Review of Danny Postel's Reading Legitimation Crisis in Tehran: Iran and the future of liberalism

Reading Legitimation Crisis in Tehran: Iran and the future of liberalism is a short essay by Danny Postel (senior editor of openDemocracy). It focuses on the failure of liberals in the US and Europe to act in solidarity with Iranian liberals, trade unionists, human rights groups and feminists in the way they did with Central America in the 1980s, explores the way liberal ideas and philosophers have impacted Iranian political discourse, explains how and why Foucault mis-read the revolution and ends with an interview with Ramin Jahanbegloo. Always interesting to see what academics from inside Iran think, but something about Jahanbegloo's confidence about liberals and liberal activism doesn't quite sit right. He's very dismissive of Iranian socialists:

DP: Why, in your view, are Iranian intellectuals and students not generally attracted to Marxist thinkers and ideas? Why do you think they tend not to be engaged by political currents like the anti-globalisation movement or anti-imperialism?

RJ: It is not necessary to explore very far to find the reason for this lack of attraction to Marxism in Iran today. In Iran the number of "Marxists" was always a hundred times greater than the number of people who had actually read and studied Marx. This is the main reason why Iranian Marxism had so much trouble making sense of the Iranian Revolution. The Tudeh Party and the leftist groups have no explanation today of their political and ideological struggles against liberal and democratic ideas in Iran. Most of these Marxist groups supported the anti-democratic measures taken against women and against Iranian liberals... I ask you the question: what do you think is left of the Left in Iran? Nothing!

The major Iranian left-wing, socialist and Marxist parties from before the Iranian Revolution may have almost zero presence and no support inside Iran, but Iranian socialists and trade unionists are still raising their voices. Iranian trade unionists trying to establish independent unions are routinely harassed by the government. During the recent student protests the slogans are those of left-wing and liberal ideas.

I fear that Jahanbegloo's "intellectuals" are not very representative of all Iranian students or the Iranian population as a whole. How many Iranians are actually reading Arendt, Habermas, etc? Jahanbegloo says young Iranians are no longer drawn to "utopian ideas". But the demands socialists in Iran are making are concrete, urgent and realistic. There's nothing utopian in asking for women's rights, an end to political repression, extra-judicial killings, goon squads harassing union activists and students or for free speech.

Postel's book doesn't address the nature of support for the government and Islamic Republic within Iran. With 17 million votes in the last presidential election, Ahmadinejad must have some supporters. Whether they're members of the industrial, city-dwelling working-class, Basij, peasant saffron-pickers getting a pay rise, middle-class bureaucrats, revolution-era religious true-believers or clerics - Postel and Jahanbegloo never really explain it. Without that clarity - without an understanding of the cultural, political, economic and religious support for the Islamic Republic - how does Postel think Americans and Europeans can overcome the cultural and language barriers and understand how they can act in solidarity and with whom?

Contesting Taheri's review of Mirrors of the Unseen

I found Amir Taheri's rather uncharitable review of Mirrors of the Unseen. Taheri, a figure not without controversy, is the author of Nest of Spies.

At the core of Taheri's critique are two key themes: Jason Elliot's failure, in Taheri's eyes, to denounce the Islamic Republic and separate the majority of Iranians from those who have "created the poverty, despotism, corruption and cynicism he so accurately describes" and his attempts to find something esoteric and mystical in Iran:

As he moves through Iran the shocking truth dawns on him — the country he had dreamt of does not exist. Iran today is a largely westernised society with the same pizza parlours, hamburger joints, traffic jams, mobile telephones and Chinese-made shoes everywhere. True, women are draped in the hijab and many men sport designer stubble. But these are mere props for a people who seem to be too enamoured of the “decadent West” for Elliot’s taste.

Elliot, in fact, finds the opposite. The people that Elliot meets are either nostalgic for the boom-town Iran that prospered (for a minority) under the Shah or are content with the way things are. People quote Hafez, Ferdosi or Khayyam. They invite him into their houses and lives. Only one person seems to raise his ire and disappoint him - a young Iranian-American man Elliot describes as being totally disconnected from Iran and self-deluded by his "insights" into what Iran really is like.

Whilst Taheri does highlight some errors and poor copy editing, he is sloppy and misrepresents Elliot when he says

The Persian greeting is “Salaam”, not the Hebrew “Shalom” Elliot was offering to people in Iran (one wonders what their reaction was).

Elliot quite clearly states he only used shalom when greeting Jewish shopkeepers and that their reaction was warm surprise and hospitality. Elliot speaks Persian and a closer reading by Taheri would have put this all of this in context. But for Taheri, the rot goes even deeper:

[A]ll travel writers ultimately write about themselves and the way their culture sees "the other". And Elliot has done a good job of illustrating that the English need a new kind of writing in which the “other” is not typecast, and patronised, in the way Byron did.

Mirrors of the Unseen which, although focused on Iran, is also about the death of the kind of travel writing of which Byron was a popular example. Byron came from a civilisation that was self-assured, not to say arrogant, and was looking for the exotic, which he found aplenty, running into colourful characters representing the “mysterious Orient”. Elliot, by contrast, comes from a civilisation riddled by self-doubt. In Isfahan he encounters a group of European women and finds them loud and aggressive — “like navvies” — that is, they behave like men.

Taheri tries to reverse Elliot's exploration of Iran and argue that he's really exploring his own "otherness" and his own society which is less sure of itself than when earlier travel writers and explorers went to Iran. Essentially, what Elliot says he saw, heard and experienced wasn't really what he saw, heard or experienced.

The problem is not that the Iran of reality did not live up Elliot's "orientalist" imagination, but that Elliot's experience of Iran did not conform to Taheri's imagining of what Elliot should have experienced. Elliot's experience was not the one what Taheri would have liked him to have and he didn't write the book Taheri wanted him to write. For Taheri, Elliot didn't visit enough of the right monuments, meet the right people, or express the right sentiments. But Elliot wrote about what he saw, the Iran that he experienced. And that is more important than whatever Taheri wanted.

Review of Mirrors of the Unseen: Journeys in Iran by Jason Elliot

Mirrors of the Unseen: Journeys in Iran is Jason Elliot's account of several journeys through Iran. It is a timely and engaging book. Speaking Persian and having previously toured and written about Afghanistan, he is more likely than other Western journalists and writers, who dip into the country only briefly, to get beyond northern Tehran, meet a broad spectrum of people and see more of the country.

As it turns out, the majority of people he meets are fairly homogenous. They are either the lofty and wealthy who have fallen on harder times since the revolution or they are ordinary Iranians annoyed at the corruption and nepotism, hollow promises, petty restrictions and plethora of other things keeping them from realising their ambitions.

Arriving in Tehran, he speeds through and quickly discards all of the clichés of writing about Iran: the ruthless taxi drivers, foreigners being charged more at every opportunity, the paradoxes and "puzzles" of Iranian life, inner city congestion and pollution, realising that growing a beard made him stand out rather than fit in, etc.

Things I had at first thought strange - the sight of women with pink toenails, daily battles with unscrupulous taxi drivers, or the lack of religious observance among ordinary people - no longer seemed like novelties worth recording, and I was asking myself questions about things that hadn't caught my attention before; abstract things, like the notion of social liberty, what Islamic art was really all about, and why Iranians banks were so incredibly inefficient. You can report from a foreign country as a newcomer, and people will share your delight or surprise or disbelief. But familiarity blunts the impact of these first impressions. And the more time you spend in a different culture, the more your reactions and judgements begin to shirt and accomodate; and soon, like a man asked to describe his home town, you can think of nothing to say. It's home that feels strange. p. 259

His prose is lyrical and easy flowing, with the occasional tendency to drift off into day-dreams, historical re-enactment and fantasy. He mixes architecture, art criticism and geometry with wading knee deep through bat dung, history and Iranian hospitality. Describing the mountains between Shiraz and Isfahan his metaphors evoke that nexus between the earthly and spiritual that the book's title alludes to

the mountains erupt in clusters of shimmering rock like the spires and battlements of weightless metropolises. These resolve illogically as one approaches into unexpected shapes, split apart by ragged valleys or extended by new ranges like convoys of airborne sharks' fins with stretch for miles. Around them the colours regroup in bleeding spectrums of bleached celestial inks that seem borrowed from some cruelley arid planet. Then, without warning, they falter, as if responding en masse to some cosmic warning signal, and moments later sinnk and collapse downwards into plains barer than the sea. p. 357

Elliot's main interest, and his stated aim, is to discover and understand the art of Iran. He waxes lyrical and at times sounds like he's taken LSD. Reviewers on Amazon have criticised his habit of explaining the history of something he's visiting or the long pages where he explains his quest to understand the meaning behind some minor feature of a building.

Elliot's is the first travel book I've read where I've visited many of the monuments and places written about. I found myself nodding along saying "Yes... Yes, it is like that", or smiling smugly to myself when he fails to mention something I know. His descriptions of the Sheik Lotfallah mosque in Isfahan made for disconcerting reading. He writes that

[t]he surfaces of the right-angled walls are covered with complex repeating designs; these tease the eye, resolving at the very moment they are deciphered into an altered pattern. Wide bands of brilliant white calligraphy on a lapis field run everywhere, coursing like foaming torrents beside the abundant gardens of spiralling vines. Above these reciprocating melodies of light and colour stretches the dome... p. 71

I was jealous of his observation and perception, his deeper understanding. I'd been there. I had seen it with my own eyes, marvelled at the way the light breaks through the dome, run my fingers along the glazed tiles in the corridor leading to the main area, but my ignorance was only apparent on reading Elliot's descriptions.

In other places his lyricism really captures the essence and the experience of being a foreigner travelling through Iran.

A shaven-headed boy of about ten, whose scalp bore a dozen scars of varying length, took my order and shouted it to the owner, who lifted a ragged haunch of meat from a hook above his head and began to carve it swiftly into morsels with a knife of black steel. An old woman, wrapped in folds of black cloth, hobbled in from the cold, croaking a please for loose change. She leaned heavily on a walking stick painted the colour of lilac, and walked almost unseeing from the door to the other end of the room and back, then disappeared into the dark. 'Befarmaid,' said the man next to me, as I was about to eat. It was eight o'clock, and all around the shutters were beginning to fall. Within an hour the city was sleeping. p. 225

Towards the end of the book Elliot appears frustrated with being in Iran and having to deal with the small things. Taxi drivers seem to be a particular annoyance for him. He becomes wary about the people that attach themselves to him. Are they hoping to extract a fee for some particular service? Or are they genuinely interested in finding out about him and practicing their English? The real problem being, for Elliot, the awkward overlap between the two. He continues to travel, but it seems to be less of an adventure and more of a duty or penance.

I had a familiar feeling that I had learned nearly nothing meaningful about the country I had come to explore, and certainly not enough worth writing about. p. 259

The politics are there, and relayed through transcripts of conversations, they seem more realistic and insightful than it would have been otherwise. On occasion Elliot finds himself defending the Islamic Republic. But this is a journey through the land and architecture of Iran. It is the other side of Iran. A magnificent journey to take.