Iran: Empire of the Mind

by Michael Axworthy

  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.

  3 See Bouhdiba, pp. 19-20 and passim.

  4 See for example Lapidus 2002, p. 30.

&n
bsp; 5 Frye 1975, pp. 64-5.

  6 Khanbaghi 2006, p. 25.

  7 Bausani 2000, p. 118.

  8 Ibid., pp.111-21.

  9 Ibid., p. 111; for the changes after the conquest see Cambridge History, vol. 4, pp. 40-8 (Zarrinkub).

  10 Cambridge History, vol. 4, pp. 63-4 (Mottahedeh).

  11 Kennedy 2005, pp. 134-6.

  12 Yarshater 1998, pp. 70-1.

  13 Frye 1975, pp. 122-3; Bausani 2000, p. 143.

  14 Bausani 1975, pp. 84-5.

  15 Nakosteen 1964, pp. 20-7.

  16 Quoted in Frye 1975, p. 150.

  17 Bausani 2000, pp. 121-30; see also Khanbaghi 2006, pp. 20-7.

  18 Al-Maqdisi and Narshakhi, quoted in Crone 1994, p. 450.

  19 Persian transliterated from Saberi, p. 20; for the translation I am grateful to Hashem Ahmadzadeh and Lenny Lewisohn for their help. The selection of poetry that follows here is a personal one, and includes a disproportionate number of rubaiyat—largely because the quatrain form is shorter than the other main verse forms and enabled me to incorporate more poetry from a variety of poets in a short space, and to include the original Persian.

  20 Clinton 1987, p. xvii.

  21 Ibid., pp. 72-3.

  22 Idries Shah 1964, p. xiv.

  23 Arberry 1958, p. 67.

  24 Aminrazavi 2005, pp. 25-7 and Avery/Heath-Stubbs 1981, Appendix 1.

  25 Ibid., pp. 199-200.

  26 Saberi, p. 75; translation Axworthy/Ahmadzadeh/Lewisohn. There are examples of quatrains where Fitzgerald took greater liberties with the originals.

  27 Aminrazavi 2005, pp. 131-3; Yarshater 1988, pp. 148-50 (Elwell-Sutton).

  28 Saberi, p. 78; translation Axworthy/Ahmadzadeh/Lewisohn.

  29 Arberry 1949, p. 14; Saidi 1992, p. 36; translation Axworthy/Ahmadzadeh/Lewisohn/Avery.

  30 For Sufism generally, see especially Lewisohn 1999, and Schimmel.

  31 Lewisohn 1999, pp. 11-43; Hodgson 1974, vol. 2, pp. 203, 209, 213, 217-22, 293, 304.

  32 Cambridge History, vol. 5, p. 299.

  33 Arberry 1958, pp. 90-1.

  34 Gelpke 1966, p. 168.

  35 Clinton 2000, p. 25.

  36 Lewisohn and Shackle 2006, p. 255; and L. Lewisohn, ‘Attar, Farid al-Din’ (article) in The Encyclopedia of Religion, 2005, p. 601—cf. Nietzsche: Was aus Liebe getan wird, geschieht immer jenseits von Gut und Böse—That which is done out of love, always takes place beyond Good and Evil.

  37 Darbandi and Davis 1984, pp. 57-75.

  38 Morgan 1986 pp. 88-96 and passim.

  39 Cambridge History, vol. 5, pp. 313-14, based on Boyle 1958, pp. 159-62.

  40 Ibid., p. 337.

  41 Levy 1999, p. 245.

  42 Mojaddedi, 2004, pp. 4-5.

  43 Saberi, p. 257; translation Axworthy/Ahmadzadeh.

  44 Chittick and Wilson 1982, p. 34.

  45 Ibid., p. 36.

  46 Moin 1999, p. 47. These are deep waters; the idea of the Perfect Man refers backward to Sohravardi, neo-Platonism and possibly to the personifications (daena, fravashi) and angels in Zoroastrianism—see also Corbin 1971, vol. II, pp. 297-325.

  47 Corbin 1977, p. 139; the similarity to the earlier extracts describing the daena is obvious.

  48 Chittick and Wilson 1982, p. 60.

  49 Wickens 1974 p. 150

  50 Browne 1969 vol. II, p. 530

  51 Saberi p. 274; translation Axworthy/Ahmadzadeh.

  52 Ibid., p. 277; translation Axworthy/Ahmadzadeh.

  53 Arberry 1958 p. 331. There is more than an echo of this poem in Matthew Arnold’s Dover Beach.

  54 Arberry 1947 p. 43; I am grateful to Lenny Lewisohn for his translation. Compare with Thomas Hardy’s poem Moments of Vision

  That mirror

  Which makes of men a transparency

  Who holds that mirror

  And bids us such a breast-bare spectacle see

  Of you and me?

  55 And not just Iranians—western commentators have agonised over whether such poems, addressed to a Beloved in the third person singular, which in Persian is gender-neutral, are homoerotic or conventionally heterosexual. The answer (given the absence of clear gender markers, such as one finds in other poems) is surely that the ambiguity is deliberate. One might more profitably reflect how appropriate the neutral third person is to the higher meaning of the Beloved, ie to God.

  56 Khanlari 1980 ghazal 197; also quoted in Limbert 1987 p. 144.

  57 Saberi p. 384; Saberi’s translation.

  58 Cambridge History, vol. 5, pp. 546-547.

  59 Paul 1997 pp. 46–47 and passim.

  60 Cf Vaziri 1993 passim.

  61 Ibn Khaldun, Muqaddimah, vol. 1, pp. 353-5; Gellner 1991 passim.

  4. SHI‘ISM AND THE SAFAVIDS

  1 The following draws largely on Momen 1985, pp. 28-33 and passim.

  2 See for example Bill and Williams 2002, pp. 1-7 and Frye 1968, pp. 19 and 57.

  3 Babayan 2002, p. xxxviii.

  4 Ibid., p. xxxix.

  5 Encyclopedia Iranica, ‘Esmail’ (Savory); see also Newman 2006, pp. 9-12.

  6 Ibid., ‘Esmail’ (Savory).

  7 Newman 2006, pp. 24-5 and 1993, passim.

  8 The extent of Shi‘ism in Iran before 1500 and the changes thereafter have been thoroughly explored by Rasul Ja‘farian (Ja‘farian 1991).

  9 Foltz 2004, p. 134.

  10 Minorsky 1943, pp. 33-5.

  11 See Floor 2000, and Matthee, 1999.

  12 Bayly 1989, p. 30; Foran 1992 (passim); Sefatgol 2003, p. 408.

  13 See Floor 2001 and Minorsky, 1943.

  14 Encyclopaedia Iranica, ‘Molla Sadra Shirazi’ (Sajjad Rizvi). ‘Molla’ and ‘Mullah’ are the same word, but I refer to Molla Sadra in this way in an attempt to distance him from modern connotations that could be misleading.

  15 Mottahedeh 1987, p. 179.

  16 Yarshater 1988, pp. 249–88 and, notably, the quotation from Bausani, p. 275.

  17 Levy/Ebrami 1999, pp 293–5; see also Sanasarian 2000, p. 45.

  18 To get a sense of this, albeit in a description from a later period, the relationship between the Jewish family and their village mullah in Dorit Rabinyan’s Persian Brides (Edinburgh 1998) is vivid and memorable.

  19 Mottahedeh 1987, p. 203. The thinker Ali Shariati (1933-1977) also attacked the Shi‘ism of the Safavid period (Black Shi‘ism) but arguably was addressing deficiencies of religious practice in his own time rather than making a historical point. His priority was to encourage a resurgence of true Shi‘ism (Red Shi‘ism)—a revolutionary Shi‘ism of social justice—see Chapter 7 below.

  20 See Matthee 1996, and Axworthy 2007.

  21 Matthee 2005, p. 61.

  22 Ibid., pp. 50-6.

  23 Savory 1980, p. 232.

  24 Matthee 2005, pp. 58-60.

  25 Ibid., pp. 91-2, 92n. The evidence comes not just from western observers at court, but also from Persian sources; the Shaykh ol-Eslam of Qom had the temerity to criticise the Shah’s drinking, and was lucky to escape execution for it.

  26 Newman 2006, p. 99; ‘part of this struggle for the hearts and minds of the “popular” classes’.

  27 See Moreen 1992 passim.

  28 Calmard 2003, p. 331.

  5. THE FALL OF THE SAFAVIDS, NADER SHAH,

  THE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY INTERREGNUM,

  AND THE EARLY YEARS OF THE QAJAR DYNASTY

  1 This version is taken from Malcolm 1829, vol. 1, pp. 399-400, but a number of Persian and other sources give the same story—cf. Mohammad Kazem Marvi, p.18 and Krusinski, vol.1, pp. 62-4.

  2 Matthee 2005, pp. 92-4; Babayan 2002, p. 485; Lewisohn 1999, pp. 132-3.

  3 Hoffmann, 1986 vol. 1, pp. 203-4, 290; Krusinski, vol. 1, pp. 121-2; Axworthy 2006, pp. 31-3.

  4 Bayly 1989, p. 30; Foran 1992.

  5 Krusinski, vol. 2, pp. 196-8.

  6 Axworthy 2006, p. 142.

  7 Miklukho-Maklai 1952, p. 97.

  8 Vatatzes, pp. 131-3.

  9 Levy/Ebrami 1999, pp 360-2;
Axworthy 2006, p. 169.

  10 The full significance of Nader’s religious policy is covered admirably in Tucker 2006.

  11 See Axworthy 2006, pp. 249-50 and my forthcoming article ‘The Army of Nader Shah’, Iranian Studies. The size of the army is corroborated from a number of sources, and is plausible given earlier trends.

  12 Bayly 1989, p. 23 (Ottoman and Moghul figures): Floor 2000, p. 2: Issawi 1971 p. 20; Floor, Dutch Trade (forthcoming).

  13 Axworthy 2006, pp 280-1.

  14 Astarabadi, vol. 2, p. 187.

  15 Cambridge History, vol. 7, pp. 63-5.

  16 Floor 2000, p. 3.

  17 Ibid.

  18 Ibid., pp. 2-3; Issawi 1971 p. 20.

  19 Floor, Dutch Trade (forthcoming).

  20 Notably by Lambton 1977. For this paragraph see also Cambridge History, vol. 7, pp. 506-41 (Richard Tapper), Tapper 1997 pp. 1-33 and Gellner 1991.

  21 Hasan-e Fasa’i, p. 4.

  22 Ibid., pp. 52-4.

  23 Malcolm 1829, vol. 2, p. 125.

  24 Cambridge History, vol. 7, p. 125.

  25 See Algar 1977.

  26 Mottahedeh 1987 p. 233; a similar process took place in the later Roman Empire with the title of Senator and other honorifics.

  27 Momen 1985, pp. 238-4; Keddie (Ghaffary) 1999, pp. 94-6.

  28 For example, Hasan-e Fasa’i, pp.101-2.

  29 Cambridge History, vol. 7, pp. 142-3.

  30 Malcolm 1829, vol. 2, p. 217.

  31 Wright 1977, pp. 4-5.

  32 Cambridge History, vol. 7, pp. 331-3; Hasan-e Fasa’i, p. 111.

  33 Ibid., p. 334; Keddie 1999, p. 22.

  34 Ibid., pp. 335-8.

  35 Keddie 2006 pp. 42-3.

  36 Kelly 2002, pp. 190-4.

  37 Keddie 1971, pp. 3-4; Cambridge History, vol. 7, pp. 174-81.

  38 Keddie 1999, p. 17; Cambridge History, vol. 7, p. 174.

  6. THE CRISIS OF THE QAJAR MONARCHY, THE REVOLUTION OF 1905-1911 AND THE ACCESSION OF THE PAHLAVI DYNASTY

  1 Amanat 1997, p. 252.