Poetry, pistachio, power

All these years Indian foreign policy has been conducted from the middle ground, from at least a loose national consensus. Till Iran. Beyond the politicking, Tehran’s uranium reprocessing programme has cracked that consensus. For critics and supporters of an IAEA board of governors’ vote to refer Iran to the UN Security Council, the issue goes beyond proliferation. It calls into question their vision of India’s place in the world. Say nay along with lone Venezuela, and you profess allegiance to non-alignment and anti-imperialism. Say aye along with the US and the EU-3 (Britain, Germany, France), and you announce fleetfootedness in the pursuit of national interest and a break from old instincts for automatic alignment.

Is this about us? Or could it be Iran itself that ruffles consensus? Glance all the way across at America, and the latter presents itself as a viable thesis. A year ago, writing in The New Republic, Franklin Foer noticed that Iran had introduced deep divisions in the neoconservative doctrine. Iran — strung so galvanisingly on the “axis of evil” by George W. Bush just the other year — had started to rob it of its most striking facet, its clarity. On what to do with Iran’s nuclear proliferation, neocon doctrine had disentangled into two strands. One maintained store by neoconservatism’s idealistic chants of human rights and democracy, of regime change being the organising principle for a safer world. The other subordinated democracy to US interests. A new set of rulers, they would argue, would not necessarily withdraw Iran from proliferation or that other great evil, anti-Americanism.

Foer saw the most visible proof of the neocons’ confusion in their one point of agreement on Iran: that it be referred to the United Nations, ironically an organisation at whose very mention they would turn blue with rage for all of 2003 and 2004. Clearly, even for Bush’s muscular empire builders reacting to Tehran’s provocative rhetoric is not that easy.

What is it about Iran? How is it that conventional modes of international engagement do not suffice? This summer, days after Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s election as president, a tour of the country obtained some clues — from the lay of its pilgrimages and the civilisational memory of its people. After a remarkably soft-spoken briefing from Hamid-Reza Asefi, the foreign ministry spokesperson, a question, even if it be taken as impolite, had to be asked. Why is it that Iran says what it does? “Civilisational pride,” Asefi smiled.

Driving around the country — through windswept deserts and pistachio oases, over the Zagros mountain range and along the shores of Lake Namak, always with the promise of a chinar around the corner — we found fragments of a reason. A reason why Iran resists familiar modes of scolding or entreating a country into falling in step with global consensus.

Aramgah-e Hafez in Shiraz is a memorial like no other. Hafez’s poetry, along with Ferdosi’s and Sa’di’s, preserved Persian culture through centuries of invasion and plunder, and it is to his tomb they all come each evening: those mourning the death of loved ones trace the engraving solemnly next to young women chicly turned out for an evening of chai and faal-e Hafez, a reading of his Diwan by the grave to glean their individual destinies. Away in a corner, not far from a specially framed photograph of Rabindranath Tagore on that homage 70 years ago when all of Shiraz turned out to welcome him, is a walled garden. Amidst cypress trees and alongside graves of long-gone poets and philosophers are the remains of Iranian pilots lost in the eight-year war with Iraq — when, as they remind you in government offices and the Persian street, Iran’s enemy was supported by most of the major powers.

In Esfahan, at the pleasure pavilions of the Safavids, historical courtesies are extended. Grand frescoes recommend reconciliation. Gazing upon Nadir Shah’s invasion of India, an artist apologises for that dark phase in Indo-Persian interaction. On a facing wall, watching Humayun, expelled from his empire, being received at the Esfahan court, he pauses, and we know our lines.

It is illustrative of Iranian memory and temperament. Distant and recent past carried almost coevally. Cultural icons and national martyrs in close and connected proximity. And grief — such an important ritual enactment in this Shia land — expressed in harmony with that ever enduring Persian pursuit, pleasure.

This is what gives Iranians of all hues an infinite reservoir of coordinates to stand apart, to delve ever more into the past for separateness and morale boosters at a time when American imperium is seen to be laying a cordon on the country’s borders. As our guide told us at Pasargadae on the outskirts of Shiraz, at Cyrus’s tomb (which moved Alexander the Great into ordering restoration work): “This is the heart of Persia.” And this is what presumably gives the country such capacity for sacrifice: in this millennia-long rise and fall of regimes, what is one more war, one more confrontation to keep Persian separateness intact. This is what motivated former president Mohammed Khatami to call his overture to the West a “dialogue of civilisations”.

Watch Iran, then, as it is taken for a possible vote at Vienna on November 24, watch its reaction, and hope for more than simple technicalities and standard diplomatese. It is a country, even now, that respects only a sophisticated challenge.