IRAN
Gods, Kings, Mystics, and Mullahs
by
JAMES TRUMAN
Driving into Tehran from the ring of hills that encloses it, you descend slowly through the layers of smoke, smog, soot, dust, and floating debris that enshroud the city. It’s an ominous welcome, but not without an eerie enchantment. In the late-afternoon light, as the high-desert sun begins to soften, you can picture a descent into a valley filled with the smoke of a thousand slow-burning brush-fires. Or, in a more Iranian image, as an approach to the ruins of a still-smoldering battlefield.
Tehran, the modern capital of Iran, has the feeling of a city under siege. Overpopulated and underserviced, it exists somewhere just a little shy of chaos. Officially the population is eight million, but most estimates start at twelve. Since 1979, when the Islamic Revolution, under the leadership of Ayatollah Khomenei, drew together the disenfranchised and the rural poor to overthrow the shah, the capital has been flooded with settlers from the provinces at a rate of several hundred thousand a year. Concurrently, Iran has undergone a population explosion: Khomenei had urged his followers to multiply, which they did so successfully that more than half the country’s inhabitants are now under the age of twenty-five. This statistic is relished, and manipulated, by both sides of Iran’s postrevolutionary divide: The religious hardliners—the mullahs—see a generation educated in the revolution’s agenda. The reformers foresee the revolution’s collapse amid soaring unemployment and a hopelessly overextended infrastructure.
The dance of power between reformers and hardliners is Iran’s central (and openly debated) drama, played out in the governmental stalemate between the elected reformist president, Mohammad Khatami, and the supreme leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, Khomenei’s successor (it’s less confusing when spoken: Kho-ME-nei emphasizes the second syllable, Kha-me-NEI the last). I hadn’t been in the country an hour before the nuances of the power struggle became apparent. Checking in to Tehran’s Laleh Hotel—formerly the Intercontinental—I was interested to note the absence of the giant lobby banner that the guidebooks had warned about, the one declaiming DOWN WITH THE USA in English and Farsi. It had been hung shortly after the revolution, when all foreign-owned hotels were nationalized. I’d read that Khatami, mindful of his country’s vanished tourism industry, had tried several times in the past six years to have it removed. Each time the conservatives had blocked him. So what had happened? Asking around, I learned that the president’s people had recently scored a neat end run: They’d had the banner taken down to be cleaned, and subsequently managed to lose it.
I’d traveled to Iran with the thought of overlooking the country’s politics and focusing on its history and natural beauty. This thought quickly disappeared, not least because Tehran itself is short on both history and beauty. A few hours in the National Museum of Iran began to illuminate the conjunction of politics and culture that has forever shaped Persian history. (Persia was renamed Iran in 1935.) The museum is divided into pre-and post-Islamic collections, honoring the convulsive event of the seventh-century Arab conquest. But the larger story is of serial convulsions, and it begins to look like a miracle: how a barren desert sandbar was sequentially overthrown and ravaged by murderous invaders and rescued by saviors who revealed themselves as tyrants and by tyrants who turned out to be saviors, and how, through it all, a culture took root and continuously flourished, transforming everything it touched, even that which had come to annihilate it. The museum elegantly lays out this history of multiple renaissances, with the story ending in the decadence and lethargy of the late-eighteenth-century Qajar dynasty, when Persia, never colonized but widely exploited, fell off the political map. In their attempts to bring it back, the two twentieth-century shahs, Reza and Mohammad, would usher in Westernization, creating the bogeyman that eventually led to the Islamic Revolution.
I found myself thinking about the shahs that afternoon as I walked the wide avenues of Northern Tehran, where plane and poplar trees, kept alive by gushing roadside canals, shaded the pavement. I indulged in a leafy reverie about the romantic pursuit of reproducing the boulevards of Rome in the middle of a desert. Later, I read in Sandra Mackey’s excellent book The Iranians that the trees were planted by Reza Shah’s private militia at his personal behest. Each soldier was given a seedling, a watering can, and a warning: “The tree dies, you die.”
A kind of fierce politesse permeates Iranian life. Formal greetings still rely on florid offerings of submission (“I sacrifice myself to you,” or “May you step on my eyes”), and it’s not uncommon to see two men stranded in a doorway, each pleading for the other to go through first. In their homes, to which any foreigner is instantly invited, Iranians are profoundly gracious and polite. Behind the wheel of a car, they are the opposite. Driving etiquette in Tehran is modeled after the chariot race in Ben-Hur. Cars hustle and swarm along the boulevards and freeways, ignoring signals, road signs, and traffic lights; the action intensifies at every corner, with each new opportunity to force another car into the dust. After an especially eventful taxi ride, I told the cabbie, who seemed to speak some English, that I’d never seen worse driving in my life. He pondered this for a few seconds, then replied with the sad pride of an Olympian who had just won the bronze, “I hear the Turks in Istanbul are actually much worse.”
The reason for all this urgency is not clear. Iranians enjoy a Mediterranean attitude toward their work, and about thirty percent of the workforce is currently unemployed. The after-dark activities that usually quicken a city’s pace—dating, drinking, dancing—are all forbidden. Entertainment was early declared an enemy of the revolution; to the mullahs, it suggested Western pleasures and a distraction from the prescribed doctrine of prayer and family life. The richly named Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance was established to oversee—that is, to prescribe—every aspect of the public’s exposure to art. While I was in Tehran, the hot topic was a controversial new film that had just squeaked by the censors (though seven minutes shorter than planned). Made by a young woman director, Women’s Prison follows the tumultuous relationships among a group of female inmates and their wardens in a Tehran jail, beginning in the year of the revolution and ending in the present. It was playing near the hotel, in a small, European-style multiplex, so I wandered over for an early-evening show. The last time I’d seen a film in this genre was in the company of some furtive-looking men in a Times Square fleapit, so I was surprised to see that the near sellout audience was well-heeled and mostly couples. The film is a bald allegory of contemporary Iran—the people versus the mullahs—made all the more startling by its allusions to prostitution, drug addiction, and lesbianism. “That was so radical,” my Iranian companion marveled as we walked out. I asked him why. “That’s the first time in twenty-three years that women have shown their hair in a movie.”
This caught me by surprise. Walking around Tehran, one immediately notices that younger women have abandoned the chador. Wearing makeup, nail polish, sunglasses, and scarves set back on the crowns of their heads, they look more like fugitive film stars than religious pilgrims. The role of women in Iranian public life has also shifted dramatically: I was frequently (though erroneously) reminded that there are more elected women in the Iranian parliament than in the U.S. Congress, more women admitted to universities than men, and an increasingly large number of women CEOs running Iranian businesses. For all that, a woman is still forbidden to shake a man’s hand in public. “It is slowly improving,” my friend explained, “but it’s too late. Alienating women was the mullahs’ biggest mistake. In Iran, it is the mother who truly educates the child, and no matter what children are taught in religious school, the mother unteaches it in the home. Consequently, young people are very unreligious.”
Later that evening, I met up with another face of the opposition, a member of Tehran’s old ruling class. I was sitting in the living room of his well-appointed penthouse, up above the city’s endless sprawl, when, with a renegade flourish, he produced a bottle of Scotch from a brown bag. This quickly facilitated the telling of his story: One of the three million Iranians who fled after the revolution, my host had wandered the world, settling in America for a few years, but had finally surrendered to his loneliness in exile and moved back to Tehran. “Things have changed, but not too much,” he said with a shrug. “It used to be that we’d stay in to pray and go out to party. Now we go out to pray and stay in to party.”
It wasn’t the first time I’d heard this, nor would it be the last. It was a catchphrase of urbane resignation among Iranians in London and New York as well as Tehran. My host’s real feelings, it turned out, were entirely different. “The country is basically ruined,” he told me later in the conversation. “There is no pleasure, no culture, no imagination. There isn’t even a good restaurant left.” I asked him why he stays. “I have what I need,” he replied. “I like the music, I have my whiskey, and I have my opium.” It occurred to me that two of the three carry jail sentences.
We were sharing our third counterrevolutionary cocktail when there was a loud knock on the front door. I made a dive for the whiskey bottle, but he waved me off and ambled to open it. He returned unruffled a few minutes later. “No one cares anymore,” he said. “The worst that can happen is you have to pay a bribe.”
As the evening drew to a close, both of us glassy-eyed, he began to tell me what I understood to be an Iranian joke. He leaned across the coffee table and barked, “Why is America going to invade Iraq?” Not sure how to play along, I stumbled into a conciliatory explanation that I’d prepared for such an occasion, but my host cut me off. “No, no!” he exclaimed, delivering the punch line. “Why can’t you invade Iran, instead?”
The desire to explore Tehran naturally cedes to the urge to leave. I was met at the airport by my guide, Ali. He told me that my intended guide, also named Ali, had been called away on a personal emergency and that he would be accompanying me around the country instead. The setup was so James Bondian that I automatically assumed Ali Two was a spy and Ali One was lying in a warehouse somewhere, bound and gagged. On the flight to Kerman, a southeastern city bordering the Dasht-e Lut Desert, Ali charmed me with tales of his school days in England and his fondness for Benny Hill. By the time we’d landed, I was buying his story—mostly because the thought of a spy school that teaches Benny Hill routines as a cover was too exotic to comprehend.
We checked in to the Pars Hotel, recently opened on the outskirts of town and built in the oil-rich modern style—awash in marble and glass and chrome. The old city center clusters around the typical triumvirate of covered bazaar, mosque, and subterranean bathhouse, or hammam—the Middle Eastern proto-mall. The seventeenth-century bathhouse, now a museum, is a delight. In Iran, religious and secular architecture broadly overlap, so the intricate tile-and stuccowork, vaulted ceilings, and brickwork arches of the hammam suspend it between the everyday and the devotional.
The country’s relationship with its precious water resources has always bordered on the religious. The first deities of ancient Iran are widely believed to have been water gods; even today, one has to drive only a few hours through the desert before the first oasis sighting arrives like a triumph of the divine. In their elaborate gardens and bathhouses, Iranians have traditionally sought to summon that same experience of grace, and make a community around it. The rituals of the hammam were (and still are) egalitarian: the men would come before 6:30 A.M., their changing rooms divided by profession but not by class; thereafter, the women, who would often bring picnics and make a day of it, enjoying massages, mineral soaks, skin scrubs, and waxing. For all we know, they might also have played New Age music.
In addition to its old city center, the reason to visit Kerman is its proximity to Bam, the spectacular citadel-town founded in the third century and inhabited until the late nineteenth century. Looming up from the desert floor like a magnificent shipwreck, it is built of the reddish sun-dried bricks and the straw-and-mud compound that dominated construction in Iran for more than two thousand years. There is poignancy in thinking of Bam as the contemporary of Pompeii—the luxury and ease of the Roman lifestyle in counterpoint to this walled-in, fiercely guarded desert outpost of the early Persian empire. Waves of history enfold it: A remnant of an ancient, pre-Islamic fire temple stands within a mosque; in a thousand-year-old gymnasium, there are still platforms for spectators and musicians above the pit where men rehearsed combat—until the day when Genghis Khan invaded and prohibited all military training (as an added precaution, he murdered most of the men of fighting age). The thick walls and watchtowers enclosing the town illustrate its always precarious position within striking distance of the Afghan border. The Afghan invasion of 1722 precipitated Bam’s gradual decline; finally abandoned in the 1930s, it is now being slowly restored by the government.
Bam’s location on the main highway leading from Iran into Pakistan and Afghanistan means a series of roadblocks and security checks, to ferret out opium smugglers. It’s not uncommon to see trucks stripped of their cargo, or sniffer dogs surrounding a stopped bus. Fortunately, the word turista seems to hold the same magical properties that VIP—or J.Lo on board—might back home; our driver rolled down his window and said the word, and we were smilingly waved through. A short drive from Bam is the desert town of Mahan, with its twin attractions of a grand nineteenth-century garden built around stepped pools and fountains and, nearby, the exquisite shrine to Shah Nemat-ollah Vali, a fifteenth-century Sufimaster.
In the garden, a handful of toughs blocked our entrance to the teahouse overlooking the fountains; the minister of culture was visiting. We sat below and watched him, a generic mullah in a black turban, puffing on a hubble-bubble. Iranian visitors milled around, seemingly unimpressed. Ali translated a comment he overheard, a rude remark about the minister’s modest height. It was hard to imagine that we were in the vicinity of theocratic tyranny. At the Sufishrine, we marveled at the brilliant turquoise dome commissioned by Shah Abbas I, whose forty-one-year reign (1588 to 1629) is held up as one of the golden ages of Persian history. In the line of charismatic potentates that runs from Darius the Great to the Ayatollah Khomenei, Abbas imposed himself as both spiritual guide and earthly leader. For a spiritual guide, he behaved rather curiously: Abbas established Shia Islam as Persia’s unifying religion yet he himself delved into mystical Sufism and Buddhism. As an earthly leader, he was a more conventional despot. His death left a gap that was unfillable—in large part because he had murdered, blinded, or otherwise disposed of his potential successors.
These became the familiar elements of a day touring Iran: a glorious drive; a beautiful ruin; the retelling of a massacre; lunch; a palace with an accompanying story of a murder; a shrine or mosque of breathtaking, miraculous beauty; dinner. On most days, lunch and dinner kept closer company with the atrocities than the miracles. The signature dishes of Persian cooking, gently spiced and delicately balanced between the sweet and the savory, are made in the home. Restaurants are the province of the kebab, and the traveler quickly becomes a connoisseur of the form: when to order chicken and when to risk lamb; how to combine the flavors of basil, mint, and raw onion to make a more interesting experience; how to gauge the difference between the many kinds of Iranian bread and how to ask for sangak, the most delicious variety, which is baked over pebbles in a pizza oven.
In an exotic holdover from the past, every restaurant features a drinks trolley, which a waiter solemnly parks tableside for your perusal. Two or three times a day, we equally solemnly deliberated over our choice from the always identical options of Coke, Fanta Orange, and nonalcoholic beer. This is the meal’s moment of pause; otherwise, Iranians eat as fast as they drive, but with more focused attention. The typical restaurant is lit with a ferocity that puts a Westerner in mind of a nighttime sporting event. When I questioned an Iranian about this, he nodded sympathetically. “I have heard about your restaurants,” he said. “I am told the lighting is terrible.”
The drive from Kerman to Yazd, several hundred miles of desert highway, was hypnotizing. The magic of the Persian landscape unfolded with a nobility that has captured foreign travelers, from Lord Curzon in the eighteenth century to Robert Byron and Vita Sackville-West in the twentieth. The desert plains, in tones of sand and ash and olive green, melted away into the distant bluish mountain ranges; in the flatness of the midday sun, the colors hovered and hummed like the panels of a Rothko painting. We were driving on a stretch of the old trading route into India. Every twenty miles—the daily range of a camel—we passed by a caravansary, the fortified desert hostels now abandoned and slowly decomposing like sand castles on a beach. In service for thousands of years, they were the backbone of merchant trade until the advent of the automobile and the rule of Reza Shah, who, seizing upon the camel as a detested symbol of all things backward, outlawed the animals. Some of the larger caravansaries are being restored as teahouses or hotels, while others slowly return to the desert. You can wander through them and conjure what now seems an impossible romantic picture: the caravan trains, sometimes three hundred camels strong, hauling through the desert, traveling at night to escape the summer heat, pulling in for shelter from the winter snows; the merchants transporting carpets, silks, and spices and, through their music and stories, dispersing Persian culture and history across the continent.
Marco Polo passed along this route on his way to China, and took time to note the appeal of Yazd. It’s still a charming city, with an old quarter that preserves the architecture of medieval Persia. The fairy-tale skyline, a color of sun-scorched desert, is dominated by the gothic, stunted towers that are one of Iran’s two great marvels of preindustrial engineering: These are the ancient badgirs, or wind catchers, that draw in even the faintest breeze and circulate it through a house, while simultaneously expelling the hot air. Ali is something of a badgir fanatic, and by the end of our first day in Yazd, I had become an expert in Iranian ventilation. Several large eighteenth-and nineteenth-century private houses have been restored and opened to the public; with their courtyard gardens, natural air-conditioning, and underground canals, they describe the vast enterprise and invention of a sophisticated desert society. The water flows into the canals via the other great low-tech marvel of ancient Persia—a series of man-made waterways, or qanats, which run beneath most of the country’s inhabited desert, directing water from the distant mountain slopes to the farms and villages of the plains. Out in the desert, mounds of stones every few hundred feet denote another well that has been drilled down into the subterranean grid.
The Jameh Mosque, which dominates Yazd’s old city, is among the most beautiful in Iran, with its towering minarets and perfectly preserved fourteenth-century mosaics. The patterned tile of turquoise and blue, which can look so strident in the display cabinets of Western museums, take on another life in the desert, resonant with the promise of comfort, refreshment, and survival. (In Persian, the word for blue is also the word for water.)
The symbol of Persia’s first organized religion, Zoroastrianism, was water’s complementary element, fire. We visited several still operative fire temples in Yazd, which is home to Iran’s small but openly tolerated Zoroastrian community. I was curious as to how this ancient religion survived both the Arab conquest and the recent Islamic revolution, so we went looking for Zoroastrians to talk to. First we visited Taft, a Zoroastrian village outside Yazd. We wandered beneath hanging branches of voluptuously ripe pomegranates, watching farmers water their orchards of quince and apple and apricot trees. It is one of the delightful revelations of Iran that if you stand around long enough looking vaguely friendly, a stranger will invite you to his house for tea and snacks. Our first host was a young Zoroastrian farmer who, complicating my investigation further, told me that he learned to speak English while attending a Christian missionary school in India. He described Zoroastrianism as an agrarian religion, centered around the seasons and an agricultural calendar. Its fundamental belief, articulated by Zarathustra sometime before 500 B.C., posits life as an ongoing struggle between darkness and light, overseen by an omnipotent, invisible god. By establishing the dualities of good and evil, with the accompanying promises of heaven and hell, Zoroastrianism influenced not only Islam but also Judaism and Christianity. It was the state religion during the two great pre-Islamic dynasties, the Achaemenid and Sassanian empires.
On the outskirts of Yazd, atop a steep, barren hill, sit two structures known as the Towers of Silence, in which Zoroastrians would bequeath their dead to the elements, which came in the form of scavenging vultures. Dirt bikers were roaring up and down the hill when we got there at sunset, but they couldn’t dispel the windswept melancholy of the place. Inside one of the towers, someone had spray-painted PINK FLOYD in large letters, possibly a mystical reference I didn’t understand, and behind me I heard the first native English I’d heard in a week. I immediately invited the voices’ owners, a distinguished-looking British couple, to join me for dinner.
A newly opened restaurant in a park spared us the gymnasium lighting. We ate our chicken kebabs beside a fountain under the stars, lounging on one of the traditional carpeted platforms that hover in the breezes a few feet aboveground. My dinner companions were Sir Michael and Lady Henrietta Burton, recently retired from the British ambassadorship of the Czech Republic. Previously, Sir Michael had served as undersecretary for Middle Eastern affairs, in which position he had been involved in trying to find a diplomatic solution to the fatwa declared against Salman Rushdie in 1989. His view of the present situation was sober. “Khatami has been a disappointment,” he told me. “He’s making a stand now, but it may be too late for him. At best he’ll be Iran’s Gorbachev—the real reforms will have to come from his successor. The crucial question is who that will be.” Over ice cream—the sublime Persian variety, scented with cardamom and rose water—Lady Burton confessed an infatuation with the hejab. “No bad-hair days, no objectification, no pressure around gender,” she explained. This was, quite unexpectedly, the overwhelming consensus among the foreign women I talked to in Iran. Having arrived from a New York summer, when the sidewalks become a Victoria’s Secret runway and every man an objectifier, I’d been surprised by my own reaction to the absence of sexuality in public life. What at first felt like an imposition, and then a withdrawal, gradually softened into an invitation to experience sensuality less heatedly. One day, when a young Iranian man asked me, “Why are you Americans so obsessed with sex?” I found myself at a loss for words.
After dinner, I wandered through the streets of Yazd for an hour. It’s guaranteed that any walk will at some point reveal the unexpected. That night, on an inauspicious road leading out of town, I stumbled across a giant amusement park full of families out on the town with their children. Neither familiar nor alien, it was nonetheless a wild sight: the women of Yazd riding the Tilt-a-Wheel, whooping and hollering and holding on to their children with one hand while the other was clamped to their heads, holding on to their chadors for dear life.
The road from Yazd to Shiraz, another hypnotic desert highway, took us through the small oasis town of Abarkuh, once a prosperous trading center and now notable for its crumbling thirteenth-century mosque. It was the eve of a public holiday celebrating the birth of Ali, the first imam and the cousin of Mohammed, whom Shiites hold to be his only true successor. The following day would be the anniversary of Iraq’s attack on Iran in 1980, which began the eight-year war known in Iran as the “imposed war.” The mosque was already festooned with military banners commemorating the dead; instead of the usual call to prayer, the speakers atop the mosque were blaring slow, looping, ecstatic dirges. It was the music that had been played hour after hour in the trenches before an attack, inspiring soldiers to dash out and get themselves blown to bits in Saddam Hussein’s minefields. A handful of veterans hobbled up the stairs to the mosque as we sat and watched. It was an unbearably sad picture, with no escape clause: Iranians are fully aware that Europe and the United States supplied the munitions that killed hundreds of thousands of their soldiers; Westerners are equally aware that Khomenei sacrificed his troops with an almost medieval disregard for life.
Our next stop was Pasargadae, the birthplace of imperial Persia, where in 550 B.C. King Cyrus the Great defeated the king of Media (who happened to be his father-in-law) and founded the Achaemenid empire. The site, still not fully excavated, and subject to much archaeological speculation, is a windswept, grassy plain of several square miles, interrupted by the splintered ruins of several palaces, a temple, and the tomb of Cyrus. It operates now as a kind of antique drive-in: Families park their cars beside a ruin, have a quick look around, and then drive on to the next one. While there isn’t a lot to see, there’s something quite distinctive to feel. The ruins are as oddly situated as the Mayan pyramids, and emanate a similarly disembodied mystery; like the remnants of all epochal civilizations, they appear to have fallen to earth from another dimension.
Architecturally, the ruins of Pasargadae are a dress rehearsal for Iran’s great wonder, Persepolis, built by Cyrus’s heirs. The day we visited, a public holiday, visitors were swarming up the magnificent Grand Stairway (the prototype for every profligate ballroom and palace staircase built since). The complex of ruined palaces at the top, accessible through a succession of monumental carved-stone gateways, still has the power to enthrall—its confluence of beauty, vanity, and power seems as contemporary as, say, New York City. And yet the experience can be astonishingly intimate. On this busy day, a solitary guard stood in the middle of the ruins, blowing a whistle and maniacally flailing his arms as children clambered over the huge stone lions and fallen columns. Meanwhile, there was unimpeded access to the prize of Persepolis—and the Apadana Staircase with its thirty flawlessly preserved bas reliefs of foreign delegations bringing offerings to the Achaemenid king. According to excavated records, it took twenty thousand workers to build Persepolis; historians are now certain that it was occupied for only a few days a year, in March, for the Persian New Year. From a modern perspective, it’s the biggest vanity project in the history of the world. Two and a half millennia ago, it ceremonially merged the forces of earthly and divine power in the unassailable figure of the king, an arrangement—and an expectation—that has shadowed life and politics in the region ever since. Within this imperial grandeur may lie the psychological key to Persia’s remarkable resilience to invasion, massacre, and suffering: From the earliest days of their civilization, Persians felt themselves superior to their occupiers. One can understand why Alexander the Great burned down Persepolis when he invaded in 330 B.C. And why in the early days of the revolution, Khomenei’s clerics drew up a plan to bulldoze the remains.
From the pedestal in front of the Palace of Xerxes (adjacent to and, one notes, slightly larger than the palace of his father, Darius), there is a clear view down to a derelict encampment a few hundred yards away. It was here, in 1971, that the shah held court before the world’s reluctantly assembled royalty and political leaders to celebrate 2,500 years of Persian monarchy. It was a bald attempt to inflate his own faltering regime with the grandeur of history, and it went awry. Famously extravagant (the food was airlifted in from Maxim’s of Paris), the party became a rallying point for antiroyalists and broadened the movement to depose him. Thirty years later, the shah’s royal pavilion still stands, wrapped in tatters of red and blue canvas. In close-up, it has the melancholy air of an abandoned carnival tent.
As we drove into Shiraz later that afternoon, the holiday spirit was blossoming. Public holidays are traditionally celebrated with picnics, and in this city of a million plus, space is apparently at a premium: There were picnickers camped out on the traffic islands, picknickers on the grassy highway meridians. Later that evening, in the park behind our hotel, we saw perhaps two thousand of them, in groups of ten or twenty, cooking, eating, drinking, and laughing in the warm early-autumn night. Family life, a central concern of Koranic law, is rarely on such public display in Iran. Following another day of imperial sightseeing, I was struck by the innocence of the scene. By chance, I ran into Sir Michael Burton, the British diplomat, who had just arrived from Yazd. “It’s hard to think we’re in the axis of evil,” he said, sharing my wonderment. “And the funny thing is that if you went over the border into Iraq tonight, you’d see exactly the same thing.”
According to Persian legend, or at least the guidebooks, Shiraz is the home of roses, nightingales, poetry, and wine. The modern city has extinguished the roses and nightingales, and the revolution did the same for the wine. But there are several beautiful mosques, and the extraordinary Shah Cheragh (King of Light) shrine, which houses the remains of the brother of the eighth imam. It is the smallest of three similarly bejeweled mausoleums (the other two being in Qom and Mashad) and the only one that will allow non-Muslims inside. More than a million fragments of mirror embellish its elaborate domed interior, making an Islamic marriage between Venice and India, the two furthermost stations of the old trading route. The effect is otherworldly, supernatural—how the world might appear to a moth trapped inside a chandelier, or how God might look as a special effect.
The other great shrine in Shiraz is the resting place of the fourteenth-century Sufipoet Hafiz. The importance of Persia’s mystic poets (Jaluddin Rumi, Omar Khayyam, and Saadi, also buried in Shiraz, are the other all-stars) is impressed upon every visitor. As illuminators of the everyday and escorts to the worlds beyond, they seem to combine the roles of philosopher, composer, romantic novelist, and shaman. It is whispered that in recent years, Hafiz has been outselling the Koran, although no one cares to discuss it. Sufis have forever been a challenge for the Islamic establishment. A mystical outgrowth of Islam, Sufism nonetheless refutes much of its doctrine, including the core Koranic belief that God cannot be directly experienced by man. Sufirituals—most famously, those of the whirling dervishes—insist upon a profound fusion of the human and the divine. Hafiz appears to touch upon the Sufirelationship to Islam in this poem: “The Great religions are the Ships, / Poets the life Boats. / Every sane person I know has jumped Overboard.” During his lifetime, Hafiz was successively celebrated, disgraced, exiled, and memorialized. His books are now appreciated as an Iranian version of the I Ching: Opened randomly, the poems are believed to answer the reader’s deepest-held questions. His shrine, a modest structure built in the last century, is enclosed by an attractive walled garden and teahouse, but the atmosphere is missing the grandeur of other sacred sites we visited. Over tea, it occurred to me that death was not Hafiz’s masterpiece; he is among the few celebrated Persians who did not die a martyr.
A week into the trip, I was ready to break with the program. Although this involved a modest amount of bureaucratic wrangling—all travelers have to register their itineraries—by mid-morning, we were leaving Shiraz for the high Zagros Mountains. The first few hours were uneventful, as the desert plateau slowly ceded to the approaching hills. At lunchtime, we passed through our first mountain village. From the car window, I noticed a crowd of men painting a large American flag on the road surface. It was the first anti-U.S. sentiment I’d encountered, and I was unsure how to respond. A few miles from town, we stopped to admire some Sassanian-period bas-reliefs cut into the rock face. They represent the by-now-familiar military victories of various kings over the Romans: For instance, King Shapur I on his horse, the emperor Gordian dead beneath his hoof and the emperor Valerian on one knee in subjugation. The capture of an actual Roman emperor was one of the great coups of the Sassanian army. Valerian was obliged to spend the rest of his life under house arrest in a palace built for him in the nearby citadel of Bishapoor; history records that he was utterly miserable and longed for Rome.
Standing in the ruins of his palace, crushed by the sledgehammer of midday heat, I felt fairly antagonistic myself, and convinced Ali to escort me back to town to converse with the flag painters. By the time we got there, the American flag had been supplemented by the flag of Israel. The crowd had dispersed, but three toughs with military haircuts were hovering around. Ali gingerly approached them to start a dialogue. Their spokesman, a red-faced fellow with a spark plug neck, demanded assurances that I was not a journalist. Satisfied, he explained that there would be a parade later, and that troops would march on the two flags. I asked him what his personal feelings were toward America. His red face turned crimson, and he let fly with something that Ali translated as “America is the great oppressor. It oppresses every country in the world. You are the world’s great oppressor.” Then he was finished. The scene was highly familiar from CNN—anti-American agitator delivers inflammatory sound bite—but without a new story to cut to, he and I were left staring at one another, bewildered as to what should happen next. Finally, his friends led him away, and Ali whispered in my ear, “Basiji. Let’s go.” This seemed like a good idea. These Basijis were the untrained, often adolescent recruits that Khomenei used as revolutionary martyrs—which is to say cannon fodder—in the Iraq war. Their continuing role is as a rural militia entrusted with protecting the revolution. Along with the better-trained Revolutionary Guard, they are the muscle behind the hardliners.
As we started to haul up the mountain roads, thoughts of Basijis faded. We were moving into the Iranian wild west, the land of the nomads. We stopped for the night in Yasuj, a mountain settlement that hums with the unruly energy of a border town. On main street we saw Mongols, Afghanis, and Turks, and it seemed like everyone was just passing through. Nomadic towns were a legacy of Reza Shah, an attempt to rein in the lawlessness of the mountain tribes. Instead, the forced settlements created poverty and deadly disease. The poverty endures. The attempted solution in Yasuj, decreed by the supreme leader himself, was the building of a large, modern hotel, the Azadi, to attract businessmen and tourists. Six years old, the hotel is already decrepit. As you might expect, nomads are not natural-born hoteliers. At dinner, the waiter handed us a menu listing an impressive twenty dishes. By the time we ordered, five minutes later, seventeen of the twenty had migrated off the menu. Staffing problems in the kitchen, he explained. The next morning, when I asked the manager to find the porter who’d helped us with our bags the night before, he looked up, shrugged, and without much surprise said, “Gone.”
The drive through the hills and down to Isfahan is one of the most beautiful in Iran. The procession of plains and mountains, fertility and barrenness, unfolds like an elemental drama of living and dying. The valleys, sage green and burnt umber, red and gold, are a changing patchwork of sun-bleached rock and lush oases of clover and rice, sunflowers and wheat, framed by groves of oak and walnut trees. In the simple, irrigated squares and rectangles of these cultivated oases, you can see the origins of the Persian garden, and also a model for the enclosed, open-air courtyard of the Persian mosque. The fanfare of blue tile and mirrored mosaics that dances before the eye in the mosque or shrine surely consecrates the wonder of the oasis. Likewise, the landscape illuminates one of the more otherworldly Persian innovations—the elaborate stepped moldings known as stalactites, which sometimes decorates domes and recesses. In the hard sunlight of early morning, the mountains take on the same honeycomb formations, mysterious and imposing.
The last golden age of Persian Islamic architecture occurred in the early seventeenth century under Shah Abbas I, who built his royal capital in Isfahan. Like most sophisticated cities, Isfahan is routinely referred to as the Paris of its region, and its combination of formal spaces and romantic architecture in fact gives the comparison some merit. The sprawling Zayandeh River divides the city, and the antique stone bridges that traverse it are a wonder of organic engineering. While traffic and pedestrians scuttle across the upper levels, the lower layers, with their lovely open-air teahouses, consummate the Persian love affair with water. It is possible, and accepted, to sit cooling one’s feet in the water while waiters hop across the stone pedestals planted in the river, delivering tea, ice cream, and hookah pipes stuffed with scented tobacco. While we were reclining in the teahouse beneath the most famous of Isfahan’s bridges, the Pol-e Khaju, we were momentarily bothered by a band of young beggars, the first I’d seen in Iran. After a waiter came by to shoo them away, they sat at a table, ordered tea, and paid their bill before wandering off. No one seemed to find this peculiar.
The centerpiece of Isfahan is the vast Emam Khomenei square, created in the early seventeenth century by Shah Abbas to accommodate his palace and two magnificent mosques. The square, now a garden, once held a giant polo field, and the palace’s elevated terrace was the royal box, from which spectators observed the games and, on occasion, public executions. Two flights up from the terrace, sequestered on the top floor, an exquisitely ornate music room hints at the pleasures of palace life. Then as now, music occupied an ambiguous position between the profane and the sacred. In the nearby Chehel Sotun Palace, built by Shah Abbas II, murals show court musicians entertaining royal visitors; in one panel, a group of dancers strike temptress poses, their breasts daringly revealed through sheer tops. Iran’s hard beauty begins to soften in Isfahan. Perhaps its most Parisian aspect is the note of sensuality that glides beneath the surface—even the surrounding mountains, a distant, milky lavender, have a velvet softness. Approaching the monumental Eman Mosque, the city’s Notre-Dame, I noticed for the first time that the familiar combination of thrusting minaret and voluptuous dome speaks of earthly as well as divine union. The Emam Mosque is a textbook masterpiece—the apotheosis of the art and science of Islamic architecture. Across the square, the smaller Sheikh Lotfollah Mosque may be Isfahan’s true treasure. I found myself wandering back at different times of day to catch a new effect of light on the domed sanctuary interior, whose arrangement of glazed and unglazed tile, blue and lemon and pale rose, shone and glowed in ever-shifting counterpoint. Two weeks of intensive mosque immersion had begun to initiate my Westerner’s eyes: Far from being hieroglyphic riddles, the wild colors and patterns emerged as explosions of life, molecular and biological, caught in a single moment of perception. One surrenders to it without sentimentality or storyline.
I’d been hoping to sit down with a mullah before leaving Iran, but the ones I’d encountered so far hadn’t displayed much chattiness. En route to Tehran, in the town of Kermanshah, we loitered outside the local madrasah (theological school) and soon fell into conversation with a handsome young cleric, Ashrafi, who agreed to discuss Islam with the foreigner. He insisted that this be over dinner at his house, after he had led evening prayers at the local mosque. His home was a modest pair of rooms, off a communal courtyard in a quiet back alley of the city, that he shared with his wife (most mullahs, even ayatollahs, are married). The room we sat in—on the floor, in traditional style—was littered with recent wedding presents: a still bubble-wrapped washing machine, a tiny TV, a chest of drawers, and, most implausible, a large Mickey and Minnie Mouse floor rug that served to invalidate most of my questions about anti-Western hysteria in the Muslim world.
Ashrafi patiently laid out the fundamentals of Shia Islam: the codes of personal ascetism, social responsibility, and humility before God that form the core of Koranic governance. He discreetly sidestepped the question of whether religious devotion and political power can coexist. He was born at the time of the revolution and educated in the politically charged theological schools of the post-Khomenei era, yet his interest in politics seemed oddly remote. It may have been self-censorship, but it more closely resembled exhaustion—coupled with the almost certain knowledge that his generation of clerics would not be running the government. His vision of the future held the wistful yearning particular to Shia Islam—the belief that the twelfth imam, the last successor to Mohammed, who disappeared in the year 873, will imminently return as a prophet of peace. This conviction seemed to permeate many aspects of Iranian culture: Indeed, it makes life possible at the fraught intersection of certainty and hopelessness.
At dinner, a kebab-free feast of minced lamb and rice, cooked by the mullah’s invisible wife—we were joined by a friend, a crippled veteran of the Iran-Iraq war. He told the story of working as a teacher and heading off to the front to fight during school holidays. On his fourth trip he was gassed, on the fifth he took a bullet in the spine. Now confined to a wheelchair, he professed nothing but gratitude for being able to serve. Such resilience is hard to quantify: In a friend it looks like heroism, in an enemy fanaticism. I asked whether he’d be happy if the United States removed Saddam. He shook his head vigorously and answered with an epigram: “The cat doesn’t catch the mouse in order to bring it to God.”
I asked my host what relationship he would like to see between Iran and the United States. He paused for a moment and then answered slowly: “Iran and America were once close, and you turned away from us. And then we turned away from you. This has made our relations difficult.” I found this a little flat and was surprised to see everyone else in the room nodding their heads with pleasure. Ali, who had been translating, explained that the mullah’s answer had been a series of double entendres describing the act of sodomy. He leaned toward Ali to make sure that I had fully understood the meaning and, smiling broadly, finished with “Please tell your people that we will always prefer to face America.”
I spent my last night in Iran with a group of Ashrafi’s contemporaries. The children of Tehran’s cosmopolitan elite, they volunteered to show me a good time. This involved driving madly around Northern Tehran, from party to party. Each one began the same way: We entered a private house, exchanged formal Iranian greetings, and then the girls removed their hejabs and coats to reveal tight jeans and sexy tops. A bottle of vodka was produced, the music went up, and the lights went down. The music was vaguely Arabic, but it was made in Paris, and the dancing was similarly international. I struck up a conversation with an attractive young medical student who told me that she’d spent a week in jail the previous year after the police raided a party like this. Like the characters in Women’s Prison, she’d shared quarters with murderers and prostitutes. I asked if her parents were angry, and she looked surprised. On the contrary, she said that they sympathized and had pulled strings to get her out. All around us that night, the drinking and partying was a family activity: The grown-ups were more wasted than their children.
On the flight to London the following morning, the steward pointed out the mountains on the western horizon, looming above the morning mist. We agreed on their beauty, and I made a comment about the Iranian landscape, to which he cheerfully replied that we were actually looking at Iraq. But I couldn’t get too excited—this current showdown began to seem like just the latest installment in a continuum of conflict. I was reminded of a conversation I’d had with a man who invited me to his house just outside Yazd. Like most Iranians I met, he was educated and worldly without ever having left his country. At one point, I asked him where outside Iran he would most like to visit. “Sweden or Switzerland,” he answered. “I very much admire their culture.”
Somewhat cynically, I responded with some variant of, “Huh?”
“Yes,” he explained. “Their culture of neutrality.”
READING IRAN
The essential books
1. Roy Mottahedeh’s The Mantle of the Prophet (Simon & Schuster, 2000) tells the true story of a young cleric’s boyhood, intellectual journey through the seminaries of Qom, the Iranian Revolution, and beyond. Gorgeously written and laced with insights into the world of Shia ayatollahs, Mottahedeh’s classic still offers the most textured, accessible account of religion’s role in Iranian society and the 1979 revolution.
2. In Daughter of Persia (Crown, 1992), Sattareh Farman Farmaian recounts growing up in a 1920s Persian harem as the daughter of a wealthy Qajar prince. The tumults of her story, from founding Iran’s first school of social work to battling tradition in her personal life, illustrate the breadth of challenges Iranian women faced in the twentieth century.
3. Ryszard Kapúscínski’s collection of atmospheric snapshots of the Islamic Revolution, Shah of Shahs (Random House, 1985), captures the chaos and psychological turmoil of the Iranian society at its moment of great transformation. A brilliant work of literary journalism at its best, Shah of Shahs chronicles how the shah’s court, busy jaunting to Europe for lunch, failed to notice the perversity of its decadence, as well as the imminence of its demise.
4.Persepolis 1 and 2 (Pantheon, 2003) is Marjane Satrapi’s enchanting comic-strip-as-memoir that spans her girlhood during the Iranian Revolution through her adulthood during the dark days of the Iran-Iraq war. Her story is told with wrenching candor and irrepressible wit, and the stark black-and-white images render her story especially powerful, turning a young girl’s ghastly encounter with dictatorship into a universal tale of spirited survival.
5. Anahita Firouz’s In the Walled Gardens (Little, Brown, 2002), a rare English-language novel by an Iranian writer, explores class tensions on the eve of Iran’s revolution. Sophisticated and engaging, it is the story of an ill-fated love affair between an aristocrat and a revolutionary, set against the backdrop of a graceful world of privilege destined to collapse.
6. In My Uncle Napoleon (Random House, 2005; originally published in 1973), Iraj Pezeshkzad weaves an epic farce around an eccentric Iranian patriarch jointly obsessed with family honor and the conviction that Iran is run by the invisible hand of the scheming British. The latter is a constant source of paranoia fixed in the Iranian psyche, and Pezeshkzad’s charming satire of this ruinous cultural tendency, told alongside a tender love story, has made his Napoleon the best-loved Iranian novel of the twentieth century.
7. A collection of contemporary Iranian poetry and prose, in translation, Nahid Mozaffari’s Strange Times, My Dear: The PEN Anthology of Contemporary Iranian Literature (Arcade, 2005) showcases how Iranian writers, in the tradition of their Eastern European counterparts under communism, have resisted political repression through creative forms of expression. The strength of the compilation lies less in the translations than in the stratagems artists use to evade censorship—a practice that until now the West has observed mainly through Iranian cinema.
8.All the Shah’s Men (Wiley, 2003), Stephen Kinzer’s suspenseful account of the 1953 American coup that overthrew the democratically elected government of Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh, is required reading for anyone wishing to understand the hostility between Iran and the United States that persists to this day. Paced and told like a spy novel, the reconstruction traces how the unintended consequences of such interventions continue to haunt American policymakers.
9.Zoroastrians (Routledge, 1979), by Mary Boyce, is an accessible introduction to the three-thousand-year-old religion that originated in Iran and shaped its civilization and cultural rituals in ways that are apparent everywhere today. If the central drama of Iranian culture is the interplay between an ancient, Zoroastrian past and the invasion of Islam in the seventh century, then Boyce’s work offers perhaps the richest context for deciphering Iran’s current-day contradictions.
10.Iran Awakening (Random House, 2006) is the memoir of Shirin Ebadi, the only Iranian Nobel Peace Prize winner and a figure known throughout the world for her work defending women and children, as well as her resistance to Iran’s harsh Islamic penal code. The country’s first female judge, Ebadi recounts being demoted to a clerk by a revolution she supported, and the struggles she faces living and working for change under the Islamic regime.