Obama's Nowruz Message to Iran: The Poetry of the Politics and the Politics in the Poetry

So I thought I was going to start my series on classical Iranian poetry with Shahnameh, Iran’s national epic, because it is what I am working on right now, but President Obama’s videotaped Nowruz message to Iran, in which he quotes the 13th century poet Sa’di, has forced me to change my plans. Those lines, The children of Adam are limbs to each other/having been created of one essence, are among the most famous lines of poetry in the world, though few in the United States have ever heard them. They are inscribed on the wall of the Hall of Nations in the UN building in New York City, and the sentiment they express, which you find throughout Gulistan, the book from which they are excerpted, helped in 16th century to catalyze a sea change in the way Christian Europe viewed Muslims and Islamic culture, from one that was governed by the mutual hatred of the Crusades to one that accepted as real the possibility that Muslims were no less human, and believed in humanistic values no less strongly, than the Christian Europeans themselves.

Before I talk about the lines Obama quoted, however (I will have more to say about Sa’di and the rest of his work in another post) I want to acknowledge the importance of the message itself, not just because he sent it–and if you don’t know much about US-Iranian relations beyond the facts of what we called the hostage crisis and the aftermath of the Islamic Revolution, you might not realize just how significant the simple fact of sending such a message is–but also because of how he said what he said. First, the message:

I am going to assume that most of what I have to say about this has already been said elsewhere on the web, but since it sets a context for talking about the poetry that President Obama quoted, I want to say it anyway. First, note that he says he wants to speak directly to the leaders and people of the Islamic Republic of Iran, signaling that he considers the country’s current leadership legitimate and they are the people with whom he needs to talk about resolving the differences between our two nations. Note as well, however, that he has chosen to send this message on the occasion of Nowruz (also here and here), the Iranian New Year, a holiday that is distinctly not Muslim–it is Zoroastrian and therefore rooted in the traditions of pre-Islamic Iran–and that the Islamic Republic has on occasion suggested it would like to replace with an Islamic holiday. Indeed, the Islamic Republic actively pursues the delegitimizing of Iran’s pre-Islamic past on a number of fronts, one of which was an attempt after the 1979 revolution to discredit Ferdowsi, the author of Shahnameh and Shahnameh itself.

When I was in Iran this past summer, to give you an example I saw with my own eyes, we visited the ruins of Persepolis (also spelled Perspolis, which is closer to how the word is pronounced in Persian), which was built by Darius I in 518 CE and was the capital of the Achaemenid Empire. One of the most remarkable things I learned when we were there was that documents found in the treasury indicated that the ancient Iranian kings not only had something like what we would call workers compensation for their employees, but also policies that permitted men to have paid leave from work when their wives were pregnant so they could help out at home. On the wall of the building that was probably the harem, however, and which is now a museum displaying artifacts found on the site, there is a proclamation issued by the government of Iran asserting that, while it is of course wonderful that people can come to see the great works God made it possible for the ancient Iranian kings to produce, we should not forget that they were tyrannical despots who exploited their people, the clear implication being and that it has only been through the Islamic Republic that Iranians have found true freedom. (Other evidence of the essentially humane nature of the ancient Iranian kings also exists, but since that is not the point of this post, I will allow the irony in what I have just written to speak for itself.)

Whether or not Persident Obama was aware of the irony of sending his message to the Islamic Republic on Nowruz, I don’t know, but like most well-constructed ironies this one can be read two ways, either as evidence that he didn’t know what he was doing and that his message will therefore fall on deaf ears, or that he knew precisely what he was doing and was sending the Islamic Republic the message that while he intends to do business with them as the legitimate political leaders of Iran, that does not mean he will kowtow to the world view they would like to impose on the people of their nation. My own sense, though, is that it doesn’t matter whether or not Obama and his people knew anything about what I have just written; the practical effect of his message, specifically his appeal to the common humanity that binds us as the context within which to talk about the differences between us, puts the Islamic Republic on notice that they cannot depend on the US being an easy enemy anymore–by which I mean an enemy they can easily avoid talking to because we fit very neatly into the “enemy” slot in their rhetoric, which is where the Bush administration kept us firmly ensconced for the eight years they were in power.

More to the point, Obama’s message, including his brief quote from the poet Sa’di, had to have spoken very powerfully to the Iranian people, first because the message of shared humanity is one they have heard all too rarely from the US not only in the last eight years, but ever. From long before the US and British sponsored coup in 1953 that unseated Mohammad Mossadeq, the duly elected prime minister of Iran, so that they could reinstate Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi (the NY Times report is here; and an allegedly unedited version of the CIA report is here)–all pretty clearly in the interest of retaining access to and control over Iran’s oil–Iranians have seen their aspirations for democracy thwarted time and time again by outside influences. To the degree that President Obama is seriously committed to engaging Iran on equal terms–by which I mean in a way that respects and honors the integrity of their much-much-older-than-ours culture, history and even their politics (a subject that is far more complicated than almost any reporting I have ever seen done on the subject here in the States–and I am certainly no expert)–and to the degree that he can demonstrate that commitment with concrete action, he is committing the United States to a radical change not only in the way we deal with Iran politically, but also in how we see Iran more broadly–since, after all, the way our media covers Iran will absolutely follow the stance our political leaders take towards Iran. (As an aside: I was very surprised by how many of the Iranians I met when I was there this past summer think that the average American thinks they are all some version of what is meant by the phrase “anti-American terrorist.” They see how they and their country are portrayed here; and they–not the government, but everyday people–despair of ever being seen by us on their own terms.)

The other reason that Obama’s use of lines by Sa’di would have resonated very powerfully with the Iranian people is the degree to which Sa’di and his work is loved and revered in Iranian culture to this day. I will write more about Sa’di in a future post. For now, suffice it to say that his position in the Iranian literary canon is not unlike Shakespeare’s place in our own. More to the point, Iran is a culture that loves its poets and its poetry; it is hard for people in the US, where poetry is so little appreciated unless it is couched in the melodies of popular song, to imagine the degree to which poetry is a living part of the culture in Iran. One very rough analogy might be to think about someone like the early Bob Dylan and how popular his songs were–and maybe still are–in progressive circles and then expand that popularity to include pretty much the entire population of the United States, and not just because people liked his tunes, but because they identified with the way he spoke truth to power; and then imagine Bob Dylan’s words not just as part of every child’s schooling, but as the primary text used to teach people how to read English.

As I said in my introductory post, I am not an expert on Iranian literature, and so I make no claim that what I have just told you about Sa’di is 100% accurate and up-to-date–indeed, it’s fascinating to learn the degree to which Sa’di’s reputation has risen and fallen depending on the political climate in Iran–but I think my analogy is generally true. Moreover, it is indisputably true that there is a long tradition in Iran, and other countries in that region, such as Pakistan, of poets being the people who speak truth to power. In fact, the lines from Sa’di that Obama quoted, wonderfully liberal and humanistic as they are, come from a story in Gulistan that is far more radical, certainly for the time it was written, than those two lines would suggest. Here is the full story, though I am now going to switch to my own translation. It’s the tenth story in the first chapter, “Padeshahan” (“Kings”), in Gulistan. First, though, some vocabulary:

• A darvish (dervish in English) was a kind of wandering mendicant, and they were usually Sufi and considered holy men.
• The Propeht Yahia is John the Baptist.

Story 10

An Arab king who was notorious for his cruelty came on a pilgrimage to the cathedral mosque of Damascus, where he offered the following prayer, clearly seeking God’s assistance in a matter of some urgency:

“The darvish, poor, owning nothing, the man
whose money buys him anything he wants,
here, on this floor, enslaved, we are equals.
Nonetheless, the man who has the most
comes before You bearing the greater need.”

When the king was done praying, he noticed me immersed in my own prayers at the head of the prophet Yahia’s tomb. The monarch turned to me, “I know that God favors you darvishes because you are passionate in your worship and honest in the way you live your lives. I fear a powerful enemy, but if you add your prayers to mine, I am sure that God will protect me for your sake.”

“Have mercy on the weak among your own people,” I replied, “and no one will be able to defeat you.”

To break each of a poor man’s ten fingers
just because you have the strength offends God.
Show compassion to those who fall before you,
and others will extend their hands when you are down.

The man who plants bad seed hallucinates
if he expects sweet fruit at harvest time.
Take the cotton from your ears! Give
your people justice before justice finds you.

All men and women are to each other
the limbs of a single body, each of us drawn
from life’s shimmering essence, God’s perfect pearl;
and when this life we share wounds one of us,
all share the hurt as if it were our own.
You, who will not feel another’s pain,
you forfeit the right to be called human.

Because I plan to write more about Sa’di in a future post, I am going to let this story speak for itself, except for two things: First, given that Sa’di lived in a monarchy, consider how much courage it would take to say such things to a king who had the power of live and death over you. Second, consider how radical it would be in a monarchy to suggest to the king that he should rule as if he and the weakest of his subjects were actually part of the same body–the metaphor is a good deal more complext than you might think on a first reading–and then consider the ways in which that metaphor resonates today, not only in countries like Iran, with governments that are in many ways hostile to their own people, but even in our own nation, where our government is supposed to be “of the people, by the people and for the people.”

My next post, unless something else happens to distract me, will be about Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh.

Cross posted on It’s All Connected.