Post by Bozur on Feb 19, 2007 21:04:11 GMT -5
Persian Pilgrimage
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By CHRISTOPHER DE BELLAIGUE
Published: October 29, 2006
To record and preserve the account of a visit to a virtually inaccessible site,” Jason Elliot writes in “Mirrors of the Unseen,” his book of Iranian journeys, “suggests an uncommon discipline. To do so accurately suggests a motive resilient enough to withstand all the diverting influences of heat, fatigue, appetite, impatient guides and the natural laziness of the eye. To make sense of one’s notes a year later is another skill; to reproduce them faithfully, and then to disguise the entire endeavor as if it had occurred naturally and without effort, is rarer still.”
Roderick Mills
MIRRORS OF THE UNSEEN
Journeys in Iran.
By Jason Elliot.
Illustrated. 416 pp. St. Martin's Press. $26.95.
Readers’ Opinions
Forum: Book News and Reviews
This, as neat a description of the travel writer’s art as you could hope to read, is Elliot’s homage to his compatriot from the 1930’s, the British gentleman scholar Robert Byron, whose “Road to Oxiana” is certainly the wittiest book, and perhaps the wisest, to have been written in English about Iran. Byron’s shadow dapples the pages of “Mirrors of the Unseen,” but relations between the two writers are not uncomplicated. On occasion, Elliot resists consulting his dog-eared copy of Byron’s masterpiece, presumably to avoid the siren call of imitation. When Elliot elaborates his own theory explaining an architectural oddity that had confounded Byron, one senses his glee at enlightening his forebear.
Byron had what Bruce Chatwin called the “ability to gauge the morale of a civilization from its architecture.” Now, three-quarters of a century after Byron and almost three decades into the Islamic revolution, it is high time for a fresh reading. Perhaps because he is pretty much alone in the field — most recent books on Iran are either memoirs or political screeds about nuclear politics — Elliot has not felt obliged to cramp his wide vision. Around his account of many months of travel, and sustained by extensive reading in libraries, he aims to build nothing less than a cohesive idea of Iran’s artistic development.
There is an intellectual quest, identified early on. Elliot is troubled by the reluctance of many modern scholars of Islamic art to inquire into the symbolic, rather than aesthetic, essence of this art. Their dull explanations revolve around history and fashion. They deny Islamic art a guiding “spirit.” “It is difficult to suppose,” Elliot writes, “that an art as prolific and expert as that of the Islamic world was driven by no more than a desire to impress the eye alone. Great art aims higher.”
Elliot’s roving gaze holds an advantage for the reader. By consulting this single volume, one can learn about Cyrus the Great’s Achaemenid Empire — and Herodotus’s Hellenic-centered account of it — and about the consequences of the Arab conquest of the seventh century, which turned Iran (then known in the West as Persia) from a Zoroastrian into a Muslim nation. Elliot describes the later Mongol devastations and gives much attention to the Safavid Empire that flowered after 1600, when Shiism, Islam’s main minority sect, came to occupy the position of political and cultural dominance in Persia that it enjoys to this day.
Where he can, Elliot juxtaposes history with modern echoes and ironies. He links the Iranians’ sensitivity to Herodotus’s bias to their later hatred for Western imperialism, British and Russian to begin with, American later on. He describes the surrender of the Mongols to the Persian culture they had set out to destroy — a culture sinuous and adaptable enough to color courtly life from Hyderabad to Istanbul. The author’s visits to former Achaemenid, Mongol and Safavid capitals, and to the modern city of Tehran, make tangible what might otherwise seem like distant abstractions.
Elliot is never less than forthright, and some of his architectural descriptions are very fine. As a traveling companion, however, he can be less than engaging. He gives us only glimpses of the self-awareness that makes the banal details of being in a foreign place — the mutual incomprehension, the periods of inert, enforced reflection, the brief encounters — so revealing, both of a traveler and his environment. His contempt for the other foreigners he comes across, whom he finds vulgar and ugly, is uncharitable and misplaced; for most Westerners, the very act of buying an air ticket to Iran, a country that is vilified like almost no other, is proof of courage and imagination. He deplores the tourists’ cultural insensitivity, preaches to unscrupulous money-changers and primly justifies his decision not to fast during Ramadan. That, he informs us, would have been “a hollow and imitative gesture, and to fast is as much an interior undertaking as an outer one.” But why would Elliot, a visitor from a non-Muslim country, and thus doubly exempt, consider fasting in the first place?
As Elliot travels around Iran, a series of mostly male, mostly listless characters cross his radar, all willing to offer him the benefit of their (seemingly limitless) time. But they are a monotonous bunch, much taken by the West and given to cursing the Islamic Republic, and collectively they do not do justice to the great variety of lifestyles and views that are to be found, coexisting uneasily, in today’s Iran. Tellingly, the most dynamic character in the book is not an Iranian at all, but an American horse-breeder, a high-spirited Cornell alumna who married an Iranian before the revolution and never went back to the United States. Elliot is relieved, one feels, to return to his beloved books and buildings.
And what of his search for the “spirit” of Islamic art, some of whose crowning achievements are to be found in Iran? This is contentious ground, if only because the qualifier “Islamic,” when applied to many broad concepts — democracy, for example — often elicits the charge, “cultural relativist.”
For all that, Elliot is surely right that Islamic art means something more than art that is produced by Muslims. Coming near the end of the book, his sprawling, ebullient discussion of the subject repays a close reading. His depiction of the “artist as intermediary,” rendering up his perfection to the glory of God, in reflection of heaven as depicted in the Koran, is especially appropriate to Iranian architecture. The antique Persian idea of the afterworld as a garden, when interpreted by the tile-makers of the Islamic era, turned mosques from mere places of worship into simulacra of paradise.
Christopher de Bellaigue is the author of “In the Rose Garden of the Martyrs: A Memoir of Iran.” He is currently writing a book on eastern Turkey.
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By CHRISTOPHER DE BELLAIGUE
Published: October 29, 2006
To record and preserve the account of a visit to a virtually inaccessible site,” Jason Elliot writes in “Mirrors of the Unseen,” his book of Iranian journeys, “suggests an uncommon discipline. To do so accurately suggests a motive resilient enough to withstand all the diverting influences of heat, fatigue, appetite, impatient guides and the natural laziness of the eye. To make sense of one’s notes a year later is another skill; to reproduce them faithfully, and then to disguise the entire endeavor as if it had occurred naturally and without effort, is rarer still.”
Roderick Mills
MIRRORS OF THE UNSEEN
Journeys in Iran.
By Jason Elliot.
Illustrated. 416 pp. St. Martin's Press. $26.95.
Readers’ Opinions
Forum: Book News and Reviews
This, as neat a description of the travel writer’s art as you could hope to read, is Elliot’s homage to his compatriot from the 1930’s, the British gentleman scholar Robert Byron, whose “Road to Oxiana” is certainly the wittiest book, and perhaps the wisest, to have been written in English about Iran. Byron’s shadow dapples the pages of “Mirrors of the Unseen,” but relations between the two writers are not uncomplicated. On occasion, Elliot resists consulting his dog-eared copy of Byron’s masterpiece, presumably to avoid the siren call of imitation. When Elliot elaborates his own theory explaining an architectural oddity that had confounded Byron, one senses his glee at enlightening his forebear.
Byron had what Bruce Chatwin called the “ability to gauge the morale of a civilization from its architecture.” Now, three-quarters of a century after Byron and almost three decades into the Islamic revolution, it is high time for a fresh reading. Perhaps because he is pretty much alone in the field — most recent books on Iran are either memoirs or political screeds about nuclear politics — Elliot has not felt obliged to cramp his wide vision. Around his account of many months of travel, and sustained by extensive reading in libraries, he aims to build nothing less than a cohesive idea of Iran’s artistic development.
There is an intellectual quest, identified early on. Elliot is troubled by the reluctance of many modern scholars of Islamic art to inquire into the symbolic, rather than aesthetic, essence of this art. Their dull explanations revolve around history and fashion. They deny Islamic art a guiding “spirit.” “It is difficult to suppose,” Elliot writes, “that an art as prolific and expert as that of the Islamic world was driven by no more than a desire to impress the eye alone. Great art aims higher.”
Elliot’s roving gaze holds an advantage for the reader. By consulting this single volume, one can learn about Cyrus the Great’s Achaemenid Empire — and Herodotus’s Hellenic-centered account of it — and about the consequences of the Arab conquest of the seventh century, which turned Iran (then known in the West as Persia) from a Zoroastrian into a Muslim nation. Elliot describes the later Mongol devastations and gives much attention to the Safavid Empire that flowered after 1600, when Shiism, Islam’s main minority sect, came to occupy the position of political and cultural dominance in Persia that it enjoys to this day.
Where he can, Elliot juxtaposes history with modern echoes and ironies. He links the Iranians’ sensitivity to Herodotus’s bias to their later hatred for Western imperialism, British and Russian to begin with, American later on. He describes the surrender of the Mongols to the Persian culture they had set out to destroy — a culture sinuous and adaptable enough to color courtly life from Hyderabad to Istanbul. The author’s visits to former Achaemenid, Mongol and Safavid capitals, and to the modern city of Tehran, make tangible what might otherwise seem like distant abstractions.
Elliot is never less than forthright, and some of his architectural descriptions are very fine. As a traveling companion, however, he can be less than engaging. He gives us only glimpses of the self-awareness that makes the banal details of being in a foreign place — the mutual incomprehension, the periods of inert, enforced reflection, the brief encounters — so revealing, both of a traveler and his environment. His contempt for the other foreigners he comes across, whom he finds vulgar and ugly, is uncharitable and misplaced; for most Westerners, the very act of buying an air ticket to Iran, a country that is vilified like almost no other, is proof of courage and imagination. He deplores the tourists’ cultural insensitivity, preaches to unscrupulous money-changers and primly justifies his decision not to fast during Ramadan. That, he informs us, would have been “a hollow and imitative gesture, and to fast is as much an interior undertaking as an outer one.” But why would Elliot, a visitor from a non-Muslim country, and thus doubly exempt, consider fasting in the first place?
As Elliot travels around Iran, a series of mostly male, mostly listless characters cross his radar, all willing to offer him the benefit of their (seemingly limitless) time. But they are a monotonous bunch, much taken by the West and given to cursing the Islamic Republic, and collectively they do not do justice to the great variety of lifestyles and views that are to be found, coexisting uneasily, in today’s Iran. Tellingly, the most dynamic character in the book is not an Iranian at all, but an American horse-breeder, a high-spirited Cornell alumna who married an Iranian before the revolution and never went back to the United States. Elliot is relieved, one feels, to return to his beloved books and buildings.
And what of his search for the “spirit” of Islamic art, some of whose crowning achievements are to be found in Iran? This is contentious ground, if only because the qualifier “Islamic,” when applied to many broad concepts — democracy, for example — often elicits the charge, “cultural relativist.”
For all that, Elliot is surely right that Islamic art means something more than art that is produced by Muslims. Coming near the end of the book, his sprawling, ebullient discussion of the subject repays a close reading. His depiction of the “artist as intermediary,” rendering up his perfection to the glory of God, in reflection of heaven as depicted in the Koran, is especially appropriate to Iranian architecture. The antique Persian idea of the afterworld as a garden, when interpreted by the tile-makers of the Islamic era, turned mosques from mere places of worship into simulacra of paradise.
Christopher de Bellaigue is the author of “In the Rose Garden of the Martyrs: A Memoir of Iran.” He is currently writing a book on eastern Turkey.