M.R. Ghanoonparvar is a professor emeritus of Persian and comparative literature at The University of Texas at Austin. He has published widely on Persian literature and culture in both English and Persian and is the author of numerous books, most recently Iranian Film and Persian Fiction (Mazda, 2016) and Dining at the Safavid Court (Mazda, 2016). His translations include Jalal Al-e Ahmad’s By the Pen (Center for Middle Eastern Studies, 1988), Sadeq Chubak’s The Patient Stone (Mazda, 1989), and Simin Daneshvar’s Savushun (Mage, 1990).

To my knowledge, the only city in Iran that in the twentieth century was divided in people’s minds into north and south is Tehran. In general, while north Tehran, for the most part, occupies the more elevated slopes and foothills of the Alborz Mountain range, south Tehran extends to the flatlands that eventually lead to the deserts that encompass other cities such as Qom. North Tehran, with its Western-style buildings and streets, already had the appearance of a modern city in the mid-twentieth century, whereas south Tehran remained an old city with twisting, narrow alleyways and streets and mud-brick houses. To Iranians and foreign visitors alike, north Tehran exhibited an image of affluence, a city with an appetite for change, one that displayed the glittering hues of modern metropolitan progress and the absence of religious moral constraints. In contrast, south Tehran continued to be seen as a traditional Islamic city resistant to change, a city that seemed to have been abandoned in some past century, immersed in poverty, with little economic and social progress, still stubbornly holding on to the trappings of a traditional religious society. This contrast between north and south Tehran, symbolically perhaps representing a contrast between north Tehran and the remainder of Iran, is the subject of a 1969 poem by the prominent poet Esma’il Kho’i.

Kho’i begins his poem “Shomal Niz” (“North, Too”), with a prediction of sorts: “Rain shall destroy the southern part of the city.” Repeating the same line, he continues: “And I, astonishingly, will not be sad.”[2]

The poetic persona wishes for the “cloud” to be the source of the flood that destroys the southern part of the city, professing

I have faith in the cloud

I am certain that the cloud knows

And it will not scatter its seeds

Lapful by lapful, impudently over the heads of these famished people.

The southern part of the city shall be destroyed

And there is no room at all for sorrow, no room at all for sorrow:

The southern part of the city MUST be destroyed.

Injustice?

No! This is not injustice

Injustice is to take pity on the ditches.

Injustice is to take pity on the bushes dwelling in the valleys,

To be a peak and to pity the valley.

Injustice has always been so

The flood says so

I say so:

Injustice has always been so.

And the flood says

“All ditches must be filled

And there should be no mountains or valleys.”[3]

The socioeconomic differences between the “famished people” of south Tehran, who, according to the speaker of the poem, dwell in the “valleys,” and the affluent in north Tehran, who are at the “peak,” would have been quite evident to Kho’i’s audience. Hence, Tehran is portrayed as a city of inequality and injustice, for the elimination of which the speaker contends that both parts shall and must be destroyed:

The southern part of the city shall be destroyed by the water’s debris

And the northern part of the city

By the destruction of the south[4]

Kho’i is not the only Iranian literary artist whose portrayal of Tehran is gloomy. An overview of modern Persian fiction since its inception in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries shows that almost all Iranian writers who use Tehran, fully or partially, as the backdrop for their stories present a similar picture. Published in Cairo in 1895, the first modern Persian novel, Siyahatnameh-ye Ebrahim Beyg (The Travel Diary of Ebrahim Beyg) is the story of a young Egyptian-born Iranian who is instructed in his father’s will to visit his ancestral homeland, which the father has described as paradise on earth. However, the novel provides a picture of the entire country, and Tehran in particular, which appears to Ebrahim more like hell than paradise.[5] Ebrahim summarizes his impressions of the Qajar capital at the end of his visit to Tehran. Regarding the businesspeople, for instance, he writes: “The merchant class does not give any thought to the advancement of commerce or its expansion. They follow the same path that their predecessors did. In all of Tehran not a single company has been founded for propagating the goods and products of the country. Although there are several owners with sufficient capital, they don’t trust one another. Even in business deals they move very cautiously with each other. All they think about is stepping on the other.”[6] He concludes his remarks about the city by saying that all the inhabitants of the city are “defective in intellect and deficient in faith,” and adds, “They’re dead, but alive; alive, but dead.”[7]

Despite the drastic efforts to modernize the country and the initial manifestations of these efforts in the capital city, not only did the transition from the Qajar dynasty to the Pahlavi dynasty not significantly change the negative image of Tehran in literary works, but in some ways, it increased it. The face of certain central areas in Tehran changed, but in literature, Tehran continued to be portrayed as a horrible city.

In fact, the title of one of the earliest social novels, by Morteza Moshfeq-Kazemi, is Tehran-e Makhowf (Horrid Tehran).[8] This novel was published in 1925, the year of the coronation of Reza Shah, who had consolidated his powers over the country about four years after virtually dismantling the Qajar rule in a coup d’état. The plot of the story, which follows a traditional love tale of two young people, Mahin and Farrokh, is a pretext for its author to show the ongoing corruption in the city, mainly through the machinations of Mahin’s father, who is attempting to secure a position of power for himself. In addition, Moshfeq-Kazemi describes the “horribleness” of Tehran by taking his characters, especially Mahin’s father and the son of an aristocrat whom he prefers to marry his daughter, to visit the seamier side of Tehran, such as the houses of prostitution and opium dens.

Other writers of the same period, perhaps most prominently Mohammad Hejazi and Ali Dashti, also use Tehran as the locale of their stories. To many writers, certain aspects of modernization, especially the entry of women into the arena of social life, seem to be a harbinger of moral corruption and deviation.

In his novels Homa (1928), Parichehr (1929), and Ziba (1930), which are all named after their female protagonists, Hejazi uses the Tehran upper-middle-class setting with which he was most familiar and chooses his characters as representatives of this class.[9] Homa is the story of a young, educated girl who is in love with a young man; but when by chance she discovers that her deceased father’s close friend, who is now her guardian and whom she greatly respects and admires, is in love with her, she decides to devote her life to him. Tehran becomes the site of a series of vicious machinations by Homa’s former suitor, who now considers the guardian to be his rival and tries to take revenge, assisted by a corrupt cleric. In Parichehr, Hejazi didactically cautions his audience against moral corruption, the victims of which are usually young women, in cities that are rapidly becoming modern, such as Tehran. In his last novel of this period, Ziba, Hejazi moralizes about governmental, political, and bureaucratic corruption, in particular in the capital city. The story revolves around Hoseyn, a young seminary student from a village, who comes to Tehran to study and to make a better life for himself. In Tehran, he meets Ziba, a well-known prostitute with many government connections. Hoseyn develops a taste for modern life, and Ziba influences him to become involved in all sorts of evil acts in order to advance.[10]

Hejazi and Dashti were often criticized by writers of the following generations for focusing on the affluent classes and characters in the capital city and disregarding the rest of the people in Tehran and the entire country.[11] But there were also writers, such as Mohammad Mas’ud of the same generation, who wrote about a different class of characters, such as young lower-class people. In his novels published in the early 1930s, Tafrihat-e Shab (Fun at Night) and Dar Talash-e Ma’ash (Striving to Make a Living), for instance, Mas’ud describes the lives of these young working-class men who struggle to survive in the rapidly changing city of Tehran by any means possible, even by engaging in illicit acts. His novels also detail the men’s indulgence in Tehran’s nightlife, including visits to taverns and the brothels of Shahr-e No (New City), Tehran’s notorious red-light district.

The efforts of Reza Shah and his government to modernize the country initially came to fruition, even if superficially, in the capital city. The emergence of the social novels of the 1920s and early 1930s, represented in this discussion by the works of Moshfeq-Kazemi, Hejazi, and Mas’ud, was the inevitable outcome of the new Tehran as the only “modern” city in the country at the time. The creation of this modern city at the center of the still pre-capitalist rural and agricultural country would be conducive to all sorts of social and moral evils seemingly inherent in modern cities.

An anomaly to the social novels of the early 1930s is the best-known piece of Persian fiction, Sadeq Hedayat’s Buf-e Kur (The Blind Owl), which was written in the mid-1930s and presents at best an ambivalent picture of the city.[12] Hedayat uses Ray (or Rey), the ancient city that eventually was absorbed by modern Tehran, as the locale of his novel, since this ancient city lends itself more suitably to the themes and subject matter of this work.[13] The Ray/Tehran of Buf-e Kur is a city having undergone drastic changes within a span of less than two decades. While Tehran had assumed the appearance of a modern city, this ancient city seemed to resist change. Ray was completely overshadowed by the growing metropolis of Tehran. All that remained of it consisted of ancient ruins and old, dilapidated houses with poverty-stricken inhabitants.

Buf-e Kur is a surrealistic representation of the same city and time frame as appears in the novels of Moshfeq-Kazemi and Mas’ud. One inhabitant of the city, the narrator of Buf-e Kur, refers to it as the “Bride of the World”:

Opening off my room is a dark closet. The room itself has two windows facing out onto the world of the rabble. One of them looks onto our own courtyard, the other onto the street, forming thereby a link between me and the city of Rey, the city they call the ‘Bride of the World’, with its thousand-fold web of winding streets, its host of squat houses, its schools and its caravanserais. The city which is accounted the greatest city in the world is breathing and living its life there beyond my room.[14]

But to the narrator, the “Bride of the World” is the world of the “rabble,” or the riffraff.

In his controversial satirical novel, Tup-e Morvari (The Pearl Cannon), Hedayat establishes a more direct link between Ray and Tehran.[15] In the form of a fictional petition written by women to “His Majesty,” who has ordered the pearl cannon (the women’s favorite edifice, which grants their wishes) to be removed from the center of the city, Hedayat fabricates various humorous etymologies for the name of the city of Tehran. Regarding one of these, he writes that according to a “reliable hadith”

the origin of the word Tehran is “tah-e uran,” which means the city of those with naked buttocks, because its inhabitants perpetually cleaned themselves and refrained from wearing pants. According to another account, the origin of the word is “tah ran,” which is derived from “tah,” which means bottom, and “ran,” which means drive. More precisely, it means those who drive on their bottoms, in other words, on their buttocks. Later on, this name, which referred to the inhabitants, became the name of this area. To explain further, at the time of the Arab invasion, the inhabitants of Shar-e Ray out of fear—of course, as a sign of protest—scooted on their buttocks and took refuge to the slopes of Alborz Mountain, which is the location of Tehran today, and they did not go back to Shar-e Ray any more.[16]

The Tehran of the first part of the twentieth century, which Hedayat describes mockingly, is a city that is, as one critic observes, “as though the place and its inhabitants did not belong to each other or to Iran.”[17]

Perhaps Hedayat and other writers of the decades prior to World War II who viewed Reza Shah’s efforts to modernize and change the face of Tehran in particular as superficial and sham intentionally focused attention on Tehran’s seamier side and the negative aspects of life in the rapidly growing city; this may have been done in reaction to the shah’s dictatorial rule. This mode of expressing dissidence was largely due to strict censorship and the iron hand of the government in dealing with anyone who dared oppose or even criticize it. In the 1940s, with the forced abdication of Reza Shah and the entry of the Allied forces into the country, the so-called “spring of freedom,” a period of relative relaxation of restrictions, began. During this time, both established and younger writers began to publish stories that were more explicitly critical of the government, although still many were about Reza Shah’s era. In the works of writers such as Sadeq Chubak, Jalal Al-e Ahmad, and Ebrahim Golestan, who began their literary careers in the politicized social climate of the 1940s, Tehran, often the backdrop of their stories, is a schizophrenic city, one of contrasts and contradictions, where traditional and modern life seem to encounter one another with reluctance. Moreover, while earlier writers such as Hejazi focused their attention on social and moral corruption, this new generation often seemed to be more interested in presenting individual portraits of inhabitants of the city, who are referred to as the “riffraff” by the narrator of Buf-e Kur and who include members of all social classes.

Tehran is a city of paradoxes, an unhappy gathering place of the poor and the affluent, in Chubak’s first collection of short stories, Kheymehshabbazi (Puppet Show), published in 1945.[18] In “Golhay-e Gushti” (“Flowers of Flesh”), in a crowded street of the city, we find Morad, a homeless opium addict and alcoholic who becomes intoxicated at the sight and scent of a woman in a provocative Western-style dress with poppy-flower prints, as he tries to evade paying his meager debt to a shopkeeper.[19] Chubak’s portrayal of Tehran continues to be negative, even in stories published more than a decade later—for example, in “Asb-e Chubi” (“The Wooden Horse”), written from the perspective of a young French woman married to an Iranian from a traditional family.[20] With the experience of having lived in Iran for three years with her husband, Jalal, the woman is spending her final hours in Iran in a bare room alone with her young son on a cold Christmas night. Reviewing her past, she recalls how she fell in love with and married Jalal, and after the birth of their son, came to live in Tehran. Her unpleasant impressions and memories include the nauseating smell of the outhouse of her in-laws’ home upon her arrival; the sickly siblings of her husband, one of whom had typhoid and died, but not before causing her to be infected with the same disease; and finally, her husband’s change in character, when soon after their arrival in Iran, he married his fat, ugly cousin. Now, looking out the window at the city makes her nauseated:

Through the window she watched the snowflakes and the black flecks of space in the street that were untouched by the snow. Cars with dazzling eyes chased after one another like scuttling ladybugs. She looked at the city’s scene, at the dome and minarets of the Sepahsalar mosque. Suddenly she felt sick. She rushed out of the room to the bathroom. Here the unwashed face and bleary eyes and tousled, grubby hair that she saw in the mirror abruptly turned her stomach and she threw up in the sink.[21]

Scenes similar to those in Chubak’s stories are also found in Al-e Ahmad’s first collection of short stories, Did-o Bazdid (Exchange of Visits), published in 1945.[22] In these stories, however, Al-e Ahmad’s general choice of setting is a public place in Tehran. The scene of “Goldan-e Chini” (“China Flower Vase”) is a crowded city bus with an assortment of people. The passengers represent a microcosm of Tehran after the lifting of the ban on chadors and veiling imposed by Reza Shah a few years earlier. A well-dressed man in an overcoat and a new hat carrying an obviously precious antique vase in his gloved hand boards the bus and, finding no other seat, manages to squeeze himself between four passengers, two men and two women fully veiled in chadors, on the bench seat at the back of the bus. A shabbily dressed, happy-go-lucky, middle-aged man, who “neither wore a collar nor a tie” and “the sleeves of [whose] shirt the buttons of which had fallen off were sticking out of his stiffly-starched raincoat” and who is sitting next to the well-dressed man, becomes mesmerized by the intricate designs on the vase; and eventually, when the owner is asked and agrees to let him examine the vase, he inadvertently drops and breaks it.[23] The passengers begin to comment on the mishap, some blaming it on fate and others taking the side of the vase’s owner. Unlike writers of the previous generation, in his created microcosm of the bus, rather than focusing on social, political, or moral corruption in the seemingly modernized capital, Al-e Ahmad is concerned with the behavior of individuals, with the rules of responsible conduct for living in such a city. With his detailed descriptions of the different dress, social class, and persuasion of various characters on the bus, Al-e Ahmad shows the incongruity of the city’s social makeup. With a comment by the frustrated owner of the broken vase, “As a nation, we are not deserving of anything. And now that he has broken it, he blames it on fate,” Al-e Ahmad seems to suggest that traditional ways, such as blaming mistakes or incompetence on fate, are incompatible with living in a modern society.[24]

Ebrahim Golestan’s short story “Zohr-e Garm-e Tir” (“Hot Noon in July”), which was written later in the same decade, is a cynical metaphor for where Tehran, before the rest of the country, was headed in its confused and clumsy march toward modernity in the mid-1940s.[25] Pulling a cart with a heavy load in the summer heat for a long distance in the streets of the city without knowing its precise destination, an illiterate porter finally manages to get the attention of a man exiting a taxi with a bare-legged woman in a flowered dress, to have him read the address written on a crumbled piece of paper. The man looks at the address and points the porter in some direction. Sweating profusely and exhausted, the porter finally reaches the destination, or so he thinks, which is a house that is still under construction in an alleyway. A shabbily dressed man who answers the door tells the porter that no one lives in the house yet, and asks him what he has on his cart. “A refrigerator,” the porter answers. “It works with electricity. It’s a new thing.”[26] Astonished, the man says, “Such weird things!”[27] As a product of modernity, the refrigerator not only seems an oddity to the man, but its delivery to a house under construction conveys the story’s intended point: Tehran, despite the efforts to change and modernize its appearance, is still under construction and not ready for modernity. This point becomes further evident with Golestan’s choice of the streets of Tehran as the backdrop of this story.

From his early stories, such as “Zohr-e Garm-e Tir,” Golestan seems to have been interested in showing the incompatibility of the people, whom he viewed as traditional or at best pseudo-modern, with modernity and its products. This is also the theme of Golestan’s 1974 novel, Asrar-e Ganj-e Darreh-ye Jenni (The Secrets of the Treasure of the Haunted Valley), which was based on his 1971 film with the same title. In the story, a dirt-poor farmer, who accidentally finds an underground treasure, begins to buy all sorts of electric appliances and take them to his village, which does not have the basic utilities of electricity and piped-in water.[28] The location of many scenes in both the novel and the film is Tehran, which, as a modern city, is contrasted with the farmer’s home village.

For many young Iranians who came to Tehran from other cities and villages for higher education in the 1960s and 1970s, Tehran often meant the University of Tehran. They would typically spend their entire three or four years of undergraduate education in the dormitories and the neighborhoods around the university campus, since anywhere else in the city they would feel like outsiders. In fact, Tehran residents pejoratively referred to them (and to other people from the provinces) as shahrestani, which carried the connotation of “country bumpkin.” This type of reception as well as the size of the city was intimidating and alienating to such students. The 1960s were also politicized years at the university, years of student protests, riots, and clashes with the agents of SAVAK (the regime’s security organization) and riot police.

Nader Ebrahimi’s short story “Bad, Bad-e Mehregan” (“The Wind of Mehregan”) is the fictional diary of one such student, who finds himself in this politicized university environment.[29] The students, all of whom seem to be opposed to the regime, talk about a revolution that has to happen, and they argue about whether they should fight for “bread” or for “freedom.” They also debate the function of poetry in addition to whether art should be “for art’s sake” or for the sake of society. All this is confusing to the provincial student, who has just begun his first year of medical school. Everyone and everything seems strange and alienating to him. Even the smells are different from those he finds familiar. The smell of the dormitory to him is “the smell of the Allies—maybe—or the smell of the Axis. The smell of wartime soldiers, the disproportionately tall Americans. And sometimes even the smell of burnt gunpowder and French perfume.”[30] He even dislikes looking into people’s eyes. When he takes a bus near the university, he feels “something ominous in the driver’s eyes,” and he continues: “Why doesn’t this thing or attitude have a name, a definition? Maybe it does, too, only I don’t know it.”[31]

To any Iranian from another part of the country, such as the protagonist of Ebrahimi’s story, Tehran and its people seemed strange and alien. As the scene of many social and political upheavals, to those who come from quiet towns and villages, the city was incomprehensible and culturally distant. As a writer from the provinces, Ebrahim Rahbar conveys this sense in his 1973 collection of short stories, Man dar Tehranam (I Am in Tehran), a series of vignettes about people from all walks of life living in a large, complex twentieth-century metropolis.[32] The first story, “Kucheh” (“Alleyway”), explores the difficult lives of young girls who are brought to the city to serve as housemaids. In “Khat” (“Bus Line”), Rahbar shows the disorder and chaos caused by the inadequate public transportation system. The narrator of the title story, “Man dar Tehranam,” is a young office employee, who, like many people in the city, is not from Tehran. Living in Tehran has so overwhelmed and confused him that he cannot even remember which bus to take home and winds up in the outskirts of Tehran, hoping for its destruction: “I hope for wind, a strong destructive wind, a storm that would toss the earth up into the sky, wreck everything, uproot the trees, and turn the buildings upside down. A person like me and in my situation, with this life and the world in which I find myself, what else could he wish for?”[33] “Khaneh” (“House”) is a story about a house of prostitution in which we get a glimpse of the lives of its occupants, prostitutes who, in the interval between their “guests,” play hopscotch in the open courtyard like little girls, and the madam who, according to one of the regular customers, owns two rental houses in the affluent section of the city.

Tehran, as the city that appears to many Iranians from the provinces to be the place where they can find jobs, has lured the protagonists of “Dar Ghorbat” (“Away from Home”) and “Peygham” (“Message”); but they soon become lost and disillusioned, as the city fails to fulfil their dreams. Likewise, the narrator of “Molaqati” (“The Visitor”), who was born in and has lived a vagrant life on the streets of Tehran, is now a peddler who sells bric-a-brac he carries on his bicycle. Tehran, however, is not kind to even the more affluent. Sina in “Eshqha” (“Loves”) is a twenty-eight-year-old, educated government employee who lives with his mother in a luxury apartment. Similar to several other young men in Rahbar’s short story collection, he is fed up with his life in the city. He feels like “a prisoner in the office,” where all day, all they do is drink tea and no work is done, and he thinks that all of his education has been wasted.[34] His evenings are not much better, as “he sat in front of television and killed the hours, one by one, as though they had made the television programs for bored people like him.”[35] At the end of the story, we find him on a bus; having left work early, he is traveling aimlessly but resolutely out of Tehran. An interesting aspect of Rahbar’s vignettes in Man dar Tehranam is that all the stories occur in public places: in an alleyway, on the street, on a bus, in a hospital, in a house of prostitution, in a movie theater, and in an office. Privacy and private space seem to be nonexistent in the city.

Many modernist Iranian writers, who often use fiction as a vehicle for social criticism, focus their attention on the negative aspects and the poor sections of the capital city, or south Tehran, and present gloomy pictures of the city. In a series of short stories generally referred to as the “Suri stories,” which were published from 1968 to 1971 in separate collections, Mahshid Amirshahi focuses on north Tehran and offers her readers a humorous image of the city.[36] The protagonist of these stories, Suri, is a teenage girl who, like her creator, belongs to a wealthy upper-middle-class family. Suri recounts her own stories, which often sound like diary entries and usually depict the idiosyncrasies of the members of her family and others, especially the adults; her own awkward teenage behavior; and the rapid and often uneasy comingling of Iranian and Western cultures, especially as symbolized by Tehran. Even though she nearly always seems to make fun of the city and its people, she also displays a genuine love of her city. In one story, on a snowy day, she comments, “When it snows, I’m quite fond of Tehran because it becomes a more agreeable and cleaner city.”[37] Later in the same story, hearing her uncle and other adults reminisce about old times in Tehran, she thinks that it must have been “an interesting sort of place,” adding

I dearly wish that the city gates and the moat and so on were still there. It would be nice too if the streets still retained their former names [. . .] There is a map of Tehran in our house [. . .] When you look at it, you imagine it’s of an entirely different place, not just because the Tehran of today has grown so huge, but because the place names have all been changed. Surely that’s why Tehran is now so utterly without roots [. . .] Let me put it like this: as soon as it gets a bit of history, they start to modernize it again, changing its appearance and all its various names.[38]

In contrast to Amirshahi’s Tehran of the Suri stories is the Tehran of Gholamhoseyn Sa’edi’s “Ashghalduni” (“The Dump”), published a few years before the Islamic Revolution.[39] The story begins on the outskirts of Tehran, where an impoverished teenage boy (Ali) and his sickly old father are panhandling on their way to the city. Hungry and homeless, they come across a man who tells them they can make some easy money by selling their blood. This encounter serves as the teenage boy’s introduction to the modern city, a city crowded with poor, hungry people; drug addicts; and money- and sex-hungry thieves, a city in which even its doctors are involved in illicit activities—in this case, the black market of blood taken mainly from the sick and addicts. Ali’s involvement and adventures in this modern jungle begin in a hospital, where he is first seduced by an older nurse, and eventually learns how to seduce other females in the hospital. He proves to be a natural “entrepreneur,” one who can survive and thrive through a series of “enterprises.” With the help of hospital workers, he begins by selling hospital food to the poor people; after gaining more experience, he eventually becomes involved in the “blood business” and even becomes a spy and a snitch for the government security organization, SAVAK. Early in the story, the hospital ambulance driver, Esma’il, who views Ali as a naïve country boy, tries to help him and teach him how to behave in Tehran:

When I say, go to hell, you have to say, You go to hell and don’t come back. If I answer you back worse, you have to give me an even worse one. For every one curse, you should give a hundred curses. And if we start a fight, you can’t run away, and you can’t lose, either. If I slap your ears, you have to give me a good slug on the chin. If you don’t do these things, you’ll always be taking it on the chin. And people who take it on the chin are no good in this dump.[40]

At the end of the story, having watched the naïve teenager transform into a monstrous character who would do just about anything for money, Esma’il finds out about Ali spying for SAVAK and realizes that Ali has become a creature who is totally at home in the Tehran Esma’il earlier referred to as a “dump”: “Listen, boy, I’ve been figuring you out all this time [. . .] You’re just a hustler. You know what a hustler is? A hustler is a go-between, a pimp, a bat, a dealer in blood, a con man, a thief, someone who doesn’t work but his pockets are full, understand? You’re not the only one; there are lots of them.”[41]

Even though disguised as a story about corruption in the medical community and blood banks, “Ashghalduni” was at the time a rather daring story about the capital of the country. For this reason, perhaps, in its film adaptation by the famed Iranian director Daryush Mehrju’i, the title was changed to Dayereh-ye Mina (“The Cycle”). The film was released during the upheavals of the late 1970s that led to the Islamic Revolution.

The picture of Tehran during and after those upheavals, as presented in Mahshid Amirshahi’s novel Dar Hazar (At Home), is even gloomier than the one Sa’edi paints in “Ashghalduni.” In the Suri stories, the upper-class teenager living in north Tehran naïvely dreams about “old Tehran” with its moats and city gates. In contrast, the Tehran in which the narrator of Amirshahi’s novel lives a decade later, during the uprising in the late 1970s, is a city of riots, confusion, filth, fear, killings, death, and lawlessness. The picture she presents of Tehran in Dar Hazar is that of a city in transition, changing from bad to worse. The novel begins with its protagonist at her home in Tehran waking up early one morning to the voice of, oddly enough, a “town crier,” announcing marshal law: “Respected inhabitants of Tehran! From this morning, in order to preserve calm in the capital city, marshal law has been declared.”[42] At every corner, people are stopped and frisked. Everything is set on fire. “Tehran is burning,” the narrator informs us: “Most banks, cinemas, and restaurants are the target of arsonists. The television news broadcast film of the attack on the university—prior to the start of the fires—has turned everyone into a rebel and an outlaw.”[43]

However, all this occurs before the change of the regime. The narrator’s depiction of Tehran after the change is far more negative. She decides to visit Riviera, one of her favorite cafés in Tehran. But Riviera has been set on fire, and she ends up in an alleyway:

The July sun has heated the garbage next to the walls of the alleyway, and I can smell the stench of rotten food, urine, and excrement. A swarm of mosquitoes quivers on the pile of garbage with every step I take and moves up and down. Several stray dogs and cats are lying down lethargically on the leftover piles of food and watermelon rinds [. . .]

I’m holding my nose with one hand and with the other, I’m driving away the large flies that have mistaken me for garbage. Not even walking fast will do any good. The flies accompany me to the end of the alleyway, and I feel the stench on my skin.[44]

Eventually, she decides to leave her beloved city. The last scene is at Tehran’s Mehrabad Airport, and her final memory of Tehran prior to her departure is when she is subjected to a humiliating search by an “ugly, middle-aged woman” whose head is completely encased in a fitted veiled:

The woman begins the search from the back. She snaps the elastic of my bra through my woolen blouse and says, “Undo this!” She then squats down and touches every centimeter of the edge of my skirt between her fingers.

I’m struggling to undo the hooks of my bra. One of the hooks is caught on my blouse, making it impossible to separate the hook and eye [. . .] Suddenly the rough fingers of the woman feel my thighs, and immediately on both sides of my underwear, before I can show any reaction, the quick hands have pulled my underwear down to my ankles, with the skill of experienced hands that remove a bandage from a wound, not for the purpose of changing the bandage but, with merciless pleasure, only to observe that moment of intense pain with the intention of leaving the wound uncovered and unprotected [. . .] The woman, who has pulled up my skirt for a more thorough examination, releases it and says, “What’s with you?  You think you’ve got something special? I’ve got one just like it. If one of those roughnecks with a thick mustache [. . .]”[45]

After the Islamic Revolution, similar to the post–Reza Shah period, when both established and new writers wrote about the bygone era, many writers chose previous decades for their stories, whether nostalgically or to escape the scrutinizing eyes of the censors. Hence, whenever the setting of the story is Tehran, it is most often the city prior to the revolution. For instance, although the settings of Shahrnush Parsipur’s novels Tuba va Ma’na-ye Shab (Tuba and the Meaning of Night), Zanan bedun-e Mardan (Women without Men), and Aql-e Abi (Blue Logos) are all in Tehran, only the last novel is set after the revolution.[46] In all these novels, however, we get glimpses of Tehran when the city is in turmoil. In Tuba va Ma’na-ye Shab, which spans over a century, Tehran is in turmoil several times: during the Qajar era and the Constitutional Revolution, the 1921 coup d’état that led to the establishment of the Pahlavi dynasty, the occupation of the country during World War II, and finally, the 1953 coup d’état that overthrew the government of Mohammad Mosaddeq.[47] The 1953 coup d’état is also the backdrop for Zanan bedun-e Mardan, while the Iran–Iraq War provides the backdrop for Aql-e Abi.[48] Interestingly, in her most popular novel, Zanan bedun-e Mardan, Parsipur portrays several women from various classes, all of whom live in Tehran. But in the end, their leaving the city, similar to the protagonist of Rahbar’s “Eshqha,” and gathering in a garden in the nearby town of Karaj suggests that they do not consider Tehran a suitable place for women.[49]

The vantage point of Amir Hasan Cheheltan’s novel Tehran, Shahr-e bi Aseman (Tehran, a City without a Sky) is after the revolution and during the Iran–Iraq War; but again, most events in the story occur prior to the revolution, from World War II to the fall of the Pahlavi regime.[50] The protagonist of the story, Keramat, is a south Tehran street thug in this enigmatic narrative, who now lives with his family in a luxury house in an affluent section of Tehran. In his younger days and throughout his life in the city, he has been involved in all kinds of illegitimate work, and even though he remains involved in illegal enterprises such as smuggling drugs and antiques, his conscience seems to have triggered a world of nightmares for him, considering all his past crimes. These nightmares, which make up most of the novel, run through his mind as on a movie screen, from knife wielding to prostitution, to having had a hand in looting Prime Minister Mosaddeq’s home as a crony of Sha’ban Bimokh, the leader of the street thugs who supported the shah during the 1953 coup d’état.[51] His recollections describe Tehran before the Islamic Revolution as a megacity “as large as an ocean” with thousands of streets, parks with flowers and fountains, but also migrants from the provinces who lived on the outskirts of old Tehran.

Keramat recollects that the people of the city made him sick: “The explicit manhood of these people, under the pressure of mimicking the effeminate gestures of women, expensive perfumes and powders, European jewelry and foods and steaks that you could only eat with knives and forks, short skirts and tight pants, universities and bookstores, and in short, the Tehranis’ offensive mimicry, was moving in the direction of femininity.”[52] He adds that “the sense of honor in the Tehrani men had hit bottom,” and that “Tehran had become a center for odd things, the center for strange behavior.”[53] Given his confused state of mind, it would be farfetched to categorize Keramat’s recollections of Tehran in the past as nostalgic, since he now believes that the revolution that transformed the city was a good thing, and that it occurred because the poor migrants from the provinces still had a sense of honor that the effeminate Tehrani men lacked.

In contrast to the novels of Parsipur and Cheheltan, genuine nostalgia characterizes Goli Taraqqi’s autobiographical stories in Khaterehha-ye Parakandeh (Scattered Memories).[54] In the first story in the collection, “Otobus-e Shemiran” (“The Shemiran Bus”), we find the narrator and her little daughter waiting on a snowy day in Paris for a bus to go to school. The snow reminds the narrator of the Tehran of her own childhood. She recalls:

I am put in mind of Tehran in winter, dominated by the tall, snow-clad Alborz peak underneath the turquoise-blue skies, the bare, sleeping trees in the far end of our garden, dreaming of the return of migrating birds.

In my childhood, snowy days had no end [. . .] Saturday, Sunday, Monday. I counted the days [. . .] Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and the snow continued to fall. Ten centimeters, twenty centimeters, half a meter, to the point that snow would block doors and the school would close for a whole week.[55]

And then, “What a joy!” she adds. But her expression of joy now as an adult is not merely because school was closed; it is incited by her memories of old Tehran—north Tehran.

In another story, “Khaneh-ye Madar Bozorg” (“Grandma’s House”), one day when the narrator’s mother and other female relatives take her shopping in the city, despite the heavy traffic, crowded buses, and her mother and aunts being accosted with catcalls and pinched by hooligans on the streets, she writes:

Personally, I just love Istanbul Avenue. The odor of fish and the aroma of coffee and roasted nuts and seeds [and European perfumes and powders] blend in my nostrils, making me feel steeped in languor and drowsiness [and make my body flex in joy]. I imagine myself a grown-up woman and the object of desire of all men around me. I fantasize that I have an interminable supply of money, that I am able to buy all the fruit loops and cream puffs my heart desires, that I can go to see [the film] “Bathing Beauties” a hundred times.[56]

Unlike Taraqqi’s nostalgic remembrances of old Tehran, Ghazaleh Alizadeh’s 1999 novel, Shabha-ye Tehran (The Nights of Tehran), the time frame of which is also before the Islamic Revolution, in the 1960s and 1970s, is a sardonic look at the past.[57] Much of the story, which revolves around the lives of a group of young, educated, and idealistic characters from the upper classes, occurs in aristocratic parties and gatherings in north Tehran’s luxurious homes and gardens; but a significant portion of the novel is also devoted to detailed descriptions of the doom and gloom of south Tehran and its inhabitants.

With a large cast of characters, this six-hundred-page novel begins with the return of Behzad, a young man in his early twenties who has spent his childhood and school years in France studying painting, and his introduction to Tehran’s “high society” by his extremely wealthy, frail grandmother. Early in the novel, Behzad becomes acquainted with a retired colonel’s daughter and son, Nastaran and Farzin, and in turn, Farzin introduces him to his friends, whom he refers to as the “savages.” Rebellious and idealistic, the “savages” represent a generation of young Iranians who want to change the world, some with subversive political activism and others through their poetry or art.

For the first nearly three hundred pages of the novel, Tehran appears to consist of merely north Tehran, which is usually represented by the gatherings of the fashionably dressed members of high society in large aristocratic homes and lush gardens full of flowers and trees. Mentions of south Tehran in this part of the novel are usually in passing, without any detailed description. One such occasion occurs in a club which Behzad’s friends have opened and for which they have had a nineteenth-century Qajar-era house completely renovated and furnished. South Tehran is mentioned in a brief conversation between Behzad and Abolala, his impeccably dressed friend who is a Western-educated architect:

“The place turned out to be very attractive. We looked around a lot to find a house like this.”

Behzad slowly placed the ashtray on the mantelpiece. He got up and stood in front of the fire:

“I never thought houses like this still existed in Tehran. Every generation of our people destroys everything from the previous generation.”

“In the southern part of the city, yes, there are a lot of old houses. But in these neighborhoods, they keep demolishing them and replacing them with those donkey phalluses.”

Behzad laughed:

“Maybe this is precisely why Tehran is a faceless ugly city.”[58]

Although south Tehran is almost totally absent in the first half of Shabha-ye Tehran, it is represented vividly in the second. The novel contrasts the parlors and gardens of affluent north Tehran with the squalor and poverty in the streets, alleyways, and flophouses of south Tehran. It also juxtaposes the genteel behavior and dialogue in the first part of the novel, about art and other “sophisticated” topics, with the rudeness and vulgar language in some episodes of the second part. This contrast and juxtaposition present an ambivalent picture of Tehran as a megalopolis that, like many other such cities throughout the world, is moving in opposite directions: north Tehran, toward a modern society with all the amenities that the twentieth century offers, and south Tehran, toward death and destruction. To fully introduce south Tehran to the reader, Alizadeh refocuses her narrative on the subversive, underground political activities of several members of the “savages,” including Farzin, who has disavowed his parents’ social class and claims that he has become a member of the working class by choice.[59] His disappearance triggers a search for him in south Tehran by his sister, Nastaran, with the help of an older member of the “savages,” Akbar Shirzad, one of the strangest characters in the novel and a self-proclaimed social philosopher. The cultural difference between north and south Tehran requires Nastaran to cover herself in a chador. After a long drive in the crowded section of the city that links the two parts of Tehran, they find themselves in an alleyway in one of the south Tehran neighborhoods: “A gutter passed through the alleyway that emitted a foul stench. Rotten leaves, empty cans, and broken glass moved through it noisily in the slimy black water. The brick walls were high, occasionally a cluster of ivy hanging from the edge. The scent of black locust and jasmine mingled with the odor of hot oil, boiled meat, and green vegetable stew. Children were playing, chasing one another, their heads shaved, grubby pacifiers hanging from their necks.”[60]

In search of Farzin, they visit several flophouses, mostly occupied by the homeless or people from the provinces. Nastaran becomes nauseous and vomits in one of them from the stench and filth, and in another

they entered a long dark hallway. The door to the room was open, and in it disheveled people with greasy dark faces were lying down or sitting in a row on metal beds. Old dying men with drifting, glassy unfocused eyes as narrow as those of roosters, mouths half open, black and toothless, large heads covered with soft white fuzz resembling newly-hatched chicks, the smell of sweat, dampness, and ammonia wafting in the hallway. They entered the room. Akbar looked at the beds and tattered clothes scattered around the brick floor. The air was unbreathable.[61]

Shabha-ye Tehran, with its gloomy themes, is the story of a lost generation, but it is also the story of Tehran; hence, the title can be a metaphor for Tehran in the years referred to as the “Age of Night,” the years that led to the events of the ensuing decade.[62]

Nostalgia for and yearning to return to Tehran, where he has lived almost all his life, is what Bahman Esfandiyar feels, as a seventy-year-old former general in the shah’s army who had fled Iran following a brief period of incarceration by the new regime, shortly after the Islamic Revolution. Ja’far Modarres-Sadeqi’s novel Ab-o Khak (Homeland) begins with the general’s return to Tehran at Mehrabad Airport, where he intends to go down on his knees to kiss the ground of his native city.[63] His plan, however, fails, because he is hastened along with the crowd of other passengers onto a bus and on to the terminal by the Revolutionary Guards for passport and security inspections. He has left behind his wife and children, who are now grown-up and married, in Irvine, California, hoping to spend the rest of his days in Tehran. He expects to be met at the airport by the wife and two daughters of his former boss and long-time friend, another general, who was executed after the revolution. This plan also fails, however, as the authorities confiscate his passport. A week later, having gone several times to an address that was given to him to retrieve his passport, he is told repeatedly that he needs to return the following day or the next week. He is frustrated: “Going after his passport was one of the things he had to do, twice a week; and in addition to going after his passport, he had to go to many places. Finding each of these in a city so crowded, after all these years of not having been in this city, and all these new names and two-way streets that had been made into one-way streets, was not an easy task.”[64]

Eventually, however, despite the fact that he can hardly recognize Tehran any more, he attempts to become accustomed to the city and its new ways. At the same time, an old love affair with his former friend’s wife, Minu, is rekindled, which becomes even more of an incentive for him to stay. However, after months of trying to cope, and following an unpleasant encounter with the security officials, his frustration intensifies. Tehran, the city every “alley and back alley of which he knew so well,” has totally changed. It is no longer the hometown he yearned for a few months earlier:

The streets had no sidewalks. At one time, all the streets of Tehran were two-way streets. At one time, all the streets of Tehran had sidewalks, and all these noisy, annoying motorcycles didn’t weave in and out between the cars. He did not wish to live in a city so stinky, so crowded, so ugly, and so filthy! A city full of cars and motorcycles honking their horns all at once, and those in the cars and the pedestrians constantly yelling at each other and fighting. The shouting of the traffic officer from the loudspeaker of the police car was louder than the other noises, and he would yell at the drivers and even curse offensively. The sidewalks were full of spit. Everyone spat wherever he wanted and no one cared. He saw some people blowing their noses and wiping their snotty hands on the trees by the sidewalk, on the wall, or on the backs of their own pants. All this insistence on spitting seemed strange to him; it was a new custom. He could not remember whether the Iranian people twenty-some years ago were so excessively fond of spitting, or not.[65]

Moniru Ravanipur’s “Tehran” is also a nostalgic story, but with a twist.[66] The narrator is a woman who, in her younger days during the Islamic Revolution, was a political activist and who has now returned to Tehran. The story opens with her wondering: “Is this the same avenue once called Mossadegh? And what are these department stores, with such elaborately designed windows and red-carpeted floors[?] Are they the same shops you used to run past like a flash of light in early dawn, with [a] stack of leaflets under your arms, to slip them under their doors?”[67] She visits a few of these luxury stores, one of which is so exclusive that she has to ring the bell to be let in, and then she wonders: “No, this kind of luxury store was not here in those days. How long ago were “those days” anyway? When did these stores and these tower-like, high-rise buildings appear in this place, you wonder. And this small park? It was not here in those days, or was it?”[68]

Walking toward the park to rest on a bench near the playground, where children are frolicking, she comments on her legs being unable to easily carry her fifty-year-old, “barrel-like” figure, when she is intercepted by a shabbily dressed young man who appears to be complimenting her on her figure or dress. When she smiles in return, a young, attractive woman sitting on another bench warns her that the man is a member of a gang of purse snatchers and that she should take out her cell phone and pretend to dial the police. After a friendly chat with the young woman, the narrator walks to a nearby store to buy a couple of sodas for them. When she returns with the sodas, the woman has vanished, and so have the contents of the narrator’s purse, including her cell phone, wallet, and ID. The story ends with, “You have been robbed.”[69]

In contrast to the Tehran portrayed in Ab-o Khak, whose protagonist’s dreams of returning to and living in “his own” city are shattered by the crowded streets packed with cars and motorcycles, sidewalks full of spit, and mistreatment at the hands of officials, the picture of Tehran presented by Ravanipur’s narrator reveals a more tranquil city: one with luxury stores, high-rises, and quiet parks—in other words, a modern city associated in the reader’s mind with a place perhaps somewhere in Europe. However, this portrayal of Tehran is even more negative, since it shows a city concealing the hands that rob those extended in friendship.

The wish or prediction of the poetic persona of Esma’il Kho’i’s poem cited at the beginning of this article was seemingly about to be fulfilled a decade later with the Islamic Revolution, which was hailed by its leaders and supporters as the “revolution of the downtrodden.” Like the “rain” in Kho’i’s poem, this revolution was supposed to eliminate the inequality and injustice that separated the “famished people” of south Tehran, who dwelled in the “valleys,” from the affluent in north Tehran, at the “peak.” Prior to this revolution, those in “modernized” or “Westernized” north Tehran were viewed as being in control of the capital city as well as the rest of the country, and they bore the blame for the poverty and misery of underdeveloped south Tehran.

As Tehran has undergone many social and political changes in the course of more than a century, its portrayal in Persian fiction has also changed. Although the overall picture of the city in these tales changes in some respects, in others it remains the same. While issues such as prostitution and moral corruption in the capital city seem to be a main concern in the works of pre–World War II writers such as Moshfeq-Kazemi, Dashti, Hejazi, and Mas’ud, post–World War II writers such as Chubak, Al-e Ahmad, Golestan, Ebrahimi, Rahbar, and Sa’edi focus their attention on the downtrodden represented by south Tehran; in general, their portrayal of such characters is a sympathetic one. In post–Islamic Revolution fiction, while the work of a writer such as Taraqqi reflects a nostalgic look back at the city of her childhood, stories by writers such as Parsipur, Cheheltan, and Alizadeh, with their retrospective look at Tehran, mainly deal with individuals and their efforts to cope with life in the megacity. On the other hand, Tehran as it appears in the works of other writers such as Amirshahi, Modarres-Sadeqi, and Ravanipur continues to be a city in which the gap between south and north has widened or become more evident, not only in social and economic terms, but also culturally. This gap can be seen in several stories in Goli Taraqqi’s Khaterehha-ye Parakandeh; but the gap is even more visible in Mahshid Amirshahi’s Dar Hazar, in which the narrator offers the readers a far more negative picture of Tehran, one in which the south has finally overtaken the north:

Beggars and stray dogs, and Arabs in headscarves and head ropes, and men who are carrying bloody carcasses of sheep or calves on their shoulders and necks are permanent spectacles on all streets. While I am waiting on Abbasabad Street for a taxi, I see each one of the four groups marching in front of me.

The Arabs pass followed by stray dogs, but the beggars stick to you like ticks and only go away to grab another passerby or someone else waiting when you shout at them and threaten them. The goods that they all initially offer you in exchange for alms consist of a series of prayers mournfully chanted for your living and dead relatives. Some of them, in addition to these goods, display a sick child or a deformed arm or leg to increase the amount of your charitable donation. When they lose hope of receiving any money, once again, they get your living and dead relatives involved—this time with sarcasm, insults, and cursing that completely erases the effect of the prayers. These days, you cannot pray for anyone free of charge.

When an orange taxi stops in front of me, I try to free my sleeve from the obstinate claws of a dark-complexioned woman who has tattoos between her eyebrows and on her chin. The woman starts cursing me, and I say to the driver, “Shah Reza Street.”[70]

To the narrator of Amirshahi’s novel, Tehran is a city in which the “rain” has leveled the “peaks” and “valleys,” a city that is now, in her view, under the control of the former inhabitants of south Tehran.

[1]This article is a shortened version of a chapter in my forthcoming book, Iranian Cities in Persian Fiction, to be published by Mazda Publishers in 2021.

[2]Esma’il Kho’i, “Shomal Niz,” Gozineh-ye She’rha-ye Esma’il Kho’i (Tehran: Sepehr, 1978–79), 78–84. All translations from Persian are mine unless otherwise noted. The poem was originally rendered into English for a discussion of the poem in a different context in M.R. Ghanoonparvar, Prophets of Doom: Literature as a Socio-Political Phenomenon in Modern Iran (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1984), 52–56.

[3]Kho’i, “Shomal Niz,” 81–82.

[4]Kho’i, “Shomal Niz,” 84.

[5]Zeynolabedin Maragheh’i, Siyahatnameh-ye Ebrahim Beyg, 3rd ed. 1895. (Tehran: Andisheh, 1975).

[6]Zayn ol-Abedin Maraghe’i, The Travel Diary of Ebrahim Beg, trans. James D. Clark (Costa Mesa, CA: Mazda Publishers, 2006), 139–40.

[7]Maraghe’i, Travel Diary, 140.

[8]For a discussion of this novel, see Hasan Abedini, Sad Sal Dastannevisi, vol. 1, 2^nd ed. (Tehran: Tandar, 1989), 36–38.

[9]All these novels are discussed in detail in Hassan Kamshad’s Modern Persian Prose Literature (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1966), in which he devotes over ten pages to a discussion of Hejazi’s work.

[10]For a detailed sociological discussion of Ziba, see Jamshid Mesbahipur-Iraniyan, Vaqe’iyyat-e Ejtema’i va Jahan-e Dastan (Tehran: Entesharat-e Amir Kabir, 1979), 60–74.

[11]Such criticism even appeared in satirical form in Sadeq Chubak’s 1966 novel, Sang-e Sabur. For a translation of this novel, see Sadeq Chubak, The Patient Stone, trans. M.R. Ghanoonparvar (Costa Mesa, CA: Mazda Publishers, 1989).

[12]Sadeq Hedayat, Buf-e Kur, 13th ed. (Tehran: Entesharat-e Amir Kabir), 1973.

[13]For an enlightening view of Hedayat’s use of Ray in The Blind Owl, see Elton Daniel, “History as a Theme of The Blind Owl,” in Hedayat’s ‘The Blind Owl’ Forty Years After, ed. Michael C. Hillmann (Austin, TX: Center for Middle Eastern Studies, 1978), 76–86.

[14]Sadeq Hedayat, The Blind Owl, trans. D.P. Costello (New York: Evergreen, 1969), 51.

[15]Although written in 1947, Tup-e Morvari was not published in Iran until 1979, and then, under the pseudonym Hadi Sedaqat; it was banned soon after. It was later published in the United States under Sadeq Hedayat’s own name as Tup-e Morvari, ed. Iraj Bashiri (Lexington, KY: Mazda Publishers, 1986).

[16]Hedayat, Tup-e Morvari, 16.

[17]Iraj Bashiri, The Fiction of Sadeq Hedayat (Lexington, KY: Mazda Publishers, 1984), 154.

[18]Sadeq Chubak, Kheymehshabbazi, 4^th ed. (Tehran: Javidan, 1972).

[19]This story has been translated by John Limbert in Iranian Studies 1 (Summer 1968): 115–19.

[20]Sadeq Chubak, “Asb-e Chubi,” in Cheragh-e Akhar (Tehran: Javidan, 1966), 111–31.

[21]Sadeq Chubak, “The Wooden Horse,” in Stories from Iran: A Chicago Anthology, 1921–1991, ed. Heshmat Moayyad, trans. John Perry (Washington, DC: Mage Publishers, 1991), 101–10. Quote on p. 108.

[22]Jalal Al-e Ahmad, Did-o Bazdid (Tehran: Entesharat-e Amir Kabir, 1978).

[23]Jalal Al-e Ahmad, “Goldan-e Chini,” in Did-o Bazdid (Tehran: Entesharat-e Amir Kabir, 1978), 71–78. Quote on p. 72.

[24]Al-e Ahmad, “Goldan-e Chini,” 76.

[25]Ebrahim Golestan, “Zohr-e Garm-e Tir,” in Shekar-e Sayeh (Tehran: Rowzan, 1965), 34–44.

[26]Golestan, “Zohr-e,” 41.

[27]Golestan, “Zohr-e,” 42.

[28]Ebrahim Golestan, Asrar-e Ganj-e Darreh-ye Jenni (Tehran: Entesharat-e Agah, 1974).

[29]Nader Ebrahimi, “Bad, Bad-e Mehregan,” in Hezarpa-ye Siyah va Qessehha-ye Sahra (Tehran: Iran Ketab, 1975), 7–50.

[30]Nader Ebrahimi, “The Wind of Mehregan,” trans. M.R. Ghanoonparvar and Diane L. Wilcox, Literature East and West 20 (1976): 218–39. Quote on p. 219.

[31]Ebrahimi, “Wind of Mehregan,” 221.

[32]Ebrahim Rahbar, Man dar Tehranam (Tehran: Amir Kabir Publishers, 1977).

[33]Ebrahim Rahbar, “Man dar Tehranam,” in Man dar Tehranam (Tehran: Amir Kabir Publishers, 1977), 27–35. Quote on p. 32.

[34]Ebrahim Rahbar, “Eshqha,” in Man dar Tehranam (Tehran: Amir Kabir Publishers, 1977), 93–102. Quote on p. 95.

[35]Rahbar, “Eshqha,” 97.

[36]These stories were published in Sar-e Bibi Khanom (Tehran: Chapkhaneh-ye Taban, 1968); Ba’d az Ruz-e Akher (Tehran: Entesharat-e Amir Kabir, 1969); and Beh Sigheh-ye Avval Shakhs-e Mofrad (Tehran: Entesharat-e Buf, 1971).

[37]In English, all the “Suri stories” were compiled and published in one volume entitled Suri & Co.: Tales of a Persian Teenager, trans. J.E. Knörzer (Austin, TX: Center for Middle Eastern Studies, 1995). The story under discussion is “Paikan Place,” 78–87, quote on p. 79.

[38]Amirshahi, “Paikan Place,” 86.

[39]Gholamhoseyn Sa’edi, “Ashghalduni,” in Gur-o Gahvareh (Tehran: Entesharat-e Agah, 1977), 93–200.

[40]This story has been translated as “The Rubbish Heap,” in Gholam-Hossein Sa’edi, Dandil: Stories from Iranian Life, trans. Robert Campbell, Hasan Javadi, and Julie Scott Meisami (New York:  Random House, 1981), 160–239. The quotations are taken from this translation, 191–92.

[41]Sa’edi, “Rubbish Heap,” 235.

[42]Mahshid Amirshahi, Dar Hazar (London: Cushing-Malloy, 1987), 1.

[43]Amirshahi, Dar Hazar, 28.

[44]Amirshahi, Dar Hazar, 344.

[45]Amirshahi, Dar Hazar, 426–27.

[46]Shahrnush Parsipur, Tuba va Ma’na-ye Shab (Tehran: Esperak, 1989); Zanan bedun-e Mardan (Tehran: Noqreh, 1989); and Aql-e Abi (San Jose, CA: Zamaneh Publishers, 1994). The last novel was originally typeset in Tehran, but its publication was prevented. Aql-e Abi has been translated by M.R. Ghanoonparvar as Blue Logos (Costa Mesa, CA: Mazda Publishers, 2020).

[47]Tuba va Ma’na-ye Shab was translated into English as Tuba and the Meaning of Night by Havva Houshmand and Kamran Talattof (New York: The Feminist Press, 2006).

[48]Two English translations of Zanan bedun-e Mardan as Women without Men have been published: one by Kamran Talattof and Jocelyn Sharlet (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1998) and another by Faridoun Farrokh (New York: The Feminist Press, 2013).

[49]Visual artist Shirin Neshat directed the 2009 film adaptation of this novel.

[50]Amir Hasan Cheheltan, Tehran, Shahr-e bi Aseman (Tehran: Entesharat-e Negah, 2001).

[51]“Sha’ban Bimokh” was the street name of Sha’ban Ja’fari. Regarding these events and the involvement of Sha’ban Bimokh in them, see Homa Sarshar, Sha’ban Ja’fari (Beverly Hills, CA: NAAB Publishers, 2002).

[52]Quoted in Anahid Ojakiyans, “[Naqd-e] Tehran, Shahr-e bi Aseman,” Nameh-ye Farhangestan, no. 6 (Summer 2005): 164–72.

[53]Ojakiyans, “Tehran, Shahr-e bi Aseman,” 170.

[54]Goli Taraqqi, Khaterehha-ye Parakandeh (Tehran: Entesharat-e Bagh-e Ayeneh, 1994).

[55]Goli Taraqqi, “The Shemiran Bus,” in A Mansion in the Sky: Short Stories by Goli Taraghi, trans. Faridoun Farrokh (Austin, TX: Center for Middle Eastern Studies, 2003), 9–22. Quote on p. 9.

[56]Goli Taraqqi, “Grandma’s House,” in A Mansion in the Sky: Short Stories by Goli Taraghi, trans. Faridoun Farrokh (Austin, TX: Center for Middle Eastern Studies, 2003), 39–58. Quote on p. 49.

[57]Ghazaleh Alizadeh, Shabha-ye Tehran (Tehran: Entesharat-e Tus, 1999). An English translation of this novel by M.R. Ghanoonparvar will be available through Mazda Publishers in 2020.

[58]Alizadeh, Shabha-ye Tehran, 80.

[59]Alizadeh, Shabha-ye Tehran, 398.

[60]Alizadeh, Shabha-ye Tehran, 453.

[61]Alizadeh, Shabha-ye Tehran, 460.

[62]See Reza Baraheni, “Qessehnevisi dar Asr-e Shab,” in Qessehnevisi (Tehran: Ashrafi, 1969–70), 75–132.

[63]Ja’far Modarres-Sadeqi, Ab-o Khak (Tehran: Nashr-e Markaz, 2005).

[64]Modarres-Sadeqi, Ab-o Khak, 53.

[65]Modarres-Sadeqi, Ab-o Khak, 150.

[66]Moniru Ravanipur, “Tehran 2006,” Zanan 136 (AH 1385/AD 2006): 76–79.

[67]Moniru Ravanipur, “Tehran,” in The Shipwrecked: Contemporary Stories by Women from Iran, ed. Fereshteh Nouraie-Simone, trans. Faridoun Farrokh (New York: The Feminist Press, 2014), 195–205. Quote on p. 195.

[68]Ravanipur, “Tehran,” 198.

[69]Ravanipur, “Tehran,” 204.

[70]Amirshahi, Dar Hazar, 306.

A whole history remains to be written of spaces – which would at the same time be the history of powers… from the great strategies of geopolitics to the little tactics of the habitat. -Michel Foucault[1]

In “Of Other Spaces: Heterotopias”, one of Michel Foucault’s later works, he argued for the importance of the spatiality of social life: the place in which the actually lived and socially produced sites and the relations between them are negotiated.[2] Foucault offered great insight into how we can interpret and produce knowledge based on human geographies, or as Edward Soja has noted, “how to see the ‘other spaces’ hidden in the more obvious and diverting multiplicity of real-world sights and situations.”[3] This paper takes the Gulistan harem (andarūn) and its surrounding areas as a complex set of spaces, whose architectural and material configuration structured the gendered, domestic, and social lives of its inhabitants in a myriad of complementary and contradictory ways. Focusing on the spatial dimensions, as well as human geography of Nasser al-Din Shah’s harem, and its location at the heart of late-19^th century Tehran, the paper will examine the historical development and expanding physical structure of Gulistan, and the intricate relationship between urban space, architecture, and practices of inhabitation that informed it.

I hope to disrupt the monolithic and narrow interpretations of Middle Eastern harems as deeply private spheres of forced and uncontested gender segregation, and instead, examine the ways in which the Gulistan harem along with the multiplicity of its residents, resisted the dichotomy between private/public domains – a modernist European dichotomy which has often been imposed onto this institution in its historiography, and instead forged unique communal practices of co-habitation (Figure 1).

Fig. 1. Group of harem women and servant. Gulistan Palace Visual Document Center, Tehran, Iran. (210-6-1)

Furthermore, the Gulistan harem was not only a space of domesticity, and distinctive familial formation, but also, a place where various kinds of social contact and collective cultural practices were realized alongside equally significant geopolitical and diplomatic affairs, as well as various registers of engagement with Persian modernity.

This paper begins with looking at the historical evolution and expanding physical structure of the Gulistan Palace, and situates it in the simultaneous history of the emergence of Tehran as an urban metropolis. I then move on to explore the physical and material organization of the Gulistan harem, and the ways in which it was controlled, lived in, and subverted. The final section interrogates the question of what constituted private, interior, and domestic spaces respectively, when speaking of the royal Qajar harem – a space composed of multiple homes, within a larger palace, which was the administrative center of Qajar rule.

The Simultaneous Development of Tehran and Gulistan Palace:

The Gulistan Palace, like Tehran, the city which houses it, was built over the course of three centuries beginning in the 16^th century, and continuing into the early 20^th century. During this period, the palace went through a number of renovations, expanding to cover a huge area of land within the urban core of Tehran by the second half of 19^th century, and later, in the 20^th century under the Pahlavis, contracting to a smaller complex.[4] The historical formation and evolution of the palace was from the beginning intricately connected to the development of the urban metropolis that it was located within. Most notably, under Nasir al-Dīn’s reign, the Gulistan harem, placed within the larger boundaries of the royal citadel (arg), grew both physically and in terms of the number of its residents to its largest scale as compared to the harem of his predecessors. When Nasser al-Din Shah began his reign in 1848, Gulistan was a much smaller, though still remarkable court, mostly built by his grandfather Fatḥ-ʿAlī Shah, who reigned between 1797-1834, and who developed Tehran into the true capital of Qajar rule.

While the establishment of both Tehran and Gulistan date back to the Safavid dynasty, the expansion of the arg and the growth of city into one of the largest urban metropolis in the region, both took proper form during the Qajar dynasty. Under the Safavids, Tehran emerged as a modest fortified town with four gates. Tehran’s importance to the Safavids was mainly due to its location on the route from Esfehan, the Safavid capital, to Mashhad, the site of the shrine of the eighth imam, which is a significant destination for Shi‘a people. [5]  Later, during the brief Zand period, Karim Khan further developed the town through building a palace and the government headquarters within the gates of the city, and promoted it to the status of a military base. It was not until 1786 that Tehran was established as a capital city by Agha Muhammad, the first Qajar ruler who went on to dispose the last Zand ruler Luft-Ali Khan, and claimed the throne in 1796. Agha Muhammad, the founder of the Qajar dynasty, began the establishment of full-scale royal court in Tehran upon claiming the throne, and in order to legitimate and expand the newly found capital city. He was responsible for setting up much of the initial infrastructure for what later became the elaborate Gulistan royal court (Figure 2).[6]

Fig. 2. Oldest Map of Tehran by Russian military officer Naskov, 1826. The square on the top left- hand corner depicts the borders of the developing Gulistan Palace. Source: http://shahrefarang.com.

The full realization of Gulistan into a grand palace, however, was accomplished only after Agha Muhammad’s death and during the thirty-five-year reign of Fatḥ-ʿAlī Shah (1797-1834).  Fatḥ-ʿAlī Shah was notorious for having one of the largest harems in Iranian history, with the number of wives estimated to reach over one thousand.[7]  Unlike his uncle, Fatḥ-ʿAlī Shah embraced a taste for luxury, reflected not only in the large number of wives and concubines in his harem, but also his love of extravagant ceremonies, which were a primary engine for the development of Gulistan Palace, beginning in 1806, less than a decade into his reign. This expansion phase included both the completion of structures which had been started by his uncle, and the initiation of new building projects, as well as the addition of large gardens, new barracks, and an extensive harem (andarūn) area to the north of the palace, which served as the residential quarter of the shah and his many wives. The most significant buildings constructed under his rule include the crystal building (imārat-i bulūr) on the north side of the court, the diamond hall (tālār-i almās) on the south, the wind tower (imārat-i bādgīr) as well as the marble throne (takht-i marmar) which was placed on the porch (tālār) of the iconic audience chamber (divān khānah), which remains to this day. The architecture of Gulistan during this period incorporated many traditional Persian design elements as a means of legitimizing Qajar rule over Persian territory. Jennifer Scarce, in her study of the architectural details of the some of the buildings inside the arg from this period, notes:

The plan and decoration of the dīvankhaneh and the marble throne is a direct visual reference to Fath ‘Ali Shah’s royal status. The plan of a spacious open reception hall supported on columns stresses both the antiquity and continuity of Iranian monarchy as it is found in pre-Islamic Achaemenid and Sasanid architecture as well as in palaces of Safavid Isfahan and Zand Shiraz.[8]

Within Iranian historiography, Fatḥ-ʿAlī Shah is considered the ruler who not only built the great arg which housed Gulistan Palace, but also developed Tehran as an urban center, and made it the core Qajar rule.[9] Most notably, during his reign, the bazaar, located to the south of the arg, was greatly expanded and the central square adjacent to arg, which connected the court to the bazaar, also witnessed considerable development.[10]

Perhaps the most significant addition was the building of the Masjid Soltanī – the first large-scale and substantial architectural structure, as well as public building, outside of the arg. Built between 1808 and 1813, it was the largest and most important mosque built under Fatḥ-ʿAlī Shah’s reign, and was located near the northern entrance of the bazaar (Figure 3).

Fig. 3. Illustration of Masjid Soltanī by French Orientalist painter Eugène Flandin made during his travels to Persia between 1839-1841.  Eugène Flandin, Voyage en Perse, avec Flandin, éd. Gide et Baudry, 1851, Vol. 2.

This showcasing of the royal family’s close relationship to both the merchant class and the ulama, through physical and structural proximity, were simultaneous endeavors undertaken and accomplished during Fatḥ-ʿAlī Shah’s thirty-seven year reign.[11] As Ali Madanipour explains in his historiography of the development of Tehran, the structure of the city from the beginning had “a clear functional organization: a political authority (royal compound), an economic center (bazaar), a religious focus (Friday Mosque), and the living places of the towns people.”[12]

While Gulistan was developed to serve as the administrative center of the state and an assertion of its political authority, it was simultaneously the place of residence of the royal family and their large entourage, as well as the site of multiple forms of ceremonial gatherings and royal patronage (through the employment of various artists, craftsmen, tile workers, performers, servants and so on). While the walls and gates built around the citadel protected the court from outside intruders, the extensive structures on the inside of the court served as a gathering place for large audiences hosted by the royal family. In this sense, as I will discuss later, from the beginning, the boundaries between deeply private and hidden, and proudly public and social were constantly negotiated both inside and outside the arg, as well as its andarūn. This multi-functional dimension of Gulistan Palace, and the various political, social, cultural and familial affairs which took place within its boundaries, continued to define the development of the physical geography of the space in its various manifestations throughout the Qajar period.

However, despite the large scale development projects and new infrastructure that were set up in the city during the nearly four decades of Fatḥ-ʿAlī Shah’s rule, Tehran’s shape and size, number of gates, and border-defining walls remained essentially the same as when they had been built three centuries earlier.[13] During his short reign (1834-1848), Fatḥ-ʿAlī Shah’s successor, Muhhamad Shah’s modest contribution to urban development mostly focused on improving the Royal Square (miydan-i shāh) which connected the bazar and the arg. He also added large gardens to the interior of both the eastern and western quarters inside the arg.[14] It was, however, not until Nasser al-Din Shah’s reign that Tehran truly transformed into a 19^th century cosmopolitan metropole, incorporating local, regional and Western ideas and aesthetics into a cityscape that was increasingly a destination point for both regional and international stake holders.

Nasser al-Din Shah officially took the throne in October of 1848, appearing on the takht-i marmar in the tālār of the divān khānah built by his grandfather inside Gulistan Palace (Figure 4).[15]

Fig. 4. Illustration of divān khānah and marble throne by French Orientalist painter Eugène Flandin made during his travels to Persia between 1839-1841.  Eugène Flandin, Voyage en Perse, avec Flandin, éd. Gide et Baudry, 1851, Vol 2.

He continued the tradition of using the divān khānah for court ceremonies, receptions and festivities, though the number of such events, as well as the size of their audience increased steadily throughout his reign, as did the number of his wives and their entourage, leading to a number of different and significant phases of expansion of the Gulistan Palace.

The first phase of urban development under Nasser al-Din Shah began soon after he took the throne.  Amīr Kabīr Mīrzā Taghī Khān (1807-52), the shah’s reformist chief minister, during his short-lived three years appointment (1848-1851), made significant improvements to the urban infrastructure of Tehran. This included further expansion of the bazaar, the building of water canals throughout the city, and perhaps most significantly, in 1851, the construction of the dār al-­fanūn, the first modern education institution in Tehran located on the most north-east corner of the arg, just above the harem (Figure 5).

Fig. 5. dār al-­fanūn University, Tehran.

The building of the school marked a new era of development in the core zone of the city with Gulistan Palace at its epicenter. The school was primarily aimed at teaching modern sciences and its inauguration was the engine for bringing in a host of international scholars over the next few decades. In fact, much of Iranian historiography argues that dār al-­fanūn was the primary engine for modernization project in Iran. And yet, it is interesting to note that virtually no scholarship on either Gulistan or dār al-­fanūn has made note of the proximity between this focal point of modernization, and the royal Qajar harem, which was literally steps away to its south.

During this same period, directly to the south of the Gulistan Palace, and outside the main entrance of the arg, a bustling public square was expanded and renamed sabzi maydān. The square became a crucial nodal point connecting the palace to the developing metropolis (Figure 6).[16]

Fig. 6. Ilya Nikolaevich Berezin, Map of Tehran, 1952. Gulistan Palace Visual Document Center, Tehran, Iran.

Concurrently, a substantial rebuilding and revitalization of the bazar quarter began and continued for over a decade, and in 1862, a major renovation project replaced the old bazaar structures with new modern buildings.[17]

A second phase of development began in 1867 and included the destruction of the old mud brick walls which made up the city border, and the enclosure of a much larger area with a wall designed by the French polytechnic engineer and teacher at dār al-­fanūn, General Alexandre Buhler.[18] Tehran expanded to four times its original size, as the area of the city grew from 3 square miles to 7.5 square miles, and the length of the border wall surrounding the city increased from 4 to 11 miles (Figures 7-9).[19]

Fig. 7. Map of Tehran prepared by dār al-­fanūn students in 1859 under supervision of Aligholi Mirza Etezadossaltaneh and technical guidance of Monsieur Kershish. Gulistan Palace Visual Document Center, Tehran, Iran.

Fig. 8. Map of Tehran in 1857, http://en.tehran.ir.

Fig. 9. Map of Tehran in 1890, http://en.tehran.ir.

This newly expanded octagonal shaped city parameter included significantly more space to the north, which was developed into an affluent residential area, and a total of twelve elaborately decorated gates.[20]

Much like other major cities in the Middle East, the development of Tehran during this period coincided with accelerated global flows, which included increase contact with both regional neighbors and Europe. Many have read this period as the birth of modernization in Iran, arguing that modernity came through contact with Europe, and meant the application and adaptation of Western civilization to a traditional Persian Islamic culture.[21] This is of course in line with how many European orientalists encountered Tehran in the second half of 19^th century. British member of Parliament, George Curzon, for example, during his 1889-1890 trip to Tehran, describes Tehran as a new and modern city. Yet for him, the city has certain deficiencies rooted in its Eastern elements. He states:

At every turn we meet in juxtaposition, sometimes in audacious harmony, at others in comical contrast, the influence and features of the East and the West… European Tehran has certainly become, or is becoming; but yet, if the distinction can be made intelligible, it is being Europeanized upon Asiatic lines. No one could mistake it for anything but an Eastern capital.”[22]

This reading of Tehran takes it as a deficient emulation of a West model, with the inferiority squarely placed on the “Asiatic” elements of the city.

In the historiography of both Tehran and Gulistan, the 1867 International Exhibition, which took place in Paris, has been read as amongst the most important vehicle for the intensification of European influenced urban development throughout the Middle East. Persian officials, along with representatives from other regional centers like Cairo and Istanbul, visited the exhibition and were profoundly moved by what they encountered. In particular, the Ottoman section of the exhibition featured a blended style of traditional Islamic and Western design motifs, and became a major inspiration for emerging architectural trends in the region. It is important to note however that the trend was in fact based in part on the European rediscovery of the medieval Spanish Islamic style of Alhambra, and thus showcased the transnational and reciprocal flow of design influences between the regions, which also predated the era of modernity.[23] It is precisely this reciprocal nature of global flows and influences that Eurocentric and orientalist depictions of modernization in the region fail to account for.

The 1867 exhibition’s impact on municipal improvement plans in Tehran was also only one of several factors that influenced the ambitious expansion plan that were carried out in the city in the second half of the 19^th century.[24] Other circumstances that contributed to the major development projects undertaken during this period were the accelerated rate of population growth and a catastrophic flood in May of 1867 which caused a great deal of damage in the north of the city and required a major rebuilding effort.[25] As such, European influence was one amongst the many factors that contributed to the intensified expansion and development of the city that took shape during his period.

The Gulistan Palace also went through a series of simultaneous and elaborate transformations. During his time as Prime Minister, Amīr Kabīr had ordered the purchasing of a major area of land to the east of the palace – though the development and incorporation of this land into Gulistan only took place later, after his death.[26] From 1867 to 1892, the arg, located now in the central part of the newly expanded city borders, grew to cover an enormous area of land, surrounded by its own new high walls and secured gates which closed it off from its surrounding exterior. Inside Gulistan, the first phase of expansion concentrated on building a large scale residential building, named Shams al-‘imārat , in the east side of the arg.

Designed by Dust ‘Ali Khan Nizam al-Dawla, and completed in 1868, the five-story building, the tallest of its kind in Tehran at the time, looked over the city and served as the royal family’s residence. The building was the first recreational tower in Tehran, as well as the first royal building which was clearly exposed to the outside public through its height (Figure 10).[27]

Fig. 10. Shams al-‘imārah. Gulistan Palace Visual Document Center, Tehran, Iran. (209-4).

Shams al-‘imārah was built with the intention of giving its inhabitants a unique view of the ever-developing city, while maintaining the royal family’s privacy. Significantly, the building also housed the first photo studio which was established by Nasser al-Din Shah in Iran.

European influence permeated the façade and architectural design of the building with features such as a large clock mounted on the central tower and a projected staircase that lead up to the multi-story building which was visible from outside of the arg.[28] At the same time, the interior architecture, which incorporated ceramic and tile-works with geometric Persian design and imagery, insured that residents were hidden from public view, thus maintaining Islamic tradition of andarūn privacy.[29] It is important to note that at the time, this was the most substantial building within the arg, and along with an expanded andarūn, located behind the divān khānah, it was the primary space in the arg occupied by the shah’s many wives and children.[30] This point highlights the significance of space occupied by women, familial life and domestic culture within the Qajar court. Shams al-‘imārah allowed its occupants to have a unique view from within the arg of the hustling urban center beyond its walls, while still remaining unseen. Significantly, it was also the first building to have direct access to the exterior with a gate which opened onto the bazaar. Combined, these features point to the ways in which residents within Gulistan Palace, including harem women, had multiple forms of access to the developing cosmopolitan life which was taking shape both inside and directly outside the arg, while still maintaining the Islamic principles of gender segregation.[31]

Another substantial building project during this period was the construction of Takkiya Dawlat to the south east of the palace – a permanent theatre erected between 1868-1873; the structure was built in the style of large amphitheaters, and could accommodate up to four thousand spectators (Figure 11).

Fig. 11. Takkiya Dawlat. Gulistan Palace Visual Document Center, Tehran, Iran (209-6).

Takkiya Dawlat was used primarily for the performance of ta’zīyi (passion plays) and ruzih khūnī (mourning rituals), and again, despite some European influence on its architectural shape, the building functioned to highlight the royal family’s strong link to Shia’ Islamic history, marking Gulistan as a public venue for the display of piety.[32] In her description of Takkiya Dawlat, where she was invited to attend a  ta’zīyi play, Lady Mary Sheil, wife of British Lieutenant Colonel Justin Sheil who served in Iran from 1844-1853, notes that the large audience of “several thousands” housed in the structure which “fulfilled all the purposes of a theatre”,  not only included the shah himself, his many ministers, wives and mother, as well as important foreign officials, but also “women of humble condition, who were great in numbers”.[33] She gives a detailed account of the collective mourning ritual that took place amongst this motely crew of audience members, highlighting women’s participation in public spectacles (Figure 12).

Fig. 12. Ta’zīyi play at Takkiya Dawlat, oil painting Kamāl-al-Molk. Gulistan Palace Museum, Tehran, Iran.

Both Shams al-‘imārat and Takkiya Dawlat are noteworthy structures within the arg because they present us with architectural examples that illuminate the intermingling of Islamic and European influences, and as I will argue in the second half of this paper, they also show the complex ways in which gender was negotiated both within the boundaries of arg, and beyond it through the spatial design, and the social and cultural practices which occupied them.

Gulistan harem’s physical proximity to the neighboring buildings and spaces both inside the arg, and outside in the ever-developing city of Tehran, cannot be underestimated. Far from being secluded, the residents of the Nasser al-Din’s harem were situated at the very heart of one of the largest metropoles in 19^th century Middle East. There are many examples of the relationship between harem and bazaar. For example, in his diaries, Muīr al-Mamlik, the shah’s grandson, makes reference to music played inside the harem announcing the different parts of the day for both court residents and those in the bazaar. He states:

At 2 in the afternoon, a drum roll would announce that it was time to start packing up the bazar and at 3pm, a different sound would announce the bazaar closure. There was a curfew at night, so dinner would be served early inside the harem so that cooks and servants who did not reside inside could leave before the curfew.[34]

These tangible connections between the bazar and the harem illustrates that physical proximity had clear material implications. It also functions to demystify the understanding of the Qajar harem as a deeply private and isolated interior space and shows its intrinsic connection to the busy commercial quarter it neighbored.

The final and most drastic development phase of Gulistan under Nasser al-Din Shah reign took place after his first visits to Europe in 1873. The expansion of the court after this period was deeply influenced by the Shah’s desire to assert Tehran’s place within the increasingly global cosmopolitan culture. This is evident in the newly built divān khānah (built between 1873 and 1882) whose façade boasted tall European-style windows and semi-engaged classical columns, as well as an expanded Museum Hall which housed the courts mounting collection of local, regional and European art. Most interestingly, this phase also included the building of an extensive new andarūn (Figure 13).

Fig. 13. Map of the arg by Jean-Baptiste Feuvrier in Trois ans à la cour de Perse, Paris, 1900; 2nd ed., Paris, 1906.

The newly developed living quarter covered approximately one third of the palace grounds and was located on the north side of the court, to the east of the new divān khānah, and south of dār al-­fanūnI (Figure 14).

Fig. 14. New andarūn under construction. Gulistan Palace Visual Document Center, Tehran, Iran (343-4).

Its expansion was a bold statement by Nasser al-Din Shah that the Islamic domestic tradition of harems was not antithetical to Persian modernization efforts and could in fact, develop and evolve simultaneously with other large scale urban modernization efforts.

The newly built harem was accessible through two entrances, both of which were secured and guarded in order to shield harem women from the intrusion and gaze of non-relative males. They opened onto separate vestibules with long corridors which linked the andarūn to the court and the outside, respectively.[35] The first entrance was to narinjistān, an orangery located in the north-east quarter of the palace. This was the entrance most commonly used by both harem residents, as well as the shah himself, for entering and leaving the andarūn. According to Muīr al-Mamlik, about 20 elder eunuchs guarded this corridor.[36] The other entrance to the harem was the diamond door (dar-i almas) which opened onto the street, and was generally kept locked with a court eunuch also in charge of the keys.[37]

Built around a massive courtyard, the new andarūn featured a series of smaller structures around a rectangular enclosure. The courtyard served as the heart of the harem, connecting all the buildings, and giving every house a clear view to the andarūn entrance, as well as all other houses. Each of the buildings was assigned to one of the shah’s wives or sighes, though eventually, many of them were occupied by multiple wives and children as the number of residents in the harem steadily increased during this period (Figure 15).[38]

Fig. 15. View of harem women posing in tālārs of andarūn buildings. Gulistan Palace Visual Document Center, Tehran, Iran (682-16).

The buildings inside the new andarūn featured deep columned porches (tālārs) which had openings on one or three sides and served multiple functions. The variously sized tālārs were used as an entrance, a small audience hall, a sleeping area in hot weather, or a balcony used for sitting and eating.[39]  These versatile spaces could offer accommodation and hospitality to all members and relations of extended family, as well as royal guests, or be used for the everyday domestic and leisure activities of their residence. Their placement at the outer limit of each building also meant that they were both a part of the interior of their respective homes, and accessible and visible to the exterior courtyard – a design feature particular to the Qajar court that again complicates the assumed notion of a clear separation between interiority and exteriority.

The most architecturally significant building in the andarūn, situated in the middle of the enormous courtyard, was the Shah’s sleep quarters (khāb gāh) – an elaborate two- story building, whose design borrowed from Ottoman palaces (Figure 16).

Fig. 16. The khāb gāh. Gulistan Palace Visual Document Center, Tehran, Iran (209-2).

The majestic building was quarantined from the surrounding area by a large fence with an iron door.[40] While the placing of the khāb gāh in the middle of the andarūn can be read as an assertion of the centrality of patriarchal rule within this space, it is important to note that this space was most often an empty signifier since Nasser al-Din was frequently not physically present within the harem. The shah was notorious for going on long vacations and spent most summer months, with some, but not all of his wives and children, outside of Gulistan. As such, despite its location, and architectural weight, it would be a mistake to see the khāb gāh as the heart of the harem. In fact, as numerous sources attest, social life of the harem revolved most often around its female residence and eunuchs, and the power negotiations between them, and took place within various women’s homes, tālārs, and gardens with the gated khāb gāh merely serving as a place holder for harem hierarchy.

For example, a note-worthy buildings in the new andarūn, which, unlike the khāb gāh, was frequently occupied by multiple residents and visitors, was the home belonging to the shah’s favored wife, Anis al-Dowleh. The building looked out onto a private garden, bāgh-i tabāni, from the back, and housed a large reception hall on its upper level, which was the location of the many gatherings, often featuring visiting foreign women, hosted by the de-facto queen (Figure 17).

Fig. 17. Social gathering at Anis al-Dowleh’s home. Gulistan Palace Visual Document Center, Tehran, Iran (2010-2-3).

Her house was amongst the few notable ones which also had a bathing room, though she still continued to frequent public baths with other harem women as a collective activity.[41]

Directly outside the bed chamber and facing its entrance was the residence of Amin Aghdas, another of the Shah’s significant sighehs. This house was noteworthy both because of its larger size in comparison to most other harem buildings, and the fact that it served as the residence of important figures in Nasser al-Din’s court including at different points, his beloved cat Bībī Khānūm, the young boy Malijak, who was the object of his obsession after the death of his cat, and Khānūm Bāshī who was a beautiful young recruit to the shah’s harem in his final years, and one of his last sighes.[42]

As we’ve seen, at every step of development and expansion, both the arg and its harem paralleled shifts, advances and progress that Tehran was going through as it transformed into a modern metropolitan city. In fact, throughout Nasser al-Din Shah’s reign, Gulistan, much like the city that surrounded it, was almost perpetually in a state of renovation and expansion. Far from being designated as a space which preserved and maintained tradition, Gulistan was in fact usually the first place of transformation and development in the city center. As such, both Tehran and Gulistan, in very material ways, were the epicenters of the Qajar’s engagements with Persian modernity (recall the first photo studio appearing in shams al emarat).

Inside Out: Biruni, Andaroon and Movements within Gulistan

Throughout its history, and the various phases of renovation and expansion under Qajar rule, Gulistan Palace maintained the basic Islamic domestic principle of a division between an administrative and presumably male dominated exterior part (bīrūnī) and the private, familial and predominately woman dominated interior (andarūn). This form of gender segregation was of course a normative practice of Islamic social and moral order and, as such, served as a source of legitimation for political authority of the Qajar rulers. The distinction between male and female space is more generally one of the most important defining characteristics of Islamic cities.[43]

Within European accounts, gender segregated space in general, and the domestic space of the harem in particular, carried a particularly heavy symbolic burden, as a bordered space which was impenetrable by European male gaze, and represented Eastern patriarchy and imprisonment of Muslim women’s bodies in its most material form.[44] While such orientalist assumptions about the Muslim world have by now been adequately critiqued, most notably by scholars such as Meyda Yegenoglu and Inderpal Grewal,[45] the basic premise that the harem, in its material form, represented an extreme form of private space occupied by women, and segregated from the male dominated public sphere, has continued to hold sway in the historiography of 19^th century Iran.[46]

Gender-segregated spaces within Islamic cultures however, do not correspond to the modern European divide between public and private spheres as easily or as neatly as many historiographers of the Islamic world have assumed. From the outset, for example, the notion of interior (andarūn) and exterior (bīrūnī), both refer to areas that constitute the domestic sphere of the home. That is to say, in the context of a traditional Iranian home, and in particular, one belonging to an elite member of Persian society, the house itself was divided into two sections: the andarūn (‘inside’ or ‘innards,’) was the space designated for women, religiously permitted men (maḥram), and in the case of very elite households, their servants and eunuchs, and the bīrunī (‘outside’ or ‘public,’) was reserved for the male head of the household, and the visitors he would receive.[47] This is in stark contrast to European understandings of private and public spheres where the former refers to the home and the latter to the social world outside of the home.

Habermas has famously argued that in Europe, the division between the private and public spheres began to emerge towards the end of the 18^th century with the rise of bourgeois culture, and was a central feature of the modern European state. According to him, there was a set of historically specific and unprecedented circumstances that allowed for the emergence of this liberal bourgeois phenomenon in Europe which in turn changed the principles and nature of state power.[48] For Habermas, this notion of public sphere grew at the same time as ideas about the intimate and private sphere of the conjugal family. The private sphere was constituted as the necessary counterpoint to the public sphere, and in the industrial era, the divide became highly gendered as men dominated the public arenas of politics and work, while women were closely associated with family and home. The European bourgeois social order relied on this gendered separation of these spheres and lead to the emergence of the nuclear family as the ideal social unit. [49] This form of conjugality is what in fact allowed citizens (read: male citizens) to have economic autonomy, play an active role in the market, and develop a liberal understanding of their rights which they could foster within the public sphere.  Love and intimacy were relegated to the private realm of the home and were to play a central role in the formation of the conjugal family and as the premise of marriage, though notions of a union between two people from different parts of the social-ladder was still highly frowned upon. [50]

By now, many feminist scholars, most notably, Nancy Fraser, have pointed out the gender blind bias of Habermas’s understating of the different spheres, arguing that “public” and “private” are themselves categories that once subjected to historically rigorous scrutiny, don’t adequately account for the nuanced ways that people divide up their intimate, social and political lives.[51] Similarly, the notion of domestic interior and social exterior spaces as oppositional and gendered has its own complex legacy in the European context. In The Emergence of the Interior, Charles Rice argues that understandings of domestic space as interior and private space began to take shape in Europe beginning in the 19^th century.  According to Rice, “the interior emerged historically as the context for newly articulated desires for privacy and comfort, the consolidation of gendered and familial roles in life, and domestic practices of consumption and self-representation”.[52] Both as concept, and as material manifestation, the notion of a separate domestic space was a modernist European phenomenon which reflected the newly articulated and increasingly widespread desires for privacy and comfort, the consolidation of specific gendered and familial roles in life, as well as a newly emerging consumer culture which set specific rules for domestic arrangements. Rice argues that discourses about domesticity as a naturalized, stable and timeless aspect of living, is a misconception, albeit a powerful one, which in fact only emerged in 19^th century Europe.[53]

Such understandings of family, conjugality, and civic life, and the rigid binaries that structured European societies in their idealized form, were not always present in other societies. In fact, family and conjugal relations in the royal Qajar harem were distinctly different than their European counterpart. The harem constituted a familial formation composed of multiple wives, with both permanent and various levels of temporary status, their relatives, as well as a large constellation of nannies, eunuchs and servants all co-habiting and collectively raising children in a communal setting. Multiple family portraits of harem women from the period attest to the complex nature of conjugality within this context (Figure 18).

Fig 18. Harem women, children and servants. Gulistan Palace Visual Document Center, Tehran, Iran (210-5-3).

Despite these glaring differences however, the Islamic architectural tendencies of royal courts and elite families, which were structured around the division between a bīrūnī and an andarūn, have generally been the site of cultural comparisons that regard such practices as material evidence for the severe gendered division between public and private life within Islamicate societies. Both European accounts of the Gulistan court, and more contemporary analysis of this space found in the English language, tend to rely heavily on such presuppositions in their spatial accounts of the palace and its harem.

For example, Jennifer Scarce, a notable architectural historian of the Qajar period, has argued that despite the modernization plans for Tehran in mid to late 19^th century, a central component of Nasser al-Din’s expansion plans of Gulistan was the maintenance of the “traditional segregation of public and private areas” through the clear and gendered distinction between bīrūnī and andarūn of Gulīstan, and the walls surrounding the complex which protected these elements from public.[54] Throughout her body of work on Qajar architecture, she argues that such division is in accordance with Islamic tradition, where “[p]ublic life takes place in the streets, the service and commercial sectors, while private life looks inwards to courtyard and rooms within wall”.[55]  She notes that while there was a visible attempt by the Qajars to modernize Gulistan, (and visibility for her is apparent through the gesture of incorporating European architectural details such as clock towers and columns), the presence of traditional Islamic social order continued to foil full-scale modernization efforts. She thus makes a clear distinction between modern forms and structures, and traditional practices which occupy them. However, Scarce fails to account for the fact that the notion of a clear division between public and private space, and in particular, domestic interiority and public civic life, was a decidedly 19^th century European phenomenon associated with European modernity, which was quite distinct from the traditions and practices which defined the Qajar court – a space that was arguably the very focal point of 19^th century Iranian modernity. In fact, most objects and practices associated with modernity, from fashion and technology, to arts and literature made their first appearance in Iran within the walls of Gulistan.

In reality, in the context of late Qajar elite culture, this form of gender segregation was not informed by a distinction between private and public realm, but was instead the product of Islamic ordering and enforcement of gender segregation in both public and private life, and one which was not deemed by many to be incompatible with modernization. Furthermore, far from being “secluded” in the andarūn of Gulistan, there is no shortage of references to harem women from the period moving through the bazaar and the streets of Tehran, visiting public shrines, or traveling throughout the country, within the archives of the period – spaces which clearly fall outside the harem or domestic sphere of the arg (Figure 19).

Fig. 19. Harem women traveling with court eunuchs. Gulistan Palace Visual Document Center, Tehran, Iran.

Within such accounts, the basic rules of gender segregation apply either through women covering themselves, or the various ways in which men were forbidden from public areas that harem women were passing through.

A noteworthy incident, which illustrates this point well, took place in the summer of 1883, when Samuel Benjamin, the first American ambassador to Iran, was traveling with his daughter from Tehran to Shimīrān to escape the heat of the city. On route, his caravan reached a coffee house where a number of horses and carriages were parked. They decided to stop and take a break, but almost immediately upon arrival, they were attacked by a group of court eunuchs and severely beaten. The reason for this attack, which caused some diplomatic tensions at the time, was that the coffee house was at the time occupied by harem women who were also on route from Tehran to their summer destination. In such instances, it was not permissible for men to enter public spaces occupied by harem women.  The beating in fact only stopped when one of the shah’s wives recognized Benjamin and his daughter, and ordered the guards to stop.[56]

This is one of several examples of harem women occupying space outside the confines of the harem gates. In fact, these women spent most of their time socializing in various public gatherings, attending weekly public baths, and going on trips and pilgrimages collectively. During such outings, men were to stay clear of their paths and if they were to get a glimpse of harem women, it was men who would be punished. [57]

Moonis al-Dowleh, one of Anis al-Dowleh’s servants, in her memoirs, for example, gives a detailed account of harem women visiting kūhi bībī shahrbānū, a shrine located in the south east of Tehran. She states:

Men and women often visited shrines together with set rituals which they would follow. There was however, one shrine that no men and not even boys were allowed to visit – the kūhi bībī shahrbānū shrine. Legend had it that bībī shahrbānū was still alive and roaming the mountains and as such, no male visitors were allowed there. Because of this, women loved to visit this shrine where they did not have to cover themselves and could frolic freely.[58]

She describes how differing classes of harem women made the journey with their eunuchs and would partake in collective leisure activities such as singing, eating meals and reading omens (fāl khūndan) for the duration of the trip.[59]

Visits to the bath house is another example of public outings that harem women partook in, generally on a weekly basis. Shireen Mahdavi gives the following account of women’s public bathing rituals:

For the women, the public baths (apart from their original purpose of a location for being cleansed) were a form of amusement and distraction from daily life. It was a social meeting place where the women would go with their extended family and arrange to meet their friends. They would usually spend a whole day there, having their hair and nails dyed with henna, eating sweetmeats and meals, telling stories and anecdotes, and smoking hookahs. There were also baths for special occasions, such as on the tenth day after giving birth to a son or prenuptial baths which would be preceded and proceeded by female musicians and dancers.[60]

While such collective homosocial activities have been well documented in the historiography of Qajar women, most notably by Afsaneh Najmabadi, few scholars have paid adequate attention to the spatial manifestation of such activities –namely that they often took place in outdoor or public spaces throughout the city which the traditional historiography has deemed inaccessible to harem women.

Even within the arg, there was no shortage of large scale gatherings and social affairs in which women took part. Muīr al-Mamlik, for example reports in his memoirs that on a few nights each month, the entire arg (so not just its andarūn, but also its bīruni) would be closed off to visitors so that the shah and the residents of the harem could tour the grounds. They would spend time in the dīvan khanih and the garden, and musicians and entertainers would perform for large audiences. Harem women would often end the evening by sharing a collective dinner with the shah in the diamond hall building (tālār-i bilirīān). [61]  Thus, even the bīruni section of the arg was regularly accessible to harem women and their servants.

Furthermore, the characterization of the royal andarūn as a private space in and of itself requires further interrogation. Understandings of the harem as a “private” sphere of domesticity ignore both the spatial configuration of it, as well as the ways in which the women living within it constituted a public in their own right, which was in constant contact with both the court and the many bodies and identities which surrounded and passed through it. In her description of harem life, Taj Saltaneh, the one of the shah’s daughter’s notes:

His Imperial Majesty, my father, had about eighty wives and concubines, each of whom had about ten or twenty maidservants and domestics. The number of women in the harem thus reached some five or six hundred. Moreover, every day the wives, concubines, or domestics received numerous relative and visitors, so that there was a constant flood of about eight or nine hundred women in the harem.[62]

It would be hard to argue that a space occupied by 800 to 900 bodies should be considered a private domain. In fact, looking at accounts of the Qajar harem from the late 19^th century, one is struck by the amount of sociality and communal practices that made up the day-to-day life of the resident even within the andarūn. Many of the architectural details which were explained in the last section, were developed specifically for this purpose – let’s recall for example the large tālārs that were built into certain buildings, or Anis al-Dowleh’s guest room on the second floor of her home which is referenced in the many accounts from the period.

Conclusion:

In a letter written to Nasser al-Din Shah, the writer informs the shah of a physical altercation which has taken place between harem servants and workers outside of the harem. Āghā Bāshī, the Shah’s loyal eunuch is mentioned as the arbitrator of the fight. According to the letter, Āghā Bāshī makes the harem servants promise not to “loiter on the street and pick fights”.[63] This letter is interesting in that it shows that while, in some sense, there was in fact a desire to keep a separation between the harem and its exterior, the boundaries between the interior and exterior were regularly crossed, in this case, by harem eunuchs who were perhaps the most mobile figures between these two realms.

Thinking through the material space of late 19^th century Gulistan, its immediate surroundings, and its location in the heart of a fast-developing urban center, allows us to move beyond fetishizing the harem as a token of idealized Eastern patriarchal sexuality or denouncing it as a prison house of Muslim women, and instead, interrogate certain social relations in late Qajar Iran through their spatial manifestation at the very heart of the empire.

Both textual and photographic evidence point to the fact that the Gulistan andarūn was at once a space of domesticity within which, for example, children were raised in a collective environment, a space of sociality wherein a constant barrage of guests, both familial, local and transnational, were entertained, a host of rituals both secular and religious were performed, as well as a series of politics, both local, national and international interrogated and negotiated. This folding in of deeply private and extremely public activities within the same space is perhaps the most unique and interesting feature of the royal court, and one which has been severely understudied. What was particularly unique about this space was that for the most part, the day-to-day affairs of the harem occurred outside of male control. Seen in this light, the Gulistan harem was a kind of heterotopic liminal zone where gender, ethnic and class differences intersected, and where the successive development of the space both formed and was informed by the domestic, leisure, cultural, and political practices that took shape with

[1]Michel Foucault, “The Eye of Power” in Power/Knowledge: Selected interviews and other writings, 1972-1977 (New York: Pantheon, 1980), 149.

[2]Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces, Heterotopias,” Diacritics 16, (Spring 1986): 22-27.

[3]Edward Soja, “History: Geography: Modernity” in The Cultural Studies Reader, ed. Simon Duing (New York, London: Routledge, 1999), 113-125.

[4]While the Pahlavis still maintained Gulistan as a royal palace which they used for formal receptions during their reign, they moved their place of residence into the newly built Niavara House to the north of the city.

[5]Fatema Soudavar Farmanfarmaian, “Politics and Patronage: The Evolution of the Sara-ye Amir in the Bazaar of Tehran” in The Bazaar in the Islamic City: Design, Culture, and History, ed. Mohammad Gharipour (Cairo: The American University in Cairo Press, 2012), 205.

[6]For a complete discussion of the different phases of development of Gulistan and Tehran prior to and during the early Qajar period, refer to Sadiqeh Golshan’s “Gulistan-i Bagh Gulistan: arg dar tarikh-i Tehran,” Soffeh Architectural Science and Research: The Journal of the School of Architecture and Urban Planning, nos. 21-22 (1996).

[7]Abbas Amanat, Pivot of the Universe: Nasir al-Din and the Iranian Monarchy (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2008), 19.

[8]Jennifer Scarce, “The Architecture and Decoration of the Gulistan Palace: The Aims and Achievements of Fath ‘Ali Shah (1797-1834) and Nasir al-Din Shah (1848-1896),” Iranian Studies, vol. 34  (2001): 110.

[9]Amanat, Pivot of the Universe: Nasir al-Din and the Iranian Monarchy, 12.

[10]For a complete discussion of the development of the Tehran Bazaar, which expanded to include many more structures, and its architectural details, refer to Fatema Soudavar Farmanfarmaian’s “Politics and Patronage” in The Bazaar in the Islamic City.

[11]In her study of the bazaar, Farmanfarmanian argues that the grand scale of the mosque served as a source of legitimacy for the new dynasty (206). Masoud Kamali, in his book Revolutionary Iran, Civil Society and State in the Modernization Process (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 1998), also argues that the Qajar’s desire to legitimate themselves as a faithful Shi‘a dynasty was realized in this way

[12]Ali Madanipour, Tehran, the Making of a Metropolis (Chichester: John Wiley, 1998), 30.

[13]John Gurney, “The Transformation of Tehran in the Later Nineteenth Century” in Téhéran, Capitale Bicentenaire, ed. B. Hourcade, S. Adle (Paris: Téhéran: Institut Français de Recherche en Iran, 1992), 51.

[14]Edmund Bosworth, Historic Cities of The Islamic World (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2007), 508.

[15]Abbas Amanat offers a detailed account of the ceremony in his section “Ascending the Throne” in Pivot of the Universe: Nasser al-Din Shah and the Iranian Monarchy, 89-108.

[16]Gurney, “The Transformation of Tehran in the Late Nineteenth Century,” 52.

[17]Bosworth, Historic Cities of The Islamic World, 509.

[18]The Cambridge History of Iran, vol. 7, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 892.

[19]Gurney, “The Transformation of Tehran in the Late Nineteenth Century,” 53.

[20]Reza Shirazi, “The Orient veneered in the Occident” in The City in the Muslim World: Depictions by Western Travel Writers, ed. Mohammad Gharipour and Nilay Özlü (Abington and New York: Routledge, 2015).

[21]Many historians of Iran have applied this simplistic definition of modernization as mimicry of the west, in particular in relation to the development of Tehran. For examples, refer to Hafez Farman Farmanian’s “The Forces of Modernization in Nineteenth Century Iran: A Historical Survey” in Beginnings of Modernization in the Middle East, The Nineteenth Century, ed. W.R. Polk and R. L. Chambers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968); and Ervant Abrahamian, Iran between Two Revolutions (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1982).

[22]George Nathaniel Curzon, Persia and the Persian Question (London and New York: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1892), 306.

[23]Ernest Tucker, The Middle East in Modern World History (New York: Routledge, 2013), 83.

[24]Jennifer Scarce, Domestic Culture in the Middle East: An Exploration of the Household Interior (Edinburgh: National Museums of Scotland in association with Curzon Press, 1996), 21.

[25]At the turn of the 19th century, during the summer months, the population of Tehran was estimated at 15 000. By 1867, during the same months, the population had increased to 100 000 (Bosworth, Historic Cities of The Islamic World, 510).

[26]Sadiqeh Golshan, “Gulistan-i Bagh Gulistan: arg dar tarikh-i Tehran”, Soffeh Architectural Science and Research: The Journal of the School of Architecture and Urban Planning, nos. 21-22, (Spring and Summer 1996): 45.

[27]Iranian Culural Heritage, Handcrafts, and Tourism Organization, “Nomination of Golestan Palace for Inscription on the World Heritage List Report (Tehran: UNESCO World Heritage Convention, 2012), 3.

[28]Sadiqeh Golshan, “The Influence of European Design on Bagh-e-Golestan: The Qajarid Garden,” The International Journal of the Arts in Society, no. 5 (2010): 393.

[29]For a discussion of European influence on the Palace structure during this phase, refer to Gurney, “The Transformation of Tehran in the Late Nineteenth Century,” 64-65.

[30]Scarce, The Architecture and Decoration, 114.

[31]Hassan Azad, Posht-e Pardeh-ha-ye Haram-sara  (Oromiyeh: Anzali, 1985), 398.

[32]Scarce, The Architecture and Decoration, 115.

[33]Lady Mary Sheil, Glimpses of Life and Manners in Persia (London: John Murray, 1856), 127.

[34]Muīr al-Mamlik, Dūst-Alī-Khān, Notes of Private Life of Nasserad-Din-Shah (Tehran: Nashr-e-

Tarikh-e-Iran, 1983), 21.

[35]Scarce, The Architecture and Decoration, 116.

[36]Muīr al-Mamlik, Dūst-Alī-Khān, Notes of Private Life of Nasserad-Din-Shah, 18.

[37]Joannes Fauvrier, Three Years in Persia’s Royal Court, trans. Abass  Eghbal (Tehran: Elm, 2006), 399.

[38]Gholām Ali Aziz al-Sultān Malījak, Ruz-nāma-ye ḵāṭerāt Gholām Ali Khān Aziz al-Sultān, ed. Moḥsen Mirzāʾi, vol. 1, Tehran, 1997, 373.

[39]Scarce, Domestic Culture in the Middle East, 34.

[40]Muīr al-Mamlik, Dūst-Alī-Khān, Notes of Private Life of Nasserad-Din-Shah, 15-16.

[41]Cyrus Sadvandian, Khāterat-i Mūnis al-Dowlih: Nadīmih’ haramsarāy-i Nasser al-Din Shah (Tehran:  Zarrin Books, 2010), 237.

[42]Azad, Posht-e Pardeh-ha-ye Haram-sara, 373.

[43]For a discussion of the significance of spatial gender divisions in Islamic cities, refer to Janet Abu-Lughod’s “The Islamic City: Historic Myths, Islamic Essence, and Contemporary Relevance,” International Journal of Middle East Studies, vol.19 (May 1987): 155-176.

[44]For a discussion of European attitudes towards Middle Eastern harems, refer to Marilyn Booth’s introduction to the 2011 edited book Harem Histories: Envisioning Places and Living Spaces (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2010).

[45]Meyda Yegenoglu, Colonial Fantasies: Towards a Feminist Reading of Orientalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Inderpal Grewal, Home and Harem: Nation, Gender, Empire, and the Cultures of Travel (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1996).

[46]This is both true in European accounts of the city from the period (James Bailey Fraser, Mary Shiel, Lord Curzon, Carl Serena, Ferrier…) as well as historical scholarship (Amanat, Scarce…).

[47]A. A. Bakhtiar and R. Hillenbrand, “Domestic Architecture in Nineteenth Century Iran: the Manzil-i Sartip Siddihi near Isfahan,” in Qajar Iran Political, Social and Cultural Change 1800-1925, ed. E. Bosworth and C. Hillenbrand (Edinburgh: Mazda Publishers,1982), 383-402.

[48]Jürgen Habermas, “The Public Sphere: An Encyclopedia Article (1964),” trans. Sara Lennox and Frank Lennox, New German Critique, 3 (1974): 49-50.

[49]Joan Scott, “Sexularism”, Ursula Hirschmann Annual Lecture on Gender and Europe, European University Institute, Florence Robert Schuman Center for Advanced Studies Distinguished Lecture, 3 April 2009, 12.

[50]Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1991).

[51]Nancy Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy,” in Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. Craig Calhoun (Cambridge: MIT press, 1992).

[52]Charles Rice, The Emergence of the Interior: Architecture, Modernity, Domesticity (Abington and New York: Routledge, 2007), 1.

[53] Rice, The Emergence of the Interior: Architecture, Modernity, Domesticity, 4.

[54]Jennifer Scarce, “The Royal Palaces of the Qajar Dynasty; a Survey” in Qajar Iran: Political, Social, and Cultural Change 1800-1925, ed. Edmond Bosworth and Carole Hillenbrand (Costa Mesa: Mazda Publishers, 1992), 339.

[55]Scarce, Domestic Culture in the Middle East: An Exploration of the Household Interior,13.

[56]S.G. W. Benjamin, The Life and Adventures of a Freelance, being the observations of S.G.W. Benjamin (Burlington: Free Press Company, 1914), 384-391.

[57]Azad, Posht-e Pardeh-ha-ye Haram-sara, 233.

[58]Sadvandian, Khāterat-i Mūnis al-Dowlih: Nadīmih’ haramsarāy-i Nasser al-Din Shah, 137.

[59]Sadvandian, Khāterat-i Mūnis al-Dowlih: Nadīmih’ haramsarāy-i Nasser al-Din Shah, 138.

[60]Shireen Mahdavi, “Amusements in Qajar Iran”, Iranian Studies, vol.40 (September 2007): 494.

[61]Muīr al-Mamlik, Dūst-Alī-Khān, Notes of Private life of Nasserad-Din-Shah, 25.

[62]Taj al-Saltanan, Crowning Anguish: Memoirs of a Persian Princess from the Harem to Modernity, ed. Abbas Amanat, trans. Anna Vanzan and Amin Neshati (Washington DC: Mage Publishers, 2003), 88.

[63]The National Archives and Library in Tehran, document 295-2592.

Amy Motlagh is the Bita Daryabari Presidential Chair in Persian Language and Literature, and an associate professor of comparative literature and Middle East/South Asia studies, at UC Davis. She is the author of Burying the Beloved: Gender, Fiction and Reform in Modern Iran (Stanford University Press, 2012) and articles on topics including Iranian cinema, literature, and gender and race in the Iranian diaspora. She is currently at work on a manuscript called “Translating Race: A Cultural History of Racial Thinking in Modern Iran and the Diaspora.”

Born in 1921 in Shiraz, eight years before the formal abolition of slavery by Reza Shah in 1929, writer, intellectual, and translator Simin Daneshvar later acknowledged that many of her stories came out of her childhood. An important “clearing center” for the Persian Gulf slave trade, the Shiraz of Daneshvar’s childhood is most extensively memorialized in her first major novel, Savushun (1969), which is set in World War II–era Shiraz.[2] Daneshvar attended a British missionary school in Shiraz that enabled her to learn English at a very high level of competency at a time when it was not common, even for affluent Iranians, to do so. She published her first collection of short stories, Atash-e khamush (Extinguished Fire) in 1948, but later insisted that it not be reissued; she was embarrassed by this early effort. She started work as a translator and writer of occasional pieces for newspapers and radio to earn money while she was a university student, and she would continue to be a prolific translator for the duration of her life: her translations include not only literary works such as The Scarlet Letter; Cry, the Beloved Country; and The Human Comedy, but also bestselling self-help works like Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus. She remained interested in the implications of translation as a profession and a practice in Iran throughout her life, but perhaps her most complicated negotiation with translation was her engagement with ideas of race between an American context and an Iranian one.

Daneshvar’s first self-conscious intellectual encounters with the concept of “race” seem to have occurred during the Fulbright year she spent at Stanford University in the United States in 1952–53. Daneshvar always acknowledged the important impact the Fulbright year had on her writing, and she indeed credited one of her teachers at Stanford, Wallace Stegner (1909–93), with changing the way she wrote entirely.[3] We can see the legacy of this fellowship period and Stegner’s influence in her fiction, not just in the explicit ways she attributed to Stegner, but also in her deployment of Blackness and whiteness in the first story collection she published after her Fulbright, A City like Paradise  (Shahri chawn behesht, 1961).[4]

In Playing in the Dark, Toni Morrison suggests the ways in which Blackness functions as a foil for white masculinity in American fiction of the late nineteenth and the twentieth centuries.[5] For Daneshvar, the practice of racial thinking and interpretation of race in her writing may have been mediated not only through Stegner’s mentorship but also through her work as a translator. One of the first books she translated after her Fulbright year was William Saroyan’s The Human Comedy (Komedi-ye ensani, 1954).[6] Although she did not translate any of Stegner’s work, she was clearly influenced by his worldview and style, and continued to seek his patronage long after her Fulbright year ended.[7] Aside from her adoption of the by-now hackneyed phrase associated with the American “program year,” “show, don’t tell,” Daneshvar continued to correspond with Stegner for many years beyond the Fulbright and clearly regarded him as an important mentor.[8] Stegner’s most famous novel of the West (Angle of Repose, 1971) was yet to come, but he was already acknowledged by this time for a multitude of writings on the American West, including Big Rock Candy Mountain (1943). Among these were One Nation (1948), which generated an associated film focused on the “American Negro” section of that book and called by the same name. Shortly after Daneshvar’s Fulbright period, Stegner also contracted to work as a propagandist for what was then the Arabian American Oil Company (ARAMCO).[9]

Daneshvar would also go on to translate other American works, with Stegner’s encouragement, including The Scarlet Letter (Dagh-e nang, 1955). For Daneshvar, American literature’s predilection for the “power of blackness” that Morrison critiques in Playing in the Dark may have come to her in part through education during the Fulbright year, and in part through translation. Stegner and Saroyan were both important architects in the development of a masculine mythology of the New West, and Stegner’s work has been both celebrated and critiqued for its depiction of the American West and of white masculinity.[10]

Daneshvar’s observations in her letters to her husband, Jalal Al-e Ahmad, complicate some of the accepted views about this remarkable writer, and shed a different light on her political affiliations and impressions of coeval political movements.[11] Her engagement with race is of particular interest, not just because of contemporary debates and attention to race globally as a consequence of police brutality in the United States, but also because it has been so much overlooked in her work. The way that she saw (or didn’t see) race is notable—not because, as many Iranian scholars and scholars of Iran erroneously suggest, Iranians are effectively color blind, but because Daneshvar’s understanding of and engagement with race reflects an attempt to grapple with a different racial paradigm in the United States. There, she witnessed some of the aspects of life that gave rise to the Civil Rights Movement, and later witnessed some of the major protests involved with that movement. Also, Daneshvar herself dealt in her own writing with race in ways that are at times profoundly troubling.

Unfortunately, scholars of Iran to date have also not been able to fully face the complicated ways in which Iranian intellectuals have negotiated race and the legacy of slavery in Iran, either in terms of its connections to race or in terms of the way that they viewed racial thinking and slavery in other contexts, especially in the United States. In her dissertation, Seeing Race (2018), Beeta Baghoolizadeh suggests that the move to preemptively distance and separate Iran’s history of slavery from any association with other histories of slavery was in effect an attempt to whitewash Iran’s past.[12] As Baghoolizadeh shows, this was a self-conscious national effort during the Pahlavi period, but one which continues into the present, and with which Iranian scholars have to some extent collaborated.

This discomfort with the legacy of slavery in Iran’s past is evident in Behnaz Mirzai’s A History of Slavery and Emancipation in Iran 1800-1929 (2017).[13] The result of extensive archival research by Mirzai, this monograph nonetheless teleologically reads the story of slavery and its abolition as the inevitable triumph of the secular nation–state in Iran. Consequently, Mirzai spends little time considering the painful and enduring effects or consequences of the enslavement of Africans on their descendants. Moreover, Mirzai declines to engage the issue of racism, selectively citing the work of other scholars to insist on a distinction between the American history and experience of slavery and the history of slavery in the Islamic world.[14] Regrettably, this denial is a trope of the genre of Iranian writing on the history of slavery.

In a similar vein to Mirzai’s approach, Haleh Afshar’s uncomfortable essay “Age, Gender and Slavery in and out of the Persian Harem: A Different Story” (2000) remembers the “freed slave” who lived in the Afshar home, a woman who had originally been bought for the harem of Muzaffar al-Din Shah Qajar.[15] When she was “freed” (i.e., the harem could no longer support so many slaves), this woman, called only Sonbol Baji (Sister Hyacinth), became Afshar’s nanny.[16] Afshar uses what she says is a framework drawn from Audre Lorde’s notion of “bio-mythography,” and describes the impulse for this article as the desire to give voice to someone who never acquired the necessary literacy to write her own story. Yet Afshar struggles to reconcile this personal history of her family’s slaveholding with the liberal racial politics required of her in her adopted country (the United Kingdom). Instead, she relies on odd assertions that suggest Sonbol Baji found her time as a slave “empowering,”[17] and that “for Sonbol Baji her colour had been one of her major attractions. The king had wished for a beautiful ‘black’ girl in his entourage and had acquired Sonbol when she was a small child.”[18] Throughout the essay, Afshar deploys the words slave and black in quotation marks, and indicates that she finds these terms insufficient and possibly foreign to the context of Iran, even though the word commonly used in Persian to describe Afro-Iranians is siah (Black).[19]

An unintended visual critique of the history that Afshar offers comes in Pedram Khosronejad’s collection of Qajar photographs, Qajar African Nannies (2017), in which a photograph of Afshar and her brother Kamran with Sonbol Baji is published.[20] Although we cannot extrapolate too much from a single photograph, I believe we can see the photograph as a critique of Afshar’s characterization. The photo shows an Afro-Iranian woman holding a large Iranian boy, perhaps two years old; a plump little Iranian girl wearing a European dress and bow in her hair is posed in front of the woman, and a (white) doll is posed at the girl’s feet. The woman’s face is shadowed, but it is weary and expresses sadness, possibly even fear. As Khosronejad observes in his introduction to the volume, “The faces of all the Africans in the photographs of this collection confirm their deep sadness and the horror that encapsulated their entire lives.”[21]

The introduction aside, this volume does not attempt to interpret the photographs deeply. Khosronejad has indeed largely eschewed critical engagement with these photographs, saying that he sees his role largely as an archivist gathering material for others to interpret.[22] His discomfort with some aspects of this process is evident, and he has commented on the fact that these photographs of enslaved persons were taken without the consent of the subjects, but would theoretically belong to the descendants of the subjects, who, in his view, are impossible to locate owing to the destruction of documents related to their ancestors’ enslavement. Instead, the photographs have become the subject of dispute between different “owners”—the Qajar families, who claim them by right of inheritance, and the Iranian government, which confiscated them during the revolution.[23]

Other evidence also points to a discomfort with a critical scrutiny of the legacy of slavery, particularly enslavement of Africans, in Iran. Even a book ostensibly dedicated to the study of race, Reza Zia-Ebrahimi’s 2017 The Emergence of Iranian Nationalism: Race and the Politics of Dislocation,[24] which focuses on the development of an Aryanist-inflected Iranian nationalism, elides the way in which Aryanism was not simply staged at the expense of other “white” minorities in Iran, but also and in ironic ways, at the cost of effacing the history of slavery and its aftermath.[25] Anthony A. Lee, in a preface to his work recovering the history of the enslaved individual Fezzeh Khanom in nineteenth-century Shiraz, notes the results of the 1868 census, which showed that in Tehran, the population of Afro-Iranians was then 12%, a fact that has been ignored or glossed over in the historiography of the period.[26] In his portrait of Fezzeh Khanom, Lee draws on Bahai historiography, which constitutes one of the few sources to record even obliquely the lives of these slaves, but notes, “while it is commendable that the presence of these African slaves is acknowledged, their significance to history is ignored.”[27]

On the evidence presented by Daneshvar herself, her family likely enslaved people. Daneshvar never (to my knowledge) discussed this fact directly or put it in any explicit comparative framework with the legacy of slavery she saw in the United States. Yet she acknowledged that a character from the story “A City like Paradise” (“Shahri chawn behesht,” from the collection by the same name), Mehrangiz, was based on her own dadeh siah (Black nanny), an Afro-Iranian slave-cum-servant, who lived with her own family.[28] Elsewhere, I have argued that this figure of the freed-slave-cum-female-domestic functions in Daneshvar’s work, and in the imaginary of Iranian modernity, as a sign of a disjuncture, an irreconcilability.[29] In particular, I have focused on the way in which even as women’s rights and status came to the fore of public attention as important aspects of Iran’s modernization, neither reformist Iranians, including feminists like Daneshvar, nor the law itself could acknowledge female domestic servants (including former enslaved persons like Mehrangiz or Sonbol Baji) as women. Mehrangiz is perhaps the closest Daneshvar comes to showing real sympathy for a female domestic, and this attitude is clearly derived from Mehrangiz’s helpless abjection in the household.

Even for feminists, the personhood of servants existed outside the law, and the status of manumitted slaves who had become, perforce, domestic servants was particularly precarious. Yet in spite (or perhaps because) of this denial of their personhood, the figure of the servant persists in important ways in modern Iranian fiction. In my book, I argue that this trace in the literature is as important as any legal document. In literary texts as well as in political discourse, female domestic workers would increasingly become the Other to the imagination of a central, dominant Iranian womanhood, which defined itself not only in contrast to the traditional wife, but also to the household servants.

Many of Daneshvar’s short stories and novels prominently feature domestic servants, especially women, and Daneshvar often thematizes their position in the household in her stories. Only the eponymous story in A City like Paradise, however, thematizes the status of a former female Afro-Iranian slave. As alluded to above, this story follows the life and finally the death of Mehrangiz, who is now serving as a nanny, maid-of-all-work, and de facto concubine in the middle-class home of her former master’s daughter, to whom she was given as a wedding gift.[30] With the onset of modernity and Reza Shah’s reforms, which included land reforms and the Manumission Law of 1929, elite slaveholders saw a rearrangement of their fortunes. Here, we see that dramatized in the case of this married daughter, who cannot afford another person in her household, resents Mehrangiz’s sanctioned intimacy with her children (and unsanctioned intimacy with her husband), and treats her as subhuman and with immense cruelty. Although the story clearly evinces sympathy for Mehrangiz, the character portrayed as the true victim is Ali, the son of Mehrangiz’s mistress, who loves Mehrangiz more than he does his mother, and whose inability to achieve the signposts of manhood (e.g., employment, marriage) is obviously signaled as the true tragedy of the story, even though it concludes with Mehrangiz’s abject death.

If Daneshvar and other leftist and feminist intellectuals had difficulty seeing domestic servants as having souls—in other words, as “real” people[31]—we might also say that she had difficulty seeing the problems with the deployment of Blackness as abasement.[32] In the two additional stories in A City Like Paradise that also foreground race, “The Iranians’ New Year” (“‘Ayd-e iraniha”) and “The Playhouse” (“Suratkhaneh”), Daneshvar deploys the use of blackface in two Iranian cultural traditions to comment on the situation of the (non-Black) Iranian. “The Iranians’ New Year” tells the story of an American expatriate family living in Iran and their two young sons’ naïve fascination with a young man whose occupation is playing the Hajji Firuz character associated with the Persian New Year, Nowruz, while “The Playhouse” revolves around an actor playing the siah in a traditional theater.

In “The Iranians’ New Year,” the mediating sensibility is that of two American expatriate children in Iran in the 1950s, when Americans were beginning to be present in Iran in larger numbers, but the site of sympathy is the Iranian young man they patronize. The two children, Ted and John Michaelson, are fascinated by the blackface Hajji Firuz character, which is an important ritual aspect of the Nowruz holiday, and they become by extension fascinated by the young man living on the margins of their neighborhood who plays this character professionally. The boys adopt a charitable attitude toward the young man and his father, who is a shoeshiner, and build, unbidden, a kiosk shack for the men, decorating it with American symbols, such as the American flag and Mickey Mouse. When one day they find the shack abandoned and open to the rain and wind, which has destroyed their decorations, the younger boy first imagines that “red Indians” have attacked the place; then, when his brother pooh-poohs this idea, insists that it must have been “black men with masks” and that they must be “lynched.”[33] The story is very obviously a critique of American expatriates in Iran in the 1950s, when they had begun to look like representatives of a colonial presence, especially after the 1953 coup engineered by the CIA and MI6. The evocation of Blackness here comes in the form of the Hajji Firuz character, as well as in the comments made by the two boys in their mistaken understanding of what has happened in the kiosk. The young man’s father has died, and the boys do not understand the reasons for the poverty in which the young man and his father lived, or that their “help” does not in fact save a man who has spent his life shining shoes by the side of the road.

As in “A City like Paradise,” here it is not the plight of any Black person that is dramatized (or a critique of the strangeness of the Hajji Firuz blackface tradition), but rather, the abased condition of non-Black male Iranians. The boys are foolish (if naïve) white Americans, but in the story, they take on sinister qualities nonetheless: their innocence, which is protected by their whiteness and their privilege as Americans, enables them to feel self-satisfied at the pathetic help they offer impoverished members of a society whose language they don’t speak and whose customs they don’t understand. Yet Daneshvar does not attempt to unpack the Hajji Firuz tradition at all. Here, as in “The Playhouse,” she deploys blackface but does not interrogate it as a problematic or dehumanizing practice. Hajji Firuz, like Zwarte Piet in the Netherlands, is a historically mysterious and contested aspect of the Nowruz celebration. Explaining the origins of this figure has become part of an apologia related to contemporary Iranian negotiations of race.[34]

“The Playhouse” follows a few days in the life of Mehdi Siah (whose name essentially translates to “Mehdi the Black”), a blackface performer in the “low” dramatic tradition that was still popular at the time of the story’s creation. In this tradition, as the story confirms, the siah is the central character in the drama—the mediating character with whom audiences are invited to identify.[35] Mehdi Siah gets caught up in the tragedy of one of the other players, a young woman who has become pregnant out of wedlock and plans to ensnare the rich amateur who has recently joined the troop, wanting to “study” Mehdi Siah. Here, Mehdi Siah reluctantly chooses class solidarity by allowing the subterfuge and entrapment of the young man to progress without intervening. Here, too, as in “The Iranians’ New Year,” the reader’s sympathy is directed toward a disenfranchised Iranian male, whose condition of abasement is made manifest in both stories by wearing blackface.

Taken together, these stories suggest a significant change in Daneshvar’s sensibilities regarding race. Her previous writings show no such attention to race at all, suggesting that her time in the United States during the Fulbright fellowship radically changed her perspective on race (as well as on class). For this reason, I am suggesting the paradigm of translation to discuss Daneshvar’s negotiation of race. While translation has become so capacious a concept in contemporary scholarship that it risks the loss of any meaning at all, I believe it can be a useful metaphor here for thinking about the negotiation of “race” because it is so clearly a concept or idea that does not fully translate between languages.

Although Iranians began to go to the United States and Europe for education in large numbers in the 1960s and 1970s, Daneshvar was not part of that wave, by virtue of her age.[36]  However, she was one of the first, if not the only, Iranians to record experiences of racial encounters during the height of the civil rights movement, and the language she uses is tentative and does not conform to any preconceived or prescribed vocabulary for discussing race.[37] Her letters suggest her fascination with race as an operative concept in the United States that structures relations between Black and white Americans. She struggles to see how she herself is understood within this paradigm, and refers to herself as “just a shade lighter” than the African Americans she meets. Against this uncertainty about where she falls in the American color continuum, we must also acknowledge the fact that Daneshvar and Al-e Ahmad, whose family was from northern Iran, clearly had a running private joke regarding her color. He sometimes refers to her in their letters as his “black girl from Shiraz” (dokhtar-e siah-e Shiraz) or “my black one” (siah sukhteh-ye man), and she frequently signs herself in the same way, or as “your black Simin” (Simin-e siah-e to).[38] On the other hand, Daneshvar is at times patronizing toward the Black Americans she meets: she seems confused and, at times, horrified or bemused at some of the situations racism in the United States engenders. She tells Al-e Ahmad the story of Dorothy, a young Black woman who lives in Daneshvar’s dormitory at Stanford and figures in the letters as someone who is remarkable for her beauty.[39] She answers a phone call intended for another girl, and when that girl is not available, the caller asks if he can take Dorothy out for a date. She accepts and waits for the caller in the dormitory’s lobby. When he arrives and discovers that she is Black, he berates her and says he won’t take her out. A female custodian for the dormitory, who is also Black and unnamed but frequently referred to, yells at the man and threatens him. Daneshvar ends the story by relating how she and another (white) friend intervene by coming home from the cinema and telling the custodian to stop, or she might be fired. Daneshvar sees herself as having helpfully intervened.[40]

Neda Maghbouleh’s important work on Iranian American racialization and racial thinking suggests some critical framework for Daneshvar’s difficulty placing herself on the color spectrum, and her ambivalent (dis)identification with Black Americans: “The specter of Iran was a racial hinge between white Europe and non-white Asia: a face, a body, a culture, and a concept that could open or close the door to whiteness as needed.”[41] Daneshvar’s descriptions of her interactions with Americans, as in the account above, show that her “blackness” is something she elects to participate in, but can step back from when she wants to do so, and take the position of whiteness.

Two comparatist Americanist scholars, Ebony Coletu and Ira Dworkin, have investigated some of the important but often overlooked moments of identification between contemporary Egyptian intellectuals, who selectively courted and rejected the idea of Egypt’s status as an African nation, and Black activism in the United States. In the article “A Complicated Embrace,” Coletu examines the reception and translation of Alex Haley’s novel Roots in the Arab world in the 1970s and 1980s, where it was enormously popular.[42] The plight of protagonist Kunta Kinte became a metaphor for the condition of Egyptians, especially Egyptians working in the Gulf, at the same time that Egypt was practicing racist policies directed at Sudanese refugees and Nubian Egyptians.[43] Coletu compares this use of Roots to Eve Troutt Powell’s powerful investigation of racial politics in Egypt during the period of the Sudanese condominium (1899–1956). Coletu comments that while the use of blackface in Egypt at that time was a way to “visualize stubborn resistance to the ‘civilizing mission’ of the British colonial project while reifying support for Egyptian cultural transformation under European influence [. . .] [t]he rhetorical plasticity of Kunta Kinte as a resistant figure and a slave marked by blackness resonates with this local history even as it conveys a distinct story about Atlantic slavery and diasporic survival in the United States.”[44] Coletu goes on to note that the use of Roots by Egyptian intellectuals such as Sonallah Ibrahim tended to exploit the metaphor of slavery elsewhere to explain the plight of intellectuals such as himself, rather than to shed light on contemporary practices of racism. She also points out that “legacies of slavery are also reworked over time and in Egypt, reference to slavery as debasement has been visually coded to blackness in the last century,”[45] a point echoed by Baghoolizadeh’s examination of racial artifacts and discourse in Iran in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Dworkin is concerned with the personal history and writings of Radwa Ashour (1946–2014).[46] Ashour, an Egyptian intellectual and writer married to prominent Palestinian poet, writer, and activist Mourid Barghouti, had long been interested in Black political movements before she began work on a doctoral degree in 1973 at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Dworkin argues that it was her long association with Shirley Graham Du Bois, who lived in Cairo for many years, that led her to choose UM Amherst’s Department of English, where she specialized in African American literature and was closely associated with the Department of Afro-American Studies. Ashour’s dissertation discussed in depth the First International Congress of Negro Writers and Artists in September 1956, and specifically, the “applicability” of the “colonial thesis,” as put forward by writers like Aimé Césaire, to the situation in the United States. Dworkin uses Ashour’s 1983 autobiography and the later quasi-historical novel Siraaj: An Arab Tale (1992), which relates the tale of a slave rebellion on a fictional east African island, to argue that Ashour’s engagement of African American cultural politics influenced her fictional and autobiographical writing in Arabic in ways that had broader (but largely unexamined) consequences for the modern Arabic novel. Her profound interest in African American politics notwithstanding, Dworkin notes that Ashour was unable to endorse the critique made by her mentor and friend Du Bois of racism in contemporary Egypt. Dworkin also argues that—similar to Coletu’s findings regarding Roots in Egypt—“the particular appeal of African American culture [for Ashour] lies more in its broad-based engagement with colonial histories of oppression than with the particular contours of racism within the modern state.”[47]

Something similar is at work in Daneshvar’s engagement with the politics of race in the United States, and her attempt to translate what she sees for Al-e Ahmad. Daneshvar was not interested in opening a referendum on race in Iran, but she clearly did see the condition of Black intellectuals in the United States as having some parallel to the situation of intellectuals and artists in Pahlavi Iran, where any critique of the shah was censored and the author blacklisted or flagged for surveillance. However, insofar as Daneshvar did see the condition of Black Americans as a metaphor for some Iranian experiences, clearly Blackness for her meant degradation or abjection. While her writerly sympathies remained with the politically downtrodden, they did not always embrace those who were class or racially suppressed. Her representations of non-Persians (and specifically, Indians and Azeri Turks) in Savushun can be charitably described as “Othering,” and her treatment of lower-class woman, especially, was often contemptuous and deployed for satire.

In the summer of 1963, Daneshvar returned to the United States for a second extended stay, to participate in the Harvard International Seminar, and she would again record her impressions in letters to Al-e Ahmad. (The collection A City like Paradise had been published two years earlier, and while on her trip, she writes irritably to Al-e Ahmad of an unfavorable review of the book by a young man she doesn’t know.)[48] Notably, she writes on several occasions, and at length, about the civil rights movement in the United States, which was foregrounded in the seminar. The filmmaker Richard Leacock screened and discussed his documentary The Chair (1962), which follows the attempt to commute the death sentence for Paul Crump, who was convicted for his participation in the killing of a security guard during an armed robbery in Chicago. The participants were taken to a Boston “slum” (Daneshvar’s word) to see conditions of life there, and were offered social experiences in self-consciously integrated settings.[49] Daneshvar also records Ralph Ellison’s visit and presentation to the seminar, which was clearly an important part of her experience that summer.

Ellison, author of Invisible Man, made a profound impression on Daneshvar, and she speaks of his work with great respect and interest, recording quotations from his speech to the seminar, and observes that he is someone who has used literature to overcome the enormous obstacle of race, which “might otherwise have defined him.”[50] She describes to Al-e Ahmad how she has begun reading Ellison’s novel and is so impressed by it that she has ordered it for Al-e Ahmad in French (he could not read fluently in English).[51] She also discusses how Ellison, in spite of being made financially comfortable by the success of Invisible Man, continues to teach. She clearly sees him as a kind of comrade, viewing him as a model for herself and for Al-e Ahmad; later in the letters, having finished Invisible Man in its entirety, she indeed compares Ellison’s style to Al-e Ahmad’s.[52] In Ellison, the avowed engagé writer, Daneshvar recognizes a commonality.[53] She tries to explain how the struggle to deal with racism and the legacy of slavery in the United States is mirrored in their own struggle for greater freedoms in Iran, but falters.[54]

Daneshvar also comments on James Baldwin, whose work she had already come into contact with during her Fulbright year. On this later occasion, Jack Ludwig, whom she calls “our professor” at the Harvard Seminar, has given her a copy of The Atlantic. While Daneshvar doesn’t really care for Ludwig’s story, she admires a story by Baldwin in the issue (she doesn’t name it, but from her description and the date, it must be “This Morning, This Evening, So Soon,” 1960), calling it a “masterpiece” (shahkar).[55] Later, however, she compares him unfavorably to Ellison.[56] Again, both Daneshvar and Al-e Ahmad seem to admire what they see as Ellison’s desire to transcend race: Al-e Ahmad comments that while he will always be Black, he doesn’t have to always be a Black writer like Baldwin; he can just be a writer.[57] Both are snide and superior about Baldwin’s open homosexuality, and refer to Ellison as mardak (little man, a derogatory term in Persian), which can simply be a highly colloquial expression, but feels unusual in Daneshvar’s language (if not in Al-e Ahmad’s).[58]

Daneshvar’s comments also suggest a sense of being above, and separate from, what she saw as an American problem. Since a large part of the program at the Harvard Seminar was about racial conflict in the United States, Daneshvar reflects: “In summary, right now the most difficult political issue in America is the solution of the case between whites and blacks, and the Don Juans of the [American] universities and colleges are thick-necked blacks, and the white and blonde girls who don’t have a black friend have lost their chance. But my dear, I’m sure you’re weary of hearing my explanations. . .”[59] The casual racism in this comment is profoundly disturbing. Yet at the same time, and in spite of making light of the situation as she does above, Daneshvar cared enough about what was happening in the United States to attend (without Al-e Ahmad’s permission!) the March on Washington. As she records it in the letters, she wanted to “be part of history, be a witness to history.”[60] She goes on to say that it had a profound effect on her: the march was organized and peaceful, and the police, both Black and white, were helpful. She observes that “the Black race is truly a beautiful one,” and that the Black and white people participating in the march, to her surprise, “were kissing each other.”[61]

Daneshvar was a self-stated critic of the injustice she saw in the world around her, and her engagement with race, both in these letters and in her post-Fulbright collection of stories, presents some uncomfortable truths about the contradictions of the politics espoused by Daneshvar and the Iranian left in the Cold War period.[62] She did not attempt to connect or critique her own contact with practices of enslavement, or the practice of enslavement and its legacy in Iran more broadly, with what she witnessed in the United States. Rather, Daneshvar’s (and Al-e Ahmad’s) representations of Blackness in Iran and the United States were deployed as metaphors for the victimization of suppressed classes, including the suppression of Iranian intellectuals, at the hands of the Pahlavi state. However, their deployment of Blackness in their writing did not enable them to see or critique their own racial thinking. For Daneshvar, in both her letters and her fiction, Afro-Iranians, Africans, and Black Americans remain an Other that cannot be remediated through narration. Instead, they become a way of “playing in the dark,” deploying Blackness to clarify and critique the position of non-Black Iranians in the Pahlavi era.

[1]I wish to thank Fatemeh Shams and Ira Dworkin for their helpful comments on this essay. This essay is offered in honor of Dr. Ahmad Karimi-Hakkak, whose erudition and mentorship have guided so many of us. 

[2]I am using Willem Floor’s expression “clearing center” from his Encyclopaedia Iranica article “BARDA and BARDA-DARI: From the Mongols to the Abolition of Slavery,” 2000, www.iranicaonline.org/articles/barda-iv.

[3]This is on page 33 of Honar va adabiyat-e emruz:  goft o shenudi ba doktor Simin Daneshvar va Parviz Natel Khanlari (Contemporary Art and Literature: Interviews with Dr. Simin Daneshvar and Dr. Parviz Natel Khanlari), ed. Nasser Hariri (Babul, IR: Ketabsara-ye Babul, AH 1366/AD 1987).

[4]Simin Daneshvar, Shahri chawn behesht (Tehran: Kharzmi, AH 1381/AD 2002).

[5]Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (New York: Vintage, 1993).

[6]William Saroyan, Payk-e marg va zendigi ya komedi-ye ensani (The Messenger of Life and Death, or, The Human Comedy), trans. Simin Daneshvar (Tehran: Ibn Sina, 1954).

[7]Daneshvar’s letters to Stegner are housed in the Stanford University Library. Daneshvar writes to Stegner while she is at the Harvard Seminar in 1963 to ask for his help in finding work in the United States. She also invites Stegner to visit Iran (which he does), and generally praises the positive influence he has had on her writing.

[8]See her letters in English to Stegner, which are part of the collection “Wallace Earle Stegner Creative Writing Program : correspondence and manuscripts, 1949-1992,” and which are held at the Department of Special Collections, Green Library, Stanford University.

[9]The story of Stegner’s association with ARAMCO is itself a fascinating story, as told by Robert Vitalis in “Wallace Stegner’s Arabian Discovery: Imperial Blind Spots in a Continental Vision,” Pacific Historical Review, no. 3 (August 2007):  405–38.

[10]Why I Can’t Read Wallace Stegner and Other Essays: A Tribal Voice (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996) by Elizabeth Cook-Lynn is one such work.

[11]Simin Daneshvar, Nameh-ha-ye Simin Daneshvar va Jalal Al-e Ahmad (The Letters of Simin Daneshvar and Jalal Al-e Ahmad), vols. 1 and 3, ed. Mas‘ud Ja‘fari Jazi (Tehran: Nilufar, AH 1385/AD 2006).

[12]Beeta Baghoolizadeh, “Seeing Race and Erasing Slavery: Media and the Construction of Blackness in Iran, 1830–1960” (PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 2018).

[13]Behnaz Mirzai, A History of Slavery and Emancipation in Iran 1800-1929 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2017).

[14]Mirzai, History of Slavery, 19–25.

[15]Haleh Afshar, “Age, Gender and Slavery in and out of the Persian Harem: A Different Story,” Ethnic and Racial Studies, no. 5 (2000): 905–16.

[16]African slaves in Iran were often given the names of flowers or gems, possibly to connote value or beauty; these were not their birth names, which are most frequently erased from history. For a historical attestation to this practice, see Bahman Katiraˈi, “Yaddasht-hayi darbareh-ye Emsal o hekam (taˈlif ‘Ali Akbar Dehkhoda)” (“Some Notes on the Proverbs and Wise Sayings [Written by ‘Ali Akbar Dekhoda]),” in Miyan-e reshteh-ha: daneshkadeh-ye adabiyat va ‘olum-e ensani-ye daneshgah-e Tehran (Between Fields: The Faculty of Literature and Humanities of the University of Tehran), nos. 5–6 (AH 1347/AD 1968): 505–32.

[17]Afshar, “Age, Gender and Slavery,” 905.

[18]Afshar, “Age, Gender and Slavery,” 909. For a fuller discussion of how liberalism in the United States and Europe has been practiced as “racial liberalism,” see Charles Mills’s Black Rights/White Wrongs: The Critique of Racial Liberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017).

[19]Many words are used in Persian for slave, but not all of them have the same historical connotation relating to enslavement of Africans. Some terms used to denote African slaves include bardeh, dadeh siah, kaka siah, gholam, and khvajeh. As in English, “I am your servant [slave]” (bandeh-ye shoma hastam) is a common polite expression, and bandeh is used as a polite personal pronoun in certain types of discourse. For one discussion in English of this form of discourse, see William O. Beeman’s useful (if now dated) Politics of Language and Status in Iran (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986).

[20]Pedram Khosronejad,  Qajar African Nannies  (Stillwater: Dr. Ali Fazel Visual Archive, Media Collection and Digital Resources, University of Oklahoma, 2018). Exhibition catalog.

[21]Khosronejad, Qajar African Nannies, vi.

[22]Pedram Khosronejad (lecture associated with photo exhibition “Qajar African Nannies” at UC Davis Alumni Center, Davis, CA, 10 May 2018).

[23]Khosronejad, lecture.

[24]Reza Zia-Ebrahimi, The Emergence of Iranian Nationalism: Race and the Politics of Dislocation (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017).

[25]Akhundzadeh, a major focus of Zia-Ebrahimi’s study, was himself a person of partially African descent through his mother (H. Algar, “AKUNDZADA,” Encyclopaedia Iranica, 2011, www.iranicaonline.org/articles/akundzada-playwright).

[26]Anthony A. Lee, “Enslaved African Women in Nineteenth-Century Iran: The Life of Fezzeh Khanom of Shiraz,” Iranian Studies, no. 3 (2012): 417–37.

[27]Lee, “Enslaved African Women,” 429.

[28]Honar va adabiyat-e emruz, 11.

[29]Amy Motlagh, Burying the Beloved: Gender, Fiction and Reform in Modern Iran (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012).

[30]Daneshvar acknowledged in several interviews that Mehrangiz was based on her own nanny.  See, for example, p. 11 of her interview with Hariri.

[31]Manijeh Nasrabadi deploys the terminology of affect, as articulated by Deborah Gould, to discuss the complicated engagement of Iranian feminists in the pre-revolutionary educational diaspora with leftist politics. Of woman members of the Iranian Student Association (ISA) in the United States, she notes, “women in the ISA were deeply invested in human liberation, including their own” (131). Some of what she attributes to these activists in that movement can also be said of Daneshvar, who, by virtue of her age, was not part of the wave of student mobilization abroad but may have anticipated some of their experiences. Manijeh Nasrabadi, “‘Women Can Do Anything Men Can Do:’ Gender and the Affects of Solidarity in the U.S. Iranian Student Movement, 1961–1979,” WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly, nos. 3 & 4 (Fall/Winter 2014): 127–45.

[32]For an important reading of the notion of “abjection” in Black diaspora discourse, see Darieck Scott, Extravagant Abjection: Blackness, Power, and Sexuality in the African American Literary Imagination (New York: New York University Press, 2010).

[33]Simin Daneshvar, “The Iranians’ New Year” (“‘Ayd-e iraniha”), in Shahri chawn behesht (Tehran: Kharzmi, AH 1381/AD 2002): 37–44. Quote on p. 42. All translations are my own.

[34]Several scholars have insisted that Hajji Firuz’s blackened face has nothing to do with racial signaling, but is about the fading blackness of winter, since the Iranian New Year is the vernal equinox and many of its rituals have to do with banishing winter and welcoming spring (e.g., Chaharshanbeh suri, or “Burning Wednesday,” when celebrants jump over bonfires and shout “My yellowness for your redness,” meaning my jaundiced [yellow] color for your ruddy [red] color). Scholarship on this topic continues to attempt to distance its racial aspects from the history of enslavement of Africans in Iran; some scholars, indeed, make no note of this possible connection. See, for example, Niayesh Purhassan’s “Hajji Firuz: performans: barrassi va mo’arefi-ye ‘Hajji Firuz’ va negahiye- tatbighi beh namayeshgaran az manzar va didgah-e performans” (“Hajji Firuz: Performance: Research and Introduction to “Hajji Firuz” and a Comparative Look at the Performers/Actors from a Performance Perspective”), in Me’mari va honar (Architecture and Art): Namayesh, nos. 125–26 (AH 1388/AD 2009): 42–47. In contrast, and for an interesting discussion of the contemporary controversy in the Netherlands over Zwarte Piet and a comparison to the Hajji Nowruz tradition, see Angelita D. Reyes, “Performativity and Representation in Transnational Blackface: Mammy (USA), Zwarte Piet (Netherlands), and Haji Firuz (Iran),” Atlantic Studies, no. 4 (2018): 521–50.

[35]For discussion of this theatrical tradition, see Bahram Beyzai, Namayesh dar Iran (Drama in Iran) (Tehran: Chap-e Kaviyan, 1965); Baghoolizadeh, “Seeing Race”; and Maryam Khakipour’s 2010 film Siah Bazi: The Joymakers (New York: Icarus Films, 2010).

[36]See, in particular, Chapter 3 of Matthew K. Shannon, Losing Hearts and Minds: Iranian-American Relations and International Education during the Cold War (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2017) for a fuller discussion of the Iranian student movement in the United States.

[37]The words historically used to discuss the practice of enslavement in Iran, bardegi; the people who were enslaved, bardeh, kaniz, gholam; and Afro-Iranians, siah, differ from the translations of terms used in the Iranian press to describe race, racism, or Black people when they occur elsewhere (nezhad, nezhad parasti/garayi, siah pustan). The latter terms have the quality of neologisms—they are not deployed in this way in historical documents (including literature) dealing with the trade in enslaved Africans or other peoples in Iran.

[38]See, for example, Daneshvar, Nameh-ha, vol. 3, 284, 286, 291, 318. See also Judith Butler’s reading of Nella Larsen’s Passing for an interesting comparison: the protagonist of Passing, Clare, is married to a racist white man who ostensibly does not know her ancestry, but calls her by the nickname “Nig” (Butler, Bodies That Matter [London: Routledge, 1993], 167–86).  When I presented an early version of this work at UC Irvine in 2017, a participant in the seminar took me aside and told me that he had heard that Daneshvar herself had African ancestry, and that this would explain “the way she looked.” When I asked for evidence of this, the person promised to send it to me but did not. I mention this to suggest how Daneshvar has herself been racialized in ways that do not always make it into print.

[39]Black students did not matriculate at Stanford until ten years later, in 1962. Although there was not the violent hostility to Black matriculation that occurred at southern US universities, one student in this cohort, Sandra Drake, remembers, “Once a girl came up to me and said: ‘I’ve never talked to a Negro.’ We were ‘Negroes’ back then.” See Roy Johnson, “What It Was Like to Be an African-American Freshman in 1962,” Stanford Magazine, September 2017, stanfordmag.org/contents/what-it-was-like-to-be-an-african-american-freshman-in-1962.

[40]Daneshvar, Nameh-ha, vol. 1, 384–85.

[41]Neda Maghbouleh, The Limits of Whiteness: Iranian Americans and the Everyday Politics of Race (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2017).

[42]Ebony Coletu, “A Complicated Embrace,” Transition, no. 122 (2017): 138–49.

[43]Roots was published in a Persian translation by Alireza Farahmand in AH 1357/AD 1978 and has never been out of print. Recently, on the occasion of the publication of a new edition of the translation by Amir Kabir Press, Farahmand was interviewed by the newspaper Hamshahri. He mentions his own interest in the history of slavery in the United States, and how he had the opportunity to meet Alex Haley on two occasions; according to Farahmand, Haley was interested in him as a Muslim, since Haley had written The Autobiography of Malcolm X. “Farahmand: Risheh-ha yeki az hezaran ast,” interview with Alireza Farahmand, Hamshahri, AH Azar 1392/December 2013, www.hamshahrionline.ir/news/241770/%D9%81%D8%B1%D9%87%D9%85%D9%86%D8%AF-%D8%B1%DB%8C%D8%B4%D9%87-%D9%87%D8%A7-%DB%8C%DA%A9%DB%8C-%D8%A7%D8%B2-%D9%87%D8%B2%D8%A7%D8%B1%D8%A7%D9%86-%D8%A7%D8%B3%D8%AA.

[44]Coletu, “Complicated Embrace,” 143.

[45]Coletu, “Complicated Embrace,” 144.

[46]Ira Dworkin, “Radwa Ashour, African American Criticism, and the Production of Modern Arabic Literature,” Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry, no. 1 (2018): 1–19.

[47]Dworkin, “Radwa Ashour,” 6.

[48]Daneshvar, Nameh-ha, vol. 3, 257.

[49]Daneshvar, Nameh-ha, vol. 3, 396.

[50]Daneshvar, Nameh-ha, vol. 3, 381.

[51]Interestingly, Daneshvar never mentions the possibility of translating Invisible Man herself, though she did translate several other American novels, and Ellison’s novel has still not been translated into Persian, in spite of a flourishing translation industry in Iran that is not regulated by international copyright laws since Iran is not a signatory to the Berne Convention.

[52]Daneshvar, Nameh-ha, vol. 3, 395.

[53]An odd footnote to Daneshvar’s and Al-e Ahmad’s encounters with Ellison at the Harvard International Seminar is the fact that Ellison later dined with Mohammad Reza Pahlavi at the White House at the invitation of President Johnson. Arnold Rampersad, Ralph Ellison: A Biography (New York: Vintage, 2008), 447.

[54]On p. 395 of vol. 3 of their letters, Daneshvar tells Al-e Ahmad that she sees Ellison as a “serious” writer. She goes on to characterize Invisible Man as a work that is focused on the hopelessness and exhaustion of (American) intellectuals, who are worn down by the petty battles of right and left politics, implicitly reading their own situation onto that of the protagonist in Invisible Man, and eliding the racial component central to the novel. Al-e Ahmad later wrote a treatise on this theme, On the Service and Treachery of the Intellectuals (Tehran: Ravagh, AH 1343/AD 1964).

[55]Daneshvar, Nameh-ha, vol. 3, 366. Baldwin’s “This Morning, This Evening, So Soon” first appeared in The Atlantic in the September 1960 issue (pp. 37–44).

[56]Daneshvar, Nameh-ha, vol. 3, 374. Both Daneshvar and Al-e Ahmad refer to Baldwin as Jimmy at times rather than James—an informality which, like their use of mardak to describe Ellison, may be a linguistic marker of friendly familiarity or an affectation meant to mirror American slang, but in context, reads as a kind of belittling. When I presented this work at the seminar “Roads Not Taken: Literary Translation in Iran” at UC Irvine in December 2018, it was pointed out to me that mardak is not always a sign of disregard, and that Al-e Ahmad often used this term much as contemporary American parlance uses dude. While I take the point, this is a usage unusual for Daneshvar and remarkable in her letters.

[57]Daneshvar, Nameh-ha, vol. 3, 543–44. Al-e Ahmad would later write “The American Husband” (1966), the only short story of his to actively engage an American setting. In this story, much of the plot revolves around an Iranian woman’s discovery of her American husband’s actual profession as a gravedigger, which is depicted as shameful not only because of its contact with the dead—a taboo—but also because his fellow diggers are Black (p. 77).  “The American Husband” (“Showhar-e amrikayi”), in Panj dastan (Tehran: Ravaaq, 1977), 67–82.

He would also write a series of ethnographies that included recording of racial aspects of the people of Kharg, an island in the Persian Gulf that was a major slave trading post. Dorr-e yatim-e khalij, jazireh-ye Khark (The Pearl of the Gulf, the Island of Khark) (Tehran: Majid, AH 1339/AD 1960).

[58]Al-e Ahmad would later meet Ellison when he himself participated in the Harvard International Seminar in 1965. Although Roy Mottahedeh mentions this meeting in passing (and more generally attributes Al-e Ahmad’s being chosen to his being one of the obvious intellectual leaders of Iran, rather than through his wife’s advocacy, which is clear to anyone who reads their correspondence), he does not, in my view, read Al-e Ahmad’s participation correctly and generally uses this to fit into his own view of Al-e Ahmad. Historical or biographical views of any individual may (indeed must) change over time, but I see Mottahedeh’s work as feeding into the hagiographical view of Al-e Ahmad, which sees him as a prefiguring martyr of the revolution. More recent research has sought to revise these views somewhat. Golnar Nikpour’s comparison of Al-e Ahmad’s hajj memoir Khasi dar miqat (published in English under the title Lost in the Crowd) with the account of Malcolm X’s hajj experience in The Autobiography of Malcolm X is an important comparative attempt, but misses out on Al-e Ahmad’s explicit engagement of Malcolm X’s ideas in his letters to Daneshvar and elsewhere. Golnar Nikpour,  “Revolutionary Journeys, Revolutionary Practice: The Hajj Writings of Jalal Al-e Ahmad and Malcolm X,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, no. 1 (2014): 67–85.

[59]Daneshvar, Nameh-ha, vol. 3, 385.

[60]Daneshvar, Nameh-ha, vol. 3, 428–29.

[61]Daneshvar, Nameh-ha, vol. 3, 428–29.

[62]One of the most interesting implications of observing these changes in Daneshvar’s work and tracing their possible sources is that it makes us look in different ways at the nativism that Al-e Ahmad came to espouse in his late work. Even before Gharbzadegi, it is clear that Daneshvar’s accounts of the United States and race had an impact on Al-e Ahmad.