God Knows I Tried.
An experimental approach to orientalism and the practice of writing.

The following text discusses several periods in the history of Irano-European relations, and also touches on questions of form in contemporary academic prose. It is the follow-up to the excerpts published in the August edition of Bad Jens.

A number of these excerpts address possible consequences of the history of Zoroastrian Aryanism, including implications for gender relations.

Tirdad Zolghadr

13 The Zolghadres were a land-owning family in East Azerbaijan, now part of Iran. At the beginning of this century, Shell discovers oil on the Zolghadre property, and within ten years or so they’re filthy rich. The daughter is called Soraya, the two sons Ali and Rashid. They all ride horseback, and speak five or six languages. The family is of Russian descent, but also of Persian, Azeri, Georgian, and Arabic stock. Later, in exile, they would never consider themselves Arabic, and would eventually only care for things Russian. "Damne, je suis Caucasien!", Ali grunts at a Paris Match reporter some seventy years later. But the family name comes from the classical Arabic zul, meaning to hold, and ghadre, respect. And "Ali" isn’t exactly Nordic either.

One day, in October 1917, they leave discreetly for France.

Paris in the twenties is a confusing place, and the Zolghadres soon blow everything they have on clothes, cocaine and so forth. Ali joins the French foreign legion, and for the next twenty years leads a brilliant military career, during which he loses one lung, half his liver, and five ribs, along with any sense of respect for human life, though he does win a Croix de chevalier de la Légion d’honneur, along with other regalia, including that interview in Paris Match.

Rashid marries a Bavarian named Lo. Apparently, noone really knows why, but the two leave Paris for Munich just when the German occupation comes to an end. (Another enigma is how Rashid acquired a Swiss passport at some point, something I learned only recently.) Lo gives birth to Frederick, and to Khavar, my mother.

During the occupation, Soraya joins the résistance. Thanks to her cool presence of mind, and a succession of one minor miracle after another, she survives searches, arrests, even a summary execution in a garage in front of a German firing squad. Like her brothers, she moves to Iran in the fifties, now a good old monarchy again. She opens a Franco-Russian restaurant in Tehran, which is frequented by russian expatriates, and other Beautiful People; the King and Queen come to dine, so does Duke Ellington, and even Nixon’s vice-president Spiro Agnew. As for the Russians, Soraya’s brother Ali and his chums enjoy singing sad Russian gypsy songs, and together they cry and moan and drink till they can’t lift their heads from the tables anymore, so the microphone is propped up between two glasses and nudged into Ali’s face while he sings and slobbers into the tablecloth.

The restaurant’s Russian customers are conspicuous enough to attract the attention of the SAVAK, the CIA- and Mossad-trained secret police, widely known and respected for its unfriendly methods of abduction, torture, assassination and so forth. The SAVAK decides to bug the restaurant, and it is one of the top honchos who takes the time to drop by, to kindly but firmly request Soraya’s cooperation. Big and stately Soraya Tukayeff-Zolghadre, widely known as "Madame Khânum", now very offended, raves at him in her old and pompous tsarist Russian, then violently shoves him down the steps, sending him flying backwards, arms flailing, unto the floor. You have to understand that a mere Iranian cannot do this sort of thing. My mother’s boyfriend at the time had had his fingernails pulled, basically for xeroxing the wrong essays. But here was Soraya, acting like the guy was some loser who couldn’t pay for his borshtsch à la crème, and getting away with it too; the restaurant reopens after a week. (Farah must have loved those blinis.) In twenty years, Soraya hardly learns a word of Farsi, for she rarely leaves this small expat community, in which I spent my early childhood, and which, on account of the many anecdotes, I never entirely left behind (for better and/or for worse).

14 In 1964, Ayatollah Khomeini, commenting on the fact that American citizens enjoyed immunity before the law in pre-revolutionary Iran, remarks that if the Shah should run over an American dog, he would be called to account, but if an American cook should run over the Shah, noone has any claim against him.

29 According to Iranian scholar Ervand Abrahamian, the term "fundamentalism" was invented by early twentieth century Protestants in North America, and appropriated by the North American media during the 1970s to describe new political movements in the Middle East. Islamic revolutionaries thought "fundamental" was a fetching way to put it, but finding no Persian or Arabic equivalent, coined a new word, bonyadegar, literally translating the English term ‘fundamental-ist’. Ironically, Iranian fundamentalism’s very modus operandi was to become the practice of regularly accusing its opponents of being elteqati ("eclectic") or gharbzadeh ("westernized", or, literally, "struck by the west").

The Islamic revolution, Abrahamian argues, was a middle-class movement that attacked the upper class and foreign powers while drawing on discourses of many shapes and colors, including religious fundamentalism. Even after the establishment of the Islamic Republic, the revolution’s leaders would prefer to mediate between disputing factions, often stepping in only to balance things out when someone had gained a clear upper hand. When in late 1987, for example, the Council of Guardians (which supervises parliament) started expressing concern over the possibility of the State replacing religious dogma with its own priorities, Imam Khomeini eventually decreed that, to defend its interests, the State may indeed at any moment suspend obligations such as prayer, fasting, or the holy pilgrimage.

Today, with adolescents laying on more makeup than Boy George on a bad-skin day, the international media are quick to ascribe this "liberalization" to a move away from scriptural dogma, and towards a newfound awareness of women’s needs. As it happens, all this precious powder and paint on Iranian cheeks, lips and teenage pimples emerged well before the election of Mohammad "everybody’s darling" Khatami. It appeared at a moment closely following the purge economically interventionist elements within the politico-religious establishment, immediately after the passing of the consensus-building Imam Khomeini. For the first time since the revolution, a single faction could rule without constraint or competition, and these weren’t a bunch of wishy-washy liberals with bleeding hearts, nor was it the League for a Hermeneutics of Indeterminacy in Iran. Without belaboring the point any further, it’s striking to note that women’s "luxuries" were first readmitted into the public sphere at the moment when economically protectionist policies were reconsidered, marking a decisive turn towards neoliberal precepts as proposed by the IMF.

30 I’ve become obsessed by the beauty spot above your lip, oh friend

I saw your fevered eye, and fell ill [ ...]

For I am fed up with mosque and seminary

I shed the garments of piety and pretension and put on

The dervish cloak of the winemaster, and achieved consciousness

The city preacher’s moralizing irritated me

I sought help from the breath of the wine besotted drunkard

Permit me to recall the temple of the idols [ ...]

Ayatollah Khomeini

32 "In Bengal and Malaysia, Rama and Sita, the principal characters of the Hindu epic, the Ramayana, are absorbed into Islamic culture. In African-influenced societies from the Persian Gulf to Morocco, demonic possession by or of females provides catharsis in popular Islamic cults. Tuareg men from the southern Sahara ritually shroud their faces while the women go proudly unveiled. A nineteenth century Shiite potentate in the Indian state of Awadh ceremonially dresses as a woman and ‘gives birth’ to a doll, claiming thereby to be the symbolic mother of the Shiite imam whose birthdate he is commemorating." Add to orientalist scholar Richard Bulliett’s register the women’s gatherings at the holy shrine of Imma Tiffelant, who metamorphosed from a dove into a prostitute, and meetings at countless other sanctuaries throughout North Africa, or the elaborate practices of Sufi or Khajiri mysticism, or of Haussa, Bosnian, Mongolian or Somali appropriations of the Qoran, not forgetting the currents and countercurrents, careerist rivalries and party politics that determine those "academic theories" of Islam, and you’ll never see the end of it.

Even a single school, under a single political aegis, must constantly deal with nit-picking arguments concerning history, philology, hermeneutic method, and the endless politics of the hadiths. "Hadiths" are basically eyewitness accounts of prophetic utterances, and are crucial in much of Islamic practice, popular and academic; the idea being to prove or disprove a given witness’ credibility by way of a vast network of seemingly incompatible accounts, and accounts of accounts.

35 I’m sure you’ll agree that the Old Testament stories that Europeans, whether agnostic or church-going, are most familiar with, are the first myths (Paradise, Babel, Noah’s Ark), the first nomads (Sarah and Abraham), the first monarchy (Solomon), and, of course, Moses and the return to the promised land. You will agree that that is pretty much it, as far as the common imaginary goes, before getting to Joseph and the Virgin Mary and whatnot.

What is striking is that the gap between "Moses" and "Mary" amounts to a period of six centuries. It was in the course of this epoch - which constitutes one of the most neglected areas in biblical scholarship and Syro-Palestinian archaeology - that Israel was colonized by Persia, during approximately two centuries. If two hundred years of colonization may sound like a long time, nothing spectacular or historically decisive is known to have happened during that period.

On the contrary, as many have been quick to point out, the Persians were different to other imperialists: they invited the Jews back home after their exile under the Babylonians, to live in peace, do their thing, and practice their religion exactly the way they liked it; temples, prayers, animal sacrifices, the works. Many even hesitate to call it a colony, and some, like established scholar Giovanni Garbini, hold that "under the domination of the Achaemenids, Hebraism knew its golden age". The pax iranica, as opposed to "the unfortunate Greek adventure [ that] followed", allowed "Hebrew culture [ the] leisure to manifest itself according to the most authentic tendencies, without the exaggerations provoked by political and ideological struggles [ between the clerics, the prophets, and the Jewish monarchy] ". And since, as everyone knows, peace is boring, it’s no surprise that neither Ezra nor Nehemia nor any other heroes from the "golden age" are the main characters in our kindergarten coloring books. As for the surprising magnanimity of the Persian authorities, it is commonly attributed either to their indifference toward Israel (too small, and too poor, to be worth any fuss), to their cynical, self-serving populism (Thooose Persians! Clever bastards!), or - in a vague and largely unexplored spirit of Persophilia - to the wisdom and tolerance of ancient Zoroastrian doctrine.

The one practicing Zoroastrian I myself ever met was the leader of the Tehrani community. He received me in his office along with several members of his flock during his weekly question-and-answer sessions. The cleric was quick to point out that Zoroastrian rulers had always been tolerant towards other religious practices, which were never considered affairs of the state. This somewhat crass example of historical revisionism - religious tolerance under the ruthless and genocidal empire was practiced very selectively through time and space - could easily be ascribed to a calculated jab at the policies of the government in Iran today. But even in Western Europe, Zoroastrianism, along with other knickknacks from preislamic Persia, has enjoyed the reputation of a highly sagacious, progressive doctrine, and has frequently occupied a most comfortable spot in the European history of civilization - a point President Khatami certainly had in mind when he proposed to the UN, last autumn, that the year 2001 be declared the "Year of Ancient Civilizations" (whatever that means). The idea was approved.

After having gone out of style during the middle ages (following the persecution of Christians by the Sasanian empire), though well before Nietzsche’s famous "Zarathustra", the prophet Zoroaster was rehabilitated by a host of cultured celebrities from the European Enlightenment, ranging from Rousseau to Voltaire to Goethe, but also Mozart and Delacroix, who all considered, in their respective ways, that the wisdom, dignity, and purity of Zoroaster’s morality made him the earliest pillar of civilization. G.W. Friedrich Hegel, for his part, always one for little timetables and marching orders, declared the Persians "the first historical people".

It was the Greeks who had first given the prophet, and founder of the philosophical school of Mazdeism in Babylon, sometime around 600 BC, the name Zoroaster, in reference to his alleged skills as an astronomist. They may have consciously and politely overheard his local appellation, Zartushtra, which presumably meant "old camel" (or "he whose camel is old", with the Sanskrit zar meaning "old", and ushtra "camel"). His full name, by which he was mostly called, was Zartushtra Spitama - Spitama derives from the Avestan and Sanskrit S’Vit, meaning "descendant of White".

39 Attempts to identify the "Israel" described in the Bible with the social and religious history of Palestine are thwarted, as "the picture drawn of ancient Palestine in non-biblical sources diverges ever more from the biblical picture", as Sheffield scholar Philip R. Davies has repeatedly insisted and elaborated. Davies is one of the more uncompromising experts in his field, insisting that not only is the entire Hebrew Bible compiled during the "Persian" period, but that "the prominence of Judah, the invention of a fictitious monarchic past including a mini-empire, the many stories reflecting immigration, the theory of ethnic identity, the invention of prophecy, the ‘period’ of Judges" are all literary constructs of that single period in time. Empirical evidence in favor of Davies’ hypotheses is scant, but every other point of departure equally has to come to terms with the fact that today the Persian period still constitutes the unexplored Dark Ages between the glamorous monarchy and the emergence of Christianity.

Ronald P. Carroll is another biblical scholar to question the supposed continuity between the religion and the social structure of the seventh and the fifth centuries: "For instance, is Moses or Mazda the key to Jewish monotheism?" Obviously, as he himself points out, Moses and Ahura Mazda would be uneasy bedfellows. If Judaism is originally the religion of semi-nomadic conquerors of a settled and civilized Canaan, by the Achaemenid Period, Zoroastrianism has long been established as the official doctrine of a centralized monarchy defending its way of life against barbaric, nomad invaders. And if Yahwist blessings go more easily to the ancient judges, patriarchs and prophets than to the national monarchs, the Persian priests always have the concept of divine justice inextricably linked with the monarchy, the clergy, and real estate. But the two do happen to have some things in common. Like Judaism, Zoroastrian philosophy isn’t a contemplative understanding of the impersonal concepts and processes of the universe (as in, say, Hellenism or Buddhism), but is directed towards active participation in a personal and cosmic struggle with the forces of good and evil. Furthermore, out of an initial, complex cosmology, Zoroastrianism, like Judaism, forged a single and personal God. And much as the Zoroastrian Ahura Mazda is not a universal God, but God of the Aryans only, YHWH is the God of Israel; both are deities with a racial and national character, and not Gods of all mankind. Neither doctrine encourages proselytism across racial boundaries, preferring to proselytize within the ethnic body, and to systematically uphold the faith in the nation, with Zoroastrianism already having an elaborate history of meting out forms of syncretic popular worship by defining them as forms of cosmic and national treason.

Scholars such as Carrol, Davies, Tamara Eskenazi and Harold Washington (see below), or Joseph Blenkinsopp and Charles Carter have argued that to take the history of the return from exile under the Achaemenid empire, as narrated in the Old Testament, at face value, is to either take this version of the story as representative for the area’s population as a whole, or to resort to the famous Myth of the Empty Land, and suppose that the Babylonians had deported just about everyone in the entire region, leaving no other story to be told in the first place. Conceding to either option would amount to uncritically taking sides with the narrators. For one thing, the sources from both within the biblical corpus and without are quite ambiguous as to just how harsh the Babylonian exile really was, and for exactly what price the exiles were willing to come back. They do suggest, and rather less ambiguously, that the returnees formed a fraction of the local population at best, but also that they were granted exclusive privileges by the Persian authorities, e.g. land rights, and control over the official cult.

This newly formed bunch of Yahwists, the above scholars agree, suddenly finds itself under the aegis of a sizable and impressive empire declaring it the sole Jewish spokesmen. All that is asked of them is to make sure anything "Jewish" is compatible with themselves and the empire, or declare anything subversive to either of them "Canaanite", or at least "non-Jewish". Though they may not control the locals, with their rampant miscegenations (their paganisms and intermarriages) and their muddled oral histories, they do have the texts; they’ll write the histories as they write their land grants, along with the official marriage permits, for that matter. And they have, as their patrons, firm believers in Purity, racial and ritual, with a politico-theological manual ready at hand should the Temple community of Judah ever need any ideas for running a centralized administration, after all those crazy years of pitching tents and being chased by Arabs.

47 Consider the story of poor, honest Naboth and the evil Queen Jezebel. The murder of Naboth is narrated twice in the Old Testament, once in 2Kings 9, and once, very differently, in 1Kings 21. In the latter version, King Ahab is interested in Naboth’s vineyard. Naboth refuses to sell it, no matter what the price, and no matter how much Ahab insists, for the simple reason that he’d "inherited it from his fathers". Ahab goes home, tells his wife the Queen, lies down with his face to the wall, and starts sulking for days on end. We already fear the worst, for the Queen is a foreigner, and named "Jezebel" on top of that. Jezebel decides to write a letter to the town elders, declaring a celebration marking the beginning of a fast, and suggests that, instead of having the usual gentlefolk lead the festivities, it should be good old Naboth who be "placed high among the people". Then she calls her aides, tells them to find Naboth, now King of the Party, arrest him for taking liberties before God and the King, and stone him to death. Which they do. Hearing this, King Ahab stops sulking, gets out of bed, and starts making plans for the vineyard. Nabothgate catches up with him, however, for YHWH takes to cursing Ahab and Jezebel, and assuring them a miserable death, with dogs licking their blood and chewing their flesh before the city gates. So Ahab starts sulking again, and slouching around the city looking so miserable he makes God himself feel guilty. And so God suggests a compromise: Ahab will be spared, but his descendants will pay for what he did. YHWH doesn’t mention, let alone absolve Jezebel, who, in the other version of the story, is thrown out of a window by King Jehu and kicked to death, "her blood splattering the walls and the horses", 2Kings 9:33.

Naboth insists that his land belongs to him by virtue of his bloodline, and is victimized at the hands of those who care nothing for these hereditary rights, most notably by the scheming foreign wife, who brings disaster upon not only herself but, more importantly, upon her descendants as well. Naboth’s unconditional respect for his forefathers is echoed in many other narratives assumed to stem from this period, the stories of Joseph, Esther and Ruth (though the latter allows for a successful integration of a good foreign woman) all represent, in their various ways, an overall shift in emphasis towards kinship (moldot) rather than territory (aretz). Lineage is an obvious way to define who is clearly Jewish in the province of Israel, i.e. who qualifies for membership in the qahal-haggola, and it is the only way to authorize the newcomers to reclaim lands long appropriated by those who had stayed behind under the Babylonians. "Qahal haggola" - the "assembly of the exile" - a term for the circle that ran the temple institution, is still in use long after the exile had come to an end.

Several books dating from the Persian Period bear witness to ugly diatribes against impure aliens sullying the country and bringing the wrath of YHWH upon it, with the qahal-haggola resorting to forced separations, and threatening to exclude from the temple anyone married to a non-Jew (e.g. Ezra 10:1-8). More precisely, it is the local non-Jewish women that bear the brunt of the xenophobic measures adopted by the assembly, Persian women are of course never mentioned, nor are women from Babylon, which a number of the Temple employees had married during exile. According to Leila Ahmed, one of the few key points that changed everyday life (elsewhere) under the Achaemenid empire was women losing all economic and property rights, along with the right to appear as witnesses as in court. But in Israel, control over the women was all the more urgent in that, once married to the right man, even slaves automatically held substantial land rights, and could participate in temple assemblies. Divorce lead to the partial disinheritance of the Jewish family.

48 According to Nancy Jay’s Through your Generations Forever: Sacrifice, Religion and Paternity (University of California Press, 1993), the Persian period also marks the birth of Judaic animal sacrifice on a grand scale. Jay argues that sacrifice is a highly efficient method for control of the production of religious meaning, especially as a means of centralizing all communication with the transcendent powers that legitimate the social order. She uses examples of sacrificial practices from preindustrial societies in Athens, Rome, Hawaii, 19th century West Africa, ancient Israel, and the Aztecs and the Incas, and points out that one principal, recurrent motif is the exclusion of potential mothers from the rituals (i.e. admitting mostly only virgins and the elderly), the sarcastic conclusion to her study being that expiatory animal sacrifice is "a remedy for having been born of woman". Ancient Israel appears as one of Jay’s more clear-cut examples, where she traces a gradual development towards a centralized State that is paralleled by a shift from "communal peace offerings" toward "expiatory sacrifice under a centralized religious order". While biblical narratives from early sources, those commonly classified under "J" and "E", know nothing of centralized expiatory sacrifice, it is first pleaded for in "D", while "P" - commonly held to be unequivocally Persian period - actually takes its existence for granted. It is no coincidence, Jay argues, that if J recognizes bilinear descent (from figures like Sarah, Rebekah, or Rachel), and E confronts the "problem" with occasional sacrificial remedies, P doesn’t even acknowledge the possibility of matriliny. But again, even if one admitted to this neat development from J to P, couched within an equally neat progression in Judaic history, the hypothesis would require a close look at not only the different genealogical varieties within the written corpus, but also a distinction between textual source and popular practice, between (the self-proclaimed metonymics of) the Temple clubhouse and the enormous spaces surrounding it, a distinction one ignores at the risk of perpetuating patriliny by ignoring its counterparts.

53 Like other texts, laws, when challenged by exceptions to the rule, or by renegade interpretations, can only respond by producing more and more text to assert themselves. For its recent antinudity legislation, the state of Florida needed a long-winded legal definition of the human buttocks to finally identify what falls under the category of indecent public exposure: "The area at the rear of the human body which lies between two imaginary lines running parallel to the ground when a person is standing - the first or top of such line drawn at the top of the cleavage of the nates (i.e. the prominence formed by the muscles running from the back of the hip to the back of the leg) and the second or bottom line drawn at the lowest visible point of this cleavage or the lowest point of the curvature of the fleshy protruberance, whichever is lower, and - between two imaginary lines on each side of the body, which run perpendicular to the ground and to the horizontal lines described above, and which perpendicular lines are drawn through the point at which each nate meets the outer side of each leg [ etc.] ."

As theorist/visual artist Elizabeth Diller puts it, the body is continually reinscribed by a "complex weave of discourses including health, beauty, economy, and geography": in land law, property lines protect private space from transgressions from the public, whereas "the property lines that define the socially decent body defend public space from transgressions of the private(s)". "The play between property and propriety or the proper", she continues - i.e. between ownership, decency, and the inherently personal or distinctive - "is particularly intricate in considering the body as a legal site."

115 Architectural theorist Mark Wigley’s essay "Untitled: The Housing of Gender" discusses the Trattato di architettura civile e militare , written in 1482 by Francesco di Giorgio Martini, a leading architectural theorist of his time. Giorgio Martini draws largely on Vitruvius’ De architectura (written ca. 40 BC, and the only complete treatise on architecture to survive from antiquity; it was presumably unknown in its own time, though it was of considerable influence from the Renaissance onwards).

Within the boundaries of the model private household as defined in the Trattato, the lady of the house is free to roam wherever she pleases. What’s more, she alone holds the keys to all the locks in the house, every door, drawer, chest, closet, vault or safe is at her disposal. Even the husband’s bedroom remains accessible to her at all times (it is separated from hers by a wall, but a door allows husband and wife to pass from one room to the other without having to pass through the corridor). There’s only one exception, and that is the room adjacent to his bedroom - the wife has a dressing room attached to hers, while the husband’s room connects with a studio. The study is where the entire economy of the household is written and compiled; contracts, records, family trees, anecdotes, whatever. None of the missus’ many keys will fit the lock to this innermost kernel of the household. The details pertaining to family pedigree must be protected from those whose "convoluted boundaries make them the representatives of another patriarchal line", and who therefore couldn’t possibly be expected to keep a secret.

This private space of private writing makes available a new literary form, "which began as a record and a consolidation of the family but increasingly became a celebration of the private individual".

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