[Engaging Books is a returning series that features books by various publishers on a given theme, along with an excerpt from each volume. This installment involves a selection from Gingko Press on the theme of Making Modern Iran. Other publishers' books will follow on a monthly basis.]
Table of Contents
Iran, Islam and Democracy: The Politics of Managing Change
By Ali M. Ansari
About the Book
About the Author
In the Media
Scholarly Praise
Additional Information
Where to Purchase
Excerpt
Call for Reviews
Javanmardi: The Ethics and Practice of Persianate Perfection
Edited by Lloyd Ridgeon
About the Book
About the Author
Scholarly Praise
Additional Information
Where to Purchase
Excerpt
Call for Reviews
The Age of Aryamehr: Late Pahlavi Iran and its Global Entanglements
Edited by Roham Alvandi
About the Book
About the Author
In the Media / Scholarly Praise
Additional Information
Where to Purchase
Excerpt
Call for Reviews
Iran, Islam and Democracy: The Politics of Managing Change
By Ali M. Ansari
About the Book
The surprise election of Hassan Rouhani in 2013 and his re-election in 2017 has focused attention on the dynamics between Islam and democracy in Iran after the hiatus of the Ahmadinejad presidency. With comparisons being drawn between Rouhani and his predecessor but one, the reformist president Mohammad Khatami (1997-2005), there has never been a better time for a review and detailed analysis of the rise and fall of the reform movement in Iran. This revised and updated edition with a new preface and conclusion incorporates more recent work on the presidential election crisis of 2009, along with the election of Rouhani in 2013 and 2017, and an additional essay on the idea of reformism in Iran.
About the Author
Ali M. Ansari BA (Lon), PhD (Lon), FRSE, FBIPS, FRAS is Professor of Iranian History and Founding Director of the Institute for Iranian Studies at the University of St Andrews and a Senior Associate Fellow at the Royal United Services Institute. In 2016, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.
In the Media
Read a review by Jonathan Fryer
Scholarly Praise for Iran, Islam, and Democracy
‘An outstanding study of the politics of contemporary Iran. It is a lively and perceptive work cutting through the foliage of Orientalism and Islamism….’
— Ervand Abrahamian, City University of New York
‘A substantial and thought-provoking analysis.’
— Charles Tripp FBA, SOAS University of London
‘Thoroughly recommended for anyone seeking to understand contemporary Iranian politics and international relations.’
— Toby Dodge, London School of Economics and Political Science
Additional Information
February 2019
640 pages
$44.95 (list price)
ISBN: 9781909942981
Where to Purchase
On Gingko website: https://www.gingko.org.uk/title/iran-islam-and-democracy/
Buy in the UK: https://www.waterstones.com/book/iran-islam-and-democracy/9781909942981
Buy in the US: https://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/I/bo26312214.html
Buy EPUB: https://www.ebooks.com/en-bh/book/detail/209647934/
Buy Kindle: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Iran-Islam-Democracy-Politics-Managing/dp/1909942987/ref=dp_ob_image_bk
Excerpt
Part VI: The United States, Iran, and the Politics of the JPCOA
Introduction
The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), which was agreed in July 2015 between P5+1 and Iran, has rapidly become a benchmark of how a diplomatic agreement can be reached between seemingly implacable foes apparently on a fast-track to war. In focusing on finding a solution to a ‘particular’ problem, that of Iran’s nuclear programme, negotiators hoped that the terms of reference could be sufficiently changed to provide a more conducive environment for the eventual construction of effective diplomatic relations between the United States and Iran. While many analysts have focused on the details of the negotiation itself, this study will concentrate on the political hinterland and show how the environment was at first prepared, nurtured and cultivated to provide political support and crucial momentum in the course of the agreement. It will both assess the narratives and show how they were disseminated and articulated to a wider audience. With problems anticipated in Congress, the White House was determined to shape the broader narrative so that popular support for this most difficult of diplomatic engagements could be sought. In effect, it aimed to manufacture consent. As effective as this operation proved to be, the protracted length of the negotiations and the urgency with which they approached conclusion resulted in a lack of coherence and an inability to prepare the ground as well as some would have liked. Moreover, the narrative of hope found itself buffeted by political expediency and the realities of politics. Trapped by a political mythology increasingly at odds with reality, the JCPOA has found itself adrift from the hinterland that should have anchored and secured it.
Few relationships have been as affected by emotion as that between the United States and Iran. Narratives and selective historical interpretation – historical mythologies – have been at the heart and the basis of this relationship for decades, spawning a rich political mythology that has tended to reinforce prejudice rather than provide clarity of vision. All international relations are in some ways constructed and shaped by perception informed by emotion, but the contemporary US-Iran relationship, born from the trauma of revolution, is perhaps more fraught than most. Each country draws on historical and political mythologies, resulting in the formation of complex semiological chains that resist effective critical interrogation. These narratives have become all the more intense and embedded within broader ‘national’ narratives as a consequence of the intimacy of the relationship between the US and Iran – friends abruptly redefined through the trauma of revolution as enemies, reinforced by a detailed narrative of betrayal, shaped on the one hand by the ‘Coup of 1953’, and on the other by the ‘Hostage Crisis of 1979’. These are the two foundational myths of the contemporary relationship upon which other narratives have been constructed. Each myth positions its protagonist as the ‘victim’ to which some measure of redress is owed, and in this particular context the junior (if emerging) power has shown itself more successful in embedding its narrative.
The arc of history
The myth of victimisation (a variation on the ‘martyr complex’ which has been so generously, and somewhat uncritically, applied in the past) is certainly rooted in experience, but has been effectively articulated and developed for political purpose. Like all political myths, it is derived from an experience that has been interpreted for political effect. It has been reinforced and provided with intellectual integrity by the development of post-colonial thought, most obviously, the critique of ‘Orientalism’ as defined by Edward Said. The irony will not have been lost on Said that a critique of Western ‘oppression’ has, far from empowering the victims, instead generated a narrative of helpless victimisation. This apparent lack of agency has been turned to good effect by the Iranians, absenting them from responsibility for their actions, even if this attitude reinforces a perception of disempowerment and the very infantilisation of the other that Orientalism was meant to eliminate.
I won’t dwell on the development of these critical historical mythologies here, they have been amply dealt with and discussed elsewhere. Suffice to say that in the run-up to the negotiations and their conclusion the myth of Mosaddeq and the narrative of the coup far outstripped that of the hostage crisis in providing a historical frame of reference. Foreign Minister Zarif, for example, was explicitly identified as a latter day Mosaddeq, and the nuclear negotiations a re-run of the oil negotiations of 1951–1953. This analogy was of course not new and was in fact initiated with great energy and enthusiasm by President Ahmadinejad in an attempt at historical appropriation that culminated somewhat awkwardly with an official invitation to the widow of Mosaddeq’s foreign minister, Dr Fatemi, to attend government festivities in honour of Iran’s nuclear progress. While in the United States the mythology of the coup was used in a somewhat blunt fashion to decry the perfidy of the United States (and the British masterminds behind it all), in Iran its application was a good deal more subtle. The comparison between Zarif and Mosaddeq was intended to place the latter in an unfavourable light, as the prime minister whose misplaced trust in the United States had undermined his own government. This distinction would be important as the negotiations proceeded, serving as a warning to the negotiators that their apparent innocence (and essential goodness) would be poorly repaid. Indeed, if Zarif was hailed by some as the man who overturned Mosaddeq’s legacy, President Rouhani was increasingly depicted as the man who might be doomed to repeat it.
In the West, meanwhile, the presentation of Rouhani has reflected a considerable amount of cultivated guilt, situated within the longer frame of historical reference provided by the narrative of 1953, but perhaps more pertinently what was widely considered to have been the missed opportunity of the Khatami presidency. Rouhani, whose standing among Iranian reformists does not really approach that of Khatami, a figure who remains immensely popular and influential despite (or indeed because of) his effective house arrest, has been portrayed in the West as far more capable than his predecessor: an idealised combination of Rafsanjani’s pragmatism and Khatami’s idealism, though crucially, with none of the latter’s apparent political naïveté. This portrayal has, of course, necessitated a selective reading of history which is itself not without contradictions and is a salutary reminder that what we forget is as important as that which we remember. Khatami, to be sure, inherited a far less problematic situation than Rouhani, but the pressures placed on the former were qualitatively higher, and perhaps in much the same vein as Mosaddeq some fifty years earlier, the West went out of their way to misunderstand him.
Rouhani has been presented as a moderate – occasional reformer – whose ‘pragmatism’ effectively excuses the occasional conservative lurch which is in any case presented as a virtue rather than a vice. Casual reminders of Rouhani’s emergence from the security apparatus have the advantage of presenting a man who can get things done – an Iranian Putin if you will. Hardline statements are excused as necessitated by context, or simply ignored as an inconvenience, while his apparent talents, including a linguistic fluency of considerable range and the now necessary doctorate from a Western University are promoted as distinctions of rare quality. In truth these exaggerations have proved hostage to expectation, as indeed some of Rouhani’s more sober Iranian supporters were keen to point out, and are more a reflection of Western enthusiasm for a break from the raucous Ahmadinejad years while bearing little relation to reality. A similar process was at work in the collective sigh of relief – and accompanying eulogies – that greeted the election of Barack Obama, culminating in the absurdly premature award of a Nobel Peace Prize within months of his election.
Call for Reviews
If you would like to review the book for the Arab Studies Journal and Jadaliyya, please email info@jadaliyya.com
Javanmardi: The Ethics and Practice of Persianate Perfection
Edited by Lloyd Ridgeon
About the Book
Javanmardi is one of those Persian terms that is heard frequently in discussions associated with Persian identity, and yet its precise meaning is so difficult to comprehend. A number of equivalents have been offered, including chivalry and manliness, and while these terms are not incorrect, javanmardi transcends them. The concept encompasses character traits of generosity, selflessness, hospitality, bravery, courage, honesty, truthfulness, and justice, and yet there are occasions when the exact opposite of these is required for one to be a javanmard. The essays in this volume represent the sheer range, influence, and importance that the concept has had in creating Persianate identities since the medieval era and across a vast geographical domain.
About the Editors and Contributors
Lloyd Ridgeon is a Reader in Islamic Studies and Head of Theology and Religious Studies at the University of Glasgow. His latest monograph is Jawanmardi: A Sufi Code of Honour (2011).
Christine Allison is Associate Professor of Kurdish Studies in the University of Exeter. She works on folklore, memory, and minority religions.
Ines Aščerić-Todd is a Teaching Fellow in Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Edinburgh. She is the author of Dervishes and Islam in Bosnia: Sufi Dimensions to the Formation of Bosnian Muslim Society (Brill, 2015).
David Barchard is a former Financial Times correspondent in Turkey and lecturer at Bilkent University. He has written widely on many aspects of twentieth-century and nineteenth-century Turkey and is completing a book on prominent nineteenth-century Ottomans and is co-author of the forthcoming Turkey: A Very Short Introduction.
Estelle Amy de la Bretèque is an anthropologist and a musician. She has conducted research on melodized speech and narratives of sorrow among the Yezidis of Armenia, on mourning ceremonies in Baku (Azerbaijan), and on the laments of displaced Kurdish women in the suburbs of Istanbul and Diyarbakir (Turkey).
Jeanine Elif Dağyeli is a research fellow at Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient in Berlin, Germany. She has a background in regional studies and works on different aspects of labor, human-environment relations, and ritual from an anthropological and historical perspective.
Maxime Durocher studied the architecture of dervish lodges and the settlement patterns of Sufi communities in medieval Anatolia for his PhD in Islamic archaeology (Sorbonne University). He is now working on Ottoman hagiographies related to medieval shrines at the Alexander von Humboldt Kolleg for Islamicate Intellectual History, Bonn University.
Olmo Gölz is a postdoctoral researcher in Islamic and Iranian Studies at the University of Freiburg, Germany, with a research focus on men and masculinities. As a member of the interdisciplinary collaborative research center “Heroes – Heroizations – Heroisms” he is currently working on dynamics of the heroic in the Iran-Iraq war.
Rachel Goshgarian is an Associate Professor at Lafayette College. Her book The City in Late Medieval Anatolia: Inter-faith Interactions and Urbanism in the Middle East is forthcoming with I.B. Tauris.
Denis Jallat is an Associate Professor of History at Université de Strasbourg. He currently teaches at Strasbourg’s Faculty of Sports Science and is affiliated with his university’s multi-disciplinary research unit Sciences sociales du sport– Strasbourg – EA 1342, where his research uses sports and physical education as an entry point into the study of cultural identities of élites and acculturation processes.
Sibel Kocaer received her PhD from SOAS, University of London. She currently lectures on Turkish literature of Ottoman era and before, mythology, and comparative literature at Osmangazi University of Eskişehir.
Nacim Pak-Shiraz is the Head of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Edinburgh. She has published widely on Iranian visual culture, particularly on Iranian cinema.
Babak Rahimi is Associate Professor of Communication, Culture and Religion and the Director of the Program for the Study of Religion at the University of California, San Diego. The historical and social contexts that inspire his research range from early modern Islamicate societies to contemporary Iran.
Philippe Rochard is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Université de Strasbourg. His research explores traditional forms of physical education with a regional focus on the Middle East, the Caucasus, and Asia. From 2008 until 2010, he was Director of Institut Français de Recherche en Iran (IFRI) in Tehran.
Raya Y. Shani has been an instructor of Islamic Art and Architecture at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Her interests include Persian architecture and painting of the pre-Safavid period.
Rıza Yıldırım studies the formative period of the Qizilbash-Alevi tradition within the context of the Ottoman-Safavid rivalry. His research interests lie in non-orthodox religious practices in the Middle East.
Farshad Zahedi received his PhD in Film History in 2008. He is a lecturer at University of Carlos III de Madrid. He has published widely on Iranian cinema.
Scholarly Praise for Javanmardi: The Ethics and Practice of Persianate Perfection
‘In these 14 essays, the editor and contributors have provided a definitive framework for the understanding of a complex phenomenon which has so far proved difficult to grasp. In a masterfully controlled investigation with a rich palette of insight into the socio-religious structure of Iran and its neighbours, this study, which ranges from the early middle ages till the present day, tackles the spiritual and ideological sources of javanmardi, its background and the manifold shifts which it underwent in the perception of individuals and communities.’
— Professor Paul Luft, Honorary Fellow, Institute of Middle Eastern & Islamic Studies, Durham University
‘Lloyd Ridgeon’s edited volume on the notion of javanmard (al-fatā in Arabic), with its balanced discussion of the nuances and meanings of the concept through different periods and spaces in Iran, Medieval Anatolia, and even modern Turkey, is poised to become one of the most important studies of the subject. The book combines various methodological approaches, resulting in a combination of discipline-based and interdisciplinary chapters; one of its greatest achievements is to guide the reader on a journey through the intellectual history of ethics and the practice of perfection.’
— Dr Denis Hermann, Director of IFRI (Institut Français de Recherche en Iran)
Additional Information
September 2018
395 Pages
$54.95 (list price)
Cloth ISBN: 9781909942158
Where to Purchase
On Gingko website: https://www.gingko.org.uk/title/javanmardi-the-ethics-and-practice-of-persianate-perfection/
Buy in the UK: https://www.waterstones.com/book/javanmardi/lloyd-ridgeon/9781909942158
Buy in the US: https://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/J/bo31271395.html
Buy EPUB: https://www.ebooks.com/en-gb/book/detail/209520969/
Excerpt
Introduction: Lloyd Ridgeon, “The Felon, the Faithful and the Fighter: The Protean Face of the Chivalric Man (Javanmard) in the Medieval Persianate and Modern Iranian Worlds”
In many nations, societies and communities there exists an idealised depiction of ethical perfection which reveals much about religious, national, trans-national, gender and class sentiments. A British tradition, typifying such an ideal, is the chivalrous English gentleman; in Japan it is possible to point to the Bushido ethic of the Samurai noble; and the Shaolin way of life in China may also be considered as an ethical worldview oriented towards human perfection. In pre-modern Persianate territories (which includes Iran, Central Asia, Anatolia and Mesopotamia) the ethic of javanmardi played a pivotal role in the way people behaved and perceived their own identity. And yet, defining the term javanmardi is problematic: on asking a cross section of modern Iranians about the term, for example, it is highly likely that the question would elicit a multitude of answers about their personal beliefs and their perception of society, and it is probable that they would provide many examples of celebrated javanmards to illustrate their responses. A literal understanding of the term offers no genuine insight into its semantic meaning. The word javanmard is a compound noun made up of the terms javan, or ‘young’, and mard, or ‘man’. Thus, a literal meaning of javanmardi is young-manliness. The vague literal meaning of the word adds to the confusion and complexity of the topic, as inevitably Iranian understandings reflect the political, religious, social and economic situations of individuals. Perhaps one of the best entry points into javanmardi is found in one of the very earliest definitions of the term, contained in the Qabus-nameh, written in 1083. The following anecdote concerns a group of ʿayyaran, or gangs of Robin Hood-type figures generally associated with javanmardi:
They say that one day in the mountains, a group of ʿayyaran were sitting together when a man passed by and greeted them.
He said, ‘I am a messenger from the ʿayyaran of Marv. They send their greetings to you and they say, “Listen to our three questions. If you answer [well] we accept your superiority, but if you do not answer satisfactorily you will have shown our superiority.”’
The [ʿayyaran] said, ‘Speak on.’
He said, [1] ‘What is javanmardi? [2] And what is the difference between javanmardi and non-javanmardi? [3] And if a man passes an ʿayyar sitting at a crossroads, and a while later [another] man brandishing a sword comes hot on his tail intending to kill him, and he asks the ʿayyar, “Has so-and-so passed here?” what should this ʿayyar answer? If he says, “[No-one] has passed here,” then he has told a lie. And if he says, “He has passed here,” he has grassed on the man. Both of these [answers] are inappropriate with the ʿayyari way.’
When the ʿayyaran from the mountains heard these questions, they looked at each other. Among them was a man called Fozayl Hamadani, and he said, ‘I [can] answer.’ They said, ‘Go ahead.’ He said, ‘Javanmardi is doing what you say [you will do]. The difference between javanmardi and non-javanmardi is fortitude (sabr). And the answer that the ʿayyar [gives to the man wielding the sword] is that he shifts himself a short distance from where he has been sitting and says, “For as long as I have been sitting here no-one has passed by.” And in this way he tells the truth.’
For the author of Qabus-nameh then javanmardi involved being a ‘man of your word’, courage and resilience (encompassed in the term sabr), refraining from slander and telling tales, and at the same time having the sagacity and know-how of extricating oneself from difficult situations. While the anecdotes from Qabus- nameh describe an 11th-century ideal and are associated with a particular kind of javanmard, the same standards have been applied to javanmardi subsequently, whether in the form of treatises on the topic that proliferated in the 13th century, or in the composition of Timurid polymath, Hosayn Vaʿez-e Kashefi (d. 1504), whose treatise on the pre-Islamic hero, Hatem-e Taʾi, depicts the latter’s generosity towards the misfortunate and was written explicitly to explain to the royal court the reality of javanmardi. The same concerns are still paramount in the lives of popularly acclaimed javanmards of the 20th century, such as Gholam- Reza Takhti (to be discussed later).
Bearing these ideas of javanmardi in mind, I propose to examine manifestations of the concept firstly in the medieval period by dividing it into three categories: the felon, the faithful and the fighter. Then I will examine these three categories in the modern period with reference to examples from literature, cinema, popular culture and sport, and in this manner I hope to demonstrate just how all-embracing the concept is. The categories of felon, faithful and fighter provide an heuristic tool, and as such these categories are not mentioned together explicitly in Qabus-nameh, nor in any of the Persian literature that discusses the term. They provide a convenient construct, however, by which to capture the disparate individuals who have been associated with javanmardi.
The medieval felon
Military connotations of javanmardi are in part due to its close association with the ʿayyar, mentioned previously. There are descriptions of groups of ʿayyaran in Iran and surrounding territories from the 9th century onwards that depict these individuals with the usual attributes that are commonly associated with soldiers. It is recognised that they also served as spies, and were an irregular and unpaid force that operated both on the territorial borders of the Islamic world and also in major cities such as Baghdad and Nishapur, where denominational strife existed (illustrated in chapter one by Raya Y. Shani).
It is interesting that around the time that Qabus-nameh was composed, an era in which there was a confidence and a bourgeoning literature written in New Persian, there are a number of works that portray the ʿayyar and his attributes of javanmardi. One of these, Tarikh-e Sistan (composed towards the end of the 11th century), describes the attributes of Yaʿqub ebn al-Lays (9th-century ruler of Sistan), who, in addition to the kind of qualities mentioned in Qabus-nameh, is said to have possessed sagacity and skill in spying. This latter aspect of military javanmardi becomes all too apparent in the portrayal of heroes in Persian epic and romantic literature. For example, Ferdawsi’s Shahnameh (completed in 1010) glorifies Rostam, the celebrated mythical champion and defender of ancient Iran, yet there are many passages in which he is shown in a less sympathetic light. ‘He can be overbearing towards inferiors... grossly disrespectful to his superiors and he does not hide his contempt for those whom he despises, [and] he gets drunk.’ In fact his name, Rostam-e dastan actually means ‘Rostam the trickster’, and ‘he is given to deceit at crucial moments... he pushes the limits of the codes [of javanmardi] ... in a word, he changes the rules when it suits him’. Likewise, the stories of Samak-e ʿAyyar, which were probably written down in the 12th century, portray this particular ʿayyar with commendable attributes counterbalanced by episodes where he resorts to cunning and trickery, the use of drugs and disguises. These attributes testify to the ʿayyar’s ingenuity and cleverness which may be understood as ‘deviousness’.
Jettisoning the deviousness of the ʿayyar, the Sufis of the time were rather concerned with the selflessness and pursuit of truth and honesty and integrity which they believed was the kernel of javanmardi. Be that as it may, it is clear that by the 11th century some ʿayyars associated with Sufis, and no doubt this was a relationship that was symbiotic. For example, Hojwiri (d.c. 1076) cites the words of an ʿayyar who was engaged in a conversation with a Malamati Sufi, clearly showing that some of these brigands had lofty, spiritual ideals:
[Nuh the ʿayyar said,] My javanmardi is that I cast aside this robe of mine and I wear the patched [Sufi] gown (moraqqaʿ) and act in a way that accords with it so that I may become a Sufi, and in that garment I refrain from committing sin out of shame before the people.
Your javanmardi (i.e. that of the Malamati) is that you cast aside that patched gown so that you will not be deceived by people and they will not be deceived by you.
So my javanmardi is the preservation of the shariʿa by making something clear and your javanmardi is the preservation of the truth by keeping secrets.
Call for Reviews
If you would like to review the book for the Arab Studies Journal and Jadaliyya, please email info@jadaliyya.com
The Age of Aryamehr: Late Pahlavi Iran and its Global Entanglements
Edited by Roham Alvandi
About the Book
The history of Pahlavi Iran has traditionally been written as prologue to the 1979 Iranian Revolution and firmly located within a national historical context. However, the reign of the last Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi (1941-1979), in fact marked the high-point of Iran’s global interconnectedness. Never before had Iranians felt the impact of global political, social, economic, and cultural forces so intimately in their national and daily lives, nor had Iranian actors played such an important global role, on battlefields, barricades, and in board rooms far beyond Iran’s borders.
Engaging with a national historical narrative, The Age of Aryamehr writes Iran into the global history of the 1960s and 1970s, so as to understand the transnational connections that in many ways formed modern Iran.
About the Authors
Roham Alvandi is Associate Professor of International History and Director of the IDEAS Cold War Studies Project at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). He is the author of Nixon, Kissinger, and the Shah: The United States and Iran in the Cold War (2014).
Claudia Castiglioni is a Research Fellow at the University of Milan and Adjunct Professor of Iranian History and Politics at the Institute d’études politiques de Paris (Sciences Po).
H. E. Chehabi is Professor of International Relations and History at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University.
Maziyar Ghiabi is Departmental Lecturer in Modern Iranian History at the University of Oxford and Titular Lecturer at Wadham College, Oxford.
Ramin Nassehi is a Teaching Fellow in the Department of Economics at University College London.
Cyrus Schayegh is Professor of International History at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva.
Robert Steele is a PhD candidate in Arab and Islamic Studies at the University of Exeter.
Samine Tabatabaei is a PhD candidate in Art History and Communication Studies at McGill University.
In the Media
Read Gareth Smyth’s review of The Age of Aryamehr for LobeLog.
Scholarly Praise for The Age of Aryamehr
‘Roham Alvandi’s edited volume brings together valuable studies on Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi’s reign in a transnational context. What makes this compendium of essays even more significant is [the fact that] the contributors to this volume re-examine the development of Iranian culture and politics without being swayed by the final episode, the revolution’
— Professor Touraj Atabaki, Senior Research Fellow at the International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam
‘This impressive collection of essays offers a detailed study of the last three decades of Mohammad Reza Shah’s rule in Iran, and it is as interesting as it is useful. It should be used in both undergraduate and graduate courses on the history of twentieth-century Iran’
— Dr Homa Katouzian, Iran Heritage Foundation Research Fellow, St Antony’s College, and Member, Faculty of Oriental Studies, University of Oxford
‘This volume brings together a diverse range of innovative and insightful surveys of Iran’s developmental state together with its achievements and errors, and also its transnational connections, during the late Pahlavi period’
— Dr Ali Gheissari, Professor of History, University of San Diego, and Editor-in-Chief of Iranian Studies
‘This outstanding collection of articles brings together key aspects of the late shah’s rule, aptly and ironically titled The Age of Aryamehr. The articles offer fresh perspectives on Iranian history in an age of monarchic grandiosity and domestic turmoil, an era whose cultural and social significance has received less attention than its political dimensions. Written by some of the leading historians in the field, this compilation will be a very useful and welcome guide for scholars and students of Iranian society and culture’
— Professor Firoozeh Kashani–Sabet, Walter H. Annenberg Professor of History, University of Pennsylvania
Additional Information
November 2018
291 Pages
$39.95 (list price)
ISBN: 978-1-909942-18-9
Where to Purchase
On Gingko website: https://www.gingko.org.uk/title/the-age-of-aryamehr/
Buy in the UK: https://www.waterstones.com/book/the-age-of-aryamehr/roham-alvandi/9781909942189
Buy in the US: https://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/A/bo28416236.html
Buy EPUB: https://www.ebooks.com/en-gb/book/detail/209520962/
Excerpt
5: H.E. Chehabi, “The Shiraz Festival and its Place in Iran’s Revolutionary Mythology”
The Shiraz-Persepolis Festival of Art, Jashn-e Honar-e Shiraz – Takht-e Jamshid, was an international performing arts festival held every summer between 1967 and 1977 in the southern Iranian city of Shiraz and at other sites in the city’s vicinity. Its organisers intended it to be an occasion for Iranian artists to expand their horizons and for non-Iranian visitors to get acquainted with the cultural heritage of Iran. For those in the Iranian leadership who did not share the organisers’ artistic and aesthetic sensibilities or were indifferent to cultural endeavours, the festival was still a welcome opportunity for Iran to claim its place among the world’s nations.
For radical leftist opponents of the shah, however, the event symbolised the regime’s warped sense of priorities and contempt for common people, while Islamists perceived it to be a token of the regime’s endemic disdain for Islam and its subservience to the West. Even a few traditional royalists believe that the festival’s avant-garde programmes were partly responsible for many Iranians’ alienation from the regime, contributing to its final overthrow. The common denominator of these criticisms is that the festival was a culturally inappropriate extravaganza that benefited only a small coterie of rich cronies of the Pahlavis. Its purported cultural inappropriateness is at times illustrated with nuggets of information that are simply untrue. This chapter aims at providing a dispassionate analysis of the Shiraz Festival so as to explain how it came to occupy such a prominent place in the imaginary of Iranians.
Origin and Organisation of the Festival
One common misperception of the festival is that its origin had something to do with the shah. Iran’s ruler does not seem to have cared much for art, reflecting, perhaps, his upbringing in an austere military household. In fact, the festival originated in the circle around the shah’s consort, Shahbanu (Empress) Farah, who is a genuine art-lover and studied architecture for two years in Paris before marrying the shah.
For most of Mohammad Reza Shah’s rule (1941–1979), the cultural activities of the state were the bailiwick of Mehrdad Pahlbod, né Ezzatollah Minbashian, who was married to one of the shah’s sisters, Princess Shams Pahlavi. In 1951, he became head of the fine arts administration (Edareh-ye Koll-e Honarha-ye Ziba) within the ministry of education, and when the arts were separated from education to create a ministry of culture and arts (Vezarat-e Farhang va Honar), he became its incumbent and held the portfolio until 1978. With the founding of National Iranian Radio and Television (NIRT) in 1966, a new impetus was given to the nation’s cultural life. Its director, Reza Qotbi, gathered creative spirits around him, including people who had earlier taken critical or even oppositional stances. As a result, NIRT developed a dynamism that contrasted favourably with the more staid ministry of culture. Qotbi is a cousin of Empress Farah, and, as she wrote in her first autobiography, ‘ever since her marriage, my mother ha[d] lived in the same house as her brother, who had an only son, and we were brought up together rather like brother and sister.’ Iran’s state-sponsored official cultural life thus became a field of activity in which the distaff and the sword sides of the imperial family acted side-by-side, with the former more interested in conventional art forms and the latter interested in recent developments and Iran’s neglected folk traditions in addition to conventional art forms. In Qotbi’s version of the story, one day, as he was visiting Farah, she told him:
For some there is the possibility to go to Europe and attend art festivals and get acquainted with the latest artistic developments in the world. But not everybody has this possibility, and we must make it possible for everybody
to get acquainted with world artistic developments by holding a festival ourselves. Moreover, Iranian art should not only be admired by a few orientalists; our culture and art must be known by Iran’s young generation and the people of the entire world.
In 1966, soon after the founding of NIRT, Qotbi asked Farrokh Ghaffari, a film-maker who had a history of run-ins with state censorship, to be his deputy for cultural affairs, and Ghaffari accepted. When the decision to have a festival was taken, it was decided that it should not be held in Tehran so as to contribute to the development of cultural life in the provinces. Three cities were considered: Kashan, Isfahan, and Shiraz. The first had the advantage of being close to Tehran, but it lacked infrastructure for productions and festival goers. Isfahan could hardly cope with the many tourists that visited it in the summer, so the choice fell on Shiraz. According to the official version, Shiraz and Persepolis were chosen because they were located in Fars, a province whose buildings had been for 2,500 years a living museum of Iranian architecture through which the eternal spirit of the nation was revealed, and because the excellence of its school of painting, its poets, and the existence of a school of dancing in the past. All of these factors, it was averred, made Shiraz and Persepolis with their good weather, transparent skies, pure wine, and hospitable people the most appropriate place for holding the festival. The theme of the festival was to be the meeting of East and West, something like the long-established and very successful Baalbeck International Festival in Lebanon, which was founded in 1955 but was suspended on account of the civil war in 1975.
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