The front of the Cyrus Cylinder. Much of the actual text is lost to us today.

The excitement surrounding the Cyrus Cylinder is part of a broader phenomenon of rejoicing in a pre-Islamic past while simultaneously ignoring how its history has been systematically reinterpreted to fit contemporary political goals. This version of history is an ideological narrative that obscures nuance while inflating the relevance of an ancient history in the modern era. The legacy of the representation and misrepresentation of the Cyrus Cylinder is as old as the artifact itself. These interpretations are deeply intertwined with twentieth century Iranian history and the Pahlavi regime.

Since its rediscovery in 1879, the Cyrus Cylinder has been the focus of study for many generations of scholars, each hoping to elucidate the sociopolitical environment of Cyrus’ rule. The object, however, has been imbued with various and changing meanings informed by political and social circumstances not necessarily extrapolated from its contents since its rediscovery. The social biography of the Cyrus Cylinder is a compelling one, for its purpose has historically changed to match the needs of leaders in each time period, beginning with the era of Cyrus the Great until today.

Map of the Achaemenid Empire at its height

After the Persian imperial conquest of Babylon, the Cyrus Cylinder was written by the government in the voice of Cyrus II of the Achaemenids that addressed the people of Babylon in their language, Akkadian. It assured them that the Babylonian gods, especially Marduk, held Cyrus in good favor and allowed him to conquer Babylon swiftly, and that he would increase offerings of ducks and geese to the Babylonian gods to stay on their good side. It also claimed Cyrus made the sanctuaries of the gods permanent, and “gathered together all of their people and returned them to their settlements.”

According to Josef Wiesohofer, a leading scholar on Ancient Persia, the text of the Cyrus Cylinder can be divided into six distinct sections. It begins with a condemnation of Nabonidus, the previous Babylonian king, asserts Cyrus’ lineage, and then details Cyrus’ arrival in Babylon. It continues to outline prayers and sacrifices to Marduk, reaffirm that people are living in peace, and highlight Cyrus’ plans for erecting buildings.

The Nabonidus Cylinder

Far from being progressive or unique, Cyrus allowed for the sacrifices and rebuilt areas to placate newly conquered peoples more swiftly. His edict used traditional Babylonian political processes and mimicked Nabonidus’ Cylinder in multiple ways, suggesting that Cyrus was imitating a commonly acknowledged political formula of his era. Both cylinders described the rulers as “king of kings, king of the four corners,” indicating a continuity in acceptable ruling titles in the region. Additionally, and perhaps more importantly, the role of religion is central to both cylinders. Much of both edicts are dedicated to describing the lengths at which the rulers, Nabonidus and Cyrus, took to restore temples and glorify the Babylonian gods.

Although Cyrus is believed to have been Zoroastrian, his cylinder makes no mention of the Zoroastrian deity Ahura Mazda, and only focuses on Marduk and other lesser Babylonian gods. The repetition of Marduk throughout the edict’s text was by no means random or a mistake; Cyrus chose Marduk to win the favor of the Babylonian people. The previous king of Babylon, Nabonidus, had privileged the moon-god Sin above all other gods, including Marduk, the primary god of the Babylonians. Cyrus had been mindful of the Babylonians’ discontent with Nabonidus and wanted to preempt any calls against his conquest by quelling their religious concerns.

Had Cyrus attempted to restructure social institutions in every conquered region, he would have failed in spreading his imperial sword as far as he did.

Relief of Marduk (on the right) chasing the Chaos Monster

The Achaemenid dynasty followed Cyrus’ protocol and continued to use religion as a political tool to spread the Persian Empire as far as possible. For example, Cambyses II, the son of Cyrus II, worshipped Egyptian gods after his conquest of Egypt. It was not until Darius I that the Achaemenids definitively promoted themselves as Zoroastrians. By creating a divine connection between himself and Ahura Mazda, Darius I succeeded in consolidating political power in an otherwise tumultuous period. It is evident, then, that both Cyrus and Darius used religion as a means to further their own political careers and empires.

Hormuzd Rassam in the mid 19th century. Many people forget that the Cyrus Cylinder was not found in Iran, but rather, in present-day Iraq.

Fast forward more than two thousand years to the nineteenth century. Until 1879, the Cyrus Cylinder remained buried where it had originally been offered to the Babylonian gods. The Cyrus Cylinder was excavated in 1879 in Babylon, present-day Iraq, by the Assyrian-British archaeologist Hormuzd Rassam. European historians linked the cylinder to the Book of Ezra and the freeing of Jews from Babylon, believing the Cyrus Cylinder as evidence for the biblical story.

It was not for another century, however, that the Cyrus Cylinder would draw the attention of the Iranian public. Iran’s last shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, worked extensively to bring the Cyrus Cylinder to the fore of public attention to create an image that appealed to his people, as well as others worldwide. The popular understanding and glorification of the Cyrus Cylinder, commonly referred to now as a symbol of religious freedom, is rooted directly in modern Iranian politics of the twentieth century.

Mohammad Reza Shah took the Cyrus Cylinder and liberally interpreted the sacrifices as a promise of religious freedom. Drawing upon Cyrus’ Biblical legacy, Mohammad Reza Shah presented the Cyrus Cylinder as a defender of all religions, removing it of its specific imperial context and creating a symbol of religious freedom where there was none. He then declared the Cyrus Cylinder as the “First Declaration of Human Rights” in 1968, hoping to bring positive attention to Iran’s history to deflect the international community’s increasing criticism of his authoritarian rule. A few years later, Mohammad Reza Shah organized the incredibly ostentatious anniversary celebration of 2,500 year monarchical rule in Iran. In the same year, to further commemorate Cyrus II’s rule, the Shah gifted a replica of the clay artifact to the United Nations in 1971.

During his rule, the Shah was accused of widespread human rights violations for torturing and executing political opponents to his regime. So brutal was his reign that Amnesty International eventually identified Iran as the world’s top human rights offenders in 1976. In particular, the infamous cruelty of Iran’s secret police SAVAK had tarnished Mohammad Reza Shah’s progressive image. In order to draw attention away from these egregious abuses, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi launched a campaign to connect his rule with that of Cyrus the Great. Ironically, the idea that the Cyrus Cylinder was the first human rights document emerged from the lips of a dictator. His campaign to recreate Iran’s public image was often linked to a racialist agenda of Persian supremacy at the expense of a more cohesive national identity.

The seal of Pahlavi’s 2,500 year anniversary celebration bore the Cyrus Cylinder in the center.

Despite the Shah’s attempts to make his autocratic rule more popular amongst Iranians, his extravagant spending on the 2,500 year anniversary celebration of monarchical rule backfired and provoked even more discontent amongst people. Mohammad Reza Shah is responsible, however, for inventing a new life for the Cyrus Cylinder—one which has been used by Persian nationalists of all stripes to reclaim the ancient empire.

Pahlavi’s attempt to restore dignity to his throne has spawned a tradition of romanticizing ancient Persia in order to deflect attention from contemporary struggles. Since the 1970s, many Iranians have been guilty of exaggerating the contents of the Cyrus Cylinder, claiming that Cyrus freed all slaves, allowed himself to be democratically elected by Babylonians, and promised freedom of religion. These claims, among others, are either entirely fabricated or dramatic deviations from the text. In fact,  Babylonia was expected to send a tribute of 500 slave boys to the Achaemenid king every year. And yet, these are the most commonly cited “values” of the Cyrus Cylinder. Scholars, including Josef Wiesehöfer, C.B.F. Walker, and Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones have done scholarly research on the Cylinder and the social milieu discounting these claims. These exaggerations helped legitimize Pahlavi’s regime by reinventing the past to distract from the present.

Thanks to Mohammad Reza Shah’s campaign, some contemporary Iranians refer to the Cyrus Cylinder as if it were the answer to current problems faced in Iran and in the diaspora. The Cylinder has become a source of pride for many, but unfortunately this esteem recycles a dictatorship’s fantastic projections onto an artifact of empire, repeating the process of inventing a noble back story instead of addressing the misuse of history for contemporary political projects.

The Cyrus Cylinder continues to be re-appropriated in a similar fashion by government elites today, denoting continuity in two governments’ approaches towards Iranian antiquity. During the Cyrus Cylinder tour to Iran in 2010, the Cyrus Cylinder was unveiled underneath the Iranian flag, and a Cyrus impersonator was honored by Ahmadinejad with the gifting of a chaffiyeh, worn by soldiers in the Iran-Iraq war and identified with the Basiji paramilitary today. The combination of current national symbols of the flag and chaffiyeh with Cyrus the Great and his cylinder indicates a desire to create a holistic national identity, drawing upon both an ancient imperial legacy and a modern culture imbued with Islam.

Ahmadinejad ceremoniously puts a chaffiyeh around “Cyrus.”

Ahmadinejad’s welcome, which tied the present day to the past, resembles Pahlavi’s recreation of the symbol in the 1960s and 70s, as both tried to link their own rule and modernity to that of Cyrus II. His attempt to co-opt the secular nationalist symbol and subsume it under a religious nationalist identity, however, backfired in many ways. His actions estranged other factions in the government, revealing the controversial nature of the Cyrus Cylinder in the eyes of some government officials today and leaving his reverence of the artifact to be ridiculed.

This year, the Cyrus Cylinder is on loan from the British Museum, touring the US from March 9th through December 2nd, making stops in D.C., New York, Houston, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. Disturbingly, the Cyrus Cylinder has been welcomed to the US by the same American congressmen who have pushed for devastating economic sanctions in Iran (see here and here). By touting the Cyrus Cylinder as the foundation for future human rights charters, some have seen the celebration of the historical artifact as a way to counter the current media blitz on Iran’s nuclear program. Historians and archaeologists of Iran, however, recognize these claims as the projection and downright insertion of modern values into an ancient text.

The meanings of objects change based upon the perspectives of the reader. A 2,500-year-old object should be analyzed in its own context, not through twentieth century universalist legal definitions. By accepting the lofty claims made about the Cyrus Cylinder, we are not only promoting false deviations from the text, but we are privileging an imperialist narrative that deserves scrutiny. Through demystification and demythification of these objects, one can better analyze the development of nationalist symbols in the modern period and their ability to obscure realities of the present and the past.

]]> http://ajammc.com/2013/06/06/reconstructing-a-persian-past-contemporary-uses-and-misuses-of-the-cyrus-cylinder-in-iranian-nationalist-discourse/feed/ 12 http://ajammc.com/2013/05/28/a-fistful-of-rials-morality-and-iranian-cowboy-masculinities/ http://ajammc.com/2013/05/28/a-fistful-of-rials-morality-and-iranian-cowboy-masculinities/#comments Tue, 28 May 2013 19:24:46 +0000 Asher Kohn http://ajammc.com/?p=3678 Continue reading »]]>

Poster for My Name is Negahdar Jamali and I Make Westerns

As the camera opens to reveal a cowboy’s stubbled face and ink-well eyes, the audience at once recognizes a familiar figure. This recognition is troubled by the cowboy’s lilting Persian, but the appearance of an Iranian cowboy is rare enough to force you to suspend disbelief. There are many ways to tell a cowboy’s story, as those familiar with John Wayne, Sam Peckinpah, and late-era Mansour know well. But in My Name is Negahdar Jamali and I Make Westerns, director Kamran Heidari chooses an unusual genre to depict his Iranian cowboy: a Western documentary. In his humanizing portrait of a Shirazi cowboy-cum-director, Heidari successfully weaves the bizarre, the unexpected, and the hilarious to tell a tale of an Iranian cowboy masculinity and the unexpected world it inhabits.

The documentary film follows the title character as he writes, directs, and stars in his own Western films. Negahdar travels around his hometown of Shiraz as he tries to make one last Western. The plot is straightforward but the storytelling isn’t, as we go back and forth between Kamran’s camera and Negahdar’s Hi-8. The audience sees Negahdar explain his love for the Western genre interspersed with tracking shots of him walking through Shiraz cadging friends into acting for him, buying props and costumes for the movie, and dealing with everyday life. We also see plenty of the “making of” of this movie, with Kamran, in his role directing a documentary, appearing on screen discussing how to shoot and in one memorable scene, playing with Negahdar’s son. We also see bits and pieces of Negahdar’s final movie and some of his previous ones in the course of the story.

Action still from My Name is Negahdar Jamali and I Make Westerns

If this sounds a bit confusing, truth be told it is. But it is all intentional, and can best be understood as a bilingual movie. We go from the visual vocabulary of Westerns to that of documentaries and back again while trying to figure out the difference between Negahdar’s fantasy movie world and his real world in Shiraz. Sometimes it’s easy: when he’s working as a laborer cleaning trucks and when his wife is concerned about family finances. Other times, when he’s discussing the Western masculine ideal, it is a bit more convoluted. This “Western masculine ideal” is the crux of the film. There is a tremendous difference between the “West” of Western films and the “West” as a theoretical space that features in the world of ideology. The West imagined by Negahdar Jamali is not the West imagined by Iranian intellectual Jalal al-e Ahmad. This isn’t a West of capital, industry, and dehumanization. The “West” of Westerns is a lawless, wild (and fictitious) place created in rejection of 20th century society. While Al-e Ahmad looked to socialist Israeli Kibbutzniks to combat the toxicity of modern life, Jamali looks to cowboys. Bringing the Western to his hometown, Jamali uses the vocabulary of Westerns, the hats and six-shooters, to talk about issues he finds pressing back in Shiraz. He follows the proud tradition of the Italian Spaghetti Western, using the cinematic trope to discuss life at home.The Western is a film genre that takes an 1800’s setting where “civilization” comes to a lawless community, setting up a conflict that usually ends in a gunfight.

Original poster for The Virginian. Courtesy Paramount Pictures

The Spaghetti Western is originally an Italian adaptation of the mid-century American genre. Directors fell in love with Westerns’ discussion of solitary individuals in the countryside, using the trope as a way to critique the country’s rapid post-WWII urbanization. The original Western is 1924’s The Virginian, in which the protagonist attempts to form law and order out of the chaos around him. Austin J. Fisher, a lecturer in Media Arts, argues that the film was a “polemical lament at the passing of the Old West [that] commented more on fin de siècle social ills than on Frontier history.”

Westerns use the past to comment on society’s present, but the 19th-century world they portray is often patriarchal, with casts consisting nearly entirely of swaggering males. From The Virginian to the mid-century white-hat Westerns to the morally complex Spaghetti Westerns, the genre uses the 19th-century American West to describe contemporary masculinity. My Name is Negahdar Jamali is no different.

In the movies he films, Negahdar uses the vocabulary of Westerns to discuss the issues he finds pressing back in Shiraz. Underemployment, marital strife, and Afghan refugees all feature in this film. Negahdar uses this vocabulary to make common cause with his audience. In his explanation of the role of the Western in the United States, Roger Ebert wrote that “in hard times, Americans have often turned to the Western to reset their compasses. In very hard times, it takes a very good Western” to make the audience empathize with the characters and associate themselves with the protagonist’s struggle. In an in-depth essay that plumbs the depths of Ebert’s quote, Dylan Hintz writes that:

“This statement provides the idea that Westerns work as morality stories, and help to establish a prototype for a man to base his idea of masculinity, the ideas of what a man is accountable for, what his responsibilities as being a man are, and what he must do in terms of violence to protect those weaker than him, off of in times of moral dilemma.”

The Western’s role as a masculinity/morality tale has survived – and even thrived – in the genre’s exportation beyond American shores. Throughout Kamran’s film, Negahdar is constructed as a conflicted man. His marriage is in shambles, his son picks on him and abuses him, and he is making barely enough money to survive. All that said, he has friends, a hobby he loves, and a dream to make movies. Negahdar embodies a negotiated existence: in his movies where he is the star, however, he lives a bold life of suspense and swashbuckling, a romantic and dashing lead in the story that exists in his camera’s Shiraz. This is no different from the audience’s complicated life, just perhaps more dramatic. The viewer of Kamran’s film sees both Negahdar’s heroic image of himself and his reality. However, the way Kamran’s film is shot and edited, one is always aware that the documentary My Name is Negahdar Jamali and I Make Westerns is of the “experience of truth.” The documentary genre is never entirely honest, and the filmmaker (in this case Kamran Heidari) can selectively set up shots and edit the film to portray the story in his preferred way. In My Name is Negahdar Jamali, the audience is always aware that Kamran is portraying Negahdar in a way as staged as Negahdar portrays himself in his own films.

Cast and crew for My Name is Negahdar Jamali and I Make Westerns. Kamran Heidari, the director, is at the very front. Negahdar Jamali stands in the pink shirt just behind him.

This duality creates the bilingual aspect referred to earlier. The audience is viewing the same of a man trying to make sense of his place in his community twice: first in the movie Negahdar is making and second in the documentary Kamran is making. There’s friction between the two cinemagraphic languages, and Kamran milks the friction for humor quite well throughout the film. When Negahdar buys drapes to cloak his “Indians” in, it’s impossible to see them as anything but drapes for the rest of the film. But once your eyes adjust to this – and it takes a bit of adjusting – the “bilingualism” of the film gives the characters and especially the city an added depth for the audience to view them through..

The streets of Shiraz and the hills outside of them are constants, and it stands to note that Kamran’s company is named “Shiraz Film Group” and that one of his stated professional goals is to bring the stories of Shiraz out to the rest of Iran and the world. In many ways, his films are about the people and the city, no different than the photographers who make up Humans of Shiraz. Kamran’s story in My Name is Negahdar Jamali is unique, and Kamran uses it to give his hometown a greater presence in the Tehran-dominated Iranian cinema scene. Negahdar Jamali is the star, but in both films, Shiraz is the strongest supporting actor.

1983 photograph of Shirazi washing carpets in Maharloo Lake. Courtesy of Mansour Ghazi Morad

When an audience sits down for a film, they build their preconceptions from the genre promised and the cinema’s context. I entered the theater expecting a Western, a documentary, or a “quirky” fish-out-of-water tale. I was surprised when I got all three; not a compromised take on each genre, but a film that uses each genre to tell a whole story about a man, a place, and the man’s place in that place. Understanding the Western genre is vital to understanding Negahdar’s worldview that Kamran is trying to explain through his own documentary. And as peculiar as an American audience may find a working-class Iranian man who makes his own Westerns, nobody in the film (save for perhaps Negahdar’s wife) finds it strange at all.

My Name is Negahdar Jamali and I Make Westerns is far more lighthearted than most International Film Festival fare. Like Facing Mirrors, the tale of a transman named Eddy negotiating life in modern Tehran, My Name is Negahdar Jamali discusses the roles of identity and society within Iran. The sense of place, and a man’s negotiation of that place, is peculiar to the Western genre. By imbuing the genre with a particular Iranian-ness, in location, in language, and in identity, a fresh, strange, and altogether wonderful vision of this particular Iranian comes through. It changes the genre as well as the popular image of Iran, using the Western to erase a false East/West divide. The man with a square jaw and jet-black eyes is no stranger but a familiar face thanks to years of the genre’s conditioning. In My Name is Negahdar Jamali, though, Kamran Heidari has given the audience a wholly new way of looking at him.

All images are property of Shiraz Film Group unless otherwise noted.

A view of Sheikh Zayed Road – a major highway in Dubai that has been the site of rapid urban development. (Image credit: Al Miller)

The setting was another routine gathering of young middle-class Iranians ushering in the weekend. It was getting late and the suggestion was made to cap the night off with the recent non-narrative documentary film Samsara – the cigarettes, music, politics and video games having run their course.

Those familiar with this genre of film know something of its time-lapse cinematography and undulating landscapes. They will also recall the juxtaposition of nature and urbanity, the ‘primitive’ and ‘modern,’ wealth and poverty, utopia and dystopia. Sometime into the film, aerial views of Dubai’s superlative cityscape also made their appearance. It was these panoramic images that elicited the remark. With a blank expression and a flat tone to boot.

I was immediately reminded of my conversations with Iranian expatriates in Dubai, and the repeated juxtapositions of this city with Iran that they often featured. The content of these juxtapositions varied considerably according to the topic of conversation. Yet what emerged between them was a distinct sense of displacement.

These sentiments of displacement reflected the peculiar situation of Dubai as a certain kind of place in relation to Iran. To begin with, there is a widespread and unmistakable sense of proximity to Iran among Iranians living in this city. After all, the distance between Dubai and Iran’s southern shores is approximately less than 100 miles, and a flight to Tehran usually takes about two hours. Sentiments of displacement, therefore, were not necessarily emphasized as displacement from Iran itself. In this regard, Iranians in Dubai have not engaged in cultivating a shared romance about returning to Iran like their counterparts living in North American and Europe have. These are the well-worn diasporic imaginings that we are familiar with; exilic tropes of rupture and loss coupled with quixotic yearnings for ‘homeland’ (variously invoked as meehan or vatan). The affective substance of exile, however, is far less pronounced in the shared imaginary of Iranians in Dubai. Iranians remain “expatriates” in Dubai regardless of their duration of stay. As such, they are subject to protocols of residency that render them a transient population unable to claim permanent residency – much less naturalization. There is no ‘mythical return’ to Iran in these circumstances; just the routine stuff of business trips, summer holidays, and stop-overs.

To appreciate the ensemble of images, narratives and vocabularies through which Iranian expatriates articulated such a sense of displacement it is first necessary to briefly elaborate on the extent to which Iranian society has been implicated in Dubai’s history and present. It is in relationship to this context that notions of displacement and its relation to the claim that Iran should have been Dubai are imagined.

Revitalization of the old Bastakiya district in Dubai – settled by Iranian merchant families from the city of Bastak in Iran.
(Image credit: Kamran Jebreili)

To begin with, Dubai’s geographical proximity and history of trade with Iran has seen it historically settled by Iranian merchant families hailing from Iran’s port cities. Locally referred to as ajami (Emirati’s of Iranian origin) their history is inextricably tied to Dubai’s and dates back to the late 1800’s. Successive periods of settlement came with Dubai’s pearl boom of the early 1900’s, and continued well into the 1920’s and 1930’s, when Iran’s Reza Shah respectively imposed steeper taxes on trade and infamously outlawed the hejab. This ban, referred to as kashf-e hejab, still figures prominently in the narratives of many such ajami, and even Iranian expatriates, and was explained as an indignity and religious affront that many were simply unwilling to tolerate.

It is worth noting that their settlement resulted in some of the earliest birth pangs of urbanization in Dubai as these Iranians brought with them wind-tower architecture. Though these structures are by now a ubiquitous symbol of local history and a draw for heritage tourism, their Iranian origin is widely (if often informally) acknowledged.

Another period of Iranian influx into Dubai came on the heels of the 1978-79 Iranian revolution, and the ensuing eight-year war with Iraq. Yet whereas earlier arrivals had generally been naturalized following the independence of the United Arab Emirates in 1971, post-independence Iranian immigrants were now officially “expatriates.” Nevertheless, this period saw economic exchange between Iran and Dubai flourish to such extent that some analysts even suggested Iran’s private sector to be located in Dubai! In fact, until recently, Iran has been among Dubai’s top trading partners and was even its largest in the mid 1990’s – e.g.: Dubai’s trade with Iran in 1994 represented about US$1.1 billion while that with its second largest trading partner, India, represented only US$243 million.*

More recently, Dubai’s emergence as a major leisure destination has also seen it attract significant tourism from Iran. Until a devalued Rial began to render such tourism increasingly untenable in the last year, large numbers of middle-class Iranians arrived to frequent Dubai’s mega-malls and attend exhibitions and concerts by popular Iranian artists often based in Europe or North America. This city emerged, in other words, as a site of ‘counter-culture’ where opportunities to fashion identities outside the realm of moral possibilities prescribed by the Islamic Republic were abundantly available. This was especially the case for Iranian middle-class youths.

In the transnational circuit of Iranian aesthetics, monies and bodies, Dubai continues to be situated as a site of mediation – even featuring as the subject of the Persian pop song below. It is a place where multiple Iranian imaginaries from within and without Iran both intermingle and elude one another.

It is precisely this position between an Iran back home and an Iran abroad, or Iran’s present circumstances and possible future, which informs the sense of displacement so widely shared among Iranian expatriates here. For many Iranians, Dubai’s emergence as a global metropolis is imagined to have resulted, more specifically, from the displacement of Iranian modernity.

Dubai’s nascent urbanization and economic progress are often cited as resulting from the abortion of progress in Iran. The reasons for this are variously explained and ranged from colonial interventions to some vaguely stated failing in our “culture,” or both. Dubai’s proximity was key to these conceptions. Displacement, after all, suggests that something has been moved out of place, not eliminated. The influx of merchants, white-collar professionals, private investments, and tourism to Dubai were thought to represent a societal potential that has been alienated from Iran’s borders but settled nearby – unofficial estimates in public discourse often claim the population of Iranians in Dubai to be about 400,000.

This is not quite the same politics of cultural despair featured in Iranian public discourse and scholarship, where an allegedly inherent Iranian “backwardness” is invoked in contrast to “Western modernity.” Such a meta-narrative leaves little room for imagining an alternative present, as its objective is to explain why the long sweep of history made Iran what it is today.

The “Persian Court” of the Ibn Battuta Mall in Dubai, featuring a large-scale rendition of the Sheikh Lotfollah Mosque in Isfahan, Iran. (Image credit: Behzad Sarmadi)

In conversations with my Iranian counterparts in Dubai, however, contemporary Iran was rarely a historical inevitability. Their elaborations hardly reached so far back into the past to offer up such events as the arrival of Islam, an oft-cited milestone in many a nationalist diatribe bemoaning Iran’s “backwardness.” Notions of modernity, here, were not often articulated in terms of a grand arc of world history. Such accounts would do little to explain Dubai’s urban transformation given the rapidity with which it unfolded, and their immediate experience of it in so short a time.

Instead, when Dubai was described as a foil to contemporary Iran it was usually in more grounded terms that implicated their recent histories. I often encountered, for example, the refrain that “we actually built this place!” – a sentiment also shared by other nationalities of long standing in Dubai. This was always in reference to the early settlements of Iranians in Dubai and their historical predominance in as a merchant class ever since. Sometimes these comments even cited the introduction of wind-towers as well. While this sentiment smacks of ethnocentrism for denying Emirati society agency in the development of its own modernity, it is also an implicit appeal for a return to a potential Iranian present that may be recovered.

Clearly a particular notion of rupture underpins these shared imaginings. It is not so much rupture from a place frozen in time (such as an idyllic ‘homeland’ at the time of departure), but from an Iran that would be Dubai had it been allowed or capable to continue progressing. It is a rupture in national time that is evident in, for example, urban space,  as displayed in films like Samsara.

To be sure, all of this has been something of a snapshot. I’ve tried to show that Iranian society has hardly been absent in Dubai, and that the imagined substance of displacement among Iranian expatriates here is informed by this history and proximity, along with Dubai’s recent urban transformation. Like all snapshots, however, this one leaves much to be desired. There are also other modes of narration and vocabularies of difference by means of which identity is articulated and performed among various segments of the Iranian population in this city. These, however, will require other snapshots. Piecing these together, I hope, will eventually yield a panorama from the ground up.

* Parsa, Ali and Ramin Keivani. 2002. “The Hormuz Corridor: Building a Cross-Border Region Between Iran and the UAE.” In Global Networks: Linked Cities. S. Sassen ed. Pp. 183-208. London: Routledge.

The concept of a queer Iranian cinema may sound contradictory or impossible, but that is exactly how one would describe Facing Mirrors (2011), the first movie to feature a female-to-male transgender main character that has been written, produced, and screened in Iran. Directed by Negar Azarbayjani and produced by Fereshteh Taerpour (two cisgender female filmmakers), Facing Mirrors features the story of the unlikely friendship between the upper-class Adineh (“Eddy”), a pre-op transman in Tehran struggling to escape from the grips of his transphobic father, and Rana, a modest, devout, working class woman who ferries passengers in order to pay her imprisoned husband’s debts and secure his release.

This film has won numerous awards and nominations in over 64 different LGBTQ and international film festivals around the world – most notably the Special Jury’s Crystal Simorgh Award at Iran’s 29th Fajr International Film Festival and the Outstanding First Feature Award at San Francisco’s 36th Frameline Film Festival. It has also received rave reviews from Iranian film critics and audiences around the country.

Facing Mirrors (2011) Official Movie Poster

Although transpeople seeking transition are legally accepted in Iran, they are not often visible in popular culture. The legal acceptance began with a fatwa issued by Ayatollah Khomeini in 1978, which laid the groundwork for the current legal regime dealing with trans issues. Today, not only does the government recognize transpeople, but it also financially supports those who cannot fully afford hormones and sex reassignment surgeries through charity grants, and more recently, by mandating that insurance companies cover the full cost of the operation.

The surprising aspect of this story, therefore, is not the positive response from both critics and ordinary moviegoers in Iran, but rather a lack of coverage by mainstream Western press of such an internationally successful movie. It would seem that a movie about transpeople in Iran would be an instant headline-grabber, especially when one considers the plethora of news reports, op-eds, and airtime devoted to criticizing the Islamic Republic of Iran’s horrid record of human rights violations, particularly when it comes to the rights of women, minorities, and lgbtq folks. Indeed, another recent movie, Circumstance (2011), written and directed by Iranian-American female filmmaker, Maryam Keshvarz, which chronicles the love story of two female Iranian teenagers – Atefeh and Shireen – trapped between a repressive government and an unaccepting society, was immediately picked up by mainstream media. It generated multiple articles, reviews, and critiques, including an interview on AfterEllen.com, a popular US-based lesbian pop culture website.

The lack of mainstream coverage of Facing Mirrors in the US stands in stark contrast to the widespread media attention given to Circumstance, which is a direct result of the Orientalizing effect of the Western gaze on Middle Eastern subjects. Historically, some European men who came into contact with the Middle East both fantasized about and denounced the closed-door sexual lives of Middle Eastern men and women, especially homosocial spaces and same-sex relations. European women, on the other hand, sought to save their Oriental “sisters” whom they viewed as oppressed by their religion and Oriental men, as elucidated by Harvard Professor Leila Ahmed in her book, Women and Gender in Islam. These attitudes toward Middle Easterners continue to this day, an example of which can be found in the movie Circumstance whose relatively positive public reception in the West arises from this conformity to Western Orientalist imaginaries, whereas the movie Facing Mirrors disrupts and challenges the hegemonic and Orientalizing narrative of Iran’s sexual and gender minorities, and is thus ignored and excluded from the cultural and artistic public domain.

Oriental Objects of Circumstance

According to the Iranian-born US-raised first-time director of Circumstance, Keshavarz, the inspiration for making the film was a lack of movies in Iran “or the Muslim world” that dealt with the issue of women’s sexuality. This claim could not be farther from the truth, as there are a plethora of movies in the Middle East and North Africa, let alone South and East Asia that deal specifically with issues concerning women, sexuality, relationships, and domestic problems, such as Caramel (2007), The Girl in the Sneakers (2001), The Circle (2000), The Last Supper (2002) and many more.

Circumstance (2011) Official Movie Poster

Shot in Lebanon, Circumstance often appears inauthentic to an Iranian audience about whom it purports to speak. From the actors’ thick American accents when speaking Persian (for most of them grew up in the suburbs of America) to the natural and urban scenes of Iran to the characters’ costumes and house decorations, there are many instances of disconnect between what the movie portrays and the reality of Iranian life. For example, during a scene when the two girls’ car is stopped by a police search patrol, the girls scream “Comité!” – a term literally meaning “the Committee,” referring to the so-called morality police in the 1980s and early 1990s. However, comités have long ceased to exist and the so-called “morality police” is now referred to as gasht-e ershad or the “Guidance Patrol.”

In addition to the many technical mistakes, the movie has also been criticized by Iranian lesbians and feminists for being extremely shallow and resembling a stereotypical exotic Orientalist fantasy rather than showing the reality of lesbian life in Iran. According to Mahboubeh Abbasgholizadeh, an Iranian feminist activist, the film incurred the wrath of a number of Iranian feminists and lesbians, because it failed to show the realities of marginalized lesbian women in Iran. It is imperative to note that Circumstance was not meant to speak to audiences in Iran, but its main interlocutor was a Western audience in the United States specifically. Indeed, when Abbasgholizadeh claims, “squeezing sex and the government’s suppressive violence and similar subjects is intended to make the film more exciting,” she is touching upon the long history of using Middle Eastern (queer) bodies and sexualities to satisfy Orientalist fantasies of the Euro-American spectator.

Atefeh and Shireen love scene in Circumstance

Historically, many Europeans who came into contact with the Middle East have often fantasized about the “behind the veil” life in the Oriental “harem,” which has come to symbolize the hidden sexual lives of Middle Eastern women. “In Circumstance, the audience is witness to that very same gaze and objectification of women’s bodies,” writes Leila Mouri, an Iranian women’s rights activist, journalist and Ph.D. Candidate at Columbia University. It is this un-veiling of the hidden lives of queer Middle Eastern women in order to serve men’s pleasures and fantasies that reduces them to mere objects of gaze and consumption for a Euro-American audience.

The greatest weakness of Circumstance is the lack of subjectivity of the two protagonists, Atefeh and Shireen. From the portrayal of a slow-motion erotic belly-dancing scene to the alcohol, drug and sex-filled underground Tehrani parties, Atefeh and Shireen are shown as mere (queer) sexual objects as opposed to subjects of their own destiny. Indeed, the movie’s byline in the official website proudly proclaims in bold letters: “Freedom is a Human Right.” However, in the movie, the Iranian (queer) woman’s struggle for social and political freedom is reduced to drinking, attending parties, playing loud music and cursing the “Mullahs.” Even though this desire for social freedoms is important, its shallow portrayal in the movie simplifies and overshadows the larger social, political, and economic struggles of Iranians, and renders their political agency and complex analyses of their social and political plight invisible. For the Western audience, however, the Orientals never possessed any agency to begin with, and thus, can only exist as mere victims of circumstance.

Reflections in the Mirror

The lack of subjectivity in Circumstance is contrasted by the strong and complex characters of Facing Mirrors. When the protagonist Eddy’s transphobic father discovers his intention to acquire a passport and leave the country, he tries to lock Eddy up; however, Eddy escapes with some money and a backpack on his shoulder, which puts him on the path of meeting Rana. In the movie, instead of being treated to the stereotypical images of the oppressed Oriental woman, one is confronted with scenes of defiance, resolve, compassion, and complexity. For example, when the “Guidance Patrol” stops Eddy and one of his female friends while driving, instead of screaming, Eddy defies the police officer and tries to (unsuccessfully) pass his brother’s driver’s license as his own. This scene offers a glimpse into the complexity that often marks the space for defiance and negotiation between Iranian youth and the state security apparatus. Eddy’s “tough-guy” attitude is, however, tempered by his softness and his pain and loneliness are revealed in a potent scene of crying in the bathroom.

Rana and Eddy share a meal and their dreams on the road in Facing Mirrors

Rana, who is devout and comes from modest means, has her own moments of defiance and struggle. She reveals that, as a young girl, one of her dreams was to learn to drive and be able to stand on her own feet. However, instead of being reduced to a helpless victim when her husband is sent to prison, she defies her overbearing mother-in-law (who doesn’t believe in women driving), and sets out to realize her dream by driving passengers in order to make enough money to care for her son and pay her husband’s debt. Instead of objectifying women and queer bodies to serve Orientalist fantasies, Facing Mirrors shows the resilient and resourceful nature of Iranian women and gender minorities whose struggle for freedom and survival is made possible by exercising their agency. These scenes offer a more complex depiction of what liberation means for the marginalized of society, and it flies in the face of the single narrative of helpless victims trapped under a repressive regime presented by mainstream Western media.

Disrupting Orientalism

The fact that Circumstance has captured the imagination of straight and queer Western mainstream audiences whereas Facing Mirrors has received little media attention in the West reveals volumes about the cultural power of the Orientalist imaginary. Additionally, the lack of mainstream coverage of Facing Mirrors in the United States is juxtaposed with the overabundance of media attention toward the film in Iran where the film has been the subject of debate and appraisal since its release.

Even though Facing Mirrors did not receive its official permit to be screened in Iranian theaters until October 24th, 2012 – almost a year-and-a-half after release in international film festivals – film critics, journalists, bloggers, and state-sponsored news agencies in Iran began commenting and reporting on its laudable success worldwide almost immediately. It has also been the subject of much debate in Iran’s online blogs and news sites where many young Iranians discuss social, cultural and political issues of the day. This film was even screened at Mofid University in Qom, an extremely religious Iranian city known for its seminaries and education of clerics. After a panel discussion with the producers and actors of the film, the Islamic seminary students and professors praised the movie for portraying the realities of transpeople’s lives in Iran. This is a testament to the fact that despite restrictions and problems of censorship in Iran, the public sphere is still open to debate and discussion of a variety of topics, including those pertaining to sex and gender.

Shayesteh Irani (Eddy), Ghazal Shakeri (Rana), Fereshteh Taerpour, Negar Azarbayjani, and Dr. Kariminia, a professor at Qom Mofid University and an expert on trans laws at a panel discussion on Facing Mirrors and issues facing transpeople in Iran.

The greatest success of the movie, however, is in the fact that it has forever entered Iran’s social, cultural, and political public space where it has inserted a thought-provoking and relatable narrative of queerness in the public imaginary, and addressing a social taboo in consequential ways that Circumstance could never have done. With its humanistic and yet complex storytelling, Facing Mirrors is able to not only touch the hearts of its audience, but it also manages to explore the viewers’ own preconceived notions about transgender people in a manner that is not moralistic or heavy-handed, while truthfully portraying the reality of being trans in the context of Iran’s society and culture. Unlike Circumstance, Facing Mirrors has the power to confront, challenge and continue the process of uprooting prejudice in Iranian culture, and potentially open up the public space for discussing other taboo socio-cultural topics in the future. Facing Mirrors is, in fact, queering the exotic image of the Oriental subject for a Western audience, as it humanizes Iranians and contextualizes their struggles.

Unfortunately, the mainstream Western culture considers such complexity as antithetical to its Orientalist narrative of oppressed Muslim women and queers in need of saving.  Therefore, a movie such as Facing Mirrors finds itself as an oddity in the Western cultural and public space where such nuances are rendered invisible or, at best, ignored. Indeed, Facing Mirrors not only sheds light on Iranian social issues, but it also holds up a mirror of reflection that exposes and disrupts Western Orientalist imaginaries, and paves the path for a new and complex understanding of the Middle East.

May Day poster distributed by the Democratic Student’s Organization. Asheville, NC, Flood Gallery Fine Art Center Collection, “In Search of Lost Causes– Fragmented Allegories of an Iranian Revolution.” —Hamid Dabashi, PhD, The Black Mountain Press, 2013 (Photo: Carlos Steward, Flood Gallery Fine Art Center).

On the first of May, 1979, hundreds of thousands of Iranians poured out into the streets to celebrate International Worker’s Day. As a public festival created by the Second International to commemorate the 1886 Haymarket riots in Chicago, May Day became a holiday that was adopted by leftist organizations all over the globe.

May Day Poster distributed by the Mujahedin-e Khalq. Stanford, CA, Hoover Institution, (Photo: Hoover Institution Political Poster Database).

Iranian left-wing groups began celebrating International Worker’s Day as early as the 1920s. Uninhibited after the departure of Reza Shah in 1941, many extant labor unions came together to form the Central Council of United Trade Unions (Shura-ye Motahedeh-ye Markazi) in 1944. In subsequent years, the labor movement continued to grow and May Day processions displayed the increasing power of a unified working class. During the height of Tudeh influence in the late 1940’s, May Day festivities in Tehran were attended by more than 80,000 people. However, the dominance of the labor movement was short-lived; following the coup d’état of 1953, trade unionism was virtually annihilated through bans and mass arrests. May Day processions would not be permitted until the final years of the Pahlavi era.

Free from the state repression of the Pahlavi era and well before the solidification of power under Khomeinist forces, the revolutionary period from 1979-1981 saw massive mobilization of the general populace. International Worker’s Day became an ideological battleground as competing political organizations—secular and religious—organized their constituents and articulated their interpretation of worker’s solidarity. Visual ephemera related to May Day– posters, more specifically– are testaments to the pluralistic nature of the early years of the Revolution. By looking at various posters disseminated by organizations of the time, one can see how various political factions used similar visual motifs and iconography.

Iranian leftist organizations tried to connect Iran’s struggles to the rest of the international community through the glorification of the worker. In these posters, Marxist totems take the forefront; heavy machinery, proletarian caps, and smokestacks are depicted to celebrate traditional Marxism of industrialized society. Leftist May Day posters were specifically designed in a socialist realist style to emulate posters used by socialist movements, particularly those based in Europe and Latin America. Relying on internationalist symbols of the multitude allowed leftist organizations to communicate an idea of collective mobilization against the forces of capitalism and imperialism.

May Day poster with clenched fist and red tulips. Asheville, NC, Flood Gallery Fine Art Center Collection, “In Search of Lost Causes– Fragmented Allegories of an Iranian Revolution.” —Hamid Dabashi, PhD, The Black Mountain Press, 2013 (Photo: Carlos Steward, Flood Gallery Fine Art Center).

“Workers of the World, Unite!” Asheville,NC, Flood Gallery Fine Art Center Collection, “In Search of Lost Causes– Fragmented Allegories of an Iranian Revolution.” —Hamid Dabashi, PhD, The Black Mountain Press, 2013 (Photo: Carlos Steward, Flood Gallery Fine Art Center).

The first two posters portrayed were produced and disseminated by the Fada’i-e Khalq, a Marxist-Leninist guerilla group that began operations against the Pahlavi state in 1971. The poster on the left depicts a red clenched fist holding a bunch of tulips superimposed over a large gear. Industrial infrastructure such as factories, smokestacks, and an oil well are in the background. A gear, an essential component of industrial technology, acts as an index for all machinery and as an emblem for the principles of rationalism, precision, and standardization.

Similarly, The right-hand poster champions the social realist aesthetic. It depicts a group of men and women working together to hoist a furling red banner. It is a narrative of a collective in motion, cooperating as a single unit to complete a specified task. The text reads: “Workers of the World, Unite.”— a direct translation of the most famous quote from the Communist Manifesto: “Proletarier aller Länder vereinigt Euch.” If one ignores the script, the poster could be comfortably placed on the streets of Berlin, Moscow, or any other city celebrating International Worker’s Day in 1979.

May Day poster distributed by the Tudeh Party of Iran. Asheville, NC, Flood Gallery Fine Art Center Collection, “In Search of Lost Causes– Fragmented Allegories of an Iranian Revolution.” —Hamid Dabashi, PhD, The Black Mountain Press, 2013 (Photo: Carlos Steward, Flood Gallery Fine Art Center).

May Day poster distributed by the Tudeh Party. Asheville, NC, Flood Gallery Fine Art Center Collection, “In Search of Lost Causes– Fragmented Allegories of an Iranian Revolution.” —Hamid Dabashi, PhD, The Black Mountain Press, 2013 (Photo: Carlos Steward, Flood Gallery Fine Art Center).

The two posters above were created by the Tudeh party of Iran. Formed immediately after the abdication of Reza Shah in 1941, the Tudeh party was the oldest and most established leftist oppositional organization during the Iranian Revolution. However, by the 1970’s, Tudeh was only a shadow of its former self, due to effective suppression by the Shah’s intelligence agency, SAVAK. The poster on the left depicts a teary-eyed industrial worker mourning the deaths of his fallen comrades. Covering his heart, a lone red carnation– the “worker’s flower”– is pinned to his chest.

The poster on the right portrays the union of industry and agriculture, a common trope in the European socialist tradition. These allusions to international socialism hoped to position Iran’s labor movement in the larger context of world revolution and worker’s solidarity. However, such styles could be alienating to the unfamiliar viewer, since the stylistic elements have not been adapted to the Iranian cultural context.

“Islam is the only Supporter of the Worker,” May Day poster distributed by the Islamic Republican Party. Chicago, Il. Middle Eastern Posters. Collection, [Box 2, Poster 24], “Special Collections Research Center,” University of Chicago Library. (Photo: University of Chicago Library).

May Day poster with factory and workers, distributed by the Islamic Republican Party. Chicago, Il. Middle Eastern Posters. Collection, [Box 2, Poster 40], “Special Collections Research Center,” University of Chicago Library.

Surprisingly, Khomeinists adopted left-wing currents, rhetoric, and imagery from their radical secular rivals in order to “Islamicize” May Day. As opposed to leaving the symbolic power of May Day’s revolutionary potential to the secular leftists, Khomeinists sought to redefine it in an Islamic manner by adopting Marxist mass-oriented symbols. Drawing upon visual revolutionary rhetoric originating from international sources like clenched fists and the products of industry, the Islamic Republican Party coupled religious undertones with traditionally leftist visual motifs.

Qur’anic verses are a common addition on Islamic-oriented May Day posters. The inclusion of surat and naksh calligraphy constitutes a sacred certitude for the May Day poster. By synthesizing the iconography of the leftist tradition with divine textual messages, religious organizations successfully subsumed worker’s solidarity under a religious cosmology. The blending of various ideologies is a visual testimony to their flexibility and heterogeneity– utilizing religious, national liberationist, anti-imperialist, and even Marxist iconography to fashion a broad revolutionary (and sometimes contradictory) message.

“Islamic Republic: Cultivator of the individuality and value of the worker,” distributed by the Islamic Republican Party. Chicago, Il. Middle Eastern Posters. Collection, [Box 2, Poster 34], “Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library” (Photo: University of Chicago Library).

May Day poster with flower and hand, distributed by the Islamic Republican Party. Chicago, Il. Middle Eastern Posters. Collection, [Box 7, Poster 269], “Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library” (Photo: University of Chicago Library).

By 1981, political organizations allied with Ayatollah Khomeini had politically outmaneuvered other oppositional groups. Nationalist and leftist parties such as the National Front and Fada’iyan (Majority) were banned and mass arrests were carried out. Furthermore, the revolutionary potential of May Day was contained by sedentizing celebrations into confined spaces such as university campuses and stadia. The holiday was eventually subsumed under a new name, “Workers’ and Teachers’ Day,” to commemorate the death of Ayatollah Motahhari. While International Worker’s Day is no longer celebrated as widely as before, the Iranian labor movement continues to be a driving force for change.

For more information, check out:

Middle Eastern Poster Collection at University of Chicago

Hoover Institution Political Poster Database at Standford University

Staging A Revolution: The Art of Persuasion in the Islamic Republic of Iran by Peter Chelkowski and Hamid Dabashi

In Search of Lost Causes: Fragmented Allegories Of An Iranian Revolution by Hamid Dabashi

May Day in the Islamic Republic by Ervand Abrahamian

Recently, Ajam’s editorial staff had the pleasure of sitting down with Slavs and Tatars to discuss their work, which melds history, geography, folk culture into provocative art and performance.

Slavs and Tatars is an artist collective that works to highlight historical connections and regional linkages often overlooked due to rigid geographic boundaries. Founded six years ago, their work focuses on Eastern Europe, Central Asia, and the Middle East, or the broad cultural continent they term “Eurasia.” This work introduces audiences to cultural exchanges between seemingly unlikely places, reminding us of the interconnected nature of global culture and highlighting histories often obscured by the rigid workings of modern geopolitics. Their commitment to an accessible, yet meaningful, art offers a refreshing dialogue for people willing to reconsider the “separateness” of the terrains of “Central Asia,” “the Middle East” and “Eastern Europe” as much more connected than otherwise expected.

Slavs and Tatars, Between 79.89.09. Screen-print and Offset print. 26 x 26 cm. Edition of 100. 2009

Slavs and Tatars offers a unique reading and deconstruction of monolithic notions of history, revealing a today very much rooted in yesterday. As a history student, I’ve followed their work for years, always pleased and surprised by their ability to initiate conversations through its pieces, which they continually expand on either in their books (PDFS available for download on their website!) or public lectures and talks available to both academic and art world audiences. The accessibility of the work goes beyond free downloads, present even in their actual media: by producing visual, audial, and literary works, they cater to different types of learners and consumers of knowledge.

Slavs and Tatars, Kitab-Kabab, . Projects 98: Beyonsense, August–December, 2012. The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Slavs and Tatars’ kitab-kebab is one example of the depth of their work. The piece, which spears six books together on a kufta-kebab skewer, explores the materiality of the book in addition to the textual information embedded in it. By skewering these books together, Slavs and Tatars questions how information is traditionally processed and categorized: should knowledge be processed horizontally, dabbling in different fields, or vertically, with an intense focus on one particular subject? Instead of buying into this binary, Slavs and Tatars provides an alternative, encouraging their audience to have a corporal and critical relationship with knowledge production.

In fact, Slavs and Tatars started out as a sort of book club, which served as inspirations for their many installations. Perhaps that is what makes Slavs and Tatars such a revolutionary art collective. Even today, they stress that their work seeks to draw the audience to their books, offering an unconventional approach whereby the pieces exhibited refer back to the books being written and produced by the collective. At their core, Slavs and Tatars initiated a sort of intellectual enterprise, creating pieces intended to draw audiences into much bigger and deeper conversations than those found traditionally within art. Their approach collapses art into itself, where sculptures, say, become more than something to be seen, but rather, something to be contemplated.

Slavs and Tatars, Molla Nasreddin: the magazine that would’ve, could’ve, should’ve, Offset print, 24 x 28 cm, 208 pages, color throughout, glue and stitched binding with solve gloss laminated and black foil embossed cover, edition of 1,700, 2011.

Listen to Slavs and Tatars on the Book 

Slavs and Tatars, Not Moscow, Not Mecca, Revolver Verlag/Secession, off-set print, 23 x 31 cm, 108 pages, 2012.

In a world full of heavy-handed visual depictions of current political or social issues that rely on simplistic, reductionist constructions of culture, Slavs and Tatars offers work rooted in a nuance and more subtle understanding of history.

Arbitrary regional boundaries and reductionist labels define academic departments and museum wings everywhere. “Middle Eastern Studies” and “Slavic Studies” departments grace almost every American university campus, and museums are often divided into “Islamic Art,” “Russian Art” and so on and so forth. These divisions hail from imperialistic and Orientalist modes of knowledge, alienating peoples from their neighbors and defining them through their relations with Western Europe. Such contemporary categorizations are remnants of this way of thinking.

Slavs and Tatars not only work in between these institutions, but in fact, succeed in critiquing them for being short-sighted in their worldview and existence. For example, their latest exhibit, “Friendship of Nations: Polish Shi’ite Showbiz” (which they wrote about for Ajam here and here) could not be categorized in either of these departments, as the pieces speak equally to Poland as they do to Iran. Friendship of Nations is, at heart, a project of critical geography, a theme that weaves through much of Slavs and Tatars’ work.

Nor could their work be housed in discipline-based departments, such as history or art history, because their multi-faceted installations and writings transcend any one discipline. Slavs and Tatars draw on multiple inspirations and methodologies, different material for an equally diverse audiences. Instead of operating in one distinct mode, Slavs and Tatars have created a place for their work, a homeland, so to speak, which welcomes transversality and storytelling across cultures.

Even if a museum had an appropriate section to display Slavs and Tatars’ works, the very essence of a museum as a cold and stark gallery for art to be placed on the wall is uninviting, an issue which they actively address in their approach to create an interactive experience. Slavs and Tatars incorporate the physical architecture of the gallery as a part of their presentation, and the souk-like atmosphere of their installations with benches and rugs provides a new space for viewers to absorb their surroundings without having to shuffle from one piece to another. Their recent exhibition, Beyonsense, offered a counterpoint to the MoMA’s approach to artistic modernity by creating a psychedelic reading room, warm, textured, and collective as opposed to rational individualism of steel and glass. By further engaging audiences at lectures or discussions at exhibit openings, Slavs and Tatars push audiences to contemplate and engage their work on a deeper level than walking by a series of framed pictures on the wall.

Listen to Slavs and Tatars on Museum Space

Slavs and Tatars, Beyonsense. Projects 98, August –December, 2012. The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Of course, their unorthodox ways of conceptualizing historic and cultural relationships have been met with different reactions from their international audiences. With exhibits across Europe, Asia, and North America, Slavs and Tatars have met with a variety of peoples.

Many audiences of various stripes have a kneejerk reaction to projects that deconstruct monolithic notions of history and culture. Even as many appreciate the work, some Iranians, for example, might take offense at projects that lump them in with broader Eurasia or that seem to imply a more culturally mixed past than nationalist narratives of history allow. This reaction is repeated among different nationalities, pointing to the continuing strength of narrow nationalisms in defining contemporary identities around the world.

Slavs and Tatars, Mother Tongues and Father Throats (installation view), wool, yarn, 300 x 500 cm, 2012, Raster, Warsaw

The diverse tapestry of modern Iranian history, imbued as it is by a rich mix of Islamic symbology and Persianate art, plays a major role in Slavs and Tatars’ work. Because their work is invested in the modern rather than in romantic notions of antiquity, Slavs and Tatars highlight a different kind of “Iranianness” that many Iranians tend to overlook or ignore. For example, the 1979 revolution one that many diaspora Iranians claim in different ways, and some don’t claim at all. These differing views color many audiences’ reactions to their exhibits: Iranians in the UAE have been much more responsive to their work, for example, than Iranians in the United States, reflecting the varied histories of these two strands of the Iranian diaspora.

Iranians in the States tend to favor a modern, urban, secular, and bourgeois understanding of culture, views which repel them from depictions of “folk” or “popular” culture. Poles, on the other hand, are generally proud of the revolutionary movement of 1989 depicted in the works, and as a result, have largely responded positively to Slavs and Tatars’ exhibits and installations.

Slavs and Tatars, Prayway, silk and wool carpet, MDF, steel, neon, 390 x 280 x 50 cm, 2012

Slavs and Tatar’s work, however, rejects superficial binaries of “Iran” and “the West,” which are deeply rooted in Orientalist understandings of geo-politics. Instead of splitting the world into political spheres of influences, Slavs and Tatars have taken on the role of a storyteller, using one story to tell another. Using 1979 and 1989 as key points to tell the stories of revolution and protest in Iran and Poland, Slavs and Tatars enrich these histories by linking them to each other. Isolated incidents tell us little about history until we consider them in a greater context.

Slavs and Tatars, Molla Nasreddin the antimodern, fibre-glass, steel, 157 x 165 x 88 cm, 9th Gwangju Biennial, 2012.

Their contributions, however, are not limited to the art world. Academia stands to be critiqued and revamped as well, and Slavs and Tatars’ is constantly looking for ways to create cross-cultural and disciplinary exchanges between universities around the world.

One idea is to have a mathematics department (MIT, are you interested?) invite a specialist of sacred geometry, found in mirror mosaics, from the Middle East as a guest lecturer for the year. Middle Eastern (and Islamic) mosaics, governed by mathematical laws, provide an unexpected and creative application of a practical discipline.

Another idea is creating the “Molla Nasreddin Chair of Economics,” perhaps at a fine institution like the University of Chicago. Molla Nasreddin, who is the blundering protagonist of short stories, could serve as a character to point out the pitfalls of an overly-analyzed system like economics. Both these ideas turn the departments on their heads, inverting them while still speaking to the philosophy of the institutions. The deconstruction of disciplinary and geographic walls built around academic departments signifies the thoughtfulness in Slavs and Tatars’ works.

A “think-tank without the agenda,” Slavs and Tatars have achieved challenging many preconceived notions and introducing little known concepts and connections to a larger audience. From language to politics to religion, Slavs and Tatars’ commentaries run deep through their work, contributing to a much-needed discourse on the land between Slavs and the Tatars with humor and depth.

Gohar Dashti, “Today’s Life and War”

Nowruz this year is haunted by the shadow of the devastating conflict in Iraq, just as it was 10 years ago. As millions around the world in Iran, Afghanistan, Kurdistan, Central Asia, the Caucasus, Turkey, and elsewhere celebrate the advent of a New Year, the joy of this springtime celebration of rebirth is stalked by the specter of the horrific wounds inflicted upon the Iraqi people beginning exactly 10 years ago.

This was meant to be a Nowruz message of joy. But in light of the 10 year anniversary of the beginning of the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, it transformed into a plea for reflection on where we were and what has become of us, even as we look forward with the hope that Nowruz inspires in us each and every single year. By foregrounding my own experiences I don’t mean to make any comparison between the suffering the Iraqi people have endured in the last decade and the Islamophobic bullying many of us experienced abroad, but only to explore how this war has shaped each one of us in distinct ways based on our positionality and relationship to it. This is the story of an individual Iranian-American childhood shaped decisively by the experience of the War on Terror but constantly inspired by the bravery of the Iraqi people, framed through the reflective and hopeful attitudes Nowruz inspires in those of us who celebrate it.

For many Iranians, the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 is one of those historical events that is difficult to parse. Saddam Hussein invaded Iran in 1980, launching a war that killed nearly a million, the majority of them Iranians. Fresh off of a revolution that had rid Iran of the tyrannical reign of the US-backed Shah, the next eight years were a series of unending horrors that stalked our cities, killed our youth, and left broad swathes of our homeland in ruins. Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was the evil monster haunting a generation of Iranians’ nightmares.

Iranian soldier saying goodbye to his children. Undated photo.

But the suffering of the Iraqi people under his tyrannical fist was never completely forgotten in all of this, and the first Gulf War and the brutal sanctions regime that followed made it hard to do anything but pity the mortal enemies that had once menaced our collective Iranian dreamscape. Even as Iran staggered under the weight of its own US sanctions in the 1990s, the terrible suffering that the Iraqi people endured as healthcare, social services, and civil society slowly collapsed and an estimated 500,000 children died as malnutrition surged under the weight of international sanctions was never far from our minds, hearts, and prayers.

In Los Angeles, far removed from the wars that stalked the daughters and sons of the Iranian Revolution, this recent history was as confusing to me as the conditions that had led to my own father’s self-imposed exile from the homeland. Attending a predominantly white, Evangelical middle school in the suburbs allowed me to imagine a Middle Eastern geography not ruptured by wars and rising sectarianism, even back in 2003.

Indeed, in the months prior to the invasion of Iraq, I had become increasingly aware that the sense of solidarity and fear I felt for the Iraqi people was understood as sameness in the Islamophobic logic that had taken root among classmates and teachers. Even though other Iranians had tried to instill in me a deep feeling of difference and distinction from our Iraqi neighbors, white American Islamophobia had the ironic effect of making me feel little difference between myself and the “Arabs.”

The weeks leading up to the invasion were peppered with many incidents of bullying of which I only have vague memories anymore: being repeatedly called “Osama bin Laden” in the hallways, girls I barely knew spitting “Saddam Hussein” at me as I passed, and being regularly accused of treason in classroom discussions about the virtues of invading someone else’s country. The difference between an Iraqi and an Iranian held little weight in any of this, and my self-professed Christian faith was meaningless in the face of my apparent sympathies for the enemy cause.  Perhaps this is the strangest part of discussing my own experiences of Islamophobic bullying growing up- as a child who believed passionately that he was a Christian, it was hard to understand how quickly I was racialized into a Muslim other in the eyes of my classmates.

The day the US carried out its “shock and awe” against the Iraqi people, committing atrocities from the air and striking terror into the hearts of millions, my classmates watched the television excitedly in the library and clapped intermittently. Inconsolable, I cried and promised myself I would wear black clothing out of mourning until the US stopped. The US never did, and eventually I gave up my promise, only bringing out my black at the yearly marches commemorating the war in Los Angeles once I was old enough to attend.

10 years on, it is hard to believe the decade our Iraqi sisters and brothers have lived through. But as North American and European sanctions begin to take a heavy toll on Iran, with millions ringing in the New Year under the heavy weight of an international sanctions regime dreadfully similar to that imposed upon Iraq two decades ago, and as drones, death, and repression stalk our neighbors, the specter of the Iraqi experience haunts us all. In Iraq, a generation has grown up knowing only the horrors of war, while abroad a generation has come of age in the War on Terror, constantly reminded of their powerlessness in the face of aggression and armed brutality.

And yet, to tell the Iraqi story entirely through the prism of despair is a betrayal of the honorable resistance millions have put up in the face of occupation, oppression, and militarism every single day for the last decade. On a daily basis, Iraqis have resisted and thrived in the face of a brutal US and UK-led occupation, living courageously and surviving creatively as the war spiraled into broader civil conflict. Iraqis have led protest movements against corruption and engaged in strikes and national movements opposing foreign control of their national resources, while multiple women’s movements have emerged and fought to ensure a more equitable Iraqi future.

Women protest on the 3rd anniversary of the invasion of Iraq in 2006 in Sydney, Australia.

Only a month before the US invaded Iraq, more than 10 million people gathered in 800 cities around the world in the largest mobilization against war and militarism the world has ever seen, demonstrating the world community’s refusal to take imperial intervention and reckless destruction of human life sitting down. Since then, hundreds of thousands have demonstrated every year around the world, objecting loudly to continued imperial occupation and aggression the world over.

The last few years have seen the people of our region rise up in search of freedom and against oppression. As the vernal equinox and the start of spring that the Iranian New Year is based on passes, millions continue to struggle for justice and equality around the world. This is, at the end of the day, what Nowruz represents for many of us- a fresh start and the hope for a better future.

In this last decade the people of Iraq were never alone for we were always there beside them, and the Iraqi people and their stories have never left our hearts. May we all be inspired this year again by the rebirth and resilience of nature and of love that Nowruz signifies, and may we be reminded of the need to live freely, honorably, and bravely as the ongoing Iraqi struggle for liberation inspires us to do.

]]> http://ajammc.com/2013/03/20/a-nowruz-dedicated-to-the-iraqi-people-10-years-later/feed/ 1 http://ajammc.com/2013/03/07/pahlavi-iran-and-zionism-an-intellectual-elites-short-lived-love-affair-with-israel/ http://ajammc.com/2013/03/07/pahlavi-iran-and-zionism-an-intellectual-elites-short-lived-love-affair-with-israel/#comments Thu, 07 Mar 2013 20:49:29 +0000 Ajam Media Collective http://ajammc.com/?p=2954 Continue reading »]]> A guest post by Lior Sternfeld, a PhD Candidate in the History Department at the University of Texas at Austin. His research focuses on Iranian social history and the religious minorities in Iran during the Pahlavi era.

The relationship between Israel and Iran dates back to the early years of the State of Israel, and was the basis of both countries’ geopolitical policies. This political relationship was not, however, merely a matter of the ruling elites. Insofar as Pahlavi Iran is concerned, even oppositional circles in the 1960s and 1970s had a complex and sometimes favorable approach to the State of Israel. Moreover, many of these viewed Israel and Iran as essentially exceptional in nature in the contemporary Middle East, a perception that would change definitively for the negative after the 1967 war.

Shortly after the establishment of Israel in 1948, a new love story began in the Middle East. In 1950, Iran granted Israel de facto recognition and opened an embassy in West Jerusalem. At that time Iran was (and still is) a homeland to the largest Jewish community in the Middle East, and a safe haven for many Iraqi Jews who had fled persecution in Iraq throughout the 1940s.

Students at a Jewish school in Tehran in 1960, one of 33 Jewish schools in Iran at the time. Image source: American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee.

Unlike the majority of Jewish communities in the Arab countries, many Iranian Jews decided to stay in Iran after the establishment of Israel. While most other Jewish communities in the Muslim world vanished between 1948-1956 and migrated en masse to Israel, the vast majority of Iranian Jews stayed in their homeland and conducted a complex relationship with the Zionist movement and Israel.

This is not to say Iranian Jews were anti-Zionist. However, due to their decision to stay in Iran, Iranian Jewish communities were generally not identified with Zionism. This was, of course, a sharp contrast to most Arab-Jewish communities from Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Morocco, and Libya. Many Arab-Jews emigrated to the newly found State of Israel before 1956, because of increasing tensions (and at times outright persecution) with the local populations on the background of the Israeli-Palestinian expanding conflict.

Chief Rabbi of Tehran, Yedidya Shofet, congratulates Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddeq on his recent political victory after the failed coup attempt against him on August 14, 1953. Image source: Goel Cohen, in “Bar bal-e khirad: gam beh gam ba hakham Yedidya Shofet”

Given the prevalence of the “Aryan Hypothesis” in Iran and the general yearn Westwards during the Pahlavi dynasty, an ideological pact with Israel made a great deal of sense. This was especially true after the inception of the White Revolution in 1963, a move that was advertised as an attempt to rapidly modernize Iran along Western lines. The notion that these countries shared a more “Western” attitude even though they were situated in the “East” became an integral part in the foundation of a regional coalition among the non-Arab countries of the Greater Middle East: Turkey, Ethiopia, Iran, and Israel. This coalition came to be known as the “Alliance of the Periphery.”

The Shah, however, was a deeply unpopular and autocratic ruler among the majority of Iranians. Despite Israel’s role in consolidating the Shah’s autocratic rule, the Iranian elite’s fascination with Israel helped to create a surprisingly favorable opinion of Israel in Iran. Due to the close ties between the two governments, Iranians tended to associate Israel with projects like the rebuilding of Qazvin after the earthquake in 1962 rather than with the notoriously brutal Iranian secret police SAVAK, which the Israeli Mossad helped establish and train.

Learning Hebrew and Persian alongside each other at school in Tehran, 1970. Image source: American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee.

Although many of the political leaders of the Iranian Jewish communities were sympathetic to the Zionist cause, most Iranian Jews remained indifferent to it. In fact, many joined leftist movements in Iran and eventually assumed leadership positions in them, demonstrating that their political allegiances belonged first and foremost to Iran. Naturally, this situation caused major frustration in Israel, a state whose existence was and still is premised on the notion that the destinies of world Jewries and the state of Israel were inexorably intertwined.

The predominant Iranian Jewish interpretation of Zionism was different from the political Zionism espoused by the Israeli establishment at that time. The former did not necessitate the existence of a Jewish state, but rather reflected a religious sentiment and an emotional-cum-spiritual attachment to Zion, the biblical name of Jerusalem. This was not unique to the Iranian Jewry, but rather common among Jews across the Middle East. It, however, remained relevant only to Iranians, as the other communities for the most part ceased to exist post 1948-1956.

While many Iranian Jews had relatives in Israel and had visited Israel before, Israel was not part of their Jewish identity, and they did not see themselves leaving their beloved homeland for any other country–including Israel. Overwhelmingly, they did not share the political interpretation of Zionism with the Zionist movement and Israel and tied any meaning of the term to the existence of the state of Israel.

To understand the unique place Israel occupied in the Iranian worldview, one should consider Iranians who wrote about Israel. Jalal Al-e Ahmad, a foremost Iranian thinker, may best convey the transformation of Israel’s representations in the Iranian public sphere. Al-e Ahmad, a one-time member of the Tudeh leadership, gained leftist-internationalist credentials with the publication of Gharbzadegi (1962), in which he criticized the tendency of broad segments of  Iranian society to blindly mimic the West. Gharbzadegi (“Westoxification”) lamented the inevitable loss of Iranian culture and identity to Western models and paradigms. His publication influenced a later generation of Iranian revolutionaries such as Ali Shariati and the current supreme leader, Sayyed Ali Khamenei.

Given his remarkable place in both the evolution of the Iranian Left and the development of contemporary political ideologies, one would not expect that he should name Israel as a model society. Yet, Al-e Ahmad conjured ideas that were common among intellectual circles in Iran before 1967–ideas which brought home the message that Israel in its essence was a cultural and political ally.

Simin Daneshvar and Jalal Al-e Ahmad in an undated photo, possibly from the early 1960s. Image source: Windows on Iran

Two years after the publication of Gharbzadegi, Al-e Ahmad and his wife, Simin Daneshvar, visited Israel. Al-e Ahmad’s travelogue, Safar beh Vilayet-e Ezrael (Journey to the State of Israel) attests to the profound impression Israel left on him. The critical thinker wrote about Israel in nothing less than admiring terms. He described in details a visit to “Yad Va’Shem,” the Holocaust memorial museum, and expressed his fascination with the resurrection of the Jewish people after the horrors of the Holocaust. Later, he broadly discussed in positive terms the Kibbutz in Israel and the state’s socialist ideology.

During their visit, Al-e Ahmad and Daneshvar stayed in Kibbutz Ayelet Ha’Shahar in Northern Israel. He described the Kibbutz for the Iranian reader as follows: “[…] these people in Israel had already laid the foundation for the socialization of the means of agricultural production in a part of the world which had been inspired by the Russian Social-Democratic movement and not by Stalin.” Thus, Al-e Ahmad associated Israel with the “correct” side of communist ideology, as the contemporary rift in the Tudeh party also created another communist opposition to Stalin’s legacy .

There is perhaps another reason for Al-e Ahmad’s  great sympathy for Israel. In his travelogue, Al-e Ahmad depicts the Arabs in derogatory terms as ideological and cultural enemies, to say the least. Cultural tensions between Arabs and Iranians surface clearly in the text. As he wrote: “I am a non-Arab citizen of the East who has suffered much at the hands of the Arabs and still do. In spite of all the services that ‘I’ [I as “Iran,” not the person of Jalal Al-e Ahmad] rendered to Islam through the ages and still do, they still refer to me as Ajam,” by which in this context he means a “foreigner” and an “illiterate” as well. Similar statements can be found throughout the text. Given Al-e Ahmad’s public status, this travelogue certainly had an impact on Iranian perceptions of Israel.

A photo of Jalal Al-e Ahmad and Simin Daneshvar’s writing from Kibbutz Ayelet Ha’Shahar Guest book.
Al-e Ahmad: “Regardless of the hospitality, I saw here people I have never expected to meet. Learned people, understanding and open-minded. In a sense, they are implementing Plato. Honestly speaking, I always identified Israel with the Kibbutz, and now I understand why.”
Daneshvar: “As I see it the Kibbutz is the answer to the problem of all the countries, including our own.”
Thanks to the archive of Kibbutz Ayelet Ha’Shahar and archivist Noa Herman for help in recovering this image.

Safar beh Vilayet-e Ezrael was published in a series of newspaper articles that were well-read and discussed among secular and religious intellectuals. For example, Iran’s current supreme leader, Seyyed Ali Khamenei, later recalled that this travelogue not only puzzled him but also stirred major controversy among the young clerics in Qom, specifically because of the inherent contradiction they saw between this book and Al-e Ahmad’s previous popular writings, first and foremost Gharbzadegi.

1967 was a watershed moment in the relationship between Pahlavi Iran and the State of Israel. The Six Day War, during which Israel invaded its neighboring countries and occupied the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, the Sinai Peninsula, and the Golan Heights, transformed Israel into a colonial power in the eyes of Iranian intellectual elites. After the war, many of the Soviet Bloc countries severed their relations with Israel, and so did their satellite parties, including the Iranian Tudeh.

Yasser Arafat (L), Seyed Ahmed Khomeini (R), the son of Ayatollah Khomeini, and the PLO delegation at the newly established Palestinian Embassy in Tehran, 1979. The building replaced the Israeli mission which had previously stood at the site. Image source: Jangi ke Bud, Jangi ke Hast.

Jalal Al-e Ahmad wrote the last chapter of this travelogue in 1968, faithfully reflecting the transformation of Iranian attitudes towards Israel. In this chapter, he describes Israel as a part of a Western capitalist scheme in the region, explaining that the reactionary Arab regimes played into the hands of Israel and the colonial powers. He also criticizes French intellectual elites for their betrayal of the Arabs and supporting yet again, a new colonial venture. His criticism was aimed directly at Jean-Paul Sartre and Claude Lanzmann for condemning the French colonialism in Algeria and being very critical towards Britain’s ventures, yet miraculously finding a way to ignore the exact same problems when it came to Israel.

Along with the elite opinion, Iranian popular perceptions of Israel also changed dramatically after 1967. A clear popular expression of this came about only one year later. In 1968, the Israeli and Iranian national football teams played against each other in Tehran as part of Asia Cup finals. Habib Elghanayan, a wealthy Jew and a community leader, purchased a large number of tickets for this game for Iranian Jews to attend and cheer for the Israeli team. This game, however, became a site where Iranian fans vehemently showed their discontent with Israel’s policy. The Israeli team and their supporters fell victims to brutal incitement and had to be escorted out of the stadium by the police. This incident reflected a sea change in the Iranians’ attitudes toward Israel. A one-time favorable partner now became an unwanted foreigner, protected only  by the grace of the Shah’s iron fist.

Footage from the infamous Iran-Israel match in 1968.

Beginning in the 1970s, the Shah attempted to find new alliances in the Middle East and beyond. Iran’s relations with the Soviet Union and some of the Arab countries were revisited. A peace agreement with Iraq and the American election of President Carter in 1976, with the subsequent harsh criticisms that Carter voiced against the human rights conditions in Iran, led the Shah to develop a more negative view of the State of Israel.

By the late 1970s, a revolution had toppled the Pahlavi Shah, and the new regime demonstrated the Iranian public’s feelings towards the State of Israel with vocal anti-Zionism, kicking the Israeli diplomatic mission out and developing strong ties to the Palestinian resistance. And while the majority of Iranians would come to forget the mixed feelings they initially harbored towards Israel prior to 1967, Jalal Al-e Ahmad’s writings stand as an almost lonely testament to that time.

Further Reading:
For more about how Al-e Ahmad’s works on Israel have been discussed since the Revolution, refer to the introduction to the 1984 edition of the travelogue by Al-e Ahmad’s brother, Shams Al-e Ahmad, as well as Hamid Dabashi, Theology of Discontent: The Ideological Foundation of the Islamic Revolution. Additionally, Haggai Ram’s book, Iranophobia: The Logic of an Israeli Obsession, deals in depth with the very distinct understandings of Zionism in Israel and Iran during the 1970s.

We all know that poetry precedes written language. The songs, hopes, and dreams of people did not wait millennia to get recorded, and we should be glad, because we still remember Odysseus, Gilgamesh and Manas. And even in the 21st century you will hear the occasional curmudgeon saying that kids nowadays should learn poetry by memorization, not by reading. That sounds silly until you come across the kind of uncle who can recite passages from the Shahnameh from heart thanks to his Alborz education.

Decoupling story from text sounds a bit absurd now, but only a century ago it was a way of life. A storyteller does not just choose his story, but chooses how it will be disseminated. The text chosen – or no text at all! – is just as political a choice as subject matter, and governments would crack down hard on people who chose wrong. Imperial Russia, the ruler of five scripts, were especially severe about this, and Samizdat did not enter the historical record with the Soviets. So how does a culture keep its identity and its sustenance when cut off from their historical handwriting? They rely on a man like Abdullah Tuqay.

Abdullah Tuqay

Abdullah (or Ğabdullah, Габдулла, or عبدالل for reasons that we will soon discuss) was born to a Tatar mullah in 1886. Now, the beauty of the Ajam platform is that there is an audience that refuses to be turned off at the sight of a yumuşak g, let alone all the madness that follows it. The always-fantastic Jake Turk has a great background reader on Tatarstan, the home of Tuqay and known if at all to Europeans as the place where Ivan the Terrible first earned his reputation. But Tatar life did not end with Russian suzerainty, and the centuries of Russian rule over Tatarstan include a complex negotiation of power.

23rd edition of Abdullah Tuqay’s Yalt-Yolt, a Tatar satirical periodical published in Kazan (1912).

Abdullah was born into this at the end of the nineteenth century into a bureaucratic household at the breadbasket of the Russian Empire. Abdullah Tuqay’s early life is a bit Dickensian. He passed from a dead mother to a grandfather in penury to a Kazani coachdriver, who later brought him to a bazaar where a leather tanner took a liking to the young boy. The tanner and his wife became sick, however, and he was sent back to his grandfather and then to a farmer, who put the boy up in a madrassa. By this time, a wealthy family member in Uralsk (a town in now-Kazakhstan 500 kilometers north of the Caspian shore) took him in and brought him to Russian school. Abdullah Tuqay was ten years old.

It is a sad beginning, no doubt, but Abdullah wrote with such brightness and enthusiasm that one wonders where it could come from. It would be nice to say that it came from Tuqay’s Jadidi teachers, who imbued in the youth a sense of pride and connection to his community. For this was the spirit of the Jadid movement explained so well by Adeeb Khalid and embraced so theatrically by Molla Nasreddin. The movement was an anti-imperialist and anti-clerical mission to imbue pride in the locality and the community in Central Asia. They promoted religious and political reform based on tenets of equality and modernism, not much different than the Protestants of old or their Constitutional Revolutionary contemporaries in Iran.

The truth is probably that the young Tuqay was quite a bit sharper and more perseverant than most of his classmates, and that he benefited more than most by visits by traveling Turkic master poets (these writers with their anti-authoritarian streaks did better relying on ta’arof than on patronage) and a teacher enthused about creating a new language for his students.

It is now in our story when Tuqay gets to pity the Americans. His contemporary, T.S. Eliot, was constrained by his language. Tuqay was integral – at the age of twenty – in creating a new one, bringing Tatarça into the Cyrillic alphabet. By this time, Tuqay moved to the Volga Tatar capital of Kazan. Kazan was and still is very much a cultural capital. Much like Tabriz, Kazan straddles a river and acts as a border entrepot. Intellectual (or literal) refugees from Moscow, Tblisi, Crimea, or Bukhara brought their ideas and their books. The Tatars themselves were of course their intellectual and creative equals. Tuqay stayed in a hotel full of young and brash youth from throughout the region, and spent days hunched over the press and nights shouting over a table. The magazines, feuilletons, broadsheets, chapbooks, and anything else that Tuqay’s crew could put in an iron press and later bound were full of religious or secular, pro-Empire or pro-Caliphate or pro-Republic, essays or diatribes or dialectics. The only rules seemed to be that it had to be written in “Tatarça” however defined and that it had to be written well.In such a multiconfessional, multiethnic, and multifarious city, Tuqay aimed mainly to have the cream of the literary class rise to the top.

19th-20th century aerial photograph of Kazan

So what is this Tatar language? This Tatarça of what we speak? It has its origins in the Kypchak Turkic language spoken today predominantly in Kazakhstan and historically also by the Mamluk rulers of Egypt. Tuqay and his cohort added in some Russian vocabulary, but it was formed as much as through the ingenuity of Jadids and Tuqay’s hotel full of excitable young men as it does necessity. In 1906, police seized his Iske Imla (essentially, Arabic) typefaces. Things would be written in Cyrillic from hereon out, or not be written at all.

Iske Imla appearing on the gravestone of Abdullah Tuqay

This was not the Russian Empire being capricious and cruel, nor was it about westernization and modernization. It was about power. Michael Hancock-Parmer discusses the political uses of Arabic, Cyrillic, and Latin scripts in a 21st-century context, but the lesson holds true:

In essence, “Arabic-script Kazakh” is nearly a contradiction in terms. When written in Arabic script, Kazakh, Tatar, Bashkir, and Karakalpak appear much more identical then then do in the current Cyrillic alphabets. Moreover, their close relationship with Uzbek, Uyghur, Kyrgyz, Turkmen, and Ottoman-Turkish was far more apparent. Though much ink has been spilled attacking the awkwardness of Arabic at correctly carrying Turkic language, the longevity of the alphabet must be re-considered rather than seen as a sign of backwardness or Oriental decadence. Rather, the very limitations of the Arabic script (i.e. writing of the various Turkic vowels) might be considered as its strength. In essence, while the Arabic script was able to add letters to represent vowels (modern Uyghur in China is an excellent example), the obscuring of the same vowels allowed for easier comprehension between speakers with different pronunciations. One can see a rough analog with the ratio of English written vowels to pronounced vowels; many differences in pronunciation are obscured, allowing much easier communication (in writing) between speakers in northern and southern portions of the United States, to say nothing of between Australia, India, England, the US, etc.

Cyrillification emphasizes difference where there previously was little to be found. Dialect went from being the sort of thing joked about to a matter of otherization. And this was not due to the unruly Turks (ethnic group not the empire) or due to the dastardly Russians (empire not ethnic group) but due to an eagerness for power and suzerainty. A new script cuts a society off from their history – literally rendering it illegible – and forces the way of the empire as the only way of societal advancement.

Abdullah Tuqay fought against this. His “New Tatar” was stripped of Arabic and Persian loan words beloved by the ulema but incomprehensible to the vast majority of Tatars., but the press’ ability to disperse not religious or educational tracts but fun and thoughtful poetry made Tatarça a force for inclusiveness. Handcuffed by imperial power, Tuqay and his cronies did their best to preach inclusiveness and fraternity, writing:

Banish enmity, its time has passed.
Friends – separated bodies,
But in our hearts, forgetting evil,
United forever.

A member of the 27 Club (done in young by consumptive pneumonia), he has taken on a bit of cult-hero status as well, with statues in Moscow and Kazan. It doesn’t hurt that he was a bit of a hunk.

Portrait of Abdullah Tuqay

Slavs + Tatars poke fun at the confusing history of Azeri  (on page 46) but the trans-Caspian Turks are hardly alone. They are well-footnoted and brothers in anti-modernisme, but they and we both know that you can’t live in the past. Abdullah Tuqay knew it too. Fierce polyglots in a monoglomaniac world, we are forced instead to link to a short list of Tuqay’s poems translated into English and use metaphor to explain our changes in mood and tongue:

As any guest to a Russian apartment will know, changing into slippers upon entering is a given. Russian in public, Tatar at home. The threshold between languages was seen this way, with speaking Tatar in public would be as though one wore one’s slippers on the street and to work. Cosy they may be, but not “prilichno.” Just not done.

AaaaaaahhhhZERI!!! 2009, screenprint, 70 x 100 cm.

So incredibly lost to the Anglophone world, Tuqay lives on in spirit. And to let you in on what has always been a poorly-kept secret, I created The Tuqay  just to embrace this coziness. It was created to be loud and argumentative, to tell great stories and give gripping lectures. It was created to have fun. Language is supposed to be sung, not pointed at (though if you must, at least be beautiful with it). Start from the left, start from the right, it does not matter; share the stories and the land will follow. Tuqay would be happy to bring storytellers like the Kyrgyz Manaschiler and the Azeri Mugham ifaçıları together on one press, if he could afford the paper costs.

The Tuqay doesn’t have to worry about such silly things in the 21st century (though there are .pdfs!) so instead it proudly works in his image. The eastern (but not easternmost!) brother of Mashallah and Ajam MC is a newborn, proud and happy, and would like nothing more than for you to join it in these emotions.

CALL FOR EDITORS – AJAMMC.com

The Ajam Media Collective (AjamMC.com) is an online community dedicated to documenting and analyzing cultural, social, and political trends in the diverse Iranian, Central Asian, and diaspora communities, and serves as a semi-scholarly resource by engaging with academics, activists, and students of the region.

Ajam is looking to add Regional Editors to our team, with the intention of broadening our coverage and improving our analysis across the region. Some potential Regional Editor positions include:

• Afghanistan
• the Caucasus
• Central Asia
• Iran
• Pakistan
• Persian Gulf

We welcome regional suggestions not mentioned in the list above.

Regional Editors are expected to manage coverage and coordinate articles exploring a particular region. Editors should be familiar with the fields they cover and should be plugged into contemporary debates, networks, and activism on and in the region as well.

Regional Editors should specialize in one or more of the following topics and display a basic familiarity with the rest: visual art, popular and traditional musics, literature, gender, sexuality, history, urbanism, social movements, religion, and the diverse intersections of these fields.

Individuals who believe they meet the above expectations are invited to apply by emailing ajammc@gmail.com with a cover letter and resume listing previous writing experience. Additionally, the applicant should submit one article (maximum 1500 words) on the region she or he is applying for. This article will be taken as a writing sample and will be published if and when the individual is accepted as Regional Editor. We especially welcome contributions from scholars and activists.

Applications must be received by Sunday, March 3, 2013.

About us: the Ajam Media Collective unites authors from various backgrounds and disciplines to promote diverse critical views of the region and seek to emphasize the region’s importance as a thriving cultural center whose multiple realities are too often obscured by the popular Western and global media. Ajam is a collective, which means that it is a labor of love for all involved and is strictly volunteer-based.