03-07-2025
A land of djinns and poets: Iran in the crosshairs of history again
Iran has been in the news for all the worst reasons in recent times.
It's as if the echoes of Paul E. Erdman's sensationally titled study, The Crash of '79, that heralded the fall of the short-lived Pahlavi dynasty is still being felt today. It was written in the context of who controlled the surge of the oil economy while waiting for the Iranian Revolution to begin. At that time, it was clear enough to Iran watchers that it was in the marketplace of Tehran, that the Bazaaris, sipping their glasses of black tea with lumps of crystalised sugar, were stirring the narrative of revolt.
Being in the crosshairs of history the land has attracted countless invaders. It is rich in stories linked often to other cultures, as it is in the silk, gemstones, artefacts, dried fruits, prayer rugs, magnificent carpets and pelts of rare animals that are exchanged in its bazaars. Iran is an emporia of ideas and beliefs exchanged and exported through the centuries by its merchants, mercenaries and storytellers.
Lightning strikes
While travelling through the deeply ridged and folded countryside you might see the black robed vultures circling the mountain tops. They could be waiting to feast on the charred bricks and bones of yet another famous city on the plain of Pars attacked by the Mongols. Just as frequently armies of warriors have crossed across to loot and pillage their distant neighbours and return with the spoils.
Who can forget Nader Shah taking over the Persian throne and first dismantling parts of the Ottoman Empire in the West and then turning his attention on north India. In lightning strikes and a reputation for a ferocious barbarity including the slaughter of women and children, he defeated the Mughal army in the Battle of Karnal in 1739.
As a peace offering in exchange for further attacks, he demanded and received the peacock throne and the world-famous Golconda diamonds, one of which, the Darya-i-Noor, is at the Gulistan Palace Museum in Tehran.
Rustam and Sohrab
In the poet Ferdowsi's epic poem in 50,000 rhyming couplets, the Shahnameh, published in 1010 CE, it's the warrior kings of Persia that are celebrated. The most famous of these is the meeting between Rustam and his estranged son Sohrab on the battlefield. The image is one that has been reproduced in Persian style miniature paintings, on painted tiles and woven wall hangings. His poem stops with the last of the hereditary rulers Khosrow ll leaving the throne; that is to say before the Arab intervention.
Ferdowsi introduces us to a land of djinns and poets with links to the early Zoroastrian priests tending their fire temples. The winged symbol of the 'Faravahar' with a figure of a man at the centre of a disc appears on the wall of the Fire Temple at Yazd in Iran; as it does at the Fire Temples of the Zoroastrians in India who fled from there across the seas with their sacred fire.
Like the mythical fire bird, the Simorgh, the Parsi community of the Indian subcontinent kept their promise to add their special lustre to the country of their adoption, while keeping their faith alive.
When the British came on the scene, the two cultures blended with an ease that is best described in the satirical The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan. It was written in English by James Justinian Morier, who lived in Qajar Iran as the British envoy. In his capacity as Hajji Baba, a Bazaari with a yen for travel, this is what he tells us: 'By the time I was sixteen it would be difficult to say whether I was most accomplished as a barber or a scholar. Besides shaving the head, cleaning the ears, and trimming the beard, I became famous for my skill in the offices of the bath. No one understood better than I the different modes of rubbing or shampooing, as practised in India, Cashmere, and Turkey; and I had an art peculiar to myself of making the joints to crack, and my slaps echo.'
British entry
There was an almost instant recognition between the scholars of the two nations that is explored in the two companion volumes by Sir Denis Wright who served as British Ambassador to Mohammed Reza Shah of Iran during his glory years. The English Amongst the Persians and The Persians Amongst the English are a glorious recapitulation of what was always a formidable relationship. As Wright mentions in his preface, 'nowhere in the world is British cleverness so wildly exaggerated as in Iran, and nowhere are the British more hated for it'. One of the reasons advanced for this analysis is that the British considered Iran as a decoy for India, against Russian advancements in the area; a Cold War thesis that we may now ignore.
One of the most chilling accounts of what happened to Iran after the installation of 'Khomeini and the Islamic Revolution' is by Amir Taheri in his 1985 book The Spirit of Allah. As editor-in-Chief of Kayhan, the national newspaper of Iran in the 1970s, Taheri, an academic now in exile, has written several books since then. However, inexorable the trajectory of events that have led to the rule by the Ayatollahs, Taheri includes a ghazal by Khomeini written perhaps in the 1930s.
'It's spring and there is blossom on the almond tree/The bride in the garden is verily, the almond tree.' And yet after such gentle beginnings, the conclusion is abrupt and terrifying.
One can only return to an earlier poet and the twelfth century Attar of Nishapur and the enchanting vision that he offers in The Conference of Birds.
It's in the form of a journey, a quest through many different forms of attachment in search of the marvellous Simorgh, the female spirit of rebirth who rises repeatedly through several revolutions. It's a reaffirmation of life through fire.
The journey starts within.
Geeta Doctor is a critic and cultural commentator.
