Heirs to Forgotten Kingdoms (21 page)
I visited this temple when I attended the memorial service for Laal and Shahriar, who died within months of each other in 2004. (They are buried at the Zoroastrian cemetery at Brookwood, where a prayer service is regularly held in a small chapel. The chapel is surrounded by neatly tended graves, their stones often marked with the
fravahar
, while grander stone tombs in Persian style house the dead of the wealthiest families.) At the ceremony a priest, his mouth veiled by a cloth mask that came down well below his chin—its purpose being to prevent contamination of the holy fire by breath or spittle—chanted rhythmically for ninety minutes in old Farsi, with his wife seated beside him, a scarf partly covering her hair. On the table in front of them were wine, milk, water, fruit, and white and purple blossoms, the last used as symbols of the spirits of the dead. Also on the table were pictures of Laal and Shahriar themselves; other photos showing their life in Iran and Britain were beamed onto a screen by a projector. Sandalwood twigs were burning in a small brazier, which was carried at intervals around the congregation, who waved their arms to waft the scent toward them. Afterward a selection of food was served, including both Indian and Iranian dishes.
As I talked to the Zoroastrians afterward over wine in plastic cups, I realized: at last, in this northern suburb of London, in a disused movie theater, I was in the tavern of Hafez’s Magi.
L
EBANON’S CAPITAL CITY
, Beirut, is a twenty-mile-long, million-resident stretch of modern buildings on the eastern coast of the Mediterranean sea—dotted here and there with an old, honey-colored, red-roofed house that has survived from when the city was smaller and more picturesque. Walking in 2011 along its Corniche past discreet lovers and seaside clubs, I heard everywhere the pounding of waves against rocks. Another metaphorical sea was obvious as well. Up by the colder waters of the English Channel a century ago, Matthew Arnold heard the sea of faith’s “melancholy, long, withdrawing roar.” At Beirut, that sea was still at the full, and stormy.
Though Lebanon’s fourteen-year civil war officially ended in 1989, the various religious groups whom that war pitted against each other still eye each other warily. The war wounded one in four Lebanese and killed one in twenty. All groups committed atrocities; all suffered them. But Lebanon’s diversity is not only a source of conflict. This country, whose five million people are divided between eighteen recognized sects and religions, offers the closest thing to religious equality that exists in the Middle East—a constitution declaring that “the State respects all creeds” and a people more tolerant of religious diversity than most others in the world, according to Gallup polling.
“Pity the nation that is full of religions and empty of faith. Pity the nation that is divided into fragments, each fragment deeming itself a nation,” wrote the Lebanese poet Kahlil Gibran in the
Garden of the Prophet,
referring acerbically to this multiplicity of sects. The reason for all this variety, though, is a virtuous one: these groups were safer in Lebanon than in most other places, because it consisted largely of mountainous areas that government forces could enter only with difficulty. Meanwhile, its location on the Mediterranean Sea made Lebanon part of both West and East. It was the Mediterranean, not the landmass of Europe, that was the heart of ancient Western civilization: around it the ancient Greeks lived, as Socrates once put it, “like frogs around a pond.” Traders shipped spices, wheat, dyes, and slaves across the sea. Philosophers and saints traded ideas and knowledge across it. The eighth-century Greek poet Homer, the fifth-century Greek historian Herodotus, and the Greek mathematician Euclid were none of them from mainland Greece: they were from an Aegean island, southern Italy, and Egypt, respectively. The Greek philosopher Pythagoras was born on the Aegean island of Samos to a Lebanese father and ended his days teaching in southern Italy. I was in Lebanon to meet members of one of its eighteen religious groups, called the Druze. I wanted to see if they might be the modern-day successors to Pythagoras’s followers, an ancient and secretive group of Greek philosophers called the Pythagorean Brotherhood.
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PYTHAGORAS FEATURED IN THE PHILOSOPHY
syllabus that I had studied at university, as he may have been a teacher of Socrates, but I could not remember anything he had written. In a Beirut bookstore I bought a book about the philosopher that had been translated into Arabic from a French original. As I read the book, I realized why I had seen so little of his work: he never wrote any of it down. Although Lebanon was part of the Greek world, it was also seen by the Greeks as exotic and mysterious (rather as it was by nineteenth-century Orientalists) because of the ancient civilizations that had existed there. Pythagoras played on this exoticism and the perception that the Orient contained esoteric wisdom passed on from the ancient Chaldeans and Israelites: legends spread that he had been taught by Jewish rabbis, Egyptian priests, and Chaldean astrologists. He was not willing to reveal what he had learned, however, except to the chosen few who were allowed to join his school. These pupils apparently had to keep absolute silence for five years, and only at the end of that time were they even allowed to catch a glimpse of their teacher. Those who gave away the secrets of Pythagoras’s teaching could expect merciless vengeance from the other members, who considered any breach of secrecy to be an unforgivable betrayal. This extended even to some of their more inexplicable teachings. Everybody knew, for instance, that the Pythagoreans were not allowed to eat beans, or even tread on them. Nobody understood why, because the Brotherhood would rather die than explain. Their spirit of secrecy, denounced by others at the time as charlatanry, was summed up by a motto at the beginning of the book, put there by its French writer: “Come near, you few philosophers, the Pythagorean way of life embraces you! But you, ordinary mass of everyday people, are far from it.”
Enough people did betray those secrets, though, for at least some Pythagorean beliefs to emerge. The Pythagoreans believed in reincarnation, and this drove them to purify the soul, which was immortal, and neglect the body, which they viewed as only its temporary casing. They wore white, undyed garments as a symbol of their commitment to living austere, self-denying lives. (When Julius Caesar encountered the Celtic Druids in Gaul, he thought they, too, must be Pythagoreans, because they also believed in reincarnation, dressed in white, guarded their teachings, and studied the stars. It is possible that he was right, since the Gauls had been exposed to Greek ideas for centuries.) Some Pythagoreans held their possessions in common, and they tended to avoid eating meat, animal products, or even cooked food. They were so unified that they were capable in their early years of taking over entire cities, and even in later centuries they were known for their solidarity. They identified themselves to each other through secret phrases and symbols deriving from their fascination with numbers and geometry. A Druze magazine that I had found completed the story. In an article titled “The Wise Pythagoras,” it noted that “persecution suppressed the sect and scattered its members, but Pythagoreans preserved their teachings over the generations.”
It might seem more natural to look for the successors to these Greek philosophers in Greece, not Lebanon. But that would be to neglect an event some historians regard as the end of antiquity and the beginning of the Middle Ages. In the year
AD
529 the Academy of Plato closed its doors for the last time. Nine centuries had passed since Plato founded it in Athens. The idea of the Academy—a place where people might study at no cost, and which kept alive a certain interpretation of Greek philosophy—had survived the philosopher’s death, the burning of the city by the Romans, and the dispersal of its teachers. Its professors tried to combine the teachings of the ancient philosophers they most revered: Pythagoras, Plato, and Aristotle. They taught that there was an ultimate cause for the existence of the Universe, which they called “the One.” But this One really was like the number 1—utterly timeless, and free from human imperfections such as mind or will.
Such ideas were anathema to Christianity, which believed in a God who created the world through an act of will. The Byzantine ruler Justinian, a devoutly Christian emperor, decided that the existence of the Academy was an insult to his religion and to his imperial power. In Athens, he ordered, “no one should teach philosophy nor interpret the laws.” The Academy’s seven last professors, the “successors of Plato,” sought refuge in Persia. Athens’s schools fell into decay.
It was a dramatic conclusion to the reign of Greek philosophy in the Mediterranean world, where philosophers had sometimes been treated as prophets or even gods. Plato had attracted a religious cult that claimed to have access to unwritten doctrines of the philosopher; it had its own initiation ceremony. The mysterious mathematician Pythagoras, Socrates’s teacher, had ended up regarded as a miracle worker, able to see the future and be in two places at once. These cults had a strong ethical dimension: Pythagoras’s followers in particular (the Pythagoreans) were encouraged to examine their consciences nightly and to overcome gluttony, sloth, sensuality, and anger. But the cults were also designed to fit alongside old pagan forms of worship, and in Europe, Christianity was sweeping them aside. “What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?” one Christian polemicist wrote. More sympathetic thinkers, such as St. Augustine of Hippo, adapted Plato’s ideas to fit with the doctrines of Christianity. Aristotle, however, was neglected until the Middle Ages, and Pythagoras is generally remembered in the West today only for his theorem regarding triangles.
In the Middle East, Greek philosophy was able to escape Justinian’s edict, because that region was far from Byzantium, was partly ruled by the rival Persian Empire, and in less than a hundred years came under the rule of Islam. The Harranians still revered Pythagoras as a prophet as late as the eleventh century. Far from being hostile to Greek philosophy, many early Muslims were keen to see their own civilization as the true heir to ancient Greece. The great Arab philosopher al-Kindi argued that the Arabs and Greeks were kin: Qahtan, the father of the Arabs, was brother to the ancestor of the Greeks, Yunan. A later scholar, al-Farabi, saw the Muslims as having accepted Greek philosophical ideas that the Christians had preferred to ignore or suppress. An early Islamic caliph claimed to have encountered Aristotle in a dream and to have then debated philosophy with him. Their discussion convinced the caliph to authorize the translation of Greek works into Arabic.
Among heterodox Muslims, regard for the Greeks was even higher. A mysterious group of Muslims who called themselves the “Brethren of Purity” and lived in southern Iraq in the tenth century had a great reverence for Pythagoras, too (the conservative scholar Ibn Taymiyyah denounced their writings as “a few insipid crumbs of Pythagoras’s philosophy”). Just like his followers the Pythagoreans, they felt that the universe was constructed around mathematics: “the nature of created things accords with the nature of number,” as they put it. The Druze are very keen on the Great philosophers, too, especially some of them and not necessarily the ones that are best known in the West. “The Druze faith,” according to Druze historian Najla Abu Izzeddin in a 1984 book, “reaches beyond the traditionally recognized monotheisms to earlier expressions of man’s search for communion with the One. Hence its reverence for Hermes, the bearer of a divine message, for Pythagoras . . . for the divine Plato and for Plotinus.” Three things in this sentence intrigued me when I read it in my room at Harvard as I prepared for my trip to Lebanon. Who was Hermes? Why was Plato “divine”? And why were Pythagoras and Plotinus so important? All eventually would become clear—or clearer, at any rate.
The Yazidi religious leaders, when I met them at Lalish, had told me that the Druze resembled them—“they even have the same kind of mustaches,” one of them added. One Druze professor told me during my time in Lebanon that the Druze’s relationship with Islam was like that of Mormons with Christianity. They have their own revelation and philosophy that mainstream Muslims would consider unorthodox. They are led politically, for the most part, by a single family: the Jumblatts, who have achieved the remarkable balancing act of remaining feudal landowners, based at a castle in Lebanon’s southern mountains, while also running a modern radical socialist political party. The Jumblatts rely to a large extent on the tribal loyalty of the Druze, but their party is in theory open to all religions. During Lebanon’s civil war, their political skills enabled them to outmuscle their longtime rivals for the Druze leadership, the Arslan family, which possesses an older lineage but less money and power. I was hoping to meet both Prince Talal Arslan and Walid Jumblatt, as well as the senior Druze clergyman.
In the center of Beirut, a small knot of people were protesting. I saw their slogans on lampposts and placards near the city’s renovated center: “No to sectarianism,” “No to bribery,” “No to stupidity.” They were asking for the right to civil marriage so that Lebanese from different sects could marry more easily. They had little chance of success. Lebanon is a liberal society in many ways; its bars and nightclubs are crowded every night with Muslims and Christians alike. But a deep strain of conservatism runs beneath the surface, and intermarriage is viewed with disfavor by the influential and conservative Christian and Muslim religious hierarchies.
Soldiers were stationed at key points around the city center. A dispute between political factions in the Lebanese Parliament had been ongoing for several months, preventing the formation of a government, and the troops were on the streets to prevent trouble. The Druze parties could play kingmakers in these disputes, but never kings: Walid Jumblatt could call on the loyalty of at least six members in the 128-member Parliament, and the Arslans on two.