Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
The reason I have chosen this is because Edward Browne is the father of Persian studies in the United Kingdom. He spent a year in Iran in the late 19th century and became a passionate believer in the revolution which took place in Iran in 1905 and the years following. He was a real champion of popular rights.
What about your final book The Persian Revolution of 1905-1909, by Edward Browne?
The reason I have chosen this is because Edward Browne is the father of Persian studies in the United Kingdom. Ironically he had a chair in Arabic at Cambridge but his big passion was Iran and the Persians and he wrote a number of seminal texts on Iranian history and literature. He spent a year in Iran in the late 19th century and he wrote a book, A Year Amongst the Persians, which was very popular. But then he became a passionate believer in the revolution which took place in Iran in 1905 and the years following.
The reason I include this book is because on the one level Browne was able to set the narrative of our understanding of this revolution for future generations. Anyone else on political development in Iran can’t afford to ignore this book, as much as it is now a slightly antiquated book.
The other thing I think is interesting about Browne is that he is the first, in many ways, of the academic activists. Apart from being a serious scholar he was also a very fierce proponent of constitutional change in Iran. He is the only Englishman to still have a street named after him in Tehran as a result of this, and they never changed it because they still feel even today that Edward Browne was a real champion of popular rights and they recognise the contribution he made. So I think his book is seminal for those two counts.
He lobbied very extensively. There is an interesting correspondence between him and Lord Curzon where he would constantly criticise him for not getting more involved in Iran and supporting the constitutional changes.
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Ali Ansari is the Professor of Iranian History and Director of the Institute for Iranian Studies at the University of St Andrews, as well as Associate Fellow of the Middle East Programme, Royal Institute for International Affairs (Chatham House). He has just finished a study of the recent presidential elections, to be published this month. He is currently working on a book for Cambridge University Press entitled The Politics of Nationalism in Modern Iran, and has recently been appointed Editor of the Cambridge History of Iran Vol 8 (The Islamic Republic). It is difficult for Iranian people within the country to freely express their views, although the internet makes it easier, he says. But what has been published in the last decade before the current crackdown reflects the fact there is a literate readership that hungers for history.
