MIRRORS OF THE UNSEEN: Journeys in Iran
by Jason Elliot

Picador £16.99 pp416

When he embarked on his journeys to Iran three years ago, Jason Elliot was hoping to re-live part of the experience of the English traveller Robert Byron as narrated in his 1933 classic, The Road to Oxiana.

The result of that quest is Mirrors of the Unseen which, although focused on Iran, is also about the death of the kind of travel writing of which Byron was a popular example. Byron came from a civilisation that was self-assured, not to say arrogant, and was looking for the exotic, which he found aplenty, running into colourful characters representing the “mysterious Orient”. Elliot, by contrast, comes from a civilisation riddled by self-doubt. In Isfahan he encounters a group of European women and finds them loud and aggressive — “like navvies” — that is, they behave like men.

Elliot says he was pursuing a dream of smoking a hubble-bubble with a native in Isfahan, something he could have done in any of the tea-houses on Edgware Road in London. As he moves through Iran the shocking truth dawns on him — the country he had dreamt of does not exist. Iran today is a largely westernised society with the same pizza parlours, hamburger joints, traffic jams, mobile telephones and Chinese-made shoes everywhere. True, women are draped in the hijab and many men sport designer stubble. But these are mere props for a people who seem to be too enamoured of the “decadent West” for Elliot’s taste.

On occasion Elliot tries to defend the Islamic revolution against Iranian interlocutors, who want none of it. He is shocked that Iranians like to talk of money, fast cars, sex, plastic surgery and whisky and, in most cases, dream of one day emigrating to the land of the “infidel”. As a sign of respect for the “natives” he grows a beard, dresses as an Islamist proletarian and rejects offers of drinks. Soon, however, people avoid him precisely because he looks “ Islamic”.

Elliot encounters no dancing girls, no snake charmers, no fortune tellers, no mysterious sheikhs, no hashish dens and no jinns dressed as princes. Instead, he runs into businessmen, dual nationals who live part of the year in California, young ladies who turn out to be engineers or managers, a young man who designs equipment for underwater warfare, a professor of forensics returning from seminars in Europe, a married lady who has the audacity to invite him for a ride in her ultra-fast car, a dowager of American origin who breeds horses and is a name-dropper worthy of Hello! magazine, and, horror of horrors, Iranians who have travelled more widely than the Englishman could dream of. At one point Elliot complains that it is he “who should do the travelling”, not those cheeky natives!

At times the cast of characters Elliot portrays is no different from ones he might have encountered on a train to Birmingham or in a pub in Hackney, bar the physical background and the better Iranian weather. In the end it is Elliot who ends up as the exotic item for the wealthy Iranians who invite him to lavish dinner parties with Filipino “slaves” in attendance, and, at times, present him as “the grandson of the famous English novelist George Eliot”.

Almost all the Iranians he encounters tell him that, “This government has killed Islam” and that “There is nothing Islamic about Iran”.

Elliot is disappointed: Where is the spirituality, the disdain for this transient world, the goddamned mystery of the “ancient East”? To compensate he clings to a wildly romanticised account of the past. He tells us that almost anything that is worthwhile in civilisation came from Iran, and that Christianity itself is a poor copy of the Persian cult of Mithras, the Sun God.

As an Iranian, I should feel flattered. I don’t, though, because Elliot’s account is naive and insulting. If the Persians did all he says they did, then their heirs, including myself, must be exceptionally stupid to have created the poverty, despotism, corruption and cynicism he so accurately describes.

It is not clear what the word “Unseen” in the title of the book means. Is it a reference to the countless monuments that Elliot decided not to visit, although in most cases he was just a few hundred yards from them? He claims to be passionate about architecture. But in Tehran he does not bother with the city’s oldest “quartier”. And how could anyone go to Isfahan and not visit the shrine of Haroun Vilayat or to Shiraz and skip the oldest mosque in Iran or to Hamadan and miss the mausoleum of Esther and Mordecai? He visits Natanz, the site of Iran’s controversial nuclear project, and makes no mention of it. Visiting almost every important carpet-weaving centre in Iran, Elliot does not bother to visit a single workshop to see how it is done or to devote a paragraph to those exquisite works of Persian craft. The list of places he missed could go on and on.

Elliot’s book suffers from poor editing and poorer fact-checking. The Caspian, for example, is an inland lake, not an “ocean”. Ctesiphon was the capital of the Sassanid not “the capitol (sic) of the Parthians”. The 25th centenary of the Persian empire was celebrated in 1971 not 1975. There is no “Hide Park” in London. The poets Saadi and Nizami were anything but “mystics”. Alexander the Great’s sacking of Persepolis was not part of the “crusades”. Darius the Great was not a grandson of Cyrus the Great but a distant relation. Iranian territory covers 1,648,000 square kilometres not 600,000.

Richard Helms was CIA director before becoming ambassador to Tehran, not after. Iran never bought “submarines by the dozens from the Americans” under the shah. It has just two, bought from the Soviet Union in the 1990s. The Tehran Railway Station is not an example of “Soviet architecture” but was built by a Danish company in the 1930s. The Persian greeting is “Salaam”, not the Hebrew “Shalom” Elliot was offering to people in Iran (one wonders what their reaction was).

Elliot says he had decided to “give politics a wide berth” when writing about Iran. But his book is a dramatic political portrayal of Iran today. He writes: “I had a familiar feeling that I had learned nearly nothing meaningful about the country I had come to explore, and certainly not enough worth writing about.”

He is wrong for two reasons. First, he discovered a great deal about Iran, just not what he had set out to find. Secondly, all travel writers ultimately write about themselves and the way their culture sees “the other”. And Elliot has done a good job of illustrating that the English need a new kind of writing in which the “other” is not typecast, and patronised, in the way Byron did.

Incidentally, the book is worth its price for one of the many photographs it offers, showing a shop window in Tabriz decorated with several posters of the prophet Muhammad and other “saints” of Islam. So who said portraying Muhammad was “an unpardonable sin” in Islam?

WORLD BEATERS

Elliot is eager to emphasise the role of the Persian civilisation in world history. Among the firsts he attributes to it are “the banker’s cheque; the world’s first postal service; the first international charter of human rights; the first modern astronomical observatory; the first calculating machine; the decimal fraction; the algorithm; the foundations of algebra and trigonometry; the almanac; the astrolabe; the theodolite; the earliest electric batteries; the windmill and the waterwheel . . .”