A Treasure on Persian Culture: Farhang Jahanpour's homepage

February 23, 2021

TFF is very proud to have published numerous articles and videos by one of the world’s most knowledgeable scholars on the Middle East in general and Iran in particular, Dr Farhang Jahanpour, Oxford, since he became an Associate in 2006 (and later Board member).

It’s been such a delightful co-operation and a great contribution to TFF and our engagement with Iran since 2012. Fortunately, this incredibly prolific writer continues to publish with us here on The Transnational, but we believe that you will also like to know that he has recently set up his own homepage with many more articles – a treasure on Persian culture, history, literature and – well, much more.

Since it seems to have been a Western media-political pastime to only publish negative, demonising stuff about Iran and omitting its amazing culture dating back to 7000 BC, it is so important that there is a homepage such as Farhang’s – encyclopedic, truthful, unbiased – serving as a tremendous source of knowledge for the discerning citizen as well as fellow experts.

This is how he – also a man of peace – introduces it himself:

“As a professor and dean of the Faculty of Foreign Language at the University of Isfahan from 1970-78, I experienced the early stages of the Islamic revolution that changed the course of Iranian history and Iran’s relations with the West. The revolution had a great impact on subsequent political developments in the Middle East and beyond, giving rise to the ascendancy of political Islam in a number of countries.

Shortly after returning to England in December 1978, I was recruited as a Monitor and later as the Editor for Middle East and North Africa at the BBC Monitoring. During more than 20 years of working at the BBC, I closely followed the momentous events in Iran and the Middle East, including the evolving history of the Islamic Revolution, Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Iran, followed by his invasion of Kuwait, Desert Shield and Desert Storm and ultimately the US invasion of Iraq.

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After my retirement from the BBC in 1997, I started teaching regular weekly courses on Middle Eastern history and politics at the University of Oxford as a part-time tutor and lecturer. My teaching at Oxford continued until July 2018.

I have written a number of books and book chapters on Middle Eastern affairs and Persian literature and culture. I have also written more than 100 articles on current political developments, most of which were published for the first time by TFF, especially after 2003 when I was privileged to be elected as an Associate of this great organisation that is dedicated to promoting peace by peaceful means.

Recently, I decided to collect some of those articles in my personal homepage so that they are readily available to the general public. In all those articles, I have tried to pursue my passion for peace and mutual understanding and to show the ugliness of war.

Having witnessed the effect of destructive wars in Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, Yemen, etc., I have come to the conclusion that it is not right to remain silent in the face of those horrendous atrocities, most of which were committed in the name of democracy and human rights.

As Martin Luther King Jr. said: “The ultimate tragedy is not the oppression and cruelty by the bad people but the silence over that by the good people. In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.”

I hope those who share my passion for peace and true democracy, and human rights will find some of these articles useful and will also decide to take an active role in promoting peace, preventing wars and exposing those who falsely claim that they wish to spread democracy through aggression and war, but are really intent on pursuing their own nefarious aims.”