Iran: Empire of the Mind (18 page)

He drank, oblivion overwhelmed his soul.
Wine mingled with his love—her laughter seemed
To challenge him to take the bliss he dreamed.

He agrees to everything the girl demands, but it is not enough—she wants gold and silver, and he is poor. Eventually she takes pity on him. She will overlook the gold and silver—if he will look after some pigs for a year as a swineherd. He agrees.

From this extreme point, the story takes a more conventional turn, as was necessary if the book was not to be banned and destroyed. A vision of the Prophet intervenes, the shaykh returns to the faith, the girl repents her treatment of the shaykh, becomes a Muslim, and dies. But this cannot draw the sting of the first part of the story, and its message: that conventional piety is not enough, that it may in fact lead down the wrong path, and that the peeling away of conventional trappings and the loss of self in love is the only way to attain a higher spirituality. As Attar wrote at the beginning, when he introduced the story:

When neither Blasphemy nor faith remain,
The body and the Self have both been slain;
Then the fierce fortitude the Way will ask
Is yours, and you are worthy of our task.
Begin the journey without fear; be calm;
Forget what is and what is not Islam…

Taken as a whole, the story appears ambiguous, but it contains a startling challenge to the religious conventions of the time.
³⁷

Attar, the apostle of love, died at some point in the 1220s; massacred along with most of the population of Nishapur when the Mongols invaded Khorasan and Persia. The Mongol invasions were an unparalleled cataclysm for the lands of Iran. Where the Arabs and Turks had been relatively familiar and restrained conquerors, the Mongols were both alien and wantonly cruel, on a massive scale.

The Seljuk Empire had been split toward the end of the twelfth century by the rise of a subject tribe from Khwarezm, whose leaders established themselves as the rulers of the eastern part of the empire as the Khwarezmshahs. In the early years of the thirteenth century the ruling Khwarezmshah, Sultan Mohammad, became dimly aware that a new power was rising in the steppe lands beyond Transoxiana. There were impossible rumours that the Chinese empire had been conquered (the reports were true). There may have been some attempts at diplomatic contact, but these were bungled, and some Mongol merchants and ambassadors were killed. The Mongols were not, as used sometimes to be thought, just a ravening mob of uncivilised, semi-human killers. Their armies were tightly-controlled, organised and disciplined, ruthlessly efficient; not wantonly destructive.
³⁸
But their ultimate foundation was the prestige of their warlord, Genghis Khan, and an insult could not be overlooked. What came next in Transoxiana and Khorasan was particularly dreadful because of this vengeful purpose. There followed a series of Mongol invasions, aimed initially at punishing Sultan Mohammad (who, veering from tragedy toward comedy, fled westward to Ray, pursued by a Mongol flying column, and then north until he died on an island off the Caspian coast) but later developing into conquest and occupation. What this meant for the hapless Iranians can be illustrated by what happened at Merv, after the Mongols had already conquered and destroyed the cities of Transoxiana:

… on the next day, 25 February 1221, the Mongols arrived before the gates of Merv. Tolui in person [the son of Genghiz Khan], with an escort of five hundred horsemen, rode the whole distance around the walls, and for six days the Mongols continued to inspect the defences, reaching the conclusion that they were in good repair and would withstand a lengthy siege. On the seventh day the Mongols launched a general assault. The townspeople made two sallies from different gates, being in both cases at once driven back by the Mongol forces. They seem then to have lost all will to resist. The next day the governor surrendered the town, having been reassured by promises that were not in fact to be kept. The whole population was now driven out into the open country, and for four days and nights the people continued to pour out of the town. Four hundred artisans and a number of children were selected to be carried off as slaves, and it was commanded that the whole of the remaining population, men women, children, should be put to the sword. They were distributed, for this purpose, among the troops, and to each individual soldier was allotted the execution of three to four hundred persons. These troops included levies from the captured towns, and Juvaini records that the people of Sarakhs, who had a feud with the people of Merv, exceeded the ferocity of the heathen Mongols in the slaughter of their fellow-Muslims. Even now the ordeal of Merv was not yet over. When the Mongols withdrew, those who had escaped death by concealing themselves in holes and cavities emerged from their hiding places. They amounted in all to some five thousand people. A detachment of Mongols, part of the rearguard, now arrived before the town. Wishing to have their share of the slaughter they called upon these unfortunate wretches to come out into the open country, each carrying a skirtful of grain. And having them thus at their mercy they massacred these last feeble remnants of one of the greatest cities of Islam…
³⁹

Contemporary eyewitnesses at Merv gave estimates for the numbers killed ranging between 700,000 and 1.3 million. These figures are huge, but credible, representing a high proportion of the population of northern Khorasan and Transoxiana at the time: the numbers in the place were probably greater than normal because country people and refugees from tens and hundreds of miles around fled there before the siege began. When we talk of the magnitude of twentieth-century massacres and genocides as if they were unparalleled, we sometimes forget what enormities were perpetrated in earlier centuries with the cold blade alone.
A skirtful of grain.
The Nishapur of Omar Khayyam, Tus, Herat and other cities in Khorasan suffered the same fate. The only option for the citizens other than massacre was immediate capitulation as soon as the Mongol columns hove in sight. Many places, encouraged by rumours of resistance by Sultan Mohammad’s son, Jalal al-Din, tried to hold their towns against the invaders, and suffered terribly as a result. But by the end of 1231, despite having achieved a string of brilliant victories against the Mongols and others, and a legend of
razm o bazm
to rival the heroes of Ferdowsi, Jalal al-Din was dead. It might have been better for the people of Iran, at this critical time, if the Khwarezmshah had been a wiser man with less panache.

Khorasan suffered terribly again as the Mongols moved in to punish those who continued to resist, and to set up their occupation regime. In Tus, which they made their base (formerly the city of Daqiqi, Nizam
ol-Mulk and Al-Ghazali), the Mongols initially found only fifty houses standing.
⁴⁰
The golden age of Khorasan was over, and in some parts of the region agriculture never really recovered; where there had been towns and irrigated fields the war horses of the conquerors and their confederates were turned out to graze. Wide expanses of Iran reverted to nomad pastoralism, with the difference that these nomads were more dangerous, ruthless mounted warriors of a different kind. Peasants were subjected to taxes that were ruinously high and were collected after the fashion of a military campaign. Many fled the land or were forced into slavery, while those artisan city-dwellers that had survived the massacres were forced to labour in workhouses for their conquerors. Minorities suffered too. In the 1280s a Jew was appointed as vizier by the Mongols, but his appointment grew unpopular, he fell from office and Jews were attacked by Muslims in the cities—[they]
fell upon the Jews in every city of the empire, to wreak their vengeance upon them for the degradation which they had suffered from the Mongols
⁴¹
—
establishing a dismal pattern for later centuries. It was a grim time indeed. Khorasan was worse affected than other parts, but the general collapse of the economy hit the entire region.

The Mongols, who made Tabriz their capital, spent the next few decades consolidating their conquests, and destroying the Ismaili Assassins in the Alborz mountains, as the Seljuks had tried and failed to do for many years before 1220. Some smaller rulers that had submitted to the Mongols were allowed to continue as vassals, and in the west the rump of the Seljuk empire survived in Anatolia on the same basis, as the Sultanate of Rum. In 1258 the Mongols took Baghdad. They killed the last Abbasid Caliph by wrapping him in a carpet and trampling him to death with horses.

Yet within a few decades, astoundingly, or perhaps predictably, the Persian class of scholars and administrators had pulled off their trick of conquering the conquerors, for the third time. Before long they made themselves indispensable. A Shi‘a astrologer, Naser od-Din Tusi, captured by the Mongols at the end of the campaign against the Ismailis, had taken service with the Mongol prince Hulagu and served as his adviser in the campaign against Baghdad. He then set up an astronomical observatory for Hulagu in Azerbaijan. One member of the Persian Juvayni family became governor of Baghdad and wrote the history of the Mongols;
another became the vizier of a later Mongol Il-Khan. Within a couple of generations or less Persian officials were as firmly in place at the court of the Il-Khans as they had been with the Seljuks, Ghaznavids and earlier dynasties. The Mongols initially retained their paganism, but in 1295 their Buddhist ruler converted to Islam along with his army. In 1316 his son Oljeitu died and was buried in a mausoleum that still stands in Soltaniyeh—one of the grandest monuments of Iranian Islamic architecture and a monument also to the resilience and assimilating power of Iranian culture.

Another important invasion took place a little earlier than the Mongol invasion of Khorasan—the invasion and conquest of India by Muslim Persians and Turks, establishing what became known as the Delhi Sultanate. We have seen already that the Parthians and Sassanids at different times invaded northern India and established dynasties that ruled there. The Ghaznavids and their provincial governors also raided into northern India, and one such governor, Mohammad Ghuri, took that practice a step further in the latter part of the twelfth century, conquering Multan, Sind, Lahore and Delhi. A series of dynasties followed thereafter, expanding the reach of the Delhi Sultanate eastwards into Bengal and southwards to the Deccan, creating a unique Indo-Islamic culture that fused Persian, Hindustani, Arabic and Turkic elements; and (in the north-west) the Urdu language. Northern India came under strong Islamic influence, Sufi missionaries set to work and it became an important region for the development of Persianate culture in the following centuries.

Culmination: Rumi, Iraqi, Sa’di and Hafez

The reassertion of Persian influence over the conquerors is not the only extraordinary feature of the period following the Mongol conquest. One might have thought that the poetry would come to a halt, or at least a hiatus in the grim, blackened aftermath of the Mongol conquest — but three of the very greatest Persian poets flourished at this time (albeit not in Khorasan), to be followed by the fourth a little later. Rumi was born in 1207, Iraqi in 1211, Sa’di some time in the same decade, and Hafez a century afterwards. Iranians themselves normally consider Rumi, Hafez
and Sa’di (with Ferdowsi) to be the greatest of their poets and it is not possible in a small space to do more than give a sense of who they were, and the merest taste of what they wrote. Iraqi is likewise an important figure, especially in Sufism. Together they represent the culmination of literary development in Persian since the Arab conquest.

Jalal al-Din Molavi Rumi (normally called Mawlana by Iranians) was born in Balkh in 1207. Not a good time and place. His father, like others fearing the approach of the Mongols, left Balkh in 1219; initially for Mecca on the Hajj, later for Konya in Anatolia. Rumi lived in Konya for most of the rest of his life. Initially he lived as an orthodox member of the ulema, as his father had done, preaching and studying according to the Hanafi school. He also learned about Sufism, but turned to it entirely under the influence of another Sufi mystic and poet, Shams-e Tabrizi, in around 1244, with whom he had an intense emotional friendship (at least) until Shams disappeared (perhaps murdered) three or four years later. Between that time and his death in 1273 he wrote about 65,000 lines of poetry. His poetry is a world on its own, a highly complex mystical world, which has become popular in the US in recent years: some say he is the most popular poet in the US today, at least in the sense that his books sell better than others. Some of the most famous lines in Rumi, which come from the opening of his
Masnavi
, express the longing of the soul for union with God: