disciple spots Death in a teahouse in Baghdad and overhears him talking about the calls he is about to make. Panicking, the disciple flees to faraway Samarkand to be sure of escaping a visit. Later, Death meets the disciple’s guru and asks about the disciple, but the guru doesn’t know where he’s gotten to. “Yes, it’s strange,” says Death, consulting his list. “It says here I’ve got to pick him up next week, in Samarkand of all places!”

The Afghan dialect of Persian. It has roughly the same relationship to the Persian spoken in Iran that Scottish English has to the Queen’s English.

Although Reza didn’t articulate it, many Iranians have, stressing the link between Imam Hossain’s story and the traditions preserved by Ferdowsi. “Why do Iranians ignore all the other imams?” wrote the founder of Iranian blogging, Hossain Derakhshan. “Why don’t we perform festivals filled with passion plays, color and music to commemorate them? Because they were all conservative; pragmatic but two-faced—all those things that are despised by our culture. Yet the characters surrounding Hossain could have come straight out of the Shahnameh.”

Chadori is used as the collective name for women who wear the most severe and unrevealing clothes. Tahmineh was a manteaui—someone wearing the knee-length coat and loose scarf. The difference between the two styles tends to be the difference between conservative and liberal women (although the distinction is by no means exclusive).

According to the theological scholar al-Ghazzali. One of Ferdowsi’s closest friends, the poet Asadi of Tus, expressed the medieval and the modern mullahs’ fear of women when he wrote, “Outside of women is green and lush as a tree, / But inside they have venom.”

In 1983, Khomeini issued a fatwa authorizing “sex reassignment surgery” after a transsexual called Maryam Molkara was beaten up by the Supreme Leader’s security guards in an attempt to gain an audience with him. Molkara explained her situation to Khomeini and soon afterward sex-change operations were legalized.

A typical example occurs in the twelfth-century Conference of the Birds by Farid ud-Din Attar. Mahmud, distraught when his slave falls ill, declares: “Ayaz, what could this Evil Eye not do / If it destroys such loveliness as you.”

The poetry of Ferdowsi’s age is rife with homosexual references, which are often surprisingly direct, such as the words of the Sahib Ibn Abbad, one of the leading politicians of the age, who exhorted a favorite to “spend the night with a beardless youth, a wide-buttocked lad, a loved one, / For wine and copulation, after indulgence with him—these are the really good things of life.” Like the bachhe bazi or “child-playing” that is still common in Pashtun society, these medieval texts often veer on pederasty: hence the “beardless youth” who, in Abu Dulaf al-Khazriji’s Ode of the Banu Sasan, is given “a stewpot whose contents will send him into a drugged stupor,” after which “the penises of the beggar leaders go into him, without him being aware of it.” However, other medieval poets have a more romantic approach to same-sex relationships—such as Hafez, who wrote of a lover who “with looks disheveled, flushed in a sweat of drunkenness, / His shirt torn open, a song on his lips and wine cup in his hand . . . at midnight last night he came and sat on my pillow.”

He was found dead in a hotel room in 1968. The government proclaimed his
death a suicide, but popular belief blamed it on Savak, the shah’s secret police.

This dual culture is summed up by a popular story about Imam Ali and Rostam. One day they meet in a strength house and take part in a friendly wrestling match. There is nothing to divide them, so the match looks like it will end in a draw, but in the closing stages, Imam Ali calls out to God for help and wins the match. The point of the story is that they are exactly equal in Iranian culture—only God tips the balance in the imam’s favor.

Among numerous innovations, Turkmenbashy renamed the months after members of his family, built gold statues of himself throughout the country (including a twelve-meter effigy in the capital, revolving throughout the day to face the sun), and composed a national epic, the Ruhnameh, or Book of the Soul, with a day of the week set aside for the population to read it and questions set on it for anyone who wanted to pass their driving test.

The lintel was studied by the Russian scholar V. I. Belyaev, who attributed it to Nasr, as did W. L. Treadwell in the Political History of the Samanid State.

I had come across Ibn Sina several times on my journey—medieval Persia’s greatest physician, who impressed Europe enough for the Italian poet Dante to “honor” him with a place in the first circle of hell, as one of the “virtuous heathens.” In the city of Hamadan, I stepped inside his rocket-shaped mausoleum. Visitors filled up the tomb chamber and kneeled beside Ibn Sina’s tomb-slab to utter a prayer, while herbs from his medical prescriptions were arranged in glass cases on the walls around them. “You know what these people are doing?” said a schoolteacher called Mehdi, sitting down beside me in the park beside the mausoleum. “They are going inside to have a look at Ibn Sina’s Qanun. Maybe they know someone who is ill so they are looking for a cure.” “But shouldn’t they go to a doctor?” I asked. “Ha! Don’t you know how much that costs? Let me tell you something. Last winter, my son had a problem with his stomach and the doctors could not make him better. So I looked in the Qanun and Ibn Sina told me to take cumin and a special flower and mix it with butter, and when I gave this to my son he became better.” As far as I could understand, his son was suffering from enteritis, for which Ibn Sina recommends “three drachms each of the nasturtium and cumin ground together, sieved and thoroughly mixed with cow-butter.”

I came across this politicization of medieval history myself, in Tashkent (the capital of Uzbekistan), when I met some of the scholars at the prestigious Oriental Institute. Dr. Vakhma Alimova, apparently a medieval expert, informed me that Ibn Sina was of Turkic origin—like the Uzbeks themselves. Given that his mother’s name was Sitareh (Persian for “star”), he wrote several books in Persian (even though Arabic was the language of books at the time) and most of the population of the Samanid empire were Persian-speaking, this was a ridiculous claim. One of her colleagues, Dr. Mirsadiq Izkhakov, insisted Ibn Sina’s contemporary, Biruni, was also a Turk. They were rewriting the ethnic history of the region to bolster the Turkic agenda of President Karimov’s nationalist government.

Especially in medieval Muslim lands, where the ninth-century polymath Jahiz describes “singing-girls” who knew 10,000 verses by heart, but remarks, “their origins in pimping-houses throw them into the arms of fornicators.”

I knew the poem because a musical version of it, recorded in the 1950s by the Iranian duo Banyan and Manizeh, was often played on a tape at the Professor’s house in Tehran. A few weeks later, in the Tajik city of Khojand, I would hear it again. This time it was in a very different setting: a sugar market. Among stalls selling rock crystal, boiled sweets, and bags of sugar cubes, an old man was seated on a metal cart. His jacket was tied around his waist with a sash and was in as threadbare a state as his trousers, while a pair of pointy-toed shoes dangled off his feet. Underneath him, a cap lay in the mouth of a large leather bag, filling up with the banknotes of the passersby. But he didn’t appear to notice: He was too carried away with his song, his head tilted back and his eyes like gems. The rounded end of a dotar rested in the crook of one arm, while the fingers of his other arm plucked its strings as if he were picking the petals of a flower. He had been a minstrel, he told me, for sixteen years and had traveled widely in Tajikistan, performing not only Rudaki but many of the other Persian greats. “I sang in many villages during the fighting,” he said, “and my songs gave comfort to many people in this time.”

It was in Bukhara, especially, that many of the early important Islamic scholars resided, such as Imam al-Bokhari, a ninth-century theologian whose work on the hadiths (anecdotes and sayings about and by the Prophet Mohammed) are considered the most authentic of all. To many Muslims, his book is second in importance only to the Quran.

When the Tajik government asked UNESCO to declare 1999 the “Year of the Samanids,” the Uzbeks were apoplectic. A meeting was arranged in Paris to defuse the dispute, in which Uzbek President Karimov’s representatives insisted it was insensitive for the Tajiks to celebrate as a “state” an empire that included the best-known cities of a neighboring country.

This was the nickname “by which she was to be known even outside the family” (according to Eleanor’s biographer, Chushichi Tsuzuki, who suggested that it “seems to have been derived from pussy, for she was very fond of kittens”). However, Marx was certainly known to have studied Chernishevsky’s writings and to be fond of epic literature (the tales of Homer, Shakespeare, and the 1001 Nights were among the bedtime stories with which Eleanor was entertained as a child).

This association of the mythical land of Turan (the kingdom of the Iranians’ great enemy in the Shahnameh) with the Turkic peoples of Central Asia was shared by many of Ferdowsi’s contemporaries. Mahmud of Kashgar, who compiled the first Turkic dictionary in the eleventh century, identified Alp er Tonga, ancestor of the Turks, with the great Turanian king of the Shahnameh, Afrasiyab (the same king who slays Siyavash and has Bizhan imprisoned in a pit). In the early twentieth century, in the wake of nationalist movements around the world, the concept of a mother-land for all the Turkic-speaking peoples, from Istanbul to China, was pinned to Turan. “The country of the Turks is not Turkey, nor yet Turkestan,” wrote the Turkish ideologue Ziya Gökalp. “Their country is a broad and everlasting land—Turan.” Although nowadays more commonly known as “pan-Turkism,” the notion of a united Turkic nation still has plenty of support, especially in Central Asia. “We Turks have to be united,” said a prominent Uzbek writer called Alishir Ibadinov, whom I met in the Fergana Valley, “if we don’t want problems with our borders, economy, and security. Maybe in the future we will have a confederation of Turkic countries.”

Nuristan is a province in northeastern Afghanistan, where many of the inhabitants have blue eyes, fair hair, and light skin. Traditionally this has been attributed to Alexander the Great and his men, who camped here in the fourth century BCE, although the arrival of the Aryan tribes several centuries earlier is just as likely a source. By calling myself a Nuristani, I wasn’t really fibbing—well, not entirely, if we’re to go with one Afghan theory (recorded by Doris Lessing in The Wind Blows Away Our Words). According to this point of view, the ancient “Angles” or “English” originated in Nuristan and only left the region because of the pressure on grazing.

Some legends trace them back to the Bani Israel, one of the lost Jewish tribes expelled from Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar. Others associate them with the Sakai, who beat the Greeks in the second century BCE and who have been linked by some scholars to the feats of Rostam.

He was known as “durr-e durran”—“pearl of pearls,” because of a looted pearl earring he was fond of wearing. Like many a Pashtun ruler, Ahmad Shah liked his rocks shiny—among his stash was the Koh-i Noor diamond, which would later famously come into the possession of Queen Victoria. His other adornments included a silver nose mask, to cover up a wound caused by a piece of flying brick in a gunpowder explosion. The wound, which would eventually kill him, grew so gangrenous that maggots fell into his mouth when he was eating—so his dining companions, as well as Ahmad Shah himself, must have been grateful for the mask.

Although he might not have been so keen to endorse it if he’d known that an opium overdose, administered by a treacherous slave, would lead to his death.

According to the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, the area of poppy cultivation in Afghanistan had grown from 7,606 hectares in 2001—when the Taliban reduced it with harsh penalties—to 131,000 in 2004. Many of the Afghans I spoke to insisted that in an arid land it has a practical value. “You don’t need so much water to grow opium,” said Nasrullah, “so it is easier to grow, and in some places it is not possible to grow anything else.”

Which takes its name—“Soldiers’ Place”—from the eleventh-century Ghaznavid barracks on which the city was founded.

For example, when they took Kabul, the Taliban seized ex-president Najibullah from his hiding place in the UN compound and strung up his castrated body on a traffic post; while stonings replaced soccer in the city’s main stadium. The best-known Ghaznavid execution was suffered by the ex-minister Hasanak and is described by the chronicler Baihaqi: “He fastened the string of his trousers,” narrates the historian, “and tied up his drawers. He took off his coat and shirt and threw them away, and there he stood naked with only his turban and trousers on, and his hands clasped together. . . . The executioner fastened him tight and the robes hung down. It was proclaimed that he was to be stoned, but nobody touched a stone. . . . At last a band of vagabonds were hired with money to throw stones; but the man was already dead, for the executioner had cast the rope around his neck and suffocated him. . . . ”

I hoped to see these frescoes at the National Museum in Kabul. But when I was there a week later, the acting manager explained that they had been destroyed in a fire caused by fighting between rival mujahideen factions. These murals cast a beam of light on the world of Afghanistan’s greatest empire, a light extinguished by the infighting of the civil war.

He appears in the Shahnameh, as one of its wisest and therefore most boring rulers, who fills up dozens of pages with his aphorisms and judicial decisions. “Praise be the Sun and the Moon,” writes Ferdowsi, who shares the reader’s eagerness to get past him, “that at last I have escaped from Buzurjamihr (Anushirvan’s minister) and the King.”

Both are etched into their respective national consciousnesses, and just as Ferdowsi sought in the Shahnameh to bring back to life the culture Qadisiya swept aside, so in Britain an antiquarian epic writer would also rail against the influx of foreign culture after Hastings, and seek to imagine the world that was lost, albeit with a heavy dose of fantasy—J. R. R. Tolkien, in The Lord of the Rings.

Ayatollah Khomeini underlined the “Islamic” perspective on nationalism in a speech on Radio Tehran on December 17, 1979: “There is no difference between Muslims who speak different languages,” he said, “for instance, the Arabs and the Persians. It is very probable that such problems have been created by those who do not wish Muslim countries to be united. . . . They create the issues of nationalism . . . and such-isms which are contrary to Islamic doctrines.” This is the exact antithesis of Ferdowsi’s point of view—and of the point of view of most of the Iranians I met.

The simorgh is a magical bird that appears several times in the Shahnameh, providing a home to Rostam’s abandoned father Zal, and when Rostam is injured in a battle with a metal-plated evangelist-warrior called Asfandiyar, he rubs his wounds with the simorgh’s feather to heal himself.

Or, more appropriately, the Caliph Mansur’s storeroom. In a similar story to the tale of Bluebeard, he gave a key to his daughter-in-law and told her that it could only be used when he was dead. Unlike Bluebeard’s wife, she bided her time, but when she opened it up, she too found a chamber filled with dead bodies—in this case, the caliph’s Shia enemies, each with a label in the ear providing their name and ancestry.

The fruit of which, delivered by cesarean section (with a steel dagger for the surgeon’s knife and wine as the anesthetic), is the greatest of all the epic’s heroes—Rostam.

According to the contemporary chronicler Baihaqi.

It is said, in the Collections of Stories by Mohammed Awfi, that Alptigin was given an opportunity to show his leadership skills when some villagers pressed him to punish the thieves who had stolen their fowls. He had the thieves’ ears bored and the birds suspended from them by strings, with the result that whenever the birds flapped their wings, blood gushed out of their ears. This, apparently, was exactly what the people of Ghazni were looking for, so they decided to make him their ruler.

The sultan’s susceptibility to flattery is suggested by a story from one of his conquests in India. Besieging the fort of Kalinjar, Mahmud finally raised the siege when he was offered (along with three hundred elephants and a promise of annual tribute) some verses composed in his praise by the Indian prince.

This example of history being hijacked for colonial divide-and-rule was underlined a few weeks later, when I continued my travels into Pakistan. “The real founder of Pakistan is Sultan Mahmud,” said Professor Homaioun at Kabul University. But according to the popular Pakistani historian Dr. Mubarak Ali, his fame had faded over the centuries. “Mahmud was just a part of history, he disappeared,” declared Dr. Ali, as we sipped milky tea under Mughal miniature paintings in his flat in Lahore. “But he was resurrected in the colonial period. The British wanted to show how the Hindus suffered from Muslims and how they were blessed to be rescued from their tyranny by the British.” Another historian, Dr. K. K. Aziz, suggested that Mahmud’s popularity was symptomatic of Pakistan’s present-day troubles. “Mahmud of Ghazni,” he said, “is put before Pakistani students from class one as a great general and iconoclast who came to India seventeen times and took a lot of jewelery and all this is applauded as a great Islamic hero. If in the textbooks you wrote that he was a great tyrant, had no business coming to India, and committed a sin because a Hindu temple is a place of worship—well, most probably the government would ban this book.”

Ferdowsi himself declares this is where Mahmud will be, calling on God in his satire to “burn this miscreant’s soul in hell.”

The verse is a famous one (I heard it recited in Herat, by Abdul Aziz’s father) and a motto for political hawks: “And should his reply with my wish not accord / Then Afrasiyab’s field, the mace and the sword!” According to the scribe Nizami of Samarkand, on hearing these lines, Mahmud asked, “Whose verse is that? For he must have the heart of a man.”

i.e., a member of the shah’s secret police.

Farun is a character in the Quran, famous for his wealth. The Persian rhyme matched “Farun” with “meimun,” the Persian for “monkey.”