Yesterday, at the Olympic Club, I gave a speech under that title. It was suggested that I post it to give others access to it. This is a blog version of that talk. Which middle eastern nation? I dedicated the talk to Kourosh and Darius, new members of the Club, both Iranian-American.
Yes, it is Iran that I would most like to admire, to visit, to love. But of course, I am not talking about today's Iran, but of the Iran it once was and could become again. Five reasons I long for that new Iran.
First, I long to love Iran because of its
Persian Heritage.
We, educated in the Western canon, focused on Greece and its heritage, and most of us don't know of or appreciate what Greece's implacable enemies, the Persians, have given our culture. The first monotheist of which we have records was Zoroaster, founder of what became Persia's state religion, Zoroastrianism. Though dating is fuzzy, he preceded Akhenaton and Abraham in preaching monotheism to polytheistic societies. Zoroastrians also believed in an affirmative evil. To Christians who might ask how a loving God could make a Hitler, a Zoroastrian would answer that there is a competing evil God, not just an absence of good or demonic possession but an affirmative Evil. Zoroaster also gave us judgement day.
Moreover, Persia gave us civic order by rule of law (at about the same time as did Hammurabi) and in architecture, the arch -- long before Roman engineers came on stage.
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| Shiraz, a lush valley surrounded by dry mountains |
And man-made oases with gardens and water features, not for supply, but in which to relax and fuel the soul with beauty.
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| Eram Garden, Shiraz |
Until the advent of Fundamentalists Khomeini and his son Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran had a middle class -- now battered and impoverished, caught between Iran’s fundamentalists and our hostility and sanctions -- but still aspiring to middle class lives.. Before the theocracy, Iran had a representative parliamentary system; Iranians know how to run elections. For the first 3/4 of the 20thC, Iranian women enjoyed access to education, workforce participation, the professions, and had legal rights of property and independence. Under Mohammed Reza Shah Pahlavi, Sharia law was suppressed. Iran increasingly urbanized. True, the Shahs Pahlavi, father and son, had autocratic powers over the legislature. None-the-less, Iran's economic, social, and political structures had much ours could relate to and work with. Iran has experienced more modernity than its neighbor Islamic states.
Third, because it’s Shia, not Sunni
This may strike some of you as prejudice, but reflect with me:
- Of the 19 airliner hijackers who attacked America on 9/11, all 19 were Sunni.
- Sunnis appear to grow radicals: ISIS, Al Qaida, The Islamic Brotherhood, the Taliban, Boko Haram, al-Shabaab, Salafi Jihadism, etc.: all Sunni. Yes, theocratic Iran sponsors Hezbollah, the Houthi, and Hamas as instruments of state policy, but they don't have such a track record as have the Sunni of home-grown terror movements.
- Traditionally, Shia have shown more tolerance of non-Muslims than have Sunni though Khomeini changed that for the worse.
- There is no in-grained history of animosity to the US until the modern era of oil politics. British Intelligence with CIA aid and encouragement changed that in 1953 by deposing democratically elected Prime Minister Mossadegh because he moved to nationalize Anglo-Iranian Oil (now known as BP.) By contrast, prickly Sunni governments, especially the Saudi Wahabis, have long resented US interference and presence in the region.
Fourth, I'd love to love Iran for the sake of my old friends – i.e., my 13th & 14thC friends, the great medieval Persian poets.
Persia was polylingual: Arabic was the language of theology; Turkish, the language of administration; and Persian, the language of poetry. Persians revered their poets. Rumi, of the13thC, is perhaps the most famous, but in fact he was not Persian. He wrote in Persian, but he was born in what is now Afghanistan and raised in Turkey (Ann and I have been to his grave at Konya.)
My favorite bed-side companions, a century younger than Rumi, are from Shiraz. Shiraz, the beautiful, lush city of vineyards and rose gardens, of nightingales and wine shops. Yes, wine. In medieval Iran? Shiraz was governed liberally at that time, though from time to time, conservative reformers shut down the wine shops. The wine shops were to Persian villages and towns what the pubs are today to English and Irish towns.
Hafez wrote of love: love lost, lovers lost, unrequited love's despair, love of wine, of wineshops, and of youthful wine servers (picture barkeeps.) Hafez loved beauty and youth. He wrote of his love for girls and for boys. Muslim critics and clerics have woven a veil of propriety over Hafez's words, claiming his talk of loving boy or girl was a symbol of his love for his celestial maker, for God. Well, there is no evidence from Hafez for that. I don't believe Hafez ever gave a hint of that interpretation. My translator, Dick Davis, applies Occam's Razor to the work and simply takes at face value what Hafez says about liking boys and girls. Hafez's poetry is moving and beautiful despite what to us are occasional references to the unacceptable. (Persian society was not alone; the ancient Greeks and Romans condoned homosexuality and adolescent sexuality.)
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| Tomb of Hafez, Shiraz. |
His companion on my beside table is Jahan Malek Khatun, an educated woman of the 14thC, a published poet, a royal princess, who sincerely and movingly wrote of love from the distaff side, but with little of the self-deprecating humor that endears Hafez to me.
The translations I use are Dick Davis's from Faces of Love (in which he also includes the works of Obayd-e Zakani, the bad boy of Shiraz who loved to write about his naughty bits and shock the 'nice' people of Persia, causing much clutching of pearls, I'm sure. I don't know this, but my guess is that some of the Pythons must have found him amusing.)
And my Fifth reason for longing to love Iran are my new Iranian-American friends and acquaintances
such as
- beautiful Shiva S, Dir. of marketing and communications for the Friends of Waterfront Park. Shiva fully lives up to her name, which in Farsi means charmingly expressive;
- Shawn T, a medical entrepreneur in San Diego, a B’hai refugee from fundamentalist persecution; and
- Kourosh and Darius T whom I met through their/our Olympic Club. Kourosh, another refugee from fundamentalist persecution, has found acceptance here in hopefully still tolerant America.
What would it take for me to come to love Iran? Change: big change in Teheran and Qom, big change in Washington and Miami Beach.
From Qom:
- The passing of Ayatollah ali Khamenei and a return to moderation;
- A middle-class uprising against theocracy; the dismantling of the Guardian Council and the Assembly of Experts;
- A blossoming of participatory republicanism;
- A restoration and opening of Shiraz -- its rose gardens, vineyards, and nightingales (and its wine shops;)
- And for Kourosh and Shawn, the freedom of choice, to choose to go back or to make their homes here, the freedom to visit their homeland in confidence and safety.
- A suspension of ideological intolerance; a repudiation of blood and soil as a litmus test of Americanism;
- An end to needing an "enemy” to justify autocratic rule by Executive Order; (fill in the blank _________. Venezuela? China? Iran? Canada? Who will be next?)
- A willingness to listen, to be present and really listen, and to discuss rather than bluster and threaten, or economically punish with tariffs;
- An acknowledgement of our differences but without judgement or proselytizing or coercion;
- A genuine search for common ground for collaborating on addressing common concerns.
