 Lingering perfume
Inside the "fat" Iranian, a "thin" dervish
often struggles for self-expression and freedom
December 18, 2004
iranian.com
["Iran... or Persia?" by
Peter Lamborn Wilson on NthPosition.com]
is one loooooong article but a true joy to read... i'm half way
throu it and it's giving
me serious goose bumps... -- Deev
After two years on the Hippy Trail in India and Pakistan, a winter
of poverty in Afghanistan, months of opium smoking in Quetta (the
capital of Pakistani Baluchistan) followed by a severe and hallucinatory
bout of intestinal malaria, I must not have looked very respectable
to the Iranian Consul.
The Consulate, a concrete box in a dreary new suburb of Quetta,
appeared to be empty except for me and the Consul, a small sour
man in a suit, who seemed to have nothing to do except make life
difficult for me personally. He was quizzing me about why he shouldn't
simply issue me a 14-day transit visa rather than the standard
tourist three-month visa I wanted. He seemed to suspect me of something.
Recently I'd been sort of thrown out of India and also Afghanistan.
Clearly the Consul took me for a wealthless vagabond, which was
rather perspicacious of him. "Why do you want to visit my
country?" he kept asking.
I felt too tired to make anything up, so I said, "Well,
you see, I'm interested in sufism..."
"Sufism!? Do you know what is sufism?"
"I know enough to know that I want to know more. Some sufis
I met in India told me to go to Iran. So..."
The Consul metamorphosed before my eyes into a different person:
all at once he became a cultivated and poetic soul unfairly and
inexplicably consigned to his empty concrete box in Baluchistan.
He unbent. He beamed. "This is fantastic! You must let me
give you the maximum possible visa." He began fumbling for
seals and stamps. "One year with extensions. Yes?"
"Well... but..."
"You must remain in my country until you have learned everything.
Please, promise me!"
We spent the entire afternoon talking and drinking tea. No one
bothered the Consul, and we enjoyed ourselves. After a while, however,
I wondered why no one ever seemed to bother the Consul. I asked
him. And discovered the reason.
The Consul himself only dealt with important travellers or suspicious-looking
cases like me. His clerks took care of the "third-class passengers",
so to speak. But not many important travellers chose to travel
overland from Quetta in East Baluchistan to Zahedan, West Baluchistan,
across the border to Iran. Not if they could help it. Smugglers
and refugees, yes. Wealthless hippies, yes. But no one else in
their right mind would ever volunteer for a three-day train journey
across the Great Desert of Baluchistan.
Flat, utterly flat and strewn with fist-size grey pebbles rather
than the usual sand or salt, this desert stretches from horizon
to horizon. The mountain directly north (where Osama bin Ladin
was last reported to be hiding as I write) remain beyond the horizon,
unseen. NASA photos of the surface of Mars look like this, only
cooler.
This was February, so the temperature never rose much above 120'
F. but on the second say the drinking water ran out. The passengers
would have rioted in disgust if not for the heat prostration.
I remember arriving at the border and /customs in a state of baked
catatonia, feeling I deserved some kind of medal, maybe the Sir
Richard Burton Award for Pointless Suffering. The prize I received,
however, was a meal -- a breakfast I've never forgotten.
At a mud-brick, poor-looking truck stop outside Zahedan along
the hot sandy/dusty highway into the city, I was served fresh flat
bread baked in a wood-fired tanoor on a bed of pebbles, made from
stone-ground wheat that tasted Neolithic (and why not, since wheat
was first cultivated in Iran about 10,000 years ago) - utterly
convincing Biblical bread. With it, a plate of sabzi, fresh-picked
herbs, six or seven kinds, maybe tarragon, chives, dill, parsley,
rosemary, spring onions, and a big piece of fresh, salty sheep-milk
cheese (panir). Very strong tea in tiny glasses with lots of sugar
lumps broken from an old-fashioned sugar loaf. Most memorable was
a dented metal bowl of spring water with a huge shard of crystal
clear ice, the first I'd seen since long before the Train Across
Hell.
Ice was a rare substance in India and Pakistan, usually available
only in chi-chi, Western-style hotels. In Afghanistan, ice fell
out of the sky in winter, but never in summer when you needed it.
I thought the ice with my breakfast was a special treat, a unique
bit of hospitality - my reward for valorous travel. But eventually
I came to realise that Iran has an ancient ice culture. In the
old days (for all I know, even in the Neolithic), winter ice was
stored in yakhchals, beehive-shaped ice houses of thick adobe.
The Persians claim to have invented ice cream and frozen sharbat; 'Marco Polo' brought the secret back to Italy. Even the poorest
eating-house in Iran serves ice, and every good-sized town boasts
at least one parlour serving rose-flavoured ice creams and fresh
iced fruit juices. But nothing sharpens the senses like deprivation,
and I still retain vivid sense impressions of that bread, those
herbs, and especially that ice, thirty-two years ago.
Although I never learned "everything" about the consul's
country or even about sufism, I did spend the next seven years
there, more or less, so my problem now is one of choice: what to
leave out of this little memoir and what to put in. I'll follow
a loose thread suggested by the theme of the Consul's unbending,
his strange transformation from bureaucrat to human being; and
secondly the theme of food, hospitality, suggested by the Consul's
tea and conversation.
And my motive for this arises from the probability
that over the next few years, no one in the US is going to be discussing
these aspects of Persian culture. Iran will be consigned to the
evil pseudo-discourse and vacant imaginaire of the "news".
Persian humanism (as Iqbal called it) will be forgotten, denied
and even betrayed - precisely because it belongs not to the realm
of ideology and the "clash of cultures" but to "everyday
life" and the ordinary and even unrepresentable beauties of
the soul.
In the Christian (and post-Christian) West, mysticism is more
widely associated with anorexic ascesis than with hospitality and
food. Fasting, self-denying sufis have certainly existed, but in
Islam, the "bounty of God" is a sign of God, and those
who refuse it may be guilty of cosmic ingratitude. Consequently,
a kind of feasting saint appears in sufism, perhaps puzzling those
occidental commentators who ignore the possibility of combining
Friar Tuck and Francis of Assisi in one living package. In sufism,
both fasting and feasting are considered spiritual disciplines.
Charles Fourier, the Utopian Socialist and inventor of 'Gastrosophy',
would have enjoyed meeting certain gourmet sufis such as the 15th
century Persian poet Abu Ishaq Shirazi, known and loved even today
as Bushaq At'imah, the "Gastronomer".
Shiraz, of course. A city of eccentric saints, pleasure gardens,
poets like Saadi and Hafez, and the most perfected cuisine in Iran
- a city of roses, which appear obsessively in Shirazi art and
architecture as well as Shirazi gardens (and even in Shirazi food)
- a city where an ode, or a new pickle, could make its creator
famous and wealthy. Shiraz in the 1970s still seemed rich in all
these pleasures, though no longer grand: a city somewhat lost in
time and therefore 'magical', to use a hackneyed term - one of
those magical cities, like Herat or Benares, where a living fabric
and not just a picturesque shroud of some romantic Past still survives.
(Or so I hope - though I'm afraid this may no longer be true, especially
of Herat.)
Bushaq's poetry concerns itself entirely and obsessively with
one subject: food. Originally a hallaj, or cotton carder, by trade,
he wrote parodies of all the great poets, transforming their conceits
and metaphors into culinary tropes, with a comic effect that Persians
still enjoy, even though Bushaq's kitchen vocabulary is now rare
and obsolete. (My co-translator Nasrollah Pourjavady had the devil
of a time finding the meaning of some of these terms, and a few
are simply lost.)
Since a lot of great Persian poetry is sufi poetry,
Bushaq did a lot of sufi parodies - but, in fact, Bushaq himself
was a sufi. His master was the famous saint Shah Ni'matollah Wali
(Ni'matollah = "Bounty of God"), who was also a fine
(though not a great) poet, and Bushaq dared even to make fun of
his own shaykh's verse.
Here's an example, first, one of Ni'matollah's
best known mystic ghazals, a spiritual "boast" in which
he reveals his true identity as the Master of the Age:
Drowned in the shoreless ocean sometimes
we are waves, sometimes the sea itself.
We are the songbird of the Beloved's rosebed
as her lover we sing the canticles of love.
We are the sun of the sky of heart and soul
and thus we move from horizon to horizon.
We are not fit for any job
except the work of making love.
Today we are drunk and in love
and know nothing of the headaches
of tomorrow.
Our beloved has become the very light of our eyes
and thus and only thus do we have sight.
Careless drunk, staggering drunk
we come from the tavern of love.
Since we first saw her face, her tresses,
sometimes we are believers, sometimes Christians.
All creatures are blind and sightless
or they would see us manifest as the Sun itself.
We have come into this world
only to show God to His Creation.
If you are sick and seek physicians
we are the doctor for everything and all.
If anyone should ask for God's Bounty
tell him to come to us, to Ni'matollah.
Bushaq's parody:
We are macaronis in the Casserole of Gnosis
sometimes lumps of dough and sometimes pie.
On the surface of the stew we are dollops of rich grease
and we befriend the yoghurt-meatball soup.
Now we are the Simurgh on the slopes of sheeptail fat
now the Phoenix on the Mount of Meat.
We have descended to this kitchen only so that we might
reveal the meat sauce to the spaghetti.
Like the dates within a bowl of rice-pudding
sometimes we are manifest and sometimes not.
This boiled sheepshead now becomes the light within our eyes
and thus through its eyes we have our sight.
We're skewered up our egos like kebabs upon the spit,
disciplines of the haggis at this feast.
Clots of honeycomb are we afloat amidst the butter:
sometimes we are up and sometimes down.
Like Bushsaq the Masterchef are we
fit for nothing but such gluttony!
According to legend, Shah Ni'matollah once visited Shiraz and
Bushaq, of course, came to meet him for the first time, since he'd
been initiated and trained, in fact, not by the saint himself,
but by the saint's son, Shah Khalilollah. Bushaq was introduced
to the master simply as a poet. "And what have you said in
your poetry?" asked the Shaykh.
Bushaq replied:
"New of the Peas at the table of Khalilollah
Ask from me,
the panegyrist of Ni'matollah."
"Aha!" Shah Ni'matollah exclaimed, "So you are
the Macaroni of the Casserole of Gnosis!"
Apologetically,
Bushaq replied, "Others talk of Allah, I talk of Allah's Bounty."
In a parody of the most famous "divine boast" or "utterance" in
all sufism - a boast that brought its speaker to the gallows for
heresy - Bushaq wrote:
Mansur al-Hallaj said, "I am the Truth" (al-Haqq,
ie God)
Bushaq al-Hallaj says, "I am the Pudding."
That was the Hallajian claim
And this is the essence of it.
This is very funny, but it's not blasphemy. Even the most platonising
Christian might have great difficulty with this notion; but for
a true monotheist, even a pudding can be the presence of God; especially
a delicious one; especially when you're hungry.
Iranian food resembles North Indian food, though without the
complex spices and peppers: rice, flatbreads, mutton, yoghurt and
so on, the basic Neolithic Central Asian table. But Persian cuisine
appears unique in its brilliant deployment of fruit in combination
with meats, eg that king of dishes fesenjan, duck in a sauce of
pomegranate and crushed walnuts, served on Caspian rice, better
and longer-grained even than Indian basmati, and called "king" rice.
(Extra nice things are often kingly: for example, mulberries, indigenous
to Central Asia, are called toot; strawberries, which are not indigenous,
are known as shah-toot.)
Most Persian master dishes combine fruit
with meat and vegetables, for instance a stew of mutton and spinach
with dried lemons; or saffron rice baked n layers with chicken
and fresh sour cherries. Although this practice may be quite archaic,
it's popularly ideologised according to the mediaeval principles
of Avicenna (Ibn Sina), familiar to the readers of Shakespeare
or the alchemists as the Theory of Four Humours. The balance between
Hot, Cold, Wet and Dry determines health. Most meat is Hot, most
fruits are Cold, so in combination they balance.
After the main
course, even the meanest host serves mounds of fresh fruit to cool
down the effects of the meat, butter and spices. In my experience
of world travel, Khorassan (the north-easternmost part of Iran
with part of Afghanistan and former Soviet Central Asia) produces
the tastiest of all fruit, especially melons and table grapes.
The first Moghul emperor Babur, in his wonderful memoirs the Babur-Nameh,
waxed so nostalgic over such fruit as to seem maudlin or far-fetched,
but anyone who's ever tasted a real kharbouzeh, or "Persian
melon", will consider Babur simply a realist.
In general, in Iran, flavours are very marked, and cookery is
devoted to enhancing rather than masking them. Wheat, chicken,
grapes remain untampered-with by Capital or Science, glorying in
their god-given or original flavours. I knew many Americans in
Tehran who hated this and even feared it. "There's something
wrong with this egg. The yolk is too orange and it smells like
a barnyard," I heard one of them say. "Do you think it
could be - ugh - fertile?"
As with Persian cookery, all traditional art forms are based
on principles considered "mystical" by modern science
- but these principles have deep effects on the fabric and colour
of everyday life. In domestic architecture, for example, the use
of adobe, the interior garden-courtyard, or - in the really hot
regions - the wind-tower with zero-power water/air conditioning;
the narrow, shaded village-like streets, the simple domes of mudbrick
that look from a distance like rows of dunes - all this humble
architecture-without-architects results from millennia-long folk
experiments in living, staying cool n the desert, keeping the community
cohesive.
The Iranian Government hated these old neighbourhoods
and often literally ploughed through them à la Haussmann
(leaving surrealist sliced houses and half-rooms exposed to public
view) to create geometric modernist lines of power and routes for
automobiles. But the pseudo-Californian architecture of concrete
boxes that always accompanied this kind of Iranian modernity was
a ghastly failure as architecture: ovens that need constant oil-powered
air-conditioning to remain habitable.
Why does Modernism always
show its ugliest face in so-called Third World countries? The house
as "machine for living" must be itself a living being,
breathing, using water and nutrients, almost conscious in its role
as shelter and expression of the social. But the machine-house
as conceived by Capital, inorganic and mechanical as an automobile,
offers only a simulacrum of shelter. Moreover, a machine designed
for use in the climate (both natural and social) of Europe or America,
produced to undersell and ruin traditional self-sufficiency, can
only result in social disaster when forced into a different Clime,
a different set and setting.
Traditional housing principles are
always inarticulate, usually non-literate, and easily fall victim
to the Modernist techno-ideology of "efficiency" and
maximum profit. Vernacular building has always know how to live
in and with its clime; but the architecture of Capital denies the
very existence of such a principle as the Clime. As every reader
of The 1001 Nights or Nezami's Seven Palaces must know, there are
Seven Climes, each with its appropriate forms, colours, foods,
religions, beauties, etc - and, of course, weather.
Once in a Tehran
hotel lobby I met a nice Swedish businessman who hoped to sell
pre-fab housing for oil workers to the companies in Ahvaz, in the
deep South.
"Scandinavian pre-fab houses?" I asked, "Designed
for the frozen North?"
"But it will work equally well
in the desert," he assured me. "Each unit is sealed against
the environment."
If architecture is frozen music, then music must the melted architecture,
an invisible way of organising consciousness of space/time, our
being-in-the-world. Persian classical music may best be experienced
in a garden - a private rose garden in Shiraz, by preference, but
if necessary a public rose garden in Shiraz. During the Shiraz
Festival of the arts, where I worked every year as Resident Critic,
the beautiful tomb-garden of Hafez was used for lamp-lit concerts
of the purest Persian and Indian classical music. (The Indians
included the great Dagar Brothers, who perform Hindu temple music
but are, in fact, Shiite Muslims; and Pandit Pran Nath, who sang
Hafez ghazals in Hindustani style.)
By a strange coincidence possible only in a "developing
nation", the strongest force for tradition and creative preservation
of classical music was then the Iranian National Television. Radio
Tehran, by contrast, represented a lovely but impure neo-traditionalism,
which even ran to experiments with violin and piano. I love Persian
piano music, which always reminds me of the mirror-mosaic architecture
of Shiite tomb-shrines and other late-19th century public buildings.
Like pianos (mostly uprights), European mirrors were shipped to
Iran
by caravan, and naturally many of them broke en route.
Tile-mosaic
craftsmen bought up shards by the camel-load and created a vulgar
but scintillating hybrid form in which whole domes and iwans
are transformed into glittering ice-diamond bursts of illumination.
Purists hate this stuff. The pianos were re-tuned to Persian
modes
and played like dulcimers, using only four fingers.
Another comparison:
all over Asia, the traditional embroidery techniques were given
a creative burst by the introduction of foot-pedalled Singer
sewing machines. Sooner or later, modern technology (inextricably
linked
with Capital) will suffocate and destroy traditional crafts,
but the initial contact is often a stimulus and gives birth
to vigorous
hybrids.
Be that as it may, the TV musicians were all rigorous but creative
purists, and the 1970s witnessed a mini-Renaissance of excellent
Persian music - played by very young enthusiasts and very old virtuosi
who'd been rescued from oblivion by the new wave and the TV budget.
The Shiraz Festival was one of its epicentres. I spent a lot of
time talking with Dr Dariush Safvat, director of The Centre for
the Preservation and Propagation of Traditional Iranian Music.
One night in Shiraz, Dr Safvat told me an interesting story.
I already knew most of it, because Nasrollah and I had written
about
it in Kings of Love, our study of the history and poetry of the
Ni'matollahi Sufi order, the spiritual progeny of Shah Ni'matollah
Wali. In 1792, one of these dervishes was martyred in Kerman; his
sufi name was Mushtaq Ali Shah and he was a madzub, a sufi "madman",
totally absorbed in divine ecstasy. He was also a legendary musician
and played the sehtar, the little three-stringed lute of Central
Asia (ancestor of the Indian sitar). One day, in his craziness,
Mushtaq played an accompaniment to the Call to Prayer (azan)
from a nearby mosque, and this blasphemy aroused the wrath of a
bigoted
mullah. The mullah called on a mosque-full of people to stone
Mushtaq Ali Shah, and he was crushed to death along with one of
his disciples.
Dr Safvat told me the story over again, but he hadn't read
it in a book. He's heard it as a youth from an old musician
friend
who
heard it from his grandfather - who had actually been present
in Kerman on May 18, 1792, and witnessed the death of Mushtaq.
The Ni'matollahi Order in the 1970s was still very pro-music
(although they never used musical instruments in their actual sufi
praxis). Several times a year on happy holidays such as the Birthday
of the Prophet or Ali, the Ni'matollahi khaniqah in downtown Tehran
would organise a jashn or musical fest. Dr Javad Nurbakhsh,
the Qutb or Shaykh of the Order, counted many musicians among his
disciples
and friends, all glad to perform at his parties. Several thousand
people from all classes and every part of Tehran (including women
and kids) would attend, and each and every one received a free
hot meal of rice and meat, and all the tea and sweets they could
stomach, along with several hours of excellent traditional music.
The
grand finale was always a provided by a troupe of wild-looking
Qadiri dervishes from Kurdistan, who roused the crowd to delirium
with dramatic chants and pounding drums. Dr Nurbakhsh told us that
at home in Kurdistan, they'd follow the music with feats of power
such as sticking knives through their cheeks or eating lightbulbs. "But
I don't allow any of that in my khaniqah," he said with a
twinkle in is eye. "You'll have to go to Sanandaj if you want
to see that sort of thaumaturgy."
So - of course - we did.
The Kurds are a sight for sore eyes after the Iranians, who have
all (except the mullahs) adopted Western-style clothes with generally
counter-aesthetic results. The Kurds dress Kurdish: big fringed
turbans, tight soldierly jackets, baggy trousers, riding boots
- and guns, if they can get away with it. The women dress in dozens
or scores of layered flower-patterned petticoats of dark, rich,
saturated, velvety colours, and look like black tulips. Some tattoo
their face with blue marks and go unveiled.
In Sanandaj, my friends and I, all of us American journalists
working or the rackety Tehran English daily Journal and all fascinated
by sufism, met Dr Murbakhsh's contact, a small, 80-year-old gentleman
who lived in a small house near the Qadiri khaniqah. He invited
us in for tea and showed us an old photo of himself in military
uniform with a really huge live snake draped over his shoulders. "You
came to see us eat glass, my young friends? Ah, that's nothing.
One need not even enter the trance state for such tricks. I'll
show you."
He snapped his fingers and his young grandson brought in a silver
tray upon which sat a single light-bulb. The old soldier broke
it up with his fingers are he uttered an invocation, then began
scooping up shards and popping them in his mouth, crunch, crunch,
crunch. Swallow. As we gaped, he winked his eye and offered us
the tray. "Like to try it yourself?"
That night in the khaniqah (after a big dervish meal of mutton
and tea on the floor around a sofreh, or dining cloth), we indeed
witnessed feats of power, including cheek skewering, electricity
eating, scorpion handling and light-bulb chomping - all performed
(after a really rousing zikr) without any trace of damage or visible
scars. I later visited Sanandaj several times, and I have to admit
these tricks soon came to seem rather ordinary, though never tried
any myself. But I never again saw the feat our tiny old soldier
friend performed.
After achieving hal, or trance, by dancing wildly
and whirling to the zikr, he suddenly ran at tremendous speed
across the whole length of the room (say, the length of a tennis
court
at least), launched himself headfirst like a rocket in the air
and crashed his skull into the far wall, bounced off, onto his
feet, and went round whirling, dancing and singing ecstatically
for the next hour. I believe it was this chap who told us that
the Grand Shaykh of the Qadiri Sufi Order in Baghdad was able
to cut off the heads of his disciples as part of the initiation
ceremony
and then replace them, no harm done. After seeing the old man
perform, I was inclined to believe this, though I admit that later
I became
sceptical again. But it's a nice story.
In the old days (say, up to mid-19th century), Iranian dervishes
adhered to an ancient way of life very similar to that of Hindu
saddhus in India - long hair (or shaved bald), patched cloak, begging
bowl (made from coco de mer shells) and ritual axes (also very
useful for chopping vegetables), distinctive cap or taj ("crown");
endless aimless wandering, music and dance, sometimes wine and
hashish, an attitude of insouciance via à vis the claims
of orthodoxy; yogic asceticism and libertine excesses - and a theology
of ecstatic love.
The Ni'matollahi Order once occupied the vanguard
of this sort of dervishism, but severe repression and even execution
for heresy (such as that of Mushtaq Ali Shah), carried out by powerful
mullahs (one of them known as Sufi-kush, or "sufi killer"),
gradually drove the radical dervishes underground. Inwardly they
retained their anti-puritanical conviction but outwardly they conformed
to orthodox Shiism. Some of the shaykhs even dressed as mullahs
in dark sombre robes and snow-white turbans.
Sufism of the wild qalandari variety may well be older than Islam,
harking back to an Indo-Iranian antiquity or even a common shamanistic
culture traceable in the earliest Indian and Iranian scriptures
(the Vedas and the Yashts). Hallucinogenic plants (called Soma
or Haoma) must have played a central role in this ur-cult. First
orthodox Brahminism and Zoroastrianism, and later Islam, pushed
these power-plants into the outer darkness of "heresy",
or "forgot" them, or turned them into metaphors like
the flavourless "wine" of so many mediocre sufi poets.
But dervishism resists change. In the hierarchic world of Asia,
with its rigid sets of inherited identities, the dervish life always
offers a way out, a kind of traditional bohemianism, not exactly
approved by authority, but at least recognised as a viable identity.
It's no wonder the hippies immediately gravitated towards the company
of these "1,000-year-old beatniks", sharing the same
zero-work ethic and predilection for intoxicants and phantastica.
In India I found saddhus and dervishes aplenty, but in Iran
they had mostly vanished, at least outwardly. The only patched
cloaks
belonged to an Order called the Khaksariyya, or "Dust Heads" (as
in the image of prostrating in the dust of the Beloved's doorway,
or throwing dust on the head in mourning). In Shiraz, I attended
zikr in one of their khaniqahs in a beautiful garden called "Seven
Bodies", where they recited Hafez and then turned out the
lights and wept in darkness.
Patch-cloaked Khaksari dervishes still
occasionally wandered around begging or selling incense against
the Evil Eye (esfand, aka Syrian rue, a potent hallucinogen if
ingested, also used to make a red dye for fezzes). I knew a teahouse
in Isfahan staffed by Khaksari dervishes, where the head waiter,
their shaykh, recited from the epic Shahnameh, acting out all
the parts, a one-man theatre.
The Khaksari Order has initiatic links with a strange Kurdish
sect called the Ahl-i Haqq, or "People of the Truth",
the same Divine Name claimed by Hallaj the sufi martyr. This is
not a sufi order but a folk religion, a synecresis of pre-Zoroastrian
paganism, extreme Shiism, dervish-sufism and perhaps Manichaeism.
One branch of Ahl-i Haqq actually worship Satan, eat pork and drink
wine; several friends of mine travelled to their remote valleys
and found them quite warm and hospitable.
The "orthodox" Ahl-i
Haqq has established a jam-khaneh, or meeting house, in Tehran
under a charismatic shaykh, Ustad Elahi, a famous musician and
master of the sehtar. Many Tehran musicians were drawn to him as
disciples; some Westerners also (including my friend, the French
ethnomusicologist Jean During); and Ustad Elahi's son has written
books in French and English.
Dervishism and the strange sects (too many to list in this essay)
seem to me to provide something quite vital to Persian culture
and even "politics" in a broad sense of that term - something
that might be called "traditional anarchism". Iran is
generally depicted as "90%" orthodox Shiite, and this
may be so, but the dervishes and heretics have played a larger
role than such figures would suggest. Inside the "fat" Iranian,
a "thin" dervish often struggles for self-expression
and freedom.
Sufis are very pious, certainly, but dervishism (even
without the outward signs and practices) also allows a way to cock
a snook at all the dreary conformities, class suffocation, puritanism,
overly formal manners and philistine consensus aesthetics. In modern
Persian, the adjective darvishi implies a whole complex of such
attitudes and tastes, not necessarily even connected with any sufi
praxis. It means something like "laid back", "cool",
informal and relaxed ("Don't dress for dinner - we'll be very
darvishi"), "hip" and bohemian.
Some sufis are very darvishi, like the Safi Ali Shah branch of
the Ni'matollahi Order, who owned a very nice khaniqah (with garden
and tiled dome) in Tehran; many were professional musicians at
Radio Tehran, and some of them
- so people said - smoked opium. I attended a fashionable funeral
in their garden once, since the dervishes rented it out for such
occasions. Other sufis criticised them for this and looked on them
as slackers. Not all sufis are darvishi by any means.
Sufism in the past has occasionally taken its "traditional
anarchism" as far as armed uprising against injustice; but
in recent times, it has transferred its energies to theological
and intellectual liberation, and applied its wildness to more inward
dimensions. Given a political reading, sufism provides plenty of
inspiration for resistance: think of Hafez's line, "Stain
your prayer-carpet with wine!" Given a cultural reading, sufism
has sparked off countless revivals of traditional culture precisely
by resisting tradition's "dead weight". The tremendous
changes in Persian classical music in the late 19th century, for
example - larger ensembles, new melodic material, experiments with
European influences etc - were all carried out by sufis or artists
steeped in cultural sufism.
"Radical tolerance" may prove impossible as a political
program at a given time and place - but it can always be internalised
by the artist and externalised as art. Since "the Orient" never
really experienced the enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution
(except as imposed by cultural imperialism), it retained many traditional
forms of Romantic resistance within the "permitted dissidence" of
sufism and the arts.
Under conditions of overwhelming oppression the dervish becomes rendi, that is to say, clever. A rend can drink wine under the
very nose of the Law and get away with it. The rend is a secret
agent of self-illumination, a strange combination of mystic monk
and prankish surrealist. Perhaps this is where Gurdjieff found
his notion of the "clever one" who avoids onerous paths
of religion and yoga, and slips into heaven like a burglar, so
to speak. In folklore, the rend becomes a comic figure like the
famous Mulla Nasroddin, outwardly a fool but in truth a sage.
Now that I've set up a dichotomy between "orthodox" Twelve-Imams
Shiism on the one hand and "heterodox" sufism and radical
cults on the other hand, I have to ruin the neatness of contrast
by admitting that orthodox Shiism has a mystical, ecstatic and
even radical aspect of its own. The late French Islamicist and
philosopher Henry Corbin went so far as to say that sufism and
Shiism are "one", or rather aspects of the same thing,
Persian esotericism. In practice, however, the opposition is real
enough - and even fatal on occasion, as we have seen.
But to some
extent it's a matter of taste and style. Dr Nurbakhsh and most
of the dervishes confess orthodox Shiism - but Nurbakhsh forbids
all forms of ritual mourning and weeping, so typical of Shiism,
saying that sufism is about life and love, not death. (Once a Western
friend of mine took an intelligent young mullah to a Tehran church
for Christmas. Afterwards he said he found it interesting except
for the sermon: "Why, no one shed a single tear! How can that
be called preaching?")
The ulema, even the most mystically inclined, would criticise
Dr Nurbakhsh for usurping the role of the spiritual master, which
for them can only belong to the Twelfth, or Hidden, Imam. As Corbin
realised, the existence of spiritual authority solely in the realm
of imaginal vision implies the existence of a kind of radical liberty
- a dissemination of potential gnosis (erfan) amongst all believer.
The paradoxical advantage of a Hidden Imam lies precisely in his
absence, which creates a conceptual space of spiritual freedom.
Of course, for Shiites (and for Corbin), the Mundus Imaginalis is real, not mere make-believe or reverie. The goal of spiritual
praxis in this case must consist of a constant renewal of visionary
energy and imaginal presence. Small, informal groups of ulema teach
and practise such practical erfan, which in some ways resembles
sufism without a sufi master. Outside orthodox Shiism in the extremist
sects (Ghulat), this spiritual anarchism can indeed be taken to
extremes. Within orthodoxy, the "golden chain" of erfan
may lie buried under the robes of the pious, but the glint of a
different metal sometimes shows through.
I once met an outstanding Shiite gnostic who wore turban and
robes but lived as a recluse scholar: the late Allamah Assar, then
very aged, father of the Persian folk singer Shusha Guppy, a friend
of mine. Mr Assar was known for his sense of humour and his deep
mysticism, but also for his clairvoyance; and in none of these
respects did he prove a disappointment. Over the teacups he suddenly
beamed at me intently and said, "You remind me of someone.
Who can it be? Ah, I have it: you look just like Shah Ni'matollah
Wali!"
No explanation was forthcoming. Shah Ni'matollah died in 1431
and there exists no authentic portrait. (Imaginary portraits depict
a stereotyped "bearded master"). Afterwards Shusha swore
she had not told her father that I was working on a book about
Shah Ni'matollah; in fact, she's forgotten it till I reminded her.
Shusha wasn't surprised: O, father's always like that, she said.
But it was a strange moment for me, and led to the theory that
good translations and biographies may sometimes be written by authors
who are somehow possessed by their subjects.
As for the Twelfth Imam, it seems he is not quite so hidden as
might be inferred from that title; in fact, according to popular
belief, he makes frequent authentic appearances in dreams and visions
and even in the flesh, or a form indistinguishable from flesh.
A friend of mine, the scholar William C Chittick, once met a man
who'd actually met the Hidden Imam several times and spoke so brilliantly
on the subject that Chittick felt almost convinced that the Mahdi
would soon return.
Later, both Chittick and I met an amazing alchemist
in Isfahan who served us tea with drops of Oil of Gold in it, very
stimulating. In fact, a Jungian psychologist who accompanied us
on this visit went into almost terminal ecstasies of archetypal
bliss. The alchemist showed us a closet-full of lead ingots that
appeared to be halfway transformed into gold. Oil of Gold was easy,
he said; transmutation of metals was more difficult. No living
master had instructed him in this mystery. Instead, at each stage
of the process he would fast for 40 days while invoking Ya
Kabir, Ya Latif ("O, Generous and Subtle", the alchemic names
of God), and then retire to sleep. He would, without fail, experience
a dream in which the Twelfth Imam, assisted by angels, demonstrated
the correct alchemical procedures; upon waking, he knew exactly
what to do. Eventually, he hoped to donate the bars to charity.
But he had no disciples or helpers, and as far as I knew, he died
before achieving the Philosopher's Stone.
Sunni Islam is "built" upon Five Pillars: confession
of unity; belief in prophets and angels; prayer; pilgrimage; and
the poor-tax. To these, Shiism adds a Sixth Pillar: social justice.
Shiism has usually existed as a religion without state power, and
traditionally as a source of potential revolt against Sunnism.
But in the course of time, the Pillar of Justice has been given
an even wider interpretation.
The late Ali Shariati, a radical
mullah assassinated by the Shah's secret police, converted many
Iranians to the concept of Shiite socialism. Shariati's tracts
reveal a fascinating blend of Marxist humanism and reverence
for Ali and Husayn as rebels against state oppression. Official
revolutionary
state Shiism in Iran today has taken another direction, not socialist
and not particularly radical. But curiously, Ayatollah Khomeini
was involved in erfani circles as a young man and wrote
several decent articles on sufism and even a few sufi poems.
His mystical
leanings made the really orthodox ayatollahs distrust him, and
this is why they never proclaimed him their chief (Marja al taqlid,
Ayatollah of Ayatollah, even now a vacant position). The link
between erfan and revolution is quite solidly historic and real,
and always
capable of regeneration.
The dervish life and attitudes I've been discussing can best
be appreciated by travelling to Iran and India, where, despite
everything, despite both persecution by orthodoxy and attrition
by modernism and "West-intoxication", dervishes are still
roaming - or at least I hope so. Short of a trip into these zones
of potential war and confusion, however, the second-best method
for getting a taste of dervishism would be to read some sufi poetry.
I've made the following tiny selection of poems to illustrate some
of the points emphasised in this essay, which doesn't pretend to
offer any explanations of sufism or dervishism, but only a nostalgic
trace of something in my memory.
Hakim Sana'i, early 12th century, one of the first great sufi
poets of the Persian language, already presented most of the great
sufi themes in his work. Read literally, his poems suggest a revolt
against orthodoxy, a form of spiritual extremism bordering on apostasy
and mystical existentialism. Of course, it remains possible to
read him (or any sufi poem) metaphorically, so that "wine" becomes
divine inspiration, "beloved" the sufi master and so
on. A lot of sufi poetry was undoubtedly written in this figurative
vein, but when it comes to the work of real poets like Sana'i,
one is forced to admit the likelihood of a complex over-writing
of different but mutually resonating interpretations.
Saki, bring wine
and do not cease to bring it
for our dear friend here has broken
his vows of repentance,
has stood up from the siege
of self-denial and obligation
and sat down in the tavern
with that "Portrait."
Let's rid his head of hypocrisy
and vain boasting
and all at once spring himself
from his monastery;
he's freed his ankle
from the chains of religion
and bound his waist with
a fire-worshipper's sash.
He drinks and urges me
"Have one yourself:
stay drunk
for as long as you can;
keep following this path
to Nothingness
and strike a fire beneath
all that survives.
It's difficult not to read this in the light of Baudelaire as
well as the light of Islamic mysticism. Pious sufis can always
read such poems piously, but it would be wrong to claim that all
readers do so. I've heard violent arguments in Iran about whether
Hafez drank real wine or metaphorical wine. The Khaksari dervishes
of Shiraz chanted Hafez and wept, but once I also witnessed a Communist
professor of literature from Tehran university reciting Hafez with
tears streaming down his cheeks. Ordinary folks still visit Hafez's
tomb to tell their fortunes by opening his poetic Divan at random,
as if he were a sort of Nostradamus, a quasi-prophet. And yet from
the Christian (or post-Christian) point of view, it would seem
difficult to venerate a person who writes like Hafez in this imaginal
letter to a long-dead sufi, Shaykh Ahmad-i Jam:
Sufi, approach and see the clarity of this jewelled vintage
in the burnished looking-glass of the cup.
Beg the secret from those profligates behind the curtain:
not the puritan, but only he of high Station attains this state.
Fold up your nets and go - no one hunts the phoenix -
the trap's hand holds nothing but empty mind.
At the banquet of the Age take one cup, two cups
and go. No more than this. No perpetual Union.
My heart, youth drains away and you've not plucked one rose:
Don't be an old laughing-stock! It's not too late to start now!
Carpe diem, for when the fountainhead dried up
even Adam fled the garden of the Abode of Peace.
As for us at your threshold, at your command
my master, look with pity on your servants;
(signed) Hafez, disciple of Jamshid's Cup
Now vagrant breeze, go and take
these signs of servitude to the Shaykh of Jam.
Finally, a quick brush with the poetry of those late 18th century
and early 19th century Ni'matollahi dervishes who suffered persecution
at the hands of the mullahs for their cavalier attitudes towards
outward form.
Nur Ali Shah was their leader. He is still depicted in popular
art as a beautiful youth of about 16 in dervish dress, archetype
of the wild qalander boy. He was the companion of Mushtaq the martyred
musician, and was himself poisoned in 1796. He married one of the
very few women who ever adopted the wandering-dervish way of life,
Bibi Hayati (her very existence scandalised the bigots). In their
poetry, they appear as a triad: Nur Ali Shah as the saki, the cup-bearer;
Hayati as the beloved; and Mushtaq as the minstrel - stock figures
in Persian literature, interiorised and expressed in poetry, in
life, and in death. Nur Ali and Hayati had a daughter, Tuti ("Parrot");
she survived the years of persecution and grandmothered a clan
of dervishes who still adhere to the Order.
I am the wave, the ocean, the ship, the storm
In the depths of the bottomless sea I am the pearl.
I open my eyes to the Light of Revelation and become
The Light itself in the beholder's eye.
My darling, I am the very soul of the Beloved's body -
What body? What soul? No, I am the Soul of Soul.
For lovers by day, lovers by night, in union and separation
I am the Light and the fire, Paradise and the pits of Hell.
The Overlord of this entire Domain of Spirit and Soul
in this Age - I say it openly - is I.
By losing my head and the very structure of my being in His Love
I have become the very order of existence for His lovers.
As the reveller breathes wine, I, like the Light of 'Ali,
Am he who overflows and breathes forth the very revellers themselves.
In this well-known ghazal, Nur Ali is boasting of his spiritual
attainments, like Shah Ni'matollah in the poem quoted earlier;
Nur Ali's poem was often cited as evidence of his heretical beliefs.
Hayati's poems are more intimate, more subjective, but no less "shocking",
especially given that they were written by a woman.
Now is the assembly of delight, feast day, jubilee, song of the
rebab
And the rays from this clear wineglass shame the sun and the
moon.
There are no strangers in the house, musicians play, the Saki
befriends us
The touch of those sweet lips fills drunkards' mouths with pure
honey.
Inlaid cups wait, filled with melted rubies.
The king s with us, the moon captures hearts, wine erases sorrow
The flesh is strong, the heart serene, the soul satisfied with
intimacy.
How, in the world of wakefulness, can such celebrations
be?
Is it a daydream? Do I sleep?
My Lord, in your benificence, cut not the way
For my soul's fingers to grasp the sleeve of pleasure, till judgement
Day.
If, for Hayati, in the heart of night the sun should shine
Tell her to unveil the face of the Daughter of the Vine.
In this ruba'i (quatrain), Hayati sums up the unique three-way
love affair:
The Saki has unmasked the rose of his face
The sweetvoiced minstrel touched the strings of his rebab:
One ravished my heart with his wordless song
I have taken liquid
rubies from the other's hyacinthine lips.
Reza Ali Shah Herati was only a minor poet and a minor disciple
of Nur Ali Shah, but still a very agreeable poet; this is one
of the nicest descriptions of the wandering dervish life I've
ever
come across in all Persian sufi poetry:
In the absolute madness of love I am sane - and I dance
In His dreams and fantasies I am awake - and I dance
Out of ocean depths of desiring Him I overflow - and I laugh
I am filled with His bountiful drunkenness - and I dance
My idleness
is busyness and all my business is idle
I have no work - I am unemployed - and I dance.
From the land of
loneliness I have reached the Station of King Jamshid
And now I am the Chief in the country of all souls - and I
dance.
Eager for the encounter I escaped myself
Like Mansur I am strung upon the gallows - and I dance.
A vagabond
lover wandering through alleyways and bazaars
The Beloved has dropped His mask -I'm helpless - and I dance.
No
thought of infamy passes through the lover's mind
In the realm of fame and reputation I am first - and I dance.
My
unconsciousness is awareness - my sobriety is drunkenness
In drunkenness and sobriety I am with the Friend - and I
dance.
I am content, within and without, I have surrendered
myself
Brought myself back from Other-than-He - and I
dance.
Happy to know that Reza Ali, although he was forced to flee
persecution after the deaths of Mushtaq and Nur Ali, died with
his boots on
in the Shiite pilgrimage town of Kazimayn in 1996.
By travelling in India and Iran rather than only reading about
them I came to appreciate and actually love certain "late
decadent periods" of he sort that are universally despised
by the Orientalists for their aesthetic impurity, despised by the
new breed of Islamist bigots for their religions impurity, and
despised by modernist pro-Western orientals for their medieval
impurity. Pretty much the only people who don't despise these late
decadent periods are the people who are actually still living
in them and are too ignorant and backward to realise their own
irrelevance,
outdatedness, political incorrectness - and impurity.
In India,
the remnants of the late Mughal era still provide a ghostly
and melancholic but exquisitely refined matrix for the lives of
many.
In Iran, it's the Qajar period (the dynasty before the Pahlevis);
a past recent enough that in the 1970s one could still touch
it through stories (like Dr Safvat's story about Mushtaq), through
buildings, paintings, music, crafts, poetry and even food.
The past lingered in a way inconceivable to Americans or even Europeans;
enough of it lingered that one could almost live in it.
 Late decadent periods attract me for many reasons; eg, they're
usually rather peaceful (because too tired and blasé for
war); often they're devoted to "small happinesses" -
which as Nietsche says may be more important than the big ones,
the ones that always betray us. Maybe great original art fails
to thrive in such periods - since kings and lords can no longer
afford it - but the "minor arts" often experience a kind
of perfection; aristocratic tastes (in cheap folkish forms) filter
down even to the lowest levels. I remember one late winter night
in Tehran, as I passed the skeleton of a half-built, jerry-built
pseudo-California office block, I saw a lone night watchman warming
himself by a barrel of burning trash; he wore a sheepskin coat
and was entertaining himself by reciting Hafez viva voce to the
snowflakes.
"Iran" is the proper ancient name for Persia, but
it wasn't the official name till the mid-20th century, changed
by decree of Reza Shah (the last late Shah's father) from "Persia" to "Iran".
His motive for this was suspect, because he was a Nazi sympathiser
and because "Iran" means "land of the Aryans" -
and the name change left a bad taste in the mouth of many Iranians.
The name "Persia" was supposed to represent all that
was backward, medieval, superstitious, anti-progress, late and
decadent - everything "Oriental" in the land and people.
But the land and its people (or some of them) still lived in that
world and loved it.
I know it's perfectly illegitimate and indefensible for me to
say that I also loved it. I know I was an outsider (although at
times I convinced myself otherwise!); I know that I cannot "represent
the Other" and even that the whole project of representation
has become suspect amidst the "ruins" of post-modernity.
I even know that the entire hippie project of Romantic travel was
largely illusory and certainly doomed to failure. The "post-colonial" discourse" has
made all this perfectly and painfully clear. Sadly, however, I'm
unable to repent or to write off my experiences as irrelevant crypto-reactionary
delusions.
"Iran" as represented in the "news", a two-dimensional
imago of oil wells and atomic reactors under the control of evil
fanatics in black robes... Is this "Iran" any more real
than the "Persia" in which I tried to travel and even
to lose myself, the Persia of roses and nightingales that impinges
so sensibly on my memory? Or are both equally real and unreal?
The truth must certainly be more complex even than such paradox
could suggest. But since "Iran" is now (as I write in
the summer of 2003) being pumped up in the media as the next spoke
of the Axis of Evil, I doubt that "Persia will get much airplay
over the next few years. Hence this essay. "Persia" has
become part of The World We Lost. Its perfume lingers even as it
recedes into a past that's half imaginal. It leaves behind it only
something that might be called difference. How else to define that
which we feel is leaving us?
 About
Peter Lamborn Wilson spent seven years in Iran, where he edited
the journal of the Iranian Royal Academy of Philosophy. He has
studied
sufism
and Ismailism, and translated Persian poetry. His books include
Scandal (Semiotext(e) 1998), a study of Islamic heresy. This piece
was published in on in August 2004, entitled "Iran...
or Persia?".
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Lingering perfume
