Recovering Asia's Lost West

AFMA Paper／AFMA報告 Recovering Asia’s Lost West Iran’s Asian Connections in the Realm of Sport H. E. CHEHABI Ⅰ . Introduction Ⅱ . Wrestling Ⅲ . Polo Ⅳ . The Asian Games Ⅴ . Conclusion I. Introduction One of the inconsistencies of contemporary geopolitical nomenclature is that the continent of Asia seems to have lost its West. In North America and Europe one speaks of East Asia, Southeast Asia, South Asia, Central Asia, but almost never of West Asia. It is often forgotten that Asia extends all the way to the city of Istanbul, the world’s only major city which is located on two continents; indeed, driving through European Istanbul, one is directed to the two bridges that link the two parts of the city by signs pointing to “Asia.” And yet, in the United States the geographic area covered by the Association for Asian Studies does not include anything west of Pakistan, an area that is covered by the Middle Eastern Studies Association. The term “Middle East” was coined by the American naval strategist Alfred 303 Recovering Asia’s Lost West: Iran’s Asian Connections in the Realm of Spor（t Chehabi） 31-2_中東学会.indb 303 2016/03/15 16:43:22 Thayer Mahan in 1902 to designate the area between Arabia and India, which in his mind was centered on the Persian Gulf [Mahan 1902]. Mahan’s article was reprinted in The Times and followed in October by a twenty-article series entitled “The Middle Eastern Question,” written by the British journalist, historian, and diplomat Sir Ignatius Valentine Chirol (1852-1929). Chirol expanded the definition of Middle East to include “those regions of Asia which extend to the borders of India or command the approaches to India.” In the course of World War I, the term “Middle East” was adopted by the British government to designate those regions of the Ottoman Empire, essentially the area south of Anatolia, that were to become “national” states for Arabs, Jews, and Armenians under British tutelage [Renton 2007]. In the late 1930s, the British established the “Middle East Command,” based in Cairo, for their military forces in the region. It was after World War II that the term “Middle East” gained broader usage in Europe and the United States, with the Middle East Institute founded in Washington, D.C. in 1946 and the Middle Eastern Studies Association (MESA) founded in 1966. The term “Middle East” has been criticized for being Eurocentric, reflecting a compartmentalization of the world that reflects Western strategic concerns, but the construct has been internalized by indigenous scholars and policy makers of the area, who now routinely speak of sharq al-awsaṭ in Arabic, khāvar-e miyāneh in Persian, Orta Doğu in Turkish, and ha-mizrach ha-tichon in Hebrew. And there is indeed a certain cultural unity to this area based on Islam and the Arabic language, which is common to all states except Turkey, Iran, and Israel. Turkey has long-standing ties to much of the Arab world, having together constituted the Ottoman Empire; Iran became connected with the Arab world after the Muslim conquest in the seventh century; and Israel is a relatively recent creation in which at least a fifth of the population speaks Arabic.(1) One could therefore argue that while it is true that “the Middle East” is a Eurocentric concept, so is “Asia,” which, after all, was defined by the ancient Greeks and not by the peoples of Asia themselves.(2) So why insist that “West Asia” is preferable to “Middle East”? The reason is that the term “Middle East” erases historical, linguistic, and cultural continuities in the contacts between the peoples of West Asia and the rest of the continent. In this article I illustrate these connections and continuities by drawing attention to athletic practices that can be found in the various regions of Asia—from the East coast of the Mediterranean to the West cost of the Pacific Ocean. For obvious geographic reasons the West Asian area most closely connected to AJAMES no.31-2 2015 304 31-2_中東学会.indb 304 2016/03/15 16:43:22 the rest of Asia is the Iranian Plateau, which borders on Central Asia in the northeast and on South Asia in the southeast. Iran has been connected to East Asia, specifically China, since ancient times by the Silk Road.(3) To give but two examples: when Muslim armies overran the Sasanian Empire in the middle of the seventh century AD, the son of the last pre-Islamic Persian emperor, Peroz III, fled to China and entered the service of the Tang dynasty; his descendants adopted the family name Li. In the late thirteenth- century China and Iran were all part of the Mongol empire, the largest the world had ever seen. Within this empire unprecedented cultural interchanges took place, one result being that even today human figures on Persian miniatures have East Asian facial features [Allsen 2001]. In the twentieth century, the Japanese victory over Russia in the war of 1905 sent shockwaves through all of Asia [Kowner 2007], including Iran, where the outcome was hailed by progressive forces in the constitutional revolution of 1906, who argued that what had allowed an Asian power to defeat a European one was that Japan was the only Asian power with a constitutional government whereas Russia was the only European power without it. Admiration for Japan was such that an Iranian poet wrote an epic in praise of the Japanese emperor titled Mikādonāmeh, ‘the Book of the Mikado’,(4) using the same poetic forms as the Shāhnāmeh, ‘Book of Kings’ by Abolqāsem Ferdowsi, a work considered to be Iran’s national epic. The successful Iranian revolution in turn inspired some of the Chinese revolutionaries of 1911 who followed events in West Asia very closely [Wang 2010]. The Iranian and Indian cultural spheres have common origins in ancient times, and exchanges between them have existed since time immemorial. The Muslim conquest of India after the eleventh century intensified these contacts when Muslim rulers in India adopted the Persian language for official purposes.(5) For this reason the commonalities between West and South Asia are better known and have been the objects of more numerous studies.(6) Modern Persian, a language born in Central Asia, varieties of which now have official status in three countries (Iran, Afghanistan, Tajikistan), was a pre-modern Asian lingua franca [Fragner 1999]. Two examples will suffice to illustrate this: when the Mongol Khan wrote a letter to the Pope in 1246 asking him to submit to his power, he wrote it in Persian [Pelliot 1922/23],(7) and when Portuguese missionaries visited Tibet, they communicated with the Tibetans in the same language [Didier 1996]. My aim here is not to present an exhaustive account of the cultural contacts between the Persian 305 Recovering Asia’s Lost West: Iran’s Asian Connections in the Realm of Spor（t Chehabi） 31-2_中東学会.indb 305 2016/03/15 16:43:22 lands and the rest of Asia. More modestly, I will use two athletic practices to illustrate how Persian traditions are embedded in a wider Asian context. These two practices are wrestling, a popular amusement, and polo, an elite pastime. I will end with a short discussion of the Asian Games as a contemporary manifestation of an “Asia” that begins at the shores of the Mediterranean Sea. II. Wrestling Wrestling is probably the most universal of all sports, and there are very few cultures and countries that do not have at least one indigenous version of it. There are three Persian terms relating to it that have spread throughout much of Asia, they are the words koshti (wrestling) and pahlavān (hero, champion), and the name Rostam, the mythical hero of the Shāhnāmeh. First, let us look at the trajectory of the word that is variously rendered as koshti, kosti, kushti, or kusti. It originally denoted a kind of belt or girdle in the Persian of northeastern Iran,(8) and the original meaning survives in the name of the sacred girdle that observant Zoroastrians, adherents of Iranians’ main pre-Islamic religion, tie around their waists (Fig. 1) [Stausberg 2004]. In Persian the verb “to wrestle” is rendered as koshti gereftan, ‘seizing the belt,’ and a wrestler is called koshtigir, ‘belt seizer.’(9) This means that the original form of wrestling in Iran was a form of belt wrestling, in which contestants tie belts or shawls around their waists, seize their opponent’s, and attempt to throw him to the ground to gain victory. This is one of the three basic forms of wrestling into which the vast majority of the world’s local and regional styles can be divided—the other two being a contest where one athlete tries to make his adversary fall down or touch the ground with any part of the body other than the feet, and a contest which continues on the ground and in which victory is achieved by pinning the adversary to the ground, rather like the modern freestyle variety. Belt wrestling is very common around the world. In Europe, Icelandic Glíma and Swiss Schwingen come to mind, and in Asia examples can be found from ancient Mesopotamia all the way to contemporary East Asia, areas connected by the Silk Road. A little statuette dating from 2600 BC and kept in the Baghdad Museum shows two Sumerian belt wrestlers (Fig. 2). AJAMES no.31-2 2015 306 31-2_中東学会.indb 306 2016/03/15 16:43:22 Fig. 1: The Zoroastrian kusti Fig. 2: Sumerian wrestlers Fig. 3: Sasanian silver cup A Sasanian silver cup from northeastern Iran dating from the seventh century and depicting various amusements (located at the Sackler Museum in Washington D.C.) clearly shows two belt wrestlers engaged in a bout (Fig.

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