Iran's Bum Rap

HISTORY PROFESSOR GENE Garth waite made history himself in January 1991, when he became the first American scholar allowed into Iran for research since the Iranian Revolution of 1979. Garthwaite's post-revolution travels, made possible through an Iranian coresearcher's connections to government officials, have given him a much freer look at his research area than his shah-era work ever had. After years of scholarly research on the Bakhtiyari, a nomadic tribe of herders, he finally was allowed to visit them.

"Iranians are badly misunderstood," he says. "No one in Iran is interested in Iranian expansion. Khomeini wanted an expansion of Iranian awareness to resist Westernization. It was a Western twist that Iran was going to take over. This was also the Saudi take on it. We've accepted the Saudi view; even State Department officials admit that." Garthwaite doesn't think Iran and the United States will soon become best friends, however. "The right in Iran, which has wanted to institutionalize the revolution, fears control by the U.S.. The left doesn't want more ties to the U.S. because it wants the current regime to fall, not become further legitimized."

On the other hand, Garthwaite did just fine on an individual basis. "An Iranian would have been shocked if I had been treated hostilely," he says. And he tells of people's curiosity about him and about the country they hear about via Radio Israel, the Voice of America, and the BBC. "As we walked up to one Bakhtiyari tent, people greeted us, invited us in. 'Are you from Japan?' they asked me. Then they wanted to know how the L.A. riots could have happened in America, which they think of as the land of justice and equal opportunity. They talked generacy, the breakdown of families. They sounded like Republicans."

It was another example, he says, "of a point I often make to my students: the so-called primitive people are far more sophisticated than we are."

Garthwaite