63. Iran: a Modern History by Abbas Amanat

My best friend is Iranian and his father recommended this book as a "pretty good history" of modern Iran.  He does not praise lightly!  Starting in 1500 and going right up to the end of the Iran-Iraq war and the Green Revolution of 2009, it answered all the big picture questions I had about Iran as well as filling in some significant gaps in the surrounding region.  It does so in a readable, yet still scholarly style, so I found it to be quite a page-turner actually.

My biggest question was how Iran/Persia remained a coherent nation (or maybe became one) with distinct language and religion from the rest of the middle east.  In answering this question, Amanat also really helped me understand the distinction between Shi'i and Sunni Islam (though I still don't know the origin of the split as that happened before 1500 I guess).  I also wanted to know better England's role in Iran's history.  I hadn't realized that Iran was never actually colonized, though it got pretty damn close.  

It's hard to write about a 900+ page book covering 600 years of history.  My big takeaways are that Iran is an amazing country with a rich and complex culture.  A lot of bad shit went down there (I thought the second Shah Pahlavi was bad then Khomeini is like hold my beer) and much of today's Iran is found in the diaspora after the Islamic Revolution.  It makes you wish that it can find a way to one day move to a more pluralistic society not dependent on autocracy and repression to grow.  It seems so often that despite changes in ideology, countries' basic structure of government seems to often adhere to their pre-modern roots.  Russia had czars and now they have a "President".  China had emperors and now Chairmen.  Iran had Shahs and now an Ayatollah.  Very hard to say what could shake that.  Another point is that Iran was never not fucked with by external forces.  At its borders, the Russians were up to constant fuckery, the Ottaman empire and then Iraq (to be fair this was more of a back and forth) and of course the British basically taking over all of Iran's oil.  Amanat is quite fair, though, in laying responsibility for Iran's mistakes equally at Iran itself as well as the outside forces.  He also gives credit for various government managing to maintain the slimmest Iranian polity when it seemed like the country was going to be split in half or uttery dominated.

Coincidentally, as I was in Vancouver finishing the book, there was a Parviz Tanavoli exhibit at the Vancouver Art Gallery.  Amanat spends a page or two on him and his contribution to Iranian modern art.  The exhibit was fantastic, adding depth to my reading.  Tanavoli captures a lot of history in his work, many of his pieces look like modernity enclosing traditional Persian forms and motifs while those forms and motifs resist back making a dynamic that felt like I was looking at the tension of Iran in a single statue.  Cool stuff.

Finally, I have to make a point about eurocentrism.  Earlier this year, I finished J.M. Roberts' Penguin History of the World, which I quite liked.  Roberts makes the argument that because Europe dominated most of the world through colonization and its political forms that the lens of world history should focus on Europe.  I don't entirely disagree with that article, but now that I have read this history of Iran, I see how much basic history of this region was missing from Robert's book.  Even if a region didn't have impact on the world (which is questionable, especially today), you still have to get its history into a history of the world.  I learned more about the history of India, the Arab world, Afghanistan and even Russia from Amanat's work in his tangential backgrounds to those regions connections with Iran.

Here are some photos I took of Tanavoli's work.