Isfahan

Among my pre college fantasies about a future career was architecture. And it is through architecture that I first thought about Iran, for I saw pictures of the many gorgeous buildings in that nation, particularly in Isfahan, a center of religious learning graced by many mosques distinguished by thrilling open half domes and wonderful mosaics.

I went on to other occupations but I kept an eye on Iran and was aware in the middle of the last century it had a quite beneficent Social Democratic, parliamentary government lead by a rather odd guy named Mohammad Mosaddegh. He lay in bed a lot. More politicians shood try that. His parliament began the process of nationalizing the mainly British oil company that then controlled Iran’s petroleum. In response the British M16 with the support of the CIA overthrew Mosaddegh and parliament and handed authoritarian power to Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, almost a neo-colonial state. This coup began a long and painful history between our two nations.

The first Iranian I met was the oil minister of the Shah in the middle 1970s. At the time I worked in a computer group that was doing advanced research in portraying words on computer screens (by methods inconceivably crude by today's standards). He visited our center where I gave demos to him in hopes of portraying Farsi on computer screens. But Farsi is always written like English cursive, so that the shape of one letter affects the shape of letters preceding and following it, far beyond the capabilities of computers at that time. Most of all I was impressed by the self-importance of the man, fawned on by several subordinates who for instance carried his briefcase, and by the managers of the institution I worked for.

Of course in 1979 the Shah fell to Islamic nationalists and Iran became the enemy of the US.

The US used to be more friendly to immigration and we have a lot of Iranian émigrés in San Francisco’s East Bay, mostly refugees from the Shah or from the mullahs or their descendants. The waves of immigration reflect the varying and difficult relations between our two nations.

I first became aware of this body of immigrants and their meaning to our history in 1990 when we were remodeling a bathroom. The plumber we hired was an Iranian immigrant who said he had been tortured both by the Savak (the Secret Service of the Shah) and by the intelligence services of the Islamic government. While he was working the Gulf War broke out and missiles criss-crossed the skies of the Middle East. He was dreadfully afraid that Iran would be drawn into the conflict and he and I sat together in our partially deconstructed bathroom chewing our nails with worry. Of course, Iran was not drawn in at that time although there was continuing military exchange with the United States culminating in the sinking of the Iranian frigate Sahand in 1988.

Our plumber was a fascinating guy full of eloquent stories of his life but had some difficulties satisfying the building inspector on our project. We stuck with him. To thank us he invited us to an Iranian nightclub in San Jose one evening. It was a small but wealthy club with a good-sized crowd of prosperous people who seemed to be from the culture of the Shah. There were champagne, belly dancers, and a singer who sang with a small orchestra in French. Indeed the use of language sounded to me to be about a third Farsi, a third English, and a third French. For us it was a trip to another world, which was filled with narcissistic nostalgia.

The next time I talked about these issues to an Iranian I was standing in line in the early 21st century to get flu shots. It turned out that the woman ahead of me in line was Iranian. By her age and conversation I judged that she had fled Iran when Mosaddegh fell. I told her that I remembered that the Shah had come to power partly because of covert activity by the CIA. It was a touching moment for my fellow vaccination standees; she broke into gentle tears because she had met an American who understood what the United States had done to her country.

An excellent falafel place run by Iranians used to flourish near where I now live. It is closed now because the building’s owners raised the rent. I saw with pleasure that it remained unrented for many months after its closure. The walls were covered with posters of many wonderful examples of architecture, mostly from Isfahan. One day after eating a delicious falafel I was standing at the counter paying. The person making change was a woman at my guess of third generation Iranian descent and about 20. To make conversation while she shuffled coins I gestured to the posters and said that I hoped that I someday might see Isfahan. She replied, in a quiet, forlorn way, “So do I.”

And things have only gotten worse. The people of Iran have periodically risen in mass demonstrations against the government, which have been brutally repressed and many have fled the country, mostly not admitted to the United States these days. Most recently the Iranian government built deep underground near Isfahan a uranium refining facility and the US, as part of a then-undeclared war, dropped on it the largest non-nuclear bomb ever built. It is not clear whether it did any damage, but it did not do any good. Now the war is declared. The US and Israel have destroyed the previous government only to make place for a worse one. The foolish and narcissistic U.S. president is hanging in the wind. I hope none of the great building in Isfahan are harmed.