Thoughts on the Middle East, History, and Religion
Juan Cole is President of the Global Americana Institute
Check out the video: Iran, Seven Faces of a Civilization.
'Beyond the gate of time lies a civilization with seven thousand years of celebrated heritage.
A cradle of civilization a tolerant world empire a crossroad of civilizations a world of artistic forms and shapes a kaleidoscope of architectural marvels recreated for the first time'
posted by Juan Cole @ 11/22/2008 12:05:00 AM
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Awards
Winner, October 5, 2007, Scott Nearing Award for Courageous Scholarship (Awarded by the Graduate Students of the Political Science Department, University of Pennsylvania).
Winner, 2005 James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism, Hunter College.
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11 Comments:
Great graphics and content but oh dear what a crappy script. The narrator does his best, but really this is fairly awful if you pay attention to the words.
What a shame.
OK, I've now listened past the embarrassing prolog and it's not so bad once it starts dealing with actual details. And indeed the story is fascinating.
But oh what a tin ear - "invention of wheel"???
You would think after 7000 years Iranians would still not be so premitive and barbaric they stone people to death.
thank you warmly from chilly wind swept southeastern france mr juan cole ... i've been a fan , no flattery or exagerration intended , for years now ; of your gifts to the human community & this video is a fine aSample of , well , sharing the care .
all my freshest & finest ... & kept a copy for a l o n g e r look hopefully soon - insh'allah wa b'slema & merci ; i remain ,
al yatimi al-wafa (!)
questorJohnny Gusto ...
There is a way of thinking, all too common in those in power, which does not allow room to consider the richness of human life and human history. There have always been brutal people, violent people, but the means of destruction now are much greater. when leaders give in thoughtlessly at best, ruthlessly and cruelly at worst,to desires to conquer and destroy, when they stir people to violence and hatred to garner support, the consequences are overwhelming. I think they have lost empathy: all the world is a Jack Bauer TV show.
Iran looks lovely. I'm sure it's a great place to live your life.
Perhaps I need to play the presentation a second time. Don't believe seven faces were presented.
An awesome film!
The following, by Mr Farhad Nabipour, amounts to a more artistic presentation of Iran and Iran's history (the sound is hi-fi so that it is recommended that one listens to the following with high-quality headphones):
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2032099907583727317
For those who may not know, in the closing part of the above video one hears Madonna reciting Rumi's love poems (from the CD Gift of Love).
The following show the ethnic diversity of Iran:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OjtGr1Qqhng
http://www.jadidonline.com/story/27072007/fq/darembakhsh
Please watch the slide show herein, i.e.
http://www.jadidonline.com/images/stories/flash_multimedia/Soraya_Darembakhsh_test/s_darembakhsh_high.html
For the interested, Horizon has a good set of photographs of Iran and Iranian people:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/horizon/sets/
This is how the modern Tehran looks like (the background music may represent what the Iranian youth may be fond of listening to):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RmVvKRm9JdU
And lastly, for reasons that I am unable to clarify (even to myself), if there is any Paradise, whether in Heaven or on Earth, it must be reminiscent of what is being portrayed in the first 20 seconds of the following slide show:
http://www.jadidonline.com/images/stories/flash_multimedia/St_stephanus_church_test/church_high.html
The corresponding article can be read here (for those not able to read Persian, it is about the Saint Stepanous Cathedral in Jolfa, East Azarbaijan):
http://www.jadidonline.com/story/10112008/frnk/st_stephanus_church
BF.
Dear anonymous who feels morally superior, please enlighten us as to how electrocuting or lethally injecting someone is superior to stoning someone to death. All are equally heinous. Some just have been rationalized in the west.
Further to my above Comment, here is the way in which Iranian-Americans celebrate the Iranian New Year, Naw-Ruz,
Dream of Peace
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i8ItwInRTVs
The work is a collaboration between Ballet Afsaneh and Nejad World Music.
The following video provides some information concerning Iranian-Americans, coming as they do from an "axis of evil",
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i3Pfm0bZQNc&feature=related
And, here is a typical example of the way Iranians have responded to the utterly unworthy "axis of evil" gibe:
Axis of Love
by Banafsheh Sayyad
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=related&v=tnlz231C1Nc
For a biography of Ms Banafsheh Sayyad I refer the interested to:
http://www.namah.net/bio.htm
I note that Ms Banafsheh Sayyad is the daughter of the celebrated Iranian film and theatre artist and director Mr Parviz Sayyad who since 1979 has been living in exile. The above dance shows that President G.W. Bush was totally mistaken in believing that he solely addressed the leadership of Iran by calling an entire nation an "axis of evil".
Some remarks concerning the dance by Ms Sayyad may be in order. I recommend all those who watch the video subsequently to read Ms Sayyad's biography where some details concerning the hand movements of Ms Sayyad are mentioned. Briefly, Ms Sayyad in fact speaks in a sign language while dancing.
Ms Sayyad's dance follows a long tradition of dancing by mystics, or Sufis. Perhaps the finest contemporary exponent of this style of dancing in the West is Mr Shahrokh Moshkin-Ghalam, a pensionaire of La Comédie Française, who also directs the Nakissa Dance Group:
http://www.shahrokh-nakissa.com/
Mr Moshkin-Ghalam has, amongst others, put the quatrains of Omar Khayyam and The Seven Valleys of Love (whose underlying story can be traced back to Zoroastrian traditions of almost 4000 years ago --- we live now in year 3746 of the Zoroastrian calendar), by the Sufi poet Farid od-Din Attar-e Neyshabouri, to dance, some short pieces of which can be viewed here:
http://www.shahrokh-nakissa.com/shah.php?p=fil
To the interested, I warmly recommend the following dance by Mr Moshkin-Ghalam, named Faryad (Cry):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D5k1-cj8Jvg
It is to be hoped that the above samples will at least encourage President-elect Obama, and his close advisers, to consider the thought that Iran is not a nation of holy warriors intent on inflicting mass murder on other nations.
Lastly, I take the opportunity and make the following recommendation to the future American negotiators who are to sit down around tables with their Iranian counterparts: Iranians entertain some very strict and puritanical language mores. The oft-repeated phrase "carrots and sticks" has an extremely negative connotation in Iranian minds. In Iranian culture, any reference or suggestion to an animal in a sentence that has bearing on human beings is a taboo. For instance, most Iranians would not say, e.g., "John was riding a donkey", unless "John" is a close friend or relative; putting the word "donkey" in the same sentence as "John" is considered an affront to "John". If necessary, they would use the euphemism "quadruped" for "donkey"; they would say, "John was riding a quadruped". That this is not an abstruse theoretical issue, I testify that I personally experience the phrase "carrots and sticks" as unquestionably demeaning, despite my decades of being in close contact with the Western culture (the memory of my both parents simultaneously reprimanding me, a small child then, for having juxtaposed the name of a person with that of an animal, still lingers in my mind). As the English-Wikipedia entry on "Carrot and Stick" indicates,
"It may derive from methods used for training mules and other animals by drawing them forward with rewards (the "carrot") and driving them forward with punishment (the "stick")"
See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrots_and_sticks
The reference to training "mules" and "other animals" tells it all why Iranians feel enraged by the phrase "carrots and sticks" being used by our politicians and media in connection with the negotiations conducted between the group of 5+1 and Iran (one often wonders what professional training, if any, these mandarins and journalists receive for their jobs).
BF.
Hey, Thanks for distributing the video. This is only part one. I think it's good to see the whole documentary. Here's the other parts of the documentary:
Part 2:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8vXvt_gn3CM
Part 3:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NtcE37IIqfQ
Part 4:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iX4kMbO9PDg
Part 5:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_sbGhQP2dts
There are also part 6 and 7 that will be uploaded soon.
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