The Enchanted Garden of Iram

Long before the Thousand and One Nights ever set down the tale of a poor merchant who stumbled into a garden of paradise on the edge of the desert, Arab grandfathers and Quranic preachers were already telling a far older and far stranger story – the story of Iram dhāt al-ʻImād, “Iram of the Pillars,” a city of indescribable beauty built in the sands of Arabia by the giant-king Shaddād ibn ʻĀd, and struck out of the visible world by God before its builder could enter it. The Quran names the city in only three short verses. The classical Arabic historians filled those verses with a thousand pages of legend. And the Thousand and One Nights, in the soft retelling that this story preserves, turns the whole vast cycle inward into a single human encounter – one ruined merchant, one strange evening, one walk between two cliffs into a place that the prophets had said would never again be seen by mortal eyes.

The Enchanted Garden of Iram is, on its surface, the gentlest of Arabian tales. There is no army, no jinn battle, no dead queen on a brass throne. There is only Zaid, an old man who has lost his wife, his children, his trade and his faith, and a garden so beautiful that he believes for one whole night that he has died and gone to paradise. But behind that quiet evening stands the immense Quranic landscape of ʻĀd and Iram, and behind that landscape stands one of the oldest theological questions in Arab religion: what does God owe a man who has forgotten Him, and what does that man owe God when grace is returned?

The Ruined Merchant and His Walk into the Desert

Zaid had not always been the broken man we meet at the opening of the tale. Forty years earlier, in the spice-streets of Damascus, his name had been spoken with respect by every caravan-master who left for Aleppo or for Basra. His warehouse had smelt of cardamom and Yemeni saffron, his ledgers had been kept by three clerks, and his courtyard had bloomed with two old fig trees and a fountain of cool water that strangers stopped at the gate to admire. Then, one season after another, the world had withdrawn from him. The caravan to Damascus the year of the great storms had been lost in the Syrian desert. A shipment of Persian silks meant for Alexandria had burnt with the ship that carried it. Two long-trusted partners in Hims, given more credit than they could repay, had fled their creditors and taken Zaid’s last gold with them. His wife, who had loved him in his wealth, had lost the patience to love him in his poverty, and had gone back to her own family in Aleppo. His sons, grown into proud men, had refused to live in the small house their father’s downfall had reduced him to, and had moved away to other cities and other names. At sixty years old, Zaid was alone, and he had stopped praying.

It was not anger that had stopped him; it was something quieter. He had gone for years to the mosque at the right hours, had kept the fast of Ramadan, had given the right portion of his earnings in zakāt, and he had been ruined anyway. He could not see how the books balanced. So he had let his prayer mat lie rolled in a corner and had stopped opening it. Each afternoon, when the heat broke and the streets of Damascus began to cool, he walked out through the city gate and into the desert that lay beyond, because there at least no one would look at him with the soft pity that had become unbearable in town.

On the afternoon the story turns on, he walked farther than he had ever walked before. The sun had begun its slow fall, and the desert, which is dull at noon, had become something else – a long burning sheet of gold over which the shadows of the dunes lay like blue water. Zaid walked east, away from Damascus, away from the road, until the dunes gave way to a rougher country of dark rocks. Two cliffs stood close together, leaning towards one another like the walls of a great gate, and between them ran a narrow path that Zaid had certainly never noticed before. He had walked the eastern desert in every weather for months. He could have sworn that the cliffs had not been there the week before. But the sun was going down and the path was cool, and he was an old man whose feet hurt, and he stepped through.

The Garden Behind the Cliffs

What lay on the other side of the cliffs was not a desert. It was a garden. And it was not the kind of garden a Damascus merchant might own – a courtyard with a fountain and two fig trees and a row of jasmine – but a garden so wide that Zaid could see no end to it in any direction, a garden in which every kind of fruit tree he had ever heard of grew beside fruit trees that his language had no name for, a garden in which the streams that ran between the beds were paved with what looked like polished silver, and the very air smelt of roses and crushed mint and a sweetness so deep that an old man stood in it and forgot, for a long moment, that his life was poor.

He walked, slowly, between the trees. Pomegranates as red as cut rubies hung within reach of his hand. Grapes the size of pigeon eggs swelled in long clusters from vines trained over arches of carved silver. Apricots and figs and almonds and a yellow fruit Zaid had no name for lay on the ground in such plenty that they had begun to soften where they fell, and the soft, sweet smell of their ripeness rose all around him. At every dozen paces a small pavilion stood among the trees, its roof tiled in glazed blue and gold, its inner walls lined with cushions of crimson silk. Lamps of beaten silver hung from chains in their ceilings, and the lamps had been lit, though no hand had lit them. Pools of clear water ran beneath their floors. Birds that Zaid had never seen called from the branches with voices like bells.

And no one, no one in the whole vast garden, was anywhere to be seen. The pavilions were empty. The paths were empty. The fountains played for no audience but Zaid. There was no gardener pruning the vines, no caretaker carrying away the fallen fruit, no princess walking with her women between the beds. Only the wind, very softly, in the high tops of the trees, and very far off – or perhaps very close, Zaid could not tell – the sound of a brook running over stones. He sat down on the cushions of the nearest pavilion, with the smell of the orchard around him, and he took up a pomegranate from a silver plate that had been left, as if for him, on the low table at his side, and he ate it; and the taste of the fruit was so much sweeter than any fruit he had eaten in sixty years of his life that he understood, slowly, that wherever he was, he was no longer in the country of ordinary men.

The Voice Beneath the Pillars

Zaid had been wandering and resting and eating in the garden for what felt like a long time when he came at last to its centre. Between two final rows of cypresses the path opened into a broad courtyard, and in that courtyard rose the pillars. There were many of them, set in pairs and in long colonnades; they were taller than any pillar Zaid had ever seen in any mosque or palace, taller than the cedars they imitated, and they were not made of stone. They were made of a stuff that looked like dark gold, polished so deeply that the dying light of the desert sun, somehow still falling in this garden though night had certainly come outside it, ran along their flutings as a single bar of fire. The pillars carried no roof; they stood, instead, like the bones of a building that had never quite been finished, or that had been built only to be looked at and to be remembered.

It was beneath these pillars that the voice spoke to Zaid. It did not seem to come from any direction in particular – not from the pillars themselves, not from the trees behind him, not from above – and it was not loud; it was, if anything, a little quieter than the sound of the fountains. O Zaid, it said, you have walked into the garden of Iram, which was the work of Shaddād ibn ʻĀd. He built it in his pride, in the deserts of al-Aḥqāf, that he might rival paradise; and on the morning he was to enter it with his nobles, God sent against him and against his people the Sayhah, a single Cry, and they were struck down to the last man, and Iram was hidden from the eyes of the living. Why is it shown to you tonight? The voice paused, then said its own answer: Because you have forgotten Him; and He has not forgotten you.

Zaid sat down on the polished pavement between the pillars. He understood, with a perfect, level clarity that the unhappy do not often know, that the voice was telling him the truth. He had forgotten God in the bitterness of his ruin; he had thought himself abandoned because his caravans had failed. And here, in a garden built by a king who had used his power to deny God and had been erased for it, he – a small merchant, ruined and alone and very far from home – was being shown what Shaddād ibn ʻĀd had bought with all his armies and never lived to see, and was being shown it not as a punishment but as a gift. He bowed his head against the cool brass of the nearest pillar, and for the first time in many years he wept – not from sorrow, but from the strange, opening relief of a man who has at last let himself remember that he is held.

The Return at Dawn and the Empty Sand

How long Zaid sat between the pillars he could never afterwards say. He must have slept, because he remembered no rising of the moon, no slow turning of the stars; only that at some point a light not unlike dawn began to grow behind the eastern colonnade, and that he stood up to see it, and that the colonnade itself was no longer there. The pillars were thinning, very gently, as a mist thins. The cypresses behind him had grown paler, as if seen through gauze. The pavilion in which he had eaten the pomegranate was a watery outline against the sky. The garden was lifting away from him, or he was lifting away from it; he could not tell which, and the voice said nothing more, and he was not afraid.

When he opened his eyes again it was full morning in the desert east of Damascus, and he was lying on a sloping bed of red sand between two ordinary brown cliffs, with no path between them and no garden at the foot of them. His robe was dusty. His feet were bare; his sandals were where he had left them at the foot of the cliff the evening before. The sun had risen high enough to be hot. There was no sound of running water anywhere, no smell of jasmine, no birdsong; only the small dry creak of the wind in the rocks. Zaid sat up slowly. He looked at his hands. In the palm of his right hand, where it had closed in his sleep on the cushions of the pavilion, lay a single pomegranate seed – black, polished, perfect, and not from any tree that grew within a hundred days’ ride of Damascus. He closed his fingers over it very gently, and he walked home through the dunes, and he did not look back.

When Zaid came again into his shabby house in Damascus he did not, the story is careful to say, become rich overnight. The caravans he had lost did not return. His sons did not write. His wife did not come back. What changed was inside him. He took the rolled-up prayer mat out of the corner where it had lain forgotten, spread it on the floor of his courtyard between the two old fig trees, and he prayed the noon prayer in the right way and at the right time. He gave away the small purse of coins he had left, to the beggars at the gate of the great mosque. He took the polished black pomegranate seed and pressed it into the dry soil of his ruined garden, beside the dead stem of a rose. And the next year, when the spring rains came, that seed put up a slender green shoot that became, in five years, a tree heavy with the largest, reddest, sweetest pomegranates anyone in the quarter had ever seen; and in the shade of that tree, until the end of his days, the old merchant Zaid sat each evening with a kettle of mint tea and gave to anyone who came to his gate, beggar or stranger or grown son, a single fruit, and the answer to whatever question they had brought him; and the people of his quarter, who did not know where the tree had come from, called it the tree that had grown out of nothing, and the children called Zaid the man who had walked once in the garden of Iram.

The Moral of The Enchanted Garden of Iram

Two opposite figures stand at the two ends of this small story: Shaddād ibn ʻĀd, the king who built Iram, and Zaid, the merchant who was permitted to walk in it. Shaddād had every advantage a man can have – an empire, an army, the wealth of a hundred cities, and the leisure to design a paradise that he meant to inhabit in defiance of the paradise that God had already promised the faithful. He spent forty years building Iram, the Arab historians say; he assembled gold from every mine and silk from every loom and gems from every coast, and on the morning he was to enter his garden in the desert with his nobles, the Cry came down from heaven and not a man of his company was found alive. Zaid, by contrast, had nothing: a ruined house, a fled wife, sons who had forgotten him, and a faith he had let lapse. And it was to Zaid, not to Shaddād, that the garden was finally shown. The tale’s moral is the inversion that runs through almost all the Quranic narratives of pride and humility: the man who tries to take paradise by force is given nothing, and the man who knows he deserves nothing is given a single night in the place that the proud king never lived to see.

The classical Arabic phrase for the lesson is tawakkul – reliance upon God – and the Quranic verse the audience of the Nights would have heard in their inner ear at the moment the voice speaks to Zaid beneath the pillars is the famous oath-passage of Sūrat al-Fajr itself:

أَلَمْ تَرَ كَيْفَ فَعَلَ رَبُّكَ بِعَادٍ إِرَمَ ذَاتِ الْعِمَادِ الَّتِي لَمْ يُخْلَقْ مِثْلُهَا فِي الْبِلَادِ
A-lam tara kayfa faʻala rabbuka bi-ʻĀd – Iram dhāti l-ʻimād – allatī lam yukhlaq mithluhā fī l-bilād
“Hast thou not seen how thy Lord dealt with ʻĀd, with Iram of the Pillars, the like of which was never created in all the lands?” (Quran 89:6–8)

The garden behind the cliffs is the answer to that Quranic question, lived for one night by one ruined Damascene merchant. What the Lord did with ʻĀd, He did so that men like Zaid – the small, the forgotten, the late-praying – might still be reminded that the garden built by the proud is held in trust for the humble, and that God’s memory of any single human soul is longer than any king’s plan to put up pillars in the desert. The closing image of the tale – the pomegranate seed that becomes a tree under which strangers are fed – is the perfect quiet figure for what tawakkul looks like in an ordinary life: not a return of the lost caravan, not the wife or the sons restored, but a single seed pressed into ruined earth, and the patience to wait for the green shoot.

Why the Tale Has Lasted

The first reason the Iram cycle – and this gentlest of its versions – has lasted for fourteen centuries is the strange topographical specificity of its setting. The Quran does not say much about Iram, but what it says – al-Aḥqāf, the “sand dunes” of southern Arabia, the country of ʻĀd – pointed Arab travellers and geographers towards a real region that they could walk into. Yāqūt al-Ḥamawī’s thirteenth-century Muʻjam al-Buldān tries to fix Iram’s location; Ibn Khaldūn in the Muqaddimah is more sceptical and notes the legends without endorsing them. As recently as 1992 the archaeologist Juris Zarins, using satellite imagery, identified the ruined caravan-city of Ubar / Shisr in the Dhofar region of Oman as a plausible historical kernel for the ʻĀd-Iram tradition. Whether or not Iram was ever a single place on a map, the legend has stayed in the Arab imagination because the desert in which it is set has stayed exactly where it was, and a reader in Cairo or Sana’a or San Francisco can still look at a satellite image of the Rubʻ al-Khālī and feel that the city of pillars is somewhere just out of frame.

The second reason the tale has lasted is its theological elegance. Most stories of pride and punishment in any tradition stop with the punishment: the proud king dies, his city is destroyed, and the lesson is read out at the funeral. The Iram cycle is unusual because the same story carries, in its second half, a story of mercy. The Enchanted Garden of Iram is that second half – the gentle one – lifted out and set on its own. The poor merchant in the dust at the desert’s edge is, theologically speaking, the inversion of the giant king at the centre of the cycle; and Arabic religious literature loves nothing better than an inversion. Jorge Luis Borges, who read the Iram tales in Edward Lane’s translation as a boy in Buenos Aires, returned to them again and again – in his essay “The Doctrine of Cycles” he calls the city of pillars “the most beautiful image in the Nights,” and he meant precisely this: a city that the proud cannot enter and the humble are, sometimes, granted a single evening in.

And the tale has lasted, finally, because every age has its Shaddāds and its Zaids, and the proportion does not change very much. There is always a king somewhere building pillars in a desert, and there is always an old man somewhere who has stopped praying because the caravans have not come back. The Thousand and One Nights are very patient with both of them. To the king the Nights offer the long warning of The City of Brass; to the merchant the Nights offer the short, sweet evening of The Enchanted Garden of Iram. A reader who closes the book with a pomegranate seed in his hand, even a metaphorical one, has been given the larger of the two gifts.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is The Enchanted Garden of Iram about?

It is the gentle version, preserved in the Thousand and One Nights cycle of Iram dhāt al-ʻImād, of a poor ruined Damascene merchant named Zaid who has lost his wealth, his wife, his sons and his faith, and who wanders one afternoon farther than usual into the eastern desert. Between two cliffs that he could swear were not there before, he walks into an impossibly beautiful garden – fountains, pavilions, silver streams, fruit on every tree, and not a single living soul. At the heart of the garden, beneath the pillars Shaddād ibn ʻĀd once built in his pride, a voice tells him that this is Iram, the city God struck out of the visible world for its builder’s arrogance, and that it has been shown to him because he has forgotten God and God has not forgotten him. He wakes in the morning on bare sand with a single pomegranate seed in his palm, and the seed becomes the tree under which he spends the rest of his life feeding strangers.

Where does the legend of Iram come from?

The historical and theological foundation is the Quran itself, Sūrat al-Fajr 89:6–8, where God reminds the Prophet of ʻĀd and of “Iram of the pillars, the like of which was never created in all the lands.” The detailed prose legend of Shaddād ibn ʻĀd, the building of the garden in the desert of al-Aḥqāf, its destruction by the Sayhah, and the later glimpse granted to the Bedouin ʻAbdullāh ibn Abī Qilāba, is preserved in al-Ṭabarī’s Tārīkh (tenth century), al-Masʻūdī’s Murūj al-Dhahab (947 CE), al-Thaʻlabī’s and al-Kisāʾī’s Qiṣaṣ al-Anbiyāʾ (eleventh and twelfth centuries), and Yāqūt al-Ḥamawī’s Muʻjam al-Buldān (thirteenth century). The cycle entered the Thousand and One Nights as Nights 276–279 of the Calcutta II / Macnaghten Arabic recension, and was translated into English by John Payne (1882) and Sir Richard F. Burton (1885).

Who was Shaddād ibn ʻĀd, and is Iram a real place?

Shaddād ibn ʻĀd is the giant-king of the ancient Arabian tribe of ʻĀd in the classical Arabic qiṣaṣ al-anbiyāʾ, a king whose pride so offended God that the Prophet Hūd was sent to warn him and was ignored. The Arab tradition associates ʻĀd with the al-Aḥqāf region named in Quran 46 – the sand dunes of southern Arabia, in what is today Dhofar in Oman and the Empty Quarter. In 1992 the archaeologist Juris Zarins, using NASA satellite imagery, identified the ruined caravan-city of Ubar / Shisr in Dhofar as a plausible historical kernel for the ʻĀd-Iram tradition. The legendary city of pillars itself was always understood to be either invisible or destroyed: Quran 89:6–8 says of it lam yukhlaq mithluhā fī l-bilād, “the like of which was never made in all the lands,” and the Arab historians say that after the Sayhah it was hidden from human eyes and could only be glimpsed by chance, by a stranger lost in the desert and granted the sight as a sign.

What is the moral of the tale?

The moral is the Arabic theological virtue of tawakkul – trusting reliance upon God – expressed through one of the great inversions of Quranic narrative. Shaddād ibn ʻĀd, the king who tried to build his own paradise in defiance of the paradise God had promised, never lived to enter it; Zaid, the small ruined merchant who had stopped praying because his caravans had failed, was permitted to walk in it for a single evening. The lesson is not that piety is rewarded with miracles; Zaid’s caravans never come back, his wife does not return, his sons do not write. The lesson is that grace is not earned and that the worst-off man in the empire is not, in the end, forgotten. The closing image of the pomegranate seed that becomes a tree under which strangers are fed is the gentlest possible figure for what tawakkul looks like: not the return of what was lost, but a small green shoot in dry earth, and the patience to wait for it.

How does this gentle Iram tale relate to The City of Brass?

The two stories are, in effect, the same Quranic cycle told from opposite ends. The City of Brass is the long warning side: a great expedition crosses the Sahara, finds the petrified body of the proud queen Tadmura on her brass throne, and reads the inscription Where are the kings? Where are the conquerors? – the answer to which is the Quranic verse kullu man ʻalayhā fān, “all that is upon the earth shall perish.” The Enchanted Garden of Iram is the gentle mercy side of the same theology: in a city built by an even more famous proud king and even more emphatically destroyed for his pride, an old man who has nothing is granted a single quiet evening of fruit, fountains and a voice that says it has not forgotten him. The two tales were almost certainly meant to be read together as the two halves of the same lesson: to kings, do not build like Shaddād; to broken men, do not despair like Zaid.