In 1979 at the height of the Islamic Revolution in Iran, student radicals took hostage the diplomats and other personnel serving in the American embassy in Tehran and held them for 444 days. This crisis marked the end of diplomatic relations between the United States and Iran. 

Currently, relationships between the two countries are quite hostile. Iran is supposedly working to develop nuclear weapons despite sanctions placed upon them by the United States, other Western countries, and the United Nations. The U.S. accuses Iran of supporting so-called terrorist groups like Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Palestinian territories, and radical Shiite groups in Iraq. There has been speculation that the U.S.—or Israel—might take military action against Iran, either to knock out their nuclear capabilities or to destroy weapons that purportedly are destined for Iraq to supply insurgents fighting against the U.S. military.

Occasionally, when governments won’t talk with each other, opportunities open up for citizens to establish direct communication and engage in a cultural exchange. Political scientists call this people-to-people diplomacy. 

One such opportunity came my way in January 2008, when I took a two-week “learning tour” in Iran sponsored by the Mennonite Central Committee (MCC), a religious relief, development, and peacemaking organization. The purpose of the tour was to learn about the history and culture, religion and politics of Iran and to attempt to build bridges between Iranians and Americans, Christians and Muslims. We met with government officials and university students in Tehran, university professors in Shiraz, and Islamic clerics and teachers in the holy city of Qom. We talked with people in the streets everywhere, including the ancient city of Esfahan.

There is a saying that if you go to Iran for a month you’ll write a book; stay six months and you’ll write an article; but if you stay a year you won’t write anything. The more you know, the more you realize you don’t know. So it’s a bit audacious of me to have been there but two weeks and then write a book about Iran. 

It needs to be said up front: I am not an authority on Iran. Whenever I found myself trying to pose as an authority while writing this book, I felt like I had gotten off track and had to get back on it again. There are many other books you should read if you want an authoritative picture of modern-day Iran or of the Persian Empire (see the resources section). My intention is to serve as witness, to give a testimony of what I saw and heard and learned and experienced while in Iran. Indeed, I was on a spiritual pilgrimage, and in many ways it was transformative.

What lies ahead, then, if you have the courage to proceed, are many stories and observations about Iran. Before I get to the stories, however, I want to share some reflections about cross-cultural encounters: what happens when we cross boundaries between cultures, peoples, nations, and religions. If this more theoretical stuff doesn’t interest you, skip it and move directly to the first chapter.

On one of our first days in Iran our MCC learning tour group had an interesting conversation about how we “see” Iran. Wally Shellenberger, one of our tour leaders, encouraged us to look for the good in Iran, not the bad. All learning does involve some measure of suspending our own judgment. For when we prejudge things we can be blinded to things as they really are. And while I certainly wanted to see the good in Iran, I responded that I wanted to see things “whole,” that is, get a more complete picture. We need to get beyond the demonizing of Iran that the U.S. engages in. Yet I’m not sure it is even in the best interests of the people of Iran if we only see and report on the positive things in their history and culture.

I was speaking, in part, as a journalist: I identified with the goals of the MCC learning tour—to learn about Iran and begin to build bridges with the people of Iran. But I also was being sent by The Christian Century with the expectation that I would write something about Iran for the magazine.1 I had my editor’s perspective in mind: He is a realist in political matters, and I knew he wouldn’t accept anything that painted only a rosy picture of Iran.

One extreme in cross-cultural encounters is to become so infatuated with the new and novel that one romanticizes it, overlooking its flaws and dark sides. There is a long history of this response, particularly from Western intellectuals, artists, and writers who for the first time are exposed to Eastern culture. They can be so enthralled with the mysterious cultures of the East that they come to believe that the sun both rises on and sets on the East.

This fascination with a culture different from one’s own can be a way of rebelling against one’s own culture, throwing off the strictures and mores and even the strengths of one’s own culture and native land. For Americans traveling abroad who know what kind of mischief our government has done around the world, including in Iran, it is easy to think that nothing good comes out of the United States, whereas the reality is much more complex than that.

The other more dominant tendency in cross-cultural encounters is to find the “Other” so strange or even threatening that we demonize it. We know all about that, given the chatter in the West since 9-11 about the clash of civilizations between the West and the Muslim East and the so-called “war on terrorism.” This “war” is essentially a battle to wipe out extremist Islam without ever really come to terms with it or learning to know what motivates it. Remember in the build up to the 2003 Iraq War, even the president of the United States didn’t know the difference between Sunni and Shi’a Islam. He thought they were all just “Muslims,” which is like glossing over the difference between Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant Christians.

We humans have the tendency to conscript others and the reality of their lives into our own conception of reality.2 Think of Christians’ views of Jews over the years: They have been viewed as Christ killers, pharisaical legalists, power-grabbing, money-loving materialists. The role they have played in our own stories may have little to do with reality, and certainly Jews often don’t recognize themselves or their history in what we claim about them.

Of course what is typically at work here is projection at best or scapegoating at worst. We project our own fears and anxieties onto other people and cultures or we blame them for our own problems. They become a symbol of what threatens us. This is not to say that others don’t represent a real threat to us: think al Qaeda, for instance. But both real and perceived threats can blind us to reality, and as a consequence we can take actions not necessarily in our own best interests, much less that of others. The preemptive Iraq War is a prime example of that.

In the current political environment, especially after 9-11, all Muslims can be painted with the same brush: They are viewed as terrorists or at least Islamic extremists. People who look Middle Eastern are “profiled” and therefore deemed suspect. As I first wrote this, there was news about several Muslim families thrown off a domestic U.S. flight just because someone else heard them say something that sounded suspicious, when apparently the families were having a benign conversation about which part of the plane is the safest in case of an accident.

It is not possible to see others objectively. God alone has a full picture of reality, but even God doesn’t see things from a disinterested or objective perspective, since God loves all creation and wishes to be in relationship with it. While we can’t step outside our own perspective, there are ways in which we can learn to see things from others’ perspective. Certainly travel is one of those ways—encountering another culture, meeting the people, listening to their stories, learning their history, seeing their art, hearing their music, eating their food, receiving their perspective on the world, not least their perceptions of us and their relationship with us. And that is what happened on this learning tour to Iran.

Miroslav Volf suggests that to come to better understanding of other people we need what he calls “double vision.” This is an attempt to see others both from our own perspective and context and from theirs. This double vision requires four steps: First, we need to step outside ourselves and be prepared to be suspicious of our own perspectives on others. There is always the likely possibility that our views of them might be mere prejudice. At the same time, we need to be suspicious of our perspective on ourselves: we most likely have deceptive and exalted views of our own selves, history, and stories. 

Second, we have to cross over a social boundary and move into the context of the other. Think of it as trying to put one’s self into the skins of others, to see the world from their perspective. It doesn’t mean that we have to accept that perspective but does calls us at least to come to understand it somewhat and even have some appreciation for it—at the very least to grasp the reasons for it, whether right or wrong.

Third, we have to take “the other” into our own world, says Volf. This is a means of comparing their perspectives with ours, not necessarily to reject either, but to see the two side by side. It may just be that we’ll come to see both perspectives as wanting in some fashion and therefore in need of modification if not transformation. 

Finally, because our perspective on others can never be fully complete, accurate, or even truthful, we have to start the process all over again. We must repeatedly step outside ourselves, moving into the social world of others, and imaginatively at least bringing their world and worldview into relationship with our own.
Aiming toward greater understanding and truthfulness about the other is an imperative of the commandment about not bearing false witness to one’s neighbor. When our learning tour group left for Iran, the United States was amid a spirited political campaign, the 2008 presidential primaries. It seemed to me that many of the candidates, in trying to paint a negative image of their opponents, were guilty of violating the commandment against bearing false witness against their neighbor, in this case their political opponents. Our reputation is one of our most treasured “belongings,” and when another person destroys it or takes it away from us, our lives can be destroyed as a result. 

Think about what happens to a person who is falsely accused of child abuse, for example. His life may never be the same again. So the commandment against bearing false witness is a serious one, the counterpart to not murdering another person. Either way, we can destroy another, one way with words, the other with lethal weapons. In any case, it is my solemn obligation to not knowingly bear false witness against Iranians, their culture, their history, or even their infamous leaders, including President Ahmadinejad.

Yet truth-telling is important too, and the truth, especially for politicians, is not always welcome. I’m no more interested in protecting Ahmadinejad from the truth than I am leaders of my own country, although it is also imperative for me to try to understand why leaders take the positions they do. But of course truth-telling is always from our perspective. There are always two sides to every story, they say. My aim, therefore, was to try to see and hear all I could and then bear witness to what I had experienced in Iran.

Nevertheless, I am but one person. And I have my own limitations and perspectives. I did have the advantage of traveling with a group. We each saw different things, asked different questions of our Iranian hosts, and had our own interpretations. That meant I was privileged to see Iran through more than my one pair of eyes and ears. I especially benefitted from having Wally and Evie Shellenberger, who have spent three years in Iran in MCC’s student exchange program, as our leaders and guides. I learned much more and “saw” more from traveling with these companions than if I had been alone. 

Of course any factual errors or misinterpretations can not be blamed on my fellow travelers. For those I alone am culpable.

—Richard A. Kauffman
Glen Elyn, Illinois