How can you live in this city?
We are destroying something that cannot be restored. Today, it is unlikely that we will be able to save an ideal like Iranshahri's idea. In many ways, the body of what has been expressed as Iranshahri thinking has been hit, and my goal in the last thirty years has been to pay attention to this issue.!
Iran has been a country with many pluralities and unity in these pluralities. Not only in our city, but our thought and culture and our music have been like this. We have not paid attention to this plurality for a long time. We have thought that unity can be injected from above by the government in the society. The statesmen and of course our citizens are all Iranians, but we do not know what Iran is. We are gradually suffering from a strange historical forgetfulness. We have gradually destroyed this unity in plurality which was the soul of these people. In the narrative of this destruction, one important thing is our cities;
Our municipalities have gradually destroyed our cities, and once something is destroyed, you cannot immediately renew it.. Everywhere in the world, the government represents the public interest. The state is not a person, it is not a person. Along with the government, there are institutions that determine public interests. But not so here.
Let me give an example: I live in an alley in this city that has a history of 20 years, but it has turned into a completely new neighborhood due to the initiative of street vendors..
If we were to demolish Tehran, which is several tens of kilometers wide and long, every twenty years and dump its ruins outside the city of Tehran, after five and twenty years, i.e. a hundred years, we will have destruction as big as five Tehrans outside the city.. How can you live in this city? If you want to buy a house in Paris, they say that we have different prices, but the most expensive ones are those built from 1880 to 1905.. This comparison shows that we are destroying the environment, we are destroying the city, and we are destroying urban relationships..
We have known each other for twenty years, we have established minimal relations. We are allergic to the alley and the tree in it. If I want to live in a place for only three years and know that I will leave and half of the people will sell and leave in that time, this is a fundamental destruction.. Because we don't know where we are. There is this basic concern, and a person like me feels this concern, and until there is a political will based on the knowledge of public interest, nothing will go away.. Our public interest is beyond what happens in the municipality. The government should make a fundamental change from above, in order to preserve the part of Iranshahr that is still left.
My argument in Iranshahri's thought has been that this great cultural Iran is truly a separate taffeta.. We must know that we were important and different. We should know that in Iranshahr, we produced something at the world level. We have an architectural school, we have an urban school, we have a literary school, we have a history writing school. We have music. And all these have national characteristics. Neither the Arabs nor the Turks in our neighborhood have had this feature.
We had a system of thought, culture and national civilization. We were a nation before many nations became nations. Ferdowsi represents the thought of a nation, and so does Hafez. Farabi also represents the thought of a nation. In the West, nation-states came from the 16th century, and indeed they became nations much later than we do.. We were the nation ahead of all of them. The name of Iran is the oldest name of the country that exists. The name of Iran is the name of the country, the name of the nation, and the name of the government. This is the complexity of this nation.
If there is to be a change, we must see what was the spirit that we gradually lost. A spirit that flowed everywhere. In our mosque, our street, our market, our architectural spaces, the colors of our tiles and even our poetry. It was the soul that created that body and flowed into every body we made.. We have lost that spirit. If possible, what Plato called Kalapolis (beautiful city) They called and translated it to the utopia that Farabi said, he created that beautiful and good city, it will necessarily be Iranian..
But if we only fix these walls well and create good urban relations, we will become Copenhagen, which is the best city in the world.. But the idea of Iranshahri is not only those walls.
March 19, 1394
(Dr. Javad Tabatabai)
