Personal Note: My Experience with Iran

Visitors may be interested in some background on how and why I came to be concerned with Iranian Civilization.

After four years as a Harvard Social Relations undergraduate, I spent a year in Pakistan on a Fullbright Scholar at the University of the Punjab. The University had a new Department of Islamic Studies. Ostensibly I and two others were enrolled in the study of "Islamic Sociology". Actually, what the department head, Dr. Allama Siddiqui, offered us was simply a course is Islam as he saw it. In this same vein, we also studied for some time with Dr. Khalifa Hakim, a westernernized Islamic scholar, as well as taking an Islamic history course with a very conservative gentleman. Other than reading the Quran in many translations and the works of Maulana Maudoodi, much of my extra-curricular work in Pakistan was on Islamic modernists, especially extremists such as Pervaiz, popular at the time. This led to a long research paper on modern trends in Islam.

I also studied Urdu at the university, an almost useless course, and spent a great deal of time with a private tutor in Urdu. My best university course was in the Persian language with a Pakistani who had spent many years in Tehran. It was with this self-effacing but ernest man that I spent my best hours. He convinced me of the value and beauty of Persian. It was during this time that I came to believe that Pakistan almost literally had no civilization (as I would now use that term) of its own. It was simply an amalgam of Indian and Persian civilizations. After the conclusion of the school year I made many efforts to get a visa for Afghanistan. Failing in this I did manage to spend a month in Iran on my way back to the states.

As far as language is concerned, I learned lots of Urdu. Unfortunately, in the dorm where I lived everyone else was interested in practicing their English while the servants spoke only Punjabi. The only time I actually held a conversation in Urdu outside of my lessons was with a young man I met at the Taj Mahal in India (Urdu being the normal language of Agra but not of Lahore). As a result my ability to speak Urdu, such as it was, was quickly lost. On the other hand, while in Lahore I read the Nawa-i-wagt newspaper every day and developed some facility on that level. I find that now, however, I have also lost that. (Urdu is based on Hindi but contains a large admixture of Persian, Turkish, and Arabic vocabulary.)

My study of Persian was, however, more inspired, so that by the time I reached Iran in the summer of 1954 I was able to speak haltingly. I was not prepared, however, for the Iranians. I'll never forget meeting with some Iranian professors and students in Tabriz. Unlike in Pakistan where everyone wanted to speak English, here our only common language was Persian. So they insisted on discussing with me such subjects as the trinity (which you will be glad to know I defended admirably although I am not a professing Christian). My itinerary included Esfahan and Shiraz. I left thinking Iran was a wonderful country, prosperous and green (which it was not at all, but it seemed so compared to Pakistan — all is relative).

I returned to Harvard to enter simultaneously Masters degree program in Middle Eastern Studies and a PhD program in "Social Sciences". The former was a program that had just been organized and which I believe still persists today. The latter was a new interdisciplinary program that lasted only a couple years. I was one of first and last to take this opportunity. (Once its creator left his position as head of Graduate Studies, the program languished.) I wrote my own ticket which included Persian Literature, Ancient Middle Eastern History, Modern Middle Eastern History, Nationalism, Theories of Cultural Change, and the History and Anthropology of the American Southwest. My advisors were the anthropologist Clyde Kluckhohn and the Iranian specialist Richard Frye.

My first two years was devoted mostly to the Middle East studies program. I took Arabic and Persian, improving my Persian and coming to some understanding but never becoming fluent in any way in Arabic. I took general survey courses in the history of the area and, most memorably, participated in a seminar by H. A. R. Gibb, the famed English Arabist. He was the first person to make me understand what is was to be a scholar and to write in a scholarly manner. My chief product of his seminar was a paper devoted to a history of Qomm. If I remember correctly, it was a 14th century Persian version of an Arabic original that had been written in the twelfth century but was now lost.

As an aside, for those who do not know, the Persian written language has evolved quite slowly, so that it was much easier for me to make out this work than it would have been to read Chaucer. But the language of Firdousi, writing four centuries before the document I was studying in the seminar, is a good deal easier still. Persian went through a strange evolution under Islam. First, those continuing to write in Persian were Zoroastrians who simply continued Sassanian tradition, including the script. Then about the tenth century modern Persian developed. Their new language was based on Sassanian but now written in Arabic script. It included a number of Sassanian usages that have since been dropped as well as a limited number of Arabic usages. As, however, the use of Persian increased and it began to displace Arabic throughout the world of Islam east of Mesopotamia, what we now call "Modern Persian" came to incorporate increasing amounts of Arabic. By the fourteenth century some documents were almost indistinguishable from Arabic, even in grammar. (This development did not, of course, affect the poetry of the time.) This extreme Arabicization was shortly abandoned. In the nineteenth century, there were introduced nationalist ideas about language that led in the twentieth to attempts to purify the language of Arabic entirely, attempts that were bound to fail. It should be said that throughout these centuries there persisted, alongside Persian, writing in Arabic by some of the learned, particularly for religious texts, in a manner similar to the use of Latin until recently in the West.

Toward the end of my M.A. program, I applied for and received a Ford Foundation grant to study modern Iranian culture, a project to be based in Shiraz. The model for my thinking was the excellent work done on Japanese Culture during World War II by Ruth Benedict, an effort that produced The Chrysanthemum and the Sword. So I was off to live in Shiraz with my wife and three month old child (Leila of course). Shiraz was chosen because of its cultural associations, but also with the new child because of the recent establishment of the Nemazi Hospital, staffed with excellent doctors and the extension of a modern water system to most of the city.

I made many good friends in the city. There was a circle of people my age that I regularly spoke with and/or interviewed. I would name names, except that it might not be helpful to them or their relatives in Iran today. Some have since moved to the United States while others have no doubt passed away. I also had a series of interviews with the ayatollahs in the city, six as I recall. Most remarkable about these was that the beliefs of the ayatollahs ranged from a form of Marxism through Sufism to conservative activist to extreme conservatism (quiescent). Our most remarkable trips were to the Qashqai, to Persepolis, and Pasargad. By myself I also took an interesting trip to Tehran, Mashhad, including the shrine, and then by bus back through the middle of the country by way of Tabas. I had a friend of a friend to stay with in Tabas. Actually, from there on back instead of taking the bus I rode with a couple of truck drivers. Just to suggest how things have changed, one morning they woke me up very early at the coffee shop we were staying at and told me to get going. They said they had noticed a bearded fellow come in and they were apprehensive about his intentions. "Never trust anyone with a beard" was their remark as we drove off. Good fellows, very much truck drivers, liked to talk about sex and how hard the Iranians worked at it. (Incidentally, while on this theme, Shiraz was the only place I ever had to fight off an advance, this by a girl of thirteen while riding with several others in a taxi cab. Taking a ride over to the Caspian a few years later in a Taxi, my driver insisted over my objections, on picking up a woman friend of his and taking her back to Tehran. The veil did not seem to prevent what is universal.)

I also had the opportunity to teach English at the new Pahlavi University in Shiraz. Unfortunately, this period was brought to the end by the University's director who insisted that I must teach more. When I demurred, he said that I was fired. Of course, as a Ford Foundation Fellow working on my thesis, I was not supposed to be teaching anyhow. It was explained to me by other friends at the university that the Iranian way would have been to agree with his demand and then simply not do it. The worst crime is to simply have said no to a superior. (I should add that the director lived in Tehran and only visited Shiraz once a month.

During this year I seldom spoke to an Iranian in English. I also spent much of the year reading Persian, modern and classical. By the end of the year my command of Persian was fair but far from perfect. My best performance was in translating between another American studying Turkish tribes in Southern Iran and his informants. Because both the Turkish speakers and I spoke stilted Persian, we understood each other better than was the case when I spoke with actual Persians. (Some Shirazis thought I spoke with an Afghan accent, which meant, of course, that I never quite got the accent right. Shirazis also spoke a local dialect of Persian which I believe the more educated tried to avoid speaking with me. For this reason they were more understandable than the average man in the street.)

The following year was spent back at Harvard with more reading and putting it all together for a thesis. Looking at it now, its main innovation appears to be the subdivision of "general belief modes" into groups. The first I called "Beliefs of the Iranian as Man" (existential), second "as a member of society", third, "as an individual in society", and fourth as an "Iranian Individual in Society". Many useful or at least interesting generalizations were made about Iranians of past and present, based on interviews, literary sources, and other investigators who had asked similar questions in the past. But whatever else it was, this was not a study of "Iranian Civilization" as I understand the term today.

Much later I wrote a book on Cultural Regions of the United States (University of Washington Press), an attempt to show how the different regions of the United States had developed for historical and other reasons into areas with somewhat different cultures. Again, this had nothing to do with civilization. However, after Cultural Regions a colleague and I put together a manuscript on Pacific Northwest Civilization. It was an examination of what the United States' Northwest had produced or added to the life of Americans or to world civilization. As a young region, the answer was not much, yet in branches of literature, particularly poetry, and in new ideas relating to the environment, in the manufacture of airplanes, or, we would say today, in the area of computer software, the people of the Northwest have, relative to their population added a great deal. I contrasted their performance with that of Switzerland, a country I had also studied closely. ith about the same population, but with a much longer history, Switzerland had, of course made a much greater contribution. This was meant as a model that might be emulated by Northwesterners.

In Western history, we find certain places that have produced more for humanity than others. Athens was a small city, yet its production was enormous. Much the same could be said of Vienna in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, and so on. In Iranian history many would similarly point to Shiraz, or perhaps to Bokhara.

Looking at the world as a whole, and over the last 7,000 years, we can define a number of civilizations, many no longer existing, that made significant additions to our universal heritage. They seldom, if ever, existed in hermetic, separate boxes, isolated from the rest of mankind. But most did grow up in relative isolation, and develop distinct styles of contribution because they were separated from the other active civilizations of the time by oceans, high mountains, or difficult deserts. Iranian civilization also made its distinct contribution, but it was necessarily less distinct than others because it was situated at the crossroads of peoples, people who always communicated with one another through the lands identified as Iranian.

Iranians, and anyone who studies deeply what has been Iranian, are today heirs to Iranian Civilization at the same time that they are also heirs to a "Modern Civilization" based on Western roots. In our world, we can no longer speak of separate civilizations, communication is too easy and too ubiquitous. But we can hope to understand and express and take pride in multiple heritages, to the extent that doing so profits us as individuals and ultimately profits mankind.