Iran is surprising, as this blog has repeatedly suggested. Those who think of the country as a vast desert, inhabited by backward "Arabs," inhabit a dream world. And it's a bad dream. Yes, Iranian society is ruled by a repressive government, but the Iranian people -- many, many of them -- are too well educated and creative to simply submit to authority like a nation of toads.
To recapitulate two events of just the past few weeks: (1) The Iranian film A Separation took the Oscar for best foreign film -- an award that both delighted and worried the reigning mullahs. And (2) even more surprisingly, last month the Iranian Book News Agency (IBNA) issued a routine press release announcing that a Persian language edition of David Sedaris's best seller, Me Talk Pretty One Day, was about to be published in Iran. The release notes that the second half of the book tells of Sedaris's move to Normandy, together with his partner Hugh. The release continues:
Much of Sedaris's humor is autobiographical and self-deprecating, and often concerns his family life, his middle class upbringing in the suburbs of Raleigh, North Carolina, Greek heritage, various jobs, education, drug use, and his life in France, and most recently in London and the South Downs.
Maybe not exactly the sort of entertainment you'd expect a fundamentalist Islamic regime to offer its people? But in Iran you just never know.
It's been nearly a year now since my own much scribbled-about trip to Iran. My own first surprise, after a late night arrival in Tehran, occurred the next morning as I stepped outside. There, looming before me, was a rugged range of snowy mountains. Intellectually, I was fully aware that the Elburz Mountains separated Tehran from the Caspian Sea, and that northern Tehran itself was built up into the foothills of that mountain range. Still, seeing all that dazzling snow as I stepped out of the hotel was something of a jolt, a sight that seemed incongruous, in my own mind, with my preconceptions of the Middle East.
All these various strands of surprise by, and pleasure with, Iran and its people came together for me this afternoon as I received the April issue of The Atlantic. In a short article,1 climber Gregory Crouch describes his experiences while on a serious climbing expedition last spring in the Elburz (he transliterates the range's name as "Alborz").
No, he didn't "accidentally" hike across the border from Iraq. In another of those Iranian surprises, the expedition was a joint venture between the American Alpine Club and the Alpine Club of Iran, with men and women from both nations participating. Making an ascent of Alam Kuh, the second highest peak in Iran, Crouch and two American partners, one male and female, climbed together with an Iranian married couple, the woman being one of Iran's best female rock climbers. Other members of the party, both American and Iranian, made the climb by a different route.
The expedition ran into some minor bureaucratic hassles before it got started, but the ultimate message of the article was that climbing is alive and well in Iran, where it is unusually popular among the better educated segments of the population, and that climbers from all nations form a like-minded community regardless of political differences among their respective governments. For me, the article also reaffirmed my conviction that Iran is a complex nation, and that even its Islamic rulers permit -- surprisingly; sporadically, perhaps; and unpredictably -- many more freedoms than we here in the West may suspect.
Excellent Iranian movies, a strong Iranian climbing community, American-Iranian exchanges -- and a healthy appreciation by Iranians of the bittersweet humor of David Sedaris. Yes. I do realize that Germans and Americans were toasting their mutual friendship and cultural kinship right up until 1939. It didn't prevent World War II.
Still, as I noted on Facebook, Iran isn't the sort of country I'd care to carpet bomb, thank you.
-------------------------------------------Photo from The Atlantic. Caption: "Two climbers, one Iranian and one American, prepare to strike out from base camp on an ascent in the Alborz Mountains."
1Gregory Crouch, "The Peaks of Persia," The Atlantic (Apr. 2012).
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