Persian Mirrors: The Elusive Face of Iran (25 page)

Beloved of the Night

Night is with child, hast thou not heard men say?

Night is with child! What will she bring to birth?

— HAFIZ, FOURTEENTH-CENTURY PERSIAN POET

Is it not passing brave to be a King,

And ride in triumph through Persepolis?

—
TAMBURLAINE
, CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE

A
MIR
M
AHALLATI
has an air of elegance about him. He always stands erect, his shoulders thrust back, his head slightly tilted upward, like the spear-carrying warriors chiseled in limestone at the ancient ruins of Persepolis. His beard is carefully sculpted to frame his smooth, lean, almond-colored face. His pale linen leisure suit does not reveal who he is: a former ambassador of the Islamic Republic to the United Nations and, more important, the son of one of Iran’s most prominent and beloved ayatollahs.

On the day we met in his hometown of Shiraz, Mahallati was in love—with the poets of Persia.

Shiraz is by far my favorite city in Iran. Tehran, more than five hundred miles away, is more cosmopolitan, with its twenty-four-hour supermarkets and lively street life. But it is a city of unrelenting ugliness, gridlocked streets, and choking pollution. Isfahan, the onetime capital of Persia in central Iran, is more classically beautiful, with its perfect proportions and the dazzling bulbous domes of its many mosques. But it is a city of political intrigue and backstabbing, and I have never met a merchant there who didn’t overcharge me.

Shiraz, by comparison, is a city of moderation, calm, and good sense. It may be overcrowded with the hundreds of thousands of Iranians who migrated there during Iran’s long war with Iraq, and it may be polluted and hot in the summer. But Shiraz opens to rich, rolling farmland, with a good highway that leads straight to Persepolis less than an hour away. Shiraz is not a place of religious pilgrimage, reflecting instead the glories of pre-Islamic Iran. So the Islamic Republic has largely left it alone, pouring money into cities like Mashad, Qom, and Isfahan. Shiraz is a place of roses, nightingales, rich people who smoke opium, and some of the best wine-producing grapes in the world. It is impossible to go to Shiraz and not feel the power of its beauty and the magic of its poetry. Some Iranians consider Shirazis lazy. I find them mellow and good-natured.

I had arranged to meet Mahallati early one morning on a street outside Shiraz’s best hotel. He arrived at the designated time, in a beat-up Iranian-made Paykan automobile that offered no reprieve from the one hundred degree heat of a humid July day. We set off for what he called “a good beginning to understand Shiraz”: the tomb of Saadi, the beloved thirteenth-century poet.

From then on, Mahallati talked of love. “Saadi is the Shakespeare of Iran. Period,” he explained along the way. “There is no such thing as Eastern love or Western love. Love is love. And love in the mind of both Saadi and Shakespeare is the same.”

Mahallati stopped at the gate leading into the tomb. “From the tomb of Saadi of Shiraz, you can smell love,” he said, translating the inscription at the entrance. “A thousand years after his death you can still smell love.”

Inside the gate is an elevated tombstone of brown-speckled marble. Suddenly, Mahallati turned dead serious. “Touch the stone and send Saadi a prayer,” he ordered. Then he closed his eyes and fell into a trance, moving his lips and sending a prayer to Saadi’s spirit. I did what I was told, closing my eyes and saying a prayer. I found the volte-face jarring. But it captured the two distinct worlds in which Mahallati navigates, the sacred and the secular. He does it with the ease of someone who has learned how to steer early in life.

Then Mahallati shifted back into the world of the poetic. He delighted in showing off his knowledge. He rushed over to a wall with a verse in dark blue tile. “Oh this is really beautiful!” he exclaimed. And then he recited the poem:

“I remember when I was a young boy, when I was with a caravan passing through the desert early in the morning. When the sun rose I noticed a person who went crazy going nowhere. I caught up with him and asked him, ‘What’s wrong with you?’ ‘I listened to nature and noticed all the birds, all the animals, all the beings praying, and that scene drove me crazy. I realized I was less than they, and that was a shock.’” Then Mahallati explained. “He was crazy in love. It’s the extreme love that drives you crazy.”

And then we heard a recorded voice on a loudspeaker singing a song of Saadi. “This night has no morning. How many thoughts went through my mind and I cannot sleep. Why does this night have no end?”

“It is hair-raising when I hear something as touching as this,” Mahallati said. We moved into a garden, and he rushed over to a flowering bush. “
Mahbub-e shab,
” he announced. “It means ‘beloved of the night.’ It gives out a strong perfume only after dusk. It has a very interesting logic. In the day people are pragmatic, not poetic. In the day you have to work and sweat. You can’t fall in love during the day. Only after dusk does your imagination start working. And then romance takes over. The perfume is so intense that it doesn’t let you sleep at night. It pushes your dreams in such a way that you can’t stay in bed. You want to embrace the beloved. If you leave Iran without smelling the beloved of the night, you have missed half of Iran.”

I heard the sound of nightingales, a fast furious sound as if a dozen were chirping in reply. “Amir, are those real birds? Or is it a recording?” I asked. I realized too late that I had broken the spell.

“They’re real, of course,” he replied flatly. “Why do you think otherwise?”

Nearby I spotted a group of young boys. They were blowing on plastic whistles that made the sound of nightingales.

Next on the itinerary was the tomb of Hafiz. “This is the heart of all Iran,” said Mahallati when we arrived.

Hafiz, whose given name was Shamseddin Mohammad, was a fourteenth-century Sufi (mystic) and Iran’s great medieval lyric poet. Because he was so learned about the Koran, he was given the name “Hafiz,” which means “he who remembers [the Koran] by heart.” The poet’s alabaster tombstone, engraved with two of his best-known verses, rests beneath an eight-pillared tiled cupola with an intricate dome tiled in turquoise. Acres of meticulously landscaped gardens lush with flowers embrace and protect it with a sensuality that is absent from the crowded streets outside.

The tomb is a peaceful, venerated place, where Hafiz’s poetry is set to music with classical Iranian instruments. The ubiquitous call to prayer of the mosque is left far behind. Iranians of all classes, occupations, and ages line up every day in the late afternoon, to pay homage and to see into the future.

Mahallati tried to explain the difference between Saadi and Hafiz. “Saadi traveled to so many countries and married several times,” he said. “Once he went to Syria and found a man who gave him room and board. The price was that he had to marry the man’s daughter, who was, shall I say, not the most beautiful. Finally Saadi accepted. Then he divorced the woman and escaped. Saadi was a horizontal man: Hafiz was different. Hafiz traveled the spirit. Hafiz was a vertical man.”

That didn’t mean that Hafiz was an ascetic, Mahallati explained. “Hafiz had a lover,” he said. “Her name was Shakheh Nabat. Whenever you want Hafiz to read your fortune you have to swear to Shakheh Nabat. You say, ‘O the Hafiz of Shiraz, you who are proud of your beloved Shakheh Nabat. I swear you to Shakheh Nabat to tell me a fortune I would desire.’”

It was time to read my fortune. For centuries Iranians have practiced a delightful ritual in which Hafiz makes predictions. Petitioners say a special prayer to Hafiz and ask questions about their future. Then they open a book of his poetry randomly. The answer is on the top of the right-hand page. At Hafiz’s tomb, it’s not necessary to bring along a volume of his poetry. Outside the gate, a man holds a caged parakeet. For a fee, the man gives the parakeet a seed and the bird chooses one of two dozen bits of folded blue and green paper on which Hafiz’s answers are written.

Mahallati bought me my fortune. Hafiz wrote in couplets, but Mahallati rendered a free interpretation, adding his own lines along the way: “I congratulate the owner of this fortune. You are like a crown over the best people in the world. You can be the mistress of your field. People will follow your orders and you will be blessed. Keep a written prayer of love with you at all times. Your heart is capturing something special. Since you have good intentions, keep them.”

Nazila, who was with us, remarked, “According to Hafiz, everyone is master of the universe!”

“And why not?” asked Mahallati. “For Hafiz, life is not a zero sum game.”

For Mahallati, poetry is a part of the soul of his country. “I can stop anyone at random on the street and ask him to recite Saadi or Hafiz,” he said. “You couldn’t ask an American to recite American poetry, could you?”

He certainly got that right. I couldn’t imagine stopping people on the main street of any American city and asking for recitations of Walt Whitman. But even though Americans don’t routinely recite poetry, we do sing songs. Perhaps Irving Berlin and Rodgers and Hammerstein are our Saadi and Hafiz.

Then Mahallati excused himself to look for a pay phone. I offered him my cell phone. “Your wireless has too many wires,” he said. He said he wanted to keep his call private; cell phones are routinely monitored by various institutions of the state.

The call took a long time, and while he was gone I asked Nazila whether she was being sarcastic when she said that Hafiz believed that everyone is master of the universe. “Not at all,” she said. “Hafiz is the poet of promise. He promises love, wine, and good times. He is the critic of hypocrisy, and sees power operating through hypocrisy. All Iranians identify with him. It’s because of this attitude that we have survived all the miserable times in our history.”

When young Iranians study Hafiz in school, they follow the same mystical, metaphorical understanding as the clerics who recite his poetry. On a previous visit to Iran, a tour guide had explained to our group, “When Hafiz writes about wine, some people say it’s about the truth, about God. But sometimes he means wine from the bottle. Once when all the wine shops were closed, Hafiz complained, and they were reopened again.”

As I have encountered Iran over the years, I have found two important components of the Iranian soul: love of poetry and love of country. No other people I know takes its poetry so seriously. And few countries have such a deep-rooted and long-lasting sense of national pride. Even the revolution and the creation of the Islamic Republic could not eradicate that unique sense of Persianness that goes hand in hand with the poets who extolled the virtues of beauty, love, and bravery.

Indeed, if poetry is a connection with the beautiful and the magical, it also is, as Nazila said, a means of survival. Wherever I travel in Iran, I hear poetry recited. Iranians are famous for their ability to memorize the Koran, and Koran recitation contests are popular and highly regarded by the clerics. But I often feel that if there were to be a contest between Koranic recitations in Arabic and poetry recitations in Persian, the poetry recitations would win out.

Just the week before this visit to Shiraz, I had found myself on one of Iran’s massive oil drilling rigs docked in the Caspian Sea. In the captain’s quarters a volume of Hafiz was sandwiched on a shelf between manuals on navigation. “What’s the book of Hafiz doing here?” I asked the captain.

His look told me he thought I was asking him why he took food and water with him when he went to sea. “Hafiz is part of life,” he said. “You can’t be without Hafiz.”

A few months before that, Nasser Hadian, a friend who is a political science professor at the University of Tehran, spent Christmas Day with me and my family in Washington, D.C. Nasser is American-educated and once enjoyed a flourishing academic career in the United States. He and his wife, Shirin Parvini, a pharmacologist, lived well. But Nasser gave it all up to go home. He said he couldn’t stay away from Iran any longer.

My husband, Andy, was incredulous. How could you give up a tenure-track college teaching position in the United States to go back to Iran? he asked Nasser.

“The poetry,” Nasser said. “The mystical poetry. I missed the sound of the poetry.” To prove his point, he took a copy of Hafiz from one of my bookshelves and read poems to us in Persian.

I found a creative interpretation of Hafiz in a well-appointed, smoke-filled apartment in north Tehran late one evening. In terms of refreshments, there was nothing out of the ordinary for a party of that type. In the back room a small group of men and women in their twenties were smoking marijuana. In the living room two dozen more were getting quietly drunk on moonshine vodka. The mother of the host kept a lookout at the front door for the morals police. Dinner was served at midnight. What was exceptional was the music. In one corner, a young man named Houtan played a classical guitar and sang in a voice so tender that he had earned an unusual nickname: the Elvis of Iran. The crowd sat transfixed as he sang the songs he had written: renditions of Hafiz, set to Spanish flamenco music.

Simply put, poetry for Iranians is religion, a religion as powerful as Islam. The tension between the two is spelled out in the Koran, which railed against the poets of the time who wandered in a world of illusions. “And as to the poets, those who go astray follow them,” one line goes. “Do you not see that they wander in the desert of bewilderment? And that they say much that they do not do?” But the Koran also approves of poets who “have faith in God and do good deeds.”

For many Iranians, the fluidity, the layers of interpretation, the magic and the mystery of their poetry keep them going, the same way prayers do for others. I saw the magic one evening at the home of Reza Seyed Hosseini, the preeminent translator of French literature into Persian. I asked him to explain why poetry is so important to Iran. He tried to explain it in scholarly terms. His wife interrupted with a more emotional response. “As children every night in winter, we would gather around my father and he would read poetry to us. My father would open Hafiz and say, ‘There will be a secret hand to solve your problem.’ I truly believe in what Hafiz tells me.”