In Isfahan

 In Isfahan  

                                                                           Chehel Sotoun Palace, Isfahan

In Isfahan is the title of a short story by William Trevor and I turned to it after watching TV pictures of the war raging across Iran and tried to make some sense of the destruction that I was witnessing.

 

Isfahan is a beautiful city. In the words of its governor Mehdi Jamalinejad:

 

“Isfahan is not an ordinary city. It’s a museum without a roof…In none of the previous eras, not in the Afghan wars, not in the Moghul conflict, not even during the ‘sacred defence’ [the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war] was this ever done.

 

“This is a declaration of war on a civilisation. An enemy that has no culture pays no heed to symbols of culture. A country that has no history has no respect for signs of history. A country that has no identity sets no value for identity.”

 

We are in no doubt which countries he is referring to here and it begs the question for us all to answer. Whatever the rights and wrongs of the reasons why this war was started, and I personally cannot find any, is there any justification for the obliteration of hundreds of years of cultural history in addition to the multiple civilian deaths caused by the repeated bombing of Iran?

 

William Trevor’s story, In Isfahan is one of almost a hundred in his Collected Stories and it is one which brings Eastern and Western cultures together. It is about two people who meet there and who almost but not quite have an affair. I remember reading it aloud to students during a short story course and remarking to the class about the beauty of the word Isfahan which, although not written in the original Persian, is pronounced Esfahan and has a marvellously sibilant sound as you read it. 

One of the students on the course recommended that I read a book by an Iranian author, Azar Nafisi. I did so and I later used one of the chapters from the book in a paper that I gave at an adult education conference in Turin in 2018: Togetherness – in times of conflict can we reconnect with our creative selves?  This is an extract from the paper:

 

“Azar Nafisi is an author and teacher of adults, who uses literature as a powerful tool to transform the lives of her students. Nafisi is now a Visiting Professor at John Hopkins University, Baltimore, USA, and her memoir, Reading Lolita in Tehran (2003) is a record of her time in Iran as a teacher. In this role she was endeavouring in some way to change the lives of women who had been caught up in the repressive regime of the clerics which had followed the overthrow of the Shah in 1979. The veil, for instance, had become obligatory for women after the revolution and Nafisi describes her doomed attempts to resist the wearing of it while she taught at the University of Tehran. Without wishing to go too deeply into the political situation of women in Iran, one only has to look at Nafisi’s description of the behaviour of the morality squads and how they broke up a gathering of six girls and one boy (p 72-3) with guns, and the resultant virginity tests, confessions and punishment beatings, to know that it is dire. Her book describes how as a reaction to such prejudices against women a number of female students would secretly visit her house in order to study English Literature.

There are a number of examples she gives of what they read - Lolita, The Great Gatsby, Daisy Miller, and I will take Daisy Miller (1879) by Henry James as the main example from her book of the power of literature to enhance the well-being of her students. Daisy is an attractive American socialite, visiting Europe with her mother at the end of the C19 and staying in Geneva where she meets an American, Winterbourne, who is staying with his aunt. As her contacts with the surrounding society increase, Winterbourne observes how Daisy naively cultivates increasingly flirtatious relationships with ‘gentlemen’. This is looked upon askance by the custodians of the society in which she moves and, although she is warned about her behaviour, she continues to flout the tradition that women should behave in a demure manner. Eventually this causes her downfall. One evening in Rome Daisy is out fraternising alone with Mr Giovanelli, a good-looking Italian playboy. Daisy wants to see the Colosseum by moon light, and it is known that to go there at such an hour one risks catching ‘Roman fever’, a form of malaria. She takes the risk, however, returns to her mother, falls ill and dies.

 

The moral of course is that women risk all if they challenge convention. Nafisi says that of all the novels the group of nine women studied with her, this is the one her students identified with most. One of the students tells her later that she has secretly named her daughter, Daisy: ‘Why Daisy?’ Nafisi asks. ‘Don’t you remember Daisy Miller?’ the student replies, ‘Haven’t you heard that if you give your child a name with a meaning she will become like her namesake? I want my daughter to be like I never was – like Daisy. You know, courageous.’”

 

As I was thinking about this book, the author Azar Nafisi herself featured in my daily newspaper under the headline, Even in these dark days, I still have hope for Iran’s future. Her article was accompanied by the photograph above. Azar gives us her thoughts about the suffering that has taken place in her country since 1979; about the more recent “Woman, life, freedom” protests; and about one of the students whom she taught on the author, Henry James. The student's name was Razieh and Azar tells us that Razieh has since been imprisoned and executed. We are not given the reason.

 

She leaves us, however, on a note of hope:

 

‘As bombs fall on Unesco sites, as crucial infrastructure is destroyed, I remember the power of intangible things. This war will end. This regime will go one day. And the stories, the poems, the art and the music will remain.’

References:

William Trevor, The Collected Stories (1992)

Henry James, Daisy Miller (1879)

Reading Lolita in Tehran, Azar Nafisi (2003)

Azar Nafisi in The Guardian, Thursday 26th March 2026

Photograph: Orteza Nikoubazi/Nurphoto/Shutterstock