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Roy P. Mottahedeh (1940–2024)

In: Journal of Persianate Studies
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Richard W. Bulliet Department of History, Columbia University

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Roy P. Mottahedeh (1940–2024)

Citation: Journal of Persianate Studies 17, 1-2 (2024) ; 10.1163/18747167-bja10050

Photograph: Patricia Mottahedeh, 2022

Roy Parviz Mottahedeh, Harvard’s much honored and admired professor of Islamic history, passed away on 30 July 2024 at the age of 84. A year before, he included a capsule autobiography in his last publication, In the Shadow of the Prophet, a collection of articles written over a span of fifty-five years.

My father emigrated from Iran in the 1920s, and his love of Iranian culture, especially its arts and crafts, is largely responsible for my early interest in the Middle East. We spoke English at home because my mother, who was born in New Jersey, never learned Persian. Although I lived in New York for only the first fourteen years of my life, I feel that I am essentially a New Yorker. I still speak American English with a few words of New York dialect, and Central Park is still the best place for a walk.

From kindergarten through high school, I studied at Quaker schools in New York and Pennsylvania. I acquired a deep respect for the Quaker approach to religion, which complemented my parents’ religion as Bahaʾis. My interest in Iran (called Persia in my youth), was encouraged by my father’s interest in Persian art, which formed the initial basis for his import business. We lived near the Metropolitan Museum, and I spent many weekends with my parents visiting the Met, especially its rooms for Near Eastern art.

As an undergraduate at Harvard, I was too much in a hurry. I graduated when I was nineteen, a terrible mistake. I was still uneducated and wish that I could have taken more courses. Harvard gave me a fellowship to travel for a year, and I spent three months in Persian-speaking Afghanistan (partly because I could not get a visa to go to Iran.) Afghanistan was a little-known treasure and at that time seemed more an eighteenth- or nineteenth-century country than one of the contemporary period.

After my year of travel, I went to the University of Cambridge, England, in 1961–62 and took the final exam, the Tripos, in Persian and Arabic. For the book prize I received, I chose the Persian mystical epic by Rumi (I still hope to read it in its entirety before I die.) Shortly after my return to Harvard, my revered teacher, H. A. R. Gibb, with whom I had studied Middle Eastern history and literature, had a stroke and retired. Among my other teachers, was Robert Lee Woolf [1915–80], with whom I studied Byzantine and Crusader history, and Richard Frye [1920–2014], with whom I studied Middle Iranian languages such as Soghdian, of which I remember nothing. I acquitted myself adequately in the four fields of history in my Ph.D. exams. One of my examiners, L. Carl Brown [1928– 2020], later moved to Princeton and offered me an assistant professorship there after I finished my degree.

At Princeton I had a largely congenial set of colleagues in my Department of Near Eastern Studies although I missed being in a history department. As a good citizen of that department, I taught both elementary and intermediate Arabic and Persian several times during my sixteen years at Princeton. However, it was the advanced language courses serving as history seminars that I most enjoyed. When I moved to Harvard, I taught only history courses, basic and intermediate courses for undergraduates and advanced text-based seminars for graduate students. Many excellent scholars came as visiting professors from the Middle East, and I audited their classes with great benefit. Unlike most scholars I never lived in the Middle East except for several months in Cairo in 1988 with my young family. [There follows a long list of other countries visited.]

For anyone like me of Iranian background, the problem of sectarianism and the occasional rejection of pluralism seems a central issue in the history of the Islamic Middle East. Consequently, in my research I was attracted to the history of the 4th/10th and 5th/11th centuries partly because it was a period of greater toleration in religious matters in the Middle East. I still dearly hope for growing acceptance in the Middle East of the variety of belief and advocacy that has been so important to the societies in which it exists.

Mottahedeh 2023, xxv–xxvi

Everyone who has ever tried to compose a memoir or brief autobiographical statement has confronted the problem of what to include and what to leave out. This applies as well to anyone writing about the career of a friend and colleague. I first got to know my friend Roy when Professor Richard Frye asked him to tutor me as the only student in intermediate Persian during my second year of graduate study. Roy was not only a superb teacher, but he and I were exact contemporaries who might have become acquainted as classmates had he not entered Harvard with advanced standing and graduated in three years.

This advanced status testifies to the impression he made upon many people throughout his life as a person of uncommon brilliance, but, at that time, his laurels as a Harvard Junior Fellow, a Guggenheim Fellow, a MacArthur Prize Fellow, and an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Council on Foreign Relations all lay ahead of him. I knew him as a perpetually disheveled fellow doctoral student who couldn’t get himself out of bed before noon and who shared with me the challenge of a wife deeply stirred by the feminist movement that torpedoed his first marriage.

A favorite quotation that Roy would drop enthusiastically into conversation almost at random was Tennyson’s line: “Let knowledge grow from more to more.” Even before hindsight came to tinge my recollections, I was struck by how appropriate this sentiment was. Roy was first and foremost a person of learning. And for him, reading Arabic and Persian texts around a table was not only the best and most enjoyable way to teach, it was his favorite way to learn. And the ease with which he interacted with and learned from individuals and small groups of all backgrounds was enviable. Yet he was much less comfortable on the lecture podium. He mentioned to me several times in his last years that his shyness as a lecturer had only grown over time.

Nevertheless, it was precisely the lectures of H. A. R. Gibb that inspired him to abandon his initial college goal of becoming a paleontologist. I, too, found Gibb’s lectures masterful (though much less so now as I reread my class notes). Roy was particularly enthralled by the elegant precision of Gibb’s Arabic blackboard notations. After Gibb’s stroke removed him as a prospective thesis advisor, Roy once remarked that he regretted having abandoned paleontology.

Richard Frye took Gibb’s place as Roy’s advisor, but he proved to be a mentor manqué. Roy has written, “My dissertation, which I never published, [was] written with almost no input from my advisor” (Mottahedeh 2023, xxvii). In fact, Roy was certain that Frye had never read his dissertation (Mottahedeh 1970), at least in its final version. He had made a few marginal check marks on a draft version and told Roy that the needed corrections would be obvious. Leafing through them and finding nothing that obviously needed correction, however, Roy simply erased the check marks and returned the draft. Frye then declared the thesis approved. Frye’s nomination of Roy for a prestigious three-year Harvard Junior Fellow position, a recognition Frye himself had once enjoyed, shows how highly he esteemed Roy’s scholarship. But his perfunctory dissertation direction may have caused Roy to take the unusual step of abandoning it. “My dissertation was respectable but not, in my view, ready for publication, so I only published this [fourteen-page] article [Mottahedeh 1973] from it on the history of Qazvin” (Mottahedeh 2023, 265). Roy’s reluctance to declare his work ready for publication would prove a lifetime problem.

Roy notes that he accepted an assistant professorship at Princeton at the invitation of L. Carl Brown. In doing so, however, he turned down an equivalent offer from Harvard. The reason, which he does not mention, is that in June 1968, Harvard conferred an honorary degree on the Iranian shah. Being at that time still a member of the Bahaʾi faith, Roy tried to present a letter from Harvard’s Bahaʾi students congratulating the shah and urging upon him a policy of religious tolerance. The shah’s security retinue intercepted Roy and held him in some bushes in Harvard Yard until the monarch had passed. Then they asked Harvard security for Roy’s name, which was duly divulged. I accompanied him to the Harvard security office to register a stern complaint about foreign agents operating in Harvard Yard and to demand an apology from Harvard’s president. After all, having once been unable to get an Iranian visa in Afghanistan, Roy was justifiably horrified at the thought that becoming registered as a threat to the shah would effectively kill his career as an Iranian historian. No apology was ever forthcoming. So, when Princeton called, he left, only to return to Harvard’s History Department sixteen years later after twice more turning his alma mater down.

When Roy eventually visited Iran for the first time in 1977, we went together for a conference on medieval administrative history in Hamadan. Though he was fearful that his parents’ Bahaʾi faith would again make him suspicious, particularly when he had to seek succor from family friends after we found ourselves stranded at Mehrabad airport, his trip was successful in an unexpected way. We met Seyyed Hossein Modarressi Tabatabaʾi, a marvelously learned Shiʿi cleric, who subsequently became Roy’s colleague and close friend at Princeton.

Modarressi proved to be an essential informant on the training of Shiʿi clergy for Roy’s most influential book, The Mantle of the Prophet: Religion and Politics in Iran (1985). Though “Persianate” gained currency well after most scholars of our vintage had already become wedded to earlier terminologies, this book appeared at just the right moment to benefit a politically aware, post-revolution readership that was still struggling to grasp the severalfold connections between being Iranian or Persian and being Shiʿi. In following this work up in 2003 with Lessons in Islamic Jurisprudence, a translation of a work by the eminent jurist Mohammad-Bāqer Sadr (1935–80), along with Roy’s extensive introduction and explanations, he continued to inform scholars, diplomats, and educated lay readers about landmarks in the still evolving landscape of Islamic law.

I am sad to say that that was Roy’s fourth and final book. For years, I and others had hectored him about bringing his other projects to proper conclusion, and I remain mystified by his resistance to finalizing publications. Maybe it was Frye’s fault. Roy taught us to “Let knowledge grow from more to more,” and he certainly practiced what he preached with respect to his own learning. Yet aside from those few score students who had the privilege of sitting in seminar with him, the world of Islamicate and Persianate learning will always wish that he had done more to spread his remarkable erudition.

What would he have done? He left us his last word on the subject: “My favorite history book is The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy by Jacob Burckhardt, and I was tempted to write such a work for the medieval Islamic period. Alas, I now see that the writing of such a book is beyond my reach” (Mottahedeh 2023, xxviii).

No, it wasn’t, Roy.

Bibliography

A full bibliography of Roy Mottahedeh’s publications appears in Mottahedeh 2023, 579–89.

  • R. P. Mottahedeh, “Administration in the Buyid kingdom of Rayy,” Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1970.

  • R. P. Mottahdeh, “Administration in Būyid Qazwīn,” in D. S. Richards, ed., Islamic Civilisation, 950–1150: A Colloquium Published under the auspices of the Near Eastern History Group, Oxford, the Near East Center, University of Pennsylvania, Papers on Islamic History 3, Oxford, 1973, pp. 3345.

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  • R. P. Mottahedeh, The Mantle of the Prophet: Religion and Politics in Iran, New York City, 1985.

  • R. P. Mottahedeh, In the Shadow of the Prophet: Essays in Islamic History, New York City, 2023.

  • M.-B. Sadr, Dorus fi ʿelm al-osul, tr. R. P. Mottahedeh as Lessons in Islamic Jurisprudence, Oxford, 2003.

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