Iran, A Modern History is the kind of serious book that beckons reader’s commitment; it is too thick to be portable, too dense with information to be dipped into and out of, and yet so compelling as to be read from cover to cover. There is no other history of Iran that does exactly what this book accomplishes. It firmly situates the transition into the modern age in Iranian history within the Safavid era (founded in 1501) but keeps the historical trajectory fluid, searching for the textures of continuity or change, interventions from high up—dynastic waves—to those from the street, through the nuances of grand historical narratives and intimate memoirs, and through texts as much as through the built environment. An eminent scholar of the Qajar era, Professor Amanat’s expertise anchors the entire 500-year history of Iran, producing an extraordinary balance between the breadth of sweeping events and the micro-level of significant detail. Such is the scope of the book that it has warranted a special cluster of reviews to reflect on Amanat’s monumental undertaking and I am genuinely honored to have been invited to take part here.
This review is cast mainly through the lens of cultural history and especially the history of the arts and architecture of Iran as recounted in the book. On that account, it should be said that the author has done something few historians of pre-modern Iran have offered us: he has systematically consolidated into his historical analyses, and the grand narratives of the periods he covers, aspects of the cultural production otherwise and often seen as too ephemeral or unstable for a hardcore, text-fixated historian. In each of its four parts—each of which could easily be a book on its own—the historian’s viewfinder has scanned a vast array of evidence, among which are embedded those of art and material culture, architecture and urbanism. The “cultural” segments of each part weave into the discussion the distinctive developments of the age as inseparable from religious, political, economic, intellectual and personal narratives. These traces of human creativity take on a remarkable range, including poetry and painting, buildings and urban spaces, gardens and palaces, mosques and churches, and in the periods since the Qajars, modern technologies and new artistic modes, including photography, cartoons, posters and stamps among others.
Taking such expressions as architecture and painting, for instance, as integral to the fabric of history leads to richer insights into any given topic. For example, the doom and gloom histories of the second Safavid century, so often repeated that they have become a truism in scholarship, are here reexamined in light of the more complex confluence of devastating political and economic decisions, of European exploitations—Dutch syphoning off of huge amounts of Safavid silver—but also of the catastrophic outbreak of syphilis and the adverse effects of climate change. Even so, Amanat takes note that despite the spread of disease, of increased royal apathy or serious mismanagement on every level, among other causes of decline, the seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Safavid dominions enjoyed a brilliant period of cultural effervescence. The urban good life and cosmopolitan flair of the late Safavid era were not an aberration. Rather, as Amanat astutely observes, they were signs of complex dynamics of the early modern Safavid society, as elsewhere in the Islamic world or Europe.
Indeed, the fact that Amanat has drawn inspiration for his narrative from art and architectural history is among his most distinctive contributions to the writing of the history of pre-modern Iran. The more common approach ignores the non-textual altogether or tends toward an occasional mention in passing of the major monuments or commissions under a reigning monarch of a certain era. Not to be preachy here, but the charisma of the built environment and material culture is not simply for the adornment of the historian’s retelling of events. Amanat, a pure historian of texts and not of art and architecture, objects and spaces, has paved the way, I think, by capturing the built and the manufactured (art and architecture and urbanism) as purveyors of subtleties of historical information, and of the pulse of a period and a place. His Isfahan of Shah Abbas was truly gratifying to read.
Equally rich is the interface between new technologies and representational strategies deployed by Qajar artists and encouraged by their patrons. Printing (of books, lithographed images, journals and propaganda material) and photography and its impact are inseparable from the historical trajectories of the nineteenth century and pave the way for the emergence of Iran’s modernities. It is somewhat surprising, on the other hand, to see so little space devoted to the important role played by art and especially architecture in the nation-building enterprise of the Pahlavi era while giving so much to the propaganda “art” of the post-revolutionary Iran.
There are a few other points to make, in particular an unfortunate mistreatment of the arts. This is in fact crucial to underscore: there is no fixed shari’a-based ban on figural representation in Islam. There may be some anxiety toward images in Islam, leading to negotiated image-making that varies in different periods and geographies of the Islamic world. Accordingly, the Qajar low-relief carved images on the rock faces or other figurative images are not intrinsically anti-Islamic (e.g. p. 186). Denizens of Safavid Isfahan saw large-size figurative compositions on the walls of the entrance to the publicly accessible Qaysariyya marketplace; the urban elite enjoyed seeing such images in the houses and palaces of the city. Another point of discontent for the art historian is the view that the visual and building arts of the Qajar era, especially of the period of Naser al-Din Shah, were inspired for the most part by European models. The Qajar obsession with the Safavids (innumerable Qajar replicas in lacquer of the Safavid wall paintings in the Chehel Sotun Palace), at least in artistic and architectural terms, would be worth considering before giving European visits too much credit. For example, the Tālār-e Salām reception hall or the Mirror Hall in the Golestān Palace may evoke something of the Hermitage in St. Petersburg or the Hall of Mirrors in Versailles but it seems more compelling to consider the Chehel Sotun or Tālār-e Āyeneh (Hall of Mirrors) in Isfahan as models. The Qajar urban design of Tehran and especially of the spatial and visual dialogue between the palace and the public square (maydān), or the boulevards was keenly alert to the urban layout of Isfahan.
If I may also indulge in one point of “criticism”—and I do so with utter humility—it would be to say that the use of images, of paintings in particular, are more illustrative of an episode in history that Professor Amanat wishes to explore than a useful weaponizing tool as the visual material can be. Painting does indeed offer us glimpses into the “thinking,” not to mention the emotional experience, of times long past. Buildings and urban vistas speak through style, forms, sights and sites of sensory experiences otherwise scarcely available through text. Like poetry, visual and material culture carry traces of the lived experience, insinuating historical knowledge other than what texts provide. Notwithstanding these quibbles on behalf of the visual cultures of Iran, the reader is treated in this book to a richly illustrated array of material. The color plates on their own offer an especially fascinating pictorial “history.”
Abbas Amanat’s judicious selection of a diversity of topics is impressive in the way he weaves in and out of sources with sensitivity towards the challenge of a synthesis. He navigates the mass of modern research, some of which remain contested—the post-Safavid chaos or the causes of the collapse of the Pahlavis—and others nearly taboo for the historian—the Babi and Baha’i facets of Iran’s modern history—to offer close readings and careful rethinking of the sources. Iran, A Modern History is a remarkable feat: it is comprehensive, inclusive and hugely fun to read.
