An American Puts a Different Spin on Iran’s ‘Axis’ Image

For another view of Iran, the country President Bush has reduced to an “axis of evil,” along with Iraq and North Korea, Terence Ward refers you to his new book, “Searching for Hassan.” Just released by Houghton Mifflin, the book is part cultural history and part travel memoir, but most of all it is Ward’s impression of a country that he shows is far more subtle than what most Westerners know. “It’s easy to reconfirm myths,” he says, “but harder to show the other side of the coin. I wanted to give a deeper understanding of the culture.”

An Irish American with coppery red hair, Ward, 48, was born in Colorado but lived in Tehran from 1960 to 1969 along with his parents and three brothers. His father worked as an economic advisor to the National Iranian Oil Co. and moved the family to the Middle East when Ward was 6. The experience set Terence off on a life of travel; he has since lived in Cairo, Geneva and Bali and worked as a management consultant in a number of Arab countries. He and his wife, Idanna, now divide their time between New York and Florence, Italy.

Terence Ward, his brothers and their elderly parents returned to Iran in 1998, 30 years after leaving, to find a country far different from the one they left behind. The booming oil industry, the extravagant ways of the ruling Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, a society attracted to the West yet steeped in ancient Persian roots, all had been shrouded in Islamic fundamentalism.

Officially, the trip was to track down the family’s beloved cook, Hassan Ghasemi, with whom they had lost touch. The search led the Wards from Shiraz north to Tehran, with plenty of side trips in between. Early on, they learned that Hassan left Tehran soon after they moved away. Ward’s mother, Donna, vaguely remembered that his hometown was Tudeshk, north of the city, but that was all they had to go on.

From the first pages of the book, it is obvious why the Wards missed Hassan, who had been far more than the family cook. Part genie, part sage, he taught the brothers to leap over fire at the new year festival and to negotiate the price of pomegranates at the local bazaar. He played his sehtar, a small mandolin, for them and wept as he told them Persian legends about kings and warriors. When the summer heat settled on Tehran like a warm woolen blanket, Ward writes, Hassan made an annual announcement. “From now on we sleep under the stars.”

“We were not even sure we would find Hassan,” Ward says on a recent visit to Los Angeles. “The book became a larger quest, a way to explore the culture and the sweep of Iran’s history.”

Finding Hassan was not easy, but the Wards finally did have their reunion, in Isfahan, where Hassan, his wife and two grown children now live. A week of feasting on dishes laced with saffron, parties with friends and relatives of their “Persian father” and conversations with Hassan about the disillusionment among Iranians all had a strong effect on Ward. “We were cheering,” Hassan said of the days following the fall of the shah. “They told us Iran will become like heaven. But then the war [with Iraq] comes. We have to fight crazy Saddam [Hussein]. So many die.”

Such conversations gave Ward his focus: “The book became a way to explore universal themes of family, friends, loyalty, the crossing of barriers,” he says. “That’s where I took the experience.”

As a travel memoir, Ward’s story crosses back and forth from the old culture to the modern one. Tours of the ancient Persian capital of Persepolis, the tomb of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the Jewish synagogue in Shiraz, the carpet dealers’ stalls in the bazaar of Isfahan are spiced with details about the engaging Ward family. In Shiraz, his brothers bargained for cherry juices at the corner store while Ward and his mother visited the synagogue. A community of about 500 Iranian Jews still live in the city.

In Yazd, Ward’s mother observed that people now look healthier than they used to, and pointed out that the extremes of wealth and poverty appear to have balanced out since the shah was deposed. “It’s critical to understand Iran in context,” Ward says. “Then we can see what this culture and others have in common.”

A mismatched pair of guides accompanied the family on their travels. Akbar, an articulate companion, led them to places that are the pride of many Iranians. In the village of Pasargadae he showed them a declaration from 539 BC by King Cyrus, founder of the Persian Empire, after his invasion of Babylon. “I ordered that all should be free to worship their god with no harm. I ordered that no one’s home be destroyed and no one’s property be taken.” The statement seems more poignant given the country’s current reputation for intolerance.

Avo, the second guide, was a nonnegotiable addition to the trip supplied by the government. A source of comic misinformation, he once explained that the substance at the top of Mt. Elburz, near Tehran, was salt. The Wards had skied there, in the snow.

Storytellers, humorists, myth makers, the cast of Iranian characters continued to grow as the trip unfolded. “Iran was the first home I ever knew,” Ward says. “I wanted to shed light on the country, the wonderful sense of humor, the rich cultural history.” It is not a perfect place, but in prying it free from the rest of the Middle East, he shows the country in all its complexity. Most Westerners would hardly recognize it.

In recent years, America’s reaction to Iran has been mostly one of anger and mistrust. The revolution there in 1979, the rise of Khomeini, the taking of American Embassy workers as hostages, the banners that read “Death to America” gave an accurate but incomplete picture. Ward describes a more intricate image of a nation caught in a tug of war with itself. Modern Iran is cosmopolitan, worldly, refined by its ancient Persian influences, even as it is wrapped in conservative, volatile Islam.

In recent weeks of touring with his book, Ward has met dozens of Iranian expatriates in Los Angeles. Over a cold drink in a friend’s living room, he wonders at the responses he has had to his book. Among them is a growing collection of e-mail bursting with heartfelt messages.

“So many Iranians who left the country during the revolution have had the experience of leaving someone behind and losing contact,” he says. “They want to go back and find the person they have missed.”

As an outsider looking in, he says, he has been welcomed. “I am someone who is not Iranian writing with admiration about them. They are not accustomed to it.”

Along the way he has made a mental list of the most often heard mistakes about Iran. People think it is an Arab country, they don’t realize that it is Persian, and has its own language, Farsi, and its own culture. They confuse Iran with Iraq, the home of chemical weapons plants and President Saddam Hussein, who invaded Iran in 1980. “I sometimes call the U.S. the United States of Amnesia,” Ward says. “It’s up to those who know the difference to create a dialogue about the other side of Iran’s story.”

Among the misunderstandings, one stands out. “Iran is one of the most pro-West countries in the Middle East,” Ward discovered on his trip. But at the same time, it is staunchly opposed to the West, as a result of its two-pronged government. President Mohammad Khatami was elected by a popular vote and wants to establish better relations with the West while the un-elected government, made up of Islamic clerics, blocks openness and has the upper hand.

“Recent polls in Iran show that 80% of the country wants change,” Ward says. There were candlelight vigils there after the Sept. 11 attacks on the U.S. At the same time, people are afraid to speak out against the Islamic stronghold.

The Iran the Wards left behind 30 years ago was not the sealed-off Islamic state the country has become. Nor was it a truly open society. At the Community School in Tehran, for the children of diplomats and foreign business executives, Terence Ward went to class with Sikhs, Zoroastrians, Christians and Jews as well as Muslims. But his father would tell him about the men who did not return to work after they criticized the shah’s regime.

Lately, the landscape is changing again. Ward met taxi drivers, waiters and rug merchants who told him how they cope with today’s fierce politics. “When Khomeini ruled Iran, we called the U.S. ‘The Great Satan,’” one said. “Now, they call us the ‘Axis of Evil.’ So, we’re even.”

At Beyond Baroque, an arts center in Venice, Ward shows slides of his trip to an audience of people with family ties in the Middle East. From a rickety projector, he flashes snapshots of enclosed gardens and dainty fountains, ancient palaces and golden-domed mosques, an outdoor teahouse, one of Hassan’s feasts spread out on a floral carpet.

Fuzzy and out of focus at times, the images still had the power to dissolve the audience in sighs of delight.

“Our fate is tied to every soul living on the other side of the planet,” he says. That is reason enough for Westerners to learn more about the land of mullahs and shahs.

“In the future,” Ward says, “to save our children we must also save theirs.”