The Persian Night: Iran Under the Khomeinist Revolution Read online

  We have to be very attentive so that some Satans [sic] do not use the names of Iran and the land of Iran as a means of diverting us from our beloved Islam. Whatever corruption we have suffered from has come from this idea of nationality and patriotism. Beware that bringing up such ideas is designed to cause divisions. One of the issues that the architects of colonialism raise is patriotism.15

  Khomeinist theoreticians claimed that the very idea of Iran as a nation is a Western imperialist invention meant to undermine Islam. This is how Sayyed Mir-Hussein Mussavi Khamenehi, Khomeini’s prime minister from 1981 until the post was abolished in 1989, put the ayatollah’s position on the subject:

  The colonialists wanted to separate our nation from its Islamic identity. This conspiracy started in an organized way in our country and left destructive consequences. There were calculated moves to promote nationalism, the revival of dead bones to claim that the Iranian system was eternal. In architecture, for example, we had to seek inspiration in [pre-Islamic] Achaemenid architecture. The idea of reliance on a pre-Islamic Iranian system of values, and recalling the history of the Achaemenids, the Sassanids, and other Iranian dynasties before Islam, was exported to our country from the West as part of efforts to de-Islamicize it. The emphasis was put on nationalist values and concepts such as blood and soil that we encounter in nationalism. The marking of the millennium of Ferdowsi’s birth in 1934 and the purging of the Persian language of Arabic words were Western conspiracies to destroy Islam. At the same time, they were bringing the ruins of Persepolis out of the earth in which they had been buried for thousands of years to fabricate a history and force our nation to feel proud about it. But that history was alien to Islam; it was a history that had died thousands of years ago.16

  The new regime coined code words to designate its ideological enemies, including terms for democrat, liberal, secular, and leftist (chapi), but the worst insult was reserved for those labeled “patriotic” (melli). The Khomeinists regretted that the Arab invaders who brought Islam to Iran had failed to destroy the national consciousness of Iranians, as had been the case with other nations conquered by the armies of Muhammad. “To emphasize our Iranian-ness is a deviation,” declared Ayatollah Sayyed Muhammad Mussavi Khoiniha, deputy speaker of the Islamic Majlis, one of the rising stars of Khomeinism at the time. “When they [the West] want to deceive people, they bring up the issue of national identity. The very concept of a nation is alien to Islam. What does national mean? As a Muslim I feel no obligation to fight for a homeland minus Islam.”17

  Proud of their claimed Arab ancestry, the Khomeinists launched a campaign to Arabize the Persian language by injecting it with hundreds of Arabic loan words. An Indo-European language, Persian has never felt comfortable in the alphabet borrowed from Arabic after the Arab conquerors succeeded in destroying the Persian characters that had previously been used. nader naderpour, who was one of Iran’s most popular contemporary poets, described Persian language as “an Aryan soul in a Semitic body.”

  The story of how Persian survived the Arab invasion would read like a narrative in the style of magical realism, since the Arabs did everything they could to destroy it. They burned all the Persian books they could find and demolished more than seven hundred libraries, including one at Ctesiphon, the capital of the Sassanids, that contained over forty thousand volumes, an impressive figure for the seventh century. Omar, the second caliph, explained the rationale for the auto da fe organized by the Arabs: “If the books of others are in conformity with Our Book [the Koran], they are superfluous and a waste of space. If they are in contradiction with it, they must be burned.” The Arabs feared that Iranians would continue to read their own books, including Zoroastrian texts, and eventually revolt against alien Islamic rule. At the time of the Arab invasion, the most popular Persian religious text was the book known as Zand va Pazand (“Truth and Counter-truth”), which explained the basic tenets of Zoroastrianism and the principal arguments of its critics. Omar made the reading of this book a capital crime, and he invented an Arabic word for it: zandaqa, a term used even today to describe anyone who deviates from Islam. The person guilty of the capital crime is called zandiq, “he who reads books other than the Koran,” and if he refuses to stop doing so after three warnings, he should be put to death. Later, the Iranian poet Mahyar Daylami, who had learned Arabic in order to “insult the Arabs in their own language,” wondered how “a people with just one book could teach others with whole libraries?”

  It took the Arabs almost eighty years to conquer most parts of Iran, forcing those who wished to read “other books” to flee to still-free areas of Iranian-ness such as the Caspian Sea littoral and parts of Central Asia. For nearly two centuries, no text of enduring value was produced in Persian. (If any were, none survived.) Iranians know that period as the “two centuries of silence” in which their existence as a nation seemed threatened. 18 In those two centuries, Iranians lost their alphabet and had to adopt the Arabic one with some modifications.19 At the same time, thousands of Arabic words crept into the most widely spoken form of Persian at the time, known as Pahlavi. (The reverse traffic also existed, although on a smaller scale, with hundreds of Persian loan words entering the Arabic vocabulary.)20

  The two centuries of silence ended with a poem written by one Abu-Hofs Soghdi, a farmer from Central Asia who appears to have remained a Zoroastrian while assuming a Muslim appearance. Only the first line of his sonnet has survived, but every Iranian knows it as the first cry of a nation reborn. As the poet Massoud Farzad put it in the 1960s, “The baby cried, and everyone knew that he was still alive—alive after two centuries of being strangulated by a vicious invader.” The first line of Soghdi’s sonnet is: How does the wild doe roam in the plain? She has no friends—friendless, how does she abide?

  For the next 1,200 years, generation after generation of Iranians believed that Soghdi’s doe symbolized Iran—wounded, friendless, and turned to the wild in an epic struggle for survival. By the tenth century, however, it had become clear that Iranians would never share the fate of Egyptians, Syrians, and north African Berbers, among other nations conquered by Islam that lost their identities and became Arabs. The text that made sure Iran would remain Iran was Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh (“Book of Kings”), which narrates the nation’s mythological past, plus a few episodes of its history under the Sassanids, in almost pure Persian.21 Ferdowsi (935-1020) reminded Iranians that they had been a proud nation, builders of empires and civilizations. He castigated the Arabs for their “violence, ignorance, and fanaticism”; they were “imbibers of camel milk and devourers of lizards.” Fortune and fate had helped them destroy the Iranian civilization; but that was not the end of the story. Iran was eternal, and would return as a great nation and builder of civilizations.

  When Ferdowsi wrote his epic, the Arabs had already vanished from the Iranian scene. The faith they brought had survived, albeit in a form that might have surprised Muhammad himself.

  Centuries later, the Khomeinist regime launched a new campaign against the Persian language. But this provoked a reaction among Iranian writers and poets who tried to resist the regime-sponsored trend by purging their work of Arabic loan words. In the 1930s, the Iranian Academy set up by Reza Shah had already opened the way by replacing some five thousand Arabic loan words with Persian equivalents, often made from ancient Pahlavi stems. Iranian nationalists made a point of writing what they called Parsi Sareh (Purified Persian). One of their leaders, Zabih Behrouz, argued that since man thought with words, it was important to establish what words were used to form those thoughts. “An Iranian who thinks with Arabic words risks ending up thinking like an Arab,” he wrote. “If we wish to become Iranians again we have to start thinking with our own words.”

  The fear that Iranians might further distance themselves from the Arabs, and thus from the religion of the Arabs, persuaded Khomeini to reduce the number of hours devoted to the study of Persian at schools to provide more time for the teaching of Arabic. Government pro
paganda presented Arabic as “the language of Allah” or even “the sacred language” (zaban moqaddas), although in the Koran nothing but Allah is described as “sacred.” At a meeting with university deans in november 1982, Khomeini lashed out at one of the academics who had suggested that teaching Arabic at schools was a waste of time, as Arabs produced no scientific or literary work that could justify the effort. “Do not say that the Arabic language is not ours!” the ayatollah shouted. “The Arabic language belongs to Islam and Islam belongs to all. Our writers must not fall into the trap of Persianization. Our textbooks must be purged. The Persian names of our streets must change so that we become independent.”

  Khomeini’s plea on behalf of Arabic was echoed by one of his lieutenants, Ali-Akbar Bahremani, better known as Hashemi Rafsanjani. In June 1985, delivering a sermon at the campus of Tehran University, he called on students to “love, cherish, and praise” the language of the Koran. “For us the Arabic language is the most noble of languages in the world and a divine gift to mankind as a whole,” he said. “We are greatly attached to this language.” While the teaching of Arabic proved a failure because the overwhelming majority of Iranian children were not interested, changing the names of streets proceeded briskly. By the end of 1983, the names of almost all Iranian mythological figures, kings, heroes, poets, scholars, and generals had disappeared from public places. Instead, Iranians found the names of obscure Arab historic figures, mullahs with an Arab background, and even the names of Arab terrorists, such as the man who murdered Egypt’s President Anwar Sadat in 1981.22

  Ironically, neither Khomeini nor Rafsanjani, nor indeed a majority of the mullahs, ever learned enough Arabic to conduct a conversation or write in that language. In 1979, an attempt by Khomeini to speak Arabic in an interview with Algerian television in Tehran turned into farce when the ayatollah came out with a mongrel version of the language that the visiting media men could not understand. They decided to switch to French, using an interpreter for Khomeini, who spoke Persian. Only one of the six individuals who have acted as president of the Islamic Republic has spoken Arabic.23

  7

  Unwelcome Faith

  Khomeini and his associates have tried to persuade the Iranians, and the world outside, that Iran welcomed Islam with open arms. Some Islamist apologists, such as Ali Shariati, have echoed the claim and tried to prove that Iranians gladly accepted Islam because they were tired of the “unjust social system” under the Sassanids. Judging by historical records, however, the opposite was the case. By most accounts, a majority of Iranians refused to convert to Islam until some three centuries after the fall of the Sassanid Empire.

  At the time of the Arab conquest, no one quite knew what Islam actually was. The Koran was not written down until a generation later. Even then, few Iranians knew enough Arabic to read it in the original, and no Persian translations appeared until four centuries later. In any case, the religious authorities regarded the translation of the Koran as a questionable if not reprehensible act and discouraged believers from consulting vernacular texts. Islamic law, or Shariah, was not codified until over a century after the conquest, mostly thanks to Iranian and Greek converts in the Levant. The Arabic language itself was little more than an oral tradition with no fixed grammatical rules and certainly no written lexicon. The grammar and lexicon were established by a number of Iranians, among them Sibuyeh and Ruzbeh (better known as Ibn Muqaffah), who pretended to be Muslim converts but continued to practice their ancestral Zoroastrian faith in secret.

  The Koran orders Muslims to battle against those “who do not believe in Allah and those who follow their own faith, even those who have (their own) books until they convert to Islam or agree to pay a poll tax.”1 This was the message that Muslim emissaries from Caliph Omar brought to the Sassanid King of Kings, Yazdegerd III: Accept Islam or submit to Arab rule! Yazdegerd wrote back to reject the blackmail. He described Omar’s religion as “a cult of terror and plunder.” Various versions of the two letters have remained in circulation ever since as part of the never-ending dialogue/conflict between Iranian nationalism and Islam.

  The Iranian monarch’s refusal triggered wars that lasted more than fifteen years and decimated the population of the country. According to historians, over 100,000 Iranians died in the battle of Jalula alone.2 Iranians fought the invaders in nahavand, Hamadan, Shushtar, Ahvaz, and Ctesiphon. In Estakhr, the people resisted for six months and, once they had surrendered, refused to convert or pay the poll tax. The Arabs ordered a general massacre in which nearly the whole of the population, some 150,000 souls, perished. There were similar massacres in Rey, near present-day Tehran; in Sistan, a province on what is now the Afghan frontier; in Qom, south of Tehran; in Shapour, in the province of Fars; and in Gorgan, close to the Caspian Sea. In Yazd, central Iran, a small army led by Mehrbanu, one of Yazdegerd’s daughters, fought the Arabs for almost twenty years. Another small army of resistance fighters under Piruz, a son of Yazdegerd, fought the invaders in Central Asia before eventually seeking refuge in China.3

  Iranian chroniclers have recorded the utter amazement caused by the Arab “passion for loot, plunder, and destruction.” It was as if the Arabs, being children of the desert, wished to reduce everything to the level of the sand dunes they had grown up with. They were comfortable only with things horizontal. To these tent dwellers, any building was something both to marvel at and to fear. They cut down trees, laid waste to the artful walled gardens known as paradais (the origin of the English word “paradise”), and pulled down any building that was taller than a camel standing up. Abu-Ubaida bin al-Jarrah, one of the Arab generals, was outraged to see that the Iranian capital had countless buildings that were grander than Allah’s Precinct at Mecca, where the black stone known as the Ka’aba (the cube) was located. non-Muslims were not allowed to have buildings taller than those in which Muslims lived.4 Whole cities were destroyed, their inhabitants forced to flee or taken into slavery.

  Some of those sent into slavery ended up as mercenaries in future Islamic conquests thousands of miles away. nearly half the army that conquered southern Spain for Islam consisted of slaves and mercenaries from Isfahan, in central Iran. Iranian mercenaries and slaves also participated in the capture of Sicily and Corsica by Muslim armies.

  For generations, the atrocities committed by the Arab invaders were not forgotten; some are remembered in Iranian folk songs and stories to this day. The history of the “two centuries of silence” is also filled with accounts of Iranian revolts against Arab oppressors. According to most historians, not a year passed without some part of the occupied territories being shaken by rebellion. Iranians created secret societies that in later centuries transformed themselves into Sufi fraternities. Rebels gathered in the charred remains of old Iranian cities laid waste by the Arabs. The urban wastelands, known as kharabat (the ruins), became havens of peace where Iranians could recite their new Persian poetry, drink forbidden wine, recall ancestral liturgies, and nurse their national chagrin. They also kept alive the memory of Iranian resistance against the invaders. Those urban wastelands, which still dot the Iranian landscape, provided refuge for anti-Arab rebels such as the Khorram-Dinan (Followers of the Felicitous Faith, i.e. Zoroastrians)—people who had rallied to the standard of Babak Khorramdin, who fought the forces of the caliph for over a decade before being betrayed, captured, and crucified.

  Under Muawyyah, the founder of the first Muslim monarchy, the Arabs decided to create permanent settlements in various parts of the occupied territories to discourage further revolts. Between 662 and 682 A.D., an estimated 50,000 Arab soldiers and their families, some 300,000 people, were settled in Khorassan, the Iranian province bordering on Central Asia. The settlers mixed with the local population, starting a process that was to continue until the end of Arab domination some 150 years later. Rather than Arabizing Iranians, however, Muawyyah’s scheme led to the Iranization of the settlers. By the start of the ninth century, outside the lowlands of Khuzestan where Arabic spea
kers had lived under Iranian rule, not a single Arabic-speaking village or neighborhood existed anywhere on the vast Iranian plateau.

  The belief that Arabs and Persians were worlds apart permeates the works of many great Iranian poets. The Arabs are depicted as a people who love fighting, plunder, and the visible rituals of their faith. Iranians, on the other hand, are presented as a people of great spirituality who love beauty and dislike showing off their religiosity. The Arabs are concerned with appearances, the outside of things; the Iranians with the “inner truth” of existence. In a famous poem, Attar tells the story of a wealthy Arab who “falls among a bunch of Persians” and loses his worldly wealth, but he is extremely happy nevertheless. When his Arab friends wonder how this can be, he says that he “lost the superficial to gain the essential.”

  Some Iranians even considered the Arabs incapable of understanding the message of Islam. Here is the Persian poet Sanai Ghaznavi (twelfth century):

  If the Arab were the protector of the faith,

  The man who fires the furnace would be master of the sun and the moon.

  It is the Persian who could build [civilization].

  The Arab is good for marauding and raiding.