FALL OF THE PEACOCK THRONE

The Story Of Iran

William Forbis

   Drown Him, Even If I Drown Too

Approached from the Indian Ocean, Iran presents a wall of mountains that rise directly from the water. Approached from Iraq, on the west, Iran is an awesome snow-capped range lifting up from the Mesopotamian plain. From the north, from the Soviet Union's low-lying Turkmenistan, Iran appears once more as lofty mountains creating a formidable barrier. And from the east, from Pakistan, one comes to Iran through the range that forms the western wall of the Indus valley.

The land contained within these rims, which average 10,000 feet in elevation, is also high, in many places (including most major cities) nearly a mile above the sea. It is as though the mountains formed a deep dish filled almost to the brim with stones and salt and sand. This high Iranian tableland, bigger than France plus Spain plus Germany, or the whole American South, does not stand quite completely in isolation, for on the northwest it adjoins mountainous Turkey, and on the northeast it adjoins Afghanistan's Hindu Kush highlands, which rise up into the Himalayas. Nonetheless, Iran is unique as a plateau nation, much bigger and better defined than its North American geographical counterpart, the Great Basin of Nevada and Utah.

"Snow is worth more than gold," say the Iranians. To Westerners envious of Iran's oil, the Shah used to reply: "Give us your rain. Rains will come until the end of the world. Oil will be finished in twenty-five years' time."

As singular as the land are the people, distinct from all their neighbours in race, culture, and history. The misconceptions of many Westerners to the contrary notwithstanding, Iran is in no way an Arabic country. You do not see the kaffiyeh in Iran, nor hear the lilting Arabic tongue. Iran is Iran, a distinct nation; and the Iranians are Iranians, a distinct people. Broadly, the distinctions are these: the Iranians:

• Descend mostly from Aryans, the ancestors of present-day Northern Europeans, rather than from the Semites who are the forebears of modern Arabs and Jews, or from the Turkomans who fathered today's Turks.
• Speak Persian, the modern version of the language the Aryans brought with them, a tongue close in structure and vocabulary to English, and unrelated to Arabic or Hebrew (except that it is written in Arabic letters).
• Relate themselves, as friends, allies, travellers, and students, to Western Europeans and Americans rather than to their physical neighbours. Even poor farmers compare themselves to Belgians or Italians more naturally than to Pakistanis or Arabs.
• Belong, as Moslems, to the Shiite branch of Islam, which differs in many substantial ways from the Sunni branch prevailing in Turkey, the Arab countries, and Pakistan (as well as in Bangladesh, Malaysia, Indonesia, and much of black Africa).
• Cherish a vast and poetic literature, and their own traditions in music, architecture, painting, and food.

National character is, as Sir Walter Scott once wrote, hard to define, something whose "existence we are all aware of; and proposing to travel, consider it as certain, nearly, that we have peculiar advantages to hope for, and dangers to guard against, from the manners of a particular region, as that we shall enjoy peculiar pleasures, or have to face peculiar inconveniences."
Elusive as the concept may be, the national character of the Iranians clearly contains two historical determinants that make this people distinct from the peoples of other nations. The first is the Iranians' guileful, many-centuried struggle to preserve their culture and identity while falling before military attacks by all the great conquerors of Eastern Hemisphere history -Alexander, the Arabs, the Turks, Genghis Khan, Tamerlane. The second is the acute schizophrenia of embracing (as a consequence of the Arab conquest) a religion that holds Persia's glorious ancient history to be pagan and despicable.

The contradictions created by these historic tensions live in every Iranian, and affect his life and behaviour. "We have always been trying to survive in the face of some invading power," a wise and meditative deputy of the Iranian National Assembly, Mahmud Ziai, told me a while back. "We are the reverse of the Japanese, who were never invaded. If we had not been invaded so much, we'd be like them." A young businessman whom I met in the provincial city of Ahvaz capped a long disquisition by saying that "so many defeats make a people noncommittal, reserved, unenterprising." As the revolution suggested, Iranians seem to feel that they are good people, but being good people has not done them much good. An American diplomat serving in Iran pointed out to me that "there's a difference in perspective between Americans and Iranians. We're used to stability, and can count on it. Iranians still see life as teetering on the edge of a dark abyss." Deputy Ziai invoked the rare ups and numerous downs of Iran's history to show that "America -young, classless, formed by people who rejected the old country, or were rejected by it- is diametrically different from this country." History tells the Iranians that you always lose in the end, something that Americans do not yet have reason to believe.

And these feelings are only heightened by the national split personality that results from the second historical factor, the conflict between the heritages of the two halves of the nation's history -between the Iran of the ancient Medes and Persians and the Iran of Islam; between the Zoroastrian god Ahura Mazda and the Mohammedan god Allah; between Persepolis and Mecca.

Parents agonize over whether to name their boy children Hormoz, a contraction of Ahura Mazda, or Mohammed, for the Prophet; Jamshid, for the Persian mythical hero, or Abdul, the title of an Islamic sultan. It is a source of pride to be called Hushang or Leila, from mythology, or Ardeshir or Mandana, from ancient history. But it is also respectable to be, or claim to be, a descendant of Mohammed, and bear the honorific title Seyyid (Seyed, or Sayed) to prove it; to have made the hajj (pilgrimage) to Mecca, and bear the honorific title Hajji to prove that. With half of their beings, the Iranians still treasure their pre-Islamic past, the times of the Persian Empire and the Parthians and the fabulous Sassanian kings. With the other half of their beings, Iranians express their devotion to Islam, in particular to the Shiite sect of it -greater devotion, they often say, than that of the Arabs to their Sunni belief. So one half of the Iranian past is at war with the other half, and modern Iranians, seeking identity, are torn in two directions.

"There is in the heart of every Iranian, even the illiterate, this conflict between his Persian heritage and his imposed religion," Ziai told me. "And more and more the conflict is in the open and the ancient culture comes to the fore. Arabic words that crept into our language, for example, are being cast out by most writers and replaced by authentic Persian words from our ancient tongue." Scholars dig into history to rediscover pre-Islamic Persia, "to prove that Persians were great people before the Arabs came." These scholars readily uncover the ever renewable fascination and psychological impact of Persian mythology, so interesting and valuable that young nations with short mythologies (such as the United States) have reason to envy Iran. But these scholars must also face such facts as Persia's need through history to borrow culture, which is "something in the nature of a confession of weakness," as one historian puts it, and helps to explain some of Iran's failings. The 1979 revolution clearly exemplified this strain. By many acts -such as naming his personal guard the Ten Thousand Immortals after the guard of the emperor Cyrus- the Shah allied himself with ancient Persia. It was quite natural that his opponents took as their leader Ayatollah Khomeini, that quintessential Moslem.

Yet, not so strangely, double identity is better than no identity, and Iran adds up to an authentic and distinct nation, like France, Greece, or China, and not an ersatz conglomerate, like Lebanon or Canada. The conflict in Iran is within individuals, and not between classes, nor between religions, nor (with fast-disappearing exceptions) between tribes or races. The effect is to put every individual on his own, not feeling strong ties to his society as a whole (as the New Zealanders or the Japanese do), or to a substantial part of it (like the Scots or the Texans). The vicissitudes of history teach Iranians the impor- tance of a man's survival, of looking out for himself; the same history diminishes the concept of a united society working toward a glorious national destiny. To this kind of interpersonal disunity the Iranians add deep skepticism (born of past defeat) over the potentialities of working together toward common goals. Obviously, no one can say whether this attitude is better or worse than the submission of the individual to society of, say, the Germans or the Russians; but it is a distinct attitude.

It struck me as illuminating, when the Shah was in power, that amid the pressures to conform that are part and parcel of a strong-arm monarchy one found a people whose most visible characteristic was concentration on self. Watching a military parade for the visiting Sheik of Qatar, for example, I saw plenty of men break through police lines to cross the street. No awe for authority was going to stand in the way of their me-first desire to get to the other side. I kept asking myself: "Is this a monarchy or an anarchy?" The answer seemed to be that if Iran were not a monarchy it would be an anarchy. The Shah might well have argued that his preeminent function was to unify and discipline the Iranians. He once wrote, with a figurative sigh, that "Persians have always been pronounced individualists. Neither invasions nor foreign domination nor other adversities have ever quenched the average Persian's determination to express himself in his own way." He made the point that Rastakhiz, his wholly owned political party, was created to take on "the task of preventing the individualistic and selfish mentality from dominating the whole of society." Ironically, the Shah did in the end unite the Iranians, if only momentarily, in hatred of him.

In its mildest form, this excessive individualism works out as unwillingness to collaborate. Team sports are weak in Iran, which goes in for weight lifting, wrestling, horsemanship, tennis, and skiing -in fact, the Persian language used to have no word for "team," and had to borrow it from English.

In its more harmful form, excessive individualism brings envy and malice, exploitation and manipulation, rascality and guile. A motorcycle rider, bulling his way illegally through a throng on a sidewalk, grows furious rather than apologetic if a child steps in his way. Several times I was greeted at our local post office with joyous cries of "No stamps! All gone!" In supermarkets, me-firstism leads to endless little tussles among line-jumpers in the checkout queues, and blasting one's way through the five-items-or-less counter with, say, two dozen articles is regarded as a delectable victory of the individual over the collectivity. An American businessman who had been in Teheran for many years remarked to me, rather sweepingly, that "the missing element is love, human compassion. Particularly between men and women, the relationship is usually exploitation. They do love themselves, though," he added sardonically.

"Drown him, even if I drown too," says a little Persian proverb. In losing a war to Afghanistan during the nineteenth century, each Persian general took delight in the defeats of the others. Some Iranians told me that their fellow countrymen's individualism was a powerful barrier to Communism. "The appeal of capitalism is strong here even to the poor," one explained. "Each thinks he has a chance of acquiring a Mercedes-Benz, and would rather go for that than be levied out by socialism." Added another: "People are interested in getting things, and if somebody gets something, each person feels, 'I must have that thing.' "

Because well-organized and collaborative societies count heavily on interpersonal trust in order to function, it follows that a nation of self-interested individualists should be tinged with mistrust -and Iran is. Iranians mistrust their accomplishments, their future, and one another. Brothers demand collateral before lending money to sisters. The Ministry of Economic Affairs and Finance, says the newspaper Kayhan International, assumes "that all taxpayers are guilty of understating their taxable income until proven innocent." Businessmen mistrust their partners; parents mistrust their children; professors mistrust their peers; fellow employees mistrust one another. In a poll a few years ago, a majority agreed that "most of my associates would stab me in the back if it meant that they could get ahead faster that way."

Another Persian proverb says: "Conceal thy gold, thy destination, and thy creed." In a bas-relief among the ruins at Persepolis, a messenger reporting to the emperor Darius about 500 B.C. is depicted tugging his beard, a gesture that was supposed to reassure the king that the man was not lying. To judge from his famous stone inscription at Behistun, Darius had a lot of problems with prevaricators, and he ordained that "the man who is a liar, destroy him utterly." For ages the Sunni Moslems, who dominated what is now Iraq, required Iranian Shiite Moslems to profess to be Sunnis in order to make pilgrimages to Shiite shrines there, and the Iranians habitually did so, for this was honorable practice of the act of taqiyah, dissimulation.

Dishonesty and its variants -deception, cheating, hypocrisy, guile, duplicity, pretence, knavery, fraud, mendacity, and corruption- are the stuff of a great body of literature on the Iranians, the most accessible book in English being The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan. The author was the British diplomat James Morier (1780-1849), who, having travelled lengthily in Persia, resolved to do for Persia what Lesage had done for Spain in Gil Blas, and the result is a classic worthy of comparison. Poking affectionate fun at the Persians from the first paragraph, Morier baptized his picaroon with the honorific Hajji for having been born when his mother, not he, was making a pilgrimage to Kerbela, not Mecca (just as not every modern Iranian who calls himself Hajji has actually made a pilgrimage to Mecca). In the course of eighty chapters, Hajji Baba rises from barber to robber to doctor to executioner to high official of the state.

In his ascent Hajji Baba encounters, among hundreds of characters, a caravan guard who "enjoyed a great reputation for courage, which he had acquired for having cut off a Turcoman's head whom he had once found dead on the road." He meets a poet proud of having written a verse about the lord high treasurer that "he in his ignorance mistook for praise [because] he thought that the high-sounding words in which it abounded (which, being mostly Arabic, he did not understand) must contain an eulogium [and] did not in the least suspect that they were, in fact, expressions containing the grossest disrespect." He meets a doctor "who calls himself a staunch Musselman" but "makes up for his large potations of cold water and sherbet abroad, by his good stock of wine at home." He meets a mullah who boasts: "None pray more regularly than I. No one goes to the bath more scrupulously, nor abstains more rigidly from everything that is counted unclean. You will find neither silk in my dress, nor gold on my fingers. My ablutions are esteemed the most complete of any man's in the capital, and the mode of my abstertion [wiping the rectum] the most in use." The mullah proposes that Hajji Baba procure whores whom the mullah (for a fee) can marry to lecherous men, and divorce an hour later, in a sanctified form of prostitution.

Morier's English readers took the novel to be a satire, which surprised him, for he insisted that he had tried to write a carefully balanced picture of the Persian psyche. He swore, for example, that he actually heard a Persian soldier say, "If there were no dying in the case, how the Persians would fight!" His judgment of his book was vindicated by the Persians themselves. Then and now, they have read The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan as a straight and psychologically accurate account of the national character. Some have insisted that it was originally a Persian book, and merely translated into English.

As the Iranians themselves stand ready to tell you at any time, they are also a hospitable people. I heard of many warm invitations extended without specifying a time or a place for the occasion (not unlike, to be sure, the we-must-have-lunch-one-of-these-days turn-off practised in London and Manhattan). But there is substance as well as unction in the Iranian proverb that says "The guest comes from God." Hosts serve food in quantities plainly too large for all the guests to consume and in varieties too numerous for any guest to try everything. I was told that "if there are five guests there must be food for fifteen." I heard many stories of foreigners enjoying uncalled-for hospitality from poor families in remote villages. "The more rural, the more hospitable," one beneficiary reported. "Anything for the guest -kill the fatted chicken. The guest must sit in the best part of the room, and he's given the finest cushion. The host is supposed to offer tea and food several times, and the guest is supposed to refuse several times before accepting." Another man, an American professor, told me of wandering into a village, where he met a peasant who took him home to a "one-room house, poor except for the rugs and the TV. The lunch was served by his agreeable and candid wife, and then from somewhere the host brought in musicians with flutes and drums, and everybody danced."

"The Persian character comes from a long and turbulent history," said Deputy Ziai, summarizing his fellow subjects. But Ziai, a melancholy, intelligent man whose eyes look right into yours, believes that the Iranians can survive the turbulence of the past. "We always adapt," he said. "We do not believe that just because our forefathers lived in a certain way, we must live that way now. Even if our style of life changes, our tradition does not. Industrialization will not affect that. In fact, our growing literacy and awareness will make people more conscious of the past." He concluded with what sounded like a bit of good advice. "People who understand Persians do not get frustrated by Persians," he said.

  TEHRAN

Architecturally, Teheran has about as much allure as Tucson, Arizona. The city's murderous taxi drivers are entitled by law to kill jaywalkers, and if they don't always succeed, it is because the streets are bottled up with the world's worst traffic jams. Nothing in art, literature, restaurants, or professional skills is truly first-rate. In this ancient land of Iran, Teheran even lacks history, having grown up mostly in the last two hundred years. After the 1979 riots, Teheran also looked a little like a war-struck city, with burned-out banks and cinemas on every hand.

But to see Teheran only through grim-colored glasses is a mistake. For if the city is difficult and problematic, it is also intriguing and astonishing. To begin with, though it is built on the dry clay-sand-and-stone of the high Iranian desert, Teheran is not a sere and desiccated city. "We have lots of water and we use it lavishly," the head of the parks department told me. Channelled from the nearby snow-capped mountains, abundant water grows tons of thousands of blossomy gardens behind the walls that surround all houses. Fountains spout in the public squares. The streets, too, are verdant: in the 1920s Reza Shah armed the soldiers of the Teheran garrisons with watering cans and poplar seedlings, and sent them out to line the streets with trees, under the order "If the tree dies, you die!"

This city that is green is also clean. It collects its garbage daily, and during the night men with brooms sweep the streets and even the expressways. Every morning, in front of the stores, boys wash sidewalks with water from candy-striped hoses.

Teheran is a large city, twenty-first in the world, the biggest between Cairo and New Delhi. It is growing fast, having reached a population of 4.5 million from only half a million thirty-five years ago (it is now in the 90's almost 15 mil.). It overwhelmingly dominates Iran, not only as the capital but also as the home of 14 percent of the population, 23 percent of the manufacturing workers, 63 percent of the students, 76 percent of the automobiles. But so far Teheran strives in vain to achieve the stature of a great city; it lacks not only Tokyo's pace and Washington's stateliness, but even Cairo's antiquity and Delhi's humanity. It needs a Seine, a subway (in the works), a center, a spirit, or something.

Teheran rises early. I sometimes went out at seven to buy bread, hot from the ovens of any of four or five small bakeries within several blocks. By then the banks, the bric-a-brac shop, the fruit stores, the groceries, and even the Mercedes-Benz showroom were open in the morning sunshine. Every few blocks, I could see steam rising from a pipe that ran under the sidewalk from a shop to the gutter, the exhaust of clothes-pressing machines in dry-cleaning shops, which abound in Teheran as a consequence of the bourgeois Iranian man's insistence on wearing a proper suit at all times.

Similar small commerce proliferates in all the main streets of this fifty-square-mile city. Sidewalk peddlers sell freshly stolen Seiko watches, peacock tail feathers, balloons shaped like animals, floor mats for cars, brooms and mops, Persian melons. Near one of Teheran's main intersections, I saw side by side stalls selling, respectively, men's jockey shorts and prettily veined sheep livers. Newsstands and grocery stores peddle cigarettes one by one. Old women sit beside bathroom scales on the sidewalk, weighing people for two rials (three cents). On Ferdowsi Avenue you can Master Charge a hookah, a carpet, or a sheepskin coat. Beggars are few, except for the blind: an old flutist led by a ragamuffin six-year-old girl, an albino playing an accordion, a grizzled grandfather gently guided by a little boy.

Before the revolution, one charm of Teheran -at least to foreigners- was the naming of stores in English. This practice was intended not only to lure the visitor, but also to provide a cachet impressive to the Iranian shopper. The store signs were bright-colored plastic creations of Roman letters rendered (and often misspelled) in Persian Art Nouveau. What the signs said was by turns engaging and baffling.
Some samples:

       STORE HEN AND EGG
       BARBER SHOP NICEMAN
       ANAL CO.
       EYEBALLOPTIC
       GENERAL BABY
       TAILOR SMORT MAN
       ESKANDARIAN'S BED
       PAYTON PLEACE BOUTIQUE
       HILTON SHOOK ABSORBERS
       LOCOMOTIVE AUTOMOBILE SHOWROOM
       PARADISE INTERNAL DECORATION
       ABDY DIAPER SERVICE AND INSURANCE CO.

Sophistication to most Teheranis seems to be things that sparkle. Dozens of stores sell nothing but crystal chandeliers. One store is four stories high, a fabulous sight when ablaze with white light in the evening. This love of light does not mean that Teheran is a neon city, at least so far; the preference is for incandescence. On the tall iron picket fences of the numerous ordnance depots and other military installations, pretty blue and green lights, arranged in star shapes, glow in the night. Mirrors abound in restaurants, theatres, private homes.

In such a city, life is largely lived at home, and in Teheran privacy is a mania. The expression of it is mud-brick walls -walls around houses, gardens, and every vacant lot. In some parts of the city you can wander for a long time in small winding streets between walls ten feet high, and only occasionally glimpse a garden through a momentarily opened door. But there is a way, though foreigners rarely use it, to invade the privacy and discover the beauty and tranquillity behind the walls. The view from the upper story of Teheran's British Leyland double-decker buses (fare, seven and a half cents) is a panorama of private lives.

The sounds of Teheran are baffling sounds, too: the cries of human voices. "Cot-e shalvari" bellows the rag picker from the street -"Coats and trousers!" After him comes the lottery-ticket vendor, the scissors grinder, and the salesman of house plants. Off in the distance, marching high school students count out: "Yek-do-se-chahar . . . Yek-do-se-chahar. " In the parks strollers carry Japanese-made shortwave radios, and listen to music from afar; on the sidewalks, youths sleep a siesta to the accompaniment of Persian sounds from transistors in their laps.

You may notice that many merchants, especially rug dealers, seem uninterested in selling their goods, and this is a clue to a startling fact about the bazaar: more than a retail merchandising operation, the bazaar is a money market, a bank, and a wholesale import-export business with worldwide connections. BUSINESS IS BRISK AT THE BAZAAR, headlines the newspaper Kayhan, and among other evidence the story relates the sale of 250 tons of raisins to Britain at $595 a ton, as well as big deals in apricot halves, wool, pulse, and vetch. The shabby-looking rug merchant in a small stall may well have just cabled a sales offer to Amsterdam or Philadelphia, and his personal wealth probably exceeds that of most American small businessmen.

Such a bazaari can move money anywhere. A rich citizen of Teheran who wants to sneak funds out of the country (as so many have lately) can turn over rials to a bazaar merchant and recover them two days later in the form of Deutsche marks deposited to his account in, say, Bremen by a German importer, who thus pays for the carpets he imported from the merchant_and neither the Iranian central bank nor the German Central Bank knows anything about the transaction. Wholesale trading within the bazaar goes on with a maximum of haggling, suspicion, and distrust, but a deal is struck with a handshake and a code of total trust governs all money transactions. This trust lets the bazaar create its own currency in the form of personal checks, which are not cashed or deposited, but simply endorsed as many as thirty times and used as money. The bottom signer is the liable one, and if the check were to bounce he could return it to the endorser who preceded him; but in practice checks never bounce, because anyone tempted to write a bad check knows that he would be run out of the bazaar.

A bazaar merchant may also create money by banking. Typically a rug merchant uses his stock as collateral to get a bank loan -that's why he does not want to sell the rugs. He relends this money to another bazaari against a promissory note. In turn, he uses this note as collateral at a bank for a loan (equal to 80 percent of the note), which he lends out for another promissory note to get another loan -and so on until his original funds are extended many times. Collecting 36 percent a year on all these loans, he can easily pay the 12 percent bank interest and earn 24 percent profits -all because the bazaar's code of trust assures him that his borrowers will repay him. Getting around the Koran's ban on interest is easy- the bazaaris call their profits a "service charge."

The borrowers do not resent the high interest: they use the money as working capital for slightly shady deals, which no conventional banker would finance but which make large profits. Bazaaris, for example, know how to bribe customs inspectors at bottleneck ports in order to release imported merchandise and turn a fast rial. A young bazaari may borrow the $10,000 he needs as key money to lease a choice stall from which to clean up on, say, turquoises sold to tourists -who may nevertheless get such bargains that they can resell the gems in their own countries for fat markups. High-interest loans also provide starting money for small industries, which often grow to become large industries and leave the bazaar. "No study of Iran's capital market is complete without investigating the forces of the bazaar's moneylending operations," says a high official of the Central Bank. "Approximately 20 percent of the total working capital of all companies in Iran is financed by the bazaar moneylenders."

For all these reasons, the bazaar is "a society separate from the rest," said a business professor in Teheran who had grown so fascinated by this institution that he studied it constantly ("It's wild in the middle of the night"). Bazaaris are among the most devout of Moslems; they respect their mullahs and in their stalls they put up likenesses of Ali, first saint of the Shiite branch of Islam. Teheran's oldest and religiously most important mosque is right in the middle of the bazaar. Bazaaris all make the hajj to Mecca "and stop in Beirut on the way back to stare at the Christian girls' legs," said the professor. In semi-secret places among the dowdy buildings of the bazaar, there are great libraries of rare and valuable Korans and other Islamic works. Yet minorities of bazaar merchants are not Moslems but rather Jews and Armenian Christians. They honour the Moslem holidays, and the Moslems in turn respect Yom Kippur and Christmas.

Because the bazaar, not only in Teheran but throughout Iran, is so deeply traditional and so profoundly grounded in Islam, it has historically been a focus of opposition to shahs. In 1978 and 1979 the bazaars reemerged in this role. When Ayatollah Khomeini called on the bazaaris to strike, they faithfully obeyed, and thus worked powerfully to bring down the king.

Go to the TOP of the page.
Go to the MIDDLE of the page.
Go to the section on TEHRAN.
Go to the section on the BAZAAR.

• Fall of the Peacock Throne Head Page

Previous Parts:


• Introduction
• His Destined Hour
• Cyrus, Darius, and Glory
• Defeat Makes Us Invincible

Title:   Fall of the Peacock Throne
Author:  William H. Forbis
Imprint: New York, Harper & Row, 1981

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