In Islam- and thus for Sufism- Paradise is a reality in the realm of the unseen regarding which Scripture affords us irrefragable information. This is 'haqiqi'- literal, unsublatable truth- not 'majazi', symbolic or metaphorical intimation. Of everything which can be seen or smelled the doubt remains that our knowledge is imperfect, our information defective. But of what is unseen, Scripture gives us a knowledge independent of epistemology, a truth that is its own ontology. But this means everywhere is already Paradise to those seized of that truth. Nirvana is Samsara. Aham Brahmasmi. Anal Haq etc, etc.
Jeddu Krishnamurthy spoke of this Truth as a 'pathless land'. This was by no means a novel insight. Socrates compares categorical thinking to having to row the boat because wind has failed the sails. There is a different type of knowledge- 'synoida'- which is not categorical and which coincides with itself. However, in First Corinthians, St. Paul says 'synoida' is not enough. God judges innocence. This represents a scandal for Monism but a marvelous opportunity for Theists to stumble, topple over, and glory in one's utter and abject reliance on a Savior to raise one from one's fallen state. This is the scandal of Love.
Annie Beasant had wanted Jeddu to study at Eton and Oxford before taking his place as the Saoshyans, or Universal Messiah, of the Age. Pico Iyer, son of the Theosophist Raghavan Iyer, passed up the opportunity to study in California to attend Eton back when the place smelled bad and the food was inedible and you weren't even allowed to have a quiet wank in your study.
Sadly, Pico- like Raghavan- has dedicated his life to writing vacuous shite. The following is an excerpt from 'the Half Known Life- in search of Paradise' whose sequel 'The Half Known After-Life- how to get the fuck out of Paradise' I eagerly await.
The Walled Garden
The word Paradise is derived from the walled park of the Persian Universal Messiah or God King. That's why Pico will now mention Iran which, however, is Islamic and uses the Arabic version of the Greek word as its own term for Paradise. This is 'Firdous'. Pardes means a garden or cabbage patch or some such thing which might not have any wall or fence around it.
Four hours in Iran, and already I was having to rethink almost everything.
Having a British passport in Iran should get your thoughts racing. But the year was 2013. Obama appeared to be making peace with the Ayatollahs. It was a good time to visit Iran- the exchange rate was low but petrol prices were at an all time high.
The local guide who'd greeted me as I stumbled out of Customs at three in the morning, elegant in black slacks and jacket,
the guide was in black slacks. Not Pico. Iyers tend to be dark skinned. I gave up wearing black slacks because peeps thought I might be naked from the waist down.
had begun to speak about his days at a boarding school near London in the 1970s.
Fortunately, it wasn't Eton otherwise the two would have started bumming each other. What? Just because I went to an Approved, not a Public, School doesn't mean I don't know what them toffs get up to.
We'd pulled up at a luxury hotel, and I'd heard the strains of "Yesterday" being plaintively piped through the lobby. In one corner of the palatial space, a small sign in English pointed to a tiny room: "Mosque." Very close to it, a Swarovski shop was dripping in crystals and an Yves Rocher boutique promised this season's offerings from Paris.
Nowadays, you don't have to be gay to know the difference between a Swarovki and a Yves Rocher though, no doubt, both end up up your bum-hole- if, that is, you are searching for Paradise.
Now, as I strolled back from an early morning walk in the late summer sunlight,
So, the time was Seven AM.
past a series of blue-glass towers lining the spotless, near-empty street, I saw Ali, my official Virgil,
coz an unofficial Virgil simply wouldn't do. Pico is a stickler for such things coz, like, he is actually the reincarnation of Dante- right?
striding towards me with a smile. The lobby behind him was full, when we re-entered, of women tapping away on smartphones with rose-colored fingernails, strands of silky hair slipping out from under many a hijab.
At Seven A.M? Surely that's a bit early to be Instagramming?
"Shall we make our first stop this morning" - Ali's English would not have sounded out of place in Windsor Castle - "Tus?"
So, the city was Mashhad a city which experienced 50 percent mortality during the 1870 famine- as British travelers were fond of pointing out. India too had famines but those of Iran were much much worse purely because the administration was 'native' and the clergy were corrupt.
"Actually, I was hoping we could go to the Imam Reza Shrine."
I suppose the thing was problematic because of the antics of an extremely anti-Sunni but quite prominent clerical family- one member has written a book describing Hazrat Ayesha as a prostitute!- whose adherents attacked the Iranian embassy in London some years ago.
The fear was that some crazy sub-continental might be masquerading as a journalist to stage some sort of protest at the holy site.
Over eighteen months of correspondence with the Foreign Ministry in Tehran, I'd taken pains to ensure my trip would begin in the holy city.
Which is what made it suspicious.
I was less interested in a shadowy government that seemed to shift policies with every passing season
Iran has been reliably anti-British- with very good reason.
than in a culture that had dazzled me from afar since boyhood with its jeweled verses and the flat visions of paradise magicked into being on its carpets.
but only Americanized and made affordable by Zeigler
The central mosque in Mashhad, with its fourteen minarets, four seminaries, seven interlocking marble courtyards and cemetery, was said to be the largest such compound on the planet.
Mecca, Medina- but also Karachi- have bigger mosque complexes. Still Mashhad is undoubtedly a great pilgrimage center.
"There are," said Ali, with what sounded like sculpted vagueness, "a few complications today. Perhaps we should drive out into the country?"
Those 'complications' sound interesting. Sadly, Pico isn't interested in anything interesting.
Captive for now, I followed my companion out to a car, where a burly older man, sporting a baseball cap - "Australia" - above his white shirt and chinos, was waiting to guide us through wide, tree-lined streets under large freeway signs in English.
Was the burly guy a driver or a guide? If the latter, how fucking useless was Ali as a guide?
We passed a commanding statue, and Ali reminded me that Omar Khayyam, cradling an astronomical instrument above the modern boulevard, had invented a calendar more accurate than the Gregorian.
Nonsense! The Jalali calendar was important because it was solar. The Gregorian was an improvement on the Julian.
Khayyam might be famous in England for his romantic quatrains - "Take care to create your own paradise, here and now on earth" -
Fuck that! What he is famous for is stuff about wine and a hot chick.
but in Iran he was best known for his transformative calculations.
Not really. Khayyam's rubais are well known.
We continued along quiet country roads that my guide could have likened to Oxfordshire, though these ones were lined with orchards of peaches and cherries.
as opposed to incestuous yokels off their heads on zider- right?
Ali spun beautifully brocaded sentences about double meanings and starlit nights,
we get it. The guy was homo. So what?
about how the same Farsi word was used for both "garden" and "paradise." All Iran was a garden
as opposed to a bath-house
in the poetry of its local hero Ferdowsi, he explained; the same man had laid down both the outlines of a legal system and a code of courtly love.
Which involved Mahmud bumming Ayaz- right? Is this the sub-text to Pico's search for Paradise?
No, of course, our hotel wasn't quite the London Hilton on Park Lane - he stayed there often while taking Iranians on tours of Britain - but he hoped it might prove comfortable enough.
for bumming- right?
We were traveling out to the small town of Tus, Ali went on, because it was there that Ferdowsi was buried.
Pico is British, not Indian. An Indian would suspect that Ali had some business of his own in Tus which is why he pretended there was some problem with sticking to the original itinerary. But then Indians don't search for Paradise in Mashhad. They may go to worship there but Paradise is Manhattan.
Jalaludin Rumi might be famous across the West; his verses about giving himself up to the "Beloved" and flinging away holy books lent themselves perfectly to secular distortion.
Rumi had a Platonic love for Shams-e-Tabrizi which deepened his spirituality.
But it was Ferdowsi who had, in the eleventh century, given the entire culture an identity and a voice.
Rudaqi is considered the first modern Persian poet.
His sixty-thousand-couplet epic, the Shahnameh, which those in the West called The Book of Kings, had hymned a new Farsi into being, over the thirty years it took to complete, much as Shakespeare had sent more than fifteen hundred words and phrases into modern English.
Firdowsi was an inheritor of aristocratic Sassanian literary culture. But Iran embraced Islam with great thoroughness and humility.
We drew up at last at a marble edifice, at the far end of a quiet, formal garden in which couples dressed as for a restaurant in Paris were strolling around and posing for photos. We stepped into the chamber where the poet was buried, and Ali pointed out scenes from the epic poem rendered along the walls in friezes, while two romancing lovers pored over verses that warned of the capricious ways of Fate.
Then our driver slipped into the space behind us. He walked up to the sepulcher in which Ferdowsi's body was said to rest, and placed his hand on the cold stone. He took off his baseball cap and set it against his heart. Without preamble, in a rich and sonorous baritone, he proceeded to deliver a long sequence of verses from the poem that turns history into myth and vice versa.
Everything stopped. For what seemed like minutes we stood rapt.
I have made the world through a paradise of words.
No one has done that but me.
Huge palaces and monuments will fall into disrepair,
But I have made a palace out of words that shall never fade.
Through this I have immortalized Iran.
As Ali concluded his translation, the driver put on his cap once more and offered me a reassuring smile. "I didn't know if I could sing again," he explained, in perfect English. "Seven months ago I was diagnosed with cancer of the throat. My doctor advised me not to sing. But when I come here, I have to try. For Ferdowsi. For Iran."
So, this was the bit of business Ali had been intent on. The guy wasn't gay or up to no good. He wanted to help a dude with throat cancer. The visiting dignitary- and Pico is certainly dignified- added luster to the occasion.
Paradise, on earth, is nothing but this sort of mutual help and emotional engagement and support. We don't know if the singer's throat cancer was cured. What is certain is that his voice, even when he most despaired of it, triumphed over death. For Ferdowsi. For Iran. Hubb al watan min al Imam!
It is a tribute to Pico's essential Britishness that he doesn't make a meal of the thing in the way that I have done. There's something to be said for breeding and Classical paideia and the Public School stiff upper lip. What that is, in my case, tends to be 'fuck the fuck off you fuckin' pooftahs!'
A paradise of words:
For Christians, Second Corinthians comes to mind. Paul speaks of one 'caught up into paradise' who 'heard unspeakable words, which it is not lawful for a man to utter.' But, it is better to have a 'thorn in the flesh' than to gain reputation by babbling of such revelation.
Ferdowsi means 'of paradise' and thus the words of his poem would indeed have that predicate. But this is the thorn in the flesh of duality which Monism can't efface precisely because its own words are unspeakable.
the driver’s incantation might have been expressing the single most urgent impulse that had drawn me here. After years of travel, I’d begun to wonder what kind of paradise can ever be found in a world of unceasing conflict -
yet, Pico, like his parents before him, comes from places with little or no conflict. He has to get on an airplane and then hire guides and drivers to get to scenes of conflict which, sadly for journalists, aren't unceasing at all.
and whether the very search for it might not simply aggravate our differences.
Why? Fuck off to Shangri La and don't come back. No differences will be aggravated.
And the natural place to embark upon such an inquiry - should we discard the notion of heaven entirely?
plenty of people have done so- for themselves. Still, they do want Mummy and Daddy and Rover the woofy dog and all the good and decent peeps to get to Paradise or- at the very least- not get stuck on the M40 motorway.
- seemed to be the culture that had given us both our word for paradise and some of our most soulful images of it.
This simply isn't true. The Garden of Eden- that's Paradise. Some Iranian Kings royal park- not so much.
The old Iranian term “Paradaijah” had been brought into Greek by Xenophon, when he’d served as a mercenary in Persia; and for centuries Persians, as most residents of Iran were then known, had cultivated detailed and ravishing visions of paradise in their walled gardens, as emblems of - enticements towards - the higher garden that awaits the fortunate.
The Zoroastrian Heaven is 'the House of Songs' which is also the Gathas. This is a spiritualized, not a material, conception of the afterlife. On the other hand, it is certainly true that the Zoroastrians considered the building and maintenance of well fenced orchards and gardens to be a meritorious act.
The Magi who had traveled to Bethlehem to pay their respects to the infant Jesus were often said to have come from Iran. So, too, the very word "magic" and the notion of a star shining above an auspicious birth.
All Hindus, including Pico, have a 'star birthday'. I lost interest in mine when I didn't get no presents from leading film stars on it. Also I turned against sex when I discovered my parents' sexual relations weren't sending me Diwali pressies.
The water-softened courtyards that had bewitched me one candlelit evening in the Alhambra,
which was a ruin occupied by squatters till Anglo Saxon visitors made a fuss about it
the landscaped gardens depicting paradise around a marble tomb that had transfixed Hiroko and me on our honeymoon, at the Taj Mahal:
also curated by Brits.
all, I'd read, had been inspired by Persia.
which had embraced Islam and had consigned its indigenous Zoroastrians to second class 'najis', ritually unclean, status.
But what gave particular power to the world's largest theocracy
there is only one theocracy in the world today- viz. the Vatican. Iran is an Islamic Republic like Pakistan which is much more populous.
right now was
America's foolish war on Terror which ended up making a present of Iraq and parts of Syria to Iran.
that so many competing visions of paradise seemed to be crisscrossing every hour here, with furious intensity.
Nonsense! Islam has a single vision of paradise. Some Crusaders turned up but were sure to be chased away sooner or later.
After overthrowing the Shah and his Westward-facing regime in 1979, the ayatollahs who took over maintained that paradise awaits only those who give themselves to sacrifice and self-denial.
Previously, Paradise awaited those who masturbated in public- right?
The vast space in southern Tehran known as "Zahra's Paradise" was one of the largest cemeteries on earth-home to one and a half million dead bodies-and fast-track entry to heaven was said to be the privilege of martyrs.
There would be little point in being a martyr- literally a 'witness'- to the truth that there is no after-life save for those who masturbate incessantly in public.
Yet many of Iran's citizens were still known for the remarkably refined and sensuous versions of an earthly paradise they fashioned behind closed doors.
Does this guy mean poor people weaving carpets so as to be able to put food on the table?
The turbaned clerics, as they saw it, were ruthless politicians pursuing worldly ends under the guise of religion; the only pleasures that could be enjoyed in such a system lay in romance and intoxicants, the latest luxuries from abroad.
Turbaned clerics could have presided over rising material standards of living if America hadn't decided to invade Iraq. Intoxicants, however, are bad. A refined and sensuous vision of paradise turns to shit if you get drunk and start vomiting all over the place.
And both secular and religious souls, confoundingly, continued to turn for support to the Sufi poems that Iranian schoolchildren, to this day, learn by heart.
Even more confoundingly, they give kisses to Mummy and hugs to Daddy and petting to the puppy dog. Paradise, the Prophet tell us, is under the feet of Mums. Hugging Daddy and petting puppy dog can come pretty close if Mum is too busy cooking dinner.
Those mystical verses traffic in the language of the everyday - roses and nightingales and wine
that's not my everyday. Pico is luckier. Wifey is giving him roses while nightingales warble amorously and the sommelier uncorks a choice vintage. I'm lucky if I the g.f lets me finish her portion of chips.
- if only to evoke a far deeper romance with the divine.
Divine got to third base with me last night. Now if only God would throw in a box of choccies and replace the nightingales with fried chicken, maybe I let him go all the way.
Turning wordlessly in circles, Islamic dervishes incarnate a truth beyond doctrine and analysis.
In the silence of the nightingale the rose shreds its skirt.
Find a heaven within, Rumi had written
instead of seeking it up my backside
- it came back to me now as Ali, the driver and I sat on a platform in the sun, munching on chicken with barberries - and you enter a garden in which "one leaf is worth more than all of Paradise."
but only if you are into gardens and don't have a pollen allergy. My heaven within is a tavern in which 'one fat chick with low self-esteem' is worth more than the whole Playboy mansion. I'm lying. My heaven is kissing Mummy and hugging Daddy. Sad.
Soon after we arrived back at our hotel, I fell into a deep sleep.
Which is what happens when a writer re-reads his tosh
By the time I awoke, darkness had fallen over Mashhad and I was hungry to experience the sacred city without my official guides.
I called Ali in his room and extended an invitation I knew he couldn't refuse. "Why don't you and the driver go to dinner alone? It looks really good."
What looked good? Dinner?
"Are you sure?"
"I'm sure. I need to rest."
Then, true to the spirit of the culture all around me,
Pico is saying Iranians are a bunch of liars. They can't help it. It's their culture.
I slipped down to the lobby and asked at the taxi desk if there was a car that could take me into the heart of town. Before long, a lean character of around thirty, with a boyish smile and unexpectedly good English, was leading me out to his battered compact.
"You have no friend?" he asked.
"I'm here in a group of one."
Holders of American passports were required to come in guided groups, but Iran was flexible about how this, like every term, might be interpreted.
"You come for the festival?"
"Festival?"
"This week," the driver explained. "The anniversary of Imam Reza." Five million people had gathered from every corner of the Shia world, he said - from Yemen and Pakistan and Beirut and Iraq, from all the provinces of Iran - to mark the auspicious occasion. Hence the archways of office buildings flooded in blue, the green lights under the trees that lined the sidewalks. Hence, too, perhaps, Ali's reluctance to allow me into the midst of passionate crowds.
These guys thought Pico was some sort of 'ghullat' Shia who would start screaming abuse at Hazrat Ayesha and the first three Caliphs.
The shrine of the imam, commemorating a holy man
This would be the Imam of his age according to Shia reckoning
said to have been poisoned by an Iraqi rival almost twelve hundred years before, is believed to cure sickness and sorrow in every pilgrim who visits; an Iranian in California would later tell me that it was also now part of a massive cartel, a multinational corporation with land assets alone valued at twenty billion dollars. It ran fifty-six companies, including the only Coca-Cola plant in Iran.This is the Astan Quds Razavi foundation. Twenty billion is a reasonable estimate. As Iran recovers economically, the figure will increase.
As we pushed through a tiny entrance, behind a wall of bodies, all we could make out was celebration. On every side, people were seated on carpets under a huge moon. They were eating or chatting or, in some cases, stretched out asleep; many were spending seven days and seven nights in the mosque. There was a low roar of devotion,
presumably because some were saying their prayers
as of traffic on a busy street, and soon we were inside the roar ourselves.
Pilgrims were releasing white doves into the blue-black sky. Black-turbaned ayatollahs - direct descendants of the Prophet - were delivering sermons on huge video screens, under the pulsing moon. We picked our way between the illuminated blue-tiled buildings, and our feet could barely find space to touch the ground.
At last we came to the entrance to the holiest space of all, the innermost sanctum where the imam was buried, and my new friend looked over at me, assessingly. Nonbelievers are traditionally excluded from the entire complex, on pain of death;
at one time the 'najis' unclean, kaffir, was indeed excluded.
when the English traveler Robert Byron came to Mashhad in 1934, he blackened his face with burnt cork just to enter the outer courtyards of the shrine, then risked execution again by stealing in a second time.
Byron explains that though the Shah had thrown open mosques to Kaffirs, there was a fear that pilgrims from Afghanistan and other less 'Westernized' places might run riot if British Sahibs turned up smoking pipes alongside their Memsahibs whose eyes they had negligently failed to blacken. Byron and his companion merely had to wear hats to pass muster as 'enlightened' Persians. They pretended to themselves that their hair and eye color was too Nordic for them to pass as Aryans. The burnt cork was an excellent wheeze but it was pure theater of a high camp variety. There was no risk of execution. It was the Shah who would be deposed if the British oil company took against him.
Yet I'd come all this way to see the complex, the driver clearly remembered, and my intentions appeared to be sincere; he gestured for me to accompany him inside.
Pico should have applied burnt cork to his burnished skin. It is what the spirit of Byron demanded. After that, like Captain Burton, Pico should have investigated a homosexual brothel.
Thrusting our way into a scrum of bodies again, we emerged within a very small room, thick with the smell of unwashed socks. The crowds here were so intense that little boys were being passed from shoulder to shoulder so they could arrive at the front and kiss the golden grille behind which lay the saint. A man wailed, and a great sound rose up around us. More than thirty million pieces of silver on the walls and chandeliers turned us all into a shiver of reflections.
Eyes blinded with tears receive just such a theophany. Of Paradise, who has not seen this much?
I was humbled as I moved among the sobbing bodies.
Good for you.
Men were running their hands down their faces and weeping as at their mother's funeral.
Mums die. Under their feet was Paradise who now are underground. The resurrection of the body- it may be- arises from the Earth's duty to render back that which has been entrusted to it. Yet the Zoroastrians preferred to expose their dead out of a more tender concern for those who ever trod lightly on earth.
More people pressed in, and the whole crowd seemed to sway and tremble, as if we were truly part of a single massed body. I'd lost contact by now with my driver, but then I caught sight of him across the room. His hand was on his heart, and he was stepping backwards, so as never to present his back to the long-dead holy man. His eyes were welling with tears.
This is worth commemorating. Pico's search had ended. A paradise of words is but a gaudy thing as is aught at whose heart not tears are.
We walked around the sacred space for a long, long time: rare privilege, perhaps, for both of us.
The companionability of that circumambulation was what had drawn Pico to the shrine. If Ali, the posh boarding school brat could not supply it, serendipity would supply the deficiency. Pico, it seems, is a fortunate man.
As we passed back out into the courtyard, officials were circling around, waving blue and yellow and rainbow-colored feather dusters to prevent the press from turning into a mob. The great domes of the mosque shone against the full moon. We stepped in silence around pilgrims in the direction of the entrance and started making our slow way back to the parked car.The driver turns out to be a refugee from Iran granted asylum in Britain. But he returns home every year to visit Mummy and this Mosque. In Farsi, 'marjah' means 'refuge. Senior Ayatollahs may be given the title 'marjah'. The driver fled Islamic marjahs to get marjah from Pico's Britain. But he travelled from one Paradise to the truer Paradise of Mummy and Mosque visiting every year. Did God grant him a cute baby daughter with blonde hair? I hope so.
"I want a daughter!" the young driver suddenly exclaimed, opened up, perhaps, by the experience of visiting the saint. "So cute, with blond hair. I want a daughter just like my wife!"
"You'll be bringing your first child to the mosque?"
"My wife is in Yorkshire," he said, as if to remind a friend who knew this already. "She is in England, with her mother."
This leaves us with Pico who regularly visited his Mummy till she passed away recently. He had known, or half known, Life or the After Life or some other such delusive duality. Whatever it was, it was scarce worth writing home about save to tell us of.... what? A refugee's prayer for an England born daughter? But Pico might himself had been just that for his parents who postponed consummation of their marriage till back in dear old Blighty. This is the other half of each of our lives which we we would pay good money to not know. Sadly, bad money is all the Paradise we can purchase. For Islam, Adam & Eve, expelled from Eden, are rediscovered to each other by a lightning flash upon Mt. Arafat. Love, it seems, is a consolation prize. For Ibn Arabi and Dante, Love might lead to the beatific vision. By the time of Milton's Paradise Lost, Worlds were already well lost for Woman's Love- the Occident had come closer to the much older Indian notion that the Viyogini- the wife suffering the pangs of separation- has attained a higher state than the Yogi. Love is the Second Creation, its God, Grief.
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