Our Toil and God’s Blessing

Education made Sisakht into the largest and socio-economically most advanced village in Boir Ahmad. Much credit for this development goes to Mr. Qobâd Nikeqbâl (“Mulla Qobâd”), Sisakht’s chief in the early 1900s. Unlike most other leaders in Boir Ahmad, he was literate and an early champion of progress who saw education as the most important vehicle for tribal people to attain a “modern life”. At the time, education was limited to a few boys who attended madrasa, the so-called “mulla school”. These were classes in which boys learned to read and write through study of the Qur’an and classical Persian literature, and earned the title of “Mulla” – that is, a literate person. For Mulla Qobâd’s vision, this level of education was inadequate. On the occasion of a summoning of tribal leaders to Tehran, he petitioned the Shah for a government teacher. In 1932 he was granted his request, a full quarter century earlier than in any other village in Boir Ahmad.

Mulla Qobâd’s plan for education was ambitious, as Sisakhtis, like all other rural families, needed their children to help with the family’s livelihood. However, Sisakhtis also recognized the natural limits on agriculture and herding in the mountains, and that their children would require other skills to succeed in the wider world. “To make progress” became a social goal and a meme. Parents worked even harder and made do with even less so that soon nearly every family sent at least one or two sons to school.

One of the extraordinary aspects of the tribal education program was the encouragement of girls’ education. Tribal economy, social structure, and the local gender philosophy placed girls firmly in the domestic sphere. Mr. Bahmanbegi, who strongly supported education for girls, persuaded the tribal elite to let some of their daughters become teachers. He figured that chiefs’ families were more likely to let their daughters study than were hard-strapped farming families. One of the first graduates and the first woman teacher in Sisakht was a granddaughter of Qobâd Nikeqbâl. She was only seventeen years old when she completed her training in 1964 and began to teach school in Sisakht.

Teaching became a coveted profession, especially for women. But women teachers struggled to balance family, household, and school at a time when the village had no running water and electricity, and families were large. Women managed the very labor-intensive and physically demanding operation of the household alongside bearing and raising many children, serving the husband, and usually caring for elderly family members as well. The first four women teachers had twenty-two children among them. Women’s difficulties with this taxing double job became an argument against girls’ education and job aspirations.

A herder checked on his young son minding a small herd of kids under the large sky of the southern plain. A boy was the apple of his parent’s eyes and the hope of the family’s future. In that wide-open countryside, without school or house to confine them, small boys spent much of their time playing and left the chores to their sisters. Carefree though their existence was, they also never had enough to eat, and had no education and poor prospects. Given the degrading pastures, the sluggish economy, and lack of general resources, the future of their sons was a great worry to parents.

A solemn, shy demeanor was seen as appropriate for young brides. For them, “wedding” meant leaving home and facing an uncertain future among unfamiliar people. A bride had no choice: getting married was a woman’s God-ordered destiny. This bride, all of 12 or 13 years old, was nervous and shy at her wedding and afterwards sat on her own looking pensive. She relaxed after visiting with her cousins and girlfriends, and smiled shyly into the camera.

Worshippers leave the mosque on a hot July day. The mood of anticipation before Friday Prayer has relaxed. A municipal groundskeeper re-directs his water hose for the children. A woman cools her baby at the water basin. Empowered by the energy of prayer, a man flashes my camera a victory sign. “Do you see this now, us praying?” another said to me. “Every one of us is stronger than an atom bomb.”

Working in synchrony, men cut wheat with sickles made by the local blacksmith. There were no children in the fields to help with harvest: boys were sent to school, even though it meant harder work for their fathers. Parents in Sisakht worked harder and longer into old age so that their children could go to school.

Winter was hard, cold, and lonely at a herding outpost. A shepherd spent the season there to look after the goat herds of several families. He set out with the animals at first light (this image), guiding them for miles into the Zagros foothills in search of food. At sundown he had them back at camp where they sheltered in a corral against wolves and thieves.

Getting the animals through winter was a tremendous worry for herders. “I thank God for every day the animals survive, and count the days until spring,” one man said to me. “But in counting off the days, we count them off of our own lives as well.”