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A
Walk Through Space and Time
My mother often used to take me to her
parents' house when I was a little boy. We used to walk through twisted
alleys and pass by the women's bathhouse and hear the roar of conversation,
shouting and rushing water, and the screams of excited children. It was
called Haj-Ali Baba, and was like most of the bath-houses, built
underground, about ten to 15 steps below street level. When one entered,
there was a vestibule opening onto the street and then the main hall which
was round, with a small pool and fountain in the middle, lower still.
We did not go in during these expeditions to my grandparents', but HajAli
Baba wa's one of the women's bath-houses to which my mother took me once
every two weeks in winter and once a week in summer. Of course my father
took me occasionally as well, in his case to the bazaar bath-house where the
men went. It was a very different experience, going with my father rather
than with my mother. With my father it took much less time, an hour or at
most two, but with my mother the bathing lasted several hours. My father
used to buy me sherbet and milk-pudding after the bath, whereas my mother
used to bring food from the house which we would have together after a bath
which sometimes lasted from nine in the morning till two in the afternoon.
After so many hours the soles of my feet would be all wrinkled up and I
could hardly put on my shoes to walk. I always had to proceed slowly on the
walk from the women's bath-house, my mother treating me to fruit from the
nearby grocer's shop which helped me to endure the pain.
It was never tedious to stay so many hours in the women's bath-house. I used
to play with other children; play with water and the fountain; watch the
women and listen to them talk and hear my mother and sisters having long,
long conversations with the other women about their dresses, weddings,
marriages, husbands, mothers-in-law and new houses. This lively and
leisurely exchange of gossip and information continued each time I returned,
with an endless succession of women sitting around the pillars and circular
steps. In the men's bath-houses the talkers used to be more business-like as
a rule, and - when it was safe to do so - conversed about politics and
governmental changes, and perhaps exchanged private information about
particularly officious and repressive policemen or guards.
The bath-houses had been meeting-places in Tabriz for hundreds of years. For
example, a story passed down, and certainly garbled down, the centuries
(especially after reproduction in the somewhat condescending renditions of
English orientalists - an Irish friend of mine remarks that when the English
find they cannot understand something they know it is time to patronise it)
tells of the great poet Sa'di of Shiraz who died a very old man, supposedly
aged over 100, around AD 1292, meeting with Humam-al-Din Tabrizi, whose own
poems greatly reflect Sa'di's influence. Sa'di had travelled to Tabriz and
wished to meet Humam (whose dates are roughly 1236-1314). He was told that
the Tabrizi poet had a very beautiful son whom he guarded carefully from
meeting with strangers, so that he would always accompany the boy when going
to the baths. Sa'di discovered the day on which Humam would be likely to
appear, hid in a corner and waited: it would seem that Humam had chosen an
hour when few people would be present, and the bath itself is termed a
private one, though presumably this would merely mean fairly expensive as
Sa'di experienced no noticeable difficulty in gaining entrance. Humam was
disconcerted to see him, seated his son behind him and enquired what was the
stranger's profession and where he came from. He evidently wanted to rebuff
the unwanted foreigner for their exchanges were rude in the extreme. Sa'di
told Humam he was from the holy land of Shiraz, and that he was a poet. The
two cities were as far apart as London and Aberdeen - in all senses. Humam
replied testily that the Shirazis were as numerous as dogs in Tabriz. Sa'di
said that it was the converse in Shiraz, where the Tabrizis were less in
number and in public estimation than were dogs. Humam then picked up the
water-pitcher and, having emptied it, inverted it and observed that the
heads of the Shirazis were bald, like the bottom of the pitcher. Sa'di, in
turn, said that the heads of the Tabrizis were empty, like the inside of the
pitcher. Next Humam, seeking to test whether the visitor knew anything about
poetry or him, or both, asked whether the Shirazis recited any of Humam's
poetry; Sa'di promptly declaimed a couplet exactly in Humam's form (which so
resembled his own), presumably grinning in the direction of the beautiful
youth almost hidden behind his father:
Humam is a veil between me and my love, I hope that the veil will rise from
betwixt us.
All was now clear. Humam knew that the stranger had recognised him and why
he was so churlish, and the stranger's way of elegantly turning the tension
into a charming little joke gave the father just the clue he needed. "I
think," said Humam, "you are Sheikh Sa'di? There is nobody else who can have
such a spirit!" He kissed Sa'di's hand, introduced his son, and brought him
back to his house where he entertained him for several days. In Sa'di's very
civilised culture it was as appropriate to compliment a parent on the beauty
of a son as of a daughter, but he showed his appreciation of Humam's wise
anxiety to protect his son from more sinister strangers. And down to my own
time, children continued to be accompanied to the baths, and to meet
interesting persons who wished to know their parents and do them honour.
Every district had several bath-houses, at varying cost for different social
classes. Whenever my nurse took me to a bath-house it would be to one in
which there were no attendants and all the women washed and dressed their
own hair; but when my mother took me it would be to a bath-house in which
there were three or four women looking after the customers, washing their
hair and helping them by pouring water on their bodies and hair while the
ladies were sitting and talking. Sometimes they would bring tea or cold
drinks while their well-to-do clients conversed. Every New Year my mother
would give presents to the attendants in the bath-house she particularly
favoured, and she might also give gifts in other ones if she was going to
them at all frequently. She would also invite one or two of the attendants
to lunch at our house. This was a way of ensuring particular attention,
especially when there might be many customers. Conversely, my mother might
take her custom elsewhere for a time if she was not getting the service she
sought, and when she did return to the slighted bath-house later she would
explain politely but firmly when asked that it was because they seemed too
overcrowded to be able to serve her. But my nurse's bath-house showed
simplicity at every level. The big cloth in which she would place our
clothes would not be white, but would be old and threadbare.
The conversations in my mother's bath-house often supplied the basis for
later discussions at home with my father and might be of considerable
importance. The talks among women might lead to proposals for marriage
alliances between their children, and details might be worked out there, as
well as the preliminaries which would set the idea in motion in the first
place. But my nurse took far less time; and there were far fewer
conversations, and their content was much more a matter of the conventional
mechanics. For myself, I preferred to be looked after by my nurse in the
bath-houses because she was so gentle, whereas the busy attendants who had
reason to be so careful with my mother were quick and rough with me.
They pushed me this way and that as they pummelled and rubbed me to get rid
of the dirt, frequently putting soap in my eyes and taking no heed of my
protests in their efforts to complete my toilet and move on to their other
clients. Then, there were other rites in men's bath-houses. It was
considered requisite for men who saw friends of theirs in a bath-house to
pay their bill if they should leave before their friends: it would be
analogous to the British custom of "standing rounds" in a pub. Women often
shared the food and drink they had brought with their friends. However, even
as I was growing up something of the communal spirit was disappearing with
the advent of modernisation; the common hot pool began to give way to single
showers.
As a child I was curious as to why the women, after entering the main
bath-house, disappeared into a place that looked like a toilet in the corner
of the great hall, later returning with a faint green colour on their
bodies. This also happened, even more frequently, with men. When I first
went to the men's bath-house with my father he disappeared saying he would
soon return and when he did he, too, had this strange green colour on his
body. Later on I found out that it was a caustic depilatory paste. Both men
and women in hot countries considered it healthy and attractive to remove
all hair from the body, and often it was taken so seriously by deeply
religious people that it was regarded as obligatory to remove all hair from
the body, especially for men. Ironically, to have very large, rich beards is
regarded as holy by the same people: head-hair is holy; body-hair is unholy.
Perhaps the long hair and beards of the ayatollahs - I have no experience of
their bodies - is a sign of their holiness!
Some years later I was living in London and a Jewish friend of mine, Larry,
told me he was travelling to Tabriz, so I sent him to our home where my
parent_, who were orthodox muslims, welcomed him into the home and treated
him as a son of the family. Larry was a charming man, and very popular with
my brothers, but like many Europeans who are discovering the East he became
a little too enthusiastic about some of its customs, in this instance
customs common to Jews and muslims. One day he had gone to the bath-house
with one of my brothers and decided to apply the depilatory paste as my
brother did, but having a fairer skin and not being used to this harsh
ointment, Larry found himself burning in some parts of his body, especially
those normally out of sight and polite conversation. When they had returned
home Larry kept repeating that his body was burning, and it took my brother
some time to realise that he was too embarrassed to indicate where he was
really suffering. They managed to clean the paste off him and get the
doctor, but he was in real pain for about a week. I saw him in Tehran about
ten years later, and his mind still went back forcibly to this incident as
his introduction - since neither of us were from Christian backgrounds I can
hardly call it "baptism by fire". But he was also able to bring with him the
much more delightful memories of my mother's tasty and special Tabrizi
dishes which Larry had liked so much and which had comforted him in his
affliction. He told me he could find no equivalent of her chilo kebab
anywhere in Tehran. He was also very proud of the carpet he brought from my
brother's factory, which he was still using in Tehran. He used to return to
my family two or three times every year, but I never heard that he showed
any further interest in depilation. Of course he still went on expeditions
to the bath-house with my brothers, but from then on he only went for the
water, despite satirical enquiries from time to time as to whether he would
like to employ its other accessories!
But all this lay far in the future - Larry did not visit Tabriz until 1961
and we must return to my walks with my mother to my grandfather's house.
Naturally, when we passed the bath-house I did not stop there, apart from
listening for a moment or two to make out snatches of conversation or find
out what the children were shouting about as they played. But after that
interruptions were frequent.
We would walk through a common burial ground, where some graves were open to
the sky, and my mother would warn _e to be careful in case I fell in. In
fact a few times my feet did fall into the graves, but with no serious
results; these would have been shallow graves, very old and whose former
tenants had completely disintegrated. At the exit of this burial ground
there was a huge door with a dark entrance whence descended a huge stairway
of hundreds of steps leading to a spring and used by a constant traffic of
men, women and children carrying their buckets and going down and up. There
are striking symbols in this juxtaposition of death and life, and water or
its absence was indeed the frontier of death and life in our culture - you
may get some idea of the climate of Tabriz from the name of our river, Quri
Chay, which means "dry river". But the steps at the graveyard did not lead
down to the Quri Chay, whose water, when it had water, was polluted and
undrinkable. The water-seekers and water-carriers at the graveyard were
going far below the level of the Quri Chay to an underground spring, or
cheshma as it is called in both Azerbaijani and Persian. I suppose there
were many springs in Tabriz, though few were as deep.
The use of the springs was chiefly limited to the poorer people: richer
families like my own had a private reservoir. But my father's office in the
bazaar used a cheshma, unlike his factory which relied on his reservoir at
home. I would often have the task of hauling the water from the bazaar
cheshma. The bazaar cheshma only involved some 25 or 30 steps, but the
graveyard cheshma was much deeper and to me as a child seemed to stretch for
at least a hundred steps. I was fascinated by it and would annoy my mother
by wanting to gaze down its depths instead of getting on my way. In the
summer, too, I would beg one of the water-carriers to let me have some
water, and would sink gratefully on the bucket when it was lowered to me,
drinking it in greedily like a fish. My mother found that we would set out
at 8.00 a.m. and would generally not reach her father's house until midday.
She complained that with my delaying it was like making a journey from one
city to another.
The people chattered happily as they met one another at the steps of the
cheshma, supremely untroubled by the proximity of the graveyard, not even
finding time for reflections like those of Omar Khayyam:
Into this Universe, and why not knowing Nor whence, like Water willy-nilly
flowing: And out of it, as Wind along the Waste,
I know not whither, willy-nilly blowing.
The district in which the graveyard and cheshma were situated was Davachi
Gapisi, which is Azerbaijani for "the Gate of the Camel-Drivers" and was the
North Gate of the four Gates of Tabriz. My mother's father, to whose house
we were making such slow progress, lived in Gajil Gapisi, "the Gate of the
Builders", since most of the construction industry operated there: this was
the West Gate. Davachi Gapisi, our own district, still retained its own
clear identity. In addition to the poorer inhabitants of the area, the
camel-drivers and mule-drivers used it extensively. Many of them had come
from adjoining villages, but some had come on the silk road which led from
China through Afghanistan to Turkey and ultimately connected with Europe.
This was the northern silk route: there was a southern one also, which
passed through Esfahan and Shiraz to the Persian Gulf and Arabia. Tabriz was
hence a very important link on the old line of communications between East
and West, and opposite the graveyard was a great karvan-sarai. The words
survive in English as caravanserai: but they are pronounced like the English
personal pronoun "I" in its Azerbaijani and Persian forms, although in
FitzGerald's Rubaiyat it is given a different rhyme.
Think, in this batter'd Caravanserai Whose Portals are alternate Night and
Day, How Sultan after Sultan with his Pomp Abode his destin'd Hour, and went
his way.
The karvan-sarai was a huge house - it literally means "caravan house" -
with stables at the bottom and bedrooms at the top, and I loved to race
across to it and goggle at the camel-drivers and dealers as they leaned back
on their great loads of merchandise, swigging tea, boasting, telling each
other stories, narrating their adventures on the roads, giving news of their
towns, even discussing the government's attitudes to them and swapping
political news as well as information about the doings of their own
families. This was the one way of passing news across the country. And those
who came from foreign cities or had specific regular trading with them
became regularly known by the names of those cities. I would have been
looking at men known as Istanbulchi, Tehranchi, Moscowchi, Baghdadchi,
Kabulchi, Bakuchi, Khorasanchi, Calcuttachi and hearing without
comprehending exchanges of information on developments in Russia, India,
Iraq, Turkey and Afghanistan as well as from other major cities in Iran as
the great men from Istanbul, Tehran, Moscow, Baghdad, Kabul, Baku (in Soviet
Azerbaijan), Khorasan (in north-eastern Iran near Afghanistan) and Calcutta
smoked their hubble-bubble, or as it is often called by the British, their
hookah (the pipe whose smoke is filtered through water). My mother was
forever having to drag me back from my efforts to abide my undestined hour
at the karvan-sarai. I must have been a terrible child!
If we remember that Muhammad, the founder of Islam, was a cameldriver, we
can get some sense of the historic role of such men and their meetings in
the development and migration of ideas in world history. History is so often
written in terms of battles and famous men; in fact the changes were often
the product of the journeyings of people completely unknown outside their
own generation. The importance of Tabriz is primarily that it was a
meeting-place for ideas and cultures over thousands of years, and the men I
watched were fulfilling the roles that their predecessors had also sustained
far before the dawn of recorded history.
Islam no doubt arrived by camel like everything else, but it also arrived by
conquest. In fact it encountered great resistance in Tabriz - we seem to
welcome the arrival of ideas there when they come from peaceful rather than
warlike communication - and found it very hard to make headway against the
local religion of Zoroastrianism. There were specific reasons for that.
Tabriz is interested in the outside world; but it is also very conscious of
its own traditions, and Zoroaster was a local hero.
As is often the case our real clues can be found in names. Tabriz is the
capital of Azerbaijan, whose old name before the Islamic invasion was
Atropad. It meant "land of fire". And Tabriz itself means "warm-flowing".
The identification in both instances with heat would seem to be allied to
the religion of Zoroaster, who believed in the worship of fire. The
warm-flowing place in the land of fire would imply that the capital status
of Tabriz existed in some form before the Birth of Christ, that it was the
heart of the country which gave birth to Zoroaster. He could certainly have
been born in Tabriz himself as Muhammad was born in Mecca; or it could have
been a"'sociated with his winning success in some way, as was the case of
Muhammad at Medina. But Tabriz evidently had a symbolic pre-eminent status
in his identification with the country of his birth, as lava is a condition
of extreme heat in the heart of fire. As for the date of all this, Zoroaster
has been claimed as having been born 1500 years before the birth of Moses,
but more sober historians today are inclined to settle for around 600 BC. In
any case trade made the city a breeding-ground for religion, and religion
was extensively exported from it along with trade; or, to put it another
way, Tabriz would have owed its status both to being a critical point on the
northern silk route and to being the heartland of the Zoroastrian religion.
It seems reasonable to suggest that Mecca would have been as popular in
Tabriz after Muhammad, as America was popular in Britain after George
Washington, or Moscow was popular in America after Lenin. In religion as in
politics the newer fashions are seldom in vogue with the centres which have
determined the shape of the old.
The religion which sprang from the philosophy of Zoroaster (or, as Nietzsche
and others call him, Zarathustra) was by no means the first Aryan religion,
but it differed from its predecessors in one crucial aspect. In evaluating
the popular faiths of Aryans, Zoroaster was appalled that most of them
centred on Ahura, the Lord of War and Destruction whose wrath had to be
constantly appeased by human sacrifice. (Similar figures are to be found in
the Greeks' Ares, the Romans' Mars, the Carthaginians' Moloch and the
Hindus' Shiva.) Zoroaster bitterly opposed human sacrifice and instead
believed in two forces guiding Man's life, represented by Ahuramazda and
Angro Maina, or Ahriman. Ahuramazda was the god of light and the creator of
all that is pure and good. Opposing him was Ahriman, symbol of evil and
destruction, of darkness and death. In preaching these ideals Zoroaster was
the first to propose that Man was involuntarily trapped in the context
between good and evil, and that Ahuramazda in his mercy gave him the freedom
to choose his own destiny. The idea of worship of fire is manifested in the
nature of the land of Azerbaijan, where you can find flames or boiling
springs in severe winter amidst snow. I myself bathed in a pool near Ardabil
(a city close to the Caspian Sea) in cold midwinter: the water seemed almost
boiling and I could not endure it for more than ten minutes. The opposition
of heat and cold arises also from our very cold winters and hot summers, and
from our huge mountains covered with trees and greenery on the one hand, and
barren desert for miles within sight of it. When one looks at nature the
sunrise has a glorious feeling each morning. I find the words I want in my
beloved William Blake:
"What," it will be questioned, "when the sun rises, do you not
see a round disc of fire somewhat like a guinea?" "0 no, no,
r see an innumerable company of the heavenly host crying
'Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord God Almighty"'.
(A Vision a/the LastJudgment, 1810.)
So Zoroaster's idea is not really worship of fire, so much as admiration of
the sun in nature and the creative imagination of Man which both he and his
followers, either poets or philosophers, stressed through their creative
imaginations and their songs. Night and darkness were regarded as transitory
and a result of absence of sun, and so in Man transgression and Fall are
seen as the want of imagination and essentially transitory. Some travellers
lose their way at night and they think that they will move always in
darkness.
Zoroaster was primarily concerned with Man and the society in which he lived
and he believed that Ahuramazda ought to be seen through Man and his actions
only, therefore he put all his thought and philosophy into three words: Good
Thoughts, Good Words, Good Deeds. (I said three words, but the thoughts,
words and actions cannot be separated from their united spirit and
goodness.) Among the lines which survive from him, he is perhaps best summed
up by his prayer:
With the help of Truth and Good Mind, give Mankind Power to
bring rest and happiness to the world,
Of which Thou, my Lord, 0 Ahuramazda, art indeed the first
possessor.
The idea of Ahuramazda influenced later religious thinkers, literary figures
and social revolutionaries. The idea of dualism in human nature which
consists of the qualities of good and evil and their extension into
principles of warring forces, is a feature of religions, Christian and
non-Christian, preReformation and post-Reformation. Yet in my study of Blake
I found in his message a clear development of Zoroaster's dualistic theory.
"There is not an Error," wrote Blake in A Vision of the Last Judgment, "but
it has a man for its. . . Agent, that is, it is a Man. There is not a Truth
but it has also a Man. Good and Evil are Qualities in Every Man. . . Man is
a twofold being, one part capable of evil and the other capable of good. . .
both evil and good cannot exist in a simple being, for thus two contraries
would spring from one essence, which is impossible. . ."
Omar Khayyam wrote, in his Rubaiyat:
I sent my Soul through the Invisible, Some letter of that After-life to
spell:
And by and by my Soul return'd to me,
And answer'd "I Myself am Heav'n and Hell":
Heav'n but the Vision of fuUill'd Desire, And Hell the Shadow from a Soul on
fire, Cast on the Darkness into which Ourselves, So late emerg'd from, shall
so soon expire.
In 1976 when I was attending the 41st International PEN Congress in London,
I found that the opening speech by Arthur Koestler enlivened my imagination
and made me go back to my origins. There must have been about 200 writers
present in the Queen Elizabeth Hall, all of them Europeans or Americans:
there were no African or Asian writers, a point which surprised and angered
me. I talked to Koestler after the speech: he had aroused my curiosity. He
was a short man, sharp in manner, quick in replies, with a bright, engaged
eye. I liked him because he was concerned with the destiny of man. At some
points he seemed a child lost in a crowd; he did not sit peacefully within
himself. He seemed to me to be searching for something. Yet he treated me
very kindly, and spent a lot of time with me: he seemed interested in my
views on writers' missions. His speech, delivered on 23 August, was
defending imagination against materialism and selfishness. It was entitled
"The Vision that links the Poet, the Painter and the Scientist" (and was
reported in The Times, 25 August 1976) and it began by attacking the theme
of the Congress "The Truth of Imagination" and its context, Keats' letter to
Benjamin Bailey of 22 November 1817 in which the poet said:
I am certain of nothing but of the holiness of the heart's affections and
the truth of Imagination. What the Imagination seizes as Beauty must be
Truth, whether it existed before or not; - for I have the same idea of all
our passions as of Love: they are all, in their sublime, creative of
essential Beauty. . . The imagination may be compared to Adam's dream: he
awoke and found it truth. I am more zealous in this affair, because I have
never yet been able to perceive how anything can be known for truth by
consecutive reasoning, - and yet [so] it must be.
Koestler observed dispassionately, "This, frankly, does not seem to make
much sense. Nor does it help much to find an echo of that passage in the
famous last lines of the Ode on a Grecian Urn, written two years later:
'Beauty is truth, truth beauty,' - that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye
need to know.
No doubt there is beauty in the lines," continued Koestler, "but do they
speak the truth?"
In some ways I had answered Koestler's question when Mother finally got me
away from gazing rapturously at the karvan-sarai and she succeeded in
dragging me as much as a hundred yards till we reached the bazaar where
there was yet another delay while I drank in its wonders. As one approached
the bazaar there was a large tea-house filled with peasants, workers and
travellers, some sitting outside because the inside was full, putting lumps
of sugar in their mouths and sipping hot tea through the sugar lump, or
smoking their hookahs and looking very relaxed as if they had no worry in
the world. What fascinated me was the man with the samovar, an enormous
receptacle, from which he was filling several glasses with tea, first from
the pot on the top and then from a tap at the side, and moving with
extraordinary expedition through the great crowd. He was placing glass after
glass of tea on their saucers in front of each storekeeper. At first I
thought the service was free, and then I noticed that at each counter he
would pick up a token, a piece of metal called pata, which my father later
told me were bought in bulk at the beginning of the week. Once I insisted on
having a cup of tea, but my mother said "The glasses are not clean, and,
besides, good boys don't have tea outside." When I persisted she said,
"Honestly, it doesn't taste good out of doors", and when I asked "How do you
know?" she was silent. But she bought me ice-cream from the shop where they
sold hot beetroot in slices out of the pot in winter, and ice-cream in the
summer. Ice-cream was made in front of the customers, the eggs and milk
being beaten in a huge wooden box, then poured into tins, put in crumbled
ice or snow brought from the mountains and turned round until the ice-cream
set. As soon as the seller finished one huge tin of the ice-cream he
followed with other ones. There were several people working in the shop.
This was the only shop in the bazaar where I saw the wife, daughter and
husband working together.
When we passed on, my eyes would be attracted by peasant men and women, in
colourful clothes and dresses. The women didn't wear veils, but had scarves,
very pretty long skirts and embroidered waistcoats. Some were mounted on
mules, some walking alongside the horses. The men from the villages were
distinguished by their hats, some made of felt. I remember some schoolboys
found it amusing to take the peasants hats and run away. When the peasants
chased them they would throwaway the hat and escape. This was regarded as a
great source of enjoyment for the city boys. Further up the bazaar could be
found shops full of material for women's dresses and men's garments. The
travellers from the villages who came to do their shopping were watched
constantly by the shopkeepers with very searching eyes, like those of cats
studying the mpvements of mice: I vividly remember their expressions. Some
of the villagers would have come from 150 kilometres away, as far as Ahar to
the north-east, for instance, or other places to the west, on the other side
of Lake Urmiyeh.
On several occasions, to my mother's annoyance, I asked the mule- and
camel-drivers to let me mount their animals, which they finally helped me to
do. I well remember the first time I mounted a camel. When I was allowed on
the beast, while it was sitting down, the driver said a quick word and I was
very frightened to see the ground falling away as my steeQ lurched upward
from the rear and then the front, and when I was finally settled on the
standing camel, holding tight to the saddle of straw and cloth, I could see
over the whole bazaar and felt the proudest boy in the place, as well as the
most grateful to a camel-driver.
This Davachi Bazaar, beginning with the cheshma and karvan-sarai, ended in a
huge square which had great shops on two sides. These sold dried fruit in
winter and fresh fruit in summer and autumn. I must admit that I used to
spend a lot of time watching these shops - in winter dried figs, almonds,
raisins, dried peaches and pears and dates captured my zealous eyes, and in
summer green water-melon and great varieties of grapes, of all colours,
piled like mountains to a child's vision. In winter the shopkeepers would
sit in a small office or outside next to their goods, lazing comfortably in
front of a brazier full of ash and burning charcoal. In summer, standing in
front of the shop, shouting how sweet their watermelons and grapes were,
they incited customers and often employed young people to attract them. Once
I persuaded my mother to buy me a bunch of grapes. She agreed with the one
condition that we keep it until we reached home and then wash and eat it.
Although I agreed, I ate almost half the bunch on the way through a hole in
the handkerchief we were carrying. When we arrived she was surprised that
half the grapes were eaten, and grimly expressed the hope that I would not
become ill.
Beyond the square, across the Quri Chay, lay another big bazaar, this time
devoted to carpets, jewellery and kitchen utensils. Once more my little eyes
lit up, and my poor mother found her journey lengthened almost beyond
endurance. Yet here above all I was amid a great and long tradition going
back at least 600 years. The great muslim topographer, Ibn Battuta
(1304-1368/9), records a visit to Tabriz in his Travels in Asia and Africa
(extending from 1325 to 1354): he is not speaking of the bazaar I knew, but
of one which had since perished and was located some short distance away. It
may perhaps seem strange to a European that Ibn Battuta writes of Tabriz so
much with the air of a man visiting a foreign country, since it is easy to
assume that different parts of the Near East are very like one another. But
in his time Tabriz was very much part of a foreign country - it was the
Mongols' capital in Persia. He would have arrived there in about 1328,
travelling north across the mountains from Baghdad.
We reached the town after ten days' travelling, and encamped outside it in a
place called ash-Sham. Here there is a fine hospice, where travellers are
supplied with food, consisting of bread, meat, rice cooked in butter, and
sweetmeats. The next morning I entered the town and we came to a great
bazaar, called the Ghazan bazaar, one of the finest bazaars I have seen the
world over. Every trade is grouped separately in it. I passed through the
jewellers' bazaar, and my eyes were dazzled by the varieties of precious
stones that I beheld. They were displayed by beautiful slaves wearing rich
garments with a waist-sash of silk, who stood in front of the merchants,
exhibiting the jewels to the wives of the Turks, while the women were buying
them in large quantities and trying to outdo one another. As a result of all
this I witnessed a riot - may God preserve us from such! We went on into the
ambergris and musk market, and witnessed another riot like it or worse.
We spent only one night at Tabriz.
Understandably, you might feel. My fellow-citizens, however exotic their
goods and exciting their markets, seem to have been a little too much for
the great topographer.
One of the Tabriz bazaars and fruitmarkets through which I roamed.
There is a slightly absurd fashion in Britain and America today for defining
anyone very reactionary as "to the Right of Genghis Khan" (a popular English
spelling for the great Mongol leader known in Persian as "Chingiz Khan"): I
suppose that the rioters might have come into that category for Ibn Battuta.
But in fact they were not the cause of his departure.
Next day the amir received an order from the sultan to rejoin him, so I
returned along with him, without having seen any of the learned men there.
So Tabriz for him was a centre of intellectualism as well as of commerce and
riots. He also knew it as a place dear to its inhabitants, and wide-ranging
in its influence and reputation. He travelled as far away as Grenada in
Moorish Spain where he found a company of Persian dervishes, wandering
spiritual men, some of them mystics, and among them a native of Tabriz who
told him that they had made their home in Grenada because of its resemblance
to their homelands. Tabriz in his time had reached its greatest importance
to date, having displaced Baghdad as the chief commercial centre of western
Asia and attracting large numbers of merchants from Europe. One wonders why
a man such as that dervish in Grenada, with his great love for Tabriz,
should have decided to make his home so far from it. The theme is one which
constantly repeats itself throughout history, through to the present day.
Thousands of intellectuals and patriots spread over the world because of
regimes as oppressive in their own ways as was the Mongols'. The movement of
dervishes, which took place between the 13th and 14th centuries and greatly
influenced Persian poets like Sa'di and Hafiz Shirazi, was against social
injustice and dogmatic religion. And the saddest thing is that those who
criticise the shortcomings of governments in the more liberal regimes where
they make their homes find themselves reproached: "If you don't like it
here, why don't you go back to your own country?" So many would have been
only too happy to return home, if they could have done so with any real hope
of retaining their liberty or even lives. |
