Speak silence for me

An Atashkaddeh or fire temple in Damghan, a very small town in Eastern Iran,

once called The City of a Hundred Gates

There was a time when the fire that burned in this fire temple, or Atash Kaddeh as the Persians call it, defied the sun. The defiant flames of that fire formed the pillars of power for one the most powerful empires on earth called the Persian Empire.  In those distant days, that fire held people's beliefs and delivered it to the emperors that held major chunks of the then world in their hands, defeated the Roman Empire three times and literally took captive one of Rome's emperors by the name of Valerian making him the only emperor in history who was captured by an enemy.  Today, however, as the sun rises each day, it does not find any signs of its rival here.  This fire temple was turned into a mosque by the conquering Muslims and in recent days was recognized as an ancient, historical site worthy of special protection.  The ancient Zoroastrians did not let the fire die even for a second.  In the above picture, however, it seems that even the sun is not able to shed enough light on it to be seen. 

Some doors are not meant merely to take us inside a place .  Through such doors we can pass through history and go back thousands of years. Let us enter.

The above pillars and arches belong to the Sasanid period -- more than two thousand years ago.  My children are playing hide and seek between them in the following pictures--the way so many kings did throughout history.  Unlike my children, however, nobody is able to find those losers or even a tinge of their glories.

Below is one of the Mihrab's in which the Zoroastrian Moghs or clergymen constantly kept their fire alive.  Today, however, as Henry David Thoreau said only "the sun is his fire."

A closer view above.  The pillars hold the building, but the fire which burned inside the above Mihrab was the true pillar which gave power to the Persian Emperors.

Arches and pillars again. Sometimes I felt I heard the footsteps of so many people throughout history who have walked through these pillars as we are doing.

My companions were in a hurry and we had to leave.  It is hard to stay long at a place where emporers didn't last.  Through the above door we returned to the contemporary life.

A flower just outside the temple.  Life goes on not in huge temples, but in tender flowers like this.  Just think of all those poems which Omar wrote when he witnessed such tiny flowers beside these huge temples!

Bastaam

The following picture shows the old entrance to Bastam's historic complex.

Through the miracle of the virtual world and our own dreams, we can now watch this picture for a moment and then close our eyes and walk through the left passage way in this picture and stand beside one of the greatest mystics in the history of Iran and the world named Bayazid Bastami.

Bastami in Persian means from Bastam. There was a time when Bayazid was beaten and expelled from the town of Bastam for his explicit openness in expressing his mystic / sufi ideas, but today, one thousands years later, it is Bayazid's name that helps the town to survive in the hearts of all the Iranian's and many people in the world.

He is known to be the first to speak openly of the annihilation in God or the Fan Fillah, which means losing one's own identity in God.  He once dropped his head down, looked at himself in a very deep mood, raised his head again and said, "I plunged into my own annihilation and rose in the eternal existance of God."  He has also said, "I came out of Bayazid the way a snake leaves its slough."

Without writing a single line of official poetry, his words are among the most beautiful samples of absolute poetry in Iran. So much so that he has influenced the greatest Persian poets like Saadi and Rumi.  Looking at the picture of Bayazid's resting shrine above, you can see one of the most important figures in the shaping of Saadi's character.  Saadi called him, "the peacock of mystics" and Rumi has admired him throughout his poetry.

Bayazid is a mirror of beauty in the Islamic culture. Love is at the core of his ideas.  Love was his whole existance.  He once said, "In the deserts that I walked, love fell not rain and my feet stuck in love the way they stick in mud."

Mystics like Bayazid are a miraculous mixture of the highest pride and the most beautiful forms of humility.  On one hand, they felt one with their God and on the other, they never felt they were above a single human being. About such mystics, Attar says, "It is said that whenever they looked at every human being they thought that he or she was better than them."  Therefore, their pride rests in humility and their humility stands on the highest peaks of pride.

You can never imagine the name of Bayazid without enjoying his selfless devotion to his mother.  He believed that he reached this unique position in sufism because of the positive prayers of his mother for him.  Once in a very cold winter night, Bayazid's mother asked him for a glass of water.  He raised from sweet sleep, left the house, went to the fountain, brought back the water, but when he returned to his mother's bed, he saw that his mother had fallen asleep again.  Then in the morning, his mother woke up and saw Bayazid had been standing at her bed throughout the whole night holding the glass of water in his hand.  She asked, "What are you doing here, my son?"  He answered, "This is the glass of water that you asked me, mother.  I stood beside your bed in order to give you the water the moment you wake up again."  Bayazid's mother looked at the water and saw it had frozen in the cold weather while he had been holding it in his hand.  She then sighed and said, "Oh God endear my son the way he endears me in this way."

This is just one of the drops of that special rain that fell from the sky above Bayazid's head on the deserts under Bayazid's feet. Just a single drop of love.

I wrote this moments before leaving on my trip to Bastam.  I was terribly busy, but I really loved to take the first step with you on this trip.

Please leave a comment.  Once I reach Bastam, I want to show all your comments to the people of Bastam.  You just can't Imagine how the people of that tiny town in the east of Iran will feel when they see a friend from the US has paid attention to them and to their mystics.  I also want to show your comments to the officials who run the Bayazid's shrine.  Americans are unaware of the fact that ordinary Iranians are so thirsty to listen to the people of the US talk to them -- especially when it comes to their poets and their mystics.

Ali