Christina Moghadam Lecture on Iran
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Christina Moghadam Lecture on Iran “Studying The Land of the Sophy” given by Dr. Abbas MIlani Hamid & Christina Moghadam Director in Iranian Studies Cantor Arts Center Stanford University October 17, 2006 The study of Iran in the West was born of curiosity and con- flict. The purpose of Herodotus in his Histories, in addition to saving the great deeds of great men from the oblivion of time, was to explicate the “cause of hostilities”1 between the Greeks and the Persians. Long years of a beastly and bloody war had created in him the curiosity to know the “Other.” zzz In the Bible, another pivotal part of the West- the Islamic regime. If in Iran, memories of Brit- ern canon, references to Persia also abound.2 In ish and Russian colonial exploits, and of US sup- the book of Ezra, the Lord of the Old Testament port for the fallen Shah, helped fuel the fires of speaks through the proclamations of Cyrus, the xenophobia, in America the lingering resentment King of Persians, who declares, “The Lord God resulting from the hostage crisis, augmented in of Heaven hath given me all the Kingdoms of the subsequent years by evidence of the Islamic Repub- earth, and he has charged me to build him a house lic’s involvement in assaults on the US—from the in Jerusalem.” Beirut barracks to the Kobar towers—made Iran The house was built; but in the book also roams the “darkness palpable” on the horizon. the ghastly specter of Hamon, of the race of Agog. This duality parallels a schism that splits the He was a vizier, and his mind and heart were poi- soul of Iran. While in Persia’s days of imperial soned by rancor and hate. But fortunately, there glory, the magnanimity of Cyrus stood in con- was Esther too, the queen of the ruling king, and trast to the malignity of Hamon, since the Arab she thwarted the demonic designs of the vizier and invasion of the seventh century, Iranians have 1 saved her fellow Jews from genocide, giving rise to been torn between the values of their Zoroastrian, the feast of Purim. Manichean, and Mithraic past, and the new Is- For over twenty-five hundred years, Iran—or lamic temperament drawn from the ethos of the Persia as Herodotus called it—has been, inter- Arabian peninsula--what Ibn Khaldun called the mittently, the West’s shadow and the face of the desert temperament or Asabiyah.4 The experience “Other,” or its ally and bridge to the enigmas of of a Persian kingdom, outwardly full of pomp and the Orient. A few years ago, as the world embraced power but inwardly frail and corrupt, falling to Is- the frenzy of the new millennium, the two aspects lamists armed with little more than their faith took of Iran were particularly apparent to discerning place twice in Iranian history: once in the seventh eyes. The concept of millennium, and the belief century, with the Arab invasion of Iran, and then in a thousand year cycle of history, as well as such again in 1979, with the Islamic revolution. But elemental ideas as heaven and hell, Satan and an- old cultures invariably find ways to survive, and gels, messiahs and virgin births, resurrection and thus Shiism arose, according to the French scholar reckoning, and even the significance of dreams Henry Corbin, as “the Iranian Islam,” the assertive as a window to the will of the divine were gifts of reincarnation of ancient Persian ways and values the Persian prophet, Zartusht (or Zarathustra), to in an Islamic guise.5 The paisley, the most recur- the common heritage of humanity.3 The pervasive ring and global of Iranian aesthetic designs, is said presence of these ideas in all Abrahamic religions, to be the metaphor of this duality. It is Zarathus- and even in some of the secular cultures of the tra’s heavenly cedar tree, bent but not broken by world, is a powerful reminder of the confluence, the weight of Islam.6 It is a metaphor of the defi- not the clash, of civilizations. ance and submission, resilience and resistance that have, since the time of Herodotus, been seen as the But in the same early days of the new cen- defining characteristics of Iran, and a key to its tury and the new millennium, the West, particular- historic survival. ly the United States, grew more and more alarmed about the increasingly assertive foreign policy of Herodotus describes the Persians as a people known for their extreme fondness for wine,7 and At the end of the Crusades, the Council of Vienna for their aversion to lies. For Persians, he tells us, “recommended that chairs of Oriental languages the most “disgraceful thing…is telling lies.”8 But be established at five European universities.”10 The Shiite Islam is characterized as much by tagiyeh as tradition of Oriental Studies was thus born and by its ban on wine. Shiism has been, throughout with it the temptation to include Iran in the larger its history, the faith of a minority, and it has de- rubric of Oriental or even Islamic studies. veloped at least two self-protective and self-fulfill- During the Crusades, a character that left an ing concepts. The first is the idea that the pious indelible mark on Western consciousness was Has- are invariably a minority, and the second is tagiyeh, san Sabah, often called the Old Man of the Moun- the art of the white lie to save the pious, of a dis- tain. His fortifications lay atop a mountain in Al- simulation similar to Jesuitical equivocation. As a amut, not far from Tehran. He was the leader of result of these conflicting cultural forces, finding the Isma’ilis, a sect of Shiism, and the fervor of the real meaning in Iranian discourse is not unlike this sect’s faith, hard to fathom even for the West- Freudian dream analysis, where circumlocution, ern Crusaders, gave rise to the myth of the Assas- condensation, and conflation, render the narrative sins, the Hashashins. Such was their fearlessness, densely suggestive, and never direct. And since, as their joyful embrace of death, their celebration of Borges suggests, censorship is the mother of meta- martyrdom, that Westerners concluded, wrongly as phor, years of oppression have added yet another scholars have since shown, that the Isma’ilis must layer of metaphoric sheen to the discursive prac- have been, in their moments of violent valor, hap- tices of Iran. In architecture, houses developed a pily hallucinating with the help of hashish. Hun- pattern defined by a stark contrast between the an- dreds of songs, fables, myths, and even operas were darun, and the birun, the outer façade and the in- dedicated to offering exaggerated, often altogether ner sanctum, while social and linguistic praxis was fabricated accounts of Hassan and his followers’ wrought from contrasting strains of zaher and bat- exploits.11 en, the overt and the covert. Even the city of Teh- 2 ran, for more than two hundred years the capital of The singularity of Iran’s role and character as a the country, is said to owe its name to its practice country of the Islamic Orient became most evident of stealth. An element of furtiveness, historians when the West was most endangered by Muslim tell us, seemed encoded in the very etymology of forces. During the sixteenth and seventeenth cen- the word Tehran. Caught in the crosscurrents of turies, when the Ottoman Turks were triumphantly history and marauding tribes, in the thirteenth marching through Europe and had conquered more century, the inhabitants of the village known for than half of the continent, it was Safavid Iran— its rich verdure built their houses underground, newly and forcefully converted to Shiism—that not only broke ranks with the Islamic world, but in and thus the name “Tahran” or “under-grounder.”9 Only those trained in the semiotics of the Iranian fact opened a second front against the Ottomans, culture can find “the word within the word” of nar- inviting a number of major European nations to ratives in Iran. establish military bases in the Persian Gulf. As the troglodytes of Tehran were building European consciousness during the time of their safe havens, the next phase in the study of Renaissance was well aware of this important reali- 12 Iran experienced its actual emergence as an aca- ty. The “most popular secular book in circulation” 13 demic discipline; and it was still characterized by of its time, Travels of Sir John Mandeville, though both curiosity and conflict—this time, the conflict controversial in terms of whether its author actu- of the Crusades. As early as the twelfth century, ally ever traveled outside his village in England, works of Iranian scholars and thinkers like Farabi nevertheless demonstrates that there was a sense at and Ibn Sina (Avicenna) were rendered into Latin the time that Persia, the land of mystery and maj- by Gerard of Cremona. Roger Bacon, the earli- esty, had an identity different from the rest of the est herald of modernity, was clearly aware of these Muslim Middle East. This awareness is even evi- thinkers. European scientists were also building on dent in Shakespeare, where Ottoman Turks pres- the pioneering work of astronomers such as Biruni. ent a haunting danger—a danger only Othello, The role of Iranian thinkers in the evolution of the the Moor, could defeat-- while Persian invariably 14 European Renaissance remains to be fully studied. refers to something opulent and urbane. The dualism of image and reality reached its nineteenth century, and as US interests began to zenith in the 19th century, when the advent of expand globally, scholarly interest in Iran also colonialism gave rise to a practical disparagement began to emerge.