FALL OF THE PEACOCK THRONE

The Story Of Iran

William Forbis

   Defeat Makes Us Invincible

In this long sweep of history, dozens of dynasties, greater and lesser, reigned over an Iran that was sometimes a vast empire and sometimes an assortment of principalities. One must learn to distinguish Seleucids from Sassanians, Seljuks from Safavids. Reasonably independent and arguably native Iranian kings ruled for thirteen of the twenty-five centuries since Cyrus, in seven national dynasties: Achaemenian, Parthian, Sassanian, Safavid, Zand, Qajar, and Pahlavi. Foreign (or local) kings prevailed during the other twelve centuries. Yet in all those bad times, Iran, marvellous to say, never became anybody's colony. The Persians' sly technique of turning their conquerors into Persians saw to that.

Within thirty years after Alexander's death, his empire broke into three realms -Egypt, Macedonia, and Persia- each ruled by one of Alexander's generals. Seleucus, the Greek who inherited the reduced lands of the Achaemenians, imported thousands upon thousands of Greeks from their overpopulated homeland. They brought Greek gods and the Greek language, which replaced Aramaic as the country's lingua franca. Persia became part of the Hellenistic world. Archaeologists digging in sites that correspond to the Seleucid period find statues carved in classical Greek style from Greek marble, and the ruins of temples built on Western plans with imitations of Greek columns and capitals. But neither Seleucus nor the succeeding Seleucid kings could stop the empire from shrinking slowly to the westward. A century and a half later they were cornered into Syria, there to be snapped up by the newly puissant Romans.

Even as the Seleucids lost their grip on power, their subjects flourished in wealth, in liveliness of urban life, and in technological progress. The rise of China made the Iranian plateau into an indispensable land bridge for trade between east and west. The inns called caravanserais arose in the deserts, and camel caravans transported all the new, sophisticated luxury goods of the world: cameos, drugs, aromatics, purple dye. Iran itself exported precious stones, carpets, pedigreed dogs; and sent to upstart Rome such boons of civilization as cotton, the lemon, the melon, sesame seed, and the duck, causing a veritable agrarian revolution in Italy. But through it all, says Ghirshman, the Iranians refused to become Greeks, and in the end "this conquest of Iran was a defeat for Hellenism. By contrast it was a peaceful victory for Iran, which emerged materially richer and more advanced."

Concurrently with the contraction of Hellenistic Persia, the Aryans in the eastern plateau stirred and reasserted power, even minting coins that bore the names of Darius and Artaxerxes. At first centered in what the Greeks called Parthia (roughly, the modern province of Khorasan), they expanded until in 87 B.C. the Parthians held all land between India and Armenia.

For four centuries, until 224 A.D., the Parthians successfully held Iran together, defended it from its enemies, and built national pride and confidence. As the Parthian empire expanded westward, the Roman empire expanded eastward. They met at the Euphrates, and contested over this border for centuries. In what is now Azerbaijan, a Parthian king threw back a legion headed by Mark Antony; in Mesopotamia, the Parthians turned back a thrust led personally by the emperor Trajan. For their part, the Romans three times burned and looted the Parthian capital of Ctesiphon on the banks of the Tigris; and compelled one Parthian king to signify his vassalage by going to Rome to accept his crown from Nero. But it is misleading to view history as a mere succession of wars, and the more relevant truth is that Rome and Parthia managed between clashes to be ardent traders with one another, and with the rich nations farther east, India and China. Rome sent manufactured goods, wines, oils, and gold in return for ivory, perfume, spices, silk, and steel. The Parthians maintained good roads, which, together with the invention of the horseshoe, made it possible for a fast rider to go 350 miles in two days. After China sent an ambassador to the Parthian king, the Iranians improved Chinese cooking by sending saffron, the onion, and the cucumber, and in return got the apricot and the silkworm.

Parthia, in effect, stopped Rome from expansion to the east; but Rome, stretching westward to Spain and Scotland, remained by any measure the greater empire. It was left to the next dynasty, building upon the foundations that Parthia laid, to elevate Persia again to true world eminence. The Sassanian kings ruled for four centuries, and at the peak of their power and glory fell in a few years to an enemy they scarcely knew existed, the Arabs.

Persia -true Persia, the realm of the Persians but not of the Medes, the land adjacent to the Persian Gulf, the modern province of Fars- was only a subkingdom of Parthia in the first two centuries of the Christian era.
Vassalage, the Persians felt, was bitter tea for the descendants of the Achaemenians. Finally one of them, Ardeshir (grandson of an obscure Persian kinglet named Sassan, and namesake of thousands of modern-day Iranians, including former Ambassador to Washington Ardeshir Zahedi) took arms and in 224 killed the Parthian king. Ardeshir appointed his son Shahpur (now also a popular namesake) co-king, and in no time Shahpur recaptured the eastern empire as far as Samarkand and the Indus River. Then he turned west against the attacking Roman emperor Valerian and had the marvellous luck to take Valerian "captive with my own hands." Shahpur exiled seventy thousand Roman legionaries to what is now Khuzistan, where they engineered and built bridges, dams, and roads, some of which still exist.

Militarily the Sassanians were strong and modern; they attacked with heavily armoured cavalry backed up by lightly armoured mounted archers in turn backed up by elephants (the tanks of the era), all followed by the infantry. Against fortresses they had siege engines the equal of the Romans'. As was the case in other dynasties, the history of the Sassanians reads like a litany of wars, as the succeeding kings defended the distant marches of the empire. Shahpur II, who reigned for seventy years beginning in 309, had to deal with the Romans close at hand after Constantine, converted to Christianity, moved his capital to Constantinople and inaugurated the Byzantine Empire.

The Metropolitan Museum in New York displays a haunting sculptured portrait of Shahpur II, as well as elegant Sassanian bowls engraved with wine-making scenes, and a dish depicting a king changing a buck to a doe by shooting off his horns and then back to a buck by adding arrows as horns. Between wars and behind the battlefronts, art and civilization under the Sassanians reached new heights of grace. What the world now thinks of as traditional Persian art took form: in mosaics and embossed silver, languorous women and madly dashing hunters; in textiles, lions and griffons; in architecture, arches and the vaulted and recessed portal called the ivan. The Avesta, the scripture of the Zoroastrian religion, was set down on paper, in the beginnings of a Persian written literature.

The members of the nobility revelled in harems, feasting, and the music of all-girl orchestras. They played chess, tennis, polo. The kings, to show their descent, sophistication, and power, had themselves depicted on the coinage facing right, like the Achaemenians, rather than left, like the crude Parthians. Persian motifs spread to Europe and the Far East. "In the sculptures and frescoes of the old French churches the artist reproduced, probably without understanding its significance, the gesture of the raised right hand with bent index finger, which was a sign of respect among the Sassanian nobles," says Ghirshman. Sassanian goblets and textiles found their way into the Shoso-in, that spooky storehouse of the treasures of Japanese emperors at Nara, near Kyoto, and remain there to this day. In fact, when the Sassanian dynasty fell, the imperial family fled to China with their court entertainers, who influenced Oriental actors and musicians with such astonishing upshots as the sculpting of long Persian noses on the masks used in the forerunner of the Japanese Noh theatre.

Underneath the glitter, the society was going rotten. The mass of peasants, outright serfs or slaves, not only had to create the wealth from which the state drew brutally high taxes, but also had to give their services for the construction of royal palaces, for building roads, and for quartering the army. At length an event both strange and predictable took place. Late in the fifth century, the peasants rose in what most historians have seen fit to call a communistic revolt, long before Marx. Large-scale protests against oppression had taken place earlier in Egypt, Greece, and Rome, but the uprising in Iran, going beyond protest, had a well-worked-out ideology. It came from the teachings of Manes (pronounced money; A.D. 216?-276?), the Persian prophet who, drawing on Zoroaster, Buddha, and Christ, created the Manichean doctrine of conflict between light and dark, good and evil. To the peasantry, and to some nobles converted to their cause, this translated as equality in the distribution of worldly goods, in this case including women. The peasants struck bloodily, and again and again, looting the property of the nobility, expropriating land, setting the harem women free, fighting an authentic class war. The rebellions were put down, after half a century, by a strong king, Khosrow. But the monarchy was spent in the bitterness of the struggle, and soon toppled.

In all the empires formed in the Middle East from the earliest civilization until the seventh century after Christ, not one had ever bothered to try to conquer the cruel, sandy Arabian peninsula. But between the Bedouins of the desert and their civilized imperial neighbours there was a certain amount of trade and communication. One day in the year 610, a forty-year-old tribesman of Mecca named Mohammed, who had heard of Christ and the God of the Jews, received a revelation from a divinity whom he called Allah, and with it the body of law called the Koran. Islam, the faith that Mohammed founded, required submission to Allah alone, instead of to the pantheon of gods and goddesses hitherto worshipped in Arabia, and by this principle it deemed all men equal. No thought of separation of church and state intruded here: the prophet, the Koran, and Allah melded into a single theocracy.

In many battles, Mohammed unified Arabia. After he died, in 632, a member of his tribe named Omar succeeded to the role of caliph, military commander, and Allah's vicar on earth. His Bedouin warriors itched for a holy war to conquer and convert Persia and Byzantium, a war that would bring booty if they lived and entry into paradise if they died. The Persians could not bring themselves to believe that the oafs from the desert were actually attacking. To one of their delegations, the last Sassanian king, Yazdegerd, sneered, "Aren't you the same people who eat lizards and bury your own children alive?" The Arabs plunged on, crying, "The Koran or the sword!" After he lost the last major battle between the Arabs and the Persians, Yazdegerd was murdered by his own men. By 652, when the Arabs reached the Oxus River, the present northern border of Afghanistan, the conquest of Persia was essentially over. Perhaps the major factor in the easy victory was the receptivity of the oppressed Persian peasants to the Islamic doctrine of the equality of men.

Thus, just about halfway through the long expanse of time between Cyrus the Great and the present, Iran took on a new God and that God's prophet and book, and with them came the nation's still problematic double identity. "Among the great Asiatic nations overthrown by the Arabs, Iran was the first and worst of sufferers, its day having been practically transformed into night," writes the Indian historian Firoze Davar, pointing out that "The symbol of the Zarathustrian faith is the sun; that of Islam is the crescent."

As they went on to conquer all of Asia Minor, North Africa, and even part of Spain, the Arabs put political power ahead of Mohammed's moralistic religion. In his inaugural speech, the first Arab satrap appointed to govern Iran thundered: "By Allah, I see heads before me that are ripe for cutting!" and he beheaded and tortured thousands.

The Arabs forced the Persians to use Arabic for records and coinage. The Syrians, history's pawns for so many centuries, seemed proud to absorb Islam and make Damascus its capital. By contrast, the Persians resisted. Among other acts of opposition, they refused to speak Arabic in everyday life, although a scholar named Sibveyh, perceiving that the backward Arabs did not have an authoritative grammar of their own language, contemptuously wrote one, which the Arabs themselves had to use for generations.

At first the Arabs did not press the Persians to become Moslems; rather the Persians adopted Islam to escape the poll tax levied on infidels. But to make a distinction between themselves and the uncouth Arabs, the Persians gradually adopted the schismatic Shi'a sect of Islam rather than the orthodox Sunni faith of the Arabs. In 750, the Sunnis, ruling from Damascus, split, and the Persians, by siding with the faction that successfully rebelled against the Damascus caliphate, were able to gain influence in the new court set up in Baghdad. This new caliphate began to let Persians serve as satraps over subdivided Iran, provided that they acknowledged Baghdad's supremacy.

Not for seven centuries did Iran again achieve a national government comparable to the Sassanian empire, but many tough and colorful lesser dynasties rose and ruled in principalities roughly corresponding to such modern provinces as Khorasan, Mazanderan, Sistan, and Isfahan. A ruler in what is now Gilan kept ninety-three wives in ninety-three palaces; one of these ladies was known as "She of the Heavy Earrings." It was an era of entertainment, of books and belly dancing and backgammon; and at the same time a period of cultural renaissance, in which kings patronized scientists and poets. The king who ruled in Bukhara (nowadays in the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic, but then included in what was generally recognized as Iran) drew to his court Razi, discoverer of medicinal alcohol and the kidney stone; Avicenna, Bukhara-born physician and philosopher; and Rudaki, the poet.

Pretty soon the kings of some of the principalities were getting so independent of the Arabs that they ordered the mullahs to omit the name of the caliph from the Friday prayers. Finally, toward the end of the tenth century, one of these principalities tumbled the Arab caliphate from power over Iran, and the Arab empire itself collapsed a little later.

But always, in Iran's history, there has been some covetous conqueror in the offing up to the north. The next invaders, about the year 1000, were the Turks, en route in a slow migration from Turkestan, their land of origin in central Asia, to their present realm in Turkey. They spoke, and speak, a language unrelated to the Aryan; theirs is an Altaic cousin of Mongolian, Korean, and Japanese. The newcomers were Sunni Moslems, having been converted by Arabs who had invaded Turkestan centuries before. The first conquering sultan, Mahmud, grabbed northeastern and central Iran, and by his sword converted adjacent India to Islam, which is why Pakistan today is a mostly Sunni Moslem country. Mahmud also gathered to his court cultivated men: the doctor Avicenna; Biruni, who made the first accurate calculations of latitude and longitude; and above all the towering Persian epic poet Ferdowsi, who wrote his masterly Shahnama under Mahmud's patronage.

The next wave of Turks, called Seljuks from the name of their tribal leader, descended about 1040, and after fifteen years spread to Baghdad, as unnecessarily zealous "protectors" of the caliph. The fiercest Seljuk king was Alp Arslan, whose mustaches were so long that they had to be tethered back while he was shooting, lest he entangle these handlebars in his bowstring and fire his entire upper lip at the enemy. He captured the emperor of Byzantium in battle near Lake Van, forcing that once potent empire back to Greece and opening to the Turks the country that now bears their name. For a hundred years what had been the Persian Empire was united under these rough and illiterate foreigners, and the Persians proceeded as ever to insinuate into the court and rule the rulers. The renowned vizier Nizam-al-Molk, a wise Machiavelli, laid down policy for Alp Arslan and his successor for thirty years, all the while building theological schools and mosques and an observatory for his friend Omar Khayyam, the mathematician, astronomer, and poet. The Seljuk court reigned first from Nishapur, which happens to be Khayyam's birthplace, then from Rey, now a suburb of Teheran, and finally from Isfahan, today Iran's most charming city. Under the Seljuks Isfahan grew to be a major trade center, with fifty caravanserais; and Nizam-al-Molk and others built there what historian Donald Wilber in Iran Past and Present calls "the most important monument of the Islamic centuries": the still-imposing Friday Mosque. The last of the Seljuk sultans constructed for himself a mausoleum whose splendour may be gauged by the fact that architectural historians regard it as the prototype of the Taj Mahal.

The Seljuks struggled through most of their reign against the breakaway Shiite sect of bloodthirsty and alleged drug addicts who gave the world the word "assassin," from hashshashin, "hashish-eaters." From mountain fortresses, chiefly Alamut (Eagle's Nest) in the Elburz Mountains, the secretive Assassins struck out to kill any political figure opposed to their faith. A charming story has it that the Assassins' original leader, whom Marco Polo called "The Old Man of the Mountains," lured recruits by drugging them with hashish and transporting them to the fortress. They awakened in a fragrant garden overrun with sensuous girls serving wine and fleshly favours. This, the Old Man assured them, was paradise, and they could return to it if killed on one of his missions of murder. One of the Assassins' victims was Nizam-al-Molk, whom they opposed because he enforced the orthodoxy of the Sunni Seljuks.

The next horrible blow from the north, the most destructive in Iran's history, came in 1220 from Genghis Khan, at the head of 700,000 Mongol tribesmen in the process of creating history's largest empire, which ran from the Pacific Ocean to Central Europe. Angered because some envoys whom he sent to Iran were put to death, Genghis annihilated five cities and looted, murdered, and raped throughout the rest of northern Iran.

"Cities of a million were wiped out, and even the dogs and cats were killed," former Member of Parliament Mahmud Ziai, an amateur historian, told me, citing the Mongol invasion as a disaster that still shapes the Iranian mentality. Genghis Khan died in 1227, but his grandson Hulagu led a new invasion in 1251 that made Iran Mongol territory clear to the sea in the south, and from the Indus in the east to beyond the Euphrates in the west. While he was on the warpath, Hulagu considerately obliterated the Assassins.

If the Mongols brought the Iranians woe, they also brought some strange and ironic gifts. One was their own barbarism, another their indifference to religion, another their lack of ideology. Once again the Iranians rushed to aid, indoctrinate, educate, guide (and control) their vanquishers. Freed from Sunni orthodoxy, the Iranians, in the process of converting the conquerors to the Shiite faith, made Shi'a ever more distinct from the Islam of the Arabs. Iranian artists began to paint miniatures that depicted the human face and figure, a no-no to all Sunnis, and the Mongol courts, hungry for culture, encouraged the practice. Almost as fast as the Mongol disaster struck, it turned into a boon, the beginning of four centuries of Iranian brilliance and high civilization. For their capital the Mongols chose Tabriz, and built mosques and schools there. The adored poet Saadi flourished under Hulagu, and the equally adored poet Hafez flourished in Shiraz until the Mongol dynasty faded away, through weaker and weaker rulers, after about a century.

In this long and exotic story of the formation of today's Iran, only two epochs remain to separate the last of the Mongols and the first of the Pahlavis. One was a period of religious intensity coupled with splendour and power that compelled respect from China to Europe. The second was a slide into decadence that left Iran with nowhere to go but up.

The splendour came with the Safavids, Turkish-descended tribesmen who dominated the parts of Iran that are now Azerbaijan and eastern Turkey. In 1490 -just as far to the west Columbus prepared his ships for the voyage to America- control of the clan fell to a thirteen-year-old named Ismail. The boy proved to be a leader of men. Operating out of Tabriz, he captured and unified Iran to the Caucasus, the Euphrates, and the Oxus River in the northeast. Genealogists managed to prove that this new Turkish shah, who also had Arab and Greek blood, descended from the pure-Persian Sassanians, which together with his devout Shiism made him a divine-right king.

Now everyone in Iran converted to Shiah -on pain of death. The nation became the island of Shiah surrounded by Sunni domains that it is today. The establishment of Shiah polarized Iran in particular with Turkey, where the Ottoman tribe of Turks, having suppressed the last of the Seljuks, had founded the belligerent Ottoman Empire, which ultimately reached as far as Austria and lasted until 1918. Without winning any battles against the Ottomans, the Safavid shahs, relying on the strength of their faith and the religious unity that it conferred upon Iran, managed to avoid incorporation into the Ottoman Empire.

Because of the Ottoman threat, the Safavids moved their capital to Qazvin, just west of Teheran, for most of the sixteenth century, and finally, right around 1600, to Isfahan. There, roughly contemporary with Elizabeth I of England, Suleiman the Magnificent of Turkey, Emperor Akbar of India, and the shogun Ieyasu of Japan, reigned the most renowned of all Iranian kings, Shah Abbas the Great.

Militarily, Shah Abbas recovered parts of Azerbaijan and Mesopotamia lost to the Ottomans, and during Russia's "Time of Troubles" he advanced farther into Georgia than any Iranian before or since. In Mogul India, he penetrated to Kandahar, now a city of Afghanistan. But his own subjects, and the Europeans who now visited Iran in growing numbers, knew Shah Abbas as a charismatic reformer. He liked to walk unassumingly in the streets and bazaars, or to drop unannounced into teahouses and even private residences for a meal. He induced Iranian men to adopt the custom of shaving; at the same time he foresightedly urged them to give up the custom of smoking, introduced a little before by Portuguese traders in the Persian Gulf. He collected art; his blue-and-white Chinese porcelains, alive with dragons, birds, and lions, fill a splendid room at the Archaeological Museum in Teheran. But the preeminent bequest that Shah Abbas left to Iran and to the world was a work of art on a larger scale, a great creation in green and gold and turquoise: the pluperfectly Persian city that bears the euphonious name Isfahan.

After the glory of Isfahan, after Shah Abbas, writes historian Richard N. Frye in Persia, "All that was necessary to be said had been said in an incomparable fashion; all that was to be created had already been made with consummate skill." The culture seemed to have no choice but to decline. The great shah himself, revealing the obverse of his character, had one of his sons murdered and two others blinded, and kept five hundred executioners busy. As the dynasty weakened, the new rulers in Afghanistan built that country's one and only empire, and one day in 1722 the Afghan emperor Mahmud appeared in Isfahan to receive the abdication of the last Safavid.

What followed was not only bloody but also bloody confusing. Some of the shahs raised money by letting princes purchase fleas gathered from the monarch's garments: to kill a flea that had threatened the royal person was a prized privilege. Famines followed wars that followed invasions. A general named Nadir emerged from the power struggle to throw out the Afghanis. Roaring on eastward, he raided the Mogul court in Delhi and returned to Iran with the celebrated Peacock Throne. This hard-bitten conqueror was surprisingly interested in matters of the soul, though apparently he was neither a Moslem nor a Christian (which was a possibility: he had the Bible translated into Persian). "I'd invent a new religion, if I only had the time," he once said. Nadir Shah was murdered in 1747. After twelve years of warfare among claimants to the throne, a surprisingly kindly ruler named Karim Khan Zand imposed twenty-one years of peace before his death in 1779.

The testicles of a young tribal leader named Agha Mohammed had a lot to do with the next phase of Iran's history, because they were cut off by his enemies, making him ultimately the bitterest and cruellest monarch of all. He was a member of the Turkish-descended Qajar tribe, which centered in Mazanderan. "His rise to power," writes historian Peter Avery in Modern Iran, "was marked by pyramids of skulls, holocausts, mass blindings" -he put out the eyes of twenty thousand citizens of Kerman who would not bow to him. But just before he was assassinated in 1797, he succeeded in reforming and uniting Iran sufficiently to found the Qajar dynasty, move the capital to Teheran, and assure the throne to his successor (in this case perforce not a son, but a nephew), Fath Ali Shah.
Overcompensating for his uncle, Fath Ali fathered two thousand princes and princesses during his thirty-seven-year reign, and had no time left over to face what became Iran's main nineteenth-century problem: the expansionist Russians and the sticky-fingered British. In 1835 he died_in bed, one presumes. The shah who reigned for most of the rest of the century -he was assassinated in 1896- was Nasir al-Din, whose passion was to go to Europe and take in world's fairs: Vienna 1873, Paris 1878 and 1889.

For centuries Europeans had thought Persia, as they called it, to be a great power, but the Qajars quickly set them straight. Czarist Russia got back Georgia in 1801, and by 1882, taking Tashkent, Samarkand, and Bukhara, had pushed Iran back to its present border east of the Caspian. The Ottoman Empire regained Mesopotamia and parts of modern Turkey. The British, now rulers of India, pushed the Iranians out of the buffer state Afghanistan during a brief war in 1856.

Worse than losing territory, the Qajars lost sovereignty within Iran. The second half of the nineteenth century was the unabashed heyday of economic imperialism, and Britain, guarding the sea routes of the empire, and Russia, looking for an Indian Ocean port, moved in on Iran. Both demanded and got extraterritoriality (the right to apply their own laws to their own citizens within Iran). British entrepreneurs obtained a concession to found the Imperial Bank of Persia. For their part, the Russians also founded a bank, dominated the commerce of Azerbaijan, and induced Nasir al-Din to officer his army with Russians, creating the famous Persian Cossacks. Nasir al-Din needed some kind of force, for he was losing control of some of his own subjects, namely the tribes -the Qashqais, the Bakhtiaris, the Kurds, the Turkomans- whose kings increased their power as fast as the Qajar throne relinquished it.

As the tiles fell and smashed in Isfahan's neglected mosques, the Qajars took Iran to ruin. Muzaffar al-Din, Nasir al-Din's son and successor, sold out Iran's most vital interests merely to get money to travel in Europe. At length came the inevitable revolution. Muzaffar Shah gave in after nothing so serious as a war, but merely a bast, a protest expressed by taking refuge, in this case in the spacious grounds of the British Embassy. The resulting constitution of 1906, modeled on the Belgian charter, established a parliament to rule Iran with the king as figurehead. (This gesture of reform and independence did not impress the Russians and the British, who blithely signed a convention that formalized their hegemony over Iran: the north to Russia, the center a neutral zone, the south to Britain -which discovered oil there the next year.) Finally a shah named Ahmad succeeded to the throne to preside over the end of "that last medievalism," as E. A. Bayne puts it. The Qajars were decadent to the finish line: Ahmad was known as the Grocery Boy Shah, because he bought up the whole grain crop during a famine and sold it to the starving at holdup prices.
Iranians felt no regrets when the recent Shah's father (Reza Shah Pahlavi, who took the throne with the help of the British) sent Ahmad packing in 1925.

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Title:   Fall of the Peacock Throne
Author:  William Forbis
Imprint: New York, Harper & Row, 1980

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