Saturday, April 13, 2013

iranbacktooxford

It's been a very long day, but at least I managed to get a bit of sleep in airplanes and on airport floors. I made it back to Oxford late afternoon and have managed to unpack, shower, say some hellos, and have a nice dinner. The bus ride from Stansted back to Oxford was rainy rainy but the rain let up to allow me to walk home unmolested. And really, it's nice to be back. I think my soul is coloured in shades of green, brown, and gray, rather than the bright blue and beige that have dominated the past month. And while the sunshine and the dryness made for a very welcome holiday, I know I more properly belong in the damp and the cold. Iran is a spectacularly beautiful country, but the bus ride home reminded me that the English countryside is also very beautiful in its modest way. Mid-sized English towns, on the other hand, are generally hideously ugly, as are a good number of the people who populate them. Fortunately, Oxford is not your average mid-sized English town. Also, I really like English people, even if (or maybe partly because) their characters lack the sunny friendliness of Iranians. As early in my trip as the Tehran airport, I could recognize who were the English people sharing my travel itinerary, not so much because of any physiognomy that distinguishes them from other Europeans, but because of the expressions of anxiety and/or embarrassment that are permanently inscribed on their faces. And let's be honest, being alive is a somewhat awkward predicament to find oneself in, so the English are on to something there.

And my oh my, the women's hair and bums! Even though it's still fairly chilly in England, people look under-dressed. The ideas of Sayyid Qutb, a central figure in the Muslim Brotherhood as well as a seminal influence on al-Qaeda and a theorist of Islamist anti-Semitism (and, it should be noted, neither Iranian nor Shi'ite), were significantly shaped by a two-year spell in the United States in the late 1940's. He was repelled by the materialism, superficiality, and lewdness of American society, and was particularly disgusted by what he perceived as the licentiousness of American women. Without having a jot more sympathy for Qutbism, I have slightly more insight into how Western women might appear to someone who comes from a place where women dress far more conservatively. Although, as I think I've noted before, the requirement to wear the hejab and manto (not only do women have to cover their hair and throats, but they're also required to wear some sort of long jacket that covers their bottoms and, at least in theory, disguises their figure) hardly prevent Iranian women from looking very elegant, they are one more layer from nakedness than Western women. I wouldn't say it's titillating in any erotic sense when, behind closed doors, women in Iran remove the hejab and manto, but these restrictions do make hair more alluring. In Iran, Salome has one veil more than she has over here.

Although really, like with Ethiopia, it's really more strange how not strange it is to return. Despite a month-long immersion in the Islamic Republic, there's not really been any reverse culture shock upon my return.

But let's turn the clock back, since I last posted four days before the end of my time in Iran. The first of those days finally saw me exploring Yazd, a visit I'd deferred with a day-trip out of town and a desert detour while I waited for the rain to let up. Yazd is an ancient city--indeed, one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world--and its old centre is pretty much intact. Esfahan and Shiraz are essentially big, bustling, modern Iranian cities with some remarkable monuments scattered about, whereas the centre of Yazd has resisted modernization. Even the people are more conservative: most Yazdi women wear the black full-body covering of the chador (chador is the Farsi word for "tent") rather than the skimpy hejab. As I learned over the course of a day of running around trying to catch all the sights, Yazd is less remarkable for the sights themselves as for the city those sights are situated in. The old city is built of beige mud bricks and stone with high walls hemming in narrow alleys that lead between old estates and through bazaars. A lot of the traditional Yazdi houses still exist, and many of them have been converted into hotels and restaurants, which meant I got to enjoy the leafy open courtyards of two or three traditional homes.

Set in the middle of the desert, Yazd is also remarkable for its adaptations to its environment. The two most notable features of Yazdi engineering are the qanat and the badgir. Qanats are underground irrigation channels that direct water from wells and springs to the gardens and homes of the city. A rather poorly curated Water Museum filled in the picture on qanats somewhat. More visible are the wind towers called badgirs, which punctuate the city skyline. These clever devices catch even the slightest breeze and direct it downward into the building below, serving as an efficient air-conditioning unit for the pre-electrical age (they're also mercifully a lot less noisy than A/C).

Even though, as I said, the city as a whole is greater than the sum of its parts, some of the parts are pretty neat. Yazd is at the heart of Iranian Zoroastrianism, and retains proportionally the largest Zoroastrian population in Iran. Once the dominant religion in Iran, Zoroastrians have been pushed out of Iran since the earliest Arab invasions in the 7th century, and today most Zoroastrians live in India, where they're known as Parsis. But Iran remains an important pilgrimage destination for Zoroastrians, and a main draw for pilgrims is the Ateshkadeh of Yazd, a fire that's been burning continuously since about 470 AD, a fact that's all the more remarkable when you bear in mind that it's had to move several times over the course of the somewhat uneven tolerance of various Muslim rulers of Iran. It's nothing hugely remarkable in itself--basically a large brazier with some burning logs--but knowing its back-story makes it quite a sight. I don't know a whole lot about Zoroastrianism (and I won't bore you with what little I know) but the fire is a symbol of purification.

But by far the highlight of my time in Yazd was a visit to the local zurkhaneh. Literally "house of strength" (just as chaykhaneh is a teahouse), it's basically a gym where men build muscle and fitness through various feats of strength, but with a ritualized element that has strong mystical-spiritual overtones. In other words, it's yoga for meatheads. And like yoga, the zurkhaneh has a very ancient pedigree. The hour-long session was propelled by a guy in a box above the lowered pit where the action took place (judging from his physique, he also got down and dirty with the workouts on a regular basis), who sang hauntingly beautiful songs and hammered out rhythms on a drum, occasionally engaging the exercising men in various forms of call-and-response. The workout involved various push-up like exercises and stretches, as well as a lot of spinning in dizzyingly fast circles (the drumbeat would accelerate to push the men to spin faster) and feats of strength involving massive wooden clubs. One guy juggled these clubs, each of which must have weighed twenty or thirty pounds, throwing them well above his head.

The men of the zurkhaneh ranged in age from early twenties to late middle age, and in physique from flabby-average to Beefcake McHunk. It was interesting to observe the nature of this community. It wouldn't be heretical to describe the devotion to the zurkhaneh as religious: people didn't simply gather here for a workout, they gathered to humbly give themselves to something far larger than them. But unlike religious ritual or yoga, this was a deeply masculine endeavour, possibly the most unequivocally masculine activity I've ever observed. The sort of thing that must populate the sweatiest dreams of Robert Bly and Harvey Mansfield. This was a community where men gathered to enact and exercise their manliness, and found support and edification in the company of other men. And it was all in deadly earnest. For the most part--and I speak from my experience travelling in various countries as much as from my experience in the West--men being men together is generally a jocular affair, as if it's impossible to be a man without making fun of something. But the zurkhaneh is a fully serious devotion (and I think "devotion" is exactly the right word) to manliness as a higher, spiritual ideal.

So that was Yazd. I was joined for part of the day by a Danish guy I met in my traditional-house-cum-hotel's shady courtyard:

"Where are you from?"
"Canada. But I live in England."
"Really? Me too."
"Oh yeah? What city?"
"Oxford."

Turns out Pelle's doing a Master's degree in Middle Eastern literature (focusing on Iraqi Jewish writers, so Iran's a holiday rather than research), and I'll probably see him again before long.

The following day was mostly gobbled up by a ten-hour bus ride from Yazd back to Tehran. Speaking of gobbling, long-haul bus rides normally provide some sort of food, but it's usually nasty enough that I've learned to bring my own provisions. I'm particularly glad I did so this time, as the nasty meal was hamburger, which I had to decline. Instead, I got to indulge one of my prime passions for Iranian food. Befitting a country of refined and delicate culture, Iran is a major producer and exporter of a number of luxury foods with delicate, subtle flavours. I think I've already praised the uses Iranians make of aubergine/eggplant (or "egg planet," as a menu in a Kerman restaurant put it), but Iran is also the world's largest producer of caviar (that's right, more than Russia), saffron, honey, and oh my sweet Lord, pistachios. Toward the end of my time in Iran, I became a huge pistachio fiend. When pistachios sit down to write their history, they will commemorate with particular horror the Great Pistachio Holocaust of 2013, which took place on a bus going from Yazd to Tehran. Pistachios, which are not cheap even in Iran, come in two varieties here: au naturel, and lightly salted and flavoured with lemon. I'm not sure which I prefer, but I brought a huge bag of the lemon-flavoured kind home with me, figuring it would be harder to find in Oxford.

Tehran seemed to know I'd be leaving Iran soon and made an extra effort to ensure that I didn't leave without getting a strong impression of Iranian hospitality. From my bus, I went to the metro where my attempt to buy a ticket failed because the ticket guy was so pleased to see me that he came out from behind his glass booth, escorted me to the ticket barrier, and buzzed me through, wishing me a happy stay in Iran. On both of the trains I had to take to my hotel, strangers started up conversations with me, asking me how I liked Iran and how I liked Canada and how they hoped I would have a very happy stay in Iran. Luckily, I have no trouble at all telling all these friendly people that I've had a wonderful time in their country and that I love Iran and its people.

My second-to-last day in Iran included a trip out to the south of the city to visit two sites of central importance to the Islamic Republic. The first was the Behesht-e Zahra, Iran's largest cemetery. There are actually quite a number of Iranian notables buried there, but most interesting to me is that it's the final resting place of about 200,000 casualties of the Iran-Iraq War. Each one has a glass box above the gravestone, containing a picture of the (usually) young man (some of these guys are just kids) along with a few mementos. The scale is hard to describe, although the figure above should give some spur to your imagination. It was deeply moving to pass among these monuments, spending a few minutes each with a dozen or so victims of the war. Even on the train out to Behesht-e Zahra, vendors were hawking flowers, and there were many more flower sellers outside the metro station. A quarter-century after the end of the war, these grave sites still get very regular traffic, and I couldn't help but feel like an ignorant interloper as I passed black-clad women weeping in front of photos of teenage boys or, in one case, a man maybe a decade older than me (and so presumably a veteran of the war) sitting mutely in front of one of the graves with a stupefied look on his face.

And right next to the Behesht-e Zahra--and indeed, an extension of it--is the Holy Shrine of Imam Khomeini. This is where the man himself is buried, and was the site of the largest funeral in human history. I'm not quite sure why, but twenty-four years after that funeral, the mausoleum looks like a construction site, with scaffolding and dug-up concrete everywhere. It's also very, very big. The site itself is not unlike other Shi'a mausolea that I've visited, including the green-lit coffin behind glass covered with heavy diagonal metal bars that mourners can grip as they circulate around it.

And the people here are as friendly as everywhere else in Iran. The soldier patting me down at security seemed more interested in where I was from than in whether I had any deadly weapons on me (don't worry, I didn't), and the guy at the bag check was greatly amused at my presence. Inside, I was approached by Mohsen, whose real name I might as well used because, of all the Iranians I've written about in this blog, he is easily the most unimpeachable character from the regime's perspective. Dressed as a religious student, he was soft-spoken and polite, and wanted to know why I'd chosen to come here. I explained (truthfully) that I want to understand Iran and that Khomeini has had a profound influence on the shape of modern Iran. We got to chatting and I learned that he'd studied aerospace engineering for four years but was now studying religion in Qom--the centre of religious scholarship in Iran, and indeed the city where Khomeini studied and taught--because he wanted to deepen his religious understanding. He spoke haltingly, and his cheek quivered with religious awe as he spoke about the great men one can meet in Qom: a central feature of Shi'a practice is to look to an esteemed authority, or marja, as a model for one's own religious development. He was very keen to invite me to his home that evening but unfortunately I already had plans, so instead we just exchanged e-mail addresses. He expressed the hope that we would meet again, and also took it as a good sign that our first meeting had occurred at such a "high quality place."

That evening I met up with a woman we'll call Mina, who's a friend of a friend in England, and who currently lives in England but has been home in Iran for a month for No Ruz and its aftermath. Mina's an artist, and it's a shame that our schedules failed to coincide until my second-to-last day in Iran as she could have provided a really interesting opening on to the art scene in Tehran. As it stands, I got only a glimpse, but it was great fun meeting her, and I imagine we'll see each other again before long. Unlike so many of the aspiring emigrants I've met in Iran, Mina loves Iran and Tehran and feels so much happier here than she does in England (Shirin, who I met three weeks earlier and saw again the following day, also said her ideal life would involve spending significant time in Iran: those who are able to get out seem able to be happier being in Iran than those who don't have the choice not to be there). Mina finds she's more creative when she's in Tehran and generally finds the Tehran art scene more vibrant and inspiring than what's going on in London. I only got a brief insight into what she meant later in the evening (Iranians seem to stay up late: the parents I've been with don't even put their children down until close to midnight) when we dropped by the home/studio of her friend, call him Morteza. Morteza and Mina are friends from art school in Tehran, and while Morteza had a decent career going as a painter, he got drawn in to animation a couple years ago and now works on animated short films obsessively. We interrupted him and his two colleagues for a couple of hours before they returned to their all-nighter, getting their latest ready for submission to Venice and Cannes. What I saw of his work was truly breathtaking: gunning for Venice and Cannes strikes me as not at all hubristic.

I also ended what I think must be the longest spell I've gone without alcohol since I was nineteen. I had a couple offers of alcohol earlier in my visit, but that was during Lent, when I'd sworn off drink. But Morteza offered me some aragh, a vodka-like spirit that he gets on the black market much the way one might get illegal drugs here. The stuff came in an unlabelled two-litre plastic container, which made it look dodgy indeed. It didn't taste great, but vodka never does, and it didn't taste bad. I imagine it could be a great hit in the West: just a label marked "Iranian liquor" would have to earn some decent sales figures.

I hadn't had a drink since 12 February, so I was a cheap drunk, but I was also pleased to find I didn't feel the least bit hung over the next day, even though I'd also not had a lot of sleep. I met Shirin fairly early, who kindly drove me out to the north of the city for a bit of a stroll even though she had various family commitments the rest of the day. We went up to Bam-e Tehran, in the foothills of the Alborz Mountains, which gave a panoramic overview of the city, which sprawled all the way to the horizon.

Because of family commitments, Shirin wasn't able to join me for my last outing in Iran, although she was a great help in making it possible. When I was in Tehran three weeks earlier, I noticed that the Iranshahr Theatre in the lovely Artists' Park was putting on a production of The Cherry Orchard after No Ruz. I love theatre in general, and I get a kick out of seeing how it's done in various places I visit. And so I added Tehran to a list of cities where I've gone to the theatre even though I don't speak the local language, a list that includes Calcutta, Bangkok, Prague, Kyoto, and an ancient Greek amphitheatre in Northern Cyprus. Shirin worked out dates, times, and ticket availability for me, and my only regret (besides the fact that she couldn't then join me) is that the production clashed with the football match I was also hoping to see. Often Friday football matches in the 100,000-seat Azadi Stadium take place in the afternoon, but this Friday's was in the evening, and much as Iranian football madness appeals, Chekhov in Farsi appealed even more.

The most interesting discovery was that Iran is in many ways more suited to Chekhov than Britain or North America. I've generally been disappointed by both productions and translations of Chekhov that I've seen in the English-speaking world because they don't seem able to capture his Russianness. The English tend to turn his plays into late Victorian costume dramas where the characters just happen to have funny names, and the Americans, well, I'm not quite sure what the Americans think they're doing. A few years ago I saw a production of The Cherry Orchard at the Old Vic in London as part of The Bridge Project, a collaboration between Kevin Spacey and Sam Mendes that brings together actors from both sides of the Atlantic. I was fortunate to attend a pre-show talk, and, not having seen the show yet, asked Rebecca Hall (who was playing Anya) what work they'd done to come to grips with the Russianness of the play. She dismissed the question, saying that she thought Chekhov's work was universal, and that they were interested in bringing out the universal themes of the play rather than anything specifically Russian. I agreed, but noted that Tennessee Williams's work is also universal, and that a Russian theatre troupe doing a production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof without having any understanding of the American South would have a hard time of it. She didn't know what to say to that.

So setting that self-aggrandizing aside aside, I was interested to find that Russianness comes much more naturally to Iranians, to the point that they didn't really need to simulate Russianness at all, but could just be Iranians. In particular, and distinct from Anglophone cultures, Russians and Iranians are both very demonstrative, almost sometimes histrionic, while also being very formal. For Anglophones, being formal and being emotionally demonstrative are often perceived as opposites, but the characters of The Cherry Orchard are both at the same time. Seeing that combination realized on the Tehran stage also helped me see something about Chekhov that I hadn't fully appreciated before.

The production wasn't flawless. In particular, it generally lacked the bustle and urgency that's simmering behind the seeming banality on the surface. In all but the second act of The Cherry Orchard, people are buzzing about busily just offstage, but I never felt that buzz in this production. Also--and I don't know enough about Iranian theatre to understand the reasoning behind this decision--the play was cut ferociously: the character of Sharlotta Ivanovna was cut out of the play altogether, and we got through four acts of Chekhov in about one hundred minutes. On the other hand, the design was simple and elegant with ingenious use made of an upstage cupboard, and it's always a great pleasure to watch actors who know exactly what their bodies are doing. There was such fine physical control in these performances that every twitch of a finger communicated something clearly.

Also amusing was the fact that the stage was flanked by large portraits of Khomeini and Khamenei on either side of the proscenium arch. I expect that's the only time in my life when Khomeini and Lopakhin will simultaneously occupy my field of vision.

And after the show, I had a bite to eat and then headed out to the airport for my 4:30am flight, figuring I could try to get a bit of sleep at the airport. I managed to survive a whole month on Iranian roads, although my cab driver out to the airport did his best to kill me. Considering how he was driving, I'm still not quite sure how he failed.

And so here we are at the end. I've had a wonderful time, learned a lot, and met a lot of really lovely people, many of whom I hope and expect to remain in contact with for years to come. I've also found myself thinking through a number of comparisons during my time in Iran, of which I'll share three.

Iran is like Ethiopia. Both are stunningly beautiful countries, set high on mountain plateaus, with deserts and forests to please the eye (although, with apologies to Iran, Ethiopia definitely wins on the stunning natural beauty front). Both support my theory that people who live at higher altitudes tend to be very good-looking (granted that the Andes and Papua New Guinea are exceptions, but besides Iran and Ethiopia, think of the Caucasus, Afghanistan, or the Himalayas). And both sit at the edges of the world that was known to pre-modern Europe, and have a history that occasionally intersects European history and occasionally runs its own course, making their ancient sites particularly intriguing to visit.

Iran is like China. Both are ancient and proud civilizations with strong traditions of education and poetry that have repeatedly been conquered by outside invaders (both have had Mongol visitors) only to absorb those invaders, who learn to adopt the superior and refined culture of the conquered people. And if the ayatollahs have any sense, they might also learn from the Chinese how an autocratic government can strengthen its own position by opening the country in ways that make life easier for its people.

Iran is like the United States. Both are car cultures in which people treat cheap oil as their birthright. Both seem also to be deeply divided societies, where an educated, liberal middle class finds itself at odds with a less educated and more religiously devout class that's drawn to populist politics. (On the topic of religion, an interesting study reveals that about 45% of Americans claim to attend some sort of religious service once a week or more, a figure that compares with many Arab countries, whereas the figure for Iran is 27%. My guess is that this lower figure for Iranians comes because of, rather than in spite of, the Islamic government: in Iran, religion is closely allied to the state, and if you're not a fan of the state, you're likely to feel less enthusiasm for the state-mandated religion as well.) The people of both countries also have well-earned reputations for friendliness and warmth.

But above all, Iran is like Iran and like nowhere else on Earth, and that's precisely the reason I wanted to visit. Comparisons can be interesting, but they also risk diminishing the uniqueness of a place. And I barely scratched the surface of this place. A month was nothing like enough: I didn't see the north, I didn't see the Kurdish and Lorish regions in the west, I didn't visit the Persian Gulf or the Caspian Sea, nor did I visit Mashhad and Khorasan in the northeast. I guess I'll just have to come back sometime.

I'll try to put up photos on facebook tomorrow, and set up a Picasa gallery for those who aren't of the facebook persuasion, and I'll post a link on this site once it's done. But now I really really must sleep.

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