Persian Puzzle

Hooman Majd’s book was published before the election (though oddly it has only now been made available in India),but to read it is to make the events of this summer that much more comprehensible. Majd,a US-based grandson of an Ayatollah and related to Khatami,brings a unique perspective. He brings in observations of both insider and outsider,of course,but his sporadic work for different Iranian presidents informs the book with a profile of the current leadership. He says he served as an “unpaid adviser” to Khatami,and also as translator at the UN to him and to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

The Ayatollah Begs to Differ is an account of travels around Iran in the years following Ahmadinejad’s first election. But Majd’s account of childhood visits to his grandparents’,his access today to a spectrum of Tehran’s political and Qom’s clerical leadership and his experience of the vastly different social worlds of north and south Tehran are instructive for more than the anecdotes. Through his narrative,Majd signposts the coordinates amid which social,political and religious developments have occurred — and,by extension,amid which change could be transacted in coming days.

Nods to Persian pride are ubiquitous — even when Condoleezza Rice,as US secretary of state,issued a veiled ultimatum to potential Iranian interlocutors,she was careful to include a preface about their great civilisation. In the days after the June 12 elections,too,international official reaction and analysis were tempered with a sort of diffidence to this notion of civilisational pride.

Majd says it is more complicated than just pride. And the markers for understanding Iran derive from assorted sources,the country’s Persian poetry,its Shia rituals of revisiting grief and emphasis on entitlement,its street culture,its class structure and its religious leadership.

He explains the cultural resonance of the idiom of the lower-middle-class,south Tehran street gangs of decades ago. He introduces the place of the kot-shalvary in working class neighbourhoods — the man who would and still does wheel his handcart full of the kind of standard-issue tie-less suits. But it is more than clothes; Majd shows how strongly the neighbourhood defines a person.

To understand Iran,says Majd,is to first know the importance of ta’arouf,the back-and-forth niceties and exaggerated self-deprecation of routine social interactions. (“The white lies that good manners dictate (they) tell in the West and generally polite banter or gracious hospitality cannot begin to describe what for Iranians is a cultural imperative that is about manners,yes,but is also about gaining advantage,politically,socially,or economically,as much as anything else.”) Nuancing this is gholov,or boastful exaggeration,and the concept of haq,or entitlement. And social interactions so transacted are informed by the private/public separation obtained from the idea of the Persian walled garden.

It would be overstating it to say that Majd completely anticipated the summer of 2009,but the prescience is evident from his profile of Ahmadinejad as the man of the masses in attire and in lifestyle,his successful mobilisation of support in 2005 on a platform of economic entitlement,and later on rally consensus on Iran’s nuclear programme as a question of haq. In his travels around Iran he senses an impatience with Ahmadinejad and the growing space for a reform candidate for 2009,perhaps supported by Khatami. Did June 12 settle that issue? As the post-election power struggle plays out,it is worth revisiting Majd’s contention that no matter how the future goes,“the (Persian) character and sensibilities of the people will not change”.