A Year Amongst the Persians

"It’s a good book to segue on to after Byron as they both visit Persia. But Byron is most of all into looking and Browne is most of all into ideas. He considers ideas in a huge way. It’s a book that’s very much an anthology of ideas. Browne studies Persian at Cambridge and goes off to Persia for a year and flits around from place to place and observes the ruling Qajar dynasty of the time. He talks interestingly about the tensions between the Qajars – who were Turkic – and the Aryans, in Persian history. The bit that I love the most is when he is in Kerman where he gets into this world of ideas. He gets in with these dervishes, who are these quite extreme Sufis. He talks about being intoxicated by opium smoke and mysticism. He has this weird experience. He gets ophthalmia when he’s in Kerman and somebody says the best way to counteract the pain is by smoking opium. So he gets into this complete reliance on opium – he calls it the “poppy wizard”. It turns into this trippy, hippy experience. Remember we’re back in the 1880s, not in the 1960s, when it’s all about mysticism and opium smoke. He, like Byron, was a supremely civilised man. I think, if I remember right, somebody advised him that if he had private means, the best way you can indulge a penchant for civilisation is by going off and indulging in Oriental studies. He was one of these supremely civilised Orientalists, quite a rare breed. There is a sheer intoxication not just with mysticism, opium smoke and metaphysics but also with words. In a sense his book doubles as an anthology of Persian poetry. This is what he went on to be most famous for, the literary history of Persia. He was a professor of Arabic at Cambridge but I think only because there wasn’t a professorship of Persian at the time. He really was a Persianist before he was an Arabist. I wouldn’t want to put readers off who are not into the mysticism, metaphysics, opium and Persian poetry because it’s also in places, like Byron’s, a deeply funny book. He says one thing about the Persians is that they share with us a sense of the ludicrous. A lovely example of this, which chimes so much with my sense of humour, is where he recalls a joke which is told about Isfahanis, who are supposed to be very miserly. He says they say the Isfahanis are so miserly they put their cheese in a glass bottle and rub their bread on the outside of the bottle. He goes on and says one day a merchant in Isfahan caught his apprentice looking hungrily at the cheese in the glass bottle and said “Isn’t dried bread good enough for you?” Something like that rings a humorous bell with us and that’s part of what makes his book so lovely. Both Byron and Browne, in different ways, are giving us this Iran or this Persia which is so utterly different to the one today. And both their Persias are so different and in different ways. In a sense I chose two books about Persia because I myself am an Arabist and they open up to me part of the Islamic world which is far away and weird and wonderful again. I like to be taken away from the Arab world and this is one reason why I chose these two."