A Visit with Poet Simin Behbahani

My Iranian friend was nervous. She had agreed to accompany me as a translator for my interview with Simin Behbahani, but now I suspect she was regretting her promise.

She was afraid there might be trouble if she were to go with a journalist to visit the well-known activist and poet. It was still early in my visit to Iran and the fear of running afoul of authorities that lurked like a low-grade fever on the brows of many of those I met had yet to rub off on me.

We brought a bouquet of rose-like lisianthus. They were in season in August and could be found in all the Tehran flower shops.



Behbahani’s son met us at the door and invited to take a seat in the ornately furnished apartment. One wall was covered with photos of the poet. They documented a lifetime as an artist and a voice for human rights. As I was looking at them, the poet herself appeared from an adjoining room. In her late 70s, Behbahani is still a handsome woman.

English translations of poems by Hafez, Rumi and Khayyam abound. But the giants of contemporary Iranian poetry, like Behbahani, Forookhzad and Shamlou remain largely unknown to non-Persian readers - with few English volumes available.

Perhaps it's because poetry doesn’t occupy the same lofty spot in other literary traditions that it does in Iranian literature. After all, few people make pilgrimages to the graves of American poets.

On an earlier trip to Iran I had visited Hafez’ tomb in Shiraz. It was a Thursday evening and the dome over the poet’s tomb at the center of a garden was lit in an emerald light. People streamed from the busy street to crowd under it.

A man knelt and rested his forehead on the tomb. People ran their fingers across the poet’s words inscribed in the stone. A young man opened a small volume of Hafez and began to sing. Onlookers lit sparklers and listened appreciatively.

Poetry is more than literature to Iranians. It is a record of Persian culture, philosophy, and history. Behbahani told me, “Basically our people's lives are mixed with literature. Even the poor and illiterate people are connected to poetry. Therefore, poetry can have a significant impact on society."

Behbahani's own work has had an impact. Within the sweep of her verses lie delicate metaphors and stark, chilling images, portraying the human toll of the hardships and realities of life in Iran. In the words of Farzaneh Milani, director of the women and gender studies program at the University of Virginia, and a translator of Behbehani’s work, "Simin Behbahani is really an historian, albeit the medium she uses is poetry. Take the last three decades of Iranian history. I sincerely doubt you will be able to find a more detailed, exquisitely written, judiciously depicted representation of everyday life in Iran."

Milani says one of Behbahani's great accomplishments is her revival of the traditional the quazal form of Persian poetry, which was, historically, a short lyrical love poem written by a man for a woman. Milani says the simple fact that Behbahani was a woman writing the quazal was significant:

”Bring me the palatte,
my beloved wants me green,
when he comes thus,
he will find me green,
from brain to skin.
Make me a pond
My beloved wants me cool;
what pleasure to wash this fire
from my soul.
What shall I say, If he doesn't care for my washed out colors,
even if this dove
is as articulate as a parrot?
What can I do, if he can't stand
my self-immolation,
even if he knows he is the cause
of my conflagration

O incredulous heart,
how quick is my pulse.
In my breast there is a turmoil again,
created by love.
Again my body is burning, hot.
Again my eyes are lit.
Again my heart is a garden.
Again this garden is paradise.

Love has come, I greet it.
It has come, defiant, and bold.
It has come with love-killing lateness,
the antidote.

Kill me or burn me:
Have I ever begrudged my life?
Whatever my friend commands
I will obey."*

But Behbahani wasn’t content to write love poems. “In her post-revolutionary Iran poems,” Milani says, “the country has become the beloved."

By adapting the ancient quazal form and writing about war, repression and poverty, Behbahani reinvented it, infusing it with modern themes. Behbahani herself talks about the change she brought to this traditional style as if it was an imperative in which she had no choice: "I don't want to have this pain, but I feel it anyway. As much as I want to get away from the pain, I can't. When I see the hunger, the misery, the dead, the war, it seems as if all these disasters are happening to me. With any poem that I have written, I have ripped a piece of my heart."

In the 1980s, one of Behbahani's students was killed in a government crackdown on Iranian dissidents. In "12 Fountains of Blood", she describes the dead student's body.

"On her shirt flowed the blood from twelve fountains of blood.
In the dust of madness laid her twin jasmine braids.
streams of blood ran down her body as if not from wounds.
her mouth was open, as if an angel had made her smile.
It was as if her clothes were not sprinkled by a tyrant’s lead,
but the sky had sprinkled starts in the cup of her body.
She who sat in my class, politely, for a year, has fallen.
She does not mind me anymore.
What would Ahriman want from an angel so pure?
His kiss and death have branded her breast,
even though the two buds there had not yet blossomed.
Who has the heart to surrender to a shroud
a body like porcelain, once accustomed to wearing silk?
Her presence will never again light up her father's eyes.
Brothers, what happened to her shirt in the thick of the night?

What was her sin? Tell me. It must be asked.
Don't keep it a secret, if you hear anything about it." (1985)

In the Diaspora that followed the revolution, many writers left Iran to write in freedom elsewhere. Although she had traveled many times outside her country, Behbahani always returns. She’s never considered living elsewhere. She told me that when she is away from Iran, “I always check my flight tickets at the end of the day to see when my return date is.” When I asked her why she hasn’t left, she answered, “Maybe others can continue their work abroad, but I cannot work only by listening to news. I have to be in the heart of the events.”

“You leave, I’ll stay. You leave, I’ll stay.
I swear, I cannot endure being separated from my homeland.
Til my last day you will hear in my bones
the same tale of the reed.
Though sparkles and light may fill the nights of exile,
they are of little use to me, since I am not happy in exile.
From the agitation of fire and molten metail
the sky above me is as turbulent as my mind.
When one must cover the light in a lamp,
I would rather extinguish the flame
than let my ears be pierced by the policeman's orders,
'lights out!' 'black out!'
Where will my heart escape,
if this house and its shade collapse on my head?
In these dark ruins we remain:
the children, the old people and I,
and our sad cares and thoughts of absent, brave warriors.
I will not forsake this unruly corner to beg for affection
in a land of self-serving calculation.
Even if this sky is dark and unsmiling,
it belongs to me and my fellow countrymen.
This canopy is not on loan.
Hoping for a better day,
I take one step, then another,
towards something I believe.
You leave, I'll stay." (1980)

Behbahani eschews political poetry as artless. “People don't like the political poetry; they don't want slogans in poetry. The poetry should be really an art and not politics.” Yet, her poetry is “political” in the sense that it deals with how outside forces affect the lives of people.

Under both kings and clerics, the Iranian censor’s pen has always been poised over the poet’s work. Like other artists, Behbahani has learned to express herself in spite of the constraints. “Under these restrictions, we always have to adapt ourselves to the circumstances, meaning that if we cannot speak openly, we speak in metaphors. During the previous regime, my poetry always involved metaphors.”

Oppression, poverty and human suffering know no season. In the Shah’s time, Behbahani wrote,

“O you who earn your bread
like morticians from the dead
don’t decorate your chest and shoulders
with their backbones.."

In the post-revolution crackdowns on dissidents and artists, Behbahani has spent only one night in jail. Many other writers haven't been so fortunate. Behbahani reasons, “Because of the persistence and the assertiveness that I've had in poetry, I have the feeling that nobody wants to dispute with me. They, to a large extent, try to avoid confrontation with me.”

Now the Internet gives Behbahani a freedom she's never known. She says, "Twenty six years ago, we didn't have the means to justify ourselves to the world. Today, if a word is said here, the whole world will hear it."

Behbahani has received numerous literary and human rights awards. In 1997, she was nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Age hasn’t quieted her voice. She is a familiar presence at rallies and demonstrations in Iran.

Health problems and unsuccessful eye surgery have left Behbehani struggling to write. She showed me how she uses black markers to write in blocky letters on large sheets of paper.

Sitting in her Tehran apartment, Behbahani grants a request and with difficulty, reads a poem entitled "Necklace" about an Iranian mother mad with grief over the death of her son in the Iran-Iraq war.


"Anxious, agitated, sad
her face uncovered, her head unveiled,
not afraid of arrest or policeman,
oblivious to the order to cover and conceal herself
Her eyes two grapes plucked from their cluster,
squeezed by the times to fill a hundred barrels with blood,
mad, really mad, a stranger to herself and others,
oblivious to the world, beyond being awakened even by the deluge
a particle of dust adrift in the wind, without purpose or destination,
lost, speechless, bewildered, a corpse without a
grave,
carrying around her neck a necklace of curses and tears,
a pair of boots tied together belonging to a dead soldier.
I asked her: what does this mean?
She smiled: my son, poor child, sitting on my
shoulders, hasn't taken off his boots yet." (1988)

My friend translates the poem for me and when she finishes I see there are tears in her eyes.

Behbahani lowers her voice and says softly that with her eyesight failing, she's afraid her life's work may be at an end.

*translations are from "A Cup of Sin" (selected poems of Simin Behbahani, 1999, Syracuse University Press.

Hallaj: Mystic and Martyr

Even in condensed form, Louis Massignon's (1883-1962)description of the 10th century milieu that produced Al Husayn Ibn Mansur al Halla, known as Hallaj - 'the carder of consciences', is exhaustive and exhausting. But I was fascinated by this story of the man some regarded as a saint and others considered a heretic or madman.

Herbert Mason's "Hallaj - Mystic and Martyr" (1982, Princeton University Press)is an abridged English translation of French Islamologist Massignon's landmark four volume, 1500 page, five- decades-in-the-writing work "The Passion of al-Hallaj".

The book requires more interest about this period of Islamic history and more patience for long, abrupt departures from the narrative than many readers possess.

Massignon's prose is at turns ponderous and breathless. People...events...ideas pass by in feverish half-page sentences littered with parenthetical and bracketed asides. Explanations about arcane and esoteric aspects of religious life mix with details of the Caliphate's annual budget. Over this backdrop Massignon's Hallaj moves like a bright comet.


For all it's scholarship, this is a very personal work. It was a verse attributed to Hallaj that first captivated Massignon: "Two moments of adoration suffice in love, but the preliminary ablution must be made in blood." It was Hallaj, Massignon contended, who helped guide him in his darkest hours, leading him from agnosticism to, of all things, Catholicism.

Hallaj was born in the Arabicized south of Iran at a time when Islam was still spilling across Asia. His grandfather, in fact, had been a Zoroastrian. He was drawn at a young age to the mystics and to 'the spiritual exile' of Sufism - which he would later abandon, "worn out by spiritual dryness and by the hypocritical fraternal correctness of those hermits who cultivate their perfection sealed off from reality."

After spending time in prayer and self denial in Mecca, Hallaj began to write and preach publicly, wandering and gaining followers. In each region he visited, he was called by a different name: "The aesthetic", "the nourisher", "the enraptured", "the dazed".

His travels took him through much of Iran, to India and into the Turkish areas where he is credited with helping to introduce Islam. He drew crowds by performing what many considered to be miracles (producing food out of thin air, increasing his physical size, etc). Apparently Hallaj made no claim to being a miracle worker. He said he performed his tricks in order to attract people to his message.

Hallaj's home was in Baghdad and Massignon creates a fascinating picture of the city teeming with the sacred and the profane: preachers holding forth in front of mosques and markets and vying for influential converts in high society, slave traders with troupes of performing women, "dream-like creatures, supposed to stimulate people's desire for aesthetic diversion...only to destroy through the lure of the feminine face..."

The rivalries of Islamic sects, the economic discontent of the masses and the political intrigues of the court combined to make Baghdad a city thrumming with tension. It was into this atmosphere that Hallaj stepped.

In Massignon's description, Hallaj preaches like a man possessed: "He cries out his joy at having reached, and having in his possession, 'the One who is at the heart of ecstasy'..."

Hallaj tears the veil of secrecy from the Sufi's lonely communion and shows the masses a man who has lost himself in God. What others preached as theory, Hallaj made real. He aroused awe and excitement among the displaced people who lived in the squalid margins of Baghdad life.

He interpreted Quranic verse and Islamic traditions in a way that puzzled some and infuriated others. Despite his denials, his followers believed he could raise the dead. His ecstatic behavior, was, to them, a sign that God spoke through him. He himself said, "Who is it but God who writes, since I am no more than the hand that serves him as an instrument?"

Hallah's most dramatic and famous proclamation was "Ana'l Haqq" - "I am the truth" (or "I am God") - a statement meant to express his oneness with the creator.

For his accusers this was enough to condemn him for "encroaching on the rights of God."

Religious leaders considered his popularity a threat and political leaders saw him as a catalyst for the people's discontent and a threat to the social order. Others withheld judgment: "What should I say about a man who in jurisprudence knows more than I do, and who in mysticism speaks a language I do not understand?"

As Reynolds Nicholson wrote in "Studies in Islamic Mysticism", Hallaj's crime was, "in actively asserting a truth which involves, religious, political and social anarchy."

Hallaj sought not adulation but condemnation and death at the hands of those who disagreed with him: "A man who is zealous for his religion is dearer to me, and dearer to God also, than a man who venerates a creature," he said. "What will you say to yourself...on the day when you see me hanging on the gibbet and killed and burned? Yet that will be the happiest day of my life."

Despite this claim, Hallaj fled when he was first ordered arrested. Later captured, he was imprisoned for eight years - but still allowed to write and receive followers.

Massigon describes how Hallaj's fate was decided in the "piestic riot" of his religious detractors and the political machinations of the Caliph's court. In a brief retrial, "this same aesthetic who had preached in vain that God must be loved first and foremost, that the holy war of the Law against idolatries must be waged against our own consciences, making us abandon all of our riches" was sentenced to death by lashing, dismemberment and decapitation and finally burning - his ashes scattered.

His execution in 922 AD was a public event accompanied by much interest and tumult. It's said he was led laughing to his death. Near the end he uttered the words: "Here I am now in the dwelling place of my desires."

There are two lives intertwined in this book: Hallaj and Massignon. After a half century of delving into his subject's story, Massignon wrote, "Not that the study of Hallaj's life yielded to me the secret of his heart. Rather, it is he who fathomed mine and who probes it still."

"In Iran everything is possible and everything is impossible."

-Woman in a restaurant


It's someone's job in Iran to go through every magazine sold here and black out offending photos. I looked through a copy of National Geographic the other day. A photo of a person standing naked in a wash basin with their back to the camera was covered in black magic marker. For some reason a photo on an earlier page featuring bare breasted women in body paint wasn't. A big sticker was placed over the cover photo of a yoga magazine to hide a woman who was wearing a bathing suit.

An Iranian friend of mine was arrested once for wearing a short sleeve shirt. He spent a night in jail. He was arrested twice more, both times for wearing bright colored shirts. The way he dressed was considered un-Islamic. That was many years ago. "Now change is happening so quickly in Iran," he told me, "The best man of today is the worst man of tomorrow." My friend is a very modern, enlightened person and he's not a devout Muslim, but when he weighs Iran's social or cultural changes, he views them through the prism of his religion.

My friend told me about something he witnessed just recently as he walked past a mosque in Shiraz. A young woman was standing on the sidewalk outside the mosque. She was wearing a tight manteau that revealed her figure, her scarf was worn back and her hair was exposed. A man came out of the mosque. He'd just finished praying. He said to the girl, "We will kill you."

_______________________________________

One night I attended a concert of Persian classical music, Sufi spiritual music as it's described to me.

Several hundred people stand outside a central Tehran concert hall called Tawlareh Vahdat waiting for the performance to begin. The show is sold out. The people are beautifully dressed. Women with their long hair gathered under colorful scarves, their makeup accentuating their dark features. Some of the men have long hair and neatly trimmed beards. Others are wearing sharp sport coats. There is laughter and the murmur of happy conversation. People greet each other in the warm Iranian way; a handshake a slight bow, maybe a hand placed over a heart. Women shaking hands with men in public - that's something relatively new.

When the gates swing open, though, the men and women must separate. They aren't permitted to enter through the same gate. The women, for some reason, have their bags checked. My companion is concerned about the camera she carries in her bag, so I take it through the men's entrance. On the other side of the gate, only a few feet from where we'd been standing together before we entered, couples, families and friends reunite. The brief separation feels like an odd ritual from a past that no longer exists.

We walk under tall pines, past boxes planted with dusky lavender and into the concert hall where a domed ceiling rises high, glittering above the three-tiered balcony.

When the lights dim and the curtains open, there are twelve musicians and eight singers on stage. A man and a woman sit in the center. She is dressed in white. The musicians wear black. There is a small violin section on one side, and on the other side a group of soloists, including a violinist, an oud player, and a man playing a tar - a stringed instrument with a small body and long, slender neck. There are two men playing round flat drums called dafs. They hold them aloft in front of them and beat with their finger tips. The drums seem to float as they play.

The man and woman in the center are the lead singers. Women aren't permitted to perform solo in front of mixed audiences in Iran. The music is transcendent and cinematic. The instruments and voices rise and fall together, with long instrumentals - frenetic string work dissolves into meditative solos.

At the end of the concert the musicians and singers all take up dafs. Another group of daf players rises from the orchestra pit. The drumming fills the hall and you're transported. Here for a moment, with these amazing performers, there's a feeling of pleasure and happiness beyond trouble.

Shariati - An Islamic Utopian

Ali Rahnema's excellent biography of Ali Shariati (An Islamic Utopian, 1998, I.B. Tauris) deftly portrays the fascinating and complex man who is often called the intellectual father of Iran's Islamic revolution.

Shariati grew up religious and poor. His political development began in Iran, but his time as a scholarship student in Paris helped to crystallize his world view. He condemned the excess and materialism of the west, but he also sensed that there were ideas in play that were absent in his own country. "I wish I had never come here and tasted the meaning of freedom," he wrote, "I should have stayed back there and read about it only in books."

Events in his own country, like the overthrow of Mohammad Mosaddeq in 1953 and the 'westoxication' of Iran under the Shah also shaped his thinking.


It's clear from Rahnema's book that there was much spirited debate and political activity among Iranian students and intellectuals even under the Shah's repressive hand. Among those groups and individuals, Shariati was a religious star in a largely secular universe. His faith tended toward Sufi mysticism, seeking annihilation of self and union with God. Among his claims at one point in his life were visions and the ability to summon spirits. But Shariati eschewed the quietest style of Sufism for an activist approach that permitted him to express himself politically.

Shariati often seems not so much anti-western, as someone who wanted people to think for themselves - without uncritically accepting either the values of the west or those of Iran's religious hierarchy. He felt exiled between "the two barren deserts of mullahs and modernists." Shariati's deepest instincts were religious, but westerners influenced his philosophy and he creatively bent their ideas and those of Shi'ia Islam to fit his own beliefs. In the case of French Islamologist Jacques Berque, Shariati learned how the meaning of words can be adapted to reflect time and circumstance. Rahnema writes, "Berque had ignited something in Shariati. He [Shariati] took each commonly used term in the vocabulary of every Muslim and reinterpreted it until gentle lullabies became electric currents. Words and concepts resonating with resignation, fatalism and self-pity in the historical memory of Iranian Shi'i, were suddenly transformed into forceful and dynamic concepts for action."

Shariati achieved notoriety as an unorthodox and brilliant lecturer at Mashhad University, but it was in a series of lectures in Tehran at Hosseiniyeh Ershad that his vision of an Islamic Democracy came into focus. Initially he was convinced that no nation could be just, classless and free unless it's people were intellectually and politically mature. At one point he espoused an interim 'guided democracy', led by an enlightened and virtuous individual: an Imam chosen by religious leaders.

Rahnema tells us that Shariati's militancy grew in the early 1970s in response to the armed struggle of the Mojahadin in Iran. Shariati moved away from his belief that enlightenment of the people had to precede revolution. In his final lectures at Ershad, he maintained that 'a group of responsible intellectuals' or a 'conscious and alert individual' could accelerate the revolutionary process. He no longer believed that popular awareness must precede actions - he wanted to wield the message and the sword together. He still believed that a new government must be led by a deeply inspirational and religious figure, but now he contended that this person should be popularly elected.

Shariati's writings and lectures excoriated religious leaders as 'polytheists' and oppressors who legitimized the monarchy. At one point he wrote, "I feel more distant from them than from enlightened atheists." He saw them as adherents to what he termed "Safavid Shi'ism", subverting the religion of Imam Ali. In his view they had replaced the religious concepts of justice, protest and personal belief and interpretation with empty ritual, blind imitation and unquestioning subservience - rendering people resigned and harmless.

His lectures and writing elicited condemnation and alarm from the mullahs. (Interestingly Khomeini, at the time exiled in Iraq, refused to back his religious brethren in Iran. "I studied the cases referred to," he said in response to requests to read and condemn Shariati, "none of the reprobations or criticisms were valid.") Eventually some progressive members of the clergy came to Shariati's defense.

Shariati increasingly armed traditional religious concepts with revolutionary significance. It was the language of empowerment in a form all Iranians, even the least politically aware and engaged, could understand. For example, he used the traditional Islamic commandment to do good deeds to exhort people to political action. Shariati said that action, not longing and mourning was the proper religious response to Iranians' plight - and it was the only response that was true to the example and spirit of Imam Hossein's uprising at Karbala. It was, Rahnema writes, "the magic wand, awakening the dormant, subjugated and the unenlightened."

Rahnema tries to answer critics who accuse Shariati of lacking the courage of his convictions when brought before SAVAK, the Shah's secret police. In Rahnema's view the government saw Shariati as a religious figure and a helpful counter to the secular Marxist movement in Iran. Eventually it became clear that Shariati was calling for armed overthrow of the government and he was arrested and imprisoned for 18 months.

Afterward, in a series of controversial articles published in the government newspaper Kayhan, Shariati made critical revisions in some of his ideas. He retreated from his call for armed struggle. He returned to his belief that personal development and popular enlightenment, not resistance and struggle, were necessary to bring about change. He took up the cause of nationalism, which he had previously equated with Iran's dynastic rulers. For the first time he declared that a capitalist system was inevitable, but it must be tempered by a moral, Islamic system of government.

In Rahnema's view, whether Shariati's change of heart was due to a genuine evolution in his thinking (perhaps a product of 'conditions on the ground' and the deaths of close friends who had joined the Mojahedin and taken up arms against the government - or the closing of Ershad and his absence from it's charged atmosphere), or pressure and threats from the SAVAK, will never be known.

Interestingly the name of Iran's Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei crops up a number of times in Rhanema's book. Khamenei was 6 years Shariti's junior. Both came from Mashad. Rhanema never gives us any details about the relationship between the two men, but they continued to see each other and it seems reasonable to think that Khamenei must have been in agreement with the basic tenets of Shariati's philosophy.

Shariati's death in England in 1977 was officially ruled a heart attack. Rhanema makes no mention of the theory that Shariati was murdered by SAVAK after he had slipped out of Iran. He died just over a year short of the beginning of Iran's Revolution. Rhanema doesn't dwell on how Shariati would view the Iran of today, simply writing that 'Shariati was a romantic, not a practitioner of revolutions'.

In an eloquent summary of his subject's life, Rhanema writes,in part, "Shariati was the unexpected rooster who took pride and pleasure in his own nocturnal crowing...He woke up the inquisitive, the inquisitors and the executioners..."

Persian Lions, Persian Lambs

There has been a long succession of books by Western visitors to Iran, stretching back two hundred years. A few have achieved 'classic' status, but those written during the latter half of the 20th century have largely slipped into obscurity (The Garden of the Brave in War is the only one I've heard people mention). Persian Lions, Persian Lambs (1965) deserves something better. It's written by novelist Curtis Harnack.

Harnack went to Iran on a teaching fellowship. After a bit of a slow start, the book recounts with perception, Harnack's adventures in Iran and his impressions of the people he got to know. He does so with humor and sensitivity.

In one chapter he's confronted with the wastefulness of his culture when compared to the Iranian need to make the most of everything. He discovered that the things he considered disposable were being scooped from his garbage by his housekeeper, Hassan. Harnack writes, "Hassan was always absorbed by what he found in my garbage pail...

I would watch him from the window as he shambled along slowly, poring over the treasure trove for the day. His wife, swathed in veils, would fly from the house to help him, like a carrion bird whose mate had found a choice morsel. Hassan would shoulder her aside angrily and make his way alone past the little chicken coop and dog house to a spot almost out of sight. Then he would begin his excited perusal, lifting out the burnished Tuborg beer cans as if he had found miniature bronze samovars...the malleable metal strip from a coffee can lid could be twisted and looped. Hassan would sell this to a droshky driver for one and a half rials; it would be an admirable device for holding together a broken harness.

In some ways a squirrel tendency began to develop in me, and I hesitated over everything before attempting to discard it. All kinds of string were wrapped into balls; my closets began to fill with empty boxes and odds and ends...the empty Hollandia butter tin became my nail container and the cardboard wedges in a shipment of phonograph records from Sam Goody's became mats for some drawings I tacked up on the wall. for a while, I saved used razor blades and one or twice caught myself long-pondering their possible usefulness.

One day in spring when Hassan's little treasure room near the chicken coop happened to be open, I peered inside, and there in an enormous heap was what he had collected from me - at least what he had not yet sold or disposed of. It seemed indecent that I had consumed enough canned food to have left this tremendous pile. And most disturbing of all, I saw many little things that I had not been conscious of discarding: bottle caps, empty folders of matches, underwear buttons, and a used kerosene wick. Next to all of this was a round, somewhat dusty red ball; had this, too, once been mine? I found that it was made of wax and for a moment I could not imagine what connection it had with me. And then suddenly, as if it were a waif to whom much had happened, I recognized it despite its changed form: this was the red wax outer layer of a few Dutch gouda cheeses I had eaten.

"Reveille For a Persian Village"

It took me a while to warm to Najmeh Najafi's 1958 book, "Reveille For a Persian Village". The prose is sometimes overfurnished and the sentiments are at times a bit misty-eyed. But as I continued to read I gradually realized this is the story of a remarkable woman. After going to college in California, Najafi returned to her native Iran. There she settled in a small village, gradually winning the hearts of her neighbors as she provides them with medical care, teaches their children and helps the villagers begin to work together. She's a devout woman and she shows a keen sensitivity to the traditional ways of the village. Her depiction of village life underscores just how little its changed in hundreds of years.

At one point in the book, Najafi describes an unexpected visitor who came to her home in the village. The visitor had heard of the author's success in teaching and treating people:

"Her bony feet were naked...her dress was worn, her eyes were weary, but there was that about the way she held her head that made be think the one word, "Queen."
"Lady Najafi?" she asked.
"Yes."
"I am of the village of Shel-shach-meh. I have come to invite you to my village."
She stayed with us for a day and I showed her the clinic, the washhouse for the dead, my chicken house, the village center, the schools where in the winter the girls and boys learned to read and write and figure, the work-study room. I had her rest on a bed which I put up in our general room and bathed her tired eyes with warm water. The next day...I had Ashghar bring a rented donkey and we three, the old lady, Ashghar and I started for the village.
"Why did not some man, perhaps the kadkhoda, come to me? I asked.
"I am the head of the village."
This village was the first matriarchate I had heard of in Iran.
"All the people of the village are my children, their children, their children."
At last we came into the little village. She called everyone to come visit with me and one of her grandsons brought a rug for me to sit upon - the only rug in the village. Nearly every child in the village had trachoma, scald head, other illnesses. And there was such poverty!
To say poverty in a country like America means very little. It is not until you have seen children actually cry for a spoonful of rice when the mother has none to give that you realize poverty means the pangs of hunger, the warping of little bodies...Poverty means not enough coverings at night to sleep through from dusk to dawn in comfort, not enough clothing to keep the body warmth next to the body, not even a pair of shoes to cover cracked, bleeding, purple-blue feet.
These things I saw in this little village. I can never be really lighthearted again.

Thought for the Day

“So long as humanity exists, the struggle will not cease between dogma and free investigation, between religion and philosophy; a desperate struggle in which, I fear, the triumph will not be for free thought, because the masses dislike reason, and its teachings are only understood by some intelligences of the elite.”

Sayyid Jamal al-Din "Afghani" Asadabadi (1838-97)

"A Year Amongst the Persians"

I’ve been reading E.G. Browne’s “A Year Amongst the Persians”, a wonderful account of his travels in Iran 120 years ago. Unlike other western chroniclers from the period (and there are many) Browne has a deep love and appreciation of Persian culture and a knowledge of the language. He travels from city to city, village to village by mule and horse, introducing us to people along the way; some are high-born, others are servants and villagers – all are colorful. He also shares with us some of the tales he hears. Here’s a sample:

On the second day after leaving Teheran, we entered the dismal region called by the Persians Malaku ‘l-Mawl Dere (The Valley of the Angel of Death). Around this spot cluster most thickly the weird talkes fo the desert.

There are several species of supernatural monsters which haunt the gloomy defiles of the Valley of the Angel of Death. Of these the ghuls and the ‘ifrits are alike the commonest and the most malignant. The former usually endeavor to entice the traveler away from the caravan to his destruction by assuming the form or voice of a friend or relative. Crying out piteously for help, and entreating the unwary traveler to come to their assistance, they induce him to follow them to some lonely spot, where, suddenly assuming the hideous form proper to them, they rend him in pieces and devour him.

Another monster is the nasnas, which appears in the form of an infirm and aged man. It is generally found sitting by the side of a river, and bewailing its inability to cross. When it sees the wayfarer approaching, it earnestly entreats him to carry it across the water to the other side. If he consents, it seats itself on his shoulders, and, when he reaches the middle of the river, winds its long supple legs round his throat till he falls insensible in the water and perishes.

Besides these, there is the pa-lis, (“Foot-licker”), which only attacks those who are overtaken by sleep in the desert. It kills its victim, as the name implies, by licking the soles of his feet till it has drained away his life-blood. It was on one occasion circumvented by two muleteers of Isfahan, who being benighted in the desert, lay down feet to feet, covering their bodies with cloaks. Presently the pa-lis arrived, and began to walk round the sleepers to discover their feet, but on either side it found a head. At last it gave up the search in despair, exclaiming as it made off, “I have wandered through a thousand and thirty and three valleys, but never yet saw a two-headed man.”

“A Year Amongst the Persians”, Edward G. Browne, 1893.

سل نوروز مبارک

Zagros Restaurant in Tehran

At the top of Park Jamshidieh, above the shadowed walkways and benches, there is a long, long series of stone stairs. You follow them and gradually the ever present cheesy music that wafts from the food stands and the voices of the young couples and families fade from your hearing.

You climb and climb, pausing breathlessly along the way to make promises to yourself about getting into better shape. The sun is bright and the sweat and discomfort spoil your appreciation of the view below, so you plunge upward toward the restaurant that lies ahead perched on the mountainside.

Your goal reached, you take a seat on a carpeted platform and peer down through the bright dyed wool Qashqaei decorations. Tehran is far below under a smear of smog. You're beyond the reach of its noise and its smell and its heat. The ghalyan arrives. You're with friends. There's talk and teasing about who struggled most on the long stairway. The conversation lapses into silence as you stare out over the city, amazed and grateful to be in this place.

On Deluding Ourselves

Like that fond dervish waiting in the throng
When some World-famous beauty went along,
Who smiled on the Antic as she pass'd -
Forthwith Staff, Bead and Scrip away he cast,
And grovelling in the Kennel, took to whine
Before her Door among the Dogs and Swine.
Which when she often went unheeding by,
but one day quite as heedless ask'd him - 'Why?' -
He told of that one Smile, which, all the Rest
Passing had kindled Hope within his Breast -
Again she smiled and said, 'O self-beguiled
Poor Wretch, at whom, not on whom I smiled.'

-From Bird Parliament by Farrid Ud-Din Attar (d.1230), translated by Edward Fitzgerald

Lotf Ali Khan Zand

Lotf Ali was the last of the Zand Dynasty rulers (ruled 1789-1794). His heroic struggle against the cruel eunuch Agha Mohammad Khan, the first of the Qajar kings, is the stuff of Shakespearean tragedy. After horribly torturing his rival, Agha Mohammad had him put to death and interred at the Mausoleum of Imamzadheh Zeid in the old bazaar in Tehran.

Lotf Ali's uncle, Karim Khan Zand (ruled 1747-1779) is considered one of the few truly benevolent rulers in Iran's long history. Karim Khan never took the title of King or Shah, choosing instead to call himself Vakil "regent of the people." For that reason his name remains on street signs and landmarks after those of past royals were removed following the Islamic revolution.

"The happy reign of this excellent prince, as contrasted with those who preceeded and followed him, affords the historian of Persia that kind of mixed pleasure and repose, which a traveler enjoys on arriving in a beautiful and fertile valley during an arduous journey over barren and rugged wastes. It is pleasing to recount the actions of a chief who, though born of an inferior rank, obtained power without crime, and who exercised it with a moderation that, for the times in which he lived, was as singular as his humanity and justice." (John Malcolm, The History of Persia, 1829)

Mullah Nasiruddin

Mullah Nasiruddin is a popular character in folk tales throughout the Middle East and south and central Asia, including in Iran, Turkey and the Arab countries. He is at once a fool and a wise man, at turns absurd and down-to-earth. I'm not sure what character in Western culture is a close approximation of Mullah Nasiruddin, but I think of Charlie Chaplin's "Tramp".

Many of the Mullah Nasiruddin stories have to do with his donkey. Here are two short pieces:

"One day the mullah's neighbor came to borrow his donkey.
The mullah said, 'My donkey isn't here.'
At that moment there was the long bray.
The neighbor said, 'You told me the donkey wasn't at home. Where did that braying come from?'
The mullah became angry and said, 'How strange people are. Will they believe a donkey before they will believe me?"



The mullah put some wood on his back and got on his donkey.
The neighborhood children asked, "'Why don't you put the wood on the donkey's back?"
The mullah said, "It would displease God if the donkey had to carry both myself and the wood."

"I see beneath the ashes the glow of fire
And it wants but little to burst into a blaze
And if the wise ones of the people quench it not,
its fuels will be corpses and skulls.
Verily fire is kindled by two sticks,
and verily words are the beginning of warfare."

Ashura

"Men travel by night
and their destinies
travel toward them."

-Imam Hossein
from the ta'ziyeh (passion play)

Iran's Supreme Leader: Up Close and Personal

There used to be some very good photos on the Web site of Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, http://www.leader.ir/ but I guess he has a new photographer and there aren't as many interesting ones.

Remember, in Iran the rial stops with the Supreme Leader - not President Ahmadinejad.

Iran Women - Hani Restaurant

This is Fatemeh Tarighat Monfared. She's the owner of Hani Restaurant in Central Tehran. It's a well-run restaurant with terrific food. Check it out if you can.

Monfared has owned Hani for more than twenty years. As a woman business owner, she's part of a small minority. She says her family opposed her entering business. Her father refused to speak to her for several years and her husband divorced her.

Much is made of the legal inequities affecting women in Iran, but if the laws were all changed tomorrow, there would still be deeply ingrained cultural norms regarding the role of women. Women are working to change these norms. They see this not as an abrogation of Islamic ideas, but as a reinterpretation of what has up to now been a solely patriarchal reading of these principles.

Kayhan Kalhor and Siamak Aghaei

Kayhan Kalhor is Persian music's only international star - he's worked with Yo Yo Ma, the Kronos Quartet and a variety of other cross-cultural projects. However on a recent evening the program was purely Persian. Kalhor, who plays the kamancheh (spike fiddle) was joined by Siamak Aghaei on santur. The results were sublime: a single unbroken improvisation in which the musicians traded solos. with pulsating drones building into frenetic exchanges. The variety of sounds that came from these two instruments was truly amazing. It was a transporting tour-de-force of rhythm and melody.

Notably, Kalhor explained in an interview that he doesn't perform in Iran, although classical music concerts are permitted. Kalhor says the bureaucratic hurdles necessary to get government permission for a performance are cumbersome and "disrespectful."

The program notes were written by ethnomusicologist Laudan Nooshin who writes that, "like other Middle Eastern traditions, Persian classical music is based on the explortion of short modal pieces: in Iran these are known as gushehs, and there are 200 or so gushehs in the complete radif [repertoire]. These gushehs are grouped according to mode into 12 modal 'systems' called dastgah. A dastgah essential comprises a progression of modally-related gushehs in a manner somewhat similar to the progression of pieces in a Baroque suite...The training of a classical musician essentially involves memorizing the complete repertoire of the radif. Only when the entire repertoire has been memorized - gusheh by gusheh, dastgah by dastgah - a process that takes many years, are musicians considered ready to embark on creative digressions, eventually leading to improvisation itself. So the radif is not performed as such, but represents the starting point for creative performance and composition."

Whew!

Qurrat al-Ain

Should I unveil my scented hair
I’ll captivate every gazelle
Should I line my narcissus eyes
I’ll destroy the whole world with desire
To see my face, every dawn
Heaven lifts its golden mirror
Should I chance to pass the church one day
I'll convert all the Christian girls.

-Qurrat al-Ain

Few Iranian women are as remarkable and as little known as Fatemeh Zarrin Taj Baraghani. She was born in about 1817 in Qazvin. Her father was a well-respected mullah who encouraged his daughter's religious education at a time when learning wasn't considered proper for young girls.

In other ways her upbringing was strictly traditional. At 14 she entered an arranged marriage with a cousin and the two of them moved to Iraq so he could pursue his religious studies. Fatemeh, also, continued her studies. She became interested in Shaykhism, a mystical school of Islamic thought. A teacher called her Qurrat al-Ain (Solace of the Eye). Central to Shaykhism was the idea that a special individual could serve as an earthly mediator between believers and the Mahdi, the hidden 12th Imam.

Fatemeh was in her 30s when she heard of a man from Shiraz who had declared himself "the Bab" - the Gate - the interlocutor between mortals and the Mahdi. She soon became a convert to Babism. She preached passionately and eloquently on behalf of the Bab, speaking to groups of men and women from behind a curtain. This was an era when women typically veiled their faces in addtion to covering their bodies.

“Such fame did she acquire that most people who were scholars or mystics sought to hear her speech and were eager to become acquainted with her powers of speculation or deduction. She had a brain full of tumultuous ideas, and thoughts vehement and restless.”

Fatemeh and the Bab never met, but he was sufficiently impressed with her through her correspondence that he declared her one of his 18 disciples. He called her Tahirih the Pure.

At a critical moment the Bab declared that he was more than just an intermediary between his followers and the Mahdi. "I am that person you have been waiting for for one thousand years!" he announced before a gathering of learned mullahs.

In declaring his own prophethood, the Bab completed his break with Islam. Some of his followers resisted, insisting that their beliefs were simply refinements of Mohammad's teachings. Other, more radical followers of the Bab, insisted their's was an entirely new religion. Qurrat al-Ain was among them. Babism promised a break with calcified orthodoxy, perhaps a greater role for women and a religious intensity that suited Qurrat al-Ain's personality. She impressed even skeptics and detractors of the Bab. Crowds of the curious and the faithful came to see her.

In 1848, Babis met in the Iranian village of Badasht to try to resolve their differences. Quarrat al-Ain was the only woman among the 80 leaders who convened there. On a summer evening, standing before the Bab's followers and curious villagers, Quarrat al-Ain removed her veil and revealed herself.

"All stood aghast before this sudden and most unexpected apparition. To behold her face was, to them, inconceivable. Even to gaze at her shadow was a thing which they deemed improper..."

Its said that one man was so shaken he cut his own throat and fled. The meeting ended in disarray. Babi persecution was on the rise and in 1850 the Bab was executed. He was 31.

Two years later, after an attempt on the Shah's life, the Bab's followers were rounded up and put to death. Among them was Qurrat al-Ain. In the hours before her execution she bathed, perfumed herself with rosewater, and dressed in a white gown. It's said she selected the silk scarf with which she was strangled.

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