Cambridge History of Iran From Nadir Shah to the Islamic Republic Book

Volume 7 in the Cambridge History of Iran provides a wide-ranging study of Iranian history from 1722 to 1979. One advantage of the study is that it covers similar events from multiple perspectives. Coverage includes political and economic history and foreign relations, religion, and culture, and the arts. What follows is an attempt to highlight and summarize portions of the book.

The study describes traditional Iranian home interior as one devoid of "free-standing furniture," noting that "rooms were empty by Western European standards, with floors covered by soft carpets worked in various techniques, and niches set into the walls to hold objects. The only other items might be chests, bookstands, and braziers for heating and cooking. Otherwise a room's main furnishings consisted of additional textiles --- curtains, cloths spread out on the floor at mealtimes, bedding, quilts, [and] cushions."

The book also describes Iranian towns conforming to a pattern "considered traditional to the Islamic city." Divided into "quarters," a city included a "royal quarter" for government administration along with "the bazaar area and the residential districts." Some cities also indicated "clearly defined Armenian [Christian] and Jewish quarters."

Integrated into the bazaar and royal quarters were mosques. These were "linked to the surrounding buildings and streets by shared communal walls and connecting passages." Integrated mosques designed according to this "open-court plan" differ from the "three-dimensional external vistas" in Western architecture.

To some extent, the royal and religious classes in Iran represented competing interests. Both wanted Iranian independence from foreign powers, but they had different reasons for wanting it. The royal class wanted to establish Iran's economic power and regional influence. However, the religious establishment desired to emphasize Iran's traditional bazaar economy to preserve traditional Islamic culture and limit the perceived corrupting influence of foreign culture and business.

Gradually, the royal class forced the religious class to assume a subservient role or protest at their peril. The general public and the educated classes had to comply with either the government class or the religious establishment. The divergent interests of the educated classes and the religious establishment only became apparent after the 1979 revolution.

The authority of either the royal class or the religious establishment left the general public and educated classes with few outlets to protest their treatment. Iranians developed an instinctive sense of knowing what was permissible within certain societal settings, such as comic theater. They also understood what could be lampooned within comic theater could not be joked about in everyday life.

Included in the comic plays were the characters Hajji, Zan-i Hajji, and Fukuli. Hajji is "a typical bazaar merchant, money-greedy, who uses religion as a shield for his doings. He may have several wives who do not know of the other's existence. This leads to trouble when they discover each other." Zan-i Hajji, "the main wife of Hajji," is "a typical middle class scold, pretentious and dissatisfied about money. She mistreats servants and badgers her husband." Fukuli is the "bow-tie wearer" portrayed as "a dandy and a person educated in the West." He "pretends to be superior to his peers or else is confused about his place in society."

The limitations on free expression in everyday life carried over into Iranian publishing. Except for brief periods during the Constitutional Revolution (1905-1911) and during World War II, newspapers, magazines, and even academic journals were subject to government censorship. The result was that when publishing inside Iran, writers had to either avoid topics perceived as political or adopt an attitude of outright solidarity with the Shah.

Iranian writer Sadegh Hedayat, best known for the novel The Blind Owl, was one voice of dissent. In his essay, "The Message of Kafka," Hedayat portrayed the silent endurance of Iranians under abusive authority as its own form of protest. He writes: "the sign of our time that the dignity of the human personality has no place: the age is, as are its laws, impersonal, its heart as of stone…Yet on arrest, 'in the name of these laws', we die like dogs, neither executioner nor victim making a sound. Because he has to gasp for air all his life, panting for breath is the man of today's only way out."