100 books like Hafiz and His Contemporaries

In my view, Josef provides the best introduction to the history of Persia in classical antiquity–something well worth knowing, given the importance of Iran now and the influence of the past on the present.

Iranians look back with pride to those centuries when three Persian empires dominated the Middle East and western Asia. The book is clear, readable, and not too long.

I like it because he attends first and foremost to the evidence, what he calls ‘testimonies,’ and because he focuses on fundamental factors rather than simply telling a story.

I have been to Iran twice for long journeys to historic sites. Like so many other travelers, I was captivated by the landscape of high mountains and parched plains and by the extraordinary buildings erected in the deep past.

Canepa’s book enabled me to travel again (in my mind) to the great palaces and sacred sites where each of the classical dynasties made its mark. Once again, I was struck by the absence of temples (before late antiquity) and by that hallmark of Iranian architecture, the ayvan, a great vaulted chamber open on one side from which a shah could gaze upon his people.

I well remember following the sequence of events–a terrible fire that killed 430 trapped in a cinema in Abadan, riots, mass shootings by the army, strikes, politicization, and Islamicization of students–which culminated in the Islamic Revolution of 1979.

Like many others I was both excited and filled with foreboding at the time. To read Desmond Harney’s eyewitness account is to be carried right into the middle of things. I was utterly gripped as the Iranian middle classes grasped at forlorn hopes and as those hopes faded away in the face of the ‘single-mindedness, implacability, fierce puritanism and commanding authority’ of Ayatollah Khomeini. 

Everywhere I went in Iran in 1998 and 2002, there were huge wall paintings of martyrs who had been killed in the war against Iraq (1980-88). Mass attacks led to appalling casualties.

I returned a vicarious Iranian patriot. Christopher de Bellaigue, who speaks good Farsi, took me far deeper into post-revolutionary society in his numerous conversations with individuals from many different milieux, including two who had fought and survived the war.

I regard him as the best guide to the temper of contemporary Iran and the reasons for the fall of the secularizing regimes of the shahs (not least the sudden order in 1936 for women to cast aside the chador, which is likened to an order to go out topless in the west). 

Five Iranian women of very different backgrounds come together in a lush Persian garden outside Tehran. We learn their stories, their dreams, their hopes. The central theme is as the title suggests: what would a world without men be like? How would life away from the narrow gender-defined roles of an oppressive patriarchal system work? If you like magical realism, there is plenty here, and it’s beautifully rendered. Because of her writing, the author spent many years in prison under the Islamic Republic. Yet she never stopped writing. I think she should be considered for the Nobel Prize in literature. This novel was also made into a film.

British-Iranian journalist, Ramita Navai shines a spotlight on 21st century Tehran that we rarely see in the mainstream press, delving into the city’s youth culture, illicit entertainment, and seedy underbelly of drugs and despair. City of Lies exposes the reality of how young, modern Iranians really live - constantly evading the authorities to seek out the pleasures they are denied under the regime.

This monumental two-volume collection, published in 2021, contains 110 accessible essays by some of the most prominent scholars of Achaemenid Persian history. It introduces the ancient evidence, including written sources, artistic materials, and archaeological remains, for every major region from the Indus to the Nile and the Aegean, and ably surveys the disciplinary history of the modern study of ancient Iran.  Thematic chapters trace numerous aspects of Persia’s imperial world, including geography, languages, gender, religion, court dynamics, administration, communications, war, diplomacy, economics, art, science, and many more. The narrative chapters place the empire’s rise and fall, including but hardly limited to the Persian-Greek wars, into a longer context of Ancient Near Eastern empire formation, setting up valuable insights through comparison with Assyria, Babylonia, and other predecessors. 

Set during the 2005 bus-driver strikes in Iran, this book explores imprisonment at nearly every level—from the confinement of a totalitarian regime to the physical and psychological torture of a political prisoner, to the locked doors of one’s own mind, to the escape sought (and sometimes found) in heroine. What sticks with me most, however, is the interior exploration of the main character, Yunus, and the way seemingly small decisions lead to enormous consequences. 

The city of Alexandria was founded by Alexander the Great, or at least named in his honour. And Alexander the Great is responsible for wiping out other fabled cities. Most notably, the ancient Persian city of Persepolis, located in modern-day Iran. Finally, a place you can actually visit! But the massive palace lies in ruins, nowhere near its original splendour with all the statuary and furnishings, and the pomp and majesty of Persia’s kings and courtiers—at the time when Persia was a global superpower.

Around 2,000 years ago, Alexander the Great’s troops looted Persepolis and burned it to the ground. And there it lay in the sand, forgotten, until the site was revived in the 1930s and somewhat restored. The site lies in southwest Iran and was inscribed to the World Heritage List in 1979.  Given that travel to Iran today is fraught with obstacles, this book about Persepolis could… show more.

I only knew of this book because my British publisher introduced me to it. For that, I’m truly thankful. The book feels honest and unflinching and makes for a great read for both myself as an immigrant as well as for those navigating a world where immigration is a constant daily reality.

I read it over a weekend in 2020 and have read it once more in 2022. I had to return to it, especially when I was faced with microaggressions or felt unheard in my new home in Canada.