Freelance

Can the lives of people in Iranian villages in the late 1970s and 1980s be compared with what ordinary people in rural Iran experience these days?

I have come across the work of ethnographers/anthropologists Erika Friedl and her husband’s Reinhold Loeffler, both retired Professors at Western Michigan University, when the latter’s book of 1988, Islam in Practice – Religious Beliefs in a Persian Village, was quoted in late Professor Patricia Crone’s last book, The Nativist Prophets of Early Islamic Iran – Rural Revolt and Local Zoroastrianism (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2012).

I have written about their work here.

Loeffler’s account of what he calls World Views, interviews with men in the village in the Boyer Ahmad region in southern Iran at the foothills of the Zagros mountains, was already an ethnographical classic. A most fascinating insight of a surprising mix of Islamic, pre-Islamic and superstitious believes which I had not really expected when having visited Iran many times in the 2000s.

Loeffler’s book made me aware of Erika Friedl’s works on women and children in Deh Koh (a fictional name of the village where the couple did their research) as well (etiquette demands that Friedl could become friendly with just women and children, and Loeffler could only interview men).

Erika Friedl and her husband visited the mountain village many times over a period of twenty years, and even later until 1994, both during the reign of the Shah as well as after the Islamic Revolution.

A rereading of Erika Friedl’s Women of Deh Koh of 1988 evokes mixed feelings. The book consists of a large number of episodes in the life of numerous women, describing their social interaction mostly with other women and, rarely, men. I got the feeling that it is, in fact, an in-depth probe into rural life which could probably also be expected in Alpine mountain villages in the 19th century. Has she actually perceived a difference? (A comparison would have been mandatory nowadays in ethnographical studies.)

I always experienced when in Iran (9 times in the 2000 years) among common or ordinary people deep religiosity. Not in Erika Friedl’s account. I get the impression that there is much superstition and a certain religiosity at the surface. But no deep understanding of Islam in general. Maybe “saints” are invoked every now and then (quite often Abbas ibn Ali, half-brother of Imam Husayn). So I asked myself, is Erika Fried’s account authentic?