a travelogue in the Iran of poets and mullahs

RFI : Travel to Iran : Waiting for the hidden imam is a travelogue in the Orient à la Pierre Loti. How did the idea for this book come about? ?

Nedim Gursel : In a way, this idea of ​​embarking on a journey through modern Iran, from which the book is based, was born from my reading of Pierre Loti. The latter wrote a lot about my native Turkey. He is considered the most Turkophile of French writers. But my relationship has been difficult with Loti, whose exotic orientalism I harshly criticized in the past. I rediscovered it by reading his masterful To Isfahan published in 1904. I was struck by its inimitable ability to evoke the landscapes of Iran, physical landscapes as well as human landscapes. This reading allowed me to change the way I looked at Loti, whom I consider today to be one of the greatest travel writers. We can say that it was in the footsteps of Pierre Loti that I landed in Iran, although my travel conditions were a thousand times more comfortable than that of my model, who had to cross the country on the back of a mule, across a hostile nature. For the author ofAziyadeIsfahan was the end of the world.

That said, you were both commissioned to make this trip. Loti, by the then French Ministry of Foreign Affairs and you…

I was invited by an Iranian admirer of my books. I was happily surprised to discover that people read me in Iran. The reader in question, Said Fekri is himself a poet and he runs a tourist agency in Tehran. He invited me to come and discover his country. I have traveled in princely conditions, by car or by plane and lodged in large luxurious hotels. What’s more, I was accompanied by an eminent photographer from the Magma agency. Nothing to do with the conditions of Loti’s peregrinations through Isfahan, at the beginning of the last century.

In Turkey, where you come from, what perception do we have of neighboring Iran?

Our two countries are at the origin of two great civilizations, Ottoman and Persian. Rival civilizations that have lived together for centuries in the Middle East, not always peacefully. Mural frescoes in the palaces that I was able to visit during my trip to Iran recall the battles which opposed the Persians to the Ottoman Turks. Our relations are based on mutual admiration, but also contempt and mockery. I remember when I was little, my parents took me to see the Turkish shadow theater which has a multitude of characters representing Turks, but also some foreigners. Among them, there was an Iranian, who spoke with a strong accent and who made me laugh a lot. Iran was also present in the Turkish language: the word bezirganfor example, is borrowed from the word bazargan in Persian. But my real initiation into Persian greatness took place when I was at the French high school of Galatasaray in Istanbul, where I discovered classical Persian poetry, which marked me a lot. This poetry also influenced Ottoman poetry.

What struck you the most during your wanderings through modern Iran?

It is precisely the omnipresence of poetry still today in daily life. Legend has it that unlike Turkey where guests are greeted with coffee and Turkish delight, in Iran they are greeted with verses. The arid lands of Iran have seen the birth of countless great poets whose names still resonate not only in scholarly circles, but also in bazaars, in homes. The great masters of Iranian poetry are called Omar Khayyam, Farïd al-Din Attär, Hafiz, Roumi and Firdoussi, whose works are known throughout the world. But what is less known is how much these poets continue to inspire the new generation of Iranian poets, a number of whom I met during my trip. The latter, if they revere Sadegh Hedayat and Forrough Farrokzhad, two of the greatest names in modern Iranian literature, they are also steeped in classical poetry. They are able to quote entire passages from memory from memory. Shahname of Firdoussi, an essential book of Iranian literature.

You write that Firdoussi is “the pillar of Iranian identity”…

Shahname Where The Book of Kings is, in my opinion, as important as The Iliad and The Odyssey. Among the statues of poets and writers that line the streets of Tehran, the most famous is undoubtedly that of Firdoussi, his epic in hand, braving the crowd. The poet Omar Khayyam, who lived in the 11th century, is also emblematic of Persian literary thought. During my trip, one of my great emotions was the visit to Nichapour, the birthplace of the poet and where his mausoleum in the shape of an upside-down wine cup is located, camped in the middle of splendid gardens. Khayyam is known for his rubayat celebrating wine and love, but paradoxically in Iran governed today by Islamic law, you can’t buy wine anywhere!

This isn’t Iran’s only paradox, because as you said, while poetry and literature are valued, writers are regularly censored and imprisoned. How is this contradiction explained?

Everywhere, political power mistrusts the power of words. Just think of Plato who proposed to drive the poets out of the city. The Koran in its suras explicitly says that the word of the poets should not be taken seriously, because they do not speak the truth. Despite the privileged place of men and women of the pen in Iranian society, the authorities do not hesitate to subject them to severe censorship. Admittedly, censorship existed at the time of the shahs, where certain poets paid with their lives for their political commitment or their opposition to the regime. The tradition was consolidated under the islamic regime. We no longer count the writers thrown into prison these days, forced into exile and whose books end up in the pestle. My Iranian interlocutors told me that in the 1990s the enterprise of intimidation of writers and intellectuals had taken on a worrying proportion, resulting in assassinations and executions perpetrated by agents of the intelligence services. While the killings seem to have ended, censorship has become a permanent practice. The authors do not have the right to evoke in their books scenes of kissing or a female breast and even less a naked body. Even the mention of the word “dance” or the word “mullah” can be subject to censorship. I was told that a government commission responsible for censoring cinematographic works was headed for several years by a blind mullah. This story seems to me to be emblematic of the terrifying proportions of debility and narrow-mindedness taken by cultural censorship in Iran since the Islamic Revolution.

Your book is also a meditation on history, because the palaces, the monuments that you have visited recall the historical continuum in which contemporary Persia is part. Have you been sensitive during your wanderings to the weight of history?

Nowhere do we feel this weight of history better than in the rubble of Persepolis, a city founded in the 6th century BC by the Achaemenid king Darius I, and sacked and destroyed by the soldiers of Alexander the Great two centuries later. The incredible reliefs adorning the walls of the old palaces that have fallen into ruins still show the daily life of the peoples of the ancient Persian Empire. The past still lives on in Pasargadae, not far from the city of Shiraz, where the tomb of the legendary Cyrus II the Great is located. He was the founder of the Persian Empire of the Achaemenids, whose lands extended from the Danube to the Indus, from the Caucasus and the steppes of Central Asia to the deserts of Libya, from the walls of Babylon to that of Jerusalem. . It is the site of Pasargadae which was chosen in 1971 by the Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, to celebrate the two thousand five hundredth anniversary of the Persian Empire. I remember watching the grand celebrations on television in Paris where I was at the time to study. I was then opposed to the shah who tortured communists and threw intellectuals in prison. The shah fell in 1979, but unfortunately the mullahs who took power did not take long to make the fallen regime regret.

Your book is also a political and social critique of contemporary Iran. One has the impression that at the end of your almost initiatory journey through the splendors and miseries of this country unlike any other, you remain torn between the fascination that this centuries-old civilization exerts on you and the concern that its theocratic and deeply archaic regime.

This is the paradox of Iran. The great tragedy of this people is undoubtedly not to have understood that Islam is not compatible with the freedom of conscience and creation. Victims of a religious and dogmatic power, of theocratic essence, the Iranians, who are Shiites, believe today in the return of the hidden imam. The Shiite Islam that Iran practices is governed by its spiritual guides, also called “imams”. According to legend, the twelfth imam, who will be the last representative of the line of Muhammad, lives today crouched in a well. Didn’t the prophet announce in one of his sayings that the hidden imam will reappear at the end of time to bring justice, bring bread to the hungry, fortune to the needy and health to the sick? ? While the people impatiently await the advent of this miraculous saviour, the mullahs impose Sharia, and force men and women to comply with strict rules of dress and writers and artists to submit to the dictates of obscurantist bureaucrats. It seems to me that this Iran of the mullahs is not very far from the Persia that Pierre Loti went through at the beginning of the last century. Iran remains a harsh, archaic and indecipherable country, despite its westernization under the regime of the shahs.

Trip to Iran: Waiting for the Hidden Imam, by Nedim Gürsel. Translated from Turkish by Pierre Pandélé. Actes Sud, 165 pages, 21 euros.