It has always been important to me to seek unconventional viewpoints. Before the Internet era, one of my favorite magazine subscriptions was to World Press Review (now known as WorldPress.org), which reprinted articles printed in newspapers and magazines world-wide – except those in the United States. Reason Magazine also fell into that category for a while, as did the venerable Whole Earth Review. So, too, did The Daily Dish, with Andrew Sullivan being a gay conservative Brit living in the United States. The fresh eye, not yet entrenched in the inevitable societal patterns, will see facets unremarked by the familiar eye, which may be banal or may give rise to exciting insight. A similar phenomenon comes in programming with the aphorism fresh eyes, which simply means bringing in someone unfamiliar with the code for a review.
And now a blog that is just going dormant has come to my attention, SaudiInIran, a blog written by a young Saudi woman who, until the recent tension between Iran and Saudi Arabia, was living in Iran, studying the culture. I haven’t had a lot of time to survey the blog, but this caught my attention:
A couple of weeks ago, I managed to negotiate myself into a zoorkhaneh. The term literally means ‘House of Strength’, and refers to an ancient Persian institution where athletes practice rigorous regiment training in a domed structure, a sort of traditional gymnasium (the zoorkhaneh). As a system of athletics originally intended to train warriors, it dates back to the Parthian era and is currently recognised by UNESCO as one of the world’s longest-running forms of such training. Although there were efforts to curb the sport, first during the modernisation campaigns of the Pahlavi era due to it being a ‘relic of the past’, and then shortly after the Islamic revolution due to its pre-Islamic origins, it is currently promoted as varzesh-e bastani (ancient sport) and is a symbol of Iranian culture and pride for many. In their contemporary form, zoorkhaneh rituals blend elements of pre-Islamic Persian culture (including Zoroastrianism and Mithraism) with the spirituality evident in Shi’a Islam and Sufism. While difficult to do it justice in words, the sport is ritualistic in essence and consists of a series of exercises combining martial arts, physical aptitude and special skills which are practiced against the backdrop of sacred poetry chanted by a musician, with drums and bells being sounded to mark the beginning of the different sections.
The balance of the entry is a wonderful view from the outside of a Persian institution of which I had never heard. I don’t know if the balance of the blog is as interesting, but if you like unusual viewpoints, Saudi In Iran may be worth your time.
AL Monitor presents an interview with the blogger, Sara Masry, here.
This is exactly the premise of her popular blog, A Saudi in Iran. Masry has written extensively about her various encounters with Iranians as a means to break Arab stereotypes of the country. “As the political scene got more and more tense over the past few years, I felt there’s just one narrative of Iran — and it’s mainly a political one. There’s no disconnect between political and human aspects … politics is one thing, but from my [Iranian] friends — the people I know — other things I see on social media is not how Iran is,” she said.
Masry said this view is mutual. In her telling, many Iranians see Saudi Arabia solely as a puritanical Wahhabist state. Confronting these mirroring stereotypes was what compelled her to move to Iran in the first place. “I felt going there would be the ultimate thing, to see it in person and actually live there and at the same time [see] how people react to me as a Saudi. Obviously there’s this whole thing between Saudi Arabia and Iran — or Arabs and Iranians. I felt like this is something that should be put to the test. I was really happy with the results that I got.” She added, “It’s very important that we tap into our common ground and stop viewing each as the ‘other.’”
