Persianate ‘adab’ involves far more than elegant manners

Detail of the Rose Garden of Sa’di, from a manuscript of the Gulistan. Mughal Empire, c1645. Courtesy Wikipedia

by Mana Kia, Psyche

Edited by Sam Haselby

In Persian, the word often translated into English as ‘manners’ or ‘etiquette’ is adab. However, adab is about far more than politeness or ethics even. It means proper social and aesthetic form and, across Persianate culture, form conveyed substance and, by extension, meaning.

From the 13th to the mid-19th century, Persian was the language of learning, culture and power for hundreds of millions of diverse peoples in various empires and regional polities across Central, South and West Asia. Persian was not the language of a place called Persia – this placename is used only in European languages (otherwise, the place is known as Iran), and using it as an adjective to describe its people obscures the fact that Persian-speakers lived in many other lands. Increasingly, scholars use ‘Persianate’ as the cultural descriptor of Persian as a transregional lingua franca. For six centuries, Persianate adab – the proper aesthetic and social forms – lived in this language through its widely circulated texts, stories, poetry: the corpus of a basic education. To learn adab, these particular forms of writing, expression, gesture and deed, to identify their appropriate moments, and to embody them convincingly, was to be an accomplished Persian.

The term adab existed in other, related languages, including Arabic, Urdu and various forms of Turkish spoken in Anatolia and Central Asia (Ottoman, Chagatai and Uzbek). But what was proper as aesthetic or social form was specifically constituted within particular language traditions – for example, generosity might look different in stories in a particular language, and be called for at differing moments. The educated and less educated across Eurasia were multilingual in varying ways, and these diverse traditions permeated each other, with language traditions circulating through storytellers, preachers, reciters, mendicant-poets and prayer leaders. However, in the Islamic east, across Anatolia, but especially beyond Baghdad after the 13th century, Persian became the language of new empires, linking these other traditions and constituting the core of adab.

He Tried to Change the System, Then Became It

Karolis Strautniekas. Courtesy New York Times.

by Rebecca Makkai, New York Times

MAN OF MY TIME
by Dalia Sofer

“We were a skipped generation, a hiccup in history,” says Hamid Mozaffarian, the narrator of Dalia Sofer’s novel “Man of My Time.” He is on the phone with his brother, who left Iran for New York with their parents during the 1979 revolution, while Hamid, a once idealistic revolutionary, stayed behind. Life has not turned out well for either brother, in a world that is, as another character puts it, “inclining towards darkness.”

Sofer, who was raised in an Iranian Jewish family that left for the United States when she was 11, explored the years shortly after the revolution in her first novel, “The Septembers of Shiraz” (2007). She takes a much longer view in her follow-up, a layered portrayal of a man who through several decades has carried with him the conflicting pieces — beauty and brutality, revolt and repression — of his country’s history.

Hamid accompanies his boss, a government minister, to New York for the United Nations General Assembly, hoping to retrieve from a warehouse in Queens a stolen 16th-century drawing of a pilgrim by the Iranian artist Reza Abbasi. We soon learn the irony of Hamid’s hopeless quest for a work of art whose theft is “a matter of national indignation”: Once an aspiring artist and cartoonist himself, he has spent much of his life as a state interrogator, a “humorless arbiter of fates” silencing Iranian artists.

Poetry fills Tehran streets as Iranians adapt Nowruz rituals to Corona restrictions

Courtesy Ajam.

by Alex Shams, Ajam

This is the second article in a series about how Iranians are adjusting their lives as they enter the second month of Coronavirus quarantine. Read the first article “Quarantine Kitchen“, about cooking and sharing recipes under quarantine, here.

Nowruz is the most important holiday in Iran, a time when families gather together, neighbors visit and share food, and friends throw parties and wish each other well in the year to come.

Nowruz marks the first day of Spring, and its most popular rituals involve gathering in large groups. The last Tuesday before the New Year, crowds light big bonfires in the streets and party through the night with their neighbors, cooking up big vats of ash reshte soup to share. They jump over bonfires in an ancient ritual meant to bring health in the year to come. The New Year itself is welcomed with a feast of white fish and herbed rice. In the days that follow, extended families visit each other’s houses. 13 days after Nowruz, families take picnics to parks to welcome the spring weather.

The spread of coronavirus has made many of these traditions impossible. Campaigns to stop the outbreak urge Iranians to stay home and not visit family or hold parties. Iran’s largest cellphone company changed the name of its network on mobile phones to read: “Khane Bemanim,” “Let’s stay home.” Most families are spending the two-week holiday, when Iranians usually travel around the country, stuck at home.

O.C. artist Roxanne Varzi shares her border-crossing work that resists media clichés about Iran

“Last Scene Underground” is a 2015 ethnographic novel by Roxanne Varzi set in Tehran during Iran’s post-2009 Green Movement. Courtesy of Roxanne Varzi and L.A. Times.

by Namrata Poddar, L.A. Times

It’s a recent warm winter afternoon in Orange County as a crowd gathers in the back alley near 4th and Spurgeon streets in Santa Ana — outside of the site of Libromobile, O.C.'s smallest bookstore — to listen to the guest speaker for the community event titled “No War on Iran!”

But Roxanne Varzi — a local writer, filmmaker, multimedia artist and UC Irvine professor of cultural anthropology — begins with a disclaimer: if anyone is expecting her to play the role of a political correspondent or explain yet another rising wave of Islamophobia in the U.S., it’s a good time to leave and check out the eateries nearby.

She has come to speak to her audience, first and foremost, as a storyteller and an artist.

She begins with her personal story.

Born in Iran to an Iranian father and an American mother, Varzi is both an American and Iranian citizen by birth. Though she was baptized and raised Catholic in a community of Irish missionaries in Tehran, she explains that by Islamic law, she is Muslim because her late father was Muslim.

Iran's top cultural event jeopardized by artist boycotts

Iranians arrive at the annual Fajr International Film Festival, Tehran, Feb. 3, 2018. ATTA KENARE/AFP via Getty Images. Courtesy Al-Monitor.

by Saeid Jafari, Al-Monitor

Confronting a boycott by Iranian artists, the Fajr International Film Festival announced the cancellation of its opening ceremony, originally scheduled for Feb. 1. In a statement released Jan. 15, festival organizers cited the “public atmosphere of the community” in sympathy with the grieving families of those killed in Iran's accidental downing of Ukrainian International Airlines Flight 752 on Jan. 8.

The cancellation marks a rare occurrence, as the festival's traditional opening in February and its concluding awards ceremony are usually star-studded, high-profile affairs staged to showcase Iran's contribution to global cinema and culture. The Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance sponsors and supervises the festival, which premiered in 1982 and is held every year on the anniversary of the Iranian Revolution.

The move by festival organizers follows in the wake of demonstrations sparked by anger over the Iranian government's initial denial and then admission that two missiles fired by its armed forces had struck the civilian airliner, resulting in the deaths of 176 people, including a number of medical doctors, university professors and students.

Alongside the protests in the streets and universities, a number of artists expressed their solidarity with the public's outrage by announcing their withdrawal from the Fajr festival.

The Minimalism and Maximalism of Ali Dadgar

The Berkeley-based Iranian artist’s work explores “brokeness”

"No Redemption" by Ali Dadgar. Courtesy SF Weekly. 

by Jonathan Curiel, SF Weekly 

Dark humor is an Ali Dadgar trademark, so his new San Francisco art exhibit is full of it — but if you’re looking for a source of that humor, you have to go back four decades to Dadgar’s native country. In 1979, when Dadgar was a teenager, Iran was convulsing politically and culturally, and the revolutionary government imposed new norms through the country’s currency, when it used the old regime’s paper bills but — hastily and surreally — printed dark designs over the Shah of Iran’s face. On some bills, they simply put an “x” over the Shah’s portrait, circulating currency that seemed straight from a George Orwell novel.

“The currency still worked, and that was so exciting to me — for this visual experience that carries this tremendous amount of political power and economical power,” Dadgar tells SF Weekly, standing in his exhibit at California Institute of Integral Studies’ Desai | Matta Gallery. “I’ve always been fascinated by shifting the access of content and the platform that designed to prevail that information and value. To me, that shift is everything. It appears in different forms even in aesthetics of art — where the break in the history of art has created movements or brokenness. I’m all about brokenness.”

Yes he is. Which is why “Ali Dadgar: Additions/Redactions” features ephemera — maps, photos, newspapers, and book pages — that are broken up with whited-out passages, painted-over sections, and other painterly obfuscation. It’s not obfuscation for obfuscation’s sake but obfuscation as a portal toward subtle, sometimes funny connections. One example: Dadgar reconfigured a 2007 New York Times arts section that reduced hundreds of words from its front-page movie review to just three disparate ones: “War. On. Ambiguity.”

Condemn Trump’s threat to Iran’s cultural heritage

Academic researchers of Iranian history, archaeology, art and culture, based in national museums and universities across the world, react in horror to the US president’s threat to target Iranian sites

The US president, Donald Trump, has threatened to hit 52 Iranian sites ‘very hard’ if Iran attacks Americans or US assets in retaliation for the assassination of Qassem Suleimani. Photograph: Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Images. Courtesy The Guardian.

Letters, The Guardian

We, the undersigned, deplore the threat by the US president, made via Twitter on 4 January (and reiterated to reporters on 5 January), that his forces have “targeted 52 Iranian sites” some of which are “important to Iran & the Iranian culture”. Whatever the policy implications of these words, we respond with horror to direct threats against the people of Iran and against their tangible and intangible cultural heritage.

As some have already noted, the president’s inflammatory statement is contrary to the stated aims of the 1954 Hague convention and the protocols of the Geneva conventions of 1949 and 1977. Furthermore, the international criminal court considers the destruction of cultural heritage to be a war crime.

We stand in solidarity with the people of Iran and state our support, at this time of great anxiety, for our friends and colleagues in Iran’s museums, universities and heritage organisations. Their mission is of fundamental national and international importance – they work to create, safeguard and interpret an invaluable material legacy for present and future generations.

As academic researchers of Iranian history, archaeology, art and culture, based in national museums and universities across the world, we call on our political representatives to condemn explicitly any statement or action that threatens internationally recognised war crimes against the Iranian people, as well as their cultural heritage.

Here's what could be lost if Trump bombs Iran's cultural treasures

The US president has warned Iran he will obliterate its cultural sites. Here is our guide to the nation’s jewels, from hilltop citadels to a disco-ball mausoleum

 Inside the Sheik Loftallah mosque, in Isfahan, Iran. It is a Unesco world heritage site. Photograph: BornaMir/Getty Images/iStockphoto. Courtesy The Guardian.

by Steve Rose, The Guardian

If carried out, Donald Trump’s threat to target “cultural sites” in Iran would put him into an axis of architectural evil alongside the Taliban and Isis, both of which have wreaked similar forms of destruction this century. The Taliban dynamited Afghanistan’s sixth-century Buddhas of Bamiyan in 2001; Isis has destroyed mosques, shrines and other structures across Iraq and Syria since 2014, some in the ancient city of Palmyra. Not, you might have thought, company the US president would prefer to be associated with.

Does Trump know what would be lost? Probably not – but he’s hardly the only one. The fact that the country is rarely visited by western tourists is not due to a lack of attractions. With a civilisation dating back 5,000 years, and over 20 Unesco world heritage sites, Iran’s cultural heritage is rich and unique, especially its religious architecture, which displays a mastery of geometry, abstract design and pre-industrial engineering practically unparalleled in civilisation. This is is not just Iran’s cultural heritage, it is humanity’s.

Once Upon a Revolution in Iran

Forty years after the Iranian revolution of 1979, the people of Iran are still struggling for their rights.

Maj. Gen. Taghi Latifi of the Shah’s police was pulled from his car and beaten by a crowd near Tehran University. Photograph by David Burnett/Contact Press Images. Courtesy New York Times.

Photographs and Text by David Burnett, New York Times
Mr. Burnett, a co-founder of Contact Press Images, has worked as a photojournalist for six decades.

I spent the better part of two months, from Christmas 1978 until late February 1979, covering the Islamic revolution in Iran. There was no internet, no mobile phones, no Twitter. No one wore masks to hide their faces. The anger was immediate and raw. It led to the fall of the Pahlavi dynasty and the founding of the Islamic Republic.

I watched those demonstrations occur almost daily. Some rallies, planned ahead, would assemble a half million people. Others, more spontaneous, would converge quickly, and once started, word would hastily spread. It would take only minutes for hundreds, even thousands, of people to show up and add their voices to the protests against Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi and his reign.

Trying to keep up with these events in a world where communication was limited to the occasional working pay phone was a challenge. More than once I found out about something happening just blocks from my hotel by hearing a dispatch from the BBC World Service on my pocket-size shortwave radio.

The political unrest highlighted Iran’s serious economic and political challenges. It was surprising to see the cars of a cross section of society lined up, sometimes for hours, for fuel as people suffered through shortages in a country rich with gas and oil.