Iran: Empire of the Mind (48 page)

Authors: Michael Axworthy

Tags: #History, #General

BOOK: Iran: Empire of the Mind

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Empire of the Mind?

The deeper, reflective, humane Iran is still there beneath the threatening media headlines. Iranian cinema is one of the most remarkable phenomena of the country since the revolution. Banned from the themes of sex and violence regarded as indispensable by Hollywood production managers, it has produced a cinema of unique poetic artistry and universal appeal, which has won many international prizes. Directors like Abbas Kiarostami, Jafar Panahi, Mohsen Makhmalbaf and his daughter Samira Makhmalbaf have become internationally recognised through films like
The
Apple
,
10
,
Taste
of
Cherry
,
The
Circle
,
Blackboards
and
Colour
of
God
. Many of these films develop subjects dealing with the mistreatment of women, the vulnerability of children, the effects of war, the distortions of Iranian politics and society, and other themes critical or tending to be critical of the Islamic regime. Some say that many Iranians, especially young Iranians, never watch these films, choosing instead to see Bollywood-style film romances that never get an outing in the West. But this cinema nonetheless shows the enduring greatness, the potential, the confidence and creative power of Iranian thought and expression.

Iran and Persian culture have been hugely influential in world history. Repeatedly what Iran has thought today, the rest of the world, or significant parts of it, has believed tomorrow. At various stages Iran has truly been an Empire of the Mind and in a sense Iran is still—Iranian culture still holds together an ethnically, linguistically diverse nation. Iran is poised now to take a bigger role in Iraq, Afghanistan and the region generally than for many years. But is Iran an Empire of the future? In other words, can Iran take the role of importance and influence in the Middle East and the wider world that is her due?

This has to be doubtful. One element of the doubt is whether the wider world community will allow Iran that role. But another doubt, the main doubt, is whether today’s Iran, governed by a narrow and self-serving clique, is capable of that wider role. In the past, at its best, Iran attained
a position of influence by fostering and celebrating her brightest and best minds. By facing complexity honestly, with tolerance, and by developing principles to deal with it. Today Iran is ruled by merely cunning minds, while the brightest and best emigrate or are imprisoned, or stay mute out of fear. A generation of the best-educated Iranians in Iran’s history have grown up (more than half of them women), only to be intimidated and gagged. Iran’s international position has been one of extreme isolation for over twenty years, and when one of Iran’s sharpest and most humane minds, Shirin Ebadi, won the Nobel peace prize in 2003, the enthusiasm with which she was fêted in the wide world contrasted dismally with the way she was ignored by the Iranian government on her return. Since 1979 Iran has challenged the West, and western conceptions of what civilisation should be. That might have been praiseworthy in itself, had it not been for the suffering and oppression, the dishonesty and disappointment that followed. Could Iran offer more than that? Iran could, and should.

NOTES

PREFACE: THE REMARKABLE RESILIENCE OF
THE IDEA OF IRAN

1
Gobineau, the earliest theorist of Aryan racial theories, served as a diplomat in the French Embassy in Tehran in the 1850s.

1. ORIGINS: ZOROASTER, THE ACHAEMENIDS, AND THE GREEKS

1
From the University of Pennsylvania website:
www.museum.upenn.edu/new/research/Exp_Rese_Disc/NearEast/wines.html
.

2
Olmstead, pp. 22-3.

3
The nature of the early Zoroastrian religion is subject to great difficulties of interpretation, on the surface of which I can barely make a scratch. I have relied heavily on Bausani 2000, but see also Boyce 1979 and Razmjou, ‘Religion and Burial Customs’ in
Forgotten Empire
, 2005, pp. 150-80.

4
Bausani, 2000, pp. 10-11; see also Boyce 1987, p. 9.

5
Though Bausani 2000 doubted this explanation as too simplistic, pp. 29-30, it is an attractive intellectual model, with an obvious read-across to the way early Christianity assimilated some previous religious forms, while literally demonising others as superstition or witchcraft.

6
Boyce, 1987, p. 8.

7
Bausani, 2000, p. 53.

8
The late Mary Boyce believed that Zoroastrianism became better known to the Jews after the end of the Achaemenid Empire, through these diaspora communities (Boyce 1987, p. 11).

9
See Foltz, 2004, pp. 45-53 and Yamauchi 1990, pp. 463-4 for a discussion of the evidence. Yamauchi disputes the Boyce thesis, but I find her arguments stronger.

10
Luckenbill, 1989, pp. 115-20.

11
Pritchard, 1969, p. 316.

12
Crone, 1994, p. 460.

13
Brosius, 1998, pp. 198-200 and
passim.

14
Olmstead, pp. 66-8, quoting later Greek sources.

15
Bausani, 1975, p. 20.

16
Wiesehöfer, pp. 33 and 82. An alternative reading of the evidence would be that Darius murdered the real Bardiya (and possibly his brother Cambyses before him) to gain the throne. He then had to crush a series of loyalist rebellions and concoct a cover story.

17
Ibid., pp. 67-9.

18
Villing, ‘Persia and Greece’ in
Forgotten Empire
, 2005, pp. 236-49.

19
See
Forgotten Empire
, 2005, pp. 230-1.

20
Olmstead, pp. 519-20.

21
Boyce, 1979, pp. 78-9.

2. THE IRANIAN REVIVAL: PARTHIANS AND SASSANIDS

1
Wiesehöfer 2006, p. 134.

2
Ibid., p. 145.

3
Levy 1999, pp. 113-115.

4
I have taken the translation of these lines from an eighteenth-century translation of Plutarch, ‘by Dacier and others’ published in Edinburgh in 1763. In the modern Penguin edition of
The Bacchae
(Harmondsworth 1973) Phillip Vellacott translated the same lines: ‘
I am bringing home from the mountains/ A vine-branch freshly cut/ For the gods have blessed our hunting.’

5
Encyclopedia Iranica
, ‘Arsacid Dynasty’.

6
Encyclopedia Iranica
, The Arsacid Dynasty’.

7
Bausani 2000, p. 12; Wiesehofer 2006, p. 149.

8
Encyclopedia Iranica
, ‘Arsacid Religion’.

9
Levy 1999, p. 113.

10
Encyclopedia Iranica,
‘Mithraism’ (Roger Beck).

11
Daryaee, forthcoming; Wiesehofer 2006, p. 160.

12
Katouzian 2007.

13
Daryaee, forthcoming.

14
Wiesehöfer 2006 p. 161; Encyclopedia Iranica ‘Shapur I’ (S Shahbazi).

15
Anthologised in Heaney and Hughes (eds), pp. 183-6.

16
Daryaee, forthcoming.

17
See Daryaee 2002.

18
Bausani 2000, p. 107.

19
Ibid., pp. 83-96.

20
Daryaee, forthcoming.

21
Bausani 2000, p. 89.

22
Ibid., pp. 89, 118 and 120; Daryaee, forthcoming.

23
Bausani 2000, p. 87.

24
For Pelagius the best book, an important book, is Rees 1998. My account of Augustine would be disputed by some, who still uphold his theological positions (reasserted in the sixteenth century and later by Calvinists) but the facts of his time as a Manichaean are not disputed. Much recent Christian theology has turned away from many Augustinian positions, favouring more Pelagian attitudes. An interesting aspect of the dispute is that Pelagius maintained that Man could perfect himself and attain salvation by his own efforts; Augustine insisted that salvation could only come by the aid of God’s grace. There is a similarity between Pelagius’s ideas on this point and the thinking of some Islamic thinkers—notably Ibn Arabi (see
Chapter 3
).

25
Bausani 2000, p. 86.

26
Also Sprach Zarathustra: ‘wenn ich frohlockend sass, wo alte Götter begraben liegen, weltsegnend, weltliebend neben den Denkmalen alter Weltverleumder’—‘if ever I sat rejoicing where old gods lay buried, world-blessing, world-loving, beside the monuments of old world-slanderers’.

27
Encyclopedia Iranica
, ‘Shapur I’.

28
Daryaee, forthcoming.

29
Bausani 2000, pp. 11-13. See ibid., p. 15 for Bausani’s explanation of the later redaction of the Zoroastrian Pahlavi texts in the ninth century.

30
Encyclopedia Iranica
, ‘The Sassanids’; Ammianus Marcellinus, vol. II, pp. 457-503, Loeb Classics.

31
Ibid., ‘The Sassanids’; Daryaee, forthcoming.

32
Daryaee, forthcoming.

33
Crone 1994, p .448. She considered the religious movement to be a life-affirming reaction to Gnosticism, rather than an outgrowth of Manichaeism (pp. 461-2) and followed an alternative chronology of events that set the death of Mazdak after Khosraw’s accession to the throne. Many aspects of the Mazdak episode are disputed.

34
Al-Tabari, vol. 5, p. 135 and note. The story also appears in western accounts, but some of them give the woman as Kavad’s wife.

35
Wiesehöfer 2006, p. 190.

36
Bausani 2000, p. 101.

37
Ibid., p. 100; Daryaee, forthcoming.

38
Al-Tabari, vol. 5, p. 149.

39
Gibbon, 1802, vol. 7, pp. 149-51 (the passage draws on the Byzantine historian Agathias).

40
Encyclopedia Iranica
, ‘The Sassanids’.

41
Runciman 1991, vol. 1, pp. 10-11.

42
Encyclopedia Iranica
, ‘The Sassanids’.

3. ISLAM AND INVASIONS: THE ARABS, TURKS AND
MONGOLS: THE IRANIAN RECONQUEST OF ISLAM,
THE SUFIS, AND THE POETS

1
Though modern colloquial Persian is in many ways simplified from the written form of classical Persian, and the Persian of young Iranians now is changing further, borrowing many words from English, via films, television and the Internet.

2
The interpretation of the Prophet’s dealings with the Jews of Medina is a controversial subject. See Spuler 1999, pp. 11-12; Stillman 1979, pp. 11-16.