Larry Beinhart's Body Politics

The Road to Esfahan

by Larry Beinhart, March 26, 2008

I’m in Shiraz, on the way to Esfahan. It’s good to get out of gray, smoggy Tehran, one of the least photogenic cities in the world, where black is the new black, from the hijabs on down. One of the attractions of Shiraz is the tomb of Hafez, a Persian poet from the 14th century. It’s thronged at night. Iranians bring flowers, then stand or kneel beside the sarcophagus and recite his poems. Iranians are among the most gracious and hospitable people I’ve ever met.

The question is, should we bomb these people?

In America today, we tend to see things in Manichaean terms, as absolute opposites: light and dark, good and evil, us and them. We could, if we went back far enough, blame that on the Iranians. Manichaean refers to the Persian prophet Mani (c. 250 CE). The whole notion of good and evil, with man in the middle, able to choose, rewarded or condemned in an afterlife, goes back to an earlier Persian, Zoroaster, from around 1,000 BCE. Those ideas entered Judaism during the Babylonian exile and the liberation of the Jews by Cyrus the Great of Persia, and from there migrated into Christianity.

There are still Zoroastrians and Jews in modern day Persia, the Islamic Republic of Iran. These are people with a rich and varied, humanistic history.

Why should we bomb these people?

The Bush administration has claimed that they are part of the Axis of Evil, though Iranians are somewhat confused by that designation.