Table of Contents

English Verso

Iranian Masculinities

Preface: Iranian Masculinities
Mostafa Abedinifard and Sahar Allamezade-Jones

A Tree Atop the Mountain: Mobad Manikan and the Elusive Promises of Masculinity
Cameron Cross

‘Prescriptive’ Masculinity?: Deception and Restraint in the Films of Asghar Farhadi
Niki Akhavan

An Iranian Female Vampire Walks Home Alone and Disturbs Freud’s Oedipal Masculinity
Mahdi Tourage

On the Path to Manhood: Men and Masculinities in the Contemporary Kurdish Novel
Kaveh Ghobadi

Homosexuality – the emerging new battleground in Islam
Junaid Jahangir & Hussein Abdullatif

The Abject Outsider: “The Story of Two Gay Men”
Claudia Yaghoobi

Queering the Iranian Nation: Be Like Others and Resistance to Heteronormative Nationalism
Amy Tahani-Bidmeshki

Persian Reverso

Wedding Trials of Masculinity in Iranian Fairy Tales
Samin Espargham, Abolghasem Ghavam, and Samira Bameshki

Ekhrajiha1 (The Outcast 1): The Role of the ‛Lāt’ Figure in the Construction of the Islamic Republic’s ‛Ideal Man’
Papoli Yazdi

The Predicament of Complicity with Hegemonic Masculinity in Goli Taraghi’s “In Another Place”
Amirhossein Vafa

The Male Homosexuality Problematic in the Context of ContemporaryIranian Shi‘ism
Arash Naraghi

Variorum

In the Mirror of Time: On Rostam and Shoghad in Firdawsi’s Shahnameh and Akhavan Salis’s “The Eight Passage”
Nasim Khaksar

Iran Days in Egypt: Mosaddeq’s Visit to Cairo in 1951
Lior Sternfeld

Table of Content- Volume 7, Number 2, Summer 2024

Iran Namag: A Bilingual Quarterly of Iranian Studies

Volume 7, Number 2, Summer 2024

Editor-in-Chief: Mohamad Tavakoli-Targhi

Iradj Pezeshkzad Commemorative Issue

Guest Editors: Mostafa Abedinifard & Pouneh Shabani-Jadidi

 

English Verso

Introduction to the Special Issue
Mostafa Abedinifard & Pouneh Shabani-Jadidi

 

Iraj Pezeshkzad’s “Prosecuting an Author”: A Translation and Short Commentary
Alireza Korangy

 

Dai Jan Napelon as a Comic Masterpiece
Dick Davis

 

Iraj Pezeshkzad as a Social Critic: The Satirical Aspects of My Uncle Napoleon and Asemun Rismun
M. R. Ghanoonparvar

 

My Uncle Napoleon and the Iranian Anglophobia
Homa Katouzian

 

Iraj Pezeshkzad and His Hafez: A Note on Hafez in Love
Pouneh Shabani-Jadidi 
& Patricia J. Higgins

 

Persian Reverso
Iraj Pezeshkzad Commemorative Issue

Laughing at Oneself in the Works of Iraj Pezeshkzad
Roya Sadr

 

Uncle Napoleon Novel and the Literary Precedents of the Servant (Aqa/Khidmatkar)
Sorour Kasmayi

 

Variorum

 

Remarks on Karim Zamani’s on Sharh-i Jami‘-i Masnavi Ma‘navi
Abdolmajid Yousefinikoo

 

Vis and Rāmin: The Relic of an Abrogated Custom
Mostafa Sa‘adat

 

Gender equality in the poetry of Parvin
Behnam Fomeshi

 

Pandemic and History: Pandemics and the Shaping of Human Civilization
Hamid Sahebjami

 

Jalal Al-e Ahmaz’s Puzzle in By the Pen
Arman Arian

Table of Contents Volume 7, Number 1, Spring 2024

Iran Namag: A Bilingual Quarterly of Iranian Studies
Volume 7, Number 1, Spring 2024
Editor-in-Chief: Mohamad Tavakoli-Targhi

Radio Special Issue
Guest Editor: Khatereh Sheibani

ENGLISH VERSO
Radio Special Issue

The Golden Era of Radio Iran (1940-1978): A Modernist Aural Culture
Khatereh Sheibani

 

The Advent and Development of Radio in Iran
Bigan Kimiachi

 

Radio: A New Cultural History of Listening to Iranian Music, 1940-1952
Pouya Nekouei

 

Sound-Scaping Diaspora and the Affective Politics of Listening
Nazli Akhtari

 

BBC Radio: A Public Sphere of Communication, Communitas and Communion
Pouneh Saeedi

 

Variorum

Weststruckness: Trials and Tribulations
Homa Katouzian and Morad Moazami

 

Mistaken Modernity and its Critices: Hussein Alatas and Jalal-e Al-Ahmad
Ali Mirsepassi and Tadd Fernée

 

PERSIAN REVERSO
Radio Special Issue
Challenges and Hindrances to the Launching of Radio in Iran
Abbas Panahi and Ghorbanali Kenar-Roudi

 

Children and Radio in the 1960s Tabriz
Naser Hassanzadeh-Tabriz

 

Radio in Birjand
Mahmoud Fazeli-Birjandi

 

Variorum
A Century of Patriarchal State
Mohammad Husayn Badamchi

 

Tourist Organization of Iran During the Pahlavi Era, 1925-1979
Somayeh Bakhtiari

 

The Utopian Condition and the Lingual Contestation Theory in Reza Baraheni’s Poetic Perspectives
Layla Sadeghi

Table of Contents Volume 6, Number 3-4

Table of Contents Volume 6, Number 2

Editor-in-Chief: Mohamad Tavakoli-Targhi

Literary Diasporas of Iran
Guest Editors: Claudia Yaghoobi & Asghar Seyed-Gohrab

 

English Verso

Introduction
Claudia Yaghoobi and Asghar Seyed-Gohrab

Poetry as Salve for Persian Exiles
Asghar Seyed-Gohrab

Exile and Absence from the True Homeland: The Topos of Exile in Religious Literature
Alan Williams

The Complete Persepolis: Visualizing Exile in a Transnational Narrative
Leila Sadegh Beigi

Between Tehran and Paris: Terre de mirages and Shayegan’s Exilic Ambivalence
Ehsan Sheikholharam

Iranian American Comedic Memoirs: Interrogating Race and Humor in Diasporic Life Writing
Leila Moayeri Pazargadi

Racial Profiling of Iranian Armenians in the United States: Omid Fallahazad’s “Citizen Vartgez”
Claudia Yaghoobi

Persian Reverso

A Reflection of Our Lives over the Four Decades after the Revolution in Literature and a Study of Exilic Literature
Nasim Khaksar

The Blurring of the Boundaries between Reality and Fantasy, Body and Soul, and Home and (Non)Home during the Creative Process of Writing Diaspora
Parvaneh Hosseini Fahraji

Desire, Power, and Agency: Iranian Female Poets Reading Their Poems before the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic
Mahdi Tourage

Table of Contents Volume 6, Number 1

English Verso

Editor-in-Chief: Mohamad Tavakoli-Targhi

“Is Hindenburg a Sultan?” The Trial of the Iranian Communist Journal Peykar in Weimar Germany
Sheragim Jenabzadeh

Mapping the Unmappable: A Critical Study of Dead Reckoning: A Novel by Bahman Sho‘levar
Babak Mazloumi

History through Talisman: The Historical Value of a Newly Identified Safavid Treatise by Molla Jalal-e Monajjem-e Yazdi
Behzad Karimi

Sovereignty and Statehood in Early Qajar Rule: An Exercise in Conceptualization
Behrooz Moazami

Persian Reverso

Introduction: The Decline of Science in the Islamic World
Ahmad Kazemi-Mousavi

The Rise and Fall of Islamic Science
John Walbridge

A Critique of Walbridge’s “The Rise and Fall of Islamic 21 Science”
Hormoz Ebrahimnejad

Why We Did Not Modernize: On the Causes of the Decline of Science in Iran
Kamran Amir Arjomand

The Puzzle of the “Scientific Revolution” in Islamic Societies
Najm al-Din Yousefi

On the Decline of Science in Islamic Societies
Rasool Nafisi

Variorum

Scholarly Plagiarism and Conceptual Dissension
Leila Sadeghi

The Futile Linkage: The Tudeh Party and Women’s Movement for Equality Rights, 1921-1941
Lila Sazgar

Forms of Nationalism
Amir Hassanpour

Sectarian Feuds and the Decline of the Buyids
Hooshhang Shokri and Ali Rafi‘i

Table of Contents Volume 5, Number 4

English Verso

Editor-in-Chief: Mohamad Tavakoli-Targhi

Special Issue Dedicated to Ahmad Ashraf for His Lifetime Contribution to Iranian Studies
Editors: Amir Ismail Ajami & Mohamad Tavakoli

Land Reform and Agrarian Transformation in Iran, 1962–78
Amir Ismail Ajami

Farmer–Herder Villages and the Revolution
Mary Martin

Individualization and the Emergence of Personalized Politics in Post-Revolutionary Iran
Azadeh Kian

Chamber of Commerce and Internal Conflicts among the Merchants of Bushehr in the Early 1950s
Soheila Torabi Farsani

Notes on the Persian Gospel Manuscript in Georgian Script
Helen Giunashvili & Tamar Abuladze

Persian Reverso

Recollections and Inquiries: From Unveiling to the Islamic Revolution
Negin Nabavi’s Interview with Ahmad Ashraf

The Challenges of Family Capitalism in the Pahlavi Era, the1940s to the 1970
Ali Asghar Saeidi

A Pioneer of Iranian Historical Sociology: Reflections on the Academic Career of Ahmad Ashraf
Dariush Rahmanian

Ahmad Ashraf and the Historical Sociology of Iranian “Underdevelopment”
Naser Sedghi

The Necessity of Utilizing Iranian Urban Historical Sociology in Contemporary Urban Development
Parviz Piran and Mohamad Reza Haeri

A Review of Ahmad Ashraf’s Perspectives on the Question of Inequality
Emad Afrough

Ahmad Ashraf’s Contribution to Social Work in Iran
Ezatollah Samaram

Peasants and the Iranian Revolution
Manijeh Dowlat, Bernard Hourcade, and Odile Puech

Selections

Was the Land Reform American? A Review of Two Documents
Ahmad Ashraf

Table of Contents Volume 5, Number 2

English Verso

Translating Rumi through the Prism of Ideology
Amir Artaban Sedaghat

 

Persian Reverso

Lily Ayman (Ahy), 1929-2018
Javad Abbasi

The Signification of “Shah” and “Shahi” in the Eastern Islamic Lands
Abbas Ahmadvand

The Peculiarities of Golestan Palace’s Art and Architecture from the Perspective of Foreign Travelogues
 Abbas Panahi and Saman Kashani 

From Vernacular Modernity to Modernizing Tradition in Iran
Yaser FarashahiNejad

Perfect Wisdom: Sa‘di and the Manners of Conversation
Hamid Sahebjami

Lost in History or Reached the Zenith? Text and Margin in the Poetic Network of the Eighth Century
Fateme Montazeri

The Hopes and Fears of the Badakhshanis of Tajikistan During Soviet Rule
Maryam Moezzi

What Befell Us?
Ziaollah Missaghi

Saeed Yousef: A Wayfaring Poet
Nasim Khaksar

Saeed Yousef: A Prominent Poet of Our Time
Reza Ghanadan

 

Book Review

The Emergence of Iranian Nationalism: Race and the Politics of Dislocation

Hamed Mehrad

Table of Contents Volume 5, Number 1

Special Issue Dedicated to Professor Shirin Bayani
Guest Editors: Javad Abbasi

English Verso

Manuscripts and Digital Technologies: A Renewed Research Direction in the Ilkhanid History of Iran
Bruno De Nicola

 

Persian Reverso

A Pioneering Woman: A Historiographical Review of Professor Shirin Bayani’s Scholarship
Javad Abbasi

The Mimeses of the Shahnameh and Historical Epics in the Mongol Age
Javad Rashki-Aliabad

A Synthesizer of Two Faiths
Mohamad Ja‘far Yahaghi

Craft Industries in the Economy and Society of the Ilkhanids
Sayed Abolfazl Razavi

Who is Khayyam?
Touba Fazelipour

The Transformation of the Mongol and the Ilkhanid Period in the Iranian College History Textbooks
Ghasem Gharib

The Twilight of the Ilkhanids and the Dawn of the Sassanids: An Acquaintance with the Learned Historian
Mohammad-Taghi Imanpour

Reflections and the Rise and Fall of the Samanids
Sayyed Abol-Ghasem Forouzani

A Morphological Reflection on the History of Bayhaqi
Fatemeh Jahanpour

‘Alam-i Niswan on Modernity and Hijab
Abbas Panahi

Recollections

An Adorer of Iran and Iranian
Sayyed Abol-Ghasem Forouzani

The Father of Such an Offspring: Remembering Dr. Khanbaba Bayani
Nasrollah Salehi

Table of Contents Volume 4, Number 3-4

Special Issue Dedicated to Professor Badrolzaman Gharib
Guest Editors: Jaleh Amouzegar and Firouzeh Qandehari

English Verso

Further Fragments of Sogdian Manichaean Riddles?
Christiane Reck

The Turtle and the Geese: A Pañcatantra Fable in Sogdian
Nicholas Sims-Williams

The Manichaean “Living Self”As Reflected in Persian Mystical Poetry
Omid Behbahani

Persian Reverso

The Unique Badri of Our Time
Firouzeh Qandehari

Badrolzaman Gharib’s Publications
Firouzeh Qandehari

Another Explanation for Duality in Zoroastrianism: A Translation of the Seventh Chapter of Shekand Gomanik Vechar
Jaleh Amouzegar

A Profile of Zoroastrian Jurisprudence in the Sassanian Era
Katayun Mazdapour

Divine Knowledge and Benevolence
Zohreh Zarshenas

Studies on the Ancient Aramaic Epigraphy of Georgia
Helen Giunashvili

Mary Magdalene and Women’s Attraction to Manicheanism: Mythical and Historical Parameters
Mohammad Shokri-Foumeshi

The Foundations of Legal Thinking in the Church of the East (400-550 CE)
Nima Jamali

The Etymology of Female Names in the Shahnameh of Ferdowsi
Yadollah Mansouri

Azar Kayvan: Life, Character, Views, and the Judgments of Others
Hooshangh Shokri

Social Media Textual Poachers: How Do Iranian Users Challenge Dominant Discourses on Telegram?
Hossein Kermani

Table of Contents Volume 4, Number 2

English Verso

Festival of Arts, Shiraz-Persepolis, 1967-1977
Mahasti Afshar

Dye on the Frontier: Henna and the Military Elites of Nineteenth-Century Bam
James Gustafson

Voluntary Conversions of Iranian Jews in the Nineteenth Century
Nahid Pirnazar

Book Review

Thesaurus of Judeo-Tat (Juhuri): The Language of the Mountain Jews of the Caucasus by Rabbi Ya‘akov Itzhaki
Dan Shapira

 

Persian Reverso

Computers and Challenges of Writing in Persian
Behrooz Parhami

Dragon Palace Myths
Azam Nikkhah-Fardaqi

An Angelic Encounter: A Review of Daryoush Shaygan’s Esoteric Reflections
Hamid Sahebjami

Loss of Identity in Jalal Al-Ahmad’s The Cursing of the Land and Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby
Ja‘far Mirzaee Porkoli & Iman Beiranvan

The Arab War Strategy in the Conquest of Iran until 644 C.E.
Saeid Moakedi, Asghar Foroughi Abari, and Ja‘far Nouri

From Qanats to Pipes: Water Distribution in Behbahan
Fatemeh Bineshifar and Mostafa Nadim

Table of Contents Volume 4, Number 1

English Verso

The Dynamics of Resistance: Moral Concepts in Sī mī n 4 Dāneshvar’s Sūvashūn
Magdalena Rodziewicz

An Inquiry into the Terms Adab, Adib, Adabiyat in the 26 Perso-Arabic Languages
Shayan Afshar

State Capacity and Democratization in Iran
Misagh Parsa

 

Persian Reverso

Iranian Wine in a European Jar: A Reflection on the 3 Spatial Form of The Blind Owl
Reza Ghanadan

The Censured Portions of Mahmoud Katirai’s Kitab-e Sadegh-e-Hedayat
Shahram Azadian

Women’s Rights in the Iranian Women’s Press, 1910-1925
Ali Baghdar Delgosha

On the Intellectual Foundations of the Tudeh Party’s Literary Theory
Yaser Farashahi-Nejad

Mâr, Mihr, and Mir: A Linguistic Connection
Shokoufeh Taghi

Iranian Studies in Georgia: The Pre-Islamic Queries
Helen Giunashvili

Reviews

A Review of a Review: Was There a Misturn in the 145 Editing of the Scrolls of the Shahnamah-Narrators?
Mohamad Jaafari Qanavati

Table of Contents Volume 3, Number 4

English Verso

Special Issue Dedicated to Professor Mohammad-Ali Islami-Nodoushan
Guest Editor: Javad Abbasi & Mahmood Fotoohi-Rudmajani

Religious Minorities in the Islamic Republic of Iran and the “Right to Have Rights”
Anja Pistor-Hatam

Male Same-Sex Sexuality in the Legislation and Jurisdictions of the Islamic Republic
Arash Guitoo

Journalist Memoirs and the Iranian Diaspora: Truth, Professional Ethics, and Objectivity Between Political and Personal Narratives
Babak Elahi and Andrea Hickerson

The First World Conference on Human Rights and the Challenge of Enforcement
Andrew S. Thompson

 

Persian Reverso

A Realist Iranophile: Reflections on Professor Nodoushan’s Contributions to Iranian Studies
Javad Abbasi

The Contest of Languages: The Role of Iranian Dehqan’s in the Enduring Competition Between Persian and Arabic
Mahmood Fotoohi

The Soul of the Iranian World
Mohammad Jafar Yahaghi

The Days of the Land of Days: Recounting Nodoushan’s Journey to Yazd
Farhad Taheri

Reading Books in Public
Hasan Zolfaqari

Avecenna’s Recital of the Birdand its Impact onGhazzali’s Epistle of Birdand ‘Attar’s The Conference of Birds
Mahdi Mohebbati

Critiquing the Editing of the Scrolls of ShahnamahNarrators (Naqals)
Kamran Arzhangi

Rustamocide or Sohrabicide? Comparing Orhan Pamuk’sThe Red-Haired Womanwith the Tales of Rostam and Sohrab
Azam Nikkhah-Fardigi

Ferdawsi’s Shahnamehin the Historical Texts of Anatolian Seljuks
Fereshtah Mohammmadzadeh

“This is Not a Building That They Have Destroyed”: Critiquing Two Editions of The Correspondence of ‘Arif Qazvini
Said Pourazimi

Selections:

Recognizing Human Rights
Mohammad-Ali Islami-Nodoushan

Interview With Dr. Mohammad-Ali Islami-Nodoushan (1977)
Farrokh Amirfaryar

 

Journalist Memoirs and the Iranian Diaspora: Truth, Professional Ethics, and Objectivity between Political and Personal Narratives

Babak Elahi <bxegsl@rit.edu> teaches in the School of Communication at Rochester Institute of Technology. He holds a PhD in American literature from the University ofRochester. His work has been published in Iranian Studies; Alif; MELUSInternational Journal of Fashion Studies, and Cultural Studies. His book, The Fabric of American Realism, was published by McFarland Press in 2009. Elahi writes about American literary and cultural studies; Iranian culture, film, and literature; and the Iranian diaspora.

Andrea Hickerson <aahgpt@rit.edu> is the Director of the School of Communication at Rochester Institute of Technology. She holds a PhD in Communication from the University of Washington. Her work has appeared in Communication TheoryJournalism and Global Networks. She writes about political communication and journalism routines, especially in transnational contexts.

 

Introduction

While interviewing Jon Stewart for Voice of America upon the release of Stewart’s adaptation of journalist Maziar Bahari’s Rosewater (2014),[1] Iranian-American blogger Saman Arbabi asks, “So, in a story, like, about Iran, how do you find the truth? I mean who decides what the truth is? And how do you find it?”  Stewart admits that he doesn’t know what the truth is: “Well, I don’t. […] I have to own my inauthenticity; I’m not Iranian. So, no matter what I do, for someone who lives there, this will be a simplistic and reductive version of their life.  But hopefully, from a Western performer for a Western audience, it’s a more nuanced look into a country that we’ve called evil.”[2]  Stewart adds that for him, “the film is just a reflection of Maziar’s book, which is again an interpretation of his experience.  So within that, truth is probably a pretty elusive figure in all this.  But I think the film is true to his reflection of his experience.  And I think that’s probably as close as I can get to what I wanted to achieve.”[3]

This exchange between an Iranian blogger and an American satirist about how close an Iranian-Canadian journalist’s memoir can get to the “truth” is emblematic of the complex ways in which journalism has been transformed by social media, by the increased legitimacy of satire as alternative journalism, and by the blurring of the line between personal experience and public information.  Stewart is suggesting that average Americans are twice removed from the truth in other countries. They must settle for his cinematic interpretation of Bahari’s narrated experience. This double remove from the truth raises important questions about the function of memoirs in the broader media landscape, especially in an era of displacement and diaspora.

This paper asks how diasporic Iranian prison memoirs penned by journalists deal with “the truth” as a moral, ethical, political, and professional category.  At this intersection—of journalism, diaspora, prison narrative, and memoir—a number of important questions converge. How do memoirs function in contexts where the nature of truth is ideologically overdetermined by state propaganda on one side, and stereotypes about dissimulating non-Western cultures on the other? How is the nature of “truth” in memoirs, or the status of “objectivity” in journalism affected by the dual experience of diaspora and captivity that these journalists’ memoirs relate? What is the best way to classify certain memoirs in terms of genre when they can fall into more than one category? Specifically, we focus on two memoirs by journalists in the Iranian diaspora, Between Two Worlds by Roxana Saberi, and Rosewater by Maziar Bahari. Both books largely recall the journalists’ experiences in captivity in the period surrounding the 2009 presidential election and the “Green Movement” in which there were mass protests against what many saw as a rigged election. In both books the journalists frame their personal and professional experiences as a quest for “truth.”  This quest for the truth is not a simple uncovering of an objective reality that is already “there,” but rather, a search for the strength to speak the truth in a context that militates against it in several ways ranging from the power of propaganda in Iran to the prevailing and similarly propagandistic stereotypes about Iranians in the U.S. media.

Theorists of and practicing commentators on the memoir focus on “truth” not as “information” but as “meaning,” and this creation of meaning is self-referential (for the memoirist as author and memoirists as subject) as well as relational between memoirist and reader.  Vivian Gornick, for example, describes memoir as a set of “fragmentary memories” rather than a “transmission” of facts. These memories are not “invented” but “composed” and the reader bears some responsibility in creating “meaning” rather than consuming information.[4]  Similarly, in their guide to reading autobiography, Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson ask readers of autobiography and memoir not merely to seek “evidence,” but to ask about the nature of truth. They urge us as readers to ask, “What’s at stake for the narrator in persuading you of the truth of his story? What’s at stake historically (in the larger society) in having this text accepted as a ‘truthful’ account of a life? What difference would it make to learn that the narrative is a fabrication?”[5] Both at the level of theory in Smith and Watson’s work, and for practitioners like Gornick, then, the key to understanding “truth” in memoirs is how it functions relationally between memoirist and reader. Similarly, Philippe Lejeune defines the “autobiographical pact” between memoirist and reader as a “contract between author and reader in which the autobiographer explicitly commits himself or herself not to some impossible historical exactitude but rather to the sincere effort to come to terms with and to understand his or her own life.”[6] However, the “truth” of referential discourse in the autobiography is different from science, history, or journalism.  In autobiography, the pact covers truth “such as it appears to me, inasmuch as I know it, etc.”[7]  The difference between journalistic truth and autobiographical truth, according to Lejeune is the distinction between information and meaning, between accuracy and fidelity: “Accuracy involves information, fidelity meaning.[8]  Information is transmitted, but meaning must be constructed.

In journalism studies, as Juan Ramón Munez-Torrez has observed, “truth” is often conflated with “objectivity.”[9] Despite the increasing prominence and popularity of news satire and punditry like Jon Stewart,[10] the perception and performance of objectivity is still seen as the hallmark of “good” journalism.[11]  In the pursuit of objectivity, journalists employ strategies and routines which can shelter them from claims of bias. Strategies include reporting conflicting claims, excluding opinion, and using quotes.[12] Journalists also tend to omit personal details, instead focusing on generic, episodic facts conveying the impression of dispassionate observers.

Scholars continue to argue that the routine insistance on objectivity transcends culture and nationality. Surveys of journalists across national cultures show it is highly valued, even if journalists have different ways of defining and practicing it (Donsbach & Klett, 1993; Post, 2015; Skovsgaard et al., 2013).[13]  Drawing on Donsbach & Klett , Skovsgaard et al. identified possible measures related to objectivity: no subjectivity, balance, hard facts, and value judgments.  They argued that journalists may favor one aspect over another based on their perception of the role journalists should play in supporting democracy.  They tested how whether or not journalists perceived their role as either a “passive mirror,” “watch dog,” “public forum,” or “public mobilizer” correlated with their assessments of objectivity.  Their results suggest objectivity is “more important with role perceptions that emphasize a representative conception of democracy in which journalists inform citizens about society, whereas it is less important when they emphasize the inclusion of citizens in a public, democratic debate.”[14]

Indeed, not all believe objectivity is possible or desirable, as Michael Ryan explains.[15]  James Brian McPherson, for example, argues that the journalistic devotion to achieving “balance” in every story leads to polarization and false equivalence.[16]  Furthermore, he contends the overwhelming number of commercially successful conservative pundits on TV and radio in the United States has forced the mainstream media further to the right politically, as they attempt to appeal to and put themselves in conversation with conservative audiences.  Arguably, this has created a vacuum whereby activist and satirists like John Oliver and Trevor Noah, both free from the constraints of objectivity in their satirical genre, find resonance with audiences looking for “truth” outside the mainstream media, and questioning an uncritical “objectivity” that subjects even the facts to contrasting opinion.  Owing to their life experiences rather than their satirical stance, diasporic journalists find themselves at the center of a dynamic tension between subjectivity and objectivity.   Diasporic journalists are widely considered experts on international news because of their experiences in countries with restricted access to Western journalists; yet, their personal histories are often characterized by emotional and sometimes physical upheaval, suggestive, perhaps superficially, of experiential bias.

In contrast to the sometimes formulaic and rigid structure of hard news stories, journalists are increasingly penning memoirs and autobiographies.   Michelle Weldon speculates that a rise in journalist memoirs may be related to a general subjective turn in journalism coinciding with the popularity of social media and blogs.[17] Weldon, who conducts workshops for journalists looking to write memoirs reminds journalists not to stray from basic facts.  “The urge to write a personal story cannot eclipse the need to fully report,” she advises.[18]  Analyzing memoirs and interviews with war correspondents, Howard Tumber and Michael Webster probed for details; Weldon’s notes are typically accounted for in the journalist-memoir genre, namely the motivations and sentiments behind journalists’ chosen occupation.  Journalists often articulate an adventurous spirit and the desire to “bear witness.” The authors further observed that journalists’ “aspirations to report truthfully are couched in language of objectivity.”[19] Pointing to Tuchman’s conceptualization of objectivity as a “strategic ritual,”[20] Tumber and Webster suggest some journalists stress balancing differing viewpoints almost to the point of absurdity. They write, for example, “Inside a military unit as an embed, it is hard to imagine how the inescapable reliance on the limited sources available could even approximate to objectivity.”[21]  In contrast to the war correspondents, historically, African American journalists in the U.S. used their memoirs to counter stereotypes and challenge dominant narratives in the mainstream press.  Calvin Hall suggests these memoirs are born out of the tradition of slave narratives, and that they provided a space for marginalized African American journalists to “challenge the status quo” and describe the institutional racism they faced on the job.[22]  In his analysis of four autobiographies of African American journalists, Hall argues each functions as a “manifesto” or a “combative document whose purpose is to allow its subject to assert him- or herself in the locale of the universal subject.”[23]  Theoretically, Hall draws heavily on Gigi Durham’s work and her argument for using standpoint theory as a counterpoint to objectivity.  Durham argues objectivity is a form of “epistemic relativism” such that the norms associated with the practice ignore and perpetuate socio-cultural inequities by not acknowledging the marginalized standpoint of minority groups.[24] Hall extends Durham to journalistic memoirs and notes how in each of the memoirs he studied, the journalists make a conscious “statement” about the “complexities of being black in America.”[25]  In other words, writers foreground their standpoint, their difference and opposition to mainstream practice, explicitly in their work.

Whether or not diasporic journalists working in mainstream media would articulate a similar stance to the satirist, the war reporter or African American reporters is unknown.  On the one hand, journalists in diaspora are extreme outsiders, marginalized by two cultures, not one. They occupy a liminal space.  At the same time, journalists living in diaspora are privileged by their ability to pass between cultures. Diasporic journalists working in mainstream media are successful because of their personal histories, not despite them. So, then, what happens when diasporic journalists relay their personal histories in memoirs? Stéphane Dufoix defines diaspora as an “analytical framework that takes into account the structuring of the collective experience abroad based on the link maintained with the referent-origin and the community stance this creates.”[26] Much of the literature on the Iranian diaspora focuses on life-writing, but not specifically on journalist memoirs, even though many of the best known Iranian writers in the West have worked as journalists, including Tara Bahrampour, Roya Hakkakian, and Azadeh Moaveni, to name but a few.

A number of articles and special issues have been published since the mid-2000s focusing on Iranian diasporic memoir, though not always explicitly identifying the writers as journalists by training, nor considering the implications of such memoirs being penned by journalists.[27]  More recently, Nima Naghibi builds on this earlier work, broadening its scope to address other media, including documentary film and social media as forums for self-narration.  The critical discourse seems to have shifted away from questions of departure to those of return, and from the affective mode of nostalgia to that of engagement.  Babak Elahi and Persis Karim gesture towards this shift, suggesting that diasporic Iranian writers and artists view their own “work, and praxis as related to the future of Iran.”[28]  Naghibi makes a similar case by contrasting memoirists who remain fixated on the individual memoirist’s nostalgia for a lost childhood with other writers who challenge their readers to bear witness to violations of human rights. While we focus on a very specific sub-genre—the journalist prison memoirs—we see Naghibi’s framing of the question useful: documentary writing negotiates the nostalgic memorializing of the Persian prerevolutionary past with the act of witnessing the present in Iran and the United States towards the overall goal of testifying, allowing for empathy through a form of transmitted affect.[29] Ervand Abrahamian focuses not on memoirs, per se, but on a variety of forms that forced confessions took in Iran, ranging from written recantations to kangaroo courts to videotaped and televised self-recriminations. Nevertheless, we find his concepts useful in analyzing Saberi and Bahari’s work.  However, we wish to narrow the focus even further on diasporic prison memoir, a subgenre Naghibi also discusses.

For example, among the forms confessions took in Iran, Abrahamian includes the “mea culpa memoirs.”[30]  Indeed, Saberi references Abrahamian in the Epilogue to her memoir, saying that in a conversation with the scholar, he tells her that Iranian interrogators force prisoners to write confessions out in their own words (like a memoir) so that these are more believable when released to the press.[31] If forced confessions can be called mea culpa memoirs, perhaps the memoirs written by Iranian journalists who were held and then released based partly on such confessions might be called mea innocentia memoirs or memoirs of political absolution—a journalist asking absolution from his readers for the sin of having made false confessions, a rhetorical stance similar to the apologia. At the same time, whether intended on the part of the authors or not, these memoirs also function as challenges to Iranian propaganda about journalism as a form of espionage.  They specifically address the question of why the memoirist lied to gain his or her freedom, and how the memoir we are reading is an attempt to redeem the author’s personal, political, and professional ethos by telling the truth about the lies they’ve had to tell to save themselves. The memoirist’s central motive becomes the journey from falsehood to fact. By focusing on Saberi and Bahari, we hope to tease out this narrative structure of memoirs of political absolution or mea innocentia statements: the struggle to regain the truth from the political necessity to lie.  Put more formally and in conversation with the previous literature we summarized relating to the genres of journalism, memoir, and journalistic-memoir, we ask: how does the process of meaning-making rather than information-reporting in memoir and journalism affect our understanding of Iranian diasporic prison memoirs?

 

Analysis

At the beginning of her captivity, Saberi is coerced into a false confession that she is a spy funneling information to an outside—presumably American—contact, causing her to waiver on both professional ethics and personal morality. Hoping that once released she will be free to set the record straight and vindicate anyone she might have implicated, she succumbs to pressure:

It was then that I came to a terrible realization: The truth meant nothing here. Only lies could save my family and me. My only way out was to admit to a crime I did not commit and to ask for forgiveness. … I could always, like many before me, recant my lies once I was freed.[32]

However, she soon realizes lies lead to more lies, and might ultimately hurt both herself and others.  In a concise Orwellian equation, Saberi sums up how her axiology of truthtelling was turned upside down by the trauma of imprisonment: “In sum: Truth = Prison.  Lies = Freedom.”[33]  The memoir can be read as Saberi’s attempt to turn this formula right side up into the adage, “the truth shall set you free.”  In fact, about half way through the memoir, after witnessing the courage of some of her fellow prisoners who refuse to sign false confessions, she redefines “freedom” as spiritual rather than physical. Saberi seeks religious (Biblical as well as Koranic), cultural, political, and professional paths back to truth, but what ultimately persuades her is the example of fellow prisoners who refuse to give false confessions.  Because the voices of fellow prisoners guide her to the truth, her narrative can be characterized by what Naghibi calls transmitted affect—a function of testiminio that allows the memoirist to speak for the voiceless, in this case Iranian women in prison who do not have the platform on which to speak that Saberi does. In this sense, Saberi’s memoir defines journalism as a balance between objectivity and advocacy, and it is in that overlap where she finds “truth.”[34]

One of Saberi’s touchstones for the value of truth is religion.  She turns to “God,” an entity she defines in a distinctly agnostic way as “a Higher Power to which all major religions pointed in one way or another.”[35] She even asks explicitly for dispensation to deceive:  “God, I asked for help, but you did not rescue me. And if you don’t save me, who will? I have no choice left but to lie for my life.”[36] The example of at least one of her fellow prisoners is distinctly Christian;[37] Saberi explicitly quotes from Matthew 6:31,[38] emphasizing trust in God, and the memoir itself might be read as an instantiation of the Biblical adage from John 8:32, “the truth shall set you free.” Much later in the memoir, she balances these agnostic or Christian religious frameworks for truth with a specifically Koranic axiology.  In response to a question from the judge in her case, she says, “I recanted [the false confession] after I realized it is better to tell the truth late than never, and the Koran told me to tell the truth because even if you suffer, in the end you will prevail.”[39]  Clearly, then, one way that Saberi negotiates the truth is through appeals to religious belief and scriptural doctrine.

In addition to religion, Saberi also turns to culture to contextualize her negotiation of falsehood and truth.  First, she points to taqīya,[40] or “dissimulation,” which she associates with Shiism. This form of cultural discourse “allowed and even encouraged Shiites to conceal their faith to protect their property or themselves.”[41]  Secondly, she links this Shiite form of strategic dissimulation to something that pre-dates and transcends Islamic influence: the practice of tā’rof, which Saberi describes as “a complex system of formalized curtesy—which could often make social interactions seem insincere, for example, when a shopkeeper refused payment although he actually expected it.”[42] As one friend tells her, “lying was not only expedient but also often necessary for survival in the Islamic Republic.” [43]  Taqīya and tā’rof, however, are balanced with Saberi’s reference to everyday Iranian wisdom that values principled honesty: “lies were harder to remember than the truth.  As the Iranian saying went, Durugh-gu kam hâfezeh ast, ‘The liar has a short memory.’”[44] Thus, Saberi finds a tension in Iranian culture between truth and dissimulation.

At the political level, Saberi identifies a moral dilemma in Iranian culture between strategic deception and principled veracity. She avers that like “people all over the world, Iranians often felt compelled to tell lies to get out of danger.”[45] Interestingly, this seems to challenge the stereotype that Iranians or Middle Easterners are particularly prone to mendacity.  She speculates that for Iranians duplicity is one of the bitter fruits of “various authoritarian regimes.”[46] As some “cynically claimed,” Iranians were “right to spin tales because their country’s rulers themselves were so adept at it.”[47]  Thus, Saberi explains that she lied under pressure as a function of Iran’s widespread culture of deception.

The moral dilemma between strategic deception and principled truth-telling is complicated by another ethical conflict: the erosion of journalistic truth in Iran. In Iran, reporters must find ways around the regime’s regulations.  This set of expectations around censorship and self-censorship rejiggers Saberi’s journalistic ethics, including notions of truth and objectivity: “It was then I understood that to report in the Islamic Republic, I would have to balance the expectations of the regime, my employer, interviewees, and my own conscience to do my job.”[48]  Rather than relying on her formal training in the West, Saberi learns from local Iranian journalists who “had become experts at … working within the regime’s often arbitrary and unclear boundaries, while still offering a measure of serious discussion and criticism through their work.”[49]  Here, again, the journalist’s commitment to the truth is replaced with a negotiation between the regime, her professional “conscience,” and her sources—interviewees. The value of the truth becomes less clear.

Ultimately, Saberi’s “truth” comes neither through religious morality, nor in the nuances of culture, nor out of political expediency, and not even from journalistic ethos, but, rather, through solidarity with fellow prisoners—a dialogic truth or truth as social justice.  Through the example of others Saberi begins to realize that she can peak truth to power: “The women I had met over the previous several days defied their interrogators demands to lie, while I had abided by many orders that were in conflict with my conscience.”[50]  One of these new friends, Nargess, tells Saberi “I am glad I didn’t succumb to these people’s threats to tell lies.”[51]  It is these appeals to the axiology of truth that persuade Saberi to change tack from dissimulation to veracity, with the exception of one white lie that she explains will secure her freedom while retaining her integrity.

By the end of the memoir, she sees the truth not only as the measure of her own salvation, but also as the greatest weapon against injustice, and it is here perhaps that the reader is pulled in to sign Saberi’s autobiographical pact, if you will—to reach the “truth” of Saberi’s memoir as the result of meaning-making.  As she prepares for one of her many speaking engagements after her release she concludes her memoir by addressing the reader more directly and highlighting the significance and power of the “truth:”

Tonight I will speak freely, hoping to give a voice to the many Saras, Faribas, and Mahshids who are struggling to achieve their most basic rights. From them, I have learned that in the dark, there is light, and that though there will always be those who suffer, eventually the truth will prevail.[52]

This statement, coming as it does in a post-script in which she—now on a book tour where she literally tells her truth—echoes her fellow prisoners’ advocacy for truth-telling. Saberi embraces the truth not so much as a professional value, but something that transcends her profession, or her culture, or political expediency. She embraces truth as a way to give voice to those who were voiceless—the cellmates who led her back to the truth. We, as readers, are signaled to participate in that purpose of transmitted affect.

However, there is a coda here that complicates the situation somewhat.  During her final appeal, Saberi complicates truth’s triumph by describing how one final tactical lie helped her protect a group with whom she had worked.  When Saberi’s boyfriend, Kurdish filmmaker Bahman Ghobadi, tells her that the “world knows that this regime tells lies,” and her lawyers urge her to admit to and apologize for the lesser crime of unwittingly copying one classified document, she opts to go along with this white lie, justifying it to herself and her readers by saying that this would protect the moderate Iranians at the Center for Strategic Research where she obtained the documents.[53] When the prosecutor asks who gave her permission to copy the classified document, she once again begins to question the truth:

My mind began to spin. I didn’t want to say that employees at the center let me copy materials because even though I didn’t think this report was classified, if it really was, I didn’t want to get anyone there in trouble. Not only was the center filled with moderates, but hard-liners had also accused one of its directors of espionage in 2007, though he was later given a suspended sentence for a lesser charge and resumed his work there. ‘No one told me,’ I said. ‘I copied it myself…out of curiosity.’[54]

Thus, the line between falsehood and the truth is blurred with one last nuance. Nevertheless, this exception is still in the service of solidarity with others who share her cause.

Maziar Bahari’s prison narrative also hinges on negotiations of truth and falsehood.  An Iranian-Canadian journalist and filmmaker working for Newsweek, Bahari was arrested by Iranian authorities in June 2009 on charges of espionage and incitement of anti-Islamic and anti-government agitation following Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s re-election to President.  He was tortured for 118 days in an attempt to extract a false confession linking him to American intelligence.  His interrogator, whom he nicknames Rosewater because of his sickly-sweet cologne, subjects Bahari to a combination of physical and emotional abuse. On the surface, Bahari’s memoir is about how he had to lie in order to free himself from Evin Prison. However, the backdrop to this story is how Bahari views journalism as advocacy, as a set of professional principles, and as personal identity that links him to a history of activism in Iran through his family.  In the context of his captivity he must defend against his captors’ insistence that Western journalism is simply part of Western espionage.

Soon after protests broke out in the summer of 2009, Bahari began to see his journalistic role as one of advocacy, specifically as a key element of the process of democratization. Bahari describes crossing the line between reporter and protester, declaring that he “was not a reporter anymore” but “part of the people.”[55]  He views this as participating in democracy, or at least attempting to revive it in a country where it is limited by a religious judiciary and a Revolutionary Guard.  Breaching journalistic ethics was, for him and others, a matter of participating in public discourse: “Even though we were trying our best to remain professional, I know that, like me, most others were rooting for Mousavi.”[56]  Crossing from journalism into activism elides the distinction between professional and personal aims: “Unlike many stories I had covered in the past, I cared very deeply, on a personal level, about this one.”[57]  In fact, he tries to persuade his captors that his personal stake in stories about Iran could only help the Iranian people and government by providing a fairer picture of Iran to the West: “I always tried to help [Iranian officials] understand that the Iranian government was, in fact, lucky that I was working for Western media.  I knew my job. I knew my country.  And I was a patriot.  If they stopped me, I could be replaced by someone with an ax to grind against the regime.”[58]  Bahari’s blurring of journalism and advocacy seems to balance Rosewater’s blurring of journalism and espionage.

One might argue that one of the things Bahari suffers in prison is a kind of epistemological torture—that he is forced to reconsider how his job as a journalist is connected to truth or lies, how it is connected to espionage rather than democratic discourse.  According to Bahari, Rosewater saw little difference between espionage and journalism.  For Rosewater and his superiors, Bahari is conducting “media espionage,” making him a “media spy” funneling information to Iran’s enemies.[59]  In one scene, Bahari recounts a sort of distorted Socratic dialogue with Rosewater. “Maziar, what is a spy?” asks Rosewater, to which Bahari answers: “A person who passes secret information related to the national security of a country to another country.”[60] Rosewater continues the perverted Platonic inquiry, asking, “What is a journalist?”[61]  Demoralized, Bahari takes his answer farther, replying that “… a spy works secretly against the national security of a country for another government, but a journalist works openly—even if he uses secret sources—to inform the public.”[62] Rosewater turns this back around, claiming that both journalists and spies spread information, and information could harm Iran.  At this point, Bahari is not dealing with the question of “truth,” but is laying the groundwork that will allow him to return to that question later. Bahari demonstrates that the ideology and paranoid style of Iran’s hardline leaders mangle truth, democracy, and integrity.

Further complicating this epistemological torture Bahari’s growing sense that his torturer’s profession of extracting information is a twisted reflection of his own work of gathering information as a journalist.  Each has his own professional code. During one interrogation session, Bahari realizes that Rosewater follows his own set of principles, as perverse as their results might be. Overhearing Rosewater complain to his wife on the phone that he gets all the difficult cases, Bahari concludes, “Rosewater was just a man.  Despite the power he had over me, he was just a man with a job.  Like most people, his main priority was to keep his job and provide for his family.”[63] Bahari relates the importance of his own professional identity as journalist to Rosewater’s professional identity as interrogator, opening up a strategy for escape: “I knew what I had to do.  I had to allow him to be successful in that job.”[64]  In some distorted way Rosewater and Bahari are engaged in a professional transaction.  Ironically, Bahari knows that his deliverable in this professional exchange is information, but the truth or falsehood of that information is secondary to its usefulness to both parties in this transaction.  This is a negotiation of truth and lies.  According to Bahari himself: “I had to give him enough information so that he could prove to his bosses that he was making progress, but not so much information that I would harm my contacts or the people close to me.”[65]

Throughout this ordeal, Bahari is haunted by memories of his father, Akbar, and sister, Maryam, who had been tortured under the Shah and the Islamic Republic, respectively.  Thus, journalism is part of Bahari’s personal and familial identity, a legacy from his sister who tells him his writing is more important than any political action he might take.  After seeking ideological solutions to his and his country’s suffering, he realizes that such answers are elusive, and turns instead to a very personal definition of journalism, but one that also situates him in a history he can trace back to his sister and father: “The Islamic government had been brought to power by the people … like Maryam. … there was no point in blaming everything on the government; instead I should remain the person Maryam wanted me to be: a good journalist.”[66] Bahari recounts a dream in which Maryam and a second redemptive figure visit him on his most trying night in prison.  Two angelic figures approach him, embodying sisters of mercy from Leonard Cohen’s song.  On one level, this can be read in relation to Saberi’s attempts to find truth through religion, but the distinctly Catholic implications of these sisters of mercy, both with names echoing “Mary,” are much more personal. The emphasis here is not so much on religion, as it is continuity, solidarity, and what Naghibi calls transmitted affect. In his conclusion, Bahari tells us that he saw these two figures as his newborn daughter Marianna Maryam, and his deceased sister, Maryam.  Through this anecdote, Bahari places journalism in a deeply personal and familial space, embracing journalism as an identity, and voicing a politics that links his sister to his daughter.

Once Bahari realizes his detention will not be brief, he also realizes that his captors’ demands cut at the very core of his sacred familial identity as a journalist.  One of his interrogators—an official given the pilgrim’s honorific of Haj Agha—broaches this subject with Bahari.  Haj Agha sees Western media as a “vehicle used to provoke demonstrations,” demanding that Bahari exchange his identity as journalist for his freedom.  He must affirm the regime’s claims about media espionage if he wants to be free.[67]  But he begins reasoning with himself: “I thought that I could […] embellish and exaggerate his concepts so that they would sound more ridiculous.  That way, when people heard or saw the confession, they would know it was coerced.”[68]  Turning the term duplicity literal, Bahari shows himself as doubled, describing his confession with the phrase, “I heard myself saying.”[69]  He gives his captors what they want: “One characteristic of the velvet revolutions is their relation to the media.  International media pave the way for such revolutions, and without their presence, these revolutions cannot happen.”[70]  The following chapter opens with Bahari describing himself banging his head against his cell wall, self-flagellation for having “betrayed my family, my colleagues, myself.  My father.” He asks, “What had I admitted to?”[71]

Truth and lies become even more explicitly central to Bahari’s negotiation later when he compares his own situation to that of his father who was a political prisoner under the Shah in the 1950s.  The difference between their experiences is that his father’s captors were attempting to extract the truth from him, while Bahari’s captors want him to lie: “I knew that what I was facing in Evin was very different from my father’s experience in the 1950s.  My father had had concrete information about a number of individuals and their whereabouts.  The torturers wanted him to tell the truth in order to save himself.  I was being tortured to lie about myself and others to preserve the regime’s and Khamenei’s narrative about the election.”[72]  In this key narrative moment, Bahari links his experience to a longer historical trajectory, noting the difference between the current regime and previous ones in Iran.  Moreover, like his reference to his sister Maryam as a sister of mercy, this also links Bahari to his father, underscoring the personal. Like Saberi, Bahari employs a variation of distributed or transmitted affect by linking his own experience to that of his sister and his father, suggesting that tortured confessions are not limited to the Ahmadinejad era, nor even to the Islamic Republic, but were also part of the Pahlavi regime. He gives voice to the now silenced voices of his sister and his father, and invites readers to share these emotional responses to his lived truth.

 

Conclusion

Like other Iranian diasporic memoirs, and particularly the by-now identifiable sub-genre of Iranian diasporic journalist prison memoirs, Saberi and Bahari negotiate the spaces between political, professional, and personal positions.  Within the broader context of how scholars understand Iranian diasporic life writing, these prison narratives tap into the hybrid voice and transmitted affect identified by scholars ranging from Naficy to Naghibi.  By focusing on what we see as a clearly identifiable subgenre of Iranian diasporic writing—personal memoirs by journalists (some of which deal with captivity)—we hope to add a new level of understanding of Iranian diasporic writing, and situate it among equally alternative subgenres like satire in visual and social media, reflexive war correspondence, and activist African American journalist memoirs. Like these other alternatives to standard notions of objectivity and truth, Iranian diasporic journalism challenges our accepted notions of objectivity, balance, and normative journalistic ethics.  This link between the subgenre of Iranian diasporic journalist memoirs and self-conscious journalism of satirists and others can, we hope, help to illuminate a number of these alternative forms of journalistic praxis.

Thus, Bahari and Saberi do not so much use their writing of the self as an extension of activism, but rather as a negotiation of hybridity.  They practice “balance,” that ideal of journalistic ethos, pointing out flaws in American and Iranian policy, despite the fact that Iran grossly mistreated them by putting them in jail.  Being in jail and asked to confess, both reporters are confronted with the nuances of truth.  More so than Bahari, Saberi speaks of a higher, moralistic truth. Ultimately both journalists use their profession to justify their adherence to truth and demonstrate balance and alternative perspectives. For example, they put forward truth claims that are indeed negative about Iran, arguing, for example, that the Iranian government is paranoid about journalists.  Yet, they both aspire to objectivity by giving voice to officials within Iran and describing their motivations.  In these ways they are more like typical war correspondents, strategically performing objectivity. The author’s emphasis on discussing and practicing objectivity in their narrative calls to mind Skovsgaard et al.’s assertion that the more journalists are preoccupied with objectivity, the more they serve as a “passive mirror” rather than an instigator of debate. In this regard, these journalists are very different from diasporic activists working for/with other mainstream journalists.

While we have focused on two post-2009 prison memoirs, the methods we have employed here can be applied to a wider range of memoirs from the Iranian diaspora, including Tara Bahrampour’s To See and See Again (1999), Afshin Molavi’s Persian Pilgrimages (2002), Azadeh Moaveni’s Lipstick Jihad (2005), and Hooman Majd’s The Ayatollah Begs to Differ (2008), to name only a few. A brief survey of such titles reveals at least four other memoirs that explore the dilemmas of truth, objectivity, and the politics of duplicity in the context of Iranian journalism and politics.  In The Road to Democracy in Iran, Akbar Ganji, the jailed Iranian dissident and journalist, writes, “Authoritarian systems turn lying from a vice to a virtue.”[73]  Similarly, Ramita Navai, a British-Iranian journalist, writes in City of Lies, “Let’s get one thing straight: in order to live in Tehran you have to lie. Morals don’t come into it: lying in Tehran is about survival. … All these lies breed new lies, mushrooming in every crack in society.”[74] In The Lonely War, Nazila Fathi, who narrowly escaped imprisonment in Iran, reveals one of these cracks when describing her courtship with her husband, Babak Pasha, who had recently come to Iran after having grown up in San Diego, California: “Having lived in a free country, lying hadn’t become engrained in his character the way it had become a self-protection impulse in me.”[75] And in Camelia, Save Yourself by Telling the Truth, Camelia Entekhabifard writes, “Affectation and lying were the first things we learned in school, along with great caution in the questions we asked, and the answers we gave.”[76]  These editorial and observations about the prevalence of dissimulation in Iran’s public sphere raise the question of how a variety of forces impinge upon truth and lies in the context of life-writing by Iranian journalists in diaspora.  Future work on these materials could deepen our understanding of how journalists work in the context of various forms of political pressure, particularly under the paranoid style of power at work in Iran.

 

[1]Rosewater was originally published in 2011 as Then They Came for Me: A Family’s Story of Love, Captivity, and Survival.

[2]Saman Arbadi, “What Jon Stewart Learned about Iran from Rosewater,” Voice of America, 14 November 2014, www.voanews.com/media/video/what-jon-stewart-learned-about-iran-from-rosewater/2520986.html.

[3]Arbadi, “What Jon Stewart Learned…”

[4]Vivian Gornick, “Truth in Personal Narrative,” in Truth in Nonfiction: Essays, ed. David Lazar (Iowa City: U of Iowa Press, 2008), 10.

[5]Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, Reading Autobiography (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 242.

[6]Paul John Eakin, Foreword to On Autobiography, ed. Philippe Lejeune, trans. Katherine Leary (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota Press, 1989), ix.

[7]Lejuene, On Autobiography, 22.

[8] Lejuene, On Autobiography, 23.

[9]Juan Ramón Munoz-Torres, “Truth and Objectivity in Journalism: Anatomy of an Endless Misunderstanding,” Journalism Studies 13, no. 4 (2012): 566-582.

[10]Lauren Feldman, “The News about Comedy: Young Audiences, The Daily Show, and Evolving Notions of Journalism,” Journalism 8, no. 4 (2007): 406-427, 409-410.

[11]See, for example, Wolfgant Donsbach and Bettina Klett, “Subjective Objectivity: How Journalists in Four Countries Define a Key Term of Their Profession,” International Communication Gazette 51, no.1 (1993), 53-83;   Michael Schudson, “The Objectivity Norm in American Journalism,” Journalism 2, no. 2 (2001): 149-171; Merton Skovsgaard et al., “A Reality Check: How Journalists’ Role Perceptions Impact Their Implementation of the Objectivity Norm,” Journalism 14, no.1 (2012): 22-42; Gaye Tuchman, “Objectivity as Strategic Ritual,” American Journal of Sociology 77, no. 4 (1972): 660-679.

[12]See Pamela Schoemaker and Stephen Reese, Mediating the Message: Theories of Influences on Mass Media Content (White Plains, N.Y.: Longman, 2006); Tuchman, “Objectivity as Strategic Ritual.”

[13]See, for example Senja Post, “Scientific Objectivity in Journalism? How Journalists and Academics Define Objectivity, Assess Its Attainability, and Rate its Desirability,” Journalism 16, no. 6 (2015): 730-749;

Donsbach and Klett, “Subjective Objectivity;” Skovsgaard et al., “A Reality Check.”

[14]Skovsgaard, et al., “A Reality Check: How Journalists’ Role Perceptions Impact Their Implementation of the Objectivity,” 36.

[15]See Ryan’s “Journalistic Ethics, Objectivity, Existential Journalism, Standpoint Epistemology, and Public Journalism,” Journal of Mass Media Ethics 16, no. 1 (2001): 149-171.

[16]James Brian McPherson, The Conservative Resurgence of the Press: The Media’s Role in the Rise of the Right (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2008.), 11.

[17]Michelle Weldon, “Journalists and Memoir: Reporting + Memory,” Nieman Reports, Winter 2011: 20 – 23, http://niemanreports.org/articles/journalists-and-memoir-reporting-memory/.

[18]Weldon, “Journalism and Memoir,” 23.

[19]Howard Tumber and Frank Webster, Journalists Under Fire: Information War and Journalistic Practices (London: Sage, 2006), 169.

[20]Gaye Tuchman, “Objectivity as Strategic Ritual,” 660.

[21]Tumber and Webster, Journalists Under Fire, 169.

[22]Calvin L. Hall, African American Journalists: Autobiography as Memoir and  Manifesto (Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow, 2009), x.

[23]Hall, African American Journalists, xviii.

[24]Meenakshi Gigi Durham, “On the Relevance of Standpoint Epistemology to the Practice of Journalism: the Case for ‘Strong Objectivity,’” Communication Theory 8, no. 2 (1998): 117-140.

[25]Hall, African American Journalists, 11.

[26]Stéphane Dufoix, Diasporas, trans. Roger Waldinger (Berkeley: UC Press, 2008), 3.

[27]See, for example, Babak Elahi, “Translating the Self: Language and Identity in Iranian-American Women’s Memoirs,” Iranian Studies 39, no. 4 (2006) 461-481; Amy Motlagh, “Towards a Theory of Iranian American Life Writing,” MELUS 33, no. 2 (2008): 17-36; Manijeh Nasrabadi, “In Search of Iran: Resistant Melancholia in Iranian American Memoirs of Return,” Comparative Studies in South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 31, no. 2 (2011): 487-97; Marie Ostby, “De-Censoring an Iranian-American Memoir: Authorship and Synchronicity in Shahriar Madanipour’s Censoring an Iranian Love Story,” Iranian Studies 46, no. 1 (2013): 73-93.

[28]Babak Elahi and Persis Karim, “Introduction,” Comparative Studies in South Asia, Africa and the Middle East (special issue on Iranian diaspora) 3, no. 2 (2011): 386.

[29]Nima Naghibi, Women Write Iran: Nostalgia and Human Rights from the Diaspora (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016), 10, 19.

[30]Erband Abrahamian, Tortured Confessions: Prisons and Public Recantations in Modern Iran (Berkeley: UC Press, 1999), 4.

[31]Roxane Saberi, Between Two Worlds: My Life and Captivity in Iran (New York: Harper, 2010), 299.

[32]Saberi, Between Two Worlds, 58.

[33]Ibid., 168.

[34]See Naghibi, Women Write Iran, 67-8.

[35]Saberi, Between Two Worlds, 14.

[36]Ibid., 61.

[37]Ibid., 139.

[38]Ibid., 195.

[39]Ibid., 230.

[40]Abdulaziz Sachedina, Chair in Islamic Studies at George Mason University, connects taqīya to political quietism among Shiite communities living in Sunni majority countries.  He defines taqiya as “prudential concealment” or “precautionary dissimulation.” Sachedina limits the concept to the practice of not divulging one’s beliefs and practices rather than lying about specific actions. See Sachedina, “Prudential Concealment in Shi’ite Islam: A Strategy of Survival or a Principle?” Common Knowledge 16, no. 2 (2009): 223-246.

[41]Saberi, Between Two Worlds, 70.

[42]Ibid., 70.

[43]Ibid., 70.

[44]Ibid., 84.

[45]Ibid., 69.

[46]Ibid., 69.

[47]Ibid., 69.

[48]Ibid., 146.

[49]Ibid., 147.

[50]Ibid., 157.

[51]Ibid., 158.

[52]Ibid., 303.

[53]Ibid., 278.

[54]Ibid., 285.

[55]Maziar Bahari, Rosewater: A Family’s Story of Love, Captivity, and Survival (New York: Random House, 2014), 60.

[56]Ibid., 56.

[57]Ibid., 64.

[58]Ibid., 104.

[59]Ibid., 272.

[60]Ibid., 272.

[61]Ibid., 272.

[62]Ibid., 273.

[63]Bahari, Rosewater, 201.

[64]Ibid., 201.

[65]Ibid., 202-3.

[66]Ibid., 145.

[67]Bahari, Rosewater, 167.

[68]Ibid., 167.

[69]Ibid., 173.

[70]Ibid., 173.

[71]Ibid., 173.

[72]Ibid., 207.

[73]Akbar Ganji, The Road to Democracy in Iran, trans. Abbas Milani (Boston: MIT, 2008), xvii.

[74]Ramita Navai, City of Lies: Love, Sex, Death and the Search for Truth in Tehran (New York:  Public Affairs, 2014), xi.

[75]Nazila Fathi, The Lonely War: One Woman’s Account of the Struggle for Modern Iran (New York: Basic Books, 2014), 149.

[76]Camelia Entekhabifard, Camelia, Save Yourself by Telling the Truth, trans. George Mürer (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2007), 92.

Table of Contents Volume 3, Number 3

English Verso

A Special Issue Dedicated to Professor Hamid Naficy
Guest Editor: Golbarg Rekabtalaei

Introduction: Alternative Visions of Iranian Culture: A Celebration of Hamid Naficy’s Work
Golbarg Rekabtalaei

Video Sensations: The Experimental Films of Hamid Naficy
Simran Bhalla

Exilic, Diasporic, and Ethnic Media: Hamid Naficy’s Oeuvre from an International Communication Perspective
Mehdi Semati

What a Line (Drawing) Might Reveal: Hamid Naficy’s Caricatures
Michael M.J. Fischer

Through Thick and Thin: An Interview with Hamid Naficy
Kaveh Askari

Ten Theses on Iranian Cinema
Sara Saljoughi

Worlding with Images: Nexus between Art and Anthropology
Mazyar Lotfalian

Persian Reverso

Translating Foreign Sources on the Iranian Cinema into Farsi: Methodological Suggestions
Mohammad Shahba

Local Studies

The Ancient Qanat of Vazvan
Hojjat Rasouli

Literary Studies

The Persian Script and Iranian Temprament
Hamid Sahebjami

Comparing Narrative Elements of “Majnun and the Phlebotomist” in Three Masnavis
Abdol-Majid Yousefi-Nekoo

In Memoriam

Professor Ehsan Yarshater and Yarshaterian Wisdom
Mohamad Tavakoli-Targhi

Table of Contents Volume 3, Number 2

English Verso

Special issue on Foucault in Iran

Foucault and Iran Reconsidered: Revolt, Religion, and Neoliberalism
Michiel Leezenberg

French Secular Thought: Foucault and Political Spirituality
Brian Turner

Risking Prophecy in the Modern State: Foucault, Iran, and the Conduct of the
Corey McCall

Foucault and Epicureanism of the Iranian Revolution
Yadullah Shahibzadeh

What is at the heart of the dispute? Reflections on the Foucault Controversy Forty Years Later
Kevin Gray and Rida Faisal

Iranian Conditions: Metaphors of Illness in Iranian Fiction and Film
Babak Elahi

Iranian Conditions: Metaphors of Illness in Iranian Fiction and Film
Babak Elahi

In Memoriam: Heshmat Moayyad, 1927-2018
Franklin Lewis

Persian Reverso

A Thunderbolt Out of the Blue: The Iranian Revolution in Foucault’s Thought
Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi

Possibilities and Limitations in Writing the History of the Present: Foucault and the Iranian Revolution
Ata Mohamed Tabriz

Foucault’ Accounts of the Iranian Revolution in Light of Islamic Historiography
Mahdi Shafieyan

Foucault and Iran
Daniel Defert

Michael Foucault’s 1979 Interview
Farès Sassine

Variorum

The British Library’s Treasured Persian Collections
Cyrus Ala’i

Dariush Shayegan’s Philosophy Revisited: A Critique of the Cultural Identity of the Migrant
Ata Hoodashtian

Preface: Iranian Masculinities

We are pleased to present the Spring 2018 issue of Iran Namag as a special issue, and the first collection of essays, on the topic of Iranian masculinities.[1] Academic studies of Iranian men and masculinities mainly gained ground during the past decade or so, especially outside Iran, and following the global wave in masculinities studies.[2] Yet, critical discussions of masculinities were not unprecedented in Iran. Indeed, they go back at least to early twentieth century, when such debates were provoked by early Iranian women’s rights thinkers and activists, both women and men. As one of us argues elsewhere, Bibi Khanum Astarabadi’s Maʿāyib al-Rijāl (The Vices of Men), can be deemed the preliminary model of Iranian masculinities studies, on the grounds of her dealing with male privilege and its subsequent sense of entitlement among her contemporary men.[3] While The Vices of Men was never published during its author’s time and we are not exactly sure how far and long it circulated in manuscript form, its outright critical approach towards men is easily noticeable in numerous issues of several women’s periodicals published during the first decades of Iranian women’s movement.

A look at the Iranian women’s periodicals during the late Qajar and early Pahlavi eras (i.e., from the beginning of early women’s movement in Iran until its decline) shows that direct challenging and critique of men and male privilege prevailed in these periodicals.[4] Examples abound. For instance, Shukūfih, the first Iranian women’s periodical, in three issues entitled “Warning to Inconsiderate Men and Youth,” criticized men who—despite being expected by verse 34 of the Qur’anic surah al-Nisā to be “keepers, guides, and guardians of women”—become the “means to women’s wickedness, calamity, lasciviousness, and their reprehensible deeds.”[5] Dānish also allocated the first article in its second issue to a similar topic, entitled “Warning to Men and Youth,” while also addressing, in other issues, men’s “customs of taking care of one’s wife.”[6] The editorial of the fourth issue of Nāmih-yi Bānovān, written by Shahnāz Azad, disparagingly addressed men, showing her disappointment with “Tehran’s affluent men,” in reference to a previous editorial by her on the importance of men’s assisting women in creating girls’ schools. Apparently irritated with many unhelpful men, she posed a rhetorical question, all published in boldface, as the title of her new editorial: “Is the ambition of all rich men in Tehran not equal to three Zoroastrian women from Bombay, who donated their wealth of two kurur [one million] tomans to the building of an all-girls boarding school?”[7] In yet another case, Roshanak No‘dust, the founder of the periodical Piyk-i Sa‘ādat-i Nisvān, in a part of its first issue’s (1927) editorial, entitled “Statement of Purpose,” wrote: “Our journal will watch and criticize the unacceptable acts and behaviors of certain young men regarding women and will seriously pursue this matter.”[8] In the same issue, in an article entitled “Reason for Women’s Wretchedness and Its Remedy,” and in an attempt to answer the question “Why have we Iranian women so far been left behind from civilization and wandering the deserts of ignorance?,” the author alludes to the impact of “men’s reprehensible mentality and their despotic beliefs.”[9] In another article in the same issue, titled “Women in Our Society,” the author explains that “the body of our society is sick and aching” and “poverty, calamity, ignorance, and the corruption of the moral are eating us away like gangrene and threatening the people of this country to a horrible death and annihilation.” The author then identifies the main cause of this “spine-chilling disease” to be “women’s ignorance and illiteracy,” and in an attempt to respond to the question “Whose fault is it?,” s/he (unknown author) points criticism toward men, writing:

If the country’s men had not belittled and demeaned women with obstinacy and animosity to such degree; if they had not closed all the doors of knowledge and information to women; and if they had not wanted women only for self-enjoyment and for satisfying their sexual needs; had they usurped and trampled women’s legitimate rights at least according to reason and [the teachings in Islamic] shari‘a; had they not deemed women’s brains’ weight and their heads’ size the criterion for their weakness and inferiority; had they not composed the poem: “Women and dragons are better dead on the earth / better is the world that is clean of these two filthy creatures,” our time would not have been so, and our lives would not have such quality.”[10]

It appears that the most notable women’s periodicals in later periods, instead of expanding on and complicating these earlier critical interventions into the “man question,” mostly forgot that approach. This remarkable oblivion is seen, for instance, in the critically acclaimed Iranian post-revolutionary women’s periodical Zanān (Women), with Shahla Sherkat as its editor-in-chief, which remains one of the most significant women’s periodicals in Iran’s modern history. Indeed, in reviewing the first thirty-five issues of this magazine (from Feb. 1991 to July 1998), very few articles are found that directly address the topics of men and masculinity. Although, a few legal articles, particularly those written by Mehrangiz Kar, while informing female readers of certain legal issues and criticizing patriarchal laws, sometimes expose privileges that the Iranian Civil Law has disparately granted men.[11]

Masculinities of various forms are pervasive in cultures, Iranian included, and yet they often insidiously remain invisible and unmarked, mostly to men—whom Raewyn Connell rightly deems to be “in significant ways gatekeepers for gender equality.”[12] The metaphor of the invisibility of masculinity was first conceptualized more than two decades ago by renowned masculinity theorist Michael Kimmel in order to make a case for studying men and masculinities—a field which has ever since been variously known as masculinities studies, critical men and masculinities studies, and studies of men and masculinities.[13] We find the metaphor equally helpful in vindicating the acceleration of the bourgeoning research on Iranian men and masculinities. As Kimmel put it back then, regarding US masculinities,

Strange as it may sound, men are the “invisible” gender. Ubiquitous in positions of power everywhere, men are invisible to themselves. Courses on gender in the universities are populated largely by women, as if the term only applied to them. “Woman alone seems to have ‘gender’ since the category itself is defined as that aspect of social relations based on difference between the sexes in which the standard has always been man,” writes historian Thomas Lacquer. As the Chinese proverb has it, the fish are the last to discover the ocean.[14]

Not only that, men as men have often also escaped scholarly scrutiny. This has especially been the case with hegemonic forms of masculinity in a culture, that is, those modes of being, or enacting as, a man which have gained cultural ascendancy not only over femininity in general but also over other subordinated and marginalized versions of masculinity.[15] Such non-hegemonic masculinities can be constructed at any given time in a culture along the lines, for example, of race, class, ethnicity, age, sexual orientation, physical abilities, nationality, and religious identity. (And as we will see, along with discussions of hegemonic masculinity, these non-hegemonic masculinities take center stage in many of the articles contributed to this special issue.) Prior to Kimmel’s warning, another founder of men’s studies, the late US sociologist Harry Brod, had also made a strong case for the field, noting the scarcity of scholarship on men as men. In a book chapter, titled “The Case for Men’s Studies,” published in his 1987 edited volume The Making of Masculinities: The New Men’s Studies, Brod, in his attempt to “delineate” the field of men’s studies and justify the necessity of undertaking such research, drew readers’ attention to an obvious contradiction, a fundamental paradox so to speak, in human history, were we to regard it through a gendered lens. On the one hand, Brod noticed, most of what was known and recorded in human history is by and about men, implying that human history is one of men; and yet, as gendered subjects, men had not become subject to any significant thinking and analysis.[16]

In its early phase, second-wave feminism’s focus on women and femininity ironically ended up in gender becoming synonymous with women, thus also contributing to the above invisibility of masculinity. The Women’s Liberation Movement provoked immediate debates on masculinities from the very early 1970s, often in the form of discussions on “the male role.” By 1980s, and later during the 1990s, those debates were, under the influence of gender studies, largely displaced by the critical theorizing of masculinities. Thus, masculinities studies emerged as a sympathetic, multidisciplinary field to pose critical questions about men and their relationship to power and patriarchy. We would like to emphasize the word “sympathetic” since unlike what many—especially outside the academe, but unfortunately also within it—may think, masculinities studies “is many things, but one thing it is not: a rejoinder to, or repudiation of feminism.”[17] Categorically rejecting essentialist, biologically determinist, and sociobiological justifications of gendered behaviors and relations, yet by no means overlooking the role of body—in its various shapes, forms, and colors—in informing prevailing notions of gender and sexuality, masculinities studies scholars presume the constructivist theory in gender studies, therefore also deeming sex, gender, and sexuality to be socially and culturally specific. Rebuffing claims to masculinities as natural or determined traits or behaviors, such scholars understand masculine identities primarily as acts and enactments situated in a given time and place, with possible continuities and ruptures over time. Thus, in line with the its empathy with feminism, seminal to masculinities studies are attempts to clarify the connections between and among femininities and masculinities within the context of the structures of gender and sexuality or as represented in cultural productions, and how those inter- and intra-relations work to sustain any gender hegemony; in addition, they examine how such hegemony may be challenged towards promoting or constructing more democratic gender orders and relations.

To these ends, today many feminists emphasize how undertaking masculinities studies must become a part and parcel of any effective inquiry to gender and sexuality, in order to ensure more comprehensive and insightful outcomes than otherwise.[18] As Judith Gardiner has put it, “feminists need to engage masculinity studies now, because feminism can produce only partial explanations of society if it does not understand how men are shaped by masculinity.”[19] Similar arguments can be made for Iranian and Muslim masculinities, too. More than a decade ago, while referring to the emergence of masculinities studies in the West, Shahin Gerami remarked  that “in other parts of the world, feminists and women scholars and organizations are still too involved with many problems of women’s rights to divert their attention to masculinity.”[20] She deems the study of Muslim masculinities as “necessary.”[21] Distinguishing between “Islamist identity” and “Muslim identities,” Gerami defined the former as “an abstract construct applied by others” yet the latter as “concrete, contested, and differentiated identities created through individual or group agency,” warning that “Muslim societies are never monolithic as such, never religious by definition, nor are their cultures simply reducible to mere religion.”[22] According to Gerami, studying Muslim masculinities will not only help women, gender studies, and men in Muslim societies, but it also “aid[s] Western masculinity studies in going beyond self-absorption with sexuality and in further incorporating the discourse of imperialism into the mainstream of gender discourse.”[23] Aspiring similar aims in Iranian gender studies provided the primary motivation for sending out the Call for Proposals for this issue more than a year ago.

During the past two to three decades, following the global development of gender and women’s studies, many Iranian studies scholars have extensively welcomed feminist theories to the extent that research on gender, as an essential identity element, is now well established in Iranian studies. Most such research has concentrated on Iranian women; however, especially during the last decade, and along with a global thriving of studies on men and masculinities, a gradually increasing number of Iranian studies scholars have also shown interest in considering masculinity within their gendered examinations of Iranian history, culture, and literature. Still, there was no separate volume directly addressing the subject. In the past, some Iranian studies scholars, including historians Mohamad Tavakoli-Targhi and Afsaneh Najmabadi, had shown interest in addressing, and at least not ignored, masculinity alongside femininity when attending to gender in their various accounts of Iranian modernity.[24] Yet, to the best of our knowledge, the first book-length projects in Iranian studies where gender is debated with conscious awareness of the relationality of masculinities and femininities are Minoo Moallem’s Between Warrior Brother and Veiled Sister: Islamic Fundamentalism and the Cultural Politics of Patriarchy in Iran (2005) and Afsaneh Najmabadi’s Women with Mustaches and Men without Beard: Gender and Sexual Anxieties of Iranian Modernity (2005), the latter recently having been followed by Najmabadi’s monograph on transgendered subjectivities in modern Iran, titled Professing Selves: Transsexuality and Same-Sex Desire in Contemporary Iran (2016).[25] Lloyd Ridgeon’s monograph, Moral and Mysticism in Persian Sufism: A History of Sufi-Futuwwat in Iran (2010) is also noteworthy. Although not much interested in analyzing futuwwat (javanmardi [chivalry]) as a gendered discourse, Ridgeon builds on previous research to render a very valuable general survey of the field of Persian Sufi-futuwwat, thus facilitating any future research also on gendered dimensions of this institution and their ramifications for studies on modern Iranian men and masculinities.[26] These book publications have also been punctuated by several scholarly articles and book chapters on Iranian masculinities, in Persian and in English, written by scholars in various disciplines, some of whom are contributing to this special issue. Recently, elsewhere, one of the authors of this Preface, while arguing for the necessity of studying men and masculinities in Iranian women’s and gender studies, rendered an overview and an annotated bibliography of the emerging scholarship in Iranian masculinities studies as well as Islamic masculinities, until 2015.[27] Inviting scholars to join the conversation, the article also proposed a list of topics worthy of attention in Iranian men and masculinities studies, an abridged version of which we included in our Call for Papers for the current special issue. We are excited to see also some monographs, directly focused on Iranian masculinities, forthcoming or in progress in this field.[28] Iranian men and masculinities studies has certainly gained ground and is flourishing. Currently, this endeavour is mostly taking place outside Iran, which is understandable given the current restraints within Iran regarding the institutionalization of gender and women’s studies.[29]

Finally, a few words on the scope of the contributions made by the articles in this issue are in order. By zooming in on masculinity in a set of texts related to Iran and the Iranian cultures, all contributors provide novel insights about their texts and wider aspects of the Iranian history, culture, literature, and the arts, from which we would have otherwise been deprived. Two articles in particular, i.e., that by Arash Naraghi as well as the one by Junaid Jahangir and Hussein Abdullatif, by nature of their particular topic and corpus, exceed Iranian studies, claiming contributions to Islamic studies, too. Moreover, we hope these articles will also be read in line with what Connell calls “a world-centered rethinking of masculinities” as they all attempt to contribute to a “world-centred, rather than metropole-centred, domain of knowledge.”[30]

This special issue, in the familiar tradition of Iran Namag, includes articles both in Persian and English. The essays showcase a variety of topics and texts and are written from various disciplinary and interdisciplinary approaches, including in gender and sexuality studies, masculinities studies, literary studies, cultural studies, visual and film studies, cultural sociology, and Islamic studies.

The English section opens with Cameron Cross’s “The Tree Atop the Mountain: Mobad Manikan and the Elusive Promises of Masculinity.” This article illuminates the complex character of Mobad, the unfortunate king of Marv in Gurgānī’s Vis & Ramin. He exposes the inherent contradictions of masculinity and the code’s inability to deliver on the promise of its ideology. Cross’s provocative and wittily written article investigates the logic underpinning the assumption that the ideal man must perform well in matters of love and war. Cross illustrates Mobad’s character as an “enigmatic” figure with innate ironies and paradoxes. He responds to the myriad studies on Vis & Ramin that see the figure of the king as static by suggesting to read Mobad’s story through the medium of his own speech, the circumstances surrounding his actions, and the process of his demise. This way, Cross demonstrates that the certainties of the king’s ideal roles as a man, a lover, and a ruler will begin to shift. Cross’s article shines a different light on a classic work of Medieval Persian literature and is a timely contribution to a broader discussion around love and power, and their relation to the concept of masculinity.

Focusing on masculinity as a contested topic in the films of Iranian Oscar Award winning director Asghar Farhadi, Nikki Akhavan’s article “‘Prescriptive’ Masculinity?: Deception and Restraint in the Films of Asghar Farhadi,” advances an argument in the face of ongoing domestic criticisms of Farhadi’s films, whose representations of masculinity such critics have often found disconcerting in a culture where male honor often enjoys a noticeable degree of authority and respect. According to Akhavan, while the critics admit the breakdown of key social institutions such as marriage and the nuclear family, they find it especially troubling to witness inefficient men and masculinities in Farhadi’s films. Focusing on the themes of deception and collusion as the two main concepts favored by Farhadi’s critics in their analyses of his films—especially About Elly, A Separation, and The Salesman—Akhavan shows that these films explore multiple men and masculinities, yet have no interest introducing masculinity or certain types of it as a (re)solution to the damaged institution of marriage, particularly because the—often violent—assertions of masculinity are themselves a serious part of the problem.

Mahdi Tourage’s article “An Iranian Female Vampire Walks Home Alone and Disturbs Freud’s Oedipal Masculinity” discusses Anna Lily Amirpour’s debut feature film A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014), which is tagged as the first Iranian vampire feminist romance. In it, the unnamed chador-wearing vampire skateboards the streets of the Bad City at night, viciously attacking men who are abusive to women. Suggesting that the film exceeds “limited categorization as a vampire movie or a feminist art film,” Tourage argues that “masculinities are deconstructed and reconstituted as spectacle in this film, and in the process the patriarchal boundaries of pleasure are remapped and circulation of desire is destabilized.” While drawing on feminist psychoanalytic film theory, Tourage notes how “this theory leaves the specific contours of an alternative feminist counter-cinema unarticulated,” thus posing important questions: “Should a feminist counter-cinema embrace patriarchal techniques of representation or develop its own cinematic language? Can a feminist counter-cinema dismantle the visual regimes of patriarchal power relation and still remain faithful to aesthetics of visual pleasure?” In response, he argues that A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night enhances our understanding of feminist film theory by instantiating an example of a feminist counter-cinema. Significantly, the film’s exclusively Persian iconography, Tourage further argues, broadens debates within feminist film theory to include subjects whose epistemological roots extend beyond the horizons of Europe and the Americas.

Kaveh Ghobadi’s “On the Path to Manhood: Men and Masculinities in the Contemporary Kurdish Novel” examines sex, gender, and particularly the representations of hegemonic masculinity in two novels from Iranian Kurdistan: Zindexew (Nightmare) by Fatah Amiri and Siweyla (Suheila in Persian, proper female name) by Sharam Qawami. Nightmare tells a story of a new generation of Kurdish young men during the final years of the late Pahlavi’s reign. The protagonist suffers from a recurring nightmare in which he tortures people as a SAVAK intelligence officer. Set in pre- and post-revolutionary Iran, Siweyla is about a young man’s stifled enthusiasm when he falls in love with the eponymous character Siweyla. Relying on Judith Butler’s notion of gender performativity as well as on Raewyn Connell’s concept of hegemonic masculinity, Ghobadi undertakes to show the ramifications of the naturalization of the categories of “masculine” and “feminine”, while also examining patterns of hegemonic masculinity in the novels to demonstrate how this culturally ascendant masculinity “adapts itself to new conditions to guarantee men’s dominant position.” Ghobadi argues that while both novels feature innovative narrative styles and radical political standpoints as well as depict a “New Man” and a “New Woman”, they “substantially reproduce essentialist gendered subjectivities, through reinscribing a binary opposition that defines woman as man’s ‘other’.”

Taking up the issue of same-sex sensuality in Islam, in their “Homosexuality—The Emerging New Battleground in Islam,” Junaid Jahangir and Hussein Abdullatif look closely at a seminal essay by Scott Kugle entitled “Sexuality, Diversity and Ethics in the Agenda of Progressive Muslims” and its scathing critique by Mobeen Vaid, in the aftermath of the shooting at a gay bar in Orlando. This dialogue becomes a starting place for the authors to address some “misconceptions that Muslims generally have on homosexuality.” While crediting Vaid for engaging with Kugle’s article in detail, the authors criticize Vaid’s analysis, suggesting that his argument “emboldens conservative Muslim leaders to equate LGBT Muslims with Lot’s people and downplay the legitimate human need for affection, intimacy and companionship as mere urges and whims.” Through this critical intervention into Vaid’s response to Kugle’s essay, Jahangir and Abdullatif deconstruct the fourteen salient points which Vaid makes in his critique of Kugle. In response to Vaid, the authors put forward rebutting counter claims. Some of the main topics addressed concern consensus in Islam regarding same-sex relations, the issue of permanent celibacy as a test, the necessity of updating traditional jurisprudence, procreation, the Qur’anic account of Lot, the qasas (stories) literature, and the heterosexist overtones of some Qur’anic tafsir or exegesis.

In the face of the paucity of research on male sexuality in Persian literature, Claudia Yaghoobi’s article, “The Abject Outsider: The Story of Two Gay Men,” introduces three texts in which male same-sex relations are brought to the fore: Amir Soltani and Khalil Bendib’s graphic novel, Yousef and Farhad Struggling for Family Acceptance in Iran: The Story of Two Gay Men; Arsham Parsi’s memoir Exiled for Love; and For the Love of Mohammad, another memoir by Jean Beaini and Mohammad Khordadian. All three narratives deal in one way or another with the “coming out” phenomenon within the contemporary Iranian culture. In her article, Yaghoobi gives center stage to the graphic novel, while occasionally drawing on the other two memoirs and their accounts of lived experiences to support some of her arguments. She examines the narratives’ male characters in order to demonstrate how Iranian hegemonic masculinity directly feeds off the subordination of the gay masculinity. She maintains that this “subordination of gay masculinity normalizes heterosexuality while deeming homosexuality as abnormal.” By contrast, Yaghoobi foregrounds the constructive role of the religion in the novel, demonstrating how religion is not the root of the main characters’ problem. On the contrary, the authors, she posits, draw on religion, especially Islamic mysticism, to subvert heteronormative discourses about male sexuality. Finally, Yaghoobi’s article highlights the role of the unique medium used by Soltani and Bendib—that is, comics as image-text—which provides unconventional expressive power by enabling the authors to create “a combination of thoughtful images and key words” to convey their message more effectively.

Finally, in her article, “Queering the Iranian Nation: Be Like Others and Resistance to Heteronormative Nationalism,” Amy Tahani-Bidmeshki takes up the intersection of masculinity and transgendered subjectivities, which she debates through the lens of Tanaz Eshaghian’s 2008 documentary Transsexual in Iran (also known as Be Like Others). The film follows the lives of several trans Iranians, particularly Male-to-Female persons, offering “the viewer opportunities for reflection about the role of gender, sexuality, whiteness, and belonging in nation-building broadly, and in the post-1979 landscape of Iran.” Tahani-Bidmeshki employs Benedict Anderson’s concept of “imagined community” to argue that “Iranian regime’s acceptance of post-SRS trans Iranians as citizen-subjects presupposes the ‘imagined community’ of heteronormative Iran” and that it is an effort to “abolish homosexuality by ensuring a particular form of trans identity.” She builds on the works of Afsaneh Najmabadi regarding the historical roots of repression of public displays of homoeroticism since the Qajar Iran and in the modernization and nation-building processes to conclude that the visual arts from the time of Qajar paintings to the present-day form in the documentary Be Like Others highlight the tensions between the government and the Iranian polity for nation-building.

The Persian section of this special issue begins with the article “Wedding Trials of Masculinity in Iranian Fairy Tales” by Samin Espargham, Abolghasem Ghavam, and Samira Bameshki. Analyzing numerous Iranian fairy tales, the authors investigate the various types of arduous and grueling trials frequently appearing in these tales, through which men must prove their suitability, manliness, and prowess to marry the tales’ princesses. The authors analyze these tales from a structuralist viewpoint and with regard to their fundamental generic units of narrative structures, i.e., their mythemes. The trials, deemed as “trials of masculinity,” are intended to test the intelligence, physical and financial capacities as well as the courageousness of the young men involved. The frequency of these literary tests of manhood poses a series of questions such as: Why should men go through hard trials, and why should men be killed in the process? Why, in these tales, is the nobility of the suiters not significant? And finally, why do the brides and the suiters all come from different lands? To answer these questions, the authors examine myths and rites related to fertility, studying the mythemes appearing in numerous fairy tales and revealing their structural similarities. Through this comparative analysis, the authors postulate that the wedding trials in fairy tales are rooted in the myth of the “sacred marriage”—or the story of Inanna, the Sumerian goddess of love, fertility, and war (known in Akkadian as Ishtar) and the shepherd-king Dumuzi (Akkadian Tammuz), who became a god at some point, possibly through his marriage to Inanna and the fertilization of nature. According to this myth, the future king would have to be “healthy,” “strong,” and “fertile” in order to guarantee his ability to impregnate his bride. The authors conclude by posing questions for further research on the possible influence of Iranian folk literature on the conceptualization of gender, particularly masculinity, in contemporary Iranian culture.

In “Ekhrajiha I (The Outcasts I): The Role of the ‘Lāt’ Figure in the Construction of Islamic Republic’s Idealized Man,” Ali Papoli-Yazdi addresses Islamic Republic discourse’s strategic revisiting a section of the Iranian traditional culture, which was initially reviled in the wake of the Islamic Revolution—i.e., the social types of the lāt (rogue) and the lūtī (tough guy). The revisiting, Papoli-Yazdi shows, is aimed at achieving a peacetime ideal of masculinity, as opposed to the male basījī (volunteer member of state-operated militia) heroic figure of the Iraq-Iran war period. These processes of revisiting and reconstruction, Papoli-Yazdi argues, occur via Masoud Dehnamaki’s best-selling film Ekhrajiha I (The Outcasts I) (2007). Analyzing the film within the context of the Iranian “Sacred Defense” Cinema, Papoli-Yazdi first shows the evolution of the image of the basiji into the lāt in The Outcasts I; then, putting the film in the context of pre-revolutionary jāhilī movies,[31] he demonstrates how the jāhil character is also restored. This restoration, however, is deployed to redefine a mystical-popular image of the clergy, since, amidst many allegedly religious persons’ denial of the lāts, it is only the clergy characters who, as if through mystical intuition, are cognizant of the eventual transformation of the lāt figure in the battlefield. Moreover, by reviving the lāt as a redefined figure, Papoli-Yazdi argues, The Outcasts I illustrates the Islamic Republic’s ideal society, one in which the lāts and clerics, as if within a traditional neighborhood, can bond.

Goli Taraghi’s novella, In Another Place, is the focus of Amirhossein Vafa’s article, “The Predicament of Complicity with Hegemonic Masculinity in Goli Taraghi’s In Another Place,” where—drawing on Raewyn Connell’s concept of hegemonic masculinity—Vafa sheds light on a particular mode of masculinity in Taraghi’s narrative, i.e., that which becomes complicit with the hegemonic masculinity in order to benefit from what Connell deems the “patriarchal dividend.” In Another Place is a final piece in the collection of the same title that tells the story of a wealthy but unhappy businessman living with his “affluent and assertive wife” in 1998 Tehran. Discontented with the sociopolitical status quo, the novella’s male protagonist is feeling for another place. Vafa offers this character as “one of the author’s most developed male portrayals to date, as a means both to make visible and to challenge the author’s conception of urban, upper middle-class masculinities in contemporary Iran.” Vafa shows that the male protagonist fails at dissent; he concludes that the character’s failure “is in part informed by the novella’s entrapment in the binary of two opposing but completing masculinities performed by the complicit middle and upper classes and the hegemonic state apparatus.” Drawing on postcolonial feminism and masculinities theory, as advanced by such scholars as Minoo Moallem and Raewyn Connell, the author criticizes Taraghi for her feminist agenda that centers exclusively on urban, upper-middle class masculinities. This exclusive feminist agenda, Vafa maintains, is limited and elitist, “potentially informed by a ‘Western’ notion of ‘egalitarian ‘feminism’.”

Contributed by Arash Naraghi, the last article of the Persian section tackles male homosexuality in Islam. Titled “The Male Homosexuality Problematic in the Context of Contemporary Iranian Shiʿism,” the essay delves into Shiʿi jurisprudence and Qur’anic exegesis, particularly on the scripture’s narration of the story of Lot, to propose a solution for the problem of male homosexuality in Islam. First, Naraghi explores the sources of discrimination against sexual minorities within Shiʿi jurisprudence, while critically evaluating the views of some prominent contemporary Iranian Muslim scholars on homosexuality. Then, he introduces a rationalist tradition within Islamic philosophy and theology which provides a theoretical framework for approaching the problem. His proposed framework is based on two pillars: first, Ibn Rushd’s view on the relation between demonstrative reason and Shariʿa, and second, Muʿtazilites’ view on the relation between God’s nature and moral obligations. Finally, within the above framework, he suggests ways for how a devout Muslim might refute discrimination based on sexual orientation, and how Muslim communities could create a space tolerant, if not welcoming of male homosexuality.

Many of these contributors, along with other scholars interested in pursuing research on Iranian men and masculinities, will be gathering in the forthcoming Association for Iranian Studies (AIS) conference at the University of California, Irvine, during 14-17 August 2018, over four panels on “Iranian Men and Masculinities,” organized by the editors of this special issue, in order to share their research with the conference attendees. As the first collection of arguments on the topic, this special issue and the above panels are of course a starting point, which we also plan to follow with an edited volume in the near future. We will have achieved more than what we aim for if these efforts incite similar endeavours.

At the end, we would like to thank all who kindly contributed their papers for this issue as well as the anonymous reviewers and the journal’s copy editors, Susan Foster and Vahid Tolooei, for their kind help and co-operation. We are also indebted to the Iran Namag’s Editor-in-Chief, Mohamad Tavakoli-Targhi, for his assistance in preparation and publication of this issue and for his editing help.

[1]The authors would like to thank Raewyn Connell for her invaluable comments on an earlier version of this introduction.

[2]Mostafa Abedinifard, “Maʿāyib al-Rijāl va Żarūrat-i Mardānigī-Pazhūhī dar Muṭaliʿāt-i Zanān-i Iran” [The Vices of Men and the Necessity of Studying Men and Masculinities in Iranian Women’s Studies],” Iran Nameh 30, no. 3 (2015): 230-282.

[3]Abedinifard, “Maʿāyib al-Rijāl.” In 1894, an educated and well-known woman named Bībī Khānum Astarābādi was motivated by some female companions of hers to retort the male chauvinism of Ta’dīb al-Nisvān (The Education of Women), copies of which had obviously moved around and impacted some people. The Education of Women—of which there exist variant manuscripts with such titles as Ta’dīb al-Nisā’ (Educating/Disciplining Women), Sulūk va Sīrat-i Zan (Women’s Conduct), Ādāb-i Moʿāshirat-i Nisvān (Rules of Etiquette for Women), and Nasāyih-i Mushfiqānah (Affectionate Pieces of Advice)—was written by a male upper-class author who chose and apparently managed to remain anonymous among his contemporaries. Up until recently, scholars had no conjectures about the author’s identity. Lately, it has been argued that the text was most probably written by Khānlar Mirzā Ehtishām al-Dawlah (?-1287/1861), the 17th son of Prince Abbās Mirzā Nāyib al-Salṭanah (1168/1789-1212/1833). As evidenced by the manuscript variants, it is likely that the author chose to remain unknown lest he be reproached by women. The text continued to be re-inscribed, with minor changes, by other men who welcomed Khanlar Mirzā’s message yet who likewise preferred to be nameless. Organized in ten short thematic chapters, The Education of Women addresses and prompts men to patrol and discipline the behavior of their daughters and wives. The author’s conservative and often misogynous advice, frequently garrisoned with references to the Qur’an and hadith, ranges from counsel on women’s unquestionable obedience to their men to instructions on table etiquette and sharing a bed. Bibi Khānum, being a pro-women rights activist, and having personally tasted the patriarchal oppression in her marital relationship, complied with her friends’ request. She responded by penning a diatribe she titled as Maʿāyib al-Rijāl, i.e., The Vices of Men, also known to be the first satirical piece written by an Iranian woman. As opposed to The Education of Women, Bibi Khanum’s book is framed and informed by autobiographical information (e.g., she reveals her painful experience of bearing with her husband’s contracting their female servant as a maid/concubine). In her rejoinder, Bibi Khanum first paraphrases and criticizes the main arguments of her opponent, and then continues by expounding on what she believes to be the typical vices of men in her time. For Persian versions of both texts, see Javadi, Hasan, Manizheh Marʿashi, and Simin Shekarlu, eds. Ruyārūʼi-e Zan va Mard dar Asr-i Qājār: Du Risālah-yi Taʼdīb al-Nisvān va Maʿāyib al-Rijāl (Chicago: The Historical Society of Iranian Women (Kānūn-i Pazhūhish-i Tārīkh-i Zanān-i Irān), 1992). See also Afsaneh Najmabadi, Maʿāyib al-Rijāl: Vices of Men (Chicago: 1992). For English translations of both texts, with commentary, see The Education of Women & The Vices of Men: Two Qajar Tracts, trans. Hasan Javadi and Willem Floor (Syracuse, New York: Syracuse University Press, 2010).

[4]For a classical account on the women’s rights movement in Iran, which also considers men’s contributions, see Eliz Sanasarian, The Women’s Rights Movement in Iran (New York: Praeger, 1982).

[5]Abdulhossein Navayee et al., eds., Shukūfih & Dānish: First Iranian Women’s Journals (Tehran: National Library of the Islamic Republic of Iran, 1998), quote on 152.

[6]Navayee et al., Shukūfih & Dānish, 305-306, 330.

[7]Alireza Tayrani et al., eds., Women’s Periodicals (Tehran: Library, Museum and Document Center of Iran Parliament, n.d.), DVD.

[8]Banafsheh Masoudi and Naser Mohajer, eds., Piyk-i Sa‘ādat-i Nisvān (Berkeley, CA: Noqteh, 1390/2011), quote on 2.

[9]Masoudi and Mohajer, Piyk-i Sa‘ādat-i Nisvān, 21-22.

[10]Masoudi and Mohajer, Piyk-i Sa‘ādat-i Nisvān, 27-28. For a more detailed discussion and further examples, see Abedinifard, “Maʿāyib al-Rijāl.”

[11]For a digitized archive of many issues of Zanān, see www.iran-archive.com/start/258.

[12]Raewyn Connell, “Change Among the Gatekeepers: Men, Masculinities, and Gender Equality in the Global Arena,” Signs 30, no. 3 (2005): 1801–1825, quote on 1802.

[13]R. W. Connell, Jeff Hearn, and Michael Kimmel, eds., Handbook of Studies on Men and Masculinities (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2005); David Buchbinder, Studying Men and Masculinities (London: Routledge, 2013).

[14]Michael Kimmel, “Invisible Masculinity,” Society 3, no. 6 (1993): 28-35; quote on 29.

[15]It is no exaggeration to regard the theory of “hegemonic masculinity” as the most influential theory in the field of masculinities studies so far. For an overview of this theory, some criticisms of it, the main theorist’s response to them, and the theory’s probable prospects in gender studies in the future, see R. W. Connell and James Messerschmidt, “Hegemonic Masculinity: Rethinking the Concept,” Gender and Society 19, no. 6 (2005): 829-859. For a more recent article by Connell on hegemony and masculinity in relation to imperialism and neoliberal global power, see Raewyn Connell, “Masculinities in Global Perspective: Hegemony, Contestation, and Changing Structures of Power,” Theory & Society 45, no. 4 (2016): 303–318.

 

 

[16]Harry Brod, “The Case for Men’s Studies,” in The Making of Masculinities: The New Men’s Studies, ed. Harry Brod (Boston: Allen and Unwin, 1987), 39-62. Commenting on an earlier version of this preface, Raewyn Connell remarks: “There was an older European questioning of masculinity, as well as femininity, which Harry Brod misses—it’s very clear in the work of Freud and Adler.”

[17]Helena Gurfinkel, “Masculinity Studies: What It Is and Why Would a Feminist Care?”

Masculinity Studies: What Is It, and Why Would a Feminist Care?

For the interplay of feminist theory and masculinities theory, see especially, Nancy Dowd, The Man Question: Male Subordination and Privilege (New York: New York University Press, 2010).

[18]See, for example, Dowd, The Man Question; Judith K. Gardiner, ed., Masculinity Studies and Feminist Theory: New Directions (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002); Peter F. Murphy, ed., Feminism and Masculinities (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).

[19]Judith K. Gardiner, “Introduction,” in Masculinity Studies and Feminist Theory: New Directions, ed. J. K. Gardiner (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 1-29; quote on 9.

[20]Shahin Gerami, “Mullahs, Martyrs, and Men: Conceptualizing Masculinity in the Islamic Republic of Iran,” Men and Masculinities 5, no. 3 (2005), 257–74, quote on 258.

[21]Shahin Gerami, “Islamist Masculinity and Muslim Masculinities,” in Handbook of Studies on Men and Masculinities, eds. M. Kimmel, J. Hearn and R. W. Connell (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2005), 448–57, quote on 456.

[22]Gerami, “Islamist Masculinity,” 448.

[23]Gerami, “Islamist Masculinity,” 456.

[24]For some such works by these authors, see Afsaneh Najmabadi, “Reading ‘Wiles of Women’ Stories as Fictions of Masculinity,” in Mai Ghoussoub and Emma Sinclair-Webb, eds., Imagined Masculinities: Male Identity and Culture in the Modern Middle East (London: Saqi Books, 2000), 147-68; Afsaneh Najmabadi, The Story of the Daughters of Quchan: Gender and National Memory in Iranian History (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1998); Afsaneh Najmabadi, “Naqsh-i Zan bar Matn-i Mashrutah,” Nimeye Digar 2, no. 3 (1997): 72-121; Afsaneh Najmabadi, “The Erotic Vaṭan [Homeland] as Beloved and Mother: To Love, To Possess, and To Protect,” Comparative Studies of Society and History 39, no. 3 (1997): 442-67; Afsaneh Najmabadi, “Digarguni-i Zan va Mard dar Zaban-i Mashrutiyat,” Nimeye Digar 2, no. 2 (1995): 72-105; Afsaneh Najmabadi, “Zanha-yi Millat: Women or Wives of the Nation?,” Iranian Studies 26, no. 1/2 (1993): 51-71; Mohamad Tavakoli-Targhi, Refashioning Iran: Orientalism, Occidentalism and Historiography (Hampshire: Palgrave, 2001); Mohamad Tavakoli-Targhi, “Going Public: Patriotic and Matriotic Homeland in Iranian Nationalist Discourses,” Strategies: Journal of Theory, Culture, and Politics 13, no. 2 (2000): 175-200; Mohamad Tavakoli-Targhi, “Nigaran-i Zan-i Farang,” Nimeye Digar 2, no. 3 (1997): 3-71; Mohamad Tavakli-Targhi, “Zani Bud, Zani Nabud: Bazkhani-yi Vujuhb-i Niqab va Mafasid-i Sufur,” Nimeye Digar 14 (Spring 1991): 77-110; Mohamad Tavakoli-Targhi, “Imagining Western Women: Occidentalism and Euro-Eroticism,” Radical America 24, no. 3 (1990): 73-87.

[25]See, respectively, Minoo Moallem, Between Warrior Brother and Veiled Sister: Islamic Fundamentalism and the Politics of Patriarchy in Iran (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005); Afsaneh Najmabadi, Women with Mustaches and Men without Beards: Gender and Sexual Anxieties of Iranian Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005); Afsaneh Najmabadi, Professing Selves: Transsexuality and Same-Sex Desire in Contemporary Iran (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014).

[26]See Lloyd Ridgeon, Morals and Mysticism in Persian Sufism: A History of Sufi-Futuwwat in Iran (London: Routledge, 2010). Ridgeon has also brought together English translations of three medieval Persian futuwwat-nameh texts (books on futuwwat/javanmardi [chivalry]), with a detailed introduction to the book, and with each text being preceded by a separate introduction. See Lloyd Ridgeon, Jawanmardi: A Sufi Code of Honour (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011).

[27]See Mostafa Abedinifard, “Maʿāyib al-Rijāl.” Since that article was published, more articles and book chapters have appeared on Iranian masculinities. Some include Christopher Gow, “Real Men: Representations of Masculinity in Iranian Cinema,” Asian Cinema 27, no. 2 (2016): 165–76; Nagihan Haliloğlu, “Activist, Professional, Family Man: Masculinities in Marjane Satrapi’s Work,” in Uwe Bläsing, Victoria Arakelova, Matthias Weinreich, eds., Studies on Iran and The Caucasus: In Honour of Garnik Asatrian (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 495-506; Amy Motlagh, “What Kind of Crisis?: Marriage and Masculinity in Contemporary Iranian Cinema,” in Kristin Celello and Hanan Kholoussy, eds., Domestic Tensions, National Anxieties: Global Perspectives on Marriage, Crisis, and Nation (New York, NY: Oxford University press, 2016), 192-211; Nacim Pak-Shiraz, “Shooting the Isolation and Marginality of Masculinities in Iranian Cinema,” Iranian Studies 50, no. 6 (2017): 945-967; Sivan Balslev, “Population Crisis, Marriage Reform and the Regulation of Male Sexuality in Interwar Iran,” British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 45, no. 2 (2018): 121-137; Sivan Balslev, “Dressed for Success: Hegemonic Masculinity, Elite Men and Westernisation in Iran, c. 1900–40,” Gender & History 26, no. 3 (2014): 545-564; Sivan Balslev, “Gendering the Nation: Masculinity and Nationalism in Iran during the Constitutional Revolution,” in Meir Litvak, ed., Constructing Nationalism in Iran: From the Qajars to the Islamic Republic (London: Routledge, 2017), 68-85.

[28]Minoo Moallem has been working on a monograph on masculinities in Iran-Iraq War movies. A chapter of hers is forthcoming in 2019: Minoo Moallem, “Staging Masculinity in Iran-Iraq War Movies,” in Aaron Magnan-Park, Gina Marchetti, and Tan See-Kam, eds., Handbook on Asian Cinema. Sivan Balslev’s monograph Iranian Masculinities: Gender and Sexualities in Late Qajar and Early Pahlavi Iran is under contract with Cambridge University Press. And Wendy DeSouza’s book Unveiling Men: The Emergence of Modern Masculinity in Twentieth-Century Iran is forthcoming by Syracuse University Press.

[30]Raewyn Connell, “Margin Becoming Centre: For a World-centred Rethinking of Masculinities,” NORMA: International Journal for Masculinity Studies 9, no. 4 (2014): 217-231.

[31]A sub-genre of the “tough guy” genre in prerevolutionary Iranian cinema. See Hamid Naficy, “Males, Masculinity, and Power: The Tough-Guy Movie Genre and Its Evolution,” in A Social History of Iranian Cinema, vol. 2 (Durham: Duke University Press), 261–324.

 

Table of Contents

English Verso

On Abbas Kiarostam

Transcending Cinema: Kiarostami’s Approach to Filmmaking
Maryam Ghorbankarimi

Trajectory of Smooth Female Spaces within the Striated Masculine in Kiarostami’s Ten
Pouneh Saeedi

Waves of Stasis: Photographic Tendency and Cinematic Kindness in Kiarostami’s Five (Dedicated to Ozu)
Donna Honarpisheh

Kiarostami and Love on the Iranian Screen
Proshot Kalami

On the Borders of Documentary and Fiction in Kiarostami’s Homework and Close-Up
Persheng Sadegh-Vaziri

Abbas Kiarostami’s “Lessons of Darkness”: Affect, Non-Representation, and Becoming-Imperceptible
Tanya Shilina-Conte

Variorum

An Approach to Humour in Persian Literature
Homa Katouzian

Transition from Orient to the Third World: Sketch of a Phenomenological Study of a Historical Fall
Tanya Shilina-Conte

 

Persian Reverso

On Abbas Kiarostami

Introduction
Khatereh Sheibani

Altering Perspectives: The Documentary and Fictional Components in Abbas Kiarostami’s Works
Saeed Aghighi

The Contradictions of Unactoricity: Actoricity in Kiarostami’s Films
Robert Safarian

Abbas and ‘his’ Bench: A Short Memoir on Abbas Kiarostami’s Latest Film in China
Hossein Khandan

Wind: Serentdipity and Cinephilia
Negar Mottahedeh

Persian Variorum

Ideological Agendas in Historiography of Early Safavid Era: Study of Tarikh-i Iran Dar Asr-i Safavi
Behzad Karimi

In Praise of Form and Deprecation Content: critiquing Rastakhiz- Kalamat
Hamid Sahebjami

Table of Contents

English Verso

My Kurdish Brother, Amir Hassanpour
Thomas M. Ricks

The Raven of Separation: Arabic Poetic Topoi and the Persian Courtly Tradition
Asghar Seyed-Gohrab

Interiority and the City Center: Locating the Gulistan Harem During Nassir al-Dīn Shah’s Reign
Leila Pourtavaf

Arānī, Kasravī and Demonic Irrationality: Discourses of Reason and Scientific Explanation
Arshavez Mozafari

 

Persian Reverso

Namag: A Concise Etymology and Semantic
Nima Jamali

Culture and Democracy
Ali Mirsepasi

The Western Problematic and the Idea of Everyday Culture and Life in the Post-Revolutionary Iran
Mohammad Reza’i and Hadi Aqajanzadeh

Divorce as Seen through Women’s Cinematic Lens
Nasrin Rahimieh

European Racial Thought, Iranian Nationalists, and Theories of Arab Invasion and Decline
Reza Zia-Ebrahimi

Kamal Khojandi, Reza Quli Khan Hedayat, and Muhammad Hashim Asef Rustam al-Hukama
Jalil Nozari

Bloodletting Practices in the Iranian History of Medicine
Mohsen Farsani

The Seven Cities of Love
Hamid Sahebjami

My Kurdish Brother, Amir Hassanpour

Amir. Your name is so simple. “The Commander.” But, in fact, it’s more complicated than that. Your father changed it from Omar to Amir knowing that you would be in a Shi’a land in Tehran for the last years of your high school. In fact, there was nothing simple about you at all.

Born on November 17, 1943 in Mahabad, Iran, you reached your seventy-third birthday this year, dear friend, and your life has been full of accomplishment. We all sat at your hospital bed standing watch as you slipped away in your long struggle with cancer, eyes closed and breathing heavy though stable and calm through it all. Then, at 5:49 on Saturday morning on June 24 of this year, you quietly left us weeping by your side motionless with blinding grief and shaken by the thought that you were no longer on this planet. Peace in Paradise. Oh yes, I know how you would dislike these words, but you know that the Persian word, pardis, is the root of our English word. When I first met you, I heard your name was “Kak Amir,” a Kurdish version. Then, as time went on, we all began to call you “Amir Khan,” in a reference to your faux military status which you scorned. You got even with me by naming me, a Peace Corps volunteer of all things, “Tom Khan.”

I met you on one of those frigid Zagros mountain days in December 1964. You were comfortably ensconced in your home reading, just down the alleyway from the bazaar. Bob Abramson, the other Peace Corps English teacher, led me to that heavy wooden door of your house and banged the knocker loudly. We had tea and cookies that day according to polite society customs, just Bob, you and me. We came to your house a few more times again, but usually met in our second-floor apartment in the old bank building on the main street.  After introductions and brief mention about what I was going to do in Mahabad, you corrected me about the town’s name. “Tom, we actually call this place “Cool Spring” or soujboolak in Kurdish.”  This was just the beginning of the avalanche of information on a myriad of subjects from Amir.

From these early days of our brotherhood, there began a long list of historical and archaeological   discussions about the writings of British, Australian, French, and Italian historians aligned with the Communist Party or from Socialist activist backgrounds, including your all-time favorite work, Man Makes Himself, by the Australian-born Marxist scholar, V. Gordon Childe. We spoke about that and several other of Childe’s writings on Labor and Civilization. All these and more were new to me though I had studied Tomistic philosophy and French literature at Notre Dame in Indiana. You had asked me if I had read much fiction and I had said some American and French as school requirements. I had then asked you the same question, and you said very little except in school. And so, for the next fifty-two years, we discussed a range of topics in history, anthropology, philosophy, archaeology, and in Marxism as well as any number of social sciences, debating their virtues and failings. Religion did not figure high at all in these discourses so when I told you that I had been in Mashhad for the previous eight months, and that some of my Persian friends took to calling me “Mashti Tom,” you had looked disapprovingly on such mirth, and announced that for you, I was only “Tom Khan.” We never spoke again about Mashhad or pilgrimage sites focusing instead on civilizations, dialectical materialism and class struggle in nearly all that we read the years I spent in Mahabad. We also talked a lot about socialism and the communist party of Iran, the Tudeh Party.

Bob was amused by our exchanges and debates, interjecting his questions and comments about the present Kurdish conditions, society and economy, and the doings of the Pahlavis in Tehran and the countryside or rusta. Together, Bob and I recalled the beginnings of Peace Corps, our training programs in Oregon and Michigan respectively, and our own unpreparedness for anything Iranian, much less Kurdish. We both had had our brief introduction to the linguistics of second language learning, but that did not count for much. We were Bachelors of Arts and Sciences, or, as Peace Corps dubbed us, “AB generalists” thrown into developing societies of the Third World.

We were witnesses, as Amir observed, of the modernity process of global outreach of industrial countries to pull other countries into rapidly expanding capitalist relations, and if we looked closely, we might observe various forms of resistance to this process. These discussions and others with Amir made me rethink so many of my older assumptions, and he became our main source of information about “Modern Iran” and the Kurdish resistance movement in Iran and in the Middle East, particularly in northern Iraq and eastern Turkey, countries that bordered northwestern Iran. It was Amir who introduced us to the fairly recent history of Mahabad and its singular Mahabad Republic of Kurdistan of 1946 and the reasons for its rise and fall. He took us to the grave site of Ghazi Mohammad, the leader of the Republic, who was executed by the Pahlavi forces in the winter of 1946.

Throughout the spring and summer of ’65, Bob and I saw Amir almost daily. As one of our colleagues and an increasingly close friend, he was introducing us to his perspective on the limited rights of Kurdish people as a minority under Pahlavi rule, the issues of US and Iran relations and military advisors, the Vietnam War, the role of women and families in Iranian society, the daily forms of resistance to modernity, and the complicated gender and family relations in Iran. In fact, these discussions were both instructive and amusing at the same time. My first encounters in Mahabad were with some of Bob’s friends whom he had befriended in evening get-togethers in their homes over the previous fall term before I had arrived. On nearly my second or third day in Mahabad, I met a Kurdish banker friend of Bob’s who began our conversation with “the rules of the street.” I was told that there are two languages spoken in Mahabad, “Kurdish and English.” The second rule was politics was everything – he wanted to know why the CIA killed President Kennedy. Stunned by both “rules” as no one had broached such matters to me while I was in Mashhad, I answered that I was willing to learn Kurdish though I had been studying Persian for nearly a year by then, and had no idea how to get Kurdish language materials, and secondly, had a few notions about Kennedy’s death none of which included the CIA!  From these early days in Mahabad, I had learned some important lessons about Kurdish nationalism, and Iran-US politics.  Bob and I had met our first Kurdish scholar, companion, and teacher, dear Amir. It was over time that Amir and I became brothers in many ways.

Amir had just completed his BA degree in English from the University of Tehran, and following those four years, he went on to complete a year at the Tehran Teacher Training College. Now, he was assigned to teach in Mahabad’s secondary schools or at the dabirestan level. In short, we and Amir had become colleagues in teaching English as a second or third language to the young Kurdish and few Azeri and Armenian adventuresome high school students in that remote mountain town comprised of 90% Kurdish Mokri and Debokri Sorani-speaking peoples of Kurdistan. We discussed why there were no more pastoralists in Kurdistan as that was part of an older period of history. While some texts on Iran do talk about the Kurdish tribes as do the American diplomats in their consular reports, Mr. Eagleton, a past US consul in Tabriz does not use those words in his introduction to Kurdish language. Come to think of it, in trying to follow the advice of Bob’s banker friend, I had asked the Peace Corps Office in Tehran to send me a Kurdish grammar and funds for a Kurdish language tutor. The reply was a little stunning – the PC Office told me that since Kurdish is a dialect of Persian, there are no funds for dialects so they could not support my language studies. I then asked my twin brother Ted in the States to find Professor Ernest McCarus’ Kurdish grammar used in his classes at the University of Michigan where he taught, and send a copy to me. My brother found the book and sent it.  It was a lesson in the Iranian linguicide of Kurdish. I left it behind with Amir when I returned to the States in 1966.

Proud of his town’s historical role in the on-going Kurdish national struggle for self-determination and the survival of Kurdish as an endangered world language, Amir’s home was stocked with Persian, Kurdish and English works on a wide spectrum of topics hidden away from Iranian security and public eyes. I found that unlike so many other educational colleagues, he had an unquenchable thirst for books. He was equally enthusiastic about Marxist theories and world view. I found that in those two years in Iran and for the rest of my life that there was just no one else like Amir Khan.

It was Amir Khan who led us to a summer excursion into the Zagros plateau north of Mahabad in search of ancient caves with some Peace Corps friends from distant Rezayeh who were also engaged in English training. During the summer months, we also spent time in picnics with our Kurdish, Gilaki, and Persian teacher and professional friends in the valleys and dells of the surrounding mountain streams in laughter-filled story-telling and mountain-naming mixed babble of English and Kurdish according to the “rules.”  In more somber moments, Amir related some of his experiences during his Tehran stay at the university, such as the time when he and several other Kurdish undergrads asked to be included in the underground students’ socialist club mainly followers of the forbidden Tudeh party – they were accepted immediately with another kind of “rule” or understanding about their use of Kurdish. They were told by the Persian-speaking students to not speak Kurdish, or there “would be consequences.” It was not the first time that I began to learn of the factionalism in the Iranian student movement.

By the fall of 1965, Amir and I were deep into our discussions about Marx and Marxist theories of historical change and historical generalizations with a growing list of new works for me. I had already discovered Eric Hobsbawm and George Rudé, part of the British “social historians” in their eye-opening work on the threshing machine protest by workers of Sussex near Kent, England. They had based their research mainly on the police records of the striking peasants in their co-authored work, Captain Swing –  the mysterious signature found at the bottom of the warnings that appeared on local parsons’ doors of the possible burning of local wheat fields using threshing machines and not human labor. This wonderful work was my introduction to the English social history school while I was in Mashhad where I had by chance met the British Consul and took some liberties with the British Council’s library. Before the year was out, Amir and I had read and discussed other British and French historians’ works, such as E. H. Carr’s seminal work on What Is History?, E. P. Thompson’s recently published The Making of the English Working Class, and the equally seminal work of Marc Bloch, The Historian’s Craft. We promised each other to continue reading the English Social Historians and the French Annales school historians after I left Mahabad at the end of my two-year obligation that had begun in February 1964. We also completed a translation project of a Kurdish romance story in the midst of our school work that included Bob and me conducting Friday (a holiday) classes in acquired language learning with all the English teachers of Mahabad and nearly free evening Adult English classes in one of the high schools for anyone interested in the subject. As with everything else, Amir was a fellow teacher in both Teacher and Adult Evening classes.

The English translation of a Kurdish folk tale that Amir and I did was his idea. The story, Khadj va Siamand, in both Persian and Kurdish, was based on a popular Kurdish ballad concerning the youth of Kurdistan in Sorani Kurdish. Khadj was the attractive young daughter of a wealthy Kurdish merchant who had forty sons from his four wives as well as several daughters. Khadj was the most beautiful of them all. Siamand, on the other hand, was a strapping young and good-looking shepherd from a neighboring village who saw Khadj and other young Kurdish girls coming to the communal well on the outskirts of the town. In the midst of the collective spring flower gathering, and the summer harvests from nearby fields, Khadj and Siamand became more acquainted, falling in love with each other over time. They then planned to run away to the mountains to live together, fearing in part her father’s outrage and the forty brothers of Khadj whom she knew would be close behind. In the eventual confrontation in the mountains, first Siamand fell in combat and then, in despair, Khadj leapt to her death off the mountain in the end. We translated the text into polished English and ran off copies of the ballad in Persian and English for the advanced students in the high schools – we were forbidden to use Kurdish by the principal. The mimeographed story was a hit, needless to say. I told Amir that I was sending our translation off to the Netherlands to be published. I found out later that the translation was only listed in a bibliography of Kurdish literature and not published. That would have to wait until later.

By February 1966/1345, I was getting ready to leave Mahabad and then Tehran for the States. Before doing so, Amir and I had decided to translate small parts of E. H. Carr’s What is History?  and V. Gordon Childe’s Man Makes Himself into Persian over the next year. We wanted the social studies teachers and advanced students to benefit from these authors. Amir was to do most of the translations, while I was to work on some bibliographic information. We planned for a translation into Kurdish but it was never done as we were both too busy in graduate programs. We did finish the two translations of Carr and Childe into Persian that I left with Amir.

Little did I realize how important we would become to each other in the next three decades. By 1975, I had married Janice and completed my doctorate at Indiana University in Middle East history with a minor in Persian Studies with a US grant while Amir had gone to the University of Illinois at Chamagne-Urbana in the mid-1970s. While Amir continued his studies in Communication, I was soon hired first by Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota, and then by Georgetown University in DC. We met a couple of times first in Chicago at the 1975 American Historical Association meeting, and then again at Illinois University as the Iranian Revolution was beginning in 1977/1356. I was the one of the guest speakers of the Confederation of Iranian Students – US at the University of Illinois and took part in one of their campus-wide conferences on Iran.

By 1979/1358, in the midst of the Iranian Revolution, like so many other Iranian students, Amir had returned to Iran with hopes for a better Iran in his mind and heart. In 1986, Amir completed his Illinois doctorate program, and, with his family, immigrated to Canada, settling first in Toronto, then in Windosr and Montreal, and finally back to Toronto taking teaching positions in those cities’ universities in Communication and Middle Eastern studies. In 1992, Amir published his revised thesis with the new title of Nationalism and Language in Kurdistan, 1918-1985 in which he made a very strong case for the role of a nation-state in the evolution and survival of languages such as Kurdish. He also argued for the standardization of Kurdish language that would contain the northern/southern Kurdish dialects of Kirmanji and Sorani.  Amir continued to read and write about Marxism and applying his Marxist perspective in his writings and teachings in his many articles on oral traditions of Kurdistan, linguistics, linguicide, genocide, Turkish and Iranian policies, the role of language formation in the media, in song and music throughout his academic career at the University of Toronto. His final work of articles in Farsi was published in April 2017, which was particularly special to him and is entitled, Bar Faraz-e Mooje Nuvin-e Kumunism [On the New Wave of Communism].

On reflection, Amir was my brother, colleague and closest academic life companion. We had left the level of normal friendship long ago during our continued conversations, debates and discussions. Amir had radicalized me in both my politics and historical research. Many of my American Peace Corps volunteer companions had remarked, rightfully, that the Peace Corps and their Iran experiences had “changed their lives.” For me, Amir, Kurdistan, and contemporary Iranian struggles for political and economic independence had changed my life. My dear mother took about three seconds upon my return to our Lafayette, Indiana home after my two-year Peace Corps absence to say that, “Tom, you’ve changed.” She was absolutely correct. It took take me several years to completely understand that statement as “Yes, Mom, I have changed because of my Kurdish brother and the Iranian people’s life and death struggles against various imperial powers including the United States.”

Sometime after I had left Georgetown University and was invited to Birzeit University in the Occupied Palestinian Territories that I understood how much of Amir’s world view or jahan bini influenced my thoughts as an analyst of contemporary US foreign policy as well as an historian of 18th century Iran. Amir and I had also discussed Immanuel Wallerstein’ s world systems analysis of center and periphery dialectics and the role of US development polices within Washington’s Consensus and world geopolitics that contributed to “underdevelopment”. We continued our discussions of Andre Gunnar Frank, Paul Baran, Samir Amin and Walter Rodney regarding dependency theories and US Agency for International Development, or US AID. My own reading of these political economic theories was in relation to historical studies of greater Asia and world historians’ work over the past three centuries as became evident in my courses and more recent writings.

Thus, Amir’s death thus has left a “hollow in the land” according to the Southern African adage. I would add that his death has now left a deep hollow in all the hearts and minds of those who knew Amir Hassanpour. His many intellectual feats, his own radical perspective of this world and its affairs, a Marxist perspective from beginning to end, and his amazing historical imagination and humor will not pass as quickly as he did physically in Princess Margaret Hospital in Toronto, Ontario. He, more than any of my life friends and acquaintances, fulfilled Samad-e Behrangi’s famous dictum in his international literary work, Mahi Siyah-ye Kuchulu, (The Little Black Fish) when the Little Black Fish notes towards the end of the story, “Living or dying is not that important. What is important are the influences one may have on the lives of other.”

So, beduwa and goodbye, Kak Amir, for now. I long to be with you again someday, my dear Kurdish friend, colleague, and companion. I am bowed from grief for Shahrzad and Salah, and all of Amir’s fine students for their and our immense loss.

Table of Contents

English Verso

“Not about, but for workers”: Media, Labour and Politics in Post-2009 Iran
Zep Kalb

“Translator’s Invisibility”: Strategies of Adaptation in Persian versions of Indian Tales from the Mughal Period: King Vikrama’s Adventures and Ocean of the Streams of Stories
Anna Martin

Hafez and Sufi Hermeneutics
Daryoush Ashouri

Persian Recto

Bonyad Monthly and the Depoliticization of Gharbzadegi
Ali Mirsepasi and Mehdi Faraji

Shafiei-Kadkani between Poetry and Prose
Reza Ghanadan

The Untold Stories of the Wolf: A Comparative Study of “The Wolf”
Nasser Maleki, Bahman Fallah, and Meraj Kazemi

Shahrzad: Pop Culture, Media Culture, and the Representation of Gender in the Digital Age
Khatereh Sheibani

Cyrus in Judeo-Persian Literature
Nahid Pirnazar

Reconstructing Ancient Iranian History through the Deciphering of the Avesta and the Fahlaviyyāt
Abolala Soudavar

Qur’anic Perspectives on the ‘Nafs’ and the ‘Ruh’
Esmail Tabibi

The Editors’ Introduction to the Special Issue

The Editors’ Introduction to the Special Issue

Mostafa Abedinifard

Assistant Professor of Modern Persian Literature and Culture, UBC

Pouneh Shabani-Jadidi

Instructional Professor of Persian, University of Chicago

 I. Iraj Pezeshkzad’s Revolutions: The Humourist’s Serious Legacy

Mostafa Abedinifard[1]

A highly prolific author and by far the most renowned Iranian satirist of the past several decades, Iraj Pezeshkzad has been recognized, not only among the public but also by some scholars, through one of his most famous works: the part-farcical, part-satirical novel Da’i Jan Napelon (My Uncle Napoleon). Ironically, when asked which of his works he favoured most, it was Adab-i mard bih zi dawlat-i ūst taḥrīr shud (Manners, Not Riches, Maketh Man), a Faustian comedy of sorts with a plot twist. Understandably, Pezeshkzad was known to have felt upset when his fans reduced the entirety of his literary creativity merely to a single work, and even more often, indeed, to the film adaptation of it. That said, he would always humbly express his gratitude toward director Naser Taghvai whose TV series adaptation of Da’i Jan, Pezeshkzad admitted, had immortalized the already bestseller book among Iranians. Being unenthusiastic about interviews, Pezeshkzad would notoriously avoid them until 2013 when the persistent Nazanin Motamedi of BBC managed to gain his permission for a documentary based on his life and work.[2] Pezeshkzad proposed the title of the documentary, amusingly threatening he would feel offended if it were not titled Iraj Pezeshkzad and His Da’i Jan. We are fortunate that he agreed to more public appearances in the few years that followed, leaving us with many precious recorded moments of his friendly company, sweet storytelling, exemplary witticism, and sharp memory, all as he approached and entered the ninth decade of his life.

Pezeshkzad’s humorous works span a wide range of genres and formats, from novel, short story, and theatrical comedy to humour column, serial publication, historical novel, and time travel fiction.[3] Any attempt at providing even an overview of Pezeshkzad’s sizeable body of humorous literature—let alone the unexplored place of his works within, and their impact on, modern Iranian literature and culture—is well beyond the scope of this introduction. Long overdue, such an endeavour is well-suited for a PhD dissertation. The necessity of conducting such research becomes clear when we notice the extent to which Pezeshkzad’s works remain understudied even among scholars of Persian and Iranian humour. It is a shame, for instance, that the only extant book on Iranian political satirists mentions Pezeshkzad only a few times, and fleetingly at that.[4]

Here, instead, we would like to briefly draw our readers’ attention to yet another under-recognized aspect of Pezeshkzad’s writing legacy. Much less known than his humorous body of works, or his scholarship on humour and satire, are a few serious books on history to which Pezeshkzad dedicated himself as an émigré after the revolution, and in most of which he explicitly mentioned “the youth” as his intended primary audience. Written in plain language, four of these books concern political movements and revolutions, both in Iran and elsewhere. To many, this may appear as an anomaly in the satirist’s otherwise humorous oeuvre. It is not. A leading and exceptionally versatile satirist in modern Iran, Pezeshkzad was a well-read author who would constantly keep himself informed of and draw upon politics and history as the primary force and subject matter of his satire. Emphasizing this under-acknowledged aspect of Pezeshkzad’s significant career is quite timely, as we are currently in the midst of an ongoing revolutionary movement among Iranians, both within and outside Iran: that of the Women, Life, Freedom movement.

Pezeshkzad grew up in a highly politicized milieu and one of prompt changes, both locally and globally, witnessing some turning-point events in modern Iranian history. Born twenty years after the Iranian Constitutional Revolution, and only two years after the abolition of the Qajar dynasty and the crowning of Reza Shah Pahlavi, Pezeshkzad grew up to live through the 1953 coup as well as the events of June 1963. Years later, he would witness also the unfolding of the 1979 Revolution, the aftermath of which—including the dismissal from employment by the newly established theocratic government and a ban on the publication of his books—left him no choice other than undesired self-exile to Paris. There, he befriended the ousted Shah’s last prime minister, Shapour Bakhtiar, with whom Pezeshkzad shared a passion of “fighting for democracy” and “an interest in Hafez’s poetry.”[5] For years, he edited the journal Qiyām-i Iran (Iran’s Uprising) at the National Movement of the Iranian Resistance, founded and led by Bakhtiar.

Two of Pezeshkzad’s revolutionary books concerned the French and the Russian Revolutions, both published in 2004 in Tehran, although one mentions the date of the completion of the manuscript as 1991 Murūr’ī dar Tārīkh-i Inqilāb-i Farānsih (A Review of the History of the French Revolution) and Murūr’ī dar Tārīkh-i Inqilāb-i Rūsīyah (A Review of the History of the Russian Revolution). In another book, which was published in Los Angeles, California in 1993, Pezeshkzad took up the apparently hackneyed case of the June 1963 events involving Ayatollah Khomeini (Murūr’ī dar Vāqi‘ah-i Pānzdah-i Khurdād-i Chihil ū Dū va Qānūn-i Maṣūnīyat-i Niẓāmiyān-i Amrīkāyī [A Review of the June 1963 Events and the US Military Personnel’s Diplomatic Immunity]). The last of these four books is concerned with the Iranian Constitutional Revolution of 1906-1911 (Murūr’ī dar Inqilāb-i Mashrūṭīyat-i Iran [A Review of the History of the Iranian Constitutional Revolution]) and was published in Frankfurt in 2006, i.e., the centenary of the revolution.[6]

To the curious reader, the absence of the 1979 Revolution in the above list seems peculiar. Not so much, however, if we consider that in almost all of Pezeshkzad’s post-revolutionary writings, the 1979 Revolution and its aftermath is either explicitly present or is an “absent presence,” elements of it serving as subject matter for most of his satirical writings. One might argue, indeed, that Pezeshkzad’s post-revolutionary writings were essentially the artistic translations of his persistent and hopeful dissent against many of the revolution’s outcomes. “Whatever I’ve written is political,” Pezeshkzad says in the BBC documentary, “even my works on history, I’ve meant [them to be] slightly political.”[7]

The “Women, Life, Freedom” movement has now entered its fourth month, already proving to be an unprecedented event, not only locally, but also globally, especially due to the remarkable and creative participation and leadership of the women in it. So far, primarily constituting of the youth—i.e., Pezeshkzad’s targeted audience in his serious books—the protesters, while not yet agreeing on any alternative form of government, have nevertheless made it clear that their ultimate aim is the collapse of the current theocratic government. The Ayatollahs, they adamantly believe, must go:

 Ākhūnd bāyad gom bishih! (“Clergymen must get lost!”)

 

Tā ākhūnd kafan nashavad, Īn vaṭan vaṭan nashavad! (“Only when all mullas die, we may call this country our homeland!”)

Nah shaykh mīkhvāīm, nah mullāh; la‘nat bih āyātūllah! (Neither sheikhs, nor mullas we want; and damn to all ayatollahs!)[8]

These are only a few of the subversive slogans which have been shouted by many of the grandchildren and children of numerous Iranians who, a few decades ago, would regard Ayatollah Khomeini, the founding father and the first Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic, no less than a saint, deeming him as “Imam,” and going so far as to deem true their pareidolic perception of the Ayatollah’s visage in the Moon. A review of Pezeshkzad’s postrevolutionary writings demonstrates his determined and tenacious struggle as an intellectual dissident to eradicate any remaining delusions in his fellow-countrymen and women regarding the post-revolutionary political-religious order in Iran. Pezeshkzad, it can be assumed, would approve of these slogans.

            It is in this capacity that Pezeshkzad, with the perception of a shrewd historian—even though he was not officially trained as one—appears to have considered it imperative for the Iranian youth to familiarize themselves with revolutions and political movements within and outside Iran for a better understanding of the present, a more conscious move toward the future, and in the hopes of avoiding past mistakes. While Pezeshkzad’s postrevolutionary satire is witness to his long-standing agreement with the “Women, Life, Freedom” protesters’ unanimous call for the Ayatollahs to go—his serious historical reviews on Iran, France, and Russia were an invitation to his audience for essential retrospective reflections on Iran’s past, as painful as they may seem, and for contemplation on how the Ayatollahs were welcomed and in fact gained political power in Iran in the first place.

In one of the above books, therefore, he takes us back further before the 1979 Revolution, to a frequently discussed albeit controversial event that preceded the revolution by more than a decade. This event has at least two names, depending on which historiography one chooses to rely on: the “spontaneous” and “bloody uprising of 15 Khordad” and the origin of the “Islamic Revolution of 1979,” according to the Islamic Republic-endorsed narratives;[9] and “the June of 1963 seditions” which involved “the looting, pillaging, and incendiary agitation committed by thugs, who were stirred by an unknown clergyman named Ayatollah Khomeini,” based on the Pahlavi-favoured version of the events.[10] Pezeshkzad’s concern with a more objective view of the circumstances motivated him to explore this historical event. Referring to the narrative espoused by the Islamic Republic, for instance, he warns:

If the youth were to ask us, “What uprising was this? Who rose up and for what purpose? And why did the uprising get bloody?,” all they will be hearing is: “It was an uprising by the followers of Ayatollah Khomeini, and during it, due to the intervention of the state military forces, some people were killed.”[11]

The June 1963 events, Pezeshkzad reminds us, are important to study for yet another reason. Regardless of the two official narratives previously mentioned, Pezeshkzad notes, “we cannot deny the fact that this event is the origin of the appearance of Ayatollah Khomeini [on the modern Iranian political scene], who years later, through leading a revolutionary movement, would overthrow the [Shah’s] established and apparently stable monarchial regime.”[12]

Pezeshkzad then does an acceptable job of juxtaposing both official narratives, while evaluating them and simultaneously complementing them by adding further missing primary sources in order to answer an essential question asked by many after the 1979 Revolution: How did Ayatollah Khomeini gain a favourable view not only among the religious but also among the non-religious Iranian protestors? Pezeshkzad intriguingly concludes that when exiled, Ayatollah Khomeini left Iran for Turkey and later Iraq, amidst an emotional milieu whose most conspicuous feature was his relentless defense for the sovereignty and glory of Iran and Iranians. This picture, Pezeshkzad argues, was strikingly oppositional not only to Ayatollah Khomeini’s previously stated viewpoints in his other sermons (for instance, Khomeini’s opposition to women’s suffrage),[13] but also to the clergyman’s prohibited published and forthcoming works in Iran. For many Iranians, Pezeshkzad suggests, all of the Ayatollah’s reactionary views were then overshadowed by his pre-exile misjudged gesture of nationalism.

            Unlike his book on the events of June 1963, Pezeshkzad’s Review of the Iranian Constitutional Revolution does not contain any arguments by him; however, it similarly renders a readable and concise account of the events during the 1906-1911 Revolution years, based on several renowned historiographies. Revealing yet again his care for his hoped-for young Iranian readers, Pezeshkzad remarks, “Today, more than any other time, our youth need to learn about this greatest national movement of their era.”[14]

            Unlike the above two books, which Pezeshkzad published outside Iran, the books in which he reviewed the French and the Russian revolutions were published inside Iran. Perhaps this is why none of the latter books contain any direct references to how these books may benefit Pezeshkzad’s intended Iranian audiences.[15] Still, he seems to be attempting at communicating a message, similar to the aforementioned one, to his young readers when, for instance, he comments on the Russian revolution in the introduction to his book on it. His aim, he maintains, is to provide his Iranian readers with an account of the Russian Revolution that goes beyond that offered by “Tudeh Party Publications, which were rarely anything beyond the translation of the USSR’s official historiography.”[16] He then poses some thoughtful questions about the Russian Revolution, many of which are intriguingly applicable to the Iranian Constitutional Revolution and/or the Iranian 1979 Revolution for the curious reader with a concern for Iran. Some of the questions Pezeshkzad asks include:

Why did the Provisional Government, which replaced the monarchy after the 1917 February Revolution, gradually lose power? What factors caused the liberal [Russian] Republic to not last beyond eight months or be incapable of protecting the government from the Bolshevik encroachments? Why did the liberal Provisional Government, which was the result of the war and the societal yearning for reforms, and in which the socialists played such an important role, dissolve so easily? Is Russia a country incapable of achieving democratic reforms, and one in which transformations have to occur always through revolutions, slaughterous systems, with no regard for public will and support? Should we admit that the homeland of [such literary figures as] Pushkin, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy would not deserve having a democracy? Despite the weak social support and the adverse economic conditions in Russia, how could the Bolshevik Party—which managed to impose itself over the country amidst the chaotic situation in Russia during Feb-Oct 1917—survive?[17]

Pezeshkzad follows these and more questions immediately by a statement, which strengthens an implied reference to Iranian history: “Our aim, in mentioning these questions, is to show, generally speaking, how all-embracing these questions could be.”[18] And if readers had any doubts about any implied connections so far, Pezeshkzad then proceeds to open the main body of his book, out of all possible options, by citing the full text of a telegram read in a 1907 session of the First Majlis of Iran (1906-1908) by the parliamentary chairman Morteza Khan Sani‘ al-Dowleh. He had received the telegram from the Imperial Duma in Saint Petersburg, he told the parliament members, in response to a congratulatory telegram the Iranian Majlis had previously sent to the Duma on the occasion of the opening of the Imperial Duma.

            We will never know how Pezeshkzad would have fared had he been allowed to remain in Iran, or return to it, after the Revolution. Yet we know that he longed for Iran all the while he was in exile. Returning to Iran was his only wish.[19] Upon entering his small apartment in Paris, the BBC director Motamedi observed, “He has lived almost forty years here in Paris, yet every inch of his house is filled with things that reveal he does not belong here.”[20] Of these, the camera shows us, Pezeshkzad’s numerous walled calligraphies of select Persian poetry that glorifies Iran are most conspicuous. Still, he would return only if “they do not harass or interrogate me, claiming that I have offended such and such Ayatollah.” He would obviously desire a different Iran, one which he had imagined for decades. As his aforementioned revolutionary books reveal, the old humourist could not have been more serious about the importance of Iranian youth’s reflecting back on the history of the major events and transformations in their own and others’ lands. The gained insights would be inevitable for any different Iran that were to come.

    II. The Special Issue: Iraj Pezeshkzad’s Satire

Pouneh Shabani-Jadidi

This issue of Iran Namag is a tribute to the late, much renowned and contemporary writer, Iraj Pezeshkzad (1928-2022). Pezeshkzad was born in Tehran and educated in both Iran and France where he received a law degree. He served as a judge in Iran for five years and then joined the Iranian Foreign Service, serving as a diplomat until 1979. In that very year, he moved to France where he lived for over forty years—in fact, his first translation was a play by Molière (L’avare) until his passing in Los Angeles in 2022. He later chose Alif Pih Āshinā (I. P. Familiar) as a penname for his articles in journals and newspapers of the time, some of which were later published as collected essays in a single book, Āsimūn Rīsmūn (1963). Pezeshkzad was one of the most prolific contemporary authors of Iran, and continued writing after leaving his home and residing in Paris for the next several decades. Thus, this special issue of Iran Namag is not only a testament and a tribute to Pezeshkzad’s invaluable writing and observations about 20th and 21st century Iran, but also a testament to Pezeshkzad’s status as a writer of world literature, worthy of global renown and attention.

Pezeshkzad began his writing career with short stories that were published in such periodicals as Ferdowsi and such collections as Nimūnah’hā-yi Ṭanz-i Muʻāṣir (Examples of contemporary satire). In the late 1950s, he also translated a number of classics from French into Persian, mainly works by French authors like Voltaire and Molière. As discussed by several authors in this special issue, these and other European and English authors had a great influence on his subsequent works; these include seventeen novels and more than a dozen scholarly books and articles on Persian literature and history (some of which are mentioned in the bibliography at the end of this introduction).

Pezeshkzad is best known in Iran and around the world, of course, for his satirical novel, Da’i Jan Napelon (Dear Uncle Napoleon), first published in 1973, which became the basis for a popular television series in Iran. The novel was translated into English by Dick Davis (a contributor in this special issue) as My Uncle Napoleon (Mage Publishers, 1996). In 2006 My Uncle Napoleon was reprinted by Modern Library, an imprint of Random House Publishing Group. Da’i Jan Napelon has also been translated into French (Sorour Kasmai, the French translator, also has an article in this issue), Russian, and German. Pezeshkzad’s Ḥāfiẓ-i nāshanīdah pand (Hafez heedless of advice), first published in 2004, has also been translated into English. Entitled Hafez in Love and translated by Pouneh Shabani-Jadidi and Patricia J. Higgins (Syracuse University Press, 2021), this is a humorous historical novel based on Hafez’s poetry. It is interesting to note that Davis’s translation won the first Lois Roth Persian Translation Prize in 2000 and Shabani-Jadidi and Higgins’s translation won the most recent Prize in 2021. Rather shockingly, twenty-one years passed between these two translations of Pezeshkzad’s work into English. It is our hope that by paying tribute to Pezeshkzad in this special issue, more translations will soon find their way into English, but also French, German, Russian and many other languages as well.

This issue of Iran Namag includes seven articles, five in English and two in Persian, and many are written by translators of Pezeshkzad’s novels and other works. Having engaged with his texts closely, these translators offer their insights and personal observations about not only Pezeshkzad’s most significant works, but also his writing style, his literary influences, and the many—often equally humorous and troubling—political issues through which he lived. Other articles in this issue, written by experts in contemporary Persian literature and twentieth-century history who are well acquainted with English and other world literatures, argue for Pezeshkzad’s works as undoubtedly worthy as essential contributions to world literature.

Our first piece in English, entitled, “Da’i Jan Napelon as a Comic Masterpiece,” is written by Dick Davis who gives an account of his translation of Da’i Jan Napelon and what he calls his “virtually non-existent relationship with its author.” Throughout the article, Davis draws comparisons with English comedies to support his points about the significance of My Uncle Napoleon in depicting Iranian society and culture. Significantly, Davis puts My Uncle Napoleon on par with the works of great English authors such as Chaucer, Shakespeare, Fielding, and Austen, and compares the characters in My Uncle Napoleon with characters in other world masterpieces. To Davis, Pezeshkzad’s having translated great works of European fiction, including those of the Czech author Jaroslav Hasek, had a major influence on his novels and the creation of his characters. In particular, Davis discusses the similarities between Hasek’s hero, Schweik, and Pezeshkzad’s Mash Qasem in My Uncle Napoleon. Both characters are trusting, naïve, good-hearted simpletons, and both are servants to vainglorious, swaggering military officers. Davis also compares My Uncle Napoleon with Simin Daneshvar’s Savūshūn, both of which are set in the second World War in Iran, though the former is humorous and satirical and the latter quite serious. In the last section of the article, Davis shares with readers the professional and friendly relationship he established with Pezeshkzad by asking the author’s input when choosing the closest equivalents to certain Persian expressions which carry semantic and cultural weight that needed to be considered and re-created in the English translation. This brief, intimate depiction between writer and translator provides a rare and generous glimpse into the importance of such relationships and the unsurprising care and good humour of Pezeshkzad.

The second article in this issue, “Iraj Pezeshkzad as a Social Critic: A Look at the Satirical Aspects of My Uncle Napoleon and Āsimūn Rīsmūn,” is authored by M. R. Ghanoonparvar. Ghanoonparvar examines Pezeshkzad as a social critic and argues how the catch phrase, “It is a British conspiracy,” used repeatedly in My Uncle Napoleon, provided a tool through which Iranians blamed the British for various social, political, and even personal misfortunes. Like Davis, Ghanoonparvar analyzes various characters in My Uncle Napoleon as well as those in other satirical works of Pezeshkzad’s, including Āsimūn Rīsmūn (1963), linking them to caricatures of people in Iranian society of a certain class and era. He also offers a brief translation drawn from Āsimūn Rīsmūn. In addition, he compares Pezeshkzad’s satire with that of other modern Iranian writers who tried their hand at writing satire, such as Mohammad Ali Jamalzadeh, Sadeq Hedayat, Mahshid Amirshahi, Khosrow Shahani, and Ebrahim Nabavi.

Another article in this special issue that deals with the idea of British conspiracy is “My Uncle Napoleon and the Iranian Anglophobia” by Homa Katouzian. Katouzian discusses conspiracy theory as an instrument of political analysis in this novel as well as other novels of the time, like those by Mahmud Mahmud, Hossein Makki, and others. To illustrate his point, the author gives examples of some of those conspiracy theories as well as some of the anti-conspiracy theories of the time, including the writings of Khalil Maleki. In fact, Katouzian emphasizes how adherence to such theories is an Iranian epidemic “disease” which was by no means limited to the Pahlavi era. Throughout the article, Katouzian skillfully provides examples from characters’ conspiracy theories in the novel, while drawing deft comparisons of those theories with their historical versions. In Katouzian’s hands, Pezeshkazad’s great wit, humour, and political insight in his novel are burnished to a hilarious and compelling luster.

The fourth article in this issue, Alireza Korangy’s “Prosecuting an Author: A Short Story of Iraj Pezeshkzad: A Translation and Short Commentary,” showcases a fantastic translation of one of Pezeshkzad’s short stories, “Muḥākamah-yi Nivīsandah (Prosecuting the author).” Following an overview of Pezeshkzad, his works, and his style of writing—particularly Pezeshkzad’s affinity with the comic opportunities of hypocrisy and self-mockery. In Pezeshkzad’s writings, no one is safe: not even himself—Korangy argues that in this story, the judge and the defendant (i.e., the accused) are both Pezeshkzad himself. Korangy also asserts that readers will see, even if they are not writers, a bit of themselves in the narrator’s self-description as the judge, jury, accused, and executioner. Another compelling point highlighted in this article is the romanticization of the works of writers of fiction—and their self-aggrandizement—as well as the fetishization of the works of writers in the West and the influence of these in Iran. Following this humorous and insightful commentary, the article ends with the translation of the short story, “Muḥākamah-yi Nivīsandah (Prosecuting the author),” a truly excellent “buffooning of the human condition.”

“Iraj Pezeshkzad and his Hafez: A Note on Hafez in Love,” written by Pouneh Shabani-Jadidi and Patricia Higgins who translated Ḥāfiẓ-i nāshanīdah pand (Hafez heedless of advice), provides the fifth and last English article in this issue. Shabani-Jadidi and Higgins share their experience translating this work and their quite intimate and often surprising correspondences with Pezeshkzad from the completion of their translation in 2018 to its publication in 2021. Given that most of the scholarly articles and reviews of Pezeshkzad’s work focus on My Uncle Napoleon, this article provides a timely compliment and rounding off to these previous works and invites scholars and translators to study not only Ḥāfiẓ-i nāshanīdah pand, but his many other works as well. After providing an overview of the book, Shabani-Jadidi and Higgins present the reception of Hafez in Love through the reviews written about it since its publication. These include examples from the original and translated text, revealing Pezeshkzad’s exceptional mastery as a writer, his breath of knowledge of Iranian history and literature, and his command of Persian classical poetry. Importantly, they also discuss Pezeshkzad’s work in relation to translation theory like that of Susan Bassnett, for example, who “argues that novels based on classic books are translations of a sort because they are a kind of interpretation of the classic texts, and they wouldn’t have existed if those classic works hadn’t existed already.” As Dominic Brookshaw writes in his foreword to Hafez in Love, in Ḥāfiẓ-i nāshanīdah pand, Iraj Pezeshkzad “has managed to humanise a figure that for so many remains unapproachably sublime” (Dominic Parviz Brookshaw, in Shabani-Jadidi and Higgins, 2021, x). Indeed, between the original work of Pezeshkzad and the translation work of Shabani-Jadidi and Higgins, we are offered a moment in which Hafez comes to us in a more earthly form, increasing our appreciation of the poet and his poetry and offering us necessary reflections on our own human condition—our heartaches, our buffoonery, and our everyday triumphs.

In the first Persian article in this issue, “Rumān-i Dā’ī Jān Nāpil’ūn va Sunnat-i Adabī-yi Āqā-Khddmatkār [The Da’i Jan Napelon novel and the literary tradition of master-servant],” Sorour Kasmai, the French translator of Da’i Jan Napelon, argues that, while rooted in Western literary traditions, the novel possesses innovative indigenous content. This is a characteristic that Pezeshkzad’s work shares with that of Sadeq Hedayat who also employed Western literary traditions in the background of the Iranian content of his works. To illustrate her claim, Kasmai focuses on the master-servant dichotomy in My Uncle Napoleon, which is one of the most important and long-lasting literary traditions in Western literature. She gives an overview of how this dichotomy has changed since the seventeenth century and how some servant characters in the literature have gradually gained importance. Kasmai sees the nineteenth century as the apex of European novel writing and also a period in which women servants replaced men servants in European novels. Following these observations, Kasmai concentrates her argument in particular on the Mash Qasem-Da’i Jan dichotomy. She concludes that Da’i Jan Napelon was influenced the most by two major European novels, Don Quixote and Don Juan, and, like Davis, Kasmai argues that Pezeshkzad was also importantly influenced by the Czech writer Hasek and his hero, Schweik. Kasmai reminds us, again, how the wealth of multiple and cross-directional influences of Pezeshkzad’s works, drawing from and speaking to Iranian and world literatures, remains an important area of further consideration, study, and scholarship.

In the second Persian article “Khandah bih Khvud dar Ayīnah-yi Ās̲ār-i Iraj Pezeshkzad [Self-teasing as reflected in the mirror of Pezeshkzad’s works],” Roya Sadr argues that the most important trait of Pezeshkzad’s works and writing is his use of archetypes, through which Pezeshkzad molds different types of personalities of different social strata into his characters. Sadr elucidates this point in two of Pezeshkzad’s works, Adab-i mard bih zi dawlat-i ūst taḥrīr shud (Manners, Not Riches, Maketh Man) and Da’i Jan Napelon through several examples of self-deprecating humor used by the characters in these works. Sadr especially argues that in Da’i Jan Napelon, this self-deprecation becomes both intensely critical and profound. Another attribute of Pezeshkzad’s satire as highlighted by Sadr is the escape of the characters from their societal problems by means of psychological projections. She differentiates the satire in Adab-i mard bih zi dawlat-i ūst taḥrīr shud from Da’i Jan Napelon in that, in the former, self-deprecation is a means to decrease psychological tensions in the main character whereas, in the latter, self-deprecation goes beyond the individual and reveals the depth of personal, social, and political behaviors of the population at large. Similarly argued as Korangy does earlier in this collection, Sadr advances the important observation that readers of these works are able to see themselves in different characters throughout these stories precisely because of Pezeshkzad’s mastery of archetypes and the astute deployment of self-deprecation.

Included among the common topics addressed in this issue are the prominence of conspiracy theories, Pezeshkzad’s mastery of satire, and his command of both Western and Persian literatures. Each article, however, takes a unique approach to the study of Pezeshkzad’s works and examines them through a particular lens, providing us with a variety of alternatingly witty, moving, and instructive insights worthy of Pezeshkzad’s oeuvre.

It almost goes without saying that, of all genres, satire is one of the most difficult literary forms to translate. Due to its underlying linguistic, cultural, and allusive qualities, the translation of satire requires the translator to not only be bilingual but to also be bicultural. Still, there will be some images, expressions, or references that do not exist in the target language, hence making the translation task impossible at times. Perhaps that is why, despite the numerous works of Pezeshkzad, only a few have been translated into English: to our knowledge, My Uncle Napoleon and Hafez in Love are the only novels of Pezeshkzad’s that have been so far given an English translation. Thus, in addition to this collection’s celebration of Pezeshkzad’s writing and important literary influence, we also hope that this issue of Iran Namag will be an invitation to translators and scholars of modern Persian literature. We invite such writers and translators to embark on the incredibly rich, no matter how challenging, task of translating more works of this masterful writer of contemporary Iran in order that they may become accessible to more readers around the world, and help to situate Pezeshkzad and his works among the masterpieces of world literature.

Major Works by Iraj Pezeshkzad

 

Satire and Fiction

Hāj Hāj Mam Ja‘far dar Pāris [Haj Mam-Jafar in Paris] (Memoir, 1954)

Māshāʼallāh Khān dar Bārgāh-i Hārūn al-Rashīd [Mashallah Khan in Harun-ol-rashid’s Court] (Novel, 1958)

Būbūl [Bubul] (Social Satire, 1959)

Āsimūn Rīsmūn [Balderdash] (Literary Satire, 1963)

Da’i Jan Napelon [Dear Uncle Napoleon] (Novel, 1970; translated into English as My Uncle Napoleon)

Adab-i mard bih zi dawlat-i ūst taḥrīr shud [Manners, Not Riches, Maketh Man] (Play, 1973)

Intirnāsyūnal-i Bachchah Pur’rū’hā [The international of the audacious] (Political Satire, 1984)

Shahr-i Farang az Hamah Rang [Foreign countries in every color] (Social and Political Satire, 1992)

Khānahvādah-yi Nīk’Akhtar [The Nik-Akhtar family] (Novel, 2001)

Rustam-i Ṣawlatān [The Rostam of awe] (Social Satire, 2005)

Gulgasht-i khāṭirāt [Journey in memories] (Social Satire, 2007)

Pisar-i Ḥājī Bābā’jān [Haji-Baba’s son] (Play, 2008)

Bih yād-i yār va diyār [In memory of the beloved and homeland] (Memoir, 2012)

Ṣandūq-i laʻnat [The box of doom] (2015)

History and Literature

Murūr’ī dar Tārīkh-i Inqilāb-i Rūsīyah [A Review of the History of the Russian Revolution] (History, 1991)

Mosaddiq Bāz’maṣlūb: Chand Maqālah-yi Siyasī [Mosaddeq re-crucified: A few political articles] (Political Articles, 1993)

Murūr’ī dar Tārīkh-i Inqilāb-i Farānsih [A Review of the History of the French Revolution] (History, 2002)

Ṭanz-i Fākhir-ii Saʻdī [The elegant satire of Sa‘di](Critique and Commentary, 2002)

Ḥāfiẓ-i nāshanīdah pand [Hafez heedless of advice] (Historical Novel, 2004; translated into English as Hafez in Love)

Murūr’ī dar Inqilāb-i Mashrūṭīyat-i Iran [A Review of the History of the Iranian Constitutional Revolution] (History, 2005)

Murūr’ī dar Vāqi‘ah-i Pānzdah-i Khurdād-i Chihil u dū va Qānūn-i Maṣūnīyat-i Niẓāmiyān-i Āmrīkāyī [A Review of the June 1963 Events and the US Military Personnel’s Diplomatic Immunity] (History, 2008)

Translations into Persian (from the original French or French translations from other languages)

 

L’Avavre (Molière)

Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme (Molière)

Nanine (Voltaire)

Alzire ou les Américains (Voltaire)

Roosevelt (Sara Delano Roosevelt, 1947)

“Satan refuse du monde,” etc. (Maurice Dekobra, 1952)

 Désirée (Annemarie Selinko, 1956)

 The Two Destinies (William Wilkie Collins, 1966)

 The Good Soldier Schweik (Jaroslav Hasek, 1985)

Mostafa Abedinifard is an assistant professor of modern Persian literature and culture at the University of British Columbia. He is a co-editor of Persian Literature as World Literature (Bloomsbury, 2021) and the author of several refereed articles, published in journals such as Iran Namag, The International Journal of Middle East Studies, HUMOR, and Social Semiotics.

Pouneh Shabani-Jadidi is instructional professor of Persian in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago. Some of her publications include The Routledge Handbook of Persian Literary Translation (2022), Island of Bewilderment (Syracuse University Press 2022), The Eight Books: A Complete English Translation (Brill 2021), Hafez in Love (Syracuse University Press 2021), The Routledge Handbook of Second Language Acquisition and Pedagogy of Persian (2020), The Oxford Handbook of Persian Linguistics (2018), The Thousand Families: Commentary on Leading Political Figures of Nineteenth Century Iran (Peter Lang 2018), Processing Compound Verbs in Persian (Leiden and University of Chicago Press 2014), and Translation Metacognitive Strategies (VDM Verlag 2009).

[1] All translations from Persian, unless otherwise stated, are mine.

[2] BBC Persian. “Guft ū gū bā Īraj Pizishkzād, Khāliq-i Dā’ī Jān Nāpil’ūn [Conversation with Iraj Pezeshkzad, the Creator of My Uncle Napoleon],” December 22, 2013. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dy3uy2cpNDk.

[3] Following Michael Billig, I take the humorous as descriptive of any text created with, among other things, the aim of eliciting a degree of laughter from its audience, whether this purpose is fulfilled or not. “Humour,” Billig shrewdly observes, “cannot be defined purely as that which elicits the response of laughter. Humour might involve the attempt to produce laughter in its recipients but it must be recognizable as humour even if it fails in its end” (Michael Billig, Laughter and Ridicule: Towards a Social Critique of Humour [SAGE Publications Ltd, 2005], 179). This is important because we will otherwise exclude from the domain of humour studies any humourous text that does not produce laughter in all audiences or even produces unlaughter in some. Examples, in our time, include sexist, racist, or homophobic humour. Coined by Billig, unlaughter is different from merely not laughing; unlaughter signifies “a display of not laughing when laughter might otherwise be expected, hoped for or demanded” (Billig, Laughter and Ridicule 192).

[4] Mahmud Farjami, Iranian Political Satirists: Experience and Motivation in the Contemporary Era, 1st ed. (John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2017).

[5] Iraj Pezeshkzad, “Irāj Pezeshkzād: Bakhtīār va shi‘r va adabiyāt-i Irān [Bakhtiar and the Iranian Poetry and Literature],” n.d. https://www.melliun.org/didgah/d11/08/06pezeshkzad.htm.

[6] For the above-mentioned books, see Iraj Pezeshkzad, Murūr’ī dar Tārīkh-i Inqilāb-i Farānsih [A Review of the History of the French Revolution] (Tehran: Nashr-e Qatreh, 1383/2004); Iraj Pezeshkzad, Murūr’ī dar Tārīkh-i Inqilāb-i Rūsīyahh [A Review of the History of the Russian Revolution] (Tehran: Nashr-e Qatreh, 1383/2004); Iraj Pezeshkzad, Murūr’ī dar Vāqi‘ah-i Pānzdah-i Khurdād-i Chihil ū Dū va Qānūn-i Maṣūnīyat-i Niẓāmiyān-i Amrīkāyī [A Review of the June 1963 Events and the US Military Personnel’s Diplomatic Immunity], 3rd ed. (Los Angeles, CA: Ketab Corp., 2008); Iraj Pezeshkzad, Murūr’ī dar Inqilāb-i Mashrūṭīyat-i Iran [A Review of the History of the Iranian Constitutional Revolution], 2nd print (Frankfurt, Germany: Alborz Verlag, 1385/2006).

[7] BBC Persian, “Murūr’ī bar zindigī-yi Īraj pizishkzād, Khāliq-i Dāstān Dā’ī Jān Nāpil’ūn [An Overview of the Life of Iraj Pezeshkzad, the Creator of My Uncle Napoleon],” January 13, 2022, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gpg6zA8wlPI, 07:39-07:45.

[8] Wikipedia contributors, “Shu’ār’hā-yi khīzish-i 1401 Īrān [The 1401/2022 Iranian Uprising’s Slogans],” October 3, 2022, https://fa.wikipedia.org/wiki/شعارهای_خیزش_۱۴%DB%B0۱_ایران, accessed January 26, 2023.

[9] Pezeshkzad, Murūr’ī dar Vāqi‘ah-i Pānzdah-i Khurdād, 4.

[10] Pezeshkzad, Murūr’ī dar Vāqi‘ah-i Pānzdah-i Khurdād, 4.

[11] Pezeshkzad, Murūr’ī dar Vāqi‘ah-i Pānzdah-i Khurdād, 1.

[12] Pezeshkzad, Murūr’ī dar Vāqi‘ah-i Pānzdah-i Khurdād, 4-5.

[13] Pezeshkzad, Murūr’ī dar Vāqi‘ah-i Pānzdah-i Khurdād, 111-112.

[14] Pezeshkzad, Murūr’ī dar Vāqi‘ah-i Pānzdah-i Khurdād, 7.

[15] Few of Pezeshkzad’s books were published in postrevolutionary Iran, a restriction that became neutralized as digital copies of his works, even though illegally, became increasingly widespread via the Internet.

[16] Pezeshkzad, Murūr’ī dar Tārīkh-i Inqilāb-i Rūsīyah, 15.

[17] Pezeshkzad, Murūr’ī dar Tārīkh-i Inqilāb-i Rūsīyah, 14-15.

[18] Pezeshkzad, Murūr’ī dar Tārīkh-i Inqilāb-i Rūsīyah, 15.

[19] BBC Persian, Murūr’ī bar zindigī-yi Īraj pizishkzād, Khāliq-i Dāstān Dā’ī Jān Nāpil’ūn,” 09:16-09:23.

[20] BBC Persian, Murūr’ī bar zindigī-yi Īraj pizishkzād, Khāliq-i Dāstān Dā’ī Jān Nāpil’ūn,” 00:30-00:39.

The Golden Era of Radio Iran (1940-1978): A Modernist Aural Culture

The Golden Era of Radio Iran (1940-1978): A Modernist Aural Culture

Khatereh Sheibani

اگر می­شد صدا را دید

چه گل­هایی … چه گل­هایی!

که از باغ صدای تو

به هر آواز می­شد چید!

اگر می­شد صدا را دید

محمدرضا شفیعی کدکنی

If voice could be seen!

gorgeous flowers … gorgeous flowers! could be picked,

from the sonic garden of your voice If voice could be seen!

Mohamadreza Shafi’ei Kadkani[1]

Introduction

Radio is the first broadcasting medium in the world and the first electronic entertainment medium that found its place in the domestic space of homes. Radio in Iran has a prolific history as an entertaining, informative, and educational form of media. As a domestic medium for more than eight decades, it has left an indisputable mark on Iranian culture and society. The articles in this issue each testify to radio’s impact on Iranian society from different perspectives. Yet, radio studies, within the larger domains of historical communication studies and Iranian studies is not a substantial field when compared to other areas such as cinema studies, journalism, and literary studies. The insufficiency of literature on radio may suggest that a sonic and oral media, despite its crucial position in culture, society, and politics, was not perceived as noteworthy as written media (such as journalism and literary studies) or visual media (such as cinema studies). In media studies, in general, there appears to be a certain hierarchical relation between visual and auditory cultures;[2] as it is also the case in Iranian media and cultural studies. Considering the long history of radio and its significance in Iranians’ lives (as depicted in the existing scholarly works), I believe there is a need to conduct more interdisciplinary research on the medium as a modern aural and oral institution. This issue of Iran Namag is dedicated to radio in Iran, as a response to such a need.

The diverse sonic palette of Radio Iran has entertained Persian audiences for more than eighty years. Officially established on April 24, 1940 (Ordibehesht 4, 1319 in the Jalali/Iranian calendar), Radio Iran, the first radio station of the country, was also the first wide-ranging and all-encompassing form of mass communication, and a major lead in the modernization endeavors in Iran. Radio content is acoustic, not written; hence by nature it is “fragmentary” and “ephemeral.”[3] Radio Iran’s content is not entirely available as audio recordings. In the early years, many radio programs were performed live and not taped. Gradually, some of the programs were recorded, especially since Radio Iran hired professional sound producers in 1954.[4] Nonetheless, many recorded and unrecorded programs, musical pieces and sounds are chronicled, restored, remembered, or documented either in Radio Iran’s periodical (published as Radio Iran magazine, and edited by Touraj Farazmand) or in the oral history (including listeners’ accounts, as well as the existing recollections of radio songs and tales in memoirs and in oral/street culture).

1An image of the Radio Iran archives.

Radio culture is a compelling part of the auditory culture of Iranians. It has contributed to the oral heritage, and as my study illuminates, it continues to live on in aural and oral cultural depository of the nation, bound by a common language and shared sociocultural values and experiences. Radio is a ‘modern’ from of mass communication. It was consciously established in Iran by the Pahlavi state as a ‘modernizing medium,’ with an outlook to the future. It formed a taste for music among Iranian audiences, prudently employed a refined Persian language, and diversified and modernized Iran’s aural culture, and by extension, the oral culture of Iran.

By investigating radio policies and radio programs, especially the news, social and cultural programs that were produced in the period from 1940 to 1977, this article depicts the ways in which Iranian aural/oral culture was influenced by radio and how these converged modernism in Iran. My study of Iranian radio and its novel domain of soundscape,[5] concentrates on radio as an aural emblem of a modernist Iran. It investigates the way radio, for the first time, mass mediated Iranian society by emitting a modern anthrophonic soundscape that evolved the public gendered sonic culture.

Radio: An Aural Emblem of A Modernist Iran

The launching of radio in Iran was aligned with other modernizing efforts during Reza Shah’s reign (1925-1941). After “consolidating his power, Reza Shah was able to embark upon an ambitious program of social, cultural, and economic reforms.”[6] The shah succeeded in restructuring the army, promoting health and hygiene practices, and reforming legal structures and national education to “integrate women, ethnic minorities, Sunni Muslims, and non-Muslims into the state.”[7] “The educational reforms were the most impressive of the civilian reforms. Between 1925 to 1941 the annual allocations for education increased in real terms by as much as twelvefold.”[8] In 1934, six colleges in Tehran were consolidated to form the University of Tehran, a modern higher education institution.[9] Print media such as Iṭilā‘āt, Kayhān, Mard-i imrūz, and the satirical magazine Tūfīq were also vehicles in enlightening the public, and when tolerated, criticizing governments. Iranian cinema, through the screening of foreign films (since 1900s) and a handful of national productions (since 1930s), refashioned a modern visual culture. Radio, with a far greater outreach and impact, modernized the aural culture of the country. The ensuing discussion provides historical examples of radio policies and radio shows that promoted a modernizing culture and transformed Iran’s aural sensibilities.

The task of establishing radio in Iran was insightfully assigned to two institutions, the Ministry of Post and Telegraph, administered by a seasoned politician, and the Radio Commission, a sub-branch of the Intellectual Development Institute (Sāzmān-i Parvarish Afkār), operated by a number of intellectuals, authors, and professors. Together, the two institutions (one well-versed in politics and technology, and the other in culture) managed to overcome the economic, political, and technical complications that were protracted to the Middle East due to the pre-World War II conflict and Russo-European competitions in the region.

The minister of Post and Telegraph, Mohamad Ebrahim Alam, known as Shokat al-Molk (1938-1941), was an eminent modernist figure of Iran’s history during and after the constitutional revolution. Shokat al-Molk had worked with the Anglo-Russian forces as the governor of Southern Khorasan, Sistan, and Baluchestan after Iran’s division to the two spheres of Anglo-Russian influence in 1907. Benefitting from the rivalry between the British and Russians, Alam had already accomplished reforming projects in his hometown of Birjand.[10] He was conscious of the proximity of war in Europe; as a result, he decided to order radio equipment from three different countries: the United States of America, Britain, and Germany, so that in case of the breaking out of war, Iranians could obtain spare parts from at least one of these countries.

Compared to some other countries in the region, radio came relatively late to Iran. Radio in Turkey was initiated in 1927 through a government supported private enterprise.[11] “In Egypt private radio broadcasting was initiated in 1925 by the Marconi company [although it] reflected the British colonial interests. … In Lebanon, radio was introduced in 1938 by the French colonial power.”[12] “[M]odeled on the BBC and run as colonial or imperial stations”, “[f]rom 1934 to 1941, three major British-governed radios stations were established in the Middle East: the Egyptian State Broadcasting (ESB) service, which began broadcasting from Cairo in 1934, the Palestine Broadcasting Service (PBS), which began broadcasting from Jerusalem in 1936, and the Near East Broadcasting Service (NEBS), which began broadcasting from Jaffa in 1941.”[13] Although EBS, PBS, and NEBS were colonial radio stations, they were also acting as national radios with “overlapping and sometimes conflicting [colonialist and nationalist] mandates.”[14] Radio broadcasting in the neighboring country of Afghanistan initially emerged as promising when inducted in 1925. However, the Afghan radio station was destroyed during un uprising against Amanullah Khan in 1929. Later in the 1930s, there was a new station set up through technical aid from Germany. Eventually, radio was officially launched in Afghanistan in 1940.[15]

The Western powers facilitated the introduction of radio in their colonial territories (such as Egypt) for propagandist reasons. Ostensibly, providing an apparatus and facilitating radio broadcasting in Iran was not a priority. The delivery of radio generators and transmission equipment from the Standard company (in the United Kingdom) was delayed for at least two years (1937-1939).[16] Ultimately, it was Germany’s Telefunken company that sent the first radio frequency generators and transmissions in 1939.[17] The ministry of Post and Telegraph oversaw other technical aspects of radio including the training of engineers and technicians. The cultural, linguistic, and artistic affairs of radio were supervised by cultural figures such as Malek o-Sho’ara Bahar, Saeed Nafissi, Zabih ul-Allah Safa, and “a number of (unspecified) intellectual women”[18] in the Radio Commission. In her monograph Iranian Women from Constitutional Revolution to The White Revolution, Badr ol-Moluk Bamdad, one of the first female graduates of the University of Tehran, indicated that she was the only woman ‘officially’ assigned to work in the Radio Commission.[19] As of 1941, the Office of Publications and Propaganda, under the supervision of Dr. Isa Sedigh took over the cultural affairs of radio.[20]

It is worth noting that Persian broadcasting services outside of the country preceded Radio Iran. In April 1939, Radio Berlin’s Persian language started broadcasting its pro-German, anti-Allied news, with antisemitic, and at times anti-Pahlavi sensibilities.[21] Radio Berlin’s Persian broadcasting did not stand unrivalled for long. BBC Persian language broadcasting was initiated on December 29, 1940. The propagandist foreign broadcasting services became an additional stimulus for the Ministry of Post and Telegraph to expedite the launching of a national, state-controlled radio station. Radio Iran, Iran’s national radio operated and financed by the Iranian government, was officially launched four months after BBC Persian Radio, following four years of technical, architectural, and intellectual preparations and one year of experimental airing of programs (1939-1940). The launching of radio was another statement of Reza Shah’s modernizing efforts, in line with his efforts to develop Iran’s social, cultural, and economic infrastructure.

On March 9, 1940, before the official inauguration of Radio Iran, radio receivers were ordered to be installed in Tehran and major cities in popular places such as city squares, and cafés for public consumption.[22] Initially, only the more privileged families owned radio receivers at home. People would gather around a radio set, with their extended family and friends to listen to radio programs.[23] Soon after, more families purchased radio sets. All radio receivers had to be registered in the constabulary office (Shahrbānī) of the respecive city.[24] The presence of radio receivers at home opened an unprecedented door of mass communication to the domestic space. Now, individuals were able to enjoy music, radio stories, the national and global news in the comfort of their homes. The electronic entertainment media made its way to Iranian households.

Radio Iran was deliberately contending with the Persian departments of Radio Berlin (and its famous, provocative radio host Bahram Shahrokh) and the BBC Radio for the dissemination of news based on Iran’s interests and policies. As it was mandated by Reza Shah, the body of Radio Iran news was gathered from Iranian sources as follow: Pars Press (Khabar’guzārī Pars),[25] as well as respected ministries and national institutions.[26] Radio Iran news was revised by a committee of experts comprised of Hejazi, Shafagh, and Nafissi to reflect governmental reforms and modernizing developments of the country.[27] The first Radio Iran news correspondent, Mohsen Farzaneh recalled how radio as a dynamic and wide-reaching media provided a unique opportunity for radio reporters to gain non-stop access to the news at the ministerial level, a privilege not offered to print media reporters of the time.[28] Radio news continued to be regulated, state-controlled and centralized by the governments in Mohamad Reza Shah’s reign to inspire optimism, patriotism, and a sense of loyalty to the shah and nation. Proficient radio correspondents such as Taghi Rohani (who joined Radio Iran in 1944 and continued his collaboration until 1978) had a vital part in representing the governmental policies through radio.[29]29 Iranian-based news remained the major source of news for the majority of Iranians until the revolutionary upheavals in 1978 when many radio listeners tuned to foreign-based broadcasters such as BBC Persian to learn about revolutionary developments from a non-governmental point of view. It is worth noting that although during Mohamad Reza Shah’s time radio was financed and regulated by the state, a number of leftist political activists were allowed to produce content for radio. Houshang Ebtehaj as the head of Gulhā program was one of the dissidents who found a prominent position in radio programming.

Radio was a source of entertaining and educational content. The wealth of Radio Iran’s programming, including its pioneering position in introducing and progressing Iranian music made it the most popular mass communication platform for Iranian listeners since the early years of its arrival. As the program guides in Radio Iran magazine depict, radio offered programs related to Iran’s geography, history, archeology, agriculture, as well as topics on global and regional affairs. There were also health and hygiene, social (such as Dr. Rezazadeh Shafagh’s program), legal, economic, athletic (such as “Varzish Bāstāni [Traditional Martial Arts]” performed by Shir-i Khoda), and religious talk shows (by Mr. Rashed and then Mr. Falsafi). Persian and world literature (as in Qiṣah ẓuhr Jum‘ah [Friday Noon Story],[30] Qiṣah Shab [Evening Story], and Johnny Dollar), and musical performances (as in Gulhā and Shumā va rādiyū [Radio and You]) were popular programs of Radio Iran. Based on the program guides of Radio Iran and local radios, it is evident that the radio content was structured based on preserving and enhancing national, cultural, and social values of Iran, in harmony with modern values of the global culture. Each program was prepared by experts in the field and presented by the producers or professional broadcasters.

The collection of radio talks by Dr. Rezazadeh Shafagh, delivered in 1960 and 1961 (later published as a book) could be taken as an example. In his talks, Rezazadeh Shafagh recognized Iranians as one nation regardless of their religious, ethnic, or linguistic differences. He glorified Iran’s pre-Islamic past yet identified the post-Islamic literary traditions of Persia and the Islamic wisdom in line with Zoroaster’s teachings and Cyrus the Great’s humanitarian deeds.[31] Generally speaking, Rezazadeh Shafagh’s program promoted patriotism, and reminded the audiences of their responsibilities towards their country, society, and fellow citizens.[32] His talk show was rich with historical, literary, and cultural details about Iran and the world. As a university professor, a former Majlis deputy, and a member of the Senate, he shared his wealth of knowledge on a variety of topics such as democracy, constitutional governance, the government’s plans on economic growth,[33] and obstacles constraining the country from following such goals. In his talks, he offered instructive criticism of Majlis deputies and the ministers, reminding all citizens to strive for Iran’s progress and sovereignty. Although at times his tone was critical, he remained optimist and faithful to the modernization plans of the government. Rezazadeh Shafagh’s talks were delivered for average audiences. His talk show was meant to offer historical, literary, and political lessons for the masses. Similarly, numerous radio shows provided entertaining and informative content for average audiences. Gulchīn-i Haftah (Selection of the Week), produced by Houshang Ebtehaj provided information about old Persian musical instruments and musicians. Hosseinali Rashed was producing a religious program on Friday nights.

Marzʹhā-yi Dānish (Borders of Science) by Mohit Tabatabai offered scientific information to listeners. Other examples of informative and entertaining radio shows from the 1950s to 1978 include, Bih Man Javāb Bidah (Answer My Question), hosted by Iraj Gorgin, and Chah Mī’dānīd? (What Do You Know?), hosted by Mohamad Soltani. As evident, radio, alongside educational institutions such as colleges and schools, had a significant role in modernizing Iranian society in the years spanning 1940 to 1978. While education in school was limited to the literate and those who had access to educational institutions, education through an all-inclusive media such as radio was for everyone, regardless of their level of literacy or economic status.

2An episode of Marzʹhā-yi Dānish (Borders of Science), authored by Touran Mirhadi, and
transcribed in Radio Iran magazine.

Radio: A Modern Anthrophonic Soundscape

Radio in Iran was a major source of changing Iran’s cultural soundscape in the 1940s and onward. Soundscape is defined as ‘‘the collection of biological, geophysical and anthropogenic sounds that emanate from a landscape and which vary over space and time reflecting important ecosystem processes and human activities.’’[34] Bernie Krause identified three separate sound sources: geophony (sounds of weather), biophony (sounds of living things), and anthrophony (human generated sounds). The anthrophonic sounds are divided into the sub-categories of controlled sounds (as in speech, music, and theatrical dialogue) and chaotic sounds or noise.[35]

Considering Krause’s categorization of acoustic ecology, the soundscape an average Iranian was experiencing in the premodern era mainly consisted of domestic and community sounds belonging to the anthrophonic subsection, as well as environmental sounds (biophonic and geophonic sounds). Examples of such aural experiences (with more emphasis on anthrophonic sounds) are domestic sounds (of family members, relatives and associates communicating with each other, the sound of household-related activities and so forth), sounds of shopkeepers, street vendors and their animals retailing products in residential areas, the bustling sound of crowded places such as bazars, workshops, and city centers, the sound of transportation vehicles, and the natural sound of pets and birds. As for the controlled anthrophonic sounds of the pre-modern to early modern era, there were also heritage and cultural sounds of religious rituals and hymns in spiritual establishments (such as the call to prayers, Azan), the occasional sounds of qavvals and naqāls in town centers, singing or reciting stories of Shahnameh or other works of classical literature, the seasonal sound of taʻziyah players, and Nowruz/New Year lyricists on the streets. In the modern era and only for those limited urban dwellers who had the privilege of listening to gramophone records, or going to the movies and theatres, or hosting or getting invited to modern musical performances of singers such as Qamar ul-Moluk Vaziri, the experienced anthrophonic soundscape was enriched with the modernized aural culture, as well.

Against this backdrop, radio during the 1940s introduced an arrayed anthrophonic soundscape the likes of which was never experienced by the majority of Iranians. Western (Czechoslovakian) and Iranian orchestras were hired to perform music in the radio studios at the Arg Square building.[36] In the first four nights after the inauguration of radio (and the days and nights after), four orchestral ensembles were created, consisting of male singers (Adib Khansari, Banan, and Badi’ Zadeh), female singers (Qamar, Rouhangiz), and musicians such as Rouhollah Khaleghi and Saba.[37] Four hours out of the six-hour evening program were dedicated to music. The rest of the evening program was reserved for news (seventy-five minutes) and talk shows. The foreign service broadcast the news in five languages (Arabic, English, German, French, Russian). Later, Turkish news was added, and the German program eliminated from the foreign service. Other radio programs in 1940 were health, agriculture, history, and geography features, as well as news in Persian.[38] A children’s program, “talk shows, soap operas, and dramatic readings of Shahnameh” were also included in radio programming.[39] As Pijanowsky, et al. have cited, “Soundscapes provide ecosystem services to humans in the form of many life-fulfilling functions.”[40] Many soundscapes also have cultural, historical, recreational, aesthetic, and therapeutic values. “Unique and natural soundscapes can be subtle or powerful links for humans to their environment.”[41] Although Radio’s soundscape in Iran created a modern anthrophonic domain, it was a reflection of the national depository of culture, history, and pahlavānī (roughly translated as heroic) rituals, hence, it had sentimental and cultural value. In other words, the modern soundscape of Radio Iran has had close ties with Iran’s cultural foundations and its heritage soundscape.

The impact of radio in modernizing Iranians’ anthrophonic soundscape was far greater than cinema because of its wider consumption and daily stretch of exposure. Having access to music on a daily basis made the audience’s ears better acquainted with rhymes and patterns of Persian and international music. Informative and educational audio programs were added to their daily soundscape regimen, and literary and cultural programs became a day-to-day segment of their aural consumption. Mixed-gender musical voices were also normalized in the aural culture of Iranians. The sonic palette accessible to Iranians became more divergent, colorful, and multifaceted. The acoustic ecosystem of sounds in towns and villages, homes and streets embraced more than the local anthrophonic sounds. Radio made the acoustic ecosystem of the nation modernized and diversified.

The wide consumption of radio made Iran a widely interconnected, modern mediated society. A mediated society that collectively experienced a new aural culture in tune with a modern era in the middle of the twentieth century. This topic is further explored in the next subsection.

 Radio in Iran: Initiating a Modern Mass Mediated Society

A mediated society “has a specific regime of communication that expresses a certain regional or local angle on culture.”[42] A mass mediated society could be comprised of multiple heterogenous communities, yet they all attach importance to common cultural reproductions. Certain topics, programs, and shows are produced, distributed, widely consumed, and valued in a mass mediated society. Institutional channels, technological procedures, cultural arrangements, and political organisations collaborate (either purposefully or coincidentally) to form a mass mediated society. Living in the digital era and having access to cyberspace, consumers of mass media are constantly connected to the internet, social media, and the traditional media (Radio, TV, and so forth) that are now modified into digital platforms. In other words, no matter where we live, we could receive or even produce information on digital platforms. Global citizens in the digital era are now connected through mass mediated networks, based on their (linguistic, cultural, audiovisual) model of media consumption. Social mass mediation predates the digital era; it starts with radio. How did it happen in the Iranian context? This section answers the above-mentioned question by exploring the way radio transformed Iranian society into a mass mediated society for the first time.

Among modern forms of mass communication, print media, journalism, and telegraphy were predecessors to radio, all of which had a crucial role in modernizing and enlightening the public, and especially in the progress of the Constitutional Revolution of Iran (1905-1911).[43] Although telegraphy and journalism have a significantly longer history in Iran, they were exclusive forms of mass communication targeting the literate/elite audiences—those who read, summarized, interpreted, and analyzed the news and stories for the illiterate or those who had no access to the printed media. Also, as written forms of media, journals and telegraphs had limited chances of exposure compared to a radio that was audible with eight-and-a-half hours of airtime at the commencement of Radio Iran, and with an increasing number of hours and radio stations thereafter.[44]

On June 29, 1960, Radio Tehran[45], a new elitist radio station, started broadcasting programs. In the same year, Radio Iran’s airtime was increased to 24 hours a day. Radio Iran programs were mostly targeted for average audiences with a diverse array of programs, while Radio Tehran, with its emphasis on arts and culture, was targeted for a more educated, intellectual audience. The frequency modulation transmission, shortened and better known as FM broadcasting was initiated on October 30, 1967. Following the success of Radio Iran in attracting audiences, community radio stations started initially in Tabriz (1947), followed by other local stations in Mashhad, Isfahan, Shiraz, Rasht, and many other cities. By 1961, Iran had twelve active community radio stations broadcasting programs both in Persian and in local languages such as Azeri, Kurdish, Arabic, Gilaki and so forth.[46] All radio channels up until 1978 had both entertainment and information-based content. In other words, they followed the melding model that is known as “infotainment” in media studies.[47]

The following pages show the monthly radio schedule dated Azar 1344 (December 1965):

3Radio Iran Programs

4Radio Iran Programs

5Radio Tehran Programs

6Radio Rasht and Radio Tabriz Programs

7Radio Shiraz Programs

Radio was the first mass broadcasting medium and the most widespread one that reached the literate and illiterate, men (with more social mobility and interactions), women, and children (who were more domestic bound). Radio was the only medium that crossed the impeding boundaries of geographic and social space, age, gender, and economic status, hence the most accessible medium for the masses.

Before the launching of Radio Iran, the first Iranian made radio set was crafted by Dr. Mahmoud Hesabi and his students in Dar al- Mo‘alimīn (Teachers College).[48] The first audible tune on their radio was from Radio Baku, broadcasting from Azerbaijan in the Soviet Union.[49] In February 1941, the Iranian government ordered affordable radio receivers to radio companies such as MEND, I.C.I, Telefunken, and Luxor and distributed them among government and municipal employees. The price of these radios averaged 200 to 300 tomans, to be paid in equal monthly payments. With the inauguration of Radio Iran, advertising and retailing different brands of radio sets in electronic stores became a profitable business in Iran.[50] Ahmad Mo’tamedi, a veteran radio engineer, recalls that a merchant by the name of Amin Ghanieh at Istanbul Avenue in Tehran managed to sell 1000 small Lincoln radios sets in a month or two after the launching of Radio Iran.[51] The number of radio sets “in 1966 was estimated at 6,800,000,”[52] while Iran’s population was 25,500,000. Therefore, there was one radio set for almost every four persons. The number of radio sets “increased to 10,000,000 in 1974,”[53] as the population rose to 31,500,000. So, during the mid1970s, for almost every three persons, there was one radio in Iran. Distribution of radio sets continued as part of a governmental project devised to connect less privileged people in cities, villages, and remote places to radio content.

8Radio advertisements from 1940s Iranian periodicals.[54]

9

10

Old radio advertisements.[55]

The geographical and economic boundaries as well as gender-based restrictions of the early 1940s obstructed many Iranian women, children, and even men (in smaller rural and urban comminutes) from enjoying a live play, a musical show, or a movie screening in city venues such as the Lalehzar district (the entertainment district of Tehran). Radio, on the other hand, became a medium of mass communication that entered homes. The domestic and easy-reaching nature of radio, compared to other forms of media, made it the most effective medium of mass communication in the 1940s and 1950s until a few years after the advent of television in the country.  The rise of radio receivers at home was a major gamechanger for female and young audiences who were traditionally barred from the gendered space of theatre houses, since such public entertainment spaces were more welcoming and accommodating to adult male audiences. With the advent of radio, women and children were able to enjoy a radio show in a more relaxing domestic space. In the 1940s, radio programs (including music) were an integral part of the public and private soundscape. Although gender reforms of Reza Shah were underway during this period, many women still did not enter the workforce, nor could they partake widely in social activities. Similarly, many male citizens who already integrated into the work force did not have a chance to receive formal education. Yet, radio entered the feminine sphere of homes in the daytime, as well as the masculine space of the labor market and its adjacent cafés. As a result, modern ideas, lectures on science, agriculture, history, geography, politics, news, and music reached out to popular audiences. Indeed, Radio Iran as the most popular radio station targeting average audiences, became an efficient tool to mediatize[56] scientific, cultural, and social discourses. In the next three decades, listening to radio became a natural daily activity among most Iranians regardless of gender or social class.

The idea of targeting various social groups of all ages and genders as radio listeners was part of the Radio Commission mandate. In December 1939, a few months before the official launch of radio, the Radio Commission expedited its plan to produce sufficient radio programs for the first few months. In his records, Ebrahim Khalili Sepehri, the administrative chair of the Radio Commission, stated that a variety of radio programs on subjects such as literature, geography, history, and homemaking/home improvement were prepared to be aired on Radio Iran.[57] Women were further identified as important radio audiences, through specialized programs such as Zan va zindigī (Women and Life) and Zanān-i Shahristānʹhā-yi Iran (Women of Iranian Provinces). Women were also among ardent radio listeners of radio dramas, poetry reading programs, and Gulhā programs—a music show produced by accomplished songwriters, musicians, and singers.[58]

11Report for the Zan va Zindigī (Women and Life) program in Radio Iran magazine.

The first children’s radio program, Bachah’hā Salam (Hello Children), was aired on April 26, 1940, by a well-versed broadcaster, literary scholar, and school teacher, Fazlollah Sobhi Mohtadi. Mr. Sobhi took the initiative to include children in the broadcast studio during the show to participate and interact with him during storytime. He adapted stories from oral literature (folk and fairy tales), mythological tales, classical Persian literature, and world literature. Upon narrating a story in simple language during his program, Sobhi would sometimes read from the original source (Rumi’s Mathnavi, for instance) to make young listeners familiar with the language of classical literature. Sobhi later published his stories for children and adults in multiple volumes.[59] His initiative became an incentive to produce modern works of children’s literature in Iran. Children’s arts and fiction were revived in the 1950s and especially during the 1960s, through the colorful animated production of children’s books, paintings, posters, videos, films, and plays. Kayhān Bachahhā, the oldest periodical for children and youth, was founded in 1956. A major producer and distributor of children’s literature, films and dramatic performances was Kānūn Parvarish Fikrī Kūdakān va Nūjavānān (The Institute for the Intellectual Development of the Child and the Adolescent, also known in English as Kanun), established in 1961.

It is worth noting that Persian-speaking children were acknowledged as radio audiences only two days after the official launch of radio. Recognizing children as media consumers also became a precursor for the ‘Children’s Movies’ genre in Iranian cinema and for children’s programs on national television.

A list of radio programs dated April 1940 shows that specialized programs for certain vocations were also incorporated into Radio Iran’s airtime. For instance, a special agriculture program was regularly aired, hence including farmers as radio listeners.[60] On both private and social levels, Iranian men, women, and children had the opportunity to connect with radio and its aural array of programs and features.

A particular characteristic of radio that differentiates it from visual-based media is its user-friendliness as a “flexible,”[61] “secondary medium,”[62] since it is viable to listen to radio, and yet be engaged in other activities (such as gardening, cooking, office work, shopkeeping, and so forth). In the early years of radio, when radio sets were larger and more expensive, most families had to gather around one radio to listen to a favorite program. The group style of radio listening required more attention. It was still viable to eat or knit while listening to the radio. In that sense, even in the early years, radio was a more flexible medium compared to, for instance, newspapers. But as radio sets became smaller and less expensive, listening habits changed to a more private practice. The popularity of small, battery operated, low-priced and portable transistor radios in the 1960s was a breakthrough. The Japanese technology company Sony mass-produced transistor radios that became available in Iran. Radio in the 1960s turned out to be the most flexible mass medium that could be enjoyed anywhere anytime, in public and in private.

12Advertisement featured in Hamsharī newspaper.[63]

Radio, as Marshal McLuhan has stated, is theoretically a “hot medium” because of its “high definition” or the wealth of sensory data given to its audience.[64] In practice, some radio content could be categorized as cool, if it does not provide an abundance of information, thus demanding more participation or completion on the part of the audience (such as radio contests).

As indicated before, Radio Iran and other Iranian radio stations prior to 1978 were operated as regulated and centralized media promoting a secular, modernized, Perso-centric, and unified Iran. Non-Persian programs (such as French, English, Arabic, Russian, German programs, and other programs in ethnic languages), as well as religious, cultural, community-based, athletic, and scientific programs, provided a diverse aural space suitable for diverse urban and rural audiences. Since 1940, Radio Iran was audible across the country and in some other countries.[65] As it was announced in the Radio Iran magazine (image below), boosting radio transmitters made Radio Iran a worldwide network in the 1950s and 1960s, targeting audiences outside of its national borders (in the USA, Africa, Europe, and neighboring countries).[66] idā-yi (Voice of Iran), later renamed Ṣidā-yi Āshinā (Familiar Voice), was broadcasting programs in foreign languages including English, French, Turkish, Russian, and Arabic. Families inside the country would send messages to their loved ones abroad through the program. This program and some other radio shows were popular among listeners outside of the country. The Afghan listeners who shared a common language with Iranians were among ardent audiences of Radio Iran. As recounted by Naderi, in the early 1970s, when a team of Radio Iran’s performers and musicians arrived at Kabul airport to take part in Mohammed Davoud Khan’s anniversary of presidency, they were greeted by a group of female students. It turned out that the girls were hoping to see Googoosh, the famous Iranian singer, who was a regular singer of Radio Iran and was also co-hosting a popular radio show called Shumā va Rādiyū (Radio and You). Apparently, Googoosh was flying from Paris to Kabul and did not accompany the radio team on that particular airplane. Realizing how much the girls were disappointed, Naderi invited them to their hotel to visit their favorite singer. In his memoir, Naderi added that at that time, Afghanistan did not have television, but Afghan people were familiar with Iranian radio shows and personalities such as Fakhri Nikzad and Googoosh.[67]

13Ṣidā-yi Āshinā (Familiar Voice) program.

With Radio Iran, the Iranian nation and Persianate communities outside of the country were widely connected by broadcasting media. Through radio, a new model of communication and a modern aural culture were created, stressing on nationalist values and the Persian language as unifying elements among all Persian speakers. As the discussion in this section depicts, with its wide-reaching content, Radio Iran mass-mediated audiences through popular radio programming. The three examples here further represent the depth of engagement with radio programs:

One of the most attractive radio shows in the 1960s and early 1970s was the detective drama Johnny Dollar. It was a free adaptation of the original CBS radio drama titled Yours Truly Johnny Dollar. The Iranian Johnny Dollar was played by the director of the show, Heidar Saremi. Interestingly, Saremi’s day job was in Tehran’s police service. After starring in the show, he became a radio celebrity of sorts. The show was an interactive mystery quiz. At the end of each episode, the listeners were asked if they could figure out how detective Dollar found the perpetrators. Those who guessed correctly would enter a raffle for a prize. Its most popular episodes were written by Jalal Nematollahi;[68] other episodes were written by radio scriptwriters, such as Assadollah Shahryari. Notable radio performers like Hamid Ameli, Farhang Merhparvar, Manijeh Zarrin, and Hamid Manoucheri were playing in the show. The series aired on Wednesday nights at 8:30 p.m. and was widely received by radio listeners, so much so that town streets would be deserted during Johnny Dollar’s airtime. The series is now republished in cyberspace via multiple platforms (Facebook, Instagram) and in contemporary literary podcasts (Audio Theatre).

Gheseh Zohre Jom’e (Friday Noon Story) is the oldest radio show and, at certain times, one of the most popular programs of Radio Iran. Sobhi Mohtadi was the producer and the distinguished storyteller of the program for twenty-four years, starting the series a month after launching Radio Iran in 1940. After Sobhi’s illness and death, his voice recordings continued to be replayed in the program for another ten years, making him the longest running broadcaster of Radio Iran.[69] Other narrators, such as Hamid Ameli, Iraj Golsorkhi, and Mousavi Garmaroudi, performed on the show. The popularity of Qiṣah ẓuhr Jum‘ah was partially owed to its rehearsing of storytelling techniques found in the tradition of Naqālī (Persian story telling for the public) and Shahnameh Khānī /reading. After the 1979 Revolution, the program lost its authentic literary nuance and embodied the ideological and theocratic perspective of the revolutionary government. As a result of this conceptual change, the previous narrator and producer, Hamid Ameli, discontinued his collaboration with the program.[70] The post-revolutionary stories in the 1980s and 1990s, narrated by Mohamadreza Sarshar for twenty-four years, were the glamorized and romanticized stories of religious saints or war veterans of the Iran-Iraq war, and so forth. Qiṣah ẓuhr Jum‘ah lost its aesthetic impact and public appeal after 1979 but it continues to air on Radio Iran.

The last example of an extremely popular radio show that created a sense of communal binding among massive listeners and an interactive relation with the show was the Ṣobḥ-i Jum‘ah (Friday Morning) show (also known as Shumā va rādiyū (You and Radio). As one of the most elaborated radio shows of the 1950s, 60s, and early- to mid-70s, Ṣubḥ-i Jum‘ah —produced by Shahrokh Naderi—recruited a team of 150 performers, authors, poets, singers, musicians, and producers. Ṣubḥ-i Jum‘ah created memorable satirical dramas, radio contests, interviews, and musical pieces performed by outstanding broadcasters, actors, and singers such as Forouzandeh Arbabi, Manouchehr Nozari, Saremi, Ali Zarandi (who played the comical Shabaji Khanoum character), Mehri Vedadian, Ali Tabesh, Mahin Bozorgi, Ahmad Ghadakchian, Fardin, Googoosh, Vigen, and Pouran. Many actors and radio personalities of Radio Iran, especially those in the Ṣubḥ-i Jum‘ah program gained stardom status in Iran and were invited to play, write, produce, or sing in movies or in television series. Radio created a solid star system in Iran and mass-mediated Persian-speaking audiences. Although Radio Iran was financed by the Iranian government, its cultural and entertainment programs were made independently by professional radio producers.

14Ms. Arbabi and Mr. Mostajabodaveh broadcasting Shumā va rādiyū.

Basil Cheesman Bunting, a scholar of classical Persian literature and culture, an MI6 intelligence officer, and a modernist poet who lived, loved, and spied in Iran, showed his tribute to Radio Iran’s inspirational programs in a section of his long illustrious poem “Al-Anfālullah [The Spoils],” published in 1951:

From Hajji Mosavvor’s trembling wrist grace of tree and beast shines on ivory in eloquent line. Flute, shade dimples under chenars breath of Naystani chases and traces as a pair of gods might dodge and tag between stars. Taj is to sing, Taj, when tar and drum come to their silence, slow, clear, rich, as though

he had cadence and phrase from Hafez. Nothing that was is, but Moluk-I Zarrabi draws her voice from a well deeper than history. Shir-i Khoda’s note on a dawn-cold radio forestalls, outlasts the beat. Friday, Sobhi’s tales keeping boys from their meat.[71]

In his previous poems (such as “Let Them Remember Samangan”), Basil Bunting paid homage to classical Persian poetry, especially to the Shahnamah. In this lengthy, multitopic poem, Bunting partly illustrates his passion for Iran’s modern aural culture as he discovered it in Radio Iran. He talks about different radio musicians, singers, and performers, including Naystani’s ney/flute, the rhythmic singing of Taj, Moluk Zarabi’s deep voice, Shir-i Khoda’s performance of Varizish-i Bāstānī on radio, and Sobhi’s tales. The sonic palette of Radio Iran is perfectly represented in this excerpt, and it might have influenced the melodious sonic quality of the poem. Bunting was so inspired by Sobhi that he recalled him as “the most perfect teller of tales.”[72] The renowned British poet found the modern oral and aural culture of Iran as interesting as its written literature of the past. Bunting, like many other radio listeners, was mediated to Radio Iran, which turned out to become a new site of cultural production with widespread accessibility.

15Shumā va rādiyū

Radio: Unveiling The Female Voice In The Public Sphere

In the pre-modern era, the exterior urban spaces in Iran were male-dominated. As a result, the city soundscape in social arenas was a dominant masculine soundscape. Radio enriched aural culture by integrating women’s voice within Iran’s social sonic oeuvre. Prior to the official launching of Radio Iran, General Amir-Khosrawi, the head of Radio Commission arranged a competition in the Officers’ Club (Bāshgāh Afsarān) to select radio broadcasters among the 160 contestants. Three women, including Ghodsi Rahbari (a seventeen-year-old girl, ranked top among both the male and female groups), Dr. Tousi Haeiri, and Taj ul-Moluk Nakhaei, as well as five men were hired for Persian broadcasting. Ten broadcasters were also selected for the international branch of radio.[73] It was the voice of Ms. Rahbari, Radio’s top-ranked broadcaster that officially inaugurated Radio Iran, at 7:15 pm on April 24, 1940: “This is Tehran, voice of (Radio) Iran.”[74] The inclusion of female voice in Radio Iran was a breakthrough in Iran’s male-dominated anthrophonic social soundscape. Audiences of radio were listening to a modern medium through a female voice that was not typically heard in social settings.

Thanks to the supervision of the Radio Commission, and, later on, the Institute of Publication and Propaganda (under Dr. Isa Sedigh’s management), professionalism in aural performance, aptitude for speaking Persian eloquently, and mastery over the topic of discussion were essential qualities of broadcasting in radio. The existing excerpts of Ghodsi Rahbari’s performance is a testimony to the high standards to which female broadcasters adhered in the 1940s and 1950s. Her presentations were enunciated in a clear, warm, and seamless style. She had mastery over Persian language and literature and articulated Persian poems impeccably. In the following years, other great female broadcasters, such as Forouzandeh Arbabi (host of the famous music program Gulhā and many other shows such as Ṣobḥ-i Jum‘ah), Azar Pajouhesh (host of Gulhā and Radio Darya), and Moloud Atefi (news broadcaster and storyteller for children’s program) joined Radio Iran. Listening to female broadcasters of the golden era of Iranian radio shows that even by the broadcasting standards of the twenty-first century, they are positioned among the greatest professional performers.

Gender integration and the audibility of female voice on Radio Iran were in accordance with the gender-reforming endeavors of Reza Shah Pahlavi’s era. In fact, in the new modernization model that was formulized by the state and progressive intellectuals, creating a modern nationalist state, could not be materialized in the absence of female participation in public life. The nationalist state demanded all its citizens to partake in reforming and developing the country. Women and men were expected to be socially active in order to build a powerful sovereign nation. The Pahlavi policy of social modernization envisaged the proliferation of female participation in social life as an essential component of a modernized Iran.[75] In the 1930s, women created more social clubs, and gained rights and visibility in educational and civil domains. Women’s education in schools and at the University of Tehran (since 1935, a year after its establishment) were encouraged by the government.[76] The public unveiling of female teachers and students was even encouraged before the formal declaration of unveiling, respectively in 1933 and 1935.[77]  Eventually, Reza Shah implemented and enforced the banning of Islamic veils for women on January 8, 1936. The unveiling project took place four years before the official inauguration of radio.

Before the introduction of modernist ideas in Iran, the female voice was socially and religiously permitted to be heard in either the domestic spaces or homosocial spaces dedicated to female groups. The first introduction of female voice in a large mixed public venue took place in movie houses. Iran was the first country in the Middle East to produce short motion pictures, known as actualités in 1900.[78] In the actualités that are left from the Qajar era, we see both men and women of the royal haram represented in motion pictures. Those short films were not meant to be seen by public audiences. In 1900, Iranians also opened private showing venues (in Tehran) and public cinemas (in Tabriz).[79] The advent of silent cinema in Iran initially introduced the female body (but not voice) to public screens, to be consumed (mostly) by men, and limited women spectators. In the 1900s, only silent films were available, all made outside of the country. The first Iranian-made, feature-length, silent film, Abi and Rabi, was made in 1930 starring Madame Siranush, an Armenian-Iranian actress.

In 1933, the introduction of sound to the first Persian speaking talkie initiated a new era in Iranian cinema. The Lor Girl (1933), the first Persian talkie by Abdolhossein Sepanta and Ardeshir Irani, became an instant hit at the movie houses. “[…]. The Lor Girl was the first film in which actors were speaking Persian. Iranian filmgoers were as thrilled to ‘listen’ to the film as they were to watch it.”[80] Another factor that contributed to the success of the film was representing a lead female figure, Sedigheh (Rouhangiz) Saminejad, as the Lor girl. The exposure of an Iranian woman’s ‘body and voice’ in the film made the film an exceptional experience for Iranian filmgoers. Comparing the unparalleled success of the first Persian talkie to an Iranian silent film (Haji Agha, The Movie Actor), both screened simultaneously, reveals that the addition of Persian enunciation made the film more successful at the box-office. The character of Golnar, played by Saminejad became a popular cultural icon, almost a prototypical model of female cinematic character, comparable to female literary icons such as Shirin (from Khusraw va Shrin), and the Shahnamah women (Tahmineh, Rudabeh, Manijeh, and so forth). Saminejad did not enjoy the celebrated status that her fictive/cinematic character relished. During the screening of the film in India and then after her return from India, she was shunned by Iranian-Indian Muslim filmgoers and and the people of her hometown in Bam and Kerman. Saminejad did not pursue her cinematic career after playing in three films in India, came back to Iran, and stayed away from the cinema community.

Two or three years after the screening of Saminejad’s films, the Iranian female broadcasters of radio were not antagonized and did not experience similar public disapproval. Unlike movie actresses who had to protect their family “reputation” by playing in films (mostly) under a pseudonym, women broadcasters were known by their real names. One of the reasons behind the overall approval of the female presence in radio is that radio, by its nature, is a “blind” medium, as Andrew Crissel, a cultural theorist defines the medium.[81] For listeners of radio, the presence of radio broadcasters is reduced to their voice. They are not ‘portrayed’ as bodies; they are only ‘audible,’ hence female participation in the social act of broadcasting was not offensive or threatening to patriarchy in the same way that the actress’ body was. In the traditional and patriarchal setting, a female broadcaster had an advantageous position over an actress. She was able to exert her social agency through broadcasting her voice, in a blind medium. She was partaking in a social domain while her presence was not visible as much. As a result, the blindness of the medium became a source of advantage for women. An acoustic-base medium such as radio, primarily exists in time, rather than space.[82] Actresses on the silver screen were engaging spectators both in space (screen) and in time (narrative line). Thus, the prominent actresses experienced social intolerance unlike their broadcasting counterparts.

Another important factor regarding the public acceptance of women in radio was that radio programs of the early years were more inclined to be informative, educational, and cultural compared to the leisurely-paced early Iranian films. The broadcasters were also chosen based on their intellectual merits, educational background, and their quality of voice and clarity of speech. Tusi Haeri and Ms. Nakhai were both university graduates. Equally, the next generation of female radio personalities in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s were known as professional women in the broadcasting industry. There were not seen by the public as entertainers. Hence, radio became an agent of gender modernization. The inclusion of female voice to the early aural repertoire of Iranian radio and its endorsement by society contributed to female visibility and agency in the wake of modernization in Iran. Four years after the unveiling of women of Iran, their voice was also unveiled, and included in a nation-wide public service. In the following years, female broadcasters were firmly established as an integral part of national radio and television. After the 1979 Revolution, women were excluded from many professional sectors. The revolutionary forces, however, could not erase women from the broadcasting industry. It might be due to women’s plentiful and strong presence in radio since 1940. However, it should be noted that the revolutionaries managed to eradicate certain figures, male and female, who had gained a stardom status, or were known as Pahlavi regime supporters.

The acoustic modernism that was introduced by radio had a formative impact on other forthcoming media of mass communication. Radio culture became a backbone to Iran’s national television (established in 1958).  Radio talk shows, musical programs, dramatic series, and the scripting model of news were rehearsed on Iranian television. Prominent radio broadcasters, producers, vocalists, musicians, and storytellers were invited to national television studios. The modern aural culture shaped and developed the modern televisual culture of Iran. The golden era of radio continued even after the birth of television, because of its niche programs such as Ṣobḥ-i Jum‘ah, or Shir-i Khoda’s Varzish-i Bāstānī, with no equivalent in television programs. The golden era of radio ended with the upheavals of the Revolution in 1978. Strikes and political disruptions discontinued most of the quality programs on the radio after September of that year.[83] After the Revolution, prominent radio personalities such as Iraj Gorgin, Reza Qotbi, and Touraj Farazmand left the country. Those who stayed were either fired (as in the case of Shahrokh Naderi), imprisoned (including many singers), or even assassinated (as in the case of the famous broadcaster Taghi Rohani, and a religious performer, Seyed Javad Zabihi, the first singer of Rabbanā prayer/du‘ā).

The Islamized radio milieu of 1979 and onward was inclined to a more converged, propagandist, and tightly regulated programming; but the aural legacy of the 1940s to late 1970s media environment did not vanquish altogether. Since the late 1990s, the decentralized and rhizomatic structure of the digital media setting provided radio audiences with alternative radio content that is not theocratic-oriented. Globally, radio adapted and adopted new platforms in the twenty-first century that were also utilized by the Persian/Iranian radio producers. The producers of radio content (who are now citizen broadcasters, not necessarily hired by state-controlled media incorporation) indulge the previous culture-oriented oeuvre of Radio Iran and Radio Tehran in their poetic, literary, cinematic, theatrical, and musical radio podcasts, and streaming audio. Some of these podcasts (such as Radio Tragedy, Radionist) are produced inside the country, and some others (such as Roqe Media, Ferdowsi-khani, and Chia with Banafsheh), are produced outside of Iran. There are also podcasts that feature and republish radio content of the golden era of Iranian radio. These radio podcasts are made in Persian or a non-Persian language, depending on their audiences and the host country. But there is one element that is common in the majority of these podcasts. The non-governmental, citizen-produced digital radio, podcast, and streaming audio content strive to maintain the progressive, cultural-oriented, infotainment soundscape that informed Radio Iran since 1940.[84]

16Announcement for Episode 12, Radio Nist podcast.

[1] Poem “Ārāyish-i Khūrshīd [The Sun’s Makeup],” in Hazārah-i duvvum-i āhū-yi kūhī [The Second Millennium of the Mountain Deer] (Tehran: Sukhan Press, 1997), 201.

[2] Kate Lacey, “Towards a Periodization of Listening: Radio and Modern Life,” International Journal of Cultural Studies 3 (2000): 280.

[3] Lacey, “Towards a Periodization of Listening,” 279.

[4] Shahrokh Naderi, Shuma va rādiyu [You and Radio] (Tehran: Nashr-i Namak : Intisharāt-i Badraqah-i Javidān, 2015), 95.

[5] “Several disciplines have used the term ‘soundscape.’ The etymology of the term ‘-scape’ is a reference to an ‘‘area, scene, space or view.” Changing Landscape: An Ecological Perspective, ed. I.S. Zonneveld and R.T.T. Forman (New York: Springer-Verlag, 1990). “‘Soundscape’ is thus ‘sounds occurring over an area.’” Bryan C. Pijanowski, et al. “What Is Soundscape Ecology? An Introduction and Overview of an Emerging New Science: Soundscape Ecology,” Landscape Ecology 26, no. 9 (2011): 1214.

[6] Ervand Abrahamian, Iran Between Two Revolutions (Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 1983), 136.

[7] Janet Afary, Sexual Politics in Modern Iran (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 145.

[8] Abrahamian, Iran Between Two Revolutions, 144.

[9] Before the establishment of the University of Tehran, a modern polytechnic college, known as Dar ul-Funun, was opened in 1851, during the Qajar era.

[10] Alam’s modernizing projects in Birjand included financing and opening a military college, establishing a “well-organized local army” (Hormoz Davarpanah, “ʿALAM, Moḥammad Ebrāhim,” Encyclopædia Iranica, online edition, 2012, www.iranicaonline.org/articles/ alam-mohammad-ebrahim-amir-sawkat-al-molk [accessed 16 October 2012]), opening the third modern school in Birjand after Dar ul-Funun and the Roshdieh school in Tabriz, and providing piped water for his hometown, making Birjand the first city in Iran with sanitary hydro facility.

[11] Hale Yaylalı, “Radio Broadcasting in Turkey from 1927 to Multi-Party Period,” İstanbul Aydın Üniversitesi Dergisi 10 (2018): 34.

[12] Khatereh Sheibani, “Film and Media in the Middle East,” in Encyclopedia of Islam and the Muslim World, 2nd ed., ed. Richard C. Martin (Farmington Hills: Macmillan Reference, 2015), 377.

[13] Andrea Stanton, “Part of Imperial Communications: British-Governed Radio in the Middle East, 1934-1949,” Media History 19 (2013): 421.

[14] Stanton, “Part of Imperial Communications,” 421.

[15] John Baily, War, Exile and the Music of Afghanistan: The Ethnographer’s Tale (London: Taylor & Francis, 2016), 25.

[16] Asnādī az tārikhchah-i rādiyū dar Iran, 1318-1345 [Documents on the History of Radio in Iran (1939-1966)], ed. Alireza Esmaili and Ali Ashuri (Tehran: Ershah Eslami, 2000), 3-4, document 2.

[17] Ahmad Mo’tamedi, quoted in Naderi, Shumā va rādiyū, 75-6.

[18] Ebrahim Khalili Sepehri’s account, quoted in Reza Mokhtari Esfehani, “History of Radio,” Voice of Islamic Republic of Iran Professional Journal 63 (2012), 37.

[19] Badr ul-Moluk Bamdad, Zan-i īrānī az inqilāb-i mashrūṭīyat tā inqilāb-i safīd [Iranian Women from the Constitutional Revolution to the White Revolution] (Tehran: Ibn Sina, 1968), 87.

[20] Asnādī az tārikhchah-i rādiyū dar Iran, 15, document 51.

[21] Hamid Shokat, “Persian Program in Radio Berlin during the WWII,” Iran Namag 28 (2013): 102-117.

[22] Asnādī az tārikhchah-i rādiyū dar Iran, vi-vii, 8, document 4; Kārnāmah-i az Rādiyū va Tilivīzīūn Milī Iran tā Pāyān 2535 [A Chronicle of Radio and Television in Iran up to 1977], ed. Jila Sazgar (Tehran: Sorūsh, 1978), 11.

[23] Kārnāmah-i az Rādiūn va Tilivīzīūn Milī Iran, 11.

[24] Naderi, Shumā va rādiyū, 90-1.

[25] Asnādī az tārikhchah-i rādiyū dar Iran, 17, document 8.

[26] Asnādī az tārikhchah-i rādiyū dar Iran, 70, document 23, 81, document 28.

[27] Asnādī az tārikhchah-i rādiyū dar Iran, 70, document 23.

[28] Mohsen Farzaneh, “Khabarguzārī dar khidmat Reza Shah Kabir az Rādiyū Tehran tā Shabkah-i sarāsarī [Journalism in Reza Shah the Great’s Service, from Radio Tehran to the National Network],” Khātirāt-i Vahid 29 (1973): 42.

[29] Naderi, Shumā va rādiyū, 186-187.

[30] “Friday Noon Story” is the oldest radio program. It started with Sobhi Mohtadi’s stories in 1940 and still airs from Radio Iran. The prerevolutionary stories were less ideologically biased and more literary.

[31] Sadegh Rezazadeh Shafagh, Chand Baḥs̲-i Ijtimāʻī: Sukhanrānīhā-yi Riz̤āzādah Shafaq dar Rādiyū Īrān [Social Issues: Radio Talks by Dr. Rezazadeh Shafagh] (Tehran: Zavar, 1961), 131-36.

[32] Rezazadeh Shafagh, Chand baḥs̲-i ijtimāʻī, 34-65.

[33] Rezazadeh Shafagh, Chand baḥs̲-i ijtimāʻī, 112-29.

[34] Pijanowski, et al. “What Is Soundscape Ecology?,” 1214.

[35] As cited in Pijanowski, et al., “What is Soundscape Ecology?,” 1214.

[36] Mo’tamedi quoted in NaderiShumā va rādiyū, 76, 77.

[37] Naderi, Shumā va rādiyū, 50.

[38] Esmaili, Asnadi az tarikhchah-i radiyu dar Iran, viii; Naderi, Shumā va rādiyū, 78.

[39] Bigan Kimiachi, “History and Development of Broadcasting in Iran” (PhD diss., Bowling Green State University, 1978), 83, ProQuest (302880754).

[40] Pijanowski, et al. “What Is Soundscape Ecology?,” 1227.

[41] Pijanowski, et al. “What Is Soundscape Ecology?,” 1227.

[42] John Jackson, Greg Nelsen, and Yon Hsu, A Mediated Society: A Critical Sociology of Media (Don Mills, Canada: Oxford University Press, 2011), 2.

[43] Reza Mokhtari Esfahani, “Tārikh-i rādiyū [History of Radio],” Māhnāmah-i ʻilmi-i takha ṣṣuṣī sada-yi Jumhuri-i Islami-i Iran 63, 10 (2012), 35-6.

[44] Giti Kaveh, “Ijmāli bar tārikhchah rādiyū dar Iran [A Short History of Radio in Iran],” Kitab-i māhʻUlūm-i ijtimāʻī 8 (2008): 66.

[45] As indicated here, Radio Tehran was an elitist radio station that was established years after Radio Iran. However, in some sources, the initial Radio Iran is also called Radio Tehran.

[46] Kārnāmah-yi az Rādiyū va Tilivīzīūn Milī Iran, 12-22.

[47] John Vivian and Peter Maurin, The Media of Mass Communication (Toronto: Pearson, 2011), 3.

[48] Naderi, Shumā va rādiyū, 89.

[49] The story of the first Iranian made radio is also recollected in an article in Dunya-yi iqtisad magazine (accessed 1 July 2022):

حکایت ساخت نخستین رادیو در ایران [The Story of the First Radio Made in Iran], ۱۳۹۷/۷/۷, https://donya-e-eqtesad.com/بخش-اقتصاد-36/3445455-حکایت-ساخت-نخستین-رادیو-در-ایران

[50] Naderi, Shumā va rādiyū, 89.

[51] Quoted in Naderi, Shumā va rādiyū, 77.

[52] Kimiachi, “History and Development of Broadcasting in Iran,” 85.

[53] Kimiachi, “History and Development of Broadcasting in Iran,” 85.

[54] In Naderi, Shumā va rādiyū, 90.

[55] https://vieuxpapier.wordpress.com/category
/آگهی-های-قدیمی/وسایل-خانه-و-زندگی/رادیو-و-گرامافون/, accessed June 10, 2022.

[56] To “mediatize” means to be ““convey [the message] to recipients via media.” Ingrid Åkesson, “Oral/Aural Culture in Late Modern Society?: Traditional Singing as Professionalized Genre and Oral-Derived Expression,” Oral Tradition 27, no. 1 (2012): 70.

[57] Quoted in Mokhtari Esfahani, “Tārikh-i rādiyū,” 37.

[58] Women who were in their twenties in the 1940s (such as my grandmother, Iran-dokht Farhang and her two sisters Iran-saheb and Farangis) fondly recalled radio dramas and musical pieces that were broadcast on Radio Iran and then later on Radio Tehran.

[59] The generation who was born in the 1940s and 1950s Iran (such as my parents) have nostalgic memories of Mr. Sobhi’s children’s program. A number of his audio shows have become available on websites such as www.aparat.com/v/mhgMf (accessed 1 July 2022)

[60] See the list in Naderi, Shuma va radiyu, 78.

[61] Andrew Crisell, Understanding Radio, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 1994), 11.

[62] Nicholas Abercrombie and Brian Longhurst, The Penguin Dictionary of Media Studies (London: Penguin Books, 2007), 295.

[63] https://newspaper.hamshahrionline.ir/id/123101/صدا-تصویر-خاطره.html (accessed 1 June 2022).

[64] Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1995), 22.

[65] Kaveh, “Ijmāli bar tārikhchah rādiyu dar Iran,” 66.

[66] Kimiachi, “History and Development of Broadcasting in Iran,” 85-7.

[67] Naderi, Shumā va rādiyū, 247-8.

[68] Naderi, Shumā va rādiyū, 230.

[69] Mohamad Hanif, Qiṣṣahʹgūyī dar rādiyū va tilivīzyūn [Storytelling in Radio and Television] (Tehran: Soroush Press, 2005), 154.

[70] Refer to “Sunnat-i Qiṣah Gūʹyī dar Rādiyū [The Storytelling Tradition in Radio]” for Ameli’s account (accessed 20 June 20 2022):

www.bbc.com/persian/arts/story/2006/09/060920_fb_mgh_radio

[71] Basil Bunting, Complete Poems (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Bloodaxe Books, 2000), 53-4.

[72] Bunting, Complete Poems, 58.

[73] Mokhtari, “History of Radio,” 38; Kārnāmah-yi az Rādiyū va Tilivīzīūn Milī Iran, 11; Naderi, Shumā va rādiyū, 74.

[74] Sam Givrad Quoted in Balatarin: www.balatarin.com/permlink/2022/4/24/5794948 ; Naderi, Shumā va rādiyū, 47, and Sam Givrad quoted in Balatarin).

[75] Refer to Abrahamian’s account in Iran Between Two Revolutions, 144, and Afary’s account in Sexual Politics in Modern Iran, 142-58.

[76] Bamdad, Zan-i Iranī, 98.

[77] Lois Beck and Guity Nashat, Women in Iran: From 1800 to the Islamic Republic (Urbana:

University of Illinois Press, 2004), 22.

[78] Khatereh Sheibani, “Film and Aesthetic Value in Iranian Context,” in A Companion to Motion Pictures and Public Value, eds. Mette Hjort and Ted Nannicelli (Wiley-Blackwell, 2022), 48.

[79] Sheibani, “Film and Aesthetic Value in Iranian Context,” 48-49.

[80] Sheibani, “Film and Aesthetic Value in Iranian Context,” 48-49.

[81] Andrew Crisell, Understanding Radio, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 1994), 6.

[82] Crisell, Understanding Radio, 6.

[83] Naderi, Shumā va rādiyū, 337-38.

[84] I would like to thank Professor Mohamad Tavakoli-Targhi for sharing his insights on radio culture with me. Our productive conversation about radio and its impact on Iranian culture shaped my ideas as presented in this article. I also had the privilege of using Professor Tavaoli’s archival material for this article.

Introduction

If we conduct a quick search within Persian classical literature, we will find specimens of the experience of exile as a leitmotiv from the outset of Persian poetry in the ninth century. Exile is a central theme in Persian mystical poetry, in which the expulsion of the human soul from its original abode and longing to return is depicted in spellbinding metaphors and allegories. A famous example is the monumental epic Mathnavi-yi maʿnavi by Jalal al-Din Rumi (1207–73), in which he depicts how the reed is torn from its bed to form a flute, complaining of the pain of separation. Such strong metaphors are used by Iranians to describe the emotions and experiences of exile. However, the focus on exile does not end with classical Persian literature; concepts such as exile and diaspora abound in the writings of Iranian diasporic authors post-revolution.[1]

After the 1979 Revolution and the invasion of Saddam Hussein’s army, which created the longest conventional war of the twentieth century (1980–88), many writers, poets, and intellectuals fled the country. Iranian poets settled in the West and wrote about the feelings of severance from “home” and how they could find solace for their homesickness by writing poetry. Some Iranians even chose voluntary exile and wrote about the themes of estrangement, exclusion, and embracing the norms and values of a new “homeland.” A good part of modern Iranian diasporic literature depicts anxiety and the fear of being torn apart, of not belonging to any community and being unable to communicate feelings and thoughts. Connected to this theme are moving descriptions of the new environment, as well as the nightmare and memories of the offences and failures of the homeland, and worries about the uncertain future. What is the place of the diaspora subject in the new environment? Can they be accepted as an integral part of the new “homeland,” or are they destined to always play on only one part of the playing field and not the entire field?

The guest editors of this special issue dedicate it to exploring how Iranian diaspora authors have reflected on the community’s attempts at carving out forms of belonging to their host nation over the past forty-something years. Contributors analyze specific modes of power and representation that the Iranian diaspora community has developed to rehabilitate their position as members of a minority population with ambivalent feelings of belonging. Intertwined with these feelings of belonging and the desire to be part of a national landscape is the importance of the concept of national identity which is situated on the boundaries and parameters of a certain community or nation. For this national identity, the past is of paramount significance because it provides cultural images and markers through which identities can be shaped. We witness examples of such nostalgia for the homeland or a moment in history in the works of Iranian diaspora authors.

However, nations are dynamic constructs, and national identity is constantly in flux. From generation to generation, this sense of belonging and national identity changes. In today’s global world, hybridity becomes significant as we no longer have the capacity to draw the line between us and them, the different and the same, here and there. In writings by Iranian diaspora authors, we frequently observe how hybridity allows for heterogeneity; claiming their difference and turning it into symbolic capital enables these authors to move beyond their marginalized ethnic position. The power of these diaspora authors lies in the force of exile as a symbolic declaration of liberation from the abject position of “ethnic minority” in “an oppressive national hegemony.”[2] In this way, they reach a transnational position. For them, the borders are defined in their imagination; they are deterritorialized. With the authors’ constant exchanges and entanglements in the host nation, boundaries between “us” and “them” are softened. While not always harmonious, these exchanges force the authors to negotiate their differences with the mainstream society via their writings. The result is a hybridized world, with porous boundaries and transnational identities.

Living in diaspora with a “double consciousness,” borrowing from W. E. B. Du Bois,[3] or even with multiple consciousnesses, Iranian diasporic writers reflect their inner struggles and the oppressive experiences of a “colonized” or “Otherized” subject—an ethnic minority.

In their works, Iranian writers endeavor to reconcile the two parts of their identity and to merge their various consciousnesses—and not leave any parts behind—in order to attain a better understanding of their self. In this sense, hybridity becomes an important concept that confronts and problematizes boundaries, although it does not erase them, because it unsettles the fixity of identities. Hybridity and in-betweenness can never be a question of harmonious merger and fusion. In-betweenness becomes a source of cultural permeability and vulnerability for Iranian diasporic authors, one that is a necessary condition for living together in difference, for decolonization, for destabilizing cultural power relations, for transnationalism. The articles in this special issue reflect exactly this.

Asghar Seyed-Gohrab’s article, “Poetry as Salve for Persian Exiles,” examines the poetry of exile composed by a number of Persian poets. Seyed-Gohrab focuses on the poet’s experiences, depicting how their experiences, observations, and reflections have changed in the last forty years and how feelings of uprootedness are gradually partly replaced by a sense of belonging to a new homeland. The article concentrates on personal emotions depicted in these poems and how hard it is to bid farewell to one’s homeland, the unwillingness to accept life in a foreign country, and the long process of mourning. Can this mourning ever be completed? How do the first generation of Iranian refugees and exiles, who experienced imprisonment and torture, process their traumatic experiences by writing poetry on exile? Is writing poetry a salve for this generation of Iranian refugees?

Alan Williams’s “Exile and Absence from the True Homeland: The Topos of Exile in Religious Literature” traces the virtually universal topos of exile and separation from the physical or spiritual homeland, which runs deep in the religious imagination. Exile may recall a historical, geographical diaspora, or an existential, spiritual separation, or both, as the one is typically a metaphor of the other. Williams explores texts from three religious traditions with distinctively different salvation histories but which have in common the theme of exile and separation from a spiritual homeland far from the writer. The texts, from Zoroastrian, Jewish, and Islamic cultures, each achieve resolution of actual and poetic tension by characteristically different means. The Zoroastrian text is an example that focuses on the collective experience of exile and a heroic outcome of perseverance; the Jewish text is a vision of the oceanic being of God enveloping and saving the stricken soul; the Sufi Islamic text affords a realization of the illusion of separateness in the ultimate unity of humanity and divinity. Williams argues that the affinity and likely correspondence between the form of the respective texts and the soteriological consolation they each afford are not coincidental but deliberate: their form and content are mutually supportive in order to convey the real possibility of resolution.

“The Complete Persepolis: Visualizing Exile in a Transnational Narrative” by Leila Sadegh Beigi explores the ways that contemporary Iranian women writers create a voice of resistance in fiction by questioning and redefining gender roles. Gender roles are defined not only by culture, tradition, and state laws in Iran, but also in a state of exile, a condition rooted in marginalization and independent of geographical location. Sadegh Beigi examines Marjane Satrapi’s The Complete Persepolis as a transnational narrative written in exile. While her narrative challenges the binary division between the Eurocentric “First World/Third World” framework of the modern global feminist analyses, her avatar, Marji, offers a gendered and discursive manifestation of women, culture, and identity in exile. Sadegh Beigi argues that the graphic novel expands the notion of exile through the visual representation of the author’s concerns about the status of women in exile at home and abroad. The portrayal of internal exile, or exile at home, relies on the images of women struggling with gender discrimination, sexism, and censorship, which limit and marginalize them as female citizens. In the portrayal of external exile, or exile abroad, Satrapi offers images of women experiencing racism, stereotyping, and marginalization in the West.

Ehsan Sheikholharam’s contribution, “Between Tehran and Paris: Terre de mirages and Shayegan’s Exilic Ambivalence,” draws on the novel Terre de mirages to discuss Daryush Shayegan’s (1935–2018) ambivalent relationship with exile. The book is the story of two imaginary lovers: an Iranian man, Kaveh, and a French woman, Marianne. While apart, one in Tehran and one in Paris, the lovers communicate through poignant and emotive letters. Living in each other’s worlds while being apart, Kaveh and Marianne are in exile in their own homes. The novel, which is written with contributions from Maryam Askari and in the form of an epistle, carries through a melancholic sense of loss. The lovers inhabit, if not two irreconcilable worlds, then two adrift temporalities. The novel simultaneously confirms and contradicts Shayegan’s life experience and intellectual productions. Shayegan is the champion of cultural hybridity and civilizational exchange. A common thread throughout his oeuvre is the examination of cultural and civilizational encounters. If Shayegan believes in the universality of certain values and sees cultures as deeply intertwined, why then does his single novel put the prospect of cultural assimilation into question? Furthermore, it was Shayegan who in 1977 reintroduced the notion of dialogue between civilizations. It is rather curious that after almost three decades, the idea of harmonious synthesis of cultures is represented as a mirage, as a false promise of sorts. This article attends to the subtleties of the story in Terre de mirages not merely to understand why Shayegan is not optimistic about the prospect of cross-cultural love, but also to tease out the elements that preclude such a possibility.

Leila Pazargadi’s “Iranian American Comedic Memoirs: Interrogating Race and Humor in Diasporic Life Writing” uses humor as a medium to explore identity politics in life writing. She argues that Iranian American memoirists are able to interrogate themes concerning identity fragmentation, hybridity, and cultural belonging, particularly where the concern is liminality in the diaspora via the diaspora. Authors like Firoozeh Dumas, Maz Jobrani, and Negin Farsad inject comedy into their life narratives to great effect, using humor and affect to recall difficult life moments ranging from witnessing the 1979 Revolution and Iran–Iraq War, to immigrating to the United States, to withstanding a post-9/11 resurgence demonizing Iranians. More specifically, however, each explores their racial identity as it relates to their sense of belonging in America, particularly around the flashpoint of 9/11. Pazargadi explores the way in which each author reflects on the process of becoming white or rejecting whiteness, particularly in their attempt to reconcile the legal paradoxes of government categorization of Middle Easterners as white compared with their own perceptions of themselves as Other. In doing so, she argues that each writer confronts their liminality and acknowledges their double consciousness in America, while also offering varying resolutions to identity fragmentation in their respective autobiographical narratives.

Claudia Yaghoobi’s “Racial Profiling of Iranian Armenians in the United States: Omid Fallahazad’s ‘Citizen Vartgez’” examines the (hi)story of Vartgez, the protagonist. Yaghoobi briefly charts the various waves of Armenian migration to the United States regardless of the migrants’ original home state. In doing so, she points out the ways that Armenians have been exposed to discrimination in the United States and delineates the ways that Iranian Armenians, along with other Middle Easterners, have been subjected to racism and Islamophobia in the United States post-9/11. Then, examining Fallahazad’s “Citizen Vartgez,” she maps out the ways that Iranian Armenians attempt to hold on to their heritage in the United States while simultaneously maintain their ties with both Armenian and Iranian cultures. The article argues that regardless of whether they live in Iran or in the United States, Armenians have had to negotiate their minoritized status within a codified legal hierarchy: in Iran, with an ethno-religious hierarchy and in the United States, with a racial one. As Christians in a Muslim-majority Iran, Armenians have their identity defined via its ethno-religious minoritized status in Iranian official narratives. However, after their migration to the United States, ironically enough, Iranian Armenians enter a national context defined by race; now, they are considered a white ethnic minoritized group, but are lumped together with Muslim Middle Easterners and subjected to America’s racism and Islamophobia. Hence, Yaghoobi also addresses questions of racial profiling against Iranian Armenians along with other Middle Easterners in the United States, concluding with a discussion of Iranian Armenians’ transnationalism as a result of their precarious minoritized position within the United States.

“A Reflection of Our Lives over the Four Decades after the Revolution in Literature and a Study of Exilic Literature,” by Nasim Khaksar, examines the ways that literature, poetry, and fiction reflect narratives about human beings. In these narratives, with allegorical, metaphorical, symbolic, ironic language and in multilayered structures, a description is given of how human beings are and how they appear in the historical, social, political, and emotional situations and events that happen to them. In these narrations, it becomes clear what forms this (human) being has taken and what has happened to this person. Each of these poetic and literary narratives has its own ways of expressing itself, to help reveal and give birth to the truth or reality of humans in the world. Based on these narratives, the reality of the present is recreated and the future is predicted. In this sense, literature, poetry, and fiction stand alongside history and philosophy and accompany them in narrating humans and their time. Over the past forty years of exile, Iranians have been forced to think about leaving their homeland and being thrown out. Iranians have often asked themselves, What is the homeland? Is it a piece of land in the world that is far away from us and that we have many memories of, or is it a part of our existence? What part of the homeland does not leave us in sleep and wakefulness? Thinking about these and other questions is a theme in world literature. Iranians have thought about these concepts and their identity in exile from various angles since 1979 and even before that with the emergence of Bozorg Alavi’s story Mirza in 1969. Khaksar provides a brief account of the narrative of Iranians’ lives and views of the revolution and its results over the past forty years, results such as the Iran–Iraq War, subsequent repression in society, imprisonment and exile, and the revolution’s reflection in poetry and fiction.

Parvaneh Hosseini’s “The Blurring of the Boundaries between Reality and Fantasy, Body and Soul, and Home and (Non)Home during the Creative Process of Writing Diaspora” focuses on the space between sleep and death in which a person’s soul takes the form of a bird and flies to the grave of a loved one in the homeland. The intermediate nature of this space indicates the uncertainty and fluidity of the immigrant’s identity. Another central concept of the novel studied, Blue Touka, that has an important place in immigration literature is the concept of home. Hosseini uses Homi Bhabha’s “home” theory—which relates homelessness to a sense of displacement (or eradication) and confusion of the boundary between home and the world—to examine the location of different characters in the story. One of the most important features of Blue Touka is that it introduces a non-Iranian immigrant character and ties their fate to the fate of the Iranian Bahman. Hosseini highlights the deep connection between these characters to show how in this novel, “the shared past”—which Stuart Hall considers important in redefining social identity—is not between several Iranian immigrants. Instead, it is between an Iranian immigrant and a Chinese immigrant because under the layers of their differences, they reach common roots in terms of experience and perception that connect their diaspora identity and thus create a kind of transnational diaspora identity.

Mahdi Tourage’s “Desire, Power and Agency: Iranian Female Poets Reading Their Poems before the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic” is an examination of desire staged during annual poetry readings by selected Iranian female poets in the presence of the supreme leader of the country. Using desire as a conceptual tool in its psychoanalytical formulation, Tourage argues that these poems, especially the highly eroticized ones, open up discursive pathways toward pleasure, creativity, and agency. He also discusses Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books. Comparison between these two types of writing demonstrates two different models of agency that emerge under structures of subordination. The first is Nafisi’s “emancipatory model,” which emphasizes acts of resistance that challenge social norms. The annual events of poetry readings by female poets in the presence of the supreme leader, however, are not transgressive. The poetics of desire (including desire for conformity) make these events the locus of creative agency and erotic indulgences that surpass the regime’s designs for domination and control.

[1]We use both exile and diaspora in this special issue, often interchangeably; however, for the most part, exile is used in reference to forced displacement and diaspora to voluntary migration.

[2]James Clifford, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 255.

[3]W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, 1903. (Columbia, SC: Digireads.com Publishing, 2019).

“Is Hindenburg a Sultan?” The Trial of the Iranian Communist Journal Peykar in Weimar Germany

Sheragim Jenabzadeh is a PhD candidate in the Department of History at the University of Toronto. His dissertation, “City of Aspirations: Iranian Student Activism in Interwar Berlin,” examines the publications and political activities of Iranian youth in Weimar and Nazi Germany and their engagement with the modernizing efforts of the Iranian state. He has received the German Academic Exchange Service Research Scholarship and has taught courses at the University of Toronto on global history and Iran’s Islamic Revolution.

Student missions abroad figured prominently in the Pahlavi state’s plans for infrastructural and technical modernization. While the majority of students in the 1920s and 1930s were sent to France, Germany’s reputation for technical knowledge encouraged the Iranian government to send students there to develop their skills in fields such as mechanical engineering, naval engineering, railway engineering, chemistry, pharmaceuticals, and modern veterinary practices.

Yet there was a lack of appreciation for societal and political factors that could alter intended state plans for the molding of students into policy instruments. The urban landscape of interwar Berlin was an exhibition of divergent political thoughts, from social democracy to communism and an emergent fascism. It housed new sights and sounds, whether it was the chaotic and liberating music of jazz; the artistic schisms demonstrated by expressionism and the artistic school of Neue Sachlichkeit, which denounced the moral elitism of the ruling classes; or the new mode of cinematic entertainment, which equally condemned the values of bourgeois culture.[1] Indeed, a new republic had been formed based on social democratic values, but it had to govern the interests of industrialists and merchants. It was a unified state, but one that was built on the skeleton of a German Empire that respected the boundaries of its constituent states. As such, it brought out disagreements over the rights of the individual provinces and foreign policy interests. The city encapsulated the extremes of modernity, suffering from inflation and political instability resulting from a mechanized, industrial, total war while enjoying the diversification of cultural tastes and political allegiances. In the midst of this milieu, Iranian students studied and partook in political activities. An investigation into one of their publications, the communist journal Peykar (Struggle), and the German and Iranian governmental reactions to it, highlights these contradictions and tensions.

The First World War and its conclusion proved to be disastrous for Germany. The Treaty of Versailles placed the burden of instigating war on the shoulders of the German Empire, and as such, harsh measures were stipulated in the treaty to ensure that German political, military, and economic power be restricted. For its actions, Germany, now under the newly formed republic headed by the Social Democratic President Friedrich Ebert, had to pay reparations, its military was severely restricted in both size and activity, whatever bits of colonial possessions it possessed were taken away, and as the defeated power, it was ostracized in postwar international negotiations. Under such severe conditions, the Weimar Republic sought an alternative means to reinvigorate its international standing and integrate itself back into the international arena while at the same time dispelling the suspicions of the entente powers of a revanchist Germany. This situation, however, was not altogether bleak. In three important ways, Germany still possessed the characteristics of a great power: its large domestic market, its ability to produce and export quality manufactured products, and most importantly for this article, its “cultural reputation.”[2] Indeed, culture could be used to recoup the prestige and power that Germany had lost. It was in accordance with the belief in the power of German academia that following the war a number of intellectuals under the guidance of the Prussian Culture Minister Carl Heinrich Becker called for a revitalization of Kulturpolitik (cultural diplomacy).[3]

Iran figured prominently in Germany’s mission of Kulturpolitik during the interwar period. Cultural diplomacy focused especially on states that did not completely fall into the territories of other European empires, whether Britain, France, or the Soviet Union. These were states that were aiming for the preservation of independence and for economic development, and were weary of too much reliance on the traditional Western powers (France and Britain). Countries such as Iran (Persia), Japan, China, the newly formed Turkish Republic, and the South American states were among the territories in which Germany sought to gain a foothold.

Thus, the opening of German schools in Iran and other countries in Asia and South America was central to rehabilitating Germany’s image and encouraging foreign students to come to Germany for the continuation of their studies. Both the Advisory Board for the Education of Persian Students in Germany and the later German-Persian School Association were formed to promote the teaching of the German language in Iran and the continuation of studies in Germany in order to make the Reich a viable and desirable destination for scholarship.[4] Iranian students were to be cultivated through German culture and education in order to become Germanophiles who, after returning to their homeland and to occupations in prominent official roles, would work to foster closer relations between the two respective countries.

For Iran, on the other hand, student missions abroad were part of a larger goal that stretched back to the founding of Dar al-Fonun in 1851.[5] That goal was to eliminate the need for foreign advisers in Iran’s drive to industrialization and economic advancement. Iranian students were sent to England, France, Germany, and Belgium, to name a few countries, under the supervision of mission guides or the Iranian delegates in those specific countries. Upon their return to Iran, the students were expected to fill prominent governmental or teaching positions that would facilitate the education and training of a larger technocratic workforce that would in turn reduce dependence on foreign teachers and advisers. Thus, the Iranian–German educational programs that emerged were the products of mutually beneficial governmental programs that sought to reconfigure both states’ international standing in the postwar period. Iranian students were at the intersection of two divergent yet intertwined state goals.

While the focus of this article is on the role played by the journal Peykar in the deterioration of relations between the Pahlavi regime and the Weimar Republic, and perhaps more importantly on German society’s self-reflection on its supposed republican freedoms, it is important to note that there were precedents to Peykar’s anti-Pahlavi stance.

One particular instance was the suspected communist activity of two Iranian students, Khalil Maleki and Ahmad Hami.[6] They were accused by the Iranian government of supporting the communist pamphlet Rote Stern (Red Star), which was printed and distributed from Leipzig.[7] On 14 June 1930, the Iranian government requested that these two students be deported from Germany due to the agitation they had caused amongst Iranians living in Europe. The Iranian envoy in Berlin expressed his disappointment that these students would partake in such activities and be disrespectful toward the supervisor of students in Berlin, Mohammadali Jamalzadeh, especially when these students were, for the most part, supported by Iranian governmental scholarships.[8] Moreover, Iran also expressed its distaste for the political movements that were gripping Germany at the time and their effects on Iranian youth.

On 7 May 1930, the German Foreign Office wrote to their envoy in Tehran, describing this dissatisfaction and its possible ramifications for Germany’s Kulturpolitik. The letter went on to state:

The Persian regime also believes that there is a danger of communist influence in Berlin due especially to its close proximity to the Soviet Union. While the number of Persian students in France is in excess of 1000, they are easier to monitor since they reside in boarding schools. A monitoring of their foreign correspondence is also possible. In Germany, however, students live more freely in apartments without any control. Therefore, many of them do not dedicate themselves seriously with their studies. This would, therefore, compel the Persian government to limit the number of students it sends to Germany. The Persian government does not know the benefits of the German universities, especially the technical universities. If the grievances were to be corrected, it would be possible for them to send more students to Germany.[9]

Understandably, the message was forwarded to the German embassies in Paris and Moscow. The Foreign Office then went on to request that the Berlin police proceed in similar fashion to the Paris police: by threatening the students so they leave the country on their own accord, enabling the German government to avoid public scorn for having forcefully deported foreign students.[10] There was a clear coordinated effort amongst the German delegations in major European capitals with their legation in Tehran to assuage the worries of the Pahlavi regime about the potential radicalization of the youth abroad. The German government was very conscious of how it handled the activities of foreign students. Importantly, it was aware of how the French government responded to political disturbances. Moreover, the Foreign Office was careful to avoid public scorn in its handling of the Iranian students, especially when the future of the student outreach program was on the line.

At the same time, the Iranian government expected the students to stick to their studies. Reza Shah was concerned that students would lose their sense of Iranian patriotism and become intoxicated with Western ideas. Upon their departure for their studies in Germany, which were funded by the Iranian government, the students were required to sign a promise that they would adhere to all the orders of the Persian envoys in Berlin and Paris—a promise that the Iranian government now deemed to have been broken. It was on this basis that the Iranian envoy in Paris, Khan Ala, requested the deportation of Maleki and Hami, and that the German government prevent the distribution of communist pamphlets, though Khan Ala believed that no doubt they must have originated from Russia.[11]

On the one hand, the Pahlavi regime had a clear expectation of the conduct, or role to be played, of Iranian students in Germany: they had to stick to their studies and nothing more. The period of study abroad would pay dividends in technical knowledge that would be not only brought back by these students, who would assume prominent positions in government and industry, but also nurtured in the education of future generations that would look to Iran instead of abroad for the continuation of their studies. On the other hand, foreign students—not just from Iran, but also from countries such as Turkey, Japan, Egypt, Argentina, and Brazil—had a clear role to play in facilitating the expansion of German academic networks, and as a by-product, ensuring favorable grounds for the forging of commercial and political ties due to the presence of Germanophiles in key positions. Thus, the activities of young Iranians beyond their studies threatened to derail the visions of both governments. As such, any disturbance, whether political or not, had to be dealt with.

In the case in question, after further investigation by the Berlin police, it became apparent that the accusation of communist activity as grounds for the deportation of Maleki and Hami was without evidence. Rather, the dispute surrounded personal grievances held by the two students against the Iranian delegate in Berlin (Mostafa Samii) and Jamalzadeh, for a case involving the suicide of their friend, Atai Hussain Gholi, who was in fact the second cousin of Maleki. According to Attaché Pirnahad and Legation Secretary Sheyhani, Atai Hussein Gholi, born in Tabriz on 21 October 1904, had requested that a particular letter be written by the legation regarding support for his studies. When such a letter was not accordingly provided, on 5 April 1930 at 2:30 p.m., Atai was found with a self-inflicted head wound and a pistol next to his body at one of the rooms in the Iranian Legation. A certain Professor Höllander bandaged his head and took him to a clinic. He died on the way.[12]

Interestingly, Khalil Maleki had been one of the targets of the German program of Kulturpolitik, having attended the German-Persian Technical College in Tehran. In 1927, he was sent to Germany with 109 other students bound for Europe as part of a program sponsored by the Iranian government. Upon arriving in Berlin, Maleki, along with 6 other fellow students, joined the Iranian Students’ Union, headed by Taqi Erani and Morteza Alavi.[13] Certain members of the union, which was composed mostly of young Iranians with leftist leanings, were initially against admitting these students, believing them to be simple “lackeys” of the Iranian government that sponsored them.[14] However, these students’ solidarity in connection with the suicide of their fellow countryman soon changed the minds of the naysayers.

Based on the lack of evidence of communist activity by the two students, the Foreign Office refused to carry out the request for deportation. Their refusal to do so was also based on their lack of trust in the capabilities of Mostafa Samii, whom they saw as “a young, inexperienced, and nervous man, who fears being made responsible for the publication of Farsi communist pamphlets in Germany.”[15] The Foreign Office also noted that the Iranian envoy in Paris, Khan Ala, was an extreme Francophile who sought to exploit the current situation in order to convince the government in Tehran to relocate its students from Berlin to either France or Belgium.[16]

This episode provides a glimpse into the political milieu of Berlin during the late 1920s and early 1930s, and the impact that Iranian students had on German foreign policy. First, it shows the competition between Germany and France over the recruitment of Iranian students. In this competition, Germany was by far the underdog due to the esteemed position the French language had amongst Iranian academics and the large contingent of Iranians continuing their education in France. Second, it shows the Pahlavi regime’s expected code of conduct by Iranian students—namely, that they avoid political activities and stick to their studies. Third, the episode demonstrates the relative ease with which charges of communist activity could spur the Weimar Republic to take action against the supposed perpetrators. It was under these circumstances that the publication of Peykar aroused a new round of domestic and foreign antagonisms.

The first issue of Peykar was published on 15 February 1931, with the second a month later on 14 March 1931.[17] The goal of the paper was as follows:

To expose the torturous and harsh penalties of despotism that have continued to this day since the Naser al-Din era [. . .] From outside of Iran, we will raise our voice through this revolutionary paper, and call on the Iranian people to join in resistance and struggle. The purpose of this revolutionary paper is to give voice to the protests and revolutionary sentiments of the Iranian people and to unite the splintered forces of the proletariat under the banner of revolution. The goal of this revolutionary paper is to bring to the attention of the progressive and freedom-loving newspapers and circles of Europe, the heart-wrenching cries of the imprisoned [. . .][18]

The writers of Peykar were thus very aware of the social and political climate of interwar Berlin. They were aware that their denunciations against the monarchical establishment of Iran would be met with a sympathetic ear. The issues of Peykar themselves mention how the paper caused reverberations among the democratic and leftist-oriented papers of Germany, whose majority reported in detail the publication of Peykar. These included leftist papers such as Berlin am Morgen, 12 Uhr, Montag Morgen, Die Weltbühne, and Berliner Tribüne.[19]

Moreover, the Berlin police’s ensuing investigation revealed the young age of both the individuals involved with Peykar and those who denounced Reza Shah in the German press. They were a mix of Iranians and Germans who sought to channel the rebellious energy of interwar Berlin toward what they perceived as a quintessential despotic regime. The identified were the following:

  • The publisher, Dr. Carl Wehner, thirty-four years old.
  • The student Morteza Alavi, twenty-six years old.
  • The editor of Berlin am Morgen, Martin Duszynski, thirty years old.
  • The journalist Ernst Kiesewetter, thirty-three years old.

The oldest of the accused was the managing director (Geschäftsführer), Felix Wolf, who was sixty-one, and claimed to have no knowledge of what was being written, as he had no knowledge of Persian.[20]

Immediately following Peykar’s publication, the new Iranian envoy in Berlin, Mohammadali Farzin, protested to the German government and used the threat of rescinding the student mission to Germany. Afterward, on 8 April 1931, Farzin wrote to the Foreign Office, hoping that appropriate action would be taken against the paper: “In fact, just to give a concrete example, Persia, whose centenarian friendship with Germany need not be further emphasized, is currently entertaining hundreds of students in Germany and other European countries who could be distracted from their school assignments by the publication of this rebellious paper.”[21] A few weeks later, in another letter, Farzin condemned the actions of individuals, such as Morteza Alavi, who “seduce young people that have been sent abroad by Persia to acquire the necessary technical knowledge for the development of their country.”[22] Even more damning, according to Farzin, was that these individuals were being assisted in their propagandistic activities by non-Iranian agitators such as Dr. Wehner. Surely, Farzin proposed, the German government would not allow its “hospitable soil to become a field of activity for those Persians who are hostile to their homeland.”[23]

Germany had, indeed, become a safe ground for many Iranian intellectuals that opposed the presiding government in Iran. Berlin, as a site for foreign opposition, had been used previously by the writers of the paper Kaveh, set up in 1916 by Hassan Taqizadeh under the auspices of the Foreign Office. While the German government had promoted these previous efforts, Iranian students themselves initiated the anti-government publications of the 1920s, much to the dissatisfaction of the Weimar Republic.[24] Morteza Alavi, a national economy student, had been tasked by the Iranian Communist Party at a congress in 1927 or 1928 to head its activities in Germany.[25] Peykar was to function as an official organ of the Iranian Communist Party. It was to be run by students studying abroad under the supervision of Alavi and Hedayat Sultanzadeh, and the publisher, Carl Wehner. Other students residing in Germany that were regular contributors to the paper included Ahmad Imami, Mohammad Purreza, and Ahmad Assadoff, as well as Dr. Morteza Yazdizadeh and Dr. Bahrami.[26]

Thus, from its inception, Peykar was very much a student affair. As such, it put both the Pahlavi and Weimar governments in a compromising position given that both of their broader state goals depended on the sending and bringing of students to Germany. The gravity of the situation forced the Iranian government to search for other avenues to pressure the German government to act against the publication. In Egypt, Djevad Sineky, the Iranian emissary, was ordered to approach his German counterpart, Eberhard von Stohrer, the former director of the Press Department, about the matter and for his message to be relayed to Berlin. Sineky expressed worry about the future of German schools in Iran, which had been set up to foster students being sent to Germany, should the Peykar affair continue unresolved.[27] However, Stohrer felt compelled to point out that nothing could be done, since in Germany, “we have freedom of the press.”[28]

In fact, the contrasting view on the inherent value of freedom of speech was a major sticking point in the dispute between the two governments. When kept up to date about the proceedings against Peykar, Reza Shah found it preposterous that the German government could be powerless in suppressing publications. Suspicion toward the German government became even stronger when it was pointed out that France had banned the import of Peykar into French territory.[29] Matters worsened even further when an article titled “The Emperor without Ancestry” by a German journalist was published in a Munich paper, detailing the shah’s humble origins and lack of education, and his rise to the country’s highest position.[30]

By October 1931, the lack of action by the German government set off an anti-German campaign in the Iranian press. According to Blücher, the German envoy in Tehran, “they write that either the German government is an incapable government, one that cannot prevent slander against foreign countries, or it is ready to allow the reputation of other countries to be stepped on.”[31]

On 20 October 1931, in a follow-up telegram to the Foreign Office, Blücher reported that the shah, out of anger for the disparaging article in the Munich paper, had recalled the entire Iranian legation from Berlin. Blücher added:

The Foreign Minister confirmed this to me and added that the shah made this decree in a certain manner that no objection could be raised. For the shah is of the mindset that if he cannot protect his government from the press attacks in Germany, then he must at least recall his representatives. I voiced the severe disparity between the measures taken and their cause, and pointed out the implications such an abrupt act will have on German-Persian relations. I had the impression that my remarks were not lost on the foreign minister. He did not consider our relations to be broken, simply that Persia would not have representatives in Berlin for a while. In my opinion this was the despotic, arbitrary act of a hot-tempered shah. The minister did not object of course out of fear. He will now likely work to soften the effects of the measures [. . .] The press has already begun to calm down.[32]

The Weimar government was understandably put in a difficult situation. It had to pursue its greater foreign policy goal of rehabilitating its image in the international arena. It feared international isolation of the type it experienced during the First World War. German officials and academics especially believed that sympathy for the French—due to the power of French cultural expansion—had been to the detriment of the German nation.[33] As such, through Kulturpolitik and the student outreach program, Germany sought to strengthen its relations with the non-European world.

Yet in trying to suppress political dissent by foreign nationals, the hands of the Foreign Office were tied by the Weimar constitution. At the same time, the Foreign Office faced fierce opposition from the provincial Prussian authorities who sought to protect their inhabitants from the arbitrary power of the federal government. The Prussian police rejected the Foreign Office’s criticism of its lack of action, pointing to article 118 of the German constitution of 1919, which prevented censorship.[34] This division in ideology and power among the different levels of government was exemplified by the Prussian police’s refusal to carry through with the Foreign Office’s demands for Alavi’s deportation. Following a review of Morteza Alavi’s time in Germany, the police reported that since there was no evidence of political activity, there was no justified reason for his deportation.[35]

The Iranian government, however, continued to press the issue, and eventually, a loophole was found. Article 103, Majestätsbeleidigung (Insult toward the Majesty), of the German penal code made it a criminal offense to publicly insult a foreign head of state. Key to the application of article 103, however, was that it had to be reciprocated by the other country. That is, since the Iranian sovereign was being protected against insults in Germany, so too must the German head of state be protected from insults in Iran.[36]

During the proceedings against the publishers of Peykar, evidence was presented that Iran already had such a law, dating from 24 February 1908, in which foreign salatin were protected from public slander.[37] However, with the key word being salatin, the plural of sultan, the Prussian police refused to take action since Germany had no sultan, or even any monarch for that matter. The provincial police’s refusal to submit to increasing pressure from the Foreign Office, and their insistence in following the full letter of the law, induced the Iranian government to amend its 1908 code to include the “sovereign” heads of state, thus incorporating presidents and other heads of republican states into its purview. The new law was promulgated in early May 1931.[38]

With the condition of reciprocity fulfilled, and the Foreign Office’s constant pressuring about the detrimental effects of the inflammatory Peykar to German interests, the police confiscated the existing issues of the paper and banned its further publication. The police’s actions at the insistence of the Foreign Office, however, immediately drew the attention of the Berlin press.

In its 17 May 1931 issue, Montag Morgen published an article titled “The Offended Shah.” The piece denounced the police actions based on article 103, and found it astounding that a republican judiciary, based on the instigation of the Foreign Office, would take away the freedom of speech of a few Iranian “emigrants” simply for the fostering of German–Iranian relations.[39]

At the time, however, the confiscation of existing issues of Peykar and ban on its publication were about as far as the police were willing to go. The police resisted demands made by the Foreign Office for Alavi’s deportation. The Prussian Ministry of the Interior even went as far as conferring onto Alavi asylum status, much to the ire of both the Foreign Office and the Iranian government.

On 18 August 1931, the Foreign Office wrote to Police President Albert Grzesinski, stating that Alavi was not, as he claimed, “a socialist,” but in fact a communist and part of the same group that fought the Iranian government in cooperation with the Soviet Union in 1919 in northern Iran.[40] The journal Peykar, moreover, was being published and sent abroad through the Karl-Liebknecht-Haus, the headquarters of the German Communist Party.[41]

The fact that Alavi was deemed to be communist and not a socialist was a major point of emphasis in the governmental correspondence in Germany at the time. The Weimar Republic was constantly at odds with the extreme leftist political elements in Germany at the time, encapsulated by the Communist Party. The division that existed was to such a degree that the republic at times depended upon extreme right-wing groups, such as the Freikorps (Free Corps) to crush leftist uprisings and any attempts at a communist seizure of power.[42] Thus, the charge that Morteza Alavi, and other leftist Iranian students for that matter, were in fact communists was a rather serious charge, one that would emphasize the revolutionary and insurrectionist nature of their ambitions and collective goal.

The presence of foreign revolutionary groups was highly inopportune for a government that sought to stabilize the economy following the market crash of 1929 and faced mounting attacks from both communists and fascists. The significance of foreign markets and contracts for industrial projects was another factor that was continuously emphasized by the Foreign Office. In an urgent message to the Prussian minister of the interior, Dr. Carl Severing, the Foreign Office on 28 August 1931 wrote that since Alavi was, in fact, “a communist and middleman for a local subversive organization,” his actions were a clear abuse of the asylum rights that had been granted to him.[43] Furthermore, the message to Severing highlighted the importance of industrial contract negotiations that had been jeopardized. In addition, the letter stated that Alavi’s “activities have greatly impaired our relationship with Persia. This is clear from the persistent complaints of the Persian Government about our tolerance of the activities of Alavi in Germany [. . .] This Persian resentment will adversely influence what until now have been favourable German-Persian economic relations.”[44]

The case of Peykar and the activities of Iranian students during the Weimar Republic underscore the governmental divisions that existed in Germany. Moreover, they draw attention to the importance of student programs and their possible negative implications for Germany’s broader postwar political and economic goals.

Indeed, on 12 September 1931, a report from Schulenburg, the previous German envoy in Tehran, noted that in the same year, the Iranian government was sending 79 students to Europe for study, the overwhelming number of whom were going to France, and 18 of whom would be going to England. None, however, were being sent to Germany that year. The reason, he believed, was that the Iranian government was “afraid students could be influenced by communism. Thus, it must be taken into consideration to dispel the Persian government’s fears for the following year.”[45]

The gravity of the situation, however, seems to have had its effect on the Prussian Ministry of the Interior. Alavi’s residency visa was not renewed, and he was forced to depart from Prussia on his own accord, much to the satisfaction of the Foreign Office.[46] Moreover, the other members of Peykar were charged, and trial proceedings were set to begin in early 1932.

On 6 February 1932, the criminal chamber of the Landgericht (Regional Court) found that the individuals involved had been charged as follows: “I. Dr. Wehner acting in concert with Duszynski, and further Kiesewetter in one case, were guilty of having insulted the ruler of a state not belonging to the German Reich, namely the shah of Iran, publicly through the press. II. Morteza Alavi knowingly assisted the accused Dr. Wehner in committing the act of offence. III. Dr. Wehner and Felix Wolf acted jointly in another independent action in publishing a periodical that went against Reich press laws.”[47]

The issue once again became the term salatin (plural of sultan), which had been used in the original Iranian penal code of 1908. Since the new code of May 1931, passed by the Iranian parliament, had come only after five issues of Peykar had already been published, the new law would be applicable from only the sixth issue onward.[48] The state prosecution, therefore, set out to prove that salatin was not only applicable to a Muslim ruler, which had been the definition given by Sebastian Beck of the Oriental Seminar in Berlin, but also meant Machthaber—that is, “ruler/sovereign” or “a person in power.” In this sense, it should also apply to the president of Germany, who at the time was Paul von Hindenburg, thus fulfilling the reciprocity clause of article 103 of the German penal code.[49]

To back its claim, the prosecution employed four expert opinions from Iran about the broader meaning of the term sultan. The four explanations were written by a long-serving undersecretary in the Ministry of Justice and, at the time, legal adviser in the National Bank, Mostafa Adl; another undersecretary in the Ministry of Justice, Dr. Ahmad Matin Daftari; the head of the criminal chamber of the high court, Mohamad Reza Vodjdani; and the adviser in the criminal chamber of the high court, Forouhar.[50]

Mostafa Adl, in his definition, stated that salatin could be interpreted in three ways. In one sense, it could be applied to anyone who has sovereignty (souvereineté) within a country, be it a king, an emperor, or the head of a republic. Secondly, it could be used specifically to refer to one existing king in a specific country. Thirdly, much like the term shah was associated with the king of Iran and the term mikado referred to the emperor of Japan, so too could sultan be used in specific reference to the Ottoman emperor. Given its varied applicability, for Mostafa Adl, the term salatin clearly could not have any meaning other than “head of state” (chef d’État).[51]

Dr. Ahmad Matin Daftari was much more practical in defining the use of salatin in the Iranian penal code. For him, the term sultan was an Arabic word that referred to the governing body, which was formed by the constitution of each respective nation, whether it be an emperor, padeshah, amir, grand duke, and so on. During the time of the Constitutional Revolution and the passing of the penal code in 1908, the individuals involved in the movement lacked equivalent native terms for the constitutional ideas that they had been influenced by from abroad. Thus, the term salatin was used to refer to chef d’État.[52]

Both Vodjdani and Forouhar had similar definitions to Mostafa Adl and Daftari. Vodjdani added that since Iran also had relations with republican countries, such as France, at the time of the penal code’s promulgation, it would be ridiculous to suggest that these nations were excluded from the law in question. Meanwhile, Forouhar pointed out that the only country at the time that employed the term sultan and with which Iran had signed treaties was the Ottoman Empire. Logically, the plural salatin could only have been used to refer to all heads of state.[53]

The Foreign Office employed all tools at its disposal to win a favorable verdict. The submission of expert opinion from abroad in a German judicial case highlights the significance of Iranian student publications in threatening German and Iranian state goals. Moreover, state laws were reformulated to prevent the publication of further inflammatory materials, as evidenced from the May 1931 revision to the Iranian penal code. As well, alongside expert Iranian opinions, the Foreign Office reached out to experts in oriental studies within Germany itself, such as the orientalist Professor Moritz, who traced the origin of the word sultan back to the eighth century BC when it was used in the form schiltanu by an Assyrian king to refer to the ruler of Egypt,[54] thus removing its Islamic connotation.

The irony of the case, in which a republican state was trying to protect a foreign monarch from public offence, was not lost on the German press. One article titled “Is Hindenburg a Sultan?” stated: “Considering that German law knows no preferential treatment of the Reich President, no concept of offence toward a majesty, according to this legal construction, the sovereign of a foreign state is better protected in Germany than the German President himself.”[55]

In another article, titled “The Triumph of the Persian Shah?” in the Berlin paper Tagebuch, author C. Z. Klötzel wrote:

We are oddly enough no longer living in a republic. There now presides in Wilhelmstrasse an order that presents a lion with a saber. The Foreign Office has achieved a victory for the Persian shah through directing its criminal code and police against the journal Peykar, and against Alavi who has lived in Germany since 1923. One, however, must be fair: it is not easy for the Foreign Office to deal with Reza Shah. This is a man that one must cautiously avoid. This is a man that has soared from a simple soldier to an emperor (Kaiser), and this career is only possible when one throws everything that stands in his way to the ground with ironclad determination [. . .] It is nonsense to let our notions of a modern state and government principles be overtaken by an Eastern country that still finds itself in Islamic medievalism.[56]

Klötzel also pointed out that a paper could be banned only if it disturbed public order. Peykar, however, was in Persian, and could not be read by anyone other than Iranians and a few academics at the Oriental Seminar. He bemoaned that “When all an ambassador or an envoy has to do to ban a paper is to walk into the Foreign Office with a complaint, so would the ‘Triumph of the Persian Shah,’ be the final destruction of the remaining press freedoms.”[57]

While the vast majority of newspapers were critical of the Foreign Office for what they perceived as bowing to a foreign ruler and especially for infringing on the rights of Iranian students to freedom of the press, some papers became critical of the students’ activities.

On 10 April 1932, the Düsseldorfer Zeitung published an article that lamented the lack of action taken by the German government against “emigrants” that abused the hospitality provided to them:

Emigrants who leave their fatherland for political reasons misuse their right to hospitality in their resident country to fight their own far away land. The Italians, who live in France and see Mussolini as an enemy, are astutely observed by the French government, to prevent the slightest damage to the relations between Paris and Rome. The parliament and the people see this as a given. Only we Germans have to be the exception, whose asylum laws for refugees enable the continuation of their subversive activities against their native government [. . .] Our diplomats in Wilhelmstrasse are in the complete right to assert that the commercial relations of Germany with Persia are more important than the asylum rights of a bunch of Persian students.[58]

German businesses were, indeed, afraid of their weakening position in Iran and had been pressuring the Foreign Office to settle the matter as quickly as possible. In a letter noted as “Strictly Confidential,” the Reich Association of German Industry, which included companies such as Krupp, spoke of the necessity of preserving good relations with Iran in the interest of German exports. Student experience was deemed to be crucial to the spread of German influence, and as a by-product, German business. Due to the “Bolshevik” activities of Iranian students in Berlin, the report continued, the Iranian government looked to send its students to Paris and London—cities free from such radical tendencies—much to the disadvantage of German interests. The Reich Association of German Industry thus called on all companies with an interest in Iran to support the Iranian legation in its demands against student “revolutionaries.”[59] Further reports came from the German envoy in Iran about the dismissal of two Germans working in the armoury, despite their outstanding work. Nine more would be dismissed in a matter of months.[60] Another report indicated that due to the Peykar affair, a commission worth 100,000 RM was threatened and that twenty-three Germans had been dismissed from the National Bank. As a result of the destabilized situation and lack of a speedy and effective solution, the German envoy reported that other Germans, fearing a similar fate, planned to call on Hitler’s intervention.[61]

With the growing power of national socialism, the tone of the press began to change. An interesting article from Der Angriff (The Attack) from 4 July 1932, titled “Jewish Propaganda Destroys Germany’s Foreign Relations,” pointed to Germany and Iran’s shared racial background, and the detestable attacks on Reza Shah’s strong leadership by the German press:

For years since the war, Germany and Persia have had the most congenial relations and developing commercial relations. These relations were strengthened with the coming to the throne of Reza Khan in 1922, who comes from a military background and from the northern province of Mazandaran where to this day the Nordic blood of the ancient Persians, our racial relatives, is strong. He kicked the hedonistic Qajars, who had blown all the nation’s money in Paris, out of the house. He created a modern army, a well-run administration, and revived a strong economy. What is simply interesting and absolutely pioneering, is [Reza Shah] rescuing his country from exploitation and foreign monopoly over trade. The new shah is without doubt a great figure in the history of Iran. He understands the importance of holding back English and Russian influence in the country while having good relations with them, and in German help and German advisors gaining a purely objective partner [. . .] Since the unfolding of the Jewish press, most of all the Berliner Tageblatt, a hate campaign has been going on against the shah who has been an honest ruler simply for defending himself against Jewish criminal delinquents.[62]

In the end, on 4 April 1932 at two in the afternoon, the verdict for the first court case for insult against a monarch (Majestätsbeleidigungprozeß) in the German republic was pronounced. All the defendants were acquitted due to the failure of the prosecution to prove to the court that reciprocity had been established in Iran. The court found that only issues six and onward could be questioned in the trial since only at the time of their publication had the new penal code in Iran been passed, amending the 1908 penal code.[63] However, issues six and onward did not contain anything that could be considered insulting to the shah. Consequently, Dr. Wehner and Felix Wolf were charged only 60 RM for violating the press law by having continued to publish Peykar despite the ban.[64] Following an appeal by the prosecution, the original decision was largely upheld with the punishment for Dr. Wehner being increased to six weeks in detention instead of the two months requested by the prosecution.[65]

By the summer of 1932, the Iranian government had largely calmed down, with the German government having addressed other grievances held by the Iranian government against its treatment in the German press.[66] The Peykar trial highlights the sensitivity of the Pahlavi regime toward its depiction in the West. It shows the divisions and contradictions that existed within the newly founded Weimar Republic. It also shows Berlin as a site where Iranian students became participants in the convoluted and contentious political atmosphere of interwar Germany. Most importantly, the episode demonstrates state perceptions of youth as vessels of state doctrines—youth that are to be molded for the attainment of particular futures guided by governmental programs such as student missions abroad, the expansion of academic institutions, or the instilling of patriotism through various youth organizations. These futures, though, are never guaranteed. They are negotiated, altered, and contested by youth who display their own agency as history-making actors and the heirs to a multitude of possible futures.

[1]See Larry Eugene Jones, “Culture and Politics in the Weimar Republic,” in Modern Germany Reconsidered 1870-1945, ed. Gordon Martel (New York: Routledge, 1992), 74–95. Reference on p. 84 and 85.

[2]Stephen Gross, Export Empire: German Soft Power in Southeastern Europe, 1890–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 13.

[3]Gross, Export Empire, 112.

[4]Letter from the German members of the Advisory Board for the Education of Persian Students in Germany to the Foreign Office, 10 March 1920, Charlottenburg, RZ 207, R 78098, Politisches Archiv des Auswärtigen Amts (PA-AA), Berlin; Constitution of the German-Persian School Association, German Foreign Office memo, 19 September 1935, Berlin, RZ 207, R 78099, PA-AA.

[5]Christl Catanzaro, “Policy or Puzzle? The Foundation of the University of Tehran between Conception and Pragmatic Realization,” in Culture and Cultural Politics under Reza Shah: The Pahlavi State and the Creation of a Modern Society in Iran, ed. Bianca Devos and Christoph Werner (London: Routledge, 2013), 37–54. Reference on pp. 43–44.

[6]Ambassador in Paris Hoesch to Foreign Office Abteilung III for the British Empire, America, and the Orient, 14 June 1930, Paris, RZ 207, R 78107, PA-AA. Another case involved inflammatory material spread by Ahmad Assadoff during the visit of Abdolhossein Teymurtash, the minister of court to Reza Shah Pahlavi, to Europe.

[7]The communist pamphlet in question seems to be Der Rote Stern (Red Star/Setare-yi Sorkh), which according to Mohammad Golban was published in Vienna. However, the location of its publication was not clear at the time, with Austrian authorities claiming that there were no known Persian communist publications in their country. Its printing and distribution, however, were thought to have originated with the Soviet-backed publisher Peuvag, located in Leipzig. Foreign Office Abteilung III to the German Embassy in Paris, 21 January 1930, Berlin, RZ 207, R 78107, PA-AA; Mohammad Golban, “Tajdid Chāpi-ha: Rouznāmeh-a va Majalehā-yi Farsi ke Tajdid Chāp Shodeh And” (“Reprinted: Farsi Newspapers and Journals That Have Been Reprinted”), Kelk 84 (2007): 29–60, reference on p. 47, www.noormags.ir/view/fa/articlepage/304033.

[8]Ambassador in Paris Hoesch to Foreign Office Abteilung III, 14 June 1930, Paris, RZ 207, R 78107, PA-AA. Mohammadali Jamalzadeh had been a longtime resident of Berlin dating from his time as a member of the Persian Committee set up by the Foreign Office during the First World War and a contributor to the journal Kaveh. Following Kaveh, Jamalzadeh published essays in Hossein Kazemzadeh’s Iranshahr, as well as his own journal Elm va Honar (Knowledge and Art) from 1927 to 1928. Within this journal, Jamalzadeh called for the creation of a modern Iranian civilization through native Iranian methods, much like Japan had done, rather than through blind imitation of the West. In 1918, Jamalzadeh took on the responsibility of supervising incoming Iranian students in Germany. See Jamshid Behnam, “Zamineha-yi Feckri-yi Andishemandān-i Irani dar Berlin” (“The Intellectual Background of Iranian Intelligentsia in Berlin, 1915-1930”), Iran Nameh 16 (1998): 553–78; Tim Epkenhans, Moral und Disziplin: Seyyed Ḥasan Taqīzāde und die Konstruktion eines “progressiven Selbst,” in der frühen iranischen Moderne (Ethics and Discipline: Seyyed Hasan Taqizadeh and the Construction of a “Progressive Self” in Early Modern Iran) (Berlin: K. Schwartz, 2005), 152. For Germany’s program of revolution during the First World War, see Fritz Fischer, Germany’s Aims in the First World War (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1967).

[9]Foreign Office Abteilung III to the German Envoy in Tehran, 7 May 1930, Berlin, RZ 207, R 78107, PA-AA. All translations are mine.

[10]Foreign Office Abteilung III to the German Ambassador in Paris, Hoesch, 18 June 1930, Berlin, RZ 207, R 78107, PA-AA.

[11]German Embassy in Paris to Foreign Office Abteilung III, 27 June 1930, Paris, RZ 207, R 78107, PA-AA.

[12]Criminal Assistant Meyer, “Polizei Revier: Kriminal-Polizei-Berlin,” 5 April 1930, Berlin, RZ 207, R 78107, PA-AA.

[13]Homa Katouzian, Khalil Maleki: The Human Face of Iranian Socialism (London: Oneworld, 2018), 6.

[14]Katouzian, Khalil Maleki, 7.

[15]Foreign Office Abteilung III to the German Ambassador in Paris, Hoesch, 18 June 1930, Berlin, RZ 207, R 78107, PA-AA.

[16]Foreign Office Abteilung III to the German Embassy in Paris, 2 July 1930, Berlin, RZ 207, R 78107, PA-AA.

[17]Peykar, 15 February 1931, 14 March 1931, RZ 207, R 78107, PA-AA. The title of the paper was originally mistranslated as Bīkār, which in Persian means “unemployed.”

[18]Peykar, 15 February 1931.

[19]Sebastian Beck of the Oriental Seminar to Fritz Grobba of the Foreign Office Abteilung III, 12 May 1931, Berlin, RZ 207, R 78107, PA-AA.

[20]Dr. Hirschbruch, Beschluss (Decision), RZ 207, R 78110, PA-AA; Dr. Wilde of the Generalstaatsanwalt bei dem Landgericht I to the Prussian justice minister, 15 April 1831, Berlin, RZ 207, R 78107, PA-AA.

[21]Mohammadali Farzin to Fritz Grobba, 8 April 1931, Berlin, RZ 207, R 78107, PA-AA.

[22]Iranian Legation in Berlin to the Foreign Office, 29 April 1931, Berlin, RZ 207, R 78107, PA-AA.

[23]Iranian Legation in Berlin to the Foreign Office, 29 April 1931.

[24]Another publication by Iranian students was Nameh-e Farangistan (Letters from Europe), published from 1924 to 1925.

[26]Moradi, “Shemeh-ī az Dastan,” 262; Alireza Ismaili, “Asnādi az Toghīf-i Ruznāmehā-yi Peykār va Nehzat dar Berlin (1309-1311),” (“Documents on the Suspension of the Newspapers Peykar and Nehzat in Berlin, 1930/31-32”), Ganjineh Asnad 29 and 30 (1998): 15–38, reference on p. 16, www.noormags.ir/view/fa/articlepage/92205; Reza Azari-Shahrrezai, Peykār dar Berlin: Doreh-ye Ruznāmeh-yi Peykār, Nashri-yi Hezb-i Communist-i Iran. Bahman 1301-Day 1311 (Peykar in Berlin: Duration of the Newspaper Peykar, a Publication of the Iranian Communist Party, February 1923-December 1932) (Tehran: Shirarzeh-Ketab-i Ma, 2016/17), 17.

[27]Eberhard von Stohrer from the German Legation in Egypt to Hans Heinrich Dieckhoff, head of Foreign Office Abetilung III, 30 April 1931, Cairo, RZ 207, R 78107, PA-AA. The spelling of the Iranian emissary’s name as used in the document was kept for this article.

[28]Stohrer to Dieckhoff, 30 April 1931.

[29]Foreign Office to the Prussian Ministry of the Interior, 20 August 1931, Berlin, RZ 207, R 78108, PA-AA.

[30]Foreign Office memo, 17 October 1931, Berlin, RZ 207, R 78108, PA-AA.

[31]Blücher to Foreign Office Abteilung III, 19 October 1931, Tehran, RZ 207, R 78108, PA-AA.

[32]Blücher to Foreign Office Abteilung III, 20 October 1931, Tehran, RZ 207, R 78108, PA-AA.

[33]General Konsul Leon Guttmann, “Außenpolitik, Universität, Hochschulbehörde,” 1928, RZ 507, R 64013, PA-AA.

[34]Fr. Klausener of the Prussian Ministry of the Interior to the Foreign Office, 6 July 1931, Berlin, RZ 207, R 78108, PA-AA.

[35]Report by the Berlin Police to the Prussian Ministry of the Interior, 12 June 1931, Berlin, RZ 207, R 78108, PA-AA.

[36]“Der Beleidigte Schah” (“The Offended Shah”), Berliner Morgenpost, 19 February 1932, RZ 207, R 78110, PA-AA.

[37]Judicial clerk, 24 March 1932, RZ 207, R 78110, PA-AA.

[38]“Der Beleidigte Schah” (“The Offended Shah”), Berliner Tageblatt, 19 February 1932, RZ 207, R 78110, PA-AA; Judicial clerk, 24 March 1932.

[39]“Der Beleidigte Schah” (“The Offended Shah”), Montag Morgen, 17 May 1931, RZ 207, R 78107, PA-AA.

[40]Foreign Office Abteilung III to Police President Grzesinski, 18 August 1931, Berlin, RZ 207, R 78108, PA-AA.

[41]Foreign Office to Grzesinski, 18 August 1931.

[42]Mary Fulbrook, History of Germany 1918-2000: The Divided Nation (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2002), 23, 27. The communists in Germany viewed the Weimar Republic as the “enemy of the working class” and a government that was in league with the counterrevolutionary forces. See William Carr, A History of Germany 1815-2000 (New York: Hodder Arnold, 1991), 245.

[43]Foreign Affairs Minister Julius Curtius to Prussian Interior Minister Carl Severing, 28 August 1931, Berlin, RZ 207, R 78108, PA-AA.

[44]Curtius to Severing, 28 August 1931.

[45]Schulenburg to the Foreign Office, 12 September 1931, Tehran, RZ 207, R 78108, PA-AA.

[46]Report by Frtiz Grobba of the Foreign Office Abteilung III, 26 October 1931, Berlin, RZ 207, R 78109, PA-AA. Following his deportation from Germany, Alavi sought refuge in the Soviet Union. After some time, he was accused of being a German spy and killed. See Alavi, “Morteza Alavi.”

[47]Dr. Hirschbruch, Beschluss (Decision).

[48]K, “Prozess gegen Persische Revolutionäre” (“Process against Persian Revolutionaries”), Germania, 5 April 1932, RZ 207, R 78111, PA-AA.

[49]Judicial clerk, Vermerk (Memorendum), Für die Richtigkeit der Abschrift, RZ 207, R 78110, PA-AA.

[50]German Envoy in Tehran Blücher to the Foreign Office, 23 April 1932, Tehran, RZ 207, R 78111, PA-AA.

[51]Blücher to the Foreign Office, 23 April 1932, Tehran, RZ 207, R 78111, PA-AA.

[52]Blücher to Foreign Office, 23 April 1932.

[53]Blücher to Foreign Office, 23 April 1932.

[54]Report by Professor Moritz, 28 June 1932, RZ 207, R 78111, PA-AA. Moritz traces transference of the term sultan into Arabic and the Koran and its adoption by the Abbasid Caliph Mansur in the eighth century AD. For the latter fact, he cites Tabari as his source.

[55]“Ist Hindenburg ein Sultan?” (“Is Hindenburg a Sultan?”), Vossische Zeitung, 18 February 1932, RZ 207, R 78110, PA-AA.

[56]C. Z. Klötzel, “Kommt im Triumph der Perser Schah?” (“The Triumph of the Persian Shah?”), Tagebuch, 31 October 1931, RZ 207, R 78110, PA-AA. Wilhelmstrasse refers to a street in Berlin where many of the governmental buildings were located.

[57]Klötzel, “Kommt im Triumph.” Incidentally, Klötzel would find himself in hot water with the Iranian government and the Foreign Office for having written this article.

[58]“Die Klage des Schah” (“The Lawsuit by the Shah”), Düsseldorfer Zeitung, 10 April 1932, RZ 207, R 78111, PA-AA.

[59]Herrn von Düring beim Reichsverband der Deutschen Industrie (The Reich Association of German Industry), Berlin, RZ 207, R 78108, PA-AA.

[60]Blücher to the Foreign Office, 29 April 1932 and 9 June 1932, Tehran, RZ 207, R 78111, PA-AA.

[61]Industrie- und Handelskammer zu Halle to the Foreign Office, 14 June 1932, Halle (Saale), RZ 207, R 78111, PA-AA; Blücher to Foreign Office, 9 June 1932.

[62]Dr. v. L, “Jüdische Hetze stört Deutsche Auslandsbeziehungen” (“Jewish Propaganda Destroys Germany’s Foreign Relations”), Der Angriff, 4 July 1932, RZ 207, R 78111, PA-AA. The year of Reza Shah coming to the throne was actually 1925.

[63]“Freispruch im Persien-Prozess” (“Acquittal in the Persian Case”), Berliner Tageblatt, 4 April 1932, RZ 207, R 78111, PA-AA; K, “Prozess gegen Persische Revolutionäre.”

[64]“Verbürgte Gegenseitigkeit” (“Guaranteed Reciprocity”), Vossische Zeitung, 5 April 1932, RZ 207, R 78111, PA-AA; K, “Prozess gegen Persische Revolutionäre.”

[65]Aufzeichnung (Foreign Office outline of trial proceedings), 2 July 1932, RZ 207, R 78111, PA-AA.

[66]These included an article published in a Munich magazine by a German named Leo Matthias and the publication of the successor to Peykar, titled Nehzat. A detailed discussion of these two publications is beyond the scope of the present article.