Occidentalist Perceptions of European Architecture in Nineteenth-Century Persian Travel Diaries

Travels in Farangi Space

Vahid Vahdat

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781134759385
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

In the midst of Europe's nineteenth-century industrial revolution, four men embarked on separate journeys to the wondrous Farangestan– a land of fascinating objects, mysterious technologies, heavenly women, and magical spaces. Determined to learn the secret of Farangestan's advancements, the travelers kept detailed records of their observations. These diaries mapped an aspirational path to progress for curious Iranian audiences who were eager to change the course of history. Two hundred years later, Travels in Farangi Space unpacks these writings to reveal a challenging new interpretation of Iran's experience of modernity.

This book opens the Persian travelers' long-forgotten suitcases, and analyzes the descriptions contained within to gain insight into Occidentalist perspectives on modern Europe. By carefully tracing the physical and mental journeys of these travelers, the book paints a picture of European architecture that is nothing like what one would expect.

1 The first brick

Prologue

Nader:	“Let her give me one reason, why in this situation we should leave for abroad.”
Simin:	“Show me a good reason why we should stay.”
Nader:	“I’ll give you a thousand reasons.”
Simin:	“Tell me just one.”
Nader:	“My dad. I can’t leave him. Do I need to give more?”….
Simin:	“He’s using this reason as an excuse right now: his father.”
Nader:	“I didn’t use it as an excuse.”
Simin:	“His father is suffering from Alzheimer’s. He’s not aware that he is his son. Or who’s around him. What difference does it make to him? Whether it’s you or someone else?”
Nader:	“Why do you say that? It matters.”
Simin:	“Does he understand that you’re his son?”
Nader:	“But I know he is my father.”
Simin:	“Is your daughter not important to you? Her future is not important to you?”
Nader:	“Who said this is about our daughter? Why do you think it’s only important to you? All these other children living in this country, do none of them have a future?”

This opening dialogue of Asghar Farhadi’s Oscar-winning film, A Separation, portrays the dilemma of the Iranian consciousness as it struggles between the weight of tradition and the aspiration toward a modern future. In the film, Simin has filed for divorce after fourteen years of marriage, citing Nader’s resistance to their initial plan to live abroad. The dialogue occurs in the courtroom while the camera is situated in the judge’s seat, placing the audience in the position of adjudicating the dispute. The film confronts us with what Darius Shayegan has described as a schizophrenic mentality in Iran.¹ Simin can be seen as representing the desire for progress through her aspiration to seek better opportunities for her daughter in the Canada, while Nader feels an intense duty to stay and care for his ailing father, who is afflicted with Alzheimer’s disease. Both Simin and Nader are prepared to make a sacrifice, either by leaving the past behind or by abandoning the prospect of future advancement, respectively. Simin suggests that a progressive future cannot be had without cutting one’s ties to the constraining past. Nader, in contrast, holds that some traditional values should not be compromised. He argues that the past, represented in the character of the father, is an extension of his present, and that any form of progress has a duty to acknowledge its history. Although the conflict between the generations helps explain the tension between the past and the future, it leaves us with many unanswered questions for Simin, including:

• Do all the roads to progress pass through the West?
• Do we not have any responsibility in regard to our history?
• Are we morally allowed to simply leave our past behind?

The elderly father in this film, who was once young and striving, can no longer control his bodily functions. He represents a historical attachment, either to the great Persian Empire or to the golden age of Islamic civilization. This constructed historical identity, similar to the degraded memory of the father who is unable to recognize his son, is alienated from its contemporary condition. The inevitable tragedy of the film is caused by the father’s quixotic quest to purchase a newspaper. This failed attempt to connect to the present poses serious questions for Nader, including:

• Except for urinating all over their lives, what is this father doing for the family?
• How real is the concept of the glorious past?
• Are the remnants of the past morally allowed to preempt our aspirations toward progress?

While the director leaves these questions open, he makes it clear that “a separation” is inevitable.

My own engagement with the questions of modernity and tradition in Iran began with my studies in architecture at Yazd University. Exploring the historic fabric of the city of Yazd exposed me to an accretion of architectural experiences built up through centuries of local practice. The traditional wisdom embedded in this city has over countless generations created a dynamic and organic architecture that functions harmoniously with the surrounding natural environment. After being struck by an exterior phenomenon during the last century, however, this traditional architecture seemed to have gone into a coma, becoming rigid and setting into decay. Some critics label this phenomenon “modernity” and believe that Iran’s architectural heritage will not recover from the coma.

Modernity, distorted

“When the me’mar [mason, and later architect] lays the first brick crookedly, the wall goes crookedly on up to the Pleiades.”

This Persian proverb reveals the mentality behind architectural practice in Iran, which is stuck between a long history of traditional experience and what modernity has to offer. Architects know that every abstract line they draw on a tracing paper, or every rasterized shape they render on their screens, will affect real lives. This awareness of the social and cultural significance of design may paralyze architects and planners. To lay “the first brick,” it is necessary to set a balanced theoretical foundation on the unstable ground between tradition and modernity. This is critical for architects and planners; failing in this intellectual project can lead to disaster. An extreme example of such failure can be seen in the story of Mohamed Atta, who studied architecture at Cairo University and urban planning at Hamburg University of Technology. Atta understood the contemporary architectural developments of his homeland as “haphazard attempts to modernize” the Middle East. In his Master’s thesis, he criticized the imposition of modern high-rise buildings as a Western attempt to penetrate into the virgin urban fabric of Islamic cities. His outrage toward such “shameless embrace of the West”² showed itself several years later, when Atta plotted the September 11 attacks and personally piloted a plane into the World Trade Center.

Such theoretical traumas and ideological conflicts, if not addressed properly, can burst into horrifying tragedies. The central impetus for this book’s investigation is to approach this conflict by readdressing the following questions:

• Is modernity totally alien to Iran’s past?
• Is modernity essentially irreconcilable with non-Western traditions?
• Is a tragic separation truly unavoidable?

The struggle to theorize the relationship between traditional values and modernity is an ongoing intellectual project, and it has been the subject of many scholarly works published in Iran since the 1850s.³ Recent international scholarship tends to unsettle the long-standing assumption that modernism arose via a one-way diffusion from the European cultural “center” to the global periphery (or from the European original to the Middle Eastern copy). Many Iranian critics of modernity, however, still rely on a strict equation of modernization with Westernization. Assuming that modernity is by nature a product of Occidental rationality, they see it as text, written in the context of the socioeconomic history of Europe, and conclude that any attempt to rewrite modernity is at best a slavish attempt at imitation or an “arbitrary and unsystematic copying from Europe.”⁴

These perspectives de-historicize modernity and insist on viewing Iranian and European societies as non-contemporaneous. Locating “the West” as a temporal destination for non-Western societies is only a logical outcome of a mentality that Hisham Sharabi rightfully calls the “model-oriented consciousness.”⁵ The model-oriented consciousness positions European modernity as an archetypal model for its non-original copies. Such idealistic renderings of European modernity tend to disparage local modernities as being distorted, altered, deformed, inauthentic, and false. This distrust in the originality of non-European modernities explains the abundance of pathological metaphors in the literature on modernity in Iran, where local interpretations of modern architecture are frequently portrayed with the rhetoric of disease: “genesis amnesia,” “cultural schizophrenia,” “plagued by the West,” “melancholy,” “apoplexy,” and “paralysis.”⁶ Commentators who adopt this approach inevitably conclude with a diagnosis of an ill-formed and derivative modernity that has come to afflict Iran.

In this book, I have sought to shed light on the local origins of the Iranian experience of modernity. In doing so, I have been cautious to avoid any essentializing positions and to refrain from any prescriptive outlooks. The methodology that I adopt to make my case should also satisfy those critics that insist on a European origin for non-Western modernities. If non-Western modernities result from a hegemonic transfer from the West, then the cause of its so-called distortion must rest somewhere in the routes that modernity takes in transit. Talinn Grigor suggested a possible explanation for this phenomenon:

The fact that the duplication of Western … motifs seems always a bit off the mark owes as much to the technique of their transference and means of reproduction as to intentional aesthetic choices. It is worth noting, too, that most of the examples analyzed here were duplicated either from memory by those who had returned from Europe … or from photographs and etchings.⁷

My method in approaching the bits that seem “off the mark” in Iran’s experience of modernity is through the study of its “transference.” I study “those who had returned from Europe” as a means to understand the complex subjective mentality that underlies the Iranian experience of modernity. By looking at Iranian evaluations of European architecture in travel accounts from the nineteenth century, I argue in this book that the route modern architecture takes from Europe to Iran is a mental journey between the Iranian self and a pre-imagined Other. This notion of Otherness plays an important role in my analysis and, as a theoretical concept, it situates my research within the context of postcolonial literature. Edward Said has famously invoked this notion of Otherness to discuss Orientalism as a self-defining project for the modern West. In his view, Westerners, at the center of a power relationship, have tended to construct an imagined Other in the Orient, colored by exotic fantasies, rendered with romantic memories, and filtered by colonial interests.⁸

My study differs from Said’s in two ways. First, I have deliberately ignored the operation of geopolitical power in the Othering process. Although this might appear to be a striking methodological choice that effaces vital context, I believe that it can allow for a clearer focus on previously unexamined aspects of East/West relationships. Often, the more nuanced, unexpected, and intersectional aspects of power and identity can become overwhelmed in analyses of the global political context. By bracketing that context, the true complexity of fantasy – which has often been ignored under the shadow of colonial analysis – can emerge and reveal its diverse inspirations. The choice to avoid a discussion of the global power structure is by no means an attempt to justify colonial ambitions, nor is it a denial of the asymmetrical relationship between the colonized and the colonizer. It is intended rather to create space for us to appreciate the stimulating aesthetic qualities of imaginary cultures, haunted landscapes, exotic beings, mystical objects, mythical ideas, sensual scenes, sublime imagery, erotic desires, and magical memories.⁹

Second, while I draw strongly on Said’s explanation of how Othering creates a distorted imagery, in this book I have changed the direction of the gaze. Here, I describe the Iranian observer who constructs a vision of modernity based on “Occidentalist” fantasies. In this approach, I am indebted to a handful of scholars, such as Sadik Jalal al-Azm and Hasan Hanafi, who have established foundational methodologies for studying images of the West as perceived by non-Western observers.¹⁰

An example of this kind of Occidentalist fantasy of exotic imaginary Western subjects can be seen in the miniature paintings of European Women produced in Iran during the nineteenth century. The illustration in Plate 1, for example, combines traditional Iranian aesthetics of feminine beauty – a rounded, doe-eyed countenance, thick brows nearly meeting above the nose, small delicate lips, a mole on the cheek, and long black hair – with the exotic and eroticized attributes projected onto...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• A note on the text
• List of figures
• 1 The first brick
• 2 Modernity in a suitcase
• 3 When worlds collide
• 4 Imagining the modern
• 5 Tajaddod as a discourse
• Appendix A: Abolhasan’s itinerary
• Appendix B: Mirza Saleh’s itinerary
• Appendix C: Rezaqoli’s itinerary
• Appendix D: Farrokh-Khan’s itinerary
• Glossary
• Bibliography
• Index