Overland by Rickshaw

Canadian journalist, and friend, Adnan Khan, has been covering South Asia and Middle East for over a decade. When not traipsing around Turkey, his home turf, the Maclean's correspondent can usually be found in Pakistan or Afghanistan working on his next feature story.

In 2012, Khan took a much needed break from his reporting duties and embarked on an epic 8,000 km overland journey between Kabul and Istanbul. A trip like that is impressive enough given the distance and dicey nature of some of the areas he travelled through. But it was the underlying purpose of the journey, and the method of travel, that made the voyage even more exceptional.

Khan and his two travel companions blazed through Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran and Turkey in an auto rickshaw - that small, quirky three wheeled vehicle sometimes used for short jaunts in urban areas of the developing world. The trio bolstered that feat, by making several pit stops along the way to put on circus-style performances, and workshops, for underprivileged children.

The group dubbed their travelling road show "The Rickshaw Circus".

You can read all about his amazing journey here.

Hassan Sabah and the Assassins

Of the many historical tales and anecdotes arising out of the Middle East, few offer the kind of salaciousness and intrigue as that of the story of “the Assassins”. It is a narrative both entertaining and fascinating, but when scrutinized, may reveal something about the way history is made.

As the Middle East of the 12th century buckled under the weight of the invading Crusaders and the ensuing political chaos that followed in their wake, a wave of brazen murders targeting some of the most powerful people in the region began in earnest. 

Representatives of different ruling powers – political, military, bureaucratic and religious – started falling to the daggers and arrows of shadowy murderers who killed with astonishing daring. With no obvious pattern or motive, these killings of mostly Sunni officials were seen as originating from outside the fray of the region’s overlapping conflicts.

Stories soon began to circulate of a strange figure said to be holed-up in an impenetrable mountain fortress in northern Persia with an army of fanatical disciples. This “Old Man of the Mountain” was none other than the formidable personage of Hassan Sabah. A religious leader of the Ismaili branch of Shia Islam, Sabah was the first in a line of politico-religious demagogues believed to be waging a clandestine war against the rulers of the Middle East. 

It was known that Sabah had studied at a religious school in Cairo, and had risen to become an outspoken and controversial figure. After falling out with authorities in Egypt following a failed power grab, he and a handful of disciples made their way to his native Persia. There he moved between principalities until finally settling at a place in the Alborz Mountains known “Alamut”. From a rugged alpine fortress, Sabah went about creating a rigid and messianic cult-like society devoted to attacking and destabilizing the region’s competing empires. 

The Ismaili Fatimids of Cairo, the Sunni Abbasids in Baghdad, various Seljuk rulers, and even the Crusaders, were all said to be targets of his army of shadow warriors. Numerous redoubts of this strange new sect had also reportedly sprung up throughout the mountains of Syria. Stories of these interlopers, which grew ever more outlandish over time, circulated in an environment of intermittent warfare where the lines demarcating friend from foe were in constant flux.

During the two centuries in which the Crusades were fought, this obscure sect, led by a succession of rulers, was known by various names, including: 

Heyssessini
Assassini
Ashashin 

They were names that would ultimately morph into the English word “Assassin” – denoting a hired professional murderer who kills by stealth.

The stories depicted these partisans as an elite corps of fanatical religious killers who had infiltrated Middle East society at all levels, awaiting orders to plunge their daggers into the hearts of men of political prominence. “The Old Man of the Mountain” (a name attached to ALL the rulers of Alamut, even after Hassan’s death), was the chief mastermind of this menace, carrying out his plans from an unreachable castle perch.

The famous Venetian traveller and merchant, Marco Polo passed through the environs of Alamut in 1273, some two decades after the Mongols destroyed the Assassin headquarters. While there, Polo collected from the locals information passed down about this erstwhile group. 

Of all the depictions of the Assassins throughout history, Polo’s would be the most memorable – and most often quoted. According to the Venetian, the Old Man of the Mountain gained his adherents, his Ashishin, by some of the dastardliest methods of subterfuge. 

Male recruits were drugged to the point of unconsciousness and relocated inside a beautiful garden where they awoke and partook in all manner of sensual pleasures. This, they were told, was a foretaste of the rewards for those willing to sacrifice themselves to the political cause. The adherents were later drugged again and removed from the gardens. When they regained consciousness they were told that they had been given a sneak preview of paradise. Only through obedience and servitude could they return there again, post-mortem.

Marco Polo asserted that through these, and other manipulative techniques, The Old Man of the Mountain brainwashed his army of fanatical murders. European writers, stupefied by these romantic histories later added to them, suggesting that all the various names for the assassins - “Heyssessini”, “Assassini”, “Ashishin” - were derived for the Arabic word hashish (and its variations describing people who take hashish, i.e. - hashishiyun) – thus lending weight to Polo’s story. 

Different versions of this tale have endured over several centuries, inspiring many written works. Interestingly there is another little known interpretation of events, albeit less dramatic, and which depicts Hassan Sabah and his supposed assassin underlings in a less damning light.

In an article written in 1922 by Sirdar Iqbal Ali Shah entitled “General Principles of Sufism”, Hassan Sabah is portrayed not as a killer, but as a mystic who led an Ismaili reform movement in isolated communities in Iran and Syria. According to Shah, his earlier training in Cairo took place at an esoteric school known as “The House of Wisdom” - an Ismaili version of its famous namesake in Baghdad that was devoted to the acquisition of knowledge. 

Shah suggests that Hassan, a natural luminary who had risen through the ranks of knowledge “saw clearly that the plan of the society of Cairo was in some respects defective.” He likely voiced his opinions and fell foul with the Ismaili religious leadership whose displeasure with his ideas forced him from Egypt. When he retired to Persia, he remodeled the Cairo coursework and set up his own esoteric school to inculcate the knowledge of Reality, which, mystics assert, lies at the heart of all religions.

What we might infer from this version of events is that Hassan and his pupils, operating in relative obscurity, may have unwittingly become the basis of a rumour that sought to explain the mysterious murders - and which then grew out of the control during the early Middle Ages.

“Around the figure of Hassan cluster many legends and traditions, most of which have been highly coloured by the passage of time,” Shah writes.

We will likely never uncover the real facts of that period - a confusing amalgam of power struggles and wars between shifting alliances and groups, both local and foreign; a situation which at times bordered on anarchy. 

But, bearing in mind the confusion of the period, the fact that murder for private and public reasons was common at the time, and that the human proclivity for assumption and imagination can be almost limitless, it seems possible that the story of the Assassins, as it has come down to us, may very well have been a distortion of some other reality. 

The Lebanese-French author Amin Maalouf, in his fictional novel Samarkand, puts forward an idea, which, when looked at closely, may lend credence to Shah’s argument. 

Referring to Assassins, Maalouf writes:

“[...] their contemporaries in the Muslim world would call them hash-ishiyun, 'hashish-smokers'; some orientalists thought that this was the origin of the word 'assassin'...The truth is different. According to texts that have come down to us from Alamut, Hassan-i Sabbah liked to call his disciples Asasiyun, meaning people who are faithful to the Asās, meaning 'foundation' of the faith. This is the word, misunderstood by foreign travelers, that seemed similar to 'hashish'."

The Cylinder of Cyrus

We don't often refer to specific articles; however, a recent one by Roger Cohen in the New York Times is very much in the spirit of this blog, and a very successful mix of cultural, political and psychological understanding. 

It is about an ancient clay cylinder with Babylonian cuneiform script that was found in Iraq in the 19th century. The text is a series of edicts calling for religious and ethnic tolerance and freedoms by the Persian King Cyrus (or Kurush in his native language). The artifact has had a long history that Roger Cohen describes:

"What is it? A Babylonian artifact written by a Babylonian scribe about a Persian conqueror; prized by Iranians as an emblem of their civilization; valued by many Jews whose Bible gives credit for Cyrus’s acts not to a Babylonian God but to Jehovah; found in modern Iraq by British-sponsored archaeologists who acquired it from the Ottomans; exploited by the shah to underwrite his megalomania; a pre-Islamic text adopted by the Islamic Republic during the Iran-Iraq War as a symbol of past victories; a declaration compared to the U.S. Constitution because of what it says about peoples worshiping freely in a single state..."

The ancient cylinder is a reminder of our constant struggle for tolerance and greater understanding between peoples. The full article can be found here: Find the Missing Word

Al Muqanna - The Veiled One

"All colour is abominable"

The following is the first in a series of posts highlighting the writing of the great 20th century Argentinian writer, Jorge Luis Borges, who had a fascination with the Islamic world. He wrote about a great diversity of subjects, from Mayan priests to gauchos, but he had a special inclination for unusual individuals and esoteric ideas from the East.

The first is a tale from the book 'A Universal History of Infamy', and it is called 'Hakim, the Masked Dyer of Merv', a city as dry as the dust of the desert around it. In his usual thrifty way, Borges recounts in three pages the story of the man who later became known as Al Muqanna, or the Veiled or Masked One in Arabic. 

One day, Hakim disappeared from Merv, in what is now Turkmenistan, leaving behind only broken vats of dye, a shattered brass mirror, and a scimitar from Shiraz. He was not to be seen again until he reappeared to a desert party, masked, accompanied by followers who were blind because "they had looked upon his face". 

Fired by revelation, Hakim had become a masked prophet, leading masses in a jihad against the Abbasid Caliph of Baghdad. Al Muqanna claimed that the Angel Gabriel had given him an ancient message of wisdom that burned one's mouth if spoken, and made his face so magnificent that no mortal eyes could look upon him - thus the mask (later exchanged for a mere veil).




He gained several military victories over the Caliph, and spread a message of a Manichaean world of light and dark, and of a god without a name or face. This divinity had nine shadows manifested as 999 descending heavens, each a paler echo of its predecessor. The descent led from angels to the demiurge who rules our world whose "fraction of divinity tends to zero". Our earth is but a murky reflection of that first nameless, faceless Divinity, a kind of hell in contrast with the original Paradise that we could aspire to, or even ascend towards. The Veiled One suggested that the misery we live in is best dealt with through a total immersion in vice, or extreme abstinence.

It is believed by some that his ideas are derived from the Persian Khurramiyyah movement, a mixture of Shiism and Zoroastrianism, that was in turn influenced by Mazdak, an Iranian reformer sometimes described as a 'proto-socialist'. The cosmogeny of ascent and descent of the universe that Al Muqanna propagated is also explained in more modern and scientific terms in the excellent book 'Godhead - The Brain's Big Bang'. John Zada, of this blog, recently published an interview with its authors, Joe Griffin and Ivan Tyrrell.

In the fifth year of Al Muqanna's reign, the Caliph's army finally surrounded the prophet's castle. In the panic that ensued, a member of his harem screamed that the Veiled One's hands were disfigured and missing fingers. Two captains of the guard rushed to remove the great one's facial cover to reveal a leprous monstrosity, a face with a "flat and inhuman nose" and lips eaten away by disease. 

As he was revealed, Hakim stuck to his lifetime chorus, shouting that the sinful were forbidden to look upon his face. The plea did not save him; instead, he was "riddled with spears" and disappeared into the Universal History of Infamy - or so the great Argentinian writer (below) tells us.

The Diversity of 75 Million People: Iran today

A vibrant collection of photos in The Atlantic Monthly presents the richness and contradictions of Iran and its people today. 

The full photo essay can be seen at A View Inside Iran

Iranian Postcard

Saadi of Shiraz

Most people in the West have heard of the poets Omar Khayyam and Jalaludin Rumi. Khayyam came to Western fame through a (poor) 19th century translation of his now-famous Rubaiyat, and Rumi is today a rock star of new age spirituality and mystical literature. Fewer people have heard of Hafez or Saadi, two Persian poets from Shiraz who are more well-known in Iran than the aforementioned pair. 

The more interesting and comprehensive outlook is to see all these writers as one stream of excellence extending from the 11th to 14th century, and bringing to the planet some of the most intelligent and insightful texts the world has known. The Persian poets are as seminal to world literature as the ancient Greek playwrights, Shakespeare, or 19th century Russian literature, but they are less well known in the West. They are part of an unstated 'global canon' of overlapping universal themes that recur in all cultures: aids for greater learning.

Saadi lived in an era of incredible violence and upheaval. European Crusaders had invaded the Levant, and the Mongols were devastating the lands further east. In 1226, Saadi left his home to tour the world. As you might expect, it was not without adventure. While criss-crossing North Africa and the Middle East, he married twice, apparently in Aleppo and Yemen, and was enslaved for awhile by the Crusaders. 

He left us with two great works among many others, the Bustan (The Orchard), and the very famous Gulistan (The Rose Garden), two works of travel, keen observations, and commentary, set in poetic style. Both works are deeper repositories of knowledge, of the human travels to deeper consciousness, and of our larger purpose. 

Ralph Waldo Emerson, the great American poet and essayist of the 19th century, understood the power of Saadi, and wrote a great poem about him, his character, and his outlook on life. Emerson also wrote an introduction to a translation of Gulistan, in which he wrote:

"The word Saadi means fortunate. In him the trait is no result of levity, much less of convivial habit, but first of a happy nature... easily shedding mishaps... and with resources against pain. But it also results from the habitual perception of beneficent laws that control the world, he inspires in the reader a good hope."

After thirty years on the road, Saadi returned to his native Shiraz. One year later, Halagu Khan and the Mongol horde sacked Baghdad annihilating the Abbasid empire. Saadi died in Shiraz at the age of 83, and his words live on to this day. One of his most famous verses is often quoted in speeches and is also found in the Hall of the United Nations in New York.

Human beings are members of a whole

In creation of one essence and soul

If one member is afflicted with pain

Other members uneasy will remain

If you have no sympathy for human pain

The name of human you cannot retain.

The Yezidis

The Yezidis are a non-Muslim ethnic minority group, concentrated in the Kurdish regions of Northern Iraq, Western Iran, Eastern Syria, southeast Turkey and Armenia. Numbering no more than around 700,00 worldwide, the adherents of this little known religion are a people shrouded in mystery and obscurity.

Yezidis consider themselves to be among the oldest races on earth. Theirs is a monotheistic religion dating back to the time of the Median Empire during the middle of the first millennium BC. It is believed the religion either preceded or derived from Zoroastrianism – an ancient Aryan faith, which is centered in modern-day Iran, and with which Yezidism shares many qualities.

What makes the Yezidi religion so hard to pin down is that there are no surviving texts or scriptures. It is a religion that has been transmitted orally. That, along with its cult of secrecy, and changes to its doctrine over the years, has caused it to be poorly understood even among Yezidis themselves.

But if anything, it is the term “devil-worshipper” which is most frequently attached to adherents of this elusive sect. In the Muslim, Christian and Jewish faiths the popular story of the angel Lucifer who disobeyed God and was demoted to rule Hell as Satan, has a somewhat different twist in the Yezidi faith.

In the Yezidi version of the creation story, the rebellious angel, who in this rendering is called “Azaziel” or “Malek al-Tawwus” (The Peacock Angel), was later pardoned by God and made chief of a gang of six angels.

The Yezidis worship and pray to the Peacock Angel which has caused others living in their midst to refer to them by the pejorative “devil-worshipper”. The idea in the Yezidi faith that both good and evil are of equal importance in the world, and that neither can exist without the other, has not helped them gain admirers. Reincarnation, another pillar of their faith, is another notion highly reviled by the orthodox religionists living among them.

It is thus of little surprise that throughout the ages, Yezidis have been persecuted and driven into isolation by both Muslims and Christians who had little comprehension, or tolerance, of their beliefs or ways.

European colonial-era travelers, too, who wrote about their encounters with the Yezidis in the 19th and 20th centuries, including such notables as Gertrude Bell and Freya Stark, tended to perpetuate the devil-worshipper misnomer without much scrutiny.

Despite the difficulties they’ve endured, the Yezidis continue to practice their culture and religion.

Once a year, Yezidis from around Europe and the Middle East, gather for their annual Eid al-Jameyah (the Feast of the Assembly), at the holy sanctuary of Lalish, near the city of Duhok in Northern Iraq.

This sacrosanct area has no residents apart from the custodians of several spire-topped mausoleums tucked in a valley below scrub-spotted hills. The Yezidis maintain that Lalish is the place where the universe began. During the festival it teems with thousands of families who bring their belongings and camp among the mausoleums for the weeklong festivities.

“This event is a kind of haj to a holy place,” says Sheikh Pasha, the Supervisor of the Yezidis in the Governorate of Ninevah, in Northern Iraq. “Lalish is like the Qa’aba at Mecca, or the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem - but of the Yezidi people.”

Music, food, song, dance and socializing underpin the event, which is more akin to an enormous family reunion, than a religious festival.

The Haji Omran Road

The Haji Omran Road, also known as the “Hamilton Road”, is a little-known rural highway in Northern Iraq that cuts through some of the most rugged terrain in the Middle East.

Sir Archibald Hamilton, a New Zealand engineer in the British army, was charged with building the road. He and a motley crew of local workers (comprising Kurds, Armenians, Assyrians, Persians, and Turcomen) labored for four years on the project beginning in 1928. The crew, working under the most difficult circumstances, blasted their way through a mountain wilderness where tribes who've always resisted central authority, made their home.

Hamilton completed his namesake route in 1932 and detailed his many adventures in his travel classic, Road Through Kurdistan.

The British desire to create a direct overland route and short cut linking the Eastern Mediterranean coast to the Caspian Sea, Iran and India led to the road’s creation. The route runs north from the city of Erbil, and then turns east connecting it with the remote towns of Rowanduz and Choman, and the Iranian border-village of Haji Omran. Passing through some of the region’s most difficult terrain (including five separate mountain ranges and the formidable Gali Ali Beg Canyon), the road is today still considered a marvel of engineering.

Buses and lorries traveling between Iraq and Iran ply the road. Iraqi Arabs from Baghdad also use the route to reach the higher altitude regions of Kurdistan in the summer to escape the stifling desert heat.

As you push past Rowanduz and head closer to Iran, the traffic thins out. Small side roads of dirt and gravel break off the main route and can be seen threading up towards mountain villages lying in the direction of the Turkish and Iranian frontiers.

In spite of the access granted to the outside world by the highway, and the subsequent inroads made by modernity, the region through which the Haji Omran Road runs remains wild, untamed and autonomous. Smuggling, rebel activity military intrigues and kinder-than-kind Kurdish locals are just some the things lying in wait for those intrepid enough to venture off the road.

Mulla Nasrudin

The Smuggler

Time and again Nasrudin passed from Persia to Greece on donkey-back. Each time he had two panniers of straw, and trudged back without them. Every time the guard searched him for contraband. They never found any.

‘What are you carrying, Nasrudin?’

‘I am a smuggler.’

Years later, more and more prosperous in appearance, Nasrudin moved to Egypt. One of the customs men met him there.

‘Tell me, Mulla, now that you are out of the jurisdiction of Greece and Persia, living here in such luxury – what was it that you were smuggling when we could never catch you?’

‘Donkeys.’

From the Exploits of the Incomparable Mulla Nasrudin, © 1983 The Octagon Press

*

In different cultures around the world, particularly in those of the Middle East, traditional stories, fables or tales serve numerous functions and can operate on different levels. A tale - listened to or read - might entertain, serve as a joke, be used to illustrate something moralistic, or it can have an even higher purpose of conveying something far more subtle – the first steps on the road to greater awareness and wisdom.

One of the more familiar characters found in the traditional corpus of tales from the East is the joke figure known as Mulla Nasrudin. The Sufis, the traditional psychologists of the East, maintain that they have used Mulla Nasrudin stories, in part, to help fine-tune the perceptual abilities of the human mind. And according to the late Afghan author, Idries Shah, a collector of these tales, Mulla Nasrudin stories “constitute one of the strangest achievements in the history of metaphysics.”

Mulla Nasrudin tales are similar to other collections of stories such as Aesop’s Fables, the Greek Myths, and the Arabian Nights collection – all of which were originally, for their own times and places, written to provide a vehicle for esoteric psychology and to symbolize aspects of human behaviour and the human mind.

As for Nasrudin himself, nobody really knows who he was, where he originated, and whether or not he even existed. His elusiveness is mirrored in the stories in which he appears. Here he takes different forms from an often bumbling, pathetic and self-deprecating fool to a man of deeper insight who has knowledge to impart.

Nasrudin tales can be found in different parts of the world from Iran and Afghanistan where he is best known; to Turkey where he is called Hodja Nasreddin; to the Arab Middle East where he is referred to popularly as Joha; to other local versions of this personality found in Italy, Greece, Bosnia, Russia and beyond to China.

In the same way that the smuggler Nasrudin and his donkey slip past the border guard in the story above - a representation of the ability of tales and humour to transcend political and cultural borders - these traditional stories are of such a refined subtlety that they have a way of also bypassing the borders and obstacles of the mind.

How do Nasrudin tales work exactly?

According to Shah and to others, Nasrudin tales are not meant to be didactic, nor are they meant to be decoded, taken-apart or analyzed by the rational mind. They are instead meant to simply be read and re-read and absorbed until they take form holistically in one’s mind. The tales can form patterns or templates in the mind which at certain moments can match up to reality, allowing us to see ourselves and the behaviour of others – including thought patterns, habits, behaviours, and even aspects of reality - which would otherwise be out of waking consciousness.

These amusing stories, told orally, have entertained countless people in the East for centuries. More recently they were collected and put into book form by Shah who spent his life researching and collecting the Eastern heritage of Sufi knowledge and relating it to the science and psychology of the West.

Understanding Iran IV - Mutual Respect

We have put forward the possibility that relations with Iran are handicapped by narrow perceptions of that country, and that Iran's behaviour, including some of its excesses, can be explained through its search to have its 'intangible' needs met in the face of considerable international barriers. This is especially the case in a country with a powerful sense of status and entitlement driven by millenia of sophisticated culture and political history.

We believe there are two basic approaches to deal with Iran. Either we use what Ornstein calls our "old brain", rely on its caricatures and act on that basis and continue to deprive Iran of its needs, or we derive a new more nuanced and realistic approach to the matter, unfamiliar as it may seem.

As we have indicated, we have in our minds only slim pictures of a fuller reality, including that of another society like Iran. All can appear terribly simplified through the words of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad or, indeed, of George Bush. It is also plain that not only the USA suffers from this problem; Iran has the same simplistic understandings of the USA (and of Israel) that Americans have of it. This is a two-way street where a sense of moral superiority, a black and white world of right and wrong, drives both sides.

Iran is a country seeking basic, if intangible, needs of legitimacy and respect. Many of the policies that have been under consideration do not sufficiently consider this. Iran will neither be bribed into a deal, nor threatened out of its ambitions. This is a cold reality. Therefore, the whole diplomatic approach of "carrots and sticks" that has marked American diplomacy will not work here. Furthermore, limited and cartoon perceptions not only limit our views of another society, they can cause misjudgments regarding the consequences of our actions:

• Sanctions on Iran, even very heavy sanctions, will not likely make it bend nor stop it from enriching uranium. In fact, it will likely only strengthen the Iranian hardliners and radicals making them pursue uranium enrichment at an even faster pace, which, theoretically, is counterproductive to the international community's goals.

• A military attack on Iran will not likely destroy Iran's nuclear capabilities nor its desire to pursuit it, but it will certainly destroy a country in the process. Hatred for the USA and Israel will be beyond the pale after such an attack with many currently incalculable consequences. Furthermore, in response, Iran can unleash a mixture of terror and missiles at Israel, American targets and other strategic sights in the Gulf, wreaking havoc in an already heavily destabilized Middle East.

Therefore, military strikes and sanctions cannot assure that Iran will not go nuclear; but they can assure that Iran will strike back, and that the atmosphere between the USA, Israel and Muslim countries will be deeply poisoned.

The reality is that this mindset may still, sadly, prevail. Both sides still feel the need to punish the other for past misdeeds, and expectations of threat can easily morph into an uncontrolled spiral of violence.

The key to avoiding this human disaster is to engage Iran on the basis of mutual respect and equality, which meets Iran's needs and may yield positive results for all concerned. Negotiating while threatening sanctions does not meet this criterion.

Although this second approach may be may be difficult and counterintuitive because of understandable aversions to the Iranian government's policies, especially over human rights, or Ahmadinejad's rhetoric about Israel, it may only be this reality that can move matters forward constructively.

Understanding Iran III - A Question of Needs

Recent advances in the field of psychology, in addition to shedding light on our own behaviour as individuals, can also provide valuable clues as to what may be happening below the surface with regards to such things as conflicts between groups. Our awareness of the subtle, and perhaps more fundamental, aspects of the Iran-West conflict may be measurably heightened by our consideration of some of these new understandings.

We are fast learning that mental health and well-being (and the actions that arise from those states) depend highly upon certain emotional needs being met. It is being demonstrated that in addition to important physical needs of food, air water, and shelter, human beings need and require:

* security
* attention (to give and receive)
* a sense of autonomy and control
* to be part of a wider community
* a sense of status within social groupings
* a sense of competence and achievement
* meaning and purpose

When enough of these emotional needs are unmet within a person or larger community, psychological disarray, suffering and conflict may result.

Iran’s political and diplomatic behaviour, posturing and rhetoric which is often characterized as “extreme” or “rogue” and is sometimes depicted as being intrinsic to Iranian culture, is more likely related to its needs as a nation being deprived than it is to some inherent evil. And western countries may be quite complicit in this situation.

The ongoing effort by the West to sanction and isolate Iran, as an uncreative standard operating procedure, may be a primary cause. In fact, it might be said with some degree of certainty that the reason for which tools such as sanctions exist is to deprive countries of their needs in order to exact punishment, or to force capitulation on an issue or range of issues.

Decades of Western hostility, suspicion, forced isolation from the global community, and a devaluing of all things Iranian, go completely against the grain of the needs listed above: security, the ability to exercise attention through official relations, autonomy, control, being part of a community, and enjoying a certain national status and the fruits of growth and achievement. The implications of this, as profound as they are on their own, are further bolstered by the fact, often unappreciated, that Iran is a historically and culturally rich nation with a deep sense of pride. It’s needs for recognition, respect, and status perhaps run even deeper than other nations.

How does this bear upon the conflict and on our perception and understanding of Iran as whole?

If Iranians, or others in a similar situation, cannot have their needs met through the usual avenues that modern nations and people do, they will try to fulfill them in other ways.

For instance, what the west takes to be actions that are purely hostile towards it, may in fact be alternate and/or misplaced avenues for Iran to pursue its needs:

• Iran’s continued revolutionary struggles, especially by its elites, against its “enemies” that include extreme rhetoric, action and political – may constitute an alternate form of pursuit of meaning and purpose, whose more appropriate forms are denied by sanctions and isolation

• The development of a nuclear program (either energy or weapons or both) is a pursuit of security, status, competence and achievement, again, where isolation and sanctions prevents Iran from attaining these goals in other areas

• Iran’s controversial relations to other groups such as Hamas, Hizbullah, Syria, North Korea can easily be understood in terms of its needs to share attention, have relations with others, and feel part of a larger community, since it is currently excluded in various ways from the community of nations

• Iran’s intentions to become a regional power in the Middle East – something construed as hostile and ill-intentioned – may be seen through the prism of Iran’s need to have a sense of autonomy and control denied to it by the wide range of economic and political strictures imposed by the world community

• Any one of these actions can be related to other unmet needs cited in the other examples.

A dialogue with Iran can be entered into to both understand these needs as well as to discuss such possible excesses.

What is the impact of all of this for our understanding of Iran?

These behaviours, seen as pure hostility and apart from their other motives, re-enforces and feeds back into our already skewed caricatures of Iran. Our responses further alienates Iran and produces more behaviours that we use strengthen our models. The cycle seems to have no end. Iran itself, or its leadership, may not be fully aware of the needs as described above and may be trying to compensate for those starved needs in excess.

The first step away from the precipice of the deadly violence which looms above this long-standing conflict, and towards more flexible policy options and improved relations between Iran and the West is for not only elites, but also regular citizens to learn and better understand why we see each other as we do, and how we might be able to bring our perception, even slightly more in line with what the reality might be.

Understanding Iran II - A Distorted View

In order to appreciate the notion that what we as humans actually perceive is often far removed from what is actually there, we need to draw upon recent understandings in the fields of psychology and human behaviour.

Dr. Robert Ornstein is an American psychologist whose pioneering research and work in the areas of brain functioning, consciousness and human nature has transformed the way in which we understand ourselves. Among other things, he has shown that contrary to what we think, we as human beings do not perceive and experience the world as it actually IS, but instead as a distorted picture or caricature of that reality.

According to Ornstein, because of the evolutionary imperative over millions of years for humans to survive, our brains have evolved to filter in only certain information relevant to our survival while ignoring a multiplicity of other stimuli and data which exists in the external world.

Once we have experienced any given thing - whether it be a person, a place, an object or an environment - our minds create visual models and slots those things into simple and generalized categories, which we subsequently re-experience as we understand them in our own minds, rather than they actually exist.

Our views and experiences become “habituated” or “automized”, as kind of natural shortcut to ensure survival. Things like assumptions, biases, and prejudices are all part of the way in which our minds generalize and simplify the world around us, in order to see and react to those things that may be most relevant to our survival. The end result is that we can only see what our minds have allowed us to see at any given time. Whatever we do “see” or “experience” is almost always done so in an incomplete fashion, and as we know it to be in our minds.

Far from being a far-flung theoretical exercise with little relevance to the real world of people and events, these contentions have been confirmed by science and apply to all aspects of human life and human interaction. Because reality feels to each of us so convincing, so rich and so complete, and because we are not otherwise taught about the limitations of our cognition, it seldom occurs to us that our perceptions are incomplete or flawed. We are thus convinced of our views, and are too often compelled to act upon them.

We tend to see a country like Iran primarily in terms of its potential dangers and its propensity for aggression because that is how we have come to identify, categorize and model it, both individually and collectively in our brains. We have become habituated to that generalized perception.

Our distance from the reality of the country itself, its people, and its rich cultural heritage, combined with media coverage filtering in stories that confirm our viewpoints further strengthens our incomplete picture. A country like the United States which has been conditioned by its past experiences with Iran, or like Israel, whose predominant collective paradigm on the outside world is that of threat and the possibility of persecution, are both more susceptible to these processes.

But the cycle of misunderstanding does not end there. It is further heightened by our own actions on the political stage, which are essentially our responses to these entrenched viewpoints, which then play back into, and further enforce, our incomplete and lopsided perceptions.

Understanding Iran

The traditional view of Iran, that of an irrational and hatemongering monolithic regime pining at any opportunity to harm its enemies, is one which has become widely accepted and unquestioned in the West. Over a generation of experts, academics, and policy-makers - some with relatively little firsthand knowledge of Persian culture - have inherited and continue to perpetuate the vilifying clichés and rhetoric that constitute the brick and mortar of a conflict that very few people understand.

The cornerstone of the West’s strategy in confronting Iran has always been to contain and punish it through the use of sanctions and diplomatic isolation, while waging covert actions in the shadows where Iran’s allies and agents are said to be also continually operative.

Despite periods of brief détente and cooperation on tactical issues, notably after 9/11, both sides have never been able to fully bridge the chasm of misunderstanding that divides them. Now, with Iran on the cusp of becoming a nuclear power, this conflict threatens to escalate to dangerous new heights as Israel – with or without the backing of the United States – stands poised to intervene militarily to deny the Iranians a nuclear capability.

Few people (including most Iranians) will deny that many of the ruling elites and organs of the Iranian state manifest extreme religious and ideological positions that are antagonistic towards the West. But in much the same way that an American would tell an Iranian who’s never experienced America that the United States is quite a lot more than someone’s idea of a “Great Satan”, Iran is also more welcoming, tolerant, diverse and sophisticated than the bleak unchanging image presented to us on the nightly news, or by our own blinkered politicians.

Indeed, at the political and other levels, if one is willing to look closely enough, there is an obvious dissonance between our perceptions of one another, and what may in fact be a more complex reality.

This in turn begs a number of questions:

1. How much of the Iran-West conflict (or any other conflict) is the result of limitations in our cognition that we as humans are naturally subject to, and are not even aware of?

2. Could the character and actions of Iran be seen through different lenses, which could help to free us from the myopic viewpoint to which we are today seemingly condemned?

3. If so, could an understanding of these subtler factors also constitute an important key towards the resolution of a long and unnecessary conflict which may yet have devastating consequences for the Middle East and for the world?

In the case of relations between Iran and the West, for example, we would like to put forward the idea that the conflict, although encompassing real issues, is also an ongoing drama involving and demonstrating flawed human cognition on multiple levels.

The West’s understanding of Iran and the dangers that it poses is more of an imaginary or psychological construct, than a true reflection of reality – and is one which gets in the way of amelioration of the conflict. The West’s inability to properly understand Iranian culture and its failure to appreciate that its own largely reactive, conditioned, and ritualistic posture of hostility towards Iran, elicits and compels Iran towards certain behaviours that then further reinforce our generalized misperceptions of Iran being a rogue.

We will be exploring these ideas further in our next series of posts.

Chogan

This painting, entitled "Chogan" or "Polo" was created by Mahmoud Farschian, a world-renowned Iranian-American master of Persian painting and miniatures. His distinct style, which has given rise to its own school of painting, combines Persian classical form with the contemporary fantasy genre. His works appear in numerous galleries and private collections around the world. This piece was completed in 1973.

Town Scene

Kerman, 19th century
Courtesy of Cyrus Carpets, New York

Persian Poets: Omar Khayyam

I am sick of idolaters and the temple.
Khayyam, who said that there will be a hell?
Who’s been to hell, who’s been to heaven?

It is we who are the source of our own happiness,
the mine of our own sorrow,
The repository of justice and foundation of iniquity;
We who are cast down and exalted, perfect and defective
At once the rusted mirror and Jamshid’s all-seeing cup.

I saw a waster sitting on a patch of ground
Heedless of belief and unbelief, the world and the faith
No God, no Truth, No Divine Law, no Certitude:
Who in either of the worlds has the courage of this man?”

The Most Important Nowhere on Earth

All text and photos in this post copyright John Zada and John Bell 2008

In brackish Arabic laced with Farsi and Hindi, Captain Abdul-Fatah al-Shehi orders a young deckhand to steer his boat along a sharp bend in the coastline. As the wooden dhow veers from the open water into a rocky inlet, al-Shehi grins with satisfaction, the vessel now navigating a course of placid water between two desolate mountains rising sharply from the Persian Gulf.

“Do you have something like this where you are from?” al-Shehi asks in heavily accented English.

On the horn of the Arabian Peninsula, the Musandam region is a place characterized by – of all things - fjords. These coastal mountains, barren and fissured, are the Middle East’s answer to the giants that guard the coasts of Alaska, Norway and Greenland. Though less grandiose than their cousins, Musandam’s fjords are an enchanting feature of an area full of strange and intriguing oddities.

Part of the Sultanate of Oman but separated by a 70km strip of the United Arab to the south, the Musandam Peninsula remains an enclave of nature and traditional Arab culture on the fringes of Dubai’s mega-urbanization project. Here steep mountain-hugging paths, isolated coastal villages, and an endless series of wadis where lone Shihuh tribesman shepherd their small flocks of goat, exist in a centuries-old time-warp.

This rocky headland of the Hajar Mountains also happens to be one of the most strategically important points on the planet: the rugged cape guards the southern side of the Straits of Hormuz, where the Persian Gulf narrows between Oman and Iran into a busy thoroughfare that sees 90 per cent of the Gulf’s oil transit to the Indian Ocean and beyond.

Despite, or perhaps because of, the geopolitics of the area, Musandam is one of the quietest and most pristine areas in the Middle East. Its deep blue waters are home to thriving coral reefs, and countless other marine species, including whale sharks and dolphins. And so inaccessible is the peninsula’s mountainous interior that it is believed to hide a small population of the elusive and critically endangered Arabian leopard.

Once a military zone largely off limits to foreigners, the area was opened to travellers in the late 1990s to attract some of the burgeoning tourist activity taking place across the border in the United Arab Emirates. Soon afterward, local businessman such as al-Shehi, emerged from Musandam’s quieter nooks to take advantage of the windfall. “Before the foreigners came, I had only one dhow boat that I used only to catch fish,” says al-Shehi, whose Musandam Sea Adventure Tour Company, is based in Khasab, Musandam’s capital. “Eventually this one boat became four, and now we make many runs a day from the port.”

Nestled in a wadi full of palm groves between the mountains and the sea, Khasab feels entirely cut off from the world. But its small port bustles day and night. As al-Shehi quietly points out to us while we are still moored, the area is teeming with Iranian smugglers – a big part of the local economy. They come to purchase commercial goods in Khasab by day - cigarettes, televisions, stereos, DVD players, refrigerators and almost anything one can find in the town’s market - then carry them across the Gulf to southern Iran in speedboats by night, carefully avoiding detection by the Iranian police boats that wait in ambush on the other side. “It’s a very dangerous job,” al-Shehi says. “Two years ago some smugglers were killed by pirates in Iranian waters - local criminals, hired by the police to stop these people.”




Parked near the speed-boats are the much slower-moving dhows that are owned and manned by Omani sailors. These wooden craft, some of them examples of ancient designs and building practices, constitute one of the oldest continuous seafaring traditions in existence. The waters off the Arabian coast are dotted with these vessels, which carry their cargo as far away as India and Pakistan.

Of course, in recent years, sailors such as al-Shehi have also become tour guides, refurbishing their boats with cushions and light canopies to ferrying travelers comfortably along the Peninsula’s circuitous coastline.

He sees it as a sustainable industry and is keenly aware of the area’s environmental sensitivity.

“It is a business, yes, but we also want travelers to continue to appreciate the beauty here,” he says. “We value nature and are working to protect it – unlike what is happening in other parts of the region.”

His dhow comes to a stop a few hours later at the end of the fjord and moors beside a tiny islet known as Telegraph Island. This, he explains, was once the site of a strategic base where the British Empire’s telegraph lines connected London with the Indian subcontinent.

The coral reef below hosts a riot of colourful fish. The passengers are handed snorkeling gear and given 45 minutes to enjoy the show while al-Shehi prepares a lunch of fish biryani and other local delights prepared beforehand by his wife.

“Maybe these fjords are not as large as the ones you know,” al-Shehi says while heating up the biryani. “But I’m sure you will not find another fjord in the world where you can do what we are doing here right now.”

This article first appeared in The Globe and Mail Travel section on Saturday April 19, 2008.