"The West" in the Eyes of the Iranian Intellectuals of the Interwar Years (1919-1939)

In 1929, after a lecture by Arnold Toynbee (from the notes of Denison Ross, the first director of the School of Oriental and African Studies) on the subject of the modernization of the Middle East, a commentator said,

Persia has not been modernized and has not in reality been Westernized. Look at the map: there is Persia right up against Russia. For the past hundred years, living cheek by jowl with Russia, Persia has maintained her complete independence of Russian thought. Although sixty to seventy percent of her trade for the past hundred years has been with Russia, Persia remains aloof in spirit and in practice. For the past ten years, Persia has been living alongside the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics, and has remained free from any impregnation by their basic ideas. Her freedom is due to her cultural independence. For the safety of Persia it is essential, if she is to continue to develop on her own lines, that she should not attempt modernization, and I do not think that the attempt is being made. It is true that the Persians have adopted motor-cars and in small way railways. But let us remember that the Persians have always been in the forefront in anything of that sort. The first Eastern nation to enter the Postal Union and to adopt a system of telegraphs was Persia, which country was also among the first of the Eastern nations to join the League of Nations and to become an active member. The Persians have always been ready to adapt to their own peculiar needs any Western invention that seemed to suit them. But that does not mean that they are being Westernized, with one exception. Westernization is taking place in the sphere of law.¹

In 1936, an unidentified pundit had this to say about Iran in the pages of the Moslem World:

It used to be said of olden Persia that in it you could always find three things: princes, camels and fleas. The first have vanished utterly; the second, though still and rightly employed in certain parts, are far fewer than they were before the advent of the motor-car, the aeroplane, and the railway-train; and with the progressive introduction of hygienic ideas the third must be diminished by some millions. On all fronts, indeed, the Shah and his Ministers are waging a successful battle against the dead wood and redundance of the past. You can no more transform Iran in a night than you can build Rome in a day, but in less than two decades the Shah (may his days be prolonged!) has very creditably revolutionized the face of his land.²

In 1944, another British analyst on Iran wrote,

Persia [had] had to make too rapid a jump into the twentieth century. We more fortunate people in the West went through a slow and gradual process of education in the arts of reading, not least in the direction of intellectual recreation. The novel, the essay, the theater slowly evolved in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The cinema did not burst on us suddenly as it has done on Persia. We had been gently introduced to its compelling charms. From the legitimate stage to the silent film, from the silent film to the "movie," we passed decorously without undue haste. Not so Persia. Within a period of little more than ten years Persia had been brought face to face with the colored film; and not only that but also with the radio, with concert parties and cabarets, with modern furniture, modern buildings, modern fabrics and fashions. Within the same period she has had to cope with the most notable, the most far-reaching social revolution of all—the emancipation of women—without much gradual process of evolution. Small wonder that Persia is a bit out of breath, a bit bewildered and uncertain of her standards.³

In 1952, T. Cuyler Young Jr. of Princeton University had this to say about the attitude of Iranians toward the West:

A more numerous group, but varied in...