Reasserting
the truth
Iranology is alive
November 3, 2003
The Iranian
With a big smile he wished me congratulations.
Shirin Ebadi had just won the Nobel Prize for Peace on the last
day of
a weeklong meeting of Iran specialists. The man who rejoiced at
the news even more than the women who were there was one of a dozen
participants from Iran attending the conference of the European
Center for Iranian Studies, an event that is held once every four
years in a different place.
This year's choice was the small
town of Ravenna, Italy, which houses, apart from spectacular mosaics
in some of the earliest churches erected on European soil, a branch
of the University of Bologna on a street adjacent to a double piazza
complete with outdoor cafes.
The conference was arranged in four
sections devoted to ancient, middle (i.e. Sasanian, Sogdian etc.),
classical and contemporary, with about 300 speakers scheduled to
hold talks on a host of subjects related to Iran. And the list
of subjects seems to grow all the time, notwithstanding the pirates
who help themselves at will to pages torn out of volumes and volumes
of Persian culture.
There was a sizable proportion of last-minute defections, most
of them from Iran and from Tajikistan (and a few from Russia),
primarily those whose expenses had been promised but never paid
out, due to the caprices of a few bureaucrats at Miras Farhangi.
In the case of a country like Tajikistan, which its Soviet-drawn
borders have reduced to
a land
without major
resources,
it was
to be expected (though caring Iranians could contribute perhaps
to the participation of fellow upholders of Persian culture.)
But in the case of the Iranians, their travel expenses would not
have
amounted to the pocket money of a wealthy mulla or of his bazaari
friends.
The pattern of promising and reneging on contracts and
expenses to scholars and archeologists has become familiar by now,
not only with respect to applicants from Iran. Scholars and institutions
of other countries are also affected by promises withdrawn inexplicably
for reasons that at best have to do with unfounded suspicion, and
at worst with petty corrupt officials.
Many of the Iranians who
turned up had dipped into their pockets to dish out an amount equivalent
to one year's salary, to pay for the trip, for they know they cannot
progress well without meaningful exchange with other scholars.
Nor did they pay any attention to the presence
of a big man with a beard who roamed through the halls without
ever attending a lecture and who seemed to be there for the purpose
of stalking participants from Iran and to report on their activities
there. A telling example of opposing factions at odds in Iran.
On the
one hand are those who are keen to study their heritage and to
draw edifying lessons, and on the other are those who ignore or
much worse, denigrate their heritage for their immediate gains.
Their numbers are dwindling, but the problems they cause increase
in proportion.
One participant who was asked, upon application
for his exit visa, to state the purpose and destination of his
trip and duly replied that it was to attend a European gathering
of Iranologists, was met with the despicable reply, "Iranology
is dead". With the newfound courage of a generation of Iranians
who do not let mullas tell them what to think, he valiantly countered:
"Never has it been more alive than it is now, thanks to you and
your likes." And
the likes of the former are on the defensive nowadays, even within
the government itself which happens to have a department devoted
to Iranshenasi under the leadership of one of the few
enlightened men in their midst.
Later in October, a delegate of the latter
(where on earth do they find so many seyeds to fill the top posts?),
who was sent to inaugurate the centenary of Iranian Studies at
the University of Goettingen, Germany, went so far as to say that
every Iranian is always perforce an Iranshenas, in a limitless
field.
From bits and pieces of information gathered on these two occasions,
one gets the impression that scholars are victimized less by concerted
policy than by virtue of haphazard decisions motivated by a range
of petty motivations such as greed and envy. Those who occupy seats
of authority without related merit or qualifications, rake in as
much as they can while the going is still good for their likes.
They are relics of the past.
A totally different picture emerges
when one talks with the young and scholarly of Iran. The ones who
turned up in Ravenna, a dozen men and women, some of them very
young, others more mature, some of them very good and some mediocre,
some of them novices speaking poor English but trying their best
to take up the challenge without official support, were involved
with just about every aspect of our evolution, from the paleolithic
to recent events.
They represent the future to which they are giving
a new shape in their minds. They have given much though to the
future of Iran, a different future in which the constituent elements
of our culture will not be cast out so much as recast, recomposed
and blended with newer elements. They have little respect for the
outdated gurus like Al-e Ahmads, Kasravis, or Shariatis whom they
deem to be anachronistic and insufficiently informed.
Never has there been a more questioning youth in our whole history
and this will eventually affect not only the premises on which
society is built, but also the people who are placed in positions
of authority without any intrinsic merit and therefore are envious
of those who are praised for good work both within Iran and abroad.
It may not be by chance that the best are harassed.
They encompass
the nation all the better that they come from different walks of
life. One said he was, as a boy, a shepherd
in Bojnurd and only spoke the local Tati dialect (a language akin
to the original tongue of Azarbaijan and Semnan and still used
in parts of Talesh, including Lankaran in the former Soviet Azarbaijan),
but who has now learnt to read Elamite, Old Persian and the Greco-Roman
classics like Strabo whom he quotes in lectures as though he were
quoting Hafez or Saadi.
They are also quite clear as to the problems
they face and never recoil from the daily struggle of trying to
obtain a modicum of support for research much of which, in spite
of apparent lack of commitment from official quarters, is coming
from Iran.
Fight they do daily for their institutions and for the
work they pursue; fight they do to denounce the negligence of
monuments and sites and the tragic looting of archeological finds
that are
shedding more light on our understanding of the prehistoric past;
fight they do to obtain the renewal of contracts and a meagre
handout for their scholarly trips. Some even see their work disappear
overnight.
One of the heart-rending complaints came from someone who, even,
in his public delivery, poured abuse on the razing of monuments
and the looting of archeological sites, usually for the purpose
of erecting buildings that will bring them profit, and justifying
the desecration of heritage by adding and adjoining mosalla for
Friday prayers, the better to mask their real intentions.
A much-publicized
case in the earlier days of the revolution was the Arg of Tabriz,
the partial destruction of which was justified by the perpetrators
as motivated by its link with the Bab and Babis. A transparent
excuse which deprived the city of its major landmark. But it did
not end there. Near the Arg were the few surviving remains of the
splendid Blue Mosque, with beautiful tilework that was only surpassed
in Timurid Samarkand and Herat (with a lot of the latter now defunct).
In the eighteenth century Tabriz had been struck by two disastrous
earthquakes with aftershocks continuing for months thereafter,
but the main coup de grace was then dealt to the Blue Mosque by
a group of mollas who coveted the land (yes, they were already
into that kind of thing two hundred years ago), and with no Babis
then, they blamed the Sunnis (the Qaraqoyunlu had originally ordered
the mosque to be built by the finest craftsmen). One bit of wall
had remained to afford a glimpse of what had been a tribute to
the craft of the tilemaker in blue-and-gold artistry and was duly
although belatedly restored in the very last years of the Pahlavi
reign.
When the situation in Iran had calmed down sufficiently after
the heat of revolution and the miseries of war with Iraq, dedicated
experts decided to unearth what they could from the ruins, but
only to see their successful efforts neutralized again by the razing
of the site by order of the Minister of Housing who wanted to use
the valuable land in the centre of Tabriz for the building of his
mall-musalla.
Or maybe he believed that old tiles were not worth
preserving at all, that it might be better to replace the old tiles
with copies as has been done in the case of great monuments, even
in Isfahan. (One wonders what was done with the old tiles removed).
The problem is that tiles of the quality used in the Blue Mosque
cannot be reproduced nowadays and even the ones that can do not
have the same quality. There were protests, of course, but countered
with accusations of 'separatism'.
Actually the alleged distinctions between Azaris and Persians
become blurred in this case as well as in others, when one is told
that
the Minister in question is a native of Urmia and that the archeologists
are both from Tabriz and Tehran and they hardly identify with Baku's
selective piracy of cultural property that belongs to a joint heritage,
and anyway stops short of great monuments to the north of the Araxes
where, if at all, they appear in the form of stone forts that come
from an altogether different tradition.
The majority of our own
Azaris are aware of being a full part of an undivided whole, and
not of a fragment as decided by tyrants, be they mollas or KGB
officials now involved with enriching themselves, and as recent
elections in Baku have just shown, with brutally rigging elections
in favour of their primogeniture.
As a matter of fact, young scholars
from Iran are also worried about the piracy of their legacy in
the absence of a government committed to its preservation. Admittedly
the case of the Blue Mosque of Tabriz is an extreme example, and
destructions of that kind are increasingly rare, but there seems
to have been a change of direction recently for reasons that are
not really clear. Other monuments are threatened by smog, when
a little money and care could avoid the worst of the damage, for
example by implementing a project to shield the Persepolis sculptures
with glass or roofing, as suggested but not done.
I would not have written about any of this if my informers had
told me that it would put them at risk. But they are fearlessly
committed and laughed off my concerns by saying that they themselves
do not hesitate to air their grievances in the Iranian press. Without
the efforts of dedicated souls the demolition squads would have
been more active and their bosses would have made more money but
only to find out that, like Molla Nasreddin, they are cutting the
branch they themselves are sitting on. They have not reached that
point and let us hope they will not, for it might be too late to
salvage the best.
From the Blue Mosque to the Bronze Age sites
of Kerman, more especially Jiroft, the story is sad and after
a period of respite and great hope, now getting sadder. I alluded
to the looting of Jiroft in an article earlier this year.
(See "Under
the arch"). I had written about how extraordinary
prehistoric objects from the prolific Bronze Age of Iran had
turned
up at auctions, especially in Paris where the best of them had
fetched stratospheric prices, while the Iranian delegate to UNESCO,
although informed in advance, had ignored the affair.
At the time I did not know the extent of the finds nor of the
damage. In the meantime they have been fully documented in an article
written
in the French magazine Archeologia. And people in Iran are very
concerned about the illegal export of objects that shed light on
the importance of the Iranian plateau long before Iranians had
come from the north to settle and to rule.
Having used information
from the site of Shahdad, also near Kerman, for an essay on the
history of cosmetics in Iran, I knew that the latter had been excavated
by professionals, but it seems that the same also holds true for
the site of Jiroft which has yielded important evidence for a period
that is fascinating archeologists worldwide and shedding a far
more important light on Elam, the extent of its rule and its major
achievements, a role so decisive that I know of at least one European
scholar who has turned his interest in the Bronze Age almost exclusively
to the sites of third-millennium Iran. But their work has been
hampered by smugglers who intervened in the wake of experts to
pillage at will.
Since Iranians are by law forbidden to buy artifacts, the money
to be made must come from abroad. Thousands of artifacts of historical
significance and often of staggering beauty lay underground to
satisfy the greed of thieves who went about the task without precautions
to preserve the context. And without the context there can be no
in-depth study of a period about which a lot more remains to be
learnt, though we already know that it was a major turning-point
in the course of civilization with far-reaching effects from the
Levant to the Indus, and Elamite Iran, right in the middle of that
transnational route playing a pivotal role in inventions that changed
the whole history of mankind and resulted in exchanges that put
globaliztion to shame.
Later visitors have described the result
of the massacre of the site as a tragic moonscape with hundreds
of deep holes pockmarking the area of Jiroft. Thankfully a few
hundred artifacts have remained in Iran, but the rest, including
a majority of by now world-famous carved chlorite vessels that
are testimony to the culture and craftsmanship of the early Bronze
Age in Iran were smuggled out and sold.
The exhibition 'First Cities' in New York was criticized
by Iranians for devoting chapters to not only Bahrain and Oman,
which were important outposts of that transnational trade, but
also to an island off Saudi Arabia where crude copies of the vessels
were fortuitously unearthed, while Susa, the capital of Elam only
received a few pages not worthy of the great role it played. No
mention of Jiroft or Shahdad on the map of Bronze Age cultures
in the catalogue devoted to that exhibtion. This was partly due
to the embargo by an American government that cannot tell the difference
between art and artifacts and the tools of terror.
Nonetheless,
if one reads the small print, one notices that, in spite of the
money received from Arabs, the writers could hardly avoid the mention
of southeastern Iran under Elamite rule. The latter extended to
Bactria or Balkh and Margiana (also known as Murghab, Marv, Margush)
in Afghanistan and in Turkmenistan, a region that, because of its
obvious links with Elamite Iran, has been labelled 'Trans-Elamite'
by the French scholar Amiet.
Such is the heritage that was shamelessly looted right under
the eyes of a government so little concerned with the proofs of
their
ancient culture. I do not know if the smugglers were acting alone
or with official blessings, but it seems that a great many of the
artifacts were bought by Arab collectors from the Persian Gulf
islands, and since the the bulk of the magnificent pre-Achaemenid
silver objects found in a cave near Ilam in the late 1980s was
also bought by a collector from Kuwait, they assume that it must
be the same with the Jiroft abjects.
This has bred resentment among
Iranians who, out of frustration, read wild interpretations into
deals that involve the very foundations of their identity, especially
if the buyer is a petro-sheikh whose country forbids importation
of printed matter that says 'Persian Gulf'. While one
is loath to condone any gratuitous conspiracy theories, the feelings
of Iranians are understandable in light of academic institutions
in the West representing the greatest Iranian scholars and scientists
of medieval Islam as Arabs.
I propose you swallow a Valium and then read a Shadi Akhavan's
article, "Close
enough". This misguided lady chided her countrymen
for failing to recognize the major contributions to Islamic culture
by 'Arab' scientists like Avicenna or Rhazes! Yet their
very names betray their true origins -- except to Shadi.
For
the first one is in fact Abu Ali Sina, a native of Bokhara in
its Persian heyday under Samanid rule and born of a father with
the
Iranian name, Sina, and who moreover wrote not only in Arabic
(the lingua franca of science in medieval Islam as Latin was that
of
medieval Christian Europe), but also in Persian for his patrons
in Marv, Isfahan and Hamedan where he died and is buried; and
as for the second, his name of Razi (Latinized as Rhazes) is a
sure
indication that he hailed from the city of Rey near Tehran. I
hope that the likes of Shadi were at least invited to the premiere
of
the first opera in Arabic on the theme of -- take a good guess
-- Abu Ali Sina. True enough, our heritage has been raped many times, and true
enough, the looting of archeological sites is not limited to Iran,
but
our nation has become more aware of its past, whereas its leaders
do not pay enough heed to what would benefit even their insatiable
appeties by attracting tourists and gaining these leaders the
respect they so lack. When countries like Poland send a large delegation
to the Ravenna conference on Iranian studies, why should the
home
country refuse to finance the attendance of its own? And if the
artifacts exported are so valuable, then why should Iranian students
not be encouraged to learn about them?
The latest news from Iran
is very disturbing. The harassement of archeologists continues
apace, and contracts to native or foreign experts are withdrawn
or cancelled at the cost of interrupting some excellent work
and major discoveries such as a cave that has evidence of a feminist
cult in the eighth century BC. The reasons for this are probably
mundane, for ideology is only an excuse nowadays, as the case
of
the Blue Mosque demonstrates so well. The reasons, as I learnt
from talking to numerous people involved, can range from envy
on the part of a petty bureaucrat who resents the work of the
best and the perks such as travel that go with such work, to greed
which
is translated into pocketing money earmarked for scholars or
for conservation.
The targeting of experts recognized abroad for their valuable
work may also have to do with a major exhibition on Achaemenid
art,
due to be held at the British Museum in 2005. Why let the
experts get credit for it? I am only guessing that a battle is
being
fought backstage to derive the maximum benefit from an international
event
in which the government of Iran is fully participating. But
the worries are now extending to something more serious,
because, on October 28th, a Persepolis fragment showing the full
head
of an
immortal guard (stolen in the early nineteenth century
by a Ousely,
the first British amabassador), went on sale in London
for 850,000 Pounds to a bidder on the telephone, presumed to be
the future
Museum of Qatar.
Are experts kept at bay from Persepolis
so that fragments can be carved off with impunity to be sold
off by traitors
to collectors abroad? Given the precedent of Iraq and the
clerical
appetite for gains, there is reason to worry, though
it seems quite unlikely that such a devilish scheme can be brought
off at the
site of Persepolis whose every inch is so well documented
that any new item appearing by chance on the art market would
inevitably
be highly suspect. Nevertheless, every Iranian abroad
has
a
duty to keep an eye open for any such misdeed and if necessary
alert
international instances to be on the watch for illegally
exported fragments from this and other known sites of the Achaemenids.
The reasoning of the people who neglect heritage is incomprehensible
in a country surrounded by newly created countries
so eager to cut out a page of our history and culture to appropriate
as their
one. How can one protest when the leaders of the country
do so little to defend our cultural rights? With a
little
good
will,
it would be easy, for piracy of history relies on fabricated
lies.
Just how selective the pickings of some former
republics
of the
Soviet Union can be is illustrated by the case of
Zoroaster. An apocryphal tradition does in fact link the prophet
with Azarbaijan (ours not theirs), but it has been proven
to be a late fabrication
by Magians who had to leave Rey in the Seleucid era
when Greek gods took over from Iranian ones. The actual birthplace
of
Zoroaster remains disputed and is placed between
the
mountains
of the Altai
and the former Eastern Iranian provinces to the north
of the Amu
Darya.
Nonetheless upon independence Baku wasted
no time
in hailing Zoroaster as one of its sons, until
the leaders came
to the conclusion
that the prophet has been firmly linked with Iran
by Western scholars. He has since been demoted from his high
position in favour of Babak
Khorramdin whose very existence does not make any
sense without links to Mazdakism. This is how capricious the
culture of
these new republics can be and it extends across
the
Caspian
to Turkmenistan
and Uzbekistan. But it is nonetheless useless to
clamour against 'separatism' or 'foreign intrigues' when preservation
is lax
and the tangible legacy
that confirms the integrity of Iran since the early
Bronze Age is sacrificed on the money altar.
In spite of the darkening horizon, however, nothing
will detract the students and scholars in Iran
from their
laudable cultural
pursuits, beginning already in their school years
when they work doubly hard to fill in for the inadequacies
of school books
that,
apart from other deficiencies, are totally silent
about art. They do not trust what they learn from a curriculum
written
and planned
by mollas.
A new generation is indeed being formed,
a generation that no longer waits for a king
or a military
strongman
or a foreign power to solve its problems. It
is more deserving than
its predecessors
for having understood the issues at stake and
without taking its cue from some foreign master or repeating
lessons like
parrots in a cage. These dedicated young are
all Ebadis, each within
his
field and each working hard on projects and
writings that result from no less than an ordeal of fire.
There are many
of them,
for the field is indeed a vast one and lies
at the basis
of a strong
identity that goes back for millenia and not
to a dead culture
as some might suppose, for there are survivals
of the past at the local as well as the mainstream level,
as research
is increasingly
showing
now.
As the multiplicity of subjects dealt within Ravenna demonstrated
so well, identity is
complex
but linked by a thread
of conscious or semi-conscious belonging
to a whole. This is what
creates
the Ebadis of Iran. No wonder Iranians are
unhappy with the media of
the West for presenting her first and foremost
as Moslem, and only then as Iranian. She
herself admitted,
in
an interview with a French
magazine, that being Iranian was no doubt
a factor in making her what she is.
As her Nobel
Prize
confirmed, all is not
darkness,
there are glimmers of light, but the danger
signals are
flashing here and there and must not be
ignored. The young people
in Iran expect us to protest the desecration
of our past and give
them
support. But of course one must do it knowingly
and not on the basis of rumours and allegations.
Luckily for every traitor there is a dedicated
person who continues to fight for cultural
rights. For every
report
of evildoing
there is compensation in the form of good
work and positive attitudes
from a new generation of thinking Iranians
who are encouraged by the fact that despite
lack
of funds,
Iran holds its
own among academics
so actively wooed by other money and by
short-term geopolitical considerations as well. For
every attempt to place Central
Asia and the Caucasus in the faculties
devoted to Eastern European studies there is a Pole
or a Russian
who has
something to say
about common
links with Iran.
And at Goettingen's
centenary of Iranian studies which aimed to to celebrate
'Iran,
Land of
Culture, The Iranian Tradition as a
World Civilization', not only
was a presentation made by a Kurdish
Yazidi with 'pagan beliefs' that are linked with
Mithraism (and erroneously
presented
as devil-worship), but the event came
to an end
with a Jewish Bukharan
musician, now
resident in Berlin, performing a concert
on a rebab. And even
though the music of Bukhara is somewhat
different from that of Iran due
to Altaic and Chinese influence, its
modes or maqams are basically alike and share
the same
roots. He
got so much
applause that
it brought tears to his eyes. Iranian
students surrounded him to obtain
his address for further communication.
Iranology is alive, and Iranians as well
as non-Iranians are involved not only
in keeping
it alive but
in adding to the
sum of knowledge.
For history has a way of reasserting
the truth. And the truth points to the resilience
of our
people, especially when their
cultural
identity in its full variety is seen
to be at risk. They
will never give up and they are up to
the task of
defending what
their leaders
so pitifully neglect.
Author
Fatema Soudavar Farmanfarmaian was born in Tehran in 1940 and
studied in Iran and Switzerland. In Iran she was on the committe
of a number of organizations, including the Museum of Modern Art
and the Women's University. She also did volunteer work for the
Deparment of the Environment, where she planned education for schools
and TV on environmental subjects. Since the Revolution she has been
focusing on research and writing. Her latest appeared in The
Journal of the Society for Iranian Studies (Summer/Fall 2000)
called "Haft Qalam Arayish: Cosmetics int he Iranian World".
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