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| Iranian anti-Shah protestors supporting Ayatollah Khomeini in 1979 |
Iran: Empire of the Mind: A History from Zoroaster to the Present Day
By Michael Axworthy
Penguin Books £9.99 333 pages
FT Bookshop price: £7.99
The Ayatollah Begs to Differ: The Paradox of Modern Iran
By Hooman Majd
Doubleday $24.95 273 pages
The Quest for Democracy in Iran: A Century of Struggle against Authoritarian Rule
By Fakhreddin Azimi
Harvard University Press £22.95, 479 pages
The Persians have had a bad press pretty much since the world became aware of them. Aeschylus (whose Persians
of 472BC is the earliest surviving play) and his fellow classical Greek
tragedians won many a pan-Hellenic Oscar by manufacturing an image of a
cruel, effeminate and decadent despotism of the east, the better to
build up Greek identity and cultural superiority. The great tragedians
were the first and most accomplished demonisers of “the other”, as
Edith Hall documented 20 years ago in Inventing the Barbarian.
Rush Limbaugh and lesser “let’s-frighten-the-children” artists, with
their reliance on pantomime villains such as Mahmoud Ahmadi-Nejad,
Iran’s mercurial president, are the bathos of a long literary tradition.
As
regime change in Washington revives the tantalising idea of some sort
of rapprochement between the Islamic Republic and the American Republic
– trapped in opposing trenches by the visceral animosities given free
rein since the Khomeinist revolution of 30 years ago – it is important
to remember that Iran is heir to a rich culture of enormous age, depth
and resilience, with an extraordinary power both to assimilate and to
radiate. These books help us do that.
Michael Axworthy’s Iran: Empire of the Mind
is a beautifully distilled retelling of Iranian history that flashes
with insight on every page. A writer and lecturer on contemporary Iran
who formerly headed the Iran desk at the Foreign Office, he begins at
the beginning and tells a very good story.
For
those of us fixated on the Islamism of the theocrats who currently run
Iran, it is instructive to remember how rich Persia’s religious
heritage is. Mazdaism, or early Zoroastrianism, had significant
influence on successor religions.
It developed a theory of a
messiah at least six centuries before Jesus Christ and probably
influenced Plato. It had a common currency of ideas with Judaism from
the time of the Babylonian exile, from which Cyrus the Great and his
Achaemenid successors liberated the Jews – getting the Persians a much
better write-up in the books of Ezra and Nehemiah than in Aeschylus.
We
tend to forget that it is not just the Holy Land and the Arabian
peninsula that have shaped the monotheist religious heritage. Axworthy
reminds us also of Persia’s early influence on Christianity, not just
its own Nestorian tradition. The Mithraic religion taken west by Roman
soldiers eventually percolated into early Christian and Gnostic belief
(Mithras was a subordinate deity of Ahura Mazda before Zoroastrianism
settled into monotheism). If you did not know that St Augustine of
Hippo was a Manichean before his conversion, this book will tell you.
Axworthy is entertainingly withering about the baleful influence of
both Augustine and Mani.
He also traces the long history of
religious revolution in Persia. The Mazdakist movement of the late 5th
and early 6th centuries, for instance, was based partly on the
preaching (and practice) of free love. But nearly all these
revolutionary movements were egalitarian. When Islam burst out of
Arabia into a Persia exhausted by war, it found a people receptive to
its levelling liberation theology that took aim at Persia’s “strongly
hierarchical aristocratic and priestly system”.
Indeed, Hooman Majd, in The Ayatollah Begs to Differ, underlines how many modern Iranian Shia see each other as Islamic Socialists of a sort.
Persia’s
empire, Axworthy argues, was tolerant by the standards of the era. It
used Aramaic as the lingua franca of Mesopotamia, Palestine and Syria,
from the Achaemenids to the Parthians. It tended to rely on devolved
power, except when this devolved into rival dynasties. But, above all,
the Persian cultural genius lay in good part in its ability to
accommodate and assimilate invaders – to conquer its conquerors.
From
the era of Alexander the Great and the Seleucids, their aim of bringing
Greek influence into Persia was probably outstripped by Persian
influence seeping into Greek civilisation. “When Rome rose to dominate
the entire Mediterranean basin, the Roman empire was divided between
the Greek east and the Latin west, but still the style of the Greek
east showed the influence of the vanished Achaemenid empire, and in
turn influenced Romans with imperial ambitions from Pompey to
Elagabulus,” writes Axworthy.
Not only the Seljuk Turks and Arabs
were treated to this Persian seduction, even the Mongols succumbed.
Before the fall of Baghdad in 1258, the Mongol devastations fell like a
cataclysm on Persia, obliterating towns and populations, reverting
swathes of the country from agriculture to nomad pastoralism for
centuries to come. In Khorasan and Transoxiana perhaps a million people
were slaughtered. But within decades the Persians pulled off their
defining trick and conquered the conquerors.
Their architects and
astrologers, their bureaucrats and viziers became indispensable to the
Mongols, who eventually converted to Islam. Meanwhile, Persians and
Turks had pushed into India and established an Indo-Islamic outpost of
Persianate culture. This is what Axworthy means by Empire of the Mind:
the way Persian scholars and poets, mathematicians and doctors kept
bouncing back through crisis after crisis, using their intellectual
heritage to refloat their language and their culture.
It is
probably an exaggeration to suggest that the Abbasid dynasty – the high
watermark of Islamic culture – was a sort of reverse takeover, the
cultural reconquest of the Arab conquerors by the Persians. But it is
undeniable that the towering legacy, in philosophy and medicine, of men
such as the Persian Avicenna (known as Ibn Sina, 980-1037) were at the
heart of this achievement. Their work, transmitted through the western
jewel of Islam, al-Andalus, revitalised European scholarship to pave
the way for the Renaissance.
One of the pleasures of this book is
Axworthy’s sensitivity to Persia’s literary heritage, in illuminating
excursions that invariably justify the detour. He has wonderful
vignettes on Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh and its shaping of Iranian
identity (“a significance in Persian culture comparable to that of
Shakespeare in English or the Lutheran Bible in German, only perhaps
more so”); on Omar Khayyam (“a rugged humanism in the face of the harsh
realities of life, and an impatience with easy, consoling answers, that
anticipates existentialism”); on the 13th-century Sufi mystic Rumi or
the ghazals of the 14th-century poet Hafez, rippling with wine and
eroticism. He complains that every century or so, the west discovers
and distorts a great Persian poet. Hafez was captured by the Romantics;
Khayyam by 19th-century aesthetes; in this century, “it has been Rumi’s
misfortune to be befriended by numb-brained New Agery”.
Axworthy
is good on the modern period, on the Safavid era (1502-1736) when
warfare again exhausted and diminished Persia, and the Qajar dynasty
(1794-1925) when Iran became the plaything of colonial powers. By the
19th century, Iran started to be ignored, in keeping with Victorian
conviction that the Orient was decadent and ripe for colonisation. This
became a policy to actively hold back Persian development. Lord
Salisbury, writing as foreign secretary in 1879, summed up the
position: “Whatever happens will be for the worse, and therefore it is
in our interest that as little should happen as possible.” Translated,
that meant, for example, no railways were built. The British and the
Russians, engaged in the Great Game, did not want any means of rapid
delivery for hostile armies to their borders (in Britain’s case, the
western approaches to India). Ever weaker and more penniless rulers
parcelled out the country in concessions and capitulations.
When
the Constitutional Revolution came in 1906 – backed by many senior
ayatollahs who at the time sought a new contract between rulers and
ruled rather than clerical rule – it was gradually undermined by
imperial intrigue. The British with their South Persia Rifles to
protect “their” oilfields, the Russians through the Cossack brigade
(whence emerged Reza Khan, who would use it to establish the Pahlavi
dynasty of Shahs) were well placed to abort the emergence of democratic
institutions, just as the French and British did elsewhere in the
Middle East.
Fakhreddin Azimi’s The Quest for Democracy in Iran
is particularly strong on retrieving the importance of the
Constitutional Revolution and threading it through to the Islamic
Republic’s current dialectic between republicanism and theocracy. He
points out that “in 1953 the CIA and its British counterpart, in their
zeal to overthrow the secular government of Mohammad Mossadegh, were
prepared to help revive clerical oversight of parliamentary legislation
in exchange for the support of leading clerics”.
It is salutary
to recall that Iran’s nationalists and democrats turned hopefully to
the US – even appointing in 1911 a young American, William Morgan
Schuster, as de facto finance minister with wide-ranging powers to
reform – in the hope of linking up with a benevolent western power that
would help them resist colonialism and open a path to modernity. That
story came to an end with the 1953 Anglo-American coup against
Mossadegh – who had presumed to nationalise the oil industry – and the
restoration of the Shah. The rest, as it were, is history.
If
Axworthy’s book is history at its ripping yarn best, Hooman Majd offers
a more conversational way into the history of Iran in The Ayatollah Begs to Differ, with anecdote, colour and paradox splashed over a contemporary canvas. His is a genial and companionable book.
American
citizen and grandson of an ayatollah, Majd is well placed to provide a
privileged glimpse into Iran and Iranians. Whether asking
theo-bureaucrats faux-naïve questions or smoking opium with mullahs in
Qom, après-ski partying with the secular elite or discussing a
dissident’s hunger-strike at the Bobby Sands burger joint in downtown
Tehran, he captures the ambiguity and plurality of today’s Iran,
roundly refuting the widespread notion that it is totalitarian. He
depicts this “culture that is, it’s true, proud beyond the
comprehension of most westerners”. He conveys brilliantly the weird mix
of breast-beating and vulnerability, the superiority and inferiority
complexes that inform popular and political culture. Westerners who
tend to seek out only Iranians who talk and think like themselves
should use this as a guide.
Majd is also superb at taking the
real measure of Iran’s contemporary institutions – a bewildering blur
of men in turbans to most outsiders – and at identifying the material
as well as spiritual interests of, for example, the Revolutionary
Guards or Pasdaran. Axworthy, too, explains well the mercantile
underpinnings of the Islamic Republic, in which the bazaar, through its
alliance with the politicised clerics, finally came into its kingdom
(he has another vivid vignette on Ahmad Kasravi, a nationalist writer
involved in the Constitutional Revolution, who penned a famous pamphlet
called “What is the Religion of the Hajjis with Warehouses?”).
To be set against this is a powerful message of religious
revolution – set out by shrewd, neo-Khomeinist populists such as
Ahmadi-Nejad in a combative language stripped of elitism that alienates
us but resonates with the Iranian and Muslim masses – which we ignore
at our cost. As Azimi formulates it: “Having invoked justice as a
pivotal notion almost defining its raison d’être, the Islamic regime
proved singularly unsuccessful in establishing a more just and
equitable society. Promising to redress this situation was at the heart
of Ahmadi-Nejad’s rise.”
David Gardner is the FT’s chief leader writer and author of ‘Last Chance: The Middle East in the Balance’ (IB Tauris)
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