We arrive at Heathrow for our long-planned trip to Iran an hour or so after the Royal Navy "captives" fly in from Tehran. It will be interesting to see how British visitors to Iran are regarded. My previous visit, in 1999, was as a member of a parliamentary delegation, trying to promote détente, and we were pretty coolly received in Tehran.
On the Iran Air flight, I watch the Iranian film, with subtitles. This is an "Upstairs-Downstairs"-style comedy, starring a lovable but ridiculous manservant, and the efforts of the family in which he is employed to marry him off to a shrewish but also lovable kitchen maid. The employers—from the monied professional class—are generally presented as sympathetic and well-meaning, but definitely superior. The social atmosphere is that of an inter-war French farce. My Iranian fellow passengers watch the film with evident enjoyment—this is a self-portrait they seem to recognise.
Sunday 8th April
After two days visiting Shiraz and Persepolis, where I have been before, we call in at Pasargadae, which is new to me—and which makes a profound impression. An immense upland plain, brown sand and rock with scant vegetation, this was the homeland of Cyrus the Great, the founder of the Persian empire in the early 500s BC, and the place where he chose to set his mark in stone upon the land. Only foundations and column bases remain, but the meaning of the monumental complex is clear—places of political and religious ritual serving an empire which stretched from the borders of India to Egypt and the Aegean: the first stone structures in what had up until then been a land of tents. This is one of those places where a sense of great beginnings is palpable.
This is where the "Persian idea" was born, and I reflect on its impressive consequences—not only the existence of modern Iran itself, with its outliers in central Asia, Afghanistan and northwest India (the Mughal empire and modern Pakistan), but also its role as the "significant other" not only to the Greeks but also to the Romans, for whom the Parthians and their Sasanian successors were the only rival world power. Persian monarchy was the model for Hellenistic kingship, and also for late-Roman and Byzantine empire: through these intermediaries our English monarchy is a distant echo of the institutions which Cyrus planted here. Yet under the impact of Islam, from the late 600s AD onwards, all this faded from local memory.
Monday 9th April
Here in Isfahan, as in Shiraz, there are numerous images of Iran's two "supreme leaders," the successors of Iran's long line of shahs. But this political iconography is very different from that ubiquitous elsewhere in the near east. For one thing, there is much less of it—and for another, the human type is quite different. In Turkey, Egypt, Syria and Libya, the leader is a man of action (Atatürk, Mubarak, al-Assad, Gaddafi), and in Arabia and the Gulf he is a fat cat. But in Iran, we have two different kinds of Oxbridge don—the founding Khomeini (forceful, cunning) and his successor Ali Khameini (benevolent, perhaps a touch ineffectual?).
The streets over which the bearded gaze of the supreme leaders looks out are bustling. High oil and gas prices are fuelling a consumer and building boom: at the street level there is absolutely no sign of economic sanctions. These cities are better run—cleaner streets, properly maintained pavements, roads and public buildings—than any I have recently visited in India, Turkey or across the region: the level is more that of the Balkans than that of the "middle east." There are quite a few German and Italian tourists, but few British. As I walk through the streets, everyone tries to engage me in conversation ("Hello!" "How are you!"), and they are all delighted to welcome "an English." There are no signs of ill-feeling—quite the reverse.
Tuesday 10th April
Last night we attended a display of athletic prowess at a zurkhaneh, or wrestling gymnasium. Fifteen men and youths, mostly in their early 20s but led by a muscular chap in his mid-30s, displayed their manly strength in a set of co-ordinated manoeuvres to the sound of a drum and chanted commentary. The origins of this may go back to the days of Cyrus and his "Immortals." But the accompanying chant, and the cries called out by the performers, are thoroughly Islamic, and specifically Shia. Muhammad and Ali are the models for these strong men.
Here we glimpse something, I think, of the force which lies behind Iran's Shia "theocracy," integrating these sweaty working-class lives with the sublimities of the great blue and turquoise mosque, the Masjid-i Imam, which is Isfahan's most striking icon. The Savafid rulers who built this in the 16th century created a new Persian identity built around Shiism, rather as earlier rulers had built an earlier Persian identity around fire-worshipping Zoroastrianism. Shiism in Iran is a powerful integration of religious impulses, theology, philosophy, politics, poetry and Sufi mysticism, with a strong ability to unite the masses under clerical leadership. Its presence in the post-secular world of the 21st century should not be underestimated.
Wednesday 11th April
We drive past the Iranian nuclear research centre near Natanz, which is quite visible from the road. It is not a large facility, and the watchtowers and anti-aircraft gun emplacements dotted here and there do not seem very impressive. Although the local press is censored, all the world's television is available, and in my hotel last night I saw the brother of Ali Larijani, the Iranian nuclear negotiator, being interviewed by BBC World in Davos. He remarks that if facilities such as Natanz were to be bombed, this would only set Iran back a couple of years: what matters, he says, is the intellectual property, and this is what Iran is fast acquiring.
Friday 14th April
Through friends in the carpet business, I have been invited to Iranian homes here in Tehran and also in Yazd. My hosts were educated in England, and speak of it with admiration. They do not like the Iranian regime—their attitude to President Ahmadinejad is strongly flavoured with contempt for a social inferior—but it strikes me that they are not really uncomfortable in revolutionary Iran. The "reference countries" for Iran are Turkey, Pakistan, the Arabs of the Gulf, perhaps Russia—and against such comparators, Iran does not feel too bad. The former upper classes have been removed, there is scope for moderate economic enterprise, with no competition from big capital or from the outside world, and although public speech is not free, private grumbling is licensed. Everywhere there is order and discipline. The social world of the Iranian middle classes is indeed not all that different from the one portrayed in the film on the plane coming out here. A Marxist might perhaps say that the 1979 revolution should be understood, in spite of its clericalism, as a "bourgeois revolution," to be set alongside those of the 1640s in England, 1776 in America and 1789 in France.
