Fusion: mud huts and sky-scrapers

The tradition of kingship which he inherits – and to which he looks in some measure for inspiration – is illustrated in the magnificent ruins of Persepolis, capital of Darius and Xerxes, and in Isfahan at the country’s centre, capital of the Safavid dynasty and location of the glittering Shah Mosque. Isfahan, too, provided a centre of artistic tradition in its carpet, metal and silk industries.

Here, in small, dark workshops, the nimble fingers of little girls work long hours weaving centuries-old patterns into the fine carpets which are big business in Iran. Small boys work alongside their fathers and grandfathers handbeating metal, with an age-old rhythmic precision, into pots and pans, trays, plates and drinking vessels. And glowing brocades are made on the same type of looms as were used hundreds of years ago.

Shiraz in the hot south spotlights the tradition of poetry — important to even the humblest Iranian. There the tomb of Sa’adi, Persia’s Shakespeare, is both a shrine and a pleasure garden.

The strong religious tradition was highlighted in a sequence of a Mullah (cleric) addressing his all-male congregation seated cross-legged in Isfahan’s 250-year-old Charbagh Mosque. Much of the dissension towards change stems from this religious background. But it is not only in the ‘black reaction’ of religion that there is a challenge to the Shah’s reform programme. Also strongly cited is the ‘red revolution’, a faction which could find its most ready support among the urban slum-dwellers, especially in the capital. It was, therefore obviously, important to the story to obtain shots of the slum quarter of Tehran. Fearful of a show of hostility if the cameras were seen among the huts and hovels of the area, the authorities were reluctant to give permission. In the end the filming was allowed only if the shots could be ‘sneaked’ from a car racing at times at up to 50 m.p.h. through the busy streets.

But it is with the rural communities, in the villages, that the success of the Shah’s reform programme will be most keenly felt. Three villages in the Tehran area were filmed to illustrate its progress – Talaw, which has yet to be affected by the land reform programme, Shoorkab, where the villagers now farm their own land, and Abnik, which has always been free.

To the villagers the arrival of the unit with cameras and sound equipment was an event of natural curiosity and at first every movement was watched by crowds of silent women and their more voluble menfolk. They accepted very quickly – and with much good-humoured patience – the disruption to their lives and even the rehearsal and retakes involving themselves which were sometimes necessary for the filming.

Both Talaw and Abnik have recently acquired their own schools as part of the Shah’s plan to stamp out nation-wide illiteracy. Scenes were shot in these village schools, one the converted room of a small house, the other the gallery of a mosque.

Abbas Sayadi, an inspector from the Ministry of Education, was chosen as the sequence’s central character. He was followed on a weekly tour of inspection including both villages. A cheerful extrovert, Sayadi was an unforgettable character. A born teacher, he burned with a fierce desire to impart the skills of leading and writing to the children in his care.

But it was not only Sayadi who made this perhaps the most impressive of the signs of change to be seen in the country. His teachers, too, dark serious young men in army uniform, had absorbed his enthusiasm to spread knowledge … as had their pupils to learn. Amateurs, teaching only by compulsion, the members of the ‘Army of Knowledge’ displayed, to the onlooker at least, an extraordinary contentment with their enforced sojourn in the remote rural communities and a real grasp of their responsibilities.

They became important members of the communities where they are sent through conscription into the ‘Army of Knowledge’ instead of spending the period in military service. They not only set up schools but also act as scribes and advisers to the older villagers.

In Abnik a village of more than 1,000 inhabitants where there are two ‘soldiers of knowledge’ – the cameras ‘sat in’ on a village council. During it the representatives asked the ‘soldiers’ to write a letter to the authorities on their behalf. Later this letter brought results. Thus the ‘Army of Knowledge’ is not only teaching the people but its members are also learning about the problems the villagers face.

There were other, more impersonal, achievements to be filmed – great dams, new roads (to film one being built by the army in the south, director and cameraman were provided with a helicopter through the auspices of Prime Minister Dr Alain), buildings and factories. Special facilities were also provided to cover sturgeon fishing, an industry for which the Iranian government has great hopes for the future.

But the problems of the Shah, as the programme shows, are still a long way from being solved.

After a month in the country it is the violent contrasts that linger in the mind – contrasts of lush cultivation and arid desert, of skyscrapers and mud huts, of modern factories and child labour, of lipstick and ‘the veil’, of American limousines and donkey trains, of the very rich and the very poor.

To what extent will this order of things be altered by a King’s Revolution?