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There was a sense of pride mixed with religious arrogance in these more
substantial businessmen which is really repulsive for a child to encounter.
They gave the impression that it was their personal ability and divine
Providence which had brought them to that position of prosperity. Later on,
when my mother suggested I marry the daughter of one of the big merchants
before I came to Britain, the first question he put to me, how high was my
salary, made me cold and humiliated inside, and put me off the subject of
marriage to his daughter completely. From the outset he made it clear that
he could employ dozens of teachers like me in his office. In fact his
response was a self-defensive one, stemming from his lack of education and
his anxiety to show himself as good as me with my degree. I remember saying,
"You may employ many teachers like me in your office but you may not possess
the mind of any of them." He said he could employ doctors to come and visit
him wherever he wished. "They run to my country residence like a servant
when they know they will be receiving good money." Then he added, "With
money you can do a lot of things in this world, but what can you do with
your degree? At the most you will get a salary of 600 tomans a month, which
is what I pay my secretary in the office." (1 toman is 10 rials.)
Many parts of these bazaars, sometimes the entire bazaar, were owned by
these big businessmen, who leased them, sometimes for enormous sums, to
their small competitors. In addition, they often owned extensive lands,
including whole villages, outside the cities. Tehran was full of this kind
of businessman, who came from different parts of the country, many from my
own Tabriz and Azerbaijan. Now and then, when the bigger businessmen found
that their goods were not bringing in the financial profits which they
sought, and when they saw the small businessmen and street vendors lowering
their own prices and flooding the market with cheaper goods, they would put
pressure on the government to clear the streets. This would be particularly
likely to happen when some foreign product - supposedly the monopoly of the
big businessmen who increased their profits by selling it in Iran - was
smuggled or even obtained perfectly legally by smaller business firms and
marketed for a cheaper price; if the businessmen could not stop it entering
the country, they made its distribution impossible, if they could, by
putting pressure on the state to close down the vendors. I have seen
policemen chasing young men who wanted to sell various Western products,
while the persecution ceased when the victims agreed to buy from the bigger
sellers and sell at the price they dictated. After the Revolution of 1979,
the import of foreign goods by small vendors was outlawed, and the big
businessmen were able to sell them at a huge profit.
The owner of the house where we were staying on my first visit to Tehran,
Ismail-Zadeh, came from a small-business family, but he worked in an office,
and his wife Azar was from an educated family. Both were kind to us. They
seemed always very busy, running in and out. In Tehran some women did not
stay in their houses as they did in Tabriz. Azar used to leave home early in
the morning and return in the evening, then start cooking, cleaning and
putting the children to bed. In comparison, I thought that women in Tabriz
of that class had easier lives. The majority of such women in Tabriz stayed
at home, and had only to run their houses, while their husbands would be the
only bread-winner of the family. Women in Tehran had a double
responsibility. I felt unhappy and insecure in that atmosphere where the
woman of the house would leave in the morning: in my world I wanted my
mother to be always available to me, a child. I knew that sitting beside my
mother at home, or beside my nurse Humai (who of course, from the point of
view of her own family, was a career-woman) I had a wonderful sense of
warmth and happiness and joy which clearly the little girls in the
Ismail-Zadeh household did not have, or lacked for much of the time. Even
when their mother was at home, everything had to be done very rapidly, and
there was obviously less time for fostering family affection.
When I came to Britain in 1960 I realised that many women work both at home
as housewives and outside as employees in factories and offices. I thought
the lower- and even middle-class women in Europe and Britain worked even
harder than women of the same class in Iran. I wondered what freedom was
gained by women in the West. Indeed, they seemed freer in social
relationships, but seemed exploited at work, at home and in society, and I
did not know why. I was rather puzzled. My sisters in Tabriz were repressed
and exploited in one way, and the women in the West were exploited in
another way. My sisters were not free to be exploited but the women in the
West were free to be exploited. Women in my family in Tabriz seemed more
secure economically than their counterparts in Britain. They did not seem to
worry about jobs, prices, domestic expenses; their husbands were in charge
of economic matters. Wives did not worry about economic questions. I found
it quite different in Britain: housewives, while responsible for running
their houses, had to budget and worry about how to spend the money for food
and other necessary items. In the East women were haunted by mothers-in-law
and in the West they were haunted by electricity and gas bills, price rises
and questioning husbands.
My mother did not like Tehran life at all. She said, comparing it with
Tehran, "Life in Tabriz is Heaven". She thought it was too complicated to
live in Tehran: for one thing they bought in bulk for storage in Tabriz,
whereas in Tehran they went out and shopped for necessities every day. My
mother did not like the idea of having to ask for everything constantly. We
in Tabriz had sacks of rice or split peas, or jars of cooking oil; in Tehran
they used to obtain everything in small amounts.
When Ismail-Zadeh and Azar were out of the house, my father used to take my
mother and grandmother and me with him sight-seeing. Once we went to visit a
place of pilgrimage outside Tehran called Shah Abdul Azim. It was like a
fairground, with a lot of sweets and other such things which we could
obtain. It is believed that Shah Abdul Azim is related to Imam Hassan (the
grandson of the Prophet Muhammad) and people go to his shrine for both
pilgrimage and sightseeing as it is put in a poem:
How nice, it offers two things:
Pilgrimage to Shah Abdul Azim and seeing pretty faces.
It mattered little to me that it was also the place where the career of
Nasir alDin Shah had ended abruptly in 1896 when he was assassinated while
preparing for the celebrations for the 50th anniversary of his accession to
the throne. He was shot dead there by a bankrupt trader who had studied
under Jamal aI-Din al-Afghani. There was an ironic retribution there also,
for after his capitulation to the religious forces unleashed over the
tobacco concession, Nasir aI-Din Shah had become anxious to placate the
conservative interests and took hostile measures against any but the most
severely orthodox forms of Islamic education. In practice, he embarked on a
war against the intellectuals, and in theory he repressed modern education
so as to ensure they would have no successors.
I sometimes think that never blows so red
The Rose as where some buried Caesar bled. . .
As we visited the place we saw some people sitting there having dinner and
tea with family or friends, and some washing themselves in the pool,
preparing for prayer. Others were sitting and telling jokes and making
people laugh. I liked most of all the kebab and sweet that we had in a
restaurant. There the kebab wJiS-Wrapped in sangak bread with fresh mint,
onion and sumaq (a kind of sour-tasting spice also used for chilD-kebabs).
Since we were going to Mashhad on pilgrimage, many friends visited us before
we left Tehran, to ask us to pray for them at the shrine and wish us a good
journey, giving us fruit and sweets for the journey. When we started our
journey it was late afternoon. Passing through rather crowded streets and
big buildings we arrived at the outskirts of Tehran, where we found large
numbers of unfortunate poor people. The houses there were humble and streets
narrow. The only things which stood out were the statues of Reza Shah to be
seen in every square, the only substantially built edifices visible. The
statues would seem isolated and separated from the people, standing on their
own. The distance was psychological and political as well as physical,
because I heard people say how much they hated him and his dictatorship. (My
father used formally to curse Reza Shah every day. That was of course in
private. Cursing Reza Shah in public could cost a man his life.) Not very
far from the statues there were huts and houses made out of clay. Further
on, a few kilometres outside Tehran, I noticed several tall chimneys. I
asked my father what they were and he told me, "They are chimneys for the
brick factories" and that the surrounding huts were where the brickmakers
lived. Both men and women worked at the factories. I saw little children
playing in mud next to their mothers who were laying bricks.
After a few hours' journey we passed a pleasant place called Damavand, which
is the name of the highest peak of the Elburz mountains which run between
the Caspian Sea and Tehran and the Persian plateau. Mount Damavand, which is
to the north-east of Tehran, is 5,628 metres high, and forms part of a chain
of mountains which continue until Khorasan, in the north-east of Iran. The
mountains carry different names and normally are called after the names of
places and cities that are situated next to them. The colours of the Elburz
mountains vary in different places; in some places they are red, some places
green and some places very dark, which gives a special beauty to the
scenery.
We were travelling now across the uppermost part of the great Persian
plateau, which cuts off the Caspian Sea in the north from the Persian Gulf
and the Indian Ocean in the south. It is also a bridge from East to West,
linking the steppes of Inner Asia to Asia Minor, and beyond it to Europe.
Iran as a whole is said to be the combined size of Britain, France,
Switzerland and the Italian and Spanish peninsulae, or, in American terms,
twice the size of Texas. Our road lay between the Caspian coast, with its
luxuriant vegetation, and the desert lands to our south, where so many of
the population were nomadic, travelling from season to season up and down
the mountains in quest of pasture for their goats, sheep and horses. As our
journey went deeper and deeper into the east, we would encounter the
mountains of Khorasan, much lower than Damavand and famed for its fertile
valleys whose abundant supply of crops make it the "granary of Iran."
Khorasan, like Azerbaijan, is famous for the very many different peoples it
sweeps together through its character as a crossroads. Our own journey was
along one of the historic silk routes through which so much of Chinese trade
had moved westward, and along which many invaders from Central Asia had also
made their way. The sign that we were no longer travelling parallel to the
south shore of the Caspian Sea came when we reached the mountain, valley and
town of Gorgan, and commenced journeying northward. Gorgan itself remains in
my memory for its warm people and for its numerous orange trees which even
grew on the streets. Beyond Gorgan is the district of Turkman Sahra, very
much a place pf nomads - one-sixth of the population of Iran are nomads. I
was pleased to find that the people whom I met spoke a similar language to
Azerbaijani, which was quite comprehensible to me as both had their roots in
Turkish. In Gorgan I had encountered an even less comprehensible dialect of
Persian than in Tehran. The people in Turkman Sahra also impressed me by
living in tents made from felt, as they had to be fit to stand both cold and
humid weather alike.
The life of the nomads is most fascinating, and very active. They move every
year between their summer pastures in the mountains to their winter pastures
in the lowlands, in search of grass for their. flocks of sheep and goats.
Reza Shah's policy was to force them to settle permanently in villages; it
met with very little success. This was also the policy of subsequent
governments, cruelly interfering with the way of life of these people. Most
nomads belong to tribes or nationalities such as the Kurds, the Lurs, the
Bakhtiari, the Baluchi, the Turkmans and the Qashqai. Some tribes are
descended from the very earliest inhabitants of the Persian plateau, others
from central Asian invaders. Others, like the Qashqai, were brought in from
outside Iran to serve as a military force. (The movement of Kurds and
Turkmans took place during the reigns of Shah Abbas (1571-1629) and Karim
Khan Zand (1750-1779); Reza Shah (1878-1944) also played an important role
in this dispersal.) With these varied origins, it is fascinating to see
these tribes with their different languages, different traditions and
colourings. Their portable homes vary too. The Bakhtiari and the Qashqai
have tents made of black goats' hair, while the Turkmans made theirs from
felt, indicating that they came from a colder and wetter area than the
others. They are a beautiful, vigorous and charming group of peoples;
naturally I had little chance to talk to them then, but when I was 18 on a
visit to Shiraz Bazaar I really had the opportunity to come to know the
Qashqai and see how much linguistic ground we had in common. The Turkmans -
the nomads I met in Turkman Sahra - also spoke a Turkish language, but the
Bakhtiari spoke Persian. We passed the cities of Bujnurd, Shirvan and Quchan
before we arrived at Tus and Mashhad. Tus, which is the birthplace of
Firdausi, is on the outskirts of Mashhad. We did not go to Tus on the first
day, but we visited Firdausi's monument a few days afterwards. This journey
was the first time I had heard of our great poet other than his name. There
had been a school called after him in Tabriz: I had hea.rC1 of it, and
several years later attended it for a year. I had also seen a street named
after him at Tehran: it led to a square where there was a fine statue -
still there today - representing the poet as an old man with a long beard
and a book under his arm, turbanned and wearing the long, flowing Persian
robe of his time, with very sharp eyes and a face inspiring in its beholders
thought, response and effect. Now at Tus we visited the great monument whose
huge stone pedestal was covered with verses from the Shah-nameh: it had been
placed there by order of Reza Shah in 1934 on the supposed millenary of
Firdausi's birth. It suited Reza Shah to be identified with so great a
spokesman for Iranian national culture and identity, although he naturally
would not have wished to stress Firdausi's anger at the treachery of rulers
against their people and the necessity for economic equality in the struggle
against social injustice. But I did not think about Reza Shah as I looked at
the tribute to the birth of Firdausi: I simply thought of this poet who so
long ago had defended and enlarged the culture of my country. It
strengthened in me, in ways I hardly understood, a sense of the richness of
my inheritance in being Iranian.
(I had also passed through the birthplace of Reza Shah, or somewhere in that
neighbourhood, when we had driven through the Elburz mountains about 500
kilometres north-east of Tehran. It was rather sinister country, and my
father was not likely to have drawn it to my attention on account of its
association with Reza Shah. The area is also an important location of many
of the scenes in the Shah-nameh, on which evidence it has produced dragons,
demons and ogres - in addition to Reza Shah.)
When we first arrived at Mashhad it was night-time and, from a few
kilometres away, the city seemed to be lit up with millions of lights. The
shrine of Imam-Riza, to which we were making our pilgrimage, was specially
illuminated with the reflection of a golden dome, and when the passengers
saw this scene from far away all 40 or 50 of us began to hail it with praise
to Allah. I was rather excited and looking forward to seeing the city and
especially the shrine, about which I had heard so much since early
childhood. It is more than a simple journey for Iranian families to visit
the shrine of Imam-Riza. All my mother's words were in my ear. She used to
say at home, almost every day, that if you had a wish or a desire you should
go to the door of Imam-Riza and ask him to grant you your wish. So when we
were approaching Mashhad she whispered, "You can get from Imam-Riza whatever
you ask." I did not know what I could ask for, but it suddenly came to my
mind, "What about a bicycle?" which I had wished to have for . . . |