Persian Mirrors: The Elusive Face of Iran (27 page)

By the time I went to see Persepolis for myself several years later, its glory had faded. Near the entrance, hundreds of Iranians picnicked with their children in grassy patches near the royal tents built for the Shah’s extravaganza. I was stunned to see that the tents were still standing. They had been well built, with concrete floors and thick wooden frames covered in red, blue, and tan rubberized canvas. The graffiti on the walls captured the shifting political sentiments of visitors. “Death to the traitor Shah” had been crossed out, replaced with the words, “Salute to the Shah.” “Rafsanjani and Khamenei are donkeys,” said another. The caretakers at Persepolis didn’t even bother to paint them over.

A generous tip to one caretaker opened the main tent, revealing a room with red cut velvet on the walls, voluminous red fabric ballooning from the ceiling, gold-trimmed mirrors à la Versailles, more than a dozen crystal chandeliers, and an elevated stage. But there were no door handles of gold, no expensive carpets or silver or crystal. They had been carted away by revolutionary looters long ago. The bedrooms were still there: one for the Shah, another for his wife, a number of others, all with soundproof doors and bulletproof glass windows. The windows had bullet nicks in them. “When the military took over they used to bet whether they could break the windows,” the caretaker said. The windows held.

At the main entrance a short drive away, more than four hundred people, mostly young families and newlyweds, filed in for the new “sound and light” show. The moonlight cast long shadows and turned the gray stones yellow. There were no mosquitoes that night. The day had been desert-hot, but the night belonged to the cool, clean breeze. Did I imagine smelling the scent of the magical
mahbub-e shab
?

Dozens of security police wandered on the set and through the crowds. Spotlights were trained on the pillars and carvings. Voices representing the ancient kings told the story of Persepolis over a crackling sound system that had seen better days. It was hard to figure out who was who and what the point of the presentation was. The recorded sounds of horses, dogs, chickens, and birds didn’t help. Drums rolled when Alexander the Great set fire to Persepolis. Then the voice of God boomed across the ruins. He spoke of resurrection into heaven for the good and damnation for the wicked. There was not a word about Islam, the Prophet, or the Koran.

A strange intense crying pierced the silence, a sound so loud that it drowned out the show. At first I thought it was part of the act. But the sound continued, off-cue. It sounded like a dozen babies. Then I thought it must be cats. The sound got closer, then suddenly stopped. It was only later when I was reading a book on Persepolis that I realized what had been making the sound: a pack of wolves howling, probably from the nearby hills. I thought it a fitting metaphor: the majesty and permanence of Persepolis threatened by wolves.

“I have good news,” Amir said. “My father has invited you to lunch.” We had finished our tour of the tombs of the poets in Shiraz, and Mahallati was outlining where we would go next.

Our next stop was the private library of Ayatollah Majdeddin Mahallati, the father of my host. With thirty thousand books and manuscripts stacked deep on old wooden bookcases it is the largest private library in Shiraz. Dusty photographs of some of the most famous clerics of Iran looked down at us.

From there we went to a small building where many of the Mahallatis—most of them clerics—are buried. The Mahallati family had been the leading religious family in Shiraz for two centuries. Amir Mahallati would probably be buried there someday. He pointed out the grave of his paternal grandfather, a learned ayatollah.

I had heard about this grandfather. Early in the revolution, he had been too outspoken and was quickly silenced. “Wasn’t this the grandfather who opposed the rule of the clergy?” I asked.

Mahallati clearly felt uncomfortable answering. But he didn’t want to lie either.

“My grandfather saw what was going on and took some distance,” he said. “He saw the summary executions of people without trials and he said, ‘This is not Islam.’ He took some distance, yes, some distance.”

Next to the room of tombs is a shrine. It is a small room of extraordinarily intricate mirror-mosaics, not just clear glass mirrors pieced together but also mirrors in blue, green, red, and yellow, raised and angled in a dozen different shapes to make the room look even more dazzling and mysterious. “There is a saying, ‘You don’t pray in front of a mirror,’ Mahallati said. “That’s because you are supposed to be so humble that you lose yourself. But with broken mirrors you don’t ever see a complete face. You see but you don’t see. It goes beyond reality.”

When he visits the United States, Mahallati is exotic, the gadfly ex-ambassador son of an ayatollah who gives lectures around the country about the mysteries of Persia. At the tombs of the poets he had shown me his romantic poetic side. Now he was playing the role of the dutiful son. “I’m sure when you meet my father, you will tell him how much you like his library and his mosque,” he said.

The ayatollah’s house is a reflection of the man. He once had enjoyed great power, and had retained a position of prestige. A large grape arbor covers the entrance into the charming courtyard filled with rosebushes. Inside the house, there are no photographs of other clerics, living or dead, which suggests that the ayatollah felt secure enough—in the privacy of his home, at least—not to align himself with others. There are two couches in the living room, which suggests a touch of the Western, since traditional families usually sit on the floor. The house is a comfortable place, with a greenhouse on one side of the dining room, stained glass windows on the other, and air-conditioning. I was told later by a friend from Shiraz that the fact that this high-ranking cleric had invited me, a non-Muslim woman, to join him in a meal was a stunning act, “the epitome of modernity.”

We didn’t eat on the floor, but at a round table. Over a lunch of lamb, rice, and vegetables served by a manservant, the ayatollah spoke of poetry, not of Islam. He recited the poems of Iran’s greatest epic poet, Abol-Ghasem Ferdowsi, not the verses of the Koran. “Two things are my favorite,” the ayatollah said from memory, “a young companion and an old wine. The young companion takes away all your sorrows, the old wine gives richness to your life.”

The ayatollah added that he was speaking metaphorically, of course, the way Hafiz and Saadi did. Still, his son did not like the way the conversation was going.

“Tell my father how much you appreciate his library,” the son said. So we moved the conversation to old books. The ayatollah told me about the library and about the religious school where he and some of his former students taught. He told me about the other institutions he had created in Shiraz, all with grassroots fund-raising: an Islamic charity that provides social security payments to the poor, free housing units for families that have lost their breadwinners, and a mosque in the center of town. The conversation shifted to other topics: the fact that his own father had been such a learned ayatollah that he had taught Ayatollah Khomeini; the high morality of young people in Shiraz; the enduring popularity of Hafiz.

I asked the ayatollah about an often-told tale that he had rescued Persepolis from revolutionary zealots who came there with bulldozers in 1979. His version was a bit less heroic. As he told it, Sheikh Sadegh Khalkhali, the notorious “hanging judge” of the revolution, came to Shiraz with a band of thugs. He gave an angry speech demanding that the faithful torch the silk-lined tent city and the grandstand that the Shah had built.

“In the beginning of the revolution, everybody was trying to run his own show,” the ayatollah recalled. “Everybody had weapons. Prisoners were freed. There was no law and order. My father, who was a grand ayatollah, and I stopped people from killing, looting, and taking money out of the country until, thank God, order was restored. Some people wanted to destroy historical places. We had to stop them. I heard the news that Sadegh Khalkhali wanted to set fire to Persepolis. So people went after him with stones.”

“Did Khalkhali escape?” I asked.

“Yes, with stones thrown at him and shouts for him to go away.” As for Persepolis, Ayatollah Mahallati added, “It’s the oldest, strongest symbol we have.”

I knew I could not let the lunch end without asking the ayatollah about his magnificent grapes. Shiraz, after all, once produced the finest wine in the country. But after the revolution, Shiraz became better known as the Australian and South African name for wines made from grapes that were similar—but not identical—to their Iranian cousins. Shiraz is now the most commonly planted grape in Australia. A cleric from Shiraz once told me a story about how Charles de Gaulle, during a visit as President of France, had loved the wine of Shiraz so much that he took cases of it back home.

I told the ayatollah about my Sicilian grandfather, and how he grew grapes in our backyard and made wine there every summer, white one year, red the next. The ayatollah ordered his manservant to cut some grapes for me. A platter of tiny, round amber-colored grapes arrived.

“Oh yes, the wine,” said the ayatollah, matter-of-factly.

I couldn’t tell from the tone whether he was praising it or condemning it. As a learned ayatollah, he certainly wasn’t serving it or drinking it. But his son had grown even more uncomfortable about this topic. He interrupted again.

“I think you are late for your departure,” he said dryly. I said goodbye to the ayatollah, who gave me a string of worry beads the same shade of gold as the grapes. The son drove Nazila and me straight to the airport.

On the flight back to Tehran, I thought about how the clerics and kings of Persia had something else in common: their deep sense of national pride. With it came a desire to prove their superiority over the Arabs, whose armies had overrun Persia in the seventh century and ruled for nearly a millennium. The Arabs may have brought Islam to Iran, but they also imposed Arabic letters onto the Persian, and injected Arabic words into the vocabulary.

Arabic became the language of religion, because the Koran was written and Muslim prayers were said in Arabic. But conversion to Islam came slowly. “The surrender was never complete,” wrote Sir Roger Stevens, a former British ambassador to Tehran, in his 1962 book,
The
Land of the Great Sophy
. “The Iranians were not in their hearts ever fully reconciled to fusion with Arab Islam; they accepted the tenets of the new religion but gave it an individual, nationalistic twist.”

It sometimes seemed difficult for the Islamic Republic to reconcile itself to the fact that the language of Islam is not Persian, but Arabic. I was amused by a speech that Ayatollah Khamenei gave one day to an international conference on the Persian language. He noted that Islam was introduced to Iran in Arabic, but added that it was “promoted” through Persian. Arabic is a particularly difficult language to learn, and many students resent the fact that they have to study it at all. (Seven years of Arabic are required of all Iranian students.) The vast majority never master the language and thus have no idea what the clerics are saying when they recite the Koran from pulpits or television screens. So much for the “thought control” of the ayatollahs so often imagined in the West.

The American academic Terence O’Donnell lived for fifteen years on a farm in Iran, and he recounted in his delightful memoir,
Garden of the
Brave in War,
the banter between him and his servant Mamdali every morning. Mamdali, wrote O’Donnell, would “knock on the dressing room door and ask the question, ‘Are you an Arab or an Iranian?’ If I was naked, I would answer that I was an Arab and he would wait outside the door, whereas if I was clothed, or partly so, I would reply that I was an Iranian and he would come in with the coffee. This, of course, was a joke reflecting the old Iranian view that Arabs were uncivilized people who went about unclothed and ate lizards.”

One of the worst insults for Iranians is to be lumped together with the Arabs. One day during a visit to the Foreign Ministry, Hamid-Reza Asefi, the ministry spokesman, fiercely criticized Iran’s presence on the State Department’s list of countries that support terrorism. I told him that to some extent, the list was political, and that even Syria, considered a strategic partner in the Middle East peace process, remained on the list. How could Iran, therefore, expect to be taken off the list?

“But we’re not Syria!” he exclaimed. “We’re Iran!” What he seemed to mean was that Syria was a poor, tiny, artificial creation, a place like Iraq, Jordan, and the Persian Gulf states, which were created by the imperial pens and imaginations of the British and the French after World War I. How could Iran, with its glorious history, culture, and geographical importance, be put in the same category? The issue of terrorism, it seemed, was beside the point.

In 1934, the monarch Reza Shah built a modern mausoleum outside Mashad for Ferdowsi. It was a monument to nationalism as much as to the tenth-century poet, whom many Iranians credit for rescuing the Persian language from oblivion with his great epic poem, the
Shahnameh,
or
Book of Kings
. Despite efforts by some clerics early in the revolution to remove the book from bookstores, the most popular poem recited in Iran today is from Ferdowsi’s epic.

Reza Shah believed that many of Iran’s problems stemmed from “Arabization” and used his reign to distance Iran from the Arabs. He scrapped the lunar calendar for the Zoroastrian solar one. He encouraged people to give Persian, non-Islamic names to their children. He created an academy to de-Arabize the language and to rewrite history to stress Iran’s Aryan heritage at the expense of its Islamic past. He sent archaeological teams around the country in search of Persian ruins.

Sixty-four years after Ferdowsi’s tomb was built, President Khatami sought to revive the memory of the poet in a different way. Khatami used the occasion of a meeting with Iranian expatriates at the United Nations in September 1998 to talk about the Iranian national character. He served notice that even an Islamic Iran cannot mature into what it could be—a democratic republic—if it denies its Persian past, just as the Islamic revolutionaries had shown the Shah the costs of ignoring Islamic sentiments. The time had come to embrace rather than deny history. What was so dramatic about what he said was that his starting point was not the Koran, but Ferdowsi’s
Book of Kings
. Khatami argued that the poem captured “a correct and beautiful image of the Iranian spirit”: courtesy, respect, politeness, an aversion to war, but a willingness to fight to preserve honor.