FROM THE beginning of 1978, when I became aware of the riots and protests which would eventually lead to the Iranian revolution, I knew, as someone who had devoted a good part of his life to the study of premodern Iran, that I was witnessing something both familiar and new in Iranian history. It was familiar because the ethos that motivated its leaders, the now-famous ayatollahs of the Shiah Muslim world, was not dissimilar to the ethos that had motivated comparable specialists in Muslim law a thousand years ago. It was new because, during the last two centuries, this religious ethos had undergone an internal intellectual revolution that had passed unnoticed by all except a handful of legal specialists within the Shiah Muslim tradition itself.
During the late spring of 1978 a professor at the University of Tehran came to visit me in Princeton, New Jersey, where I teach. He had studied for many years at the seminaries in the shrine city of Qom at which traditional Shiah learning is taught; after that he had become interested in gaining a secular education and had parted (with a certain relief) from the company of mullahs and ayatollahs. Traditionally-educated religious leaders were much on our minds at that time because they were directing the movement of protest that had swollen in a few months from the provincial outcry by some seminarians in Qom to a clamor heard throughout the Iranian nation and even then heard from time to time by the world beyond Iran.
As we walked through the hybrid Gothic architecture of the university, I asked my friend about his early education: How did one study to become a mullah? He told me that in the Shiah seminaries such as those in Qom a student began by studying grammar, rhetoric, and logic. From that moment I knew I wanted to write this book.
Grammar, rhetoric, and logic comprise the trivium, the first three of the seven liberal arts as they were defined in the late classical world, after which they continued to constitute the foundation of the scholastic curriculum as it was taught in many parts of medieval and Renaissance Europe. So basic were the subjects of the trivium that people who had passed on to more advanced levels of learning considered an elementary knowledge of all three commonplace and therefore of little importance; hence our word “trivial.” I realized (and subsequent study confirmed) that my friend and a handful of similarly educated people were the last true scholastics alive on earth, people who had experienced the education to which Princeton’s patrons and planners felt they should pay tribute through their strangely assorted but congenial architectural reminiscences of the medieval and Tudor buildings of Oxford and Cambridge. Here was a living version of the kind of education (with its tradition of classroom disputation and of commentaries and super-commentaries on long-established “set texts”) that had produced in the West men such as the saintly and brilliant theologian Thomas Aquinas and the intolerant and bloodthirsty grand inquisitor, Torquemada, and in the East thinkers such as Averroës among the Muslims and Maimonides among the Jews.
I spent the next two years reading the curriculum mullahs read and interviewing Iranians (and one or two Iraqis) who had studied this curriculum in the traditional seminaries. The “Ali Hashemi” in this book is a real person whose wish to remain anonymous I have scrupulously respected. All the events in the narrative of Ali Hashemi and his friends are based on the lives of Iranians as described to me by Iranians. I believe in the good faith of my informants, and have often found evidence external to their accounts that confirms what they said.
The passages between the accounts of Ali Hashemi’s life, which try to present an extended reading of the history of Iranian culture insofar as it applies to the lives of the principal characters, are based on a reading of the primary sources for Iranian history that is as accurate as my time and abilities allow. The reader may notice a difference in tone between these analytic passages and those that narrate the life of Ali and his friends. Naturally the characters of the narrative tell of their own lives with an inward-looking voice that I neither can nor wish to imitate in the historical sections of the book, where events are told in my own voice and from my own perspective.
The non-Iranian reader should be aware that no presentation of the history of Iranian culture, and, in particular, no presentation of its religious tradition, can please all Iranians. In the past five years, as Iran has moved through a political and cultural revolution with dramatic and often violent aftermaths and entered a long and bitter war with its neighbor Iraq, many thousands of Iranians have been executed, tens of thousands have died in battle, and hundreds of thousands have chosen to live in exile. Any consensus on the meaning of the Iranian past has been torn up by the deeply felt disagreement among Iranians over the meaning of the Iranian present.
As a result of this disagreement, some Iranians will feel that the account of the mullah who stands at the center of this book’s personal narrative is not reverential enough; he has experienced doubts and shifts of attitude that they will think atypical of Shiah men of religion. Others will think the portrait altogether too reverential; they will protest that a mullah who has attended a secular university and who is so broad in his interests and so liberal in his views is no typical mullah. To some degree both parties will be right. But I am not giving an account of an archetypal mullah, and as a historian I could not do so in good conscience. In preparing this book I talked with real Iranians, not archetypes, and the book reflects what they said. Nevertheless a number of significant details and episodes have been transferred from the lives of some informants to the lives of others in order to preserve their anonymity; attempts to identify any character with a specific living Iranian are almost sure to fail. All these changes have been checked and corrected by Iranian friends with a view toward preserving the book’s faithfulness to the characters of the individuals it portrays. The reader may also notice how little is told of the adult family life of the figures prominent in the personal narrative. My Iranian friends were reluctant to speak about such matters, and I have respected their reticence. Ali Hashemi’s silences reflect his character as much as does his own narrative of his life.
This book is, in some sense, the story of all of us in the last part of the twentieth century—a time in which we have seen a revival of religious enthusiasm and a reassertion in so many societies of the demand that religion play a role in politics. In another sense it is the story of most of the Third World, where disappointment at the yield of a generation or more of nationalism, Westernization and socialism has fostered a return to older and more deeply rooted values. But it is most particularly the story of Iran, a land with over two millennia of consciousness of itself. Love for its heritage informs everything I have written here.