Persian Mirrors: The Elusive Face of Iran (26 page)

“My mother believes in Hafiz too,” said Golnaz, her daughter-in-law and Nazila’s sister. “She reads Hafiz every night for guidance.” Then Seyed Hosseini closed his eyes and began to recite, caressing the words and carrying us away with the music and the passion of the verses.

I found poetry in the oddest places. On a drive back to Tehran from the Caspian Sea one morning, Nazila, Mr. Salimi, and I stopped for breakfast at a teahouse that beckoned us with strings of colored lights. It was the Iranian version of a truck stop: a small grocery store attached to a slightly larger place to eat. The plastic tablecloths were sticky. The cheap cups and saucers were chipped. We ate what was available: tea, scrambled eggs, flat bread, a feta-like cheese, and big chunks of onion. Honey was scooped up fresh from the hives out back. The black flies loved the place.

I asked the owner about the old wooden abacus he used to calculate our tab. He showed me how it worked, flicking the beads fast with his fingers. “Take it, it’s yours,” he said.

I know that Iranians don’t really mean it when they tell you to take something that is theirs. But I have always wanted an abacus. So I offered to buy it. He refused. In the end, we struck a deal. He gave me the abacus. I gave him a black vinyl overnight bag imprinted with the logo of
The
New York Times
.

Then the deal-making needed to be celebrated. An old barefoot, bald-headed man who lived in the teahouse produced two wooden flutes. He said he wanted to play for us but that he was shy. We took our cue and urged him on. He was still too shy, he said.

So Mr. Salimi began to recite the
Rubáiyát
of Omar Khayyam. I had known Mr. Salimi for years, and he had always struck me as a strictly literal type. So I was both startled and delighted to find out that Mr. Salimi recited poetry. I reminded Mr. Salimi of the Persian saying, “You only know someone after you’ve traveled with him.”

“Everybody knows Khayyam,” he said, his face beaming. “Khayyam believed that life on earth was short. That’s why he wrote about love.” Mr. Salimi told the story of his father-in-law, who loved Khayyam’s poetry so much that when he died the family tried to bury his body close to Khayyam’s tomb in Khorasan province.

Finally, the old man got up his nerve. He put the larger flute between his lip and gum on the left side of his mouth and began to play and sing local love songs from Mazandaran province. “You are such a beautiful lady,” he sang. “Your brow is high. Your eyebrows are arched. Whoever takes you will never age.”

He sang and sang: medieval poems set to music, modern songs made famous by female singers of the Old Regime but banned by the Islamic Republic. Within a few minutes, trucks and a passenger bus pulled up and the teahouse was full.

Someone said that one of the truck drivers, a ruddy-faced man with a strong Turkish accent, was also a singer. “No, no, I don’t have any energy!” the truck driver protested, and walked out of the room. He was cajoled back. “I can’t sing without whiskey!” he then said. We fed him chocolates and tea instead.

“I’m on top of the highest mountain,” he sang in his local dialect. “Don’t give your daughter away! I want to marry her! Don’t give your daughter away until I pick up my cotton crop. Then I’ll come and marry your daughter. The water stops running. The moon is in the sky. The night is very long. And I must wait.”

The audience applauded. One by one the drivers and passengers left. And we continued on our way back to Tehran.

Poetry is so universal that even Ayatollah Khomeini apparently loved Hafiz. The austere Khomeini was known to have had a strong mystical streak and to have read the images of wine and love spiritually, as longing and love for God. After Khomeini’s death, his son Ahmad released poems said to have been written by his father. They were mystical verses in classical Hafiz style.

Good news, O meadow bird: spring has come again

The season of drinking and kissing and hugging has come again.

The term of withered fading and sadness has ended

The days of dallying with the beloved have come again. . . .

To celebrate a beauty’s curly tresses

Wine bearers, wine shops, singers, and dancing have come again.

Should you pass the schoolhouse door, tell the sheikh that

A tulip-cheeked beauty to teach him has come again.

Close up the shop of abstinence for this happy season

For my heart’s ears hear that the song of the lute has come again.

O Saqi, open the door of the wineshop for me;

Make me heedless of lessons, discussions, asceticism, and hypocrisy.

Lay a strand of your curly hair in my way;

Free me from learning, the mosque, teaching, and prayers
.

Singing like David, bring me a jug of wine;

Make me heedless of worry over status and its ups and downs.

“Human fallibility aside, it is difficult to imagine Ayatollah Khomeini actually doing all the things he seems to long to do in his
ghazals
[sonnets],” wrote the scholar William Hannaway, in a commentary accompanying his translation of the poems. He suggested that someone as committed to both the form and the substance of Islam as Khomeini “would find classical-style mystical poetry a convenient vehicle to express his mystical feelings.”

The poems reflected the mystery that shrouded Khomeini, even in death. Some Iranians didn’t believe that Khomeini had written the poetry at all.

If poetry is one of the pillars of the Iranian identity, then another can be found nearly forty miles to the northeast of Shiraz, at Persepolis, the magnificent ritual site that was built by Darius the Great, one of Persia’s most illustrious kings, more than 2,500 years ago.

The ruins there range from the meager to the magnificent. Some of the pillars are nothing more than short stumps, some not even that, just concrete planters with nothing in them except gravelly dirt in which nothing can grow. But then, amid the fallen columns and blocks of stone are sumptuously carved doorways and window frames and relief carvings on a monumental staircase to record the 256 peoples who came to pay homage to their emperor. At its creation, Persepolis had running water, a complex sewer system, a postal service, and highways connecting it to other cities of the Persian empire.

But when the Islamic revolution took control of Iran, Persepolis posed a problem. Over the years, it had become a symbol not just of Iranian identity, but of worldly power and royal grandiosity. Just eight years before, in 1971, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi held an extravaganza at Persepolis to celebrate the 2,500th anniversary of the Persian empire and the thirtieth anniversary of his reign. The Shah envisioned it as a modern-day Congress of Vienna, to which kings and presidents and prime ministers would come to discuss the challenges facing them.

In preparation, the royal Imperial Guard waged war against the poisonous snakes that infested the desert. Shiraz was cleaned up too: the prison was painted, shopkeepers were given new jackets, birds in cages were hung on lampposts, and power stations were built to supply air conditioners, television sets, refrigerators, and telephones.

The affair attracted thirteen presidents, ten sheikhs, nine kings, five princes, two sultans, and an assortment of lesser dignitaries and hangerson. A vast silk-lined tent that housed the apartments of the Shah and his wife was decorated by the house of Jansen in Paris with red-velvet drapes and gilded chairs. It was surrounded by smaller tents, all with marble bathrooms, sitting rooms, refrigerators, and even ironing boards for the maids. Elizabeth Arden created a new line of cosmetics named Farah, after the Shah’s wife. Lanvin designed the court’s uniforms, Baccarat the goblets. Maxim’s of Paris led the team of chefs and caterers. Except for caviar that was served in quails’ eggs, the food and wine were flown in from Paris as well. In the end, the effect was more French than Persian.

Estimates of the cost ran as high as $200 million—all so the Shah could say, as he was reported to have told a friend in Paris, “The descendants of Charlemagne came to Persepolis to pay homage to the son of a corporal.”

From his exile in Iraq, Ayatollah Khomeini used the occasion to attack the monarchy. “It is the kings of Iran that have constantly ordered massacres of their own people and had pyramids built with their skulls,” he declared. “Islam came in order to destroy these palaces of tyranny. Monarchy is one of the most shameful and disgraceful reactionary manifestations.” Khomeini argued that Iran’s kingly legacy was inauthentic. The only true identity Iranians should have is their Islamic one.

When he came to power in 1979, Khomeini expunged the trappings of royalty and eliminated the glorification of kings. He replaced sensuous richness with spiritual austerity. I turned up for an interview with Prime Minister Mehdi Bazargan one day as movers were carrying out carpets and boxes of china and silver. The scholar Abdol-Reza Houshang Mahdavi, who was working at the Foreign Ministry at the time, recalled the day the clerics came and removed the carpet from under his feet. “I watched them throw priceless French and Dutch paintings out the window into pickup trucks, just like logs,” he said. “They even took down my dark yellow curtains. They said they looked too much like gold.”

The artwork and crystal chandeliers that weren’t destroyed or hidden away were sold. The clerics stamped the words “Islamic Revolution” on the postage stamps bearing images of Persepolis and other pre-Islamic sites. They renamed streets after mullahs and martyrs. They rewrote the national anthem. Even the crown jewels were locked up.

Nothing was too petty to be removed. Khomeini especially hated lions. A lion wearing a crown and carrying a sword beneath a sun had been used as the official symbol of the Pahlavi dynasty. Khomeini gave a speech one day criticizing as un-Islamic the government workers who continued issuing passports and writing on stationery with the Pahlavi symbol. So work stopped at the ministries because no one dared to write on the official stationery. For months, no passports were issued. Eventually, a new symbol for the Islamic Republic was created: a tulip-shaped mirror image of the word “Allah.”

As for Persepolis, it became a suspect site. For years after the revolution, it lay fallow, attracting few tourists and little government money. “One cannot find a single reasonable king during all the monarchial dynasties,” Khomeini had said in 1985. So it wasn’t surprising that he never visited Persepolis or that he and the other clerics didn’t quite know what to make of the place. During the war with Iraq, the army turned the Shah’s tent city into barracks for recruits. The evergreens planted by the Shah grew so tall that they blocked the view of the ruins from the road.

Then in December 1988, just a few months after the end of the Iran-Iraq war, Ali Khamenei, who was then President, visited Persepolis. He thanked those responsible for preserving what he called “these historic sites.” He praised “the art, elegance, and the superb ability” that had created Persepolis, adding that even after all these centuries, they “still remain a marvel to mankind.” But for Khamenei, Persepolis was great only as an architectural feat that reflected man’s ability to create. Otherwise, it was a symbol of Iran’s dark imperial past, what he called the “cruel greatness” of Persia’s expansionist emperors driven by the motto on the stone inscriptions: “One has become the ruler of many.” In other words, the artistic miracle of Persepolis was worthy of praise, but the kings who ordered it built were to be condemned. It was left to Khamenei’s successor as President, Ali-Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani, to rehabilitate the place.

That happened in April 1991, when Rafsanjani too made a stop at Persepolis, and used the occasion to become the first clerical leader to embrace the kingly legacy of Iran. Rafsanjani was a state-builder, and he was determined to restore Iran to a position of power in the region, even if he had to bend principles to do it. He came from a family of merchant-farmers from Nough, near the southern Iranian town of Rafsanjan. The family business, the Rafsanjan Pistachio Producers’ Cooperative, was the largest pistachio enterprise in the country. While other clerics wrote great tomes interpreting the Koran, Rafsanjani wrote a favorable biography of Amir Kabir, the nineteenth-century nation-building Prime Minister and reformer.

From the early days of the revolution, Rafsanjani favored pragmatism over religious absolutism. I saw that firsthand in early 1980 during the hostage crisis when Maynard Parker, an editor of
Newsweek,
and I interviewed Rafsanjani, who was then a member of the Revolutionary Council. He justified the seizure of the American embassy, but his heart didn’t seem to be in it. Unlike Khomeini, he seemed filled not with hatred and rage, just frustration. He wanted to get on with the business of governing—and with the business of business.

At a time when other Iranian leaders demanded the return of the exiled Shah, Rafsanjani said he had a simpler solution: “If the Shah dies, that would help,” he told us. Shortly afterward, the Shah did die of complications caused by cancer, but the hostage crisis went on. Not everyone on the Revolutionary Council was as eager as Rafsanjani to get back to business.

In 1991, the moment had arrived for Iran to give Rafsanjani’s practical approach a try. He saw in Persepolis something other than monarchy: the importance of heritage and national dignity. By now, the war with Iraq had been over for three years. The religious rhetoric of the clerics had lost the power to inspire. So Rafsanjani—like the Shah before him—decided to re-create a glorious past based on the greatness of Persia’s empire. “Standing in the middle of these wonderful centuries-old ruins, I felt the nation’s dignity was all-important and must be strengthened,” Rafsanjani said. “Our people must know that they are not without a history.”