By Cyrus Massoudi
For Cyrus Massoudi, a tender Britishborn Iranian, the rustic his mom and dad have been compelled to escape thirty years in the past used to be a spot entirely unknown to him. eager to make experience of his roots and piece jointly the divided, divisive and deeply contradictory puzzle that's modern Iran, he launched into a sequence of trips that spanned 1000s of miles and hundreds of thousands of years during the many ebbs and flows of Iranian heritage. From the border with Turkey to that of Turkmenistan, from the Caspian basin right down to the Persian Gulf, his trips took him from the mythological first kings of Iran, to the Elamite country, the eras of Cyrus and Darius, the distinction of the Sasanians, the surprise of the Islamic Arab conquests and the later Mongols, Safavids and directly to Khomeini, Ahmadinejad and past. wealthy portrayals of Sufis and growing old aristocrats, smugglers and underground rock bands are all woven including historical past, faith and mythology to shape a distinct portrait of latest Iranian society....
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Extra info for Land of the Turquoise Mountains. Journeys Across Iran
Example text
By July 1988, when no victory seemed in prospect for either side, Iran took the initiative to accept peace when Ayatollah Khomeini famously reversed all his previous rhetoric and declared he was prepared to drink from the ‘poisoned chalice’ of peace. 5 million. It is now more or less universally accepted that the whole exercise was a grotesque and unnecessary folly in which two contradictory regimes slugged each other senseless until both collapsed exhausted. * * * Amidst all the slaughter, Rahimi was one of the lucky ones.
On this stage the biggest tragedy in the Shi‘i narrative was being acted out in front of an audience teeming with emotion. The taziye, or passion plays, are a long-standing part of the Ashura festival. In them the martyrdom of Imam Hossein is recreated in dramatic form. The taziye depicts how, for ten days, the Imam’s camp suffered without food and water in the searing desert heat. The children suffered the most, their frail bodies ravaged by the effects of dehydration. As Hossein’s camp grew weaker by the day, Shemr’s army was strengthened by the arrival of reinforcements sent by Yazid, swelling their ranks by thousands.
The elderly man was then joined by another to help administer the devotional blows. The white-clad crowd jostled as they each pushed and shoved to have their scalps slit by the ever-active dagger. Some were so keen to commemorate Hossein’s suffering and to show their piety that they demanded more: more blows, more blood, more feverish devotion. The elderly man raised the dagger in the air for another blow onto an already bloodied head, a glazed look in his eye, but just as he went to bring down the blade he was stopped by an outstretched hand.