Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Terence Ward
Read between
July 20 - August 23, 2025
“Nostalgia” comes from the Greek word nostos, to return home, and algos, pain. The ancients used the term to describe the state of mind of Hellenic soldiers of Alexander the Great garrisoned in far-off Asia.
Chris and Kevin had carved out their own worlds in America. But at nightfall, when they herded their little children off to sleep, the echo of a familiar Persian voice rose in their bedtime stories. In this way, verbal heirlooms—like Hassan’s tale of Solomon’s ring—were gently passed on to a new generation.
The past is a country from which we all have emigrated. —SALMAN RUSHDIE, IMAGINARY HOMELANDS
“For those who have left it,” Mircea Eliade wrote in No Souvenirs, “the city of their childhood and adolescence always becomes a mythical city.”
Mostly, I remember, he begins the travels east along India’s Malabar Coast; for the dried Omani lemon he sets out from the southern Arabian deserts. I listen, pleased to join his verbal caravan.
While Reverend Lockhart waved his arms, trying to synchronize our voices, his embarrassed face reddened deeper with the painful awareness that his young flock were already spoken for and defiantly holding on to their parents’ faith. We were living proof of the Babel of tongues and the scattering of nations.
Feudal allegiances and religious obedience divided the classes, and many sought revenge.
The guttural sounds of Arabic’s throat-grabbing vowels had disappeared. No trace. Words sounded crisp and clipped. “History, like a badly constructed concert hall, has occasional dead spots where the music can’t be heard,” the American poet Archibald MacLeish once wrote. In our search for Hassan, we had resolved to seek out the nation’s dead spots. For twenty years, the Islamic Republic had offered its version of truth, yet other truths existed. Only by listening to the past could we hope to reach beneath the surface.
A quick scan of the Indo-European family for similar words for baradar reveals: phrater in Greek, brathair in Irish, and bhratar in Sanskrit.
Akbar told us that it was still intact only because of the quick-witted Pasargadae villagers. In the seventh century, invading Arabs bent on destroying all things ancient and pagan rode up to the tomb and asked who was buried there. “Solomon’s mother,” the villagers replied. The holy name from the Koran sent the coarse, illiterate Bedouins galloping on. The bluff worked. Now the resting place of Cyrus II, founder of the Persian Empire, sat starkly alone.
Robert Byron, in The Road to Oxiana, considered by many to be the finest travel book ever written, described Cyrus’s tomb as “a sarcophagus of white marble on a high, stepped plinth, standing by itself among the ploughed fields. It looks its age: every stone has been separately kissed, and every joint stroked hollow, as though by the action of the sea. No ornament or cry for notice disturbs its lonely serenity.”
Because history is for every person. We are the manifestation of past times, and we give what we are to our children and to the future of the world. So the events of life, you see, are all related. That’s why I love history.”
Today, one thousand miles away, in Cairo’s pulsing human beehive, medieval, befouled and grim, plagued by pollution and endless traffic jams, the last Shah can be found. Within the dust-covered walls of Al-Rifa’i Mosque he lies in state, a prisoner of his own making, trapped far from the original homeland of the Persians. Pasargadae’s broad green plain, it seems, has no room for impostors.
Lamps and light bulbs lit each shop and its dangled wares: hand-stitched lace, silks and cottons; copper trays and serving bowls; tribal weavings, saddlebags and carpets; tea glasses and porcelain; leather shoes and sneakers. All to entice customers. And, of course, there were no price tags.
It always surprised me how rapidly these exchanges could deteriorate. Each new offer by Hassan would be countered with a stiff rebuff. The vocal flurry—interspersed with calls to God, pleas of poverty, accusations of being swindled or swearing on ancestors’ graves—moved to a rhythmic beat. Each comment escalated the volume. Finally, before they breached all decency or collapsed in exhaustion, the bout would be declared a draw and, dignity restored, the deal was struck. Hassan would take our newly bought eggplants, tomatoes and plucked chickens and hand me a bag of oranges and pomegranates to
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How shortsighted, I thought, to let a simple price tag, rudely scribbled, eliminate all dialogue between buyer and seller.
Over the centuries, it earned a reputation for producing learned scholars, artists and the country’s two most celebrated poets: Hafez and Saadi. Another renowned Shirazi son was Ostad Isa, the architect who designed the Taj Mahal.
Harry de Windt also described the city, in A Ride to India: “Shiraz has been called the ‘Paris of Persia,’ perhaps from the beauty and coquetry of its women.”
It took me a long time to fall asleep that first night; an eerie tingling of pleasure came over me. It felt surreal to be back, to hear Farsi being spoken, to hear the wind rustling through the trees’ new leaves outside my window, to see a huddled figure walking home under the lamplight, and to think that somewhere out there over the mountains, maybe, was Hassan.
Hassan’s older brother bore the name of the great martyr Hussein. None of their children carried the great “pagan” name of Cyrus or Darius. The ghosts of Persepolis, the sun-washed glories of historic Persia, rich and magical, were too removed from their world.
“When you study history in schoolbooks, you hear only great things about Alexander, but if you look at the other side, you’ll understand why in Iran we call him gostakh. The important thing about traveling is that you can see two sides of the coin.” “Go-stakh,” I said, and wrote it down. “It’s a word from Old Persian.” “And it means?” “Well… son of a bitch.”
Paradise. Eden. Elysium. Arcadia. Shangri-la. Utopia. Abode of the Blessed. Medieval maps of the world always placed earthly Paradise in the East. Medieval Europe’s Paradiso, most famously described in Dante’s Divine Comedy, was rooted in the Latin word paradisos, which in turn descended from the classical Greek paradeisos. But to find its true source, one had to look farther east, across the hostile deserts of Asia’s gnarled landmass. In ancient Persian, pari-deiza meant “enclosed garden.” The linguistic roots of the “divine” garden sprouted here.
“We must travel,” John Berryman once advised, “in the direction of our fear.”
Italo Calvino described the curious effect of travel on memory: “Arriving at each new city, the traveler finds again a past of his that he did not know he had: the foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places.” What were we going to find in the end? A past we didn’t know we had?
The patriarchs of the largest tribes bypassed Ali and chose their leader—the first caliph, Abu Bakr—through tribal consensus. These multitudes, their descendants and converts would call themselves Sunnis, derived from sunnah, the tradition. Those in opposition looked upon the Prophet’s family as the only legitimate heirs, led by his son-in-law, Ali, and his grandchildren, Hassan and Hussein. This branch of Islam came to be known as Shia Ali, partisans of Ali.
Ali and his two sons, Hassan and Hussein, are the first three imams. Various Shia schools differ in the number of recognized saints: five among the Lebanese Druze, seven for the Ismailis, led by the Agha Khan. Iranians believe in twelve imams. The twelfth, Imam al-Zaman, or the Saint of All Time, mysteriously disappeared in the tenth century. He is the Shia messiah, or madhi, living in hiding, who will reemerge on judgment day to restore justice on earth. Throughout Iran, silent prayers are offered for his return.
But to label Akbar an Arab was not only a blunder. It was an insult. Like insisting that an Irishman is the same as a Brit, or calling a Greek a Turk, or thinking that a New Yorker is like a Texan. Divided by history, culture, language, cuisine and, above all, by their branch of Islam, Iranians and Arabs have never been friends. While Greece and Turkey are neighbors, all Greeks will remind you that the border is all they share with Turks. So it is with Iranians and Arabs.
“Ali would ask his Arab followers battling the Zoroastrians, ‘Have you read their holy book, Avesta? They have their own faith and worship only one God just as we do.’ He even tried to stop the Bedouins itching to wage war against us,” Akbar whispered.
This defining moment of Ashura rivals the agony of Christ. But unlike the Christian ordeal, for the Shia there is no resurrection, no deliverance, only suffering and tears. Iranians will never forget or forgive evil Yazid for his crimes. Yet the Sunnis do. This is why the divide between Shias and Sunnis is so irreversibly profound.
Imam Hussein’s martyrdom was so potent in the Iranian psyche that Khomeini invoked it to rally the nation with his new battle cry: “Kull yawm Ashura, kull ard Kerbela. Every day is Ashura, every place is Kerbela.”
Blistering temperatures topping 140 degrees had created the need for these ingenious towers, marvels of architecture. They are life preservers, wind catchers, fishing lines to the sky. A large opening at the top of the tower traps the hot wind. Gusts channel their way down the shaft, then bounce off a cool pond below. Thus the heated
When you wake up in a new city, the prodigious travel writer and historian Jan Morris suggested two rules: “One is found in E. M. Forster’s guide to Alexandria—to wander aimlessly. The second is from the Psalms; grin like a dog and run about through the city.”
I had now decided that his fearsome mug was only a front; inside, he was a complete sweetheart.
“Well, boys,” he told us, “just remember what Oscar Wilde said: ‘The book of life begins with a man and a woman in a garden, and it ends with revelations.’ ”
I helped Fatimeh with her rugs, the cooking, buying things, even doing the washing. At night I took everything down to the qanat. The men would say, ‘Hey, look at the crazy man who comes to wash his children’s clothes and the dishes.’ No men did any cleaning. Only the women. One man even said, ‘If I were Hassan, I would throw myself off the mosque roof.’ ” “Now all the men are washing dishes,” Fatimeh said. “Yeah, I started a revolution in Tudeshk,” said Hassan. “You became a hero for the women,” my mother said. “And enemy for men,” Rasool whined. “Good baba,” Maryam said.
Her favorites were Doctor Zhivago, Jane Eyre, the novels of Virginia Woolf, Daphne du Maurier, Pearl S. Buck and Balzac, and Maupassant’s stories. She adored Gone with the Wind.
Sitting before me was the new Iran. The Revolution had opened doors to an entire class that would never have stood the remotest chance in the Shah’s “Great Civilization.” Hassan’s children now served their country as professionals. An engineer, a naval officer and a teacher. It would have been unimaginable thirty years ago.
This Revolution had embodied a paradox. Populist and socialist themes had been woven into a conservative theocratic agenda. What was billed as a religious revolution actually championed a radical social transformation. The revolt against the Westernized Iranians blasted open gates for the vast underclass. Gardeners, cooks, laborers and truck drivers saw their chance to break through unassailable boundaries. And they took advantage of it.
For all the talk of a “hard-line pariah state,” something had indeed softened in Iran. Both the Pahlavi and Islamic regimes had earned grisly reputations for their ferocious security apparatus—the secret police who spirit adversaries away to feared Evin Prison—yet now people on the street spoke openly and unafraid, with typical Iranian humor. This stood in sharp contrast with the Arab world, where self-censorship had gripped tongues for decades.
A strange breed, no doubt, these carpet dealers, who always claimed to be your long-lost baradar, who think nothing of swearing on the Koran or their departed mother’s soul. Otherwise, a trustworthy bunch of cultivated pirates.
As we rose to leave the quiet courtyard, Hassan said one more thing. “It’s like the old poem. Open the eye of your heart, then you can see things that cannot be seen.”
Jorge Luis Borges once wrote that the “thousand” of The Thousand and One Nights implied “endless nights, countless nights.” So a thousand and one, he concluded, “is adding one to infinity.” What then of Fatimeh and her carpets? I wondered. Were her fingers weaving anything less than infinity? I had watched her create gardens of Paradise with plump roses, budding leaves, running deer and water vases. From the first winter frost through the melting of snows and the sudden burst of spring, each day she wove. She knew that sooner or later her carpet would warm someone’s feet, brighten a room and
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Mementos of our shared life together. I studied each one as if they were windows onto a regained childhood.
To hear Hassan say “my son,” to hear Fatimeh echo those same words, poured rain on parched soil. The edges of cliffs folded over, the harsh precipice eroded, and earth filled the chasm that for so long had split my heart. What was once a gaping divide disappeared.
“They paved paradise,” Kev said, “to put up a condo.”
Sigh... gone were those two-storied house with lawns and gardens, for apartment complex which hardens the souls of us like its cement. A garden - is the true luxury of materialistic life!
A reincarnation of Colonel Sanders, but with a curly black beard and a dark cloak, was posted in front of a fast-food joint advertising “Kabooky Fried Chicken.”
LOL
He made a sharp turn. “Bad Shah and his corrupt thieves. Bad mullahs, they abuse our God and bankrupt our nation. Poor Iranis!” The cabby raised a finger to his mouth. Saket, silence. But it didn’t last long. “We wait. We’ve put up with the Greeks and the Arabs, the Mongols and the Turks, the British, the Shah, and now…”
“Look, Terry, the most important thing in life is to wake up each morning and be able to look yourself in the mirror and know you’re clean.”
I leaned back in my seat, and the Iran Air 727 taxied down the runway. The overhead bins rattled. My mother squeezed my arm. Dawn was breaking with its first pale vermilion fire over Mount Demavand, the mythic volcano.
Out beyond the ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there. —RUMI
