Richard Jeffrey Newman

The gov­ern­ment in Iran is crack­ing down in the weeks lead­ing up to the anniver­sary of the June 2009 “elec­tions.” Check out this arti­cle on Tehran Bureau: Hard­lin­ers Close in on Mousavi.

From the Every­One website:

Kiana Firouz, 27 years old, actress and les­bian activist from Teheran, Iran, has long been engaged in the bat­tle against the dis­crim­i­na­tion and per­se­cu­tion of homo­sex­u­als by the Ahmadine­jad régime. After pho­tograms of her video doc­u­men­tary on the con­di­tion of les­bians and gays fell into the hands of the Iran­ian intel­li­gence, agents began to fol­low and intim­i­date her. Con­cerned about her safety, Kiana left Teheran and sought refuge in the U.K., where she could con­tinue her work and studies.

She filed for asy­lum but her appli­ca­tion was rejected by the Home Office even though the Min­istry rec­og­nized her being per­se­cuted for her sex­ual ori­en­ta­tion and despite the fact that the Min­istry is well aware that under Islamic law homo­sex­u­al­ity is con­sid­ered a heinous crime pun­ish­able by hang­ing and that gays and les­bians are ene­mies of Allah. In Iran, pun­ish­ment for an adult con­sent­ing les­bian of healthy mind and is 100 whip­pings. If the act is repeated three times and pun­ished each time, the death sen­tence is applied the fourth time (Art. 127, 129, 130).

Hat tip: thef­bomb

If you have a mind to, please sign the peti­tion.

Zahra’s Par­adise. Here’s the first page:

Only chap­ter one is up so far, but it looks like it’s going to be a very good book. Go check it out.

Writ­ing in this past Thursday’s issue of The New York Times (Feb­ru­ary 4^th), Michael Kim­mel­man com­pares the Euro­pean tour on which the gov­ern­ment of Mah­moud Ahmadine­jad sent the Tehran Sym­phony Orches­tra to sim­i­lar tours on which the for­mer Soviet Union would send its own world-class per­form­ers, such Svi­atoslav Richter.¹ The con­certs these per­form­ers gave served both to dis­tract West­ern audi­ences from the dis­si­dents the Soviet gov­ern­ment was exil­ing to the gulags and to force those audi­ences into “the moral com­pro­mise [that] attend­ing such pro­pa­ganda events” would require. Given that the Iran­ian symphony’s tour took place “around the time the Iran­ian gov­ern­ment exe­cuted two more polit­i­cal pris­on­ers, charg­ing nine oth­ers with wag­ing war against God, a cap­i­tal offense,“² it is likely that the Islamic Repub­lic was try­ing to imple­ment a sim­i­lar strat­egy. Indeed, the title of the music the orches­tra per­formed, “Peace and Friend­ship Sym­phony,” by Majid Entezami, would seem to make that strat­egy explicit. Kim­mel­man, how­ever, does not have kind words for the music, call­ing it “a four-movement jere­miad of mar­tial bom­bast and almost unfath­omable incom­pe­tence and silli­ness, orig­i­nally per­formed, accord­ing to Tehran Times, last Feb­ru­ary in Iran to cel­e­brate the 30^th anniver­sary of the rev­o­lu­tion [and] reti­tled for this occasion.”

What struck me most about Kimmelman’s arti­cle, though, was not what he had to say about the sim­i­lar­i­ties between what Tehran was try­ing to do last month and what Moscow did dur­ing the Cold War, but rather what he had to say about the differences:

The dif­fer­ence now isn’t just that the Tehran orches­tra play­ing a pathetic Peace and Friend­ship Sym­phony is such a far cry from Emil Gilels play­ing Beethoven’s Emperor con­certo. More fun­da­men­tally, it’s that a tour by an anointed sym­phony orches­tra from the other side barely reg­is­ters in the West­ern polit­i­cal con­scious­ness. In an Inter­net age when everyone’s sup­pos­edly savvy to crude pro­pa­ganda, the pre­sump­tion seems to be that the Iran­ian tour doesn’t even rise to the thresh­old of newsworthiness.

But this pre­sump­tion is a result of what the Amer­i­can musi­col­o­gist Richard Taruskin calls a com­mon fal­lacy. The fal­lacy, he has writ­ten, con­sists in turn­ing “a blind eye on the morally or polit­i­cally dubi­ous aspects of seri­ous music,” as if “the only legit­i­mate object of praise or cen­sure in art” is whether it’s good or not.

“Art is not blame­less,” Mr. Taruskin writes. “Art can inflict harm.”

We take the blame-worthiness of art for granted when it comes to pop­u­lar cul­ture, crit­i­ciz­ing Avatar, for exam­ple, for being yet one more movie about a white guy who saves a nature-loving peo­ple of color or the writ­ers of a show like Bat­tle Star Galac­tica for how they write rape into the show’s nar­ra­tive; but it is good to be reminded that no art, not even clas­si­cal music, is with­out polit­i­cal sig­nif­i­cance, that it too can be used as pro­pa­ganda, to rein­force, or to sub­vert, the sta­tus quo.

In the con­clu­sion to his review, Kim­mel­man quotes an Iran­ian busi­ness­man liv­ing in Geneva. This man was angry because he kept “see­ing Ahmadinejad’s face in the music.” He said, how­ever, that his heart “goes out to the musi­cians. They’re vic­tims like the rest of us.“

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This is my con­stant refrain these days when it comes to cur­rent events in Iran: I wish I had time to do more than write this lit­tle bit and link to a cou­ple of blog posts and arti­cles worth read­ing, but I’ve got too much else on my plate right now. Mas­soud Alimo­ham­madi, from every­thing I have been able to gather, was a nuclear sci­en­tist who sup­ported the oppo­si­tion in Iran. The Iran­ian gov­ern­ment has con­structed a nar­ra­tive in which Alimo­ham­madi was a sup­porter of the régime and he was killed by a car bomb that was planted by the Mujahedin-e Khalq with the help of, of course, Israel and the United States. Here are links to a few places that have more infor­ma­tion, analy­sis and more links to fur­ther details:

• Gary Sick at Gary’s Choices: Assas­si­na­tion in Tehran
• Homy­lafayette: Tehran Uni­ver­sity Pro­fes­sor Mas­soud Alimo­ham­madi Assas­si­nated: Fact and Fiction
• Frontline|Tehran Bureau: Bomb Kills Iran Nuclear Physi­cist Tied to Mousavi

I have been work­ing on a long post deal­ing with the pol­i­tics of Holo­caust imagery in lit­er­a­ture and the Jew­ish com­mu­nity. It should be done soon. I’m hop­ing to write some­thing more in depth about Iran when I am done with that.

Farid Al-Din Attar is one of the most impor­tant writ­ers in the Per­sian canon. Not only is he a major poet in his own right, but his work offers cru­cial insight into Sufi thought and expe­ri­ence, while pre­fig­ur­ing other impor­tant poets like Rumi, Saadi and Hafez. As well, once trans­la­tions of clas­si­cal Per­sian lit­er­a­ture began to appear in Eng­lish in the 18^th and 19^th cen­turies, Attar’s work — along with, among oth­ers, that of the three poets I just men­tioned — played an impor­tant role both in help­ing the English-speaking world of the time under­stand Per­sian and Islamic cul­ture and in bring­ing into Eng­lish lit­er­a­ture an influ­ence felt by the likes of Matthew Arnold and Lord Byron, and that con­tem­po­rary writ­ers like Robert Bly con­tinue to find impor­tant. It is both ironic and a shame, there­fore, that only one of Attar’s major works, Man­teq al-Tayr, exists in a con­tem­po­rary trans­la­tion for a gen­eral English-language read­er­ship, The Con­fer­ence of the Birds, pub­lished in 1984 by Afkham Dar­bandi and Dick Davis. Read­able, enjoy­able and poet­i­cally pow­er­ful, The Con­fer­ence of the Birds is the kind of trans­la­tion we deserve of a lit­er­a­ture that has influ­enced ours in such sig­nif­i­cant ways. Unfor­tu­nately, what­ever its mer­its on schol­arly grounds, the same can­not be said — at least not with the same enthu­si­asm — for John Andrew Boyle’s out-of-print trans­la­tion of Ilahi-Nama, The Ilahi-Nama or Book of God, pub­lished by the Uni­ver­sity of Man­ches­ter Press in 1976.

In an essay called “Rep­re­sen­ta­tions of Attar in the West and in the East,” Christo­pher Shackle crit­i­cizes Mar­garet Smith’s 1932 trans­la­tion of Man­teq al-Tayr for being writ­ten “in a prose whose archaisms, includ­ing bib­li­cal ‘thee’s and ‘thou’s, cover Attar’s stu­diously clear style with a patina of rev­er­ence….” (187). Boyle’s Ilahi-Nama suf­fers from the same weak­ness. Here, for exam­ple, is his ren­der­ing of the pas­sage in “The Tale of Mar­juma” where the woman berates her brother-in-law for try­ing to have his way with her:

She said to him: “Art thou not ashamed before God? Dost thou thus show respect to thy brother?
Is this thy reli­gion and thy pro­bity? Dost thou thus keep trust for thy brother?
Go, repent, return to God, and eschew this wicked thought.”

That man said to the woman: “It is no use; thou must sat­isfy me at once,
Oth­er­wise I will cease to con­cern myself about thee, I will expose thee to shame, I will slight thee.
Straight­away now I shall cast thee to destruc­tion, I shall cast thee into a fear­ful plight.” (32)

As well, Boyle too often relies on a lit­er­al­ness that ends up being unin­ten­tion­ally comic and/or almost impos­si­ble to com­pre­hend. The first line of the final sec­tion of the “Exordium,” in which Attar praises and med­i­tates upon the great­ness of God — “Come, musk of the soul, open thy musk-bladder, for thou art the deputy of the Vicar of God” (27) — is an exam­ple of the for­mer. In “The Tale of Mar­juma,” to give an exam­ple of the lat­ter, when the female pro­tag­o­nist is on a ship at sea, about to be raped by the entire crew, she prays to God to save her. This is Boyle’s ren­der­ing of that scene:

When the woman learned of these wicked men’s feel­ings, she saw the whole sea as a liver from her heart’s blood.
She opened her mouth [and said]: “O Knower of Secrets, pre­serve me from the evil of these wicked men.” (38)

The phrase “the whole sea as a liver from her heart’s blood” clearly relates to the idea in Per­sian cul­ture that the liver, not the heart, is the seat of emo­tion, but what the phrase means, except in the vaguest of senses, is far from clear. By way of com­par­i­son, here is my ver­sion of those lines:

When she learned
what the men intended, she turned
and saw in the sea sur­round­ing her,
filled with her heart’s blood, a liver
wide enough to hold all she felt.
Her mouth fell open. She knelt,
prayed: “Pro­tect me, Knower of Secrets!
Save me from this wickedness.”

I make no claim that this is great poetry, or that there is no bet­ter solu­tion to the “heart’s-blood-liver” metaphor; and I am very aware that whether or not my trans­la­tion will endure is a ques­tion that only time and read­ers will answer, but the value of bring­ing Ilahi-Nama into 21^st cen­tury Amer­i­can Eng­lish poetry is not only, and not even pri­mar­ily, that it might be suc­cess­ful in these terms. Rather, the value lies in the sus­tained engage­ment trans­la­tion is — both in the writ­ing and the read­ing — with another culture.

On the one hand, the value of such engage­ment is, or ought to be, self-evident, requir­ing no fur­ther jus­ti­fi­ca­tion. On the other hand, how­ever, given the cur­rent national and inter­na­tional polit­i­cal moment, it is, or ought to be, impos­si­ble to talk about trans­lat­ing Per­sian lit­er­a­ture with­out also talk­ing about both the state of rela­tions between Iran and the United States and the polit­i­cal unrest that has focused world atten­tion on Iran since the con­tested pres­i­den­tial elec­tions there in June 2009. Each of those dynam­ics demands that the peo­ple of the United States learn as much about the Iran­ian peo­ple, their cul­ture and their his­tory, as we pos­si­bly can, espe­cially since our col­lec­tive igno­rance about Iran has been pro­found since diplo­matic rela­tions between our two coun­tries ended after the Islamic Rev­o­lu­tion in 1979 – 80. Boyle’s trans­la­tion of Ilahi-Nama is not a text to which peo­ple are likely to go for that kind of learn­ing, most imme­di­ately because it is out of print, but also because its archaic dic­tion and bib­li­cal style is more likely than not to alien­ate them.

I am nei­ther naïve nor arro­gant enough to assume that my trans­la­tion of Ilahi-Nama will by itself effect any change, large or small, in US-Iran rela­tions or that it will alter even one reader’s notions about Iran and/or Islam. I do know, how­ever, that each trans­lated book made avail­able to a read­ing pub­lic increases the like­li­hood of such change tak­ing place. At the very least because it offers a rad­i­cally dif­fer­ent view of Islam from the ver­sion prac­ticed and pro­mul­gated by the cur­rent Iran­ian gov­ern­ment and can there­fore help to com­bat the anti-Muslim stereo­types cur­rently in fash­ion, but even more sig­nif­i­cantly because it is a great work of lit­er­a­ture writ­ten by one of the world’s great­est poets, whom we in the United States deserve to know bet­ter than we do, a new lit­er­ary trans­la­tion of Ilahi-Nama should be among the books mak­ing such change possible.

Sources

ʻAṭṭār, Farīd al-Dīn. The Ilāhī-Nāma Or Book of God of Farīd Al-Dīn ʻAṭṭār. Trans. John Andrew Boyle. Per­sian Her­itage Series, Vol. 29 Man­ches­ter: Man­ches­ter Uni­ver­sity Press, 1976.

Shackle, Christo­pher. “Rep­re­sen­ta­tions of Attar in the West and in the East: Trans­la­tions of the Man­tiq Al-Tayr and the Tale of Shaykh Ṣanʻān.” Attar and the Per­sian Sufi Tra­di­tion: The Art of Spir­i­tual Flight. Eds. Leonard Lewisohn, and Christo­pher Shackle. Lon­don: I. B. Tau­ris, 2006. 165 – 93.

The only things we know for sure about the life of Farid al-Din Attar are that he was a phar­ma­cist and a native of Nisha­pur, Iran, where a mon­u­ment¹ to him that was built over his tomb at the end of the 15^th cen­tury CE still stands. The best evi­dence that we have places his birth in Nisha­pur in either 1145 or 1146; and schol­ars seem to agree that he died in Nisha­pur when he was well over sev­enty years old, at the hands of Mon­gol invaders, in April of 1221. The leg­ends which grew up around him once his fame as a poet and mys­tic began to spread in earnest in the 1400s tell us some­thing about the high esteem in which oth­ers held him and his work, but — except for the fact of how he earned his liv­ing and his claim that he there­fore did not have to write the eulo­gies and other pan­e­gyrics that court poets had to pro­duce to earn their keep — the work itself reveals next to noth­ing about the details of his life.

Attar wrote six major works of poetry and one of prose. The prose work, Tadhki­rat al-awliya (Mem­oirs of the Saints), is a col­lec­tion of biogra­phies of famous Sufis. The poetic works are Asrar-nama (Book of Mys­ter­ies), Man­tiq al-tayr (The Con­fer­ence of the Birds)², Mushibat-nama (Book of Adver­sity), Mukhtar-nama (Book of Selec­tions), Divan (Col­lected Poems), and the book por­tions of which I will be trans­lat­ing, Ilahi-nama (Book of the Divine). Rec­og­nized mas­ter­pieces though they are, none of these books earned Attar much recog­ni­tion out­side of Nisha­pur dur­ing his life­time. Only after he died, in the second half of the 13^th cen­tury, did peo­ple start to pay atten­tion in earnest to Mem­oirs of the Saints, and, as men­tioned above, it was not until the 15^th cen­tury that his fame as a mys­tic, a poet and mas­ter of nar­ra­tive really began to spread.

The more peo­ple val­ued Attar’s work, the more they told sto­ries about him. There is, for exam­ple, a prob­a­bly apoc­ryphal tale about the time that Rumi’s fam­ily came to Nisha­pur when Rumi was still a child. Attar — who was by then already an old man — imme­di­ately rec­og­nized in the young Rumi a unique curios­ity and intel­li­gence. One day, accord­ing to this nar­ra­tive, Attar saw Rumi fol­low­ing his father out of their house and said, “Look! There goes a sea chased by an ocean!” This story also has Attar giv­ing Rumi a copy of his Book of Mys­ter­ies and, when Rumi’s fam­ily left Nisha­pur, say­ing to Rumi’s father, “One day your son will set fire to all for­lorn hearts” (Moyne & New­man 28 – 29).

The desire that there should have been a meet­ing between Attar and Rumi, cer­tainly one of the great­est poets Iran has ever pro­duced, no doubt arose from Rumi’s own acknowl­edg­ment of Attar as one of his spir­i­tual and lit­er­ary mas­ters. About Attar, for exam­ple, Rumi wrote the following:

Attar was the spirit;
Sanai, its two eyes.
I am their shadow.

…

Attar has toured the seven cities of love;
I am still at the turn of the first alley. (Quoted in Moyne & New­man 29)

Rumi, in other words, looked to Attar not only, and per­haps not even pri­mar­ily, as a lit­er­ary influ­ence, but also as a spir­i­tual one. Indeed, every­thing Attar wrote is devoted exclu­sively to Sufi prac­tice and ideas. As Leonard Lewisohn and Christo­pher Shackle write in their intro­duc­tion to Attar and the Per­sian Sufi Tra­di­tion: The Art of Spir­i­tual Flight, “through­out all of [Attar’s] gen­uine col­lected works, there does not exist even one sin­gle verse with­out a mys­ti­cal colour­ing [sic]; in fact, Attar ded­i­cated his entire lit­er­ary exis­tence to Sufism” (xix). This spir­i­tual focus lies at the root of Attar’s impor­tance in both the East, where his stature and influ­ence are com­pa­ra­ble to that of John Mil­ton in the West, and the West, where the trans­la­tion and study of his work has not only influ­enced West­ern per­cep­tions of Iran and, more gen­er­ally, Islam, but has also inspired artists of all kinds. » Read the rest of this entry «

Edited to add: Bahari has writ­ten in Newsweek a har­row­ing and necessary-to-read account of his impris­on­ment. Go read it right now.

Maziar Bahari, a Newsweek jour­nal­ist, was held in prison for 118 days in Iran after the con­tested elec­tions in June. His appear­ance on The Daily Show is worth watching:

I’ve been feel­ing guilty that I haven’t posted about the recent goings on in Iran. Peo­ple were out in the streets protest­ing again, and the basij were there to try to beat them back, and it’s impor­tant – espe­cially because of the nego­ti­a­tions hap­pen­ing now about Iran’s nuclear pro­gram – that we in the United States know that the oppo­si­tion move­ment in Iran has not sim­ply retreated. I just have not had the time to gather the pic­tures I have seen, the arti­cles and wit­ness accounts that I have read, and write about them in a way that will make sense. So – and even this is late – I am repost­ing here some­thing I wrote on my other blog¹ dur­ing the protests in June.

Pro­test­ers in Fer­dowsi Square after the June 09 elec­tions in Iran

The con­nec­tion between lit­er­a­ture and pol­i­tics is always a dif­fi­cult one. Treat­ing pol­i­tics as if it were lit­er­a­ture, politi­ciz­ing lit­er­ary texts, are strate­gies that peo­ple use to advance agen­das that are fun­da­men­tally polit­i­cal, and often not pro­gres­sive in nature. Espe­cially in con­nec­tion with what is going on in Iran right now, when peo­ple are really dying and when the Iran­ian gov­ern­ment is doing every­thing it can to iso­late the entire nation of Iran so that it (the gov­ern­ment) can restore what it believes should be the (clearly repres­sive) order of things, to talk about life imi­tat­ing art, to read what is going on in Iran through the lens of Iran’s own lit­er­a­ture, has felt to me like a self-indulgent and gra­tu­itous intel­lec­tual exer­cise. Yet lit­er­a­ture, and in this case specif­i­cally poetry, also helps peo­ple give mean­ing to their lives; it can inspire, and it can con­nect us to some­thing larger than our­selves in ways that polit­i­cal feel­ings, no mat­ter how strongly felt and/or acted upon, often can­not. And so, pre­cisely because peo­ple are really dying in Iran – because I really do believe, along with William Car­los Williams, that peo­ple die every day for lack of what is found in poetry – and pre­cisely because there is so much at stake over there, and because Iran is a cul­ture that loves and reveres its poets, I have decided to write this. Per­haps con­nect­ing the unrest in Iran not only to the spe­cific his­tory of the Islamic Repub­lic and the rev­o­lu­tion out of which that repub­lic was born – which most ana­lysts, rea­son­ably, are focus­ing on – but also to the Iran­ian cul­ture that is larger and older than both the Repub­lic and Islam, will make a dif­fer­ence. What that dif­fer­ence might be, and to whom, I have no way of know­ing, but I just don’t think it is mere coin­ci­dence that the cur­rent unrest finds echoes in a story Iran has been telling itself about itself for cen­turies: the tale of Kaveh and Zah­hak from the poem com­monly referred to as Iran’s national epic, Shah­nameh (Book, or Epic, of the Kings), part of which I am in the process of trans­lat­ing. I will include my trans­la­tion at the end of this post.

Writ­ten by Abolqasem Fer­dowsi in the 10^th cen­tury, Shah­nameh tells the story of the Iran­ian nation by telling the story of its kings, from the nation’s myth­i­cal begin­nings right up to the moment of the Mus­lim con­quest in the 7^th cen­tury CE. One of the themes that runs through the poem is the ques­tion of how to respond to an unjust ruler. The tale of Zah­hak and Kaveh, which you will read below, is one of the nar­ra­tives that explores this theme. First, though, you need some back­story: Zah­hak is Shahnameh’s first evil king. Son of an Arab monarch named Mer­das, Zah­hak is seduced by Eblis (the devil in these sto­ries) into killing his father to assume the throne, and he is even­tu­ally cursed by Eblis with a ser­pent grow­ing out of each shoul­der, to which he must feed one human brain per night. In other words, he must kill two peo­ple a day in order to keep the ser­pents fed. As you might imag­ine, then, Zah­hak does not turn out to be a benev­o­lent ruler, and when he con­quers Iran – whose pre­vi­ous king, Jamshid, made him­self vul­ner­a­ble when he declared him­self a god and so lost the true god’s favor – Zahhak’s cru­elty kicks into high gear.

The statue of Fer­dowsi in Fer­dowsi Square, bedecked in green, dur­ing a rally, June 18

One night, Zah­hak has a dream that dis­turbs him. When he asks his advi­sors to inter­pret it, they say that the dream fore­tells his destruc­tion by a man named Fer­ay­doun, who will kill him and assume the throne. Zah­hak goes on a killing ram­page try­ing to hunt Fer­ay­doun down, and though he is unsuc­cess­ful, he does man­age to kill Feraydoun’s father. Finally, out of a kind of des­per­a­tion – and here is where, if you have not seen par­al­lels to what is going on in Iran until now, the par­al­lels start to get obvi­ous – Zah­hak sum­mons the prince of each province in his king­dom and asks them to sign their names to a procla­ma­tion assert­ing that he, as their leader, has only ever been con­cerned with jus­tice, right­eous­ness and spo­ken only the truth. He wants this pub­lic acknowl­edg­ment so that he can raise an army with which to defeat the neme­sis who is com­ing to chal­lenge him. The heads of the provinces, know­ing that their leader will kill them if they refuse to sign the procla­ma­tion, sign. It is at this point that Kaveh walks in, and from here I am going to let the poem speak for itself, because I think the par­al­lels to today’s sit­u­a­tion – a ruler afraid he will lose power, a rigged state­ment of approval, a (failed) attempt to appease the cit­i­zenry and oppo­si­tion marches – while not exact, need no fur­ther expla­na­tion. (This selec­tion from my trans­la­tions of parts of the Shah­nameh, I should add, has just been pub­lished in the really fine-looking jour­nal The Dirty Goat Mag­a­zine.)

» Read the rest of this entry «

Zah­hak: We’d Need To Hear His Mother’s Story, an excerpt from my trans­la­tion of parts of the Shah­nameh, the Iran­ian national epic, was pub­lished recently on Eklek­so­graphia. I hope you’ll go check it out.