At the beginning of the Islamic Revolution, an anecdote circulated in Tehran about the Shiite clergy’s ability to adapt to changing circumstances without violating the prohibition against lying. Pursued by an armed group, a man flees through the streets of the capital. He meets a mullah heading to the mosque. “Save me,” cries the stranger, “if they catch me, they will kill me.” And he continues his flight, taking advantage of a few minutes’ head start on his attackers. The latter arrive an instant later at the same spot. They find the religious man lost in thought on a public bench. One of the armed men questions him about the fugitive. The answer comes without delay: “Since I have been sitting here, I have not seen anyone pass by.”
Iranians love stories. The one that Jean Paul Roux tells in his work on “Iran and the Iranians from the origins to our times” is thousands of years old. Long before our era, the inhabitants of Persia already lived in palaces. But these three millennia seem not to have altered the legendary capacity of the Persian to adapt. Foreign invasions, territorial occupations, new religions imposed by military victors or by usurpers after a coup d’état, nothing works: yesterday as today, the Iranian seems unshakeable. He waits his turn. He uses this time to discover and draw from the misfortune that strikes him a source of enrichment. Question a contemporary Iranian little suspected of supporting the Islamic regime and he will disconcert you with his answer: “In fifty or a hundred years, we’ll see!” Should one detect in this attitude the famous “takiye,” a central element of this typically Iranian psychology mentioned too quickly by Jean Paul Roux in his introduction? It describes this capacity for dissimulation which, faced with the persecutor’s demands, allows recourse to lying in order to preserve families and possessions.
The author devoted many years to the study of Oriental peoples and Indo-European civilizations. But in the “evening of his life,” he acknowledges the irreducible attraction that the country of Aryana, Iran and Afghanistan “under its new name,” and its peoples “aryans par excellence” exercised over his entire work, a term which in ancient Iranian as in Sanskrit, one continues to translate as “noble.”
Perhaps it is this nobility that aroused such covetousness. Conquerors indeed jostled at the gates of Iran: from the very beginning of the 7th century before our era, the first Scythian invasions cross territories already occupied by the Medes and Persians, peoples united—already—against the Mesopotamians. They will successively form the initial empires announcing the great dynasty of the Achaemenids. The tone is set. Greek hegemony under Alexander the Great, Chinese interventions, Arab conquest of the Umayyads, Turkish domination then “devastating” Mongol invasions, not to mention Russian incursions of the modern era, punctuate the history of this Iranian plateau. If these “passing guests” never miss an opportunity to shed blood, they also know how to bring in their baggage a religious culture, fragments of which will regularly nourish the Iranian psyche. In the mists of time—between the 14th and 7th centuries before our era!—is lost the origin of Zoroastrianism about which the author wonders whether Zoroaster (Zarathustra) was its founder or merely a reformer. Perhaps he simply existed. To this historical edifice, the other monotheisms will add their stone. Hence disturbing bridges with Christianity or Islam, identified by the author who nevertheless avoids any syncretism. If the religion of Muhammad finally imposed itself in Iran in 1501, it will only be under its marginal form, Shiism. As it will be unable to eradicate the original foundations. Even today, Iranians celebrate the Zoroastrian festival of the last Wednesday before the new year. This celebration allows all inhabitants of a neighborhood to gather around a fire, fueled by old domestic furniture. It gives rise to a particular ritual: the youngest take a running start, rush toward the flames which they jump over while pronouncing an incantatory formula aimed at, for the coming year, “throwing one’s weaknesses into the fire and taking its strength from it.” Placed under the close supervision of Islamic committees, this event precedes another, that of the thirteenth day after the Iranian new year. Less followed in the modern era, it consists of leaving the house to spend an entire day in the countryside or forest, so as to “let the evil spirits” empty the places they occupied the previous year.
Contribution but not fusion. The “great conservatism” of the Iranian language bears witness to this. Under the Caliphate of Damascus, the Arabic language will be provisionally adopted before finally being “repudiated.” Language, religion, culture, the Iranian borrows but does not lose itself. He preserves his intimacy. Hence this clear distinction still in effect between “biroun” and “andaroun,” what happens outside the house and the actions within the walls, literally the harem. In Zoroastrianism, is not the “self that preexists” feminine?
Jean-Paul Roux, History of Iran and the Iranians, From the Origins to the Present Day, Fayard, 2006, 513 p., 25 euros.
Jlvannier@free.fr
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