Books
Ancient and modern
Published 28 February 2008
Empire of the Mind: a History of Iran
Michael Axworthy C Hurst & Co, 256pp, £20
In January 1989 an eminent theologian wrote a letter to Mikhail Gorbachev, then still president of the USSR, urging him to study Islam. Three of the scholar's closest companions arrived in Moscow bearing the urgent message in person: communism might be defunct, but the present danger was that the Russian leader would fall prey to another false religion - capitalism's worship of mere matter. A reading list was produced in order to bring the Soviet leader to the path of truth and, surprisingly enough, it did not include the Quran. Gorbachev should read instead Avicenna, the Persian scholar whose early-11th-century commentaries on Aristotle shaped medieval European philosophy and scholarship. The letter also suggested that the president would find enlightenment in the works of Ibn Arabi (d.1240), the greatest of all the Muslim mystics and a special enthusiasm of Gorbachev's correspondent.
The theologian in question was Ruhollah Khomeini who, as Michael Axworthy suggests in his lucid survey of Iran's history, may have felt a particular affinity with Gorbachev. Both were unconventional figures who spent most of their careers trapped within unimaginative systems. The Soviet communism of the Kremlin was as well versed in neutered pieties as Iran's Islamic Establishment under the last shah. Gorbachev received the emissaries graciously, but it is doubtful whether 1989 gave him much time to pursue the scholarly recommendations of the "supreme leader".
Khomeini himself, however, came in for criticism during this last year of his life and the clergy of Qom, a spiritual powerhouse for Iranian Shiaism, rebuked him in an open letter. Such overt enthusiasm for a mystic and philosopher, they complained, was dangerously unorthodox. Khomeini responded sharply, calling them "stupid mullahs". Had their brand of obscurantism become dominant in Iranian and Islamic history, "I have no doubt the clergy and seminaries would have trodden the same path as the Christian Church did in the Middle Ages."
Iran's history is ancient and the preoccupations of the narrative's central characters, even in modern times, elude the conventional western categories of left and right, liberal and conservative, progressive and reactionary. The bearded ayatollah is, to western eyes, the very embodiment of clerical prejudice. But Khomeini, as his letter to Gorbachev shows, was an intellectually adventurous figure who quarried the past with an eye to the present. His brand of revived Shiaism spoke not just to the Iranian street but also to a wider strand of opinion in the Arab cultures of the Middle East, because that milieu had been profoundly influenced by an Iranian civilisation whose continuities also embrace ancient, pre- Islamic Persia.
A historian of Iran therefore has to move easily across the national boundaries that have been set in later centuries, and Axworthy executes his paces with great skill and authority. The Medes and Persians, Farsi speakers who moved into what we now call Iran around 1000 BC, kick off a narrative that moves elegantly on to the Achaemenids, the dynasty that turned Persia into a world power and ancient Greece's greatest single foe. East of the Caspian, and during the 2nd century BC, there emerged the Parthians, no simple nomads, but rulers endowed with a genius for accommodating their subject peoples' cultural variety, a quality also evident in their successors as imperial rulers, the Sassanians.
A central question in Iranian history is whether the 7th-century Islamic conquest created an entirely new civilisation or one that was continuous with the past. Axworthy shows how the Persian language survived the conquest, incorporated a large number of Arabic loan-words, and re-emerged as a guarantor of cultural continuity. The Safavids, a militant brotherhood from eastern Anatolia, emerged in the 16th century to create Iran's most sophisticated form of Muslim culture. But the appeal of Shiaism to the new rulers, with its strain of mysticism and saint-worship, also showed the continuing influence of Iran's ancient Mazdaean religion, with its sharp contrasts between light and dark, good and evil.
Iranian history can seem like a continual oscillation between chaos and despotism. Elements of both typify the present regime, and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, that grotesque Holocaust denier, is given an appropriately rough treatment in the book's last chapter. Invasions and revolutions are the very stuff of Iran's political and military history and explain why that narrative seems to be dominated by a series of sharp discontinuities. Axworthy's nimble account of these matters makes him a reliable guide in the often melancholy maze of Iranian history. Yet that is only part of the story, and beside it must be set the more continuous history of Iranian art and architecture, poetry and philosophy. This is an empire of the mind that has proved more enduring than those won by force of arms and Axworthy's clear yet subtle account of its glories makes this the best available single-volume introduction to Iran's history.
The Endless City, edited by Ricky Burdett and Deyan Sudjic, Phaidon, 510pp, £35
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