In a seminar last month at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), London University, the author and professor Abbas Milani mused over why the Middle East, and specifically Iran, has produced so few biographies.
Milani was not referring to hagiography, the acritical and often paid lauding of leaders, but to a craft that seeks both to tell a narrative and meet objective standards of academic scrutiny. Milani suggested the biography emerged at the same time as the novel, with both emphasizing human character. Both forms, he argued, are part of “modernity,” a notion usually linked to the Renaissance and one about which he has written extensively.
“Modernity came with the beginnings of individuality,” Milani told a group of SOAS academics and postgraduate students. “One of the central pillars of modernity is individuality, the notion that the individual can change history.”
Modernity has, he said, five interrelated themes: the acceptance of private space, including within religion; subjectivity in aesthetics; an urban economy; law based on a social contract between rulers and ruled; and the notion of knowledge as tentative or uncertain.
Modernity, Milani has argued, presents a particular problem for the Middle East. In a preface to “The Persian Sphinx: Amir Abbas Hoveyda and the Riddle of the Iranian Revolution,” his 2000 account of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi’s longest-serving prime minister, Milani wrote that biography has a “tortured history” in Iran. “While the Archaemenid kings of some 2,500 years ago were unashamedly self-assertive (the inscriptions they left behind gave detailed description of their past deeds and personal wishes), with the advent of Islam, the self was gradually eclipsed, and the individual was no longer directly described or revealed to the reader.”
Modernity has also presented a challenge for monarchy – as Milani traced in “The Shah,” his biography of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, published in 2011. The SOAS seminar was primarily devoted to the challenges of writing that book, and Milani recalled Machiavelli’s notion that the modern prince cannot inherit legitimacy but must create and maintain his own. “Monarchies require a certain degree of opacity,” he wrote in his book, “and modernity is an age of transparency.”
There is also an issue with sources, as Milani noted in “The Persian Sphinx.” He observed, “When ... I can read about the details of the taxes William Shakespeare paid in 1595, but 20 years after Hoveyda’s death, I still cannot get my hands on the minutes of his Cabinet meetings, I develop what can only be called ‘archive envy.’”
“The Shah” perhaps offered more scope. Milani told the SOAS seminar he had sifted through 70,000 pages of documents, conducted 500 interviews and read 14 volumes of speeches and articles by Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, as well as hundreds of books. But still, he insisted, researchers lacked access to “many of the most important documents,” as the shah’s own collection remained partly in Iran where the post-revolutionary rulers have made their own selection to publish.
Milani suggested that if he read all the documents, he would need to rewrite the book. In any case, he insisted that biography is “contingent truth” that must be “historically verifiable.” Answering a question about his analysis of Mohammad Mossadegh, the prime minister who in 1953 fell afoul of Britain, the United States and the army in trying to nationalize oil, Milani replied: “Your reading is as important as my intention. This is a modern text, not a medieval text.”
Milani went on to say that conspiracy theories, to which Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi was very prone, and messianism undermine biography. Speaking of the shah, Milani remarked that his book “Answer to History” had “virtually no answer to history because everything is a conspiracy theory.” And conspiracy theories and messianism predate modernity, Milani continued, because they leave out the active, historical subject: “Somebody else will determine your future, as they have determined your past.”
Middle Eastern biography is certainly bedeviled by the issues Milani raised. The kiss-and-tell account of the onetime Lebanese militia leader Elie Hobeika by a former bodyguard, Robert Maroun Hatem, writing under the pseudonym Cobra, did the rounds in Lebanon in 1999 after being banned. However, the book would struggle to meet rigorous standards of objectivity or peer review.
Likewise, a raft of instant biographies – such as Kasra Naji’s “Ahmadinejad: The Secret History of Iran’s Radical Leader” or Aram Rostam’s “The Man Who Pushed America to War: The Extraordinary Life, Adventures and Obsessions of Ahmad Chalabi” – are rough-and-ready rather than lasting accounts.
But Milani is not entirely alone. Said Aburish has penned biographies of Gamal Abdel Nasser, Saddam Hussein and Yasser Arafat. Patrick Seale’s “Asad: The Struggle for the Middle East” has sold well, partly because of the author’s unusual access to the subject. Historical biographies are more plentiful – either because distance removes controversy, makes fewer demands over sources, or because professional historians have more time.
With Iran, there has been a spate of books about the 1953 coup against Mohammad Mossadegh, among which Homa Katouzian’s “Musaddiq and the Struggle for Power in Iran” and Christopher de Bellaigue’s “Patriot of Persia” take the form of biography. For the revolutionary period, “Khomeini: Life of the Ayatollah,” by Baqer Moin, the former head of the BBC Persian service, is compelling.
But, to my knowledge there are no biographies in English of the two durable figures of the Islamic Republic: Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, Iran’s former president and head of the Expediency Council. Could they be written now?
Perhaps not, Milani suggests. Underlying his work is a conviction that becoming “modern” involves Iran breaking from authoritarianism. His judgment is that Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi made a crucial mistake by not following his father in weakening the clergy. Rather, he allowed clerics to flourish while suppressing other parts of Iranian society.
“The shah thought he could buy into modernity piecemeal, the way the Chinese are doing now,” Milani told his SOAS audience. “His notion of modernization was authoritarian – both against the left and Marxism, and against secular democrats, such as Mossadegh. The only group he allowed to organize, to have its own funding and publishing, was the [clergy] in Qom.”
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