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Research in Iran

As a student of Persian and Islamic history at the University of Oxford, I was struck by the stark periodization that separates the historiography of Qajar and Pahlavi Iran. In particular, I was drawn to the decade and a half between the Russian suppression of the second Majles and the establishment of Pahlavi autocracy. Most accounts gloss over the interim as years lost to chaos and political disarray, after which Iranians, or at least their elite, gratefully abandon the constitutional struggle for the strong hand of Reza Khan. It seemed an abrupt shift. As I approached my fourth year, and the time to choose a dissertation topic, I decided to investigate this period more closely. I felt the existing literature was over-reliant on (mostly British) diplomatic sources, and being keen to put my language skills to good use, I began looking for Iranian documents to shed new light on these years. Fortunately for the historian in me, the Constitutional Revolution’s vibrant political press survived into the 1920s. Though they underwent periods of suppression, newspapers continued to play an important role in reflecting and shaping public opinion. I hoped that that they would offer an original perspective on the politics of the day; one not coloured by the specific interests and biases of foreign observers.

My search began in Oxford’s Middle East Centre. I had a tip-off that it held, buried somewhere deep behind the issue desk, the Majles Library’s DVD collection of digitized Iranian newspapers. Once located it gave me an interesting first look at some 1920s Iranian newspapers, but little more than that. As well as frequent gaps in its sequences it was missing a large number of titles completely, including all of those that I had earmarked as potentially interesting. To find a more complete collection I would have to travel to Iran. After several months of wrangling and a trip to Istanbul to collect my visa, I finally got there in December of last year.

I had spent my year abroad studying in Iran, but was apprehensive about returning without the other foreign students I had been there with, my apartment on Meydan-e Felestin or the strictly timetabled classes of the International Centre for Persian Studies. Eighteen months had passed and Iran had a new president, but life in Tehran seemed much the same. A favourite old haunt, Café Prague, had closed, and Persepolis still languished mid-table in the Persian Gulf Cup, but foreign currency went much further and the mosquitos were less ferocious in mid-winter than the summer (though puzzling still present, I maintain that there is some solid PhD research to be carried out on the microclimate of the BIPS hostel!). Taking the good with the bad, I settled in quickly. My first research foray, to the archives of the Majles Library, ended abruptly with the purposeful closure of a security barrier in front of me. Intimidated by the air of brusque officialdom I decided to argue my case later, and retreated to the Library’s more visitor-friendly shop around the corner. Fortunately, it was not a wasted trip. The Majles Library has published a vast array of documents in print and on CD, which I spent almost an hour browsing (using a dictionary to decipher some of the titles, to the shopkeeper’s bemusement). Digital transcriptions of Majles proceedings and collections of historical Kurdish-language newspapers particularly caught my eye but, haunted by the thought of my return flight’s luggage allowance, I settled for the DVDs I had seen back in Oxford.

My second and more productive research destination was the Institute for Contemporary Iranian Historical Studies. Situated in leafy grounds in Elahieh, it was just a short walk from Bagh-e Qolhak. My first visit, on Christmas day, was fairly brief. I was shown the library, and spoke to

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the director, who seemed happy to have a foreign visitor and asked me to return with a letter of introduction from my university. This done, I was introduced to one of the Institute’s historians, who offered me detailed recommendations of primary and secondary sources. This advice was extremely helpful. With the period’s press almost totally ignored by Western scholarship, I would have been embarking on my research blindly without it. Armed with this knowledge I began my reading, first of the Institute’s books and journals (including the invaluable Mosaddeq-era ‘History of Iran’s Press and Publications’), then its broad collection of newspapers. The 1920s language and orthography of the latter took some getting used to, but that achieved the publications were fascinating, and began to offer very different perspectives on Reza Khan’s rise from the diplomatic correspondence and the literature based on it. I had access to an almost unlimited amount of material, but with just a few short weeks in Iran and a 15,000-word limit for my dissertation, I had to narrow my focus. It would have been impossible to provide a comprehensive survey of the period’s press, so instead I focused on what was possibly the period’s greatest political struggle, and certainly Reza Khan’s greatest setback, the 1924 movement to establish a republic. Its defeat has conventionally been attributed to the conservative opposition of the ulama, but some more recent research, particularly the contributions of Stephanie Cronin and Vanessa Martin, have argued convincingly that opposition to republicanism was political rather than religious, and rooted in the Tehran street rather than the Shi’ite institutions of Qom or Iraq. They have tended to concentrate on the role of the Tehran ulama, and particularly the preeminent parliamentarian Sayyed Hassan Modarres, but I wanted to examine the views of secular constitutionalists. Their participation has been widely overlooked, perhaps because as the men who shaped Iran’s Fundamental Law, and who had no reason to fear republicanism’s secularist associations, they do not mesh well with the dominant conception of opposition to Reza Khan as simple reaction.

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The first of two titles I based my argument on was Mirzadeh Eshqi’s Qarn-e Bistom. Despite Eshqi’s renown as an innovative nationalist poet, and the obvious significance of the 30,000 mourners at his funeral (from a Tehran population of around 150,000) chanting anti-government slogans and causing days of unrest, nowhere in the Western literature did I see textual references to his newspaper. Its final issue, published after a state-enforced hiatus of several months, came out after the defeat of the republican movement, and is dedicated entirely to lambasting it. But the criticisms it makes, through prose articles, humorous poems and caricatures, are not conservative ripostes to the concept of republicanism. In fact, Eshqi does not engage with republican ideology at all, and takes pains to refer to ‘our republicanism’, ‘false republicanism’ or ‘republicanism in Iran’. His primary objection is his perception that the republican movement, and Reza Khan, are merely tools for Britain’s continued imperial domination of Iran. This idea is encapsulated by the striking drawing on the newspaper’s cover. It depicts John Bull guzzling down the syrup that represents Iran’s wealth, while riding ‘the donkey of republicanism’ to hide his footprints. Elsewhere in the issue Reza Khan is denounced for his violent, dictatorial methods, and his allies for their mercenary, self-serving support. Nowhere is any enthusiasm for the Qajars or religious sentiment in evidence, and Eshqi in fact appeals to the symbols of pre-Islamic Iran in a manner associated with aggressively secularist nationalism and, ultimately, the Pahlavis themselves

The second title I examined was Shaykh Ahmad Bahar’s Mashad newspaper, Bahār. Though a less well-known figure than Eshqi, Bahar is also an interesting character. Another newspaper man and poet, Bahar was exiled for his opposition to the 1919 Anglo-Iranian agreement, and returned to Mashhad just in time to becoming a leading press supporter of Colonel Mohammad Taqi Khan Pesyan’s radical gendarme regime there. He was briefly imprisoned when Pesyan’s challenge to the authority of the central government (and Reza Khan) failed. As a cousin and admirer of the more famous Mohammad Taqi Bahar, the poet laureate, leading light of the Constitutional Revolution and close ally of Modarres, from whom he took his name, I expected Ahmad Bahar to be an opponent of republicanism. I was mistaken. In an example of the constantly shifting and hard to fathom political configurations of the time, by 1924 Bahar had broken with his cousin and was a supporter of Reza Khan. But vitally, the arguments made for republicanism in Bahār do not describe constitutionalism as failed, or advocate dictatorship. Instead it praises the struggles of the constitutionalists, and describes republicanism as a minor modification, calling for a president elected for fixed terms. ‘In this republican system’, one article explains, ‘the president would do the tasks of the king, and otherwise it is much the same as constitutionalism.’

Of the two prominent publications I considered for my dissertation, one opposed Reza Khan for respectably progressive, constitutionalist reasons, and the other supported him out of the same principles. I would argue that the conventional historiography, which holds that by 1921 constitutionalism was fully discredited and Iran’s modernisers were crying out for one man’s strong, even dictatorial rule, is a simplification based on too narrow a range of European sources. I believe this has significance beyond the years of Reza Khan’s rise, because both veterans of the Constitutional Revolution, such as Mohammad Taqi Bahar and Modarres, and the political leaders of later years, such as future prime ministers Ahmad Qavam and Mosaddeq, were central to events. Shaykh Ahmad Bahar, for his part, went on to serve as chief of staff to the two latter men. If we overlook the period between the end of the Constitutional Revolution and the

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establishment of the Pahlavi dynasty as lost to chaos and historically irrelevant, the impression emerges of an Iran that was dominated by autocracy in the first half of the 20th century. If we give these years their due, the diversity and endurance of the political struggle comes across much more clearly. Carrying out my research was a novel and exciting experience that taught me a great deal. I hope it also unearthed some new insights, and that those I presented to at the BIPS workshop in March found it interesting. Without the financial support and use of the hostel that BIPS offered it would not have been possible, and I am extremely grateful to the Institute for the fantastic opportunity.

Nathaniel Rees University of Oxford Account of my research Trip to Tehran (August 20- August 30, 2014)

Thanks to a generous travel grant from BIPS, and the invitation of the Museum of Music in Tehran, I was able to travel to Iran in August. The purpose of my trip to Iran was to collect archives of early 78 shellac recordings, 45-rpm recordings and Persian journals and printed material related to the 19th and early 20th century Performance Arts in Iran. I also wanted to consult with the Museum of Music in Tehran to familiarize myself with the extent and contents of their collections.

I was successful in meeting with staff at the Museum of Music, where I was able to compare notes with them both regarding their archives and holdings, and my own private collections that I had been given, and in this manner, and so confirm the presence or absence of gaps in our archives.

I spent most of the 10 days in Tehran and its suburbs, where I was able to collect significant collections of audio and visual files relating to the early 20th century Performance Arts, including a significant amount of 78 shellac, and 45-rpm recordings as well as journals and printed matter relating to 20th-century performing arts. However, I took one short visit to Isfahan to collect an archive of early and mid 20th-century songs and taranas, where I was also introduced to Reza Tabataba’i, one of the main students of the great iconic vocalist of the Isfahani musical style: Taj Isfahani. I conducted a long interview with him on the origins of the Isfahani musical style and its main proponents, who (such as Taj Isfahani, Jalil Shanaz, Adib Khwansari, and Hasan Kasa’i) were his close friends and colleagues. I hope in the not too distant future to be able to make all of this material available to the public.

While I was in Tehran I was also able to begin research on the history of Lalehzar Street and district. Lalehzar was one of the most iconic streets and districts in Tehran, which in its glory days was the avenue for the introduction of all things modern and in its decline, became the centre for song and dance cabarets, film-Farsi cinemas and burlesque theaters. Concerning Lalehzar, I was able to interview a number of reputable scholars, such as Sayyid Mohammad Beheshti Shirazi, who is currently head of the archival committee of city planning for the Cultural Arts Centre, and Director of the College for the history of archecture and city planning in Tehran. I also interviewed Dr. Sayyid Ahmad Mohit-Tabataba’i, who is a specialist in the cultural affairs and head of the international committee for the National Museums, and Assistant Director of the College for the History of Architecture and City Planning. I met with Nasru’llah Haddadi, a scholar who specializes on the history of Tehran and was a

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producer of programs on the history of Tehran for the Iranian radio and television. On the subject of Lalehzar, I also interviewed Amir Shahab Rezvani, and Mehrdad Zahediyan, two filmmakers who have worked extensively on subjects relating Iranian historical subjects, and Tehran in particular.

I was also interviewed by two reporters from the Ittela‘at newspaper about my work on the Golha Project website. An article about my work appeared in print in Tehran on 11 Shahrivar 1393 - 02/09/14 (no. 35960 http://www.ettelaat.com/etiran/?p=68506) in the Arts and Literature section (Adab va honar) of Ittela‘at. At the Ittela‘at newspaper, I was the guest of Mr. Du‘a’i, the general director of the Ittela‘at Newspaper Cooperation, who generously donated the entire collection of all the Ittela‘at newspapers on CDs to the Golha Project (totaling 24 kilos!) going back to 1924.

Jane Lewisohn SOAS Report of a BIPS research visit to the Department of the Middle East, The British Museum British - 29 July 2014- 07 September 2014 The Fellowship from the British Institute of Persian Studies at the British Academy enabled me to spend six weeks at the Department of the Middle East at the British Museum to work on Assyrian reliefs related to the fall of Elam in the late seventh century BC. I had the benefit of working with British Museum colleagues on different aspects of the reliefs and other subjects, such as Nigel Tallis, Julian Reade and Irving Finkel.

The subject of this present research is based on his interest in the iconography of Assyrian reliefs and I focused particularly on the depiction of the last Elamite kings and their final battles with the Assyrians. These scenes are accompanied with informative descriptions in Assyrian cuneiform, and despite their importance, the scenes are not well known to scholars of Iranian archaeology and to the university students in Iran.

The study had to be carried out almost immediately, due to the packing up of some of the main reliefs for a forthcoming exhibition in New York. I was able to complete his research in the basement of the British Museum by examining panels of the Assyrian reliefs depicting the Battle Til Tuba with the help of a powerful torch. I undertook extensive photography by using a high resolution camera which catches the necessary faint details of the relief sculptures. This enabled me to use the photographs and notes taken from the sources in the library, for my teachings at Tehran University and forthcoming publications. I also discovered many new details; none of these findings have previously been observed and are not found in any old and recent western publications. I hope that the results of my studies will be published soon in IRAN, the Journal of the British Institute of Persian Studies, as well as in Persian publications in Tehran.

During this research visit, I was also able to examine closely a fragment from the Oxus Treasure in connection with a different research related to Achaemenid Jewelry. In addition, I worked on a translation of an unpublished fragment of a foundation clay cylinder inscribed in Babylonian cuneiform script from Susa, and prepared a transliteration and translation of the text.

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I am most grateful to the British Institute of Persian Studies and its Research Board for this generous grant. It gave me direct access to primary material in the British Museum, which houses the best collection of Assyrian reliefs in the world. I am also grateful to colleagues in the British Museum, in particular Jonathan Tubb, J D Hill, Nigel Tallis and Irving Finkel for supporting my project, providing working space and giving me an opportunity to work on this material. My thanks go also to the Museum Assistants and the Senior Administrator in the Middle East Department, Jerry Baker and Wendy Adamson, and Dean Baylis. I should also like to express my deep gratitude to Dr Vesta Sarkhosh Curtis for her valuable help and constant support through various stages of the project. My thanks also to Professor Ali Ansari, President of BIPS, the BIPS Research Committee, and Mariam Emamy, Secretary of BIPS for organizing my research visit and arranging my visa. Without all these individuals, this fellowship would not have materialized.

Shahrokh Razmjou University of Tehran EVENTS OF INTEREST FOR OUR MEMBERS Yarshater Lecture Series (January 2015) “In the Rays of Light of Imperial Favour”: the Visual Arts of Early Fifteenth Century Timurid Herat 15 January – Timurid Herat: The City as a Setting for Art and Literature 16 January – The Timurid-Ming Embassy of 1419-22: Art after China 19 January – Modelling Artistic Process: The Kitabkhana and ‘Arzadasht 20 January – Baysunghur’s Books: Codifying Form and Aesthetic Value These Lectures will be given by Dr David Roxburgh Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Professor of Islamic Art History, Harvard University These lectures are organised by the Islamic Art Circle and are held in the Khalili Lecture Theatre of SOAS at 7.00pm For further information please contact Rosalind Wade Haddon on 07714087480. SAD NEWS In July this year we lost John Cloake, a very dear friend of BIPS who served as BIPS Honorary Treasurer at a very difficult time. As we say in Iran, his place will be empty.

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GOVERNING COUNCIL

PRESIDENT

Professor Ali Ansari. MA, PhD

VICE PRESIDENT

Professor Charles Melville, MA, PhD

HONORARY VICE PRESIDENTS

Professor Edmund Bosworth, MA., PhD, FBA

Professor Robert Hillenbrand, MA,DPhil, FBA, FRSE

Professor  Paul  Luft.  MA.,  PhD    

Professor  David  Stronach,  OBE,  MA.  FSA    

HONORARY  SECRETARY  

Dr  Oliver  Bast,  Maître-­‐ès-­‐Lettres,  Dr.  phil.  

HONORARY  TREASURER    

Mr  Douglas  Kinnear,  LLB,  NP  

MEMBERS  

Dr  Ladan  Akbarnia,  MA,  PhD  

Professor  James  Allan,  M.A.  DPhil  

Dr  Roham  Alvandi,BA,MALD,  MPhil,  DPhil  

Dr  Sussan  Babaie,  PhD  

Dr  John  Curtis,  OBE,  FBA    

Ms  Narguess  Farzad,  BA    

Dr  Melanie  Gibson,  MA,  PhD  

Professor  Robert  Gleave.    BA,  MA,  PhD    

Dr  Cameron  Petrie,  BA,  PhD  (Co-­‐Opted)  

Dr  Lloyd  Ridgeon,  BA,  MA,  PhD    

Professor  Eberhard  Sauer,  M.St.DPhil.FSA    

EDITOR  

Dr  Cameron  Petrie,  BA.  PhD    

SECRETARY  

Ms  Mariam  Emamy,  BA,  MA    

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                                                                 THE BRITISH INSTITUTE OF PERSIAN STUDIES (A Registered Charity)

The  President  of  the  British  Institute  of  Persian  Studies  Cordially  invites  all  its  members  to  the  Annual  General  Meeting  of  the  Institute  

 On  Thursday  27th  November,  2014  

At  5.15pm    

The  Lecture  Theatre  

British  Academy  

10  Carlton  House  Terrace  

LONDON    SW1  

The  AGM  will  be  followed  by  a  lecture    

by  

Dr  Oliver  Bast  

University  of  Manchester  

entitled  

From  Battleground  to  Moral  High  Ground:  On  the  place  of  World  War  I  

 in  the  History  of  Modern  Iran  

The  lecture  will  be  followed  by  a  reception  

Venue:                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                      RSVP    

British  Academy                                                                                                                                                                                                                    Mariam  Emamy  

10  Carlton  House  Terrace                                                                                                                                                                                    Tel:    020  7969  5203  

LONDON    SW1Y  5AH                                                                                                                                                                                              BIPS@britac.ac.uk  

Those  wishing  to  attend  the  AGM  and/or  lecture  are  asked  to  confirm  their  attendance  by  Friday  21  November,  2014