Richard Foltz

The Australian National University, Centre for Arab and Islamic Studies (CAIS), Visiting Fellow

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Richard Foltz is a cultural historian specializing in the broader Iranian world. He has published 12 books and over one hundred scholarly articles, and his work has appeared in over a dozen languages. His most recent books are The Ossetes: Modern-Day Scythians of the Caucasus (Bloomsbury, 2023) and A History of the Tajiks: Iranians of the East (2nd edition, Bloomsbury, 2023).

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Improbably Persian: An Anglo-Saxon's Forty-Year Foray into Iranology

Not My Chosen Career Path I would like to say that I went into Iranian Studies out of a love for ... more Not My Chosen Career Path I would like to say that I went into Iranian Studies out of a love for Rumi's poetry and a desire to better understand the depths of his wisdom by reading him in the original language. Or perhaps, like my late, lamented art history teacher, out of an appreciation for the fine subtlety of Persian miniature paintings. Or due to being a passionate amateur of Persian rugs. Or because the turquoise domes of Iranian mosques evoked my own unquenchable spiritual desires, reaching ever upwards to the heavens. In past conversations and media interviews I have claimed all these reasons, and others equally noble, but the truth is far more banal and frankly somewhat embarrassing: I simply met a girl at a party. It was Salt Lake City, Utah, sometime in May 1986. I had traveled there from my most recent home in Copenhagen, Denmark in a guilty attempt to rekindle my relationship with my parents from whom I had been estranged for a number of years. My intent was to stay a month and then return to Denmark. Although I really had no prospects there, I had been fleeing the country of my birth since the age of sixteen and the prospect of anything longer than a brief visit back felt like an admission of failure. Growing up during the 1970s in an all-white suburb of Columbus, Ohio, my idea of the exotic centered on Monty Python's Flying Circus and British progressive rock bands. I dreamed of one day moving to Europe, where I imagined that people were more civilized than in the bible-thumping, gun-toting, culturally blinkered American Midwest. The Middle East was an idea that evoked nothing more than oil and terrorism, when it came up at all which was almost never. It must have been quite a culture shock for the three Iranian boys who enrolled at my high school in 1976. (I assume now that they were the children of fathers either employed or studying at the nearby university, but none of us ever cared enough to ask them.) One, Jamshid, was chubby, cheerful, and friendless, and baffled us all by constantly pulling out a small dictionary where English words were paired with what appeared to be chicken scratches. Another, Sina, annoyed us by being better at soccer than anyone else in the school, effortlessly scoring goals with his head as if the ball were under his personal psychic control. I recently heard from an old classmate that the third, Peyman, died in a car accident in Texas a couple of decades ago. A sometime member of my circle of friends, Will S., had spent his early years in Iran, but we viewed that as a kind of misfortune and never pressed him on the subject. I realized years later that he was the son of a famous archaeologist whose work was universally admired. My total lack of curiosity about any part of the world other than Western Europe persisted throughout my early, repeatedly abortive university career. During one of my frequent semesters off when I was sneaking into the student cafeteria at Sciences-Po in Paris where a friend of mine was an exchange student, we shook our heads in disdain at the groups of angry, bearded Middle Easterners who would approach our table and demand to know what we thought of the Ayatollah Khomeini, whoever that was. (That dour-looking, turbaned old man living in a farmhouse outside of Paris, whom they kept showing on the news surrounded by microphones as if he had something worthwhile to say? Why on earth would we care about him?) My awareness of the Revolution was limited to having to skirt the sidewalk in front of the Iran Air office on the Champs-Élysées which was now closed off by steel barricades and guarded by gendarmes holding automatic rifles. It was this narrow vision of my seventeen-year-old self that caused me to miss one of my life's great opportunities, which I have never ceased to regret. I was standing at the entrance ramp of the Autoroute du Soleil on the southern loop of Paris' Boulevard Périphérique when two long-haired hippies in a clunky Citroën 2cv pulled over and invited me in. As I climbed aboard they asked me where I was going. "La Côte d'Azur!" I proudly announced, having been offered the keys to a friend's garçonnière in old Antibes. "Cool!" they replied. "We're going to Afghanistan. You wanna join us?" I tried to stifle a scoff. Hadn't they heard me? I was going to Antibes. And thus did I forfeit my one and only chance to experience the glories of pre-revolution Iran, or of famously hospitable Afghanistan before it collapsed into endless war. Such was still my mentality eight years later when my mother, worried about how I would pass my time while visiting their new home in a Mormon-dominated city where I knew no one, introduced me to her "colleague" Saeid who was about my age. I use quotes because Saeid, like me, was an imposter and a charlatan. He had managed to bluff his way into a respected position as principal IT consultant for the research institute where my mother worked, and he later managed to become the CEO of a Silicon Valley tech company. Saeid's rise to success was no doubt due as much to his good looks and extraordinary charm as to his technical skills. Everyone liked him, and liking him led to entrusting him with just about any duty or responsibility. Brilliant scientists unable to resolve glitches in their software would turn to Saeid, who would fix the issue within minutes and respond to their astonished expressions of gratitude with a shrug and a humble smile. Before long they were sending him to represent the institute at trade fairs, and when people addressed him as "Professor" or "Doctor" he did not correct them. (I do not believe he actually had a degree of any kind.) Another dimension of Saeid's charm, at least for the nubile denizens of the Mormon capital, was the fact that he drove a flame-red Mercedes 450 convertible, in which he would take me cruising up and down State Street on Friday evenings. If I hadn't actually witnessed with my own eyes the sheer number of young blondes that would materialize at every stoplight saying "Ooh, nice car! Can I have a ride?" I would have written off his sexual exploits as mere locker-room bravado. In fact he was engaged to a beautiful, intelligent Iranian-German woman, Zahra, who was dutifully saving herself for their marriage and naïvely believed that he was doing the same. Even after their engagement fell through she never doubted his fidelity. I was at that time under the stereotyped illusion that Middle Eastern women are all devoted to chastity, which Saeid qualified by saying that while Iranian wives were indeed less likely than Western women to be unfaithful they were nevertheless not entirely "safe". (This was still the 1980s, before it became popular in Iran for women to cheat on their husbands as a form of anti-patriarchal political protest.) The downside of course for the still single was that Iranian girls were supposedly very difficult to date. So when Saeid took me to a Persian dance party one late spring weekend it was merely in a spirit of fun that I approached the most stunning girl in the room, Ladan, who it turned out was considered the local Iranian community's most desirable catch and whose marital future was the subject of endless speculation. Heads turned and eyes popped as I engaged her in conversation, which came more easily for me than it usually does since I had no illusions about picking her up. To my surprise-and to that of our many onlookers-Ladan was warm and responsive, and we talked for some time. In the end and in a purely "what the hell" frame of mind I asked for her number, and out of the corner of my eye I could see the shocked expressions spreading across the room. Later as Saeid was driving me home he chuckled and shook his head at my audaciousness. "A foreigner comes to the party and starts talking to the one girl everyone is obsessed with, as if it's nothing!" he exclaimed, clearly impressed. "But Richard," he warned, "if you're going to take this any further, you have to realize it's serious." As serendipity would have it the local university happened to be offering a summer intensive language course in Persian which began the following week. I had reached and surpassed the end of my planned month in Salt Lake, but suddenly returning to my undocumented, jobless status in Denmark seemed less pressing. An eightweek study program didn't appear to threaten that much of a delay, and might learning a girl's language suffice to demonstrate that one was "serious"? Ladan and I went out several times. I sent her flowers and, as I began to read up on her culture, I accompanied them with quatrains I had written (in English) modeled on those of Omar Khayyam whom I had now discovered for the first time. She seemed to be responding well to these gestures, until one day I called and Ladan's roommate informed me that she had left for Phoenix where she had just gotten engaged to a wealthy Iranian painter. I had meanwhile gotten to know Saeid's fiancée Zahra, who was one of Ladan's friends at the time. We met for coffee one afternoon a few days later. "I thought I knew her," she related to me in a tone of disgust, "but I was wrong. The other day she was all la-dee-da and saying how these two men were in love with her and she couldn't decide which of them to choose. 'One of them is cute and funny and writes me poems but he doesn't have any money. The other is middle-aged and bald but he's rich…' And now we see she has made her choice. Honestly I don't want to be friends with her anymore." So that is the true story of why I learned Persian, and when I related it years later to a psychiatrist friend he offered, in a display of slavish devotion to the founder of his profession, the following unsolicited diagnosis: "So basically your entire career has just been one long unrequited fuck." Ever since that awkward conversation I have avoided giving anyone the genuine version of what drew me to Iranology, until now. (And maybe not entirely unrequited, as two...

Richard Foltz

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