THE MAXIM REDEFINED: MODERN SCIENTIFIC NEUROPHYSIOLOGIZATION OF “THE MIND”

In an article on psychology,

Ali Akbar Siyasi stressed that its object of investigation, the mind, is not a vague, metaphysical thing.

⁷

Exemplifying my argument that the modernists' reinterpretation of the mind revolved around (a nondeterministic type of) physiologization, he argued that

Siyasi's treatment of the problem of the mind embraced two key components, which illustrate the reinterpretation of

aql. First, he departed from traditional notions of the mind or spirit as an entity, transforming it into a multitude of operations and processes: thoughts, memory, feelings, and so on. He and his peers were interested not in the name or essence of this “thing” but in how it functions and can be instrumentalized. While in everyday use, nafs or rūh still designated soul or spirit and

aql signified reason, the modernist scientific view of body and mind made such distinctions irrelevant,

⁹

pitting them against metaphysical, religious understandings of soul and mind. In his lectures on psychology, for instance, Q. Ghani did not deny the existence of metaphysical forces or things—“the interior and the hidden nature of things”—incomprehensible to the human mind, but insisted that only modern natural sciences offer relevant data and theses for any “part which is comprehensible,…the external things.”¹⁰

This included mind and body, and he held that thoughts, feelings, will, and so on are physiological per se, or the outcome of physiological processes. Probably in allusion to the fact that he lectured at Tehran University's Faculty of Theology, he stressed that these principles “are undeniable…. [O]nce we leave their limits, we leave certain/investigative science (

ilm-i tahqīqī) behind us and enter meta-physics (māvarā

al-tabīy

at).”

¹¹

Opposition to the theoretical dimension of religious understanding of mind was doubled up by critique of what was seen as its main practical manifestation: traditional religious education. It underlines that the modern middle class's scientific knowledge and practice was set up against other social groups. It also accentuates its ability to exploit its interstitial position linking global and local social circles by employing knowledge acquired in the former to buttress its position in the latter. In the present case, that move was illustrated by trenchant critique of the ulama. While the “separation of mind from body” was seen also to have characterized the European Middle Ages—but was corrected by the West's modern “civilized nations”¹²

—the clergy's maktabs and madrasihs were condemned for their lack of hygiene (insufficient air, sun, space) and the fact that the absence of physical exercise damages the mental and physical health of the pupils.¹³

The second point in Siyasi's text is his location of mental processes in the activity of the brain and the nervous system. Attention was centered on how mental processes are linked to neurophysiological processes. This focus constituted the central hallmark of both popular and specialized modernist texts discussing the functioning of the mind.¹⁴

The nervous system was perceived as the site of mental activity and disease; the brain's role in mental activity was discussed; and the connections between nervous system and brain were underlined and metaphorically likened to the telegraph.¹⁵ Specialized texts on psychology and psychiatry also stressed the importance of neurophysiology for the understanding of mental phenomena. Expert literature referred to the different Western sources of this new understanding. Thus, not only late-19th-century determinist physiological psychologists such as Wundt and Ribot, but also the newer generation as represented by Janet and the philosopher Bergson, who advocated less deterministic approaches, were well known.¹⁶ Finally, the physiologization of mental activities also became part of discussions of broader issues such as regeneration, medical treatment, education, the identity of the Iranian race, and criminology.¹⁷

This physiologization of the mind was not entirely new, though. Since the mid-19th century, Western physiology had entered Iran via the Dar al-Funun (opened in 1851), and émigré Iranian intellectuals, such as Mirza Agha Khan Kirmani (1853–96), living in Istanbul since the late 1880s were acquainted with it, too. However, far fewer Iranians were involved in these debates before the 1910s than after that decade, reflecting the emergence of a small circle of secular intellectuals into a modern middle class. In addition, contexts changed. After the 1910s, criticism of the Constitutional Revolution's failure to modernize Iran by political-institutional means intertwined with louder calls for thorough sociocultural reforms, investing these issues with a much higher degree of importance. Second, the medical-intellectual context differed: early- to mid-20th-century modernists' version of the “physiologized mind” did not concur with the more radically materialist accounts of the mid- to late 19th century, exemplified by Kirmani's mechanist vocabulary.¹⁸

This modification was rooted in changing psychological and medical views of the mind developed in Western countries, to which Iranian modernists were introduced while studying abroad—above all, in France, which until 1945 hosted most Iranian students. Two particularly well-documented cases are those of Siyasi and Sadiq,¹⁹

who were first introduced to these views through their studies at French écoles normales (teachers' colleges) in 1911–14, where they followed courses on morale laïque that mirrored the changed medical views of the mind. While the two decades after the 1848 revolution had witnessed great confidence in Central and Western Europe in a distinctly determinist version of natural science as the solution for all problems of the modern age, and Comteian positivism and a materialist scientism were blooming, various events and processes soon cast shadows of doubt on the feasibility of permanent progress. Since the 1870s, a new French generation of center-left liberal professionals and scientists constituting the Third Republic's political elite attacked the materialist tenet that man was determined by hereditary genetic factors and biological physiological processes. They stressed the role of the social-milieu and human-will view that entered the 1882 law decreeing the instruction of morale laïque in primary schools. Rejecting Catholic metaphysical antisensationalism and scienticistic determinism, French republicans identified psychology as morale laïque's scientific underpinning but reformulated Ribot's deterministic biologist psychology of the 1870s. Jules Payot, author of various texts on morality, composed the textbooks that after the late 1890s were used by French schools, including the écoles normales where Sadiq and Siyasi studied after 1911. Discarding both determinst-automatist views of the human being and Cousin's theory that moral liberty is effortlessly secured, Payot's L'éducation de la volonté and instruction manual Cours de Morale advocated a psychologie de la volonté, arguing that the duty to control one's willpower allies awareness of organic-physical nature with knowledge of one's mental-psychological constitution.²⁰ Therefore, while mental processes were physiologized as located in the brain and the nervous system, they were not seen to be determined solely by physiological structures.

It was precisely this approach, departing from earlier materialist views such as Kirmani's, that had been advanced since the early 20th century by Iranian modernists' texts on the nature of the mind and its connection to the body. Echoing other authors, Siyasi reflected this pattern particularly well. He preserved the differentiation between “mind” (rūh) and “body” (jism), and his terminologically explicit grounding of this intermediary position between French “spiritualistes” and “matérialistes” underlines the influence of the French view that people are constituted by a mental-psychological and an organic-physiological element.²¹

THE MAXIM APPLIED: UNDERSTANDING DISEASE AND STRESS IN THE MODERN AGE

The modern neurophysiological understanding of body and mind was not confined to theory, though. Rather, it was of great practical relevance, on one side, for helping to contain various diseases—especially venereal diseases and drug addictions—seen to be on the rise in and caused by modern Iranian society, and, on the other side, for tackling hitherto unknown strains on body and mind. Some of the latter were triggered by the speed and technologization of the modern “machine age” and seen to harm all urbanites alike. Others were caused by modern professional life and believed particularly to affect the modern middle class. This view reflects an understanding of modernity and modernization that was all but simplistic. Rather than having only beneficial effects, modernization was seen to pose new threats, with its social, technological, and economic shifts harboring hitherto unknown dangers for human beings. Truly enough, these shifts were accepted by the modern middle class as indispensable pillars for the creation of a modern industrialized nation and as a challenge to injurious traditional habits. However, as in the West, where the very source of strength—rapid industrialization—simultaneously created problems that caused growing concern toward the turn of the century, so in “underdeveloped” Iran, too, transformations were not only praised for their positive results. They were also feared to create personal pathologies, threatening the vision of modernization and a progressive, disciplined, productive society.²²

In fact, psychologists and psychiatrists stressed the general threat posed by modern civilization's pressure on mental health. The psychiatrist Mirsipasi warned of a drastic increase of “moral insanity” in Iran, claiming that contemporary Iranian society was degenerating into moral “nothingness” (nīstī) and concluding that

Modern civilization posed not only direct but also indirect threats to mental health. In fact, the danger posed by traditionally endemic diseases such as malaria was exacerbated by problems described as particularly modern phenomena: venereal diseases, especially syphilis, and drug (specifically opium) addiction. Thus, it was argued that modern civilization not only was a direct cause of mental disease, but also could function as an underlying, “foundational” (mehiyāsāzī) cause that created and accelerated problems favoring mental diseases. In this context, alcohol and opium addiction were seen as two particularly dangerous “external factors” that “hastened insanity”—an urgent problem especially in large, growing cities such as Tehran, where any excess was possible and where wine and spirits were freely produced, sold, and consumed.²⁴

Iranians' perception of syphilis was influenced by an awareness of the immense apprehension it had been causing in Europe since the late 19th century.²⁵

This venereal disease was believed to be spreading in Iran's cities—affecting 20–40 percent of the population—and increasingly in villages. It was also believed to have been disseminated beyond previous levels by European armies during World War I and to be further accelerated by mushrooming prostitution, which many advised should be brought under medical and police control patterned on European countermeasures. On the one side, prostitution was seen as the supply-side answer to higher demand created by the rising marriage age of male bachelors, and on the other side, it was described as the result of abject poverty and adverse socioeconomic circumstances. One author, Dushan, posited a direct cause-and-effect relationship between growing prostitution and Iran's incorporation into the world economy.²⁶ This modern problem was all the more worrying because venereal diseases had the capacity to affect the mental state of the afflicted. Although most authors clarified that syphilis first affected the skin and various internal organs, they stressed that—commencing in its so-called third stage, at the latest—it seriously degraded the nervous system and the brain.²⁷ Another aggravating factor was syphilis's inheritable nature, which caused many children to be stillborn or “epileptic, hysteric, or insane.”²⁸

With regard to drug addiction, opium's deleterious effects on addicts' physical constitution was noted, and its mental effects were understood to be caused by the opiate's impact on the nervous system.²⁹

The manifestations of such addiction—loss of concentration, diminution of intelligence, loss of willpower—were, as in the case of venereal diseases, seen to have grave consequences for social and, especially, family life.³⁰ Moreover, as with venereal diseases, modern life was seen to be at the root of increasing opium addiction. Western powers were accused of having instigated opium production and addiction, and it was argued that opium production and addiction had mushroomed only since the late 19th century:³¹ it was on the rise because many people were seeking to escape from the “sorrow, anxiety, nervousness, and thousand other diseases which belong to our contemporary civilization” and to “redress the fatigue of the nerves by using financially crippling poisons.”³² Specialized psychiatric literature echoed this viewpoint. Mirsipasi, for instance, lamented that “people's ‘toxicomanie’ increases day by day, to the same degree as the advance of material civilization and moral weakness,” a position that other specialists and medical students shared.³³ In sum, the modern civilizational spread of venereal diseases and drug addiction was linked to a perceived increase of mental weakness and illness, and it was in this concrete context that the modern neurophysiological understanding of mind and body became particularly significant.

The modern age's aggravation of diseases—that is, the resultant mental-health problems—was one reason for the importance of a correct understanding of body and mind. The arrival of the modern “machine age” in Iran constituted another main cause. On the one hand, a newly rising sociotechnological reality centered on expanding modern transportation and communication

³⁴

facilitated life: On the other hand, however, as the closing words of this quote hint, modern technology also created new dangers. The very speed of modern mechanized transportation that served to save time was seen to help create a feeling of lack of time, to become a source of stress, and to unleash mental disease. Moreover, the speed of modern traffic threatened the physical safety of a population accustomed to a slower pace.³⁶

In this situation, the control of body and mind was desirable for all urbanites, all the more so because the injurious mental effects of technological change were aggravated by the mental frictions caused by the economic difficulties of modern life. Mu

tadil opened his medical thesis How to Preserve One's Nervous Health with the remark that

In this bleak context, the practical implications of the scientific understanding of the “mind–body connection” were of considerable importance. Besides influencing modern education and work,³⁸

this understanding formed the theoretical base of a new modernist cultural practice that was seen to check the negative impact of modern life: sports.³⁹

In the context of city life's effects on body and mind, sports were deemed to be vital for all urbanites, but they were seen to be of particular importance for modernists. In the absence of countermeasures, the modernists' nonphysical, mental work was feared to cause an imbalance between body and mind and lead to physical, and thus mental, decay.⁴⁰

Although—or, indeed, because—the modern middle class thought of itself as the spearhead of Iran's modernization, it also believed that its specific occupational profile turned it into a prominent potential victim of the modern age's problems.⁴¹

In addition to its relevance in the context of the modern age's transformation of life and work, spread of diseases and addictions, and resultant rise of mental illness, the reinterpreted

aql-i salīm dar jism-i sālim thus was made to bear on the specific needs of the modern middle class's socioprofessional situation. Thus, class influenced not only how the maxim's modern redefinition was contrasted with the traditional understanding of other social groups. Again using its interstitial position to acquire, adapt, and employ Western scientific knowledge and related reformist models in Iran, the modern middle class's interests also shaped its claim that the practical application of that maxim was not equally important for all social groups.

THE MAXIM APPLIED: THE HUMAN MACHINE IN THE MODERN AGE

New technological and socioprofessional realities do not adequately explain a second feature linked to the rise of the “machine age”: the adoption of the concept of man as machine. In my view, this last element constituted the cultural dimension of the Iranian modernists' call to modernize Iran's economy. It indicates the importance, for the Iranian sociocultural scene and economy, of the Iranian modernists' knowledge about how modern science and technology had restructured 19th-century bourgeois Europe's understanding of man as a “machine”—as a thermodynamic, energy-converting, labor-producing motor. However, while in the United States and Europe this concept had emerged in interplay with industrialization's transformation of the economic mode of production, its acculturation in Iran corresponded only very partially with actual industrialization—a process that was initiated, in low gear, only in the 1930s and that excluded agriculture. In Iran, the use of the man-as-machine concept thus constituted the cultural dimension of the modernists' demand, their hope, for full-fledged economic modernization still to come.

In Europe, the mechanistic materialism of the 1830s and 1840s conceived the human machine as a motor, akin to electrically driven devices or the steam engine. This reconceptualization, which differed from that of Descartes or La Mettrie, drew on the inventions of the first industrial revolution and on the first thermodynamic law, Helmholtz's 1847 theory of energy conservation. It argued that while the sum of energy in the universe is constant, energy itself is infinitely transformable, and matter and energy are inseparable. This law was not confined to physics but included social and economic undercurrents and implications. Part of the mid-century's scientific materialism, this law's productivist framework held that every use of energy produces work, which thereby was redefined as a “quantitative economy of energy,” spelling a radical change in the concept of human work. Christian ethics, traditional craft ideals, and ancient Greek notions of work as pain were replaced by “labor power, a concept emphasizing the expenditure and deployment of energy…[where] the intellectual, purposeful, or teleological, side is incidental.” Like mechanical machines, the human body was now seen as a thermodynamic motor converting energy into motion and thus work, and like machines, the human body became “the site of conversion and exchange between nature and society—the medium through which the forces of nature are transformed into the forces that propel society.”

This productivist image of the human motor, and the parallel concept of labor power that tied all social activities to production, persisted well into the mid-20th century. But in the last third of the 19th century, the previously strong optimism about the easiness of science-driven progress, and the faith in the facile management and unlimited labor power of human motors, began to wane. Growing anxiety about the detrimental effects of modernity on the human body and mind in the 1870s spun around the concept of fatigue. These worries were underwritten by biomedical findings and by the socioeconomic implications of Clausius's second law of thermodynamics. Formulated in the 1850s, Clausius's challenged Helmholtz's law by arguing that, on the micro level, “in any isolated system, the transfer of energy from a warmer to a colder body is accompanied by a decrease in total available energy.” Working through complex interactions between nervous and muscular systems, fatigue was now identified as the main source of the body's and the mind's inefficiency and adversity to work. While physical fatigue mainly concerned the proletarians working in the second industrial revolution's factories, mental fatigue, besides touching urban dwellers in general, especially attacked students and the bourgeois middle classes in general. Despite their divided origins, however, physical and mental fatigue caused similar negative effects on labor power, thus becoming a common source of “social disorder and moral decay.” Their treatment by the science of work (and the Taylorist system) was seen not as a class-biased intervention, but as a “neutral, objective solution to economic and political conflicts arising from labor,” crossing political and ideological boundaries to include French social liberalists, Germans in the Kaiserreich and during Weimar, Italian fascists, Soviet communists, and American liberals and conservatives.

The Iranian texts referring to man as a machine need to be read against the background of the general understanding of modern economy, which is—and has to be in Iran, too—“characterized…above all by the use of machines.”⁴³ In the greater historical scheme, “machines,” “machinery,” or “machinisme” had triggered the industrial revolution.⁴⁴ If machinisme was a central aspect of modern economy, “machine man” was its human dimension. A crucial problem of this “human machine” was its correct management—the conditions of its physically, as well as mentally, sound state. The human body's physiological constitution was discussed in certain texts on sports to determine the optimal time of the day to train the limbs constituting “the machine of the body.” In this productivist reading and explanation of the importance of health, the human being was equated with a machine insofar as the conditions under which it could function properly were concerned.⁴⁵

One fundamental condition enabling the human machine to function optimally concerned its material input. If the mechanical machine was able to operate by forms of energy such as electricity or fuel, the human machine, considered as a thermodynamic, energy-converting, work-producing device, also needed “fuel”—in the form of food.⁴⁶

An article titled “The Machine of the Human Body” listed the body's main chemical components and advised the reader about harmful and fortifying food items.⁴⁷ In a more direct reference to the thermodynamic principles driving the human machine, another author argued that “food fulfils for the human body the function of oil or coal for the operation of a machine, and the better it is digested and the more heat it produces, the more beneficial it is.” Essential for the optimal working capacity of the human being thus was a complete combustion of the food consumed. “The main part of the oxygen which reacts with the food comes from the air we breathe. In order to draw maximal benefits and to incur minimal damage from the food, it has to be burned in a way which does not produce smoke—in other words, which [guarantees] complete combustion. For this objective, the best means are sports, sun rays, deep breathing in fresh air.”⁴⁸ Related to this nutritional aspect of the machine were texts about the caloric value of different food items, which underscored that different professional activities required their practitioners to eat different amounts and kinds of food.⁴⁹ Eating thus was not as simple an activity as it traditionally had seemed to be. “As the enlightened and informed class of this society have called for and [still] call for the people to adhere to science, knowledge, and culture, they [also] say that every activity must be executed in a rational way…. A logical and rational method is at work also in the choice of food and in the manner of eating and drinking.” The necessity of nutritional rationalization forced the people to gain basic knowledge about the food they were consuming and could, in certain cases, require the advice of specially educated professionals—for example, a physician. As with other aspects of life in the modern age, nutrition thus became the object of a discourse of specialized knowledge; it was “completely dependent on scientific stipulations”: Related to the issue of different occupations' divergent effects on body and mind, as mentioned earlier, the theme of nutrition's impact on the human being thus also indicates that the understanding of body and mind was linked to issues of socioprofessional stratification and its nature.

Another area that preoccupied the modern science of work was the problem of how work produces fatigue in the human machine. A text that elaborated in the most detailed fashion the link between man and machine, the European science of work, and its constant concern with fatigue—and that best reflects their larger economic-productivist background—was published in the mid-1930s in Ittila

at. The text, written by Dr. Hashtrudi, a regular contributor to the daily at the time,

⁵¹

was published under the rubric “The Health Section.” In combination with its title, “Work and Fatigue: What Do We Have to Do to Become Tired Later,” this again reflects the link between health and economy, a topic explicitly discussed by the text. While Hashtrudi stressed the importance of industrial health in contemporary Iran, the article's main concern was to explain how bodies and minds work and why exactly they grow tired: The three central statements of these passages—the definition of work, the definition of fatigue, and the argument about the role of the nervous system in fatigue's creation—all reflect central concepts of the European science of work. The Iranian case thus seems to confirm Rabinbach's argument that the productivist view of man was applied across ideological and political boundaries. The first issue was mentioned earlier: with regard to fatigue, European research on the “physiology of the muscles, of nutrition, and … empirical observations” had, since the mid-19th century, begun to concur that it constituted the body's most important limiting reaction against work. But it was in 1891 that the Italian Angelo Mosso's study La Fatica demonstrated that “each person's fatigue curve displays the same regularity … regardless of the causes of fatigue.” After the turn of the century, articles on fatigue swamped the scientific journals of Western Europe, and one of the central figures in the debate, the Belgian Ioteyko, indeed described it as the “diminution of effort as a function of time,” which is the definition advanced by Hashtrudi. Mosso's contention that intellectual fatigue obeys the same laws as physical fatigue was soon confirmed by more advanced research. “[B]y 1900, most researchers had concluded that the nervous system provoked the debilitating chemical reactions as fatigue intensified.”⁵³

Hashtrudi's comment on the effects of intellectual work on fatigue echoed the argument that intellectual work is as taxing as, if not more tiresome than, manual work. Individuals performing such labor thus need to take special measures to neutralize its negative effects. This constituted (along with the special importance of regenerative sports for modernist professionals and their nutritional needs) a third dimension of the modernist claim that different professions had divergent effects on the body and mind, underlining the role of their particular socioprofessional status in their view of

aql-i salīm dar jism-i sālim.

The Iranian modernists' understanding of man as a thermodynamic laboring machine thus reflected a complex scientific, and yet socially layered, cast of mind. Seen in this wider context, the issues of differentiated nutrition and of the impact of working nerves on the production of fatigue seem to indicate that the image of the human machine was inscribed into the social texture of contemporary Iran. On the one hand, the concept surely was seen as a universally valid scientific category: all people were thermodynamic laboring machines and thus needed to have a basic knowledge of the needs their bodies and minds to optimally carry out their work. On the other hand, individuals' diverse social and professional affiliation meant that one standard method of care, supervision, and control would not suffice to “operate” their respective “machines.” Beyond a basic set of scientific rules, there was a layer of more specialized advice and knowledge for particular social groups that dealt with the specific dangers they were facing in the modern age.

THE MAXIM HISTORICIZED: BODY AND MIND IN THE IRANIAN PAST

Although the Iranian modernists openly embraced key elements of modern Western scientific understanding of body and mind, their semicolonial position also induced them to search for a prehistory of this understanding in their own culture's “authentic” past. A pivotal component of this attempt to splice modern science into cultural heritage, and thus to qualify the West's monopolistic claim over modern science, pertained to the character of education in ancient Iran, which included the training of the mind as well as the body:

The notion that the ancient Iranians had acted on the knowledge that body and mind are strongly linked was quite widespread. It was not only advanced in scholarly texts, but also made an appearance, for instance, in speeches at high schools: The body–mind connection and its importance in ancient Iran in fact played a significant role as a basis and point of reference for modern sports, the practice of which began to spread in Iran in the early 20th century. In this connection, references were made to the famous poet Firdawsi (d. 1020), who in his masterpiece Shahnamih frequently referred to the physical activities of epic pre-Islamic Iranian kings and heroes.⁵⁶ However, while modernist Iranian's reconstructions of the country's past definitely had “Persianate” roots,⁵⁷ the Iranian modernists' use of translations and comments by Western scholars (of Greek texts, but also of texts in old Iranian languages) also suggest that, to a certain degree, Western Orientalist research contributed to the reimagination of a secular Iranian cultural authenticity.⁵⁸ The topic of body and mind reflects this point quite well. In addition to referring frequently to the American Iranist A. V. Jackson in his dissertation, for example, M. Nakhosteen repeatedly quoted from a book titled Education Among the Ancient Iranians.⁵⁹ Written in 1905 by the Indian Jivanji Jamshedji Modi, a “leading Parsi priest” educated in Bombay, Sweden, and France,⁶⁰ the book commences with the following words:

In addition to using modern European authors in his analysis, Modi mainly relied on various Zoroastrian texts, including the Avesta, almost all of which he translated himself; European translations of Muslim Iranian authors (Firdawsi and Tabari); and European translation of ancient Greek historians (Herodotus, Xenophon, Strabo).⁶²

In his 1937 medical dissertation “De la médecine Persane au course des âges,” A. Ghavami also relied on Western authors. They were actually more crucial for Ghavami because, unlike Modi, he did not read Pahlavi or any other ancient Iranian language. Ghavami also used Casartelli to buttress one of his claims: namely, that ancient Iranian medicine had been characterized by equal attention to physical and mental troubles.⁶³ Casartelli (1852–1925) was vital for understanding ancient Iran's education of body and mind because in his Traité de médecine mazdéenne (1886) as well as in his translation of the medical chapters of the Dinkart, he had “offered the first analysis of the medical conceptions attested in the Avesta and transmitted through Pahlavi texts.”⁶⁴

Turning back to the Iranian modernists' argument that ancient Iran had excelled in combining the education of body, mind, and moral faculties, it should be noted that they also asserted that ancient Iran's role—until the 7th century, if not into the Middle Ages—was that of principal powerhouse of knowledge for “East” and “West” and a bridge between the two. Certain texts centered on the country's position as main transit route between “Orient” and “Occident,”⁶⁵

or, more grandly, on its civilizational role.⁶⁶ Nakhosteen maintained that Iran's blend of moral, physical, and mental education had already impressed the ancient Greeks and Babylonian Judaism, penetrated Christianity, and thereby influenced the European continent. After the Sassanids' fall, the impact of Persian education on Europe was channelled through Islam. Therefore, he concluded, Persian education had played “a significant part…in forming what is known to-day as the western culture.”⁶⁷

This view of Iran's influence on other regions concerned not only physical and mental education, but also the field of general medicine, a topic that was taken up in a medical dissertation by Abbas Naficy. Nephew of the famous Iranian modernist intellectual Sa

id Nafisi and scion of a renowned family of physicians, Naficy held that until the 7th century, the Greco–Roman and Iranian civilizations mutually influenced each other, but emphasized that after the Arab invasion of Iran, Iran's medicine reigned supreme. While he did call the 8th and 9th centuries the “zenith of the Arabo-Persian civilisation,” he underscored that “it is Persia that has the honor to have supplied the Orient with its most illustrious physicians and philosophers.” And, he concluded, it was from the Iranians, whether writing in Arabic or Persian, that “Europe has acquired a good part of its philosophic and scientific ideas.” Up to the late Middle Ages, Iran had formed one, if not the most important, center of medicine in the Orient and—through translations into Latin—a crucial source of knowledge for the Occident, losing this position only in the 14th century, in the wake of Tamerlane's invasion.

⁶⁸

The ontological construction of the nation as a living organism progressing through linear time⁶⁹

that lies at the base of Naficy's argument about the influence of medieval Islamic Persian/Arab medicine on Europe, which is undoubtedly correct,⁷⁰ found a parallel in Ghavami's claim that Iran had in a certain, if rudimentary, way been scientifically modern or generally modern avant la lettre. Ghavami presents an interesting case. On one side, his comparison of ancient Iran's accomplishments with where “we” are today, with all of science at “our” disposal, relies on the implicit assumption that one can extract two civilizations separated by 3,000 to 4,000 years from their contexts, place them on a neutral ground, and compare their performance in a given area. Obviously, such an operation effaces the contingent meanings of terms such as “civilized,” “science,” “disease,” and “health,” and assumes that, having defined them in a suprahistorically sense, one can head backward in linear historical time and assign them to a bygone culture. On the other side, on his way into the past, the author hesitates for a moment over the weight of sciences such as bacteriology. Founded in the late 19th century by researchers such as Pasteur and Koch, this biomedical field was a completely new laboratory-based science and thus could not be claimed to have any antecedents in the Iranian past. Ultimately, though, Ghavami qualified their importance by calling them “certain points,” which seems to presuppose a view of medicine as a united field that develops over time and implies that real ruptures and revolutions do not take place—at least, not in the sense of changing medicine's basic matrix. However, in yet another turn, the very language used to describe ancient Iran's body and mind education indicates, contrary to this image of continuity, that this interpretation results from a new, modern cast of mind. “[A] daily program that was intelligently divided”; “[l]iving in the open air”: these are descriptive interpretations of practices that reflect modern concerns about health in times of advancing urbanization and industrialization.

At times, the claim that one's own culture predates the modern West's scientificity was adopted very explicitly. Emir Faradj Khan (later Amir A

lam), for instance,

⁷²

argued that Islam, far from impeding progress, had actually embraced by the 7th century hygienico-medical concepts used nowadays. Surely enough, he did not talk about ancient Iran; rather, he described Iranians as part of a broader Muslim Orient. However, he also hinted that religion needs to be used instrumentally because today's masses in the Orient, just like the Arabs of the 7th century and contemporary European workers, are not convinced by science alone but follow religion “with much respect and blindness.”⁷³

Faradj Khan was unambiguous about the status of his main cultural point of reference. Islamic commands regarding hygiene, forming part of the religion's very core, are farther advanced than in any other religion and are “rational” and “practical.” Therefore, Islam is “in almost perfect conformity with the modern hygienic facts” too.⁷⁴

In conclusion, Faradj Khan argued that although “we Orientals” currently lag behind the West, “we [were]…first promoters of modern civilization,” and “Mahomet…had already had foreseen modern hygiene.”⁷⁵

With this statement, he not only reflected the more widely held assumption about the unity of history and the historical roots of modern science in the (Iranian or Oriental) past, but pushed this view to its logical conclusion, reclaiming for his own culture's past the very (scientifico-medical) modernity that the West had considered its own brain child, particularly since the late 19th century.⁷⁶

Iranian modernists thus stressed one point above all: the acculturation of modern, originally European medicine and scientific explanations regarding body and mind not only did not violate their authentic cultural past, but, to the contrary, dovetailed with one of its central aspects. This strategy—whether in its weak version (Iran/Orient as the root of scientific modernity) or strong version (Iran/Orient having been scientifically modern long ago)—served to stake the modernists' claim to a central dimension of the West's modernity as Iran's scientifico-cultural authenticity. Thereby, it sheds light on the tensions resulting from the hierarchical nature of the global colonial sphere to which the modernists belonged insofar as their interstitial position made them part of Iranian society. The Iranian modernists wished to belong to that sphere and were greatly interested in the novel, scientific forms of knowledge to be acquired there. However, they could not accept the claim, put forward by that sphere's Western masters, that modern science was completely Western, a novelty unrelated to any prior scientific tradition. In consequence, they sought to reconnect modern science to their own country's history—to Iran's past and to its now supposedly reawakening political and scientific might.