Iranian anthropology 1900–25
In attempting to redefine the Iranian self, nineteenth-century intellectuals drew on three different images of the self: a modern self, based on Western culture;
a national historical self, based on pre-Islamic Iranian culture, and a religious self based on Shi’ism. These images of the self, in turn, established three competing discourses: modernism, nationalism and Islamism. Later, at the end of the nine- teenth century and during the early decades of the twentieth, nationalism and modernism became united and generated a modernist–nationalist discourse. This discourse reached a climax with the onset of the Constitutional Revolution in 1906, and continued until the 1979 Islamic Revolution.
All intellectual fields, including history, literature, religious studies and philoso- phy were dominated by the modernist–nationalist discourse (Adamiyat 1962, 1967; Vaziri 1993; Gheissari 1998). The intellectuals used anthropological studies, and in particular, folklore and archaeological findings, to reinforce the sense of pre-Islamic national identity. Many writers of all groups produced an abundance of travel accounts. These writings were the first form of modern Persian ethnographic work, and introduced the modern concept of anthropology in Iran. Moreover, the time in question was the high point of Orientalism, when European scholars had established a significant discourse about Iranian culture.
Orientalist discourse had a clear political effect on Iranian intellectuals. Likewise, in order to simplify the excessively formal aristocratic Persian language and literature of the court, the Iranian intellectuals and literati began to use and study Persian folk language and folklore. This brought about a kind of modern folklore studies among the Iranian literati.
In this chapter, I shall examine these trends and their socio-political contexts.
I have organized the chapter accordingly. The first section is an introduction to Persian travel accounts of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In this section, I review the contents of the most outstanding accounts and then analyse their ethnographic significance and political implications. The sec- ond section is devoted to Orientalist anthropological studies of Iran and their ethnographic and political significance. The final section is an introduction to Persian folklore studies and literature in the early decades of the twentieth century.
Travel accounts
As Poirier says ‘We in fact owe the first form and notion of anthropology to travellers, philosophers and naturalists’ (1991: 6). In the same vein, Iranian scholars argue that Persian ethnographic5writing began in the early Islamic cen- turies when many writers began to write their autobiographies and personal observations (Khaliqi 1974: 5; Ruholamini 1975; Shahshahani 1986: 65). In this view, there are two kinds of anthropological traditions in Persian intellectual his- tory: first, a scholarly trend that began with Abu Reihan Biruni’s studies of India and Iran. I examine this trend in Chapter 5 in the context of Islamic anthropol- ogy. The second Persian anthropological tradition is that of travel accounts, which I shall discuss here.
28 Anthropology and Iranian cultures
The tradition of writing travel narratives and autobiographies has a long history in the Islamic world and Iran. This history can be divided into two main stages: the Middle Ages and the nineteenth century. In the Middle Ages, the first genre of Persian ethnographic writing began with travel accounts. Naser Khosrow’s Safarnameh(Travelogue) (1975), the oldest account of travel in Persian prose (Zarrinkub 1996: 129) as well as the first Persian ethnographic writing, was written in 1034,6when Iran was a part of the Empire of Islam. From the twelfth century onwards, in the Mongol and Safavid periods, there was no significant biographical or ethnographic text until the nineteenth century (Ashraf 1996),7 when Iranian modernization began and relations between Iran and European countries expanded.
In what follows I shall examine some of these accounts. In his study of Iranian travel writing from the Safavid period until the nineteenth century, Tabataba’i argues that during the period studied Iranians showed no interest in Western cul- ture and society (1999: 58). Because of this, the very few Iranians who did travel to Europe and visited Western countries, such as ambassadors or businessmen, left no accounts of their travels. Tabataba’i argues that this was due to two fac- tors: despotism and mysticism. Because the Iranian kings had absolute power and control over everything, people did not have the opportunity or motivation to know and write about other cultures; in other words, they were forbidden to acquire or display any kind of knowledge that might give them power and further opportunity for participating in society, economy and politics. Mysticism was a way of life, a way of thinking and feeling that discouraged Iranians for a long time from involving themselves with the real world, as Tabataba’i argues. Mysticism does not invite people to travel in the outside world; rather it encourages people to seek an inner spiritual world.
However, as Tabataba’i and Ashraf note, there are a few travel accounts from the sixteenth century. For example,Khatayi Nameh(1993) written in 1516 by Sayyid Ali Akbar Khatayi, an unknown author, and Safineh Soleimaniby Mohammad Rabi (1978), Iranian ambassador in Siam in the years 1683–7. Although these accounts contain much historical information about the political system of Iran in the Safavid era and Far Eastern countries, their ethnographic value is insignificant.
Iranian travel writing began in earnest in the nineteenth century, when relations between Iran and the West expanded.
In the nineteenth century, different genres of autobiographical and travel writing emerged and became highly popular in Iran. Persian autobiographical accounts fall into four main categories: first, accounts about European countries, some of which I review below. Second, different types of regional accounts of Iran (e.g. Naser al-Din Shah’s Safarnameh Iraq-e Ajam(Qajar 1983); and Safarnameh Khorasan(Qajar 1975). Third, accounts of the Hajj, which became popular in the second half of the century. In an unpublished paper, Jafariyan (2000) lists 29 Persian travel accounts of the Hajj written in the nineteenth century. Fourth, diaries and biographies such as Naser al-Din Shah’s Diaries (Qajar 1999).
To limit my study I focus here on Persian accounts of European countries, which are the earliest and are politically significant and ethnographically richer Anthropology and Iranian cultures 29
than the others. Examination of the Persian autobiographical literature of the nineteenth century requires a separate study.
Accounts of travel to European countries
At the beginning of the nineteenth century a number of Iranians travelled to European countries, and several wrote descriptive accounts of their experiences.
As Denis Wright (1985) and Tabataba’i (1999) state, the earliest Iranian travel writing about Europe is Tohfat al-Alam (Covenant of the World), written in 1798–1801 by Abdul-Latif Musavi Shushtari (1984). The son of Nematallah Jazayeri, one of the grand clerics of the Safavid period, Abdul-Latif was born and brought up in Shushtar, and went to Hyderabad in India, where he stayed for many years.
As Tabataba’i (1999) argues, Tohfat al-Alamis the first text to give Iranians a vision of Western history and society. Having lived for a long time in India, Shushtari became familiar with British people and culture and, based on his conversations and familiarity with the British, provided an encyclopaedic account of the social and political history of modern Europe as it was then. It contains detailed information about the French Revolution, the discovery of America, the European Renaissance and the rise of Napoleon, and customs and everyday life in European countries, in particular France and Britain.
Shushtari admires European advancement and tries to explore and explain the causes of European development. He identifies three factors that made modern Europe: independence of Church and State (1984: 251), the rule of law (ibid.: 275) and modern technological innovations (ibid.: 156). The rule of law and the limitation of the King’s powers in England was a novel idea in the Iranian political realm. He writes: ‘After the passing of power from the king . . . the founders of the state divided this power into three, between the king, the nobles, and the commons in such way that whenever the necessity of attending to a major political matter occurs, no decision is taken regarding it until the three parties are in agreement’ (Wright 1985: 47).
Although he saw many differences and conflicts between Islam and Western culture, he admires the British political system, for in Britain law rules every- where. He describes the ‘edalatkhaneh’ (house of justice) and how both King and people respect the law.
However, Abdul Latif never visited any European country and all his informa- tion was collected from English sources and his Indian and British friends.
Because of this, his description is not first-hand ethnography, though he was a pioneering figure in introducing Iranians to European society and culture.
Mirza Abu Taleb Khan Esfahani’s Masir Talebi fi Belad Afranji(1994; written in 1804) is another early Persian travel account of the West. Abu Taleb was an Iranian who lived in India and travelled to Europe in 1798 in order to ‘rid him- self of sorrow and see the wonders of the West’. Unlike Abdul Latif, Abu Taleb did visit Europe, and was the first Iranian traveller to describe his experiences of western society. On returning to India he began to write about his observations 30 Anthropology and Iranian cultures
over four and a half years in Great Britain, France, Southern Europe and the Ottoman Empire. At the beginning of his book he maintains that his purpose in writing it is to enlighten the inhabitants of ‘mamaleke eslami’ (Muslim societies) who were in sheer ignorance (1994: 5), though he would refrain from describing issues that are not compatible with Islam (ibid.: 4). Nevertheless, he provides a very rich description of social, political and cultural life in Europe, and particularly in Great Britain, and as Wright argues he did take into account every aspect of European life and culture, because ‘many of the customs, inventions, scenes, and ordinances of Europe, the good effects of which are apparent in those countries, might with great advantage be imitated by Mohammedans’ (quoted by Wright 1985: 48). Like Abdul Latif, he focuses on political and social issues that were unknown to Iranians: political freedom, the Industrial Revolution in England and the values of the British judicial system. He discourses on the values of a Western education. Mirza Abu Taleb’s writings ‘revealed the life of the countries he vis- ited and brought for the first time a vivid picture of the West to the attention of the Persian reading public’ (Farman-Farmayan 1968: 135).
Hajj Mirza Abol Hasan Khan, Fath Ali Shah’s first ambassador, wrote another early account of travel to Europe, Hayratnameh Sofara(Amazing Record of the Ambassadors). He travelled to London in 1809 and stayed there about four years.
Like Mirza Abu Taleb, Abol Hasan Khan’s attention was attracted to many aspects of the everyday life of British people that were quite unknown in Iran. He drew attention to the limited powers of the English king, which struck all Iranians who visited Britain in the nineteenth century. For example, Mirza Abu Taleb Khan wrote that ‘even in the event of war the king may not act alone but must consult his Councillors and subjects’ (in Wright 1985: 67).
One of the most significant Persian travel accounts of Western society was that of Mirza Saleh Shirazi (1983, written in 1819). In 1815, Abbas Mirza, governor of Azarbayjan, sent five Iranians to London to study modern sciences (Shahidi 1983: 23). One of them was Mirza Saleh, the first Iranian student to study a modern European humanities discipline and ‘earliest author of a Middle East student’s autobiography’ (Menashri 1992: 66). The account begins with a very short chapter about the purpose, story and departure time and place of travel.
Chapter 2 describes his journey to Britain through Russia (pp. 56–162). Chapter 3, the main body of the book, describes Shirazi’s four years living in England and his study of the history of Britain. The last chapter recounts his return journey to Iran and his observations of Turkey.
To explore and understand the depth of the politics and culture of Russia, Britain and Turkey, Shirazi adopts a historical approach and mixes his ethnographic and personal observations with historical data. Because of this, the account is an Iranian reading of the history of the modern world, in particular England. The political aspect of the account is explicit on every page. Shirazi’s main purpose is to explain to Iranian readers what made Russia and Britain successful in achieving and constructing a just, free and developed society. Like Abdul Latif, he sees the rule of law, parliament, freedom and justice as the key fea- tures of the British political system. He describes Britain as ‘the land of freedom’
Anthropology and Iranian cultures 31
(velayate azadi) where everyone is safeguarded and protected under the rule of law, and where all citizens – king and ordinary people – are equal (1983: 205). He gives a detailed description of the customs and everyday life of Londoners, and shows how social order is structured and internalized within the society and peo- ple’s minds. For example, he describes modern social institutions located in London, such as the Parliament (mashveratkhaneh) (p. 249), the municipality and Mayor of London (p. 281), prisons (p. 282), churches (p. 284), hospitals (p. 288), schools (p. 290), mental hospital (p. 291), newspapers and press (pp. 292, 295), museums (p. 304) and pubs (p. 307). In chapter 4 (pp. 374–436), he portrays the Ottoman Empire as a despotic and underdeveloped country, and explains the issues that are relevant to Iranian society and political life such as political corruption at court, poverty, lack of social order, despotism and illiteracy of the people.
Another significant Safarnamehof the time studied was Mirza Mustafa Afshar’s Safarnameh-ye Khosrow Mirza be Petersburg. Afshar was a member of Abbas Mirza’s court in Azarbayjan and served as personal official secretary on Prince Khosrow Mirza’s mission to Russia in 1829. In his account of nearly ten months in Russia, Afshar openly compared and contrasted Russia with Iran. His main purpose was to discover how Iran would cope with the modern age (asre jadid) and how to create a progressive programme in Iran (Afshar 1970: 235). His purpose was to reform Iranian education by adapting the Western system. He describes the precedent of Russian reform and explains its benefits and the route to reform.
The following passage contains his ideas concerning European form of education as a vehicle of modernization and ‘progress’.
The establishment of such European-style schools in the Kingdom of Iran would be extremely simple and easy. A few masters of Western sciences could be brought to Iran, and one of the schools for the children of nobility of the land could be selected and they could be gathered together there and several people of high moral conduct could be selected to supervise them. The stu- dents would learn both Iranian sciences from Iranian teachers (modarrisin) as well as Western sciences from Western instructors (moallemin) . . . In this way, whether from amongst the military or the men of the pen, accomplished and capable servants will be obtained for the governments who will be informed of the world situation and the complicated ways of the world . . . From this best management, the splendor and improvement of the kingdom would increase daily.
(Ibid.: 236–7, quoted in Ringer 2001: 61) Since the beginning of the nineteenth century, hundreds of other Persian travel books have been written which cannot be described and analysed here. My aim is merely to draw attention to these texts as a form of Persian ethnographic writing, and to their political and ideological significance. The above-mentioned texts not only paved the way for modernization in Iran, but also drew attention to cultural issues such as ‘everyday life’ and ‘ordinary people’s manners of behaviour 32 Anthropology and Iranian cultures
and thought’. From then onwards, many thinkers began to write about those issues, which had not been common before.
These accounts were the first ethnographic representations of the modern world in Iran as well as the first modern Persian ethnographic writings. As many have argued, these writings had a great impact on Iranian modernization (Ringer 2001). As Ringer writes, ‘the travel literature provided a particularly rich source for the understanding of attitudes towards Iranian deficiency. . . These travelogues were predicated on the perception of a “deficiency” and consciously sought to accurately evaluate its causes and potential resolution’ (ibid.: 53–4). Travel literature played a significant role for Iranians in constructing a Western Other, on the one hand, and a new image of the self on the other hand. It is also notable that almost all Iranian travellers in the nineteenth century had no theoretical understanding of the philosophical and structural aspects of modern European societies; they mainly described what they observed and experienced (Tabataba’i 1999: 83).8
Orientalism
As stated earlier, in the latter half of the nineteenth century a modern notion of national identity began to form among Iranian intellectuals, which became known as the ancient Iranian Nationality/Identity. At that time intellectuals wrote and published books and journals with accounts of Iran’s ancient splendours.
They created an influential nostalgia for pre-Islamic Iranian history, and lamented the influence of the Arabs and Islam. In their view, Islam and the Arabs had damaged Iranian civilization and had turned Iran into a poor and weak country. To awaken the Iranian populace to their glorious past, they popularized stories of Achaemenian and Sassanian military and cultural achievements, and of the religious superstition and obscurantism that Arabs created and circulated in Iran.
In this enthusiasm for cultural nationalism, Iran was partly inspired by European nationalism and Orientalism. The source of Iranian nationalist thought was a European romantic nationalist ideology formed and based on the ideas of Johan Gottfried von Herder, the German philosopher who supported the Aryan Theory in the early nineteenth century and expounded the fundamental principles of romantic nationalism. Herder’s nationalism was based on four premises: first, each nation, by nature and history, is a distinct organic unity with its own unique culture; second, each nation must cultivate its own culture and national soul developing from its past experience and third, the national soul is expressed best in its language and, particularly, in its folk poetry and folklore.
Finally, it is possible for the continuity of a nation’s development to be interrupted (Wilson 1976: 27); this had been the case with Germany and also was true of Iran.
European romantic nationalism and the Aryan Theory inspired many European archaeologists, philologists, folklorists, historians and anthropologists to study ancient Iranian culture. Consequently, the folklore and archaeology of Iran have been studied and recorded since the nineteenth century.9These studies had Anthropology and Iranian cultures 33
a significant impact on the thinking of Iranian intellectuals in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Mostafa Vaziri, an Iranian scholar, has minutely and convincingly examined the relationship between Iranian nationalism and European studies of Iran (1993). He argues that, based on the study of antiquity and philology, European scholars classified and codified civilizations according to language categories, and accordingly they separated Iranian from Arab and Semitic civilizations. In particular, they used philology as a basis for theorizing a racist ideology and for squeezing the complex historical fabric of the Orient into a narrow national context.
Perhaps, the most significant and influential outcome of these studies was the Aryan Theory. Vaziri argues that Orientalists used many Iranian languages such as Avestan, Median, Old Persian, Middle Persian, Soghdian and Parthian as sources for the Aryan Theory, and they discovered that there had been some connection between the German, Celtic and Old Persian languages (1993: 24). In addition, Vaziri argues that, like history, literature, philology and archaeology, ‘anthropo- logical studies were methodologically used in an Aryan context to reinterpret and vitalize a sense of Iranism’ (ibid.: 25). Although anthropology as such was not known to Iranians in the nineteenth century, Iranian historians and literati used mythology and folklore to construct a new national identity.
Mythology and nationalist history
The resources of Iranian nationalist historiographers were comprised of existing archaeological ruins, literary texts, mythologies and rituals and customs. To arouse the patriotic sentiments of the people against Arabs and Islam, they needed to create influential symbols. So, ‘mythological and historical heroes such as Kayumars, Mazdak, Anushiravan, and Kaveh Ahangar were recreated and reconstructed as the symbols of justice, religion, and Iranian national heroes’
(Tavakoli-Targhi 1990: 95). Many historians of that time, such as E’temad al-Saltaneh (1993), Mohammad Hossein Forughi (1895–7) and Mirza Aqa Khan Kermani (n.d.), described the social and cultural life of Iranians in the pre-Islamic period using pre-Islamic mythology to arouse the people. Among the icons frequently invoked is Kaveh the Blacksmith (Kaveh Ahangar).10As Tavakoli-Targhi states, Kaveh’s famous banner was ‘interpreted as Iranian national flag in Forughi’s Sassanid history (1895–7); and Mirza Aqa Khan Kermani in A‘ineh Sekandariportrayed Kaveh as the vanguard of revolution’ (ibid.: 96).
In his writings, Kermani emphasized the importance of history and mythology for the advancement of Iran. As he put it, ‘A nation that does not know its history and the tools of its advancement and decline is like a child who does not know his father and ancestors’ (quoted in Adamiyat 1967: 148). We could say he was the pioneering figure of modern Iranian mythological and folklore studies. He believed that ‘we can, to some extent, by investigating fables, myths, and proverbs find out the habits and characteristics of Iranian people’ (ibid.: 150). In an article entitledEfadeh Makhsus, Kermani lists the following five major sources for Iranian 34 Anthropology and Iranian cultures