Iran

Richard N. Frye, Richard N Frye

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781138223967
• eBook ISBN: 9781000639506
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Regional Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Richard N. Frye, who worked for many years in Iran, Afghanistan, Turkey and Egypt, brings to this 1960 book an historian's accuracy, a writer's talent, and an eye for colour. The result is a fascinating, accurate portrait of a vital area in the cold war, an area composed of many peoples of ancient religions and customs and characterised by a vig

1
Land and People

Introduction

IN THE second half of the twentieth century the Orient has become a bone of contention between the conflicting worlds of the West and the Soviet Union. But the issues here are far more complicated than great power rivalry, for nascent nationalisms and internal unrest in the countries of the East overshadow the issue of acceptance or rejection of Communism, and our relations with these countries must be based on an understanding of their internal problems, not solely on the black-white yardstick of their pro- or anti-Communist positions. Many of the problems are age-old and not to be solved overnight, nor by a universally applicable touchstone of Western democracy. For much of what has been developed 011 European soil is a result of traditions and circumstances peculiar to our land and people. In transplanting our ideas and techniques to other countries we may find that they do not flourish or that they develop in directions other than those followed in the West. This is especially true in Asia where there are ancient civilizations with cultural patterns different from the West European Christian tradition. And Asia itself is no unit; there are many peoples and cultures in that vast land mass. The countries vary in language, in religion, in level of industrialization, and in a host of other respects.

That is why one must study the background of a country like Iran to realize her peculiar problems and those features which distinguish this country from her neighbors. To put all of the peoples and countries of the Middle East into one category with little differentiation is a great error; each people and nation must be examined separately in the light of geography, history, customs, and present conditions.

The oil of Iran has usurped the headlines concerning that little-known land, but Iran also has great strategic importance bordering the Soviet Union and acting as a land bridge between India and the Mediterranean states. She is a member of the free, non-Communist world—even though a weak member at present. The revolution and change in government in Iraq have shaken the Persians, but the basic problem of Iran is internal, her ability to take a place in the modern world with all that this implies. The growing pains of “modernization” in Iran are legion, but they must be resolved if Iran is to survive, and it behooves us to understand, aid, and encourage the Persians in this difficult task of theirs. Before we can really help, we must understand; and for that we must study her past as well as her present.

The Land

Persia, or Iran as it is called by its inhabitants,¹ is a country almost as large as the United States east of the Mississippi River, a land of great variety in its physical features. High mountain ranges alternate with barren deserts or lush semi-tropical forests, all of which have tended to separate the people from each other rather than to bind them together in a geographical unity. And nature is extremely important in conditioning the lives of the people for they are closer to and more dependent on the whims of nature than we in the West. An exacting climate and an unwilling soil are not the least of the hardships which test the strength and patience of the Persian peasant and nomad.

¹ In the West the form Persia, from the southern province now called Fars, is more common than Iran, from Aryan. In this book Iran, Iranian and Persia, Persian are used synonymously.

The location of Iran, as a link between the Far East (with India) and the West during most of her history, and as an area of dispute between the Russians from the north and the British from the south in more recent times, must be remembered in studying the past of the country and especially her role today in great power politics. Iran has also served as a highway for invading peoples from Central Asia, passing either to the east of the central deserts on the road to India, or to the west towards Iraq and Anatolia. Furthermore, the influence of Iran in political and economic, but especially in cultural, matters extended and still extends beyond her present political frontiers; geography helps to explain this.

The geographic unit of which present political Iran is the largest part comprises the plateau with mountains extending from the plains of the Punjab to the lowlands of Iraq. The plateau is bounded on the south by the Persian Gulf and the Indian Ocean, and on the north by the Caucasus Mountains and the plains of Central Asia. For our present purposes, however, we must exclude those areas of the plateau which are included in the boundaries of the Soviet Union, Afghanistan, or Pakistan.

The part of the plateau which is in Iran is by no means comparable to a billiard table; rather it is divided by many mountain ranges, narrow valleys, and wide deserts. It is roughly the shape of a triangle with the apex in the northwest, where Iran meets Turkey and the USSR, and the other two points where Iran touches Afghanistan and Russia and where she is bounded by Pakistan and the Indian Ocean. Outside the plateau, but within the political frontiers of Iran, are in the south the plain of Khuzistan, a continuation of the rich alluvial lowlands of Iraq, and in the north the Caspian littoral, which lies below sea level.

Two great mountain ranges divide the plateau from these plains; one of these, the Elburz, extends from the Caucasus south of the Caspian and into Afghanistan, with its highest peak, Mt. Demavand (18,600 ft.), visible to the east of Tehran. The other, the Zagros range, lies along Iran’s western border and continues to the south along the Persian Gulf and Indian Ocean to Pakistan. Smaller mountains intrude into the interior of the country, and even in the central deserts mountains are never out of sight. These two deserts, the Dasht-i-Kavir and the Dasht-i-Lut, are impressive in their desolation and loneliness. In them are salt craters reminiscent of the moon’s surface seen through a telescope, and there is absolutely no animal or vegetable life.

In general, verdure and trees on the plateau are conspicuous by their absence, and only the agency of man, leading water to gardens and oases by irrigation, brings green to an otherwise naked landscape. Probably in the past there was more vegetation than there is today. For example, the first Moghul emperor of India mentions in his memoirs the verdure on the environs of the city of Kabul, Afghanistan, whereas today, after four hundred years, they are barren of vegetation. Nonetheless one wonders how much of the greenery then was due to the industry of the population, and whether much of the lack of it today is the result of neglect and depredations. There are traces of habitations and caravansarais in the deserts attesting to once populous areas where today there is no one, but this may be the result of shifts in population, and it is a question whether the population of pre-Mongol Iran, estimated by some at five or six times the present number of people, may not be an exaggeration.

In any case the mountains and valleys are the same, and now as then they divide the plateau into a number of parts. Excepting the two areas outside the plateau mentioned above, one may make ten divisions starting with Azerbaijan in the northwest, a geographical entity which from time to time has led a political existence apart from the rest of Iran. This is the only province of Iran where dry-farming is practiced. The heart of the country is the Tehran-Isfahan-Hamadan area, frequently the site of the capital, and the center of power in recent times. To the south is the important province of Fars, with its principal city of Shiraz, homeland of Iran’s pre-Islamic dynasties. Further to the east is the province of Kirman, with its largest city of the same name, high in altitude, and its second city Bam. This area is isolated from the rest of Iran by deserts to the west between Kirman and Yezd, and to the east between Bam and Seistan. The latter is a flat plain watered by the Helmand River, which flows from the mountains of Afghanistan and rescues the land from the desert. Here one can lose sight of the mountains to the west and find himself in a rich farming area where Indian water buffaloes mingle with the sheep and goats of nomadic Baluchis. Farther to the south and east is the barren land of Baluchistan, at present divided between Iran and Pakistan.

In the northeast is the comparatively populous province of Khurasan (Khorasan), with its largest city, Meshed, the religious center of Iran. Here too are extensive poppy fields, producing the opium for which Iran is noted. Khurasan is separated from the rest of the country by the two great salt deserts, which, however, are not impassable, since oases and waterholes can be found along the caravan routes. The Turkoman steppes, though they may be regarded as the northern part of Khurasan, are better considered as a continuation of the steppes of Central Asia, extending south from the Soviet Union. Finally there is the wide Zagros mountain range in the west, inhabited by Kurds and Lurs, famous for their fierce, independent spirit. This division of Iran does not correspond to modern political divisions, but rather to historical and geographical factors.

In addition there is the oil province of Khuzistan at the head of the Persian Gulf and the caviar province of Gilan with Mazanderan province on the Caspian Sea. These areas are quite unlike the plateau in appearance and population. The plain of Khuzistan is cut by many rivers, including the only navigable river of Iran, the Karun. Whereas on the plateau the climate is continental, with cold winters and hot summers, in Khuzistan the winters are mild but the summers are characterized by the same unbearable heat as at Basra in Iraq. The present fame of Khuzistan rests on oil, for on the island of Abadan is a huge, modern oil refinery, with pipes leading to the wells in nearby hills and mountains. While the oil industry has brought an unprecedented activity and development to this part of the country, it may, on the other hand, have contributed to a neglect of agriculture, for Khuzistan, famous in ancient times as a rich granary, is hardly that today.

The Caspian provinces are relatively the most densely populated and, with humus soil, the richest agricultural lands in Iran. Here swiftly flowing rivers drop to the Caspian from high mountains, for the width of the coastal plain between sea and mountains is rarely more than a few miles. The abundant rainfall, in contrast to that of the plateau, and the warm climate produce areas of semi-tropical vegetation which the Persians call jungles. This area produces rice and silk, both of which are famous outside the borders of Iran. Gilan and Mazanderan have been for centuries exposed to raids and invasions from across the Caspian, the raiders including the Vikings in the tenth century and the Bolsheviks in 1920.

Water

The cultivated soil, hardly more than one tenth of the total land area, is, over most of the plateau, a kind of loess becoming more and more sandy to the south and east. The great need in agriculture is water, the life blood of Iran, and irrigation must supply the major part of the country’s needs. Since early times the Persians have maintained a remarkable system of irrigation with underground tunnels called qanats (or ghanats). These lead water from the mountains sometimes as much as thirty miles into the plains, underground to avoid loss by evaporation. Today, as for hundreds of years, they are dug and maintained by primitive methods, much labor, and a considerable outlay of capital. Deep wells are dug at intervals of about 150 feet, and then the bottoms of the wells are connected by a tunnel only large enough for a man with back bent to crawl through. Constant cleaning of mud and repair of cave-ins is necessary, though not an easy job, for the tunnels are sometimes as much as a hundred feet under the earth. Unfortunately most of the rivers on the plateau are seasonal streams, raging torrents for a short time in the spring and dry the rest of the year, and most of them empty into salt lakes or swamps. With the construction of permanent dams much water might be saved for agricultural purposes, and several dams are under construction on the rivers of Khuzistan, while others are planned else-where in the country. Without large dams it is difficult to see how land reform and division of the land among the peasants will succeed, since water, not land, is important in Iran. And only the landlords at present have the necessary capital and ability to organize the peasants for labor on the qanats.

The Peasants

As elsewhere in Asia, peasants are the great bulk of the Persian population. Estimates of the total population place it at about twenty million with perhaps three quarters living in villages or on the land. Since World War II, however, there has been a great movement to the cities; Tehran, the capital, has now more than tripled its population from some half million before the war.

The life of the peasant has changed little in the past thousand years; it is still hard, little above the starvation level. He is constantly beset by disease—malaria, syphilis, tuberculosis—with diseases of malnutrition the most common. By nature conservative, he is difficult to persuade to change practices he inherited from his father and grandfather. The average peasant lives in a mud hut in a village which belongs to a landlord who may never visit the village if he owns scores just like it and affairs keep him in Tehran. There is usually a headman, or kadkhuda, in each village; in most cases he is the manager of the estates of the greatest landlord of the village or his appointee. It must be recognized that many landlords have treated their feudal domains paternally, taking care of the irrigation system and the peasants who are under them. Also, the amount of wealth many landlords derive from their villages is not always as great as one might suppose, since the margin above mere existence is small and there is little for the landlord to take.

Traditionally the produce of the land is divided into five parts, with one share each going to the persons who provide water, draft animals, labor, and seeds, while the landlord receives one fifth. If the peasant can provide oxen or seed he is in a better position than a neighbor who can only contribute his labor. In practice, however, the peasant is bound to the land, usually in eternal debt to the landlord. While this almost feudal system is accompanied by many abuses, it fosters also the paternalism and the kind of democracy where the landlord will sit on the floor to eat with his employees and peasants, providing for all. The problem of raising the standard of living of the peasant is of course basic to any plan for...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Original Title
• Original Copyright
• Contents
• Maps
• CHAPTER 1. Land and People
• CHAPTER 2. Empires of the Past
• CHAPTER 3. The West and Oil
• Bibliographical Note
• Appendixes
• Index