![Drinking Arak Off an Ayatollah's Beard](/assets/artwork/1x1-42817eea7ade52607a760cbee00d1495.gif)
![Drinking Arak Off an Ayatollah's Beard](/assets/artwork/1x1-42817eea7ade52607a760cbee00d1495.gif)
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Drinking Arak Off an Ayatollah's Beard
A Journey Through the Inside-Out Worlds of Iran and Afghanistan
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
An engrossing blend of travel writing and history, Drinking Arak off an Ayatollah’s Beard traces one man’s adventure-filled journey through today’s Iran, Afghanistan, and Central Asia, and describes his remarkable attempt to make sense of the present by delving into the past.
Setting out to gain insight into the lives of Iranians and Afghans today, Nicholas Jubber is surprised to uncover the legacy of a vibrant pre-Islamic Persian culture that has endured even in times of the most fanatic religious fundamentalism. Everywhere—from underground dance parties to religious shrines to opium dens—he finds powerful and unbreakable connections to a time when both Iran and Afghanistan were part of the same mighty empire, when the flame of Persian culture lit up the world.
Whether through his encounters with poets and cab drivers or run-ins with “pleasure daughters” and mujahideen, again and again Jubber is drawn back to the eleventh-century Persian epic, the Shahnameh (“Book of Kings”). The poem becomes not only his window into the region’s past, but also his link to its tumultuous present, and through it Jubber gains access to an Iran and Afghanistan seldom revealed or depicted: inside-out worlds in which he has tea with a warlord, is taught how to walk like an Afghan, and even discovers, on a night full of bootleg alcohol and dancing, what it means to drink arak off an Ayatollah’s beard.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In his travelogue-cum-history, Jubber (The Prester Quest) recounts his journey into the heart of contemporary Persian culture with the 11th-century poetic epic, Shahnameh ( The Book of Kings ), as his Rosetta stone. Traveling through Iran, Central Asia, and Afghanistan, the author finds that the book is a living, breathing entity; the most accurate account available of the psyche of the Persian-speaking people ; its myths, heroes, and villains are daily cultural touch points, from dinnertime conversation to pop song lyrics, in village butcher shops and on city stages. As Jubber becomes better acquainted with the Shahnameh, he comes to see that the best way of getting to grips with this strange, secretive might be through the unlikely binoculars of a thousand-year-old epic, and he uses the epic to scaffold his own discoveries. By book's end, having moved from North Tehran villas to rickety Afghan buses, and having encountered kindness and brutality, technological savvy and vestiges of medievalism, Jubber's account offers a full and satisfying panorama of the region with its rich paradoxes and complexities intact.