In the Rose Garden of the Martyrs

CHAPTER TWO Isfahan

One afternoon in the spring I set out from the Armenian quarter in the lovely city of Isfahan, towards the Seminary of the Four Gardens. The following day was the anniversary of the investiture of the Imam Ali as the Prophet’s successor. The people were in a good mood. They revered Ali for being modest and just, and looked forward to celebrating these qualities by visiting family members, stuffing themselves with beryan – a dish that features minced sheep’s lungs – and passing judgement on their hosts’ new daughter-in-law. They strolled in the mild afternoon sun, mothers and daughters arm in arm (and fathers in their wake), buying tulips to put in iced water to keep overnight, and sweetmeats to take as gifts.

I reached one of the main roads that head north towards the river, and hailed an old shared taxi. The back seat had its complement of three. The occupant of the front passenger seat stepped out so that I could sit between him and the driver; I was suspended over the gap between their seats. The driver sat hunched over the steering wheel, leaning slightly against the door. We moved off. The driver changed gears like a surgeon replacing dislocated bones.

We were soon stuck in traffic outside one of the big banks, in front of which was a shiny blue car mounted on a gantry. The car – new, French-made – was an incentive: every account holder stood a chance of winning it in a prize draw. It was caparisoned with bunting and flashing light bulbs. It had metallic paint that had been devised by a computer. The bank had put it on the gantry to publicize it – and to make it hard to steal.

I looked in the rear-view mirror and my eye was taken by a fat woman sitting in the middle of the back seat. She was staring longingly out of the window at the zippy French car. She caught me looking at her and pretended to be scandalized, tucking her fringe under her headscarf. ‘What’s happening up there. Mr Driver?’ she demanded, ‘Why aren’t we moving?’

A car, a Buick from the 1970s, was stuck at the intersection, having carried out half a U-turn. Another car, an Iranian-made Paykan, had grazed one of the Buick’s tailfins. The drivers had got out of their cars. The wife of the Buick driver was leaning out of the window, yelling.

‘Look at the wife, egging him on!’ said our driver. ‘What difference does it make? That poor Buick’s been wounded more times than I have.’ The side of the Buick was discoloured from dents that had been amateurishly smoothed out. The engine was still running. It emitted black smoke.

The taxi driver reached under his seat, pulled out a thermos and unscrewed the cap. He poured a little tea into a dirty glass that rested on the dashboard, swilled it around and poured it out of the window. He filled the glass with tea and, putting it back on the dashboard, closed the thermos and put it back under his seat. Then he held up the glass and said, ‘Please go ahead …’

He was offering us tea. In such instances, you don’t accept. It would be bad form. It’s his tea, but he has to offer it. It would be bad form not to. But he’d be put out if someone said, ‘Yes, I’d like some of your tea.’ No one does. The driver gets to drink his tea and appear courteous at the same time. Both ways he wins.

There was polite murmuring around the taxi: ‘Thanks, but no’ … ‘You go ahead and have some’ … ‘I don’t feel like tea’ … ‘I’ve just had some tea.’

Lies. We’d all enjoy a glass of tea.

The driver took out a packet of cigarettes and we went through the same rigmarole. We felt our breast pockets for imaginary packets of cigarettes. Eventually, the driver withdrew a cigarette from his packet, lit it and settled down to watch. A policeman had arrived at the intersection. He was trying to broker a reconciliation. The driver of the Paykan was a cocky brute, well-built, young enough to be the Buick driver’s son. He danced from one foot to another. Soon, the policeman seemed to make a breakthrough. The youth hugged the Buick driver.

During the argument, the traffic lights at the intersection had turned green several times, at which cars had surged forward from all directions. Lots of them wanted to turn, this way or that, but the Buick and the Paykan were blocking their way. The cars were revving, edging forward, kissing bumpers. Someone would have to reverse. Iranian drivers don’t like reversing. It’s a form of defeat. I felt sorry for the policeman.

He did a good job. He positioned himself in the middle – whistling, gesturing, occasionally giving a winning smile. He was a professional. In a little while, at his prompting, a car edged forward from the middle, and away. Another followed. The knot was untied.

‘Well done!’ the taxi driver murmured, and we moved forward. The protagonists stayed where they had been. They would wait for more policemen, who would take statements and measure angles to determine who was at fault. As we went past, the Buick driver’s wife, a woman in a red scarf, leaned out of the window and shouted at her husband, ‘I should have known you wouldn’t have the balls to stand up for yourself! You, who took the full brunt of the Iraqi attacks! Why don’t you stand firm, instead of letting some beardless chick trample your pride?’

The woman’s husband turned around. His face was full of anguish. His wife wasn’t much older than the Paykan driver.

The taxi driver sighed as we drove off. ‘You’ve got to show them who’s boss from day one. I mean, now it’s too late. He’s let her get out of control, challenge his authority. Nothing he can do now.’

A little further down the road, a man who was sitting next to the woman in the back seat got out. He was replaced by a thin woman who recognized the succulent woman: they were distant relatives. They didn’t seem pleased to see one another. They passed on regards to each other’s families, and extended invitations for tea and lunch.

The thin woman said, ‘Did you get much rain in Tehran?’

‘More than dear Isfahan, I can tell you! You know, what with struggling to combat the illness of my late husband – may God show him mercy – and the demands it’s made on my time and health, this is the first time I’ve been to Isfahan for five years. Oh! My heart burned when I saw the river – dried up like a burned courgette, with the wretched boatmen standing around in the mud, with nothing else to do but pray for rain. I mean, is it possible for a river to have no water? Our river? In this day and age?’

‘They sold our water to Yazd,’ the driver said. ‘They sent it off in a pipeline. Cost a fortune to build. The fathers of bitches.’

We were in a long queue of cars. The driver leaned out, far enough to see past the cars in front. He swung the wheel and pressed down hard on the accelerator. We emerged from the queue of cars, into the oncoming traffic. There weren’t many cars coming; the lights ahead were red. By the time the oncoming traffic started to move, we were elbowing our way into a gap between two cars, now much nearer the traffic lights. One of the other drivers raised his hand, but was too lazy to clench it.

‘I don’t know why everyone drives so fast,’ the fat woman said to her relative. ‘All they do when they get to their destination is drink tea.’

The driver grinned. ‘God forbid, madam, you were offended by my efforts to expedite you to your destination! Or perhaps it was what I said? Do you have Yazdi blood, by any chance?’

‘Lord, no! My parents – may God show them mercy – were from Isfahan, and proud of it. But the president is from Yazd, isn’t he?’ she said slyly. ‘That might explain why they’re allowed to drink our water. The Yazdis have always had it in for Isfahan. I should know; my son married a Yazdi. She won’t even iron his shirts. She says he gets through too many. He gives them to me, my poor darling. Too proud to iron an Isfahani’s white shirt, the Yazdis are!’

‘At least they opened the dam again, in time for the holidays,’ said the third passenger in the back seat. ‘There’s water in the river now, thanks be to God.’

‘Exactly!’ said the fat woman. ‘They were scared the Isfahanis would flay them if they didn’t open the sluices. But they’ll shut the dam again after the holiday, and say there’s no more water. They’ll send it to Yazd instead.’

‘And our poor Isfahani kids will carry on topping themselves,’ the man said. ‘Everyone knows the suicide rate goes up when the river’s dry. It’s bad for the soul.’

The man next to me stirred in his seat. ‘Pardon me, but you’re wrong. The problem is not Yazd, but the farmers in Isfahan province. They’re planting rice along the river banks, even though rice needs more water than almost any other crop. Only an idiot would plant rice when there’s a drought.’

‘And what would you have us eat if there’s no rice?’ the fat woman demanded. ‘You want us to get thin and weak?’

‘We should buy our rice from elsewhere.’

‘Sir, you’d prefer that we eat Pakistani rice that has no perfume? Or that sticky revolting stuff the Turks call rice? You can’t make a respectable polov with that.’

The man sitting next to her said, ‘She’s right; our rice is the best in the world. Everyone says so.’

‘And there’s another thing,’ said the woman, ‘our dear motherland has been dependent on foreigners for hundreds of years. Now you want to put our bellies at the mercy of Pakistan! Everyone knows who’s behind Pakistan: the English! It wouldn’t surprise me if the English had something to do with our water shortage. They always stir up trouble in countries they fear. That’s why they’re the best politicians, and we’ve never been any good.’

‘The English are indeed very devious,’ said the man next to me, ‘but I haven’t heard of them altering the climate.’

The woman snorted. ‘I wouldn’t put anything past them.’ Then she said, ‘With your permission. Mr Driver, I’ll get out here.’

The thin woman said, ‘I thought your brother lived further on.’

‘He does,’ the fat woman replied. ‘But I like to exercise before a holiday. I’ll walk the last half-kilometre.’ The taxi stopped. The thin woman got out to allow the fat woman to do so. The fat woman put out both her arms to try and lever herself from the hollow she had created in the back seat. For a moment, one of her hot hands gripped my shoulder. She stood at the window, and looked in.[*]

The fat woman said: ‘How much, sir?’

‘Be my guest,’ said the driver.

The fat woman said: ‘I beg of you.’

‘Whatever you like,’ he grinned. ‘Really, it’s not important.’

‘How much? I beg of you.’ The woman was getting out her purse.

‘I’m serious; be my guest.’

‘How much?’

The driver surrendered. ‘Seventy-five tomans, if you’d be so kind.’

‘Seventy-five tomans? I only got in at Hakim Street. It’s fifty tomans from there.’

The driver frowned. ‘Seventy-five. It’s been seventy-five tomans for three weeks now.’

‘I gave fifty tomans two days ago. I’m not giving more than fifty.’ She looked sharply at her relative who was examining her nails.

‘It’s seventy-five tomans,’ said the driver. His smile had disappeared.

Suddenly, the woman was angry. ‘Is this the correct treatment, the day before we celebrate the investiture of the Imam Ali, salaam to him and his family?’ She looked accusingly at me. ‘Is this the right impression to give foreigners, that Iran’s a country of unprincipled hat-lifters? I’m not giving a penny more than fifty.’ She threw the note in the window.

The driver picked it off my knee. As he put the car into gear, he said, ‘She eats my head with her worthless prattle. She’s too stingy to stay in as far as her destination. Then, she rips me off.’

‘We’re only related by marriage,’ said the thin woman.

I said: ‘I may as well get out here, Mr Driver. I want to cross the bridge.’

‘Where are you from?’ said the driver, as I gave him the fare.

‘France,’ I said.

He patted my shoulder. ‘Whatever you do, don’t marry an Iranian.’

I entered the bridge of Allahvardi Khan. Framed in one of the pierced arches was a middle-aged couple, staring at each other. I touched the bricks. They were warm and biscuity. When I reached the other side, I looked back. The Islamic arch had been repeated like the name of God in a prayer.

In the first years of the seventeenth century, these bricks were baking in the name of Shah Abbas I, castles of them hardening over smoking dung. Between 1598 – when Abbas moved his capital to Isfahan from the northern city of Ghazvin – and his death in 1629, they turned a provincial town into one of the world’s most opulent capitals.

By moving to Isfahan, Abbas changed the nature of a country whose extremities now roughly corresponded to the borders of modern Iran. (At its peak, his empire encompassed the Iranian plateau, with fingers reaching into Mesopotamia and Anatolia to the west, into the Caucasus to the northwest, and almost to the River Oxus, the northern boundary of modern Afghanistan, in the northeast). Rather than stay near the Caspian Sea, as his Turkmen ancestors had done, Abbas aimed at the centre.

The migration allowed Abbas to give up his former dependence on Turkmen tribesmen, and to set up a new confederation. His government and army contained not only Persians, Turkmens and Arabs, but also Georgian, Caucasian and Circassian converts to Islam. He forcibly imported three thousand Armenian Christian families to Isfahan, and encouraged them to prosper spiritually as well as economically. Foreign visitors found in Isfahan a suitable seat for a cosmopolitan empire – Ghazvin, by comparison, had been a draughty Turkish tent.

Abbas enjoyed the company of foreigners. They, confused by the name of his dynasty, Safavi, called him the Sophy. Like his near-contemporary, India’s Akbar, Abbas discussed religious questions with the Augustinians and the Carmelites. Like Akbar, he resisted their efforts to convert him.

The Balenciagas, Faberges and Dunhills of the age spoke Persian. During Abbas’s reign, Europe acquired a taste for Persian goods – for silken carpets brocaded with silver and gold, damasks and taffetas, bezoar stones and turquoises. They learned to trip on Persian opium. Abbas’s wealth was axiomatic; Fabian wouldn’t stop baiting poor Malvolio even ‘for a pension of thousands to be paid from the Sophy’.

Abbas was not a successful family man. He murdered his eldest son, Mirza, and blinded the second, Khodabandeh – ruling him out, according to Islamic law, of the succession. Jane Dieulafoy, a formidably disapproving French archaeologist and traveller of the nineteenth century, relates an account she heard of Khodabandeh’s revenge – apparently exacted on his own small daughter, in order to spite Abbas, who adored his grandchildren:

One morning, at the very moment when the child came to kiss his unseeing pupils, he seized her and slit her throat, in full view of his panic-struck wife. Then, he threw himself on his son, who had come running at the sound of the struggle, and tried to deal him the same fate. In vain; the child was snatched – still alive – from his father’s arms, and Shah Abbas was informed of what had happened. When he was confronted by the corpse of his granddaughter, the old king emitted exclamations of rage and desperation that filled the killer with an exultant and dastardly happiness; for a few moments, he savoured his horrendous revenge, before ending his own life by swallowing poison.

Abbas’s fear of his sons perhaps kept him alive; it also prevented promising princes from maturing into worthy rulers. Most of the Safavid Shahs who came after Abbas rivalled themselves only for despotism and sloth. For the remainder of the seventeenth century and the first quarter of the eighteenth, the empire was defended only by one or two competent grand viziers, and the structural excellence of Abbas’s state.

Today, Abbas’s paranoia has been forgiven. Even in a regime that hates and fears monarchs, people refer to him as Abbas the Great. Hard-line revolutionaries concede his achievements – though they are loath to admit that, were it not for him, their revolution could not have happened. Not only did Abbas help set the boundaries that delineate modern Iran, he also made Iran institutionally, irrevocably, a Shi’a state.

His uncle, the mystic Ismail, had imposed Shi’ism on Iran’s mostly Sunni population. But many orthodox Shi’as considered Ismail to be a heretic. His self-depiction as (variously) the harbinger of the twelfth Imam, the twelfth Imam, the Imam Ali, even God, drew to him deluded fanatics who believed he was immortal and impossible to defeat. (Until, that is, his army was smashed by the Turks.) His poetry was denounced as blasphemous. Even by the standards of the time, he drank and sexed immoderately.

Abbas was more conventional – and more inscrutable – than his uncle. He was tempted by flesh and wine, but he dropped Ismail’s claims to divinity. His zeal, though sincere, was complemented by his politics; his promotion of Shi’ism as a state religion helped set Iran apart from two predatory Sunni empires in the vicinity: the Ottomans and the Mughals of north India. One of his most important acts was to promote orthodox Shi’a clerics. State-sponsored mullahs were expected to be loyal and to counter the influence of mysticism. (They had a personal interest in doing so. Mysticism’s emphasis on the believer’s personal relationship with God undermines the mullahs’ perception of Islam as primarily a code of laws and behaviour, belittling the transmitters of that code – the mullahs themselves.) Abbas endowed Shi’a seminaries that attracted clerics from other Shi’a centres, like Bahrain and southern Lebanon; he himself married the daughter of one of these foreign clerics.

Scholars in the seminaries learned to understand and interpret Islamic law – through logic, grammar and rhetoric. They learned the relationship between Islamic law and their sources, the sayings and traditions of the Prophet Muhammad and the twelve Imams. They were taught a set of systematic principles for deriving one from the other, called jurisprudence. In time, senior mullahs started issuing new and comprehensive compilations of the sources.

Islam has no sacrament requiring ordained ministers; there is, strictly speaking, no ‘clergy’ – certainly not in the sense of a homogeneous group of professionals whose job is to mediate between people and God. In the Safavid period, however, Iran gained a clergy in all but name, and it became a social and political institution. Experienced mullahs were sent to the provinces as judges, dispensing Islamic law. They administered wealthy religious foundations. They systematized the collection of religious taxes that entered their own coffers. They became the state’s spiritual backer.

The expanding science of jurisprudence legitimized their influence. Jurisprudence allowed senior clerics to interpret religious rulings. The most senior of the jurists – the mojtahed – was deemed qualified to divine God’s will in areas where he had not expressed himself; this made the mojtahed a kind of divine legislator. As the Safavid era wore on, the Shah ceased in religious terms to be more than the titular head of Ismail’s old mystic order. He came to rely on the mojtahed for religious sanction of his policies and actions. The Safavid-era mullahs did not go as far as to demand political leadership; but that did not stop some of them acquiring a taste for worldly power.

Shah Sultan Hossein, Abbas’s great-great-great grandson, came under the influence of mullahs who persuaded him to forbid alcoholic revels and to banish mystics from the capital. He endowed the Seminary of the Four Gardens in Isfahan, to propagate the theology of these mullahs. He authorized the persecution and forcible conversion of Sunnis under his control, as well as minorities such as Christians, Jews and Zoroastrians.

Sultan Hossein’s bigotry, combined with indecision and misrule, led to revolt. In 1722, an army of Sunni Afghans captured Isfahan. After keeping Sultan Hossein captive for a few years, they executed him, effectively extinguishing the Safavid dynasty. Iran sank into anarchy and the clergy withdrew from sight.

I walked up the Four Gardens. It had once been four recreational gardens that were laid out by Abbas, with arcades made up of plane trees bowing to one another and a track for horsemen. Now it’s a straight, modern road, with travel agents and cake shops. After about half a kilometre I came to a wall of arch shapes illuminated by tiles – the Seminary of the Four Gardens, Sultan Hossein’s endowment. I pushed open a door and went in.

After the movement and noise of the street, the seminary gave me an immense sensation of peace. It was laid around a courtyard, bounded by cells set in vaulted niches, with tiled porticos on three sides. A rectangular pool of water and a path divided the grass into four lawns. The cypress trees almost obscured the vivid blue dome over the prayer hall.

A mullah strolled along the pool of water, talking to a seminarian. When they reached the far end, they turned around and retraced their steps. Other seminarians were crossing the courtyard, on their way to class. A few were sunning themselves on the balconies of the first-floor cells. A door slammed, the way they do in institutions.

I walked to one of the corners of the courtyard. Its arch led into a roofless chamber with low stone platforms; in the old days, the mullahs would lecture from these platforms, the seminarians at their feet. I sat down in the shade.

Back in the 1970s, Isfahan was sinking under slime. The King Mother’s eastern wall kissed Iran’s most opulent hotel, the Shah Abbas. (The Shah Abbas had been a traditional travellers’ rest house; now, it had a slab of modern rooms stuck on the front, and a kind of unending feast of Balthazaar going on inside.) Outside the door of the seminary, in the Four Gardens, cars blared Western music. Their young occupants lusted for a US college education. Everywhere, there were signs of progress. Advertisements for washing machines; Old Spice aerosols in pharmacy windows; female arms sprouting downy hairs coming out of halter tops. You could buy foreign booze in the Four Gardens and go whoring round the back of the municipality.