Heirs to Forgotten Kingdoms (19 page)

The verses quoted above are just one example of how Hafez’s writing was deeply suffused with Zoroastrian thought. No wonder, then, that a Zoroastrian named Khosro wanted to honor Hafez. When he saw an earlier memorial to him in a shabby state, he tried to build a new one around his grave. That was back in 1899, and the effort came to an end when a local Muslim cleric led a mob to destroy the monument because it had been built by a Zoroastrian. The tomb has since been rebuilt magnificently by the poet’s Muslim admirers. Where, I wondered as I stood by the stone pillars of this new tomb, were Hafez’s Magi now? As I did so, a dervish in ragged clothes walked past me and proceeded to circumambulate seven times around the monument. It is an old Zoroastrian custom. But as well as brown robes and a tall round hat, this holy man was wearing a green scapular, the color of Islam. He was a Muslim, not a Zoroastrian; Iran has been deeply influenced by Sufism, and some Sufis pay respect to dead saints by walking around their tombs. Of course, there might have been some Zoroastrians among the young men and women who were praying at the tomb or sitting in the café attached to the tomb. But I did not think so. Hafez’s Magi had shut their taverns long ago.

A dervish circumambulates the tomb of the poet Hafez, in Shiraz, Iran. Photo by the author

There was one place where I was confident of finding the Zoroastrians: Yazd, where Laal had been born. The road there went for a hundred miles through the desert, past jagged ridges of rock and fields of sand and dust, before it reached Yazd’s oasis. A huge tiled façade of pointed arches called a
tekyeh
, several stories high, greeted me on arrival; it was decorated in light blue and cream-colored Iranian faience, and next to it was a wicker wheel called a
nakhl.
These were used to stage the yearly Shi’a passion plays that commemorate the death of Ali’s son Hussein, who in Shi’a eyes was the third imam and who fell in battle with his Sunni Muslim opponents.

Browne came to Yazd and described his delight when he “had at length succeeded in isolating myself not only from my own countrymen, but from my co-religionists,” and was mistaken for a Zoroastrian himself. He reported that the community was “less liable to molestation now than in former times,” though they “often meet with ill-treatment and insult at the hands of the more fanatical [Muslims], by whom they are regarded as pagans.” When a bad governor held office, or when there was nobody in charge at all, he added, they were treated worse.

Browne was encountering the Zoroastrians at a time when their fortunes were on the mend. Despite the pervasive influence of their ideas, they had been treated with great harshness through the Middle Ages and beyond. A visitor to Iran in 1854, Maneckji Limji Hataria, wrote, “I found the Zoroastrians to be exhausted and trampled, so much that even no one in this world can be more miserable than them.” The community then was subject to a special
jizya
tax, imposed on all non-Muslims. Zoroastrians were also denied the right to testify against a Muslim in front of a judge, which put them at a great disadvantage in disputes over land or trade. In addition, they were reeling from what has been called “the last mass forcible conversion of Zoroastrians to Islam”—an episode that saw a mob attack a village in the 1850s and threaten its residents with death if they did not convert. Hataria was from a family of Parsees, descendants of Zoroastrian refugees who had left Iran a thousand years before for Gujarat in northern India. The Parsee community had originally looked to Iran for religious guidance, but it had become larger and wealthier over the centuries, and Hataria was there not to receive aid but to give it. He and his fellow Parsees sent money to the poorest Zoroastrians in Iran, founded modern schools, and helped persuade the Iranian government to abolish the
jizya
in 1882.

More improvements in the situation of Yazd’s Zoroastrians soon followed, and after 1906, when a constitutional revolution forced the monarchy to accept a set of liberalizing measures, including the creation of a parliament, one Zoroastrian was elected to the new body. The monarchy reasserted itself soon afterward but was eventually replaced by the dictatorship of Reza Khan, who took the title of shah and the surname Pahlavi. Despite these political changes, the community continued to flourish for the next seventy years. Zoroastrians entered government, and one of their own, Farhang Mehr, even rose to become deputy prime minister. They were particularly successful in business. As a result, fewer and fewer went into the priesthood, a profession that paid little and involved spending much time learning texts in ancient Avestan (an archaic language that itself could take years to learn). Laal’s father—the priest who used to stand on the roof of his house studying the stars—told her brothers to become doctors, not priests, if they wanted to escape a life of poverty. Other Zoroastrians clearly felt the same way. In the 1930s there were two hundred priests in Yazd; by 1964, there were fewer than ten.

Laal’s father was not only a priest—who eked out a small income as an itinerant preacher and small trader—but also a poet and thinker who took enthusiastically to the new ideas that were then spreading in Iran. When Reza Shah forbade the wearing of the head scarf in Iran in the 1930s, Laal’s mother wanted to stop her from attending school—for, though not a Muslim, she had her own strict idea of how a girl should dress in public. It was Laal’s father who insisted that she should be schooled again. When Laal chose to be a midwife, a profession that involved regular contact with human blood—taboo in a religion that placed great value on ritual cleanliness—he supported her, as he did when she chose for her husband Shahriar after being introduced to him by her brother.

It was a traditional courtship: at her first meeting with her future husband, she was accompanied by her mother and sister and did not look him in the face. She had to ask her sister what he looked like. Eventually she sneaked a look at him when they were sitting together on their third date, at a cinema, when she hoped that he was concentrating on the film and would not notice her sideways glance. She liked what she saw, and agreed to marry him. The family by that time had moved to Tehran, but after their marriage Laal and Shahriar did return occasionally to Yazd, to visit a small house they owned in the mountains; they rented out its lands to local farmers in return for a yearly supply of almonds and fruit. Their move to Tehran was a trend followed by many Zoroastrians as the Pahlavi shahs liberalized Iranian society. Laal’s brother no longer had to hear shouts of
gabr
—he went on to be a doctor in Iran’s air force. Shahriar was an army officer, later decorated for valor. For the first time since Nihavand, Zoroastrians could fight for Iran.

I saw no priest on the roof of any Yazdi house in 2006. At first I struggled to find any trace of Zoroastrians at all. Obituaries pasted to lampposts on every street had the Arabic Muslim heading
bismillah
(in the name of God) above photos of the recently dead. On one street corner, though, I found a notice with a different heading.
Ba nam-e-Ahura Mazda,
it declared in Persian: “in the name of Ahura Mazda.” Beneath it was the symbol of the bird-man, a man with a Persian cap and wings to his left and right and beneath him. I had seen the same symbol at Persepolis. Here at last were the Zoroastrians. A grocery shop along that road was festooned with pictures. Just as Middle Eastern Christians plaster images of St. George or the Virgin Mary to their walls and Muslims display photos of the shrine at Mecca or (in Iran) of Hussein, these pictures were of Zarathustra and the
fravahar.
They were stuck on the glass of the counter, the cash register, and the walls of the shop. At the end of the road there was even a shop selling Zoroastrian souvenirs. I contemplated whether to buy a clock with the Zoroastrian motto “Good thought, good word, good deed” written on it in Persian.

Opposite the shop, set back from the road behind a small garden, stood a fire temple. I was allowed inside, into a small clean room: behind a glass window, I could see a small flame burning. A picture of Zarathustra was on the wall of the room, and alongside it ran various excerpts from Zoroastrian scriptures—reminding the visitor that the Zoroastrians, too, have a holy book, which, along with belief in a single God, is traditionally a prerequisite for toleration under Islam. The “people of the book” are spoken of highly in the Koran, and in Iran the Zoroastrians are counted among their number. The regime derides them, however, because of their reverence for the sacred fires in their fire temples, alleging that they “worship fire.” This is something that the Zoroastrians deny, saying that they do not consider the fire God, but instead worship God by means of the fire. I asked the temple’s caretaker how many Zoroastrian families remained in Yazd. Very few, he said. Life was hard: the economy was bad and the government unfriendly. The numbers of Zoroastrians in the whole country, I later learned, had dropped since the revolution from thirty-three thousand to ten thousand (these are approximations, as no definitive statistics exist).

Perhaps it was appropriate that after visiting the fire temple, my next appointment was with the dead. On the opposite side of the city were two dusty hilltops surmounted by ruined towers. Called “towers of silence” by tourists, these were known to Zoroastrians as
dakhma
s. The road leading up to these hills, along which young men were racing all-terrain vehicles, used to be the route for Zoroastrian funeral processions. The body of the deceased would lie in the family home for three days, while a dog was kept nearby to deter evil spirits. Then the body would be carried on an iron bed, by men specially trained for the task, up this road and into the
dakhma
. Here the bier carriers would address the dead man: “Fear not and tremble not! This is the place of your ancestors, and of our fathers and mothers, and the pure and good, for a thousand years.”

An
ateshkadeh,
or fire temple, at Yazd. Photo by the author

“What follows,” Herodotus wrote in his account of this ceremony, “is reported about their dead as a secret mystery and not with clearness, namely that the body of a Persian man is not buried until it has been torn by a bird or dog.” In fact, the body was exposed until it was wholly eaten by birds or dogs. The birds, usually crows or vultures, could pick a body clean within minutes. The custom was abandoned in Iran some decades ago, apparently by choice, though it continues to be practiced among Parsees in India. The practice may predate the Zoroastrians by centuries. At Catalhuyuk in Turkey, where a human settlement from the eighth millennium
BC
has been excavated, there is some archaeological evidence that dead bodies may have exposed to the elements before burial.

A
dakhma
in Yazd, where Zoroastrians once exposed their dead for the birds to eat. Photo by the author

I climbed the
dakhma
nearest to the road, and from its wall looked down to see a Zoroastrian funeral in progress down below. Since the
dakhma
had now been abandoned, the funeral was heading instead for a nearby cemetery. There bodies were placed in stone and concrete to prevent them from polluting the earth. After the funeral, the participants would go home and wash themselves with bull’s urine. (The ammonia this urine contains makes it a good disinfectant, and apparently after years of storage it loses its smell—which is just as well, as sometimes Zoroastrians are expected to drink it, for example during coming-of-age ceremonies, although the squeamish now substitute pomegranate juice for the urine. Plutarch, in the first century
AD
, refers to this ceremony, so it is certainly very old.)