Mirrors of the Unseen: Journeys in Iran

this article appeared in Wexas Traveller magazine summer 2006

Published on 5 May 2006 by Picador £16.99

Jason Elliot’s last book, An Unexpected Light, Travels in Afghanistan, won the Thomas Cook/Daily Telegraph Award for travel writing and went on to become a bestseller on the New York Times list. With his new book he has tackled another country that is dominating news headlines, Iran.

The premise of the book is Elliot’s quest to uncover the nature of Persian art and inevitably along the way, Islamic art too. He combines his artistic musings with a thorough travelogue that takes the reader not only to Iran’s most famous sites and monuments, but also to the remote steppe of Iranian Turkomanistan, the mountains of Kurdistan and on numerous white-knuckle taxi rides.

He records encounters with ordinary Iranians and by weaving in the rich history of the country with scenes of contemporary life, he affords a rare glimpse inside this complex, subtle, misunderstood country. This is Elliot’s real achievement, his ability to present to the reader the many nuances that inform Iranian society, the pitfalls of social interaction with its complicated rules of courtesy, and always, the interplay between the author’s expectations of Iran as a fundamentalist Muslim country and the reality of life in which people skate between what is lawful and what is permissable. He has the honesty to have his own prejudices challenged and constantly reassess the concept of freedom.

Full of literary allusions and rich with intellectual musings, Elliot’s search for the mystical behind Islamic art can feel dense but this does not detract from his achievement: a book on Iran that presents something approaching an accurate picture of this important country.

Kamin Mohammadi is an Iranian writer. She is working on a family memoir of Iran to be published by Bloomsbury in 2007.

© Kamin Mohammadi