ENTER THE TURKS 125sand couplets. "Did I say gold?" the sultan frowned. "I meant to say silver.
One piece of silver for each couplet."
The offended Firdausi went off in a huff and offered his poem to an-
other king. According to legend, Sultan Mahmud later regretted his
penny-pinching and sent servants with trunk loads of gold to coax the
poet back, but they were knocking on the front door of the poet's house
while his corpse was being carried out the back for burial.2
The Book of Kings represents all of history as a struggle between the de-
scendants of two legendary brothers, Iran and Turan, who (it is often
thought) represent the Persians and the Turks, respectively: Iran is the
good guy, and Turan the bad guy. Not surprisingly, The Book of Kings is
now the national epic of Iran, and I wonder if it was actually the cost of
the book that gave the sultan pause: maybe he didn't like seeing Turks pre-
sented as the bad guys of history.
Firdausi also heaped scorn on the Arabs and devoted a long passage at
the end to detailing their primitive savagery as compared to the civilized
grace of the Persians at the time Islam was born. His book was just one
more sign of the decline of Arab power and the rising prestige of Persian
culture within Islam. In fact, his attitude about Arabs was not unique. As
another poet of the era wrote,
Arabs were eating crickets in the wasteland, living on the brink,
While in Mashad, even dogs had ice water to drink.^3Sultan Mahmud was not only first in patronage of the arts; he also prided
himself on the number of Hindu temples he sacked and how thoroughly
he sacked them and what quantities of loot he snatched away from infidel
fingers. He hauled his plunder home to ornament his capital and pay the
nine-hundred-plus literati living at his court. His invasions of India and
his slaughter of Hindus made him, he felt, a hero of Islam.
Mahmud's son Masud built himself a winter capital on the banks of the
Helmand River, about a mile downriver from my own boyhood town of
Lashkargah. The ruins of the city are still there. Growing up, I often won-
dered if Masud might have hunted deer on the same wooded island in the
middle of the river where my buddies and I used to roam, woods that in
my day teemed with jungle cats, jackals, and wild boar.