Tehran museums, Holy Defence and Monir: Persian politics on display

Two relatively new museums put the politics of war-ravaged Persia on display.

An overhead installation in Tehran’s Museum of Holy Defence composed of dogtags, representing the dead.

The Americans have never really understood Iran, its Islamic Rev­o­lution in 1979, or its subsequent ­evolution. How, in the first place, could its people overthrow a ruler such as the shah, a relatively benevolent despot by Middle Eastern standards who had modernised his country, vastly improved the educa­tional level of its population and generally raised the country’s standard of living?

But it must be admitted that the Iranian ­people themselves were also confused, and few of them realised that they were having an Islam­ic revolution until it was too late.

And yet, despite the oppression of religious fundamentalism, the shah’s work in the fields of educatio­n and industrial development has continue­d, resulting in an increasingly modern, educated and secular population — and a young one — that has little attachment to headscarves and chadors.

In many ways, Iran would be a much better ally for the US than Saudi Arabia, which, like the Gulf states, represents a distasteful combination of crude materialism and hypocritically enforced fundamentalist piety. Admittedly, American Christian fundamentalism has found its own way of reconciling gross materialism with revivalist religion, so perhaps there is a natural fit between the two.

Iran has suffered many vicissitudes over the centuries, but it has a far longer history and a deeper culture than the Arabs; indeed, Arab cultur­e is almost entirely made up of what the Arabs learnt from the Greeks and the Persians following their conquests in the seventh and eighth centuries AD. The Arabs were a tribal people, suddenly occupying lands where remark­able civilisations had flourished for a millennium and a half, and indeed far longer if we go back to the Bronze Age.

The greatest handicap of the Persians — and ultimately the root cause of their inability to conquer the Greeks in the fifth century BC — was that they had never developed the ideas of the rule of law or of responsible government, in the broadest sense, which underpinned the life of the Greek polis. The law remained at the whim of the ruler, and because the people had no say in who the ruler was, they had no commit­ment to the state.

All of that is what the constitutionalist movement of the early 20th century was trying to change: the modernisers in Persia, as it then was, realised that they could never become a modern nation until they were able to build the institutions of civil society. But on the other hand the great advantage of Persia was a deeply humanistic yet also spiritual tradition embodie­d by its great poets, and a profound ethos of communi­ty, manifest in remarkable infrastructure, especially the underground water conduits or ghanat that make life possible in the desert, and unfailing courtesy in private relations betwee­n people.

Today, the political life of Iran is a work in progress: it is a semi-democracy, in the sense that the people vote for the election of a president as well as for members of parliament, but from lists of candidates vetted by the clergy, who regularly disqualify anyone they consider too radical.

Despite this, the drift has been toward­s more progressives in parliament. President Hassan Rouhani is a relative moderate, a clergyman who realises that the system must adapt if it is to survive; the ultimate leader of the country, however, remains the supreme Ayatolla­h, who is more conservative but has been willing to ­support Rohani in some of his reforms.

The two most important things that are often misunderstood about the Iranians are first, that they are not Arabs at all, but Indo-Europeans (Persian is related to Latin, Greek and German); and secondly, that they belong to the Shia branch of Islam, which adheres to the direct line of descent through the Prophet’s daughter ­Fatima and son-in-law Ali, and which was usurped by the Umayyad caliphs and their success­ors the Abbasids, who systematically murdere­d all of the rightful heirs, known to the Shia as imams.

The first of these facts explains their dislike of Arabs in general — and their hatred of Saudi Arabia and its proxies in particular — and the second explains the unique cult of martyrdom that pervades Shia religious life in a way that far exceeds the cult of the martyrs in the Catholic Church. The separation of Shia from Sunni was sealed by the killing of Ali’s son Hussein at the battle of Karbala in 680AD, and to this day the annu­al commemoration of that battle, the most important time in the Shia year, is held in Septemb­er or thereabouts, depending on the lunar calendar, and lasts for a month.

These factors are important if one is to understand the ethos behind the Museum of Holy Defence in Tehran, which opened in 2012, although parts of the vast site are still being developed­. The museum commemora­tes the Iran-Iraq War of 1980-88, in which Saddam Hussein took advantage of the disarray into which the Islamic Revolution of 1979 had thrown the shah’s powerful armed forces to ­invade Iran and seize parts of its territ­ory.

The plan was initially successful, but the Iranians regrouped and fought back, and ­gradually pushed the Iraqis out; peace was restore­d in 1988 after a war in which hundre­ds of thousands of young men died and no territ­ory was gained on either side.

For the Iranians, the awful reality was overlaid with historica­l ­echoes, the first of which was that the Iraqi invasio­n recalled the Arab ­invasion of 651AD, which effectively put an end to Iran as an independ­ent state for about 850 years, althoug­h the Iranians resisted the ­cultural imperia­lism of Arabic and retained the Persian language.

Even deeper were associations with martyrdom and Imam Hussein as protomartyr. Every young man who died in the war was re-enacting the sacrifice of Hussein in the face of barbarism. This is the theme around which the ­museum is built. The visitor is led through a narrative that is chronological but more importantly thematic, culminating in the apotheosis of the martyrs who fell in the war.

The story is told using a range of mixed media, installation and video art devices that are borrowed from contemporary art but harnesse­d to telling a story and conveying a set of clear messages.

The visitor is led through halls and rooms with alternating video screens, projections on walls and artefacts from the war; these are often arranged in a striking way, such as the swarm of rocket launchers suspended almo­st invisibly in the air and facing a screen on which a tank lumbers towards us before exploding into flames. We walk through reconstructions, like film sets, of bombed houses and an oil refinery, or of trenche­s with barbed wire, surrounded by the noise of machines and bombs, and yet these spaces can also be overlaid by projections of documentary footage and symbolic imagery. Literal reconstruction can alternate with stylis­ation and artifice, as when we walk over a pathway of disconcertingly sprung steel platforms, surrounded by reeds, to evoke duckboards crossing marshy territory.

The exhibition is at its best when it focuses on the evocation of the reality of war, rather than preaching, and under the circumstances it is reasonably successful in this.

Occasionally the demands of propaganda make themselves felt in a dissonant way, as in a corridor devoted specifically to the apotheosis of the martyrs: the floor slopes upwards, like a bridge, under a ­scarlet overhead installation that turns out to be composed of hundreds of thousands of ­dog-tags, representing the dead. This all makes a striking effect, but the wall ­projections of ­planets and heavenly bodies are kitsch and senti­mental.

Another new museum in Tehran is a much smaller affair, part of the beautiful Negarestan complex that housed the first modern academy of art, founded by Nasir al-Mulk after returning from studies in Paris in the late 19th century. The complex is built around a Persian garden, with shady trees and shrubs around channels, fountains and basins of water, and has a permanent exhibition of late 19th and early 20th-­century art. Some of the work is very able, but most often one can sense that the artist is imitatin­g contemporary French art without understanding its logic from the inside.

Mirror mosaics by Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian in Tehran’s Monir Museum.

A specific museum within this complex was opened last year to celebrate the work of one of Iran’s senior contemporary artists, Monir ­Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian, who was born in 1922 to a branch of the 19th royal family of the ­Qajars and lived for many years in New York, including a period of exile after the revolution, before returning to Tehran in 2004. The work collected here includes abstract geometrical designs and meticulous studies of flowers, as well as later pieces that reflect her deep interest in Persian culture and the forms of traditional calligraphy: one calligraphic work obsessively repeats the word jang (war), in 1980, just before the outbreak of the Iran-Iraq War.

There are also examples of the medium for which she is best known, large and complex mirror mosaics, based on a tradition that began in Iran centuries ago as a way of using precious Venetian mirrors broken during transport. Farmafarmaian has shown such works in biennales and other exhibitions around the world, includin­g an important commission for the Asia-Pacific Triennial of 2009-10, where ­Lightning for Neda (2009) stood out aesthetic­ally and morally.

This apparently entirely abstract work was profoundly political, but in a subtle way that can only be fully understood within the traditions of Persian culture. Readers may remember that Neda Agha-Soltan was a young woman shot by a paramilitary thug during the demonstrations in 2009 against the dubious re-election of then president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who did so much to aggravate relations with the West. Her death was recorded on video and the images provoked grief and outrage in Iran and abroad; alarmed, the government tried to suppress any public commemoration of her death.

When I reviewed this exhibition at the time, I interpreted Lightning for Neda as an expression of Zoroastrian light in the face of the darkness of bigotry, but there is something more specific and more pointed in this work, for the mirror mosaics can be used in secular palaces, but are most spectacularly deployed in the shrines and mausoleums of the Shia imams and martyrs.

In dedicating this spectacular mirror piece to Neda, the artist was implicitly acknowledging her as a martyr too; but because the martyr ideology has become an instrument of state propaganda, to present a dissident as a martyr is like introducing a virus into the program, which begins to deconstruct the official ideology from the inside.

Not surprisingly, the new museum cannot include anything like this, and thus remains an interesting but rather bland experience.

Museum of Holy Defence, Tehran

Monir Museum, Negarestan Museum Park Gardens, Tehran