In 1977 Iran found itself playing host to two remarkable American visitors. Lee Majors, the star of the highly popular Six Million Dollar Man, had decided to spend his honeymoon with his new bride, Farah Fawcett, in the one place he thought no one would know them. He was in for quite a surprise. As the couple entered Iran, they found themselves seized upon by Iranian television reporters excitedly in search of an interview, which the bewildered and somewhat exhausted couple graciously provided, patiently sitting through the sort of banal questions often thrown at celebrities (“Was Farah Fawcett really named after the Empress Farah?”) and an Iranian TV mock-up of the bionic man in action. It was an extraordinary moment—one that your reviewer remembers all too well—and all the more remarkable because, within a year, relations between Iran and the United States had plummeted to a state of mutual hostility from which they have yet to recover.
Quite how this happened is charted in this elegant and erudite study by Kashani-Sabet. The author situates the better known political history in a broader cultural canvas, restoring much of the nuance of the relationship that has been lost over the last forty-four years. Too often, assessment of US–Iran relations focuses on the power politics, without drawing back to look at the wider cultural lens that witnessed decades of cultural appreciation on both sides, as Americans discovered the Orient and the romance of “Persia,” and Iranians admired the can-do spirit of a thoroughly modern country, which, initially at least, carried none of the stigma associated with European imperialism, most obviously that of Britain and Russia.
Kashani-Sabet does not ignore the political tribulations that followed, but is careful to detail the cultural links that underpin that relationship, which go some way to explaining the often contradictory nature of the relationship to this day. That the hostage takers had the temerity to ask their newly released captives whether they might get a visa to go to the United States can only be explained by this deeper admiration, even if at that particular moment it was far from mutual.
Here we have a detailed discussion of the growth of Persian studies in the United States in the nineteenth century, building on and extending the work of British Orientalists such as Rawlinson to gain a deeper understanding of the Persian Empire and its contribution to wider civilization. Informal networks of missionaries in this period helped foster a deeper understanding of Persian language and culture, such that in 1849 the American Whig Review discussed the genius of Ferdowsi and introduced their readers to the Shahnameh, and the National Magazine introduced its readers to Hafiz and Saadi.
Iranians for their part were encouraged to participate in the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893 and enthusiastically took part, engaging with the US commissioner, one “Cyrus” Adler, his name suggestive of the deep American Protestant affection for this particular Persian biblical hero. The exhibition provided many affluent Americans with their first encounter with the Persian carpet, soon to become a much sought after status symbol. P. T. Barnum, who appears to have had an acute taste for all things Persian, named his home “Iranistan.” It was, of course, the art historian Arthur Upham Pope who really put Persian art, and carpets in particular, on the map. Pope, as Kashani-Sabet notes, has a controversial reputation but his impact can scarcely be denied, and he was ably assisted in his promotion of Persian art by the nationalism of the new Pahlavi monarchy and its supporters.
If American diplomats occasionally worried about the nature of development in Pahlavi Iran, they nevertheless remained wedded to a particular idea of Iranian exceptionalism, a view they shared with British colleagues, who likewise approached the country with a degree of admiration tempered by political cynicism. This became apparent during the Allied occupation of World War II, and most obviously during the oil nationalization crisis that followed. Kashani-Sabet does not dwell on the politics of the coup, but instead focuses on the cultural consequences that followed, with some perceptive insights into the way in which close cultural associations fostered dissident opinion.
If the United States was keen to develop its relations with the shah and to frame its relations with Iran through the lens of the Cold War, the underlying cultural relationship was growing in different and interesting ways. This was the era of civil rights and Vietnam, mass media, education, and travel. Iranian students were traveling to the United States in ever greater numbers and engaging with a popular subculture that was far from the hallowed halls of Niavaran Palace or the White House. Iranians had first encountered the West selectively, as diplomats, missionaries, and intellectuals. Then, in the twentieth century, during two world wars and with growing economic ties, there were wider encounters with business people who had little more than a passing interest in Iran and its culture.
From the mid-twentieth century onward, more educated Iranians were traveling abroad and seeing firsthand that their idealized vision of the West was riven with contradictions. It was not only disconcerting, it seemed like a betrayal. When the American tennis player Arthur Ashe visited Tehran to play in the Aryamehr tennis tournament, he gave an interview in which he described the various ways in which he had tried to help the more deprived communities in his native Mississippi. Similarly, Muhammad Ali's objections to the Vietnam War were to prove a revelation. As Kashani-Sabet notes, “Through Ashe, Ali, and other civil rights advocates, Iranians came to know America's Black citizens, not only its white ambassadors, as they began to see the fight against racism in color.”
Mirroring the relationship between Britain's Persia Committee with the Constitutional Revolutionaries of 1906, Iran's new revolutionaries related to a different type of American, ones who shared their common struggle, with whom they could identify as “oppressed.” It should come as no surprise that the student revolutionaries who seized the embassy in 1979 swiftly released their Black captives. The Iranian government also sought to broaden its appeal by developing relations with sub-Saharan Africa, but it could never do so with quite the authenticity of those struggling for political rights, not least because of the US government's involvement in Vietnam and the shah's own ambivalent relationship with democracy.
The tragedy of the hostage crisis was that the diplomats who were taken captive on November 4, 1979, were not the traditional “white ambassadors” of old. With the fall of the shah the US had wisely reduced its diplomatic footprint in Iran and replaced the old hands with individuals largely drawn from the very dissident culture the revolutionaries sought to identify with. These were former Peace Corps volunteers who had lived in Iran, often in the provinces, well beyond the imperial glitz of north Tehran, and knew and understood both the language and culture like few others. They were the very people calculated to have sympathy for the newly liberated masses of Iran, who might in better circumstances have navigated a route to a more productive and realistic relationship shorn of the simplistic idealism of earlier times. Instead, the relationship stalled, with a mutual appreciation giving way to apparent loathing. Yet, beneath the political grime, there are glimpses of an intimacy not altogether lost, which in time may lay the foundations for a flourishing recovery.
