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Title: Roses and Nightingales Author: Peter Lamborn Wilson Date: 2003 Language: en Topics: Iran, tradition, Fifth Estate, Islam Source: Retrieved on 6th October 2021 from https://www.fifthestate.org/archive/363-winter-20032004/roses-and-nightingales/ Notes: Published in Fifth Estate #363, Winter, 2003/2004
The military dictator Reza’ Shah Pahlavi changed the name of Persia to
Iran in 1935. This move was part of a broader effort to craft a nation
through the celebration of a largely imaginary Indo-Aryan past at a time
the territory was dealing with a century’s worth of British and Russian
imperialist interference, as well as the increasing power of foreign oil
companies.
Today, Iran is on the “Axis of Evil” shortlist, meaning that its people
have been continually threatened by the Bush-Cheney regime’s mass murder
fantasies and neo-colonialist ambitions. With an eye to current events,
then, we present Peter Lamborn Wilson’s “Roses and Nightingales,” an
appreciation of the heretical, Islamic mysticism that he encountered
while traveling in southwest Asia in the early 1970s.
Wilson associates the fringe elements of sufism with a cultural tendency
that has tenaciously survived despite nationalist modernization,
deepening levels of European imperialist penetration, and escalating
governmental repression. In the course of Wilson’s investigations, he
believes that he has found vestiges of pre-Iranian Persia and a rich
variety of unorthodox Islamic (and pre-Islamic) practices. Both then and
now, the sufi exploration of emotive extremes of asceticism and
debauchery in pursuit of ecstasy rattle those who adhere to strict
Islamic doctrine and other rigid institutions of law and order.
Many of you already appreciate Wilson as an informed observer of offbeat
arcana, and his efforts to tease out those strands in the history of
Islamic society that cherish freedom and imagination are perceptive. In
general, the sufis are a community of Muslims whose practices run
counter to the oppressive use of that religion by the ayatollah
oligarchy, the House of Saud aristocrats, and the murderously prudish
swine of the Hezbollah and al-Qaeda.
When cynical neoconservatives and hateful, right-wing Christian/Zionist
neo-crusaders are exaggerating the tyrannical characteristics of Islamic
society in order to demonize and disparage anything remotely Arabic and
Muslim, any positive evaluation of that culture that defies the National
Security State’s use of racism, prejudice, and provincialism is welcome.
Still, there will be those who will be irritated by Wilson’s embrace of
mysticism and tolerance of misogyny within these subcultures. Some
readers (together with some members of FE’s editorial collective,
including myself) find it impossible to reconcile any aspect of any form
of theism—no matter how lawlessly exhilarating or ecstatic—with freedom,
mutual aid, and solidarity.
But I am reminded of a conversation that I had a few nights ago on the
subject of sufism and political dissent with my friend Sayeedeh.
Following a bloody cycle of mass anti-government demonstrations and
police riots in September 1978, she, like many of her Marxist comrades
at Tehran University, had her life threatened by both the thugs loyal to
the Shah and by those who supported Khomeini. When she eventually had to
escape the city, she did so along night-darkened railway lines with the
help of some indigent sufis. When I asked her why sufi ascetics would
help a Marxist feminist escape police dogs and fundamentalist Shi’ite
vigilantes, Sayeedeh brought up the subject of the medieval Christian
heretic and radical primitivist Jan Hus.
Was everyone in the anti-feudal peasant and artisan rebel movement
following Hus really Christian? Or, were some using Christian language
and symbols simply as means for articulating the realities of the deep
social crisis that they were experiencing? Perhaps Wilson appreciates
Sufism in the same light.
— Doug Graves
It was 1971. After two years on the Hippie Trail in India and Pakistan,
a winter of poverty in Afghanistan, months of opium smoking in Quetta
(capital of Pakistani Baluchistan) followed by a severe and
hallucinatory bout of intestinal malaria, I must not have looked very
respectable to the Iranian Consul.
The Consulate, a concrete box in a dreary new suburb of Quetta, appeared
to be empty except for me and the Consul, a small sour man in a suit,
who seemed to have nothing to do except make life difficult for me
personally. He was quizzing me about why he shouldn’t simply issue me a
14-day transit visa rather than the standard Tourist Three Month visa I
wanted. He seemed to suspect me of something. Recently, I’d been sort of
thrown out of India and also Afghanistan. Clearly the Consul took me for
a wealthless vagabond, which was rather perspicacious of him.
“Why do you want to visit my country?” he kept asking.
I felt too tired to make anything up so I said, “Well, you see, I’m
interested in sufism…”
“Sufism!? Do you know what is sufism?”
“I know enough to want to know more. Some sufis I met in India told me
to go to Iran. So…”
The Consul metamorphized before my eyes into a different person: all at
once he became a cultivated and poetic soul unfairly and inexplicably
consigned to this empty concrete box in Baluchistan. He unbent. He
beamed, “This is fantastic! You must let me give you the maximum
possible visa,” he began fumbling for seals and stamps, “One Year With
Extensions, Yes?”
“Well…but…”
“You must remain in my country until you have learned everything.
Please, promise me!”
Although I never learned “everything” about the Consul’s country or even
about sufism, I did spend the next seven years there, more or less, so
my problem now is one of choice; what to leave out of this little memoir
and what to put in. I follow a loose thread suggested by the theme of
the Consul’s unbending, his strange transformation from bureaucrat to
human being. My motive for this arises from the probability that over
the next few years no one in the US is going to be discussing these
aspects of Persian culture. Iran will be consigned to the evil
pseudo-discourse and vacant imaginary of the “News”. Persian humanism
(as Iqbal called it) will be forgotten, denied, and even
betrayed—precisely because it belongs not to the realm of ideology and
the “clash of cultures”, but to “everyday life” and the ordinary and
even unrepresentable beauties of the soul.
By a strange coincidence possible only in a “developing nation”, the
strongest force for traditional and creative preservation of classical
music was then the Iranian National Television. Radio Tehran, by
contrast represented a lovely but impure neo-traditionalism, which even
ran to experiments with violin and piano—I love Persian piano music,
which always reminds me of the mirror-mosaic architecture of Shiite
tomb-shrines and other late 19^(th) century public buildings. Like
pianos (mostly uprights), European mirrors were shipped to Iran by
caravan and naturally many of them broke en route.
Tile-mosaic craftsmen bought up shards by the camel-load and created a
vulgar but scintillating hybrid form in which whole domes and iwans are
transformed into glittering ice-diamond bursts of illumination. Purists
hate this stuff. The pianos were re-tuned to Persian modes and played
like dulcimers, unpedaled, using only four fingers. Another comparison:
all over Asia traditional embroidery techniques were given a creative
burst by the introduction of foot-pedaled Singer sewing machines. Sooner
or later modern technology (inextricably linked with Capital) will
suffocate and destroy traditional crafts, but the initial contact is
often a stimulus, and gives birth to vigorous hybrids.
Be that as it may, the TV musicians were all rigorous but creative
purists, and the 1970s witnessed a mini-renaissance of excellent Persian
music: played by very young enthusiasts and very old virtuosi who’d been
rescued from oblivion by the new wave and the TV budget. The Shiraz
Festival was one of its epicenters. I spent a lot of time talking with
Dr. Dariush Safvat, TV’s director of “The Centre for the Preservation
and Propagation of Traditional Iranian Music.” One night in Shiraz, Dr.
Safvat told me an interesting story. I already knew most of it because
Nasrollah Poujavady and I had written about it in Kings of Love, our
study of the history and poetry of the Ni’matollahi Sufi Order, the
spiritual progeny of Shah Ni’matollah Wali. In 1792, one of these
dervishes was martyred in Kerman; his sufi name was Mushtaq Ali Shah and
he was a niadzub, a sufi “madman” totally absorbed in divine ecstasy. He
was also a legendary musician and played the sehtar, the little
three-stringed lute of Central Asia (ancestor of the Indian sitar). One
day, in his craziness, Mushtaq played an accompaniment to the Call to
Prayer (azan) from a nearby mosque, and this blasphemy aroused the
puritanical wrath of a bigoted mullah. The mullah called on a
mosque-full of people to stone Mushtaq Ali Shah, and he was crushed to
death along with one of his disciples. Dr. Safvat told me the story over
again, but he hadn’t read it in a book. He’d heard it as a youth from an
old musician friend who heard it from his grandfather who had actually
been present in Kerman on May 19, 1792, and witnessed the death of
Mushtaq.
The Ni’matollahi Order in the 1970s was still very pro-music (although
they never used musical instruments in their actual sufi praxis).
Several times a year on happy holidays such as the Birthday of the
Prophet or Ali, the Ni’matollahi khaniqah [or “spiritual center”] in
downtown Tehran would organize a jashn, or musical fest. Dr. Javad
Nurbakhsh, the qotb or Shaykh of the Order, counted many musicians among
his disciples and friends, all glad to perform at his parties. Several
thousand people from all classes and every part of Tehran (including
women and kids) would attend, and each and every one received a free hot
meal of rice and meat and all the tea and sweets they could stomach,
along with several hours of excellent traditional music. The grand
finale was always provided by a troupe of wild-looking Qadiri dervishes
from Kurdestan, who roused the crowd to delirium with dramatic chants
and pounding drums. Dr Nurbakhsh told us that at home in Kurdestan
they’d follow the music with feats of power such as sticking knives
through their cheeks or eating light bulbs. “But I don’t allow any of
that in my khaniqah,” he said with a twinkle in his eye. “You’ll have to
go to Sanandaj if you want to see that sort of thaumaturgy.”
So, of course, we did.
The Kurds are a sight for sore eyes after the Iranians, who have all
(except the mullahs) adopted western-style clothes with generally
counter-aesthetic results. The Kurds dress Kurdish: big fringed turbans,
tight soldierly jackets, baggy trousers, riding boots—and guns, if they
can get away with it. The women dress in dozens or scores of layered
flower-patterned petticoats of dark, rich, saturated, velvety colors,
and look like black tulips; some tattoo their face with blue marks, and
go unveiled.
In Sanandaj, my friends and I—all of us American journalists working for
the rackety Tehran English daily journals and all fascinated by
sufism—met Dr. Nurbakhsh’s contact, a small 88-year-old gentleman who
lived in a small house near the Qadiri khaniqah. He invited us in for
tea, and showed us an old photo of himself in military uniform with a
really huge live snake draped over his shoulders. “You came to see us
eat glass, my young friends? Ah, that’s nothing. One need not even enter
the trance state for such tricks. I’ll show you!”
He snapped his fingers and his young grandson brought in a silver tray
upon which sat a single light bulb. The old soldier broke it up with his
fingers as he uttered an invocation, then began scooping up shards and
popping them in his mouth, crunch crunch crunch. Swallow. As we gaped at
him, he winked his eye and offered us the tray, “Like to try it
yourselves?”
That night in the khaniqah (after a big dervish meal of mutton and tea
on the floor around a sofreh or dining-cloth), we indeed witnessed feats
of power, including cheek skewering, electricity eating, scorpion
handling, light bulb chomping—all performed (after a really rousing
zikr) without any trace of damage or visible scars. I later visited
Sanandaj several times, and I have to admit these tricks soon came to
seem rather ordinary (though I never tried any myself). But I never
again saw the feat our tiny old soldier friend performed. After
achieving hal or trance by dancing wildly and whirling to the zikr, he
suddenly ran at tremendous speed across the whole length of the room
(say the length of a tennis court at least); launched himself headfirst
like a rocket into the air, and crashed his skull into the far
wall—bounced off, onto his feet, and went around whirling and dancing
and singing ecstatically for the next hour. I believe it was this chap
who told us that the Grand Shaykh of the Qadiri Sufi Order in Baghdad
was able to cut off the heads of his disciples, as part of the
initiation ceremony, and then replace them, no harm done. After seeing
the old soldier himself perform, I was inclined to believe this, though
I admit that later I became skeptical again. But it’s a nice story.
Sunni Islam is “built” upon Five Pillars: Confession of Unity, Belief in
prophets and angels, Prayer, Pilgrimage, and the Poor-tax. To these
Shiism adds a Sixth pillar: Social Justice. Shiism has usually existed
as a religion without state power and traditionally as a source of
potential revolt against Sunnism. But in the course of time, the Pillar
of Justice has been given an even wider interpretation. The late Ali
Shariati, a radical mullah assassinated by the Shah’s secret police,
converted many Iranians to the concept of Shiite Socialism. Shariati’s
tracts reveal a fascinating blend of Marxist humanism and reverence for
Ali and Husayn as rebels against State oppression. Official
revolutionary State Shiism in Iran today has taken another direction,
not socialist, and not particularly radical. But the link between social
justice Shiism and revolution is quite solidly historic and real—and
always capable of regeneration. Iran is generally depicted as 90%
orthodox Shiite, and this may be so.
But the dervishes and heretics have played a larger role than such
statistics would suggest. Inside the “fat” Iranian a “thin” dervish
often struggles for self-expression and freedom. Sufis are very pious,
certainly—but dervishism (even without the outer signs and practices)
also allows a way to cock a snoot at all dreary conformism, class
suffocation, puritanism, overly formal manners, and philistine consensus
aesthetics. In modern Persian, the adjective darvishi implies a whole
complex of such attitudes and tastes, not necessarily even connected
with any sufi praxis. It means something like “laid back,” “cool,”
informal, and relaxed (“Don’t dress for dinner; we’ll be very
darvishi”); also “hip” and bohemian. Dervishism and the strange sects
(too many even to list in this essay) seem to me to provide something
quite vital to Persian culture and even “politics” in a broad sense of
that term—something that might be called “traditional anarchism.”
In the old days (say, up to mid-19^(th) century), Iranian dervishes
adhered to an ancient way of life very similar to that of Hindu saddhus
in India: long hair (or shaved bald), patched cloak, begging bowl (made
from coco de mer shells) and ritual axes (also useful for chopping
vegetables), distinctive cap or taj (“crown”); endless aimless
wandering, music and dance, sometimes wine and hashish, an attitude of
insouciance vis-a-vis the claims of orthodoxy; yogic asceticism and
libertine excess—and a theology of ecstatic love. The Ni’matollahi Order
once occupied the vanguard of this sort of dervishism, but severe
repression and even executions for heresy (such as that of Mushtaq Ali
Shah), carried out by powerful mullahs (one of them known as Sufi-kush
or “sufi killer”) gradually drove the radical dervishes underground.
Inwardly, they retained their anti-puritanical convictions, but
outwardly, they conformed to orthodox Shiism. Some of the shaykhs even
dressed as mullahs in dark sober robes and snow white turbans.
Sufism of the wild qalandari variety may be older than Islam, harking
back to an Indo-Iranian antiquity or even a common shamanistic culture
traceable in the earliest Indian and Iranian scriptures (the Vedas and
the Yashts). Hallucinogenic plants (called Soma or Haoma) must have
played a central role in this ur-cult. First orthodox Brahminism and
Zoroastrianism, and later Islam, pushed these power-plants into the
outer darkness of “heresy,” or “forgot” them, or turned them into
metaphors like the flavorless “wine” of so many mediocre sufi poems.
But dervishism resists change. In the hierarchic world of Asia, with its
rigid sets of inherited identities, the dervish life always offers a way
out, a kind of traditional bohemianism, not exactly approved by
authority, but at least recognized as a viable identity. It’s no wonder
the hippies immediately gravitated toward the company of these “1000
year-old beatniks,” sharing the same zero-work ethic and predilection
for intoxicants and phantastica. In India, I found both dervishes and
saddhus in plenty, but in Iran they had mostly vanished, at least
outwardly. The only patched cloaks belonged to an Order called the
Khaksariyya or “Dust-Heads” (as in the image of prostrating in the dust
of the Beloved’s doorway, or throwing dust on the head in mourning). In
Shiraz, I attended zikr in one of their khaniqahs in a beautiful garden
called “Seven Bodies,” where they recited Hafez and then turned out the
lights and wept in darkness. Patch-cloaked Khaksari dervishes still
occasionally wandered about begging or selling incense against the Evil
Eye (esphand aka Syrian rue, a potent hallucinogen if ingested; also
used to make a red dye for fezzes). I knew a teahouse in Isfahan staffed
by Khaksari dervishes, where the headwaiter, their shaykh, recited from
the epic Shahnameh acting out all the parts, a one-man theater. The
Khaksari Order has initiatic links with a strange Kurdish sect called
the Ahl-i Haqq or “People of the Truth” (the same Divine Name claimed by
Hallaj, the sufi martyr). This is not a sufi order but a folk religion,
a syncresis of pre-Zoroastrian paganism, extreme Shiism, dervish sufism,
and perhaps Manichaeanism. One branch of the Ahl-i Haqq actually worship
Satan, eat pork, and drink wine; several friends of mine traveled to
their remote valleys and found them quite warm and hospitable. The
“orthodox” Ahl-i Haqq had established a jamkhaneh or meeting-house in
Tehran under a charismatic shaykh, Ustad Elahi, a famous musician and
master of the sehtar. Many Tehran musicians were drawn to him as
disciples, as were some Westerners, including my friend the French
ethnomusicologist, Jean During. Ustad Elahi’s son has written books’ in
French and English.
Some sufis are very darvishi, like the Safi Ali Shahi branch of the
Ni’matollahi Order, who owned a very nice khaniqah (with garden and
tiled dome) in Tehran. Many of them were professional musicians at Radio
Tehran, and some of them (so people said) smoked opium. I attended a
fashionable funeral in their garden once, since the dervishes rented it
out for such occasions. Other sufis criticized them for this and looked
on them as slackers. Not all sufis are darvishi by any means.
Sufism in the past has occasionally taken its “traditional anarchism” as
far as armed uprising against injustice, but in recent times, it has
transferred its energies to theological and intellectual liberation and
applied its wildness to more inward dimensions. Given a political
reading, sufism provides plenty of inspiration for resistance—think of
Hafez’s line, “Stain your prayer carpet with wine!” Given a cultural
reading, sufism has sparked off countless revivals of traditional
culture precisely by resisting tradition’s “dead weight.” The tremendous
changes in Persian Classical music in the late 19^(th) century for
example—larger ensembles, new melodic material, experiments with
European influences—were all carried out by sufis or artists steeped in
cultural sufism. “Radical tolerance” may prove impossible as a political
program at a given time and place, but it can always be internalized by
the artist and externalized as art. Since “the Orient” never really
experienced the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution (except as
imposed by colonial imperialism), it retained many traditional forms of
Romantic resistance within the “permitted dissidence” of sufism and the
arts.
Under conditions of overwhelming oppression, the dervish becomes rendi,
that is to say, clever. A rend can drink wine under the very nose of the
Law and get away with it. The rend is a secret agent of
self-illumination, a strange combination of mystic monk and prankish
surrealist. Perhaps this is where Gurdjieff found his notion of the
“clever one” who avoids onerous paths of religion and yoga and slips
into heaven like a burglar, so to speak. In folklore, the rend becomes a
comic figure like the famous Mulla Nasroddin, outwardly a fool but in
truth a realized sage.
By traveling in India and Iran rather than only reading about them I
came to appreciate and actually love certain “late decadent periods” of
the sort that are universally despised by the Orientalists for their
aesthetic impurity, despised by the new breed of Islamist bigots for
their religious impurity, and despised by modernist pro-Westerners for
their medieval impurity. Pretty much the only people who don’t despise
these late decadent periods are the people who are actually still living
in them and are too ignorant and backward to realize their own
irrelevance, outdatedness, political incorrectness—and impurity. In
India, the remnants of the late Mughal era still provide a ghostly and
melancholic but exquisitely refined matrix for the lives of many. In
Iran it’s the Qajar period (the dynasty before the Pahlevis); a past
recent enough that in the 1970s one could still touch it through stories
(like Dr. Safvat’s story about Mushtaq), through buildings, paintings,
music, crafts, poetry, and even food. The past lingered in a way
inconceivable to Americans or even Europeans; enough of it lingered that
one could almost live in it.
Late decadent periods attract me for many reasons, e.g. they’re usually
rather peaceful (too tired and blase for war); often they’re devoted to
“small happinesses”—which as Nietzsche says may be more important than
the big ones, the ones that always betray us. Maybe great original art
fails to thrive in such periods—since the kings and lords can no longer
afford it—but the “minor arts” often experience a kind of perfection;
aristocratic tastes (in cheap folkish forms) filter down even to the
lowest levels. I remember one late winter night in Tehran, as I passed
the skeleton of a half-built, pseudo-Californian office block, I saw a
lone night watchman warming himself by a barrel of burning trash; he
wore a sheepskin coat and he was entertaining himself by reciting Hafez
viva voce to the snowflakes.
“Iran” is the proper ancient name for Persia, but it wasn’t the official
name till the mid-20^(th) century, changed by decree of Reza Shah (the
last late Shah’s father) from “Persia” to “Iran”. His motive for this
was suspect, because he was a Nazi sympathizer and because “Iran” means
“land of the Aryans”—and the name-change left a bad taste in the mouths
of many Iranians. The name “Persia” was supposed to represent all that
was backward, medieval, superstitious, anti-progress, late and
decadent—every thing “Oriental” in the land and its people. But the land
and its people (or some of them) still lived in that world and loved it.
I know it’s perfectly illegitimate and indefensible for me to say that I
also loved it. I know that I was an outsider (although at times I
convinced myself otherwise); I know that I cannot “represent the Other”
and even that the whole project of representation has become suspect
amidst the “ruins” of post-modernity. I even know that the entire hippie
project of Romantic travel was largely illusory and certainly doomed to
failure. The “post-colonial discourse” has made all this perfectly and
painfully clear. Sadly, however, I’m unable to repent or to write off my
experiences as irrelevant, crypto-reactionary delusions.
“Iran” as represented in the “News”, a two-dimensional image of oil
wells and atomic reactors under the control of evil fanatics in black
robes…Is this “Iran” any more real than the “Persia” in which I tried to
travel and even to lose my self?—the Persia of roses and nightingales
that impinges so sensibly on my memory? Or, are both equally real and
unreal? The truth must certainly be more complex even than such paradox
could suggest. But since “Iran” is now being pumped up in the media as
the next spoke of the Axis of Evil, I doubt that “Persia” will get as
much airplay over the next few years. Hence this essay. “Persia” has
become a part of The World We Lost—its perfume lingers even as it
recedes into a past that’s half imaginal. It leaves behind it only
something that might be called difference. How else to define that which
we feel is leaving us?