Friday, Oct 14, 2005
Iran's heritage deserves respect
Martin Woollacott
AS THE protests and demonstrations that led to the fall of the Shah swelled in 1978, Western reporters travelled to Iran to cover each new outbreak. Back in Teheran, a returning Time magazine correspondent was asked which trouble spot he had just visited. "Persepolis," he replied, "I'm the irony correspondent."
There had in fact been no big demonstrations near the ruins of the dynastic and ritual centre of the ancient Persian empire, but the Time man's instinct was nevertheless sound. The Shah's attempt to convince the world of his family's connection with the rulers of that empire reached a point of folly with his coronation there in 1971 before an audience of royalty, politicians, and celebrities from abroad. This "picnic of unparalleled vulgarity," in the words of a former Iranian diplomat, had exactly the opposite effect to that intended. Besides the ruins and artefacts of a great empire the Shah looked like the parvenu he was, and to his more religious subjects he also looked like a man denying or diluting the country's Muslim faith.
Yet the Shah and his father, the soldier who seized the throne in Iran in 1926, were not wrong in seeking a source of legitimacy in the pre-Islamic past. The Persian empire lives on in the consciousness of modern Iran, providing a language of justice, protest, and difference at home and shaping the country's relationships abroad. When Americans, for example, look at their dealings with Iran, they see a world power trying to cope with a small, difficult and potentially dangerous country. But when Iranians look at the same encounter, although at a practical level they register the same disparity, it is not absolutely fanciful to say that, at another, they see the relationship as one between equals.
One empire speaking to another — could this have been part of what Ayatollah Muhammad Khatami, the former President, meant by "a dialogue between civilisations"? Mr. Khatami never made it quite clear whether it was Iran alone, Islam alone, or a combination of the two, to which he was referring. But what is clear in his idea of dialogue is the need for respect, a respect to which Iran is entitled, in part, by virtue of its great history. Americans and Europeans misunderstand this at their peril.
Ancient and modern
How ancient history relates to modern problems is the question to be examined on October 18 at a public forum on Iran organised by the British Museum in London. It is certainly a difficult legacy. Italians shrugged off Mussolini's fantasies of a new Roman empire and derive their identity mainly from the Renaissance, while the Greeks are both proud of their ancient prowess and irritated by some its consequences, like having to learn ancient Greek. India and China, emerging as substantial powers in the 21st century, have a relatively comfortable relationship with former greatness. But Iran labours under a double burden. First, its ancient past, not least because the role of another universal religion, Zoroastrianism, clashes with its Islamic identity. The analogous contradictions of Christianity with paganism, or modern Chinese secularism with Chinese religious tradition, are not of the same severity. Secondly, Iranians have a profound sense that the importance of their civili sation has never been as wholeheartedly acknowledged as that of others. Not by Arabs, who gloss over the contribution of Iranians during the Golden Age of Islam, not by Indians, who minimise Iranian influence in the subcontinent, and not by Westerners, even though Western scholars led in reconstructing the Iranian past.
Iranians reacted against the Shah's attempt to appropriate the pre-Islamic era, but they have also reacted against the Islamic Republic's attempts to suppress what remains of its traditions. Norouz, the old Iranian New Year, is still enthusiastically celebrated, as is the fire festival of Charshanbeh Suri. Iranians still call their children Cyrus, Darius, and Roxana after emperors and their consorts, even though the regime at one stage said such children would not get birth certificates. And, as Nasrin Alavi notes in her fascinating book We are Iran, an anthology of Iranian blogs, even the regime seems to forget sometimes, for instance permitting IranAir planes to carry an image of Homa, the pagan Persian guardian of travellers.
The Iranian authorities have recently taken a different line. Under Mr. Khatami, Western archaeologists returned to Iran to work on excavations with Iranian colleagues, there are new departments of pre-Islamic studies at some Iranian universities, and ancient Iranian history is back in the school curriculum. A surge of interest in the period brings new titles into the bookshops every year, although most are translations of Western works.
The paradox of the Iranian attachment to the ancient past remains that it co-exists with much ignorance and with a striking gap between indigenous scholarship and that done abroad. As with other civilisations, much of Iran's history was brought to it by Westerners — from the driven British army officer who scaled cliffs near Kermanshah to puzzle out cuneiform and other inscriptions to the French archaeologists who excavated Shush. The gap should have been closed by the growth of an indigenous scholarship. But, under the Islamic Republic, according to a publisher who specialises in Middle Eastern titles, there has been "not one book in 30 years" written in Iran on any period of Iranian history, Islamic or pre-Islamic, "that would stand the scrutiny of Western scholarship." Others are less harsh, and things appear to be changing, but the impressive scholarship on Iran by Iranians is in the diaspora.
Those who know Iran well say that ordinary Iranians can have a surprisingly limited or scrambled view of their history.
Yet they also have a grasp of poetry and literature that puts their Western equivalents to shame. The manner in which they are able to pluck out a line of Hafiz or Ferdausi to illustrate a point is enviable. Iranian poetry, because its oblique and sometimes coded nature allows it to reconcile or evade contradictions, may offer the nearest to a synthesis of Islamic and pre-Islamic identity as can be found.
But as Richard Frye, the American Iranologist, has said: "Few nations present more of a justification for the study of history."
This is a nation that has survived turmoil, has suffered from it, and has in its day several times brought order out of turmoil in the Middle East. In another time of troubles, it would be a wise course on both sides if empire could indeed speak unto empire. —
© Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004
Copyright © 2005, The Hindu.