Iran: Empire of the Mind (20 page)

Again the times are out of joint; and again
For wine and the Beloved’s languid glance I am fain.
The wheel of fortune is a marvellous thing:
What next proud head to the lowly dust will it bring?

…
‘Tis a famous tale, the deceitfulness of earth;
The night is pregnant: what will dawn bring to birth?
Tumult and bloody battle rage in the plain:
Bring blood-red wine, and fill the cup again.
⁵³

But before the skies darkened again with the smoke of war and massacre, Hafez took the previous patterns of Persian poetry and elevated them to new, unsurpassed heights of expression. In the following ghazal the familiar images of wine and the Beloved ripple, interfere, overlap, reflect each other and thereby transcend the immediate eroticism to point beyond desire to the world of the spirit. It is saying that if love is offered, it must be taken, and drunk to the dregs, because love demands full commitment, nothing less; and it is only then that its true significance can be grasped, that love is the essential gift, the essence of life, given to us before time:

Her hair was still tangled, her mouth still drunk
And laughing, her shoulders sweaty, the blouse
Torn open, singing love songs, her wine cup full.
Her eyes were looking for a fight, her lips
Ready for jibes. She sat down
Last night at midnight on my bed.
She put her lips close to my ear and said
In a whisper these words: ‘What is this?
Aren’t you my old lover—Are you asleep?’
The friend of wisdom who receives
This wine that steals sleep is a traitor to love
If he doesn’t worship that same wine.
Oh you prudes, go away. Stop arguing with those
Who drink the bitter dregs, because it was precisely
This gift the divine ones gave us before Eternity.
Whatever God poured into our cup
We drank, whether it was the wine
Of heaven or the wine of drunkenness.
The laughter of the wine, and the dishevelled curls of the Beloved
Oh, how many nights of repentance—like those of Hafez
Have been broken by moments like this?
⁵⁴

Poems like this unsettle many Iranians even today.
⁵⁵
Some religious Iranians will say directly that these poems are not really about wine or erotic love at all, that the meaning is entirely on a spiritual level, and that the poets themselves never touched wine. Whether or not that is true (and personally I doubt it), the fact is that the poems only work if the eroticism and the alcoholic intoxication are real—or rather, they work
because
they are real, because they ring true and speak directly to our own experience, as only great literature can. They seem to remind us of something we had always known, but had forgotten. Otherwise the metaphors would be just a device, and the rebellion against convention no more than a pose. This poetry has more bite, more impact than that. Hafez wrote the following in a period of officious imposition of religious orthodoxy (and some have pointed up its relevance in contemporary Iran):

Bovad aya ke dar-e maykadeha bogshayand
Gereh az kar-e forubaste-ye ma bogshayand
Agar az bahr-e del-e zahed-e khodbin bastand
Del qavi dar ke az bahr-e khoda bogshayand

Might they open the doors of the wineshops
And loosen their hold on our knotted lives?
If shut to satisfy the ego of the puritan
Take heart, for they will reopen to please God.
⁵⁶

In later times Hafez was appreciated and translated by Goethe, among many other Europeans, and was so revered by Persians that his
Divan
(the book collecting his work in one volume—Divan being the conventional term for such collections of a poet’s work) was used as an oracle, and sometimes is still—people wanting to know their fortune would open it at random in the hope of texts that could be interpreted as optimistic predictions. The only other book used in that way is the Qor’an.

Ay bad, hadis-e man nahanash migu
Serr-e del-e man be sad zabanash migu
Migu na bedansan ke malalash girad
Migu sokhani o dar miyanash migu

O wind, tell her my story secretly.
Tell her my heart’s secret in a hundred tongues.
Tell her, but not in a way that may offend her.
Speak to her and between the words tell her my story.
⁵⁷

Persians did not stop writing poetry in the fifteenth century. There were many important poets after Hafez; notably Jami, and Bidel later. But by that time a body of literature had been created of unparalleled importance, of almost inconceivable quantity, of great diversity and sublime quality. One could compare this body of literature to a human brain and think of it in the way that some theorists now consider human consciousness: that consciousness is not located in any one part of the brain, but is the consequence of the impossibly complex interaction of millions of different cells and their sparking synapses. Somehow, out of this poetry and the combinations and interactions of the ideas and metaphors contained within them, emerged the Iranian soul.

Every hundred years or so the reading public in the West discovers another of these Persian poets. In 1800 it was Hafez, in 1900 Omar Khayyam, in 2000 it is Rumi. The choice depends perhaps not so much on the merits or true nature of the poets or their poetry; more on their capacity to be interpreted in accordance with passing literary and cultural fashions in the West, and their expectations. So Hafez was interpreted to fit with the mood of romanticism, Omar Khayyam with the aesthetic movement, and it has been Rumi’s misfortune to be befriended by numb-brained New Agery. Of course, an attentive and imaginative reader can avoid the solipsistic trap, especially if he or she can read even a little Persian, but the mirror of language and translation means that the reader may see only a hazy but consoling reflection of himself and his times, rather than look through the mirror into the true depths of the poetry, which might be more unsettling.

The religion of love of these Sufi poets from 800 years ago might superficially seem rather distant and archaic. That is belied less by the burgeoning popularity of Rumi and Attar than by the deeper message of these poets. Those Darwinists who, like Richard Dawkins, believe Darwinism ineluctably entails atheism, might be upset by the idea, but what could be more appropriate to an intellectual world that has abandoned creationism for evolution theory, than a religion of love? Darwinism and evolutionary theory have demonstrated the intense focus of all life on the act of reproduction, the act of love. The spirit of that act and the drive behind it are the spirit of life itself. What could be more fitting than a religion that uses the emotional drive behind that act as a metaphor for a higher spirituality, and its longing as a longing for union with the Godhead—
This gift the divine ones gave us before Eternity.

Timur

After about 1300 (notably under the ruler Ghazan Khan) the Mongol Il-Khans, becoming Islamised and Persianised, reversed their extractive, destructive, slash-and-burn style of rule. They began to try to reconstruct cities they had destroyed, and the systems of irrigation and agriculture that had been abandoned. They had some success, and Tabriz certainly prospered, as the new capital. Azerbaijan, with its wetter climate, was favoured generally by the conquering horsemen for the better pasture it offered. The great historian Rashid al-Din (a converted Jew) enjoyed the patronage of the Il-Khans and, building on the earlier works of Juvaini and others, wrote a huge and definitive history. The cultural flow was not all one way: Persian miniature painting was permanently influenced by an imported Chinese aesthetic and there were other examples. But Iran under the Il-Khans, for all the signs of regeneration, was a poorer, harsher place than before. With almost a deterministic inevitability the empire of the Il-Khans began to fragment, as local vassal rulers slowly made themselves independent of the centre, as had happened before under the Seljuks and the Abbasids. In Khorasan, around Sabzavar, a rebel movement arose in the mid-fourteenth century called the
sarbedari (heads-in-noose)
, with egalitarian tendencies and co-opting Shi‘a and Sufi elements.
⁵⁸

Like some later and earlier movements, the sarbedari show the eclectic nature of popular, provincial religion in Iran at this time. Elsewhere, the Shi‘a and the Sufis tended to be in opposition, but the sarbedari seem to have had little difficulty fusing the apparently contradictory tenets of the different beliefs involved, and this creative ferment of popular religion was to prove important later too. The sarbedari are significant in another way—they represent again a spirit of popular resistance to the invaders, independent of contingent dynastic leadership, that we saw after the Arab invasion, which was there at the beginning of the Mongol period,
⁵⁹
and which appears again later in Iranian history. This might prompt questions about nationalism that could easily absorb the rest of this book.
⁶⁰
What we call nationalism today is in my view too specifically a constructed phenomenon of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to be considered without anachronism in the fourteenth century or other earlier periods. But we have seen that there was a sense of Iranianness, beyond local or dynastic loyalty, in the time of the Sassanids and before; it was part of what later inspired the shu’ubiyya, the Samanids and Ferdowsi. Nationalism is the wrong word, but to deny any Iranian identity in this era requires some serious contortions of evidence and logic.

From 1380, the hopeful vassal dynasty-builders, the resurgent cities and peasants and the bold sarbedari were all alike submerged by the next invading surge of steppe nomads under Timur (
Timur-e lang
—Timur the Lame—Tamerlane or, in Marlowe, Tamburlaine). Timur was the son of a minor Turkic vassal in Transoxiana, who set up a following of warriors and built a tightly-disciplined army explicitly on the model of the great Mongol, Genghis Khan. He married a princess from the great Khan’s family and called himself Güregen, which means son-in-law, to draw on the prestige of his predecessor. He took Mongol precedent as a precedent for terror also. Timur established himself first in the cities of Transoxiana, with a base at Samarkand, and then invaded Persia. Cities were razed, their citizens massacred, and the plunder sent with any valuable survivors back to Samarkand, to adorn a new paradise of gardens and grand buildings. As he marched through the Persian provinces Timur raised up pillars of human heads (70,000 heads set in 120 pillars outside Isfahan alone,
after the people had been foolish enough to attack the Timurid garrison) to intimidate his enemies, and in his wake (notably in Sistan) the desert again encroached on abandoned farmlands and irrigation works. Unlike the Mongols, Timur conquered in the name of orthodox Sunni Islam, but this in no way moderated his conduct of war. After taking Persia and defeating the Mongols of the Golden Horde in the steppe lands around Moscow, he moved into India and took Delhi, before turning west again, where he conquered Baghdad (another 90,000 heads), defeated the Ottoman Sultan, captured him and returned to Samarkand. He died in 1405 in the midst of preparations for an attack on China.

There is a story that Timur met Hafez, but it is probably apocryphal. He did meet the Arab historian and thinker Ibn Khaldun however. No historian looking at the history of the Islamic world in the period covered by this chapter could avoid noticing the cyclical pattern of dynastic rise and decline, and nomad invasion; but Ibn Khaldun came up with a theory to explain it.
⁶¹
His theory began with the
asabiyya,
the strong solidarity or group feeling of nomad warriors, fostered by the interdependence that was necessary in mobile tribal life in the harsh conditions of desert, mountain and steppe margins. This was the cohesive spirit that made the nomads such formidable warriors, that enabled them to invade and dominate areas of sedentary settlement, and conquer cities. But having done so their leaders had to consolidate their support. They had to protect themselves against being supplanted by other members of the tribe, and therefore gave patronage to other groups: city dwellers, bureaucratic officials, the ulema. They also used building projects and a magnificent court to impress their subjects with their prestige, and employed mercenaries as soldiers because they were more reliable. So the original asabiyya of the conquerors was diluted and lost. Eventually the ruling dynasty came to believe its own myth and spent increasingly on vain display, weakening its strength outside the capital city and within it. The ulema and ordinary citizens became disillusioned with the dynasty’s decadence and ready to welcome another wave of conquering nomads, who would start up a new dynasty and set the cycle off all over again.

The theory does not address all the elements of the cycle of invasions as they affected Iran (though the above is a greatly simplified version of it). We have seen how the prosperity of the Silk Route encouraged plundering invasions as well as trade, and how the vulnerability of Iran (and particularly Khorasan) flowed from its central geographical position, just as geography gave it great economic and cultural advantages. The Abbasids and their successors were weakened repeatedly by the measures they used to try to overcome the difficulty of gathering taxes. Officials tended to become corrupt and siphon off tax revenue, so the rulers gave the responsibility to tax farmers instead; but they tended to plunder the peasant farmers, quickly running down the productivity of agriculture. The rulers could grant land holdings (
iqta, soyurgal
) to soldiers in return for military service, but this tended to mean in time that the soldiers came to think of themselves as farmers or landowners rather than soldiers. Or they could do a similar thing on a grander scale and grant whole provinces to trusted families in return for fiscal tribute and military support; but as we have seen the likelihood then was that the provincial governors would grow powerful enough to become independent and even take over the state themselves (as did the Buyids).