Nine hundred years ago, there walked in Persia one of the most remarkable humans the world has ever known. Omar Khayyam (1048–1131) was a scientist, mathematician, poet, historian, and philosopher whose Epicurean-tinged agnostic leanings were overlooked more often than not by the Turkish Muslim overlords of Persia in recognition of his value as a rigorous astronomer and innovative algebraist. For Khayyam, life was, generally speaking, a bitter thing full of disappointments and ending in merciful obliteration. The entire dismal and deterministic affair was made tolerable only by the minor miracle of steady intoxication.
In the centuries that followed the death of Khayyam, Persia went from humiliation to humiliation, passing from Turkish to Mongol hands and then back again before being divided in the nineteenth century into zones of British and Russian influence. The emerging nationalists of that era were left to wonder where everything went so wrong for a country that once boasted a culture so vibrant. Over the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the answer for nascent modernizers such as Fath’ali Akhundzadeh (1812–1878) was simple: the Arab Muslim invasion of the seventh century. If Persia was to slip the bonds of its millennium-long torpor, it would have to learn to let go of Islam and find its way back to its best instincts by embracing the figures of its jeweled free-thinking past, such as Khayyam, and the best practices of the rational present, such as those embodied by European methods of inquiry and analysis.
It was one thing, however, to say, “Let us return to Omar” but quite another to figure out precisely how that might be done in a still very much Islamic state. That task—creating a new movement of Iranian skepticism by fusing the free-thinking spirit of Khayyam with the psychological insights of modernity—fell largely to the tragic genius of Sadeq Hedayat (1903–1951), the father of Iranian prose fiction.
We are fortunate that Hedayat was born precisely when he was; a decade in either direction would have caused the seed of his talent to either rot in soil unprepared to receive it or stagnate in the muck of politicized literary factionism that followed the Second World War. As it was, he was born just two years before the 1905 Iranian Revolution, which culminated in the introduction of a new government in 1906 that mixed Western constitutionalism with Islamic practices. His youth was spent in the fires of debate about where this new experiment should be allowed to go, a discussion that spilled over into the literary world. It saw the revolution as an opportunity to expand the Persian literary tradition, which had been dominated by traditionalized poetic forms to the great expense of the development of national prose fiction.
The young authors of the 1910s and 1920s had the rare opportunity of building an entire nation’s prose practices from the ground up, without any encumbrances from past tradition. Mohammed-Ali Jamalzadeh (1892–1997) pointed the way in 1921 with his collection of short stories, Once Upon a Time, which featured a mixture of biting social commentary and religious satire so disturbing to Iranian officials that copies were burned publicly. While Jamalzadeh was showing what Iranian short-form prose fiction could do (and how it would likely be received), Hedayat was busy living a somewhat diffuse life as the privileged son of a wealthy and influential family. A highly sensitive and melancholy child, Hedayat studied French and Persian literature at a dual-language missionary school, graduating in 1925 before receiving official permission to continue his studies in engineering in Belgium. For the next four years, he drifted from school to school and discipline to discipline, achieving little to no success as a student, attempting suicide in 1927, and penning his first professional works.
In 1923, Hedayat published an edition of Khayyam’s Quatrains, in which he portrayed the great Persian thinker as a disillusioned figure, contemptuous of religion and philosophy for their inability to satisfactorily explain the great questions of existence. He ultimately settled on skepticism and pessimism as the only honest approaches to a world so full of instability, falsehood, and pain. Khayyam’s sensitivity to the world and its capacity for brutality matched his own experience of it. Khayyam’s descriptions of what happens to a thinking mind and feeling disposition when subjected to the brutal mangle of existence would form the basis of much of Hedayat’s best work.
The other major work Hedayat wrote during this era was Man and Animal (1924), an impassioned appeal to humanity to fundamentally rethink its casual and systemic cruelty toward animals. A lifelong vegetarian, Hedayat was sickened by the way animals were (and, let’s face it, still are) tormented, harassed, and slaughtered for the entertainment and profit of humans. Iranian children burn mice in the street for fun. Merchants savagely beat their exhausted, frothing donkeys to squeeze a few more torturous steps out of them. Every day people shovel strips of animal flesh into their mouths without a thought for the unrelentingly horrendous conditions experienced by the living and feeling animal it had once been. A hundred years ahead of its time, Man and Animal was a fearless indictment of an Iranian and world society driven by an unthinking thralldom to its stomach to blankly allow myriad tragedies to be carried out in the name of its culinary whims.
Unable to complete a degree in any of the subjects he drifted between, Hedayat returned home to Iran in 1930, where he worked at a series of jobs he tackled with as much indifference as he had his studies in Europe. Every year or two, he switched occupations while steadily compiling a body of written work that formed the foundation of modern Iranian fiction. These included collections of short stories in the spirit of Jamalzadeh, including Buried Alive (1930) and Three Drops of Blood (1932), which featured strange new characters hitherto unseen in the world of Iranian fiction: broken men who had seen and suffered too much to give credence to the ruling illusions of the era and who sought solace in madness, drugs, and ultimately death.
The people populating these stories are the “rabble,” beings governed by the twin masters of their stomachs and genitals—merchants, murderers, butchers, prostitutes, and false holy men, each devoted to the cause of Getting Theirs while trammeling outright the weak and thoughtful who might be so foolish as to ask why all of this scrambling for position, profit, and power is necessary. Hedayat’s particular scorn was meted out to those who profess deep religious motivations for their actions. His works from this era are filled with pilgrims using religious ritual as a cheap means to forgiveness for the horrible things they have done in life, public ascetics who preach the killing of the passions while privately indulging in acts of gluttony and fornication, men slicing the throats of innocent animals to wash away their sins, and priests grown powerful through their ability to blast cavalcades of scattered holy verses at a reality that daily gives the lie to their superstition-bound view of the cosmos.
Facing censorship after he contributed a sketch of Muhammad for the cover of a booklet by his friend Mohammad Moqaddam, Hedayat spent a year in 1936 at his friend’s estate in India, where he completed and published in a limited edition of fifty copies the book still considered by many to be Iran’s greatest novel, The Blind Owl. Its intellectual forbears include Kafka as well as Khayyam, but the universe Hedayat created therein was one wholly his own. His characters bleed into each other in a cycle of mutual torment that ultimately shatters the fragile sense of self of the sickly narrator. It is a book of deep and bleak realism, rejecting utterly all hope of redemption or a world beyond our own. It offers but scant glimmers of real and genuine humanity in the loo of a world we inhabit.
During the reign of the modernizing dictator Reza Shah, who had come to power in 1921, The Blind Owl was banned as a work whose pervasive pessimism was inimical to the positivist spirit Shah was attempting to forcibly cultivate. With Reza Shah’s overthrow in 1941, however, it seemed like the time had come at last for modern influences and concerns to permeate Iranian literature. Unfortunately, the postwar cultural environment soon broke down to a conflict between two rival factions, which both found bold and exciting new ways to not understand the work of Sadeq Hedayat.
After the war, The Blind Owl saw publication in Tehran but soon ran afoul of a new rising power in the state, the Communist-associated Tudeh Party, which had attracted most of Iran’s literary and intellectual talent. While generally appreciating the work’s satirical view of religion and traditionalist society, Iranian Communists tended to be nervous about Hedayat’s blanket skepticism about human nature and the destiny of world civilization. Communism rested ideologically on an assumption of dialectic progress, of cumbersome and oppressive systems overcome and replaced by better and more humane ones, culminating in the ultimate victory of the common people who would usher in a paradise of cooperation and common cause. It’s an optimistic view of human trajectory that could not have been more at odds with Hedayat’s Khayyamian nihilism.
Meanwhile, rightist traditionalists, who had been suppressed during Reza Shah’s generally Western-looking and secular regime, had returned with a vengeance after his fall. Religious figures in Iran lost little time in reforging their alliances with figures in power, a development decried by the Tudeh as a step backward in their nation’s progress. Hedayat’s Hajji Aqa (1945) contained savage satirical broadsides against religion as a means of social control and the maintenance of existing power structures. While the book was hailed by members of the Tudeh elite as a step in the right direction, it was excoriated by the traditionalists returning to their former glory and influence.
The Tudeh Party tore itself apart in 1946 over differences of opinion about Azerbaijani independence and was ultimately banned by the state in 1949, taking with it for many the hope of a fresh path forward for Iran. By 1950, Iran had little to offer Hedayat, who felt professionally uninspired and creatively stagnant in a nation that had overthrown a dictator only to return even more slavishly to its superstitious instincts. He believed that perhaps a return to Paris would refresh his spirits and productive energies, so he left Tehran on December 3, 1950.
Paris, however, brought no peace. Hedayat sank into lethargy that expanded into despair as the deadline for his return to Tehran loomed and the assassination of his influential brother-in-law by Islamic extremists seemed to close down definitively any potential for its extension. Facing inevitable return to a land that had caused him so much pain, Hedayat tore up his unfinished work and, on April 9, 1951, carefully plugged the holes in his rented apartment, turned on the gas valve to his room, and laid down on his bed, to die at last.
In the years since his death, the power of Hedayat’s prose continues unabated. In 2006, Ahmadinejad’s Iran banned the republication of his books, deepening if anything the cachet of works such as The Blind Owl, Hajji Aqa, and Three Drops of Blood as volumes of subversive forbidden literature that generations of disillusioned Iranian youths have taken to their hearts. These are not happy books; they are not even books that say everything is horrible now but there is room for happiness later. They are books that look directly into the mechanical guts of humanity and read therein an oppressive logic that cannot be stopped by fine phrases or mystical incantations. Existence is consumption, and consumption is pain. Anybody with a flicker of awareness beyond the confines of tradition and daily practice is doomed to fundamental disillusionment. Perhaps these are not the words to appeal to the jaunty humanism of the resource-rich present, but there may come a day, if humans can survive long enough to see it, when the stars will shine less brightly, survival will claw more insistently, and humans will again drop their masks to reveal the gnashing stomachs beneath genuflecting in desperation to long absent gods. Should those times come, it will be well to have Hedayat’s words, and their grim comforts, close at hand again.
Further Reading:
The Blind Owl is readily available in English in D. P. Costello’s translation, as is a collection of some of his best short stories, Three Drops of Blood and Other Stories, translated by Deborah Miller Mostaghel. To learn more about his life and times, Homa Katouzian’s Sadeq Hedayat: The Life and Legend of an Iranian Writer (2nd edition, 2021) is a good source, though it assumes a degree of familiarity with Persian literary and political history that most people probably won’t have at hand.
Nine hundred years ago, there walked in Persia one of the most remarkable humans the world has ever known. Omar Khayyam (1048–1131) was a scientist, mathematician, poet, historian, and philosopher whose Epicurean-tinged agnostic leanings were overlooked more often than not by the Turkish Muslim overlords of Persia in recognition of his value as a rigorous …