"The Extremes of Our Commitment: A Review of Jamshid Fanaian's Twilight," Sunrise Book Promotions, 1999, Ron Price.

Reading Jamshid Fanaian's book Twilight reminded me again and again of Roger White's poem Lines from Last Letters.1 So, I will open this short commentary on Fanaian's work with this poem. LINES FROM LAST LETTERS On reading letters written in 1981 by Baha'i prisoners in Iran, to their families, within the hour of their execution for refusing to recant their faith. How simply the fictive hero becomes the real; How gladly with proper words the soldier dies If he must...... Wallace Stevens I leave a wristwatch and a blanket; please collect them..... Brought to the extremes of our commitment let us not speak of torture but say death simplifies our gestures pries us from abstractions. The cloak and flourish put aside we seek a humble order, a final dignity, our testament the cordial instruction of vacationing householder to milkman. If I have offended anyone I ask forgiveness...... Finality too has its protocol. If we die well and decorously it is our sanctioned custom. We are reconciled to our convention though noone sees and the world's cameras and microphones distractedly avert their glance. We have heroic models in these matters, know our end has meaning if only light and shade come clear again in a blurred age. I had no time to finish weaving bracelets for our daughters....... Reasonable men desire to leave memories and we are reasonable men, moderate even in our regret and gladness. Death might blush to call us from our innocent concerns but nothing checks that wastrel's rasher whims.
1

Roger White, "Lines from Last Letters," Occasions of Grace, George Ronald, Oxford, 1992, p.5.

Kiss the children for me and beg them not to mourn....... How simple it all is, the human pang domesticated in a penstroke. Even the callous might not deplore our final modest question, the one we cannot put to God: My dearest wife, are you well pleased with me? Lord, Lord! Accept these as the proper words.2 Apologies for using such a long poem to introduce this commentary on what is essentially quite a simple story. Fanaian's story is simple but it has many complexities. In many ways it is the story of the experience of the Baha'i community in Iran after the revolution in 1979. It is a story with its tragedy, its romance, its interplay of relationships. It is the story of people brought to the extreme of their commitments. Fanaian, an Iranian himself, seeks, it seems to me, as White puts it in this poem, "a humble order, a final dignity." He seeks this order and dignity, I think to myself as I read, through the architecture of his book, his design, his narrative line. I don't feel any strutting and stridence, any fretting and fulminating in the author's psyche, although I'm sure that from time to time he has had his battles, his intense struggles with life and with himself. I feel that for Fanaian, and for the Baha'is, the "end has meaning." Light and shade do, in fact, come clear in a blurred age. At least for some; at least for the beleaguered community of Baha'is in Iran, beleaguered for more than a century and a half. I'm intentionally not going to tell you the story here. It is a familiar enough one to Baha'is. But it is a story worth telling for it is rarely, if ever, told in a fictionalized, novelistic form. Mostly, the story comes at the Baha'is and the world in the form of news reports. The first one came into my life in 1955. Why I was only a little chap and the Baha'i community in Canada where I lived was just as little back then. The news was a report of persecutions in Iran in the mid-fifties not unlike those of 1979 and after. Sometimes the Baha'i story is told as a slice of history like in Iran's Secret Pogrom by Geoffrey Nash(Suffolk, 1982). Sometimes Baha'is memorialise the tragedies as in A Cry From the Heart by William Sears(Oxford, 1982). Sometimes we find a historical/sociological analysis emphasising the resistance of Baha'is such as the one by Fereshteh Bethel(A dissertation in United States International Union, 1980). Sometimes specific policies and mechanisms of oppression are examined such as that by Douglas Martin in Middle East Focus, 1982. Generally, though, Fanaian's book is the story of the Baha'i community in Iran responding dynamically and with spiritual elan, despite the methodical plan by the civil and ecclesiastical authorities to uproot it entirely. In the process the Baha'i
2

idem

community has been transformed into a more cohesive one. This cohesiveness could be the subject of a follow-up book if Fanaian continues his interest in the subject. He is getting on in years. I've only met him twice in four years and for only a few minutes each time. I don't really know him well. But I liked his book and generally I don't read fictionalized accounts of anything. This book was but another response of the Baha'is in Iran, in the world, to the cruel tests they have experienced in recent years: economic pressures, burnings of shops, farms, homes, arrests, efforts to force recantations, death and the threat of death. These are a resourceful people and, perhaps, resurrected from what the Baha'is call the Heroic Age. There is no doubt Fanaian feels a sense of history. You might like to try his book on for size to get a sense of this history and, more importantly, a sense of recent events in Iran in the last quarter-century. Ron Price 6 June 2003