Love and Pomegranates: Artists and Wayfarers on Iran

by Meghan Nuttall Sayres, The Huffington Post

My last post was entitled "Media Washed Middle East," in which I wrote about my experiences traveling and writing about the Middle East. Those sojourns abroad culminated in an anthology that was just published this spring by Nortia Press entitled Love and Pomegranates: Artists and Wayfarers on Iran. It is a collection of essays, poetry, interviews and blog posts written by ordinary people who have found friendships, mentors and muses in Iran. The anthology aims to challenge stereotypes about Iran and its people currently perpetuated in the Western media. Below is the introduction to the book...

Prior to my first trip to Iran in March 2005, when I was invited to speak at the country's First International Children's Book Festival, I had looked for a book to help relieve doubts about my decision to go. At first, I found none. Then a friend gave me a copy of Alison Wearing's Honeymoon in Purdah. Wearing's account of her travels in Iran during the summer of 2000 helped me to deconstruct the myth that Iran is a haven of sequestered women and armed masked martyrs. Her book -- infused with humor -- showed me that I, too, would be welcomed there.

Love and Pomegranates: Artists and Wayfarers on Iran came about because my friends, colleagues and I have developed a profound appreciation of Iranian culture and an abundance of stories about the friendships we made and the generosity we received in Iran. On our journeys we found another Iran, one that lies in stark contrast to the ominous picture of their culture painted by the American and other Western mainstream media, which has repeatedly tainted our collective perspective on Iran. A recent study discovered that half of Americans view Iran as a threat and opinions of that country have worsened in recent years; yet, two thirds of us have never met an Iranian. Perhaps the study suggests that the media's focus on our nation's foreign policies and on the idea of national security prevents us from considering the richness of Persian history and culture, which reflects a long-held tradition of peace and hospitality.

Perhaps the bias against Iranians is bound up in a bias against Muslims. After the capture and killing of Osama Bin Laden in 2011 polls revealed that the perceived threat from Muslims living in the United States and abroad increased significantly. While many Iranians in the U.S. and Iran are Muslim, they are also secular, Christian, Jewish, Zoroastrian, Bahai, or follow other spiritual paths. An Iranian acquaintance of mine living in Tehran attends her father's mosque and her mother's Catholic church. Dr. Carl Ernst, a professor of Islamic Studies at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill estimates that there are at least 300,000 Christians in Iran today. Historically, in Sasanian Iran, Christianity was a prominent religion and home to a number of Eastern churches that were considered heretical by the Byzantines.

Whatever the cause, the purpose of this anthology is to counter an insufficient understanding of a nation and its people. We hope this anthology of essays, interviews, poems and blogs from people who have traveled or lived in this country of golden deserts, cypress-scented mountains, and inexpressibly-beautiful tiled mosques, will help readers to better interpret the disinformation and stereotypes about Iran that might eclipse what the human heart may discover: a warm, educated and artistic people, whose dreams are much like our own. We are hopeful that this collection will help to inspire others to get to know their Iranian neighbors at home and perhaps even travel to Iran.

Indeed, I made many new friends and acquaintances in Iran. So have all the contributors to this collection. This volume is enriched by their varied backgrounds; here are voices of botanists, a Persian dafs musician, a radio show host, professors of Persian history and literature, filmmakers, grandmothers, teachers, carpet dealers, adult and children's book writers. Many are of Western ancestry and thus have little or no familial ties with Iran. Few knew each other prior to submitting their work for this anthology. I think of each of them as "missionaries in reverse," a term borrowed from musician Cameron Powers, who has traveled in the Middle East connecting with people through the love of music as founder of Musical Missions of Peace. The American contributors in this anthology did not go to Iran to promote Western culture or to preach any religion. They went to learn from our supposed foe, to enrich and enlighten their own lives through their experiences. Reading their work, I felt a rind peeling back and seeds of a new garden spilling over me -- a leafy space where a fresh breeze of conversation flows. Their testimonies bestow a pomegranate-like radiance by which others may see.

The Iranian contributors' memories and praise for Iran spoke of love: of friends and relatives missed; of a deep yearning for the sands of their homeland; of Persian cooking, art, classical literature, music and traditions.

Many of the contributors visited Iran for a few weeks, others worked and lived there for several years. Some grew up in Tehran, but now live in the United States and other Western countries. A few of them have always lived in Iran. What the non-Iranians have in common are fond memories of those they've met during their stays in Iran. As Rowan Storm writes in her blog, "These everyday meetings with vulnerable and open-hearted people are what provide the foundation for making a difference in this world." The Iranian voices of the diaspora and of those living in Iran give us a seldom-heard view of their homeland, one which defies the bleak picture painted by some expats whose voices have become hostages of yesterday's demons. The Iranian writers in this collection move beyond the past with an open mind, give us the opportunity to hear their questions and know their assessment of us, from which we may grow.

Dr. Martin Luther King said during the Vietnam War, "The world now demands of America a maturity we may not be able to achieve." He called for a worldwide fellowship "that lifts neighborly concern beyond one's tribe, race, class and nation," and for "an all- embracing and unconditional love for all men." The writers in this anthology from both East and West, who have made an effort to find themselves in others, help show our diplomats and public officials a path toward that maturity. The synchronicity, the friend- ships, and forces that drew these writers from many different continents together in this book is--to borrow a notion from the late Cistercian monk Thomas Merton--"an epiphany of certainties we could not know in isolation." An epiphany that affirms a deep belief that there is a more sympathetic way to live and gaze upon this world. President Barack Obama's rhetoric toward Iran seems to suggest a willingness to undertake a small but crucial step toward Dr. King's dream of a mature America. One that may lead the world to a more inclusive vision of compassion.

In This Collection 

Within, you will find a communion of spirits among new voices from many countries: America, Iran, Greece, New Zealand, Britain, Turkey, and more. Original essays will take you, among many other destinations, into a bakery in Tehran to bake bread; on a journey from Tabriz to the Turkish-Iranian border in search of a lost passport; alongside a painter whose work is transformed at the foot of Hafiz's shrine in Shiraz; into the heart of an Iranian poet as she questions her new American identity; high into the Alborz Mountains to discover flowering lamb's ear (Stachys byzantina) in its native haunts; deep into the woods on a dark winter night to witness a Zoroastrian fire ritual; and beneath a bridge over the River Zayandeh to smoke hookah.

Love and Pomegranates opens with the section First Impressions and Persian Hospitality which captures immediate reactions to Iran as written in blogs as well as reflective essays on returning to Iran after a prolonged absence. It also holds stories of Iranians of the diaspora stepping foot on the soil of their ancestors for the first time and tales of random acts of kindness experienced by Westerners, such as a spontaneous all-day tour with a stranger. Natives talk about tourists they've hosted or welcomed to their country. In the section Finding Ourselves in the Other Westerners talk about Iranians they've known and loved, and about finding common ground with others they've just met. Iranians living outside of Iran write about their adjustment to their adopted coun- tries, their nostalgia for the traditions of their homeland and what it means to be part of the diaspora. The sections Arts and Culture and Islam and Other Faiths share stories by artists and scholars who traveled to Iran in pursuit of their muse or work. They express their admiration for Iranian musicians, painters, writers, Islamic saints, Sufis, nature, art and architecture. A New Path Forward touches upon the United States' past and cur- rent relationship with Iran. It includes thoughts on how the West might move toward a better understanding of Iranians at home and abroad through cultural, academic and medical exchanges, as well as other creative avenues.

A theme running through many of these essays by contributors from both East and West, involves having experienced in Iran a sense of ecstasy -- a communion with a larger reality, a universal light. It seemed fitting to include in this collection poems by the classical Persian Sufi poets Hafiz, Sa'di, Khayyam, Ferdowsi, 'Attar, Rumi and others, writers who call us to a deeper consciousness and who remind us that only love will help us evolve. No book celebrating the richness of Iranian culture could be without them. In keeping with Persian tradition, some of the selections of these poems were made by the contributors opening books by their favorite poets to a random page. This age-old practice has proven that the words found in the poetry offer wisdom or even an anecdote for whatever question or problem the reader or seeker might be experiencing at the time. We encourage you to read this collection in a similar spirit of openness.

It is my hope that the depiction of life in Iran in this anthology will lift you out of this period in history in which we sometimes reduce people and nations to simplistic groupings of good and evil. Love and Pomegranates is a gesture of peace.

I invite you to read the first story in this collection, "The Frangrance of Naan," by Shahrokh Nikfar on loveandpomegranates.com. Shahrokh is a U.S. citizen who was born and raised in Tehran and who returned to his homeland in 2000 for the first time in twenty-one years. I've included an image of him in this post reading from his piece at a recent gathering of intrepid readers and travelers from Spokane, Washington.

Shahrokh hosts a weekly radio program The Persian Hour, KYRS Radio, Spokane, WA. Coming soon on loveandpomegranates.com is a podcast of recent discussion between Shahrokh and myself about the story of how this anthology came to be, its 67 or so contributors and their work.

Meghan Nuttall Sayres is author of a new young adult novel set in 20th century Persia Night Letter published this month by Nortia Press along with a re-issue of Anahita’s Woven Riddle (Abrams, 2006) an ALA Top Ten Best Books YA and a Book Sense/Indie Pick. Her anthology Love and Pomegranates: Artists and Wayfarers on Iran will be released spring 2013. She’d like to thank Rumi and Kabir Helminski for sharing similar thoughts about rubies, as well as PEN American who first published this essay.

Via  The Huffington Post

Can a text from ancient Persia break down mistrust between enemies?

The 2,600-year-old Cyrus Cylinder is embarking on a first US tour with a message of tolerance from Iran's past

The Cyrus Cylinder. Photograph: British Museum. Courtesy Guardian

by Ian Black, Guardian

Thirty-plus years of mutual suspicion, demonization and hostility separate the United States from Iran, so it would be naive to hope for any sudden change — on the nuclear front or on any of the other thorny issues that divide Washington from Tehran. But an innovative exercise in cultural diplomacy might, just, make a small dent in the wall of prejudice.

Hopes rest on a rugby-ball sized object whose permanent home is in a glass case in the magnificent Iran gallery of the British Museum. It was there that a modest send-off ceremony was held the other day for the Cyrus Cylinder, heading off on a US tour to give American audiences a glimpse of an ancient civilization whose heritage is too often masked by contemporary clamour and aggression.

The cylinder, one of the most famous objects to have survived from the world of antiquity, is a clay tablet inscribed with Akkadian Cuneiform script. It was made shortly after the Achaemenid king Cyrus the Great of Persia captured Babylon in 539BC and records how he allowed deported peoples to return to their homelands. In the words of the Iran Heritage Foundation:

"It tells how the god of Babylon – the conquered land – has chosen Cyrus to improve the lives of the Babylonians, and it talks about Cyrus's efforts in repatriating displaced people and restoring temples across Mesopotamia, letting them worship the god of their choice, not the god of the conqueror. It tells the story of letting people living their lives even after their country was conquered, something that was not heard of at the time."

Strikingly — given the hateful nature of current Middle Eastern politics — those peoples included the Jews, who went back to Palestine to rebuild their Temple. Enthusiastic European reactions to the discovery of the cylinder in the bible-reading days of 1879 were influenced in part by the Old Testament books of Isaiah and Ezra, which portray Cyrus as a liberator of the Jewish exiles.

The hope, says the IHF, is that the exhibition — the cylinder and other objects — will appeal to the substantial community of expatriate Iranians living in the US (many of them refugees from the 1979 revolution) as well as to American Jews accustomed to the mutual hostility between the Islamic Republic and Israel, including outlandish Holocaust-denying statements by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

The object is not itself Persian but Babylonian and was found in what is now Iraq by British Museum archaeologists, who acquired it from the Ottomans. It describes events from a Babylonian perspective and records Cyrus as having been guided by the Babylonian deity Marduk. It has however, become closely identified with Persia's pre-Islamic culture: when the British Museum loaned it to Iran in 2010 it was seen by 1m people in three months and there were briefly fears that it might not be returned to its Bloomsbury home.

The US tour will begin in the Smithsonian in Washington — in time for the Persian new year of Norouz - before going on to museums including the Metropolitan in New York and the J Paul Getty in Los Angeles.

Understanding of the artefact's historical and cultural significance has been enriched by the work of the British Museum's director, Neil MacGregor, who emphasizes its message of respect for diversity, tolerance and universal human rights - the reason a replica is on display at UN headquarters in New York. As Karen Armstrong, the renowned historian of religion, put it at the send-off event:

"The chief task of our time is to build a global community where people of different persuasions can look at each other's sacred traditions and learn to co-exist."

Other experts, however, have cautioned against too liberal and contemporary interpretation of a message from 2,600 years ago, recalling that the text is in essence a boastful proclamation by a conquering tyrant justifying his actions to posterity. In the words of theologian Jacob Wright:

"The values of tolerance that the Cyrus Cylinder has come to represent today must be held high. Yet in doing so, we must also heed the voices of those who opposed Persia's imperial reach. Otherwise, we lose sight of the danger posed by any power that would organize the world primarily for the purpose of greater control, exploitation and expansion."

Via Guardian

Art Beyond Borders: Edinburgh Iranian Festival 2013

The third Edinburgh Iranian Festival promises a re-examination of the culture, history and art of a much-misunderstood country

by  Bram E. Gieben, The Skinny

From 1 to 16 February, the third Edinburgh Iranian Festival comes to the capital to celebrate the history, culture, language and art of Iran. Often, the portrayal of Iran in the media focuses on the negative – Iran's policies on censorship and its political situation are the subjects most often addressed, but the rich cultural heritage of Iran, not to mention its thriving contemporary cultural life – both in Iran itself, and in the expatriate Iranian community – are often passed over.

The Edinburgh Iranian Festival seeks to redress this balance, and to expose the expat Iranian community in Scotland, and Scottish audiences, to a wide array of Iranian culture, history and art. Sara Kheradmand set up the first festival in 2008, after founding the Edinburgh University Persian Society, and the first season ran in 2009. “Doing something like this – which is about culture, about giving something back to both the Scottish and the Iranian community – is something we are all passionate about,” she says.

This year's festival is dedicatedv to the Persian poet Ferdowsi, who wrote Iran's 'national epic,' The Shahnameh. It celebrated its 1000th anniversary in 2010. “There is a long-standing tradition of people – usually men – acting out the stories from The Shahnameh. People will gather around to listen,” says Kheradmand. Xanthe Gresham will be performing an English-language version of some tales from the epic: “We've never seen anyone doing this before,” says Kheradmand. “She has taken the translations and applied her own twists.” There is also a lecture from Professor Ali Ansari about the relationship between The Shahnameh and modern Iran.

While talking about life and culture in modern Iran, both Kheradmand and her colleagues are keen to dispel some myths. Haleh Jamali, the curator of the festival's visual arts strand and a featured artist, says: “You rarely see programmes on Iran's culture or history, so we would like to focus on that.” The film strand engages directly with life in present-day Iran, and the hardships that are entailed: “Modest Reception touches upon life in villages; Orange Suits is about street-sweepers,” says Kheradmand. The films are intimate: “You get to know their lives.” The lecture programme explores contemporary life in Iran from different perspectives: “We have a lecture about tribal life in Iran with Professor Borbor – a completely different lifestyle than you would encounter in Tehran,” she says. “The photographer James McGachie's lecture is about his travels in Iran – he presents an outsider's perspective.”

The art exhibition is based around the theme of ‘borders,’ and presents work from international artists alongside contemporary work from Iran, and Iranian expats. “We were interested to see how people across cultures and nations would respond to the theme,” says Jamali. “Some are about geographical borders, some are about more abstract things – the borders between the real and unreal.” Given that the rest of the programme has a strong focus on Iranian history and culture, why does the Borders event not focus exclusively on contemporary Iranian art? “In the final selection, we have some Iranian artists, but the majority are not Iranian,” says Jamali. “Sending art from Iran can be quite difficult and expensive, so that was a factor. There are some traces in the Iranian pieces, some references to their cultural identity. But there aren't specific references to Iran. [Their work] can be seen as part of a Middle Eastern art tradition, rather than a specifically Iranian one.” 

According to Jamali, the Iranian contemporary art scene is alive and kicking: “In the past three years or so, performance and video art have become quite strong in Iran,” she says. She “can see lots of very high art coming from Iran in the future.” Perhaps at future festivals, more of this work can be exhibited. Nonetheless, this year's show still has some fantastic Iranian art on display: “There are Iranian artists living in Iran and expatriate artists in the exhibition, so it is a chance to compare their work,” Jamali says.

The festival’s music strand sees five performances from contemporary Iranian bands. “In the Iranian population right now, there are a significant amount of people who are under 30. These youngsters, through today's media and technology, are very much exposed to Western music, and this has an effect,” says Kheradmand. “You get fusions of jazz, pop, hip-hop, lots of diverse musical styles. Many of these bands use traditional instruments.”

Roxana Vilk, whose band GOL are on this year's bill, use the daf and santour, blending them with jazz and electronica. “The group Baran have mixed it in another way – they have Indian and Spanish influences, as well as Iranian and Kurdish,” says Kheradmand. “Radio Tehran are simply a rock band who happen to sing in Farsi. The more traditional bands, you might hear on Iranian radio channels...”

“But who listens to those radio stations? That's the interesting question,” says Vilk, who is also working on a contemporary dance and video art piece inspired by traditional Iranian tile and metalwork. For Vilk, the internet has changed everything – when GOL were featured on BBC Persia, they had a flood of requests from Iranian fans asking for more of their music, which has never been commercially released in Iran, but thrives illicitly in the backstreet music shops and underground recording studios which service the young music fans of the country.

There is “virtually no copyright in Iran,” according to Vilk. “I've recorded in Tehran, and the musicians there will have a better understanding of Western music, and Eastern music, than we do here. They are so culturally and musically literate.” Much of the music made and enjoyed in Iran has to be discovered via unofficial channels, like internet radio. “Women singing is still forbidden – you can sing as a chorus, but not solo,” says Vilk. “If you have a record with a lead singer who is female, that will be released underground.”

Another important event in the festival calendar is an exhibition at the National Museum of Scotland, curated by Friederike Voigt, the Museum's Senior Curator of the Middle East and South Asia collections. It includes metal works and ceramics, and will show “contemporary art in the context of historical pieces.” Voigt says: “We want to show some of the principles applied in the decorative systems; their inner nature, which still inform today. Pieces by renowned artists such as Parviz Tanavoli or Khosrow Hassanzadeh were acquired and are now on permanent display.” For Voigt, the exhibition is an opportunity to “explore how artists draw on their own heritage.”

One such exploration is Roxana Vilk's dance piece, which uses the patterns of Iranian metalwork and ceramic tiles as “a sonic and choreographic score.” Vilk explains: “Showing figurative human forms is a complex issue in Islamic culture. But the patterns in the tiles and metalwork are about movement and repetition. I wanted to ask how this could be used by bodies, without coming out of the territory of traditional Iranian art and values.” This kind of cultural dialogue between the past and the present, the historical and the contemporary, is what the festival is all about.

Speaking frankly about censorship in Iran, the festival's curators are loath to categorise the effects of Iran's attitudes towards, and laws about art as entirely negative. “In certain ways, censorship creates creativity,” says Kheradmand. “Art and culture always carries on. It finds a way, within the limits.” For Jamali, “it depends on the artist.” She says that living and working in Iran “helped quite a lot,” because she “managed to concentrate on something which [she] could present.”

Vilk meanwhile is wary of romanticising art produced under censorious regimes: “Take Václav Havel or Milan Kundera – undeniably, their lives were made more difficult by censorship. I think that outside Iran, there is a market for art, music and films which idealise that censorship, and the artists' work produced in reaction to it.”

With workshops on calligraphy, Farsi, Iranian cooking and a whole host of other events, and a gala performance from one of the festival’s long-term supporters, Irish-Iranian comedian Patrick Monahan, 2013's Edinburgh Iranian Festival promises to educate, inform and entertain, all in the name of reaching a better understanding of the life and history of one of the most maligned and misrepresented cultures in the modern world.

“We have always used the festival as a platform to bring together artists, musicians, lecturers and other people together,” says Kheradmand. “Once you understand another culture, and it stops being alien to you, you're not afraid of it. You see the people. You see the culture.”


The Edinburgh Iranian Festival runs from 1-16 Feb. For times, prices and dates of events, check out the full programme at the festival's website: www.ediranfest.co.uk

Via The Skinny

Pearls of Persian art

Late collector’s Islamic collection spans centuries and genres
 

“There’s a real breadth here,” said the exhibition’s curator, Mary McWilliams, who holds the namesake chair as Norma Jean Calderwood Curator of Islamic and Later Indian Art. The collection contributes “a scope and depth that we didn’t have before.” Photos by Kris Snibbe/Harvard Staff Photographer, Courtesy Harvard Gazette.

by Katie Koch, Harvard Staff Writer

Among the roughly 170 pieces of Islamic art that Norma Jean Calderwood and her husband left to Harvard, one in particular hints at the late collector’s philosophy: an earthenware bowl bearing, in precise calligraphy, the epigram “Greed is a sign of poverty.”

Calderwood was a patron of the arts and a renowned Boston philanthropist, and her legacy of generosity was as rich as her varied collection of Persian and Iranian objects, which spanned more than a millennium (from the ninth through the 19th century) and a variety of genres, from glazed ceramics to illustrated manuscripts to lacquered pen cases.

Now that little-seen collection, amassed by Calderwood over 30 years and donated by her and her husband, Stanford, to Harvard in 2002, will be put on public display.

“In Harmony: The Norma Jean Calderwood Collection of Islamic Art,” which opens Thursday atthe Harvard Art Museums/Arthur M. Sackler Museum, is both a celebration of Calderwood’s championship of once-obscure work and a showcase of the vibrancy of Iranian culture over time.

“There’s a real breadth here,” said the exhibition’s curator, Mary McWilliams, who holds the namesake chair as Norma Jean Calderwood Curator of Islamic and Later Indian Art. The collection contributes “a scope and depth that we didn’t have before.”

Among the fruits of Calderwood’s labors are folios from illustrated manuscripts of famed medieval Persian poems, such as the “Shahnama” (“Book of Kings”) and the “Khamsa” (“Quintet”); elegant ceramic bowls bearing both Islamic teachings and lines of Persian poetry; and single-page compositions such as “Young Dervish” by Riza Abbasi, the most influential artist of 17th-century Iran.

That the collection exists at all — and that it ended up in Harvard’s care — is something of a fluke. Norma Jean and Stanford Calderwood, both Colorado natives, took to the Boston area, where they would later concentrate their philanthropy, as transplants. Norma Jean Calderwood, who died in 2006 at age 84, was a lifelong autodidact, completing her bachelor’s degree at Boston University in her 40s before pursuing graduate studies in Islamic art at Harvard in the 1960s.

Among the collection is a folio from an illustrated manuscript of the medieval Persian poem “Shahnama.” Courtesy Harvard Gazette.

“No obvious factor emerges to suggest what might have motivated a middle-aged woman living in suburban Boston to immerse herself in an artistic tradition that was neither easily mastered nor at the time broadly popular,” McWilliams writes in the exhibition’s catalogue.

But immerse herself in the subject — and master it — Calderwood did. She went on to lecture at the Museum of Fine Arts and Boston College, and began amassing her collection in 1968, guided by the idea that the region’s decorative and fine arts were worth studying on their own terms.

“Every comparison with the idea of art as the Western world conceives it should be thrown out, abandoned, and then it should be looked [at] with quite different eyes,” Calderwood wrote in one of her lectures on Islamic art.

Perhaps it’s fitting, then, that the Sackler exhibition marks the Harvard Art Museums’ first use of augmented reality technology to enhance museumgoers’ experience. Android, iPhone, and iPad users can download the mobile app Layar to snap photos of certain pieces in the exhibit that will take viewers directly to additional content, from an audio clip on how Islamic potters used color to a video demonstrating how a medieval dish for sweetmeats was likely constructed.

Few saw the collection during Calderwood’s life. (“I think she was keenly aware that as a private collector she should keep the collection private and not try to boost its value” by publishing information about its contents, McWilliams said.) But with the production of the exhibition and catalog, McWilliams hopes that professors, researchers, and students can benefit from its unique contents.

David Roxburgh, Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Professor of Islamic Art History, said the exhibition can be a teaching tool.

“Before the Calderwood gift, we had some very nice pieces of ceramics that you could study, but the sheer variety and number of objects in this ceramics collection would allow you to do a seminar in Islamic ceramics, for example, beginning in the 10^th century and going to the 17^th,” said Roxburgh, who contributed two essays to the exhibition’s catalogue. “Before we had these objects, it was difficult to have a representative sample across these centuries and this region. I’m quite excited to use these materials for teaching.”

“In Harmony: The Norma Jean Calderwood Collection of Islamic Art” is on view at the Arthur M. Sackler Museum, 485 Broadway, Cambridge, through June 1. To celebrate the opening, the museum will host a public reception and lecture, “Tables and Other Social Settings in Ninth-11^th Century Eastern Iran,” by Oya Pancaroğlu, associate professor of history at Boğaziçi University, on Wednesday from 6 to 8 p.m.

Via Harvard Gazette

Irandokht: Daughters of Iran

How an accidental find prompted an art project to document a forgotten era before the Iranian revolution

Courtesy of the Tehran Bureau, Guardian, Link to the pictures

by Sourena Parham for the Tehran Bureau, Guardian

In the autumn of 2005, Najaf Shokri was on his way to work when he made an intriguing discovery in a rubbish bin near his house in downtown Tehran. The bin, outside a branch of the National Civil Registrations Organisation, was filled with old national identification documents, all issued in 1942 and long expired.

"It was like discovering a mass grave," says Shokri. "They could have gone away and faded into history with no remaining trace."

He decided to create an art project out of his find, a collection of ID photographs that documents a generation. Shokri called the project Irandokht - "daughter of Iran" - after he noticed so many women by that name among the documents. It used to be a common first name in Iran.

Shokri's presentation focuses entirely on the photographs, revealing no names or personal information. The original meaning-making process is reversed, turned on its head as it were. The ID portraits no longer refer to specific individuals but to what we now call "meta-data": the postures in front of the camera, the hairdos, the makeup, the outfits, and even the photographic style of the time. All this meta-data evokes the era between the second world war and the Iranian revolution, an era that already seems very distant.

Before their replacement with more modern ID cards, Iranian identification documents consisted of four-page birth certificates issued without photographs. A holder was required to add a photograph to the document before using it for various legal purposes such as marriage, the national university entrance examination (known as the concours), or voting. Though the documents Shokri found were issued in 1942, the images in Irandokht are largely drawn from the period between the late 1950s and the late 1970s, when most of the women pictured added their photographs to their IDs.

Between 1950 and 1978, women's roles in Iranian society transformed dramatically. The middle class rapidly expanded, and women from different backgrounds found their way into schools and the job market. Basic primary education, once the preserve of the economic elite, spread to much of the populace. Young women in Iran's cities either removed their hijab or never wore it in the first place.

"One can see the history of the era in these faces," Shokri says. "Many of these women had mothers who were born to rural or small-town families but were married to men who came from the cities. The urban population was expanding and life was changing. It seems despite the fact that many of these families came from more traditional backgrounds they were in the process of adapting to the more westernised life of the big cities."

A popular term from the early 1920s through the early 1940s, during the country's preceding surge of modernisation, Irandokht is now out of fashion both as concept and name. But that's in part exactly why Shokri chose it for his project.

"I wanted to transform expired private documents into public heritage," he says. Irandokhts, the daughters of Iran, remind us of a past - in fact not so distant - when the Middle East had a different face.


Via Guardian

Restoring Iran’s Heritage of Magnificent Homes in an Age of High Rises

The largest restored palace in Kashan has several courtyards and is a tourist attraction. Photo by Newsha Tavakolian, courtesy of  The New York Times.

by Thomas Erdbrink, NYTimes

A petite woman in gray boots and a checkered scarf, Shanaz Nader had spent much of her adult life abroad, with long stretches in Tokyo, London and New York. But here she was braving a cold wind in this desert city three hours south of Tehran, making her way through a maze of high mud-brick walls.

Black-clad women waited at a small bakery as the rattling noise of a motorcycle in the distance echoed through the alleys. Finally, Mrs. Nader, an interior designer in Tehran, reached her destination: a large, two-panel wood door that opened up to her fully renovated weekend home, a majestic old Iranian house with four bedrooms, colored-glass windows, a separate office, two garden areas and a large rectangular marble fountain. 

After boiling tea, Mrs. Nader, 68, sighed and sat down under an arched passageway. The sun reflected in the fountain, as the wind blew in faint sounds of the midday call to prayer. 

“Whenever I dreamed of Iran while being in some faraway place, I dreamed of owning such a house,” she said. 

For thousands of years, houses with secluded gardens and courtyards have been a cornerstone of Iranian architecture, which strongly influenced structures like the Alhambra and the Taj Mahal. Similar dwellings are described in literature from Achaemenid times, around 700 B.C., and their old Persian name is the root for the word “paradise.”

But in past decades the houses fell out of favor and were widely demolished to make way for glassed apartment blocks, especially in Tehran. The sprawling family gardens on the flanks of the Alborz Mountains in the capital have long since been demolished to make way for high rises, turning landowners into millionaires but wiping out Iran’s architectural heritage. 

But Mrs. Nader and some others are beginning to reverse that trend. In recent years, dozens of houses and palaces in Kashan, a city known for its carpets and traditional Iranian architecture, have been painstakingly renovated into holiday homes and hotels. 

She was drawn to Kashan in 2008 when the owner of one of the palaces, Manoucheri House, built 200 years ago by a local merchant family, asked for her help in transforming it into a boutique hotel. Well known in Tehran for her basic but tasteful furniture and printed textiles that strike a delicate balance between the old and the new, Mrs. Nader was an obvious choice for the job, and she jumped at the opportunity. 

Now, all across the old neighborhoods of Kashan, laborers are renovating houses that until recently were neglected by their owners. 

At first the newcomers stirred opposition from local people, apparently upset that some of the renovations were being done with government money, which they wanted for building modern housing. “Hundreds of people signed a petition asking for the old houses to be flattened instead,” said Akbar Arezugar, 54, a renovation supervisor from Kashan. “But when the renovation was done, the cleric who was leading the opposition personally called everybody involved, apologized and applauded the work we had done.” 

While many Iranian cities face unemployment and an economic downturn because of sanctions and mismanagement of the economy, the burst of renovations — most of them by individuals — is keeping Kashan bustling. 

Mohsen Shahi, a 26-year-old architect, said he much preferred working on the renovations to designing apartment buildings, something that many of his university friends are doing. “If I had an unlimited budget I would buy old houses and rebuild them the way they were,” he said. 

Mr. Shahi was working on the Ameri House, a huge property with seven courtyards with fountains and dozens of rooms that is scheduled to open as a hotel in April. “For a long time it seemed as though our love for culture had diminished in our country,” he said. “Those old families that once built these beautiful houses were not thinking of profits, but of their legacies. Thankfully, now we are starting to learn from them.” 

Shanaz Nader, in the house that she bought and restored.  Photo by Newsha Tavakolian, courtesy of  The New York Times.

When her work on the boutique hotel was finished, Mrs. Nader looked for a place of her own. The first time she saw her house it was run-down and filled with dirt. Parts were even slated for demolition. “I bought it for $20,000 and people said I was crazy,” she said, while giving a tour of the house. The restoration cost another $300,000, she said, and has been worth every penny. 

She is planning to write a book on traditional Iranian architecture, and has also built an office where she wants to work with local architects. 

For most people, it is a labor of love. For the hotels, renovation costs are high, without much prospect of making profits. There are almost no foreign tourists anymore making their way to Kashan, which lies 30 miles north of Iran’s main uranium enrichment facility in Natanz. Many people fear the nuclear site could one day come under attack, with possibly deadly consequences for those living in its vicinity. 

“Sometimes I worry about the future,” she said, standing on one of the roofs of her house. In the distance, snow-capped mountain peaks basked in the sun. “But history shows that Iran always lands on its feet. I’m not abandoning ship.” 

Via NYTimes

On Iranians, Drinking Wine, and Cultural Stereotyping

by Touraj Daryaee, Tehran Bureau

Foreign fantasies of excess versus a tradition of moderation.


From archaeological excavations that suggest northwest Iran was one of the earliest places where wine was produced -- more than 6,000 years ago -- to the tale of medieval French knights bringing grapes from the city of Shiraz, where the great Persian poet Hafez lived and wrote about his love of drink, there are many historical associations between wine and the land of Iran. In more recent times, Chateau Sardasht is still remembered by those who lived in Iran before the 1979 Revolution. Nowadays, visitors to Napa Valley can view the Persopolitan-looking Darioush Winery, one of California's leading vintners.

But there are other, more fanciful observations that inform the Western notion that Iranian culture was veritably drowning itself in wine in antiquity. Athenaeus, a Greek author who wrote about all things related to food, mentions that the Achaemenid king Darius the Great had the following inscription on his tomb: "I was able to drink a great deal of wine and to bear it well." Such an inscription is nowhere to be found. A similar picture is painted of Xerxes the Great in the biblical Book of Esther (1:10), where we read that the "heart of the king was merry with wine." Some commentators have suggested that the Achaemenid ruler was drunk when he ordered the beautiful young girls brought before him, so he could choose a new queen.

The fifth century BCE historian Herodotus claimed not only that the Persians were very fond of wine, but that they routinely made important decisions while drunk on it. According to Herodotus, the day after such a drunken deliberation, the Persians would reconsider their decision and if they still approved, adopt it. This is, to put it mildly, a highly unlikely image of a group of people who were able to carve out one of the largest empires in antiquity and sustain it for two centuries. Are we to think that they just got lucky over and over again when they were drunk out of their minds? This is certainly the view that the Greeks promoted and Iranian irrationality remains a topos in Western culture. A striking recent example comes in the 2009 movie by Bill Maher, Religulous, in which as soon as Iranians are mentioned, there is a scene of a party and people drinking alcohol out of the bottle in a frenzy.

But if one looks at the internal Iranian evidence, for example Zoroastrian texts, a new image of the importance of wine in classical Iran emerges. The most interesting of these texts is one called The Spirit of Wisdom from the sixth century CE. One chapter discusses how wine can bring one's good and bad dispositions, and argues that those who drink it in moderation benefit in enhanced awareness and intellectual facility: "this that is forgotten will be remembered and goodness will take place in thought and it will increase the sight of the eye and hearing of the ear and the speech of the tongue, and doing work and managing will proceed faster." Relative temperance, however, is emphasized. "But anyone who drinks wine must be conscious to drink in moderation, since through moderate drinking of wine this much goodness will come to him, because food will be digested and kindle fire [of the body], and increase intelligence and the mind and seed and blood, and reject torment."

The key here appears to be the Iranian notion of "moderation," a concept that exists in the Greek world as well, but it is somehow overlooked by the Greeks when they turn to look at Iran. As the classical Iranians saw it, drinking wine in moderation made one more attentive and mentally keen. This idea is not so alien to us in the modern world, but it was simply not associated with the Iranians when they were being observed from outside. So it appears quite plausible that the classical Iranians made important decisions while drinking wine, and then just to make sure that they had not exceeded moderation, weighed their decisions again the next day. This is a picture drastically different from the familiar one that was painted from afar. Ethnic stereotyping has a long history, not least when it comes to Iran.


Dr. Touraj Daryaee is a history professor at the University of California, Irvine.  

Related Links:  That Sweet Iranian Spirit | Breaking the Stereotypes of Persia and Iran 
 
Via Tehran Bureau