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 From Brian to RasoolI became so Iranianized that I became a Moslem at the Tehran Rotary Club By Brian H. Appleton July 17, 2002 The Iranian Since the age of 16 in 1966 until the present day I have been a lover of Persian culture and language. I went to Iran for the first time when I was 16 as the houseguest of an old aristocratic family who could trace both sides of their family back 1,000 years and showed me titles and land grants which had been given to their ancestors by Nader Shah. I went to school in Rome for five years with one of their sons who started teaching me Farsi in exchange for English but he also taught me much, much more than just the language. He taught me about the proverbs, the honorifics and taroff, the poems, the cuisine, the jokes, the Mullah Nasrudin stories, the sweets and candies and confections like the pistachios and dates and sun flower seeds and a whole Persian world view: The generosity of Persian friendship, the elaborate system of good manners, how to show respect to elders, to statesmen, how to recognize the humanity in everyone from the humblest to the greatest. He taught me many things like giving other people presents when you had had some great success as a way of sharing your good fortune and not making them jealous of it. Next thing you know, I found myself bickering over who should go through the door first or who should pay the restaurant bill. The concept of dividing up the bill evenly between us was unthinkable and un-Iranian. Over the course of time I figured out that although it took longer, that by having each person take turns paying the entire restaurant bill that things eventually evened out, the same as dividing up each bill but with two added advantages: Each of us got to play the big shot in public and this arrangement tended to help sustain friendships because in order to get paid back you had to keep going out to dinner with the same people. This was a completely foreign language in itself to your average American.  The Iranians had a wonderful quality which having grown up in Italy,
I had also seen in the Italian culture, which was the appreciation of the individual
with all his eccentricities, strengths and flaws, the great human interest that people
took in what made an individual interesting or amusing or unique. There was no total
reliance on technology, or trends or fashion or the opinions of others or the size
of someone's wallet or car or house to define who they were. Although many of the newly wealthy cared about fashion and street addresses and club membership, when I went to live in Iran in 1974, I went into a world where not only the wealthy would shower a visitor with generosity but even the poorest individual would try to give you the shirt off his back or cook for you his last chicken. It was a world where rich and famous people spent as much time talking about the latest misadventure of one of their servants or trying to get their servant married off properly or trying to help him earn some extra money by finding him extra jobs working a friend's party or at a government function, as they spent time talking about their own children, friends and affairs. I found a world where the neighborhood car washer who lived in the street, was someone everybody knew and gave gifts to on Aid-e-Gorban. I never saw a beggar in that Iran. No matter how poor a person was, he would be selling something even if it was only pencils or gerdou. I found a world where family elders would still help settle the marital disputes of their children and nephews and nieces. I found a world where everyone was in charge and no one was a subordinate which made organizing anything even something as simple as the tenants of a six unit apartment building trying to collect the money to buy another tank of heating fuel almost impossible and yet it was a world where humanity was the measuring stick. I learned the meaning: "What is possible everywhere else in the world is impossible in Iran, but what is impossible everywhere else in the world is possible in Iran." I could give many examples but two will suffice. My boss's younger brother, who was about 18, got arrested one night for being drunk and disorderly at the Pars American Club ultimately getting into a fist fight with the local policeman and throwing him into the swimming pool until reinforcements arrived. I was asked by my boss to go down to the police station and see what it would take to get his brother released. This was my first day on the job and never having dealt with the police in Iran, I was a bit nervous about the outcome and besides I did not particularly admire his brother's behavior to begin with. On my way by taxi, I began to fabricate a story for "Tony" which would appeal to the Iranian sensibility. I explained to the chief of the police station that, "Tony" had gotten a little carried away last night with the partying because he had just become engaged to be married to an Iranian girl whose parents had consented. In fact "Tony" actually did end up marrying an Iranian girl but several years later. The police chief upon hearing this explanation seemed to be satisfied and sympathetic. So I took the next venture which was to ask him what I could do to obtain his release from jail. The police chief called in the policeman who had been hit and thrown in the pool by "Tony" and told me to ask him what I could do. The policeman listened politely to my explanation of "Tony's" behavior and said then in a very modest and friendly way, he showed me his torn uniform and said that since he had to pay for his own uniform that if I could just pay for the repair of his uniform which was probably less than $10 that he would be satisfied provided of course that "Tony" didn't get into anymore fights. And so I left with "Tony" next to me in my taxi that very afternoon which was not the outcome I had expected.  Can you imagine what would have happened to an Iranian
who had gotten drunk in some private club in the USA, struck a policeman and through
him in the swimming pool back in 1974? He would probably still be serving time in
jail.The other story I want to tell is how one of the supervisors of the American corporation for which I worked was rear ended by an Iranian workman on his motorcycle one morning on the way to work. The American supervisor had been put in jail not the guilty party who had rear ended his car and who was driving his motorcycle without a license. I understood by this time that the police other than the highest ranking ones considered themselves to be working class as well and they always seemed to favor whoever was poorer rather than whose fault it was. The American did not understand this unwritten unspoken concept at all and of course he didn't understand a word of Farsi either even though he had lived there for years so his reaction was to scream and yell and bang on the walls of his cell and make gigantic threats about what his Embassy was going to do about this injustice when he got out of jail. By this time I had learned the routine. I asked the judge how much the repair bill on the motorcycle was going to be and when he told me some modest some like $150 or $200 I started to hand it over to the motorcycle driver but I had one condition that I addressed to the judge and to the policemen present. My one condition was that they keep the loud mouthed American supervisor for a few days rather than turning him loose immediately. They had no problem with my request. This is a true story, one of many I want to tell your subscribers. I became so Iranianized over the course of the next 5 years that I became a Moslem at the Tehran Rotary Club in the presence of the late Foreign Minister Khalatbari, late Prime Minister Manouchehr Eghbal's younger brother and many other dignitaries of the Shah's government and the clergyman presiding over the ceremony was Shah's official Imam Jomeh. It was in the local papers and I still have copies of the articles and photographs from that occasion. I adopted the pseudonym Rasool Aryadust on that occasion. In addition I became a very good friend of Professor Parvin Ansary, who is a film producer and director who lives in Rome and was good friends with the lates: Fellini, Di Sica, Vittorio Gazman, and still live Sofia Loren and many other Italian actors, directors and producers such as: Antonioni, Visconti, Bartolucci as well as Iranians such as Kimiavi, Abassi, and many more. Khanoum-e-Parvin put me in two of her films in Iran which both the Italian and Iranian National TV and Radio companies helped to subsidize.  I played the role of Robert Shirley in one of the films
set in the time of Shah Abbas. I met the then current TV starlet "Atash"
in that film and acted with her sometimes in my role or more often as the double
of her Italian husband in the film, because the real life actor couldn't ride a horse
or row a boat or any of those manly things. We even had use of the Shah's horses
for one of the scenes in the film. Also, a role was given to Naghshineh in this film,
who later went on to become the Daie Jan Napoleon of the TV series which was adapted
from Iraj Pezeshkzad's novel. Our film:"The Travels of Pietro Della Valle",
went on to win a gold medal at the Nice Documentary Film Festival that year.I have photos of all these people and of the filming as well as a complete copy of that film dubbed in Italian which I would like to share with the Nostalgia section of your website. In our second film I got to know Shohreh Aghdashlou, who was wonderful and fun to work with and I had the incredible experience of re-introducing myself to her backstage after a production of "Our Share of Father's House" in September 2001, at a college campus theatre in Northern California after we had not seen each other since 1977 or '78 in Iran.
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