The BBC's 'Art of Persia': a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma (on Arte, ‘De la Perse à l'Iran - 3 000 ans de civilisations')

Last year, the BBC issued a three-part series called Art of Persia. I discussed it a lot with friends on Facebook at the time, and we agreed it was a huge disappointment. 'Dreadful,' said one friend in the UK who's written and published art books. It's now showing, dubbed into French (and German, I guess) on Arte, a culturally-oriented Franco-German TV channel. I've had time, by now, to get used to the idea of its not being about art, but, having watched it again so I can talk about it with French friends, I've ended up even more bewildered than last year.

The title in English was, then, Art of Persia. I can easily imagine the BBC seeing the point in making that: a panorama of gorgeous Persian art and architecture over the centuries, with sweeping landscapes and snatches of local colour. People would watch. The Corporation probably also knew the Victoria & Albert Museum was planning a big exhibition called Epic Iran: 5,000 Years of Culture, for early 2021 (postponed on account of COVID until the end of May). The Sarikhani Foundation, credited in the videos, is a partner to the V&A show. (Link to article in The Sunday Times).

But in the end, the series is something else. It's an attempt to trace the survival of a unique 'Persian identity' in spite of invasions, changes in religion, and so on, focusing in particular on Zoroastranism, the Shahnameh, poetry more widely, and even the tradition of the 'house of strength' or Zurkhane. 'Persian identity' is surely not a very catchy subject to sell. Also, why would a non-specialist journalist want to make an expensive documentary about that? But that's what Samira Ahmed did. (Arte's title for the series implies they took this change of subject to some extent into account; they call it De la Perse à l'Iran - 3 000 ans de civilisations - with 'civilisation' in the plural, to complicate things further.)

Before the programme was aired in the UK, Ahmed wrote a longish article for the FT in which she talked more about the art of being Persian , as she called it: 'Through exploring its art and culture over 7,000 years, our filming had a mission - to attempt a deeper understanding of modern Iran than can be found in news headlines, by exploring many ordinary Iranians’ cultural identity as Persians.' The Art of Being Persian is even the title of the FT article.

But I don't think the presenter herself knew a great deal about about Iran before making the series, so where did this change of tack (from art to 'identity') come from? It seems unlikely that the aim was to focus on identity from the start, but then stick 'art' in the title as a kind of 'decoy' to lure people in. Sometimes you get hints that one starting-point might have been UNESCO's list of Iranian 'World Heritage' sites - not a bad way to begin planning a survey of the country’s glories. But the finished series isn’t that.

Also, as you might expect, talking about a unique 'Persian identity' supposedly uniting Iranians through thick and thin is controversial to specialists, as Iran is such a big and varied country with various languages (about 20% of Iranians speak Turkic languages, for example), various ethnic groups, religions, and so on. Who actually wrote the script? What specialist would step - blithely (or blindly), you might say, as the script is so simplistic - into such a minefield?

And then... in Isfahan she stands under a beautiful brick dome in the old Jameh mosque there - so beautifully proportioned that legend (or at any rate, legend as related in guide books for tourists) claims it was designed by Omar Khayyam himself. It is large but not vast. Yet Samira Ahmed tells us that when built, in 1086, it was the biggest dome in the world. Even I knew that couldn't be right. I see Wikipedia states much the same, albeit more ambiguously: 'The south dome was built to house the mihrab in 1086–87 by Nizam al-Mulk, the famous vizier of Malik Shah, and was larger than any dome known at its time.'

Does that perhaps mean ‘known in Persia at the time'? Possibly. Whatever the answer, are we to think that the BBC gets its facts from Wikipedia, that the expert we suppose is behind the script believed it was true, and that nobody at the BBC noticed the blunder before the series went out?

 

It doesn't help, either, that the script, in archetypal BBC-documentary language, is delivered as if to a class of not-very-bright infants. It opens, over music, as follows: ‘This is the land known by two names. The first is Persia: ancient, mysterious, a place of adventure, of mighty temples and palaces, built by powerful kings - a land of unimaginable beauty. The other is Iran: isolated, proud, defiant - especially of foreign interference.' It's enough to set anybody's teeth on edge, let alone an Iranian's.

It's all very puzzling. A conundrum. And I'm not alone in finding the end product obscure. A Scottish friend wrote: 'It was a rather confused set of programmes, as though the commissioning had been disputed within the BBC and a camel designed by committee. I only enjoyed the first programme.' French friends have also given up halfway through.

UK press coverage, at least what I've found, was all positive - plenty of 'five-star' ratings in the TV reviews. This link is to the only academic opinion I've managed to drag up, from the Oxford Review of Books. The author, Fuchsia Hart, mentions the Isfahan dome howler, but more seriously, focuses on the uncritical belief in a single, unifying and unwavering 'Persian identity' displayed in the programme.

Although the crew travelled far and wide, taking in places relatively few tourists visit, one of the frustrating things about the videos is that, instead of allowing us to revel, in true armchair-orientalist style, in the lovely old buildings and works of art the title leads us to expect, they linger on relatively mediocre Pahlavi-era statues and mausoleums. The irony of this is that, as Ms Hart's article suggests, Ferdowsi's (French-designed) tomb in Shiraz, to cite one example, 'is not so much an indication of how beloved Ferdowsi was, but how he was co-opted into a nationalistic ideology' under the Pahlavi shahs: i.e. a deliberately constructed 'Persian identity'.

While the BBC's videos are, in theory, jealously-guarded - Arte's French version too - you can find them in the usual places, even if you may end up watching with Catalan subtitles that charmingly mis-translate 'Timurid' into 'timid' and 'Ottoman' into 'pouf', thus offering Catalan-speaking viewers the quaint image of timid Mongol warriors defeating savage Turkish poufs...

 

Finally, link to an article on the National Geographic website about the Achaemenid empire.