Heirs to Forgotten Kingdoms (18 page)

Thinking about this belief of the Shi’a, I was tempted to compare it to music in a minor key, like the haunting Iranian song I had heard earlier that day on the car stereo. The notes of the elegiac melody of the twelfth imam might have been familiar to any Zoroastrian, pining for the restoration of the old order. And the Mehdi, according to legend, will be descended from the ancient emperors of Persia. For Shahrbanu, daughter of the last emperor of independent Persia before it became Muslim, was said to have married Hussein, grandson of the Prophet Mohammed: had this been true, all the subsequent imams would have been descended not only from the Prophet but also from the Persian royal family. Perhaps this story helped shore up support for Islam among Iranians who pined for the old order.

The Avesta, too, prophesied a Messiah—the Saoshyant, the redeemer who will lead the armies of good in their final battle, after which will come the end of the world and the resurrection of the dead. This Zoroastrian concept, which fits neatly into their belief that the world is a battlefield for the forces of good and evil, appears to have predated both the Jewish belief in the Messiah and the Muslim belief in the Mehdi; some scholars think that it inspired them both, though in truth the idea of a historical figure rising from the dead to rescue his people is one that might appeal to any society whose past was greater than its present. In later legend, a great lake in southeastern Iran was said to contain the seed of Zarathustra, capable of giving the world seven more prophets like himself to bring the world to a new level of wisdom each time. This concept was adopted by some Muslim groups, which sometimes suggested that Mohammed was the seventh prophet. Breakaway groups from Islam claimed that Mohammed had only been the fifth or sixth, and that their own founder was the seventh.

In the ninth and tenth centuries the Arab Abbasid Empire’s grip on Iran weakened and local dynasties gained control over parts of the country. It was one such dynasty, called the Samanids, who sponsored the writing of the Iranian national epic, the
Shahnamah
. The writer, Ferdowsi, was officially a Muslim, but the poem is saturated with Zoroastrian ideas. The history it tells of the Iranian people, for example, begins with a battle against Angra Mainyu. The poet may also, by using the Persian language, have helped to preserve it. Iran never adopted Arabic for everyday speech and continues proudly to enjoy its own quite separate literature, especially a rich corpus of poetry.

—————

FROM ZENDAN-E-SOLEYMAN
I headed for a city that represents more than any other the Shi’a Islamic side of Iran. Qom is home to the country’s premier shrine and seminary, where Muslim clerics are trained. The shrine in the city was built around the tomb of the sister of the eighth imam, Fatimah al-Maasoumah. It is not as important a site as the cities of Najaf and Karbala in Iraq, where the Prophet’s son-in-law Ali and grandson Hussein are buried. Qom, however, has often been much easier for Iranian pilgrims to reach, and so has become immensely popular. The green lights of the shrine illuminated the parking lot where we stopped, and I could see where devout pilgrims had pitched tents among parked cars, to get as near as possible to the shrine. At a hotel overlooking the square, where I hoped to find a room, the receptionist—after showing me my room—told me not to stay there. “It’s much too expensive here,” he said confidentially; “you should stay instead with my friend Mr. Jehangir. He loves to meet visitors!” He placed a call and confirmed that the mysterious Mr. Jehangir could give me a bed for the night, and then told me how to find him. I wandered off down a series of little roads and alleyways till I found Mr. Jehangir’s cellar apartment.

Mr. Jehangir turned out to be a newly fledged Shi’a cleric, though he was not wearing his clerical clothes. After ushering me into his home he introduced me to three of his friends who were all sitting on his floor (his wife, wearing a white face veil, sat demurely in the background, but his toddler daughter was less restrained). They were all at various stages of clerical study in one of Qom’s seminaries: he was the most senior of them and proudly showed me a picture of himself in the white turban of a sheikh
,
the title for a man who has attained a certain level of religious learning but who does not have the extra distinction of being a black-turbaned
sayyid,
a descendant of the Prophet. I was quizzed for hours by the clerics about Britain—though more about society, and how to get a visa, than politics. We didn’t finish until around 1:00 a.m., and even then they clattered away on their laptops for another hour as I lay on a nearby mattress trying to sleep. At five in the morning they rose to pray. I had to rise with them and—bleary-eyed but delighted to have this opportunity—made myself ready to be shown around Iran’s top seminary by its own students.

First they gave me a tour of the shrine, whose golden domes and shiny new blue ceramic tiles were visible signs of how much support and funding it received. Non-Muslims were not allowed to enter, but my companions ushered me in. They went to pray; I stood waiting for them as the crowd of worshipers flowed past me. When they returned, they said they had another place to show me. We filed out of the mosque and walked along a tree-lined street to a large seminary. This seminary was special: it was where the Ayatollah Khomeini once studied. The two-story arcade that surrounded its wide, leafy courtyard was topped by a picture of the ayatollah. My new friends guided me to the room that once had been Khomeini’s small bedroom-cum-study, and they stood as Westerners might when their national anthem is played, reverently gazing at the simple furniture and the ayatollah’s picture on the wall. I fidgeted uncertainly. By resisting the temptations of wealth and power as an absolute ruler, Khomeini had shown great strength of character. Yet he was no friend to the Zoroastrians of Iran, who had prospered under the secular monarchy he overthrew.

We sat in the seminary courtyard for a while; a black-clad
sayyid
and a black cat walked slowly by, as if in stately procession. One of Mr. Jehangir’s friends told me he hoped to study at the seminary. First he had to pass his entry exams; Plato’s philosophy was one of the core subjects on which he would be tested. In the seminary he would study Aristotle, attending tutorials in which he learned through debating with fellow students (a technique that itself resembles that of the Greek philosophers). It was years since I had studied Aristotle and Plato myself, and I had not expected to find them a useful introduction to the Ayatollah Khomeini’s classmates, since that was what my friends had turned out to be. There was a certain historical irony to it: the classical philosophers, who had inspired the European Enlightenment, were fashionable with the reactionary clergy of Iran? Plato the Athenian, and Aristotle the mentor of Alexander, were popular in Persia—which famously had been the enemy of Athens and Alexander?

But this was ignorance on my part, because as I learned, the much-hated Alexander the Great did in fact leave a legacy in Persia of affection for Greek culture. Iran’s Parthian rulers in the first century
BC
were addicted to Greek theater. (When the unlucky Roman general Crassus was killed at Harran, his head was brought to the emperor and used as a stage prop in Euripides’s
Bacchae
.) Greek science was so much revered in Persia that even after the West had adopted newer ideas, the Persians continued to follow the Greeks. Into the nineteenth century, anyone going to a doctor in Persia would have had his or her humors analyzed, based on the prescriptions of the second-century Greek doctor Galen. (
Unani-tibb
—Arabic for “Greek medicine”—has now been abandoned in Iran, though it is still practiced in India.) The astronomy that Iranian clerics were still being taught at the start of the twentieth century was that of Ptolemy, a second-century Greek scientist. A man called Ahmad Kasravi once studied to be a cleric and then went on to become one of the major anticlerical writers of modern Iran—and his disillusionment with Shi’a Islam began not with the Koran but rather with a flaw he spotted in Ptolemy.

Because of this enthusiasm for Greek learning, it was natural that when in the sixth century
AD
the last pagan members of Plato’s Academy—whose practice it was to teach students first Plato’s philosophy and then Aristotle’s—were expelled by the Byzantine emperor Justinian, the Persians offered them refuge. They were housed at a town called Gundeshapur, where they joined scholars from one of the Byzantine Empire’s religious minorities, who had likewise been expelled; in later years the Persians brought Chinese and Indian scholars to join them. Gundeshapur became a great university whose curriculum included Greek, Sanskrit, and Chinese texts; it had a hospital that was the greatest medical center in the region, and doctors even took examinations there (a startling innovation at that time). Byzantium’s intolerance became Persia’s gain.

Khomeini would have studied Plato in the seminary. In fact, his idea that Iran should be run by the “most learned cleric” not only marked a sea change from the traditional Shi’a view that government was intrinsically wicked but is not found in the Koran. Instead it is perhaps the closest approximation on earth to Plato’s vision, set out in his
Republic,
of a state that is run by the “wisest philosopher.” Khomeini always denied that there was a connection, although he approved of Plato and once said that he considered him “sound.”

—————

MY JOURNEY FROM QOM
took me through the fabulous city of Esfahan, whose central square was designed to double as a polo field, whose blue faience mosques are among the most beautiful buildings in the world, and in whose bazaar artists carefully paint tiny china boxes with love scenes and images of poets. And south from Esfahan I went to Shiraz, a city where in the 1840s a conservative Muslim
sayyid
called Ali Shirazi declared himself to be the Mehdi and won a hundred thousand followers before he was brutally put to death by the authorities, who regarded him as a blasphemer. His followers, who included Zoroastrians, declared that he was also the Saoshyant. They called themselves the Babis, because Shirazi was the “Bab,” the mystical gateway to God. In the late 1880s, the British scholar Edward Browne visited Iran. Later one of the greatest Western experts on the country (and still the only British man to have a street named after him in modern Tehran), he went deep into Iranian society and became adept at deciphering the secret codes Iranians used—such as the code that Iranian men employed when puffing smoke from their water-pipes, each series of puffs representing a letter. Despite his skill and his keenness to meet the Babis and quiz them about their beliefs, he was unable to penetrate the secrecy with which they surrounded themselves. Every time he approached someone who seemed plausible, the man would claim to be an orthodox Muslim.

Clearly enough, the Babis were watching him during this time, because they eventually decided that they could trust him. “The ‘Friends’ are everywhere,” a Babi man told him after revealing his own affiliation, “and though hitherto you have sought for them without success, and only at last chanced on them by what would seem a mere accident, now that you have the clue you will meet them wherever you go.” He learned about their customs, some of which showed clear Zoroastrian influences: Babi men took only one wife each, Babi women did not veil, and Babis adopted a new fast in place of Ramadan, held in the run-up to Nowruz. The secrecy was justified: Iran’s nineteenth-century government slaughtered thousands of Babis and enslaved their wives. The Babis’ religion eventually morphed into Baha’ism. In recent years the Baha’i leaders have been imprisoned and their followers systematically harassed, excluded from government jobs, and sometimes arrested on the grounds that they are apostates from Islam. Since the Islamic Revolution, two hundred Baha’is have been killed.

Shiraz is a city much celebrated in Iranian poetry, and most of all in the poems of the fourteenth-century Hafez, Iranians’ favorite poet—though one whose work does not survive well in translation. “Oh, come to Shiraz when the north wind blows! / There abideth the angel of Gabriel’s peace / With him who is lord of its treasures; the fame / Of the sugar of Egypt shall fade and cease, / For the breath of our beauties has put it to shame.” Hafez’s
Diwan
is one of the two books that every traditional Iranian family owns—the other being the Koran. His tomb in Shiraz is a place of pilgrimage. I saw a young man kneel at it and stay there for a long time in silent prayer, while several women stood nearby, heads bowed. Perhaps it was not just Hafez they honored and longed for but the vivacious and liberated culture that he proclaimed: “Hail Sufis! Lovers of wine, all hail! For wine is proclaimed to a world athirst.”

Hafez’s poetry is rife with references to wine. Embarrassed by this, because wine is forbidden in Islam and Hafez was the favorite poet of Iranian Muslims, the pious interpret these references as being metaphors for spiritual delight. On that basis even the Ayatollah Khomeini wrote a poem declaring, “Let the doors of the tavern be opened, and let us go there day and night.” Hafez’s taverns, however, were kept by the Zoroastrian priests, the Magi. As one of his poems says, “I placed my difficulty before the old Magi last evening, / Who with the help of his glance could solve the problem. / I found him happy and smiling with a glass of wine in his hand.” It shows that Hafez’s mentions of wine are references to the Zoroastrian belief that drinking wine is a way to communicate with God. At a Zoroastrian prayer ceremony, wine is among seven fruits of creation that are placed in front of a priest (who is sometimes also called a Magus). In Zoroastrian tradition Zarathustra gave the saint-king Vishtaspa wine to drink, which put him into a trance. In that trance he ascended to heaven and glimpsed the glory of God. Herodotus said that the Persians made a decision only if they had considered it twice—once when sober and once when drunk. So if they made a decision while sober, they would then get drunk and see if it still seemed a good idea. If it did, they would go ahead. When I first read this, I assumed it was a joke—but in fact it makes sense. If wine gives a special kind of mystical insight, then it would seem to be a good idea to get drunk before making decisions. And a few bad experiences would have taught the value of thinking the decisions over when sober, too.