Professor Ehsan YARSHATER [and Roxana SABERI, journalist].
"The True Face of Iran"
By Nassrine AZIMI
Published: September 27, 2013.
HIROSHIMA — Ehsan YARSHATER, for 50 years the face of Iran at Columbia University, was born in the ancient capital of Ekbatan, today’s Hamadan, at the foot of Mount Alvand in western Iran. Orphaned at a young age but brilliant and thirsting for knowledge, Yarshater grew up to become one of the foremost scholars of the Persian language.
His contributions to the field of Iranian studies are impressive, but it is to his life’s work — the monumental "Encyclopaedia Iranica" — that Yarshater has dedicated the most of his erudition. As general editor and the heart and soul of a massive project involving over 1,300 international scholars, he has kept the work alive against all odds for more than four decades. In an interview, the 93-year-old scholar was once asked whether he missed his homeland. He responded that his every waking hour was spent studying the real Iran, so how could he ever miss it ?
As President Hassan ROUHANI attends the U.N. General Assembly opening in New York — to present, as he has announced, the “true face of Iran” at meetings, events and interviews — one must hope he will aptly convey the diversity of the land and its peoples, including the close to four million worldwide who form the Iranian diaspora.
I am one of those millions. Many of us have not returned to the land of our birth since the 1979 Islamic revolution.
We are Zoroastrian, Jewish and Armenian, Muslim, Bahai and agnostic. We have embraced new citizenships — becoming American (a majority) and Canadian, Swiss and Swede, Italian and Australian, Turk and Malaysian. We form one of the world’s best-educated and better-integrated diaspora. Diversity is part and parcel of our lives — on a global scale. Families like mine, which includes Norwegian public servants, Swedish physicians, British teachers, and American business owners and engineers — are quite the norm.
Most of us have also experienced the bitterness of exile and separation, and anxiety for our loved ones in Iran. We have dealt with foreign ignorance, fear or pity, at times hung our head in despair watching Iran’s rulers trample basic human rights, and cringed throughout the eight years of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s miserable presidency.
And it has always been clear to us, too, that the ills afflicting our ancient homeland went beyond it. The region that was once the cradle of civilization has been absent from the great march of humanity in recent decades — absent in scientific innovations, in literary and artistic achievements, in space discovery, in medical breakthroughs, in the realm of competitive sports or industrial patents. It has too few Nobel Prize winners, and too few foreign students competing for its universities.
From Iraq to Libya, from Syria to Afghanistan, from Egypt to Pakistan — too many nations in our region have paid dearly for their rejection of diversity and of intellectual discord, of the equating of identity with mere religion. Too many of our leaders have been self-anointed or incompetent tyrants who mismanaged our economies. Even when and where oil has brought great wealth, it has been for just a few, and has come with conflict and corruption.
When I travel around Japan I frequently hear the question, “Where are you from?” When I say I was born in Iran, people look vague. Few have ever been there. Yet the moment I mention my Swiss background, studies or citizenship, people are suddenly talkative: “Ah, Switzerland — so peaceful — my daughter just visited ... ”.
Why is it so hard to imagine hearing someone someday exclaiming: “Ah, Baghdad! Ah, Tehran! Aleppo! Kabul! Lahore! Damascus! Such ancient gems, so beautiful, so peaceful ... ”
Iraq, where in 2003 all of the American-led delusion and Middle Eastern collusion came to a head, is in its broken, violent state today a reminder of where so much small-mindedness can lead to: Shiite fighting Sunni; neighborhood fighting neighborhood. And what to do, but helplessly watch the suffering and the disintegration of Syria?
In 2005, Ghanim al-Jumaily, the Iraqi ambassador to Japan and now its envoy to Saudi Arabia, attended a conference on governance and reconstruction that my office had organized in Hiroshima. An elegant man and accomplished scientist, with patents in the field of optical communications, he said that Iraq’s salvation could come from seeking commonalities, embracing its vast, long civilization in its fullness, instead of focusing on the smaller print — its religious differences. The ambassador’s insights ring ever more true today.
Walking the corridors of the United Nations in New York, Rouhani may pause in front of the glass container where a replica of the Cyrus Cylinder is being shown. A small clay tablet engraved in the 6th century B.C., it talks of tolerance, respect and diversity. The original is now touring the United States, on loan from the British Museum. The Persian Empire’s great King Cyrus already knew that inclusiveness, compromise and pragmatism bond nations and assure loyalties far better than brute force and ideology.
Rouhani’s statements suggest that he understands the stakes. Iran’s destiny is tied to whole Middle East: Either there will be shared prosperity, or no prosperity. He represents the majority view — in Iran and elsewhere. We can but hope that he will be able to convince the zealots in Tehran and Jerusalem, Riyadh and Washington, of the justness and the urgency of his cause.
Nassrine AZIMI is a senior adviser at the "United Nations Institute for Training and Research" ("Unitar") in Hiroshima.
