dawn on the last stage to Teheran, the Sayyid said again:âWhat is the mistake all the European powers make with regard to Persia? I will tell you. They think only of the great personages. They do not realize that there are little people, like me, doctors, mollahs, small merchants, and that even the peasants talk politik in the teahouses along the roadside. They know they can bribe and threaten the great personages and they think they have the country in the palm of their hands. But they cannot bribe us, the little people, because we are too many. If they buy me over or get me killed there will be hundreds of others who think just like me to take my place. What good will it do them?
It was just dawn; the sharp upward angle of Damavand, the great mountain that overlooks Teheran, was edged with a brittle band of gold. The wind had a sharpness almost of snowfields about it.
âAnd when you go back to your country, said the Sayyid,âdo not forget to tell the Americans that there are little people in Asia.
VII. MOHARRAM
For Z. C. B.
1. Darvish
Outside the gate where the dusty road winds off under the planetrees towards the hills sits an old man dressed in white with a blue turban. His beard is dense as if moulded out of silver. He sits motionless, staring straight ahead of him out of frowning hawkeyes. In one hand he holds up a curved sword, in the other hand resting in his lap he holds a book. The sword or the Koran. The horns of the swelling crescent drawing together on the world. People as they pass leave coppers on the corners of the prayer rug he sits on. The old man sits without moving, regardless of the swirling dust, squats beside the road on a piece of Manchester carpet with the face of an emir leading Islam into holy war.
In Persia there is a sort of holiness in the very fact of beggary. A beggar is an instrument by which a believer may lay up for himself treasures in heaven. In Mianej at the khan there was a merchant whose caravan had been plundered by bandits. He had a certificate from some mujtahid that Allah had bereft him of worldly goods and was sitting in the upper chamber patiently waiting for travellers to make him presents so that he might eventually start in business again. He had the face of a very happy man, of one who had stopped struggling against adverse currents. Not for nothing does Islam mean submission, self-abandonment.
And in every teahouse along the road you find merry fellows, ragged and footsore, men of all ages and conditions who have given up working and drift along the highroads, exploiting as best they can the holiness of poverty. They are certainly the happiest people in Persia. They have no worry about tax collectors or raids from the hilltribes or bandits in the passes. They go about starving and singing prayers, parched by the sun and wind, carrying epidemics and the word of God from the Gobi desert to the Euphrates. Tramps exist everywhere, but in what we can vaguely call the East, going on the bum is a religious act. All madness, all restlessness is from God. If a man loses his only child or his loved wife or suffers some other irreparable calamity he strips off his clothes and runs out-of-doors and lets his hair grow long and wanders over the world begging and praising God. A man becomes a dervish as in the Middle Ages in Europe he would have gone into a monastery.
I used to think deeply of all these things on my way back and forth to the telegraph station during those weeks in Teheran when my bag of silver krans had dwindled to a handful and my hotel bill grew and grew and every cable for money cost a weekâs board. It was in the early days of Moharram, the month of mourning, when there is no music or dancing, the month of the passion of Hosein, the son of Fatima, daughter of the Prophet. Every day Teheran was filling more and more with beggars and religion and hatred of foreigners. I used to wonder how it would be to sit under a planetree beside the road
It was just dawn; the sharp upward angle of Damavand, the great mountain that overlooks Teheran, was edged with a brittle band of gold. The wind had a sharpness almost of snowfields about it.
âAnd when you go back to your country, said the Sayyid,âdo not forget to tell the Americans that there are little people in Asia.
VII. MOHARRAM
For Z. C. B.
1. Darvish
Outside the gate where the dusty road winds off under the planetrees towards the hills sits an old man dressed in white with a blue turban. His beard is dense as if moulded out of silver. He sits motionless, staring straight ahead of him out of frowning hawkeyes. In one hand he holds up a curved sword, in the other hand resting in his lap he holds a book. The sword or the Koran. The horns of the swelling crescent drawing together on the world. People as they pass leave coppers on the corners of the prayer rug he sits on. The old man sits without moving, regardless of the swirling dust, squats beside the road on a piece of Manchester carpet with the face of an emir leading Islam into holy war.
In Persia there is a sort of holiness in the very fact of beggary. A beggar is an instrument by which a believer may lay up for himself treasures in heaven. In Mianej at the khan there was a merchant whose caravan had been plundered by bandits. He had a certificate from some mujtahid that Allah had bereft him of worldly goods and was sitting in the upper chamber patiently waiting for travellers to make him presents so that he might eventually start in business again. He had the face of a very happy man, of one who had stopped struggling against adverse currents. Not for nothing does Islam mean submission, self-abandonment.
And in every teahouse along the road you find merry fellows, ragged and footsore, men of all ages and conditions who have given up working and drift along the highroads, exploiting as best they can the holiness of poverty. They are certainly the happiest people in Persia. They have no worry about tax collectors or raids from the hilltribes or bandits in the passes. They go about starving and singing prayers, parched by the sun and wind, carrying epidemics and the word of God from the Gobi desert to the Euphrates. Tramps exist everywhere, but in what we can vaguely call the East, going on the bum is a religious act. All madness, all restlessness is from God. If a man loses his only child or his loved wife or suffers some other irreparable calamity he strips off his clothes and runs out-of-doors and lets his hair grow long and wanders over the world begging and praising God. A man becomes a dervish as in the Middle Ages in Europe he would have gone into a monastery.
I used to think deeply of all these things on my way back and forth to the telegraph station during those weeks in Teheran when my bag of silver krans had dwindled to a handful and my hotel bill grew and grew and every cable for money cost a weekâs board. It was in the early days of Moharram, the month of mourning, when there is no music or dancing, the month of the passion of Hosein, the son of Fatima, daughter of the Prophet. Every day Teheran was filling more and more with beggars and religion and hatred of foreigners. I used to wonder how it would be to sit under a planetree beside the road
Similar Books
