Heirs to Forgotten Kingdoms (17 page)

“Welcome!” said a voice as I stepped onto Iranian soil. An old man sitting in a chair seemed to be the only border force deployed here. He looked delighted to see a foreigner among the small crowd of locals. Did he know, I wondered, that I came from the “Little Satan”? I fingered my British passport nervously as I moved on toward the customs queue. I was sure that the staff here, after seeing my passport, would summon the secret police, who would then have me tailed conspicuously wherever I went. But the customs police waved me through, and on the other side there was no sinister escort. In fact, I found myself in an emptying parking lot with no means of onward transport. It seemed I was beneath the Islamic Republic’s notice.

I walked from the terminal along the road. A driver passed by and called out to me, “Ten imams!” I was puzzled.
Imam
was a name for the Ayatollah Khomeini. But then the man stopped his car and took a 10,000-riyal note out of his wallet. It had a picture of Khomeini on it. “Ten of these,” he said, “to take you to the town.” I asked him instead to drop me at an old house nearby, now a museum, which once had belonged to a Kurdish aristocrat and whose reception rooms were decorated in best Iranian early-twentieth century style, with bright blue shutters and walls covered with shimmering mirrored glass. It had been built in 1912. Iran at that time was undergoing rapid social change, illustrated by two paintings on the ceiling of the dining room. In one, a turbaned patriarch eats with his hands from a bowl while all around him men with mustaches, beards, and black
tarbush
hats do likewise, or drink tea. In the other, a clean-shaven man in a dinner jacket raises a glass of wine, while his wife, who sits next to him, does the same. Their guests are men and women in smart European fashions. One of the women is shown looking over her shoulder at the
tarbush
wearers in the other painting.

The pictures were meant to celebrate the change from the old to the new. With hindsight it could be read differently: the Westernized elite were wise to be looking over their shoulders at the traditionalists, because the turbaned patriarchs would eventually take their revenge. In January 1979 Iran’s secular ruler, Mohammed Reza Shah, gave in to the demands of revolutionaries and went into voluntary exile. The following month, his longtime critic Ruhollah Khomeini returned from exile to Tehran, and moved swiftly to take power. As an ayatollah—a senior Shi’a cleric—he claimed divine authority for the new government he established. “The commandments of the ruling jurist,” he declared, meaning his own, “are like the commandments of God.” The shah and his father had done much to help the Zoroastrians; under the ayatollah’s rule, the authorities became more hostile to non-Muslims, and laws were changed in ways that disadvantaged them.

When I reached the nearest town I went to eat at its kebab shop, and two Muslim Iranians at the next table decided to adopt me. They were brothers. “Come to our village,” they said, and I said yes, hoping to see Iranian family life. As we drove through the cherry orchards near Lake Orumiyeh, with Iranian music of exquisite sadness playing on their stereo, I learned that the brothers were Azeris, a Turkish people who have been assimilated into Iran over the past seven hundred years. There were Kurds and Assyrian Christians and Armenians also living in this part of the country, and though each group had its own language, the majority spoke Azeri. At the village, my new hosts asked me to slide down in my seat to avoid being seen, because they were forbidden to entertain foreigners. “It is because I belong to the
basij,
” one of them told me. So, I realized, I was in the hands of the
basij
—if not in the way I had feared. The brothers gave me dinner and a bed for the night. I met their wives and small children, who ate with us.

The next morning, when I sat on the red woolen rugs that had been laid out on the floor of the living room and consulted my map, I saw that I was close to a Zoroastrian landmark. So after the brothers surreptitiously dropped me off at a bus stop (“Keep down!” they said as the car passed people they knew on the street), I caught a bus for a short ride out of town, past snow-capped peaks, to a steep, cone-shaped hill with dust-colored sides. On the winding track that led to its summit were various Iranian couples, some young boys, and an old man. I followed them, and at the top all of us stared down into the crater of an extinct volcano. This, they told me, was Zendan-e-Soleyman, Solomon’s prison.

—————

THE JEWISH KING SOLOMON
features prominently in the Koran, where he is said to have had power over the unseen spirits that Muslims call
djinn.
In one of the fables that make up the
Arabian Nights,
a fisherman opens a bottle that has the seal of Solomon on its stopper, and a
djinni
is released and tells how Solomon, “to punish me . . . called for this bottle and imprisoned me in it, and closed it with a leaden stopper, and he stamped the lead with the Most Great Name.” Apparently local tradition held that Solomon had done something similar at Zendan-e-Soleyman, imprisoning rebellious spirits within its deep, steep-sided crater.

The spirits of the place might well have resisted Solomon. Before the coming of Islam this volcano was one of the greatest and most important shrines of Zoroastrianism. It may have been a site for sacrifices: Herodotus tells us that when the Persians wanted to sacrifice to Ahura Mazda, they went up on a high mountain. They also then sacrificed, he added, “to the sun and the moon and the earth, to fire and to water and the winds.” I imagined them climbing the same path that I had come, exhausted from carrying a sacrificial lamb or goat all the way up the mountainside. Three of the four elements remained: wind still swept over the plain, bringing a chill even in springtime; the earth was there, brown and ungenerous; and a nearby lake was still a beautiful deep blue. But the fire had gone.

This ruined temple at the foot of Zendan-e-Soleyman once housed the Gushnasp fire, sacred to warriors, which was visited by Persian emperors prior to their battles with the Romans. Photo by the author

Herodotus adds that the Persians rejected the common practice of depicting gods in human form and worshiping them in temples: “They have no images of the gods, no temples nor altars, and consider the use of them a sign of folly.” Later, though, the Zoroastrians did build temples, perhaps under the influence of Babylonians and other peoples they conquered, but they housed no statues of gods, only an ever-living flame. As I looked down from the crater’s brim I could see the ruins of one of the greatest of these temples. It had been built nearly two millennia ago to house what must have seemed a truly supernatural fire—a flame that was kept perpetually alight by the natural gas seeping from the volcano’s base. The Zoroastrians called this fire Gushnasp and regarded it as one of the three most sacred fires of Persia.

Gushnasp was known as the warriors’ fire, and Zoroastrian tradition held that it was as old as the world. Persian kings would visit it to make an offering before going out on campaigns against the Romans and later the Byzantines. By the seventh century
AD
constant warfare had exhausted the Persian Empire. A successful campaign that took the Persians as far west as Egypt proved to be their empire’s last gasp. In
AD
627 the last royal visitor came to the Gushnasp fire. His name was Khosro, and he made his visit at a time of despair. He and his forces were in retreat from the advancing Byzantines, who were employing local Arab tribes as mercenaries. The Byzantines were Christians who were known to treat the holy fire with disrespect, and rather than let it fall into their hands Khosro removed it from the shrine and took it with him. Fifteen years later his empire fell—not to the Byzantines but to the Arabs, unified now by Islam.

The Arabs did not want to confront the Persian armies, which they feared would win any military encounter. But when the Arabs were finally drawn into a battle with the Persian army they successfully pressed their opponents back to a place called Nihavand, where the Persians decided to make a stand. As the great Persian epic the
Shahnamah
describes the scene, an Arab envoy in rags comes to deliver an ultimatum to the Persian knights, all of them dressed in splendid gold armor, a sign of their glory and decadence. Rustam, son of the Persian king, reads the stars and sees into the future: “The stars decree for us defeat and flight. / Four hundred years will pass in which our name / Will be forgotten and devoid of fame.” After their defeat the emperor and the remnants of his court did indeed flee eastward into central Asia, taking their religion with them. It survived there as the dominant faith for another generation or so. From Nihavand onward, Islam became the state religion in Iran. The fire of Gushnasp was never rekindled.

Opinions differ over how fast the Iranians abandoned Zoroastrianism, but some members of the royal family appear to have become Muslims early on. Converts would have found that some aspects of the new religion meshed well with Zoroastrian custom. Both religions required their followers to pray several times a day (Zoroastrians three times, Muslims five), revered cleanliness, and were based on a set of divine scriptures. Islam offered an escape from the Zoroastrian caste system, in which priests and warriors were at the top; the lower castes were taught less about the religion and were quicker to abandon it, as is apparent from the high proportion of priestly families among those who have remained Zoroastrian. Converts could have it both ways, adopting Muslim practices but also keeping up some of the most popular traditions of Zoroastrianism, such as the celebration of the New Year (Nowruz), which is still a major two-week festival in Iran. During my visit, I spotted many Iranian families sitting outdoors with picnics in celebration of Sizdah Bedar, the last day of Nowruz.

Whether the Iranians adopted Islam quickly or slowly, they clearly did not easily accept being ruled by Arabs. In countries further to the west, the Arab invasion transformed the entire culture of the conquered peoples, many of whom eventually began to call themselves “Arabs” and forgot their former identities and languages. It likely helped that the conquered peoples were also Semites, with languages that resembled Arabic, not to mention that they were already subjects of the Byzantine Empire and, with the Arab conquest, were only swapping one set of rulers for another.

Persia was different. An imperial people now were reduced to subservience. The Arab poet al-Ja’di gives us a poignant image of their changed fortunes: “O men, see how Persia has been ruined and its inhabitants humiliated: they have become slaves who pasture your sheep, as if their kingdom was a dream.” The worst insult that the Zoroastrian priests could throw at someone who left their religion for Islam was that he or she had “ceased to be Iranian.” The Arabs in turn regarded Zoroastrianism with suspicion, often denouncing it as fire worship and hesitating to extend to its followers the same level of tolerance they offered to Christians and Jews.

As an early Arab governor in Iran warned his fellow Muslims soon after the conquest: “This is the religion of the Persians—to kill Arabs.” In Bukhara the Arabs attempted to spread Islam by offering money to those who came to prayers, and by forcibly settling Arabs among the inhabitants; the city repeatedly rebelled nonetheless, and those who adopted Islam apostatized. The man who was caliph of Islam at the time of Iran’s conquest, Omar ibn al-Khattab, was assassinated by an Iranian slave. Even in subsequent centuries a spirit of rebellion seems to have persisted, especially in the havens that rebel movements could find in the Iranian mountains. Two centuries after the Arab conquest a group called the Khorramiyah and its leader, Babak, operated north of Maku, preaching redistribution of property and free love and waging war on the government. Then in the twelfth century a dynasty that claimed to be descendants of the Prophet Mohammed operated from a fortress called Alamut on a formidable pinnacle of rock standing high above a remote valley. From their mountain stronghold they sent out their followers, known as the Assassins, to kill senior figures in the government that ruled Iran at the time. One of the dynasty declared the abolition of all religious laws: “What was forbidden is now licit,” he said, “and what was licit is now forbidden.”

Iran was in those days mostly Sunni rather than Shi’a. It became majority Shi’a only in the sixteenth century. Yet it seems more than a coincidence that this fallen empire has ended up with a version of Islam that has embedded within it a sense that all is not right with the world—that the true order of things has been inverted. Shi’a Islam began with twelve imams, who were meant to be the successors to the Prophet Mohammed (from whose family they were all descended; one of the points on which the Shi’a insist is that the rulers of Islam must be from the Prophet’s family). Only the first of these Shi’a imams was accepted by the majority of Muslims, and many of them died amid accusations of foul play. For the Shi’a this embedded in their faith a contempt for worldly governments and a pious hope that the last of the twelve imams would one day return as the Mehdi—the equivalent of the Jewish and Christian Messiah—to usher in the end of the world. The medieval rulers of Iran even had a horse always ready in their stable for the Mehdi to ride, should he return.