Voluntary Conversions of Iranian Jews in the Nineteenth Century

Nahid Pirnazar Volume 4, Number 2, Summer 2019

Nahid Pirnazar <nahidpirnazar@gmail.com> earned her Ph.D. from UCLA in Iranian Studies, teaching the Habib Levy Visiting Professorship of Judeo-Persian Literature and The History of Iranian Jews at UCLA. Dr. Nahid Pirnazar is the founder and president of the academic research organization, “House of Judeo-Persian Manuscripts.” Dr. Pirnazar’s works have been featured in English and Persian in Academic publications including, Irano-Judaica, Irānshenāsi, Iran Nameh and Iran Namag. She is also a contributor to the Encyclopedia of Jews in the Islamic World as well as Encyclopedia Iranica and the guest editor of the quarterly of Iran Namag (Summer, 2016).

Prior to the nineteenth century, with few exceptions, voluntary conversion was an unknown phenomenon in Iranian Jewish history. In Islamic Iran, infrequent voluntary

conversions were mainly for socio-economic or cultural reasons. According to the Shi’ite interpretation of Koranic Sura IX, verse 28, Jews were characterized as “impure and non-beleivers.”^{^[1]} In this respect, Ephraim Neumark, a visitor from the Holy Land in late 19^th century, reported: “In Iran, they do not purchase bread or other food stuffs from Jews, and should a Jewish to purchase from a Muslim, he must point to the product he wishes to purchase from a distance.^{^[2]}

Furthermore, dominated as “ahl al-Dhimma” meaning “under the protection of Islam,” Jews were prohibited from celebrating their identity. Thus, at the threshold of the nineteenth century, the deprived, humiliated, and hopeless members of the Iranian Jewish community—with the exception of a few educated and elite members—were left without self-esteem, dignity and pride, almost fading away from the consciousness of Western Jewry. Iranian Judaic traditions were outdated, as religious laws had remained untouched since Joseph Caro’s fifteenth century halakhic book, Shulhan Arukh, a guideline for Judaic traditions and laws.^{^[3]}

History has demonstrated that, while disasters and hardships may strengthen one’s religious ties, they may also draw an individual either to denial of faith or the search for a spiritual alternative. Mohammad Saeed Sarmad Kashani, a seventeenth century poet of Jewish descent, is an example of the latter, as he sought a spiritual alternative to voluntary conversion. He turned from Judaism to Islam, Hinduism, and mysticism, respectively, before ultimately being beheaded as an agnostic on the steps of Jame‘ Mosque in Delhi around 1661. Similar cases are noted the discourse of “Jewish Sooffees of Meshed and Bokhara in 1831,” as reported by Joseph Wolff, a Christian missionary, and the experience of the Jews of Kurdestan, who celebrated the Jewish festival of Simchat Torahwith Soofi type mystic dances of samā‘.^{^[4]} Upon review of the motives above, one can infer that the urge for religious conversion, as a solution, often speaks of a profound need for social change.

Image of Iranian Jews in the Nineteenth Century

Unlike some of the governing bodies in neighboring countries, the Qajar rulers (1779-1924) denied the Jews important economic roles. In addition to occupying low-income professions, Jews were nonetheless able to participate in businesses prohibited to Muslims.

Only in a few major cities did Jews have the opportunity to occupy higher social positions outside of the Jewish community, mainly as physicians for the royalty or for the public.^{^[5]} Reports from travelers and Christian missionaries such as Joseph Wolff, Henry Stern and other travelers including Benjamin II, who had visited Iran at the time, talk about the friendly attitude of royalty to such doctors; otherwise, the inferior social conditions of Iranian Jewry remained largely unnoticed through the first half of the nineteenth century. It was not until the famine in 1871 and the two visits of Nasser al-Din Shah Qajar ( 1848-1896) to Europe, in the years 1873 and 1889, that the attention of European Jews was drawn toward the Jews of Persia.^{^[6]}

At the time, the insecure social environment and weak legal system of the Qajars had allowed an alternative protective measure, the Capitulation Law, to be used by some affluent families including elite Jewish ones.^{^[7]} Those holding dual nationality were sheltered under the protection of their respective new countries’ jurisdiction.^{^[8]} While some Jews sent petitions pleading their legal and social cases to European Jewish organizations such as the Anglo-Jewish Association or the Alliance Israélite Universelle, most Jews did not have such access.^{^[9]} Under such circumstances, for unprivileged and unprotected Jews, change of faith offered an alternative, or even a remedy to improve or gain legal and social respect. Persian Jews waited for the arrival of Alliance schools as an expected liberator who would offer them education, protection, and self-esteem. Mr. Bassan, the Alliance representative to Kermanshah in 1904, described his arrival in the city by reporting that, “For the Muslims, I was a strange creature; for my fellow Jews, a person to be treated with the greatest respect and who had come to bring security and tranquility.” The memoirs and documents reflected in the bulletin of Alliance give testament to the community’s lack of self-esteem, pride, and security. Albert Confino, the first educator sent to Iran, reports the enthusiasm, emotions and the tears he received upon his arrival to Kashan and later Isfahan, “as if they were welcoming not the teachers or founders of school, but liberators in person”.^{^[10]}

Alliance Israélite Universelle, faculty and students,15th year anniversary of the boys school in Tehran Courtesty of www.7dorim.com

Alliance Israélite Universelle, girls’ school Kermanshah, 1950.

Iranian Jewish emancipation was facilitated as a result of the education provided by Alliance, the first school established in 1898, the limited civil rights provided by the constitution for all minorities in 1906, and the revival of the dream of Zionism, thanks to the Balfour Declaration, signed in 1917. Such privileges not only established a “national identity” for Jews, but also transformed the means for the fulfillment of respected social status and a gradual change to their social reputation and the rate of religious conversions of Iranian Jews.^{^[11]}

At this point, unlike the Sephardic Moranos of Spain, a number of the forced converts of Jews of Mashhad, named as Allah Dad (God Given) or Jadid al-Islam (New Muslims) returned to their original faith.

Conversion to Islam

In the unstable atmosphere of the nineteenth century, Jewish voluntary conversion to Islam, for the most affluent families, was stimulated by socio-economic or professional reasons. Prestigious positions such as private physician to the royal family—individuals like Hakim Haq Nazar and Hakim Nurmahmood, servicing the Qajars—or instances of intermarriage between prominent members of the two communities were the causes behind some conversions.^{^[12]} As for common people, the stigma of “impurity,” as well as mandatory observation of Jewish religious and legal restrictions were strong motives.^{^[13]} In that period of instability, financial and social issues were serious impetuses for conversion to Islam. Among the motivations for conversion to Islam were financial issues depriving Jews of legal and business rights for making transactions with Muslims. The Law of Apostasy allowed Muslim members of the family be the sole recipients of the family inheritance; among other incentives for conversion were exclusion from the larger Muslim community, obligation to wear certain attire and identification patches, and lack of protection by the authorities even toward physicians serving the royalty or the public in case of malpractice.^{^[14]}

A number of prosperous families adopted Islamic identities, at least by pretense, mainly duetothe restrictions imposed by laws of impurity which helped Jewish individuals avoid segregation, and to be allowed to establish social ties with Muslim neighbors and business partners. Aside from the very few cases of Capitulation Law, nominal conversions to Islam were employed as a legal strategy to protect the economic interests of privileged families. This practice was tolerated by both the Shi’a ‘ulama and the Jewish community, without incurring the usual demands from converts to publicly observe Islamic edicts such as mosque attendance.^{^[15]} Despite these alleged nominal, or covert conversions, such families, like that of Hakim Nurmahmood maintained their prominence in the Jewish community. In later years, some of their descendants such as Dr. Loghman Nehoray even served as Jewish representatives in the National Assembly without the potential stigma of covert conversion.^{^[16]}

Hakim Nurmahmood received patients at his home in 1880s
Courtesy Amnon Netzer, Padyavand III, 1999.

In other cases, however, publicly known conversions were mandatory. One such case occurred in the western city of Kermanshah in the late nineteenth century, when the daughter of a Muslim cleric fell in love with Isma‘il, the son of a prominent Jewish physician, Hakim Nassir. In in order to save the family’s honor, not only did the young man have to marry the daughter of the cleric, but also seventy of his family members were obligated to publicly convert to Islam. Later, in the post-constitution era, the newly converted groom, who was given the title of Mo‘azed al-Molk, (deputy administration) became the vice president of National Assembly in Tehran, and eventually the deputy Finance Minister in the national cabinet. Many descendants of the family, following the will of the Hakim Nassir, returned to Judaism once the political conditions allowed or when they migrated abroad.^{^[17]}

Hakim Nasir family from Kermanshah and his son Mo‘azed al-Molk years after conversion into Islam
Courtesy of Nina Harouni Springer (2017). See: Avraham Cohen, “The Jewish Community of Kermanshah (Iran) from the early 19th century to the Second World War,” Jerusalem 1992 (Heb) rights & permission: Noam Publishing, Jerusalem.

Courtesy of Mo‘azed family reporting about the Jewish heritage of
Nasir al-atebba’ and Mo‘azed al-Molk (2017)

For commoners, voluntary conversion had a dual cost. They had to cut ties with the Jewish community, while in the Muslim community, they still continued to bear the stigma of outsiders, carrying the name Jadid al–Islam (new convert). Such derogatory connotations haunted following generations as well, whereas conversion to other minority faiths did not carry any later tag.

Conversion to Christianity

Historically the Jews have lived in Iran about 900 years longer than Christians.^{^[18]} Nevertheless, all religious minorities in Iran, including Christians, Assyrians, Nestorians and Armenians, had not much conflict with the Jews, as all more or less shared the same experience in Islamic Iran.^{^[19]} However, beginning with the 19^th century, various Christian outreach societies such as the London Missionary Society from England and the American Presbyterian Missionary from America undertook a vast policy of spreading Christianity among not only the Nestorian Assyrians in Northern Iran, but also among the Jewish communities throughout Iran and Central Asia. Although missionary activities were permitted for the purposes of attracting non-Muslims, the protocol was not always observed by the missionaries in their effort to convert some Muslims.^{^[20]}

For the Jews of Iran, conversion to Christianity was another means of escaping their living conditions. Though they were not very successful at first, the seeds of their work blossomed among the Jews through the latter part of the century. Ironically while leaders of European Jewry were negotiating with Nasser al-Din Shah regarding the establishment of Alliance schools, during his two trips to Europe, Western Christian missionaries had acted more swiftly and were already trying to promote their faith by offering hygiene, medical, and financial facilities in Iran. ^{^[21]}

Among the many British evangelical missionaries to Iran in the early nineteenth century, Joseph Wolff and Henry Stern are particularly valuable historical resources thanks to their descriptions of Persian Jewish society.^{^[22]} Joseph Wolff (1795-1862), throughout his life made three missionary journeys to Iran.^{^[23]} His first journey (1821-1824) described in Missionary Journal and Memoirs of Revered Joseph Wolff; his second journey (1831-1834) was recorded in Researches and Missionary Labours Among the Jews, Mohammedans, and other Sects; and his third trip was reported in Narrative of a Mission to Bukhara to Ascertain the Fate of Colonel Stoddart and Captain Conolly.^{^[24]}

Joseph Wolff, on his three different trips to Iran reports on his numerous visits with the crown princeAbbass Mirza,^{^[25]} and speaks about the religious identity of the Jews of Mashhad even before the massacre of 1839. According to Wolff, by 1831 and before the Massacre of Mashhad, some Jews of Mashhad had dual religious identity, mainly for business and social reasons. Wolff describes “Mullah Levi Ben Meshiakh, a Mohammedan at Meshad, and a Jew whenever he goes to Sarakhs, while his wife and children still professing Jewish religion.”^{^[26]} He also describes the level of cultural assimilation of the Jews, finding them writing Hafez in Judeo-Persian, while not having many religious books such as the Talmud available.^{^[27]} He even writes about Jewish Suffees studying the Quran, led by a Muslim Morshed named Mohammad Ali, with the aim of finding confirmation of the validity of their Suffee systems.^{^[28]} As an evangelist, Wolff expresses his regret for seeing that “no attempt has ever been made in the way of converting these Jews,…who are ignorant on the subject of Christianity.”^{^[29]} Furthermore, it is in his book, Narrative on a Mission, that he speaks of the converts of Mashhad of 1839, referring to them as “Islam Jadeeda.”^{^[30]}

Henry Stern was another evangelical missionary who visited Iran twice in 1844 and 1852.^{^[31]} On his first trip in 1844, he traveled through Damascus and Baghdad. In Iran he first visited Kermanshah, and Hamadan, both in western Iran and later Shiraz in the south then going north towards Isfahan, with Tehran as his final destination. It is during this visit in Tehran that he most likely met with the Physicians of the Court of Mohammad Shah (1834-1848), including Ḥakim Ḥaqnaẓar and Ḥakim Moshe and their sons, the latter converts to Christianity. Stern indicated that the main outcome of this period was the creation of interest in the study of the books of the Christian Society and the eagerness to enter into discussion on the subject of Christianity.^{^[32]} One possible result of this connection is the later conversion of Mirza Nurollah, the son of Hakim Moshe.

On his second trip in 1852, which Stern reports in Dawnings of Light In the East, Stern considered traveling in Iran as perilous. On both trips Stern portrayed the misery and poverty of Jewish communities, blaming the Church for being so late and “unmindful of her duty and indifferent to the call of thousands of Jews, calling for help.”^{^[33]} He reported that, during his visit to Kermanshah, on a Shabbat morning dated Febuary 27, 1852, upon his entrance to a local synagogue in “an unhealthy part of the town, and amidst a few wretched hovels, which [were] striking proof of the misery of their occupants,” he is kindly received by a mulla [rabbi]. On his entrance, he is offered “an unoccupied seat on a mat,” and a talis, the prayer shall, which he politely refuses to wear, responding “ I did not require such implements in pouring out my feeling in prayer to God.” Upon the conclusion of the service which he finds “neither solemn nor devotional,” he is invited to the oratory, preaching to them of “the very Savior whom they ignorantly have so long despised and rejected,” attributing all the misery and suffering of the community to the sin of not having yet accepted Christ as the Savior. He further adds that:

One of the Rabbis, Mullah Aron, was evidently afraid of the effect discourse might have, and politely requested me to speak Hebrew, and not Persian; but I told him that since all were sinners, and stood in need of a Savior, it was my duty to declare the saving message in a language understood: ‘Why are we in the prison-bonds of the Ishmaelites, and treated as the dust under their feet? Why do the spoilers seize our property, and kidnap our daughters under their defiled roofs? Surely our sins and unbelief are the cause of this misery!’^{^[34]}

In general by the second half of the century, the misery and deprivation suffered by the Persian Jewish community had left it devoid of self-esteem and pride. The famine of 1871, poor hygiene due to squalid living conditons and various diseases, made the Jews desperate for any help that was offered to them.

However, during the twenty-five years of delay since the first approach of European Jews to Naser al-din Shah in 1873, until the establishment of the first Alliance Schools in 1898 , the first Christian missionary schools were established as early as 1876 in the ghetto of Tehran. Other schools that were established included those in Hamadan 1881, Isfahan in 1889 in and and Kermanshah in 1894. Having twenty to thirty Jewish children converted in the year 1891-2, the year was considered by the missionaries as the “year of spiritual harvest.”^{^[35]} To best connect with the Persians, the American missionaries provided evangelical, medical, and educational activities.^{^[36]} At stations in various cities, they offered hygiene and medical care, and, in the final quarter of the nineteenth century, opened separate schools for boys and girls. The key vehicle for their missionary activities, schools, were first established in Hamadan, and later in all major cities.^{^[37]}

Among the many different missionary societies mentioned that were involved in religious conversions were the Church Missionary Society of London, the London Society for the Jews and the American Presbyterian Missionary, all of whom worked in Iran on a cooperative basis.^{^[38]} The Reverend Robert Bruce from the Church Missionary Society of London was sent to Iran in 1869. He went to Jolfa, the Armenian suburb of Isfahan, with the intention of revising a Persian Bible which was accomplished by 1871. He also persuaded his Society to establish a mission in Iran named the Church Missionary Society. A number of Armenians of Jolfa became Protestants, and after 1900, medical and other work had begun in Isfahan. By 1935, missionaries were primarily in the four cities of Isfahan, Kerman, Yazd and Shiraz, with a commitment to cooperate and coordinate with each other.^{^[39]}

After having sent three missionaries in 1852 in response to the request of several converts from the leading Jews in Hamadan, the London Society of the Jews sent a missionary to that city in 1881 and another one in 1883 who remained in Iran only until 1884.^{^[40]} Among the first and most dramatic conversions influenced by this missionary are those of Mirza Nurollah, the son of the prominent Jewish physician of the royal court, Hakim Moshe. He was sent to England for training in 1884. Upon his return in 1888, in addition to his missionary work, Mirza Nurollah opened a school in Jubareh, the Jewish Ghetto of Isfahan which the Reverend J.L. Garland took charge of in 1897.^{^[41]}

London Society for Promotion of Christianity amongst Jewish Youth Courtesy of www.7dorim.com

By 1900, Mirza Jalinus, son of Hakim Shokrollah and the nephew of Mirza Nurollah, on his sister’s side, converted to Christianity.^{^[42]} Mirza Jalinus, being a physician as well, had a different impact on the Jewish community. Upon his death, another Jewish convert, the Reverend Iraj Mottahedeh, took over his mission.^{^[43]} The loyal services as native missionaries and educators of these new converts had a great impact on the life and education of the Iranian Jewish community.

Mirza Nurollah was later on appointed by the London Society to conduct two schools for Jewish children in Tehran, which were later taken over from the American Presbyterian Missionary.^{^[44]} The two schools were named Sedagat for boys in 1897 and Nur school for girls in 1898. Mirza Nurollah passed away in 1925 and his mission was continued by his daughter Gertrude, known as Miss Nurollah, and his nephew Mirza Jalinus, who had both been sent to England for education.^{^[45]} The school with two sections of boys and girls expanded with financial support from some Jewish community members, including a banker, Haj Eshagh Fahimian and a tailor, Yossef Darvish. The school gradually moved to different locations with larger space. By 1925, 200 boys and 150 girls were enrolled at the school with a faculty consisting of almost all new converts of Jewish descent.^{^[46]} The school was closed in 1937, but after WWII Miss Nurollah opened a new professional day school for girls .^{^[47]}

Graduation ceremony of Girls’ Nur school, 1962
Right to left: Mr. Soleyman Haim, Miss Nurollah the principal, unknown, Mirza Jalinus principal of boys Nur Sedaghat school, Hossein ‘Ala past prime minister and incombant minister of the royal court.
Courtesy of www.7dorim.com

As for Hamadan, the Station of London Society of the Jews was relinquished in 1904 and its work was transferred and continued by the American missionaries in that city.^{^[48]} Garland was put in charge of Isfahan in 1897 by the Anglican church [The London Society for Jews] to set up two schools, one [for boys] in Jubareh, the Jewish Ghetto, and one [for girls] in Jolfa, theArmenian section of the city.^{^[49]} Having Isfahan as his base, Garland sometimes visited the surrounding cities of Khonsar, Golpayegan, and Borujerd for his missionary purposes throughout his life.^{^[50]} In 1904, the boys’ school was transferred to Isfahan while the girls’ school continued in Jolfa until 1912. The boys’ school was later expanded and renamed Stuart Memorial College in memory of Bishop Stuart, the first missionary Bishop in Iran. In 1939 Stuart Memorial College was encorporated into the Iranian secondary educational system and was renamed Adab High School, from which many Jewish youth graduated.^{^[51]}

As Amnon Netzer reports, the school in Jubarheh was financially supported for years by Ishaq Sasson, a new Jewish convert. In spite of the existance of Alliance Israélite schools the Jubareh school survived, although with fewer and fewer students, until 1928. Reverend Garland passed away in Isfahan in 1932.^{^[52]}

The American Presbyterian Missionary, which had originally started its limited missionary work in Iran in 1834/35, was transferred to the Presbyterian Board of Foreign Missions in 1872. Under the new leadership, it followed the Church Missionary Society of London and the London Society for the Jews. The American group, under this new leadership, tried to reach the Iranians through the gates of evangelical, medical, and educational activities in the eastern and western parts of the country while the British focused on the southern regions.^{^[53]}

In 1887 an American school based on the US educational system was founded in Tehran by James Basset, who was later joined by Samuel Ward, another Presbyterian missionary. Mirza Nurroallah became the principal of this school in 1897.^{^[54]} However, probably the most appreciated educational activity of the American Presbyterian missionaries in Iran was the founding of two prominent schools for girls and boys which educated many Jewish and non-Jewish students. Their first girls’ school in Tehran, later named Iran Bethel School, was founded in 1874, with only 12 students. The school was located near the American Church, providing board and clothing, and was tuition-free. At the end of the first ten years, the school moved into a new location inside the mission premises. Jewish and Zoroastrian girls applied for admission since 1888, but no Moslem girl attended the school until much later. By 1898, the school turned into a day school with no further free tuition.^{^[55]} Miss Jane Doolittle took over as principal of the girl’s school in 1921. The name of the school was first changed to Nurbakhsh and by 1935 to Reza Shah Kabir.^{^[56]} Nevertheless, Miss Doolittle continued with another girls’ school which carried the name of Iran Bethel until the late 1960s, when the school was transferred to the Girls’ College of Damvand, headed by Dr. Francis Gray.^{^[57]} Many Iranian Jewish or non-Jewish girls attended that school to enhance their education.

The American College for boys, changed into Alborz College in 1935, was the most renowned achievement of the educational activities of Christian missionaries in Iran. It was founded in in 1873, almost two decades before Alliance Israélite, for the purpose of converting Iranian Jewish and Armenian boys. The school was directed later on by Dr. and Mrs. Samuel Jordan from 1898. The missionary couple carried out an extensive promotion campaign for the expansion of the school with the addition of full college-level work. By 1935, the school requested to be identified by the Persian name, Alborz College, yet still maintain the initials of the American College of Tehran (A.C.T.). Both schools, the American College and Nurbakhsh, preserved the highest standard of education, and, played a tremendous role in the education of Iranian youth of all faiths until they were taken over by the Iranian government in 1939.^{^[58]}

Another area of full cooperation between the British and American parties were the Church-synagogues named “Penial Churches” which were established by the London Society and Presbyterian Church in 1894, much to the resentment of the people of Hamadan. Such combined church-synagogues and assemblies were also held in Isfahan and Tehran. However, the station in Hamadan was relinquished in 1904 and the work was continued by the American missionaries.^{^[59]} In the case of Isfahan, the church was composed entirely of Jews, and was a part of the Church of England under the auspices of the Anglican Bishop in Isfahan, with close connection to the church in Tehran. This effort allowed Jews to pray with the translated Old and New Testaments by 1900, in both Judeo-Persian and Persian scripts, provided by the London Society for the Jews.^{^[60]}

In the areas of hygiene and health services, the establishment of hospitals by the British, American, Russian and French missionaries brought modern medicine into both major and small cities, places where otherwise no form of modern medicine was practiced.^{^[61]} It is through these missionary medical establishments such as the Church Missionary Society that some Iranian Jews were introduced to Western modern medicine and Western physicians, which in most cases resulted in the voluntary conversion of the students or their families to Christanity as well in order to access these services. The establishment of a British hospital in Isfahan, in 1914, known as the Morsalin Hospital taught Western medicine to many Jewish and non- Jewish students.^{^[62]} Subsequently a women’s hospital was founded,^{^[63]} where, in addition to offering medical services, women were trained as nurses. Among students of Jewish descent, Dr. Shokrollah Hakhamimi trained as a physician and Mrs. Iran Hakhamimi as a nurse.^{^[64]} Eventually the mission sponsored new maternity hospitals in cities of Yazd (1898), Kerman (1901), and Shiraz (1924). It was in these cities where doctors pioneered surgery for the carpet weavers.^{^[65]} Medical services of the Presbyterian missionary were also offered in the city of Rasht since 1905, where a hospital was later established. After WWI, hospitals’ financial aid attracted many needy patients among the Jews, Assyrians and Armenians. However, the hospital was taken over by the Soviet Government, but later controlled by American missionaries again.^{^[66]}

Although Protestant missionaries were of great service to Iran in the fields of medicine and education and opened many doors to future progress, the Christian message was not widely accepted among Muslims. Nevertheless, their evangelic causes offered through medical and hygienic services brought Jewish patients, for the most part, closer to the physicians and nuns who helped heal their bodies and souls, resulting in many conversions in almost all the cities where they rendered their services.^{^[67]}

One of the main tasks of Christian missionary activities was the distribution of pamphlets and stories infused with Christian doctrine, translated into Judeo-Persian to be read by Jews. For this undertaking, they required Christian Jews who understood Hebrew.^{^[68]} In the first half of the century, except for some missionary publications in Assyrian for distribution in Urumiah and Azarbayjan, basically not much Persian language material had been published. Reportedly an effort was made to publish some books by a missionary representative named C.G. Pfander from the Basle Mission in Caucasus, without much success.

As early as 1840, the British missionaries attempted to translate and transliterate the books of the New Testament into Persian and Judeo-Persian for the Jews in the northeast and southwest of Iran. In 1847, the first translation of the Gospels, transliterated into Judeo-Persian was printed in London to be distributed amongst the Jews of Persia.^{^[69]} The fierce resistance of Persian Jews towards these efforts was not only expressed by the majority of Jews in those communities where the mission tried to get a foothold, but also by the unique literary product which very clearly encouraged their conversion.^{^[70]} The translation of the well-known medieval polemical treatise on the life of Jesus, Toldoth Jeshu, into Judeo- Persian in 1844 was no doubt motivated by the desire to resist the activities of the Christian missionaries of that time, giving the Jews a defensive weapon in their discussions with the missionaries.^{^[71]}

The London Society also initiated to translate the Old Testament, specifically the five Books of the Torah (Pentateuch) into Judeo-Persian. Upon the request of the British Bible Society, Mirza Nurollah took upon himself the task; if not for his efforts, “the Christian missionary might have failed all together.”^{^[72]} The book was published in London in 1895 and then distributed among the Jewish population in Iran. Mirza Nurollah’s effort was continued by two other Persian Jewish converts, his cousin Mirza Khodadad, and his nephew and cousin Mirza Jalinous, both the descendants of Hakim Eshagh who helped translate and transliterate the entire Old Testament into Judeo-Persian, which later on found its way into every Jewish household.^{^[73]}

One can assume that the choice of some Iranian Jews to convert to Christianity, moving from one marginalized minority group to another, involved different elements than those for conversion to Islam. The direct access of the missionaries to the very heart of Jewish families could have been a crucial point, such as the case of Henry Stern’s acquaintance with the family and sons of Hakim Moshe on his first trip (1844) and his visit to a synagogue in Kermanshah during his second trip (1852). These contacts were provided by the submissive attitude of the Jewish leaders, inviting the missionaries into their homes and synagogues and the persistence of the Hebrew-speaking missionaries using their biblical and Persian knowledge in their interactions.

The desperate need for schools and the thirst for education sent many Jewish children to missionary schools, especially when free board and clothing were initially provided.^{^[74]} Lack of knowledge about Judaism, in particular its philosophical and ethical values made the missionary arguments convincing and impressive. The novelty of the church-synagogue assemblies held in Persian, a language which they could understand and relate to, brought more people to the prayer chapel, and finally the conviction of the Messianic Arrival, the concepts of redemption (salvation and deliverance), absolution (forgiveness of one’s sin) as well as ascendance to heaven by accepting Christ seemed attractive to some.^{^[75]}

As an example of their efforts, a missionary report of 1891-1892, refers to the year as the “year of the spiritual harvest,”^{^[76]} averaging about 20-30 Jewish student conversions per year. Nevertheless, with the opening of Alliance Israélite, Iranian Jews became less accessible to the influence of the missionaries. A historian of the Protestant Missionary writes: “Among the Jews the fond hopes of the early days have not been fulfilled…The close connection of the Jews with the Jewish world outside Persia and the munificent donations of the French Alliance Israélite make the Jews less accessible to missionary influence.”^{^[77]}

Altogether the percentage of Jewish conversion to Christanity dropped after the establishment of the Alliance in Iran and the Jewish pride created after the Balfour Declaration of 1917. During the reign of the Pahlavis and the departure of most missionaries the rate of conversion further decreased. After the Islamic Revolution of 1979, in spite of all the covert conversion of Iranian Moslems to Christianity, we hardly hear of a Jewish conversion to that faith. The new Jewish converts abroad were basically divided into two groups, those who joined Presbyterian churches or reverted back to Judaism.

Conversion to the Bahā’ī Faith

The Bahā’ī faith began in 1844 with Seyyed Ali Mohammad-e Bab (1820-1850), who proclaimed himself to be the “Gate of God” through which man “can pass into the chamber of beatitude and true faith.”^{^[78]} In 1863, he was followed by the prophetic proclamation of Mirza Hossien Ali Nuri (1817-1892), later named as Bahā’ullāh. His son and successor Abdul-Bahā (1844-1921), expanded the social ideas of the faith; his grandson and successor, Shoghi Effendi (1897-1957) envisioned a global perspective to the faith.^{^[79]}

The rise of the Bahā’ī faith came in the midst of Persian socio-political and economic stagnation. This progressive and tolerant movement with its high level of morality was enough to be seen by some Persian Jews as their salvation.^{^[80]} For the first time, the Jews found Persian-speaking friends within another religious minority.The Bahā’ī Faith, with its initial flexibility and ability to redefine itself during its formative period, achieved global success and expansion.^{^[81]} In contrast to Islam, the adoption of Bahā’ī faith did not necessitate abandonment of deep-rooted social, family, marital, and business relationships. It was possible for most Jewish converts to continue with their observance of Jewish rituals and holidays, thus making the transition less culturally and socially dramatic. By the same token, intermarriage with families of non-Jewish backgrounds did not occur in Kashan until 1929. For a short while, Jewish Bahā’īs had their own kosher butchery and separate Spiritual Assemblies. However, by the 1930s, the flexible religious identity and loose associations that had been one of the key elements in the growth of the movement were challenged by an institutionalized form of religious confirmation.^{^[82]} The process of consolidation under the leadership of Shoghi Effendi made it more difficult to sustain multiple religious identities, producing a more tightly-knit Bahā’ī community in which memberships to any other religious community were no longer acceptable. Such developments were partly the cause of the declining rate of growth of the Iranian Bahā’ī community by the 1950s. The reversed openness that once enhanced dialogue and exchange is a key to understanding the drastic decline in the number of Bahā’í conversions.^{^[83]}

For both the middle-aged converts and inquisitive youths, change seemed to be the answer. The Bahā’ī Faith’s departure from certain Islamic and Jewish principles raised special interest in Iranian Jews. These points of departure include, among others: the abolition of the concept of impurity freed Jews, Christians, and Zoroastrians from the old Shi’a stigma; the inheritance law based on equality, preferable over both Jewish and Islamic Shi>a laws of apostasy; the emancipation of women and the forbiddance of holy war.^{^[84]} This attitude was even reported by Leon Loria, a teacher of Alliance in Hamadan (1903-1909) as he reports on 30 August 1908 that:

…. It can be stated without exaggeration that nine-tenths of the Jewish population of Hamadan are affiliated with the Bahā’ī sect…They [Bahā’īs] are extremely tolerant….will not accept any differences in treatment of Muslims and non-Muslims, reject all directives concerning the nedjes and allow their wives to walk in the street freely and without veils, They also reject Polygamy.^{^[85]}

The strong Iranian and mystical cultural commonality that the Bahā’ī Faith shared with the other religions of the area was missing in the Western cultural novelties imported by Christian missionaries. It was easier to accept Bahā’ullāh’s messianic claim than to accept Christian concepts like the Holy Trinity and the Original Sin.[86] Furthermore, lack of rooted philosophical and cultural education on Judaism left many unprepared for religious debate specially to some biblical references.^{^[87]} Mirza Abul-Faza’el Golpaygani of Golpaygan was a disciple of Bahā’ullāh. In his “Evidence and Proof of the Truth of the Bahā’ī Religion,” he tried to give genuine biblical prophecies to prove the validity of Bahā’ullāh’s messianic claim in support of one of the first books, the Book of Iqan (The Book of Certitude), written in 1862.^{^[88]}Some of the biblical references by Golpaygani and others include the entire chapter eleven of the Book of Isaiah (Isa: 11) starting with “A shoot shall come out from the stump of Jesse and a branch shall grow out of his root……” which speaks about the arrival of a new Messaiah;^{^[89]} furthermore, William Sears, in his Thief in the Night, particularly elaborates on the same book (Isa 62:2 ) “…..and thou shall be called by a new name that the mouth of the Lord will give…” reasoning the “new messiah” is Bahā’ullāh and his followers are the Bahā’īs.^{^[90]} The number 2300 mentioned in the Book of Daniel in his dream, regarding the time needed for the restoration of the Sanctuary, (Dan. VIII:14) “ ……For two thousand three hundred evenings and mornings…….”, he interprets the days and night as years, to have ended in 1844 when the founder of the Bahā’ī faith proclaimed himself as the Bab.^{^[91]} The accidental exile of Bahā’ullāh to Palestine (Holy Land, in Acre and Haifa) enhanced the effect of the Jewish connection (Hosea II:15) with their faith, and a strong impact on Iranian Jews who were looking for a savior.^{^[92]}

At this point, with the aid of sophisticated Jewish converts, some parts of Bahā’ī writings were translated into Hebrew, first distributed in Hamadan.^{^[93]} In addition, resentment towards strict Jewish clerical authority, in terms of religious observations like those pertaining to the Sabbath, often pushed Jews to Bahā’ī gatherings for spiritual support and fulfillment. In general, the Bahā’ī attachment and its base in Israel, as well as the efforts of its promoters to find biblical indications as the proof of the Bahā’ullāh’s messianic role, created a feeling of familiarity and continuity for Jews.

The center of Jewish Bahā’ī converts was formerly in Hamadan but due to the efforts of the Alliance Israélite teachers the number of converts decreased considerably and the movement went to the Jews of Kashan and Tehran.^{^[94]} According to Ehpraim Neumark, the Pole who visited Hamadan in 1883/4, there were about eight hundred Jewish families in Hamadan, approximately one hundred and fifty of whom were Jews who had converted to the Bahā’ī religion.^{^[95]} We also hear from Rabbi Yeuda Kopelioviz who visited Iran in 1928 and remarked upon the fast spread of the Bahā’ī religion affecting Jewish communities of Isfahan and Shriaz. The extent of the impact was so significant that it was even mentioned in the charter of the Hadassah Society of Jewish Women in Iran-Hamadan. In their charter, paragraph #12 stated that “the Society endeavors to influence the Jewish women not to take part in Bahā’ī meetings.”^{^[96]} Kopelioviz noticed that despite the Alliance school in Hamadan, founded in 1900 in the Jewish quarter, many Jewish children attended the Bahā’ī school located in the same area.^{^[97]}

The geographer Dr. Abraham Jacob Brawer who visited Iran in 1935 raised the astonishing question: “After all, the Bahā’īs too are persecuted in Iran, so what in fact does the Jew gain when instead of a persecuted Jew, he becomes a persecuted Bahā’ī?.”^{^[98]} One reason he offers is that the Bahā’ī accepts all prior prophets, including Zoroaster and Buddha, but all of them are outdated and that the last messenger is Bahā’ullāh, as hinted in the Book of Daniel, the Evangelist texts and the Quran. His second reason is the “simplicity of Bahā’īsm, its universality and the relinquishing of many commandments put upon by other faiths.” Nevertheless, Brawer believed that the country’s modernization and the return to Zion “put an end to the Jew’s fascination with Bahā’īsm.^{^[99]}

Walter Fischel regarded the idea of messianism as the focal point, since Bahā’ullāh claims to be the long awaited Messiah, as Mahdi of the Muslims, the Messiah of the Jews, the savior of Christians and the Saoshyant of the Zoroastrians.^{^[100]} Habib Levy believes that the universal concepts of the unity of the family of man and moral values of the Bahā’ī religion attracted the Jews, especially the educated ones. However, he adds that these concepts had already been introduced and spread by the Jewish prophets, but the alienation from Jewish values and ignorance with regard to the essence of the Jewish religion, not only by the population at large, but also among educated Jews, allowed Bahā’īs to infiltrate different levels of Jewish people.^{^[101]}

Unlike conversion to Islam, conversion to the Bahā’ī faith was not to be an abrupt conversion. Neither did it necessitate abandoning deep-rooted social ties involving many kinship, marriage and business relationships. This transitional period would help a newcomer enter with the psychological assurance that one did not have to make a choice between one’s past and present, but rather gradually adopt the new faith. But once the new demand for formal enrollment (tasjil) were established, since the 1930s, laws related to marriage and prohibition against working on Bahā’ī holidays were strictly enforced. These developments coincided with, and may in part explain the decline in the rate of growth of the Iranian Bahā’ī community by the 1950’s.^{^[102]}

Netzer observes that a considerable number of the “Baha’i Jews” in Iran, particularly in Hamadan and Kashan, reached the highest prestigious ranks in the organizations and leadership. It is reasonable to assume that: those Bahai’s of Jewish origin, who had received a modern education in the Alliance schools, where they acquired fluent French and also mastered the English language, spearheaded the spread of the new religion world wide.^{^[103]}

Conclusion

The motives and authenticity of religious conversions of the nineteenth century regardless of what religion, can be understood in the socio-economic and cultural background of Persian Jewry in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. The low number of voluntary conversions to Shi’ia Islam is understandable, considering the level of maltreatment and humiliation extended by the Muslim majority towards the Jews. Conversion to Islam was primarily for financial gain or promotional purposes whereas, conversions to Christianity and the Bahā’ī faith were likely more genuine, especially seen in those new converts who so passionately dedicated their lives to be active leaders and promoters of their new beliefs. Whereas, a new convert in Islam, however, still bore, at least for one generation, the stigma of Jadid al-Islam, or “new convert.”

Fulfillment of spiritual and emotional needs as well as practical issues within Judaism such as Jewish inheritance and divorce laws which favored male members of the family provoked conversions to other faiths. Furthermore, the new religious affiliation would provide them a larger circle of socio-cultural, economic and political benefits. Overall, however, considering the level of commitment and observance of the new converts, Bahā’ī conversion, in spite of the great persecution that the young religion faced, seems to have been the more successful and lasting one among former Jews.

A study on the first generation of Iranian Jews, following their emancipation, which entitled them to national and limited civil rights, would probably be a true test of the authenticity of prior conversions. The scope of this evaluation should take into consideration those Iranian Jews who at the approach of modernity, in order to fulfill their intellectual and spiritual needs, instead of conversion chose either to go abroad for education or continued their studies at home at the limited facilities available in Iran at the time. This evaluation can also look upon the time when the gates of Israel and other democratic countries were opened to Jews for migration, giving them the long awaited spiritual security.

Coming from a closed and traditional community, Iranian Jews were mostly taught midrashic accounts and strict halakhic and traditional rituals. As a traditionally orthodox community, unlike Western Jews, Persian Jews were never guided through religious channels to face issues of modernity or benefit from reformation. Rabbi Kopelioviz concerning Jewish education in Iran says:

General ignorance among the people also affected religious issues. There are no learned Torah Scholars in Iran. The rabbis are not scholars..…Needless to say that they are not capable of having educational impact on the Jewish community….they do not have the power to conquer the hearts of the young….^{^[104]}

The same observation was made by Dr. Brawer who noted that: “ …the lack of knowledge of the Torah and tradition made it easy for the Bahā’īs & Christians to capture Jewish souls.”^{^[105]}

Brawer also commented on the indifference of the Jews of Iran towards those who converted to Christianity and Bahā’īsm: Such indifferent attitude is most noticeable since the converts

live in one courtyard with their Jewish relatives, celebrate Passover and eat together in their homes [kosher food] and go to the synagogue on Yom Kippur and do not even forget to atone.^{^[106]}

Brawer also observed that [some] Jews took advantage of financial help and other benefits of conversion, such as hospital care and the availability of suitable jobs.^{^[107]} With regard to the rate of conversion, Kopelioviz considered the Alliance as an active factor in the assimilation of Iranian Jews [due to their secular approach of education].^{^[108]} In this respect Amnon Netzer also believes that:

Although the Alliance and the Zionist movement were major factors in halting the wave of conversions, one may say nonetheless that, to a certain extent, they were also factors that pushed the intellectuals towards assimilation……[Not only] Alliance did not reinforce Judaism; on the contrary, it let to acculturation if not assimilation. ^{^[109]}

With the glorification of nationalism during the period of Reza Shah Pahlavi (1925-1941) and the halt he put on political activities, Zionism could not have had an impact on the acculturated Iranian Jews who had the thirst for modernity.

Certainly in modern days, while middle-aged Jews can freely observe their faith in whichever level, from Orthodoxy to Reconstructionism in different Jewish communities, there are academic or non-academic centers available for inquisitive Jewish youth from any background. In academic Jewish institutions or even temples for those who practice religion, there are debate opportunities for those interested in the issues of modernity, secularism, and intellectualism or any other issue challenging Judaism in particular, and religion in general.

Such opportunities provide a rational and modernized approach in questioning spirituality and elements of Judaism without having the need to change one’s faith. Unfortunately, this was an opportunity that the Jews of the nineteenth century and early twentieth century in Iran were were not privileged to have.

[1]The Quranic verse 9:28, “Inama al-Mushrikun najs” meaning the “Idolaters are indeed unclean” has been interpreted differently throughout time. In early Islam non-believer meant “polytheist,”but later on the term implied to “non-Muslim.” As for Sunnis, “non-believer implies only to the polytheists, whereas, Shi>ites interpret and imply the term to followers of other monotheist faiths as well.

[2]Habib Levi, Trkh-e Yahd-e Irn, 2^nd ed., vol. 3 (Costa Mesa: Mazda Publishers, 1999), 422-423. Ephraim Neumark, born in 1860, moved to the Holy Land as a child with his parents. But at the age of 23, he traveled through Tiberias, Syria, Kurdistan, Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan. After his trip, he wrote his three-year travelogue which has been used by many leading researchers of Jewish society.

[3]Shulhan Arukh: (1488-1575 C.E. / 892-983 A.H.).

[4] סימחאה תור (SimhaTorah, rejoicing the Torah) Jewish celebration at the end of Sukkot.

Joseph Wolff, Researches and Missionary Labours Among the Jews, Mohammedans and other Sects, 2^nd edition (London: J. Nisbet, 1835), 128-129.

[5]Walter Fischel, “The Jews of Persia- 1795-1940” in Jewish Social Studies 8, no. 2 (April 1950): 122; E.G. Browne, A Year Amongst the Persians (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1926), 241, 243, 320-21; Habib Levi, Trkh-e Yahd-e Irn, 2^nd ed., vol. 3 (Beverly Hills: Iranian Jewish Cultural Organization of California, 1984), 635, 744-747.

[6]Fischel, “The Jews of Persia,” 127.

[7]Encyclopedia Britannica, S.V. “Capitulation Law”: A treaty whereby one state permitted another to exercise extraterritorial jusrisdiction over its own nationals within the former state’s boundaries.

[8]Levi, Trkh-e Yahd-e Irn, vol. 3, 724-29, as reported from the notes of Soleyman Cohan Sedgh.

[9]Alliance Israélite Universelle, hearafter refered to as the “Alliance.”

[10]Amnon Netzer, “Establishment of the Alliance School in Tehran,” in Pdyvand 3 (Costa Mesa: Mazda Publishers, 1999), 98-99; Honoring the Founders of Alliance Israélite Universelle (New York: 1996), 46. The name of Bassan, as the first Alliance representative in Kermanshah is reported by both Amnon Netzer in Padyavand and the Honoring of the Founders book, as “M. Bassan -1904” with no first name recorded..

[11]Mehrdad Amanat, Negotiating Identities, Iranian Jews, Muslims and Bahā’īs in the Memoirs of Rayhan Rayhani (1859-1939), Ph.D. Dissertation (Los Angeles: University of California, 2006), 107.

[12]Levi, Trkh-e Yahd-e Irn, vol. 3, 668-669, reporting from the memoirs of Rahim Misha’il. In 1892, Zulaykha ,the wife of Zaghi, converted to Islam in order to get divorced. She married the Muslim clergyman who right away claimed all the property of Zaghi for Zulaykha according to the Law of Apostasy.

[13]For divorce of Zolaykha and Zaghi; also see Levi, Trkh-e Yahd-e Irn, vol. 3, 668-669.

[14]Levi, Trkh-e Yahd-e Irn, vol. 3, 635-36, 659-669.

[15]Amanat, Negotiating Identities, 146.

[16]Amanat, Negotiating Identities, 146-147.

[17]Heshmat Allah Kermanshahchi, Iranian Jewish Community: Social Developments in the Twentieth Century (Los Angeles, Ketab Corporation, 2007), 347-350. See also www.ostani.hamshahrilinks.org/Print?itemid=188651.

[18]Circa BCE700- 200 CE)

[19] Nestorian Church, also called the Assyrian Church of the East, views Jesus Christ as two different entities, one human and one divine, in one body. Nestorians have lived in Iran since the pre-Islamic era, having fled from the areas under the control of the Roman Empire and the Catholic Church. See Massoume Price, Brief History of Christanity in Iran, 2002, 6; www.farsinet.com/iranbibl/christians_in_iran_history.html.

[20]Fischel, “The Jews of Persia,” 148.

[21]Fischel, “The Jews of Persia,” 148.

[22]Amnon Netzer, Shofar of New York, September 1998, vol. 209, 22-23.

[23]Joseph Wolff, the world traveler and Christian missionary to the Jews in the Orient was born in Bavaria (Germany) to the family of a Jewish Rabbi. He converted to Catholicism in 1812, but because of his Heretical views, he moved to England and joined the Anglican Church around 1818/1819. He then joined the Society for Promoting Christianity among the Jews (CMJ) which was set up in London about ten years earlier in order to help convert Jews.

[24]Joseph Wolff, Researches and Missionary Labours Among the Jews, Mohammedans, and other Sects [see n. 5],138, 154-157. It is during this visit that the Qajar prince, Abbas Mirza, compared his missionary activity as “a wandering Dervish, who goes about as a man of God,” and he subsequently gave permission to establish a school at Tabreez, expressing his desire to see the nation civilized.

[25]Joseph Wolff, Researches and Missionary Labours, 138,154-157.

[26]Wolff, Researches and Missionary Labours, 136-137.

[27]Wolff, Researches and Missionary Labours, 148.

[28]Wolff, Researches and Missionary Labours,128-129.

[29]Wolff, Researches and Missionary Labours, 425.

[30]Joseph Wolff, Narrative of a Mission to Bokhara, in the Years 1843-1845, to Ascertain the Fate of Colonel Stoddart and Captain Conoly vol.1, 2^nd ed. (London, J.W. Parker, 1845), 176.

[31]Henry A. Stern, Dawnings of Light In The East (London: Charles H. Purday, 1854), 196.

[32]Fischel, “The Jews of Persia,” 147.

[33]Stern, Dawnings of Light In the Eat, 272.

[34]Henry A. Stern, Dawnings of Light In the East, 236-237; also refer to the conclusion, 272-278.

[35]Fischel, “The Jews of Persia,” 148.

[36]Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. Iran Mission, A Century of Mission Work in Iran (Persia 1834-1934) (Beirut: The American Press, 1936), 14-15. Also see Fischel, “The Jews of Persia,” 146.

[37]Massoume Price, Brief History of Christianity in Iran, 2002, www.farsinet.com/iranbibl/christians_in_iran_history.html, 9.

[38] A Century of Mission Work, 112, 14-15.

[39]A Century of Mission Work, 14.

[40]A Century of Mission Work, 14.

[41]A Century of Mission Work, 14-15; see also Netzer, Shofar, vol. 213, article no. 11, 23.

[42]A Century of Mission Work, 14-15, 112; Netzer, Shofar, vol. 213, article no. 11, 23. .

[43]Netzer, Shofar, vol. 213, article no. 11, 23.

[44]A Century of Mission Work, 15,

[45]A Century of Mission Work, 15, 88; Netzer, Shofar, vol. 213, Article no. 11, 23; oral interview with Mrs. Agdas Sabi, a graduate of Nur school (20 July 2017).

[46]Netzer, Shofar, vol. 213, article no. 11, 23, 44.

[47]Netzer, Shofar, vol. 213, article no. 11, 44; Netzer, Shofar, vol. 172, 28, 29, 60, June 1995.

[48]A Century of Mission Work, 15.

[49]A Century of Mission Work, 14-15, 112.

[50]Netzer, Shofar, vol. 213, article no. 11, 23.

[51]Ecyclopaedia Iranica, S.V. “ British Schools in Persia,” www.iranicaonline.org/articles/great-britain-xv; Church Missionary Society Archive SV. “Iran (Persia),” www.ampltd.co.uk/digital_guides/church_missionary_society_archive_general/editorial/introduction/by/rosemary/keen.aspx; also, oral interview with Dr. Hushang Hakhamimi whose parents were educated at Morsalin Hospital (20 July 2017); oral interview with Dr. Shokrollah Baravarian who has attended Adab H.S. (22 July 2017).

[52]Netzer, Shofar, vol. 213, article no. 11, 23.

[53]Walter Fischel, Jewish Social Studies, 146.

[54]Netzer, Shofar, vol. 212, no. 9, 23.

[55]A Century of Mission Work, 86-88.

[56]A Century of Mission Work, 14-15,103; Oral interview with Mrs. Aghadas Sabi a graduate of Nurbakhsh H.S. (20 July 2017).

[57]For further information about Damavand College, see D. Ray Heisey, “Reflection on a Persian Jewel: Damavand College, Tehran,” Journal of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies (in Asia) 5, no. 1 (2011).

[58]A Century of Mission Work, 87; Netzer, Shofar 212, article no. 10, 23. For further information about Alborz College see: www.iranicaonline.org/articles/alborz-college.

[59]A Century of Mission Work, 14-15.

[60]^“The Five Books of Moses”/ אספאר כמסה מאוסי/ اسفار پنجگانه موسی, Judeo-Persic Pentateuch, trans. Amirza Noorollah b. Hakham Hakim Moshe and Amirza Khodada b. Hakham Eliyahoo (London: British Hebrew Persian Bible Society, 1900).

[61]Encyclopaedia Iranica, S.V. “BĪMĀRESTĀN,” www.iranicaonline.org/articles/bimarestan-hospital-.

[62]“Church Missionary Society Archive Iran (Persia), Journal of Research on History of Medicine 2, no. 2, 2013, www.ampltd.co.uk/digital_guides/church_missionary_society_archive_general/editorial/introduction/by/rosemary/keen.aspx; also oral interview with Dr. Hushang Hakhamimi (20 July 2017).

[63]The women’s hospital was founded and placed under the supervision of Dr. Emmelina Stewart.

[64]Oral interview with Dr. Hushang Hakhamimi, having both parents been trained in Morsalin Hospital(July 20, 1017).

[65]“Church Missionary Society Archive Iran (Persia),” Encyclopaedia Iranica, S.V. “BĪMĀRESTĀN,” www.ampltd.co.uk/digital_guides/church_missionary_society_archive_general/editorial/introduction/byrosemary/keen.aspx. The hospital in Shiraz was funded by Ḥājj Moḥammad-Ḥosayn Nāmāzī.

[66]Netzer, Shofar 209, article no. 7, 45.

[67]Century of Mission Work, 56. Beyond the schools, hospitals were also “utilized as a center for evangelistic work,” bringing in similar results.

[68]Fischel, “The Jews of Persia,” 149. Thus Garlan’s “A Christian Catechism for Jewish Pupils” (Isfahan, 1899) was transliterated into Judeo-Persian by a Jewish convert, but all the copies were later burned by the same person who did the translations. See Alliance Israélite (1901), 57. “Catechism” means religious questions and answers to be used to test some body’s religious knowledge in advance of Christian baptism or confirmation.

See also John Elser, The History of American Missionary in Iran, trans. Soheil Azari (Tehran: Nour Jahan Publishers, 1333 AH/1954),101. Prior to that in 1877, another book, named The Christian Dialogue, Ketab-e So’al va javab-e Massihi,was prepared for publication.

[69]Fischel, “The Jews of Persia,” 149. According to the ‘British and Foreign Bible Society, authority from Calcutta was given to issue an edition of Henry Martyn’s translation. (See H. Martyn, Controversial Tracts on Christianity and Mohammdedanism, ed. S. Lee (Cambridge: J. Smith, 1824).

[70]Fischel, “The Jews of Persia,” 149.

[71]Fischel, “The Jews of Persia,” 149; http://www.princeton.edu/judaic/special-projects/toledot-yeshu/:

www.princeton.edu/judaic/special-projects/toledot-yeshu/. “The Book of the Life of Jesus(in Hebrew: Sefer Toledot Yeshu) presents a chronicle of Jesus from a negative and anti-Christian perspective. …..Perhaps for centuries, the story circulated orally until it coalesced into various literary forms.”

[72]Fischel “The Jews of Persia,” 149.

[73]Fischel, “The Jews of Persia,” 150.

[74]A Century of Mission Work, 87.

[75]Meriam-Webster Dictionary, S.V. “Absolution”: “the act of forgiving someone for having done something wrong or sin”; “ a remission of sins pronounced by a priest (as in the sacrament of reconciliation).” “Redemption” means salvation; deliverance from sin.

[76]Fischel, “The Jews of Persia,”148.

[77]Fischel, “The Jews of Persia,” 151.

[78]Walter Fischel, “The Bahā’ī Movement and Persian Jewry,” Jewish Review (1984): 47-55. For the most updated conversion of Jews to the Bahai faith, see Amnon Netzer, “Conversion of Iranian Jews to the Bahā’ī Faith: Early Period,” Irano-Judaica VI (Jerusalem, 2008), 290-323.

[79]Amanat, Negotiating Identities, 104.

[80]Fischel, “The Jews of Persia,” 154.

[81]Amanat, Negotiating Identities,103.

[82]Amanat, Negotiating Identities,125-126, 174.

[83]Amanat, Negotiating Identities, 125.

[84]Fischel, “The Jews of Persia,”153-54.

[85]Honoring the Founders of Alliance Israélite Universelle, 37.

[86]Merriam Webster, S.V. “Original Sin”: “The state of sin that according to Christian theology characterizes all human beings as a result of Adam’s fall”; Merriam Webster, S.V.”Holy Trinity”: “the unity of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit as three persons in one Godhead according to Christian dogma.”

[87]Wolff, Researches and Missionary, 54-55. See also Deut. 18: 15, 18; Fischel, “The Jews of Persia,” 156.

[88]Fischel, “ Jews of Persia,” 155; Abul-Faza’el Golpaygani, 1978, Rasā’el va raqā’em [1886-1913].

[89]Fischel, “ Jews of Persia,” 155.

[90]William Sears, Thief in the Nigh: The Strange Case of the Missing Millennium (Oxford: George Ronald, 1961),

[91]Fischel, “ Jews of Persia,” 155. The 2300 years mentioned in Daniel VIII:14 were said to have come to an end in 1844 C.E. (period of Daniel’s prophecy B.C.E. 456 + 1844 C.E. rise of Bab= 2300 years). For further biblical (old and new) as well as books of other faiths regarding the validity of the year 1844 as the year for the arrival of the new messianic prophecy, see Thief in the Night: The Strange Case of the Missing Millennium.

[92]Fischel, “ Jews of Persia,” 155; Hosea II,15: “ I will make the valley of Achor, a door of hope.”

[93]Fischel, “ Jews of Persia,” 155; see also Amanat, Negotiating Identities, 5.

[94]Fischel, “Jews of Persia,” 156.

[95]Netzer, “Conversion of Iranian Jews,” 303; reports from Neumark, 81.

[96]Netzer, “Conversion of Iranian Jews,” 304.

[97]Netzer, “Conversion of Iranian Jews,” 304.

[98]Netzer, “Conversion of Iranian Jews ,” 304.

[99]Netzer, “Conversion of Iranian Jews,” 306.

[100]Fischel, “Jews of Persia.,” 154.

[101]Netzer, “Conversion of Iranian Jews,” 309.

[102]Amanat, Negotiating Identities, 24-126.

[103]Netzer, “Conversion of Iranian Jews ,” 318.

[104]Netzer, “Conversion of Iranian Jews ,” 304.

[105]Netzer, “Conversion of Iranian Jews ,” 305.

[106]Netzer, “Conversion of Iranian Jews ,” 305.

[107]Netzer, “Conversion of Iranian Jews ,” 305.

[108]Netzer, “Conversion of Iranian Jews ,” 304.

[109]Netzer, “Conversion of Iranian Jews ,” 316.

State Capacity and Democratization in Iran

Misagh Parsa Volume 4, Number 1, Spring 2019

Misagh Parsa < Misagh.Parsa@dartmouth.edu> is a professor of Sociology at Dartmouth College. His most recent book, Democracy in Iran: Why It Failed and How It Might Succeed, was published in November 2016 by Harvard University Press.

Scholars and social thinkers have long analyzed and debated the nature of the democratic state. Most sociologists agree that the likelihood of democratization is directly affected by state capacity, i.e., the power of the political system or the government to control and regulate the activities of the population within its jurisdiction. Democratization can be defined as the process of empowering the civilian population vis-à-vis the state. Empowering the civilian population requires all of the democratic freedoms and civil liberties, including freedom of speech, association, assembly, and above all, political equality and accountability of the rulers. This minimalist definition is consistent with the institutions of liberal democracy, which do not address matters such as equity and social justice. Very high capacity states often undermine the likelihood of democratization and generate irreconcilable conflicts, as in the case of the Soviet Union. Similarly, states with low capacity may fall vulnerable to instability and collapse. Hence, only states possessing a moderate capacity to control the social activities of their public are likely to be able to function along the principles of a liberal democracy. Based on these criteria, Iran’s theocracy would fall into the category of a high capacity state whose institutions are incompatible with liberal democracy.

Iranian society failed to democratize and empower the civilian population vis-à-vis the state for more than a century. Despite repeated popular attempts, from the Constitutional Revolution, through the nationalist movement of the 1950s, to the 1979 revolution and the Green Movement in 2009, Iran’s political system has resisted democratization. During all these contentious periods, internal forces, sometimes in alliance with external powers, denied Iranians democratic rights, and succeeded in imposing highly authoritarian rule.

During the revolutionary struggles, Ayatollah Khomeini and other Islamic leaders promised democratic rights and institutions. Here are a few samples of Khomeini’s statements on freedom and democracy:

“In Islamic government, there is no dictatorship.”
“We think that force and repression are not the means to progress.”
“There is no repression in Islam. There is freedom in Islam for all classes—for women, for men, for whites, for blacks, for everyone.”
“We will not abandon our struggle until we have a real democratic government that replaces the dictatorship and bloodshed.”
“Never allow a small group to rule over you like in the bitter days of despotism of the past. Do not forget the principle of Islamic democracy.”
“Repression has been buried and will not return.”[1]

But, once in power, following the revolution, Ayatollah Khomeini and his supporters pursued policies that undermined democracy and democratic institutions. Khomeini rejected democracy on the grounds that it was based on the rule of humans who could fall into error. Democracy was deemed unacceptable because it had a Western dimension. Khomeini even rejected the suggestion of calling the country an Islamic democratic republic. In a large public gathering in Qom, he noted, “We accept Western civilization but do not accept their corruption.” He denounced those “aristocrats” who lived in the West and had no role in the movement but wanted to derail the revolution. Khomeini declared that those who weakened the government were traitors. He noted that it was the youth who created the revolution, not the lawyers. He stated, “Newspapers should correct themselves and not commit treason against Islam. . . . The thing we want is an Islamic republic, not just a republic, or a democratic republic, or even an Islamic democratic republic, just an Islamic republic.”

Khomeini and his allies pressed relentlessly for the formation of a high capacity state that would remain unaccountable. Once Iranians approved the formation of an Islamic Republic in March 1979, Khomeini called it “the government of God.” Within a short period of time, he and his allies created the most powerful state in Iran’s modern history. Khomeini declared that the preservation of the Islamic system was one of the most important obligations. He asserted that, in the service of Islam, one could spy, lie, and even drink alcohol. Khomeini’s declaration undermined accountability and the rule of law, which constitute critical dimensions of a democratic state.

As the undisputed leader of the revolution, Khomeini determined the Islamic Republic’s constitution, which empowered the clergy. According to the constitution’s Article 5, the Muslim nation’s highest leadership position during the occultation of the Twelfth Imam was the Supreme Leader, reserved for the clergy. In response to criticism that this position might pave the way for dictatorship, Khomeini asserted that the velayat- e faghieh and clerical rule would not establish dictatorship but prevent it. But, in actuality, Khomeini instituted one of the most authoritarian systems in Iran and in the modern world.

Today, the Supreme Leader controls all three branches of government through his position at the apex of an elaborate network of councils and assemblies that reinforce theocratic, authoritarian decision-making and leave no room for democratic checks and balances. The Supreme Leader determines the regime’s top leadership by directly appointing six of the twelve members of the Guardian Council and the head of the judiciary. The Guardian Council vets and approves all candidates for the Assembly of Experts, who must also pass a religious examination. Only approved candidates for the Assembly are presented to the public for a nationwide popular vote. By determining the Guardian Council’s membership, the Supreme Leader exercises additional influence over its role in certifying that all legislation is compatible with Islam. The Supreme Leader also appoints all members of the Expediency Council, which is constitutionally charged with resolving disputes between the Guardian Council and the Majles. The Supreme Leader is appointed for an indefinite term by the Assembly of Experts, which theoretically can dismiss him in case of moral transgression or incompetence. However, such an outcome is highly unlikely because of the Leader’s influence over the Assembly. In reality, the Supreme Leader is accountable to no one.

The Supreme Leader’s powers are not limited to political arena. He enjoys other economic and ideological privileges. In addition to receiving unspecified amount of resources from the state, the Supreme Leader and economic entities under his rule control an estimated fifty percent of Iran’s GDP. More importantly, the Supreme Leader claims unusual qualifications and ideological prerogatives. He and his clerical subordinates claim that he is infallible and does not make mistakes because he receives guidance and inspiration from the prophet and the Twelfth Imam. Some clergy claim that the Supreme Leader is appointed by the Imam of Age (Hidden Imam). Some even note that everyone must submit to the rule of the Supreme Leader and disobedience is tantamount to polytheism. And anyone who opposes the regime would be deemed as mohareb, or enemy of God, and could be executed.

According to the ruling clergy, the Islamic Republic and the Supreme Leader do not gain their legitimacy from the Iranian people because God and the prophet confer the legitimacy for the system and its ruler. It is important to note that such claims negate Article 56 of the country’s constitution, which declares that God “has made man the master of his own social destiny. No one can deprive man of this divine right, nor subordinate it to the vested interests of a particular individual or group.” Obviously, a regime that represents divine rule and whose legitimacy is not rooted in the consent of the people must have attained a high level of autonomy from the population and may not represent the will of the people.

In sum, the Islamic Republic is an example of a high capacity state headed by absolutist rule resembling divine rights, with no accountability. The Supreme Leader wields enormous powers over the social, economic, and political structures of Iranian society, violating the basic requirement of political equality. It has become an exclusive state fundamentally incompatible with liberal democracy. The state imposes numerous obligations on the population but grants it no political rights. According to the rulers of the Islamic Republic, it is the duty of Iranians to obey and submit to a system that is a divine trust.

The formation of such a high capacity state in Iran entails significant implications for the country’s democratization. Extensive state control in virtually every aspect of society violates people’s democratic rights to determine their own destiny. Moreover, such state intervention generates multiple, irreconcilable contradictions and conflicts. Maintaining the Islamic Republic requires widespread, endless repression to silence dissent. Given that Iran’s theocracy is based on absolutist principles that rejects popular sovereignty, the regime cannot be democratized through limited reforms. In combination, the denial of democratic rights, the prolonged exclusion of the populace from determining its own destiny in the social, cultural, economic, and political spheres, endless state repression, along with the inability to reform tend to radicalize the people and set the stage for revolutionary struggles.

To avoid authoritarian rule and establish democracy, democratic movements must refrain from forming high capacity states. Such states often become highly intrusive, have the ability to severely control the social, economic, and political activities of the population under their jurisdiction. Furthermore, high capacity states may also impose all kinds of obligations and restrict people’s rights, violating the basic premises of democracy.

Thus, Iranians interested in empowering the people vis-à-vis the state must attempt to establish a liberal democracy and avoid instituting high capacity states. To democratize, Iranians must realize that above all democracies are based on political equality. Hence, they would have to revoke all political privileges and powerful institutions that have given rise to the theocracy and created economic and cultural advantages for a small portion of the population. All such powers and institutions are incompatible with modern definitions of democracy and democratic rights.

Iranians interested in empowering the people vis-à-vis the state and establish a liberal democracy would find little enlightenment from the Russian and Chinese experiences. A more fruitful path would be to learn what bourgeois revolutions accomplished in England, France, and the United States earlier in those countries’ histories. After all, those revolutions challenged divine rights and demanded people’s political rights, which enabled their citizens to obtain a say in the decision-making processes.

But liberal democracies, which usually rely on market forces to determine the distribution of wealth and income, often do not have an interest in issues of social justice and equity. Iranians interested in equity and social justice may want to study social democracies, which partially empower working and middle classes vis-à-vis the economically dominant class. Social democracies generally possess greater capacity than liberal states, exercise greater control over the economy and society, possess some state enterprises for certain services, and play an active role in the distribution of wealth and income, while still remaining vibrant democracies. When socialists in Great Britain nationalized a number of industries and services after World War II, the country did not become undemocratic. The British government continued for decades to be the major shareholder of British Petroleum, formerly the Anglo-Iranian oil company, the largest corporation in the empire. In spite of such state intervention in the economy, the British government remained democratic. States in Scandinavian countries also have had a greater role in their economies while remaining fully democratic. In Norway, an oil-rich country, the state owns and controls much of its oil, which constitutes about 25 percent of GDP. The country remains both democratic and one of the most egalitarian societies in the world. Norway would provide an appealing model for Iranians seeking social democracy.

In conclusion, this brief analysis demonstrates that state capacity directly affects the likelihood of democratization. High capacity states tend to regulate heavily, control their population’s social activities, and become unaccountable. Such states leave little room for the public to decide their own behavior freely. Although Ayatollah Khomeini promised political freedom and democracy to the Iranian people during the revolutionary struggles, after the 1979 revolution the Islamic regime built a very high capacity state. The Islamic state was empowered to control and regulate the cultural, social, economic, political, and religious activities of the people. Iran’s experience clearly reveals that a high capacity state is incompatible with liberal democracy. Iranians interested in greater political freedom would do better to avoid a high capacity state; those who are also interested in social justice may learn from the experiences of social democracies in Europe and other parts of the world.

[1]Misagh Parsa, Democracy in Iran: Why It Failed and How It Might Succeed (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), 80.

What a Line (Drawing) Might Reveal: Hamid Naficy’s Caricatures

Michael M.J. Fischer Volume 3, Number 3, Fall 2018

Michael Fischer <mfischer@mit.edu> trained in geography and philosophy at Johns Hopkins, social anthropology and philosophy at the London School of Economics, anthropology at the University of Chicago. Before joining the MIT faculty, he served as Director of the Center for Cultural Studies at Rice. He has conducted fieldwork in the Caribbean, Middle East, South and Southeast Asia; and works now on the anthropology of biosciences, media circuits, and emergent forms of life.

For Hamid, July 2018

An invitation to a Naficy game, a family tradition, a kind of reverse e’awase (a Japanese form in which one person writes an essay on a painting and the other produces a new transformed version of the painting): in this case 17 caricatures produced over the years by Hamid Naficy. The invitation’s instruction was: Comment! Seventeen is a traditional Iranian number, the number of neighborhoods in a town, each with its own character. They are often rivals in ritual displays and processions. Not unlike academics in debates and performances.

There are rules of the game. Hamid’s self-imposed rules for the caricatures are: simple pencil or pen and paper, no erasing, focus on the face while an academic is addressing an audience. His own self reflections about the drawings tend toward the Freudian, attributing the attachment to the face as mother love, attachment to the breast, late weaning.

My self-imposed rules of the game: (i) start with pure first-impressions and free associations; (ii) channel the character talking to the audience, and so write in the first person; (iii) re-order the caricatures, from the alphabetical order (by first name) in which they were supplied, intro a chronological order, mainly to underscore the dates of production and their contexts, but also to see if artistic gestures or narrative features might grow over time into signatures of style. The first person address can also give the character, in a final separate short paragraph, a chance to comment on the caricature. Thus, three or four turns of the line: free association, narrative “content,” historical context, character commenting on the caricature.

What does the line reveal that the natural eye does not see? The line in the commentary is the boundary between artist and subject’s point of view. It is a line that needs crossing.

Homa Katuzian, 1985

First impressions: sharp beaked angry bird, wattle a wagging, standing firm in Persian slippers, legs apart, under fitted Safavid robe with flared bell-shaped skirt, back to the audience, looking over his shoulder askance.

HK: What! You really think Reza Shah’s 1921 coup was engineered by the British? And the Anglo-Persian agreement of 1919 was meant to turn Iran into a British protectorate? Not so. Of course Iran fell into the pit of the oil curse of all petroleum rentier economies: all revenue channeled through the state; perfect opening for corruption and repression — build up the secret police, stifle dissent. No difference today. A cancre eats the soul, as Sadegh Hedayat famously put it — you saw my books about him? I also edited Mohammad Mosaddiq’s memoirs: what a waste, all that effort towards restoring a constitutional republic and get some sovereignty over the oil, only to have Ayatullah Kashani and his goons ally with the royalists to bring the young shah back. Oh well, I fit better in Sa’idi’s slippers, do you like them, elegant and pointed like his poems. Yeah, so it’s 1985, you’d think we’d have gotten over all this Islamic craziness, but no, the Iran-Iraq disaster of a war continues with the Battle of the Marshes (Badr) and second war of the cities; the re-election of mid-level mullah Hojat ul-Islam Ali Khamenei as President (they only let three members of the IRP run, disqualifying Mehdi Bazargan who was protesting suppression of basic civil liberties and calling for an end to the war), the Iran-Contra affair (Israel ships weapons to Iran which gets Hezbollah to release U.S. hostages in Lebanon, and the proceeds of the weapons sales illegally aids the Contras in Nicaragua, all at the direction of President Reagan). What a mess!

And you wonder why I’m looking over my shoulder askance?! Make fun, if you like, of my turning my back on the present in favor of a more cultivated past, but I do not have a wattle! — it’s a goatee.

“Homa Katouzian,” 8 March 1985, drawn in a lecture at UCLA.

Julian Greimas, 1986

First impressions: stunned eyes, behind square spectacles, one eye strong and round, one eye squished elliptically and clouded, set above a very long, long, long nose and wonderfully thick upturned long-horn walrus mustache. A seal of a man.

AJG: Taip, oui, d’accord! You see, one eye is tracking what I call the semantic universe while the other is tracking the discourse universe; ja, it’s a bit complicated both neurally and structurally. You see the neural system has to transpose actual language into a meta-language. You know, there is this chiasmus between the right and left eye or rather the nerves largely go to the opposite brain hemisphere. They were first mapped out by Santiago Ramon y Cajal in 1898. So, I’m not really cross-eyed, nor is my right eye squinting or wandering, but it does have to do with Aristotle’s much too static 2×2 logic squares, which I’ve tried to turn into a dynamic generative and transformational square. They call it the Greisemer or semiotic square. Like two eyes, you have phonemic and morphemic binary oppositions to make meaning, but each binary creates a mediating third, and so on, and so there can be a directionality to the transformations. And in any case, in a square that represents binaries as opposite corners, there are diagonal, as well as vertical and horizontal, contrasts between the corners: a big X in a box. Because, you see, to capture how we actually communicate, you have to combine three levels. There is the subject defined by his or her quest for objects; second, the quest follows a narrative schema, sort of the way Vlad Propp analyzed folktales as having characters on the vertical axis and plot sequences along the horizontal axis, or nouns and verbs, if you like. Call these elements of narrative “actants.” So, the subject has a mandate, an action and an evaluation — a narrative. But different subjects deploy these narrative forms with different cognitive styles or grammatical competence. And they, in turn, are modified by their passions into distinctive performances. Taip, yeah, a bit complicated, surface levels and deep levels, transformations and such, all very nice, geometrically speaking, or maybe a kind of cat’s cradle, you know.

Anyway, this caricature of me makes fun of my big nose, but the curved Nietzschean walrus mustache I wish I could grow; mine is bushy but just droops around my mouth, less flamboyant, more like a seal.

“Cornelius Castoriadis, Heteronomous society!” UCLA.

Kaja Silverman, 1987

First impressions: Kwakiutl mask, speedy she-wolf, raptor or raven, angry, and chewing up Freud’s toy train, drooling out the last car. The striking top of the head is what attracts the eye first. The curvature of the nose with its line arching back under the eye is like a bullet train, or airplane cockpit window; and the nose is a 1950s idea of an aerodynamic automobile or airplane nose. The eye shape is like a Kwakiutl raven mask. Then there is the severe razor-straight mustache above the lip. This Freudian condensation of anger’s speed, determination, and pointedness is so dominating, it almost takes effort to scan down and see the mouth ingesting or masticating the train. Or is the train a tongue? The tongue is for talking, working through. In analytic sessions, one deconstructs rebus images, entrained, and needing decoupling, interpretation and transference to make sense to the dreamer, the analyst, and the feminist. It is a tongue like that of Kali’s hanging out, bloody and destructive, ingestive, and indigestive. For Freud, the train is a metaphor for free association (say what comes to mind as if sitting in a train and describing the things that come into view); for inner work (my moods change like the landscapes seen by a traveler from a train); for mirroring (seeing my reflection in the glass of the door or window); for analytic sessions of timed enclosures (huis clos, no exit); and for modern anxieties (staying on track, acceleration of time, always running to catch up, fear of missing the train or Reisefeber, neurasthenia or railway shock causing railway spine, railway brain). Hamid’s caption is blunt: “phallic mother,” making one think of tunnels and penetration, vagina dentata, and maternal incorporation, not letting go of the penis, not allowing separation. Hamid’s own self analysis speculates about over-identification with, over long weaning from, his mother’s face/breast.

KS: Now look, a bit of correction here: my work has changed over time, and I do get tired sometimes of this insistent reduction to narrow terms of the feminist opposition to the repetitive term patriarchy, and so want to turn in the future to the analysis of paintings, like those of Gerhardt Richter. But you are right: at this moment, now in 1987, the book I’m working on, The Acoustic Mirror (1988), attempts to find within psychoanalysis ways to show how the psyche can be resistant or antipathetic to patriarchy. Against Lacan, I want to find a non-phallic access to the symbolic order, showing how desire and identification are structured in relation to the mother rather than only the father, just as Hamid muses about himself. My next book (Male Subjectivity at the Margins, 1992) is going to be about alternative forms of masculinity based on identification with the feminine, which is not to say that Hamid, father of two, with his grand beard is not fully masculine. But look, already in my first book, The Subject of Semiotics (1983), I used the example, from Proust, of Swann and Odette to show how we invest our libido in a variety of associational fields that we attach to a love object. Odette is not Swann’s type, but he is attracted because he hears a piece of music he loves when she is present. Then he connects her to a Botticelli painting, and so on. Our identity is constructed through a series of misrecognitions of ourselves beginning with the mirror stage, and then many other displacements which light up other objects of incorporation than ourselves, and integrate them as parts of ourselves. A parent, the father or mother, is not a fixed entity but a heterogeneous host of memories, any one of which can be the starting point for displacement, and construction of self.

No comment on my caricature: it’s true I have gotten more severe and monotonic in my public readings as I’ve aged, so I kind of like the energy in the portrait and it is certainly very astute in identifying a number of the misrecognitions that have given form to my identity, my writings over time, and the ways in which others see me. My work tries out several of those closed door (huis clos) train carriages (or analytic sessions) to work out how gender dynamics might work to explode the train’s phallicism. Maybe Jacques (Derrida)’s deconstruction of phallic logocentrism could help here.

“Kaja Silverman on ‘Phallic Mother’” 20 May 1987, Society for Cinema and Media Studies Conference

Martin Jay, 1987 (“Habermas and postmodernism”)

First Impressions: man in Russian or Hassidic fur cap, with twisted shark’s teeth, crossed nostrils and beady eyes, severed hind leg astride a tank with aerial up, and a squirrel tail. A wide-eyed circle super-flat manga character peers over the tank from the crook of the man’s arm. Hamid’s caption reads, “Habermas and postmodernism.” Is the manga figure Habermas — that is, a figure of his communicative rationality as the condition of possibility for his ideal public sphere —looking in wonder at the real world’s performative contradictions? Or is the main caricature Habermas, and Martin Jay is the little manga man, the blank commentator, observing, but keeping himself out of the way? So now the head is topped by Habermas’ unruly shock of hair, and the twisted mouth is Habermas’ distinctive hare-lip which, despite corrective surgery, slurs his speech, but does not interfere with his incisors or incisiveness. He preoccupies, overwhelming Martin Jay’s own figure, lecturing on “Habermas and postmodernism” in 1987.

MJ: So, why can’t Jürgen Habermas understand the theorists of the postmodern? It’s really frustrating, because they are actually politically on the same side (eventually he and Jacques Derrida will become good friends), but Habermas today, in 1987, sees the shadows of resurgent Heideggerianism and nihilistic Nietzscheanism in recent French enthusiasms. French intellectuals, after all, have taken the longest time to recognize the totalitarian evils of Stalin, and they seem, according to Habermas, to underestimate the dangers of a reunified Germany and its nationalist resurgence. The shadows of war remain long, there are still amputees, damaged veterans, damaged physically but also psychically and morally. The task of building and rebuilding robust deliberative democracies requires, as Derrida says, constant vigilance, no one more vigilant and outspoken than Habermas, hugging the tank with severed limb. After all, from early on, Habermas analyzed the fall of spectacle politics, the theater state of the French monarchy, and the emergence of an open society of deliberation, newspapers, and debate, in turn threatened by the colonization of the public sphere by owners of the media. Things have not gotten simpler or transparent, and Habermas’ own efforts to define a social theory of pure communicative rationality seems beset by the way the world works in reality. No wonder he appears in the cartoon as a little bubble of purity dismayed by the sharks, cossacks, and crossed swords, waving their tails like flags of virtue. As the rabbis say, if I am only for myself, who and what am I? So too we need to foster plural lifeworlds and not allow their subversion by the formal rationalities that bureaucrats and totalitarian regimes use against us arbitrarily or at the whim of the market.

Aggh! No, I can’t see any likeness between the cartoon and myself, unless I’m supposed to be the little round-eyed guy, and Jürgen’s the one with all the hair – maybe the ambiguity is supposed to be a sign of the postmodern? But it sure is a striking visual, more dramatic than I’ll ever be.

“Martin Jay on ‘Habermas and Postmodernism,” 9 April 1987, UCLA.

Jean-François Lyotard, 1987

First impressions: Sharp nose and searching eyes in a trim bird-like head seems right, but how do we parse the surrealist figuration of a pen — sharpened and protruding from an electric razor, pencil sharpener, or anus, resting atop an oversized buttoned-up shoe, or is it a judge’s gavel decorated with some academic trimming? Either way, shoe or gavel, the foundations on which we balance our discursive rationalizations are at odds with our apperceptions, thanks to visual and libidinal forces. Discourse [and] Figure (1971) interrupt each other (the tropes in language often redirect awry the speaker’s thoughts], as does the wiring and the anus extruding pen, or the libidinal inscriptions, below the neck (The Libidinal Economy, 1974). The synaptic electricity seems to have caused the neural wiring to explode and go haywire all over the penguin-like tuxedo. Justice (the gavel) or Just Gaming (1975, translated 1985) is a problem of interpretation of competing events, unresolvable because of The Differend (1983/1988), that is, the non-commensurable differences across language games. Such perhaps is the libidinal economy and the computerized information system that constitutes the conditions of postmodern knowledge. Minitel, the early French computerized information system, was the object in mind during the writing of The Postmodern Condition (1979/1984) — a false lead, but a productive one — raising the same questions that Habermas raises: about the conditions of legitimation of knowledge, expertise, and governance; and about the challenges of the mercantilization of knowledge, judged by performativity, metrics of excellence and instrumentality. Still, as in the caricature, the role of the avant-garde or postmodern art is that of pushing the boundaries of modernism, that only later will become recuperated as modernism.

JFL: Ok, now for the caricature to actually function in a postmodern way, it needs to be a little more like Barnett Newman’s work. It needs to index that something profound and sublime is going on, without having to specify what that something is. And it needs to show an injustice, a result of a differend, a structural immemorial, that cannot be memorialized (encrypted, pushed away), but keeps irritating, keeping the critical senses alive. So, actually, I kind of like the caricature. The pen is irritating, beyond the body, and beyond the capacities of the electronic media which soon will be called the digital media. All of us in the 1970s and 1980s expected information theory to be transformative, often in uncontrollable and dangerous ways. In the new millennium, business managers will fetishize “disruption,” digital tools for disaggregating jobs into tasks, and further mercantilizing everything. Life was easier in the days of Socialisme ou Barbarie, or rather it was imagined to be a simpler matter of revolutionary politics; the revolution didn’t happen in Algeria, and it didn’t happen in 1968 France. Good luck, now.

“Lyotard,” 15 October 1987, UCLA.

Jacques Derrida, 1987

First Impressions: almond eyes, Spock ears, hair on fire, large mouth, thick-necked and chubby, with narrow tie and jacket. The eyes, drawn with dark, elongated upper eyelids/brows, are like statues of the Buddha or Mahavira before they are installed or enlivened, that is, with empty sockets, waiting for the awakening (democracy to come, justice to come). Derrida is portrayed as a youthful Algerian Jewish exile, aspirant to French culture, insider-outsider, deconstructor of the Western philosophical tradition, using his Talmudic-semiotic skills as well as his French-German-and-English skills to show how languages, tropes and reason undo themselves, carry meanings other than those intended by their authors, doing work in their very framing beyond the frames.

JD: So, let’s “deconstruct” this caricature. Given that for years I refused to allow any pictures of myself, and then, when I did allow a few, I posed in striking angles, always making sure my hair was waved just so, it’s odd to try to interpret features in this drawing that seem like Levi-Strauss’s challenge in interpreting the masks of the Northwest Coast Indians or First Nations as inversions of one another’s masks and myths. So, for starters, there is no nose, no olfactory sensibility, no attunement to fragrance and odor, albeit its importance as a communicative channel. Instead there is suggested logorrhea (“should I ask H for a break after this, 15 minutes”) and antenna-tuned aurality. The pointy ear perhaps is a reference, a pointer, to my recently translated The Ear of the Other (1986), the effort to explore, in the manner of George Herbert Mead, the construction of the self through engagements with the other, not unlike what Kaja Silverman said a bit earlier in this colloquium. The narrow, vestigial, tie refers to my efforts to eschew only masculinist imagery.

The caricaturist turns me into a chubby adolescent, ambitious to make his way (hair at attention), with Algerian (Oriental?) eyes vacant, unknowing as yet how to make my mark. But it is already 1987, the year of English translations of The Truth in Painting, and The Postcard: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, and the giving of my lectures at Rice University on “Psyche: The Invention of the Other,” which I had previously given at Cornell and Harvard. Sorry, it put the President of the University to sleep in the front row.

Mehrzad Boroujerdi, 1988

First Impressions: The manga man (wide eyes in circular face), this time with a burnt left index finger, is holding onto the inside of a bubble attached to the bottom of a floating bag of hot air, inside of which floats a blank white map of greater Iran from Baghdad to Samarkhand, outlined in the black of (Sunni?) rivals (Arabs, Turks and Turkomen, Baluchis). At the very top is a mop of hair flapping as if the bag were perhaps a face. There are two inscriptions. One, attached to the map, reads, “Iran, the guilt culture: intellectuals either imitate the West or define their identity in opposition; to define this a return to nativism, indigenization.” The other bubble near the manga man reads, “Mehrzad Boroujerdi on ‘The identity problematic of Iranian intellectuals.’”

MB: Yes, so I’m one of the many who fled Iran, got my fingers burnt as it were, and I do plan to write an account of the history of the past forty years through the story of my family. But first I will write up the book that I’m talking about today in 1988, Iranian Intellectuals and the West: The Tormented Triumph of Nativism (1996). But next I will do a more empirical study of 2,333 political figures that have staffed the Islamic Republic of Iran from 1979 to 2018. This will allow “me to abandon grandiose theorizing, in favor of laborious data collection and fact-based biographical sketches.”[1] So, in a way, the caricature is promissory, to fill in the bag with empirical data.

Elias Khouri, 1989

First impressions: The otherwise placid caricature of the author of eleven novels, journal editor, public intellectual and academic (signified by three pairs of spectacles hanging from his jacket) has three disturbing features: doubled eyeballs, a light bulb or hearing aid as his left ear, and a bloody hand attached to a shoulder dripping two drops of blood.

EK: There’s nothing particularly odd or surreal about the drawing. After all, although, I was born in a Greek Orthodox family, I’ve been involved with Palestinian issues in Lebanon since 1967 when, as a 19 year old, I travelled to Jordan, lived in a refugee camp, joined Fatah and the fedayeen, and experienced the expulsion of Palestinians after Black September in 1970. After finishing my Ph.D. in Paris, I returned to work in the Palestine Research Center in Beirut. During the Lebanese civil war in 1975 I was injured and temporarily lost my eyesight, so the double vision or reborn vision of the doubled eyeballs is quite apt. I wrote novels as a way of catalyzing change. But unlike one-eyed Palestinian writers, I was always concerned to treat the Palestinian experience as the mirror of Israeli experience, countering the stereotypes on both sides. So, again the doubled eyeballs are apt. Again, I use interior monologue and some dialect, rather than only standard Arabic, so yes, I depend on listening, and the caricature’s focus on a hyper-ear is correct. Nothing really need be said about the bloody hand in a situation where there is oppression on all sides including in Lebanese jails. But my effort is to gather together all the partial stories that make up the rhythms of life, democratically retelling stories over and over, each time capturing the lifeworld a little differently. In this, Jacques Derrida is correct: repetition generates difference, and in difference lies hope and the future.

Peter Chelkowski, 1990

First impressions: clean cut, large, elongated eyes raised upwards, mouth with displaced lips (or a very large planted kiss by a female admirer); the head emerges from a Swiss cheese block, or drilled holes in an architectural element, with scalloped or squinch cutout at the bottom, set against a brick chimney from which two mushrooms emerge. One cannot help but wonder about the ghastly brick chimneys of World War II in Poland, which this man had nothing to do with. It is, like one of his adopted homes, Iran, a place of pain and tragedy. Poland where he was born, and Iran where he got a Ph.D. in Persian literature were both places that remained deep in his affections and self-identity. Perhaps the Swiss cheese is history drilled full of holes. Chelkowski became an expert on the taziyeh mourning rituals of Iran, particularly the shabih re-enactments of the Battle of Karbala, for which he delightedly played impresario, dramatically retelling the stories himself to classes, showing films and photographs, and helping host the Taziyeh conference at Trinity College, Connecticut. Always with good humor, he kept his eyes raised towards the good things in life.

PC: What an honor and delight to be represented in this collection, Hamid! The caricature line drawing is itself a great Iranian tradition, used for satire, and good humor. You show here yet another of your exquisite skills, that would make your storied literary forebears in Isfahan and Tehran proud. Thank you, and congratulations.

Douglas Crimp, 1993 (“it’s all displacement, cathexis, despair”)

First impressions: The elegant arc of the body strikes first, then resolves into a lighting fixture. The head emerges from the lighting fixture that tapers down into an arrow or shovel stuck into the ground. The little puff of smoke that comes out from the seam between the ball and socket of the lighting fixture provides a small balance to the bubble comment from the figure’s mouth: “it’s all displacement, cathexis, despair.” The triangle of the eyebrow and that of the sparse hair at the back of the head also geometrically balance one another. The elegant arc of the figure is Crimp the dance critic, not so much the queer theorist or art critic. He’s 49 in 1993, still very handsome but losing the hair along the sides that had framed his face as a younger man.

DC: The spotlight metaphor is very kind. I did earn my chops in New York setting up shows at the Guggenheim, and then the little show downtown in 1977 that made my name, “The Picture Show.” While that balloon is a little reductive, October, the journal I managed and co-edited with Rosalind Krauss and Annette Michaelson from 1977 to 1990 was indeed full of the language of psychoanalytic “displacement, cathexis, and despair.” “The Picture Show” was about what we eventually called postmodern art—photographers like Cindy Sherman and photorealist painters like Robert Longo —who reworked popular culture images. I’ve written about that first decade of my life in New York in my hybrid memoir Before Pictures (Chicago University Press, 2016). It opens with the metaphor “Front Room, Back Room,” for having to walk through the front room of the restaurant-club Max’s Kansas City in the late 1960s to get to the back room where all the gay action was. I was always bending to different desires (you got that right, including presenting anally). There was deep ambivalence negotiating the straight and academic art world with the queer world, and later negotiating the activist world of ACT UP during the AIDS emergency with my duties both at October and my day job as an academic. It eventually caused my divorce from October. I will collect my writings in ten years or so on the years of the 1980s in a volume I’ll call Melancholia and Moralism – Essays on AIDS and Queer Politics (MIT Press, 2004). I’m still very committed to the pleasures of promiscuity of that brief gay liberation moment between Stonewall (1969) and AIDS (1981 on). I remain deeply disturbed both by American moralism around sexual matters, and by the increasing domination of the art world by the market. Yes, I’d like to think that the graceful arc of the caricature also captures something of my work with dancers and choreographers. But also, maybe my defense in public hearings of Richard Serra’s “Tilted Arc,” a site-specific sculpture for Federal Plaza, before the government removed it.

Hayden White, 1993 (at Brazo’s bookstore) “unheimlich”

First impressions: the genial open face and hair are well caught. Maybe the striped clown arm and gloved hand are a reference to White’s Metahistory (1973) and likewise the bubble saying “unheimlich, oh my, unheimlich.” It is clowning only in the serious sense of mucking about with settled convention. Similarly, the uncanny is a kind of unstable double vision of things that sometimes allows you to see and play with the mechanism behind the illusion.

HW: I don’t know about the clowning metaphor, but true, I do not believe biography or history gets us to any direct truth. In the case of master historians of the nineteenth century, there was always an unstable and unsatisfactory effort to get argument, narrative plot, and ideological preference to sync together, which provoked successors to try to do better. And, so, history writing would cycle through more tragic, comic, and ironic forms reflecting the mood of the times. How did I slip into metahistory? The answer is the typical socialist realist 1930s scenario. Born to working class family in the south, moved to Detroit, the manufacturing center in the Depression to find work, where everything was more racialized than in my relatively integrated southern background, going to public schools where one was made aware of class differences, then to the city’s college, DeKalb, where I became interested in medieval history. But I found most people who studied the Middle Ages believed in its ideologies, and I couldn’t comfortably do that. So, through Max Weber, I discovered the role of ideology, the analysis of the construction of ideologies. He was a historian of the ancient world who also did medieval history, and the question was how could beliefs sustain themselves for a thousand years. So, with socialist convictions, and ideology critique, I got into how historical construction is used to construct ideology. The discomfort and ambiguities that Douglas Crimp talked about is somewhat similar, in his case, across conventional and gay histories, or moralisms and freedom from those moralisms; in my case, market ideology and artistic critique.

Cornelius Castoriadis, 1995 (“heteronomous society”)

First impressions: bald head with pronounced triangular shape below the nose are realistic; the worker’s ax attached to a blood flushed hand (stop!) reflects Castoriadis’ shifting alliances from Athenian Communist youth and Communist Party of Greece (against the Metaxas dictatorship), to Trotskyist, to libertarian socialist (around the journal Socialisme ou Barbarie, along with Lyotard and Claude Lefort), and later Lacanian psychoanalysis. The outsized ear spurting a stream of blood across mouth and tongue, dripping with blood, perhaps signifies his work as an economist for the OECD (the destructiveness of market capitalist ideologies) as well as his debunking of Soviet claims to be a socialist mode of production with a mode of distribution that had as yet failed to keep up. It was instead, he argued, a state capitalist formation. The caption “heteronomous society,” is the term he used in contradistinction to autonomy. Autonomous forms are self-organizing from Greek agora and democracy to the autonomia workers movement of Italy in the 1970s. Heteronomous forms are those that allow control to rest in the hands of others. So, the relation between revolution (ax), hand (stop!), tongue, and ear has to do with his sense of the (Lacan-derived) social imaginary: how a society names and institutes itself. History consists of revolutionary, discontinuous events, which are given meaning by being named, by taking ownership. Born in Constantinople, and part of the Greek-Turkish exchange, followed by exile to Paris in 1945, his work became part of the non-Marxist left, reflecting his life’s experiences.

CC: I died in 1997, so it’s hard to comment, but kudos to the artist.

Ehsan Yarshater, 1995 (Talking about the Mazdakite Movement)

First impressions: puppy-like eagerness to please with warm eyes, floppy ears, nuzzle prone nose and gregarious mouth, looking around from a magician’s top hat, set next to a hexapede (six-footed) elongated turtle with head extended and shell or blanket ending in a heel and toe -like foot. Actually, the cartoon captures Yarshater’s friendly face quite nicely, and no disrespect intended in the “puppy” label (I think of Emmanuel Levinas’ dog, Bobby, the only living being who always greeted the concentration camp inmates with warmth and recognition). The floppy ears are really side tufts of hair, and he really is friendly and gregarious, and an unusually well trained and fine scholar of Iran, long time editor in Iran of Bongaah-e Tarjomeh va Nashr-e Ketaab, and then in New York, editor of the Encyclopedia Iranica, as well as of the volume in the Cambridge History of Iran on the Seleucids, Parthians and Sassanians. Trained by W.B. Henning in Old and Middle Iranian, a student of the northern Tati dialect as well as Jewish-Persian dialects, he was born in Hamadan of Baha’i (and I suspect Jewish) ancestry. His take on the Mazdakites — an egalitarian and proto-socialist reform movement of Zoroastrians in the sixth century C.E., that had early success, was suppressed by the Sassanians, and reappeared as an influence in resistance movements after the Arab conquest of Iran— was that as they became disruptive to the control of the elites they were suppressed including a bloody massacre in Ctesiphon, the capital. The friendly reptile at the bottom thus becomes legible as an “undercover” social movement with many feet (followers) over a long period of time (turtles live long lives), having a big foot (foothold) in the nationalism of Iran (Zoroastrian state religion), sticking their head out from time to time in favor of social justice, economic redistribution, and egalitarianism.

EY: Good, good, I like it. The good religion (beh din) of good words, good thoughts, good deeds is well grounded and survives today.

Paul Rabinow, 1995

First impressions: It’s a triple faced Daruma doll (or okiagari “roly-poly”) with a stabilizing tail. One is a sun-shaped Paul, genial, smiling, with a tuft of wild professorial hair at the back of his head. This Paul is being nestled at the chest, facing a Plato’s cavern of darkness, with indirect rays of light only on the cavern floor. Above are two bespectacled faces in African or North African turban-cap, one face turned forward with small round mouth; the other in profile with jutting jaw, open mouth, and curved nose. The triplet theme is right for 1995, when he was writing Making PCR. So, threes have to do with the triplets of nucleotides, the automated PCR device which replicates or amplifies DNA, and the genetic code, composed of “letters” of triplets of nucleotides. Cetus Corporation, the biotech company that commercialized the automated system is described by Rabinow as doing three things: turning an idea (Cary Mullis gets the Nobel Prize for this) into an experimental system (the work horses of the invention in Rabinow’s evaluation) which in turn gets packaged into a sellable tool or kit (commercial value that allows Roche Pharmaceuticals to buy out a large part of Cetus with the PCR patents). So, a third sense of the triplet in the caricature is Paul as DNA being incubated (experimental system), with up-top Paul as the idea, and turned to the side with open mouth for propagation (speech, marketing, exchange value, commerce) of the commercial kit. The roly-poly is a metaphor for the ups and downs of scientific experimentation commercialization: lots of failures, getting knocked down, and having to bounce back up. And the large bowl-like bottom, filled with squiggly worms, is both an incubator (of DNA, of ideas) and a government investment in research and development; the tail is the stabilizing tax revenues making it all possible.

PR: Yes, that’s good. I’d only add two things that did not make it into the representation. First the quirk of fate that as an anthropologist I got access to Cetus Corporation through Tom White, its science-manager, because his wife had read Writing Culture and so had an inkling of what an ethnographic-anthropological project might be. And second, that the conditions of possibility for the whole roly-poly were established by the Chakrabarty supreme court decision and the Bayh-Dole Act, both in 1980. These incentivized the biotech boom of the 1980s and 1990s, by allowing the patenting of inventions and commercialization arising from government sponsored research.

As to the caricature itself, no comment yet: I’ll get to the visual arts in twenty years with my work on Gerhardt Richter.

Hamid Naficy, Self Portrait, 1996

First impressions: A very fine Kwakiutl mask face, with big cheeks or mustache, round eyes (reels), chattering teeth (sprockets), on the side of a police whistle (film canister), with the curved mouthpiece (film strip) unwinding to a small horse tail tip. Switching parallax point of view, one can also see the “horse tail” as a mustache; the handle of the whip forms a nose and eye (black pupil and white segments); the high forehead, curves back to the film canister brain. The brain contains a hard disk spinning, with random access enabled, digital film archives.

HN: No comment because of confusion about whose breath is blowing through the sound system.

“[Hamid Naficy] Self Portrait!,” 1996, Rice University.

Tom Gunning, 1999 (“industrialization of simulacrum”)

First impressions: bust of a large eyed, droopy mustachioed, round shouldered, fellow with flowing hair parted center left (stage right). The bust is held up by accordion-like lungs on a vertebrae-like stringed instrument neck, with tuning pegs. The contraption stands in a boat, or begging bowl. It’s a wonderful image for a master of the cinema of attractions (many entertainment forms from vaudeville, sonic and visual gimmicks) and of the cinema of allegories of vision and modernity (follow the use of the telephone as an actant in Fritz Lang’s movies).

TG: I could use the occasion for another talk, but I’d rather just sit back and play upon Baudrillard’s notions that in the movies or the television news, things are repeated without any original experience or event being required. Ever notice how footage from one war is substituted for another by a lazy or time-pressured newsroom. Also notice how the program music tells you what to feel or expect without necessarily having any relation to what you are seeing. As the channels of communication and sensation get pulled apart and remixed, new possibilities open up, new worlds, new kinds of experience. Digitalization makes it all easier, more liquid. The synthesizers and electronic orchestras are taking over the means of perception.

By the way, in the next few years I’ll let my hair grow even longer.

“Tom Gunning,” 1999; Talk bubble: “Industrialization of Simulacrum.”

Goli Emami, 2000 (My story begins)

First impressions: an intellectual middle-class woman’s head par excellence, elegant squared glasses, short combed hair, stem like long neck set on an angle like a lamp, serene, placed on a buttoned-up tunic, part of a three-layered pedestal. The buttons could also be violin pegs, aligned with the xylophone carved into the bottom of the pedestal, i.e. not just a reading lamp, but a music system to read by. Captures a translator, journalist, publisher, serial library and bookstore owner, woman of strength and valor, convener and facilitator of a generation of young strong women in Tehran. Goli Emami (nee Golrokh Adib-Mohammadi), with her husband Karim, first founded Zamineh Publishing, which became Zamineh Bookstore, a gathering place. She became general manager for three years of Farzan Publishing House. She will later found Bayan Salis International Book Store, another gathering place with light butcher block shelves for local authors, and dark wooden ones for foreign authors. 1997 was when Khatami was re-elected for his second Presidential term; but in 2000 two prominent women activists, Mehrangiz Kar and Shahla Lahiji, were arrested after attending a conference in Berlin, celebrating the reformists’ victory. And so it goes, back and forth, with, most recently, Emami telling us about a Women’s Center meeting she attended on what to do if arrested and interrogated. Serene and persistent, these women of Iran who never give up.

GE: No, I am not associated with the commercial site “My story begins.” But do stop by the bookstore. We will soon put up an art exhibit of caricatures drawn by the great historian of Iranian film, Hamid Naficy. Do come by and see.

3-3-4e-fig13

[1]Mehrzad Boroujerdi and Kourosh Rahimkhani, Postrevolutionary Iran: A Political Handbook (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2018). See the brief Jadaliyya interview with Boroujerdi, http://jadaliyya.com/Details/37603.

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

Kaveh Ghobadi Volume 3, Number 1, Spring 2018

Whereas gender studies in the West turned its attention to men and masculinity in 1970s, the topic has largely been absent in gender studies in the Middle East until recently.[1] As elsewhere in the Middle East, gender studies in different parts of Kurdistan has primarily focused on women.[2] Studies on the Kurds and Kurdish society have to take into consideration the specificities of each part of Kurdistan and their differences from each other as a result of decades of separation. A thorough understanding of socio-political dynamics of each part of Kurdistan would only be possible if any part is studied within broader socio-political framework of the states where that part resides. Therefore, this paper limits its focus on representation of masculinity in two Kurdish novels from Iranian Kurdistan: Zindexew (Nightmare) (2003) by Fatah Amiri (b. 1946) and Siweyla (Suheila in Persian, proper female name) (2004) by Sharam Qawami (b. 1974).[3]

Studying Nightmare and Siweyla within the broader Iranian context can result in a better understanding of nuances and complexities of Kurdish masculinities, while also challenging the official narrative of a national masculinity which is blind to ethnic and religious diversity in Iran. I suggest that whereas the above novels are progressive on certain formal and thematic levels, they are quite conservative when it comes to gender democracy, as I will illustrate below. Both novels present a “New Man” who is educated, socially and politically active, and relatively egalitarian in his attitude towards women. At the same time, they portray a “New Woman” who is educated, steps out of the domestic sphere and participates in social and political domains. Yet such positive changes in gender politics remain at the surface as both novels fail to move beyond hierarchical binary thinking.

The theoretical framework of the present paper is informed by R. W. Connell’s concept of “hegemonic masculinity and Judith Butler’s notion of gender as “performativity.” The former refers to the masculinity which occupies dominant position “in a given pattern of gender relations,”[4] and the latter suggests that gender is an effect constituted by “a regularized and constrained repetition of norms.”[5] At any given time in a society, certain discourses become dominant which idealize one form of masculinity and marginalize the others. The concept of “hegemonic masculinity,” first introduced in gender studies in the 1980s, was notably developed by Raewyn Connell and further elaborated by other masculinity studies scholars.[6] She argues that masculinity, as well as femininity, “is simultaneously a place in gender relations, the practice through which men and women engage that place in gender, and the effects of these practices in bodily experience, personality and culture.”[7] In the same vein, Butler views gender as a process, “a set of repeated acts within a highly rigid regulatory frame that congeal over time to produce the appearance of substance, of a natural sort of being.”[8] The above definitions denounce attribution of any fixed essence to men and women and instead set out to present these categories as relational, multiple, and contingent, prone to change under new conditions.

Drawing on Butler’s “performativity,” this paper sets out to put “masculine” man and “feminine” woman in the context of the discourses by which they are constituted, thus revealing the implications of naturalization of these categories for gender inequality. On the other hand, “hegemonic masculinity” provides a useful conceptual tool to examine patterns of hegemonic masculinity in the selected texts and how it adapts itself to new conditions to guarantee men’s dominant position.

Emotional women, rational men: ideal femininity and masculinity in Amiri’s Nightmare

Amiri was born in Bukan, a Kurdish city in West Azerbaijan province. He wrote his first novel entitled Hawarebere in 1990, which was also his first novel to be published in Iran.[9] Three years later, in 1993, his second novel, Mîrza, was also published in Iran.[10] Nightmare covers the final years of Pahlavi rein leading to the Iranian revolution of 1979. It tells the story of a teenaged boy, Azad, about sixteen or seventeen years old, who disobeys his family’s plan for his future career and life. His family wants him to follow his profession as a merchant and marry early, but he craves the opportunity to study. His resistance and diligence finally pays off and he enters university. His first year in university coincides with the political upheaval that led to the Iranian 1979 revolution. Azad has been suffering from a recurring nightmare for several years. In his nightmare, he is a SAVAK (Organization of National Security and Information) officer;[11] his name is Ḥusên (Kurdish pronunciation of Hussein), and he is Azari. He tortures political prisoners to extract information and forced confession from them. However, Ḥusên gets to a point where he can no longer continue torturing prisoners and, towards the end of the novel, he kills himself to put an end to his “disgraceful” life and unbearable sufferings.[12] Azad meets a girl named Elaheh at Urmia University whose father was a SAVAK officer who passed away when she was only a few years old. As the protests against Shah escalates, Elaheh and her mother no longer feel safe in Iran and leave the country. After a while, Elaheh posts a letter with his father’s photo to Azad, explaining her mother’s and her own special feelings for him. Surprisingly, Azad finds that he was born on exactly the same day that Elaheh’s father died and that his name was Ḥusên. The striking similarity between Azad and Ḥusên’s photo as well as his dreams all indicate that Ḥusên’s soul was incarnated in Azad’s body.

Nightmare is a realist text in terms of its narration, characterization, plot, and its attempt to mirror reality objectively. It is entirely narrated through one single character’s perspective and voice, that of Azad in the form of first person narration. Although Azad is not an omniscient narrator-protagonist, his perspective is a God-like one because what he tells us is presented as truth. He also enjoys a safe vantage point from where he observes the world. His perception of the other characters, of himself, and socio-political issues are rarely challenged, and when they are, he usually takes the upper hand in the arguments and discussions. Having said that, Nightmare is a progressive novel in the sense that it relativizes the ethnic and national identity. To do so, Amiri creates a simple, but successful strategy, that is, the incarnation of the oppressor in the oppressed. In this way he shows that national or ethnic identity is largely constructed and “imagined.” As such, he conveys his message, that no nation or ethnic group is inherently superior to others or has any natural right to suppress them. At the same time, the novel calls for the recognition of Kurdish and other minorities’ rights in a democratic Iran. However, while Nightmare presents progressive political ideals, it undertakes a conservative approach when dealing with cultural and patriarchal values in society. The novel invites the reader to comply with the traditional gender values and norms underlying the patriarchal structures of the Kurdish society, for example, a gender-unequal division of labour and a polarized notion of masculinity and femininity.

In Nightmare, Amiri presents a new generation of young Kurdish men who, in comparison with their forefathers, are more educated, progressive, and hold more egalitarian attitudes towards women. In the same way, the new generation of Kurdish women, as depicted in the novel, are educated and more actively involved in social and political causes. Azad and Meli, for example, are the primary characters who represent the new generation of men and women in Iranian Kurdistan respectively. They are about the same age, and they played as friends since they were children. As they grew up, Meli fell in love with Azad and towards the end of the novel Azad develops mutual feelings of love. Azad defies his family’s insistence to pursue his father’s work as a businessman and instead enters university.[13] Despite that he does not quite see Meli as an equal partner, he holds more respect for women than the previous generation did.[14] When he talks to Elaheh, his female classmate, about the unrests leading up to the 1979 revolution, the status of the Kurds and their demands, he acknowledges her intellectual capability.

Unlike Elaheh, Meli is represented as emotional and impulsive in her reactions; but she is also depicted as someone who reads books and actively participates in anti-shah protests.[15] However, the novel does not abandon the old essentialist and binary perception of gender and sexuality, so these positive changes in gender politics do not trigger fundamental changes in gender relations.

In the course of the novel an image of ideal Kurdish masculinity is forged. The characteristic features of an ideal man mainly relate to his deeds, actions, and thoughts. Throughout the novel the ideal man is demonstrated as brave, strong, wise, and authoritarian. This ideal masculinity is partly constructed and conveyed through Daye Xeyal (Azad’s nanny),[16] recounting to Azad the story of a number of great men in the history of Sabllagh.[17] Aqa Mirza Fatah Qazi is the one who had a deep effect on her.[18] She describes him as a “chivalrous (ciwançak),” educated (xwêndewar), brave (aza) and mighty (bekar)” man who “would stop the Russian army.”[19] Likewise, Azad’s father is described by one of his friends as an exceptional man and the kind of man one used to see in the olden days: “he was not like the men in our time; he was awe-inspiring (besam), everyone was in awe of him. Sabllagh has not seen a man like Haji Mirza since he passed away.”[20] Elsewhere, Azad’s father is complimented by his uncle as “great (gewre),” “wise (beşi‘ûr),” “social and communicative (bemişûr),” and “generous (bereket).”[21] However, they are only a few who are capable of rigorously practicing such hegemonic patterns of masculinity. They are “real” men who are considered as touchstone against whom the other men’s masculinity (piyawetî: mardānigī) is measured. At the core of the image of an ideal masculinity forged in the course of the novel is bravery, wisdom, and authority.

Having as its subject the development of its protagonist, Azad, in the passage from adolescence to adulthood through various ups and downs, Nightmare resembles bildungsroman novels.[22] The novel opens with two psychological crises with which Azad grapples: his father’s death and his recurrent nightmare in which he is a SAVAK officer and torturer. Under the influence of these two events, he becomes depressed and, consequently, lives as a recluse. His relatives and acquaintances are less concerned for his health than for his endangered manliness. Azad is frequently blamed for his unmanly behaviour and is encouraged by his family members to resume a normal life and face the problems like a man. After two years or so he came to terms with himself: “I must be strong, life is a fight, fight to overcome problems … I must be patient … from today on I have to be a man, a strong and courageous man.”[23] Thus, he conforms to the widely accepted attributes of hegemonic masculinity such as physical strength, bravery, and sexual performance in order to be accepted and respected as a man and entitled to its privileges. His involvement in anti-Shah activities and his arrestment for a couple of days during which he is tortured are extremely significant in his development into manhood marked by bravery and toughness.

The construction of the ideal masculinity, however, as Alan Petersen notes, involves “reference to its complementary opposite,” i.e., the ideal femininity.[24] In the novel, the ideal woman is portrayed as someone with some degree of physical beauty and attractiveness.[25] Further, unlike men, the sort of behaviours and traits considered as appropriate for a good woman has nothing to do with bravery or authority. On the contrary, ideal woman is portrayed as shy, obedient to her man, and sacrificing her life for her family. Being submissive and tacit, she is viewed, by both men and women, as a wise woman. Daye Xeyal, for example, compliments Daye Xanim (Azad’s mother) for being submissive and obedient to her husband to the extent that she “was always obedient to her husband’s wishes” (le ḥast Ḥacî roh’î nebû which literally means “she didn’t have a soul vis-à-vis Ḥacî”).[26]

Unlike the older generation, Meli has the opportunity to attend school and to be educated. She shows as much enthusiasm for reading and learning as Azad does, though she finds textbooks boring and does not do very well at school. The text reveals that under the influence of books other than those needed to study at school she becomes more liberal and progressive in her attitude and participates in the anti-shah protests to the end of the novel. Yet, she is expected to do the housework and cooking and to behave delicately and gently, like a woman. Daye Xeyal recommends Azad to marry Meli because “she is a perfect housewife, she is not loose (Sûk û çirûk) and a lazybones (qûn-lê-kewtû).”[27] Elsewhere in the novel Azad gets impressed by Meli’s skills in housekeeping: “in no time she sets the table like an experienced housewife. She is clean and agile (tond û toł).”[28] Physical beauty, coyness and chastity, and being a good housewife are of great significance that along with submissiveness makes a perfect ideal woman of both generations in the novel.

The female characters are also evaluated according to different parts of their body. Azad describes Meli, for example, as follows: “I look at her head to toe from a suitor’s view… Meli is slim and agile … her teeth are shining and she has plump lips.”[29] This sexual description is not only limited to his beloved Meli, but also, he fantasizes about other female characters in the novel. Ashraf, an Azari and married woman, loves Azad and tries to seduce him, but this ends in failure.[30] Yet, Azad’s characterization of her is sexual. He introduces her to the reader from a male’s sexual gaze: “she stretched her slender neck out of the door, and was wearing a tight sleeveless blouse which made her waist look thinner.”[31] Elsewhere in the novel, Ḥusên, praises Zari, his fiancé, for her physical beauty: “a tall, olive-skinned woman with round breasts … her white teeth look whiter in contrast with her olive skin … She is slim, sylphlike and a clean housewife.”[32] Nowhere in the novel is a male character reduced to his physical beauty, nor is his identity represented as fragmented, as a woman’s is through descriptions of her legs, arms, lips, breasts and other parts of the body. Female characters in Nightmare are represented as ideal women only if they enjoy a certain degree of physical attractiveness. That is, there are pieces of their body which, from a male character’s gaze, make a perfect woman of them. The male character on the contrary, is presented differently. His body is portrayed as a unified whole inseparable from his mind, with the concentration on his wisdom, bravery and virtue.

The novel relies on a dualistic view of the world in which every phenomenon, concept, or value gains its meaning against its opposite. In this binary system, Woman functions as “other” for the male character against whom he can shape his masculine subjectivity. Hélène Cixous lists a set of binary oppositions including “Activity/passivity, Sun/Moon … Father/Mother, Head/heart, Intelligible/sensitive, Logos/Pathos” and poses the question as to where the place of woman in this binary system might be.[33] These couples are not neutral; rather one opposition overweighs the other. Each couple “can be analyzed,” notes Moi “as a hierarchy where the ‘feminine’ side is always seen as the negative, powerless instance.”[34] These oppositions are, in one way or another, associated with femininity and masculinity. To put it another way, the opposition of “man/woman” has underlain the hierarchal binary system throughout the history.[35]

Most of these binary oppositions presented by Cixous could be found in Nightmare. Activity/passivity, as Cixous remarks, “traditionally” comes up when dealing with sexual difference.[36]The female characters in the novel are less active than their male counterparts in the political, intellectual, social, and economic realms. Amiri brings to the fore some social, cultural, and familial constraints which have led to the female characters’ suffering. Zohreh and Ashraf are two characters whose lives have been ruined by some socio-familial factors over which they have no control. Ashraf, as we come to know from Azad’s perspective and comments on her, is not happy with her married life. Azad notices a deep and hidden sadness and frustration in her eyes, her sighs, and the tears she sheds.[37] However, she has accepted her life as it is and passively puts up with it without doing anything to improve her situation. Also, Zohreh, Azad’s landlord’s daughter in Urmia, is ashamed of her mother who is a prostitute and suffers from loneliness as she spends the night at her customers’ places. She finds herself completely helpless and doomed to failure in her life. Her only hope is to wait for a prince to take her away with him and make her happy.[38]

In the novel, Azad is depicted as cool, wise, respectable, and logical while Meli is presented as emotional, mysterious, and irrational. Meli is head over heels in love with Azad. Perpetuating suffering and never-ending jealousy are the consequences of her lovesickness which has taken her to the edge of madness: “Jealousy has ruined Meli’s life … I’m worried that it makes her sick,” Azad says.[39] She is extremely suspicious and jealous of any woman, stranger or relative. Early in the novel when Azad returns from his uncle’s place to his home, Meli is waiting for him there. “She turned pale and looks angry,” as she is suspicious of Fewziye (Kurdish pronunciation of Fouzieh), Azad’s cousin, trying to steal his heart. Calmly, Azad teases her and makes her more furious with his response when she asks what he was doing in his uncle’s house for the whole afternoon. Azad says: “I was with Miss Fewziye; the cousins’ fates are entwined in the heavens. She blushes with anger and goes into attack mode; she is about to grapple with me.”[40] The novel abounds with such scenes in which Azad behaves wisely, calmly, and patiently, while Meli, controlled by her emotions, behaves irrationally and is easily irritated. Azad is concerned about her excessive love for him: “For the first time I have noticed that her love is different from mine, her love has crossed the line.”[41] However, this insanity is not perceived as a big surprise by the narrator, and probably Amiri himself, as he does not regard this behaviour very unusual for a woman.

Allocating the inferior place in the patriarchal binary system to women, however, is not questioned by the female characters in Nightmare. Rather, they have internalized a “female inferiority” which, as Lynne Pearce notes, “is held by both sexes in a set of shared, but mostly unspoken, ‘beliefs’ that women … are intellectually inferior, emotional rather than rational, primitive and childlike.”[42] At points in the novel Meli is treated like a child who needs some degrees of control by Azad. He punishes her for the scandal she caused at the wedding by ignoring and not speaking to her. Receiving no attention from Azad is unbearable for Meli; thus, she appeals to Daye Xeyal to intervene. Consequently, Azad agrees to talk to her: “[M]y feeling for you will not change, but only if you promise to be a bit wiser. Had it not been for Daye Xeyal’s sake, I wouldn’t have talked to you.”[43] This seems to be more like a parent-child relationship in which the former resorts to punishment for the latter’s sake. This parenting and protecting role is granted to Azad by the society, as presented and approved of in the novel. Meli’s mother and Daye Xeyal, are content when Azad slaps Meli on the back to exercise his power and control over her and to stop her attending demonstrations and doing activities against the Shah.[44]

All Meli wants is to have Azad, to possess him; her world is confined to him. Her extreme love for him has led her to teetering on the brink of paranoia, psychological imbalance, and behavioural disorders. However, it seems that in the novelistic world of Nightmare only female characters are susceptible to lovesickness. In this regards, Kurdish/Iranian perception of “masculinity” as a rational entity appears to be similar to Western perception of it, as the association of “masculinity” with rationality, and the opposition of “masculinity” with emotionality “are central themes in contemporary Western thought.”[45]

Yet, the New Man represented by Azad had to combine sensitivity with toughness to regenerate male authority. Hegemonic masculinity, as Connell notes, “embodies a ‘currently accepted’ strategy. When conditions for the defence of patriarchy change, the bases for the dominance of a particular masculinity are eroded.”[46] In the face of socio-political challenges and with the increasing pressure from women rights movements, Kurdish/Iranian men had to refashion their masculine identities and come up with new strategies to legitimize patriarchy. As such, Amiri had to renegotiate the old ideal masculinity to fashion a man which was tuned to the new conditions in the Iranian/Kurdish society, that is, a modern notion of being a man, one which is less marked by roughness, violence, and authority as was the case with older versions of masculinity.

In the same vein, Amiri has attempted to depict a modern woman in the novel as educated and as someone who is, to a certain degree, allowed to involve in social and political movements. Yet, she cannot transgress the social norms regarding femininity. She has to act and behave properly as a woman in order to fit into the patriarchal definition of womanhood, that is, in Afsaneh Najmabadi’s words, a “modern-yet-modest” image, and be accepted by others, both male and female characters.[47] In other words, while Amiri’s redefinition of the ideal woman requires her to have a minimum of literacy, education, valour, and intelligence, these characteristic features have a complementary role in the female characters’ subjectivities—unlike their male counterparts who are required, by both male and female characters in the novel, to enjoy a good deal of those characteristics. The primary characteristics a woman needs to have are still those of the previous generation, namely, self-sacrifice, submissiveness, patience, housekeeping, and, above all, physical attractiveness.

Whereas Amiri comes from a generation of Kurdish authors who followed literary and social realism in their writings, Qawami belongs to the younger generation of Kurdish writers who abandoned conventional realism and experimented with modernist and postmodernist modes of writing. Qawami’s first novel, Siweyla, is experimental in form and radical in content. It deploys a multi-focalized narrative, abundant with flashbacks and sharp shifts in perspectives and voices. It is radical for its political standpoint and for portraying sexually explicit scenes. However, the technically and politically progressive Siweyla is still, more or less, as conservative in dealing with sexuality and gender as is Amiri’s Nightmare.

Sexual act as a remedy for wounded masculinities in Siweyla

Qawami was born in Sanandaj in Iranian Kurdistan. In 2000, he started his career as a writer by publishing a collection of short stories entitled Mêjûyîtirîn Zamî Daykim (My Mother’s Most Historic Anguish). Since then, he has produced works ranging from poetry, translation, and literary criticism to novel. Bîrba (2006) and Palltaw Shorr (The Man with Long Coat, 2007) are his other two novels. In 2017, he published his first novel in German, entitled Brucke dez Tanzes. In this section, I examine masculinity and sexuality in Siweyla. At stake here is how sexuality serves to revive masculinity undermined by unfavourable socio-political circumstances. Whereas Nightmare is set in the last years of Pahlavi reign, Siweyla covers both pre- and post-revolutionary Iran. But it is mainly concerned with the social, economic, political, and psychological aftermath of the Kurdish movement’s failure in Iran after the revolution. It narrates the concerns, dilemmas, hopes, desires, and dreams of two generations in the pre- and post-revolutionary Iran. Both generations are affected by massive social, political, and environmental changes, of which the 1979 revolution in Iran is of utmost significance. Equally, the novel is about love and sex. Most of the characters presented in Siweyla are affected by a mystified notion of love as a disease. The protagonist, Aram, is a young man who used to be an energetic writer and social activist who spent most of his time reading and writing. This great enthusiasm, however, comes to an end when he falls in love with Siweyla, the eponymous character, though they had never met and had only spoken to each other through telephone.

Siweyla is politically progressive in the sense that it facilitates dialogues between different voices and points of view regarding Kurdish armed-struggle as a suitable means to obtain freedom and democracy. Like Amiri, Qawami does not dehumanize the Kurdish “other”, namely, those who sympathize with and work for the Iranian government. It seems that the Kurdish writers writing in the early years of the twenty first century, including Amiri and Qawami, have abandoned the simplistic representation of “us” against “them”. Siweyla and Nightmare both counter the general trend in some other Kurdish novels written during 1990s, especially the ones written in diaspora by the writers affiliated with the Kurdish opposition parties of Iranian Kurdistan, in which a strict line is drawn between the Kurds and the Iranian government, representing the former as the good and the latter as the devil. However, in terms of form, Siweyla is more progressive than Nightmare. It mostly employs the prototype modernist narrative techniques: a fragmented narrative, stream of consciousness, multi-focalizations, and sudden shifts in perspective and voice. That said, while Qawami’s experiment with prototype modernist techniques in Siweyla has led to a relativization of “truth” and a radical political viewpoint, it nevertheless fails to be progressive in terms of creating alternative masculine and feminine subjectivities or offering a new, non-hierarchical gender order.

As depicted in Siweyla, before the 1979 Revolution, at the core of hegemonic masculinity was chivalric (pahlavānī) values. One of the characters in the novel named ‘Eziz Khan is the embodiment of chivalric masculinity. Pałewan ‘Ezîz (pałewan/pahlavān means “knight” in Kurdish) is actually a real person from Sine (Sanandaj) in Iranian Kurdistan, who is well known to most of the Kurds in Iran for his chivalry and physical strength.[48] In the novel he is depicted as a knight who protects the poor and the oppressed.[49] ‘Ezîz Khan’s words and actions are prototypes of a knight. After the revolution, when his friends ask him to explain his case to the new government – that he was sacked in the Pahlavi regime from his job as a gendarme due to political activities – he refuses to do so. His resistance is especially heroic taking into account that “he was in a very bad condition. Being addicted and helpless, he became a recluse. We couldn’t convince him to get a pension from the new government. Whenever we asked him to do so, he replied, ‘God is Generous’. He was such a great man.”[50]

During the last years of the Pahlavi era and after the Revolution, however, the public sphere in Kurdish society where ideal masculinity could be performed, shifted from tea-houses and ZurKhaneh (house of strength) to streets and later to the mountains of Kurdistan. Along with unrest in the other parts of Iran during the final years of the Pahlavi era, the Kurdish people actively participated in protests against the Shah.[51] However the Kurds soon realized that the new Islamic government is strongly against any share of power with other minorities or granting autonomy to the Kurds or other ethnic minorities in Iran. Consequently, the clashes escalated between the Kurdish fighters and the Revolutionary Guards, or Sepah-e Pasdaran, “a formation which asserted the Shia values of the new government,” that soon turned into a full-scale war.[52]

This new social and political environment required recasting of the ideal masculinity, which shifted from chivalric (pahlavānī) masculinity to some sort of heroic masculinity which could be attained by self-sacrificing for the sake of homeland and demonstrating courage and valour in the battle to bring about justice, equality, and freedom. The protagonist, Aram, and his friends were exposed to Kurdish nationalism when the Kurdish Peshmerga forces were fighting against central government in Iran. They were highly idealized and respected by most Iranian Kurds and this made them heroes to be praised by Aram and the other boys in his group.[53]

Shahin Gerami, in her article on masculinity in post-revolutionary Iran, argues that the Islamic Revolution’s ideology “discredited some prerevolutionary masculinity types” and instead promoted new ones: the “mullahs” as the leaders of revolution, “martyrs” as its soul, and “men” as its beneficiaries.[54] With its centralized political structure, the Islamic Republic’s gender policies affected the whole country, including its Kurdish areas. The state’s forced hijab and harsh policies of segregation, for example, affected all Iranian women regardless of their class and ethnicity. Having said that, the peculiarities of Kurdish society should not be overlooked. As an example, while they share a good deal of history, religion, and mythology with Persians, they also have a history, culture, and literature of their own. Furthermore, they do not share the same national heroes, at least in their modern histories. As such, except for the “beneficiary men,” who enact what Connell calls “complicit” masculinities,[55] the first two masculinity types in Gerami’s classification of masculine prototypes in post-revolutionary Iran are not compatible to the Kurdish society. Having said that, there is indeed a Kurdish version of the martyr type of masculinity. Whereas in the official ideology of the Islamic Republic, martyrs have been glorified for fighting to protect Islam and their country, in Kurdistan the Peshmerga warriors are idealized for fighting for the rights of Kurdish people who live under the Islamic Republic in Iran.[56]

This dramatic shift from chivalric masculinity to heroic masculinity in the national imaginary underpins Connell’s theory that hegemonic masculinity is a social construct that varies socially and historically. Aram and his friends are the younger generation of men in the novel whose youth coincides with late 1990s in Iran when the Kurdish movement had been suppressed by the central government. Accordingly, as reflected in the novel, severe frustration, passivity, and a lack of action ensued.

Presenting the events, memories and experiences from almost entirely the male characters’ perspectives, either Aram or others, the novel obtains the reader’s sympathy and approval of them. Siweyla does not invite the reader to challenge sexual potency as the marker of masculinity; conversely, it actually reinforces such perception of masculinity. In order for male characters to impose their dominance over women, the narrator and other male characters in Siweyla emphasize male sexual virility and prowess on the one hand and female sexual weakness and passivity, on the other.

In Siweyla, in effect, whenever male characters’ masculinity is undermined in the face of political repression and economic hardship, their sexual virility is overemphasized in a desperate attempt to heal their wounded masculinity. They freely talk about their penises and proudly express their sexual needs and desires. Both generations in the novel, to put it in Andreas G. Philaretou’s words, “embark on various personal odysseys to conquest the much-prized female sexuality hoping that such sexual conquests would ultimately help them maintain their masculine status or attain it respectively.”[57] This is especially the case when they cannot enact their masculinity by becoming involved in social and political causes. Whereas in Amiri’s novel, the increasing political opposition to the Shah provided a great opportunity for the protagonist, Azad, to obtain a hegemonic position of masculinity through his involvement in the Anti-Shah protests, the male characters in Siweyla find themselves in the post-revolution era when Kurdish resistance and all forms of dissidence in Iran are suppressed. Under such circumstances, Aram and other male characters find themselves powerless to make any changes. Instead, they utilize sexual virility to construct an exaggerated masculinity as a compensation for their inability to take political actions.

In one scene, for example, Aram and his friends, when they were teenagers, compare their penises to see whose is the largest. Then, they compete in another game, that is, splitting the tomatoes with their penises, “the tomatoes were too hard for our penis to penetrate; they were bending like plastic when we tried to penetrate them; but, ‘Ebe[58] penetrated the tomatoes with his penis like a skewer, splitting them and laughing loudly while throwing them to one side.”[59] The young boys proudly participate in a competition to test their masculinity, the bigger and stronger the penis, the more powerful and masculine its owner is assumed to be. It is worth mentioning that Kêrzilî “having a big penis” in Kurdish language means, according to Hejar, “‘bullying, coercion,’”[60] that is, as Amir Hassanpour notes, “associated with the exercise of physical and political power.”[61] This coercion and consequently the physical power are well conveyed in the narrator’s tone when describing ‘Ebe splitting the tomatoes with his penis.

As with Nightmare, a hegemonic masculinity, an idealized manhood, takes shape in the course of the novel as virile, dominant, and physically and/or intellectually powerful. ‘Ebe, for example, is presented by the narrator as a hero who “as soon as sexually matured, he found [Feride] and screwed her” (her ke gonî pêşey kird, xoy pêgeyand û boy pêwe na).[62] This heroic action earns him honour and respect from his friends, and also invites the male reader to identify with and admire his virility as a significant marker of hegemonic masculinity. Also, another character, ‘Izet, since falling in love with a girl, became a recluse and drank alcohol day and night as he could not obtain her father’s consent to marry her. His friend blamed him for ruining his own life and showing weakness for a woman: “You should be ashamed of yourself. Why on earth do you behave like this? There isn’t a single woman in Iran and Iraq who you haven’t screwed (Jinî ‘Êraq û Êran nemawe netgabê).”[63] For him, a woman is just for sexual pleasure; she is not worth sacrificing one’s life for, especially by a promiscuous man who used to, in Connell’s words, rigorously practice the hegemonic masculinity “in its entirety.”[64]

Interestingly, at least in this regard, the same “phallic economy” in Western culture dominates the Kurdish/Iranian culture. In the western sexuality, as Luce Irigaray writes, erection has more or less, received an “exclusive—and highly anxious—attention.”[65] In this “male-rivalry” dominated sexuality, she continues, the “strongest” is “the one who has the best ‘hard-on,’ the longest, the biggest, the stiffest penis, or even the one who ‘pees the farthest’ (as in little boys’ contests).”[66] No doubt, then, in the fictional world of Siweyla the male characters would gain honour and respect for having sex with women, while women would be labelled as loose or as prostitutes for having sex with men. Not even once in this novel has a woman talked about her vagina, as if she is completely unaware of this organ or ashamed to talk about it as the male characters frequently do, and thus a woman does not have “a” sex to be identified or represented. That being the case, no “room” has been left for women in sexual relations. Conversely, the whole space is allocated, in Elizabeth Grosz’s words, to “men’s fantasies of a femininity that conforms to their (oedipal) needs.”[67] The male characters’ fantasy of femininity and womanhood not only leaves women with no space of their own, but it also deprives them of their very control over their body.

For Irigaray, as Grosz notes, isomorphism, the “correspondence of form or shape between phallocentric representational systems and phallic male sexuality,” is not a natural or objective one, but a “socio-linguistic construction.”[68] That is, the human body, whether female or male, is “already coded, placed in a social network, and given meaning in and by culture, the male being constituted as virile or phallic, the female as passive and castrated. These are not the result of biology, but of the social and psychological meaning of the body.”[69] The female body, is considered as weaker in the novel, and has been subordinated to its male counterpart and, accordingly, her life and fate would be in his hands. This attitude is especially true of the characters from the older generation most of whom are parents of the group of young boys.

On the other hand, in Siweyla, Qawami presents a new generation of women who are liberal and educated. Aram’s sister, Çinûr, for example, studies medicine at university. She and another girl named Parvin would hang out with the group of young boys. They would drink alcohol together and are relatively free to have romantic relationships with two of the boys in the group.[70] However, unlike the male characters, even one single female character cannot be found to talk about her sexual needs and desires to others or even to herself in the form of, for example, interior monologue. Women are mainly portrayed as “sexual objects” desired by men, not “desiring subjects” when it comes to sex.

In a scene from a wedding, for example, the narrator, Aram, expresses his desire for the female body: “I was stealing glances at women’s big butts. Their butts were swaying from one side to another, stretching their maxi dresses.”[71] Or, “a woman’s beautiful leg caught my eyes […] she was sitting half-naked, wearing a mini skirt. She had exposed thighs. When she bent I snuck a look and could see her cleavage.”[72] Furthermore, overemphasizing the male characters’ sexual virility has resulted in some pornographic descriptions in the novel. Aram, for example, overhears a couple making love while he passes an empty alley at midnight; he, then, peeps through the window into their house:

A light was lit in the Gendarmerie alley. I grabbed the window and lifted myself up. Inside the room a naked man and woman were making love. The woman was lying on her back and the man was touching her butt and breasts […] He grabbed her breasts and made a pillow of her arse. The woman’s mouth had drooped open […] He went over her body and rode with her butt, grabbed her hair, lifted her head and breast up and took her breasts into his mouth from the back. The woman was moaning. He turned her over, slid into her legs and screwed her.[73]

While the man is presented as active, virile and dominant, literally and symbolically, the woman remains passive and under his control. Nowhere in this scene is the woman demonstrated as actively participating in the sexual act.

Furthermore, the verbal expression used here is also sexist. The words, for example, “têy tepand” and “eynûzandewe” have a visible and invisible meaning. On the surface they mean “fucked her” and “she was moaning,” respectively. However, beneath the surface meaning there is an invisible patriarchal history. Coitus, as Millett rightly pointed out, does not simply indicate a biological activity between the two sexes; it rather “is set so deeply within the larger context of human affairs that it serves as a charged microcosm of the variety of attitudes and values to which culture subscribes.”[74] “Têy tepand” has a more cultural meaning than a biological one. It belongs to men’s vocabulary which denotes an aggressive form of penetration, enabling them to impose authority over women. In “eynûzandewe” (she was moaning), the woman even loses her place as a human. It is a misogynistic term which dehumanizes her and derogates her status to that of a dog. This especially makes sense in the context of the Islamic/Kurdish culture in which it is an insult to call anyone a dog or to describe someone as behaving like a dog, i.e., barking, howling, or whining.

Siweyla’s treatment of sexual matters and gender relations reinforces the traditional conventions on masculinity and femininity, which presents the man as both socially and sexually active and desiring and the woman as a passive object of men’s sexual desires. Presenting sexuality merely from a male gaze that objectifies women sexually, Siweyla reproduces the already existing definitions of masculinity and femininity in society, thus failing to create an alternative female subjectivity that indulges in, for example, “activity, satisfaction, and a corporeal self-sufficiency.”[75]

The male characters, on the other hand, attempt to obtain the hegemonic position of masculinity by overemphasizing their manliness through sexual potency and promiscuity. They resort to virility and sexual prowess, to borrow Philaretou’s words, “to attain, maintain, heal, and strengthen their fragile masculinity not only in the eyes of their significant others, but above all, in their own eyes. It is as if the intensity of their sexual experience with women acts as a booster of their damaged masculine male self-esteem.”[76] In other words, sexual relationship is more than simply a biological act; it is also a site where men aspire to hegemonic masculinity by, in Samira Aghacy’s words, transforming sexual intercourse “into a kind of conquest conflated with rape where the penis is a symbol of power, an instrument of appropriation, and a weapon expressing simultaneously male misogyny and fear of female power.”[77]

Conclusion

This paper engaged in an exploration of the presentation of masculine subjectivity as opposed to feminine subjectivity in Nightmare and Siweyla, two Iranian Kurdish novels published in the early twenty-first century. The authors of both novels attempted to present a modern image of Kurdish men as more educated, liberal, and softer than their forefathers. They also opted to present a different image of woman, an educated New Woman involved in socio-political activities. However, both novels substantially reproduce essentialist gendered subjectivities, through reinscribing a binary opposition that defines woman as man’s “other”. In this hierarchical binary system, women are allocated the inferior status: they are described, for example, as caring, self-negating, emotional, and sexually passive as opposed to supportive, independent, rational, and sexually active men.

While Amiri’s Nightmare is set in the mid- to the late seventies, Qawami’s Siweyla is mainly set in the nineties and the beginning of the twenty-first century. The late seventies were a time of new hopes, high ideals, and belief in people’s agency and power to overthrow the tyranny of the Shah. Thus, the protagonist, Azad, was able to enact hegemonic masculinity through his involvement in the Anti-Shah protests. The nineties and the early twenty-first century in Iranian Kurdistan, however, is a period of lost hopes and shattered dreams. In stark contrast to Zindexew, thus, Siweyla portrays a Kurdish society in Iran which has lost its high values due to frustration ensuing the suppression of the Kurdish movement. Under such circumstances, Aram and other male characters utilized sexual virility to construct an exaggerated masculinity as a compensation for their inability to take political actions. Regardless of being modernist or realist, experimental or conventional, these contemporary Kurdish novels reproduce hierarchical binary oppositions essential for men’s dominance over women.

[1]Some representative works include Mai Ghoussoub and Emma Sinclair-Webb, eds., Imagined Masculinities Male Identity and Culture in the Modern Middle East (London : Saqi, 2000); Hoda Elsadda, “Imaging the ‘New Man’: Gender and Nation in Arab Literary Narratives in Early Twentieth Century,” Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies 3, no.2 (2007): 31-55; Paul Amar, “Middle East Masculinity Studies: Discourses of ‘Men in Crisis,’ Industries of Gender in Revolution,” Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies 7, no.3 (2011): 36-70; Marcia C. Inhorn, The New Arab Man: Emergent Masculinities, Technologies, and Islam in the Middle East (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012); and Mostafa Abedinifard, “The Vices of Men and the Necessity of Studying Men and Masculinities in Iranian Women’s Studies,” Iran Nameh 30, no.3 (2015): 230-282.

[2]Of these works, one can name Women of a Non-State Nation: The Kurds, edited by Shahrzad Mojab, a collection of papers which deal with issues ranging from women and Kurdish nationalism and women and Sufism to sexism in language, covering all parts of Kurdistan (California, Mazda Publishers, 2001). Minoo Alinia in her book, Honor and Violence Against Women in Iraqi Kurdistan (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), utilizes an intersectional approach to illuminate gender oppression and violence against women in the name of honour. She studies honour-based violence intersecting with ethnicity and class against the backdrop of broader socio-political context of Iraq and Iraqi Kurdistan. Of the few works dealing with Kurdish masculinity in one way or another, one can name Ahmet S. Aktürk, “Female Cousins and Wounded Masculinity: Kurdish Nationalist Discourse in the Post-Ottoman Middle East,” Middle Eastern Studies 52, no.1 (2016): 46-59. In his paper, Aktürk states that following repeated failure to liberate Kurdish territories under Turkish control in 1920s and 1930s, the Kurdish nationalist movement re-established itself in Syria and Lebanon in 1930s and 1940s. Unable to free Kurdistan through armed struggle, these Kurdish nationalists, instead, opted to revive Kurdish language and culture by, for example, publishing Kurdish periodicals. Despite all their efforts to revive Kurdish culture and awaken the Kurds of their national rights, Aktürk argues, their “male honour” was still injured because they were not able to fight for the independence of their country.

[3]“Shahram” is a Persian name which is pronounced “Sharam” by the Kurds. I chose the above two works because they represent two generations of Kurdish writers. While Amiri belongs to a generation whose works are more conservative in terms of their literary form and addressing sexual issues, Qawami comes from a new generation of Kurdish writers who experiment with innovative and radical literary forms and are more open to addressing sexual matters. It has to be said that Qawami’s naked description of sexual scenes is quite radical even among the new generation of Kurdish writers. These two writers, as examples of two generations of Kurdish writers, give an insight into different patterns of masculinities and femininities in Kurdish literature.

[4] R. W. Connell, Masculinities, 2^nd ed. (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005), 76.

[5]Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (New York: Routledge, 1993), 95.

[6]For critiques of the concept of hegemonic masculinity, for example, see Demetrakis Z. Demetriou, “Connell’s Concept of Hegemonic Masculinity: A Critique,” Theory and Society 30 (2001): 337-361; T. Jefferson, “Subordinating Hegemonic Masculinity,” Theoretical Criminology 6, no.1 (2002): 63-88. For a genealogy of the concept of “hegemonic masculinity,” its applications and critiques, see R. W. Connell and James Messerschmidt, “Hegemonic Masculinity: Rethinking the Concept,” Gender and Society 19, no. 6 (2005): 829–859.

[7]Connell, Masculinities, 71.

[8]Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London: Routledge, 1999) 43-44.

[9]“Hawarebere” is the name of a melody which is played by shimshal, a Kurdish musical instrument similar to flute.

[10]To transcribe Kurdish texts, I have used a modified version of Bedirxan’s Hawar alphabet to suit the Sorani dialect. Except for the names anglicized by the writers themselves, I have transliterated the names of other Kurdish writers and scholars and those appearing in the Kurdish texts.

[11]“Prior to the Islamic revolution of 1978–79 in Iran, SAVAK (Organization of National Security and Information), the Iranian secret police and intelligence service, protected the regime of the shah by arresting, torturing, and executing many dissidents.” Encyclopaedia Britanica, “National Intellegince Systems-Iran,” https://www.britannica.com/topic/intelligence-international-relations/National-intelligence-systems#ref796186.

[12]Fatah Amiri, Zindexew (Erbil: Aras, 2003), 257-58.

[13]Amiri, Zindexew, 152.

[14]Amiri, Zindexew, 177-190.

[15]Amiri, Zindexew, 2013.

[16]“Daye” means mother. It is also used to address grandmother or an old woman.

[17]Formerly known as Savoujbulagh (Sabllagh in Kurdish), Mahabd is a Kurdish city in West Azerbaijan province.

[18]Mirza Fatah Qazi was a member of the prominent Qazi family in Mahabad. Qader F. Qazi describes him as a “man of pen and man of sword … Despite being a cleric and wearing a gown and turban, he was an extremely brave warrior.” Mirza Fatah never compromised with other oppressive tribe chiefs or the Mahabad governors appointed by central government. Hence, there were a great deal of tension and conflict between him and other tribes which at times led to bloody wars (Qazi, 63). Qazi holds that “due to his freedom-loving, Mirza Fatah was always at war with local governors” and was hosting people who were taking refuge under his protection from the local government’s harassments and suppressions; see Qader F. Qazi, Kurte Mêjuy Bine Malley Qazî le Wilayeti Mukiryan [A Short History of Qazi’s Family in Mukiryan Province] (Hewlêr: Aras, 2009), 67–70.

[19]Amiri, Zindexew, 38.

[20]Amiri, Zindexew, 51.

[21]Amiri, Zindexew, 57.

[22]“Bildungsroman” and “Erziehungsroman,” Abrams and Harphams write, are German terms referring to the “novel of formation” or “novel of education.” M.H. Abrams and Jeoffrey Galt Harphams, A Glossary of Literary Terms, 9^th ed. (Boston: Michael Rosenberg, 2009), 229.

[23]Amiri, Zindexew, 44-45.

[24]Alan Petersen, Unmasking the Masculine: ‘Men’ and ‘Identity’ in a Sceptical Age (London: Sage Publishers, 1998), 43.

[25]For example, see Amiri, 12, 29, 57, and 88.

[26]Amiri, Zindexew, 77.

[27]Amiri, Zindexew, 74.

[28]Amiri, Zindexew, 88.

[29]Amiri, Zindexew, 29.

[30]Amiri, Zindexew, 42.

[31]Amiri, Zindexew, 57.

[32]Amiri, Zindexew, 12.

[33]Hélène Cixous, “Stories,” in David Lodge and N. Wood, eds., Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader, (London: Longman, 1988), 262–70.

[34]Toril Moi, Sexual/Textual Politics, 2^nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2002), 102.

[35]Cixous, “Stories,” 287.

[36]Cixous, “Stories,” 288.

[37]Amiri, Zindexew, 64–65.

[38]Amiri, Zindexew, 192–93.

[39]Amiri, Zindexew, 58.

[40]Amiri, Zindexew, 26.

[41]Amiri, Zindexew, 159.

[42]Lynne Pearce, “Sexual Politics,” in S. Mills and L. Pearce. eds., Feminist Readings/Feminists Reading, 2^nd ed. (London: Prentice Hall, 1996), 23–56.

[43]Amiri, Zindexew, 168.

[44]Amiri, Zindexew, 204–5.

[45]Petersen, Unmasking the Masculine, 72.

[46]Connell, Masculinities, 77.

[47]Afsaneh Najmabadi, “Women, State and Ideology in Contemporary Iran,” in Deniz Kandiyoti, ed., Women, Islam and the State (London: Macmillan, 1991), 22–47.

[48]Aziz Rahmani, known as ‘Ezîz Khan and Pałewan Aziz (Pahlavān Aziz), was born in 1921 in Sanandanj, Iran, and passed away at the age of 73. He is buried in the same city. For more information, see www8.irna.ir/fa/News/80720399/.

[49]Sharam Qawami, Siweyla, (Sanandaj: Golbarg, 2004), 76.

[50]Qawami, 113.

[51]F. Koohi-Kamali, “The Development of Nationalism in Iranian Kurdistan,” in Philip G. Kreyenbroek and Stefan Sperl, eds., The Kurds: A Contemporary Overview (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), 135-52.

[52]David McDowall, A Modern History of the Kurds (New York: I.B. Tauris, 2004), 162.

[53]Qawami, Siweyla, 121-22.

[54]Shahin Gerami. “Mullahs, Martyrs, and Men: Conceptualizing Masculinity in the Islamic Republic of Iran,” Men and Masculinities 5, no. 3 (2003): 257-274.

[55]Connell, Masculinities, 79. According to Connell, in a patriarchal system, while not all men benefit from the hegemonic masculine ideals, most men do become complicit with those ideals so they can benefit from a “patriarchal dividend,” that is, “the advantage men in general gain from the overall subordination of women.”

[56]Hemn Seyedi, in an article published by BBC Persian, provides a different reading of the unrest in Kurdistan in the first years of the Iranian Revolution. He counterposes two different discourses on two key figures back then: Mostafa Chamran and Foad Mostafa Soltani. Whereas the former is presented, by the Islamic Republic, as a hero in its war against the Kurdish Peshmerga, the latter is regarded as a hero by the Kurds themselves for defending the Kurds and their rights. See www.bbc.com/persian/blogs/2014/05/140508_l44_nazeran_chamran_paveh.

[57]Andreas G. Philaretou, The Perils of Masculinity: An Analysis of Male Sexual Anxiety, Sexual Addiction, and Relational Abuse (Oxford: University Press of America, 2004), 13.

[58]‘Ebe is the short form of Abdullah in Kurdish.

[59]Qawami, Siweyla, 56.

[60]Cited in Amir Hassanpour, “The (Re)production of Patriarchy in the Kurdish Language,” in Shahrzad Mojab, ed., Women of a Non-state Nation: The Kurds (California: Mazda Publishers, 2001), 227–63.

[61]Hassanpour, “The (Re)production of Patriarchy in the Kurdish Language,” 240. The association between phallus and power is not limited to Kurdish culture. Examining the “sexual politics” in the works of D.H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, Norman Mailer, and Jean Genet, Kate Millett shows that, with the exception of Genet’s works, the phallus is praised for its form and size and is granted an innate power and supremacy over the vagina. See Kate Millet, Sexual Politics (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1969), 7–8. Analysing an excerpt from Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Millet writes “Connie and the author-narrator together inform us the penis is ‘overweening,’ towering’ and ‘terrible.’ Most material of all, an erection provides the female with irrefutable evidence that male supremacy is founded upon the most real and uncontrovertible grounds” (Sexual Politics, 239).

[62]Qawami, Siweyla, 56.

[63]Qawami, Siweyla, 81.

[64]Connell, Masculinities, 79.

[65]Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter and Carolyn Burke (New York: Cornell University Press, 1985), 24.

[66]Irigaray, This Sex Which is Not One, 25.

[67]Elizabeth Grosz, Sexual Subversions (Sydney, Aus.: Allen & Unwin, 1989), 119.

[68]Grosz, Sexual Subversions, 111.

[69]Grosz, Sexual Subversions, 111(original emphasis).

[70]Qawami, Siweyla, 42.

[71]Qawami, Siweyla, 37.

[72]Qawami, Siweyla, 40–41.

[73]The original passage reads : “Le nêw kollanêkî Jandarmirîda çiray malêk helkira bû. Çingim kirde sawî sitadyeke u xom berz kirdewe. Lew dîwî hewdakanî baranda jin û piawêk be rûtî xerîkî eşiqbazî bûn. Piyaw jiney demewrû rimandibû u destî be simt û memkekaniya ehêna […] pencey kirde jêr sikya u memkekanî girte çing û simtî kirde serîn. Jine demi taq mabû […] Çiwe ser jestey û siwar simtî bû, çingî be qijya kird, ser û sîney helbirrî u le piştewe memkekanî girte dem. Jine eynûzandewe. Hellîgerandewe xoy be nêw qaçekaniya kird û têy tepand.” (Qawami, 139).

[74]Millett, Sexual Politics, 23.

[75]Grosz, Sexual Subversions, 116.

[76]Philaretou, The Perils of Masculinity, 13.

[77]Samira Aghacy, Masculine Identity in the Fiction of the Arab East Since 1967 (New York: Syracuse University Press, 2009), 20-21.

Kiarostami and Love on the Iranian Screen

Proshot Kalami Volume 2, Number 4, Winter 2018

“The thinking of love, so ancient, so abundant, and diverse in its forms and in its modulation, asks for an extreme reticence as soon as it is solicited.”

Jean-Luc Nancy, “Shattered Love,” The Inoperative Community

“For me the beauty of art resides in the reactions that it causes.”

Abbas Kiarostami, “Statement on Ten 10,” Abbas Kiarostami

Production and Censorship Codes are challenges that any Iranian filmmaker has to deal with. Naturally, cinematic representation of love within such limitations becomes more challenging. Some avoid it and some deal with it with less satisfactory outcomes. Kiarostami, however, turns it into an art by not only overcoming the limitations, but by creating a new aesthetic language that traverses borders, nations, and races to reach us all and effect us all fundamentally. It is a tall claim that he achieved, gradually but masterfully in ways that left his viewers at awe and in admiration for his Homework (1989), Where Is the Friend’s Home? (1987), and Through the Olive Trees (1994).

In his earlier works such as Homework and Where Is the Friend’s Home?, his perspective of love seems to be more embedded in a philosophical notion of love that Jean-Luc Nancy acknowledges as “shattered love”^{^[2]}, which is more concerned with how love affects us at its societal level and then manifests itself in various ways within each of us individually. That effect, however, as Nancy argues, and as Kiarostami’s screen validates, nuances our attitude towards one another differently. I argue that Kiarostami is deeply interested in those nuances, which inform our love at various levels, and not just between lovers. Kiarostami explores the ways in which love (or lack there of) functions in tangible terrains such as treatment of school children, the reaction of children, and the solution that the children find on their own. These solutions, on Kiarostami’s screens are all informed by that fundamentally philosophical notion of love.

Homework may be a philosophical apology on the absence of love where it’s most expected, either communal—in case of pastoral love towards primary school children—or within domestic sphere. The lack, the viewers will come to discover throughout the course of the film, is filled with beating or physical punishment for not being able to finish their homework properly. Yet parents and students both attest to the fact that the assignments are excessive and expectations are beyond reason. Often children fall short of giving any example of reward when Kiarostami asks them if they have ever been rewarded. But they all know punishment means beating, most often by means of a belt, and sometimes a slap on the face. And punishment is for the boy who has not finished his homework.

When putting his subjects in front of the camera, Kiarostami normalises the dire atmosphere by asking them various questions, which in their reticence reveal deeper emotions of fear, anxiety, and love, surprisingly! In such moments, there is no editing, hardly any movement of the camera, nor much of cinematic techniques to manipulate the shot. There is of course the perturbing gaze of the camera and the questions that come from Kiarostami. Towards the end of the documentary, when the viewer by now understands that the students are all overwhelmed by the sheer weight of their homework, and parents helpless and confused in supervising their children’s progress, one interview attracts attention more than the rest:

What do you want to be when you grow up?
A pilot!
Why?
To kill Saddam!
Why?
He is brutal, he ruins houses.[3]

When he is asked what he would do if by the time he grows up Saddam is dead, the child responds he would cure those who have heart problems and need heart surgery. Compassion and communal love are the only alternative in his imagination. At once, and at the presence of an alternative to war, he expresses the love that informs fraternity. The child testifies as a lover, yet who can also be a killer of the one who shatters love. Just by positioning the camera without any interruption in front of the boy, and by allowing him to project his wishes, Kiarostami peels away complex layers that stand as hindrance to the manifestation and flowering of love. There is a reticence here in thinking of love, of the possibilities of love. “To think love would thus demand a boundless generosity towards all these possibilities”^{^[4]} as Nancy argues and perhaps this reticence yet yielding towards exploration of it in Homework, becomes its informing drive.

Kiarostami seems to seek the generosity of the fraternal love that is absent in schools.

[I]t is this generosity that would command reticence: the generosity not to choose between loves, not to privilege, not to hierarchies, not to exclude. Because love is not their substance or their common concept, is not something one can extricate and contemplate at a distance. Love in its singularity, when it is grasped absolutely, is itself perhaps nothing but the indefinite abundance of all possible loves, and an abandonment to their dissemination, indeed to the disorder of these explosions.^{^[5]}

The testimonies of children one by one stand witness to the fact that love is missing from the very place it is prescribed, and remains absent from the heart of being. Conglomerated in the final testimony of a little boy who is visibly, painfully, and psychologically shattered, is the lack. The lack is ironically juxtaposed by the poem he recites. He is a nervous 2^nd grader who cannot bear to stand in front of the camera all by himself and breaks into hysteric reaction demanding the presence of his classmate, Mowlayie, for that is all he has to hold on to, to feel secure. Kiarostami edits the child’s testimony with an interview with the boy’s father, which reveals that he works with the child on his homework in a room with closed door. The father is critical of the care and protection of the mother shielding the child from what the father thinks as “educating his son”. Cutting to a brief interview with the classmate, Mowlayie, separately, he reveals to us by way of the camera that when they were in 1^st grade, the teacher had broken a ruler while beating the frightened child. Since then he had shown anxiety when feeling insecure, hence he became dependant on the presence of his classmate. The editing and the interview with the father together seem to suggest that domestic and educational spheres both are devoid of the love that the investigating camera of Kiarostami is looking for. In the final sequence of the film and the last shot of the shattered boy, when feeling comfortable having his classmate present in the room, he volunteers to recite a poem:

Oh Lord of the beautiful stars/ Oh Lord of the colourful cosmos/ Oh Lord who created the Venus/ The Moon and the Sun/ All the mountains, hills and oceans/ The beautiful blooming trees/ Beautiful wings for the butterfly/ Nests for the birds/ Happiness, games and abilities/ Eyes for us to see/ The Snow, the Rain, the Heat and the Cold/ Were all created by you, Lord/ Grant me all that I asked from you/ Fill our heart, you Lord, with joy.

This is where Kiarostami ends his Homework and the boy recites gloriously, devoid of all love that he counts so masterfully in his recitation of aspects of God’s love. The film is the very representation of the lack, the absence, the absolute void of the communal love where it is expected most, and found least. This is the love, shattered.

Figure 1, from Homework

In an interview with Jonathan Rosenbaum, Kiarostami reminds us about why and how he made Homework:

That’s when I first thought about writing a different kind of documentary, where the audience put the pieces together on their own…The film should allow that to happen, make room for that interaction… [T]he audience invent their own close-ups without me providing any because of their own attentiveness to what’s happening. They furnish the meaning of the event.^{^[6]}

And he does allow that freedom in his other works too.

On Where Is the Friend’s Home?,

I believe that love is indeed what I call in my own philosophical jargon a ‘truth procedure’, that is, an experience whereby a certain kind of truth is constructed. This truth is quite simply the truth about Two: the truth that derives from differences as such.

Alain Badou [7]

Babak Ahmadpour and Mohammad-Reza Nematzadeh are primary school children who share the same desk. Nematzadeh has left his notebook at his cousin’s house, which is why he has written his homework on a piece of paper. An extreme close up shows the worried face of his classmate, Ahmadpour. There is a series of cut-reverse-cut from the close up of Nematzadeh’s tear-covered face to sick-worried face of Ahmadpour. The teacher tears the assignment and threatens to expel him if this happens for the third time. Later when leaving the school, we find them together again in an establishing shot. The camera moves with them in a long shot without any cut. The narration is simple, unsophisticated, and honest. Nematzadeh falls. The camera follows Ahmadpour who collects Mohammad-Reza’s belongings for him, takes him to the water fountain, and cleans up his trousers for him. The scene ends. The camera re-invents a friendship. The compassionate love is present. Its un-named presence is very similar to the silent support of the last two classmates in Homework. Here, in developing this unique aspect of love, Kiarostami seems to pick up in Where Is the Friend’s Home? where he left off in his documentary. The quest begins when Ahmadzadeh realises that he has, by mistake, put Mohammad-Reza’s notebook in his bag. That worried look is returned in a few medium close up shots. And that is when his quest to look for his friend’s house begins.

Figures 2, 3, 4 from Where Is the Friend’s Home?

Kiarostami renders his films as quest for truth, but what kind of truth? He aims to find it in relation to something very precise. That is evident in his choice of location, the dialogue that the mise-en-scène immediately initiates with the viewer, in his selection of non-actors, and of course the way in which he treats the subject of his film. Where Is the Friend’s Home? in ways more than one, points to all the above-mentioned elements and how they illuminate his quest for the truth. As Badiou suggests, Kiarostami questions what the world is like when it is experienced and lived from the point of view of difference, of the two and not one. “That is what I believe love to be.”[8] His camera challenges our lives from the perspective of the other. It follows the young boy in search of his classmate in more than one attempt. The quest of the boy is an experience in which he forgets himself—and by way of him, we do too—on behalf of the other. But he does not dissolve in the other. Kiarostami makes him go back to Poshteh (the neighbouring village where Nematzadeh lives) twice, and each time he either sends him to a wrong address or makes sure his protagonist arrives late, to delay the encounter of the two. Nonetheless, his camera follows Ahmadpour through the olive trees, over the hill with zigzag path, and the uneven back alleys of Poshteh every time. The gnarled branches constantly cut through our vision, creating a sense of speed editing while the camera dollies most of the time.

Figure 5, 6 from Through the Olive Trees

Kiarostami constructs a world from a decentered point of view which denies any reaffirmation. Ahmadpour runs through the olive trees. The pace of editing is slightly faster, cutting through alleys of Poshteh, then a cemetery, leading to the olive trees. These are the same trees that years later we get to see again in Through the Olive Trees, where the lovers, on a different quest, traverse at a slower pace. In a long shot, Kiarostami sends Ahmadpour uphill through a zigzag road. This has become one of the most famous scenes in film history. The long shot of the boy running down and up the hill twice is the very representation of the decentered point of view from which we access his narrative of love.

The camera values the experience over the construction of the plot. Perhaps that is the informing factor for the aesthetic choice Kiarostami makes to repeat the same location in his future film. The locations, which are constantly consisting of up and down narrow alleyways, uneven stairs, and asymmetrical windows that frame extremely meticulous geometrical shapes, all weave the mise-en-scène to reinforce the decentered quest to avoid the encounter. Yet the boy encounters many other characters who in their own turn display aspects of love, the love that is mainly informed by the community within which they live.

Those same people—his mother included—however, cannot see the driving force of love that feeds the boy’s worry for his classmate. He is misunderstood by his father who punishes him for arriving home late, for he thinks his son was out playing. Badiou observes that the “Lover, particularly over time, embraces all the positive aspects of friendship, but love relates to the totality of the being of the other,”^{^[9]} which explains why Ahmadpour is so obsessively focused on finding Nematzadeh. He cannot bear the possibility of his friend’s repeated pain. Witnessing him being punished for not having done his homework in his notebook is an unbearable responsibility on the beating heart of the child. “Love isn’t simply about two people meeting and their inward-looking relationship: it is a construction, a life that is being made, no longer from the perspective of One but from the perspective of Two.”^{^[10]} Perhaps for this reason he decides to write two homework assignments, one for himself and one in Nematzadeh’s notebook, for him.

The editing speed and techniques create tension in the construction of such dual perspective of Two. By doing that, Kiarostami distances himself from the melodramatic or even romantic conception of love and thus renders a liminal space where the quests become the very notion of love. He re-invents a quest. He creates the desire for an unknown duration and renders that duration the truth. It is this truth which is projected on Kiarostami’s screen in Where Is the Friend’s House?. “[L]ove is a re-invention of life. To re-invent love is to re-invent that re-invention.”[11] This explains why Kiarostami sends the boy to Poshteh more than once, why he misled his character to different addresses, why he creates two different households by the name of Nematzadeh, why he delays the boy with the chance encounter with the window-maker. He is an old man who can barely walk, and the only one who makes wooden windows; this is the last chance of connecting Ahmadpour to his friend, for he has made windows for their house. Alas, we still have to wait. He takes Ahmadpour to the wrong window of the wrong house.

Figure 7 from Where Is the Friend’s House?

The next day the teacher is about to check Nematzadeh’s homework, when Ahmadpour arrives rather late. When his teacher asks him to explain his tardiness, he says he is coming from Poshteh. The audience does not see his morning journey, but we know where and how he has gone. “[T]he viewer can imagine what’s beyond the reach of his eyes. And viewers do have creative minds… The viewer always has this curiosity to imagine what’s outside the field of vision; it’s used all the time in everyday life.”^{^[12]} We take the journey in our head, as Kiarostami wanted us: “[…] the audience put the pieces together on their own…The film should allow that to happen, make room for that interaction…”^{^[13]} Ahmadpour takes out both notebooks and hands them to the teacher while telling Nematzadeh that he has completed the homework for him. There is a flower dried between the pages of his friend’s notebook. We now are seeing from the perspective of the Two and not One. We are in love. We have experienced love. We have traversed alongside love. Badiou believes “in love, the other tries to approach ‘the being of the other.’ In love the individual goes beyond himself, beyond the narcissistic. … You go to take on the other, to make him or her exist with you, as he or she is. It is a much more profound conception of love than the entirely banal view that love is no more than an imaginary canvas painted over the reality of sex.”^{^[14]} Within a span of 24 hours, fraternity and communal love manifested in Ahmadpour’s quest tells the tale of a love that cannot be limited to one simple explanation. The search is for that house, the house of that friend, the lover who is not bound by gender, sex or mere desire.

Figure 8 from Where Is the Friend’s House?

On Through the Olive Trees

Figure 9 from Through the Olive Trees

It is through meandering on such rocky roads that Kiarostami finds his way in Through the Olive Trees and celebrates the ever presence of love that brings young hearts together despite the shattering effect of a deadly earthquake. It is in the absolute depth of chaos where the master finds absolute love. His editing techniques and speed, his camera angles, his meticulous selection of location, and his sharp taste in finding that gem in non-actors together create the symphony of love that surpasses any blade of censorship and silence. Here, I endeavour to explore such techniques in revealing how Kiarostami becomes the master of Love in his masterful cinema that will continue to inspire generations of filmmakers to come. Kiarostami finds it imperative to go back to the scene of his former film, Where Is the Friend’s Home? after the devastating earthquake that apparently ruined Poshteh. He finds the two brothers who played the roles of Ahmadpour and Nematzadeh. They are alive and provide flowerpots for the shooting. Having seen Where Is the Friend’s Home?, and knowing about the earthquake, one cannot help but being moved emotionally when the two brothers, now much older, appear in front of the camera. That is the moment when Kiarostami’s viewers realise that they have lived with the boys, they have carried their love within, and have anxiously waited to see if Kiarostami has found them alive. As Badiou reminds us, “in love, the other tries to approach ‘the being of the other.’ In love the individual goes beyond himself, beyond the narcissistic. … You go to take on the other, to make him or her exist with you, as he or she is.”[15] Kiarostami’s screen had made us, his viewers, philosophers of love. We have approached “the being of the other”.

Kiarostami is making Life and Nothing More when he notices that three days after the earthquake a young couple got married. That becomes the nucleus of the idea for Through the Olive Trees. It is the power of community that draws him to the subject. As Badiou argues, if you love each other deeply “the whole of this loving community will approach the ultimate fount of all love that is divine transcendence itself.”^{^[16]} It is here that the lovers accept the experience of the other, the lover, the gaze that is towards the other, and that is through the investigative lens of Kiarostami’s camera. He looks for the collective love that at once initiates and emanates from the community.

However, his film is not a testimony to any fixed definition of love. The notion that is crystallised in the last few sequences of Through the Olive Trees, where he leaves the conclusion to the audience: “When the woman stops walking in the last sequence of Through the Olive Trees, the audience invent their own close-ups without me providing any because of their own attentiveness to what’s happening. They furnish the meaning of the event.”^{^[17]} The Lovers are and are not a part of the community that is created around them at two levels simultaneously. They both belong to a village that is levelled by the devastating earthquake. They both are touched by death. In the case of the boy, 27 deaths in his family, and in the case of the girl, her parents. The other layer is the constructed community of the film (film crew and the film scripts that define them as an already married couple). Both are real as much as unreal; the film defines them as an already married couple while their actual community does not consent to the young man marrying the girl. Yet, our Lovers expose above all the “unworking” of both of these communities. “Unworking is what they show in their communal aspect and intimacy. But they expose it to the community, which already shares their intimacy”[18], in this case through the camera that records them at both levels at once. “For the community, Lovers are on its limit, they are outside and inside, and at this limit they have no meaning without the community” yet, Kiarostami renders a layer to it that goes beyond the limitations of the community that concerns Nancy or Badiou.

Love does not complete community. There is a communion, a marriage. But even that is investigated through his lens. The actors who are acting for the camera, within the world of the film, are actually in love in real life. But the film they are shooting tells the story of them as a married couple. The young man takes advantage of every opportunity to criticise the character he is to play, if he finds that character not fair to his sujet of affection. Through him, Kiarostami observes the complexity of the notion of communal love. A love that although depends on the constitution of marriage, goes beyond it in the way the young lovers re-live it. “[L]ove, provided it is not itself conceived on the basis of the politico-subjective model of communion in one, exposes the unworking and therefore the incessant incompletion of community. It exposes community at its limit.”^{^[19]}

The last few sequences, which are the focus of this part of the present essay, begin with the film crew prepping the scene. The two young lovers on the balcony are left alone. The boy starts talking to the girl, while serving her a cup of tea, picking two stems of flowers, placing them gently on the tray, and telling her that this is the meaning of life: sometimes I serve you tea, sometimes you serve me tea. They do not touch. He touches the flowers.

Figures 10 & 11 from Through the Olive Trees

When “the ego roots itself in its divine source” as Nancy states in his reading of Kierkegaard’s notion of ultimate love, it moves beyond seduction and “through serious meditation of marriage, becomes a way to accede to the super-human”.^{^[20]} This super-human is the poetry of images that Kiarostami projects on his screen. The young man, the lover, becomes the vehicle of such a notion. After a few more takes of another sequence the film crew decides to wrap up. Later, when the filming session of that day is ended, the young man carries on clearing the empty cups. He picks up her half-empty cup of tea, pours it onto the flowerpot gently, yet empties the other cups onto the earth. Her lips, by way of her half-drank tea, touch the flowers. He places the two stems of flower previously picked by him, for her, in his pocket.

Figures 12 & 13 from Through the Olive Trees

On the same balcony where the two lovers were located, we find the two brothers from Where Is the Friend’s Home? returning to retrieve the flowerpots they brought for the set. The two who manifested the love, now reappear at the place of love, where the young man has confessed his love. The continuation of Where Is the Friend’s Home? in Through the Olive Trees is not an accident. Kiarostami is reminding his viewers of the multitude of the possibilities to love on his screen.

Figure 14 from Through the Olive Trees

The absence of touch on Kiarostami’s screen turns into a poetry of touches. Editing is minimal and the speed is gentle. Whenever possible, the camera simply follows the young lovers. This “unleashing of passions confronts lovers with community not because it would place them at a simple remove from community” as Nancy indicates.[21] Kiarostami exposes the Lovers “at the limit, the exposition of singular beings to one another and the pulse of this exposition: the compearance, the passage, and the divide of sharing” surpasses the limitation of a censored society. “In them, or between them-this is exactly the same thing-ecstasy, joy touches its limit”^{^[22]} manifest itself in poetry of cinematography.

In this series of sequences, the girl does not reciprocate his love in front of the camera. We, the spectator, have to wait a bit longer, until they disappear as the boy is following her through the olive trees—the same olive trees through which Ahmadpour ran in search of his friend’s home—up the hill through the zigzag path—the same that we have seen in Where Is the Friend’s Home?, to see them re-emerge on the other side of the olive trees. Now they are just two distant figures engulfed by the enormity of a lush pastoral landscape. And it happens, suddenly. The two who are reduced to two white moving dots suddenly stop. The girl stops. There is a pause. It is a wide angle establishing shot. There is a contact; if you blink you may barely miss it. The music changes, the young man runs back the distance which he covered to follow her. His joyous run can only indicate the positive answer of the girl. His dreams come true. She must have said yes! The girl, by way of Kiarostami’s direction, defied the communal limitations of both communities (the village and the film). Yet again, the absence of touch becomes the largest symbolic presence of the ecstasy, the jouissance which had already become the poetry of movements of tea, flower, and flowerpots.

Figures 15 & 16 & 17 from Through the Olive Trees

CONCLUSION

None of the stories Kiarostami recounts in any of the films are new, yet he shows them as the very experience of love in its varieties and degrees, as universal and as unique they can get:

What is universal is that all love suggests a new experience of truth about what it is to be two and not one. That we can encounter and experience the world other than through a solitary consciousness: any love whatsoever gives us new evidence of this. And that is why we live to love; as St Augustine says, we like to love, but we also like others to love us: simply because we love truths. That is what gives philosophy its meaning: people like truths, even when they don’t know that they like them.”[23]

Kiarostami tells us those truths we long to know, truths that are at times impossible to recount on a Persian screen, truths of lovers who find life and continuum amidst destruction and devastation. Truths that young school children tell without knowing of their telling, the truth about the absence of love. The truth of the quest to find the friend, to protect the friend from the unbearable weight of a possible punishment. Kiarostami’s universe of truths renders the re-invention of love a re-lived experience anew.

[1]Proshot Kalami < pkalami@bhcc.mass.edu> received her PhD in Comparative Literature with two designated emphasises in Critical Theory & Film & Performance Studies from UC Davis in 2007. Prior to that she was a lecturer, playwright & radio director. Her scholarly publications are in Theatre & Performance studies & World Cinema in form of books, book chapters & articles. Her creative works are in Documentary Filmmaking, Video Installation, Visual Arts & Creative Writing.

^{^[2]}Jean-Luc Nancy, “The Inoperative Community”, Theory and History of Literature, ed. Wald Godzich and Jochen Schulte-Sasse 76 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 76.

[3] Homework, directed by Abbas Kiarostami (1989), DVD, min. 56.

^{^[4]}Jean-Luc Nancy, “Shattered Love”, 83.

^{^[5]}Jean-Luc Nancy, “Shattered Love”, 83.

^{^[6]}Jonathan Rosenbaum and Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa, “Interview with Abbas Kiarostami”, in Abbas Kiarostami (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2003), 107-8.

[7]Alain Badiou, “The Truth of Love” in In Praise of Love (London: Serpent’s Tail, 2012), 38.

[8]Badiou, “The Truth of Love,” 22.

^{^[9]}Badiou, “The Construction of Love,” 36.

^{^[10]}Badiou, “The Construction of Love,” 36.

[11]Badiou, “The Construction of Love,” 33.

^{^[12]}Rosenbaum and Saeed-Vafa, “Interview with Abbas Kiarostami”, 114.

^{^[13]}Rosenbaum and Saeed-Vafa, “Interview with Abbas Kiarostami”, 107.

^{^[14]}Badiou, “Philosophers and Love”, 19.

[15]Badiou, “Philosophers and Love”, 19.

^{^[16]}Badiou, “Philosophers and Love”, 65.

^{^[17]}Rosenbaum and Saeed-Vafa, “Interview with Abbas Kiarostami”, 108.

[18] Badiou, “Love and Politics”, 40.

^{^[19]}Nancy, “The Inoperative Community,” 38.

^{^[20]}Nancy, “The Inoperative Community,” 38.

[21]Nancy, “The Inoperative Community,” 38.

^{^[22]}Nancy, “The Inoperative Community,” 38.

[23]Badiou, “The Truth of Love,” 39-40.

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

Arshavez Mozafari Volume 2, Number 3, Fall 2017

Abstract

As part of a broader postsecular historical investigation into the role of demonological discourses in the formation of Iranian modernity, this article seeks to account for the presence of the demonic in the works of two interbellum thinkers, the Marxist theoretician and physicist Taqī Arānī (1903-40/1321-59 gh.) and Arānī’s defence attorney during the Group of 53 trials, a religious reformist who was a major proponent of the anti-mystical rational theology, Aḥmad Kasravī (1890-1946/1308-65 gh.). What is unique about these two thinkers is that their respective commitments to materialist inquiry and the conceptualisation of a God of Reason accommodated the residue of “traditionalist” demonism in different functional forms. Primarily through the use of idioms, embodied evil was delineated in a manner that radically contravened long-standing demonological trappings. As seen in works such as “Jabr va Ikhtiyār (Determinism and Free Will),” Pisīkūlūzhī: ʿIlm-i Rūḥ (Psychology: The Science of the Spirit), Ākharīn Difāʿ-i Duktur Taqī Arānī (Dr. Taqī Arānī’s Final Defence), Mātiriyālīsm-i Diyāliktīk (Dialectical Materialism), “ʿIrfān va Uṣūl-i Māddī (Mysticism and the Principles of Materialism),” and Bashar Az Naẓar-i Māddī (The Human from a Material Standpoint), Arānī allowed the satanic to serve an instrumental role in scientific explanation, the crystallisation of proletarian-state relations, and the framing of irrationality even though he was swift in his dismissal of occult existence. Arānī’s major demonological contribution, his assertion of demonic irrationality, is one that he shared with Kasravī. In Rāh-i Rastgārī (The Path of Salvation) and Āyīn (Creed), the Shīʿī reformist elaborated the idea of demonic irrationality in his attempt to promote a universalised rational order, and this was done through the use of exclusionary logic.

Introduction

In his interbellum work, “Jabr va Ikhtiyār (Determinism and Free Will),”[1] the Iranian Marxist theoretician and physicist Taqī Arānī (1903-40/1321-59 gh.) was inadvertently participating in a transformative mode of demonographical inscription that gave prominence to demonic irrationality. This is of note in three direct respects. Firstly, notwithstanding his inveighed assaults against religion and dismissal of demonic existence,[2] Arānī’s process of thinking by means of the demonic—even if ultimately tongue in cheek—illustrates how secularity was complicit in religious conceptual formations, and how a secular ethos was in part established through religious imaginaries. This observation is, of course, indebted to the postsecular impulse with its historiographical denial of religion as containing a “transhistorical essence,”[3] and its assertion that religion is “attached to specific processes of power and knowledge”[4] and dependent upon “historically distinctive disciplines and forces.”[5] Secondly, in Iran the extrusion of demonic irrationality points to the contemporaneous circulation of rationalisation nomenclature and debates concerning the place of rationality in social discourse. As “irreducibly stochastic,”[6] the demonism being described here coincided with and even encouraged the most concerted Iranian attempt to establish a universal rational order. Thirdly, the attempt to establish a closed rational order by so-called “anti-traditionalists” allowed demonic irrationality to enter a stage of autonomy and exteriority beyond logos—an unprecedented development in Iran’s Islamic history. The modernist confrontation with the “ancient or vestigial” autonomy of “pure irregularity”[7] is precisely the matter under consideration here.

The purpose of this paper is to explore these statements, along with their implications, as they are found in a series of interbellum works by Arānī and Aḥmad Kasravī (1890-1946/1308-65 gh.), Arānī’s defence attorney during the Group of 53 trials and a religious reformist who was a major proponent of the anti-mystical “rational theology”[8] that jettisoned demonic figures from the scope of order. During the first Pahlavī period (1921-41/1300-20 sh.) these two thinkers contributed to the processual break with the longstanding alliance between the satanic and the rational in Islamic thought. After all, it was during the formative stage of the religion that Qur’an commentators unequivocally linked Iblīs—Satan in angelic/jinn form, the “fiery primogenitor”[9]—to qiyās, or analogical reasoning. This attribution gave the Ẓāhirī school of jurisprudence an opening to redouble its critique against the futility of human reason without scriptural guidance, but it did not entirely diminish the importance of reason among other branches of law—for instance, qiyās holds a prominent place in Shāfiʿī thought.[10] What many commentators ultimately agreed upon was how satanic pride, narcissism, spiritual vapidity and the inevitable downfall that accompanied these traits were neatly nestled within an excessive reliance upon intellection.[11] Even when—in the style of “the sibling rivalry motif”[12]—it is conceded that Iblīs’ view regarding his essential superiority over Adam retains integrity and is the expression of a faculty that was bestowed upon him by God Himself, Satan’s tragedy is that he is lambasted for his sound rational judgment.[13] It is in this light that Satan as the tempter should be explained. Rather than focusing on the irrationality of the passion-driven carnal soul, of which Satan is construed as the proprietor, and demonic possession as “destroy[ers] [of] the rational structure of the mind,”[14] the accent should be placed on Iblīs’ rejected offering of reasons[15] as the precipitating moment behind the machinations for which he is most reviled. To top it off, he is considered the first to have ever exercised reason.[16] In other words, satanic temptation is based in rational proposals.

Often ridiculed by Sufi scholars such as al-Hujwīrī (c. 990-1077/c. 380-469 gh.), the eighth-tenth century rationalist movement known as Muʿtazilism partially evaded the consequences of a rational evil by associating the development of the rational faculties with true spiritual commitment.[17] In fact, the Muʿtazilites went so far as to conclude that the human mind is capable of grasping the reason(s) behind God’s dismissal of Iblīs’ antagonism.[18] To this extent, evil itself can be comprehended, a position that was embraced by Ibn Sīnā (c. 980-1037/c. 369-428 gh.) even though he was a known critic of Muʿtazilism.[19] All of this is to say that evil, the first figural expression of which was simultaneously the first appearance of reason,[20] is construed by rationally inclined Islamic thinkers as intelligible.

While we can thus far conclude that the demonic has traditionally been construed as both rational and intelligible, it has also common practice to situate him within the divine cosmic scheme. As the cleric and constitutionalist Āqā Najafī Qūchānī (1878-1943/1295-1362 gh.) put it in Siyāḥat-i Sharq (Eastern Journey), “All existents (mawjūdāt) are created (makhlūq) by, are the shadows (ẓil) of, and are dependent (mansūb) upon” God. Even though the degree of divine attribution (andāzah-yi intisāb) in Satan may be limited, he is nevertheless enclosed within the Islamic cosmological order.[21] As the “necessary instrument in [God’s] Hands,”[22] the archfiend “possesses powers only by extension.”[23] It is against this background of a contained and instrumentalised Satan that Arānī’s commentary of the demonic becomes piercing in its distinctiveness. There is tension between the demonic as it is situated within recognisable and coherent limits and that to which Arānī is referring. If demonological discourse during the early twentieth century teetered away from Qūchānī’s traditional conception towards one that is more lawless and impervious to disciplining, then how was this received, compounded and guided by literate culture?

Arānī’s Demonology

Let us first detail what Arānī actually said in “Jabr va Ikhtiyār.” After a brief deterministic account of causation, he states that without the benefit of laws or principles (qānūn yā nāmūs) it would not be possible to predict (pīsh’bīnī) any occurrences.[24] This mechanistic conception of reality lent itself to a positivistic and materialist worldview that came to inform revolutionary leftist theory in Iran for decades.[25] However, it is the logic of the following statement that has gone under the radar: “Today, bread is baked in an oven but it is possible (mumkin ast) that if Satan so desires (agar Shayṭān bikhvāhad), tomorrow bread can grow (sabz shavad) on trees like fruit.”[26] Is this desire of which Arānī speaks not reminiscent of the originary “passionate desire” of Satan in Paradise Lost that is subverted and made to be forgotten by God and Christ in their capacities as “reason and restraint?”[27] By being juxtaposed to a form of causal reasoning that can be traced back to Aristotle, Satan’s desire here escapes logical comprehensibility and coherence. Again, this is rather odd considering how, in the Islamic tradition, the fallen angel is associated with analogical reasoning (qiyās) and thus the “limitations and ultimate unreliability of human intellection.”[28]

What is implicit in Arānī’s conception is how similar Satan is to the Ashʿarite understanding of God as an Absolute Will that is purely arbitrary. In this view, “no contingent being or event can be rationally accounted for.”[29] The instrumentalised Satan falls by the wayside in favour of a sovereign Satan who assumes “the truest and most complete manifestation of God and his omnipotent freedom.”[30] The appearance of the latter satanic form should not be simply construed as a stale extract from a millennia-old depository of edifying turns of phrase, but rather the expression of an intellectual debate over the merits of determinative causation. Compare Arānī’s approach to determinism with that of the well-known lawyer Maḥmūd Sarshār (1901-1964/1280-1343 sh.), whose thoughts on the matter were written just over a decade after Arānī’s death. In the case of Arānī, a prominent figure within the religious imagination is transformed into a carrier of the torch of chance. For Sarshār, the prospect of discovering laws (qavānīn) and relations between phenomena and theories (bāyad ḥavādis̱ va qaz̤āyā rā mū’shikāfī kardah va irtibāṭ-i ānhā rā bā yik dīgar paydā nimāyad) is at the basis of a determinative science. With this telos in mind, the veils of ignorance (pardah’hā-yi jahl va nādānī) can be torn, and he tables a Qur’anic verse to seal his position.[31] While Sarshār helps to incorporate scientific determinism into an Islamic framework, Arānī’s commitment to dialectical materialism separates it off from religion, leaving the latter with only fortuitousness.

Theorists who emerged after Iran’s far-left transition from social democracy to orthodox Marxism[32] advocated a certain “unswerving”[33] dogmatism that had the world’s disenchantment[34] at its basis. It is within this context that the demonic strangely emerges, not as the theoretical intelligence of the early determinists that is “capable of ascertaining the complete set of initial conditions of the world system at any one instant of time,”[35] but as a stochastic force that helps to stabilise the theory of determination through the production of chains of indeterminacy.[36] While Arānī used a disenchanted and aseptic materiality to disprove manifestations of idealist and religious discourse, he nevertheless preserved these manifestations—usually in the form of familiar but “irreverent idioms”[37] or metaphors—as the face of incoherence and lawlessness in the determinism vs. anti-determinism debate.

Though at times invoked as a relatively abstract principle, Arānī’s lawlessness is also localised in phenomenal entities, as detailed in Pisīkūlūzhī (Psychology). In his discussion of the psychological notion of “suggestion (talqīn),” Arānī uses an image of a satanic child (bachchah-yi shayṭānī) who, by biting into a sour lemon (līmū-yi turshī) in front of a military band (shaypūrchī´hā-yi niẓāmī), is able to disrupt its performance by inducing salivation.[38] Here, we observe lawless demonic exteriority intruding upon the world of laws without any direct physical causes (bidūn-i vujūd-i ʿillat).[39] Similar to the notion of religiously grounded satanic whispering (vasvasah) as the subversion of human fortitude and fidelity, demonic suggestion is pivoted upon the absence of physical causes. However, the question implicitly asked is not how to safeguard oneself from temptation, but how the outside enters the inside without resistance.[40] How could pure rational discipline (military band) be violated by unrefined arbitrariness (demonic child) when no clear physiological connection is apparent?

Arānī’s resolution comes by way of the meta-will (māvarā-yi irādah). This concept when an individual presumes that due to the lack of direct and discernible internal causes (bidun-i ʿillat-imustaqīm), certain external experiences are actually instigations of foreign stimuli, such as magic (siḥr va jādū) or spirits (arvāḥ), when indeed it is the meta-will that is the source of these actualisations.[41] This is similar to the way in which in capitalist production “the activity of the worker is [perceived as] not [being] his own spontaneous activity.”[42] For Arānī, the truth of the reaction is completely internal to the actors involved.[43] In comparing this discussion to his description of suggestion, it is clear that in the first instance, the distance between subjectivity and an invasive demonic irrationality is affirmed, while in the second, both the occult and its foreignness disappear in favour of the “blind circuit”[44] of reason.

In some of Arānī’s arguments, the demonic is alluded to in order for persuasive scientific points to be made. He goes beyond occultist logic but he also allows his rhetorical “resources”[45] to be partially derived from this very location. This resort to “local knowledge”[46] allows him to appeal to an audience invested in the scientific debates of the time, and in doing so he borrows from, as well as tinkering with, a reconfigured demonological discourse. What is remarkable is that scientific persuasion provided an outlet for this new demonological configuration to be transmitted. Thus, instead of nullifying the role of the demonic in the conceptualisation of actuality, Arānī “rehabilitat[es]”[47] it in the service of a relatively new genre concerned with polemic and scientific popularisation.

The dearth of demonic references in Pisīkūlūzhī and related texts can indeed be raised as a rejoinder to my position, but attention should be directed to their mere presence and what this says about the genre of scientific popularisation in Iran. In Arānī’s contribution to this literature, key explanations of scientific facts were “garnished”[48] with the demonic because he was attuned to the way his audience was in the midst of rethinking the role of the occult in society. Nature for him was devoid of all religious meaning and significance, and yet the “obfuscatory” element remained textually embedded. Not exactly a form of “fetishistic disavowal of belief” where, in this case, the demonic “enables the subject to accept [the] knowledge [of the demonic] without paying the full price for it,”[49]Arānī’s use of the demonic was part of a “textual strategy” meant to capture his audience’s full attention.[50]

In Ākharīn Difāʿ-i Duktur Taqī Arānī (Dr. Taqī Arānī’s Final Defence), Arānī’s partially transcribed 1938/1317 sh. public trial, in which he “spoke vigorously in his own defense,”[51] the demonic occult emerges in the social conflicts that crash like waves against the state,[52] specifically those concerning workers. By this time, the notion of an identifiable working class had a very short history in the country. Initially and primarily deployed by social reformers and democrats in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries as a theoretical device, it was only in the 1920s/1300s sh. when the likes of Āvitīs Sulṭānzādah (1889-1938/1306-57 gh.) started speaking of workers (kārgarān) as an identifiable class.[53] This is not to say that there did not exist prior instances of proletarian organisation. During the Constitutional Revolution (1905-11/1323-29 gh.), workers (notably local tanners) coordinated strike actions and political parties championed the interests of workers. A boom in the Soviet oil sector during the 1910s/1330s gh. attracted many Iranian workers who became receptive to the didactic efforts of Russian Social Democrats.[54] The early 1920s/1300s sh. was also a time when a number of organisational efforts made headway, particularly by postal, telegraphic and educational workers.[55] The rise of Riz̤ā Shāh Pahlavī (1878-1944/1295-1363 gh./r. 1925-41/1304-20 sh.) and the shadow that his state casted[56] were obstacles for proletarian striving, and it was in this context that Arānī’s intellectual productions were nestled.

In Ākharīn Difāʿ, the physicist questions, rhetorically, how Iran’s toilers (ranjbarān), or workers, are able to provoke such great fear in the state.[57] He also expresses curiosity as to why the police (maʿmūrīn-i shahrbānī) violently tear apart any bulletin, leaflet or communiqué on which the word ‘toiler’ appears.[58] In Arānī’s discourse, the excessive sensitivity and supposed apprehension evident in the authorities was to be partially expected for they were dealing with the working class as the ‘universal redeemer of humanity.’[59] Though law enforcement during Riz̤ā Shāh’s reign had until that point been consistently and aggressively quelling union activities,[60] May Day festivities and strike actions, and maintaining networks of surveillance,[61] state authorities are said to be more frightened of workers than jinn confronted by the Qur’anic preamble ‘In the name of God’ (mis̱l-i jinn va bismillāh).[62]

While the notion of fear is paramount in this formulation, it should be viewed as part of an irreconcilable opposition. In his Kitāb-i Kūchah (Book of the Street), poet Aḥmad Shāmlū (1925-2000/1304-79 sh.) defines mis̱l-i jinn va bismillāh as “two things or individuals that will never come close to one another; mutual antipathy between two things.”[63] Through the use of this idiom, Arānī wishes to say that while the state is full of dread, a fully evolved proletariat is fearless, for the object of fear is always outside and ahead of the thing experiencing it: “The worker is not a proletarian by virtue of what-will-happen-to-him-tomorrow, but by virtue of what happens to him every minute of the day.”[64]Arānī’s declaration further revealed the Pahlavī state for what it was: an entity that never truly established the “legal-rational authority” proposed by the constitutionalist movement[65] and was thus fearful of its future. The facade of rationality that the largely traditional monarchy was able to erect through modern state institutions[66] was quickly turning to an irrational acting out (the destruction of every document on which the word ‘toiler’ appears), as per the dictum: “what the common human understanding finds irrational is in fact rational, and what it finds rational is irrational.”[67]

In fact, what was perhaps more disturbing for the state was the prospect of having the illusion of rational order exposed as an illusion. This is where the jinn in mis̱l-i jinn va bismillāh take precedence because like the state, their claim to being the harbingers and custodians of truth lose substance with the invocation of a single protective or apotropaic phrase.[68] The effect of bismillāh is instantaneous, and when combined with the Marxian eschewal of the criterion of existence from any theoretical discussion of the state,[69] the gaunt and even superfluous character of occult actuality becomes over-pronounced. To put it in a different way, the working class was capable of exposing the non-existence of the state and simply dispelling it with the slightest of gestures, before any self-reflection on the part of the state itself. After all, “[s]ince [its] strategy is […] often not known in advance within (and by) the State itself, it is not always susceptible to rational formulation.”[70] Thus, in this account, Arānī uses the jinn to describe the existential and rational limitations of the state and vice versa.

As such, the jinn became essentially homologous to the arguably defunct presuppositions of idealist philosophy in that they are “ideal figments of the brain.”[71] In Mātiriyālīsm-i Diyāliktīk (Dialectical Materialism), Arānī asks that if the idealist position of the internality of movement, time, and space to the mind (ḥālāt-i ẕihnī-yi mā hastand) is affirmed,[72] meaning the “pure forms of sensible intuition as principles of a priori cognition,”[73] then the sensuous effects of, for instance, telephone calls, must essentially be attributed to miraculous or magical sources (muʿjizah va siḥr va jādū).[74] Accordingly, dragons, demons, Rustam, Satan and the jinn are said to be in contradiction to internal logic (taz̤ādd-i bāṭinī-yi manṭiqī),[75] for there are no materially based reasons for the supposition that spirit is constitutive of reality (rūḥ hamah jā mawjūd ast)[76]—an unfortunate stance that more often than not leads to the claim that our pockets are brimming with tiny slippery devils (shayṭānak´hā-yi rīz va līz).[77] Rather than the beings themselves, it is the belief in such spirits that is derivative of the material environment (ʿavāmil-i māddī-yi muḥīṭ). According to this position, and as Arānī illustrates in “ʿIrfān va Uṣūl-i Māddī (Mysticism and the Principles of Materialism),” there were specific material preconditions that historically necessitated jinn-worship (jinn’parastī).[78]

Arānī is here thinking of “natural religion,” the early adherents of which were alienated from a world that had “hardly been altered by history.”[79] This being so, in Mātiriyālīsm-i Diyāliktīk Arānī is careful to remind his readers that they are living in a time during which causes (ʿillat) are no longer based on belief in the effects (iʿtiqād bi taʿs̱īr) of idols and the insidious Ahrīman,[80] meaning those “mental projections” that thwart a scientific theory of knowledge.[81] Indeed, it was his Marxian commitment to “objective law, causality and necessity in nature”[82] that allowed him to maintain this position. In another section of the text, he expands upon his approach to the occult through a discussion of contradiction, which is worth quoting in full:

It is usually said that any statement that does not engender a logical contradiction is true, for contradiction is a sign of error. If we were to carefully study this definition of truth, we would find it to be false. For instance, it has until recently been said that there exist only three dimensions in nature—length, width and depth. In physics, we now know that time is another dimension, meaning that the physical properties of nature consist of four dimensions. With this in mind, is there a logical contradiction in the statement that nature consists of five dimensions?

If someone were to claim that nature must comprise of five dimensions in the same way that it has four, we would say that they are mistaken. Hence, though there is no internal logical contradiction in our thinking when we refer to dragons, demons, Rustam, Satan, jinn, etc., all of these imaginings are nevertheless false. Now, let us consider the other side of the coin: It is possible that, in reality, a contradiction can exist without the presence of an error—meaning that there is no logical contradiction—and that from an existing contradiction we can deem a certain position to be egregious. For instance, a three dimensional world apparently contradicts the notion of nature being comprised of four dimensions, but it cannot be said that the first case is false. If it were, none of the discoveries made on this spurious foundation could have been true and practical, meaning that the notion of three dimensional space has had a certain truth to it.

This being said, the fundamental sign in the recognition of truth is one’s connection to experience. We remarked that recognition is the relation between thought and nature, so if we want to pay attention to recognition then thought and nature must be related in actuality, and not simply have relations created between words in thought. We say that statements that affirm the existence of fantasies, jinn [and] dragons […] are erroneous because dragons, etc. cannot actually be shown. However, we say that Kepler’s statements regarding planetary orbit have truth to them because in every instance the orbit of the planets can be made subject to study as a way to assure the accuracy of Kepler’s law. The natural and material sciences of today have truth to them because according to theirown principles they are being actualised in factories where the necessities of life are being produced. It is enough for you to pay attention to the light of the electric bulb that surrounds you, the sound of the radio, and the automobile that gives you motion. You will then see that the principles of these sciences are in orderly relation to real events.[83]

To put it succinctly, though there is no logical contradiction in the assertion that demonic beings exist, the inability to empirically test this existence (or experience it in nature) compels Arānī to completely dismiss the possibility of occult existence. However, the crux of the matter is that although he relegated the belief in the demonic to the realm of non-existence, he nevertheless contributed to the movement that was positing the nature of the demonic as irrational. While early-modern Europe was witness to forms of experimentation that united witchcraft theory with scientific inquiry,[84] here Arānī derides the absence of experimentation in occult thought while simultaneously using the demonic in the service of scientific explanation. It can be argued that Arānī’s allusions to the demonic were intended to be purely tongue-in-cheek or that they semantically transcended their constituent meanings, but this detracts from the way that language “recommends” itself to the user, that it is possible to be “surprise[d]” by certain vernacular invocations.[85] Thus, in a moment of scientific explanation, a demonological expression, which is possibly intended to be tongue-in-cheek, is actually presented to the user by the prevailing lexicon. The demonological offering is arguably the once missing variable that makes the explanation finally work. The science that needed to be accounted for was beholden to a demonological framework that was being re-worked at the time, and by embracing the offering Arānī was also participating in its diachronic reformulation.

It is in light of Arānī’s demonology that his critical remarks against Shīʿī mujtahids should be examined. Clerics of his time are said to have ignored the precision of technical terms in the hard sciences. Instead, their loose and flexible handling of these terms emptied them of any empirical weight (magar īn ki mā kalamāt rā bi har maʿnī ki khvudimān khvāstah bāshīm). The example Arānī draws on in “ʿIrfān va Uṣūl-i Māddī” was the much discussed notion of how the European discovery of microbes (mīkrūb) was actually the disclosure of Satan’s deceptive spite (gharaz̤ az Shayṭān ki mīgūyand shumā rā gūl mīzanad).[86] Part of what Tavakoli-Targhi has called the “Pasteurization of Islam,” the microbial conception of the demonic emerged during a crisis in religious knowledge, particularly as it pertained to ritual purity. The identification and spread of contagious diseases allowed many skeptics to question pre-microbiological methods of maintaining cleanliness, but coupled with this were attempts to redeem the role of Islamic jurisprudence in governing hygiene. A few prominent medical professionals began reconciling microbiological facts with religious ordinances, and it is out of this that the identity of the jinn—the demonic more generally—and microorganisms began to take shape.[87]

Consistent with his criticism of the “spirit worship and Spiritism of America’s old women (rūḥ parastī va Spīrītīsm-i pīrzan´hā-yi Āmrīkā)” and the dictates of jinn-catchers (jin’gīr´hā) in Bashar Az Naẓar-i Māddī (The Human from a Material Standpoint),[88] the occultist narrativisation of microbiology represented another form of mystification for Arānī. However, based on what we have demonstrated, it can be argued that while in the case of the medical practitioners studied by Tavakoli-Targhi the demonic is explained by science, Arānī’s demonology deploys an irrational demonism in the service of scientific explanation even though it is simultaneously relegated to non-existence.

Besides his unique approach to scientific explanation, Arānī also contributed to the way the occult sciences developed an enduring “epistemological legacy”[89] at the heart of scientific discourse. This is seen in “Jabr va Ikhtiyār,” where Arānī differentiates the prognostications of the social sciences (ʿulūm-i ijtimāʿī) from the fallacious and flattering (durūgh va tamalluq) forecasts of occult practitioners,[90] or the so-called “men of faith” who set up shop (dukān) to deceive their customers.[91] However, he uses the same term, pīsh’bīnī (forecast), to account for the activity of each field of investigation. To paradoxically both deepen and rupture the association between the two, he then deploys the term ghayb’gūʿī (divination/prognostication) and allows for its double meaning to flourish. This case expresses how some elements of demonic and occult nomenclature were wrenched away from their traditional abode and integrated into scientific discourse while others were more deeply engrained into the fibre of lawlessness, as was the case with the satanic.

On account of these examples, one would be tempted to declare Arānī to have been devoutly idiosyncratic, but his uniqueness laid in the way his demonology, along with his contribution to the discursive structure of modern Iranian scientific discourse, were embedded in a deep commitment to materialist methodology and sensibility. Similar to the notion of over-identification where the “exaggeration of gestures” reveals a certain distance from the identity that those gestures embody,[92] Arānī’s intense fidelity to materialism betrays a certain distance from this mould insofar as he was beholden to the offerings of language, which made almost necessary the inclusion of the demonic in scientific explanation.

Thus, take note of the foregoing in light of the more orthodox and historical passages in Pisīkūlūzhī: According to the materialist critique, jinn, spirits and gods were engendered as personifications of human qualities and mediated by a distinct class of practitioners equipped with skills in fortune telling (fālgīrī), divination (az ghayb khabar dādan), magic (siḥr), and geomancy (raml). “However, slowly but surely, this profession (ḥirfat) came to serve as the basis of the group’s material life (zindagānī-yi māddī)” and was able in large part to structure popular opinion (ʿaqāʿid-i ʿumūmī).[93] Before dialectical materialism was said to be able to adequately explain the social function of devotion (fadākārī), it was once thought that an individual’s social powers (quvā-yi ijtimāʿī-yi yik fard) were rooted in the influence of beings like Ahrīman the Ignorant (jahl).[94] According to Arānī, during periods of religious reformation (maẕāhib-i iṣlāḥ) when the space for scientific inquiry was permitted (maydān rā barā-yi ʿaqāyid-i ‘ilmī āzād mīguẕārad), practices such as divination (ghaybgū’ī) become naturally inhibited.[95]

Because of this form of progress and man’s repudiation of his former incapacitation (dar ibtidā bashar ʿājiztar būdah),[96] he no longer needs to feel compelled to act based on the injunctions of jinn and devils (ḥukm-i ajinnah va shayāṭīn),[97] engage in apotropaic rituals—such as tribal tattooing (khāl’kūbī)—to distance himself from their insidiousness,[98] or submit to Mawlavī’s (Jalāl al-Dīn Muḥammad Rūmī, 1207-73/604-672 gh.) periodisation model that describes the progressive perfection of existents (takāmul-i mawjūdāt) in contradistinction to the findings of the natural sciences (ʿulūm-i ṭabīʿī), such as fossil-based paleontological mapping,[99] for he understands that to cleanse one’s heart through illusory mystical instructions (dastūrāt-i mawhūm) is equivalent to wanting to dominate the skies by means of a flying carpet (qālīchah) or Sīmurgh, the ancient mythical flying creature of Iranian lore. “Not only has materialist thinking and methodology (ṭarz-i tafakkur va uslūb-i māddī) in reality effaced (maḥvkard) such illusions,” it has also offered man the conditions and instruments to realise goals such as flight.[100] Above all, it is the dialectical materialist thinker (mutifakkir-i māddī-yi diyāliktīk) who, with the precise and absolute laws of physics and chemistry (qavānīn-i fīzīk va shīmī-yi daqīq va jabrī) in his possession, is capable of brushing aside (pusht-i pā bizanad) the fallacious power of the geomancer’s breath (nafas-i rammāl).[101]

Kasravī’s Demonology

Besides their equal disdain for mystical thought,[102]Arānī’s notion of an irrational demonism also corresponded with Shīʿī reformer Aḥmad Kasravī’s approach to the topic. To understand Kasravī’s demonological contribution, it must be recognised that late-nineteenth century Iran was a period of immense religious transformation that radically altered the structure of Shīʿī inquiry and the sect’s understanding of reason. In addition to the (debatably) crippled state of scholastic rationalism[103] and the Orientalist exhortation that Iranians replace “their myths with facts,”[104] the reformist writings of ʿAbd al-Ḥusayn Mīrzā Āqā Khān Kirmānī (1851-95/1270-1314 gh.) and Sayyid Jamāl al-Dīn Afghānī (1838-97/1257-1316 gh.), which were rejuvenated a few decades later by the likes of Riz̤ā Qulī Sharīʿat Sangilajī (1890-1944/1309-63 gh.), ʿAlī Akbar Ḥakamī’zādah (d. 1988/1367 sh.) and Kasravī marked an attempt to reverse what they perceived to be a steep decline in thought (inḥiṭāṭ-i tafakur).[105] These thinkers and their supporters shared a desire for a rationally-inspired Islamic renaissance that would finally relinquish the dependency on the hadith-centrism of the Majlisī School.[106] The accompanying critique of fanaticism, superstition, and traditionalism was construed by the clerical establishment as a serious affront to its socio-political standing.[107] In spite of this, the reformers persisted in their efforts, and in so doing contributed to the complexity of the period’s demonological configuration.

In Kasravī’s Rāh-i Rastgārī (The Path of Salvation), not only is the necessity of religion declared (jahāniyān bī’dīn natavānand zīst), the central place of reason (āyīn-i khirad) in the endurance of dispensational unity is also underlined. By allowing rationality to be the internal guide of religion, every element that contradicts this precept becomes situated beyond the normative bounds of the creed (rāhnamā-yi dīn khirad ast va har ānchah bā khirad durust nabāshad az dīn bīrūn ast).[108] As Kasravī puts it, let the past be the past (guẕashtah’hā guẕashtah).[109] With reason at its helm, religion serves to inhibit dispersion (parākandagī) and the groundless thoughts (pindār’hā-yi bī’pāyah) that underpin this scattering. One of these thoughts is the hypostatic Ahrīman.[110]

What is ultimately betrayed in Kasravī’s line of thinking is his adherence to a crude and skeptical form of phenomenological bracketing[111] that jettisons the demonic from determined frontiers of reality for the purpose of focusing on the rational kernel of actuality. Kasravī says that if one accepts the reality of Ahrīman, there is a simultaneous misunderstanding (nimīshināsand) of religion.[112] In other words, like many ancient Greeks who “relapsed with a sigh of relief into the pleasures and comforts of the primitive” in the midst of great philosophical and medical advances,[113] Kasravī asserts that a regressive segment of Iranian society is attracted to Ahrīman’s fallacious advances during a time when rationalised religious discourse is most available for observance.

Like Arānī who renounced demonic existence but simultaneously used it for scientific explanation, Kasravī coerced the demonic into the realm of irrational non-existence, all the while allowing it to remain an integral part of his explanatory apparatus. To put it differently, for Kasravī the conceptualisation of a rational religion hinged upon the inclusive exclusion of the demonic. This is seen when Ahrīman is presented in a roundabout way as the product and producer of a multiplicity of polluted unknowings (ālūdah-yi ṣad nādānī),[114] forms of idleness (bīkārī),[115] as well as a renewed commitment to idol worship (but’parastī’hā-yi nuvīnī āghāz kardah’and) and the generational perversions (ān gumrāhī’hā-yi mardumān ast ki har zamān chīz-i dīgarī bāshad) that spring up unfailingly[116]—the consequence of such nescience being the scattered focus of obedience (dar barābar-i ānhā gardan kaj mīsākhtand).[117] He goes on to say that the idol worshippers (but’parastān) who pursue these avenues will end up in a shoreless field of thoughts and suppositions (maydān-i pindār va ingār-i bīkarān ast)[118] similar to the pre-Socratic Apeiron in that its limitlessness cannot be reduced to anything but itself.[119]

Kasravī’s realm of degenerative sliding (laghzishgāh) is said to be due to the abandonment of Islam’s simplicity (dīn-i sādah) in favour of Greek philosophical (falsafah-yi Yūnān) debates put forth by the likes of Plato (Aflāṭūn) and Aristotle (Arasṭū). Independent thoughts were appended to ancient Greek ideas (īnhā pindār’hā’ī nīz az khvud bi pindār’hā-yi kuhan-i Yūnānī afzūdand) and this led to the creation of Sufism (Ṣūfī’garī), esotericism (bāṭinī’garī), and kharābātī’garī (doctrine of frequenting taverns).[120] What resulted from all this activity of diluting truths with crookedness (rāstī’hā rā bā kajī’hā dar ham āmīkhtah’and)[121] was the production of empty and meaningless texts (nivishtah’hā-yi pūch-i bī’maʿnāʿī).[122] Though this meaninglessness has limitless potential, it is essentially based on a perceptual limitation (andāzah nigāh nadārand), particularly among those considered to be the most learned (dānishvarān).[123] They insist upon bringing forth self-circumscribed truths through the weaving of incantations (munājāt’bāfī), verse construction (āyah’sāzī), and sleight of hand (shu’badah’bāzī), while absolute certainties are left to languish.[124] This being so, there is a bestial (chahārpāyān va dadān)[125] quality to all these doctrinal constructions in that they are rooted in irrationality.

In his account of the bestial in Āyīn (Creed), Kasravī places stress on necessity (nāchār va nākhvāh)[126] and because the bestial is situated outside the bounds of the rationalistic religion he is advocating (kasānī ki dīn rā kinār mī’guzārand hamtā-yi chahārpāyān va dadān’and),[127] Natural necessity begins to intermingle with the demonic, since Ahrīman is also located in the beyond. Kasravī states that “most Europeans do not separate humans (ādamī) from other creatures (jānivarān),” and this leads to their support of human emulation of animal existence (bih gumān-i īshān ādamī mītavānad balkah mībāyad hamchūn dadān va chahārpāyān zindagī kunad).[128] By endorsing this crosspollination, scholars and philosophers (dānishmand va fīlsūf) are said to be enemies of humankind (gūyī dushman-i jins-i ādamī būdah’and) and envious (rashk) of animals,[129] even though (to Kasravī’s unbeknownst) the truth may be more ambivalent than this, for they also “refuse […] to be like […] animal[s].”[130] All the same, the function of reason is to reject man’s integration with the bestial and to thus guide him away from irrationality (ādamī bāyad khirad rā rāhnamā-yi khvud sākhtah)[131] through the rise of prophets (payghambarān bi dushmanī-yi ānhā barkhvāstah’and).[132]

Running parallel to the wave of self-doubt that swept over segments of the Western intelligentsia just prior to and during the Second World War when “technical rationality” simply became synonymous with the “rationality of domination”[133] and “the Enlightenment […] eradicated the last remnant of its own self-awareness,”[134] was Kasravī’s assertion that modern European contributions to science—which, one could say, is of Ahrīmanic origin insofar as they are not rooted in a rational kernel—directly led to the creation of hellish instruments (abzār’hā-yi dūzakhī) of war. According to him, prior to the European takeover as the vanguard scientific civilisation, the sciences offered humanity more benefit than harm (sūdash bīshtar az zīyānash būdah), but that this has now reversed. Similar to the way Islamic philosophers and mystics supplement unalloyed truisms with self-circumscribed propositions, European scholars likewise pervert objective scientific findings with trifling ideational (pindār’hā) additives. This tendency is rooted in their insubstantial core (bīmāyah’and) and illusory claim to mastery (da’vī-yi ustādī mī´kunand). The connection between economic motive (vasīlah-yi tavāngarī)[135] and technology’s social ascendance[136] enters the demonological landscape when Kasravī equates profit maximisation with the increased production of hellish instruments (shumārah-yi abzār’hā-yi dūzakhī rūz’afzūn ast).[137] Though the Europeans have acquired a great wealth of knowledge (dānish-i bīkarān andūkhtah) and talent (hunarmandī zamīn rā bi āsimān dūkhtah), it is due to their irreligiosity (bī’dīnī) that the world has transformed into hell (dūzakh).[138]

Confused by the hypnotic grip the hellish instruments have on man (ākhar īn abzār-i dūzakhī chi arzishī dārad kih jahān īn hamah giriftār-i āsīb’hā-yi ū bāshad?!),[139] Kasravī leaves us off with the strong impression that it was not simply Riz̤ā Shāh who was “fascinated by technological aspects of modernisation.”[140] The wicked acts of the authorities (riẕālat’hā-yi ma’mūrīn)[141]—which he speaks of in Qānūn-i Dādgarī (The Just Law)—an almost obvious place to look for the demonic, is not the operative location of Iranian demonology during this time. It cannot even be said that his charge against the European scientific intervention is part of a critique of reason. For Kasravī, much of lived experience is rooted in demonic irrationality, to the point where bestial anti-humanism and modern instruments of war enter its orbit. In so doing, both the Shīʿī modernist and Arānī, the hardened dialectical materialist, contributed to the transformation of a discourse they are rarely—if ever—associated with, thus sending the demonic into a deeper state of lawlessness.

[1]Taqī Arānī, “Jabr va Ikhtiyār (Determinism and Free Will),” in Ās̱ār va Maqālāt (Œuvre) (Köln: Pahl-Rugenstein Verlag, 1977), 146-57.

[2]In this regard, my approach, which at times incorporates the views of thinkers who categorically denied the existence of demons but obliquely contributed to the evolving longevity of demonism through their demonographical inscriptions, departs from those studies that focus on the “convictions of those who believed in its very possibility.” For the latter position, see Stuart Clark, Thinking with Demons (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 28.

[3]Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 29.

[4]Asad, Genealogies of Religion, 42.

[5]Asad, Genealogies of Religion, 54.

[6]Ian Hacking, The Taming of Chance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 2.

[7]Hacking, The Taming of Chance, 2.

[8]Lloyd Ridgeon, Sufi Castigator (New York: Routledge, 2006), 45.

[9]Whitney S. Bodman, The Poetics of Iblīs (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011), 239.

[10]Peter J. Awn, Satan’s Tragedy and Redemption (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1983), 35.

[11]Awn, Satan’s Tragedy and Redemption, 95.

[12]Bodman, The Poetics of Iblīs, 239.

[13]Bodman, The Poetics of Iblīs, 25-6.

[14]Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, 3 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973) 1: 114.

[15]Bodman, The Poetics of Iblīs, 139.

[16]Bodman, The Poetics of Iblīs, 163.

[17] Awn, Satan’s Tragedy and Redemption, 95.

[18]Bodman, The Poetics of Iblīs, 264.

[19]Wilferd Madelung, “Al-Ghazali’s Changing Attitude to Philosophy,” in Islam and Rationality, vol. 1, ed. Georges Tamer (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 28.

[20]What gives credence to this statement is Satan’s association with the jinn, subtle beings thought to possess rational faculties. In the same way that Qur’an commentators link Iblīs’ rational follies to that of humans, the holy text reprimands humans and jinn in equal measure for their egregious use of reason and free will. See Amira El-Zein, Islam, Arabs, and the Intelligent World of the Jinn (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2009), 13-5.

[21]Sayyid Muḥammad Ḥasan Āqā Najafī Qūchānī, Sīyāḥat-i Sharq (Eastern Journey) (Mashhad: Chāp-i Tūs, 1972/1351 sh.), 14.

[22]Annemarie Schimmel, Mystical Dimensions of Islam (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1975), 194.

[23]Awn, Satan’s Tragedy and Redemption, 147.

[24]Arānī, “Jabr va Ikhtīiyār,” 147.

[25]FarzinVahdat, God and Juggernaut (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2002), 97.

[26]Arānī, “Jabr va Ikhtiyār,” 147.

[27]Harold Bloom, “Introduction,” in Satan, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House, 2005), 8.

[28]Awn, Satan’s Tragedy and Redemption, 35-6.

[29]R.M. Frank, “Currents and Countercurrents,” in Islam: Essays on Scripture, Thought & Society, ed. Peter G. Riddell and Tony Street (Leiden: Brill, 1997), 133.

[30]Michael Allen Gillespie, Nihilism before Nietzsche (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 103.

[31]Maḥmūd Sarshār, “Ṭarīqah-yi Kashf-i Jaʿldar ʿAsr-i Ḥāz̤ir (The Path to Unveiling Forgeries in the Present Era),” Kānūn-i Vukalā 32 (1953/1332 sh.): 22.

[32]Zabih, The Communist Movement in Iran, 64-5.

[33]Zabih, The Communist Movement in Iran, 66.

[34]“… increasing intellectualization and rationalization does not mean increasing general knowledge of the conditions under which we live our lives. It means something else. It means the knowledge or belief that if we only wanted to we could learn at any time that there are, in principle, no mysterious unpredictable forces in play, but that all things–in principle–can be controlled through calculation. This, however, means the disenchantment of the world. No longer, like the savage, who believed that such forces existed, do we have to resort to magical means to gain control over or pray to the spirits. Technical means and calculation work for us instead. This, above all, is what intellectualization actually means.” See Max Weber, “Science as a Vocation,” in Max Weber’s Complete Writings on Academic and Political Vocations, ed. John Dreijmanis, trans. Gordon C. Wells (New York: Algora Publishing, 2008), 33.

[35]Karl Popper, The Open Universe (New York: Routledge, 2000), 30.

[36]This is my modification of Alfred Landé’s statement that the deterministic impulse “may have its roots in a feeling of being ourselves demons who can deliberately start deterministic chains.” See Alfred Landé, “The Case for Indeterminism,” in Determinism and Freedom in the Age of Modern Science, ed. Sidney Hook (New York: Collier, 1961), 85.

[37]Adam Weiner, By Authors Possessed (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1998), 48.

[38]Taqī Arānī, Pisīkūlūzhī: ʿIlm-i Rūḥ (Psychology: The Science of the Spirit) (N.p.: Intishārāt-iĀbān, 1978/2537 sha.), 259.

[39]Arānī, Pisīkūlūzhī, 259.

[40]“[…] versagt sie sich zugleich jedem Eindringen in sie.” See Martin Heidegger, “Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes (1935/36),” in Gesamtausgabe, I. Abteilung: Veröffentlichte Schriften 1914-1970, Band 5, Holzwege (Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann, 1977), 33.

[41]Arānī, Pisīkūlūzhī, 260-1.

[42]Karl Marx, “Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts (1844),” in Early Writings, trans. Rodney Livingstone and Gregor Benton (London: Penguin Books, 1992), 327.

[43]Arānī, Pisīkūlūzhī, 260.

[44]Slavoj Žižek, Enjoy Your Symptom! (New York: Routledge, 1992), 167.

[45]R.W. Serjeantson, “Proof and Persuasion,” in The Cambridge History of Science, Volume 3, ed. Katharine Park and Lorraine Daston (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 133.

[46]Serjeantson, “Proof and Persuasion,” 145.

[47]Serjeantson, “Proof and Persuasion,” 160-1.

[48]Bernard Lightman, Victorian Popularizers of Science (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2007), vii.

[49]Slavoj Žižek, In Defense of Lost Causes (London: Verso, 2009), 300.

[50]Lightman, Victorian Popularizers of Science, 16.

[51]Zabih, The Communist Movement in Iran, 67.

[52]Ralph Miliband, The State in Capitalist Society (New York: Basic Books, 1969), 1.

[53]Asef Bayat, “Historiography, Class, and Iranian Workers,” in Workers and Working Classes in the Middle East: Struggles, Histories, Historiographies, ed. Zachary Lockman (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), 192-3.

[54]Habib Ladjevardi, Labor Unions and Autocracy in Iran (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1985), 5-6.

[55]Ladjevardi, Labor Unions and Autocracy in Iran, 14.

[56]Miliband, The State in Capitalist Society, 1.

[57]Taqī Arānī, Ākharīn Difāʿ-i Duktur Taqī Arānī (Dr. TaqīArānī’s Final Defence) (N.p.: Intishārāt-i Ḥizb-i Tūdah-yi Īrān, n.d.), 17.

[58]Arānī, Ākharīn Difāʿ-i Duktur Taqī Arānī, 17.

[59]In response to the question of whence German emancipation will arise, Marx says, “… in the formation of a class with radical chains, a class in civil society that is not a class of civil society, of a social group that is the dissolution of all social groups, of a sphere that has a universal character because of its universal sufferings and lays claim to no particular right, because it is the object of no particular injustice but of injustice in general. This class can no longer lay claim to a historical status, but only a human one.” See Karl Marx, “Towards a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: Introduction,” in Selected Writings, ed. David McLellan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 81.

[60]Ladjevardi, Labor Unions and Autocracy in Iran, 17.

[61]Ladjevardi, Labor Unions and Autocracy in Iran, 20-2.

[62] Arānī, Ākharīn Difāʿ-i Duktur Taqī Arānī, 17.

[63]Aḥmad Shāmlū, in collab. with Āydā Sarkīsiyān, Kitāb-i Kūchah, B, Daftar-i Duvvum (Book of the Street) (Tehran: Maziyār, 1998/1377 sh.), 1318.

[64]Louis Althusser, “The International of Decent Feelings,” in The Spectre of Hegel, ed. François Matheron and trans. G.M. Goshgarian (London: Verso, 1997), 25.

[65]H.E. Chehabi, Iranian Politics and Religious Modernism (London: I.B. Tauris, 1990), 17.

[66]Ali M. Ansari, Modern Iran (New York: Routledge, 2007), 51.

[67]Karl Marx, Capital, 3 vols., trans. David Fernbach (London: Penguin, 1991) 3: 914.

[68]Alireza Mohammadi Doostdar, “Fantasies of Reason: Science, Superstition, and the Supernatural in Iran” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 2012), 61.

[69]Miliband, The State in Capitalist Society, 49.

[70]Nicos Poulantzas, State, Power, Socialism, trans. Patrick Camiller (London: Verso, 2000), 33.

[71]Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Holy Family or Critique of Critical Critique, trans. R. Dixon (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1956), 73.

[72]Taqī Arānī, Mātiriyālīsm-i Diyāliktīk (Dialectical Materialism) (Tehran: Mu’assisah-yi Intishārāt-i Ātash, 1946/1325 sh.), 16.

[73]Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 157.

[74]Arānī, Mātiriyālīsm-i Diyāliktīk, 16. If we are to suppose that Arānī is referring to Kant’s transcendental idealism by virtue of his quip against his distinctive theory of time and space, then the argument concerning the questionable sources of sensuous effects was raised by others as well. Like Jacobi, Arānī is suspicious of the place of matter and its determinacy in the idealist system, but their ultimate arguments are at variance. According to Jacobi, “what we realists call actual objects or things independent of our representations are for the transcendental idealist only internal beings which exhibit nothing at all of a thing that may perhaps be there outside us, or which the appearance may refer. Rather, these internal beings are merely subjective determinations of the mind, entirely void of anything truly objective.” See F.H. Jacobi, “On Transcendental Idealism,” in The Main Philosophical Writings and the Novel Allwill, trans. George di Giovanni (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1994), 334. The problem is that Kant admits to the existence of matter and its permanence, and simply states that “outer sense” is tied to “inner sense” (Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 122.). This connection makes the supposed idealist bewilderment of external incidents quite dubious. Furthermore, Kant had a specific understanding of miracles and their relationship with rational comprehension. As he puts it, ” [in] practical affairs, […] we cannot possibly count on miracles, or in any way take them into consideration in the employment of our reason (which is necessary in all circumstances of life).” See Immanuel Kant, “Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason,” in Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason and Other Writings, trans and ed. Allen Wood and George di Giovanni (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1998), 101.

Notice how remarkably similar Arānī’s critique of idealism in this one sentence is to the example of the satanic child used to explain the concept of suggestion. In both cases, an inexplicable evil bursts forth from the external world. In his critique of idealism, he rebukes what he had acceded to earlier, thus alienating himself from his true association with the demonic. For a homologous example concerning religion, see Slavoj Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies (New York: Verso, 1997), 99.

[75]Arānī, Mātirīyālīsm-iDīyāliktīk, 31.

[76]It can be argued that Arānī is here presenting another skewed interpretation of the idealist tradition. It is not simply that mind or spirit constitute what appears to be the material world. After all, Kant himself was careful to point out that matter is “something permanent, which must therefore be a thing distinct from all my representations and external” (Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 122.). External objects, matter, or to put it in Kant’s term, “outer appearances,” are only grounded by the mind (Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 158.). Certain “subjective condition[s]” need to be met before the intuition of these appearances (Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 161.), which hold particular “shape[s] and position[s] (Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 163.).

This being said, Arānī might as well be referring to Berkeley’s subjective idealism which, at times, staggered close to objective idealist territory, particularly in his argument that the world is “the product of a single supreme spiritual cause.” See V.I. Lenin, “Materialism and Empirio-criticism,” in Collected Works, 45 vols., trans. Abraham Fineberg and ed. Clemens Dutt (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1977) 14:32.

[77]Arānī, Mātiriyālīsm-i Diyāliktīk, 51.

[78]Taqī Arānī, “ʿIrfān va Uṣūl-i Māddī (Mysticism and the Principles of Materialism),” in Ās̱ār va Maqālāt (Köln: Pahl-Rugenstein Verlag, 1977), 140.

[79]Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, “The German Ideology,” in Collected Works, 50 vols. (New York: International Publishers, 1976) 5: 44.

[80]Arānī, Mātiriyālīsm-i Diyāliktīk, 54.

[81]Lenin, “Materialism and Empirio-criticism,” 78.

[82]Lenin, “Materialism and Empirio-criticism,” 155.

[83]Arānī, Mātiriyālīsm-i Diyāliktīk, 30-1.

[84]Walter Stephens, Demon Lovers: Witchcraft, Sex, and the Crisis of Belief (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2003), 146.

[85]Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “On the Phenomenology of Language,” in Signs, trans. Richard C. McCleary (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 88.

[86]Taqī Arānī, “ʿIrfān va Uṣūl-i Māddī,” 119.

[87]Mohamad Tavakoli-Targhi, “From Jinns to Germs: A Genealogy of Pasteurian Islam,” Iran Nameh 30 (2015): iv-xix.

[88]Taqī Arānī, Bashar Az Naẓar-i Māddī (The Human from a Material Standpoint) (Tehran: Majallah-yi Dunyā, 1944/1323 sh.), 34.

[89]Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150-1750 (New York: Zone Books, 1998), 236.

[90]Arānī, “Jabr va Ikhtiyār,” 156.

[91]Rahnema, Superstition as Ideology in Iranian Politics, 113.

[92]Slavoj Žižek, Less than Nothing (London: Verso, 2012), 355.

[93]Arānī, Pisīkūlūzhī, 270.

[94]Arānī, Bashar Az Naẓar-i Māddī, 30-1.

[95]Arānī, Pisīkūlūzhī, 272.

[96]Arānī, Pisīkūlūzhī, 275.

[97]Arānī, Pisīkūlūzhī, 275.

[98]Taqī Arānī, “Hunar va Mātiriyālīsm (Art and Materialism),” in Nivishtah´ha-yi ʿIlmī, Falsafī, va Ijtimāʿī (Scientific, Philosophical, and Social Writings) (Florence: Intishārāt-i Mazdak, 1975/1354 sh.), 32.

[99]Arānī, “ʿIrfān va Uṣūl-i Māddī,” 119.

[100]Arānī, Bashar Az Naẓar-i Māddī, 31.

[101]Arānī, Bashar Az Naẓar-i Māddī, 57.

[102]Ridgeon, Sufi Castigator, 191.

[103]John Walbridge, God and Logic in Islam (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 169.

[104]Ali M. Ansari, The Politics of Nationalism in Modern Iran (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 17.

[105]Ali Mirsepassi, Political Islam, Iran, and the Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 29.

[106]Ali Rahnema, Shi’i Reformation in Iran (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015), 112.

[107]Sohrab Behdad, “Utopia of Assassins: Navvab Safavi and the Fada’ian-e Eslam in Prerevolutionary Iran,” in Iran: Between Tradition and Modernity, ed. Ramin Jahanbegloo (Oxford: Lexington Books, 2004), 73-4.

[108]Aḥmad Kasravī, Rāh-i Rastgārī (The Path of Salvation) (Tehran: Intishārāt-i Majīd, 1378 sh.), 26.

[109]Kasravī, Rāh-i Rastgārī, 117.

[110]Kasravī, Rāh-i Rastgārī, 26-7.

[111]Edmund Husserl, Ideas, First Book, trans. F. Kersten (Boston: Martinus Nijhoff, 1983), 61.

[112]Kasravī, Rāh-i Rastgārī, 27.

[113]E.R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1951), 193.

[114]Kasravī, Rāh-i Rastgārī, 28.

[115]Kasravī, Rāh-i Rastgārī, 152.

[116]Kasravī, Rāh-i Rastgārī, 76.

[117]Kasravī, Rāh-i Rastgārī, 28.

[118]Kasravī, Rāh-i Rastgārī, 37.

[119]Adam Drozdek, Greek Philosophers as Theologians: The Divine Arche (Hampshire: Ashgate Publishing, 2007), 9.

[120]Kasravī, Rāh-i Rastgārī, 37-8.

[121]Kasravī, Rāh-i Rastgārī, 76.

[122]Kasravī, Rāh-i Rastgārī, 39.

[123]Kasravī, Rāh-i Rastgārī, 41.

[124]Kasravī, Rāh-iRastgārī, 76-7.

[125]Kasravī, Rāh-iRastgārī, 51.

[126]Kasravī, Rāh-iRastgārī, 51.

[127]Aḥmad Kasravī, Āyīn (Creed) (N.p.: Chāp-i Rashdīyah, 1977/2536 sha.), (Part I) 52.

[128]Kasravī, Āyīn, (Part I) 56.

[129]Kasravī, Āyīn, (Part II) 5.

[130]In respect to historical memory, it is said, “Consider the cattle, grazing as they pass you by: they do not know what is meant by yesterday or today, they leap about, eat, rest, digest, leap about again, and so from morn till night and from day to day, fettered to the moment and its pleasure or displeasure, and thus neither melancholy nor bored. This is a hard sight for man to see; for, though he thinks himself better than the animals because he is human, he cannot help envying them their happiness – what they have, a life neither bored nor painful, is precisely what he wants, yet he cannot have it because he refuses to be like an animal.” See Friedrich Nietzsche, “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life,” in Untimely Meditations, trans. R.J. Hollingdale, ed. Daniel Breazeale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 60.

[131]Kasravī, Āyīn, (Part I) 57.

[132]Kasravī, Āyīn, (Part II) 10.

[133]Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, trans. Edmund Jephcott, ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 95.

[134]Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 2.

[135]Kasravī, Āyīn, (Part I) 38.

[136]Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 95.

[137]Kasravī, Āyīn, (Part I) 38.

[138]Kasravī, Āyīn, (Part I) 52.

[139]Kasravī, Āyīn, (Part II) 18.

[140]Atabaki and Zürcher, “Introduction,” 11.

[141]Aḥmad Kasravī, Qānūn-i Dādgarī (The Just Law) (Tehran: N.p., 1340 sh.), 34.

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

ایران نامگ Volume 7, Number 1, Spring 2024

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

Pouneh Saeedi

….sound, sound, only sound, the sound of the transparent wish of water to flow, the sound of the falling starlight on the earth’s feminine crust the sound of closure of the seed’s meaning and the extension of love’s shared mind sound, sound, sound, it is only sound that remains

—Forugh Farrokhzad, “It is Only Sound That Remains”^{^[1]}

Radio scholar Susan J. Douglas has bemoaned the transformation of “listening in” to “sitting in” when it comes to radio listening habits, valorizing “radio” over “television,” in that she sees in the former an avenue for the burgeoning of one’s imagination in ways that the latter falls short of offering. Despite distancing herself from Marshall McLuhan, particularly within the context of the latter’s famous dictum of “the medium is the message,” Douglas’s view is nevertheless similar to the Canadian media maestro’s, for in radio Douglas sees an emphasis on orality in a manner that touches the “innards” of the listener, bringing about a productive engagement with the self not to be seen in any other medium.^{^[2]} Television, on the other hand, has its own appeal in presenting a “mosaic mesh” and an “all-inclusive nowness.”^{^[3]} As will come to the fore in this article, the addition as of 2015, of a televised aspect to the Persian-language radio programs in the series of programs collectively labelled as Chishm andāz bāmdādī Radio BBC (CABRBBC), has granted audiences additional affordances (most importantly, a sense of live and immediate connectedness with the radio announcers and the audience) in ways that have enhanced the formation of an “imagined community” à la Benedict Anderson. While investigating some of the aspects of radio and television (more so the former than the latter), the article will get into how the BBC Persian Service (BBCPS) has served as an “electronic hearth” around which speakers of Persian have huddled, albeit virtually, from far and wide in a bid to form a hub that will keep them close to “home” (the term is used both in its figurative and literal senses as it applies to Iranians within the country as well as non-Iranian speakers of Persian, in whose case, “home” could be interpreted more so in linguistic and cultural rather than cartographic terms).^{^[4]} As shall be seen, certain concepts including that of “imagined communities,” associated with Benedict Anderson, “the public sphere” (Öffentlichkeit), as elaborated by Juergen Habermas, and James W. Carey’s “ritual view of communication,” will be invoked to further showcase the role BBCPS has played in giving rise to a sense of community and/or communitas—depending on whether or not the circumstances faced by the collective qualify as being labelled “liminal” or not—if not communion, and thereby in providing a sense of “home” to Iranians irrespective of geography. It goes without saying that the mediated environment that comes to the fore through BBCPS has been punctuated, if not dominated, by the cataclysmic events that have swept across the world—primarily, though, in Iran—at different junctures.^{^[5]} This paper seeks to explore certain sociocultural impacts that emerge in the wake of the Iranian community’s engagement with the BBCPS. What media scholar Joshua Meyrowitz refers to as “effect loops,” which at its core, signifies the impacts human behavior have on media and vice versa could be an apropos point de départ for a paper that somewhat ambitiously seeks to unpack the threads that go into the fabric of an imagined “community” that embodies aspects of communitas—a communion and communication (from a ritualistic perspective as shall be explained below) all in one.^{^[6]}

As has been hinted at in the introduction, the reason underpinning the extensive sociocultural ramifications of a radio channel ought to be sought in the affordances and properties of the medium itself. Therefore, taking a closer look at certain features of both radio and television as well as a synergy of the two that comes to the fore in the example of CABRBBC will help shed light on the far-reaching impact that such a medium can have in and of itself. While radio, as noted by McLuhan, is a “hot” medium, television is a “cool” medium, meaning that the former requires a lower level of energy on the part of the user and the latter a higher level, which can be evidenced in how some of us are able to interact with radio as we go about our daily chores, but will need to sit down and watch a television program to interact with it.^{^[7]} Over the years, I have found the dichotomy presented by McLuhan to require more contextualization than I had initially assumed, for, in one sense, and on many an occasion, I myself have put my proverbial “all” in terms of my interactions with radio programs and I am no exception.^{^[8]} For that matter, and despite being focused on the example of BBCPS here, my engagements with radio programs are not limited to those aired on CABRBBC, but go on to encompass Harriet Gilbert’s World Book Club, the BBC’s The Inquiry program, Trending, Forum, etc., as well as Deutschlandfunk’s Büchermarkt and Radio France International’s top-of-the-hour news bulletins and En sol majeur, among many others, which, for the most part, have called on me to put in much more energy than any medium labelled as “hot” would require.^{^[9]} It is worth noting that while my engagement with English- and Persian-language programs has been on a more cerebral level, and this, on account of my own linguistic capacities in these languages, in the other examples stated above, I have found myself exerting a high level of energy when listening to radio programs other than English and Persian—and this in a bid to fully grasp the content. That having been said, my engagement with BBCPS, particularly CABRBBC, has been on a different level as I have found myself to have been engaged on a more “visceral level,” not in the extinct mode that comes to the fore through Herbert Morrison’s famous utterance of “Oh the humanity!” but rather in an Althusserian sense, which bids me to feel myself summoned to respond to the news stories as a civic duty.^{^[10]} In being “hailed” to bring forth aspects of my personhood as a subject that touch on my ideology of nationhood, à la Althusser, I imagine myself a member of a vast nation that communes on radio wavelengths emanated through the broadcasting of BBCPS and, of late, more so through the Internet during live broadcasts.^{^[11]} As it is imagination that bids us to see ourselves more as belonging to a particular nation than a mere denizen of the world, it is important to take a deeper look at “imagination” and the concomitant concept of “imagined communities” within the context of this article.[12]

It is no wonder that media scholars have found the world that radio gives rise to, in its heavy reliance on “imagination,” akin to a so-called “ethereal world.”^{^[13]} For one thing, Susan Douglas has an entire chapter titled “The Ethereal World,” wherein she posits that “the fact that radio waves are invisible, emanate from the ‘sky,’ carry disembodied voices, and can send signals deep into the cosmos links us to a much larger, more mysterious order.”^{^[14]} It is along similar lines that film and media studies professor John Durham Peters asserts that [radio]’s “ability to spirit intelligence through space” has “elicited immediate comparisons to telepathy, séances, and angelic visitations.”^{^[15]} Moreover, and albeit quite subtly, he aligns the birthing of such an “ethereal world” with the concept of “privacy,” in the definition famously presented by Louis Brandeis and Samuel Warren as the “right to be let alone.”^{^[16]} That the “right to be let alone” and “imagination” go hand in hand within this context requires little explanation; however, viewing the two in tandem, allows us to further appreciate how the experience of listening to radio, including BBCPS, can simultaneously be solitary and imaginative—as my own suggests. The experience that transpires in the privacy of the chambers of our minds is akin to what Benedict Anderson notes within the context of the “imagined communities” that arise in the course of our perusal of local newspapers:

The significance of this mass ceremony—Hegel observed that newspapers serve modern man as a substitute for morning prayers— is paradoxical. It is performed in silent privacy, in the lair of the skull. Yet each communicant is well aware that the ceremony he performs is being replicated simultaneously by thousands (or millions) of others of whose existence he is confident, yet of whose identity he has not the slightest notion. Furthermore, this ceremony is incessantly repeated at daily or half-daily intervals throughout the calendar. What more vivid figure for the secular, historically clocked, imagined community can be envisioned? At the same time, the newspaper reader, observing exact replicas of his own paper being consumed by his subway, barbershop, or residential neighbours, is continually reassured that the imagined world is visibly rooted in everyday life.^{^[17]}

Interestingly, what is observed above, as noted by Douglas, takes place on a more involved level within the context of our experiences with radio:

For it wasn’t just that this technology made imagined communities more tangible because people now listened to a common voice and a shared event at truly the exact moment as others around the region, or the country. Listeners themselves insisted that this technology enhance their ability to imagine their fellow citizens, as well as the ability to be transported to “national” events and to other parts of the country. […] The sheer geographic scope that these new, simultaneous experiences now encompassed […] outstripped anything the newspaper had been able to do in terms of nation building on a psychic, imaginative level.^{^[18]}

The need for the “image of communion” highlighted by Anderson within the context of reading newspapers, as picked up on by Douglas, becomes all the more pronounced—permeating, as it does, our inner selves—at times of crisis such as domestic turmoil and war.^{^[19]}

It is little wonder as to why the BBCPS, in commemorating its eightieth anniversary, not only enumerates a series of cataclysmic events that received special coverage over the years— including the Allied Forces’ advances through the Rhine during World War II, the Islamic Revolution of 1979, the Shah’s departure from Iran as well as the Iran-Iraq War (which it refers to as the “forgotten war,” or in the original Persian, jang-i farāmūsh shudah)—but also emphasizes how its emergence on December 29, 1940 came as a result of a competition with the Persian-language radio programs broadcast from Nazi Germany.^{^[20]}

In Big News, a documentary produced by CBC Gem in 2021, Canadian news executive Sue Gardner highlights how the BBC came about with the aim of filling in a gap that was left in the wake of World War I, when people realized their need for a reliable source that could inform them of the latest news. What Gardner maintains here resonates with members of my generation as well. For instance, I recall how, in the dying days of the Iran-Iraq War, my parents and close relatives would huddle around a rickety radio set constituting the heart and hearth of a dilapidated room in the suburbs of Tehran, to listen to a static-ridden BBCPS which, notwithstanding its informative function, jarred against our ears. As such, more than television, it was radio that aligned itself with the epithet of “electronic hearth,” as family members would huddle around it to collect information on the latest political events. Radio not only broadcast events, but also embodied in and of itself an event. An event that allowed for the unfolding of a “public sphere” in the sense that Habermas has presented: that of the convergence of individuals and the exchange of ideas that have the potential of influencing politics.^{^[21]}

That times of war have tested the mettle of major radio stations’ personnel is showcased in the coverage of such monumental radio correspondents as Edward R. Murrow and William L. Shirer, reporting from the field, respectively, in London and Berlin during World War II. As noted by Bill Kovarik:

With Murrow in London and Shirer in Berlin, Americans by 1938 began hearing some of the disturbing developments first-hand. Murrow’s radio and television work would later be seen as legendary in broadcasting, while Shirer went on to write a ground-breaking history of the Third Reich and a memoir of his years covering Mahatma Gandhi in India.^{^[22]}

Despite the Iranian audience’s reliance on radio stations such as BBCPS and Voice of America (VOA) Farsi for further information during the Iran-Iraq War, BBCPS’s coverage of war, as asserted by BBC producer, Shahriar Radpour, ran into problems on account of the absence of a correspondent on the ground which, unlike today, could not be compensated for through the deployment of mass media ensuring both speed and simultaneity.^{^[23]} However, as Radpour points out, the tough times brought about in the thick of the eight-year war, led a number of BBCPS producers to come up with the idea of broadcasting a program that would help cheer up war-weary Iranians. It was with that thought in mind that “majallah shafahi” (literally, “oral newsletter”) sprang into existence, which, beyond covering the ongoing war in an objective tone, began to report on cultural matters with a touch of humour.

At a time when radio reigned supreme and “convergence culture” had not yet dominated the scene, the words that emanated from the radio were akin to an event.^{^[24]} In fact, as specified by Walter Ong, the utterance of a word in and of itself is an event.^{^[25]} It is little wonder then that the weight that the news carried when it was aired across FM radio was more ponderous than what we are witness to nowadays when the audience is more dependent on the visual. Ong goes on to highlight the “participatory” nature of the word in oral cultures: an aspect which has been replicated in the huddling around of the “electronic hearth” and the feeling we experience in belonging to a part of a collective much more extensive than the one we find in our immediate precincts. Anderson’s concept of “imagined communities,” as much as being initially invoked within a context pertaining to the perusal of daily papers, manifests itself even more clearly within the aural/oral environment of radio broadcasts. As such, each Iranian listening to the broadcasts is summoned to identify as a member of an extensive collective interested in the fate of the nation regardless of geographical locus. In fact, BBCPS’s very first announcer, Hasan Movvaghar Balyouzi’s first utterance on the then nascent Persian-language radio program called on Iranians from far and wide to listen in, all the while informing their friends of its existence.^{^[26]}

That BBCPS, similar to many other vernacular radio programs, has come over time to showcase a media matrix in its various audio-visual aspects has had some intriguing sociological, if not psychological impacts in terms of its reception; for as a result of interactivity, many listeners are now prosumers rather than mere consumers of news. Mass self-communication is one of the many affordances which new media, including digital broadcasts, offer, and it is particularly relevant in an investigation of the media environment that arises in our interactions with BBCPS. An array of cognate terms, including “community,” “communion,” and “communitas” have found fertile grounds with the “comment” feature which has emerged since BBCPS’s broadcast on social media platforms (such as Facebook and Telegram), thanks to the Internet. Thus, the audience ends up not only engaging with the news stories, but also with other members of the audience, not to mention the newscasters. From far and wide, Iranians across the globe forge (weak) ties with one another and the presenters themselves. Judging by the content of some of the comments left behind, it could be said that there seems, among some, to be a predisposition towards the formation of a para-social relationship with other members of the audience, if not with the presenters themselves. In my own personal observations, there are listeners/viewers whose primary purpose for connecting with the program seems to be the forging of weak ties with other members of the audience and/or the presenters rather than listening to the latest news. While, initially, I used to attribute superficial value to the interactions that take place in the course of chatting with other members of the audience and/or the presenters themselves, I have come to see such instances as attempts made in the direction of heightening the sense of an “imagined community” comprising fellow Iranians, which may or may not be simultaneously aimed at breaking out of the confines of solitude—an aspect that has become more pronounced during the pandemic. In fact, one perspective towards mass media beyond their value to transmit information comes to the fore in their value towards facilitating a communion through acts of ritual. James W. Carey, who is known as the theorist of the ritual view of communication, stipulates that

in a ritual definition, communication is linked to terms such as ‘sharing,’ ‘participation,’ ‘association,’ ‘fellowship’ and ‘the possession of a common faith’… A ritual view is directed not toward the extension of messages in space but toward the maintenance of society in time; not the act of imparting information but the representation of shared beliefs.^{^[27]}

The above image, captured in May 2022, is a screenshot of the live streaming of CABRBBC and showcases some of the points made here, including how speakers of Persian from across the world feel a bond (even when seemingly at odds over their ethnic backgrounds) on grounds of their shared linguistic, if not geographical, heritage. It is more so an example of the “ritual perspective of communication” in its enhancement of societal bonds amongst Persian speakers than the “transmission view” (although Afschin Eskandari’s comment hints at some data regarding the Talebans’ modus operandi). There are also times when members of the audience are greeting each other and the announcers, as well as when the announcers are responding to comments made by members of the audience live, in real time, through the like emojis or even by making a direct announcement on the program in a strategy that comes close, if not replicates, what Peter Warren Singer and Emerson T. Brooking have referred to as “planned authenticity,” by which they mean the direct engagement of a renowned figure (which happens to be Taylor Swift in their example) with their fan base. ^{^[28]}

The above is a screenshot of the livestreaming of CABRBBC taken in April 2022 which showcases a commentary made by one of the avid listeners, Afschin Eskandari, a resident of Germany, as to how—by withholding transactions with Russia in the field of gas and energy and further pressures exerted by other countries—one could see an end to the raging war in Ukraine. There is also an example of a greeting, as well as the comment of a disgruntled listener/spectator, to the effusive greetings of one of the regular members of the audience.

As has been noted by Mitra Shahrani, “BBC Persian pursues strategies intended to attract audiences, keep them in a long-term relationship and win their trust;” hence, not only are its reports and programs “professionally produced,” but attempts are also made to provide the audience with “the easiest possible ways to access the different media services.”^{^[29]} It is perhaps along the same lines that BBCPS, which was being broadcast on TV as of 2008, decided as well to televise its own radio programs in line with a new mode of broadcasting, one that would not only attract a larger audience, but also allow for a higher level of participation. However, the highly mediated world we are living in along with our new lifestyle, which has rendered us ever more isolated (this is particularly true as of the onset of the pandemic), has made CABRBBC not only a source of information, but also a popular node of connection and communication among Iranians living in the diaspora. The term “broadcast” is quite appropriate within this context, for, as noted by Peters, in its use the finger is pointed at “agricultural use” and the “scattering of seeds,” also that “the free character of things broadcast naturally fit the radio signal’s tendency to stray.”^{^[30]}

Among the forms of media literacies, in addition to media content and media grammar, Meyrowitz enumerates a third, “medium literacy,” which “develops from the perception of media as unique environments.”^{^[31]} While the product presented here is in print and thus primarily invested in the enhancement of the sense of “sight,” it has attempted—in focusing on certain points in the trajectory of BBCPS which have come about in the wake of media-related transformations—to bring to the fore an image of “tactility,” à la McLuhan, far from being confined to touch, represents “an interplay of the senses.”^{^[32]} The emergence of “tactility” in its McLuhanite definition of the term, coupled with the aural origins of BBCPS, which, as argued earlier, calls for a form of tribalism, has fostered the formation of “imagined communities”—namely, the “nation.” The very fact that the BBCPS is broadcast in Persian, a language whose scope is limited, does not allow for an ad humanitatem address, and as such, for the most part, interpellates the native speakers of Persian in the midst of the many vicissitudes that they have experienced with regard to their homeland, or “nation.”^{^[33]} Accordingly, many Iranians, regardless of their cartographic locus, heed the call and in so doing find themselves in the midst of a collective that, in feeling connected to “home” (in its literal sense), forms another “home” (in its figurative sense) on the basis of the “community”—a “communitas” that has emerged at threshold moments in its entanglements with critical questions that concern Iran on multiple levels that go beyond mere news to encompass cultural, linguistic, and sociological aspects that mirrored in the mosaic of programs produced by BBCPS.

All things considered, in the interactions that take place by virtue of the existence of BBCPS, especially CABRBBC, members of the audience are able to not only imagine the nation in the “lair of their skulls” (to re-echo Anderson’s usage of the phrase), but to see actual members of their community appear simultaneously, engaged in a bonding akin to “communion,” which by definition calls for a belief in an entity greater than one’s self—in this case, the nation.

I wish to bring my observations to a close by clarifying that, despite my implied valorization of the resuscitation of a sense of tribalism and horizontal camaraderie that comes to the fore in the regular watching and/or listening of certain radio programs such as CABRBBC, I am wary of the “narcotizing dysfunction” that may impact avid listeners, who, according to the definition of the concept, by virtue of “keep[ing] abreast of the world”—and more so in this case of Iran as well as Afghanistan, and to a certain extent Tajikistan, where Persian is spoken in a variety of accents—may falsely assume themselves to be engaging in a form of activism. As founders of the Columbia school of sociology, Paul Lazarsfeld and Thomas K. Merton, have famously elaborated, “the flood of information may serve to narcotize rather than to energize,”^{^[34]} which is to say that partaking in the aural acts of communion that manifest themselves in a variety of forms such as “commenting,” examples of which were mentioned above, or listening simultaneously with many other speakers of Persian to CABRBBC, may come to be mistaken by members of the audience for activism. Nonetheless, at the end of the day—as can be sensed by my choice of Forugh’s poetry at the beginning of the paper—I believe sound (in this case, voice) to be an all-powerful force that can lead to a micro-level creatio mundi and, as discussed above, bring into existence “imagined communities” which would not have existed otherwise; all in all, penetrating through our insular selves to connect to a much wider and more meaningful world outside.

Sadly, shortly before the publication of this issue, BBC Persian Radio went on air for the very last time on March 26, 2023, in a special program on which an array of its anchors past (e.g., Loftali Khonji) and present (e.g., Mina Joshaghani, Dariush Rajabian, and many others) had been invited with the purpose of recounting some memorable moments. In so doing, they unanimously invoked the sense of “intimacy” (ṣamīmīyat) that is specific to radio broadcasts. At the end of the day, in its closure, BBC Persian Radio will have many an avid listener longing for a bygone era in which an “imagined community” found itself communing and communicating in ways that will be impossible to replicate on any other mediated platform.

[1] The above stanza has been translated by the author from “Tanhā ṣidāst kih mīʹmānad,” in Furugh Farrukhzad, Majmūʻah-i ashʻār-i Furūgh Farrukhzād (Intisharat-i Navid: Saarbrücken, 1989), 439.

[2] See Marshall McLuhan, “The Medium is the Message,” in Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (London and New York: Routledge, 1964), 7–23.

[3] McLuhan, Understanding Media, 336–68.

[4] Note that at the root of these three terms is communis (meaning “common” or “shared”). While “communion” (which, according to the OED, while signifying “mutual participation,” has religious meanings as well, including “The fellowship or mutual relationship between members of one church, or between bodies which recognize each other fully as branches of the universal Christian Church; membership of a church”), “communitas,” though based on the OED, means “community; a body of people acting collectively,” in cultural anthropology, it signifies “A strong sense of solidarity and bonding that develops among people experiencing a ritual, a rite of passage, or other transitional states together,” and its use within the context presented here is no exaggeration in view of the host of cataclysmic, indeed at times “liminal” events, that the Iranian community has been facing while seeking answers and objective information on BBCPS.

[5] The following article that deals with BBCPS’s coverage of the Islamic Revolution of 1979, which also allows for a further appreciation of the role it enacted in the years leading up to the revolution, presents valuable details in this respect: Massoumeh Torfeh and Annabelle Sreberny, “The BBC Persian Service and the Islamic Revolution of 1979,” Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication 3 (2010): 216–41.

[6] In his groundbreaking work, No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), Meyrowitz highlights how new media, as indicated in the title, have transformed our social situations in ways that are no longer contingent on geography. He brings up “effect loops” within a context which highlights those complexities of analyzing media in terms of cause and effects: “The analysis of ‘effect loops’ suggests that while such adjustments are often perceived as spontaneous causes of social change, they themselves may be effects of changes in media and situations.” Meyrowitz, No Sense of Place, 127.

[7] See McLuhan, Understanding Media, 24–44.

[8] In his chapter, “Radio: The Tribal Drum,” McLuhan includes the following quote from a radio poll to further elucidate the potentially immense impact radio has had on its listeners: “I live right inside radio when I listen. I more easily lose myself in radio than in a book.” See McLuhan, Understanding Media, 325.

[9] The inherent characteristics of radio, as has been noted by a variety of scholars, give rise to a media environment that calls for a form of sharing of the self that does not transpire across other forms of mass media; hence, it is no surprise that the author would choose to share her personal predilections within the context of radio programs.

[10] The reference goes back to 1937 when Herbert Morrison, touched to the core by the bursting into flames of the Hindenburg—the largest aircraft that had embarked on its maiden voyage—in his reporting of the event, and choked by emotion, famously utters the following phrase: “Oh the humanity!”

[11] See Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972), 127-86. The term “imagination” can etymologically be traced back to the Latin verb “imaginari” (“conceive,” “to picture to oneself”) and the Latin noun “imago” (“an image,” “a likeness”).

[12] The term “imagination” can etymologically be traced back to the Latin verb “imaginari” (“conceive,” “to picture to oneself”) and the Latin noun “imago” (“an image,” “a likeness”). It goes without saying that conjuring up an “image” in one’s mind requires a specific state of mind and enlists cerebral faculties that call on us to touch the deeper layers of the self.

[13] While Susan J. Douglas has a chapter titled “The Ethereal World” in her monumental work, Listening In: Radio and the American Imagination: From Amos ‘n’ Andy and Edward R. Murrow to Wolfman Jack and Howard Stern (New York; Toronto: Random House, 1999), 40–54, as noted by John Durham Peters, the term “ether” in reference to radio is associated with the pioneer of American television and radio, David Sarnoff (see Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000], 207).

[14] Douglas, Listening In, 41.

[15] Peters, Speaking into the Air, 206.

[16] Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis, “The Right to Privacy,” Harvard Law Review 4, no. 5 (December 5, 1890): 193.

[17] Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (New York and London: Verso, 1983), 35-6.

[18] Douglas, Listening In, 24.

[19] See Douglas, Listening In, 6, and Anderson, Imagined Communities, 23.

[20] “BBC-yi Fārsī hashtād sālah shud,” BBC Persian December 29, www.bbc.com/persian/iran-55480435

[21] Julian McDougall, Media Studies: The Basics (London: Routledge, 2012), 114. Also, note that embedded in the German term “Öffentlichkeit” used for “public sphere,” there is the term “öffen” (meaning “open”), which could hint at the opening up of the self that occurs, on varying levels, in the “public sphere.”

[22] Bill Kovarik, Revolutions in Communication: Media History from Gutenberg to the Digital Age (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), 291.

[23] Shahriar Radpour, “Jang-i Iran u ‘Iraq: dar baksh-i Farsi-yi BBC chih guz̲asht,” BBC News-Farsi, 14 September 2010, https://www.bbc.com/persian/iran/2010/09/100912_war30th_bbc_iran_war_iraq_radpour

[24] Henry Jenkins, who is credited with the introduction of the concept of “convergence culture,” defines “convergence” within the context of media studies, as follows: “the flow of content across multiple media platforms, the cooperation between multiple media industries, and the migratory behaviour of media audiences who would go almost anywhere in search of the kinds of entertainment experiences they wanted.” Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York: New York University Press, 2008), 2.

[25] In fact, Walter Ong has highlighted how the Hebrew term “dabar” means both word and event. See Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word, (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), 74.

[26] “BBC-yi Fārsī hashtād sālah shud.”

[27] James W. Carey, “A Cultural Approach to Communication,” in Communication as Culture:

Essays on Media and Society (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989), 18.

[28] See Peter Warren Singer and Emerson T. Brooking, “Authenticity: The Power of Being Real,” in Likewar: The Weaponization of Social Media (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018), 165–9.

[29] Mitra Shahrani, “BBC Persian: Filling the Media Void in the Persian-speaking World,” Asian Politics & Policy 6, no. 2 (2014): 337.

[30] Peters, Speaking into the Air, 207.

[31] See Joshua Meyrowitz, “Multiple Media Literacies,” Journal of Communication 48 (1998): 19‒108.

[32] McLuhan, Understanding Media, 342.

[33] See John Durham Peters, “Mass Media,” in Critical Terms for Media Studies, eds. W.J.T Mitchell and Mark B.N. Hansen (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2010), 268. Peters makes use of the Latin phrase ad humanitatem to refer to addresses that are directed at everyone; however, given that Persian is not spoken on the scale of English, Spanish and many other tongues, messages encoded in this language will be cipherable to the relatively few who speak it.

[34] Paul Lazarsfeld and Thomas K. Merton, “Mass Communication, Popular Taste and Organized Social Action,” in Communication Theory: Volume I, General Approaches to Communication and the Processing of Communication on the Intra-Individual Level, ed. Peter J. Schulz (London: Sage Publications, 2010), 311.

Reshaping Religious Traditions: The Seven Sleepers of Ephesus and the Zoroastrian Golden-Eared Dog

Miguel Ángel Andrés-Toledo Volume 6, Number 3-4, Fall-Winter 2021

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

Ehsan Sheikholharam Volume 6, Number 2, Summer 2021

Ehsan Sheikholharam is a teaching fellow and a PhD candidate in the Department of Religious Studies at UNC Chapel Hill. Situated at the intersection of architecture and religion, his work examines the religiosity of non-religious architecture. Beyond his primary focus on the Aga Khan Award for Architecture, his research spans interrogations of ideologies of public space, spatial motifs in cinema, and theories of subjectivity. He has received recognition from institutions such as the University of Miami, Dumbarton Oaks’ Mellon Initiative, and the Roshan Cultural Heritage Institute. His work has been published in the American Academy of Religion’s Reading Religion, Maydan, CLOG, and WIT Press.

Psychoanalysis is in essence a cure through love.^{^[1]}

—Sigmund Freud, Letter to Carl Jung

Introduction

The etymology of the term exile is ambiguous. Although in its fourteenth-century French meaning, exile corresponds to contemporary usage, connoting a “forced removal from one’s country,” its Latin roots suggest a more nuanced understanding.^{^[2]} If taken as a derivative of the verb ex-sulere, an exsul refers to a person “who is taken out.” This hints at a forced uprooting that is not only unsettling but also agonizing. Yet its origin can also belong to the Latin ambulare, which connotes “to walk,” thus referring to one “who walks out.”^{^[3]} The connotations of “walking out” and “being taken out” are not the same. The former suggests a willed act, whereas the latter hints at an external imposition. Exile as a concept is therefore charged with ambiguity. It is not simply an externally imposed condition—a predicament with which one needs to reconcile. Exile can also be internal—a willed departure from what is intimate and familiar. Incidentally, this latter connotation resonates with the Persian mystical tradition, not because it evokes an original rupture with the divine, but rather because it is predicated upon an internal, willed rupture with the self.^{^[4]} The wayfarer abandons her abode not because she is forced to do so;[5] she departs from the angst of existence because through a journey away from the self, she returns to the Self, becoming one with the Divine—as epitomized by Hoseyn Mansur Hallaj’s (executed 922) “ana al-haqq.” Hallaj did not cry out “I am the Truth” to declare that he is literally God, but to say that through the “annihilation of the ego,” he had reunited with the Divine.[6] This ambiguity, nonetheless, does not alter the affective composition of exile. A willed exile is not exempt from those experiences integral to a forced exile: agony, a sense of loss, and estrangement.

Daryush Shayegan, a Franco-Persian writer, epitomizes an ambivalent relationship with internal exile. An itinerant who traversed the epistemic (and geographic) horizons of the Orient and the Occident,^{^[7]} Shayegan never inhabited a single universe with total infatuation and identitarian attachment.^{^[8]} Living in Paris, he was reflecting on the Iranian Revolution of 1979; living in Tehran, he was writing about the French struggle with national identity. Any attempt to pin him down in either the French intellectual milieu or among the Persian intelligentsia does injustice to Shayegan’s polyvalent work, for he wrote comparative work in both French and Persian, drawing on multiple registers of knowledge.

Feeling uneasy with being confined to a single horizon (whether intellectually, emotionally, or geographically), Shayegan simultaneously inhabited multiple worlds. While Ramin Jahanbegloo^{^[9]} and Laurent Testot^{^[10]} have called Shayegan’s twelve-year stay in France a “self-exile,” I argue that his roving did not begin when he left Tehran a year after the revolution, in 1980, nor did it end when he returned. His exilic subjectivity was already in the making in his multilingual and multicultural upbringing as well as his cosmopolitan education. Nonetheless, characterizing Shayegan as an exile seems rather strange for someone who lived a life of privilege.

Shayegan was born in Tabriz, Iran, to an affluent family. His father was an Azeri merchant and his mother a descendant of the Georgian aristocracy. The milieu in which he was raised was ethnically, religiously, and linguistically mixed. His father was Shi‘a and his mother Sunni. If Persian, Azeri, and Georgian were not enough, his nanny spoke Russian to him. As was the case for children of wealthy liberal families in that era, he was shipped off to a French Catholic school in Tehran. At Saint-Louis School, he was exposed to Iranian Jews, Armenians, and other minorities. At the age of fifteen—and having not yet finished high school—he embarked on a journey to Europe to visit Italy, Sweden, and France. Young Daryush finally landed at a boarding school in London. Later, he attended college in Geneva, studying “comparative philosophy, Sanskrit, and literature.”^{^[11]} When he returned to Tehran in the early 1960s, he was introduced to Seyyed Hossein Nasr and Henry Corbin as well as influential Shi‘a reformists and progressive thinkers. Under Corbin’s supervision, Shayegan received his doctorate from the University of Paris–Sorbonne in 1968.^{^[12]} Shayegan’s expertise in comparative religions (his dissertation brought together the Vedanta schools in Indian philosophy and the Persian Sufi tradition) enabled him to teach Indian Studies in the Department of Comparative Philosophy at the University of Tehran, having had already taught Sanskrit there while working on his dissertation. A year after the 1979 Revolution, Shayegan returned to Paris where, over the course of twelve years, he published several books that examined, among other themes, the encounter between tradition and modernity.

Shayegan’s oeuvre interrogates the effects of globalization on the modern subject. Drawing on psychoanalytic theory, Shayegan argues that the hyper-connected world fragments the psyche into a broken mirror. While he recognizes the problematic nature of this fragmentation, he maintains that “cultural schizophrenia” is the universal condition of the modern world. Exile, in-betweenness, and hybridity are not singular conditions of migrants and itinerants, but modes of being that are integral to the modern psyche.^{^[13]} Instead of attempting to cure this fragmented cultural psyche, Shayegan wants to tame it. Put differently, Shayegan does not wish to fight the condition of modern subjectivity; his project is to reconcile its antinomies. Rather than invoking the metaphor of the melting pot—where fragments combine in an unvariegated whole—he imagines a psyche constituted of difference.

Shayegan’s model of the psyche is intertwined with his life trajectory. His personal experience of interculturalism informs his understanding of cultural hybridity. Although Shayegan’s object of analysis appears to be the condition of the modern psyche, one cannot but realize that the subject analyzed is a cosmopolitan thinker like himself. How would one imagine a conversation Shayegan had with himself? It is perhaps only through a reflexive doubling of the self that he could contemplate his ambivalence. I argue that his only novel, Terre de mirages (Land of Mirages), narrativizes his thoughts on exilic subjectivity. The novel serves not only as a narrative device—it also serves as a talking cure.^{^[14]}

Terre de mirages is a story of two lovers, Marianne (a French woman) and Kaveh (an Iranian man), who, after having lived together for several years, exchange letters from Paris and Tehran. Over almost three years (from January 1997 to December 1999), the two itinerants use these letters to reflect on their incomplete journey. The novel, which is written in the form of an epistle with contributions from Maryam Askari, features eighty letters that tell the story of exilic love. Marianne, who had given up on the possibility of them being together, abandoned Kaveh and abruptly left Tehran. Yet it soon becomes clear that their desire for each other lingers on—although with a melancholic sense of loss. It is this quivering, undead desire that propels their continued conversations.

One could read the book as a diary of cultural psychotherapy.^{^[15]} The two lovers are not simply physically distanced; they have always been apart precisely because they have remained blocked in their cultural enclosures. Trying to live in each other’s respective worlds, the protagonists are strangers in their own homes.

I will begin by providing a glimpse into the narrative structure of the novel. I will then recount three phases of encounter: resistance, schizophrenic fragmentation, and the process of taming cultural schizophrenia. I will explain what role Terre de mirages plays in Shayegan’s thinking—especially regarding the phenomenon of “cultural schizophrenia.” In the next section, I will analyze a series of themes related to exilic subjectivity, including ambivalence, hybridity, and in-betweenness. Subsequently, I will situate the novel in Shayegan’s oeuvre, arguing that it is a pivotal work. Finally, I will posit a critique of the novel.

The Story

The story begins with a letter from Kaveh in Tehran, dated 24 January 1997. He was expecting a letter from Marianne, who had suddenly left Iran. By then, they had been living together for about ten years—in both France and Iran. Soon, one gathers that they had reached a point in their relationship where moving forward seemed impossible. Kaveh is disillusioned, Marianne irreparably hurt. The protagonists are in profound agony. Marianne, who has learned about Kaveh’s melancholic condition, writes:

He [their mutual friend] told me some very disturbing things about your state of mind, your depression, your voluntary isolation, in short, the signs of a deep unease for which I feel directly responsible. Without my hasty departure, you would probably not have suffered so much [. . .] I hurt you very badly and I am deeply sorry; I took you for a wise man, such was the image that you wanted to communicate to the world, and here I am discovering a delicate, fragile and very vulnerable being.^{^[16]}

The mutual distress with which the novel begins has little to do with the partners’ immediate relations. Despite apparent frustrations and hurtful misunderstandings, their love persists.^{^[17]} “We love each other,” Marianne writes, “but we can’t live together.”^{^[18]} Kaveh echoes Marianne’s ambiguity: “I miss you painfully,” yet we “are imbued with nostalgia” and crippled by “regret.”^{^[19]} The disconnect, nonetheless, goes beyond themselves.

As the story unfolds, one gathers that their relationship failed not due to irresolvable quibbles, but precisely because of cultural prejudices, atavistic attachment to identities, and withdrawal into nativism.^{^[20]} “It is difficult,” Marianne declares in despair, “to get out of the shackles of habits.” Molds of thoughts, subconsciously and gradually, turn into “a straitjacket that binds us to our atavisms.”^{^[21]}

In the novel, cultural differences are articulated through seemingly mundane conversations. The story builds up these overarching themes of civilizational discontent through flashbacks, recounting what happened between the two protagonists at different occasions when they were together. In trying to make sense of their failed love, Marianne poses poignant questions: “Are our respective worlds so incommensurable? Aren’t we living in the same world, speaking the same languages?”^{^[22]}

Their differences are manifold. While Marianne was engaging and personable, Kaveh was somehow aloof. Disinterested in the mundane, he often “refused to participate in collective life.” Since he was more invested in metaphysical thoughts and mystic poetry, his interest in politics and urban life remained feeble. Furthermore, Kaveh tended to think in binaries. He was quick to frame ordinary quibbles into irreconcilable antinomic themes. Marianne recalls how Kaveh complicated a simple disagreement into an inherent divide between the East and the West: “In Europe, one exchanges ideas as if they were going to the market, while ignoring the real sympathy that is the communion between people. One is intelligent, sometimes too intelligent, but it is wisdom that is missing. One is tolerant, but not compassionate enough.”^{^[23]}

Marianne astutely observes that Kaveh’s reproaches were civilizational rather than personal.^{^[24]} Throughout the novel, Marianne, too, poses a similar critique that, although it seems personal, addresses larger cultural themes.^{^[25]} Beyond cultural generalization, occasionally one can find more particular examples. Kaveh, for instance, remembers how Marianne was repelled by “the deplorable condition of women, the confusing relationship between genders, the hustle and bustle of ambiguous situations, and the ambivalence of generalizing judgments.”^{^[26]} Sometimes, these themes and sentiments, especially when it comes to essentialized cultural differences, are narrated through less sophisticated voices in the novel. Kaveh’s mother, for example, reiterates her unfading distrust about the possibility of their relationship. Voicing her motherly concern for Kaveh’s unrest, she says poignantly: “Don’t you know that East and West are two opposite poles that will never meet?”^{^[27]}

As Marianne and Kaveh try to mediate between seemingly incompatible worlds,^{^[28]} they enter a third space.^{^[29]} “I have the impression,” Marianne writes, “that we have now created a gaping space between us.”^{^[30]} Throughout the novel, Marianne and Kaveh refer to each other as “exile” (exilée), “foreigner” (l’étranger), “immigrant” (immigré), and “nomad” (nomade). Marianne suggests that the “ambivalence of migrants and the effects of exile” have become “the condition of humanity today.”^{^[31]} Marianne was caught in an ambiguous space between “flashes of joy” and “secret dismays.” By being “shaken up” out of their “torpor,”^{^[32]} the protagonists also enter a reflexive space of remaking the self. This self-discovery is nonetheless disquieting. Marianne writes in a despondent tone: “I had ceased to be a serious Frenchwoman, but that did not mean that I had become a carefree Persian. Here I go! I am no longer this or that.” As she seems suspended in an in-between space, she perceives her own consciousness as mesmerized and disoriented. She tries to morph into a shape that seems incompatible with her “natural” mold: “I have become a migrant in the agony of metamorphosis.”^{^[33]}

The lovers are in an emotional limbo from which one cannot be emancipated without the support and validation of the other. By trying to understand Kaveh’s world, Marianne begins to decipher her own mysteries. It is not merely that Marianne “had become fundamentally different.” What is remarkable about this retrospection is that she realizes she has always been different.^{^[34]} In trying to tear the veil of the Other, one confronts the hidden side (face cachée) of their own existence.^{^[35]} What was once familiar and intimate turns into something exotic and strange. Entering an “interworld” (d’intermonde), they discover that they need to remake their subjectivities as if nothing were fixed.^{^[36]} In this precise sense, the novel functions as a guide for dealing with the psychic effects of exilic love: “I don’t know if our letters are proof of our love,” Kaveh wonders, “or some cunning ruse closer to psychotherapy.”^{^[37]}

The inconsistencies exhibited by the characters are twofold. On the one hand, they are divided internally: they are struggling to assimilate into each other’s respective worlds. On the other, they are not yet equipped with the intellectual and emotional tools to recognize each other. Kaveh writes about a similar (internal) struggle: “It’s true that I have a conflicting soul—it looks like two antagonistic forces pulling me in opposite directions.”^{^[38]}

The novel is a journey of taming this ambivalence. Shayegan implies that what brought their relationship to a standstill was a kind of cultural egocentrism where their in-betweenness was turned into a centrifugal force. Each withdrew into their own closed universe. It is only when they are apart—that is, at those moments when the immediacy of each other’s presence is gone—that they can reflect on their encounter. Welcoming this space of disjointed retrospection is, indeed, the first step in the way of taming their fragmented subjectivity. It is through this disjunctive engagement that they gradually move away from blaming each other toward recognizing their own biases and idiosyncrasies. Although recognition of their egocentrism is the first and fundamental step, it takes them three years and eighty letters to move from recognition-as-diagnosis to recognition-as-reconciliation. Marianne writes: “At the time, I interpreted your thoughts as gibberish uttered by an agitated person in exile, to whom nothing was more satisfying than criticizing our way of life. With time and experience, nonetheless, I began to understand the relevance of these words. Now that I live alone in Paris, I gradually identify with what you must have felt when you were propelled towards us. Perhaps, dear Kaveh, I too have become, at my expense, an exile.”^{^[39]}

Yet because Marianne has the will and courage to be vulnerable, she goes through a metamorphosis; she embraces in-betweenness. Moving from a closed and fixed identity to an open and fluid one comes at a price. Marianne contemplates the “secret maladies” of this love: “[I] was so captivated by the world I was discovering that I had to deny a large part of myself. I came forward defenseless; it may have allowed me to explore areas otherwise inaccessible to a stranger. Nonetheless, I paid dearly for it: I came out bruised, broken, disfigured inside. Now I have taken a step back and am trying to analyze what really happened to me.”^{^[40]}

Meanwhile, as Marianne and Kaveh are navigating their mixed feelings and lingering desire, they also experiment with new romance. Marianne meets Sadegh, an Afghani painter who has a small gallery in Paris. As she shares with Kaveh her fascination with and libidinal desire toward her new flame, Marianne realizes that she is using her artist lover as a substitute for Kaveh’s absence.^{^[41]} Her Afghani lover is an empty signifier onto which Marianne projects the repressed object of her desire.^{^[42]} Her hesitation, she says, is rooted in her lingering love for Kaveh: “I carry the delicious stigmata in my soul.”^{^[43]} Likewise, Kaveh starts dating Afsaneh—a Persian woman who, after having lived on the US west coast and later in France, returned to Tehran.^{^[44]} They travel together to the United States. While Afsaneh feels as free as a fish who has been returned to the sea, Kaveh feels alienated.^{^[45]} Although he appreciates the country’s multiculturalism and diversity, his subconscious “anti-Americanism” functions as a barrier. Kaveh remains suspicious of profit-driven capitalism, all-too-confident positivism, and “euphoric and artificial happiness” that has ensued from the economic boom. Kaveh breaks up with Afsaneh not merely because she is happy in the American milieu and he is not, nor because they are not “on the same wavelength,” as Kaveh mentions.^{^[46]} He cannot continue, because, like Marianne, his struggles are internal.

By providing yet another space for introspection, these failed attempts at finding romance help the protagonists to reignite their passion for each other. Through a process reminiscent of a Hegelian double negation, they come to realize what is desirable by recognizing what is not. Toward the end of the novel—and after having sorted out their internal struggles—the two lovers notice how what was once a “great distance” has “narrowed.” Just as their fragmented psyche morphs into a harmonious tapestry of differences, so too their love for each other returns with fervor. Marianne marks this decisive moment with ardor: “No! I don’t want to be silent anymore; I want everyone to know the immensity of my love.”^{^[47]}

They finally decide to reunite. Marianne, who is getting ready to join Kaveh in Iran, receives a letter from a mutual friend. Kaveh has disappeared in the desert in the south of Iran with an archaeologist friend. The story ends in desperate suspense. The last paragraph, in which Marianne writes poignantly to her friend, is worth citing at length:

First of all, there was this desire to go elsewhere. It was this invitation to travel that spurred my thirst to leave, to tear myself away from my old habits, to venture into unknown worlds. I got to know Kaveh who was almost my alter ego. Then there were my extraordinary efforts to integrate myself into an unusual environment which, while welcoming, was no less hostile. I went through all these hardships with joy as I believed in my destiny. I was certain that at the end of the road, something awaited me—a big surprise. It is with this hope that I embarked on my Persian adventure. I had to disincarnate to reincarnate again [. . .] I had to re-capture those fragile moments when my being was shattered and my body began to spin madly around the axis of my soul. Finally, I had to endure my ordeal and despair only to learn that my life clung to a frail desire and that this desire was but a mirage in the desert.^{^[48]}

Hence, the novel partly confirms yet also contradicts Shayegan’s life experience and intellectual work. Shayegan, the embodiment of cultural hybridity and civilizational exchange, ends his book with hesitation, suggesting that the possibility of reconciliation is a mirage, an illusion.

Cultural Schizophrenia

The novel captures three phases of Marianne and Kaveh’s relationship. The first phase, which happened over the ten years immediately before their correspondence begins, has to do with the unsettling and disorienting encounter with the Other. The affective content of this encounter is twofold. On the one hand, the protagonists were drawn to the novelty and charm of the unknown; on the other, they were repelled by it. What was missing between them was a space for mediation—a third space equally open to both of them. The novel revels in expatiating on the first stage prior to the formation of this in-between zone. The protagonists recall how unintelligible sentiments and inexplicable behaviors often ended in frustrations.

In the second stage, they reflect on their encounter in dialectical form. The dialogical nature of the epistolary form affords an interplay between claims and counterclaims, between arguments and counterarguments, or thesis and antithesis. At times, a single letter includes both a thesis and an antithesis, showing how Marianne’s and Kaveh’s respective ways of seeing a given situation are opposed. Yet the following letter comes close to a synthesis, where they gesture toward a mediatory position. Instead of denunciations and hasty judgments, they try to understand each other’s worlds. In the final stage, Marianne and Kaveh have cultivated the third space of mediation where neither of them needs to assimilate into the world of the other. Their identities are now augmented by the presence of the other. What characterizes this emancipatory stage is its radical openness.^{^[49]} Their once-fragmented psyche has turned into a woven fabric of difference where different layers coexist. Rather than a forced assimilation of one’s identity into either space (Marianne “becoming” Persian, or Kaveh “becoming” French), the third space helps them to move beyond choosing one over and against the other.

What the two lovers are experiencing is what Shayegan has called “cultural schizophrenia.”^{^[50]} The encounter between heterogeneous worlds is by nature unsettling. The cultural psyche traced over and cut by zigzag lines is schizophrenic.^{^[51]} The psyche is left with “broken ontologies” when these traces and fragments have not morphed yet into a tangible composition: “The inter-epistemic situation shows that these blocks of knowledge can coexist, clash, and create a kind of cultural schizophrenia. In this specific case, the magical-mythical world can pass through the conceptual grid of the modern gaze. Moreover, both can act within the same person, paralyzing their critical faculties, causing mental blockages, identity tensions.”^{^[52]}

In speculating about a solution, Shayegan is not interested in flattening constitutive differences and cultural particularities. In his view, the Orient and the Occident are not homogeneous, and the difference between them cannot be glossed over. Nor is he advocating the infusion of “different registers of consciousness” into an unvariegated mélange. “As we live in the interstitial spaces of entangled worlds,” we become not only “multiple [and] plural,” but also “fractured.”^{^[53]} Manifold identities, hybridity, and borderline subjectivities are integral to the interconnected world, but these are ambivalent in and of themselves. In-betweenness can be augmentative or reductive. The novel depicts the process in which exilic subjectivity becomes augmentative.

Instead of pathologizing cultural schizophrenia or trying to eliminate its symptoms, Shayegan wants to tame it. This taming, nonetheless, requires conscious effort. It is a process that entails both “mental acrobatics” and emotional engagement. Shayegan writes: “One who combines these heterogeneous worlds must have a decoding keyboard—a toolbox for taming schizophrenia (apprivoiser sa schizophrénie) and its contradictions.” It is crucial, he continues, “to live simultaneously and serenely [these] antithetical worlds.” One needs to break free from their “cultural orbit,” while taking a distance from their “metaphysical coordinates.” Only through this self-exile can one “scrutinize these ludic crossroads” of distinct views.^{^[54]} Terre de mirages is a guide to “mental gymnastics” that enables the reader to “learn [the] acrobatic art of living in the middle.”^{^[55]} Shayegan wants to outline the progression from refusing, to embracing anguish and disorientation, and finally to arriving at clarity freed from ambiguity.^{^[56]} A passage in Shayegan’s foreword to Cultural Schizophrenia: Islamic Societies Confronting the West captures this phenomenon:

We who were born on the periphery are living through a time of conflict between different blocs of knowledge. We are trapped in a fault-line between incompatible worlds, worlds that mutually repel and deform one another. If accepted consciously, lucidly, without resentment, this ambivalent situation can be enriching; it can amplify the registers of our learning and broaden our sensibility. But the same ambivalence, when sheltered from the critical field of knowledge, causes mental blocks and lacunae, mutilates perceptions and (in the manner of a broken mirror) fragments realities and mental images alike.^{^[57]}

The taming of cultural schizophrenia is not about building connections between existing ontologies—that is, essentialized and mythologized notions of cultures. It has to do with mobilizing dynamic forces that are integral to cultural differences. If the heterogeneous and often opposing forces that pull the modern psyche in multiple directions are assimilated, the encounter augments the self. But if this ambivalence is left unresolved, it turns into a reductive and subtractive antagonism.^{^[58]} On an individual level, unresolved contradictions—or to use Shayegan’s term, ontological incompatibilities—grow into “epistemological schizophrenia,”^{^[59]} while on the level of political discourse, they translate into a form of “false consciousness.”^{^[60]} For example, in Qu’est-ce qu’une révolution religieuse? (What Is a Religious Revolution?), Shayegan reprimands Ali Shariati (1933–77) not only for “ideologization of tradition,” but also for contributing to false consciousness by identifying the repressed masses in Iran with the Marxist category of the proletariat.^{^[61]}

But what are the genealogies of cultural schizophrenia? The phrase schizophrénie culturelle is associated with Shayegan. Nonetheless, its genealogy is manifold. Its underpinnings can be traced back to the first half of the twentieth century, not only in psychology, but also in cultural studies on race and coloniality. In English, the concept “cultural schizophrenia” was already prevalent in the 1940s and 1950s, not only in the context of anti-Semitism,^{^[62]} but also in art and architectural critiques.^{^[63]} In French, it first appeared in 1974 in an article by Isaac Yetiv on the theme of alienation in Maghrebian novels.^{^[64]} For Yetiv, “schizophrénie culturelle” was the effect of colonial alienation.^{^[65]} Although he drew on Albert Camus and Franz Kafka, his critique was aligned with the core critique of racial repression in Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk (1903), and Frantz Fanon’s Peau noire, masques blancs (1957).^{^[66]}

In the sixties and seventies, Shayegan was immersed in the French poststructuralist milieu. Perhaps the most influential work among poststructuralists was Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1972); they were the first to theorize schizophrenia beyond clinical pathology.^{^[67]} With Deleuze and Guattari, schizophrenia became a new form of cultural critique—a subversive model that through its rhizomatic ontology could destabilize hierarchical forms. This was the moment when schizophrenia was transformed from a pathology into a revolutionary force. “Schizophrenia is like love,” wrote Deleuze and Guattari, “schizophrenia is the universe of productive and reproductive desiring-machines, universal primary productions as ‘the essential reality of man and nature.’”^{^[68]} In alignment with this “glorification of schizophrenia,”^{^[69]} more complex subjectivities have been conceived, and it is in this very context that one should read Shayegan’s novel.

In contrast to postmodern cultural politics, Shayegan is firmly opposed to the notion of “grafting.” One cannot force realities that are constructed upon different historical trajectories and distinct regimes of knowledge to come together. He writes: “Grafting attempts to obscure the absence of isomorphism and reconcile epistemologically two different paradigms, old and new, which, owing to the caesuras separating them, have become incommensurable.”^{^[70]} What is necessary, rather, is a third space of translation. Shayegan finds Homi Bhabha’s formulation of this third space congenial to his own understanding. He cites a line from Bhabha’s The Location of Culture: “The interstitial passage between fixed identifications opens up the possibility of a cultural hybridity that entertains difference without an assumed or imposed hierarchy.”^{^[71]} For Shayegan, fragmentation, interconnectivity, and in-betweenness are no longer the conditions for marginal identities, but a new way of being in the world.

It might seem that Shayegan is advocating a kind of postmodern multiculturalism or cultural relativism. Quite the contrary. For him, multiculturalism is predicated on reducing, or rather reifying, cultures (and by extension identities) into fixed entities. In articulating his critique, Shayegan writes, “multiculturalism tends to become a kind of identity politics where the concept of culture is inevitably confused with ethnic identity.”^{^[72]} In the long run, he argues, such an obsession with identities and fetishization of the minority moral rights proves not only “intellectually sterile” but, more dangerously, “politically suicidal.”^{^[73]} Shayegan condemns “die-hard multiculturalists” for essentializing cultures by valorizing their assumed singularity.^{^[74]}

In his thinking, identitarianism, either in the form of a naive confidence conferred by an imagined superiority, or in the form of withdrawal resulting from a sense of inferiority, must be overcome. He condemns identitarianism in a scathing critique: “In their excess of self-assertion, they produced opposite and aberrant effects. Rather than re-establishing the specific right to recognition, they led to delusional fantasies whereby myth merges with reality.”^{^[75]}

He is equally critical of cultural relativism. In a relativist world, each culture tries to claim its particular identity at the expense of others.^{^[76]} By overdetermining cultural distinctions, one risks essentializing cultures altogether.^{^[77]} Although each culture is constructed upon a particular historical trajectory, none has rigid boundaries. In order to repudiate the essentialization of cultures and to evade identitarian pitfalls, Shayegan proposes the concept of interculturalité (interculturalism). Interculturalism is predicated on the porosity of cultural boundaries. Instead of cultural antagonisms and resentments, Shayegan advocates a dialogical construction of new identities.^{^[78]}

He uses the French construct l’entre-deux (literally, between the two) to characterize in-betweenness.^{^[79]} Thus, he situates the following concepts in a metonymic relationship to demonstrate their structural resemblance: “I am interested,” he says in La conscience métisse, “in plural identities, zone of hybridization, virtualization, métis consciousness, in short in everything that characterizes our kaleidoscopic world.”^{^[80]}

Shayegan’s Ambivalent Relationship to Terre de mirages

Unlike what might be expected from a novel titled Terre de mirages, with its cover featuring the silhouette of a desolate woman sitting in a desert, the book is not a romance. It is true that the characters are fictional and the storyline is about their romantic relationship. But, at its core, the book is Shayegan’s attempt at expressing in a different genre his own fascination—namely, the encounter between dissimilar worlds. Although the book is written in the form of an epistolary novel, the publisher (Éditions de l’Aube) does not classify it under the category of novels. It is part of the collection Regards croisés, co-directed by Marion Hennebert and Manon Viard. This collection is primarily dedicated to the literary work of French-speaking authors who share their exilic experiences.^{^[81]}

The novel brings two trajectories into a single frame: Shayegan’s philosophical thought and his personal formation. The adventurous path traversed by the protagonists can be squarely mapped onto Shayegan’s odyssey into the comparative analysis of cultures. More importantly, the novel is a turning point in his oeuvre, functioning as a hinge upon which his thinking turns. Many of the conceptual propositions gestured toward here are later developed in his critical work.

I identify three stages in Shayegan’s oeuvre apropos the question of encounter: confluence of compatible horizons, confrontation of an incompatible episteme, and reconciliation of dissimilar ontologies.^{^[82]} In the first stage, Shayegan examines the encounter between compatible worlds. His doctoral work with Corbin examines the confluences of the Indian philosophical and religious traditions with Persian Sufism through their shared ontological, cosmological, and metaphysical horizons. For him, Dara Shokuh’s Majma-ul-Bahrain (The Confluence of the Two Seas) was the apotheosis of cultural hybridity. This period, in which he wrote primarily in Persian, spans from the end of his doctoral work, 1967–68, to the Iranian Revolution, 1978–79.^{^[83]}

In the second period, roughly between 1977–78 to 1992, he is fascinated with the question of meeting between heterogeneous worlds.^{^[84]} Shayegan uses his comparative skills to formulate a critique of reified identities, disenchanted modernity, and religious ideologies. He examines the encounter between the putatively incompatible worlds of the Orient and the Occident^{^[85]} in three volumes: Asiya dar barabar-i Gharb (Tehran, 1977); Les illusions de l’identité (Paris, 1992); and Le regard mutilé, schizophrénie culturelle : pays traditionnels face à la modernité (Paris, 1989). Disenchanted with the Iranian Revolution, he also formulates his critique of the “ideologization of religion” in Qu’est-ce qu’une révolution religieuse? (Paris, 1982).

In the third period, from 1992 to 2018, Shayegan moves from diagnosing cultural schizophrenia to taming it. After years of bouncing between dissimilar worlds, he accepts in-betweenness as a space to be cherished. He begins to not only appreciate hybridity, nomadism, and mixed consciousness, but to promote them as the appropriate subjective conditions for a “kaleidoscopic world.”^{^[86]} He no longer defends Oriental spirituality against the disenchantment of modernity, as he did in the first period; nor does he applaud the West for its technological progress without recognizing the malaise that comes with that progress. He wants to create a new hybrid identity by reappropriating the most illustrious aspects of both cultures.

Despite this critical gaze toward the West, Shayegan always admires the critical core of the Enlightenment, when the West reevaluated its own taken-for-granted concepts. Shayegan takes this critical core as a universal value.^{^[87]} Openness, charitable critique, and lucidity are principles that should be cultivated. In this third period, Shayegan talks about hope. Instead of pointing to cultural differences in order to reveal their flaws and unconscious biases, Shayegan is in search of reconciliation.^{^[88]} La conscience métisse (Paris, 2012), encapsulates this phase of his work. Furthermore, it is in this third period that Shayegan turns to poetry as yet another way of examining cultures.^{^[89]} Incidentally, Shayegan’s work on five pillars of Persian poetry, in Panj iqlīm-i ḥuẓūr, pays special attention to Jalal al-Din Rumi (1207–73) and Sufi metaphysical thought more broadly. I suggest that Rumi’s three stages— I was raw (kham budam), I was cooked (pokhte shodam), and I was burned (sokhtam)—correspond to the three stages of transformation for Shayegan, as well as to the three stages of the novel. Perhaps the bitter ending of the novel should not be interpreted as a defeat of exilic love, but as its ultimate sublimation.

Shayegan Disguised as Kaveh

The exchange of letters between two distant lovers is not merely Shayegan’s thought process in developing his theory of cultural encounters; the story can be read as his personal struggle with identity. In an interview entitled “Terre de mirages,” Lila Azam Zanganeh challenges Shayegan about an evident conflict in his intellectual trajectory.^{^[90]} Reflecting on his forty years of writing, Shayegan identifies his work as a symptom.^{^[91]} “Without being aware of it, I was inhabited by two contradictory tendencies [referring to the ‘logic’ of a magico-mythical world and the mode of thinking integral to ‘modernity’],” he continues, “I was, in other words, ‘schizophrenic.’”^{^[92]} This is not merely a novel by Shayegan, reflecting on possibilities of overcoming a kind of bipolar cultural psyche, but a book for Shayegan—that is, a site for the reconfiguration of a hybrid identity. As a thinker of the periphery, he is well-aware of the temptation of “indomitable atavisms.” In La conscience métisse, he denounces the obsession with a closed identity by framing it as a “mental ghetto.”^{^[93]} Elsewhere, Shayegan welcomes the idea of a critical self-dialogue, where one comes to recognize their hybridity, the interconnectedness of their sense of the self to multiple, overlapping identities.^{^[94]} In Terre de Mirages, Shayegan tests his theory of cultural psychotherapy by recounting a story that constructs an image of cultural hybridity.

The novel goes beyond symbolizing cultural particularities, the differences between the Orient and the Occident, more broadly, and between Persian and French culture, more specifically. I suggest that one can read the novel as a story where Shayegan converses with his alter ego. As the story provides clues about the life trajectory and the genealogy of its protagonists, one gathers that the main character is none other than Shayegan himself.^{^[95]} The events and their chronology match those of Shayegan: his childhood in an ethnically mixed household and the hybrid cultural milieu of his parental home in the forties, his cosmopolitan education in the fifties and sixties, and his crisscrossed journeys in the seventies and eighties.^{^[96]}

But why would Shayegan use France (as a cultural and national counterpart) and a French woman (as an interlocutor) in dealing with his in-between identity? Isn’t the story that is the inverse of his own struggle a way of exploring the universality of the problem of cultural schizophrenia?

It seems that Shayegan develops the character Marianne as his feminine alter ego. She is a learned woman, with tremendous interest in the Persian culture. She has studied “oriental languages in Paris.”^{^[97]} More specifically, Marianne studied the Islamic art of the Mongols in India. Shayegan himself studied Sanskrit and comparative philosophy with a particular interest in the Mongol era. It was due to her research that Marianne traveled to Iran, where she met Kaveh. Not only is Shayegan weaving the intellectual genealogy of the heroine to his own trajectory, but by constructing the narrative within a Franco-Persian frame, he also shows the affinities between the two milieus.^{^[98]} Marianne’s father was an orientalist, “infatuated with Indo-Persian Mongolian art.” Her father, who was a descendent of nobility (noblesse de robe), had a “rare collection of Persian manuscripts.”^{^[99]} He was a disciple of the famous eighteenth-century French orientalist Anquetil-Duperron, who “discovered the Persian translation of Dara Shokuh’s Upanishads.”^{^[100]} It should not come as a surprise that Dara Shokuh was the central figure in Shayegan’s doctoral dissertation.^{^[101]} Hence, it is not only Kaveh (elite Persians like Shayegan himself) who is in love with Marianne (French culture); the fascination is mutual.^{^[102]}

A Critique

While the novel skillfully narrativizes the process in which one could come to terms with exilic and hybrid subjectivities, it suffers from certain shortcomings.

First, it reiterates stereotyped gender roles. It seems that Kaveh is the one who assumes the dominant position. He appears to be more confident—in his wisdom and his interpretations. The novel gives the impression that Marianne is the one who needs to come to terms with her in-betweenness.^{^[103]} “Despite my good will,” Marianne bemoans, “I did not learn this acrobatic art of living in the middle [. . .] I’m still too stiff for mental gymnastics.”^{^[104]} This is ironic. Toward the end of the novel, Marianne suggests that—although “both came out transformed,” and although they have arrived at the same conclusion but from different paths—she has been able to overcome her ambivalence. Kaveh admits that he has been stuck in a “mental ghetto” as he is still trapped in an ethnic enclosure.^{^[105]}

Metaphorically, Kaveh likens Marianne to Paris. One might find this association sexist, especially when he writes: “I have always identified your beauty, your whims, your mood swings as well as the ambiguity of your character, with the city where you were born.”^{^[106]} It seems as if Shayegan is reproducing the nineteenth-century notion of hysteria, where emotional excess was deemed feminine.

Second, the novel exhibits certain formal limitations. Although it is an attempt at writing in a different genre, it remains close to Shayegan’s analytical writing. Furthermore, the story is overwhelmed with cultural theory, philosophical speculations, and terminology borrowed from cultural studies. It seems that the two protagonists are present only to symbolize and represent. Shayegan seems more concerned with laying out the putative and contested cultural boundaries than with developing the characters themselves.^{^[107]} Marianne and Kaveh are allegories for two civilizations. Thus, everything remains allegorical. For example, there are a few scenes where Shayegan depicts intimate relations. Even these intimate episodes are more about the problematic status of sexuality in Iranian culture than they are about the characters’ personal rapport. Because Shayegan pays more attention to the analytical content than to its aesthetic form, it is difficult to appreciate the book as a literary novel with an engaging storyline.

Furthermore, by tracing a selective genealogy, Shayegan constructs an image of cultural hybridity in which the French and Persian cultures appear to be congruent. On the one hand, the cosmopolitan identities of Marianne and Kaveh suggest that the affection between the two elite intellectuals is the sublimation of a prior, genuine interest in the cultural and philosophical production of two civilizations. On the other, Shayegan highlights particular moments in the history of Iran and France to highlight their historical similarities.

Next, and most crucially to Shayegan’s critical project, the novel inevitably falls into the very traps that Shayegan aims to denounce—namely, essentialization, self-orientalization, and romanticization. Furthermore, although Shayegan is conscious of generalizing deductions, the novel, nevertheless, suffers from sweeping cultural generalizations.^{^[108]} To allegorize the two civilizations, he often begins with stereotypical accounts, depicting the Orient as sentimental and the Occident as rational.^{^[109]} The binary essentialization carries through. The Orient is associated with a penchant for poetry, obscurantism, and sexual modesty, not to mention lazy and carefree attitudes. The Occident is linked to disenchanted modernity, clarity of thought, sexual promiscuity, determinism, and so forth.^{^[110]}

This brings me to another crucial point. Shayegan is a defender of “universal” values, which take the predictable form of Eurocentrism. Furthermore, he refers to the “cultural exception” of France with much admiration: “the French,” he writes, “are the people of culture par excellence.”^{^[111]} Shayegan seems to have internalized and replicated European biases in his own scholarly work. While Persian poetry was at the summit of cultural production in the Orient, Shayegan was disenchanted by the intellectual lethargy and a kind of withdrawal from reality which plagued Iran after the sixteenth century.

Although Shayegan positions his notion of cultural schizophrenia and métissage in relation to other iterations of similar concepts, there are a few connections that remain absent. One finds traces of the work of Peter McLaren (cultural imaginaries),^{^[112]} François Laplantine and Alexis Nouss (Le métissages),^{^[113]} Homi Bhabha (third space),^{^[114]} Serge Gruzinski (La pensée métisse),^{^[115]} and Charles Taylor (multiculturalism)^{^[116]} in Shayegan’s oeuvre. Although these references are crucial, I cannot but think of the relevance of Alain Badiou’s ontology of the event for Shayegan’s thinking on the taming of cultural schizophrenia.^{^[117]} Furthermore, for Badiou, the construction of love is a subjective process similar to what we see in Shayegan’s novel.^{^[118]}

Lastly, Shayegan’s romanticized remedy for cultural clashes is thoroughly individualist and remains constrained to the privileged realm of philosophical and literary speculations. Not only is there no reference to social class in the novel, but the question of class struggle remains marginal in his oeuvre. It is no surprise that, like Shayegan, Kaveh is a wealthy member of the elite surrounded by other privileged fellows.^{^[119]} In dissociating cultural problems from political or economic failures, Shayegan remains complicit with neoliberal politics.^{^[120]}

Conclusion

Terre de mirages is an odyssey into the unsettling twilight zone of exilic love. Through poignant letters, the distant lovers contemplate their forsaken journey. The book is Shayegan’s singular attempt at writing in a different genre about his central theme of inquiry: the construction of a third space for the taming of hybrid cultural psyches. Through recounting a story of a failed relationship, Shayegan puts to the test his theory of cultural psychotherapy. Shayegan shows that hybrid identities, mixed consciousness, and cultural interbreeding are not particular states of migrants and exiles, but the universal condition of a kaleidoscopic world. The story is a site for the construction of a new subjectivity that goes beyond the suspense and liminality of in-betweenness.

The book marks a pivotal point in Shayegan’s work by disavowing his prior characterization of cultural schizophrenia as a pathology. The fragmented psyche is not something to be fought; it needs to be tamed. Modern identity is not one that flattens its inner struggles, but one that patches together its fragments to form a complex tapestry. Not only does cultural schizophrenia name the universal condition of modern subjectivity as such, but it also offers a more expansive and creative way of being in the world.

The exilic journey depicted in Terre de mirages mirrors the author’s personal struggle with his hybrid identity. As the story unfolds, one realizes that Kaveh’s trajectory maps onto the life of Shayegan himself. Furthermore, Shayegan symbolizes his ambivalent love for French culture in a feminine figure: Marianne can be read as his alter ego. The novel serves not only as a narrative device but also as a talking cure. The topography signified by the title of the novel is suggestive. Terre de mirages is a reflective surface, and its story makes clear how writing and self-fashioning are interwoven. Just as a mirage is an ambiguous redoubling whose perception depends on a perpetual subjective engagement with its becoming, so too exilic love can be sustained only in a space of constant remaking.

[1]For Freud, therapy requires the emotional engagement of both the analyst and the analysant (the person who is being analyzed). Central to Freud’s theory is this emotional charge in analyst–analysant relationship. Letter to Jung, December 6, 1906, in The Freud/Jung Letters: The Correspondence between Sigmund Freud and C.G. Jung, ed. William McGuire, trans. Ralph Manheim and R. F. C. Hull (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 12–13.

[2]Michiel Arnoud Cor de Vaan, “exile,” Etymological Dictionary of Latin and the Other Italic Languages (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 196.

[3]Vaan, Etymological Dictionary, 196.

[4]Reflecting on Sufi tradition, Shayegan writes: “Mais sous quelque forme que l’Ange veuille bien se manifester, sa fonction pédagogique est la même : éveiller l’âme en tant qu’Étrangère en ce monde et susciter la conjonction de la bi-unité de l’âme avec son Alter-Ego céleste.” (“But, in whatever form the Angel manifests itself, his pedagogical function is the same: to awaken the soul as a Foreigner in this world and to bring about the conjunction of the bi-unity of the soul with its celestial Alter-Ego.”) All translations are mine unless otherwise stated. Daryush Shayegan, Henry Corbin : penseur de l’islam spirituel (Paris: Albin Michel, 2011), 100.

[5]I am using she to follow those (including Bhabha) who argue that for a long time, the masculine pronouns have been used. It is a gesture to raise the question of why he seems to be so natural, but she invites a pause.

[6]Al-Ḥusayn ibn Manṣur Ḥallaj, Hallaj: Poems of a Sufi Martyr, trans. Carl W. Ernst (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2018), 167.

[7]While essentialized notions of the Orient or the Occident are somehow obsolete, I use them to be faithful to the novel.

[8]I am referring to identitarianism as an ideology that constructs forms of collective identifications with rigid and exclusionary boundaries. Identitarianism often foregrounds mythical ideas about race and imagined purity of origins for cultures. In its historical frame, the ideology of identitarianism emerged as a reaction toward the “cultural Marxism” of the 1960s as well as the presumed domination of multiculturalism. In its more contemporary iterations, it lends itself to far-right nationalist politics. Jean-Yves Camus and Nicolas Lebourg, Les droites extrêmes en Europe (Paris: Editions Seuil, 2015).

[9]Ramin Jahanbegloo, “Shayegan, Daryush,” Encyclopaedia of Islam, THREE, 2021, dx.doi.org/10.1163/1573-3912_ei3_COM_40491.

[10]Laurent Testot, “Daryush Shayegan : Philosophe sans frontières,” Sciences humaines 240 (2012): www.scienceshumaines.com/daryush-shayegan-philosophe-sans-frontieres_fr_29181.html.

[11]Jahanbegloo, “Shayegan, Daryush.”

[12]According to Jahanbegloo, Shayegan was inspired “by the nativist vision of Iran, based on a return to Shīʿī philosophy, with a particular inclination to Heidegger (d. 1976), Corbin, and the Iranian mystics.” Jahanbegloo’s statement is problematic in two ways. First, Shayegan’s vision of Persian Sufi tradition is comparative; following his advisor (Corbin) and Louis Massignon (Corbin’s mentor), they collectively and successively mapped a cosmopolitan genealogy for Iranian Sufism. Shayegan’s doctoral work already marks a departure from Hassan Nasr’s perennial philosophy as well as a Shi‘a-centric vision of Sufism. Second, the intellectual foundation of the work that was published in this period was shaped in the late sixties. His Hindouisme et Soufisme was his doctoral dissertation, which, with some minor adjustments, was presented to the Faculty of Letters of the University of Paris in May 1968.

[13]Daryush Shayegan, La conscience métisse (Paris: Albin Michel, 2012), 44.

[14]In Freudian psychoanalysis, the term talking cure refers to the therapeutic process that is enabled by linguistic processes. The analysant (patient) discharges some repressed (unconscious) drive energies through establishing a link between fragments from an altered state of consciousness and memories that are accessible to their conscious mind. The cathartic articulation of this link through speaking (or writing) is called talking cure. Jeffery Berman puts it in a nutshell: talking cure refers to “the magical power of language to relieve mental suffering.” See his Talking Cure: Literary Representations of Psychoanalysis (New York: New York University Press, 1987), 2.

[15]In La conscience métisse, Shayegan lays out the parameters of his notion of cultural psychoanalysis. It entails unraveling mental blockages, deconstructing hybrid and composite concepts that have built up through an insensible act, and disentangling the muddled and confused registers [of knowledge]. “Dénouer les blocages mentaux, déconstruire les concepts hybrides que l’on a édifiés souvent par un acte inconscient, démêler les registre confondus, c’est effectuer une sorte de psychanalyse culturelle.” Shayegan, Conscience métisse, 119.

[16]Daryush Shayegan, Terre de mirages, Maryam Askari, collaborator (Paris: Éditions de l’Aube, 2004), 49–50.

[17]Kaveh expresses his deep affection by ending his first letter with the following line: “Je t’embrasse affectueusement, ton vieil ami Kaveh.” Shayegan, Terre de mirages, 5.

[18]Shayegan, Terre de mirages, 29.

[19]“Nous nous aimons, tu t’ennuies de moi, toi tu me manques douloureusement, on est imbus de nostalgie, de regret, mais on cherche des faux-fuyants.” Shayegan, Terre de mirages, 94.

[20]When a culture withdraws into itself, Shayegan argues, it turns into a drug, into “a scaffolding of self-forgetting.” “Une culture qui se replie trop sur elle-même devient à la longue une drogue, voire un échafaudage d’oubli de soi.” Terre de mirages, 14.

[21]“Mon séjour dans ton beau pays m’a appris au moins une chose : il est très difficile de sortir du carcan des habitudes, des moules de la pensée qui sont devenus souvent, à notre insu, une camisole de force qui nous cloue à nos atavismes les plus indomptables. L’étonnement que suscite la rencontre avec l’autre fait office de filtre. C’est à travers ce filtre-là que je me suis jetée dans mon aventure persane, c’est ce filtre-là qui décanta mes illusions, qui allégera mes résistances, me fit même croire que j’avais touché le fond alors que je ne faisais que flotter à la surface des choses.” Shayegan, Terre de mirages, 24.

[22]Shayegan, Terre de mirages, 10.

[23]Shayegan, Terre de mirages, 11.

[24]“J’ai voulu comprendre le sens de ces reproches, je m’y suis appliquée et j’ai fini par comprendre que ce que tu nous reprochais ne relevait pas tant des individus que du type de civilisation à laquelle nous appartenons.” Shayegan, Terre de mirages, 11.

[25]“Depuis des siècles, vous lisez les mêmes poèmes (peut-être faudrait-il que quelqu’un éclaircisse votre relation pathologique avec ce genre de pensée), vous les apprenez par coeur, vous les récitez à haute voix, vous vous y référez à tout bout de champ. Pour chaque situation vous avez déjà un proverbe préconçu ou quelques vers sortis tout frais de l’arsenal ancestral, et pour chaque misère humaine un remède miraculeux. Rien en somme qui provoque l’étonnement, qui effondre les certitudes, rien qui bouleverse les fondements de l’être. Mais cette solidité apparente est-elle une constance de caractère, ou bien une pétrification? Cette suite fastidieuse dans les idées, est-ce une sagesse ou bien un ennui ritualisé?” Shayegan, Terre de mirages, 27.

[26]Shayegan, Terre de mirages, 13.

[27]“Ne sais tu pas que l’Orient et l’Occident sont deux pôles opposés qui ne se rencontreront jamais? And the twain shall never meet.” Shayegan, Terre de mirages, 103.

[28]“J’ai pris conscience également que pour le moment leur coexistence était quasi impossible.” Shayegan, Terre de mirages, 11.

[29]I refuse to attribute the notion of in-betweenness and “third space” to Homi Bhabha. The reason for this resistance is that Shayegan had already developed this notion of cultural in-betweenness in the late 1980s when Bhabha’s The Location of Culture was published in 1994. The French term, l’entre-deux, employed by Shayegan in his 1977 L’Asie face à l’Occident, is already a kind of third space. The subtle point is that Shayegan moved from being critical toward the in-betweenness (l’entre-deux) of “traditional” civilizations in L’Asie face à l’Occident to see it in Le regard mutilé : schizophrénie culturelle : pays traditionnels face à la modernité (Paris: Éditions de l’Aube, 1989) in a more positive light. The space between the two was no longer something negative, but a space suffused with possibilities.

[30]“J’ai l’impression que nous avons à présent créé un espace en suspens entre nous, un espace invisible aux autres, mais qui a ses propres repères, et c’est à l’intérieur de ce monde que, télescopent sans cesse nos regardes, nous essayons de démêler l’inextricable lacis de cette intimité unique que fut notre amour.” Shayegan, Terre de mirages, 22.

[31]Shayegan, Terre de mirages, 49.

[32]“Tu viens de me secouer, de me faire sortir de ma torpeur.” Shayegan, Terre de mirages, 44.

[33]“J’avais cessé d’être une française sérieuse mais je n’étais pas devenue pour autant une Persane insouciante. Voilà! je n’étais ni l’une ni l’autre, j’étais une migrante en proie aux métamorphoses.” Shayegan, Terre de mirages, 18.

[34]“J’étais devenu fondamentalement différente [. . .] Une deuxième découverte : si je t’avais suivi, c’est que sans que j’en sois vraiment consciente, j’étais différente déjà.” Shayegan, Terre de mirages, 104.

[35]“En pénétrant dans ces mondes, tu m’inities à leur face cachée – ce qui était une évidence devenait un paradoxe, ce qui était banal devenait un fait insolite.” Shayegan, Terre de mirages, 5.

[36]“Enfin une troisième découverte : j’étais vraiment dans une sorte d’intermonde où tout était déplacé, et c’est sur ce terrain glissant et effroyablement instable que je devais construire ma vie.” Shayegan, Terre de mirages, 104.

[37]“Je ne sais plus si nos lettres sont les preuves de notre amour mutuel ou quelque stratagème habile qui ressemblerait davantage à une psychothérapie.” Shayegan, Terre de mirages, 45.

[38]“Il est vrai que j’ai une âme conflictuelle, on dirait deux forces antagonistes qui tirent mon être à hue et à dia. Ce que l’un veut, l’autre le refuse, ce que celui-ci réclame de tout coeur, l’autre s’en soucie comme d’une guigne.” Shayegan, Terre de mirages, 31.

[39]Shayegan, Terre de mirages, 45.

[40]Shayegan, Terre de mirages, 22.

[41]“Je me demande parfois si le fait qu’il soit Afghan ne me sert pas de substitut à ton absence.” Shayegan, Terre de mirages, 127.

[42]I am referring to the Lacanian notion of subject as “empty.” Slavoj Žižek, How to Read Lacan (New York: W. W. Norton, 2007), 54–60.

[43]“Et puis il y a toi donc je porte toujours les délicieux stigmates dans mon âme; il y a enfin l’amour charnel, possessif, intransigeant, tyrannique qui est une malédiction en soi.” Shayegan, Terre de mirages, 127.

[44]“Elle a mené, comme toutes les jeunes femmes de sa génération qui ont vécu dans des continents très différents, une vie assez mouvementée. Mariée et divorcée a présent, elle a quitté la côte Ouest des États-Unis pour s’installer tout d’abord en France, puis en Iran, et enfin nulle part. Car elle a la bougeotte, elle ne cesse de se déplacer au gré de ses fantaisies. Elle a un tempérament poétique et compose de temps en temps en français des vers pénétrants mais assez maladroits, alors qu’elle maitrise parfaitement l’anglais.” Shayegan, Terre de mirages, 111.

[45]Shayegan, Terre de mirages, 132.

[46]Shayegan, Terre de mirages, 134.

[47]“La grande distance qui s’était instaurée entre nous s’est tout a coup rétrécie. … Non! Je ne veux plus me taire, je veux que tout le monde sache l’immensité de mon amour.” Shayegan, Terre de mirages, 139.

[48]Shayegan, Terre de mirages, 165–66.

[49]Shayegan, Terre de mirages, 24.

[50]Later, I will pinpoint the phrase schizophrénie culturelle in Shayegan’s oeuvre.

[51]Laurent Testot writes that Shayegan used the term zigzag to characterize his trajectory. Testot, “Daryush Shayegan.”

[52]Shayegan, Conscience métisse, 44.

[53]“Comme nous vivons dans les espaces interstitiels des mondes enchevêtrés, nous sommes devenus nous-mêmes des êtres multiples, pluriels — si tu veux, fractures.” Shayegan, Conscience métisse, 95.

[54]Shayegan, Terre de mirages, 54.

[55]Shayegan, Terre de mirages, 55.

[56]“J’ai essayé de suivre pas à pas ton évolution : le refus, l’angoisse, le dépaysement et enfin la déclaration sans ambages de ta décision.” Shayegan, Terre de mirages, 56.

[57]Daryush Shayegan, Cultural Schizophrenia: Islamic Societies Confronting the West, trans. John Howe (London: Syracuse University Press, 1997), vii.

[58]Shayegan, Cultural Schizophrenia, 100.

[59]While Shayegan cherishes the generative capacities of hybridity—especially in the context of hybrid identities—he, nonetheless, denounces the notion of a hybrid idea. The latter is a mélange that needs to be deconstructed into its often-incompatible elements that have unconsciously been added up. He refers to himself as a thinker who (at an earlier stage in his life) was caught between two incompatible horizons, his analytic mind torn between two modalities of knowledge (i.e., the Koranic notion of prophetic light and the Cartesian cogito). Shayegan, Conscience métisse, 204.

[60]“Les contradictions auxquelles se réfèrent ces livres peuvent se traduire soit sous la forme de fausse conscience au niveau du discours politique, soit de schizophrénie épistémologique au niveau de l’individu.” Shayegan, Conscience métisse, 205.

[61]Daryush Shayegan, Qu’est-ce qu’une révolution religieuse? (Paris: Albin Michel, 1991), 216–31.

[62]Isacque Graeben and Steuart Henderson Britt, Jews in A Gentile World: The Problems of Anti-Semitism (New York: Macmillan, 1942).

[63]Sigfried Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture (London: Cumberlege USW, 1954), 12–17.

[64]Isaac Yetiv, “L’Aliénation dans le roman maghrébin contemporain,” Revue des mondes Musulmans et de la Méditerranée, no. 17 (1974): 149–58. The term schizophrénie culturelle appeared earlier, in 1967, in a work on theology, but that subject is of no interest or relevance to this paper.

[65]What makes Yetiv’s article relevant to Shayegan’s novel is that the works interrogated in the article are primarily autobiographical. The authors of the novels in Yetiv’s essay are alienated due to a “shocking encounter between two different civilizations,” one of the colonized, and the other of the colonizer. The angst experienced by these authors has to do with their psyche being pulled apart from two opposing directions. Yetiv, “L’Aliénation dans le roman,” 150.

[66]It is worth mentioning that Fanon combined Lacanian psychoanalysis with Du Bois’s “Double Consciousness.”

[67]Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Capitalisme et schizophrénie : l’anti-oedipe (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1972).

[68]Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen Lane (New York: Penguin Books, 1972), 5.

[69]Fredric Jameson, The Ideologies of Theory (London: Verso Books, 2008), 424.

[70]Shayegan, Cultural Schizophrenia, 76.

[71]Shayegan, Conscience métisse, 124. Cf. Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 1–2.

[72]“Le multiculturalisme tend à devenir une sorte de politique identitaire où le concept de culture se confond immanquablement avec l’identité ethnique, ce qui risque d’essentialiser l’idée de culture en surdéterminant ses distinctions.” Shayegan, Conscience métisse, 35.

[73]Shayegan, Conscience métisse, 35.

[74]Shayegan’s rejection of particular identities is reminiscent of Elizabeth Grosz’s critique of recognition. In Becoming Undone, Grosz writes: “The subject seeks to be known and to be recognized, but only through its reliance on others, including the very others who function to collectively subjugate the subject [. . .] once the subject is recognized as such, what is created through this recognition? [. . .] We wait to be recognized instead of making something, inventing something, which will enable us to recognize ourselves, or more interestingly, to eschew recognition altogether. I am not what others see in me, but what I do, what I make. I become according to what I do, not who I am. Linked to the preeminence of the subject and of concepts of subjectivity is the privileging of the epistemological (questions of discourse, knowledge, truth, and scientificity) over the ontological (question of the real, of matter, of force, or energy).” Elizabeth Grosz, Becoming Undone: Darwinian Reflections on Life, Politics, and Art (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 84.

[75]“Les multiculturalistes purs et durs ont suscité de la sorte un racisme à rebours. Dans leurs excès d’auto-affirmation, ils ont produit des effets inverses et aberrants. Plutôt que de rétablir le droit spécifique à la reconnaissance, ils ont débouché sur des fantasmes délirants ou le mythe se confondait avec la réalité.” Shayegan, Conscience métisse, 245.

[76]“Dans le monde de relativisme où nous vivons, chaque culture à ses revendications propres : sa façon de voir le monde, sa façon d’apprécier des droits de l’homme, sa manière de définir la souveraineté des peuples et des droits des citoyens.” Shayegan, Conscience métisse, 34.

[77]“Les multiculturaliste militants aussi viennent ajouter leur voix à ces protestations : ils parlent de ‘terreur blanche,’ des méfits pernicieux de l’eurocentrisme qui, selon eux, opère part opposition binaires, blanc/noir, bien/mal, normal/déviant.” Shayegan, Conscience métisse, 34–35.

[78]In 1977, Shayegan reintroduced the notion of “dialogue between civilizations,” as a counterweight to Samuel Huntington’s clash of civilizations.

[79]The notion of in-between as a productive force takes multiple forms in Shayegan’s work: metamorphosis and bricolage (formal expressions), plasticity (as an artist form), after-tomorrow (après-demain) and not-yet (pas-encore) as temporal conditions, l’économie interconnecté (for interconnected global economy), and métissage (racial hybridity).

[80]“Comment peut-on intégrer cette situation de ‘l’entre-deux’ dans un ordre mondial? [. . .] Je suis intéressé aux identités plurielles, à la zone d’hybridation, à la virtualisation, à la conscience métisse, bref à tout ce qui caractérise notre monde kaléidoscopique et qui ne ressemble en rien à l’idée que nous nous faisons jadis de notre ‘être-dans-le-monde.’” Shayegan, Conscience métisse, 17.

[81]“Regards croisés,” Éditions de l’Aube, editionsdelaube.fr/nos-collections/regards-croises/ (accessed 10 February 2021).

[82]This is not a chronological classification, as some of the themes overlap or are repeated.

[83]Three publications mark this period: Adyān va maktab-hā-yi falsafī-yi Hind, 2 vols. (Tehran: Tehran University; Farzan Rooz, 1346/1967); Buthā-yi dhihnī va khātira-yi azalī (Tehran: Amir Kabir University; Farzan Rooz, 1355/1976); and Hindouisme et soufisme. Une lecture du confluent des deux océans (Paris: Albin Michel, 1979).

[84]Although he moved to Paris in 1980, he primarily wrote in French during this period until his return to Tehran in 1992.

[85]In this binarization, he refers not only to East and West in terms of cultures, but also to Global South and North in the politico-economic sense.

[86]“I am interested in plural identities, in the area of hybridization, in virtualization, in mixed consciousness (conscience métisse), in short in everything that characterizes our kaleidoscopic world and which bears no resemblance to the idea that we once had of our own ‘to be-in-the-world.’” Shayegan, Conscience métisse, 17.

[87]As represented in his Au-delà du miroir, Diversité culturelle et unité des valeurs (La Tour-d’Aigues, France: Éditions de l’Aube, 2002).

[88]This is seen in three books of his: Sous les ciels du monde, entretiens avec Ramin Jahanbegloo (Paris: Éditions du Félin, 1992); La lumière vient de l’Occident. Le réenchantement du monde et la pensée nomade (La Tour-d’Aigues, France: Éditions de l’Aube, 2001); and Terre de mirages.

[89]Panj iqlim-i ḥuẓūr (Tehran: Farhang-i Moaser, 1393/2014–15); L’âme poétique persane (Paris: Albin Michel, 2017); Junūn-i hushyārī (Tehran: Nazar, 1395/2016–17); Marcel Proust : Fānūs-i jādūʾī-yi zamān (Tehran: Farhang-i Moaser, 1396/2017–18).

[90]“Bearing a lens on your oeuvre, one would be surprised by the variety of your preoccupations. How do you explain this ‘conflict of interest?’” “Terre de mirages,” interview by Lila Azam Zanganeh, Conscience métisse, 203.

[91]Here, Shayegan talks about implementing two types of interpretations in his work, each of which is based on a distinct “consciousness.” One might refer to this duality as “double consciousness.” Although I am not referring to either the Du Boisian conception or its Fanonian iteration, one can see the connections.

[92]“A vrai dire je ne l’ai pas fait exprès ; j’étais sans doute habité par ces deux tendances contradictoires, j’étais, en d’autres termes, ‘schizophrénique’, sans que j’en aie vraiment conscience.” Shayegan, Conscience métisse, 204.

[93]It is interesting that Shayegan uses the socio-spatial metaphor of ghetto to refer to withdrawal to cultural enclosures (repli sur soi). Incidentally, the etymology of the term exile also refers to a place of banishment. Conscience métisse, 219. Cf. Daryush Shayegan and Ramin Jahanbegloo, Sous les ciels du monde : entretiens avec Ramin Jahanbegloo (Paris: Éditions du Félin, 2011).

[94]Shayegan, Conscience métisse, 43.

[95]Only one piece of evidence does not fit into this hypothesis. In passing, Kaveh mentions that he grew up in the United States: “J’ai grandi en Amérique.” Shayegan, Terre de mirages, 112.

[96]For example, Marianne recalls that Kaveh was a student in Sweden in the 1950s, and that he has “perfect mastery” of French. The story also contains a couple of references to Kaveh’s mother, who was a descendent of the Georgian aristocracy. Furthermore, in a conversation with his mother, Kaveh hints at the exilic condition of Iranians: “We are the epitome of the broken family and we are not the only one. The Iranian diaspora litter the entire planet with its debris.” Shayegan, Terre de mirages, 60.

[97]“Tu l’as étudié autrefois à l’École des langues orientales à Paris.” Shayegan, Terre de mirages, 55.

[98]To substantiate these affinities, he also looks at architecture. Living in Paris, for example, he compares it to Isfahan, arguing that one is the antipode of the other vis-à-vis dreams. He cites Baudelaire’s image of Paris as a “swarming city, a city full of dreams.” Isfahan is, on the other hand, “an ‘imaginal’ vision in suspense in the space of dreams.” Conscience métisse, 185. Baudelaire opens his poem “Les Sept Vieillards” with the following verses: “Fourmillante cité, cité pleine de rêves, / Où le spectre en plein jour raccroche le passant!” Charles Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du Mai, ed. Jacques Crepet and Georges Blin (Paris: Corti, 1942), 97–100. Quote on p. 97.

[99]Shayegan, Terre de mirages, 81.

[100]Shayegan, Terre de mirages, 82.

[101]“Mon père avait suivi les traces d’Anquetil-Duperron, un orientaliste français parti aux Indes au dix-huitième siècle pour étudier le pahlavi. Il avait traduit en latin l’Avesta, le livre sacré des Zoroastriens, puis avait fait la découverte de la traduction persane des Upanishads de Dara Shokuh, qu’il avait également rendus en latin.” Shayegan, Terre de mirages, 83.

[102]Can love for a French woman symbolize his love for France (and Paris)? After talking about his education in Tehran, where he learned French, Kaveh explains why for many Iranians “Paris was the ‘queen of cities.’” It was attractive, or perhaps seductive, because it was simultaneously “sulphurous and learned [savante].” It was a city, Kaveh writes, where “three contradictory sensations were intertwined: the forbidden, temptation, and beauty.” Shayegan, Terre de mirages, 92.

[103]Marianne recalls a long monologue in which Kaveh censures her for not being willing to embrace in-betweenness: “You are arrogant and naively confident of yourself because you are stuck in a single register of knowledge. You believe that you are deciphering the world with your tight reading grids, without recognizing that these grids are terribly limiting. You neglect the vertigo of abandonment, the chaos of drunkenness, and the risk of change of scenery. It is impossible for you to be here and there, at one and the same time, to navigate between the crossed worlds. You do not know the in-between, which is the most difficult position to adopt. [An in-between space is difficult to sustain] since nothing is solid, clear, linear. It is the domain of chiaroscuro, penumbra, uncertainty, ambiguity.” Shayegan, Terre de mirages, 17.

[104]“Malgré ma bonne volonté je n’ai pas appris cette art acrobatique qui consiste à vivre dans l’entre-deux. J’y pense souvent, je m’y aventure de temps à autre, mais, que veux-tu, je reste encore trop raide pour de gymnastique mentale.” Shayegan, Terre de mirages, 20.

[105]“We have been broken, each in their own way. You by abandoning me without worry to an adventure that you believed to be harmless and without great consequences for you; me by wanting to provoke it in order to subdue my internal resistance. We both came out transformed [. . .] I conquered my indistinct inclinations, my vain attempts to escape to finally reach a firm resolution, and as for you, my adorable friend, despite the recent upheavals which have shaken you so deeply, you remain as in yourself you will stay.” Shayegan, Terre de mirages, 155.

[106]“J’ai toujours identifié ta beauté, tes caprices, tes sautes d’humeur et aussi cette ambiguïté de ton caractère, à la ville ou tu es née et je me suis aperçu qu’il m’est impossible de vous dissocier dans mon esprit; qu’en essayant d’apprivoiser ta ville, je me laisserai apprivoiser par toi; que l’initiation à l’une menait inévitablement à la connaissance de l’autre.” Shayegan, Terre de mirages, 93.

[107]One needs to read through nearly half of the book (letter 35) to figure out why Marianne was interested in Persian culture. The same goes for Kaveh, who only gradually becomes knowable to the reader. Although this gradual development might be engaging, the narrative has little appeal for someone who is trying to follow how the love between the two is evolving.

[108]“Et comme tu étais très enclin aux généralités, de déductions en déductions, tu t’es mis à discourir sur le délabrement total de l’Occident dans son ensemble.” Shayegan, Terre de mirages, 17.

[109]As Kaveh attests, Marianne turned “from a European human-rights activist to a Persian mystic.” “Puis je t’ai vue changer graduellement. De l’Européenne militante des droits de l’homme, tu devins mystique.” Shayegan, Terre de mirages, 14.

[110]The transformation was manifold. To be able to indulge in poetry, Marianne mastered the language. Her perception of time also changed. She was no longer anxious about time; she “became careless, carefree, as if time was lengthening, unraveling, curling up according to your changing moods.” Shayegan, Terre de mirages, 14.

[111]“La France devient un pays multiculturel, tout en restant le pays de ‘l’exception culturelle’. Tu te souviens de ce que ce ‘chevalier d’esprit’, cet aristocrate balte, d’une grande perspicacité, disait de la France : ‘La grandeur de la France se manifeste la seulement ou la disposition intime de la nature et de l’esprit rayonnant peuvent former une synthèse harmonieuse. Or, cette synthèse n’est autre chose que ce qu’on appelle culture.’ Donc, les Français sont le peuple européen de la culture par excellence.” Shayegan, Terre de mirages, 78–79.

[112]Peter McLaren, “White Terror and Oppositional Agency: Towards a Critical Multiculturalism,” in Counterpoints 4: Rethinking Media Literacy: A Critical Pedagogy of Representation, ed. Peter McLaren, Rhonda Hammer, David Sholle, and Susan Smith Reilly (New York: NY Lang, 1995), 87–124.

[113]François Laplantine and Alexis Nouss, Métissages : de Archimboldo à zombi (Paris: Pauvert, 2001).

[114]Bhabha, Location of Culture.

[115]Serge Gruzinski, La pensée métisse (Paris: Fayard, 2009).

[116]Charles Taylor, “The Politics of Recognition,” in Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition, ed. Amy Gutmann (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 25–73.

[117]I would suggest that Terre de mirages itself is an event in the Badiouian sense. Alain Badiou, Being and Event, trans. Oliver Feltham (London: Continuum, 2006).

[118]Badiou rejects “the fusional conception of love.” The same way that Shayegan does not wish to collapse differences between Marianne and Kaveh, Badiou also refutes “suppression of the multiple.” Badiou writes: “Love is not that which makes a One in ecstasy through a Two supposedly given [. . .] Love is not the prostration of the Same on the altar of the Other. I will maintain below that love is not even an experience of the Other. It is an experience of the world, or of the situation, under the post-evental condition that there were Two.” Alain Badiou, “What Is Love?,” in Sexuation, ed. Renata Salecl (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), 263–81. Quotes on p. 267.

[119]The character Kaveh is surrounded by his privileged friends: “Majid, dans son immense jardin, est les contreforts de la chaîne des montagnes [. . .] Notre immense propreté au nord de la ville.” Shayegan, Terre de mirages, 51.

[120]For Shayegan, social problems were cultural first and political or economic second. What needs to be changed is the way of seeing the world, a change of perspective, not the world itself. Reflecting on his transformation, Kaveh mentions that through the process “nothing has changed except himself.” Shayegan, Terre de mirages, 104.

Notes on the Persian Gospel Manuscript in Georgian Script

Helen Giunashvili & Tamar Abuladze Volume 5, Number 4, Winter 2021

Helen Giunashvili completed her doctoral thesis, “Personal Verbal Forms in Parthian and Early Middle Persian,” at the Institute of Oriental Studies (Institute of Oriental Manuscripts) at Saint Petersburg. Her scholarly assignments have included positions at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the University of Tehran, the Academy of Persian Language and Literature, the French Institute of Iranian Studies, the Sorbonne, and the National Centre for Scientific Researches. Dr. Giunashvili is currently a research associate at the Giorgi Tsereteli Institute of Oriental Studies at Ilia State University. She has published numerous scientific works dealing with different issues of Iranian-Georgian cultural-linguistic relations.

Tamar Abuladze is the head of the Department of Manuscript Preservation and Registration at the Korneli Kekelidze Georgian National Centre of Manuscripts. Her research involves codicological and philological study of medieval Georgian and Oriental scientific manuscripts; studies of Georgian, Persian, and Georgian-Persian historic documents; and Georgian-Persian cultural relations. She has written several books and catalogues, including as author Translating Activities of Vakhtang VI (Bagrationi) (Metsniereba, 1990); and as coauthor Illuminated Historical Documents in the Depositories of Georgia (Favorit Print, 2011); Georgian Manuscript Book, 5^th-19^thCenturies (Korneli Kekelidze Georgian National Centre of Manuscripts, 2014); and Astronomical Manuscripts in Georgia (Ilia State University Press, 2015).

Introduction

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, during the Safavid dynasty’s reign in Iran (1501–1736), long-term Iranian-Georgian relations intensified, which corresponded to existing political realities.

During this period, Georgia was governed by Georgian kings who had converted to Islam and khans appointed by Persian sovereigns. However, the attitude of secular and religious leaders to their suzerains often remained formal. The Islamic influence was mostly reflected in the administrative order of East Georgia, in different fields of the country’s social and cultural life.

The attitude to Christianity maintained by the Safavids and their successors, the Afsharid sovereigns (1736–96),[1] was not standard.[2] Iran’s policy remained cautious concerning the

religious issues, as Christianity and statehood represented identical concepts in Georgia and Georgians maintained their national identity through their Christian faith. The attitude of the Iranian authorities to Christianity changed regularly in accordance with historical realities and with particularities of the strategic and political orientation of Iran within a specific period.

In this respect, the most significant event was the coronation of the King of Kartli (East Georgia) Teimuraz II (1700–62)[3] in 1744. This was held with Christian ceremonies during Nader Shah’s reign (1736–47), during which the Afsharid sovereign expressed his loyalty to the Christian vassal. This was caused by Nader Shah’s desire to strengthen his position among the ruling circles of Eastern Georgia and, to some extent, win over Christian nobles and create a stronghold in the Caucasus region.[4]

1. Persian Historical Documents at the Korneli Kekelidze National Centre of Manuscripts

Among the rich collections preserved at the Georgian National Antiquities (Korneli Kekelidze National Centre of Manuscripts, National Archive of the Ministry of Justice of Georgia), Persian historical documents (farmans and hoqms) present the most important records elucidating relations of Shi‘ite rulers with Georgian clergy, mostly with the catholicoses (high priests) of East Georgia (Kartli and Kakheti principalities). These Persian deeds comprise valuable data on the rights of catholicoses (on property, in religious matters, in participation in state issues, etc.).[5]

Figure 1. Pd-4, 1642, Illuminated Documents, p. 168. Reprinted by permission of the Korneli Kekelidze National Centre of Manuscripts.

The deed (farman) issued by Shah Safi I (1611–42) in 1642 addressed to the vali (vassal and executor) of Kartli Rostom/Rostom Khan (r. 1632–58) and vali of Kakheti Teimuraz (r. 1606–48) is an example. According to this deed, the shah orders his viceroys in Christian Georgia (Rostom Khan and Teimuraz) to return to a catholicos the ownership of properties located in Kartli and Kakheti originally belonging to the Svetitskhoveli Cathedral[6] (the document Pd-4 from the National Centre of Manuscripts; see Figure 1).[7] The catholicos is mentioned in the text as “the most distinguished among Christians . . . being elevated by Shah’s pure mercifulness and generosity.” The deed is a typical specimen of Persian illuminated documents. On the top of the text in the center is placed the shah’s large dome-shaped seal set into the rosette, which is made with refined gold gilding with blue and red accents. The seal has an inscription and is surrounded by poetic writings dedicated to Imam Ali.

Two other documents with similar content about granting, confirming, and reconfirming the ownership of properties to the catholicoses of Kartli and Kakheti were issued in the eighteenth century by Shah Sultan Husayn (r. 1694–1722). These documents have been preserved at the National Centre of Manuscripts. One of them is Pd-47 (issued in 1708; see Figure 2),[8] which presents Shah Sultan Husayn’s decree to the authorities of Kartli and Kakheti about granting estates which originally were in the Holy Church possession to the catholicoses. The document states that these lands remain forever in the unchallenged possession of the Church, and presents the eminent pattern of the refined Persian illuminated manuscripts. Another illuminated document, Pd-48 (Figure 3), presents analogical content and style.[9]

The most valuable material concerning the relations of the Georgian Church and Iranian authorities is preserved in bilingual Georgian-Persian historical documents, which rank among the unique samples and developments in the history of diplomacy. They came about due to the regular change of the administrative system in East Georgia.

Figure 2. Pd-47, 1708, Illuminated Documents, p. 192. Reprinted by permission of the Korneli Kekelidze National Centre of Manuscripts.

Also, the rulers of Kartli and Kakheti and the catholicoses of Georgia employed their sovereignty concerning the country’s internal affairs. However, Iran formally controlled Georgian agricultural affairs. Iran was truly paving the way for the dominance of Oriental landownership in Georgia, which ultimately ensured its incorporation in the Iranian empire.

Bilingual documents express the loyal policy of Iranian shahs to Georgian high priests, implying administrative rights and liberties. In Persian texts, more privileges are given to the Church than in the Georgian counterparts of the same documents. This expressed ‟compromise policy” connected with the reign of Rostom Khan (Khosrow Mirza), king of Kartli (r. 1633–58) and, later, king of Kartli-Kakheti (r. 1648–56), the son of King David XI (Daud Khan), the last representative of the Bagratid royal dynasty of Kartli. Rostom Khan made the clergy faithful and assigned them a payment. He executed this inner strategy under Iranian orders.[10]

Among these unique bilingual documents, which were issued by Christian sovereigns and allowed by the shah’s supremacy, the most distinguished is the document Ad-1837[11] (1670; see Figures 4 and 5) kept at the National Centre of Manuscripts. The document deals with confirming that lands located near the river Mtkvari belong to the main Christian Church, Svetitskhoveli Cathedral, and liberating the inhabitants of this region from taxes. The document is a scroll, the main text of which is in Georgian while the Persian text is a summary of the deeds written in calligraphic nastaʿliq in irregular lines. The upper part of the document is illuminated. It contains images of the twelve Apostles in the upper margins; the Holy Trinity in the middle; and Archil II, who was the king of Kakheti (r. 1664–75), and Domenti III, who served as a catholicos from 1660 to 1675, in the lower margins.

Figure 3. Pd-48, 1713, Illuminated Documents, p. 197. Reprinted by permission of the Korneli Kekelidze National Centre of Manuscripts.

Figure 4. Ad-1837, 1670, Illuminated Documents, pp. 88–89. Reprinted by permission of the Korneli Kekelidze National Centre of Manuscripts.

Figure 5. Ad-1837, 1670, Illuminated Documents, pp. 88–89. Reprinted by permission of the Korneli Kekelidze National Centre of Manuscripts.

Through its architectonics and inspiration, the document clearly illustrates different aspects of Iranian-Georgian political, social, and juridical relations. The illumination could be considered of a mixed type, Persian and Georgian: borders and ornaments reflect Oriental influence while figures are essentially Christian (Apostles and secular and religious authorities), their expression and manner also remaining essentially Georgian.

2. Persian Gospel Manuscript Written in Georgian Script

Apart from the above historical documents, religious issues and the relations of Christian Georgia with its neighboring Islamic states are equally reflected in other manuscripts. One of them is of particular interest: the Persian Gospel translation, transliterated in Georgian script and kept at the Korneli Kekelidze National Centre of Manuscripts (S-16). The Georgian scholar Makar Khubua devoted a special linguistic study to this manuscript.[12]

The main tactic in the gradual Islamization of the population was to have ethnic Georgian priests reading Gospels in Persian and Ottoman (Turkish) languages in Christian Churches of the eastern and western principalities of Georgia (Kartli-Kakheti and Meskheti). Georgian worshippers did not consider listening to Gospels in these languages as an act of suffering, and the writing of Gospels in Oriental languages became a good means of widely spreading the languages and Islamic beliefs in the regions. Subsequently, through these languages, alongside activities performed in “compromise policy,” Islam would have been widely spread.[13] Our article deals specifically with these issues.

The Bible was extensively translated into Persian from the fourteenth century onward, notably from Greek (fourteenth century), Hebrew (fourteenth or fifteenth), and Syriac (fifteenth). Translations from Hebrew and Greek were made from the sixteenth century onward[14] under the Safavid monarchs, by the order of Shah Abbas I (r. 1588–1629), Shah Sultan Husayn (r. 1694–1722), and Nader Shah Afshar (r. 1736–47).

At the request of Shah Sultan Husayn, the Gospel translation from Arabic into Persian with matching glosses was completed in 1703. The text of this manuscript was published in 1996 by Rasul Jaʿfariyan in Tehran.[15] The translation and the translator, Sayyid Mir Muhammad Baqir ibn Ismaʿil Khatunabadi, will be discussed below.

In 1739, after his victory in India, Nader Shah ordered his court historian, Mirza (Mohammad) Mahdi Khan Astarabadi, to make translations of the Bible from Hebrew, Christian, and Muslim manuscripts into Persian.[16] In turn, Mirza Mahdi engaged two other scholars, Mir Mohammad Maʿsum Hosayni Khatunabadi and his son ʿAbd-al-Gani. They were the son and the grandson of Sultan Husayn’s translator, Mir Muhammad Baqir. This group was joined by Jewish rabbis and Carmelite missionaries. In 1741, the translation of the Bible was completed. Nadershahi Gospel (Nader Shah’s Gospel) was published in a scholarly edition by Rasul Jaʿfariyan from a manuscript that had been preserved in Golestan Palace and according to him was the original version. Jaʿfariyan concludes that ‟the completed translation was really done by the Iranians.”[17]

The Persian Gospel manuscript in Georgian script is related to and directly follows the translation by Muhammad Baqir. On the other hand, it is also related to the version composed during Nader Shah’s reign. This version apparently presents the original copy of the text transliterated in Georgian.[18] Certainly, there is a direct connection between these two Persian texts, and we intend further studies of this issue and their detailed textual relations to the manuscript in the Georgian script.

Let us return to the four Gospels translated in Shah Sultan Husayn’s period by the imam and scholar Sayyid Mir Muhammad Baqir ibn Ismaʿil Khatunabadi (d. 1715). We rely on Dennis Halft’s research concerning this translation.[19]

Khatunabadi completed his translation in 1697, including a detailed introduction, extensive marginal glosses on the Gospels, and a short conclusion, all of which are written in Persian. Besides his own essays, Khatunabadi is known for his translations of various Arabic works into Persian, most of them made at the request of Sultan Husayn. Among all his treatises and translations, the glossed Persian translation of the Gospels remains Khatunabadi’s only work related to Christianity.[20]

The Persian version closely follows the Vatican revision of the Arabic Vulgate. Khatunabadi’s glossed translation of the Gospels can be regarded as the result of the interreligious scholarly connections between Christianity and Islam of that period. As the Shi‘ite scholar relates in his introduction, he relied in his glosses on several “books and treatises” (Pers. kutub va-rasāʾil) by Christian authors. Khatunabadi’s marginal glosses show that various Christian books in printed and manuscript form were available to Shi‘ite scholars in Isfahan in the late seventeenth century. Khatunabadi’s glossed translation demonstrates once more a Shiʿite-Catholic history of Persian translations of the Bible in pre-modern Iran.[21]

The undated manuscript of the Persian Gospel translation in Georgian script preserved at the Korneli Kekelidze National Centre of Manuscripts (S-16) belonged to the royal family. Most scholars date it to the seventeenth or eighteenth century.[22]

2.1 Description of the Manuscript

The manuscript comprises 358 pages. Its dimensions are 29.5 by 19.5 centimeters. The material is paper with watermarks. The watermarks show images of a rider with a sword and of a horse. The manuscript has a leather and embossed wood cover, with the crucifixion in the middle and the Evangelists on the borders (Figure 6).

Figure 6. S-16, seventeenth or eighteenth century, book cover. Reprinted by permission of the Korneli Kekelidze National Centre of Manuscripts.

The manuscript contains all four Gospels, but it lacks the last part of Mark’s Gospel. The handwriting is in the Georgian script, Mkhedruli. The ink is black, with the titles written in red ink. Some Persian phonemes are specifically expressed by Persian letters and signs (ﻉ, ﺀ).[23]

2.2 Decorations

Each page of the manuscript is spotted with gold ink. On the borders, spots are more frequent, serving as settings for the text. Golden rhomboid figures are used for ornament on some pages, and blue figures are also found (Figures 7 and 8).

Figure 7. S-16, seventeenth or eighteenth century, 278v-279r. Reprinted by permission of the Korneli Kekelidze National Centre of Manuscripts.

Figure 8. S-16, seventeenth or eighteenth century, 216v-217r. Reprinted by permission of the Korneli Kekelidze National Centre of Manuscripts.

The original version of the manuscript is preserved at the Saint Petersburg Institute of Oriental Manuscripts (C-268), in the collection of the Georgian Prince Teimuraz Bagrationi (1782–1846).[24] According to the preface of the original version, the Gospel was translated from Arabic into Persian during Nader Shah’s reign. The manuscript written in Isfahan was taken to Tbilisi and given its final form in Georgian.[25]

During the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, Georgians held important positions in the governmental and cultural spheres of Safavid Iran. Many distinguished Georgian intellectuals significantly contributed to the development of science and art. Of the seventeenth-century intellectuals, Parsadan Gorgijanidze (1626–96) is the most eminent figure from the second half of the century. He served in the Safavid administration as deputy governor (na’eb-e daruga) of Isfahan and royal chamberlain (ishik-aqasi); he was also a historian.

Gorgijanidze carried out the work later fulfilled by scholars Marie-Félicité Brosset (1802–80) and Johannes Albrecht Bernhard Dorn (1805–81) by compiling Persian historical data concerning Georgia. Facts mentioned in Georgian sources that have reached us are attested to in Gorgijanidze’s History of Georgia. This work contains rich material, which is especially important for researching existing historical works and elucidating many issues in twelfth- and thirteenth-century Georgian history. Gorgijanidze undertook various creative activities: he rewrote and made an editorial work of the Georgian translation of Shahnameh, Rostomiani; translated Jam’e‘Abbasi, the Muslim lawbook; and compiled a Georgian-Persian-Arabic dictionary. Thus, Gorgijanidze was an author with mutual Georgian and Persian cultural traditions, and undoubtedly, he had many followers who remained in Isfahan and followed in his creative footsteps. Hence, the Georgian transliteration of the Persian Gospel might have been the result of scientific activities (particularly, translations) originally established by Gorgijanidze.[26]

Makar Khubua, who explored this manuscript systematically, considered it an exact transliteration of the original version kept at Saint Petersburg. The manuscript is important for the study of Iranian-Georgian cultural, religious, and linguistic relations. In addition, it clearly illustrates Georgian and Persian handwritten bookmaking traditions: decorated borders, floral ornaments, an adorned cover, and pictures of the Evangelists and Jesus Christ.

According to Khubua, the composition of the Persian Gospel manuscript in Georgian script exactly follows the manuscript PK-55/90 from the Qajar collections of the Korneli Kekelidze National Centre of Manuscripts, dated 1697. The manuscript presents a text of the Persian Gospel translated from Arabic at the request of Shah Sultan Husayn. The preface states that the translation was done according to the shah’s order by Ibn Ismaʿil al-Husayn Muhammad Baqir.

Manuscript PK-55 contains the four Evangelists’ narratives, with additional glosses. On the borders are lengthy and brief comments which also contain headings of particular passages. In some places, only the heading is highlighted or only the comment is left untitled (the birth of Jesus Christ, the revelation of Jesus Christ to the apostles, etc.).

The manuscript comprises 152 pages. Its dimensions are 20.6 by 13.9 centimeters. It is written on a thin, glossy, yellowish Oriental paper in a refined nastaʿliq. The headings are in red; the text is embedded in a colored frame.[27] See Figure 9.

Figure 9. Persian Gospel, PK-55/90, seventeenth century, pp. 4v–5r. Reprinted by permission of the Korneli Kekelidze National Centre of Manuscripts.

Conclusion

The Persian Gospel manuscript in Georgian script raises a number of important issues concerning the comprehension of the Christian Holy Book by a Muslim author, textual interrelations of the Persian translation with the transliterated version, linguistic peculiarities of the text (phonetic, morphologic, syntactic), and the requirements and trends of a specific historical period, among others. Thorough consideration and detailed analysis of the above issues will be possible after both versions of the manuscript have been critically compared. We are planning this research for the future.

Thus, the Persian Gospel manuscript written in Georgian script vividly reveals a picture of Iranian-Georgian religious, political, and cultural relations in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries conditioned by historical realities, and it requires further comprehensive religious-cultural study.

[1]On these periods of Iranian history, see multiple articles in Encyclopaedia Iranica, notably Rudi Matthee, “Safavid Dynasty,” Encyclopaedia Iranica, 2008, iranicaonline.org/articles/safavids. See also Homa Katouzian, Iranian History and Politics: The Dialectic of State and Society (London and New York: Routledge/BIPS Persian Studies Series, 2003), 128; and J. R. Perry, “Afsharids,” Encyclopædia Iranica, 2011, www.iranicaonline.org/articles/afsharids-dynasty.

[2]On the historical, social-political, economic, and cultural state of Eastern Georgia (Kartli) in the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, see Mamia Dumbadze, ed., Sakartvelos istoriis narkvevebi (Essays on History of Georgia, vol. 4, Georgia from the Beginning of Sixteenth Century till 30^th Years of Nineteenth Century) (Tbilisi: Sabtchota Sakartvelo, 1973), particularly chapters 4–8, 225–385. On the historical-cultural interrelations of Safavid Iran and Georgia, see Valerian Gabashvili, Kartuli feodaluri cqobileba XVI-XVII saukuneebshi (The Georgian Feudal Order in the XVI-XVII Centuries) (Tbilisi: Metsniereba, Akademia, 1958); David M. Lang, “Georgia and the Fall of the Safavi Dynasty,” BSO(A)S 14 (1952): 523–39; Dumbadze, Sakartvelos istoriis narkvevebi, 312–33, 398–412; and Keith Hitchins, “History of Iranian-Georgian Relations,” Encyclopaedia Iranica, vol. X, fasc. 5 (New York: Bibliotheca Persica Press, 2001), 460–97. See also the following publications with a complete list of bibliographic references: Grigol Beradze and Karlo Kutsia, “Towards the Interrelations of Iran and Georgia in the 16^th-18^th Centuries,” The Near East and Georgia, vol. III (Tbilisi: Publishing House Chronograph, 2002), 160–76; and David Katsitadze, Iranis istoria III-XVIII saukuneebshi (History of Iran in the III-XVIII Centuries) (Tbilisi: Horosi XXI, 2009), 367–459.

[3]Teimuraz II of the Bagrationi dynasty was the king of Kakheti (eastern Georgian kingdom) from 1733 to 1744 and the king of Kartli from 1744 till 1762.

[4]Dumbadze, Sakartvelos istoriis narkvevebi, 398–412.

[5]On the relations between Christians and Muslims, see Rudi Matthee, “The Politics of Protection: Iberian Missionaries in Safavid Iran under Shāh ‘Abbās I (1587-1629),” in Contacts and Controversies between Muslims, Jews and Christians in the Ottoman Empire and Pre-Modern Iran, ed. Camilla Adang and Sabine Schmidtke (Würzburg, Germany: Ergon, 2010), 245–71; and Rudi Matthee, “Sulṭān Ḥusayn, Shah of Persia,” in Christian-Muslim Relations: A Bibliographical History, vol. 12, Asia, Africa and the Americas (1700-1800) (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2018), 278–91.

[6]The Svetitskhoveli Cathedral (literary, the Cathedral of the Life Pillar) is an Orthodox Christian cathedral located in the ancient capital of Georgia, Mtskheta, to the northwest of Tbilisi. The Svetitskhoveli Cathedral has long been one of the principal Georgian Orthodox churches and is among the most venerated places of worship in the region. The cathedral’s exterior architecture is a well-preserved example of decorations typical of the eleventh century.

[7]Vladimer Puturidze, Sparsuli istoriuli sabutebi saqartvelos cigntsatavebshi (Persian Historical Documents in the Libraries of Georgia) (Tbilisi: Academy of Sciences of the Georgian SSR, 1961), book 1, part 1, 43–45; Makar Khubua, Sakartvelos muzeumis sparsuli firmanebi (Farmans and Hoqms of the Museum of Georgia) (Tbilisi: Academy of Sciences of Georgian SSR, 1949), 8–9, 135; and Darejan Kldiashvili, ed., Mokhatuli istoriuli dokumentebi Sakartvelos sidzveltsatsavebidan (Illuminated Historical Documents from Georgian Depositories) (Tbilisi: Favorit Print, 2011), 168.

[8]Vladimer Puturidze, Sparsuli istoriuli sabutebi saqartvelos cigntsatavebshi (Tbilisi: Academy of Sciences of the Georgian SSR, 1965), book 1, part 3, 34–35; Khubua, Sakartvelos muzeumis sparsuli irmanebi, 50–52; and Kldiashvili, Mokhatuli istoriuli dokumentebi, 192.

[9]Puturidze, Sparsuli istoriuli sabutebi, 1965, book 1, part 3, 71–73; and Kldiashvili, Mokhatuli istoriuli dokumentebi, 197–98.

[10]On Georgian-Persian bilingual documents, including editions, characterization, and analysis with a complete list of references, see Beradze and Kutsia, “Towards the Interrelations,” 173–74. For a recent publication on Georgian-Persian historical documents, see Nana Kharebava, Bamberger Orientstudien, vol. 10, Regesten der zweisprachigen georgisch-persischen Urkunden der Safavidenzeit (Bamberg, Germany: University of Bamberg Press, 2017). On the relations of the Georgian Church with Iranian authorities in the light of new Georgian-Persian historical documents, see Tamaz Abashidze, “Samghvdeloebis saxelze gatsemuli kartul-sparsuli sabutebi” (“Georgian-Persian Documents Issued to the Clergy”), in The Near East and Georgia, vol. 10 (Tbilisi: Ilia State University Press, 2017), 181–88.

[11]Vladimer Puturidze, Kartul-sparsuli istoriuli sabutebi (Georgian-Persian Historical Documents) (Tbilisi: Academy of Sciences of the Georgian SSR, 1955), 311–15; and Kldiashvili, Mokhatuli istoriuli dokumentebi, 88–90.

[12]Makar Khubua, “Sakartvelos sakhelmtcifo muzeumis S-16 khelnatceris gramatikuli analizisatvis” (“About the Grammatical Analysis of the Persian MS S-16 (E) in the State Museum of Georgia”), Bulletin of the Academy of Sciences of the Georgian SSR, no. 9 (1943): 931–34; and Makar Khubua, “XVII-XVIII ss. Otkhtavis sparsuli khelnacerebi Sakartvelos muzeumshi” (“XVII-XVIII Centuries Persian Gospel Manuscripts in the Museum of Georgia”), in Works of the Institute of Linguistics, Series of Oriental Languages, vol. 1 (Tbilisi: Academy of Sciences of Georgian SSR, 1954), 163–85. See also Helen Giunashvili and Tamar Abuladze, “Sur l’études des manuscrits de l’Évangile perse des 17-18ème siècles écrits en géorgien” (paper presented at Les interactions entre chiʻites duodécimains et chrétiens: histoire, théologie, littérature, Institut Catholique de Paris, 11–13 April 2018).

[13]The manuscript of the Turkish (so-called “Tatar”) Gospel translation transliterated in the Georgian script and dated to 1739 is kept at the museum in Zugdidi (West Georgia) with catalogue no. 89:4. There is also a copy made in 1881 and kept in Tbilisi at the National Archive of Georgia, fund 1446, no. 401.The manuscript contains 405 pages and is written in the script named Mkhedruli. The manuscript has been investigated by Murman Beltadze, “XVIII saukunis turkulenovani dzegli kartuli transkriptsiit” (“XVIII Century Turkish-Language Monument in Georgian Transcription”), Works of Tbilisi State University 121 (1967): 125–64. See also Tsisana Abuladze, “Türkische Texte in georgischer Transliteration” (paper presented at The Evolution of Turkic in Iran, Mainz, 17–19 December 2004); and Joakim Enwall, “Turkish Texts in Georgian Script: Sociolinguistic and Ethno-Linguistic Aspects,” in Turcology in Mainz, ed. Hendrik Boeschoten and Julian Rentzsch (Wiesbaden, Germany: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2010), 135–47.

Noteworthy is the existence of the analogical type (of Persian) translation of the Gospel transliterated in Armenian script. According to the colophons of Matenadaran manuscripts N 8492 and N 3044 (eighteenth century), the Gospel was translated into Persian to be used by Armenians living in Eastern Transcaucasia. The Gospel was translated into Persian for Christians living in that area, and its execution in Armenian script was for preserving religious (Christian) and national identity of those Armenians who lived among Iranians in that region. See Hasmik Kirakosian, “On the Colophons to the Two Persian Gospels Manuscripts in Armenian Script (Matenadaran N 8492 and N 3044),” Etchmiadzin (Էջմիածին) 5 (2018): 47–62; and Hasmik Kirakosian, “The Armeno-Persian Handwritten Gospel from Gandzak in the Context of Interreligious Polemic Translations,” Bulletin of Matenadaran, no. 29 (2020): 287–97.

[14]On the history of the Bible’s translation into Persian, see Kenneth J. Thomson and Fereydum Vahman, “BIBLE vii. Persian Translations of the Bible,” Encyclopaedia Iranica, 2016, iranicaonline.org/articles/bible-vii.

[15]Rasul Jaʿfariyan, ed., Tarjama-ye anājil-e arbaʿa: Bā taʿliqāt wa tawżiḥāt-e Mir Moḥammad-Bāqer Ḵātunābādi (1070–1127 A.H.) (Tehran: Nuqta, AH 1375/1996), xi.

[16]Roberto Gulbenkian, “The Translation of the Four Gospels into Persian,” Neue Zeitschrift für Missionswissenschaft 37 (1981): 35–57. Reference on p. 45.

[17]Rasul Jaʿfariyan, ed., Enjil-e nāderšāhi: Mattā, Marqos, Luqā, o Yuḥannā (Tehran: Elm, AH 1388/2009), 23; Kenneth J. Thomas and Fereydun Vahman, “BIBLE iii. Chronology of Selected Persian Translations of Parts or the Whole of the Bible,” Encyclopaedia Iranica, 2016, iranicaonline.org/articles/bible-iii; and Khubua, “XVII-XVIII ss. Otkhtavis sparsuli khelnacerebi,” 171.

[18]Khubua, “XVII-XVIII ss. Otkhtavis sparsuli khelnacerebi,” 171.

[19]Dennis Halft, “The Arabic Vulgate in Safavid Persia: Arabic Printing of the Gospels, Catholic Missionaries and the Rise of Shīʿī Anti-Christian Polemics” (PhD diss., Free University of Berlin, 2016), 161–64, 168–71, 206–8.

[20]Halft, “Arabic Vulgate,” 161–64.

[21]Halft, “Arabic Vulgate,” 168–71.

[22]Alexandr Antonovich Tsagareli, Svedenija o pamjatnikax gruzinskoi pisjmennosti (Data on Georgian Written Monuments), part I (Sankt-Peterburg: Tipografija Imperatorskoi Akademii Nauk, 1886), 27; Nikolay Yakovlevich Marr, “Opisanie persidskogo rukopisnogo Chetveroevangelija,” Zapiski Vostochnogo otdelenija Imperatorskogo Russkogo arxeologicheskogo obshchestva, III (1889): 377–81; Ekvtime Semyonovich Taqaishvili, Opisanie rukopisey “Obshchestva rasprostranenija gramotnosti sredi gruzinskogo naselenija,” vol. I (Tiflis: Izdanie Upravlenija Kavkazskogo Uchebnogo Okruga, 1902), 121–22; Makar Khubua, “Hamza sparsul metqvelebashi” (“Hamza in Persian Speech”), Bulletin of the Academy of Sciences of the Georgian SSR, no. 9–10 (1947): 675–79, reference on p. 678; Khubua, “XVII-XVIII ss. Otkhtavis sparsuli khelnacerebi,” 171; and Olga Suladze, “Kartuli asoebit shesrulebuli sparsuli otkhtavis zogierti grafikuli, ortografiuli da fonetikuri tavisebureba” (“Some Graphic, Orthographic and Phonetic Peculiarities of the Persian Gospel Written in Georgian Script”), in Jevanmardi, vol. II (Tbilisi: Metsniereba, 1979), 38–44, reference on p. 39.

[23]Makar Khubua, “O persidskix rukopisjax v gruzinskoi transkripcii,” Soobshchenija Akademii Nauk Gruzinskoi SSR 2 (1941): 301–7, reference on pp. 304–7; Khubua, “Hamza sparsul metqvelebashi”; Khubua, “XVII-XVIII ss. Otkhtavis sparsuli khelnacerebi,” 171–75; and Suladze, “Kartuli asoebit shesrulebuli,” 39–40.

[24]Teimuraz Bagrationi (Batonishvili), the son of the last king of Georgia, Giorgi XII. He was a writer, translator, scientist, and public and political figure. He lived in Iran (1803–10) and Saint Petersburg (from 1810 until his death). He was a member of the Saint Petersburg Academy of Imperial Sciences, Danish Royal Antiquarian Society, Asiatic Society of Paris, and French Academy of Fine Arts. In collaboration with Marie Brosset, he contributed to the development of Kartvelian (mostly historic) studies in Saint Petersburg. A great part of his rich collection of manuscripts and books was donated to the Saint Petersburg Asiatic Museum, from which another part was then sent to Georgia.

[25]Khubua, “O persidskix rukopisjax,” 305; Khubua, “Hamza sparsul metqvelebashi,” 678; Khubua, “XVII-XVIII ss. Otkhtavis sparsuli khelnacerebi,” 171; and Fati Sebua, “Barresiye tarjomehaye enjil dar zaban e farsi, resale baraye daryaft e darajeye doktori” (Ph.D diss, Daneshgah e Tehran, daneshkadeye adabiyat va ‘olum e ensani, AH 1388/2009), 324–32.

[26]Jamshid Giunashvili, “Gorgijanidze, Parsadan,” Encyclopædia Iranica, 2016, iranicaonline.org/articles/gorgijanidze-parsadan; and Helen Giunashvili and Tamar Abuladze, “Georgia and Iran: Historical-Cultural Context and Tendencies of Georgian Renaissance (According to Georgian Handwritten Heritage),” Iranian Studies (forthcoming).

[27]For a fuller description of the manuscript, see Tsisana Abuladze, Rusudan Gvaramia, and Maya Mamatsashvili, Korneli Kekelidzis saxelobis xelnatcerta institutis arabul, turkul da sparsul xelnatcerta katalogi (A Catalogue of Arabic, Turkish and Persian Manuscripts of the Korneli Kekelidze Institute of Manuscripts) (Tbilisi: Metsniereba, 1969), 89; and Seyfollah Modabber Chaharborji, Fehrest e tafsiliy e noskh e khatiy e farsi enstitu Kekelidzeye e Teflis, jeld e avval (Tehran: Markaz e chap va entesharat e vezarat e omur e xareje, AH 1383/2004), 145–46.

Omar Khayyam’s Transgressive Ethics and Their Socio-Political Implications in Contemporary Iran

Ali Asghar Seyed-Gohrab Volume 5, Number 3, Fall 2020

Ali Asghar Seyed-Gohrab is an associate professor of Persian at Leiden University. In addition to many articles, blogs, and chapters, he has authored, edited, and translated several books on Persian literature and culture. His latest publications include the edited volumes Pearls of Meanings: Studies on Persian Art, Poetry, Sufism and History of Iranian Studies in Europe by J.T.P. de Bruijn (Leiden University Press, 2020) and The Layered Heart: Essays on Persian Poetry, A Celebration in Honor of Dick Davis (Mage, 2019). He is the founding general editor of the Iranian Studies Series at Leiden University Press.

ابریق می مرا شکستی ربّی
بر من در عیش را ببستی ربّی
من می خورم و تو می‌کنی بدمستی
خاکم به دهان، مگر تو مستی ربّی

O Lord! you broke my wine jug;
O Lord! You barred the door of pleasure to me.
I am drinking wine while you like a drunkard behave badly
O Lord! May I perish [for asking], but are you drunk?[1]^,[2]

This quatrain is part of an anecdote recounting how God broke Omar Khayyam’s (ca. 1048–1131) wine jug when he wanted to drink. It is said that Khayyam composed this quatrain extemporarily to protest against God.[3] Immediately after these blasphemous words, his face turned black. To apologize to God, he composed the following quatrain:

ناکرده گنه در این جهان کیست بگو!
آن کس که گنه نکرد چون زیست بگو!

من بد کنم و تو بد مکافات دهی
پس فرق میان من و تو چیست بگو!

Tell me, who in this world has not sinned?
Tell me, how does one who has not sinned live?
I do wrong while you punish wrongly,
Tell me, what is then the difference between you and me?[4]

God accepted his apologies, and his face returned to normal.

This is one of the dozen anecdotes in which Khayyam is associated with wine and blasphemy. It is cited by two eminent scholars of Persian literary history, Qasem Ghani (1892–1951) and Mohammad-ʿAli Forughi (1877–1942), to highlight the problematic reception of Khayyam in Iran. They write:

it is disappointing that although these quatrains have made Khayyam famous, our people, both learned and uninformed, have not appreciated his worth and have created imaginings about him . . . Dry mystics and clerics have considered his words soaked with heresy, while people in general think of him as a wine drinker. They look at his poetry from the perspective of praising and prompting wine drinking. For the same reason, another group presupposes that he had no beliefs in the soul’s Origin (mabda’) and the soul’s Return (maʿad) and have, therefore, become his enthusiasts, while the divines discredit him for the same ideas.[5]

In this paper, which is dedicated to my teacher, colleague, and friend Dr. Ahmad Karimi-Hakkak, I would like to examine several social implications of Khayyam’s poetry. Dr. Karimi-Hakkak’s fascination with Persian poetry as a living tradition is a leitmotiv in his publications, examining the powerful artistic appeal of this millennium-old literary tradition in modern times.[6] This essay is just a droplet in the reception history of the Persian sage (hakim) Omar Khayyam, who has become a personification of transgressive ideas in Persian literary history.[7] The fascination I share with Dr. Karimi-Hakkak is due not only to Khayyam’s poetic genius (although he is not the author of the majority of quatrains attributed to him), but also to his problematic reception in twentieth-century Iran and how he has been connected to the notion of modernity. Both religious and secular intellectuals have tried to position Khayyam in the modern intellectual history of Iran in their own ways.

An exhaustive treatment of this topic would include a review of the ways in which influential figures in the modern cultural history of Iran have treated Khayyam’s philosophy. Briefly, Khayyam’s contemporary reception in Iran differs from the appreciation of other classical Persian poets such as Saʿdi (ca. 1210–92), Rumi (1207–73), Hafez (1315–90), and even Ferdowsi (ca. 940–1029), although the latter has also been connected to modern nationalism and Iranian identity. This essay concentrates on two aspects of Khayyam’s reception: First, it investigates how Khayyam’s faith and ideas on life and the afterlife are perceived by Iranian intellectuals of modern Iran in general, and by scholars such as ʿAbd al-Karim Sorush in particular. Second, it analyzes how Khayyam’s quatrains dealing with bacchanalian themes and motifs have been received by several Persian literary scholars who try to contextualize them in Islamic ethics. In articles on Khayyam and in introductions to his quatrains, they have sought to defend Khayyam’s religiosity and mitigate his allusions to wine.

In today’s Iran, Khayyam has the reputation of a cynical unbeliever. This reputation is constantly buttressed by both medieval Persian and modern Western evaluations of Khayyam. An example of the latter is a tourist guide about Iran by Maria O’Shea, published in the series Culture Shock! In one chapter, “The Language of Poetry and Sugar,” the author examines the role of poetry in daily life in Iran, emphasizing that Persian poets have confirmed “the Iranian concept of poetry as a necessity of life rather than an abstract art form.”[8] She emphasizes the “startling degree of erudition” in classical Persian poetry and names a few classical masters: Omar Khayyam, followed by Saʿdi, Rumi, Hafez, and Ferdowsi. O’Shea describes Khayyam as follows: “Like many poets, his work protests against the established articles of faith and contains many possible blasphemies as well as exhortations to hedonism.”[9] O’Shea is not simply repeating a Western appreciation of Khayyam; she is informing her potential travelers to Iran about the reactions they may receive if they mention Khayyam. This image of Khayyam as a blasphemous poet dates from the twelfth century.

Khayyam’s Reception in Medieval Persia

In the medieval period, there is little criticism of wine in Persian poetry. Wine drinking, carpe diem, hedonism, and similar motifs and themes occur extensively in the works of other poets and authors. Bacchanalia is not only an indispensable part of Persian poetry; it was an essential part of Persian courtly culture and Persian Sufism, as chapters in the “mirror for princes” genre and mystical manuals testify.[10] Khayyam’s name is heavily associated with wine and is included in several anthologies of quatrains. In this respect, there is no disapproval at all. Criticism is directed rather at Khayyam’s philosophy concerning God, his creation, and the hereafter. These issues were also addressed by other Persian philosophers and poets before and after Khayyam, but their discussions did not generate such persistent condemnation. The criticism is directed at Khayyam as a philosopher who discusses thorny theological issues, planting doubts in the hearts and minds of Muslims. Jamal al-Din Yusof Qifti (1172–1248) refers to Khayyam’s deviant ideas in his poetry, characterizing them as serpents for the Sharia.[11]

I limit myself here to two medieval authors who criticize Khayyam for his nonconformist opinions on God and as a materialist philosopher—namely, Farid al-Din ʿAttar (died about 1221) and Najm al-Din Daya (AH 573–654/AD 1177–1256).[12] In his Elahi-nama, ʿAttar tells an anecdote about Khayyam in his grave. A seer comes to his grave and sees that the soul of the learned Khayyam is covered with perspiration, for he has realized that despite all his wisdom, he cannot rely on his philosophical knowledge in the hereafter. ʿAttar’s message is that any knowledge, especially intellectual discursive reasoning, that does not contain trust in God cannot save humankind in the hereafter, even if one is as learned as Khayyam. In ʿAttar’s opinion, intellect is part of the whole and can never fully understand the whole. He compares it to a person who by the aid of a candle wants to see the sun. The anecdote removes Khayyam from mysticism and connects him to philosophers who are characterized as natamam, “incomplete,” “deficient,” or even “faulty”:[13]

یکی بینندهٔ معروف بودی

که ارواحش همه مکشوف بودی

دمی گر بر سر گوری رسیدی

در آن گور آنچه می‌رفتی بدیدی

بزرگی امتحانی کرد خردش

به خاک عمر خیّام بردش

بدو گفتا چه می‌بینی درین خاک

مرا آگه کن ای بینندهٔ پاک

جوابش داد آن مرد گرامی

که این مردیست اندر ناتمامی

بدان درگه که روی آورده بودست

مگر دعویِ دانش کرده بودست

کنون چون گشت جهل خود عیانش

عَرَق می‌ریزد از تشویر جانش

میان خجلت و تشویر ماندست

وزان تحصیل در تقصیر ماندست

بر آن دَر حلقه چون هفت آسمان زد

ز دانش لاف آنجا کی توان زد

چو نه انجام پیداست و نه آغاز

نیابد کس سر و پای جهان باز

فلک گوئیست و گر عمری شتابی

چو گویش پای و سر هرگز نیابی

Once, there was a famous clairvoyant

to whom all souls were visible.

He had only to approach a tomb for a moment

to see what was happening in that tomb.

A great man tested the ability of this clairvoyant;

He brought him to the grave of ʿOmar Khayyam

and said to him: “What do you see in this grave?

O pure seer, make me aware.”

The honourable seer gave him answer:

“Here lies a man who is incomplete,

because of the court to which he turned.

Although he claimed to have knowledge,

now, when his ignorance has become clear

he is perspiring out of shame for his own soul.

He is caught between sweating and shame.

The pursuit of knowledge has left him open to blame.

He made circles at the Gate like the seven revolving heavens.[14]

How could he boast of knowledge in the hereafter!

Since neither the beginning nor the end can be seen,

no one can solve the riddle of the world.[15]

The heavenly sphere is a ball, and like a ball,

A lifetime of haste won’t ever discover its head or its foot.”[16]

The second author is Najm al-Din Daya, who cites two quatrains in his mystic manual Mersad al-ʿebad and uses them to criticize Khayyam for his materialist thoughts and his skepticism about the creation of the world. As a Hanafite, adhering to Ashʿarite rationalist theology, Daya was “an enemy of the philosophers because of their claim that the intellect (ʿaql) could reach gnosis.”[17] Intellectual ratiocination fails to perceive the truth. Daya cites Khayyam’s quatrains to attack philosophers. The first is an example of Khayyam’s agnosticism about human purpose, while the second is cited to condemn his doubt about God’s purpose in creating humankind:

در دایره‌ای که آمدن و رفتن ماست

او را نه بدایت نه نهایت پیداست

کس می نزند دمی در این معنی راست

کاین آمدن از کجا و رفتن به کجاست

We come and go in a circle

whose begin and end are invisible

In this world, no one speaks a sincere word

about where we come from and where we are going.

دارنده چو ترکیب طبایع آراست

از بهر چه او فکندش اندر کم و کاست

گر زشت آمد پس این صورعیب کِراست

ور خوب آمد خرابی از بهر چراست

Why did the Owner who created the arrangement of nature

cast it to include shortcomings and deficiency?

If it was ugly, who is to blame for these flawed forms?

And if is beautiful, why does he break it again?[18]

The second quatrain is a popular one as it appears for the first time in Fakhr al-Din Mohammad b. ʿOmar Razi’s (d. 1209) exegesis of the Koran entitled Resala fi ‘l-tanbih ʿala baʿḍ al-asrar al-mawʿdah fi baʿḍ al-surah al-Qur’an al-ʿazim and is cited in connection with the concept of maʿad or the place of the soul’s return.[19] During Khayyam’s time and later, there was a heated discussion as to whether the soul returns to the body on Resurrection Day. Philosophers generally believed that human beings would return to their original spiritual state after death.[20] The purpose of this temporal material life was to prepare oneself for eternal life in the hereafter. Humans were expected to purify themselves through ascetic training and to acquire knowledge of the world in order to know the Creator. The more one knows about the Creator, the more one knows about oneself, since the individual is created in the image of God and is a microcosmic representation of the universe. As de Bruijn explains, “according to this theory, life is to be conceived as a cyclical process which offers humans the opportunity to perfect their pre-eternal souls.”[21] Theologians gave a different interpretation of maʿad, as “the idea of a separation between body and soul in the afterlife was unacceptable to them because it contradicted the dogma of the resurrection of the dead held to be one of the foundations of Islamic orthodoxy. In their view, maʿad could only mean the return of the souls to their resurrected bodies, which shall take place on the Day of Judgement.”[22]

This difference of opinion between philosophers, Sufis, and orthodox theologians created the image of Khayyam the blasphemer, which has persisted to this day. While the accusations made against Khayyam in his own time and soon after suggest that he may be the author of these quatrains, the unauthentic quatrains found in later collections, in which Khayyam defends himself against the accusation of heresy, show how a tradition was formed around his character. This tradition of accusing him of heresy also created a countermovement for those who identified with Khayyam to defend themselves. The authenticity of the apologia quatrains is most questionable:

دشمن به غلط گفت که من فلسفی‌ام

ایزد داند که آنچه او گفت نیَم

لیکن چو در این غم آشیان آمده‌ام

آخر کم از آنکه من بدانم که کی‌ام

The enemy wrongly accuses me of being a philosopher.

God knows that I am not what the enemy says.

But since I find myself in this house of sorrow

The truth is, should not I know who I am?[23]

As previously noted, a reception history of Khayyam in the medieval Persian world is certainly a desideratum, as it would clarify the function of transgressive ideas in discussions of thorny theological issues. But that is beyond the scope of this essay.

Khayyam in Twentieth-Century Iran

Attar and Daya’s evaluations of Khayyam have certainly contributed to his image among religious people in Iran. Even those religious people who furtively read him have mixed feelings. As the following anecdote shows, the first acquaintance of many Iranians from a traditional Islamic background with Khayyam is ambivalent. The prominent Persian scholar ʿAbd ‘l-Hosayn Zarrinkub (1923–1999) recalls:

I can never forget my first acquaintance with Khayyam. I was eleven years old when I was first introduced to this grey old man. I do not know which of my father’s friends gave me a cheap edition of his quatrains with a lot of spelling mistakes, but I know very well that my father’s strict and thorough approach to rearing and educating me could neither exclude this book (which is from end to end unbelief, scepticism and apostasy) from our house, nor withhold me from having the book and reading it. In those days, there was nothing else in our house but the sound of daily prayer and recitations of the Qur’ān. In those days, I was a frail child who sought pretexts [to go my own way] and I was just recovering from a long illness. I do not know how many times I read the book, on that Friday at the end of February, but I do know that at the end of the day, many of the heart-ravishing, melodious poems had been engraved on the blank tablet of my mind. [. . .] I remember that one day I recited the quatrains for my grandmother. Tears filled her eyes, she cursed the poet, and then she went out of my room. Perhaps it was the same attitude [on her part] that had made my father an enemy of Khayyam.[24]

This candid recollection reveals several aspects of Khayyam’s reception. Although Zarrinkub does not say so directly, it is clear that his father feared that the book would sow seeds of doubt and unbelief in the heart of his young son. On the other hand, his father allows a friend—someone who values the poems—to give a cheap edition to his son. The father perhaps feels a paradox: on one hand, Khayyam reminds his readers that life is brief and the world is vanity, while on the other, he problematizes theological issues such as the role of the Creator, and the nature of the hereafter, in a way that disturbs readers with a religious disposition.

Another example of an ambivalent appreciation of Khayyam is ʿAbd al-Karim Sorush’s discussion of death in his chapter “The Services and Benefits of Religion (khadamat va hasanat-e din).”[25] This is a long chapter covering several topics. In treating the question of human existence on earth, he says, “If we have come to this world as guests, what does the descending mean?” The author explains that humans are guests of God, both originally in paradise and now on earth. He contrasts the views of Jalal al-Din Rumi (1207–73) to the philosophy of Khayyam by citing the following quatrain of Khayyam comparing humans with a cup of wine, a plaything of destiny:

جامی است که چرخ آفرین می‌زندش

صد بوسه مهر بر جبین می‌زندش

این کوزه‌گر دهر چنین جام لطیف

می‌سازد و باز بر زمین می‌زندش

It is a cup that is struck by the elevated Wheel.

It gives the cup a hundred loving kisses on his forehead.

The pot-maker of Time makes such an elegant cup,

He makes it and smashes it again to the ground.[26]

Here God is depicted as a pot maker who creates humans and smashes them into pieces again. Sorush rejects Khayyam’s view, stating that those who consider the shortcomings and bitter experiences of this world as disappointments cannot see God and cannot have a loving relationship with God. Sorush observes that it would be senseless to create such a convoluted creature as a human being only to break that creature into a hundred pieces. Rational reasoning can never find an explanation for this. Sorush cites Rumi, who, like many other Persian mystics such as ʿAttar and Daya, considers death as eternal life, a union between the lover and the beloved. He cites the following piece from Rumi’s Mathnavi, in which he depicts death as the soul’s union with the Creator:

مرگ دان آنک اتّفاق امّتست

کآب حیوانی نهان در ظلمتست

همچو نیلوفر برو زین طرف جو

همچو مستسقی حریص و مرگ‌جو

مرگ او آبست و او جویای آب

می‌خورد والله اعلم بالصواب

ای فسرده عاشق ننگین نمد

کو ز بیم جان ز جانان می‌رمد

سوی تیغ عشقش ای ننگ زنان

صد هزاران جان نگر دستک‌زنان

جوی دیدی کوزه اندر جوی ریز

آب را از جوی کی باشد گریز

آب کوزه چون در آب جو شود

محو گردد در وی و جو او شود

وصف او فانی شد و ذاتش بقا

زین سپس نه کم شود نه بدلقا

Know death, as agreed among the Islamic community,

As the Water of Life hidden in the Land of Darkness.

Grow like the water-lily from this side of the river-bank,

Like one who suffers from dropsy be greedy and crave for death.

To him, the water is death, yet he seeks the water

He drinks it — and God best knows the right course.

O frozen lover, in the felt garment of shame,

Who, in fear of his life, flees the Beloved!

O you disgrace to women! Behold a hundred thousand souls

clapping their hands, [running] towards the sword of His love!

When you see a river, pour your jug in the river:

how could the water flee from the river?

When the jug’s water is in the river-water,

it is dissolved in it, and the river becomes it.

Its attributes have disappeared, while its essence remains.

After this, it does not dwindle or become ill-favoured.[27]

Sorush uses Rumi’s poem to argue that death is not like the pot that is fractured (gosastan), but like the water in it being united (peyvastan) with a flowing stream and then the ocean.[28] Sorush observes that in this context, religion serves to reconcile humans with this world. As humans cannot do anything about death, religion offers a vision of the meaning of death. In this line of reasoning, religion comes to help when ratiocinating, intellectual deliberations fall short.

Sorush appropriates the mystical philosophy of Rumi for his political ideology, but whenever he feels that the philosophy of Khayyam’s quatrains fit his own ideas, he cites him. Khayyam is so much part and parcel of Persian culture that even scholars and politicians who disagree with his philosophy on life, death, and the hereafter cite him as rhetorical buttressing. Discussing the topic of “Ideology and Worldly Religion” (ide’olozhi va din-e donyavi), Sorush posits that those who have not acquired the right perception of this world and the hereafter cannot claim to have fully understood the implications of religion for this world and the hereafter. He then demonstrates the relationship between this world and the hereafter through the metaphor of an embryo and the world, again citing Rumi:

چون جنین بد آدمی بد خون غذا

از نجس پاکی برد مؤمن کذا

[…]

گر جنین را کس بگفتی در رحم

هست بیرون عالمی بس منتظم

یک زمینی خرمی با عرض و طول

اندرو صد نعمت و چندین اکول

کوه‌ها و بحرها و دشت‌ها

بوستان‌ها باغ‌ها و کشتها

آسمانی بس بلند و پر ضیا

آفتاب و ماهتاب و صد سها

[. . .]

او به‌حکم حال خود منکر بدی

زین رسالت معرض و کافر شدی

When man was an embryo, his food was blood:

Likewise, a believer finds some purity in the “unclean” thing.

[. . .]

If anyone were to tell the embryo in the womb,

“Outside, there is a well-ordered world,

A pleasant earth, broad and long,

containing a hundred delights and so many things to eat,

with mountains and seas and plains,

fragrant orchards, gardens and sown fields.

A sky that’s very lofty, full of light,

sun and moonbeams and a hundred stars.”

[. . .]

The embryo would deny this, because of its present state, and would reject this message and be an unbeliever.[29]

Sorush cites these lines to explain humankind’s position in this world, and the reasons for human birth and death. He develops a mystic interpretation, stating that a human is separated from the world of non-existence through a set of veils in the same way that a fetus is concealed in the womb. Before citing the second couplet of one of Khayyam’s quatrains, Sorush explains this metaphor:

A foetus is both in the womb and in this world. This world has two phases: a prenatal and a postnatal phase. Only a veil separates these two phases. When we were still in the womb, we could not see the world and we did not know that we were in this world and that our mother was in this world and that our food was also from this world, etc. There was a veil between us and this world. We saw only the outward, i.e., we saw only ourselves, and the little world of the womb, but inside this embryonic world, which stands for this large and expanded world, was unknown to us and was veiled to us. As Khayyam says,[30]

[اسرار ازل را نه تو دانی و نه من

وین حرفِ معمّا نه تو خوانی و نه من]

هست از پس پرده گفت‌وگوی من و تو

چون پرده برافتد، نه تو مانی و نه من

[Neither you nor I know the secrets of pre-eternity,

Neither you nor I can read these enigmatic letters.]

Our dialogue takes place behind the veil:

When the veil drops, neither you nor I remain.[31]

Although this quatrain shows a good deal more agnosticism about the hereafter than either Rumi’s poem or Sorush’s reading, Sorush uses only the last couplet to emphasize the need for gnostic knowledge to understand the hereafter. Immediately after his citation, Sorush adds:

When this veil falls, we will enter into another world and the previous world falls away. At the moment we live in this world and [then] we are living in the Hereafter. We are the same embryos who are in the womb of this world, but this whole world and the embryos are together in the world of the Hereafter, which is the inner (baten) of this world. But the people who see the outward (zaher-bin), only see the life in the outward world and are ignorant of its inside (baten) which is the Hereafter. You know that God says to people, especially the Prophets, on the Resurrection Day, ‘Certainly you were heedless of it, but now We have removed from your veil, so your sight today is sharp’ (Qur’ān 50:22). When you had not experienced this situation, you were ignorant of this. We removed the veil from your eyes, we tore apart the veils. Today, your eyes are sharp and seeing. This means that your eyes were not seeing previously, because a veil and a curtain were put before them. It is just enough to tear them, and in that case, all our eyes will be opened, and see the inner world (bateni) which we were barred from seeing.[32]

While in the previous example, Sorush positions Khayyam and Rumi in an oppositional binary, representing two medieval belief systems, here he is integrating Khayyam’s poem entirely in a mystical and Koranic context. For Sorush, the idea of removing the veil (i.e., dying) is attractive and suits perfectly his argument, while Khayyam’s doubt about the existence of the hereafter is ignored here; even the first couplet is not cited. In a literal interpretation of the last couplet, Khayyam observes that “when the veil drops, neither you nor I remain,” which implies that it is not clear what happens with a human soul after death. As I have analyzed elsewhere, the philosophy of this particular quatrain is not mystic, because in mysticism, the purpose of creation is defined.[33] God has created humankind out of love. In the first encounter between God and the souls of humankind, God asked Adam’s souls, “Am I not your Lord?” to which the souls answered, “Yes, we witness you are.” Mystics interpret this affirmative answer as the souls’ being spellbound by God’s beauty. The souls had become drunk by the beauty, and therefore, they answered positively. It is this moment of union with the Creator that the human soul craves. Orthodox Muslims may read Khayyam’s quatrain as sheer blasphemy, as the poet is claiming that humans cannot understand the reasons for God’s creation. From an orthodox point of view, God’s purpose for humankind on earth is evident: humans are temporarily on this earth to sow the seeds of good acts in order to harvest them in the eternal hereafter.

Even more provocative assertions are expressed in a series of quatrains attributed to Khayyam. In his prose work, Khayyam follows the critical ideas of Ebn Sina (Avicenna, about AH 370–428/AD 980–1037) about God’s knowledge of the particulars of what humans do and say, bodily resurrection on Judgment Day, and the existence of paradise and hell.[34] In several quatrains ascribed to Khayyam, he complains about a Creator who has dumped human beings in a deprived world with many responsibilities and without interfering with their affairs:

یارب تو گلم سـرشته‌ای من چه کنم

این پشم و قصب تو رشته‌ای من چه کنم

چون خار بلا تو کشته‌ای من چه کنم

خود بر سـر من نبشـته‌ای من چه کنم

O Lord, You have kneaded my clay, what can I do?

You have spun this wool and linen, what can I do?

When you’ve planted the thorn of affliction, what can I do?

You yourself have written my destiny on my forehead, what I can I do?[35]

The topic points at the heated debates between the Muʿtazilite and the Ashʿarite schools of theology during the poet’s time, on theological issues such as God’s unity, justice, reward, and punishment.[36] The Muʿtazilites rejected predestination and affirmed individual responsibilities, while the Ashʿarites took the opposite view.[37]

Some editors of Khayyam’s quatrains, especially in the introductions of critical text editions, make these philosophical ideas more palatable in an Islamic context by framing them as part of Khayyam’s inquisitive spirit and his longing to know God. For instance, the eminent Persian scholar Ziya al-Din Sajjadi writes: “Khayyām is not a pessimist, not a sceptic and also not a denier of God, he does not belong to Islamic mystics, Sufis, neither does he belong to Esmaʿili sect, and all these have their own arguments.”[38] To prove Khayyam’s sincere belief in God, Sajjadi refers to the report of Imam Mohammad Baghdadi, one of Khayyam’s sons-in-law, as recounted in ʿAbu ‘l-Hasan Bayhaqi’s Chronicle. When Khayyam was reading Ebn Sina’s chapter “Theology” from his famous Ketab al-shefa, he was cleaning his teeth with a golden toothpick. When he came to the section “Unity and Multiplicity” (al-wahid wa al-Kathir), he placed the toothpick in the book, asking for a pious person to come and write his will. After writing his will, he performed a prayer and started his fasting. Late in the evening, during his evening prayer, he knelt and directed his attention to God, saying:

یا رب به قدر قدر تو نشناختم تو را

در حدّ فکر کوته خود ساختم تو را

دردیست رنج غفلت و رنجیست درد جهل

افسوس با تو بودم و نشناختم تو را

O God! I have not known you to the degree you are worth.

I have made a ‘You’ within the small bounds of my thought.

My neglect is anguish, my ignorance is my grief.

Alas, I was with you but was unable to know you.[39]

After this prayer, Khayyam died. He had predicted that his grave would be in a place covered with blossoms in spring and autumn.[40] By citing the anecdote and emphasizing that Khayyam did not have any religious or mystical affiliations, Sajjadi absolves Khayyam of heresy, presenting him as a pious believer, who used his knowledge to know God.

Another Persian literary scholar, Baha’ al-Din Khorramshahi, defends Khayyam through an extensive commentary on controversial quatrains. He explains the quatrains within the Perso-Islamic framework, citing poetry from Khayyam’s predecessors to explain that specific ideas and opinions knitted to Khayyam actually belong to the Persian cultural and literary heritage, as in the following quatrain:

گر می نخوری طعنه مزن مستان‌ را

بنیاد مکن تو حیله و دستان‌ را

تو غره بدان مشو که می مینخوری

صد لقمه خوری که می غلام‌ست آن‌ را

If you’re not drinking wine yourself, do not despise the drunk.

Do not prepare the ground for trickery and fraud.

Be not proud that you’re not drinking wine,

You eat a hundred morsels, far, far, worse than wine.[41]

In Khorramshahi’s opinion, the reason the poet invites people to drink wine is not the wine itself; he wants to explain that hypocrisy is a sin.[42] Khorramshahi conjectures that there are two types of wine in Khayyam’s quatrains: grape wine (bada-ye anguri) and literary wine (bada-ye adabi). He says:

If we take Khayyam’s allusions to, and themes of, wine, his praise of drunkenness, and his ignorance [of the hereafter] in his quatrains in a literal way, we will have a portrait of an irresponsible man, a vagabond, an alcoholic, a hedonist, a worshipper of wine, a waster of time, someone who throws away the fruits of his work and life, instead of a sagacious Khayyam who was an eminent sage and a mathematician, who was very possibly a student of Ebn Sina [and otherwise a follower of his philosophy].[43]

Khorramshahi rejects such ideas and bases his own on Mohammad ʿAli Forughi, who interprets Khayyam’s use of wine in the same vein as Hafez’s. According to Forughi, when Hafez refers to “two-years-old wine” (may-ye do sala) and a “fourteen-years-old beloved” (mahbub-e chahardah sala), he is using metaphors: the former refers to the Koran and the latter to the Prophet Mohammad.[44]

Many contemporary Persian scholars try to contextualize Khayyam in a Persian mystic tradition. The eloquent Iranian scholar Hosayn Elahi-Qomsha’i defends Khayyam by placing him in Persian and Indian mystic traditions. In his opinion, the image of Khayyam as a heretic has been created in the West. He writes:

It is a pity that in the opinions of many western readers he is a heretic, a lustful drunk, who has become a famous poet busy only with wine and worldly pleasures. This is the same current misinterpretation that people have about Sufism. The West looks at Khayyam from its own perspective. But if one wishes to appreciate the essence of Eastern literature, the reader should look at how indigenous readers interpret their own literature. It may be astonishing for the western public to hear that in Iran there is no discussion and difference of opinion about the true meaning of Khayyam’s poems, and that everyone considers him as a great spiritual poet and a true believer.[45]

Although Qomsha’i later admits that there are a wide range of opinions about the quatrains in Iran, he puts Khayyam’s actual Persian quatrains aside and offers a purely mystical interpretation of Edward FitzGerald’s (1809–83) version in Rubaiyat.[46] For Qomsha’i, Khayyam’s quatrains are so permeated by Islamic mysticism that even their English adaptations possess spiritual elements. To show this mysticism, he translates the English quatrains back to Persian and gives a commentary based on the philosophy of the Indian mystic and yoga master Paramahansa Yogananda (1893–1952). Afterwards, Qomsha’i gives his own mystical interpretation. Here I give one example of Qomsha’i at work:

Awake! for Morning in the Bowl of Night

Has flung the Stone that puts the Stars to Flight:

And Lo! the Hunter of the East has caught

The Sultan’s Turret in a Noose of Light.[47]

Yogananda interprets this quatrain as follows:

Awake and leave the sleep of ignorance and simple-mindedness, because the dawn of wisdom and knowledge has arrived. Rise and throw the hard stone of asceticism in the dark cup of ignorance, and make the faded light of the stars that manifest your desire and endless worldly lusts take flight.[48]

Qomsha’i adds:

O inhabitants of the city of deceit and imagination, awake, because my sun of the mystic and Gnostic message, which awakes the sleeping people, can be seen on the horizons of your towns. Rise and break the scales of ignorance with the spiritual stone of asceticism. Divest yourself of this worldly and ephemeral pleasure which shines only for one moment and is extinguished again.[49]

Khayyam and the Antinomian Movement

What is perhaps most intriguing about this brief reception history of Khayyam is why he in particular has been the locus of accusations of heresy, although other philosophers and poets expressed the same ideas in a philosophical context. For later medieval mystic poets, he was an example of a rational and materialist philosopher whose ideas opposed mystic views on the Creator, creation, and the hereafter. There was (and is) an adversarial relationship between theologians and philosophers: while the letter of the Koran was enough for the religious scholars, philosophers problematized key notions of theology such as the soul’s origin (mabda’), living in the material world (maʿash), and the return (maʿad). Why then would mystic poets and religious scholars focus their critique on Khayyam? He formulated complex theological issues in a simple style comprehensible to people of all walks of life. He was quotable, and a poet to whom dozens if not hundreds of “heretical” quatrains were attributed from the thirteenth century onwards. While some of the quatrains narrated in anecdotes show him as remorseful, there are other contexts in which such quatrains are read in an antinomian context. But is this fair to Khayyam?

The antinomian (qalandari) movement started to take shape gradually during Khayyam’s life. Central motifs of the qalandari poetry are wine, homoerotic love, and the censure of outward piety. To provoke religious scholars, these qalandars drank wine publicly and criticized the most sacred rites and rituals (such as the pilgrimage to Mecca), the mosque, and even Islam itself; they preferred winehouses, Zoroastrian temples or Christian churches, and unbelief (kofr). This antinomian poetry is deeply religious, reflecting a paradoxical piety that rejected any show of religiosity. While this poetry is a provocative response to the theologians, the strength of Khayyam’s poetry lies in its personal tone, in which the poet wonders about the mysteries of the universe, who the Creator is, why the universe was created, what the purpose of humankind is, and what the destination of the soul in the hereafter is. Khayyam’s wine poetry is a means to mitigate the pain and frustration of humankind’s inability to perceive the imperceptible.

ʿAttar is one of the prominent qalandari poets, who criticize the holiest tenets of Islam, emphasizing the individual’s spiritual growth, but he does not take Khayyam as a qalandar; rather, as we have seen, he sternly criticizes him. Much of the poetry of other Persian poets such as Hafez, Saʿdi, and Rumi embodies a qalandari philosophy, both in its emphasis on wine and in criticism of the holiest Islamic tenets. Yet even qalandari poets such as ʿAttar looked with a suspicious eye at Khayyam’s ratiocinative worldview.

The growing body of heretic poetry attributed to Khayyam probably did not help to make his Robaʿiyyat seem unequivocally spiritual. Any poet could write a quatrain and use Khayyam’s name as a cover, making the corpus grow to some thousands of quatrains. Several qalandari quatrains are attributed to Khayyam. One appears in the thirteenth-century collection of quatrains Nozhat al-majales by Jamal Khalil Shervani. In this collection of some 4,000 quatrains, he devotes a chapter to dar maʿani-ye ʿOmar Khayyam. This heading is ambiguous because it may be understood as “On the Ideas of ʿOmar Khayyam,” referring to a popular genre in which poets write on the same themes and motifs, such as carpe diem, bacchanalia, and complaints about fate. The heading can also be understood as “On the Meanings of ʿOmar Khayyam,” which refers to the readings of his poetry. As the authorship of several of the poems cited in Shervani’s chapter is unclear, Shervani is probably referring to poems with the themes and motifs for which Khayyam had become the personification. The chapter also includes quatrains by other poets, such as Sana’i, Sayfi, and Mujir, which reinforces my interpretation of the chapter heading. Shervani also cites quatrains attributed to Khayyam elsewhere in the collection. The following quatrain on the qalandari way appears in the first chapter “On Unity and Gnosis” (towhid va ʿerfan), but it is hard to accept it as authentic, based on the above line of reasoning:

تا راه قلندری نپویی نشود

رخساره بخون دل نشویی نشود

سودا چه پزی تا که چو دلسوختگان

آزاد به ترک خود نگویی نشود

So long as you do not walk the path of qalandari, it may not be;

So long as you do not wash your cheeks with the heart’s blood, it may not be.

Why boiling your passion like those with burnt hearts,

unless you freely renounce your own ego, it may not be.[50]

Rahim Rezazada Malik dismisses the attribution of this quatrain to Khayyam, stating, “the composer of this quatrain is so distanced from the logic of scholasticism and he is so unfamiliar from such tradition that he does not explain what it means to say [the lines above].”[51] Rezazada continues his criticism, stating that the composer of this poem is not at all clear about what he wants to say and the usage of the “gargantuan” word qalandar points to the author’s vagabond (qalandari) origin.

Conclusion

The popularity of Edward FitzGerald’s adaptation of the quatrains in the West initiated a new evaluation of Khayyam and the quatrains in Iran. While influential intellectuals such as Sadeq Hedayat (1903–51) saw in Khayyam the rebellious Arian spirit who fought against Semitic beliefs, other less-well-known authors such as Siddiqi Nakhjavani published books and articles condemning Khayyam for giving unbridled advice to drink wine and disrespecting religion.[52] Sorush’s application of Khayyam’s quatrains in modern religious-political contexts exhibits this oppositional binary. In one place, Sorush cites Khayyam as an opponent of Rumi, to convey the functionality of religion and how religion does help humankind understand death and the hereafter; in others, he simply cites Khayyam to strengthen his arguments about death, without going into Khayyam’s views on the hereafter. In the latter cases, Khayyam’s poetic memorability and popularity count more than his critical philosophy of the origins of creation.

Scholars such as Sajjadi, Khorramshahi, and Qomsha’i seek to create an Islamic context for both Khayyam’s personality and his quatrains, so that his poetry can be viewed within the bounds of Islamic ethics. It remains fascinating that, despite all these heated discussions on the “Islamic” or “heretical” nature of Khayyam’s quatrains, he has been among the best-selling authors in Iran, perhaps the most translated medieval poet in the world,[53] and a symbol of Persian spirits, philosophizing the mysteries of the universe in poetry while drinking wine and loving his friends.

[1]Omar Khayyam, Robaʿiyyat-e Khayyam, ed. M.ʿA. Forughi and Q. Ghani (Tehran: Nahid, AH 1373/AD 1994), 54; also see Sadiq Hidayat, Tarana-ha-ye Khayyam (Tehran: Ketabha-ye parastu, AH 1353/AD 1974), 15. The phrase khakam ba dahan means literally “may dust be at my mouth,” implying remorse.

[2]All translations are mine unless otherwise indicated.

[3]On composing poems extemporarily in Persian literary tradition, see A.A. Seyed-Gohrab, “Improvisation as a Chief Pillar of the Poetic Art in Persian Literary Tradition,” in Images, Improvisations, Sound, and Silence from 1000 to 1800 – Degree Zero, ed. B. Hellemans and A. Jones Nelson (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2018), 131–44.

[4]Khayyam, Robaʿiyyat-e Khayyam, 55. This quatrain with a different first couplet is also attributed to Rumi. See Jalal al-Din Mohammad Rumi, Kolliyyat-e Shams ya Divan-e kabir az goftar-e Mowlana Jalal al-Din Mohammad mashhur be Mowlavi, ba tashbihai va havashi, 3rd ed., ed. Badiʿ al-Zaman Foruzanfar, 10 vols. (Tehran: Amir Kabir, AH 1378/AD 1999), 8:266, quatrain 1579:

ای جان جهان جز تو کسی کیست بگو

بی‌جان و جهان هیچ کسی زیست بگو

من بد کنم و تو بد مکافات دهی

پس فرق میان من و تو چیست بگو

In English, it runs thus:

Tell me, O soul of the world! Who else is there?

Tell me! Could anyone live without a soul and the world?

I am doing bad and you punish badly,

Tell me, what is then the difference between you and me?

[5]Khayyam, Robaʿiyyat-e Khayyam, 54.

[6]See, for instance, Ahmad Karimi-Hakkak, “Continuity and Creativity: Models of Change in Persian Poetry, Classical and Modern,” in The Layered Heart: Essays on Persian Poetry, A Celebration in Honor of Dick Davis, ed. A.A. Seyed-Gohrab (Washington, DC: Mage Publishers), 25–54.

[7]M. Aminrazavi, The Wine of Wisdom: The Life, Poetry and Philosophy of Omar Khayyam (Oxford: Oneworld, 2005), 18–66.

[8]Maria O’Shea, Culture Shock! Iran, 1999. (London: Kuperard, 2001), 88.

[9]O’Shea, Culture Shock, 90. Chapter three is devoted to poetry, 72–95.

[11]See A.A. Seyed-Gohrab, “Khayyam’s Universal Appeal: Man, Wine, and the Hereafter in the Quatrains,” in The Great ʿUmar Khayyam: A Global Reception of the Rubaiyat (Leiden, NL: Leiden University Press, 2012), 11–38, reference on p. 12; A.A. Seyed-Gohrab, “The Flourishing of Persian Quatrains,” in A History of Persian Literature: Persian Lyric Poetry in the Classical Era 800-1500: Ghazals. Panegyrics and Quatrains, vol. 2, ed. E. Yarshater (London: I.B. Tauris, 2019), 488–568.

[12]Mohammad-Amin Riahi, “Daya, Najm-Al-Din Abu Bakr ʿAbd-Allah,” in Encyclopaedia Iranica, 2011, www.iranicaonline.org/articles/daya-najm-al-din. For an overview of these medieval critics on Khayyam, see Aminrazavi, Wine of Wisdom, 40–66.

[13]For an excellent study of ʿAttar’s philosophy, see H. Ritter, The Ocean of the Soul: Man, the World, and God in the Stories of Farid al-Din Attar (trans. of Das Meer der Seele: Mensch, Welt und Gott in den Qeschichten des Fariduddin Attar), ed. Bernd Radtke, trans. John O’Kane (Leiden, NL: Brill, 2003).

[14]This line can also be translated as “He knocked at the Door like the seven heavens.” I have chosen the above translation to allude to the poet as an astronomer, drawing circles to measure heavenly bodies.

[15]Literally, sar-o pa-ye jahan, “the head and the feet of the world,” referring to the beginning and the end of the world.

[16]Farid al-Din ʿAttar, Elahi-nama, ed. H. Ritter (Tehran: Tus, AH 1368/AD 1989), 272, lines 8–18. Also see Ritter, Ocean of the Soul, 83–84; Aminrazavi, Wine of Wisdom, 62.

[17]Riahi, “Daya.”

[18]Najm al-Din Daya, Mersad al-ʿebad men al-mabdaʾ ila’l-maʿad, ed. M.A. Riyahi (Tehran: Scientific & Cultural Publications Company, 1992), 31. For an English translation of this book, see Razi: The Path of God’s Bondsmen, Persian Heritage Series 35, trans. H. Algar (New York: Caravan Books, 1982). The quatrain appears with some alterations in Khayyam, Robaʿiyyat-e Khayyam, ed. Forughi and Ghani, 112 (quatrain 34) and 108 (quatrain 31), respectively.

[19]See my discussion of Khayyam’s quatrains in the unique miscellaneous manuscript Safina, which contains 209 works, copied between AD 1321 and AD 1323: A.A. Seyed-Gohrab, “Literary Works in Tabriz’s Treasury,” in The Treasury of Tabriz: The Great Il-Khanid Compendium, ed. A.A. Seyed-Gohrab and S. McGlinn (Amsterdam: Rozenberg Publishers and West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2007), 126–30. Also see Sayyed-ʿAli Mir-Afzali, Robaʿiyyat-e Khayyam dar manabeʿ-e kohan (Tehran: Nashr-e daneshgahi, AH 1382/AD 2003), 23–25.

[20]See J.T.P. de Bruijn’s discussion on this topic: J.T.P. de Bruijn, Persian Sufi Poetry: An Introduction to the Mystical Use of Classical Poems (Richmond, UK: Curzon Press, 1997), 88–90.

[21]de Bruijn, Persian Sufi Poetry, 89.

[22]de Bruijn, Persian Sufi Poetry, 89.

[23]Khayyam, Robaʿiyyat-e Khayyam, ed. Forughi and Ghani, 149, quatrain 129.

[24]ʿAbd ‘l-Hosayn Zarrinkub, Ba karavan-e holla (Tehran: ʿElmi, AH 1372/AD 1993), 127–28.

[25]ʿAbd al-Karim Sorush, Mudara va modiriyat (Tehran: Toluʿ-i Azadi, AH 1376/AD 1997), 227–76.

[26]Sorush, Modara va modiriyat, 268. Also see Khayyam, Robaʿiyyat-e Khayyam, ed. Forughi and Ghani, 143, quatrain 115.

[27]See Jalal al-Din Mohammad Rumi, The Mathnawi of Jalalu’ddín Rumi, vol. 3, ed. and trans. R.A. Nicholson (London: Gibb Memorial Trust, 1925–40). My translation is based on Nicholson’s, using the critical Persian text edited by M. Esteʿlami, Mathnavi-ye Maʿnavi, vol. 3 (Tehran: Zavvar, AH 1372/AD 1993), 180, lines 3909–16.

[28]Sorush, Modara va modiriyat, 268–69.

[29]My translation is based on Nicholson’s (p. 7), using Esteʿlami, Mathnavi-ye Maʿnavi, 11, lines 50, 53–56, 60.

[30]Sorush, Modara va modiriyat, 184–85.

[31]Sorush, Modara va modiriyat, 185. This quatrain is included in neither Robaʿiyyat-e Khayyam, ed. Forughi and Ghani, nor Omar Khayyam, Robaʿiyyat-e Khayyam dar manabeʿ-e kohan, ed. Mir-Afzali (Tehran: Nashr-e daneshgahi, AH 1382/AD 2003).

[32]Sorush, Modara va modiriyat, 185.

[33]A.A. Seyed-Gohrab, “There Was a Door to Which I Found No Key,” Leiden Medievalists Blog, leidenmedievalistsblog.nl/articles/there-was-a-door-to-which-i-found-no-key (accessed 10 March 2020).

[34]For a discussion about the Islamic nature of such provocative ideas, see Shahab Ahmed, What Is Islam: The Importance of Being Islamic (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016), 11–13.

[35]This quatrain appears in neither Forughi and Ghani’s nor in Mir-Afzali’s edition of Robaʿiyyat-e Khayyam. The quatrain was probably written by Sharaf al-Din Shafarva of Isfahan (in the twelfth century) and later attributed to Khayyam. On Sharaf al-Din, see Safa, Tarikh-e adabiyyat dar Iran, vol. 2 (Tehran: Ferdows, AH 1368/AD 1989), 740–43; Lotf-ʿAli Beyg Adhar Bigdeli, Tadhkera-ye atashkada adhar, ed. Sayyed Jaʿfar Shahidi (Tehran: AH 1337/AD 1958), 182–83. However, this quatrain is not mentioned in these sources, and I do not have Sharaf al-Din’s Divan in my possession.

[36]See M. Aminrazavi, “Reading the Rubaʿiyyat as ‘Resistance Literature,’” in The Great ʿUmar Khayyam: A Global Reception of the Rubaiyat (Leiden, NL: Leiden University Press, 2012), 39–53. Aminrazavi gives many examples of quatrains attributed to Khayyam and reflecting the disputes between these schools.

[37]D. Gimaret, “Muʿtazila,” in Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd ed.

[38]Omar Khayyam, Robaʿiyyat-e ʿUmar Khayyam, ed. Ziya al-Din Sajjadi (Tehran: Karun, AH 1370/AD 1991), 5.

[39]This quatrain is included in neither Forughi and Ghani’s nor in Mir-Afzali’s edition of Robaʿiyyat-e Khayyam. Sajjadi summarizes this quatrain in prose on p. 5, and the poem appears on several Internet pages, but the authenticity of this weak poem is questionable.

[40]See Nezami ʿAruzi, Chahar-Maqala, ed. E.G. Browne (London: Gibb Memorial Series, Luzac & Co, 1921), 71–72: “In the year A.H. 506 (A.D. 1112-1113) Khwaja Imam ‘Umar-i-Khayyami and Khwaja Imam Muzaffar-i-Isfizari had alighted in the city of Balkh, in the Street of the Slave-sellers, in the house of Amir Abu Saʿd Jarrah, and I had joined that assembly. In the midst of our convivial gathering I heard that Proof of God (Ḥujjatu’l-Ḥaqq) ʿUmar say, “My grave will be in a spot where the trees will shed their blossoms on me twice a year.” This thing seemed to me impossible, though I knew that one such as he would not speak idle words. When I arrived at Nishapur in the year A.H. 530 (A.D. 1135-6), it being then four years since that great man had veiled his countenance in the dust, and this nether world had been bereaved of him, I went to visit his grave on the eve of a Friday (seeing that he had the claim of a master on me), taking with me one to point out to me his tomb. So he brought me out to the Ḥira Cemetery; I turned to the left, and found his tomb situated at the foot of a garden-wall, over which pear-trees and peach-trees thrust their heads, and on his grave had fallen so many flower-leaves that his dust was hidden beneath the flowers. Then I remembered that saying which I had heard from him in the city of Balkh, and I fell to weeping, because on the face of the earth, and in all the regions of the habitable globe, I nowhere saw one like unto him. May God (blessed and exalted is He!) have mercy upon him, by His Grace and His Favour! Yet although I witnessed this prognostication on the part of that Proof of the Truth ʿUmar, I did not observe that he had any great belief in astrological predictions; nor have I seen or heard of any of the great [scientists] who had such belief.”

[41]Khayyam, Robaʿiyyat-e Khayyam, ed. Forughi and Ghani, 99, quatrain 4.

[42]Khayyam, Robaʿiyyat-e Khayyam, ed. Forughi and Ghani, 175.

[43]Khayyam, Robaʿiyyat-e Khayyam, ed. Forughi and Ghani, 11.

[44]Khayyam, Robaʿiyyat-e Khayyam, ed. Forughi and Ghani, 12.

[45]Omar Khayyam, Robaʿiyyat-e Khayyam-i Nayshaburi, ed. Hosayn Elahi Qomsha’i (Tehran: Khushrang, n.d.), 3.

[46]Khayyam, Robaʿiyyat-e Khayyam-e Nayshaburi, ed. Qomsha’i, 5, note 4.

[47]Khayyam, Robaʿiyyat-e Khayyam-e Nayshaburi, ed. Qomsha’i, 5; P. Yogananda, The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam Explained, ed. J. Donald Walters (Nevada City, CA: Crystal Clarity, 1994), 2–5.

[48]These are not Yogananda’s literal words but a summary made by Qomsha’i. See Khayyam, Robaʿiyyat-e Khayyam-e Nayshaburi, ed. Qomsha’i, 5.

[49]Khayyam, Robaʿiyyat-e Khayyam-e Nayshaburi, ed. Qomsha’i, 5.

[50]Jamal Khalil Shervani, Nozhat al-majales, ed. M.A. Riyahi, AH 1366/AD 1987. (Tehran: Maharat, AH 1375/AD 1996), 145, quatrain 33. The chapter on Khayyam appears as chap. 15, pp. 671–76. This chapter consists of thirty-eight quatrains, twelve of which are attributed to Khayyam. Also see Robaʿiyyat-e Khayyam, ed. Mir-Afzali, 39–48. Sadeq Hedayat includes one of these qalandari quatrains in his collection. See Tarana-ha-ye Khayyam, 99; Khayyam, Robaʿiyyat-e Khayyam, ed. Forughi and Ghani, 126, quatrain 72.

[51] Rahim Rezazada Malik, ʿOmar Khayyam: Qafela-ye salar-e danesh (Tehran: Maharat, AH 1377/AD 1998), 125–26.

[52]Hedayat, Tarana-ha-ye Khayyam, 27; R. Seddiqi Nakhjavani, Khayyam-pendari va pasokh-e afkar-e qalandarana-ye u (Tabriz, IR: Sorush, AH 1320/AD 1931).

[53]See Jos Coumans, The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam: An Updated Bibliography (Leiden, NL: Leiden University Press, 2010). Coumans’s bibliography lists 1,015 editions of the translations and is the first bibliography of the Rubaiyat since 1929, when A.G. Potter published his A Bibliography of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (London: Ingpen and Grant, 1994). Also see Jos Biegstraaten, “Khayyam, Omar xiv. Impact on Literature and Society in the West,” in Encyclopædia Iranica, 2008, www.iranicaonline.org/articles/khayyam-omar-impact-west; A.A. Seyed-Gohrab, “Edward FitzGerald’s Translations of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam: The Appeal of Terse Hedonism,” in The Wiley Blackwell Companion to World Literature, ed. Ken Seigneurie (John Wiley & Sons, 2019), 2059–70.

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

Dan Shapira Volume 4, Number 2, Summer 2019

Dan Shapira <shapiradan.apple@gmail.com> is Professor at the Department of Middle Eastern Studies of the Bar-Ilan University in Ramat Gan, Israel.

Rabbi Ya‘akov Itzhaki, Thesaurus of Judeo-Tat (Juhuri) Language of the Mountain Jews of the Caucasus, edited with an Introduction and Notes by Michael Zand (Jerusalem: Ben-Zvi Institute for the Study of Jewish Communities in the East, Yad Itzhak Ben-Zvi and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2016).[1]

Judeo-Tati / Juhuri is an Iranian language spoken by the native Jews of Daghestan and some other localities in the northern Caucasus, as well as in the northern part of the Republic of Azerbaijan. These communities are generally referred to as “mountain Jews,” a name given to them by Russian Imperial officials in order to distinguish them legally from the other (mostly Ashkenazi) Jews of the Empire, after the Russians had conquered the territories of Qajar Iran where these Jews lived between 1802 and 1828.

By most of the 19^th century, they were calling their language “Persian”; during the Soviet era, “Tati”;[2] and now the preferred name is “Juhuri” (literally, “Jewish”; note the rhoticism which goes back to an earlier linguistic form of their language).

Modern Judeo-Tat / Juhuri is definitely a language of its own, distinct from Persian on many levels; and yet linguists describe it alongside the Persian of the Islamic Republic of Iran, the Tajiki of Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, and the Dari-Kabuli of Afghanistan. The modern Judeo-Tat / Juhuri was engineered by Soviet linguists in 1920s and 1930s, and our knowledge of the older strata of this language is rather limited though not non-existent;[3] the present book closes the gap to a great extent as it reflects the language of Derbend’s Jews in the 1870s.

To complicate matters further, along with the Judeo-Tat and the Tati dialects studied by Yarshater, there is another continuum of dialects also called Tati which are / were spoken by Shi‘a and Sunni Muslims, and (in the past) by Armenians in the northeastern region of the Republic of Azerbaijan (and in Daghestan).[4] They were seen by scholars as lying somewhere between Persian dialects and the Caspian languages. There was a constant decline in the number of speakers due to Turkification and assimilation into Azeri identity of the Republic of Azerbaijan, however there is now a small revivalist movement found mostly on the internet.

As for the speakers of Judeo-Tati / Juhuri, the majority of them now live in Israel, the USA, Canada, and in the Russian Federation. It is an endangered language.

The author of the dictionary was Rabbi Ya‘aqov Yiṣḥaqī, who was born in Derbend in Daghestan in 1846 and passed away in Jerusalem from hunger and misery during the Young Turks’ seferberlik, shortly before the city was liberated by the British army, in the early summer of 1917. From 1868, Yiṣḥaqī served as the Chief Rabbi of Derbend and Daghestan. He spent time in the Land of Israel first in 1876, then in 1887, and finally established himself there in 1907. In that year, he and a group of Mountain Jews from Daghestan, along with some other Jews, established an agricultural settlement on land bought from a Lutheran German community; this is now the town of Be’er Ya‘aqov, “the well of Jacob,” named after the rabbi and author of the edited dictionary under review.

During his life, Yiṣḥaqī penned several religious and historical compositions in Hebrew, but also wrote an article in Russian for the Ministry of Interior. He worked with the prominent Russian-German Iranist Bernhard Dorn (1805-1881), and with Abraham Harkavy (1835-1919), the great scholar of Jewish manuscripts, both of whom stressed to the author that the translations of his dictionary entries should be in Russian (or German), and not in Hebrew, in order to make his work accessible to those who did not read the language.[5] And indeed, though Naftaly-Ṣebi / Nikolay Anisimov (1886-1966), himself a Mountain Jew and a scholar, gave a lecture at a Moscow institution in 1926-27 about “the Yiṣḥaqī’s Manuscript of the Judeo-Tati-Russian Dictionary,” nothing is known about this manuscript.[6] However, it seems that there was not only a Hebrew version of the Dictionary, but a Russian one, too. Dorn asked the author to compose a Tati grammar in Russian, too, and in Yiṣḥaqī’s notebooks there are traces of the initial stages of this work.[7]

In 1975, Yiṣḥaq Yiṣḥaqī, the son of the author, donated two of his father’s notebooks to the Ben-Zvi Institute for the Study of Jewish Communities in the East, an institution established by the second President of Israel, Yitṣhak ben Zvī, who had been Yiṣḥaq Yiṣḥaqī’s friend since their days in Ottoman Istanbul where they were both students. The book under review is the product of Professor Michael Zand’s decades-long study of these notebooks. The structure of the work indicates the extensive research and synthesis of its contents. The book’s table of contents is in Hebrew only. The preface, written in 1976 by Yiṣḥaq Yiṣḥaqī, the son of the author, is found on pp. 9-12; the introduction, pp. 13-27; the thesaurus proper, pp. 31-71; the notes, pp. 73-149; a list of abbreviations used in the notes to the dictionary, pp. 151-153; a list of abbreviations used in the MS, p. 155; and the bibliography, pp. 157-161.

Some examples of the entries in the dictionary (elucidated by Zand in his extensive notes):

nifri, “curse”; ‘asb,[8] “horse”; ‘ajal,[9] “death”; ‘aqraba”, “relations”; qadā, “disaster”; qarib, “proselyte[10]/stranger”; šovar, “a wife’s husband” (Persian: šawhar); šafaqat, “mercy”[11]; manqal, “grill”; kaqāz, “paper”; kayf, “delight, party”; nasus, “pump”, from Russian nasos; mīḥanaf, “sycophant”, a “fully assimilated” Hebraism; maqbūl, “sadness, worry”, a strange meaning of the word though attested in Tati sources collected by Griunberg; xilix, “a wild boar’s jaws”, from Turkic; yort, “property, inheritance”, from Turkic; yašāv, “rest, calmness”, apparently, a local Hebraism; yad, “alien, enemy”, from Turkic yat; yāqi, “enemy” (yāğī); ḥarōm, “forbidden”; zarrab, “money changer” (ṣarrāf); zīvan, “damage, loss” (ziyān); was, “enough” (bas); wasāl, “spring”; wa‘dā’, “time”, an old Aramaic word appearing in Judeo-Persian and Judeo-Middle-Qıpčaq. As well, there are quite a number of Turkic words; some words in the dictionary are also rendered in Arabic, like mīxag, “clove”, which is “qaranfīl in Arabic”;[12] and Zand suggested that these are reminders of the author’s life in the Holy Land.

This work is the final academic legacy of Professor Michael Zand, a great scholar of Persian and Tajiki poetry and literatures and the rich cultures of the Oriental Jewish communities of Greater Iran and the former Soviet Union.

[1]This small Hebrew book is the result of decades of work by the late Professor Michael Zand (1927-2018), may his memory be blessed. The book was published shortly before his death. The book is essentially an edition of a dictionary of the Judeo-Tat / Juhuri language with translations into Hebrew, written probably in the late 1870s, and Zand’s extensive notes on the entries.

[2]The name of the language has very little to do with the Tati dialects of the northern Islamic Republic of Iran which have been studied in Ehsan Yarshater, A Grammar of Southern Tati Dialects, Median Dialect Studies I (The Hague and Paris: Mouton and Co., 1969).

[3]See V.Miller, Materialy dlja izučenija jevrejsko-tatskogo jazyka, Vvedenije, teksty i slovar’ (Sankt-Peterburg: 1892); see also, Jevrejsko-tatskije mā‘nī“, Zapiski Vostočnogo otdelenija imperatorskogo russkago arxeologičeskago obščestva, t. 21, 1911-1912 (Sankt-Peterburg, 1913).

[4]A.L. Griunberg, Jazyk severoazerbajdžanskix tatov, Izdatel’stvo Akademii Nauk SSSR (Moscow, 1963). It is called zuhun tati, farsi, parsi.

[5]Rabbi Ya‘akov Itzhaki, Thesaurus of Judeo-Tat (Juhuri) Language of the Mountain Jews of the Caucasus, edited with an Introduction and Notes by Michael Zand (Jerusalem: Ben-Zvi Institute for the Study of Jewish Communities in the East, Yad Itzhak Ben-Zvi and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2016), 21.

[6]Itzacki, Thesaurus, 23.

[7]Itzacki, Thesaurus,16.

[8]Note the use of the ‘Ayin, frequent in the spelling of this word in Judeo-Persian.

[9]Ibid.

[10]This meaning is also attested in Judeo-Middle-Qıpčaq.

[11]Ibid.

[12] Itzacki, Thesaurus, 22, 111.

The First World Conference on Human Rights and the Challenge of Enforcement

Andrew S. Thompson Volume 3, Number 4, Winter 2019

Andrew S. Thompson <asthompson@balsillieschool.ca> is an adjunct assistant professor of political science at the University of Waterloo and a fellow at both the Centre for International Governance Innovation and the Balsillie School of International Affairs. He is the author of In Defence of Principles: NGOs and Human Rights in Canada (2010), and On the Side of the Angels: Canada and the United Nations Commission on Human Rights (2017). A portion of this article is based on “Tehran 1968 and Reform of the UN Human Rights System,” Journal of Human Rights 14, no.1 (2015): 84-100.

Introduction

2018 marks the fiftieth anniversary of the First World Conference on Human Rights in Tehran, Iran. The aim of this special issue is to assess its significance half-a-century after the fateful event. As the other contributors have shown collectively, the conference’s legacy is multifaceted and varied, depending on the vantage points and political agendas of the actor or actors in question. As Roland Burke argues so persuasively, for Africa, Asia and the Middle East, Tehran was an opportunity to exert its influence over the UN Human Rights System, to call into question the vary notion of universalism generally and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights specifically, and assert the primacy of development over rights.[1] For the West, Tehran was a bust on several fronts. The conference solidified the fissure between North and South on questions of human rights that had been growing since the early 1950s beginning with the negotiations to draft binding international law – specifically the covenants on Political and Civil Rights, and Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights – at the now defunct United Nations Commission on Human Rights (CHR). For the United Nations human rights project more broadly, Tehran was a pivotal moment, one that brought to a head many of the failings of the UN human rights system that had been festering since the establishment of the Commission in 1946 and would continue to plague the project well after the conference was over, most notably questions of enforcement.

Enforcement and the Commission on Human Rights

Human rights – as articulated in the 1942 Atlantic Charter – had been an important rhetorical tool for mobilizing support for the Allied war effort during the Second World War, and that after the war the founders of the United Nations understood its symbolic value to the post-war order.[2] But the UN Charter only spoke of human rights in very general terms, and the United Nations was only given the authority and responsibility to “promote” and “encourage” respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms (Article 1.3 of UN Charter) through international cooperation. It has no authority to “intervene in matters which are essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of any state” unless authorized by the Security Council (Article 2.7 of UN Charter).

When the Commission on Human Rights – the principal body within the UN responsible for human rights and the predecessor of the current Human Rights Council – was established in 1946, the enforcement of human rights took a back seat to codifying rights into law, or standard-setting, as it is also known. In a move that critics have pointed to as an example of the hollowness of the UN human rights project, the Commission in 1947 decided that it would take no action on the thousands of letters it received from individuals around the world who hoped that it would hear and act on their complaints.[3] It was a disappointing decision to be sure, but not one that was out of step with the times. Indeed, it reflected both the cautiousness of the day and the widely held view that human rights were a domestic matter between states and their citizens.

This particular outcome, however, was not pre-ordained. At the first meeting of the Commission on January 28 at Lake Success, officials agreed that “communications received would be brought to the knowledge of members of the Commission but they could not give them to the press.” Following the vote, the delegate from the Philippines noted that they had just established a policy that allowed member states to learn the identities of those filing the complaints against them, thus inadvertently exposing these individuals to potential reprisals. Recognizing the errors of their ways, the Commission struck a sub-Committee to recommend a more sensible policy for handling the appeals for help it received. The sub-committee proposed the creation of a permanent body consisting of three members of the Commission whose task it would be to review the communications and report back to the Commission at large. Prior to its meetings, the Secretary-General would be responsible for compiling “a confidential list of communications concerning human rights.” This list would then be disseminated to all members of the Commission, who were to be granted the “right upon request to consult the Secretariat, the originals of these communications.”[4] But even this was deemed to be too much of an intrusion on the domestic affairs of member states. Those around the table quickly determined that the Commission should not have the authority to investigate or act on the information it received.

This reluctance continued as the Commission set out to fulfil its first task, namely to draft an international bill of rights. Indeed, the drafters of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), the foundational document in international human rights law, initially hoped for a binding treaty. But this idea was soon abandoned on the grounds that the political climate of the day would not allow for anything more than an aspirational document. Granted, the Commission quickly turned its attention to drafting the International Covenants on Political and Civil Rights and Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, but the stickiest points were arguably the articles that dealt with matters of enforcement.

Part of the issue was that the West had no interest in enforcement. At the beginning of the Commission’s session in 1953, the U.S. announced it would not be ratifying the Covenants. Although Washington’s allies were all, to one degree or another, sympathetic to Washington’s reservations, reactions by member states of the developing world was far less generous. Chile’s delegate, Umberto Dias Casanueva, lamented that the U.S.’s decision would have “tremendous repercussion on public opinion,” and could lead to a loss of faith in the Commission, while Italo Perotti of Uruguay warned that “the peoples of the world would not understand such reluctance.” India’s delegate, Mrs. Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay, concurred; she cautioned that when “a country which had played a great part in the evolution of democracy announced that it would not ratify such a document, it raised doubt among the peoples.”[5] The following day during the third plenary session, Jose Ingles of the Philippines told the Commission that the U.S. position was both “deeply regrettable,” and misguided.[6]

In lieu of signing on to the covenants, Washington proposed a three-point “Human Rights Action Programme” for the Commission. According to Tolley, it was “uncontroversial” and not terribly effective, but had the potential – which would never be realized – to serve as a “tool for monitoring compliance with international norms.”[7] If adopted, the Programme would require governments to submit annual reports to the Commission on the human rights situations in their countries. The plan also called for the use of independent rapporteurs or expert advisors to counsel governments in the preparation of their reports. Finally, it recommended the establishment of “advisory services” for member states on “specific aspects of human rights.”[8]

Unsure of what to make of the Programme of Action and under pressure to provide feedback to the Secretary-General by 1 October 1953, Ottawa took its cues from the British, who disliked the proposal considerably. On 4 September, Canada’s High Commissioner informed the Department that London considered the Action Programme to be “in substance almost as objectionable as the Covenants,” and intended “to adopt stalling tactics in the Assembly” in the hopes of having the proposal “referred back to the Commission on Human Rights for further study.” According to the memorandum, the British did “not like the idea of reports from member governments,” did not consider human rights to be “an appropriate subject for technical assistance,” and were of the view that “separate studies of specific rights are unnecessary since they would overlap with the Human Rights Yearbook,” one of the annual tasks of the Commission.[9]

Ottawa concurred with its British colleagues that the Action Programme – which was “obviously designed to offset the effect of the United States’ announced decision not to ratify the Covenants at the present time (or in the near future)” – “did not merit a particularly favourable reply.”[10] Although intended to serve as a peer-review mechanism, officials at External Affairs were of the opinion that the reports “were unlikely to yield tangible results,” and, above all, would cause “constitutional difficulties” for the country. Furthermore, the prospect of having independent rapporteurs scrutinize Canadian policies was no more appealing. The concern was that these individuals could, if unsatisfied with the level of cooperation with governments, decide “to report separately to the Commission.” As such, “the Government would have no control of what would be sent to the United Nations and official United Nations publications might include statements in relation to Canadian affairs with which the Canadian government would not agree.”[11]

Even so, Ottawa was reluctant to oppose the Action Programme publicly. Its fear was that any overt lack of support would lead to negative repercussions at home, and might require the federal government to provide “some justification for the existence of the Human Rights Commission and satisfy to some extent at least those elements of the population which feel strongly [in favour] on this subject both internationally and in the domestic field.”[12] With no alternative proposal of its own, Ottawa opted to “await the outcome of the [General] Assembly debate before making any commitment.” Its hope was that “a lack of response from member governments might cause [the Americans] to let the proposal die a natural death.”[13]

Perhaps nowhere was this politicization along regional lines more apparent than during the drafting of the terms of reference of the nine-member Human Rights Committee (HRC), a body whose broad mandate would be to “examine complaints on the violation of human rights” and “establish the factual state of affairs.”[14] One question before the Commission was which rights the Committee would rule on, and which ones would fall outside its purview. Most Western European and Others Group (WEOG) members of the Commission had initially been supportive of the HRC when it had first been proposed earlier in the 1950s. But that was before economic, social and cultural rights were added to the mix. In 1953, the U.S., French and UK delegates all supported a complaints system for the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR). But they opposed any measures beyond simply a reporting system for the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) on the grounds that the rights it codified were aspirational, not judiciable. In contrast, the Polish and Chilean delegates endorsed implementation measures for both covenants, but only on the condition that they “take into account the special circumstances of each State” and “be adapted to the degree of development and facilities available to each country,” which would, in effect, mean that developing states could not be held to full account for any violations of either treaty. This was something the WEOG could not accept.

The members of the Commission also jockeyed to control the selection processes to determine both the composition of the HRC, and its potential caseload. With respect to the former, the original proposal was that the International Court of Justice would pick the jurists in order to ensure that qualified individuals sat on the Committee. The Yugoslav delegate, however, countered that the members of the Committee should be elected by the General Assembly, which was not controlled by the WEOG, so as to avoid the possibility that the HRC would become “a mere tool in the hands of the imperialists.”[15] As for the latter, imperialism, or more specifically decolonization, was very much on the minds of those states from the developing world. They contended that the HRC should have the authority to hear complaints from “non-self-governing territories.” Indeed, they saw the Committee as an instrument through which these territories could argue their cases for independence.[16] Predictably, several members of the WEOG – Australia, Belgium, France, Sweden, the UK and the United States – all objected on the grounds that any provision directed at the administering powers was inherently discriminatory.[17] René Cassin, one of the original drafters of the UDHR and a future Nobel laureate (he was awarded the prize in 1968), told the Commission that the Human Rights Committee possessed “neither the qualification nor the means to deal with communications regarding the people’s right of self-determination…it ought not to be given the responsibility for carrying out tasks which were essentially political.” On this matter, the Soviets and Ukrainians sided with the West, their position being that the “system of implementation now being drawn up by the Commission was a violation of the principle of non-interference in the domestic affairs of States.”[18]

As Europe’s empires disintegrated in the late-1950s there was a flurry of activity at the UN on matters relating to decolonization and bringing an end to racial discrimination, all of which had implications for the UN human rights system’s capacity to enforce international law. On 14 December 1960, the General Assembly passed the Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples.[19] In 1961 and 1962, respectively it established the Special Committee on the Situation with Regard to the Implementation of the Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples, which “took over the functions previously exercised by the Special Committee for South-West Africa and the Committee on information from Non-Self-Governing Territories,” and the Special Committee on Apartheid “to deal with the racial practices of the Republic of South Africa.” Three years later in 1965, a reporting system was implemented in which country reporting would take place on a “three-year cycle, with civil and political rights in the first year, economic, social and cultural rights in the second, and freedom of information in the third.”[20]

The crowning achievement was the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, adopted by the General Assembly in 1965. Paul Gordon Lauren suggests that the Convention was groundbreaking for a number of reasons: it “marked for the first time in history a standard-setting and binding treaty that defined racial discrimination, pledged themselves to adopt all necessary measures to prevent and eradicate it, agreed that they could be subject to criticism from other states party to the Convention and individual petitioners, and, significantly, authorized the creation of the first international machinery for any United Nations-sponsored human rights instrument to implement compliance with the treaty itself.”[21] While the treaty-monitoring body, the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD), was in many respects a ground breaking innovation, agreement was only possible because of the inclusion of a reservations clause, which stated that “a reservation shall be considered incompatible or inhibitive if at least two-thirds of the States Parties to this Convention object to it.”[22]

The CERD was only the first of a number of important developments in the mid-1960s relating to the enforcement capacity of the UN human rights system. In 1966, the ICCPR and ICESCR were opened for signature at the General Assembly, the former of which included a treaty-monitoring body, the Committee on Human Rights. The following year the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC), in which the Commission was housed, adopted resolution 1235 (XLII) of 1967, which authorized the Commission to receive petitions, investigate cases of gross and consistent patterns of human rights violations including “policies of racial discrimination and segregation and of apartheid, in all countries.”[23] Moreover, membership on the CHR increased from twenty-one to thirty-two, which shifted the balance of power from the West to newly decolonized states from Africa and Asia. According to Howard Tolley, these new members “transformed” the Commission. They aligned themselves with the Soviet Bloc countries, forming “a new majority that regularly outvoted the Western and Latin American members,” their principal aims being, “to combat racial discrimination and advance the right of self-determination.”[24] As planning got underway for the First World Conference on Human Rights, the WEOG reacted to these developments by contemplating a series of reforms to be presented at Tehran, reforms that were motivated as much by a desire to take back control of the Commission’s agenda as they were by any principled commitment to strengthening the enforcement capacity of the UN human rights regime.

Tehran and the Reforms that Never Were

In the months prior to Tehran, many members of the WEOG had misgivings about the conference, which were by no means unfounded. Indeed, the meetings of the preparatory committee responsible for organizing the event were fraught with tension. For example, delegates of the western states favoured granting wide access to the conference only to NGOs that were “primarily concerned with human rights” (virtually all of which were based in western countries), the Soviets wanted them restricted entirely, while the African and Asian delegates called for limited participation for NGOs and equal representation across regions. Unable to come to agreement, the committee referred the question back to the General Assembly on the understanding that access would indeed be “limited,” although by how much was unclear. The host Iranians preferred to limit participation to about twelve NGOs on the ground that that was all the conference facilities could accommodate. Much to the displeasure of the Soviet and Afro-Asian blocs, Canada co-sponsored a resolution at the Third Committee of the General Assembly that granted NGOs permission to circulate briefs about the state of human rights in particular countries prior to the proceedings.[25] Of particular concern was Item 11 of the provisional agenda, which dealt with the “formulation and preparation of a human rights programme” for the UN, and included, among other sensitive issues, “measures to achieve rapid and total elimination of all forms of racial discrimination in general and of the policy of apartheid in particular;” “the importance of the universal realization of the right of peoples to self-determination and of the speedy granting of independence to colonial countries and peoples for the effective guarantee and observance of all human rights;” and the “international machinery for the effective implementation of instruments in the field of human rights.”[26] The first priorities were not only highly charged politically, but were specifically directed at the records of the WEOG, specifically their support for apartheid governments in Southern Africa. On 22 March 1968, the day after the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, Ashkar Marof, the Guinean ambassador to the UN and chair of the Special Committee on Apartheid, accused European governments of aligning themselves with “fascist regimes or racist dictatorship to oppose non-white liberation,” and suggested that the “culpable impotence of the international community” had sparked a race war, something the British found to be particularly inflammatory.[27] At least initially, the West hoped that this last piece – the “international machinery” – might be tailored to undermine the ones that came before it.

There was no shortage of good ideas in circulation. One was to establish a High Commissioner for Human Rights, an idea that had been around since the mid-1940s but had become entangled in Cold War politics (the Soviets in particular were not keen on the idea), and WEOG member states were only supportive if the High Commissioner’s authority was “strictly [limited].”[28] Moreover, the François “Papa Doc” Duvalier regime in Haiti had shrewdly (and ironically) sponsored a resolution that equated “practices of discrimination, colonialism, and slavery,” as crimes against humanity, and called for the creation of a “Human Rights Commissioner-delegate” whose mandate would be to gather evidence of human rights violations in “colonial territories,” something the Europeans could not accept.[29] As such, WEOG opted not to pursue the matter. A second potential reform proposed by Sean MacBride of the International Commission of Jurists was the establishment of an international penal tribunal – an International Criminal Court – for the most serious human rights violations. It was by no means a new idea, but it too was not pursued because of the geo-politics of the day. The Canadian government, for example, was of the mind that “certain countries” would attempt to advance their political agendas “through an over-liberal interpretation of the term ‘genocide.’”[30]

London contemplated more serious reforms. Specifically, it proposed replacing the Commission with a Human Rights Council “on par with and independent of ECOSOC” – specifically its Social Committee, a body that was “primarily concerned with questions of inter-agency cooperation and economic development,” – whose purpose would be to “rationalize” the UN’s human rights activities, and “help to restore human rights question to a position of prominence in the United Nations.”[31] Its reasons for doing so were not motivated solely by a desire to advance rights. Rather, London was resentful that the Commission had “turned its attention almost completely away from technical questions of human rights to become another propaganda organ of [the] UN for Afro-Asian and Communist Bloc views on such subjects as Vietnam, Rhodesia and South Africa.”[32]

London’s allies were generally sympathetic to the proposal, at least in principal. There was general agreement that the bureaucratic pathologies of ECOSOC hampered the work of the CHR and its Sub-Commissions, and that cutting ECOSOC out of the process of setting human rights standards would indeed streamline the UN’s human rights activities.[33] Moreover, the proposal did represent a bold reform, one that was in keeping with the overall vision of the conference. At least in theory, in elevating the importance of human rights within the United Nations it would have advanced efforts within the organization to enforce the standards that it set.

But the costs of pursuing the reform were high, and there was no guarantee that it would be adopted. For starters, the Soviet bloc countries, which had abstained on the vote to adopt the UDHR, would undoubtedly oppose any efforts to strengthen the UN’s ability to advance political and civil rights.[34] Moreover, such a reform would potentially require amending articles 7(1), 62(2) and 68 of the UN Charter (the articles that govern the Commission), something members of the WEOG were not keen to do.[35] The safer route would be to try to bolster the authority and enforcement capacity of the Commission.

The Member States of the WEOG had good reason to be cautious. Anti-western hostility had grown in the lead-up to the conference. As Burke has argued, the conference reflected the “UN’s postcolonial transformation,” and the assertion of a “collective rights ideology” based on “the primacy of economic development driven by a powerful, centralized state.”[36] Of course, Tehran did not deal with questions of enforcement. Ironically, Haiti submitted a resolution to establish a Council outside of ECOSOC. But it was never debated due to “a lack of time.”[37]

Enforcement post-Tehran

The history of the diplomacy leading up to the Tehran World Conference on Human Rights in 1968 is not without relevance to contemporary challenges associated with enforcing international human rights law. The 1960s was time of great innovation and creativity, a time in which the seeds of the contemporary human rights system were sown though never permitted to flower. But the proposed enforcement mechanisms of the era were not solely intended to rectify gaps in the human rights governance architecture or limiting the ways in which states could treat their own citizens. Rather, they were also about control of the Commission following decolonization. Still, while Tehran was a missed opportunity for reform-minded states, it was an event that was in many ways ahead of its time, and marked the end of days when the CHR could only focus its attention on standard-setting.

The first major breakthrough occurred in 1970 with the adoption of ECOSOC Resolution 1503 (XLVIII) authorizing the Sub-Commission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities, which reported to the Commission on Human Rights but was made up on individual experts acting in their own capacities rather than state officials, “to appoint a ‘working group’ to investigate specific allegations of human rights violations,” which would then share its findings with the Commission. As Wheeler notes, resolution 1503 “required strict confidentiality be maintained until any investigation had been completed,” but under the terms of resolution 1235, the Commission then had the authority to publicize the findings of the working group.[38] But the gains derived from resolution 1503 were short-lived. Displeased with the prospect of having their human rights records scrutinized in an international forum, a number of member states actively worked to undermine the Commission’s activities, and mute the criticisms of their records (a practice that ultimately led to the dissolution of the Commission in 2006).

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, new treaty-monitoring mechanisms were established, such as the Committee Against Torture (CAT), along with special rapporteurs responsible who “report and advise on human rights from a thematic or country-specific perspective.”[39] Ted Piccone of the Brookings Institute rightly argues in his book on the special procedures and treaty-monitoring bodies, that “states can be persuaded but rarely compelled to do the right thing.”[40] Moreover, the mechanisms are generally “slow and cumbersome, while too many states ignore their decisions” and are reluctant to “cooperate with rapporteurs.” Coupling these problems with inadequate training for staff and a “morass of bureaucratic entanglements, tensions and clashes,” it is little wonder that the system has failed to live up to expectations.[41] Despite these shortcomings, Piccone contends that the special procedures provide a number of critical services from fact-finding to norm development, to connecting a diverse set of UN stakeholders, to providing victims with access to the UN system. “By most accounts,” he notes, “they have played a critical role in shaping the content of international human rights norms, shedding light on how states comply with such norms, and advancing measures to improve respect for them. They are considered by many to be, in the words of Secretary-General Kofi Annan, ‘the crown jewel of the system.’”[42]

One of the great innovations of the post-Cold War era has been the creation of the Office for the High Commissioner of Human Rights following the Second World Conference on Human Rights in Vienna in 1993, something that had not been possible in Tehran. The High Commissioner’s mandate is to lead “the UN’s global efforts to promote and protect all human rights for all people.”[43] Despite the lofty ideals that inform the Office, it is often an impossible position for reasons that are not unexpected. The current High Commissioner, Prince Zeid bin Ra’ad Zeid al-Hussein of Jordan, who had been quick to criticize the permanent five powers for their human rights records, including the United States, has said that he will not seek a second mandate once his current one expires in August 2018, because to do so “in the current geo-political context,” would require “bending a knee in supplication,” thus undermining the integrity of the office.[44]

Throughout modern history there has been a norm that former heads of state are immune from prosecution in other countries for acts of war or human rights violations. In the 1990s things looked like they were changing. Following the atrocities in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia, the UN established special tribunals to try perpetrators. What followed was a furious effort internationally to establish the International Criminal Court, a permanent body that would serve as the bedrock of international criminal justice. Moreover, the arrest of former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet in 1998 in the UK following an extradition request from Spain sent shockwaves throughout the world. Meanwhile, states around the world introduced universal jurisdiction laws that allow them to try alleged perpetrators of mass crimes on their own soil, even if the crime happened somewhere else. All of a sudden, it looked like no one was above the law.

Sadly, the promise of the late 1990s was short-lived. After its election, the George W. Bush administration actively tried to undermine the International Criminal Court.[45] It was by no means alone. Indeed, the court is going through a legitimacy crisis at the moment, the perception being that it is a court of the strong against the weak. This criticism is particularly acute in part of Africa. Indeed, Burundi withdrew from the Court in 2017, and the Jacob Zuma government of South Africa attempted to withdraw, and would have done so had the South African courts not ruled that doing such a move would be unconstitutional.[46] More than this, universal jurisdiction laws have been weakened, and states have resisted going after former heads of states from other countries for fear of the potential for retaliation. The exception to this seems to be the Global Magnitzky Acts, which give governments the ability to freeze the assets of known human rights violators. But for all intents and purposes, the norm of immunity for former leaders seems to have been re-affirmed.

Of course, the most recent innovation is the Human Rights Council, an idea whose origins can be traced back to the conference in Tehran. In March 2006, the United Nations General Assembly adopted Resolution 60/251 by a vote of 170 in favour, 4 against with 3 abstentions, which called for replacing the CHR, which had lost much of its credibility, with a new Council.[47] The Council is, in many ways, a significant upgrade over its predecessor. It reports to the General Assembly rather than ECOSOC, and it meets at least three times per year and can call emergency sessions. It also administers the Universal Periodic Review, a peer-review system in which all states have their rights records examined every four years, and General Assembly’s decision in 2011 to suspend Libya from the Council in response to the Gaddafi regime’s excessive use of force to crack down on popular anti-government protests set a “crucial precedent” and signaled that the Council was at least capable of acting in a way that the Commission could not, at least when there is the will to do so.[48] However, individual member states continue to use their influence to deflect criticism of their behavior and that of their allies and too often its actions become hostage to politics, all of which serves as a powerful reminder of the limits of the ability of the international human rights regime to move beyond standard-setting.

Conclusion

For the West, the First World Conference on Human Rights was a disappointment, an event that entrenched the shift in the balance of power on the Commission that had begun in the early 1950s and was accelerated with the expansion of its membership in the mid-1960s. Although many observers deemed the event to be a failure, the reforms that took place in the years and decades that followed suggest that the conference did mark a turning point for the UN human rights system, if for no other reason than that it forced the international community to confront the issue of enforcement, even if its reasons for doing so sometimes had little to do with a desire to uphold universal human rights. But despite the gains that have been made over the course of the last five decades, there is still much work to be done. Indeed, fifty years after Tehran, the central challenge confronting the international human rights regime is still that the protection of rights is rarely if ever just about rights, and there is little evidence that this will change any time soon. Until this day comes, the promise of the First World Conference on Human Rights will, sadly, remain unfulfilled.

[1]See Roland Burke, “From Individual Rights to National Development: The First UN International Conference on Human Rights in Tehran, 1968,” Journal of World History 19, no. 3 (2008): 275-96.

[2]See Elizabeth Borgwardt, A New Deal for the World: America’s Vision of Human Rights (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005).

[3]Andrew S. Thompson, On the Side of the Angels: Canada and the United Nations Commission on Human Rights (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2017), 19.

[4]E/CN.4/SR.3, “Commission on Human Rights: Summary Record of the Third Committee,” Lake Success, New York, 28 January 1947, 7; E/CN.4/14, “Commission on Human Rights: Report of the Sub-Committee on the Handling of Communications,” 4 February 1947, 2.

[5]“Commission on Human Rights, Ninth Session: Opening of the Discussion on the Draft Covenants,” Information Centre, European Office of the United Nations, Geneva, Press Release No. HUM/60, 8 April 1953, 1-3.

[6]“Commission on Human Rights, Ninth Session: Several Delegations This Morning Explained Their Position Following…,” Information Centre, European Office of the United Nations, Geneva, Press Release No. HUM/61, 9 April 1953, 2.

[7]Howard Tolley, The UN Human Rights Commission (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1987) 32, 42.

[8]For the full text of the three components of the “Human Rights Action Programme,” see E/CN.4/L.266/Rev.2, 28 May 1953; E/CN.4/L.267/Rev.1, 18 May 1953; and E/CN.4/L.268, 7 May 1953.

[9]LAC, Department of External Affairs fonds, RG25, “United Nations Economic and Social Council – Commission on Human Rights,” vol. 6409, file no. 5475-W-40, pt. 8, file “Memorandum: No. 1525 re: 8^th Session of General Assembly,” 4 September 1953.

[10]Ibid., “Memorandum from the United Nations Division: Human Rights,” 17 September 1953, 2; and “Memorandum from Charles Ritchie, Acting Under-Secretary of State for External Affairs to the Deputy Minister of Justice,” 25 September 1953.

[11]Ibid., “Memorandum: “Report of the Economic and Social Council: Comments on U.S. Proposals re: Human Rights Programme,” 8 September 1953, 2-3.

[12]Ibid., “Memorandum from the United Nations Division: Human Rights,” 17 September 1953, 2-3.

[13]Ibid., “Memorandum: “Third Committee – Human Rights” 28 September 1953.

[14]“Roundup of the Ninth Session of the Commission of Human Rights,” Information Centre, European Office of the United Nations, Geneva, Press Release No. HUM/119, 1 June 1953, 3-4.

[15]“Commission on Human Rights, Ninth Session: The General Discussion on Measures of Implementation Continues,” Information Centre, European Office of the United Nations, Geneva, Press Release No. HUM/64, 13 April 1953; “Commission on Human Rights, Ninth Session: End of General Discussion on Measures of Implementation,” Press Release No. HUM/65, 13 April 1953; and “Commission on Human Rights, Ninth Session: Continuation of the Discussion of Article 52, Press Release No. HUM/76, 22 April 1953.

[16]“Commission on Human Rights, Ninth Session: Adoption of Articles 50 and 51 – Preliminary Consideration of Article 52,” Press Release No. HUM/74, 21 April 1953, 2.

[17]On 27 April 1953, the Commission overwhelmingly rejected a proposal that would have granted the “right of petition to individuals and non-governmental organizations” at the Committee on the grounds that it would open the door for politicized attacks on states framed as rights complaints, and that individuals’ status in international law should not be elevated to that of states. See United Nations Press Release SOC/1651, “Human Rights Commission Approves Draft Article Stipulating Procedure Whereby States Only May Bring Charges of Violation of Human Rights Before the UN,” 28 April 1953. See also “Commission of Human Rights, Ninth Session,” Press Release No. HUM/119, 1 June 1953, 4.

[18]“Commission of Human Rights, Ninth Session: Continuation of the Discussion of Article 52,” Press Release No. HUM/76, 22 April 1953, 1-2.

[19]UNGA Resolution 1541 (XV), 14 December 1960.

[20]Roger S. Clark, “Human Rights Strategies of the 1960s Within the United Nations: A Tribute to the Late Kamleshwar Das,” Human Rights Quarterly 21 (1999): 316-17, 26.

[21]Paul Gordon Lauren, “To Preserve and Build on Its Achievements and to Redress its Shortcomings: The Journey from the Commission on Human Rights to the Human Rights Council,” Human Rights Quarterly 29 (2007): 319.

[22]Egon Schwelb, “The International Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Racial Discrimination,” International and Comparative Law Quarterly 15, no. 4 (1966): 1056.

[23]According to Wheeler, Arab states used the Commission’s newly expanded mandate “to seek condemnation of Israel for its occupation of Arab territories during the Six Day War, which ended within days of the passage of Resolution 1235.” Ron Wheeler, “The United Nations Commission on Human Rights, 1982-1997,” 76. Up until 1974, Resolution 1235 was only used against Israel and South Africa.

[24]Howard Tolley, “Decision-Making at the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, 1979-82,” Human Rights Quarterly 5, no. 1 (February 1983): 27-29; Clark, “Human Rights Strategies of the 1960s Within the United Nations,” 319.

[25]LAC, SSEA fonds, RG 6 “Report of the Canadian Representative on the Preparatory Committee on an International Conference on Human Rights,” c. June 1967, 7-8; LAC, SSEA fonds, RG6, “International Conference on Human Rights, Teheran, 1968,” box 119, file, pt. 1, “Telex from Canadian delegation in New York to External Affairs: XXII UNGA: Third Committee: International Year of Human Rights,” 12 December 1967, 1-2.

[26]Item 11 stated: “Formulation and preparation of a human rights program to be undertaken subsequent to the celebration of the International Year for Human Rights for the promotion of universal respect for, and observance of, human rights and fundamental freedoms for all without distinction as to race, colour, sex, language, or religion, in particular:

Measures to achieve rapid and total elimination of all forms of racial discrimination in general and of the policy of apartheid in particular;
the importance of the universal realization of the right of peoples to self-determination and of the speedy granting of independence to colonial countries and peoples for the effective guarantee and observance of all human rights;
the question of slavery and the slave-trade in all their manifestations and practices, including the slavery-like practices of apartheid and colonialism;
measures to promote women’s rights in the modern world including a unified long-term United Nations programme for the advancement of women;
measures to strengthen the defence of human rights and freedoms of individuals;
international machinery for the effective implementation of international instruments in the field of human rights;
other measures to strengthen the activities of the United Nations in promoting the full enjoyment of political, civil, economic, social and cultural rights, including the improvement of methods and techniques and such institutional and organizational arrangements as may be required.

“International Conference on Human Rights, 1968: Provisional Agenda,” A/CONF.32/1, 1-2.

[27]LAC, SSEA fonds, RG6, “International Conference on Human Rights, Teheran, 1968,” box 119, file, pt. 2, “Telex from Permanent Mission in New York to Ottawa re: International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination: Marof statement,” 22 March 1968, 1-3.

[28]Ibid., “Telex from External Affairs to London re: Human Rights Conference – Teheran,” 6 March 1968, 5.

[29]Ibid., “Telex from Teheran to External re: UN Conference on Human Rights,” 28 April 1989, 2-3.

[30]LAC, RG6, box 119, file, pt. 2, “International Conference on Human Rights, Tehran, 1968,” “Telegram from External Affairs to London re: Human Rights Conference – Tehran,” 6 March 1968, 2; “Telegram from Teheran to External Affairs re: Human Rights Conference: Draft Resolution on Human Rights and Armed Conflict,” 6 May 1968, 1-3.

[31]LAC, SSEA fonds, RG6, “International Conference on Human Rights, Teheran, 1968,” box 119, file, pt. 1, “Proposal for a New Human Rights Council,” c. 1968, 1-2.

[32]LAC, SSEA fonds, RG6, “International Conference on Human Rights, Teheran, 1968,” box 119, file, pt. 2, “Telex from London to Ottawa,” 26 March 1968, 1.

[33]The perception was that the Third Committee had become a “rubber stamp” for decisions made by the UNHRC and the Commission on the Status of Women, and that, despite scrutinizing treaties produced by its subsidiary bodies, it made few substantive contributions of its own. “Proposal for a New Human Rights Council,” 1-2, 4.

[34]Ibid., 3.

[35]“Proposal for a New Human Rights Council,” c. 1968, 2-3.

[36]Burke, Decolonization, 284-87.

[37]United Nations, Final Act of the International Conference on Human Rights (New York: United Nations, 1968), 46.

[38]Ron Wheeler, “The United Nations Commission on Human Rights, 1982-1997: A Study of Targeted Resolutions,” Canadian Journal of Political Science/Revue canadienne de science politique 32, no. 1 (2009): 76.

[39]“Special Procedures of the Human Rights Council,” www.ohchr.org/EN/HRBodies/SP/Pages/Welcomepage.aspx.

[40]Ted Piccone, Catalyst for Change: How the UN’s Independent Experts Promote Human Rights (Brookings Institute Press, Washington D.C., 2012), 1.

[41]Ibid., 3-4, 18, 58-59.

[42]Ibid., 5.

[43]“Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights,” www.unfoundation.org/how-to-help/donate/ohchr.html.

[44]As quoted in “UN rights chief refuses to ‘bend knee’ after US clash, will not seek second term,” The Jordan Times, 22 December 2017, www.jordantimes.com/news/region/un-rights-chief-refuses-bend-knee-after-us-clash-will-not-seek-second-term.

[45]See Erna Paris, The Sun Climbs Slow: Justice in the Age of Imperial America (Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf Canada, 2008).

[46]Norimitsu Onishi, “South Africa Reverses Withdrawal From International Criminal Court,” New York Times, 8 March 2017, www.nytimes.com/2017/03/08/world/africa/south-africa-icc-withdrawal.html.

[47]Those countries that voted against the resolution were the US, Israel, Palau and Marshall Islands, while Iran, Venezuela, Belarus each abstained.

[48]Thomas G. Weiss, What’s Wrong with the United Nations and How to Fix It, 2^nd ed. (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012), 43, 152.

Through Thick and Thin: An Interview with Hamid Naficy

Kaveh Askari Volume 3, Number 3, Fall 2018

Kaveh Askari <askarik1@msu.edu> is an Associate Professor of English and Film Studies at Michigan State University.

This transcript is an edited version of an eighty-minute interview conducted at Northwestern University on January 5, 2018 under the auspices of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies. The Fieldnotes project of SCMS aims to trace, through discussions of the career trajectories of pioneers of film and media studies, developments that have shaped–and continue to shape—the expanding field.

Kaveh Askari: Let’s start a little earlier than some professional biographies and talk about childhood experience, because it is something you have written about and something that scholars working in exile sometimes braid into their work.

Hamid Naficy: I was born and raised through high school in the city of Isfahan in Iran. As a kid, my first memory of movie-watching is going to the theatre and the movie-house with my dad. Thief of Baghdad was one of the early ones I remember. I also watched a number of films in the fifties that were based on literature, like King Vidor’s War and Peace and Jean-Paul Le Chanois’ Les Misérables. I had read the novels before. In this case, one medium sort of led me to the other. I think one of the early intersections of two media or intertextuality for me as a kid happened there. I had read the novels, I would go to see the movies. Then a neighbour of ours gave me a 35mm Agfa camera and I took this camera with me to see the movies. I clearly remember trying to take a picture of Audrey Hepburn in War and Peace; I was holding the camera like this, holding my breath, making sure that my hand wouldn’t shake when I took the picture. That’s how from early on I had a fairly multi-media relationship with film. Just to answer your question a little bit more, the role of foreign cultural societies in my childhood was very important. The Soviets had their Iran-Soviet Cultural Relations Society in Isfahan, the British had The British Council, and the Americans had the Iran-America Society, where they not only showed films, but also taught languages and had libraries. Interestingly, when I was in elementary school the United States Information Agency, USIA, began to train Iranians in making documentaries. They brought a whole new phenomenon of film screening in Iran, as well, which involved showing films via mobile film units. These were Jeeps that had a driver who was also the projectionist. He would carry 16mm Bell & Howell projectors with screens. He would come to our school every Thursday afternoon, the day before the weekend, and set up his screen in our library and show a USIA film.

KA: All USIA films or other kinds of films?

HN: USIA films, which included films on development and agriculture, Iran News newsreels shots in Iran, and newsreels about life in the United States. He would travel from that school to villages nearby and show the films. The thing which is remarkable for me is that I have a notebook that contains 16 film reviews which I had written of USIA films at age nine while attending that school. I don’t think that was based on my own initiative. I think that was a requirement by an enlightened teacher. So that’s another aspect of film viewing and reviewing and criticism which was embedded into my experience from early on.

KA: So, there are two different dimensions to the film-going that you are talking about. One is kind of an institutional dimension with USIA educational film; the other is commercial film-going. Were there overlaps between these two worlds in terms of film fans or was that something unique to your particular educational experience?

HN: I think anybody who was going to that elementary school (called Nemuneh Elementary) had similar experiences. By the way, that school was built by funding from USIA in Iran, and served as a model for modern schools. It had an open-stack library, which was very unusual. All the libraries in Isfahan in those days were closed stacks. You had to go and ask for a book and somebody would fetch it for you. In this library students would just browse and find the books they wanted to read. There was a film club which had just opened up and they would generally rent commercial cinema and show films Friday mornings, when nobody else would go to see movies. I attended that film club’s film screenings a few times. There were very few, like 10 or 12 people, in the huge cinema watching some arthouse film, mostly foreign stuff. When I was a kid I also tried to build a film projector and failed! That was miserable! I tried to build a radio receiver and I failed, again! I still remember the regret and sense of frustration, but that’s how it goes!

KA: What were you watching at the time you were contemplating studying abroad?

HN: The films that I remember were these literature-based films that I mentioned, as well as Richard Brooks’ The Brothers Karamazov. I had read the novels and looked for their filmic adaptations. Reading was a big thing in our family and all the kids had actually pulled together a children’s library which by the time of the revolution housed some 5000 volumes, many of them children’s books, which was an incredible treasure. So, we did a lot of reading and writing.

KA: And then your parents supported your desire to go abroad. You went to England first, is that right?

HN: Yes, I went for a year to the UK in the early 1960s. My dad was actually a well-known physician and for his heart specialisation went to Harvard. He also brought back with him a present for me which was one of those View-Master slide viewers with the disc and you click on it to change the slides. So, actually, for the first time through the agency of my dad I became Americanised; not only by watching American films with him before, but [also] through these slides of national parks and so forth I began to sort of imagining myself there. So, there were multiple strands that turned me towards media, in particular film, and also toward the States as a site for education and college.

KA: How was that experience of arriving and studying into the US?

HN: I came to the US in 1964 to go to school at University of Southern California. My intention was to major in dentistry. The first year I had to take science courses and pre-dental courses, but organic chemistry did me in, basically. I think I got 40. That was terrible. So, I said to myself, “I’m gonna take a course in this Department of Telecommunication, and if I like that course, I’ll change my major.” It just so happened that I took a course from Edward Borgers who was an old massive and voluble guy who had us analyse a classic television drama, like Playhouse Nightie, as well as TV commercials. I remember analysing for the first time a Marlboro cigarette commercial. I’d never seen anybody assign a 60-second commercial for analysis. Remember, those days filtered cigarettes were more regarded as female cigarettes, so for the first time they were trying to reassign filtered cigarettes to men, and the He-Man, the rugged cow-boy type, who was smoking filtered cigarettes was a new phenomenon. Anyway, that kind of textual analysis of the Marlboro man really attracted me tremendously, as it demonstrated how these lowly commercials were producing meaning. So, I switched to telecommunication, which in today’s parlance means Radio-Television. USC had a separate school of cinema. Telecommunication was in another school, so we didn’t have a lot of contact with cinema, but I did take a couple of courses there as well. I remember, George Lucas was a year or two ahead of me as a student in cinema. I was undergrad and he was, I think, either a grad or at the end of his B.A. I participated in a lot of activities in the telecom department. We had the KUSC-FM radio station, where I was a sound-effects man for a whole series of radio dramas. Then, I had my own weekly half-hour show on that radio station, called Non-Western Music. I played Indian, African, Persian, Arab and Asian music of various sorts. The format of my program was completely idiosyncratic, for I interspersed these musical numbers with my readings of the latest discoveries culled from Scientific American. This format satisfied my own interests, but nobody told me not to do it and nobody told me to do it. USC was an interesting experimental place where I continued my combination of production and studies…

KA: So, film studies was there for you from the start, but your major was in production?

HN: Both. Not film production, but radio and TV production. Courses were generally broadcast- oriented, like management or analysis of history of radio, history of television, with a few production courses thrown in.

KA: And after that point you’d gone into MFA at UCLA.

HN: That’s right.

KA: That was in film?

HN: Yes. That was in the department of theatre arts which had both film and television. It was a heady time, from 1968 to 71, and the counter-culture movement, the anti-Vietnam war and the civil rights movements were all on. Students were actually taking over offices of the faculty at UCLA. I remember a group of students took over Howard Suber’s office. He said to me later that he evacuated his office and gave it to the students for a year to run things from it. Students took over the department’s remote van and went around campus filming various activities and demonstrations. Then, they took the van to different locations on campus and played back the tapes, so people could see. As a group of 11 students in the MFA production program, we petitioned the department to give us a course that we, the students, would design and manage, and the department agreed. It was an unusual thing, part of the counterculture ethos. So, we were eleven students running our own class, in which I made some of my early shows, both documentaries and surreal, experimental films and videos. I was at the time living in a leftist, hippie commune called Ellis Island, so I made a documentary, Ellis Island: A Commune (1969), which captured it during an important period of transition.

KA: Were there any particular interlocutors in the MFA programme that stand out to you? Because it seems like a very collective experience.

HN: The faculty were very hands-off and that was an advantage for people who knew what they wanted to do, and I was one of those. I became interested in doing for my MFA a film, using computers, in the days when computers were primarily accounting machines. There was this hotshot group in the computer science department at UCLA. A young professor, Leonard Kleinrock was running it. I went to him and said I’d like to make a computer-animated film about the consciousness of the external universe and the internal human consciousness within us. And I said to him, “I would like you to be on my committee.” He said: “Fine, I’ll be willing to be on your committee, provided that you go on and take a Fortran class and do not bother my staff and graduate students, and you have access to the computer room only after 5 o’clock.” I said, “Fine” to all of his restrictions and conditions. I went and took the courses and did well in them. In two years, by the time I was about to finish my MFA film, Salamander Syncope (1971), I had six system analysts and programmers on his money working on my project, one of whom is now a major figure in Google. His name is Vint Cerf, the Chief Internet Evangelist at Google, often credited as the co-inventor of the Internet. My project was arduous, because I was moving out of the normal realm of the film production into a highly technological and evolving one involving the new medium of digital and analogue computers. So, it was a very good experience and UCLA was a very good place. My interlocutors at that point were really more computer guys than film guys.

KA: So that was your MFA film and you graduated. Did you go back to Iran immediately or start make films in L.A.?

HN: Again, I have an experimental side and always look for new things, like new media. After I finished my MFA, the first cable company opened up in LA. Theta Cable Television, Channel 3, opened up in Santa Monica, and I was one of the first people they hired as producer/director for their original programming. For two years I directed the daily newscasts, a weekly discussion show, and occasionally children’s programming, Theta Cable Fable Car. It was a fantastic experience at local programming and production. Then I got an invitation to go to Iran to help plan a new multimedia university that was patterned after Open University system in the UK. So, I returned to Iran where for three years I worked with a dynamic group on its planning and soon it became a reality, as Free University of Iran (Daneshgah-e Azad-e Iran). The Shah approved of the plan to start this multimedia university which was really innovative, because we didn’t have a main campus like most other universities. But we imparted our educational material through books that we published, for which the university established the largest publishing house in the country. In conjunction with the National Iranian Radio and Television Organisation we produced radio and television programmes. We produced science kits, which the students would receive and take home and with which they could conduct 150 experiments in their kitchens. There were twenty study centres in different parts of the country with tutors available to help students. Copies of university’s radio and television programs were also available there. It was a very integrated and media-intensive situation. We had taken in the second year of our students when the tanks came into the streets and the revolution was on. About that time, my request for a sabbatical had come through, fortunately, so I decided to return to the US to see if I wanted to do further education and graduate studies or to continue filmmaking. So that was a major transition for me away from Iran.

KA: I’m curious about the collaboration between NIRT and this Free University. Was the university designed to work with these other institutions within Iran? I’m trying to get a sense of how those infrastructures were forming in the 1970s.

HN: The head of the university was Abdolrahim Ahmadi who was a well-known literary person, whose translation of Grapes of Wrath I loved when I was a high school kid. He had published it under a pseudonym. But he was a learned man, well connected to various institutions and had a mandate from the prime minster, Amir Abbas Hoveyda, to create this university as approved by the Shah. So, he had approval at the highest level. At the same time this university needed to connect with other institutions, as you mentioned. We brought in the entire editorial staff from Franklin Publishing, which was a major publisher of pocket books in Tehran, to come on board and become the editorial department for the book publishing in our university. We contracted with the Educational TV network to help produce and broadcast our radio and television programmes. The Broadcast and Media Center, the unit that I directed at the university, hired the producers and directors and sent them to the BBC to be trained in production. Upon their return, they used the Educational TV’s studios and staff to produce our programmes. The heart of the university which, I think, was ingenious and was borrowed partly from the UK system, was a course team that designed and produced all the educational materials collectively. For example, the course team for the science course would consist of a physicist, a chemist, a biologist, and a mathematician, but it would also have a textbook editor, a radio and television producer, a kit designer, and an educational technologist. All of these would work together to decide on what material would go to the kit, to radio or TV, or to textbook. Together they produced the various components of the course. It was kind of unusual in the atmosphere of authoritarianism and distrust endemic in Iran at the time. It’s interesting that after the revolution this university was divided up and dispersed. A lot of it went to form the Allameh Tabatabai University. The whole text production became Nashr-e Daneshgahi, the university publisher, which is the biggest publisher in Iran. But then a new Islamic Free University was created in its place which has none of these features we are talking about.

KA: And that was when you wrote your first book-length project on documentary?

HN: That’s right. It’s a good point, because at the same time that I was working at the Free University of Iran, I also taught in the College of Cinema and Television a course on the history and theory of documentary cinema. There was a lot of material written and published in Persian about documentary films, but there wasn’t a single book yet. So, as I began to teach and prepare my lectures, I saw the beginning of a book forming and it became a two-volume book in Persian, Film-e Mostanad (Documentary Film) which the Free University of Iran Publishing House published. As it was being published the revolution happened. The book sold out immediately and no more copies were produced, because the publishing house also was transformed. I received only three copies of the book after I returned to the US. There was a great deal of interest in reprinting it, and in one of my return trips, the director of the new University Publishing offered to reprint the book if I amended it, particularly by removing some of the stills of women who showed too much skin, which were considered inappropriate for the new Islamic era. I refused. So, for many years the Xerox copies of the book were available in bookstores in Tehran. That is the story of my first major publication.

KA: And some of your other publications in journals like Jump Cut on documentary came out of the same project.

HN: Yeah, gradually they came out of the same project…Jump Cut and Quarterly Review of Film Studies. In addition, I began to publish a series of interviews I had conducted with direct cinema documentarists the Maysles brothers and Richard Leacock, and with verité filmmaker, Jean Rouch. I had kept all of those interviews that I had done in preparation for my Persian language book and so transcribed and edited them and they were published in American journals.

KA: So, we’re kind of going back now to LA. You took a sabbatical from the Free University?

HN: Which became permanent! I came back to LA and began working in television for a while. The UCLA had an internal production house for producing educational shows and I became a producer-director in that outfit, one among seven producers-directors. While there I produced or directed several major series, like a twenty-part TV series, Mastery Teaching, designed to train teaching assistants, a 14-part TV show, The Tutors’ Guide, for training tutors, or a 14-part radio show called Power in America. Then I made a whole series of television shows for the American Medical Association on various topics like hearing loss, obesity, asthma, COPD, and sexually transmitted diseases. These were two-hour tapes plus study guides that we produced. It was very technical material, but it was fun and I enjoyed the process, having come from a family of doctors. As a result of making the hearing loss show I was also able to make another film that was award-winning. It was called Beethoven: Triumph over Silence, for which I worked with a famous otolaryngologist, Dr. Victor Goodhill. We basically tried to recreate what Beethoven would have heard before he lost his hearing and how he lost it and in what frequencies he lost it. Because after he lost his hearing, he communicated with people by writing in a notebook, and other people responded by writing in his notebook, and these notebooks exist today; we had a remarkably intimate record of what Beethoven thought and felt and said. We used these writings as part of the narrative of the film and recreated audio-wise how he would have heard, for example, when he conducted his 9^th symphony and he went out of synch with it. We have his notes as to how terrible he thought of what he had done. But we were also able to recreate his hearing loss in the first, say, 30 seconds of the 9th, which conveys the drama and the tragedy that Beethoven felt to contemporary audiences.

KA: Was it around that time that you started thinking about doing a PhD?

HN: Yes, because I was on the UCLA campus all the time anyway, and also at this point I had gotten to know a lot of Iranian Studies and film studies people at the UCLA. So, I applied for the PhD programme in film-TV and got in. Our professors were Nick Brown, Janet Bergstrom, Steve Mamber, Teshome Gabriel, Katherine Montgomery, Robert Rosen, and Howard Suber. These were the core faculty, but I worked mostly with Teshome Gabriel, who was my advisor and a friend.

KA: And you edited a book together. Was it while you were a student or after?

HN: I was still a grad student…almost finished. Working with Teshome I put together a special thick issue in 1991 of Quarterly Review Film and Video (combining three issues into one) on postcolonial cinema, which we later republished as a book, Otherness and the Media: The Ethnography of the Imagined and the Imaged. I had begun to study the Iranians in diaspora for my PhD. I remember Teshome advising me not to choose an Iranian topic. He said because you are going to be branded as an Iran specialist and pigeon-holed, which I think was a good advice, but I didn’t take it, because I was personally interested in that topic and I was very knowledgeable about it. I had followed all these Iranian exiles with their television and radio programmes and pop music. Iranians were very active in those days and media-savvy, because many of those who came to LA were media people already. Producers, dancers, singers, actors, directors, musicians, all kinds of people were there. In one decade, Iranians in LA produced nearly 90 periodicals in Persian language alone, and these were all commercially-driven, which means they had to have had fairly strong cultural and economic capital to invest in advertising and to sell products to Iranians. They produced over sixty television shows. I began videotaping these programs and going to their studios and interviewing them. I had a lot of stuff that nobody else had, why give it up? Plus, working on the Iranian exile meant I was also working on trying to figure out my own situation in exile. By the way, all of the videos and research materials I collected for my dissertation project are now on deposit at Northwestern University Library Archives, where they are being processed and catalogued for use by other researchers.

KA: And that was the genesis of Iran Media Index and the dissertation project, right?

HN: They were two different things. That was the genesis of dissertation which in a couple of years became my next book, The Making of Exile Cultures, in which I basically paid attention to the totality of pop culture of Iranians in Los Angeles as an alternative home, the home that they didn’t have or had escaped because of the revolution, and the home that they longed to return to. So all of these feelings and nostalgia and longings were embedded in the shows and they were very political as well as cathected. I think that the book established a model for ethnic television studies which hadn’t been on the horizon very much yet.

KA: Just as follow-up to that, you were working on Third Cinema and post-colonial questions and then you choose to start with this television study. Could you say something about that choice?

HN: It’s because television and radio were the media for the Iranian exiles in LA to communicate not only with the exile community in LA, but also with the diasporic community of Iranians elsewhere and with Iranians in the homeland. Eventually these individual television shows which were broadcast on lease-access televisions at first became 24-hour satellite channels. Right now, there are somewhere around two dozen satellite channels in Persian language being broadcast out of LA and are received in Iran. They have become kind of a force in some of demonstrations that are going on this week, for example. So, this was a significant new development in the media and exile world. A lot of Iranian filmmakers who are in exile turned to television, because that was the medium with which they could communicate with large audience. So, film was put on the back burner for a while. But the thing that I want to mention is that around Teshome Gabriel a number of students gathered; not only students and faculty in film, but also those from literature, political science, anthropology, and other fields. We used to get together on Friday afternoons in one of the cafeterias of the UCLA (Lu Valle Coffee-shop), and just B.S. and talk about post-colonial theory, Third Cinema, Third World Cinema, etc. Eventually these gatherings led to the production of two magazines. Emergences was the one that I was involved with. This sort of led me to get involved in academic journalism. It’s interesting that at around this same time, Beverley Houston and Ron Gottesman, the editors of Quarterly Review of Film Studies which was at USC, asked me if I wanted to become the managing editor of their journal. Delighted, I accepted and, so as a graduate student, I was suddenly basking in the glow of all these academic film studies people in southern California and elsewhere. I was the traffic cop for the magazine.

KA: It was an important time for that journal, too.

HN: Yes. For the journal and for film studies. Because also the turn to theory had occurred, so there was an incredible excitement. Everybody was turning to feminism, psychoanalysis and cultural studies, deconstruction, postmodernism, etc. All of these concepts were coming into film and media studies and it was a very exciting period. That’s how I ended up being on so many editorial boards and advisory boards of culture and media journals, from Diaspora to Framework.

KA: And I want you to talk more about the turn to theory and how it figures in your own work at the time. But before we do that, I was trying to figure a good place in the chronology to talk about your programming work and I thought maybe talking about it early on can be an interesting place to put that question, because of all of the controversies surrounding some of your early programmes.

HN: Actually, in terms of timeline it also works well, because my first major film programming occurred in 1990, the year that I was finishing my dissertation. I hit upon this idea of organising a film festival for UCLA. I proposed that we do a film series on Iranian cinema, ten years after the revolution, to sort of take stock of all the films that had been made after this destructive event, which targeted cinema and movie houses for elimination. Not many films after the revolution had been brought to LA for Iranians to see. And the atmosphere among Iranian exiles was highly partisan against the Islamic republic, because most people had sort of escaped the revolution for political or religious reasons. There were lots of Baha’is and Christians and Marxists and the royalists, from all kinds of places and [also] minoritarian Iranians [or] ethnic minorities who had escaped the enforced Islamisation. So, the atmosphere was decidedly against the Islamic republic…

KA: And many of them had left their careers at home too…

HN: That’s right. They had lost their careers and they were angry; personally angry. I was able to establish a relationship with the Ministry of Culture and Art. I asked for 44 films that I had selected. From them I selected 22 or 24 films for exhibition in this decade of Iranian Cinema event and I invited Abbas Kiarostami and Dariush Mehrjui to come and show their latest films and interact with the audiences. But as soon as we announced the festival, the Iranian television producers came out against it and said that it was a whitewash of the Islamic regime and we were being paid by Islamic republic and blah, blah, blah. On the night of the opening many well-known filmmakers, television producers, actors and so forth came out against it, holding placards [saying] “Down with the Festival.” I was walking with our guests Kiarostami and Mehrjui into the cinema [in] the Melnitz Hall, which was the site of the screenings when Kiarostami walked to one of them- I think it was Parviz Sayyad- and said: “Why don’t you give me your placard? I’ll stand in the line demonstrating against the festival. You go inside and look at the films and see if you still want to demonstrate.” The fact was that none of them had seen these films. They were just categorically opposed because they were made under the Islamic regime. The most interesting thing for me as a programmer was the response of the audiences coming out of cinema. Many of them were crying. These were adult people, professors, [who were] crying on my shoulder, thanking me for giving them the opportunity to see Iran from the point of view of Iranians inside Iran. Remember at the time Iranians had suffered the hostage crisis and so there was a very hostile atmosphere in the US media against Iran and Iranians, including those in the US. So, the image that was painted of Iran in the American media was very one-sided and stereotypically negative. Everything was Islamic hard-liners and bearded people and angry fists in the air and women all covered up and so forth. So, for Iranian exiles that festival was sort of the first insider view of the Iran that they knew and loved. That festival became an annual event and still continues.

KA: So, in 1990 you probably showed Where is the Friend’s House but not yet Close Up?

HN: Close-up hadn’t come out yet. We showed it at the festival that I started in Houston. When I moved to Houston in 1992 to teach at Rice University I started another Iranian film festival with Rice Cinema and Museum of Fine Arts in Houston. That also became an annual festival which still continues.

KA: That’s actually a good transition to talk about your move to Houston. You moved there before The Making of Exile Cultures comes out?

HN: Yes, I got a Rockefeller post-doc at Rice to work on turning my dissertation into a book. It took me a year to do that. So, the following year, 1993, my book came out and that’s when Rice also announced a new position in film studies, their first fully-fledged film studies person. I applied for that job, they did a national search and I got the job, so I stayed.

KA.: What was it like to develop your 1990s book projects in that environment? What interventions were you focusing on as you were writing them?

HN: I did another kind of programming there in addition to the film festival for the Museum of Fine Arts and Rice Cinema. I organised a major international conference on exile and diaspora studies and brought in a lot of people, including Homi Bhabha. The contribution from that conference formed the backbone of my next edited book, Home, Exile, Homeland in which we examined different ideas about home, like Vivian Sobchack did a chapter on the body as home. She had lost one leg due to cancer, so I asked her “What about the body as your home or un-home, when your own body is attacking you?” She wrote a really interesting article about that. Other people wrote about the house, as home. Pat Seed wrote about the key to the house. She’s a medieval historian and she was studying the Muslims and the Jews who were thrown out of Spain due to Inquisition and they lost their homes, but when they were kicked out of the country they took with them the keys from their houses, and they put these keys above the doors of their new homes in exile as a reminder [that] “as long as I have these keys, I’m in exile.” She wrote a very interesting chapter. We did a variety of interesting intervention on the concepts of home, house, homeland. Then Teshome and I transformed the three special issues of Quarterly Review of Film and Video into a book. Teshome had gotten a post-doc at Rice, as well, so for a year he joined me there and we worked together on that. It was a very productive year. These three books: The Making of an Exile Culture: Iranian Television in Los Angeles; Otherness and the Media: The Ethnography of the Imagined and the Imaged; and House, Home, Homeland: Film, Media, and the Politics of Place were really pushing me towards theorising my next book, which was the idea of an “accented cinema.”

KA: You were talking about this personal dimension of exile, and this leading to books that are so intently focused on the feeling of exile [such as] claustrophobia, anxiety, dread, longing…those kinds of things. Could you talk a little bit about how affect works in these books?

HN: I think it came into my work not through theory first, but through my own experience of exile and displacement, of having an accent. Everywhere I went as soon as I began to talk people would say “where are you from?” So, my “foreignness” and “outsider-ness” were already pointed out. On the other hand, I became much more cognisant of the affect, [like] the smell of a place or of a particular food, that would suddenly transport you 10,000 miles to somewhere else, or to 40 years earlier. The senses become a lot more important to you when you are displaced or out of place. I think that’s how affect came into my work through my own synaesthetic experiences of displacement, and then through paying attention to the theory. My theorization tends to be bottom up.

KA: And what has the audience been for “An Accented Cinema” Have you traced its afterlife?

HN: It’s been taught in a lot of different places, like in Eastern European countries. I think it’s been translated into Turkish and Hebrew, but not into Persian, partly because some of these films are not readily available. They are esoteric films, made by smaller people, not well-known auteur directors. So, without access to the films, it’s very hard to see them and to teach and translate them. I think the internet is opening up access to some of these films. There are all kinds of openings that internet has created for alternative and minoritarian cinema. I think when the book first came out in 2001, we did have the internet, but not the kind of fast and high capacity internet that we have now, with streaming and YouTube and all of those things.

KA: So that book comes out and then shortly, after a few years you moved to Evanston, to this office.

HN: Yes. I moved here, because I think Northwestern has one of the first radio-television departments in this country, if not the first. It has a long history of engagement with various media and also our Department of Radio-TV-Film has various programmes, among them film production, screen writing, documentary production, and a screen cultures PhD programme, with very good and diverse faculty. And there are many others in other departments who teach film and media. So, it was very attractive for me to move here from Rice which had very few full-time film studies people who were in different departments and there was no cohesiveness to their efforts. So, I came right here to this office 11 years ago.

KA: Were those links between production and studies that happen here important for your decision as well?

HN: Yes, because when I teach my PhD graduate courses, graduate students in documentary production oftentimes take it. I not only teach theory and history, but also bring in production issues that film studies professors may not bring in. As a result, both the production and studies students get exposed to things that they probably would not get exposed to normally. Some of the MFA documentary students who have taken my “Accented Cinema” course have made their films inspired by that course. So, it’s fascinating to see how they interpret the material. I teach a graduate “Documentary and Ethnographic Film” course as well, which they have also taken, and they apply some of the things they learn in their studies courses in their work. It’s really nice to see what the takeaway is for them in their work. Of course, this is where my own production experience is also helpful, because I can talk in their language and point to the filmmaking techniques in terms of budgeting, styles of filming, how the group dynamic works, shooting arrangements and so forth. I think I can talk with certain authority to filmmakers who take my classes that average film studies person who doesn’t have a background in film production may not possess.

KA: This was also an important move in terms of finally finishing up this project that you’ve been working on for essentially your entire professional life.

HN: Yes, the four-volume A Social History of Iranian Cinema. With every article that I wrote and published on Iranian cinema or talk that I gave or every visit to an archive…that’s actually where my first English language book, Iran Media Index, comes in as well. For that book I went to a lot of archives in several countries. The whole project basically was to document from 1900 to 1981, all the documentaries, newsreels, and television news programmes that were made about Iran in the UK and the US. For that I went to many archives like, the National Film Archive in the UK, Iran’s National Film Archive, the US Library of Congress, the US National Film Archive, lots of commercial newsreel archives, etc., to produce this filmography. That sort of made me aware of the enormity of the material. Some of the findings from that book, were plugged into A Social History of Iranian Cinema when I was writing about the history of documentary filmmaking by foreigners about Iran. Likewise, other chapters were helped by the previous books that I had published. The three books that I did on exile and diaspora cinema became the impetus for a major chapter in volume 4 about the Iranian filmmakers in the diaspora. Originally, my project was to do a one-volume book, as specified by my contract with Duke University Press. After a few years of writing I realised that it was not going to be one volume.

KA: And in building an argument that runs through all three thousand pages that takes forty years to create, there were massive transformations in the files along the way. Can you say something about the way you adapted the project to the way the field changed, both in Cinema and Media Studies and Iranian Studies?

HN: As I was writing and doing the research, Iranian Studies came into its own, in the US at any rate. Really until the 90s, Iranian studies circles focused primarily on history, politics, anthropology, sociology and if they dealt with the arts, they were traditional arts [like] paintings, Saqqa-khaneh paintings or poetry and literature. Modern media were not really in the purview. So, one of the changes that was occurring in Iranian Studies was that modern media and pop culture gradually became acceptable topics, as a new generation of scholars were minted. In Film Studies we had, at the beginning, as I was mentioning earlier, to turn to theory that really revitalised academia in various fields, including in cinema. I was at the right time in the right place at UCLA, where a lot of these guys like Derrida, Lyotard, Habermas were coming to give talks or to teach courses. I was there and have sketches of all these people, because in all these lectures that I attended, I also sketched the individual speakers. So, I have thousands of sketches of these intellectuals with a little blurb identifying the gist of their talk. That was my notetaking. I was kind of an inquisitive child, constantly absorbing both the field of Iranian Studies and Film Studies and Critical Theory, all of which were evolving. I incorporated them promiscuously perhaps, but I hope that I have done it seamlessly and creatively enough to make a coherent argument and not be pedantic or doctrinaire about it.

KA: I’m also thinking of how the field is giving more serious attention to non-theatrical media and to the links between television and film.

HN: I think that is partly because I am intersectional. I’m interested in the intersections and interstices. I wrote a preface to the book Projecting Migration: Transcultural Documentary Practice, edited by Alan Grossman and Aine O’Brien, which deals with this topic; it was entitled “On the Global Inter-, Multi-, and Trans- —Foreword.” I’ve always been interested in connections and layers, in how things connect to each other. That’s where it comes from. I think the topic is also part of that autobiographical element. If you listen to and look at your own self and your own interests, you may discover that something new is there. But if you constantly try to follow the trends, you won’t discover anything new. The real newness is when you turn inward and inside and discover something there.

KA: Do you have a sense of how the book was received within the field of Iranian studies, maybe among film scholars writing in Persian in comparison with those working in film studies in North America?

HN: It seems to have done very well, with many reviews published in Iranian studies and film and media journals. The first volume has already been translated into Persian. There was a recent documentary that was made about me [called] Mouth Harp in Minor Key: Hamid Naficy In/On Exile. Just a couple of weeks ago this was shown at the Cinema-Vérité film festival [in Farsi: Sinama-Haghighat] in Tehran and did very well. Many fans had to sit on the floors because the cinema was so full and they scheduled new sessions for the film. The filmmaker, Maryam Sepehri, is now exploring international film festival and distribution circuits for that film. So, through the publication of translation of the first volume of A Social History of Iranian Cinema, as well as through translations of my other works in article form, people had heard enough about me to come and see this documentary about this guy who is abroad. A whole bunch of reviews and interviews with the filmmaker are beginning to come out. So, I think it has had some impact. Given the kind of national hostility between my two countries, the US and Iran, which also affects travel- the Trump administration bans travel of Iranians to the US and the Iranian government labels Iranian bi-nationals who travel to Iran to conduct research as US spies, so any time you go there you fear that your research would be taken as spying- it is a very tough field to work in, but such is both the peril and privilege of interstitial existence!

K.A: What you are working on now, and what’s coming on the horizon?

HN: Actually, one of the projects that I’m working is apropos of what I was just saying. Because of the lack of formal relationship between the two countries of Iran and the US, most contact between Americans and Iranians has occurred via media, in cyberspace or on television or in film. As a result of the four-volume book, I’ve been working on this idea of public diplomacy between the two countries involving not only governments’ use of media, directly or through their allies and subterfuge entities, but also by citizens’ use of media, particularly social media. That may become another book, but that one is also an evolving animal. Public diplomacy via media is a constantly evolving topic not only because of what the governments and social media do, but also because of the technological revolutions that are taking place right under our noses. So that’s one project I’m working on, on the side-line.

KA: Focusing mainly on things like social media or satellite broadcasting?

HN: All of them. The totality of media which I’m calling media-work, which includes all of the Iran-related media-work, in Persian and also in English, coming out of the US and Iran, including the social media that Iranians mobilise, like during various periodic uprisings or demonstrations. The other [project] is a memoir that I’ve been working on for a while. I have a huge amount of material, as usual, so the challenge here is how to not turn it into a compendium of three thousand-pages, but into something cohesive and readable for the general public. That’s what I’m supposed to be working on this year while I’m on sabbatical.

KA: Thank you so much for being so generous with your time.

HN: Thank you for coming up here. I hope that this will be edited into a nice bouquet of flowers!

[Ramin Khanjani transcribed and contributed to the editing of this interview.]

French Secular Thought: Foucault and Political Spirituality

Bryan S. Turner Volume 3, Number 2, Summer 2018

Bryan S. Turner <The Australian Catholic University (Melbourne)>is the Professor of the Sociology of Religion at the Australian Catholic University (Melbourne), Honorary Professor of Sociology Potsdam University Germany and Emeritus Professor of Sociology, The Graduate Center, The City University of New York, USA, and a Fellow of the Edward Cadbury Centre University of Birmingham. He was the recipient of the Max Planck Award 2015. His recent publication, as the chief editor, is The Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Social Theory in 2017.

Introduction

In this article I note that “religion” was either largely absent from 20th century French social theory or appeared as a puzzle that would be resolved by history. Religion was a remnant of traditional culture that been challenged both by the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. Marxist sociology, that was inspired by Louis Althusser, treated religion as merely an ideology that spread resignation or confusion among subordinate groups. The tradition of secular Marxist research on Islam in France is illustrated by the work of Maxine Rodinson. I focus on Rodinson as the most prominent secular scholar of Islam and the Middle East of his generation in order to make the contrast with Michel Foucault’s attempt to avoid looking at Shi’ism through the lens of Western secularity. Rodinson, who was highly critical of Foucault as simply “naive”, is credited with inventing the idea of “Islamofascism” to describe the Shia revolt as resulting in an Islamic theocracy. Laicité ran deep in political life, in civil society and in the academy.

The Shia Revolution therefore presented a specific puzzle or anomaly – could archaic forms of religion actually act as a progressive force in removing a modernizing but authoritarian monarchy? I applaud Foucault’s attention to religion and find his account of the revolution unhindered by any privilege allocated to Western views of Shia religiosty. The difficulty with Foucault’s analysis of the revolution is that it was inconsistent with his theory of power as the ensemble of micro disciplines. How can we reconcile the notion of governmentality with the erruption of a mass movement against the Shah?

Foucault’s understanding of the revolution in terms of “political spirituality” was unsurprisingly ridiculed and he was further criticized for not retracting his understanding of Shia radicalism when the revolution assumed a post-revolutionary authoritarianism. However the post-revolutionary situation in Iran raises a deeper question about the nature of revolution itself. Were the two revolutions of Iran in the twentieth century – the Constitutional Revolution (1906-11) and the Shia Revolution (1978-9) to overthrow the Pahlavi Shah – both historical failures? Foucault’s sociology of the Islamic revolution raises a troublesome and enduring question about the negative unintended consequences of all forms of resistance and revolt.

History and Context: Post-War French Social Theory

To understand Michel Foucault’s intervention in the Shia Revolution and more importantly the response to his publications, we have to take into account the history of French secularism. In this context I prefer to speak about “The Shia Revolution” following Vali Nasr’s The Shia Revival and not “The Iranian Revolution” to bring into the foreground its religious nature. By contrast with the United States and the United Kingdom, French culture in general and its elite intellectual culture in particular are profoundly and explicitly secular. While both France and the United States share a revolutionary origin, the United States has a secular constitution, but religion plays a large part in its politics and civil society. One basic aspect of American exceptionalism has been the overt role of religion in public life. To a large extent, France has remained much closer to the Enlightenment legacy of rationalism and secularism. For example, being engaged with the legacy of the Enlightenment has been one foundation of the anti-Catholic attitude of urban France. Laïcité, the French version of secularism, is the dominant feature of public life. This secularity was reinforced as a consequence of the devastation of two World Wars and German occupation.

After World War II, two secular traditions – existentialism and neo-Marxism – largely dominated the humanities and social science. Two key figures were Jean-Paul Sartre and Louis Althusser. In sociology, Althusser attempted to reformulate Marxist economic determinism by arguing that politics and ideology are conditions of existence of the economic.[1] He also reconstructed the Marxist theory of ideology by developing the idea that ideological relations are real and not simply reflections of the economy, but this insight was not applied to religion. The reproduction of capitalism in the modern world rests on what he called the “ideological state apparatus.” Althusser and Etienne Balibar[2] had considerable influence outside France; their ideas were explored energetically by a generation of British sociologists.[3] The other influential figure in this Marxist revival was Nicos Poulantzas.[4] These ideas were not ingested without criticism One other major figure in post-war French intellectual culture was Raymond Aron who was, as a disciple of Max Weber, critical of Marxist sociology. Despite ideological divergences in this post-war generation of intellectuals, the one thing they had in common was a total lack of interest in religion.[5] Prior to the political crisis in Iran, Foucault had also given little attention to religion, being mainly focused on madness, psychiatry, penitentiaries, sexuality and the origins of the human sciences. The revolution put radical Shi’ism on the foreign-relations agenda of the West and focused academic attention on the nature of the uprising.

Perhaps the oddity of post-war Marxism was that it also involved a revival of the legacy of Antonio Gramsci, but it did not include any significant acknowledgement of his recognition of the importance of religion in general and of the Roman Catholic Church in particular. Gramsci recognized the moral and cultural hold of the Church over society and that any successful political party of the working class would have to displace that moral control with its own educational and ethical systems.[6] At the popular level, Catholicism had a powerful hold over the masses.

Marxist sociology never developed much beyond Marx’s famous metaphor of “the opium of the people.” However if religion is far more than a collection of false beliefs that function as a narcotic, how can we understand its material force from a sociological perspective? Secular sociology tends to concentrate research on beliefs and attitudes because such data lends itself to easy quantification. Research on religious practices typically requires an ethnographic approach that does not readily produce large sets of quantitative data. In order to conceptualise the materiality of religion, I list five components. First, contemporary sociology of religion has returned to the idea of the axial age religions (800-200 BCE) which are said to have opened up “the age of criticism” by contrasting the unsatisfactory nature of our existence on earth with a future world to come.[7] The result was the creation of powerful narratives of suffering and justice involving possibilities of resistance and retribution. The camel cannot pass through the eye of a needle and the rich man cannot entire into paradise. Secondly, religions typically involve powerful symbols, signs and spaces that concentrate and condense these abstract narratives into collective memories and emotions that become conduits of the faith. Thirdly, there is an ensemble of daily practices such as diet, prayer and more formal rituals around birth and death that give concrete expression to the narratives, symbols and sacred objects. Fourthly, following Emile Durkheim, these beliefs and practices relative to sacred objects create a community of believers who can act in concert. Fifthly, religions typically operate in and through holy cities – one thinks of Mecca, Rome, Qom, Ankor Wat, and Jerusalem. These holy cities are the sites of pilgrimage, collective rituals, healing, and miracles. What secular cities have commanded such adoration over the centuries? Can Birmingham compete in the world of collective memory alongside Canterbury? Shi’ism with its narratives of suffering and martyrdom, its holy cities and global community, its moral codes and theology was a material force able to overthrow a rich and powerful state. Neither Marxism nor secular sociology have adequately grasped this “materiality” of the religious – its holy places, its cosmopolitan communities, its sacred figures, its histories of oppression and resistance, its emotions of resentment and revenge, and its narratives of justice and sacrifice. Given the force of religious movements, the modern state has sought to mobilize religious forces to bolster its own power. The religious and the political are almost inevitably intertwined and intertangled.[8]

Perhaps unsurprisingly French sociology did not produce any major figure in the sociology of religion in the twentieth century, because, I would argue, the civil religion of French society was deeply secular. The same is true for contemporary scholatship. While Pierre Bourdieu has made lasting contributions to sociology, his writing on religion is slight and coventional.[9] Luc Boltanski is equally influential for his work on capitalism, indignation, and justice, but he has not in any systematic way contributed to the study of religion.[10] The French case has been precisely described by Jose Casanova who argues that France has a secular etatist ideology or laicité that has the function of a civil religion in direct competition with an ecclesisatical religion.[11] France’s civil religion demands the strict privatization of all religious belief and practice. Insofar as sociologists paid any attention to religion, they were primarily engaged with approaches that treated secularization as a necessary feature of modernity. In fact the sociology of Islam did not begin to acquire significant attention in Western sociology until after 9/11.[12] With the growth of anti-Muslim sentiment, the sociology of Islam came to be dominated by an interest in Islamophobia, but this dominant focus has distorted research by cutting off other more fruitful channels of inquiry.[13]

While secular social science has been neglecting religion as a topic of serious research, religion in the world of global politics was very prominent in the 1960s. It was in Public Religions in the Modern World that Casanova identified major social movements in which religion played a critical role. He saw the revolution in Iran as a key example of the importance of “public religions” alongside liberation theology in Latin America, the Solidarity movement in Poland, and the rise of the Moral Majority in the United States.[14] In fact we might reasonably add that if anything Casanova underestimated the impact of the religious revolution in Iran. After 1978-9 tensions between Shi’ism and Sunni Islam were manifest in the growing revivalry between Iran and Saudi Arabia that have been played out in Iraq and Syria, and more recently in Yemen, Qatar and Lebanon.

A critical turning point in the Church’s relationship to the world was Vatican II in which the Catholic hierarchy accepted the idea of political modernization. More recently Casanova notes that, “By my hermeneutic Catholic perspective I mean the fact that my theory of ‘modern public religion’ was very much informed by the experience of the official Catholic aggiornamento of the 1960s.”[15] He challenged the traditional notion of secularization as the slow but inevitable erosion of religion as measured within a positivist epistemology as the decline in church attendance, belief in God, frequency of prayer, recruitment to the ministry and priesthood, and so forth. Casanova’s publication drew attention to the obvious fact that around the world religion appeared, not to be simply a matter of private belief and practice, but a vital part of public life. The aggiornamento allowed the Church to shift from a state-oriented to a civil society-oriented institution, and as a result it disengaged from the authoritarian states of Latin America and embraced human rights as a basis for its actions. Subsequently modernized Catholicism has become a new transnational and de-territorialized global religion.

This transformation of Catholicism has had little impact on the Church’s relationship to laïcité. The principal development has been the emergence of ‘la nouvelle laïcité’ from 2003 onwards in which the state has extended its control of religion in public spaces by various legislative and judicial actions. The state no longer confines itself to the overview of religous symbols in schools, but claims jurisdiction over all public spaces including the street.[16] However the state is primarily concerned, not with Catholicism which is no longer regarded as politically problematic, but with Islam. Churches are regarded as part of the national heritage from a tourist perspective. Chartres is a good example. The real target of la nouvelle laïcité is Islam and specifically the veiled Muslim woman.

Marxism and Islamofascism

To understand the critical reception of Foucault’s journalistic commentary on the revolution, we need to understand both Marxism and Oriental Sciences. Foucault annoyed and irritated both Marxists and Oriental scholars. French academics had in fact been prominent in much early Orientalism and Islamic Studies in such figures as Jacques Berque, Louis Massignon, and Henry Corbin. Along with Claude Cahen, Rodinson was a member of the French Orientalist tradition that was influenced by Marxism and sociology. Rodinson had grown up in a Jewish household that was fervently anti-Israeli. His parents, who had escaped from earlier progroms, died in Auschwitz in 1943. Rodinson, like many secular Jews, had joined the Communist Party in 1937, but turned against Communism in response to the autocracy of Stalinism. While rejecting Communism, his work was grounded in Marxist sociology. In his political career he published various works that were critical of Israel such as Israel and the Arabs (1982) and Israel: A Colonial Settler State? (1988). In the 1950s and 1960s, Marxism was “in the air” and Marxist categories were widely embraced by Arab intellectuals. However by the late 1970s, Rodinson lamented the decline of Marxist influence in the Middle East, noting that few regimes were committed to the struggle against the American hegemony and more broadly against the capitalist system. His Islam and Capitalism published in France in 1966 was the first publication to explore systematically the debate about the connections (if any) between Islam and capitalist development.

In my Weber and Islam I drew attention to the conundrum of secular sociology to make sense of the claims of charismatic prophecy and the extraordinary revelations of the Prophet.[17] In 1961 in Muhammad, Rodinson, as an atheist, responded to the Prophet’s revelation through a synthesis of Freudian psycho-analysis and Marxism to claim that the Qur’an had emerged in the Prophet’s unconscious and was forged from “his actual experience, the stuff of his thoughts, dreams and meditations, and memories of discussions that he heard.”[18] Perhaps not surprisingly the book was banned in many Muslim societies.

Rodinson dismissed the truth claims that orthodox Muslims make about the nature of their faith, the unique character of the Prophet, and their historical destination as a community of the faithful. What mattered for Rodinson was the role of Islam as a social movement alongside and comparable with twentieth-century Communism. However Marxism only takes us so far. The most important development of the historiography of Islam, according to Armando Salvatore, was undertaken by Marshall G. S. Hodgson whose three volume The Venture of Islam[19] remains the definitive social historical and sociological account of Islam from its origins until the twentieth century.[20] Hodgson developed a theory of world history and analyzed Islamicate civilization as a world order. Whereas traditional Oriental studies had concentrated on the Arab world, Hodgson had an appreciation of Islam as a religious sytem connecting Europe, the Middle East and Asia into a global network. However Hodgson’s main concern was to document how the core of religious consciousness, or “Sharia-minded” spirituality as he called it, was compromised by the power elite and their economic interests. The logic of Marxist sociology is either in general to ignore the religious mindedness of social actors, down-play the historical role of Sufism and Shi’ism, or to reduce religion to a thin ideological veneer covering and disguising real economic interests with (from a rational point of view) false beliefs.

Whereas Foucault saw the Shia Revolution as a spiritual movement, many in the West were quick to see it as fascism. Rodinson allegedly coined the term “Islamic fascism” to describe the Shi’ite revolution, but there are however several other contending sources such as Michael Onfray who spoke of the Islamic revolution giving rise to “an authentic Muslim fascism” in his Atheist Manifesto[21]and another being Malise Ruthven[22] in an article in The Independent newspaper where he used the term “Islamofascism.” The theme was also taken up by Paul Berman[23] and even more extensively by Norman Podhoretz[24] in World War IV: The Long Struggle against Islamofascism.

It was inevitable that Rodinson emerged as a major critic of Foucault. He complained that the “great gaps in his knowledge of Islamic history enabled him to transfer the events in Iran, to accept in most part the semitheoretical suggestions of his Iranian friends, and to extrapolate from this by imaging an end of history that would make up for disappointments in Europe and elsewhere.”[25] Rodinson opposed the idea of “political spirituality” that had allegedly inspired the revolutionary movement; it failed to uncover the more material causes behind the discontent. The intolerant nature of the religious elements in the revolt had from the beginning contradicted the humanist sense that he had ascribed to it. In so doing, Foucault had demonstrated his political naivity.

In Rodinson’s world view, political opposition came through working-class movements that found their expression in trade unions, socialist political parties, nationalist organizations, working-class communities and organizations promoting international associations and not through movements inspired by a millenarian religion. He claimed that, “Multiple cases of political spirituality have existed. All came to an end very quickly.”[26] Would this claim also apply to the Pauline Christianity,[27] or to the Protestant Reformation, or to Pentecostalism in the twentieth century, or to Islam itself? Surely these movements would fall under the idea of “political spirituality.”

Modern social movements are perhaps best illustrated by Occupy Wall Street, Occupy Sandy, the Arab Spring, the Umbrella Revolution, the Jasmine Revolution and the 20 February Movement. These movements are often driven by educated, largely middle-class, young people who have little trust or interest in organized politics (of the left or the right) and they use social media rather than community groups and trade unions to mobilize their members. They draw heavily on women, women’s associations and gender politics. Women have played a conspicuous part in these new social movements as they did in the Shia Revolution. The distance between Rodinson and contemporary social theory is defined by these gender issues, recognition of women in social movements and the public, feminist social theory, and LGBT identity theory. Foucault by contrast was closely associated with new theories of sexuality.

Foucault’s Theory of Knowledge-Power

Foucault’s interpretation of the revolution was in many ways inconsistent with his earlier work on discipline and the more general theory of governmentality. For Foucault, power is not concentrated in any single institution such as the state. Rather it is dispersed to more local and micro levels such as the school room, the doctor’s clinic or the psychiatric couch.[28] He thus rejected the idea, common in Marxist sociology, that power rests in the centralized apparatus of the state. He saw power as distributed through social institutions, especially medicine and psychiatry.[29] The panopticon of Jeremy Bentham obviously fascinated Foucault as an early example of governmentality where a large number of prisoners could be disciplined by the architecture of observation. This example however points to an important difference between Foucault and his critics over the character of power. For Foucault, power is about producing effects – the disciplined self – whereas Marxism was about the negativity of power in creating repressive regimes, and thereby avoiding social effects.

In Foucault’s account of subjectification, through socialization in the family and other primary institutions individuals acquire discipline that habituates them to society.[30] As a result individuals have a propensity to follow and obey the norms of society, because social conformity is psychologically rewarded. For Foucault, habituation plays a large part in the exercise of power, and it is partly for that reason that we can include Foucault into a canon of political sociology – at least broadly defined. Foucault was concerned to study how power/knowledge/ethics were woven into the quest to support a political system that constrained any challenge to its legitimate authority.

In a series of lectures that were eventually published as Security Population Territory he explored the growth of the Christian pastorate as an example of governmentality growing out of religious practices towards the laity.[31] This form of power was absent in Greek society, but generally manifest in the Eastern Mediterranean and especially among the Hebrews. Pastoral power was derived from the idea of a shepherd’s responsibility for his flock. It was not a power over territory but over a population and it was a beneficent power, directed at the well-being of the flock. In Christianity this art of governing men signals the beginning of the modern state. Governmentality is par excellence the rational and calculated practice of regulation, but it is productive (of subjectivities) not necessarily destructive. Thus the soft power of the patoral regume did not disappear with secularization. Instead it was built into the bureaucratic apparatus of the modern state.

Given Foucault’s views on governmentality and pastoral power, how was the Shia Revolution possible? In fact how is any revolt possible? Why therefore did the prospect of revolutionary change interest Foucault sufficently to bring him to Iran? The most plausible account of Foucault’s vision of the revolutionary as a break with history is to be found in Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi’s Foucault in Iran: Islamic Revolution after the Enlightenment. The subtitle is a particularly important aspect of his general argument. Foucault did not want to deny the unique possibility of historical change and the prospect of a breakthrough the routines of subordination, and he attempted to go outside the dominant paradign of Western secularism to watch history in the making.

A charismatic breathrough is not unthinkable in modernity, but do revolutions ultimately fail? Ghamari-Tabrizi locates this question in the context of the pessimism of the Left when, after the 1968 student revolt, there was an atmosphere of political defeatism in France. He writes: “Foucault saw in Iran a moment of creative pause in, or even negation of, his theory of power and governmentality. The Iranian masses demonstrated the possibility of resistance without participating in or perpetuating a preconceived schema of power.”[32] Foucault did not recant his views because he did not want to rob the Iranian masses of the authencity of their protest and their success in removing the Shah. Foucault’s interpretation of the events that produced the revolution are not especially problematic once one accepts the notion contra Marxism that religion has independent effects and has a material force. In defence of Foucault, he did not wish to see the revolution through the framework of Western Orientalism. Published at the time of the revolution, Edward Said’s Orientalism identified several defining themes in the Western view of Islam and Islamicate cultures. Islamic societies were static and unchanging, and hence in need of modernization which could only come through external forces.[33] Secondly, Muslim societies were backward and could not understand the real causes of their lack of history and their backwardness. Only the West could truly understand the East. While Said’s criticism was largely addressed to literary works such as the novels of Jane Austin, there was ironically a parallel criticism of Marxism which in terms of the Asiatic mode of production which argued that radical social change could only come from outside the system.[34] Foucault to his credit was able to approach the Shia Revolution without the intellectual baggage of secular Marxism.

Conclusion: Foucault and the Fate of Revolutions

Foucault’s newspaper articles have been translated and much discussed. It is not my intention here to repeat these commentaries. Foucault has been much ridiculed and criticized for his support of religion and the revolutionary overthrow of the Shah. Foucault did not retract from his original position and evolution of the revolution into laïcité than with Foucault’s support for a spiritual revolution in spiritless times. The criticisms and ridicule of Foucault emerged from a culture that could not recognise the political significance of global religions. He has also been criticized for his silence with respect to the role of Muslim women in the revolution and its aftermath. These attitudes are also part of the legacy of laïcité. Whereas the modern secular French woman is free to enjoy and express her sexual freedom, the Muslim woman is covered, secluded and lacking in will. The veil which is an offence to the Republic “covers what ought to be seen.”[35]

The Shia Revolution can be said to have been succesful in removing an authoritaian and repressive regime, but in the long run it failed to reconcile two contradictory principles – velayat- e faqih or the Rule of the Jurist and the democratic will of the masses invested in responsible institutions by fair elections. The velayat- e faqih was an invention of the Revolution and has no precedent in Shia theology in which the just Ruler is the Prophet and the twelve Infallible Imams.[36] The constitution named Ayatollah Khomeini as Leader for life and created an elected Assembly of Experts that in practice has merely endorsed the rulings of the Leader. Consequently the “monarchy was replaced by an Islamic Republic, a novel combination of clerical theocracy and populist democracy.”[37] In many ways the most negative outcome of the revolution was the reversal of the liberation of family law in 1979 that had been passed during the Shah’s reign. Under the government of Ahmadinejad the Revolutionary Guards became ever more powerful.

It is on these grounds that Foucault was criticized for naivety in his notion of “political spirituality” and for his failure to retract his views. However, as I have indicated, this judgment raises a more general question as to whether revolts and revolutions are ever successful, and hence whether opposition to authoritarianism is justified. Criticism of Foucault raises a far deeper problem in political philosophy about the unintended consequences of action. Modern Western thought does appear to embrace a metaphysical pathos of despair in promotong the view that the unintended consequences of political action are always negative. In this pathos, revolutions have outcomes that are the opposite of the the intentions of social actors. This promotes the obvious question: why are there no good unintended consequences? Fortune (Fortuna) looks unfavourably at protest?

Defeatism was in the air in the late 1960s.[38] Was the French Revolution itself another failed revoltuion in which the aspirations of 1789 descended into the violence of 1793? The student revolts of the late 1960s had also been of little lasting consequence. By contrast, the religious protests of 1978-9 had removed the Shah through a mass movement. Similar arguments might be raised against those who welcomed the Arab Spring and endorsed the overthrow of Mubarak in Egypt. To question Foucault’s endorsement of the Shia Revolution is therefore to question any mass movement against oppression and to resign oneself to the futility of protest.

[1]Louis Althusser, For Marx (London: Allen The Penguin Press, 1969).

[2]Louis Althusser and Etienne Balibar, Reading Capital (London: New Left Books, 1970).

[3]Nicholas Abercrombie, Stephen Hill and Bryan S. Turner, The Dominant Ideology Thesis (London: Allen Lane, 1980).

[4]Nicos Poulantzas, Political Power and Social Classes (London: New Left Books, 1970).

[5]Raymond Aron, The Opium of the Intellectuals (London: Seeker & Warburg. 1957).

[6]Antonio Gramcsi, Selections from the Prison Notebooks (London: New Left Books, 1971).

[7]Arnold Momigliano, Alien Wisdom: The Limits of Hellenization (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975).

[8]Bryan S. Turner, The Religious and the Political (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013a).

[9]Terry Rey, Bourdieu on Religion: Imposing Faith and Legitimacy (London: Routledge, 2007).

[10]Simon Susan and Bryan S. Turner, eds. (The Spirit of Luc Boltanski: Essays on the ‘Pragmatic’ Sociology of Critique (London: Anthem Press, 2014).

[11]Jose Casanova, “Public Religions Revisited,” in Religion: Beyond the Concept, ed. Hent de Vries (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 101-119.

[12]Tugrul Keskin, ed., The Sociology of Islam: Secularism, Economy and Politics (Reading: Ithaca Press, 2011).

[13] Bryan S. Turner, “Sociology of Islam: The Desiderata,” Sociology of Islam 1 (2013b): 107-109.

[14]Jose Casanova, Public Religions in the Modern World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).

[15]Casanova, “Public Religions Revisited,” 106.

[16]Joan Wallach Scott, The Politics of the Veil (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2007).

[17]Bryan S. Turner, Weber and Islam: A Critical Study (London: Routledge, 1974).

[18]Maxime Rodison, Muhammad, 2nd ed. (London: Tauris Parker, 1971), 77.

[19]Marshall G. S. Hodgson, The Venture of Islam. 3 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974).

[20]Armando Salvatore, The Sociology of Islam (Oxford: Blackwell Wiley, 2016).

[21]Michael Onfray, Atheist Manifesto: The Case Against Christianity, Judaism and Islam, trans. Jeremy Leggatt (New York: Arcade Publishing, 2007), 204.

[22]Malise Ruthven, “Construing Islam as a Language,” The Independent, 8 September 1990.

[23]Paul Berman, Liberalism and Terror (N.Y.: W.W. Norton, 2003).

[24]Norman Podhoretz, World War IV: The Long Struggle Against Islamofascism (New York: Doubleday, 2007).

[25]Maxime Rodinson, “Critique of Foucault on Iran,” in Khomeini and the Primacy of the Spiritual, 267-277, trans. from Maxime Rodinson, Le Nouvel Observateur, 19 February 1979.

[26]Rodison, “Critique of Foucault on Iran,” 271.

[27]Alain Badiou, Saint Paul: Foundation of Universalism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003).

[28]Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization (London: Tavistock, 1971); see also Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic (London: Tavistock, 1973).

[29]Michel Foucault, Power: The Essential Works 3 (London, Allen Lane: The Penguin Press, 2001).

[30]Michel Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the Collège de France 1981-1982 (New York: Picador, 2005); see also Michel Foucault, The Government of the Self and Others: Lectures at the Collège de France 1982-1983 (New York: Palgrave, 2011).

[31]Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France 1977-1978 (New York: Palgrave, 2007).

[32]Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi, Foucault in Iran: Islamic Revolution After the Enlightenment (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2016), 68.

[33]Edward Said, Orientalism (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978).

[34]Bryan S. Turner, Marx and the End of Orientalism (London: Allen and Unwin, 1978).

[35]Joan Wallach Scott, “Secularism, Gender Inequality, and the French State,” in Islam, Gender, and Democracy in Comparative Perspective, ed. Jocelyne Cesari and Jose Casanova (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017) 63-81.

[36]Said Amir Arjomand, The Turban and the Crown: The Islamic Revolution in Iran (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988.

[37]Ziba Mir-Hosseini, “Islam, Gender and Democracy in Iran,” in Islam, Gender, and Democracy in Comparative Perspective, ed. Jocelyne Cesari and Jose Casanova (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ) 211-236.

[38]Ghamari-Tabrizi, Foucault in Iran, 68.

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

Persheng Sadegh-Vaziri Volume 2, Number 4, Winter 2018

Persheng Sadegh-Vaziri teaches at Penn State Harrisburg’s department of Communications. Her current research is focused on documentary films and Iranian filmmakers. She has worked as a documentary filmmaker and producer on films focusing on Iran and Iraq, which were produced for KCET/Link TV, the National Geographic’s All Roads Project, Deep Dish TV, and independently. Her most recent film is Road to Kurdistan, which examines the Iran-Iraq Kurdistan region. Her graduate studies were in cinema studies at New York University and in media and communication at Temple University.

Close-Up (1990) and Homework (1988) were completed one after the other and bear similarities that are notable and mark Kiarostami’s style, which often transgresses limited definitions of documentary and fiction. These films employ the documentary mode extensively, though Kiarostami resisted the label. They are about very different topics, but they share the director’s personal interest and curiosity in uncovering the motivations that lead the main characters, real life people who have acted against normative expectations. Homework (1988) was even defined by the director as a documentary report. It appears as a straightforward educational film about the problem of homework in elementary schools in Iran. It focuses on one school in a working- class neighborhood of Tehran and features interviews and statistics of parents’ involvement in their children’s nightly homework. However, the film is also reflexive and highlights the filmic process and Kiarostami’s presence and role in shaping it. Kiarostami’s patient and incisive questioning takes the film beyond the objective documentary stance to an engaged and interactive one. His acclaimed film Close-Up (1990) focuses on real characters and a real legal case. Hassan Sabzian was charged for impersonating the famous Iranian director, Mohsen Makhmalbaf and deceiving an upper middle-class family. Kiarostami approached this case after reading about it in Soroush magazine and was immediately intrigued.[1]

Close-up defines the complex way in which Kiarostami employs the real and gives it fictional elements to investigate the deeper meaning behind the characters’ motivations. Kiarostami was moved by this working-class man’s dreams of cinema, which led him to deceive a family and brought about his arrest. Through dramatized and controlled reenactments, the director intervenes to recreate Sabzian’s story. This paper examines the two films and explores how Kiarostami employs reality and the documentary form extensively, even while insisting his films are works of fiction.

The two films employ practices of documentary film, such as focusing on real characters and examining their real lives. The definitions and practices of documentary film have evolved over time from the strict observational mode practiced in the 1960s by Ricky Leacock and the Maysles. This kind of documentary required filmmakers to be invisible “flies on the wall.” As Iranian filmmaker and theorist Pirooz Kalantari explains it, documentaries no longer have to use realism stylistically. Documentaries are not defined by their portrayal of pure reality without intervention. They are defined by the interactions of the filmmaker with the real world, making that the main subject of films.[2] In Close-up Kiarostami manipulates the characters’ actions on film and recreates certain events that happened and at least one that did not take place in the historical world. However, his main subject is a real man and a real case. Sabzian is enamored by cinema and deceives a family in order to live out his dream. For Sabzian and the family, the simulacra of cinema is just as real as real life. Consequently, the film becomes a tangle of the real and the creative in the hands of Kiarostami. In the concluding scenes, Kiarostami and Makhmalbaf advise Sabzian that by performing the deception, he actualized his promise to the family – to have them participate in a film and meet the famous director.

The relationship between documentary and fiction has been addressed by many documentary theorists. Bill Nichols claims that documentary offers the viewer access “to a shared historical” world, not a constructed one, but “the world,” where bullets really kill and decisions can carry life and death consequences.[3] What distinguishes documentary films from reality itself is that not everything in the world that a documentary creates is discursive, “even if their meanings and social values are.”[4] The historical world extends beyond the filmed world and it is the director who shapes it and gives it meaning, whether by using interviews, observational footage, or reenactments. Michael Renov points to the problems of reproducing reality in documentaries, “The duplication of the world, even of what we know most intimately – ourselves – can never be unproblematic…. Mimesis (even as photographic representation) means producing simulacra which are the equivalent of their historical counterparts. Signifying systems bear with them the weight of their own history and materiality.”[5] This awareness of the gap between reality and its reproduction has led documentary filmmakers in recent years to move away from purely observational or expositional documentaries to freely use artifice and reflexivity in order to recount the historical world. Jay Ruby proposes that documentarians employ reflexivity to grapple with the problems of objectivity and the presence of the camera, as well as presenting the reality of their own understanding and feelings.[6] In both films Kiarostami foregrounds the cinematic process to present the viewer with his interpretations of reality. In Close-up, he recreates certain events and places the characters in those situations. He intervenes in actuality in order for the viewer to understand and contemplate the character’s complex motivations. Jonathan Rosenbaum labels some of Kiarostami’s films, “controlled documentaries.”[7] He argues that in Homework and Close-up Kiarostami was deconstructing the documentary form.[8]

Is Close-up any less a documentary than Flaherty’s Nanook of the North, in which a pristine Inuit life, which had already been transformed by Western trade, was recreated for the benefit of audiences in the 1920s? When Kiarostami visited the Island of Aran where Robert Flaherty shot A Man of Aran, he commented on the gap between the reality of the island and how it is represented in Flahery’s film. His statement also sums up his outlook on the role of the director:

When we visit places where they have shot the films in, we are often surprised, and find it hard to believe the film was shot there… [In films] we are subject to the power of storytelling that offers us a reality much different than its true reality… We see it from the director’s point of view, his frame. Left on our own we tend to look around freely, and lack the kind of concentration we have in movie theatres. While encountering reality we are not concentrating and we are not guided. That’s why we roam around, and fail to see what we need to see…[9]

Kiarostami utilizes the documentary form but intervenes in it extensively to present his questions or perspective. He includes some observational elements in Homework – the images of children arriving at school or during their break. For most of the film he uses a formal interview set-up, a dark room with lights and the cameras. It makes the students quite aware of the filming process. However, by also including shots of the camera and himself and his voice, he signals viewers to be aware of the reality of the filmmaker’s process and presence.

Early in Homework Kiarostami explains to a bystander off-camera that the film is a visual exploration of children’s homework because his own kids have difficulty completing their work each evening. In Close-up (1990) the director or his voice is often present and visibly directs the events. He tells the judge presiding over the case that he is interested in the case because it is about cinema. There are shots of the rolling camera, the clapboard, and discussions about the cameras, which increases the visibility of the process. In the court scene in Close-up, he informs the accused that one of the cameras is framing him to record his explanations, establishing his own presence as director. The reflexive mode shows the viewer how the camera and the director intervene in the process of representation. Rather than letting us focus solely on the story or the topic of the film, it highlights the encounter between the filmmaker, the subject, and the viewer and allows us a space of awareness in relation to what we are watching.[10] This strategy serves a political function as well, since it casts doubt on the process of representation and the authenticity of documentary sound and image by calling attention to the intervention of the filmmaker.[11]

In the two films the social actors who play themselves are deemed guilty by those around them, but their stories are retold through the director’s examination of the underlying meaning behind their acts. The court scene in Close-up, for example, appears as a documentary scene, but was created by the director as a documentary style sequence to dramatize the accuser and the accused’s points of view.[12] In actuality, there was mediation between the family and Sabzian, where the charges were dropped and there was no need for a court appearance. In this way Close-up extends beyond the historical world to present the fleeting truth which Kiarostami seeks.

Nichols (1991) defines the interactive mode in documentaries as when the director is no longer just an observer behind the camera, but acts as instigator, provocateur, participant or mentor in the film.[13] There are ethical issues regarding how far the presence of the filmmaker provokes or interferes in the revelation of the truth. There is an inherent inequality between the director and the social actors, particularly if they are young children. In Homework, the interactive and reflexive modes remind the viewer of the filmed process and highlight the imbalances that the children endure when they are questioned by adults. In Close-up, the reflexive mode makes us aware of how cinema has intervened in Sabzian’s life, changed it, propelled it towards a cinematic resolution.

Homework

Homework is ostensibly a documentary about the problem of homework in a public boys’ school in Tehran that mainly uses children’s testimonials. Kiarostami makes his presence and intervention prominent in repeated shots of his face and voice, of the camera, and cameraman. He listens to the school boys and guides them to explain the difficulties they face in completing their work. A range of first and second graders, nervous and teary, bold and shy, explain in interviewed examinations, why they have not completed their assignments. Kiarostami asks them about their home life after school. They are distracted by their chores, siblings, television, or family visitors. Most do not get adequate help in completing their work, as many of their parents are illiterate.

During this period Kiarostami was working for the state funded Kanoon (Center for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults), which produced many documentaries. Hamid Naficy explores the counterhegemonic tendencies of those who worked at the Kanoon, including Kiarostami. These filmmakers often made films about children, with underlying messages about the ills of society.[14] The scenes of children in the school yard reciting slogans in support of the Iranian forces fighting Saddam or a young boy’s thoughts regarding the fighting at home, which Kiarostami likens to war, point to this analogy. The film also includes elements of a traditional documentary; it incorporates a montage sequence, where a female voice-over narrates the results of hundreds of questionnaires that were distributed among parents. It shows that in the late 1980s in that school, 37% of parents were illiterate and could not help their children and a large number were overworked and tired and requested the school to exempt them from having to help their children with homework.

From the first shots of Homework reflexivity is established as a dominant trope. On their way to school the children playfully address the camera and comment on being filmed. A group of them approach the director and ask what the film is about. Then the off-screen voice of a passerby is heard who questions the director on whether the film is documentary or fiction. Kiarostami responds that the film is not fictional and unlike his earlier film, The First Graders (1986) which was scripted, this film has no script and is based on an idea. He wanted to make it because he had difficulty with his own children regarding their nightly homework. It is not clear if the question was presented to him or if it was scripted.

A series of establishing shots show the start of a school day with the children lined up to sing anthems praising Islam’s Imams and supporting the Iranian war against Iraq’s Saddam Hussain (1980-1988). We then witness a series of formal interviews in which young boys speak directly to the camera and answer questions from the director. In the first interview set-up, an establishing shot shows the director, the interviewee, the camera, and lights, in a room prepared for the interview. Kiarostami comments about the lighting and gives directions to his cameraman. It is an unequal set up, where the director and his crew appear on one side of a typical teacher’s desk and a young, vulnerable boy stands or sits on the other side. Some answer shyly, some are reticent, some are outspoken, and a few are terrified. Kiarostami speaks gently with the boys and sometimes teases them about how much cartoons they watch. He addresses them like adults and for the most part does not interrupt their responses. Many of the interviews are long scenes that give us a full picture of the boy’s responses.

The director pursues the theme of punishment in several of the interviews, exposing the the underlying problem for the children. As Naficy states, it is a counterhegemonic strategy to let the children confess their pain of facing punishment by their parents or teachers.[15] A few boys cannot even define the meaning of “encouragement” or “praise”, but they all know the meaning of punishment. A traumatized teary-eyed child claims his brother doesn’t let him study and no one helps him. Following that interview an engaged parent appears in front of the camera and says he wants to express his views regarding this problem. He speaks for the director in stating the unreasonable pressures that parents and teachers place on the kids. During recess, a sequence of children is seen chanting slogans and beating their chests with religious songs. These scenes point to the institutionalization of physical pain and suffering in Shia Iran.

Documentary’s association with the observational or verité style is a strong element of the documentary form, where actual events are recorded in an unscripted and uncontrolled manner. However, most documentaries, even observational ones demonstrate the director’s control in shaping the film. In particular, the interview process is a set-up common to documentaries, where the director or interviewer poses the questions and directs the flow of the exposition. In this film, Kiarostami mainly uses the interview process to capture a number of testimonials from young children to distill several of the problems of the Iranian educational system in the late 1980s, only a few years after the Revolution and in the midst of an eight-year war with Iraq.

After several scenes of interviews with students posing similar questions, a pattern emerges of the difficulties students face with all the expectations placed on them. Following a few such interviews, Kiarostami pauses on Majid’s case. Kiarostami’s slow and methodical examination prepares us for the final revelation that clarifies why Majid cannot do well in school. It is not for a lack of effort, but because of the crippling fear of punishment. Majid is a traumatized young boy who can barely speak to Kiarostami. In the midst of his sobs he asks that his friend stay with him during the interview.

Kiarostami tries to calm him and persists to understand what the source of his anxiety is. Majid’s father is interviewed separately and he explains the troubles of his young boy, who may have learning difficulties. His young friend is also interviewed and explains that the teacher has punished Majid often and that is why he is terrified. After the boy finally calms down, with his friend by his side, he explains that he is upset because he has not prepared for his religion class. Kiarostami asks him if he can remember any of his lessons. He volunteers to recite a poem he has learned for the class. Surprisingly, Majid delivers the poem eloquently. With his friend close to him, in a strong voice he praises God’s beautiful creations – the stars and the universe, nature, the trees and the sky, and hearts full of joy. The film ends with a freeze frame of Majid and his friend. A choral sound-track emerges singing the same poem over the closing titles. This musical emphasis shows the director’s belief that young people need to experience joy. Majid’s transformation on camera is a moving revelation.

Over the course of his career Kiarostami has shown his genius in recognizing and resting on small stories and their power to uncover universal human themes. His complicated approach merits further examination regarding the relationship between the director and subject and the treatment of reality in films. Ziegfried Kracauer defines a strategy that Kiarostami seems to use. “Found stories” are important sources for documentaries – stories that are found in the material of actual physical reality. “When you have watched for long enough the surface of a river or lake you will detect certain patterns in the water which may have been produced by a breeze or some eddy. Found stories are in the nature of such patterns.”[16]

Closeup

In Close-up the character of Sabzian, who impersonated the famed director Makhmalbaf, fascinated Kiarostami. He read about him in a magazine article and set out to research the story. In the course of the film, Sabzian emerges as a complicated imposter, a fallen hero, who with his confessions and actions makes us think deeply about cinema and the widespread desire to get close to and emulate a celebrated director. Kiarostami’s focus on this “found story” and Sabzian’s behavior point to a common human condition: the need to be seen and be counted. The film moves between documentary set-ups, as the director inquires about Sabzian and his case, and reenacted sequences in which all the people involved in the story play their own parts.

The film starts with a dramatized reenactment. The journalist who wrote the original story in a magazine takes two soldiers to arrest the accused Sabzian. In the taxi the journalist tells the driver the story of the man’s deception. Though we don’t know if the story happened in this precise manner or not, the reenactment has many elements of the real. All the characters play their own roles. Some of the conversations are improvised as they ask passersby for directions to the house of the plaintiffs, the Ahankhah family. When the police and the journalist go in to arrest the culprit, the camera remains with the taxi driver instead of following the main action. The bored driver walks around aimlessly, then kicks a spray can down the slope and the camera stays on a long shot of the can until it stops rolling. The lengthy shot which digresses from the main story points to the director’s lack of interest in showing what is obvious, but is rather interested in following the subtle details, which allow the underlying truth to emerge.

The sequences that follow feature Kiarostami himself researching the story in several reenacted or documentary scenes, including a police station, at the home of the Ahankhah family and in prison where Sabzian is held. In the home of the Ahankhahs, they complain that the magazine article showed them as a gullible family, and that various people like the journalist (and possibly the filmmaker) have come to them to gain something from their misfortune. They want to defend themselves and tell their side of the story. Kiarostami asks them where Sabzian is held and they guide him to Ghasr prison.

The camera is not allowed inside the prison visiting room and we watch through a window frame as Kiarostami meets Sabzian for the first time. Rosenbaum claims this scene was also recreated, though its framing, the characteristics of the location, and Sabzian’s behavior point to its documentary nature. There is a lot of activity going on in the background and Sabzian seems to be unaware of the camera. The director who is mic’d asks him if he can do anything for him and Sabzian responds that he wants his pain to be visualized. The camera zooms in to give us a closer shot of the two of them talking. We only see Kiarostami’s back and Sabzian’s face. As Rosenbaum states, Kiarostami’s approach throws the veracity of all scenes into uncertainty, which is the point.[17] Because truth is elusive.

Sabzian says he admitted to embezzlement but his motivation was his love for art and cinema. He asks Kiarostami to give his message to Mohsen Makhmalbaf – that he lives with the director’s film The Cyclist (1987). During this period, Makhmalbaf was Iran’s most famous director. He had emerged from a humble background, became a revolutionary filmmaker, and then a critically acclaimed cineaste, who made dramatic and surreal films about the plight of returning war veterans and the poor. The Cyclist is an allegorical film about a poor and desperate Afghani immigrant, who raises money for his ill wife’s medical care by riding a bicycle non-stop for a week. In the prison encounter, Sabzian is established as pensive and modest character that rises above his petty crime. Kiarostami’s deep study, the accused’s awareness of his motivations, and his identification with The Cyclist make us see him as he sees himself, in the role of a tragic hero of a neorealist film.

The next scene is in the offices of the judge, as Kiarostami requests that they expedite the proceedings. The judge doesn’t see the significance of the case for a film and explains that they deal with more interesting criminal cases that the filmmaker could use. He agrees to let Kiarostami film in the courtroom once he obtains the right permits. This scene is also devised by Kiarostami, since there was no actual trial. An Iranian film critic who accompanied one of the participants in the trial scene, explained that it was conducted just like a trial, with the presiding judge and the participants speaking from their own convictions.[18]

Bill Nichols, in his discussion of the documentary form explains that the objective world or reality is neither a text nor a narrative. In order for it to be defined or shaped it needs a system of signs, language or discourse. Both documentaries and fiction are texts that share “formal, ideologically inflected status.”[19] However, fictional worlds, even if they have a realist style, remain metaphorical. He states that both are constructs, but they differ significantly in their representations of the historical world. Nichols claims that in documentaries representation works with rhetoric and persuasion rather than with likeness or reproduction.[20] There are many indexical signs present in Closeup that problematize it as a work of fiction. In both Homework and Close-up something different happens. The social actors play themselves and the director engages them to participate in retelling their stories in a way that illuminates a deeper truth. He transgresses the documentary form when the real characters reenact a scene that did not take place, but perhaps had happened metaphorically. Kiarostami creates the courtroom scene, not to dramatize, but to force the characters into a space where they would speak their intentions.

The courtroom scene begins with the clapboard marking its fictional nature. It is also reflexive, signifying that we are indeed watching a film. The light stands are visible and Kiarostami appears to be more in charge of this scene than the judge. His voice intervenes in the beginning by explaining that two cameras are placed there to record the judge and the accused. He directs Sabzian to address one of the cameras when he explains his reasons behind his acts. The judge asks Kiarostami’s permission to begin and the session starts. Later in the sequence, the director interrupts to ask his own questions.

As discussed earlier, reflexivity in works of art challenges cinematic conventions, whether it is documentary or narrative, to bring awareness to the form itself, as well as to the inner “workings of society.”[21] By bringing attention to the position of cameras, including the director’s off-screen voice that interjects in the proceedings, the viewer becomes aware of the reality of the filmmaking process and the power of the medium. In a film about the main character’s love for cinema, the director aptly brings our attention to the artifice of film and makes us question whether Sabzian is any more duplicitous than a film director, in presenting an imaginary world and passing it on as real.

In the courtroom, the camera pans the faces of the attendants, the plaintiffs, the journalist, and the accused. The younger Ahankhah explains the family’s charges against Sabzian, whom they believe had plans to embezzle them. The courtroom sequence cuts to a dramatized flashback of Sabzian and Mrs. Ahankhah on a bus, when they first met and the deception began. In this scene, they sit next to each other on the bus and Mrs. Ahankhah asks Sabzian if he is the famous director and tells him about her son’s interest in cinema. Back in the courtroom Sabzian reiterates that his psychological motivation was his love for cinema, not money. For him Makhmalbaf’s films expressed his pain and he also sees himself as the main character in Kiarostami’s film The Traveler (1974). The Traveler is about narrative film about a child who is so passionate about football that in order to buy tickets to a game, he deceives his classmates and charges them for photographs taken with his fake camera. However, he falls asleep and misses the game. Sabzian says that he has also missed out in life.

After the plaintiffs state their complaint, again Kiarostami’s voice intervenes and asks Sabzian to explain more clearly why he took their money to pay for his taxi. Sabzian recounts that being Makhmalbaf empowered him. People responded to his requests. Then at the end of the night he would have to go home and be the same unemployed, desperate man who could not even afford to buy a bag of chips for his child. Navigating the two worlds was painful for him, but he was encouraged to continue because he felt empowered.

In another reenacted scene that reflects back to the first scene, we watch from inside the house as Sabzian is found out and arrested. He is talking to the family in the living room, but they appear distracted. The father leaves and talks to the journalist outside. The camera remains on Sabzian, while the journalist and the Ahankhahs leave to bring in the police. Sabzian remains alone in a long shot that emphasizes his loneliness. In a closer shot Sabzian pulls the curtain and watches helplessly and with apprehension what is about to take place. Once again, the camera remains not on the dramatic interchange, but on the trapped man. He paces the room, but is unable to leave. Kiarostami’s main concern is Sabzian’s psychological state and his behavior. In this reenactment Sabzian plays himself and convincingly shows the anguish he had experienced.

Later in the trial Kiarostami asks him pointedly if he prefers to act or to direct and Sabzian responds that he prefers acting. Kiarostami follows up to ask if he is acting now in the courtroom. Sabzian responds resolutely that he is speaking from the heart and it is not an act. Though the scene is set up by the director, Sabzian’s response is based on his real motivations – his inner experiences. Here through a fictional scene the director arrives at documentary truth.

Sabzian’s confession and his questioning by the judge and Kiarostami resemble the interviews Kiarostami conducted with the children in Homework. Sabzian responds to the questions that the judge and Kiarostami put to him, and the director prods him to go deeper to the source of his motivations for deceiving the family. Like the children he is in the hot seat and has to explain himself. Kiarostami often said that Close-up was his favorite film and explained in an interview that he could see that the children in Homework would grow up to be like Sabzian because they were all the products of the same society and system.[22] In this way Sabzian also takes on universal characteristics that we can identify with and becomes a tragic figure whose passion leads to his downfall.

The final sequence of the film features Sabzian’s release from prison. Kiarostami has arranged for Makhmalbaf to greet him and give him a ride on his motorbike to go to the Ahankhah home and apologize. Sabzian is so moved that he cries and can barely talk. We watch the encounter from inside the car where Kiarostami and his cameraman record the interaction. The sound is cuts off intermittently, presumably due to technical difficulties. Later in an interview Kiarostami admitted that he did not want to include all the banal conversations that Makhmalbaf and Sabzian were having, so he came up with the idea of cutting off the sound.[23] Kiarostami’s car follows them; the camera frames their motorbike from behind the cracked window of their car. The crack is another reminder that accentuates the viewer’s separation from the main action and heightens the awareness of the filmmaking process.

Reality, Fiction, Documentary

Kiarostami approaches the documentary mode not as an end, but as a means to uncover reality; he uses it and goes beyond it, making the viewers aware of his interventions and his interpretations of reality. Several of the scenes in Close-up, including the police station, are difficult to define as reenactments or documentary sequences. Regarding Close-Up, Kiarostami said that he attempted to “reach fiction through the documentary.”[24] In another interview he said, “Reality is not particularly interesting to me. Its value is in bringing us closer to the Truth… that humans are ultimately alone – they ultimately have to face their issues alone. This is not selfishness, quite the contrary, it is with this lonesome self that one understands others.”[25] Sabzian’s act that brought him to trial and Majid’s refusal to cooperate with his teachers and parent exemplify our human condition – our predicament to ultimately face life alone.

In several interviews Kiarostami has declared that the documentary mode does not exist, but that we can approach reality through his interventions. His definition of documentary was restricted to recording pure reality, which is not the function of documentaries. His body of work mainly features fictional works that explore the relationship between films and reality. Many of them use reflexivity or borrow from the documentary mode. In Through the Olive Trees he foregrounds the process of filmmaking. In the endless takes and repetitions of the film within the film, the characters live their lives in between the takes. The non-professional actor, Hossein Rezai proposes to Tahereh while they wait for the filming to begin.[26] However, those scenes were also set up and shot, as did the shots of the camera crew. They are no more documentary than the rest of the film. In Ten (2002) a woman drives her car in Tehran. She is going through a divorce and argues with her real- life son and picks up other women in her car. They confide their difficulties in their relationships to her. The entire film takes place inside the car – it was shot with two digital cameras that were fixed on the driver and her riders. Once again, its simple structure and long shots and improvisations give it the appearance of the documentary mode. Shirin (2009) is a conceptual film with a simple design that subverts our expectations of documentary truth. The entire film consists of close-ups of faces of more than fifty actresses, as they presumably watch an Iranian epic tragedy. We do not see the film, but hear it on the sound track. The film is purely artifice; it was not shot in a theatre and the actresses were not watching the epic. However, it is significant that he was using real actors, whose job is to perform. In Shirin, we are watching the reality of their acting.

In Certified Copy, the two leading characters discuss the differences between a real work of art and its copies as they drive in the Italian countryside. The female character, played by Juliette Binoche, takes a writer to see a famous work of art that is not an original, but a copy. Their discussion harkens to Walter Benjamin’s ruminations about the original work of art, its authenticity and aura, which is lacking in reproductions;[27] the writer declares that copies are no less valuable as they point us to their original and lead to self-inquiry. This brings us back to Kiarostami’s thesis, that his films are copies of reality but they are no less real. They push us to a focused examination of the nature of reality. In Close-Up, Sabzian’s act and Kiarostami’s intervention make us reexamine if his pretense was not the result of a society that values cinema very highly and where media have taken hold of our reality. We are led to conclude that both Sabzian and the boys in Homework are not guilty of anything, except for being vulnerable members of their society who are punished when they fail.

The two films are not confessionals nor do they operate like “Reality TV”, which may share some of the same motivations. Using the documentary mode extensively, they do not simply divulge what happened in the past, but build up to the conflict and the truth of the story within the diegesis of the film. In Homework, the climax of the film is presented in the last interview when the upset young boy is prodded by Kiarostami. He carefully prepares the stage for the boy and for us by interviewing the boy’s father and his friend, in order to uncover the difficulties at home and in the classroom. The educational documentary is transformed into a drama as the boy is inconsolable and breaks down, then relaxes and shows the director and the viewers that he is actually quite capable of doing good work, but only with support and encouragement. The film does not cross the boundaries of documentary, as their reality unfolds in front of the camera.

In thinking about the slippage between the real and the copy, Baudrillard asserted that reality is disappearing to make room for images.[28] Simulation is what is left, as our mediated society dissolves the borders further and further with each movie, TV show, game, and technological innovation. Sabzian became entangled in the simulacra of films rather than in his problem-ridden life of struggle and unemployment and invented a new identity that attracted the Ahankhah family. Kiarostami uses Sabzian’s story to express how reality and a story about the real event are inextricably entangled. The film is designed to help us see the contradictions in punishing a powerless man of a crime for posing as a powerful director. Here, as James, the character in Certified Copy declared, the copy becomes more valuable than the original.

[1]Mehdi Sahabi, “Reenacting Reality, In Search of Reality,” (interview) Film Magazine 88, (1990), 66.

[2]Pirooz Kalantari, “A Longshot and a Close-up: A Glance at Kiarostami and Documentary Film,” Film Magazine 513, (11 September 2016), 21.

[3]Bill Nichols, Representing Reality (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1991), 109.

[4]Nichols, Representing Reality, 109.

[5]Michael Renov, Theorizing Documentary (London: Routledge, 1993), 26.

[6]Jay Ruby, “Reflexivity and the Documentary Film,” in New Challenges for Documentary, ed. Alan Rosenthal, (University of California Press, 1988), 71.

[7]Jonathan Rosenbaum, “From Iran With Love,” Chicago Reader (1995), www.jonathanrosenbaum.net/1995/09/from-iran-with-love/.

[8]Jonathan Rosenbaum & Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa, Abbas Kiarostami, (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2003), 15.

^[9]Jamshid Akrami, A Walk with Kiarostami, (video-recording, 2005), https://vimeo.com/214245067.

[10]Nichols, Representing Reality, 60-61.

[11]Nichols, Representing Reality, 61.

[12]Ahmad Talebinejad, “Memories of Kiarostami: Elegy for a Heavyweight,” Film Monthly 513, (11 September 2016), 26.

[13]Nichols, Representing Reality, 44.

[14]Hamid Naficy, A Social History of Iranian Cinema, vol. 2 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), 404.

[15]Naficy, A Social History of Iranian Cinema, 75.

16Ziegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 245.

[17]Jonathan Rosenbaum, (2003), 17.

[18]Talebinejad, “Memories from Kiarostami,” 26.

[19]Nichols, Representing Reality, 110. .sing the documentary mode extensively, cted to recording pure reality, which is not the work of documentary filmmakers. he proc

[20]Peter Wollen, cited in Bill Nichols, Representing Reality, 66.

[21]Jamshid Akrami, “Kiarostami Interview in Cannes,” (video recording, 1997), www.youtube.com/watch?v=F9l_KD96E_M.

[22]Geoff Andrews, “Abbas Kiarostami,” The Guardian (28 April 2005), www.theguardian.com/film/2005/apr/28/hayfilmfestival2005.guardianhayfestival.

[23]Rashmi Doraiswamy, “Abbas Kiarostami: Life and Much More,” Cinemaya: The Asian Film Quarterly (Summer 1999): 18-20.

[24]Sahabi, “Reenacting Reality, In Search of Reality,” 66.

[25]Stephen Holden, “Film Festival Review: Blurring Truth and Fiction in Rural Iran,” The New York Times, 24 September 1994, www.nytimes.com/movie/review?res=9C04E1D6153AF937A1575AC0A962958260?.

[26]Walter Benjamin, “Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, 1995), 217-252.

[27]Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2006), 144.

Hafez and Sufi Hermeneutics

Daryoush Ashouri Volume 2, Number 2, Summer 2017

Daryoush Ashouri was born in Tehran in 1938. His extensive scholarship examines historical, cultural and linguistic matters of Persia, also as a Third World country encountering modernity. He is author, compiler, and translator of more than 25 books. One of his major works is his hermeneutical, intertextual study of the Divan of Hafez, ‘Erfān o rēndi.

The usage of an equivocal and highly metaphorical language with its frequent references to historical, legendary, and symbolic figures of Semitic and pre-Islamic Persian origin, has made Divān of Hafez the most enigmatic piece of Persian literature for modern minds and, for this reason, the most challenging one. The mastery of its author in simultaneously playing with real, symbolic, and metaphorical meanings of the words in an equivocal manner, has made his poetry extraordinarily responsive to a spectrum of largely incompatible, and even contradictory, interpretative approaches from a host of differing and opposing ideological and philosophical horizons. In recent times, the endeavors of many scholars and enthusiastic admirers of Hafez, mostly Iranians, to decode the puzzle of its language of metaphors and symbols have produced a sizable interpretative body of literature.

The Sufi mystics, with their ancient tradition of reading and decoding poetic texts considered as symbolic expressions of their specific esoteric views, still see in him the most brilliant icon of the spiritual ascetic life, and in his words as authentic mystical exegesis of Qur’an. In this relationship, he is entitled as ‘tongue of the invisible world’ (lesān al-ghēyb) or a highly mysterious voice expressing godly secrets in an allusive language which could be deciphered only by ‘men of secrets’ (ahl-e rāz).

Others, rising out of the avant-garde movement of the modern Iranian intelligentsia, on the contrary, consider him the greatest libertine and blasphemous figure amongst the classical Persian poets. Still some interpreters of Hafez from the extreme right wing of Iranian nationalism carrying enthusiastic anti-Arab and anti-Islamic views, by referring to his frequent recalling of the historical and legendary political and spiritual figures of the ancient Persian history, like Jamshid, Dārā, and Zoroaster, in an extremely arbitrary way they consider his words as thoroughly allusive expressions of complete adhesion to the original ‘Persian’ world views which reflect an anti-Islamic spirit. They go so far to ascribe Hafez to a hypothetical esoteric sect, living until his time as a relic of the aboriginal pre-Islamic religion of Mithraism. Finally, some ardent leftists, driven by their essentially presentist concerns, depict Hafez as a severe social critic and, somehow, a politically militant figure.

In spite of my continuous study of the vast literature produced on the Divān of Hafez, my quest for disclosing the enigma of his poetry from a modern point of view never attained a satisfactory response for decades. In this way, his oeuvre remained for me, like many other readers, the most complex mystery of Persian culture, ultimately unattainable by a logically acceptable approach. In this regard, certain obvious obstacles have played a part in complicating the interpretive task. One example is the impossibility of arranging the ghazals of the Divān, except a few number, according to their exact date of composition, for disclosing clearly their possible biographical or historical connotations. Another important obstacle is the poet’s intentional playful tone which strives to conceal, in a mystical manner, its deeper layers of meanings expressed in a secret allusive tongue, indecipherable by ‘strangers’ (nā-mahramān). In the end, from a modern analytical point of view, it seems to me that the absence of a properly applicable methodological device, until now, has been the main obstacle for such a hermeneutical assignment.

Sufi hagiography interprets images, terms, and imaginary figures appearing as persons in the Divān in accordance with its own traditional way of reading. This tradition regards Hafez as a saintly figure inspired by the Occult World (ālam-e ghēyb), and, in this manner, sets him at the highest rank in its pantheon of poet-saints. But such readings hardly satisfy the modern mind that aims to understand the Divān as a text produced by its own specific historical circumstances. In this respect, the only factual element is the pervasive presence of the vocabulary, allusions, imagery and symbols in the Divān common to the poetics of mystical love in Persian language. This specific language establishes the undeniable genealogical affinity of the Divān to other Sufi or mystical (ērfāni) poetry in this language, as in the divāns of Attār, Rumi, Erāqi, Sa‘di, Khājū, and the works of numerous other poets among predecessors or contemporaries of Hafez.

Hafez’s obsessive concern with the themes and terms of Sufi literature, juxtaposed with his continuous harsh criticism of institutionalized Sufism and its representatives, in the name of an individualistic esoteric faith, reveals his very intimate acquaintance with Sufi literature and his enthusiastic engagement with key Sufi concepts, terms, spiritualistic claims, and practices. The constant presence of two central iconic figures– zāhēd (the ascetic), on one hand, and rēnd (the enlightened libertine) on the other– should be considered as the core discourse of the Divān. The bipolar characterization of these two central figures and their eternal contradictory positions on the matters of Truth and righteousness are the dominant themes in the poetry of Hafez, which essentially is adopted from his predecessors among Sufi poets, originally based on the Sufi exegesis of the Qur’anic account of the myth of the Creation.

Regarding the problematics noted above, intertextual approach seems to be the most fruitful method for disclosing the basic contextual meanings of the numerous terms, images, and symbolic expressions, that the Divᾱn of Hafez shares basically with the long and prolific tradition of the Persian Sufi literature, both in poetry and prose.

The Basic Implications of the Intertextual Approach

In recent decades, Iranian scholars have extensively explored the intertextual relations between the Divān of Hafez and other books of poetry, both Sufi and non-Sufi, composed by his predecessors and contemporaries. These explorations have clearly demonstrated Hafez’s wide reading of Persian literary works and, also, his considerable use of images, expressions, and even verbatim citations, in part or in full, from such works. But these comparative surveys, fundamentally, have been performed from a literary point of view. Therefore, the more fundamental issue, that is, the ideational relations between the basic images, symbols, figurative expressions, and concepts in the Divān and other texts of Sufi literature, have not been subject to a meticulous analytical investigation.

The comparative study of the Divᾱn[1]and certain classical Sufi Qur’anic hermeneutical

works in prose, which precede the Divᾱn by several centuries, performed by me, strived to use modern instruments of conceptual analysis in search of a positive intertextual affinity, at least in part, between the Divᾱn and those works. This study revealed the undeniable influence, impact, and echoing of those works upon the main thrust of poetic discourse in the Divᾱn of Hafez.

The intertextual approach proves to be the most effective method for contextualizing the Divᾱn in its proper historical setting and deconstructing its structure of meaning. This method ultimately discloses the genealogy of the complex allusions and key terms adopted from Sufi tradition of poetic tongue in the Divān. Set alongside certain studies done by Iranian scholars in recent decades on the abundant reflections of the Qur’anic verses in the Divān, some students of the Sufi literature have pointed out the reflections of Sufi Qur’anic hermeneutics in the Divān. Two texts are of special note in this regard: Kashf al-asrār of Rashid al-Din Meybodi (d. 520/1126), the great pioneering work of Khorasani Sufism, and Mērsād al-ēbād of Najm al-Din Rāzi (d. 654/1256), a fundamental Sufi work that appeared later along the same hermeneutical lines. To provide direct evidence of this influence, the section devoted to intertextual study in my book on Hafez cites numerous verses from the Divān alongside selected related passages from the two Sufi hermeneutical works mentioned above. This juxtaposition clearly demonstrates how many lines in the Divān repeat almost precisely the key terms and metaphors found in those texts, and strongly echo their hermeneutical approach to the Qur’anic myth of Creation. The difference, of course, is that what these Sufi authors describe through a lengthy and detailed prose treatment, Hafez expresses in a uniquely succinct and allusive poetical tongue.

The detailed and extended exposition of those terms and images in Meybodi’s work facilitates a clearer understanding of the referential role of many words and expressions obsessively repeated in the Divān. For example, we can confidently ascertain the meaning of the term salāmat— which is repeated many times in the Divᾱn—as expressed in a half line by him:

منِ سرگشته هم از اهلِ سلامت بودم…

(Man-e sar-gashtē ham az ahl-ē salāmat būdam…)

I, the wandering one, once belonged to the people of sound life…

Here, as in the other places, salāmat refers to the ‘sound life’ in the ‘House of Soundness’ (Dār al-Salām), Heavenly Abode, the Paradise. Thus, ahl-ē salāmat, as a term, refers to the inhabitants of Dᾱr al-Salᾱm. In this verse, the stable, sound, and delightful life in the ‘House of Soundness’, devoid of any disturbance, stands in contrast to the life of the narrator– the poet—living an earthly life, characterized as the life of a perplexed, homeless one, a ‘wanderer’ (sar-gashtē).

Through further investigation into the above-mentioned hermeneutical texts, we can realize that Hafez, in this verse as in many others, identifies himself, as ‘wanderer’, with his archetypal paradigm, Adam, the Father of humankind , after leaving the Paradise. According to Sufi hermeneutics of the Khorasani school, an extensive exposition of which appears in the section devoted to mystical interpretation of the Qur’an in Kashf al-asrᾱr, Adam’s ‘wandering’ in the Eternal Time was caused by his positive and courageous response to the invocation of Love while living in Paradise. Then, by committing the Original Sin, he chooses, deliberately, to desert the ‘House of Soundness’ (Dᾱr al-Salᾱm) and, by this action, alienates himself from its sound-living inhabitants (ahl-ē salᾱmat) to commence a life, full of hazards and dangers, in the mundane, terrestrial world (ālam-ē khāki), in order to fulfill the will of the Eternal Beloved (mahbūb-ē azali). The second half line of this verse reveals that the adventure of deserting the heavenly safe and sound life was caused by a love ‘trap’ put in his way (dᾱm-ē rᾱh) by the ‘curly hair’ of the Beloved. In this relationship we read in the Kashf al-asrᾱr,

فرمان آمد، :”یا آدم، اکنون که قدم در کویِ عشق نهادی از بهشت بیرون شو که این سرایِ راحت است و عاشقانِ درد را با سلامتِ دارالسلام چه کار!”[2]

A heavenly command came, “O Adam, now that you have passed into the quarter of love, get out of the Paradise which is the house of comfort. What the lovers of sufferings have to do with the sound life of the ‘House of Soundness’!”

By means of the intertextual study we come to understand the original reason for and meaning of the ‘wandering’ (sar-gashtēgi) of the poet. Another point, which provides strong support to this approach, is the use Hafez makes of the word ‘sar-gashtē’ in this context. This word is borrowed from Mērsᾱd al-ēbᾱd [3], where Rᾱzi is recounting the story of the Fall of Adam from Paradise, using this attribute to describe his ultimate ‘homelessness’. On another occasion, Hafez speaks of ‘man-ē sar-gardᾱn’ (me, the wanderer), which is again a term adopted from Mērsᾱd (ibid., idem.) in the same context, where Rᾱzi relates the words that Adam has told to God after the Fall, describing his own situation as ‘sar-gardᾱni’ (wandering).[4]

In fact, this very condition of ‘wandering’ is expounded in great detail in these Sufi hermeneutical works, where the myth of Creation of Adam according to the Qur’an is analyzed in details from a mystical perspective. Throughout his Divᾱn, Hafez makes repeated poetic allusions to this specific Sufi hermeneutical version of the story. Likewise, an intertextual study of the Divān alongside the mystical interpretation of Qur’anic passages in Meybodi’s work, clearly reveals the precise referential meanings of many other terms and expressions, such as: karāmat (god’s graciousness), malāmat (blame), peymān (pact), gharib (stranger), lotf-ē azal (pre-eternal grace), dām-ē balā (trap of afflictions), zāhēd-ē khod-bin (the conceited ascetic), etc. By the same token, the search for intertextual relationships between the Divān and the section devoted to the extended mystical interpretation of the myth of Creation in Mērsād al-ēbād of Rāzi, allows us to grasp the referential meanings of such terms and expressions as: ganj (treasure), kharābāt (‘Tavern of Ruin’), sowme‘a (cloister), rēndān-ē qalandar (wild roving libertines), gowhar-ē makhzan-ē asrār (the Pearl of the Treasury of Mysteries), and so forth.

Even more essential to our quest for the structure of meaning in the Divān of Hafez is the strong echo of the central point of the Sufi hermeneutics in the greatest number of his ghazals.

The Core of Sufi Hermeneutics

The intertextual study undertaken by this author reveals a very crucial point: the selected parts of the two Sufi hermeneutical works by Meybodi and Rāzi that exhibit the greatest affinity to the terms, images, and expressions in the Divān of Hafez, as mentioned above, are directly concerned with a mystical reading and interpretation of the myth of Creation in Qur’an. It is the focal point of all attempts made by Sufi exegetes to reveal the mysteries (asrār) of God’s Word (Kalām Allāh). To this end, they ventured a bold exegesis of those parts of the Qur’an which are mainly narrated briefly, being scattered in seven different suras. The Sufis who pioneered esoteric Qur’anic hermeneutics strongly believed that their adventurous quest for uncovering the secret layers of meanings in God’s Word, in reality, are heavenly inspirations. Through their unique and daring approach, the Sufi exegetes found themselves, as it were, being guided to their heartfelt knowledge, induced by God, to the safe harbour of a thoroughly original mystical theology, angelology, and anthropology. By this extraordinary hermeneutical leap of understanding, they could consider themselves as ‘God’s friends’ and ‘God-knowing’ ones (owliyā’ and orafā’), chosen by God to serve as treasurers of His mysteries (khᾱzine-yē asrār-ē ēlāhi).

In Meybodi’s work, which constitutes the first great Persian compilation of Sufi hermeneutics, we witness the author’s mission of disclosing the secrets of Adam’s creation by revealing his place in the teleological design of the World. To this end, the Sufi exegetes from Khorasan create their specific manner of reading and interpreting God’s Word. This strategy patently manifests itself in the very title of the Meybodi’s colossal work: Kashf al-asrār i.e. the discovery of the mysteries.[5] Following the legacy and tradition of earlier Sufi masters, Meybodi ventures to follow the three-way relationships between God, the Angels (including, specifically, Eblis), and Adam, as described in the Qur’an in a semi-dramatic style. Meybodi implements this strategy through a meticulous analysis of the words exchanged between the three parties and their behaviours toward each other during the process of the Creation of Adam and subsequent events, that is, the story of the primordial Sin and Fall.

Meybodi, as a compiler of the long tradition of Sufi hermeneutics, garners all the key Qur’anic segments related to the story of man’s Creation in the Heavenly World, and juxtaposes these with other relevant verses about the qualifications of man’s life in this World. Moreover, to expound upon the terse Qur’anic narrative, he supplies complementary materials drawn from the hadiths (Godly and Prophetic traditions), and ‘testimonies’ (khabar), including ideas and interpretations integrated from the Jewish and Christian scriptural hermeneutical traditions. In this manner, he strives to reconstruct the ‘full text’ of the story of Creation, delving into great detail to disclose its teleological mysteries. Close study of the strategy of Sufi hermeneutics provides essential clues for understanding how Sufi esoteric ‘discoveries’ (kashf) in this context played a crucial role in forming the spirit, subject-matter, and tongue of the later Persian Sufi literature, reflected specifically in its extraordinarily prolific poetical productions.

According to the Sufi hermeneutical analysis, as discussed in the two pivotal works by Meybodi and Rāzi, when God announced His resolve to appoint a successor (khalifa) on the Earth, the angels protested that this, yet unnamed, creature, i.e. the later Adam, would be a corrupt and bloodthirsty being (II:29). The Sufi exegetes tried to discover the angels’ hidden intention in those words by tracing their subsequent words and behaviors.[6] They concluded that the Angels’ disdainful words about Adam, or their hostile attitude toward him, derived from the pride they took in having served God for eons. It also reflected their jealousy for the special attention that God bestowed upon Adam. Hearing God’s Words and observing His long labor in shaping Adam’s mould of clay by His own hands, the angels saw the creation of favored being who, in spite of his low earthly origin, would be far closer to God than them. Hence, they objected against Adam to preserve their superior position as spiritual beings. God’s response to their objection, that ‘I know the things that you never know,’ (II:29) confirmed His secret intentions of creating Adam. Finally, the refusal of Eblis — an angel of the highest rank and knowledge– to prostrate himself before Adam, confirmed the eternal rivalry for closeness to God between angels, as heavenly creatures, and Adam, as the earthly being. While the God’s act of bestowing Adam from his own Spirit and making him enlightened by suggesting the knowledge of ‘all names’ in him from the treasury of His own absolute knowledge, puts great questions before the exegetes about the three partite relationships between God, Man, and the Angels.

The long quest of Sufi hermeneutics to penetrate the mysteries of the Creation of Adam through God’s Word, by centuries of elaborations, finally culminates in the belief in Adam’s moral and spiritual superiority to Angels; in spite of the apparent spatial closeness of the Angels to God in the Heavenly world and Adam’s Fall from grace reside in proximity of the Angels and God himself. Through their specific manner of interpretation, they arrived at this essential insight by contemplations on the real, but secretive, closeness of Adam to God. They finally find out Adam as the creature chosen by God for the role of the protagonist in the romantic epic of the Eternal Love story. This thesis found its justification in their meticulous analysis of the Myth of Fall (hobūt) of man.

Adam’s Fall and his punitive exile from Paradise to the inferior Earthly realm for disobeying God’s orders, is interpreted as a momentous secret plot willed by Him, in which the Angels came to participate unwittingly, unaware of the mysterious divine intent behind it. Indeed, the Creation of Adam remains an eternal mystery to the Angels because they are ontologically inferior to Adam by being deprived of Adam’s share in God’s Spirit and Knowledge. Therefore, Adam’s primordial sin, which led to the Fall, is interpreted as God’s disguised Eternal blessing (lotf-ē azal) for mankind, as Hafez reminds. This epochal event was fully pre-ordained as part of God’s pre-eternal resolve (mashiyat) for revealing the highest stage of all being: His Beauty. Thus, when coming to Adam and his ontological mission, we read in Kashf al-asrᾱr such words of exultation:

که داند سرِّ فطرتِ آدم! که شناسد دولت و رُتبتِ آدم! عقابِ هیچ خاطر بر شاخِ درختِ دولتِ آدم نه نشست!

دیده یِ هیچ بصیرت جمالِ خورشید-صفـوّتِ آدم درنیافت![7]

Who could know the mystery of Adam’s nature! Who could recognize the loftiness of the fortune and status of Adam! The eagle of no mind soared so high to sit on the branch of the tree of Adam’s fortune! The eyes of no insightfulness perceived the sun-like feature of Adam!

The fundamental reversal of meaning of the Fall in Sufi hermeneutics discloses Adam’s secret ontological mission. Then, in Sufi hermeneutics and Persian poetics of the mystical love, Fall (hobūt) finds an interpretive translation as safar, journey, of Adam, and, in this way, gaining an entirely positive connotation. According to the Sufi exegesis, Adam voluntarily renounces the safe life of Paradise and embraces the hazardous earthly life only to fulfill God’s eternal Will. In contrast, the Angels, remain God’s absolutely obedient servants in the Kingdom of Heaven, and know Him only in His fearful, wrathful features that indicate His attributes of majestic authority (named as al-jabbār and al-qahhār: the Compeller, the Dominator).[8] As such, only the frightening despotic features of God is manifest to Angels, described, by His own Words, in His Names of Majesty.

But, these features are not the perfect manifestations of His Names. There are attributes of compassion and mercy for Him that their manifestation demands the existence of a rebellious, sinful creature begging His mercy. This creature is none other than Adam who, through his humble, earthly, and sinful nature, realizes and underscores the superior divine attributes of beauty and compassion. Thus, in this context, we can see clearly how Hafez could proudly identify himself with Adam in the ‘journey’ destined for the joyful ‘captivity’ in the love affairs originally willed by the Eternal Beloved.

من آدمِ بهشتی ام امّا در این سفر

حالی اسیرِ عشقِ جوانانِ مهوش ام.

I am the Adam, man of Paradise

But, now, in this journey,

Fallen captive to the love of the lovely young creatures.

In unraveling the secret core of Adam’s creation, Persian Sufi hermeneutics discovered the greatest and most precious jewel of knowledge within this narrative, namely, the eternal love relationship between God and Man from the very First Day of Creation (rūz-ē awwal, rūz-ē alast). The Angels, in spite of their spatial proximity to God, are denied Adam’s favored ontological position, elevated by God’s intimate love for Mankind. The resounding echo of the Eternal love story could be heard throughout the whole Sufi poetics of mystical love in Persian and most persistently in the Divān of Hafez.

In summary, the core of Sufi hermeneutics consists of the transmutation of the Myth of Fall into the epic of the Odyssey of Adam. He leaves Paradise with a heroic adventurous spirit for carrying the ‘burden of God’s trust’ (bᾱr-ē amᾱnat). The Odyssey of Adam in Kashf al-asrᾱr and Mērsᾱd al-ēbᾱd are narrated in fine masterly written examples of Persian prose, in its primary stage of development, that blends epic and poetic elements decorated by colorful couplets of love poetry. This tongue echoes the already fostered highly rhetorical and boastful discourse of Khorasani ode-composition (qasidē-sarᾱ’i) and colossal epic work of Ferdowsi, employed in the service of the Sufi discourse. The stylistic, highly refined literary tongue of the pioneering Persian speaking Sufis of Khorasan, like Bᾱyazid, abu Sa’id, and Ansᾱri, culminates in the colossal work of Meybodi.

The poetic prose of these early Sufi sayings and works must be considered as literary antecedents of the later eruption of the Sufi poetical literature from 6^th/12^th century. In the time line of Persian mystical works, one can follow the trail of these early works to the mature writings of such Sufi poets as Attᾱr, Erᾱqi, Rumi, Sa’di, and Khᾱjū.

Two Archetypal Models: Adam/Hafez versus Angel/Ascetic

The story of the Angels’ disapproval of Adam’s creation and their subsequent rivalry with him, especially the momentous hostile role played by Satan in the story of Adam’s primordial Sin and ultimate Fall, reveals two pre-eternal oppositional figures whose contrasting behaviors are pre-ordained. On the one hand, there is the archetype of the zāhēd (ascetic), represented by the thoroughly innocent life of the Angels who spend, according to Qur’an, eternally, ‘days and nights’, in constant prayer to their Lord. On the other hand, there is the archetypal model of the rēnd [9] (libertine), represented by Adam, characterized by his innate propensity to revolt against God and breaching his Lord’s Primordial ‘Pact’ (peymān)[10] which forbade his access to the famous tree (Qur’an II:35). According to narratives cited in Sufi hermeneutics, Eblis himself had a record of seven hundred thousand years of prayer and devotion to God. But the pride and arrogance stemming from that very piety, led to his disobedience before Gods order to all Angels to prostrate before newly created Adam, and ultimate banishment of him. This arrogance contrasts with Adam’s humility, his confession of guilt, and his plea for forgiveness, which endeared him to God. Thus, Hafez says:

از آنِ ماست بهشت، ای خداشناس، برو!

که مستحقِ کرامت گناه‌کاران اند.

Ours is Paradise, away with you, Godly one!

For it is the guilty who deserve forgiveness.

Hafez’s mockery of the ascetic life and his disdain of zāhēd and zohd (asceticism), alongside the glorification of the rēnd and rēndi appears extensively in Persian Sufi love literature from sixth/twelfth century onwards. This position relates to the dual and contrasting archetypes of ‘earthly Adam’ (ādam-ē khāki) and the angels. The former is destined to live in the ‘House of the Magi’ (sarā-yē moghān) in consort with other disreputable outcasts (rēnd‌ᾱn), like himself, while the latter reside as ascetics in the ‘Cloister of the Holy World’ (sowmē‘a-yē ālam-ē qods). Therefore, by identifying himself with his Eternal archetypal model, Adam, and proclaiming himself as his faithful descendant, proudly sharing his Eternal destiny of ‘sinfulness’ and ‘fall’, Hafez confirms his human way of life, depicted as rēndi (libertinism), is his pre-eternal destiny:

مرا روزِ ازل کاری بجز رندی نفرمودند

هر آن قسمت که آن جا رفت از آن افزون نخواهد شد

From the Pre-eternal day I was ordained to live but a libertine life

Nothing will be added to what was destined there

In the following verse, where Hafez clearly indicates Adam’s paternal status to him, and his relinquishment of the ‘recluse of asceticism’, and, therefore, deserting Paradise, as his eternally destined inheritance to live by.

نه من از خلوتِ تقوا بدر افتادم و بس

پدر-ام نیز بهشتِ ابد از دست بهشت

Not only I deserted the recluse of asceticism,

My Father, too, forswore the Eternal Paradise!

Thus, the Sufi hermeneutics by setting up a binary opposition between the two groups, ascribe such negative attributes as arrogance, hypocrisy, conceit, and piety-for-show to the so-called ‘heavenly’ ascetics. Curiously, these negative attributes are also present among the zᾱhēdᾱn, the earthly counterparts of the heavenly ascetics. In contrast, Adam, who represents the archetype of the guiltiness through his libertinism (rēndi), is characterized with the loftiest and most humane attributes, such as chivalry, universal kindness to all living beings, humility, righteousness, sincerity, and inner godliness, in spite of the apparent primordial breach of God’s prohibition. In this way, zāhēd versus rēnd, and their almost total opposition, in the ghazals of ecstatic Sufi literature, becomes main theme in the poetics of mystical love in Persian language and occupies the center of its discourse.

A Crucial Semantic Metamorphosis

In the Qur’an, angels are described as guardians of the divine Throne (‘arsh) and ordained as strict overseers of the behavior and uttering of human beings (Qur’an, L,18; LXXXII: 10-11). The key term here is raqib, which originally means overseer, used several times for God Himself in Qur’an (IV:1; V:117; XI:93; XXXIII:52). But, in Persian language, under the influence of Sufi hermeneutics of Khorasani origin, the meaning of this borrowed term gradually underwent a crucial transformation. Tracing of this transformation provides an essential clue for a deeper understanding of the archetypal dichotomy in the Sufi hermeneutics, which entails the ontological bipolarity of Adam/Angels, and Eblis, the so-called strongest ‘claimant’ (modda’i) among the Angels.

In Arabic, raqib has kept its meanings of watcher, guardian, and warden from its original Qur’anic usage to this day. In the early Islamic centuries, the Persian language borrowed this term which was used in its original sense by poets like Rūdaki, Nēzāmi, Khāqāni, and, even later, Sa’di. But from 6th/12th century onward, its meaning in Persian Sufi literature tended to transform to that of the ‘rival’ in a love affair. From the poetry of Attᾱr, Erᾱqi, Owhad al-Din Marᾱgha’i to Hafez and the later poets, we can follow and document the metamorphosis of the meaning of the raqib to rival. From early times to the time of Hafez, it gradually connoted the double meanings of watcher/rival in its allusive poetic usage. In later times, the meaning of rival in a love affair came to be dominant to the point of total disappearance of the original meaning in the Persian language. It was used many times interchangeably, with other pejorative appellations like modda’i, insincere claimant, zᾱhēd, the ascetic, often insincere, khasm, the enemy who is by its very nature filled with jealousy (hasad).[11] One can follow the abundant use of those emblematic words in the works of the Sufi poets from the early times of the fostering of the Sufi poetic tongue. Then, from the time of Hafez, raqib, and its infinitive, rēqᾱbat, gradually have got no other meaning in Persian language than rival and rivalry, or competitor and competition, used as such in the context of love affairs, sport events, commercial affairs, and the like.

This amazing semantic transformation cannot be explained without affirmative reference to Sufi hermeneutics. It conveys, through this hermeneutics, that the Angels were down-graded from their original superior position of overseers and ‘restrict watchers’[12], as told in Qur’an, to the semi-equal position of ‘rivals’ of Adam, and his descendants, in their mutual love for God, and their competitive striving to keep close to Him. Sufi hermeneutics viewed this ‘rivalry’ as having originated at the very moment when God proclaimed his resolve to create Adam as his ‘successor’ (khalifa) on the Earth. Therefore, raqib in the context of the Persian poetics of mystical love refers to the Angels collectively in its plural form (raqibᾱn), and in its singular form primarily to Eblis, who, as the resolute enemy of Adam and his progenies, by means of treacherous plots, out of jealousy, tries to block the access of the Lover to his Eternal Beloved.

The Great Pioneer of the Sufi Hermeneutics

We have mentioned how the refined poetic taste and epic tone of Sufi hermeneutics, as seen in Kashf al-asrᾱr and Mērsᾱd al-ēbᾱd, is the product of a cumulative process spanning centuries. One can trace it back, through citations of Kashf al-asrᾱr, to the first great Persian-speaking Sufi of Khorasan, Bᾱyazid of Bastᾱm (3^rd/9^th century). Bᾱyazid pioneered the use of the aphoristic, poetic-epic tone mixed for expressing his mystical paradoxes of longing and love. But Shaykh Abū Sa‘id ēbn-ē Abēl-Khayr (357-440/967–1048) must be considered as the decisive turning point in the development of mystical love in the Persian language, primarily appearing in Khorasan. We can consider him as the certain forerunner and founding father of the new style of Qur’anic reading and interpretation that vastly manifested itself in later Sufi literature.

Abū Sa‘id was a revolutionary figure in the arena of the already widespread Sufi culture in Khorasan. His radical contribution was to change the extremely phobic attitude inherited from his Sufi predecessors and prevalent among his notable contemporaries, such as Abol-Hasan Kharaqᾱni and Abol-Qāsēm al-Qoshayri (d. 465/1074). The Sufis of earlier times, struck by the horror-inducing tone of the ‘verses of agony’ (āyāt-ē adhāb) that suffuse the greatest part of the Qur’an, often seemed haunted by an obsessive fear of God’s omnipresence and His wrathful scrutiny of human misdeeds and sinful thoughts. This attitude is clearly described in their hagiographical and didactic works about the lives of many great Sufi figures of the earlier times. However, with his highly original way of reading Qur’an, Abū Sa‘id replaced this deeply traumatized and depressed attitude with a cheerful and jubilant spirit, seeing nothing in God’s attitude toward Man, and moreover to all living beings, but compassion and gracefulness.

Abū Sa‘id’s new revolutionary hermeneutics of God’s Word can be considered a great historical turning point in the Sufi culture of Khorasan. Reports of his life, recounted mainly by his grandchildren, tell us that he had experienced the rigours and exercises of asceticism in the extreme for decades. To purify his soul, he forsook the worldly life and lived in seclusion for many years. Eventually, however, he renounced asceticism and settled for a simple but joyful life among ordinary people. Abū Sa‘id was heroic, both in practicing asceticism and in renouncing it. He was pivotal in establishing the khānēqāh as a center for social life based on benevolent humanitarian principles. He breathed poetic life into the Sufi vernacular by reciting poems on every occasion, especially in his public preaching. He also introduced the practice of listening to music (samā‘) and dancing in the dervishes’ house (khānēqāh). Much of this behavior stood in stark contrast to the religious dogmatism of contemporary Sufis, whose wrath he incurred from time to time. By his original and courageous way of reading the Qur’an, the spirit of religious toleration, chivalry, graciousness, and humanitarianism took roots in Khorasani Sufism, breaking the conventional frameworks of ascetic, austere, and dogmatic attachment to sharia.[13]

Abū Sa‘id’s grandson and biographer, Ebn-ē Monavvar, relates that the master had destroyed his own writings. But the oral transmission of his memorable deeds and sayings, and their final recording after three generations, attests to his eminent posthumous reputation. His style of reading and interpreting the Qur’an seems had great influence on his disciples and was passed down to later generations as esoteric knowledge among Sufi circles for decades. In this way his hermeneutical tradition must have appeared broadly in Meybodi’s work, apparently mediated by Khāja Abdollāh Ansāri (396-1006/1006-1088).

An essential thought-provoking point about Abū Sa‘id’s style of reading the Qur’ᾱn is his selective approach to the verses. This is related in Asrār al-towhid, the hagiographical account of his life by Ebn-ē Monavvar. He recounts that Sheikh in his final years, when reading the Qur’an, recited only the ‘verses of compassion’ (āyāt-e rahmat) and ignored the ‘verses of agony’. When somebody criticized him that this way of reading distorts the order of Qur’anic verses, he replied: ‘What is related to us all are the verses of good tidings and absolution. The verses of agony belong to the others?’[14]This arbitrary bold way of reading the Qur’an must have had great appeal to the Sufis. Because it corroborates their self-conception as real friends (owliyā’) of God, whom He loves as His chosen people among all creatures.

A Basic Dichotomy in Sufi Hermeneutics

It seems that there has been a fundamental misunderstanding prevalent amongst modern students of the Sufi culture which stems from the conception of viewing the entire intellectual tradition of Islamic mysticism as a version of Neo-Platonism. Even such great pioneering scholars like R. A. Nicholson and Henry Corbin, in all their research, seem to have been directed by this conception.

Until recent times, the structure of the meaning and world view of the pivotal works of Sufi hermeneutics from Khorasan remained unexplored from a theoretical perspective. Perhaps the literary approach of these texts to theology and the strong presence of the poetic and emotive spirit, expressed in an allusive, symbolic language, did not submit itself easily to conceptual classification and analysis. However, the great Khorasani Sufis, and their counterparts in the other parts of the Persian speaking world, openly declared their anti-philosophical attitudes by rejecting and even despising the Greek way of thought. Thus, a meticulous examination of the Sufi hermeneutical works penned in Khorasan reveals their total renunciation from Greek philosophy. The Sufi poets and prose stylists of that line of thought and literary style often stress their revulsion for any rationalistic, argumentative approach to religious and theological matters. They disparaged the bewilderment in the uncertain realm of the human reason and renounced, in Rumi’s words, walking with the ‘wooden feet of the argumentative people’.[15] In contrast, they have always extolled extravagant spirituality and absolute submission to the God’s Will and His esoteric guidance. Their way of getting knowledge is immersion in inspirational moods of the moment (ahwᾱl), which is conferred upon them from the Occult World (ᾱlam-ē ghēyb). They recommend moving in the daylight of inspirations received through the center of affections, the heart (qalb), along the path of ‘mania’ (jonūn), spiritual drunkenness, ecstasies of experiencing love relationship with the Eternal Beloved, towards the final goal of the annihilation of one’s self in God.

The fundamental irrationalism of this line of Sufism expressed in poetical tongue, either in poetic or prose form, their enthusiastic disdain for Reason and glorification of madness, that we repeatedly encounter in their divᾱns, refers back to their hermeneutics of the myth of Creation and the dichotomous positions of its two main archetypal figures, Angels versus Adam. According to their hermeneutics of the myth of Creation, by listening to the invocation of Love and deserting the sound life of Paradise, Adam also deserted the cautious ways recommended by Reason and dauntlessly submitted himself to the demands of Love. By following the way of ‘madness’ through acceptance of all dangers arising from submission to the unconditional demands of Love, Adam, as archetypal model, stands in contrast to Angels who symbolize Reason and reasoning in Sufi poetics.[16] The clash between Reason and Love as two sources of attraction for man is a recurrent theme in their literature.

Certainly, there is a serious tension inside the Sufi world of thought between a highly sensational poetical manner of thought and a stream of theosophical thought producing, in its own style, argumentative mystical theology. The former developed mainly in Persian language in earlier centuries, while the latter was mainly expounded in the Arabic in later times. In spite of the blending of these two traditions thereafter, and dominance of the philosophical style theosophy, in general, it is possible to distinguish, by certain criteria, the Sufi theology of pure poetic tongue and outlook from theoretically influenced by, or based on, Neo-Platonic metaphysics formulated mainly by Ibn Arabi and Sohravardi.

Their oppositional conceptions of Time seems to be a clue for identification of these two trends. In Greek metaphysics, founded by Plato and Aristotle, the fundamental objects of philosophical investigation are non-temporal ideational or essential realities as eternal foundations of the temporal, ephemeral things of the sensible world. In the Platonic and Neo-Platonic account, the latter are viewed only as shadows of the eternal realities. God, in this conception, is the mute, unmoving source of the emanation of the Platonic ideas or Aristotelian essences. He exists in His transcendental seclusion eternally beyond the sensible world. But, in the poetic Sufi view of the world, the universe is created anew in every instant by an absolute power and free will that is not subject to any restrictions. This dynamic, omnipresent, omnipotent, articulate God is the Creator of infinite things out of nothingness in the uninterrupted sequence of time, and in the position of the ‘living’ (hayy) Being accompanies them as permanent observer and guide. The metaphysical realities, as propounded by Greek metaphysics, are comprehended by the faculty of reason in man, while senses and emotions have no part in the act of cognition of the transcendental realities. Their cognitive role is limited to the accidental world of the temporary sensible things. But in the poetic strand of Sufi theology, it is the emotional, sensitive nature of man that plays the greatest part in his relationship with God.

The theosophy of the Sohravardi and Ibn Arabi, with their Neo-Platonic frameworks, represent the metaphysical approach. They investigate timeless divine realities that govern the world and its history, and attempt to describe these realities theoretically. Their highly discursive efforts constitute a kind of mystical philosophy, which combines a rational, discursive, more or less systematic way of reading the Qur’an with the esoteric findings of the so-called mystical ‘discoveries’. In contrast, the Sufis with poetic inclinations, following a tradition developed in Khorasan and Fars, insist on the importance of vaqt (heavenly endowed moment), or even naqd-ē vaqt (the ‘cash’ of the moment), and hᾱl (mood, temperament) which is allotted constantly by God Himself, not only to human beings, but to all creatures. In the experience of the ‘importations of the moods’ (vᾱrēdᾱt-ē ahwᾱl) which are temporal and, therefore, temporary, reason and its volitional activity has no part. Indeed, the reason, or calculating faculty for self-preservation in man, is viewed as a disturbance that stands in the way of immediate bold experience of the presence of God. This experience is possible only by absolute submission to His Will through opening one’s heart and its receptiveness to what is sent by Him every moment.

In Persian, hᾱl also means the present time, allowing the superposition of both connotations of mood and moment in the colloquial and literary usages of the word. For the Sufi, ahwᾱl (moods) have different, even contradictory, modalities, from sorrow and depression (qabz) to happiness and euphoria (bast), to states of boundless ecstasy. Moods are not permanent. Sufis of this inclination called themselves ahl-ē hᾱl, or people of mood/moment. The term hᾱl, with both overlapping mood/moment connotations, remains in common usage in colloquial Persian. The submissiveness of the ahl-ē hᾱl to their destined mood/moment is thoroughly compatible to the poetic way of life and its manner of expression. Sufis given to the mood/momentary way of experiential, not theoretical, personal relationship with God, instinctively approached the poetical form of expression and developed in an extraordinary manner their own specific tongue in this domain for expressing their esoteric emotional experiences or mood/moments. Therefore, the original poets among Sufis were generally averse to the discursive language and systematic arguments about their creed.

The essential difference among the two groups is best reflected in their approach to language. The discursive type expresses its own ideas in detailed, semi-systematic, cold, prosaic manner, while the other expresses itself in the succinct, allusive, metaphoric, and emotive tongue of poetry. The ghazals of Sanᾱi, Attᾱr, Rumi, Erᾱqi, Sa’di, and Hafez reflect perfectly these characteristics. The original Sufi poets typically preferred telling tales and fables in the poetic frame of mathnavi for expressing their religious and moralistic ideas instead of using the dry tongue of formal arguments.

In later periods, we observe the emergence of a different kind of Sufi poetry (essentially of khᾱnēqᾱh-i type) that uses the metaphoric and symbolic language of this genre of poetry as clichés at the service of the conceptual Sufi theosophy. This kind of ‘poems’ are generally uninspired mass productions devoid of the sparkle of true poetic creation and its mood/moment. This pseudo-poetic literary productions appeared under the gradual dissemination and final supremacy of theosophical Sufism (ērfᾱn-ē nazari) in the later history of Sufi culture in the Persianate world.

Theosophical Sufism made instrumental use of the already developed poetic mystical tongue. It adopted the poetics of rēndi by fixing dry, rigid, and ascetic ‘real meanings’ for its metaphoric, symbolic terms. As a result, all its erotic and sensual symbolic terms and expressions were reduced to a standard, monotonous, conceptual lexicon, with the intent of washing out all their seemingly immoral, irreligious, or carnal connotations.[17]

However, the influence of the theosophical Sufism was limited to the circles of the ahl-ē hēkmat (men of wisdom, philosophers and knowledgeable pious Sufis), while the poetics of rēndi, especially through the vast popularity of the poetic tongue of Sa’di and Hafez, had a much greater share in shaping the mentality and literary tastes of the educated and refined people in the Persianate world. The pleasure of poetry, mainly the poetry of love with a taste of rēndi, has taken hold over many centuries far beyond the literate world to pervade public culture, even among the illiterate people in remote reaches of the Persian-speaking world.[18]

Conclusion

We have stressed how the intertextual study provides a solid basis for understanding the underlying discourse of the Sufi poetics of mystical love in Persian. A close look at the historical dynamics of Sufi hermeneutics reveals its crucial turning points. We examined the distinct ruptures between the early ascetic readings of the Qur’an and its subsequent mystical-ecstatic readings, especially as developed in Khorasan. The latter reading was based on the discovery of the pre-eternal mutual love relationship between the Creator and human creatures which already began on the ‘Day of Covenant’ (rūz-e alast). It caused a radical transformation in the earlier conception of this relationship which was predicated on the absolute divine authority, on the one hand, and absolutely servile, fearful obedience of man, on the other hand.

The Sufi discourse of love finally spread from Khorasan to other parts of the Persian-speaking world, like Fars, Kerman, and, finally, to the greater Persianate world. In Shiraz, this blossomed in the love poetry of Sa’di, where we observe a deeper exploration of rēndi and its implications for human life. In this context, rēndi, most probably under the influence of the Christian theology, was viewed as essential sinfulness inherited by mankind from their Eternal Parents, Adam and Eve. However, this momentous heritage later was embraced ecstatically as the pre-defined and primordial fate of man on earth.[19]Indeed, rēndi develops into an Eternal model for human nature which defines his teleological place in ‘two worlds’. It stands in contrast to the zohd (asceticism), characteristic of angels who are destined for eternal innocence and constant prayer to God.

Other novel developments in the poetics of love mysticism are noteworthy. In earlier stages of the Sufi poetics, developed in Khorasan, Sufi and ᾱrēf (man of deep esoteric knowledge and mystical experience) were considered identical, but in the last stage, which marks the culmination of rēndi poetics, developed properly in Shiraz by Sa’di and Hafez, Sufi and zᾱhēd (the ascetic) are usually identified and posited as unlearned arrogant hypocrites in contrast to ᾱrēf [20], the real enlightened connoisseur of God and godliness. Sa‘di is the pioneering figure of this stage, followed by Khājū and Hafez in subsequent generations. Sufi in this context alludes to the followers of the formal ascetic doctrines and institutionalized Sufism centered in dervishes’ houses (khānēqāhs). Hereafter, Sufi refers to the people who are still attached to the old ways of extreme piety and asceticism by rejecting, out of their very ignorance, the pleasures of earthly life in pursuit of illusory eternal enjoyments in Paradise. In opposition to the Sufi way of life, we have ᾱrēf, the bold man of gnosis with pronounced individuality and piercing knowledge of God’s infinite grace to human beings and all living world. Therefore, unlike the Sufi or zᾱhēd’, the ᾱrēf chooses to partake of earthly pleasures and manifestations of beauty as blessings emanating from the inexhaustible bounty of God showered upon His humble but favored creatures, as a sign of His unbounded graciousness. Such a gnostic, as Sa’di expressly pronounces, and Hafez after him, never deprives himself of the ‘cash’ of paradise (behesht-ē naqd) in the here-and-now in exchange for ‘childish’ desire after the heavenly one which already had been abandoned voluntarily by our ‘Father’ in pre-eternity.

چو طفلان تا کی، ای زاهد، فریبی / به سیبِ بوستان و شهد و شیر-ام

O Ascetic! How long will you so deceiving me, like children,

With the apple of the Garden and [streams of] honey and milk!

من که امروز-ام بهشتِ نقد حاصل می‌شود / وعده‌ی فردایِ زاهد را چرا باور کنم؟

With the ‘cash’ paradise within my reach Today,

Why should I believe the ascetic’s promise for Tomorrow (i.e. afterworld)

The strong and vibrant tongue of Meybodi in narrating and interpreting stories related to the Creation of Adam, which is the continuation and promotion of the poetic and aphoristic sayings of the great Sufis of Khorasan, can be considered as the most influential primary source for the great jubilation witnessed in later Persian Sufi literature. This tongue embedded the poetics of mystical love at the heart of Persian literature, and caused the later flowering of Persian as a highly refined literary language especially fostered for mystical (ērfᾱni) expressions. Going beyond Iran proper, this tongue and its literature spread throughout the Indian subcontinent, Central Asia, and many other lands, including realms of Ottoman Empire in Anatolia and Balkan. This revolutionary change of attitude in Sufi ontology engendered not only the enormous body of poetical literature, but a new mystical poetic language enriched with highly expressive sensual metaphors and symbolism.

The human-divine romance relationship, developed mainly in Kashf al-asrār, becomes the central theme and tale related with fervor and passion throughout the burgeoning tradition of the ‘religion of Love’ (maz’hab-ē ēshq) within the prolific Khorasani school of Sufi literature and its branch outs in other parts of the Persianate world. These poets wrote not only passionate pieces of prose and poetry expressing their devotion to God as Beloved, but poetically praised the revelation of His Beauty in the beautiful creatures of the natural and human world. Lastly, from the sixth/twelfth century onwards, among the followers of the Sufi way of love, one sees such prominent figures like Ahmad al-Ghazāli (d. 520/1126), and a century later, Owhad al-Din Kermāni (d. 635/1238) and Fakhr al-Din Erāqi (610/1213–688/1289), who show uncommon erotic behaviors in public, justified by development of the poetics of love and rēndi in Sufism. This trend finds its culmination in the ghazals of Sa‘di and Hafez as supreme rēnds amongst all Persian poets and great masters of the poetics of rēndi.

My friend, professor Assad Arjang, has kindly performed the editing of my English text and I am thankful of him.

[1]See Daryoush Ashouri, ‘Erfān o rēndi (Tehran: Nashr-e Markaz, 1379/ 2000), 68-139.

[2]Rashid al-din Meybodi, Kashf al-asrᾱr va ‘oddat al-abrᾱr, ed. ‘A.A. Hekmat (Tehran: Amir Kabir Publishers, 1331/1952), I:162.

[3]Najm al-Din Rᾱzi, Mersād al-ēbᾱd, ed. M. A. Riyᾱḥi (Tehran: Bongāh-ē tarjomē va nashr-ē ketāb, 1352/1973, repr. 1383/2004), 94.

[4]By having at hand these intertextual data, we can understand, with much certainty, the meaning of the ‘vagabond heart’ (dēl-ē harzē-gard) of Hafez, of which he speaks in the following line:

تا دلِ هرزه‌گردِ من رفت به چینِ زلفِ او

زین سفرِِ درازِِ خود عزمِ وطن نمی‌کند

Since my vagabond heart traveled to the land of his/her [long] curled hair

Never intends turning back from this prolonged journey to its homeland.

By returning to Kashf al-asrᾱr (VI:191) we find that ‘the homeland’ (vatan), here, is nowhere but the Heavenly Abode from which the Spirit, in the body of Adam, has started its ‘wandering’ or ‘prolonged journey’– as expressed by Hafez– to the Earthly House. By comparative study of the symbolic image of the ‘[long, curly hair’] (zolf) of the Beloved in the Divᾱn of Hafez (see Ashouri, 382-86) and other divᾱns of the Sufi love literature, such as Divᾱn-ē Shams-ē Tabrizi, we learn that the zolf, with its blackness and much twisted curly texture, and its ‘restlessness’ (ᾱshoftēgi, biqarᾱri) symbolically represents the Earthly World. Unlike Rumi, whose object of love is the heavenly sun-like, or moon-like, ‘face’ (rūy) of the Eternal Beloved, Hafez relates us of his falling in passionate love with the zolf of the Eternal Beloved already at the first glance on it at the ‘First Day’ (rūz-e avval /rūz-e nokhost) of Creation. He speaks, again and again, emphatically of remaining lovingly faithful to this ‘captivity’ in the ‘curl of the Beloved’s hair’ (kham-ē zolf-ē yᾱr), i.e. conditions of the Earthly life, which is, at the same time, ‘trap of afflictions’ (dᾱm-ē balᾱ). He accepts the Earthly World as the eternally ordained Human (Adamic) abode destined by Eternal Beloved, in contradistinction to the Heavenly World, the abode of the Angelic creatures. Pondering on this differentiation in the Sufi poetics of mystical love makes it possible to separate an earlier stage of its fostering, represented, highest of all, by Attᾱr and Rumi, from its ultimate stage in the poetry of Hafez (see Ashouri, 304-27; and ‘Conclusion’ in this article).

[5] A thorough study and analysis of Kashf al-asrᾱr is recently published. See Annabel Keeler, Sufi Hermeneutics: The Qur’an Commentary of Rashῑd al-Dīn Maybudῑ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).

[6]Meybodi, III:570-73; Rᾱzi, 65-97.

[7] Meybodi, III, 297-98

[8] Meybodi, III, 571.

[9]Rēnd, as a disapproved attributive noun, originally used for the people who disregarded moral and religious laws, committed all kinds of sinful deeds, such as drinking alcohol, gambling, and visiting the defamed quarters of the town (kharᾱbᾱt), the site of taverns and brothels. As collective name (rēndᾱn), many times was used for groups of urban ruffians. Sufis adopted this word, alongside a group of others, like kharᾱbᾱt, maykadē (tavern) or mēykhᾱnē, and used them with metaphoric and symbolic meanings. It happened when the Persian Sufi hermeneutics, by its own way of reading the myth of Creation in Qur’an, discovered the two archetypes of zohd (asceticism) and rēndi (libertinism), represented, respectively, by Angles, as eternally innocent, and Adam, as the first human being and father of all humanity, who has committed the Original Sin. The attributive noun rēnd and its substantive form, rēndi is used almost by all Sufi poets (Attᾱr, Rumi, Erᾱqi, S’adi, and others) with real or mystical and symbolic connotations. But, it was Hafez who set it with extolment, as the highest spiritual position for a human being, as pivotal concept in his anti-ascetic poetics of rēndi.

[10]On the term ‘pact’ (peymᾱn), between God and Adam, see Meybodi, I:161.

[11]Innumerable lines of poems in the divᾱns of the Sufi poets, before and after Hafez, attest to this point:

Raqib as a couple of angels sitting on the left and right shoulders of every human being, assigned to record all their good and evil deeds:

خدایِ عرش مدام از فرشتگان دو رقیب / به نزدِ بنده نشانده است بر شمال و یمین (امیر معزّی)

رقیبِ دستِ چپ را مانده شد دست / زِ بس کردارِ تو بنوشت پیوست

رقیبّ دستِ راست آزاد از تو / قلم بر کاغذی ننهاد از نو (عطّار)

Raqib as devil (Ahrēman; the ancient Persian name for Eblis):

رقیب کی‌ست! که در ماجرایِ خلوتِ ما / فرشته ره نبرد، تا به اهرمن چه رسد! (سعدی)

Raqib as rival in the love affair:

همه‌شب نهاده ام سر چو سگان بر آستانت / که رقیب در نباید به بهانه‌یِ گدایی (عراقی)

روا مدار، خدایا، که در حریمِ وصال / رقیب محرم و حرمان نصیبِ من باشد (حافظ)

با تو بینم رقیب و من گذران / دیده بر هم نهاده، دل نگران (محتشم کاشانی)

Raqib as guardian, gatekeeper:

جان وصلِ تو بی‌رقیب جوید / دل رویِ تو بی‌نقاب خواهد (خواجو)

رقیبان غافل و ما را از آن چشم و جبین هر دم / هزاران گونه پیغام است و حاجب در میان ابرو (حافظ)

Raqib as faultfinder:

از طعنه‌ی رقیب نگردد عیارِ من / چون زر اگر برند مرا در دهانِ گاز (حافظ)

Raqib as the jealous one:

بکش جفایِ رقیبان مدام و جورِِ حسود / که سهل باشد اگر یارِ مهربان داری (حافظ)

Modda’i (insincere claimant) as rival in a love affair:

مدّعی را اگر آواره نسازم زِ دَرَش / از سگانِ سرِ آن کوی حساب‌ام نکنید (محتشم کاشانی)

مدّعی از رشک، بر در، چون نمرد امشب؟– که بود / بزم دلکش، باده بی‌غش، یار سرخوش، من خراب! (محتشم کاشانی)

شب‌ها به بزمِ مدّعی، ای بی‌مروّت، جا مکن / آرامِ جانِ او مشو، آزارِ جانِ ما مکن! (فروغیِ بسطامی)

Modda’i as zᾱhēd (ascetic [of the heavenly world; allusion to Eblis himself])

ای مـّدعیِِ زاهد، غرّه به طاعتِ خود / گر سرّ‌ِ عشق خواهی، دعوی زِ سر بدر کن (عطّار)

باده بیاور، که هیچ توبه نخواهند کرد / مدّعی از زهدِ خشک، اوحدی از شعرِِتر (اوحدیِ مراغه‌ای)

مدّعی بی‌خبر از عالمِ معنی ست، از آن / در سر از حجّتِ خُشک این‌‌همه دعوی دارد (عمادالدینِ نسیمی)

Modda’i as faultfinder = raqib as faultfinder

با مدّعی بگوی که، ای بی‌بصر، مکن/ عیبِ نظر، که دیده نبیند نظیرِِ او! (اوحدیِ مراغه‌ای)

ساقی بیار باده و با مدّعی بگوی / انکارِ ما مکن، که چنین جام جم نداشت (حافظ)

Modda’i, as the jealous one:

بَـَرش ادا نکنم مدّعایِ خود هرگز / که مدّعی زِ حسد بَد-ادایی‌اي نکند

(محتشمِ کاشانی)

Zᾱhēd as Devil (or Eblis)

زاهد ار رندیِ حافظ نکند فهم، چه باک / دیو بگریزد از آن قوم که قرآن خوانند

Alongside the interchangeable usage of raqib, modda’i, zᾱhēd, ḥasūd, essentially as allusions to Eblis, other appellations like doshman, khasm, ‘adū (all meaning ‘enemy’) in the Divᾱn of Hafez and other Sufi love poetry, refer to him too.

[12]The term of raqibᾱn-ē tond-khū as used by Hafez, most probably has reference to the raqibon ‘atῑd in Qur’an (L 18).

[13]See Terry Graham, ‘Abū Sa‘īd ibn Abī’l-Khayr and the School of Khurāsān,’ in The Heritage of Sufism, vol. 2, Classical Persian Sufism from its Origins to Rumi, ed. Leonard Lewisohn (Oxford: Oneworld 1999), 83-136.

[14]Mohammad ēbn-ē Monavvar, Asrᾱr al-towhid fi maqᾱmᾱt-ē al-Sheikh Abi Sa’id, ed. M.R. Shafi’i Kadkani (Tehran: Āgāh Publishers, 1366/1986).

[15]Jalᾱlu’ddin Mowlavi, Mathnawi, ed. R. A. Nicholson (Tehran: Hermes Edition, 1382/1993), I:97.

[16]As Hafez says in his famous ghazal (ed. Khānlari, n. 148) that explains metaphorically the fundamental conflict among the Reason and Love:

عقل می‌خواست کزان شعله چراغ افروزد / دستِ غیب آمد و بر سینه‌ی نامحرم زد

The Reason [in the Eternity] wanted to kindle its lantern from that flame [of love]

But, the Unseen Hand [of God] came and pushed out the stranger.

[17]The endeavors of Sheikh Mahmūd Shabastari, the author of Golshan-e rᾱz, in this direction has been greatly influential. See, also, as a very expressive example, Bahᾱ’ al-Din Khorramshᾱhi, ed., Tafsir-ē ērfni-ye Divᾱn-ē Hafez.

[18]The depth and extendedness of the influence of the poetical Sufism, especially the poetics of rēndi, into the general culture of the Persian speaking people could be measured by the strong influence of their vocabulary into the vernacular of the ordinary people. The prevalence of hᾱl in common daily usage and its numerous phrasal verbs and compound forms in the vernacular and literary Persian is a meaningful example, such as: hᾱl kardan (to enjoy, to be pleased of), hᾱl dᾱdan (to give pleasure), hᾱl gereftan (to displease), dar hᾱl būdan (to be in a pleasant mood), ḥᾱl rᾱ daryᾱftan (to enjoy one’s moment), az hᾱl raftan (to faint), bē hᾱl ᾱmadan (to be refreshed), hᾱl ᾱvardan (to make fresh), bᾱ-hᾱl (lively, pleasant), bi-hᾱl (faint, unpleasant), khosh-hᾱl (happy), bad-hᾱl (sick, in bad mood), etc. The more literary form of the hᾱl, that is, ḥᾱlat, is extensively used in the Persian poetic literature.

[19]Ashouri, 193-202.

[20]The scornful identification of the Sufi with zᾱhēd, in contrast to the praiseworthy ‘ᾱrēf, occurs many times in the Divᾱns of Sa’di and Hafez. Sa’di says, for example:

زاهد و عابد و صوفی همه طفلانِ ره اند / مرد اگر هست بجز عارفِ ربّانی نیست

The ascetic, the devout man, the Sufi, all are nothing but children in the [spiritual]path

There is no man in this way except the Godly Gnostic

Iraj Pezeshkzad and His Hafez: A Note on Hafez in Love

ایران نامگ Volume 7, Number 2, Summer 2024

Iraj Pezeshkzad and His Hafez: A Note on Hafez in Love

Pouneh Shabani-Jadidi

Instructional Professor of Persian, University of Chicago

Patricia J. Higgins

University Distinguished Service Professor Emerita, SUNY Plattsburgh

Iraj Pezeshkzad is well known as a writer not only in Iran but also in the West, largely because of his satirical novel, Da’i Jan Napelon (Dear Uncle Napoleon).[1] That novel, which features the antics of members of a pseudo-aristocratic family in Iran of the 1940s, pokes fun at many widespread Iranian beliefs and behavioral characteristics.[2] It became a bestseller and the basis for a wildly popular television series which aired in Iran in the late 1970s. Reportedly, the streets of Tehran would become eerily quiet whenever a new episode first aired.[3] While both the book and the TV series were banned for a time in the Islamic Republic of Iran, bootleg copies were still widely circulated.[4] The book itself has been translated into more than a dozen languages. The English version translated by Dick Davis and entitled My Uncle Napoleon was first published by a small press devoted to Iran-related topics.[5] My Uncle Napoleon won the Lois Roth Prize for Literary Translation from Persian in 2001, and in 2006 it was issued in a second edition by a major trade publisher[6] with an introduction by the well-known writer Azar Nafisi[7] and an afterword by the author himself.[8]

Da’i Jan Napelon is indeed a classic of twentieth-century Persian literature, but it is by no means the only thing that Iraj Pezeshkzad wrote. According to one obituary, “he wrote more than 17 satirical novels and more than a dozen scholarly books and essays on history and literature.”[9] While at least one of these essays has been translated into English,[10] none of Pezeshkzad’s other novels had been until we undertook to translate Ḥāfiẓ-i nāshanīdah pand (Hafez, heedless of advice),[11] now available as Hafez in Love.[12] We started this project in 2016 after reading several of Pezeshkzad’s other novels and particularly enjoying every sentence and every word of Ḥāfiẓ-i nāshanīdah pand.

It was in October 2018 that we first contacted Mr. Pezeshkzad to ask for his permission to publish our translation. We made this contact through his son, who was introduced to us by Professor Mohamad Tavakoli-Targhi of the University of Toronto and by Sorour Kasmai, who is the French translator of Pezeskzad’s Da’i Jan Napelon, Mon Oncle Napoleon.[13] We received a reply from Bahman, Mr. Pezeskzad’s son, the same day, saying that we had his father’s permission to publish the translation if Dr. Tavakoli-Targhi had given his blessing to our project. The same day, we called and spoke to Mr. Pezeshkzad as well. His voice was deep and kind, and after an explanation of our project and our qualifications, he told us that he would give us written permission to publish our translation, which we expected any publisher to want. At the age of 91, he had steady calligraphic handwriting (see Appendix); the date of the permission is October 11, 2018, and the place is Paris.

The next time we spoke with Mr. Pezeshkzad was in 2021 when we wanted to send him his complementary copies of our translation. He was as gracious and kind as he had been the first time that we spoke to him. He asked us to send him any reviews written on the book in English, which of course we agreed to do.

Later, we had the pleasure of inviting Mr. Pezeshkzad to talk about his works, including Ḥāfiẓ-i nāshanīdah pand, in the Heshmat Moayyad Lecture Series organized by the University of Chicago’s Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations Department. After Professor Franklin Lewis introduced Mr. Pezeshkzad and listed several of his books, Mr. Pezeshkzad began his talk.[14] This was October 2021, and it was the last talk that Mr. Pezeshkzad gave before his death in Los Angeles on January 12, 2022, a few days shy of his 96^th birthday.

Like most of Pezeshkzad’s other works, Ḥāfiẓ-i nāshanīdah pand is at least in part a satire, and like several of his other works, it is a historical novel. Though Mr. Pezeshkzad told us he considered it more a historical novel than satire, the reader cannot help but notice the parallels between fourteenth-century Fars Province and Iran in the era of the Islamic Republic. Based on our experience, satire is one of the most difficult genres to translate because it contains cultural references and allusions that are sometimes impossible to recreate in the target language. Mr. Pezeshkzad’s satire is very subtle and clever, which makes the job of the translator even harder.[15]

Based on historical accounts, Pezeshkzad imagines a certain period in the life of Mohammad Shams al-Din Shirazi, arguably the best known and best loved Persian-language poet, better known by his pen name, Hafez. The time is 1354 CE and the beginning of Amir Mobarez al-Din Mozaffar’s rule over Fars and neighboring provinces. It is a time of political and social instability, which is arguably very similar to the situation of twenty-first century Iran. Just as in present-day Iran, in the novel the morality police are stripping the people of their freedom of speech and squelching the expression of any belief that goes against those of the ruling group. Similar, too, is the ostentatious religiosity of the ruling group and the expectation that those who aspire to power or favor will follow suit. Whether consciously or subconsciously, Pezeshkzad paints a vivid image of contemporary Iran in his depiction of the sociopolitical atmosphere in fourteenth-century Fars, the references of which are discernable by any Persian reader.

A reviewer of Hafez in Love suggests that the book can also be read as a commentary on the sociopolitical situation in the US in 2020 (although surely Pezeshkzad, writing in the early twenty-first century, did not intend that). This unnamed reviewer writes sarcastically,

Of course a ruler who favours executions, encourages mob violence, is anti intellectual and does not read, who has a nasty violent streak, who is not prepared to compromise but is full of his own self-righteousness, who does not know when his time is up, who appoints people to high positions purely on the basis of their loyalty rather than their competence and fires them at will and who pretends to be religious, while living a debauched life, is surely not something we could find in this era.[16]

That a novel set in fourteenth-century Iran written early in the twenty-first century speaks in this way to contemporary English-speaking readers is a testament to Pezeshkzad’s skill as a writer and to Ḥāfiẓ-i nāshanīdah pand’s candidacy for inclusion in world literature.

What makes the book especially interesting, yet challenging to translate, is the insertion of a number of poems, most by Hafez himself, some by his contemporary, ‘Obayd Zakani, as well as his predecessor, Sa‘di Shirazi, and others. The poems are so interwoven into the text that one wonders which came first in the writing process—whether it was the poems that inspired the author to write certain scenes, or whether the poems were selected and inserted after the framing of the story and the writing of the text.

For example, the narrator cites the following couplet several times as an example of Hafez’s carelessness in criticizing Amir Mobarez:

محتسب شیخ شد و فسق خود از یاد ببرد

قصه ماست که در هر سر بازار بماند

The morality officer became a pious sheikh and forgot his debauchery

It is my story that remained throughout the bazaar.

As another example, when welcoming a female guest, the character ‘Obayd Zakani cites a couplet from Sa‘di:

کس درنیامدست بدین خوبی از دری

دیگر نیاورد چو تو فرزند مادری

No one this exquisite has ever come in through a door

Nor has a mother ever brought forth a child like you.

Twenty-seven of Hafez’s poems are included in their entirety and similarly woven into the story. For example, the poem that begins with the following couplet is said by the narrator to have been written during the months that Hafez was mourning the death of his young wife:

آن یار کزو خانه ما جای پری بود

سرتا قدمش چون پری از عیب بری بود

The beloved for whose sake our house was a fairyland

Head to toe, like a fairy, she was flawless.

Whichever may have come first in the writing process, the poem or the narrative, the book as a whole shows Pezeshkzad’s mastery as a writer, his breath of knowledge of Iranian history and literature, and his command of Persian classical poetry. That the book has reached its thirteenth edition in Persian indicates the success of the novel and the talent of its author, Iraj Pezeshkzad.

Susan Bassnett, translation theorist and scholar of comparative literature, argues that novels based on classic books are translations of a sort because they are a kind of interpretation of the classic texts, and they wouldn’t have existed if those classic works hadn’t existed already. “It is a matter of using the past,” she says, “to make sense of the present.”[17] Translation is bringing back to life a work written decades, centuries, and millennia ago. It can be argued that Pezeshkzad’s Ḥāfiẓ-i nāshanīdah pand is a translation of Hafez’s Divan and Pezeshkzad’s way of making sense of the present with the aid of Hafez’s poetry.

Most of the characters in Ḥāfiẓ-i nāshanīdah pand are real historical personages, and the large-scale events are historically accurate. Historians know very little of Hafez’s life, however, so the day-to-day events and the relationships between the characters in this book are largely the product of Pezeshkzad’s imagination as based on his reading of Hafez’s poetry. When asked why he depicted Hafez in this book as a playful young man, Pezeshkzad said he was sorry and disappointed that Hafez, this poet of love and joy, is always shown as an old man feebly holding a cup of wine with a beautiful young girl standing beside him. He said he did not at all picture Hafez this way when he was reading his poems; therefore, he wanted to make the readers see Hafez the way he sees him reflected in his poetry. In addition, he said he didn’t believe that Hafez was inclined toward Sufism, nor that he was a Sufi, but rather that he used Sufi and mystic expressions in his poems as a literary device.

Although Ḥāfiẓ-i nāshanīdah pand is a novel rather than a history book, Pezeshkzad relied upon several historical sources which he acknowledged at the end of the book. They include: 1) Tārīkh-i ‘aṣr-i Ḥāfiẓ dar qarn-i hashtom (History of the age of Hafez in the fourteenth century) by Qasem Ghani, 2) Nuzhat al-qulūb (Purity of hearts) by Hamdollah Mostafa Qazvini, edited by Seyyed Mohammad Dabir-Siyaqi, 3) Dīvān-i Ḥāfiẓ (Collected poems of Hafez), edited by Parviz Natel Khanlari (text and notes), 4) Kullyāt-i Sa’dī (Collected works of Sa‘di), compiled by Mohammad Ali Foroughi, and 5) Kullyāt-i ‘Ubayad Zākānī (Collected works of ‘Obayd Zakani), compiled by Parviz Atabaki. Nevertheless, there have been certain criticisms about the veracity of the historical facts in the Ḥāfiẓ-i nāshanīdah pand.[18] For example, the existence of someone by the name of Golandam (the narrator of the book, purported to be Hafez’s best friend and brother-in-law) is contested, as is the date of Hafez’s birth, and therefore the age of Hafez in 1354. Moreover, some of the historical personages who appear as characters in the book may not have actually been in Shiraz that year. One must remember, however, that this is fiction based on history and not history itself, so the writer can employ his imagination in developing scenes and relationships.

The Hafez depicted Ḥāfiẓ-i nāshanīdah pand is 23 years old, recently widowed, and still mourning the loss of his young wife, a cousin with whom he had been in love since childhood. His best friend and the first-person narrator of the story is Mohammad Golandam, who in reality is believed by some to be the author of the introduction to an early collection of Hafez’s poems—an introduction that provides most of what little we do know of Hafez, apart from his poetry. In the story, Golandam is married to Hafez’s sister who, along with her mother, is visiting relatives out of town for the entire several months of the story. While Hafez and Golandam spend their time with a bevy of male friends, some their contemporaries and some much older, the only female characters in the book are Bibi Khavar, an elderly woman caring for Hafez’s household in his mother’s absence; Jahan Malek Khatun, in real life and the story, a princess and poet; and Banafsheh, ‘Obayd Zakani’s housekeeper and servant.

Though Hafez is young in this story, his poetry is already presumed to be well known and widely admired not only in Shiraz but in far-off lands as well. For example, the narrator Golandam refers to “news from Anatolia, India, and Baghdad about the fame of Shams al-Din’s poems,”[19] and Pezeshkzad incorporates into the story the often-translated couplet,

به شعر حافظ شیراز می رقصند و می نازند

سیه چشمان کشمیری و ترکان سمرقندی

To the poetry of Hafez of Shiraz, they sing and dance,

The black-eyed beauties of Kashmir and the fair-faced Turks of Samarqand[20]

Pezeshkzad’s Hafez is a scholar as well as a poet, serving as secretary of the court archives under the previous ruler and doing research on such diverse subjects as mathematics, astronomy, and medicine.[21]

Despite such serious pursuits, Pezeshkzad’s Hafez is indeed joyful, and, for the most part, he takes great pleasure in life. He enjoys the company of his friends, appreciates the renown he has already received as a poet, and waxes eloquently over the natural beauty of Shiraz and its environs. He is rather intolerant, however, of hypocrisy, including what he sees as the hypocrisy of the new ruler, Amir Mobarez, and his followers. He makes his criticism of this group public through some of his poems and through his reluctance to join the ranks of the court poets. With his generally optimistic outlook, he refuses to see the danger that he has put himself in, and he ignores the advice of his friends to curb his tongue and make himself scarce for a time. (Hence the original title of the book, which can be translated as “Hafez, heedless of advice.”)

This Hafez is also playful, at times to a fault. He and the elder ‘Obayd Zakani (a writer of prose and poetry, often satirical and ribald, in real life as well as in the story) amuse themselves and others by baiting and then mercilessly making fun of fellow guests at literary gatherings. Further, he plays practical jokes, sending acquaintances on wild goose chases and then laughing boisterously that they took him seriously and fell into his trap. This joking at the expense of others gets Pezeshkzad’s Hafez into trouble, too, as he loses the support of some important allies at whom he has poked fun.

Other problematic characteristics of the Hafez portrayed in Ḥāfiẓ-i nāshanīdah pand are his manipulativeness and his sometimes-wanton disregard for the welfare of others. Early on in the story he pesters and needles Golandam until the latter agrees to accompany him to a party that Golandam thinks they both should avoid. Later on, he convinces Golandam, against the latter’s better judgement, to accompany him in the dead of night to check out the home of an acquaintance to see if the owner has returned from a journey. This escapade exposes him to arrest. While in jail, he prevails upon an admittedly quite willing admirer to smuggle out a letter for him, resulting in the man’s beating when he is caught with the letter while leaving the jail.

On the other hand, this Hafez does sometimes show concern for others, as when he expresses some regret at tricking a friend into preparing a long poem to recite in the presence of Amir Mobarez, who has no patience for long poems. “Then I became sorry,” he says, “that I had teased the poor guy. They say that if Amir Mobarez hears a long poem not only does he not listen, he also beats the poet.”[22] As another example, he decides to leave the home of an acquaintance who has given him shelter when he realizes the danger his presence poses for his host. “Whatever disaster might befall me,” he says, “it is better than that I cause trouble for the innocent Mehraban Ardashir.”[23]

In this book, Hafez’s lyric poetry is presented as addressing human beings and their strengths and weaknesses. In accordance with Pezeshkzad’s stated belief that Hafez was not a Sufi, the beloved in his poems is interpreted in this story as human rather than divine. While many scholars believe that the beloved of most classical Persian poetry, when human rather than divine, is a boy or teenage youth, in this story Hafez’s romantic interest is solely in females. For this reason, we translated the genderless Persian third-person singular pronoun as “she” rather than “he.”

When reading Ḥāfiẓ-i nāshanīdah pand, one can imagine the young Pezeshkzad in the character of playful Hafez and the elder Pezeshkzad in the character of respectable, meticulous, and funny ‘Obayd. Hafez’s infatuation with Jahan Malak Khatun also has some resemblance to the first love of Pezeshkzad, with the object of which he was never united, yet who he mentions when people ask him how he came to write Da’i Jan Napelon.[24] In Ḥāfiẓ-i nāshanīdah pand, Golandam describes Hafez’s playfulness and sense of humor as what saves Hafez in a period full of atrocities and ugliness—“a safety line that does not allow [him] [. . .] to drown of harshness in a sea of grief.”[25] Perhaps Pezeshkzad’s sense of humor was his savior too, enabling him to bear the sociopolitical problems that he faced which led him to seek exile in France. By his own account, he sorely missed Iran and longed to return to the country, but never felt that he could.[26] Yet he turned the pain of exile into at least one humorous essay[27] and at least one novel.[28]

For a comparison of Pezeshkzad’s Hafez with Hafez as interpreted by other scholars, we invite English-speaking readers to refer to Dominic Brookshaw’s Hafiz and His Contemporaries: Poetry, Performance, and Patronage in Fourteenth Century Iran,[29] as well as some of the English translations of selections from Hafez’s poetry, including Faces of Love: Hafez and Other Poets of Shiraz by Dick Davis,[30] Hafez: Translations and Interpretations of the Ghazals by Geoffrey Squires,[31] Wine and Prayer: Eighty Ghazals from the Divan of Hafiz by Elizabeth A. Gray and Iraj Anvar,[32] and The Angels Knocking on the Tavern Door: Thirty Poems of Hafez by Robert Bly and Leonard Lewisohn.[33]

When we spoke with the author in 2018 to get his permission to publish our translation, he told us that he would like us to use the same cover image as on the Persian version, which is a painting by Abbas Moayeri (1939-2020). He urged us to use the original painting so that the black stripe that runs across the cover of the Persian version would not appear. He further told us that the reason for the black stripe is to cover the breasts of the girl in the picture. Many of Pezeshkzad’s books criticize censorship, lies, and hypocrisy, as does Hafez in his poetry. It seems appropriate, therefore, that he wanted to break free from the censorship imposed on the original cover image. We tried reaching the artist then, but unfortunately, we only heard back from him two years later when the cover image was already chosen and approved. Soon after, Abbas Moayeri passed away, in October 2020.

Pezeshkzad’s art is in bringing the heavenly Hafez onto earth for readers to meet and to experience vicariously the occasions for which some of his poems could have been written.[34] The writer does not try to interpret Hafez’s poems directly. Instead, he masterfully employs the poems to create a hypothetical situation which could have inspired Hafez to compose a certain poem. He explains the existence of alternate versions of some of Hafez’s poems by the poet’s presumed penchant for repeatedly revising (ornamenting and embellishing, he would say) his works and even creates a story to illustrate the fictional Hafez’s attitude about the circulation of various versions. This story is related by ‘Obayd to Golandam,

One day at a gathering I heard a minstrel sing this couplet of his [Hafez]:

راهی است راه عشق که هیچش کناره نیست

آنجا جز آنکه جان بسپارند چاره نیست

The road of love is an endless road.

There is no choice there other than yielding your soul.

Several days later at a different place the minstrel sang the first line of the couplet this way: The sea of love is an endless sea. When I asked Shams al-Din why he wouldn’t say which version was his, do you know what answer he gave? With a laugh he said, “It’s fine if it is both, because there’s no difference. And for laughs, it’s not bad.” When I asked, “What laughs?” he said, “The same way that for several years now there has been arguing, quarreling, and strife between two groups of Sufis about a single phrase uttered by a Sufi master, if by chance my poetry, like the poetry of Sheikh Sa‘di, endures, then a hundred years, two hundred years, three hundred years from now, a difference of opinion will be found among literary scholars. One will say sea of love is correct and road of love is an error, and the other will say road of love is correct and sea of love is an error, and they will take the life of one another over road and sea. The youth of that time will laugh over their fights, and my spirit will take pleasure from their laughter.”[35]

In the talk that Pezeshkzad gave virtually at the University of Chicago three months before his death, he started by joking about his age. He then gave us a synopsis of his biography and discussed what led him to be a writer rather than the physician that his father wanted him to be and rather than a lawyer, for which he had studied in France. He said that he began his writing career by translating stories from French into Persian and publishing them Iṭṭilāʻāt-i haftigī (Weekly Iṭṭilāʻāt). He admitted that it was in France that he was introduced to literary social satire as it was a very common genre in French in those years after the end of World War II. He added that in order to help him earn a living while working at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, he wrote literary satire pieces and published them in the journal Ferdowsi for four years—essays which were then collated into a book.

He also talked about several of his books and what led him to write them. At a certain period in his life, he was sent from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs on a mission to Algeria, and since he had a lot of time on his hands, sitting idly in the embassy, he started writingAdab-i mard bih zi dawlat-i ūst taḥrīr shud (One’s manners outdo one’s wealth),[36] which he said is his own favorite among the books he has authored. He stated that this book was very well received in the theatrical scene of Iran, and it was transformed into a play by the prominent actor and director, Davoud Rashidi (1933-2016). Yet, it did not go on stage because of an unfortunate incident that happened to the main actress. He added that, after the revolution, they tried to bring it to the stage, but this was stopped by the Revolutionary Guards and the play was subsequently banned. Later, he mentioned that the first play he translated from French to Persian was Voltaire’s Nanine. It seems that Pezeshkzad had an ongoing interest in theater and playwrighting. This is likely the origin of one of the distinctive features of his writing: his mastery of dialogue, which he employs in his novels, short stories, plays, and any writing he has embarked upon during his productive life.

The style of the Persian in Ḥāfiẓ-i nāshanīdah pand is rather formal and literary. Perhaps having just finished writing another of his books, Ṭanz-i fākhir-i Sa’dī (The elegant satire of Sa‘di),[37] the author was influenced by Sa‘di’s language. Other than the few encounters with the cat, the rest of the text of Ḥāfiẓ-i nāshanīdah pand is written in a high register. Since the entire book is purported to be a manuscript written by Hafez’s close friend, this style helps the reader imagine the story being written in the fourteenth century. When we were translating this book, we tried to maintain this style to some extent. For example, we chose to use archaic or old-fashioned words in places where they seemed appropriate, such as “wenching,” “realm,” “tavern,” “mount” rather than “horse,” “goblet,” and “minstrel.” We also kept the sometimes quite elaborate expressions of politeness. For example, when the poet and princess Jahan Khatun enters the room, she is greeted by her fellow guests with several couplets of poetry. She responds in part by incorporating one of the poetic phrases: “[. . .] it is the presence of you dear poets that opens the door of blessing onto me.”[38] Because of this style, the English reader might find the text a bit stilted, pretentious, and verbose in places, but this is exactly how Pezeshkzad chose to write his historical novel. It is also how historic documents written in English sometimes sound to contemporary readers. Nevertheless, due to the existence of jokes here and there and the satirical nature of the book, it is not at all cumbersome to read.

Hafez in Love: A Novel, the English translation of Ḥāfiẓ-i nāshanīdah pand, won the 2021 Lois Roth Prize for Literary Translation from Persian, and it has been mentioned positively on several literary platforms. For instance, The Modern Novel website writes, “Pezeshkzad beautifully mixes in the various plot lines, so that we are always left wondering what will happen, while, at the same time, letting us enjoy the interchange between him and his friends, and the poetry of Hafez and his friends so that the book really is a joy to read.”[39] In his review of the book, Ali-Asghar Seyed-Gohrab comments, “Hafez in Love is an extraordinary English rendering showing why this Persian poet of wine, love, and honesty has been the most widely read author from the Balkan to the Bay of Bengal for seven hundred years in the Islamic world. [. . .] A fantastic read to be recommended to everyone who loves Persia, Persian poetry, and historical novels.”[40] M. A. Orthofer writes about the novel and its translation in Complete Review: “Hafez in Love is a quite charming little historical romance, in a world that has become very unstable but where poetry also still matters. It’s an enjoyable read—and fans of Hafez and his poetry will certainly appreciate it, not least for how the poetry is cleverly employed in the novel.”[41]

As noted above, to date, the only books of Pezeshkzad that have been translated into English are My Uncle Napoleon and Hafez in Love. Yet, Pezeshkzad has written many more books that are waiting to be introduced to English-speaking readers, and we hope to see more of his books translated into English in the near future.

Appendix

Iraj Pezeshkzad’s handwritten note granting permission to the translators:

Translation of Iraj Pezeshkzad’s written permission to publish the English translation of his book:

Dear Ms. Pouneh Shabani-Jadidi,

Respectfully, in response to your letter dated October 8, 2018, regarding the publication of the English translation of my Ḥāfiẓ-i nāshanīdah pand, considering the information that you gave me about your scholarly and academic achievements, hereby, I express my consent.

Wishing you success,

Iraj Pezeshkzad

Paris

October 11, 2018

Pouneh Shabani-Jadidi is instructional professor of Persian in the Department of Near Eastern Language and Civilizations at the University of Chicago. Some of her publications include The Art of Teaching Persian Literature: From Theory to Practice (Brill, forthcoming), The Bewildered Cameleer: A Novel of Modern Iran (Mazda 2023), The Routledge Handbook of Persian Literary Translation (2022), Island of Bewilderment: A novel of Modern Iran (Syracuse University Press 2022), The Eight Books: A Complete English Translation (Brill 2021), Hafez in Love (Syracuse University Press 2021), The Routledge Handbook of Second Language Acquisition and Pedagogy of Persian (2020), The Oxford Handbook of Persian Linguistics (2018), The Thousand Families: Commentary on Leading Political Figures of Nineteenth Century Iran (Peter Lang 2018), Processing Compound Verbs in Persian (Leiden and University of Chicago Press 2014), and Translation Metacognitive Strategies (VDM Verlag 2009).

Patricia J. Higgins is university distinguished service professor emerita at SUNY Plattsburgh. As an anthropologist of Iran, she has published her work in Iranian Studies, Human Organization, Journal of Research and Development in Education, and NWSA Journal and as chapters in edited volumes. Some of her publications include Island of Bewilderment (Syracuse University Press 2022), Hafez in Love (Syracuse University Press, 2021), and The Thousand Families: Commentary on Leading Political Figures of Nineteenth Century Iran (Peter Lang 2018). In addition, she is co-editor of Classics of Practicing Anthropology: 1978–1998 (Society for Applied Anthropology 2000). At SUNY Plattsburgh, she served as a faculty member, an associate vice president, and then interim provost and vice president for academic affairs.

[1] Iraj Pezeshkzad, Da‘i Jan Napelon (Dear Uncle Napoleon) (Tehran: Farhang-e M‘aser Publishing House, 1973).

[2] For relevant examples, see M. R. Ghanoonparvar and Homa Katouzian in this issue.

[3] Emily Langer, “Iraj Pezeshkzad, celebrated Iranian satirist and author of ‘My Uncle Napoleon,’ dies,” The Washington Post, January 18, 2022.

[4] Langer, “Iraj Pezeshkzad.”

[5] Dick Davis, trans., My Uncle Napoleon (Washington, D.C.: Mage Publishers, 1996, 2000).

[6] Dick Davis, trans., My Uncle Napoleon (New York: Random House, 2006).

[7] Azar Nafisi, “Introduction,” in My Uncle Napoleon, trans. Dick Davis (New York: Random House, 2006), vii-xv.

[8] Iraj Pezeshkzad, “Afterword,” in My Uncle Napoleon, trans. Dick Davis (New York: Random House, 2006), 501-503.

[9] Farnaz Fassihi, “Iraj Pezeshkzad, Author of a Classic Iranian Novel, Dies at 94,” The New York Times, February 23, 2022, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/23/world/middleeast/iraj-pezeshkzad-dead.htm.

[10] Iraj Pezeshkzad, “Delayed Consequences of the Revolution,” in Strange Times, My Dear: The PEN Anthology of Contemporary Iranian Literature, eds. Nahid Mozaffar and Ahmad Karimi-Haddad (New York: Arcade Publishers, 2005), 105-14.

[11] Iraj Pezeshkzad, Ḥāfiẓ-i nāshanīdah pand [Hafez, heedless of advice] (Tehran: Nashr-e Qatreh Publishers, 2004).

[12] Pouneh Shabani-Jadidi and Patricia J. Higgins, trans., Hafez in Love: A Novel (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2021).

[13] Sorour Kasmai, trans., Mon Oncle Napoleon (Arles: Actes Sud, 2011).

[14] Iraj Pezeshkzad, “A Conversation with Iraj Pezeshkzad” (Heshmat Moayyad Lecture Series, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, October 28, 2021), https://nelc.uchicago.edu/heshmat-moayyad-lecture-series.

[15] For similar discussions, see Dick Davis in this issue.

[16] “Iraj Pezeshkzad: Hafez-e nashenideh pand (Hafez in Love),” The Modern Novel, accessed September 3, 2022, https://www.themodernnovel.org/asia/other-asia/iran/iraj-pezeshkzad/hafez-in-love/.

[17] Susan Basnett, “Living in Translation,” keynote lecture presented at Bristol Translates lecture series, Bristol University, Bristol, England, July 5, 2022, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ih6wBl-n9qw, accessed September 3, 2022.

[18] Ahmad Madani, “A Critical Look at Hafez-e Nashenide Pand (Hafez, heedless of advice) by Iraj Pezeshkzad,” Artistic-Analytical Journal, Café Catharsis, https://cafecatharsis.ir/20127/نگاهی-انتقادی-به-رمان-حافظ-ناشنیده-پند/, accessed September 3, 2022.

[19] Shabani-Jadidi and Higgins, Hafez in Love, 156.

[20] Shabani-Jadidi and Higgins, 182.

[21] Shabani-Jadidi and Higgins, 13-14.

[22] Shabani-Jadidi and Higgins, 148.

[23] Shabani-Jadidi and Higgins, 82.

[24] Pezeshkzad, “Afterword,” 501-504.

[25] Shabani-Jadidi and Higgins, Hafez in Love, 23.

[26] Fassihi, “Iraj Pezeshkzad.”

[27] Pezeshkzad, “Delayed Consequences.”

[28] Iraj Pezeshkzad, Khānavādah-yi nīk’akhtar [The Nik-Akhtar family] (Tehran: Ketab-e Abi Publishing House, 2001).

[29] Dominic Brookshaw, Hafiz and His Contemporaries: Poetry, Performance and Patronage in Fourteenth-Century Iran (London: I. B. Tauris, 2019).

[30] Dick Davis, trans., Faces of Love: Hafez and the Poets of Shiraz (New York: Penguin Books, 2013).

[31] Geoffrey Squires, trans., Hafez: Translations and Interpretations of the Ghazals (Miami, FL: Miami University Press, 2014).

[32] Elizabeth A. Gray and Iraj Anvar, Wine and Prayer: Eighty Ghazals from the Divan of Hafiz (Ashland, OR: White Cloud Press, 2019).

[33] Robert Bly and Leonard Lewisohn, trans., The Angels Knocking on the Tavern Door: Thirty Poems of Hafez (New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 2008).

[34] Kayhan London, “In Commemoration of Iraj Pezeshkzad: This Playful Hafez,” News and Views for a Global Iranian Community, https://kayhan.london/fa/1400/11/03/270528/, accessed September 3, 2022.

[35] Shabani-Jadidi and Higgins, Hafez in Love, 108.

[36] Iraj Pezeshkzad, Adab-i mard bih zi dawlat-i ūst taḥrīr shud [One’s manners outdo one’s wealth] (Tehran: Safi Ali Shah Publishing House, 2002).

[37] Iraj Pezeshkzad,Ṭanz-i fākhir-i Sa’dī [The elegant satire of Sa‘di] (Tehran: Shahab Saqeb Publishers, 2002).

[38] Shabani and Higgins, Hafez in Love, 42.

[39] The Modern Novel, “Iraj Pezeshkzad.”

[40] Ali-Asghar Seyed-Gohrab, Review, https://press.syr.edu/supressbooks/3471/hafez-in-love/, accessed September 3, 2022.

[41] M. A. Orthofer, The Complete Review, https://www.completereview.com/reviews/iran/pezeshkzad.htm, accessed September 3, 2022.

Weststruckness: Its Trials, and Its Tribulations

ایران نامگ Volume 7, Number 1, Spring 2024

Weststruckness: Its Trials, and Its Tribulations

(With Morad Moazami)

Abstract

From the late nineteenth century onwards, ‘Weststruckness,’ under some moniker or another, has remained prevalent in Iranian sociocultural discourse. Its message, however, has largely been distorted and misunderstood by way of its weaponisation as a political, indeed, revolutionary tool. In this paper, we trace the history of the concept from the late nineteenth century through to the Constitutional Revolution and the Pahlavi period, up to the Iranian Revolution of 1979. We describe the evolution of the concept by analyzing the sociopolitical ideas of Sheikh Fazlollah Nuri, Seyyed Hasan Taqizadeh, Ahmad Kasravi, Fakhreddin Shadman, Ahmad Fardid, Jalal Al-e Ahmad, and Ali Shariati. We will then demonstrate how the concept of ‘Weststruckness,’ originally expressing distress over the intrusion of Western culture into Iran, was stripped of its inherent cultural content and fashioned only into a pejorative slogan.

Historical Background

‘Weststruckness’ (and its kindred terms such as ‘Westoxication,’ and ‘Occidentiotis’) is an English rendering of Jalal Al-e Ahmad’s Gharbzadegi (1962). The subject, however, is much wider as well as older than that. The fear of the intrusion of European culture goes back to the second half of the nineteenth century, when the culture of modernisation was beginning to take form inside Iran.

In the nineteenth century, such fears not only contributed to Naser al-Din Shah’s decision to disband the upper-class intellectuals’ pseudo-Freemason club called Farāmūshkhānah, but they also influenced the cancellation of Reuter’s Concession in 1872, intended as a wide programme of mainly economic modernisation of the country, including the construction of railways. Naturally, the concession would have also meant the employment and influx of large numbers of European personnel, from managers downwards, who would bring their Christian and European lifestyles with them. This, of course, was believed to impact the Muslim fabric of society.

When, after the shah’s death in 1896, constitutionalism began to gather momentum, two central notions came to the fore with respect to what a constitutional government must entail. First and foremost was the abolition of arbitrary rule; and second was the modernisation of state and society that the younger and secularist intellectuals had long advocated. Some naively believed that the two projects necessarily overlapped.

In particular, the prospect of secular modernisation frightened Sheikh Fazlollah Nuri and his disciples into effectively opposing constitutionalism by advocating mashrūʻah (as opposed to mashrūṭah) which at best meant that the government should apply religious law. Among their concerns was their opposition to the equality before the law of religious minorities, participation of ‘Frankish Madames’ (mādām’hā-yi farangī) in mixed meetings; newspapers; and even whistling and clapping. For example, Nuri’s party wrote in one of their major statements that, at first constitutionalism was about the abolition of arbitrary despotism, but now other non-Islamic ideas have been put forward, such as:

[…] the education of women and the founding of schools for girls, and the usage of funds hitherto used for religious congregations and the pilgrimage of sacred shrines for investment in factories and the paving of roads and streets, and in the construction of railways and acquiring European industries.[1]

Nuri and his disciples, however, lost their cause completely when they sided with arbitrary rule in the aftermath of the Constitutional Revolution, paying a mortal price for it.

Yet, the uneasiness over the dislocation of Iranian traditions in favour of modernism were far from past. Indeed, a prime illustration of this unease can be found in Mohammad Ali Jamalzadeh’s short story, “Persian is Sweet,” published in 1921, about an Iranian peasant finding himself trapped in a prison with two Iranians whose language he cannot understand. One of them was a well-dressed, novel-flicking, and mustachioed “farangī’ma’āb” (Europeanist) amusingly addressed as “Mr. Monsieur,” who speaks only in a Franco-Persian hybrid.[2] Another piece of literature written in the same period, which also ridiculed the farangī’ma’āb type, was Hasan Moqaddam’s (penname, Ali Nowruz) play, Ja‘far Khan has Returned from Europe.[3]

Pseudo-Modernism

While the triumph of constitutionalism had not immediately led to secularism and modernism around this time, it had indeed planted the seeds for it. These seeds continued to grow steadily until Reza Khan and his supporters won their power struggle and launched their pseudo-modernist programme in the 1920s. The term ‘pseudo-modernist’ is explained by the fact that there was a rush to emulate some of the most superficial aspects of life in Europe, not only widening the streets by demolishing whole buildings, including monuments, but even ordering the people to wear European-style hats, the resistance to which ended in bloodshed.[4]

Regarding this subject Mokhber al-Saltaneh (Mehdiqoli Hedayat, who had been Reza Shah’s prime minister for almost six years) wrote in his memoirs:

In an audience the shah took my [chapeau] hat off my head and said, ‘Now what do you think of this?’ I said it certainly protects one from the sun and the rain, but the hat, which we had before had a better name [meaning ‘the Pahlavi hat’, which also had been forced on men a few years before]. Agitated, his majesty paced up and down and said, ‘All I am trying to do is for us to look like [the Europeans] so they would not ridicule us.^{^[5]}

Perhaps no better critic of pseudo-modernism than Seyyed Hasan Taqizadeh could show the extent of the sentiments against it. In January 1920, in the first issue of the new series of Kāvah which he and Jamalzadeh published in Berlin, Taqizadeh wrote that “Iran should both in appearance and in reality, both physically and spiritually become Europeanized and nothing else.”[6] Taken out of context, these words do suggest pseudo-modernist thinking, although a study of other articles written mainly by Taqizadeh on the subject in Kāvah reflect a higher level of sophistication than shown by the above sentence. At any rate, this was taken and repeated as gospel by the young nationalist and pseudo-modernist elite at the time and later. By the same token, when in the 1960s and 70s, as a result of a backlash against pseudo-modernism there was an emotional and unrealistic rejection of the West and everything Western, Taqizadeh was singled out as the demonic harbinger of ‘Weststruckness.’

Long before the outburst against ‘Weststruckness,’ however, Taqizadeh had argued that his view had been misunderstood and misinterpreted, although this involves some exaggeration. He himself did acknowledge once that, earlier, he might have gone a little too far in his zeal for promoting progress and development along European lines. The occasion on which he extensively and most emphatically disowned and denounced pseudo-modernism was in his correspondence with Abolhasan Ebtehaj, the able and honest governor of Bank Melli Iran (then a commercial bank as well as the central bank). Taqizadeh had criticised the Bank’s extravagance in building a lavishly modern new branch in the Tehran bazar on the ruins of the perfectly sound Takyah-i Dawlat, the public hall built by Naser al-Din Shah for social occasions, pick-axed for the purpose. In response, Ebtehaj wrote and reminded him of the famous sentence in the article in Kāvah twenty-seven years before. In his reply of January 1948 to Ebtehaj’s letter, Taqizadeh wrote that his point had been misunderstood, and that in a country which suffers from so much “misery, homelessness, hunger, nakedness, disease, illiteracy and filth,” to construct “pharaonic and Parisian buildings” in emulation of rich Western countries is “the deadliest sin and tantamount to religious infidelity:”

And if, as you have pointed out, twenty-seven years ago I encouraged the people to adopt ‘the European civilisation both in appearance and in reality, both physically and spiritually,’ my intention was never such mad and idiotic imitations of luxury. By apparent civilisation I meant such things as clean clothes, adequate housing and public health […] and good manners […] and […] valuing time. And regarding spiritual civilisation, I meant science, scholarship, foundation of universities, publication of books, improvement of the situation of women […] and removal of corruption and bribery and still thousands of other spiritual, legal, moral and behavioral matters which would take another ten pages to enumerate […] Unfortunately, we acquired neither the apparent civilisation of Europe, nor its spiritual one. Of the apparent civilisation, we did not learn anything except prostitution, gambling, sartorial aping and making ourselves up with imported material, and of the real civilisation, none other than rejecting the religions without having faith in any other moral code or principle […] ^{^[7]}

Ahmad Kasravi

Under the rapid pace of pseudo-modernisation during this era, nostalgia was slowly beginning to break out. In turn, Ahmad Kasravi’s 1932 book, Āyīn, emerged both as a prime illustration of this mode of thinking, and more deeply, the cultural unease that these modernist programmes had prompted.

A former religious scholar and preacher who had left that profession to become a modern lawyer and later, a vociferous campaigner against Shiism and Shia clerics, his argument in Āyīn was simple and clear: Modern technology and secularism had led to irreligion and immorality everywhere, and while Iran should acquire from modern European products what was necessary for its survival, it should reject ‘Europeanism’ (urūpā’yī’garī). His argument resembled Jean- Jacque Rousseau’s who, put in a few simple words, believed that the march of material and scientific progress had not led to the greater happiness and fulfilment of the human race, but the reverse was true.

Written as early as 1932, Kasravi’s discourse was global: there was no basic moral difference between East and West, except that the European machine age had led to moral decline and unhappy living in Europe as well as any society that had been copying it. However, he makes it clear in a footnote that, throughout the book, by Europe he means the whole of the West.

“Have modern European inventions added to human happiness?” asked Kasravi rhetorically. “Sadly not! Alas, not!” he replied. “In fact, such inventions and the inevitable changes which they have brought with them have caused increasing trouble to human beings […] We ourselves remember well what a peaceful life we used to enjoy until twenty years ago when we still had our own Eastern mode of living and know what difficulties we face now that we have been polluted by Western style of living.”^{^[8]}

Expanding on the previously popular farangi-ma’āb, the term urūpā’yī’garī was plainly concerned with the same decades-old fear: that the influx of European inventions and ways of life could lead the country towards a divergent and unfortunate path. Since Kasravi had, by then, already observed first-hand the transformations that the sudden and rapid employment of European inventions had brought about, this was far from a matter of mere nativism. Nativism, after all, “operates not as a reminder of one’s cultural history, but as a stark and closed interpretation of who belongs and who does not.”[9] Though written as a polemic, Āyīn’s differentiation between East and West served more as a cultural critique and warning. After all, the author was not denying the useful features of these innovations; rather, he was concerned that the Iranian Europhiles’ hastily implementing them lacked the “intellectual independence… [to pursue] an alternative path of progress and development that could detour the social and economic problems of Europe.”[10] Instead, they naively believed that European means and methods were superior, and therefore deserved emulation.

Kasravi, however, reminded readers that Europe was not necessarily superior to the rest of the world. Its innovations, despite their advantages, had caused great harm as well:

Europe claims that the machine reduces human suffering […] This use of the machine cannot be denied. But the damages which these instruments have caused to the world are also numerous. One must say that if the machine has relieved hands a hundred times, it has added to the suffering of hearts a thousand times.’^{^[11]}

He went on to argue that ever since Europe had begun to invent machines, it had risen against religion: “lack of faith is now one of the gifts that people of the East bring for their fellow citizens from Europe”^{^[12]}:

They will ask, ‘What should be done?’ We say, ‘we must turn our eyes off Europe and return to our old Eastern living. Governments would have to watch Europe and be aware of the intentions of the Europeans about the East so that they could protect their countries. And they should acquire newly-invented war materials and whatever is useful for government and administration, and enact the laws which are necessary for it. But people must turn their eyes off Europe.’^{^[13]}

It is important to emphasise that Kasravi’s argument here, as in his many other books, comprises both a universal and a local element. Europe itself has declined almost in every sense since the Industrial Revolution, prompting the loss of religious faith and moral virtues. Therefore, the wholesale imitation of European customs and innovations could prompt Iran to go the same way. More importantly, the country could end up in the same situation unless Iranians take heed and retain their moral and spiritual life.

Similarly, by providing a historical context to European innovations so as to arrive at these conclusions, Kasravi is indicating that Iranian Europhiles might not be as cognizant of these developments in the first place, which has, in turn, led to the animated emulation of all things European without any thought given to its repercussions. For Kasravi, it is not just Iran’s adoption of Western ways that is problematic; even the West needs to rescue itself from its moral and religious decline in consequence of the rise of modern industry.

Fakhreddin Shadman

A quarter of a century later, in February 1948, Seyyed Fakhreddin Shadman—who, unlike Kasravi, had “stayed in Europe for fifteen years”[14]—wrote Conquering the European Civilisation, another book thematically concerned with the threat of Europeanism. Like Kasravi’s Āyīn, the book suffers from much repetition and its message is at times contradictory. If Kasravi’s preoccupation was with the ‘machine’ and its harmful consequences for clean and peaceful living by way of its undermining pure faith and the traditional public ethics, Shadman’s is the fear of European civilisation ‘conquering’ Iranian culture.

Europe—by which he also means the entire Western civilisation—is highly advanced although despite what most educated Iranians believe, it is not perfect. Nevertheless, it has had great achievements, which should be acquired by Iranians such that they could then “conquer Europe” or European civilisation. To put it in a few words, Europe is Iran’s enemy out to “conquer Iran,” but Iran can ‘conquer’ Europe instead by cautiously acquiring Europe’s achievements. Indeed, the whole issue of ‘conquest’ and ‘counter-conquest’ revolves around these subjects, rather than political and economic domination, although that too has been mentioned in passing in a general critique of the West. And what are the instruments for conquering European civilisation? They are language, literature and culture, which he often summarizes under the category of ‘language.’

Shadman is first and foremost concerned with the risk of the decline of Persian language and literature, but combines this with an attack on ‘fukulī,’ or the pseudo-Europeanist dandy who he believed was mindlessly abandoning Persian language and civilisation in preference for imitation of half-baked European forms, norms, languages and ways of life:

In reply to the person who asks why fukulī is the greatest enemy of Iran, I would say that during the onslaught of European civilisation this domestic enemy is aide to the foreigner […] and in the hope that European civilisation conquers us as soon as possible, he would not shy away from betraying our language and our good cultural traditions. If we do not stop the onslaught of European civilisation, the people of Iran would be destroyed.[15]

Fokoli, based on the French faux col for a detachable collar, referred to a European-type Iranian dandy. And so, within the popular idiom of the time, a fukulī is a person who, having learned a few words from European languages thinks that he can introduce European civilisation, which he does not know, to Iranians; he is no different from Kasravi’s ‘Europhile’ or the farangī’ma’āb of old. What is remarkable about Shadman’s view is that, unlike pan-Iranian nationalists, he values both the Islamic as well as the pre-Islamic period of Iran’s history, and believes that missionaries are enemies, not just of Islam but of Iran itself:

The Iranian fukulī is an ignoramus who does not understand that the European missionary, due to grudge and prejudice, regards Islam as the source of Iran’s misfortune […] He is the enemy of our religion [and] not a friend of Iran. And if we were Zoroastrian, he would regard that as the reason for the catastrophes which are faced by today’s Iran. And if we worshipped the Trinity while his religion was Islam, he would still not leave us alone and say that the teachings of Christianity have ruined Iran…[16]

This seems senseless, because it assumes that under any and all circumstances Europeans are enemies of Iran. Unlike Kasravi, Shadman has no fear of the ‘machine’, of European inventions and the real Western achievements, yet he fears European civilisation—a kind of ambiguous, if not senseless, Europhobia—which he sees as an enemy of Iran and bent on the destruction of its culture. He points out that Iran has been defeated several times in history but has managed to survive, but the conquest of European civilisation will be a defeat from which Iran would never recover:

Do not look upon European civilisation as a plaything. If European civilisation conquers us, the history of one of the most important and oldest of the world’s great nations would come to an end, and the book which has been open for two thousand and five hundred years would be shut forever.[17]

What should therefore be done? Should Iranians turn their back to the great achievements of European civilisation, which Shadman enlists with great admiration? His answer is ‘no.’ He distinguishes between “rationally and cautiously” acquiring it rather than being conquered by it:

Either of two things should be done: either we should rationally and cautiously acquire European civilisation, or we should surrender before it, so it would sweep us away like a flood […] In my view the day that European civilisation conquers us will be the last day of the life of Iran; and the only escape route is for us to conquer it before we become captive to it.[18]

The simpletons who would like to be conquered by European civilisation do not realize that it is not our friend. A comparison of those countries, which surrendered before European civilisation in the last couple of centuries, with those that willingly adapted it clearly shows the advantage of rational and cautious acquisition as opposed to surrender before “this pitiless enemy:” Russia and Japan, acquired it and are now advanced nations; Algeria was conquered by it and is a miserable country.[19]

Even though emotionally charged, this is a rational argument. Put in a few words, it says that Iran should rationally adapt Western civilisation, rather than purely imitate it. However, it is not clear in what sense this would result in Iran—by the force of the Persian language and culture—‘conquering’ it. Russia and Japan developed through modernisation, but this does not mean that they ‘conquered’ Western civilisation.

Examining Kasravi’s and Shadman’s arguments, it becomes clear that neither of them could be authentically described as ‘nativist.’[20] True, their account is packed with idealisms of various kinds, but neither of them quite advocates complete insularity or a ‘return to self.’ On the contrary, both merely advocate a better historical understanding of the lifestyles and innovations that, they believe, Iranians have natively experienced.

As we saw, Kasravi’s message is both universal and local. Since the industrial revolution, faith, humanity and morality have sharply declined, in the first instance, in the West itself. Therefore, Iran should not follow the West in this, especially without knowing of the consequences that these innovations wrought on European civilisation. This, for Kasravi, does not mean that Iranians should avoid Western physical and social products, since they need them for their use. Only caution is key. While, on the other end of the spectrum, Shadman makes a call to conquer Western civilisation rather than turning back on it, he also concludes that Iran should ‘rationally and cautiously’ adapt Western products but maintain its language and culture, if not promote them.

Even so, the critiques of Kasravi and Shadman hardly had an impact on the intellectuals and the educated, let alone the whole society. Although Ahmad Fardid had first used the term gharbzadegi in a different sense, it is Al-e Ahmad’s book that gave it its extensive and intensive currency. Within a few years, and especially after his death in 1969, gharbzadegi conquered Iran “as completely as the Holy Inquisition conquered Spain.” This is how John Maynard Keynes described the complete triumph of Ricardo over Malthus so that, as he continues, “argument ceased.” It is indeed an apt description of how the term gharbzadegi conquered Iran.

Ahmad Fardid

Before examining Al-e Ahmad’s gharbzadegi, however, it is important to look into Ahmad Fardid’s original conception of the term. Due to the sparseness of his writing, Fardid was largely an oral philosopher. His ideas were either transmitted through his lectures at the University of Tehran (where he taught philosophy from the 1960s onwards), or his weekly dūrahs (gatherings) dubbed “Fardidiyehs.” Among his noteworthy followers at the time were philosophers Dariush Shayegan and Dariush Ashuri, both of whom would also contribute to the gharbzadegi discourse later in their careers—which however did not include Fardid’s more extremist views, which came to the fore especially after the 1979 Revolution. [21]

Fardid’s gharbzadegi (introduced as a rendition of Yunānzadigī, meaning ‘Greekstruckness’) was concerned with the sizable influence of Greek epistemology across the history of European modernity, through to its effects on Eastern modernist thinking. Borrowing from the Nietzschean concepts of active and passive nihilism, Fardid considers gharbzadegi to be both a passive and passing era in Western as well as Eastern philosophy. This period, he maintains, will soon give way to a more active, questioning form of gharbzadegi that will lead to the renunciation of the Greek epistemological hegemony, and a return to a more spiritual, faith-based philosophical discourse.

Following a loose and mostly personalized historical account, Fardid claims (not quite correctly) that gharbzadegi entered into the Muslim world following the Crusades – the crusades happened long before the Renaissance! – only to ‘redouble’ as a “progressist, modernism-struck, and modernity-desiring” concept in the eighteenth century. This ‘redoubled’ form of gharbzadegi then set the stage for the Iranian Constitutional Revolution of the early twentieth century, fueled by Western philosophy’s “worldly” and “objectivized”[22] perspective. This Western epistemological worldview’s central flaw was that it posited “an existential separation between the human mind as the knowing subject and the external world as the object of study,” a concept inherently at odds with spiritual Oriental thought.[23]

Moreover, upon closer inspection one can see that the French Revolution, by which Iran’s Constitutional Revolution was inspired, led to only “sin and heresy,”[24] with no trace of God or spirituality left in its wake. And so, in consequence, Iran’s Enlightenment-based Constitutional Revolution seems to have occurred around the time that Western philosophy was breathing its final breaths in the West itself, with the ultimate nail in its coffin being the “the Russian Revolution, which occurred against a similar kind of gharbzadegi.”

A period of ‘redoubled’ gharbzadegi, as experienced in the Constitutional Revolution, is for Fardid marked by “its imitations of the West,”[25] and by the elimination of the deep-seated faith-based residue of an Eastern culture. It was during such a period, Fardid maintains, that the word millat, which connotes religion, was translated into ‘nation,’ even though ‘nation’ actually connotes race.[26] Indeed, for Fardid, these “constitutional translations” reeked of nothing other than the objectivized, worldly thinking of the West.[27]

As for the present day, Fardid claims that Westerners have begun to call out that “Oh sir, our minds have become warped! And this freedom isn’t really freedom, and this world is really moving towards collapse!”[28] Now, “after four hundred years, the history of the West has reached a dead end,” and the only way for Iran to avoid the same predicament is “mysticism”[29] (darvīshī) and “self-awareness” (Khud’āgāhī).[30] These terms actually echo Martin Heidegger’s admittedly irrational complex concept of ‘Being-in-the-world’ (Dasein), which also called for a more spiritual, mindful, and thus more authentic engagement with the physical world. For Fardid, this sort of self-cognizant mysticism is the only way to fight ‘spiritual poverty’ and counteract the West’s dead-end of epistemic objectivity, and thus, to fight against gharbzadegi.

As we can see, even in Fardid’s case, a universal concept is utilized so as to arrive at a more local philosophical conjecture. Though written under a different— this time, philosophical—discursive umbrella, much of Fardid’s conception of gharbzadegi shares similarities with the previous, more cultural iterations of farangī’ma’ābī as well as urūpā’yī’garī. What is original in Fardid’s conception, however, is his conjecture that gharbzadegi is a necessary stage in human history, and one that had to be seen through to its very end. Analogously, this stage of gharbzadegi also comprises its own sub-stages, one that travails a passively nihilistic form of gharbzadegi, marked by its process of blind imitation, to a more active variation of it, ultimately marked by a newly self-cognizant interrogation of gharbzadegi with a more spiritual bent.

While the West has already reached the stage of active gharbzadegi, the East continues to be passive. It bears noting that despite Fardid’s largely philosophical examination, echoes of Kasravi’s observation can be detected in his argumentation as well: the West has already discerned its collapse, while the East remains naively enchanted by its innovations. As for what will result from these introspections, Fardid is unclear; for him, gharbzadegi is merely a historical stage, bound to wear out and give way to a new history thereafter.

Al-e Ahmad

For Jalal Al-e Ahmad, however, gharbzadegi was posited as both a mania and an underlying threat to contemporary Iranian culture. Repurposing Fardid’s philosophical conjecture, Al-e Ahmad focuses on the immediate repercussions of a cultural gharbzadegi. Contrary to Fardid, Al-e Ahmad does not claim that the threat of gharbzadegi lies in its being historically and essentially Western; rather it lies in the fact that Iranians have wholly given themselves away to Western products and habits of consumption, “copying the West outwardly and superficially,”[31] while making little effort to generate their own cultural products, to say nothing of their unwillingness to understand the mechanisms behind these new products and ways of life. At the heart of Al-e Ahmad’s critique is not the Western-ness of these products, but the passivity that they have instigated due to their inherent luxury and convenience.

By the time Al-e Ahmad wrote Gharbzadegi at the age of thirty-nine, he was already an accomplished author, critic, and translator. Written in 1962, a year before the Shah’s White Revolution and the revolt of June 1963; and four years before an unknown person and Ali Shariati—one after the other—translated Franz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth into Persian in Paris, Gharbzadegi was not an anti-West manifesto; rather, Weststruckness, under Al-e Ahmad’s definition was:

[…] a characteristic of the period of our history that we have not yet acquired the machine and do not know the codes of its organization and construction. Weststruckness is a characteristic of the period of our history that we have not yet learned the premises of the machine, i.e. modern science and technology. [32]

Likewise, for Al-e Ahmad, the gharbzadeh is a character who has severed his ties with Iranian culture and tradition. This is an individual “with no connection to the past, and no idea about the future,”[33] who also attends only to the most superficial aspects of day-to-day life. This person only cares for ease and uses much of his time “to groom himself […] giving importance only to his shoes, his clothes, and the furnishings inside his home.”[34] Everything for the gharbzadeh is about looking like a European. Sometimes, he appears as though he has been “unrolled from some golden piece of foil or has just returned from some European maison.”[35]

It must be said that Al-e Ahmad was not opposed to Western culture either. Strictly speaking, he was concerned about ways that Iranians had taken up and employed these ‘machines’ without quite understanding their implications. Western modernism, he believed, was being applied at a time when Iranians did not yet “comprehend the actual nature, foundation, and philosophy of Western civilisation.”[36]

In fact, as the founding editor of the intellectual journal ‘Ilm-i Zindigī, Al-e Ahmad had actively tried to better familiarize readers with that civilisation through his translations of André Gide’s Return from the Soviet Union, Albert Camus’s The Outsider, Jean-Paul Sartre’s The Dirty Hands, Dostoevsky’s The Gambler, and (with Ali Asghar Khobrezadeh) Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon. Indeed, towards the end of Gharbzadegi, he even goes so far as to refer to Nabokov’s Lolita, and Bergman’s The Seventh Seal—which were among the most recent intellectually fashionable works to be published and screened in the West—so as to point to the cultural problems faced by the West itself.[37]

However, we should distinguish between the book’s principal point and how it is presented. Indeed, much of the criticism should be levelled at the style of presentation, not least its polemical tone and its extensive use of the familiar Iranian conspiracy theory. A distinction must also be made between the first edition (1962) and the second edition (1967) of the book. The first edition speaks of the harmful influence of “the machine.” Indeed, having read the first edition in 1962, the present author pointed out to Al-e Ahmad that it smacked of Luddism, of the early nineteenth-century resistance against modern machinery, to which the latter responded by saying that he was in love with his own Hillman Minx motorcar.[38] However, he wrote in the second edition:

The point is that as long as we have not understood the nature, essence and philosophy of the West, and only superficially copy-cat it by consuming its machines, we are like the donkey who went into the lion’s skin…At any rate, it is two hundred years on that, as a crow, we pretend on being a partridge…And from all that we said something commonplace emerges, namely that as long as we are only consumers and not builders of the machine, we are Weststruck.[39]

The concept he introduced, indeed, was neither political nor anti-West; nor did he advocate any form of “return to self.” It merely served as a call to go beyond imitation, and to create as well as to appropriate imported cultures in line with Iranian customs. Contrary to the anti-western theories which were soon become fashionable even to the point of claiming that Western culture itself was rotten, Al-e Ahmad was not railing against Western culture as it was lived and practiced in the West itself. Instead, his cause for concern was simply the prospect of superficial imitation—of “being a crow and pretending to be a partridge”[40]— something that years before Gharbzadegi, he had also warned against when critiquing the contemporary press in Iran.[41] However, as indicated, by far the greatest weakness of his argument is his strong proclivity to conspiracy theory and his cavalier treatment of historical analysis.

As with the large body of Weststruckness discourse, commonalities exist in Al-e Ahmad’s argumentation when compared to his predecessors: a call to caution with respect to modernism; insistence on a peculiar mimetic compulsion appearing among modernists, as well as a historically framed attempt to wipe away the romanticism often accorded to the Euro-American modernist way of life. However, each of these thinkers offer a different angle with respect to this discourse. In Al-e Ahmad’s case, his discourse—unlike those of Kasravi, Shadman, Fardid, and Shariati— was neither religious nor moral, nor even philosophical. And unlike Bazargan, Shariati and Khomeini, he was not advocating one or the other form of Islamic or Islamically-inspired government.

Later misidentified as the father of a more politicized notion of gharbzadegi, Jalal Al-e Ahmad, though a dissident intellectual, never actually affixed himself to a political vision, much less an ideology, following his 1953 falling out from politics. Al-e Ahmad’s preoccupations were largely social and cultural, and his aspirations to social change vis-à-vis political oppression were never spelled out under any specific political or ideological umbrella.[42] And no way does it justify the retrospective and anachronistic accounts that pit him and his cultural output as harbingers of the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

By the 1970s, however, Al-e Ahmad’s iteration of gharbzadegi had become a slapdash idiom in the service of many. Adults, children, old and young people, men and women, the poor, the well-off, and even the rich all had begun to use it as a pejorative term by which to discredit their interlocuters’ point of view or cultural identity. Indeed, any object of disagreement, dissent and disapproval, especially in the social and political spheres was attributed to gharbzadegi. For example, when a British-educated Iranian economist was trying to explain to a British-educated Iranian physicist, who was engaged in higher studies in Paris, that the first country to become capitalist could not now be “sous développé,” as she maintained Britain had become, she shouted ‘stop being Weststruck’ (gharbzadih nashū)! Just the same, this pejorative term’s admission into the contemporary idiom was less a direct result of the underlying message in Gharbzadegi itself than it was a consequence of the ideological weaponization of the term at the hands of ideologues inspired by Al-e Ahmad’s book but not necessarily informed by it. As Liora Hendelman-Baavur remarks:

The significance of Al-Ahmad’s treatise evolved over time, far beyond the reach of its author. In the prerevolutionary decades, Gharbzadegi was renowned for its criticism against the modernisation enterprise enforced by the Shah and the West’s imperialist exploitation. Following 1979, it was associated with the hegemonic discourse of clerical revolutionaries and, shortly afterward, with the anti-Western terminology of Ayatollah Khomeini, as well as guidelines for the foreign policy of the Islamic Republic.[43]

Ali Shariati

A name routinely put forward in connection to the more ideological flank of the gharbzadegi discourse is Ali Shariati. Much unlike Al-e Ahmad’s example, although Shariati’s influence was substantial—to the point that, not quite accurately, he is sometimes described as the ideologue of the Iranian revolution—it appealed much less to the secular than to the traditional individual.[44]

Shariati’s works, mainly transcripts of recordings of his talks and lectures, run in tens of volumes. He was a prolific and eclectic thinker in the style of religious reformers and prophets. Still, it should be said it was not so much Shariati’s ideological analysis and evaluations that was most effective in attracting young men and women to his cause; rather, it was his simple discourse on Islam, society, and social change.

Most of Shariati’s followers were born in traditional religious families. They had been affected by the modern secular environment in Iran and elsewhere; and they were also trying to hold on to their religious sentiments while at the same time pursuing a modern, revolutionary line of thought and action. French-educated scholar himself, Shariati made use of the gharbzadegi discourse to paint a picture of exactly such a predicament. However, he did so with a counter-ideology already in mind—something that cannot quite be said of his predecessors within the discourse. Shariati’s counter-ideology, infusing Marxism with his own configuration of Islamic philosophy, can be examined in 1971’s Bāz’gasht bih khvīshtan (‘Return to the Self’). At the onset, Shariati reminds his interlocutors of the West’s history of imperialism:

The West, from the eighteenth century onwards […] is trying to provide the world with the thesis that ‘there is only one kind of civilisation, which is Western civilisation, and if any other individual wants to become civilised, they must consume the civilisation we have constructed, and if they wish to rebuff our civilisation, they will remain savages.[45]

Shariati then goes on to offer a personal anecdote so as to shed light on the sheer effectiveness of this mode of cultural imperialism. He recalls sitting next to an individual on an Iranian aeroplane, whose Persian accent was indeed so westernised (‘farangī’) that the author could not even understand what he was saying. Afterwards, he hears the individual speaking in a European language, only to find out that the boy cannot even speak that other language properly. “Just look at the pretension,” he laments, before pondering its cause out loud: “It is because such an individual cannot even stand himself, cannot stand where he belongs to, cannot stand anything that reminds him of himself.”[46]

These statements echo Al-e Ahmad’s classifications of the gharbzadeh as well; an individual that had no relations to the past, and a person who no longer belonged anywhere at all. Shariati believed that this individuality had been sparked by the imperialistic tendencies of the West, which has made anyone Other feel themselves ‘condemned,’ and at the same time, ‘compelled to pretend, to gesture, to use make-up, and to live’ like the Westerner.[47]

Unlike his predecessors, however, Shariati actually outlines an ideological path through which to fight back against this cultural inferiority complex. Before doing so, however, he makes sure to remark that he is not advocating mere nativism. “If I were to say that we must return to a racial self, we would become prone to racism and fascism and tribal ignorance, and as such, it would all just amount to a reactionary mode of return,” he admits.[48] Neither does he approve of a historical or nationalist return, since, as he maintains, “such selves can only be discovered by historians, sociologists, scientists, and archeologists.”[49] Instead, Shariati advocates for a self that is more accessible, “a self, based on deep-seated sentiments and spiritual and humane values that exists within us […] that is still alive inside us.’[50] This self, he finally attests, is “a religious self, an Islamic self.”[51] Thus, in the end, his ‘return to self’ meant return to early, ‘Alid’, Shiism.

With Marxism being highly popular both in Iran and elsewhere, Shariati also felt impelled to employ its concepts and categories, and to address the political sentiments arising from them. Still, he did so in his own fashion. He went as far as saying that “the socioeconomic order of Islam is scientific socialism, based on the worship of God.”^{^[52]} Likewise, he used dialectical analysis to explain the course of human history within a moral and spiritual framework. The anti-Marxist material which appeared under his name in the Tehran press shortly before he left for England, may have been an expedient move, as some critics have tended to believe. However, there is little in their substance that is contradictory both with his ideas and his politics.^{^[53]} In his view, “Islam, especially Shi’i Islam, was a radical ideology that could outdo Marxism in championing revolution and the class struggle, as well as in opposing feudalism, capitalism, and imperialism.”^{^[54]}

In line with this, Shariati argued that Islam could and should be turned into an ideological weapon capable of successfully competing with both imperialism and Marxism, in order to bring about radical change in Islamic societies. At the same time, Shariati did not have faith in the religious leadership; indeed, he almost believed in an Islam and a Shiism without the clerics. Shariati, in his turn, castigated conservative religious leaders, and spoke of “two different Islams,” distinguishing between Alid Shiism (Tashayyu’-i ‘Alavī) and Safavid Shiism (Tashayyu’-i Ṣafavī), the latter of which he identified with the established Shiism of his time, holding it to be false and reactionary.^{^[55]} That is how he contrasted his version of revolutionary Islam to the Islam of Shia clerics.

As we have also seen, contrary to the prevailing official nationalism which emphasised Iran’s pre-Islamic past, for Shariati, a ‘return to self’ meant returning to pure Shia and Islamic roots:

When we say ‘return to one’s roots’, we are really saying return to one’s cultural roots which in the case of Iran is not a return to pre-Islamic Iran, by which the masses of Iranians are not moved. Consequently, for us to return to our roots means not a rediscovery of pre-Islamic Iran but to a return to our Islamic roots.^{^[56]}

In sum, Shariati advocated a revolutionary Islam with a modern face, which involved a return to an idealized early Shia culture and tradition—a Shiism virtually without the ulama—but one which was influenced by European intellectual and political developments of his time. As such, even if this concept can be described as a kind of ‘nativism,’ Alid Shiism is the past Shariati aspires to, which has its origins in Arabia, not Iran.

Conclusion

What, then, is the upshot of the above discussion on gharbzadegi or Weststruckness? First, it was shown that concern about the modern European impact on traditional Iranian society goes back as long ago as the mid-nineteenth century. This became an issue during the Constitutional Revolution, but it was one that did not impress the majority even of clerical constitutionalists. The issue began to be taken seriously in the post-constitutionalist era, and especially in consequence of uncritical emulations of Europe under Reza Shah and his wholesale attack on all things traditional.

There were (sometimes significantly) different responses and reactions such a Taqizadeh’s social critique of pseudo-modernism and Kasravi’s moral and religious discourse on the decline of the industrialized West. To some extent, each comprised a similar plea: a call to stop imitating Western society, except for what was necessary for the safeguarding and independence of the country. Then came Shadman’s peculiar and somewhat self-contradictory argument about the need to ‘conquer’ Western civilisation before it conquered Iran. In the end, however, even Shadman came to the conclusion that Iranians should cautiously adopt Western products and at the same time develop the Persian language and Iranian culture. Yet, none of these ideas and arguments made a noticeable intellectual, let alone popular, impact on Iranian society, not even Fardid’s philosophical discourse, despite the fact that he was the inventor of the term gharbzadegi.

Shariati’s modern Islamic ideology had an appreciably greater impact than theirs, and it came closest to what might be described as a ‘nativist’ advocacy for ‘return to self,’ although it must be stressed that not only is ‘the self’ here not Iranian but Arabian, but also that Shariati was quite aware of the nationalistic dangers of nativism, and accordingly endeavored to skirt its implications within his rhetoric. The fact that he also framed his Islamic ideology within Marxism, which was a chiefly European school of thought, also points to the flaws of a nativist argument made with respect to Shariati.

All the same, it was Al-e Ahmad who gave the term gharbzadegi its quintessential currency with his cultural critiques. And it was subsequent to that when it became everything to all men and women, its inherent cultural critiques spurned in favour of its use as a foolhardy pejorative term. The anti-West and Europhobic meaning that was attached to it was indeed far from the author’s original conception, which had only appealed for more specialization and a better contextual understanding of modernist innovations. Despite this, gharbzadegi became an ideological weapon in the hands of almost all the revolutionaries, but especially Islamists and Marxist-Leninists, who, in turn, rewrote both the history and connotations of the term so that it could serve their versions of the greater good.

[1] See Ahmad Kasravi, Tārīkh-i Mashrūṭah-yi Iran [Constitutional History of Iran] (Tehran: Amir Kabir, 1994), 415-17.

[2] Mohammad Ali Jamalzadeh, “Fārsī shikar ast,” in Yikī Būd va Yikī Nabūd (Tehran: Bongah-e Parvin 1922).

[3] Hassan Moqaddam, Ja’far khān az farang āmadih (Tehran, 1922).

[4] See Homa Katouzian, The Political Economy of Modern Iran: Despotism and Pseudo-Modernism, 1926–1979, 1st ed. (London and New York: Macmillan and New York University Press, 1981).

[5] Mehdi Qoli Hedayat [Mokhber al-Saltaneh], Khāṭirāt va Khaṭarāt (Tehran: Zavvar, 1982), 407.

[6] Iraj Afshar, ed. Kāvah, 22 January 1920 (Tehran: Entesharat-e Asātir, 2005), 2.

[7] Iraj Afshar, Zindigī-yi Tūfānī: Khāṭirāt-i Seyyed Hassan Taqizadeh (Tehran: Mohammad Ali Elmi, 1368/1948), 672-73.

[8] Ahamad Kasravi, Āyīn, 1932, Part 1, reprint (Tehran: Nashr o Pakhsh-e Ketab, 1975), 6.

[9] Shirin S. Deylami, “In the Face of the Machine: Westoxification, Cultural Globalization, and the Making of an Alternative Global Modernity,” Polity 43, no. 2 (2011): 259.

[10] Mohamad Tavakoli-Targhi, “Ahmad Kasravi’s Critiques of Europism and Orientalism,” in Persian Language, Literature and Culture: New Leaves, Fresh Looks, ed. Kamran Talattof (London and New York: Routledge, 2015), 230.

[11] Kasravi, Āyīn, Part 2, 13.

[12] Kasravi, Āyīn, Part 1, 13.

[13] Kasravi, Āyīn, Part 1, 47.

[14] See Seyyed Fakhreddin Shadman, Taskhīr-i Tamaddon-i Farangī (Tehran, n.p., 1948); reprinted in Abbas Milani, ed. Taskhīr-i Tamaddon-i Farangī (Tehran, 2003), 3.

[15] Shadman, Taskhīr-i Tamaddon-i Farangī, 22-23.

[16] Shadman, Taskhīr-i Tamaddon-i Farangī, 14.

[17] Shadman Taskhīr-i Tamaddon-i Farangī, 24.

[18] Shadman, Taskhīr-i Tamaddon-i Farangī, 30; emphasis in the original.

[19] Shadman, Taskhīr-i Tamaddon-i Farangī, 30.

[20] See Mehrzad Boroujerdi, Iranian Intellectuals and the West: The Tormented Triumph of Nativism (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1996), for an in-depth investigation of what the author considers to be ‘nativist’ tendencies in the works of several notable Iranian intellectuals of the twentieth century, Shadman among them.

[21] For an extensive examination of Fardid’s life and thoughts, see Ali Mirsepasi, Transnationalism in Iranian Political Thought: The Life and Times of Ahmad Fardid (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017).

[22] Sayyid Ahmad-i Fardid, “Gharbzadegi,” in Maqālāti az Seyyed Ahmad-e Fardid (Web: Ketabnak, 2012), 82.

[23] Ali Gheissari, Iranian Intellectuals in the Twentieth Century (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1997), 89.

[24] Fardid, “Gharbzadegi,” 82.

[25] Fardid, “Gharbzadegi,” 82.

[26] Fardid, “Gharbzadegi,” 82.

[27] Fardid, “Gharbzadegi,” 82.

[28] Fardid, “Gharbzadegi,” 83.

[29] Fardid, “Gharbzadegi,” 84.

[30] Fardid, “Gharbzadegi,” 84.

[31] Jalal Al-e Ahmad, Gharbzadegi. 1967 (Qom: Nashr-e Khorram, 2007), 20.

[32] Al-e Ahmad, Gharbzadegi, 26.

[33] Al-e Ahmad, Gharbzadegi, 117.

[34] Al-e Ahmad, Gharbzadegi, 123.

[35] Al-e Ahmad, Gharbzadegi, 123.

[36] Al-e Ahmad, Gharbzadegi, 20.

[37] Al-e Ahmad, Gharbzadegi, 187-88.

[38] Homa Katouzian, conversation with Al-e Ahmad in London, 1962. Katouzian’s copy, which was given to him by Al-e Ahmad himself, was lost in the 1996 fire in his library. And efforts to find a copy of the first edition for use in this chapter proved unsuccessful. Hence, the general references to its substance here are from memory.

[39] Al-e Ahmad, Gharbzadegi, 20.

[40] Al-e Ahmad, Gharbzadegi, 20.

[41] See Jalal Al-e Ahmad, “Varshikastigī-yi Maṭbū’āt,” in Sih Maqālah-yi Dīgar, 2nd ed. (Tehran, 1342), 8–39.

[42] For a biographic analysis of Al-e Ahmad as well as the ideological dilemmas he was often faced with, see Michael Hillmann, “Introduction: Cultural Dilemmas of an Iranian Intellectual,” in Jalal Al-e Ahmad, Lost in the Crowd, trans. John Green, Ahmed Alizadeh, and Farzin Yazdanfar (Washington, D.C: Lynne Rienner Publishers Inc, 1985).

[43] Liora Hendelman-Baavur, “The Odyssey of Jalal Al-Ahmad’s Gharbzadegi—Five Decades After,” in Persian Language, Literature and Culture: New Leaves, Fresh Looks, ed. Kamran Talattof (London and New York: Routledge, 2015), 276.

[44] For a side-by-side examination of Al-e Ahmad and Shariati’s outlooks on westernisation (with an additional analysis of writer Samad Behrangi’s similar concept of ‘Amrikazadegi’), see Brad Hanson, “The ‘Westoxication’ of Iran: Depictions and Reactions of Behrangi, Al-e Ahmad, and Shariati,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 15, no. 1 (1983): 1–23; see also, Ali Mirsepasi, Intellectual Discourse and the Politics of Modernization: Negotiating Modernity in Iran (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), which investigates both the politics and epistemology behind Shariati and Al-e Ahmad’s stances.

[45] Ali Shariati, Bāz’gasht bih khvīshtan (1350/1971), 7.

[46] Shariati, Bāz’gasht bih khvīshtan, 14.

[47] Shariati, Bāz’gasht bih khvīshtan, 12.

[48] Shariati, Bāz’gasht bih khvīshtan, 17.

[49] Shariati, Bāz’gasht bih khvīshtan, 18.

[50] Shariati, Bāz’gasht bih khvīshtan, 18.

[51] Shariati, Bāz’gasht bih khvīshtan, 18.

[52] See Ali Rahnema, An Islamic Utopian: A Political Biography of Ali Shari’ati (London: I.B Tauris, 1998), 24

[53] See his Marxism and Other Western Fallacies: An Islamic Critique, trans. R. Campbell (Berkeley: Mizan Press, 1980); Rahmena, An Islamic Utopian, chapter 22.

[54] Ervand Abrahamian, “The Working Class and the Islamic State,” in Reformers and Revolutionaries in Modern Iran: New Perspectives on the Iranian Left, ed. Stephanie Cronin (London and New York: Routledge, 2004), 269.

[55] See Ervand Abrahamian, The Iranian Mojahedin, reprint edition (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2009), 119, quoted from Intiẓār (1980), 21.

[56] Abrahamian, The Iranian Mojahedin, 116, quoted from Shariati, Bāz’gasht bih khvīshtan, 11, 30.

A Seventeenth-Century Prose Abridgment of the Shahnamah Produced by a Zoroastrian Priest

Nasrin Askari Volume 6, Number 3-4, Fall-Winter 2021

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

Leila Moayeri Pazargadi Volume 6, Number 2, Summer 2021

Leila Moayeri Pazargadi is an associate professor of English at Nevada State College, teaching composition, postcolonial literature, life writing, and Middle Eastern literature. She received her PhD in comparative literature with a certification in gender studies from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2012. Her research focuses on Middle Eastern women writers producing autobiographical material in fiction and nonfiction. In 2020, she was a visiting scholar at UCLA’s Center for Near Eastern Studies, researching Middle Eastern women’s memoirs for her upcoming monograph. She has been published in Biography, a/b: Autobiography Studies, Gender Forum, and the Getty Research Journal.

As an innovative aesthetic in transnational life writing, humor can facilitate an affective transmission of eyewitness experiences, particularly of past historical traumas. In Iranian American[1] diasporic writing, comedic writing has become an innovative and increasingly popular tool for recounting experiences of immigration from Iran to America during the aftermath of the 1979 Iranian Revolution, and for confronting ensuing acculturative and racist struggles. One early example of this subgenre occurred in 2004 when Firoozeh Dumas debuted her popular memoir, Funny in Farsi, offering readers a comparison of life in America before and after the 1979 Iranian Revolution. As part of her autobiographical self-disclosure, Dumas notes increased racial hostility against Iranians in America, using humor to explore themes of white passing, racism, and liminality in America. Yet, rather problematically, the author at times uncritically embarks on a racial transformation to socially ascend and pass for white as a French woman, perhaps as a way of coping with liminality. In contrast to Dumas’s earlier work stand two comedians who similarly employ humor in their memoirs, but complicate their experiences of racialization as Iranians in the American diaspora.

Maz Jobrani employs humor akin to Firoozeh Dumas in his 2015 memoir, I’m Not a Terrorist but I’ve Played One on TV: Memoirs of a Middle Eastern Funny Man, in order to bridge gaps between his Iranian identity and surrounding American fears about Iranians. Like much of his stand-up work, Jobrani’s memoir does not wade deep into controversial waters. However, it does manage to ruminate on changing perceptions of Iranian racial identity, particularly from his perspective as a brown Muslim man living in increasingly hostile America. Jobrani entertainingly uses humor to ease tensions between Iranians and his mostly non-Iranian audience, who might mistake Iranians for threatening terrorists.

To round out these comparisons, Negin Farsad’s 2016 How to Make White People Laugh approaches Iranian liminality from a space of Black power and allyship, as opposed to a position of white passing. Farsad uses humor to teach her audience about the nuanced liminality of Iranians, while disrupting neatly packaged narratives and exposing gaps of belonging. Like Jobrani, she offers a few suggestions to build bridges between peoples, but more so, she ruminates on the liminality of Iranian Americans. In this way, her humor takes Jobrani’s observations and criticisms one step further, speaking to the messiness of fitting into a neoliberal American social order that seeks to ostracize her. Farsad embraces her Otherness, while deftly employing critical race theory to outline a different positionality for Iranians living in the diaspora, one that rejects racial erasure.

Ultimately, through the stylistic aesthetics of humor, the structure of these comedic confessionals playfully offers alternatives to the more traditional form of memoir, thereby allowing for a rich exploration of Iranian American racial identity. Thus, this essay explores the ways in which Jobrani and Farsad reflect on the process of their racialization from white to brown, depending on how threatening they are perceived as being, especially after 9/11. This racialization fluctuates from rewarding Iranian Americans with whiteness when they are received as model minorities, to punishing them with brownness when they are perceived as threats. Ultimately, both Jobrani and Farsad touch on themes uncovered in John Tehranian’s and Neda Maghbouleh’s works that explore the legal paradoxes of government categorization of Middle Easterners as white compared with Iranian American perceptions of themselves as “Other.” Additionally, by applying Maghbouleh’s concepts of “racial hinges” and “racial loopholes” to these memoirs, this essay considers how Jobrani and Farsad use humor as a mechanism to confront and acknowledge their liminality in America. At the same time, they employ comedy to diffuse tension around racial stereotyping and identity fragmentation in order to carve out a space for Iranian Americans.

The Legacy of Racial Formation Theory: Racializing “White Ethnics” in America

In terms of life writing aesthetics, both Jobrani’s I’m Not a Terrorist but I’ve Played One on TV and Farsad’s How to Make White People Laugh use humor to expose racial paradoxes; at the same time, they propose views that challenge American stereotypes about Iranians and Muslims alike (since these identities often converge in stereotypes). Through their narratives, the authors employ a unique intersection of comedy and racial politics to interrogate identity in the United States and appeal to readers’ affective state. As Iranians in the American diaspora, the authors use humor to undercut the audience’s expectations that Iranian Muslims are threatening or terrorists, thereby diffusing tensions. Jobrani often claims that he is “brown and friendly,” as expressed in his 2009 comedy tour of the same name, while Farsad ups the ante by heralding the “Muslims Are Coming” in her 2013 comedy tour and corresponding comedic documentary. Both comedians mock American stereotypes about Iranians and Muslims, but in varying degrees: Jobrani mildly mocks the stereotype, trying to prove himself in an acculturative way, while Farsad identifies as a woman of color, borrowing from African American studies to align with Black Power movements to disrupt narratives of perceived whiteness. Compared with Dumas’s earlier examples, the narrative critiques of both authors go one step farther than Dumas’s polite acquiescence and assimilative approach to being Iranian in America.

Central to both Jobrani’s and Farsad’s texts is an interrogation of racial politics that explores the boundaries of white designation for Middle Easterners, specifically Iranian Americans. To determine this process of racial self-selection, Jobrani and Farsad touch on debates about the racialization of perceived whiteness, which are stirring inside and outside the Iranian community. For instance, according to law professor John Tehranian, in his study of the racial status of Middle Eastern Americans in Whitewashed, Iranian Americans often work through the state’s designation of them as Caucasian and “white,” as opposed to their social Othering as “brown,” particularly after 9/11. In the American diaspora, this question has come to a boiling point given the ongoing war against terrorism, which simultaneously disrupts the settlement of racial categorization for Iranians. Under the umbrella of Middle Eastern American, Iranian Americans are categorized as white according to the US census; however, in practice they are socially excluded and politically marginalized as people of color. According to Tehranian’s assessment in Whitewashed, Middle Eastern Americans are discriminated against in their daily lives, but have little legal recourse to challenge this discrimination since the American government classifies them as white.[2] Relegated to the status of Other, Americans of Middle Eastern descent are not afforded the benefits of white privilege.[3] He echoes Anita Famili’s assessment that Middle Eastern Americans are “both interpolated into the category of Caucasian while simultaneously racialized as an ‘other’…Middle Eastern Americans do not appropriately fit into the prevailing categories of race. Rather, their ethnic/racial identity is constantly contested.”[4] This makes any type of integration that speaks to the American project of equality difficult to achieve.

This is not unlike the established racial dissonance between other minorities who were classified as white and treated as marginalized. Tehranian draws on long contemplations of the racialization of “white ethnics,” such as the Irish, Italians, and Jews who immigrated to the United States. Building on notions of liminality, he expounds on increased Islamophobia since the 9/11 attacks, which compounds racism for Iranians and Middle Easterners (regardless of religious identity or belief). Very briefly, many critical race theory scholars have found that white ethnics, for lack of a better phrase, have experienced the paradox of white legal classification along with racialized mistreatment. Drawing on Michael Omi and Howard Winant’s seminal theory of racial formation, scholars note the social constructions of race that shift along with social mores. As legal scholar Kevin Johnson observes, “The slow social assimilation, or ‘whitening,’ of various immigrant groups, such as the Irish and Jews, evidences how concepts of races are figments of our collective imagination, albeit with real-life consequences.”[5] Indeed, Steven Belluscio notes in his study of Jewish American and Italian American writers in To Be Suddenly White: Literary Realism and Racial Passing that Italian and Jewish American writers historically were posed as part of the white majority, but were simultaneously considered as ethnic Others, and denied privileges associated with whiteness.[6] Similarly, in Matthew Frye Jacobson’s Whiteness of a Different Color, the author focuses on the concept of race as a social construct in evaluating how society has historically regulated white privileging in America. In his discussions of Jewish Americans, he notes that a non-Christian prototype for Iranians exists, suggesting that Iranians are also simultaneously white and Other.[7] Jacobson focuses on visual cues of race, describing the way in which anti-Semitism is centered on appearance since “race is social value become perception; Jewishness seen is social value naturalized and so enforced.”[8] Most notably, Karen Brodkin adds to these conversations, showing How Jews Became White Folks since many Jewish Americans were perceived as outsiders, but opted for model minority status and assimilated to the American way of life.[9] Of course, all of these theories and discussions are much more nuanced and complex than presented here, but for the purposes of this study, their overview is helpful for identifying the trajectory of critical race theory and its relevance to the discussion of Iranians and race.

Returning to the discussion of Iranian Americans, what ensues from this discourse is a paradox that supports Tehranian’s observations about Iranian Americans’ navigation of whiteness. In the racial spectrum of America, Iranians forge a separate identity in a liminal, tertiary space. His case studies and legal references, in addition to previous conversations about the racialization of white ethnics, are helpful in determining the way in which Iranian Americans are paradoxically classified as white but socially denied the status.[10] Consequently, he makes the case for new racial classifications and official designations for Iranian Americans, especially on the census.

Building on Tehranian’s work, Neda Maghbouleh similarly observes in The Limits of Whiteness: Iranian Americans and the Everyday Politics of Race that everyday experiences of racism and racialization simultaneously occur alongside legal designations of whiteness and internalized “racial covering.”[11] Iranian Americans often Anglicize their names (at least their first name) so as not to easily draw attention to their difference.[12] Moreover, they may obscure their national identities and ties to Iran, instead fabricating points of origin or focusing on former residences in countries lived in prior to immigration to America. This process of racial covering (as Tehranian puts it and on which Maghbouleh expands) attempts to reconcile the legal paradoxes of government categorization of Middle Easterners as white compared with their mistreatment by the Transportation Security Administration, law enforcement, and border patrol officers, who perceive Iranian Americans as Other.[13] They must adapt to access whiteness, since they are left with little legal recourse to challenge discrimination in light of their legal classification as white.[14] Maghbouleh also evaluates the scholarship extending from Omi and Winant’s racial formation theory to show how “racial categories involving liminal groups expand, contract, and transform through social, economic, and political force.”[15]

While Tehranian points out the legal issues for Iranians, Maghbouleh takes the material a step further by offering an innovative theory for articulating the process of racializing Iranians. Her concepts of “racial hinges” and “racial loopholes” are pertinent to the racial explorations of Jobrani’s and Farsad’s identities in America. According to Maghbouleh, the concept of “racial hinges” touches on how “the geographic, political, and pseudoscientific specter of a racially liminal group, like Iranians, can be marshaled by a variety of legal and extralegal actors into a symbolic hinge that opens or closes the door to whiteness as necessary.”[16] Furthermore, “racial loopholes” diagnose the daily “contradictions and conflicts that emerge when a group’s legal racial categorization is inconsistent with its on-the-ground experience of racialization or deracialization.”[17] Racial loopholes is another way of referring to the racialized paradoxes that Tehranian notes about the dissonance between the white status of Iranian Americans and their everyday marginalization.

Taken together, these concepts are useful to show the paradoxes noted in Jobrani’s and Farsad’s memoirs. Combining these paradoxes with notions of humor and affect inherent in the aesthetics of comedic memoirs, these two Iranian American comedians provide plenty of thoughtful fodder for those left wondering about the complexity of racial categorization concerning Iranian Americans. They both use humor and draw upon their stand-up comedy routines to evoke laughter from the audience, so that readers can take in the irony, the mockery, and the light-hearted approach to heavier topics like racism, dispossession, and un-belonging. Furthermore, a comedic approach allows for the bridging of gaps and the diffusing of racial tensions in creating an affective response in readers, who might reexamine their biases and prejudices. In so doing, through the power of their autobiographical disclosure, these comedian-cum-authors attempt not only to entertain but also to instruct audiences about how to coexist.

I’m Not a Terrorist but I’ve Played One on TV

In my discussion about the racialization of Iranian Americans, it is first useful to discuss Maz Jobrani’s memoir, I’m Not a Terrorist but I’ve Played One on TV: Memoirs of a Middle Eastern Funny Man, since he takes a less critical and more exploratory approach to racial dynamics than does Negin Farsad in her memoir. In his debut memoir, Jobrani addresses the elephant in the room by announcing through his title that he is not in fact a terrorist, contrary to American stereotypes about Iranians and Muslims. This notion is even more pronounced by the cover of Jobrani’s memoir, which shows him wearing a suit with a keffiyeh and a lit bomb, accompanied by a puzzled look that casts doubt on the whole scene. From the very beginning, Jobrani regales his audience with tales of how television producers and film directors attempted to dress him in a random assortment of stereotyped clothing meant to look like Islamic terrorist chic. Throughout this discussion about Middle Eastern and Muslim stereotypes, Jobrani notes that he refuses to take these roles, considering the damage that they do for Iranians and the broader Middle Eastern community. It is with this frame of mind that Jobrani opens his memoir in discussing stereotyping and racialization of Iranians.

In his memoir, Jobrani discusses his early childhood in Iran, his move to Northern California at six years old, his acclimation to America, and his rise to becoming a world-traveling comedian. As a 1.5-generation immigrant,[18] he uses humor to cope with the liminality of leaving Iran and moving to America, particularly during the aftermath of the 1979 American hostage crisis in Iran. Just like many other Iranian Americans, the Jobrani family’s journey was a bit unexpected: they “packed for two weeks” but “stayed for thirty years.”[19] Immediately, Jobrani recalls classmates making fun of him in the predominately white city of Tiburon in Northern California. But what ensues is a comedic approach to discussing issues like racism, racial profiling, and double consciousness as a way of addressing Iranian Americans like him. In so doing, he means to reeducate American and Iranian readers about one another as he attempts to dispel negative stereotypes about Iranians as threatening, particularly the misperception that they are terrorists. For Jobrani, memories of being teased at school are undercut by his public reprimands of a school bully in his memoir.

While microaggressions against him started during his childhood, Jobrani recounts how they continue throughout his life and career. Even so, he finds the capacity to laugh, using humor to inject his own critiques while undermining racially motivated slights and teasing. Through his comedic approach, Jobrani attempts to tackle the past trauma of his childhood with scathing sarcasm:

My attempt at blending in failed miserably when I was in the fourth grade. I was met with a verbal confrontation by a sixth grader named Jim who somehow figured out that I was the representative of the Islamic Republic of Iran in Marin County. After all, I had a funny name, beautiful furry eyebrows, strange-sounding parents, and a dad who drove a better car than his dad. I had to be involved with the hostage crisis somehow – I looked the part. This sixth grader came up with a clever nickname, calling me a Fucking Eye-ranian. That’s what people called Iranians back then: Fucking Eye-ranians. “First of all,” I explained, “it’s pronounced Ee-ron-ian, not Eye-ranian. Second, you’re bigger than me so it’s whatever you want it to be. Third, I’m not sure where you heard a rumor that I’m Iranian. I’m not. I’m totally Italian – ciao!”[20]

Jobrani’s Iranian and Muslim identities are read as Other, particularly through his perceived foreignness as evidenced through his “funny name,” “furry eyebrows,” and “strange-sounding parents.” At the time of the hostage crisis, when tensions were high, Iranians in the United States were treated as enemy combatants—even when they had nothing to do with the crisis. The epithet “Fucking Eye-ranian” is doubly damning since it not only includes a forceful expletive, but it also willfully mispronounces Iranian to provide further ridicule. Countless others can attest to having experienced the particular barb embodied by the word Eye-ranian, which unleashes its sting as it is transformed from a noun to a verb in its mispronunciation. Through learning about Jobrani’s experience, at the beginning of his acclimation to America, the reader is able to glean a few points: first, Jobrani is considered an outsider; second, through his use of comedy, he makes a joke to diffuse the tension; and third, he hints at Iranians obscuring their origins and passing for Italian, which is a practice that resurfaces throughout his memoir.

Just as in the rest of the book, here Jobrani relies on humor to create a cathartic release regarding this specific racial tension. Reflecting on this specific instance, he employs what Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson refer to as the “narrating I,” which is the autobiographical voice aware of crafting a memoir during the process of narration.[21] This usually occurs during chronological jumps forward and backward in time when Jobrani (and other autobiographical writers) revisits a memory from the past with a new perspective. Employing the “narrating I,” he notes, “Years later, while doing stand-up comedy, I began talking about these incidents. It felt like I was opening up an old wound, but it was good to talk about the childhood troubles I had with Jim.”[22] In the practice of comedy, autobiographical confession is often mixed with a sense of irony or satire, which can help to heal “old wounds,” as Jobrani says. Specifically, the relief theory of comedy suggests that “humor enables a release of psychic energies otherwise deployed in restraining the primal impulses and emotions like hostility, anger, or sexual desire; laughter saves energy otherwise spent on self-control.”[23] Indeed, humor is a coping mechanism and tool that allows Jobrani to reevaluate his childhood traumas. This is not surprising, since life writing often allows for catharsis, particularly for those who have been marginalized. Even more so, the use of humor allows a comedic writer to work through past trauma to show racism and bigotry to be just as reprehensible as other atrocities.

Additionally, and perhaps significantly, Jobrani’s early experiences with racialization in America touch on Tehranian’s research on racial covering. Not unlike the earlier example of Dumas’s passing for French, Jobrani also jokingly attempts to pass for another white ethnic: Italian. He mentions this numerous times, making jokes via name changes and Italian words and phrases like ciao, eventually pointing out the absurdity of this habit carried out by many Iranian Americans. In the earlier example when he notes he had a “funny name,” what is indeed funny about his name is that Maziyar is an ethnically Persian name that is neither Arabic nor Muslim in origin (as it is mistakenly perceived), and Jobrani, which is also Persian, sounds Italian in its foreignness. It is not surprising that Jobrani is able to pass for Italian, even if it is a practice that increasingly frustrates him. In fact, these modes of white passing become vexing for Jobrani, who attempts to encourage Iranian Americans to embrace their authentic identity. For example, he admits that many of his friends changed their names to “Tony” after Not without My Daughter debuted in the United States and depicted Iranian men as particularly threatening and abusive toward women. Jobrani recalls:

They went from being named Shahrokh, Mahmoud, and Farsheed to all being named Tony. I’m not sure why they all chose Tony, but it seemed odd to me that women wouldn’t question you when you would introduce your friends this way: “I’m Maz. This is my friend Tony. Over there, next to Tony, is Tony. Over there next to Tony and Tony is Tony. Yes, they’re all Italian. Very Italian. Me? I’m Iranian. Wait, where are you going? Did I say Iranian? I meant Persian, like the cat. Meow!”[24]

This passage includes a punch line that Jobrani often repeats—“Persian, like the cat. Meow!”—which often elicits laughter from Iranians and non-Iranians alike. Here, he attempts to turn the tables on an ignorant audience who associates Persians only with cats. In this way, laughter is used to build a coalition amongst other Iranians, while they are laughing at American stereotypes about Iranians. Jobrani’s humor also creates space for non-Iranians to laugh at themselves and their own ignorance, eventually moving on from that unawareness. Lastly, there is another layer of humor since the word Persian is used by some Iranians as a form of racial covering designed to obscure their supposedly undesirable origins. Whether through his stand-up or his memoir, Jobrani often makes fun of the way in which some Iranians attempt to become associated with a more romantic origin.

Throughout the passage, Jobrani affirms his identity as Iranian and notes the way in which other Iranians around him attempt to pass for Italian, especially via an appellative transformation to “Tony.” Regarding this type of appellative passing, Tehranian observes that Iranian men in particular would change their name to “‘Mike’ for Mansour, ‘Morty’ for Morteza, ‘Al’ for Ali, and ‘Moe’ for Mohammed” as a way of passing for white.[25] About racial covering, Tehranian observes that the more someone associates with the white community, the more accepted and assimilated they will be. Their whiteness will become more legitimized through association with “credible” whites. Furthermore, associational covering can use financial success as a signpost for whiteness, which explains the Iranian American community’s preoccupation with wealth and status, and more specifically, the Jobrani family’s emphasis on driving a nice car. Group affiliation is another form of covering, wherein Iranian Americans purposely mislead or fail to correct their ethnicity when mistaken for Italian, French, or another more preferable identity. All of this is done to avoid the stigma of being associated with terrorism, hostage takers, and general foreignness.[26] But these measures are also taken because they point to the precarious situation in which Iranians find themselves: their legal classification is white, which is incongruous with their marginalization.

There is little legal recourse for these chasms between legal and perceived racial identities for Iranian Americans, yet steps like legal identification on the census would help ameliorate racial ambiguity. When discussing the US census, Jobrani, like Tehranian, Maghbouleh, and Farsad, finds the lack of ethnic and racial choices frustrating. Jobrani notes that because many Iranian Americans want to fit in, they often indicate “white” on the census. As he sarcastically observes about the question concerning ethnic background, in an affected Persian accent, “Ethnic background? Vhite. Or Italian. Or whichever ethnicity is not currently making headlines.”[27] The census is a sticking point for Jobrani and for many Iranian Americans because as Tehranian points out, “white privilege still reigns supreme, and, naturally, immigrant groups still seek white recognition”; they often check “white” due to an unwillingness to relinquish legally sanctioned whiteness, or for lack of a better option.[28] Despite changes to the 2000 census, which allowed Middle Eastern individuals such as Iranian Americans to identify themselves as “Other,” Tehranian notes that “it appears that very few Iranian Americans took the opportunity to do so. In fact, only 338,266 individuals in the United States identified themselves as Iranian.”[29] Surprised, Tehranian remarks that “any visitor to Los Angeles (often referred to as Tehrangeles or Irangeles) can attest that there are probably 338,266 individuals of Iranian descent living in Southern California, let alone the rest of the country.”[30]

Even a nearly decade later, Jobrani, who was part of the 2010 census effort to encourage Iranian Americans to identity as Other and “write in” Iranian so that they could be counted, laments:

Iranians continue to mark the box that reads “white” and move on with their lives. Based on the last census in 2010, there are about 300,000 Iranians in America. Based on my personal experiences in Westwood, California, there are at least 300,000 Iranians at most Persian weddings. There have been estimates between 300,000 and 1.5 million Iranians in America. The reason for this wide discrepancy is that Iranians are not into filling out census forms. That’s because they want to lay low and avoid the government.[31]

His take is more humorous than Tehranian’s, but it confirms the same quagmire concerning race. Iranians attempt to pass for white, particularly as they see the denigrating mistreatment toward African Americans and other minorities. The solution is to change the census to offer more inclusive categories. In her memoir, Farsad adds that the United States should change the census: “How can we build policies or have a basic understanding of our country with that? We have five categories, but why not have 105 categories? [. . .] Let us figure out who actually lives in this country, how they identify, and what they need!”[32]

This attachment to whiteness for Iranians predates coming to America, as it was part of Pahlavi-era nation making that tenuously claimed Iranians were descendants of Aryans, just at a time when modern nation making in the Middle East attached itself to European self-determination movements.[33] Zia-Ebrahimi elaborates on Pahlavi-era revisionist narratives about nezhad-e ariyayi (Aryan race), noting Leon Poliakov’s observation that “le mythe aryen”[34] found its roots in Reza Shah’s renaming of Persia as Iran, or “land of the Aryans” and through Mohammad Reza Shah’s self-styling as ariyamehr or the “Light of Aryans.”[35] The myth, as Zia-Ebrahimi notes, “divides humankind into several races, and considers most Europeans, but also Iranians and Indians, as members of the Aryan race.” While it was first philologically used to categorize Indo-European languages, it soon took on a political connotation through European claims to whiteness. As Zia-Ebrahimi observes, “Aryanism’s political charge, infused with romantic imagery, intensified over time, propagating claims that the Aryan race was bestowed with a special destiny, that of supremacy over what were now deemed to be the ‘others,’ the ‘inferior races.’”[36] It is not surprising, then, that both Pahlavi regimes, and by extension, Iranians involved in nationalization projects, would refer back to the ancient word ariya and wrongfully appropriate it as the malapropism ariyayi, in order to make a tenuous connection to Aryans reimagined as white Europeans.[37] The national revisions taking place throughout the twentieth century begin to account for the legacy of attachment to the myth that Iranians come from a Europeanized Aryan stock, particularly when they clutch for claims to whiteness in Euro-American spaces.

Both Jobrani and Farsad poke fun at these misconceptions of Aryanness. In his memoir, Jobrani cites the Aryan myth as the reason for many Iranians’ attachment to white racial identity. He explains:

Growing up, most of my friends were white with a few Persians sprinkled in here and there. Before I go any further, I know that any Iranians reading this right now are thinking: But Iranians ARE white! That is true. Iranians are ethnically white. The word “Iran” derives from the word “Aryan.” Our ancestors can be traced back to the Caucuses, so that makes us Caucasian – the original white people. Yes, Aryans were originally dark complexioned people with thick, hairy eyebrows. This is a point that many educated Iranians in the West insist on making.[38]

In this instance, Jobrani turns his comedic gaze to Iranians and addresses the old guard, in particular, who are attached to their whiteness vis-à-vis the Pahlavi romanticization of a distant past. Tehranian similarly observes, “they will tell you that the word Iran comes from the Sanskrit word meaning ‘Land of the Aryans’ and that they, not the Germans, are the original Aryans.”[39] Gelareh Asayesh might put it best: “This tenuous link to the global ruling class permits Iranians to look down on the other people of the Middle East, most notably the Arabs, who had the temerity to defeat the faltering Persian Empire in the seventh century.”[40] Maghbouleh also finds that for first-generation parents—who were “socialized into an Aryan and anti-Arab national history, ‘Caucasian’ geographic location, and concomitant white racial identity as children in Iran”—relinquishing these ties is hard, particularly when challenged by their children (second-generation immigrants), who might perceive themselves as people of color.[41] As Jobrani points out in his earlier observation, it is the Iranians educated in the West (the 1.5- and second-generation immigrants) who note that Aryan ancestors of Iranians who migrated from the Indian subcontinent were probably swarthy people of color as opposed to images of the fair-skinned Aryans reimagined by Hitler. Although there is an ambiguity in this passage concerning Jobrani’s stance on Iranian whiteness, elsewhere throughout his memoir and in paratextual material, he refers to Iranians as people of color.

While Jobrani emphasizes the many instances wherein Iranians might consider themselves white, he also makes reference to their unfair marginality via their perceived brownness. As evident in the naming of his “Brown and Friendly” comedy tour, Jobrani attempts to educate Iranians and non-Iranians alike that Iranians can be racialized as brown and Other. He seems to refer to himself as a person of color, though he spends little time explaining his own racial self-perceptions. He admits, “In the West, despite our Caucasian heritage, Iranians are seen as more brown than white. If you don’t believe me, try this test. Get an Iranian with a thick Persian accent and a unibrow and have him run up to the front of an airplane before the doors close for takeoff and tell the stewardess he doesn’t feel well and needs to get off the plane.”[42] What he goes on to imply is that Iranians can be stereotyped as threatening because of their perceived difference from white Americans. Per usual, he uses humor to trouble a stereotype with which he disagrees. To explain the racial ambiguity of Iranians further, Tehranian notes that “Middle Easterners are consistently subjected to a process of selective racialization” that renders them as white when they socially advance and exhibit positive values, and conversely as Other when they are seen as committing a transgression.[43] Here, Maghbouleh’s notion of racial hinges is also helpful, since it describes the mechanisms for which doors seem to open for Iranians who are perceived as white as opposed to racial loopholes and opportunity loss for Iranians perceived as brown. As Maghbouleh notes, the racial hinge is symbolic, opening and closing access to whiteness depending on social demands, dramaturgy, and sometimes, legal codification.

How to Make White People Laugh

On racial hinges and racial loopholes that account for the double consciousness experienced by Iranians in the diaspora, Negin Farsad’s memoir, How to Make White People Laugh, is both entertaining and instructive. Farsad, who is a second-generation Iranian American, sees her navigation of race a bit differently from Jobrani. Rather than dance around questions of race and color, Farsad embraces her identity as a woman of color, often comparing her experience to other intersectional minorities in the United States. Like Jobrani, she employs humor to skillful effect. Her title makes clear references to her targeted audience: they are white people, and she intends to make them laugh. This title is visually echoed via her book cover, which features a silhouetted Farsad standing in front of—what we later learn to be—her TEDx PowerPoint visual, which inspired her ensuing memoir. In both cases, her life storytelling mixes humor, anti-racism discourse, and social justice principles to cogently discuss the liminality of Iranian Americans who feel estranged from whiteness.

Farsad’s approach is refreshing for Iranian Americans who have felt alienated from or dissatisfied with their legal white designation. From the very first words in her introduction’s title, she heralds her ensuing reflections with “I Used to Be Black,” which automatically signals an identity apart from the usual Iranian claims to whiteness.[44] Of course, the past tense quickly reminds the reader that there has been some sort of change or evolution from this idea. Still, what she refers to is her internalized feelings of being Other, which naturally coincided with what she had known of African American studies and the Black struggle. She quickly clears up impressions that she is trying to appropriate Blackness by disclosing, “To be clear, I’m actually an Iranian-American Muslim female comedian-slash-filmmaker” and quickly corrects any misperceptions that she is putting on some sort of racial “black face.”[45] Elaborating further, she notes, “I used to feel black. Sometimes ‘kinda pretty black,’ occasionally ‘really black,’ and, depending on how drunk I was, ‘Don Cheadle.’ I’m Iranian, an ethnically brown Muz type, and definitely not black.”[46] Depending on the everyday racial loopholes that depict Farsad through a colorist spectrum, and on her personal sentiment and social mistreatment from others, her feelings of Otherness vary. Farsad signals a very different memoir from other Iranian American life writers who avoid answering questions about race. However exaggerated Farsad might be in her initial proclamations of Blackness, what seems sincere are her frequent pronouncements that she is brown and Muslim, and more authentically, that she is not in fact Black. It is funny to note that for many Iranians, as she points out, the fact that she is a female comedian also presents a marginalized community, albeit mostly amongst more traditional Iranians.

For Farsad, the attraction to Blackness stems from a desire to build coalitions between marginalized minorities. Especially because she grew up with immigrant parents, Farsad “felt like my minority and ethnic status was the flashpoint of national blame for some kind of social tension [. . .] So my still burgeoning mind decided to embrace the struggle, embrace that blackness. It was the only narrative around ‘otherness’ out there.”[47] Karen Brodkin observes that this sense of belonging to a racialized category “comes from racial middleness: of an experience of marginality vis-à-vis whiteness, and an experience of whiteness and belonging vis-à-vis blackness.”[48] Aptly, Farsad notes about this experience, “That’s what a lot of hyphenated Americans say to themselves when they glom onto the larger minority groups: close enough.”[49] For Farsad, what is at stake is racial self-determination for Iranians who want to authentically embrace their national, cultural, and ethnic identities in the United States.

This type of coalition building is a cornerstone for social justice work, about which Farsad is passionate throughout her memoir. Additionally, Farsad points out the precariousness of not being able to fully fit in. She feels a bit more at ease with the Black struggle and its fight, but at the same time, she is aware that she is white passing, admitting, “I can pass, but when the full scale of the whiteness hit me, I realized passing wasn’t my choice. I didn’t get to choose whiteness. You’re rewarded whiteness.”[50] This speaks to Maghbouleh’s notion of Iranians and model minorities as racial hinges who are rewarded with whiteness and the privileges thereof. But even more so, it speaks to the racial ambiguity and complexity concerning Iranian social status, which Farsad is quick to point out. This ambiguity and complexity are not surprising, since “Iranians, who have from their arrival in the United States been legally situated inside whiteness, have been simultaneously escorted, framed, and deported out of its everyday social limits.”[51]

After struggling with her racial identity, Farsad realizes that she must reject extra-cultural affiliations and articulate the paradoxes of Iranian American identity to bring her identity into existence. About her racial epiphany and self-acceptance, she observes:

And that’s when it struck me: I wasn’t black, or Mexican or Asian or Russian. I was an Iranian-American Muslim female (the comedy, filmmaking, and honey-mustard enthusiasm didn’t come till later). To large swaths of the American public, that meant I was a possibly dangerous brown person who potentially sympathized with Al Qaeda or

Hezbollah. To other swaths of the American public, I was the kind of person who pronounced “Iran” in a way that didn’t make it sound like a past-tense verb.[52]

Farsad’s proclamations that she is both brown and an “Iranian-American Muslim female” are significant and direct identifiers, particularly because she acknowledges, like Jobrani, terrorist stereotypes lodged against Muslims. To counter this, she notes the potential power of intersectionality, stating, “The fight in being a woman and the fight in being a person of color is the same fight, but being a woman and a person of color just adds twelve extra steps.”[53] This witty disclosure at the end of her observation injects some humor to vary the sting of her critique that evaluates her limited mobility in American society with respect to race and gender.

These identity struggles speak to Maghbouleh’s research on the differences between first-generation and second-generation Iranian immigrants and their navigation of race. Maghbouleh finds that second-generation Iranian American immigrants come of age, “chafe against their social position at the limits of whiteness [. . .] by eschewing the ‘white’ category altogether.”[54] In fact, Maghbouleh adds that because second-generation Iranian immigrants are “pushed outside the limits of whiteness,”[55] they operate in an in-between space, functioning as racial hinges, “crafting political identities as racial outsiders, banding together with other youth [. . .] and practicing an antiracist and strategically inclusive Iranianness [. . .] They are becoming brown by choice and by force.”[56] This self-selection of brownness is significant because it allows Iranian Americans to properly address racial loopholes that allow for their everyday discrimination, while more powerfully reclaiming an identity that has been whitewashed by political machinations in Iran and in the United States.

Considering the revival of anti-Iranian and anti-Muslim sentiment after 9/11, the acceptance of Iranian and Muslim identities as people of color can allow Iranian Americans to push back against their liminal positions between whiteness and Blackness. In response to post-9/11 racist surges of what Farsad calls “Muz-hate,”[57] the author sagely observes “the need to shoehorn Islam as the major reason for everything in post-9/11 America defines so much of how we see mainstream American Muslims. We’ve created an arsenal of icons based on this shoehorning, and those icons do not represent me or fit my worldview.”[58] The word me is significant here as it highlights Farsad’s ownership over her Muslim identity and her repudiation of Islamophobia, which does not fit her world view. Furthermore, she spends some time discussing Islamophobic iconography, demonstrating the intensifying stereotyping of Muslims as backward and threatening. As she notes about white Americans’ perceptions of Muslims, “Islam = the promotion of violence. Muslims = violent people with dusty faces always running around the desert. The Middle East = a place full of violent people with dusty faces always running around the desert, plus women shrouded in what appear to be blankets.”[59] Throughout the text, Farsad pays particular attention to the way stereotyped images become recycled and reified, drawing attention to the “violent” and “dusty” qualities that have permeated Euro-American orientalist imaginations about the Middle East for centuries, from the paintings of Jean-August-Dominique Ingres to the ravings of Bill Maher.

Fully acknowledging these multiple identities and their subsequent marginalization by the white majority, Farsad finally concludes that there is not a neat racial construction of her intersectional identities. She refers to this liminality as a “Third Thing”: “I’m a Third Thing- Islam doesn’t explain me, Iranian poetry doesn’t explain me, and apple pie doesn’t explain me. And yet I understand all of these things. Being a Third Thing is a designation for people who straddle worlds, who may have a foot in every door yet their butt is hovering between door frames and they may even have more than two feet, and either way they’re definitely going to pull a groin muscle.”[60]

Farsad hits the nail on the head for many Iranian American Muslims: they are hybridized in a tertiary space where they experience becoming a “Third Thing” that exists between worlds. There is a “thirdness,” perhaps even a triple consciousness, that allows Iranian Americans to be aware of their difference, which speaks to the way in which Iranians have to identify themselves in distinct racial, ethnic, and religious categories (not just lumped in with whites). Consequently, Farsad notes that when one is “the de facto voice of your people’s Third Thing subgroup [. . .] the people in the First and Second Things aren’t necessarily going to like it.”[61] Farsad, who attended graduate school for a master’s degree in African American studies, is surely referencing Stuart Hall’s and Homi Bhabha’s works on liminality, hybridity, and the “Third Space.” Briefly, in Hall’s prolific body of work, the author often points to hybridity as a way for those with diasporic cultural identity to negotiate a footing in liminal spaces. In particular, through creolization of cultural practices, those in the diaspora can start to describe themselves in new tertiary terms, as opposed to binary ones of tradition and opposition.[62] This relates well to Bhabha’s notions of hybridity in The Location of Culture, wherein all cultural statements and systems are constructed in a negotiated “Third Space” that defies binary positionality between the colonizer and the colonized.[63] In the in-between third space, there is a burden for producing new cultural modes of belonging that recognize the complexity of transcultural identity. For Farsad, this third space signals the possibility for a hybrid identity that blends together her Muslim faith, Iranian ethnicity, and American surroundings.

The mention of becoming a “de facto voice” begins to touch on Farsad’s mission throughout her memoir: to use humor to collapse binary categories and unsettle seemingly established truths. Farsad notes the impact of accepting her multilayered identity on her comedy and ability to use her voice. Her sense of urgency is announced at the beginning of the memoir:

I needed to come out of the closet. I wasn’t helping anyone by glossing over my real identity. This was my struggle, and I had work to do! There [were] 1.6 billion Muslims worldwide whose identity was being hijacked! People needed to know that secular, fun Muslims who smell nice are the norm- more the norm than the dusty brown people we were seeing on television. And I had to let people know it with the only tool I had: comedy.[64]

Returning to those “dusty brown” stereotypes, Farsad senses the importance of coming to terms with her identity instead of culturally affiliating with Black identity or other ambiguously ethnic identities. Rather, Farsad takes up the mantle of diversifying images about Muslims, carving out a space for herself as a secular Muslim, despite white American expectations and Islamic hardliner denials that she may not be Muslim enough to make these claims. These rhetorical and comedic approaches, which she dubs “social justice comedy,”[65] enable Farsad to engage in “educational accounting,” a strategy of informing cultural outsiders about one’s culture in order to help non-Iranians to confront their ignorance.[66] In fact, in her conclusion, Farsad highlights the importance of this educational accounting: “Do people ask where you’re from? That’s great! Let ‘em know. Don’t assume that they’re otherizing you [. . .] you’re a teacher. Yeah, I know you didn’t sign up to be a teacher.”[67] Using her oft-employed sarcasm, Farsad acknowledges what she is asking of her readers: to either take the time to educate others or to be educated as part of her plan to build coalitions in her social justice work.

In order to understand her motivations for using comedy and penning her memoir, it is important to consider the following rhetorical question posed by Farsad: “Why aren’t minorities in the United States building bridges and finding the commonality?”[68] It is a central question that births her comedic memoir since she makes the argument that comedy can propel people to laugh and “start fewer wars.”[69] Continuing, she notes, “I think laughter is the key to all sorts of conflict resolution, and in these pages I want to show you how, why, where, and when this laughter is useful [. . .] Comedy is the great lubricant, metaphorically, for easing people into tough discussions [. . .] I wanna lube up the whole nation [. . .] I won’t stop until we all just get along.”[70] This last reference to getting along is similar to the messages echoed throughout Dumas’s and Jobrani’s memoirs. It is interesting that despite their varying approaches to navigating race, they all agree on taking a moderate approach that aims to establish common ground.

Additionally, on an aesthetic level, comedy and its use in life writing can allow authors like Farsad and Jobrani to inspire change and provide conflict resolution. According to Indira Ghose, “One of the most insidious fallacies is the belief that laughter is trivial. The function of laughter is to make things trivial—and thus gain mastery over whatever threatens to overwhelm us. Laughter is a serious matter [. . .] Laughter is a strategy of self-defence that enables us to face sources of fear or pain.”[71] Humor and its byproduct, laughter, are certainly helpful tools for releasing tension. This is because “humor is inextricably linked with power, and can be used both to reinforce and to challenge dominance and power; the marginal humor [of those in socially disadvantaged positions] may empower the powerless, may invert and subvert the status quo.”[72]

In Farsad’s case, she mentions numerous times throughout her memoir that she wishes to educate those (namely, white people) who are interested in evolving their views about Iranian Americans. According to Farsad, that is the ultimate point of her memoir: to use her voice to educate white people, who possess so much control and power in America. Discussing her reasons for writing, Farsad offers two motivations. First, she declares, “I want to give voice to the multi-hyphenated Americans caught in the margins. I want to give voice to all those feelings of self-censorship and cross-cultural pressures that they feel. I want mainstream American culture to take note, because we can’t be ignored anymore, and recognizing us is a matter of social justice.”[73] Using one’s voice and asserting one’s agency is very important to Farsad, particularly as she attempts to counter invisibility because she advocates standing up and speaking out as a woman of color. Her second motivation pertains to audience: to address white people, who hold so much institutional power. Anticipating questions about her book’s title and focus, Farsad reflexively asks, “Why do white people matter anyway? Because, here’s the thing: White people (still) sorta control stuff.”[74] As a way to undercut that power, Farsad employs humor to “break up the truth” by unsettling accepted notions of race.[75]

Ultimately, as an innovative aesthetic, humor has the ability to undercut traditional beliefs, while at the same time, create connections between comedian life storytellers and their captive readers. Both Maz Jobrani and Negin Farsad aim to laugh at life’s hypocrisies and absurdities with their readers. If they are laughing at anyone, it is themselves. Furthermore, they both reevaluate traumatic moments from their lives and expose the barbs that racists hurled at them. But, as each comedian advances from childhood to adulthood, they refocus their attention on using comedy to explore their racialization. Along the way, they also reject stereotypes lodged against them, ranging from model minority to terrorist. In contrast to other Iranian American memoirists, both Jobrani and Farsad ask challenging questions about the way in which Iranians have been legally categorized as white but paradoxically mistreated as Other. While many Iranian Americans cling to whiteness—and by extension, white privilege—these two authors poke holes in those arguments. They assert themselves as people of color who use comedy to build bridges and coalitions with other ethnic minorities who also find that they are unchecking the white box.

[1]Because I do not want to neatly situate or categorize identity, I do not hyphenate Iranian American identity. Rather, I would like to draw attention and bring awareness to the tension and difficulty in reducing identities to distinct ethnic categories.

[2]John Tehranian, Whitewashed: America’s Invisible Middle Eastern Minority (New York: New York University Press, 2008), 3; Neda Maghbouleh, The Limits of Whiteness: Iranian Americans and the Everyday Politics of Race (Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press, 2017), 3.

[3]Tehranian, Whitewashed, 3.

[4]Anita Famili, “What About Middle Eastern American Ethnic Studies?” (paper presented at Undergraduate Research Opportunities Programs Symposium, University of California, Irvine, 17 May 1997); Tehranian, Whitewashed, 3.

[5]Kevin R. Johnson, “The End of ‘Civil Rights’ as We Know It? Immigration and Civil Rights in the New Millennium,” UCLA Law Review 49 (2002): 1481–1511. Quote on pp. 1488–89. Tehranian, Whitewashed, 22.

[6]Steven Belluscio, To Be Suddenly White: Literary Realism and Racial Passing (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2006).

[7]Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 174.

[8]Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color, 137.

[9]Karen Brodkin, How Jews Became White Folks and What That Says about Race in America. (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1998).

[10]Tehranian, Whitewashed, 3–4.

[11]Maghbouleh, Limits of Whiteness, 4; Tehranian, Whitewashed, 65.

[12]Tehranian, Whitewashed, 6.

[13]Tehranian, Whitewashed, 38. As a member of the Iranian American community, I have also personally observed cases of racial covering and appellative passing amongst many Iranians in the diaspora.

[14]Tehranian, Whitewashed, 6.

[15]Maghbouleh, Limits of Whiteness, 170.

[16]Maghbouleh, Limits of Whiteness, 5.

[17]Maghbouleh, Limits of Whiteness, 5.

[18]Sociologist Ruben Rumbaut coined the term 1.5 generation to “describe the situation of immigrant children who are socialized and begin their primary schooling abroad but immigrate before puberty.” Ruben Rumbaut, “Assimilation and Its Discontents: Between Rhetoric and Reality,” International Migration Review 34 (1997): 923–60. Quote on p. 950.

[19]Maz Jobrani, I’m Not a Terrorist but I’ve Played One on TV: Memoirs of a Middle Eastern Funny Man (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2015), 31.

[20]Jobrani, I’m Not a Terrorist, 52.

[21]Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 73.

[22]Jobrani, I’m Not a Terrorist, 53.

[23]Ambreen Hai, “Laughing with an Iranian American Woman: Firoozeh Dumas’ Memoirs and the (Cross-) Cultural Work of Humor,” Journal of Asian American Studies, no. 2 (2018): 263–300. Quote on p. 275.

[24]Jobrani, I’m Not a Terrorist, 58–59.

[25]Tehranian, Whitewashed, 80.

[26]Tehranian, Whitewashed, 105.

[27]Jobrani, I’m Not a Terrorist, 46.

[28]Tehranian, Whitewashed, 75.

[29]Tehranian, Whitewashed, 77.

[30]Tehranian, Whitewashed, 85.

[31]Jobrani, I’m Not a Terrorist, 46.

[32]Negin Farsad, How to Make White People Laugh (New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2016), 226.

[33]Tehranian, Whitewashed, 85; Maghbouleh, Limits of Whiteness, 11.

[34]Reza Zia-Ebrahimi, “Self-Orientalization and Dislocation: The Uses and Abuses of the ‘Aryan’ Discourse in Iran,” Iranian Studies 44 (2011): 445–72. Quote on p. 447.

[35]Zia-Ebrahimi, “Self-Orientalization and Dislocation,” 446.

[36]Zia-Ebrahimi, “Self-Orientalization and Dislocation,” 448.

[37]Zia-Ebrahimi, “Self-Orientalization and Dislocation,” 447.

[38]Jobrani, I’m Not a Terrorist, 46.

[39]Tehranian, Whitewashed, 85.

[40]Gelareh Asayesh, “I Grew Up Thinking I Was White,” in My Sister, Guard Your Veil; My Brother, Guard Your Eyes: Uncensored Iranian Voices, ed. Lila Azam Zanganeh (Boston: Beacon Press, 2006), 12–19. Quote on p. 12. Tehranian, Whitewashed, 179.

[41]Maghbouleh, Limits of Whiteness, 11.

[42]Jobrani, I’m Not a Terrorist, 47.

[43]Tehranian, Whitewashed, 73.

[44]Farsad, White People Laugh, 1.

[45]Farsad, White People Laugh, 1.

[46]Farsad, White People Laugh, 1.

[47]Farsad, White People Laugh, 3.

[48]Brodkin, How Jews Became White Folks, 2.

[49]Farsad, White People Laugh, 6.

[50]Farsad, White People Laugh, 86.

[51]Maghbouleh, Limits of Whiteness, 171.

[52]Farsad, White People Laugh, 8.

[53]Farsad, White People Laugh, 102.

[54]Maghbouleh, Limits of Whiteness, 171.

[55]Maghbouleh, Limits of Whiteness, 171.

[56]Maghbouleh, Limits of Whiteness, 172.

[57]Farsad, White People Laugh, 7.

[58]Farsad, White People Laugh, 143.

[59]Farsad, White People Laugh, 7. Emphasis in original.

[60]Farsad, White People Laugh, 144.

[61]Farsad, White People Laugh, 146–47.

[62]Stuart Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” in Identity: Community, Culture, Difference, ed. J. Rutherford (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1990), 222–37.

[63]Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994), 37.

[64]Farsad, White People Laugh, 8.

[65]Farsad, White People Laugh, 9.

[66]Amir Marvasti and Karyn D. McKinney, Middle Eastern Lives in America (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004).

[67]Farsad, White People Laugh, 227.

[68]Farsad, White People Laugh, 62.

[69]Farsad, White People Laugh, 27.

[70]Farsad, White People Laugh, 27.

[71]Indira Ghose, Shakespeare and Laughter: A Cultural History (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008), 7.

[72]Hai, “Laughing with an Iranian American Woman,” 274.

[73]Farsad, White People Laugh, 24.

[74]Farsad, White People Laugh, 24.

[75]Susanne Reichl and Mark Stein, ed., Cheeky Fictions: Laughter and the Postcolonial (New York: Rodopi, 2005), 10.

The Beginning of New Education in Nineteenth-Century Iran

David Menashri Volume 5, Number 3, Fall 2020

David Menashri is a professor emeritus and the founding director of the Alliance Center for Iranian Studies at Tel Aviv University. Prof. Menashri has authored and edited ten books. His book Education and the Making of Modern Iran has been translated into Persian as Nezam-e Amuzeshi va Sakhtan-e Iran-e Modern, published by Hekmat Sina in 2017. He is currently completing a book titled tentatively “Iran: Domestic Challenges and Regional Ambitions.”

Toward a New Education System

The progressive deterioration of Iran’s internal situation and the expanding contacts with the West, including the military defeats and the humiliating treaties of Golestan (1813) and Turkmanchay (1828) with Russia, sustained awareness of the country’s weakness and spurred the desire to adopt new methods to meet the growing challenges facing the country. All these promoted—much as they did in the Ottoman Empire and in semi-independent Egypt—the twin processes of imitation and change. The Middle East could no longer ignore the threatening strength of the West and sought to “discover and apply the elusive secret of its greatness and strength.”[2] The West, thus, provided both the impetus for change and the model for imitation, generating a conspicuous tension between the urge to reject and the desire to emulate.[3] As the challenge was noticed primarily in the battlefield, the response was first sought in imitating Western military technology. Gradually, it was realized that modern military techniques and technologies could not be implanted into an otherwise unchanged society. The fabric of the social, economic, and political order needed to be reshaped. In the view of a growing number of Iranian thinkers, education was one of the main secret sources of Western progress and its adoption the main route to progress.

In Muslim lands, the value placed on education was readily received. Western models and Indigenous tradition reinforced, rather than battled, each other in recognition of the value of knowledge. In Iran, both the pre-Islamic and Islamic traditions commend education. Both understand it as a twofold process: acquisition of knowledge and character formation. This is reflected in the two-term expressions used to connote the educational process: ta‘lim va tarbiyyat or amuzesh va parvaresh (a neologism derived from old Persian roots). The Avesta contains numerous references to education and educated people. Of even greater relevance to the realities of modern Iran is the prominence of knowledge in Islam. Islamic tradition makes the search for knowledge (talab al-‘ilm) “a duty of all Muslims . . . from the cradle to the grave” and in any place, “even in [distant] China.”[4] Even greater importance is attached to ‘ilm in the tradition of the Shia—the religion of Iran since the early sixteenth century. The ultimate aim of ‘ilm is the knowledge of God and, thus, traditional schools—maktab or madrese—concentrate on religious subjects. The admiration Iranians have for classical literature and poetry further stresses the importance of knowledge. Sa‘di, for example, devoted a chapter in Golestan to tarbiyyat. Human beings’ ability, he said, is based on knowledge. A phrase from Ferdowsi’s Shahname became the motto of the Ministry of Education in the 1930s: “Capable is the one who possesses knowledge” (tavana bavad an ke dana bavad), or in modern parlance, “education is power.” Following the 1979 Islamic Revolution, the motto was changed to ta‘lim va tarbiyyat ‘ebadat ast (“education is worship”). With all the differences in their approach, both terms glorify learning.

Such proud traditions notwithstanding, the school system in the early nineteenth century was incapable of responding to the momentous challenges of modern times. Yet the plea for change was confronted by the forces of tradition, with the ‘ulama’ (prominent clerics) at their head. Customarily, they rejected innovation as un-Islamic—bid‘ah (unlawful innovation)—and regarded it as their “religious obligation” to oppose any idea imported from the infidel West.[5] By and large, political dignitaries and social elites, too, rejected any change likely to jeopardize their status. Crown Prince ‘Abbas Mirza thus complained in 1812 that his brother and political rival, Mohammad ‘Ali, had rendered him and his reform plans odious by arguing that “in adopting the customs of the infidels,” he was subverting Islam.[6] Still, some channels for the infiltration of new ideas gradually opened during the century, not from any ideological preference but because of exigencies of the situation.

Since weakness was most painfully sensed on the military front, the first steps were to acquire Western military technology. A French training mission was invited to Tehran (1807–9), followed by a British one. In keeping with the growing contacts with the West, the first Iranian diplomatic mission was set up in London in 1809, followed by resident embassies in other European capitals. Living in Europe, the diplomats and their companions became acquainted with Western culture and politics and, no less important, learned foreign languages, which was instrumental in transferring ideas. The first steps to obtain the benefits of Western schooling were the government’s initiatives to finance students to study at European universities. The process was slow and limited in numbers, but in retrospect, the contribution of returning graduates to the process of change was invaluable. It was no less than groundbreaking change for the government to take upon itself responsibility for the education of its people (hitherto the exclusive domain of religion), and to send their children to learn from the infidels.

In 1811, the first two Iranian students left for London, placing them among the first Middle Eastern students to do so, followed by another five in 1815. Five more left to France in 1845 (but were rushed home because of the political change in Paris and the shah’s death in 1848). Three others studied in Russia and another in Italy. The initiative was accelerated under Nasser al-Din Shah (1848–96). In 1856–57, three students left for France; two years later, forty-two students left for France. This group stands out not only because of its unprecedented size, but also because all its members were graduates of Dar al-Fonun (discussed below), and thus were better prepared for studies abroad than were their predecessors. The early choice of England soon made room for a preference for France, which was to last well into the twentieth century. Almost all students came from prominent, wealthy families.

Returning graduates were appointed to prestigious positions upon their return and rose rather quickly to prominent positions; but their positions often had little to do with the fields of their studies. Given their social background, they would have been assured of a fine career in any case; nevertheless, new education—particularly European education—was of growing weight in their elevation. Gradually, upper-class families came to feel that the careers of their children had to be underpinned by educational qualifications. Appreciation of Western science and technology, coupled with the curiosity toward these “explorers” of Europe, turned the graduates into a focus of social attention. People were not interested much in their academic credentials; what mattered more was that they had had a glimpse of the West and its secrets. As Malkom Khan—one of the most influential proponents of change in the late nineteenth century—put it, anyone who had wandered in the cities of Europe for a few days was regarded as a source of knowledge.[7] In “Shaykh va Shukh,” the author conveys that it did not matter how much the graduates had actually learned of Western science; they were lionized just for having been to Europe. Shukh comments: “Whoever walked in the streets of Paris is appointed upon his return to a directorship in a government hospital [. . .] build[s] himself a large house, is granted a title, earns a good salary, [and] obtains decorations?”[8]

The first six graduates were initially appointed to positions related to their fields of study. Many of those who studied in Europe between 1845 and 1848 did not complete their studies, which explains why most of them served in positions where they could make use of their general education and knowledge of foreign languages, rather than specific training. Those sent out by Nasser al-Din Shah did complete their studies yet usually proved reluctant to work in their fields of expertise. Clearly, the returning graduates and their families preferred political, diplomatic, or administrative appointments. Mirza Asadollah Khan was exceptional in expressing annoyance at such a turn of events. Having studied paper manufacturing and then been assigned to a senior position in the post office, he cynically remarked: “Thanks God, I still have business with paper; although I am not a maker of paper (kaghaz saz), I still play with paper (kaghaz baz).”[9] Already in the early 1850s, such practices limited the contributions that the specialists were capable of making to the community. While this turn of events was not intended by the initiators of the program, in the wider process of change, the participation of the specialists with new education in the country’s social, political, and cultural life contributed significantly to the overall process of modernization.

The establishment, in 1851, of the Dar al-Fonun (polytechnic college), was the natural outgrowth of the motives that had led to the dispatch of students to Europe—to acquire Western technology. It was the first educational institution in modern Iran to be set up by the government, and the first to hire European instructors to teach Western sciences. Amir Kabir, the initiator and driving force behind the college, had modeled it after similar schools in Russia (where he had traveled in the 1820s) and the Ottoman Empire (where he had spent a long time in the late 1840s). In Russia, he was particularly impressed by the technical college at St. Petersburg, and in Istanbul, by the Maktab ‘Ulum Harbiye and by the wider educational reform in the 1840s. At Dar al-Fonun, Amir Kabir expected to gain the same benefits as were derived from sending students abroad, without incurring the heavy expenses of travel abroad and without exposing them to the “negative influences” of residence in a foreign country.[10]

Opposition to Dar al-Fonun came mainly from the ‘ulama’, who opposed setting up schools outside their influence and resented the teaching of modern subjects modeled on Western design. The founders tried to smooth tempers by incorporating religious studies into the curriculum and by holding public prayers at school, but to no avail. Having failed to prevent its establishment, the ‘ulama’ pressured the shah to deny support for the school, arguing that it was bound to foster anti-monarchical philosophies. Their pressure increased with the spread of the liberal movement in the Ottoman Empire and the approval of a constitution there in 1876, and later with the growth of the liberal movement in Iran, in which graduates of Dar al-Fonun and of foreign universities played a significant part. Even before its opening, the assassination of Amir Kabir had removed the school’s most vigorous supporter. Later, the shah’s initially enthusiastic support for the school gave way to indifference, before turning more favorable again in the late 1870s. In all, the status of the school alternated according to the shah’s arbitrary and inconsistent approach.[11]

Dar al-Fonun became the cornerstone of modern education, and some scholars view its establishment as signaling the beginning of new education in Iran. It trained relatively large cadres of Iranians and acquainted them with Western technology and general education. Many of its graduates later pursued their higher education in Western countries. Dar al-Fonun itself turned into a cultural center, hosting public lectures and discussions and publishing newspapers, textbooks, and translations of Western literature. Graduates, in the high positions they came to occupy, worked hand in hand with graduates of Western universities to support the overall process of change and reform.

Dar al-Fonun owed its existence to a government initiative and relied on its support. The government appointed its academic and administrative staff, drafted the curriculum, selected the entrants, and managed the employment of its graduates. This benefited the school as long as leading state figures (such as Amir Kabir, Mirza Hosein Khan Sepahsalar, Moshir al-Doula, and, at times, Nasser al-Din Shah) supported it, but harmed it when those in power turned against it. In all, the school contributed significantly to the development of modern education and to the larger process of Westernization. Hekmat’s conclusion that its graduates were of “the most important service for the advancement of Iran,”[12] and Safa’s assertion that they were an “important source for ideological, scientific and literary change,” do not seem to be exaggerated.[13]

Almost half a century later, several ministries founded schools of higher learning to provide them with expert staff in their ministries. An important feature of these schools was that they were the first to go beyond imitating the military or technological feature of Western education. In the stormy years of the early twentieth century, Madrese-ye ‘Ulum-e Siyasi became a center of intellectual activity. In 1907–8, its graduates founded the Sherekat-e Ma‘aref (Association for Education), which organized cultural events and founded new schools. These institutions of higher learning later became the building blocks of Tehran University.

New elementary and secondary schools were opened in Iran beginning in the 1870s (missionary schools started earlier). Their establishment was made possible largely through the collaboration between reformist intellectuals and politicians supportive of their vision. Most prominent among the latter were Sepahsalar (in the 1870s) and Mirza ‘Ali Khan Amin al-Doula (end of the century); the ministers of education Ja‘far Qoli Khan and Mirza Mahmud Khan Ehtesham al-Saltane; and to a degree, Shah Mozaffar al-Din himself. In 1873–74, Sepahsalar established in Tehran the first public secondary school, named Moshiriye in his honor. A similar school was established in Tabriz in the same year, to be followed by military high schools in Isfahan (1882–83) and Tehran (1884–85). Public elementary schools were opened in 1890, first by Mirza Hasan Roshdiye and later mainly by Sherekat-e Ma‘aref. Schools for girls were founded in the late 1890s, in addition to already-existing missionary schools and classes in private houses for the affluent. By 1918–19—over a century after the first contacts with Western education—there were a considerable number of new elementary and secondary schools, with a total of no less than thirty thousand students.[14] The curriculum and pedagogical approach differed from one school to another according to the educational philosophy of the founders. It was, as ‘Isa Sadiq (a student at such a school and later minister of education) noted, a period of “experimentations with a new education.”[15] However, each school differed thoroughly from the traditional system: the curriculum went far from what was taught in the maktabs, including new sciences and foreign languages. The majority of the teachers and headmasters were graduates of foreign schools or of Dar al-Fonun.

Few reasons made the opposition by the ‘ulama’ to the new elementary schools more forceful and passionate than their resentment of Dar al-Fonun or of the dispatch of students to Europe. They viewed the elementary schools as a threat to the students’ faith and resented their own lack of control over education, especially as such schools dealt with young children in a sensitive phase of their life. Also, unlike the earlier, numerically limited initiatives, they feared that the new elementary schools would lead to sweeping change embracing the entire country. Sending students abroad or to Dar al-Fonun did not threaten the madrese, but the opening of new elementary schools often resulted in the closure of maktabs. Eventually, the ‘ulama’ also deplored the loss of an important source of income by the akhunds (junior clerics). To the clergy, the struggle against the new elementary schools was a struggle for their faith and a defense of their traditional privileges and functions.

Consequently, the struggle over new elementary schooling turned into an acute cultural battle. The ‘ulama’ pressured the government to refrain from supporting the new schools, threatened the schools’ headmasters and staff, and brought pressure to bear on the students and their families. Roshdiye, the driving force behind such schools, suffered takfir (accused of apostasy), and his school in Tabriz was destroyed by tullab (theological students). His father had warned him that by founding new schools, he would be branded as an infidel.[16] In 1903–4, a fatva (religious ruling) by four mojtaheds (prominent clerics) from Najaf urged the shah to forbid the foundation of new schools. The supporters of modern education persuaded the shah to reject the request.[17] Opponents then argued that the new education was harmful to Iran and to Islam, and served as a tool for foreigners to advance their imperialist schemes. Nonetheless, the advocates of the new education overcame clerical opposition. Once the crucial early years had passed, and mainly under Reza Shah (1925–41), the expansion of the new school system—and the concomitant closure of the maktabs—became irreversible.

With all its quantitative and qualitative limitations, the new education of the nineteenth century became the cornerstone of twentieth-century education. In a manner neither planned nor foreseen by its initiators, the new education became extremely significant to the overall modernization of Iran. Beyond the academic contribution, it signified two major innovations: there was a deliberate, even methodical, attempt to learn from the West; and the state assumed responsibility for education, dislodging the religious establishment from its monopoly. These remained major features of Iranian education until the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

The Educated Class as a Motor for Change

The new educated class played a crucial role in the nineteenth-century reforms and the liberal movement that led to the Constitutional Revolution. Although too weak to mobilize mass support for their new ideologies, the members of this class were successful in mobilizing some key politicians to endorse reforms, contributing to the growing intellectual enlightenment and promoting new schools. The fact that many recipients of new higher education had moved into politics, government, or various cultural engagements, coupled with the social prestige that went with being Western educated, rendered them all the more capable of promoting the overall modernization of Iran, despite not working in the fields in which they had been trained. In the hectic years of the late nineteenth century, they proved instrumental in promoting Western concepts and offering the ideology to underpin both the Constitutional Revolution and the tobacco movement. Considering their small numbers, graduates of new schools, overseas and at home, had an astounding influence on the spread of liberal thought and the modernization of Iran. In due course, a number of influential reformist politicians emerged. Most prominent among them were the Crown Prince ‘Abbas Mirza and his chief minister Mirza Abu-Qasem Qa’em-maqam early in the century, Amir Kabir in mid-century, and Sepahsalar in the 1870s. A growing number of intellectuals, most of them graduates of foreign universities, joined their entourage.

One of the most important testimonies to the influence of Europe on the first students is the travel book of Mirza Saleh Shirazi, who studied in London (1815–19).[18] He expanded upon his impressions of the political system; personal liberties; the supremacy of law; the limits of royal authority; the concepts of freedom, religion, and the state; and the education system. The notion of political freedom so captivated Shirazi that he referred to England as the “Realm of Freedom” (velayat-e azadi). With much amazement, he described how the regent (George IV) wished to build a new street (to be named after him) but failed because a shopkeeper refused to sell his property. Even all the army, Shirazi maintained, could not force the shopkeeper to sell his property against his will, nor could the regent cause him any harm. All citizens—from the poorest to richest—were subject to the same law and enjoyed the same liberties. Even more illuminating is his remark that azadi (freedom) did not contradict entezam (public order). He wrote of the separation of powers, and tried to make it comprehensible to his readers that the people elected their representatives freely and, thus, became responsible for their destiny; that members of parliament enjoyed unlimited freedom; and that their decisions had sovereign force. “If necessary,” he exclaimed, “parliament can even change the religion.”[19] He took note that, unlike Islam, Christianity was a religion of conscience rather than practice. This led him to conclude that the ‘ulama’ were an obstacle to the progress of Muslim societies.[20]

If his was not the first Persian book to describe the European political system,[21] Shirazi was the first student—from anywhere in the Middle East—to set out his impressions of the West for the benefit of his countrymen. Study abroad influenced the students’ personal conduct and behavior and, with the prestige that went with studying abroad, they influenced many others. Shirazi’s descriptions of England were illuminating for Iranians, contrasting Western practices with the situation in Iran. Finally, rather than in its details, the importance of Shirazi’s book lies in the positive image of the West that it conveyed.

Though not entirely divorced from their Persian–Muslim heritage, the Iranian thinkers found new inspiration in the West. Their writings showed traces of French eighteenth-century thought on education, and some betrayed the influence of the founding fathers of the United States, who held that freedom and illiteracy were irreconcilable. Yet promoting new ideas was not easy. Given the prevalent religious ambience, some of them sought—often unconvincingly or awkwardly—to accommodate Western ideas with Islam. In 1876, Malkom proposed that reformists should present their desired innovations in Islamic terms to make them more easily acceptable. He labeled his approach “reformation of Islam”[22]—a concept reminiscent of the contemporary Egyptian thinker Mohammad ‘Abduh’s “Islamic modernism.” Yet in the second half of the nineteenth century, a new group of reformist thinkers managed to introduce some new ideas and advance the wheels of change.

The interrelation between education, freedom, and progress became the mainstay of intellectual argument then. In numerous treatises, Malkom drove home his view of education as the prerequisite for progress in general and constitutional order in particular. In his Shaykh va Vazir, a fictional dialogue between the shaykh (conservative) and the vazir (reformist), the latter argued that the secret of the strength, welfare, and the survival of nations depend on knowledge, and opined that unless it adopts Western education, Iran will fail to equal the achievements of the West.[23] In Neda’-ye ‘Edalat, he stated that only the spread of education had enabled the West to establish a political order based on justice. Iran is poor because it lacks legal justice (‘edalat-e qanuni) and because of its leaders’ failure to perceive the importance of education.[24] Sepahsalar was concerned primarily with the establishment of a constitutional order as a guarantor of freedom and social justice. To achieve these, he held that a European-style education was essential. ‘Ilm va Jahl, attributed to him, stressed: “The key to spiritual and material progress is knowledge,” adding that “one can achieve perfection only by knowledge.”[25] Mirza Yusef Khan Mostshar al-Doula attached similar importance to the spread of education, but considered a constitutional regime its prerequisite. In Yek Kalame, he claimed that “a single word” contained the key to progress: “Law.” However, without education the reign of law would not survive.[26] In a report to the Crown Prince Mozaffar al-Din, he opined—apparently for the first time in Iran—that education was also vital for fostering national unity.[27]

At the turn of the century, intellectuals’ appeals to expand new education turned more insistent, as was their critique of traditional schooling. Inaugurating a new school in Tehran (1898), Malek al-Motakallemin gave vent to his boundless expectations: “Only through knowledge can mankind achieve the highest peaks of progress; only under its aegis is it possible to establish justice and bring redemption to the world.” Turning to the young students, he said: “Having come to study at these factories for producing human beings (karkhane-ye adam-sazi), you ought to know that the destiny of the world, the fate of your nation, your own future and that of your children—[all] depend on knowledge alone.”[28] In Malkom’s Shaykh va Vazir, the shaykh queried, “How is it at all possible to adopt the principles of infidels?” just for the vazir to respond: “I do not deny that they are infidels. My only claim is that the strength of Europe derives from their unique mechanisms [. . .] The ‘ulama’ should either permit us to imitate the principles of Europeans’ strength, or bring some squadrons of angels down from heaven to rescue us from European rule.”[29] Abul-Qasem Khan Nasser al-Molk, a statesman educated in Britain, regarded constitution as “the origin of happiness, nobleness, and honor.” However, in Iran it may become the “origin of chaos, destruction, suffering, insecurity, and [. . .] sore evils,” because Iran lacked “the knowledge and potential” to turn it to good use. Constitutional order could not survive in an illiterate society as progress did not depend on the formal approval of a constitution but on the spread of education. He added passionately: “In the name of Allah, we need educated people. In the name of the Ka‘ba, the prophet and faith [. . .] we need educated people. The one and only way toward progress, equality, justice, happiness, sovereignty and pride is through spread of knowledge and existence of people who are educated according to the requirements of the times.”[30] For ‘Abd al-Rahim Talebov (Talebzade), the “lack of knowledge and spiritual poverty” were not only the “enemies of freedom,”[31] but education also had a significant economic value. In line with Adam Smith, he regarded “human potential” (este‘dad) as “economic wealth” and education as the main means for its cultivation. In his words, “If we will have a constitution, we will have education, and will possess wealth, order (nazm) and independence. But if we ignore these truths, we will be nothing but fools who betray their nation, homeland and religion.”[32]

At the end of the period under review, the intellectuals’ optimism was further fueled by the modernization of Japan. Its victory over Russia (1904–5) fired the imagination of Muslim intellectuals and breathed confidence in the East’s ability to equal and, eventually, outpace the West. They were impressed by the way the Meiji restoration benefited from educational reform. The fact that Japan, an Eastern country with a constitution, defeated a Western power with no constitution was especially illuminating for them. Ignoring what was unique in the Japanese experience, Iranians used it as a paradigm, a proof of the linkage between education, constitution, and advancement. They often seemed to view education—and in a way also parliamentarism and constitutionalism—as an entity isolated from social, economic, and political structures, one that could be easily transplanted from one country to another. Malek al-Motakallemin and Malkom Khan attested to their underlying sentiment by referring to schools as “factories for producing human beings.” Just as industrial factories “take in raw materials and turn out final products,” Malkom opined, the schools “take in ignorant children and turn out engineers and accomplished thinkers.” Setting up several such “factories” would enable Iran “to advance by 3000 years in the space of three months.”[33] Similar sentiments were expressed by Talebov in his fictional book Ketab-e Ahmad (inspired by Rousseau’s Emile) in a dialogue between the author and his sons, Ahmad and Mahmud. Soon after Ahmad entered a new school, the father told him that in only four months, “you have gained more knowledge than Mahmud, who is attending the maktab for over three years.” Before the age of nine, students at the new schools learned the history of their nation, religion, geometry and arithmetic, geography, physics, chemistry, literature, and several foreign languages. “While the tullab, even at the age of seventy, are still stuck in the laws of taharat (purification), wondering how to spell that word.”[34]

Graduates of universities abroad and Dar al-Fonun were also the driving force behind the first newspapers. The first newspaper, Kaghadh-e Akhbar, published in 1837, eventually led to the publication of Vaqaye‘-e Ettefaqiye in 1851 at Dar al-Fonun, which lasted until the Constitutional Revolution. Later, official or semi-official papers—such as Iran, Sharaf, and Ettela’, still habitually praising the shah and his conduct—also included some educational and literary articles. Much more important were the newspapers published in the diaspora by expatriates mainly from the 1870s onward. Free from supervision or censorship, they argued for reform and for a constitution. The most significant of them were Malkom’s Qanun (London, first published in 1890); Akhtar (Istanbul, 1876); Habl ul-Matin (Calcutta, 1893); and Thoraya and Parvaresh (Cairo, 1890s). Many more were published closer to the Constitutional Revolution. Altogether, Browne lists 371 newspapers published until the revolution, some of which were of “a very high order, and afford examples of a prose style, forcible, nervous, and concise, hitherto almost unknown.”[35]

Another important avenue for intellectual discourse was translation and critical writing. Most prominent among the early translators was Mirza Reza Mohandes (studied in Paris), who translated (in 1829–30) Voltaire’s essays on Peter the Great and Charles XII of Sweden and later Edward Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Many more books appeared with the establishment of Dar al-Fonun. In addition to textbooks, they included translations of European classics, such as Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, Moliere’s plays, Dumas’s The Three Musketeers, Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days, and, of particular significance for Persian readers, Morier’s Hajji Baba of Isfahan. Additionally, biographies of Napoleon Bonaparte, Nicholas I (Russia), Frederick the Great, William I (England), and Louis XV, and short histories of Rome, Athens, France, Russia, and Germany also became available in Persian. The shah likely commissioned some of these translations to glorify the monarchy, but they inadvertently allowed for unflattering comparison, contrasting the shahs and the prevalent poverty in Iran with famous world leaders and an advanced Europe.

In the last quarter of the century, numerous original books were also published, usually conveying critical messages. Most influential were the books by Talebov (such as Ketab-e Ahmad and Azadi va-Siyasat), Zayn al-‘Abedin Maraghe’i (Siyahat Name-ye Ebrahim Beg), Mostshar al-Doula (Yek Kalame), the treatises of Malkom, and the publications of Mirza Mohammad-Hasan Khan E‘temad al-Saltane (who studied at Dar al-Fonun and later in France). It is not certain whether the last actually wrote and translated the countless books appearing under his name, or if some of them were written by the team that he headed in the Ministry of the Press, but they are believed to reflect his views. Among such books are the Salnames, Mir’at al-Boldan, Matla‘at al-Shams, and Al-Ma‘ather va al-Athar. His sharp criticism of the mismanagement of Iranian affairs came out most clearly in Khalsa (Ecstasy), also known as Ketab-e Khab (Dream Book). Like Maraghe’i’s Ebrahim Beg and Talebov’s Ketab-e Ahmad, Khalsa adopted a loose fictional framework—a poetical dream—to castigate Qajar dignitaries for the decline of Iran. In Khalsa, the nineteenth-century chancellors were called upon to confess their sins in a tribunal “in the presence” of the great rulers of Persian history, standing accused of Iran’s decadence. Reviewing the Qajar period through their actions, eight years later, Seyyed Jamal-al-Din Wa‘ez, Malek al-Motakallemin, and Sheykh Ahmad Kermani wrote Ro’ya-ye Sadeqe (True Dreams), making the dignitaries, clerics, and governors account for their sins at the Last Judgment. Among the charges against the ‘ulama’ was their opposition to new education.

Gradually, many more intellectuals felt an urge to make their newfound views public. Though merely “inexperienced youngsters,” Hedayat wrote about the returning graduates, “each holds under his arms a thesis (resale) about the French Revolution and wishes to play the role of Robespierre or Danton.”[36] Writing about the leading intellectuals of that time, Mangol Bayat stated that they perceived themselves “as the new apostles,” spreading reason, science, liberty, and progress.[37] They did not necessarily share the same perception of Western civilization, nor did they want to imitate it in every respect, but they were impressed by what they witnessed and viewed borrowing elements of it as indispensable. However, a major barrier was the perception that change and innovation are un-Islamic (tantamount to bid‘ah). Yet throughout the century, intellectuals managed to mitigate such concerns, at least to some degree and in certain limited groups.

The urge to publish was supplemented by a desire to read. The reading public fed on political treatises, periodicals, and newspapers. Banned publications were smuggled into the country and read avidly, even at the shah’s court. Iranians, with their traditional admiration for verbal skill, marveled at the new idiomatic style and popular language of such books. “The intricate tales and excitements of this new literature were so fascinating [. . .] that families used to gather to hear them read aloud.”[38] The urge to write, however, seemed stronger than the aptitude to read. There is some truth in what Hedayat grieved: “Of books we have enough; what we lack are readers [. . .] The customers are illiterate.”[39]

Thus, when it came to mobilizing mass support for the tobacco revolt (1891) or the Constitutional Revolution (1906), the intellectuals needed elite groups as a driving force. The main contribution of the intellectuals was in influencing the influential segments of the elites, including some ‘ulama’ and officials, not the populace. When political change was finally in the offing and revolutionary forces were searching for an ideology to unite the divergent components of their camp, the intellectuals offered their ideology as the cohesive element. Freedom, parliamentarism, and constitutionalism were their contribution, and the wording of the constitution of 1906 carried their imprint. In the 1970s, their fellow intellectuals could not claim as much.

In all, the nineteenth century was a significant phase in transition from traditional schooling to new education inspired by the West. It was a slow process—in fact, too slow—involving severe ideological and political clashes between contradictory convictions. The following overly picturesque description by Mojtaba Minovi, a prominent twentieth-century historian, seems to properly illustrate the situation. He compared the role of the recipients of new education to spreading seeds in an uncultivated soil, where the land had not been fertilized or irrigated, and weeds and stones had not been removed. Some of the seeds, therefore, fell on spots where they could not germinate, but a few fell on fruitful soil and yielded the crop of progress.[40]

Conclusion

In the search for a path to confront the challenge of modernism, Iranian political thought over the last two centuries has fluctuated between extremes. From the Islamic doctrine that characterized the country’s general outlook until the late eighteenth century, Iran gradually underwent a phase of change, inspired by the West, that was exacerbated in the generation preceding the Islamic Revolution in 1979.

Integral to the general fabric of society, education has been a catalyst for change and an element itself subject to transformation. In the contest between traditional-religious and new, Western-style schooling, which took on the nature of a Kulturkampf in the late nineteenth century, the latter emerged triumphant and the religious establishment lost its age-old monopoly over education. Once the government had control, it changed the structure and content of the schooling system. New subjects, not previously included in the traditional curriculum, became the stock-in-trade of the new education. The new education of the nineteenth century was only the prelude, still limited at the end of the century. This initial change was underpinned by the Pahlavi monarchy (1925–79).

Perhaps the most significant testimonial to the value of the new education and to the degree to which it has become rooted in Iranian culture has come from the Islamic regime. With all the opposition of the ‘ulama’ to Western-style education, the elementary school system, despite significant changes in the content, follows the new patterns. Even as they became firmly in control in the first four decades of Islamic rule, the ‘ulama’ did not reverse the process. Education, with the exception of the madrese, has remained much closer to Westernized education than to traditional schooling. New sciences are included in the curriculum, and English language is taught at schools. Universities, closed for Islamization immediately after the revolution, were reopened after two years with their overall structure intact. The clerics in power have used the fruits of modern education in the service of their revolutionary goals in spite of their initial opposition. In a way, they seem to aspire to turn the wheel back to where it had been at the outset of the period discussed, when a distinction was made between (desirable) Western science and technology and (undesirable) Western culture. There is no reason to think that it is more feasible to make such a distinction now than it was then.

Finally, Iran’s historical identity has long been based on two main pillars—which did not necessarily live in harmony throughout the centuries—ancient/imperial/Persian and Islamic/Shi‘i. Since the nineteenth century, a third layer of Iranian identity seems to have emerged—modern/Western. Together, they shape Iran’s new distinctiveness. New education has had a significant role in introducing Western-style education and, through it, has influenced other aspects of Iranian life. Constitutionalism, parliamentarism, and nationalism, as well as modern education—deeply entrenched in modern Iranian history and endorsed also by the Islamic regime—are borrowed from Western culture. The question, it seems, is not if Western civilization and local traditions can live together, but rather if it is at all possible to totally separate them.

[1]This article has been reproduced from my book Education and the Making of Modern Iran (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992). This book was translated into Persian in Tehran in 2017: Nezam-e Amuzeshi va Sakhtan-e Iran-e Modern, by Hekmat Sina.

[2]Bernard Lewis, The Middle East and the West (New York: Harper and Row, 1964), 45.

[3]Gustav von Grunebaum, “Acculturation and Self-Realization,” in The Contemporary Middle East, ed. B. Rivlin and J.S. Szyliowicz (New York: Random House, 1965), 141–42.

[4]Franz Rosenthal, Knowledge Triumphant: The Concept of Knowledge in Medieval Islam (Leiden, NL: Brill, 2007), 89–91, 295.

[5]A lecture by Malkom Khan in London cited in Fereshte Nura’i, Tahqiq dar bare-ye Afkar-e Mirza Malkom Khan, Nazem al-Doula (Tehran: Ketabha-ye Jibi, 1973–74), 48–52.

[6]James Morier, A Second Journey through Persia, Armenia and Asia Minor (London: Longman, 1818), 213.

[7]See Malkom Khan, “Dastgah-e Divan,” in Majmu‘e Athar-e Mirza Malkom Khan, ed. Mohit Tabataba’i (Tehran: Danesh, AH 1327/AD 1948–49), 73–95. Quote on p. 78. All translations are mine unless otherwise stated.

[8]“Shaykh va Shukh,” in Afkar-e Ejtema‘i va Siyasi va Eqtesadi dar Athar-e Montasher Nashode-ye Dowran-e Qajar, ed. Fereydun Adamiyyat and Homa Nateq (Tehran: Agah, 1977), 144–49. Quote on p. 149.

[9]As cited by Mohit Tabataba’i, Shafaq-e Sorkh, “Tarikhche e‘zam muhasel beh Orupa,” (6 Murdad 1312/28 July 1933).

[10]‘Abdollah Mostowfi, Tarikh-e Ejtema‘i va Edari Dowre-ye Qajariye, vol. 1 (Tehran: Tehran Mosavvar, n.d.), 70; Hajj Mirza Yahya Doulatabadi, Tarikh Mo‘aser ya Hayat-e Yahya, vol. 1 (Tehran: Ibn Sina, 1957–58), 324–28; Hosein Makki, Zendegani-ye Mirza Taqi Khan, Amir Kabir (Tehran: ‘Ilmi, 1958), 183.

[11]Mostowfi, Tarikh-e Ejtema‘i, 86; Doulatabadi, Tarikh Mo‘aser, 327–29; Mehdi Qoli Hedayat, Khaterat va Khatarat (Tehran: Rangin, 1950–51), 75.

[12]‘Ali Asghar Hekmat, “Ta‘limat-e ‘Aliye: Notq-e Jenab-i Aqa-ye Hekmat . . .,” Ta‘lim va Tarbiyyat, sal 6, shumareh 4 (Tir 1315/June–July 1936), 249–60. Quote on p. 251–52.

[13] Dhabihollah Safa, “’Madrase,” Iranshahr, vol. 1 (Tehran: Daneshgah-e Tehran, 1963), 736. See similarly Mostowfi, Tarikh-e Ejtema‘i, 86; Hedayat, Khaterat va Khatarat, 94.

[14]Sazeman-e Barname va Budjeh, Markaz-e Amar, Bayan-e Amari-ye Tahavvolat-e Ejtema‘i va Eqtesadi-ye Iran dar Dowran-e [. . .] Pahlavi (Tehran: 1976–77), 35–36; ‘Isa Sadiq, Tarikh Farhang-e Iran (Tehran: Daneshgah-e Tehran, 1976), 354–59.

[15]Sadiq, Farhang, 359.

[16]Doulatabadi, Tarikh Mo ‘aser, 180–84; “Roshdiye Pir-e Ma‘aref,” Amuzesh va Parvaresh, Dawreh 14, Shumarah 10 (December 1944), 543–46; Mehdi Malekzade, Tarikh-e Enqelab-e Mashrutiyyat-e Iran, vol. 1 (Tehran: 1948–49), 150.

[17]Doulatabadi, Tarikh Mo‘aser, 238–43.

[18]Mirza Saleh Shirazi, Safarname (Tehran: Razun, 1968).

[19]Shirazi, Safarname, 325.

[20]Shirazi, Safarname, 427.

[21]Two others had preceded him: Mir ‘Abd al-Latif Shushtari, Tuhfat al-‘Alam va Zayl al-Tuhfah, ed. Samad Muvahhid ([Bombay: s.n., 1847]; Tehran: Tahuri, AH 1363/AD 1984), 363–67; Mirza Abu-Taleb Khan ibn Mohammad Esfahani, Masir Talebi fi Bilad al-Faranji (Tehran: Ketabha-ye Jibi, 1973).

[22]Wilfrid S. Blunt, Secret History of the English Occupation of Egypt (London: 1907), 83–84.

[23]Malkom Khan, Nazem al-Doula, Kolliyyat-e Malkom (Tehran: n.p., 1907), 88–95.

[24]Malkom Khan, “Neda-ye ‘Edalat,” in Majmu‘e Athar-e Mirza Malkom Khan, ed. Mohit Tabataba’i (Tehran: Danesh, AH 1327/AD 1948–49), 193–217. See also Nura’i, Afkar-e Mirza Malkom Khan, 35–57.

[25]Guity Nashat, The Origins of Modern Reform in Iran, 1870–1880 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982), 144.

[26]Mehdi Bamdad, Sharh-e Hal-e Rejal-e Iran dar Qorun-e 12-14 Hejri, vol. 4 (Tehran: Navar, 1968–69), 490–93; Ferydun Adamiyyat, Fekr-e Azadi va Moqaddame-ye Nehzat-e Mashrutiyyat (Tehran: Sokhan, 1961–62), 182–211.

[27]See the report in Nazem al-Islam Kermani, Tarikh Bidari-ye Iraniyan, vol. 1 (Tehran: Bonyad-e Farhang, 1967–68), 206–11.

[28]Malekzade, Tarikh-e Enqelab-e Mashrutiyyat, 152–54.

[29]Malkom, Kolliyyat, 89–91.

[30]Nazem al-Islam Kermani, Tarikh Bidari-ye Iraniyan, vol. 2 (Tehran: Bonyad-e Farhang, 1967–68), 214–23.

[31]Mirza ‘Abd al-Rahim Talebov [Talebzade], Azadi va Siyasat (Tehran: Sahar, 1978–79), 111–13.

[32]Mirza ‘Abd al-Rahim Talebov, Ketab-e Ahmad, vol. 2 (Istanbul: 1895–96), 80–84, 89–90.

[33]Tabataba’i, Malkom Khan, 8–13; Hamid Algar, Mirza Malkum Khan: A Study in the History of Iranian Modernization (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), 28.

[34]Mirza ‘Abd al-Rahim Talebov, Ketab-e Ahmad, vol. 1 (Istanbul: 1895–96), 10–11; Talebov, Ketab-e Ahmad, vol. 2, 5–7.

[35]Edward Browne, The Press and Poetry of Modern Persia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1914), 27–153; Edward Browne, The Persian Revolution of 1905–1909 (London: Frank Cass, 1966), 127–28.

[36]Hedayat, Khaterat va Khatarat, 150.

[37]Mangol Bayat, Mysticism and Dissent: Socioreligious Thought in Qajar Iran (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1982), 134.

[38]Hassan Kamshad, Modern Persian Prose Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966), 28.

[39]Hedayat, Khaterat va Khatarat, iii.

[40]Mojtaba Minovi, “Avvalin Karavan-e Ma’refat,” Yaghma 6 (1953–54): 181.

Ten Theses on Iranian Cinema

Sara Saljoughi Volume 3, Number 3, Fall 2018

Sara Saljoughi <sara.saljoughi@utoronto.ca> is Assistant Professor of English and Cinema Studies. She has published articles in Iranian Studies, Camera Obscura, Feminist Media Histories, Film International, and Jadaliyya. Her current book project, Burning Visions: The Counter-Cinema of the Iranian New Wave, examines the aesthetics and politics of art cinema in Iran during the 1960s and 1970s. She is the co-editor of 1968 and Global Cinema (Wayne State University Press, 2018).

In memory of Abbas Kiarostami, 1940-2016

The study of Iranian cinema has blossomed over the past two decades. Where it was once dominated by the study of auteur cinema made in the context of the new film industry of the Islamic Republic of Iran, it now spans the history of the moving image in Iran. New studies push forward earlier understandings of the field by introducing new periodization, critical genres, and new methods of reading and interpretation. Alongside the expansion of topics and approaches is a breadth in disciplinary methodologies. Current research in Iranian cinema is informed by fields as diverse as Middle Eastern studies, film studies, comparative literature, history, and anthropology, to name a few. It is now crucial to signal this shift away from earlier studies that tended to focus on the social and political dimensions of cinema, at the cost of examining other equally important aspects of film. Insofar as fields of study form by first offering an account of objects, it is especially important to chart how the field has changed and, more specifically, the ways it has opened up and expanded. Alongside that opening must necessarily come some questioning of the object itself. While it is certainly useful to ask “what is Iranian cinema?” we might also want to ask how we have told the stories of Iranian cinema and how we might alter and change those stories as we begin to utilize new interdisciplinary paradigms.

The present essay takes this opening of the field as the occasion to propose ten theses on Iranian cinema that open possibilities for rethinking the field as well as key moments in its history. The title of the essay is a nod to Abbas Kiarostami’s Dah/Ten (2003), a text that represents dynamic shifts, both in the work of the filmmaker and in the broader Iranian cinematic landscape. In attempting to attach ten theses to Iranian film history, the essay borrows the experimental, fragmented structure of Ten in order to imagine a new synchronic history.

Iranian cinema has always been attentive to the politics of looking.

From its earliest years of production, Iranian cinema has concerned itself with the politics of looking. While an engagement with the politics of looking might be inherent to the moving image itself, investigations into contemporary Iranian cinema overwhelmingly suggest that attention to the look is the province of post-revolutionary film culture and its focus on an Islamic cinema. Doubtless, this emphasis is part of an overall tendency to equate the new film culture post-1979 as representing a radical departure from previous film practices. This is certainly true in terms of the guidelines on screen representations of women and of heterosexual relations. But beyond this, there are questions of aesthetics and politics that persist throughout the history of Iranian cinema. One of these is the question of fascination with the image and how that fascination prompts us to look in particular ways—at each other, the world, and ourselves. Haji Agha, Aktor-e Sinama/Haji Agha, the Cinema Actor (1933, dir. Ovanes Ohanians) one of the earliest feature length films made in Iran, explores this fascination with the image in the context of skepticism of the new technology of the film camera. In particular, the film asks us to consider how propriety is implied and/or challenged by the looks the cinema engenders. The question seems urgent because the moving image differs in significant ways from the images that had circulated in Iranian culture prior to this moment. It was not just the images that differed but the manner in which they were exhibited and seen.

Haji Agha, the second feature by Ohanians—who is also credited with the first Iranian feature film Abi and Rabi (1930), can be read as a critique of a reactionary society that wishes to modernize but is deeply suspicious of the changes that come with modernization, such as new technologies. Ohanians acts in the film as a director looking for a subject for his film. He lands on the titular Haji Agha, a rich conservative with community importance. Haji Agha’s daughter and son-in-law conspire with the director to capture Haji unawares. In an exaggerated manner, when Haji Agha sees his own image in the finished film, he is captivated by it, forgetting the suspicion he previously held. Seeing himself reflected on screen completely transforms his position on the cinema, which he comically comes to appreciate. The politics of looking as presented in the film can be read as an allegory for the push-and-pull effect of modernization; on the one hand, it is seen as the road to the dilution of so-called tradition values (that might try to restrict certain looks), while on the other hand it offers a seductively new way of understanding the world around us.

The fascination with the image, as it is explored in Haji Agha, opens out in later Iranian cinema as a potential of the frame. The film shows us, through Haji Agha’s altered stance on cinema—indeed, his transformation—the possibilities of the frame as a device for shaping our vision of the world. Nowhere is this explored more explicitly than in Kiarostami’s cinema. The windows and cars that abound in Kiarostami’s films are suggestive of multiple ways to frame vision, even within a single shot. Kiarostami often have us think about looking by framing and reframing, but also by playing with light to introduce new types of images. In 2010’s Copie conforme/Certified Copy, we see Elle (Juliette Binoche) and James (William Shimell) through the windshield of a car, which reflects buildings and cobblestones that lie in the road ahead. We also see straight through the car and out the rear window, seeing what they have passed and what Elle, the driver, might see in her rearview mirror. Throughout the film, Kiarostami plays with these multiple viewpoints, suggesting different possibilities for looking.

One of the implications of this long history of interest in looking is that the modesty guidelines imposed on Iranian cinema after the establishment of the Islamic Republic of Iran are not novel in their attempts to write overlooking as a troubled and troubling act. Throughout the history of Iranian cinema, filmmakers have used various types of looks to trouble any notion of straightforward visuality and looking relations.

Sabzian is Iranian cinema.

Sabzian, the cinephile star of Abbas Kiarostami’s Nema-ye Nazdik/Close-Up (1990) states, quite baldly, “I am interested in cinema.” This declaration is more than the admission of a hobby or interest; it is the crux of the man’s journey of self-transformation.

Hossein Sabzian infamously impersonates Mohsen Makhmalbaf to an impressed and impressionable Tehran family, thereby gaining access to their home, lives, and eventually, financial support. Close-Up is one of Kiarostami’s most revered films for the manner in which it restages the real-life events of the Sabzian case with the social actors playing themselves. The reenactment allows for reflection on what occurred and its repetition in front of Kiarostami’s camera. Through the reenactment, the depth of Sabzian’s desire to become Makhmalbaf compels viewers to contemplate this very bewildering form of cinematic embodiment. In stating his interest in cinema, Sabzian symbolizes something much larger than the scope of the film. It is a statement that calls forth a radical subjectivity, which mirrors the transformative moment in Iranian cinema within which the film takes place.

To speak of his interest in cinema, Sabzian described an inclination toward cinema. It is a statement of cinephilia, but one so deep that it performs the work of transforming the subject into cinema itself. It is as though Sabzian is stating he is the cinema. The statement is reflective of the official status of cinema post-revolution. If Sabzian is the cinema, then it bears asking what we know of Sabzian and what that might tell us about cinema. He is a pious, working class man struggling to survive. He belongs to the segment of Iranian society that the nation-state (following the establishment of the Islamic Republic of Iran) projects. He then must also be implicated in the state’s opposition to cinema as a technology of imperialism. Sabzian embodies the cinema by becoming what he knows of it—seemingly a sole film by Mohsen Makhmalbaf, The Cyclist (1987). He is thus a condition of possibility for the rebirth of Iranian cinema for his very existence implies that watching film is a transformative experience. The regime too, as Negar Mottahedeh has argued, imagines a heterosexual male as its ideal spectator, for the manner in which screen codes are oriented always toward that subject’s projected desire.[1] The notion of becoming and transforming though the act of spectatorship is one implicit in the very position the state took toward cinema after 1979. This is the case both in terms of restrictions and guidelines, as well as in Khomeini’s famous vote of confidence for the productive possibilities of revolutionary cinema. Sabzian’s transformation into Makhmalbaf, even if dubiously intended, suggests that cinema holds possible an endless variety of such transformations. The relationship between cinema and subjectivity then opens out onto different configurations, which may or may not align with the project of the nation-state. In other words, the state may wish to engender a particular type of citizen at various points in history but this may or may not “work” in the spectatorial experience.

Iranian cinema is in intimate dialogue with other Iranian arts.

Through its engagement with a variety of Iranian arts, such as poetry, painting, and drama, Iranian cinema is in a constant state of questioning about cinema’s relation to these arts and its pivotal position in national culture.

“Cinema is not cinema as we know it.” This could be the message of Shirin (2008), one of Kiarostami’s more experimental films. One of the film’s central concerns is the nature of cinema, how viewers understand the medium, and what process best enables thinking through these questions. The viewer of Shirin watches a number of women—all well- known actresses—watching a film at the cinema. The film they are watching is an adaptation of the twelfth-century epic poem, “Khosrow and Shirin.” Kiarostami’s spectator is never permitted to watch the film-within-the-film, seeing only the faces of the women as they watch and react to the events on the screen. The film attempts to make an ontological statement about cinema by breaking image from sound. It also robs us of the point-of-view of the women who watch the film, as we never see a reverse shot from their perspective. These challenges to our understanding of film language break open what we consider cinema—that composite whose elements are often seamlessly combined. The story of Khosrow and Shirin becomes as important as Kiarostami’s film because it is the sonic accompaniment to our observation of the women spectators. This is a novel take on adaptation better described as a kind of marriage. Here we have the persistence of the old, through the re-imagining of such an important cultural text. Through this juxtaposition, we are invited to re-think cinema and also to re-imagine the ways in which cinema and other Iranian cultural traditions relate to one another. In this, the gambit of Shirin shares much with the contrapuntal stance of Sabzian. It is the proximity of cinema to other arts, the intimacy of the moment of suture for the spectator (regardless of the ideological outcome) that makes cinema such a vital part of the politics of Iranian culture.

The relationship of cinema to Iranian literature is a long one. As Hamid Naficy discusses, there has been a long history of stories and poems from Iranian mythology and folklore adapted for the screen, as well adaptations of contemporary Iranian literature in the mid-twentieth century.[2] During the heyday of the Iranian New Wave in the 1960s and 1970s, dissident literature by writers such as Gholamhossein Sa’edi and Houshang Golshiri were adapted into relatively successful screenplays for films that were understood to be critiquing the regime of Mohammed Reza Shah. Through this intimate relationship, cinema gained a degree of gravitas as a serious art form through its encounter with literature and poetry. This collaboration between cinema and other forms is evident not only in terms of literature providing the narrative content of films but also in terms of the aesthetics of various forms. The very notion of a poetic cinema (most often ascribed to documentary in the Iranian context) owes much to the historical encounter between cinema and poetry. Poet Forough Farrokhzad’s film editing, which begins with Golestan’s A Fire but comes into full fruition in her film, Khaneh siah ast/The House is Black (1962), put forward a groundbreaking collaboration between the two forms. The rhythm of Farrokhzad’s poetic language fuels her experiments with montage, while the worldview of the film provides an intertextual link to the social consciousness of her poetry.[3] The sensibility of this encounter between poetry and cinema can be traced in Iranian art cinema over the last half century.

If we consider Iranian cinema to have always been in collaboration (rather than only “dialogue”) with other Iranian arts, then we have opportunity to imagine anew the emergence of cinema in Iran. One of the dominant theses regarding cinema in Iran posits that we can consider the form as co-emerging with modernity.[4] While there is certainly much to suggest this historically, the relationship of cinema to Iranian art provides a model for thinking cinema beyond the model of an imported Western technology. To conceptualize the development of Iranian cinema in a local and national context allows us to see the ways in which the status of cinema can be understood differently in different historical situations.[5] Future work that expands existing insights into the relationship between Iranian arts such as pardekhani and cinema could help develop knowledge in this area.

Iranian art cinema pays homage to the Persian miniature.

If Iranian cinema is intimately involved with earlier Iranian art forms, then the tradition of miniature painting is its most forceful example. The miniature has been described as “using a continuous space that infers a single temporal moment”—monoscenic, while at the same time representing multiple perspectives.[6] Multiple perspectives are particularly important to what David J. Roxburgh calls the visual logic of the paintings, for they “do not control the viewer’s bodily relationship to surface.”[7] As we look at a miniature painting, its compositional structure frees the viewer’s head and eyes to roam over the entire painting, moving in multiple directions. For Roxburgh, this opens up interpretational possibilities that supplant the temporality of the image.

This feature of the composition is striking for its compatibility with the temporal slowness of Iranian art cinema. There is a mutual relation of intermediality that is afforded and aided by this compatibility. The temporality of a film like Zir-e darakhtan zeitoun/Through the Olive Trees (Kiarostami, 1994) and its final scene, where the lovers weave through the trees and out into a clear field as we watch from an extreme long shot, brings to life the compositional possibilities of the miniature in its collision with cinema. Filmmakers such as Marva Nabili, director of Khak-e sar be morh/The Sealed Soil (1977), have noted the influence of miniature painting on the mise-en-scène of their films. This influence can take shape in several ways. We have, on the one hand, a mimicry of composition. In Nabili’s film this is expressed by way of the isolation of the human figure within a natural landscape. On the other hand, we also see in Iranian cinema a propensity to emulate the loose interpretative framework offered by the miniature form. Miniatures could be interpreted differently depending on the time of reading. They relied upon the person explicating the image and the context within which the explication took place.[8] In this way, we might argue vehemently against the charge of style over substance. This charge has been aimed, quite unsurprisingly given their fame, at directors such as Kiarostami. Indeed, David J. Roxburgh notes that this same charge of superficiality and surface was made against Persian miniature painting, aided by a disciplinary dependence on Western paradigms of analysis.[9] But where one might see a lack of explicit political content—this is despite strategies of distanciation that are quite common in the filmmakers’ work—we might instead consider that lack as an interpretive openness whereby the moving image signifies in a multitude of political ways. This does not suggest that the films are so open that they are meaningless and flat. Rather, those who wish to analyze Iranian art cinema must look for aesthetic strategies such as citations of the miniature in addition to their more common identification of modernist techniques.

Iranian cinema must be understood in the disciplinary context of film studies.

The interpretation of Iranian cinema reached a new horizon with the publication of Negar Mottahedeh’s Displaced Allegories: Post-Revolutionary Iranian Cinema (Duke University Press, 2008). This groundbreaking book presents a new moment in the study of Iranian cinema by re-reading post-revolutionary art cinema as a women’s cinema. This interpretive gesture aimed to re-think the new guidelines on screen representations of women and of heterosexual, non-familial relations. Importantly, Mottahedeh reads in directors’ interpretations of the guidelines not only the usual workarounds artists must do under censorship, but instead the seizure of an unparalleled creative opportunity. Filmmakers such as Bahrami Beyzai, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, and Abbas Kiarostami, Mottahedeh argues, were creating a new grammar for Iranian cinema, one based in part on the state’s projection of the ideal citizen-spectator. Mottahedeh’s reading of Iranian art cinema in the 1980s and 1990s is facilitated by an engagement with psychoanalytic and semiotic theories of cinema. It is her engagement with 1970s feminist film theory in particular that heralds the book’s new methodology for understanding Iranian film culture. In this way, Mottahedeh’s book represents the beginning of entirely new possibilities for understanding Iranian cinema within the framework of the discipline of film and media studies.

The specter of fire haunts Iranian cinema.

It is possible to write a history of Iranian cinema as a history of fire. When we invoke fire in relation to Iranian cinema, we think first of the infamous Cinema Rex fire in 1978, an event that is a metonymy of the mainstream reaction to cinema in the lead-up to the 1979 Revolution. The Cinema Rex fire took aim at the trajectory of Iranian cinema, at the audacity of the moving image, and at the spectators who convened for the pleasures of the screen. Its perpetrators remain shrouded in mystery, with various theories as to which faction might have committed the crime. One thing is certain: the fire in Abadan led to many other copycat fires at cinemas across Iran. The year 1978 might be said to present the death of cinema in Iran, and it certainly appeared that way, even if its death was short lived. The metonymic fire flickered years into the post-revolutionary cinematic culture, as a quiet rage that had once stopped cinema in its tracks only to turn around and reignite its very language. Fire functions not only as the engine of death and change in Iranian cinema, but also as potential. It is renewal that persists. And we may think of the qualities of fire, such as burning, as metaphor for the utopian ideals of Iranian cinema prior to the revolution. Elsewhere I discuss the Cinema Rex fires as an eruption of energy and how that energy contained within it not just a reactionary dismissal of cinema, but also visions of how cinema could be used toward social transformation.[10] The repetition of the Cinema Rex story in so many accounts of Iranian cinema demonstrate the perception of fire as renewal in the collective unconscious of those who wish to tell the stories of Iranian cinema. Perhaps the burning oil fields of Ebrahim Golestan’s Yek atash/A Fire (1961) were prescient in more than one way. Golestan is associated with the tradition of poetic documentary in pre-revolutionary Iran and A Fire, which was edited by poet and filmmaker Forough Farrokhzad, sets forth a new film language. The images of the industrial site of the oil fields, the images of workers and the landscape are paired with a poetic voice (Golestan’s own) describing the massive, seemingly unending fire and the efforts to contain it. The spread of the fire strikes us now as metaphor for Golestan and Farrokhzad’s influence on Iranian cinema, much of which bears the imprint of the poetic rhythm of their editing and the non-interventionist attitude to the social world conveyed by the films’ commentary. If the year of cinema burnings in 1978 managed to only briefly terminate the Iranian film industry, the story of the rebirth of Iranian cinema after the revolution is all the more compelling for such a powerful fire ceases only when it is transformed into something else.

When we refer to Iranian cinema as a national cinema, we understand Iranian cinema as a distinctly international phenomenon.

A familiar way of looking at Iranian cinema has been through the category of national cinema. As Andrew Higson has argued, one of the ways a body of films comes to stand as the “national” cinema of a given nation-state is often through international perception of that nation’s cinema.[11] Moreover, as Higson argues, art cinema often comes to stand in for and define national cinema because it is in most cases the cinema that circulates at international film festivals and the like.[12] This could not be truer in the Iranian context. Think here of the appearance of Abbas Kiarostami on the cover of Cahiers du cinéma, with the question, “Qui-êtes vous M. Kiarostami?” signalling the recognition of Iranian cinema beyond its borders, but even more so, suggesting, with its questions, that recognition by European film circles confers upon non-Western cinemas an arrival of sorts.[13] This notion of art cinema standing in for national cinema raises the question of whether Iranian art cinema is too dominant in terms of the reception and understanding of Iranian cinema more broadly. What makes the films of Kiarostami and other auteurs examples of national cinema? Why not an immensely popular film such as Marmoulak/The Lizard (2004)? The conflict between art and popular cinemas is neither new nor unique to Iran, but it remains important to ask why a supposed “cinema of quality” is considered to speak for the nation. In the context of Iran, it is somewhat troubling that the period of political reform in Iran coincided with international audiences ascribing a relationship of paradox between Iranian cinema and Iran the state. The charming children and bucolic landscapes of Iranian art cinema were interpreted as salves for the more common media images of Iran circulating in the West—threatening and hostile crowds on the other side of a supposed civilizational divide. This type of praise is more than troubling for it posits cultural production as a kind of oasis, while also undermining the manifold nuances of a given film into a mere example of triumph under censorship.

It is the work of the international circulation of Iranian art cinema that write that cinema back into the nation’s “national” cinema. To call Iranian cinema an international phenomenon does not undo its “Iranian-ness,” but rather ascribes to this vast body of films a quality of mutability not dissimilar from the transformative effects of watching a film. The act of traveling, bringing with it encounters that inevitably change the traveler (whether human or here, an art object) can also function as bringing to the fore qualities that are less visible when rooted. When we discuss the politics of reading in the Anglo-American academy, we often interrogate the practices of reading non-Western art as an act rife with assumptions about the object in question. In particular, it is the tendency to allegorize non-Western art as always nationally oriented that collapses the particularities of the work.[14] But if we consider that strange object—the Iranian film abroad—as a thing quite distinctly its own and therefore only representative of “national cinema” in that context, we can begin to clarify the different ways in which the “national” in national cinema comes into being. The stakes of this letting go are a more productive mode of inquiry that might allow us to see the ways in which Iranian films themselves are persistent in their interrogation of the national. Indeed, “which Iran?” as the protagonist of Ferydoun Rahnema’s Pesar-e Iran az Madarash Bikhabar Ast/The Son of Iran Has No News from His Mother (1976) asks.

Iranian cinema, as a field of study, is in the midst of a significant transformation.

How do we understand and write the history of Iranian cinema? The publication of Hamid Naficy’s four-volume opus, A Social History of Iranian Cinema (Duke University Press, 2011-12) represents a major turning point in the field. Until Naficy’s book, there had been virtually no account, in English, that covered the breadth and longevity of Iranian cinema. Beginning with the dawn of cinema in Iran and taking the reader through to the contemporary moment, with all its transnationalism and box office successes, Naficy’s history of Iranian cinema is a robust treatise on the diversity of what we call “Iranian cinema.” Discussing everything from artists’ film to queer cinema and diasporic film, the books present numerous new areas for research. These areas would undoubtedly bring with them new research methodologies. Where the study of Iranian cinema was once rather limited to studying the effects of the revolution on film and visual culture, a more expansive understanding of film cultures in Iran and the Iranian diaspora allow for a more multifaceted understanding of cinema.

Studies of cinema after 1979 focused rather significantly on auteur-based studies or works that emphasized the social dimensions of cinema. Newer works, such as Blake Atwood’s Reform Cinema in Iran: Film and Political Change in the Islamic Republic (Columbia University Press, 2016) put forward new critical genres. Atwood argues that to simply label Iranian cinema after 1979 “post-revolutionary” is to gloss over the significant differences between revolutionary cinema (that which came with regime change in the immediate years after the revolution) and reform cinema, which was closely aligned with the politics of the reform movement and former President Mohammad Khatami.[15] Atwood reads the relationship between cinema and politics as mutually determining, which marks a departure from the way this relationship has been understood in the field. New concepts require new methodologies and here Atwood’s book is also illustrative of the changes underway in the field. In Reform Cinema, the political dimensions of cinema are considered in tandem with an analysis of the aesthetics and formal strategies of films. What these new approaches to studying Iranian cinema demonstrate is that the field is opening up and in that opening, reveals itself to be capacious for different modes of reading. The opening of the field to accommodate new approaches also operates at the level of individual films, which can only deepen in significant when understood through different approaches at various points in the history of the field.

This is not a thesis on Iranian cinema.

Jafar Panahi’s In Film Nist/This is Not a Film (2011) made under house arrest after he was sentenced to time in prison and a twenty-year ban on filmmaking, raises significant questions about the conditions of film production in Iran. The film cheekily claims it is “not a film” in order to bypass the restrictions on Panahi’s activities. But it is also not a film insofar as the activity of making it frustrates Panahi’s expectations of what a film ought to be. In a crucial scene, Panahi and his co-director Mojtaba Mirtahmasb sit on the floor of his living sketching an outline of frame composition in a scene, and Panahi writes off his “film” as not at all a film for its lack of story or plot. Blake Atwood discusses the manner in which This is Not a Film uses the question of medium specificity to investigate who has the right to tell stories and how they are told.[16]

This is not a thesis on Iranian cinema. To have a thesis on “Iranian cinema” would be to work against what I have described here as its mutability, its volatility, and its openness to transformation. The act of watching Panahi’s film makes us ask, if I am watching it, is it a film (even if the director claims it is not)? And so we might ask, in our attempt to theorize Iranian cinema, what is Iranian cinema? Who decides that its history can be chronicled, or that its objects are known and therefore closed to interpretation? Who decides its parameters? To avoid a definitive answer would allow the thing itself—the object—to escape our grasp, and it is precisely what might allow us to think with these films and non-films.

The future of Iranian cinema is…

Why write ten theses on Iranian cinema? I have proposed ten arguments for thinking Iranian cinema, which range from an analysis of the aesthetics of Iranian cinema, its relationship to other arts, and ways of understanding the changing field of Iranian cinema studies. What repeats in these theses is the mutual existence of historical discontinuity and, what remains a steadfast feature of Iranian cinema—its ability to engage in transformation. This transformation, whether in the spectator-screen relation, or as a way of understanding the object as it circulates globally, belies the determined nature of a project of “ten theses.” Not only do multiple theses suggest the impossibility of one, but they also represent a desire to resist a grand narrative that collapses the particularities of aesthetics and politics in Iranian cinema.

Kiarostami’s Ten, the inspiration for this piece, represents a particularly generative moment for thinking Iranian cinema. It is widely known as Kiarostami’s first digital film, and it is also his first film to feature a female protagonist. It maintains some of Kiarostami’s recognized cinematic signatures, such as working without a script and the use of non-actors. It represents at once the pre-‘79 period of cinema, during which Kiarostami began his career, as well as the celebrated elements of the post-‘79 period, most notably the interplay between reality and fiction). Ten also represents the future of Iranian cinema, both in its digital mode and its emphasis on women’s experiences. In its signalling of new directions in Iranian cinema, Ten represents the engagement from Iran’s celebrated auteur with a democratic form of filmmaking. With digital cinema, more young Iranian filmmakers had access to creating moving images and participating in cultural production. In the contemporary political moment, these young filmmakers bring new political questions and renewed formal strategies, thereby expanding our understanding of “Iranian cinema,” beyond the long-held dichotomies between “popular” and “art” cinema, and “tradition” and “modernity.”

[1]Negar Mottahedeh, Displaced Allegories: Post-Revolutionary Iranian Cinema (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008).

[2]Hamid Naficy, “Iranian Writers, Iranian Cinema, and the Case of ‘Dash Akol,’” Iranian Studies 18.2, no. 4 (1985): 231-251.

[3]For a more detailed discussion of this relationship, see Sara Saljoughi, “A New Form for a New People: Forough Farrokhzad’s The House is Black,” Camera Obscura Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies 94, vol. 32, no. 1 (April 2017): 1-31.

[4]See Hamid Naficy, A Social History of Iranian Cinema, Volumes 1-4 (Durham: Duke University Press), 2011-2012 and Hamid Dabashi, Close Up: Iranian Cinema Past, Present, and Future (London: Verso, 2000).

[5]For a discussion of distinctly local cinematic practices, see Shahab Esfandiary, Iranian Cinema and Globalization: National, Transnational, and Islamic Dimensions (London: Intellect, 2012).

[6]David J. Roxburgh, “Micrographia: Toward a Visual Logic of Persianate Painting,” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 43 (Spring 2003): 12-30: 23.

[7]Ibid., 27.

[8]See Christiane Gruber, “Questioning the ‘Classical’ in Persian Painting: Models and Problems of Definition,” Journal of Art Historiography 6 (2012): 1-25.

[9]Roxburgh, “Micrographia,” 15.

[10]I explore this concept in my manuscript on the aesthetics and politics of cinema in Iran during the 1960s and 1970s, provisionally titled Burning Visions: The Counter-Cinema of the Iranian New Wave.

[11]Andrew Higson, “The Concept of National Cinema.” Screen 30, no. 4 (1989): 36-47.

[12]Ibid., 41.

[13]“Qui-êtes vous Monsieur Kiarostami?” Cahiers du cinéma (July 1995).

[14]This tendency is encapsulated by the response to Fredric Jameson’s, “Third World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism,” Social Text 15 (1986): 65-88. See also Aijaz Ahmad, “Jameson’s Rhetoric of Otherness and the ‘National Allegory,’” Social Text 17 (1987): 3-25.

[15]Blake Atwood, Reform Cinema in Iran: Film and Political Change in the Islamic Republic (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), 14.

[16]Ibid., 203.

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

Corey McCall Volume 3, Number 2, Summer 2018

Dr. Corey McCall <cmccall@elmira.edu> is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Elmira College in upstate New York. His teaching and research interests include 19th and 20th century European philosophy, American philosophy, postcolonial literature and thought, and the history of philosophy more broadly. Recent and forthcoming publications include the co-edited volumes Melville Among the Philosophers (2017) and Benjamin, Adorno, and the Experience of Literature (Forthcoming in 2018).

For too long, Foucault scholars have kept Foucault’s Iranian writings at arm’s length. Considered a curiosity at best, the essays and dispatches that stem from his two visits to Iran in the fall of 1978 were long thought extraneous to Foucault’s writings.[1] With the publication in recent years of Foucault’s Collège de France lecture courses, we can begin to see how misguided this earlier view of these writings truly was. The initial effort in this direction was made by the compilers of Foucault’s Iranian writings in English, Janet Afary and Kevin B. Anderson.[2] While the Afary and Anderson volume was certainly valuable as a compilation of Foucault’s Iranian writings, their interpretive essay that introduced the volume contained serious misunderstandings of Foucault, Iran, and Foucault’s writings on Iran.[3] Initially, many readers and scholars of Foucault’s writings reacted to these texts on events in Iran with puzzlement, if not outright embarrassment. Indeed, Afary and Anderson’s interpretive essay can be seen as the culmination of this initial phase of the scholarly reception of Foucault’s Iranian texts. Despite the fact that it attempts to place these writings within the broader context of Foucault’s thought, it offers a thoroughly inadequate reading of Foucault’s work.

More recently, Foucault scholars have attempted to place Foucault’s writings on Iran within the broader context of his published writings and his lecture courses. Melinda Cooper’s essay “The Law of the Household: Foucault, Neoliberalism, and the Iranian Revolution” is a good example of this more recent approach to Foucault’s Iranian writings.[4] Cooper’s essay contextualizes Foucault’s writings in terms of his analysis of two very different revolutions (the neoliberal “revolution” and Iranian Revolution) by reading Foucault’s dispatches from Iran alongside his 1978-1979 Birth of Biopolitics lecture course. My own approach will be similar to Cooper’s, but I wish to examine these writings through the lens of the course that Foucault delivered just prior to visiting Iran, the 1977-1978 lecture course subsequently published as Security, Territory, Population. In this course Foucault develops the concepts of conduct and counter-conduct that represent both a shift in how he conceives power relations and an anticipation of his later work on the care of the self. Like his Iranian writings, Security Territory, Population should be read on its own terms as well as seen as a text that serves as an incubator for subsequent work. In other words, these writings are transitional, provided that we understand this transition as the work of transforming his previous writings and conditioning what comes later rather than a simple move from one position to another. Just as Melinda Cooper suggests that we read Foucault’s lectures on neoliberalism in terms of his Iranian writings and in anticipation of his later work on the care of the self, I want to trace another trajectory that runs through counter-conduct and its attendant risks, the Iranian Revolution, and parresia read through the lens of governmentality and the intellectual’s political attempts to understand, critique, and ultimately contest modern technologies of government.[5] I hope to contribute to this more recent interpretive trend by examining how governmentality and parresia (or at least anticipations of these) can be seen to function within Foucault’s writings on Iran.

Foucault becomes increasingly interested in parresia (frank or fearless speech) in his lecture courses of the 1980s, but we can glean the origins of this later concern with fearless speech through Foucault’s conception of counter-conduct as developed in Security, Territory, Population. The first section of this essay focuses on the role that governmentality plays in Foucault’s Iran texts before making the connection between governmentality and parresia plain. The second section focuses on various anticipations of parresia in Foucault’s writings on the Iranian Revolution beginning with Foucault’s understanding of the intellectual’s political role and his claim that we understand philosophy as “the politics of truth” before turning to Foucault’s ambivalent remarks concerning the intellectual’s prophetic voice. Finally, I conclude with some general considerations of Foucault’s conception of the modern intellectual, based upon insights from his Iranian writings and his collaborative work in the early 1970s with the Groupe d’Information sur les Prisons (GIP) and his characterization of Ali Shariati as the intellectual voice of the Iranian Revolution.

Governmentality and Modern State Power in Iran

With the publication of Foucault’s lecture courses, it becomes much easier to see the coherence and hidden congruencies within his work. The earliest reception of Foucault’s work was driven by a belief that his work consisted of distinct periods in which the work of the later period superseded that of the earlier period. The conception of the later Foucault rewriting the work of his earlier self is the basis of Hubert Dreyfus’ and Paul Rabinow’s influential study Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics. Indeed, their approach makes it seem as if the works of the later Foucault constitute an erasure and revision of the earlier one, for by their account, Foucault senses that his archaeology led to a methodological dead-end so he develops his genealogical method. However, such an interpretive approach forces the reader to discount Foucault’s own claim that he was doing both archaeology and genealogy in his later works. More recently, Thomas E. Flynn has argued more convincingly for a prismatic approach that finds Foucault’s work coalescing around three main themes, that of knowledge, power, and ethics. Flynn’s interpretive strategy provides a better account of the relationship between the lecture courses and the published work, for Foucault did not strive to provide the final word on anything. In the lecture courses, we can see him constantly returning to what he has previously said and rethinking it—not in order to correct it, but to open it up for new exploration. The lecture courses do not provide the last word, nor should they take precedence over the published works, but do they help us to better grasp Foucault at work.

If we keep these methodological considerations in mind, we can better grasp how Foucault’s lecture courses relate to each other and how his occasional writings in turn relate to both the lecture courses and the published works. No doubt Foucault proceeds through fits and starts, and we would not want to minimize various discontinuities and dead ends present in his lecture courses, but we find correspondences and connections within them as well. Here, I wish to focus on the connection between Foucault’s treatment of governmentality (understood as the conduct of conduct) on the one hand and the two of the forms that resistance to governmentality may take, counter-conduct and parresia. From this connection we can see how Foucault conceives of the conduct of the intellectual in his lecture courses and how this conception informs Foucault’s Iranian writings. In other words, the conclusion of this section will examine the question of whether Foucault reconceives his conception of the intellectual’s role in contemporary society as a result of the events witnessed in Iran. In the next section I will show how these related concepts provide insights into Foucault’s Iran writings and his conception of the intellectual during the last years of his life.

In the “Course Context” to Security, Territory, Population, Michel Senellart places the 1978 lecture course within the broader trajectory of Foucault’s writings. The lecture courses from 1976-1979 form a triptych in which Foucault broaches the topic of biopower and biopolitics, but always haltingly and indirectly. He announces the project in his 1976 course Society Must Be Defended as well as in the conclusion to the first volume of The History of Sexuality. As Senellart points out, it is as if this conception of the various mechanisms that govern life can only be approached obliquely. He announces the biopower project (biopower understood here as the various modern technologies of power that take populations as their object) toward the end of Society Must Be Defended, but he does not begin to develop the concept until 1978 (Foucault did not offer a course at the Collège de France in 1977). Even here, the lectures quickly turn away from a general analytic of biopower and toward a more specific analysis of governmentality; indeed, by the fourth lecture, governmentality and pastoral power have taken center stage.[6] Similarly, Foucault begins The Birth of Biopolitics by announcing that he will focus that year’s lectures on biopower but quickly takes up the birth of neoliberalism. “What is actually involved in both cases is bringing to light the forms of experience and rationality on the basis of which power over life was organized in the West. But at the same time the effect of this research is to shift the center of gravity of the lectures from the question of biopower to that of government, to such an extent that in the end the latter almost entirely eclipses the former.”[7] Whether it is because Foucault realizes that he cannot say anything about biopolitics without first developing the concept of governmentality itself (in Security, Territory, Population) and neoliberal governmentality (in The Birth of Biopolitics) or for some other reason, one of the interesting consequences of this decision to focus on governmentality in these lectures is that the anticipation of the later work becomes readily apparent. Senellart points this out: “Breaking with the discourse of the ‘battle’ employed from the 1970s, the concept of ‘government’ would mark the first shift, becoming more pronounced from 1980, from the analytics of power to the ethics of the subject.”[8] Foucault completes the Security, Territory, Population lectures in April of 1978 and is sent to Iran by the Italian newspaper Corriere della serra in the fall of 1978, so it seems reasonable to surmise that we would find some connections between the material in the lecture course and Foucault’s writings on Iran.

Governmentality plays various roles in Foucault’s Iranian writings, though never a central one. I shall focus on two instances where Foucault uses the term in ways that indicate its growing significance in his work during this period. But first, a few words about one of the common criticisms of these texts: it has often been claimed that Foucault fails to adequately understand the Iranian Revolution on its own terms but instead imposes categories from his own European frame of reference upon these events.[9] This criticism is true to a certain extent; furthermore, such a practice is likely unavoidable for someone who lacks expertise in these fields. Nevertheless, it does not follow that Foucault is the latest in a long line of European thinkers engaging in an Orientalist project to understand the Middle Eastern and Asian cultures in European terms, nor is he dazzled by the exotic sights he witnesses in Iran. Rather his claims concerning parallels between, say, power relations in European contexts and cross-cultural parallels to places such as Iran or Japan remain invariably probing and tentative. Connections between his work and what he witnesses in Tehran or Qom are not dogmatically asserted but instead remain searching and hypothetical.

Stuart Elden has recently traced the chronology of Foucault’s work during this period, and he reminds us that Foucault concluded Security, Territory, Population in April 1978 and then proceeded to travel to Japan, where he gave two lectures and visited a Zen monastery.[10] Elden suggests we read these lectures as well as many of his Iranian writings as attempts to test whether his re-conceived notion of power as governmentality has anything like cross-cultural validity. He is not attempting to impose this schema upon other cultural conceptions of power, but rather determining whether it can be applied. And this is a useful way to approach the Iran texts as well: Foucault is testing a hypothesis in order to see whether his conception of power as government (as “the conduct of conduct”) provides something more than merely a European matrix for understanding power relations.[11]

As evidence, we can first consider this reference to government found in “Tehran: Faith Against the Shah”: “I do not feel comfortable,” Foucault writes, “speaking of Islamic government as an ‘idea’ or even an ‘ideal.’ Rather, it impressed me as a form of ‘political will.’ It impressed me in its effort to politicize structures that are inseparably social and religious in response to current problems. It also impressed me in its attempt to open a spiritual dimension in politics.”[12] Readers are often puzzled by the introduction of the term “political spirituality” in these texts; Foucault employs the term here to characterize this distinctive form of government introduced in Iran by the revolutionaries, a form of government that was developed through opposition to the Shah. That is, Islamic government was shaped through opposition, through the counter-conduct that eventually led to the shah’s ouster. In other words, Islamic government is a set of concrete practices that politicize domains that had previously been free from governmentalization.

In both Security, Territory and Population and The Birth of Biopolitics, Foucault’s concerns lie not only with the innovation and proliferation of arts of government characteristic of modernity, but also with the limitations imposed upon these innovative arts of government, either externally or through self-limitation. In The Birth of Biopolitics, one of the key differences he emphasizes between previous forms of government and eighteenth century forms of liberalism is that prior to the eighteenth century both innovations in governmentality and limitations on government were imposed from the outside. Liberal and later neoliberal theorists held that government ought to restrict itself. At the end of the eighteenth century, “there is a shift of the center of gravity of public law. The fundamental problem of public law will no longer be the foundation of sovereignty, the conditions of the sovereign’s legitimacy, or the conditions under which the sovereign’s rights can be exercised legitimately as it was in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The problem becomes how to set juridical limits to the exercise of power by a public authority.”[13] Liberal governmental rationality consists of self-imposed limits that will ultimately help it achieve its aims through “the management of risk”:

A number of consequences follow from this. First, we can say that the motto of liberalism is: “Live dangerously.” “Live dangerously,” that is to say, individuals are constantly exposed to danger, or rather, they are conditioned to experience their situation, their life, their present, and their future as containing danger. I think this kind of stimulus of danger will be one of the major implications of liberalism. An entire education and culture of danger appears in the nineteenth century which is very different from those great apocalyptic threats of plague, death, and war which fed the political and cosmological imagination of the Middle Ages, and even of the seventeenth century.[14]

Risk is the complement of liberty, and by the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the main task of liberal governmentality in Western states had become the management of risk. Individuals and corporations are obliged to assume risk within society, but the truth of liberalism lies in the calculation of that risk. Drawing on the work of neoliberal economists such as Gary Becker, Foucault develops this theme of individual risk in liberalism and neoliberalism later in the lecture course by considering the neoliberal account of crime and the criminal. The criminal is one who “invests in an action, expects a profit from it, and who accepts the risk of a loss.”[15] Consequently, the penal system targets the conduct of the criminal: “It has to concern itself with a conduct or a series of conducts which produce actions from which the actors expect a profit and which carry a special risk, which is not just the risk of economic loss, but the penal risk, or that economic loss which is inflicted by a penal system.” That is, the penal system provides a set of reactions to the “supply of crime.”[16] The management of risk gives rise to various techniques of neoliberal governmentality that develop around the economic calculation of risk, with criminal justice as just one dimension of this economization. In other words, neoliberalism sees everything through an economic lens, and the penal system becomes subject to economic analysis for the first time. Although it may not initially appear so, this conception of governmentality, understood as “the conduct of conduct,” and various forms of resistance (“counter-conducts”) to it, lies in the background of these writings on the Iranian Revolution.[17]

Foucault’s claim that Islamic government represents a new form of political will occurs in the final section of his article “What Are the Iranians Dreaming About?” entitled “The Inventors of the State.”[18] He concludes the article with four observations, two about the present and two about the relationship between the present and the distant past. First, he remarks that the intensity of this political will precludes a moderate solution, but secondly he also wonders at its depth, whether it is “rooted deeply enough to become a permanent factor in the political life of Iran, or will it dissipate like a cloud when the sky of political reality have finally cleared […]?” These questions indicate present concerns, but Foucault has deeper concerns that center around state power, governmentality, and resistance; that is, that concern conduct and counter-conduct from a historical perspective. “At the dawn of history, Persia invented the state and conferred its models on Islam. Its administrators staffed the caliphate. But from this same Islam, it derived a religion that gave to its people the power to resist state power.”[19] So, Foucault asks, how does the present revolution relate to this longer history of the state and resistance to the state? With the Iranian Revolution, are we witnessing a re-invention of this state, or something new? His second historical question concerns political spirituality: “For the people who inhabit this land, what is the point of searching, even at the cost of their own lives, for this thing whose possibility we have forgotten since the Renaissance and the great crisis of Christianity, a political spirituality. I can already hear the French laughing, but I know that they are wrong.”[20] The crisis of Christianity occurred during the same period as the initial proliferation in arts of government: in both cases, we see a close connection between spiritual matters and governmentality. An Islamic government, in other words, would be one that institutionalizes and governmentalizes political spirituality.

With the exception of Khomeini, Foucault harbors no illusions regarding whether the Shi’ite clergy themselves might constitute a revolutionary vanguard, but he remains open to the possibility that Shi’ism itself can. Foucault detects a split in the opposition, between those he terms “politicians” who believe that Khomeini has no concrete governing program and the people themselves, for whom Khomeini’s charisma, which Foucault characterizes as “a mysterious current that flowed between an old man who had been exiled for fifteen years and his people,” is irresistible.[21] He notes in several places in these texts that what the world is witnessing is a revolution from below in the name of Islam. Of course, this scrambles the neat Western dichotomy that draws a rigid distinction between revolution and religion, with religion seen as a conservative force within society that seeks to maintain its hold on tradition. One source of this rigid distinction between revolution and religion is Marx himself, who famously claimed that religion was “the opiate of the people,” but another source of it can be found in the Enlightenment legacy of bourgeois humanism that contrasts progress in society in such fields as science, technology, and politics with the benighted realm of religious superstition. One of the things that fascinates Foucault about what he witnessed in Iran was that the revolt against the Shah was in the name of religion: it was a religious revolt that scrambled this neat distinction between religion and revolution.[22] Foucault reports that he never once heard the word “revolution.” Instead, the people are clamoring for “an Islamic government,” which was what Ayatollah Khomeini repeatedly claimed was the aim of resistance to the Shah as well.[23] Foucault distinguishes two possible meanings for this term. “Islamic government” may mean a “utopia” or, alternatively, “an ideal” that refashions ancient meanings into something qualitatively new. “At any rate, it is something very old and also very far into the future, a notion of coming back to what Islam was at the time of the Prophet, but also of advancing toward a luminous and distant point where it would be possible to renew fidelity rather than maintain obedience.”[24] In other words, the demand for Islamic government is a demand for the creative renewal of Islam that will transform its current legalism.[25] He continues that “it is first and foremost about a movement that aims to give a permanent role in political life to the traditional structures of Islamic society. An Islamic government is what will allow the continuing activity of the thousands of political centers that have been spawned in mosques and religious communities in order to resist the shah’s regime.”[26] Foucault gives an example of an earthquake in Ferdows that devastated the city. When the authorities presented their rebuilding plan, it was rejected by the people, who, under the guidance of a religious leader, raised the money to rebuild the city at a nearby site that was dubbed Islamiyeh.[27] This is the sort of political creativity at the heart of a revolt focused squarely on a revolutionary transformation of the present.

It is simultaneously this demand for Islamic government and the focus on the present that fascinates Foucault here. While this makes some amount of sense given Foucault’s self-description as an historian of the present, it contrasts markedly with his understanding of European historico-political discourses prior to the nineteenth century. In their recent analysis of Foucault’s work on state and civil society, Mitchell Dean and Kaspar Villadsen remind us of this forgetting of the present in eighteenth-century discourses on both state power and the various resistances to it, as documented in Foucault’s 1976 course Society Must Be Defended:

In the old eighteenth-century historico-political discourse the present is always viewed as a moment of profound forgetfulness. More precisely, the present was understood to be permeated by a complex of shifts and alliances between rival forces that had rendered the fundamental and primitive state of war muddled. The present was negatively valued because the objective was to awaken form or cure oneself from this forgetfulness.[28]

This nostalgia for a national past changes at the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth, when thinkers begin to prize the present for its own sake rather than seeing it as a “muddled” moment of oblivion during which the nobility demanded a reawakening of past glories.[29] Late eighteenth-century and nineteenth century thinkers become simultaneously more focused on the present and more forward-looking. The European nobles in Foucault’s 1975-1976 lecture course sought a return to the archaism of the nation as a way to call into question the legitimacy of the absolutist state. In his last published text, Foucault will claim that it is Kant’s focus on the present that marks him as an Enlightenment thinker. Foucault knows that Kant is not the first philosopher to reflect on the present, but he believes that he is the first to reflect on the present on its own terms, and not, as a dimension of world history (Plato), or as a sign pointing to the future (Augustine), or a transition to something new (Vico). Instead, Kant sees the present as an Ausgang or exit from self-incurred immaturity that precludes thinking and acting for oneself, both at the level of the individual and the social.[30]

This return to Kant in Foucault’s late texts seems to have perplexed some readers, but it really shouldn’t. After all, Foucault began his intellectual career with the publication of a translation and interpretation of Kant’s Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, and Foucault’s various engagements with Kant extend throughout his career.[31] The next section focuses on one aspect of this engagement. I focus on the conception of intellectual praxis that we find in Foucault’s engagement with Kant’s work in the late 1970s and how it relates to his Iranian writings. Ali Shariati, the thinker who is often cited as the ideological prophet of the Iranian Revolution, will provide my focus.

Contesting State Power: Kant, Shariati, and the Risks of Resistance

The question concerning the intellectual’s role in modern societies has been a recurring theme throughout Foucault’s writings, though this theme manifests itself more in his occasional writings and lecture courses than in his published writings. This is an enduring concern that can be traced to quite early in Foucault’s career. For example, “Intellectuals and Power,” which is a dialogue between Foucault and Gilles Deleuze conducted in March of 1972, addresses the changing role of the intellectual in modern European societies.[32] This piece dates from the pair’s involvement with the Groupe d’information sur les Prisons (GIP), a loosely-affiliated group of intellectuals and activists who sought to provide French inmates with a platform so that they could draw attention to the squalid prison conditions in France. It was important to the intellectuals involved that the prisoners be given an opportunity to speak for themselves instead of acting as their representatives. Hence, one of the topics of this dialogue was representation, i.e. an analysis of the various conditions under which the intellectual is authorized to speak on behalf of another.

Foucault has already begun to contest the Marxist conception of the engaged intellectual, according to which the intellectual both speaks on behalf of the exploited proletariat and attempts to get the members of this class to see their wretchedness. By 1972 Foucault sees that this conception of the engaged intellectual, one that extends from Marx and Engels at least through Sartre, was inadequate. He endeavors to replace this Marxist conception of the engaged intellectual who speaks on behalf of others and serves as their representative with the conception of the specific intellectual. Among other things, this individual does not pretend to have privileged knowledge that remains inaccessible to those she represents. Foucault here discusses the role of the intellectual in much the same way that he will some seven years later in his interview with Baqir Parham. He notes that the intellectual’s political status in bourgeois society typically stems from two sources: either it results from her position within society, “the position as an intellectual in bourgeois society, in the system of capitalist production, in the ideology which that system produces or imposes” or from the “intellectual discourse itself, in as much as it revealed a particular truth, uncovering political relationships where none were before perceived.”[33] The first reason for politicization of the intellectual is due to the fact that many intellectuals exist on the margins, either ignored or actively persecuted by the authorities. The second reason for the intellectual’s politicization within bourgeois society stems from her role as a critic. This figure of the marginalized intellectual who engages in social critique provides the basis both for Foucault’s analysis of intellectual counter-conduct (what he with some hesitation labels “dissent” in Security, Territory, Population) and his understanding of the political role that the intellectual plays in the Iranian Revolution. This is most evident in his understanding of the significance of Ali Shariati as a prophet of the Revolution, whom Foucault characterizes in startlingly Kantian terms.

One of the most important continuities between Security, Territory, Population and Foucault’s other writings during this period can be found in his attempt to develop this insight from 1972 and his work with the GIP that intellectuals are always imbricated in the political. Despite various attempt to tenaciously cling to an apolitical, objective stance that remains above the fray, intellectual labor always has specific political implications. This is put most succinctly in Foucault’s re-conception of philosophy at the beginning of the Security, Territory, Population lectures that philosophy ought to be understood as “the politics of truth.” As I noted above, Foucault begins the lecture course by claiming that his aim for that year will be the study of biopower, though he quickly becomes ensnared first in the study of governmentality and then of pastoral power as the antecedent of modern arts of government. He begins by presenting a series of “indications” or “principles of intent” regarding where he hopes the investigation of biopower that year will lead. After noting that these indications will neither yield a general definition of power relations nor a conception of power as an essence that exists independently of the relations constituting it. He concedes that the analysis may indeed lead to a general analysis of society, but that possibility will not guide him. Rather, this project is a philosophical one, provided that we understand philosophy as “the politics of truth,” that is a discipline whose “role is showing the knowledge effects produced by the struggles, confrontations, and battles that take place within our society, and by the tactics of power that are the elements of that struggle.”[34] Indeed, he seems here to be taking up Deleuze’s suggestion in “Intellectuals and Power” that theories be seen as a tools in a tool box, or, as Foucault says in 1972, that theory be seen as a “local and regional” praxis:

A struggle against power, a struggle to bring power to light and open up where it is most invisible and insidious. Not a struggle for some ‘insight’ or ‘realization’ (for a long time consciousness as knowledge has been acquired by the masses, and consciousness as subjectivity has been taken, occupied by the bourgeoisie)—but a struggle to undermine and take power side by side with those who are fighting, and not of to the side trying to enlighten them. A ‘theory’ is the regional system of this struggle.[35]

The intellectual remains immanent within society and not a privileged member of it. Furthermore, society is here understood as a site of struggle that forms the basis for state power and its technologies of government. Hence the problem with treating the intellectual as an authoritative prophet is that this status assumes privileged knowledge that she would share if only her fellow members of society would listen. Foucault underscores this position in a series of interviews he gave with the Italian Marxist journalist Ducio Trombadori after his return from Iran at the end of 1978. In the final interview, included in the 1991 collection Remarks on Marx as “The Discourse on Power,” Foucault makes his reservations regarding the modern intellectual’s role within society plain. Trombadori attempts to get Foucault to admit that the intellectual has some general political role to play in society, and Foucault responds:

My role is to address problems effectively, really: and to pose them with the greatest possible rigor, with the maximum complexity and difficulty so that a solution does not arise all at once because of the thought of some reformer or even in the brain of a political party. The problems that I try to address, these perplexities of crime, madness, and sex which involve daily life, cannot be easily resolved. It takes years, decades of work carried out at the grassroots level with the people directly involved; and the right to speech and political imagination must be returned to them.[36]

The intellectual’s task is direct involvement “at the grassroots level.” Instead of speaking on behalf of people due to the peculiar authority of the intellectual, the intellectual must work to restore what the people have lost, the right to speech and political imagination. Foucault continues: “I carefully guard against making the law. Rather, I concern myself with determining problems, unleashing them, revealing them within the framework of such complexity as to shut the mouths of prophets and legislators: all those who speak for others and above others.”[37] This concern with speaking for others and its attendant problems of representation and misrepresentation had already been addressed in the 1972 interview, and Foucault remains concerned with it here. In his conversation with Trombadori, Foucault seems to categorically deny that the intellectual any prophetic role. However, if we return to the Iranian writings, we see that Foucault’s emphasis on political imagination and the right to speech (what he will subsequently term parresia) render this condemnation of intellectual prophecy less categorical. While he never advocates the view that the intellectual be seen simply as a prophet, once we examine what he has to say about Iranian intellectuals in general and Ali Shariati in particular we can surmise that Foucault would likely endorse this qualified sense of immanent intellectual prophecy—the intellectual as a specific prophet rather than a general one.

In his discussion with Trombadori, Foucault’s main worry about understanding the intellectual in terms of a prophet or a legislator is that these conceptions provide the intellectual with prescriptive authority. According to these two conceptions, the intellectual does not simply analyze and describe how things are; in addition, she assumes a position of authority that makes it possible for her to render the phenomena or actors involved in her social analyses and critiques as objects of research who must submit to her authority and in whose name she speaks. There is another worry here, though, and it is this worry that provides the basis for a modified conception of the prophetic intellectual, one not subject to Foucault’s reservations. The typical prophetic intellectual is able to secure a position that minimizes her risk, one that might be literal or figurative. For example, a professor employed by a university generally assumes fewer risks than the intellectual who is not part of such an institutional setting. The intellectual might find a way to comment on events (on a blog or in the media) and thereby avoid becoming implicated in the social events that occasion her analysis thus remaining above the fray. So, does Foucault offer us a way for the intellectual to be both prophetic and assume the risks borne by individuals who lack the intellectuals’ various institutional advantages?

An adequate answer to this question would require a fuller examination of Foucault’s lectures on parresia during the final years of his life than I will be able to provide here.[38] Instead, I would like to examine two moments that anticipate his later work on parresia. In addition to contributing to an account of the development of this idea in Foucault’s work, it will also help us to see the role of the prophetic intellectual in Foucault’s writings on Iran. I will begin with Foucault’s remarks on the intellectual found in his interview with Baqir Parham. I conclude by discussing Foucault’s remarks on Ali Shariati as an exemplar of the prophetic intellectual who risked speaking out against a tyrannical government.

Foucault begins his dialogue with Parham by reiterating his claim that one’s status as an intellectual entails political engagement, but he rejects previous attempts to define the intellectual in purely theoretical or objective terms.[39] The salient question, then, is what sort of relationship to politics the intellectual ought to have: will it be characterized by the intellectual’s attempts to remain aloof from engagement, or will she embrace it? And, if she embraces it, then how best to do so? Since the French Revolution, Foucault claims, the intellectual has “played the role of a prophet, a foreteller of the future society. In other words, the intellectual was one whose responsibility was to deal with general and universal principles for all of humanity.”[40] Due to various changes in modern society, this pretension to speak on behalf of all humanity has been undermined. He continues, “In my opinion, today the intellectual must be inside the pit, the very pit in which the sciences are engaged, where they produce political results.”[41] It is necessary, Foucault claims, to begin anew, “to construct another political thought, another political vision, and teach a new vision of the future.”[42] In other words, the intellectual’s task remains oriented to the future, but a specific future in which she can no longer speak for all. This is how Foucault understands his role in Iran, and it is how he characterizes the role of Ali Shariati.

Foucault characterizes Ali Shariati as the intellectual hero of the Revolution. In “Tehran: Faith Against the Shah,” Foucault writes about Ali Shariati in a way that anticipates his formulation of the Kantian present as an “Ausgang” or “exit” in his final writings. Shariati dies in June of 1977, but his work provides the basis for Foucault’s conception of political spirituality. Indeed, Foucault claims that the present is haunted by the spirit of Ali Shariati. In terms that echo the famous opening lines of The Communist Manifesto (“A specter is haunting Europe—the specter of Communism”), Foucault characterizes Shariati as the ghost that haunts Iran today:

But one dreams also of another movement, which is the inverse and converse of the first [i.e. an Islamic government]. This is one that allow the introduction of a spiritual dimension into political life, in order that it would not be, as always, the obstacle to spirituality, but rather its receptacle, its opportunity, and its ferment. This is where we encounter a shadow that haunts all political and religious life in Iran today: that of Ali Shariati, whose death two years ago gives him the position, so privileged in Shi’ism, of the invisible Present, of the ever-present Absent.[43]

Shariati defines the present for a Shi’ism in revolt, just as Kant had defined the Enlightenment for liberal Europe two centuries before. Furthermore, Shariati constitutes a public outside the university through his teaching. Foucault continues: “His ‘luck’ was that persecution forced him to go to Tehran and to have to teach outside of the university, in a room prepared for him under the protection of a mosque. There, he addressed a public that was his, and that could soon be counted in the thousands: students, mullahs, intellectuals, modest people from the neighborhood of the bazaar, and people passing through from the provinces.”[44] The distinction Foucault draws here between a life devoted to university teaching and one devoted to a public one constitutes oneself echoes the distinction that Kant drew between the private and public use of reason. Private reason is constrained by another, while public reason permits one to speak unfettered, in one’s own voice.

In May 1978, Foucault gives a lecture at the Sorbonne entitled “What is Critique?” In this lecture, he gives a first sketch of what he terms here “the critical attitude” from the beginning in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and extending through Kant and the European Enlightenment.[45] The significance of this critical attitude can only be understood in light of Christian pastoral power in which “every individual, whatever his age or his status, from the beginning to the end of his life and down to the very details of his actions, ought to be governed and ought to let himself be governed […] by someone to whom he is bound in a total, and at the same time meticulous and detailed, relation of obedience.”[46] This is a summary of the genealogy of modern governmentality that Foucault had just traced from its roots in the Middle Ages administration of obedience in Security, Territory, Population. Modernity witnesses “a veritable explosion” of these arts of governing. What had been limited to the institutional site of the monastic life became both widespread throughout society and unmoored from its religious context.[47] This laicization and proliferation of the arts of government prompt individuals and groups to find ways to avoid this governmentalizing tendency in society. The question in a wide variety of both sacred and secular contexts becomes, “How not to be governed like that, by that, in the name of these principles, in view of such objectives and b the means of such methods, not like that, not for that, not by them.”[48] This “art of not being governed so much” is the essence of the critical attitude. Foucault next provides three examples: the European Protestant refusal of the governing Church hierarchy, refusal of sovereign power in the name of natural rights, and questioning authority. “I will say that critique is the movement through which the subject gives itself the right to question truth concerning its power effects and to question power about its discourses of truth.”[49]

This implicit association of Shariati with European Enlightenment critique becomes less jarring once we recall that Foucault characterizes his account of parresia in Fearless Speech as a genealogy of the critical attitude, “concerned with the question of the importance of telling the truth, knowing who is able to tell the truth, and knowing why we should tell the truth, we have the roots of what we could call the ‘critical’ tradition in the West. And here you will recognize one of my targets in this seminar, namely, to construct a genealogy of the critical attitude in Western philosophy.”[50] Foucault and Shariati both realized that critique properly understood is the political work to imagine other futures than the one that seems given.

[1]Indeed, in his otherwise excellent reconstruction of Foucault’s work during this period, Stuart Elden adopts this attitude by dismissing Foucault’s Iranian writings as mere journalism. See Stuart Elden, Foucault’s Last Decade (Cambridge: Polity, 2016). On 101-102, he writes that “his reports, principally for the Italian newspaper Corriere del Sera [sic], have provoked controversy both at the time and since. Much of their detail is now of historical interest, and the way that events have developed has outstripped what is, in truth, journalism and prediction rather than the more considered work of his lectures, books, or other writings.” In a footnote Elden acknowledges those who have found these works to be a more significant part of Foucault’s corpus, but I believe he remains too dismissive of Foucault’s writings on Iran.

[2]Janet Afary and Kevin B. Anderson, eds., Foucault and the Iranian Revolution: Gender and the Seductions of Islam (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).

[3]The inadequacies of Afary and Anderson’s interpretive essay were recognized in the first reviews of the book by Foucault scholars. See, for example, James Bernauer’s review essay of Foucault and the Iranian Revolution in Philosophy and Social Criticism 32, no. 6 (2006), 781-786 and Richard Lynch’s review in Foucault Studies, no. 4, (February 2007), 169-176. More recently, Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi has used Foucault’s Iranian writings as the basis to reinterpret the Iranian Revolution. See Foucault in Iran: Islamic Revolution after the Enlightenment (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016).

[4]Cooper’s essay appears in the collection The Government of Life: Foucault, Biopolitics, and Neoliberalism, eds. Vanessa Lemm and Miguel Vatter (NY: Fordham University Press, 2014), 29-58.

[5]Melinda Cooper, The Government of Life, 32. In his dialogue with Baqir Parham, Foucault characterizes the intellectual as one whose action are always already political, and he claims that the since the French Revolution the role of the intellectual has always been understood in terms of prophecy. He accepts this conception of the intellectual with the stipulation that the intellectual function specifically rather than universally. He then proceeds to situate the intellectual within the context of revolutionary praxis and the risks of thought. See Foucault and the Iranian Revolution, 183-184. We will explore this connection further below.

[6]Later in 1978, after he gives the Society Must Be Defended lectures and returns from Iran, Foucault gives a series of interviews with Duccio Trombadori. In the last of these interviews, Foucault provides a helpful definition of governmentality: “And by ‘government’ I mean the set of institutions and practices by which people are ‘led,’ from administration to education, etc. It is this set of procedures, techniques, and methods that guarantee the ‘government’ of people, which seems to me to be in crisis today.” Michel Foucault and Ducio Trombadori, Remarks on Marx, trans. R. James Goldstein and James Cascaito (NY: Semiotext(e), 1991), 176. I will return to Foucault’s account of the intellectual in this interview in the subsequent section of this essay.

[7]Michel Senellart, “Course Context” in Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France 1977-1978, ed. Michel Senellart, trans. Graham Burchell (NY: Palgrave MacMillan, 2007), 370.

[8]Senellart, “Course Context,” 370.

[9]This is one of the main critiques advanced by Afary and Anderson. However, they manage to mangle Foucault’s thought so thoroughly that this criticism loses some of its force. They freely state that they read Foucault’s genealogical method itself becomes “a suprahistorical grand narrative” that “privileges not modernity but the traditional social orders.” Foucault and the Iranian Revolution: Gender and the Seductions of Islamism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 13-14.

[10]Stuart Elden, Foucault’s Last Decade (Malden, MA: Polity, 2016), 101: “It [‘Sexuality and Power,’ one of the two lectures Foucault gave in Japan] closes with a return to the theme of pastoral power, which is of principal interest for its relation to Feudalism within Europe and Confucianism in the East. On this trip Foucault also spent time in a Zen temple, clearly fascinated by the rituals and rules, in which he saw both parallels and distinctions from Christian monasticism and mysticism.”

[11]Ian Almond does a good job of capturing Foucault’s ambivalence toward non-European societies (indeed, often ambivalence can be indistinguishable from tentativeness). He claims that Foucault wants to critique the otherness of Islam at the same time that he surreptitiously employs it. “On the one hand, like Nietzsche, Foucault will always be aware of ‘the thousand-year old reproach of fanaticism’ that has been directed at Islam and the perennial outsider status it has been given by the West; on the other, the very European ‘outsiderness’ that Foucault analyses will simultaneously be of use. The complexity of Foucault’s approach to the Islamic Other—be it Tunisian demonstrators or Iranian Shiites—lies in this consecutive (at time even concurrent) analysis and appropriation of Islam’s alterity.” The New Orientalists: Postmodern Representations of Islam from Foucault to Baudrillard (London: I.B. Tauris, 2007), 22-23.

[12]Afary and Anderson, Foucault and the Iranian Revolution, 208.

[13]Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, ed. Michel Senellart, trans. Graham Burchell (NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 39, cf.

[14]Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 66.

[15]Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 253.

[16]Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics. Bernard Harcourt develops Foucault’s sketch of the transformation of criminality under liberal and neoliberal regimes of governmentality in The Illusion of Free Markets: Punishment and the Myth of Natural Order (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012).

[17]Governmentality must be understood in terms of conduct: it consists of the techniques whereby the conduct of individuals and groups is conducted. Cf. Corey McCall, “Conduct,” The Foucault Lexicon, eds. Leonard Lawlor and John Nale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 68-74.

[18]Afary and Anderson, Foucault and the Iranian Revolution, 208-209.

[19]Afary and Anderson, Foucault and the Iranian Revolution, 208.

[20]Afary and Anderson, Foucault and the Iranian Revolution, 209.

[21]Afary and Anderson, Foucault and the Iranian Revolution, 204-205.

[22]Melinda Cooper notes this in her essay “The Law of the Household” as well: “Foucault was convinced that something quite extraordinary was at stake here. The revolutionary movement in Iran, he contended, paved a way for a new form of politics, one which escaped the limitations of the two most salient models of revolution in European history—one the one hand, the liberal revolution which had introduced parliamentary democracy, citizenship, and ‘the monstrosity of the state; and on the other, Marxist revolution, with its tendency to reduce all conflict to class struggle.’” See The Government of Life, 34-35.

[23]Afary and Anderson, Foucault and the Iranian Revolution, 205.

[24]Afary and Anderson, Foucault and the Iranian Revolution, 206.

[25]Afary and Anderson, Foucault and the Iranian Revolution, 206.

[26]Afary and Anderson, Foucault and the Iranian Revolution, 207.

[27]Afary and Anderson, Foucault and the Iranian Revolution, 207.

[28]Mitchell Dean and Kaspar Villadsen, State Phobia and Civil Society: The Political Legacy of Michel Foucault (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2016), 82. Cf. Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France 1975-1976, eds. Mauro Bertani and Alessandro Fontana, trans. David Macey (NY: Picador, 2003), 227: “In the history and historico-political field of the eighteenth century, the present was, basically, always the negative moment. It was always the trough of the wave, always a moment of apparent calm and forgetfulness.”

[29]Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 227.

[30]Michel Foucault, “What is Enlightenment?” Essential Works of Foucault 1954-1984, vol. 1: Ethics, ed. Paul Rabinow (NY: New Press, 1997), 304-305.

[31]Michel Foucault, Introduction to Kant’s Anthropology, ed. Roberto Nigro (NY: Semiotext(e), 2008). See also Marc Djaballah, Foucault, Kant, and the Forms of Experience (London: Routledge, 2011) for an account of Foucault’s sustained engagement with Kantian critique throughout his career.

[32]Gilles Deleuze, “Intellectuals and Power,” Desert Islands and Other Texts 1953-1974, ed. David Lapoujade, trans. Michael Taormina (NY: Semiotext(e), 2004).

[33]Deleuze, “Intellectuals and Power,” 207.

[34]Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, 2-3.

[35]Deleuze, “Intellectuals and Power,” 207-208.

[36]Michel Foucault and Ducio Trombadori, Remarks on Marx, trans. R. James Goldstein and James Cascaito (NY: Semiotext(e), 1991), 158-159.

[37]Foucault and Trombadori, Remarks on Marx, 159.

[38]Minimally, an engagement with Foucault’s 1981-1982 lecture course The Hermeneutics of the Subject, ed. Frédéric Gros, trans. Graham Burchell (NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005) and his final lecture course from 1983-1984 The Courage of Truth, ed. Frédéric Gros, trans. Graham Burchell (NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). Finally, his Berkeley lectures from the fall of 1983 published as Fearless Speech, ed. Joseph Pearson (NY: Semiotext(e), 2001) provide a succinct statement of the meaning and significance of parresia.

[39]Afary and Anderson, Foucault and the Iranian Revolution, 183.

[40]Afary and Anderson, Foucault and the Iranian Revolution, 184.

[41]Afary and Anderson, Foucault and the Iranian Revolution, 184.

[42]Afary and Anderson, Foucault and the Iranian Revolution, 185.

[43]Afary and Anderson, Foucault and the Iranian Revolution, 207.

[44]Afary and Anderson, Foucault and the Iranian Revolution, 208.

[45]Michel Foucault, “What is Critique?” in What is Enlightenment? Eighteenth Century Answers and Twentieth Century Questions, ed. James Schmidt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 382.

[46]Foucault, “What is Critique?” 383.

[47]Foucault, “What is Critique?” 383-384.

[48]Foucault, “What is Critique?” 384.

[49]Foucault, “What is Critique?” 385.

[50]Foucault, Fearless Speech, 170-171.

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

Claudia Yaghoobi Volume 3, Number 1, Spring 2018

Introduction

In his “Homosexuality in Arabic Literature,” Frederic Lagrange offers the following categorizations regarding the presence of diverse sexualities, and representation of (male) homosexual characters in Arabic literature: “a typical aspect of traditional society, either to be denounced or simply neutrally described [. . .], a homosexual character, whether central or secondary, is often represented as undergoing a malaise and loss of self-worth, possibly leading to death or suicide; thirdly, homosexuality may be articulated in the traumatic relationship with the Other.”[1] While Persian literature, to some extent, suffers from a paucity of discussion about (male) sexuality, Amir Soltani and Khalil Bendib’s graphic novel, Yousef and Farhad Struggling for Family Acceptance in Iran: The Story of Two Gay Men (referred to as Yousef and Farhad hereafter), Arsham Parsi’s memoir, Exiled for Love, and Jean Beaini and Mohammad Khordadian’s biography, For the Love of Mohammad, provide us with homosexual characters similar to the ones in Lagrange’s categorization.[2]

Yousef and Farhad breaks the silence on diverse (male) sexualities and redefines masculinity as non-singular, rather than the outcome of a biological or social construction. The graphic novel chronicles the struggles of a gay man, Yousef, after coming out to his family. Yousef and his lover, Farhad, are exposed to harassment and violence after revealing their true sexual orientation.[3] They appeal for acceptance and dignity from their family and society, but are instead rejected and abandoned. The graphic novel illustrates that central to the construction of the dominant (heterosexual, middle-class) masculinity is the subordination of the gay masculinity as a repository for everything that heterosexual masculinity deems as weak and feminine.[4] This subordination of gay masculinity normalizes heterosexuality while deeming homosexuality as abnormal. Although today’s Iran is considered one of more than 75 countries globally that criminalize homosexuality by punishing with death, Soltani and Bendib show that the new generation of Iranian society is undoubtedly evolving toward a more tolerant and accepting relationship with the LGBTQ community. Exploring the characters, this paper considers Yousef and Farhad as the “abject outsiders” of their society, who simultaneously mark the boundaries and initiate the destabilization of hegemonic masculinity while their sexuality is constituted and defined in relationship to the dominant heterosexual and middle-class masculinity.[5]

To explore the hierarchy of masculinities in Iran within various genres, I also examine two memoirs: Arsham Parsi’s Exiled for Love and Jean Beaini and Mohammad Khordadian’s For the Love of Mohammad. Exiled for Love delineates Parsi’s coming to terms with his identity as a gay man in Iran and his attempts to bring the LGBTQ community together via the Internet, while raising awareness about the Iranian LGBTQ community in the world. It expounds on the torture and imprisonment of gay men (and all LGBTQ individuals), the brutal socio-cultural environment, and the harsh Islamic laws in Iran against homosexuality. For the Love of Mohammad discloses the complexities of a relationship into which a young gay man, the renowned Iranian male dancer Mohammad Khordadian, has been manipulated while in love with another man. It hints at the socio-cultural constraints mandating men marry women, and the fact that many gay men enter into these marriages to avoid ostracism, while maintaining a relationship with another man on the side. This type of secrecy within relationships not only elucidates the impact of such marriages on the lives of gay men, but also shows how such decisions alter the lives of the women involved. Utilizing Parsi’s and Khordadian’s accounts of lived experiences, this paper brings to light the influence of suppression and silencing on those whose lives are affected. Focusing on all three works, this paper attempts to show what has been excluded in the construction of the dominant masculinity and to address the public silences about diverse sexualities and sexual practices.[6] In Joan Scott’s words, “[W]orks such as these provide evidence for a world of alternative values and practices whose existence gives the lie to hegemonic construction of social world,” in this case to the hegemonic, socio-cultural construction of gender and sexuality.[7] By bringing Parsi’s and Khordadian’s experiences to the fore, the memoirs make visible the experiences of a group of men who are deemed different, and they simultaneously expose a long history of repressive mechanisms. While memoirs are viewed as more authoritative because they attribute a sense of authenticity to a narrative, graphic novels are often deemed less credible in academia. Nonetheless, this paper considers Soltani and Bendib’s choice of graphic novel as a means of subversion to the hegemonic discourses of not only masculinity in Iran, but also literature in academia.

Hierarchy of Masculinities

Regardless of the fact that the title of the graphic novel and the storyline revolve around the relationship between Yousef and Farhad, the character who provides us with the most pertinent characteristics regarding the question of masculinity is Yousef’s father, Mr. Jafari. Though he does not fit into the traditionally constructed category of a protagonist, he is not entirely an individual antagonist either. He can, however, be considered as the embodiment of heterosexual, homophobic masculinity in current Iran. Of course, Mr. Jafari is not the archetypal representation of the community’s hegemonic masculinity in his capacity as the head of the family; however, he can implement power over Yousef. As Connell points out, “The public face of hegemonic masculinity is not necessarily what powerful men are, but what sustains their power and what large numbers of men are motivated to support.”[8] The preferred hegemonic masculinity is “an unattainable ideal” that most men representing sub-hegemonic masculinities strive for.[9] Hegemony is established through the “correspondence between cultural ideal and institutional power,” which claims authority.[10] These dominant masculinities are those that benefit from the “patriarchal dividend” of the instituted hegemony, while not being subject to the risk of those few that do embody the wholly archetypical exemplar of that hegemony.[11] Mr. Jafari falls within this category of masculinities.

Since masculinity is a culturally specific construction, answers about Middle Eastern masculinities should be sought in the cultures where they are shaped.[12] The ideal of masculinity in Muslim societies generally, and in Iran particularly, revolves around the institution of family and procreation; that is, a man is expected to marry, have a wife, and father a child. Maleeha Aslam writes, “The most central and almost universal expectation from the masculine gender is to be and to perform like a breadwinner. Men fall down the appropriate gender order if they fail to fit into this assigned gender role.”[13] According to Amanullah De Sondy, “Masculinity is constructed around the tenets of power, and the powerful needs a power base. In the lives of most Muslim men this locus has become the heterosexual family.”[14] Since homosexuality is not a topic of discussion or debate in countries like Iran, Asia Siraj’s words ring true that “the accommodation of ‘deviant’ identities is considerably more difficult …. In countries … where Islam predominates, the subject continues to be clouded in ignorance and intentional neglect. Indeed, the traditional and continued silence on the issue prevents many with homosexual feelings from identifying themselves publicly.”[15] In such societies, “coming out,” which S. Seidman defines as “the dramatic quality of privately and publicly coming to terms with a contested social identity” is more often than not accompanied with violence and disavowal from family and society.[16]

In Yousef and Farhad, the very fact that Yousef is afraid to “come out” to his family and when he does, is faced with violence and abandonment, confirms the rationale behind this imposed public silence and neglect in regard to representations of diverse human sexuality, particularly homosexuality. In his memoir, too, Mohammad Khordadian echoes the complexity of this fear and public silence. He writes, “By the age of nineteen, I was already beginning to realize the implications of having been born into a culture and religion with many restrictions on how, who, or when one should love, and a pervading intolerance towards the crossing of those lines.”[17] It takes Khordadian experiencing a painful marriage and distressing struggles in exile to be able to “come out” to his wife, family, and friends. Likewise, in his memoir, Arsham Parsi chronicles similar traumatic experiences. It is only in exile that he is able to tell his family the truth about his identity. Regarding violence against the LGBTQ community in Iran, Parsi touches upon the grave matter of the criminalization of homosexuality and the brutal executions of homosexuals as well. He writes that murdering a homosexual “bestowed blessings on those that inflicted these punishments for they were carrying out the will of God.”[18] He keeps questioning, “How does a person feel when they discover that their life is worth nothing to those that hold the power in their society?”[19] While Khordadian’s and Parsi’s families seem to be understanding, such tolerance cannot be overgeneralized or extended to all Iranian families. Although Khordadian and Parsi critique society for upholding traditional beliefs regarding homosexuality, and the state for exerting strict laws and punishments, in Yousef and Farhad, the authors focus on the family’s struggles to come to terms with Yousef’s homosexuality. Of course, the truth is, behind the family’s troubles in accepting their sons are such thoughts as “what will others think?” and “I do not want them to hang him up”, giving voice to the aforementioned traditional and political perspectives operating against the idea of homosexuals as human and homosexuality as a crime against the state.

In Yousef and Farhad, once Mr. Jafari becomes aware of Yousef’s homosexuality, he reacts in a way that reveals exerts his hegemonic power position immediately. Soon after confronting Yousef, Mr. Jafari strikes him across the face and degrades Yousef and Farhad’s poetic correspondences, calling them “filth.”[20] He physically eliminates his son from his life, tearing down posters and impetuously throwing Yousef’s belongings out into the street. In order to further assert his son’s subordinate position, Mr. Jafari humiliates him by throwing him out into the rain, thus solidifying his position as a dominant heterosexual male, as well as the patriarch of the family.

Figure 1: Panels from p. 9 of Yusuf and Farhad in Persian. Here, Mr. Jafari, who has just become aware of Yusuf’s relationship with Farhad, slaps Yusuf, condemns him for his correspondences with Farhad, and throws Yusuf out of his house.

This illustrates that to the heterosexual Mr. Jafari, homosexual masculinities fall at the bottom of the gender hierarchy and must be subordinated. To Mr. Jafari (and by extension to all who desire to punish homosexuals), his son’s sexual orientation is what is banished from hegemonic definitions of masculinity. De Sondy discusses the hierarchy of masculinities in Islam referring to the “prophetic tradition [that] places emphasis on the valiant and heroic form of Islamic masculinity above the more softer form of Islamic masculinity,” exemplifying that traditions are always “partially subjective to suit the needs and desires of individuals who choose as they desire.”[21] In fact, Mr. Jafari’s understanding of his son’s gayness falls along those same binary lines which are distorted with homophobic notions that consider male homosexuality as the softer type of masculinity parallel to femininity. As Siraj argues, “Heterosexist norms construct heterosexual masculinity based upon a static binary of male/female; the antithesis of this construct is, in effect, the homosexual male.”[22] Therefore, through his self-identification, the homosexual male (and female) challenges the dominant gender binary and disrupts hegemony.

Discussing male homosexuality in Iran, Najmabadi argues that what made homosexuality “a cultural assault and moral insult [in Iran] was … the shame of being kuni. The most derogatory word in the realm of sexuality, kuni literally means anal, but in Persian it exclusively means to be receptive of anal penetration.”[23] Given the story was allotted a mere 20 pages for the tale of events to unfold, Yousef is almost immediately painted as a passive-receptive participant in the relationship. Such expediency helps explicate why Mr. Jafari deems Yousef’s actions defamatory toward the family reputation as well as actions that are not worthy of a living person. Mr. Jafari’s attitude is mirrored in another encounter Yousef has when a passerby in a vehicle approaches him as he is wandering the streets as a homeless youth. The driver yells out to Yousef, “Hey, Good Looking! How much?” and when Yousef denies giving his attention to the driver, the driver angrily shouts out, “You filthy homo! You’re too good for me?!” Correspondingly, when his father initially throws Yousef out of his home, the neighborhood kids proceed to call him “faggot.”[24]

Figure 2: Panels from p. 11 of Yusuf and Farhad in Persian. After being thrown out of his house by his father, Yusuf is exposed to verbal harassment by the neighbors who call him a “faggot.”

These instances reify the lack of humanity and masculinity culturally associated with male homosexuality. The word that Soltani and Bendib use in the Persian text is “koonie” which harps on the passivity of one partner in same-sex relationships following the rhetoric of positionality. The importance of the word choice and limitation is emphasized in Khordadian’s memoir where he indicates, “Yet at the same time our language did not possess a single decent word for homosexual. A homosexual was a koonie, ‘one who gives arse’, and so I dared not speak of my love for this man who had captured my heart, because I did not want my parents to know or to suffer the shame of their youngest son being labeled in this derogatory way: a ‘koonie’.”[25] A conversation also comes up in Parsi’s memoir where he is asked if homosexuality means being a “sodomite.”[26] In another instance, Parsi is called a “faggot” which is a literal translation of the Persian word “koonie”.[27] The belief that the passive-receptive partner deserves condemnation is consistent with pre-modern Arabo-Muslim (also Greek) discourses on same-sex desire and relations which regard “a preference for the passive-receptive role in sexual intercourse … as the very antithesis of masculinity.”[28] Such discourses emphasize the importance of positionality; that is, the active-passive roles of the participants in the relationship.[29] In pre-modern Arabo-Muslim societies, the role of the passive-penetrated was perceived to be either feminine, diseased, pathological condition, or a great sin, as it was assumed the penetrated or passive partner enjoyed the act.[30] Traditional Arabic medical discourse, following the Greek, regarded a man who desired to be penetrated as being afflicted with a disease with prescribed remedies. This was considered an innate condition and was called ubnah. The individual afflicted with the disease was called ma’bun and was “perceived as being at odds with the ideal of masculinity.”[31] The belief in female-passive and male-active gender roles continues to this day as Najmabadi remarks that this gender-binary renders any fissures in hegemonic masculinity as effeminization.[32] While discussing his son’s homosexuality with Zahra and Miriam, not only does Mr. Jafari consider him feminine (passive-receptive partner), but also he distraughtly declares that his son has an incurable disease.[33]

Documenting the experiences of its characters as “abject outsiders,” Yousef and Farhad demonstrates how Yousef’s father continuously condemns his son’s membership in his family and even denies him human existence. Talking to Miriam and Zahra about his son, Mr. Jafari uses the past tense, completely dissociating himself from Yousef.[34] He considers Yousef’s sexuality and vivacious self-embracement as a prudent attempt to defame and detract from his and the family’s honor and thus an unbelievable embarrassment in his life, asking, “How could you be so selfish, my son?”[35] When Yousef attempts to commit suicide, it is an even additional impudence and disgrace to Mr. Jafari, who remarks while sitting in the hospital waiting room, “First dishonor, and now this…,” an implacable comment when read alongside the one made previously to Zahra and Miriam suggesting that Mr. Jafari’s life would be painless if his son was actually dead.[36] Mr. Jafari’s aloofness and the insensitivity of his comment prompts Miriam to remind him to be thankful that Yousef is not dead.[37] Yousef’s “coming out” and public act of subversion through suicide is what Mr. Jafari believes has brought shame and dishonor to the family. Not only does Mr. Jafari view Yousef as the passive-receptive partner in his relationship, he also perceives Yousef’s suicide attempt as a weak and thereby non-masculine act.[38]

In addition to physically undermining subordinated masculinities, a very important factor in maintaining hegemony for heterosexual, middle-class men is denying “cultural definition and recognition as alternatives” to different sexualities.[39] In Yousef and Farhad, this denial is enacted through Mr. Jafari’s repudiation of Yousef’s humanity and a refusal to name him. When asked, “Who is this?” while looking at the torn fragments of Yousef’s photograph, he answers that “He has no name.”[40] This dismissive attitude about naming and acknowledging Yousef’s identity persists throughout the graphic novel. Mr. Jafari’s disinterest in acknowledging Yousef’s identity is parallel to renouncing Yousef altogether from the Jafari family. In this way, Yousef is stripped from his familial and societal identity. While Mr. Jafari is the one who estranges Yousef from his family, he is also the one character who is recognized by his last name (denied first name) only and is addressed by the honorific “Mr.” throughout the graphic novel. Mr. Jafari’s lack of identity, however, has a contrastive effect which makes him to be easily generalized as a representation of Iranian hegemonic masculinity.

Calling normative narratives into question, Mr. Jafari’s prejudice and homophobia are set at odds with his brother Taymour’s acceptance and support for his nephew. Teymour becomes the voice of reason for Yousef’s father as he points out the hypocrisy in the fact that Mr. Jafari had premarital sex with the woman who became his wife because they were so in love. For Yousef’s uncle, true love is true love, whether between a man and a woman or a man and another man. Yousef’s uncle draws connections between Yousef’s parents’ premarital sex and Yousef’s homosexuality, questioning Mr. Jafari’s beliefs about the superiority of iteration of one love over the other.[41] The two Jafari brothers’ physical appearances are, however, juxtaposed significantly (disused fully in the next section). Taymour is tall, broad, muscular, wearing a full beard, whereas Mr. Jafari is short, thin, gaunt-looking, with a thin mustache. While Taymour is respectably employed at his own print-and-copy store and Internet café, Mr. Jafari drives a taxi which he parallels with a coffin, and which is frequently associated with lower-income class of the society. The contrast between the brothers illustrates that the relationship between the dominant and subordinate group is not a fixed one. In particular situations, this power structure changes. This is further crystalized in the scene where another irritated driver confronts Mr. Jafari and proceeds to call him a “faggot.”[42] This greatly insults and enrages Mr. Jafari and results in a physical confrontation between the two drivers. Scott’s argument resonates with the scene: “Not only does homosexuality define heterosexuality by specifying its negative limits, and not only is the boundary between the two a shifting one, but both operate within the structure of the same “phallic economy” –.”[43] Even though Mr. Jafari (like other men similar to him) holds and exercises power in the society for being heterosexual, at any point, he too might be exposed to subordination by other masculinities that are higher than his on the hierarchy. However, these subordinations do not mean that those who are subordinate submit to the power structure. As we witness in the memoirs and graphic novel, they challenge and disturb such power structures.

Figure 3: Panels from p. 33 of Yusuf and Farhad in Persian. This is when the tables are turned and another driver calls Mr. Jafari a “faggot.” This name-calling drives him mad and he treats the other driver violently.

Mr. Jafari’s reactions to Yousef’s “coming out” demonstrate how family and home shape men’s public image. The domestic sphere or the home has a fluid, yet pervasive relationship with the male body.[44] The private sphere, although confined within the walls of the home, influences gender performances. The male self must not only act as a son, husband, or father in the private space of the home, but also wrestle with being a politically, culturally, and professionally active figure in society.[45] Likewise, openness is potentially deadly. Like Yousef, not all Muslim homosexuals are received with love and acceptance. The act of identifying as a gay man means risking rejection, because of which Yousef is forced to find a new space to enact his masculinity and social status.[46] The identification with the LGBTQ community and potential rejection from a previous community may require the drawing of new boundaries between private and public spaces. Judith Butler notes that gender is not stable; rather, gender is the combination of body movements, gestures, and acts that all constitute an illusion of a gendered self.[47] Butler’s definition of gender as performative, and not a rigid or fixed identity, pushes for a better understanding of gender as an identity. In Yousef and Farhad, Yousef must answer for himself what it means to embody masculinity as a man and as his identity, and perform it. Yousef’s abrupt, yet forced departure from home suggests his departure from the traditional male role and rejection of conformity. Yousef’s father not only forces Yousef out of a private space where his sexuality is no longer secret, but he also crumbles Yousef’s poems and throws them outside of his home. While walking in the rain and receiving insults from gossiping neighbors, in his mind, Yousef notes a line from the well-known thirteenth century Persian poet Sa’di Shirazi: “I am in love with all of creation for all of creation emanates from the Creator.”[48] However, unable to retort vocally, Yousef chooses not to embrace the masculine emotion of anger. He chooses to cling to his own definition of masculinity while at the same time rejecting society’s identification of him as a “faggot”.

Figure 4: Panel from p. 18 of Yusuf and Farhad in Persian. This is the letter Yusuf leaves behind before his attempted suicide.

As a safer space, Yousef chooses the “third space of writing” where he can embrace his own definition of masculinity. The line of poetry that Yousef reads in his mind is suggestive of Yousef’s choice of love through Sufism rather than anger and resentment. Mr. Jafari’s denial and disavowal creates the possibility for Yousef to redefine and form his masculinity. Within the “third space of writing” in his letter to his family, he seeks forgiveness, engaging in a different masculine behavior—humility. Yousef’s departure from the domestic sphere reinforces his departure from his role as a child and offers him a way to reshape his masculinity. In this way, not only does Yousef challenge the hegemonic notions of masculinity, he also marks its boundaries as his own sexual identity is defined in relationship with that same hegemony.

Facial Hair and Bodily Form

To what extent does “the body, as the locus where experiments are played out and attitudes performed, both [replicates] the status quo and [provides] challenges to it[?]”[49] In Yousef and Farhad, whether the authors intentionally present stereotypical features or not, the characters’ outward appearances disclose much about their sexual orientation. Conventional beliefs dictating that a man who is gay should perform his sexual identity through make-up or hairstyle, form much of the public’s (mis)perception about the gay community. In his memoir, Parsi explains how while waiting to be interviewed by the United Nations High Commission for Refugees, another Iranian waiting asked him why he was there. When he responded that it was because of his sexual orientation, he was perceived to be a liar because he had not shaved and he was not wearing make-up.[50] This type of interaction harks upon stereotypical views and highlights the public’s misunderstanding of gay individuals and their outward appearance.

In Yousef and Farhad, the characters’ physical features, especially the use of “feminine” features for Yousef and Farhad, are exaggerated. One aspect of these illustrations is the use (or lack thereof) of beard and facial hair. Historically in the Muslim world, beards and mustaches have been viewed as the most visible characteristics of masculinity and male honor.[51] Soltani and Bendib’s unbearded characters, Yousef and Farhad, challenge notions of dominant masculinity. In contrast, the other males of the graphic novel sport facial hair, mustaches and beards. Bendib chooses to omit facial hair on his protagonists so as to draw on typical stereotypes and perceptions of homosexuality as feminine. On the other hand, a beard, a mustache, or both features adorn his older, masculine subjects’ faces.

Figure 5: Panel from p. 13 of Yusuf and Farhad in Persian. This is when Yusuf is wandering on the streets after being thrown out of his house. He is verbally harassed, spends time with stray dogs, and uses the state-run newspaper “Keyhan” as a blanket.

Interestingly enough, Mr. Jafari and the stranger who harasses Yousef on the street lack a beard. The stranger boasts a thin, well-groomed mustache whereas Mr. Jafari wears a thick, untrimmed mustache. As he is walking on the street, Yousef becomes the object of this much older man’s desire. When Yousef rejects his invitation, he calls Yousef a “filthy homo.”[52] Yusef’s clean-shaven face provokes the driver’s stereotypical understanding of male homosexuality. It is important to note that this older man’s comment is a reference to a certain population of heterosexual men who besides their heterosexual marriages and families, have tendencies for homosexual sex as well. Ironically, Mr. Jafari lacks what Yousef and Farhad lack: a beard. Mr. Jafari’s thick eyebrows and the taxi driver’s angular and linear facial features serve as physical representations of their restricted, linear views on homosexuality. These contrasting bodily representations are an apropos reminder of the discourse that to shape his own subjectivity, a heterosexual individual needs an “abject other.” Judith Butler astutely comments that, “The forming of a subject requires an identification with the normative phantasm of “sex,” and this identification takes place through a repudiation which produces a domain of abjection, a repudiation without which the subject cannot emerge.”[53] Yousef and Farhad’s unbearded presence places them in the category of “abject outsiders” through the repudiation of those whom the heterosexual father and stranger use to assert their own subjectivity.

In addition to their facial hair, Yousef and Farhad are characterized with long eyelashes, sensual, quasi-feminine lips, and fluid curves. Their long, slender fingers intertwine and embrace one another. In the scene where Yousef and Farhad rekindle their love under the nighttime sky, both gaze at the other with large, beautiful, narcissus-eyes during their night together. But Yousef and Farhad are not exclusively drawn with feminine physical traits, an attempt to break away with stereotypes. In their intimate night in the mountains, within their own private space, Yousef and Farhad are shown to embody broad muscular physiques, and hairy arms. Their fit, muscular bodies differ from the jolly, curvy, husky bodies of Yousef’s uncle, Taymour. Their bodies also differ from Yousef’s scrawny, angular father. However, Bendib does not zoom-in on the eyes or lips of his “masculine” men, rather, Mr. Jafari’s thick eyebrows and angular face are emphasized. The contrasting aesthetics of Yousef and Farhad and the heterosexual males of the story are an attempt to show the prevalent hierarchy within masculinities, to disclose the public’s stereotypical misperceptions of the gay community, and to break away from those conventional perceptions. Through image and text the authors emphasize that “both masculinity and femininity are learned performances, affected but not dictated by genetics and societal expectations, with as many nuances and meanings as there are individuals who adopt, embody, or redesign them.”[54]

Figure 6: Panel from p. 8 of Yusuf and Farhad in Persian. This is an image depicting the intimate moments between Yusuf and Farhad in the mountains. Here, they use symbolic religious and Sufi language.

Religion and Sufism

The relationship between religion and gender is interdependent, with religion at the male ego’s service, as Aslam notes.[55] However, in Soltani and Bendib’s graphic novel, religion is not portrayed as the problem or root of the issues the young gay men are having. For the authors, cultural norms, state laws, and familial expectations regarding male sexuality and masculinity are the key issue while religion, particularly Sufism, is seen as a potential solution. Soltani and Bendib’s narrative seeks to subvert heteronormative discourses about male sexuality through the use of Sufi discourse and religious symbolism.

Throughout Yousef and Farhad, allusions to, and imageries of, the twelfth hidden Imam in Shi’ism, Mahdi, abound.[56] Yousef’s movement between social spaces or states of being in relation to his community can be compared to Mahdi’s occultation. To draw these parallels, looking at Soltani and Bendib’s other graphic novel, Zahra’s Paradise, is necessary. In Zahra’s Paradise, Soltani and Bendib tell the story of a young man named Mehdi, gone missing after participating in the 2009 protests in Iran following Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s re-election to presidency, and of Mehdi’s mother and brother’s search for him. Though Mehdi’s (the character) occultation is slightly less concrete than that of Yousef’s since he is not actually present in the story, both are seeking “refuge” in response to personally targeted injustice. Mehdi’s mother Zahra, her Armenian friend, Miriam, and Yousef’s father are actually present in both novels, and it is in Zahra’s home that Yousef and Farhad begins. When Mr. Jafari relates his struggle with discovering his son’s sexuality to Zahra and Miriam at the beginning, he is unwilling to speak frankly about it, forcing the women to guess the source of his vexation. Once it is revealed that Mr. Jafari is grieving his son’s sexual identity, Miriam asks, “So he’s not an addict, not a thief and not a murderer…but worse than all of them combined?” to which Zahra replies, “Almost sounds like my murdered son, Mehdi….”[57] When Zahra mentions that the situation reminds her of her murdered son, Mr. Jafari says “your Mehdi may be dead, but lives inside you. Mine is alive, but he’s dead inside me.”[58] Here, Soltani and Bendib seem to be making a point about the way in which being homosexual in Iran is perceived. The authors adequately demonstrate the inanity of viewing homosexuality as worse than murder. Yousef has not harmed any individual by theft or violence, and yet he is like Mehdi, someone who stood against the state. So, Yousef is standing against the state and in danger of the same fate as Mehdi simply by being who he is. This idea is further supported when Mr. Jafari throws Yousef out of the house and rips a “One Love” poster down from his wall, drawing another parallel to the poster and music in Mehdi’s room and the shirt sporting the same design that Mehdi wore during the protests when he disappeared.[59] The descriptive terms used by Mr. Jafari to denote his son’s supposed “devious” act all focus on family shame and dishonor. At a later point in the story, after Yousef’s suicide attempt, Mr. Jafari gives him the money saved for his future wedding and tells him to “go find another country” after informing him that there are “no gays in Iran.”[60] This is an obvious jab at the comment made by former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, but also a statement about the ways in which “homosexual” and “Iranian” are seen as mutually exclusive identities.[61] Yet at no point does Mr. Jafari specifically use an Islamic reference or religious source to condemn Yousef’s love for another man, although he does refer to the fact that the state punishes gay men by hanging them from the crane.[62] Hence, the problem comes from culturally based gender constructions of masculinity and the theocratic state laws against diverse sexualities, and not an inherently religious adjuration of same sex love.

Soltani and Bendib audaciously utilize Sufi symbolism and metaphors to shine a positive light on Yousef and Farhad’s love for each other. In the scene where the two exchange a tender moment in the mountains, they reference the well-known medieval Persian Sufi poet Rumi and his master-beloved, Shams, as lovers.[63] The relationship between Rumi and Shams and the reference to them in the graphic novel hints at the Sufi philosophy of shahed-bazi which allows “the possibility of love between man and creator, and … accept(s) the likelihood of a beatific vision or of an experience leading to the presence of God.”[64] According to this Sufi philosophy, considering all God’s creatures as His emanations and contemplating their beauty, the individual is led on a spiritual path toward union with the divine. The beauty of God’s creations becomes the shahed, witness or testimony, to God’s beauty and love. While Soltani and Bendib might have this philosophy in mind, their view of Sufism is also in line with D. S. Ahmed’s argument that “Sufism glorifies contemplation and a passive-receptive attitude. The word ‘Islam’ itself has profound connotation of submission, acceptance and surrender – all resounding, stereotypically feminine attributes.”[65] It would follow then, that much like homosexuality, Sufism challenges the dominant discourses about strict religiosity, surrender, and acceptance.

In addition to the allusion to Imam Mahdi, Yousef and Farhad also make use of religiously charged terms such as “Kaaba” and “pilgrimage” in their declarations of love to one another.[66] Teymour also uses religious language and emphasizes the beauty of everything God creates. He tells Yousef after his suicide attempt that “we have enough martyrs” and that he should “practice resurrection.”[67] Eventually, Yousef is taken to Qom, a city with much religious significance in Iran, and given refuge with Farhad’s uncle, an ayatollah. Farhad describes his uncle as a “friendly fanatic” which evokes the question “a tolerant ayatollah? Isn’t that an oxymoron?” from Yousef.[68] We find the ayatollah working in his garden commenting on nature as part of God’s beautiful creation. In line with Sufi beliefs, this comment gives the impression that the ayatollah sees Yousef and Farhad, as well as their love for each other, as part of what God creates. Yousef is surprised by the ayatollah’s acceptance of his sexual orientation, yet his acceptance is indicative of Sufi teachings of love. Through love, the characters in Yousef and Farhad are able to find peace and acceptance. The ayatollah is associated with knowledge as he lives in Qom, the center of theological learning, but he also seeks love, and shows action by giving refuge to the young couple.

Graphic Novel as a Means of Subversion

Historically, the comic and graphic novel mediums have been shunned for depicting serious topics. There is a stigma surrounding the use of graphic novels, as they are believed to depict lighthearted subjects, mainly appealing to adolescents. Graphic novels have been stereotypically presented as “intellectually devoid fodder.”[69] However, there have also been a number of graphic novels which conveyed a serious message such as Maus, Art Spiegelman’s classic graphic novel which tells the story of a boy learning about his father’s experiences during the Holocaust. Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis is another example which “introduced personal biography to the form.”[70] While many scholars look down on the graphic novel as an inferior art form devoid of any intellectual fodder, it is gradually gaining recognition as an alternative for portraying evocative messages, due to the creative expression in literary form that primarily deals with the arrangement of images and words to emphasize points in a story, or to dramatize an idea.[71]

The use of the graphic novel medium is an interesting choice to depict the love story of Yousef and Farhad. Both the medium by which the story is told, and the story itself are unconventional, and draw parallels from each other, such that they force the reader to seek a different approach in understanding the struggles of the characters, the disavowal of homosexuality in Iran, the hierarchy of masculinities, and the lack of legitimacy that graphic novels are given in the world of academia. The story and medium encourage the acceptance of alternate forms of not only masculinities, but also writing styles. In Yousef and Farhad, a few elements of visual imagery particularly invite critical thinking. One such scene is the presence of a dog when Yousef is thrown out of his home and walks the neighborhood.[72] The dog is seen later again when Yousef rests at the bench.[73] In traditional Islam, dogs are considered impure and contact with them is to be avoided. It may be inferred that among his family Yousef’s newfound identity as a homosexual is equated to the impurities of a dog, and therefore has cast an obscene light on him, which is insupportable to his family. Furthermore, it can be interpreted that Yousef’s homelessness is a circumstance directly caused by the laws of the state, as is seen in the image of Yousef lying on the bench covered in Kayhan, a state-run newspaper, with the crescent moon and stars in the background sky.[74] These are but a few small examples found throughout the novel, but references like these make the graphic novel, contrary to popular belief, a notable method of storytelling as it forces the reader to be more analytical and conscientious of what is on the page in terms of visual cues and text, versus simply analyzing blocks of scholarly text, which is often done in academia.

Using graphic novels as non-traditional sources of information in higher education challenges the conventional hierarchical notions of appropriateness in academia.[75] Nevertheless, in the special case of homosexuality in Iran, it seems as though a nontraditional mode of storytelling fits the mood for portraying and celebrating the story of Yousef and Farhad, as the story of the LGBTQ community in Iran deserves recognition. Utilizing the graphic novel as their platform, the authors provide a combination of thoughtful images and key words that require the reader to use critical information literacy skills in deciphering the strong message that is being conveyed. Both topics of homosexuality in Iran as well as the stage of graphic novels have received much criticism for not living up to heteronormative standards that society has arbitrarily placed values on. Furthermore, both medium and subjects require the reader to question conformist methods and to appreciate the vast multitudes in differences of perspective that every writing medium as well as every lifestyle and person has to offer.

[1]Frederic Lagrange, “Homosexuality in Arabic Literature,” Imagined Masculinities: Male Identity and Culture in the Modern Middle East, ed. Mai Ghoussoub and Emma Sinclair-Webb (London: Saqi Books, 2006), 175.

[2]Amir Soltani and Khalil Bendib, Yousef and Farhad Struggling for Family Acceptance in Iran: The Story of Two Gay Men (OutRight Action International, 2015); Arsham Parsi and Marc Colburne, Exiled for Love: The Journey of an Iranian Queer Activist (Halifax: Roseway Publishing, 2015); and Jean Beaini and Mohammad Khordadian, For the Love of Mohammad: A Memoir (U.S.: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2014).

[3]The names of the protagonists might be of significance to our discussion in this paper. Yousef shares his name with Prophet Yousef (Joseph) who was one of Jacob’s twelve sons. In Islamic tradition, Yousef is the ideal of male beauty. However, Yousef’s male beauty and sexuality is contested as it is portrayed as fluid in Persian cultural productions throughout history. See Claudia Yaghoobi, “Yusef’s ‘Queer’ beauty in Persian Cultural Productions,” The Comparatist Journal 40, no.1 (Fall 2016): 245-266. Farhad is the name of the most important character in an ancient tragic Persian love story written by many poets including Nezami in his Khosrow and Shirin, which projects Farhad as the epitome of true and pure lover.

[4]See Raewyn W. Connell, Masculinities (CA: University of California Press, 1995).

[5]For a discussion of the relationship between homosexuals and heterosexuals see Clyde W. Franklin II, “‘Ain’t I a Man’? The efficacy of black masculinities for men’s studies in the 1990s?” in The American Black Male: His Present Status and His Future, ed. R. Majors and J. Gordon (Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1994).

[6]Judith Newton, “White Guys,” Feminist Studies 24, no. 3 (Fall 1998): 575-560.

[7]Joan W. Scott, “The Evidence of Experience,” Critical Inquiry 17, no. 4 (Summer, 1991): 773-797.

[8]Raewyn W. Connell, Gender and Power: Society, the Person, and Sexual Politics (CA: Stanford University Press, 1987), 185.

[9]Connell, Gender and Power, 185.

[10]Connell, Masculinities, 77.

[11]Connell, Masculinities, 79.

[12]See D. D. Gilmore, Manhood in the Making: Cultural Concepts of Masculinity (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1990) and Misogyny: The Male Malady (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001).

[13]Maleeh Aslam, “Gender Theory,” in Gender-Based Explosions: The Nexus between Muslim Masculinities, Jihadist Islamism and Terrorism (Tokyo: UNU Press, 2012), 85. Regarding the importance of establishing family in perception of masculinity, see also Marcia Claire Inhorn, The New Arab Man: Emergent Masculinities, Technologies, and Islam in the Middle East (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2012).

[14]Amanullah De Sondy, “Feminists’ Nonothering Hermeneutics,” in The Crisis of Islamic Masculinities (London, NY: Bloomsbury Publishers, 2015), 72-3.

[15]Asif Siraj, “On Being Homosexual and Muslim: Conflicts and Challenges,” in Islamic Masculinities, ed. Lahoucine Ouzgane (New York: Zed Books, 2006).

[16]S. Seidman et al., “Beyond the Closet? The Changing Social Meaning of Homosexuality in the United States,” in Sexuality and Gender, ed. C. L. Williams and A. Stein (Massachusetts: Blackwell, 2002), 427.

[17]Beaini and Khordadian, For the Love of Mohammad, 25.

[18]Parsi and Colborne, Exiled for Love, 13.

[19]Parsi and Colborne, Exiled for Love, 13.

[20]Soltani and Bendib, Yousef and Farhad, 7.

[21]De Sondy, “Introduction,” 10.

[22]Asif Siraj, “On Being Homosexual and Muslim,” 212.

[23]Afsaneh Najmabadi, Professing Selves: Transexuality and Same-Sex Desire in Contemporary Iran (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013), 138. I have used the spelling of the word ‘kuni’ or ‘koonie’ the way it has been spelled in various works.

[24]Soltani and Bendib, Yousef and Farhad, 8.

[25]Beaini and Khordadian, For the Love of Mohammad, 27.

[26]Parsi and Colborne, Exiled for Love, 24.

[27]Parsi and Colborne, Exiled for Love, 37.

[28]Khaled El-Rouayheb, “Pederasts and Pathics,” in Before Homosexuality in the Arab-Islamic World: 1500-1800 (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2005), 21.

[29]Janet Afary, Sexual Politics in Modern Iran (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 107.

[30]El-Rouayheb, “Pederasts and Pathics,” 16. See also Frederic Lagrange, “Homosexuality in Arabic Literature,” 171.

[31]El-Rouayheb, “Pederasts and Pathics,” 19-21.

[32]Afsaneh Najmabadi, Women with Mustaches and Men without Beards (CA: University of California Press, 2005), 3.

[33] Soltani and Bendib, Yousef and Farhad, 4.

[34] Soltani and Bendib, Yousef and Farhad, 2.

[35] Soltani and Bendib, Yousef and Farhad, 4.

[36] Soltani and Bendib, Yousef and Farhad, 13.

[37] Soltani and Bendib, Yousef and Farhad, 13.

[38] Yet, Yousef is not the only character that Mr. Jafari subordinates. In the same scene in the hospital waiting room, he confronts Farhad during his attempt to visit Yousef. He accuses the young man of corrupting his son, calling him a “bastard” and a “faggot” and asserting that he has “no rights” before harshly dismissing him with a threat of further violence (Yousef and Farhad, 13).

[39]Connell, Gender and Power, 186.

[40]Soltani and Bendib, Yousef and Farhad, 2.

[41]Soltani and Bendib, Yousef and Farhad, 15.

[42]Soltani and Bendib, Yousef and Farhad, 20.

[43]Scott, “The Evidence of Experience,” 779.

[44]Joanna De Groot, “The Bureaucrat, the Mulla and the Maverick Intellectual ‘at Home’: Domestic Narratives of Patriarchy, Masculinity and Modernity in Iran, 1880–1980,” in Raffaella Sarti, ed., Men at Home, Special Issue of Gender & History 27, no.3 (2015): 791–811. See also Joanna de Groot, “Brothers of Iranian Race”: Manhood, Nationhood and Modernity in Iran 1870-1914,” in Masculinities in Politics and War: Gendering Modern History, ed. Stefan Dudink, Karen Hagemann and John Tosh (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), 137-56.

[45]de Groot, “The Bureaucrat, the Mulla and the Maverick Intellectual ‘at Home’,” 795.

[46]de Groot, “The Bureaucrat, the Mulla and the Maverick Intellectual ‘at Home’,” 794.

[47]Judith Butler, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory,” Theatre Journal 40, no. 4 (December 1988): 519-531.

[48]Soltani and Bendib, Yousef and Farhad, 8. This line is from Sa’di’s Ghazal number 13, which is considered to be his most mystical (Sufi) line. It refers to the belief in love mysticism where all creations are emanations of the divine and through contemplating and loving the creations, even if they are subversive, a Sufi or individual will be guided to divine beauty and love.

[49]Anthony Shay and Jennifer Fisher, ed. “Introduction,” in When Men Dance: Choreographing Masculinities Across Borders (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 9.

[50]Parsi and Colborne, Exiled for Love, 1-2.

[51]El-Rouayheb, “Pederasts and Pathics,” 26.

[52]Soltani and Bendib, Yousef and Farhad, 9.

[53]Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (London, NY: Routledge, 2014), 3.

[54]Shay and Fisher, “Introduction,” 12.

[55]Aslam, “Gender Theory,” 73.

[56]Shortly after the death of his father, the twelfth Imam, also called Mahdi, or “the one who is guided by Allah”, is said to have retreated into protective hiding or occultation (al-Ghayba). This hiding represented a withdrawal of Allah’s guidance from humanity as a result of the injustice in the world at that time, and when the end of time arrives and Mahdi is revealed again, it is the Shi’i belief that with him will come a time of perfect peace, justice, and rebirth.

[57]Soltani and Bendib, Yousef and Farhad, 3.

[58]Soltani and Bendib, Yousef and Farhad, 3.

[59]Soltani and Bendib, Yousef and Farhad, 8; Soltani and Bendib, Zahra’s Paradise (New York: Macmillan, 2011), 95, 126, and 188.

[60]Soltani and Bendib, Yousef and Farhad, 16.

[61]See www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-483746/We-dont-gays-Iran-Iranian-president-tells-Ivy-League-audience.html.

[62]Soltani and Bendib, Yousef and Farhad, 16.

[63]Some scholars believe that Rumi and Shams were actually lover-beloved while others deny such a relationship.

[64]Dror Ze’evi, “Morality Wars: Orthodoxy, Sufism, and Beardless Youth,” in Producing Desire: Changing Sexual Discourse in the Ottoman Middle East, 1500-1900 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 81.

[65]D. S. Ahmed, “Gender and Islamic Spirituality: A Psychological View of ‘Low’ Fundamentalism,” in Islamic Masculinities, ed. L. Ouzgane (London and NY: Zed Books, 2006), 18-20.

[66]Soltani and Bendib, Yousef and Farhad, 6.

[67]Soltani and Bendib, Yousef and Farhad, 14.

[68]Soltani and Bendib, Yousef and Farhad, 18.

[69]Steven Hoover, “The Case of Graphic Novels,” in Communications in Information Literacy 5, no. 2 (2012): 174-186.

[70]Jeremy J. Llorence, “Exploring Graphic Literature as a Genre and its Place in Academic Curricula” in McNair Scholars Journal 15. 1 (2011): 30-40.

[71]Hoover, “The Case of Graphic Novels,” 178.

[72]The dogs are present in Zahra’s Paradise where they are killed and thrown into the river, foreshadowing the incident which happen later to the youth, including Mehdi, during the protests. This symbolism refers to the fact that the subversive youth in Iran who challenge conventions are viewed as impure dogs that need to be eradicated.

[73]Soltani and Bendib, Yousef and Farhad, 9.

[74]Soltani and Bendib, Yousef and Farhad, 9.

[75]J. B. Carter, “Comics, the Canon, and the Classroom,” in Teaching Visual Literacy: Using Comic Books, Graphic Novels, Anime, Cartoons, and More to Develop Comprehension and Thinking Skills, ed. N. Grey and D. Fisher (Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press, 2008), 47-59.