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Iranian Studies in the United Kingdom in the Twentieth Century

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Mansour Bonakdarian*
Affiliation:
Historical Studies department, University of Toronto, Mississauga

Abstract

This essay provides a general introductory survey of Iranian and Iran-related studies in the United Kingdom in the twentieth century (including languages, literature, and the arts), with a very brief preliminary foray into earlier Iran-related scholarship and wide-ranging imaginations of Iran in Britain and Ireland, as well as some concluding remarks on contemporary knowledge production about Britain in Iran. Among other themes covered in the essay are the varied contributions of non-Britons and non-Irish to Iran-related scholarship and imaginations in the United Kingdom, underscoring the overall transnational production, dissemination, reception, and utilization of knowledge (history, geography, archaeology, cultures, ethnography and anthropology, art and architecture, Iran-related Persian-language literatures and poetry, etc.). In particular, the essay highlights the contributions made by individuals from, and institutions in, the Indian subcontinent to “British” scholarship and knowledge about Iran.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © The International Society for Iranian Studies 2010

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Footnotes

This article is an expanded version of a presentation given at the “Iran and Iranian Studies in the 20th Century” conference in Toronto, Canada, in October 2007, organized by the Toronto Initiative for Iranian Studies (University of Toronto) My thanks to Dr. Homa Katouzian and Dr. Mohamad Tavakoli-Targhi, for inviting me to participate at the conference.

For a general survey of the academic teaching of “Iranian studies” in Britain, see Charles Melville, “Great Britain X. Iranian Studies in Britain: Islamic Period,” Encyclopaedia Iranica (http://www.iranica.com/newsite/index.isc?Article=http://www.iranica.com/newsite/articles/unicode/v11f3/v11f3001g.html).

References

1 Throughout the article “British” will refer to the geographically-defined contours of Iranian studies in both Great Britain and Ireland (Northern Ireland after 1922), while “British” and “Britons” will be used in reference to both Britons (English, Scots, and Welsh) and the Irish (or the population of Northern Ireland after 1922), given that there exists no alternative single term in reference to the entire population of the UK.

2 On the problematic of periodization schemes, see for example Zerubavel, Eviatar, “Language and Memory: “Pre-Columbian” America and the Social Logic of Periodization,Social Research, 652 (1998): 315328.Google Scholar

3 See also Henderikus Braaksma, Michiel, Travel and Literature; an Attempt at a Literary Appreciation of English Travel-books About Persia, from the Middle Ages to the Present Day (Groningen, 1938)Google Scholar; Denis Wright “Great Britain. VII. British Travelers to Persia,” Encyclopaedia Iranica, http://74.125.95.104/search?q=cache:rFrtfB9j4HsJ:www.iranica.com/articles/v11f3/v11f3001d.html+Great+Britain+British+Travelers+to+Persia&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1&gl=ca; Clifford Edmund Bosworth, “Three British Travellers to the Middle East and India in the Early Seventeenth Century,” 2005, http://www.mta.hu/fileadmin/szekfoglalok/000914.pdf.

4 Jenkinson's travel accounts first appeared in the multi-volume collection of English travel accounts published between 1598 and 1600 by Richard Hakluyt (The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries of The English Nation) and were later published by the Hakluyt Society as Early Voyages and Travels to Russia and Persia (1885).

5 On early accounts of European travels to Asia, see also Lach, Donald F. and Van Kley, Edwin J., Asia in the Making of Europe. Vol.III: A Century of Advance (Chicago, 1993).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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8 See Schwab, Raymond, The Oriental Renaissance: Europe's Rediscovery of India and the East, 1680–1880 (New York, 1984)Google Scholar; Kopf, David, British Orientalism and the Bengal Renaissance: The Dynamics of Indian Modernization, 1773–1835 (Berkeley, 1969).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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11 See Peter Avery, “Ouseley, Sir William,” Encyclopaedia Iranica, http://www.iranica.com/articles/ot_grp5/ot_ouseley_william_20050106.html.

12 A few of the many publications during the nineteenth century include John Macdonald Kinneir, A Geographical Memoir of the Persian Empire, Accompanied by a Map (1813); Sir John Malcolm, The History of Persia, From the Most Early Period to the Present Times (1815); James Morier's, A Second Journey through Persia, Armenia and Asia Minor, to Constantinople, Between the Years 1810 and 1816 (1818); Sir William Ouseley (the brother of Sir Gore Ouseley, the British representative in Tehran), Travels in Various Countries of the East; More Particularly Persia (1819); Arthur Arnold, Through Persia by Caravan (1877). Austen Henry Layard, Early Adventures in Persia, Susiana, and Babylonia (1887); Isabella Bird (Bishop), Journeys in Persia and Kurdistan (1891); George Nathaniel Curzon, Persia and the Persian Question (1892); Edward G. Browne, A Year Amongst the Persians (1893); and Gertrude L. Bell, Safar nameh. Persian Pictures: A Book of Travel (1894). Lady Mary Leonora Sheil's Glimpses of Life and Manners in Persia (1856), was the first book-length account of a residence in Iran written by a British woman. Lady Sheil, who arrived in Iran in 1849 after marrying Justin Sheil, the British representative to Iran from 1842 to 1853, and remained there for nearly four years, was by no means the first British woman to travel to Iran, but she was the first to publish a lengthy narrative of her impressions of that country. Lady Ouseley, the wife of Sir Gore Ouseley, the British representative in Tehran (1811–14), and her two maids, appear to have been the first British women to travel to Iran in the nineteenth century. Sir Denis Wright remarks: “Apart from a Mrs. Barnwell, the wife of one of the East India Company's factors who was briefly in Persia [in the eighteenth century], I know of no British lady in Persia before the nineteenth century.” Wright, Denis, “Memsahibs in Persia,Asian Affairs, 14, no. 1 (February 1983): 5.CrossRefGoogle Scholar See also Wright, Denis, The English Amongst the Persians: During the Qajar Period 1787–1921 (London 1977).Google Scholar

13 See also Curtis, John, Tallis, Nigel, and André-Salvini, Béatrice, eds., Forgotten Empire: The World of Ancient Persia (Los Angeles, 2005), 59Google Scholar, 70, 254.

14 On the latter collection, see also Scarce, Jennifer M., “Major-General Sir Robert Murdoch Smith KCMG and Anglo-Iranian Relations in Art and Culture,” in Martin, Vanessa, ed., Anglo-Iranian Relations Since 1800 (London, 2005), 2135.Google Scholar

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16 Yohannan, John D., “The Persian Poetry Fad in England, 1770–1825,Comparative Literature, 4, no. 2 (Spring 1952): 137160CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Javadi, Hasan, Persian Literary Influence on English Literature: With Special Reference to the Nineteenth Century (Costa Mesa, 2005).Google Scholar For wide-ranging examples of British and other European influences on “intellectual” thought in Iran during the nineteenth century, see, among many other works, Hairi, Abdul-Hadi, Nukhustin Ruyaruiha-i Andishih-garan-i Iran ba Dou Raviyih-i Tamadun-i Bourzhevazi-i Qarb (Tehran, 1987/88)Google Scholar; Masroori, Cyrus, “European Thought in Nineteenth-Century Iran: David Hume and Others,Journal of the History of Ideas, 61, no. 4 (October 2000): 657675.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

17 See also Lloyd, David, “James Clarence Mangan's Oriental Translations and the Question of Origins,Comparative Literature, 38, no. 1 (Winter 1986): 2035CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lennon, Joseph, Irish Orientalism: A Literary and Intellectual History (Syracuse, 2004), 160162.Google Scholar

18 See Binning, Robert, A Journal of Two Years' Travel in Persia, Ceylon, Etc. Vol. I (London, 1857), 409411Google Scholar; Fischel, Walter J., “The Bible in Persian Translation: A Contribution to the History of Bible Translations in Persia and India,The Harvard Theological Review, 45, no. 1 (January 1952): 345CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Yahya Armajani, “Christianity. VII. Christian Missions in Persia.” Encyclopaedia Iranica, http://www.iranica.com/newsite/index.isc?Article=http://www.iranica.com/newsite/articles/unicode/v5f5/v5f5a018.html.

19 Evidently Cowell was not all too pleased with the publication of Fitzgerald's book. See “An Orientalist: Letters of Edward Byles Cowell, Who Taught Edward FitzGerald Persian,” New York Times, 10 September 1904, 20.

20 See also Ghani, Cyrus, Shakespeare, Persia, and the East (Washington, DC, 2008)Google Scholar; and Niayesh, Ladan, “Shakespeare's Persians,Shakespeare, 4, no. 2 (June 2008): 137147.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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22 See also Ziter, Edward, The Orient on the Victorian Stage (Cambridge, 2003), 78.Google Scholar

23 Ali, Tariq and Brenton, Howard, Iranian Nights (London, 1989).Google Scholar See also Keith Peacock, D., Thatcher's Theatre: British Theatre and Drama in the Eighties (Westport, CT, 1999), 103104.Google Scholar

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25 See also Cheng, Vincent John, Joyce, Race, and Empire (Cambridge, 1995), 177.Google Scholar

26 See also Islam, Shamsul, “The Influence of Eastern Philosophy on Yeats's Later Poetry,Twentieth Century Literature, 19, no. 4 (October 1973): 283290CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Viswanathan, Gauri, “Ireland, India, and the Poetics of Internationalism,Journal of World History, 15, no. 1 (March 2004): 730CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Catherine Candy, “Unreasonable Histories: Persia, America and the Decolonizing Occult in Margaret Cousins's Irish-Indian Mediations” (forthcoming).

27 He “based his poem ‘His Bargain’ on the one hundred and seventy-third poem of Hafiz's Divan. He quoted Hafiz's poem in a speech in Diarmuid and Grania, which he and George Moore wrote together in 1902: ‘Life of my life, I knew you before I was born, I made a bargain with this brown hair before the beginning of time and it shall not be broken through unending time.” Islam, “Influence of Eastern Philosophy”: 284–285.

28 Wright, Denis, The Persians Amongst the English: Episodes in Anglo-Persian History (London, 1985), 143145.Google Scholar

29 See also Tavakoli-Targhi, Mohamad, Refashioning Iran: Orientalism, Occidentalism and Historiography (New York, 2001), 1834.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

30 New York Times, 10 September 1899, 17; Lia Genovese, ed., “Proceedings (Extract) of XII International Congress of Orientalists, Rome, October 1899,” http://idp.bl.uk/4DCGI/education/orientalists/index.a4d. The participation of Iranian and other “oriental” scholars at the gatherings of the International Congress pf Orientalists also calls into question the historically inelastic Saidian definition of Orientalists as those studying and representing the Orient who were not of the Orient themselves. See the “Introduction” in Edward Said, Orientalism (New York, 1978).

31 Fagan, Brian, Grahame Clark: An Intellectual Biography of an Archaeologist (Boulder, 2003), 1316.Google Scholar

32 On two recent divergent assessments of Browne's career as an academic orientalist and his political espousal of Iran's independence, see Nash, Geoffrey P., From Empire to Orient: Travellers to the Middle East, 1830–1926 (London, 2005), 139168CrossRefGoogle Scholar and passim; and Edmund Bosworth, C., “Edward Granville Browne,” in Edmund Bosworth, C., ed., A Century of British Orientalists, 1902–2001 (Oxford, 2001), 7586.Google Scholar

33 The term “Middle East” was coined in 1900 and only gained wide currency after World War I. See Rose Greaves, “Gordon, General Sir Thomas Edward,” Encyclopaedia Iranica, http://www.iranica.com/newsite/index.isc?Article=http://www.iranica.com/newsite/articles/unicode/v11f2/v11f2031.html.

34 C. Edmund Bosworth, “Vladimir Fed'orovich Minorsky,” in Bosworth, ed., A Century of British Orientalists, 203–218.

35 Boyce, Mary, “Obituary: Walter Bruno Henning,Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, 30, no. 3 (1967): 781785.Google Scholar

36 Shaykh Hassan Tabrizi (a.k.a. “Cambriji”), a colleague and friend of Browne at Cambridge, was also the author of Persian Self-Taught (in Roman Characters) with English Phonetic Pronunciation (London, 1909).Google Scholar

37 Iranshahr, Kazem Kazemzadeh, âsār va ahvāl-i Kāzemzādeh-i Irānshahr (Tehran, 1985), 109116.Google Scholar

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39 Sadiq, yädigär-i omr, 123. On Levy, see also Melville, “Great Britain: X. Iranian Studies in Britain: Islamic Period.”

40 See also Braun, Lindsay Frederick, “Suez Reconsidered: Anthony Eden's Orientalism and the Suez Crisis,The Historian, 65, no. 3 (March 2003): 539544.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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42 See Darab, Gholam Hosein, Persian Composition (London, 1948), iiiviGoogle Scholar, and the Persian pages 3–4. Darab Khan was also a translator of Nezami Ganjavi's works. According to Pound, Darab Khan was still teaching at SOAS well into the early 1950s. See Pound, Omar S., “Wyndham Lewis: A Memoir Without Benefit of Diaries,Modernism/Modernity, 4, no. 2 (1997): 191.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

43 Denis Wright, “The Iran Society: The First Sixty-five Years, 1935–2000” (with an Introduction by Lord Temple-Morris) (Iran Society, 2001), http://www.iransociety.org/sixtyfive_1.htm; Lambton, Ann K. S. and Shadman, S. F., “A Review of Anglo-Persian Relations, 1798–1815,Journal of the Royal Central Asian Society, 31, no. 1 (January 1944): 2339.Google Scholar

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45 On academic and non-academic orientalism in Britain, see also Nash, From Empire to Orient.

46 Arberry, Arthur J., Oriental Essays: Portraits of Seven Scholars (New York, 1960), 174.Google Scholar

47 See also Abrahamian, Ervand, “The 1953 Coup in Iran,Science & Society, 65 (Summer 2001): 2.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

48 See also Searight, Sarah, “Denis Wright and the English in Persia,Journal of Iran Society, 2, no. 6 (2007): 716Google Scholar; Wright, “The Iran Society: The First Sixty-five Years, 1935–2000.”

49 On Oriental Studies and “Irish Orientalism,” see Mansoor, Menahem, The Study of Irish Orientalism (Dublin, 1944)Google Scholar; Lennon, Irish Orientalism.

50 See Vieyra, A. Animadversiones philologicæ in nonnulla Corani loca. Accedunt illustrationes in V.T. ex Arabismo, necnon Persismo depromptæ. Pro specimine edidit R. Antonius Vieyra (Dublin, 1785).Google Scholar

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54 “School of Oriental and African Studies Archives,” http://www.aim25.ac.uk/cgi-bin/search2?coll_id=2951&inst_id=19.

55 On the “Third World,” see also Prashad, Vijay, The Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third World (New York, 2007).Google Scholar

56 University of Cambridge “Archives of the Faculty of Oriental Studies,” http://janus.lib.cam.ac.uk/db/node.xsp?id=EAD%2FGBR%2F0265%2FORS.

57 See also Hayter, William, “The Hayter Report and After,Oxford Review of Education, 1, no. 2 (1975): 169172.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

58 Early in the century, such accounts included Percy Molesworth Sykes's Ten Thousand Miles in Persia (1902), Joseph Maunsell Hone's and Page Lawrence Dickinson's Persia in Revolution (1910), David Fraser's Persia and Turkey in Revolt (1910), or Vita (Victoria Mary) Sackville-West's Passenger to Teheran (1926), among many others.

59 See, for example, Percy Molesworth Sykes's two-volume History of Persia (1915).

60 Fry, Roger, Pope, Arthur Upham, Wilson, Arnold T., et al., Persian Art: An Illustrated Souvenir of the Exhibition of Persian Art at Burlington House London 1931 (London, 1931)Google Scholar; Binyon, Laurence, Wilkinson, J. V. S., and Grey, Basil, Persian Miniature Painting. Including a Critical and Descriptive Catalogue of the Miniatures Exhibited at Burlington House, January-March, 1931 (London, 1933)Google Scholar; Martin Briggs, S., Binyon, Laurence, Kendrick, A. F., Ashton, Leigh, and Rackham, Bernard, “The Persian Exhibition,The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs, 58, no. 334 (January 1931): 345Google Scholar; Villard, M. S., “The International Exhibition of Persian Art in London,Parnassus, 3, no. 2 (February 1931): 3034.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

61 The Persia Committee, founded in London in October 1908 with H. F. B. Lynch as its Chairman and E. G. Browne as its vice-chairman, championed the Iranian constitutional movement and Iran's territorial sovereignty. Lamington served as the committee's president from 1909 to the outbreak of World War I, when the committee ceased its activities.

62 The Times (London), 4 December 1933, 17; 30 October 1934, 17.

64 Nicholas J. Cull, “Propaganda?,” http://www.britishcouncil.org/history-why-propaganda.htm.

67 British Society for Middle Eastern Studies, http://www.dur.ac.uk/brismes/.

68 The editors of different volumes were William Bayne Fisher, Peter Avery, Gavin R. G. Hambly, Charles Melville, Peter Jackson, Lawrence Lockhart, Ilya Gershevitch, Ehsan Yarshater, Richard N. Frye, John Andrew Boyle, and Harold Bailey.

69 Vanessa Martin's own publications include the edited volume Anglo-Iranian Relations since 1800 (London, 2005).Google Scholar

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71 This was largely due to a sharp decline in the total number of Iranian students pursuing their studies abroad during the Iran–Iraq War of 1980–88. Other factors contributing to the overall decline in numbers included the UK visa restrictions as well as the Iranian government's financial restrictions (both state grants and private-funds transfers) for degree seekers in the humanities and the Social Sciences studying abroad at the time.

72 British Society for Middle Eastern Studies (BRISMES), “The Crisis Facing Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies in British Universities” (2003), http://www.dur.ac.uk/brismes/ME%20studies%20-%20seminar%20report.htm.

73 See also Societas Iranologica Europaea, Iranian Studies. Part I: Institutions and Teaching Programmes in Twelve Countries of Western Europe (Leiden, 1988), 4249.Google Scholar

74 Colin Paul Mitchell, “Canada, Iranian Studies in. I) The Development of Iranian Studies in Canada,” Encyclopaedia Iranica, http://www.iranica.com/newsite/index.isc?Article=http://www.iranica.com/newsite/articles/unicode/supp4/CanadaIranStud.html; Rivanne Sandler, “Iranian Studies at the University of Toronto,” in the conference program of the Seventh Biennial Conference on Iranian Studies (the International Society for Iranian Studies, Toronto, 31 July–3 August 2008).

75 See Boyce, Mary and Windfuhr, Gernot, eds., Iranica Varia: Papers in Honor of Professor Ehsan Yarshater (Leiden, 1990).Google Scholar