Persian Pictures

Book excerpt: "Here in the dust and the sunshine is an epitome of the living East, and standing unnoticed in a doorway, you will admit that you have not travelled in vain. But as the procession of people files past you, you will realize what a gulf lies between you. The East looks to itself; it knows nothing of the greater world of which you are a citizen, asks nothing of you and your civilization."This brilliant, vivid and impressionistic series of sketches, formed during her 1892 stay in Persia, is Gertrude Bell's first published work. Infused with a distinctive orientalism, "Persian Pictures" is an evocative, virtuosic meditation, moving sinuously between Persia's heroic complex, mythical past and present decline; the public face of Tehran and the otherworldly "secret, mysterious life of the East;" the lives of its women; its enclosed, quasi-medieval gardens; from the bustling cities to the lonely wastelands of Khorasan. Bell's documentation of Muharram - the month of mourning for Imam Hussein, the grandson of the Prophet Mohammed - and Ramadan, display a mind finely attuned to the differences and similarities between Islam and Christianity, East and West. "Persian Pictures" is both travelog and meditation, an elegaic and beautifully observed account of a spellbinding land.Scholar, historian, linguist, archaeologist, photographer, secret service agent and traveller, Gertrude Bell (1868-1926) was a hugely significant figure. Her early travels were made in Europe and Persia; she made two round-the-world trips (1897-8 and 1902-3), while her climbing exploits in the Alps from 1899-1904 earned her renown as a mountaineer. Like other British 'orientalists' of the early 20th century, she explored the Ottoman Empire during and after World War I and was hugely instrumental in the post-war reconfiguration of the Arab states in the Middle East. She was a prime mover in creating the new state of Iraq and establishing a constitutional monarchy there with a parliament, civil service and legal system; as Honorary Director of Antiquities in Iraq, she established the Iraq Museum in Baghdad.