THE PATTERN OF THE WORLD

2 1 R T H E P A T T E R N O F T H E W O R L D R U S S E L L F R A S E R I sing Iran, known to older generations as Persia. Most in America, if they think of it at all, turn thumbs down. There are reasons for doing that, and my music has its dissonant side. But the country’s positives far outweigh its negatives, and if it isn’t the jewel in the crown of my travels, it comes close. One of its illustrious men, Shah Abbas, known as the Great (1587–1629), called his capital city, Esfahan, the Pattern of the World. I hope to make you see why. Assigning rank is mostly a bad idea, though I’m often guilty of it. Such as, Who was the best center fielder in New York in my time, Mantle, Mays, or Snider? But ranking cultures is certainly a mistake, not sometimes, always, and you won’t find me assigning a number to Iran, above or below France or Italy. Enough to say that it’s outsize, dwarfing everything around it. Modern Iran is huge, bigger than France and Italy, seven times larger than the United Kingdom. But greater Iran, an intermediate area between the limits it reached in history and the present-day state, its territory fixed in 1907, is much larger. All of what is now Iraq used to be part of it. Casting avaricious eyes on its neighbors from its earliest beginnings under the Achaemenid kings, it wanted to replace 2 2 F R A S E R Y their psyche or soul with its own. That accounts for the ubiquity of what is called the Persian style. Spreading through the Timurid Empire to Bukhara and Shakrisabz , the former among the storied cities of antiquity, it included in its sphere of influence what was once known as Khorezm, now Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. Before it was done expanding, Iran boxed the compass. It absorbed Egypt to the southwest, north of it Arabia, on the east Transoxiana (‘‘the other side of the Oxus’’), even Afghanistan. Ferghana, high in the northern Pamirs and home to the Heavenly Horses, coveted by the emperor of China, was Persian. So was northern India before the coming of the Mughals. The heralds of its empire were the architects and master builders who created Samarqand, most of them Persian and more than one hundred surviving by name. Among these heroes of art was Oavam ad-Din bin Zaynad-Din Shirazi, whose name says he came from Shiraz in Iran. In the first half of the fifteenth century, he played the di√erent roles of designer, decorator, astronomer, and master mathematician, helping di√use the Persian style far beyond his country’s borders. Between the years 1300 and 1500, this polymath and others like him labored in the service of beauty and truth. It doesn’t seem to me extravagant to liken their achievement to that of the Renaissance in Florence. Six hundred years later, Shiraz still lifts the heart. City of Love, men call it, of Gardens, especially of Roses. Poets like Hafez sang the praises of the Shiraz grape. Unhappily, it no longer produces the wine that bears its name. The mullahs have seen to that. My first night out in town, I dine on traditional Shirazi food: rice and tomatoes followed by stewed eggplant. It tastes much better than it sounds. In lieu of wine, however, I am o√ered Coca-Cola. This gratifies the mullahs, who get their jollies from denying the rest of us the pleasure of an innocent glass. But of the celebrated trio of wine, women, and song, two are holding their own, the women nice to be with, and song, expressed as poetry, diverting both the senses and soul. People in Shiraz carry on a love a√air with living. Their calendar , descending from Zoroastrian times, tells you as much. Skipping over the dark days of winter, it begins on the first day of spring. This is when Iranians celebrate their feast of No Ruz, a T H E P...