My Iran Diary—Conclusion

by Yoginder Sikand

Afzal, our driver, proves true to his word. We reach Mashhad five minutes before midnight, as he had promised, although I was not really convinced then. We have covered over a thousand kilometres in just eight hours, a journey that would have taken several days in India. Tomorrow being the birthday of the Imam Mahdi, the streets of the town are festooned with banners and ropes of multicolored lights. Many shops are still open.

I accompany Ali Hussain down a narrow alley, in a part of town which abounds in cheap hostels that are mostly used by pilgrims visiting the hallowed shrine of Imam Ali Reza, the eighth Shia Imam. The places we stop at are all full, and so we are forced to settle for an airless basement which is also used as a prayer room. Ali Hussain spreads his blanket on the cold floor, and despite the presence of an obese man, whose snore is more like a roar, whom we share the room with, we fall off to sleep almost immediately.

We are up early next morning, as Ali Hussain wants to offer his fajr prayers at the shrine of Imam Reza. Even at this early hour the town is abuzz with activity. The shrine is teeming with pilgrims, today being a special holy day. Ali Hussain says that we are bound to lose each other in the crowd, and so, from now, we must go our own ways. ’ Inshallah’, he says as he embraces me and plants a kiss on both my cheeks, ‘We’ll meet in Afghanistan sometime, if you come to my village’.

I scribble down his address. I would, of course, love to visit him sometime, if God permits, and, of course, provided the Americans are expelled, the Taliban put down and peace finally returns to that hapless land.

The shrine of Imam Reza is a sprawling complex, containing several vast squares, domed chambers, colonnaded corridors, museums, libraries and madrasas, and a grand edifice that houses the Imam’s grave. It is, by all counts, one of the gems of Iranian architecture. Inside, I am pushed and shoved, and, in turn, I push and shove, too, till I barely manage to touch the grill that encircles the grave. I am not allowed to stand there for more than a couple of seconds, for behind me literally thousands of other people want to enjoy the same privilege.

I stroll around the shrine till mid-afternoon, marveling at its exquisite architecture but, even more, at the awe-inspiring outpouring of faith and grief displayed by the milling crowds sending salutations to Imam Reza, who, like almost all the other Shia Imams, died a bloody death at the hands of an assassin. I observe turbanned speaker after speaker lecturing to the faithful about the expected return of the Twelfth Shia Imam, who, they assure their listeners, will avenge the deaths of his predecessors and will establish a global rule of justice and peace. 

I do not intend to spend the night again in the same stuffy basement in the hostel, so I decide that I must leave Mashhad tonight. But before that I have to do a hurried round of some of the sites that my guidebook lists. It mentions a castle perched on cliff somewhere near the Afghan border and a thriving market-town on the frontier with Turkmenistan, both roughly an equal distance from Mashhad. They both sound exciting, but I’m pressed for time.

I take a bus to the historic town of Tus, which is now, I discover to my dismay, a bustling modern suburb of Mashhad, ringed on all sides with ugly factory buildings. Tus was the home of a number of classical Persian scholar-poets. The grand Abbasid vizier, Nizam ul-Mulk, considered to be the patron of the first state-sponsored madrasas that later flourished throughout the Islamic world, hailed from Tus, as did the twelfth century Imam Ghazali, recognized as one of the greatest Muslim thinkers ever, who sought to reconcile Sufism with the shariah-based Islamic tradition. Only a bare stone slab in the porch of a forlorn ancient domed structure keeps the memory of the latter alive.

A much more popular destination for visitors is what is purported to be the tomb of Abol Qasem Ferdausi, one of Iran’s most renowned poets, set in a delightful garden designed in the classical Persian style, with little quadrangles of grass and flower beds divided by gurgling water channels. My guidebook warns me that whether or not Ferdausi is actually buried here still remains unclear.

This grand tomb complex was redone in the 1960s in the reign of the later deposed Shah of Iran, Reza Pahlavi. Commissioning the complex was a singularly political act on his part. After all, Ferdausi is best known for his magnum opus Shah Namah, a work that recounts the legendary pursuits and fame of the various pre-Islamic Persian rulers, who styled themselves as virtual ‘shadows of God on earth’, a status that the megalomaniac Reza Pahlavi might have aspired to. Ferdausi devoted more than 35 years to writing his magnum opus, which he composed for the Samanid princes of Khorasan, the chief instigators of the revival of Iranian cultural traditions after the Arab conquest of the seventh century.

Reflecting the Shah’s obsession with Iran’s pre-Islamic monarchical tradition, this tall marble tomb-structure, that from a distance looks like a decorated wedding cake, bears on top the Zoroastrian religious symbol of a crowned and bearded human figure with a pair of enormous outstretched wings. The adjacent museum hosts a fabulous collection of miniature paintings, ancient as well as recent, depicting the exploits of the various Iranian rulers whom the Shah Namah extols. One, which I instinctively recoil at, but as I carefully examine it,  find curiously amusing, shows a pot-bellied Indian prince perched in a howdah atop a ponderous elephant, engaged in battle with an un-named Iranian king.

I see the same sort of imagery, and experience somewhat the same reaction, at the tomb of Nader Shah which I visit when I return to Mashhad later in the day—a metal engraving of the ruthless eighteenth century usurper sacking and burning down Delhi. This bandit ruler, who is also referred to as the ‘Napoleon of Iran’ for having united the country, returned to Mashhad, his capital, with unimaginable treasures that he looted from India, including the famed peacock throne, leaving the Mughals so enervated that they soon fell easy prey to the wily British.

I’m running short of money, and my ATM card does not work in Iran, so I decide that spending the night traveling in a bus would save me the literally several tens of thousands of tomans—a couple of hundred Indian rupees—that I would otherwise have to spend for a room in a hotel in Mashhad. Accordingly, I board a bus to Isfahan, located 1300 kilometres and a fourteen-hour drive from Mashhad. I feel sort of silly fleeing Mashhad like this, not going to the various nearby places that my guidebook highly recommends, but I have just one day left in Iran, and surely, I tell myself, I cannot leave the country without visiting the town that is, of course rather exaggeratedly, also referred to as Nisf Jehan or ‘Half of the World’.

                                                *

My guidebook tells me that two days are the bare minimum that one must set aside for Isfahan, which, like all the other Iranian towns I’ve visited, is now a well-planned modern city. I am forced to pick and choose between the various sights.

I begin with the mandatory visit to the sprawling Imam Square, which is lined with literally hundreds of shops selling an amazing assortment of delightful handicrafts, adjacent to which are the awe-inspiring blue mosques whose enormous minarets reach for the skies, for which Isfahan is world-renowned. I stroll around in the cool shade of the forest of Chinars at the nearby Chehel Sutoon Palace, where I accost the dreaded Nadir Shah once again, this time in a massive fresco that covers an entire wall, from bottom to top, my patriotic fervour being even more aroused on seeing him and his men triumphing over the Mughals and their army and capturing Delhi!

From there I head to Jolfa, the Armenian Christian quarter of the town. There are some ten thousand members of this community in Isfahan, mostly well-off traders. There are three imposing churches here—contrary to what the media says, Iranian Armenians enjoy considerable religious freedom, as do the country’s other recognized minorities—Zoroastrians and Jews. A museum run by the authorities of the Vank cathedral, Isfahan’s largest Christian place of worship, holds an amazing collection of artifacts that reflect the rich history of the community—including, and this is a relief from the shock that the Nadir Shah images have administered me, a copy of the first ever Armenian newspaper, published in the late seventeenth century in Calcutta, the city where I was born! Other exhibits of interest include numerous letters issued by various Iranian rulers exempting Armenian traders from taxes, providing churches with lands and warning errant officials to refrain from harassing members of the community. Particularly noteworthy is the memorial dedicated to the roughly two million Armenians massacred in Turkey by the Ottoman authorities.

I spend the afternoon sauntering in the bustling lanes of Isfahan’s covered bazaar, said to be over a thousand years old, a confusing maze consisting of dozens of intersecting lanes. Sacks overflowing with spices and nuts, furry rugs and delicately woven silk carpets, giant glass hukkahs and crystal perfume bottles, images of holy personages and fat leather-bound religious tomes give the place a certain enchanting aura. As evening descends, I do a hurried trip to the Atesh Khane or ‘fire house’, an ancient and now neglected and rapidly crumbling Zoroastrian shrine. The fire that burned here was extinguished many centuries ago when Iran turned largely Muslim, but the inner walls of what was the holy fire-chamber are still covered with layers of soot. Today, there are only a few thousand Zoroastrians in Iran, and in Isfahan, once a major centre of Zoroastrianism, only a few dozen families remain.

I am now down to just about enough money to get back to Tehran. I adopt the same tactic to save on spending on a hotel that I used yesterday—I spend the night, the second in a row, on a bus. Back in Tehran, I have time just enough to visit the infamous ‘Den of Spies’, which I insist to myself I simply cannot miss.  This sprawling, heavily barricaded campus served as the American Embassy, till the Shah of Iran, a close American ally, was toppled in 1979, following which most of the American staff inside were held captive by revolutionary enthusiasts, who identified them as spies. Entry is forbidden, and so I have to reluctantly remain satisfied with the visual treat on display on the outer walls—an eerie skull and a smoking gun drawn across an American flag, an army of victorious Iranian revolutionaries defying the might of the ‘Great Satan’—America depicted as a monster, an empathic announcement in the form of a verse that claims that American imperialism will soon be crushed, and so on.

Who knows what these claims now mean, I think as I click them away on my camera, with Bush plotting to bomb Iran on trumpeted charges, and with America still refusing to learn from its gory history? I am assured by a man, who joins me to ponder on the slogans that most Iranians, even those unhappy with the present regime, would solidly unite against any American attack.

I can only hope this man is right, of course, and the possibility of much that I see now as I sit in the taxi that takes me to Imam Khomeini Airport, some seventy kilometers away, being blotted out by American bombs in a few weeks or months—who knows?—makes me nauseous and indignant. I decide that when I get back to Delhi I must contribute, in my own very modest way, to countering the sedulously cultivated myths in the media about Iran that are being now wielded to justify a murderous American-Israeli imperialist offensive against the country on a massive scale.

The only thing I can do in this regard is write. So, I decide to do an Iran Diary in the hope that at least some people might see one of the most world’s most fascinating and friendly countries as I saw it in a brief stay of a week.