Tweet
THE REMAKING OF IRAN
The Canberra Times
http://www.canberratimes.com.au/news/local/n ews/general/the-remaking-of-iran/1424832.aspx?stor ypage=0
Feb 4 2009
Australia
Stand on the roof terrace of the Ali Qapu palace overlooking the
central square of Isfahan, Iran's most beautiful city, and you begin
to grasp the significance of Shah Abbas I (1587-1629), arguably the
country's most brilliant ruler. Before you lies the masterpiece of
urban planning that integrated the political, economic, religious and
social elements out of which he built a nation. Here is an architecture
which perfectly expresses the political economy of its ruler and
enabled him to claim his country was at the centre of the world.
The square, Naqsh-i Jahan, is one of the biggest urban spaces in the
world; at 500m by 160m, its scale is surpassed only by Tiananmen in
Beijing. Opposite the palace are the exquisite minaret and dome of the
Shah's private mosque, the blue tiles gleaming in the late afternoon
sun. As the muezzin sounds, Isfahani families begin to lay out rugs
among the fountains and gardens of the square. The moon is rising
and it catches the imposing public mosque the Masjid-i Shah which
dominates another side of the square. The fourth side is taken up by
the entrance to the bazaar, still one of the biggest in Iran. It was
on the Ali Qapu terrace that the Shah entertained ambassadors from
China, India and Europe with military parades and mock battles. This
was the stage he used to impress the world; his visitors, we are told,
came away stunned at the sophistication and opulence of this meeting
point between East and West.
Shah Abbas: The Remaking of Iran, a major exhibition at the British
Museum in London, is the third in a series on rulers who have changed
the world (the fourth will be on the Mexican ruler Montezuma). Previous
subjects have been familiar the first emperor of China and the Roman
emperor Hadrian but this latest show takes the visitor into what for
many will be new territory: a country much misunderstood in the West
and a little-known period in its long history. Abbas's story sheds
fascinating light on how nations acquire power and how they sustain it.
"The British are very naive about the acquisition and loss of power; we
have a sort of amnesia about how we lost our empire," Neil MacGregor,
the museum's director, says. "We grew up with the stability of American
and Soviet empires and we are now seeing the rise of China, Russia
and India. Our ignorance of other empires was part of our political
project of supremacy, but it is now crippling our capacity to manage
our relations with the countries over which we once established that
supremacy. Iran has never been able to be naive about power, given its
geostrategic significance in central and western Asia. Under Abbas,
it became adept at using soft power."
If you want to understand modern Iran, arguably the best place to
start is with the reign of Abbas I, and nowhere better demonstrates
his ambition than Isfahan, his new capital.
Abbas had an unprepossessing start: at 16, he inherited a kingdom
riven by war, which had been invaded by the Ottomans in the west
and the Uzbeks in the east, and was threatened by expanding European
powers such as Portugal along the Gulf coast. Much like Elizabeth I in
England, he faced the challenges of a fractured nation and multiple
foreign enemies, and pursued comparable strategies: both rulers were
pivotal in the forging of a new sense of identity. Isfahan was the
showcase for Abbas's vision of his nation and the role it was to play
in the world.
In the Shah's palace of Ali Qapu, the wall paintings in his
reception rooms illustrate a significant chapter in the history of
globalisation. In one room, there is a small painting of a woman
with a child, clearly a copy of an Italian image of the Virgin;
on the opposite wall, there is a Chinese painting.
These pictures indicate Iran's capacity to absorb influences, and
demonstrate a cosmopolitan sophistication. Iran had become the crux of
a new and rapidly growing world economy as links were forged trading
china, textiles and ideas across Asia and Europe.
Abbas took into his service the English brothers Robert and Anthony
Sherley as part of his attempts to build alliances with Europe against
their common enemy, the Ottomans.
He played European rivals off against each other to secure his
interests, allying himself with the English East India Company to
expel the Portuguese from the island of Hormuz in the Persian Gulf.
The bazaar at Isfahan has changed little since it was built by
Abbas. The narrow lanes are bordered by stalls laden with the carpets,
painted miniatures, textiles and the nougat sweets, pistachios and
spices for which Isfahan is famous. This was the commerce that the
Shah did much to encourage. He had a particularly keen interest in
trade with Europe, then awash with silver from the Americas, which he
needed if he was to acquire the modern weaponry to defeat the Ottomans.
He set aside one neighbourhood for the Armenian silk traders he had
forced to relocate from the border with Turkey, aware that they
brought with them lucrative relationships that reached to Venice
and beyond. So keen was he to accommodate the Armenians that he even
allowed them to build their own Christian cathedral. In stark contrast
to the disciplined aesthetic of the mosques, the cathedral's walls
are rich with gory martyrdoms and saints.
It was the need to nurture new relationships, and a new urban
conviviality, that led to the creation of the huge Naqsh-i Jahan
square at the heart of Isfahan. Religious, political and economic
power framed the civic space in which people could meet and mingle. A
similar impulse led to the building of Covent Garden in London in
the same period.
There are very few contemporary images of the Shah because of the
Islamic injunction against images of the human form. Instead he
conveyed his authority through an aesthetic that became characteristic
of his reign: loose, flamboyant, arabesque patterns can be traced
from textiles and carpets to tiles and manuscripts. In the two major
mosques of Isfahan that Abbas built, every surface is covered with
tiles featuring calligraphy, flowers and twisting tendrils, creating
a haze of blue and white with yellow.
The light pours through apertures between arches offering deep shade;
the cool air circulates around the corridors. At the centre point
of the great dome of the Masjid-i Shah, a whisper can be heard from
every corner such is the exact calculation of the acoustics required.
Abbas understood the role of the visual arts as a tool of power; he
understood how Iran could exert lasting influence from Istanbul to
Delhi with an "empire of the mind", as the historian Michael Axworthy
has described it. Central to Abbas's nation-building was his definition
of Iran as Shia.
It may have been his grandfather who first declared Shia Islam as the
country's official religion, but it was Abbas who is credited with
forging the link between nation and faith that has proved such an
enduring resource for subsequent regimes in Iran (as Protestantism
played a pivotal role in the shaping of national identity in
Elizabethan England).
Shia Islam provided a clear boundary with the Sunni Ottoman empire to
the west Abbas's greatest enemy where there was no natural boundary
of rivers or mountain or ethnic divide.
The Shah's patronage of the Shia shrines was part of a strategy of
unification; he donated gifts and money for construction to Ardabil
in western Iran, Isfahan and Qom in central Iran, and Mashad in the
far east. The British Museum has organised its exhibition around
these four major shrines, focusing on their architecture and artefacts.
While Isfahan still seduces every foreign visitor as it was intended
to do, it is at Mashad, close to the border with Afghanistan, that
the connections between Abbas and contemporary Iran become most
clear. Abbas once walked barefoot from Isfahan to the shrine of Imam
Reza in Mashad, a distance of several hundred kilometres.
It was a powerful way to enhance the prestige of the shrine as a
place of Shia pilgrimage, a pressing priority because the Ottomans
controlled the most important Shia pilgrimage sites at Najaf and
Kerbala in what is now Iraq. Abbas needed to consolidate his nation
by building up the shrines of his own lands.
Today Mashad is one of the biggest pilgrimage sites in the world,
with 20 million visitors every year. In peak season, hundreds of buses
arrive each day, and there are 24 daily flights from Tehran alone;
passengers at the airport are greeted with a huge slogan above the
arrivals gate, in Iranian and English: "Welcome pilgrim to pray to
Imam Reza as an intercessor before God."
To cope with the volume of pilgrims, huge motorways and underground
car parks have been built around the shrine complex. More are planned
as this small city of seminaries, libraries, museums and conference
centres continues to grow; cranes jostle alongside the minarets. It
is also a major business centre the shrine owns factories, hospitals
and agricultural enterprises. Since the Islamic revolution in 1979,
money has been poured into the expansion of the shrine much as it
was by Abbas in a bid to build legitimacy for his rule more than 400
years ago.
Mashad's precincts teem with people from every social background,
from large peasant families of several generations to the stylish
young Tehrani couples who come here on honeymoon. All the women must
be in full black chador, and attendants with bright pink and yellow
feather dusters are everywhere to ensure that even the smallest lock
of hair is hidden. Every pilgrim wants to touch the shrine of Imam
Reza; such is the crush around the golden grille that often it is
only possible to get close to it late in the evening or at night.
The shrine's vast museum is subjected to the same veneration. The
pilgrims touch the doorjamb of the entrance and brush their lips in
prayer; many exhibits prompt more touching and praying donations are
left at some. This is a museum unlike any other in the world: a place
of worship. The museum's collections are made up entirely of gifts,
and the abundance is bewildering: there's a model of Mashad airport,
and then the medals of the great Iranian wrestler of the 20th century,
Gholamreza Takhti. There is even a lifesize lobster in gold donated by
the Supreme Ayatollah. And interspersed among four centuries' worth of
giving are the gifts of Abbas, including some beautiful early Qur'ans.
Abbas donated his collection of more than 1000 Chinese porcelains to
the shrine at Ardabil, and a wooden display case was specially built
to show them to the pilgrims. He recognised how his gifts and their
display could be used as propaganda, demonstrating at the same time
his piety and his wealth. It is the donations to the shrines that have
inspired the choice of many of the pieces in the British Museum show.
This is a timely exhibition: a bold attempt to deepen understanding
of a country with which our own is locked in a hostile diplomatic
impasse. It is only four years since the museum mounted the Forgotten
Empire exhibition on Iran's ancient history; it is as if the museum
is conducting its own independent foreign policy, using culture
as a form of exchange between countries for which other methods
of communication are difficult. That is no small order. Iran has
provoked fascination and fear in western Europe for more than two
millennia. Europeans' knowledge of the country was for a long time
second-hand, heavily influenced by the hostility of the historians of
ancient Greece. Generations of European elites educated in the classics
viewed it through the writings of Herodotus and his accounts of the
wars with Persia. Sunni Arab commentators were similarly hostile.
The fearful incomprehension has only intensified since 1979. Shia
rituals of self-flagellation, intercession, pilgrimage, relics and
martyrs can alienate in a Europe that is rapidly forgetting its
own version of such rituals in the Catholic tradition. In a world
in which most cultures are being brought into closer communication,
Iran has arguably become more alien rather than less. That makes the
challenge of understanding a critical period in this nation's history
daunting but all the more pressing.
The Canberra Times
http://www.canberratimes.com.au/news/local/n ews/general/the-remaking-of-iran/1424832.aspx?stor ypage=0
Feb 4 2009
Australia
Stand on the roof terrace of the Ali Qapu palace overlooking the
central square of Isfahan, Iran's most beautiful city, and you begin
to grasp the significance of Shah Abbas I (1587-1629), arguably the
country's most brilliant ruler. Before you lies the masterpiece of
urban planning that integrated the political, economic, religious and
social elements out of which he built a nation. Here is an architecture
which perfectly expresses the political economy of its ruler and
enabled him to claim his country was at the centre of the world.
The square, Naqsh-i Jahan, is one of the biggest urban spaces in the
world; at 500m by 160m, its scale is surpassed only by Tiananmen in
Beijing. Opposite the palace are the exquisite minaret and dome of the
Shah's private mosque, the blue tiles gleaming in the late afternoon
sun. As the muezzin sounds, Isfahani families begin to lay out rugs
among the fountains and gardens of the square. The moon is rising
and it catches the imposing public mosque the Masjid-i Shah which
dominates another side of the square. The fourth side is taken up by
the entrance to the bazaar, still one of the biggest in Iran. It was
on the Ali Qapu terrace that the Shah entertained ambassadors from
China, India and Europe with military parades and mock battles. This
was the stage he used to impress the world; his visitors, we are told,
came away stunned at the sophistication and opulence of this meeting
point between East and West.
Shah Abbas: The Remaking of Iran, a major exhibition at the British
Museum in London, is the third in a series on rulers who have changed
the world (the fourth will be on the Mexican ruler Montezuma). Previous
subjects have been familiar the first emperor of China and the Roman
emperor Hadrian but this latest show takes the visitor into what for
many will be new territory: a country much misunderstood in the West
and a little-known period in its long history. Abbas's story sheds
fascinating light on how nations acquire power and how they sustain it.
"The British are very naive about the acquisition and loss of power; we
have a sort of amnesia about how we lost our empire," Neil MacGregor,
the museum's director, says. "We grew up with the stability of American
and Soviet empires and we are now seeing the rise of China, Russia
and India. Our ignorance of other empires was part of our political
project of supremacy, but it is now crippling our capacity to manage
our relations with the countries over which we once established that
supremacy. Iran has never been able to be naive about power, given its
geostrategic significance in central and western Asia. Under Abbas,
it became adept at using soft power."
If you want to understand modern Iran, arguably the best place to
start is with the reign of Abbas I, and nowhere better demonstrates
his ambition than Isfahan, his new capital.
Abbas had an unprepossessing start: at 16, he inherited a kingdom
riven by war, which had been invaded by the Ottomans in the west
and the Uzbeks in the east, and was threatened by expanding European
powers such as Portugal along the Gulf coast. Much like Elizabeth I in
England, he faced the challenges of a fractured nation and multiple
foreign enemies, and pursued comparable strategies: both rulers were
pivotal in the forging of a new sense of identity. Isfahan was the
showcase for Abbas's vision of his nation and the role it was to play
in the world.
In the Shah's palace of Ali Qapu, the wall paintings in his
reception rooms illustrate a significant chapter in the history of
globalisation. In one room, there is a small painting of a woman
with a child, clearly a copy of an Italian image of the Virgin;
on the opposite wall, there is a Chinese painting.
These pictures indicate Iran's capacity to absorb influences, and
demonstrate a cosmopolitan sophistication. Iran had become the crux of
a new and rapidly growing world economy as links were forged trading
china, textiles and ideas across Asia and Europe.
Abbas took into his service the English brothers Robert and Anthony
Sherley as part of his attempts to build alliances with Europe against
their common enemy, the Ottomans.
He played European rivals off against each other to secure his
interests, allying himself with the English East India Company to
expel the Portuguese from the island of Hormuz in the Persian Gulf.
The bazaar at Isfahan has changed little since it was built by
Abbas. The narrow lanes are bordered by stalls laden with the carpets,
painted miniatures, textiles and the nougat sweets, pistachios and
spices for which Isfahan is famous. This was the commerce that the
Shah did much to encourage. He had a particularly keen interest in
trade with Europe, then awash with silver from the Americas, which he
needed if he was to acquire the modern weaponry to defeat the Ottomans.
He set aside one neighbourhood for the Armenian silk traders he had
forced to relocate from the border with Turkey, aware that they
brought with them lucrative relationships that reached to Venice
and beyond. So keen was he to accommodate the Armenians that he even
allowed them to build their own Christian cathedral. In stark contrast
to the disciplined aesthetic of the mosques, the cathedral's walls
are rich with gory martyrdoms and saints.
It was the need to nurture new relationships, and a new urban
conviviality, that led to the creation of the huge Naqsh-i Jahan
square at the heart of Isfahan. Religious, political and economic
power framed the civic space in which people could meet and mingle. A
similar impulse led to the building of Covent Garden in London in
the same period.
There are very few contemporary images of the Shah because of the
Islamic injunction against images of the human form. Instead he
conveyed his authority through an aesthetic that became characteristic
of his reign: loose, flamboyant, arabesque patterns can be traced
from textiles and carpets to tiles and manuscripts. In the two major
mosques of Isfahan that Abbas built, every surface is covered with
tiles featuring calligraphy, flowers and twisting tendrils, creating
a haze of blue and white with yellow.
The light pours through apertures between arches offering deep shade;
the cool air circulates around the corridors. At the centre point
of the great dome of the Masjid-i Shah, a whisper can be heard from
every corner such is the exact calculation of the acoustics required.
Abbas understood the role of the visual arts as a tool of power; he
understood how Iran could exert lasting influence from Istanbul to
Delhi with an "empire of the mind", as the historian Michael Axworthy
has described it. Central to Abbas's nation-building was his definition
of Iran as Shia.
It may have been his grandfather who first declared Shia Islam as the
country's official religion, but it was Abbas who is credited with
forging the link between nation and faith that has proved such an
enduring resource for subsequent regimes in Iran (as Protestantism
played a pivotal role in the shaping of national identity in
Elizabethan England).
Shia Islam provided a clear boundary with the Sunni Ottoman empire to
the west Abbas's greatest enemy where there was no natural boundary
of rivers or mountain or ethnic divide.
The Shah's patronage of the Shia shrines was part of a strategy of
unification; he donated gifts and money for construction to Ardabil
in western Iran, Isfahan and Qom in central Iran, and Mashad in the
far east. The British Museum has organised its exhibition around
these four major shrines, focusing on their architecture and artefacts.
While Isfahan still seduces every foreign visitor as it was intended
to do, it is at Mashad, close to the border with Afghanistan, that
the connections between Abbas and contemporary Iran become most
clear. Abbas once walked barefoot from Isfahan to the shrine of Imam
Reza in Mashad, a distance of several hundred kilometres.
It was a powerful way to enhance the prestige of the shrine as a
place of Shia pilgrimage, a pressing priority because the Ottomans
controlled the most important Shia pilgrimage sites at Najaf and
Kerbala in what is now Iraq. Abbas needed to consolidate his nation
by building up the shrines of his own lands.
Today Mashad is one of the biggest pilgrimage sites in the world,
with 20 million visitors every year. In peak season, hundreds of buses
arrive each day, and there are 24 daily flights from Tehran alone;
passengers at the airport are greeted with a huge slogan above the
arrivals gate, in Iranian and English: "Welcome pilgrim to pray to
Imam Reza as an intercessor before God."
To cope with the volume of pilgrims, huge motorways and underground
car parks have been built around the shrine complex. More are planned
as this small city of seminaries, libraries, museums and conference
centres continues to grow; cranes jostle alongside the minarets. It
is also a major business centre the shrine owns factories, hospitals
and agricultural enterprises. Since the Islamic revolution in 1979,
money has been poured into the expansion of the shrine much as it
was by Abbas in a bid to build legitimacy for his rule more than 400
years ago.
Mashad's precincts teem with people from every social background,
from large peasant families of several generations to the stylish
young Tehrani couples who come here on honeymoon. All the women must
be in full black chador, and attendants with bright pink and yellow
feather dusters are everywhere to ensure that even the smallest lock
of hair is hidden. Every pilgrim wants to touch the shrine of Imam
Reza; such is the crush around the golden grille that often it is
only possible to get close to it late in the evening or at night.
The shrine's vast museum is subjected to the same veneration. The
pilgrims touch the doorjamb of the entrance and brush their lips in
prayer; many exhibits prompt more touching and praying donations are
left at some. This is a museum unlike any other in the world: a place
of worship. The museum's collections are made up entirely of gifts,
and the abundance is bewildering: there's a model of Mashad airport,
and then the medals of the great Iranian wrestler of the 20th century,
Gholamreza Takhti. There is even a lifesize lobster in gold donated by
the Supreme Ayatollah. And interspersed among four centuries' worth of
giving are the gifts of Abbas, including some beautiful early Qur'ans.
Abbas donated his collection of more than 1000 Chinese porcelains to
the shrine at Ardabil, and a wooden display case was specially built
to show them to the pilgrims. He recognised how his gifts and their
display could be used as propaganda, demonstrating at the same time
his piety and his wealth. It is the donations to the shrines that have
inspired the choice of many of the pieces in the British Museum show.
This is a timely exhibition: a bold attempt to deepen understanding
of a country with which our own is locked in a hostile diplomatic
impasse. It is only four years since the museum mounted the Forgotten
Empire exhibition on Iran's ancient history; it is as if the museum
is conducting its own independent foreign policy, using culture
as a form of exchange between countries for which other methods
of communication are difficult. That is no small order. Iran has
provoked fascination and fear in western Europe for more than two
millennia. Europeans' knowledge of the country was for a long time
second-hand, heavily influenced by the hostility of the historians of
ancient Greece. Generations of European elites educated in the classics
viewed it through the writings of Herodotus and his accounts of the
wars with Persia. Sunni Arab commentators were similarly hostile.
The fearful incomprehension has only intensified since 1979. Shia
rituals of self-flagellation, intercession, pilgrimage, relics and
martyrs can alienate in a Europe that is rapidly forgetting its
own version of such rituals in the Catholic tradition. In a world
in which most cultures are being brought into closer communication,
Iran has arguably become more alien rather than less. That makes the
challenge of understanding a critical period in this nation's history
daunting but all the more pressing.