Day 5: A mullah takes the long view at Persepolis

I finally met a mullah. No trip to Iran would be complete without a mullah meeting. And today I had one.
His name was Mahdi Atashkar and he was touring the ruins of Persepolis, capital of the ancient Persian Empire.

In 518 B.C., the Persian King Darius built himself a network of palaces designed to awe subjects from every corner of an empire that ran from India to Ethiopia. The walls were flecked with gold and turquoise. The surviving carvings on the limestone blocks are so detailed, you can read the expressions on the faces of courtiers and tell a Phoenician from a Cappadocian. It's honestly hard to do the place justice with mere words.

Atashkar, sporting a white turban and a thick, black upswept beard, pronounced himself impressed, but offered the sort of long-range perspective you'd expect from a man of God. "Where are those that built these places? Where are they now?" he asked. "Despite the beauty of the architecture, none of them exist anymore. They left this world with empty hands."

They weren't the only ones. The former Shah liked Persepolis so much that in 1971 he staged an absurdly lavish celebration here. He invited kings and queens from all over the world, housed them in luxurious tents at the base of the ruins and flew in their food daily from Maxim's of Paris.

The Shah figured his subjects, most of whom had a better chance of seeing the moon than visiting Paris, would get a kick out of how important he was. Instead, they fumed at the extravagance and began plotting his demise. He was gone by 1979 and dead a little more than a year later.

Standing at Persepolis, I had the same feeling I always get when I'm seeing one of the ancient world's treasures. The people who lived long before us once were just as proud of their accomplishments, just as certain they had life all figured out, as some of us are today. The 10,000 bodyguards who ringed Darius wherever he went were known as "The Immortals."

In the end, they proved pretty mortal. The Persian Empire's day of reckoning, like the Shah's, inevitably arrived. Alexander the Great swept in from Macedonia in 330 B.C., burned anything flammable and wrecked or looted whatever wouldn't burn.

By now, the young mullah and I had been talking for awhile about the controversy over Iran's nuclear program, Islam and Christianity, you name it. About a dozen of his students, all girls, all wearing black chadors, stood nearby, gawking and giggling like teenagers anywhere.

As I prepared to leave, Atashkar said he had one more thing to say. "I want you to inform the American people," he said, "¡­that there is no difference between a true Muslim and a true Christian."

We all face that day of reckoning.