Chapter 1
A Life on the Margins
A foreign traveler to Iran once retold the story of an encounter somewhere in the borderlands of the country. Meeting a local villager, he spoke of his love for Iran, whereupon the startled villager asked: âWhere is Iran? I know all the villages in this area and we donât have any with such a name.â We donât know how much truth there is to this apocryphal tale but it illustrates a point about life on the margins of the Iranian plateau.1 The great urban jewels of Iran have long seduced many a visitor but the people of its pastoral and rural borderlands have been something of a silent majority, a mystery or a danger: now castigated as disloyal subjects who donât belong, then lauded as heroic keepers of the marshlands and guardians of the nation. This is tribal Iran.
The tribes of Iran are diverse and changing in their ethnicity, language, religion, and mode of life. Their fortunes rise and fall with the tides of history and events near and far. One event that affected them all was the rise to power, in the 1920s, of an ambitious young monarch named Reza Pahlavi. Backed by many of the countryâs modernizing intellectuals who were disillusioned with the chaos that had followed the ups and downs of the Constitutional Revolution of 1905â6, Reza wanted a centralized and effective state and had to wage war against anything that stood in his way. The nomadic tribes definitely made the list and many of the nationalist intellectuals, opposing what they perceived as tribal backwardness, were enthusiastic about taking them on. Lacking permanent settlements, the tribes often migrated seasonally, taking their massive tents with them. They were equipped with their own arms, and consequently the state apparatus had limited penetration into the lives of tribal peoples. They spoke a variety of languages: some Persian or a close sibling, Lori, but many Turkic Azeri, Kurdish, Arabic, or Balochi. If Reza Shah wanted to build his centralized state, he had to suppress the tribes. And so he did. Traditional clothes and the black tents were banned, tribal confederations were broken and many tribes were forcibly settled. The process of forced settlement came to be known by a Turkic term, âtakhte qapu,â which simply means âbuilding a wooden gate,â seen as the most conspicuous sign of a resettled tribe. The term still disturbs many and tribal histories still speak with fear and trembling of the young monarchâs campaign of terror against them.
Reza had gone on the record describing the tribal peoples as âilliterate, unproductive, abnormal tent-dwelling savages, left in their primitive state for too long.â2 The young monarch wasnât alone. Ignorant of the cosmopolitan histories of these tribes, the countryâs literati held similar conceptions. In the southern province of Kerman, not far from the waters of the Persian Gulf, the tribes hadnât played the pivotal role that their counterparts had elsewhere in Iran. They werenât kingmakers, allies of revolutionaries, or armed accomplices to foreign governments, but they had the most colorful mercantile history. The provincial urban center of Kerman sat not far from Bandar Abbas, the old port on the Persian Gulf which got its current name when the forces of Shah Abbas defeated the Portuguese in 1622, reconquering it after a century of European domination. Kicking out the Portuguese didnât lead to autarky: English, Dutch, and Portuguese merchants continued to pass through southern Iran and each tribe in Kerman boasts its own stories of interactions with the European merchants and empires.
By 1956, when our story begins, years of central state oppression had taken their toll. The tribes of Kerman province were no longer the international mercantile interlocutors of the past and now languished on the margins of power and wealth in modern Iran. The forced settlement program was to intensify around this time. The provinceâs most valued commodity, wool, particularly from the soft and fluffy hairs closest to a mammalâs skin (known as down hair, ground hair or undercoat), had seen a drop in price.3 Successive years of bad droughts had led to animal deaths. The tribes were devastated and struggled to find new avenues for livelihood: Girls would be raised to take part in the intensive and artful labor of producing the famed Kermani carpets for the markets, while young men would learn to drive, to become truckers perhaps, connecting central and southern Iran to the ports on the Persian Gulf via the roads that the new shah of Iran, Rezaâs son, Mohammad Reza, was busy building. Not everybody chose such noble callings. Some held on to their rifles, hiding them from the central government, practicing road robbery or engaging in petty crime.
In the county of Rabor, a few hoursâ drive away from the city of Kerman, lies the small village of Qanat Molk with a population of a few dozen families. Rabor has something in common with many locales around the world: villages in Jordan hosting forcibly settled Bedouin, hill towns in Southeast Asia home to sedentarized populations whose nomadic lives cannot be tolerated by modern states. The people of Qanat Molk claimed common descent from a particular sub-tribe. They almost all shared the same last name: Soleimani, that is, people of Soleiman (the biblical Solomon), the mythical king of the Jews in whose magical qualities Muslims believed as fervently as their Abrahamic predecessors.
The Soleimanisâ presence in Kerman dated back to the eighteenth century when they had chosen to settle there on their way back from the Indian subcontinent where they had fought under the command of the legendary Persian king Nadir Shah. Or so they claimed. This gave them seniority over the many tribes that had been displaced in the previous few decades or during the tumult of the nineteenth century.
The village boasted beautiful walnut trees which the local lore claimed as the oldest in the world. But there was little to mark it beyond the local level. In 1956, even the county seat of Rabor, less than ten kilometers away from Qanat Molk, was yet to be founded. That would happen only in 1962 by bringing together five smaller locales. There was no industry or factoriesânor is there today. No significant site of the kind that brought tourists in droves to the neighboring Fars province, to see beauties such as Persepolis or other ruins of the ancient Persian empires. No grand historical character, no famed Persian poet, no notable scientist of the golden age of Islam had ever emerged from this marginal part of Kerman.
But that mattered little to the many who loved their part of the world. Qolam Ali, who grew up in the 1960s in the nearby village of Nosratabad, just a stoneâs throw from Qanat Molk, is full of fond memories. âThe harsh winters bothered us but the temperate spring and summer were so heavenly,â he says. âThe walnuts were famous but we had so much more. Apples, pears, and even some exotic fruits, believe it or not. We even had our own olives, rumored to have come from Lebanon.â4
Qolam well remembers Nosratabadâs village head, Khosrow, or kadkhoda Khosrow, to use the Persian prefix. The retired Khosrow still summers in Nosratabad while living in the nearby town of Jiroft. In the late 1950s, he had a close friend in Qanat Molk, Hassan Soleimani.
Born in 1922 into a small landowning family of peasants, Hassan had worked on his familyâs fruit gardens all his life. Kadkhoda Khosrow remembers him as a hardworking and humorous man, just as he appears in a video interview from decades later.5 He had his first child at a relatively late age, being thirty-three when, in 1955, he and his wife, Fatima, had a daughter. Their first son arrived the following year. Like many Persian Muslims, they picked an Arabic name for him. The boy was to be called Qassem, Arabic for âdividerâ and the name of a rare son of the Prophet Mohammad (who had many daughters but no son who survived to adulthood). More to the point, Qassem was the name of a great-grandson of the Prophet, born to Imam Hassan, the Second Shia Imam. Hassan of Qanat Molk now had his own Qassem, just like Imam Hassan of 1,400 years before.
It was this son, Qassem, who would change the fate of this little village and much beyond. He would give this part of Kerman its first real celebrity, the first local boy who would make it. Heâd be feted and known not only in the provincial center, Kerman, but in Tehran and the ancient Arab capitals that Qanat Molkis had only heard about in stories: Damascus, Beirut, Baghdad. Heâd even be welcomed and honored in Moscow, then one of the two superpower capitals of the world, and his image would appear on countless magazine covers the world over, causing fear and loathing in lands far from the pleasant walnut trees of central Kerman.
The village saw dividends from this rise to power of the little boy who became Major General Qassem Soleimani. Helped by the general, Qanat Molk would get amenities sooner than other villages. It would boast a workshop to produce herbal medicine6 and a massive mosque, partially built by the proud father himself. Until his death in 2016 at the age of ninety-five, Hajj Hassan Soleimani was to never leave his small village of 300 families or so. âOne feels better in oneâs homeland,â he said in a video interview with a Kermani outlet a few years before this death. Qanat Molk, with its pleasant cool breezes and sturdy walnut trees, was as good as one could wish for in a âhomeland.â Today he is buried there, next to his wife, who predeceased him by a few years. But the small village has entered the annals of history, due to the deeds of their first son.
The general never lost touch with this corner of the world. Heâd visit as often as he could. His career would have been nothing without the sons of the area that flocked to join the military force he built in the 1980s to fight against the Iraqi invasion. One wonders how the family of Ebrahim Araste, for example, thinks of General Soleimani. Born in 1971 in the village of Mohammadabad, Ebrahim went to Qanat Molk, three kilometers away, for part of his schooling. Like many local boys, he worked hard to help his family from an early age. Life in Mohammad Abad was even harder than in the relatively rich Qanat Molk. The Shahâs grandiose development projects were yet to bring running water to the village and Halime, Mohammadâs mother, sometimes accompanied by her daughters, had to walk to a stream nearby, even in the dead of winter, to wash clothes and dishes and bring water back, just like Victor Hugoâs fictional Cosette a century and a half before her. In his early teens Mohammad, who couldnât bear to see his mother go through this, took action. He managed to find a water pump in Qanat Molk and, not having the means to hire a car or get help, brought back the heavy piece all by himself, walking the three kilometers to Mohammad Abad. Like any good family of farmers, the parents hoped to rely on such a hardworking son for years. But this wasnât to pass. In 1987, in the fields of Shalamcha, on the Iranian-Iraqi border and not far from the port city of Basra, Ebrahim was killed by an Iraqi bullet, one of the up to 65,000 Iranians who died in the disastrous Iranian siege of Basra. His grave is there in Mohammad Abad today but it is empty as his body has never been found. He was all of fifteen years old.7
Mohammad was one of the many Kermanis mobilized by General Soleimani to fill the ranks of the Islamic Republic, a regime built in the name of the people of the margins. Before giving these people anything, the republic needed them to perform that age-old duty: dying for the nation. This is one thing Qassem would turn out to be very good at: mobilizing people to fight and die. What he started with the tribal Kermanis, heâd repeat with astonishing success in lands far from his marginal home village. But before he could get there, he had to get out of Qanat Molk.
* * *
Qassem was born into an Iran run by a man around the age of his father. Born in 1919, Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi was the first son of Reza, that very ambitious monarch who had brutalized the Iranian tribes to build his modernizing state. Rezaâs project and ambitions were typical of the statesmen of the region. He followed the lead of Mustafa Kemal AtatĂźrk of Turkey and Amanallah Khan of Afghanistan, heads of states which, like Iran, had the rare distinction of being non-European realms never to be colonized. Reza particularly cherished the reform model of AtatĂźrk. The two had met in Rezaâs first and only foreign trip during his reign, a state visit in 1934 to Turkey. In time away from interpreters, Reza had tried to converse with AtatĂźrk in what he knew of the Turkic dialects of his native northern Persia but didnât have much success as AtatĂźrkâs Anatolian Turkish, soon to become a standardized language, shorn of its Arabic and Persian loanwords, was quite different. This symbolized the distance between the two men. AtatĂźrk had been a general in the armed forces of a grand empire, the Ottomans; had fought in a world war; had defeated the British and French (under the leadership of the UKâs First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill) on the hills of Gallipoli. He had lived in Bulgaria and had seen something of the world. Reza had had to build his military career during Iranâs worst times of chaos, following the dying days of the Qajar dynasty when the country was falling prey to Russia and Britainâs âGreat Gameâ in the region. The intrigues of London and Moscow called the shots in Iran before Reza rose to power thanks to a UK-backed coup in 1921. The British had liked his military disciplineâthe only field in which he had some talent. Iranâs new strongman flirted with republicanism before helping to replace the Qajars with a new dynasty with himself as the founding king. Taking the ancient Persian name Pahlavi, the uncouth general from a humble background sought entry into the annals of the Iranian dynasties.
AtatĂźrk had inherited something of the impressive Ottoman state and traditions whereas all Reza got was the remnants of the weak Qajar regime. He also had the support of at least some of the intellectual and political elites of the Persian Constitutional Revolution of 1905â6, ranging from liberals to social democrats, but he was quick to suppress them. Like many a military man, Reza soon grew tired of his intellectual supporters. By 1941, when he was overthrown by the Anglo-Soviet invasion of Iran due to Allied worries about the country falling to Hitlerâs Germany, much of what the Iranian historian Touraj Atabaki was to call âauthoritarian modernizationâ had failed to stick.8 Compared to AtatĂźrkâs Turkey, Reza created much more chaos and disharmony with far fewer results to show for it.
In 1941, as he departed Iran for a fatal exile in British-held realms (Mauritius, then South Africa), Reza gave the reins to his Swiss-educated 21-year-old son, Mohammad Reza. The young Shah was initially overshadowed by the countryâs raucous tribes, skilled politicians, and political parties, chiefly the communist Tudeh Party, in the only democratic period in Iranâs history. The democratically elected parliament occasionally returned communist MPs and cabinet ministers. It also became the base of power for Iranâs progressive prime minister, Mohammad Mossadeq. Backed by communists and a mass movement on the streets, Mossadeq took on the most powerful empire of his world, the British, but ended up becoming the first casualty of the worldâs newest imperial power. In 1953, the United States helped the British organize a coup, overthrow Mossadeq, crush the communists and all other political parties, and put an end to Iranâs twelve-year experience of democracy. The young Shah, now thirty-three years of age, had a new lease on life. No longer an overshadowed monarch, he was well on his way to becoming an all-powerful autocrat like his father. In 1958, after a communist-backed revolution overthrew the young monarchy in his neighboring Iraq, the Shahâs fears grew and he cracked down further. The once vibrant parliament became a pliant rubber-stamp assembly, divided into two groups famously known as the âYesâ and âYes, Sirâ parties. The Shah emerged to become a seminal figure in the colorful tapestry of the global Cold War.
Iran had been central to the Cold War since day one. Historian Bruce R. Kuniholm even claimed that the âwarâ had started in the Near East, with the Soviet-US face-off in Iran being a big part of the story.9 Iran was to be a theater of the Cold War throughout its entire duration and though they might not have known it, the lives of the people of Qanat Molk, too, were deeply affected by the ebbs and flows of that global conflict. The Cold War made lives of people around the world interconnected but in deeply unequal waves. The decisions of a relatively few people in the swing states of the United States could change the lives of millions around the world, including the unsuspecting farmers of Qanat Molk. In the 1960 US presidential elections, John F. Kennedy, a young sen...